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

CHAPTER V

They walked for a long time, moving through a world becoming gradually more familiar as the mist continued to lift. And yet, for all the re-emergence of the ordinary, Crispin thought, it had also become a landscape changed beyond his capacity of description. Where the bird had been about his neck there was an absence that felt oddly like a weight. There were crows in the field again, towards the woods, and they heard a songbird in a thicket south of the road. A flash of russet was a fox, though they never saw the hare it pursued.

At what must have been mid-afternoon they stopped. Vargos unwrapped the food again. Bread, cheese, ale for each of them. Crispin drank deeply. He looked away to the south. The mountains were visible again, rifts in the clouds above them showed blue and there was snow on the peaks. Light, shafts of colour, coming back into the world. He became aware that Kasia was looking at him. "She. the bird spoke," she said. Apprehension in her face, though there had not been in the forest, in the grey mist of the field.

He nodded. He had made himself ready for this during the silent walking. He had guessed it would come, that it had to come.

"I heard," he said. "She did."

"How? My lord?"

Vargos watched them, holding his flask.

"I don't know," he lied. "The bird was a talisman given me by a man said to be an alchemist. My friends wanted me to have such a thing for protection. They believe in forces I do not. Did not. I… understand next to nothing of what happened today."

And that was not a lie. Already the morning felt to be a recollection of being wrapped in mist, with a creature in the Aldwood larger than the world, than his comprehension of the world. Thinking back, the only vivid colour he could remember was the red blood on the bison's horns.

"He took her, instead of… me."

"He took Pharus, as well," said Vargos quietly, pushing the stopper back into his flask. "We saw Ludan, or his shadow today." There was something near to anger in the scarred face. "How do we worship Jad and his son after this?"

Real anguish here, Crispin thought, and was moved. They had lived through something together this morning. Wildly different paths to that glade seemed to matter less than one might have expected.

He drew a breath. "We worship them as the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do." He surprised himself. "We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can't even stop children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another?" It was posed as a rhetorical question, a flourish, but the words hung in the brightening air. A blackbird lifted from the stubble of the field and flew away west in a low, sweeping arc, wings beating.

"I do not know," said Vargos, finally. "I have no learning. Twice, when I was younger, I thought I saw the zubir, the bison. I was never sure. Was I being marked? For today, in some way?"

"I am not the man to answer that," said Crispin.

"Are we… safe now?" the girl asked.

"Until the next thing comes," Crispin said, and then, more kindly, "Safe from those who followed, yes, I believe so. From whatever was in the wood? I… also believe so." He doesn't want the girl. He came for me.

It took a certain act of will, but he kept his mind from calling out again to the silence. Linon had been with him for so little time-abrasive, unyielding-but no one else, not even Ilandra, had ever been within him in that way. My dear, she had said, at the end. Remember me.

If he understood any of this rightly, Linon had been a woman, named as Kasia had been named to the forest god, but she had died in that grove a long time ago. Heart cut out, body hanging from a sacred tree. And soul…? Soul claimed by a mortal man who had been watching, insanely daring, and drawing upon some arcane power Crispin's mind could not compass.

He remembered, unexpectedly, the look on Zoticus's face when it had emerged that of all his birds it was Linon whose inward voice Crispin had heard. She was his fast, Crispin thought, and knew it was true.

Tell him goodbye, the bird had said silently at the end, in what would once have been her own voice. Crispin shook his head. He had thought once, in his arrogance, that he knew something of the world of men and women.

"There is a chapel we will come to soon," Vargos said. Crispin pulled his thoughts back, and realized they had both been watching him. "Before sunset. A real one, not just a roadside shrine." "Then we will enter it and pray," said Crispin.

There would be comfort in the well-worn rituals, he realized. A returning to the customary, where people lived out their lives. Where they had to live their lives. The day, he thought, had done all it could do, the world had revealed all it would just now. They would calm themselves, he would order his thoughts, begin adjusting to the absence about his throat and in his mind, begin thinking of what to say in a difficult letter to Zoticus, perhaps even begin looking forward to wine and a meal at tonight's inn. A returning to the customary, indeed, as if coming home from a very long journey. Men, when they think in this way-that the crisis, the moment of revealed power, has passed-are as vulnerable as they will ever be. Good leaders of armies at war know this. Any skilled actor or writer for the stage knows it. So do clerics, priests, perhaps cheiromancers. When people have been very deeply shaken in certain ways they are, in fact, wide open to the next bright falling from the air. It is not the moment of birth-the bursting through a shell into the world-that imprints the newborn gosling, but the next thing, the sighting that comes after and marks the soul.

They went on, two men and a woman, through an opening world. No one else was on the road. It was the Day of the Dead. The autumn light became mild as the sun swung west, palely veiled. A cool breeze moved the clouds. More rifts of blue could be seen overhead. Crows in the fields, jays, and another small bird Crispin didn't know, swift-flying on their right, with a bright tail red as blood. Snow far off, on the distant mountain peaks emerging one by one. The sea beyond. He could have sailed, if the courier..

They came to the place of which Vargos had spoken. It was set behind iron gates, some distance back from the road on the south side. It faced the forest. The chapel was much larger than the usual roadside places of prayer. A real one, as Vargos had put it: a grey stone octagon with a dome above, neatly cropped grass around it, a dormitory beside, outbuildings behind, a graveyard. It was very peaceful here. Crispin saw cows and a goat in the meadow beyond the graves.

Had he been more aware of time and place, had his mind not been wrestling with unseen things, he might have realized where they were and been prepared. He did not, and he was not.

They tied the mule by the low wall, went through the unlocked iron gate and up the stone path. There were late-season flowers growing beside it, lovingly tended. Crispin saw an herb garden to the left, back towards the meadow. They opened the heavy wooden door of the chapel and the three of them went in and Crispin looked at the walls, as his eyes slowly adjusted to the muted light, and then, stepping forward, he looked up at the dome.

Divisions of faith in the worship of Jad had led to burnings and torture and war almost from the beginning. The doctrine and liturgy of the sun god, emerging from the promiscuous gods and goddesses of Trakesia during the early years of the Empire of Rhodias, had not evolved without their share of schisms and heresies and the frequently savage responses to these. The god was in the sun, or he was behind the sun. The world had been born in light, or it had been released from ice and darkness by holy light. At one time the god was thought to die in winter and be reborn in the spring, but the gentle cleric who had expounded this had been ordered torn apart between cavalry horses by a High Patriarch in Rhodias. For a brief time, elsewhere, it had been taught that the two moons were Jad's offspring-a belief more than halfway to the doctrines of the Kindath, who named them sisters of the god and equal to him in disturbing ways. This unfortunate fallacy, too, had required a number of deaths to extirpate.

The varying forms of belief in Heladikos-as mortal son, as half-mortal child, as god-were only the most obdurate and enduring of these conflicts waged in the holy name of Jad. Emperors and Patriarchs, first in Rhodias and then Sarantium, wavered and grew firm and then reversed their positions and tolerance, and Heladikos the Charioteer moved in and out of acceptance and fashion, much as the sun moved in and out of cloud on a windy day.

In the same way, amongst all these bitter wars, fought with words and iron and flame, the rendered image of Jad himself had become a line of demarcation over the years, a battlefield of art and belief, of ways of imagining the god who sent life-bringing light and battled darkness every night beneath his world while men slept their precarious sleep.

And this modest, beautifully made old chapel in a quiet, isolated place on the ancient Imperial road in Sauradia was that dividing line.

He'd had no warning at all. Crispin took some steps forward in the subdued, delicate light of the chapel, noting, absently, the old-fashioned mosaics of intertwined flowers on the walls, and then looked up.

A moment later, he found himself lying on the cold stones of the floor, struggling to breathe, gazing up at his god.

He ought to have known what was waiting for him in this place. Even setting out from Varena it had crossed his mind that the road through Sauradia would take him past this chapel at some point-he wasn't certain exactly where, but he knew it was on the Imperial road-and he'd even been looking forward to seeing what the old craftsmen had done in their primitive fashion, rendering Jad in the eastern way.

But the intensity and the terror of what had happened this morning in the fog and the wood had driven that thought so far from him that he was wide open, defenceless, utterly exposed to the force of what had been done by mortal men on this dome. After the Aldwood and the bison and Linon, Crispin had no barriers within himself, no refuge, and the power of the image above hammered into him, driving all strength from his body so that he fell down like a pantomime grotesque or a helpless drunk in an alley behind a caupona.

He lay flat on his back staring up at the figure of the god: the bearded face and upper torso of Jad massively rendered across virtually the entirety of the dome. A gaunt image, battle-weary and grim, weighted down- he registered the heavy cloak, the bowed shoulders-by his burdens and the stern evils of his children. A figure as absolute and terrifying as the bison had been: another dark, massive head, against the pale, golden tesserae of the sun behind him. A figure seeming as if it would descend in overwhelming judgement from above. The image encompassed the head and shoulders, both lifted hands. No more, no room on the dome for more. Spreading across the softly illuminated space, gazing down with eyes large as some figures Crispin had made in his day, it was so out of scale it should never have worked, and yet Crispin had not in all his life seen anything made that touched the strength of this.

He had known this work was here, westernmost of all the renderings of the god done with the full dark eastern beard and those black, haunted eyes: Jad as judge, as worn, beleaguered warrior in deathly combat, not the shining, blue-eyed, golden sun-figure of Crispin's west. But knowing and seeing were so far from the same thing it was as if… as if one was the world and the other the half-world of hidden powers.

The old craftsmen. Their primitive fashion.

