Empire of Dragons (41 page)

Lucianus stepped back behind the line formed by his comrades and, as soon as Metellus ordered him to stop, placed his shield on the ground and started to twirl his sling. Rufus, on his knees, was weighing his javelin.

The circle of adversaries pressed close and their blows showered down from every direction with no forewarning; only the total closure of the Roman formation afforded them protection.

‘They’ll try to get in now!’ shouted Metellus. ‘Careful, careful!’ And as he was shouting, one of the Flying Foxes vaulted up, rebounded off a comrade and went soaring through the air, followed by a second.

‘Open up!’ shouted Metellus at that very instant.

Lucianus’s shot streaked through the air and hit the Chinese warrior full in the forehead. He dropped lifelessly to the ground in their midst. The other’s assault was aborted when Rufus’s javelin forced him to twist aside.

The furious response of the Flying Foxes was immediate: two of them flew through the air, whirling their swords, and tried to catapult into the centre of the enemy formation, but before they landed, the
testudo
closed up again and Severus shouted out an order. Eight steel spikes sprang from the leather which covered each shield and pierced through the feet of the two flying warriors at the moment they touched down. They fell to the ground screaming and were promptly finished off by Lucianus and Septimius, who ran them through with their swords.

Then the formation closed up again in a tight seal.

‘We can make it, men!’ said Metellus. ‘We’re already ten against seven. Don’t let up. Stay shoulder to shoulder! Brace yourselves with your feet!’

Wei, livid with anger on his throne, turned to his adviser. ‘If this continues, a new legend will be born. The foreign devils must die, immediately. But not all of them.’ He gave a signal and four more warriors sprang from the dragons’ mouths, wielding arms no one had ever seen before: jointed axes that they whipped through the air with a shrill whistle. In a moment they had joined the other seven.

‘They’ve already admitted defeat!’ shouted Metellus, trying to encourage his exhausted men. ‘Fourteen of them against ten of us. Hold out! We can still beat them!’

The Flying Foxes exchanged understanding looks. Brief guttural sounds flew between them and, before the Romans had a chance to react, the four fresh warriors were upon them, flying over their heads. A lob of Rufus’s javelin eliminated one of them and one of Publius’s knives wounded another, but the other two landed on the
testudo
and hacked through the raised shields with their axes. The others were already managing to catapult inside the Roman formation, flourishing their swords. They finally broke through the obstinate resistance of the small contingent, forcing the compact group to do battle individually.

Those who remained outside started to advance in a semi-circle, whirling their swords faster and faster until their whistling turned into a dull roar in the spectral silence of the immense arena. When they were very close to the Romans, a cry as shrill as a falcon’s echoed through the square and the man dressed in black sitting between the two bronze dragons on the stage got to his feet. He let his long robe slip off and he flew into the arena wearing only a light costume of black silk, brandishing a razor-sharp sword that glittered with blue reflections.

From her vantage point, Yun Shan shuddered. Wei was entering the field to lead the assault of the Flying Foxes himself! Her hand grasped the hilt of Tip of Ice under her cloak, but she stopped herself. She knew full well that if she were found out, it would be all over.

Wei shot in like a bolt of lightning and the assault was transformed into a violent onslaught. The Romans’ shields yielded one after another to the Flying Foxes’ deadly weapons and their cuirasses were ripped to shreds. The Flying Foxes coordinated their actions as precisely as if they were obeying a single brain: a single mind that contracted their muscles and stretched them into superhuman leaps, that commanded their swords to strike invisibly, piercing and slashing.

And now the crowd cried out, exploding into a roar as if liberating energy long suppressed. As if some mysterious fear or strange indecision had kept them silent until that moment.

