by H. G. Parry
“Now!” Desaix’s voice came, and at once the air was alive with the sounds of gunshots, the crackle of fireballs, the hiss of fledgling shadows. These last were too weak to kill with a touch, but the Mamelukes needed to fire at them or be hurt, and so many of their pistols were empty by the time they reached the French squares. Many fell before then, pierced by shots or scorched with flame; some at the front of the squares crumpled too, but others came to take their place.
The cavalry wheeled, retreated, then turned to strike again.
This strategy might be enough to win the fight, Napoléon knew. The squares were all but impenetrable by swords and light magic; if the enemy cavalry repeated their charge, they would eventually be forced to retreat or be killed. But he wasn’t familiar enough with Murad Bey’s magicians to know for certain that this was all they had. Once the usual strategy failed, they could well bring out stronger magic.
Unless he did so first.
Napoléon himself was in the middle of the center square, as were his staff and a small core of handpicked battle-mages. Among them for the first time were Alexandre Belmont and Madame Foures. As the cavalry wheeled for a second run, Napoléon gave them a curt nod.
It was all he needed. Madame Foures drew a deep breath and gathered her magic about her. Threads of shadow began to stream through from the ether, wispy at first and then darker. They twisted, entwined, and resolved themselves into an elongated human form.
Napoléon, even in the midst of command, nodded approvingly. It was a strong shadow: well shaped, dark, alert to its surroundings. Pauline Foures had not been exaggerating. She was very good. She and the shadow bowed to each other, an incline of the head, and then with a whisper and a twist of her hand Pauline bound it. It wasn’t at first apparent where it had gone: a rush of air, a wisp of smoke, and it seemed to have vanished entirely. It hadn’t.
At first, the Mamelukes thought it was a funnel of sand, possibly an act of wind magic. It rose at their left flank, near the city walls. Most didn’t see it at all, focused as they were on the charge. Only one or two of the closest spared it a more cautious glance as they drew near; it seemed, amid the swarm of dust, to have a human form, almost like a shadow. But it was too tall to be a shadow. It was too tall to be any living thing.
The front of the Mameluke cavalry was only feet away when the statue rose from the ground.
What had been visible above the ground was only a part of the statue: standing, trailing sand, it was perhaps fifteen feet tall. Its worn, shapeless face gave way to elongated arms and legs; a weathered hand clutched a staff with a stone-edged blade. Shadows flickered at the edges of its shoulders and calves as it stepped forward into the line of the charge. One sweep of its great staff, and three men were knocked from their seats; their horses screamed and wheeled as the rest of the line veered sharply away.
Napoléon glanced over at Alexandre Belmont, the stone-mage, and saw his thin sun-browned face narrowed in concentration. His green eyes were fixed inward, and perspiration beaded on his brow. He had practiced this combination spell only once before: the magic was too new and too strange, and the effort involved had left Belmont weak and dizzy. Napoléon couldn’t afford to squander his magicians’ strength on rehearsals, particularly not his only stone-mage. As it happened, his two best shadowmancers had died on the forced march, the first of fever, the other, less forgivably, having shot himself in the head rather than endure the relentless heat and thirst another minute. Pauline Foures had been a godsend.
Napoléon had learned one thing from the kraken in Italy, and from several of his more successful altercations since. An unexpected, never-before-seen act of magic was a weapon like no other. The damage it could do was almost (though not quite) incidental. The power was in the spectacle. It was an absolute event, something that the other side had no defense against and no words even to describe. Strategies fell apart in the face of it.
Many of the horses had wheeled and scattered already. Others attempted to regroup and charge; the sweeping stone spear crushed them, while their shots and slashes barely chipped the statue’s torso. The fellaheen were already running. At last, after a few blasts of fire from Desaix’s square, the very last of the army retreated, leaving a string of burned and crushed bodies in their wake.
“That’s enough,” Napoléon said calmly, without looking at Belmont.
The statue crumbled to dust as the magic left it, and the shadow within it streamed away with that dust on the breeze. The battle had lasted not quite an hour.
The French Army burst into cheers. Napoléon turned to his stone-mage, who was on his hands and knees retching miserably onto the sand. Beneath his sunburn he was dead white, and shivering even in the heat.
“Forgive me, sir,” Belmont said. He rose, trembling. “I’ve never worked with that kind of stone before. It was so old, and it had already been shaped. It didn’t want to be moved. And the shadow didn’t want to move with it.”
“You did well,” Napoléon said. It was rare praise from him. He turned to Pauline, standing beside him. “You both did.”
“He’s right about the shadow, though,” Pauline said. There was a sheen of sweat on her own face, but hers had been the easier task, and she glowed with triumph. “I think there might be ways to bind it more effectively. With practice.”
He nodded thoughtfully. There was little time to think of it now, in the aftermath of the battle, but it was something to consider. So, too, was the way Pauline’s hair curled about her face in the heat.
Napoléon rode into Cairo a few days later. His troops met with no further resistance.
It was like entering his childhood dreams. The country was his, if he could hold it, and there was nobody with the power or the authority to curb him. He took over the house of one of the Mameluke beys, living on the first floor while his staff slept below, and his window looked over a private garden with shady trees and pools of water.
