Cyrodian’s sigh of relief was audible.
“What has passed here between us never occurred, Athadian.”
“Agreed.”
“But reconcile yourself to one condition, and this above all others.”
“What is that?”
“I have done you a service, Prince Cyrodian. One day you must repay me. Swear to me that you will respect this condition. From one warrior to another.”
Cyrodian stared at him.
“This allegiance, Cyrodian, this oath—it goes beyond our families and our countries. You understand this. It is greater than nations and stronger than politics.”
“I do understand.”
Nutatharis spoke the truth. An agreement sworn to by warriors was regarded in the West as an oath older than any law code, and it was respected in the courts even more than was the testimony of a dying man, or the sworn disposition of a temple priest, or the words of a mother in the service of great Hea. It was an oath that predated civilization, and profound it was.
“Do you swear this, Prince Cyrodian?”
Cyrodian breathed and watched Nutatharis’s eyes, and in that moment, they were equals.
“I swear it,” he said, and held up his fist, then opened it.
He had never before done such a thing in his life.
* * * *
Later that evening, Cyrodian visited General Kustos’s chamber in his apartment on the second floor of the palace. A court physician was just leaving the room as the prince reached the door.
“He lives?” Cyrodian asked the leech.
The physician’s gray eyes showed sadness; his expression was one of regret. “He will not last the night, your honor, unless I am mistaken. The wound was poorly tended to; it developed a poison and spread quickly. The general’s fever worsens, and he is sinking. Excuse me while I notify King Nutatharis.”
Cyrodian placed a heavy paw on the doctor’s arm. “Nutatharis has retired. Do not disturb him. I’ll inform him before I take to my own bed. But I’d like to speak with the general before I do. Is he alert enough to speak?”
“Yes. But I would ask you to keep your visit short.”
“That I’ll do. But we soldiers, you know, have our own business to attend to, even under such circumstances as this.”
“Very well. But be sure to advise the king, your honor.” If the doctor was suspicious of this outlander, he did not show it and was, in fact, even more grateful at being able to retire for the night. The king would not be disappointed; he knew already that Kustos was a dead man merely awaiting the last breath.
“Go ahead,” Cyrodian insisted.
He watched as the physician hoisted his heavy leather bag of tools and medicines upon his shoulder and moved away, down the hall into shadows.
Then Cyrodian entered the chamber. It was dark, save for a circle of lamps lit around Kustos’s bed and the ever-present incense braziers that burned mith and gola leaves to aid his respiration. Cyrodian quietly went to the general’s bed and stood above the supine man, his darkness falling over him. Kustos’s old face was seamed with exertion, and sweat lay in the wrinkles like water in gullies.
The moist eyes opened, staring upward.
Cyrodian took one of Kustos’s hands, his left hand, in a false gesture of concern. “My friend,” he whispered, “you are doing well. You are to live.”
“No, I will not.” Kustos’s voice was a croak, nothing better. “I am dying. I know it. I can feel it in me. The cold and the darkness.”
Cyrodian’s expression did not change.
“I have many regrets,” Kustos whispered thickly. His tongue swiped at the sweaty corners of his mouth. “Cyrodian, please…call me a priest. Find one. There are temples in the city.”
“A priest?”
“Please. In my youth…I was devout.”
Cyrodian swallowed but nodded. “I will find you a priest, then,” he promised, thinking such a request odd from so seasoned a soldier. But who could say how each of us faces the passing of the light? “Rest,” he told Kustos, and turned from the bed and crossed the room to the door, determined to find some palace servant capable of fetching a prelate for the dying man.
Such had not been his intention on entering Kustos’s chamber. Cyrodian wanted facts about some of the officers serving under the general, the better to manipulate and make use of those men, come spring. But if bringing a holy man to the bedside would help Cyrodian gain Kustos’s trust, why, then, this soon-to-be-a-ghost should have his holy man.
But as he reached the door, Cyrodian turned to look back at Kustos, and when he did, he heard a voice whispering on the other side of the general’s bed and saw the movement of some shadow just beyond the smoky lamps.
