Conan of the Red Brotherhood Page 18

  With a gentle laugh, Crotalus brushed the flaking carcass from his lap into a flower bed. “So you see, O Prince, time is of no great importance to me... or should I say, of no great moment? Ten days will suffice for the physical processes I require, assuming that ship construction will continue smoothly.”

  “Ten days then, no more. I will announce a date for the sea-trials this midday.” The prince’s manner hinted at a new-found respect for the wizard, also at new caution. “I assume the facilities assigned to you by the Admiralty are sufficient?” “Yes, though I will need a full crew of slaves or prisoners, a hundred men at least. Their ability, even their physical health, is of no great matter to me—” here the dignified Crotalus shot a sly glance to his ruler “—since they are likely to be expended in the labour.”

  “I understand... as much as I need to. It will be done.” Yezdigerd arose briskly from his viny seat. “Crotalus, I depend on you to produce, ah, tangible results. So far, this undertaking, and the performance of the two highly promising candidates I supported, have been a disappointment to me. I had begun to doubt the merit of the idea... but your demonstration here today reassures me.”

  He extended a hand and after the merest hesitation, laid it on the robed magician’s shoulder. “Whatever arcane spell you mean to use to transform that gem into naval propulsion, proceed with it. At this moment you are my best, brightest hope.”

  The announcement of the new date for judging the contest was the focus of widespread attention. This second spectacle was to be far grander than the first, with space on the harbour mole and mudflats offered free to the general populace, in addition to the invitations sent to high-ranking courtiers for choice places of vantage in the Navy Yards.

  A public holiday was declared, with the added attraction of real, living pirates: captives brought from the Eastern Vilayet, to be condemned and done to death by public torments, with crowd participation welcomed. It was rumoured that the arch-criminal Amra himself was to be among them; in any case, no city householder could afford to pass up such a memorable event, neither for its promise of boon festivity and fellowship, nor for the edification and warning of wives, slaves, and children.

  It could be asked—and in some circles, it most emphatically was—why, after the unmitigated disaster of the first sea-trials, such a great and public event was being made of the follow-up? The answers were various, and not necessarily consistent with each other: Emperor Yildiz, it was whispered, grew feeble-minded., whether from overindulgence in wine or from the gassy, sickly humours of his mercury bed; consequently, there were those in high advisory positions who did not mind urging him along a disastrous course for the sake of undermining his power. Or, alternatively, sly Yildiz knew that his son Yezdigerd’s name was the one linked primarily in the public mind to the naval contest. The canny old emperor did not begrudge a flagrant expense of wealth and state prestige to humble his overweening child; so he publicized the event in the positive hope that it would result in another laughable failure. Yezdigerd, for his part, sought a more public triumph to enhance his reputation, and so the stakes were raised on both sides.

  For Alaph the alchemist, the prospect of another judging rekindled old hopes for success in the competition; it renewed his fears as well, in the light of previous disasters. Regarding the promised execution of pirates, Alaph had always dreaded such displays because of a fundamentally squeamish nature—though generally he had been forced to attend the gatherings regardless, to take advantage of the booming trade in buns. Now his bakery commerce was delegated to others; indeed, it throve better unburdened by the demands of his steam-demons. The alchemist, except for occasional cursory supervision of his bakers, was left to devote all of his worry to the contest.

  His notions about the value of his work had grown broader and clearer during his recent labours. Mastery of the water-spirits was a great power, obviously; also it was a great risk, one requiring nerve and courage to sustain. If an adept was willing to face death and horrible bums, great rewards might be sought, such as the power to set steam-demons to work rowing oared galleys. Alaph had conceived a way this might be done by means of a heavy, greased beam, pushed forward in a bronze box by a rush of living steam, then pushed backward again from the far end by the shuttling of the racing djinni through pipes and valves into another similar box. Such a back-and-forth motion could easily be used to swing oars, even on existing ships refitted to its demands. It would limit the crew requirements to three or four men, enough to work the rudder, feed the fire, maintain pressure in the coffin-boiler and release any excess. It would also be necessary to vary the bite of the oars in the water on port and starboard sides by direction of the steersman.

