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

CHAPTER V

The first thing Gisel came to understand, as she and the Strategos and his exquisitely haughty wife entered the presence of the Emperor and Empress of Sarantium, was that they were expected. She was not supposed to realize that, she knew. They wanted her to believe that Leontes's impulsive action in inviting her had taken Valerius and Alixana by surprise here. She was to labour under this misapprehension, feel emboldened, make mistakes. But she had lived in a court all her life and whatever these arrogant easterners might believe about the Antae in Batiara, there were as many similarities as there were differences between her own palace complex in Varena and the Imperial Precinct here.

Weighing alternatives quickly as the musician lowered his instrument and the Emperor and a very small gathering of companions turned to her, Gisel elected to offer a full, formal salutation, brushing the floor with her forehead. Valerius-smooth-cheeked, bland, genial of expression- looked at Leontes and then back to Gisel as she rose. His mouth curved in a hesitant welcome. Alixana, in a low-backed ivory chair, dressed in deep red and adorned with jewellery, offered an entirely gracious smile.

And it was the ease of this on both their parts, the effortless deception done together, that made Gisel suddenly afraid, as if the walls of this warm room had given way to reveal the vast, cold sea beyond.

She had sent an artisan here half a year ago with an offer of marriage for this man. The woman, the Empress, knew of it. The artisan had told her about that. They had both anticipated-or deduced it- Caius Crispus said, before he had even spoken with them. She believed him. Seeing them now, the Emperor feigning surprise, Alixana offering the illusion of full welcome, she believed him implicitly.

"Forgive us, thrice-exalted, this unplanned intrusion," said Leontes briskly. "It is royalty I bring you, the queen of the Antae. It is past time, in my view, she was here among us. I will accept any fault attached to this."

His manner was blunt and direct. No trace of the suave, courtly pacing and tone he'd revealed in the dancer's home. But he had to know this was no surprise, didn't he? Or was she wrong about that? Gisel stole a quick glance at Styliane Daleina: nothing to be read in those features.

The Emperor gestured in a distracted way, and servants hastened to offer seats to the two women. Styliane smiled a little to herself, holding a private amusement close, as she crossed the room and accepted a cup of wine and a chair.

Gisel also sat down. She was looking at the Empress. Doing so, she felt a faint but very real horror at her own folly of the year before. She had proposed that this woman-old, childless, surely worn out and tiresome by now-might be expendable.

Folly was not, really, an adequate word. Alixana of Sarantium, polished and smooth as a pearl, glittered with light where it reflected from her jewels and found her dark eyes. There was amusement there too, but of a very different sort from what could be seen in the Strategos's wife.

"No intrusion, Leontes," she murmured now, speaking first. Her voice was low, honeyed, calm. "You honour us, of course, all three of you. You have come from a wedding, I see. Will you take wine and share some further music here and then tell us about it?"

"Please," said Valerius II earnestly, Emperor of half the world. "Regard yourselves as invited and honoured guests!"

They were perfect, the two of them. Gisel made her decision.

Ignoring an offered cup, she rose smoothly from her seat, clasped her hinds before her and murmured, "The Emperor and Empress are far too good. They even allow me the flattering illusion that this visit was unanticipated. As if anything that transpires in great Sarantium could possibly pass unnoticed by their all-seeing eyes. I am deeply grateful for this courtesy."

She saw the thin, aged Chancellor Gesius look suddenly thoughtful where he sat warming himself near the fire. There were only five other quests here, all superbly dressed and barbered men, and the balding, plump musician. Leontes looked irate suddenly, even though he'd surely have had to be the one who'd warned Valerius they were coming. Styliane was smiling again, behind her wine cup and her rings.

Valerius and Alixana laughed aloud. Both of them.

"And so we learn our lesson," the Emperor said, a hand rubbing at his soft chin. "Like impish children caught out by their tutor. Rhodias is older than Sarantium, the west came long before the east, and the queen of the Antae, who was daughter to a king before she ruled in her own name, was always likely to be aware of courtly practices."

"You are clever and beautiful, child," said Alixana. "A daughter such as I might wish to have had."

Gisel drew a breath. There could not possibly be anything sincere in this, but the woman had just casually drawn attention to their ages, her own childlessness, Gisel's appearance.

"Daughters are seldom in demand at a court," she murmured, thinking as quickly as she could. "We are only tools for marriage most of the time. A complication in other ways, unless there are also sons to smooth a succession." If Alixana could be direct, so could she. There was an undeniable ripple of excitement within her: she had been here almost half a year, doing nothing, suspended like an insect in Trakesian amber. What she did now might end in death, but she realized she was prepared to court that.

This time it was Gesius who smiled briefly, she saw. She was conscious of his measuring gaze upon her.

"We are aware, of course, of your difficulties at home," said Valerius. "Indeed, we have spent a winter pondering ways of addressing them."

There was little point, really, in not responding to this, either.

"We have spent a winter," Gisel murmured, "doing the same thing. It might have been appropriate to do so together? We did accept an invitation to come here in order to do that."

"Indeed? Is that so? It is my understanding," said a man dressed in figured silk of a deep green, "that our invitation and an Imperial ship were what saved your life, queen of the Antae." His tone, eastern, patrician, was just barely acceptable in this company. The Master of Offices paused, then added, "You do have a savage history in your tribe, after all."

This she would not countenance. East and the fallen west again? The glorious Sarantine heirs of Rhodias, the primitive barbarians from the northern forests? Not still, not here. Gisel turned her gaze to him.

"Somewhat," she said coldly. "We are a warlike, conquering people. Of course succession here in Sarantium always proceeds in a more orderly fashion. No deaths ever attend upon a change of Emperors, do they?"

She knew what she was saying. There was a little silence. Gisel became aware that glances were being cast-quickly, and then away-towards Styliane Daleina, who had seated herself behind the Empress. She made a point of not looking that way.

