Harry Turtledove - Krispos of Videssos

Love or infatuation, Zaidas had spoken only the truth. "Someone special? She was indeed," Krispos said. Harvas had cost him so many who were dear to him: his sister Evdokia, his brother-in-law, his nieces, Mavros, Trokoundos, now Tanilis. But Tanilis had hit back, hit back harder than Harvas could have expected. How hard? Now Krispos' voice held urgency. "Zaidas, see what you can sense of Harvas for me."

"Of his plans, do you mean, your Majesty?" the young mage asked in some alarm. "I could not probe deeply without his detecting me; probing at all is no small risk—"

"Not his plans," Krispos said quickly. "Just see if he's there and active inside Pliskavos."

"Very well, your Majesty; I can do that safely enough, I think," Zaidas said. "As you've seen, even the subtlest screening techniques leave signs of their presence, the more so if they screen a presence as powerful as Harvas'. Let me think. We bless thee, Phos, lord with the—"

Zaidas' voice grew dreamy and far away as he repeated Phos' creed to focus his concentration and slide into a trance, much as a healer-priest might have done. But instead of laying hands on a wounded man, Zaidas turned toward Pliskavos. His eyes were wide and unblinking and seemed sightless, but Krispos knew they sensed more than any normal man's.

After a couple of minutes of turning ever so slightly this way and that, as if he were a hunting dog unsure of a scent, Zaidas slowly came back to himself. He still looked like a puzzled hound, though, as he said, "Your Majesty, I can't find him. I feel he ought to be there, but it's as if he's not. It's no screen I've ever met before. I don't know what it is." He did not enjoy confessing ignorance.

"By the good god, magical sir, I think I know what it is. It's Tanilis." Krispos told Zaidas the whole story of her struggle against Harvas Black-Robe.

"I think you're right, your Majesty," Zaidas said when he was through. The young mage bowed to the cot on which Tanilis lay as if she were a living queen. "Either she slew Harvas as she herself was slain, or at the very least hurt him so badly that his torch of power is reduced to a guttering ember too small for me even to discern."

"Which means all we face in Pliskavos is an army of ferocious Halogai," Krispos said. He and Zaidas beamed at each other. Next to the prospect of battling Harvas Black-Robe again, any number of berserk, fearless axe-swinging northerners seemed a stroll in the meadow by comparison.

XII

The walls of Pliskavos burned all through the night. Only when morning came again did the flames begin to subside. Smoke still rose here and there inside the town from the fires the blazing wall had started.

Two heralds, one a Videssian, the other from Krispos' force of Haloga guards, approached the wall as closely at its heat would allow. In the imperial speech and the tongue of Halogaland, they called on the northerners inside Pliskavos to yield, "...the more so," as the Videssian-speaker put it, "since the evil wizard who brought you to this pass can no longer aid you."

Krispos held his breath at that, afraid in spite of everything that Harvas had been laying low for reasons of his own and would now reappear with redoubled malice and might. But of Harvas there was no sign. The Halogai did not yield, either. The heralds called out their message again and again, then withdrew to the imperial lines. Pliskavos remained silent, smoky, and enigmatic the whole day long.

At the officers' meeting just after sunset, Krispos said, "If the walls have cooled enough by morning, we'll send men up onto them to see what's going on in there."

"Aye," Mammianos said. "It's not like the cursed northerners to keep so quiet so long. They're up to something we'll likely regret—unless they've all been roasted, but that's too much to ask for, worse luck."

The rest of the generals loudly and profanely agreed with him. Then Bagradas raised his wine cup and said, "Let's drink to the brave lady Tanilis, who made sure they were the ones who roasted rather than us, and who made Harvas choke on his own bile."

"Tanilis!" The officers shouted out her name. Krispos spoke it with the rest of them and drank with them as well. The meeting broke up soon afterward. The soldiers filed out of the imperial tent, leaving him alone.

He sat down on the edge of the cot. He shook his head. The night before, Tanilis and he had shared the cot first in triumph, then in terror. Now she was dead, and Bagradas' well-meaning toast did not, could not, begin to do justice to what she'd accomplished. Zaidas understood far more. Krispos wondered how much he understood himself.

Too much had happened too fast—his emotions were still several jumps behind events. Instead of victorious or full of grief, he mostly felt battered, as if he'd gone through rapids without a boat.

He drained his cup, then poured another and drained that. Then he set down the jar of wine. Tanilis would have wanted him to stop, he thought: he'd need a clear head come morning. He undressed and lay down where he had lain with Tanilis; the scent of her still clung to the blanket. Tears filled his eyes. He angrily brushed them aside. Tears were no fit monument for Tanilis. Finishing what she'd made possible was. He did his best to sleep.

"Majesty!" a Haloga guard boomed. "There's stirring inside Pliskavos, Majesty."

Krispos woke with a grunt. A guttering lamp gave the tent all the light it had; the sun was not yet up. "I'll be out soon," he called. He got out of bed, used the chamber pot, and put on his gilded coat of mail.

He saw the eastern sky had turned gray. "What's toward?" he asked the guardsman.

"That we don't yet know, Majesty. But through the grates of the portcullises some scouts have spied the warriors within Pliskavos milling about. Come the dawn, we'll have a better notion of why."

"True enough," Krispos said. "We'd best be ready for the worst, though." Night or day, a detachment of military musicians remained on duty. Krispos went over to them. "Call the men from their tents and to assembly." As the martial music rang out, he hurried up to the palisade to see what was going on for himself.

As the guard had said, no one could tell just what was going on in Pliskavos, but something definitely was. The wooden gates had been burned to ashes when the wall caught fire, but the portcullises' iron grills survived. Through the grillwork Krispos saw shadowy motion. He could not make out more than that, even as twilight brightened toward dawn.

Behind him, noise quickly built as the imperial army readied itself for whatever might come. Men called back and forth; underofficers shouted; swords and quivers and armor rattled; horses snorted and complained as troopers tightened girths. Through it all, the musicians kept playing. Their music got louder, too, as more of them came on duty.

The sun rose. Krispos sketched Phos' circle over his heart as he murmured the creed. It was also on other men's lips as they caught the day's first sight of the chiefest symbol of the good god.

Mammianos came up to Krispos. He said, "If they are going to try to break out, your Majesty, do you want to meet them behind the palisade or before it?"

"If everything goes well, meeting them behind the palisade would be cheapest," Krispos mused. "But we'd be stretched all along the line around Pliskavos, and they might well rush their men at one point and smash their way through us." He rubbed his chin. "I hate to say it, but I think we have to meet them face to face. What do you say, Mammianos? I halfway hope you can talk me out of it."

The fat general grunted, far from happily. "No, I fear you have the right of it, your Majesty. I was hoping you could talk me round to the other way, but you see the same dangers I do." He grunted again. "I'll pass on the word, then."