So he had thought, back home. Crispin felt an aching in his heart for the depths of his own folly, the revealed limitations of his understanding and skill. He felt naked before this, grasping that in its own way this work of mortal men in a domed chapel was as much a manifestation of the holy as the bison with its blood-smeared horns in the wood, and as appalling. The fierce, wild power of Ludan, accepting sacrifice in his grove, set against the immensity of craft and comprehension on this dome, rendering in glass and stone a deity as purely humbling. How did one move from one of these poles to the other? How did mankind live between such extremes?

For the deepest mystery, the pulsing heart of the enigma, was that as he lay on his back, paralysed by revelation, Crispin saw that the eyes were the same. The world's sorrow he'd seen in the zubir was here in the sun god above him, distilled by nameless artisans whose purity of vision and faith unmanned him. Crispin was actually unsure for a moment if he'd ever be able to get up, to reassert his self-control, his will.

He struggled to disentangle the elements of the work here, to gain some mastery over it and himself. Deep brown and obsidian in the eyes, to make them darker and stronger than the framing brown hair, shoulder length. The long face made longer by that straight hair and the beard; the arched, heavy eyebrows, deeply etched forehead, other lines scoring the cheeks-the skin so pale between beard and hair it showed as nearly grey. Then down to the rich, luxurious blue of the god's robe beneath his cloak which was shot through, Crispin saw, with a dazzling myriad of contrasting colours for a woven texture and the hinted play and power of light in a god whose power was light.

And then the hands. The hands were heartbreaking. Contorted, elongated fingers with the ascetic spiritualism suggested by that, but there was more: these were no cleric's fingers, no hands of repose and clasped meditation, they were both scarred. One finger on the left hand had clearly been broken; it was crooked, the knuckle swollen: red and brown tesserae against white and grey. These hands had wielded weapons, had been cut, frozen, known savage war against ice and black emptiness in the endless defence of mortal children whose understanding was… that of children, no more.

And the sorrow and judgement in the dark eyes was linked to what had happened to those hands. The colours, Crispin saw-the craftsman in him marvelling-brought hands and eyes inescapably together. The vivid, unnaturally raised veins on the wrists of both pale hands used the same brown and obsidian that were in the eyes. He knew, intuitively, that this precise pairing of tesserae would exist nowhere else on the dome. The eyes of sorrow and indictment, the hands of suffering and war. A god who stood between his unworthy children and the dark, offering sunlight each morning in their brief time of life, and then his own pure Light afterwards, for the worthy.

Crispin thought of Ilandra, of his girls, of the plague ravaging like a rabid carnivore through all the world, and he lay on cold stone beneath this image of Jad and understood what it was saying to him, to all those here below: that the god's victory was never assured, never to be taken for granted. It was this, he realized, that the unknown mosaicists of long ago were reporting on this dome to their brethren with this vast, weary god against the soft gold of his sun.

"Are you all right? My lord! Are you all right?"

He became aware that Vargos was addressing him with an urgency and concern that almost seemed amusing, after all they had survived today. It wasn't especially uncomfortable on the stones, though cold. He moved a hand vaguely. It was still somewhat difficult to breathe, actually. It was better when he didn't look up. Kasia, he saw as he turned his head, was standing a little apart, staring at the dome.

Looking over at her, he grasped something else: Vargos knew this place. He'd been along this road, back and forth, for years. The girl would never have seen this incarnation of Jad either, had most likely never even heard of it. She'd only come from the north a year ago, forced into slavery and the faith of the sun god, had only known Jad as a young, fair-haired, blue-eyed god, a direct descendant-though this she wouldn't know-of the solar deity in the pantheon of the Trakesians centuries ago.

"What do you see?" he said to her. His voice rasped in his throat. Vargos turned to follow his gaze to the girl. Kasia looked over at him anxiously, then away. She was very pale.

"I… he…" She hesitated. They heard footsteps. Crispin struggled to a sitting position and saw a cleric approaching in the white robes of the order of the Sleepless Ones. He understood now why it was so quiet here. These were the holy men who stayed awake all night praying while the god fought daemons beneath the world. Mankind has duties, the figure overhead was saying, this is an unending war. These men believed that and embodied it in their rituals. The image above and the order of clerics praying in the long nights fit together. The men who made the mosaic, so long ago, would have known that.

"Tell us," he said quietly to Kasia as the white-clad figure, small, round-faced, full-bearded, came over to them.

"He.. doesn't think he is winning," she said finally. "The battle."

The cleric stopped at that. He eyed the three of them gravely, apparently unsurprised to find a man sitting on the floor.

"He isn't certain he is," the cleric said to Kasia, speaking Sarantine, as she had. "There are enemies, and man does evil, abetting them. It is never sure, this battle. Which is why we must be a part of it."

"Do we know who achieved this?" Crispin asked quietly.

The cleric looked surprised. "Their names? The craftsmen?" He shook his head. "No. There must have been many of them, I suppose. They were artisans. and a holy spirit possessed them for a time."

"Yes, of course," Crispin said, rising to his feet. He hesitated. "Today is the Day of the Dead here," he murmured, not sure why he was saying that. Vargos steadied him with a hand at his elbow and then stepped back.

"I understand as much," the cleric said mildly. He had an unlined, gentle face. "We are surrounded by pagan heresies. They do evil to the god."

"Is that all they are to you?" Crispin asked. In his mind was a voice- a young woman, a crafted bird, a soul: I am yours, lord, as I ever was from the time I was brought here.

"What else should they be to me?" the white-robed man said, raising his eyebrows.

It was a fair question, Crispin supposed. He caught an anxious look from Vargos and let the matter rest. "I am sorry for.. how you found me," he said. "I was affected by the image."

The cleric smiled. "You aren't the first. Might I guess you are from the! west.. Batiara?"

Crispin nodded. It wasn't a difficult conjecture. His accent would have given that away.

"Where the god is yellow-haired and comely, his eyes blue and untroubled as summer skies?" The white-robed man was smiling complacently.

"I am aware of how Jad is rendered in the west, yes." Crispin had never been much inclined to be lectured by anyone.

"And as a last hazarded guess, may I assume you are an artisan of some sort?"

Kasia looked astonished, Vargos wary. Crispin eyed the cleric coolly, "A clever surmise," he said. "How would you know this?"

The man's hands were clasped at his waist. "As I said, you aren't the first westerner to react this way. And it is often those who make their own attempts at such things who. are most affected."

Crispin blinked. He might feel humbled by what was on the dome, but "attempts at such things" was not acceptable.

"I am impressed by your sagacity. It is indeed a fine piece of work. After I attend to certain requests from the Emperor in Sarantium, I might be willing to return and supervise the needed repairs to the erratic groundwork done on the dome."

The cleric's turn to blink, pleasingly. "That work was done by holy men with a holy vision," he said indignantly.

"I have no doubt of it. One shame is that we don't know their names, to honour them, another is that they lacked technique equal to their vision. You do know that tiles have begun to dislodge towards the right side of the dome, as we face the altar. Parts of the god's cloak and left forearm appear to have recklessly chosen to detach themselves from the rest of his august form."

The cleric looked up, almost reluctantly.

"Of course you may have a parable or a liturgical explanation for this," Crispin added. In the oddest way, fencing with the man was restoring his equilibrium. Not necessarily a proper thing, he supposed, but he needed it just now.

"You would propose changing the figure of the god?" The man seemed genuinely aghast.

Crispin sighed. "It has been changed, good cleric. When your extremely pious artisans did this work centuries ago, Jad had a robe and a left arm." He pointed. "Not the remains of dried-out groundwork."

The cleric shook his head. His features had reddened. "What manner of man looks up at glory and speaks of daring to set his own hands upon it?" Crispin was quite calm now. "A descendant in the craft of those who did it in the first place. Lacking, perhaps, their piety, but with a better understanding of the technique of mosaic. I should add that the dome also appears near to losing some of its golden sun, to the left. I'd need to be up on a scaffold to be certain, but it seems some tesserae have dislodged there as well. If that goes, then the god's hair will soon begin to fall out, I fear. Are you prepared to have Jad come down upon you, not in a thunderous descent but in a dribble of glass and stone?"

"This is the most profane heresy!" the cleric snapped, making the sign of the disk.

Crispin sighed. "I am sorry you see it that way. I do not mean to provoke you. Or not only that. The setting bed on the dome was done in an old-fashioned way. One layer, and most likely with a mixture of materials we now understand to be less enduring than others. It is-as we all know-not holy Jad above us, but his rendering by mortal men. We worship the god, not the image, I understand." He paused. This was a matter of extreme contention in some quarters. The cleric opened his mouth as if to answer, but then closed it again.

Crispin went on. "Mortals have their limitations, and this, too, we all know. Sometimes new things are discovered. It is no criticism of those who achieved this dome to note such a truth. Lesser men may preserve the work of greater. With competent assistants I could probably ensure the restored image above us would remain for several hundred years to come. It would take a season of work. Perhaps a little less or more. But I can tell you that without such intervention those eyes and hands and hair will begin to litter the stones around us soon. I would be sorry to see it. This is a singular work."

"It is unmatched in the world!"

"I believe that."

The cleric hesitated. Kasia and Vargos, Crispin saw, were eyeing him with astonishment. It occurred to him-with a restorative amusement that neither of them had had any reason to believe he was good for anything to this point. A worker in mosaic had little enough chance to show his gifts or skill walking the emptiness of Sauradia.

In that moment, in an intervention Crispin could have called divine a tinkling sound was heard across the floor. Crispin repressed a smile and walked over. He knelt, looking carefully, and found a brownish tessera without difficulty. He turned it over. The backing was dry, brittle. It crumbled to powder as he brushed it with a finger. He rose and walked back to the other three, handing the mosaic piece to the cleric.

