He assembled the last few pieces of the papyrus, and watched them heal together Read the words there. And felt his heart stop for an instant, before it began to pound, painfully, and much too quickly. No, he thought, his eyes dimming. That’s . . . that’s not possible.
But the words were there, and clearly legible:
Adam, son of Light. The Ideal of Man. Godslayer and Guardian.
Adam tore his eyes away from the assembled scroll, even as his lips had started to form the first syllable of his own name. Adam ben Maor. Adam, son of Light.
. . . And his name is your name and your name is his name . . .
Adam heaved himself up from the table. Rolled the scroll, which felt unaccountably warm and supple now, like the living warmth of a human hand, and tucked it into its case, so that it could be stored in its argon-filled vault once more. And headed for the archive’s stairs.
The only thing that kept him from running was the fact that he needed to use his damned cane.
It took a while for the panic and the adrenaline to stop flushing through his system, and allowed his brain to function again. But when it did, he remembered decades-old arguments with Trennus over the term Ideal. It was a very specific concept in Hellene philosophy. Plato and Socrates and their ilk had said that there was, on some other plane, a perfect image of everything that existed. That there was, for example, an Ideal table in that other realm. One so perfect in its tableness, that every table in the mortal realm that you happened to encounter—the ones that somehow needed to have sugar packets braced under two of their legs just to keep them from wobbling—were just shoddy reflections of this Ideal.
Adam reflected on that, as he made his slow, crabbed way along the street outside. The Ideal Man. So, what are the others? The Ideal Fire? The Ideal Mountain? He snorted under his breath, but the notion had a certain seduction to it. His religion did, after all, teach that Man was the son of . . . Light. More or less. And the notion of being the perfect, the Ideal of something . . . well, he’d always striven for it. He’d wanted to be the best. The pinnacle of what it meant to be a human.
Adam looked down at his ropy arms, and shook his head. The problem with that entirely too tantalizing proposition was this: The person who’d written the scroll, millennia ago, had accepted the dogma of the godslayers. That they were the Ideal of whatever. And if you thought you’d already achieved perfection—hah, achieved. Maybe they’ve always been whatever they are, the way Trennus thinks, unchanging—you had no reason to strive.
That’s not me, Adam thought. his mind muzzy. God. That’s not even humanity. If there’s an Ideal of Man—what a pretentious thing!—it would be someone who never stopped trying. Never stopped reaching. Never stopped becoming. An Ideal is frozen forever. It’s a contradiction in terms. It can’t be.
And yet, the understanding in him was horrifying. Because he might yet do this thing. He might let himself be frozen.
On the other side of town, Fritti had just finished another eighteen-hour day, overseeing what could be done for the refugees. The encampments now completely surrounded Jerusalem, and she knew that the other major cities that remained, such as earthquake-damaged Rome and frost-chilled Burgundoi, were ringed by tent cities and squalor, just as this one was. She’d spent most of her shift today in a hospital, and had quietly transferred the life-energy of a crippled grandfather into the body of a fourteen-year-old grandson, who’d been crushed by a falling wall in one of the recent earthquakes. The boy and his family were nieten. They’d just clasped her hand, and wept, because they couldn’t say thank you for a gift that took as much as it gave. But they hadn’t asked any questions, either.
Fritti found a wall to lean against, and closed her eyes. I’m not strong enough to do this, she thought, tiredly. I’ve been doing this every day for twenty-nine years, but it’s only gotten worse and worse. I just can’t anymore. I can’t see the desperation and dazed look of loss in everyone’s eyes. I can’t see the petty squabbling over a foot of extra space in a tent, or the fights over who got a bigger piece of bread from the dole line . . . . Her breath puffed out in a white cloud, and a tear streaked down her face. I can’t.
