Exorcism, in this case, took the form of music and dance. First stating a need for privacy, Za-Ilmaknun brought Alexios and Isato up to Mount Minthrion—past the ruins of the old hippodrome and the chapels and monasteries—where the bustling city below was out of sight. Shepherds sometimes guided their flocks to this grassy hilltop, and there would be idyllic picnics here after church on summer Sunday afternoons in the company of a few lowing cattle of the sun. But for now, it was deserted.

  Next, Za-Ilmaknun sprinkled Alexios with droplets from a vial of holy water, telling the kentarch to drink the rest. Then Za-Ilmaknun withdrew two things from his backpack: a lyre called a krar, plus a calfskin drum. His backpack he set down on the ground beside his tau-shaped mequamia stick.

  Za-Ilmaknun strummed a simple yet catchy folk song from the krar’s strings. Isato took the drum, and pounded a strong heartbeat-like rhythm to Za-Ilmaknun’s melody, telling Alexios to clap once for every two drum beats. Then Za-Ilmaknun sang in Aethiopian, and, while playing his lute, danced around Alexios and Isato. Soon the singing, string-playing, and percussion harmonized. Alexios felt no change in his condition, but he liked the music, nodding as Za-Ilmaknun stomped and swirled around him. The singing was call-and-answer, with Za-Ilmaknun soloing while Alexios and Isato answered his calls.

  “What’s he saying?” Alexios whispered to Isato without breaking the rhythm.

  “He quotes the psalter,” Isato answered. “He seeks to draw whatever lies inside of you out.”

  All of a sudden, Za-Ilmaknun stopped playing. Alexios and Isato kept clapping and drumming for a few more beats before they also stopped and stared at Za-Ilmaknun—who had flung his krar away. Now his eyes were rolled back in his head, and he was staggering toward Alexios and swaying back and forth as though about to fall. Isato got up to help him, but Alexios stopped her. The cross in Za-Ilmaknun’s forehead glowed orange, and sweat was running down his face, which was quivering.

  “You,” he said, speaking with a different voice—it sounded distorted, like he was using an old microphone connected to an even older amplifier. He pointed at Alexios. “You have no spirit sickness.”

  Alexios leaned forward. “Is that good?”

  Za-Ilmaknun groaned, fell to the grass, and rolled over before picking himself up and crawling away. Then he was walking again on his feet, although he lurched like he was drunk.

  “Who are you?” Isato said, her blue eyes flashing. “Are you a zar or adbar spirit?”

  “I am Hawajat.” Za-Ilmaknun fell to his knees and seized earth and grass in his hands. “This vessel meant to draw the spirit from your flesh. But he drew me from the nether realms instead.” Za-Ilmaknun cackled.

  Alexios and Isato looked at each other.

  Shrugging, Alexios turned back to Za-Ilmaknun. Might as well make the best of this. Either Za-Ilmaknun is putting on some sort of show, or he’s having a psychotic episode. Or he’s being possessed by a spirit who might help us.

  “I’ve been having these visions,” Alexios said. “I keep seeing everyone I know either getting killed or enslaved. It’s driving me crazy. I don’t know what to—”

  “You have the gift of prophecy,” Za-Ilmaknun said. “You flesh-and-blood-and-bone, body bag, flesh bag. The pain of prophecy. The double-edged blade of prophecy. It skewers you like you are a boar, it skewers your foes like they are boars. Yet it is also a boar’s tusks, pointing either way. You see now what everyone shall see soon.”

  Alexios shook his head. “But that can’t be possible. It’s never been a problem with—”

  “It is,” Za-Ilmaknun said. “Oh, it is. You toyed with the farr so much, little flesh-and-blood, passing your hand through the flame and laughing. But now the farr toys with you. Too close have you flown to the philosophical sun. Now it burns you, heart and soul. It scalds you to a crisp, and you burst into flames.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Alexios said.

  “Flee, flee for your life, for all your days,” Za-Ilmaknun said. “Take whom and what you can with you. For all who stay here shall perish in this place consigned to dust. Stay and fight here, and your body of flesh-and-blood shall be broken, and your spirit shall join us in the nether realms, from which none escape—none, not even me. There is only darkness here. Yes, only darkness, and hot invisible flame burning the defiers of the Mosaic law.”

  “There has to be another way,” Alexios said.

