"Sailing to Sarantium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

CHAPTER IX

Kasia awakened from a dream at dawn. She lay in bed, confused, half asleep, and only gradually became aware that there were bells pealing outside. There had been no Jaddite bells at home where the gods were found in the black forest or by rivers or in the grainfields, assuaged by blood. These sanctuary bells were a part of city life. She was in Sarantium. Half a million people, Carullus had said. He'd said she'd get used to the crowds, learn to sleep through the bells if she chose.

The dream had been of her waterfall at home, in summer. She'd been sitting on a bank of the pool below the falls, shaded by leafy trees that bent low over the water. There had been a man with her, which had never been so at home, in life.

She couldn't see his face in the dream.

The bells continued, summoning Sarantium to prayer. Jad of the Sun was riding up in his chariot. All who sought the god's protection in life and his intercession after death should be rising with him, making their way, even now, to the chapels and sanctuaries.

Kasia lay very still, thinking about her dream. She felt strange, unsettled; something nagged at her awareness. Then she remembered: the men had not come home last night, or not before she'd fallen asleep. And there had been that disquieting visit from the court mosaicist. An edgy man, afraid. She'd not been able to warn Crispin about him before he was taken off to the court. Carullus had assured her it didn't matter, that the Rhodian could handle himself in the Imperial Precinct, that he'd have protectors there.

Kasia knew that the very idea of a protector meant that there might be someone you needed to be protected from, but she hadn't said that. She and Carullus and Vargos had had their dinner together and then come back here through the very wild streets for a quiet glass of wine. Kasia knew the tribune would have greatly enjoyed strolling through the last night of the Dykania with a flask of ale in his hand, that he was staying inside for her. She was grateful for his kindness, his easy way with a story. Several stories. He made her smile and grinned when he did. He had knocked Crispin unconscious with an iron helmet the first moment they met. Vargos had been beaten very badly by his men. Much had changed in a short time.

Later, from the festive chaos outside, a brisk messenger had entered looking for the soldiers: they were to go to the Imperial Precinct, wait by the Bronze Gates-or wherever they were ordered when they got there-and escort the Rhodian mosaicist, Caius Crispus of Varena, home when he was dismissed. It was a command, from the Chancellor.

Carullus had smiled at Kasia across the table. "Told you," he'd said. "Protectors. And he got away with using his own name, too. This is good news, girl." He and five of his men had armed themselves and gone.

Vargos, used to early nights and early mornings, had already gone to bed. Kasia had been alone again. She didn't really have any fears for herself. Or, that wasn't quite true. She had no idea what was to become of her life. That would turn into a fear if she stopped to dwell upon it.

She had left the last of the wine on the table and had gone up to her room, locked the door, undressed, eventually fallen asleep. Had had dreams on and off through the night, awakening at random noises from the streets below, listening for returning footsteps down the hall.

She hadn't heard them.

She rose now, washed her face and upper body at the basin in the room, dressed herself in what she'd worn on the road and since arriving. Crispin had spoken of buying her clothing. The comment had raised in her mind again the uneasy question of her future.

The bells seemed to have stopped. She tugged fingers through her tangled hair and went out into the hall. She hesitated there, then decided it was permissible to look in on him, tell of the other mosaicist who had come, find out what had happened in the night. If it was not permitted, best she learn that now, Kasia thought. She was free. A citizen of the Sarantine Empire. Had been a slave less than a year. It did not define your life, she told herself.

His door was closed, of course. She lifted a hand to knock and heard voices inside.

Her heart lurched, surprising her greatly, though afterwards she would find it less surprising. The words she heard spoken were a shock, however, and so was what Crispin said in reply. Kasia felt herself flush, listening; her lifted hand trembled in the air.

She didn't knock. Turned, in great confusion, to go down.

On the stairs she met two of Carullus's men coming up. They told her about the attack in the night.

Kasia found herself leaning against the wall as she listened. Her legs felt oddly weak. Two of the soldiers had died, the little Soriyyan and Ferix from Amoria: men she had come to know. All six of the attackers had been killed, whoever they had been. Crispin was all right. Carullus had been wounded. The two of them had only just come in, at dawn. They had been seen going up the stairs, hadn't stopped to talk.

No, the soldiers said, there had been no one else with them.

She hadn't heard them in the hallway. Or perhaps she had, and that- not the bells-had drawn her from dream, or had shaped her dream. A faceless man beside a waterfall. Carullus's men, grim and scowling, went past her to their shared room to get their weapons. They would carry them everywhere now, she understood. Deaths altered things.

Kasia paused on the stairway, shaken and uncertain. Vargos would be at chapel by now; there was no one to be with downstairs. It came to her that an enemy might already be upstairs, but Crispin had not sounded. alarmed. It occurred to her that she ought to tell someone, or check on him herself, risking embarrassment. Someone had tried to kill him last night. Had killed two men. She took a deep breath. The stone of the wall was rough against her shoulder. He had not sounded alarmed. And the other voice had been a woman's.

She turned back and went to Carullus's room. They'd said he'd been wounded. Resolutely, she knocked there. He called out tiredly. She spoke her name. The door opened.

Small things change a life. Change lives.

Crispin twisted violently to one side, away from the levelled knife. He jammed a hand hard against the post at the foot of the bed to stay upright.

"Ah," said the woman in the shuttered half-light of his bedroom. "It "s you, Rhodian. Good. I feared for my virtue."

She laid down the knife. After, he would remember thinking it was not the weapon she needed to wield. At the time he was speechless.

"So," said Styliane Daleina, sitting at ease upon his bed, "I am told the little actress let down her hair for you in her chambers. Did she go to her knees the way they say she used to on stage, and take you in her mouth?"

She smiled, utterly composed.

Crispin felt himself go white as he stared at her. It took him a moment to find his voice. "You appear to have been misinformed. There were no actresses in the Blues" compound when I arrived there," he said very carefully. He knew what she'd meant. He was not going to acknowledge it. "And I was in the kitchen only, no one's private chambers. What are you doing in mine?" He ought to have called her "my lady."

She had changed her clothing. The court garb was gone. She was wearing a dark blue robe with a hood, thrown back now to frame her golden hair, which was still pinned, though without ornament now. She would have had the hood up, he imagined, to pass unknown through the streets, to enter here. Had she bribed someone? She would have had to. Wouldn't she?

She didn't answer his spoken question. Not with words, at any rate. She looked up at him for a long moment from the bed, then stood. A very tall woman, blue-eyed, fair-haired, a scent about her: Crispin thought of flowers, a mountain meadow, an undercurrent of intoxication, poppies. His heart was racing: danger and-rising swiftly and against his will-desire. The expression on her face was thoughtful, appraising. Without hurrying, she lifted one hand and traced a finger along his shaven jaw. She touched his ear, circled it. Then she rose up on tiptoe and kissed him on the mouth.

He didn't move. He could have withdrawn, he thought afterwards, could have stepped back. He was no innocent, had known-fatigued as he was-that measuring look in her eyes as she stood up in the shadow and light of the room. He hadn't stepped back. He did refrain from responding, though, as best he could, even when her tongue…

She didn't seem to care. Appeared to find it amusing, in fact, that he withheld himself, standing rigid before her. She took her time, quite deliberately, body fitted close against his, tongue brushing his lips, pushing between them, then moving down to his throat. He heard her soft laughter, the breath warm against his skin.

"I do hope she left some life in you," murmured the aristocratic wife of the Supreme Strategos of the Empire, and proceeded to slip a hand down the front of his tunic to his waist-and past it-by way of inquiry.

This time Crispin did step back, breathing hard, but not before she'd touched him through the silk of his garment. He saw her smile, the small, even teeth. She was exquisite, was Styliane Daleina, like pale glass, pale ivory, like one of the knife blades made in the far west of the world, in Esperana, where they crafted such things to be works of beauty as well as agents of death.

"Good," she said, again. She looked at him, assured, amused, daughter of wealth and power, wedded to it. He could taste her, feel where her mouth had been along his throat. She said, musingly, "I will disappoint you, I now fear. How can I compete with the actress in this? It was said in her youth that she lamented holy Jad had granted her an insufficiency of orifices for the acts of love."

"Stop it!" Crispin rasped. "This is a game. Why are you playing it? Why are you here?" She smiled again. White teeth, hands coming up into her hair, long, wide sleeves of the robe falling back to show bare, slender arms. He said, in anger, fighting desire, "Someone tried to kill me tonight."

"I know," said Styliane Daleina. "Does it excite you? I hope it does."

"You know? What else do you know about it?" Crispin said. Even as he spoke, she began to unpin her golden hair.

She paused. Looked at him, a different expression in her eyes this time. "Rhodian, had I wished you dead, you would be. Why would a Daleinus hire drunks in a caupona? Why would I trouble to kill an artisan?"

"Why would you trouble to come uninvited to his room?" Crispin snapped.

She laughed again at that. Her hands were busy another moment, collecting pins; then she shook her head and the richness of her hair spilled down, falling about her shoulders, filling the hood of her robe.

"Must the actress be allowed all the interesting men?" she said.

Crispin shook his head, the familiar anger rising now. He sought refuge in it. He say it again: this is a game you are playing. You are not here because you want to be bedded by a foreign artisan." She hadn't stepped back. There was very little space between them and her scent enveloped them both. A dark redness, heady as poppies, as unmixed wine. Very different from the Empress's. It had to be. Carullus and then the eunuchs had told him that.

Deliberately, Crispin sat down on the wooden chest under the window. He took a deep breath. "I have asked some questions. They seem reasonable in the circumstances. I'm waiting," he said, and then added, "My lady."

"So am I," she murmured, one hand pushing her hair back. But the voice had changed again, responding to his tone. There was a silence in the room. Crispin heard a cart rumble past in the street below. Someone shouted. It was morning. Bands of light and dark fell across her body. The effect, he thought, was quite beautiful.

She said, "You may be inclined to underestimate yourself, Rhodian. You have little concept of what the patterns are at this court. No one is summoned as swiftly as you were. Ambassadors wait weeks, artisan. But the Emperor is infatuated with his Sanctuary. In one single night you have been invited to court, given control of the mosaics there, had private counsel with the Empress, and caused the dismissal of the man who was doing the work before you came."