The Chancellor gave a dry cough behind his hand. Another of the seated men glanced quickly at him and then gestured briefly. The musician, with alacrity and evident relief, made a hasty obeisance and left the room with his instrument. No one paid him the least attention. Gisel was still glaring at the Master of Offices.

The Emperor said, in a thoughtful voice, "The queen is correct, of course, Faustinus. Indeed, even my uncle's ascension was accompanied by some violence. Styliane's own dear father was killed."

So much cleverness here. This was not a man, Gisel thought, to allow a nuance to slip by, if he could make it his own. She understood this, as it happened: her father had been much the same. It gave her some confidence, though her heart was racing. These were dangerous, subtle people, but she was the daughter of one herself. Perhaps she was one herself? They could kill her, and they might, but they could not strip her of pride and all legacies. She was aware of a bitter irony, however: she was defending her people against an allegation that they were murderous, barbaric, when she herself had been the intended victim of an assassination- in a holy, consecrated place.

"Times of change are seldom without their casualties," said the Chancellor softly, his first words. His voice was thin as paper, very clear.

"The same must be said of war," said Gisel, her tone blunt. She would not let this become an evening discussion of philosophers. She had sailed here for a reason, and it was not merely to save her life, whatever anyone might think or say. Leontes was looking at her, his expression betraying surprise.

"Truly so," said Alixana, nodding her head slowly. "One man burns and dies or thousands upon thousands do. We make our choices, don't we?"

One man bums and dies. Gisel looked quickly at Styliane this time. Nothing to be seen. She knew the story, everyone did. Sarantine Fire in a morning street.

Valerius was shaking his head. "Choices, yes, my love, but they are not arbitrary ones if we are honourable. We serve the god, as we understand him."

"Indeed, my lord," said Leontes crisply, as if trying to draw a sword through the seductive softness of the Empress's voice. "A war in the name of holy Jad is not as other wars." He glanced at Gisel again. "Nor can it be said that the Antae are unfamiliar with invasions."

Of course they weren't. She'd implied as much herself. Her people had conquered the Batiaran peninsula, sacking Rhodias, burning it. Which made it difficult to argue against the idea of an invading army, or ask for mercy. She wasn't doing that. She was trying to steer this towards a truth she knew: if they invaded-and even if this tall, golden general succeeded in the beginning-they would not hold. They would never hold against the Antae, with the Inicii on the borders and Bassania creating another war front as it grasped the implications of a reunited Empire. No, the reclaiming of Rhodias could happen in only one way. And she, in her youth, in her person, a life that could end with a cup of poisoned wine or a silent, secret blade, was that way.

She had such a narrow, twisting path to try to walk here. Leontes, the handsome, pious soldier gazing at her now, was the one who would bring ruin to her country if the Emperor gave him word. In the name of holy Jad, he'd said. Did that make the dead less dead? She could ask them that, but it wasn't the question that mattered now.

"Why have you not spoken with me before?" she said, fighting a sudden, rising panic, looking at Valerius again, the calm, soft-faced man she had invited to marry her. She still had difficulty meeting the gaze of the Empress, though Alixana-of all of them-had been the most welcoming. Nothing here could be taken for what it seemed to be, she kept telling herself. If there was any truth to cling to, it was that.

"We were in negotiation with the usurpers, "Valerius said with brutal frankness. He uses directness as a tool, she thought.

"Ah," she said, hiding discomfiture as best she could. "Were you? How very… prudent."

Valerius shrugged. "An obvious course. It was winter. No armies travel, but couriers do. Foolish not to learn as much as we could about them. And they would have known if we had received you formally here, of course. So we didn't. We did have you watched, guarded against assassination all winter. You must be aware of that. They have spies here-just as you did."

She ignored that last. "They wouldn't have known if we had met like this," she said. Her heart was still pounding.

"We assumed," said the Empress gently, "that you would refuse to be received in any way but as a visiting queen. Which was-and is-your right."

Gisel shook her head. "Should I insist on ceremony when people die?"

"We all do that," said Valerius. "It is all we have at such times, isn't it? Ceremony?"

Gisel looked at him. Their eyes met. She thought suddenly of the cheiromancers and the weary clerics and an old alchemist in a graveyard outside the city walls. Rituals and prayers, when they raised the mound of the dead.

"You should know," the Emperor went on, his voice still mild, "that Eudric in Varena, who calls himself regent now, by the way, has offered an oath of fealty to us and-something new-to begin paying a formal tribute, twice annually. In addition, he has invited us to place advisers in his court, both religious and military."

Details, a great many of them. Gisel closed her eyes. You should know. She hadn't, of course. She was half a world away from her throne and had spent a winter waiting to be seen here in the palace, to have a role to play, to justify her flight. Eudric had won, then. She had always thought he would.

"His conditions," the Emperor continued, "were the predictable ones: that we recognize him as king, and accomplish a single death."

She opened her eyes and looked at him again, unflinching. This was familiar territory, easier for her than they might guess. There had been wagers back home that she would die before winter. They had tried to kill her in the sanctuary. Two people she loved had been slain there, for her.

She was her father's daughter. Gisel lifted her chin and said hardily, "Indeed, my lord Emperor? Sarantine Fire? Or just a knife in the night for me? A small price to pay for such resounding glory, isn't it? A fealty oath! Tribute, advisers? Religious and military? Great Jad be praised! The poets will sing and the years resound with the splendour of it. How could you refuse such glory?"

A rigid silence followed. Valerius's expression changed, only a little, but watching the grey eyes Gisel understood how people might fear this man. She could hear the crackle of the fire in the stillness.

It was Alixana, predictably, who dared speak. "You are bested, love," she said lightly. "She is too clever for you. Now I understand why you won't cast me aside to marry her, or even properly receive her at court."