Someone else in the room? A servant? A housekeeper?
Cyrodian stepped to one side, positioning himself in the darkness alongside the wall, and opened the door as he stood by it, then closed it again without exiting. He waited, making no sound, breathing as quietly as he could.
In a moment, a figure appeared from the shadows at a far corner of the room and approached General Kustos’s bed.
“Swear it to me!” hissed this shadow. “Make the proclamation! All you need do is swear it to me, and all will be transformed. Help me! Don’t you understand?”
Kustos moaned.
“Swear it to me!” repeated the dark man. “Give me your life! Give me your life, and all will be—”
Cyrodian jumped across the flags, grunting an obscenity. Immediately, at the sound of his boot steps, the shadow pulled back, and the light of the oil lamps swept across him, showing plainly who he was.
Eromedeus.
“What the hell are you doing?” Cyrodian angrily asked him.
Kustos whined from his bed, “The priest, General! The priest!”
“Because of him?”
“Please!”
Cyrodian looked into Eromedeus’s black eyes. “What are you doing here, sorcerer?”
“I am no sorcerer,” was the arrogant reply.
“Answer me, or be damned! What are you doing to him?”
“This is our own business, barbarian. It’s no affair of yours.”
“You’ll answer me,” Cyrodian said, lifting his right hand to his sword pommel, “and I’ll know one way or—”
“The priest!” Kustos pleaded. He was in fear. “General, only a priest can help me!”
Cyrodian leaned over Kustos. “What does he mean about you giving him your life?”
Eromedeus whispered, “Fool.”
“Please, Cyrodian.…”
“Get from here,” Eromedeus ordered Cyrodian. “Leave here now and never interfere with—”
“Dog!” Cyrodian pulled free his sword and held it above the bed, aimed at Eromedeus’s heart.
The steel shimmered with patterned colors in the lamplight; the tip of it hovered before Eromedeus like an orange tongue. The minister reacted, falling back and throwing up a defensive arm. Cyrodian had not intended for his blade to cut Eromedeus; nevertheless, the edge caught the man’s right hand and sliced it neatly from knuckles to wrist.
“Dog!” he said again.
Eromedeus sneered; he swiftly covered the wounded right hand with his left. Cyrodian watched him, his sword still stretched out above the bed; the giant glanced at the hurt hand.
He saw no blood.
Yet he had felt the slight resistance on the edge of his steel and knew that he had made a cut.
Eromedeus grinned.
Kustos, seeing all this, groaned from his pillows. “By the gods, General!”
Cyrodian said to Eromedeus, “You’re not bleeding.”
Eromedeus removed his left hand, baring the right. Where a wound should have been, deep and dripping, there was no mark at all.
“I struck you!” Cyrodian yelled.
“You did not,” Eromedeus replied.
Cyrodian lost all sense. Ignoring Kustos’s weak-voiced warning, he stepped quickly around the bed and lifted his sword t
o confront Eromedeus directly. The man made no effort to step away. Without warning, Cyrodian pushed the steel directly into Eromedeus’s belly.
The long blade was inside Eromedeus halfway to the hilt. Cyrodian felt the mild resistance of organs against the steel and the muddy scrape of the edge upon some bone low on the spine, or perhaps the hip. Yet as he withdrew his weapon, there was no sign of blood on the shining metal, and upon Eromedeus’s person was only punctured clothing.
No blood.
Eromedeus laughed deeply and fully. The wind of his mockery moved the flames of the oil lamps.
Cyrodian’s face dropped. He looked from his sword to Eromedeus, then back to his weapon.
No blood.
“He cannot die!” Kustos whispered from the bed, beginning to sob. “Cyrodian! He cannot die! He dies only if…someone gives up his life! He is cursed of the gods!”
Again, the low, mocking laughter from the king’s minister.
“Name of the gods!” Prince Cyrodian swore, staring at him.
