Lord of Emperors

Book Two of The Sarantine Mosaic

GUY GAVRIEL KAY

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000

Copyright © Guy Gavriel Kay 2000

Guy Gavriel Kay asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007342099

Ebook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007352074

Version: 2014-12-03

Dedication

For Sam and Matthew, ‘the singing-masters of my soul.’

This belongs to them, beginning and end.

Epigraph

Turning and turning in a widening gyre . . .

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Part One: Kingdoms of Light and Dark

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Part Two: The Ninth Driver

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Map

PART ONE

KINGDOMS OF LIGHT AND DARK

Chapter I

Amid the first hard winds of winter, the King of Kings of Bassania, Shirvan the Great, Brother to the Sun and Moons, Sword of Perun, Scourge of Black Azal, left his walled city of Kabadh and journeyed south and west with much of his court to examine the state of his fortifications in that part of the lands he ruled, to sacrifice at the ancient Holy Fire of the priestly caste, and to hunt lions in the desert. On the first morning of the first hunt he was shot just below the collarbone.

The arrow lodged deep and no man there among the sands dared try to pull it out. The King of Kings was taken by litter to the nearby fortress of Kerakek. It was feared that he would die.

Hunting accidents were common. The Bassanid court had its share of those enthusiastic and erratic with their bows. This truth made the possibility of undetected assassination high. Shirvan would not be the first king to have been murdered in the tumult of a royal hunt.

As a precaution, Mazendar, who was vizier to Shirvan, ordered the king’s three eldest sons, who had journeyed south with him, to be placed under observation. A useful phrase masking the truth: they were detained under guard in Kerakek. At the same time the vizier sent riders back to Kabadh to order the similar detention of their mothers in the palace. Great Shirvan had ruled Bassania for twenty-seven years that winter. His eagle’s gaze was clear, his plaited beard still black, no hint of grey age descending upon him. Impatience among grown sons was to be expected, as were lethal intrigues among the royal wives.

Ordinary men might look to find joy among their children, sustenance and comfort in their households. The existence of the King of Kings was not as that of other mortals. His were the burdens of godhood and lordship—and Azal the Enemy was never far away and always at work.

In Kerakek, the three royal physicians who had made the journey south with the court were summoned to the room where men had laid the Great King down upon his bed. One by one each of them examined the wound and the arrow. They touched the skin around the wound, tried to wiggle the embedded shaft. They paled at what they found. The arrows used to hunt lions were the heaviest known. If the feathers were now to be broken off and the shaft pushed down through the chest and out, the internal damage would be prodigious, deadly. And the arrow could not be pulled back, so deeply had it penetrated, so broad was the iron flange of the arrowhead. Whoever tried to pull it would rip through the king’s flesh, tearing the mortal life from him with his blood.

Had any other patient been shown to them in this state, the physicians would all have spoken the words of formal withdrawal: With this affliction I will not contend. No blame for ensuing death could attach to them when they did so.

It was not, of course, permitted to say this when the afflicted person was the king.

With the Brother to the Sun and Moons the physicians were compelled to accept the duty of treatment, to do battle with whatever they found and set about healing the injury or illness. If an accepted patient died, blame fell to the doctor’s name, as was proper. In the case of an ordinary man or woman, fines were administered as compensation to the family.

Burning of the physicians alive on the Great King’s funeral pyre could be anticipated in this case.

Those who were offered a medical position at the court, with the wealth and renown that came with it, knew this very well. Had the king died in the desert, his physicians—the three in this room and those who had remained in Kabadh—would have been numbered among the honoured mourners of the priestly caste at his rites before the Holy Fire. Now it was otherwise.

There ensued a whispered colloquy among the doctors by the window. They had all been taught by their own masters—long ago, in each case—the importance of an unruffled mien in the presence of the patient. This calm demeanour was, in the current circumstances, imperfectly observed. When one’s own life lies embedded—like a bloodied arrow shaft—in the flux of the moment, gravity and poise become difficult to attain.

One by one, in order of seniority, the three of them approached the man on the bed a second time. One by one they abased themselves, rose, touched the black arrow again, the king’s wrist, his forehead, looked into his eyes, which were open and enraged. One by one, tremulously, they said, as they had to say, ‘With this affliction I will contend.’

When the third physician had spoken these words, and then stepped back, uncertainly, there was a silence in the room, though ten men were gathered amid the lamps and the guttering flame of the fire. Outside, the wind had begun to blow.

In that stillness the deep voice of Shirvan himself was heard, low but distinct, godlike. The King of Kings said, ‘They can do nothing. It is in their faces. Their mouths are dry as sand with fear, their thoughts are as blown sand. They have no idea what to do. Take the three of them away from us and kill them. They are unworthy. Do this. Find our son Damnazes and have him staked out in the desert to be devoured by beasts. His mother is to be given to the palace slaves in Kabadh for their pleasure. Do this. Then go to our son Murash and have him brought here to us.’ Shirvan paused to draw breath, to push away the humiliating weakness of pain. ‘Bring also to us a priest with an ember of the Holy Flame. It seems we are to die in Kerakek. All that happens is by the divine will of Perun. Anahita waits for all of us. It has been written and it is being written. Do these things, Mazendar.’

‘No physician at all, my great lord?’ said the small, plump vizier, dry-voiced, dry-eyed.

‘In Kerakek?’ said the King of Kings, his voice bitter, enraged. ‘In this desert? Think where we are.’ There was blood welling as he spoke, from where the arrow lay in him, the shaft smeared black, fletched with black feathers. The king’s beard was stained with his own dark blood.

The vizier bowed his head. Men moved to usher the three condemned physicians from the room. They offered no protest, no resistance. The sun was past its highest point by then, beginning to set, on a winter’s day in Bassania in a remote fortress near the sands. Time was moving; what was to be had long ago been written.

Men find courage sometimes, unexpectedly, surprising themselves, changing the course of their own lives and times. The man who sank to his knees by the bed, pressing his head to the carpeted floor, was the military commander of the fortress of Kerakek. Wisdom, discretion, self- preservation all demanded he keep silent among the sleek, dangerous men of the court that day. Afterwards he could not have said why he did speak. He would tremble as with a fever, remembering, and drink an excess of wine, even on a day of abstinence.

‘My king,’ he said in the firelit chamber, ‘we have a much-travelled physician here, in the village below the fortress. We might summon him?’

The Great King’s gaze seemed already to be in another place, with Perun and the Lady, beyond the confines and small concerns of mortal life. He said, ‘Why kill another man?’

It was told of Shirvan, written on parchment and engraved on tablets of stone, that no man more merciful and compassionate, more imbued with the spirit of the goddess Anahita, had ever sat the throne in Kabadh holding the sceptre and the flower. But Anahita the Lady was also called the Gatherer, who summoned men to their ending.

Softly, the vizier murmured, ‘Why not do so? How can it matter, lord? May I send?’

The King of Kings lay still another moment, then he motioned assent, the gesture brief, indifferent. His rage seemed spent. His gaze, heavy-lidded, went to the fire and lingered there. Someone went out, at a sign from the vizier.

Time passed. In the desert beyond the fortress and the village below it a north wind rose. It swept across the sands, blowing and shifting them, erasing dunes, shaping others, and the lions, unhunted, took refuge in their caves among the rocks, waiting for night.

The blue moon, Anahita’s, rose in the late afternoon, balancing the low sun. Within the fortress of Kerakek, men went forth into that dry wind to kill three physicians, to kill a son of the king, to summon a son of the king, to bear messages to Kabadh, to summon a priest with Holy Fire to the King of Kings in his room.

And to find and bring one other man.

Rustem of Kerakek, son of Zorah, sat cross-legged on the woven Ispahani mat he used for teaching. He was reading, occasionally glancing up to observe his four students as they carefully copied from one of his precious texts. Merovius on cataracts was the current matter; each student had a different page to transcribe. They would exchange them day by day until all of them had a copy of the treatise. Rustem was of the view that the ancient Trakesian’s western approach was to be preferred in treatment of most—though not all— issues relating to the eye.

Through the window that overlooked the dusty roadway a breeze entered the room. It was mild as yet, not unpleasant, but Rustem could feel a storm in it. The sands would be blowing. In the village of Kerakek, below the fortress, the sand got into everything when the wind came from the desert. They were used to it, the taste in their food, the gritty feel in their clothing and bedsheets, in their own intimate places.

From behind the students, in the arched interior doorway that led to the family quarters, Rustem heard a slight rustling sound; he glimpsed a shadow on the floor. Shaski had arrived at his usual post beyond the beaded curtain, and would be waiting for the more interesting part of the afternoon lessons to begin. His son, at seven years of age, showed both patience and a fierce determination. A little less than a year ago he’d begun dragging a small mat of his own from his bedroom to a position just outside the teaching room. He would sit cross-legged upon it, spending as much of the afternoon as he was allowed listening through the curtain as his father gave instruction. If taken away by his mothers or the household servants he would find his way back to the corridor as soon as he could escape.

Rustem’s two wives were both of the view that it was inappropriate for a small child to listen to explicit details of bloody wounds and bodily fluxes, but the physician found the boy’s interest amusing and had negotiated with his wives to allow Shaski to linger outside the door if his own lessons and duties had been fulfilled. The students seemed to enjoy the boy’s unseen presence in the hallway as well, and once or twice they’d invited him to voice an answer to his father’s questions.

There was something endearing, even to a careful, reserved man, in a seven-year-old proclaiming, as was required, ‘With this affliction I will contend,’ and then detailing his proposed treatment of an inflamed, painful toe or a cough with blood and loose matter in it. The interesting thing, Rustem thought, idly stroking his neat, pointed beard, was that Shaski’s answers were very often to the point. He’d even had the boy answer a question once to embarrass a student caught unprepared after a night’s drinking, though later that evening he’d regretted doing so. Young men were entitled to visit taverns now and again. It taught them about the lives and pleasures of common men, kept them from aging too soon. A physician needed to be aware of the nature of people and their weaknesses and not be harsh in his judgement of ordinary folly. Judgement was for Perun and Anahita.

The feel of his own beard reminded him of a thought he’d had the night before: it was time to dye it again. He wondered if it was still necessary to be streaking the light brown with grey. When he’d returned from Ispahani and the Ajbar Islands four years ago, settling in his home town and opening a physician’s practice and a school, he’d considered it prudent to gain a measure of credibility by making himself look older. In the east, the Ispahani physician-priests would lean on walking sticks they didn’t need, gain weight deliberately, dole out words in measured cadences or with eyes focused on inward visions, all to present the desired image of dignity and success.

There had been some real presumption in a man of twenty-seven putting himself forward as a teacher of medicine at an age when many were just beginning their studies. Indeed, two of his pupils that first year had been older than he was. He wondered if they’d known it.

After a certain point, though, didn’t your practice and your teaching speak for themselves? In Kerakek, here on the edge of the southern deserts, Rustem was respected and even revered by the villagers, and he had been summoned often to the fortress to deal with injuries and ailments among the soldiers, to the anger and chagrin of a succession of military doctors. Students who wrote to him and then came this far for his teaching—some of them even Sarantine Jad-worshippers, crossing the border from Amoria—were unlikely to turn around and go away when they discovered that Rustem of Kerakek was no ancient sage but a young husband and father who happened to have a gift for medicine and to have read and travelled more widely than most.

Perhaps. Students, or potential students, could be unpredictable in various ways, and the income Rustem made from teaching was necessary for a man with two wives now and two children—especially with both women wanting another baby in the crowded house. Few of the villagers of Kerakek were able to pay proper physician’s fees, and there was another practitioner—for whom Rustem had an only marginally disguised contempt—in the town to divide what meagre income was to be gleaned here. On the whole, it might be best not to disturb what seemed to be succeeding. If streaks of grey in his beard reassured even one or two possible pupils or military officials up in the castle (where they did tend to pay), then using the dye was worth it, he supposed.

Rustem looked out the window again. The sky was darker now beyond his small herb garden. If a real storm came, the distraction and loss of light would undermine his lessons and make afternoon surgery difficult. He cleared his throat. The four students, used to the routine, put down their writing implements and looked up. Rustem nodded and the one nearest the outer door crossed to open it and admit the first patient from the covered portico where they had been waiting.

He tended to treat patients in the morning and teach after the midday rest, but those villagers least able to pay would often consent to be seen by Rustem and his students together in the afternoons as part of the teaching process. Many were flattered by the attention, some made uncomfortable, but it was known in Kerakek that this was a way of gaining access to the young physician who had studied in the mystical east and returned with secrets of the hidden world.

The woman who entered now, standing hesitantly by the wall where Rustem hung his herbs and shelved the small pots and linen bags of medicines, had a cataract growth in her right eye. Rustem knew it; he had seen her before and made the assessment. He prepared in advance, and whenever the ailments of the villagers allowed, offered his students practical experience and observations to go with the treatises they memorized and copied. It was of little use, he was fond of saying, to learn what al-Hizari said about amputation if you didn’t know how to use a saw.

He himself had spent six weeks with his eastern teacher on a failed Ispahani campaign against the insurgents on their north-eastern reaches. He had learned how to use a saw.

He had also seen enough of violent death and desperate, squalid pain that summer to decide to return home to his wife and the small child he had scarcely seen before leaving for the east. This house and garden at the edge of the village, and then another wife and a girl-child, had followed upon his return. The small boy he’d left behind was now seven years old and sitting on a mat outside the door of the medical chambers, listening to his father’s lectures.

And Rustem the physician still dreamt in the blackness of some nights of a battlefield in the east, remembering himself cutting through the limbs of screaming men beneath the smoky, uncertain light of torches in wind as the sun went down on a massacre. He remembered black fountains of blood, being drenched, saturated in the hot gout and spray of it, clothing, face, hair, arms, chest . . . becoming a creature of dripping horror himself, hands so slippery he could scarcely grip his implements to saw and cut and cauterize, the wounded coming and coming to them endlessly, without surcease, even when night fell.

There were worse things than a village practice in Bassania, he had decided the next morning, and he had not wavered since, though ambition would sometimes rise up within him and speak otherwise, seductive and dangerous as a Kabadh courtesan. Rustem had spent much of his adult life trying to appear older than he was. He wasn’t old, though. Not yet. Had wondered, more than once, in the twilight hours when such thoughts tended to arrive, what he would do if opportunity and risk came knocking.

Looking back, afterwards, he couldn’t remember if there was a knock that day. The whirlwind speed of what ensued had been very great, and he might have missed it. It seemed to him, however, that the outside door had simply banged open, without warning, nearly striking the patient waiting by the wall, as booted soldiers came striding in, filling the quiet room to bursting with the chaos of the world.

Rustem knew one of them, the leader: he had been stationed in Kerakek a long time. The man’s face was distorted now, eyes dilated, fevered-looking. His voice, when he spoke, rasped like a woodcutter’s saw. He said, ‘You are to come! Immediately! To the fortress!’

‘There has been an accident?’ Rustem asked from his mat, keeping his own voice modulated, ignoring the peremptory tone of the man, trying to reestablish calm with his own tranquillity. This was part of a physician’s training, and he wanted his students to see him doing it. Those coming to them were often agitated; a doctor could not be. He took note that the soldier had been facing east when he spoke his first words. A neutral omen. The man was of the warrior caste, of course, which would be either good or bad, depending on the caste of the afflicted person. The wind was north: not good, but no birds could be seen or heard through the window, which counterbalanced that, somewhat.

‘An accident! Yes!’ cried the soldier, no calm in him at all. ‘Come! It is the King of Kings! An arrow!’

Poise deserted Rustem like conscripted soldiers facing Sarantine cavalry. One of his students gasped in shock. The woman with the afflicted eye collapsed to the floor in an untidy, wailing heap. Rustem stood up quickly, trying to order his racing thoughts. Four men had entered. An unlucky number. The woman made five. Could she be counted, to adjust the omens?

Even as he swiftly calculated auspices, he strode to the large table by the door and snatched his small linen bag. He hurriedly placed several of his herbs and pots inside and took his leather case of surgical implements. Normally he would have sent a student or a servant ahead with the bag, to reassure those in the fortress and to avoid being seen rushing out-of-doors himself, but this was not a circumstance that allowed for ordinary conduct. It is the King of Kings!

Rustem became aware that his heart was pounding. He struggled to control his breathing. He felt giddy, light-headed. Afraid, in fact. For many reasons. It was important not to show this. Claiming his walking stick, he slowed deliberately and put a hat on his head. He turned to the soldier. Carefully facing north, he said, ‘I am ready. We can go.’

The four soldiers rushed through the doorway ahead of him. Pausing, Rustem made an effort to preserve some order in the room he was leaving. Bharai, his best student, was looking at him.

‘You may practise with the surgical tools on vegetables, and then on pieces of wood, using the probes,’ Rustem said. ‘Take turns evaluating each other. Send the patients home. Close the shutters if the wind rises. You have permission to build up the fire and use oil for sufficient light.’

‘Master,’ said Bharai, bowing.

Rustem followed the soldiers out the door.

He paused in the garden and, facing north again, feet together, he plucked three shoots of bamboo. He might need them for probes. The soldiers were waiting impatiently in the roadway, agitated and terrified. The air pulsed with anxiety. Rustem straightened, murmured his prayer to Perun and the Lady and turned to follow them. As he did, he observed Katyun and Jarita at the front door of the house. There was fear in their eyes: Jarita’s were enormous, even seen at a distance. She stared at him silently, leaning against Katyun for support, holding the baby. One of the soldiers must have told the women what was happening.

He gave them both a reassuring nod and saw Katyun nod calmly back as she put her arm around Jarita’s shoulders. They would be all right. If he came back.

He went through the small gate into the road, taking his first step with his right foot, glancing up for any signs among the birds. None to be seen: they had all taken shelter from the rising wind. No omens there. He wished there hadn’t been four soldiers sent. Someone ought to have known better. Little to be done about that now, however. He would burn incense at the fortress, in propitiation. Rustem gripped his stick and struggled to present an appearance of equanimity. He didn’t think he was succeeding. The King of Kings. An arrow.

He stopped abruptly in the dusty road.

And in the moment he did so, cursing himself for a fool, preparing to go back to the treatment rooms, knowing how very bad an omen that would be, he heard someone speak from behind him.

‘Papa,’ said a small voice.

Rustem turned, and saw what his son was holding in both hands. His heart stopped for a moment then, or it felt as though it did. He swallowed, with sudden difficulty. Forced himself to take another deep breath, standing very still now just outside the gate.