Someone made a choking sound. Gisel swallowed, hard.

Valerius turned to his wife.

He said nothing, but his expression changed yet again, became odd now, strangely intimate. And a moment later it was Alixana who coloured a little and then looked down.

"I see," she said quietly. "I hadn't actually thought…" She cleared her throat, fingered the necklace she wore. "That wasn't… necessary," she murmured, still looking down. "I am not so fragile as that. My lord."

Gisel had no idea what this meant, suspected no one else did. An intensely private exchange in a public space. She looked from one to the other again and then-quite suddenly-she did understand. Was sure of it.

Things were not what she had taken them to be.

She hadn't been invited to the Imperial Precinct before tonight, not because of negotiations with the usurpers in Varena or any rigidities of protocol, but because the Emperor Valerius was shielding his wife from Gisel's youthful presence and what-in purely formal terms-it meant, or could mean.

They all knew there was a way to simplify this reconquest of the Empire s homeland. She wasn't the only one who had seen it, sending an artisan on the long journey here with a private message. The logic, the sense, of a marriage was overwhelming. And the husband had been overriding the Emperor. Amazingly.

Which meant, if she was right in this sudden line of thought, that she had been admitted here now, tonight, only because… because a different decision had now been made.

Spring was coming. Was here, in fact. She took a breath.

"You are invading us, aren't you?" she said flatly.

Valerius of Sarantium turned from his wife to look at Gisel. His expression grave as a cleric's again, thoughtful as an academician, he said simply, "Yes, in fact, we are. In your name and the god's. I trust you will approve?"

He wasn't really asking, of course. He was telling her. And not just her. Gisel heard, almost felt a ripple pass through the small, luxurious room as men shifted where they stood or sat. The Strategos's nostrils actually flared, like a racehorse's hearing the trumpet. He had surmised, anticipated, but had not known. Until now. She understood. This was the moment of telling that Valerius had just chosen, moving with the moment, the mood, her own arrival here. Or perhaps this entire evening of music among intimates on the trembling brink of springtime had been arranged to achieve this instant, with none of the others knowing, not even his wife. A man who pulled hidden strings, made others dance for his needs, or die.

She looked at Alixana and found the other woman's steady gaze waiting for hers. Gisel, gazing into those depths, imagining what those dark eves could do to a man or a certain kind of woman, understood something else, entirely unexpected: improbable as it was, she had an ally here, someone else who also wanted to find a way to guide them all around this invasion and what it portended. Not that it seemed to matter.

"The Emperor is to be congratulated," a third woman's voice interjected, Styliane's tone cool as the night wind outside. "It seems his taxation officers have been more diligent than rumour suggests. It is a miracle of the god and his regent upon earth that adequate funds for an invasion are in the treasury after all."

The ensuing pause was brittle. Styliane, Gisel thought, had to have extraordinary confidence in her situation to speak in this way, in this company. But she would, wouldn't she? By birth and marriage-and disposition.

Valerius turned to look at her and his expression, remarkably, was amused again. "An Emperor receives the aid he deserves, Saranios once said. I don't know what that suggests about me and my servants, but there are ways of funding a war. We've decided to rescind pay for the eastern army this year. No point bribing Bassania for a peace and paying soldiers to keep it."

Leontes looked startled. He cleared his throat. "This has been decided, my lord?" He had obviously not been consulted.

"A fiscal matter, Strategos. I do wish to meet with you tomorrow to discuss the possibility of offering the soldiers land in the east to settle. We have discussed this in the past, and the Chancellor has now proposed we do it."

Leontes was too experienced to further betray his surprise. "Of course, my lord. I will be here at sunrise. Though I regret that I have been made a liar over something I said this afternoon at the wedding. I promoted the bridegroom and posted him east. Now he loses not only his promised increase in salary but all his income."

Valerius shrugged. "Re-post him. Take the fellow west with you. A small matter, surely."

Leontes shook his head. "I suppose it is. But I never take newly married men to a campaign."

"Commendable, Leontes," said the Empress. "But I'm sure you can make exceptions."

"Bad for an army, exalted lady."

"So is obduracy, surely," said his own wife, from her seat near the Empress. She set down her wine cup. "My dear, really. You obviously think the fellow is competent. Appoint him to your private staff, pay him yourself as you pay the others, post him east to Eubulus as your observer for a year-or until you think it is all right for him to be called west and killed in war."

The crisp precision of this in a woman, Gisel thought, looking from face to face to face, must surely be galling to the men assembled. Then she reconsidered, looking at the Empress. They might be accustomed to such things here-unlike her own court, where a woman speaking with authority could be marked for murder.

On the other hand, Gisel had reigned in Varena, in her own name. Neither of these women did. It mattered. It did represent a difference. And as if to underscore that, Styliane Daleina spoke again. "Forgive me, my lords, this presumption. I was ever too inclined to speak my mind." There was no real contrition in her tone, however.

"A trait of your father's," the Emperor said quietly. "It… need not be a failing."

Need not be, Gisel thought. The room seemed laden and layered with intricacies of past and present and what was to come. Nuances coiling and spreading like incense, subtle and insistent.

Styliane rose and made a graceful obeisance. "Thank you, my lord. I will ask your permission and the Empress's to withdraw. If matters of war and policy are to be discussed, it is proper that I take my leave."

It was, of course. No one spoke to gainsay her. Gisel wondered if she'd expected someone to do so. Her husband? If so, she would be disappointed. Leontes did escort his wife towards the door but turned back to the room as she went out. He looked at the Emperor, and smiled. The two men had known each other, Gisel remembered hearing, from before the day when the first Valerius had been placed upon the throne. Leontes would have been very young then.

"My dear lord," the Strategos said, unable to keep his voice entirely steady, "may I ask that all those here be cautioned that this information is to go no further yet? I can make use of the advantage of time."

