Use the blade, fool!
Lightning went off inside Quintus's skull. A nail-sticker like that to take out a giant serpent? He laughed, the coarsely cheerful mirth that Rufus reserved for the most awkward Legionary-in-training.
Not a serpent. Another illusion. The friezes and the broken walls turned firm again. Once more, the White Naacals marched over the roughened stone toward their altar, and power sluiced out like warm water pouring down an aching back, healing, comforting....
It was all a lie, wasn't it?
He let the dagger drop from his hand. Manetho wavered and sagged, and Quintus reached out to steady him—almost in the embrace of brothers.
"I've wasted time we can't spare," Quintus said. "Lead on."
He followed Manetho at a near run through what quickly seemed so like a maze that he expected a Minotaur to bellow and charge them at every crossing of the ways they passed. He had no thread, though, to mark his passage, and his Ariadne—to whom he would be faithful, unlike Theseus—lay in the grasp of their enemies.
Draupadi was, he reassured himself, a mistress of illusion, able to dispel hallucinations that might have finished off him and the Legionaries. Just as he must trust Manetho, he must have faith in them and their inborn strength to hold firm until he could retrieve the Eagle and lead them.
Now, he and Manetho raced through a narrow passageway. On either side, he heard a rushing sound. Water, perhaps, coursing through hidden channels as if through an aqueduct? Or air singing through tunnels set into the thick walls? Romans were engineers. These walls, though, made anything built by Rome seem like a shed flung up out of flat stones.
As they hastened on, it became easier and easier for Quintus to see the path up ahead. Some trick of the light, perhaps? He thought he saw a glow welling from the floor wherever Manetho stepped.
"They are coming," he said.
Was this to be a full rising of the slaves, then? Quintus's belly clenched. Was this how the gladiators had felt, turning on their masters, who were vastly more numerous and powerful than they? And yet, they had put Rome in such fear that it would never forget them. Given the Eagle, given its power, how much more could he—
"This used to be a place where the underpriests robed...." Manetho told him.
How long ago? Don't ask, Quintus. Don't even think of asking.
His foot brushed something, and he stumbled. What was that?
Something bulky sprawled against the rock. Quintus swerved, but could not avoid it. He went sprawling and fell hard against the wall, the carvings bruising his flesh. And his arm, dropping over what had tripped him, landed hard enough to bring a moan out of the man he had stumbled across.
It was Rufus's voice.
Jupiter Optimus Maximus and all the lesser gods, Quintus thought, as he knelt beside the centurion, feeling for wounds on the man's hard skull. Rufus groaned repeatedly. The light rising from the floor showed his eyes, glazed now, with the pupil of one eye larger than that of the other.
"Lad... I mean, sir... by all the gods, didn't know you had a twin. You'll need to be Castor and Pollux both to take on... to the crows with that little bastard. His father should have exposed him at birth or thrown him from the Tarpeian rocks, which is what I'd do if I ever got him home.... Damn, my head, my head..."
Rufus gagged, doubling over and retching. Quintus supported his shoulders.
"Come on!" whispered Manetho.
Up ahead, Manetho might fume that they were out of time, but Rufus carried my stretcher. He forbade that I be abandoned on the desert or killed quickly when they thought I could not see. He taught me. And Manetho wasn't a man to abandon a comrade, either.
"Who?" Quintus asked, his heart sinking to depths he would have judged impossible.
"He came up behind us... the lady and I... Edepol, sir, I'm glad you're here to take charge...."
"Draupadi?" Quintus asked. "What happened?"
"Poor girl never had a chance. That useless traitor, that Lucilius... I'd like to have the purple stripe off their togas and them nailed up to a cross...."
In the ruined hall, Lucilius had crouched at first with the Legionaries and the slaves, but then gone outside, pleading restlessness and the need to breathe untainted air.
And that was all that was clean about him! Quintus let his hands rest on Rufus's shoulders, trying to reassure the older man: but there was no reassurance for either of them.
Even as Lucilius had slipped outside, were the voices already eating away at his resolve? He had always been apt for treasons, as long as Quintus had known him. And this was not the first time he had tried to strike a bargain with an enemy.
It had been hard enough for Quintus with his old Roman grandsire and—as Lucilius thought—his ludicrous respect for loyalty to resist the voices that the Black Naacals sent out to tempt those who would stand against them.
What had they promised the patrician? Gold, it went without saying, and perhaps Draupadi, compliant or not.
"He hit me first, sir," Rufus said. "I went down. And then he grabbed for the Eagle—our Eagle! The lady snatched it away before he could lay his rotten hands on it, and I tried, so help me Minos and Rhadamanthus, I swear I tried to go to her aid. But he grabbed her by one arm and told her that he wouldn't kill me if she went along without using her magic on him. That was bad enough. And then he kicked me, and I went crashing into the wall, a real tyro's trick.... Gods, I've been a fool, bungled everything. Oh, Dis, to the cross with this head of mine...."
"Steady there," Quintus muttered absently. "It's all right."
