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

CHAPTER XVI

He had known the last days here would be difficult, he hadn't fully grasped just how much so. For one thing, from the time he came down from the dome the second time, late at night, after returning from the Imperial wedding in the palace and working by lantern-light to finish an image of his daughters that would be torn down almost as soon as it had set, Crispin had spent very little time entirely sober.

He wasn't enamoured of the image of himself as someone who drank to blur pain, but he didn't seem able to do much about it, either.

One of the hardest things was the outrage of other people. It enveloped him. For a private man that was difficult. Well-meaning, wildly passionate friends (he had more than he'd realized here, one never really stopped to count), cursing the new Emperor, offering wine in their homes or taverns. Or late at night in the kitchen of the Blues" compound, where Strumosus of Amoria held forth with articulate savagery on barbarism and the presence of it in a civilized place.

Crispin had gone there to see Scortius, but the charioteer had been asleep, medicated, and he had ended up in the kitchen taking a meal long after dark. He didn't get back to the compound again until just before departing. Scortius was sleeping that time, too. He chatted briefly with the Bassanid physician, the one whose name and address Zoticus had given him before the man was even in Sarantium. He was past the point of trying to sort that through, as well: there were simply things in the world he would never understand, and they didn't all have to do with the doctrines of holy faith.

He finally caught up with Scortius to say goodbye later that same evening. There was a crowd in the man's chambers-a routine circumstance, it appeared. It made that parting casual, which was easier.

He found that too much of the passion of others expended in sympathy for him was both wearying and humiliating. People had died here. People were dying all the time. Crispin had had a commission withdrawn, his work found unsatisfactory. It happened.

He tried to make himself see it this way, at any rate, to advise others to perceive it as such. He didn't succeed.

Shirin, when he called on her and said these things, declared him soulless (he made no witty comment about her choice of words, it wasn't the time for that) and an outright liar, and then she stormed out of her own sitting room, tears on her cheeks. Danis, the bird, from around her throat in the hallway as they left, declared silently that he was a fool, unworthy of his own gifts. Of any gifts.

Whatever that meant.

She didn't even come back to see him out. One of the household women walked him to the door and closed it behind him.

Artibasos, the next afternoon, serving a good Candarian, well watered, with olives and fresh bread and olive oil, reacted differently.

"Stop!" he cried, as Crispin tried the same explanation about commissions being ended or withdrawn. "You shame me!"

Crispin fell obediently silent, looking down at the dark wine in his cup.

"You don't believe any of what you say. You are only saying it to make me feel better." The little architect's hair was standing straight up, giving him the unsettling look of a man who'd just been terrified by a daemon.

"Not entirely," Crispin said. He remembered Valerius smoothing down that hair, the night he'd taken Crispin to see the dome that was his gift.

Unworthy of any gifts.

He took a breath. "Not just for you. I'm trying to make myself… to find a way to…"

It wasn't any good. How did you say this aloud, and keep your pride?

For they were profoundly right, all of them. He was lying, or trying to. Sometimes you needed a certain kind of dishonesty, even with yourself, to… carry on. Of course artisans lost commissions. All the time. Patrons didn't pay to keep a project going, remarried and changed their minds, went abroad. Or even died, and their sons or widows had a different idea of what should be done to the ceiling of the family dining room or the bedroom walls of the country estate.

It was true, everything he'd said about that was true, and it was still a lie, in the heart.

His drinking, starting in the morning, every morning, was its own proof of that, if you thought about it. He didn't want to think about it. He looked at the cup Artibasos had poured for him and drained it, held it out for more.

It was a death, what had happened. The heart would cry.

"You will never go back in there, will you?" the little architect had said to him.

Crispin shook his head.

"It is in your mind, isn't it? All of it?"

Crispin had nodded.

"Mine, too," Artibasos had said.

The Emperor went north to Eubulus with his army, but the fleet, under the Strategos of the Navy, did sail, after all. Leontes, now Valerius III, was hardly a man to let such an assembly go to waste. No good general was. The ships, laden with provisions and siege engines and weapons meant for a war in the west, were sent east instead through the Calchas Sea and then north. All the way through the far straits, to anchor near Mihrbor, firmly in Bassanid territory. Enough soldiers went on board to achieve a landing and defend it.

The army going overland, the troops that had been about to sail for Batiara, would be far larger than any force Shirvan had sent to harry the north. It was an army of invasion, this one, long-planned, and the new Emperor intended to use it that way-but in a different direction.

The Bassanids had breached the peace. A mistake, born of a desire to hamper a western invasion and an understanding-accurate enough-of the desires and designs of Valerius II.

Valerius II was dead.

The consequences of the miscalculation were on the Bassanids" own heads.

The soldier Carullus, once of the Fourth Trakesian, then very briefly of the Second Calysian, more recently a member of the Supreme Strategos's own guard, was not in either force, not those who rode and marched or those who sailed.

He was unhappy about this. In the extreme.

The new Emperor continued to have strong views, amounting almost to an element of his well-known piety, about taking newly married men to a theatre of war if there were options and alternatives. With an army of this size, there were.

Further, there had been dramatic and lethal purges in the ranks of the Excubitors after the role some of them had played in the assassination. Some innocent, highly capable men had undoubtedly been among those executed, but that was a risk to be assumed by those belonging to a small, elite company when absolute truth was hard to come by. At the very least it could be said that they'd failed to detect treachery among their fellows and paid a price for that.

This treachery, of course, had placed the new Emperor on his throne but that-one need hardly say-was not a relevant point.