"Oh, my dear," said the wife at the Emperor's side, "they will have been preparing for you since long before this child fled her throne. Ask her, if you really need to."

Gisel ignored that, both the child and the fled, and saw that Valerius was looking at her, and she realized belatedly that he was actually waiting for an answer to the question he'd asked of her. I trust you will approve? Formality, a coyrtesy, she thought. Such things mattered to him, it seemed. Worth knowing. He would always be courteous, this man on the Golden Throne. Even as he did exactly what he chose to do and accepted-or courted-any consequences that might fall to others.

"Do I approve?" she repeated. "My lord, of course I do," she lied. "Why else did I sail to Sarantium?"

She sank low in obeisance again, mainly to hide her face now and what was in her eyes. She was seeing the burial mound again, not this elegant, lamplit palace room, was remembering civil war and famine, the festering aftermath of plague, was savagely lamenting the absence of a single living soul she could trust. Wishing, almost, that she had died in Varena, after all, and not lived to hear this question asked of her as she stood utterly alone in a foreign land where her answer-truth or lie- carried no weight or meaning in the world.

"I really do not feel well," said Pertennius of Eubulus, spacing his words with care.

They were in a modest room on the upper floor of the secretary's home. Pertennius lay prostrate on a dark green couch, one hand over his eyes, the other on his stomach. Crispin, at a small window, stood looking down on the empty street. The stars were out, a wind was blowing. There was a fire lit on the hearth. On a desk against the wall between couch and window was an assortment of documents, books, writing implements, papers of different colours and textures.

Scattered among these-Crispin had seen them as soon as he'd entered the room-were his own early sketches for the dome and wall of the Great Sanctuary.

He had wondered how they came to be here, and then remembered that Leontes's secretary was also the official historian of Valerius's building projects. In an unsettling way, Crispin's work was part of his mandate.

Why a bison? Pertennius had said, standing unsteadily in the street outside his door. Why so much of you on the dome?

Both, as it happened, shrewd questions. Crispin, no admirer of the dry-as-dust secretary, had come inside and up the stairs. Challenged, intrigued, both? Probably a waste of time, he realized, glancing over at the recumbent secretary. Pertennius looked genuinely ill. If he'd liked the man more, he might have been sympathetic.

"Too much wine of an afternoon can do that to you," he said mildly. "Especially if one doesn't normally drink."

"I don't," said Pertennius. There was a silence. "She likes you," the secretary added. "More than me."

Crispin turned away from the window. Pertennius had opened his eyes and was looking at Crispin. His gaze and tone were both quite neutral: a historian noting a fact, not a rival making complaint.

Crispin wasn't deceived. Not about this. He shook his head, leaning back against the wall by the window. "Shirin? She likes me, yes, as a link to her father. Not as anything more." He wasn't actually certain that was true, but he thought it was, most of the time. Think of her fingers slipping your tunic up from behind and then sliding back down along your skin. Abruptly, Crispin shook his head again, for a different reason this time. He hesitated, then said, "Shall I tell you what I think?"

Pertennius waited. A listening sort of man, privy to much: in his profession, by his nature. He really didn't look well. Crispin suddenly wished he hadn't come up here. This — wasn't a conversation he wanted to be having. With an inward shrug and a flicker of irritation that he was being placed in this situation-or had placed himself in it-he said, "I think Shirin is tired of being beset by men every time she steps out-of-doors. It makes for a difficult life, though some women might think they want it."

Pertennius nodded slowly, his head heavy on his shoulders. He closed his eyes, struggled to open them again.

"Mortals seek fame," he said sententiously, "unaware of all it means. She needs a… protector. Someone to keep them away."

There was truth to all of this, of course. Crispin decided not to say that a secretary and historian was unlikely to prove sufficient deterrent as an acknowledged lover to achieve that protection. Instead, he murmured, temporizing, "You know there are those who have commissioned love spells from the cheiromancers."

Pertennius made a sour face. "Fob.!" he said. "Magic. It is unholy."

"And it doesn't work," Crispin added.

"You know this?" the other man asked. His eyes were briefly clear.

Aware, suddenly, of a need for caution, Crispin said, "We are taught by the clerics that it doesn't, friend. "Irritated again, he added, "In any case, have you ever seen Shirin wandering the streets before dawn against her will and desire, her hair unbound, compelled to where some man waits in his open doorway?"

"Oh, Jad!" said Pertennius, with feeling. He groaned. Illness and desire, an unholy mix.

Crispin suppressed a smile. Looked out the partly open window again. The air was cool. The street below was empty and silent. He decided to leave, considered asking for an escort. It was not particularly safe to cross the City at night alone and his own house was a distance away.

He said, "You'd do well to get some sleep. We can talk another-"

"Do you know that they worship bison in Sauradia?" said Pertennius abruptly. "It is in Metractes's History of the Rhodian Wars.

Again, Crispin felt a flicker of alarm. His regret at being here grew more intense. "I remember Metractes," he said casually. "I was made to memorize him as a child. Dismally dull."

Pertennius looked offended. "Hardly so, Rhodian! A fine historian. A model for my own histories."

"I beg your pardon," Crispin said quickly. "He is, ah, voluminous, certainly."

"Comprehensive," said Pertennius. He closed his eyes again. The hand came back up to rest over them. "Will this feeling pass?" he asked plaintively.

"In the morning," Crispin said. "With sleep. There is little else to be done for it."

"Am I going to be sick?"

"It is certainly possible," Crispin said. "Do you want to stand by the window?"

"Too far. Tell me about the bison."

Crispin drew a breath. Pertennius's eyes had opened again, were on him. "There is nothing to tell. And everything. How does one explain these things? If words would do, I wouldn't be a mosaicist. It is as the roebuck and the rabbits and the birds and the fish and the foxes and the grain in the fields. I wanted them all on my dome. You have the sketches here, secretary, you can see the design. Jad created the world of animals as well as mortal man. That world lies between walls and walls, west and east, under the hand and eye of the god."