"Your man," Crispin said.

"After a fashion," she said carelessly. "He had done some work for us. I judged it of some use to have Valerius in our debt for finding him a craftsman. Leontes disagreed with that, but had his own reasons for preferring Siroes. He has. views on what you and the other artisans should be permitted to do in the sanctuaries."

Crispin blinked. That might need thinking about. Later. "It was Siroes who hired those soldiers, then?" he guessed. "I had no intention of ruining anyone's career."

"You did, however," said the woman. The aristocratic coolness he remembered from before was in her voice again. "Quite completely. But no, I can attest that Siroes was not in a position to hire assassins tonight. Trust me in this."

Crispin swallowed. There was nothing reassuring in her tone, but there was a note of truth. He decided he didn't want to ask why she was so certain.

"Who was it, then?"

Styliane Daleina raised her hands, palms out, an elegant, indifferent gesture. "I have no idea. Run down the table of your enemies. Pick a name. Did the actress like my necklace? Did she put it on?"

"The Emperor wouldn't let her," Crispin said, deliberately.

And saw that he'd surprised her. "Valerius was there?"

"He was there. No one went down on her knees."

She was amazingly self-possessed. A lifetime of dealing with intrigue and lesser mortals. She smiled a little. "Not yet," she said, the timbre of her voice lower, the glance direct. It was a game, and he knew it, but entirely against his will, Crispin felt the stirrings of desire again.

As carefully as he could, he said, "I am unused to being offered love-making on so little acquaintance, except by whores. My lady, I am generally disinclined to accept their offers as well."

She gazed at him, and Crispin had a sense that-perhaps for the first time-she was taking the trouble to shape an evaluation of the man in the room with her. She had been standing. Now she sank down onto the end of the bed, not far from the chest where he sat. Her knee brushed his, then withdrew a little.

"Would that please you?" she murmured. "To treat me like a whore, Rhodian? Put my face hard to the pillow, take me from behind? Hold me by the hair as I cry out, as I say shocking, exciting things to you? Shall I tell you what Leontes likes to do? It will surprise you, perhaps. He rather enjoys-"

"No!" Crispin rasped, a little desperately. "What is this about'? Does it amuse you to play the wanton? Do you wander the streets soliciting lovers? There are other bedrooms in this inn."

Her expression was impossible to read. He hoped his tunic was concealing the evidence of his arousal. He dared not look down to check.

She said, "What is this about, he asks. I have assumed you to be intelligent, Rhodian. You gave some sign of it in the throne room. Are you stupid with exhaustion now? Can you not guess that there might be people in this city who think an invasion of Batiara a destructive folly? Who might assume that you-as a Rhodian-might share that belief and have some desire to save your family and your country the consequences of an invasion?"

The words were knives, sharp and precise, almost military in their directness. She added, in the same tone, "Before you became hopelessly enmeshed in the devices of the actress and her husband, it made some sense to assess you."

Crispin rubbed a hand across his eyes and forehead. She'd given him a partial explanation, after all. A renewal of anger chased fatigue. "You bed all those you recruit?" he said, staring coldly at her.

She shook her head. "You are not a courteous man, Rhodian. I bed where my pleasure leads me." Crispin was unmoved by the reproof. She spoke, he thought, with the untrammelled assurance of one never checked in her wishes. The actress and her husband.

"And plot to undermine your Emperor's designs?"

"He killed my father," said Styliane Daleina bluntly, sitting on his bed, pale hair framing the exquisite, patrician face. "Burned him alive with Sarantine Fire."

"An old rumour," Crispin said, but he was shaken, and trying to hide it. "Why are you telling me this?"

She smiled, quite unexpectedly. "To arouse you?"

And he had to laugh. Try as he might to hold back, the effortless shift of tone, the irony of it, was too witty. "Immolation is unexciting for me, I fear. Do I take it the Supreme Strategos shares the view that no war ought to be waged in Batiara? He has sent you here?"

She blinked. "Take no such thing. Leontes will do whatever Valerius tells him. He will invade you as he invaded the Majriti deserts or the northern steppes, or laid siege to Bassanid cities east."

"And all the while his new, beloved bride will be acting to subvert him?"

She hesitated for the first time. "His new prize is the phrase you want, Rhodian. Open your eyes and ears, there are things you ought to learn before Petrus the Trakesian and his little dancer co-opt you to their service."

Contempt lay undisguised in the aristocratic voice. She would have had no choice, Crispin imagined, in the matter of her wedding. The Strategos was young, though, triumphant, celebrated, an undeniably handsome man. Crispin looked at the woman in the room with him and had a sense of having entered black waters, with unimaginably complex currents trying to suck him down. He said, "I am only a mosaicist, my lady. I was brought here to assist with images on sanctuary walls and a dome."

"Tell me," said Styliane Daleina, as if he hadn't spoken, "about the queen of the Antae. Did she offer her body in exchange for your service too? Are you Jaded now because of that? Am I too late to be of any appeal? You reject me as lesser goods? Shall I weep?"

The dark waters swirled. This had to be a bluff, a guess. That late-night secret encounter could not be so widely known. A memory came to Crispin: another hand in his hair as he knelt to kiss an offered foot. A different woman, even younger than this one, as familiar with corridors of power and intrigue. Or perhaps. not so. West to the east. Could Varena ever be as subtle as Sarantium? Could any place on earth?

He shook his head. "I am not familiar with the thoughts or the. favours of the ruling ones of our world. This encounter is unique in my experience of life, my lady." It was a lie, and yet, as he looked at her through slatted interstices, the lines of shadow and light, it wasn't, at all.

The smile again, assured, unsettling. She seemed able to move, he thought, from the intrigues of empires to those of bedrooms without a pause. "How nice," she said. "I like being unique. You do know it shames a lady, however, to offer herself and be refused? I told you, I lie where pleasure leads me, not need. "She paused. "Or rather, where a different sort of need draws me."

Crispin swallowed. He didn't believe her, but her knee within the blue, simple robe lingered a hand's-breadth from his own. He clung desperately to his anger, a sense of being used. "It shames a man of pride to be seen as a piece in a game."

Her eyebrows arched swiftly and the tone changed-again. "But you are, you foolish man. Of course you are. Pride has nothing to do with it. Everyone at this court is proud, everyone is a piece in a game. In many games at once-some of murder and some of desire-though there is only one game that matters, in the end, and all the others are parts of it."

Which was an answer to his thought, he supposed. Her knee touched his. Deliberately. There were no accidental things with this woman, he was sure of it. Some of desire.

"Why should you imagine yourself to be different?" Styliane Daleina added, quietly.

"Because I will myself to be so," he said, surprising himself.

There was a silence. Then, "You grow interesting, Rhodian, I must concede, but this is almost certainly a self-deception. I suspect the actress has enchanted you already and you don't even know it. I shall weep, I suppose." Her expression had changed, but was nowhere near to tears. She stood abruptly, crossed in three strides to the door, turned there.

Crispin also rose. Now that she'd withdrawn he felt a chaos of emotions: apprehension, regret, curiosity, an unnerving measure of desire. He'd been a stranger to that last for so long. As he watched, she drew up her hood again, hiding the spilled gold of her hair.

"I also came to thank you for my gem, of course. It was… an interesting gesture. I am not difficult to find, artisan, should you have any thoughts about your home and the prospects of a war. It will become clear to you soon, I believe, that the man who brought you here to make holy images for him also intends to wreak violence upon Batiara for no reason but his own glory."

Crispin cleared his throat. "I am pleased to find my small gift deemed worthy of thanks." He paused. "I am an artisan only, my lady."

She shook her head, the expression cool again. "That is a coward in you, hiding from truths of the world, Rhodian. All men-and women- are more than one thing. Or have you willed yourself to be limited in this way? Will you live on a scaffold above all the dying?"

Her intelligence was appalling. Just as the Empress's had been. It crossed his mind that had he not met Alixana first he might indeed have had no defences against this woman. Styliane Daleina might not be wrong, after all. And then he wondered if the Empress had thought of that. If that was why he'd received so immediate a late-night invitation to the Traversite Palace. Could these women be that quick, that subtle? His head was aching.

"I have been here two days only, my lady, and have not slept tonight. You are speaking subversion against the Emperor who invited me to Sarantium, and even against your husband, if I understand you. Am I to be bought with a woman's hair on my pillow for a night, or a morning?" He hesitated. "Even yours?"

The smile returned at that, enigmatic and provoking. "It happens," she murmured. "It is sometimes longer than a night, or the night is… longer than an ordinary one. Time moves strangely in some circumstances. Have you never found that, Caius Crispus?"

He dared make no reply. She didn't seem to expect one. She said, "We may continue this another time." She paused. It seemed to him she was wrestling with something. Then she added, "About your images. The domes and walls? Do not grow… too attached to your work there, Rhodian. I say this with goodwill, and probably should not. It is weak of me."

He took a step towards her. She lifted a hand. "No questions."

He stopped. She was an incarnation of icy, remote beauty in his room.

But she wasn't remote. Her tongue had touched his, her hand, moving downwards.

And this woman, too, seemed able to read his very thoughts. The smile came again. "You are excited now? Intrigued? You like your women to show weakness, Rhodian? Shall I remember that, and the pillow?"

He flushed, but met her ironic gaze. "I like the people in my life to show some… of themselves. The uncalculated. Movements outside the games of which you spoke. That would draw me, yes."

Her turn now to be silent, standing very still by the door. Sunlight, sliding through the shutters, fell in bands of pale morning gold across the wall and floor and the blue of her robe.

"That," she said, finally, "might be too much to expect in Sarantium, I fear." She looked as if she would add something, but then shook her head and murmured only, "Go to sleep, Rhodian."

She opened the door, went out, closed it, was gone, save for her scent and the mild disarray of his bed, and the greater disarrangement of his being.

He fell onto the bed, still clothed. He lay with eyes open, thinking of nothing at first, then of high, majestic walls, with marble columns above marble columns, and the dwarfing, graceful immensity of the dome he'd been given, and then he thought for a long time about certain women, living and dead, and then he closed his eyes and slept.