Carullus, complaining volubly, had had to content himself with yet another shift and promotion-when he was appointed one of the three ranking officers just below the new Count of the Excubitors. It was a very substantial rise this time, a court office, not just a military one.

"You have any idea," he fumed one night, having spent a day in the Imperial Precinct absorbing information, "how many changes of clothing a man needs in this position? How often you change each day? How many ceremonies I'm expected to learn? Want to know what you wear for escorting fucking envoys from the fucking Karchites? I can tell you!"

He did, in detail. It seemed to help him to talk, and it was good, Crispin found, to have someone else's troubles (such as they were) to consider.

They ended up in The Spina every night, Pardos and Vargos accompanying them, various others coming and going at their booth. It was regarded as their booth by then. Carullus was a well-known, well-liked man, and Crispin had achieved, it appeared, a certain notoriety. It had also become known that he was leaving. People kept stopping by.

Pardos had surprised Crispin. He had decided to stay in Sarantium, continue to work at his craft here, despite the changes in matters of faith. With time to reflect, later, Crispin was to understand how he'd misjudged his former apprentice. It appeared that Pardos, now a fully fledged member of the guilds of course, had his own discomfort about working with certain images.

It had begun to change for him, Pardos said, while he was labouring to preserve that vision of Jad in Sauradia. A conflict of piety and craft, he'd said, stumbling, an awareness of his own unworthiness.

"We're all unworthy," Crispin had protested, fist on the table. "That's part of the point of it!"

But he'd let it slide, seeing Pardos's evident distress. What was the profit in making the other man unhappy? When did you ever change someone's views on faith, even a friend's?

Distraught as he obviously was about what was to happen to the work on the dome (spear-butts and hammers pounding, tesserae shattered and falling), Pardos was content to work on a secular scale, to make a life here, doing scenes for the state in administrative buildings, or private commissions for the courtiers and merchants and guilds who could afford mosaics. He could even work for the factions, he said: Hippodrome images for the walls and ceilings within the compounds. The new doctrines prescribed against rendering people only in a holy place. And for the wealthy, a mosaicist could still offer marines capes, hunting scenes, interwoven patterns for flooring or walls.

"Naked women and their toys for whorehouses?" Carullus had asked, cackling, making the younger man blush and Vargos frown. But the soldier had only been trying to change the mood.

Vargos, for his part, had made an immediate offer to sail west with Crispin. A difficulty, that, one that needed to be addressed.

The next evening, mostly sober, Crispin had gone walking with him through the City. They'd found an inn near the walls, far from anyone they were likely to know, and the two of them talked alone for a time.

In the end, Crispin had dissuaded him, not without effort and not 'without regret. Vargos was well on the way to making himself a life here. He could be more than a simple labourer-could apprentice himself to Pardos, who would be thrilled to have him. Vargos liked the City, far more than he'd expected to, and Crispin made him acknowledge that. He wouldn't be the first of the Inicii to force the Imperial City to give him a welcome and a decent life.

Crispin also admitted that he had no idea what he was going to do when he got home. It was hard to see himself doing fish and seaweed and sunken ships on a summer-house wall in Baiana or Mylasia now. He didn't even know if he would stay at home. He couldn't accept the burden of Vargos's life, of having the other man follow wherever his uncertain path carried him. That wasn't friendship, really. It was something else, and Vargos was a free man here. Had always been his own, free man.

Vargos didn't say a great deal, wasn't someone who argued, was certainly not the sort to inflict himself anywhere or on anyone. His expression revealed little as Crispin spoke, but that night was difficult for both of them. Something had happened on the road, and it had made a bond. Bonds could be broken, but there was a price.

It was deeply tempting to invite Vargos to come west. Crispin's uncertainty about his future would be balanced by having this man with him.

The big, scarred servant he had hired at the western border of Sauradia to take him along the Imperial Road had become someone whose presence brought a measure of stability to the world.

That could happen, when you went into the Aldwood with someone, and came out. They didn't speak of that day at all, but it underlay everything that was said, and the sadness of parting.

Only at the end did Vargos say something that brought it briefly to the surface. "You're sailing?" he had asked, as they were settling their account in the tavern. "Not back along the road?"

"I'd be afraid to," Crispin had said.

"Carullus would give you a guard."

"Not against what frightens me."

And Vargos had nodded his head.

"We were… allowed to leave," Crispin had murmured, remembering fog on the Day of the Dead, Linon on the dark, wet grass. "You don't test that by going back."

And Vargos had nodded again and they had gone back out into the streets.

A few days later they had to pretty much carry Carullus from The Spina. The soldier was caught in such a whirlwind of emotion it was almost comical: his marriage, his meteoric rise, which meant at the same time missing a glorious war, his delight in what had happened to his beloved Leontes set against what that meant to his dear friend, and an awareness, day by passing day, of Crispin's onrushing departure date.

That particular night as they drank he talked even more than usual. The others were almost in awe of his volubility: stories, jests, observations in an endless stream, battlefield experiences, lap-by-lap recollections of races seen years ago. He wept at the end of the night, hugging Crispin hard, kissing both his cheeks. The three others took him home through the streets. Approaching his own door Carullus was singing a victory song of the Greens.

Kasia heard him, evidently. She opened the door herself, in a night robe, holding a candle. The two other men supported Carullus as he saluted his wife and then made his precarious way-still singing-up the stairs.

In the hallway by the door, Crispin stood alone with Kasia. She gestured and they went into the front room. Neither said anything. Crispin knelt and poked at the fire with an iron rod. After a while the other two came down.

"He'll be fine, "Vargos said.

