Fallen Eagle

Chapter 87: Accelerated Plans

The night was black under the trees.What in daylight was just scant remnants of fallen trees, overgrown moss, or skittish animals at night became something else. Every branch looked like a spear haft. Every patch of moving shadow seemed a man stepping out to cut his throat. As the cart jolted over roots and ruts, men kept starting at the smallest sound in their surroundings.

Venianim had two brothers. When word of rebellion first came to Kalamita, they had been taken up with the rest and sent to fight before the city itself could be threatened. They had gone so he did not have to, and had fought in an astounding victory that had saved the city. He owed the bastards too much for his liking, so when the call came for volunteers to carry supplies to the Crown army outside Mangup, Veniamin stepped forward before he had time to think better of it.

Now, deep in the forest and farther into enemy ground than any sensible should have been, he was doing a great deal of thinking.

“It’s too quiet,” he whispered.

“And that is how I like it,” Vasileus muttered back. “So keep your mouth shut.”

The old peddler had been placed in charge of the cart and the animals. He was a hard, narrow man, the sort who looked at a beast only for what it might fetch at market. He had not come for brothers, prince, or duty. He had come because he had been promised the cart and the donkeys if the run succeeded. But he knew how to handle the animals well. When they tossed their heads and stamped in their harness, spooked as much as any of them, he laid a hand on their backs and scratched them near the shoulder until they settled.

The trek seemed never-ending. One hour passed, then another, in such stillness that even breathing felt loud. Nobody dared speak, and Veniamin held himself tight as a drawn bow, certain that one careless sound would bring men out of the trees with knives and bows.

Then he saw the river through the dark, a pale band between the banks.

The sight of it eased something in his chest.

They brought the cart down carefully and began unloading in haste, though the Theodoran camp was nowhere in sight. That had been the cleverness in the plan the Kalamita nobles had made. They reasoned the roads nearest the camp would be watched, so the convoy had been sent far around, through rough country and bad ground, to reach the Belbek well upstream. The river would be the one to carry the load the last stretch.

“Get the raft out,” Vasileus said.

The men dragged it down from the cart. It was long and rough-built, more useful than handsome, with air-filled pelts lashed along its sides to keep it afloat. A crude rudder had been fixed at the stern so one man could guide it and keep it from drifting to the bank.

As the lone fisherman in the group, that man was Veniamin.

He looked at the black water, then at the bundles waiting to be loaded, and felt the fear rise in him again, colder now than it had been in the trees.

Veniamin and five others dragged the raft into the river as quietly as they could, boots nearly slipping in the mud and dark. When the water reached his knees, the cold struck him so sharply it drove the breath from his chest. Until then the whole thing had felt half like a bad dream, the sort a man shook off at dawn. The river made it real. This was no errand. It was life and death, and they were standing out in the open with nowhere to hide.

All that remained was to load the sacks and barrels onto the raft and trust the current to bear them down toward the camp.

If they pulled this off, they would be heroes who helped save the Principality. Veniamin could already picture it, the look on his mother’s face, the pride swelling within him whenever he walked the streets and people whispered of him in admiration or greeted him warmly. Maybe he’d even find a fine lass to-

A sound came from the treeline.

Every man turned toward it at once, stiff and wide-eyed, like fish caught in a line.

That was all the warning they had before bolts tore from the dark.

Five men dropped almost together. One pitched backward without a cry, another folded at the waist as though he’d lost his balance, then stumbled into the water face first. Two more were taken in the throat and shoulder and went over the side of the raft in a crash of spray. The last spun half around before he fell, hands clawing at the shafts jutting from his ribs. The river took them at once, black water churning white around thrashing limbs, then swallowing the sound.

By some miracle or divine intervention, the massacre had only escaped Vasileus and Venianim himself.

The old peddler threw up both hands toward the bank, palms wide in surrender.

“Mercy!” he cried. “Mercy, I yi-”

Three bolts struck him square in the chest and threw him backward into the shallows.