When he dreamt, though, as the sun rose through the windy, clear autumn morning outside, it was of the zubir at first, obliterating time and the world in mist, and then of one woman only.

"Let there be Light for us," Vargos chanted with the others in the small neighbourhood chapel as the services came to an end. The cleric in his pale yellow robe made the two-handed gesture of solar benediction they used in the City, and then people began talking again and milling briskly towards the doors and the morning street.

Vargos went out with them and stood a moment, blinking in the brightness. The night wind had swept away the clouds; it was a crisp, very clear day. A woman balancing a small boy on one hip and a pitcher of water on her shoulder smiled at him as she went by. A one-handed beggar approached through the crowd but veered off when Vargos shook his head. There were enough needy people in Sarantium, no need to give alms to someone who'd had a hand chopped for theft. Vargos felt strongly about such things. A northern sensibility.

He wasn't poor, mind you. His accumulated savings and salary owing had been reluctantly released by the Imperial Postmaster before they left Sauradia, through Carullus's centurion's intervention. Vargos was in a position here to buy a meal, a winter cloak, a woman, a flask of ale or wine.

He was hungry, in fact. He hadn't taken breakfast at the inn before prayers, and the smell from across the road of lamb roasting on skewers at an open-air stand reminded him of that. He crossed, pausing for a cart full of firewood and a giggling cluster of serving women heading for the well at the end of the lane, and he bought a skewer of meat with a copper coin. He ate it, standing there, observing the other customers of the small, wiry vendor-from Soriyya or Amoria, by his colouring-as they snatched a morning bite on their hurried way to wherever they were going. The little man was busy. People moved fast in the City, Vargos had concluded. He didn't like the crowds and noise at all, but he was here by his own choice, and he'd adjusted to more difficult things in his time.

He finished his meat, wiped his chin, dropped the skewer in a pile by the vendor's grill. Then he squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and strode off towards the harbour to look for a murderer.

Word of the attack had come to the inn from the Blues" compound in the night, while Vargos slept, oblivious. He actually felt guilty about that, though he knew there was no sense to such a feeling. He had learned of the night's events from three of the soldiers when he came down at sunrise, responding to the bells: Crispin attacked, the tribune wounded. Ferix and Sigerus slain. The six attackers killed, by the tribune and by Blue partisans in the faction's compound. No one knew who had ordered the assault. The Urban Prefect's men were investigating, he was told. Men seldom talked freely to them, he was told. Soldiers were too easily hired for something like this. They might not find out anything more-until the next attack came. Carullus's men had armed themselves, Vargos saw.

Crispin and the tribune hadn't come in yet, they'd said. They were both with the Blues, however, and safe. Had spent the night there. The bells were ringing. Vargos had gone to the little chapel down the road- none of the soldiers came with him-and had concentrated on his god, praying for the souls of the two dead soldiers, that they might be sheltered in Light.

Now prayers were done, and Vargos of the Inicii, who had bound himself freely to a Rhodian artisan for an act of courage and compassion and had walked into the Aldwood with him and come out alive, went in search of someone who wanted that man dead. The Inicii made bad enemies, and whoever that someone was had an enemy now.

He had no way of knowing it-and would have been unhappy with the suggestion-but he looked very like his father just then as he strode down the middle of the street. People were quick to give him room as he went. Even a man on a donkey edged hastily out of the way. Vargos didn't even notice. He was thinking.

He wouldn't ever have said he was good at planning things. He tended to react to events, rather than anticipate or initiate them. There hadn't been much need for forethought on the Imperial Road in Sauradia, going back and forth for years with a variety of travellers. One needed endurance, equanimity, strength, some skill with carts and animals, an ability to wield a stave, faith in Jad.

Of these, perhaps only the last would be of use in tracing whoever had hired those soldiers. Vargos, for want of a better idea, decided to head for the harbour and spend a few coins in some of the rougher cauponae. He might overhear something, or someone might offer information. The patrons there would be slaves, servants, apprentices, soldiers watching their copper folles. An offered drink or two might be welcome. It did occur to him there might be some danger. It didn't occur to him to alter his plan because of that.

It took him only part of a morning to discover that Sarantium was much the same as the north or the Imperial Road in one thing, at least: men in taverns were disinclined to answer questions posed by strangers when the subject was violence and a request for information.

No one in this rough district wanted to be the one to point to someone else, and Vargos wasn't skilled enough with words or subtle enough to steer anyone casually around to the topic of last night's incident in the Blues" compound. Everyone seemed to know about it-armed soldiers entering a faction's quarters and being slaughtered there was an event of note even in a Jaded city-but no one was willing to say more than the obvious, and Vargos received black looks and silence when he pushed. The six dead soldiers had been on leave from Calysium: duties along the Bassanid border. They'd been drinking around the City for some days, spending borrowed money. More or less what soldiers always did. That much was commonly known. The issue was who had bought them, and as to that no one knew, or would speak.

The Urban Prefect's men had already begun nosing about the district, Vargos gathered. He began to suspect, after someone deliberately knocked over his ale in one sailor's bar, that they'd learn as little as he was. He wasn't afraid of getting into a fight, but it certainly wouldn't achieve anything if he did. He'd said nothing, paid for the spilled ale and continued on, out into the early-afternoon sunshine.

He was halfway along another narrowing, twisty lane, heading towards the noise of the waterfront, where the masts of ships were leaning in the crisp breeze, when he received an idea, along with a memory from Carullus's army camp.

He would describe it that way, afterwards, to himself and to the others. Receiving the thought. As if it had been handed to him from without, startling in its suddenness. He would attribute it to the god, and keep to himself a recollection of a grove in the Aldwood.

He asked directions of two apprentices, endured their smirks at his accent, and duly turned towards the landward walls. It was a long walk through a large city, but the boys had been honest with him and not mischievous, and in due course Vargos saw the sign of The Courier's Rest. It made sense that it was near the triple walls: the Imperial riders came in that way.

He'd heard about this inn for years. Had been invited by various couriers to come by if ever he was in the City, to share a flask or three with them. When he'd been younger, he'd understood that a drink with certain of the riders would likely be followed by a trip upstairs for some privacy, which never did hold any appeal for him. As he grew older the invitations lost that nuance and suggested only that he was a useful and easygoing companion to those enduring the steady hardship of the road.

He paused on the threshold before going in, his eyes slowly adjusting to the closed shutters and the loss of light. The first part of his new thought hadn't been especially complicated: after the experiences of the morning it was obvious he had a better chance of learning something from someone who knew him than by continuing to ask questions of sullen strangers near the harbour. Vargos had to admit that he wouldn't have answered any such questions himself. Not from the Urban Prefect's men, not from an inquisitive Inici new to the City.

The deeper idea-the thing given to him on the street-was that he was now looking for someone in particular, and thought he might find him here, or receive word of him.

The Courier's Rest was a good-sized inn, but it wasn't crowded at this hour. Some men were having their midday meal late, scattered among the tables, singly and in pairs. The man behind the stone counter looked up at Vargos and nodded politely. This wasn't a caupona; he was nowhere near the harbour. Civility might be cautiously assumed here.

"Fuck that barbarian up the backside," said someone in the shadows. "What's he think he's doing in here?"

Vargos shivered then, unable to stop himself. Fear, undeniably, but something else as well. He felt in that moment as if the half-world had brushed close to him, forbidden magic, a primitive darkness in the midst of the City, in the crisp, clear day. He would have to pray again, he thought, when this was over.

He knew the voice, remembered it.

"Buying a drink or a meal if he likes, you drunken shit. What are you doing here someone might ask?" The man serving drinks and food glared across the counter top at the shadowed figure.

"What am I doing here? This been my inn ever since I joined the Post!"

"And now you aren't in the Post. Notice I haven't booted you out? I've more than half a mind to. So watch your fucking tongue, Tilliticus."

Vargos had never claimed his thoughts proceeded at any speed. He needed to… work things through. Even after he heard the known voice and then the confirming name, he walked to the counter, ordered a cup of wine, watered it, paid for it, took his first sip, before anything coalesced properly in his mind, the recognized voice merging with the summoned recollection from the army camp. He turned. Offered another silent prayer of thanks, before he spoke.

He was quite sure of himself now, as it happened.

"Pronobius Tilliticus?" he said quietly.

"Fuck you, yesh," said the shadowy figure at the corner table.

Some men turned to glance at the other man, distaste in their expressions.

"I remember you," said Vargos. "From Sauradia. You're an Imperial Courier. I used to work the road there."

The other man laughed, too loudly. He was clearly not sober. "You "n me both, then. I used to work the road, too. On a horse, on a woman. Fading on the road." He laughed again.

Vargos nodded. He could see more clearly now in the muted light. Tilliticus was alone at his table, two flasks in front of him, no food. "You aren't a courier any more?"

He pretty much knew the answer to this already, with a few other things. Holy Jad had sent him here. Or, he hoped it was Jad.

"Dishmished," said Tilliticus. "Five days ago. Last pay, no notice. Dishmished. Like that. Want a drink, barbarian?"

"I have one," Vargos said. He felt something cold in himself now: anger, but a different sort than he was accustomed to. "Why were you dismissed?" He needed to be sure.

"Late with a post, though it's none of anyone's fucking business."

"Everyone fucking knows," another man said grimly. "You might mention fraud at the hospice, throwing away posted letters, and spreading disease while you're at it."

"Bugger you," said Pronobius Tilliticus. "As if you never slept with a poxed whore? None of that would've mattered if the Rhodian catamite…" He fell silent.

"If the Rhodian hadn't what?" Vargos said quiedy.

And now he was afraid, because it truly was very difficult to understand why the god might have helped him in this way, and try as he might not to do so he kept thinking and thinking now of the Aldwood and the zubir and that leather and metal bird Crispin had carried in around his neck and left behind.

The man at the table in the corner made no reply. It didn't matter. Vargos pushed himself off from the bar and went back out the door. He looked around, squinting in the sunlight, and saw one of the Urban Prefect's men at the end of the street in his brown and black uniform. He went over to him and reported that the person who had hired the soldiers who'd killed three men last night could be found at the table immediately to the right of the door in The Courier's Rest. Vargos identified himself and told the man where he could be found if needed. He watched as the young officer walked into the tavern, and then he headed back through the streets towards the inn.

