Narses’s life was draining through the fingers pressed to his skin. With all his strength, and with all the farr he possessed, he resisted. Nikephoros laughed.
“So we’re gonna do this the hard way, huh?” he said.
Narses gritted his teeth, and pushed back harder, but it was no use. Nikephoros was too strong. It was like battling a god—one huddled over Narses, a predator feasting on prey. His health, stamina, and farr ticked down.
The cold floor and vaulted arches of the audience chamber vanished, and Narses was standing in a place he had never seen. It was a dark hallway of onyx, with torches set at regular intervals in the walls, their flames flickering. Strangely, there was no ceiling to this place—or the ceiling, rather, was lost in the gloom, and higher even than the dome of the great Church of Holy Wisdom. As Narses narrowed his eyes, he saw that the ceiling actually had an odd appearance. It seemed to be made of stairwells—a dizzying array, a maze of interlocking paths.
A labyrinth.
So is this where we fight to the last? Narses thought. The House of Asterion.
That was the name of this place. It was impossible to say how he knew this.
Something roared in the distance. The sound echoed across the vast cavernous complex. Narses’s right hand went for his sword, and when he drew it, he found that Almaqah had returned—his great weapon, the undefeated blade. His heart soared to hold it again, and all his confidence returned.
I am a warrior of virtue, he thought. I will defeat this monster. I will take the Throne of Solomon, execute Paul, and marry Erythro. Our descendants shall rule Rome for a thousand years.
I have prepared for this moment all my life. I will triumph over all adversity.
Gripping the sword, Narses stepped forward. He noticed now that he was clad in his traditional black armor, light and strong. Nothing could stop him. His Majesty was tough, but Narses had slowed the draining of his own soul. He had created this arena, greater by far than the Flavian Amphitheater of old Rome, where gladiators drew each other’s blood to entertain tens of thousands of screaming spectators.
But here were only two spectators—two fighters—himself and Nikephoros.
Narses gripped Almaqah with both hands and whispered a prayer to the Virgin with his eyes shut. Then he opened his eyes and walked the labyrinth. Somewhere in the distance, the monster shrieked, and Narses paused and tensed up, his heart throbbing in his ears, his fingers tight over the blade’s hilt. The shriek was like stone scraping metal, but deafeningly loud. When the echoes faded after reverberating many times, he continued onward.
I have not survived so many battles to perish here, Narses thought.
The hallways were straight, turning suddenly at right angles to the left, then to the right, branching seemingly at random. Self-bifurcating. Narses did his best to move toward His Majesty.
Like a stone dropped in a pool, I move directly to my goal.
Sometimes his path led him up stairwells that rose above the maze, allowing him to see that it stretched for many stadia into the gloom. It seemed endless. But even from this height he was unable to spot the monster. He stood for a long time and looked for it in vain.
Must be down there somewhere.
Where the flames flickered against the walls, Narses sometimes saw shapes forming in the interplaying light and darkness. Here in the depths of one shadow theater was his young mother, whose face was a blur, placing him—just a baby—swaddled at the Chalkē Gate in Konstantinopolis. Both the guards there had fallen asleep, leaning on their spears, their metal blades glinting from the flames fluttering like soft reams of windblown silk in the nearby braziers.
She left him. He screamed for her to come back, but she never did. All his life she had been walking away.
Mother, why?
His wailing woke the guards. They brought him to the Count of the Excubitores, an uncouth warrior named Nikephoros Komnenos who took Narses in his muscular arms and called him his own.
Back in the labyrinth, after lots of walking, Narses’s path led him into a type of wall he had never seen before. It was vertical, yet decorated with stairs. Narses stretched out his leg and set his foot on one of the steps, and found that he was able to reorient himself. The wall ahead of him became the floor beneath him, and the floor behind him rose up like a wall. The torch flames ahead rose up into the air while the ones behind burned to the side.
Strange.