Yes, you can. The voice was Loki’s, and oddly comforting. She felt as if he’d put his arms around her, but when Fritti opened her eyes, she didn’t see him. You are strong enough, because you’ve always been strong enough. You survived a sacrifice attempt, and you didn’t let it embitter you. You decided to learn more about other people, other nations, and other beliefs, because of it. You wouldn’t be frightened away from understanding . . . and from the chance to help them to understand your people, too.
That doesn’t feel like enough, she admitted.
You’ll have enough strength to see things through to the end. Not much longer now . . . one way or another. Loki paused, and added, gently, And I swear to you, we will be together . . . .
When the end comes? Fritti asked, thinking of Rig, who had to be behind Persian lines by now.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. When the stars go dark, at least. A mental caress. Every ending brings new beginnings. Perhaps this one will, as well.
Caesarius 6, 1999 AC
Deep behind enemy lines, Maccis, Solinus, and Rig flew on Scimar, Rodor, and Heolstor’s backs to the island of Ikaros. They all moved as if they’d practiced their flight maneuvers together for years. All the fingers of a single hand, finally conjoined. Rig maintained the illusion over them that they were a small flock of kingfishers as they finally came in for a landing on the western edge of the island. We should scout from the air, Heolstor told them all, immediately.
Maccis shook his head. “If they have any anti-magic wards, Rig’s illusion might fall. I’ll scout. Sol, anything here look different from when you were stationed here?”
“Other than the banners over the fort?” Solinus’ expression was grim. “They’ve fortified the main buildings a bit more. And the large building to the north of us . . . that’s new. Might be a barracks.”
Technically, all they really needed to do was find a good spot, and drop the spellstone. And given that this was an island, and a small one, at that, any part of the shore would do. A little extra information would be a bonus, however. It would be good to know if they were about to hit the location where Emperor Antiochus had holed up. Rig had said on the way here, tightly, It’s good to know about the people you’re about to kill, right? It hadn’t been a joke.
Maccis stripped to the skin, even taking off his collar, and pushed himself into dog form. Not a wolf, this time, but specifically a mongrel whose lineage could have included the lion-hunting dogs of Egypt, or the sight-hounds of the Raccian steppes . . . but whose ribs protruded under the fur. A mangy stray, not to be looked at twice, other than for its size. I’ll yell if I get into trouble.
You’d better, Solinus told him. Stay safe.
Maccis trotted along beside one of the island’s roads, and found where the camps of the shepherds and goatherds had been set up, while Solinus had been stationed here. The animals’ dung still filled the pastures, but not a single one of the beasts remained, and the tents of the nomads had collapsed, left to the elements. They were just heaps of moldering rubbish now.
Further into camp, soldiers threw rocks at him, and Maccis shied, tucked his tail between his legs, and ran, not wanting to seem like a threat. He circled around, and tried again, avoiding large clear areas outside the perimeter where human scent hadn’t been left lately . . . minefields, probably. And finally, he made his way to the heart of the camp, a cook offered him food . . . and Maccis could smell sedatives in it. Ah. You want to eat the large, friendly dog? Been a while since you finished slaughtering all the nomads’ sheep and goats, I take it?
He sniffed at the food several times, and then sat back, wagging his tail. And when the cook turned, distracted by an assistant, Maccis slipped out of the kitchen, and continued to wander around the camp, largely disregarded. Though his heart almost stopped when a man in the robes of a magus crossed
his path, and stared down at him. “Huh. I’ve never seen that dog before . . . someone should tell the cook. That’s enough meat to feed a squad for a week . . . .”
Maccis ducked away, finally nosing his way to the new building Rig had pointed out. His sense of smell almost overloaded, and his ears laid back. The building reeked. Pain changed the chemistry of human skin. Made it rank. And he could detect blood and magic, too. A cursory glance inside, and several more deep inhalations told the tale. There were people housed in these barracks. All them were male, though most of them lacked the emphatic odor of testosterone. The foul odor of fresh cerebrospinal fluids, and a strangled scream of pain made him lay back his ears, and he bolted away, as any animal would at the sudden sound. That’s an Immortal processing facility, he thought. That’s where they lobotomize and castrate them, tattoo the skin, and implant the spirit into its new housing.