On the way there he stopped at another chapel-a larger one, with marble and some painted decoration, including the remains of a wall fresco behind the altar of Heladikos aloft, almost entirely rubbed out- and in the dimness and the quiet between services he prayed before the disk and the altar for guidance through and out of the half-world into which he seemed to have walked.

He would not pray to the zubir, whatever ancient power of his own people it represented, but within himself Vargos sensed a terrible awareness of it, immense and dark as the forests on the borders of his childhood.

Carullus was still in his room, evidendy sleeping off wounds and treatment, when Crispin came downstairs just past midday. He felt muzzy-headed and disoriented himself, and not only from the wine he'd had last night. In fact, the wine was the least of his afflictions. He tried to put his aching head around some of the things that had happened in the two palaces and the Sanctuary and in the street afterwards, and then to come to terms with who had been in his room-on his bed-when he'd stumbled back at dawn. The conjured image of Styliane Daleina, beautiful as an enamelled icon, only made him feel more unsettled.

He did what he'd always done at such times as this, back home. He went to the baths.

The innkeeper, eyeing Crispin's unshaven scowl with a knowing expression, was able to offer a suggestion. Crispin looked about for Vargos who was also-unaccountably-absent. He shrugged, ill-tempered and querulous, and went out alone, blinking and squinting, into the irritating brightness of the autumn day.

Or, not really alone. Two of Carullus's soldiers came with him, swords in scabbards. Imperial orders from the night before. He was to have a guard now. Someone wanted him dead. Not the other mosaicist, not the lady, if he could believe her. He did believe her, but was aware that he had no very good reason for doing so.

On the way, passing the windowless facade of a holy retreat for women, he thought of Kasia-and then backed away from that as well. Not today. He wasn't deciding anything significant today. She needed clothing, though, he knew that much. Considered sending one of the soldiers to the market to buy her some apparel while he bathed, and his first faint smile of the day came with the image of one of Carullus's men judiciously selecting among women's undergarments in the street market.

He did get a minor, useful idea, however, and at the baths he asked for paper and a stylus. He sent a messenger running to the Imperial Precinct with a note for the eunuchs of the Chancellor's office. The clever men who had shaved and attired him last night would be more than adequate to choosing clothing for a young woman newly arrived in the City. Crispin entreated their aid. On further reflection, he set a budget for the purchases.

Later that afternoon, Kasia-dealing with some unexpected discoveries of her own-would find herself accosted at the inn by a swirling, scented coterie of eunuchs from the Imperial Precinct and spirited away by them for the surprisingly involved task of acquiring proper garb for life in Sarantium. They were amusing and solicitous, clearly enjoying the exercise and their own wittily obscene disagreements over what was suitable for her. Kasia found herself flushed and even laughing during the escapade. None of them asked what her life in Sarantium was to fee, which was a relief, because she didn't know.

In the baths, Crispin had himself oiled, massaged, scraped down, and then subsided blissfully into the soothing, fragrant hot pool. There were others there, talking quietly. The familiar drone of murmurous voices almost lulled him back to sleep. He revived with a cool immersion in the adjacent pool, then made his way, wrapped in a white sheet like a spectral figure, towards the steam room, where half a dozen similarly shrouded men could be seen through the mist, lounging on marble benches, when he opened the door.

Someone shifted wordlessly to make room for him. Someone else gestured vaguely, and the naked attendant poured another ewer of water over the hot stones. With a sizzling sound, steam rose up to enclose the small chamber even more densely. Crispin mentally declined the associations with a fogbound morning in Sauradia and leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes.

The conversation around him was sporadic and desultory. Men seldom spoke with much energy amid the enveloping heat of the steam. It was easier to drift, eyes closed, into reverie. He heard bodies shift and rise, others enter and subside as cooler air came briefly in with the opening door and then the heat returned. His body was slick with perspiration, languorous with an indolent calm. Bathhouses such as this, he decided, were among the defining achievements of modern civilization.

In fact, he thought dreamily, the mist here had nothing in common with the chill, half-worldly fog of that distant wilderness in Sauradia. He heard the hiss of steam again as someone poured more water, and he smiled to himself. He was in Sarantium, eye of the world, and much had already begun.

"I should be greatly interested to know your views on the indivisibility of the nature of Jad," someone murmured. Crispin didn't even open his eyes. He'd been told about this sort of thing. The Sarantines were said to be passionate about three subjects: the chariots, dances and pantomimes, and an endless debating about religion. Fruit-sellers would harangue him, Carullus had cautioned, regarding the implications of a bearded or a beardless Jad; sandalmakers would propound firm and fierce opinions on the latest Patriarchal Pronouncement about Heladikos; a whore would want his views on the status of icons of the Blessed Victims before deigning to undress.

He wasn't surprised, therefore, to hear well-bred men in a steam room discoursing this way. What did surprise him was his ankle being nudged by a foot and the same voice adding, "It is unwise, actually, to fall asleep in the steam."

Crispin opened his eyes.

He was alone in the swirling mist with one other person. The question about the god had been addressed to him.

The questioner, loosely wrapped in his own white sheet, sat eyeing him with a very blue gaze. He had magnificent golden hair, chiselled features, a scarred and honed body, and he was the Supreme Strategos of the Empire.

Crispin sat up. Very quickly. "My lord!" he exclaimed.

Leontes smiled. "An opportunity to talk," he murmured. He used an edge of the sheet to wipe sweat from his brow.

"Is this a coincidence?" Crispin asked, guardedly.

The other man laughed. "Hardly. The City is rather too large for that. I thought I'd arrange a moment to learn your views on some matters of interest."

His manner was courteous in the extreme. His soldiers loved him, Carullus had said. Would die for him. Had died-on battlefields as far west as the Majriti deserts and north towards Karch and Moskav.

No visible arrogance here at all. Unlike the wife. Even so, the utterly confident control behind this encounter was provoking. There had been at least six men and an attendant slave in the steam a few moments ago…

"Matters of interest? Such as my opinion of the Antae and their readiness for invasion?" This was blunt, he knew, and probably unwise.

On the other hand, everyone knew his nature at home, they might as well start finding out here.

Leontes merely looked puzzled. "Why would I ask you that? Do you have military training?"

Crispin shook his head.

The Strategos looked at him. "Would you have knowledge of town walls, water sources, road conditions, paths through mountains? Which of their commanders deviate from the usual arraying offerees? How many arrows their archers carry in a quiver? Who commands their navy this year and how much he knows about harbours?"

Leontes smiled suddenly. He had a brilliant smile. "I can't imagine you could help me, actually, even if you wanted to. Even if any such thing as an invasion was being contemplated. No, no, I confess I'm more interested in your faith and your views on images of the god."

A memory clicked into place then, like a key in a lock. Irritation gave way to something else.

"You disapprove of them, might I guess?"

Leontes's handsome face was guileless. "I do. I share the belief that to render the holy in images is to debase the purity of the god."

"And those who honour or worship such images?" Crispin asked. He knew the answer. He had been through this before, though not perspiring in steam and not with a man such as this.

Leontes said, "That is idolatry, of course. A reversion to paganism. What are your thoughts?"

"Men need a pathway to their god," Crispin said quietly. "But I confess, I prefer to keep my views to myself on such matters." He forced a smile of his own. "Uncharacteristic as reticence about faith might be in Sarantium. My lord, I am here at the Emperor's behest and will endeavour to please him with my work."

"And the Patriarchs? Pleasing them?"

"One always hopes for the approval of one's betters," Crispin murmured. He passed a corner of his sheet across his streaming face. Through the steam, he thought he saw blue eyes flicker and the mouth quirk a little. Leontes was not without a sense of humour. It came as a relief of sorts. It was very much in his mind that there was no one here with them, and that this man's wife had been in Crispin's bedchamber this morning and had said. what she had said. This did not, he decided, represent the most predictable of encounters.

He managed another smile. "If you find me an inappropriate conversationalist on military matters-and I can see why you might-why would you imagine we ought to discuss my work in the Sanctuary? Tesserae and their designs? How much do you know or care to know about tinting glass? Or cutting it? What have you decided about the merits and methods of angling tesserae in the setting bed? Or the composition and layers of the setting bed itself? Have you any firm views on the use of smooth stones for the flesh of human figures?"

The other man was eyeing him gravely, expressionless. Crispin paused, modulated his tone. "We each have our areas of endeavour, my lord. Yours matters rather more, I would say, but mine might. last longer. We'd likely do best conversing-should you honour me-about other matters entirely. Were you at the Hippodrome yesterday?"

Leontes shifted a little on his bench; his white sheet settled around his hips. There was a vivid diagonal scar running from his collarbone to his waist in a reddened line like a seam. He leaned over and poured another ewer of water on the stones. Steam cloaked the room for a moment.

"Siroes had no difficulty telling us about his designs and intentions," the Strategos said.

Us, Crispin thought. "Your lady wife was his sponsor, I understand," he murmured. "He also did some private work for you, I believe."

"Trees and flowers in mosaic, yes. For our nuptial chambers. Deer at a stream, boars and hounds, that sort of thing. I have no difficulty at all with such images, of course." His tone was very earnest.

"Of course. Fine work, I'm sure," Crispin said mildly.

There was a little silence.

"I wouldn't know," said Leontes. "I imagine it is competent." His teeth flashed briefly again. "As you say, I could no more judge it than you could appraise a general's tactics."

"You sleep in the room," Crispin replied, perversely abandoning his own argument. "You look at it every night."

"Some nights," said Leontes briefly. "I don't pay much attention to the flowers on the wall."

"But you worry enough about the god in a sanctuary to arrange this encounter?"

The other man nodded. "That is different. Do you intend to render an image of Jad on the ceiling?"

"The dome. I rather suspect that is what is expected of me, my lord. In the absence of instruction otherwise from the Emperor, or the Patriarchs, as you say, I should think I have to."

"You don't fear the taint of heresy?"

"I have been rendering the god since I was an apprentice, my lord. If this has formally become heresy instead of a matter of current debate, no one has informed me of the change. Has the army taken to shaping clerical doctrine? Shall we now discuss how to breach enemy walls with chanted Invocations of Jad? Or launch Holy Fools in catapults?"

