An instant later, the magistrianos got the chance to test his theory. A club thudded into his ribs. He gasped, but managed to spin away from the rioter’s next wild swing. After that, drilled reflex took over. He stepped in, knocked away the club—it looked to be a table leg—with his left hand, thrust his dagger into the man’s belly. The Georgian might never have heard of defense, and it was too late for him to learn it now.
By then, Argyros had come quite close to his real target, the ladder leaning against the rear wall. A man was climbing over the wall. The magistrianos displayed his blood-smeared knife, grinned a ghastly grin.
“Your turn next?” he asked. He had no idea whether the man knew Greek, but the message got through, one way or another. The fellow jumped down—on the far side of the wall. From the curses that followed, he landed on someone. Argyros knocked over the ladder.
The last few rioters inside Supsa’s compound had been pushed back against the wall of the stable. Only traders still fought with them hand to hand. Argyros’s men, professional survivors, shouted for their allies to get out of the way so they could finish the job with arrows.
“A lesson the townsfolk will remember,” the magistrianos told Corippus. He rubbed at his rib cage, which still hurt. \ le knew he would have an enormous bruise come morning. But to his relief, he felt no stabbing pain when he breathed. He’d had broken ribs once before, and knew the difference.
“Bodies strewn here and there will make a mob think twice,” Corippus agreed. “I’m just glad they didn’t try to torch us.”
Ice walked the magistrianos’s spine. He’d forgotten about that. With jar after jar of hellpowder in Suspa’s inn—He crossed himself in horror. “ Mè genoito!”
he exclaimed: “Heaven forbid!”
“I don’t think even a mob would be so stupid,” Corippus said. “Fire’d mean the whole stinking town would go up. Of course,” he added, “you can’t be sure.”
Argyros told his archers to shoot anyone they saw outside with a torch. For the moment, the inn seemed safe enough. Like any other scavengers, the mob preferred prey that did not fight back. Rioters went by—at a respectful distance —carrying their loot. At any other time, Argyros would have wanted to seize them and drag them off to gaol. Now, caught in chaos in a country not his own, all he did was scan the sky to make sure no plumes of smoke rose in it.
“Night before too long,” Corippus observed. ‘That’ll make things tougher.”
“So it will.” The magistrianos laughed self-consciously. In his concern for fire, he had not even noticed the deepening blue above. The din outside was still savage and getting worse. Of itself, his hand bunched into a fist. “What’s Goarios doing to stop this mess?”
“Damn all I can see—probably under the bed with his soldiers.” Contempt filled Corippus’s voice. “I’d say our new-Alexander can’t even conquer his own people, let alone anybody else’s.”
Yet soldiers did appear. Darkness had just settled in when a heavily armed party approached the front gate of Supsa’s inn. Argyros recognized its leader as an officer he had seen several times in the palace. He stayed wary even so—the fellow might be taking advantage of the riot, not trying to quell it. “What do you want?” he shouted in Persian.
The officer’s answer startled him too much to be anything but the truth: “You’re the wine merchant? His majesty has sent us to collect the next consignment of your yperoinos. Here’s the gold for it.” He held up a leather sack.
With a curious sense of unreality, Argyros let him come up the barred gate. The magistrianos counted the nomismata. The proper number were there. Shaking their heads as they went back and forth, Argyros’s men fetched the jars of superwine and handed them to the officer’s troopers over the top of the gate. When he had all of them, the officer saluted Argyros and led his section away. All the magistrianos could think of was Nero, singing to his lyre of the fall of Troy while Rome burned around him. Dariel was not burning, but no thanks to Goarios.
The stout defense Argyros’s band and the real traders had put up gave the rioters a bellyful. They mounted no fresh assaults. The magistrianos found the night almost as nervous as if they had. All around was a devils’ chorus of screams, shouts, and crashes, sometimes close by, sometimes far away. They were more alarming because he could not see what caused them. He kept imagining he smelled more smoke than cooking fires could account for.
“Who’s that?” one of his men called, peering at a shadow moving in the darkness. “Keep away, or I’ll put an arrow through you.”
A woman laughed. “I’ve been threatened with worse than that tonight, hero. Go wake Argyros for me.”
“Who are you to give me orders, trull?” the Roman demanded. “I ought to—”
“It’s all right, Constantine. I know her,” the magistrianos said. He looked out, but saw little. “I’m here, Mirrane. What do you want?”
“Let me inside first. If Goarios learns I’ve come, we’re all done for. We may be anyhow.”
“Are you going to open the gate for her?” Despite Mirrane’s alarming words, Corippus plainly did not like the idea. “No telling who’s lurking there out past our torchlight.”
Argyros nodded. Trusting Mirrane was harder than wanting her. He remembered, though, her supple dancer’s muscles. “Can you climb a rope if we throw one out to you?” he called over the fence. She laughed again, not in the least offended. “Of course I can.” A moment later she proved good as her word, dropping into the courtyard as lightly and quietly as a veteran raider. She was dressed like one, too, in nondescript men’s clothes, with her fine hair pulled up under a felt hat that looked like an inverted flowerpot. Few marauders, however, smelled of attar of roses.
Ignoring the curious glances the men in the courtyard were giving her, she baldly told Argyros, “Goarios knows you were in the marketplace where the riot started this afternoon. In fact, he thinks you’re the person who got it started.”
“Mother of God!” The magistrianos crossed himself. “Why does he think so?”
“You can’t deny you were there—one of my, ah, little birds saw you.” Mirrane sounded very pleased with herself. “As for why he thinks you threw that knife at the Kirghiz, well, I told the little bird to tell him that.” She grinned as if she had done something clever and expected Argyros to see it too. All he saw was disaster.
Those of his men who heard shouted in outrage. “I should have let Constantine shoot you,” he ground out, his voice as icy as Corippus’s eyes.
“Ah, but then you’d never have known, would you, not till too late. Now you—we—still have the chance to get away.”
“I suppose you expect my men to give you an armed escort back to Persia.”
Mirrane paid no attention to the sarcasm. “Not at all, because I’m not planning to go south.” She paused. “You do know, don’t you?”
“Know what?” Argyros’s patience was stretched to the breaking point, but he would sooner have gone under thumbscrews than reveal that to Mirrane.
“That the w hole Kirghiz army is through the Caspian Gates and heading for Dariel.”
“No,” Argyros said woodenly. “I didn’t know that.” With the chaos inside the town, that at first seemed a less immediate trouble than many closer at hand. Then the magistrianos ran Mirrane’s words through his head again. “You’re going to the Kirghiz?”
“To stop them, if I can. And you and yours are coming with me.”
Argyros automatically began to say no, but checked himself before the word was out of his mouth. The pieces of the puzzle were falling together in his mind. “That’s why your man fed Goarios that lying fairy tale!”