The battle stiffened. Some of Rhavas’ bandits, it seemed, would not fall, no matter what blows landed on them. Marcus heard Gaius Philippus snarl, “Go down, you bastard, go down!”, heard the soft, meaty sound of a blade driven home.
But the senior centurion’s foe only grinned like a snake. Scaurus saw the yellowish stain on his surcoat sleeve. He slashed back at the Roman, a clumsy stroke Gaius Philippus turned with his shield. But doubt clouded the veteran’s eyes—how was he to beat a man he could not wound?
That same doubt appeared on more and more Roman faces. As Rhavas’ anointed gained confidence in their invulnerability to steel, they began running risks no warrior would have thought sane, taking ten blows to land one. They taunted the legionaries, as boys will taunt a savage dog when safely behind a high fence. And, inevitably, they took their share of victims. The Roman advance stumbled.
Smiling wickedly, a tall, jackal-lean Videssian engaged Viridovix. The cutthroat swung his sword two-handed—what need had he of shield? The big Gaul slid to one side, light on his feet as a great hunting cat. His blade, twin to Scaurus’ own, sang through the air, druids’ marks flashing gold.
It bit through flesh and windpipe and bone. Before the expression of horrified surprise could form on the brigand’s face, his head leaped from his shoulders, hitting the ground with a warm, splattery thud. The spouting corpse collapsed, its limbs thrashing, for a moment not realizing they were dead.
Viridovix’s banshee howl of triumph filled the courtroom. He leaped forward. Another muck-sleeved ruffian fell, clutching at the guts the Celt’s sword laid out into his hands, neat as an anatomical demonstration.
Marcus went hunting stained surcoats, too, realizing that, as had always been true in Videssos, his good Gallic blade was proof against sorcery. Like Viridovix, he killed his first man with ridiculous ease. Not knowing the weapon he faced, the bandit scarcely bothered to protect himself. He gasped as the tribune’s sword found his heart, then tried to breathe, but coughed blood instead.
“Liar!” he whispered, slumping to the floor; his eyes were on Rhavas.
The harsh captain’s men wavered in their attack, newfound confidence faltering as they watched their comrades die so in surprise. Then Arsaber, the hulking street ruffian, felled yet another of their number, his heavy club making a shattered ruin of the left side of his opponent’s face.
Gaius Philippus was no scholar, but in battle he missed nothing. “It’s only iron won’t hurt ’em!” he shouted to the legionaries. He snatched a pilum from one of the Romans, grabbing the shank to wield it club wise. He shouted in fierce delight as the blow sent one of Rhavas’ warriors spinning back, sword flying from nerveless fingers. Marcus did not think that man would rise again; the senior centurion had exorcised all his fear of magic in one prodigious swing.
“Stand, you ball-less rabbits!” Rhavas bellowed, and Vardanes Sphrantzes’ well-trained baritone rose in exhortation: “Hold fast! Hold fast!” But they were shouting against a gale of fear roaring through their followers—sword and spear had not held the Romans, and now sorcery failed as well.
One desperate band cut its way clean through the legionaries; its handful of survivors dashed through the Grand Gates, intent only on escape. Marcus heard their cries of despair as they ran headlong into more of Thorisin Gavras’ troops outside. With agility born of desperation, bandits clawed their way up wall hangings to insecure refuges in window niches ten feet above the floor. Others tried to surrender, but not many of Scaurus’ men would let them yield. Quintus Glabrio kept more than one from being killed out of hand, but he could not be everywhere.
Outis Rhavas cut down a bolting man from behind, and then another, his own way of encouraging his bandits to stand and fight. But even with the hardiest of his irregulars at his side, the surging Romans at last drove him from his wizard’s cauldron. He fell back toward the imperial throne.
Marcus traded swordstrokes with one of his lieutenants. The man was fast as a striking viper; he pinked Scaurus twice in quick succession, and a vicious slash just missed the tribune’s eye. But the cutthroat’s heel slipped in the great pool of blood that had gushed from the serving wench his master had killed. Before he could recover, Scaurus’ blade tore out his throat. He fell across the girl’s outraged corpse.