  “Yours is a noble cause, flesh-and-blood.” Za-Ilmaknun glared white eyes at Alexios. Laughter trembled at the edges of his lips. “And will inspire many generations to come. But the time is not right. No, not yet. You are weak, the enemy is strong, it is simply a fact of life for you, factotum. But times change. One grows at the other’s expense. A day will dawn, a day will dawn when the victory of the great struggle is at hand. But that day is long from now. Many lifetimes. You are doomed, all of you are doomed, there is nothing you can do.”

  Za-Ilmaknun groaned and raised his arms.

  “That’s it?” Alexios stood and walked toward Za-Ilmaknun. “You can’t do this. You can’t leave me, just talking nonsense like this!”

  Out of nowhere, he seized Za-Ilmaknun and wrestled him to the ground. Isato ordered him to stop, while Za-Ilmaknun laughed.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Alexios screamed in Za-Ilmaknun’s face. “I’m not just going to abandon my friends—”

  Za-Ilmaknun grabbed Alexios’s head in his hands, then kissed his mouth.

  “Ah, but there is a way, flesh-and-blood,” he said. “I forgot. But it is not an easy way. It is hard, oh so difficult, the most difficult.”

  “Tell me,” Alexios said.

  “Go east,” Za-Ilmaknun said, his face contorted. “Wander there all your life, in lands beyond. One day, many years from now, when you are old and dying, lad, when all this here is but the faintest memory, with your last breath, you must ride the dragon.”

  “What?” Alexios said. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It is the only way,” Za-Ilmaknun said.

  “It can’t be!” Alexios yelled.

  “Give your life,” Za-Ilmaknun said. “Live your life, ride the dragon, save your friends. Or stay here and fight and die and lose all you love. Watch with your own eyes as their bodies are broken like eggs, and their essences leak into the realms of spirit.”

  Before Alexios could think of a response, the orange cross faded in Za-Ilmaknun’s forehead, his eyes rolled forward, and his grotesque facial expression became confused.

  Hawajat was gone.

  Alexios realized that he was gripping Za-Ilmaknun’s shoulders. Releasing him, Alexios stood and walked toward the edge of Mount Minthrion which overlooked Trebizond.

  “What happened?” Za-Ilmaknun said. “What did I—?”

  “Alexios!” Isato shouted.

  She ran after him. He had stopped at the mountain’s edge, and was watching the city below. The sounds of rattling carts, neighing horses, hammering construction, and drilling soldiers overwhelmed the quiet hilltop.

  Isato took Alexios’s arm, then bent her knees, as if getting ready to fight. “Don’t do it,” she said.

  “I’m not doing anything,” he said. “What would be the point? No matter what I do, we fail. It’s too hard. It’s always too hard!”

  “You must follow the debtera’s instructions, and stop this incessant whining.” Isato glanced back at Za-Ilmaknun, who was still sitting on the ground. “The spirits speak in riddles, but they also speak the truth.”

  “How can any of us know that?” Alexios said.

  “They have inhabited his body before,” Isato said. “They were the ones who told us to come to Rome.”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Really? How’s that working out?” Alexios pulled free, then walked away from Isato, seemingly in a random direction.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  He stopped and looked back at her. “Tell Herakleia I need a break. Tell the kids I’ll be gone for awhile. Until sundown…maybe for a few days.”

  “Where, Alexios?”

  “I don’t know. I need to be alone.”

  Isato was going to follow him, but Za-Ilmaknun stopped her. They watched Alexios disappear into the mountains and valleys.

  Where to go? What to do?

  Alexios left without food, water, armor. All he possessed were his clothes, shoes, and the Gedara sword strapped at his side. Yet as he walked away, he realized he was thirsty. He had been so distracted with Za-Ilmaknun’s little episode that he’d failed to notice his thirst. Hiking up Mount Minthrion, then wrestling Za-Ilmaknun and screaming in his face had used up the water he’d drunk at breakfast. The weather was also hotter than might have been expected. Even just a few kilometers away from the Euxine’s moderating influence, out here on the other side of Mount Minthrion, the summers and winters were harsher, the springs and autumns shorter. It was an almost Mediterranean climate in Trebizond, but in the mountains the sun burned brighter and hotter, drawing the sweat from Alexios’s flesh.