‘Yes, Shaski,’ he said quietly. He looked at the small boy in the garden and a strange calm descended upon him. His students and the patients watched in a knotted cluster from the portico, the soldiers from the roadway, the women from the other doorway. The wind blew.

‘The man said . . . he said an arrow, Papa.’

And Shaski extended his two small hands, offering his father the implement he’d carried out into the yard.

‘He did say that, didn’t he?’ said Rustem, gravely. ‘I should take that with me then, shouldn’t I?’

Shaski nodded his head. His small form straight, dark brown eyes serious as a priest’s with an offering. He is seven years old, Rustem thought. Anahita guard him.

He went back through the wooden gate, and he bent and took the slender instrument in its leather sheath from the boy. He had brought it back from Ispahani, a parting gift from his teacher there.

The soldier had indeed said there was an arrow. Rustem felt a sudden, quite unexpected desire to lay a hand upon the head of his son, on the dark brown, curling hair, to feel the warmth, and the smallness. It had to do, of course, with the fact that he might not come back from the fortress. This might be a farewell. One could not decline to treat the King of Kings, and depending on where the arrow had lodged . . .

Shaski’s expression was so intense, it was as if he actually had some preternatural apprehension of this. He couldn’t, of course, but the boy had just saved him from the terrible auspice of having to re-enter the treatment room after walking out and taking his bamboo reeds, or sending someone back in for him.

Rustem found that he was unable to speak. He looked down at Shaski for another moment, then glanced over at his wives. There was no time to say anything to them, either. The world had entered through his doorway, after all. What was to be had long ago been written.

Rustem turned and went quickly back out through the gate and then with the soldiers up the steep road in the north wind that was blowing. He didn’t look back, knowing the omen attached to that, but he was certain that Shaski was still standing there and watching him, alone in the garden now, straight as a spear, small as a reed by a riverbank.

Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, the military commander of the southern fortress of Kerakek, had been born even farther to the south, in a tiny oasis of palms east of Qandir, a sparse, spring-fed island of greenery with desert all around. It was a market village, of course. Goods and services exchanged with the dark, grim peoples of the sands as they came riding in on their camels and went back out again, receding and then disappearing on the shimmering horizon.

Growing up as a merchant’s son, Vinaszh came to know the nomadic tribes quite well, both in times of trade and peace and during those seasons when the Great King sent armies south in yet another fruitless attempt to force access to the western sea beyond the sands. The desert, at least as much as the wild tribesmen who shifted across its face, had made this impossible, again and again. Neither the sands nor those who dwelled there were inclined to be subdued.

But his childhood in the south had made Vinaszh— who had chosen the army over a merchant’s life—an excellent, obvious choice to take control of one of the desert fortresses. It represented a rare measure of clear thinking on the part of officials in Kabadh that he was, in fact, appointed to govern Kerakek when he attained sufficient rank, rather than being given command of, say, soldiers guarding a fishing port in the north, dealing with fur-clad traders and raiders from Moskav. Sometimes the military succeeded in doing things properly, almost in spite of itself. Vinaszh knew the desert, was properly respectful of it and those who dwelled there. He could manage some of the dialects of the nomads, spoke a little of the Kindath tongue, and was unruffled by sand in his bed or clothing or folds of skin.

Still, there was nothing at all in the background of the man to suggest that the soldier son of Vinaszh the trader might have had the rashness to speak up among the mightiest figures of Bassania and offer the uninvited suggestion that a small-town physician—one not even of the priestly caste—be summoned to the King of Kings where he was dying.

Among other things, the words put the commander’s own life at risk. He was a dead man if someone afterwards were to decide that the country doctor’s treatment had hastened or caused the death of the king—even though Great Shirvan had already turned his face to the fire as if looking in the flames for Perun of the Thunder, or the dark figure of the Lady.

The arrow was in him, very deep. Blood continued to seep slowly from it, darkening the sheets of the bed and the linens that had been bunched around the wound. It seemed a wonder, in fact, that the king still breathed, still remained among them, fixedly watching the dance of the flames while a wind from the desert rose outside. The sky had darkened.

Shirvan seemed disinclined to offer his courtiers any last words of guidance or to formally name an heir, though he’d made a gesture that implied his choice. Kneeling beside the bed, the king’s third son, Murash, who had covered his own head and shoulders with hot ashes from the hearth, was rocking back and forth, praying. None of the other royal sons was present. Murash’s voice, rising and falling in rapid incantation, was the only human sound in the room other than the laboured rhythm of the Great King’s breathing.

In that stillness, and even with the keening of the wind, the sound of booted feet was clearly heard when it finally came from the corridor. Vinaszh drew a breath and briefly closed his eyes, invoking Perun, ritually cursing Azal the Eternal Enemy. Then he turned and saw the door open to admit the physician who had cured him of an embarrassing rash he’d contracted during an autumn reconnaissance towards the Sarantine border towns and forts.

The doctor, trailed by Vinaszh’s obviously terrified captain of the guard, entered a few steps and then paused, leaning on his staff, surveying the room, before looking over at the figure on the bed. He had no servant with him—he would have left in great haste, the captain’s instructions from Vinaszh had been unambiguous—and so carried his own bag. Without looking back, he extended the linen bag and his walking stick and some sheathed implement, and Vinaszh’s captain moved with alacrity to take them. The doctor—his name was Rustem—had a reserved, humourless manner that Vinaszh didn’t really like, but the man had studied in Ispahani and he didn’t seem to kill people and he had cured the rash.

The physician smoothed his greying beard with one hand and then knelt and abased himself, showing unexpectedly adroit manners. At a word from the vizier he rose. The king hadn’t turned his gaze from the fire; the young prince had not ceased his praying. The doctor bowed to the vizier, then turned carefully—facing due west, Vinaszh noted—and said briskly, ‘With this affliction I will contend.’

He hadn’t even approached—let alone examined—the patient, but he had no real choice here. He had to do what he could. Why kill another man? the king had asked. Vinaszh had almost certainly done just that by suggesting the physician be brought here.

The doctor turned to look at Vinaszh. ‘If the commander of the garrison will remain to assist me I would be grateful. I might have need of a soldier’s experience. It is necessary for all the rest of you, my revered and gracious lords, to leave the room now, please.’

Without rising from his knees, the prince said fiercely, ‘I will not leave my father’s side.’

This man was almost certainly about to become the King of Kings, the Sword of Perun, when the breathing of the man on the bed stopped.

‘An understandable desire, my lord prince,’ said the doctor calmly. ‘But if you care for your beloved father, as I can see you do, and wish to aid him now, you will honour me by waiting outside. Surgical treatment cannot take place in a crowd of men.’

‘There will be no . . . crowd,’ said the vizier. Mazendar’s lip curled at the word. ‘Prince Murash will remain, and I myself. You are not of the priestly caste, of course, and neither is the commander. We must stay here, accordingly. All others will depart, as requested.’

The physician simply shook his head. ‘No, my lord. Kill me now, if you wish. But I was taught, and believe, that members of the family and dear friends must not be present when a doctor treats an afflicted man. One must be of the priestly caste to be a royal physician, I know. But I have no such position . . . I am merely attending upon the Great King, at request. If I am to contend with this affliction, I must do so in the manner of my training. Otherwise I can avail the King of Kings not at all, and my own life becomes a burden to me if that is so.’

The fellow was a stuffy prig, greying before his time, Vinaszh thought, but he had courage. He saw Prince Murash look up, black eyes blazing. Before the prince could speak, however, a faint, cold voice from the bed murmured, ‘You heard the physician. He is brought here for his skills. Why is there wrangling in my presence? Get out. All of you.’

There was silence.

‘Of course, my gracious lord,’ said Mazendar the vizier, as the prince, mouth opening and closing, stood up uncertainly. The king had still not taken his eyes from the flames. His voice sounded to Vinaszh as if it already came from somewhere beyond the realms of living men. He would die, the doctor would die, Vinaszh, very probably, would die. He was a fool and a fool, near the end of his days.

Men began moving nervously out into the corridor, where torches had now been lit in the wall brackets. The wind whistled, an otherworldly, lonely sound. Vinaszh saw his captain of the guard set down the doctor’s things before quickly walking out. The young prince stopped directly in front of the slim physician, who stood very still, waiting for them to leave. Murash lifted his hands and murmured, fierce and low, ‘Save him, or these fingers end your life. I swear it by Perun’s thunder.’

The physician said nothing, merely nodded, calmly eyeing the hands of the overwrought prince as they opened and closed and then twisted before his face in a sudden gesture of strangulation. Murash hesitated another moment, then looked back at his father—it might be for the last time, Vinaszh thought, and had a swift, sharp memory of his own father’s deathbed in the south. Then the prince strode from the room as others made way for him. They heard his voice rising in prayer again, from the hallway.

Mazendar was last to leave. He paused near the bed, glanced at Vinaszh and the physician, looking uncertain for the first time, and then murmured, ‘Have you instructions for me, dear my lord?’

‘I gave them,’ said the man on the bed quietly. ‘You saw who was here. Serve him loyally if he allows. He might not. The Lord of Thunder and the Lady guard your soul if that is so.’

The vizier swallowed. ‘And yours, my great lord, if we meet not again.’

The king made no reply. Mazendar went out. Someone closed the door from out in the corridor.

Immediately, moving briskly, the physician opened his linen bag and extracted a small sachet. He strode to the fire and tossed the contents onto it.

The flames turned blue, and a scent of wildflowers suddenly filled the room like an eastern springtime. Vinaszh blinked. The figure on the bed stirred.

‘Ispahani?’ said the King of Kings.

The physician looked surprised. ‘Yes, my gracious lord. I would not have imagined you—’

‘I had a physician from the Ajbar Islands once. He was very skilled. Unfortunately he courted a woman he would have done better not to have touched. He used this scent, I recall.’

Rustem crossed to the bedside. ‘It is taught that the nature of the treatment room can affect the nature of the treatment. We are influenced by such things, my lord.’

‘Arrows are not,’ said the king. But he had shifted a little to look at the physician, Vinaszh saw.

‘Perhaps that is so,’ said the doctor, noncommittally. He came to the bedside and, for the first time, bent to examine the shaft and the wound. Vinaszh saw him suddenly check his motion. A strange expression crossed the bearded features. He lowered his hands.

Then he looked over at Vinaszh. ‘Commander, it is necessary for you to find gloves for me. The best leather ones in the fortress, as quickly as possible.’

Vinaszh asked no questions. He was likely to die if the king died. He went, closing the door behind him, and hurried along the corridor, past those waiting there, and down the stairwell to find his own riding gloves.

RUSTEM HAD BEEN TERRIFIED when he entered, overwhelmed, summoning all his reserves of composure so as not to show it. He’d almost dropped his implements, feared someone would see his trembling hands, but the captain of the guard had moved quickly to take them. He’d used the formal movements of genuflection to speak a calming invocation in his mind.

After rising, he’d been more blunt than he ought to have been, asking the courtiers—and the vizier and a prince!—to leave the room. But he always used a manner of crisp efficiency to suggest authority beyond his years, and this was no time or place to deviate from his customary methods. If he was to die, it hardly mattered what they thought of him, did it? He asked the commander to stay. A soldier would be unfazed by bloodshed and screaming, and someone might have to hold the afflicted person down.

The afflicted person. The King of Kings. Sword of Perun. Brother to the Sun and Moons.

Rustem forced himself to stop thinking in that way. This was a patient. An injured man. That was what mattered. The courtiers left. The prince—Rustem didn’t know which of the king’s sons this was—paused in front of him and made vivid with twisting hands the threat of death that had been with Rustem from the moment he’d left his garden.

It could not be allowed to matter. All would be as had been written.

He’d cast the Ajbar powder into the fire to bring the room in tune with more harmonious presences and spirits, then crossed to the bed to examine the arrow and the wound.

And he had smelled kaaba there.

His mind reeling with shock, he’d realized that the smell had jogged a hovering awareness, and then a second one had emerged and left him very much afraid. He’d sent the commander hurrying for gloves. He needed them.

If he touched that arrow shaft he would die.

Alone in the room with the King of Kings, Rustem discovered that his fears were those of a physician and not a lowly subject now. He wondered how to say what was in his mind.

The king’s eyes were on his face now, dark and cold. Rustem saw rage in them. ‘There is a poison on the shaft,’ Shirvan said.

Rustem bowed his head. ‘Yes, my lord. Kaaba. From the fijana plant.’ He took a breath and asked, ‘Did your own physicians touch the arrow?’

The king nodded his head very slightly. No hint of anger diminishing. He would be in very great pain but wasn’t showing it. ‘All three of them. Amusing. I ordered them to be executed for their incompetence, but they would each have died soon, wouldn’t they? None of them noted the poison.’

‘It is rare here,’ said Rustem, struggling to order his thoughts.

‘Not so rare. I have been taking small amounts for twenty-five years,’ said the king. ‘Kaaba, other evil substances. Anahita will summon us to herself when she wills, but men may still be prudent in their lives, and kings must be.’

Rustem swallowed. He now had the explanation for his patient’s survival to this point. Twenty-five years? An image came into his mind: a young king touching— fearfully, surely—a trace amount of the deadly powder: the sickness that would have ensued . . . doing the same thing again later, and then again, and then beginning to taste it, in larger and larger amounts. He shook his head.

‘The king has endured much for his people,’ he said. He was thinking of the court physicians. Kaaba closed the throat before it reached the heart. One died in agony, of self-strangulation. He had seen it in the east. A method of formal execution. Amusing, the king had said.

He was thinking of something else now, as well. He pushed that away for the moment, as best he could.

‘It makes no difference,’ said the king. His voice was much as Rustem had imagined it might be: cold, uninflected, grave. ‘This is a lion arrow. Protection from poison doesn’t help if the arrow cannot come out.’

There was a tapping at the door. It opened and Vinaszh the garrison commander returned, breathing as if he’d been running, carrying dark brown leather riding gloves. They were too thick for easy use, Rustem saw, but he had no choice. He put them on. Unlaced the thong of the case that held a long thin metal implement. The one his son had brought out to the garden for him. He said an arrow, Papa.

‘There are sometimes ways of removing even these,’ Rustem said, trying not to think about Shaski. He turned to the west, closed his eyes and began to pray, mentally tabulating the afternoon’s omens, good and bad, as he did so, and counting the days since the last lunar eclipse. When he had done the calculations he set out the indicated talismans and wardings. He proposed a sense-dulling herb for the pain of what was to come. The king refused it. Rustem called the garrison commander to the bedside and told him what he had to do to keep the patient steady. He didn’t say ‘the king’ now. This was an afflicted man. Rustem was a doctor with an assistant and an arrow to remove, if he could. He was at war now, with Azal the Enemy, who could blot out the moons and sun and end a life.

In the event, the commander was not needed, nor was the herb. Rustem first broke off the blackened shaft as close to the entry wound as he could, then used a sequence of probes and a knife to widen the wound itself, a procedure he knew to be excruciatingly painful. Some men could not endure it, even dulled by medication. They would thrash and scream, or lose consciousness. Shirvan of Bassania never closed his eyes and never moved, though his breathing became shallow and rapid. There were beads of sweat on his brow and the muscles of his jaw were clenched beneath the plaited beard. When he judged the opening wide enough, Rustem oiled the long, slender, metal Spoon of Enyati and slid it in towards the embedded arrowhead.

It was difficult to be precise with the thick gloves, already blood-soaked, but he had a view of the alignment of the flange now and knew which way to angle the cupping part of Enyati’s device. The shallow cup slid up to the flange through the flesh of the king—who had caught his breath now, but moved not at all where he lay. Rustem twisted a little and felt the spoon slip around the widest part of the head, pressing against it. He pushed a little further, not breathing himself in this most delicate moment of all, invoking the Lady in her guise as Healer, and then he twisted it again and pulled gently back a very little.

The king gasped then and half lifted one arm as if in protest, but Rustem felt the catch as the arrowhead was gathered and shielded in the cup. He had done it in one pass. He knew a man, a teacher in the far east, who would have been gravely, judiciously pleased. Now only the smooth, oiled sides of the spoon itself would be exposed to the wounded flesh, the barbed flange safely nestled within.

Rustem blinked. He went to brush the sweat from his forehead with the back of one bloody glove and remembered—barely in time—that he would die if he did so. His heart thudded.

‘We are almost home, almost done,’ he murmured. ‘Are you ready, dear my lord?’ The vizier had used that phrase. In this moment, watching the man on the bed deal silently with appalling pain, Rustem meant it too. Vinaszh, the commander, surprised him by coming forward a little at the head of the bed and leaning sideways to place his hand on the king’s forehead above the wound and the blood: more a caress than a restraining hold.

‘Who is ever ready for this?’ grunted Shirvan the Great, and in the words Rustem caught—astonishingly— the ghost of a sardonic amusement. Hearing it, he set his feet to the west, spoke the Ispahani word engraved on the implement and, gripping with both gloved hands, pulled it straight back out from the mortal flesh of the King of Kings.

‘I AM TO LIVE, I take it?’

They were alone in the room. Time had run; it was full dark now outside. The wind was still blowing. On the king’s instructions, Vinaszh had stepped out to report only that treatment was continuing and Shirvan yet lived. No more than that. The soldier had asked no questions, neither had Rustem.

The first danger was always excessive bleeding. He had packed the expanded wound opening with lint and a clean sponge. He left the wound unclosed. Closing wounds too soon was the most common error doctors made, and patients died of it. Later, if all went well, he would draw the wound together with his smallest skewers as sutures, taking care to leave space for drainage. But not yet. For now he bandaged the packed wound with clean linen going under the armpit and across the chest, then up and around both sides of the neck in the triangle pattern prescribed. He finished the bandage at the top and arranged the knot to point downwards, as was proper, towards the heart. He wanted fresh bedding and linen now, clean gloves for himself, hot water. He threw the commander’s bloodied gloves on the fire. They could not be touched.

The king’s voice, asking the question, was faint but clear. A good sign. He’d accepted a sedating herb this time from Rustem’s bag. The dark eyes were calm and focused, not unduly dilated. Rustem was guardedly pleased. The second danger now, as always, was the green pus, though arrow wounds tended to heal better than those made by a sword. He would change the packing later, wash the wound, and change the salve and dressing before the end of the night: a variant of his own devising. Most physicians left the first bandage for two or three days.

