"Lord of Emperors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

CHAPTER XI

It is true, undeniably, that the central moments of an age occur on the margins of the lives of most people. A celebrated play from the early years of the eastern empire in Sarantium begins with shepherds quarrelling over their entangled flocks when one of them notices a flare of light in the east as something falls from the sky. There is a brief pause in the dispute as the men on the hill slope consider the event; then they return to the matter at hand.

The death of Heladikos in a falling chariot, bearing fire from his father, cannot compete in significance with the theft of a sheep. The drama by Sophenidos (later banned by the clerics as heretical) moves from this beginning to treat matters of faith and power and majesty, and contains the celebrated Messenger's speech about dolphins and Heladikos. But it begins on that hillside, and it ends there, with the sacrifice of the disputed sheep-employing the new gift of fire.

Nonetheless, for all the human truth of Sophenidos's observation that the world's major events might not seem so to those living through a given time, it remains equally true that there are moments and places that may properly be seen as lying at the heart of an age.

That day, in the early spring of the year, there were two such places on the earth, far apart. One was in the desert of Soriyya, where a man in a hood, with a cloak drawn over his mouth, preserved a silence among the drifting sands, having remained awake all the night before, fasting, and looking up at the stars.

The other was a tunnel in Sarantium, between palaces.

He stands in a curve of the walls and floor, looking up at torches and a painted ceiling of the night sky, down at a mosaic of hares and pheasants and other creatures in a forest glade: an artisan's illusion of the natural world here underground within city walls. The pagan faiths tell of dark powers in the earth, he knows, and the dead lie underground, when they are not burned.

There are people in wait ahead of him, people who ought not to be here. He has deciphered that from the measured, unhurried footsteps behind. They have no fear that he will flee from them.

The curiosity he feels might be considered a defining trait of the Emperor of Sarantium, whose mind is endlessly engaged by the challenges and enigmas of the world the god has made. The anger he experiences is less characteristic but equally intense just now, and the repeated pulsing of grief, like a heavy heartbeat, is very rare for him.

There were-there are-so many things he has intended to do.

What he does do after a moment, rather than continue to wait like one of the hares, frozen in the mosaic glade, is turn and walk back towards those behind him. One may sometimes control the moment and place of one's dying, thinks the man whose mother had named him Petrus, in Trakesia, almost half a century ago, and whose uncle-a soldier-had summoned him to Sarantium in early manhood.

He is not, however, reconciled to his death. Jad waits for every living man and woman, but can wait a little longer for an Emperor, surely. Surely.

He deems himself equal even to this, whatever it turns out to be. Has nothing with which to defend himself, unless one counts a simple, unsharpened blade at his belt used for breaking the seal on correspondence. It is not a weapon. He is not a warrior.

He is fairly certain he knows who is here, is rapidly deploying his thoughts (which are weapons) even as he goes back down the tunnel and comes around the curve and sees-with brief, trivial satisfaction-the startled reaction of those coming after him. They stop.

Four of them. Two soldiers, helmed to be unknown but he knows them, and they are the two who were on guard. There is another cloaked man-all these hidden assassins, even with no one to see-and there is one who walks in front, unshielded, eager, almost alight with what Valerius perceives to be desire. He does not see the man he has feared-quite intensely-might be here.

Some relief at that, though he may be among those in wait at the other end of the corridor. Anger, and grief.

"Anxious for an ending?" asks the tall woman, stopping before him. Her surprise was brief, swiftly controlled. Her eyes are blue flames, uncanny. She is dressed in crimson, a gold belt, her hair bound in a net of black. The gold of it shows through in the torchlight.

Valerius smiles. "Not as anxious as you, I daresay. Why are you doing this, Styliane?"

She blinks, genuinely startled. She had been a child when it all happened. He has always been conscious of that, guided by it, much more so than Aliana.

He thinks of his wife. In his heart, in the pure silence of the heart, he is speaking to her now, wherever she might be under the sun overhead. She had always told him it was a mistake to bring this woman-this girl when the dance began-to court, even to let her live. Her father's daughter. Flavius. In silence the Emperor of Sarantium is telling the dancer he married that she was right and he was wrong and he knows she will know, soon enough, even if his thoughts do not-cannot-travel through walls and space to where she is.

"Why am I doing this? Why else am I alive?" the daughter of Flavius Daleinus says.

"To live your life," he says crisply. A philosopher of the Schools, admonishing a pupil. (He closed the Schools himself. A regret, but the Patriarch needed it done. Too many pagans.) "Your own life, with the gifts you have, and have been given. Easy enough, Styliane." He looks past her as fury kindles in her eyes. Deliberately ignores that. Says to the two soldiers, "You are aware that they will kill you here?"

"I told them you would say that," Styliane says.

"Did you also tell them it was true?"

She is clever, knows too much of hatred. The rage of the one who survived? He had thought-gambled-the intelligence might win out in the end, saw a genuine need, a place for her. Aliana said it would not, accused him of trying to control too much. A known flaw.

She is still so young, the Emperor thinks, looking again at the tall woman who has come to kill him here under the still-cold ground of spring. He doesn't want to die.

"I told them what was-and is-more obviously true: any new court will need Excubitors in the highest ranks who have proven their loyalty."