"A holy message?" he said dryly. "Or just a piece of dark stone from'- he looked up-'most likely the robe again, on the right side?"

The cleric opened his mouth and closed it, exactly as he had before. He was undoubtedly regretting, Crispin thought, that this had been his day to be awake in daylight and deal with visitors to the chapel. Crispin looked up again at the severe majesty overhead and regretted his bantering tone. Attempts at such things had rankled, but it hadn't been personal, and he ought to have been above such pettiness. Especially today, and here.

Men, he thought-perhaps especially this man, Caius Crispus of Varena — seemed to escape so rarely from the concerns and trivial umbrages that made up their daily lives. He ought to have been moved beyond them today, surely. Or perhaps-a sudden, quite different sort of thought-perhaps it was because he'd been taken so far beyond that he needed to find his way back in this manner?

He looked at the cleric, and then up again at the god. The god's image. It could be done, with skilful people. Probably close to half a year, however, realistically. He decided, abruptly, that they would stay the night here. He would speak to the leader of this holy order, make amends for irony and levity. If they could be made to understand what was happening on the dome, perhaps when Crispin reached the City bearing a letter from them, the Chancellor, or someone else-the Imperial Mosaicist? — might be enlisted in an attempt to preserve this splendour. He'd teased and been flippant, Crispin thought. Perhaps he'd make redress by an act of restoration, in memory of this day and perhaps of his own dead.

In the unfolding of events, of a man's life, so many things can intervene. Just as he was not to see his torch of Heladikos in the chapel outside Varena by glittering candlelight, so this, too, was a task Crispin was never to perform, though his intentions in that moment were deeply sincere and nearly pious. Nor did they, in fact, end up spending that night in the dormitory of the ancient sanctuary.

The cleric slipped the brown tessera into his robe. But before anyone could speak again, they heard a distant and then a growing thunder of horses from the road.

The cleric looked to the doors, startled. Crispin exchanged a sharp glance with Vargos. Then they heard, even through the doors and well back from the road, a loudly shouted command to halt. The hoofbeats stopped. There was a jingling, then boots on the path and the voices of men.

The doors burst open admitting a spearshaft of daylight and half a dozen cavalry soldiers. They strode forward, heavy steps on stone. None of them looked up at the dome. Their leader, a burly, black-haired, very tall man, carrying his helmet under one arm, stopped before the four of them. He nodded to the cleric, stared at Crispin.

"Carullus, tribune of the Fourth Sauradian. My respects. Saw the mule. We are looking for someone on this road. Would you be named Martinian of Varena, by any chance?"

Crispin, unable to think of any adequate reason to do otherwise, nodded his head in agreement. He was, in fact, speechless.

Carullus of the Fourth's formal expression gave way on the instant to mingled disdain and triumph-a remarkable conjunction, in fact, a challenge ever to render in tesserae. He levelled a thick, indicting finger at Crispin. "Where the fuck have you been, you shit-smeared Rhodian slug? Sticking it into every poxed whore on the road? What are you doing on the road instead of at sea? You've been awaited in the fucking City for weeks now by his thrice-exalted Majesty, His Imperial Magnificence, the fucking Emperor Valerius II himself. You turd."

"You are a mentally defective idiot of a Rhodian, you know."

An entirely unexpected memory came to Crispin with the words forming slowly, retrieved from some lost corner of childhood. It was amazing, really, what the mind could dredge forth. At the most absurd moments. He had been stunned unconscious when he was about nine years old, playing «Siege» with friends around and on top of a woodshed. He'd failed to repel a ferocious Barbarian assault from two older boys and had pitched from the shed roof, landing on his head among logs.

From that morning until the guardsmen of Queen Gisel had clapped a sack of flour over his head and clubbed him into submission the experience had not been repeated.

It had now, Crispin grasped through the miasma of an excruciating headache, been duplicated twice in the same autumn season. His thoughts were extremely muddled. For a moment he'd attributed the obscene words he'd just heard to Linon. But Lmon was sardonic not profane, she called him imbecile not idiot, spoke Rhodian not Sarantian, and she was gone.

Recklessly, he opened his eyes. The world shifted and heaved, appallingly. He closed them again quickly, near to throwing up.

"A genuine fool," the heavy voice went on implacably. "Ought never to be allowed out of doors. What in holy thunder do you expect to happen when a foreigner-a Rhodian at that! — calls a Sarantine cavalry tribune a fart-faced goat-fucker in the presence of his own men?"

It wasn't Linon. It was the soldier.

Carullus. Of the Fourth Sauradian. That was the swine's name.

The swine went on, his tone a gross exaggeration of patience now. "Have you the least idea of the position you put me in? The Imperial army is entirely dependent on respect for authority. and regular payment, of course. and you left me next to no choice at all. I couldn't draw a sword in a chapel. I couldn't strike you with my fist… giving you far too much dignity. Flattening you with a helm was just about the only possible course. I didn't even swing hard. Be grateful that I'm known for a kindly man, you snot-faced Rhodian prig, and that you've a beard. The bruise won't show as much before it heals. You'll be as ugly as you've always been, not more than that."

Carullus of the Fourth chuckled. He actually chuckled.

He'd been slugged with a helmet. It was coming back to him. On the cheekbone and jaw. Crispin had a memory of a swift, heavy arm coming across, then nothing more. He attempted to move his jaw up and down, and then from side to side. A searing pain made him gasp, but movement was possible, it seemed. He continued to try opening his eyes at intervals, but the world insisted upon moving about in a sick-making fashion whenever he did.

"Nothing's broken," Carullus said easily. "Told you, I'm a good-natured man. Bad for discipline, but there it is. There it is. The god made me what I am. You really must not think you can walk the roads of the Sarantine Empire making insults-however clever-to the face of military officers in the presence of their troops, my western friend. I have fellow tribunes and chiliarchs who would have dragged you straight outside and run you through in the graveyard to save lugging your corpse anywhere. I, on the other hand, do not entirely subscribe to the general loathing and contempt for the sanctimonious, cowardly, shit-smeared Rhodian catamites that most soldiers of the Empire profess. I actually find you people amusing at times and, as I said before, I'm a kindly man. Ask my troops."

Carullus, a tribune of the Sauradian Fourth, liked the cadences of his own voice, it appeared. Crispin wondered how and how soon he could kill this kindly man.

"Where.. am I?" It hurt to talk.

"In a litter. Travelling east."

This information brought no inconsiderable relief: it seemed the world was indeed moving, and the perception of a weaving landscape and an up-and-down-bobbing military conversationalist beside him was not merely a product of his braincase having being rearranged again.

There was something urgent to be said. He struggled and then remembered what it was. Forced his eyes open again, finally grasping that

Carullus was riding beside him, on a dark grey horse. "My man?" Crispin asked, moving his jaw as little as possible. "Vargos."

Carullus shook his head, his own mouth a thin line in a smooth-shaven face. "Slaves who strike a soldier-any soldier, let alone an officer-are torn apart in a public execution. Everyone knows that. He nearly knocked me down."

"He's not a slave, you contemptible shit!"

Carullus said, mildly enough, "Careful. My men might hear you, and I'd have to respond. I know he isn't a slave. We looked at his papers. He'll be whipped and castrated when we get to camp, but not killed between the horses."

Crispin felt his heart thump then, hard. "He's a free man, an Imperial citizen and my hired servant. You touch him at absolute peril. I mean it. Where s the girl? What's happened to her?"

"She is a slave, from one of the inns. And young enough. We can use her at camp. She spat in my face, you know."

Crispin forced himself to be calm; anger would make him nauseated again, and useless. "She was sold from the inn. She belongs to me. You will know this, having gone through those papers, too, you pustulent excrescence. If she is touched or harmed, or if the man is harmed in any way, my first request of the Emperor will be your testicles sliced off and bronzed into gaming dice. Be clear about this."

Carullus sounded amused. "You really are an idiot, aren't you? Though pustulent excrescence is good, I must say. How do you tell anything to the Emperor at all if it is reported that you and your companions were found by our company to have been robbed, sexually penetrated in various ways, and foully murdered by outlaws on the road today? I repeat, the man and the girl will be dealt with in the usual manner."

Crispin said, still struggling to keep his composure, "There is an idiot here, but he's on the horse not in the litter. The Emperor will receive a precise report of our encounter from the Sleepless Ones, along with their earnest petition that I return to supervise the restoration of the image of Jad on the dome, as we were discussing when you burst in. We were neither robbed nor killed. We were accosted in a holy place by slovenly horsemen under an incompetent dung-faced tribune, and a man personally summoned by Valerius II to Sarantium was struck by a weapon in the face. Do you prefer a reprimand leavened by my conceding I provoked you, or castration and death, Tribune?"

There was a satisfying period of silence. Crispin brought up a hand and tenderly touched his jaw.

He looked over and up at the horseman, squinting into the light. Odd specks and colours danced erratically in his vision. "Of course," he added, "you could turn back west, kill the clerics-all of them will know the story by now-and claim we were all robbed and violated and killed by those evil brigands on the road. You could do that, you dried-out rat dropping."

"Stop insulting me," Carullus said, but without force this time. He rode some further distance in silence. "I had forgotten about the fucking cleric," he admitted, at length.

"You forgot about who signed my Permit, too," Crispin said. "And who requested me to come to the City. You've read the papers. Get on with it, Tribune: give me half a reason to be forgiving. You might consider begging."

Instead, Carullus of the Fourth Sauradian began to swear. Impressively, in fact, and for quite some time. Finally he swung down from his horse, gestured at someone Crispin couldn't see, and handed off the reins to the soldier who hurried up. He began walking alongside Crispin's litter. "Rot your eyes, Rhodian. We can't, have civilians-especially foreigners-insulting army officers! Can't you see that? The Empire is six months behind in their pay. Six months, with winter coming! Everything's going for buildings." He said the word like another obscenity. "Have you any notion what morale is like?"