"I know he will," said Kasia. "Thank you."

There was a brief silence. "We'll wait down the street," Pardos said.

Crispin heard the door close as they went out. He stood up.

"When do you sail?" Kasia asked. She looked wonderful. Had gained weight, lost the bruised look he remembered in her eyes. They are going to kill me tomorrow. First words she'd ever spoken to him.

"Three days," he said now. "Someone apparently mentioned I was looking for a ship, word got around, and Senator Bonosus was good enough to send a message that I could have passage on a commercial vessel of his going to Megarium. Kind of him. She, ah, won't be fast, but she'll get me there. Then it's easy to cross the bay from Megarium, this time of year, to Mylasia. Ships go back and forth all the time. Or I could walk, of course. Up the coast, back down. To Varena."

She smiled a little as he rambled. "You sound like my husband. Many words to a simple question."

Crispin laughed. Another silence.

"They'll be waiting for you outside," she said.

He nodded. There was suddenly a difficulty in his throat. She, too, he'd never see again.

She walked him to the front door. He turned there.

She put her hands to either side of his face and, rising on tiptoe, kissed him on the lips. She was soft and scented and warm.

"Thank you for my life," she said.

He cleared his throat. Found his head spinning, that no words would come. Too much wine. Amusing: a torrent of words, no words at all. She opened the door. He stumbled onto the threshold, under the stars.

"You are right to leave," Kasia said softly. She put a hand on his chest and gave him a little push. "Go home and have children, my dear."

And then she closed the door before he could say anything at all in reply to something so astonishing.

It was astonishing. There were people in the world who could-and would-say such a thing to him.

One person, at least.

"Let's walk for a little," he said to the other two when he caught up to them, waiting under a wall lamp.

Both were taciturn men, not intrusive at all. They left him to his thoughts, kept their own, as they paced through the streets and squares, offering their presence as security and companionship. The Urban Prefect's guards were about, the taverns and cauponae open again, though the City was still formally in mourning. That meant the theatres were closed and the chariots wouldn't run, but Sarantium was alive now in the springtime dark with smells and sounds and movements into and out of lantern-light.

A pair of women called to the three of them from a doorway. Crispin saw a flame flicker in the lane beyond, one of those he'd had to grow accustomed to, appearing without source, disappearing as soon as seen. The half-world.

He led the others down towards the harbour. The fleet had gone, leaving only the usual naval complement, with the merchant vessels and fishing boats. A rougher neighbourhood, waterfronts always were. The other two, in stride a little behind him, came nearer. Three big men were unlikely to be disturbed, even here.

Crispin felt almost clear-headed now. He made a decision, and he was to keep it: rising the next morning, eating a meal without wine, taking a trip to the baths, having a shave there (a habit by now, he'd break it at sea).

So many farewells, he was thinking, Kasia's words still with him, walking with two friends by the harbour at night. Some goodbyes not yet properly done, some never to be done.

His work not done, never to be done.

It will all come down.

As he walked he found himself continually looking into doorways and down alleys. When the women called to him, offering themselves with promises of delight and forgetting, he turned and looked at them before moving on.

They reached the water. Stopped, listening to the creak of ships and the waves slapping the planks of the piers. Masts moved, the moons appearing to swing from one side of them to another, rocking. There were islands out there, Crispin thought, looking at the sea, with strands of stony beach that would be silver, or blue-tinted in the moonlight beyond the dark.

He turned away. They went on, climbing back up the lanes leading from the water, his companions offering silence as a kind of grace. He was leaving. Sarantium was leaving him.

A pair of women walked by. One stopped and called to them. Crispin stopped as well, looked at her, turned away.

She could change her voice, he knew, sound like anyone at all. Probably look like anyone. Artifice of the stage. If she was alive. He had a fantasy, he admitted finally to himself: he was walking in the darkness of the City, thinking that if she was still here, if she saw him, she might call to him, to say farewell.

It was time to go to bed. They walked back. A servant sleepily admitted them. He said goodnight to the others. They went to their rooms. He went up to his. Shirin was waiting there.

Some goodbyes, not yet properly done.

He closed the door behind him. She was sitting on the bed, one leg neatly crossed over the other. Images begetting images. No dagger this time. Not the same woman.

She said, "It is very late. Are you sober?"

"Tolerably; he said. "We took a long walk."

"Carullus?"

He shook his head. "We pretty much carried him home to Kasia."

Shirin smiled a little. "He doesn't know what to celebrate, what to mourn."

"That's about right," he said. "How did you get in?"

She arched her eyebrows. "My litter's waiting across the road. Didn't you see it? How did I get in? I knocked at the door. One of your servants opened it. I told them we hadn't yet said goodbye and could I wait for you to return. They let me come up." She gestured, he saw the glass of wine at her elbow. "They have been attentive. How do most of your visitors get in? What did you think, that I climbed through a window to seduce you in your sleep?"

"I'm not so lucky a man," he murmured. He took the chair by the window. He felt a need to sit down.

She made a face. "Men are better awake, most of the time," she said. "Though I could make a case the other way, for some of those who send me gifts."

Crispin managed a smile. Danis was on her thong about Shirin's neck. They'd both come. Difficult. Everything was difficult these last days.

He couldn't really say why this encounter was, however, and that was a part of the problem, in itself.

"Pertennius being troublesome again?" he asked.

"No. He's with the army. You should know that."

"I'm not paying attention to everyone's movements. Do forgive me." His voice was sharper than he'd meant it to be.

She glared at him.

'She says she feels like killing you," Danis spoke for the first time.

