She nodded. “This is not for us to fix. We need serious support.”
Qna Liras made a face. “I would like to tell you that Masr will heal its own wounds,” he said. “But I don’t think we can last more than a few weeks, even with the glyphs and shields. Food—and more Magi. I know, better than most of my brethren, how powerful the Academy is, and the Studion. Send me fifty Academicians. And we will close the rift. I agree that it can be done.”
Aranthur took a deep breath.
“I have to go to Antioke,” he said. “And then I will go straight to Megara.”
Dahlia nodded. “I will go with you.”
Sasan chewed his lip. “I want to go back to Safi,” he said. “Maybe that’s just a dream, but—”
“It is a good dream,” Jalu’d said. “I would go with you. But we are not yet strong enough. Bide, my brother. The tide has not yet turned.”
Ansu nodded. “For my part,” he said, “I am much closer to home here. And I think I can make a real contribution to holding this city.” He glanced at Haras. “I will stay if you will have me.”
“Ansu!” Aranthur said.
Ansu shrugged. “Pleasant as I have found this whole game of playing soldier,” he said with a fair amount of sarcasm, “the awful truth is that we have come to a parting. I came west to bring a drake—and to look into the powers of the Pure. Now I have seen their works at first hand, and I can no longer dismiss them. Instead, I want to hurry home and prepare my own people to give them the reception they deserve. And who knows? Perhaps the way to defeat the Master is from the East.”
Aranthur threw his arms around the prince.
“I know,” Ansu said. “I will miss you too.”
“And you owe us a year’s rent on our rooms, you ingrate,” Dahlia growled. “Now we have to find another room-mate.”
“Who knows? Perhaps I will return and study your ways of magik. In the meantime, I’m out of money… You’ve already spent it all on the shields.”
“I cannot abandon my city in the hour of her need,” Qna Liras said. “So I will stay here. But I would appreciate it if you would take this young priest with you to be our ambassador to the Emperor. I would go myself, or send someone far more senior, but much of our hierarchy died eight days ago, and more have been taken since. We will need the survivors to hold the line. You say that the Master takes great risks. Now I must take one. Haras will carry our most precious relic with him. I cannot risk its fall, either to the Master or the entities.”
Aranthur met the Magos’ eyes.
“You are now in… command?” he asked.
Qna Liras spread his hands. “Among senior priests, like the more advanced Magi, there is no ‘command.’ But most will follow my lead, now that I have returned.”
“Why did you ever leave?” Dahlia asked.
Qna Liras smiled without any warmth.
“I was exiled for my views. And now all that I feared has come to pass, they want me to save them.” He motioned for Haras. “This young man will go with you, carrying something incredibly precious. Perhaps the anxiety will grind away a little of his arrogance. In truth, I cannot spare him—the most promising of the Magi of his generation—but spare him I must.” He looked around. “And I will send one of the temple’s most dangerous servants. To protect the Black Stone, and Haras, and even you.” He shrugged. “She is a bit of a two-edged sword, but I have no stronger weapon. Also, a company of soldiers. I don’t wish to lose a single soldier, but I have a small group who want to leave.”
Ansu smiled. “Surely all soldiers, given the choice, might consider leaving.”
“I suspect that you underestimate our priest-soldiers. But these are mercenaries. They served us where… political faction might have interfered… Never mind. It does not matter. I will only say that they have done an incalculable service for us, and faced the Disciple, and lived. I wish them well.” He nodded to Aranthur. “And they are your countrymen. They want to go home—you are going that way. The arrangement suits everyone but me—I need every sword I can raise.” He shrugged. “So be it. I am gambling with someone else’s money, as we say here in Al-Khaire.”
“There’s an Arnaut here?” Aranthur asked.
It was as likely that he’d find dragon-head gable ends on an Al-Khaire balcony.
