“The Eagle,” she demanded. “Let me take it.”
Rufus froze.
“He is an old man,” Draupadi pleaded. “And I can use it well.”
“Lady, I have my orders.”
“For him, too!” Draupadi cried. “We must fight now. Don’t you think they’ll be back? Don’t you think they’ll take the strongest, the fittest? They took Ganesha away quickly enough!”
She tried to dart to one side and grasp the standard. Wrong move, Draupadi.
“I have my orders.”
“With power like that,” Manetho said, “they’ll have it all. We cannot wait. I must rouse the people, and we must fight. What if they come back for her? What if they seize your Eagle? It may not be…”
“Rufus,” Draupadi pleaded, “listen to me. You have no idea how strong Ganesha’s power is. It may be enough. How would you feel if you gave your enemies a weapon that could crack this world like an earthen plate?”
Rufus shook his head, stubbornly.
“And what about him? He is not back yet,” Draupadi told Rufus. “What if they have him already?”
Him? She was speaking of Quintus!
“Come on!” said Manetho. “Now, while we have the chance….”
Rufus shook his head back and forth. No.
“What do you mean, ‘no’? You are the flesh of Rome itself,” she told Rufus. Now, I am going to find my friend and my kinsman. Can you do less for your officer?”
Manetho turned to go.
Quintus gestured. A moment more. Rufus walked over to the Eagle, gleaming even in the shadow. He saluted it, put out his hand to take it—and Draupadi darted forward and caught it up. The bronze Eagle poised atop its standard did not blaze up, as if it too sensed how great their peril was and that it must stay hidden. But its brightness seemed to subtly intensify, to take on a richness akin to the saffron that Draupadi wore.
She looked upon the Eagle and her lips moved as if she spoke to it in a whisper, or a prayer. Then she nodded. Was it a trick of the light that made Quintus think that the Eagle had dipped its head in assent to whatever she had told it?
“Man, move it! Do you want your people facing the Dark Ones without you!?” Manetho’s voice cracked.
He pulled at Quintus’s arm. This time, the tribune allowed himself to be drawn through the ruins at a speed he would not have dared by himself. It was too fast, through unfamiliar terrain: He had fears of falling, terrible images of writhing, the yellow bone piercing the flesh of his thigh, crippling him for the rest of his life—assuming he had a “rest of his life.”
“Faster,” Manetho gasped. He passed a gap in the wall and gestured, once and then again. “In here.”
“Where are you taking me?”
Quintus planted his feet, good old Roman stubbornness warming him for the first time, as he thought, for days. Even a dozen Legionaries, with Roman discipline and their swords outthrust, should be able to wreak terror on the Black Naacals—and he, standing with his men, would finally pay Rome the death he owed.
Hot pain lanced into his arm, and he spun around in shock.
Manetho had his dagger out. Fool, to let yourself be gulled by fear and a sad story!
“Your men’s lives lost? Your lady stolen? And you think that is all we have faced?”
Quintus clapped hand to the wound Manetho had made. Not serious. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”
“You will never find your way back,” Manetho’s teeth shone in the darkness. “And your blood will leave a spoor for the Dark Ones to follow.”
Quintus’s arm had begun to sting as if Manetho had smeared the little blade with poison. Perhaps he has. Perhaps those gestures were signals for his followers to strike you down, you and all the others. Who knows? Perhaps he has sold you to the Black Naacals himself?
Temptation threatened to overwhelm him. Kill this traitor. Find your men. Take the Eagle and fight your way in to reclaim Ganesha and Draupadi. And then get out of this trap, leaving these fools and slaves behind.
Manetho folded his arms over his chest. “They’re in your mind,” he said. “Pain helps. You can kill me now, you know. You might be able to find your way back: Who knows? You found your way here, didn’t you? Or you can come with me and give us all a chance to fight.”
The desert wind blew, but Quintus was drenched in sweat…. After Carrhae, they crouched, betrayed in the dark swamp. Some of his men drank the foul standing water and shuddered with fever and flux—to the cross with this madman and dying in this place.
“Come on,” Manetho almost taunted him. “Decide. Kill me or help us. But do it quickly. We have run out of time. They are moving to attack, and it will be as it was the last time—and they will overwhelm the whole world. Well, which is it?”
From the rags of his tunic, Manetho pulled out a dagger with a bone hilt, curiously bright. Light welled from the blade’s point. If he’s fool enough to arm you, quench us that knife in the slave’s blood. We would welcome news. We would welcome you. Come to us….
“It will get worse, you know,” Manetho told him. His voice was almost kind. “I will forgive you, too, if you kill me, strange as it sounds. Life like this has been no great blessing. I have seen so many of my brothers dead in ways—do it. Do it quick. I may even thank you. This way, I would die as a warrior at a warrior’s hands— you’re even giving me a chance at a decent rebirth!”
Quintus looked wonderingly at the dagger.
“And leave your people?”
“What have you left for them? You came in as you did with White Naacals and a weapon that cast trails of power like a comet from halfway across the waste. You think the Dark Ones don’t want that? That they wouldn’t spend all of us to get it? The best any of us can hope for is a quick death before they make the entire world their slave.”
Manetho raised his chin to allow Quintus the easy, fast blow to the blood vessels in his throat.
He was so thin! Quintus thought he had never seen such a poor specimen passing for a fighting man. But he stood, trembling only slightly, waiting at a time when waiting was perhaps the riskiest thing in the world to do. What gave him the courage?
Only hope. In hope, Quintus had marched across the desert and reclaimed his Eagle. And now? Taking on the Black Naacals would be like a single cohort toppling The Surena’s forces when the Legions of Rome had failed…
…but he had the Eagle, and with it, a weapon that would alter the balance of power.
Kill the wretch now and come to us!
The intensity of that attack made him sway as if he had taken a blow to the jaw. The carvings on the ruined rock walls seemed to drift in and out of focus. In his mind, processions of White Priests moved toward an altar surmounted by the many-headed serpent that meant—coils, crushing and constricting, squeezing the life from their victim, draining him, before the great jaws gaped wide for the flesh that remained….
The serpent seemed to writhe in his consciousness, its eyes stark with ancient malice. Its tongue flickered back and forth.
Use the blade, fool!
Lightning went off inside Quintus’s skull. A nail-sticker like that to take out a giant serpent? He laughed, the coarsely cheerful mirth that Rufus reserved for the most awkward Legionary-in-training.
Not a serpent. Another illusion. The friezes and the broken walls turned firm again. Once more, the White Naacals marched over the roughened stone toward their altar, and power sluiced out like warm water pouring down an aching back, healing, comforting….
It was all a lie, wasn’t it?
He let the dagger drop from his hand. Manetho wavered and sagged, and Quintus reached out to steady him—almost in the embrace of brothers.
“I’ve wasted time we can’t spare,” Quintus said. “Lead on.”
He followed Manetho at a near run through what quickly seemed so like a maze that he expected a Minotaur to bellow and charge them at every crossing of the ways they passed. He had no thread, though, to mark his passage, and his Ariadne—to whom he would be faithful, unlike Theseus—lay in the grasp of their enemies.
Draupadi was, he reassured himself, a mistress of illusion, able to dispel hallucinations that might have finished off him and the Legionaries. Just as he must trust Manetho, he must have faith in them and their inborn strength to hold firm until he could retrieve the Eagle and lead them.
Now, he and Manetho raced through a narrow passageway. On either side, he heard a rushing sound. Water, perhaps, coursing through hidden channels as if through an aqueduct? Or air singing through tunnels set into the thick walls? Romans were engineers. These walls, though, made anything built by Rome seem like a shed flung up out of flat stones.