The Dark Lord (81 page)

"You should stay on the camel," Shirin said with asperity. "You might not have been cut, but you're certainly bruised within an inch of your life."

"No," Thyatis said, standing away from the Khazar woman. She squared her shoulders, chin rising. "There's more. I... I was responsible for them, for the blast. We fought on the mountaintop..." Thyatis' voice trailed away, then she rallied. "I was too slow, Shirin, and all those people were killed. Your children were killed, because I looked away at the wrong moment."

Shirin stared at the Roman, lips twisting into a surprised grimace, then settling into a tight, hard line. "What are you talking about?" Her eyes glittered, even in the encompassing darkness. Thyatis took an involuntary step back, licking her lips.

"The Duchess sent me—sent us—to murder Prince Maxian. He was hiding out in a villa on the slopes of Vesuvius. I nearly had him in the crater—my knife was at his throat!" Thyatis' voice slewed into a harsh growl. "But it wasn't enough. The mountain erupted. I think... I think he did something, disturbed something, and Vesuvius just... blew apart."

Shirin stood silent and Thyatis waited. After awhile, she sat down, still waiting, but too tired to stand. The eastern sky brightened steadily, shading from deep blue to pink and then a pearl white. Finally, Shirin stirred, shaking the cowl of her
djellabah
back. She faced the sun, long hair a wavy cloud behind her head, and she breathed deep, holding her arms wide. The dawn wind was dropping, reduced to gusts and zephyrs scudding across the barren plain.

"This prince... what was his name?"

Thyatis looked up, startled at the grim determination in the woman's voice. "Maxian Atreus, the younger brother of Emperor Galen."

Shirin nodded to herself, fine white teeth biting her lower lip. "A wizard? A sorcerer?"

"Yes." Thyatis watched her friend with growing puzzlement. "Shi—I'm sorry."

The Khazar woman stepped to the Roman and held out her hands, an expression of deep and abiding grief making her cheeks hollow and her eyes dark pits smudged with pain. Thyatis took them and stood, leaning heavily on the slighter woman. Shirin held her close, face pressed against leather and iron, raven-dark hair tickling Thyatis' nose. The Roman woman sighed, overcome by enormous relief, and then staggered, barely able to stand. Again, Shirin caught her and put Thyatis' hands against the camel for support.

"Tell me one thing," Shirin said, voice suddenly cold. "Did you have any idea what would happen on the mountaintop?"

Thyatis looked sideways, meeting the Khazar woman's eyes, shaking her head. "We all thought
we
would die at the prince's hands, or those of his servants. I didn't think he..." Her voice failed, her attention focused on something very far away. She resumed, voice faint. "No one knew how powerful he was or what he would do to live."

The sun was a hot pink spark on the eastern horizon as Vladimir and Nicholas wearily climbed the low hill, pushing their way through prickly scrub. Sand dragged at their feet, making every step an effort. Reaching the hollow, Vladimir collapsed to his knees and laid down, panting. A cold mist rose from the lake, making the air damp and chill. The Walach luxuriated in the temperature, knowing too well the sun would soon be full in the sky, burning away the fog and hammering the land with unrelenting heat.

"Where..." Nicholas started coughing again, a raw rasping sound. After the spasm passed, he managed to croak, "where is the telecast?"

"There—" Vladimir rolled over, outflung arm indicating the section of sand where he'd buried the bronze disc. He stopped, staring. "—it is."

Hastily excavated sand made an untidy pile around an empty hole. Vladimir closed his eyes, feeling the earth tilt under him. When he opened them again the hole remained. Nicholas knelt beside him, face white with fury as he examined the ground.

"I've not your nose," he muttered, rising to pace through the brush. "But people were here—more than one." The Latin paused, fingers gently working a scrap of beige cloth free from a thorn branch. "Here—does this smell familiar?"

Vladimir took the scrap of cloth, eyes narrowing, and drank deep of the faint aroma clinging to the loose-weave fabric. The smell was tantalizing, then he remembered and a deep growl issued from the back of his throat. At the same time, the Walach rocked back on his heels, gritting his teeth against a sudden, hollow feeling. Nicholas watched his friend with dead eyes, quick mind having leapt ahead to the same inevitable conclusion.

"Thyatis," Vladimir said dully, staring at the hole as if the woman were there herself, laughing at their slow, dull minds. His fingernails shredded the fabric, letting the threads drift away in the dawn breeze. "She was here. With the others."