Cairo was immense, teeming with life and color and heat and smells. Once in the city, the army could take whatever houses and mistresses they so chose, and local merchants were swift to take advantage of them. Those interested went on expeditions to visit the great pyramids outside the city. Some of his magical scholars, of course, were already there, trying to learn the great secrets of the Egyptian magicians. Others he put to work in the city, giving them free rein over their choice of projects. Some worked to purify the Nile or discover the true color of the sea; others to study the crocodiles and ostriches and the formation of the sand dunes. The best of them were sent to Thebes with General Desaix, with instructions to chart and study anything they found along the way.
Amid all the business of administrating his new empire, as he had in Italy, Napoléon wrote long letters every day to Joséphine. She rarely wrote back, but in the weeks that followed he poured his love on the page in saccharine, overflowered descriptions of her beauty that made up in excess what they lacked in poetry. He went into pornographic detail of exactly what he would do to her when she came to Egypt, and he ignored the whispers of her infidelity that had followed him from France.
And then, as he sat in his marbled office some weeks after the taking of Cairo, the voices of his staff drifted up from the garden. He kept working at first; his brain only half recognized the voice of his aide and one of his generals. Then he heard his own name and listened with more attention.
His staff clearly had no idea that he had been upstairs. When he crashed into the garden, bristling, they fell silent with comical alacrity. Napoléon was in no mood to laugh.
“Is it true?” he demanded.
“Is what—?” his general began.
“Don’t treat me like the idiot you clearly believe I am. Is it true?”
His aide winced. “It’s… certainly true that people are saying it.”
“And by people, you mean all of Paris.”
“No, no. That is… It isn’t Paris alone.”
“France, then.” His aide was silent. “I can’t imagine a
nyone outside of France much cares about my marriage.”
“The English do, I’m afraid.”
Napoléon was silent. From the way his aide cringed, he knew that anger was coiling behind his eyes, and everyone nearby was waiting for it to spring. In fact, something far stranger and more terrible was taking place inside him. His sense of self was shifting, spiraling, contorting in ways he couldn’t explain. Rage, jealousy, and grief pummeled at his young heart, and because he refused to let it break it was reshaped instead under the blows.
“Show me,” he said flatly.
Nobody dared to protest that there was nothing to show. Wordlessly, his aide handed over the British paper they had been discussing. Napoléon had little grasp of English, but neither did most of his men. It needed no language to recognize the caricature of his wife sprawled lasciviously across the page, or his own scrawny image wailing in the corner. He could recognize his own name in print. The world flushed red; he breathed deeply, and it cleared again.
“I see,” he said, and handed the paper back. His face was white.
The following day, he called Lieutenant Foures to see him and gave him orders to carry a message back to France of their great victory at Cairo.
A week after his departure, Pauline Foures dined with him and several of his officers downstairs in what had been the great banquet hall. The serving boy, carrying the wine past the table, tilted the glass very slightly and sent a cascade of red spilling across her dress.
Napoléon scolded the boy furiously, then turned to the shadowmancer. “I’ve very sorry, madame,” he said. “Would you like to use my rooms to clean yourself?”
“Thank you,” she said. Her eyes held the same hint of knowing mischief they had on the sands before the Battle of the Pyramids. “I would.”
“And would you like me to come with you?”
If she hesitated, it was only for a single heartbeat. “Yes. Yes, why not?”
When they embraced upstairs in his bed, her magic spilled from her, drawing whispers of shadows from the ether and wreathing them in delicate smoke. Their touch was the sting of cold on a frosty morning, on the edge between pain and pleasure. He tightened his grip around her waist, pushed deeper into her kiss, and Egypt seemed to disappear.
Later that night, he left Pauline sleeping and went to the window. Some of the heat had sunk below the horizon with the sun, and the faintest hint of a breeze cooled the ever-present perspiration on his face. Beneath the palace, Cairo sprawled across the desert, all fire and heat and dirt and life. Just a city, he told himself, like any other. He had learned Paris; he would learn this one. But somehow he wondered whether it would be so easy this time. And, more often, he wondered whether it would be enough.
Too many things had changed since the kraken, and the pyramids, and Joséphine. He didn’t feel like himself—or, perhaps, he felt too much like himself. All the careful layers of restraint, caution, and civility he had built up over the years were sloughing off like scales from a shedding snake, and the fierce, burning ambition of a man certain of his own great destiny was peeking through the cracks.
He must have dozed in the last hour or so before the early dawn. For the first time in months, he opened his eyes to his childhood home. It looked fainter than before, more fragile. The light was stronger, but so bright that it obscured rather than revealed. He no longer had the sense that anyone moved in the other rooms. The voices from outside were shouts rather than the murmur of childhood streets, and they sounded very far away.
And yet he wasn’t alone. His friend stood by the window, as he had the handful of other times Napoléon had encountered him over the years. The shadows were lighter too; Napoléon saw clearly the lines of his face, the aquiline nose and finely arched brows.
“Napoléon Bonaparte,” his friend said. It was the first time he had greeted him with the French form of his name. “We haven’t had much opportunity to speak recently.”
