Free Unholy Night by Seth Grahame-Smith Page A

tippers, and doling out the necessary kickbacks, the coins Balthazar nicked from the forum were barely enough to keep them all fed and housed. There was no extra money for extravagances like new clothing, or lamp oil, or sweetmeats. No rugs to sit on or chalices to drink from.
    And it was getting harder to provide as time went on. The forum was becoming too dangerous. Balthazar was being recognized, questioned by the Roman soldiers who patrolled the Colonnaded Street. Money changers were getting nervous about offering tips, since capture could mean crucifixion.
    But what could he do? Picking pockets was all that Balthazar was good at—today’s fiasco notwithstanding. He knew of some boys, just a few years older than he was, who’d been arrested for murdering a money changer and stealing his inventory. He’d known these boys since he was born. He knew all of their parents and siblings. Like him, they’d started out picking pockets in the forum. Like him, they’d reached a point where they became too recognizable. A point where they’d needed more than a few coins to get by. And so they’d turned to another method. And for that, they’d all been put to death. Strung up by the Romans and thrown in a ditch on the other side of the Orontes.
    And that’s what had first given him the idea.
    Every day, men were rounded up by the Romans for any number of reasons—including no reason at all—and put to death. Every day, their bodies were carried to an unmarked field on the other side of the Orontes and buried. And with their bodies went their rings and bracelets and necklaces. Yet it never occurred to the Romans to take that jewelry for themselves. And why not? Because of the one thing the Greeks, Macedonians, Romans, Indians, Chinese, and even his fellow Syrians had in common: religion . They were all superstitious. Frightened of the unknown. Sufferers of a mass delusion, a hysteria of genuflection, ritual sacrifice, and old words. Not even the Romans, for all their Imperial brutality, would dare defile a dead body. But religion wasn’t a hysteria Balthazar suffered from.
    He never had. Not for lack of instruction. His father, like most Syrians, had worshipped the old pagan gods. And his mother, while not overtly religious, was one of the world’s most superstitious women. Balthazar had simply never found a use for it. He was more concerned with feeding his family than throwing himself at the feet of some statue, more concerned with tomorrow than the rants of a prophet who’d lived a thousand years before his birth. A prophet who never heard of Rome or Herod. He found nothing abominable about eating certain foods on certain days or wearing this kind of hat versus that kind of hat, or even— God forbid —no hat at all. Beliefs like that put you in a cage.
    And Balthazar was going to set himself free.

III
     
    H e waited on his belly, wet and alone in the dark. To the east, the lights of the city danced off the waters of the Orontes. To the west, nothing but desert. Balthazar had decided to avoid the bridge and swim across. You never knew when you were going to run into a Roman patrol. And he was paying for that caution by shivering in the cold desert air.
    He’d seldom been on this side of the river. There wasn’t much to see other than a few hermits and fields of shallow graves, one of which he now observed from afar. He watched as four slaves worked together to bury the day’s victims, supervised by a single Roman soldier. Two of them used shovels to dig a knee-deep trench, another transferred bodies from a wheeled cart and placed them in, and the fourth filled in the dirt on top of them.
    He hadn’t told a soul about his plan. No one could know—not his oldest, most trusted friends from the slums. Not his accomplices from the forum. No one . Picking pockets was one thing. Even murders could be forgiven. But this …
    He was tampering with the unspeakable.

    Balthazar dug with his bare hands. It had taken