Thomas Harlan - The Gate of fire

"Who will train me?" Dwyrin spread his hands wide in disgust. "I hadn't quite caught up with Zoe and Odenathus before they left. Now I'm years behind the next journeyman! I see the regard the other thaumaturges hold for me-not as high as for a trained mouse!"

"This is true," Blanco grated, cutting off Dwyrin's next protest. "No other five will take you. Therefore, you will have to make do with me."

Dwyrin stopped, considering. The centurion was a grizzled veteran, quick with the baton or a mind-whip, never shy about using pain and fear to gain his ends-obedience and instant response. He did not have the technical skill of the other sorcerers, but he had raw power enough and years of experience.

"If you say so, Centurion…"

"I do," Blanco growled, standing up and brushing off his legs. "I'll show you what I can, when I can. It's up to you to make it work."

The Crypts of Alamut

Khadames, his face a mask of tension and control, descended a long stair. Thousands of steps, hewn from the living stone of the mountain, receded behind him. Three of the sixteen followed him, their dark masks ill-lit by the fires that roared up from below. The stair turned, reaching a landing jutting out from the rock wall. Fumes rose from the floor of a vast chamber, where great crucibles burned with liquid iron. The air was filled with the din of forges and hammers falling on ruddy metal. Khadames stepped down, his breath growing short as the air became thick with noxious vapors. Behind him, the three of the sixteen marched on, tireless, each carrying twice the burden of a strong man.

The Persian lord crossed the wide floor, wending his way between great levered hammers and gangs of men in dirty loincloths, sweating and cursing the huge machines. Great chains ran up into the smoke-fogged darkness above, constantly moving, ratcheting up and up and up. Even deeper beneath the tunnels and hidden storehouses of Damawand, a river surged in a black abyss. There, great iron wheels turned, driven by the snowmelt, that power flowing up through the sinews of the mountain. It drove forging hammers and bellows, pushing fresh air through the miles of tunnel, fueling all the constant industry that throbbed in the heart of the mountain. Khadames reached another stairway, this one cut into the floor of the long hall. Pillars of brass rose up around the head of the stair, and a crowd of half-naked Uze squatted around it.

The barbarians, like Khadames, were sweating rivers in the furnace-hot air, but they still growled at him and checked his body for forbidden weapons. They had shaved their heads, and many of them bore new tattoos in black and red ink. Scars decorated their faces in long stripes. Each man also bore the mark of his master branded on his left shoulder-a single black snake, with eyes of blood, curling into a wheel. The three of the Sixteen they ignored. Nothing existed in those cold metal shells and clammy flesh save that which their master desired. Finally, after examining all of Khadames' accoutrements, they parted, letting him set foot on the black onyx of the first step.

– |Khadames had been sitting in his office on the fourth level above the main gate when the three of the Sixteen had come to him. The office was notable most for the tall, narrow shaft that pierced the roof, letting in-for the better part of the day-a beam of reflected sunlight that illuminated the wooden desk at the center of the room. Khadames had been sitting there, hunched over reams of parchment and papyrus paper, feeling the millstone weight of his responsibilities crush his face into the plank tabletop. Three scribes-two Indian slaves and a Jew-were working in the room, sitting on the thick rugs and working their counting beads. Somehow, as he had struggled to keep the mountain and its inhabitants fed, and deal with the constant flow of strangers who made their way to the great river-gate, he had accumulated a staff.

At night, when he lay in exhaustion on the pallet in the small room behind the office-really no more than a closet with a sleeping platform cut from the wall-he wondered what had happened to him. He had served Chrosoes, King of Kings, for nearly his whole adult life, and most of that time he had been commander of the right wing in the armies led by the great Shahr-Baraz. He thought of himself as a fighting leader, not one of the scroll pushers who always followed the Royal Boar or the King of Kings from palace to palace. Now, in the darkness, he fretted that he was short of men who could use the counting beads and keep track of thousands of items in hundreds of storerooms.

Each day, too, he blessed the five hundred who had followed him and the sorcerer from the wreck of Palmyra across the breadth of the Empire to this forgotten, remote valley. In them he had found the captains and sergeants and drill instructors for a new army. Without them, the slowly accumulating horde of barbarians, hill tribesmen, wayward sons, foreign mercenaries, and feckless wanderers who filled the barracks and dormitories of Damawand would be uncontrollable. But in the five hundred, he had the brutal force and hard-won experience to take the mob and make them an army.

Others had come, too, as individuals and families, making the long, hard trek up the hidden ways that led to the river gate and the scowling faces of the Uze who were stationed there. The sorcerer had never bothered to explain why these peasants and townspeople had come, but when he passed, they bowed low and made an odd sign with their fist before their heart. Many times, Khadames had intended to question them, to ask them what tie or oath or religion bound them to the dark Prince. But time was precious, and the opportunity had never arisen. At first, Khadames had been at a loss to make use of them, but then, while he wandered through the impromptu village that had sprung up at the base of the road that zigzagged up the lower face of Damawand, he had smelled fresh bread baking.

The mountain-a maze of barracks and armories and assembly halls and forge rooms and cisterns and storehouses mighty enough to feed a city-held even more than that. Khadames was used to commanding an army in motion, driving against the enemies of the sons of Sassan. Garrison duty had never been his forte, nor had he ever served as a civil governor. He had never liked the simple truth that armies needed bakeries and seamstresses and carpenters and weavers and laundry operations. For long years in his service to the Boar, he had taken pains to avoid dealing with those matters. But that morning, in the bitterly cold mountain air, smelling the yeasty tang of a loaf pulled fresh from a rock oven, he realized that all of Damawand, with its endless tunnels and vaulted chambers, would soon be filled to overflowing.

That same afternoon, the peasants, artisans, and townspeople who had been drifting into the valley were moved into the mountain. A hundred rooms, long abandoned, suddenly had purpose. At the same time, Khadames had begun to worry about where he was going to get more skilled men and women. Once the full breadth of what was required to support the army that was growing impressed itself upon him, he felt rather ill. That night, Khadames had taken the time to climb the 999 steps to the height of the mountain, to the aerie where the sorcerer sat on a throne of cold stone, looking out upon the world.

"Loyal Khadames, welcome." The full power of that dreadful voice had long since returned. The human weakness that the general had glimpsed while the sorcerer lay dying was gone. "Is there a problem?"

"No, my lord," Khadames had answered. "I wonder, though, at the patience you showed when I did not understand your purpose in summoning these people. I have only just ordered all your followers moved into the mountain."

Lord Dahak had smiled, a cold glitter of white teeth in his lean face. For a moment, Khadames felt the full pressure of the intellect and power that lurked behind the odd yellow eyes, and he felt a chill to the marrow of his bones. In that moment, he felt how alone and isolated he was, here at the peak of the mountain, exposed among the clouds. In the short moment, the sky above seemed the mouth of an infinitely deep pit, filled with nothingness. Khadames felt dizzy and struggled to keep from swaying.