An Emperor for the Legion (28 page)

Thus when Rhavas threatened Marcus, he was alone, while Viridovix and half a dozen Romans leaped to the tribune’s defense. Balked of his prey, Rhavas cursed horribly. But he gave ground, falling back until he was one of the last defenders of the cauldron that still boiled and steamed in the center of the courtroom.

Even through woodsmoke, Marcus caught its contents’ sick-sweet carrion reek, but a score of Rhavas’ soldiers had already wet their sleeves in the liquid. And not soldiers alone; the sleeve that went into the pot now was purple satin shot through with thread of silver and gold.

“Vardanes!” the tribune shouted, and at the cry the elder Sphrantzes jerked as if jabbed with a pin. Scaurus had rarely seen Ortaias’ uncle other than perfectly composed or known that round, ruddy face with its fringe of neat black beard to reflect anything but what the Se vastos wanted seen. But now he wore the furtive, guilty look of a man surprised at a perversion.

The battle stiffened. Some of Rhavas’ bandits, it seemed, would not fall, no matter what blows landed on them. Marcus heard Gaius Philippus snarl, “Go down, you bastard, go down!”, heard the soft, meaty sound of a blade driven home.

But the senior centurion’s foe only grinned like a snake. Scaurus saw the yellowish stain on his surcoat sleeve. He slashed back at the Roman, a clumsy stroke Gaius Philippus turned with his shield. But doubt clouded the veteran’s eyes—how was he to beat a man he could not wound?

That same doubt appeared on more and more Roman faces. As Rhavas’ anointed gained confidence in their invulnerability to steel, they began running risks no warrior would have thought sane, taking ten blows to land one. They taunted the legionaries, as boys will taunt a savage dog when safely behind a high fence. And, inevitably, they took their share of victims. The Roman advance stumbled.

Smiling wickedly, a tall, jackal-lean Videssian engaged Viridovix. The cutthroat swung his sword two-handed—what need had he of shield? The big Gaul slid to one side, light on
his feet as a great hunting cat. His blade, twin to Scaurus’ own, sang through the air, druids’ marks flashing gold.

It bit through flesh and windpipe and bone. Before the expression of horrified surprise could form on the brigand’s face, his head leaped from his shoulders, hitting the ground with a warm, splattery thud. The spouting corpse collapsed, its limbs thrashing, for a moment not realizing they were dead.

Viridovix’s banshee howl of triumph filled the courtroom. He leaped forward. Another muck-sleeved ruffian fell, clutching at the guts the Celt’s sword laid out into his hands, neat as an anatomical demonstration.

Marcus went hunting stained surcoats, too, realizing that, as had always been true in Videssos, his good Gallic blade was proof against sorcery. Like Viridovix, he killed his first man with ridiculous ease. Not knowing the weapon he faced, the bandit scarcely bothered to protect himself. He gasped as the tribune’s sword found his heart, then tried to breathe, but coughed blood instead.

“Liar!” he whispered, slumping to the floor; his eyes were on Rhavas.

The harsh captain’s men wavered in their attack, newfound confidence faltering as they watched their comrades die so in surprise. Then Arsaber, the hulking street ruffian, felled yet another of their number, his heavy club making a shattered ruin of the left side of his opponent’s face.

Gaius Philippus was no scholar, but in battle he missed nothing. “It’s only iron won’t hurt ’em!” he shouted to the legionaries. He snatched a
pilum
from one of the Romans, grabbing the shank to wield it club wise. He shouted in fierce delight as the blow sent one of Rhavas’ warriors spinning back, sword flying from nerveless fingers. Marcus did not think that man would rise again; the senior centurion had exorcised all his fear of magic in one prodigious swing.

“Stand, you ball-less rabbits!” Rhavas bellowed, and Vardanes Sphrantzes’ well-trained baritone rose in exhortation: “Hold fast! Hold fast!” But they were shouting against a gale of fear roaring through their followers—sword and spear had not held the Romans, and now sorcery failed as well.

One desperate band cut its way clean through the legionaries; its handful of survivors dashed through the Grand Gates, intent only on escape. Marcus heard their cries of despair as
they ran headlong into more of Thorisin Gavras’ troops outside. With agility born of desperation, bandits clawed their way up wall hangings to insecure refuges in window niches ten feet above the floor. Others tried to surrender, but not many of Scaurus’ men would let them yield. Quintus Glabrio kept more than one from being killed out of hand, but he could not be everywhere.

