In the evenings, Narses visited the blacksmiths and alchemists in the Great Palace’s Mangana armory. This place abutted the polo field, where various emperors and princelings in the past had allayed their boredom by riding coursers, whacking wooden balls with long mallets, and falling off their mounts and breaking their necks, thereby precipitating civil wars and succession crises that consumed entire nations and populations in flames. There was also a monastery.

Amid the cryings of white peacocks, the roars of lions in the bestiary, the groaning of camels in the stables, the blacksmiths had brought their forges and tools here and were trying to construct a smaller basilik, the more portable kind favored by the defeated Trapezuntine criminals. (Paul had earlier informed Narses that the scouts sent to Trebizond had returned early, having made excellent time, to report that Trebizond was indeed defeated.)

Now Narses and Paul described these weapons as resembling long cylindrical bells, though even bells were unfamiliar to local blacksmiths, the ones used in Galata’s Latin churches having been shipped there from the great forges of Venetia. Otherwise bells would have been unknown in Konstantinopolis. People would have called the very idea an affront to God—using crude metal to make music and call the faithful to pray. Like many things in his life, this backwardness frustrated Narses.

Must Rome always be behind? Must I always teach everyone the basics? It is as though if you have any intelligence, any industry or creativity, everyone wonders what you are doing here. They doubt me—they laugh at my claims—then I prove them wrong, and they themselves soon believe that they had always agreed with me in the first place! Then I tell them some new idea, and they mock me again, and the cycle repeats. This City is the home of lazy, incompetent fools, all still living off the achievements of their ancestors.

So much for the blacksmiths. There were also the three alchemists whom Narses had ordered to join him in the Mangana. Each of these whitebeards wore a silk tunic and robe with a Phrygian cap, though they all hailed from different countries. Garshasp came from Sindh and Hind, Karsudan from Punt, and Sangan from Guri, an unknown land that lay beyond the Empire of the Seres on the shores of the Cosmic Ocean and the Cinnamon Sea. All heathens of some kind, they worshipped a relaxed, effeminate golden man named Boutta, but were also familiar with the thought of Porphyry and Iamblichos, and had broken their brains on every imaginable variety of abstruse mystical poppycock.

Narses had first found them in the cattle market at the Forum of Theodosios. They were performing magic tricks—throwing chemicals into fires—for a bored audience. Everyone cleared out when he arrived with his retinue of Turks and Varangians—Axouch, Sulayman, Sigurdsson, and Ironside—and with Makrenos. (Wanting the domestikos for himself, Narses had promoted him to spatharos, sword-bearer, while Kentarch Tavit had been promoted to Domestikos of the Athanatoi Tagma.) The magicians, too, had seized their tools and were about to flee, but Narses and his men stopped them.

“Your emperor has need of you,” Makrenos said.

“With magic tricks?” the wizard named Garshasp said.

Narses stepped forward. “It is not enough for me to transform this City into a great factory and barracks. Nor is it enough to make my men worthy Roman legionaries. Our great task demands even greater sacrifice—”

Garshasp coughed, saying as he did so: “Get to the point.”

Makrenos drew his blade, but Narses pushed it back into its scabbard. He only tolerated this insubordination because he needed the alchemists’ help.

“We intend to build a weapon,” he said. “A terrible weapon. One that might even allow us to reconquer the Roman Empire. And one unlike anything you have ever seen before.”

“The blacksmiths’ quarter’s near the Strategion,” Sangan from Guri said. Garshasp and Karsudan laughed. “They’ll make you a good sword and suit of armor if you—”

“I’m not talking about swords or suits of armor,” Narses said. “This weapon will render such things obsolete.”

“Will it also render air and water obsolete?” Karsudan said.

Narses ignored their pathetic jokes. “I’ve already gotten all the blacksmiths I need. I’m talking about guns.”

They were unfamiliar with this term, which always sounded Varangian to everyone for some reason.

“With the proper materials,” Narses explained, “fire can push a large, heavy iron ball through a cannon—a sort of long tube, like a long cauldron. This ball will then move with force sufficient to knock down a wall of stone. Sieges will end. Cities will fall in hours rather than months. The world will be ours.”