Orange-painted face; dark black eyes; evil smile, dead smile.
“He cannot die!” Kustos sobbed again, writhing in his bed. “Please, please, General, find a priest to save my soul from him!”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The conquest of Erusabad by the Salukadians was accomplished in less than one day’s time.
Two ships sailed from Ugalu and, under orders from Huagrim the Great, made port early in the morning in the Holy City. Four thousand soldiers disembarked, as Salukadian soldiers routinely did, and entered the city in four neat units the size of regiments, after the Western style. Because changeovers in personnel in Erusabad took place occasionally, no one paid particular attention to this deployment, despite the dramatic numbers apparent in the streets.
In a prearranged schedule provided by Governor Dusar, each of the Salukadian regimental commanders led his troop to one of the four bridges that crossed the Usub, the river that divided Erusabad into halves and that, logically and traditionally, marked the demarcation between the Athadian northern and the Salukadian southern sides of the Holy City.
The crossing of the Ibar, Bisht, Avarra, and Nasub bridges by an armed Salukadian host was in itself an act of military occupation and therefore an outright declaration of belligerency. But Erusabad had lived so long divided, yet at peace, that those Athadian citizens who stood in the squares this morning, or leaned from their windowsills, or peered from their shops to witness the advance of the eastern forces, did not presume to consider that what they were witnessing was a military takeover. Not daring to entertain the worst, the Athadians in the northern half of Erusabad assumed the least: that for some unknown but wholly legal reason, King Elad had sanctioned this entrance of the Salukadians onto western land.
When the first of the four regiments reached the Kinesh Square, it was approached by twenty men of an Athadian mounted patrol and asked to identify itself and state its business. Calling a halt to their advance, the Salukadians stood at rest while their commander presented a written notice, signed and sealed by Governor Dusar, allowing the soldiers entrance into the northwestern quarter. The city guards were uncertain what to make of this. Dusar, although the Athadian authority in the city, certainly did not have the privilege of granting foreign troops access to government soil.
The city patrol politely but firmly requested that the Salukadians remain as they were until the issuance of the order could be verified. The Salukadians, far more aware than the city guards of what was occurring, complied and maintained their posture, standing down while a number of the city patrol made their way to army headquarters to inquire about Dusar’s peculiar order.
By this time, the remaining three Salukadian regiments had moved, uninterrupted, through the city to station themselves at locations prearranged by Dusar: one at the Vilusian Gardens, the second at the Temple of Bithitu, and the third at the Himu Square.
One hour after the arrival of the eastern troops into Port Erusabad, General Thytagoras, the military commander in charge in Athadian Erusabad, angrily entered Dusar’s offices in the Central Authority building, just off Himu Square, and demanded to know the meaning of an armed Salukadian entrance onto Athadian soil. He was not immediately granted access to Governor Dusar’s office but was told to wait until the governor could arrange to see him.
General Thytagoras was a man of short temper and long experience. He was also a man of stern judgment who recognized just two sides to any question—his own, and the one that did not matter. The presence of an armed foreign host on his country’s soil meant but one thing him: a provocation to war.
Thytagoras was not a man used to waiting when the moment demanded action. He stalled in the outer offices of the Central Authority for perhaps as long as it had taken him that morning to lace his boots. Then, asserting that the damned eastern sewer-dogs had broken the peace, he shoved his way past the tables in the front hall, threatened to kill any bureaucrat who tried to stop him from entering the place, and moved like a stalking animal up the first stairwell he came to until he reached the second floor, where he knew Dusar’s office to be.
When he entered the governor’s chamber, he found Dusar in a compromising position: seated at his table, flanked by two attractive women, and counting the eastern gold that Huagrim had had delivered to him as payment for sanctioning the foreign occupation of western Erusabad. A man of practical tastes and limited refinement, Dusar had demanded for his treachery four thousand in the equivalent of long Athadian gold, secret passage south on a Salukadian merchanter, and two Salukadian servant girls—one a dancer (a high-bosomed beauty with whom Dusar was already familiar), the other the creamy-complexioned daughter of an inner-city merchant.
