The stranger swayed through the blizzard toward the light, carrying the child on his back. Clothed in tatters, with the wind howling in his ears and the snow up past his knees, the stranger swore he had never been so cold. His sandals had fallen apart weeks ago, and he had even boiled and eaten the leather straps. Now his feet—wrapped in bark and long grass—were so numb he was close to collapse. As he struggled up the mountain toward the light, the sharp rocks, snow, and ice flayed his skin.
The stranger had spotted the light while searching for shelter in the storm. At first it appeared as a soft glow, like in a fever dream. As he came closer, a dark house with windows emerged from the whirling blizzard. A fire burned in a warm hearth behind thick frosted glass panes. Beside the house was a huge stone tower.
By the time the stranger reached the house, he was only strong enough to pound the door once. He then slumped into the snow, and the heavy child on his back pushed him down further.
Shivering, the stranger covered the child’s body, and brushed the wet hair from his eyes.
Forgive me, Romanos, the stranger thought. My best wasn’t good enough.
Something clattered in the door, which opened slightly, though it was stuck against the snow.
“Hello?” an old man said. “Someone there?”
“Help us.” The stranger was unsure if he had spoken these words aloud or merely thought them.
“Get away!” The old man pulled the door shut again. “Go back to wherever you came from!”
“No,” the stranger gasped.
“This is a military installation, not an inn!” The old man’s voice was muffled by the door. “I’m warning you, I was a kataphraktos, I’ve been in many battles. If you don’t leave at once, I’ll—”
“I’m a soldier,” the stranger said. “A kentarch with the Roman legions.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so? Move so I can open the door!”
The stranger picked himself up with the last of his strength and carried the child Romanos a few feet away. Then the stranger fell back into the snow. The old man kicked the door until the gap was wide and pulled the stranger and Romanos inside.
The stranger lay on the warm floor, gasping as the snowflakes covering him melted in the heat. The old man slammed the door shut and bolted it.
Romanos was still. His skin looked blue.
“My god.” The old man brushed snow off the stranger. “Are you alright? Forgive me, my good sir, I had no idea—”
“The boy,” the stranger said, indicating Romanos.
The old man dragged the stranger near the fire roaring in the hearth, then brought Romanos. A kettle had been howling on a metal shelf set over the flames. In a moment the old man poured the hot liquid into a ceramic cup and pressed it into the stranger’s hands, lifting the steaming drink to his mouth. It burned the stranger’s lips—Seran cha—but he drank it all, luxuriating in the heat scalding his chest and flowing through his veins. Once he had finished, he slumped to the floor.
Meanwhile, the old man had been removing Romanos’s soaked rags and drying him with a cloth, saving his long dark hair for last. Then the old man wrapped Romanos in a blanket and placed him in one of the three couches built into the walls.
“Hot.” The old man felt Romanos’s forehead.
“Will he live?” the stranger said.
“We must wake him. Get some broth into him. What’s his name?”
“Romanos.”
“Hey, Romanos, wake up!” The old man slapped the boy’s cheeks. “Stay with us, by God!”
Romanos was silent. The old man slapped him twice more, then the stranger asked him to stop.
“He needs rest,” the old man said. “Now it’s in God’s hands.” He made the sign of the cross and murmured a prayer to the Physician Saints, keeping his eye on a small ikon of the Mother of God displayed on a nearby shelf.
Lying on the floor, the stranger stared at Romanos.
The old man removed the stranger’s clothes and the blade in the scabbard belted to his side. Then he dried him with a cloth, wrapped him in another blanket, and helped him into one of the couches.
“What is this place?” The stranger’s teeth were chattering.
“Rest,” the old man said. “You’re safe—you have a place to lay your head after all your travels. It’s a terrible storm outside, the first of the winter, coming right on the heels of Michaelmas. I’ve seen nothing like it, not in all my days. How you could survive such a tempest dressed like that is beyond me.”
“Tell me where I am.”
“This is the Kerasos Signal Tower. I am Marianos, the signal-lighter. May I ask your name, sir?”
The stranger hesitated. Months had passed since the siege. During that time he and Romanos had struggled to get back to the City, fleeing the bandits roaming the mountains, keeping away from towns and settlements. Anything could have happened in the outside world in the mean time. The criminals could have even overthrown His Majesty the Emperor by now.
“You said you were a kentarch.” Marianos hefted the stranger’s blade in its jeweled scabbard. “An important one, by the look of it. How did you find your way out here? I haven’t had any visitors in weeks! I hope that doesn’t mean you think me odd?”
“My name is John,” the stranger said. “Kentarch of the Fourth Century, Hikanatoi Tagma.”
Your attempt to trick Marianos the Signal-Lighter has succeeded, the game voice said. +1 XP added to Charisma Skill (26/100).
