"Then nothing should happen if I open the box?" Krispos persisted.
"Nothing should." Trokoundos took out more sorcerous apparatus. "If anything does, I am prepared to meet it."
"Good." Krispos flipped the catch that held the box shut. As he did so, Trokoundos stepped up to protect him from whatever was inside. He opened the lid. Inside the box was a curiously curved piece of meat, bloody at the thick end.
Trokoundos' brows came together at the anticlimax. "What is that?" he demanded.
Krispos needed a minute to recognize it, too. But he had butchered a good many cows and sheep and goats in his farming days. This was too small to have come from a cow, but a sheep had one much like it... "It's a tongue," he said. Then horror ran through him as he remembered the note that had accompanied this gift. "It's—Iakovitzes' tongue," he choked out. He slammed the lid shut, turned his head, and vomited on the fine mosaic floor.
Near the south end of Videssos the city's wall was a broad field where soldiers often exercised. Several regiments of horsemen, lancers and archers both, were drawn up in formation there. Their banners rippled in the spring breeze. They saluted as Krispos and Agapetos rode past in review.
Krispos was saying "Draw out whatever garrison troops you think the towns can spare, if they're men who'd be any good in the field. The Kubrati nomads always liked to play the raid-and-run game. Now it'll be our turn. If Harvas thinks he can sell us peace at the price of maiming an ambassador, we'll teach him different. The way I see it, he's stolen a hundred pounds of gold. We'll take it back from his land."
"Aye, Majesty," Agapetos said. "But what happens if one of my raiding bands comes up against too many men for them to handle?"
"Then pull back," Krispos told him. "Your job is to keep Harvas and his cutthroats too busy in their own country to come down into the Empire. I won't be able to send you much support, not until Petronas is beaten. After that, the whole army will move to the northern frontier, but until then, you're on your own."
"Aye, Majesty. I shall do as you require." Agapetos saluted, then raised his right arm high. Trumpets brayed brassily, pipes skirled, and drums thuttered. The cavalry regiments rolled forward. Krispos knew they were good troops. Agapetos was a good soldier, too; Videssian generals made a study of the art of war and learned scores of tricks for gaining the most with the smallest expenditure of manpower.
Then why am I worried? Krispos asked himself. Maybe it was because the competent, serious Videssian soldiers had not faced warriors like Harvas' Halogai before. Maybe it was because competent, serious Agapetos had already let Harvas trick him once. And maybe, Krispos thought, it's for no reason at all. No matter how well he acts the part, Harvas isn't Skotos come again. He can be beaten. In the end, even Skotos will be beaten.
Then why am I worried? he asked again. Angry at himself, he yanked Progress' head around sharply enough to draw a reproachful snort from the horse. He rode back to the city at a fast trot. He knew he should already have been in the westlands, moving against Petronas. But for Harvas' latest outrage, that campaign would have begun a fortnight before.
Krispos rode not to the palaces, but to the Sorcerers' Collegium north of the palace quarter. Iakovitzes had reached the capital the night before, more dead than alive. The Empire's most skillful healer-priests taught at the Collegium, passing on their art to each new generation in turn. The desperately ill came there, too, in hope of cures no one less skilled could give. Iakovitzes fell into the latter group.
"How is he?" Krispos demanded of Damasos, the head of the healing faculty.
The skin under Damasos' eyes was smudged with fatigue, part of the price a healer-priest paid for his gift. "Majesty," he began, and then paused to yawn. "Your pardon, Majesty. I think he may yet recover, Majesty. We are at last to the point where we may attempt the healing of the wound itself."
"He's been here most of a day now," Krispos said. "Why haven't you done anything before this?"
"We have done a great deal, Majesty," Damasos said stiffly. He was of middle height and middle years, his pate tan, his untrimmed beard going gray. He continued, "We've had to do a great deal, much of it in conjunction with sorcerers who are not healers, for added to this mutilation was something I have never before encountered and pray to the good god I never see again: a spell specifically intended to thwart healing. First discovering and then defeating that spell has occupied us up to this time."
"A spell against healing?" Krispos felt queasy; the very idea was an abomination worse than the torture Harvas had inflicted on Iakovitzes. "Who could conceive such a wicked thing?"
"For too long, we did not, Majesty," Damasos said. "Even after we realized what we faced, we needed no small space of time to overcome the wizardry. Whoever set it on the wound bound it with the power of the victim's blood, making it doubly hard to banish. It was, in effect, a deliberate perversion of my own ritual." Tired though he was, Damasos set his jaw in outrage.
Krispos asked, "You are ready to heal now, you say?" At the healer-priest's nod, he went on. "Take me to Iakovitzes. I would see him healed, as best he may be." He also wanted Iakovitzes to see him, to know how guilty he felt for sending him on an embassy about which he'd had misgivings.
He gasped when Damasos ushered him into Iakovitzes' chamber. The little noble, usually so plump and dapper, was thin, ragged, and filthy. Krispos coughed at the foul odor that rose from him: not just that of a body long unwashed, but worse, a ripe stench like rotting meat. Yellow pus dribbled from the corner of his mouth. His eyes were wide and blank with fever.
Those blank eyes slid past Krispos without recognizing him. A healer-priest sat beside the bed where Iakovitzes thrashed. Four beefy attendants stood close by. Damasos spoke to the priest. "Are you ready, Nazares?"
"Aye, holy sir." Nazares' glance rested on Krispos for a moment. When Krispos showed no sign of leaving, the healer-priest shrugged and nodded to the attendants. "Commence, lads."
Two of the men seized Iakovitzes' arms. A third grabbed his head to pull down his lower jaw, then wedged a stout stick padded with cloth between his teeth. Iakovitzes had not seemed aware of his surroundings till then. But the instant the stick touched his lips, he began to struggle like a man possessed, letting out blood-curdling shrieks and a string of gurgles that tried to be words.
"Poor fellow," Damasos whispered to Krispos. "In his delirium, he must think we're about to cut him again." Krispos' nails bit into his palms.
In spite of the battle Iakovitzes put up, the fourth attendant forced a metal gag into his mouth, of the sort horse doctors used to hold an animal's jaws apart so they could trim its teeth. When the gag was in place, Nazares reached into Iakovitzes' forcibly opened mouth. Seeing Krispos still watching, the healer-priest explained, "For proper healing, I must touch the wound itself."
Krispos started to answer, then saw Nazares was dropping into a healer's trance. "We bless thee, Phos, lord with the great and good mind, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor." The priest repeated the creed again and again, using it to distract his conscious mind and to concentrate his will solely on the task of healing before him.
As always, Krispos felt awed to watch a healer-priest at work. He could tell just when Nazares began to heal by the way the man suddenly went rigid. Iakovitzes continued to moan and kick, but he could have burst into flames without turning Nazares from his purpose. Almost as if lightning were in the air, Krispos felt the current of healing as it passed from Nazares to Iakovitzes.