General Thytagoras drew his sword.
The women shrieked. Dusar, utterly shocked by the sudden intrusion of the military commander, dropped a basket of coins and ran across the floor of his office, away from the bared steel.
“Stay back, Thytagoras!”
“Dog!”
“This can be explained!”
“It cannot be explained!”
“I have soldiers within call!”
“Salukadian soldiers, son of a slut!”
The women pushed against each other to reach a door in the back of the room that led to a stairwell—and safety. Dusar, attempting to defend himself, managed to hoist a heavy chair and heave it toward Thytagoras, who easily stepped aside as it neared him.
Dusar then gave thought to ducking out the way the women had taken but, because he was nearer a window than the door, decided to take his chances by that route. However, the governor was a stout man and also unused to thinking clearly in moments of crisis. Hesitating therefore cost him time, while the effort to move himself, as large as he was, onto the stone sill of the shuttered window gave Thytagoras everything he needed to do what his fury required. His heavy sword, notched from many episodes of engagement, caught the governor as he pulled himself onto the sill and carved him open from shoulders to buttocks, as though Thytagoras were field dressing any large animal.
Blood came, and Dusar screamed as he fell away from the window ledge onto the stones of the floor. He looked up at Thytagoras, but already shock had set in, and all of the pain that held him, while his blood ran out beneath him.
Thytagoras, disgusted, once again moved his sword up and down and quickly beheaded the governor. He kicked the head away—it rolled bumpily and struck the leg of a table—then squared his shoulders and howled in rage.
The door of the office burst open. Twenty clerks from downstairs rushed in. At the sight of the governor, they swore angrily and threatened General Thytagoras with legal action or worse.
Thytagoras waved his bloodied sword at them, let loose a string of colorful obscenities learned from a life in war camps, then kicked open the shutters of the window by which Dusar had tried to escape and yelled down into the Himu Square. “The governor is a traitor! The Salukads are in our streets! It is war!”
* *
* *
War.
But the war did not last a day.
General Thytagoras, despite any headstrong intentions to the contrary, did not have the opportunity of assuming control of Erusabad upon Governor Dusar’s death; that office fell to one of the bureaucrats of the Central Authority, an old man named Sirom. It was Lord Sirom who, in the absence of any direct order from King Elad, thought it prudent to make a gesture of peace and thus settle with the Salukadians until he might be notified by the throne to do otherwise.
This decision did not accommodate General Thytagoras’s own intentions. He ordered out four of his companies and made combat with the Salukadian regiment in the Himu Square. But the engagement was little more than a skirmish that lasted only a short time. When Thytagoras, seeing the losses his men were taking, ordered a retreat to the walled cisterns and the overturned carts in the street, Sirom angrily presented himself at an upper balcony of the Central Authority and—upon a blast of trumpets from the guards who had move in to protect him and the crown’s property—demanded an end to the conflict. He ordered Captain Thytagoras’s men to throw down their arms, and he called for the leader of the Salukadian regiment to enter the Central Authority for a parley.
Thytagoras, outraged, retired with his soldiers to their barracks, and the commander in charge of the Salukadians, with his retinue of retainers, met in private with Sirom. Sirom engaged the easterners calmly, explaining that their entrance into Athadian-held Erusabad was a provocation to war, but that he—because of the legal ramifications of the late Governor Dusar’s contract with King Huagrim—would refrain from moving his city troops against them. Rather, he would communicate with King Elad in the Athadian capital, and if King Elad ordered war to be declared between the empires, then the streets of the Holy City would become the first battlefield of that conflict. If, however, King Elad (for whatever reasons) decided to accept the occupation on terms agreeable to the eastern ghen, then Sirom and the city of Erusabad would have no choice but to capitulate, as well.
This de facto resignation to the current conditions was agreed to by the Salukadians, who quite naturally now regarded Sirom and his government as little more than a collection of weak fools.
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