Qna Liras nodded. “He’ll meet you at your boat. I have an armed trabaccolo readying on the river. Or rather, because everyone is terrified of the riverside, I’m having the boat prepared in the Temple Canal. You’ll launch from there, and you may have to fight your way out.” He smiled. “I doubt it, though. Because we’ll take back a piece of the Al-Jasr neighbourhood at dawn, with your shields and a lot of magik. Ansu, if you’d be so kind…”
“At your service.”
“I expect that we’ll distract the entity completely, but I have no idea how an insane monster with godlike powers, imprisoned for thousand of years and on the verge of escape, sees the world.” Qna Liras smiled.
Aranthur shook his head. “I wanted a life of adventure,” he said.
Sasan smiled at him. “I blame you, then.”
At dawn a day later, four companies of black-turbaned soldier-priests bearing glyph-shields moved off from the inner walls into the poorest neighbourhood in the city, the Al-Jasr. From the Temple of Lyra’s prayer tower, Aranthur could see the new, red sun touching their spear points in the alleys to the east.
He leant out over the stone railing.
“Are we ready?” he asked.
“Not yet,” called an unfamiliar voice.
Down in the stone-paved temple courtyard, there was a man in a velvet coat and a white fustanella.
“Some of my little bastards are still in the arms of their temporary loves. Give me a few minutes!”
All this in the dialect of home. The man, clearly a Souliote, waved.
Aranthur shouted down, “Quick as you can!” in his best officer voice. In Souliote.
Then he went back to watching the lower town.
From so high, it was relatively easy to follow the progress of the “attack,” although it was difficult to pin down exactly what the Masran warriors were attacking. They moved through the streets efficiently, though; as they came to intersections, they split into smaller bands, so that they occupied a united front.
Aranthur saw the moment at which they encountered the entity. There was a sparkle of blue, and the shrill sound of a shouted order, repeated.
And then a whirlwind of Ars Magika—too fast to follow. In a hundred heartbeats, the sihr was walled off by shields—enclosed—and overwhelmed.
The result was roughly the same as that of a young boy hitting a hornet’s nest with a stick.
Suddenly, pools of sihr emerged from abandoned houses, or from the very streets themselves. It was more like a rising tide than an attack. People screamed. There were still people living in the Al-Jasr, and they panicked, scattering away from the emanations.
Aranthur saw them as dust clouds.
And the entity across the river displayed itself as a firestorm of black-purple-white fire around the Black Pyramid. There was a cataclysmic crack, as if all the lightning in the world had flashed at once. A mighty bolt of black fire fell on the Al-Jasr.
And Qna Liras’ seamless shield responded.
The outpouring of sihr and saar was so great that Aranthur’s fingers tingled and his hair writhed.
With fearsome discipline, the soldier-priests opened ranks, let the screaming crowd past, and closed their shields across ten alleys and a dozen streets. Their line was ragged now, and assailed from every direction. In one case, the panicked people ran through their line and into a dark maw of voracious evil.
The Souliote came into the Temple court with a dozen men at his back. As many more were pushing through the gates.
“All present, Centark!” he roared.
The man had a deep voice and sounded so much like Aranthur’s uncle that he had a moment of confusion.
“Go!” Aranthur y
elled.
He took one more glance at the fighting—if the mute defence of six hundred soldiers against a wave of sorcery could be called a fight.
Then he ran down the long, twisting steps of the prayer tower.
He reached the bottom and ran along the towering wall, past the prayer arches, and past the long side of the pillared nave. The ground sloped down towards the river. There was a processional way where devotees of the god were taken after death, down to the canal-side docks where they could be transported to the necropolis across the river, in normal times. Now, there were hundreds of corpses close-wrapped in linen and stacked like a winter’s firewood. Aranthur threw the tail of his turban over his face and ran down the ramp towards the muddy canal.
Somewhere to the east, there were three explosions that shook the ground. Aranthur watched the rapid plumes of smoke rise as buildings caught fire. He concentrated on running for the boat.
