by Ethan Cade Varnado
in Issue 105, October 2020
The Thracian Zagrios came at last to the tombs. Twelve mudbrick monoliths, houses without doors or windows, monuments to kings long-dead, their names lost along with the very language neatly etched into the tomb-face. Time had rendered these towers little more than shade against the scorching heat of the desert.
I’ll take it, thought Zagrios, and the Thracian brought his horse to a stop inside one of the long shadows. “Now, now.” He tied her to a stunted acacia.
He had bought the mare in Yazgerdad, on the edge of the Great Waste. A good girl, but skittish. She had been riding all day, and would need water soon. Zagrios reached into her pack and pulled out his wineskin. He shook it, making a sound like the waves of the Glass Sea.
He, too, would need water soon.
Not far now. Fifteen miles, twenty, a village by an oasis, Zagrios remembered, like he remembered the tombs. If he could find one, he could find the other. First though, he would rest in the cool shadow of the tombs.
No matter how often he crossed the vast deserts of Parthia, Zagrios never could get used to the heat. Sweltering. He dressed himself head-to-toe in robes, white, to shield his even whiter skin, and that left him a dripping mess.
“No matter how long I call this country home, I fear my body will always disagree.” Zagrios took another swig, then sat in the sand, settling his back against the face of one of the tombs. Soon he would make for the oasis, then for lands beyond. Answer the woman who’d summoned him this far. First though, he would rest.
He looked to the dunes, rolling forever beneath the heat of the sun and the weight of his eyelids. Mesas in the distance. Sky brutally blue. How far I’ve come, he thought.
Zagrios closed his eyes and dreamed of Thrace. Thrace, country of the deep gullies and the towering gray mountains, each of them carved special by the nimble fingers of so many winding rivers. He dreamed the Thracians, bone-pale people who never saw the sun but through the night-black canopy of leaves, who tied their long hair—orange as sacral fire—into knots to mark the grueling passage of days, who hid away their villages in the deeps and darks of that faraway country, ever since the fall of their king at Nicopolis four centuries past.
Thrace, the Slave of Empires.
Zagrios dreamed of his village. He sat with it, by the many-eddied swamp, watched the fog slink out from behind every cypress of the forest, savored the discourse of owl and toad.
He watched a girl of twelve lead a wedding procession. Violets in her hair. He followed her to the altar, stood beneath the thatched roof of the temple.
Zagrios heard the praise-song of Zalmoxis drip from bearded lips. “Come from the flesh,” they sang, “that our flesh of our sons might grow lean and strong. Come from the blood, that their blood might flow faster. Come from the bones, that theirs will never break.
“Come Zalmoxis, bride and bridegroom both, that our bellies may be full. Come Triple-Horned Zalmoxis, that we may crown a king again, and set him on a throne to rule us.
“Come from the smoke, that we might breathe free.”
Zagrios dreamed of a blood-red pit and the dull hum of water not far beyond.
***
When he woke, a boy was standing over him, a boy not twenty, with half as many hairs taken root upon his chin. A smiling boy, his black curls in a tight knot, with good strong arms and slim, curving hips.
For creatures such as this, Zagrios remembered—that was why he left Thrace. As red as the mesas in the sunset, he thought, and then he looked past lithe young body, to the west. “Shit,” he said, “the sun is setting.”
“It does that,” said the boy, still smiling, “nearly every day.”
“Local customs elude me.” Zagrios wiped his brow, then readied his legs for standing.
“Or maybe you’re just not very observant?” The boy pouted at him now, full lips, the tinkling of song in his voice.
Zagrios pouted back. “You’re standing in the light.”
He laughed now, and Zagrios with him. “Then rise, friend, and join me in the light—what remains of it, at least.” He held out a hand, and soon the Thracian was up on his feet.
The ochre light of gloaming swept both their faces now, just as it swept the sands. The boy was smiling again. “Tell me stranger, where are you riding?”
“The oasis, at the next town. I forget its name.” Zagrios shrugged and, in the distance, spied the shadow of another horse. “And you, stranger?”
“Home,” said the boy, “but I think we’re traveling the same route.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, for it isn’t every day two strangers meet in the shadow of the Tombs of Nepethys. Let alone, two strapping lads such as ourselves.” The boy’s eyes wandered. “Call it kismet.”
