The dawn wind swept through the streets of Ecbatana, carrying the stench of blood.
Drunk on slaughter and alcohol alike, Lusitanian soldiers wandered through the city, dragging women behind them with one hand while stepping over the bodies of the dead.
From a corner of the royal palace, the man in the silver mask looked down upon the city stained by blood and disgrace.
“Enjoy your victory while you can, you barbarians.” Though he spoke of his supposed allies, he made no effort to hide the contempt in his voice. “The more eagerly you indulge in this revelry of stupidity and bloodshed, the more the people of Pars will long for a savior. They will seek a hero who can drive you out and restore their land. And when that day comes, you will pay for what you have done today.”
Another group of Lusitanian soldiers ran past beneath him. They were headed for the great temple to loot it. Men who feared not the royal authority of the Parsian throne had no reason to fear its divine authority either. They even had a convenient justification: they were destroying the center of idol worship in the name of God.
After much effort, they smashed open the temple doors and surged inside. Statues of the gods of Parsian mythology stood in rows on either side.
There was Anahita, goddess of water and childbirth, wearing a golden crown and robes of beaver fur.
A white horse with a golden mane represented Tishtrya, god of rain.
Verethragna, god of victory, held the feather of a giant raven.
Radiant Ashi, goddess of beauty and fortune and protector of maidens.
And Mithra, god of contracts and loyalty, said to possess a thousand ears and ten thousand eyes and to know all things in heaven and on earth. He was also revered as a god of war.
The Lusitanian soldiers shouted as they swarmed over them and began dragging them from their pedestals. The statues varied in material. Some were carved from marble. Others were bronze covered with sheets of gold leaf.
The marble statues crashed to the floor and shattered. The bronze statues were stripped of their gold leaf by eager hands and sword points.
“Heathen gods!”
“Evil demons!”
Loudly proclaiming their religious righteousness, the soldiers stuffed the torn gold leaf into their pockets and spat on the faces of the gods.
“Pigs do behave like pigs.” A cold voice of mockery brought them to an abrupt halt. Among the fallen statues stood a young Parsian. “To destroy statues of goddesses this lovely. Have you no appreciation for beauty at all? You’re only proving your own barbarism.”
The Lusitanian soldiers exchanged looks. One of them understood Parsian, the common language of the Continental Highway.
“What are you talking about?” he said. “Idol-worshiping servant of evil. When the one true god Yaldabaoth descends at the end of the world, you heathens will be cast into hell for all eternity. It will be too late for regret then!”
“Who would want to go to a heaven filled with Lusitanian pigs like you?” the young man—Giv—fired back while quietly shifting into a stance from which he could draw his sword at any moment.
The Lusitanian soldiers began forming a ring of swords around him.
“O beautiful Ashi, goddess of fortune. Protector of springs, nourisher of the earth,” Giv said as though reciting a poem to a lovely woman, lifting his eyes toward the heavens. “Among all your faithful, the most handsome and graceful of men is about to be murdered by filthy Lusitanian swine. If you possess any mercy, grant me your protection.”
The soldier who understood Parsian erupted in fury, while those who did not were filled still with discomfort. A soldier who appeared to be the captain raised his broad-bladed sword and lunged.
Moonlight flashed across Giv’s blade in a silver arc, and the captain’s sword flew high into the night sky. Before the captain could recover from the shock of his effortless defeat, Giv was already on him. He grabbed the man’s right wrist with his left hand and twisted it behind him. At the same time, he extended his sword horizontally with his right hand, threatening the surrounding soldiers as he descended the stone steps one level at a time.
The Lusitanians exchanged nervous glances and retreated. This elegant, carefree-looking youth had just demonstrated extraordinary swordsmanship. It would have felt less humiliating if the captain had been slain outright.
“Don’t move, you blasphemous barbarians.” Giv’s voice was almost musical. “One step, and your captain’s height gets measured from the shoulders down. Anyone who speaks human language, translate that for the other pigs.”