"By betraying their oath and Emperor? You expect trained soldiers to believe that?"

"They are here with us."

"And you will kill them. What does murder say about-"

"Yes," says the cloaked man, finally speaking, face still hooded, his voice thick with excitement. "Really. What does murder say? Even after years?"

He doesn't remove the hood. It doesn't matter. Valerius shakes his head.

"Tertius Dalemus, you are forbidden the City and know it. Guards, arrest this man. He is banned from Sarantium as a traitor." His voice crackles with vigour; they all know this tone of command in him.

It is Styliane, of course, who breaks the spell with her laughter. I'm sorry, the Emperor is thinking. My love, you will never know how sorry.

They hear footsteps approaching from the other end. He turns, apprehensive again. A pain in his heart, a premonition.

Then he sees who has come-and who has not-and that pain slips away. It matters to him that someone is not here. Odd, perhaps, but it does matter. And replacing fear, swiftly, is something else.

This time it is the Emperor of Sarantium, surrounded by his enemies and far as his own childhood from the surface world and the mild light of the god, who laughs aloud.

"Jad's blood, you have grown fatter, Lysippus!" he says. "I'd have wagered it was impossible. You aren't supposed to be in Sarantium yet. I intended to call you back after the fleet had sailed."

"What? Even now you play games? Oh, stop being clever, Petrus," says the gross, green-eyed man who had been his Quaestor of Revenue, exiled in the smouldering, bloody aftermath of riot two years and more ago.

Histories, thinks the Emperor. We all have our histories and they do not leave us. Only a handful of men and women in the world call him by his birth name. This hulking figure, the familiar, too-sweet scent surrounding him, his fleshy face round as a moon, is one of them. There is another figure behind him, mostly hidden by the spilling shape of Lysippus: it is not the one he feared, though, because this one, too, is hooded.

Leontes would not be.

"You don't believe me?" the Emperor says to the vast, sweating bulk of the Calysian. He is genuinely indignant, no need to pretend. His back is now fully turned to the woman and her cloaked, craven brother and the renegade guards. They will not stab him. He knows that with certainty. Styliane means for this to be theatre, ceremony, not only murder. A lifetime's worth of… expiation? For history. There are steps yet to this dance. His dancer is somewhere else, up above, in the light.

They will not let her live.

For that as much as anything he will keep trying here underground, probing, subtle and quick as a salmon, which is holy in the north among the pagans his people once were before Jad came among them. And Heladikos, his son, who fell.

"Believe that you were about to call me back?" Lysippus shakes his head, jowls quivering. His voice is still distinctive, memorable. Not a man, once met, who can ever be forgotten. His appetites are corrupt, unspeakable, but no man had ever managed the Imperial finances with such honesty or skill. A paradox never fully fathomed. "Must you, even now, assume all others are fools?"

Valerius gazes at him. He'd actually been a well-formed man once, when first met, handsome, educated, a patrician friend to the young, scholarly nephew of the Count of the Excubitors. Had played a role in the Hippodrome, and elsewhere, on that day when Apius died and the world changed. Rewarded for it with wealth and real power and with eyes averted from what he did in his city palace or in the litter that carried him at night through the streets. Then exiled, of necessity, to the countryside after the riot. Bored there, of a certainty. A man inextricably drawn to the City, to dark things, blood. The reason he is here.

The Emperor knows how to handle him, or did once. He says, "If they behave as fools, I do. Think, man. Did the country dull you entirely? Why did I have the rumours started that you were back in the City?"

"You start them? I am back in the City, Petrus."

"And were you two months ago? I thought not. Go ask in the faction compounds, friend." A deliberate word, that last." And I will have Gesius give you names. Half a dozen. Ask when word first began to spread that you might be here. I was testing it, Lysippus! On the people and the clerics. Of course I want you back. We have a war to win-probably on two fronts."

A bit of new information dropped there for them. A hint, a tease. To keep the dance going, in any way. Keep holding to life here. They will kill her after him.

He knows Lysippus very well. The torches are bright where they are standing and he sees the registering of a fact, then conjecture at the hint, then the watched-for doubt in the remarkable green eyes.

"Why bother? No need to ask anyone," says Styliane Daleina behind him, breaking the mood like a glass dropped on stone, shattering into shards.

Her voice, continuing, is a knife now, precise as an executioner's edge. "This much is perfectly true. A good liar mixes truth in his poison. It was when I first heard those tales and realized what was happening that I saw the chance to invite you back to join us. An elegant solution. If the Trakesian and his whore heard tidings of you they would assume they were their own false rumours."

Which is what, indeed, has happened. He hears that word whore, of course, understands what she so passionately wants from him. He will not give it to her, but is thinking how she is so much more than clever. He turns. The soldiers remain helmed, her brother hooded, Styliane is almost glowing in her intensity. He looks at her, here under the earth where old powers dwell. He thinks that what she would like is to unbind her hair and claw his beating heart from his breast with her fingers and nails like the god-drunk wild women on hills of autumn long ago.