All true, not the truth.

Pertennius made a vague sign of the sun disk. He was visibly struggling to stay awake. "You made it very big."

"They are big," Crispin said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice.

"Ah? You've seen one? And Rhodias is up there too? My dome, you said. Is that pious? Is it… proper in a sanctuary?"

Crispin had his back to the window now, leaning against the ledge. He was about to answer, or try, when he realized there was no need any more. The secretary was asleep on the green couch, still in his sandals and the white garb of a wedding guest.

He took a deep breath, felt an undeniable sense of relief, escape. It was time to go, escort or not, before the other man awoke and asked further questions of this disconcertingly sharp nature. He's harmless, Shirin had said to Crispin on that first day they met. Crispin had disagreed. He still did. He crossed from the window, making for the door. He would send the servant up, to attend to his master.

If he hadn't seen scribbled handwriting across his own sketch on the table, he would have walked out. The temptation was irresistible, however. He paused, glanced quickly again at the sleeping man. Pertennius's mouth had fallen open. Crispin bent over the sketches.

Pertennius-it had to be him-had written a series of cryptic notes all over Crispin's drawings of the dome and wall decorations. The writing was crabbed, almost illegible. These were his notes for himself-not worth bothering with. There was nothing privileged about sketched proposals.

Crispin straightened to go. And as he did his eye fell across another page half-hidden under one of the sketches, written in the same hand, but more carefully, even elegantly, and this time he could read the words.

It was revealed to me by one of the officials of the Master of Offices (a man who cannot here be named for reasons of his life and security) that the Empress, remaining as corrupt as she was in her youth, is known to have certain of the younger Excubitors brought to her in her baths of a morning by her ladies who are, of course, chosen for their own depraved morals. She greets these men wantonly, naked and shameless as when she coupled with animals on the stage, and has the soldiers" clothing stripped from them.

Crispin found that he was having trouble breathing. Very carefully, with another glance at the couch, he shifted the paper a little and read on, in disbelief.

She will have congress with these men, insatiably, sometimes two of them at one time using her like a whore in her own bath while the other women fondle themselves and each other and offer lewd, lascivious encouragement. A virtuous girl from Eubulus, the official told me in great secrecy, was poisoned by the Empress for daring to say that this conduct was impious. Her body has never been found. The unspeakable whore who is now our Empress always has her holy men detained outside the baths in the morning until after the soldiers have been dismissed through a hidden inner door. She then greets the clerics, half-naked, the reek of carnality about her, making a mockery of the morning prayers to holy Jad.

Crispin swallowed hard. He felt a pulse throbbing in his temple. He looked over at the sleeping man. Pertennius was snoring now. He looked ill and grey and helpless. Crispin became aware that his hands were shaking. He released the sheet of paper when it began to rattle in his grasp. He felt rage and fear and-beneath them both like a sounding drum- a growing horror. He thought he might be sick.

He ought to go, he knew. He needed to go from here. But there was a power to this exquisitely phrased vituperation, this venom, that caused him-almost without volition, as if he'd been rendered subject to a dark spell-to leaf to another page.

When the Trakesian farmer who foully murdered to claim the throne for his illiterate relative was finally seated there in his own right, though not his own peasant name (for he abandoned that as a vain effort to abandon the dung smell of the fields), he began to more openly practise his nighttime rites of daemons and black spirits. Ignoring the desperate words of his holy clerics, and ruthlessly destroying those who would not be silent, Petrus of Trakesia, the Night's Emperor, turned the seven palaces of the Imperial Precinct into unholy places, full of savage rituals and blood at darkfall. Then, in a vicious mockery of piety, he declared an intention to build a vast new Sanctuary to the god. He commissioned evil, godless men-foreigners, many of them-to design and decorate it, knowing they would never gainsay his own black purposes. It was truly believed by many in the City in this time that the Trakesian himself conducted rituals of human sacrifice in the unfinished Sanctuary by night when none were allowed but his own licensed confederates. The Empress, besmeared with the blood of innocent victims, would dance for him, it was said, between candles lit in mockery of the holiness of Jad. Then, naked, with the Emperor and others watching, the whore would take an unlit candle from the altar, as she had done in her youth on the stage, and she would lie down in sight of all and…

Crispin crammed the papers back together. It was enough. It was more than enough. He did feel ill now. This unctuous, watchful, so-discreet secretary of the Strategos, this official chronicler of the wars of Valerius's reign and his building projects, with his honoured place in the Imperial Precinct, had been spewing forth in this room the accumulated filth and bile of hatred.

Crispin wondered if these words were ever meant to be read. And when? Would people believe them? Could they shape, in years to come, an impression of truth for those who had never actually known the people of whom these ugly words were written? Was it possible?

It occurred to him that if he but walked from here with a randomly chosen sheaf of these papers in his hand Pertennius of Eubulus would be disgraced, exiled.

Or, very possibly, executed. A death to Crispin's name. Even so, it stayed in his mind to do it, standing there over the cluttered table, breathing hard, imagining these pages as crimson-hued with their hatred, listening to the sleeping man's snores and the snap of the fire and the faint, distant sounds of the night city.

He remembered Valerius, that first night, standing under the stupendous dome Artibasos had achieved. The intelligence and the courtesy of the Emperor as he patiently watched Crispin come to terms with the surface he was being given for his own craft.

He remembered Alixana in her rooms. A rose in gold on a table. The terrible impermanence of beauty. Everything transitory. Make me some-thing that will last, she had said.

Mosaic: a striving after the eternal. He'd realized that she understood that. And had understood even then, that first night, that this woman would be with him always, in some way. That had been before the man now sleeping gape-mouthed on his couch had knocked and entered, bearing a gift from Styliane Daleina.

