The Gate of Fire (25 page)

The rattle of wooden practice swords on the heavy plywood surface of a training
scutum
filled the air over the camp. Among the tents of the Thaumaturgic cohort was an added whine of small rotating fans that stirred the hot, dry air. In one of the larger tents, opened on one side by a raised awning, two men were sitting, discussing a third who sat opposite. The two men were sitting on triangular campstools, their boots planted firmly on the ground. The young man they were discussing stood at the center of the tent, his hands behind his back, his eyes and body showing great weariness.

"Lad's not good for much now," the first of the two sitting men said, a veteran with a barrel-like chest and sandy, short-cropped hair. "Without the rest of his five, he'll have to be assigned to a new
manus
."

The other, his superior officer, was a redheaded fellow with a stolid, doughy face. He wore the dress tunic of a tribune, with a gold flash at the shoulders, and an expensive leather belt. There was a streak of grease on his left hand and a smudge by his left ear. Watery blue eyes hid behind twin circles of glass, held in a fragile-seeming metal frame.

"He can't be assigned to an existing
manus
, one lacking a digit? There were losses at Kerenos that have not been replaced."

The tribune looked Dwyrin up and down, measuring him for the market. The Hibernian ignored him, staring dolefully over the heads of his superior officers. Since Odenathus and Zoë had left, he had been at loose ends. There was no one to practice with—all of the other thaumaturges in the cohort were at least a dozen years his senior and far beyond his skills. He had tried to keep up the daily drill, but too much of it depended on having the rest of your five in hand. The Legions taught cooperative tactics in battle thaumaturgy. In the end, all that he had been able to do was practice fire-casting, which came easily to him, anyway, and the most basic wards and signs.

Blanco frowned, considering the tribune's words. He had already thought of moving the boy into one of the empty slots in the other fives. Unfortunately, every five-leader he had approached had angrily rejected the idea. It took too long for a battle-mage group, whether of three men or five, to learn to battlecast together. No one wanted to start over with a boy of little training. Slowly, and with regret, the centurion shook his head no.

"Tribune Quintus, he will have to go to a new-formed
manus
with other fresh recruits."

The tribune sighed, though it was obvious that he was not concerned about the issue. He had rosters to fill out and men to shuffle about. If this boy could fill one of his tally-slots, then so much the better!

"Very well, keep an eye out for him and keep him out of trouble, Centurion. He'll be reassigned once he gets to Constantinople."

Dwyrin felt his heart sink even further. Now he truly had no place here.
It would be pleasant, he thought, to smash in that cowlike face and its bland indifference to my pain
. But he could not. Surely not with Blanco glowering at him, and beyond that? A soldier striking a superior officer got more than the lash, that was a surety. The thought of marching all the way back to the capital, alone and friendless, was a crushing weight.

"Dismissed," the tribune said, turning away to consider his paperwork.

Dwyrin sat alone, in darkness, under a clear night sky. The wagon had been "appropriated" by one of the other units, leaving him with only a blanket and ground cloth for shelter. He could, he supposed, get a bunk in one of the legionary tents that lined the streets of the great camp. There seemed little point in that, not with an endless succession of clear, cloudless days and nights marking their time in the Orontes valley. The moon had not yet risen, letting the vast wash of stars shine in full glory above. The night wind hissed off the desert, too, as he lay on his back, the blanket rolled under his head.

He could hear men on the watch as they passed along the camp-street, complaining about the nip in the wind. That brought half a smile to his lips, even through the deep funk that had gripped him. He was a poor student of the defensive arts that so intrigued the thaumaturges, but he could control fire and heat and warmth. Even enough to summon the latent heat from the rocks that littered the field and wrap it around himself as an invisible blanket. Once, in the high mountains of Albania, he had cursed the other mages for this skill, but it had come easily to him, once he put his thought to it.

Bats wheeled and chittered overhead, hunting in the night. Their voices were indistinct, but they tugged him toward a kind of peace. Bats sounded much the same in his distant home, when they blurred over the fields of wheat and rye. For a moment he wondered why that life seemed so distant. But, in the end, it did not matter. He was sworn to the Legion and owed them twenty years of his young life.
I will be in the Legion until I die
. It was a mournful thought, but it felt true as he thought it.