In more light and shadow, as he walked, he saw himself as a child living in the Orphanage of St. Paul—regrettable name—a structure so old that Latin graffiti could be found carved into its bricks. Located between the Gate of Eugenios and the ruined Acropolis of Byzantion—whose stones were said to have been lain by old Byzas himself—the orphanage was built beside a leprosarium, a hospital for cripples and the elderly, as well as a school for the blind and deaf.
In the light and darkness of the labyrinth’s torches, Narses saw himself as a child surrounded by cripples—often downcast veterans who had lost their legs to gangrene. For as long as Narses could remember, the pompous and puffed-up priests, monks, and officials working in the orphanage had demanded his help in reading to the blind and gesticulating with the deaf. Wealthier cripples were cared for in palaces or monasteries, but the poor ones staggered or crawled or were dumped here, and Narses and the other orphans were responsible for feeding and cleaning them, and helping them live.
But he had no life of his own. No one asked if this was the way he wished to live. The priests would beat him if he did anything other than bow, keep his eyes low, and acknowledge their orders. To make a mistake, to rest, to whisper a joke to the other orphans—any of this meant risking a beating from the priests. Sometimes they would beat you just because, or do far worse things with the children out of sight.
Now and then the enormous man everyone bowed to named Count Nikephoros Komnenos would check on Narses and ask how his little legionary was doing. Narses once made the mistake of complaining about his treatment. The priests responded by bowing, apologizing, and promising that things would improve for the poor boy. Then, the instant Nikephoros left—after swearing and making threats—the priests beat Narses before locking him in an underground cell which had neither a window nor a candle. There wasn’t even a bucket to shit in.
A month passed. When he emerged, everything went back to normal, at least on the outside—the same stale unending normal. Black bread and cold beet soup. Scrubbing the asses of elders who wailed with mania, who slapped him and cursed him.
But after that, whenever Count Nikephoros Komnenos visited the orphanage, Narses always told him everything was fine.
The darkness of the cell had never left Narses.
Now he shuddered in the labyrinth. It was almost better to be here, alone in this endless maze with a monster, rather than back in that orphanage.
Simple.
His life there had passed so slowly, time had almost stopped, with the dust motes floating in shafts of sunlight, and a single cathedral gong endlessly humming. He had thought it normal to feel as though centuries passed between the sun’s rising and setting, but when he grew up and began to train with the now-General Nikephoros Komnenos and found himself feeling sensations with names like joy or exhilaration for the first time, he realized that nothing had been normal about the orphanage. In the training camp and the expeditions outside the City to Hebdomon and Selymbria and lands beyond, Narses soon realized that he made an excellent soldier, not only because he loved the general’s praise—and the priests and monks never praised anyone save their superiors—but because he had no aversion to killing. He even enjoyed it. As he grew older, taller, stronger, each time he swung his sword at someone, he felt he was slaying the priests—slaying his father and even his mother—taking revenge on the people in his life who had wronged him.
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“Where are you, Narses?” The emperor shouted in the distance, his voice echoing in the darkness of the labyrinth, making the torch flames tremble. “Let’s get this over with! I’ve got a work to do!”
“All my life I wanted to serve you!” Narses shouted back. “It’s all I ever wanted!”
“Well, you fucked up big time! You were a mistake! I should have left you at the orphanage and forgotten you!”
Narses sighed and wiped a tear from his eye. It was stupid. When was the last time he had cried?
His Majesty was the only one whose praise I ever cared about, Narses thought. You can only count on yourself.
He continued wandering the labyrinth, and saw himself on his old dependable war horse Xanthos, whose gleaming black muscles rippled as he galloped over the green plains of Anatolia, Makedonia, and Thraki, the hills rolling beneath mountains which were serrated with snow and ice gleaming in the blinding sun—galloping with the great unstoppable army, conquering the world while it turned beneath their thundering hooves, the soldiers singing Raise the Golden Eagles—a tune from Caesar’s day—as the pennants on their lances whipped in the wind.