"Say it yourself," Crispin snapped. "Don't hide behind the bird."

"I am not hiding. Unlike some people. It isn't… polite to say such things aloud."

He laughed, against his will. Protocols of the half-world.

Reluctantly, she smiled as well.

There was a small silence. He breathed her scent in his room. Two women in the world wore this perfume. One now, more likely, the other was dead, or hiding still.

"I don't want you to go," Shirin said.

He looked at her without speaking. She lifted her small chin. Her features, he had long ago decided, were appealing but not arresting in repose. It was in the expressiveness of her, in laughter, pain, anger, sorrow, fear-any and all of those-that Shirin's face came alive, her beauty compelled attention and awareness and gave birth to desire. That, and when she moved, the dancer's grace, suppleness, unspoken hint that physical needs scarcely admitted could be assuaged. She was a creature never to be fully captured in an art that did not move.

He said, "Shirin, I cannot stay. Not now. You know what has happened. You called me a liar and an idiot for trying to make… less of it, when last we spoke."

"Danis called you an idiot," she corrected, and then was silent again. Her turn to glare at him.

And after a long moment, Crispin said, bringing the thought into words, ! cannot ask you to come with me, my dear."

The chin lifted a little more. Not a word spoken. Waiting.

"I… have thought of it," he murmured.

"Good," said Shirin.

"I don't even know if I'll stay in Varena, what I'll do."

"Ah. The wanderer's hard life. Nothing a woman could share."

"Not… this woman," he said. He was entirely sober now. "You are just about the second empress of Sarantium, my dear. They need you desperately, the new rulers. They'll want continuity, the people diverted. You can expect to be showered with even more than you have now."

"And ordered to marry the Emperor's secretary?"

He blinked. "I doubt it," he said.

"Oh. Do you? You know all about the court here, I see." She glared at him again. "Why not stay, then? They'll geld you and make you Chancellor when Gesius dies."

He looked at her. Said, after a moment, "Shirin, be truthful. Do you honestly fear they'll force you to marry someone-anyone-right now?"

A silence.

'That isn't the point," Danis said.

Then she shouldn't have mentioned it, he thought, but did not say. Didn't say it, because something was twisting in his own heart as he looked at her. Zoticus's daughter, as brave as her father, in her own way.

He said, "Did you… did Martmian sell your father's farm for you?"

She shook her head. "I didn't ask him to. Forgot to mention that to you. I asked him to find a tenant, to keep it going. He did. He's written me a few letters. Told me a lot about you, actually."

Crispin blinked again. "I see. Another thing you forgot to mention to me?"

"I suppose we simply haven't talked enough." She smiled.

"So there," said Danis.

Crispin sighed. "That feels true, at least."

"I'm pleased you agree." She sipped her wine.

He looked at her. "You are angry. I know. What must I do? Do you want me to take you to bed, my dear?"

"To help with my anger? No thank you."

"To help with this sorrow," he said.

She was silent.

'She says to say she wishes you had never come here," Danis said.

"I'm lying, of course," Shirin added aloud.

"I know," Crispin said. "Do you want me to ask you to come west?"

She looked at him.

'Do you want me to come west?"

"Sometimes I do, yes," he admitted, to himself as much as to her. It was a relief to say it.

He saw her take a breath. "Well, that's a start," she murmured. "Helps with the anger, too. You might be able to take me to bed for other reasons now."

He laughed. "Oh, my dear," he said. "Don't you think I-"

"I know. Don't. Don't say it. You couldn't think about… any of this when you came, for reasons I know. And now you can't for… new reasons, that I also know. What do you want to ask of me, then?"

She wore a soft cap of dark green, a ruby in it. Her cloak lay beside her on the bed. Her gown was silk, green as the cap, with gold. Her earrings were gold and rings flashed on her fingers. He thought, looking at her, claiming this image, that he'd never be gifted enough at his craft to capture how she appeared just then, even sitting still as she was.

Speaking carefully, he said, "Don't… sell the farmhouse yet. Perhaps you'll need to… visit your property in the western province. If it becomes a province."

"It will. The Empress Gisel, I have decided, knows what she wants and how to get it."

His own thought, actually. He didn't say it. The Empress wasn't the point just now. He discovered that his heart was beating rapidly. He said, "You might even… invest there, depending how events unfold? Martinian's shrewd about such things, if you want advice."

She smiled at him. "Depending how events unfold?"

"Gisel's… arrangements."

"Gisel's," she murmured. And waited again.

He took a breath. A mistake, perhaps; her scent was inescapably present. "Shirin, there is no way you should leave Sarantium and you know it."

"Yes?" she said, encouragingly.

"But let me go home and find out what I… well, let me… Ah, well if you do marry someone here, by choice, I'd be…Jad's blood, woman, what do you want me to say?"

She stood up. Smiled. He felt helpless before the layers of meaning in that smile.

"You just did," she murmured. And bending before he could rise, she kissed him chastely on the cheek. "Goodbye, Crispin. A safe voyage. I'll expect you to write me soon. About properties, perhaps? That sort of thing."

That sort of thing.

He stood up. Cleared his throat. A woman desirable as moonlight when the night was dark.

"You, um, you kissed me better the first time we met."

"I know," she said sweetly. "Might have been a mistake."

And she smiled again and went to the door and opened it herself and went out. He stood rooted to the spot.

"Go to bed," said Danis. 'We'll have the servants let us out, A good journey, she says to say.

'Thank you" he sent, before remembering they couldn't make out his thoughts. He wished, suddenly, he could make out his own.