“Call me Zagrios.”
“Meru.”
All smiles, now.
“We should go,” said Zagrios, “to that oasis I-forget-where. Sun is setting and my horse needs watering, and I’m sure yours—”
“No. The horses can wait. I want to stay on a bit longer.”
Yes, the horses could wait, Zagrios agreed, they should stay and… he noticed that Meru’s eyes—gold-brown and lovely, two chestnuts, ripe and tender—were looking past him. Scanning the tomb. “Looking for something?”
Meru glanced higher now, to the pyramidal roof of the tomb. “Remember when you said I was in your way? As it turns out, the feeling was, briefly, mutual—kismet, Zagrios, it was really kismet. Why else did we chance upon each other, of all places, of all times? Here, in the wastes.”
“Why did you come here?” Zagrios asked. He felt foolish, not having done so. Old Parthian saying: the gravedigger loves a cocksure mercenary.
“Would you,” said Meru, lowering his lovely eyes at last, “like to see what’s inside that tomb? The big, one I mean.”
The big one, of course. Zagrios did a half-turn and pressed his hand flat against the smooth face of the tomb complex. Smoothed by time, smoothed by wind and sand. “How would you even get inside? No door.” Maybe it had been smoothed away too.
“Don’t worry about getting in. No trouble there. Worry about what’s inside.”
Oh, he did. Never mind booby-traps—the pressure plates that sent arrows flaming at you, fall-out floors and ceilings, inexplicable boulders—it was what they might find moving in the dark that harried him most. Bats, at least bats. Not an admirer, Zagrios. “What do you expect to find?”
“Ancient history.”
Ah. “I was hoping you’d say jewels. Could really use jewels.”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Meru, “if we don’t find any jewels, I’ll just have to find some other way to pay you back, once we’re at the oasis.”
Zagrios looked him over again. Plump round arms and a gently sloping torso promising, well, more plumpness. Kid was trouble though, obviously. He should really know better than to trust plumpness.
He stayed quiet for a time, thinking, didn’t talk even when Meru said, “Are you going to follow me into the bowels of the Earth, or what?”
“As long as you go in first.” Zagrios would follow those hips anywhere.
***
Inside, only darkness. Who saw that coming? Trick question: it was too dark to see.
Luckily, Meru was an experienced tomb-diver. “Don’t let that torch go out.”
“Oh, I won’t.” He held it delicately, half-fearing it might spill. In his left hand, a sword. “It’s this thing we should be worried about. Better with the poleaxe.” But that was a two-handed weapon, and Zagrios wasn’t fool enough to go traipsing around without a light to call his own. He’d left his halberd under the care of a very thirsty horse.
“You’ll make do, I’m sure. You seem uncommonly competent.” Meru lowered his own torch, to better mark the curvature of their descent. This tomb was a giant stair, swirling down into darkness. Cold.
Zagrios lowered his own torch, to mark the curvature of Meru. “Thanks. You too.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me?”
“Ask you what?” Whatever it was, it seemed Meru would tell him anyway.
“How I knew to open the tomb? Where to go, what to do?”
“Oh, that. No, wasn’t planning on it.”
“Huh.”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to be dismissive. It’s just…” All the kid had done was find the spot where a hummingbird was etched upon the tomb-face, then whistled a little ditty at it. With a terrible yawn, the tomb had opened for them. “I have a lot on my mind right now.”
“I’m not sure I believe that.”
“Well, what with the grave-robbing and all.”
“Opening the tomb was part of the grave-robbing!” Meru stopped short, and Zagrios almost tumbled into him.
“Okay, look, when you’ve been in my shoes, when you’ve wandered far and lonesome, you get used to seeing things. Marvels, let’s call them.”
“Like what?”
“Like a palace ten miles wide, with spires that climbed the sky, taller than any mountain. Long-lost islands in the Green-Glass Sea, that seemed to come and go with the fog. The hidden mountain caves where lionesses dwell dreaming in the winter, and where they wake, hungry, come the spring.”
Meru made a rude noise. “Boring. Islands, caves, even castles—they’re all just rock formations. You’re describing rocks.”
