While Herakleia, Ra’isa, and Joseph searched for a hiding place, Latins all over the city were shouting at each other in Gaulish.

“Le duc Robert est mort!” they cried.

They also yelled obscenities at the Romans, who were making themselves scarce—all but the beggars before the church, who had nowhere to go. Latin guards beat them and locked them in chains as priests inside the church rang their handbells.

Herakleia, Ra’isa, and Joseph had lived in Trebizond for months, yet none could think of where to hide. Should they duck into an alley? Or jump into the public latrine? Disgusting, yes, but better than death. What the Latins would do to Joseph, who could say—it was easy enough to guess, if Bishop Herluin got his hands on him—but Herakleia and Ra’isa they would kill, no question. The Latins would catch them, surround them, and hold them down…

Herakleia pushed the thought from her mind.

With time running out, the three fugitives dashed toward Jamshied’s blacksmith shop just as horses began thundering along the streets. So loud and heavy were these huge beasts that they made the ground shake enough to make the fugitives lose their footing. The horses snorted and metal rang. Any moment now the knights would hurtle around the corner with no regard for the people who could be standing in their way, the riders howling and waving their swords, the hooves of the horses smashing the cobblestones.

To Herakleia’s surprise, however, she found Jamshied working outside his shop, almost exactly where she had left him nearly a week ago when Alexios first warned them about the attack. Now Jamshied was using tongs to draw a glowing sword from a flaming forge, holding the blade against a cold anvil, then hammering sparks from the orange-yellow metal that radiated wavering heat into the air, which scintillated like the damascened patterns he smashed into the slag.

Unlike the last time Herakleia had seen him, Jamshied now had no assistants or apprentices to breathe life into the flames with the wheezing bellows, and a diagonal scar cut across his face and straight through one of his eyes—which, however, seemed unharmed. But rather than detracting from Jamshied’s beauty, this scar only added to it.

Herakleia saw and thought all of this in an instant. “Help us!” she gasped.

Jamshied regarded the three fugitives with an inscrutable expression. Then, dipping the blazing sword into a bucket of water, where it blasted the air with steam, he made only the slightest movement with his head, indicating that they should hide inside.

Metal boots clanked against the streets behind them while screams rose into the air. Herakleia pulled Ra’isa and Joseph into the dim, cramped interior where fire roared and sharp metal knives, swords, spears, and shields poked out from every direction. Aside from ducking under the table here or under the bed in Jamshied’s private room, it seemed the fugitives had nowhere to go. The shouting outside, meanwhile, was getting closer.

Herakleia yanked her two friends through the smoke, past the blades, and into the courtyard out back. They ran to the coal piled there and buried themselves, all save their faces, which they concealed as best they could. Herakleia winced at the stale, poisonous coal smell, which reminded her of the Kárbouno mine. It also felt frigid against her skin. At the same time, she was impressed with how well Joseph had adjusted to their new situation. Only minutes ago he had been a slave, but now he was a criminal, a transformation which apparently seemed normal to a boy with a life as full of danger as his own. In the courtyard he had jumped into the coal like it was a pool of water, vanishing so completely that Herakleia needed to ask if he could still breathe.

“Of course I can!” he whispered. “Now hide!”

Herakleia and Ra’isa looked at each other, then finished burying themselves.

By then Latin soldiers were already at the storefront yelling in Gaulish at Jamshied. Herakleia sensed that every able-bodied Latin man or woman was stalking the streets, knife or sword or club in hand, ready to kill or maim any Trapezuntine they found. A strange energy electrified the air. Until then, the Latins had believed themselves safe, and they had even relaxed a little on the backs of those laboring beneath them, only dimly aware that the slaves whom they considered to be less than beasts were actually human beings intent on revenge.

During that time, the slaves’ anger had swelled to bursting.

We lost the siege, Herakleia thought. But the war isn’t over.

Until she had killed Robert, she had felt powerless, and had smothered every thought of resistance which had formed in her mind. But this sudden act of violence was empowering. It showed her—it reminded her—that the Latins were not gods, but men, creatures of soft flesh and warm blood beneath all that cold steel and hard muscle and bone.

They had weaknesses. They could be killed.

And so, as it turned out, the old adage was true. Whoever desired victory more—whoever sacrificed more toward that end—would prevail.

