One of the vast inner courtyards of the royal palace was paved with decorative tiles and arranged with shir fountains, orange trees, and small gazebos of white granite. At one time, it had been stained with the blood of Parsian nobles and palace ghulams, but the traces had been cleared away. Though it still fell short of its former splendor, it no longer looked unsightly. No coarse knights or soldiers were allowed to enter.
All this was the result of orders from King Innocentius VII of Lusitania—strict, and at the same time carefully concealed from Archbishop Bodin. For within a section facing this courtyard, a woman lived under confinement. It was only confinement in name. In reality, she was allowed luxuries that even noblewomen of Lusitania could not hope to see. That woman was Queen Tahmineh of Pars, a heathen.
Innocentius VII visited that part of the courtyard once every day, and always asked to see Tahmineh. She never spoke a word, her face hidden behind a black veil. The king of the conquerors would mutter awkwardly about whether she needed anything, then hurry away to avoid Bodin’s notice.
But then one day in the twelfth month, Innocentius VII came with a slightly lifted chest, as if expecting praise.
“When the new year begins,” he said, “I will no longer call myself a king. I will be emperor.”
Innocentius—the king of old Lusitania, Maryam, and Pars, now ruler of a new Lusitanian Empire. No longer merely the Seventh.
“So, Lady Tahmineh,” he continued, “people say an emperor must have an empress. I believe that to be true as well.”
Queen Tahmineh said nothing.
The meaning of her silence eluded him. Was it refusal? Affirmation? Or simply waiting? Innocentius VII could not tell. Until then, he had been a simple man living in a simple world, where good and evil were clearly separated, like summer day and winter night.
But at this stage of his life, he had begun to sense, dimly, that there were things which could not be measured by such standards.
That day, a grand book-burning ceremony took place in the square before the southern gate of the royal capital. The so-called evil heretical texts to be destroyed amounted to twelve million volumes. The royal library was left completely empty. Before the mountain of books and the gathered crowd, Archbishop Bodin raved like a madman. A knight with an interest in academia had bravely—or perhaps foolishly—spoken out against the burning.
“Even if these are heretical texts, should we really throw such valuable works into the fire without study? Would it not be better to take time and judge their worth before burning them?”
“You blasphemer!” Bodin stamped his foot hard on the ground. “If these books say the same thing as the holy scripture of Yaldabaoth, then the scripture alone is enough for mankind. If they contradict it, then they are the Devil’s deception and must be destroyed. Either way, they belong in the fire!”
“But what about medical texts?”
The knight was struck hard across his face, and he staggered.
“Those who truly worship Yaldabaoth will never be struck by disease. Those who fall ill carry evil seeds in their hearts, and so they are punished by God! A king is no exception.” Bodin turned his venomous gaze toward the king seated on a distant throne and raised his voice even higher. “The moment he desires to take a heathen as his wife, disease will become the rod of God to strike down the arrogant! Repent, all who harbor such wicked thoughts!”
Innocentius VII turned pale and trembled, not from fear but from displeasure. At his side, Prince Guiscard watched with quiet satisfaction. To him, this was a good sign.
As Bodin raised a hand, oil was poured over the pile of books, and torches were thrown in.
Flames surged up and roared, swallowing twelve million volumes. A thousand years of human thought and feeling, accumulated since before the founding of Pars, were being obliterated by the god of the invaders.
History, poetry, geography, medicine, pharmacology, philosophy, agriculture, crafts—all of it burned. The labor and passion of countless people poured into each book turned to charcoal and ash in the fire.
Behind the ranks of Lusitanian soldiers in iron armor, stifled cries of rage and sorrow came from the Parsian crowd watching the burning.
Among them stood two tall men wearing deep hoods. The slightly shorter one muttered bitterly, “Stealing wealth is one thing. But to burn culture to ash? They’re not even barbarians anymore. They’re apes.” Find the original chapter at g.com.
“Look at that archbishop in command. He’s practically dancing with joy.”
“Leave that Bodin fellow to me. You take the king and the prince. All right, Dariun? That one is mine.”
“Very well.”
It was Dariun and Narses.
They did not stay to watch the book burning to the end. Instead, they left the square before the gate and made their way into the labyrinthine lower city. Whatever anger they felt over the destruction of the books, they still needed information about Shah Andragoras and Queen Tahmineh.
“Apparently, Yaldabaoth originally meant sacred ignorance in ancient Lusitanian,” Narses explained as they walked, sounding anything but amused.
According to their mythology, humanity had once lived in an eternal spring paradise, free of suffering and doubt. But they were cast out after biting the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Narses found the myth unpleasant. He thought it reduced human beings to pigs. A man who never questioned contradiction and never grew angry at injustice was worse than a pig. And yet, why did religions like the faith of Yaldabaoth always preach obedience and silence?
“Did you know, Dariun,” he continued, “that they destroyed Maryam and invaded Pars because of passages written in their holy book?”
“You mean their god told them to take Pars?”
“It doesn’t say Pars directly. But their scripture says their god will give his followers the most beautiful and prosperous land in the world. So in their eyes, any land like Pars naturally belongs to them. That makes us the illegal occupiers.”
“That’s incredibly self-serving,” Dariun said. He pulled his hood back into place and brushed his hair from his brow. “So do they truly believe that command from their god?”
