Bagratuni slid to one side of the step, keeping the blanket on his lap.
“Which play do you suppose it was?” he asked, looking over his shoulder at Thyatis.
“Eyes front! Sounds like the Girl from Miletus, which is about right for Anagathios. Just the kind of play to get him thrown in jail by some straitlaced Persian garrison on the edge of nowhere.”
The actor was hustled into the doorway by Bagratuni’s two cousins, who bounced him gently off the right wall a few times to settle him down. The actor, free of the arms of the two heavily built men, brushed off his tattered motley and produced, with a flourish, a knife with a serrated edge. Thyatis stepped forward and raised a hand. The man in front of her crouched down and found the wall behind him with the heel of his foot. At the entrance to the doorway, Bagratuni moved back into the middle of the steps.
“So, actor, do you have anything to say to your critics?”
The man’s head jerked up, showing a dusky olive skin, a fine-boned nose, high cheekbones, and liquid brown eyes with long eyelashes. The knife wavered in his hand. Thyatis unhooked the veil and demurely drew it from her face. The Syrian’s face split with a huge grin and he bowed his head to the flagstones without bending his legs. The knife disappeared into a sleeve in the process. Thyatis wrapped him a huge hug.
“Hello, old friend,” she said in a warm voice as she sat him down. “I was afraid that you were dead.” Anagathios shook his head no, but his eyes were sad. His ringers sketched in the air and Thyatis sighed. I was separated from the others and hid in the bushes unfit the soldiers were gone. I did not see them take any prisoners. Sorry.
No matter, she signed back. Time is short. I have work for you to do.
The Syrian smiled again, his perfect face glowing. Thyatis grinned back.
Stripped down to only a loincloth with a cotton bandeau twisted tight around her chest, Thyatis stood thigh deep in the rush of the sewage tunnel. Jusuf and two of the other Bulgars, clad only in short kilts, were just downstream of her, a stout log slung on their shoulders. A flickering light illuminated them from a lantern hung on a hook set into the ceiling. Thyatis caught the end of the log with her right hand, halting them. Sahul peered around his arm, then turned and gave a sharp whistle. Behind him, in the long tunnel from the river, the whistle was repeated.
The sound of thirty men moving in the tunnel was drowned by the rushing passage of foul water down the sewer. With the logs stopped, Thyatis reached above her head and found, by touch, a heavy leather collar that was dangling at the end of a long rope.
Sloshing through the muck that swirled around her legs, which left-them coated with grease, she dragged the collar down to the level of the log. She knew that up above, in the clerestory of the temple, Bagratuni and his cousins were anxiously watching the upper end of the rope slither through the pulleys that they had embedded in a heavy wooden framework at the top of the shaft. A heavy leather bag slapped at her waist, filled with iron rods. Reaching the log, she dragged the collar over the end of it, which had been cut out into a cross shape by a hand axe and adze.
“Isn’t this a bit much?” Jusuf wheezed, his muscular shoulder straining under the weight of the log. “A ladder over the wall would do as well to get us in.“
“A ladder in the street would be seen by a passerby,” she said, shaking her head. “This way gets us in and out unseen. With your brother’s package safely delivered, it could be days or weeks before the prison guards realize that anything is amiss.”
Once the collar was past the cutout, she fumbled in the bag and drew out an iron rod. One end was bluntly pointed, while the other was flattened into a mushroomlike cap. She pushed the blunt point into one of a pair of matching holes drilled through the cross-section of the end of the log. It stuck partway through, and she cursed under her breath at the delay. She tapped Jusuf twice on his shoulder and stepped back to the little ledge on the edge of the sewer tunnel. The water was cold, even with the steaming offal that drifted past, and her legs were beginning to go numb.
“You don’t believe in keeping it simple, do you? Really, just a plain old ladder…”
Thyatis ignored him and picked up a mallet with a cotton cloth wrapped around one end and returned to the log. The three men carrying the log braced their feet against the wall of the tunnel, and she used the mallet to tap the rod through the hole until the cap end was three or four knuckle bones from the wood. The blunt end stuck out about the same distance on the other side of the log. Once done, she stepped under the log and drove the other rod the same distance through the cross-section at right angles to the first. She tugged at the rope and high above her Bagratuni unshielded a lantern over the edge of the airshaft. Thyatis saw the light flash twice up in the darkness.
“Ready!” She hissed at the three men and they walked forward a bit, until she stopped them, just as the log was about to pass beyond the opening in the ceiling of the sewer. She tugged on the rope again, three times, and then felt it go taut.
“Lay it down,” she called over the sound of the rushing water to the three men. Jusuf motioned to the two others and they laid the end of the log down into the water. The rope and the collar drew snug against the bolts driven through the end of the log and the rope kept the one end high, while the other end was now in the water. Far above Thyatis thought she heard a creaking sound, and she leaned forward, both hands on the log to guide it. The rope groaned a little as it took the full weight of the log, and then the log began to rise. Thyatis and the three men guided it into the center of the shaft and watched as it rose up into the darkness.
“Prepare the others,” she said to Jusuf, handing him the bag of iron rods and the mallet. “If you think about it, my fine Bulgar friend, we can use these pylons for more than just this one purpose.”
Jusuf stared at her in something verging on horror. “We’re going to move them again after this?” His whisper climbed near to a shout.
Thyatis gave him a look that could have melted bronze and pointed off down the sewer.
He shrugged and splashed away into the fetid darkness to prepare the other nine logs that had been pushed in darkness across the river and dragged by the Bulgars up through the water gate of the city and into the sewers. The creaking sound continued to echo above, and Thyatis began to worry that the sound of the pulleys could be heard in the temple. Her fingers itched for the hilt of her sword, but it was in a bundle with her other clothes up at the top of the shaft.
There was a noise above her, and she suddenly skipped out of the way as a cloth bag filled with sand dropped out of the darkness and splashed into the water. Thyatis cursed and wiped slime off her face.
“Quick on the hook,” she said, reaching up to grab the rope. It quivered under her fingers, still stretched taut. “Wait for it!” The other two men had splashed forward and grabbed the top of the bag, where a hook was snagged into the rope bag that surrounded the cloth. “There!”
The tension slackened on the rope and the two men were quick to slip the hook out. They immediately dragged the bag, which was soaking with water at a terrific rate, upstream. With the hook gone, the end of the bag spilled open and sand poured out to vanish in the current of the tunnel. Thyatis felt the sand brush against her ankles as it whipped past.
Better than rats gnawing, she thought. She let go of the rope and hoped that Bagratuni’s man at the top thought to let the rope with the collar down slowly, or she’d be brained as it fell sixty feet down the shaft. A moment later it descended jerkily and she grabbed it.
“Bring the next,” she whispered. Another log, already sporting the cross of iron rods, appeared out of the darkness on the shoulders of the next three men. “Closer,” she said, holding out the collar. The numbness in her feet crept higher, into her thighs.