  A heady idea, this, and more elaborate than his original one of rear-facing jets. Yet it seemed crucial to keep the demons confined as long as possible to get them to do useful work. Alaph had ordered more metal and artisans from the Navy Yard for the project, and set to work overtime on it.

  Another idea along the same line was the steam ram. Oar ships frequently fenced and chased, as every Turanian knew, to achieve a successful ram, with victory often determined by a deft turn at close quarters or a last supreme effort at the oars. Accordingly, Alaph saw promise in a device that might be fitted to bow, stem, or both, once again at the end of a long wooden beam butted inside a metal-clad box. When, at the proper moment, steam-devils were loosed into the box, the bronze-sheathed ram must necessarily shoot forth through the water, spearing or smashing the enemy vessel from an unexpected distance.

  Already Alaph had assigned a team of artisans to the design. Yet of late he found himself teased by a further thought: Why must the ram stop at all once it was hurled at the target? Might it not be freed of the ship entirely, to speed home to the enemy like a water-borne lance or catapult-ball? Was there some way the fevered djinni could be contained inside the projectile, working to propel it though water, even through sky?

  Alaph’s sounding board for such speculations was Mustafar, his fellow contestant. Countless times the genial ship-armourer had proposed physical means to enable him to try to implement one of his far-fetched ideas. While Alaph’s suggestions to his friend had less immediate practical value, Mustafar seemed to prize them as pointing out subjects for future inquiry.

  “With our combined skill and inventiveness,” the armourer boasted, “there is little doubt that we will comer the Naval Prize between us. I care nothing for the mumbo jumbo, spells, and star-readings of our opponents; I do not think Yezdigerd will either, in the final reckoning.” The moustached draughtsman favoured Alaph with one of his confident smiles. “At all events, my craftsmanship assures me a well-paid place here at the Navy Yard. The real profit in this business lies in the fitting-out of ships. So even if I do not win the golden talents, I will not overmuch mind.”

  The occasion for their talk was an informal pretesting of several of the contest schemes. Alaph was there surveying his new steam-coffin, its polished-bronze rectangle gleaming from the stem of a low, trim galley. The redesigned boiler was to be heated by Mustafar’s liquid pitch, carried through a feed pipe from a keg kept safe in the bows. The more intricate mechanics of Alaph’s invention were not yet installed, but he hoped first to test this improved sarcophagus for strength and leakage.

  Mustafar, for his part, stood with the alchemist on the low stone quay, readying his catapult and waiting for the waterway to clear. The machine was a standard one, not one of his rapid-fire or heavy, dart-shooting models. But he intended to use it in a novel way, to hurl an exploding firepot that would burst on the water, spreading flames as a floating barrier to deter ships from approaching. Such a device, mounted on a light merchant vessel, could conceivably be a positive deterrent to piracy. Had Alaph not liked and admired the armourer so, he might have been painfully envious of his cleverness.

  “These horsetail binding-springs are blasted troublesome,” the black-moustached craftsman complained, loosening pegs on the catapult frame. “They react to
the sea’s damp and to the sun’s heat, and must be tuned daily. Nor can they be left long at full tautness, lest they stretch out of shape. I have often thought of using some harder substance, such as bone or metal, to draw the cable.”

  “You will have plenty of time, anyway,” was Alaph’s comment. “It will be noon before Tambur Pasha’s water-chariot is clear of the harbour.”

  He referred to the astrologer’s latest experiment in automotion, a small galley powered by two water-wheels instead of oars. The wheels, suspended over each side of the ship into the water, resembled oversized chariot wheels, but with a couple of differences. The rims, for one thing, were fitted with projecting wooden flanges; these were meant to push at the water like oar blades once the wheels were turning. Alaph found this idea interesting, thinking of how it might be applied to his own devices; but then, there would not be time to work up such a design for the contest.