“Okay.” Zagrios was really looking forward to telling the cave of lions story, but okay. “Pirates, then. I once infiltrated an entire port taken over by river-pirates and dueled their leader to the end. Or, how about the time I climbed to the top of tower, barehanded, to save a clumsy sorcerer from his own spell, gone muddled and awry?”
“Yeah, I’ve met people too.”
“Once I fought an army the size of a city. Blood washed the rivers red for half a season.”
“Well that story just sounds sad.”
It was. Do these stairs never end? “I killed a dragon.”
“Really?” Meru stopped again, turned all the way around this time. His chin hairs dazzled in the torchlight. Six, Zagrios counted quick. “Well that does sound marvelous. And hard?”
“Wasn’t easy.”
“And I thought they weren’t real. Mythological?”
“There was at least one. Now, maybe not.”
“Maybe not,” Meru agreed, smiling. His cheeks were jagged as water. “What did you kill him—him?—with?”
“Him. A sword, of course.”
“Not a polearm?”
“Well, where do you think I found it?”
“In the dragon’s lair,” he guessed.
Zagrios shook his head. “In his tail.”
There was that rude noise again, and laughter. “A tale indeed. How could I ever expect to compete?”
Zagrios cocked his head, just so that a lock or two of his long red hair might slip from below his white turban. “Now I never said you were the problem, did I?”
“Who remembers?” asked Meru. “Let’s say you blamed the tomb.”
“I did. Of course, I did.”
Zagrios leaned forward, and the boy did the same. In the torchlight, everything glistened. Meru was all tongue.
Down in the darkness, below them, something moved. Scuttering sound—then a voice. Not a howl exactly, nor a scream. Animal or man, Zagrios couldn’t tell.
They broke, and faced the depths.
“I’m sorry, why are we here again? Meru, what’s down here?”
“Old bones,” he said. “Dust.”
“That didn’t sound like dust. Bats, even.”
“Nothing marvelous,” Meru said absently. “Answers, not mysteries.”
“All right, now I’m curious. Answers to what?”
Meru took one step forward, turned around once more. Lovely chestnuts in his eyes. His torch blew out.
“Meru!” Zagrios lurched forward, reached out, touched nothing. He waved his torch and saw only dust, like pollen, glittering.
Shit, he thought. Why did I ever leave home? Carefully, Zagrios took another step, descending, all the way. His feet touched the bottom-land.
Beneath him, cool stone, and above and around him, hewn smooth like brick, but Zagrios could tell it had been there long before the first stonemason. Like a good Thracian lad, he’d been trained from birth by the priesthood to recognize the ancient and unyielding.
Wish I was half as good at recognizing trouble when I see it. Wait, maybe I am. Is trouble the same thing as a pretty face? The priests would surely agree—Zagrios always suspected they had it in for pretty faces. Sagging, scowling, to a man.
But maybe they had a point. Ugly faces don’t draw you down into tombs, at least not prematurely. “Meru!” He reasoned that since he was carrying the only light source deep beneath the earth here, stealth wasn’t a high priority. “Whenever you want to come out, Meru, that’s fine. I’ll be here. In the dark.” Boy, it was dark. Real dark. “Meru!”
He considered turning back. Every minute that passed in this tomb, he risked his possessions, his horse, his mission—that’s right, he was on a mission, she had called him forth!—not to mention his life. Meru was cute, but they had only just met.
And did he want to see what lay at the bottom of the tomb? Even if it was only old bones… Yeah, probably should turn back, he thought as he took another step forward. Then again, that ass.
To his left, a growl that was not a growl. Zagrios swung around, jumped backward. I know that noise, he thought, but he knew it only dimly, and now was no time for enlightenment. He held his sword steady.
“Do it,” he said, not knowing what he meant. “Show yourself.”
Movement, in the dark. Zagrios turned to face it. He waved his torch.
There was a door in the wall.
Think I would’ve noticed that there. Suddenly it occurred to Zagrios that he’d lost his sense of where the long stairs were, and of where he’d been going. Not a good feeling. Well, nowhere to go now but forward. Into the obvious trap. Swell.
Zagrios approached the doorway, and when he stepped inside, he was blinded by light.