"The man. The girl," Crispin said, ignoring this. "Where are they? Are they hurt?"

"They're here, they're here. She's not been touched, we've no time for play. You are late, I told you. That's why we were riding to look for you. An undignified, Jad-cursed order if ever there was one."

"Oh, shit yourself! The courier was late. I wrapped up affairs and left five days after he came! It was past the season for sailing. You think I wanted to be on this road? Find him and ask questions. Titaticus, or something. An idiot with a red nose. Kill him with your helmet. How is Vargos?"

Carullus looked back over his shoulder. "He's on a horse."

"What? Riding?"

The tribune sighed. "Tied across the back of one. He was… worked over a little. He struck me after you fell. He can't do that!"

Crispin tried to sit up, and failed, miserably. He closed his eyes and opened them again when this seemed practical. "Listen to me carefully. If that man has been seriously injured, I will have your rank and your pension revoked, if not your life. This is an oath. Get him in a litter and have him tended to. Where s the nearest physician who doesn't kill people?"

"At camp. He struck me," Carullus repeated, plaintively. But he turned, after a moment, and gestured again, behind him. When another soldier trotted up on his horse, Carullus murmured a rapid volley of instructions, too softly for Crispin to hear. The cavalryman muttered unhappily but turned to obey.

"It is done," Carullus said, turning back to Crispin. "They say he's had nothing broken. Won't walk or piss easy for a while, but nothing that won't pass. Are we friends?"

"Fuck yourself with your sword. How far to your camp?"

Tomorrow night. He's all right, I'm telling you. I don't lie."

"No, you just shit all over your uniform when you realize you've made the mistake of your life."

"Jad's blood! You swear more than I do! Martiman, there is fault here both ways. I am being reasonable."

"Only because a holy man saw what happened, you bloated fart, you pantomime buffoon."

Carullus laughed suddenly. "True enough. Number it among the great blessings of your life. Give money to the Sleepless Ones until the day you die. Bloated fart is also good, by the way. I like it. I'll use it. Do you want a drink?"

The situation was outrageous, and he was only moderately reassured about Vargos's condition, but it did begin to appear that Carullus of the Fourth Sauradian was not entirely a lout, and he did want a drink

Crispin nodded his head, carefully.

They brought him a flask, and later an aide to the tribune cleaned Crispin's bloodied cheek and jaw line with decent care when they halted for a brief rest. He saw Vargos then. They had indeed worked him over, and more than a little, but had evidently chosen to reserve more substantial chastisement until such time as everyone at their camp could watch the fun. Vargos was awake by then. His face was puffy from the blows and there was an ugly gash on his forehead, but he was in a litter now. Kasia was led up, apparently untouched, though with that furtive, doe-like look in her eyes again, as if caught in torchlight by night hunters and frozen in place with apprehension. He remembered his first sight of her. Yesterday at about this time in the front room of Morax's inn. Yesterday? That was astonishing. It would give him another headache if he dwelled on it. He was an idiot. An imbecile.

Linon was gone, to her god, into silence in the Aldwood.

"We have an escort to the military camp," Crispin said to both of them, still moving his jaw as little as possible. "I have achieved an understanding with the tribune. We will not be harmed further. In return I will allow him to continue functioning as a man and a soldier. I am sorry if you were hurt, or frightened. It seems I am now to be accompanied to Sarantium the rest of the way. There was more urgency to my summons than was evident in the documents themselves or their delivery. Vargos, they have promised a physician at their camp tomorrow night to tend to you, and I will release you from my service then. The tribune swears you will come to no harm and I believe he is honest. A gross pig, but honest."

Vargos shook his head. He mumbled something Crispin couldn't make out. His lips were badly swollen, the words garbled.

"He wants to come with you," Kasia said softly. The sun was low, now, behind her, almost straight along the road. It was growing colder, twilight coming. "He says he cannot serve on this road any more, after this morning. They will kill him."

Crispin, after a moment's thought, realized that had to be true. He remembered a blow struck by Vargos in the dark of the innyard before dawn this morning. Vargos, too, had intervened in this sacrifice. His own was not the only life in the midst of change, it seemed. In the last bronze glow of the sun under-lighting clouds he looked closely at the man in the other litter. "This is correct? You wish me to retain your services all the way to the City?"

Vargos nodded his head.

Crispin said, "Sarantium is a different world, you know that."

"Know that," Vargos said, and this time he heard it clearly. "Your man."

He felt something unexpected then, like a shaft of light through everything else that day. It took him a moment to recognize it as happiness. Crispin stretched out a hand from his litter and the other man reached across the space between to touch it with his own.

"Rest now," said Crispin, struggling to keep his own eyes open. His head was hurting a great deal. "It will be all right." He wasn't sure he believed that, but after a moment he saw that Vargos had indeed closed his eyes and was asleep. Crispin touched his bruised chin again and struggled not to yawn: it hurt when he opened his mouth so much. He looked at the girl. "We'll talk tonight," he mumbled. "Need to sort out your life, too."

He saw that quick, flaring apprehension in her again. Not a surprise, really. Her life, what had happened to her this year, and this morning. He saw Carullus coming over: long strides, his shadow behind him on the road. Not a bad man, really. An easy laugh, sense of humour. Crispin had provoked him. In front of his soldiers. It was true. Not the wisest thing. Might admit that later. Might not. Might be better not.

He was asleep before the tribune reached his litter.

"Don't hurt him!" Kasia said to the officer as he came up, though Crispin never heard it. She stepped quickly between the litter and the soldier.

"I can't hurt him, girl," said the tribune of the Fourth Sauradian, shaking his head bemusedly, looking at her. "He has both my balls on a smith's anvil and the hammer in his hand."

"Good!" she said. "Keep remembering that." Her expression was fierce, northern, not at all doe-like just then.

The soldier laughed aloud. "Jad rot the moment I saw the three of you in that chapel," he said. "Now Inici slave girls tell me what to do? What ere you even doing abroad on the fucking Day of the Dead, anyhow? Don't you know it is dangerous today in Sauradia?"

She went pale, he saw, but made no reply. There was a tale here, his instincts told him. They also told him he wasn't likely to hear it. He could have her beaten for disrespect, but knew he wouldn't. He really was a kind-hearted man, Carullus told himself. The Rhodian didn't know how lucky he was.

Carullus also had a sense-a mild one, to be sure-that his own future might possibly be at risk as a result of this encounter at the sanctuary. He'd seen, a little too late, the Rhodian's Permit, and who had signed it, and had read the specific terms of the Emperor's request for the presence of a certain Martinian of Varena.

An artisan. Only an artisan, but personally invited to the City to lend his great expertise and knowledge to the Emperor's new Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom. Another building. Another fucking building.

Wisdom, holy or wholly practical, suggested to Carullus that he exercise a measure of caution here. The man talked a very confident game, and he had papers to back him up. He did own the girl, too; those documents had been in the satchel as well. Only since last night, mind you. Part of that story he wasn't going to learn, Carullus guessed. The girl was still glaring at him with those blue northern eyes. She had a strong, clever face. Yellow hair.

If the cleric hadn't been watching what had happened, Carullus could have had the three of them killed and dropped in a ditch. He probably wouldn't have. He was far too soft, he told himself. Hadn't even broken the Rhodian's jaw with his helmet. Shameful, really. Respect for the army had disappeared in this generation. The Emperor's fault? Possibly, though you could be drummed out of the ranks with a slit nose for saying as much. Money went to monuments these days, to Rhodian artisans, to shameful payments to the butt-fucked Bassanids in the east, instead of to honest soldiers who kept the City and the Empire safe. Word was that even Leontes, the army's beloved, the golden-haired Supreme Strategos, spent all his time now in the City, in the Imperial Precinct, dancing courtly attendance on the Emperor and Empress, playing games of a morning with balls and mallets on horseback, instead of smashing Bassanid or northern enemies into the puling rabble they were. He had a rich wife now. Another reward Wives could be a world of trouble to a soldier, Carullus thought, had always thought. Whores, if they were clean, were much less bother.

They had halted long enough. He gestured to his second in command. Darkness was coming and the next inn was a ways yet. They could only move as fast as the carried men. The litters were hoisted, the litter-bearers" horses collected and led along. The girl gave him a last fierce glare, then began walking between the two sleeping men, barefoot, looking small and fragile in a brown, too-large cloak in the last of the light. She was pretty enough. Thin for his taste, but spirited, and one couldn't have everything. The artisan would be useless to her tonight. One had to exercise a bit of discretion with the personal slaves of other men, but Carullus wondered absently what his best smile might achieve here. He tried to catch her eye, but failed.

He was in some real pain but his father and brothers had given him worse beatings in his day and Vargos was not by nature inclined to feel sorry for himself or surrender to discomfort. He had struck an army tribune in the chest today, nearly felled him; by rights they could kill him for that. They had intended to, he knew, when they reached the camp. Then Martinian had intervened, somehow. Martinian did… unexpected things. In the darkness of the inn's crowded main-floor sleeping room, Vargos shook his head. So much had happened since last night at Morax's.

He thought he had seen the old god this morning.

Ludan, in his guise of the zubir, in the Aldwood. In a sacred grove of the Aldwood. He had stood there, knelt in that grove… and had walked alive from there out into the misty field again because Martinian of Varena had carried some kind of magicked bird about his neck.

The zubir. Against the memory of that, what were bruises or a swollen mouth or a stream of red when he pissed tonight? He had seen what he had seen, and lived. Was he blessed? Could such a man as he be blessed?

