Their temples had been burned. His brothers had been hunted down, accused of heresy and put to death, until the once-thriving magi had been all but erased from the earth. Until all that remained was one lone disciple. One man with mastery over ancient darkness. And that, quite frankly, was a lonely existence.
Herod had been right about one thing: The world had no use for men like him anymore. But the king was weak. And his greatest weakness was that he thought himself wise. All it had taken was a little enchantment. A little trickery. As ancient spells went, it was relatively simple, and it worked only on those desperate enough to believe its effects. Fortunately, the king was such a man.
In reality, Herod’s illness was irreversible. Whatever curse had coiled itself around his innards was far stronger than anything the magus could conjure. But while he couldn’t actually make the puppet king healthy again, he could make the king think he was healthy. In Herod’s bewitched eyes, his lesions and sores were fading away, and his health was roaring back. In the eyes of the rest of the world, he was the same repulsive creature.
Yes, his courtesans and whores might think it strange that their king was suddenly so ebullient and spending so much time admiring himself in the mirror. Yes, they might think it strange when he skipped about with renewed vigor or remarked on his renewed appearance. But the beauty of it was, no one would dare tell him differently. And even if they did, Herod would simply think them mad.
Judea’s puppet king had become the magus’s personal puppet. And he would remain so, even as the disease he could no longer see or feel ate him to death.
And it will. Soon. Unless Augustus kills him first. Kills him for stealing his prized magus away.
And when Herod was gone? The magus would be there to take full ownership of the throne. A kingdom all to himself. An army, guided by ancient darkness, to challenge Rome. And a chance to rebuild an ancient brotherhood that had been all but lost to history.
A strange silence permeated the dungeon, broken only by the sound of rainwater seeping through the ceiling and falling to the stone floor, the crackling of the clay oven and its suffocating heat. Balthazar hung limply from the wooden beam above, trying to take his mind off the agony that radiated from the two strips of raw, exposed muscle on his sides. Even the slightest movement of air caused a severe pain that tensed his body and took his breath away.
He looked up through strands of wet hair and saw that the room was empty, save for two Roman guards posted on either side of the door. His torturers had excused themselves. Apparently, watching a man suffer is hard work. Water dripped steadily from the ceiling, seeping through the cracked mortar between the bricks, where it clung in defiance of gravity until each individual droplet grew fat enough to fall. Some of those droplets ran down the rope that held him aloft by his wrists. Some fell onto Balthazar, running down his body, mixing with the blood on his skin and aiding it on its way to the floor, where puddles had begun to form.
Balthazar was having trouble focusing his eyes through the mixture of seeping raindrops and the involuntary tears that came when the waves of pain crashed ashore. He heard the cell door creak open and saw the ghostly white outline of a large man enter.
“So, here he is,” said the man, taking off his cape and handing it to one of the guards. “Here’s the great ‘Antioch Ghost’ in the flesh. I had to come and see for myself.”
He was older. Grayed, though still upright and muscular. He was an officer of some kind, a general maybe. A career soldier in the twilight of his fighting years.
“I was stationed in Antioch some time ago,” he said, moving forward. “I found it to be a filthy place, truth be told. And, please, I mean no offense.”
Soon would come the slight hunch, the withering of muscles. Next, the weight would fall off of his bones with alarming speed, dark spots would appear on the tops of his hands, and he would use a cane to carry himself a few last wintry steps to the grave. But not yet. There was still power left in this man. Balthazar could tell, just by the way he carried himself.
“The river, the Colonnaded Street… the forum. Antioch had its charms.”
There was something flittering and gold under his chin. Something that caught the torchlight and threw it back in all directions.
“It’s just that… as beautiful as it was, I could never get over the people. They reminded me of… rats. Thieving little rats.”
Balthazar felt whatever strength he had left retreat. He felt his breath leave his chest and his body go numb.
It was a pendant.
Abdi’s pendant.
V
Sela didn’t know whose knife it was. She only knew it was pressed dangerously, painfully against her throat.
“To your feet, slowly,” said the voice. “You so much as twitch, and I’ll cut your throat.”
She rose, damning herself for being caught unaware. Damning herself for staying long enough to get caught in the first place. They’d held freedom in their hands, but they were all dead now. Ripped away. And for what? A moment of stupid sentimentality. She never should have led them here. She should have done what she promised Balthazar and hurried them to Egypt. “Don’t look back!” he’d told her.
She was standing up tall now, still unable to see the man who had a knife to her throat. In the corner of her right eye, she could see Joseph and Mary being forced to stand in the same fashion, with knives to their throats — Joseph with his hands held high over his head, Mary holding the baby beneath her robes and muttering, “No, no, no” again and again.
No, thought Sela. Not like this. They’d gotten Balthazar. They’d gotten Abdi. They could have Joseph and Mary for all she cared. And they could have her. But they didn’t get to have the baby.
Not a chance.
She exploded, grabbing the wrist of whoever held the knife and forcing it away from her neck. In the same motion, she spun around so that she was facing her attacker, a Roman sentry — no surprise there — and brought her right knee firmly up into his testicles, so hard that she was sure she’d rendered them forever useless. The soldier couldn’t help himself. He dropped the knife and brought both hands instinctively to his groin. And as he doubled over in the customary fashion and vomited, Sela brought her knee up again, this time to his face, where it jarred several of his front teeth loose and turned his nose into a mere suggestion of its former shape. He fell, unconscious, and Sela quickly picked up the knife he’d dropped.
This, of course, had drawn the attention of the other two sentries, who left Joseph and Mary and rushed at Sela, their blades out front. But while two of them rushed her, only one made it more than a step — for Joseph jumped on the back of the second and put him in a headlock, choking him from behind. Sela moved out of the other sentry’s path just in time, his knife grazing her face. He tried to regain his footing and come back for another attack, but he slipped on the wet rock and had to put one hand on the ground to keep from falling over.