  He stopped at the first stream flowing down the jagged rocks, and drank its sweet water and splashed his face. Looking down at his rippling reflection in the pool beneath the stream, he sat on a boulder, clutched his face, shuddered, and began to cry. All the emotion poured out of him.

  Everyone you love is doomed. There’s nothing you can do. The uprising’s finished. All its victories, all the sacrifices were for nothing. Hermes Trismegistos was right.

  He cried because he knew that the spirit Hawajat was also right. Alexios’s visions of the future were more real than the present he saw now before his own eyes. Everything around him was crumbling away. The pieces would come together in a new form, building an entirely new world, one in which the uprising was barely a footnote in future history books.

  Thousands of people, years of struggle, for nothing.

  This was not necessarily because the Roman historians were incompetent—although they were. It was because the uprising was doomed. Had it succeeded, its historians would have written their own histories, and these would have become the standard version of events. All Roman history would have been redefined. From the earliest days of Romulus and Remus and Lupa the She-Wolf and the Seven Hills, all the way to the imperium at Konstantinopolis, all of it would have led to the uprising. Rome’s entire purpose for thousands of years would have been to create the uprising. Rome would have been the footnote.

  Alexios stared at the stream. He wiped his eyes, splashed his face.

  What am I supposed to do? I can’t abandon my friends because some witch doctor puts on a good show. And we are all marked men. The instant we decide we’re fighting for the uprising, for real justice, we commit suicide. Victory for the cause is inevitable—one day in the future—but our own individual death is guaranteed. We will die. They really will figure out where we are and get us. They will come for us, the same way they already came for everyone else.

  Alexios looked up at the dark, ancient forest growing in the mountain valley, the roots drinking from the stream and the pool, the gnarled limbs twisting, the green leaves silent. There was no wind, no birds. Had anyone else ever come here? How long had he been walking until he’d found this place? Somehow Alexios had wandered into an unknown wood, an obscure forest of the self. He’d been too distracted to even think about where he was going. Maybe no one else had been here for years, decades, centuries. Looking around, he saw no evidence of any human presence. If goatherds, shepherds, or cowherds had come here, their flocks would have left droppings. Grass and leaves would have been munched. Sometimes herdsmen carved shapes or even letters into the trees or rocks.

  But there was nothing. There was only Alexios, the stream, the forest, the boulders, and the mountains rising into the sky that was white in the midday heat. It was a beautiful, fearsome place, but nothing could distract Alexios from his worries for long.

  Go east, Hawajat had said.

  “I can’t do it,” Alexios said to himself. “I can’t go on alone.”

  “You’ll never have to.”

  Alexios looked up. An old, big-bearded man was sitting on a boulder on the pool’s far side.

  “Dionysios.” Alexios stood to his feet.

  “They’ll always be with you,” Dionysios said. “The ones you love. Even after they’re dead and gone.”

  “The way you’re with me?”

  Dionysios shook his head. “I’m just a dream, a final projection of my dying consciousness. My body’s still back in that garden of good and evil, with Narses stabbing me at midnight. This is just the last gasp of everything I was. The atoms that swirled together to make me have already swirled away into other things.” He tossed a rock into the pool. “But you remember me. I live on inside your memory. The things that I did live on in the world, like the ripples in this pond. It’ll be the same for all the people you care about.”

  “You want me to just abandon them like I’m some kind of monk,” Alexios said. “‘Nothing matters, just drop everything that’s troubling you. Anyone or anything that causes the slightest discomfort, just let it go. Spend the rest of your life meditating in a cave and just hope that things magically work themselves out on their own.’”

  “That’s not what anyone’s saying. We’re telling you to fight—in fact, to fight harder than you’ve ever fought before. To do something harder than you’ve ever done. Victory in this war, it’s not always a straight path. Sometimes you have to do things that are unexpected, that make your hands dirty, that even you yourself doubt. An uprising is not a dinner party. But it’s only natural to have questions. It’s completely normal.”

  “Completely normal to run away and let my friends die.”

  “I heard what the spirit said, and so did you. If you stay here, you’re history. And then the uprising will be over. The chi-rho won’t just be rising over Trebizond. It’ll spread across the world. You and me and Herakleia and Gontran, we aren’t the only ones with ideas from the outside. Narses has some ideas, too. And those ideas are changing things even now.”

