“T HAT, lord, was the Street of the Silversmiths. Already our men have recovered half a ton of the metal, melted by the heat of the burning. It is the only thing which survived.”

The horses of the entourage picked their way gingerly in between the broken masonry, the charred wood—some beams still had tiny flames licking at them—and the scattered bricks. The corpses had been hauled from their path and the way cleared a little, but Shahr Baraz could see objects which seemed to be thick lengths of burnt logs inside the ruins on either side. Bodies, immolated until they were nothing but the stumps of torsos. They had been so thoroughly burned that they presented no threat of disease. The reek of ash and smoke was the only smell in the air. Shahr Baraz nodded approvingly. The clean-up crews had done their work well.

For as far as the eye could see the desolation extended. The shells of buildings towered in abject ruin, burnt black, gutted, half fallen. Their remains were as bare as gravestones, the foundations buried in rubble, like black crags standing in the breakers of a grey sea. Aekir had become a ghostly place. Already it seemed like a monument, the ruin of a long-dead civilization.

Jaffan was jovially pointing out other landmarks gleaned from books and maps. Even the more stolid of his staff, Shahr Baraz thought, seemed a bit drunk, as though the victory were a potent spirit still singing in the blood five days after the event. The enormity of the thing they had achieved had been slow in sinking home in the aftermath of reorganization and the crushing of the last resistance. Now, as they rode unhindered through what had been the greatest and holiest city of the unbelievers in the world, they were at last savouring the taste of triumph.

For Shahr Baraz, the triumph had a bitter aftertaste. Aekir had been burned to the ground. The day after the city’s fall, he had been forced to order its evacuation by all troops and let the fires burn themselves out. The huge walls still stood, as did the more robust buildings, including the palaces of the High Pontiff, the cathedral and other public buildings. But the poor brick of much of the city had collapsed in the intense heat of the burning and vast expanses of the space within the walls were levelled plains of dust, rubble and ash.

The rubble and the ash had cost his army almost fifty thousand men to win.

Three leagues to the east of the city, the female prisoners covered almost nine acres. A good proportion of those would remain with the army. His men had earned them. And trundling back to Orkhan was a train of waggons two leagues long; the spoils of Aekir sent back to the Sultan Aurungzeb. The richest city in the world should have yielded more in the way of plunder, but most of it had gone up in smoke ere his troops were able to come to it. The men were restless as a result. Well, that restlessness would be put to good use.

Aekir was a shell. It would require the labour of several lifetimes to rebuild it, but Shahr Baraz did not doubt that it would be done. Aurungzeb wanted Aekir to be his capital some day. Aurungabar he had said he would rename it, but he had been drunk at the time.

A cat darted out of a cleft between the stones and sped across the street, startling the lead horses. The staff officers fought the excited animals into submission. Shahr Baraz’s own mount laid back his ears, but the old general talked to him softly and he remained quiet. The young men were too impatient with horses these days. They treated them like tools instead of companions. He would have a word with the cavalry-quartermaster when they returned to camp.

Jaffan had regained his composure. He was pointing out something else. . . ah, yes. The spires of Carcasson. They loomed through the smoke haze like the horns of some huge, crouching beast. What would they do with that place? Baraz wondered. It was his own ambition to found a university in Aekir before he died, and Carcasson—what a library it would make! And in the centre, where the Ramusians had worshipped their idols, would be the prayer mats of Ahrimuz.

Baraz’s thoughts darkened. The retreating Torunnans had fired the library of Gadorian Hagus as they retreated. Two hundred thousand books and scrolls, some of them dating back into the dim history before the days of the Fimbrian Hegemony. All of them had been lost. Horb, Shahr Baraz’s secretary, had been in tears at the news.

John Mogen would not have done that. He would have known that the Merduks would have preserved the library and would have left it intact behind him. But this Lejer fellow, he was a barbarian. He deserved the fate which awaited him.

They were riding to view his crucifixion.

The cavalcade turned left, into the afternoon sun. The buildings, or their remnants, receded on either side and all of a sudden there was a space before them, a square fully a sixth of a league wide. This was the Square of Victories, built by the Fimbrian Elector Myrnius Kuln himself. It was the largest square in the world, and drawn up in it to meet their general were a hundred and twenty thousand Merduk troops in full battle array.

The cavalcade halted before that sea of faces. Rank on rank of soldiers with their pikes held upright in salute, the slow-match of the Hraibadar arquebusiers drifting in blue streamers down the breeze, the drawn tulwars of the Subadars and Jefadars and Imrahins catching the faint sunlight in serried glitters. The cavalry was there, regiment by regiment, the tall headdresses of the horses nodding and waving, their riders stock-still. Beyond them the elephants stood in long lines, so fantastically caparisoned so as to seem like animals out of some fabled bestiary. In the towers that perched on their broad backs their crews swayed as the beasts shifted from foot to foot; they did not like the feel of the grit underfoot. Notoriously footsore creatures, elephants. Dozens had been crippled by caltrops in the last assault.

Shahr Baraz’s staff took up their places behind him in a momentary stillness. The old Khedive was helmetless and the wind swayed the long white hair of his topknot, the two ends of his drooping moustache. His face seemed hardly lined despite his age, and his eyes were almost invisible within their slits. He sat his steed as easily as a young man, in black and gold lacquered armour, his scimitar sheathed at one thigh. His horse, a tall grey gelding, bore a black chamfron and a tall yellow crest, and its tail was bound up with white ribbons.

Shahr Baraz tightened his knees, and his mount started forward into the square at an easy canter.

There was a murmur of sound from the assembled army. As the old Khedive approached the centre of the square it swelled into a roar. The army was cheering him, three sides of the gargantuan space erupting as the thousands upon thousands of throats joined in an air-shaking storm of noise. Then it began to form words, a phrase repeated over and over again:

“Hor-la Kadhar, Hor-la Khadar!”

Glory to God they were chanting, thanking their creator for this moment of triumph, this spectacle of their greatness. And their cheers were directed at Shahr Baraz on his horse near the heart of their formations. Glory to God for this evidence of His love for them, this victory of victories.

“Hor-la Kadhar,” Shahr Baraz whispered, his eyes stinging with tears that he would not let fall. He whipped out his scimitar so that it was a white flash in the sunlight, and the cheering redoubled. They would hear it for leagues, he thought. They would hear the Merduk army giving praise to the One True God, and they would tremble, those unbelievers, knowing at last that the time of the Saint had ended and the time of the Prophet was beginning.

Shahr Baraz sheathed his scimitar. The blood was racing through him like a spring tide, making him young again. The gelding caught his mood and began to dance beneath him. The pair continued on their way to the scaffold that had been set up in the square where the statue of Myrnius Kuln stood looking on with granite eyes, as he had looked on for six centuries in this city he had founded. The Khedive’s staff caught up with him, their silk surcoats flapping like banners, the battle fanions streaming like brightly coloured serpents above their heads.