  As another peculiarity, the spokes of the wheels were curved, running out straight from the hubs but intersecting the rims at a flat angle. Around each of these spokes was attached a sliding lead weight. This, as Alaph heard it explained, accomplished the following self-evident effect: On the ascending side of the wheel, the weights slid in close to the hub, and so exerted very little leverage. But on the descending side, the same weights slid out to the wheel-rim and so bore down more heavily on the spokes. Therefore it must happen that, with the falling side in effect heavier than the rising side, the wheel would keep turning of its own accord. The paddles would push water, and the craft would move forward without need of manpower, providing a form of self-perpetuating motion.

  The idea seemed to Alaph almost too good to be true. So it proved in practice, out in the water, since the craft would not seem to gain any speed. The astrologer stood in the stem, working hard with his steering-oar to encourage forward motion across the quiet bay. The wheels creaked and turned sluggishly, but it was unclear whether this was a cause or a consequence of the craft’s slow drifting—aided, perhaps, by the efforts of the two slaves in the waist who had been assigned to grease the lead weights and keep them sliding.

  “When will that fat fool give up?” Mustafar muttered. “As many times as the dull-brained idea has failed on land, why should he think it would work any better at sea? Ah, there at last, he orders his slaves to use their oars. At least he was not fool enough to leave them ashore!”

  “You will have longer to wait,” Alaph observed, “if he is not out of the way before Zalbuvulus sets forth.”

  The two of them turned to the adjacent dock, where the Corinthian inventor even then herded his oar-crew out to their waiting galley. As Alaph watched, he felt a cold shifting in his vitals: There was something of nightmare in this scene. Whatever dark preparation the sour philosopher had put his men through this time, it had left them scarcely men.

  The rowers slunk and scuttled pitifully, straggling along the pier like no crew of healthy slaves the alchemist had ever seen. Their aspect as they hurried by was that of cowed, broken things cringing away from the lash... even though their stem, frowning commander carried none. As they scuttled past, they gave off a strange, hoarse rasping or chattering, though none of their lips appeared to move. All of them, eerily enough, had become hunch-backs. Each man, under his coarse neck-to-knee robe, slouched along with spine or shoulder sharply elevated. Alaph recalled none of them having shown this defect before. Their necks now hung forward unnaturally, looking red and painfully lacerated. In all, the deformities were worse than abnormal; rather, they appeared supernatural in origin. Several times the alchemist thought he saw the odd-shaped lumps moving underneath the loose fabric of the robes, and once, where a tear in the coarse stuff shifted, he saw eyes peering out—luminous eyes set in a squat, fiendish face.

  “Fie, a blight on all sorcerers!” Mustafar swore hoarsely in his friend’s ear. “Of all the dark conjuring men stoop to, this western vice of philosophy must be the worst!”

  “He has saddled them with some kind of incubi,” Alaph marvelled, “demons that bite and claw at them.” He watched the last of the hurrying slaves scurry into the ship before their stem-faced master.

  “Aye. Each man with a personal imp to shriek and chatter in his ear—when to lift oars, when to stroke, when to puke and when to die!” The armourer cursed again. “I would be doing them all a favour if I unleashed my weapon now and filled up their galley with cleansing fire!”

  “Nay, do not say such things,” Alaph soothed, putting a restraining hand on Mustafar’s knotty shoulder. “With any luck, they will be out of the way soon.”

  But fortune did not make matters easy. The galley, once orders were given and the drumbeat commenced, set out at a clumsy, halting pace. Some oar blades skipped over water and clashed against one another awkwardly, while others dug in deeply, stroking at a too-frantic pace. The result was forward motion of an erratic kind—made far worse, so it seemed, by the consequences of failure, which included guttural, rasping admonitions in an alien tongue and high-pitched, agonized screaming. As one oar section and then another faltered and recovered, the ship meandered out toward the river channel in a pitiful fashion, the shrieks and pleadings of its crew gradually fading.

  Alaph, though leg-weak from the spectacle, consented to test his ship. ‘ ‘Mine is a simple trial anyway, merely to fire the coffin. I do not intend to go cruising about the harbour and delay your test further.”

