Thomas Harlan - The shadow of Ararat

This isn't a summer party on the Seven Hills, she thought, someone will be dead soon… maybe a fat woman with no sense of style.

She missed the Duchess. Anastasia was so skilled with this kind of thing that were she here, the barbarian woman would have already fled in shame. The Roman woman smoothed her sleeves over the hidden shapes of the spring-gun and her knife. She still had some small consolations.

The lead Walach stopped, raising a hand in warning. Silently he pointed to the left, into a dark recess. The stock trail turned away to the right, into a high barrel-vaulted building made of thick courses of stone blocks with bricks laid in between. The smell of sheep and goats tickled the nose. Krista watched the Prince advance carefully and confer with the two Walach boys.

"Soon," Gaius Julius said in her ear, "there will be some blood spilled."

Krista nodded, turning around to keep the old Roman in view. The others had stopped, the Walach squatting, Alais drifting up to the Prince, her hand resting lightly on his shoulder. Gaius Julius met her eye and winked, his face holding back some suppressed amusement.

Krista's left eyelid flickered in anger and then she made a small smile. "You must be pleased, seeing battle again…"

Gaius Julius grimaced and shook his head.

"No," he said, "I never miss war. I miss the disputation in the Forum. I miss testing my wit and voice against others. This escapade has some intrigue, but little else… I used to say that war was the recourse of the defeated or the barbarian who knew no better. If you had to fight, you had already lost your case, you see?"

The Prince hissed at them and they turned. Maxian gestured toward the dark recess. One of the Walach boys was disappearing down the flight of brick steps hidden within its shadow. Krista nodded but then held back until everyone else had gone ahead. She took one last look around, starting with alarm when a white face appeared at the doorway of the barrel-vaulted building. Then she smiled and nearly laughed aloud.

A puzzled-looking goat stared after her as she turned and descended the stairs.

– |Krista hurried down the stairs. At last the staircase wound to a stop and a narrow corridor split off from it. She had to bend down to keep from bumping her head against the triangular roof. The Prince had stopped ahead, his face illuminated by a pale-green light. The others were kneeling on the dusty floor.

"Ahead of us," the Prince whispered, "is a wooden door. It is not locked, but there is a pattern on it. Khiron, take our Persian friend forward and use his hand to open the door." The Prince smiled, his green-lit features corpselike in the darkness.

"Beyond that door is a hall. I can smell smoke. We go to the right and head for the center of the chambers. The priests will come to me, or I will go to them. Then we will settle this dispute. Remember, we need to find the Sarcophagus-so take anyone that you find alive!"

He glared at the Walach and Khiron in particular. The homunculus met his eyes with an impassive stare. The Walach boys bobbed their heads in acknowledgment. Alais smiled, her lips softly moist. Krista checked the lacings on her boots and the tightness of the leather harness she wore around her slim waist. Fingers touched each weapon and tool in turn, ensuring that they were still in place. Khiron moved ahead to the door, the body of the Persian held limply in front of him.

There was a clicking sound and the door opened, flooding the dark passage with warm orange light from some hidden fire. Khiron cast the Persian's unconscious body aside and blurred through the opening. The Walach boys bolted into the chamber on its heels. Maxian moved forward but stopped, holding up a hand to prevent Alais and Gaius Julius from entering.

There was a savage howl and sudden screams from beyond the door. Men shouted and there was a clatter of metal and ceramics falling. The Prince, silhouetted in the doorway, raised his hand and thunder spoke, shaking dust loose from the corridor's ceiling.

– |The caverns under the ziggurat were ancient broad brick-lined passages with triangular ceilings. Maxian stormed forward through them, wrapped in smoke and fire.

Khiron's fingers dug into the dark wood of a door fifteen feet high in a wall of sandstone blocks each bigger than a tall man. Ancient oak splintered and snapped as his fingernails dug into the surface. The Prince stood back, his cloak furled around his shoulders, his eyes dark. The panel groaned as the homunculus put his shoulder and leg into it. Iron bolts quivered and then screeched in agony as they pulled out of the wall. The muscles in the creature's back bunched and strained under his mottled translucent skin.

The bar that held the great door closed creaked. Blood, thick and black, seeped out of the deep holes that the homunculus had gouged in the oak panels.

The bar snapped with a sharp report like an amphora dropped from a great height onto a marble floor. Khiron cried out, an animal shout, and tore the door out of the wall. With a heave, he cast it aside, crashing into a pottery statue of a long-dead king. Blue-white fire blossomed in the doorway and the homunculus staggered back, covered with licking flames and screaming soundlessly.

Maxian's face contorted into a grimace and he flared his hands out from his body, palms facing forward. The blue-white flame snuffed out, a candle plunged into deep water. Khiron collapsed to the ground, a puppet with strings suddenly cut. The Prince clenched his right fist and punched in the air at the door. The remaining panel boomed and then sheared out of the wall, sending fifteen-inch iron pins spinning across the chamber. The Walach boys ducked as the bolts flashed past. The oaken door spun away into the vast room beyond with an echoing roar and smashed into a flight of steps that occupied the far wall.

Krista picked herself up from the brick floor and shook her hair out of her eyes. Kneeling, she hurriedly rewove the braid that had come loose. The Walach boys had loped forward into the great chamber, but Gaius Julius' whistle had brought them back to heel. The Prince stood in the doorway, his arms held away from his body. Alais had moved to place the Prince between her and the room. Krista slid the long water-steel knife out of her forearm sheath for the first time. The metal gleamed in the ruddy light spilling through the doorway.

Flame roared and hissed in the great room, rushing up from two rows of pits along the walls of the chamber. Between each pit, statues of frowning men in long robes rose up to the murky roof. The men on the right-hand side were clean-shaven with high foreheads. The men on the left were scarred and ugly, their faces distorted with rage. The floor between the rows of statues gleamed with polished hexagonal tiles. The shattered door had sprayed wooden splinters and chunks of oaken panel across the space. At the far end, the entire wall was a staircase rising up to some other level, currently unseen.

The three old men who had confronted Gaius Julius on the ziggurat stood on the steps, the hot wind from the fire pits ruffling their beards. A few servants were arrayed at the base of the steps, though the scything door had pulverized two of them, leaving a bloody smear of limbs and intestines on the floor. The Prince descended the short flight of steps inside the shattered door, his own followers spreading out in an arc behind him.

Krista stepped through the door and slid to one side, vanishing into the murky shadows at the fringe of the room. While the Prince advanced slowly across the broad floor, she flitted through the space behind the statues, feeling her way through the darkness between bands of illumination. The rumble and roar of flames was constant, filling the entire vast room.

"We bade you leave this place." The voice of the walnut-hued man rumbled out above the hiss of flames. "Yet you come against us with steel and claw."