Crispin remembered-and now understood in a very different way- the devouring glance Pertennius had cast about Alixana's small, rich, fire-lit chamber, and the expression in his eyes when he'd seen the Empress with her hair unbound and seemingly alone with Crispin late at night. The unspeakable whore who is now our Empress.

Abruptly, Crispin left the room.

He went quickly down the stairs. The servant was dozing on a stool in the hallway under an iron wall sconce. He snapped suddenly awake at the sound of footsteps. Sprang up.

"Your master is asleep in his clothing," Crispin said brusquely. "See to him."

He unlocked the front door and went out to where there was cold air and a darkness that appalled him so much less than what he had just read by firelight. He stopped in the middle of the street, looked up, saw stars: so remote, so detached from mortal life, no one could invoke them. He welcomed the cold, rubbing hard at his face with both hands as if to cleanse it.

He suddenly wanted, very much, to be home. Not in the house he'd been given here, but half a world away. Truly home. Beyond Trakesia, Sauradia, the black forests and empty spaces, in Varena again. He wanted Martinian, his mother, other friends too much neglected these past two years, the comfort of the lifelong-known.

False shelter, that. He knew it, even as he shaped the thought. Varena was a cesspool now, as much or more than Sarantium was, a place of murder and civil violence and black suspicions in the palace: without even the possibility of redemption that lay overhead here on the Sanctuary dome.

There was, really, nowhere to hide from what the world seemed to be, unless one played Holy Fool and fled into a desert somewhere, or climbed a crag. And, really, in the great scale and scheme of things-he took another deep breath of the cold night air-how did a fearful, bitter scribe's malevolence and lecherous dishonesty measure against… the death of children? It didn't. It didn't at all.

It occurred to him that sometimes you didn't really arrive at a conclusion about your life, you just discovered that you already had. He wasn't about to flee from all this, let his hair grow wild and his garments stink of unwashed sweat and excrement in the desert while his skin blistered and burned. One lived in the world. Sought what slender grace was to be found, however one defined such things, and accepted that Jad's creation-or Ludan's, the zubir's, or that of any other worshipped power- was not a place where mortal men and women were meant to find tranquil ease. There might be other worlds-some taught as much- better than this, where such harmonies were possible, but he didn't live in one and was not ever going to live in one.

And thinking so, Crispin turned and looked down the street a little way and he saw the torchlit wall of the enormous house adjacent to Pertennius's and the gated courtyard into which an elegant litter had been carried a little time ago, and in the starlit dark he saw that the front door of that house now stood open to the night and a servant woman was there, robed against the chill, a candle in her hand, looking at him.

The woman saw that he had noticed her. Wordlessly, she lifted the candle and gestured with her other hand towards the open doorway.

Crispin had actually wheeled around to face the other way before he'd even realized he was doing so, the movement entirely involuntary. His back to the dark invitation of that light, he stood very still again in the street, but all was changed now, changed utterly, by that open door. To his left, above the handsome stone and brick facades of the houses here, the arc of the starlit dome rose, a serene curve above all these jagged, wounding mortal lines and edges, disdainful of them in its purity.

But made by a mortal man. A man named Artibasos, one of those who lived down here among all the cutting, human interactions of wife, children, friends, patrons, enemies, the angry, indifferent, bitter, blind, dying. Crispin felt the wind rise, imagined the slim serving girl shielding her candle in the open doorway behind him. Visualized his own tread approaching her, passing through that door. Became aware that his heart was pounding. I am not ready for this, he thought, and knew that in one way it was simply untrue, and in another he would never be ready for what lay beyond that door, so the thought was meaningless. But he also understood, alone on a starlit night in Sarantium, that he needed to enter that house.

Need had many guises, and desire was one of them. The jagged edges of mortality. A door his life had brought him to, after all. He turned around.

The girl was still there, waiting. Her task was to wait. He went towards her. No supernatural fires flitted or sparked in the night street now. No human voices came to him, of watchman's cry or night walker's song or faction partisans careening from a distant tavern, heard over the rooftops. There were four torches spaced evenly in iron brackets along the beautifully fashioned stone wall of the great house. The stars were bright above him, the sea behind now, almost as far away. The woman in the doorway was very young, Crispin saw, no more than a girl, fear in her dark eyes as he came up to her.

She held out her candle to him and, without speaking, gestured again inside, towards the stairs which were unlit by any lamps at all. He took a breath, felt the hammering presence of something deep within himself and acknowledged a part, in the heavy current of the moment, of what the intensity of this stirring meant. The fury of mortality. Darkness, some light carried, but not very much.

He took the flame from the girl's cold fingers and went up the winding stair.

There was no illumination but his own, throwing his moving shadow against the wall, until he reached the upper landing and turned and saw a glow-orange, crimson, yellow, rippled gold-through the partly opened door of a room along the corridor. Crispin remained still for a long moment, then he blew out his candle and set it down: a blue-veined marble-topped table, iron feet like lion's paws. He went down the hallway, thinking of stars and the cold wind outside and his wife when she died and before, and then of the night last autumn here when a woman had been waiting for him in his room before dawn, a blade in her hand.

He came to her door now through this dark house, pushed it open, entered, saw lamps, the fire, low and red, a wide bed. He leaned back against the door, closing it with his body, his heart drumming in his chest, his mouth dry. She turned; had been standing by a window over an inner courtyard.

Her long pale golden hair was unpinned and down, all her jewellery removed. She wore a robe of whitest silk, a bride's night raiment. In bitter irony, in need?

His vision actually blurred with apprehension and desire, seeing her, his breath coming ragged and quick. He feared this woman and almost hated her and he felt that he might die if he did not have her.