Veniamin did the only thing he could think to do and ducked under the water.

The cold closed over his head, but he knew it well. He and the ocean had had their fair share of spats, and the Belbek was a timid mistress in comparison. He kicked, pushing himself downstream, helped along by the current.

They had waited for this, these damned Catholics. Waited until the raft was in the river and the men had no cover, no footing, and no hope of flight. He had been a fool to think that a few peasants with a cart could sneak past a proper military force.

His chest began to burn. He kept going until the pain became unbearable, until his body forced him upward.

He broke the surface with a gasp.

The next volley was waiting for him.

Bolts slashed down into the water. One struck his arm even through the river’s drag, punching through flesh with a force that spun him sideways. He nearly cried out in earnest, but panic gave him a kind of wit. He let out a broken, choking sound instead, the sort a dying man might make with blood in his lungs, and flung his wounded arm above his chest, angled in the darkness to make it seem as though the shaft had driven through his chest. Then he went limp.

The current carried him as a few more bolts struck around him, hissing into the river, but none found him. Veniamin floated on his back and then on his side, scarcely daring to breathe until the shooting stopped.

The knowledge he’d survived brought him no comfort. He had escaped the Italians but that would only earn himself a slower death behind the fortifications, if he even reached them at all.

…

On the bank, mounted on a stallion black enough to merge with the night around it, Aniballe surveyed the captured supplies and the raft his men had seized nearly intact. Moonlight flashed dull and pale on wet leather, overturned barrels, and the floating bodies turning slowly in the current.

It had been a clever attempt of a sort. He could give them that much. But Aniballe was not foolish to think they’d stick to the main paths. He had patrols all across the southern forest, awake through the night.

“Now let us see what you do next, my friend,” he murmured, lifting his gaze toward the moon with a thin smile.

He was eager for it. There was a pleasure in crossing minds with an adversary who refused to yield, in waiting to see what new trick necessity would force from him.

Aniballe knew full well that desperation brought out ingenuity in men like nothing else.

“Did you manage to place them?”

Theodorus found Nikos in the sergeants’ tent shortly after his return. The half-tatar man sat on a simple bed of hay, shoulders bowed, face smeared with dirt, his clothes stained dark from sweat, and dark, muddy earth.

“The ones meant for this first round, yes,” Nikos confirmed.

“And the men?”

Theodorus couldn’t help but ask. He had given Nikos operational control over those chosen for the mission.

Command, in his view, was not something learned by hovering at the edge of responsibility, but by being forced to make your own decisions.

“Performed well,” Nikos said. There was a glint in his eye despite the exhaustion. “At this pace, it should be finished in two days. We just need the weather to change.”

Theodorus kept his face still, though he had to master the urge to press the matter harder. A week felt like too long as every day spent in a stalemate cost them. But rushing the work now and blundering would unravel the entire scheme.

“Be careful,” Theodorus said, and there was iron in his voice.

“I always am, Captain.” Niko’s faint smile told him he’d used his old Probatoufrorio title deliberately.

Before he could answer, noise stirred beyond the tent. Theodorus pushed aside the flap with his left hand and looked out.

In the pale drizzle of dawn he saw a knot of men gathered near the riverbank around a body laid out on the ground with more were converging from all sides. Then one of the men broke from the cluster and came half running, half stumbling uphill toward the officers’ tents.

Nikos saw the change in his face at once.

“What is it?” he asked, already trying to rise, though the movement was slow and heavy.

“It’s nothing. Rest,” Theodorus said, though he was already stepping out, he felt that bad news were on the horizon.

He reached the command tent just in time to hear the tail end of the report.

“-the convoy was ambushed, and the supplies were taken.”

Oaths broke out around the tent, officers cursing under their breaths. Men still arriving at the entrance stopped short as the meaning of it struck them. The air seemed to tighten all at once.