He says, calmly, "You use a foul tongue for someone of breeding. But it is an elegant solution, indeed. My congratulations on the cleverness. Was it Tertius who thought of it?" His tone is mildly acerbic, giving her nothing of what she wants. "The loathed, godless Calysian enticed to become a perfect scapegoat for the murder of a holy Emperor. Does he die here with me and these soldiers, or do you hunt him down and produce a confession after you and poor Leontes are crowned?" One of the helmed men behind her shifts uneasily. He is listening.

"Poor Leontes?" She simulates her laughter this time, is not truly amused.

And so he gambles. "Of course. Leontes knows nothing of this. Is still waiting outside the far doors for me. This is the Daleinoi alone, and you think you'll control him after, don't you? What is the scheme? Tertius as Chancellor?" Her eyes flicker. He laughs aloud. "How very amusing. Or no, I must be wrong. Surely I am. This is all for the greater good of the Empire, of course."

The craven brother, named twice, opens his mouth within the hood and then closes it. Valerius smiles. "Or no, no. Wait. Of course! You promised that position to Lysippus to get him here, didn't you? He'll never have it, will he? Someone must be named and executed for this."

Styliane stares at him. "You imagine everyone treats people as disposable, in the way you do?"

His turn to blink, disconcerted for the first time. "This, coming from the girl I let live against all advice and brought into my court with honour?"

And it is then that Styliane finally says, with a glacial clarity, the words slow as time, inexorable as the movement of stars across the night sky, an indictment carrying the burden of years (so many nights awake?) behind it: 'You burned my father alive. I was to be bought with a husband and a place on the dais behind a whore?

There is a silence then. The Emperor feels the weight of all the earth and stone between them and the sun.

"Who told you that absurd story?" Valerius says. His tone is light, but it costs him something this time.

Still, he moves, swiftly, when she swings a palm to strike him in the face. He catches her hand, holds, though she twists savagely, and he says, in turn, through gritted teeth, "Your father wore purple in the street on the day an Emperor died. He was on his way to the Senate. He could have been killed by any man in Sarantium with respect for tradition, and burning would have suited so much impiety."

"He did not wear purple," says Styliane Daleina, as he lets her tear her hand free. Her skin is almost translucent; he sees the marks of his fingers red on her wrist. "It is a lie," she says.

And now the Emperor smiles. "In the god's most holy name, you astonish me. I had no idea. None at all. All these years? You honestly believe that?"

The woman is silent, breathing hard.

'She does… believe it." Another voice, behind him. A new one. "She is wrong, but it… changes… nothing."

But this mangled, whistling voice changes everything. And it is with a bone-chill now, as if a wind crossing from the half-world has blown into him, bringing death truly into this tunnel where walls and plaster and paint hide the roughness of earth underground, that the Emperor turns again and sees who has spoken, stepping out from behind the obscuring bulk of the Calysian.

There is something this man holds. It is actually tied to his wrists, for his hands are maimed. The tube-like implement, attached to something that rolls on a small cart behind him, is one the Emperor recognizes and remembers, and so it is with a struggle, a real one, that Valerius remains motionless now, betraying nothing.

There is fear in him, however, for the first time since he heard the tunnel door open behind him and understood he was not alone. Histories returning. Sign of a sun disk given to a watching man below a solarium, years and years ago. Screaming afterwards, in the street. He has reason to know that this is a bad way to die. He looks briefly at Lysippus and from the expression there understands something else: the Calysian, being what he is, would have come here to see this used, if for no other reason at all. The Emperor swallows. Another memory reaches him, from even further back, childhood, tales of the old dark gods who live in the earth and do not forget.

The high, wheezing sound of the new voice is appalling, especially if one recalls-and Valerius does-the resonance of it before. This hood is thrown back now. The man, who is eyeless and whose face is a melted ruin, says, "If he… wore purple to go before… the people it was as the… proper… successor to an Emperor who… had named none."

"He didn't wear purple," Styliane says again, a little desperately.

"Be silent, sister," says the queer, high whistling voice, the authority in it startling. "Bring Tertius here… if his legs… will move him. Come behind me." The blind, disfigured man wears a trivial, incongruous amulet around his neck, a small bird, it looks like. He shrugs off his cloak now onto the mosaic floor. Those in the tunnel might wish he had not done so, had kept the hood, save for Lysippus. The Emperor sees him regarding the hideous figure of Lecanus Daleinus with the moist, wide, tender eyes one might fix upon an object of yearning or desire.

All three Daleinoi then. The contours of this now terribly clear. Gesius had, discreetly, obliquely, implied they ought to be attended to, at the time the first Valerius took the throne. Had suggested the Daleinoi offspring be regarded as an administrative matter unworthy of the attention of the Emperor or his nephew. Some things, the Chancellor had murmured, were beneath the proper consideration of rulers taxed with the burden of far greater issues on behalf of their people and the god.

His uncle had left it to him. He left most such things to his nephew. Petrus had declined to kill. Had his reasons, different in each case.

Tertius was a child and then later was manifestly a coward, insignificant, even during the Victory Riot. Styliane he saw from the outset as important, and more so as she grew up through a decade and more. He had plans for her, the marriage to Leontes at the heart of these. He'd thought-arrogantly? — he could use her ferocious intelligence to win her to a larger vision. Had thought he was doing so, if slowly, that she grasped the unfolding stages of the game that would have her Empress after all. One day. He and Aliana had no heir. He'd thought she understood all this.