Metellus fought alongside his men like a lion, dripping blood from every part of his body. He parried and returned blow after blow with his two
gladii
, but it was like fighting off a monstrous hydra with a thousand arms and a thousand swords. He saw Severus, his ingenious
faber
, fall, and then Publius, just after one of his flying knives had plunged deep into the shoulder of a Flying Fox. He saw Rufus, the red-haired Sicilian, disembowelled by the swipe of a sword; he collapsed to the ground, holding his guts in his hand, futilely defended by Lucianus, daring slingsman, who was himself finished off by an enemy slash. He saw Septimius, blond Septimius, the great hunter, battling on with a maimed arm, howling like a wounded beast, blood spraying from the stump on to his assailant, until he was run through simultaneously by three swords. He saw Antoninus, who had lost every weapon, in a clinch with the enemy, sinking his teeth into the other’s shoulder like a wolf, before taking stabs to the stomach and neck. He watched as Martianus dropped his broken sword to grasp his dagger but was stopped by hands and feet as hard as stones, and the sound of his shattering bones accompanied the rattle of death. Quadratus and Balbus were the last to fall: Balbus’s chest caved in under a devastating kick and he was nailed to the ground by a dagger’s blade, and then Quadratus was struck from behind and on his side by four adversaries as he tried to shield his fallen comrade. He crashed to the ground like a slaughtered bull.

Then silence, again.

M
ETELLUS SWAYED
on his feet, exhausted. His blood flowed copiously from many wounds: a single red stain covered his body. He felt that death was moments away, but time, in that grievous solitude, seemed to stretch out infinitely. He should have been dead and he couldn’t understand why the final blow hadn’t arrived. He ripped off his helmet and tossed it away, and then his breastplate, which fell to the ground at his feet.

Wei dropped his sword.

Metellus was panting. He wiped the blood from his eyes to see black death looming over him: the beautiful youth, with his raven hair and cruel eyes, who paced around him from left to right and from right to left and who could have made him fall just by looking at him.

Yun Shan, very close now, knew how the warrior of Taqin Guo would die: the tiger’s blow, the secret handed down from generation to generation from Master Mo himself. A blow so fast that it was invisible. She knew that she could fend it off by absorbing a part of its lethal power. Yun Shan concentrated all of her energy into the chest of the wounded warrior, who still gripped his
gladius
. There, he was lifting it suddenly to strike, but Wei stopped him. His left hand slashed down and broke the arm that held the sword; Metellus let it drop with a groan of pain. At that very moment, the death blow descended, invisible, from the right. Yun Shan stiffened into a painful contraction, her eyes rolled up into their sockets and her heart stopped beating.

When she could see again, Metellus was stretched out on the ground lifeless while the crowd deliriously cheered the victor, who climbed the staircase between the two open-mouthed bronze dragons. Wei turned for just a moment, his gaze searching for something, and Yun Shan realized that he was looking straight at her even though he could not possibly recognize her at that distance. Her chest ached terribly, but she forced herself to make her way through the thronging crowd.

Wei, on the stage now, was relishing his triumph, while a group of servants removed the dead bodies and loaded them on to a cart.

‘As you see, My Lord,’ said his elderly counsellor, ‘I was not mistaken. The people are with you.’

Wei nodded. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You know what you must do now.’

The adviser motioned for a Manchurian mercenary to approach. He whispered something in his ear and the officer hurried off.

T
HE GIGANTIC ELEPHANT
charged in a fury, goaded on by the Indian mahout, while Daruma watched closely from behind the corner of a nearby house. The animal drove his iron-plated tusks and headgear into the brick wall before him, producing a wide rent. Several Red Lotus fighters dropped into the breach and found a bewildered Dan Qing inside. They tied two ropes to the iron rings which bound the prince and urged on the elephant again. He pulled back, ripping the chains from the wall.

A moment later, Dan Qing was in the saddle of a swift horse, bolting off at a gallop with the comrades who had freed him right behind. Baj Renjie and several of his soldiers had stayed in place momentarily to take care of the guards who had rushed up, shouting, to give the alarm. From his observation post, Daruma saw a group of Manchurian horsemen arriving at full tilt from the area of the palace where the combat had taken place, and he realized that they had spotted Dan Qing breaking out. He had to stop them by some means, even at the cost of cutting off the escape route of Baj Renjie and his comrades, who were still occupied with the guards. He stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled hard. A herd of camels, asses and mules was instantly driven into the middle of the road, obstructing it completely. The Manchurian mercenaries struggled to get through but even more animals flocked in to block their passage.