***
He stood, not in any stone chamber, but in a meadow. Blue fog, like tireless smoke. The light of the sun was dim, even without tree cover, but it hurt his eyes nonetheless.
Thrace. He was in Thrace.
Zagrios shouted “Meru!” again. He did an about-face, and the door behind him wasn’t there anymore, because of course it wasn’t. Forward, then.
Elsewhere in the mist, the half-human noise. His skin slithered. A faltering heart. Forward. He walked on, till the fog broke, and he came to the tall cliffs.
Here among the blue and green, red hair. Thick on the heads of little boys and girls, the chins of priests. Even on some of the prisoners.
Pale bodies, chained to the rocks. Naked, scrawny. Spaced far enough apart that they couldn’t try eating one another. They moaned, some weak, some strong. All half-human. Those who could shook their chains.
“Behold the wretched ones, the hated of Zalmoxis. See the worthless fate of all who trouble Thrace.” The priest ushered the children closer.
“Speak!” cried another of his order. “Tell the children of the follies that doomed you. Tell them why Zalmoxis, the ever-just and wise, imprisoned you here.”
They all of them moaned. The rattling of chains.
The second chuckled, while the first took up his litany. “Behold the tongueless, the mute of Zalmoxis, who brooks no heresy on the hallowed ground of Thrace.”
The children, they beheld. Zagrios with them.
“I will speak,” said the second priest, “by Zalmoxis’ leave, I will name their sins. These three, outlanders.” The men he gestured at were dark, of skin and hair, but this prison had whitened them. “Colonizers. All who set foot on the hallowed ground without worship on their tongues will lose their tongues.
“Bandits,” he continued, “who took more than the god of the hard earth deigned give them.” These were Thracians. Red-headed and dying. “And here, rapists, who spit on the rites of Matrimonial Zalmoxis. Killers, who took our sons from us, even as Zalmoxis of hosts demands we muster an army to defend the holy land.
“And these,” he said, “I would rather I cut out my own tongue than name their crime. For all the evil that these others prisoners have worked, these have managed it and more, in a single act. Behold them, heretic and thief, who deny the rites—who steal our sons from us. The sin itself dares not speak its name.”
Three guesses, though, thought Zagrios. He frowned; for once in his life, he felt glib.
“And here, like so many sinners before them, they come to their fated end. And you, my children, like many before you, you have come to face your fate. It is no less terrible, no less divine. Today, you put childhood behind you. Put it on the altar of Zalmoxis.”
The boys and girls lifted up their eyes. Zagrios closed his.
“Take up your knives, O children of Thrace, and make a sacrifice, that we may sing the Godhead out from impure blood.”
He squeezed his eyelids so tight, covered his ears, but he still feel the cold cruelty of the knife in his young hands, taste the damp metal of the blood as it seeped into the fog. He could hear the moaning and the rattling of chains.
How long it had taken him to forget that awful sound. He promised himself now, he would never forget it again.
When he finally opened his eyes, he was alone in the dark.
***
His torch was gone, and his sword. I should really be more worried about that, he thought. Instead, he just fumbled. Cool air all around him, then a wall.
In the chamber—or perhaps in his mind—the dismal moan again, and the chains. Zagrios clenched his ears and vomited. Yeah, much more worried. He wiped his mouth and spat.
“Meru! Dammit, I’m leaving without you!” Worth a shot. Knew he wouldn’t though. Why he left Thrace, Slave of Empires.
He groped forward. He fumbled his way.
“Zagrios. Zagrios, I’m over here.”
Meru, then. “Where?”
“In here.”
“Right, but where?”
“Follow my voice.” He sang.
In the distance, chains. His stomach heaved, but Zagrios swallowed. He always did. “Fine.”
“This way. Hurry. To me, Zagrios.”
Zagrios followed. He always did.
“Reach out!” Zagrios touched a portal’s edge. Beyond it, cool and empty air. “In here.”
When he stepped into the room, it filled with light. Not the light of the sun, not the moon. He was not in some other place. Here was the very heart of the tomb, and there, the sarcophagus. Torches blazing on every side, blazing red-gold.
