Swords of the Legion (Videssos)

by Harry Turtledove

  “And so?” Avshar’s whisper crawled with menace.

  “A favor for a favor. I give them back their lives in exchange for Tabari’s.” Wulghash turned to Scaurus and Gaius Philippus. “Get your horses. You may leave. No one will pursue you, I vow. I have called you my friends and I do not go back on my word—but you should have trusted me in full. I am no longer happy with you, friends or not. Go on; get out.”

  Hardly daring believe his ears, Marcus searched the khagan’s face. It was stormy with disappointed anger, but he read no deceit. As Wulghash had said of himself, he was as determined in friendship as he was in enmity. “You are a man of honor,” the tribune said softly.

  “You do well to remind me, for I am tempted to forget.” Wulghash waved brusquely for them to be gone.

  “Thou dung-headed fool!” Avshar roared before the Romans could move. They froze again; any exit would take them straight past the wizard-prince.

  But Avshar had nearly forgotten them in his rage. He screamed abuse at the khagan: “Thou dolt, thou clodpoll, thou idiot puling mousling with fantasies of manhood! Reeking filthy louse-bearded barbarous bastard son of a camel turd, thinkest thou to gainsay me? These sneaking spies are mine; get thee down on thy wormish belly and grovel in thanksgiving that I do not serve thee worse than them for thine insolence!”

  White about the lips, Wulghash snapped an order in the Yezda tongue to his guards. They drew their weapons and advanced on the wizard-prince.

  “Thou’lt not find it so simple to be shut of me as that,” Avshar sneered. “Am I as stupid as thyself, to take no precautions against thy childish thoughts of treachery?” He spoke a single word, in Videssian or some darker speech, the trigger to a spell long prepared against this time. The khagan’s guards came to a ragged halt. All at once they were looking at Avshar with the devotion a lap dog gives its mistress. “How now, O clever booby?” he chuckled.

  Wulghash, though, was wise in the ways of Makuran for reasons stronger than antiquarianism. He knew why the Makuraner kings of old had ordained that men seeking audience with them should halt at a certain spot. His hand darted to a spring cunningly concealed in the arm of his throne. A six-foot slab of stone fell away beneath Avshar’s feet.

  But the wizard-prince did not drop into the pit below. An abrupt pass let him bestride the empty air like polished marble. Wulghash’s nobles moaned; some covered their faces. The khagan’s guards—no, Avshar’s now—smiled at the new proof of their master’s might. Those smiles made Scaurus shudder. Only the soldiers’ lips moved. Their eyes stayed bright and blank.

  “This farce wearies me,” Avshar said. “Let there be an end to it. Look now, Wulghash, on the power thou hadst thought to oppose.” Still standing easily on nothing, the wizard-prince threw back the mantlings that always veiled his face.

  Even Gaius Philippus, calloused by more than half a lifetime of hard soldiering, could not hold back a groan. His cry was lost in the chorus of horror that swelled and swelled as Avshar turned toward the nobility of Yezd.

  Two thoughts raced across Scaurus’ mind. The first was that he had gone mad. He wished it were true. And the second was of the myth of Aurora’s lover Tithonus. The goddess had begged immortality for him from Jupiter, but forgot to ask that he not grow old.

  In his decrepitude, Tithonus had been turned by Jove into a grasshopper. No god had shown Avshar such kindness. Staring—he could not help but stare—the tribune tried to guess how many years had rolled over the sorcerer. He gave up; as well try to reckon how many goldpieces had gone into Phos’ High Temple. Imagining such age would have been enough to make the skin prickle into gooseflesh. Seeing it, and seeing it combined with Avshar’s undoubted vigor, was infinitely worse.

  “Well?” Avshar said into vast silence. “I own eight and a half centuries. Eight hundred years have passed since I learned in the ruins of Skopentzana where true power lay. Which of you puny mayfly men will stand against me now?” There was no answer; there could be no answer. Smiling a lich’s smile, the wizard-prince gestured to the guardsmen he had ensorceled. “I rule here. Kill me that lump of offal fouling my throne.”

  He spoke Videssian, but they understood. They surged toward Wulghash, sabers clenched in their fists.