Theodorus met Silvanus’s wide-eyed gaze across the room. They had been counting on that convoy. With rationing already in force, they had perhaps a week and a half remaining, perhaps less if rain spoiled the stores. It was not proper reserve by any stretch, but a thin margin before desperation.

The Doux and Poseidippus, for their parts, betrayed nothing, receiving the blow with admirable control.

“Silence,” the Doux said.

His voice was sharp, and it rolled through the tent and smothered the rising disorder at once.

“The situation is now critical,” he continued. “Which means we have to accelerate our plans.”

As he said it, his dark gaze settled on Theodorus.

The meaning was perfectly clear. Their own gamble, prepared piece by piece, would have to move forward with all possible speed.

Zeno walked the battlements of the citadel each morning without fail. From those heights he surveyed the rabble stationed along Mangup’s walls, measuring not merely their arms and stations, but their posture, their alertness, the tenor of their faces. Readiness in a garrison was not a matter of numbers alone. It lived in habits and in bearing.

The successful ambush against the Genoese had done much to vindicate his initial controversial appointment as the Captain of the Watch. Thus it fell to him to impose at least the rudiments of order upon the mixture of militiamen, retainers, and frightened townsmen he had been given. They were not the soldiery he would have chosen for such a task, but he was still a step too far removed from the men who actually had weight on those decisions. If only just.

Power, he had long since concluded, was a subtler thing than most men understood. Fools imagined it resided only in decrees, seals, and the right to command with ink upon parchment. Yet visibility was a power unto itself. Though the old fops and ornamental officials still nominally oversaw the city’s defense, it was Zeno whom the men saw upon the walls. It was Zeno who inspected watchfires, questioned sentries, corrected sergeants, and appeared wherever anxiety threatened to curdle into indiscipline. To the common soldier, formal transfers of authority mattered far less than the identity of the man whose presence ordered his daily reality.

A thunderous crash suddenly rolled upward from below, crashing into Zeno's ear.

Speaking of power.

Few things could rival the brute majesty of the Genoese bombards. From their raised platform the great guns spoke with a violence that seemed to tear the morning apart, and their shot came crashing into the timber palisade of the so-called relief army below. It was hardly an army in the noble sense, more an irritant at the enemy’s rear than a true instrument of battle, yet it had proved vexingly difficult for the Genoese to brush aside.

“It is the wrath of God,” one of the wall militia muttered nearby.

Zeno turned his head slightly, enough to mark the speaker without seeming too eager to correct him. The man was a farmer pressed into service, his face pale despite the drizzle, his voice full of that instinctive dread with which the common masses greeted anything they did not comprehend. Zeno had grown accustomed to such talk. The unease on the walls merely echoed the mood of the city below, where all Mangup seemed suspended between hope and dread, waiting to learn whether deliverance would come or whether ruin would simply arrive more slowly than feared.

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“But look,” another man said, peering over the parapet. “They’re still hanging in there. God must have blessed our fortifications to withstand that thunder.”

That, in truth, was the most astonishing feature of this entire affair. Against every reasonable expectation, the peasant levies raised by the Crown had endured more than a week of Genoese bombardment. Zeno did not know by what contrivance the Doux had managed it. Some cleverness in the earthworks, he suspected, but whatever its nature, it had worked.

“You are entirely correct,” Zeno said as he came upon the group.

They started at his voice. He noticed that his inspections had become predictable enough for the men to anticipate his arrival, and so he had begun varying his hours and route.

“God is just,” he continued, his tone measured, sonorous, pitched with the cadence of a practiced speaker. “And He, who sees beyond the blindness of men, knows best. Is it not miraculous that plain timber should withstand the ungodly weapons our enemies have brought against us?”

The soldiers straightened, drawn at once by certainty more than by argument. Morale, Zeno knew, was the first and most precious currency of a siege. Though he himself had learned to place no faith in providence, he was not such a fool as to neglect a useful instrument to leverage his men with.

