“What now?” Gaius Philippus grunted.

  “Who knows? It started when that side tunnel joined this one, I think.” Scaurus took back the lead, trying to look every way at once. It might not be a pit this time, but vitriol from a spigot in the ceiling, or a blast of fire, or … anything.

  The uncertainty ate at him, made him start at the shift of his own shadow as he walked. He paused to rest a moment, letting his sword drag in the dust.

  Light fountained from the blade, so brilliant the tribune flung up his arms to shield his eyes. The dazzling burst lasted only an instant. Marcus leaped backward, wondering what snare he had tripped. Then he saw the line of footprints stretching out ahead in the dust.

  They were invisible to Gaius Philippus until he touched the hilt of the Gallic longsword. “So someone’s covering his tracks by magic, is he?” the veteran said. He made a menacing motion with his dagger. “Can’t you just guess who?”

  “Who else but Avshar?” Marcus said bitterly. How had the wizard-prince got ahead of them? No matter, the tribune thought grimly; there he was. The Romans could not retreat, not with the Yezda in the corridors behind them. No choice but to go on. “He won’t take us unawares.”

  “Or need to.” But Gaius Philippus was already moving forward. “We’ll stalk him for a change.”

  As it did all through the tunnel system, the dust went thick and thin by turns, now rising in choking clouds when the Romans scuffed through it, now only a film. The light of Scaurus’ sword, though, picked out the sorcerously concealed trail even at its most indistinct.

  “Branching up ahead,” Gaius Philippus said. “Which direction did the bastard go?” He spoke in a whisper; in these twisting passages, sound carried further than light.

  “Left,” Marcus answered confidently. But after continuing for about another fifteen feet, the trail disappeared, Gallic magic or no. “What the—” the tribune said. He heard a sudden rush of steps behind him. Knowing he had been tricked again, he whirled with Gaius Philippus for a last round of hopeless combat.

  He would remember the tableau forever—three men with upraised weapons, each motionless in astonishment. “You!” they all cried at once, and, like puppets on the same string, lowered their blades together.

  “I saw you dead,” Marcus said, almost with anger in his voice.

  “It was not me you saw,” Wulghash replied. The deposed khagan of Yezd wore an officer’s silk surcoat over a boiled-leather cuirass, and trousers of fine suede. Trousers and coat were filthy, as was he, but he still bore himself like a king. He went on, “I put my seeming—and my robes—on one of the traitors I slew and took his image for myself when I carried him out. In his arrogance, Avshar did not look past the surface.” The khagan spoke matter-of-factly of his sorcery; Scaurus could only imagine his haste and desperation as he had worked, not knowing whether more of the wizard-prince’s guards would fall on him before his spells were done. But Wulghash was looking at the Romans with like amazement. “How is it you walk free? I saw you taken by Avshar in truth, not seeming. You have no magic save your sword, and you had already lost that to him.”

  Marcus hid the blade behind his body before he answered. Wulghash’s eyes were watering; he had known little light in the tunnels. The tribune said, “There was no magic to it.” He explained what Tabari had done.

  “Gratitude is a stronger magic than most of the ones I know.” Wulghash grunted. “You conjured more of it from Tabari than I, it seems, if he obeys Avshar now.” Scaurus thought the minister of justice lucky he was nowhere near his khagan at that moment.

  With characteristic practicality, Gaius Philippus demanded of Wulghash, “So why didn’t you flee, once you were wearing another man’s face?”

  “I would have, but Avshar, his own Skotos eat him, saw fit to promote me for murdering myself, and to give me these gauds.” The khagan patted his draggled finery. “That meant I was in his henchmen’s company and could hardly up and go. Besides, the glamour I had cast was a weak one. I had no time for better, but it could have worn off at any moment. That would have killed me, did it happen while I was still in the palace for his slaves to spot. So when I was finally alone a moment, the best I could think of was to take to the tunnels.”

  He waved. “Here I am safe enough. I know these ways better than most. They must be learned on foot; masking spells hide much of them—and many traps—from sorcerous prying. Some go back to the Makuraner kings, others I set myself against an evil day; if you ride the snake, watch his fangs. And if you know where to search, there are cisterns and caches of Makuraner bread baked hard as rock to keep forever. Not fare I relish, but I can live on it.”