As the tribune pushed forward, he glanced down into the iron pot Rhavas had defended with such ferocity and found himself looking at horror. Floating in the boiling, scum-filled water was a dead baby, the soft flesh beginning to fall away from its bones. No, he corrected himself, not even a baby—the tiny body was no longer than the distance between the tips of his outstretched thumb and little finger.
His eyes slipped to the serving wench’s opened belly, back in disbelief to the cauldron, and he was sick where he stood. He spat again and again to clear his mouth of the taste and wished he might somehow wipe his vision clear so easily.
Cold in him was the knowledge that there were, after all, worse evils than Doukitzes’ tortured death. He was tempted to follow the creed of Videssos, for in Outis Rhavas surely Skotos walked on earth.
That thought led to another, and sudden dreadful certainty gripped him. “Rhavas!” he shouted; the name was putrid as the vomit on his tongue. Then he solved the other’s anagram, his monstrous joke, and cried another name: “Avshar!”
It grew very still within the Grand Courtroom; blows hung in the air, unstruck. Outis Rhavas’ name brought with it rage and hatred, but the wizard-prince of Yezd had struck cold terror into Videssos’ heart for a generation. Inside the ranks of Rhavas’ men, Marcus saw Vardanes Sphrantzes’ red cheeks go pale as he understood his state’s greatest foe had been a chief upholder of his rule.
Across the thirty feet that separated them, Rhavas—no, Avshar—dipped his head to the tribune in derisive acknowledgement of his astuteness. “Very good,” he chuckled, and Scaurus wondered how he had not known that fell voice at first hearing. “You have more wit than these dogs, it seems—much good will it do you.”
After that moment of stunned dismay, the legionaries hurled themselves with redoubled fury at the backers of him who had styled himself Outis Rhavas. The men they faced threw down their swords in scores. Rhavas the brigand chief was a captain they had followed in hope of blood and plunder, but few were the Videssians who would willingly serve Avshar.
A bandit leaped at his longtime master’s back, saber upraised to cut him down. But Avshar whirled with the speed of a wolf; his heavy longsword smashed through helm and skull alike. “A dog indeed,” he cried, “nipping at the heels he followed! Are there more?”
The men who had been his flinched away in fright, all save a black handful who still clove to him, who would have happily fought for him had they thought him Skotos enfleshed—the worst of his band, but far from the weakest. Almost all wore surcoats stained with his protective brew—no qualm of conscience had kept them from dipping their sleeves in that horrid pot.
Vardanes Sphrantzes stood in indecision, a spider caught in a greater spider’s web. He did not think of himself as an evil man, merely a practical one, and he feared Avshar with the sincere fear a far from perfect man can have for one truly wicked. But the Sevastos was more afraid to yield himself to Scaurus and, through him, to Thorisin Gavras. He knew too well the common fate of losers in Videssos’ civil wars and also knew his actions in raising his nephew to the throne—and since—were sure to doom him in the victor’s eyes.
The wizard-prince saw Sphrantzes waver; he flayed him into motion with the whip of his voice: “Come, worm, do you think you can do without me now?” And Vardanes, who had felt only contempt for soldiers, looked once more at the Romans’ crested helms and at their stabbing swords and long spears. It seemed they were all bearing down on him alone. His will failed him, and he fled with Avshar.
The way they chose—the only way they could have chosen—was a narrow spiral stair that opened out into the Grand Courtroom just to the right of the imperial throne’s gold and sapphire brill
iance. It had not been part of the throne room’s original design, for it brutally abridged a delicate wall mosaic. Marcus wondered what ancient treason caused some cautious Emperor to put safety above beauty.
Once Avshar’s few partisans had gained the stair, the legionaries’ advance was easy no more. Those steps had been made so one man could hold back an army, and the wizard-prince himself was rear guard, a cork not to be lightly pulled from the bottle.
The tribune and Viridovix attacked by turns; not only were they nearest Avshar in size and strength, but theirs were blades to stand against his sorcery. At every stroke the druids’ marks incised upon them flashed golden, turning aside the banes locked within his brand.
Legionaries, crowding close behind their champions, jabbed spears over them at Avshar. Warded as he was, the thrusts could not hurt him, but spoiled his swordstrokes and threatened to trip him up. His heavy blade hewed clear through more than one soft iron pilum-shank; nevertheless he was forced back, step by slow step.
