“It’s haunted you,” said Balthazar. “His face… I know it has… ”
The admiral looked at him with real pity. “The truth?” he asked. “Look at me. Do you want me to tell you the truth?”
Balthazar looked up. Glared at him.
“I’ve hardly thought about him.”
He’s lying. He wants me to believe that. But no man is that callous.
“I didn’t like my father all that much,” said the admiral. “But before he died, he gave me a piece of advice. The only one that ever really made a difference in my life. ‘Hug your children,’ he said. ‘Kiss your mothers and fathers, your brothers and sisters. Tell them how much you love them, every day. Because every day is the last day. Every light casts a shadow. And only the gods know when the darkness will find us.’”
The admiral turned away and helped himself to one of the orange slices on the platter. He sucked on it, enjoying the taste and the moisture until there was nothing left. As he did this, Balthazar made a decision.
I’m going to find out what comes next.
Blood trickled down Balthazar’s wrists as he pulled down on the rope with all his strength, pulled down on the wooden beam that it was tied to. The beam began to groan under the stress, and the admiral turned. He looked up at the beam — sturdy as any beam had any right to be. He looked down at Balthazar, pulling with what limited strength he had left in his body. The math didn’t hold up. There was no way a man could free himself under these circumstance. Satisfied, he turned his thoughts back to the orange slice in his mouth.
The magus grabbed his head and bolted upright from his couch in the throne room, knocking over his cup in the process. Something was terribly wrong.
“What is it?” asked Herod, standing up from his throne. By the time Herod got the words out, the magus was on his feet, shoving courtesans and advisors aside, looking for something. Anything. When Herod realized what he was doing, he shouted, “Bring him something to write with, at once!”
A piece of parchment was hurried into the magus’s hands as advisors tried to make themselves look busy. Herod crossed the throne room and stood over the little priest’s shoulder, reading along with every letter:
Prisoner is free. Ghost fr —
“Impossible!” cried Herod. “He’s under guard!”
The magus hurriedly scribbled again, then shoved the paper so close to Herod’s face that he nearly broke the king’s nose.
Guards dead. Everyone dead.
Balthazar is born again. He’s Samson slaying an entire army with a jawbone. He’s Hercules killing the Nemean lion. David killing Goliath. He pulls his arms until they shake, pulls on the ropes that bind each of his wrists to the wooden beam above. And witness now the sound of cracking wood.
The admiral’s eyes nearly leap out of his head, because he doesn’t believe what he sees. The math doesn’t hold up. A man can’t be that powerful, especially one whose body has been so battered. Yet the beam splinters, then splits in two and falls to the stone floor with a crash, freeing Balthazar’s hands.
The guards draw their swords and come at him. Balthazar charges too. He goes for the table against the wall — the one filled with an assortment of scalpels and clamps and scissors. He grabs the first one his fingers touch, unaware that it’s the very scalpel that was used to cut away the missing flesh beneath both of his arms. With long ropes still attached to both wrists, Balthazar turns and swings the blade in front of his body just in time.
And as weak and battered as he is, he swings with more strength than he’s ever known. His blade cuts through the droplets of rainwater that fall from the stone ceiling, splitting the ones it touches as it strikes the side of the first guard’s face — flaying it open like his own flesh had been flayed. He pierces the other beneath the armpit, driving the blade deeper — deeper past his ribs and into his lungs. He withdraws it and the man falls to the wet floor, where he’ll either drown in his own blood in seconds or die from infection in weeks. It doesn’t matter, as long as he leaves the earth in pain.
But no time for these thoughts. Not yet. For the admiral has just realized that he’s next and begins his hasty retreat toward the closed cell door. Balthazar has to cover twice the distance to beat him there. It’s impossible. But not today. The world has bowed before him. Time has wrapped him in its arms. Balthazar moves with wings on his feet, sees with eyes in the back of his head. He takes a sword from one of the guards and moves across the wet floor with impossible speed, blocking the admiral’s escape. And the admiral is afraid. He backs away, for he can see the truth written on Balthazar’s face. He can see that this man will not fail, no matter what he aims to do. He’s afraid because he knows that these are his last moments on this earth and that they’re going to be terrible moments.
And he’s right.
Balthazar pushes his sword into the admiral’s belly. And the admiral cries out as his tender flesh gives way but doesn’t break. So Balthazar pushes harder, and the flesh tears — letting the blade in. Letting it through his belly and out the back. And it hurts, and he’s so afraid. Suddenly lying on the wet floor, where his blood mixes with rainwater. Pouring out of him, around the sides of the blade.
Every day is the last day, he thinks. Every light casts a shadow. And only the gods know when the darkness will find us.
But the admiral sees a light. A light coming for him. His breathing is labored, blood running from the corners of his mouth. He watches this warm, soothing orange light as it grows closer, dancing from side to side. And he knows it’s a merciful light, though he doesn’t know how he knows this.
But there’s a man with the light — carrying it with him. It’s the Ghost. And now the admiral is afraid again, because he knows. He knows what the light really is. The Ghost has gone and taken something out of the oven. Something metal. Hot enough to glow.
And the Ghost is above him now. He brings a bare foot down on the admiral’s hair and presses it hard against the wet stone floor. So hard that the admiral can’t move his head. And before he can scream, the light is forced into the admiral’s mouth, shattering his front teeth — and his scream disappears behind the sizzle and smoke. He can smell his lips burning away. Feel his saliva turning to steam and his tongue cooking as the poker moves past his mouth and down into his throat — the red-hot iron blackening his tonsils and vocal cords. He writhes with what little strength he has left as the Ghost pulls the light back out of his throat and pushes it up into the roof of his mouth, searing his palate before breaking through it and entering his nasal cavity. And the Ghost can see that glowing light beneath the skin of the admiral’s face now, and it’s a strange, almost beautiful sight — that warm orange light making a man’s face light up from the inside. But he keeps pushing, until the iron tip breaks through the bone at the top of his nasal cavity and sinks into his —
The admiral woke with a scream. Panicked at first, he examined his body, looking for blood, bruises, anything — but to his relief and amazement, he was unharmed. It had all been a strange, vivid dream. Something brought on by an illness, perhaps. The stress of being away from home for too long.
He stood on the bank of a river. It was a hot, clear day. The fishermen were out in droves, the boats drifting gently by. He could see a boy and a toddler resting in the shade of a scarred palm tree on the opposite bank.
The Orontes… Antioch.
He was back in Antioch, and for all its crime and rats, he’d never been happier to be anywhere in his life. The admiral turned, expecting to see the familiar desert behind him, the long, narrow mounds marking the shallow graves where the Romans tossed their dead trash. But the desert was gone. The graves were empty. And in their place was a wall of the dead — their eyes long since turned to dust but looking at him all the same.
They’d been waiting for him… waiting to welcome him into the wasteland they’d called home for so many years. A place where there were no years. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder — a semicircle that bent around him until it touched the river on both sides. Trapped, by all the unjustly dead of Antioch. And there, at the center of this mob of twisted, bloodless bodies, was a man unlike any of the others. A man unlike any the admiral had ever seen.