  The Romans looked at each other and at their canteens, which held a couple of swallows apiece now. How many times had they missed chances to fill them? Tone roughened by chagrin, Gaius Philippus said, “All right, you escaped Avshar. But this moles’ nest must have its ways out. Why didn’t you use one?”

  Pride rang in Wulghash’s answer: “Because I aim to take back what is mine. Aye, I know Avshar has been pickling in his own malice like a gherkin in vinegar these many hundred years, but I am no mean loremaster either. Let me but catch him unawares, and I can best him.”

  Marcus and Gaius Philippus glanced at each other again. “You do not believe me,” the khagan said. “As may be, but with no hope at all I would still be here.” His voice, his entire aspect, softened. “Whom else has Atossa to rely on?”

  The Romans could not help starting. Wulghash did not miss it. “What do you know? Tell me.” He hefted his saber as if to rip the answer from them.

  “I fear she is dead,” Scaurus said, and told of the shriek from the court room that had been so suddenly cut off.

  Wulghash raised the saber again. Before the tribune could lift his own blade for self-defense, the khagan slashed his own cheeks in the mourning ritual of the steppe. Blood ran into his beard and dripped in the dust at his feet.

  He paid it no attention. Pushing past the Romans, he started down the corridor from which he had come. Now he made no effort to conceal his tracks; he cared nothing for magic any more. The sword in his hand was all that mattered to him. “Avshar!” he roared. “I am coming for you!”

  Near mad with grief and rage, he could not have stood against the wizard-prince for an instant. Gaius Philippus realized at once the only course that might stay him. He taunted the khagan: “Aye, go on, throw yourself away, too. Then when you meet your woman in the next world you can tell her how you avenged her by getting yourself killed to no purpose.”

  The jeer served where Marcus’ more reasoned tone would have failed. Wulghash whirled with catlike grace. He was close to Gaius Philippus’s age, but hardly less a warrior. “What better time to take the spider unawares in the palace than when everything is topsy-turvy after your escape?” He spat the words at the veteran, but that he argued at all showed reason still held him, if narrowly.

  “Who’ll take whom unawares?” the senior centurion said with a scornful laugh. “The palace, is it? My guess is the son of a whore’s not five tunnels behind us, and his guards with him, magicking their way past the spiked pit back there.”

  That reached Wulghash, though not for the reason Gaius Philippus had expected. “You came this way past the pit?” he demanded in disbelief. “How, without wizardry? That is the deadliest snare in all the tunnels.”

  “We have this,” Scaurus reminded him, motioning with his sword. “It bared the trap before we fell into it—the same way it showed your footprints,” he added.

  Wulghash’s jaw muscles jumped. “Strong sorcery,” he said. “Strong enough to draw Avshar were he blind as a cave-fish.” He scowled at Gaius Philippus. “You have reason, damn you. With Avshar close by and his magic primed and ready, I cannot hope to beat him now. Best we flee, though saying so gags me.”

  Still scowling, he turned back to Marcus. “What point in flying, if you carry a lantern calling the huntsmen after you? Leave the sword here.”

  “No,” the tribune said. “When he took me, Avshar feared to touch it. I will not abandon the best weapon I have, or let him put it to the test at his leisure.”

  “Ill was the day I met you,” Wulghash said balefully, “and I would had never named you friend.”

  “Cut the horseshit,” Gaius Philippus snapped. “If you’d never met us, you’d be dead yourself, and Avshar running your stinking country anyway.”

  “So forward a tongue is ripe for the cropping.”

  The hue and cry from the Roman’s pursuers gave a sudden surge. “The wizard’s men are past the pit,” Marcus said to Wulghash. “You talk like Avshar; maybe you’re thinking like him, too, and hoping to buy your own life from them with ours.”

  “By whatever gods may be, I will never deal in peace with him or his, so long as breath is in me.” The khagan paused to think. He set down his saber. His hands flashed through passes; he muttered in the same archaic Videssian dialect Avshar used.

  “Your magic will not touch me or my blade,” Scaurus reminded him.

