Once he felt the power he needed surge into his hand, Agis focused his thoughts on his sword. It was a magnificent weapon as ancient as Tyr itself, with a beautiful basket of etched brass upon the hilt and its long history etched on the face of its curved steel blade. He stretched his arm toward the sword and saw himself gripping the hilt. He remembered how it felt to hold the smooth, cord-wrapped hilt in his hand, and then he lifted the weapon out of its case.
“Very impressive,” Tithian said.
Agis opened his eyes again and saw, as he had expected, that the sword was now truly in his hand. Using the energy of the Way, he had simply reached across the intervening distance and picked it up.
Agis moved toward the templar, saying, “You didn’t come here as a friend.”
“Actually, I did,” Tithian said, not retreating. “I’m sure you’ll appreciate that … if you’ll just go to the front of the house.”
Agis frowned, still suspicious. “You lead the way,” he ordered, motioning toward the garden’s exit.
“Of course.” Tithian smiled.
The templar led the way around the west side of the house, past a marble colonnade where Agis often received special guests. As they neared the front of the mansion, Tithian went up a short flight of steps onto a veranda that enveloped the front of the house. When they stepped around the corner, Agis’s heart fell.
The anterior courtyard was filled with five hundred slaves, nearly his entire work force. They were being guarded by magical human-giant mixes called simply “half-giants.” Members of a brutish race, the guards stood as high as twelve feet, with heavy-boned features, sloped foreheads, and long, drooping jaws. They all had chunky, almost flabby builds, with sagging shoulders, round bellies, and enormous bowed legs. The half-giants before him now were dressed in hemp breeches and the purple tunics of the king’s legion.
Agis’s personal guard, a hundred men and dwarves wearing leather corselets, sat to one side of the courtyard with their hands on their heads. They were being guarded by a dozen of Tithian’s subordinate templars, who held their hands forward and high, making it clear that they were ready to deal with any resistance by casting the spells granted to them by the king.
Caro, Agis’s dwarven manservant, stood at the head of the slaves, his sagging chin resting on his sunken chest and his cloudy eyes focused on the ground. The ancient dwarf’s bald head and hairless face were cracked by age lines, and his black eyes were little more than narrow, dark slits peering out from beneath their baggy lids.
“I’m sorry, master,” he apologized in the thick mumble of a toothless old man. “I should have warned you, but I was napping.”
“It’s not your fault, Caro,” Agis said.
“It is,” the dwarf maintained. “If I’d have been awake, none of this would have happened.”
“Damn it, Caro, if I say it’s not your fault, it isn’t!” Agis snapped, losing patience with his stubborn manservant. “Is that clear?”
Caro scowled, staring at Agis for a moment, then finally looked at the ground and nodded.
Agis faced Tithian and demanded, “What’s happening here?”
The templar met the black-haired noble’s gaze evenly. “The king has need of more slaves to complete his ziggurat,” Tithian said, his voice assuming an officious and imperious tone. “The survivors will be returned to you after it is completed.”
Agis lifted his sword a few inches. “I should just kill you now and be over with it.”
Tithian looked hurt, but did not retreat. “Need I point out that you’re threatening a lawful representative of the Golden Tower? This is an act of open revolt, Senator.”
“You don’t have the authority to confiscate my slaves,” Agis said, reluctantly lowering his sword.
“The king issued a decree giving me that authority this morning,” Tithian replied.
“The Senate will veto that decree!”
“Not if it knows what’s good for it.” Tithian’s voice grew less formal. “If you try, Kalak will make sure that there aren’t enough senators in attendance to achieve a quorum.” The high templar started to leave, then paused. “I’ll leave the women and children to work your fields. That’s more than I’m allowing anyone else, old friend!”
FOUR
THE CITY OF TYR
As Sadira approached the rusty, iron-clad gates of Tyr, she cast a wary glance at the templar standing behind the customary pair of half-giant guards. He wore the standard black cassock of the king’s bureaucracy, but even in the dim light of dusk she could see the glint of a metal pendant hanging from his neck. The jewelry suggested he was a man of considerable rank, for ordinary templars could hardly have afforded so much metal.
Without slowing her pace toward the city, the sorceress searched the area immediately outside the gate, looking for anything that might explain the templar’s presence. From what she knew of Tyr, it was odd for a high-ranking official to assume the mundane duty of supervising guards at the gate.
To one side of the road, thirty porters were unloading a wooden argosy, one of the mighty fortress wagons used by merchants to haul cargo across the vast deserts of Athas. The caravan wagon was too large to maneuver in the streets of Tyr, so it had to be unloaded outside the gate.
The two mekillots that drew the argosy were still anchored in their harnesses. Nearly as long as the wagon itself, the lizards had huge, mound-shaped bodies covered by a thick shell that served both as armor and a source of shade. Sadira gave the mammoth beasts a wide berth, for they were famous for lashing out with their long tongues and making snacks of imprudent passersby.
The other side of the road was clear of argosies and caravans of other sorts. There was a large patch of dusty ground where wagons would wait their turn at loading and unloading, but it was empty now. Beyond this barren patch, dozens of starving slaves were spreading offal from the city sewers over one of the king’s fields. As they used their bare hands to throw fistfuls of the foul-smelling sludge over the azure burgrass, or to pack it around the stems of the golden smokebrush that speckled the field, their black-robed overseers whipped them mercilessly with nine-stranded whips.
When her furtive search of the gate area revealed no reason for the templar’s unusual presence, Sadira hitched up the huge bundle of sticks on her back and continued at her same slow pace. Though the templar made her nervous, she saw no choice except to trudge slowly forward and hope that his presence had nothing to do with her. Turning away now would have drawn too much attention and, besides, she was too exhausted and thirsty to spend the night in the desert.
After her escape from the Break, Sadira had collected her spellbook and slipped away from Tithian’s compound by walking invisibly out the main gate. Her spell had lasted long enough for her to reach a cluster of rocks just beyond the edge of Tithian’s lands. Here, she had gathered the large bundle of sticks now slung over her back, put her spellbook in a drab shoulder satchel, and donned a tattered robe over her low-cut smock so that she would draw less attention to herself. She had then gone to the road and trudged to Tyr with the slow, measured pace of a loyal slave who had spent the morning scouring the countryside in search of wooden tool-handles for her master.
The journey had been as uneventful as the other trips Sadira periodically undertook to visit her contact in the Veiled Alliance, save that the road had been emptier than usual because she had been traveling in the afternoon, the hottest time of day. Now, as she approached the eastern gate, the sun was already sinking behind the scorched peaks of the western horizon. Fiery filaments of magenta and burgundy were shooting across the sky, and evening was casting its purple shadow over the city’s sand-colored walls.