Lecanus, oldest of the three, was something different. Was one of the figures that haunted the Emperor's dreams when he did sleep, seeming to stand like a deformed, dark shadow between him and the promised light of the god. Were faith and piety always born of fear? Was this the secret all clerics knew, foretelling eternal darkness and ice under the world for those who strayed from the light of the god?

Valerius had given orders that Lecanus not be killed, whatever he did, even though he knew that for all real purposes, by any honest measure, the eldest child of Flavius Daleinus, a better man than his father had ever been, had died in the street outside their home when the father had. He had just kept on living. Death in life, life in death.

And what he holds now, tied to his wrists to more easily handle it, is one of the siphons that disgorge the same liquid flame, from the canister rolling behind him, that was used on that morning long ago to make a point, an overwhelming assertion, one that every man and woman in the Empire could understand, about the passing of an Emperor and the coming of a new one.

It seems to Valerius as if they have all moved straight from that morning sunlight long ago to this torchlit tunnel, with nothing in between. Time feels strange to the Emperor, the years blurring. He thinks of his god, then, and his unfinished Sanctuary. So many things intended and unfinished. And then again of Aliana up above, somewhere in the day.

He is not ready to die, or to have her die.

He makes the blurring memories stop, thinking quickly. Lecanus has summoned his brother and sister to cross to him. A mistake.

Valerius says, "Only the two of them, Daleinus? Not these loyal guards who let you in here? Have you told them what happens to those in the line of the flame? Show them the rest of your burns, why don't you? Do they even know this is Sarantine Fire?"

He hears a sound from behind him, one of the soldiers.

"Move now, sister! Tertius, come."

Valerius, staring down the nozzle of the black tubing that holds the worst death he knows, laughs again in that moment and turns to the other two siblings. Tertius has taken a tentative step forward, and now Styliane moves. Valerius backs up to stand right beside her. The soldiers have swords. He knows Lysippus will have a blade. The big man is more nimble than one might imagine.

"Hold them both," the Emperor snaps to the two Excubitors. "In the god's name, are you fools that wish your own deaths? This is fire. They are about to burn you."

One of the men backs up then, an uncertain step. A fool. The other puts a tentative hand to his sword hilt.

"Do you have the key?" the Emperor snaps. The nearer man shakes his head. "She took it. My lord."

My lord. Holiest Jad. He may yet live.

Tertius Daleinus twists suddenly and sidles forward against the tunnel wall to cross to his brother. Valerius lets him go. He is not a soldier, but this is his life now, and Aliana's, and a vision of a world, a legacy, in the shaping. He seizes the woman, Styliane, by the upper arm before she can move past him, and he takes his small knife in his other hand and puts it to her back. It has an edge that can scarcely break skin; they will not know that.

But Styliane, who does not struggle at all, who has not even tried to avoid his grip, looks at him even as he holds her, and the Emperor sees a triumph in her gaze, not far from madness: he thinks again of those women on the hill slopes of myth.

Hears her say with a frightening calm, "You are mistaken yet again if you believe my brother will refrain from burning you in order to save me. And equally mistaken in thinking that I care, so long as you burn as my father did. Go ahead, brother. End it."

Valerius is shaken to the core, struck dumb. Knows truth when he hears it; she is not dissembling. End it. In a sudden stillness of the soul he hears, then, a faint, far sound like a tolling bell struck once.

He had thought, had always believed, intelligence could overmaster hatred, given time, tutelage. It is not so, he sees now, too late. Aliana was right. Gesius was right. Styliane, brilliant as a diamond, might welcome power, and wield it with Leontes, but it is not her need, not the key to the woman. The key, beneath the ice of her, is fire.

The blind man, uncannily precise in where he aims the siphon, moves his gash of a mouth in what Valerius understands to be a smile. He says, "Such… a waste, alas. Such skin. Must I… dear sister? Then so be it."

And the Emperor understands that he will do it, sees an unholy, avid hunger in the gross face of the Calysian beside the maimed Daleinus, and with a sudden furious motion-awkward, for he is not a man of action- he snatches at the waist purse of the woman and pushes her forward hard so she stumbles and crashes into her blind brother and they both fall. No fire. Yet.

Backing up, he hears the two guards retreating behind him and understands that he has turned them, they are with him. He would pray now, but there is no time. At all. 'Move!" he snaps. "Get the siphon!"

Both guards spring past him. Lysippus, never a coward, and having cast his dice with the Daleinoi here, goes for his sword. The Emperor, watching, backing up quickly now, fumbles in the cloth purse, finds a heavy key, knows it. Does pray then, in thanks. Styliane is already up, pulling at Lecanus.

The first Excubitor, upon them, levels his blade. Lysippus steps forward, slashes, is parried. Lecanus is still on his knees, mouthing wild, incoherent words. He reaches for the trigger of the flame.

And it is then, just then, even as he sees this, that the Emperor of Sarantium, Valerius II, Jad's beloved and most holy regent upon earth, thrice-exalted shepherd of his people, feels something white and searing and final plunge into him from behind as he backs towards the door, towards safety and the light. He falls, and falls, his mouth opening, no sound, the key in his hand.

