Without looking away from the distant glowing eyes, Narses turned to the domestikos at his side. “I’ll handle this,” he told Poghos. “If I get incapacitated, stay in formation and proceed on mission. Finish de-criminalizing Chalkedon and Chrysopolis and then bring my men back to Konstantinopolis.”

  Poghos bowed. “Yes, o despota mou.”

  Narses noted that there was no longer any hint of rebellion in this man’s mind. A more troublesome personality would have asked how they were supposed to get across the Bosporos without ships. Paul would have cracked a joke about swimming in armor, and then tittered like an old lady. Nobody else laughed at the eunuch’s jokes.

  Narses patted Poghos’s shoulder. Good to have reliable people.

  Drawing his rhompaia, Narses stepped toward the glowing eyes. They had grown brighter, in the mean time, and the voice was louder. Narses wished that he had brought a priest—a spellcaster for exorcisms.

  “Who goes there?” he said. “Who dares stand in Rome’s way?”

  The eyes were so bright, now, that Narses discerned the figure which contained them. She was indeed a little old woman—a crone, a witch, a harridan, a battle-axe, a gorgon, a shrew, a termagant, a virago, a hag, a scold, a baba yaga clad in peculiar white robes which seemed out of step with the colorful tunics and dresses favored by Romanía. Narses’s old world self thought she looked like she had walked out of the Bible. Someone was even standing beside her—an Aethiopian man dressed like a pilgrim, holding a long, hooked cane, and wearing a large pack over his shoulders.

  Narses shook his head. What the…?

  The wind was blowing harder, and the crone’s long white hair was flying about her face, though she never blinked. Her eyes were mesmerizing. Narses had trouble looking away, even as they burned his vision. Yet he also could have sworn that the stars in the night were brightening, particularly those belonging to the Milky Way.

  Impossible. I must be losing my mind. Maybe I really am as crazy as everyone thinks.

  Something exploded behind him—a basilik wielded by one of his men. A bullet whistled through the air straight toward the mystical grannie. But just as it was about to strike her forehead and turn her skull into a red burst of blood and bone, a blurred figure sped in from out of sight—it had been hiding in the darkness—and deflected the bullet with a burning scimitar of damascened steel. In front of the old crone, the figure halted. It was a woman clad in armor. Her long curly black hair flew behind her as she moved at a speed that only the farr could have granted.

  Herakleia.

  For a moment Narses was so overcome with rage he was unable to speak. Yet he pointed his rhompaia at the criminal queen, the reason for every problem, then looked back to his men. “Attack! All centuries attack!”

  “Yes, aphéntēs!” they answered in unison, drawing their weapons and marching forward.

  By then the wind was blowing so hard Narses worried about losing his footing. The leaves of the trees were roaring in the night as loud as waterfalls, but another louder sound rose above these before the Roman legionaries could take another step. Stranger still, the stars had grown too bright to even look at.

  Day replaced night

  Then grew blinding bright.

  The sun was swallowing the world. Narses even felt his skin burning. His men were screaming for Jesus to save them.

  “And Life be praised!” the old woman suddenly shouted in Roman. “And Life is victorious!”

  It happened so fast, he was unable to understand. Some invisible liquid force, a freezing ocean wave the size of a mountain, slammed him onto the ground and dragged him away. He was powerless, like a toy doll dropped into a surging sea, thrown who even knew how far, tumbling in the spume. Foaming saltwater was everywhere—filling his mouth, choking him—yet not a drop was visible. By the time this mysterious force receded, he was lying on the ground, gasping for breath, hurled there as if onto a beach from oceanic depths, like an octopus clinging to a boulder.

  How far had the water taken him from his men? Had any survived? Narses looked around, too exhausted to stand, shivering both from the cold—he was soaked—and fear. The spirit of death had again stalked close, even tapping Narses’s shoulder with his scythe tip.

  When Narses climbed onto all fours, he vomited seawater. Coughing and wiping his mouth, he staggered to his feet. It was dark. Where was he? His rhompaia was gone. He must have dropped it. No matter. The real loss was his army. Where was his army?

  Night had returned, and the stars were back to normal, though Narses eyed them warily, as though they could explode again at any time. He worked his way back to Chrysopolis, using the dim torches of distant Konstantinopolis to navigate the darkness, going slow, stumbling over ruins, tree roots, and the bodies of his drowned men. Some were still alive, thankfully, and he gathered these as best he could. When a little strength had returned, they shouted for others to join them.

  Bombarded in the morning. Drowned in the evening.

  What had even happened? Ever since his immortals had perished before Trebizond’s walls, and since Romanos had betrayed and nearly murdered him, Narses had sworn to keep the farr to himself. It was too powerful and dangerous for people, the vast majority of whom were stupid, lazy, and corrupt. Only the best could be trusted to learn it, and as emperor, whom could Narses trust? Paranoia was not some illusion when you sat on the Throne of Solomon. It was how you stayed alive.

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  The instant you let your guard down, that’s when they get you.

  Now he was wondering if he should have trained more acolytes. But did this old woman, this gello, did she know the farr? Her power went beyond anything Narses could conceive of. It seemed she was drawing her strength from some other source.

  God is real. Even Allah is real. The ancient gods are real. They draw their strength from our belief. When we cease to believe in them, they fade away. A small number of practitioners, though, know how to draw upon their strength, and apply it in the real world. This ‘Piriawis’ she mentioned, it must be an old god’s name. To know their names is to have power over them, just as knowing a man’s name in the real world is to have power over him. But the gods are always trying to trick you, using their hundreds of names. You have to hold them down and wrestle them even as they change into a thousand different forms, like Proteos transforming into a puddle of water—a chicken, a temple architrave, Helen of Troy, fireworks—even as you grapple with him. There is nothing he cannot be.