He didn't go to bed. There would have been no point. Stayed awake a long time, sitting in a chair by the window. Saw her wineglass and the flask on a tray but didn't take them, didn't drink. He'd made himself a promise about that, earlier tonight, in the street.

He was grateful for clear-headedness in the morning. A message- more than half expected-was waiting for him when he came down the stairs, delivered at sunrise. He ate, went to chapel on impulse, with Vargos and Pardos, then to the baths, had himself shaved, paid some visits in the Blues" compound and elsewhere. Was aware, as the day progressed, of the movement of the sun overhead. This day, this night, one more, then gone.

Some goodbyes not yet done. One more coming at darkfall.

In the palace.

"I had considered a flour sack," said the Empress of Sarantium, "for memory's sake."

"I am grateful, my lady, that you left it as a thought."

Gisel smiled. She had risen from a small desk, where she'd been opening sealed correspondence and reports with a small knife. Leontes was north and east with the army, but the Empire was still to be run, guided through changes. She and Gesius, he thought, would be doing so.

She crossed the room, took another seat. She was still holding the small paper knife. It had an ivory handle, carved in the shape of a face, he saw. She noticed his gaze. Smiled. "My father gave me this when I was very young. The face is his, actually. It comes off, if you twist." She did so. Held the ivory in one hand, the suddenly hiltless blade in the other. "I wore this against my skin when I boarded ship to sail here, had it hidden when we landed."

He looked at her.

"I didn't know, you see, what they intended to do with me. At the… very last, sometimes, we can only control how we end."

Crispin cleared his throat, looked around the room. They were almost alone, one woman servant with them here in the Traversite Palace, Gisel's rooms, that had been Alixana's. She hadn't had time to change them yet. Other priorities. The rose was gone, he saw.

Alixana had wanted dolphins here. Had taken him to see them in the straits.

Gesius the Chancellor, smiling and benign, had been waiting to escort him to Gisel himself when Crispin presented himself at the Bronze Gates. Had done so, and withdrawn. There was no hidden meaning to this after-dark invitation, Crispin realized: they worked late in the Imperial Precinct, especially in wartime and with a diplomatic campaign already unfolding for Batiara. He'd been invited to see the Empress when she had a moment to grant him in a crowded day. A countryman sailing home, bidding farewell. There was no secrecy now, no abduction in the dark, no private message that could kill him if revealed.

That was past. He had journeyed here, she had journeyed even farther. He was going back. He wondered what he'd find in Varena, in the place where wagers on her life had been drunkenly made in taverns for a year.

Men had won those wagers, lost them. And those of the Antae lords who had sought to murder her and rule in her stead… what would become of them now?

"If you'd been a little quicker in your planning," Gisel said, "you might have taken an Imperial ship. It left two days ago, with my messages for Eudric and Kerdas."

He looked at her. Again the eerie sense that this woman could read his thoughts. He wondered if she was like that with everyone. Wondered how any man could have been foolish enough to wager against her. She had glanced away just now, was gesturing to her woman to bring him wine. It was carried across the room on a golden tray inlaid with precious stones around the rim. The riches of Sarantium, the unimaginable wealth here. He poured for himself, added water.

"A careful man, I see," said the Empress Gisel. She smiled, deliberately.

He remembered these words as well. She'd said the same thing the first time, in Varena. There was such an odd sense to this night encounter. The distance travelled, in half a year.

He shook his head. "I feel I need my wits about me."

"Don't you, usually?"

He shrugged. "I was thinking about the usurpers myself. What is to happen? Or may one ask, Majesty?"

It mattered, of course. He was going back, his mother was there, his house, his friends.

"It depends on them. On Eudric, mostly. I have formally invited him to become Governor of the new Sarantine province of Batiara, in the name of the Emperor Valerius III."

Crispin stared, then collected himself and looked down. This was an Empress. One didn't gape at her like a fish.

"You would reward the man who…"

"Tried to kill me?"

He nodded.

She smiled. "Which of the Antae nobility did not wish me dead last year, Caius Crispus? They all did. Even the Rhodians knew that. What man might I choose if I eliminated all of those? Best to empower the one who won, is it not? An indication of capability. And he will live… in some fear, I believe."

He found himself staring again. Couldn't help himself. She was twenty years old, he guessed, perhaps not even that. As calculating and precise as a… as a monarch. Hildric's daughter. They lived, these people, in a different world. Valerius had been like this, he thought suddenly.

He was thinking very quickly, actually. "And the Patriarch in Rhodias?"

"Good for you," said the Empress. "He has messages of his own, arriving on the same ship. The schisms of Jad are to be resolved if he agrees. The Eastern Patriarch will accept his preeminence again."

"In exchange for…?"

"Pronouncements supporting the reunion of the Empire, Sarantium as the Imperial Seat, and endorsement of a number of specific matters of doctrine, as proposed by the Emperor."

It was all so neat, unfolding at such speed.

And his anger was hard to check. "Such matters to include the representation of Jad in chapels and sanctuaries, of course."

"Of course," she murmured, unruffled. "It matters a great deal to the Emperor, that one."

"I know," he said.

"I know that you know," she replied.

There was a silence.

"I expect questions of government to be sorted through more easily than issues of faith. I have told Leontes as much."

Crispin said nothing.

After a moment she added, "I was in the Great Sanctuary again this morning. I took that passageway you showed me. I wanted to see the work on the dome again."

"Before they start scraping it off, you mean?"

"Yes," she said, undisturbed. "Before that. I told you when we passed through at night-I have a clearer understanding, now, of matters we discussed at our first meeting."

He waited.

