“Then they will murder you,” I said. “Within a day or so.”
“So be it,” said Philip. “Just don’t tell me who or when.” He grinned sardonically. “I like surprises.”
I shook my head in dismay and began to walk away from him.
“Wait,” he called, misinterpreting me. “Will it be you, Orion? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
Drawing myself up to my full height, I said, “Never! I’ll die myself before I let them kill you.”
That one good eye of his scanned me closely. “Yes, you would, wouldn’t you? I never believed you had deserted.”
He turned away from me and began to limp down the hillside toward the city. Before he had taken three steps he winked out, leaving me alone in that distant bubble of spacetime. I closed my eyes…
And opened them in the dungeon beneath the castle at Aigai. I was still chained hand and foot and the side of my head where Pausanias had kicked me throbbed with sullen pain.
There was no way for me to reckon time in that dark cell except for the beat of my own pulse. Impractical, yet for lack of anything better to do I counted beats the way an insomniac might count sheep. I could leave this cell and translate myself to the Creators’ abandoned city, but I would always return to this same place, in the same chains. Like Hera, I was trapped here until the cusp of this nexus was resolved, one way or the other.
I gave up counting pulse beats when I realized that there were rats in this cell, just as there had been in the one at Pella. My cell mates, my companions, ready to gnaw off my toes or fingers if I did not wiggle them every now and then. The manacles on my wrists were so tight that a normal man’s hands would have swollen painfully from lack of blood circulation. I consciously forced my deep-lying blood vessels to take over the work of the peripherals that were squeezed shut by the manacles. And I moved my fingers constantly to help keep the circulation going—and to discourage the beady-eyed hungry rats.
I heard footsteps shuffling along the corridor outside. They stopped at my door. The bolt squealed back and the door groaned open. My two jailers stood out there, one of them holding a torch.
Between them stood Ketu.
He pushed between the jailers and came into my cell. Kneeling beside me, he peered into my face.
“You are still alive?”
I made a smile for him. “I haven’t achieved Nirvana yet, my friend.”
“Thank the gods!” He straightened up and told the jailers to take me outside.
They had to drag me, grunting and struggling, to the big room at the end of the corridor. My heart thumped when I saw that the place was filled with instruments of torture.
“The king has ordered your release,” Ketu reassured me. “This smith here—” he pointed to a sweaty, hairy, totally bald man with a bulging pot belly—”will strike off your chains.”
He nearly struck off my arms, but after nearly half an hour of clanging and hammering I was free once again. My wrists and ankles were raw where the cuffs had chafed my skin, but I knew they would heal quickly enough. Ketu led me out of the dismal cellar and up into the fading sunlight of a dying day.
“The king’s daughter has been safely married to Alexandros of Epeiros,” Ketu told me. “Philip himself instructed me to set you free and give you all that you need to leave Macedonia. You may travel wherever you want to, Orion.”
“The wedding is over?” I asked.
He was leading me to the stables, I saw. Ketu answered, “The marriage ceremony was last night. The feasting will last another two days, of course.”
“Has anyone tried to assassinate the king?”
Ketu’s liquid eyes went wide. “Assassinate? No! Who would dare even try?”
“A traitor,” I said.
“Do you know this for certain?”
“I’ve heard it from the traitor’s own lips.”
“You must tell the captain of the king’s guard, Pausanias.”
“No, I must get to the king himself.”