“You found me.” In this room of ornament—of strange cyclopean carvings on the wall, tall heaps of brass tripods and wine-bowls, of fire and a sarcophagus large enough to swallow any man whole—Meru could not be seen. “Here I am,” he said. “Come to me, closer now.”
Zagrios wavered. “You’re not—”
“Closer.”
“—in there.” The coffin.
“Come to me.”
Maybe it was a prank. Maybe Meru was hiding—for some reason—in that giant sarcophagus in the strangest room of a haunted tomb, after—somehow—having disappeared into darkness. Zagrios didn’t like to think of himself as an idiot, but that didn’t mean there had to be anything unsavory going on here, beneath the surface. Beneath the surface of the tomb. “Oh, dammit.”
“Come.”
Zagrios came to him. “But only because I already came all this way.” He approached the sarcophagus—electrum and gold with sapphires for eyes and fingers made of bronze. He reached out, ready to touch those fingers, but the lid swung wide as he approached, swung on an ancient hinge.
“Behold.”
He did. “Oh, Meru.”
Here was a body so ancient that its skin was brown vellum. Eyeless, toothless, bald. Its belly hollowed out. It wrapped itself in withered arms.
It’s so small, thought Zagrios. Even without the imposing height of the sarcophagus, it would be small. The body of one not yet twenty.
“Zagrios.”
The Thracian reached out his hand, then pulled it back. “I don’t know what it is about this lighting that makes me wonder,” he said, “but you haven’t been lying to me about your age?”
“No lies,” said the corpse, its voice a chill wind. It did not move its lips; it had no lips. “This is a house of truth. My house.”
“See, I thought we were supposed to rob a tomb together.”
“We are,” was the answer.
“You certainly have my attention,” he told the corpse.
“We came looking for the past, I told you, I told you. And didn’t you find it?”
He sure did, thanks. “One awful day, yes.” He remembered the dream he had, in the shadow of the tomb. The wedding. “And another.”
“More. There are more. They live with me, those hypocrites, the days. Every tomb is a temple to them. Stay long enough and you can meet them all.”
“Pass.” Zagrios took his eyes off the body just long enough to check that the exit was still there. Black and ominous, but there.
“You will not stay,” said Meru. “You will leave with me. Together.”
Meru’s legs were leather spindles. His left foot was dust. “You’re walking?”
“I will walk. All things will I do. I will speak and I will rule and I will make love again.”
“Solid plan. Just don’t see what I have to do with any of it.” Especially the love-making. Zagrios had let himself be fooled by nice clothes before, but this was a body he could never touch. Too fragile. And honestly the moth-eaten genitalia didn’t help.
“It has everything to do with you. Zagrios, I have seen your days. I have spoken with them. Here in this shadow-kingdom, they are my subjects.”
Zagrios heard the chains, the inhuman sound. He closed his eyes and raised his voice. “If you think I’m going to be your subject, in whatever cockamamy kingdom you’ve devised, well, you’re cute and all—”
“How could I ever make you my subject?” asked the ghost of Meru. “I brought you here to be my partner.”
The moaning stopped, and Zagrios opened a single eye.
“I know your days, Zagrios. The brutal darkness of Thrace, yes, but the golden hours, too, spent in foreign fields, in foreign beds. I know the way that battles boils your blood, and I know what it takes to cool you down again.”
*So cool, in the tomb^. Zagrios shivered.
“I have seen the Ten-Mile Palace. I’ve seen its hundred white towers gleam amber in the light, like a field of wheat.
“I know that is where you ride, Zagrios, to an audience with the God-Empress of Parthia herself. I know you fear you cannot help her, I know she fears the same. I know you both fear betrayal. A Thracian savage and a royal queen—it’s not an obvious friendship.”
“Better to befriend a king, then?”
“She will never raise you up, like I will. She can never love you. You will always be her subject, you will always be an outlander, a Thracian. Slave of Empires.”
Slave of Empires. The voice of priests rang hollow in his head. “You would raise me up?”
“On a shining throne. We will cast down the empires of this world, and rule anew.”
King Zagrios did have a ring to it. Heart, be still. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you might be sort of old for me.”
“Soon I will be young forever. In this you must help me. It is why I brought you here, for this loving first step.”