The riverboat was a trabaccolo, low and fifty paces long and black—a practical boat with little decoration, equally at home on the great river or at sea. Her pitch-coated black sides shone in the sun, and her two masts and long bowsprit stood out from the smoke. On board, Vilna stood amidships, shouting orders at men in the shallow hold. A dozen Arnauts in fustanellas were piling aboard, stowing their linen sacks against the netting with a skill that told of long experience on boats. The Nomadi and the Safians looked ill at ease with the sudden appearance of the Arnauts. In the bow and stern, a dozen Masran sailors in white linen kilts stood ready to cast off from lines already loosened on the pier’s stone bollards.
“Get us underway!” Aranthur called
He leapt from the stone pier to the deck, which was crammed with gear, people, and horses.
The sailors in the bow looked aft. Aranthur turned towards the command deck; he’d been on ships before.
“Captain?” he called.
“Here,” shouted a woman in the bow.
She was tall and covered in tattoos where her brown skin showed. She wore black silk trousers, a black khaftan and a black turban with a veil, and had a large and very rosy kuria crystal on a black chain around her neck. Something about her gave the impression of immense strength.
Aranthur saluted.
“Aranthur Timos,” he said as he moved towards her, passing an angry Ariadne and stepping over a crate of unstowed chickens.
“Yasmina Inoques,” the woman said with a slight bow, in accented Byzas. “Syr Timos, I am to obey you in all things save those required for the safety of my ship.”
“I’m very sorry we didn’t…”
Aranthur waved in the direction of the Temple of Lyra, as if to excuse the whole war.
Another pair of explosions rocked the city.
“Get us underway, please,” Aranthur said.
“Doing my best, but I need all this detritus off my deck. Animals. Arnauts, too.” She pointed at the man in the velvet waistcoat. “Get your marines… No. Tell your people to get these horsemen to clear my deck.” She glanced at Aranthur. “I am not convinced that this entire attempt is not insane.” She enunciated every word in an unnatural way, as if she’d learnt Byzas from an automaton.
Ariadne disappeared into the maw of the hold, held by two leather straps under her belly.
Dahlia was standing on the command deck, just behind Myr Inoques.
“Something has gone very wrong. One of the entities was waiting.” She pointed to a viewer. “I set this last night.”
Aranthur watched from a high vantage point. Dahlia’s viewer was better cast than his own ever were, and she’d cast it on an object—a tall tower in the Temple of One Hundred Women.
The black-clad Masran priests were being systematically cut off and overwhelmed.
“Whatever it is, it can reach across running water,” Dahlia said.
“And our friends are in it.”
Aranthur was watching someone’s Steppe pony going into the cradle. The ugly horse was the last big animal on deck. Two sailors were chasing a sheep. Other bundles were being thrown into the hold through the forward grating.
Sasan shook his head. “We’re never going to find anything again.”
“Jaryah!” shouted a tall man with a white kilt and intricate whorls of tattoos showing.
Myr Inoques nodded, shouted a long order. Aranthur watched the low hull drift away from the pier, helped along by four men and a woman with long pikes pushing against the shore.
“We are underway,” Myr Inoques said. “It’s going to be bad out on the river.”
Her Byzas was accented and he had to pay close attention to her to understand. She used terms he didn’t know, like “steerage way,” that took him time and concentration to understand.
“Mera!” she shouted at the white-kilted man, and he answered.
Aranthur ignored them and went through the small leather bag in which he kept his store of kuria crystals, most of them looted from a certain shop in Megara.
“I have an idea,” he said.
Dahlia nodded. “If that thing spots us, we’re dead.”
“Where’s the priest? Haras? I need a clear space of deck, maybe two paces by two paces, preferably amidships.”
The captain raised a tattooed eyebrow, but then shrugged.
“So be it.”
“And…” Aranthur grinned. “And a…” He bludgeoned his memory for the word. Sailors had an implement…“Loggerhead,” he said in Byzas.
She nodded. “Yes, I know this thing.”
“Or, whatever you use to… heat. So you can smooth your pitch.”
Days on tramp freighters as a working passenger had given him a slight knowledge about seagoing tools and labour.
