Khenti half-turned in that direction, and Vorenus was aware of the Egyptian’s hand sliding toward the sword at his side.
Vorenus opened his mouth to say something, but in that moment a ghost arose from higher on the embankment, where the path leading to the dock had worn a kind of trench through the rising earth. The dark red of the last rays of the sun splashed directly upon the man’s skin, making it appear to be bathed in fresh blood. It deepened the crossing scars that were scattered across the face Vorenus had known, and age or injury had stooped his once powerful neck, but the broad shoulders were the same. And the voice with which he shouted out was the same one that Vorenus heard in haunted dreams of the past.
“Vorenus!” cried the ghost of Titus Pullo.
There was time for a single heartbeat of shock and exhilaration. Then Vorenus heard the thrum of bowstrings loosed. And in the next instant, something hot and wet spat across his face as an arrow ripped across Khenti’s side and embedded itself in the cloth between them.
Vorenus saw Khenti roll forward and down toward the top of the deck, making himself small, and then Vorenus’ own instincts thrust him in the opposite direction, away from the darkness of the embankment on which he had seen the ghost of Pullo. His legs kicked until his feet found purchase and he flung himself back and to the side, putting the pile of rugs between himself and whoever or whatever was hunting them in the growing dark.
He hit the other side of the deck with a grunt, and all at once sound returned to the world. The young deckhand was screaming from the back end of the boat, and there was shouting from the shoreline, accompanied by the high clear ring of metal swung against metal. Closer, Vorenus heard the splash of a body moving through water.
And closer still, the black shape of Khenti rose up in his vision, the curved blade of his Egyptian sword flashing moonlight in his hand as he ran toward the rear of the barge.
Another bowstring loosed, just one this time, and Vorenus both heard and felt its whistle as it sang through the night air above the deck, narrowly missing Khenti, who did not falter in his run.
Once more the familiar voice of his old friend bellowed from onshore, “Vorenus!”
Vorenus blinked as if he were waking from a dream. The shout rocked something loose inside of him, and when he looked down at his hands he saw that they had already answered the calclass="underline" his fingers were now tightening around the familiar grip of his unsheathed sword. He arose from the cover of the piled rugs.
At a glance, he took it all in. The barge had turned. Something had happened with Petosiris back at the tiller. In seconds, the ship would run aground into the side of the canal, only feet from the old wooden dock that he’d seen. Beside the dock, the man who could not exist—the man who looked like Pullo—was knee-deep in the reed-filled marsh, swinging his sword before him like a scythe. Someone was before him, hidden in the reeds but still visible as he struggled to back away from the charging beast that Vorenus knew so well. A second man had slipped out of the marsh in Pullo’s wake. He was dropping a recurved Egyptian bow from his left hand, while his right was drawing a long dagger. He was looking at Pullo’s back.
“Pullo!” Vorenus shouted. With sudden urgency, no longer thinking but simply reacting, he jumped around the intervening piles of rugs, took four sprinting steps to get up to speed, and then leapt from the deck of the barge just as it hit the shoreline and shuddered from beneath him. He cleared several feet of water and landed left leg first on the old dock.
His foot slipped for an instant, and he felt his tendons groaning from the unfamiliar strain, but already his momentum was carrying him forward. His right leg came down on the wood ahead of him as if stretching across a great leap. It planted, and then the muscles of his thigh tightened and released, propelling him onward, out of control now, right at the man who had his blade out and ready to strike Pullo down.
Vorenus had his own gladius held before him, hoping that in this initial assault he could push it through the man, but the action of bringing it forward had taken too long. Vorenus was hardly the young man he’d once been. The time he’d taken had given the man he attacked a chance to turn and bring his long dagger around to defend himself. The edges of their weapons clashed loudly, each ringing off the other and away. Vorenus felt the sting of the other man’s blade gashing across his forearm where his leather legionnaire armor once would have been.
Vorenus’ sword point was turned away, but there was no stopping the weight of his body. An instant later, Vorenus had smashed into the man, shoulder-first, as if he were breaching a door. The mass of him lifted the would-be killer off his feet, and Vorenus tumbled over him and landed with a lung-clearing grunt against the grassy foot of the embankment.
The stars above him spun as Vorenus fought to get air in his lungs and ground beneath his feet. A part of him—the memory of a younger him—shouted in his mind, ordering him to move faster, to get up and engage first, to attack and kill before the enemy was prepared. But Vorenus was no longer that man. His shoulder and side pounded for attention in their present pain, and the muscles of his right thigh were screaming in distress.
And his sword! Where was his sword?
Vorenus had managed to gather himself up to his knees, but he got no further as his hands rifled through the grass in the darkness.
“Looking for this?”
Vorenus froze and then slowly looked up. The man he’d knocked to the ground was on his feet, standing above him with his long dagger in one hand and the Roman gladius in the other. He was smiling triumphantly. He started to raise the gladius back for a strike.
“I’ll make it quick, old—”
His words were cut off by a throttled gasp as the tip of a second gladius crunched through his chest. The dagger in the Egyptian’s hand dropped in front of Vorenus, who instinctively picked it up and then staggered to his feet and backed up a step as his friend who ought to be dead—big, beautiful Pullo—gave one half-turn to the embedded blade and then jerked it free from the man’s back with a wet and slopping sound that made Vorenus thankful for the night. The lifeless body sagged to the ground like a stringless puppet.
“Vorenus!” The big man stepped over the corpse as if it were a log. In the moonlight Vorenus could see his friend’s concern on a face that was still recognizable despite the jagging of new scars that lent it the look of a weather-beaten tent, more patches than cloth. Dampness shone on those torn cheeks, though Vorenus couldn’t tell whether from blood, sweat, or tears. He saw, too, that his friend didn’t step with the same thunderous gait that had shaken the decks of Mark Antony’s flagship at Actium. He moved instead with an upright, almost straight-legged lumber, as if he walked on painful stilts.
“I’m okay,” Vorenus managed. He wanted to reach out and touch him, to assure himself that this was real, that Pullo was really still alive. He wanted to shake his hand as they once did, he wanted to embrace him as they never really had, and—just in the back of his mind—he wanted to punch him square in the thick jaw for letting him think he was dead for so long. “Gods, Pullo, I thought you—”
Pullo, too, had seemed abruptly paralyzed once they faced each other in the night. But as Vorenus started to speak, he cut him off. “There were three,” he said. “This is two.”
Vorenus suddenly remembered the splash of water and the barge turning. He quickly reached down to roll over the dead Egyptian and retrieve his gladius. “The boat. Khenti is there.”
Pullo was looking over toward where the path to the dock disappeared into the rising embankment. “Go on. I’m behind you,” the big man said. “I’ve got to do something first.”
Vorenus nodded as his old friend started lumbering away. Then he, too, began to move, running up along the dock. From the darkness behind him he heard Pullo’s deep voice. “I’m always saving you,” his old friend grumbled.