  “What are you talking about? That guy could barely put a sentence together back in high school. He came here twice and we beat him twice, and you’re telling me he has ideas?”

  “In some ways you’re right. In the first siege, you beat Narses, you killed almost all his guys, and you nearly killed him.”

  “We thought he was dead! I saw him get shot!”

  “But he came back. And this time he was stronger. This time he conquered Trebizond, and you guys only barely managed to drive him out. When he left, he burned the place to the ground. It’s honestly a miracle any of you even survived to begin with—a double miracle that you’ve rebuilt so much since then. But you can see that he’s getting stronger. He’s learning from his mistakes. I know you want that guy to be just some jock, and maybe that’s what he is, but when you’ve got the whole Roman Empire behind you, and you remember even a little about what things used to be like in the old world, you can be pretty dangerous.” Dionysios had walked around the pool and was sitting beside Alexios now.

  “It just never ends,” Alexios said. “The further we go, the harder it gets. These visions in my head…I can barely take a step without just being overcome with them.”

  “As the uprising progresses, contradictions intensify until the old society is swept away. People you considered friends instead become enemies, as the old society tears itself apart. Everything disintegrates. Things which seem permanent suddenly vanish as though they had never existed to begin with. All that is solid melts into air.”

  “I can’t do it, Dionysios. I can’t just abandon my friends.”

  “You’re on the council. Talk with them. Tell them about these visions you’ve been seeing. The uprising always comes first. But you never know. They might support this decision of yours.”

  “I haven’t made any decision.”

  “I think you already have. You’re wrestling with it now, the way you wrestled with that spirit. The decision to go east.”

  “But to go east where?”

  “Keep the rising sun ahead of you, and the setting sun at your back. Keep going until you find this dragon Hawajat talked about.”

  “He said I’d find it with my last breath. That could be years from now. Decades.”

  “You should have listened to what Isato told you. Spirits may speak in riddles. But we never lie.”

  Dionysios vanished. Alexios looked back and forth, shocked at the old man’s disappearance, wondering if he had imagined the conversation that had just taken place. What if he had only been talking to himself?

  Everyone thinks I’m crazy. Maybe they’re right.

  He found his way out of the secluded valley with the pool, and climbed back up Mount Minthrion. Isato and Za-Ilmaknun were sitting at the cliff’s edge, still watching the city below. The sight of sailboats on the sea with huge sails puffing with wind always amazed Alexios, and he struggled to understand the reason why. What made them so elegant, delicate, beautiful? They were instruments of commerce. Conveyers of wealth, money, slaves, food. The so-called goodly merchandise.

  Isato and Za-Ilmaknun turned at Alexios’s approach.

  “He has returned.” Za-Ilmaknun raised his eyebrows.

  “After a fashion,” Isato said.

  “I wanted to thank you for going through the trouble of channeling the spirits or whatever you want to call it,” Alexios said to Za-Ilmaknun. “And I want to apologize for beating you up.”

  “Beating who up?” Za-Ilmaknun said. “I missed the fight. And besides, that is not the first time! The spirits often tell us things which aren’t easy to hear.”

  Alexios nodded. “Yeah. You can say that again.”

  Za-Ilmaknun bobbed his head. “Why would I wish to repeat myself?”

  Alexios turned to Isato. “Will you come with me?”

  “Come with you where?” she said.

  “No idea,” Alexios said. “And I have no idea when we’ll come back. If we ever do. We could be leaving forever.”

  “May I remind you, your highness,” Za-Ilmaknun said. “You have duties. Responsibilities.”

  “Silence, debtera,” Isato said. “My duty is to the uprising that has sheltered us, protected us, and taken us in—as well as all those unfortunates on this Earth who have requested its assistance.”

  “You have a duty to the House of Zagwe—”

  “The house that turned me out,” Isato said. “The house that chewed me up and spat me away because it was disgusted with my appearance, with the things I said and did, with who I am. No thank you. I am under no compulsion to be kind to those who have sought my destruction. That is the kindness of fools. That is the kindness of those who have given up—and who wish to be destroyed.” She looked to Alexios. “I will go with you, if the council grants us permission to leave.”

  Alexios stretched out his hand, and Isato took it. Together they walked down to Trebizond, arm-in-arm. Za-Ilmaknun followed.