He'd gone too far, it seemed. Leontes's expression darkened. "You are impertinent, Rhodian."

"I hope not, my lord. I am indicating that I find your chosen subject intrusive. I am not a Sarantine, my lord. I am a Rhodian citizen of Batiara, invited here as a guest of the Empire."

Unexpectedly, Leontes smiled again. "True enough. Forgive me. You made a… dramatic entry among us last night, and I have to confess I felt easier about the decorations being planned, knowing Siroes was doing them and my wife was privy to his concepts. He was intending a design that did not. incorporate the rendered image of Jad."

"I see," said Crispin quietly.

This was unexpected, and solved another part of the puzzle. "I had been told his dismissal might distress your lady wife. I see it is also a matter of concern to you, for different reasons."

Leontes hesitated. "I approach matters of faith with seriousness."

Crispin's anger was gone. He said, "A prudent thing to do, my lord. We are all children of the god and must do him honour… in our own way."

He felt a certain weariness now. All he'd come east to do was put pain a little way behind him, seek solace in important work. The tangled complexities of the world here in Sarantium seemed extremely… enveloping.

On the facing bench, Leontes leaned back, not replying. After a moment he reached over and tapped on the door. At that signal it was pulled open by someone, letting in another rush of air, and then it closed. Only one man seemed to have been waiting to enter. He shuffled, favouring one foot, past the Strategos to take a seat opposite Crispin.

"No attendant?" he growled.

"He's allowed a few moments to cool down, "Leontes said politely. "Ought to be back shortly, or a different one will come. Shall I pour for you?"

"Go ahead," the other man said, indifferently.

He was, Crispin realized, evidently unaware who had just volunteered to serve as a bathhouse servant for him. Leontes picked up the ewer, dipped it in the trough, and poured water over the hot stones, once and then again. The steam sizzled and crackled. A wave of moist heat washed over Crispin like something tangible, thick in the chest, blurring sight.

He looked wryly at the Strategos. "A second employment?"

Leontes laughed. "Less dangerous. Less rewarding, mind you. I ought to leave you to your peace. You will come to dine one night, I hope? My wife would enjoy speaking with you. She. collects clever people."

"I've never been part of a collection before," Crispin murmured.

The third man sat mute, ignoring them, close-wrapped in his sheet. Leontes glanced over at him briefly then stood. In this small chamber he seemed even taller than he had in the palace the night before. Other scars showed along his back, and corded ridges of muscle. At the doorway, he turned.

"Weapons are forbidden here," he said gravely. "If you surrender the blade under your foot you will have committed only a minor offence to this point. If you do not, you will lose a hand to the courts, or worse, when tried on my evidence."

Crispin blinked. Then he moved extremely fast.

He had to. The man on the bench opposite had reached down with a snarl and ripped a paper-thin blade free from under the sole of his left foot. He held it deftly, the back of his hand up, and slashed straight at Crispin, without challenge or warning.

Leontes stood motionless by the door, watching with what seemed to be a detached interest.

Crispin lurched to one side, sweeping his sheet from his shoulders, to catch the thrusting blade. The man across from him swore viciously. He ripped the knife upwards through the fabric, trying to wrench it free, but Crispin sprang from his bench, wrapping the great sheet in a sweeping movement like a death shroud about the other man's arms and torso. Without thought-or space for thought-but with an enormous, choking fury in his chest, he hammered an elbow viciously into the side of the man's head. He heard a dull grunt. The trammelled blade fell to the floor with a thin sound. Crispin pivoted for leverage, then swung his left arm in a backhanded arc that smashed the side of his fist full into the man's face. He felt teeth shatter like small stones, heard the breaking of bone, and gasped at a surge of pain in his hand.

The other man fell to his knees with a weak, coughing sound. Before he could grapple for the dropped knife, Crispin kicked him twice, in the ribs and then, as his assailant slid sideways on the wet floor, in the head. The man lay there and he did not move.

Crispin, breathing raggedly, slumped back naked onto the stone bench. He was dripping wet, slick with perspiration. He closed his eyes then opened them again. His heart was pounding wildly. He looked over at Leontes, who had made no movement at all from his position by the door.

"So kind… of you… to assist," Crispin gasped. His left hand was already swelling up. He glared at the other man through the eddying mist and the wet heat.

The golden-haired soldier smiled. A light sheen of perspiration glistened all along his perfect body. "It is important for a man to be able to defend himself. And pleasing to know one can. Don't you feel better, having dealt with him yourself?"

Crispin tried to control his breathing. He shook his head angrily. Sweat dripped in his eyes. There was a pool of blood trickling across the stone floor, seeping into the white sheet in which the fallen man lay tangled.

"You should," Leontes said gravely. "It is no small thing to be able to protect your own person and your loved ones."

"Fuck you. Say that to plague sores," Crispin snarled. He felt nauseated, struggling for control.

"Oh dear. You can't talk to me like that," the Strategos said with surprising gentleness. "You know who I am. Besides, I have invited you to my house. you shouldn't talk to me like that." He made it sound like a social failing, a lapse of civilized protocol. It might have been comical, Crispin thought, had he not been so near to vomiting in the now-stifling wet heat, with a stranger's dark blood continuing to soak into the white sheet at his feet.

"What are you going to do to me?" Crispin rasped through clenched teeth. "Kill me with a hidden blade? Send your wife to poison me?"

Leontes chuckled benignly. "I have no reason to kill you. And Styliane's reputation is far worse than her nature. You'll see, when you join us for dinner. In the meantime, you'd best come out of the heat, and take some pride in knowing that this man will quite certainly reveal who it was who hired him. My men will take him to the Urban Prefect's offices. They are extremely good at interrogation there. You have solved last night's mystery yourself, artisan. At the small price of a bruised hand. You ought to be a satisfied man."

Fuck you, Crispin almost said again, but didn't. Last night's mystery. It seemed everyone knew about the attack by now. He looked over at the tall commander of all the Sarantine armies. Leontes's blue gaze met his through the eddying of the steam.

"This," said Crispin bitterly, "is the ambit of satisfaction for you? Clubbing someone senseless, killing him? This is what a man does to justify his place in Jad's creation?"

Leontes was silent a moment. "You haven't killed him. Jad's creation is a dangerous, tenuous place for mortal men, artisan. Tell me, how lasting have the glories of Rhodias been, since they could not be defended against the Antae?"

They were rubble, of course. Crispin knew it. He had seen the fire-charred ruin of mosaics the world had once journeyed to honour and exalt.

Leontes added, still gently, "I would be a poor creature were I to see value only in bloodshed and war. It is my chosen world, yes, and I would like to leave a proud name behind me, but I would say a man finds honour in serving his city and Emperor and his god, in raising his children and guiding his lady wife towards those same duties."

Crispin thought of Styliane Daleina. I lie where pleasure leads me, not need. He pushed the thought away. He said, "And the things of beauty? The things that mark us off from the Inicii with their sacrifices, or the Karchites drinking bear blood and scarring their faces? Or is it just better weapons and tactics that mark us off?" He was too limp, in fact, to summon real anger any more. It occurred to him that mosaicists-all artisans, really-seemed never to leave behind their names, proud or otherwise. That was for those who swung swords, or axes that could send a man's head flying from his body. He wanted to say that, but didn't.

"Beauty is a luxury, Rhodian. It needs walls, and… yes, better weapons and tactics. What you do depends on what I do." Leontes paused. "Or on what you just did here with this man who would have killed you. What mosaics would you achieve if dead on a steam room floor? What works here would last if Robazes, commander of the Bassamd armies, conquered us for his King of Kings? Or if the northerners did, made fierce by that bear blood? Or some other force, other faith, some enemy we don't even know of yet?" Leontes wiped sweat from his eyes again. "What we build-even the Emperor's Sanctuary-we hold precariously and must defend."

Crispin looked at him. He didn't really want to hear this. "And the soldiers have been waiting too long for their pay? Because of the Sanctuary? However will the whores of the Empire make a living?" he said bitterly.

Leontes frowned. He returned Crispin's gaze through the mist for a moment. "I should go. My guards will deal with this fellow. I am sorry," he added, "if the plague took people from you. A man moves on from his losses, eventually."

He opened the door and went out before Crispin could offer a reply- to any of what he'd said.

Crispin emerged from the baths some time later. The attendants in the cold room had winced and clucked over his swollen hand and insisted he immerse it while a doctor was summoned. The physician murmured reassuringly, sucked at his teeth as he manipulated the hand, ascertained that nothing was broken inside. He prescribed some bloodletting from the right thigh to prevent the accumulation of bad blood around the injury, which Crispin declined. The doctor, shaking his head at the ignorance of some patients, left an herbal concoction to be mixed with wine for the pain. Crispin paid him for that.

He decided not to take the concoction, either, but found a seat in the bathhouse's wine room, working his way through a flask of pale wine. He'd more or less decided he had not even a faint hope of sorting through what had just happened. The pain was dull and steady, but manageable. The man he'd pounded so ferociously had been removed, as promised, by the Strategos's personal guard. Carullus's two soldiers had gone ashen-faced when they learned what had occurred, but there was little they could have done unless they'd followed him from pool to pool and into the steam.

In fact, Crispin had to concede, he didn't feel badly, on the whole. There was undeniable relief in having survived another attack, and in the likelihood that the perpetrator would reveal the source of the murderous assaults. It was even true-though this he didn't like admitting-that having dealt with this himself brought a measure of satisfaction.

He rubbed at his chin absently and then did so again, coming to a morose realization. He asked an attendant for directions and, carrying his cup of wine, stoically betook himself to a nearby room. He waited on a bench while two other men were dealt with, then subsided glumly onto the barber's stool for a shave.

The scented sheet tied around his throat felt much like an assassin's cord. He was going to have to do this every day. It was highly probable, Crispin decided, that some barber somewhere in the City was going to slit his throat by accident while regaling the waiting patrons with a choice anecdote. Whoever was paying assassins was simply wasting his money; the deed would be done for him. He did wish this man wouldn't accentuate his flow of wit with a waving blade. Crispin closed his eyes.