“Let’s the both of us fight him at the same time,” Viridovix panted. Marcus shook his head. The stairway was so narrow two men abreast would only foul each other, but he would have refused had it been wider. The first time his sword had met the Gaul’s, they were whirled here; were they to touch again, only the gods knew what might befall.
The spiral wound through three complete turns. Then Avshar’s massive frame was silhouetted against a background lighter than the stairway’s oppressive gloom. The wizard-prince drew back away from the topmost step, as if inviting his pursuers to come on.
That Marcus did, but warily, expecting deviltry. He remembered Avshar’s escape from Videssos the year before—the sea-wall arsenal’s sudden-slammed door, the corpse of the wizard’s servant speaking with his master’s voice, the swords and spears that flew to the attack with no man wielding them. Avshar was never more dangerous than when seeming to give way.
A blade slammed against his upraised shield, but there was a ruffian back of it, a red-faced man with a great mat of greasy black beard. Scaurus parried, countered. The thrust was clumsy, but his reach and long blade made his stocky foe give back a pace. He stepped up quickly, Viridovix only a single stair behind him, legionaries jamming the stairway behind.
The suite above the throne room had to be the Emperor’s disrobing chamber, a private retreat from the ceremonial of the Grand Courtroom. There had been, Marcus saw, six or eight well-stuffed chairs and a couch set up in the outer room; Avshar’s men had flung them against the seascape-painted walls to gain fighting room. The rough treatment had burst one, and gray feathers whirled in the air.
Even as he fenced with the black-bearded highbinder, Scaurus wondered why Avshar had yielded the stair so easily there at the end, why for the moment he was leaving the battle to his henchmen. Where was he? Hardly time to see, with this cutthroat hacking away like a berserker.
The tribune let his foe’s slash hiss past, stepped forward inside the saber’s arc, and ran him through the throat. Aye, there was Avshar, in front of a closed door with Vardanes Sphrantzes. He bent low to say something to the Sevastos, who shook his head. Avshar smashed him in the face with his gauntleted hand.
Vardanes, strong-willed in this ruin of all his hopes, still would not do the wizard’s bidding. With cold deliberation, Avshar hit him again. Marcus saw something crumple inside the proud Sevastos. All his life the bureaucrat had upheld his faction by circumventing brute force, by bringing Videssos’ proud soldiers to heel without violence. Now at last he had to confront it with no buffers, and found he could not. He pulled a brass key from his belt, worked the lock, and slipped into the room beyond.
Marcus forgot him almost as soon as he disappeared. Fighting back to back, the tribune and Viridovix cleared enough space to let the legionaries emerge, a couple at a time, from the stairwell. Even with reinforcements constantly added, the fight was savage. Save for Scaurus’ sword and the Celt’s, Roman blades would not wound Avshar’s men. They had to be clubbed into submission with spearshafts and other makeshift bludgeons, or else disarmed by a clever sword-stroke and then wrestled to the floor and dispatched with bare hands. They made the Romans pay dearly for each life.
The price would have been higher yet, but Avshar, as if conceding all was lost, stood aloof from the struggle, watching his men die one by one. Only when a legionary drew too near the door he was guarding did his blade flash forth, wielded as always with skill and might to daunt a hero. There was no shame in seeking easier prey, and so in the end the wizard-prince stood all alone before that doorway.
Facing a lesser foe, the Romans would have rolled over him and after Vardanes Sphrantzes. But Avshar was like a lion brought to bay; the debased majesty in him carried awe mingled with the dread. Push forward, Scaurus thought—make an end. But Avshar’s gaze came baleful through visor slits, and the tribune could not move. Even Viridovix, a stranger to intimidation, stood frozen.
A strange silence fell, broken only by the legionaries’ panting and the moans of the injured. Without turning, Avshar rapped on the door behind him. His iron-knuckled hand made it jump on its hinges. Only silence answered him. He hit it again, saying, “Come out, fool, lest I stand aside and let them have you.”
There was another pause, but as Avshar began to slide away from the door, Vardanes Sphrantzes drew it open. The Sevastos clutched a dagger in his right hand. His left cruelly prisoned the wrist of a young girl; she wore only a short shift of transparent golden silk that served but to accent her nakedness beneath.