Or was he being warned-a sudden thought-to forsake the other god, the one behind the sun, Jad and his chariot-driving son?

Or was Martinian right about this, too: that the one power need not mean a denial of the other? No cleric Vargos knew would accept that, but Vargos had already decided that the Rhodian was worth listening to.

And staying with.

All the way to Sarantium, it seemed. There was apprehension in that thought. Megarium, on the coast in the west of Sauradia, was the largest city Vargos had ever seen, and he hadn't liked it. The confining walls, the crowded, filthy, noisy streets. Carts rumbling by all night long, brawling voices when the taverns spilled their denizens, no calm or quietude even in the dark when the moons rode. And Vargos knew by tale what Sarantium was: as much beyond provincial Megarium as golden-haired Leontes, Strategos of the Empire, was beyond Vargos of the Inicii.

He couldn't stay here, though. It was the simplest of truths. He'd made a decision in the dark of a hallway in Morax's late last night and had sealed it with a blow of his staff in the pre-dawn courtyard amid smoky torches and fog. When you can't go back and you can't stay still, you move forward, nothing to think about, get on with it. The sort of thing his father would have said, draining another flask of home-brewed ale, wiping his moustache with his wet sleeve, gesturing with a thick arm for one of the women to bring more beer. It wasn't a complex decision, seen a certain way, and the grace here was that there was a man worth following and a place to go.

Vargos lay on a perfectly decent cot in the next inn east from Morax's and listened to snoring soldiers and laughter from the common room. They were still drinking there, Martinian and the tribune.

He lay quietly, unable to sleep, and thought of the Aldwood again. Of the zubir in the middle of the Imperial road in a swirling away of fog, then appearing-somehow-right beside them in the misty field an instant after. He would think of these things all his days, Vargos knew. And remember how Pharus had looked in the road when they came back out.

The stablemaster had been dead before they went into the wood, but when they stood above his body, after, they saw what else had been done to him. Vargos would swear by his mother's life and his own soul that no man had walked up to where the dead man lay. Whatever had claimed the man's heart had not been mortal.

He'd heard a lifeless bird speak aloud with a woman's voice to the zubir. He'd led a man and a woman through the Aldwood and out. He'd even-and here, for the first time, Vargos smiled a little in the close darkness-struck a Sarantine officer, a tribune, and they'd only roughed him up a little, and then they had put him in a litter-a litter! — and carried him to this inn, because Martinian had made them. That memory, too, would stay with him. He would have enjoyed having his Jad-cursed father watch cavalrymen dismount to carry him along the Imperial road like some senator or merchant prince.

Vargos closed his eyes. An unworthy, vain thought, today of all days. Pride had no place in the soul tonight. He struggled to shape a proper prayer to Jad and to his son, the fire-bearer, asking guidance and forgiveness. In his mind's eye, though, he kept seeing again and again that ripped-open chest of a dead man he'd known and the black zubir with blood on the short, curved horns. To whom did one pray?

He was going to the City. Sarantium. Where the Imperial Palace was and the Emperor, the Triple Walls and the Hippodrome. A hundred holy sanctuaries, he'd heard, and half a million people. He didn't really believe that last. He wasn't a northern lout any more, to be gulled with gross, exaggerated tales. Men told lies in their pride.

Growing up, he had never imagined himself living anywhere but in their village. Then, after that changed one mild, bloody spring night, he'd expected to spend his days going back and forth along the Imperial road in Sauradia until he grew too old for that and took a position at the stable or the forge in one of the inns.

Life did unexpected things to you, Vargos of the Inicii thought in the darkness. You made a decision, or someone else made one, and there you were. There you were. He heard a familiar rustling sound, then a grunt and a sigh; someone had a woman with him on the far side of the room-He turned over on his side, carefully. He'd been kicked in the lower back. That was why his piss was red, why it hurt to turn.

They had a phrase along the Imperial road. He's sailing to Sarantium, they said when some man threw himself at an obvious and extreme hazard, risking all, changing everything one way or another, like a desperate gambler at dice putting his whole stake on the table. That's what he was doing.

Unexpected, really. Not his nature. Exciting, he had to admit. He tried to remember the last time he'd felt excited. Perhaps with a girl, but not really, that was different. Nice enough, though. Vargos wished he felt a little better. He knew two of the girls here fairly well and they liked him enough. On the other hand there were soldiers here. The girls would be busy all night. Just as well. He needed his sleep.

They were still laughing-and starting to sing now-in the common room. He felt himself drifting off. Martinian was there with the burly, smooth-faced tribune. Unexpected.

He dreamt that night that he was flying. Out of the inn and across the road under both moons and all the stars. West first, over the chapel of the Sleepless Ones, hearing their slow chanting in the night, seeing the candles burning through the windows of the dome. He flew past that image of holy Jad and turned north over the Aldwood.

League upon league he flew above the forest, north and farther north and farther, seeing the black trees touched by mingled moonlight in the iron cold. League upon league the great forest rolled, and Vargos wondered in his dream how anyone could do other than worship a power that dwelled therein.

Then west again for a time across the grass-covered ridges of soft hills and over the wide, slow river meandering south with the road beside it. Another forest on the other side of the gleaming water, as black, as vast, as Vargos flew over it, north and north in the clear, cold night. He saw where the oaks ended and the pines began, and then at last he saw by the moons a range of mountains he had always known, and he was flying lower over fields he had tilled himself in childhood, seeing a stream he had swum in during summers gone, and the first tiny outlying houses of the village, his own home near the small shrine and the Elder's house with the branch bound above the door, and then he saw the graveyard in his dream, and his father's grave.

It was unusual for a man to travel any distance with a female slave, but it was learned by the soldiers of the Fourth Sauradian that the artisan had taken possession of the girl only the night before-some sort of wager won, the story went-and it was not at all unusual that a man might want a body with him on a windy autumn night. Why pay for a whore when you had your own woman to do the needful? The girl was too skinny to be really warm, but she was young, and yellow-haired, and probably had other talents.

The soldiers were aware by now that the Rhodian was more important than he looked. He had also formed an unlikely bond with their tribune over dinner. This was sufficiently surprising as to elicit its own measure of respect. The girl had been escorted, untouched, to the room assigned the artisan. Orders had been explicit. Carullus, who liked to describe himself to anyone who would listen as a gentle soul, was known to have had men crippled and turned out of his company to beg for botching orders on an assignment. His principal centurion was the only one who knew that this had been done once only, soon after Carulluss promotion to tribune and his command of five hundred. The centurion was under standing orders to make certain all new recruits knew the tale, properly embellished. It was useful for soldiers to be somewhat afraid of their officers.

Kasia, about to sleep under a different roof than Morax's for the first time in a year, had settled beside the fire in the bedroom, feeding it the occasional log, to wait for the man who owned her now. The room was smaller than the better ones in Morax's inn, but it did have this fire. She sat on her cloak-Martinian's cloak-and gazed into the flames. Her grandmother had been skilled at reading futures in tongues of fire, but Kasia lacked any such gift and only found her mind drifting as she watched the fire dance. She was sleepy but there was no pallet in the room, only the one bed, and she had no idea what to expect when the Rhodian came upstairs. She could hear singing from below: Martinian and the man who had knocked him senseless. Men were very strange. She remembered the night before, in Morax's, when she had been sent up to find a thief in Martinian's room and everything had changed. He had saved her life twice now. At the inn and then, somehow, with a magical bird in the Aldwood.

She had been in the Aldwood today.

Had seen a power of the wood, known only in her grandmother's tales told by another smoky northern fire. She had walked from the sacred glade and the black forest alive, unsacrificed, to see that someone else's heart had been torn from his chest. A man she had known, had been forced to sleep with more than once. She had been violently ill, looking down at what remained of Pharus, unable not to remember him using her body, seeing what had now been done to his. She remembered the mist in the field, her hand on the mule. Voices, and the dogs hunting her. Martinian drawing his sword.

Already, curiously, the interlude in the forest itself was receding, blurring, becoming lost in a kind of fog of its own, too difficult to master or retain. Had she actually seen a zubir with those dark eyes, that dwarfing size? Had it really been that large? Kasia had the strangest sense, drowsy and half-entranced by the fire, that she was meant to have been dead by now, that her entire being was.. unrooted, oddly light, because of that. A spark flew and landed on the cloak; she brushed it quickly away. Could the future of such a person be known? Could her grandmother have seen anything at all in this fire, or was Kasia now a blankness, unwritten from this moment forward, unknowable? A kind of living ghost? Or freed from fate because of that? We'll talk tonight, Martinian had said in the litter, before drifting to sleep again. Need to sort out your life.

Her life. A north wind was blowing outside; a clear night tonight but very cold, winter behind the wind. She put more wood-a little waste-fully-on the fire. Saw that her hands were shaking. She laid one palm against her chest, feeling for the presence, the beating of her heart. After a while she realized her cheeks were wet and she wiped away the tears.

She had fallen into a shallow, fitful sleep, but they made a great deal of noise coming up the stairs and one of the merchants in the room across the hall shouted at them, causing a soldier to pound truculently on the shouter's door, eliciting further laughter from his fellows. Kasia was therefore on her feet in the middle of the room when they pushed open the unlocked door and Martmian stumbled in, supported-almost carried, in fact-by two soldiers of the Fourth Sauradian, with two more behind.

Weaving erratically, they led him over and spilled him onto the bed, good humoured and amused, despite-or because of-another furious volley of shouts from the room across. It was very late and they weren't being quiet. Kasia knew all about this: by law, the Imperial Inns had to put up as many as twenty soldiers at a time free of charge, doubling up paying guests to make room for them. They had to do it, but no one needed to enjoy the disruption of those nights.