"You lamented your tools. Remember? I told you they were the best we had. That there had been a plague and a war."

"I remember."

Gisel smiled a little. "What I told you was the truth. What you told me was more true: I have seen what can be done by a master with proper equipment to deploy. Working on my father's chapel, I had you hampered like a strategos on a battlefield with only farmers and labourers to command."

His father had been like that. Had died like that.

"With deference, my lady, I am uneasy with the comparison."

"I know," she said. "Think about it later, however. I was pleased with it myself, when it came to me this morning."

She was being entirely gracious, complimenting him, granting a private audience merely to bid him farewell. He had no cause at all to be surly here. Gisel's rise to this throne might save his homeland and hers from destruction.

He nodded. Rubbed at his smooth chin. "I shall have leisure to do so, I imagine, on board ship, Majesty."

"Tomorrow?" she asked.

"The next day after."

He was to realize later (leisure on board ship) that she had known this, had been guiding a conversation.

"Ah. So you are still resolving business affairs."

"Yes, Majesty. Though I believe I am done."

"You have been paid all outstanding sums? We would want that properly dealt with."

"I have, my lady. The Chancellor was good enough to attend to that himself."

She looked at him. "He owes you his life. We are… also aware of our debt to you, of course."

He shook his head. "You were my queen. Are my queen. I did nothing that-"

"You did what was needful for us, at personal risk, twice." She hesitated. "I shall not dwell over-long on the other matter-" He was aware she had switched to the personal voice. "But I am still of the west, and take pride in what we can show them here. It is a regret for me that… circumstances have required the undoing of your work here."

He lowered his eyes. What was there to say? It was a death.

"It has also occurred to me, with what else I have learned these past days, that there is one more person you might desire to see before you sail."

Crispin looked up.

Gisel of the Antae, Gisel of Sarantium, gazed back at him with those blue eyes.

"She can't see you, however," she said.

There were dolphins again. He'd wondered if he would see them, and was aware that there was something mortally foolish and vain in that doubting: as if the creatures of the sea would appear or not appear in consequence of whatever men and women did in cities, on the land.

Looked at another way (though it was a heresy), there were a great many souls to be carried these days, in and about Sarantium.

He was on a small, sleek Imperial craft, passage gained merely by showing Gisel's slim dagger with the image of her father in ivory for a handle. A gift, she'd declared it, handing it to him, a way to remember her. Though she'd also said she expected to be in Varena before too many years had passed. If all fell out as it should, there would be ceremonies in Rhodias.

A note had gone before him, alerting the crew that the one bearing the image of the Empress's father could sail to a place otherwise forbidden.

He had been there before.

Styliane was not in the prison cells under the palaces. Someone with a keener sense of irony and punishment-Gesius, most likely, who had lived through so much violence in his days, and survived all of it-had chosen a different place for her to live out the life the new Emperor had granted her, as a mercy to one he had wed and a sign to the people of his benevolence.

And one really didn't have to look further than Leontes on the Golden Throne and Styliane on the isle, Crispin thought, watching the dolphins beside the ship again, to find a sufficiency of ironies.

They docked, were tied, a plank was run out and down for him. The only visitor, only person disembarking here.

Memories and images. He looked, almost against his will, and saw where Alixana had dropped her cloak on the stones and walked away. He'd been dreaming of that place, moonlit.

Two Excubitors met the ship. One of those on board came down the plank and spoke quietly to them. They led him, wordlessly, along the path through the trees. Birds were singing. The sun slanted through the leafy canopy.

They came to the clearing where men had died on the day Valerius was killed. No one spoke. Crispin became aware, try as he might to quell it, that his principal feeling was dread.

He wished he hadn't come. Couldn't have said with any certainty why he had. His escorts stopped, one of them gestured towards the largest of the houses here. He didn't need the indication.

The same house in which her brother had been. Of course.

A difference, however. Windows open on all sides, barred, but unshuttered, to let in the morning light. He wondered. Went forward. There were guards here. Three of them. They looked past him at his escorts and evidently received some signal. Crispin didn't look back to see. The door was unlocked by one of them.

No words, at all. He wondered if they'd been forbidden to talk, to avoid any chance of being seduced, corrupted. He walked in. The door closed behind him. He heard the key turn. They were taking no chances at all. They would know what this prisoner had done.

This prisoner sat quietly in a chair by the far wall, her profile to him, unmoving. No visible response to the arrival of someone. Crispin looked at her, and dread slipped away, to be replaced by a myriad of other things he couldn't even begin to sort out.

She said, "I told you I am not eating."

She hadn't turned her head, hadn't seen him.

Couldn't see him. Even from where he stood, across the room, Crispin realized that her eyes were gone, gouged out. Black sockets where the brightness he remembered had been. He pictured, fighting it, an underground room, implements, a burning fire, torches, large men with fat, skilled thumbs approaching her.

One more person you might desire to see, Gisel had said.

"I don't blame you at all," he said. "I imagine the food is dreadful."

She started. There was pity in that, that a woman so flawlessly composed, so impossible to disconcert, should be made to react like this, merely by an unexpected voice.

He tried to imagine being blind. Colour and light gone, shadings, hues, the wealth and play of them. Nothing worse in the world. Death better, he thought.

"Rhodian," she said. "Come to see what it is like to bed a blind woman now? Jaded appetites?"

"No," he said, keeping calm. "No appetite at all, like you, it seems. Come to say goodbye. I leave for home tomorrow."

"Finished so soon?" Her tone changed.