The stranger was a Professional Charismatic (7/10), so it would be a long time before he leveled up to Master.
“The Hikanatoi Tagma,” Marianos said. “His Majesty’s elite guard.”
“That is correct.”
Marianos shook the stranger’s hand. “Well then, it’s an honor, sir. His Majesty the Emperor Nikephoros is truly a blessing. If you still feel like talking, and if you don’t think it’s rude of me, may I ask how you came here, and what happened to your horses? It seems you’ve been out in the wild for some time.”
“We were scouting,” the stranger said. “Keeping an eye on the criminals. But they ambushed us.”
Your attempt to lie to Marianos the Signal-Lighter has succeeded, the voice said. +1 XP added to Charisma Skill (27/100). Keep it up!
These minor successes pleased the stranger. A long time had passed since anything had gone his way.
“The criminals are terrible, aren’t they?” Marianos said. “We’ll get them for Trebizond. We’ll take no prisoners for the unholy things they’ve done.”
“That will be difficult without an army.”
“You mean you haven’t heard the news?”
“As you said, I have been gone some time.”
“His Majesty has restored the ancient tradition of Roman diplomacy.” Marianos refilled the stranger’s cup of cha, then poured one for himself and sat on the last empty couch. “Foreign nations respect us again. Some say he may even reunite the church and end the Great Schism. We shall have unity, which matters above all else. Satan has divided us, but His Majesty—with the Lord’s guidance—shall bring us back together.”
The stranger almost spat in disbelief. “We don’t need any Latin scum.”
“At His Majesty’s request,” Marianos continued, “the Pope in Rome has preached Holy War against the criminals in Trebizond, and many Latins have taken up the cross to aid us. Soon all the western lands shall be emptied. Even now they send a hundred ships here full of fighting men, for the poor people of Trebizond yearn for freedom, oppressed as they are by those devil-worshipping criminals who preach equality merely to trick them. We must help return the good Romans to the fold, and cast out the corrupt leaders of Trebizond.”
The stranger’s eyes widened. “The Latins have sent a fleet?”
“I swear by Holy God.” Marianos placed his hand over his heart. “Have you forgotten? I’m the signal-lighter. I help His Majesty coordinate with all the loyal cities and armed forces scattered across the homeland.”
“How could the Latins pay for such a venture?”
Marianos chortled amiably. “It matters not. Thankfully—God be praised—the children of light are now fighting back the savages of darkness. Even as we speak, the Latins wend their way here to cure the world of madness. Good shall soon triumph over evil once and for all.”
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The stranger’s eyes were fluttering, but the news encouraged him. “Then there is hope.”
“You seem weary, kentarch. Please rest, if that is your wish.”
The stranger nodded. He had stopped shivering, though now he could hardly keep his eyes open, and the game voice was warning him that if he neglected to replenish his stamina, his health would suffer. Turning over in his couch and wrapping himself in his blanket, he was unable to keep from falling into pure blackness, a sweet timeless infinity which lasted forever, yet passed in an instant.
When he opened his eyes, white light filled the house. It was hot and stuffy. A fire snapped in the hearth, and snow was melting down the leaded window glass. Outside, the sky was bright blue, and the white mountains stretched into the distance, the Pontic Ocean pounding their roots.
This place was built on a cliff, the stranger thought. I couldn’t tell in the blizzard. If we’d taken one wrong step…
After thanking God for His Mercy (and gaining a little piety XP), the stranger checked Romanos. The child was still asleep, his chest rising and falling with uneven breaths. Marianos sat beside him, wiping the boy’s face—flushed, soaked in sweat—with a cloth he was dipping in a water bowl.
“His fever’s bad,” Marianos said.
These words were like a knife twisting in the stranger’s gut.
The child, he thought. I can’t lose him.
“I have no fever medicine here,” Marianos continued. “I ran out some time ago, and the quartermasters in the City haven’t yet been able to resupply me. There have been many such issues lately. Trebizond has flooded marketplaces across Romanía and even beyond with cheap clothing and iron and coal, causing problems, particularly with money. A nomisma bought so much more in the good old days. That’s one reason the Latins were so eager to join us. Thanks to Trebizond, their money has become worthless, and they’ve had no choice but to release many of their slaves and peasants. There is chaos in Gallía and even beyond, in the winterlands in Thoúlē where the Varangians oar their long ships.”
The stranger lacked interest in such things and therefore paid little attention to Marianos’s babbling. After all, the stranger was a warrior of virtue. His focus, at the moment, was helping Romanos. Were there medicinal herbs outside, perhaps? No—they were snowed in. Even if he had known which herbs lowered fevers, he could never have found them. Yet a Zhayedan healing technique existed for this, one he had never used.