She met him in the middle of the room. He was unaware of having stepped forward, time moving in spasms, as in a fever dream. Neither of them spoke. He saw the fierce, hard blue of her eyes, but then she suddenly twisted and lowered her head, exposing her neck like a wolf or a dog in submission. And then before he could even react, respond, try to understand, she had lifted her head again, the eyes uncanny, and took his mouth with her own as she had done once, half a year ago.

She bit him this time, hard. Crispin swore, tasted his own blood. She laughed, made to draw back. He cursed again, aroused beyond words, intoxicated, and held her by the curtain of her hair, pulling her back to him. And this time as they kissed he saw her eyes fall shut, her lips part, a pulsing in her throat, and Styliane's face in the flickering firelight of her room was white as her robe, as a flag of surrender.

There was none, however. No surrendering. He had never known lovemaking as a battle before, each kiss, touch, coming together, twisting apart for desperate breath an engagement of forces, the need for the other hopelessly entangled with anger and a fear of never coming back out, never controlling oneself again. She provoked him effortlessly, would approach, touch, withdraw, return, lowered her neck again once in that brief, submissive averting-her throat long and sleek, the skin smooth and scented and young in the night-and he felt a sudden, genuinely shocking tenderness entwine with anger and desire. But then she lifted her head again, the eyes brilliant, mouth wide, and her hands raked his back as they kissed. Then, very swiftly, she lifted his hand and, twisting away, bit him there.

He was a worker in mosaic, in glass and tile and light. His hands were his life. He snarled something incoherent, lifted her off the ground, carried her before him to the high, canopied bed. He stood a moment there, holding her in his arms, and then he laid her down. She looked up at him, light caught in her eyes, changing them. Her robe was torn at one shoulder. He had done that. He saw the shadowed curve of her breast with the firelight upon it.

She said: "Are you certain?"

He blinked. 'What?

He would remember her smile then, all that it meant and said about Styliane. She murmured, ironic, assured, but bitter as the ashes of a long-ago fire, "Certain it isn't an empress or a queen you want, Rhodian?"

He was speechless a moment, looking down upon her, his breath caught as on a fishhook embedded in his chest. He became aware that his hands were shaking.

"Very certain," he whispered hoarsely, and pulled his own white tunic over his head. She lay motionless a moment then lifted one hand and traced a long finger lightly, slowly down his body, a single straight movement, illusion of simplicity, of order in the world. He could see that she was struggling hard for her own control, though, and that added to his desire.

Very certain. It was entirely true, and yet hopelessly not so, for where could certainty lie in the world in which they lived? The clean, straight movement of her finger was not the movement of their lives. It didn't matter, he told himself. Not tonight.

He let the questions and the losses slip from him. He lowered himself upon her and she guided him hard into her, and then those long slender arms and her long legs were wrapped around his body, hands gripping in his hair and then moving up and down his back, mouth at his ear whispering things, over and again, rapid and needful, until her own breathing grew more ragged and terribly urgent, exactly as his own. He knew he must be hurting her but heard her cry out harshly only as her body curved upwards in its own arc and lifted him with her for that moment, away from all the jagged edges and the broken lines.

He saw tears startle like diamonds on her cheekbones and he knew- knew-that even consumed like a burning taper by desire she was raging within against the revealed weakness of that, the dimensions of longing betrayed. She could kill him now, he thought, as easily as kiss him again. Not a haven, this woman, this room, not a shelter of any kind at all, but a destination he'd needed overwhelmingly to reach and could not, by any means, deny: these bitter, furious complexities of human need, down here beneath the perfect dome and the stars.

"You have no dread of high places, I may assume?"

Lying beside each other. Some of her golden hair across his face, tickling a little. One of her hands on his thigh. Her face was averted, he could see only a profile as she stared at the ceiling. There was a mosaic there, he now saw, and abruptly remembered Siroes who had made it, whose hands had been broken by this woman for his failings.

"A fear of heights? It would be an impediment in my work. Why?"

"You'll leave through the window. He may be home soon, with his own servants. Go down the wall and across the courtyard to the far end by the street. There is a tree to climb. It will take you to the top of the outer wall."

"Am I leaving now?"

She turned her head then. He saw her mouth quirk a little. "I hope not," she murmured. Though you may have to depart in haste if we delay too long."

"Would he… come in?"

She shook her head. "Unlikely."

"People die because of unlikely things."

She laughed at that. "True enough. And he would feel compelled to kill you, I suppose."

This surprised him a little. He'd somehow concluded that these two- the Strategos and his aristocratic prize-had their shared understandings in matters of fidelity. That servant with her candle, visible to the street in the open doorway…

He was silent.

"Do I frighten you?" She was looking at him now.

Crispin shifted to face her. There seemed no reason to dissemble. He nodded his head. "But in yourself, not because of your husband." She held his glance a moment and then, unexpectedly, looked away. He said, after a pause, "I wish I liked you more."

"Liking? A trivial feeling," she said, too quickly. "It has little to do with this."

He shook his head. "Friendship begins with it, if desire doesn't."

Styliane turned back to him. "I have been a better friend than you know," she said. "From the outset. I did tell you not to become attached to any work on that dome."

She had said that, without explaining it. He opened his mouth but she held up a finger and laid it against his lips. "No questions. But remember."

"An impossibility," he said. "Not to be attached."

She shrugged. "Ah. Well. I am helpless against impossibilities, of course."

She shivered suddenly, exposed to the cold air, her skin still damp from lovemaking. He glanced across the room. Rose from the bed and tended to the guttering fire, adding logs, shifting them. It took him a few moments, building it up again. When he stood, naked and warmed, he saw that she was propped on one elbow, watching him with a frank, appraising gaze. He felt abruptly self-conscious, saw her smile, seeing that.

