Five for Silver

Prologue

The young man awoke in the embrace of a suffocating nightmare.

To darkness.

A monstrous heaviness bore in on him from above and all sides.

He tried to move. His foot came down on a surface which resisted for an instant, then gave way. Wetness trickled into his boot. The invisible mass pinning him shifted with a soughing noise and the weight of the world settled onto his chest. What felt like an elbow or knee dug into the small of his back.

His eyes were open, but he could see only those ghostly lights that drift beneath closed eyelids.

He couldn’t breathe. He struggled to turn his head, to find air. His cheek was brushed by cold, stiff fingers.

Then he understood.

He was buried with the dead.

The miasma of death filled his nostrils, flooded his lungs. He tried to cry out for help, but could only manage to spit up a choking sob. In the blackness, his flailing hand encountered the rounded shape of a skull.

More than once as he had walked through the city he had stepped into the street, fastidiously distancing himself from a corpse sprawled beneath a colonnade or crumpled in a doorway. Here the dead pressed themselves against him with obscene intimacy, as if he were already one of them.

Perhaps he was.

From above, from the world of the living, came a muffled shout.

“Lies! More lies!”

A cascade of liquid trickled across his back. Blood?

No. Rivulets of fire, burning like hot coals. He must be alive. An incorporeal shade could never feel such blistering agony.

“Lye. More lye,” the shouter somewhere beyond the darkness repeated.

The young man clenched his fists, arched his back, and began to fight his way up toward air. He scrabbled higher, pushing with his feet wherever he could find purchase on a head or shoulder blade, pulling himself up through the nightmare of tangled limbs.

His hands slid against liquescent flesh, boiled off bones by lye poured endlessly into the heaped corpses. Was he at the bottom of a pit, or in one of the towers that Justinian had ordered be filled with Constantinople’s dead? Clutching at the darkness his hand fastened unexpectedly on a face.

He gagged convulsively.

For a heartbeat he lay still. The blazing fire inside his chest was as intense as that outside. Had he swallowed lye?

Ignoring the pain, he snaked one hand upwards and grabbed a cold, rigid arm. Once it might have been part of a prosperous merchant, a starving beggar, a Christian, a pagan.

To the young man, it was just another rung on the ladder back to life.

He forced himself on, pulling, slithering, pushing with feet and elbows.

A lifetime passed. Then, abruptly, he could see the vaguest wash of light, the merest suggestion of shapes.

He lunged upwards. A hand reached down. He grasped it.

Decayed flesh slid off the bone.

A final spasm propelled him into light. He saw then that he held a ragged strip of skin entangled with a silver ring, the gift of the pit.

“I’m alive!” he screamed as he looked up, just in time to receive a bucket of lye in the face.