Arigh buried the mistreated corpses without a word. If they were meant to intimidate, they had the opposite effect. In cold anger, the Arshaum hunted down a squad of Yezda scouts and drove them straight into the lances of the mountaineers still with them. The enemy horsemen did not last long. The evening’s camp held a grim satisfaction.

  But the Yezda returned to the attack the next day. The iron-studded gates of one of the larger of the Hundred Cities, Dur-Sharrukin, swung open to let out a sally party, while two troops who had been shadowing the Arshaum nipped in from either flank.

  They were still outnumbered and could have been badly mauled, but Arigh threw the bulk of his forces at Dur-Sharrukin’s gate. If he could force an entrance, the city was his. The Yezda gate-captain saw that, too. He was, unfortunately, a man of quick action. He put a shoulder to the gate himself and screamed for his troops to help. The bar slammed into place seconds before the Arshaum got there. Much of the garrison was trapped outside, but the town was secure.

  The plainsmen milled about in confusion just outside Dur-Sharrukin. In their dash for the gate they had pulled away from the Erzrumi, and the Yezda flanking attack fell on the hillmen.

  Gashivili’s company stopped one assault in its tracks. Used to clashing with the Khamorth at the edge of the steppe, the lord of Gunib’s veterans waited till the Yezda drew close enough to be hurt by a charge and then, with nice timing, delivered a blow that brought a dozen lightly armed archers down from their horses at the first shock and sent the rest galloping away for their lives.

  On the other wing the combat went less well. The free spirits who had clung with the Arshaum acknowledged no single commander. They grouped together by nation or by friendship, and each little band did as it pleased. Lacking the discipline for a united charge, they tried to fight nomad-style, and the nomads had much the better of it.

  “Stay close to me,” Rakio called to Gorgidas as the first arrows whipped past them. The Yrmido swung his lance down and roweled his big gelding. He thundered toward a Yezda who was restringing his bow. On a more agile mount, the other had no trouble eluding him, but his grin turned to a snarl as he saw Gorgidas bearing down on him behind Rakio.

  The Greek rode a steppe pony himself and was thrusting at the Yezda as the latter snatched out his saber. A backward lean saved him from Gorgidas’ sword, but another “orphan” from the Sworn Fellowship speared him out of the saddle. All the remaining Yrmido, about fifteen of them, stuck close together; even now, few of the other Erzrumi would have anything to do with them.

  They cut down a couple of Yezda more and took injuries in return. One was shot in the shoulder, another wounded in the leg by a sword stroke. His foe’s saber cut his horse as well. Crazed with pain, it leaped into the air and galloped wildly away, by good fortune toward Gashvili’s troops. One of their rear guard rode out to the hurt warrior, helped bring his beast under control, and hurried him into the safety of their ranks.

  “That is well done,” Rakio said. “These men of Gunib decent fellows have themselves shown to be. Some here would let the Yezda take him.”

  Back at Dur-Sharrukin, the Arshaum were reversing themselves and riding to help their allies. The Yezda, seeing that their advantage would soon be gone, battled with redoubled vigor, to do all the damage they could before they had to retreat.

  The Yrmido took the brunt of that whirlwind assault, and, because they were who they were, the rest of the Erzrumi did not hurry to help them. Gorgidas parried blow after blow and dealt a few of his own. “Eleleleu!” he shouted—the Greek war cry.

  He wished he could use a bow; arrows flew by him, buzzing like angry wasps. He noticed his left trouser leg was torn and wet with blood and wondered foolishly if it was his.

  Through the tumult he heard Viridovix’ yowling battle paean. “Eleleu!” he yelled, and waved his hat to show the Celt where he was. The wild Gallic howl came again, closer this time. He thought he could hear Skylitzes’ cry as well; Goudeles was apt to be noisier before a fight than during.

  Rakio shouted and flung both hands up in front of his face. A little kestrel stabbed claws into the back of one wrist, then screeched and streaked away to its Yezda master. Another Yezda landed a mace just above Rakio’s ear. The Yrmido slid bonelessly to the ground.