Only the strong survive, he thought. Yet if I save Romanos, he may be strong one day. He may help me purge Romanía of sin.
The stranger sat beside Romanos, touched his hot face, then grasped the boy’s bare arm with both of his large, powerful hands. Romanos seemed so frail and small.
Closing his own eyes, the stranger summoned the last of his farr. It was almost depleted—making him as weak as any peasant—but the game voice told him that 4/100 points remained. It then said that his attempt to enter the boy’s soul had succeeded, adding 25 XP to his Initiate healing skill (1/10).
While the stranger’s last points of farr ebbed away, he ransacked Romanos’s soul for sickness. In the landscape of the boy’s spirit, many levies had broken, and floodwaters were rushing through; the stranger bound up the gaps. Yet a storm raged in the boy’s heart, uprooting forests, smashing houses, fortresses, churches. A cracked dome was floating on a sunless sea, pillars slammed down, and bridges collapsed into raging rivers. The crops were destroyed, the farm animals were carried into the whirlwind, the farmers would starve, there would be no surplus to pay the soldiery or maintain the government, the rulers and their attendants would lose their jewels and Tyrian purple robes and beg in the streets like commoners. Everything was falling apart faster than the stranger could repair it.
This was Romanos’s soul.
But like an avenging archangel, the stranger hurled away the tempest so that it dragged its dark skirts of rain and tassels of glimmering lightning over the horizon. Warm sun returned. It lit the faces of the peasants cowering beneath splintered carriages.
This was all the stranger could do, for by then his farr was gone, and his health was suffering.
Back in the fire-lighter’s house, the stranger collapsed to the floor.
“Sir,” Marianos said. “I mean—Kentarch John. Are you alright?”
Unable to speak, the stranger now lacked the strength to take communion even with this old man. Only once had the stranger been so vulnerable. Months ago, a barbarian queen had tempted him so that he had almost betrayed His Majesty, an unspeakable crime. But thankfully the eternal laws had prevailed.
Marianos helped the stranger into his couch and wrapped a blanket around him.
“Is there nothing else I can do?” Marianos said.
“The boy,” the stranger gasped.
Marianos felt Romanos’s forehead. “Praise the Lord—the fever has lifted!”
The stranger fell back onto his couch. “Praise God.”
The game voice announced that his healing skill had leveled up to Beginner (2/10). It was easy to build your skills in the beginning, before you plateaued. At that point you would need a teacher to guide you, as well as a lot of time and focus.
“How did you heal him, sir?” Marianos said. “I’ve seen nothing like it. Not in all my days…”
“I was born with these skills,” the stranger said.
He considered taking Marianos’s soul and transferring it to Romanos, but the stranger was too exhausted. Soon he fell asleep.
This time he dreamed of all the criminals he had defeated in battle. At the Siege of Trebizond, he had thrown his Almaqah blade into a woman’s back while she rode a galloping horse. She fell into the dust, clutching at the sword in a vain effort to pull it loose. Then on Trebizond’s walls he drank a girl’s soul from her sweet red lips, and the blazing light surged like lightning in his veins. A ruffian’s head he had liberated from his shoulders before the gates of the city of Niksar, the stranger’s blade swooping through flesh, bone, artery, ligament, the ruffian’s facial expression changing from polite smile to gaping shock as his head tumbled into the blood-soaked grass.
So many Sarakenoi had met just ends by the stranger’s hands. The barbarian queen—whose beauty made the rocks tremble with lust—fell before the stranger’s strength and intelligence.
Now their ghosts—and many others, too numerous to count—crowded him in silence.
He laughed in their faces. “I defeated you all! What do any of you matter to me?”
“A reckoning will come,” the barbarian queen said. Somehow she reminded him of his mother in Romanía, though she was faceless in his memory, for he had never known her.
“Sore losers,” the stranger said. “You were weak, you were traitors, and I gave you all what you deserved.”
“One day we shall be free,” the barbarian queen said. “The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.”
The stranger shook his head. “You chose the wrong side, Zoë Karbonopsina.”
That was the barbarian queen’s absurd name. Zoë of the Coal-Black Eyes. Now he remembered the way they shone in the dark.
“You could have lived a comfortable life in the Great Palace,” he added. “Instead, you made common cause with the Sarakenoi, and justly perished beneath my blade.”
The dead surrounded him, pushed him down, smothered him.
“They defeated you!” the dead shouted. “The ones at Trebizond! They did it once! They’ll do it again!”
There were so many ghosts, it was impossible to fight them off. They laughed as they ripped him apart and scattered his flesh to the ends of the Earth.