She didn't turn her head. They had shorn off almost all her golden hair. With another woman it might have marred her appearance. With Styliane it only revealed the perfection of cheek and bone below the still-bruised and hollowed eye socket. They hadn't marked her, he thought. Only the blinding.

Only the blinding. And this prison on the isle where her brother had lived his days in darkness, burned and burning within, without any light allowed to enter.

And here was, as much as anything, a mark of the nature of the woman, Crispin thought, of her pride: light flooding the room, useless to her, offered only to whoever might enter. Only the silent guards would come, day by day-but there was no hiding for Styliane Daleina, no shielding herself in darkness. If you dealt with her, you had to accept what there was to see. It had always been so.

"You have finished your work already?" she repeated.

"I haven't," he said quietly. Not bitter now. Not here, seeing this. "You warned me, long ago."

"Ah. That. Already? I didn't think it would be…"

"So swift?"

"So swift. He told you it was a heresy, your dome."

"Yes. Did it himself, I'll grant."

She turned to him.

And he saw that they had marked her, after all. The left side of her face was branded with the symbol of a murderer: a crude blade cut into a circle meant to stand for the god's sun. The wound was crusted with blood, her face inflamed around it. She needed a physician, he thought, doubted they'd made arrangements for one. A cheek scarred into ugliness, with fire.

Again, someone with a dark awareness of irony. Or, perhaps, just a person in a locked and soundproof room under the earth, utterly impervious to such things, only following the duly prescribed protocols of justice in the Imperial Precinct of Sarantium.

He must have made a sound. She smiled, an expression he remembered, wry and knowing. It hurt to see it, here. "You are heart-struck by my enduring beauty?"

Crispin swallowed hard. Took a deep breath. "In truth," he said, "I am. I could wish it were not so."

That silenced her a moment.

"That is honest, at least," she said. "I recall that you liked him. Both of them."

"That would have been a presumption for an artisan. I admired him greatly." He paused. "Both of them."

"And Valerius was your patron, of course, surety of all your work. Which will now be lost. Poor Rhodian. Do you hate me?"

"I could wish I did," he said finally. So much light in the room. The breeze cool, fragrant with wood-smells. Birdsong in the trees, all around the clearing. The green-gold leaves. Born now, green in summer, dying in the fall. Do you hate me?

"Is he marching north?" she asked. "Against Bassania?"

A lifetime in the halls and rooms of power. A mind that could not stop working.

"He is."

"And… Gisel is to negotiate with Varena?"

"She is."

Gisel, he thought, was exactly the same in this. They did live in a different world, these people. Same sun and moons and stars, but a different world.

Her mouth twisted wryly again. "I would have done the same, you realize? I told you the night we first spoke that there were those of us who thought the invasion misguided."

"Alixana was one of them," he said.

She ignored that, effortlessly.

"He had to be killed before the fleet sailed. If you stop to think, you will see it. Leontes had to be in the City. He wouldn't have turned back, once he'd sailed."

"How unfortunate. So Valerius had to die, that Leontes-and you- could rule?"

"I… thought that was it, yes."

He opened his mouth, closed it. "You thought?

Her mouth twisted again. She winced this time, brought a hand up towards her wounded face, then put it down without touching. "After the tunnel, it didn't seem important any more."

"I don't…"

"I could have killed him years ago. A foolish girl, I was. I thought the thing to do was take power, the way my father ought to have been given power. Leontes ruling, but only needing his soldiers" love and his piety to be content, my brothers and I…" She stopped.

I could have killed him years ago.

Crispin looked at her. "You think Valerius killed your father?"

"Oh, Rhodian. I know he did. What I didn't know was that nothing else mattered. I… should have been wiser."

"And killed sooner?"

"I was eight years old," she said. And stopped. The birds were loud outside. "I think my life ended then. In a way. The life I was… headed towards."

The son of Horius Crispus the mason looked at her. "You think this was love, then? What you did?"

"No, I think it was vengeance," she said. And then added, with no warning at all, "Will you kill me, please?"

No warning, except that he could see what they had done and were doing to her, in the guise of mercy. Knew how desperately she would want this to end. There weren't even logs here for a fire. Fire could be used to kill oneself. They would probably force food into her, he thought, if she refused to eat. There were ways of doing that. Leontes intended to demonstrate his generous nature by keeping a murderous woman alive for a time, because she had been his wife in the eyes of Jad.

A pious man, everyone knew it. They might even bring her out at times, on display.

Crispin looked at her. Could not speak.

She said, softly, that the guards would not hear, "You have known me a little, Rhodian. We have… shared some things, however briefly. Will you leave this room and leave me… in this life?"

"I am-"

"Just an artisan, I know. But-"

'No!" He almost shouted. Then he lowered his own voice. "That isn't it. I am… not a man… who kills."

His father's head, flying from his shoulders, blood spurting from the toppling body. Men telling the tale in a tavern in Varena. A boy overhearing them.

"Make an exception," she murmured lightly, but he could hear desperation beneath the cool tone.

He closed his eyes. "Styliane"

She said, "Or see it another way. I died years ago. I told you. You are just… signing a deed already executed."

He looked at her again. She was facing him directly now, eyeless, marred, exquisitely beautiful. "Or punish me for your lost work. Or for Valerius. Or for any reason. But please." She was whispering. "No one else will do it, Crispin."

He looked around. Nothing remotely resembling a weapon in here, guards at all the iron-barred windows and beyond the locked door.

No one else will do it.

And then, belatedly, he remembered how he had gained admission to this isle, and something cried out within him, in his heart, and he wished that he were already gone from here, from Sarantium, for she was wrong. There was someone else who would do it.