Always curious, Zagrios asked, “And what would that be?”
“Take up your sword,” he said.
Zagrios looked to his left—why his left, he wasn’t sure—but he did, and sure enough amid the treasure-hoard, there lay his errant blade. “So that’s where I left it. Huh.” He took it up. “And now.”
“Open a vein. Spill your lifeblood.”
Yikes. “Pretty sure I need that, though.”
“Not all. Enough.”
“How much?”
“Enough to sing me out of the blood.”
The sword clattered when it struck the floor. “Not this. I will not.”
“Oh, my poor little son of Thrace, poor boy. Do not fear this rite. What the hypocritic days have showed you was a lie; in Thrace, they sing a false song to a false god. Zagrios, I am real—let me be your god. Let me teach you a new song.”
“I won’t,” he said again. “Not this.”
“One last time,” said the corpse, “spill it now that no one ever need spill it again. Sing a kinder empire to life, that none need be slaves again. Now is your chance to seek a better world, Zagrios. All you have to do is sing a song.”
“Your song.”
“Our song, always.”
“A hymn,” said Zagrios. “And spill a little blood.”
“Only a little.”
“My blood.”
“So many days gone by, you spilled it willingly.”
“The hypocritic days.” In Zagrios’ hand, the sword caught the light of the torches. Full of fire, that sword, his hands.
“Sing me a song, Zagrios. Then we both can live again.”
Zagrios looked into the black and empty sockets of the corpse and found in them the swirling eddies of Thracian rivers. “You should have stayed buried.” Full of fire, he lifted his sword and charged. He swung.
Meru caught the blade in his hand. Not the withered branches of his corpse, but with the lithe fingers of the boy Zagrios met in the shadow of the tomb. “This is my kingdom,” he said, rose-lipped. “These shadows. If you will not build me an empire, a new Nepethys, then I must rule the dark instead.”
The chamber was gone now, the sword, the corpse of Meru. Only his shadow remained, bright in blackness, and Zagrios. “Come to me, out of darkness, my days.”
They fell together. Zagrios tried to grapple with him, but he couldn’t grab hold. For how can one hold the night air?
Meru though, he sank his fingers into Zagrios’ flesh and twisted. “I will have your blood, one way or the other. I will make you sing.”
“You won’t!” But blood trickled down from his shoulders nonetheless.
They fell into the heat of war, a battle raging on the Argolian plain, between the forces of the Parthian Empress and her husband. Zagrios watched himself cutting down men like the chaff, with a green and pulsing poleaxe. He had bathed in blood that day.
“Their blood came easy.”
It had.
They fell into a Thracian midnight, where a young boy rose from the bed where an even younger girl lay sleeping. He left his hut, running, hoping that soon the canopy above him would break, and he would see a cloudless sky and all the eastern stars.
“Easier still.”
Too easy.
They fell into a cave, black as any tomb. While a young man sat cradling his still-bleeding wounds, something glowed long and green, not far away.
“You are always spilling blood,” cried Meru, “like you don’t even want it.”
“I do.”
“Liar. Give it to me.”
It was here in the cave that Zagrios wrenched himself free of Meru’s razor-sharp grasp. The new wounds, on his shoulders, he cradled them. “Blood must be earned.” Blood on his hands. “Especially your own.” Acrid in the cave, hot in the cave.
“And how should I do that?”
“Fight me. Fight fair.”
Meru laughed. “Are you asking for your sword back?”
“No. Something else I earned.” Zagrios ducked and rolled and came up holding the ancient halberd by its green copper shaft, his fingers clinging hard to its scaly rivets. He heaved it, pointing its wicked, curved fang of a blade at Meru. It too was damp with blood.
Zagrios said, “Come.”
Meru smiled pretty, then drew a longsword out of thin air. He lunged.
Zagrios parried the blow with the shaft of his weapon, and sent the boy reeling with a kick to the groin. He swept his poleaxe like a scythe; Meru cowered quick, avoided his reaping.
One hard thrust, and then another—the second did not miss. Zagrios plunged the blade deep into Meru’s thigh. The cracking of bone. Meru dropped his weapon, spilled his blood, shrieked.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to bring a sword to a spearfight?”