Doors slammed, people screamed, horses whinnied, and armor rang along the streets. A Latin soldier entered the courtyard, lunged toward the piles of coal, and dug with his hands. Herakleia kept still and held her breath, praying for him to fail. The Latin’s face was out of sight, but his armor glinted, as did the sword sheathed at his side—sharp, long, heavy. Over his armor and mail he wore the white shirt with the red cross stitched to the center, which always frightened her.

He’ll pull us out and kill us, she thought. It’s over. But I had a good run. I kept my honor. I’m only sorry for Joseph and Ra’isa. I’ll fight if he finds me—I’ll die so they can escape.

The Latin grunted swears. Herakleia recognized his voice—it was Hilduin Venator. He was growing frustrated, but also getting closer. Herakleia felt the coal shifting above her head. Only another moment and he would see her hair poking out through the black rocks, and he would stab her skull. She would be lucky if that was all he did.

Someone shouted in Gaulish from the street.

“Tabernacle,” Hilduin growled.

He stopped digging, stepped back, and then stomped away. Soon metal boots were running on the street outside the blacksmith’s shop.

Herakleia relaxed. She could have sworn Joseph and Ra’isa did the same, though they were so silent Herakleia was unsure.

Jamshied entered the courtyard and shoveled bits of coal lying on the ground into his wheelbarrow.

“I told you I’d come back,” Herakleia whispered.

“What has happened?” Jamshied’s voice was so quiet Herakleia wondered if she had imagined it. “What has angered the barbarians?”

She whispered a quick explanation.

“You killed the duke?” Joseph rasped.

“Let’s be honest,” Herakleia said. “He was asking for it.”

Jamshied chuckled. “Oh, strategos, you had us all fooled. The barbarians were likewise fools to let you live—and even more foolish to let you walk about freely from a prison cell, with neither chain nor hindrance.”

“We all thought she was a traitor,” Ra’isa whispered. “It seems we were wrong.”

“I’d still be trapped in there if it weren’t for you,” Herakleia said to Ra’isa.

“And I would still be shoveling horse shit for rapists,” Ra’isa growled.

“What are rapists?” Joseph whispered.

Herakleia shuddered. “We’ll explain later. The question is, what do we do now?”

“Stay here until night at least,” Jamshied said. “You’ll find no better hiding place. You can stay here a month, a year, ten years if you must, right in the belly of this beast.”

“Hopefully it will not be so long,” Ra’isa said. “I wish to drive every barbarian into the sea…”

“Then you’re still with us?” Herakleia said to Jamshied.

“Strategos, I never left your side.”

She shut her eyes with bliss. It felt good to be back with her friends, fighting for what was right. Her wanderings in the wilderness were over.

“I will check on you sometimes,” Jamshied said. “And bring food and water. But you must remain hidden until dark. Even then, you must be silent. If they find us, they will do such awful things, we will long for death.”

Joseph whimpered. Herakleia wanted to comfort him, but she was unable to move. Yet in a way, she thought that it was good for the boy to be afraid. It would keep him quiet, still, and safe. The Latins were worse than any ghosts or monsters because the danger was real.

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Jamshied left. Soon his hammer was clanging against his anvil out by the street as though nothing was amiss. The Latins, meanwhile, must have ransacked every house within Trebizond’s walls by now. Wood was crashing and splintering and people were shrieking in the Daphnous suburbs, while horses were galloping back and forth along the Satala Road.

They’ll never find us, Herakleia thought.

She worried, then, that she had jinxed herself. Because she couldn’t knock on wood or on her head—old world superstitions died hard—she merely thought to herself knock on wood to preserve her luck. Wasn’t that how it worked?

It’s all very scientific.

Soon her giddiness gave way to fear for all the Trapezuntines the Latins were terrifying, harming, or even killing. Robert would be far from the only person to die today.

I’m sorry, she thought. But it had to be done. I couldn’t take another moment with that man.

All the meals she had eaten with Robert and the two times she had slept with him flashed in her mind. She shuddered. But her disgust was far from just personal. He might have been a conqueror, a murderer, and a rapist, but his desire to “uplift” Trebizond—heedless of the fact that he was the reason it had fallen—seemed genuine.

A friendly conqueror, one who stretches out his hand to the vanquished, is far more dangerous than a cruel one, she thought. The cruel conquerors make the contradictions of the occupation clear to almost everyone. But the friendly conquerors—the ones who even let the natives rule, so long as they follow the conqueror’s laws, and keep the cheap labor and commodities coming—they make the contradictions almost invisible.

