"Robert Jordan - Conan 02 - The Invincible" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jordan Robert)

"Hear me, Conan of Cimmeria," the dark man hissed. "If you betray me in this, you will pray long your
head did in truth adorn a pike."

Conan tore his hand free from the other's bony grip. He had to restrain himself from working the hand,
for those icy fingers had seemed to drain the warmth from his own. "I have agreed to do this thing," he
said hotly. "I am not so civilized as to break the honor of my word."

For a moment he thought the hook-nosed man was going to sneer, and knew that if he did he would rip
the man's throat out. Ankar contented himself with a sniff and a nod, though. "See that you remember
your honor, Cimmerian." He rose and glided away before Conan could loose a retort.

Long after the dark man was gone the muscular youth sat scowling. It would serve the fool right if he
kept the pendants, once they were in hand. But he had given his word. Still, the decision as to where to
gain his wealth had been settled. He upended the pouch, spilling thick, milled-edge roundels of gold,
stamped with Tiridates' head, into his palm, and his black mood was whisked away.

"Abuletes!" he roared. "Wine for everyone!" There would be time enough for frugality when he had the
ten thousand.

The man who called himself Ankar strode out of the Desert, trailed to the very end of the twisting,
odoriferous streets by human jackals. They, sensing something of the true nature of the man, never
screwed their courage tight enough to come near him. He, in turn, spared them not a glance, for he could
bend men's minds with his eye, drain the life from them with a touch of his hand. His true name was
Imhep-Aton, and many who knew him shuddered when they said it.

At the house he had rented in Hafira, one of the better sections of Shadizar, the door was opened by a
heavily muscled Shemite, as large as Conan, with a sword on his hip. A trader in rare gems-for as such
he was known among the nobles of the city-needed a bodyguard. The Shemite cowered away from the
bony necromancer, hastening to close and bolt the door behind him.

Imhep-Aton hurried into the house, then down into the basement and the chambers beneath. He had
chosen the house for those deep buried rooms. Some works were best done in the bowels of the earth,
where no ray of sun ever found its way.

In the anteroom to his private chamber two lush young girls of sixteen summers fell on their knees at his
entrance. They were naked but for golden chains at wrist and ankle, waist and neck, and their big, round
eyes shone with lust and worshipful adoration. His will was theirs, the fulfillment of his slightest whim the
greatest desire of their miserable lives. The spells that kept them so killed in a year or two, and that he
found a pity, for it necessitated the constant acquisition of new subjects.

The girls groveled on their faces; he paused before passing into his inner chamber to lay his staff before
the door. Instantly the wooden rod transmuted into a hooded viper that coiled and watched with cold,
semi-intelligent eyes. Imhep-Aton had no fear of human intruders while his faithful myrmidion watched.

The inner room was barren for a mage's work-chamber-no piles of human bones to stoke unholy fires,
no dessicated husks of mummies to be ground into noxious powders-but what little there was permeated
the chamber with bone-chilling horror. At either end of a long table, thin, greasy plumes of smoke arose
from two black candles, the tallow rendered from the body of a virgin strangled with her mother's hair
and made woman after death by her father. Between them lay a book bound in human skin, a grimoire
filled with secrets darker than any outside of Stygia itself and a glass, fluid-filled simulation of a human