Free The Emperor Awakes by Alexis Konnaris Page B

The metal on the barred opening appeared rusted and the surrounding frame had started to chip away. I pulled the bar and easily wrenched it off. Now for the door. Luckily it was unlocked. I opened it slowly and took a peek outside.
    Strangely, the street was totally deserted. I could see fires in the distance. I walked to the end of the street and looked around the corner. Ayia Sophia was only a short walk away. The distance was short, but the leap would feel long through the fire and the lion’s den.
    I could now hear the sounds of battle, looting and rape. I could see the glow from the fires spreading across the city. I held my sword firmly in my left hand and plunged into the burning streets.
    My destination was the gardens on the hills spreading North-East of the old Imperial Palace, the hills where the acropolis of ancient Byzantium used to be.
    I hardly met with any resistance as I briskly made my way to my temporary refuge. I did not stop running until I had reached the deserted area of scrubland, magnificent ancient trees and caves.
    This was one of the few pristine and untouched areas in the densely populated city, where buildings were for the most part packed close together, stubbornly jostling for space, vying to inhale the smallest breath of fresh air, their impatience rising, and then ebbing away, sliding down the blessed and cursed uneven gradient of the city all the way into the waters of the Bosphorus and its murky depths.
    There, away from the hustle and bustle of the great city, it was difficult to accept that you were in the centre of the greatest city on earth.
    Only when I stopped and let myself fall, exhausted, to the ground, did I realise that I was soaking wet, water mixed with sweat dripping from every surface and every pore, my clothes and my hair, and forming shining paddles at my feet.
    I felt as if I had been dragged backwards through a hedge. I tried to recover from my close brush with death. I sat down under a great plane tree and tried to remember how to breathe normally again and find some semblance of calmness, before I did what I urgently had to do: talk to my mother.
    She appeared before me, as impressive as ever, her larger-than-life presence filling every nook and cranny of the rocks and the motionless vegetation around me and invading every pore of my skin.
    Her voice sliced through the air like a blade. Her voice was a booming echo filling my brain, with copious blood rushing to engage the intruder, and almost giving me a paralysing seizure.
    ‘Finally, our sick lady has succumbed to her fate. It was sad to see her at her sickbed fading away. But history will take its course and we cannot change that. We should not change it at any case. Michael, there is much to do, but we must move with extreme caution. The identities and secrets of the members of the Order may have been compromised and it will be difficult to know whom to trust. It is imperative to find that child and the fate of the real Emperor. Have you found the Likureian icon?’
    ‘No, I did not get the chance to even properly conduct a search for it. Mother, have you heard anything from Mark?’
    ‘Not yet. I will let you know when I do.’
    And with those final words, she was gone.
    * * *
     
    Before I could be on my way I had a strange vision.
    There was a castle and a beautiful garden next to an old harbour and a child was trying to climb an ancient olive tree and kept failing to get a grip, and kept falling down, but persisted and kept scratching the trunk and pulling the branches.
    A short distance away, a woman, most likely the child’s mother, was smiling, full of pride at her child’s exploits and persistence, her eyes twinkling in amusement, a matching pair of two flawless emeralds, reflecting the sun’s rays and the surrounding landscape in a myriad colours.
    Her mind was plotting her child’s future. I was surprised to be privy to her thoughts. The boy kept calling his mother to join him, to help him. From