“Strategos,” Joseph whispered. “I need to pee.”

“Fuck,” Herakleia whispered. “I mean—sorry. Joseph, I think you’re going to have to pee where you are.”

“You mean I have to pee my tunic?”

“It’s better than getting killed.”

“But nobody’s ever told me to pee my tunic!”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“But I don’t want to. It’s gross. And I’ll get cold and wet.”

This was reminding Herakleia of that time on the Paralos. “Then you have to hold it.”

“I can’t!”

“Joseph—”

“I’ll just climb out for a minute. They won’t see me. Nobody’s even here. The city’s quiet.”

Herakleia groaned. “Ra’isa, what do you think?”

“Don’t know, strategos,” Ra’isa said. “If you do one thing, it is dangerous. If you do another thing, it is also dangerous.”

“Fighting in the siege was easier than figuring this out,” Herakleia said.

Ra’isa laughed.

“Strategos!” Joseph cried.

“The boy may freeze and die if he makes water here,” Ra’isa said. “It seems, too, that the barbarians are busy with other people now.”

“Alright, Joseph,” Herakleia sighed. “Climb out and—”

The boy leaped from the coal pile, dashed to the courtyard wall, and unleashed a torrent of urine which splashed against the stone like a blast from a firehose. Herakleia raised an eyebrow.

He really had to go.

At this point, she realized that she also needed to, especially after all the time she had spent banqueting with Robert. Yet she also noticed that the poor boy was shivering while he peed.

Herakleia climbed out of the coal and snuck back into the blacksmith’s shop. In Jamshied’s private quarters she pulled the blanket from his bed—mouthing a silent apology—and, returning to the courtyard, wrapped up Joseph after he had finished peeing. He was dressed for the citadel’s hot kitchen, not for the wintry outdoors. Ideally Herakleia would have warmed him by the fires inside, but this was the best she could do.

Once Joseph had hidden himself again, she squatted near where he had urinated, pulled her dress aside, and released her own stream of urine. She rarely envied men, but she believed that penises made peeing easier when no bathrooms were around. Men also didn’t need to deal with periods, pregnancy, or childbirth. It wasn’t fair. Yet under the right circumstances, a woman could wrap even the strongest man around her finger—as she may have unconsciously done to Robert.

After she had climbed back into the coal, and after Ra’isa, too, had relieved herself, Herakleia wondered if Robert was down in the inferno, boring demons with his stories and opinions. ‘We thought things were bad before,’ they would say. ‘But this is really bad!’

That’s not how it works, she thought. They’ve skewered him from his mouth through his asshole, and they’re roasting him over the flames like a boar, sprinkling lemon juice on his simmering flesh and sometimes cutting off a piece to taste. Then that flesh grows back on his body so the devils can enjoy his agony forever.

The same fate may have awaited Herakleia thanks to all the people she had killed through action or inaction. As she lay in the coal pile, the faces of the dead came back to her. Robert was dead because of her, though he deserved it. Qutalmish, too, had died for her. Vatatzes. The hundreds of Roman sailors and soldiers who had died when she had helped Alexios annihilate their dromon with naphtha back during the escape from Konstantinopolis. She could still hear their screams, no different from the screams of the Latins who had perished in the fire outside Trebizond’s walls. When people were roasted like that, they shrieked like pigs at the butcher shop. It was a sound, and especially a smell—not just of blood, but of organs, of cooking meat—she could never forget.

Plenty of workers had also died in Trebizond thanks to her. When all of this was over, what would the survivors say?

I’ll submit to the workers’ justice, Herakleia thought.

Had the devil himself offered to save Trebizond in exchange for her soul, she would have agreed. No matter what torture the demons down in the pit devised for her, she would meet them all with a smile.

In fact, she was surprised at how energetic she felt now—like she could take on the world. Back in the citadel she had believed herself alone, and her situation hopeless, but at almost the instant she had risked her life to fight back, friends had appeared everywhere, as if conjured from the very air, and the idea of victory—before then, beyond all imagining—now seemed so inevitable, she could see it as clearly as the coal that surrounded her. Trebizond was liberated, the heraldic flags were falling, red flags were rising in their place. The workers’ army was marching on Konstantinopolis with basiliks and cavalry. Sailing alongside them, their great armada covered the sea.

But would she have felt the same if the Latins had caught her? Perhaps. Before her execution, if they asked for her last words, she would answer: “I’d do it again—a thousand times!”