“It can only mean,” he said, allowing his voice to rise, “that His hand is at work here. He aids us in this holy struggle against the Catholic heretics, men who exalt greed and coin above right doctrine, and profit above truth. He stands with us.”

He raised his hand.

A cheer rose along the wall, ragged at first, then stronger, spreading from one cluster of men to the next until it ran the length of the battlements. Zeno listened to it with inward satisfaction.

“But divine favor is not a purse that may be emptied without replenishment,” he said. “We must answer it in equal measure. I do not mean with idle prayer alone, but with vigilance. With discipline. With the faithful execution of the duties entrusted to you. Patrol your sections. Keep your eyes upon the approaches. Do not mistake deliverance for exemption from labor.”

Several of the men looked abashed, as though suddenly aware that they had been caught admiring the spectacle below when they ought to have been minding the wall.

“Yes, sir,” they answered, straightening at once and offering hurried salutes. The gesture lacked all harmony and most of the dignity military display was meant to project, but Zeno had long ago learned to economize his expectations of those around him to avoid disappointment.

“Master Zeno.”

One of his attendants came quickly up the steps, flushed from the climb. The new rank had afforded Zeno a few such small conveniences, and he could not deny the thrill of pleasure at seeing how far he had come.

“The Prince has convened the council and requires your presence.”

Zeno nearly smiled. That meant Lord Kostis was attempting once more to gather the aged ornaments and hollow dignitaries left in the capital, no doubt in hopes of directing the Prince’s judgment. That they now summoned Zeno specifically to speak among them was the most gratifying feature of his recent ascent. At last, he felt, the architecture of influence was beginning to bend in his favor.

And all it took was to play the dangerous part of double spy, playing the two chief political forces of the Principality against one another while keeping everyone else sufficiently misled to preserve his own position.

Life really couldn’t be easy for men like him.

“Tell him I shall attend at once,” Zeno said, already turning from the parapet.

The boy hurried back down the stair, well aware that Zeno regarded tardiness as a not so trivial fault.

As Zeno descended from the wall and made his way into the city, he found his thoughts returning, not for the first time, to the precariousness of the game he had played.

His plans had danced upon a blade’s edge. After the Crown’s stunning victory it had almost seemed unlikely Philemon would ever lay siege to the capital, and much of Zeno’s maneuvering would have been rendered useless in that case. In that sense, he had been fortunate that his uncle had sold his soul to the Genoese; it had furnished the very conditions for Zeno’s scheme to finally bear fruit.

There was an irony in that which pleased him greatly. In the end, for all his designs and machinations, his uncle had served him.

Now he just needed the Principality to survive long enough to take his rightful due.

The streets of Mangup offered a strangely tempered picture of siege. Life had not ceased, merely withdrawn into itself. Children still played in the lanes from time to time, Elderly men still stood beneath eaves or by courtyards in conversation, but speaking in the muted tones. Women moved between cisterns, ovens, and storehouses with baskets on their arms and worry in their faces.

The mood was not yet openly dire because Mangup itself had not suffered a true assault. Thus far the enemy’s wrath had fallen chiefly upon the entrenched army beyond the flank, where timber and earth absorbed what might otherwise have been visited upon the city’s own walls.

Moreover, the capital had been provisioned tolerably well before matters deteriorated, thanks to the advanced warning they’d received of the rebellion. Mangup’s broad plateau also provided ample space enough that people were not yet pressed into one another’s misery.

Taken together, it produced an almost innocent picture, as though the city had merely entered a season of inconvenience rather than one of mortal peril. One could nearly forget, walking those streets, the slaughter and strain unfolding beyond the walls.

What Zeno had not told the men upon the battlements was that whatever ingenious expedient the Doux had employed in the outer works, they were near their breaking point. Another week at the most, by his estimations.

He finally arrived at the council chamber, the room itself as austere as ever. As he approached the doors, he could already hear the low murmur of voices within.