  The khagan was perhaps the only man in the room not paralyzed by dismay. He did not need Avshar’s unmasking to know what had served him. No small wizard himself, he had divined that long ago. In his ambition he thought to use the other to exalt himself, to ride to greatness on Avshar’s back. For all that arrogance, though, he always remembered tool and user might one day be reversed. And so he pressed another stud mounted on his throne. A hidden doorway swung open behind it. He darted into the tunnel it had concealed.

  Avshar howled in fury; the door was secret even to him. “After him, you bunglers,” he screamed to the guards, though the blunder had not been theirs.

  Pushram sprang up and grappled with the leading guardsman. He was scrawny and carried nothing more deadly than a stylus, but he bought his master a few seconds with his life.

  His sacrifice jerked the Romans from their daze. They both seemed to have the same thought at once—better to die fighting than in Avshar’s clutches. They tore their swords free and hurled themselves at the wizard-prince’s soldiers.

  Avshar understood immediately. “Take them alive!” he shouted. “Their end shall not be as easy as they wish.”

  Sword in hand, a Makuraner noble dashed toward the thrones, rushing to the Romans’ aid and to the defense of the khagan. Avshar cursed and moved his guantleted hands in savage passes. The nobleman crashed to the floor, writhing in torment. “More?” the wizard asked. There were none.

  By weight of numbers, the guards forced Scaurus and Gaius Philippus away from the doorway down which Wulghash had vanished. Several rushed after the khagan. The tribune laid about him desperately, but a cleverly aimed slash caught his sword just above the hilt. It flew from his numbed fingers. Knowing how little good it would do, he snatched out his dagger and stabbed at the nearest guardsman. He felt the blade bite and heard a grunt of pain.

  Avshar’s order hampered his men, who took losses because of it and passed up several sure killing strokes. The Romans battled ferociously, trying to make their foes finish them. Then a guardsman sent his fist clubbing down on the back of Marcus’ neck. The tribune toppled. He did not see the Yezda swarm over Gaius Philippus and finally bring him down.

  An echoing shout from the secret tunnel’s opening returned Scaurus to blurry consciousness. Someone screamed, then silence fell once more. A couple of minutes later, a broad-shouldered guard, staggering under the weight, came out of the doorway with a corpse on his back. It wore royal robes. Marcus had a glimpse of fleshy nose, square-cut gray beard, eyes gone set and staring—no way now to see if intelligence had been there.

  Avshar’s terrible grin grew wide. “Well done,” he said. “Thou’lt be a captain for this day’s work. What end did he make?”

  As usual, the sorcerer spoke in Videssian, but the guardsman had no trouble with it. He answered in his own tongue. Avshar grimaced impatiently. “What care I that your stupid comrade fell? Incompetence punishes itself, as always. Here, give the body to these others to fling on the midden; hie yourself off to the officers’ chambers, to deck yourself with something finer than those rags you wear.”

  The soldier said something that sounded like a protest of unworthiness. Avshar made his harsh voice as genial as he could, answering, “Nay, thou hast earned it. Hyazdat, Gandutav, take him along and fit him out.” Pounding the trooper on the back, the two guards officers led him away.

  More guardsmen carried off the corpse that had won him his promotion. Save for those still grasping the tribune and Gaius Philippus, only a couple were left in the throne room.

  Avshar did not need them. By himself he cowed the nobility of Yezd, bold haughty Makurani and fierce Yezda alike. Men stared at their shoes, at each other, at the walls, anything to keep from meeting his eyes. He snarled a
t them. They went to their knees and then to their bellies in proskynesis before him. Some, mostly Makurani, performed the prostration with grace, others were slow and clumsy. But all knelt.

  “And thou,” Avshar said to Marcus. “I have heard thou wouldst not bend the knee before the Avtokrators. I am greater than they, for I am at once priest and lord, patriarch and Emperor. They shall know my power, and my god’s—as shalt thou.”

  He gave the tribune no chance to refuse; at his command, the guards cast Scaurus at his feet. His boot, still smelling of lathered horse, ground cruelly into the Roman’s shoulder. He suddenly asked, “What didst thou with the head of Mavrikios Gavras, when I gave it thee?”

  “Buried it,” Marcus answered, too startled not to respond.

  “A pity; now when I take Thorisin’s, the set will remain broken. Perhaps thine shall serve in its stead. Such decisions should not be frivolously made, but then I now enjoy the leisure to choose among the interesting possibilities.”