  Gorgidas spurred his pony forward, as did the two or three men of the Sworn Fellowship who were not fighting for their own lives at that instant. But Rakio had got separated from them by fifty yards or so. Though Gorgidas burst between two Yezda before either could strike at him, more were between him and his lover, too many for him to overcome even had he had a demigod’s strength and Viridovix’ spell-wrapped blade.

  He tried nonetheless, slashing wildly, all fencing art forgotten, and watched with anguish as a Yezda leaped down from his horse to strip off Rakio’s mail shirt. The Yrmido stirred, tried groggily to rise. The Yezda grabbed for his sword, then saw how weak and uncertain Rakio was. He shouted for a comrade. Together they quickly lashed Rakio’s hands behind him, then heaved him across the first warrior’s saddlebow. Both men remounted and trotted off toward the west.

  The Yezda were breaking contact wherever they could as the Arshaum drew near. Gorgidas’ chase stopped as soon as it began. An arrow tore through his pony’s neck. The horse foundered with a choked scream. As he had been taught, the Greek kicked free of the stirrups. The wind flew from him as he landed in the middle of yet another trampled grain field, but he was not really hurt.

  Viridovix was almost thrown himself as he stormed toward Gorgidas. He was spurring his horse so hard that blood ran down its barrel. At last it could stand no more and tried to shake him off. He clung to his seat with the unthinking skill a year’s waking time in the saddle had given him.

  “Get on, ye auld weed!” he roared, slapping the beast’s rump. He saw its ears go back and slapped it again, harder, before it could balk. Defeated, it ran. “Faster now, or it’s forever a disgrace to sweet Epona you’ll be,” he said as he heard Gorgidas’ war cry ring out again. As if the Gallic horse goddess held power in this new world, the pony leaped forward.

  The Celt shouted himself, then cursed when he got no answer. “Sure and I’ll kill that fancy-boy my ain self, if he’s after letting the Greek come to harm, him such a fool on the battlefield and all,” he panted, though he would sooner have been flayed than have Gorgidas hear him.

  He hardly noticed the Yezda horseman in his path, save as an obstacle. One sword stroke sent the other’s shamshir flying, a second laid open his arm. Not pausing to finish him, Viridovix galloped on.

  Though the physician was in nomad leathers, the Celt recognized him from behind by the straight sword in his hand and by the set of his shoulders, a slump the self-confident Arshaum rarely assumed. “ ’Twill be the other way round, then,” the Gaul said to himself, “and bad cess to me for thinking ill o’ the spalpeen when he’s nobbut a dead corp.”

  But when he dismounted to offer such sympathy as he could, Gorgidas blazed at him: “He’s not dead, you bloody witless muttonhead. It’s worse; the Yezda have him.”

  Having seen the grisly warning in the army’s path, Viridovix knew what he meant. “No help for it but that we get him back, is there now?”

  “How?” Gorgidas demanded, waving his hand toward the retreating Yezda. As was their habit, they were breaking up and fleeing every which way. “He could be anywhere.” Clenching his fists in despair, the physician turned on Viridovix. “And what is this talk of ‘we’? Why should you care what happens to my catamite?” He flung the word out defiantly, as if he would sooner hear it in his own mouth than the Gaul’s.

  Viridovix stood silent for a moment. “Why me? For one thing, I wouldna gi’ over a dead dog to the Yezda for prisoner. If your twisty Greek mind must have its reasons, there’s one. For another, your friend,” he emphasized, turning his back on the hateful word, and on his own thoughts of a few minutes before, “is a braw chap, and after deserving a better fate. And for a third,” he finished quietly, “didn’t I no hear you tried to chase north over Pardraya all alone, the time Varatesh took me?”

  “You shame me,” Gorgidas said, hanging his head. Memory of Rakio’s remarks when the Yrmido had saved him came scalding back.

  “Och, I didna aim to,” Viridovix said. “If kicking the fool arse o’ you would ha’ worked the trick, it’s that I’d have done, and enjoyed it the more, too.”

  “Go howl!” The physician could not help laughing. “You fox of a barbarian, no doubt you have the rescue planned already.”

  “That I don’t. Your honor has made the name for being the canny one. Me, I’d sooner brawl nor think—easier and less wearing, both.”