  He made sure to pole the craft a fair distance from the quay, to avoid innocent deaths in the event of an explosion. Then he ordered his slave in the bows to open the tap and start the trickle of flammable humours. He struck flint and steel into the trough himself, braving the scorching blast as the fumes ignited. Once burning, the flame stayed bright and even, Alaph having already determined that it would not follow the pipe forward to the supply kegs. He waited. It was not long before the bronze sarcophagus began to tick and redden with heat and the restlessness of the trapped demons.

  When the flat surfaces of the coffin began to bulge, Alaph vented some of the elementals, first through a pipe he had attached astern below the waterline, then through another above. The experiment showed what he should have guessed earlier: The pipes shrieked and spurted furiously, sending forth jets of dissipating vapour., but they did not provide any forward motion. Once free, the alchemist saw, the steam-demons would not willingly work for him. It was necessary to keep them contained, teasing them with the promise of freedom... as long as one did not tease and delay too long.

  To mark his position in the water, he watched the nearby quay. There Mustafar was ready with his catapult, Zalbuvulus's demon-ridden craft having by now cleared the harbour. Then at once the alchemist noticed something sinister.

  An oily, black substance dripped from the gutters at the side of the quay, pooling on the surface of the water. His eye followed the stain upslope to the wagon where Mustafar's kegs of flammable supplies waited, well back from the catapult. He glimpsed furtive movement about the cart; one or more of the kegs must have tipped or ruptured, sending a stream of dark liquid down to the waterside, where the armourer and his slaves made ready to strike fire for the weapon test.

  “Mustafar! Watch out!” Over the shrill noise of the steam vent, his cry went unheard. “Cut off the fuel!” Motioning frantically to his slave in the bows, Alaph bent and twisted shut the steam valve astern, causing the plaintive soughing to die out. Standing and drawing new breath to shout, he saw a flame wink to life on the pier—wink and blossom, then expand to a giant, black-maned fire-demon. The hungry beast swallowed the quay in an instant and ran its greedy tongue up to the supply wagon to find a fresh feast there.

  Alaph’s vessel survived unharmed, though it had rocked in the water with the force of the blast, and its maker’s eyebrows had been singed away by the hre-djinn's ferocious breath. Of Mustafar, his helpers, and his brave ideas, nothing remained after the holocaust but char and bone-ash.

  No clue was found, either, as to how the mishap had occurred. Some calle
d it the inevitable price of trafficking with fire elementals. But Alaph was certain it had been sabotage. He even thought of expressing his belief to the Admiralty officials. But then the tragedy was forgotten in the excitement over the appearance of the pirate fleet.

  XIV

  The Scented Trap

  The fleet that rowed into the naval harbour at Aghrapur and boldly dropped anchor was a motley, rugged-looking assemblage. There were four biremes, two-deckers of the largest type used by the eastern pirate bands, all but the one of them ill-maintained and undermanned; a good half-dozen galliots and oar-cruisers of a similar size; a trim penteconter, still in black Imperial paint, closely resembling the warship lost by the wizard Crotalus to the pirates; and a score or more of smaller sail- and oarships, the dhows and feluccas common to eastern sea-islanders and coastal raiders.

  Disreputable and treacherous as these intruders seemed, they were not attacked by the harbour catapult batteries or rammed by Imperial guardships—because, after all, even a sizeable pirate fleet could scarcely be seen as a danger to the empire, stopping together here in the very hornet's-hive of Imperial naval power. Furthermore, above the skull and crossed-sabre flag of the pirate Brotherhood, the largest bireme flew the blue pennant of a Turanian military governor. A canopy had been raised on the flagship’s afterdeck, concealing whatever official passengers the vessel carried. But in view of the negotiations currently under way with the trans-Vilayet islanders, it was deemed prudent to apprise Emperor Yildiz of the matter before any action was taken.

  The emperor, as it happened, was in no hurry to resolve the mysterious arrival. Yildiz saw the foreign fleet as a public curiosity and a highly fortuitous embellishment to the impending naval spectacle. He expressed his hope— which, in high court circles, was tantamount to a command—that any agreement or punishment would be deferred for several days, so that the result might be shown off as a part of the naval pageant.