One of the soldiers, a Soriyyan by his colouring, gazed at Kasia in the flicker of the firelight. "He's all yours," he said, gesturing to the man sprawled untidily on the bed. "Not much to you. Want to come down with us? Men who can hold their wine then hold a girl?"

"Shut fucking up," another said. "Orders."

The Soriyyan looked for a moment as if he'd object, but just then the man on the bed intoned, quite clearly, though with his eyes closed, "It is considered indisputable that the rhetoric of Kallimarchos was instrumental in the onset of the First Bassanid War. Given this as a proposition, ought later generations then lay the blame for so many cruel deaths at the philosopher's tomb? A vexing question."

There was an extreme, disconcerted silence, then two of the soldiers laughed. "Go to sleep, Rhodian," one of them said. "With luck, your head will be working again in the morning. Better men than you have been knocked senseless or bested in a drinking bout by the tribune."

"Not too many've had both happen," the Soriyyan added. "All hail the Rhodian!" More laughter. The Soriyyan grinned, pleased with himself. They left, closing the door with a bang.

Kasia winced, then walked over and slid home the bolt. She heard the four of them pound, in sequence, on the merchant's door across, then their boots sounded on the stairs descending to the ground-floor sleeping room.

She hesitated, then walked back towards the bed, looking uncertainly at the man lying there. The firelight made unstable shadows in the room. A log settled with a snapping sound. Martinian opened his eyes. "I begin to wonder if I was meant for the theatre," he said, speaking in Sarantine and in his normal voice. "Two nights in succession I've had to do this. Have I a future in the pantomime, do you think?" Kasia blinked. "You aren't. drunk, my lord?" "Not especially." "But…?"

"Useful to let him best me in something. And Carullus can hold his wine. We might have been down there all night, and I need to sleep."

"Best you in something?" Kasia heard herself say, in a voice her mother and others in the village would have recognized. "He knocked you senseless and nearly broke your jaw."

"Trivial. Well, for him it was." Martinian rubbed absently at his bearded cheek. "He had a weapon, no great achievement. Kasia, they carried me here. And carried a servant who struck an army officer. I made them do that. He lost a lot of prestige, Carullus did. Decent-enough man, for an Imperial soldier. And I wanted to sleep." He lifted a booted foot and she wrestled the boot off and then did the same with the other.

"They said my father could drink most men down onto the tavern floor or off their couches at a banquet. Guess I inherited that from him," Martinian murmured vaguely, putting his tunic over his head. Kasia said nothing. Slaves did not ask questions. "He's dead," Martinian of Varena added. "On campaign against the Inicii. In Ferrieres." He wasn't entirely sober, she realized, whatever he might say. The drinking had gone on a long time. He was bare-chested now, had matted curls of dark red hair on his chest. She had seen that when she bathed him yesterday. "I'm.. Inici," she said, after a moment. "I know. So's Vargos. Odd, in a way."

"The tribes in Sauradia are… different from those who went west to Ferrieres. The ones who went are… wilder." "Wilder. I know. Why they went."

There was a silence. He pushed himself up on an elbow and looked around the room in the wavering light. "A fire," he said. "Good. Build it up, Kasia." He didn't call her Kitten. She went over quickly and knelt putting on another log, pushing at it with the stick.

"They didn't bring you a cot," he said from the other side of the room "They'll assume there's only one reason I bought you. I must tell you I was informed at great length downstairs that Inici girls, especially skinny ones, are evil-tempered and a waste of money. Is this true? Carullus did offer to spare me the duty of bedding you tonight while I was in pain. Nice of him, I thought. They should have put a cot in here."

Kasia stayed where she was, looking at the fire. It was difficult to sort out his tone sometimes. "I have your cloak to sleep on," she said finally. "Over here."

She busied herself sweeping ashes into the hearth. He probably did like boys, she decided. The pure-blooded Rhodians were said to be inclined that way, like Bassanids. It would make her nights easier.

"Kasia, where's home? Your home?" he said.

She swallowed abruptly. This was not what she'd expected.

She turned, still kneeling, to look at him. "North, my lord. Most of the way to Karch." He had finished undressing himself, she saw, and was under the blanket now, sitting up, arms around his knees. The firelight moved on the wall behind him.

"How were you captured? Or were you sold?"

She clasped her hands in her lap. "Sold," she said. "Last autumn. The plague took my father and brother. My mother had no choice."

"Not so," he said quickly. "There's always a choice. Sold her daughter off to feed herself? How civilized."

"No," Kasia said, clenching her fists. "She… we… talked about it. When the slave train came. It was me or my sister, or we'd all have died in the winter. You won't understand. There weren't enough men to do the fields or hunt, nothing had been harvested. They bought six girls from my village, with grain, and coins for the market town. There was a plague. That.. changes things."

"Oh, I know," he said softly. Then, after another silence, "Why you? Not your sister?"

She hadn't expected that, either. No one had asked these things. "My mother thought she was. more likely to marry. With nothing to offer but herself."

"And you thought?"

Kasia swallowed again. Behind the beard and in the dim, uneven light it was impossible to discern his expression.

"Why… how does this matter?" she dared to ask.

He sighed. "You're right. It doesn't. Do you want to go home?"

"What?"

"Your village. I'm going to free you, you know. I have not the least need for a girl in Sarantium, and after what… happened to us today I do not propose to tempt any gods at all by making a profit on you." A Rhodian voice, a firelit room. Night, the edge of winter. The world being remade.

He said, "I don't think that. whatever we saw today. spared your life to clean house or heat bath water on a fire for me. Not that I have any notion why it spared my life. So, do you want to go back to your… oh. Jad. Jad's blood. Stop that, woman!"

She tried, biting her lip, wiping with the sooty backs of her hands at her streaming face. But how did one not weep, confronted with this? Last night she had known she would be dead today.

"Kasia, I mean it. I will throw you downstairs and let Carullus's men take turns with you! I detest crying women!"

She didn't think he really did. She thought he was pretending to be angry and fierce. She wasn't sure of what else she thought. Sometimes things happened too quickly. How does the riven tree explain the lightning bolt?

The girl had fallen asleep, close to what remained of the fire's warmth. She was still in her tunic, wrapped in one cloak, pillowed on the other, under one of his blankets. He could have had her come into the bed, but the habit of sleeping alone since Ilandra died was entrenched by now, had become something mystical, talismanic. It was morbid and spirit-ridden, Crispin thought sleepily, but he wasn't about to try to break free of it this night with a slave girl bought for him the night before.

Though slave girl was unfair, really. She'd been as free as he was a year ago, a victim of the same plague summer that had smashed his own. There were, he thought, any number of ways a life could be ruined.

Linon would have declared him an imbecile for having the girl sleep by the fire, he knew. Linon wasn't here. He had laid her down on wet grass; by wet leaves in a forest this morning and walked away. Remember me.

What happens to an unhoused soul when a body and its heart are sacrificed to a god? Did Zoticus know the answer to that? What happens to" the soul when the god comes to claim it, after all? Could an alchemist know? He had a difficult letter to write. Tell him goodbye.

A shutter was banging along the wall. Windy tonight; would be cold on the road tomorrow. The girl was coming east with him. It seemed, both of these Inicii were. So odd, really, the circles and patterns one's life made. Or seemed to make. Patterns men tried to impose on their lives, for the comforting illusion of order?

He'd overheard men talking in a cookshop one day when he was still a boy. His father's head, he'd learned, had been completely severed from his shoulders. By an axe blow. Had landed some distance away, blood spraying from the toppling, headless body. Like a red fountain, one of the I men told the other in an awed voice. It was dramatic enough, unsetding enough even for soldiers, to have become a tale: the death of the stonemason, Horius Crispus.

Crispin had been ten years old when he'd heard that. An Inici axe. The tribes that went west to Ferrieres had been wilder. Everyone said that. The girl had said it tonight. They'd pressed south into Batiara constantly, harrying the northern farms and villages. The Antae sent armies, including the urban militia, into Ferrieres just about every year. Usually they were successful campaigns, bringing back needed slaves. There were casualties, however. Always. The Inicii, even outnumbered, knew how to I fight. A red fountain. He ought not to have heard such a thing. Not at ten years of age. He'd had dreams after, for a long time, had been unable to tell them to his mother. He was certain, even then, that the men in that cookshop would have been appalled had they known Horius's boy had been listening to them.

When her tears had stopped, Kasia's explanation tonight had been clear enough: there was no place for her at home any more. Once sold, once a slave, sent up or down a hall to any man's room, she had no hope of a life among her own people. There was no going back, marrying, raising a family, sharing in the traditions of a tribe. Those traditions did not allow space for what she'd been forced to become, whatever she had been in the time before the plague when she had a father and brother for shelter.

A man captured and enslaved might escape and return to his village with honour and status-a living emblem of defiant courage. Not a girl sold to the traders for winter grain. The village of her childhood was barred to her now, on the far side of a doorway to the past and there was no key. One could feel some sorrow for other's griefs, Crispin thought, awake and listening to the wind.

In the crowded, roiling streets of Sarantium, amid the arcades and workshops and sanctuaries and so many people from so many lands she could-perhaps-create a life for herself. Not an easy or a sure thing for a woman, but she was young, had intelligence and spirit. No one need learn she had been an inn girl in Sauradia, and if they did. well, the Empress Alixana herself had been little better in her day. More expensive, but not different in kind, if any of the rumours were true.

Crispin supposed they slit your nose, or worse, for saying that. It was blowing hard outside. He could hear that shutter banging and the high keening of the wind. The Day of the Dead. Was it the wind?