The guards crossed their halberds aside and admitted him without a word. Inside, Lord Kostis was already present, along with Father Damianus, the Metropolitan of Gothia, and the usual assortment of elderly nobles whose chief political talent lay in surviving long enough to mistake habit for wisdom.

“Good day, gentlemen,” Zeno said, offering a precise bow and a measured smile. “Has His Highness not yet arrived?”

“No,” Lord Kostis answered. He tried for composure, but concern lingered plainly in his voice.

“The Prince has been much afflicted of late,” Father Damianus said. “Yet prayer and right devotion shall see us safely through.”

Zeno kept his face still. The remark deserved derision, but there was little profit in displaying it. That the Metropolitan was still permitted a place in councils of consequence, despite his obvious ties to the rebellious Principe, was less a sign of Christian charity than of a state grown too enfeebled to prune its own dangerous branches.

The doors opened again.

Prince John Gabras entered slowly, and the sight of him gave little confidence to those who saw it. He looked as though he’d aged ten years in ten days. His face had fallen in upon itself, the skin loose and grey with strain, his movements were hesitant in a way no ruler’s ought ever to be. Beside him came his wife, Princess Euphrosyne, fair-haired and handsome as ever, one hand at his arm, the other lightly at his back, guiding him through the final steps with the attentive gravity of a painted saint.

Behind them shuffled the aged steward Trifon, bent and leathery, more like some dried relic left too long in a storeroom than the man responsible for what remained of the realm’s finances.

“Please, be seated,” Euphrosyne said, gesturing to the room as she helped the Prince lower himself onto his chair.

Zeno took his own place beside Lady Anastasia, the Doux’s consort, who represented the closest authority to the Doux after Zeno himself.

“What is it you wished to discuss?” the Prince asked. His voice already carried the weariness of a man exhausted before the matter had even begun.

“My lord,” Kostis said, stepping forward, “I convened this council to address the increasingly precarious position of the Doux’s army outside the walls. Though they remain entrenched for the moment, they are encircled, and unless action is taken, their fall is only a matter of time.”

“This again, Kostis?” The Prince gave a long, irritated sigh.

“The present standstill is a frail one-”

“The Doux will find a way,” the Prince cut across him. “Or he will not, and they will all perish.” He said it with the flat indifference of someone who had stopped caring. Zeno saw Lady Anastasia stiffen beside him.

“Surely there is something we may do,” Kostis said, turning toward the officers present.

“A sortie would be unwise, my lord,” one of them answered at once.

“It may surprise them at first,” said another, “but if we are repulsed, the withdrawal could become a rout. Morale would suffer greatly.”

“Best to proceed cautiously,” said the last, with all the bloodless prudence of a man whose imagination extended only as far as avoiding blame.

Zeno almost smiled. Between them, the three had managed to reduce military counsel to an argument for standing still.

“Then perhaps diplomacy,” Kostis said. He had long favored opening talks in hopes of securing tolerable terms.

The Prince reacted as expected.

“And yield yet more concessions?” he said, as though even the words exhausted him. “No. I will not. I have spoken and begged before half the world. I have spent years across distant shores bowing and scraping merely to keep this realm upright.” His voice rose as anger lent force to what fatigue had denied him. “I have humiliated myself. And what has it purchased me? Vassalage. Indenture. Invasion!” By the end, spittle flew with the words. “My neighbors look upon me with greed and contempt!”

The outburst broke upon a wheezing breath, and that alone arrested it, giving him just enough pause to master himself before the tirade consumed what little strength he had left.

“I ought to have killed my son when I had the chance,” the Prince said at last. He spoke not in rage, but in the flat register of a man too worn down to flinch from his own thoughts.

“My lord, you must not say such things,” Lord Kostis said at once.

“That would be a grievous sin, my liege,” Father Damianus added, his brows furrowed in concern.

The Prince lifted a hand, and the room fell into startled silence.