It is not recorded by anyone, for it never is nor ever can be, whether he hears, as he dies, an implacable, vast, infinite voice saying to him and to him alone in that corridor under palaces and gardens and the City and the world, 'Uncrown, the Lord of Emperors awaits you now.

Nor is it known if dolphins come for his soul when it leaves, as it does leave then, unhoused, for its long journey. It is known, but only by one person in the god's world, that his last thought as a living man is of his wife, her name, and this is so because she hears it. And hearing-somehow hearing him-understands that he is going, going from her, is gone, that it is over, ended, done, after all, the brilliant dance that had begun long ago when he was Petrus and she was Aliana of the Blues and so young, and the afternoon sun is bright above her and all of them, in a cloudless springtime sky over Sarantium.

She cut off most of her hair in the small boat, being rowed back from the isle.

If she was wrong about what Daleinus's departure and the murdered guards meant, shorn hair could be covered, would grow back. She didn't think she was wrong, even then, on the water. There was a blackness in the world, under the bright sun, above the blue waves.

She had only Mariscus's knife with which to cut; it was difficult in the boat. She hacked raggedly, dropped tresses in the sea. Offerings. Her eyes were dry. When the hair was chopped she leaned over the side and used the salt water to scrub the cream and paint and scented oils from her face and blur the scent of her perfume. Her earrings and rings she put in a pocket of her robe (money would be needed). Then she took one of the rings back out and gave it to Mariscus, rowing her.

"You may have a choice to make," she said to him, "when we reach the harbour. You are forgiven, whatever you do. This is my thanks to you for this task, and for all that has gone before."

He swallowed hard. His hand shook as he took it from her. The ring was worth more than he could earn in a lifetime in the Imperial Guard.

She told him to discard his leather armour and Excubitor's over-tunic and sword. He did so. They went overboard. He had not spoken the whole of the way, rowing hard, sweating in the light, fear in his eyes. The ring went into his boot. The boots were expensive for a fisherman, but they would not be together long. She would have to hope no one noticed.

She used his knife again to cut off the lower portion of her robe, did it unevenly, tore it in places. People would see stains and rips, not the fineness of a fabric. She took off her leather sandals, tossed them, too, over the side. Looked at her bare feet: painted toenails. Decided they would be all right. Women of the street painted themselves, not just ladies of the court. She did immerse her hands in the water again, rubbing and roughening them. She pushed off the last of her rings, one she never removed, let it drop down through the sea. There were tales of sea people whose rulers had wed the sea in this way.

She was doing something else.

She spent the last of the journey back to harbour biting and chipping at her fingernails, smeared the torn robe with dirt and salt water from the bottom of the boat, and then her cheeks again. Her hands and complexion, left as they were, would give her away before anything else.

There were other small boats in the water around them by then so she had to be discreet. Fishermen, ferrymen, small craft carrying goods to and from Deapolis in and among the looming shapes of the fleet that was to sail west to war. The announcement planned for today, though none out here knew that. The Emperor in the Hippodrome kathisma after the last race, with all the great ones of the realm. She had timed her morning's outing on the water to be there in time, of course.

Not now. Now what she sensed ahead of her was an aura of death, an ending. She had said in the palace two years ago, when Sarantium was burning in the Victory Riot, that she would rather die in the vestments of Empire than flee and live any lesser life.

It had been true then. Now, something different was true. An even colder, harder truth. If they killed Petrus today, if the Daleinoi did this, she would live long enough herself to see them dead, somehow. After? After would take care of itself, as was needful. There were endings and there were endings.

She could not have known, even self-conscious and aware of her own appearance as she had always been, how she appeared in that moment to the soldier in the boat with her, rowing to Sarantium.

They approached a mooring, far down the slip, manoeuvring among the other jostling small boats. Obscenities and jests rang back and forth across the water. Mariscus was only just adequate to navigating his way in. They were loudly cursed, she swore back, crudely, in a voice she hadn't used for fifteen years, and made a caupona jest. Mariscus, sweating, looked quickly up at her and then bent back to his task. Someone in the other boat laughed aloud, back-oared and made way for them, then asked what she'd do in return.

Her reply made them whoop with laughter.

They docked. Mariscus leaped out, tied the boat. Aliana moved quickly, stepping out herself before he could offer a hand. She said, quickly and low, "If all is well you have earned more than you can dream of, and my thanks for a lifetime. If it is not well, I ask nothing more of you than what you have now done. Jad guard you, soldier."

He was blinking rapidly. She realized-with surprise-that he was fighting back tears. "They will learn nothing from me, my lady. But is there nothing more…?"

"Nothing more," she said briskly, and went away.

He meant what he said, and was a brave man, but of course they would learn what he knew if they were shrewd enough to find him and ask. Men had, sometimes, a touching belief in their ability to withstand professional questioning.

She walked up the long slip alone, barefoot, her adornments gone or hidden, her long robe torn into a short, stained tunic (still too fine for her station now, she would need another soon). One man stopped and stared at her and her heart lurched. Then he made a loud offer, and she relaxed.

"Not enough money and not enough man," said the Empress of Sarantium, looking the sailor up and down. She tossed her shorn, ragged hair, and turned away dismissively. "Find a donkey to hump for that price." His outraged protest was drowned in laughter.