“Now then, lovely Lady Ashi. I’ve avenged your humiliation, if only a little. Next, I intend to make these pigs offer restitution. They stole these goods from honest Parsian citizens and from the royal palace in the first place. Please accept them graciously.” Raising his voice, he pointed at one of the soldiers. “You there, pig. Take off your cloak. Then collect all the loot from your comrades. Unless you’d prefer your captain’s head gone.”
The soldier undoubtedly preferred otherwise. The Lusitanians were completely overwhelmed and offered no resistance.
Five minutes later, Giv was making his way into the underground waterway. The captain carried a cloak bundled with stolen treasures. Outside the heavy door, the Lusitanian soldiers had finally begun making a fuss, but Giv could not have cared less.
At a suitable spot, he struck the captain on the head with the hilt of his sword and knocked him unconscious. After propping him against the wall, Giv shouldered the bundle himself and followed the passage until he emerged above ground in a forest beyond the city. Follow the newest chapters on novelping.com.
Smoke rose in the distance, away from the royal castle. No doubt the Lusitanian army was burning another village, looting and slaughtering as it pleased. By morning, hundreds of heathen heads would likely be displayed beneath the city walls on spearpoints.
“What a miserable ending.”
Carrying a small fortune on his back, Giv started walking, thinking about where he might acquire a horse.
“And thus did Kay Khosrow the Hero ascend the golden throne. The kings of the world knelt upon the earth and swore their allegiance, and so the unification of Pars was achieved,” Giv quietly sang a passage from the founding legends.
The cheerful frivolity vanished from his face. His eyes gleamed hard and sharp, like a sword reflecting starlight.
The fall of Pars was inevitable. The kingdom itself had been built from the embers of other nations. It was born from ashes, and to ashes it shall return.
That being said, he found no pleasure in watching Lusitanian barbarians trample the soil of Pars beneath their horses’ hooves while indulging in looting and slaughter. Whatever small profit he’d taken for himself was an entirely different matter.
One day, he would make them pay.
Before dawn fully broke, Giv left the royal capital behind and disappeared into the last shadows of the night.
The royal palace had now become a hunting ground for armored beasts.
“Find the queen and seize her!”
The shouts and pounding footsteps of the invading Lusitanian soldiers thundered across the mosaic-tiled floors.
Capturing Queen Tahmineh was their official objective. At the same time, however, they indulged their personal desires. If they raped a fleeing handmaid, killed her, and stripped her of her necklace and rings, they could satisfy three urges at once.
No matter what atrocities they committed against heathens, Yaldabaoth would forgive them. The bishops guaranteed it. The more they persecuted infidels, the more faithfully they followed the will of God and fulfilled their duty as believers. There was no reason to hesitate. All the more so if in the process, they could also unleash the beast within themselves.
Thus the palace filled with the mad laughter of the victors and the screams of the defeated. The magnificent marble halls that had overflowed with splendor and luxury before Shah Andragoras marched to war became a swamp of blood and degradation.
The man in the silver mask wandered the palace alone, though not for the same reasons as the Lusitanian soldiers. Blood stained his leather boots. Severed limbs lay beneath his feet. But he felt nothing.
A murmur no one could hear came from behind the mask. “That woman never expected Ecbatana to fall so quickly. She sent out a decoy to draw the Lusitanians’ attention away and planned to escape once their vigilance slackened. If so, there must be a hidden chamber or another passage somewhere.”
The silver-masked man stopped. A thick, half-slashed curtain wriggled like a caterpillar. After confirming that no Lusitanian soldiers were nearby to compete for credit, he strode forward, swept the curtain aside, and exposed the crouching person behind it.
It was a middle-aged man dressed as a magupat.[1] His gaudy robes of gold and purple emphasized not holiness but worldliness.
“I’ll convert! I’ll convert!” Before the silver-masked man could speak, the high priest threw himself to the floor and wailed, “I’ll have my disciples convert as well. No, I’ll make every priest in the kingdom swear loyalty to Yaldabaoth. So please, please spare me!”
The silver-masked man started to walk past him with the same indifference one might show a squealing pig.