He emerged only mildly scathed, however, and having been just quick enough to decline the offered perfume. He felt surprisingly energized, alert, ready to begin addressing the matter of his dome in the Sanctuary. It was already his dome in his own thoughts, he realized with some wryness. Styliane Daleina had voiced a warning about that, he remembered, but what artisan worth anything at all could heed such a caution?

He needed to see the Sanctuary again. He decided to head that way before returning to the inn. He wondered if Artibasos would be there, suspected he would. The man practically lived in his building, the Emperor had said. Crispin suspected he might end up doing the same. He wanted to speak with the architect about the setting beds for his mosaics. He'd need to find the Sarantine glassworks, as well, and then see about assessing-and probably reshaping-whatever team of craftsmen and apprentices Siroes had assembled. There would be guild protocols to learn-and work around. And he'd have to start sketching. There was no point having ideas in his head if no one else could see them. Approvals would be needed. Some things he had already decided to leave out of the drawings. No one needed to know every idea he had.

There was a great deal to be done. He was here for a reason, after all. He flexed his hand. It was puffy, but that would be all right. He thanked Jad for the instinct that had led him to use his left fist. A mosaicist's good hand was his life.

On the way out he paused by the marble counter in the foyer. On sheerest impulse he asked the attendant there about an address he'd been given a long time ago. It turned out to be close by. For some reason he'd thought it might be. This was a good neighbourhood.

Crispin elected to make a call. A duty visit. Get it done with, he told himself, before work began to consume him, the way it always did. Rubbing his smooth chin, he walked out of the baths into the late-afternoon sunshine.

Two grim soldiers striding purposefully behind him, Caius Crispus of Varena followed the given directions towards the house and street name he'd had handed to him on a torn-off piece of parchment in a farmhouse near Varena. Eventually, turning off a handsome square and then into a wide street with well-made stone houses on either side, he ascended the steps of a covered portico and knocked firmly at the door with his good hand.

He hadn't decided what he would-or could-say here. There might be some awkwardness. Waiting for a servant to answer, Crispin looked about. On a marble plinth by the door stood a bust of the Blessed Victim Eladia, guardian of maidens. Given what he had heard before, he suspected it was meant ironically here. The street was quiet; he and the two soldiers were the only figures to be seen, save for a young boy grooming a mare tethered placidly nearby. The row houses here looked cared for and comfortably prosperous. There were torches set in the front walls and on the porticos, promising the security of light after darkfall.

It was possible, standing amid these smooth facades, to envisage an infinitely calmer life in Sarantium than the violent intricacies he had discovered so far. Crispin found himself picturing delicately hued frescoes within proportioned rooms, ivory, alabaster, well-turned wooden stools and chests and benches, good wine, candles in silver holders, perhaps a treasured manuscript of the Ancients to read by a fire in winter or in the peace of a courtyard among summer flowers and droning bees. The accoutrements of a civilized life in the city that was the centre of the world behind its triple walls and guarded by the sea. The black forests of Sauradia seemed infinitely far away.

The door opened.

He turned, preparing to give his name and have himself announced. He saw the slender figure of a woman dressed in crimson on the threshold, dark-haired, dark-eyed, small-boned. He had just enough time to note this much and realize this was not a servant before the woman cried out and hurled herself into his arms, kissing him with a hungry passion. Her hands clenched in his hair, pulling him down to her. Before he could react in any cogent way at all, while the two soldiers were gaping slack-jawed at them, her mouth moved to his ear. Crispin felt her tongue, then heard her whisper fiercely: "In Jad's name, pretend we are lovers, I beg of you! You will not regret it, I promise!"

" What are you doing?" Crispin heard a stunningly familiar voice say from nowhere he could have placed. His heart lurched. He gasped in shock, then the woman's mouth covered his own again. His good hand came up-obedient or involuntary, he couldn't have said-and held her as she kissed him like a lost love regained.

"Oh, no!" he heard within: a terribly known voice, but a new, lugubrious tone. "No, no, no! This will never work! You'll get him beaten or killed, whoever he is."

At which point someone, standing in the front hallway of the house behind the woman in Crispin's arms, cleared his throat.

The woman in the red, knee-length tunic detached herself as if with anguished reluctance, and as she did Crispin received another shock: he realized belatedly that he knew her scent. It was the perfume only one woman in the City was said to be allowed to use. And this woman was not, manifestly, the Empress Alixana.

This woman was-unless he had been led very greatly astray-Shirin of the Greens, their Principal Dancer, celebrated object of the anguished desire of at least one young aristocrat Crispin had met in a tavern yesterday, and very likely a great many other men, young or otherwise. She was also the daughter of Zoticus of Varena.

And the bewailing, anxious inner voice he'd just heard-twice-had been Linon's.

Crispin's head hurt again, suddenly. He found himself wishing he'd never left the baths, or the inn. Or home.

The woman stepped back, her hand trailing lingeringly along the front of his tunic, as if reluctant to let him go, as she turned to the person who had coughed.

And following her gaze, overwhelmed by too many things at once, Crispin found himself struggling suddenly not to laugh aloud like a child or a simple-witted fool.

"Oh!" said the woman, a hand coming up to cover her mouth in astonishment. "I didn't hear you follow me! Dear friend, forgive me, but I could not restrain myself. You see, this is-"

"You do seem to insinuate yourself, don't you, Rhodian," said Pertennius of Eubulus, secretary to the Supreme Strategos, whom Crispin had just seen disappearing through steam. And this man he had last encountered delivering a pearl to the Empress the night before.

Pertennius was dressed extremely well today, in fine linen, blue and silver, embroidered, with a dark blue cloak and a matching soft hat. The secretary's thin, long-nosed face was pale, and-not surprisingly in the current circumstances-the narrow, observant eyes were not noticeably cordial as they evaluated the tableau in the doorway.

"You… know each other?" the woman said, uncertainly. Crispin noted, still struggling to control his amusement, that she had also gone pale now.

"The Rhodian artisan was presented at court last night," Pertennius said. "He has just arrived in the City," he added heavily.

The woman bit her lip.

‘I warned you! I warned you! You deserve everything that happens now" the patrician voice that had been Linon's said. It sounded distant, but Crispin was hearing it within, as he had before.

It wasn't addressing him.

He forced the implications of this away and, looking at the alchemist's dark-haired daughter, took pity. There was, of course, no way they could pretend to be lovers or even intimate friends, but.

"I admit I did not anticipate so generous a welcome," he said easily. "You must love your dear father very much, Shirin." He continued, smiling, giving her time to absorb this. "Good day to you, secretary. We do seem to frequent the same doorways. Curious. I should have looked for you in the baths just now, to share a cup of wine. I did speak with the Strategos, who was good enough to honour me with his company. Are you well, after your late errand last night?"

The secretary's mouth fell open. He looked very like a fish, so. He was courting this woman, of course. It would have been obvious, even if the young Green partisans in The Spina had not said as much yesterday.

"The Strategos?" Pertennius said. "Her father!" he said.

"My father!" Shirin repeated in a usefully indeterminate tone.

"Her father," Crispin confirmed agreeably. "Zoticus of Varena, from whom I bring tidings and counsel, as promised by my message earlier." He smiled at the secretary with affable blandness and turned to the woman, who was gazing at him now with unfeigned astonishment. "I do hope I am not intruding upon an appointment?"

"No, no!" she said hastily, colouring a little. "Oh, no. Pertennius simply happened to be in this quarter, he said. He… elected to honour me with a visit. He said." She was quick-witted, Crispin realized. "I was about to explain to him… when we heard your knock, and in my excitement

Crispin's smile was all benign understanding. . you offered me an unforgettable greeting. For another such, I'll return all the way back to Varena and come again with further word from Zoticus."

She coloured even more. She deserved a little embarrassment, he thought, still amused.

"You do not deserve so much good fortune," he heard inwardly, and then, after a pause, "No, I will not cook myself in a pot for dinner. I told you not to try such an obviously ridiculous-"

There was an abrupt silence, as the inward voice was cut off.

Crispin had a good idea what had caused that, having done it himself many times on the road. He had no idea what was happening here, however. He should not be able to hear this voice.

"You are a Rhodian?" Pertennius's expression, eyeing the slender girl, revealed an avid curiosity. "I didn't know that."

"Partly Rhodian," Shirin agreed, regaining her composure. Crispin recalled that it was always easier with the bird silenced. "My father is from Batiara."

"And your mother?" the secretary asked.

Shirin smiled and tossed her head. "Come, scribe, would you plumb all of a woman's mysteries?" Her sidelong look was bewitching. Pertennius swallowed and cleared his throat again. The answer, of course, was "yes," but he could hardly say as much, Crispin thought. He himself kept silent, glancing quickly around the entranceway. There was no bird to be seen.

Zoticus's daughter took him by the elbow-a much more formal grip this time, he noted-and walked him into the house a few steps. "Pertennius, dear friend, will you allow me the comfort of a visit with this man? It has been so long since I've spoken with anyone who's seen my beloved father."

She released Crispin and, turning, took the secretary's arm in the same firm, friendly grip, steering him smoothly the other way towards the still-open doorway. "It was so kind of you to come by just to see if the strains of the Dykania had not wearied me too greatly. You are such a solicitous friend. I am very fortunate to have powerful men like you taking a protective interest in my health."

"Not so powerful," the secretary said with an awkward little deprecating movement of his free hand, "but yes, yes, very much, very much indeed interested in your well-being. Dear girl." She released his arm. He looked as if he would linger, gazing at her and then past, at Crispin, who stood with hands clasped loosely together, smiling earnestly back.

"We, ah, must dine together, Rhodian, "Pertennius said, after a moment.

"We must," Crispin agreed enthusiastically. "Leontes spoke so highly of you!"

Leontes's secretary hesitated another moment, his high forehead furrowing. He looked as if there were a great many questions he had a mind to ask, but then he bowed to Shirin and stepped out onto the portico. She closed the door carefully behind him and stood there, resting her head against it, her back to Crispin. Neither of them spoke. They heard a jingle of harness from the street and the muted sound of Pertennius riding off.

"Oh, Jad!" said Zoticus's daughter, voice muffled against the heavy door. "What must you think of me?"