The fire had taken the edge off the chill in the room, and he was under two good blankets. He thought, unexpectedly, of the queen of the Antae, young and afraid, her fingers in his hair as he knelt before her. The last time his head had been cracked like this. He was tired and his jaw hurt. He really shouldn't have been drinking with the soldiers tonight. Extremely stupid. Imbecilic, someone would have said. Decent man, though, Carullus of the Fourth. A surprise. Liked to hear himself talk. That image of the god, on the chapel dome. Mosaicists had made it, artisans, like himself. But not. Something else. He wished he knew their names, wished someone did. Would write to Martinian about that; try to order his thoughts. He could see the god's eyes in his mind right now.

As vividly as he had ever seen anything. That fog this morning, nothing to see at all, all colours leached from the world. Voices pursuing, the dogs the dead man. The forest and what took them into it. He had feared those woods at first sight, all the way back at the border, and yet he had walked in the Aldwood, after all, black, dense trees, leaves falling, a sacrifice in the glade. No. Not quite. The completion of a sacrifice.

How did one deal with so much? By drinking wine with soldiers? Perhaps. Oldest refuge, one of the oldest. By pulling blankets up to one's bruised face in bed, and falling asleep, sheltered from the knife of wind and the night? Though not the night that was always there now.

Caius Crispus, too, had a dream in that cold dark, though in his he did not fly. He saw himself walking the echoing corridors of an empty palace and he knew what it was, where he was. Had been there with Martinian years ago: the Patriarchal Palace in Rhodias, most glittering emblem of religious power-and wealth-in the Empire. Once, at any rate. In its day.

Crispin had seen it in dusty, emptied-out decay, long after the Antae sack and conquest: most of the rooms looted and empty, closed up. He and Martinian had been walking through it-a cadaverous, coughing cleric as their guide-to view a celebrated old wall mosaic a patron wanted copied for his summer house in Baiana by the sea. The two of them had been admitted, reluctantly, by virtue of a letter-and probably a sum of money-from their wealthy patron, to walk through echoing emptiness and dust.

The High Patriarch lived, worshipped, schemed, dictated his ceaseless flow of correspondence to all quarters of the known world on the two upper floors, seldom venturing from there save on holy days, when he crossed the covered bridge over the street to the Great Sanctuary and led services in the name of Jad, bright gold in glory on the dome.

The three men had walked endless empty ground-level corridors- their resonating footsteps a kind of reproach-and had finally come to the room with the to-be-copied work. A reception hall, the cleric muttered, fumbling through a ring of keys on his belt. He tried several, coughing, before finding the correct one. The mosaicists walked in, paused, and then set about opening shutters, though from the first glance they had both seen there was little point.

The mosaic-running the length and full height of a wall-was a rum, though not from the wearing of time or the effects of inadequate technique. Hammers and axes had been taken to this, daggers, sword hilts, maces, staves, boot heels to the lower parts, scrabbling fingers. It had been a marinescape-they knew that much. They knew the studio that had been commissioned, though not the names of those who had actually done the work: mosaicists names, like those of other decorative artisans, were not deemed worth preserving.

Hues of dark blue and a splendid green were still there as evidence of the original scheme near the wood-panelled ceiling. There would have been precious stones used here: for the eyes of a squid or sea-horse, the shining scales offish, coral, shells, the gleam of eels or undersea vegetation. They had all been looted, the mosaic hacked apart in the process. One would feel ill, Crispin thought, were this not so much the expected thing in Rhodias after the fall. There had been a fire set in the room at some point. The charred walls bore black, silent witness.

They stood gazing a while in silence, noses tickled by stirred dust in streaming sunlight, then methodically closed all the shutters again and walked with the afflicted cleric back down the same branching corridors and out into the vast, nearly empty spaces of the city once the centre of the world, of an Empire, once thronged with teeming, vibrant, brutal existence.

In his dream, Crispin was alone in that palace, and it was even darker, emptier than he had known it that one time in a life that seemed fright-endingly remote now. Then, he'd been a newly married man, rising in his guild, acquiring some wealth, the beginnings of a reputation, flush with the wondrous, improbable reality that he adored the woman he'd wed the year before and she loved him. In the corridors of dream he walked a palace looking for Ilandra, knowing she was dead.

Door after locked door opened somehow to the one heavy iron key he carried, and room after empty room showed dust and the charred black evidence of fire and nothing more. He seemed to hear a wind outside, saw a blue slant of moonlight once through broken slats in shutters. There were noises. A celebration far away? The sacking of the city? From a sufficient distance, he thought, dreaming, the sounds were much the same.

Room after room, his footprints showing behind him in the long-settled dust where he walked. No one to be seen, all sounds outside, from somewhere else. The palace unspeakably vast, unbearably abandoned. Ghosts and memories and sounds from somewhere else. ‘I m is my life, he thought as he walked. Rooms, corridors, random movement, no one who could be said to matter, who could put life, light, even the idea of laughter into these hollow spaces, so much larger than they had ever needed to be.

He opened another door, no different from any of the others, and walked into yet another room, and in his dream he stopped, seeing the zubir.

Behind it, dressed as for a banquet in a straight, ivory-coloured gown banded at collar and hem with deep blue, her hair swept back and adorned with gems, her mothers necklace about her throat, was his wife.

Even dreaming, Crispin understood.

It wasn't difficult; it wasn't subdue or obscure the way dream messages could be, requiring a cheiromancer to explain them for a fee. She was barred to him. He was to understand she was gone. As much as his youth was, his father, the glory of this ruined palace, Rhodias itself. Gone away. Somewhere else. The zubir of the Aldwood proclaimed as much, an appalling, interposed wildness here, bulking savage and absolute between the two of them, all black, tangled fur, the massive head and horns, and the eyes of however many thousand thousand years teaching this truth. He could not be passed. You came from him and came back to him, and he claimed you or he let you go for a time you could not measure or foretell.

Then, just as Crispin was thinking so, struggling to make a dream's peace with these apprehended truths, beginning to lift a hand in farewell to the loved woman behind the forest god, the zubir was gone, confounding him again.

It disappeared as it had in the road in fog, and did not reappear. Crispin stopped breathing in his dream, felt a hammer pounding within him, and did not know that he cried aloud in a cold room in a Sauradian night.

Ilandra smiled in the palace. They were alone. No barriers. Her smile cut the heart from him. He might have been a body lying on a road then, his chest torn open. He wasn't. In his dream he saw her step lightly forward: nothing between, nothing to bar her now. "There are birds in the trees," his dead wife said, coming into his arms," and we are young." She rose up on her toes and kissed him on the mouth. He tasted salt, heard himself say something terribly, hugely important, couldn't make out his words. His own words. Couldn't.

Woke to the wild wind outside and a dead fire and the Inici girl-a shadow, a weight-sitting on his bed beside him wrapped in his cloak. Her hands clutched her own elbows.

"What? What is it?" he cried, confused, aching, his heart pounding. She had kissed..

"You were shouting," the girl whispered.

"Oh, dear Jad. Oh, Jad. Go to sleep…" He struggled to remember her name. He felt drugged, heavy, he wanted that palace again. Wanted it like some men want the juice of poppies, endlessly.

She was silent, motionless. "I'm afraid," she said.

"We're all afraid. Go to sleep."

"No. I mean, I would comfort you, but I'm afraid."

"Oh." It became unfairly needful to order his thoughts. To be here. His jaw hurt, his heart. "People I loved died. You can't comfort me. Go to sleep."

"Your.. children?"

Every word spoken was drawing him farther from that palace. "My daughters. Last summer." He took a breath. T am ashamed to be here. I let them die." He had never said this. But it was true. He had failed them. And had survived.

"Let them die? Of the plague'?" the Inici woman on his bed said, incredulous. "No one can save anyone from that."

"I know. Jad. I know. It doesn't matter."

After a moment, she said, "And your… their mother?"

He shook his head.

The god-cursed shutter was still banging. He wanted to go out into the savage night and rip it from the wall and lie down in the icy wind with Ilandra. "Kasia," he said. That was her name. "Go to sleep. It isn't your duty to comfort here."

"Not a duty," she said.

So much anger in him. "Jad's blood! What do you propose? That your lovemaking skills transport me to joy?"

She went rigid. Drew a breath. "No. No. No, I… have no skills. That wasn't.. what I meant."

He closed his eyes. Why did he have to even address these things now? So vivid, so rich a dream: on tiptoe, within his arms, a gown he remembered, the necklace, a scent, softness of parted lips.

She was dead, a ghost, a body in a grave. I am afraid, Kasia of the Inicii had said. Crispin let out a ragged breath. That shutter still banging along the wall outside. Over and over and over. So inane. So… ordinary. He shifted in the bed.

"Sleep here then," he said. "There is nothing to fear. What happened today is over now." A lie. It didn't end until you died. Life was an ambush, wounds waiting for you.

He turned on his side, facing the door, making room for her. She didn't move at first, then he felt her slide under both blankets. Her foot touched his, moved quickly away, but he realized from the icy touch how cold she must have been with the fire dead. It was the bottom of the night. Spirits in the wind? Souls? He closed his eyes. They could lie together. Share mortal warmth. Men bought tavern girls on winter nights for no more than this sometimes.

The zubir had been there in the palace and had disappeared. No obstacle. Nothing between. But there was. Of course there was. Imbecile, he could hear a voice saying. Imbecile. Crispin lay still for another long moment then, slowly, he turned.

She was lying on her back, staring up at darkness, still afraid. She had thought for a long time that she would die today, he knew. Die brutally. He tried to comprehend what such an expectation would be like. Moving as if through water, or in dream, he laid a hand to her shoulder, her throat, brushed some of the long golden hair back from her cheek. She was so young. He took another breath, deeply unsure, even now, still half lost in another place, but then he touched one small, firm breast through the thinness of her tunic. She never took her eyes from his.