“That depends,” Narses said. “Do they believe it, or do they only pretend to believe it to justify their invasion?”
If it was the latter, then there was room to stand on common ground and resolve things through diplomacy. If it was the former, then Pars would not survive unless they crushed the Lusitanians by force. Either way, they needed a way to defeat them.
“There are several ways to manipulate the Lusitanians,” Narses said.
For the sake of the prince who had promised him a post as court painter, Narses intended to use every method his abilities allowed.
“For example, if the prince declares the abolition of slavery across all of Pars, and promises full emancipation, then even if only ten percent of the ghulams take up arms, that still gives us an army of half a million. Of course, that would require self-sufficiency.”
“I see.” Dariun nodded.
“But in that case, we could not expect support from the nobles and landowners who currently own ghulams. No one helps you when they think they will lose something.”
“You speak as the lord of Daylam who once freed his own ghulams and gave up his lands.”
“I’m an oddball,” Narses replied, almost proudly. Then his expression darkened. “Even so, freeing ghulams is not the end of it. That is when the real trouble begins. It’s not something you can solve by sitting behind a desk and imagining it.”
It sounded like experience speaking rather than theory. Dariun did not press him further. Narses shook his head to recover his focus, then began counting on his fingers several strategies for defeating the Lusitanian army.
“Another plan would be to lure Sindhura using the lands of Badakhshan as bait. We could also infiltrate Maryam and spark an uprising among the royalists trying to restore it, cutting off Lusitania’s communication with its homeland. Or we could work directly inside Lusitania itself and push the royalty or nobles that stayed behind to claim the throne. We could even stir up Lusitania’s neighboring states and send them marching against the homeland.”
Dariun looked at his friend with admiration. “You keep coming up with one outlandish scheme after another,” he said. “A simple warrior like me really can’t compare to you.” Find the original chapter at novelping.com.
“I appreciate the compliment from Pars’s greatest warrior. But even if I come up with a hundred plans, I might only be able to carry out ten, and only one of those will succeed. If every plan you conceived worked, no ruler would ever lose his country.”
They moved to enter a tavern. Even in times of war, some businesses never declined—brothels, gambling houses, dealers in spoils of war and looted goods. So were the establishments where such people gathered to drink, negotiate, and trade. And naturally, places like that always carried more information than the number of people inside them, including plenty of reckless rumors.
A drunken Parsian soldier stumbled out of the tavern. He was clearly one of Qaran’s men who had sworn loyalty to Lusitania. About sixty percent drunk, he collided with Dariun’s shoulder as he tried to pass, muttered a curse, then looked up beneath his hood. His expression changed completely.
“D-Dariun?!” he cried. He jumped back and shoved his way through the crowd as he fled. Any trace of alcohol seemed to have been flung far into the heavens. There was no chance to grab him by the collar and pull him back.
Narses stroked his chin, impressed. “To run without even fighting,” he said, “means he knows his own limits well enough.”
Then the two of them set off after him. They did not run. There was no way to catch him that quickly on foot, and they already had a plan in mind.
Instead, they kept a deliberate distance, walking deeper into the labyrinthine streets. Whispers slid along the walls of buildings, and unseen eyes tracked their every step.
It did not take even a thousand heartbeats before Narses found his way blocked by four soldiers wearing unseen reward tags around their necks.
Dariun had become a mardan in his teens, earned the title shir gir, and was the youngest marzban. He was even called a mardan-e mardan. Compared to him, it was natural enough that they judged Narses as the easier target. But that choice brought them no fortune in the end. They held the upper hand only until all four blades were drawn.
Narses sprang toward the enemy on his right and brought his longsword down in a diagonal strike. With no time to dodge, the man tried to block it with his own blade. The instant the swords met, Narses’s weapon drew a brief white arc and cut cleanly across his neck.
Narses slipped away from the spray of blood that obscured vision, dropped lightly to one knee, and immediately drove his blade forward again. The second man’s right wrist flew into the air still clutching his sword, trailing blood. Before his scream could fully form, the third soldier was already collapsing, Dariun’s longsword buried in his chest.
The fourth soldier stood frozen, unable to even raise his voice. He looked back and saw Dariun approaching, then turned again to Narses’s faintly mocking smile. Finally, he dropped his sword and slumped to the ground. His mouth gaped open and shut as he tossed a leather pouch aside.
The pouch burst open, and about ten dinars and twice as many drachms spilled onto the ground. Neither Dariun nor Narses showed any interest in them.
“What we want is simple,” Narses said. “Shah Andragoras’s whereabouts.”
“I don’t know!” the soldier shrieked. “If I knew, I’d tell you! I want to live too, but I swear I don’t know!”
“Rumors will do. Try to remember, for your own sake.”
Under the quiet pressure, the soldier shared everything he knew. Shah Andragoras was apparently still alive. He was probably being held somewhere, but Qaran had only shared that information with a few close men. Even the Lusitanian generals had not been informed, and were dissatisfied about it.
And there was one more rumor that couldn’t be ignored.
“I-I heard Lusitania soldiers talking,” the man said. “They said Queen Tahmineh was going to marry the Lusitanian king. Their king saw Her Majesty once and lost his soul to her beauty.”
“What?!”
Both the bold Narses and the fearless Dariun were struck speechless.