[excerpt from The Sacred Band: BLINK OF THE GOD’S EYE]

A man as angry as Nikodemos was, in the aftermath of the Theban rescue gone awry, didn’t belong among the civilized. And the island of Lemuria was the most civilized place Niko had ever been: a city-state with towering citadel, power unchallengeable behind its sheer seaside walls. Nikodemos was a secular adept of the Bandaran mystery of maat – of transcendent perception, equilibrium and mystic calm. He was failing himself and all maat’s precepts if he lost control of his temper, of his balance or his heart.

So once back safe, if not sound, on New Year’s Day in Lemuria, he quietly ordered the Sacred Band of Stepsons and the new Theban Sacred Band, all twenty-three pairs, to make ready for an unspecified sortie as soon as they were fit to fight. Seeing hell in his eyes and muscles jump in his angular jaw, his flesh wounds unbandaged and scabbing up willy-nilly, Stepsons went scurrying through the whitewashed barracks and the town below, preparing for they knew not what. Meanwhile, Niko chased after his temper, trying to get it under control. But he couldn’t catch it. There was too much unrest in his soul.

Now nearly all knew he was planning a mission. He didn’t tell them where. But Crit knew where, had to know. And Straton knew. Soon Cime the Free Agent, the Riddler’s woman who ruled as “Evening Star” in timeless Lemuria, must be told that he was taking the Sacred Band to Sanctuary.

This was the foray the Riddler intended, after all. When Niko had briefed Critias and Straton, they’d stared at him in disbelief. But they would implement his orders. He was the Riddler’s right-side partner; his word bound the Band like law while their commander lay abed.

Ignoring deeper wounds (his own, his seasoned fighters’) that needed tending, he called the three youngest Stepsons out of their barracks and told them they were lucky to be alive, dressing them down savagely for not holding steady in the ranks. Their eyes, wide and shocky; their faces, cut and bruised; their hands, trembling, told him they’d learned something on the Chaeronean battleplain. What they’d learned was nowhere near enough. These three Bandaran-trained youths were his responsibility; he couldn’t leave them to their own devices. He’d sponsored them, first on Bandara with the secular adepts, and now in Tempus’s Sacred Band.

So he got his best horse and he drilled the trainees on the practice field until the sun set, and had the veteran, Gayle, take over from him then. “All night long,” he told his broad and sturdy Stepson, once a 3^rd Commando fighter and among his most studied masters of the crueler arts. “Until they drop in their tracks. And tomorrow, all day long. I want them disciplined.”

And he left, wishing he could find something to hack to pieces.

Then he had to face the Riddler’s woman up at Pinnacle House in that uncanny palace of hers, with indoor trees and arcane windows to take you anywhere in the blink of a god’s eye. Up he went as the sun was setting, a supplicant on a pilgrimage, seeking absolution in that vast and vaulted hall of glass and stone where multicolored streamers hung from rafters, tattered standards from forgotten wars.

His own cowardice shamed him. He should have come here sooner. Cime would have all their hides for bedspreads. But Stealth, called Nikodemos, had a rage in him so deep he’d spent years in the misty isles of Bandara trying to tame it. Now it was loose, anger aimed at the gods themselves. He’d had to wait until he could trust himself with Cime: they never were easy with each other. She’d almost seduced him once. He couldn’t trust her. Her relations with his left-side leader were beyond his ken.

“I’m here to see the Evening Star,” he said when a jowly servant with black dogs on either side opened up the huge oak doors.

“Come in, Lord Nikodemos,” the man bid him. They all knew he’d wed a princess, years ago, and was royalty in his own right – if he cared to return to the city at the edge of time. He didn’t care if he ever went back there. Those were other days, other hurts that fed his anger; but none as deep as these, today.

How was he going to tell Cime how badly he’d failed, what a botch he’d made of this mission of mercy that Tempus had decreed?

Niko was led by the padding servant and the dogs through marble halls, all red and black and white, to her sanctum. Cime was the Riddler’s sister, some said: a gray-eyed beauty, her black hair silvered, wearing silk and leather and a look on her diamond-shaped face as if she’d seen a ghost. Ageless, Cime was, as long as he’d known her; as they all were here, while in Lemuria’s embrace. She seemed thirty. He’d heard she was far beyond three hundred years of age. She had a deeper beauty than mortals do, a fabled power, and a voice always full of seduction. Always.

Always, but not today. She knew at first glance that something was very wrong. Perhaps she sensed his misery. Or she’d heard whispers. She was braced and guarded.

“What is it, Niko?” Voice too sharp, edgy. She looked him up and down and found him wanting. Three huge black dogs milled around her feet; some said they changed to humans when she chose. “What happened?”

So he had to own to it. He squared his shoulders and sucked in a breath. As she came up close, he bowed his head to look into those gray eyes his commander loved so well. “We fouled up. I did. He got hurt. Badly, maybe. And the god…is not helping him today.”

She said nothing, but ran full-tilt past him down the hall, like a sprite or a goddess bent on vengeance. She’d know where Niko would have put him.

He had to run after her. And he never caught her till they got to where the Riddler lay.

When they reached the Stepsons’ billet, everyone was there who had no incapacitating wounds or pressing duties. Even a couple of Thebans waited (walking wounded in kirtles and mantles, hair shorn, alike as father and son, eyes so full of loss they barely noticed what they saw), helmets under their arms. Stepsons saw Cime, then Niko, come running and parted the crowd for them, squinting at them as if from a hundred miles away. No one talked. All stood back. It wasn’t a good day, everybody knew.

He tried to guide Cime to the sickroom. She shook him off – a sharp, dismissive shrug. Inside, Strat and Crit sat on the Riddler’s either side with a bucket full of bloody rags and murder in their eyes. Whitewashed walls seemed too close, the simple bed of his commander’s office cell too hard.

Tempus just lay there, unseeing, a wound bubbling in his chest that should be mortal. But wasn’t – yet. Niko clutches that hope like his dream-forged sword.

Cime pulled two rods down from her hair and it tumbled around her face. Even Niko stepped back involuntarily. All three Stepsons in this room know what those diamond rods can do: suck your soul, suck your life, and leave you empty, lost, or worse. What else they did was between her and the powers that she served.

“Well,” Cime said, still at the foot of the Riddler’s sickbed, diamond rods in fists on either hip, “now you’ve done it, haven’t you, all you fools? Tempus, can you hear me?”

“Life to you, Cime,” said the Riddler from his bed, “and everlasting glory.” He smiled his humorless kill-smile, just a tightening at the corners of his mouth.

The last thing Cime would do was acknowledge the Sacred Band greeting. “Get out of here, Stepsons. I’ll see to him. You three have done quite enough today: all of you and your feckless, treacherous god.”

And with that, she banished them. Niko hoped this banishment was not forever, but who could say?

The last thing he saw was Cime striding to the bed. The last thing he heard was Tempus’s voice, rattling deep in his chest, saying, “Sister, don’t bait the god today.”