She walked on through the thronged, noisy harbour, a silence within her so deep it echoed. She trudged up a narrow street. She didn't know it. So much had changed in fifteen years. Her feet hurt already. She hadn't walked barefoot in a long time.

She saw a small chapel and stopped. Was about to go in to try to order her thoughts, to pray, when-in that moment-she heard from within a known voice speaking her name.

She remained where she was, didn't look around. This was a voice from nowhere and everywhere, someone who was hers alone. Had been hers alone.

She felt an emptiness invade her like an army. She stood very still in that small, steep city street and amid the crowds and bustle, with no privacy at all, she bade a last farewell, by birth name not Imperial one, to the loved soul that was leaving, that was already gone from her and from the world.

She had wanted forbidden dolphins for her room. Had taken the mosaicist, Crispin, to see them this morning. Only this same morning. Petrus had… found them first. Or been found by them, and not as a mosaic on a wall. Was perhaps being carried, his soul, to wherever they carried souls on the way to Jad. She hoped they were kind, that the way was easy, that there had not been too much pain.

No one saw her weep. There were no tears to see. She was a whore in the City, with people to kill before they found and killed her.

She had no idea where to go.

In the tunnel, the two guards made the remarkably foolish mistake of looking back over their shoulders when the Emperor fell. This entire circumstance, the horror of it, had undermined all their training, unmoored them like ships torn from their anchors in a storm. They burned for the error. Died screaming, as the blind man found and pulled the trigger on the nozzle that released the liquid fire. Lecanus Daleinus was cursing, crying, high-pitched and incomprehensible, wailing as if demented in his own mortal agony, but he aimed the nozzle with uncanny accuracy past his sister and brother straight at the soldiers.

They were underground, far from life and the world. No one heard them screaming or the bubble and sizzle of melting flesh save for the three Daleinoi and the gross, avid man beside them, and the other one, standing behind the dead Emperor, sufficiently far away that he felt a wet surge of heat come down the tunnel and a bowel-gripping fear but was not even singed by that fire from long ago.

He became aware, as the heat died away and the screams and the wet moaning stopped, that they were looking at him. The Daleinoi, and the fat man he remembered very well and had not known was in the City. It… pained him that that could have happened without his knowing.

But there were greater sources of distress just now.

He cleared his throat, looked at the bloodied, sticky dagger in his hand. There had never been blood on it before, ever. He wore a blade for display, no more. He looked down at the dead man at his feet.

And Pertennius of Eubulus said then, feelingly, "This is terrible. So terrible. Everyone agrees it is wrong for an historian to intervene in the events he chronicles. He loses so much authority, you understand."

They stared at him. No one said anything at all. It was possible they were overwhelmed by the truth of what he'd said.

The blind one, Lecanus, was crying, making strangled, ugly sounds in his throat. He was still on his knees. There was a smell of meat in the tunnel. The soldiers. Pertennius was afraid he would be ill.

"How did you get in here?" It was Lysippus.

Styliane was looking at the Emperor. The dead man at Pertennius's feet. She had a hand on her weeping brother's shoulder, but she released him now, stepped past the two burned men and stopped, a little way down the tunnel, staring at her husband's secretary.

Pertennius wasn't at all sure he owed any answers to an exiled monster like the Calysian, but this did not seem the right context in which to explore that thought. He said, looking at the woman, his employer's wife, "The Strategos sent me to discover what was detaining the… the Emperor. There have come… have just come, tidings…»

He never stammered like this. He took a breath. "Tidings had just come that he thought the Emperor should know."

The Emperor was dead.

"How did you get in?" Styliane this time, same question. Her expression was odd. Unfocused. Looking at him, but not really. She didn't like him. Pertennius knew that. She didn't like anyone, though, so it hadn't much mattered.

He cleared his throat again, smoothed the front of his tunic. "I have, happen to have some keys? That… open locks."

"Of course you do," said Styliane quietly. He knew her irony well, the bite of it, but there was something bloodless, perfunctory about her tone this time. She was looking down again, at the dead man. Untidily sprawled. Blood on the mosaic stones.

"There were no guards," explained Pertennius, though they hadn't asked. "No one in the corridor outside. There… should have been. I thought"

"You thought something might be happening and you wanted to see it." Lysippus. The distinctive, clipped tones. He smiled, the folds of his face shifting. "Well, you did see, didn't you? What now, historian?"

Historian. There was blood on his blade. Mockery in the Calysian's tone. Smell of meat. The woman looked at him again, waiting.

And Pertennius of Eubulus, gazing back at her, not at Lysippus, did the simplest thing. He knelt, very near the body of the anointed Emperor he'd loathed and had killed, and, setting his dagger down, he said softly, "My lady, what is it you wish me to tell the Strategos?"

She let out a breath. To the secretary, watching her narrowly, she seemed to have become hollowed out, a figure without force or intensity. It… interested him.

She didn't even answer. Her brother did, lifting his hideous face. "I killed him," Lecanus Daleinus said. "By myself. My younger brother and sister… came and… killed me for it. So virtuous! Report it so… secretary. Record it." The whistle in his voice became more pronounced than ever. "Record it… during the reign… of the Emperor Leontes and his glorious Empress… and of the Daleinus… children… who will follow!"