"I really don't know," said Crispin carefully. "What should I think of you? That you give friendly greetings? They say the dancers of Sarantium are dangerous and immoral."

She turned at that, leaning back against the door. "I'm not. People would like me to be, but I'm not." She had not adorned herself, or painted her face. Her dark hair was quite short. She looked very young.

He could remember her kiss. A deception, but a practised one. "Really?"

She flushed again, but nodded. "Truly. You ought to be able to guess why I did what I did. He's been calling almost every day since the end of summer. Half the men in the Imperial Precinct expect a dancer to go on her back and spread her legs if they wave a jewel or a square of silk at her."

Crispin didn't smile. "They said that of the Empress, in her day, didn't they?"

She looked wry; he saw her father, abruptly, in the expression. "In her day it might have been true. When she met Petrus she changed. That's what I understand." She pushed herself off from the door. "I'm being ungracious. Your cleverness just now saved me some real awkwardness. Thank you. Pertennius is harmless, but he tells tales."

Crispin looked at her. He was remembering the secretary's hungry expression last night, eyes passing from the Empress to himself and back to Alixana, with her long hair unbound. "He may not be so harmless. Tale-tellers aren't, you know, especially if they are bitter."

She shrugged. "I'm a dancer. There are always rumours. Will you take wine? Do you really come from my bastard of a so-called father?"

The words were rightly spoken, tossed away.

Crispin blinked. "Yes I will and yes I do. I wouldn't have been able to invent a tale like that," he said, also mildly.

She went past him and he followed her down the corridor. There was a doorway at the end of the hallway, opening to a courtyard with a small fountain and stone benches, but it was too cold to sit outside. Shirin turned in to a handsome room where a fire had been laid. She clapped her hands once, and murmured quiet instructions to the servant who immediately appeared. She seemed to have regained her self-possession.

Crispin found that he was struggling to keep his own.

Lying on a wooden and bronze trunk set against the wall by the fire, on its back as if it were a discarded toy, was a small leather and metal bird.

Shirin turned from the servant and followed his gaze. "That actually was a gift from my endlessly doting father." She smiled thinly. "The only thing I've ever received from him in my life. Years ago. I wrote to him that I'd come to Sarantium and been accepted as a dancer by the Greens. I'm not sure why I bothered to tell him, but he did reply. That one time. He told me not to become a prostitute and sent me a child's toy. It sings if you wind it up. He makes them, I gather. A pastime of sorts? Did you ever see any of his birds?"

Crispin swallowed, and nodded his head. He was hearing-could not help but hear-a voice crying in Sauradia.

"I did," he said finally. "When I visited him before leaving Varena." He hesitated, then took the chair she gestured towards, nearest the fire. Courtesy for guests on a cold day. She took the seat opposite, legs demurely together, her dancer's posture impeccable. He went on, "Zoticus, your father… is actually a friend of my colleague. Martinian. I'd never met him before, to be honest. I can't actually tell you very much, only report that he seemed well when I saw him. A very learned man. We. spent part of an afternoon together. He was kind enough to offer me some guidance for the road."

"He used to travel a great deal, I understand," Shirin said. Her expression grew wry again. "Else I'd not be alive, I suppose."

Crispin hesitated. This woman's history was not something to which he was entitled. But there was the bird, silenced, lying on the trunk. A pastime of sorts. "Your mother… told you this?"

Shirin nodded. Her short black hair bobbed at her shoulders with the movement. Crispin could see her appeal: a dancer's grace, quick energy, effervescence. The dark eyes were compelling. He could imagine her in the theatre, neat-footed and alluring.

She said,'To be just, my mother never said anything bad about him that I can recall. He liked women, she said. He must have been a handsome man, and persuasive. My mother had been intending to withdraw from the world among the Daughters of Jad when he passed through our village."

"And after?" Crispin said, thinking about a grey-bearded pagan alchemist on an isolated farm amid his parchments and artifacts.

"Oh, she did retreat to them. She's there now. I was born and raised among holy women. They taught me my prayers and my letters. I was… everyone's daughter, I suppose."

"Then how.?"

"I ran away."

Shirin of the Greens smiled briefly. She might be young, but it was not an innocent smile. The houseservant appeared with a tray. Wine, water, a bowl of late-season fruit. Zoticus's daughter dismissed her and mixed the wine herself, bringing his cup across. He caught her scent again, the Empress's.

Shirin sat down once more, looking across the room at him, appraisingly. "Who are you?" she asked, not unreasonably. She tilted her head a little sideways. Her glance went briefly past him, then returned.

"Is this the new regimen? You silence me except when you need my opinion? How gracious. And, yes, really, who is this vulgar-looking person?"

Crispin swallowed. The bird's aristocratic voice was vividly clear now in his mind. They were in the same room. He hesitated, then sent, inwardly, "Can you hear what I am saying?"

No response. Shirin watched him, waiting.

He cleared his throat. "My name is Caius Crispus. Of Varena. I'm an artisan. A mosaicist. Invited here to help with the Great Sanctuary."

A hand flew to her mouth. "Oh! You're the one someone tried to kill last night!"

"He is? Wonderful! A splendid fellow to be alone with, I must say."

Crispin tried to ignore that. "Word travels so quickly?"

"In Sarantium it does, especially when it involves the factions." Crispin was abruptly reminded that this woman, as Principal Dancer, was as important to the Greens in her way as Scortius was to the Blues. Seen in that light, there was no surprise in her being well informed. She leaned back a little, her expression openly curious now, watching Crispin's face.

"You can't be serious? With that hair? Those hands? And look at the left one, he's been in a fight. Attractive? Hah. It must be your time of month!"

Crispin felt himself flushing. He looked down, involuntarily, at his large, scarred hands. The left one was visibly swollen. He felt excruciatingly awkward. He could hear the bird, but not Shirin's replies, and neither of them had any idea he was listening to half their exchanges.

She seemed amused at his sudden colour. She said, "You dislike being talked about? It can be useful, you know. Especially if you are new to the City."

Crispin took a needed drink of wine. "It depends what… people are saying, I suppose."

She smiled. She had a very good smile. "I suppose. I do hope you weren't injured?"

"Is it the Rhodian accent? Is that it? Keep your legs closed, girl. We know nothing about this man."

Crispin began to wish Shirin would silence the bird, or that he had a way to do so. He shook his head, trying to concentrate. "Not injured, no, thank you. Though two of my companions died, and a young man at the gates to the Blues" compound. I have no idea who hired those soldiers." They would know, soon enough, he thought. He had battered a man senseless just now.

"You must be a terribly dangerous mosaicist?" Shirin's dark eyes flashed. There was a teasing irony in the tone. The report of deaths seemed not to disturb her. This was Sarantium, he reminded himself.

"Oh, gods! Why not just undress right here and lie down? You could save the long walk all the way to the bed —»

Crispin breathed a sigh of relief as the bird was silenced again. He looked down at his wine cup, drained it. Shirin rose smoothly, took the cup. She used less water this time filling it, he saw.

"I didn't think I was dangerous at all," he said as she brought it to him and sat down again.

Her smile was teasing again. "Your wife doesn't think so?"

He was glad the bird was silent. "My wife died two summers ago, and my daughters."

Her expression changed. "Plague?"

He nodded.

"I'm sorry." She looked at him a moment. "Is that why you came?"

Jad's bones. Another too-clever Sarantine woman. Crispin said, honestly, "It is almost why I didn't come. People urged me to do so. The invitation was really for Martinian, my partner. I passed myself off" as him, on the road."

Her eyebrows arched. "You presented yourself at the Imperial Court under a false name? And lived? Oh, you are a dangerous man, Rhodian."

He drank again. "Not exactly. I did give my own name." Something occurred to him. "In fact, the herald who announced me may also have lost his position because of that."

"Also?"

This was becoming complex, suddenly. After the wine at the baths, and now here, his head wasn't as clear as it needed to be. "The. previous mosaicist for the Sanctuary was dismissed by the Emperor last night."

Shirin of the Greens eyed him closely. There was a brief silence. A log crackled on the fire. She said, thoughtfully, "No shortage of people who might have hired soldiers, then. It isn't difficult, you know."

He sighed. "So I am learning."

There was more, of course, but he decided not to mention Styliane Daleina or a hidden blade in the steam. He looked around the room, saw the bird again. Linon's voice-the same patrician accent all the alchemist's birds had-but a character entirely other. Not a surprise. He knew, now, what these birds were, or once had been. He was quite certain this woman didn't. He had no idea what to do.

Shirin said," And so, before someone appears to attack you in my house for some good reason or other, what message did a loving father have for his daughter?"

Crispin shook his head. "None, I fear. He gave me your name in case I should need assistance."

She tried to hide it, but he saw the disappointment. Children, absent parents. Inward burdens carried in the world. "Did he say anything about me, at least?"

She's a prostitute, Crispin remembered the alchemist murmuring with a straight face, before amending that description slightly. He cleared his throat again. "He said you were a dancer. He didn't have any details, actually."

She reddened angrily. "Of course he has details. He knows I'm First of the Greens. I wrote him that when they named me. He never replied." She tossed her head. "Of course he has so many children scattered all over. From his travels. I suppose we all write letters and he just answers the favoured ones."

Crispin shook his head. "He did say his children didn't write to him. I couldn't tell if he was serious."

"He never replies," Shirin snapped. "Two letters and one bird, that is all I have ever had from my father." She picked up her own wine cup. "I suppose he sent birds to all of us."

Crispin suddenly remembered something. "I don't. believe so."

"Oh? And how would you know?" Anger in her voice.

"He told me he'd only ever given away one of his birds."

She grew still. "He said that?"

Crispin nodded.

"But why? I mean.?"

He had a guess, actually. He said, "Are any of your. siblings here in the City?"

She shook her head. "Not any I know of

"That might be why. He did say he'd always planned to journey to Sarantium and never had. That it was a disappointment. Perhaps your being here.?"

Shirin looked over at her bird, then back to Crispin. Something seemed to occur to her. She said, with an indifferent shrug, "Well, why sending a mechanical toy would be so important to him, I have no idea."