“We put the fires out when we go to sea. It takes fire to heat this tool.”
“We can make fire and heat,” Dahlia said. “We are… Magi.” She glanced at Aranthur.
“I know,” Myr Inoques said, with a slight smile.
“What are we doing?” Dahlia asked with mock sweetness.
He was already clearing the centre of the amidships deck. The Arnauts watched him with open curiosity.
“I’m almost afraid to tell you.”
“Try me,” Dahlia said.
“We inscribe the glyph of warding on the ship.”
Dahlia laughed. “Good. I thought so, too.”
“The glyph will only be as powerful as the saar we put in,” he said.
She shrugged.
“My thought…” Aranthur was hesitant to give it voice. It was a stupid idea.
But tactically sound. They had to escape and the entities barred the river. As if they knew…
“My thought,” he said with false confidence, “is to cut the entity or entities in the city off from the other shore. With the ship, and our… casting.”
Dahlia’s eyes widened involuntarily. Then she gave him one of her twisted half-smiles.
“By the Goddess of Wisdom. That may be the best foolish notion I’ve ever heard.” She looked at the haze on the far shore, and the rippling, heat-distorted pyramids. “But it will come after us.”
Aranthur shrugged. “It’s not good at surprises.”
“Hmm.” Dahlia waved at the lower city, where broken towers looked like the splintered teeth of a beaten man. “We surprised them last night. Today, they are ready with ambushes.”
A sailor appeared with an iron bar that had a heavy copper teardrop riveted to the end. Ordinarily, this tool was heated in a brazier and used to melt a line of pitch to make the ship’s seams tight and waterproof.
“I’ll do it,” Dahlia said.
Without apparent effort, she made the copper glow a dull red in the bright sun. Aranthur could feel the heat.
He took his buckler off his pack and laid it at the foot of the mainmast. Then, working quickly, he copied the glyph on the buckler and burned the glyph into the deck.
The captain turned her head away, as if it was too painful to watch.
“Heat it again,” he said to Dahlia.
A sailor took a wet rag and ran it over the whole glyph. The other sailors watched with horror. All of them clearly feared the fire.
Aranthur took the newly heated thing and bored six small holes into the symbols of the glyph. He put all but one of his remaining crystals into the holes.
When he was done, the ship was moving slowly down the muddy canal. A handful of long oars protruded from each side.
“Tell me what happens next,” Aranthur asked the captain.
She was watching forward, over the bow. She shouted something in Masri and turned.
“In a very few minutes we come… the mouth of the canal. We come…to… the mouth. Yes?” She shrugged.
“I understand.”
“Good. Then we turn into the current, and get the sails up. If we live to get them up, we go very fast indeed. Even faster if…” She smiled mirthlessly. “Never mind, foreigner. We will move fast.”
“I’d like you to stay near this shore,” Aranthur said.
She nodded. “Yes. I have no wish to meet one of the entities.”
“What in a thousand iron hells are we doing, Captain?” asked a large, bearded Arnaut.
“I have no idea. Ask this man, he appears to be in charge.”
Captain Inoques turned away and called a string of orders down the now-cleared deck.
“Are we fighting?” the big man asked. “I’m Kallotronis.”
“Timos,” Aranthur said, offering his hand the Souliote way.
The big man grinned. “Flavi?”
“Over the mountain,” Aranthur answered. “Schiavon?”
“Po, bosi!” Kallotronis said in Northern Souliote. “Are we fighting?”
Aranthur pointed out over the pylons at the mouth of the canal, towards the looming bulk of the pyramids.
“You know about the Apep-Duat?” he asked.
“Little brother, I was fucking there.”
Kallotronis grinned, and his mouth was full of gold teeth.
“So, yes, we’re fighting,” Aranthur said. “But it’s mostly Magi. We’ll protect you.”
The big man grinned and his teeth glittered.
“Never yet met anything that could stand against a rifle ball. My lads dropped one of their Exalted.”
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