Familiar, throaty laughter came from the alleyway. “Is that you, dear Basil?” Mirrane called mockingly.
“Where will you run now?”
It was an excellent question. The pottery’s front door was barred on the outside, just as the back had been. So were the stout wooden shutters, which—damn Abraham—had locks on both inside and out. Mirrane let Argyros stew just long enough, then said, “Well it seems we shan’t raise Daras yet. A pity—but then, bagging one of the Emperor’s precious magistrianoi (oh yes, I know who you are!) is not the smallest prize either.”
“You’re behind this!” he blurted. He had thought she was merely a pleasant distraction thrown his way by the real plotter—Shahin maybe, or Abraham, or Yesuyab, whom he had never seen. She might have been reading his thoughts. Bitterness edged her voice as she answered, “Aye, by the Good God Ormazd, I am! Did you think I lacked the wit or will because I am a woman? You’ll not be the first to pay for that mistake, nor the last.” She shifted from Greek to Persian and spoke to one of her henchmen: “I’ll waste no more time on this Roman. Burn the place down!”
Someone let out a harsh protest in Arabic.
“Don’t be a donkey, Abraham,” Mirrane snapped. “The noise of breaking in the door might bring the watch—we’re too close to the barracks to risk it. The King of Kings will pay you more than you would earn from this miserable hovel in the next fifty years. Come on, Bahram, set the torch. The bigger the blaze, the more likely it is to destroy everything we need out of the way, Argyros included.
“... Isn’t that right, Basil?” she added through the door.
The magistrianos did not answer, but could not argue with her tactics. A very accomplished young woman indeed, he thought ruefully—and in such unexpected ways. He had no doubt several armed men would be waiting when smoke and flames drove him to try bursting out through the door. He could see Bahrain’s torch flame flickering, hot and yellow, under the doorjam.
But Mirrane, for all her ruthless efficiency, did not know everything. Along with his burglar’s pincers, Argyros had fetched a couple of the tightly corked clay pots he had passed off to her as sediment testers. Stooping, he set them at the base of the back door.
His lamp was beginning to gutter, but it still held enough oil for his need. He touched the flame to the rags that ran through the stoppers. Those were soaked in fat themselves, and caught at once. As soon as the magistrianos saw they were burning, he put down the lamp and dove behind Abraham’s counter. He clapped his hands over his ears.
It was not a moment too soon. The hellpowder bombs went off, the explosion of the first touching off the second. The blast was like the end of the world. Shattered bits of pottery flew round the shop, deadly as slingers’ bullets. The double charge of the charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter mix the Franco-Saxons had discovered flung the door off its hinges, hurling it outward at Mirrane and her companions. Dagger in hand, Argyros scrambled to his feet. His head was ringing, but at least he knew where the thunderbolt had come from. To Mirrane and her friends in the alleyway, it was a complete and hideous surprise.
The magistrianos charged through the cloud of thick, brimstone-smelling smoke that hung in the shattered doorway. He discovered one of Mirrane’s henchmen at once, by almost tripping over him. The fellow was down and writhing, his hands clutched around a long splinter of wood driven into his groin. He was no danger and would not last long.
Several other men went pelting down the alley as fast as they could run. Through half-deafened ears, Argyros heard their shouts of terror: “Devils!” “Demons!” “Mother of God, protect me from Satan!” “It’s Ahriman, come to earth!” That last had to come from a Persian: Ahriman was Ormazd’s wicked foe in their dualist faith.
One of the nearby shadows moved. Argyros whirled. “A trick I did not know about, it seems,” Mirrane said quietly. Her self-possession was absolute; she might have been talking of the weather. She went on, “The game is yours this time, after all.”
“And you with it!” he cried, springing toward her.
“Sorry, no.” As she spoke, she opened the door behind her, stepped through, and slammed it in Argyros’s face. The bar locked it just as he crashed into it. He rebounded, dazed at the impact. Mirrane said, “We’ll meet again, you and I.” He heard her beat a rapid retreat. Only then did he think of anything beyond the predicament from which he had just escaped. As Mirrane had said, Abraham’s pottery was only a block from the main barracks of Daras. Already Argyros could hear cries of alarm and then the disciplined pound of a squadron running his way.
“Here!” he shouted.
The squad-leader came puffing up, torch held high. He gaped at the wrecked doorway to Abraham’s shop. “What’s all this about?”
“No time to explain,” the magistrianos snapped. He gave the underofficer his rank; the man stiffened to attention. “Have some of your troopers break down that door,” Argyros ordered, pointing to the one through which Mirrane had escaped. He quickly described her, then sent the rest of the squad around the corner to where the front entrance of the house or store or whatever it was let out. They returned empty-handed. At Argyros’s urging, Leontios sealed the gates of Daras within the hour, and for the next two days the garrison forces searched the town from top to bottom. They caught Abraham hiding with Yesuyab the tailor, but of Mirrane no sign whatever turned up. Argyros was disappointed, but somehow not surprised.
“Very clever, Basil, your use of the map to ferret out the nest of spies,” George Lakhanodrakon said.
“Thank you, sir.” Argyros’s office chair creaked as he leaned back in it. “I’m only annoyed it took me as long as it did. I should have seen that the Persians deliberately avoided putting their parchments in certain parts of Daras so as to give Leontios no reason to search in them. But it wasn’t until I found out that Yesuyab’s tanning-works (and the gluemaker’s next to it), Abraham’s pottery, and Shahin’s tavern were all in the exact centers of the empty areas that things began to make sense.”
“A pretty piece of reasoning, no matter how you reached it.” The Master of Offices hesitated, clearing his throat, and went on, “All the same, I’m not entirely sure the situation you left behind satisfies me.”
“I’m not certain what else I could have done, your illustriousness,” the magistrianos said politely. “No more inflammatory handbills are appearing in Daras, the town was calm when I left it, and I discovered the means by which the Persians were producing so many copies of the same text.” Excitement put warmth in his voice. “A means, I might add, which could be used to—”
“Yes, yes,” the Master of Offices interrupted. “I don’t intend to slight you, my boy, not at all. As I said, you did splendidly. But all the same, there is no final resolution of the problem underlying this particular spot of trouble. It could crop up again anywhere in the east, in Kirkesion or Amida or Martyropolis, the more so as the tricksy Persian baggage in charge of the scheme slipped through your net.”
“There you speak truly, sir,” Argyros said. Mirrane’s getaway still rankled. Also, it piqued him that the enjoyment she showed in his arms had probably been assumed to lull him. It had seemed very real at the time, more, he thought, than with any woman he had known since Helen. He hoped her parting warning would come true; one way or another, he wanted to test himself against her again. He went on, “In any case, a second outbreak is not likely to be as serious as the first was. Now that we know how the thing is done, the local officials should be able to search out clandestine letterers on their own. And if the government issues them sets of clay archetypes on their own, they can easily counter any lies the Persians try spreading.”