The three alchemists stared. Someone in the distance, on the Mese, sneezed.

“You intend to set a fire inside some manner of cauldron,” Karsudan said. “And believe that this will move an iron ball. Which will then allow you to conquer the world.”

Sangan sighed. Garshasp covered his mouth, looked away, rolled his eyes.

Narses was losing them.

These thinkers are different from army grunts, he thought. To force the wizards to work for me will crush their fragile intellects. I must compromise. Entice.

Unusually for Narses, his tone grew wilder and more excited. “We need a special powder. It makes the fire stronger. My logothetes have already found Orban’s recipe in the palace library. Orban—he worked for the last emperor, making weapons and basiliks, you understand?”

The alchemists shook their heads.

Narses went on. “You will help me translate the treatise, and then synthesize this powder. This is what alchemists like yourselves enjoy, is it not? The synthesis of unique substances?”

Sangan jutted his chin and narrowed his eyes. “What’s the pay?”

“Name your price,” Narses said.

The wizards huddled together, arguing and whispering. Then they turned back to Narses.

Sangan crossed his arms. “Five golden nomismas per month.”

“Done,” Narses said. This was five times the pay for a regular enlisted legionary.

“Each,” Sangan added.

“Done,” Narses said.

The wizards looked at each other, laughed, clapped one another on the back, and even shook Narses’s forearm—something they never would have done, had they known about the power it contained.

They don’t know I debased the coinage. We used to strike seventy-two nomismata from one pound of gold. Now we strike eighty-two from that same pound, but keep it a secret.

Bringing the wizards to the Mangana, Narses ordered them to synthesize the black powder used in the basilik’s interior combustion. His logothetes provided the recipe. This was contained in an old, inscrutable Seran treatise Orban had somehow obtained from the east, and then left for safekeeping in the palace library. But the wizards barely consulted it. Instead, they spent too much time fingering their own preposterous, moldering texts full of convoluted symbols and diagrams while blabbering about the Endless, Eternal One, the Ten Categories, as well as important conjunctions of stars, planets, and constellations.

“Venus and Mars currently rest in the House of Aquarius,” Garshasp exclaimed. “A most fortunate conjunction!”

“Oh, the mathematical purity of it,” Karsudan said. “I could almost get drunk on the numbers alone!”

They also mentioned vegetarianism and something called paramita. Yet when they deciphered Orban’s treatise—thanks to Sangan’s knowledge of Seran letters—it turned out that the actual black powder recipe was even more ridiculous, as though God himself was playing a joke on humanity. Aside from the brimstone from Melos, they needed a huge amount of evaporated piss crystals, called nitron. This required them to get drunk, urinate into the biggest iron cauldron they could find, and then repeat the process continuously for days.

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“Pissing and drinking, drinking and pissing.” Karsudan hiccuped as he chugged wine from a wineskin. “And getting paid for it.”

“It is a heavy cross to bear,” Sangan said.

At this time Doctor Shabbethai Donnolo wandered onto the field to see what all the fuss was about.

“Hey,” he said to the three wizards. “You guys really oughta take it easy. You keep drinking like that, you’re gonna damage your livers and poison yourselves.”

“I will damage your liver and poison you if you remain on the polo field,” Narses said.

Donnolo returned to the Hippodrome hospital.

Once the cauldron was full of piss, the three wizards boiled it to evaporation, leaving a little pile of white crystals which they scraped out with shovels.

“Behold the position to which we have been reduced,” complained Garshasp. “In the past we plotted the destinies of emperors. Now we are but mere boilers of piss!”

“Be grateful that is all you are,” Narses told him. “I have reduced others to far less.” Even then, he felt the souls struggling to escape the prison in his chest.

“You don’t frighten me, Lord Narses.” Garshasp left his two companions and stuck his beaklike nose so close to Narses it nearly poked his face. “The people of the City may be intimidated by your lucky sleights of hand, but I recognize a charlatan when I see one.”