“I haven’t had much opportunity to sleep recently.”
“Nor have I. Things are moving in Paris.”
“Is that where you are?” Napoléon asked. “Paris? I can hear shouting.”
“Never mind where I am, and never mind the noises. I need to talk with you—before your companion decides she needs you again.”
His temper, often unquiet these days, flared. “Don’t you dare reprimand me for Pauline. I was betrayed first, and held up for mockery and ridicule for it. How would it have looked if I’d remained faithful to Joséphine, under the circumstances? Why should I?”
“I don’t care about your indiscretions, or those of your wife. Have a hundred lovers if you like. Let Joséphine make you ridiculous—although if I were you, I wouldn’t allow her to live once I returned.”
“I wish I were you.” His anger died. What was left tasted of ash. “Unfortunately, I love her.”
“I warned Robespierre that it was those he loved that had the greatest power to harm him, and I was right. But I’m not so very worried for you. I need to speak to you about the stone your magical scholars will find buried somewhere in the sands here.”
Napoléon frowned. “What stone?”
“The one the entire purpose of this expedition has been to find.”
“This expedition was to take Cairo. And then to use it as a base of power to hold Egypt.”
“And I commend your victory over Cairo. It will make your reputation. But you’ll never hold Egypt—even I wouldn’t try. You’ve taken on more than you know with this city, and indeed this country. Clever tricks won’t confuse it for long. It has a magic of its own, very different from the French sort, and you’ll never understand it.”
“I disagree. I’ve brought civilization to Cairo. I’ve liberated its people from the Mamelukes. I’m not a fool, you know—I’ve studied their customs and traditions, and I’ve told them I have no intention of challenging them. In exchange, they’ve given me their obedience. They accept me as their leader.”
“They fear you as their conqueror, for now. They don’t accept you. Believe me, I know. No, the stone, when they find it, will give you your greatest triumph here. It will tell you how to find a dragon.”
Napoléon frowned. “There haven’t been any dragons since the Middle Ages. One or two small wyrms in the seventeenth century, if you believe the old scrolls, but—”
“I do in this case, but I agree, they’re of little note and long since dead. I speak of the old dragons, the treasure hoarders, the fire breathers. The Viking war dragons. The dragons that once served the vampire kings.”
“Those dragons were all killed long ago.”
“In Europe, yes. This isn’t Europe. Things have survived.”
“Things have survived in Europe too, if you’re anything to go by.”
It was the first time he had dared say anything of the kind to his friend—anything that hinted that he suspected what he was. His friend only smiled.
“True,” he conceded. “But dragons have survived here.”
Napoléon took a moment to let that sink in.
Dragons. Just as he had grown up with stories about Egypt, he had grown up with stories about dragons. Once they had been a common sight in Europe and the Mediterranean, his mother had told him. They could not be bound against their will, as shadows were bound. They could not be tamed; they could not be controlled, as one controlled a kraken. But they responded to mesmerism; a bargain of sorts could be made with them, and had been made by powerful men and women throughout history. They recognized greatness. Above all, they recognized blood magic. They had been the allies of vampire kings for hundreds of years, before the Knights Templar had destroyed vampires and dragons alike. Like the stories of ancient warlords he had loved, they were a promise of power.
They were also the last confirmation he needed that his friend was exactly what Napoléon had thought he was.
“We need to find it,” he said. It was the clear, direct way he had told the French government they needed to invade Egypt—the directness
of an order.
“We will,” his friend said. “But I need to make sure that you won’t tell a single soul once we do. Not your men, not your women, not your Directory. Nobody.”
“Why would I find the greatest weapon France has possessed since the Vampire Wars and not tell anyone I had it? For that matter, how could I? A dragon is not something to be deployed secretly.”
“Obviously. I’m telling you not to deploy it at all—not yet.” His friend sighed at Napoléon’s glare. “Let me explain. That dragon could do a great deal of damage here. It could do a great deal of damage in Europe. But we can already do great damage on land. The dragon can do one thing that all our magic and armies cannot.”
Napoléon snorted. “Fly? Breathe fire?”
His friend ignored him. “When the time is right, it can fly across the English Channel. And all the naval might of Britain would be powerless to stop it.”
“If you want to take Britain, we can do it. There’s an invasion force already being assembled. I inspected it myself on the way here. I don’t believe it to be capable of the challenge, but certainly with a dragon to clear the path for it—”
“The time isn’t right. We need a stronger base of power in Europe before we can be sure of holding Britain.”
“France is perfectly capable of holding Britain.”
“I’m not talking about France.” The voice was sharp. “Do try to keep up, Bonaparte. I’m talking about us. You and me. We need to take possession of France ourselves before we try for Britain.”
The words didn’t surprise him. It was as though his friend had voiced a truth he’d heard in whispers all his life and only now understood. It was only the scope of them that caught his breath in his throat and lit his chest on fire.
I might need someone to become the leader of France, his friend had said, the very first night they had met. Napoléon had not let himself think too closely about that—at the time, it had seemed impossible. It would have been. But the world had changed a great deal since then.
