Thomas Harlan - The Gate of fire

"Pfaugh! What a must!" Gaius held the urn away from him and nodded at Alexander to hold the silk bag open. Ashes spilled out in a thin gray stream, barely filling half of the bag.

"Must have been a small fellow," Alexandros said, curiously looking into the sack.

Gaius ignored him and tied up the top of the bag with the purple string. "Take this," he said to Alexandros. "I need to replace the urn so they don't notice."

Gaius wrestled the heavy marble cylinder back into its niche, then pulled yet another bag from his belt. This one was heavy. He pulled the top open and poured the contents into the urn, his face turned away. "Ay! You're complaining about the mustiness of this? What in Hades is that?" Alexandros backed away from the niche, holding his nose closed and breathing through his mouth.

Gaius stepped back and brushed his hands off on his cloak. He was smiling broadly. "Just paying my proper respects," muttered the old Roman. "Make sure everything is picked up."

Alexandros nodded, and they checked the area around the niche carefully, obscuring any footprints in the dust and recovering their tools. There was no reason to leave any clues to their theft. Within minutes they were gone, the tiny bobbing candle vanishing up the stairs that led to the entrance tunnel.

Outside Antioch, Roman Syria Magna

The rattle of wooden practice swords on the heavy plywood surface of a training scutum filled the air over the camp. Among the tents of the Thaumaturgic cohort was an added whine of small rotating fans that stirred the hot, dry air. In one of the larger tents, opened on one side by a raised awning, two men were sitting, discussing a third who sat opposite. The two men were sitting on triangular campstools, their boots planted firmly on the ground. The young man they were discussing stood at the center of the tent, his hands behind his back, his eyes and body showing great weariness.

"Lad's not good for much now," the first of the two sitting men said, a veteran with a barrel-like chest and sandy, short-cropped hair. "Without the rest of his five, he'll have to be assigned to a new manus."

The other, his superior officer, was a redheaded fellow with a stolid, doughy face. He wore the dress tunic of a tribune, with a gold flash at the shoulders, and an expensive leather belt. There was a streak of grease on his left hand and a smudge by his left ear. Watery blue eyes hid behind twin circles of glass, held in a fragile-seeming metal frame.

"He can't be assigned to an existing manus, one lacking a digit? There were losses at Kerenos that have not been replaced."

The tribune looked Dwyrin up and down, measuring him for the market. The Hibernian ignored him, staring dolefully over the heads of his superior officers. Since Odenathus and Zoe had left, he had been at loose ends. There was no one to practice with-all of the other thaumaturges in the cohort were at least a dozen years his senior and far beyond his skills. He had tried to keep up the daily drill, but too much of it depended on having the rest of your five in hand. The Legions taught cooperative tactics in battle thaumaturgy. In the end, all that he had been able to do was practice fire-casting, which came easily to him, anyway, and the most basic wards and signs.

Blanco frowned, considering the tribune's words. He had already thought of moving the boy into one of the empty slots in the other fives. Unfortunately, every five-leader he had approached had angrily rejected the idea. It took too long for a battle-mage group, whether of three men or five, to learn to battlecast together. No one wanted to start over with a boy of little training. Slowly, and with regret, the centurion shook his head no.

"Tribune Quintus, he will have to go to a new-formed manus with other fresh recruits."

The tribune sighed, though it was obvious that he was not concerned about the issue. He had rosters to fill out and men to shuffle about. If this boy could fill one of his tally-slots, then so much the better!

"Very well, keep an eye out for him and keep him out of trouble, Centurion. He'll be reassigned once he gets to Constantinople."

Dwyrin felt his heart sink even further. Now he truly had no place here. It would be pleasant, he thought, to smash in that cowlike face and its bland indifference to my pain. But he could not. Surely not with Blanco glowering at him, and beyond that? A soldier striking a superior officer got more than the lash, that was a surety. The thought of marching all the way back to the capital, alone and friendless, was a crushing weight.

"Dismissed," the tribune said, turning away to consider his paperwork.

– |Dwyrin sat alone, in darkness, under a clear night sky. The wagon had been "appropriated" by one of the other units, leaving him with only a blanket and ground cloth for shelter. He could, he supposed, get a bunk in one of the legionary tents that lined the streets of the great camp. There seemed little point in that, not with an endless succession of clear, cloudless days and nights marking their time in the Orontes valley. The moon had not yet risen, letting the vast wash of stars shine in full glory above. The night wind hissed off the desert, too, as he lay on his back, the blanket rolled under his head.

He could hear men on the watch as they passed along the camp-street, complaining about the nip in the wind. That brought half a smile to his lips, even through the deep funk that had gripped him. He was a poor student of the defensive arts that so intrigued the thaumaturges, but he could control fire and heat and warmth. Even enough to summon the latent heat from the rocks that littered the field and wrap it around himself as an invisible blanket. Once, in the high mountains of Albania, he had cursed the other mages for this skill, but it had come easily to him, once he put his thought to it.

Bats wheeled and chittered overhead, hunting in the night. Their voices were indistinct, but they tugged him toward a kind of peace. Bats sounded much the same in his distant home, when they blurred over the fields of wheat and rye. For a moment he wondered why that life seemed so distant. But, in the end, it did not matter. He was sworn to the Legion and owed them twenty years of his young life. I will be in the Legion until I die. It was a mournful thought, but it felt true as he thought it.

"MacDonald?" Blanco's voice was unexpected, coming from the darkness. Dwyrin could hear the crunch of boots on the dirt and gravel. "I see you're still awake."

Dwyrin sat up, his forearms on his knees. He was tired, but could not sleep. "Ave, Centurion. What brings you out at this late hour?"

Blanco sat, brushing a scorpion out of his way. In Dwyrin's mage sight, it glowed a faint blue as it scuttled away between the rocks. "You," Blanco said in a resigned voice. "I seem to remember tasking someone else with you and your troubles, but she has bunkered off, which means I must deal with these things myself."

"Centurion, you needn't do anything." Dwyrin's voice was resigned, but he had considered this as well as he had sat listlessly in the shade of one of the wagons for the past three days. Like the rest of his unit, he had received three day-pass chits to go into the city. He still had them. The thought of smiling, cheerful people, their faces flushed with wine and dancing, made his stomach roil and brought the taste of bile to his mouth. As long as there was a daily ration of wine and something to eat, he would live. At the moment, beyond that, he had little care. "I'll do my best to stay out of the tribune's sight," he continued, waving a hand. "I'll be no trouble."

Blanco grunted and tapped his fingers on his belt. "That," the centurion said, "is not what I want. You're a soldier in my cohort. You need to learn the skills that the others know, to master your focus and power. You'll ever be behind if you do not… This is my responsibility, to see you trained and equipped and ready for battle."