“Help me, Quirion! I am rich—I can give you anything.”
“You whining cur!” Quirion spat. “You would send a hundred thousand men to their deaths without a thought, and yet you cringe at the prospect of your own. Great Gods, what a king you would have made for this unhappy realm! So you will give me anything?”
“Anything, for God’s sake, man! Only name it.”
“I will take your life, then,” the Presbyter snarled, and he thrust the knife into the nobleman’s stomach.
Sastro’s eyes flared in disbelief. He staggered backwards.
“Sweet Saints,” he gasped. “You have killed me.”
“Aye,” Quirion said shortly, “I have. Now get about your dying like a man. I go to surrender Abrusio to the heretic.”
He turned on his heel and left the room without a backward glance.
Sastro fell to his knees, his face running with tears.
“
He gripped the hilt of the knife and tried to pull it out of his belly, but only yelped at the pain of it, his fingers slipping on the slick blood. He fell to his side on the stone floor.
“Oh, sweet Blessed Saint, help me,” he whispered. And then was silent. A bubble of blood formed over his open mouth, hovered, and finally popped as his spirit fled.
“T HERE are white flags all over the city, sire,” Sergeant Orsini told Abeleyn. “The enemy are throwing down their arms—even the Knights. Abrusio is ours!”
“Ours,” Abeleyn repeated. He was bloody, grimed and exhausted. He and Orsini walked up the steep street to where the abbey of the Inceptines glowered sombre and high-spired on the skyline ahead. His men were around him, weapons still at the shoulder, but the glee of victory was brightening their faces. Shells were falling, but they were being fired by the ships in the harbour. The enemy batteries had been silenced. Men sank into crouches as a shell demolished the side of a house barely fifty yards away. Streamers of oily smoke were rising from the abbey as it burned from a dozen direct hits.
“Courier,” Abeleyn croaked. His mouth felt as though someone had filled it full of gunpowder.
“Sire?”
“Run down to the waterfront. Get a message to Admiral Rovero. The bombardment of the Upper City is to cease at once. The enemy has surrendered.”
“Gladly, sire.” The courier sped off.
“I wish you joy of your victory, sire,” Orsini said, grinning.
Abeleyn found himself smiling, though he did not know why. He held out his hand, and after a moment’s surprise Orsini took it. They shook as though they had just sealed a bargain. The men cheered at the sight.
More Royal soldiers were congregating as the news spread. Soon there was a crowd of several hundred about Abeleyn, shaking their swords and arquebuses in the air and cheering, heedless of the cannonballs which were arcing down not far away. They picked up Abeleyn and carried him in crude triumphal procession towards the burning abbey and the shell-pocked palace which belonged to him again. Abrusio, broken and smouldering, had been restored to her rightful sovereign.
“Long live the King!” they shouted, a hoarse roar of triumph and delight, and Abeleyn, borne aloft by the shoulders and the approbation of the men who had fought with him and for him, thought that it was for this, this feeling, that men became conquerors. It was more precious than gold, more difficult to earn than any other form of love. It was the essence of kingship.
The shouting, parading troops were almost at the walls of the abbey, their numbers swelled to thousands, when the last salvo from the ships in the harbour came screaming down among them.
The street erupted around Abeleyn. One moment he was being borne along on the shoulders of a victorious army, and then the world became a heaving nightmare of bursting shells and screaming men. His bearers were scattered under him and he fell heavily to the cobbles, cracking his head on the stone. Someone—he thought it was Orsini—had thrown his body across him, but Abeleyn would have none of that. He would not cower behind other men like a frightened woman. He was a king.
Thus he was fighting to get to his feet in the panicked crush, pushing men aside to right and left, when the last shell in the salvo exploded not two yards away, and his world disappeared.
T HE woman was beautiful in the winter sunlight, tall and slim as a mountain birch, with something of the same starkness about her colouring. The officers on the galley quarterdeck directed quick, hungry glances at her as she stood by the starboard rail. She was veiled, of course, as all the Sultan’s concubines were, but Aurungzeb was so proud of his Ramusian beauty that her veil was translucent, scandalous, as was her clothing. As the wind shifted the layered gauze about her body it was possible to see the momentary imprint of her nipples, the line of her thigh and calf. The stolen looks kept many of the Merduk sailors dreaming for weeks, while the slaves who toiled at the oars and who had once been free Ramusian citizens regarded her with pity and outrage. She was somehow more evocative of her people’s enslavement than the chains that shackled them at wrist and ankle, a taunting display of Merduk prowess.
It seemed that she was staring out at one thing only, and saw nothing else: the monstrous central tower of what had once been the cathedral of Carcasson, horned, forbidding and black with the flames it had survived. It stood alone amid the rubble of what had once been the greatest city in the world and was now a desolated wasteland, save where the walls of the larger buildings stood like monuments to a lost people.
Aekir, the Holy City. Months had passed since its fall, but it was still a ruin. The Merduks had encamped by the thousand around the Square of Victories, where the statue of Myrnius Kuln stood yet, and their tents formed streets and villages in the middle of the desolation, but even their teeming thousands could not fill a tithe of the space within the broken circuit of the city’s walls. They were like maggots come squirming in the long-dead corpse of a unicorn, and Carcasson was the dead beast’s horn.
The woman called Ahara by her lord and master the Sultan Aurungzeb had once been someone else. A lifetime, a millennium, a nightmare ago, she had been named Heria and had been married to an ensign of cavalry named Corfe. Until Aekir fell.
Now she was the bed toy of the greatest conqueror in the east. She was a trophy of war as much as ruined Aekir was, and she stared out at Carcasson’s lonely spire as if in communion with it.
Her grasp of Merduk was very good now, but the Sultan did not know that. She had been careful to appear slow in comprehension and muddled in her own efforts at conversation. Not that there was much conversation required when Aurungzeb blew into the harem like a gale, calling for his favourite bedmate. One had to be willing and uncaring, and submit to whatever the Sultan had in mind.
She had no hope of deliverance: that dream had been knocked out of her long ago. And since her Corfe, who had been her life, was dead it did not seem to matter in what manner she spun out her existence. She was like a ghost hovering on the fringe of life, with no expectations and no prospect of change.
But she kept a little corner of her soul to herself. It was for this reason that she pretended to be slow in learning the Merduk language. Aurungzeb would say things in front of her, or hold discussions in her presence which he was sure she could not understand. That was power of a sort, a tiny gesture towards the maintenance of some personality of her own.
And thus she stood here as the Sultan’s galley was rowed down the broad expanse of the Ostian river, with ruined Aekir running along the banks on either side. And she listened.
The commander of the main field army of Ostrabar, Shahr Indun Johor, was deep in talk with the Sultan whilst the staff officers kept to the port side of the quarterdeck. Heria, or Ahara, was able to eavesdrop on them as the toiling slaves propelled the galley downriver towards the concentration of ships and men that waited farther downstream.
“The Nalbenic transports have already docked, highness,” Shahr Johor was saying. A tall, fine-featured young man, he was the successor to Shahr Baraz, the old khedive who had taken Aekir and made the first, fruitless assaults on Ormann Dyke.
“Excellent.” Aurungzeb had a white-toothed grin that was somehow startling in the midst of that expanse of beard, like suddenly glimpsing the bared canines of a dark-furred dog. “And how soon will the fleet be ready to