‘My king, I believe you are. The arrow is gone, and the wound will heal if Perun wills and I am careful with it to avoid the noxious exudations.’ He hesitated. ‘And you have your own . . . protection against the poison that was in it.’

‘I wish to speak with you about that.’

Rustem swallowed hard. ‘My lord?’

‘You detected the fijana’s poison by the smell of it? Even with your own scented herbs on the fire?’

Rustem had feared this question. He was a good dissembler—most physicians were—but this was his king, mortal kin to the sun and moons.

‘I have encountered it before,’ he said. ‘I was trained in Ispahani, my lord, where the plant grows.’

‘I know where it grows,’ said the King of Kings. ‘What else do you have to tell me, physician?’

Nowhere to hide, it seemed. Rustem took a deep breath.

‘I also smelled it elsewhere in this room, great lord. Before I put the herbal scent to the fire.’

There was a silence.

‘I thought that might be so.’ Shirvan the Great looked coldly up at him. ‘Where?’ One word only, hard as a smith’s hammer.

Rustem swallowed again. Tasted something bitter: the awareness of his own mortality. But what choice did he now have? He said, ‘On the hands of the prince, great king. When he bade me save your life, at risk of my own.’

Shirvan of Bassania closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, Rustem saw a black rage in their depths again, despite the drug he had been given. ‘This . . . distresses me,’ said the King of Kings very softly. What Rustem heard was not distress, however. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder if the king had also detected kaaba on the arrowhead and shaft. He had been ingesting it for twenty-five years. If he had known the poison, he had allowed three physicians to handle it today without warning them, and had been about to let Rustem do the same. A test of competence? When he was on the brink of dying? What sort of man . . . ? Rustem shivered, could not help himself.

‘It seems,’ said Great Shirvan, ‘that someone besides myself has been protecting himself against poisons by building up a resistance. Clever. I have to say it was clever.’ He was silent a long time, then: ‘Murash. He would have made a good king, in fact.’

He turned away and looked out the window; there was nothing to see in the darkness. They could hear the sound of the wind, blowing from the desert. ‘I appear,’ the king said, ‘to have ordered the death of the wrong son and his mother.’ There was another, briefer silence. ‘This distresses me,’ he said for a second time.

‘May these orders not be rescinded, great lord?’ Rustem asked hesitantly.

‘Of course not,’ said the King of Kings.

The finality in the quiet voice was, Rustem would later decide, as frightening as anything else that day.

‘Summon the vizier,’ said Shirvan of Bassania, looking out upon night. ‘And my son.’

Rustem the physician, son of Zorah, wished ardently in that moment to be home in his small house, shuttered against the wind and dark, with Katyun and Jarita, two small children peacefully asleep, a late cup of herbed wine at his elbow and a fire on the hearth, with the knocking of the world at his door something that had never taken place.

Instead, he bowed to the man lying on the bed and walked to the doorway of the room.

‘Physician,’ said the King of Kings.

Rustem turned back. He felt afraid, terribly out of his depth.

‘I am still your patient. You continue to be accountable for my well-being. Act accordingly.’ The tone was flat, the cold rage still there.

It did not take immense subtlety to understand what this might mean.

Only this afternoon, in the hour when a wind had arisen in the desert, he had been in his own modest treatment room, preparing to instruct four pupils on couching simple cataracts according to the learned devisings of Merovius of Trakesia.

He opened the door. In the torchlight of the corridor he saw a dozen tired-looking courtiers. Servants or soldiers had brought benches; some of the waiting men were sitting, slumped against the stone walls. Some were asleep. Others saw him and stood up. Rustem nodded at Mazendar, the vizier, and then at the young prince, standing a little apart from the others, his face to a dark, narrow window-slit, praying.

Vinaszh the garrison commander—the only man there that Rustem knew—raised his eyebrows in silent inquiry and took a step forward. Rustem shook his head and then changed his mind. You continue to be accountable, the King of Kings had said. Act accordingly.

Rustem stepped aside to allow the vizier and the prince to walk into the room. Then he motioned for the commander to enter as well. He said nothing at all, but locked eyes with Vinaszh for a moment as the other man went in. Rustem followed and closed the door.

‘Father!’ cried the prince.

‘What is to be has long ago been written,’ murmured Shirvan of Bassania calmly. He was propped up on pillows, his bare chest wrapped in the linen bandages. ‘By the grace of Perun and the Lady, the designs of Black Azal have been blighted for a time. The physician has removed the arrow.’

The vizier, noticeably moved, passed a hand before his face and knelt, touching the floor with his forehead. Prince Murash, eyes wide as he looked at his father, turned quickly to Rustem. ‘Perun be exalted!’ he cried, and, striding across the floor, he reached forward and seized both of Rustem’s hands in his own. ‘You shall be requited, physician!’ exclaimed the prince.

It was with a supreme act of self-control and a desperate faith in his own learning that Rustem did not violently recoil. His heart was pounding furiously. ‘Perun be exalted!’ Prince Murash repeated, turning back to the bed and kneeling as the vizier had done.

‘Always,’ agreed the king quietly. ‘My son, the assassin’s arrow rests there on the chest beneath the window. There was poison on it. Kaaba. Throw it in the fire for me.’

Rustem caught his breath. He looked swiftly at Vinaszh, meeting the soldier’s eyes again, then back to the prince.

Murash rose to his feet. ‘Joyfully will I do so, my father and king. But poison?’ he said. ‘How can this be?’ He crossed to the window and reached carefully for a swath of linen that lay beside Rustem’s implements.

‘Take it in your hands, my son,’ said Shirvan of Bassania, King of Kings, Sword of Perun. ‘Take it in your bare hands again.’

Very slowly the prince turned to the bed. The vizier had risen now and was watching him closely.

‘I do not understand. You believe I handled this arrow?’ Prince Murash said.

‘The smell remains on your hands, my son,’ said Shirvan gravely. Rustem cautiously took a step towards the king. The prince turned—outwardly perplexed, no more than that—and looked at his hands and then at Rustem. ‘But then I will have poisoned the doctor, too,’ he said.

Shirvan moved his head to look at Rustem. Dark beard above pale linen bandages, the eyes black and cold. Act accordingly, he had said. Rustem cleared his throat. ‘You will have tried,’ he said. His heart was pounding. ‘If you handled the arrow when you shot the king then the kaaba has passed through your skin and is within you by now. There is no menace to your touch, Prince Murash. Not any more.’

He believed this was true. He had been taught that this was so. He had never seen it put to the test. He felt oddly light-headed, as though the room were rocking slightly, like a child’s cradle.

He saw the prince’s eyes go black then—much like his father’s, in fact. Murash reached to his belt, whipped out a knife, turned towards the bed.

The vizier cried out. Rustem stumbled forward, unarmed.

Vinaszh, commander of the garrison at Kerakek, killed Prince Murash, third of the nine sons of Shirvan the Great, with his own dagger, flung from near the doorway.

The prince, a blade in his throat, dropped his weapon from lifeless fingers and slowly toppled across the bed, his face to his father’s knees, his blood staining the pale sheets red.

Shirvan did not move. Neither did anyone else.

After a long, frozen moment the king turned from gazing down at his dead son to look over at Vinaszh and then at Rustem. He nodded his head slowly, to each of them.

‘Physician, your father’s name was . . . ?’ A tone of detached, mildly curious interrogation.

Rustem blinked. ‘Zorah, great lord.’

‘A warrior-caste name.’

‘Yes, lord. He was a soldier.’

‘You chose a different life?’

The conversation was so implausible it was eerie. Rustem felt dizzied by it. There was a dead man—a son— sprawled across the body of the man with whom he was speaking thus. ‘I war against disease and wounds, my lord.’ What he always said.

The king nodded again, thoughtfully, as if satisfied by something. ‘You know one must be of the priestly caste to become a royal physician, of course.’

Of course. The world knocking at his door, after all. Rustem lowered his head. Said nothing.

‘It will be arranged at the next Accession Ritual before the Sacred Flame in midsummer.’

Rustem swallowed hard. He seemed to have been doing so all night. He cleared his throat. ‘One of my wives is of the commoners’ caste, Great King.’

‘She will be generously dealt with. Is there a child?’

‘A girl, yes, my lord.’

The king shrugged. ‘A kindly husband will be found. Mazendar, see it is done.’

Jarita. Whose name meant desert pool. Black eyes, black hair, light step en tering a room, leaving it, as if loath to trouble the air within. Lightest touch in the world. And Inissa, the baby they called Issa. Rustem closed his eyes.

‘Your other wife is of the warrior caste?’

Rustem nodded. ‘Yes, my lord. And my son.’

‘They may be elevated with you in the ceremony. And come to Kabadh. If you desire a second wife there it shall be arranged.’

Again Rustem closed his eyes.

The world, hammering and hammering at his door, after all, entering like the wind.

‘This cannot take place until midsummer, of course. I wish to make use of you before that. You appear a competent man. There are never enough of them. You will treat me here, physician. Then you will undertake a winter journey for me. You are observant, it seems. Can serve your king even before you rise in caste. You will leave as soon as I am well enough to go back to Kabadh, in your own judgement.’

Rustem opened his eyes then. Looked up slowly. ‘Where am I to go, great lord?’

‘Sarantium,’ said Shirvan of Bassania.

He went home briefly when the King of Kings fell asleep, to change his bloodied clothes, replenish his herbs and medicines. It was cold in the windy darkness. The vizier gave him an escort of soldiers. It seemed he had become an important man. Not surprising, really, except that everything was surprising now.

Both women were awake, though it was very late. They had oil lamps burning in the front room: a waste. He’d have chastised Katyun for it on a normal night. He walked in. They both rose quickly to see him. Jarita’s eyes filled with tears.

‘Perun be praised,’ said Katyun. Rustem looked from one to the other.

‘Papa,’ someone said sleepily.

Rustem looked over and saw a little, rumpled figure stand up from the carpet before the fire. Shaski rubbed at his eyes. He’d been asleep but waiting here with his mothers.

‘Papa,’ he said again, hesitantly. Katyun moved over and laid a hand across his thin shoulders, as if afraid Rustem would reprimand the boy for being here and awake so late.

Rustem felt an odd constriction in his throat. Not the kaaba. Something else. He said, carefully, ‘It is all right, Shaski. I am home now.’

‘The arrow?’ said his son. ‘The arrow they said?’

It was curiously difficult to speak. Jarita was crying.

‘The arrow is safely removed. I used the Spoon of Enyati. The one you brought out for me. You did very well, Shaski.’

The boy smiled then, shyly, sleepily, his head against his mother’s waist. Katyun’s hand brushed his hair, tender as moonlight. Her eyes sought Rustem’s, too many questions in them.

The answers too large.

‘Go to sleep now, Shaski. I will speak with your mothers and then go back to my patient. I will see you tomorrow. Everything is well.’

It was, and it wasn’t. Being elevated to the priestly caste was a stunning, miraculous thing. The castes of Bassania were immovable as mountains—except when the King of Kings wished them to move. A physician’s position at court meant wealth, security, access to libraries and scholars, no more anxieties about buying a larger house for a family or burning oil lamps at night. Shaski’s own future had suddenly expanded beyond all possible hope.

But what could one say to a wife who was to be cast off by order of the King of Kings and given to another man? And the little one? Issa, asleep in her cradle now. The little one would be gone from him.

‘Everything is well,’ Rustem said again, trying to make himself believe it.

The door had opened to reveal the world on his threshold. Good and evil walked hand in hand, not to be separated. Perun was opposed, always, by Azal. The two gods had entered into Time together; one could not exist without the other. So the priests taught before the Holy Flame in every temple in Bassania.

The two women took the child to his room together. Shaski reached up and held each of their hands, walking through the door, claiming them both. They indulged him too much, Rustem thought. But this was not a night to dwell upon that.

He stood alone in the front room of his own small house amid the burning of lamps and the firelight and he thought about fate and the chance moments that shaped a man’s life, and about Sarantium.

Chapter II

Pardos had never liked his hands. The fingers were too short, stubby, broad. They didn’t look like a mosaicist’s hands, though they showed the same network of cuts and scratches all the others’ did.

He’d had a great deal of time to think about this and other things on the long road in wind and rain as autumn steadily turned to winter. Martinian’s fingers, or Crispin’s, or Pardos’s best friend Couvry’s—those were the right shape. They were large and long, appearing deft and capable. Pardos thought his own hands were like a farmhand’s, a labourer’s, someone in a trade where dexterity hardly mattered. It bothered him, sometimes.

But he was a mosaicist, wasn’t he? Had finished his apprenticeship with two celebrated masters of the craft and had been formally admitted to the guild in Varena. He had his papers in his purse now, his name was entered on the rolls back home. So appearance wasn’t really important, after all. His short, thick fingers were nimble enough to do what needed to be done. The eye and the mind mattered, Crispin used to say before he went away; the hands could learn to do what they were told.

It seemed to be true. They were doing what needed to be done here, though Pardos would never have dreamt that his first labours as a fully-fledged mosaicist would be expended in the remote, bitterly cold wilderness of Sauradia.

He would never have even dreamt, in fact, of being this far away from home, and on his own. He had not been the sort of young man who imagined adventures in distant places. He was pious, careful, prone to worry, not at all impulsive.

But he had left Varena—his home, all he knew of Jad’s created world—almost immediately after the murders in the sanctuary, and that was about as impulsive an action as could be imagined.

It hadn’t felt as though he was being reckless, it seemed rather as if there was no real choice in the matter, and Pardos had wondered why the others couldn’t understand that. When pressed by his friends, and by Martinian and his concerned, kind-hearted wife, Pardos had only said, over and over, that he could not stay in a place where such things were done. When they told him, in tones of cynicism or sadness, that such things happened everywhere, Pardos replied—very simply—that he hadn’t seen them everywhere, only in the sanctuary expanded to house the bones of King Hildric outside Varena.

The consecration of that sanctuary had been the most wonderful day of his life, at first. He and the other former apprentices, newly elevated to the guild, had been sitting with Martinian and his wife and with Crispin’s white-haired mother in places of honour for the ceremony. All the mighty of the Antae kingdom were there, and many of the most illustrious Rhodians, including representatives of the High Patriarch himself, had come to Varena along the muddy roads from Rhodias. Queen Gisel, veiled and clad in the pure white of mourning, had been sitting so near that Pardos could almost have spoken to her.

Except that it hadn’t been the queen. It had been a woman pretending to be her, a lady-in-waiting. That woman had died in the sanctuary, and so had the queen’s giant, silent guard, chopped down by a sword that should never have been in a holy place. Then the swordsman— Agila, Master of Horse—had himself been slain where he stood by the altar, arrows whipping down from overhead. Other men had died the same way, while people screamed and trampled each other in a rush for the doors and blood spattered the sun disk beneath the mosaics Crispin and Martinian and Pardos and Radulph and Couvry and the others had laboured to craft in honour of the god.

Violence, ugly and profane, in a chapel of worship, a desecration of the place and of Jad. Pardos had felt unclean and ashamed—bitterly aware that he was Antae and shared the blood, and even the tribe, as it happened, of the foul-tongued man who had stood up with his forbidden sword, smeared the young queen with ugly, vicious words, and then died there with those he’d killed.

Pardos had walked out the double doors into the sanctuary yard even as the services—under the orders of the sleek chancellor, Eudric Golden hair—had resumed. He had gone past the outdoor ovens where he’d spent a summer and fall attending to the setting lime, out through the gate and then along the road back to the city. Before he’d even reached the walls he had decided he was leaving Varena. And almost immediately after that he’d realized how far he intended to go, though he’d never been away from home in his life and winter was coming.

They’d tried to dissuade him later, but Pardos was a stubborn young man and not easily swayed when his mind and heart were set. He needed to put a distance between himself and what had happened in that sanctuary—what had been done by his own tribe and blood. None of his colleagues and friends were Antae, they were all Rhodian-born. Perhaps that was why they didn’t feel the shame as fiercely as he did.

Winter roads to the east might have their dangers, but as far as Pardos was concerned, they could not be worse than what was about to happen here among his people with the queen gone and swords drawn in holy places.

He wanted to see Crispin again, and to work with him, far away from the tribal wars that were coming. Coming again. They had been down this dark path before, the Antae. Pardos would go a different direction this time.

They’d had no word from Martinian’s younger, more intense partner since a single relayed message sent from a military camp in Sauradia. That letter hadn’t even been addressed to them, it had been delivered to an alchemist, a friend of Martinian’s. The man—Zoticus was his name—had passed on word that Crispin was all right, at least to that point in his journey. Why he’d written the old man and not his own partner or mother was not explained, or at least not to Pardos.

Since then, nothing, though Crispin would probably have reached Sarantium by now—if he’d reached it at all. Pardos, with his own decision to leave now firm in his mind, latched onto an image of his former teacher and announced an intention to follow him to the Imperial City.

When they realized he wasn’t to be dissuaded, Martinian and his wife Carissa turned their considerable energies to making sure Pardos was properly prepared for the journey. Martinian lamented the recent—and very sudden—departure of his alchemical friend, a man who apparently knew a great deal about the roads east, but he succeeded in canvassing opinions and suggestions from various well-travelled merchants who were former clients. Pardos, who was proud to say he knew his letters, was provided with carefully written-out lists of places to stay and to avoid. His options were limited, of course, since he couldn’t afford to bribe his way into the Imperial Inns en route, but it was still useful to learn of those taverns and cauponae where a traveller stood a higher-than-usual chance of being robbed or killed.

One morning, after the sunrise invocations in the small, ancient chapel near the room he shared with Couvry and Radulph, Pardos went—somewhat embarrassed—to visit a cheiromancer.

The man’s chambers were towards the palace quarter. Some of the other apprentices and craftsmen working on the sanctuary had been inclined to consult him, seeking advice in gambling and love, but that didn’t make Pardos feel easier about what he was doing.

Cheiromancy was a condemned heresy, of course, but the clergy of Jad walked carefully here in Batiara among the Antae, and the conquerors had never entirely abandoned some aspects of their past beliefs. The door had been openly marked with a signboard showing a pentagram. A bell rang when it opened, but no one appeared. Pardos went into a small, dark front room and, after waiting for a time, rapped on an unsteady counter there. The seer came out from behind a beaded curtain and led him, unspeaking, into a windowless back room warmed only by a small brazier and lit with candles. He waited, still silent, until Pardos had placed three copper folles on the table and spoken his question.

