Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

The guard held Eboric tighter and moved him slowly towards Chosroes, whose eyes flickered between me and the approaching treat. It was a matter of choosing the right moment. I needed to go for Chosroes when his normal reflexes were at their slowest. Carefully, I tensed every muscle. I watched for him to open his mouth to let out a groan of ecstasy.

Because I was too busy watching Chosroes, I missed the absolute precision of what Eboric did next. I saw from just inside my field of vision how he twisted round to face the guard and how he kissed him on the lips. I saw how he raised both arms aloft and flicked both iron bracelets to his wrists. I saw only in part how he smashed both bracelets at once against the guard’s temples. I did clearly see the creature go down like something stunned in a pagan sacrifice. Still more clearly, I saw Eboric take up the dead man’s sword and make a dash at Chosroes.

‘No!’ I shouted. I threw myself forward, grabbing the boy just in time. Even so, his oddly powerful momentum nearly carried the pair of us into the killing zone. I rolled on top of him and pulled him on top of me. We ended with the sword pressed between us. In all this, I’d barely heard the click of machinery as Chosroes tipped the hidden lever and then the deafening crash of his safety cage.

Every tyrant needs one, you see — and Chosroes had everything a tyrant needed. I’d never seen it in action in Ctesiphon. No one I’d spoken to ever mentioned it. Perhaps no one had seen it work and been left alive to warn of its existence. But I’d sat night after night with him, working out the function of the red square drawn on the floor and of the irregular contours in the coffered ceiling above where the Great King always sat when strangers were present, or those some turn of his frenzied imagination had given him cause to suspect of treason. I’ve said this room was a scaled-down copy of its counterpart back home. It was unthinkable its designers had left off the dual layer cage of bronze bars, eight foot by eight, that would in emergencies seal off the Great King from so much as a lucky bowshot. I’d now seen it do its work. Spikes on its underside had nailed it immovably to the floor. One of the projecting steel blades was barely an inch from my nose. Even after the reverberant crash was over, the whole of the raised palace continued pitching and swaying from the transfer of weight.

I let Eboric finish his orgasm dance. Then I lifted him, sobbing and twitching, out of harm’s way. I sat up and took the sword. There was no one left to kill for the moment. But the guards down in the pass would need to be drunk not to have noticed the fall of the safety cage.

‘You’ve failed again, Alaric!’ came the snarling cry from behind the tight bronze strands of the cage. ‘You’ll never touch me now.’ There was a double lamp hanging from the ceiling behind the cage. By the light of this, I could see the bowed shape of Chosroes shuffling about.

I looked at Urvaksha. He hadn’t been so lucky as his master. One of the fins had sliced him in half from right shoulder to left hip. The palace had settled into a slight tilt and I watched his dark blood run towards the far end of the room, where Theodore had gone still and quiet.

I turned away. ‘Get dressed!’ I ordered the boys. ‘There’s no time to lose.’ I think a couple of the support poles now gave way together. It was like standing in the belly of a ship that’s just hit something. I staggered to keep my balance. That isn’t easily done when standing upright in relation to everything round you means you’re off vertical by about twenty degrees. I gave up brandishing the sword and put it to use as a walking stick.

Rado brought forward one of the elaborate silk jackets in which they must have got past the guards. A dreamy smile on his face, Eboric stared at it. I kicked him in the chest. ‘Come on,’ I hissed. ‘He’ll get away and they’ll burn us alive in this thing.’

I was wrong. I’d guessed that the security cage was only intended to ward off an immediate attack and there was a trap door to get Chosroes properly out of danger. But no one had allowed for the buckling of the segmented floor. I could hear Chosroes pulling and pushing frantically at an exit that might be jammed beyond hope. I saw him get up and caught the flash of his steel blade. He howled in the terror of being caught in a space that didn’t let him stand upright. He rattled his sword against the bars. He went back to banging at the jammed trap door. He hadn’t yet noticed that Urvaksha was dead. He would eventually care about that, I knew. Every tyrant needs his safety cage, or something like it. And every tyrant needs at least one certain friend. When he got free of what was now his prison, there would be blood on the moon in his wild grief for a seer whose predictions had only been an excuse for their friendship. But he was a prisoner and it suddenly appeared that whatever blood he finally shed wouldn’t be ours.

I swallowed. I relaxed. I bent down and kissed Eboric on the face. ‘I could never have asked for a better son,’ I said gently. I helped him to his feet. I gave Rado a manly nod. ‘But do get something on you. We need to be away from here.’

Even as I spoke, there was another sound of snapping wood and of groaning palace sections. I’ve never been in a shipwreck. But that must be what the sideways collapse of the far end of the room resembled — that and the shifted slope of where we stood to about forty-five degrees. One of the lamps had come off the wall and was already spreading a pool of burning oil across the floor. If the outside of the palace was sodden from the rain, its furnishings might, with luck, become a royal funeral pyre.

Eboric was still fumbling with his clothes. No time for niceties. I snatched the coat from him and threw it over his shoulder. ‘We’re getting out as we are,’ I said calmly. ‘Keep your mouth shut. If there’s talking to be done, let me do it.’

Holding hands, the three of us slithered down the slope of the floor towards the collapsed far section. This had squashed an unknown number of the guards and I could hear maniacal shouting that took me back to the failed assault on my own palace in Constantinople. We slid down the silk rugs that still connected the two parts of the floor. I looked back once at the cage where Chosroes was now hurling himself about like a trapped wild animal.

‘Don’t leave me here, Alaric,’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t let me burn. I’ll be your friend again. I’ll make you Emperor in Constantinople.’ He raised his voice to a shrill scream. ‘Get me out of here and I’ll do whatever you want.’ He raised his voice higher. ‘Urvaksha — where are you, Urvaksha!’

Water was leaking upwards through the lower segments of the floor and the silk rugs squelched underfoot. Only one lamp down here had survived the collapse but it was enough to show us towards a sheared-off section of wall. Another few yards, and we could step out into the shouting, terrified crowd.

I heard Theodore behind me. ‘Please, Father,’ he begged in Syriac, ‘take me with you.’ I turned and saw him lying on his back, bound hands stretched out in supplication. No one could complain if I say that I gave him a kick of my own in the balls and hurried out alone into the darkness. Instead, I walked carefully back across a floor that seemed to have come to life beneath me and threw him across my shoulder.

The collapse we’d had so far wasn’t the end of the destabilising effect of the fallen cage. There was another sound of snapping supports. This time, there was a crash that went on and on. I’ve said I was never in a shipwreck but many’s the time I’ve seen a building catch fire and burn to the ground. This was like the final inward crash of floors. All that was missing was the explosion of sparks and the blast of intense heat.