"Which others? The Persians?" Nicholas squatted down, realizing he was silhouetted against the skyline. His face had grown very still, lips a harsh slash, eyes dark slits in a tanned face. "How many?"

The Walach did not answer immediately, but crawled slowly around the hole, head low to the ground. Then he crept off into the brush and did not return for some time. When he did, a ghastly expression haunted his face. Nicholas was waiting, Brunhilde across his knees, chin in his hands.

"What did you find?"

Vladimir squatted beside the hole, digging his long fingers into the sand. "Betia was here too, and three or four other women. There were camels hidden down there." He pointed at the deserted, quiet village. "They put the telecast on a camel and went away into the desert to the northeast."

"On the pilgrim road?" Nicholas did not meet his friend's eyes, focusing on rubbing soot from the scabbard with his tunic sleeve.

"No. There is another trail following the line of ridges."

Nicholas looked up, pale mauve eyes glittering in reflection of the spreading cloak of dawn. "Our camels and water?"

Vladimir shook his head. "Gone." The beasts had fled wildly from the ambush on the temple mount and though he'd seen their tracks, they were long gone. "We have nothing," he said, biting his knuckles.

Nicholas rose into a crouch, fixing the Walach with a furious glance. "Don't be a fool! We are alive and there is water in the oasis pools. These houses will be filled with food, water bags, everything we need."

Vladimir nodded, but he looked to the north. Flat-topped mesas dotted the horizon, flattened as by the blows of giants, their sides crumbling and rocky with shale and chalk. Beyond them lay the open desert, wind-blown plains of rock and stone, and endless rolling sand beyond. "How..."

"We walk," Nicholas said, moving down the hill, still keeping low. "First to Praetonium and then a ship to Cyrenaicea or Rome herself."

Vladimir stared after him for a moment, then shook himself from head to toe, like a wet dog, and followed.

"It's your turn." Frontius sat with his back against pitted old sandstone, squinting sideways at his friend. Both men were in a scrap of shade thrown by a merlon rising from the tower wall. The sun was a huge, brassy disk in the morning sky, its heat magnified by sodden delta air.

"I think not!" Sextus replied, between gulps of tepid brown water from a cup. A bucket sat beside him, wedged into the corner of a stone embrasure. Two more buckets filled with river sand completed the fire-brigade station. "Who was cutting the cables on the Heliokonpolis bridge while the Jackal came on at us, thundering like the gods and spitting fire?"

"You," Frontius allowed, closing his weak eye. Sweat oozed in a steady, slow stream down the side of his nose. "And handily done too. But I took the last look-see. It's your turn now."

Groaning, Sextus peered over the edge of the embrasure, helmet crammed down tight on his head, a sweat-dark leather strap biting into his stubbled chin. The sky growled and rumbled with muted, distant thunder, but there were no clouds on the horizon. Instead, a heavy grayish haze hung over the fields and canals facing the city. The engineer's armor clamped tight against his chest and upper arms, the metal burning with sweat. He blinked a trail of salt out of his eyes, searching the irregular, rumpled landscape for the enemy.

The irregular wind out of the north fluttered to a stop. A suffocating pressure began to build in the humid air.

All along the Roman lines, a sloping, packed earthen berm two miles long, faced with slabs of scavenged stone and brick, riddled with sharpened stakes, topped by a fighting platform reinforced with palm logs, mud-brick and irregularly placed towers, the Legions tensed. Every man crouched down, pressing himself into the muddy corduroy walkway. Sextus counted himself lucky, on one hand, for their position stood at the Nile Canal gate—a proper fortification of sandstone and cement, long predating the earthworks—and on the other, he was shivering with fear, for the exposed bastion of the gate towers were sure to draw the full attention of the enemy.

The engineer had seen the strength of the Persian sorcerers—more than once—and the rush of blood in his veins was loud in his ears. A half-mile of lumpy ground, denuded of vegetation, buildings and every scrap of brick, stone and wood faced the wall. Flocks of white birds pecked among the waving, knee-high grass. Sextus wiped sweat from his eyes, searching for the Persian lines, for the glint of watery sunlight on spears and helms...

There!

The air twisted, a monstrous shape winging towards the Roman lines. The heat-haze rippled, bunching and roiling around a swift sparkling mote speeding like Apollo's arrow towards the gate. The birds spurted up from the ground in a panicked cloud of white feathers. Screeching in alarm, they darted away across the bobbing grass.