The cheiromancer gestured to a bench. Pardos sat down carefully; the bench was very old.

The man, who was rail-thin, dressed in black and missing the little finger of his left hand, took Pardos’s short, broad hand and bent his head over it, studying the palm for a long time by the light of the candles and the smoky brazier. He coughed, at intervals. Pardos experienced an odd mixture of fear and anger and self-contempt as he endured the close scrutiny. Then the man—he still had not spoken—had Pardos toss some dried-out chicken bones from his fist down onto the greasy table. He examined these for another long while and then declared in a high, wheezing voice that Pardos would not die on the journey east and that he was expected on the road.

That last made no sense at all and Pardos asked about it. The cheiromancer shook his head, coughing. He put a stained cloth to his mouth. He said, when the coughing subsided, that it was difficult to discern further details. He was asking for more money, Pardos knew, but he refused to offer more than he’d already paid and he walked out into the morning sunshine. He wondered if the man was as poor as he seemed to be, or if the shabbiness of his attire and chambers was a device to avoid drawing attention to himself. Certainly cheiromancers were not short of trade in Varena. The cough and rheumy voice had sounded real, but the wealthy could fall ill almost as easily as the poor.

Still embarrassed by what he’d done, and aware of how the cleric who presided over services in his chapel would feel about his visiting a seer, Pardos made a point of reporting the visit to Couvry. ‘If I do get killed,’ he said, ‘go get those three folles back, all right?’ Couvry had agreed, without any of his usual joking.

The night before Pardos left, Couvry and Radulph took him drinking at their favourite wine shop. Radulph was also going away soon, but only south to Baiana near Rhodias where his family lived, and where he expected to find steady work decorating homes and summer retreats by the sea. That hope might be affected if civil war broke out, or an invasion came from the east, but they decided not to talk about that on their last night together. During the course of a liquid farewell, Radulph and Couvry both expressed wistfully intense regret that they weren’t coming with Pardos. Now that they were reconciled to his sudden departure, they had begun to see it as a grand adventure.

Pardos didn’t view it that way at all, but he wasn’t about to disappoint his friends by saying so. He was deeply touched when Couvry opened a parcel he’d brought and they presented Pardos with a new pair of boots for the road. They’d traced his sandals one night while he slept, Radulph explained, to get the size right.

The tavern closed early, by order of Eudric Goldenhair, once the chancellor, who had proclaimed himself regent in the absence of the queen. There had been some unrest in the wake of that proclamation. A number of people had died in street fighting the last few days. The drinking places were under a curfew. Tensions were high and would be rising.

Among other things, no one seemed to have any idea where the queen had gone, clearly a matter of some agitation among those now occupying the palace.

Pardos simply hoped she was all right, wherever she was, and that she would come back. The Antae didn’t favour women rulers, but Pardos thought Hildric’s daughter would be better, by far, than any of those likely to take her place.

He left home the next morning, immediately after the sunrise invocation, taking the road east towards Sauradia.

IN THE EVENT, dogs were his biggest problem. They tended to avoid larger parties, but there were two or three dawns and twilights when Pardos was walking on his own, and on one particularly bad night he found himself caught between inns. On these occasions, wild dogs came after him. He laid about with his staff, surprising himself with the violence of his own blows and his profane language, but he took his share of bites. None of the animals appeared to be sick—which was a good thing or he’d have been dying or dead by now and Couvry would have had to go get the money back from the fortune-teller.

The inns tended to be filthy and cold, with food of indeterminate origin, but Pardos’s room at home was no city palace and he was hardly a stranger to small biting things sharing his pallet. He observed his share of unsavoury figures drinking too much bad wine on damp nights, but it must have been obvious that the quiet young man had nothing in the way of wealth or goods to steal and they left him pretty much alone. He did take the precaution of smearing and staining his new boots, to make them look older.

He liked the boots. Didn’t mind the cold or the walking at all. Found the great black forest to the north— the Aldwood—to be oddly exciting. He enjoyed trying to detect and define shadings of dark green and grey and muddy brown and black as the shifting light caused changes at the edge of the forest. It occurred to him that his grandfathers and their fathers might have lived in these woods; perhaps that was why he was drawn to them. The Antae long had made their home in Sauradia, among the Inicii and Vrachae and other warring tribes, before setting out on their great migration south and west into Batiara, where an empire had been crumbling and ready to fall. Perhaps the trees stretching alongside the Imperial road were speaking to something ancient in his blood. The cheiromancer had said he was expected on the road. He hadn’t said what was expecting him.

He sought out others to travel with, as instructed by Martinian, but after the first few days he didn’t greatly worry if he found no one. He was as faithful as he could be about the morning invocations and the sunset rites, trying to find roadside chapels for his prayers, so he often fell behind less pious companions even when he did link up with them.

One smooth-shaven wine merchant from Megarium had offered to pay Pardos to share his bed—at an Imperial Inn, even—and had needed a rap with a staff on the back of his knees to dissuade him from a grab at Pardos’s privates as a masking twilight overtook their party on the road. Pardos had worried that the man’s friends might react to his cry of pain and make trouble, but in fact they seemed to be familiar with their colleague’s nature and gave Pardos no difficulty. One of them had even apologized, which was unexpected. Their group had stopped at the Imperial Inn when it loomed out of darkness—large and torchlit and welcoming—and Pardos had kept going, alone. That was the night he ended up huddled on the southern side of a stone wall in the knifing cold, dealing with wild dogs in the white moonlight. The wall ought to have kept out the dogs, but it was broken down in too many places. Pardos knew what that meant. Plague had been here as well in the years just past. When men died in such numbers there were never enough hands for what needed to be done.

That one night was very hard and he did wonder, shivering and struggling to stay awake, if he would die here in Sauradia, having lived a brief, utterly inconsequential life. He thought about what he was doing so far away from everything he knew, without the means to make a fire, staring into the black for the lean, slavering apparitions that could kill him if he missed their approach. He heard other sounds, as well, from the forest on the far side of the wall and the road: deep, repeated grunting, and a howling, and once the tread of something very large. He didn’t stand up to see what it might be, but after that time the dogs went away, thanks be to Jad. Pardos sat huddled in his cloak, leaning against his pack and the rough shelter of the wall, and looked up at the far stars and the one white moon and thought about where he was in Jad’s creation. Where the small, breathing, unimportant thing that was Pardos of the Antae was passing this cold night in the world. The stars were hard and bright as diamonds in the dark.

Later, he was to decide that that long night had given him a new appreciation of the god, if that wasn’t a thought too laden with presumption, for how dare a man such as he speak of appreciating the god? But the thought remained with him: didn’t Jad do something infinitely more difficult each and every night, battling alone against enemies and evil in the bitter cold and dark? And—a further truth—didn’t the god do it for the benefit of others, for his mortal children, and not for himself at all? Pardos had simply been fighting for his own life, not for anything else that lived.

He’d thought, at one point in the darkness after the white moon set, of the Sleepless Ones, those holy clerics who kept a night-long vigil to mark their awareness of what the god did in the night. Then he’d fallen into a fitful, dreamless sleep.

And the very next day, chilled, painfully stiff and very tired, he came to a chapel of those same Sleepless Ones, set back a little from the road, and he entered, gratefully, wanting to pray and give thanks, perhaps find some warmth on a cold, windy morning, and then he saw what was overhead.

One of the clerics was awake and came forward to greet Pardos kindly, and they spoke the sunrise invocation together before the disk and beneath the awesome figure of the dark, bearded god on the dome above. Afterwards, Pardos hesitantly told the cleric that he was from Varena, and a mosaicist, and that the work on the dome was— truly—the most overwhelming he had ever seen.

The white-robed holy man hesitated, in turn, and asked Pardos if he was acquainted with another western mosaicist, a man named Martinian, who had passed this way earlier in the autumn. And Pardos remembered, just in time, that Crispin had travelled east using his partner’s name, and he said yes, he did know Martinian, had done his apprenticeship with him and was journeying east to join him now, in Sarantium.

At that, the thin-faced cleric hesitated a second time and then asked Pardos to wait for him a few moments. He went through a small door at one side of the chapel and returned with another man, older, grey-bearded, and this man explained, awkwardly, that the other artisan, Martinian, had suggested to them that the image of Jad overhead might need a certain measure of . . . attention, if it were to endure as it should.

And Pardos, looking up again, more carefully now, saw what Crispin had seen and nodded his head and said that this was, indeed, so. Then they asked him if he might be willing to assist them in this. Pardos blinked, overawed, and stammered something about the need for a great many tesserae to match those used above for this exacting, almost impossible task. He would require a mosaicist’s equipment and tools, and scaffolding . . .

The two holy men had exchanged a glance and then led Pardos through the chapel to one of the outbuildings behind, and then down some creaking stairs to a cellar. And there, by torchlight, Pardos saw the disassembled parts of scaffolding and the tools of his own trade. There were a dozen chests along the stone walls and the clerics opened these, one by one, and Pardos saw tesserae of such brilliance and quality that he had to struggle not to weep, remembering the muddy, inadequate glass Crispin and Martinian had been forced to use all the time in Varena. These were the tesserae used to make that image of Jad overhead: the clerics had kept them down here, all these hundreds of years.

The two holy men had looked at him, waiting, saying nothing at all, until at length Pardos simply nodded his head. ‘Yes,’ he’d said. ‘Yes.’ And, ‘I will need some of you to help me.’

‘You must teach us what we need to do,’ the older man had said, holding up a torch, looking down at the shining glass in the ancient chests as it reflected and caught the light.

Pardos ended up staying in that place, working among those holy men, living with them, through almost the whole of the winter. It seemed he had been, in the strangest way, expected there.

There came a time when he reached the limits of what he felt capable of doing without guidance or greater experience, putting his own hands to a work of such holy magnificence, and he told the clerics as much. They respected him by then, acknowledged his piety and care, and he even thought they liked him. No one demurred. Wearing a white robe they offered him, Pardos stayed awake with the Sleepless Ones on the last night and, shivering, heard his own name chanted by holy men in their rituals as someone virtuous and deserving, for whom the god’s grace was besought. They gave him gifts—a new cloak, a sun disk—when he set out again with his staff and pack on a bright morning, with birdsong hinting at spring, continuing towards Sarantium.

In all honesty, Rustem had to admit that his vanity had been offended. With the passage of a little more time, he decided, this wounded, unsettled, choleric feeling would probably pass and he might begin to find his wives’ reactions and his own response to be amusing and instructive, but an adequate interval had not yet gone by.

It seemed he had indulged himself in some domestic illusions. He wasn’t the first man to do so. Slender, fragile Jarita, who was being discarded, cast off by the desire of the King of Kings to raise Rustem of Kerakek to the priestly caste, had appeared entirely content when informed of this development—as soon as she was told of the promise that she was to be given an appropriate, kindly husband. Her only request was that this happen in Kabadh.

It seemed that his second, delicate wife, had a greater dislike for desert sand and heat than she had ever revealed, and an equally strong interest in seeing and dwelling within the bustle and excitement of the royal city. Rustem, nonplussed, had indicated that it was likely she could be accommodated in this wish. Jarita had kissed him happily, even passionately, and gone off to see her baby in the nursery.

Katyun, his first wife—calm, composed Katyun, who was being honoured, as was her son, by elevation to the highest of the three castes, with the prospect of unimagined wealth and opportunity—had erupted in a storm of grief upon hearing these same tidings. She had refused to be consoled, wailing and distraught.

Katyun did not have any liking for the great cities of the world, never having seen—or having felt any desire to see—any of them. Sand in clothing or hair was a trivial affliction; the heat of the desert sun could be dealt with if one knew the proper ways to live; small, remote Kerakek was an entirely pleasant place in which to dwell if one were the wife of a respected physician and had the status that came therewith.

Kabadh, the court, the famous water gardens, the churka grounds, the flower-laden, crimson-pillared hall of dance . . . these were places where women would be painted and perfumed and garbed in exquisite silks and in the manners and malice of long practice and familiarity. A woman from the desert provinces among such . . . ?

Katyun had wept in her bed, squeezing her eyes tightly shut, refusing even to look at him, as Rustem strove to comfort her with talk of what opportunities this royal munificence offered for Shaski—and any other children they might now have.

That last had been an impulsive, unplanned comment, but it did produce an ebbing of tears. Katyun wanted another baby and Rustem knew it. With a move to Kabadh, in the lofty role of royal physician, there would be no further arguments about living space or resources that could be applied against the idea of another child.

Inwardly, he had still been wounded, however. Jarita had been much too matter-of-fact about being set aside with her daughter; Katyun gave no evidence of realizing how astonishing this change in their fortunes was, no sign of pride in him, of excitement in their shared new fate.

The suggestion about a second child did calm her. She dried her eyes, sat up in the bed, looked at him thoughtfully and then managed a brief smile. Rustem spent what was left of the night with her. Katyun, less delicately pretty than Jarita, was also less shy than his second wife and rather more skilled in arousing him by diverse means. Before dawn he had been induced, still half-asleep, to make a first assay at engendering the promised offspring. Katyun’s touch and her whispering voice at his ear were balm to his pride.

At sunrise he’d returned to the fortress to determine the status of his royal patient. All was well. Shirvan healed swiftly, signs of an iron constitution and the benign alignment of auspices. Rustem took no credit for the former, was at pains to monitor and adjust for the latter.

In between visits with the king, he found himself closeted with the vizier, Mazendar, others joining them at intervals. Rustem received an education, at speed, in certain aspects of the world as they knew it that winter, with particular emphasis on the nature and the possible intentions of Valerius II of Sarantium, whom some named the Night’s Emperor.

If he was going there, and was to do so to some purpose, there were things he needed to know.

When he finally did depart—having made hasty arrangements for his students to continue with a physician he knew in Qandir, even farther to the south—the winter was well advanced.

The most difficult parting—and this was entirely unexpected—was with Shaski. The women were reconciled to what was happening, could understand it; the baby was too young to know. His son, too soft by far, Rustem thought, was visibly struggling not to cry as Rustem finished tightening the drawstrings on his pack one morning and turned to bid a last farewell to all of them.

Shaski had come forward a few steps down the walk. He rubbed at his eyes with bunched fists. He was trying, Rustem had to acknowledge. He was attempting not to cry. But what little boy grew so absurdly attached to his father? It was a weakness. Shaski was still of an age when the world he ought to know and need was that of the women. A father was to provide food and shelter and moral guidance and ensure discipline in the home. Perhaps Rustem had made a mistake, after all, in allowing the child to listen to his lessons from the hallway. Shaski had no business reacting this way. There were even soldiers watching; an escort from the fortress would go with him the first part of the way, as a sign of favour.

Rustem opened his mouth to admonish the boy and discovered that—shamefully—he had an awkward lump in his own throat and a constriction of feeling in his chest that made it difficult to speak. He coughed.

‘Listen to your mothers,’ he said, more huskily than he’d expected.

Shaski nodded his head. ‘I will,’ he whispered. He still wasn’t crying, Rustem saw. His small fists were clenched at his sides. ‘When will you come home, Papa?’

‘When I have done what I have to do.’

Shaski took another two steps towards the gate where Rustem stood. They were alone, halfway between the women by the door and the military escort a little down the road. He could have touched the boy if he’d reached out. One bird was singing in the bright, crisp winter morning.

His son took a deep breath, visibly summoning courage. ‘I don’t want you to go, you know,’ said Shaski.

Rustem strove for outrage. Children were not to speak this way. Not to their fathers. Then he saw that the boy knew this, and had lowered his eyes and hunched his shoulders, as if awaiting a reprimand.

Rustem looked at him and swallowed, then turned away, saying nothing after all. He carried the pack a few steps until one of the soldiers jumped down from his mount and took it from him, fastening it efficiently to the back of a mule. Rustem watched him. The leader of the soldiers looked at him and raised an eyebrow in inquiry, gesturing at the horse they’d given him.

Rustem nodded, inexplicably irritated. He took a step towards the horse, then suddenly turned around, to look back at the gate. Shaski was still there. He lifted his hand to wave to the boy, and smiled a little, awkwardly, that the child might know his father wasn’t angry about what he’d said, even though he should have been. Shaski’s eyes were on Rustem’s face. He still wasn’t crying. He still looked as though he might. Rustem looked at him another moment, drinking in the sight of that small form, then he nodded his head, turned briskly and accepted a hand up onto his horse and they rode off. The uncomfortable feeling in his chest lingered for a time and then it went away.

THE ESCORT RODE with him to the border but Rustem continued west into Sarantine lands—for the first time in his life—alone save for a dark-eyed, bearded man -servant named Nishik. He left the horse with the soldiers and continued on a mule, now; it was more suited to his role.

The manservant was another deception. Just as Rustem was not, for the moment, simply a teaching physician in search of manuscripts and learned discussions with western colleagues, so was his servant not really a servant. Nishik was a veteran soldier, experienced in combat and survival. In the fortress it had been impressed upon Rustem that such skills might be important on his journey, and perhaps even more so when he reached his destination. He was, after all, a spy.

They stopped in Sarnica, making no secret of their arrival or Rustem’s role in saving the life of the King of Kings and his forthcoming status. It had been too dramatic an event: the tidings of the assassination attempt had already run before them across the border, even in winter.

The governor of Amoria requested that Rustem attend upon him and seemed appropriately horrified to learn further details of deadly perfidy within the royal family of Bassania. After the formal audience, the governor dismissed his attendants and confided privately to Rustem that he had been encountering some difficulties in fulfilling his obligations to both his wife and his favourite mistress. He admitted, somewhat shamefacedly, that he’d gone so far as to consult a cheiromancer, without success. Prayer had also failed to be of use.

Rustem refrained from comment on either of these solutions and, after examining the man’s tongue and taking his pulse, advised the governor to make a meal of the well-cooked liver of a sheep or cow on those evenings when he wished to have relations with either of his women. Noting the governor’s extremely florid complexion, he also suggested refraining from the consumption of wine with that important meal. He expressed great confidence that this would prove helpful. Confidence, of course, was half the treatment. The governor was profuse in his thanks and gave instructions that Rustem was to be assisted in all his affairs while in Sarnica. Two days later he sent a silk robe and an elaborate Jaddite sun disk to Rustem’s inn as gifts. The disk, though beautiful, was hardly an appropriate offering to a Bassanid, but Rustem concluded that his suggestions had met with some nocturnal success.