  “Liar,” Gorgidas said. But his wits, once the Gaul had dragged him unwilling from despondency, were working again. He said briskly, “We’ll need to see Arigh for soldiers, then, and Tolui, too, I think. What better than magic for tracking someone?”

  To their surprise and anger, Arigh turned them down flat when they asked him for a squad. None of their arguments would change his mind. “You’ve chosen a madman’s errand,” he declared, “and one I do not expect you to come back from. Kill yourselves if you must, but I will not order any man to follow you.”

  “Is that the way a friend acts?” Viridovix cried.

  “It is how a chief acts,” the Arshaum returned steadily. “What sort of herdsman would I be if I sought a lost sheep by sending twenty more to meet the wolves? I have all my force to think of, and that is more important than any one person. Besides, if the Erzrumi is lucky he is dead by now.” He turned away to discuss the evening’s campsite with two of his commanders of a hundred.

  That what he said had a great deal of truth in it did not help. Gorgidas was coldly furious as he went looking for Tolui. He found the shaman and learned that Arigh had preceded him. When he put his request to Tolui, the nomad shook his head, saying, “I am ordered not to accompany you.”

  “Och, and what’s a wee order, now?” Viridovix said airily. “They’re all very well when you’d be doing what they tell you with or without, but a bit of a bother otherwise.”

  Tolui raised an eyebrow. “My head answers for this one.” Seeing Gorgidas about to explode, he stopped him with an upraised hand. “Softly, softly. I may be able to help you yet. Do you have anything of your comrade’s with you?”

  From his left wrist the physician drew off a silver bracelet stamped with the images of the Four Prophets. “Handsome work,” Tolui remarked. He reached behind him, took the staring devil-mask of his office from his saddlebag, and lowered it over his head. “Aid me, spirits!” he called softly, his voice remote and disembodied. “Travel the path between the possession and the man and show the way so the journey may be made in this world as well as in your country.”

  He cocked his head as if listening. With an annoyed toss of his head, he got out his fringed oval summoning drum. “Aid me, aid me!” he called again, more sharply, and tapped the drumhead in an intricate rhythm. Gorgidas and Viridovix started when an angry voice spoke from nowhere. Tolui laid his command on the spirit, or tried to, for it roared in protest. With drum and voice he brought it to obedience and flung out his hands to send it forth.

  “They have your view of orders,” he said to Viridovix.

  “Honh!” The Celt waited with Gorgidas for the spirit’s return. Watching the Greek’s set features, all the more revealing in their effort to conceal, he knew what pictures his friend was imagining. He had his own set, and it was not hard to substitute Rakio’s face for Seirem’s.

  Tolui repeated that odd, listening pose, then grunted in satisfaction and handed the bracelet back to Gorgidas. Accepting it, the physician was puzzled until he noticed the faint bluish glow crowning the head of the leftmost prophet. Answering the unspoken question, the shaman said, “There is your guide. As the direction of your search changes, the light will shift from figure to figure, from west to north to east to south; it will grow brighter as you near your goal.”

  He waved aside thanks. Gorgidas and Viridovix hurried away; the sun was low in the west, and the army slowing as it prepared to camp. Somewhere the Yezda would be doing the same, Gorgidas thought—if they had not made a special stop already.

  As they rode away, someone shouted behind them. Viridovix swore—was Arigh going to stop them after all? He lay his sword across his knees. “If himself wants to make a shindy of it, I’ll oblige him, indeed and I will.”

  Their pursuer, however, was no Arshaum, but one of the Yrmido, a quiet, solid man named Mynto. “I with come,” he said in broken Vaspurakaner, of which the Greek and Celt had picked up a handful of words. He was leading a fully saddled spare horse. “For Rakio.”

  Viridovix smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “What a pair o’ cullions the two of us make! We’d have had the poor wight riding pillion, and belike wrecking our horses for fair.”

  Gorgidas was marshaling what Vaspurakaner he knew. “Big danger,” he said to Mynto. “Why you come?”

  The Yrmido looked at him. “Same reason you do.”

  The answer was one the physician might have been as glad not to have, but there could be no arguing Mynto’s right to join them. “Come, then,” the physician said. Viridovix managed to swallow a grin before the Greek turned his way.