"MacDonald?" Blanco's voice was unexpected, coming from the darkness. Dwyrin could hear the crunch of boots on the dirt and gravel. "I see you're still awake."

Dwyrin sat up, his forearms on his knees. He was tired, but could not sleep. "
Ave
, Centurion. What brings you out at this late hour?"

Blanco sat, brushing a scorpion out of his way. In Dwyrin's mage sight, it glowed a faint blue as it scuttled away between the rocks. "You," Blanco said in a resigned voice. "I seem to remember tasking someone else with you and your troubles, but she has bunkered off, which means I must deal with these things myself."

"Centurion, you needn't do anything." Dwyrin's voice was resigned, but he had considered this as well as he had sat listlessly in the shade of one of the wagons for the past three days. Like the rest of his unit, he had received three day-pass chits to go into the city. He still had them. The thought of smiling, cheerful people, their faces flushed with wine and dancing, made his stomach roil and brought the taste of bile to his mouth. As long as there was a daily ration of wine and something to eat, he would live. At the moment, beyond that, he had little care. "I'll do my best to stay out of the tribune's sight," he continued, waving a hand. "I'll be no trouble."

Blanco grunted and tapped his fingers on his belt. "That," the centurion said, "is not what I want. You're a soldier in my cohort. You need to learn the skills that the others know, to master your focus and power. You'll ever be behind if you do not... This is my responsibility, to see you trained and equipped and ready for battle."

"Who will train me?" Dwyrin spread his hands wide in disgust. "I hadn't quite caught up with Zoë and Odenathus before they left. Now I'm years behind the next journeyman! I see the regard the other thaumaturges hold for me—not as high as for a trained mouse!"

"This is true," Blanco grated, cutting off Dwyrin's next protest. "No other five will take you. Therefore, you will have to make do with me."

Dwyrin stopped, considering. The centurion was a grizzled veteran, quick with the baton or a mind-whip, never shy about using pain and fear to gain his ends—obedience and instant response. He did not have the technical skill of the other sorcerers, but he had raw power enough and years of experience.

"If you say so, Centurion..."

"I do," Blanco growled, standing up and brushing off his legs. "I'll show you what I can, when I can. It's up to you to make it work."

Khadames, his face a mask of tension and control, descended a long stair. Thousands of steps, hewn from the living stone of the mountain, receded behind him. Three of the sixteen followed him, their dark masks ill-lit by the fires that roared up from below. The stair turned, reaching a landing jutting out from the rock wall. Fumes rose from the floor of a vast chamber, where great crucibles burned with liquid iron. The air was filled with the din of forges and hammers falling on ruddy metal. Khadames stepped down, his breath growing short as the air became thick with noxious vapors. Behind him, the three of the sixteen marched on, tireless, each carrying twice the burden of a strong man.

The Persian lord crossed the wide floor, wending his way between great levered hammers and gangs of men in dirty loincloths, sweating and cursing the huge machines. Great chains ran up into the smoke-fogged darkness above, constantly moving, ratcheting up and up and up. Even deeper beneath the tunnels and hidden storehouses of Damawand, a river surged in a black abyss. There, great iron wheels turned, driven by the snowmelt, that power flowing up through the sinews of the mountain. It drove forging hammers and bellows, pushing fresh air through the miles of tunnel, fueling all the constant industry that throbbed in the heart of the mountain. Khadames reached another stairway, this one cut into the floor of the long hall. Pillars of brass rose up around the head of the stair, and a crowd of half-naked Uze squatted around it.

The barbarians, like Khadames, were sweating rivers in the furnace-hot air, but they still growled at him and checked his body for forbidden weapons. They had shaved their heads, and many of them bore new tattoos in black and red ink. Scars decorated their faces in long stripes. Each man also bore the mark of his master branded on his left shoulder—a single black snake, with eyes of blood, curling into a wheel. The three of the Sixteen they ignored. Nothing existed in those cold metal shells and clammy flesh save that which their master desired. Finally, after examining all of Khadames' accoutrements, they parted, letting him set foot on the black onyx of the first step.