  Avshar strode over to the tribune’s sword, which still lay where it had fallen. The wizard-prince stooped to pick up the prize, but paused before his hand closed on the hilt—that blade had shown itself dangerous to his spells too many times for him to be easy about touching it. But he did not stay baffled long. He pointed to a noble. “Tabari, come you forward.”

  “Aye, my lord,” the man the Romans had rescued said eagerly. He prostrated himself before the wizard. His face to the floor, he went on, “I am privileged to see you raised at last to your proper estate. Your followers here have waited long for this day.”

  “As have I,” Avshar said. “As have I.” The pain behind Marcus’ eyes was not the only thing to sicken him now. Bad enough to have saved a Yezda minister. To have preserved one of Avshar’s creatures and fallen into the wizard-prince’s hand because of it mortified him past bearing.

  He hardly noticed when two of the ensorceled guards hauled him to his feet. Another pair did the same with Gaius Philippus, who had also been cast down. The senior centurion struggled in their grasp, but could not break free.

  Avshar was saying, “Carry this piece of rusty iron down to my workroom in the dungeons. As minister of justice, you doubtless know them well enough to find the place without difficulty.”

  Tabari’s laugh was not pleasant, except to Avshar. “Oh, indeed, my lord.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “I thought as much. And while you are about it, guide the guards holding these wretches—”A thumb jabbed toward the Romans—“to the block of cells adjacent. Perhaps the blade will yield up its secrets to me when housed in their flesh.”

  “What a pleasant prospect,” Tabari said, killing any lingering hope Scaurus had for the permanence of his gratitude. Tabari gestured to the tribune’s captors. They dragged him away. He heard Gaius Philippus, still swearing, forced along behind him.

  Avshar’s voice pursued them: “Enjoy this respite while you may, for you shall have none other, ever again.”

  Tabari waved the guards down a narrow spiral ramp cut into the living rock just outside the throne room. As they descended into the bowels of the palace, a woman’s shriek rang out far above. Atossa, Marcus thought dully, must have come into the court. The scream was abruptly silenced.

  Gaius Philippus also recognized the cry. “Wulghash has a son,” he said.

  “What of it? What chance has he, when Wulghash couldn’t stand against Avshar in his own palace?”

  “Damn little,” the veteran sighed. “For a minute, I thought he’d get away—he was ready for anything. Did you hear Avshar howl when that passage opened up? He hadn’t a clue it was there.”

  The guards gave little doglike grunts of devotion to hear their master’s name. Otherwise they did not seem to care if their prisoners talked. Wondering whether Avshar’s spell had taken more of their wits than that, Marcus tensed to try to break free. Their grip tightened. Nothing wrong with their physical reactions, he saw ruefully.

  They did not mind his turning his head this way and that. Several tunnels had already branched off from the ramp. Some held storerooms; from another came the rhythmic clang of a smith’s hammer on hot iron. Down and down they went. More than once, they passed workers replacing burned-out torches. Even far underground, the brands burned steadily and did not fill the passageway with smoke. The Makuraner kings, Marcus thought as a puff of cool air touched his cheek, had worked out a better ventilation system than the Videssians used in their prison. He wondered how many men had compared the two.

  Gaius Philippus barked laughter when he muttered that under his breath. “It’s nothing to brag of.” Scaurus’ nod made fresh pain flare in his head.

  The tribune’s ears clicked before the guards finally turned down a still, lonely side corridor. “Yes, gentlemen, we are almost there,” Tabari said. He had been very quiet on the long trip down, nor had the Romans cared to speak to him.

  Now at last, though, Marcus turned his head to plead with Wulghash’s—no, Avshar’s—minister. He did not beg for his life; he had lost hope for it. Instead he said, “Take my sword and strike us down. You owe us that much, if nothing else.”

  “I am the judge of my debts; no one else.” Tabari hefted the Gallic blade. Without warning, he drove it into the back of one of Gaius Philippus’ guards. The Yezda groaned and crumpled.

  Gaius Philippus acted as if he had been waiting for the blow. He spun and grappled with his other captor, giving Tabari the moment he needed to wrench out the sword.