  The peaks of Dilbat hid the sun. The day’s vicious heat subsided a little. Night in the land of the Hundred Cities had a beauty missing from the flat, monotonous river plain by day. The sky was a great swatch of blue-black velvet, with the stars’ diamonds tossed carelessly across it.

  The horsemen, though, had little chance to enjoy the loveliness. Swarms of mosquitoes rose, humming venomously, from the fields and the edges of the irrigation channels to make the journey a misery. The riders slapped and cursed, slapped and cursed. Their mounts’ tails switched back and forth as they did their best to whisk the bugs away. Gorgidas was reminded of the fight between Herakles and the Hydra; for every insect he mashed, two more took its place.

  The mosquitoes particularly tormented Viridovix, whose face in the starlight was puffed and blotchy. “Dogmeat I’ll be before long,” he said sadly, waving his arms in a futile effort to frighten the biters away.

  Thanks to a swollen bite over one eye, Gorgidas had to squint to see the bracelet that was steering them. “North,” he said after a bit, as the blue radiance began to shift, and then, a little later, “More west again.” He had no doubt the glow was stronger than it had been when they set out.

  As well as they could, the three of them tried to decide what they would do when they found Rakio. More than language hindered them; much depended on how many enemies held the Yrmido and what they would be doing to him when the rescuers arrived. Viridovix made the key point: “We maun be quick. Any long fight and we’re for it, and no mistake.”

  They skirted one Yezda camp without being spotted; the bracelet was still guiding them northwest. Soon after, a squadron of Yezda rode past them only a couple of hundred yards away. No challenges rang out; the squad leader must have taken them for countrymen. “No moon—good,” Mynto whispered.

  “Bloody good,” Gorgidas said explosively once the Yezda were out of earshot.

  He was hiding the bracelet in his sleeve to conceal its brightness when he and his companions passed the mound that marked yet another abandoned city. As they came round it they saw several fires ahead and men moving in front of them. When the physician checked the bracelet, its glow almost dazzled him. “That must be it.”

  “Yes.” Mynto pointed. He was farsighted; they had to draw closer before the unmoving figure by one of the fires meant anything to the Greek. He caught his breath sharply. No wonder the man did not move—he was tied to a stake.

  “Ready for sport, are they, the omadhauns?” Viridovix said. “We’ll give them summat o’ sport.”

  They made plans in low mutters, then almost had to scrap them at once when a sentry called a challenge from out of the darkness. “Not so much noise, there,” Viridovix hissed at the Yezda in the Khamorth speech they shared, doing his best to imitate the fellow’s accent. “We’ve a message for your captain from the khagan himself. Come fetch it, an you would; there’s more stops for us after the one here.”

  The sentry rode forward, not especially suspicious. He was only a few feet away when he exclaimed, “You’re no—” His voice cut off abruptly as Mynto hurled half a brick at his face. He went over his horse’s tail.

  They waited tensely to see whether the noise would disturb the Yezda in the camp. When it was clear the enemy had not noticed, Viridovix said, “Here’s how we’ll try it, then,” and shifted into his lame Vaspurakaner, eked out with gestures, so Mynto could follow.

  “That place is mine,” Gorgidas protested when the Gaul came to his own role.

  “No,” Viridovix said firmly. “Mynto has his chain-mail coat, and I this whopping great blade and all the practice using it. Each to the task he’s suited for, or the lot of us perish, and Rakio, too. Is it aye or nay?”

  “Yes, damn you.” Having lived his life by logic and reason, the physician wished he could forget them.

  “You’ll get in a lick or two, that you will,” Viridovix promised as they moved in. They kept their horses to a walk, advancing as quietly as they could. The Yezda around the fires went about their business. One walked up to Rakio and slapped him across the face with the casual cruelty so common among them. Several others laughed and applauded.

  Gorgidas could hear them plainly. With his comrades, he was less than fifty yards from the campfires before one of the Yezda turned his head their way—close enough for them to see his eyes go big and round and his mouth drop open in astonishment.

  “Now!” Viridovix bellowed, snatching the reins of the spare horse from Mynto. Spurring their beasts, they stormed forward.