Khadames had been sitting in his office on the fourth level above the main gate when the three of the Sixteen had come to him. The office was notable most for the tall, narrow shaft that pierced the roof, letting in—for the better part of the day—a beam of reflected sunlight that illuminated the wooden desk at the center of the room. Khadames had been sitting there, hunched over reams of parchment and papyrus paper, feeling the millstone weight of his responsibilities crush his face into the plank tabletop. Three scribes—two Indian slaves and a Jew—were working in the room, sitting on the thick rugs and working their counting beads. Somehow, as he had struggled to keep the mountain and its inhabitants fed, and deal with the constant flow of strangers who made their way to the great river-gate, he had accumulated a staff.

At night, when he lay in exhaustion on the pallet in the small room behind the office—really no more than a closet with a sleeping platform cut from the wall—he wondered what had happened to him. He had served Chrosoes, King of Kings, for nearly his whole adult life, and most of that time he had been commander of the right wing in the armies led by the great Shahr-Baraz. He thought of himself as a fighting leader, not one of the scroll pushers who always followed the Royal Boar or the King of Kings from palace to palace. Now, in the darkness, he fretted that he was short of men who could use the counting beads and keep track of thousands of items in hundreds of storerooms.

Each day, too, he blessed the five hundred who had followed him and the sorcerer from the wreck of Palmyra across the breadth of the Empire to this forgotten, remote valley. In them he had found the captains and sergeants and drill instructors for a new army. Without them, the slowly accumulating horde of barbarians, hill tribesmen, wayward sons, foreign mercenaries, and feckless wanderers who filled the barracks and dormitories of Damawand would be uncontrollable. But in the five hundred, he had the brutal force and hard-won experience to take the mob and make them an army.

Others had come, too, as individuals and families, making the long, hard trek up the hidden ways that led to the river gate and the scowling faces of the Uze who were stationed there. The sorcerer had never bothered to explain why these peasants and townspeople had come, but when he passed, they bowed low and made an odd sign with their fist before their heart. Many times, Khadames had intended to question them, to ask them what tie or oath or religion bound them to the dark Prince. But time was precious, and the opportunity had never arisen. At first, Khadames had been at a loss to make use of them, but then, while he wandered through the impromptu village that had sprung up at the base of the road that zigzagged up the lower face of Damawand, he had smelled fresh bread baking.

The mountain—a maze of barracks and armories and assembly halls and forge rooms and cisterns and storehouses mighty enough to feed a city—held even more than that. Khadames was used to commanding an army in motion, driving against the enemies of the sons of Sassan. Garrison duty had never been his forte, nor had he ever served as a civil governor. He had never liked the simple truth that armies needed bakeries and seamstresses and carpenters and weavers and laundry operations. For long years in his service to the Boar, he had taken pains to avoid dealing with those matters. But that morning, in the bitterly cold mountain air, smelling the yeasty tang of a loaf pulled fresh from a rock oven, he realized that all of Damawand, with its endless tunnels and vaulted chambers, would soon be filled to overflowing.

That same afternoon, the peasants, artisans, and townspeople who had been drifting into the valley were moved into the mountain. A hundred rooms, long abandoned, suddenly had purpose. At the same time, Khadames had begun to worry about where he was going to get more skilled men and women. Once the full breadth of what was required to support the army that was growing impressed itself upon him, he felt rather ill. That night, Khadames had taken the time to climb the 999 steps to the height of the mountain, to the aerie where the sorcerer sat on a throne of cold stone, looking out upon the world.

"Loyal Khadames, welcome." The full power of that dreadful voice had long since returned. The human weakness that the general had glimpsed while the sorcerer lay dying was gone. "Is there a problem?"

"No, my lord," Khadames had answered. "I wonder, though, at the patience you showed when I did not understand your purpose in summoning these people. I have only just ordered all your followers moved into the mountain."