Dan Qing and his comrades disappeared at the end of the street, while Baj Renjie, trapped along with his soldiers, was captured and disarmed. Daruma, flattened against the wall of his hideout, breathed a deep sigh. He had had no choice, but at least he’d acted in time. Another instant of hesitation and the plan to free Dan Qing would have failed.

A
NIGHT OWL
perched on a skeletal trunk hooted mournfully, then suddenly took to the air, frightened by the arrival of a cart. Wings silently beating, it vanished into the dark.

The two cart drivers pulled on their mules’ reins, stopping them short. They dismounted and opened the unhinged gate that led to the foreigners’ cemetery, where a wide, freshly dug ditch was waiting for the corpses of the foreign devils. They hung a lantern from a tree branch, then grabbed the bodies by the feet and shoulders and dragged them to the edge of the pit, piling them up on top of each other. They stopped a moment to catch their breath and, as they were stretching their tired limbs, they saw a ghostly apparition that left them dumbstruck. It was a warrior – his face covered and a red ribbon on his arm – standing in front of them with a drawn sword. They took one look and spun around to run for it, but their heads, detached from their shoulders, fell directly into the ditch, while their bodies still lunged forward, driven by the impetus of the race they’d just begun.

The warrior’s face was exposed now, revealing delicate feminine features. Yun Shan gave a long sigh and bent over the inert bodies of the Romans, turning them over one by one until she found the man who had led them into the arena for that desperate battle. She placed a hand on his heart and on his jugular vein, then bowed her head disconsolately.

She remained still, but a breath answered hers and a barely perceptible voice murmured, ‘Yun Shan . . .’

The girl’s head snapped up and she saw the foreigner turning his eyes to the martyred bodies of his fallen comrades.

‘My soldiers . . . my brothers. I vowed to bring them home, and I led them to death . . .’

Yun Shan felt tears rise to her eyes. ‘You’re alive . . .’ she whispered, passing her hand over his tumid features. ‘You’re alive . . .’

Metellus embraced her for an instant, letting the warmth of her body pervade his.

Yun Shan looked into his eyes. ‘We haven’t a moment to lose. Please, you must try to get up. We have to leave!’ She helped him to his feet and supported him for the few steps that separated them from the cart. She set him down gently and hid him under the bloody rags that had covered the cadavers.

Just then the gravedigger who was to bury the dead bodies approached. He dropped down behind a bush before anyone could see him, trembling with fear.

Yun Shan sensed a presence, but when she took the lantern and looked around, her other hand gripping her sword, she saw nothing. She grabbed the hat of one of the cart drivers and threw his cloak over her shoulders before urging on the mules.

The cart swayed and squeaked its way off, soon disappearing into the darkness.

The gravedigger, finally free to take a breath, ran as fast as his legs could carry him to report that a girl had killed two live men to carry off a dead one. Most thought him mad; someone else, on the other hand, took him seriously.

B
AJ
R
ENJIE WAS BROUGHT
into the presence of regent Wei that evening by a dozen Manchurian mercenaries. The first things he saw were the instruments of torture, and the thought of the savagery of those skilled in inflicting pain made him tremble. He knew he was completely at the mercy of an extraordinarily intelligent and incredibly cruel enemy, a man who hated the world for what he had suffered. Waves of panic washed over him and he had to restrain himself from falling to his knees and begging for mercy.

‘Where are they headed?’ asked the eunuch.

Baj Renjie drew a long breath and then said, all at once: ‘I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.’

‘Then they’re making for Li Cheng.’

Baj Renjie did not answer.

‘And how does one get to Li Cheng?’ asked Wei, unperturbed.

Baj Renjie could very easily imagine the monsters that were crouching in the apparently immobile swamp of the eunuch’s soul. He called on his courage and said, ‘I do not know, and even if you torture me I cannot tell you what I do not know. None but the initiated members of the Red Lotus know where Li Cheng is.’

‘Do you take me for a fool?’ shouted Wei. ‘Even if you don’t know where Li Cheng is, I’m sure you know someone from the Red Lotus.’