  “I know,” Wulghash said when he could speak normally. “But I can set a spell round you and it both, to befog one seeking it through sorcery. The magic does not touch you, you see; if it did, it would perish. But because of that it only befogs. It will not blind. So, my friends” he said, his tone making it an accusation to flinch from, “can you run with me, since you have proven running the greater wisdom?”

  They ran.

  X

  “THERE IT SITS, MASHIZ ITS AIN SELF, AND DAMN ALL WE CAN DO ABOUT it,” Viridovix said glumly. He peered through evening twilight toward the Yezda capital from the jumbled hills at the edge of the mountains of Dilbat.

  “Aye, one glorious, sweeping charge, and it’s ours,” Pikridios Goudeles said in ringing tones that went poorly with his dirty buckskin tunic and bandaged shoulder. Sour laughter floated up from the edge of the Arshaum camp where the survivors of the Videssian embassy party and their few friends congregated.

  Gorgidas found he could not blame the plainsmen for their bitterness toward the imperials. Despite Arigh’s steadfast friendship, most of the nomads felt they had been drawn into a losing campaign for the Empire’s sake. And Mashiz, so close yet utterly unattainable, symbolized their frustration.

  The cloud of noxious smoke rising from the granite pyramid in the western part of the city did not hide the throng of yurts and tents and other shelters that daily grew greater as Yezd’s strength flowed in to the capital. Campfires glittered like stars. At its freshest the Arshaum army would have lost to such a host. Fragmented as the plainsmen were, a determined assault would have swept them away.

  The Greek wondered why it had not come. After the blows that broke the Arshaum apart, their foes seemed to have lost interest in them. Daily patrols made sure the scattered bands stayed away from Mashiz, but past that they were ignored. The Yezda even let them make contact with each other, though the mountain country was too broken and too poor for them to regroup as a single force.

  “Who comes?” Prevalis Haravash’s son barked nervously when an Arshum approached; things were at the point where the imperial trooper from Prista was as leery of his allies as he would have been of the enemy. Then the young sentry relaxed. “Oh, it’s you, sir.”

  Arigh leaned against a boulder set into the side of the hill and looked from Goudeles to Viridovix to Skylitzes to Gorgidas to Agathias Psoes. He slammed a fist down on his thigh. “I don’t propose living out my life as an outlaw skulking through these mountains, thinking I’m a hero because I’ve stolen five sheep or an ugly wench.”

  “What do you aim to do instead, then?” Psoes asked. The Videssian underofficer had a Roman air of directness to him.

  “I don’t know, the wind spirits curse it,” Arigh glared at the winking field of campfires in the distance.

  Skylitzes followed his gaze. He said, “If we skirt them, we can ride for the Empire.”

  “No,” Arigh said flatly. “Even if I could jolly my men into it, I will not turn away from Mashiz while I can still strike a blow. My father’s ghost would spurn me if I gave up a blood-feud so easily.”

  Familiar with the customs of the plains, the Videssian nodded. He tried a different tack. “You would not be abandoning your vendetta, simply getting new allies for it as you did in Erzerum. Seeking the Empire’s aid would bring your soldiers round.”

  “That may be so, but I still will not. In Erzerum I was master of the situation. With Thorisin I would be a beggar.”

  Gorgidas said, “Gavras is as much Yezd’s enemy as you. It’s not as if you would be forgetting your fight by seeking his aid.”

  “No,” Arigh repeated. “Thorisin has his own kingdom to rule; his concerns and mine are different. He might have reason to make peace with Yezd for now—what if the Namdaleni still hang over him, as they did last year? I am too weak to be able to take such chances. They would cost me my last freedom of action. If I had something to offer Gavras, now, something to deal with, it might be different. As is, though …”

  He sighed. “You mean well, all of you, but mercenary captain has no more appeal to me than robber chief as a lifelong trade. What will become of my clan, with Dizabul as their khagan? I must find a way back to Shaumkhiil with my people.”

  His clipped Arshaum accent added to the urgency of his words. Viridovix marveled at how his friend had grown from a roistering young blood in Videssos to a farsighted chieftain over the course of a year. “Indeed and he’s outgrown me,” the Gaul murmured to himself in surprise. “I’d go for my revenge and be damned to what came next. Och, what a braw prince he’ll make for his people, for he’s ever after thinking on the good o’ them all.”