While in Sarnica, Rustem visited with one of his former pupils and met two doctors with whom he’d exchanged correspondence. He purchased a text of Cadestes on skin ulcers and paid to have another manuscript copied and sent to him in Kabadh. He told those physicians he met exactly what had happened in Kerakek, and how, as a consequence of saving the king’s life, he was soon to become a royal physician. In the interval, he explained, he had requested and received permission to conduct a journey of acquisition, obtaining further knowledge for himself and written sources from the west.

He gave a morning lecture, pleasingly well attended, on the Ispahani treatment of difficult childbirths, and another on the amputation of limbs when inflammation and noxious exudations followed upon a wound. He left after a stay of almost a month and a gracious farewell dinner hosted by the physicians’ guild. He was given the names of several doctors in the Imperial City upon whom he was urged to call, and the address of a respectable inn where members of the healing profession were inclined to stay when in Sarantium.

The food on the road north was wretched and the accommodations worse, but—given that it was the end of winter, not yet spring, when any remotely intelligent people avoided travel entirely—the trip proved largely uneventful. Their arrival in Sarantium was rather less so. Rustem had not expected to encounter both death and a wedding on his first day.

It had been years since Pappio, Director of the Imperial Glassworks, had actually done any actual glassblowing or design work himself. His duties now were administrative and diplomatic, involving the coordination of supplies and production and the distribution of tesserae and flat sheets of glass to craftsmen requesting them, in the City and beyond. Determining priorities and placating outraged artisans comprised the most delicate part of his office. Artisans, in Pappio’s experience, tended to incline towards outrage.

He had his system worked out. Imperial projects came first, and amongst those Pappio made assessments of how important a given mosaic might be in the scheme of things. This required delicate inquiries in the Imperial Precinct at times, but he did have a staff for that, and he had acquired a sufficient polish to his own manners to make it feasible for him to attend upon some of the higher civil service functionaries when necessary. His wasn’t the most important of the guilds—the silk guild had that distinction, of course—but it wasn’t anywhere near the least significant, either, and under this particular Emperor, with his elaborate building projects, it could be said that Pappio was an important man. He was treated respectfully, in any case.

Private commissions came behind the Imperial ones, but there was a complication: the artisans engaged on projects for the Emperor received their supplies free of charge, while those doing mosaic or other glass work for citizens had to buy their tesserae or sheets of glass. The Imperial Glassworks was expected to pay for itself now, in the modern scheme of things devised by thrice-exalted Valerius II and his advisers. Pappio was not, therefore, at liberty to entirely ignore the entreaties of those mosaicists clamouring for tesserae for private ceilings, walls, or floors. Nor, frankly, would it make sense for him to refuse all the quiet offers of sums for his own purse. A man had a duty to his family, didn’t he?

Over and above these nuanced issues, Pappio had a powerful inclination to favour those craftsmen—or patrons—who had a demonstrated affinity for the Greens.

The Splendid Greens of Great and Glorious Achievement were his own beloved faction, and one of the extreme pleasures attendant upon his rise to this lofty status in his guild was that he was now in a position to subsidize the faction somewhat, and be honoured and recognized accordingly in their banquet hall and at the Hippodrome. He was no longer just another humble supporter. He was a dignitary, present at the feasts, prominently seated at the theatre, among those in the preferred places for the chariot races themselves. Long past were the days when he’d line up before dawn outside the Hippodrome gates to get a standing place to watch the horses run.

He couldn’t be too obvious in his favouritism—the Emperor’s people were present and observing, every-where—but Pappio did make sure that, all other things being remotely balanced, a Green mosaicist did not go away empty-handed if competing for hard-to-find colours or semi-precious stones with a known follower of the accursed Blues or even someone without declared allegiance.

This was only as it should be. Pappio owed his appointment to his Green partisanship. His predecessor as head of the guild and Glassworks Director—an equally fervent Green—had selected him in large part for that reason. Pappio knew that when he chose to retire he was expected to pass on the position to another Green. It happened all the time, in every guild except the silk, which was a special case and closely scru tinized by the Imperial Precinct. One faction or the other controlled most of the guilds, and it was rare for that control to be wrested away. One had to be blatantly corrupt for the Emperor’s people to interfere.

Pappio had no intention of being blatant about anything, or even corrupt, if it came to that. He was a careful man.

And it was that instinctive caution, in part, that had made him a little uneasy about the surprising request he’d received, and the extremely substantial payment that had accompanied it—before he’d even done a preliminary sketch of the glass bowl requested!

He understood that it was his stature that was being bought. That the gift would acquire greatly enhanced value because it had been fashioned by the head of the guild himself, who never did such things any more. He also knew that the man buying this from him—as a wedding gift, he understood—could afford to do so. One didn’t need to make inquiries to know that the principal secretary to the Supreme Strategos, an historian who also happened to be chronicling the Emperor’s building projects, had sufficient resources to buy an elaborate bowl. This was a man who, more and more, seemed to require a certain deference. Pappio didn’t like the sallow, unsmiling, lean-faced secretary, but what did liking have to do with anything?

What was harder to sort out was why Pertennius of Eubulus was buying this gift. Some discreet questions had to be asked elsewhere before Pappio thought he had the answer. It turned out to be simple enough, in the end—one of the oldest stories of all—and it had nothing to do with the bride and groom.

It was someone else that Pertennius was trying to impress. And since that person happened to be dear to Pappio’s own heart, he had to overcome a certain indignation—visualizing a woman sleek and splendid as a falcon in the thin arms of the dour secretary—to concentrate on his unaccustomed craft again. He forced himself to do so, however, as best he could.

After all, he wouldn’t want the Principal Dancer for his beloved Greens to think him less than an exemplary artisan. Perhaps, he daydreamed, she might even ask for further work on her own behalf after seeing his bowl. Pappio imagined meetings, consultations, two heads bent close over a series of drawings, her notorious perfume— worn by only two women in all of Sarantium—enveloping him, a trusting hand laid on his arm . . .

Pappio was not a young man, was stout and bald and married with three grown children, but it was a truth of the world that certain women carried a magic about them, on the stage and off, and dreams followed where they went. You didn’t stop dreaming just because you weren’t young any more. If Pertennius could attempt to win admiration with a showy gift given to people he couldn’t possibly care about, might not Pappio try to let the exquisite Shirin see what the Director of the Imperial Glassworks could do when he put his hands and mind— and a part of his heart—to his earliest craft?

She would see the bowl when it was delivered to her house. It seemed the bride was living with her.

After some thought, and a morning’s sketching, Pappio decided to make the bowl green, with inset pieces of bright yellow glass like meadow flowers in the spring that was coming at last.

His heart quickened as he began to work, but it wasn’t the labour or the craft that was exciting him, or even the image of a woman now. It was something else entirely. If spring was nearly upon them, Pappio was thinking, humming a processional march to himself, then so were the chariots, so were the chariots, so were the chariots again.

Every morning, during the sunrise invocations in the elegant chapel she had elected to frequent, the young queen of the Antae went through an exercise of tabulating, as on a secretary’s slate in her mind, the things for which she ought to be grateful. Seen in a certain light, there were many of them.

She had escaped an attempt on her life, survived a late-season sailing to Sarantium, and then the first stages of settling in this city—a process more overwhelming than she wanted to admit. It had taken much from her to preserve an appropriately haughty manner when they had first come within sight of the harbour and walls. Even though she had known Sarantium could overawe, and had been preparing for it, Gisel learned, when the sun rose that morning behind the Imperial City, that sometimes there was no real way to prepare oneself.

She was grateful for her father’s training and the self-discipline her life had demanded: she didn’t think anyone had seen how daunted she was.

And there was more for which thanks ought to be given, to holy Jad or whatever pagan deities one chose to remember from the Antae forests. She had entirely respectable housing in a small palace near the triple walls, courtesy of the Emperor and Empress. She’d acted quickly enough on arrival to secure adequate funds of her own, by demanding loans to the crown from Batiaran merchants trading here in the east. Despite the irregularity of her sudden arrival, unannounced, on an Imperial ship, with only a small cadre of her guards and women, none of the Batiarans had dared gainsay their queen’s regal, matter-of-fact request. If she’d waited, Gisel knew, it might have been different. Once those back in Varena— those doubtless claiming or battling for her throne by now—learned where she was, they would send their own instructions east. Money might be harder to come by. More importantly, she expected they’d try to kill her then.

She was too experienced in these affairs—of royalty and survival—to have been foolish enough to wait. Once she’d acquired her funds, she’d hired a dozen Karchite mercenaries as personal guards and dressed them in crimson and white, the colours of her grandfather’s war banner.

Her father had always liked Karchites for guards. If you kept them sober when on duty and allowed them to disappear into cauponae when not, they tended to be fiercely loyal. She’d also accepted the Empress Alixana’s offer of three more ladies-in-waiting and a chef and steward from the Imperial Precinct. She was setting up a household; amenities and a reasonable staff were necessary. Gisel knew perfectly well that there would be spies among these, but that, too, was something with which she was familiar. There were ways of avoiding them, or misleading them.

She’d been received at court not long after arriving and welcomed with entirely proper courtesy and respect. She had seen and exchanged formal greetings with the grey-eyed, round-faced Emperor and the small, exquisite, childless dancer who had become his Empress. They had all been precisely and appropriately polite, though no private encounters or exchanges with either Valerius or Alixana had followed. She hadn’t been sure whether to expect these or not. It depended on the Emperor’s larger plans. Once, affairs had waited on her plans. Not any more.

She had received, in her own small city palace, a regular stream of dignitaries and courtiers from the Imperial Precinct in that first interval of time. Some came out of sheer curiosity, Gisel knew: she was a novelty, a diversion in winter. A barbarian queen in flight from her people. They might have been disappointed to be received with style and grace by a reserved, silk-clad young woman who showed no sign at all of using bear grease in her yellow hair.

A smaller number made the long trip through the crowded city for more thoughtful reasons, assessing her and what role she might play in the shifting alignments of a complex court. The aged, clear-eyed Chancellor Gesius had had himself carried through the streets to her bearing gifts in his litter: silk for a garment and an ivory comb. They spoke of her father, with whom Gesius had evidently corresponded for years, and then of theatre—he urged her to attend—and finally of the regrettable effect of the damp weather on his fingers and knee joints. Gisel almost allowed herself to like him, but was too experienced to permit herself such a response.

The Master of Offices, a younger, stiff-faced man named Faustinus, arrived the next morning, apparently in response to Gesius’s visit, as though the two men tracked each other’s doings. They probably did. The court of Valerius II would not be different in this regard from Gisel’s father’s or her own. Faustinus drank an herbal tea and asked a number of self-evidently harmless questions about how her court had been administered. He was a functionary, these things occupied his attention. He was also ambitious, she judged, but only in the way that officious men are who fear losing the patterns of their established lives. Nothing burned in him.

In the woman who came a few days after, there was something burning beneath a chilly, patrician manner, and Gisel felt both the heat and the cold. It was an unsettling encounter. She had heard of the Daleinoi, of course: wealthiest family in the Empire. With a father and brother dead, another brother said to be hideously maimed and hidden away somewhere, and a third keeping cautiously distant from the City, Styliane Daleina, wife now to the Supreme Strategos, was the visible presence of her aristocratic family in Sarantium, and there was nothing harmless about her, Gisel decided very early in their conversation.

They were almost of an age, she judged, and life had taken away both their childhoods very early. Styliane’s manner was unrevealing, her bearing and manner perfect, a veneer of exquisite politeness, betraying nothing of what might be her thoughts.

Until she chose to do so. Over dried figs and a small glass of warmed, sweetened wine, a desultory exchange about clothing styles in the west had turned into a sudden, very direct question about Gisel’s throne and her flight and what she hoped to achieve by accepting the Emperor’s invitation to come east.

‘I am alive,’ Gisel had said mildly, meeting the appraising blue gaze of the other woman. ‘You will have heard of what happened in the sanctuary on the day of its consecration.’

‘It was unpleasant, I understand,’ had said Styliane Daleina casually, speaking of murder and treason. She gestured dismissively. ‘Is this, then, pleasant? This pretty cage?’

‘My visitors are a source of very great consolation,’ Gisel had murmured, controlling anger ruthlessly. ‘Tell me, I have been urged to attend the theatre one night. Have you a suggestion?’ She smiled, bland and young, manifestly thoughtless. A barbarian princess, barely two generations removed from the forests where the women painted their naked breasts with dyes.

More than one person, Gisel had thought, leaning forward to carefully select a fig, could preserve her privacy behind empty talk.

Styliane Daleina left soon after, with an observation at the door that people at court seemed to think the principal dancer and actress for the Green faction was the preeminent performer of the day. Gisel had thanked her, and promised to repay her courtesy with a visit one day. She actually thought she might: there was a certain kind of bitter pleasure in this sort of sparring. She wondered if it were possible to find bear grease in Sarantium.

There were other visitors. The Eastern Patriarch sent his principal secretary, an officious, sour-smelling cleric who asked prepared questions about western faith and then lectured her on Heladikos until he realized she wasn’t listening. Some members of the small Batiaran community here—mostly merchants, mercenary soldiers, a few craftsmen—made a point of attending upon her until, at some point in the winter, they stopped coming, and Gisel concluded that Eudric or Kerdas, back home, had sent word, or even instructions. Agila was dead; they had learned that by now. He’d died in her father’s resting place the morning of the consecration. With Pharos and Anissa, the only two people left in the world who might have been said to love her. She’d heard the tidings, dry-eyed, and hired another half a dozen mercenaries.

The visitors from the court continued for a time. A few of the men gave indications of wishing to seduce her: a triumph for them, doubtless.

She remained a virgin, regretting it occasionally. Boredom was one of the central problems of this new life. It wasn’t even really a life. It was a waiting to see if life could continue, or begin again.

And this, unfortunately, was where the dutiful attempt to summon proper gratitude each morning in the chapel usually faltered as the invocations to holy Jad ended. She’d had an existence of real—if precarious—power back home. Reigning queen of a conquering people in the homeland of an empire. The High Patriarch in Rhodias deferred to her, as he had to her father. Here in Sarantium she was subjected to lectures from a lesser cleric. She was no more than a glittering object, a jewel of sorts for the Emperor and his court, without function or access to any role. She was, in the simplest reading of things, a possible excuse for an invasion of Batiara, and little more than that.

Those subtle people from the court who rode or were carried in curtained litters across the city to see her seemed to have gradually come to that same conclusion. It was a long way from the Imperial Precinct to her palace near the triple walls. Midway through the winter, the visits from the court had also begun to grow less frequent. It was not a surprise. At times it saddened her how little ever surprised her.

One of the would-be lovers—more determined than the others—continued to visit after the others had ceased to appear. Gisel allowed him, once, to kiss her palm, not her hand. The sensation had been mildly diverting, but after reflection she’d elected to be engaged the next time he came, and then the next. There hadn’t been a third visit.

She’d had little choice, really. Her youth, beauty, whatever desire men might have for her, these were among the few remaining tools she had, having left a throne behind.

She wondered when Eudric or Kerdas would attempt to have her murdered. If Valerius would really try to stop it. On balance, she thought, she was of more use to the Emperor alive, but there were arguments the other way, and there was the Empress to consider.

Every such calculation she had to make by herself. She’d no one she trusted to advise her here. Not that she’d really had that back home, either. At times she found herself feeling furious and bereft when she thought of the grey-haired alchemist who had helped her in this flight but had then abandoned her to pursue his own affairs, whatever they might have been. She had last seen him on the wharf in Megarium, standing in the rain as her ship sailed away.

Gisel, having returned from the chapel to her home, was sitting in the pretty solarium over the quiet street. She noted that the rising sun was now over the roofs across the way. She rang a small bell by her chair and one of the very well trained women the Empress had sent to her appeared in the doorway. It was time to begin preparing to go out. It was wrong, in truth, to say that nothing ever surprised her. There had been unexpected developments.

In the wake of one of them, involving a dancer who happened to be the daughter of that same grey-haired man who had left her in Megarium, she’d accepted an invitation for this afternoon.

And that reminded her of the other man she had enlisted to her service back home, the red-haired mosaicist. Caius Crispus would be present today as well.

She had ascertained that he was in Sarantium shortly after her own arrival. She’d needed to know; he raised considerations of his own. She had entrusted him with a dangerously private message, and had no idea if he’d delivered it, or even tried. She’d remembered him to be bitter, saturnine, unexpectedly clever. She’d needed to speak with him.

She hadn’t invited him to visit—as far as the world knew, he had never met her, after all. Six men had died to preserve that illusion. She’d gone, instead, to observe the progress being made on the Emperor’s new Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom. The Sanctuary wasn’t yet open to the general public, but a visit was an entirely appropriate—even a pious—outing for a visiting monarch. No one could have possibly queried it. Once she’d entered, she’d decided, entirely on impulse, on an unusual approach to this matter.

Thinking back to the events of that morning in early winter, as her women now began preparing her bath, Gisel found herself smiling privately. Jad knew, she wasn’t inclined to give way to impulse, and few enough things ever gave her occasion to be amused, but she hadn’t conducted herself in that stupefying place with what might be considered decorous piety, and she had to admit she’d enjoyed herself.

The tale had run around Sarantium by now. She’d intended it to.

A man on a scaffold under a dome with glass in his hands, trying to make a god. More than one, in truth, though that particular truth was not one he proposed to reveal. Crispin was, that day—early winter in Jad’s holy city of Sarantium—happy to be alive and not anxious to be burned for heresy. The irony was that he hadn’t yet realized or acknowledged his own happiness. It had been a long time since he’d known the feeling; he was a stranger now to such a mood, would have glowered in vexation and snapped off a brittle insult to someone who’d dared make the observation that he seemed content with his lot.

Brow unconsciously furrowed, mouth a line of concentration, he was attempting to finally confirm the colours of his own image of Jad above the emerging skyline of Sarantium on the dome. Other artisans were creating the City for him under his supervision; he himself was rendering the figures, and he was beginning with Jad, that an image of the god might look down upon all who entered here while the dome and semidomes and walls were being achieved. He wanted the god he made to echo, in a tacit homage, the one he’d seen in a small chapel in Sauradia, but not slavishly or too obviously. He was working on a different scale, his Jad a ruling element of a larger scene, not the entirety of the dome, and there were matters of balance and proportion to be worked through.