For all its paint, her face was not a palace tart’s; the knowledge on it was of a different kind. But not until her calm greeting, “Well met, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus,” did the tribune know her for Alypia Gavra.
Caught by surprise, he took an involuntary step forward. Sphrantzes’ dagger leaped for her throat. Light glinted off the mirror-bright sliver of steel. The stiletto was only a noble’s jewel-encrusted toy, but it could let her life river out before any man could stop it. Alypia stood motionless under its cold caress.
Scaurus also froze, two paces away. “Let her go, Vardanes,” he urged, watching Sphrantzes closely. Vardanes’ plump face was unnaturally pale, save for two spots of red that marked the impact of Avshar’s hand. A thin trickle of blood ran from his left nostril into his beard. His pearl-bedecked Sevastos’ coronet sat awry on his head—for the dandy Sphrantzes was, a telling sign of disintegration. His eyes were wide and staring, trapped eyes.
“Let her go,” Marcus repeated softly. “She won’t buy your escape—you know that.” The Sevastos shook his head, but the dagger fell—not much, but an inch or two.
Avshar chuckled, his mirth more terrible than a shriek of hate. “Aye, let her go, Vardanes,” he said. “Let her go, just as you let Videssos go when it was in your hands. You took your pleasure from it as from her, and then watched with drool dribbling down your chin as it slipped through your fingers. Of course, let her go. What better way to end your bungling life? Even as a puppet you were worthless.”
Marcus never knew whether Avshar’s contempt was more than the Sevastos could endure or whether, in some last calculation of his own, Vardanes decided—and perhaps rightly—the wizard-prince’s death might be the one coin to buy his safety from Thorisin Gavras. Whatever his reasons, he suddenly shoved Alypia forward, sending her stumbling into the tribune’s arms, then whirled and drove his dagger into Avshar’s armored breast.
The thin steel needle was the perfect weapon to pierce a cuirass, and Sphrantzes’ desperate stab was backed by all the power his well-fed frame could give. Scaurus had always thought there was muscle under that fat. Now he knew it, for when Vardanes’ hand came away, the stiletto was driven home hilt-deep.
But Avshar did not crumple. “Ah, Vardanes,” he said, laughing a laugh jagged as broken glass. “Futile to the very end. My magics proofed you against cold iron’s bite. Did you think they would do less for me, their maker? See now, it should be done this way.”
Swift as a serpen
t’s strike, he seized the Sevastos, lifted him off his feet, and flung him against the wall. Marcus heard his skull shatter—the exact sound, he thought, of a dropped crock of porridge. Blood sprayed over the painted waves; Vardanes was dead before he slid to the floor.
Avshar drew the dagger from his chest, tucked it into his belt. “A very good day to you all,” he said with a last mocking bow, and darted into the farther chamber.
His flight freed the Romans from the paralysis with which they had watched the past minutes’ drama. They rushed to the door; but though the locks were on the outside, they would not open. The Romans attacked the door with swords and their armored shoulders, but the apartment over the throne room was, among other things, a redoubt, and the portal did not yield.
Through the noise of their pounding came Avshar’s voice, loudly chanting in some harsh tongue that was not Videssian. More magic, Marcus thought with a twist of fear in his guts. “Zeprin!” he shouted, and then cursed the confused pushing and shoving that followed as the Haloga bulled his way up the crowded spiral stair.
He burst puffing out of the stair well; the climb had left his normally ruddy features almost purple. His head swiveled till he spied Scaurus’ tall horsehair plume. The tribune stabbed his thumb at the door. “Avshar’s on the other side. He—”
Marcus had been about to warn the Haloga that Avshar was brewing sorcery, but found himself ignored. Zeprin the Red had nursed his hatred and lust for vengeance since Mavrikios fell at Maragha; now they exploded. He hurled himself at the doorway, roaring, “Where will you run now, wizard?”
Legionaries scattered as his great axe came down. It was as well they did; in his berserk fury the Haloga paid them no heed. Timbers split under his hammerstrokes—no wood, no matter how thick or seasoned, could stand up to such an assault for long.
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