"Down!" Sextus screamed, kissing the stone. Every man in the tower did the same, eyes screwed shut against the expected flare of brilliance. A wild rushing sound ripped overhead, then a colossal
thwang
reverberated through stone and air. Sextus' eyes flew open in surprise, staring up, and his mind—normally quick, even in exhaustion—took a moment to grasp what he saw.

A furious black spark whirled and sputtered in the air. Curlicues of lightning danced around the edges, illuminating—just for a fraction of a grain—a queer distortion in the air. The shuddering pocket of flame flared, leaping across some invisible surface and the engineer gaped to see the ravening destruction unfold, spilling away from him, lighting the sky, the tower and the rampart for thousands of yards in either direction, but held in the air like a stone distending a taut cloth. A rumbling, deafening
crack-crack-crack
rocked the engineer, throwing him to his knees, but the hissing, spitting destruction he expected to rip across the top of the tower, incinerating the defenders, cracking stone, scorching their scorpions and ballistae, stalled in the wavering air. Flame roared away, flooding down into the ground, into the foundations of the tower, like water spilling from a millrace.

In the blink of an eye, the blast was gone, leaving only sizzling earth and clouds of steam boiling up from damp fields. Sextus shook his head, trying to clear his mind, then he saw the previously empty plain surging with the enemy. The northerly wind resumed, stirring turgid air.

"Here they come!" The engineers leapt to their ballista. Frontius scrambled up on the far side of the machine, grasping hold of a metal-faced plate set in the firing port of the wall. Sextus took hold of a smooth wooden handle with his left hand, then seized hold of the firing lever with the other. Frontius, ducking, dragged the metal plate aide, revealing the fields and the road below.

Thousands of Persians and Greeks swarmed forward, shrieking war cries, running across the rumpled field towards the wall. Nearly every man, Sextus saw in the brief instant he spared to survey the attack, bore a shield and they came on in two distinct waves. The first ranks were men with climbing ladders, shields, axes, long spears—then the second were archers, already advancing in staggered line, some men lofting arrows towards the defense, the others drawing shaft to string as they jogged forward. The sky darkened with flights of shafts.

On the road itself, a three-story-high tower rumbled forward on massive wooden wheels. A huge crowd of Persians packed the road behind the siege engine, pushing for all they were worth. On the fighting top, a dozen men in glittering, head-to-toe armor crouched behind wicker and hide shields. Sextus cursed, dragging the heavy ballista up and around. A four-foot-long wooden shaft lay in the aiming groove, tipped by six inches of triangular iron. Wooden slats flared from the butt-end of the bolt.

"Aiming!" Sextus cried, narrowing his left eye as he sighted against a curved iron brace set above the bolt. Regularly spaced marks were etched in the metal. His right hand tightened on the lever. Frontius and one of the boys assigned to the engine scuttled aside, taking up positions behind and beside each torsion arm, hands light on matching wheels. Another legionnaire was ready at the engineer's shoulder with a second bolt.

The top of the fighting tower clanked into sight through the iron loop. Sextus slammed the lever down. Oiled metal squealed in release and the big triple-corded cable snapped with a sharp
thwack
against rope-padded stays. The entire ballista rocked violently forward. The bolt flicked away, faster than Sextus' eye could follow. He stayed focused on the Persian siege tower, ignoring the frenzied activity of his crew as they reloaded.

The bolt smashed through a wicker screen and into a Persian soldier's breastplate. The man sprang backward, as if by surprise, jerked by the massive blow. The soldier behind him tried to duck aside, but the bolt tore through the
diquan's
chest, out through his right shoulder and punched into the second man's mailed chest with a ringing
tonk!

"Range one hundred yards!" Sextus barked. "Three-quarters tension!"

Frontius and the other soldier at the iron wheels immediately began cranking them 'round as fast as they could. Sextus waited, watching the siege tower rumble closer, listening to the thunderous boom of Persian drums, the splintering rattle of arrows hitting the parapet, sweating more from fear now than heat. His eye caught another shining mote speeding through the air towards the tower, leaving a coiling tail of disturbed air behind. He clenched his teeth, willing his bladder to hold firm. The
clank-clank-clank
of the winch jumping back with each turn of the iron wheels filled his ears.