“I happen to know where Queen Tahmineh is hiding,” the magupat said, his tone a mixture of servility and cunning. The silver-masked man’s gaze made him recoil, but the shameless priest pressed on, “I’ll tell you where she is. In return, I trust you’ll see to my conversion and my safety.”
“Very well. Speak.”
And so Queen Tahmineh was sold to the enemy by the very magupat upon whom she had bestowed countless privileges and favors.
When she was dragged out from a secret chamber beneath the wine cellar along with several handmaids, she showed no hint of embarrassment and met the silver-masked man’s gaze head-on. The man stared in return.
“Yes, this is the woman. The Princess Consort of Badakhshan whom Andragoras became obsessed with.” He sounded as though he were drawing stagnant water from the bottom of a deep well of memory. The source of this chapter is novelping . com.
Tahmineh’s expression did not change, but the color visibly drained from her face.
“You haven’t changed at all since then. How many men’s lives and fates have you fed upon to remain so beautiful, you witch?”
The hatred packed into those words was enough to make anyone’s skin crawl.
Two banners fluttered above the walls of Ecbatana: the national flag of Lusitania and the sacred banner of Yaldabaoth. The two were identical in design, differing only in color. At the center was a silver emblem composed of two short horizontal lines crossed by a single long vertical one, with a silver border around it. The national flag was red, while the sacred banner was black. Red represented earthly power; black symbolized heavenly glory.
Looking up at those banners, several Lusitanian commanders spoke among themselves.
“I hear the man in the silver mask captured Queen Tahmineh.”
“Oh? So he captured both the shah and his queen almost single-handedly. Quite a feat.”
“Do you think that man is truly loyal to Lusitania?”
“Hmph. If he is, then why has he still refused to reveal to the Parsians that their shah is our prisoner?”
Voices thick with suspicion, distrust, and loathing rose louder.
“If the Parsians knew their king had been captured, their will to resist would have broken. This city would have fallen long ago. And what about that underground waterway? He and his men slipped through it alone and left us to storm the walls.”
“He probably wanted all the glory for himself. It’s not very endearing, but I can understand the sentiment.”
“Perhaps. Maybe that’s all it is. But I can’t shake the feeling that he’s plotting something.”
Those voices never reached the silver-masked man. Even if they had, he likely would not have cared.
He stood before the captive Queen Tahmineh, presenting her to King Innocentius VII of Lusitania. They were in the grand hall used for royal audiences. The blood and corpses had only just been hastily cleared away.
King Innocentius VII did not look like a mighty conqueror or a ruthless invader. He was tall and well-built, yet pale, his skin dull and lifeless. His eyes burned with fervor, but it was not a fire directed toward this world.
He was said to be a model follower of Yaldabaoth. He drank no wine. He ate no meat. For thirty years, he had never missed a single one of his three daily prayers. At the age of ten, he fell gravely ill, and vowed that he would never marry until he destroyed a great heathen empire and built a temple to Yaldabaoth in its capital. Now forty years old, he remained unmarried.
“Burn every depraved book that defies the Holy Scriptures. Eradicate all heathens from the earth.”
That creed defined his entire life. He had already ruled for fifteen years. During that time, he killed three million heathens—including infants—and burned roughly a million books on sorcery, atheism, and foreign cultures. Scholars who proclaimed, “There is no god,” had their tongues torn out. Men and women who neglected temple worship to meet in secret were “made one body” by means of a gigantic iron stake heated red-hot.
If there was any way a fanatical king would treat a heathen queen, it would be through nothing less than the most brutal execution. But the expectations of his retainers proved wrong.
When the King of Lusitania first laid eyes on Tahmineh, he said nothing. Shock spread slowly across his face. Then his entire body began to tremble.
Several of his retainers exchanged glances. A dark foreboding settled over them. Silently, they watched their king and the queen of the fallen enemy kingdom.
1. Parsian term for chief priest. Based on the magupat, the title of the chief priest in the Sasanian period of ancient Iran, which developed from the earlier term magus. ↩