“You see in me some of yourself.” Narses smiled at Sangan’s two terrified companions, who were both motioning for him to shut up and go away.

“The worst parts of myself,” Garshasp said. “Taken to outrageous extremes.”

“No one is more moderate or reasonable than me. Didn’t you know that, Garshasp?”

Karsudan cleared his throat. “Narses knows nothing of the Middle Way. He is unawakened.”

“The Middle Way?” Narses said. “You mean the Mese Ordos?” He gestured to the City’s main thoroughfare, which lay just over the walls.

“Enough of this,” Sangan said. “We will never finish if we keep arguing. Lord Narses, you have set us a task, now let us complete it!”

Narses relented. The white crystals were mixed with wood charcoal. Next came the brimstone. It had taken the merchants weeks to return from Melos with this long sought-after substance, a yellow crystalline mass with the devilish reek of rotten eggs. It was mixed with the other two ingredients in the proper proportions to form black powder.

“Behold.” Sangan stretched out his flabby arms from his long silk sleeves. “We have brought forth the hallowed shit crystals!”

“We could have just ordered some slaves to hack coal from the mountains,” said Karsudan. “It would have been simpler.”

The powder was stored in clay amphorae and kept away from any flames, according to Narses’s instructions. Yet the wizards, in their excitement, mocked him to his face, joking about how he had paid them so many nomismas to produce a substance so manifestly ugly and useless.

“May we celebrate this most glorious of achievements for artists, scientists, and philosophers such as ourselves.” Karsudan poured himself and his two cronies cups of wine from a large wineskin. “The famed regular paying gig.”

“Where we are paid to get drunk.” Sangan raised his cup into the air.

Makrenos was ready to draw his sword again, but Narses—once more—stopped him. The emperor then left the celebrating wizards. Some distance away from the amphorae full of black powder, still on the polo field, he used his fire strikers to light a torch—having to do everything himself, as usual. This being done, he thrust the burning torch into the field, then scooped a handful of the black powder from an open amphora and ordered the three wizards to follow him. Laughing and slurping their wine, they did so, singing and dancing arm-in-arm. Once they had reached the torch, Narses showed them the black shining crystals in his hand—they laughed harder, he was holding their evaporated piss—and then flung the darkness into the flames. The flash popped so loud, the three wizards leaped away, screamed, and dropped their cups, spilling wine all over their silk garments. Karsudan even lost his Phrygian cap. Only Makrenos kept steady.

“Now do you see?” Narses showed them his blackened hand.

They stared at him, speechless, forgetting even the wine that was soaking their silk robes.

In time, a prototype miniature basilik was ready for testing. Roughly the size of a horse, it could be moved on a single carriage, rather than the dozens of carts which had carried Orban’s great basilik in pieces across Anatolia.

Narses wasted no time in mixing enough black powder to fire a few shots. He was frustrated yet again at how he needed to do everything himself, but also too excited to complain.

“Perhaps you should have been an alchemist.” Garshasp looked as though he was about to vomit from drinking too much wine and pissing out too many nitron crystals. “You can join us, if you want. After you fire us, that is.”

“I was born to be emperor,” Narses said as he worked.

Together with the blacksmiths, the alchemists, some slaves, Makrenos, the best archery squad from the new tagmata, the patriarch and his retinue, and Paul, Narses had the basilik and its ammunition brought to the Prosphorion Harbor mole. From there, he aimed the barrel at the nearest Venetian ship, and loaded the cannon, ordering everyone to watch carefully. Then it was ready, at last.

So many weeks, so much struggle and doubt, so much fighting. It all came down to this. He had a small army now, but he could never reconquer the empire without basiliks.

With the same fire strikers, he lit the same torch as before—his lucky torch. He yelled for his audience to stand clear and cover their ears. They did so half-heartedly and with smiles of contemptuous amusement. Makrenos was the only one who believed in him.

Narses told himself that he would keep close to the cannon. If it exploded—if the metal was too weak to contain its inner energy—he would perish in the blast.