It would have been the cross or worse for all of them. The Black Naacals had Ganesha, with his great strength and power. And, while the old man had held out all these lifetimes and while he might well have endured until the final death that he had escaped in the whelming of his home, could he endure seeing a dear friend put to torment? Especially when the friend had been not just a student, but a daughter to him for all that time?
"She has the Eagle, sir," Rufus said. He stifled a groan—a sign he might recover if he concealed his pain. "I should be flogged, broken... one woman and I could not even protect her...."
"Come on!" snapped Manetho. "They will betray us. Now we must hasten."
No! Do not think of Ganesha or Draupadi in torment. Do not think of the sacrifices of the Black Naacals. The priestess of the sun had power enough to use the Eagle; he only hoped that she would.
"The longer we stay here, the worse the chance.... Do you know what those priests do to their victims?"
Don't think of Draupadi's amber skin dappled with her blood or turned the color of chalk. Don't think of Ganesha's towering spirit quenched. And don't think of them.... They would put their hands on Draupadi. Maybe even Lucilius, who had wanted her and she had rebuffed him.
"First there will be a sacrifice. Then, they will begin," Manetho spoke, his voice hollow with dread.
Quintus had never expected to return to Rome, much less to return with the Eagle. He had, however dimly, begun to hope for some shreds of a life. Now, though, now, he must take the Eagle and wield it. A whole world hung in the balance.
"If they die, they die as soldiers." He heard his voice, so hoarse it was hard to recognize the words as his lips shaped them. "Rufus, you go back. Manetho, I'm with you. We will catch them in a circle. No one will get out alive."
Least of all ourselves.
But the idea of Romans, their eyes alight with anger and relieved tension, and the bloody drill of their short swords, advancing deliberately on the Black Naacals and cutting them asunder had its own attraction and even carried its own healing. Rufus struggled to his feet. What began as an unsteady walk finished up as a march.
Quintus turned to Manetho. "I know you would rather be with your own men," he said. "But with your help..."
"You must take care. It is you they want!" cried Manetho. "They know who brought in the strangers. You are young, strong.... They may wish to make you one of their number.... Sometimes it happens when one of our sons grow
s too strong and they have a vacancy in their ranks...."
Now that was damnable—suborning sons as well as killing them. Let a strong man rise, and the slaves would never know if they could rely on him, or if, at the moment of sacrifice, they would look up at the Black Naacal holding the knife and see in his face the man who had once been son or brother or friend.
"They will have to content themselves with the terror they have already wrought," Quintus snapped. He would like to execute Lucilius himself: The patrician had betrayed not only his city and his caste, but all his world.
However, Quintus's first responsibility must be to rescue the Eagle. To wield it, if he could; and if not, to afford Draupadi and Ganesha a clean death before the Black Naacals unleashed their power. Perhaps he would even have time to fall on his own sword.
And the Eagle? If he could not wield it, he must destroy it. Most likely, that would eliminate the need to fall on his sword—or for any of the others to try it.
He had come, he realized, to the end of the skein of time allotted him by the Fates. With that realization came the death of hope—and the end of his fear. His sword gleamed in his hand, but did not quiver.
Abruptly he laughed. "Morituri te salutamus!" he cried, saluting the darkness.
Manetho glared at him. The poor bastard probably feared him almost as much as the Black Naacals. Yet he must lead his men and work with Quintus, whom he clearly found a strange creature if he could face death laughing.
But Manetho was brave. He led. And Quintus followed, his senses keyed up for this final battle.
Again, the banging of gongs and now, the braying of horns and the sound that Quintus feared even more—the blowing of bone flutes, higher and more shrill than the priests' horns. Manetho shuddered. So long a slave, and now he was forcing himself to face worse than death. Quintus opened his mouth to utter the comforting words he himself had heard before his first battle. Again came the clamor of the priests' instruments. Energy thrilled in his blood. He felt stronger, fairly matched, and he no longer needed to place his feet with such care. The fear was gone, all of it. He wanted to share that comfort, for such it was, with Manetho, but the slave was a dark blot up ahead.
Even through the walls, Quintus heard the thunder. Lightning played across the gaps in the walls and danced in the waste, turning salt flats and stone slabs white. A wind blew. Remembering the storms he had endured with Ganesha and Draupadi—and the whirlwinds they had survived—he was not dismayed.
The lightning flashed once more. Now, the very walls themselves seemed to glow. Flames seemed to brush the hands of the figures in the battered friezes. Krishna had danced that way. But Quintus's talisman lay buried in the waste. Quintus decided that the sight was a good omen, if a fearsome one. Fare forward, Krishna had told him so very long ago. Told Arjuna, who faced armies, not a man with the blood of princes in his veins and the soul of a felon. Not Dark Priests. Your battle is harder than mine, came a voice in his head. Arjuna's this time, not the Dark Ones.
Quintus would fare forward, as he had been taught. It was relief. It was rebirth. And it was deadly danger.
