Conan the Savage Read Online Free Page A

of their leader. Ragged and long-bearded as they were, waving their arms with excitement, their charge resembled more the disgorging of a madhouse or a graveyard than a prison break. The convict Tjai stayed close by Conan’s side, clutching his shoulder for mutual balance in difficult spots, his face alight with hope at the sudden opportunity.
    “’Tis a brilliant idea, Conan!” the Ilbarsi gasped along the way. “I did not think you knew the stone that well, to shave things so close—and after such a short time in the pit!”
    Conan turned, clasping his comrade’s arm in the legionary double hand grip, the better to haul the smaller man up a cottage-sized boulder. “When I was a lad, I hunted mountain sheep through the alps of my native land. I learned to read the rocks even as the horn-heads do.”
    “You learned well, Conan,” Tjai affirmed. Slit-eyed, the Ilbarsi pointed forward and upward. “There, see, through the dust... it looks as if this slide of ours stretches clean to the quarry’s rim!”
    “Aye, Crom thump me,” Conan swore devoutly. “But now the thrice-cursed guards have guessed what we are about. Our work begins in earnest.”
    Ahead, they could see where the landslide had cut into the mine’s defences. A catwalk was down, one end of it trailing in the sloping rubble, with what looked like the broken body of a guard lying in the stony wrack a little way beneath. Two more guards crouched on the last, sagging horizontal reach of catwalk, outlined against the bright, welcoming sky as they peered down through the roiling dust. Above them, one of the cabins had been partly undermined. Its rounded log-skids sagged out over the precipice, yet it had not fallen.
    “Ho there, you prisoners, get on back!” a voice came down to them, funnelled through cupped hands. “Do not venture near the rim, on pain of death!”
    “Aye, rascals, take your stenchy hides back down into the pit,” the other guard called less officiously. “You lackeys have a sorry mess of stone to clean up!”
    As Conan climbed, hard, round pebbles began to shatter near him: slung stones, each one easily large enough to kill or maim. Slingers could be seen on the balcony of the guard cabin, with more now appearing at the unbroken edge of the quarry. Their barrage intensified, and just ahead, a crunching, despairing cry rang out. One of the white-bearded convicts clutched his shoulder and fell, rolling a dozen man-lengths down the rubble slope to lie moaning, his arm bloodied and one leg twisted crazily beneath him.
    This, however, did not halt the others. It only hastened their climb. Some, with wild eyes set on the cliff edge, scrambled past the dangling end of catwalk and its two defenders; but Conan headed straight for it, with Tjai following close behind him.
    Slipping and scrabbling in the rubble, the Cimmerian grabbed hold of a trailing end of rope and used it to haul himself up all the faster. When he reached the hanging wooden slats, he gained some protection against the bombardment of stones; they smote and dinted the thin planks, thudding down heavily at his feet.
    The two catwalk guards were armed only with long daggers, which they now used to saw at the thick, tarred cordage, working to cut away the dangling portion of catwalk where it trailed into the pit.
    “Tjai, grab hold! Stoutly, now!” Seized by a sudden, devilish inspiration, the two tugged and swung on the slack ropes. The men on the unstable footing above clutched for their lives, and one of them, taken by surprise, overtoppled. Flailing and calling out piteously as he fell, he ended in the netting just above Conan’s head, while his long, sharp poniard tumbled almost into the Cimmerian’s lap.
    “Aha, fellow, and welcome!” But the man was dead, his neck twisted in cordage. Hauling the corpse down, Conan laid hold of the makeshift ladder. “Now we must climb, and fast!”
    Clamping the weapon in his teeth, oblivious of the stones that still cracked and