Crispin looked away. She was dissembling, but she had to do that. So was he, for that matter. He was going to need time, he thought, to sort this through as well. Every encounter he had in this city seemed to be raising challenges of one sort or another. He sternly reminded himself that he was here to work. On a dome. A transcendent dome high above all the world, a gift to him from the Emperor and the god. He was not going to let himself become trammelled in the intrigues of this city.

He rose on that thought, resolutely. He'd intended to go to the Sanctuary this afternoon. This visit was to have been a minor interlude, a dutiful call. "I ought not to outstay your welcome to an uninvited stranger."

She stood up quickly, her first awkward motion. It made her seem younger.

He approached, became aware of her perfume again. And had to ask, against his own better judgement. "I… was given to understand earlier that only the Empress Alixana was allowed that particular.. scent. Is it indiscreet to ask…?"

Shirin smiled suddenly, visibly pleased. "You noticed? She saw me dance in the spring. Sent a private message with a note and a flask. It was made public that, in appreciation of my dancing, the Empress had permitted me to use the scent that was otherwise hers alone. Even though she's known to favour the Blues."

Crispin looked down at her. A small, quick, dark-eyed woman, quite young. "A great honour." He hesitated. "It suits you as much as it does her."

She looked ironic. She would be used to compliments, he realized. "The association with power is attractive, isn't it?" she murmured dryly.

Crispin laughed aloud. "Jad's blood! If all the women in Sarantium are as clever as the ones I've already met

"Yes?" she said, looking up at him slantwise. "What follows, Caius Crispus?" Her tone was deliberately arch, teasing again. It was effective, he had to concede.

He couldn't think of a reply. She laughed. "You'll have to tell me about the others, of course. One must know one's rivals in this city."

Crispin looked at her. He could imagine what her bird would have said to that. He was grateful it was silent. Otherwise-

"Oh, gods! You are a disgrace! You bring shame upon. everything!"

Crispin winced, covering it with a quick hand to his mouth. Not silenced, obviously. It was evident that Zoticus's daughter had her own methods of controlling her bird. She'd been toying with both of them, he thought. Shirin turned, smiling privately to herself, and led the way back down the corridor to the front door.

"I'll call again," Crispin murmured, turning there. "If I may?"

"Of course. You must. I'll assemble a small dinner party for you. Where are you staying?"

He named the inn. I’ll be looking for a house, though. I believe the Chancellor's officials are to find me one."

"Gesius? Really? And Leontes met with you at the baths? You have powerful friends, Rhodian. My father was wrong. You couldn't possibly need someone like me for. anything." She smiled again, the clever expression belying the words. "Come and see me dance. The chariots are finished, it is theatre season now."

He nodded. She opened the door and stood back to let him pass.

"Thank you again for the greeting," he said. He wasn't sure why he'd said that. Teasing. Mostly. She'd done enough of it, herself.

"Oh, dear," Shirin of the Greens murmured. "I'm not to be allowed to forget that, am I? My beloved father would be so ashamed. It isn't how he raised me, of course. Good day, Caius Crispus," she added, keeping a small but discernible distance this time. After her own gibes at him, he was pleased to see that she had reacted a little, however.

"Don't kiss him! Don't! Is the door open?"

A brief pause, then, "No I do not know that, Shirin! With you I am never certain." Another silence, as Shirin said whatever she said, and then in a very different tone Crispin heard the bird say, "Very well. Yes, dear. Yes, I know. I do know that."

There was a tenderness there that took him straight back to the Aidwood. Linon. Remember me.

Crispin bowed, feeling a sudden wave of grief pass over him. Zoticus's daughter smiled and the door closed. He stood on the portico thinking, though not very coherently. Carullus's soldiers waited, watching him, eyeing the street. which was empty now. A wind blew. It was cold, the late-afternoon sun hidden by the roofs of houses west.

Crispin took a deep breath then he knocked on the door again.

A moment later it swung open. Shirin's eyes were wide. She opened her mouth but, seeing his expression, said nothing at all. Crispin stepped inside. He himself closed the door on the street.

She looked up at him.

"Shirin, I'm sorry, but I can hear your bird," he said. "We have a few things to talk about."

The Urban Prefecture in the reign of the Emperor Valerius II fell under the auspices of Faustinus the Master of Offices, as did all of the civil service and, accordingly, it was run with his well-known efficiency and attention to detail.

These traits were much in evidence when the former courier and suspected assassin, Pronobius Tilliticus, was brought to questioning in the notorious, windowless building near the Mezaros Forum. The new legal protocols established by Valerius's Quaestor of the Judiciary, Marcellinus, were painstakingly followed: a scribe and a notary were both present as the Questioner set out his array of implements.

In the event, none of the hanging weights or metal probes or the more elaborate contrivances proved necessary. The man Tilliticus offered a complete and detailed confession as soon as the Questioner, gauging his subject with an experienced eye, elected to suddenly clutch and shear off a hank of the man's hair with a curved, serrated blade. As his locks fell to the stone floor, Tilliticus screamed as if he'd been pierced by the jagged blade. Then he began to babble forth far more than they needed to hear. The secretary recorded; the notary witnessed and affixed his seal when it was done. The Questioner, showing no signs of disappointment, withdrew. There were other subjects waiting in other chambers.

The detailed revelations made it unnecessary to interrogate formally the soldier from Amoria who had been interrupted and personally halted by the Supreme Strategos while apparently attempting a further assault on the Rhodian artisan in a public bathhouse.

In accordance with the new protocols, a member of the judiciary was requested to attend immediately at the Urban Prefecture. Upon arrival, the judge was presented with the one-time courier's confession and such further details as had been assembled regarding the events of the night before and that afternoon.

The judge had some latitude under Marcellinus's new Code of Laws. The death penalty had been largely eliminated as contrary to the spirit of Jad's creation and as a benign Imperial gesture in the aftermath of the Victory Riots, but the possible fines, dismemberments, mutilations, and terms of exile or incarceration were wide-ranging.

The judge on duty that evening happened to be a Green supporter. The deaths of two common soldiers and a Blue partisan was a grave matter, to be sure, but the Rhodian involved-the only important figure in the story, it seemed-had been unharmed, and the courier had confessed his crimes freely. Six perpetrators had been killed. The judge had barely divested himself of his heavy cloak and sipped once or twice from the wine cup they brought him before ruling that the gouging of one eye and a slit nose, to label Tilliticus as a punished criminal, would be a proper and sufficient judicial response. Along with a lifetime's exile, of course. Such a figure could not possibly be allowed to remain in the City. He might corrupt the pious inhabitants.

The Amorianite soldier was routinely branded on the forehead with a hot iron as a would-be assassin and-of course-thereby forfeited his place in the army and his pension. He too was exiled.

It all unfolded with satisfying efficiency, and the judge even had time to finish his wine and exchange some salacious gossip with the notary about a young pantomime actor and a very prominent Senator. He was home in time for his evening meal.

That same evening, a surgeon on contract to the Urban Prefecture was called in and Pronobius Tilliticus lost his left eye and had his nose carved open with a heated blade. He would lie in the Prefecture's infirmary for that night and the next and then be taken in chains across the harbour to Deapolis port and released there, to make his one-eyed, marked way in exile through the god's world and the Empire-or wherever he chose to go beyond it.

He went, in fact, as most of the god's world would come to know one day, south through Amoria into Soriyya. He quickly exhausted the meagre sum his father had been able to put together for him on short notice and was reduced to begging for scraps at chapel doors with the other maimed and mutilated, the orphans, and the women too old to sell their bodies for sustenance.

From these depths he was rescued the next autumn-as the story was to tell-by a virtuous cleric in a village near the desert wastes of Ammuz. Smitten with divine illumination, Pronobius Tilliticus went forth a distance alone into the desert the next spring carrying only a sun disk, and found a precipitate tooth of rock to climb. It was a difficult ascent, but he did it only once.

He lived there forty years in all, sustained at first by supplies sent out by the humble cleric who had brought him to Jad, and later by the pilgrims who began to seek out his needle-like crag in the sands, bearing baskets of food and wine which were hauled up on a rope-and-pulley arrangement and then lowered-empty-by the one-eyed hermit with his long, filthy beard and rotting clothes.

A number of people, carried out to the site in litters, unable to walk or gravely ill, and not a few women afflicted with barren wombs, were afterwards to claim in carefully witnessed testaments that their conditions had been cured when they ate of the half-masticated pieces of food the Jad-possessed anchorite was wont to hurl down from his precarious perch. Besought by the people below for prophecies and holy instruction, Pronobius Tilliticus would declaim terse parables and grim, strident warnings of dire futures.

He was, of course, correct in large measure, achieving his immortality by being the first holy man slain by the heathen fanatics of the sands when they swept out of the south into Soriyya following their own star-enraptured visionary and his ascetic new teachings.

When a vanguard of this desert army reached the stiletto of rock upon which the hermit-an old man by then, incoherent in his convictions and fierce rhetoric-still perched, seemingly impervious to the winds and the broiling sun, they listened to him fulminate for a time, amused. When he began coarsely spitting food down upon them, their amusement faded. Archers filled him with arrows like some grotesque, spiny animal. He fell from his perch, a long way. After routinely cutting off his genitalia they left him in the sand for the scavengers.

He would be formally declared holy and among the Blessed Victims gathered to Immortal Light, a performer of attested miracles and a sage, two generations later by the great Patriarch Eumedius.

In the official Life commissioned by the Patriarch it was chronicled how Tilliticus had spent hard and courageous years in the Imperial Post, loyally serving his Emperor, before hearing and heeding the summons of a far greater power. Movingly, the tale was told of how the holy man lost his eye to a wild lion of the desert while saving a lost child in peril.

"One sees Holy Jad within, not with the eyes of this world," he was reported to have said to the weeping child and her mother, whose own garment, stained by the blood that dripped from the sage's wounds, came to be included among the sacred treasures of the Great Sanctuary in Sarantium itself.

At the time the Life of the Blessed Tilliticus was written, it was either forgotten or deemed inconsequential by the recording clerics what role a minor Rhodian artisan might have played in the journey of the holy man to the god's eternal Light. Military slang also comes and goes, changes and evolves. No coarse, ribald associations at all would attach to the name of Jad's dearly beloved Pronobius by then.