At the moment, he was thinking about eyes and the lines in the skin above and below them, remembering the wounded, haggard vision of Jad in that chapel he’d seen on the Day of the Dead. He’d fallen down. Had literally collapsed beneath that gaunt, overpowering figure.

His memory for colours was very good. It was flawless, in fact, and he knew this without false humility. He’d worked closely with the head of the Imperial Glassworks to find those hues that most precisely matched the ones he remembered from Sauradia. It helped that he was now in charge of the mosaic decoration for the most important, by far, of all Valerius II’s building projects. The previous mosaicist—one Siroes—had been dismissed in disgrace, and had somehow broken the fingers of both hands that same night in an unexplained accident. Crispin, as it happened, did know something about that. He wished he didn’t. He remembered a tall, fair-haired woman in his bedroom at dawn, murmuring, I can attest that Siroes was not in a position to hire assassins tonight. And she’d added, very calmly, Trust me in this.

He did. In that, if in nothing else. It was the Emperor, however, not the yellow-haired woman, who had shown Crispin this dome and offered it to him. What Crispin asked for now he tended to receive, at least insofar as tesserae were concerned.

In the other spheres of his life, down among the men and women of the City, he hadn’t yet decided what it was he even wanted. He only knew that he had a life below this scaffolding, as well, with friends, enemies—attempts on his life within days of his arrival—and complexities that could, if allowed, distract him dangerously from what he needed to do up here on this dome that an Emperor and an architect of genius had given to him.

He ran a hand through his thick red hair, rendering it even more haphazard than usual, and decided that the eyes of his god would be dark brown and obsidian like those of the figure in Sauradia, but that he would not evoke the pallor of the other Jad with grey hues in the skin of the face. He would pick up the two shades again when he did the long, thin hands, but would not make them ruined, as the other’s had been. An echoing of elements, not a copying. It was pretty much what he’d thought before coming back up here—first instincts tended to hold for him.

Having decided as much, Crispin took a deep breath and felt himself relax. He could begin tomorrow, then. With the thought he detected a slight stirring of the scaffold, a swaying movement, which meant someone was climbing.

This was forbidden. It was utterly and absolutely forbidden to the apprentices and artisans. To everyone, in fact, including Artibasos, who had built this Sanctuary. A rule: when Crispin was up here, no one climbed his scaffolding. He had threatened mutilation, dismemberment, death. Vargos, who was proving to be as competent an assistant here as on the road, had been scrupulous in preserving Crispin’s sanctity aloft.

Crispin looked down, more stunned by the breach than anything else, and saw that it was a woman—she had discarded a cloak for easier movement—who was ascending the scaffold rungs towards him. He saw Vargos among those far below on the marble tiles. His Inici friend spread his hands, helplessly. Crispin looked at the climber again. Then he blinked and caught his breath, gripping the low railing tightly with both hands.

Once before he had looked down from this great height, just after arriving, when he’d been using his fingers like a blind man to map this dome where he intended to make the world, and had seen a woman far below, feeling her very presence as an irresistible pull: the force and draw of the world where men and women went about their lives.

That time it had been an Empress.

He had gone down to her. Not a woman to be resisted, even if she simply stood below, waiting. Had gone down to speak of dolphins and of other things, to rejoin and be reclaimed by the living world from the place where love lost to death had taken him.

This time, staring in mute stupefaction at the climber’s steady, quite competent progress, Crispin tried to deal with who this was. Too astonished to call out or even know how to react, he simply waited, heart pounding, as his own queen came to him, high above the world, but in plain sight of all below.

She reached the last rung, then the scaffold itself and— ignoring his hastily extended hand—stepped onto it, a little flushed, breathless, but visibly pleased with herself, bright-eyed and unafraid, to stand in this place of absolutely private speech on a precarious platform just under Artibasos’s dome. However many listening ears there might be in dangerous Sarantium, there were none here.

Crispin knelt and lowered his head. He had last seen this young, beleaguered woman in her own palace, in his own city far to the west. Had kissed her foot in farewell and felt her hand brush his hair. Then he had left, having somehow promised to try to deliver a message to an Emperor. And he’d learned the morning after that she’d had six of her own guards killed—simply to preserve the secret of their encounter.

On the scaffolding below the dome, Gisel of the Antae brushed his hair again with a light, slow hand. Kneeling, he trembled.

‘No flour this time,’ his queen murmured. ‘An improvement, artisan. Bur I prefer the beard, I think. Has the east claimed you so soon? Are you lost to us? You may stand, Caius Crispus, and tell what you have to tell.’

‘Your Majesty,’ Crispin stammered, rising, feeling himself flushing, terribly unsettled. The world, coming up to him, even here. ‘This is . . . this is not a safe place for you, at all!’

Gisel smiled. ‘Are you so dangerous, artisan?’

He wasn’t. She was. He wanted to say that. Her hair was golden, her gaze a deep, remembered blue—she had the same colouring, in fact, as another of the very dangerous women he knew here. But where Styliane Daleina was ice with an edge of malice, Gisel, the daughter of Hildric the Great, showed something wilder and sadder, both.

He’d known she was here, of course. Everyone had heard of the arrival of the Antae queen. He’d wondered if she’d send for him. She hadn’t. She’d climbed up to find him, instead, graceful and assured as an experienced mosaicist. This was Hildric’s daughter. An Antae. Could hunt, shoot, ride, probably kill with a dagger secreted somewhere on her person. No delicate, sheltered court lady, this.

She said, ‘We are waiting, artisan. We have come a long way to see you, after all.’

He bowed his head. And told her, unvarnished and with nothing that mattered held back, of his conversation with Valerius and Alixana, when the small, brilliant figure that was the Empress of Sarantium had turned in a doorway to her inner chamber and asked—with seeming casualness—about the marriage proposal he undoubtedly carried from Varena.

Gisel was disturbed, he realized. Was trying to hide that and might have done so from a less observant man. When he finished, she was silent awhile.

‘Did she sort it through or did he?’ she asked.

Crispin thought about it. ‘Both of them, I believe. Together, or each on their own.’ He hesitated. ‘She is . . . an exceptional woman, Majesty.’

Gisel’s blue gaze met his briefly, then flicked away. She was so young, he thought.

‘I wonder what would have happened,’ she murmured, ‘had I not had the guardsmen killed.’

They’d be alive, Crispin wanted to say, but did not. He might have, a season ago, but was not quite the same angry, bitter man he’d been at the beginning of autumn. He’d had a journey, since.

Another silence. She said, ‘You know why I am here? In Sarantium?’

He nodded. It was all over the city. ‘You avoided an attempt on your life. In the sanctuary. I am horrified, Majesty.’

‘Of course you are,’ said his queen, and smiled, almost absently. For all the terrible nuances of what they were discussing and what had happened to her, an odd mood seemed to be playing about her, in the dance and drift of sunlight through the high windows all around the dome. He tried to fathom how she must feel, having fled from her throne and people, living here on sufferance, devoid of her own power. He couldn’t even imagine it.

‘I like it up here,’ the queen said suddenly. She went to the low railing and looked down, seemingly unfazed by how high they were. Crispin had known people to faint or collapse, clutching at the planks of the scaffold up here.

There were other platforms, around the eastern perimeter of the dome, where men had begun setting tesserae on Crispin’s sketched pattern, to make a cityscape and the deep blue and green of the sea, but no one else was aloft just now. Gisel of the Antae looked at her own hands on the rail, then turned and held them up to him. ‘Could I be a mosaicist, do you think?’ She laughed. He listened for desperation, fear, but heard only genuine amusement.

He said, ‘It is a craft only, unworthy of you, Majesty.’

She looked around for a time without answering him. ‘No. This isn’t,’ she said finally. She gestured at Artibasos’s dome, at the beginnings of Crispin’s own vast mosaic upon it. ‘This isn’t unworthy of anyone. Are you pleased you came now, Caius Crispus? You didn’t want to, I recall.’

And in response to the direct question, Crispin nodded his head, admitting it for the first time. ‘I didn’t want to, but this dome is a life’s gift for such as I.’

She nodded. Her mood had changed, swiftly. ‘Good. We also are pleased you are here. We have few we may trust in this city. Are you one such?’

She had been direct the first time, too. Crispin cleared his throat. She was so alone in Sarantium. The court would use her as a tool, and hard men back home would want her dead. He said, ‘In whatever ways I may help you, my lady, I shall.’

‘Good,’ she repeated. He saw her colour had heightened. Her eyes were bright. ‘I wonder. How shall we do this? Shall I order you to come now and kiss me, so that those below can see?’

Crispin blinked, swallowed, ran a hand reflexively through his hair.

‘You do not improve your appearance when you do that, you know,’ the queen said. ‘Think, artisan. There has to be a reason for my coming up here to you. Will it help you with the women of this city to be known as a queen’s lover, or will it mark you as . . . untouchable?’ And she smiled.

‘I . . . I don’t have . . . My lady, I . . . ’

‘You don’t want to kiss me?’ she asked. A mood so bright it was a danger in itself. She stood very still, waiting for him.

He was entirely unnerved. He took a deep breath, then a step forward.

And she laughed. ‘On further thought, it isn’t necessary, is it? My hand will do, artisan. You may kiss my hand.’

She lifted it to him. He took it in his own and raised it to his lips, and just as he did so she turned her hand in his and it was her palm, soft and warm, that he kissed.

‘I wonder,’ said the queen of the Antae, ‘if anyone could see me do that.’ And she smiled again.

Crispin was breathing hard. He straightened. She remained very near and, bringing up both her hands, she smoothed his disordered hair.

‘We will leave you,’ she said, astonishingly composed, the too-bright manner gone as swiftly as it had come, though her colour remained high. ‘You may call upon us now, of course. Everyone will assume they know why. As it happens, we wish to go to the theatre.’

‘Majesty,’ Crispin said, struggling to regain a measure of calm. ‘You are the queen of the Antae, of Batiara, an honoured guest of the Emperor . . . an artisan cannot possibly escort you to the theatre. You will have to sit in the Imperial Box. Must be seen there. There are protocols . . .’

She frowned, as if struck only now by the thought. ‘Do you know, I believe you are correct. I shall have to send a note to the Chancellor then. But in that case, I may have come up here to no purpose, Caius Crispus.’ She looked up at him. ‘You must take care to provide us with a reason.’ And she turned away.

He was so deeply shaken that she was five rungs down the ladder before he even moved, offering her no assistance at all.

It didn’t matter. She went down to the marble floor as easily as she’d come up. It occurred to him, watching her descend towards a score of unabashedly curious people staring up, that if he was marked now as her lover, or even her confidant, then his mother and his friends might be endangered back home when word of this went west. Gisel had escaped a determined assassination attempt. There were men who wanted her throne, which meant ensuring she did not take it back. Those linked to her in any way would be suspect. Of what, it hardly mattered.

The Antae were not fastidious about such things.

And that truth, Crispin decided, staring down, applied as much to the woman nearing the ground now. She might be young, and terribly vulnerable here, but she’d survived a year on her throne among men who wished her dead or subjected to their will, and had managed to elude them when they did try to kill her. And she was her father’s daughter. Gisel of the Antae would do whatever she had to do, he thought, to achieve her purposes, until and unless someone did end her life. Consequences for others wouldn’t even cross her mind.

He thought of the Emperor Valerius, moving mortal lives this way and that like pieces on a gameboard. Did power shape this way of thinking, or was it only those who already thought this way who could achieve earthly power?

It came to Crispin, watching the queen reach the marble floor to accept bows and her cloak, that he’d been offered intimacy by three women in this city, and each occasion had been an act of contrivance and dissembling. Not one of them had touched him with any tenderness or care, or even a true desire.

Or, perhaps, that last wasn’t entirely so. When he returned home later in the day to the house the Chancellor’s people had by now arranged for him, Crispin found a note waiting. Tidings took little time to travel in this city—or certain kinds of tidings did. The note, when unfolded, was not signed, and he’d never seen the round, smooth handwriting before, but the paper was astonishingly fine, luxurious. Reading the words, he realized no signature was needed, or possible.

You told me, Styliane Daleina had written, that you were a stranger to the private rooms of royalty.

Nothing more. No added reproach, no direct suggestion that he’d deceived her, no irony or provocation. The stated fact. And the fact that she’d stated it.

Crispin, who’d intended to have a midday meal at home and then return to the Sanctuary, had taken himself off instead to his preferred tavern and then to the baths. In each of these places he’d had more wine than was really good for him.

His friend Carullus, tribune of the Fourth Sauradian, had found him later in the evening, back at The Spina. The burly soldier had seated himself opposite Crispin, signalled for a cup of wine for himself and grinned. Crispin had refused to smile back.

‘Two pieces of news, my inexplicably drunken friend,’ Carullus had said breezily. He held up a finger. ‘One, I have met with the Supreme Strategos. I have met with him, and Leontes has promised half the arrears for the western army will be sent before midwinter and the rest by spring. A personal promise. Crispin, I’ve done it!’

Crispin looked at him, trying to share in his friend’s delight and failing utterly. This was hugely important news, though—everyone knew about the army unrest and the arrears of pay. It was the reason Carullus had come to the City, if one excepted a desire to see chariots in the Hippodrome.

‘No, you haven’t done it,’ he said morosely. ‘It just means there’s a war coming. Valerius is sending Leontes to Batiara, after all. You don’t invade with unpaid troops.’

Carullus only smiled. ‘I know that, you sodden dolt. But who gets the credit, man? Who writes his governor in the morning that he has succeeded in getting the payment released when everyone else has failed?’

Crispin nodded and reached for his wine again. ‘Pleased for you,’ he said. ‘Truly. Forgive, if I’m not as pleased to hear that my friends and my mother are now to be invaded.’

Carullus shrugged. ‘Warn them. Tell them to leave Varena.’

‘Get fucked,’ Crispin had said, uncharitably. Whatever was happening was not Carullus’s fault, and his advice might be good—even more so in the light of what had happened that morning on the scaffolding.

‘That activity on your mind? I heard about your visitor this morning. Do you keep pillows up on that scaffold of yours? I’ll let you sober up but I’ll expect a very detailed explanation in the morning, my friend.’ Carullus licked his lips.

Crispin swore again. ‘It was play-acting. Theatre. She wanted to talk to me and needed to give people something to think.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Carullus, his eyebrows arched high. ‘Talk to you? You rogue. They say she’s magnificent, you know. Talk? Hah. Maybe you’ll make me believe that in the morning. In, ah, the meantime,’ he added after an unexpected pause, ‘that, er, reminds me of my second bit of news. I suppose I’m, ah, out of that sort of game now, myself. Actually.’

Crispin had looked muzzily up from his wine cup.

‘What?’

‘I’m, well, as it happens, I’m getting married,’ Carullus of the Fourth said.

‘What?’ Crispin repeated, cogently.

‘I know, I know,’ the tribune went on, ‘Unexpected, surprising, amusing, all that. A good laugh for all. Happens, though, doesn’t it?’ His colour heightened. ‘Ah, well, it does, you know.’

Crispin nodded his head in bemusement, refraining only with some effort from saying, ‘What?’ for a third time.

‘And, um, well, do you, er, mind if Kasia leaves your house now? It won’t look right, of course, not after we have it proclaimed in chapel.’

‘What?’ Crispin said, helplessly.

‘Wedding’ll be in the spring,’ Carullus went on, eyes bright. ‘I promised my mother back when I first left home that if I ever married I’d do it properly. There’ll be a season’s worth of proclaiming by the clerics, so someone can object if they want to, and then a real wedding celebration.’

‘Kasia?’ Crispin said, finally getting a word in. ‘Kasia?’

And as his brain belatedly began to function, to put itself tentatively around this astonishing information, Crispin shook his head again, as if to clear it, and said, ‘Let me be certain I understand this, you bloated bag of wind. Kasia has agreed to marry you? I don’t believe it! By Jad’s bones and balls! You bastard! You didn’t ask my permission and you don’t fucking deserve her, you military lout.’

He was grinning widely by then, and he reached a hand across the table and gripped the other man’s shoulder hard.

‘Of course I deserve her,’ Carullus said. ‘I’m a man with a brilliant future.’ But he, too, had been smiling, with unconcealed pleasure.

The woman in question was of the northern Inicii, sold by her mother into slavery a little more than a year before, rescued from that—and a pagan death—by Crispin on the road. She was too thin and too intelligent, and too strong-willed, though uneasy in the City. On the occasion of their first encounter she had spat in the face of the soldier who was now grinning with delight as he announced that she’d agreed to marry him.

Both men, in fact, knew what she was worth.

And so, on a bright, windy day at the beginning of spring, a number of people were preparing themselves to proceed to the home of the principal female dancer of the Green faction where a wedding was to commence with the usual procession to the chosen chapel and then be celebrated with festivity afterwards.

Neither bride nor groom was in any way from a good family—though the soldier showed signs of possibly becoming an important person—but Shirin of the Greens had a glittering circle of acquaintances and admirers and had chosen to make this wedding the excuse for an elaborate affair. She’d had a very good winter season in the theatre.

In addition, the groom’s close friend (and evidently the bride’s, it was whispered by some, with a meaningful arch of eyebrows) was the new Imperial Mosaicist, the Rhodian who was executing the elaborate decorations in the Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom—a fellow perhaps worthy of cultivation. There were rumours that other significant personages might attend—if not the actual ceremony, then the celebration in Shirin’s home afterwards.

It had also been widely reported that the food was being prepared in the dancer’s kitchen by the Master Chef of the Blue faction. There were those in the City who would follow Strumosus into the desert if he took his pots and pans and sauces.

It was a curious, in many ways a unique event, this celebration orchestrated by Greens and Blues together. And all for a middle-ranking soldier and a yellow-haired barbarian girl from Sauradia just arrived in the city with a completely unknown background. She was pretty enough, it was reported by those who’d seen her with Shirin, but not in the usual way of those girls who made a surprising marriage for themselves. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if she was wedding a really significant fellow, was it?

Then another rumour started that Pappio, the increasingly well-known Director of the Imperial Glassworks, had personally made a bowl commissioned as a gift for the happy couple. It seemed he hadn’t done any actual crafts-manship himself for years and years. No one could understand that, either. Sarantium was talking. With the chariot races not beginning again for some few days, the event was well timed: the City liked having things to talk about.

‘I’M NOT HAPPY,’ said a small, nondescript artificial bird in an inward, patrician voice heard only by the hostess of the day’s affair. The woman was staring critically at her own image in a round, silver-edged mirror held up by a servant.