Endless glory.
That was Narses’s life. Ride horses, charge enemies, rest in tents and camps. Tell stories with your mates, pray in churches for the ones lost in battle. Find yourself at the ends of Romanía, in outposts like Dorostolon at the far northern edge of Thraki, or Mantzikert in Vasprakani—that last one in the good old days before the Sarakenoi destroyed it.
From the farthest east to the farthest west, you find yourself.
Narses felt his strength ebbing again. His Majesty was trying harder to drain him away. Health, stamina, and farr continued to decrease.
“Where are you?” Narses shouted. “Come and fight!”
Down the hallway the monster came charging, his heavy hooves pounding onyx. He was a great bull, his shoulders the height of a man’s head, his body as long as a man’s, but he also had a man’s face—His Majesty’s face—with huge horns curving out of his scalp, their points tipped with gold, a spray of green laurel on his head.
The bull charged, and Narses leaped out of the way.
At the hallway’s far end, as the bull turned, he tumbled into a dark blur, and when he emerged, he was a tall man—muscular like a bodybuilder—standing upright and clutching a huge double-bladed axe. Only his head was a bull’s.
“A fitting transformation, Your Majesty,” Narses said. “Thus is your true nature revealed.”
Roaring, the emperor ran at him, and swung the axe. Narses deflected with Almaqah, which sparked against the axe as he swung it into the onyx floor, smashing it, sending a cloud of gleaming splinters into the air. Both weapons were stuck for a moment. Narses seized the opportunity to kick His Majesty’s face, which was gleaming with snot pouring from his snout. His Majesty groaned, then lowered his head and lunged forward in an attempt to gore Narses with his horns, which were like scimitars of bone. Narses dodged.
“I would have done anything for you!” Narses shouted. “I loved you like a father!”
Groaning, His Majesty pulled his axe from the floor, and this action knocked Narses onto his back. He barely rolled out of the way in time before the axe came down again so close to his face the shining splinters exploding from the impact scratched blood from his cheek. Narses saw his opening, however, and swung his sword hard, severing the emperor’s hands from his axe.
Critical hit!
His Majesty screamed as blood blasted outward from his wrist stumps in furious geysers. They were like two firehoses. He fell back onto the floor, gasping and forcing his wrists against his chest to stop the bleeding. His head changed from bull to emperor, the horns looping back inside the skull.
Narses stood and aimed Almaqah at His Majesty’s throat. In spite of how pale the emperor was from blood loss, he shuddered with laughter.
“You were always like a son to me,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I might as well tell you. All that shit about being abandoned at the Chalkē Gate by your mother—about being an orphan—it was a lie. You aren’t just like a son, Narses. You are my son.”
Narses lowered his sword. “You’re just trying to trick me.”
“My other kids, they’re no good. All they do is waste money and relax. That’s it. I could tell even when you were all babies. It was easy to see none of ‘em wouldn’t ever do a good job as emperor. They never had any ambition, you know? Now they just want to wine and dine. You were the youngest. I decided to try somethin’ different with you.”
“You put me in the orphanage to make me strong,” Narses said.
“That’s right,” His Majesty said. “And it worked. You ain’t perfect, oh no, but you’ll make a good emperor.”
“You were testing me this whole time. Years of misery in the orphanage, of the priests beating me and doing worse, of crying myself to sleep every night—that was just a test?”
“And you passed. With flyin’ colors! Only you went a little too far with all those cities you wrecked. You can’t have an empire without cities and taxes—”
Narses returned the blade to His Majesty’s throat. “My mother. Who is she?”
His Majesty managed to smile, and his eyebrows were raised, as if he was asking Narses to calm down.