He slowed to a walk, tail still clamped between his legs, and slunk back through the rest of the camp. He checked what Solinus had indicated to be the original command building, and paced around outside of it. Unfortunately, dog-form wasn’t particularly good for infiltrating closed buildings. Even looking inside a window was problematic. But he could smell food. Spices, making his mouth water. He hadn’t smelled cinnamon in years. Real coffee. Either the Persian military had better supply lines than anyone in what was left of the Roman Empire, or someone of very high rank was here. And Maccis didn’t think that they would waste these kinds of expensive, rare supplies just to maintain the illusion on a daily basis. It’s one thing to make a camp look more important to the satellites, or larger. They wouldn’t know when Rome or Judea had spies here to use the odors. Unless, of course, they keep the façade up, continuously, with magic . . . but what a waste of energy that would be.
He trotted into the underbrush, shifting form well outside of view of the camp into his preferred wolf shape. Made his way back to the others, and reported what he’d seen. Solinus shook his head. “Pretty good chance that the Emperor actually is here.”
“A pity he didn’t coincidentally go for a walk and cackle madly, and address himself by name,” Rig noted. “Or wander outside with a half-dozen of his generals, all addressing him as ‘your imperial majesty.’”
That would have been convenient, Heolstor agreed, shifting his weight from paw to paw as Maccis got dressed again. A pity that life never seems to have easy answers.
“Doesn’t matter. Either way, this place needs to be wiped out,” Maccis said. “They have a production center for the Immortals. That means they have technomancers here. Magi who didn’t side with Erida. They have Immortals, and the means of making more of them. It needs to go.”
Rig nodded. Solinus held up a finger. “You happen to notice if any of our people, or the nomads, happened to be left here?” Solinus’ face was taut, as they all crouched in the underbrush. “Any prisons with Roman legionnaires left here?”
Maccis cleared his throat, uncomfortably. “The nomads’ tents are all destroyed. As to the rest . . . Sol . . . .” He pulled his tunic on over his head, using the moment to marshal his thoughts. “They were considering killing me, a stray dog, for the meat. They don’t have food to waste on prisoners.” He looked down. “The only place I found that smelled like a prison was the Immortal facility. I think . . . we can guess what happened to the male soldiers and nomads. They’ve probably been . . . repurposed.” A flash of the misery in Zaya’s face, so long ago, when she’d confided in him that her mother had told her how Immortals were made. That Erida had been once been present for the process. “It used to be an honor, Zee told me. The family gave them up for dead, but the family would be . . . recompensed. They’d get the man’s pension for as long as his body continued to live as an Immortal.”
There was another moment of silence. “Did you smell any women or children?” Rig asked, quietly.
Women had never been used as Immortals. The ancient Persians hadn’t usually thought of women as soldiers, and even in modern times, only women who were of the Magi really entered combat. Maccis grimaced. “I could smell that a few have been here,” he said, picking up a stick, and digging in the dirt with it. “All the smells were old, though. Weeks or months. I . . .” His stomach churned, and he was glad he hadn’t eaten anything yet. Rape was a fact of warfare. Probably every man being forced into Immortal status had been degraded in that fashion before being gelded and having his mind torn away. There had been sex smells—faint, but lingering—around some of the barracks. Along with the smell of blood. “Either they’ve been sent off to other camps for . . . morale purposes . . .” he hated the words, even as he spoke them, “. . . or they were raped to death here.”
Any fresh graves? Scimar asked, his blue scales dull in the gray light.
“There’s a fairly large mass grave to the east side of camp, but I didn’t investigate. If they were throwing rocks at me before, they’d have shot me if they thought I’d eaten human carrion.”
Solinus rubbed tiredly at his face, beard stubble making an audible scratching sound. “All right. We don’t have any friendlies in position.”