‘Oh, Danis, neither am I!’ Shirin murmured in silent reply. ‘Every woman from the Precinct and the theatre will be dressed and adorned to dazzle and I look like I haven’t slept in days.’

‘That isn’t what I meant.’

‘Of course it isn’t. You never think of the important things. Tell me, do you think he’ll notice me?’

The bird’s tone became waspish. ‘Which one? The chariot-racer or the mosaicist?’

Shirin laughed aloud, startling her attendant. ‘Either of them,’ she said inwardly. Then her smile became wicked. ‘Or perhaps both, tonight? Wouldn’t that be something to remember?’

‘Shirin!’ The bird sounded genuinely shocked.

‘I’m teasing, silly. You know me better than that. Now tell me, why aren’t you happy? This is a wedding day, and it’s a love match. No one made this union, they chose each other.’ Her tone was surprisingly kind now, tolerant.

‘I just think something’s going to happen.’

The dark-haired woman in front of the small mirror, who did not, in fact, look at all as if she needed sleep or anything else beyond extremes of admiration, nodded her head, and the servant, smiling, set down the mirror and reached for a bottle that contained a perfume of very particular distinctiveness. The bird lay on the tabletop nearby.

‘Danis, really, what sort of party would this be if something didn’t happen?’

The bird said nothing.

There was a sound at the doorway. Shirin turned to look over her shoulder.

A small, rotund, fierce-looking man stood there, clad in a blue tunic and a very large bib-like covering tied at his neck and around his considerable girth. There were a variety of foodstains on the bib and a streak of what was probably saffron on his forehead. He possessed a wooden spoon, a heavy knife stuck into the tied belt of the bib, and an aggrieved expression.

‘Strumosus!’ said the dancer happily.

‘There is no sea salt,’ said the chef in a voice that suggested the absence amounted to a heresy equivalent to banned Heladikian beliefs or arrant paganism.

‘No salt? Really?’ said the dancer, rising gracefully from her seat.

‘No sea salt!’ the chef repeated. ‘How can a civilized household lack sea salt?’

‘A dreadful omission,’ Shirin agreed with a placating gesture. ‘I feel simply terrible.’

‘I request permission to make use of your servants and send one back to the Blues compound immediately. I need my undercooks to remain here. Are you aware of how little time we have?’

‘You may use my servants in any way you see fit today,’ Shirin said, ‘short of broiling them.’

The chef’s expression conveyed the suggestion that matters might come to that pass.

‘This is a completely odious man,’ the bird said silently. ‘At least I might assume you don’t desire this one.’

Shirin gave a silent laugh. ‘He is a genius, Danis. Everyone says so. Genius needs to be indulged. Now, be happy and tell me I look beautiful.’

There was another sound in the hallway beyond Strumosus. The chef turned, and then lowered his wooden spoon. His expression changed, grew very nearly benign. One might even have exaggerated slightly and said that he smiled. He stepped farther into the room and out of the way as a pale, fair-haired woman appeared hesitantly in the doorway.

Shirin did smile, and laid a hand to her cheek. ‘Oh, Kasia,’ she said. ‘You look beautiful.’

Chapter III

Earlier that same morning, very early in fact, the Emperor Valerius II of Sarantium, nephew to an Emperor, son of a grain farmer from Trakesia, could have been seen intoning the last of the antiphonal responses to the sunrise invocation in the Imperial Chapel of the Traversite Palace where he and the Empress had their private rooms.

The Emperor’s service is one of the first in the City, beginning in darkness, ending with the rising of the reborn sun at dawn when the chapel and sanctuary bells elsewhere in Sarantium are just beginning to toll. The Empress is not with him at this hour. The Empress is asleep. The Empress has her own cleric attached to her own suite of rooms, a man known for a relaxed attitude to the hour of morning prayer and equally lenient, if less well-publicized, views regarding the heresies of Heladikos, the mortal (or half-mortal, or divine) son of Jad. These things are not spoken of in the Imperial Precinct, of course. Or, they are not spoken of freely.

The Emperor is, as it happens, meticulous in his observations of the rituals of faith. His long engagement with both the High and the Eastern Patriarchs in an attempt to resolve the myriad sources of schism in the doctrines of the sun god is as much begotten by piety as it is by intellectual engagement. Valerius is a man of contradictions and enigmas, and he does little to resolve or clarify any of these for his court or his people, finding mystery an asset.

It amuses him that he is called by some the Night’s Emperor and said to hold converse with forbidden spirits of the half-world in the lamplit chambers and moonlit corridors of the palaces. It amuses him because this is entirely untrue and because he is here—as at every dawn—awake before most of his people, performing the rituals of sanctioned faith. He is, in truth, the Morning’s Emperor as much as he is anything else.

Sleep bores him, frightens him a little of late, fills him with a sense—in dream or near to dream—of a headlong rushing of time. He is not an old man by any means, but he is sufficiently advanced in years to hear horses and chariots in the night: the distant harbingers of an end to mortal tenure. There is much he wishes to do before he hears—as all true and holy Emperors are said to hear—the voice of the god, or the god’s emissary, saying, Uncrown, the Lord of Emperors awaits you now.

His Empress, he knows, would speak of dolphins tearing the sea’s surface, not onrushing horses in the dark, but only to him, since dolphins—the ancient bearers of souls—are a banned Heladikian symbol.

His Empress is asleep. Will rise some time after the sun, take a first meal abed, receive her holy adviser and then her bath attendants and her secretary, prepare herself at leisure for the day. She was an actress in her youth, a dancer named Aliana, tuned to the rhythms of late nights and late risings.

He shares the late nights with her, but knows better, after their years together, than to intrude upon her at this hour. He has much to do, in any case.

The service ends. He speaks the last of the responses. Some light is leaking through the high windows. A chilly morning outside, at this grey hour. He dislikes the cold, of late. Valerius leaves the chapel, bowing to the disk and altar, lifting a brief hand to his cleric. In the hallway he takes a stairway down, walking quickly, as he tends to. His secretaries hurry another way, going outdoors, taking the paths across the gardens—cold and damp, he knows—to the Attenine Palace, where the day’s business will begin. Only the Emperor and his appointed guards among the Excubitors are allowed to use the tunnel constructed between the two palaces, a security measure introduced a long time ago.

There are torches at intervals in the tunnel, lit and supervised by the guards. It is well ventilated, comfortably warm even in winter or, as now, on the cusp of spring. Quickening season, season of war. Valerius nods to the two guards and passes through the doorway alone. He enjoys this short walk, in fact. He is a man in a life that allows of no privacy at all. Even in his sleeping chamber there is always a secretary on a cot and a drowsy messenger by the door, waiting for the possibility of dictation or a summons or instructions to be run through the mysteries and spirits of a dark city.

And many nights, still, he spends with Alixana in her own intricate tangle of chambers. Comfort and intimacy there, and something else deeper and rarer than either—but he is not alone. He is never alone. Privacy, silence, solitude are limited to this tunnel walk underground, ushered into the corridor by one set of guards, received at the other end by another pair of the Excubitors.

When he raps and the doorway is opened at the Attenine Palace end, a number of men are waiting, as they always are. They include the aged Chancellor Gesius; Leontes, the golden Strategos; Faustinus, Master of Offices; and the Quaestor of Imperial Revenue, a man named Vertigus, with whom the Emperor cannot say he is well pleased. Valerius nods to them all and ascends the stairs quickly as they rise from obeisance and fall into place behind him. Gesius needs assistance now, at times, especially when the weather is damp, but there has been no sign of any similar impairment of the Chancellor’s thinking, and Valerius will trust no one in his retinue half so much.

It is Vertigus he briskly quizzes and unsettles this morning when they come to the Audience Chamber. The man is hardly a fool—he’d have been dismissed long ago if he were—but he cannot be called ingenious, and almost everything the Emperor wishes to achieve, in the City, the Empire, and beyond, turns upon finances. Competence is not, unfortunately, sufficient these days. Valerius is paying a great deal for buildings, a very great deal to the Bassanids, and he has just yielded (as planned) to entreaties from several sources and released the final arrears of last year’s payment for the western army.

There is never enough money, and the last time measures were enacted to try to generate a sufficiency Sarantium burned in a riot that almost cost him his throne and his life and every plan he’d ever shaped. It had required some thirty thousand deaths to avoid those consequences. Valerius is of the hope that his unprecedented, almost-completed Great Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom will serve as his expiation before the god for those deaths—and certain other things—when the day for such a reckoning comes, as it always does. Given this, the Sanctuary serves more than one purpose in his designs.

Most things do.

It was difficult. She was aware that Carullus loved her and that an astonishing number of people were treating their wedding as an occasion for celebration, as if the marriage of an Inici girl and a Trakesian soldier were an event of significance. She was being wed at an exquisite, patrician chapel near Shirin’s house—the Master of the Senate and his family were among the regular attendees there. The banquet would take place back here in the home of the Greens’ Principal Dancer. And the round, fierce man acclaimed by everyone as the finest chef in all the Empire was preparing Kasia’s wedding feast.

It was hard to believe. Mostly, she didn’t believe it, moving through events as in a dream, as though expecting to wake up in Morax’s inn in a chill fog with the Day of the Dead still to come.

Kasia, who had been seen as the clever one by her mother, and unmarriageable, the daughter sold to the slavers, was aware that all of this extravagance had to do with the people they knew: Crispin and his friends Scortius the chariot-racer and Shirin, into whose house Kasia had moved when the betrothal was announced early in the winter. Carullus had actually met—twice now—with the Supreme Strategos himself and had achieved a success regarding the arrears of soldiers’ pay. There was a rumour that Leontes might even make an appearance at the tribune’s wedding party. At her wedding party.

The other part of this exaggerated attention had to do, she’d come to understand, with the fact that for all their vaunted cynicism (or perhaps because of it) the Sarantines were almost unfailingly intense and emotional by nature, as if living here at the centre of the world heightened and added significance to every event. The notion that she and Carullus were marrying for love, having chosen each other freely, held extravagant appeal for those surrounding them. Shirin, witty and ironic as she was, could go misty-eyed at the very thought.

Such marriages tended not to happen.

And it wasn’t happening here, whatever people were thinking, though Kasia was the only one who knew that. She hoped.

The man she desired—and loved, though something in her fought the word—was the one who would stand with them today in the chapel holding a symbolic crown over his friend’s head. It wasn’t a truth she liked, but it didn’t seem to be something she could do anything about.

Shirin would stand behind Kasia with another crown, and an elegant gathering of white-clad people from theatre and court and a number of rather more bluff military men would smile and murmur in approval and then they would all come back here to eat and drink: fish and oysters and winter game and wine from Candaria and Megarium.

What woman, really, married purely by choice? What sort of world would it be if that could happen? Not even aristocrats or royalty had such a luxury, so how could it descend to a barbarian girl who had been a slave in Sauradia for a bitter year that would linger in the soul for who knew how long?

She was marrying because a decent man wanted her and had asked. Because he offered the promise of shelter and support and some real kindness was in his nature, and because, failing this union, what life was there for her? Dependent on others all her days? Servant to a dancer until the dancer made her own prudent choice of husband? Joining one of the sects—the Daughters of Jad—who took eternal vows to a god in which Kasia didn’t really believe?

How could she believe, having been offered as a sacrifice to Ludan, having seen a zubir, creature of her tribe’s long faith, in the depths of the Aldwood?

‘You look beautiful,’ Shirin said, turning from a conversation with the chef to look at Kasia in the doorway.

Kasia smiled warily. She didn’t really believe it, but it might even be true. Shirin’s house was efficiently run by her servants; Kasia had been living with her through the winter more as a guest and friend than anything else and she’d eaten better food and slept in a softer bed than ever in her life. Shirin was quick, amusing, observant, always planning something, very much aware of her position in Sarantium: both the implications of renown and the transitory nature of it.

She was also more than any of these things, because none of them spoke to what she was on the stage.

Kasia had seen her dance. After that first visit to the theatre, early in the winter season, she had understood the other woman’s fame. Seeing the masses of flowers thrown down onto the stage after a dance, hearing the wild, shouted acclamations—both the ritual ones of Shirin’s Green faction and the spontaneous cries of those who were simply enraptured with what they’d seen—she had felt awed by Shirin, a little frightened by the change that took place when the dancer entered this world, and even more by what happened when she stepped between the torches and the music began for her.

She could never have exposed herself willingly the way Shirin did each time she performed, clad in streaming silks that hid next to nothing of her lithe form, doing comical, almost obscene things for the raucous delight of those in the less expensive, distant seats. But nor could she ever in her life have moved the way the Greens’ dancer did, as Shirin leaped and spun, or paused with arms extended like a sea-bird, and then gravely stepped forward, bare feet arched like a hunter’s bow, in the older, more formal dances that made men weep. Those same silks could lift like wings behind her or be gathered into a shawl when she knelt to mourn a loss, or into a shroud when she died and the theatre grew silent as a graveyard in a winter dark.

Shirin changed when she danced, and changed those who saw her.

Then she changed back, at home. There she liked to talk about Crispin. She had accepted Kasia as a house-guest as a favour to the Rhodian. He knew her father, she’d told Kasia. But there was more to it than that. It was obvious that he was often on the dancer’s mind, even with all the men—young and less young, many of them married, from court and aristocratic houses and military officers’ quarters—who regularly attended upon her. After those visits Shirin would talk to Kasia, revealing detailed knowledge of their positions and ranks and prospects: her finely nuanced social favours were part of the delicate dance she had to perform in this life of a dancer in Sarantium. Kasia had the sense that however their relationship had begun, Shirin was genuinely pleased to have her in the house, that friendship and trust had not before been elements in the dancer’s life. Not that they ever had been in her own, if it came to that.

During the winter Carullus had come by almost every day when he was in the City. He’d been absent a month amid the rains, leaving to escort—triumphantly—the first shipment of the western army’s arrears to his camp in Sauradia. He was thoughtful when he came back, told Kasia there seemed to be very strong indicators that a war was coming in the west. It was not precisely surprising, but there was a difference between rumours and onrushing reality. It had occurred to her, listening, that if he were to go there with Leontes he could die. She’d taken his hand as he talked. He liked it when she held his hand.

They’d seen little enough of Crispin during the winter. He had apparently chosen his team of mosaicists as quickly as possible and was up on his scaffolding all the time, working as soon as the morning prayers were done and into the night, by torchlight aloft. He slept on a cot in the Sanctuary some nights, Vargos reported, not even returning to the home the Chancellor’s eunuchs had found and furnished for him.

Vargos was working in the Sanctuary as well, and was their source for the best stories, including the one about an apprentice chased by Crispin—the Rhodian roaring imprecations and waving a knife—all around the Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom, for having let something called the quicklime be spoiled one morning. Vargos had started to explain about the quicklime, but Shirin had pretended to scream with boredom and had thrown olives at him until he’d stopped.

Vargos came by regularly to take Kasia to chapel in the morning if she’d go with him. Often she did. She was working to accustom herself to the noise and crowds, and these morning walks with Vargos were a part of that. He was another kind man, Vargos. She’d met three of them in Sauradia, it seemed, and one of them had offered marriage to her. She didn’t deserve such fortune.

Sometimes Shirin came with them. It was useful to make an appearance, she explained to Kasia. The clerics of Jad disapproved of the theatre even more than they disliked the chariots and the violent passions and pagan magic they inspired. It was prudent for Shirin to be seen kneeling in sober garb, without evident adornment, her hair pinned back and covered, as she chanted the morning responses before the sun disk and the altar.

Sometimes Shirin would take them to a rather more elegant chapel than Vargos’s, nearer to the house. After services there one morning, she had submissively accepted the blessing of the cleric and introduced Kasia to two of the other people attending—who happened to be the Master of the Senate and his much younger wife. The Senator, Plautus Bonosus by name, was a wry-looking, slightly dissipated man; the wife seemed reserved and watchful. Shirin had invited them to the wedding ceremony and the celebration after. She’d mentioned some of the other guests attending and then added, casually, that Strumosus of Amoria was preparing the feast.

The Master of the Senate had blinked at this, and then quickly accepted the invitation. He looked like a man who enjoyed his luxuries. Later that morning, over spiced wine at home, Shirin had told Kasia some of the scandals associated with Bonosus. They did offer some explanation, Kasia had thought, for the young, second wife’s very cool, self-contained manner. She had realized that it was something of a coup for Shirin to have so many distinguished people coming to a dancer’s home, a defining and asserting of her preeminence. It was good for Carullus too, of course—and so for Kasia. She’d understood all of this. There had still been an aura of unreality to what was happening.

She had just been saluted by the Master of the Sarantine Senate in a chapel filled with aristocrats. He was coming to her wedding ceremony. She had been a slave when autumn began, thrown down on a mattress by farmers and soldiers and couriers with a few coins to spend.

THE WEDDING MORNING was well advanced. They would be going to the chapel soon. The musicians would be their signal, Carullus arriving with them to escort his bride. Kasia, standing for inspection before a dancer and a chef on her marriage day, wore white—as all the wedding party and guests would—but with a bride’s red silk about her waist. Shirin had given that to her last night, showed her how to knot it. Had made a sly joke, doing so. There would be more jests and bawdy songs later, Kasia knew. That much was exactly the same here in the City of Cities as it was at home in her village. Some things didn’t change no matter where you went in the world, it seemed. The red was for her maidenhead, to be lost tonight.

It had been lost, in fact, to a Karchite slaver in a northern field some time ago. Nor was the man she was to wed today a stranger to her body, though that had happened only once, the morning after Carullus had almost died defending Crispin and Scortius the charioteer from assassins in the dark.

Life did strange things to you, didn’t it?

She had been going to Crispin’s room that morning, unsure of what she wanted to say—or do—but had heard a woman’s voice within, and paused and turned away without knocking. And had learned on the stairway from two of the soldiers about the attack in the night just ended, their comrades dead, Carullus wounded. Impulse, concern, extreme confusion, destiny—her mother would have said the last, and shaped a warding sign—had made Kasia turn after the soldiers had gone and walk back down the long upstairs hallway to knock on the tribune’s door.

Carullus had opened, visibly weary, half-undressed already. She had seen the bloodstained bandage wrapped around one shoulder and across his chest, and then she’d seen and suddenly understood—she was the clever one, wasn’t she?—the look in his eyes as he saw that it was she.

