The gates opened all right, and the legions were assembled cheering and scrambling into line. I jammed myself in between Philip and Simon, one sandal still half unlaced, my helmet perched on my head with the cheek pieces flapping, halfway through dressing in the dawn when I’d heard the triumphant blast of our trumpets. Philip was swearing in soft jubilant Greek, and Simon was whooping like a fiend. But the sun rose hot and messengers rode back and forth, and we stood shifting from foot to foot as demands were trotted up and down the mountain. It was full afternoon before a line of prisoners surrendered themselves and the legions ground their way up the winding mountain trek to the city—and before we’d got halfway up we saw smoke begin to billow into the sky in huge black waves, and realized that the Dacians had fired the city to keep us from sacking it. By that time Trajan was in no mood for mercy. “Where is your king?” he said harshly, and even all the way back in the legion’s second cohort I could hear the rasp in his voice.

“Can you see him?” Philip breathed, shorter than me and craning over the helmet crest of the man before him. We stood arrayed before the temples, which had remained unfired although we coughed through watering eyes at the acrid smoke that drifted from the burning quarters of Old Sarm. “Their king shouldn’t be hard to find—I heard he wears a lion-skin cloak!”

“He might have taken the cloak off, you idiot!”

The Emperor’s voice snapped out again like a whip. “Where is he?”

The captives glanced among themselves, muttering. “We’ll see about that,” the Emperor snarled, and in another moment his cavalry were stirring, vaulting onto horses.

“Bastard must have escaped before they surrendered,” Simon muttered at my side.

“No fight, then?” I said, disappointed, as the trumpets began to sound again.

“They’ve surrendered! Of course there won’t be a fight.”

“Oh.” I felt flattened somehow, and I wondered if the Emperor did too. He was staring up at the fortress, maybe remembering the sacked Roman garrisons with their skull idols staring from the niches where the legionary eagles had once preened. “If they burned their city, we can burn this,” the Emperor said curtly, and again we could all hear the snarl in his voice. “Destroy it.”

Not long at all before more flames began licking at the sky. The Dacian warriors looked at them, and looked away.