“And even if we did, the best I could do to evacuate them would be to cover us in illusion, run to where they’re being held, cover them in illusion, too, and tell them to run. And I’d need an illusion over their holding cells to show that they were still in there . . .” Rig trailed off. “Too many moving pieces, when we don’t even know if there are any people there. Too much of a chance that someone will notice, and the camp will be alerted.”
They all considered it for a long moment. “I don’t see much of a choice,” Solinus said, at last. “I could have Rig go back, invisible, and do a more complete recon, but then we’re all out here, trying to stay hidden from patrols, until he confirms what Maccis has said, or finds prisoners who . . . may or may not be there.”
And that is time that we do not have to spare, Scimar said, impatiently. The lindworm shook his red-scaled head. It is a terrible decision, I realize, but there is only one choice we can make.
“Correct.” Solinus stared into space for a moment, and Maccis did not envy him the choice. And yet, he implicitly trusted Solinus’ decisions. Not just because Solinus was his eldest brother, but . . . it somehow felt as if Sol had been his commander for years. “All right. It’s a go. I’ll carry the spellstone in phoenix form to the southern shore. Rig, remind me—how close do you need to be to keep me invisible? Half a mile, wasn’t it?”
“That’s my maximum range, yes.” Rig was already digging in Rodor’s saddlebags for the technomantic devices they’d been given for the mission, and pulled on a medallion on a chain and a set of bracers, all set with carnelians, with heavy battery packs inside their bulky panels. He tossed a similar medallion and set of bracers to Maccis, who put them on, while Rig began setting up similar spell-stones and devices on each of the lindworms. Large collars, made of brass, were set with several carnelians each, and had panels that opened to reveal batteries and circuitry, which Rig now checked, carefully, before slipping them on each worm’s neck. Scimar seemed, like most of the red lindworms, to be marginally resistant to heat and fire, but there was no sense in testing the limits of his abilities today.
“A half a mile is within the ‘total vaporization’ destruction zone,” Maccis muttered, and double-checked his own devices, carefully. When he’d heard the mission details, he’d approached Masako for directions to her irezumi artist in Little Nippon; the man was a skilled sorcerer and technomancer, as well as a genuine artist. And he’d settled on a design, swiftly—this one was a lindworm, wreathed in flames. And the properties had been similar to the ones Masako wore herself: flame resistance. He hadn’t been able to tell Zaya why he was getting the work done, only that he had a dangerous mission behind enemy lines. He hadn’t even been able to promise that it would be the last. “We have devices for the physical force of the blastwave itself, too?”
Rig nodded, and tossed him a belt, made of copper links, and set with wha
t looked like a very large piece of tiger’s eye. Again, behind the stone, battery packs and more circuitry than Maccis knew what to do with. Zaya probably would have understood it all. He just had to trust that it would work. “What’s it do?” he asked, buckling it on.
“Establishes a temporary shield that deflects kinetic energy. Anything moving faster than about twenty miles an hour has its energy stolen and used to reinforce the shield. Trouble is, it may overheat. There’s going to be a lot of energy in play here.”
Solinus shook his head. “I’ll come in over the water. That’s where I need to drop it, anyway. And in the end, if they manage to disable me in the air over the water, the spell will go off anyway. So long as it’s within a half-mile . . . it won’t matter much.” He grimaced. “Technically, they could have just sent me alone.” He gave them an apologetic look. “Didn’t need to risk all of you.” He thumped Scimar’s shoulder. “And still don’t. You all hang back.”
“Solinus Matrugena, one-man-legion.” Rig retorted. “Highly noticeable, though, given the fact that your phoenix form is a ball of fucking fire.” He folded his arms across his chest. “There are ships out there. There are ornithopter squadrons on the mainland that will scramble, as soon as they see the mushroom cloud. They might well send spirits ahead of them, if they can force any of them to manifest. No. We all go in together.”
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