31
MANETHO TURNED TO Quintus. "They have started," he said, tonelessly. They have taken the Naacals, and now they also have your weapon."
Now Quintus's reluctant guide would have only to shout. Surely, the Dark Ones had stationed guards in these honeycombed walls. Would the Romans face a second betrayal tonight?
The thought chilled Quintus for a moment, until he forced it out of mind. The Black Naacals might have the Eagle, but he somehow doubted that they could use its full powers. Still, since it was an Eagle of Rome, its loss was grievous.
More so was the loss of Draupadi, leaving an ever-growing ache in his heart. All his life, he had loved, only to have what he had loved snatched from him. Now, in losing her, he stood to lose even more than love: The whole world might pay for it.
Not if I can help it, he vowed.
Lightning illuminated Manetho's pale face, showing skin streaked with oily sweat, and eyes rolling from side to side like those of a horse frightened by a raging fire. With this evil ritual begun, Manetho reacted to slaves' fears: Run and hide, perhaps survive until next time— even if he also sensed that, if they did not fight now, there would be no next time.
What do you recommend? It would be cruelty to ask. But it was a question the Roman must have an answer for. Manetho knew this ruin; Quintus did not.
His own people were running out of choices. They might gather what water and supplies they could and retreat into the deep desert—if they could pass the barriers—and trust to Fate and skill to find more water before they went mad, and died. Or they might hide within this complex—assuming Lucilius did not betray them. Even if they hid successfully, there would come a day when their luck would run out.
The Black Naacals wanted him, Quintus, now—sacrifice or apprentice to their foul magic, who could say?
Neither was a choice for a Roman. What then were Roman choices? Quintus could rejoin his men, and they could fall on their swords. Or they could follow their own harsh code: Draw those swords, form a battle line, and attack as long as life was in them.
"Will you turn on us now?" Manetho demanded. Quintus's silence had made him, too, suspect betrayal.
"Put that thing away," Rufus grumbled, coming up to them as he gestured at the ancient blade the slave had drawn. "A man could die poisoned by its dirt before he bled out life from any cut you gave him."
Though terror had given Manetho keen ears, Quintus wagered that he had not heard the centurion pad up behind them. Accustomed to the darkness now, he saw that Rufus had slung his boots about his neck and carried his own blade.
The centurion gave the tribune a strange look. That look—Quintus had seen its like the night the man of the Legions had come to tell his family that his father had died. Hard news, it meant, to be borne as a man bears the dealings of fate.
"Sir," Rufus began, "I felt some better, and I went to scout out the Black Naacals'..." his mouth moved as if he wanted to spit, "...what they'd call a shrine. They're all there, along with those they took for their altar. I had thought if I could, I'd give them a decent death: no luck."
If Rufus had been able to reach Ganesha and Draupadi, would they have welcomed his "decent death"? Could they even die, after so long?
Manetho shifted from foot to foot, and Quintus guessed his wariness: The slave had only the sight and voice of the two Naacals—and terror thereafter. With their knowledge, their wealth of experience, and their study—which had once been the discipline of the Black Naacals before they turned to darkness—how easy it would be for them to adapt to a new form of power. For him, priests were like serpents: There were some whose venom killed after you took one step, and some whose venom killed after you took two steps—but you died just the same.
"You think they'd—" Ganesha's deep wisdom, Draupadi's supple grace, extinguished in a pool of drying blood, either in sacrifice or by Rufus's rough mercy.
"They wouldn't betray us. Not those two," Rufus said. "It's what I'd want for me. You would too, sir. And even if they're not Romans..."
"Never mind, soldier." In another minute, Rufus would have him wet-eyed—and this was no time for tears. "Anyhow, you did not succeed."
"No, sir," Rufus drew himself up. "It's Carrhae all over again. We have failed."
The boom of a great gong shuddered through the walls, its vibration shaking into them as they huddled against the worn masonry. Just so had they heard the gongs and bells and drums of The Surena's reinforcements and prepared to sell their lives in the bright sun so far away.
"Well," Quintus said, "we have known we were living on borrowed time. So now we pay it back, eh?"
He had well expected that grim laugh from Rufus.
"It's worse than you know, sir. They have set a guard more dangerous than any we might have expected. The lady Draupadi herself."
Quintus whirled to grab the centurion's shoulders, slamming h
im back against the rock. Chaos was come, if Draupadi could be turned against them. And he had been so sure that she would not.
"It's not like that!" Rufus hissed at him. "You know how worn out she has been. The way Lucilius turned, that seems to have been the last straw. When he brought her in, they talked to her, and she shook her head. That was when they grabbed her. I was going to go after her, but three of the boys held onto me.... I let 'em live.... They forced some drug into her...."
Quintus heard himself moan.
"... and now she seems to have turned inside... not like a madwoman, but like a sibyl seeing visions. And what she sees, they can use. They can use her."
"How do you know?"
"We saw her sitting there. Just sitting. I was surprised that she wasn't better guarded. So, one of the lads thought he could sneak up and rescue her. One less to worry about, eh? And he knew it would please..."