He took out the blade and looked at it. At the ivory carving of Hildric of the Antae on the hilt. Fine work, it was.

He didn't know, he really didn't know, if he was being made into an instrument yet again, or was being offered, instead, a dark, particular gift, for services, and with affection, by an Empress who had declared herself in his debt. He didn't know Gisel well enough to judge. It could be either, or both. Or something else entirely.

He did know what the woman before him wanted. Needed. As he looked at her and about this room, he realized that he also knew what was proper, for her soul and his own. Gisel of the Antae, who had carried this blade hidden against her body, sailing here, might also have known, he thought.

Sometimes dying was not the worst thing that could happen. Sometimes it was release, a gift, an offering.

Amid all the turning gyres, all the plots and counterplots and images begetting images, Crispin made them come to a stop, and he accepted the burden of doing so.

He took the ivory handle off the blade, as Gisel had done. He laid the knife down on the table-top, hiltless, so slender it was almost invisible.

Amid the glorious springtime brightness of that room, that day, he said, "I must go. I am leaving you something."

"How kind. A small mosaic, to comfort me in the dark? Another gem-stone to shine for me, like the first you gave?"

He shook his head again. There was a pain in his chest now.

"No," he said. "Not those." And perhaps something in the difficulty with which he spoke alerted her. Even the newly blind began to learn how to listen. She lifted her head a little.

"Where is it?" Styliane asked, very softly.

"The table," he said. He closed his eyes briefly. Towards me, near the far side. Be careful."

Be careful.

He watched her rise, come forward, reach her hands towards the table edge to find it, then move both palms haltingly across-still learning how to do this. He saw when she found the blade, which was sharp and sleek as death could sometimes be.

"Ah," she said. And became very still.

He said nothing.

"You will be blamed for this, of course."

"I am sailing in the morning."

"It would be courteous of me to wait until then, wouldn't it?"

He said nothing to this, either.

"I'm not sure," said Styliane softly, "if I have the patience, you know. They… might search and find it?"

"They might," he said.

She was silent a long time. Then he saw her smile. She said, "I suppose this means you did love me, a little."

He was afraid he would weep.

"I suppose it does," he said quietly.

"How very unexpected," said Styliane Daleina.

He fought for control. Said nothing.

"I wish," she said, "I'd been able to find her. One thing left unfinished. I shouldn't tell you that, I know. Do you think she's dead?"

The heart could cry. "If not, I think she will be, most likely, when she learns… you are."

That gave her pause. "Ah. I can understand that. So this gift you offer kills us both."

A truth. In the way they seemed to see things here.

"I suppose it might," Crispin said. He was looking at her, seeing her now, and as she was before, in the palace, in his room, in her own, her mouth finding his. Whatever else I do…

She had warned him, more than once.

She said, "Poor man. All you wanted to do here was leave your dead behind and make a mosaic overhead."

"I was… overly ambitious," he said. And heard her laugh, in delight, for the last time.

"Thank you for that," she said. For wit. There was a silence. She lifted the sliver of the blade, her fingers as slim, almost as long. "And thank you for this, and for… other things, once." She stood very straight, unbending, no concessions to… anything at all. "A safe journey home, Rhodian."

He was being dismissed, and not even by name at the end. He knew suddenly that she was not going to be able to wait. Her need was a hunger.

He looked at her, in the brightness she'd elected to offer here that all might see clearly where she could not, the way a host forbidden drink by his physician might order forth the very best wine he had for his friends.

"And you, my lady," he said. "A safe journey home to the light."

He knocked on the door. They opened it for him and let him out. He left the room, the glade, the woods, the stony, stony beach, the isle.

In the morning he left Sarantium, on the tide at dawn, when hues and shades of colour were just coming back into the world at the end of the god's long voyage through the dark.

The sun rose behind them, filtered by a line of low clouds. As he stood at the stern of the ship upon which Plautus Bonosus, in kindness amid his own sorrow, had offered him passage, Crispin, with the handful of other passengers, looked back upon the City. Eye of the world, they called it. Glory of Jad's creation.

He saw the bustle and brilliance of the deep, sheltered harbour, the iron pillars that held the chains that could be dropped across the entrance in time of war. He watched small boats cut across their wake, ferries to Deapolis, morning fishermen setting out, others coming back from a night's harvesting on the waves, sails of many colours.

He caught a glimpse, far off, of the triple walls themselves, where they curved down to the water. Saranios himself had drawn the line for these when first he came. He saw the glint of this muted early sunlight on rooftops everywhere, watching the City climb up from the sea, chapel and sanctuary domes, patrician homes, guild-house roofs bronzed in ostentatious display. He saw the vast bulk of the Hippodrome where men raced horses.

And then, as they swept from a south-west course more towards the west, clearing the harbour, reaching the swells of the open sea where their own white sails billowed, Crispin saw the Imperial Precinct gardens and playing fields and palaces, and they filled his sight, all of his gaze, as he was carried past them and away.

West they went, on a dawn wind and tide, the mariners calling to each other, orders shouted in the brightening, the zest of something beginning. A long journey. He looked back still, as did the other passengers, all of them caught, held at the stern rail as if in a spell. But at the end, as they drew farther and farther off, Crispin was looking at one thing only, and the very last thing he saw, far distant, almost on the horizon but gleaming above all else, was Artibasos's dome.

Then the rising sun finally burst above those low clouds east, appearing right behind the distant City, dazzlingly bright, and he had to shield his eyes, avert his gaze, and when he looked back again, blinking, Sarantium was gone, it had left him, and there was only the sea.