Outis Rhavas cut down a bolting man from behind, and then another, his own way of encouraging his bandits to stand and fight. But even with the hardiest of his irregulars at his side, the surging Romans at last drove him from his wizard’s cauldron. He fell back toward the imperial throne.

Marcus traded swordstrokes with one of his lieutenants. The man was fast as a striking viper; he pinked Scaurus twice in quick succession, and a vicious slash just missed the tribune’s eye. But the cutthroat’s heel slipped in the great pool of blood that had gushed from the serving wench his master had killed. Before he could recover, Scaurus’ blade tore out his throat. He fell across the girl’s outraged corpse.

As the tribune pushed forward, he glanced down into the iron pot Rhavas had defended with such ferocity and found himself looking at horror. Floating in the boiling, scum-filled water was a dead baby, the soft flesh beginning to fall away from its bones. No, he corrected himself, not even a baby—the tiny body was no longer than the distance between the tips of his outstretched thumb and little finger.

His eyes slipped to the serving wench’s opened belly, back in disbelief to the cauldron, and he was sick where he stood. He spat again and again to clear his mouth of the taste and wished he might somehow wipe his vision clear so easily.

Cold in him was the knowledge that there were, after all, worse evils than Doukitzes’ tortured death. He was tempted to follow the creed of Videssos, for in Outis Rhavas surely Skotos walked on earth.

That thought led to another, and sudden dreadful certainty gripped him. “Rhavas!” he shouted; the name was putrid as the vomit on his tongue. Then he solved the other’s anagram, his monstrous joke, and cried another name: “Avshar!”

It grew very still within the Grand Courtroom; blows hung in the air, unstruck. Outis Rhavas’ name brought with it rage and hatred, but the wizard-prince of Yezd had struck cold terror into Videssos’ heart for a generation. Inside the ranks of
Rhavas’ men, Marcus saw Vardanes Sphrantzes’ red cheeks go pale as he understood his state’s greatest foe had been a chief upholder of his rule.

Across the thirty feet that separated them, Rhavas—no, Avshar—dipped his head to the tribune in derisive acknowledgement of his astuteness. “Very good,” he chuckled, and Scaurus wondered how he had not known that fell voice at first hearing. “You have more wit than these dogs, it seems—much good will it do you.”

After that moment of stunned dismay, the legionaries hurled themselves with redoubled fury at the backers of him who had styled himself Outis Rhavas. The men they faced threw down their swords in scores. Rhavas the brigand chief was a captain they had followed in hope of blood and plunder, but few were the Videssians who would willingly serve Avshar.

A bandit leaped at his longtime master’s back, saber upraised to cut him down. But Avshar whirled with the speed of a wolf; his heavy longsword smashed through helm and skull alike. “A dog indeed,” he cried, “nipping at the heels he followed! Are there more?”

The men who had been his flinched away in fright, all save a black handful who still clove to him, who would have happily fought for him had they thought him Skotos enfleshed—the worst of his band, but far from the weakest. Almost all wore surcoats stained with his protective brew—no qualm of conscience had kept them from dipping their sleeves in that horrid pot.

Vardanes Sphrantzes stood in indecision, a spider caught in a greater spider’s web. He did not think of himself as an evil man, merely a practical one, and he feared Avshar with the sincere fear a far from perfect man can have for one truly wicked. But the Sevastos was more afraid to yield himself to Scaurus and, through him, to Thorisin Gavras. He knew too well the common fate of losers in Videssos’ civil wars and also knew his actions in raising his nephew to the throne—and since—were sure to doom him in the victor’s eyes.

The wizard-prince saw Sphrantzes waver; he flayed him into motion with the whip of his voice: “Come, worm, do you think you can do without me now?” And Vardanes, who had felt only contempt for soldiers, looked once more at the Romans’ crested helms and at their stabbing swords and long
spears. It seemed they were all bearing down on him alone. His will failed him, and he fled with Avshar.

The way they chose—the only way they could have chosen—was a narrow spiral stair that opened out into the Grand Courtroom just to the right of the imperial throne’s gold and sapphire brilliance. It had not been part of the throne room’s original design, for it brutally abridged a delicate wall mosaic. Marcus wondered what ancient treason caused some cautious Emperor to put safety above beauty.