  To Gorgidas, though, Arigh showed the doomed grandeur of a tragic hero. The physician wondered how many defeated lords had been driven into the uplands of Erzerum, vowing to return with victory. But Erzerum was a distant backwater. In Dilbat the Arshaum could only be hunted down.

  “What does your shaman say of the omens?” Psoes asked. Having served so long at the edge of the steppe and on it, he was more ready than the other imperials to find value in the nomads’ rites. Skylitzes frowned at him.

  “He’s taken them several times and got no meaning from them. Too close to that—” Arigh pointed at the smoking pyramid. He did not need to elaborate. Gorgidas knew the odor that rode those fumes; once he had helped carry corpses from a charred building. Arigh went on, “The very ground is full of pits beneath our feet, Tolui says.”

  “Heathen superstition.” Skylitzes’ frown deepened, but he admitted, “One could, I suppose, take that as metaphor for the reek of evil that hangs over Mashiz.” He, too, recognized the stench of burned human flesh; the Videssian army used incendiary mixes fired from catapults.

  “Metaphor?” Goudeles raised an eyebrow in mocking surprise. “I’d not thought a bluff soldier type like you would know a metaphor if one strolled up and bit your foot, Lankinos.”

  “Then whose ignorance is showing, mine or yours?”

  Viridovix drew a tally mark in the air. “A hit, that.” Irritated, Goudeles scowled at him. It irked the bureaucrat that Skylitzes, in his taciturn way, gave as good as he got.

  A low, grating sound came from the boulder against which Arigh was leaning. Pebbles and small stones spattered around his feet. He yelped and leaped away. “What’s this? Do the rocks walk in this stinking country?”

  “Earthquake!” Rakio said it first, with Gorgidas, Skylitzes, and Goudeles a beat behind. But the ground was not really shaking, and no stones fell anywhere but around the gray granite boulder. Gorgidas bit back a startled exclamation. The boulder itself was quivering, as if alive.

  “Meta-whatever, eh?” Arigh said triumphantly to Skylitzes. The Arshaum reached for his sword. “Seems more like an ordinary snare to me. Now to close it on the ones who set it—they aimed too well for their own good this time.” His companions also drew their blades.

  After that grinding beginning, the boulder moved more smoothly. “There is a path for it to run in,” Rakio said, pointing. Sure enough, a shallow trench let the great stone move away from the hillside. Blackness showed behind it. “They try to befool us with a secret doorway, eh?” The Yrmido sidled forward on the balls of his feet.

  Viridovix started. He remembered Lipoxais the enaree in doomed Targitaus’ tent. The Khamorth shaman had seen fifty eyes, a door in the mountains, and two swords. The first part of the prophecy had proven such a calamity that the Gaul wanted no part of the second.

  The opening in the side of the hill was almost wide enough to admit a man. “Whoever it is lurking in there, I’ll cleave him to his navel,” Viridovix cried. He pushed past Rakio, his sword upraised.

  As he approached the moving chunk of stone, the marks stamped down the length of his blade came to golden life. “ ’Ware,” he called to his companions. “It’s Avshar or one of his wizards.”

  Behind the stone, someone spoke. “I’m losing it, Scaurus. I thought I just heard that great Gallic chucklehead out there.”

  At the familiar rasp, Viridovix had to make a quick grab to keep from dropping his sword. He and Gorgidas traded wild stares. Then the Celt was shoving the stone out with all his strength. The physician rushed up to help him. The stone overbalanced and fell on its side. Blinking against the glare of the campfires, the two Romans and their comrade stumbled out of the tunnel.

  With a whoop of joy, Viridovix flung open his arms. Gaius Philippus returned his embrace without a qualm. Marcus, though, flinched at his touch. “A wound,” he explained, courteous even if both he and the senior centurion were bruised, hollow-cheeked, and filthy.

  “Phos save me, it is Scaurus,” Pikridios Goudeles whispered. For the first time Gorgidas could remember, he sketched the sun-circle over his heart.

  The Greek hardly noticed, nor did he pay attention to Arigh shouting to his men that these were, past all expectation, friends. He needed to be no physician to see the Romans were badly battered. “What are you doing here?” he all but shouted at them as he helped ease them down by a fire.