“No,” he said. “The sin was permitting him to pursue this folly when I knew well enough what he was capable of. And for that, I ask you to forgive me.”

The words struck the chamber like a hurled stone. Even those who had long ceased to expect steadiness from him seemed taken aback by the nakedness of the admission.

“Now our enemies stand at our gates, and our bastion is compromised. I have doomed us.”

He rose with visible difficulty, and Princess Euphrosyne moved at once to support him.

“If any of you still wish to save the Principality, then do so,” the Prince said by way of parting. “You have my leave. I shall retire.”

And with that, after scarcely five minutes spent in council over the survival of the realm, he withdrew from the very discussion meant to preserve it.

Zeno struggled not to roll his eyes at all this melodrama.

“We cannot conduct diplomacy with the Prince in this condition,” Lady Anastasia said before the room’s dismay could curdle into something worse. “He is not in any state to negotiate, and to send only Lord Kostis in his stead would be read as weakness.”

“The Doux and the army are already in talks with them,” Kostis said, sounding more irritated than reassured by the fact. “At the very least, I might join them and provide some oversight. They have already held half a dozen rounds of negotiations in the past week. Who knows what those brutes are offering the Italians.”

“My husband is perfectly capable of managing diplomatic affairs,” Lady Anastasia replied coolly at Lord Kostis’s insinuation. “And I doubt the Genoese would admit your presence in any case. To do so would be to invite coordination between the army before them and the fortress behind.”

“Of course, my lady,” Kostis said quickly. “My apologies. I am merely frustrated. It feels as though we do nothing but wait for the inevitable while the enemy sits at our gates.”

The silence that followed suggested that many in the chamber shared the sentiment, though none cared to voice it so plainly. It was not merely silence, Zeno thought, but the hush of a body waiting for someone else to risk proposing what all suspected might be necessary and dangerous.

He judged the moment exact and stepped into it.

“Perhaps there are measures we might take that are not purely passive.”

Every eye turned toward him.

Zeno had thus far spoken sparingly in council. As one still junior to most men in the room, he understood well the backlash any useless intervention could have on him. And he also knew that influence was accumulated most effectively when offered at moments of acute need. Utility was always valued, but under pressure it became indispensable. One did not spend such currency frivolously. One waited until desperation had raised its price.

“Would you care to elaborate, Master Zeno?” Kostis asked. Hope, however guarded, had entered his voice.

“A sortie,” Zeno said. “As was mentioned earlier. It is the boldest action available to us, and therefore the one most likely to inflict real damage and disorder upon the enemy.”

“We have already discussed the folly of that course, and its risks,” one of the fortress commanders replied at once. “The matter is hardly new, Zeno.”

“If it were only our untrained militia, you would be entirely correct,” Zeno said.

The chamber fell quiet at once, as if the words themselves had opened a question none of them wished to ask too quickly. If not the militia, then whom?

“We possess, within reach, a body of trained and capable men.” Zeno revealed.

“The Crown army?” Lord Kostis asked, voice thick with disbelief.

“We are surrounded,” one of the commanders said immediately. “We cannot coordinate a joint assault through a ring of enemy troops.”

“Yes,” Zeno replied, calm and precise, “we can.”

A scoff came from further down the table. “How? By prayer?”

“By messenger,” Zeno said, with the patient tone one used for a child or an officer who had outlived the better part of his wit. “Unless none of you have been observing the enemy dispositions, it should be clear by now that the force directly outside of Mangup has thinned noticeably since the opening days of the siege.”

That won him the room’s attention. They had not spent any noticeable amount of time on the wall, as if scared to look down below into their doom. Zeno had, exactly so he could spot the opportunity when it arose.

“Some losses may be attributed to attrition,” he continued, “but over the past week the Genoese have diverted an increasing number of men to some other purpose, most likely to intensify their harassment of the relief force. That army now hangs by a thread. Its destruction would not immediately doom us, of course, but it would place us in a precarious situation once more.”