As Herakleia fantasized, she kept still in the chilly coal, and her two friends did the same. The Latins tired themselves out, meanwhile, ransacking the city they had conquered, harming the slaves they needed for work.

You think yourselves so powerful, Herakleia thought. You think all your success is due to your own hard work and intelligence—until you suddenly run out of slaves. Until then, you believed your own lies. Now you know the truth.

As afternoon turned to evening, metal boots trudged back up the streets to the citadel, and horse hooves clopped slowly. All the shouting had ended, as had conversation of any kind. The only sound remaining was Jamshied hammering his anvil, the bright heat from his forge pouring out the doorway even into the courtyard, where it shone like gold in Herakleia’s eyes, warming her exposed cheeks.

A victory for Trebizond, she thought. As the enemy’s metal softens, the blacksmith goes on tempering our steel.

The sun sank below the horizon, and dusk faded to a frigid night—each little blue and orange star blazing in the dark like diamonds glittering on velvet. The three fugitives inside the coal pile kept silent and still. Trebizond, too, grew quiet. For the Latins in their citadel and mansions, it was a sullen quiet, but for the Trapezuntines, it was full of hope.

This quiet grew even more profound when Jamshied finished working. The clanging ended, and the forge went out. In the starlight Herakleia saw him step into the courtyard, his muscles gleaming sweat, his eyes shadowed with fatigue.

“I think it is safe,” he whispered. “But you must be silent.”

Shivering, the three fugitives stumbled out of the coal pile and fell onto the ground, their muscles sore, the marrow in their bones nearly frozen. Jamshied brought them into his private room, where a fire was fluttering in the hearth, and closed the door behind him. He had even nailed a spare blanket above his only window to make sure no one outside could spy on them.

As the three fugitives shivered before the fire, Jamshied brought them cups of hot cha, which they drank eagerly, sighing as the warmth seeped into their cold flesh.

“I almost died out there,” Herakleia whispered.

“Are the doors locked?” Ra’isa asked Jamshied.

“Does a donkey fuck a watermelon?” he said. “And the Latins would be fools to attack. I have been making and repairing their swords and armor since they took the city. They will leave us alone at least until morning. They, too, must rest, for they are tired from a long day of depredations.”

“They can sometimes be fools,” Herakleia said. “They would rather hurt themselves than surrender.”

Ra’isa looked at her. “What reason to surrender? They will replace Robert with his son Bohemund and go like before.”

“But are the others loyal to Bohemund?” Herakleia said. “They swore their oaths to his father, not to him.”

“I do not know barbarian ways,” Ra’isa said. “And I do not care. I think things will go like before. Bohemund is like young Robert.”

“That’s what he looks like,” Herakleia said. “But is that how he’ll act? Robert had a great deal of experience, he worked his way to the top almost from nothing, but Bohemund was born rich.”

“We can be certain of how the Latins will act,” Jamshied said. “They will continue tomorrow what they began today. The repression may continue for months before the city returns to normal, if it ever does.”

“‘Normal’ gave us this,” Ra’isa gestured to the air. “We can never go back.”

“You have awoken the Latins from their slumber,” Jamshied said to Herakleia. “But you may have also awakened our people.”

“All of us were stultified by the occupation,” Herakleia said. “It was like I was half-asleep.” She looked to Ra’isa. “Until you woke me up.”

Joseph, meanwhile, had lain down in front of the fire and passed out. His chest was rising and falling slowly with his breaths, like he was a cat, cozy in his blanket before the flames. Jamshied left for a moment, then returned with swords for Herakleia and Ra’isa. Each got a Roman gladius as well as a dagger sheathed at their sides, the game voice informing Herakleia about the bonuses to strength and agility they provided. The gladius gave the usual +10 bonuses, as did the dagger—called a tantō—but this second weapon had a peculiar feature.

If you use it on yourself, the game voice said, it causes a critical hit every time.

I guess that means there’ll just be one time, Herakleia thought. For me, anyway.

“The gladius is for fighting,” Jamshied said. “That is obvious. But the dagger, this is another eastern innovation from the warriors of a faraway place called Cipangu, beyond Sera—Chini in the tongue of Persia—and even beyond the peninsula of Cauli, too. The dagger is for if the Latins catch you. With such weapons you may keep your honor if disaster strikes.”

“I will not go back to the citadel,” Ra’isa said, examining her tantō. “Not alive.”

“Neither will I,” Herakleia said.