No point in going on if I fail.

He jammed the torch inside the firing hole.

There was a deafening peal of thunder, and a searing light, almost purple-green, that illuminated all the buildings in Galata and Konstantinopolis, every stone in every wall, and every cobble in the paved roads, casting deep black shadows as though from the radiance of a thousand suns.

Narses had forgotten how loud and bright it was. It shook the bones within his flesh; the flash could gash his eyes if he was careless enough to look at it. All the birds in the City scattered from every tree and roost, a black screeching cloud swarming the sky.

The old world is dead, the new world is born.

He had doubted the power of the basilik when Orban first introduced it, and on the long march to Trebizond the device had proven itself to be more trouble than it was worth. It was the criminals, later, in the second siege—when they somehow manufactured and deployed smaller versions of these weapons against the Latins—who had taught him their potential. Now he had harnessed it.

The black ball zoomed out of the scalding barrel through the cloud of smoke and sparks, hurtling upward in a heavy parabola before descending straight down onto its target. Slivers of wood burst from the hull of the Venetian ship, which was so faraway that a moment passed before the resulting crash pounded Narses’s ears.

The alchemists, blacksmiths, soldiers, slaves, and priests stared in awe. Only Paul was familiar with this weapon; the rest seemed unable to comprehend what they were even looking at. On the Venetian ship’s deck, men were running back and forth and yelling at each other. The crew of the other Venetian ship was unfurling their sails and setting their oars in their oarlocks.

Trebizond had already taught them what basiliks were capable of. When facing such weapons, one could only run and hide.

Narses turned to his audience. “You said I could not do it, that it could not be done. You thought it impossible. A crazy dream. A delusion of a mad emperor—that fire would move metal. All of you doubted me. Now look at where that has gotten you.”

No one spoke.

He gestured to the archery squad. “Now it is your turn. You have already proven yourself decent archers; now prove yourself Rome’s first artillery crew. Get to work and sink these barbarian swine.”

They bowed, acknowledged his command, and reloaded the basilik. Narses monitored them closely, and instructed them when necessary. Patriarch Eustratios Garidas and his retinue of priests—the last clergy in the City who would be seen anywhere near Narses—approached the weapon and blessed it.

“O, holy, holy, holy.” They shook holy water onto the hot metal, praying to the sky and getting in the crew’s way until Narses drove them off.

When the artillery crew announced that they were ready to fire, he checked their aim, then nodded for them to proceed. One soldier jammed the flaming torch inside the firing hole while the others knelt, plugged their ears with their fingers, and turned away.

Bang!

The black ball shattered the Venetian ship’s hull a second time.

Makrenos pumped his fist. “Nice shot!”

Already the Venetian was listing. Her crew was bailing her out or waving their hands and shouting for the other two ships to rescue them. The other two ships, however, were rowing for the Bosporos, their oars rising and falling almost too fast to see, churning milky foam from the waves. But the great chain slung across the Golden Horn blocked them. Disturbed by the two explosions, Galata’s populace had gathered at the shoreline and the piers to watch the battle, and now they were shouting for the fleeing Venetian vessels to come back. Without their ships, the Latins of Galata had little hope of survival or escape.

I will kill them all.

Narses told his artillery crew to keep firing, though he took one man aside and ordered him to return to the Hippodrome to find more archers to form a second artillery squad. They would train together and then work in shifts, firing as often as possible until Galata was reduced to ruins. As for the blacksmiths, Narses ordered them to produce more basiliks and iron balls as quickly as possible. The three wizards were to do the same with the black powder.

“Majesty,” Karsudan said. “We are but three men…”

“Find more men who can piss. We will pay for them.” Narses turned to Paul. “I want a hundred basiliks in the City in the coming months. With enough ammunition for a thousand shots. Every approach to the City—by land or sea—will be covered. Any ship that passes along the Bosporos without paying the excise tax will be destroyed. Then we will use the basiliks to launch an invasion of the Turkokratía—and wipe out the Turks. Afterward it will be the Latins’ turn. Rome shall rise again.”