He opened his hands with the controlled ease of a practiced speaker guiding an audience toward the conclusion he had already reached for them.

“With their lines thinned, the possibility of sending someone through them from Mangup to the camp is no longer absurd. Difficult, yes. Dangerous, certainly. But possible.”

“Possible is not the same as likely,” Lady Anastasia said at once. “It would require someone with exceptional talent for stealth and irregular operations to have a respectable chance of success. Do we possess such a man, and one willing to undertake it?”

Thought settled over the chamber. Zeno could see it move across their faces, the slow assembling of the same realization. He waited. He had, of course, already thought this plan through in its entirety. The conversation thus far had merely been a trail of stones laid carefully in advance to lead others to the same conclusion he’d reached.

“We do not,” he said at last. “But they do.”

Panagiotis stood at the mouth of his tent and surveyed his army.

They had accomplished more than he had any right to expect of them. They had endured marches that should have scattered them, defeated a foe that should have crushed them, and withstood a bombardment that should have shattered them. Yet even the stoutest rope frayed if pulled without rest, and he could see the wear upon them plainly now. Men walked with a heaviness that had nothing to do with armor. Their faces had taken on the dull look of those living on too little sleep and too little food.

The signs were everywhere if one knew how to read an army. Fires had grown fewer, for they could no longer risk boiling water as freely as before. Foraging had become more perilous by the day. The Genoese counter-fort, despite all their harassment and raiding, was nearing completion. The sleep deprivation tactics, while muted by their own tactic, wore on the men.

Every morning, every day, tightened the noose further around their necks.

But worse than all of that, they were losing hope. That, more than anything, warned him that they were near the breaking point. Men would follow hardship if they could still imagine an end worth reaching. When they ceased to see one, order crumbled.

The loss of the supplies had struck them like a hammer. What the army needed now was not merely food, nor sleep. It needed a victory. And it needed one soon.

Panagiotis lifted his eyes to the great fortress of Mangup and wondered whether this might at last yield the stroke they so desperately needed.

“It is the signal for emergency measures,” a voice rasped beside him, its owner staring at the intermittent plume of smoke rising beyond the walls. “They are meant to light it only when a breach is imminent.”

That was the formal meaning of the signal, certainly. It was meant to warn any relief force that the fortress stood on the edge of being stormed. Yet Panagiotis did not believe for a moment that this was how it was being used now.

“It is a summons,” he said, not taking his eyes from the smoke. “A call to action. They mean to tell us that something must be done, and done quickly.”

The words settled into the starkness of the grey dusk. Rain pattered steadily around them, as it had for days, a ceaseless companion that had once served their defense and now turned against them. The camp had become a churned morass of mud and standing water. Men slept damp and woke colder than they had laid down.

Already, coughs echoed through the night in growing number, and sickness had begun to spread.

Panagiotis turned at last toward the figure half-concealed in the nearby dark, a scarred shape so still he might have been mistaken for a stump or a broken post in the rain.

“Gennadios,” he said.

The disfigured bodyguard straightened at once.

“I need you to sneak into Mangup.”

Gennadios did not waste breath on surprise. He understood immediately both the danger of the task and the urgency beneath it.

“You think they are planning something?” he asked.

“I am certain of it,” Panagiotis replied, an iron certainty in his voice. “That was not a call for us to take action. It was a signal that they will soon.” In the rain and fading light, Panagiotis’s expression hardened further. “Find out what it is.”

Water ran down the scarred planes of his skin, but Gennadios’s eyes were sharp and unblinking. He gave a single nod.

“Yes, my Doux,” he said, his voice low and spare as wind through bare branches.

He only used Panagiotis’s title when he knew they might not see each other again. It was a reminder of the vow they’d made together that night.

Then he was gone.

It was a suicide mission, a desperate gamble that had every right to fail. But as Panagiotis watched the place where he had vanished, he felt no doubt. If such a task could be entrusted to any man alive, it was his shadow.