A moment passed, another. And then Pertennius smiled. He understood, and it was all as it should be. At last. The Trakesian peasant was dead. The whore was or would be. The Empire was turning back-finally- to a proper place.

"I shall," he said. "Believe me, I shall."

"Lecanus?" It was Lysippus again. "You promised! You did promise me." There was desire in his voice, unmistakable, the tone raw with need.

"The Trakesian first, then me," said Lecanus Daleinus.

"Of course," said Lysippus, eagerly. "Of course, Lecanus." He was bowing and jerking, Pertennius saw, the gross body moving with urgency, hunger, like spasms of faith or desire.

"Holy Jad! I'm leaving," said Tertius, hastily. His sister moved aside as the youngest Daleinus went hurriedly back along the tunnel, almost running. She didn't follow, turning instead to look at her ruined brother, and at the Calysian, who was breathing rapidly, his mouth open. She bent down and said something then, softly, to Lecanus. Pertennius didn't hear what it was. He hated that. The brother made no reply.

Pertennius lingered long enough to see the blind man extend the nozzle and trigger and observe how the Calysian trembled as he untied Daleinus's maimed hands from them. Then he felt a sickness coming. He reclaimed and sheathed his knife and then he, too, went quickly back towards the door he had unlocked. He didn't look back.

He wasn't going to record this, anyhow. It had never happened, wasn't a part of history, he didn't need to watch, he told himself. Only the things written down mattered.

Somewhere men were racing horses, ploughing fields, children were playing, or crying, or labouring at hard tasks in the world. Ships were sailing. It was raining, snowing, sand blew in a desert, food and drink were being taken, jests made, oaths uttered, in piety or rage. Money changed hands. A woman cried a name behind shutters. Prayers were spoken in chapels and forests and before sacred, guarded flames. A dolphin leaped in the blue sea. A man laid tesserae upon a wall. A pitcher broke on a well rim, a servant knew she would be beaten for it.

Men were losing and winning at dice, at love, at war. Cheiromancers prepared tablets that besought yearning or fertility or extravagant wealth. Or death for someone desperately hated for longer than one could ever say.

Pertennius of Eubulus, leaving the tunnel, felt another rush of wet, distant heat, but heard no scream this time.

He came out into the lower part of the Attenine Palace again, below ground. A wide staircase led up, the corridor ran both ways to other hallways, other stairs. No guards. No one at all. Tertius Daleinus had already run upstairs. Somewhere. A trivial, meaningless man, Pertennius thought. Not a thought to be written now, of course, or not in any… public document.

He took a breath, smoothed his tunic, and prepared to go up, outside, and back across the gardens, and then down in the other palace to tell Leontes what had happened.

It proved unnecessary, that walk.

He heard a clatter of sound from above and looked up, just as, from behind him in the tunnel, there came a muffled, distant cry, and a last blast of heat came down, all the way to the hallway where he stood alone.

He didn't look back. He looked up. Leontes descended the stairs, moving briskly as he always did, soldiers behind him, as there always were.

"Pertennius! What in the god's holy name is keeping you, man? Where's the Emperor? Why is the door… where are the guards?

Pertennius swallowed hard. Smoothed his tunic. "My lord," he said, "something terrible has happened."

"What? In there?" The Strategos stopped.

"My lord, do not go in. It is… terrible." Which was nothing but truth.

And generated the predictable response. Leontes glanced at his guards. "Wait here." The golden-haired leader of the Sarantine armies went into the tunnel.

So, of course, Pertennius had to go back in. This might never be recorded, either, but it was impossible for a chronicler not to be present for what would happen now. He closed the door carefully behind him.

Leontes moved quickly. By the time Pertennius had retraced his steps down the tunnel and come to the curve again, the Strategos was on his knees beside the blackened body of his Emperor.

There was a span of time wherein no one moved. Then Leontes reached to the clasp at his throat, undid it, swept off his dark blue cloak and laid it gently over the body of the dead man. He looked up.

Pertennius was behind him, couldn't see his expression. The smell of burnt flesh was very bad. Ahead of them, motionless, stood the other two living people in this place. Pertennius stayed where he was, at the curve of the tunnel, half hidden against the wall.

He saw the Strategos stand. Saw Styliane facing him, her head high. Beside her, Lysippus the Calysian seemed to become aware that he was still holding the nozzle of the fire device. He let it fall. His face was strange now, too. There were three dead bodies beside him, all charred and black. The two guards. And Lecanus Daleinus, who had first burned all those years ago, with his father.

Leontes said nothing. Very slowly he moved forward. Stood before his wife and the Calysian.

"What are you doing here?" he said. To Lysippus.

Styliane was as ice, as marble. Pertennius saw the Calysian looking at the Strategos as though unsure where he'd come from." What does it look like?" he said. A memorable voice. "I'm admiring the floor mosaics."

Leontes, commander of the armies of Sarantium, was a different sort of man than the dead Emperor behind him. He drew his sword. A gesture repeated more times than could ever be numbered. Without speaking again he drove the blade through flesh and into the heart of the man standing beside his wife.

Lysippus never even moved, had no chance to defend himself. Pertennius, coming forward a step, unable to hold back, saw the astonishment in the Calysian's eyes before the blade was pulled out, hard, and he fell, thunderously.