He crossed back towards the bed and stood beside it, looking down at her. Without shame or evasion she lay, unclothed and uncovered, and let him track with his gaze the curves and lines of her body, arc of hip, of breast, the fine bones of her face. He felt the stirrings of desire again, irresistible as tides.

Her smile deepened as her glance flicked downwards. Her voice, when she spoke, was husky again. "I did hope you weren't in haste to find the courtyard and the tree." And she reached out with one hand and stroked his sex, drawing him to the bed and back to her that way.

And this time, in a slower, more intricate dance, she did eventually show him-as she'd offered half a year ago-how Leontes liked to use a pillow, and he discovered something new about himself, then, and illusions of civility. At one point, later, he found himself doing something to her he'd only ever done for Ilandra, and it came to him, feeling her hands tightening in his hair, hearing her whispering a stream of incoherent words as if unwilling, compelled, that one might feel the sadness of loss, of absence, love and shelter gone, but not be endlessly consumed and destroyed as by an ongoing lightning bolt of tragedy. Living was not, in and of itself, a betrayal.

Some had tried to tell him this before, he knew.

She made a higher sound then, on a taken breath, as if in pain, or fighting something. She drew him up and into her again, her eyes tightly closed, hands pulling him, and then swiftly turned them both together so she rode upon him now, harder and harder, imperative, her body glistening in the firelight. He reached up and touched her breasts, spoke her name, once: resisting that but impelled, exactly as she had been. Then he gripped her hips and let her begin to drive them both, and at length he heard her cry aloud and opened his eyes to see that arcing of her body again, the skin taut across her ribs as she bent back above him like a bow. There were tears on her cheeks, as before, but this time he reached up and drew her slowly down and kissed them, and she allowed him to do so.

And it was then, lying upon him in an aftermath, her body shaking, and his, her hair covering them both, that Styliane whispered without warning, eerily gentle in his memory of the moment after, "They will invade your country later in the spring. No one knows yet. It was announced to some of us tonight in the palace. Certain events must happen now. I will not say I am sorry. A thing was done once, and all else follows. Remember this room, though, Rhodian. Whatever else. Whatever else I do."

In his confusion, his mind not yet working properly, the sudden knife's blade of fear, all he could say was, "Rhodian? Only that? Still?"

She lay upon him, not moving now. He could feel the beating of her heart. "Rhodian," she repeated, after a considering silence. "I am what I've been made to be. Don't be deceived."

Then why were you weeping? he wanted to ask, but didn't. He would remember these words, too, all of them, and the straining backwards arcing of her body and those bitter tears at her own exposed need. But in the silence that came after she spoke what they both heard was the front door down below closing heavily, reverberating.

Styliane shifted a little. Somehow he knew she would be smiling, that wry, ironic smile. "A good husband. He always lets me know when he comes home."

Crispin stared at her. She looked back, eyes wide, still amused. "Oh dear. Really. You think Leontes wants to spend his nights killing people? There's a knife in here somewhere. You want to fight him for my honour?"

So there was an agreement between them. Of some kind. He really wasn't understanding these two at all, was he? Crispin felt heavy-headed and tired now, and afraid: A thing was done once. But a door had slammed, down below, leaving no space for sorting matters through. He stumbled from the bed, began to dress. She watched him calmly, smoothing the sheets about her, her hair spread out on the pillows. He saw her drop her torn garment on the floor, not bothering to hide it further.

He adjusted his tunic and belt, knelt and quickly tied his sandals. When he stood again, he looked at her for a moment. The firelight was low again, the candles burnt out. Her naked body was chastely covered by the bed linens. She sat propped on pillows, motionless, receiving and returning his gaze. And Crispin abruptly realized then that there was a kind of defiance in this, as much as anything else, and understood that she was very young, and how easy it was to forget that.

"Don't deceive yourself," he said. "While trying so hard to control the rest of us. You are more than the sum of your plans." He wasn't even sure what that meant.

She shook her head impatiently. "None of that matters. I am an instrument."

His expression wry, he said, "A prize, you told me last time. An instrument tonight. What else should I know?" But there was an odd, entirely unexpected ache in him now, looking at her.

She opened her mouth and closed it. He saw that she'd been taken off guard, heard footsteps in the hallway outside.

"Crispin," she said, pointing to the window. "Go. Please."

It was only when he was crossing the courtyard, past the fountain, making for the indicated olive tree at the corner near the street, that he realized she'd spoken his name.

He climbed the tree, crossed to the top of the wall. The white moon was up now, halfway to full. He sat on a stone wall above the dark, empty street, and he was remembering Zoticus, and the boy he'd once been himself, crossing from wall to tree. The boy, and then the man. He thought of Linon, could almost hear her commenting on what had just passed. Or perhaps he was wrong: perhaps she would have understood that there were elements here more complex than simple desire.

Then he laughed a little, under his breath, ruefully. For that was wrong, too: there was nothing the least simple about desire. He looked up and saw a figure silhouetted in the window he'd just left. Leontes. The window was pulled shut, the curtains drawn in Styliane's bedroom. Crispin sat motionless, hidden upon a wall.

He looked across the street and saw the dome rising above the houses. Artibasos's dome, the Emperor's, Jad's. Crispin's own? Below-a flicker at the corner of his eye-one of those utterly inexplicable eruptions of flame that defined Sarantium at night appeared in the street and vanished, like dreams or human lives and their memory. What, Crispin wondered, was ever left behind?

They will invade your country later in the spring.

He didn't go home. Home was very far away. He jumped down from the wall, went across the street, cutting up a long dark lane. A prostitute called to him from shadow, her voice a kind of song in the night. He kept going, following an angling of the laneway, and eventually came to where it opened onto the square across from the Imperial Precinct gates, with the front of the Sanctuary on his right. There were guards on the portico, all night long. They knew him as he approached, nodded, opened one of the massive doors. There was light inside. Enough to let him work.