  The crescent moon was overhead when Narses gathered the survivors of the cataclysm before Chrysopolis’s walls. Poghos had vanished, so Narses assumed direct command of the survivors. About half were gone. The rest were soaked and shivering in the cold. Much of Narses’s farr was also drained.

  “Had enough?” came Herakleia’s voice from the night.

  Narses spun around, brandishing a sword he had taken from a dead soldier. “Where are you?” he said. “Face me like a man.”

  “I’m not a man,” she said, her voice echoing from every side.

  “You’re a witch,” Narses said. “Satan’s temptress.”

  “That’s a good one. I’ll have to add it to my list of titles.”

  “Stop toying with me. Come out and fight.”

  “You killed my sister, Narses. Your old boss, Emperor Nikephoros, killed my father—and you helped him. For the last year, you’ve been trying to kill me and everyone who’s left, everyone who won’t bow to you. You tortured me, Narses, you murdered my father and sister.”

  “And you,” Narses said. “What have you done? You’ve either tricked people or forced them to follow your insane ideas, working with our enemies to destroy Rome. If you had just worked within the system, if you hadn’t poisoned your own movement with your extremism, if you had submitted petitions rather than swords, if you had accepted incremental rather than radical change, maybe you could have achieved more without anyone getting hurt.”

  Herakleia laughed. Narses continued.

  “So many are dead because of you. So many cities lie ruined. You are such a hypocrite, Herakleia, and not even a true believer in the ideals of this little so-called ‘uprising’ of yours. You talk about ending slavery, yet you yourself are a product of slavery—the education that corrupted your mind, who paid for it? Who built the buildings you studied in? Even the clothes on your back, where did they come from? You’re a hypocrite! Do you not enslave me, by fighting me? You could have lived all your days in the palace, never doing a day of real work in your life, but that wasn’t good enough, and so you needed to trick all these poor fools into following you. If you ever defeat me, if you take the Throne of Solomon, you’ll just be a new boss replacing the old boss. Nothing will change. People are fundamentally corrupt. You think you know everything, but no one is good enough to build this pure and equal utopia of yours. We could get things done and make things better—if only you would admit the truth.”

  “You’re so right, Narses. You know nothing about us, have barely spoken with us, have never bothered to read any of our texts, yet you’re an expert, in fact you know us better than we do ourselves. Humans have always been exactly the same in every time and place since the dawn of time. Who is God himself, except the great slave owner in the sky? What was the Big Bang except a golden investment opportunity? Nothing has ever changed anywhere—which is why humans are all still living in caves. There is no difference between good or bad. I am a murderer because I want to stop murderers. I am a slave owner because I want to end slavery.”

  Narses scoffed. “I didn’t come here to have philosophical arguments. I came to bring an end to this criminality of yours, to bring peace, justice, dignity, prosperity, and freedom to these lands—to put an end to your violation of the fundamental human rights of democracy and freedom of speech.”

  “Your mind is so muddled, you’re mixing up ideas from the old world with Rome. You don’t even know what you’re saying. All of you think you’re so unique, but you all think, look, speak, and act in exactly the same way. I should have remembered—when people like you talk about freedom, what they mean is the freedom to commit genocide and enslave.”

  “I didn’t come here to argue. I came here to fight.”

  “You should know that ideological defeats are but a prelude to defeats in the real world. What is your ideological weakness bespeak except the weakness of the economic base that created it in the first place?”

  “Fight me!” Narses screamed.

  “Very well,” Herakleia said. “If you want me, come and get me.”

  She stepped out of the darkness and into the moonlight, directly ahead of Narses, not twenty feet away.

  Narses raised his sword, and was about to attack, but then her entire army stepped forward behind her. It consisted mostly of armored women wearing veils or hijabs—thousands of them. They had all been lurking in the darkness in silence. Some were mounted on horses or carrying basiliks. Narses even recognized Gontran Koraki.

  Thousands of them here. Only a few hundred of us left. How could they put together an army like this? No chance of victory for us. Yet I will meet my end bravely. I will make an end everyone will remember forever.

  “There are new powers I have.” Narses walked toward them, forcing his voice to stop trembling with fear. “Powers you know nothing about. Powers you’ve never seen before. Things I learned from Nikephoros.”

  “I’d like to see them.” Herakleia raised her scimitar.

  “Let me kill him,” said a dark and beautiful woman in a green hijab standing beside Koraki, speaking with a vaguely eastern accent. Something about her seemed familiar, but Narses couldn’t place her. She had raised her basilik and was aiming it at him. “I have a clear shot.”

  “Is that how you plan to kill me, Herakleia?” Narses said. “By having your henchmen do it for you, in this fair society of yours?”

  “I’ll take care of him,” Herakleia said.

  She stepped toward Narses. Soon he sensed that she was close enough. He knew exactly what he would do: take communion with her spirit. Narses was a farr vampire, so he didn’t even need to touch her. Then it would be over. Herakleia also knew nothing of these new powers. Her army would collapse; Narses’s men would cut them down. He was so close.

  Just then, he heard the strange sound of jingling coins. It was distracting. He looked up for an instant, and narrowed his eyes. Some kind of giant black flying snake was silhouetted against the crescent moon.