"Skills are a very small part of it," he said. His own voice sounded odd. Then he kissed her, as gently as he could.

He tasted salt again as he had in the dream. Drew back, looking down at her, at the tears. But she lifted a hand, touched his hair, then hesitated as if unsure what to do next, how to move-how to be-when it was by choice. The pain of others, he thought. The night so dark with the sun beneath the world. He lowered his head very slowly and kissed her again, then moved and brushed her nipple with his lips, through the tunic. Her hand stayed in his hair, tightening. Sleep was a refuge, he thought, walls were, wine, food, warmth, and this. And this. Mortal bodies in the dark.

"You are not at Morax's," he said. Her heart was so fast, he could feel it. The year she must have lived through. He intended to be careful, patient, but it had been a long time for him, and his own gathering urgency surprised and then mastered him. She held him close after, her body softer than he would have guessed, hands unexpectedly strong against his back. They slept like that for a while and later-nearer morning when they both awoke-he guided their pace more attentively, and in time he heard her begin to make her own sequence of discoveries, on a taken breath and another-like a climber reaching one ridge and then a higher one-before the god's sun finally rose in testament to battles won again, if at cost, in the night.

The senior physician at the army base was a Bassanid, and skilful. The former was strictly against regulations, the latter so rare-and valuable-as to have caused the military governor commanding southern Sauradia to ignore all applicable bureaucratic and ecumenical rules. He wasn't, as it happened, the only senior military official in the Empire to take this view. There were openly pagan physicians, Bassanids worshipping Perun and Anahita, Kindaths with their moon goddesses, all through the army. As between a regulation and a good doctor… there was no decision at all.

Unfortunately, from a practical viewpoint, the physician took a careful look at the mildly admonished Inici servant, examined a red sampling of his urine, and declared he was unable to ride a horse for a fortnight. This meant they had to commandeer a cart or a wagon for him. And since the girl was travelling east as well and women couldn't ride horses, the wagon had to be large enough for two.

Then the artisan revealed that he had an acute dislike of riding, and since they were using wheeled transport in any case…

The military governor had his secretary sign the papers, wasting no more time than absolutely necessary on this distraction. The Emperor in his supreme wisdom wanted this man for something to do with the newest sanctuary in Sarantium. The newest, insanely expensive sanctuary. He had-through the lofty offices of the Chancellor-ordered good soldiers to spend their time tracking a Rhodian artisan on the road. A four-person military carriage was only one more insult.

In the prevailing circumstances the governor proved amenable to a diffident-if loquacious-suggestion from one of the tribunes of the Fourth Sauradian, the man who had found this party.

Carullus proposed that he accompany the artisan, following in the wake of a rapidly couriered letter from the governor, to add a direct personal appeal to the Master of Offices and to the Supreme Strategos, Leontes, that the arrears of pay be attended to as expeditiously as possible. The god knew, Carullus could talk, the governor thought glumly, dictating his letter for the military messenger. Might as well put his tongue to use.

It also appeared that the Rhodian had not, after all, been lax in responding to his invitation. The postal courier charged with the Imperial papers had taken an unconscionably long time to reach Varena. His name and civil service number were, as usual, on the envelope below the broken seal- the governors secretary had recorded them. Tilliticus. Pronobius Tilliticus.

The governor spent an irritated moment pondering what sort of foolish mother gave her son a name almost identical to that for female genital organs in current military slang. Then he dictated a postscript, suggesting to the Master of Offices that the courier be reprimanded. He was unable to resist adding an offer that important communications west to the Antae kingdom in Batiara might better be entrusted to the military. Despite his recently chronic stomach pains, the governor did smile sourly to himself, dictating that part of the letter. He sent off the messenger.

The artisan's party stayed at the camp for two nights only, though the physician was unhappy about this speed. During the brief stay a notary attended upon the Rhodian to record and archive in his files-and forward copies, as requested, to the civil registry in the City-documents attesting to the freed status of the woman, Kasia of the Inicii.

At the same time, the recruiting centurion of the Fourth Sauradian cavalry dealt with the necessary protocols for the military conscription of the man, Vargos-a procedure that released him from his contract with the Imperial Post and triggered the immediate right to all moneys owing under his civil contract. Paperwork arranging the transfer of the appropriate sums to the military paymaster in the City was also processed. The centurion was entirely happy to do this, in fact… relations between the military and the civil service were about as cordial here as they were anywhere else. Which was to say, not at all.

The centurion was markedly less enthused about signing the release of the same fellow from his all-too-transitory military service. Had his instructions not been explicit about this, he might well have demurred. The man was strong and fit, and once he recovered from his accidental injuries would make an excellent soldier. They'd been coping with desertions-with pay more than half a year in arrears, it was not in the least surprising-and all the units were undermanned.

It was not to be. Both Carullus and the governor appeared anxious to get the red-bearded Rhodian and his party on their way. Imperial papers signed by Chancellor Gesius himself could have that sort of effect, the centurion supposed. The governor was near enough to his retirement to have an extreme disinclination to ruffle feathers in the City.

Carullus, for his own part, was apparently going with the artisan to Sarantium, leading an escort himself. The centurion had no idea why.

In fact, there were several reasons, the tribune of the Fourth Sauradian cavalry thought, during the days of travelling east and then, in Trakesia, curving gradually down south. A tribune commanded five hundred men was much more significant than any messenger bearing yet another letter of complaint. He could have a legitimate expectation of at least being received and obtaining a formal answer as to the arrears for the Saura-dian troops. The Master of Offices might not give him more than platitudes, but Carullus had hopes of seeing either Leontes himself or one of his personal cadre of officers and getting a clearer picture.

In addition, he hadn't been to Sarantium in years, and the chance to visit the City was too appealing to be passed up. He'd calculated that they could arrive-even moving slowly-before the season-ending races in the Hippodrome during the Dykania Festival. Carullus had a lifelong passion for the chariots and his beloved Greens that found little satisfaction in Sauradia.

Beyond this, he had developed an unanticipated but quite genuine liking for the red-bearded Rhodian he'd clipped with his helmet. Martinian of Varena was not an especially genial man-not that Carullus really needed other people to keep a conversation going-but the artisan could hold his wine almost as well as a soldier, knew a number of startlingly obscene western songs, and showed none of the arrogance most Rhodians displayed when confronting an honest Imperial soldier. He also swore with an inventiveness of phrase worth copying.

In addition, Carullus had reluctantly come to acknowledge to himself-looking around to determine the whereabouts of certain others in the party as they rode-that he was being continually assailed by an entirely new emotion.

It was the most unexpected thing.

For centuries, the journals and correspondence of seasoned travellers had made it clear that the most imposing way to first see Sarantium was from the deck of a ship at sunset.

Sailing east, the god's sun behind you lighting the domes and towers, gleaming on the seaward walls and the cliffs that lined the infamous channel-the Serpent's Tooth-into the celebrated harbour, there was no way, all travellers reported, to escape the awe and majesty Saranios's city evoked. Eye of the world, ornament of Jad.

The gardens of the Imperial Precinct and the flat churkar ground where the Emperors played or watched the imported Bassamd game of horses and mallets, could be seen from far out at sea, amid the gold- and bronze-roofed palaces-the Traversite, Attenine, Baracian, all of them. The mighty Hippodrome could be descried, just beyond: and across the forum from it-in this year of the reign of the great and glorious beloved of Jad, the thrice-exalted Valerius II, Emperor of Sarantium, heir of Rhodias- could be seen the tremendous golden dome, the latest wonder of the world, stretching across the new Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom.

From out at sea, sailing to Sarantium, all of this and more would spread itself out for the traveller like a feast for the famished eye, too dazzling, too manifold and vividly manifest to be compassed. Men had been known to cover their faces with their cloaks in awe, to close their eyes, turn away, to kneel in prayer on the ship's deck, to weep. Oh City, City, my eyes are never dry when I remember you. My heart is a bird, winging home.

Then the ships would be met by the small harbour boats, officials would board, papers would be cleared, customs documents affirmed, cargoes examined and duly taxed, and finally they would be permitted to sail up the curve of the Serpent's Tooth-the great chains drawn back in this time of peace-passing between the narrow cliffs, looking up at walls and guards on each side, thinking of Sarantine Fire unleashed on hapless foes who thought to take Jad's holy and defended City. Awe would give way to-or be joined by-a proper measure of fear. Sarantium was no harbour or haven for the weak.

To port, as instructed by the Harbour Master with shouts and signal horns and flares, and then, papers examined and cleared yet again, the traveller could at last set foot on land, upon the thronged, noisy docks and quays of Sarantium. One could stride unsteadily away from the water after so long at sea and come into the City that was, and had been for more than two hundred years, both the crowning glory of Jad and the eastern Empire and the most squalid, dangerous, overcrowded, turbulent place on earth.

That was if you came by sea.

If you first approached by land down through Trakesia-as the Emperor himself was known to have done thirty years ago-what you saw before anything else were the Triple Walls.

There were those dissenters, as there always are among travellers-a segment of mankind inclined to have, and voice, strong opinions-who urged that the might and scale of Sarantium were made most evident and overwhelming by these titanic walls, seen gleaming at a sunrise. And this was how Caius Crispus of Varena saw them on a morning exactly six weeks after he had set out from his home to answer an invitation from the Emperor addressed to another man, and seeking to discover a reason to live-if they didn't kill him as an imposter first.

There was a paradox embedded in that, he thought, gazing at the brutal sweep of the walls that guarded the landward access to the City on its promontory. He didn't have the frame of mind just then to deal with paradoxes. He was here. On the threshold. Whatever was to begin could now begin.