Meru’s leg was a sopping mess, but his face was eerily calm. “My word is law here, and I say, no more weapons.” Silence for a moment, then his eyes widened. Zagrios twisted the blade, and the boy shrieked again.
“It’s only a shadow! Why can’t I make it vanish?”
“Because it came from blood,” said Zagrios. “Because it can’t go back.” He wrenched the weapon from the wound, and aimed for the belly this time, but Meru himself had vanished before the blade found its mark.
“To me, my days!” his voice rang out, and suddenly Zagrios was following the boy, who was running, limping, through a city no Thracian eyes had ever looked up. Monoliths abounded, cubes and pyramids white with marble, blotting out the sun. Surely the tombs of Nepethys were the merest of their children; and yet, but for this shadow, the monoliths were dust.
A little something to reflect upon later, he thought, sprinting, leaping, flailing the poleaxe madly. Even for one so grievously wounded, Meru was fast—but Zagrios was faster. He brought the blade down. Meru’s back split open.
Another day. They ran through a kingdom’s worth of courtiers. An atrium with a vaulted roof. The throne could almost touch it, but the boy perched there was markedly small. Not twenty.
Meru fled into a crowd of men—long purple robes, long flaccid beards like horsetails on their chins. Whispering.
“He’ll doom us,” said one. “The doom of Nepethys.”
“A thousand years of progress,” another said, “wiped out in an instant by one not yet twenty. The oracles are clear, only true sons of the empire may—”
“Quiet!” said a third. “Not even the shadows here are safe.”
Zagrios found a shadow on the floor and pierced it deep. It roared beneath him.
Things went dark again—not that dark of the tomb, or so many Thracian days, but of the desert night. The light of the moon, the stars, slipping in through the windows. Zagrios was in a bedroom, elsewhere in the palace.
The shadow crept into its bed. The boy of not yet twenty didn’t stir beside.
Zagrios followed. “I knew I’d get you into bed, sooner or later.” But before he could heft his poleaxe, the chamber-doors swung wide.
Men. The ones from before, from the throne room? Zagrios could not tell. So meager, the light of the stars. Enough to glint upon their daggers, at least.
“True sons of the empire,” one shrieked, and they all of them fell upon the bed and bloodied it. The boy moaned, inhuman, dying. The men raised their knives and brought them down again regardless.
Zagrios fought the urge to shut his eyes, drop his weapon, cover up his ears and cry. “It won’t save you, that sound. It’s been with me a long time, and it’s not going away any time soon.” His eyes and ears were open.
“One way or another,” said the shadow, “I said I would make you sing. I said there would be blood.”
“Congratulations.” Zagrios lifted his tongue in the harsh music of a battle-cry, lifted his spear high above the heads of murderous men. He plunged it into the bloody bed and the shadow waiting there.
The moaning wouldn’t stop. Never. He knew this now.
The stars went out.
***
Light again, but only a little. The torches of the burial chamber dying low, never to flare up again.
Still, light enough to give the mummy what for. Zagrios kicked it until it was a heap of rag and bone. Dust. The he took up one of the torches and groped around in the dark till he found the stairs.
He half expected to stumble into yesteryear on his way up, to hear the moaning and the rattle of the chains again, as Meru pulled him back down into darkness. None of that, not anymore. His past, his hypocritic days, he would take with him. Everything else would remain buried. Good riddance.
Out the desert, dawn was nigh. Zagrios thrust his torch into the sand. Plenty to see with now.
His horse was drowsy, and clearly parched, but more than that, she was happy to see him. “Hey, girl,” he told her, “glad the jackals didn’t get to you.” She whinnied.
“Big week ahead of us.” In four days’ ride, he would be in the Ten-Mile Palace of Parseh, answering the call of the most beautiful woman in the world, being showered by gifts and lavish amusements. She would give him some impossibly great deed and, in her name, he would accomplish it, with derring-do.
But first, an oasis. Yes. He would ride out in hopes of water and, if he was very lucky, a boy made of more than the dust.
©October 2020, Ethan Cade Varnado
Ethan Cade Varnado‘s work has appeared in The Puritan and failbetter, and received a 2019 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. He attended the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Houston. This is his first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.