The wall comes down. The unpaid go through the breach. Then the whole camp starts saying one name.

A ram made of a wagon axle and three hundred shoulders. A supply officer trying to burn the garrison's books in a brazier, and the foundling who tips the brazier over and lets him live. A young officer at the postern gate who says "I have a son" with a knife at his ribs, and the thirty men behind him who lay their spears down on the stone. A Numidian king on the ridge with thirty-one riders, deciding how long the foundling will last. Wine poured into helmets, a Libyan woman with a blue spiral on her cheek, two quarter-shekels, and sex against the side of a supply wagon. And at the edge of the firelight, Aza sorting clipped coins, hearing the name Kadmar for the first time, then again, and again.

Chapter Four of THE JACKAL OF CARTHAGE, read in full. New chapter every Thursday at ten. The magic, myths, and world of Carthage every Tuesday.

Grab your copies of The Plague of Carthage and The Viper of Carthage before they are released at: https://books.nightforgeafterdark.com/ebook-carthage-v2/

THE JACKAL OF CARTHAGE is live: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HGBZF3VS

Book Two, THE KNIFE OF CARTHAGE, is out under the full moon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKTGSZFN

There is a book in Carthage nobody is allowed to read. It has three columns: Favour, Cost, Client. The Cost column is never blank.

Tonight you climb the steps of the fire god's temple while the drum is beating, and I tell you what the drum is for. The bronze bull with a furnace in its belly. The two smokes over the road that never meet. A grain-shipper buying a southwesterly wind for eight silver shekels, counted onto a stone tray under a priest's thumbnail, with a clay receipt and no prayer. The moon's temple across the road gives on credit and sends perfumed reminders; the fire sells outright and collects while you are still in the building. The ledger on its lectern, written in ink ground with furnace ash so the entries never fade. What the fire is fed, from lamp oil to the thing behind the precinct wall that the city agrees to hear as a drum. A general who bought a complete victory for forty-three talents of silver, twelve of gold and six hundred of the enemy's dead left unburied, and came back the morning after to read what he had already paid. A trader who sailed for Utica owing, and the priest who was waiting on the dock with the bill itemised down to the ink. And the last line in the book: Favour, the city. Cost, recorded. Client, blank.

Grab your copies of The Plague of Carthage and The Viper of Carthage before they are released at: https://books.nightforgeafterdark.com/ebook-carthage-v2/

THE JACKAL OF CARTHAGE is live: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HGBZF3VS

Book Two, THE KNIFE OF CARTHAGE, is out under the full moon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKTGSZFN

Pools lined with blue stone. Fish with gold rings in their mouths. A hundred lamps hung in the trees like a second sky. And on one night when the moon rose wrong, the richest house in Carthage threw a feast for the army it would not pay...and the army ate the fish.

Tonight you are not a listener. You are a spearman three months unpaid, walking up the black sand into Megara with ten thousand men behind you. The steward who counts you in like grain. The Libyan who takes a sacred carp out of Tanit's pool and bills it to Hamilcar. The moon that goes out of the water, one fish at a time. The door with the moon-lamp that frosts a man's shoulder for trying it. The bill, read aloud at the table: forty jars, six oxen, a hundred lamps, three hundred staters, two hundred and forty months of pay for one night. The three wines: the red the Gauls found, the white the Syrian hid, and the temple-sweet that should never have left the sanctuary, and what it does to the men who drink it in the lily beds. The lions, and the Gaul who should have listened to the keeper. The elephant they call the patient one. And the steward at dawn, writing zero where the goddess's fish used to be. The war began in a garden, over wine. This is the garden.

Read Book One, THE JACKAL OF CARTHAGE: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HGBZF3VS

Book Two, THE KNIFE OF CARTHAGE: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKTGSZFN

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