  Scaurus’ guards hesitated a fatal instant. Had they shoved him away at once, they might have quickly overwhelmed Tabari and then wheeled round to retake him. As it was, he managed to thrust out a foot and trip one of them. He sprang on the fellow’s back, grabbing for his knife wrist.

  The Yezda was strong as a bull. They thrashed on the ground. The tribune felt his grip failing. The guard tore his hand free. His dagger slashed along Scaurus’ ribs. Gasping, the tribune tried to seize his arm again, all the while waiting for the thrust that would end it. I made them kill me, he thought with something like triumph.

  The guard snorted, as if in disdain. The weight pressing on Marcus suddenly grew heavier. He groaned and shoved desperately at the Yezda. The guard slid off, knife clattering to the floor as it slipped from his fingers. Another dagger stood in his back. Gaius Philippus pulled it out. Marcus’ nose caught the death stench of suddenly loosed bowels.

  The other guards were down, too. The one Gaius Philippus had fought lay unmoving. “Bastard had a hard head, but not as hard as a stone floor,” the senior centurion said. And Tabari knelt by the last one, wiping the Gallic sword clean on the fellow’s caftan.

  “You are hurt,” the Yezda minister said, pointing to the spreading red stain on Marcus’ chest. He helped the tribune shed his tunic, tore rags to try to dress the long cut that ran down from just outside Scaurus’ left nipple. The bleeding slowed but did not stop; the rough bandages began to grow soggy with blood.

  “That was all an act, you cheering Avshar on up there?” Gaius Philippus demanded. He did not sound as though he believed it, and held his dagger in a knife-fighter’s crouch.

  “No, not all of it,” Tabari said.

  Gaius Philippus was poised to hurl himself at the minister. “Hear him out,” Marcus said quickly.

  Calmly, Tabari went on, “I’ve long favored Avshar over Wulghash; he will make Yezd mighty. But I have already said once that I judge my debts.” He handed Marcus the Gallic sword. The tribune snatched at it; without it, he felt more than half unmanned.

  As Scaurus struggled to his feet, Gaius Philippus snapped at Tabari, “Are you crazy, man? When that walking corpse finds out you’ve let us go, you’ll envy what he had planned for us.”

  “That thought had occurred to me.” One of Tabari’s dark eyebrows quirked upward. “I will ask you, then, to lay me out roughly—I hope without permanent damage. If I am stunned and battered when found, everyone will think I put up the best fight I could.”

  “What do we d
o then?” Marcus said.

  “Can you walk?”

  Scaurus tried it. The effort it took dismayed him; he could feel blood trickling down his belly. But he said, “If I have to, I can. I’d try flying to keep out of Avshar’s hands.”

  “Then go into the maze of tunnels down here.” Tabari pointed to an opening in the rock wall. “They run farther than any man knows these days, except perhaps Wulghash, and he is dead. Maybe you will find a way free. I have no better hope to offer you.”

  “I think I’d sooner fly,” Gaius Philippus muttered mistrustfully, eyeing the blank black hole. But there was no help for it; he realized that as fast as Marcus.

  Tabari drew himself up to stiff attention. “At your service,” he said, and waited.

  Gaius Philippus approached him, thumped him on the shoulder. “I’ve never done this as a favor before,” he said. In the middle of the sentence, he slammed his left fist into Tabari’s belly. As the minister folded, Gaius Philippus’ right hand crashed against his jaw. He slumped to the floor.

  Rubbing bruised knuckles, the senior centurion opened the unconscious man’s tunic and used the dagger to make a bloody scratch on his chest. “Now they’ll figure we thought he was dead.”

  “Don’t forget to cut the tunic, too,” Marcus said. Gaius Philippus swore at himself and attended to it. Marcus took canteens from the dead guards—no telling how long the Romans might wander this labyrinth. He wished the Yezda had food with them. When he was finished, he saw Gaius Philippus pulling torches from the sconces set in the tunnel wall. “Why do that? All these ways should have lights ready for us to take.”

  “Aye, but if we do, whoever comes after us will be able to track us by it,” the veteran said, and it was Scaurus’ turn for chagrin. Gaius Philippus went on, “Eventually we’ll have to start using the torches we come on, but by then we should be lost enough that it won’t matter.” The centurion’s chuckle held no mirth. He strode toward the lightless tunnel entrance. Marcus reluctantly followed. The two Romans plunged in together.