Tedor followed her outside into a murky summer night. The torch-lights of an ancient city pulsed and throbbed off to their left.
"His capital, Aix-la-Chapelle," said Laniq. "Charlemagne got help from the monopolist, Barwan. Fortunately, when Charles the Great died his Paladins couldn't hold the Empire together. Despite Papal acceptance, the Holy Roman Empire was a paper kingdom after Charlemagne."
Outside Tours proper, Charlemagne had set up a tent city in which the elite of his Army bivouacked. Clusters of tents dotted the plain, cook-fires cast eerie light, sentries prowled and plodded sleepily. Tedor heard loud talking in the old dialect of the Franks. Hypnosleep had yielded a new language to him again in a matter of minutes.
They crept up behind a sentry, were on the point of passing him when Laniq stumbled. The sentry whirled, spear poised, but Tedor ducked under it in the darkness and used the edge of his hand against the sentry's Adam's apple. It was dirty fighting, but necessary. The sentry went down silently and Tedor grabbed the spear before it could clatter.
"Stay here," he told Laniq. He had materialized for himself the clothing of a Frank warrior. With it and his spear he strode boldly to Charlemagne's own tent, relieving the sentry who paced outside it, then a few moments later relieving the guard inside.
"I don't know you," the man grumbled.
"I'm new," said Tedor. "German. Go to sleep."
Charlemagne was a tall, slender man fully six and a half feet in height, with white hair and a long white beard. He paced back and forth anxiously, great hands folded behind his richly robed back.
"The road to Rome is not open," he said to someone irritably, as if he had said if before but the man refused to take no for an answer.
"Not yet, it isn't," his guest answered suavely. He was a younger man, clean-shaven like Tedor. "I can open it for you. Empire awaits you, Charles; don't turn away from it."