The echoes of that took time to die away. Amid a stench of meat and the bodies of five dead men now, a husband and a wife faced each other underground and Pertennius shivered, watching them.

"Why did you do that?" said Styliane Daleina.

The slap took her across the face, a soldier's blow. Her head snapped to one side.

"Be brief, and precise," said her husband. "Who did this?"

Styliane didn't even bring a hand up to touch her cheek. She looked at her husband. She had been ready to be burned alive, the secretary remembered, only moments ago. There was no fear in her, not the least hint of it.

"My brother," she said. "Lecanus. He has taken his revenge for our father. He sent word to me this morning that he was coming here. Had obviously bribed his guards on the island, and through them the Excubitors at the doors here."

"And you came?"

"Of course I came. Too late to stop it. The Emperor was dead, and the two soldiers. And the Calysian had already killed Lecanus."

The lies, so effortless, so necessary. The words that might make this work, for all of them.

She said, "My brother is dead."

"Rot his evil soul," said her husband flatly. "What was the Calysian doing here?"

"A good question to ask him," Styliane said. The left side of her face was red where he'd hit her. "We might have an answer had someone not blundered in waving a sword."

"Careful, wife. I still have the sword. You are a Daleinus, and by your own statement your family has just murdered our holy Emperor."

"Yes, husband," she said. "They have. Will you kill me now, my dear?"

Leontes was silent. Looked back, for the first time. Saw Pertennius watching. His expression did not change. He turned to his wife again. "We are on the very eve of war. Today. It was to be announced today. And now there are tidings that the Bassanids are across the border in the north, breaking the peace. And the Emperor is dead. We have no Emperor, Styliane."

Styliane Daleina smiled then. Pertennius saw it. A woman so beautiful it could stop your breath. "We will," she said. "We will very soon. My lord."

And she knelt, exquisite and golden among the blackened bodies of the dead, before her husband.

Pertennius stepped away from the wall and went forward a few steps and did the same, falling to both knees, lowering his head to the floor. There was a long silence in the tunnel.

"Pertennius," said Leontes, at length, "there is much to be done. The Senate will have to be called into session. Go to the kathisma in the Hippodrome. Immediately. Tell Bonosus to come back here with you. Do not tell him why but make it clear he must come."

"Yes, my lord."

Styliane looked at him. She was still on her knees. "Do you understand? Tell no one what has happened here, or about the Bassanid attack. We must have order in the City tonight, to control this."

"Yes, my lady."

Leontes looked at her. "The army is here. It will not be the same as… the last time there was no heir."

His wife looked back at him, and then at her brother, beside her on the ground.

"No," she said, "Not the same." And then she said it again, "Not the same."

Pertennius saw the Strategos reach out then and help her to rise. His hand went to her bruised cheek, gently this time. She did not move, but her eyes were on his. They were so golden, the two of them, Pertennius thought, so tall. His heart was swelling.

He stood and turned and went. He had orders to obey.

He entirely forgot there was blood on his dagger, neglected to clean it all that day, but no one paid any attention to him so it didn't matter.

He was so seldom noticed; an historian, a recorder of events, hovering and grey, present everywhere, but not ever someone who ever played any kind of role in events.

Going up the stairs swiftly, then hurrying through the palace towards an upper staircase and the enclosed walkway that led to the rear of the kathisma, he was already casting his mind after phrasings, a way to begin. The proper tone of detachment and reflection at the outset of a chronicle was so important. Even the most perfunctory study of past events teaches that Jad's just retribution for the godless and evil may be long in coming but…

He stopped abruptly, forcing one of the eunuchs in a corridor to sidestep him quickly. He was wondering where the whore was. She was unlikely-surely-to be in the kathisma, though that would have been something to observe. Was she still in her bath in the other palace, naked and slippery with a soldier? He smoothed his tunic. Styliane would deal with her, he thought.

We must have order in the City tonight, she had said.

He knew what she meant. How could he not? The last death of an Emperor without a named heir had been Apius's, and in the violence that followed that-in the Hippodrome and the streets and even the Imperial Senate chamber-an ignorant Trakesian peasant had been lifted on a shield, acclaimed by the rabble, robed in porphyry. Order was hugely important now, and calm among the eighty thousand in the Hippodrome.

It crossed his mind that if all went as it should, by the end of this day his own status might rise a great deal. He thought of another woman, then, and smoothed his tunic again.

He was very happy, a rare, almost an unprecedented state for him, as he carried enormous, world-shaking tidings to the kathisma, with blood on the blade in his belt.

The sun was high above the City, past its peak, going down, but that day-and night-had a long way yet to go in Sarantium.

In the tunnel, among the dead, two golden figures stood looking at each other in silence, and then walked slowly out and up the wide stairs, not touching, but side by side.

On the stones behind them, on the mosaic stones under a blue cloak, lay Valerius of Sarantium, the second of that name. His body. What was left of it. His soul was gone, to dolphins, to the god, to wherever souls go.

Somewhere in the world, just then, a longed-for child was born and somewhere a labourer died, leaving a farm grievously undermanned with the spring fields still to be ploughed and the crops all to be planted. A calamity beyond words.