The stranger bolted upright and gasped. He was in Marianos’s home. It was warm and the whole house was glowing from the fire in the hearth. Night blackened the windows. Romanos was sitting up in his couch eating bread and pork—a sight so beautiful the stranger forgot his nightmare and almost cried out with joy. Yet he swallowed the tears, for to show emotion was a sign of weakness.
“Hey, look who’s up,” Romanos said. “Want some dinner?”
“You could have been killed,” the stranger growled, suddenly furious at Romanos’s lack of gratitude.
“Live and learn,” Romanos said. “Now eat.”
“You have forgotten your discipline.”
“Sorry.” Romanos rolled his eyes.
Now that the boy’s alive, I almost wish he’d died, the stranger thought. Children are most beautiful when they’re asleep.
Marianos handed the stranger a plate piled with food cooked in the fire. Before the stranger even knew what he was doing, every morsel disappeared into his gullet. Marianos gave him more, and he ate, restoring his depleted health.
“How long has it been since you’ve had a decent meal?” Marianos said.
“We could go nowhere,” the stranger said. “The criminals infest the land like a plague of locusts.”
“Well, lucky for me, this house is built high up on the cliffs,” Marianos said. “I get food shipments straight from the capital. How did you even climb up here?”
“God knows,” the stranger said.
“The Kerasos Signal Tower has been here many centuries,” Marianos continued. “It has withstood harsher storms than the one that sent you here. Harsher storms than the one attacking our great country. Such storms cannot last. The more furiously they rage, the quicker they dissipate. I think the sunlight will break through the clouds soon. As a matter of fact, I know the Latin armada will be here within the next few days.”
Romanos cackled. “Don’t be so sure, Marianos. You weren’t at Trebizond. You don’t know what those people are like—”
The stranger glared at Romanos.
“What?” Romanos said. “I can’t tell Marianos? All he’s done is help us!”
The stranger threw his plate aside and climbed out of the couch to attack Romanos, but stumbled onto the floor. Unable to get up—still weak from lack of farr—he writhed there pathetically. Romanos laughed.
“He’s always like this,” Romanos told Marianos, who was shocked by the stranger’s behavior. “Always in the worst mood. Even when things are going well. Nobody can stand him. He always tries to do everything himself, then just keeps screwing up. And it’s anyone’s fault but his, every time. He blames everyone else. He thinks he’s the strongest, smartest guy, and that he can conquer the whole world all by himself, but for some strange reason nothing ever goes his way. He was born at the top of the pecking order, but he thinks he made it up there all on his own.”
“That’s not true,” the stranger said.
“This is no way to speak with your elders, young man.” Marianos picked up the plate, wiped the mess on the floor with a cloth, then helped the stranger back into his couch. “Now I’ll kindly ask you, kentarch, to refrain from throwing food, something I never thought I’d have to explain to a man as distinguished as yourself.”
“So he didn’t tell you we were at Trebizond,” Romanos said. “Did he also tell you his name was John? That’s the name he always uses. He was in love with Kentarch John, once upon a time, but the evil criminals took him away. He would never stop talking about it!”
“Enough,” the stranger said.
“You mean John isn’t his name?” Marianos said. “He isn’t a kentarch?”
“Oh, he’s a kentarch, alright,” Romanos said. “He’s the kentarch—the Grand Domestic. The Domestikos of the Scholaí, or the Scholōn, whatever they’re calling it now. This guy right here is General Narses himself.”
Marianos stared at Narses.
“You see before you the only survivors of the Siege of Trebizond,” Romanos added. “The only ones we know of, anyway. Narses was too busy running for his life to check anyone except me. I had passed out by then because some bastard kicked me right in the face, but I guess Narses must have been running pretty hard. Sprinting like a madman—fast enough to leave a cloud of dust behind him. When they wanted to find out where he’d gone, they just needed to look for a Narses-shaped cloud in the air. He zipped away like a rabbit. For days he wouldn’t even tell me what happened, he was so embarrassed!”
“That’s no laughing matter, young one.” Marianos eyed Narses. “Many good Romans lost their lives that day. They died for the Holy Cross upon which our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ sacrificed himself for our sins.”
“Give me a break,” Romanos said. “I knew those guys. They were all chumps. Who else would volunteer to join the army?”
“Do not speak of our brother soldiers like this,” Narses said from the couch.
“If that is so, why then do you fight alongside such people?” Marianos said to Romanos. “You are a soldier, are you not? Why do you have such contempt for the troops, young one? The ones who gave their lives for your freedom?”
“If this is freedom, I’ll take slavery,” Romanos said. “I didn’t join the army by choice.” He nodded to Narses. “You should have seen what he did to my home.”
“The boy has much to learn,” Narses said.
“Indeed,” Marianos said. “And manners is at the top of that list!”