“Good Emperor Anastasios’s wife Prokopia,” His Majesty said. “The last empress before my own wife, Ino Dalassena. Prokopia was a little uptight, but she liked a good roll in the hay now and then. She loosened up a little if you managed to find her special spot. A little winin’ and dinin’, a little conversation, a little tellin’ her she’s pretty and everyone she hates is wrong, and boom, you’re in bed with her. You’re a farmer, you’re ploughing her fields of joy.”
Narses remembered. Prokopia Argyra was just another rich lady living in the Great Palace, one who never spoke to the guards or servants except to complain about them, demand that they do something, or order them to be punished. The Argyroi were an ancient patrician family. Prokopia—as Narses realized with revulsion—was also Herakleia’s mother.
Years ago Prokopia had died of plague. She had never shown any interest in Narses.
“But how did she conceal her pregnancy?” Narses said.
“Nothing’s impossible,” His Majesty said. “We got lucky. The other guy was away on campaign all the time. He never paid much attention to her in the first place. They didn’t really get along too well. She was lonely. She needed a dick to ride. I had a dick that needed riding.”
“So that makes me heir to the Throne of Solomon.”
“Nope,” His Majesty said. “You’re illegitimate, for one, and even if I declared your parentage, even if I made the patriarch ratify it, the people would never approve. They’d burn the whole city down before letting an illegitimate rule. So you’d best keep the truth a secret. That’s what I’ve done for you, boy. Nobody knows. And if you’re careful, nobody ever will.”
“They just think I’m an orphan.”
“Hey, it’s better than being a bastard. For all the people know, your mother and father were married, they were just too poor to take care of you—too poor even to care for another son. But you were so strong and bright, you raised yourself all the way up to the top. You were my greatest achievement.”
Narses stared at him, unable to think of what to say.
“But there’s one last thing you gotta do,” His Majesty said.
“You want me to kill you?”
“Why not? You never had a problem with killing anybody else! And I deserve it. I’ve done a lot of bad things. My time’s come. I talked about passing the torch—and I meant I wanted to pass it to you.”
“But you can be redeemed.”
The emperor laughed. “Ain’t this rich? The one time you show mercy, it’s to the guy who deserves death way more than anybody you ever killed. You need to do it, Narses. You need to show me you can go all the way. Rome needs tough guys who do whatever it takes.”
Narses’s shoulders slumped. “I can’t.”
“Don’t forget who I am—who I really am. I’m the reason you were miserable half your life. I did that to you on purpose. I’m the reason you’ve always felt alone wherever you go in the world. All your pain is thanks to me. For your whole life, you never knew your mother or father, you never knew your family, you never even had any friends—any real friends—and it’s all my fault.” His Majesty leaned forward and grinned. “And I’ll never apologize for it. I’d do it again. No hesitation.”
Narses shoved the blade through the emperor’s throat. Nikephoros choked, gagged, and spluttered blood as Narses glared at them. Then the labyrinth vanished, and he was in the Boukoleon audience chamber. Having burst through his rope restraints, Narses was now hunched over His Majesty, pressing his hands to the man’s flesh and draining his essence. In a moment the emperor was cold, pale, still, and his pneuma had joined Zoë Karbonopsina’s and Hagop’s inside Narses’s ribcage, where he would carry them forever. Narses pulled off the emperor’s imperial signet ring and slipped it over his left pinky finger.
The XP gain was massive. Narses leveled up to Apprentice Farr Vampire (4/10), meaning that he could now absorb people’s energy just by looking at them, so long as they were only a few feet away.
Quest completed, the game voice said. Protect the emperor.
Protect? I just killed him!
You are the emperor now. Defend the empire. That is your new quest.
When Narses stood and looked around, the guards by the doorway were bowing to him on their knees. Paul had disappeared. Erythro—his half-sister—was staring at him open-mouthed.
Have to make it official, Narses thought. Have to marry her.
He walked toward Erythro and grabbed her. As she struggled to escape, he pulled her close, kissed her lips, and shoved his tongue inside her mouth.