Salvator shrugged. “I did enjoy our little escapade in the south, but it also served to remind me that I’m not a young man anymore. A duel here and there, certainly. But crawling through dark passages, lying in cramped cellars, running from legions of armed cultists? No, my little friend, I think that part of my career is now behind me.”
“Retirement, then?”
“Of a sort. I think perhaps I should restrict myself to sitting in grand ballrooms, playing cards, drinking wine, and explaining Italian foreign policy to beautiful young princesses.”
Tycho snorted. “Lady Nerissa has no interest in you.”
“I should hope not!” Salvator exclaimed. And then with a grin, he said, “She’s far too old for me.”
Both men chuckled in the darkness.
Tycho nodded to the Hellan soldiers as the carriage rattled through the gates of the Sunken Palace. The two men dismounted the carriage and stood in the silent courtyard, glancing around at the wide green lawn and the huge granite slabs strewn about the field. Before them stood the only building, a small stone house not unlike a mausoleum, classical Hellan architecture in miniature with a single gaping doorway flanked by Hellan pike men and Vlachian archers carrying small recurve bows.
Tycho had only to show his face and revolver for the guards to recognize him and allow him to enter. Inside the stone doorway a row of burning braziers led down a long stone stair. Tycho signed the log book with the officer on duty, sighed, and started down the steep steps.
Salvator clumped along noisily behind him. “My word, this is a long stair. I don’t remember it being quite so long. I hope we reach the bottom in short order.”
“Ha. And again, Ha.” Tycho grimaced and kept his eyes on his footing.
“Yes, you see, I’m harassing you for being short and thus for taking too long to go down the stairs,” the Italian said. “I’m being witty.”
“I hadn’t realized,” Tycho said. “Have you learned to parry a bullet yet, old man?”
Salvator didn’t answer.
Tycho reached the bottom of the stair with an ache in his hip, but he merely pressed his hand to his holster to silence the uneven clinking of his gun and continued across the small anteroom they had converted to an office. After just a few paces he passed the first cistern, a vast colonnaded chamber that had once been a grand dining hall, now filled with water nearly to its vaulted roof. A distant dripping echoed eerily in the darkness as they crossed the chamber on the elevated walkway.
They passed two more cisterns, both smaller than the first, before they came to a series of doors where four young Hellans in piecemeal armor and red cloaks sat around a rickety table playing cards. They glanced up and nodded sternly to Tycho, saying, “Evening, major.”
“Evening.” Tycho glanced at the doors. “We’re here to see the new arrival.”
Keys rattled, doors slammed, and Tycho and Salvator sat down in a narrow, windowless cell lit only by the small lantern that they borrowed from the soldiers and set on the floor. The man before them was just barely taller than Tycho, a lean little fellow with a shaven head and a greasy tuft of beard on his chin, and a pair of chains on his wrists.
One of the soldiers lingered in the doorway. “He was twitchy when they brought him in this afternoon. And he’s been getting twitchier by the hour.”
Tycho took a second look at the prisoner and saw the man’s eyes darting madly around the floor, his fingers shivering, his lips trembling with silent words. The major nodded and said, “We’ll proceed gently.”
The prisoner leapt forward, his eyes wide and pleading, his hands reaching for Salvator’s face. The Italian smashed his fist into the man’s nose and sent him sprawling back against the stone wall. Salvator glanced at his comrade. “But not too gently.”
Eventually, with much coaxing and a few bribes, they got the man to sit up and look them in the eye and speak in a fairly calm voice. He said his name was Tahir, and he came from a village in Turkiya just a few miles south of Stamballa.
“You were captured leaving the north shore,” Salvator said.
“Yes.” The Turk nodded many times.
“Were you sent to observe our troops?” Tycho asked.
“No.” He shook his head violently.
“Were you sent to meet with someone?” the Italian asked.
“No, no, no.” More head shaking.
“All right, all right, settle down.” Tycho paused. “All we want to know is why you were on the north shore. Where did you go? Who did you speak to? And what were you going to tell your people when you got back to Stamballa?”
For a moment, the man’s lips shook in silence. Then he said, “I saw them. I was told to look for them and I did, I saw them, a lot of them.”
“Who?” Tycho leaned forward. “The Hellans? The Vlachians?”
“The dead. The dead people. I saw the dead people… walking.”
Tycho leaned back and looked at Salvator.
The Italian sighed and stroked his mustache. “The dead. This again. It must be the fifth time this month. What the hell are these people talking about? Walking corpses. Bodies crawling out of their graves. First it was the farmers, then the Vlachians, and now even the Eranians are saying it.”
“Well, they sure as hell saw something.” Tycho grimaced and leaned forward again and caught the Turk’s eyes. “All right, Tahir. Now, tell us, exactly how many of these dead people did you see?”
“Dozens. Hundreds.”
Salvator shook his head and muttered, “It can’t have been that many. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Whoever these dead people are, if there were hundreds of them out there, we would have had official reports of them by now. What do you think? Rus mercenaries? Or raiders from Jochi?”
“Maybe.” Tycho cleared his throat. “Tahir. Where did you see the dead people?”
“S… Saray.”
Tycho’s fist closed around the grip of his revolver and he gritted his teeth.
No! That’s impossible.
Salvator paused. “What is that, a fort? I’ve never heard of it. Where is Saray?”
“It’s in the province of Thrace.” Tycho turned to look into the cynical eyes of the Italian knight. “It’s less than eighty miles from here.”
For the next half hour, Tycho and Salvator battered the Turk with questions but the shaking prisoner did not have much else to offer. He had left Stamballa less than ten days ago, crossed the Strait under cover of night, and then simply walked northwest along the main highway, apparently under orders to look for the so-called deathless army. And after he found them in Saray, he had turned right around and run all the way back to Constantia where a poorly transacted bribe with a Hellan fisherman had delivered him into the hands of the Constantian army. The last thing Salvator was about to wring from Tahir was that the officer who gave him the order wore a green uniform.
“Well, clearly he’s lying. The Turks wear blue, not green,” the Italian said. “Lying, or colorblind, or insane. Take your pick.”
But Tycho frowned. “No. You and I have seen green uniforms in the empire before, in Alexandria.”
Salvator raised an eyebrow. “The Osirians? Now that is an interesting thought.”
Satisfied that they would get no further details from the prisoner, Tycho and Salvator left the cells and told the guards not to let anyone speak to the Turk without Lady Nerissa’s approval. Then they crossed back through the dark, echoing chasms of the cisterns and began the long, slow climb up to the surface of the city.
“In ancient times, the Persians had an army called the Immortals,” Tycho said. “Maybe this deathless army is something similar.”
“But from where?”
“Probably not from Jochi. They still call their armies the Hordes.” Tycho huffed as he worked his way up the stairs as quickly as he could. “In Rus, I hear they sometimes call Koschei the Deathless. Perhaps it’s a Rus army.”
“But Koschei actually is immortal. You and I both saw his little demonstration. It took days to get the blood out of the carpets,” Salvator said. “Are you suggesting there is an entire army of Koscheis marching down the