Once Avshar’s few partisans had gained the stair, the legionaries’ advance was easy no more. Those steps had been made so one man could hold back an army, and the wizard-prince himself was rear guard, a cork not to be lightly pulled from the bottle.

The tribune and Viridovix attacked by turns; not only were they nearest Avshar in size and strength, but theirs were blades to stand against his sorcery. At every stroke the druids’ marks incised upon them flashed golden, turning aside the banes locked within his brand.

Legionaries, crowding close behind their champions, jabbed spears over them at Avshar. Warded as he was, the thrusts could not hurt him, but spoiled his swordstrokes and threatened to trip him up. His heavy blade hewed clear through more than one soft iron
pilum
-shank; nevertheless he was forced back, step by slow step.

“Let’s the both of us fight him at the same time,” Viridovix panted. Marcus shook his head. The stairway was so narrow two men abreast would only foul each other, but he would have refused had it been wider. The first time his sword had met the Gaul’s, they were whirled here; were they to touch again, only the gods knew what might befall.

The spiral wound through three complete turns. Then Avshar’s massive frame was silhouetted against a background lighter than the stairway’s oppressive gloom. The wizard-prince drew back away from the topmost step, as if inviting his pursuers to come on.

That Marcus did, but warily, expecting deviltry. He remembered Avshar’s escape from Videssos the year before—the sea-wall arsenal’s sudden-slammed door, the corpse of the wizard’s servant speaking with his master’s voice, the swords and spears that flew to the attack with no man wielding them.
Avshar was never more dangerous than when seeming to give way.

A blade slammed against his upraised shield, but there was a ruffian back of it, a red-faced man with a great mat of greasy black beard. Scaurus parried, countered. The thrust was clumsy, but his reach and long blade made his stocky foe give back a pace. He stepped up quickly, Viridovix only a single stair behind him, legionaries jamming the stairway behind.

The suite above the throne room had to be the Emperor’s disrobing chamber, a private retreat from the ceremonial of the Grand Courtroom. There had been, Marcus saw, six or eight well-stuffed chairs and a couch set up in the outer room; Avshar’s men had flung them against the seascape-painted walls to gain fighting room. The rough treatment had burst one, and gray feathers whirled in the air.

Even as he fenced with the black-bearded highbinder, Scaurus wondered why Avshar had yielded the stair so easily there at the end, why for the moment he was leaving the battle to his henchmen. Where was he? Hardly time to see, with this cutthroat hacking away like a berserker.

The tribune let his foe’s slash hiss past, stepped forward inside the saber’s arc, and ran him through the throat. Aye, there was Avshar, in front of a closed door with Vardanes Sphrantzes. He bent low to say something to the Sevastos, who shook his head. Avshar smashed him in the face with his gauntleted hand.

Vardanes, strong-willed in this ruin of all his hopes, still would not do the wizard’s bidding. With cold deliberation, Avshar hit him again. Marcus saw something crumple inside the proud Sevastos. All his life the bureaucrat had upheld his faction by circumventing brute force, by bringing Videssos’ proud soldiers to heel without violence. Now at last he had to confront it with no buffers, and found he could not. He pulled a brass key from his belt, worked the lock, and slipped into the room beyond.

Marcus forgot him almost as soon as he disappeared. Fighting back to back, the tribune and Viridovix cleared enough space to let the legionaries emerge, a couple at a time, from the stairwell. Even with reinforcements constantly added, the fight was savage. Save for Scaurus’ sword and the Celt’s, Roman blades would not wound Avshar’s men. They had to be clubbed into submission with spearshafts and other
makeshift bludgeons, or else disarmed by a clever sword-stroke and then wrestled to the floor and dispatched with bare hands. They made the Romans pay dearly for each life.

The price would have been higher yet, but Avshar, as if conceding all was lost, stood aloof from the struggle, watching his men die one by one. Only when a legionary drew too near the door he was guarding did his blade flash forth, wielded as always with skill and might to daunt a hero. There was no shame in seeking easier prey, and so in the end the wizard-prince stood all alone before that doorway.

Facing a lesser foe, the Romans would have rolled over him and after Vardanes Sphrantzes. But Avshar was like a lion brought to bay; the debased majesty in him carried awe mingled with the dread. Push forward, Scaurus thought—make an end. But Avshar’s gaze came baleful through visor slits, and the tribune could not move. Even Viridovix, a stranger to intimidation, stood frozen.