He wasn’t the man who had saved her from Morax’s inn and then from death in the forest, who had offered her a glimpse one dark night of what men might be like when they hadn’t bought you, but he could be—she had thought, lying beside Carullus, after, in his bed— the one who saved her from the life that followed being saved. The old stories never talked about that part, did they?

She’d thought, as she watched the sun rise higher that morning, and heard his breathing settle as he fell into needed sleep beside her like a child, that she might become his mistress. There were worse things in the world.

But only a little while after, even before winter began, with the midnight Ceremony of Unconquered Jad, he’d asked her to marry him.

When she’d accepted, smiling through tears he could not have properly understood, Carullus had vowed with an uplifted hand, swearing by the sexual organs of the god, that he wouldn’t touch her again until their wedding night.

A promise he’d made long ago, he explained. He’d told her (more than once) about his mother and father, his childhood in Trakesia in a place not so different from her own village; he’d told of Karchite raids, his older brother’s death, his own journey south to join the army of the Emperor. He talked, Carullus, quite a lot, but amusingly, and she knew now that the unexpected kindness she’d sensed in this burly, profane soldier was real. Kasia thought of her own mother, how she’d have wept to learn that her child was alive and entering into a protected life so unimaginably far away, in every respect, from their village and farm.

There was no way to send a message. The Imperial Post of Valerius II did not include farms near Karch on its customary routes. For all her mother knew, Kasia was dead by now.

For all Kasia knew, her mother and sister were.

Her new life was here, or wherever Carullus, as a tribune of the Fourth Sauradian, was posted, and Kasia— in white, with a bride’s crimson girdling her waist on her wedding day—knew that she owed lifelong thanks to all the gods she could ever name for this.

‘Thank you,’ she said to Shirin, who had just told her she looked beautiful, and was still gazing at her and smiling. The chef, an intense little man, seemed to be trying not to smile. His mouth kept twitching upwards. He had sauce on his forehead. On impulse, Kasia used her fingers to wipe it away. He did smile then and extended his apron. She dried her fingers on it. She wondered if Crispin would be with Carullus when her husband-to-be came to bring her to the chapel, and what he might say, and what she would say, and how strange people were, that even the fairest day should not be without its sorrow.

Rustem hadn’t been paying attention to where they were going, or who was around them, and he would blame himself for that later, even though it hadn’t been his responsibility to look to their safety. That was why Nishik, querulous and dour, had been assigned to a travelling physician, after all.

But as they’d crossed the choppy strait from straggling Deapolis on the southeastern coast towards the huge, roiling port of Sarantium on the other side, negotiating past a small, densely wooded island and then bobbing ships and the trailing nets of fishing boats, with the City’s domes and towers piled up and up behind and hearth-smoke rising from innumerable houses and inns and shops all the way to the walls beyond, Rustem had found himself more overwhelmed than he’d expected to be, and then distracted by thoughts of his family.

He was a traveller, had been farther east, for example, than anyone he knew, but Sarantium, even after two devastating plagues, was the largest, wealthiest city in the world: a truth known but never fully apprehended before this day. Jarita would have been thrilled and perhaps even aroused, he mused, standing on the ferry, watching the golden domes come nearer. If his newfound understanding of her was correct, Katyun would have been terrified.

He had shown his papers and Nishik’s false ones and dealt with the Imperial Customs Office on the wharf in Deapolis before boarding. Getting to the wharf had been a process in itself: there were an extraordinary number of soldiers quartered there and the sounds of ship construction were everywhere. They couldn’t have hidden anything if they’d wanted to.

The customs transaction had been costly but not unpleasant: it was a time of peace, and Sarantium’s wealth was largely derived from trade and travel. The customs agents of the Emperor knew that perfectly well. A discreet, reasonable sum to assuage the rigours of their painstaking labour was all that proved necessary to expedite the entry of a Bassanid physician and his manservant and mule— which had proved on examination not to be carrying silk or spice or any other tariffed or illicit goods.

As they disembarked in Valerius’s city, Rustem took care to ensure that no birds were aloft on his left side and to set his right foot down first on the dock, just as he had boarded the ferry with his left boot first. It was noisy here, too. More soldiers, more ships and hammering and shouts. They asked directions of the ferryman and made their way along a wooden quay, Nishik leading the mule, both men wrapped in cloaks against a sharp spring breeze. They crossed a broad street, waiting for carts to rumble past, and came into a narrower lane, passing an unsavoury assortment of the usual waterfront sailors and whores and beggars and soldiers on leave.

Rustem had been vaguely aware of all this as they went, and of how ports seemed to be the same from here to Ispahani, but he had mostly been thinking about his son as they’d moved away from the docks, leaving the noises behind them. Shaski would have been wide-eyed and open-mouthed, taking all this in the way parched ground absorbs rain. The boy had that sort of quality, he decided—he’d been thinking of him more than a man ought to dwell on his small child at home—an ability to take things in and then try to make them his own, to know when and how to use them.

How else explain the uncanny moment when a seven-year-old boy had come after his father into a garden carrying the implement that ended up saving the life of the King of Kings? And making the fortune of their family? Rustem shook his head, remembering it on a morning in Sarantium, walking with his soldier-servant towards the forum they’d been directed to and the inn beside it where they would stay if there were rooms to be had.

He was under instructions not to establish any direct link with the Bassanid envoy here, only the expected, routine note sent to report his arrival. Rustem was a physician searching for medical treatises and knowledge. That was all. He would seek out other physicians—he’d been given names in Sarnica and had set out with some of his own. He would make his contacts, attend lectures, give some perhaps. Buy manuscripts or pay scribes to copy them. Stay until summer. Observe what he could.

Observe all he could, in fact, and not just about the healing profession and its treatises. There were things they wished to know, in Kabadh.

Rustem of Kerakek was a man who ought not to attract any attention at all in a time of harmony between the Emperor and the King of Kings (a peace bought expensively by Valerius) with only the occasional border or trade incident to mar a smooth surface.

That ought to have been so, at any rate.

The outrageously clothed and barbered young man who wove his way unsteadily towards Rustem from a tavern doorway as he and Nishik ascended a steep, unfortunately quiet laneway, heading for the Mezaros Forum, seemed oblivious to such carefully thought out considerations.

This seemed equally true of the three friends similarly dressed and adorned who followed behind him. All four were dressed in Bassanid-style robes for some reason, but with crudely designed golden jewellery in their ears and about their necks and with their hair worn untidily long down their backs.

Rustem stopped, having little option. The four youths barred their way and the laneway was narrow. The leader swayed a little to one side then straightened himself with an effort. ‘Green or Blue?’ he rasped, wine fumes on his breath. ‘Answer or be beaten like a dry whore!’

This question had something to do with horses. Rustem knew that much, but had no idea what answer would be best. ‘I beg your indulgence,’ he murmured in what he knew by now to be perfectly adequate Sarantine. ‘We are strangers here and don’t understand such things. You are blocking our way.’

‘We are, aren’t we? Fucking observant, you are. Bassanid butt-fucker,’ said the young man, switching away from the Blue-or-Green business readily enough. Rustem’s origin and Nishik’s was obvious from their clothing; they hadn’t made any effort to hide it. The vulgarity was disconcerting and the sour smell of wine on the young man’s breath so early of a morning sickened Rustem a little. The fellow was doing damage to his health. Not even the rawest recruits off duty in the fortress drank this early.

‘Mind your foul tongue!’ Nishik exclaimed loudly, playing the loyal servant, but with a little too much edge in his voice. ‘This is Rustem of Kerakek, a respected physician. Make way!’

‘A doctor? Bassanid? Saves the fucking lives of slime who kill our soldiers? The fuck I’ll make way, you goat-faced castrate slave!’ Saying which, the young man proceeded to alter the nature of an already unfortunate encounter by drawing a short, quite elegant sword.

Rustem, taking a quick breath, noticed that the other youths looked alarmed at this. Not as drunk, he thought. There’s a hope here.

There was, until Nishik snarled an oath of his own and, unwisely, turned to the mule that had stolidly accompanied them all this way, grappling for his own blade strapped to the animal’s side. Rustem was sure he knew what was in Nishik’s mind: the soldier, outraged by insults and impediment from a civilian, and a Jaddite at that, would be determined to disarm him in a swift lesson. A well-deserved tutoring, undoubtedly. But it was not the way to enter Sarantium quietly.

Nor, in fact, was it wise for other reasons entirely. The man with the already-drawn sword happened to know how to use it, having had instruction in the blade from a very early age at his father’s city home and country estate. He was also, as Rustem had already noted, well past the point of prudently evaluating his own conduct or that of others.

The young man with the stylish blade took a single step forward and stabbed Nishik between the third and fourth ribs as the Bassanid soldier was pulling his own weapon free of the ropes about the mule.

A chance encounter, purest accident, a wrong laneway taken at a wrong moment in a city full of lanes and streets and paths. Had they missed the ferry, been detained by customs, stopped to eat, taken another route, things would have been entirely otherwise at this moment. But the world—guarded by Perun and Anahita and menaced always by Black Azal—had somehow reached this point: Nishik was down, his blood was red on the street, and a drawn sword was pointed unsteadily at Rustem. He tried to think back to which omen he’d missed that all should have gone this terribly awry.

But even as he pondered this, struggling to deal with the sudden randomness of death, Rustem felt a rare, cold fury rising, and he lifted his walking staff. As the young swordsman looked down in either drunken confusion or satisfaction at the fallen man, Rustem dealt him a quick, sharp, punishing blow across the forearm with the staff. He listened for the sound of a bone cracking and was actually distressed not to hear it, though the vicious youngster let out a scream and his sword fell clattering.

All three of the others, unfortunately, promptly drew their own blades. There was a disconcerting absence of people in the morning lane.

‘Help!’ Rustem shouted, not optimistically, ‘Assassins!’ He looked quickly down. Nishik had not moved. Things had gone appallingly wrong here, a catastrophe swirling up out of nothing at all. Rustem’s heart was pounding.

He looked back up, holding his staff before him. The man he’d injured and disarmed was clutching at his elbow, screaming at his friends, his face distorted by pain and a childish outrage. The friends moved forward. Two daggers had been drawn, one short sword. Rustem understood that he had to flee. Men could die in the city streets like this, without purpose or meaning. He turned to run—and caught a flashing blur of movement from the corner of his eye.

He spun back swiftly, raising his staff again. But he wasn’t the target of the figure he’d glimpsed.

A man had burst out from a tiny, flat-roofed chapel up the lane and, without breaking stride, now barrelled from behind into three armed men, wielding only a traveller’s staff almost identical to Rustem’s own. He used it briskly, clubbing the sword-wielder hard across the back of the knees. As the man cried out and pitched forward, the new figure stopped, wheeled, and whipped his staff back the other way, clipping a second assailant across the head. The young man let out an aggrieved sound—more a boy’s cry than anything else—and fell, dropping his knife, clutching at his scalp with both hands. Rustem saw blood welling between his fingers.

The third one—the only one left armed now—looked at this compact, bristling new arrival, then over at Rustem, and finally down to where Nishik lay motionless on the street. ‘Holy fucking Jad!’ he said, and bolted past Rustem, tearing wildly around the corner and out of sight.

‘You’d be advised to do the same,’ Rustem said to the pair felled by the man who’d intervened. ‘But not you!’ He pointed a shaking finger at the one who had stabbed Nishik. ‘You stay where you are. If my man is dead I want you brought before the law for murder.’

‘Fuck that, pig,’ said the youth, still clutching at his elbow. ‘Get my sword, Tykos. Let’s go.’

The one called Tykos made as if to claim the blade but the man who’d saved Rustem stepped forward quickly and stamped a booted foot down upon it. Tykos looked sidelong at him, frozen in the act of bending, then straightened and sidled away. The leader snarled another foul-mouthed oath and the three youths followed their vanished friend swiftly down the lane.

Rustem let them go. He was too stunned to do anything else. Heard his own heart pounding and fought for control, breathing deeply. But before turning the corner, their assailant stopped and looked back up, pushing his long hair from his eyes, then gesturing obscenely with his good arm. ‘Don’t think this is over, Bassanid. I’m coming for you!’

Rustem blinked, then snapped, entirely uncharacteristically, ‘Fuck yourself,’ as the young man disappeared.

Rustem stared after him a moment, then knelt quickly, set down his staff, and laid two fingers against Nishik’s throat. After a moment he closed his eyes and withdrew his hand.

‘Anahita guide him, Perun guard him, Azal never learn his name,’ he said softly, in his own tongue. Words he had spoken so often. He had been at war, seen so many people die. This was different. This was a city street in morning light. They had simply been walking. A life was done.

He looked up and around, and realized that there had, in fact, been watchers from the recessed doorways and small windows of the shops and taverns and the apartments stacked above them along the lane.

An amusement, he thought bitterly. It would make a tale.

He heard a sound. The short, stocky young man who’d intervened had reclaimed a pack he must have dropped. Now he was slipping the first assailant’s sword into the ropes on the mule, beside Nishik’s.

‘Distinctive,’ he said tersely. ‘Look at the hilt. It may identify him.’ His accent, speaking Sarantine, was heavy. He was dressed for travel, in a nondescript brown tunic and cloak, belted high, with muddy boots and the heavy pack now on his back.

‘He’s dead,’ Rustem said, unnecessarily. ‘They killed him.’

‘I see that,’ said the other man. ‘Come on. They may be back. They’re drunken and out of control.’

‘I can’t leave him in the street,’ Rustem protested.

The young man glanced back over his shoulder. ‘Over there,’ he said, and knelt to slip his hands under Nishik’s shoulders. He smeared blood on his tunic, didn’t seem to notice. Rustem bent to pick up Nishik by the legs. Together they carried him—no one helping, no one even coming into the lane—up to the small chapel.

When they reached the doorway, a cleric in a stained yellow robe stepped out hastily, his hand outthrust. ‘We don’t want him!’ he exclaimed.

The young man simply ignored him, moving straight past the holy man, who scurried after them, still protesting. They took Nishik into the dim, chill space and set him down near the door. Rustem saw a small sun disk and an altar in the gloom. A waterfront chapel. Whores and sailors meeting each other here, he thought. More a place of venal commerce and shared disease than prayer, most likely.

‘What are we supposed to do with this?’ the cleric protested in an irate whisper, following them in. There were a handful of people inside.

‘Pray for his soul,’ the young man said. ‘Light candles. Someone will come for him.’ He glanced meaningfully at Rustem, who reached for his purse and took out a few copper folles.

‘For the candles,’ he said, extending them to the cleric. ‘I’ll have someone get him.’

The cleric made the coins disappear—more smoothly than a holy man ought, Rustem thought sourly—and nodded briefly. ‘This morning,’ he said. ‘By midday he’s tossed into the street. This is a Bassanid, after all.’

He had been listening, earlier. Had done nothing at all. Rustem gave him his coldest look. ‘He was a living soul. He is dead. Show respect, for your own office and your god if for nothing else.’

The cleric’s mouth fell open. The young man laid a hand on Rustem’s arm and drew him outside.

They went back and Rustem took the mule’s halter. He saw the blood on the stones where Nishik had lain, and he cleared his throat. ‘I owe you a great debt,’ he said.

Before the other man could reply, there came a clattering sound. They both spun to look.

Fully a dozen long-haired youths careened around the corner and skidded to a halt.

‘There!’ cried their first assailant savagely, pointing in triumph.

‘Run!’ snapped the young man at Rustem’s side.

Rustem grabbed his own pack from the mule, the one with his papers from home and the manuscripts he’d bought in Sarnica, and he sprinted uphill, leaving behind the mule, his clothing, his staff, two swords, and all shreds of the dignity he’d imagined himself bearing as he entered the city of cities that was Sarantium.

At this same hour, in the Traversite Palace of the Imperial Precinct, the Empress of Sarantium is lying in a scented bath in a warm, tiled room through which wisps of steam are drifting, while her secretary—sitting on a bench, his back carefully turned to the exposed, reclining form of the Empress—reads aloud to her a letter in which the leader of the largest of the dissident tribes in Moskav proposes that she induce the Emperor to fund his long-planned revolt.

The letter also, with little subtlety, intimates that the writer is prepared to personally attend to the Empress’s physical delight and rapture at some time in the future, should this persuasion of Valerius take place. The document concludes with an expression of well-phrased sympathy that a woman of the Empress’s manifest magnificence should still be enduring the attentions of an Emperor so helplessly unable to conduct his own affairs of state.

Alixana stretches her arms out of the water and above her head and allows herself a smile. She looks down at the curves of her own breasts. The fashion in dancers has changed since her day. Many of the girls now are much as the male dancers are: small breasts, straight hips, a boyish look. This would not be a way to describe the woman in her bath. She has seen and lived through more than thirty quite remarkably varied years now and can still stop a conversation or double a heartbeat with her entrance into a room.

She knows this, of course. It is useful, always has been. At the moment, however, she is remembering a girl, about eight years of age, taking her first proper bath. She had been fetched from a laneway south of the Hippodrome where she’d been wrestling and tumbling with three other children in the dust and offal. It had been a Daughter of Jad, she remembers, a square-jawed, stern-faced woman, grey and unsmiling, who had separated the brawling offspring of the Hippodrome workers and then taken Aliana off with her, leaving the others watching, open-mouthed.

In the forbidding, windowless, stone-walled house where that sect of holy women resided, she had taken the now silent, overawed girl to a small, private room, ordered hot water brought, and towels, and had stripped and then bathed her there in a bronze tub, alone. She had not touched Aliana, or not intimately. She’d washed her filthy hair and scrubbed her grimy fingers and nails, but the woman’s expression had not changed as she did so, or when she leaned back after, sitting on a three-legged wooden stool, and simply looked at the girl in the bath for a long time.

Thinking back, the Empress is very much aware of what must have been the underlying complexities of a holy woman’s actions that afternoon, the hidden and denied impulses stirring as she cleansed and then gazed at the undeveloped, naked form of the girl in the bath. But at the time she had only been aware of apprehension slowly giving way to a remarkable sensation of luxury: the hot water and the warm room, the hands of someone else tending to her.

Five years later she was an official dancer for the Blues, growing in recognition, the child-mistress of one of the more notorious of the faction’s aristocratic patrons. And she was already known for her love of bathing. Twice a day at the bathhouse when she could, amid languorous perfumes and warmth and the drifting of steam, which meant shelter and comfort to her in a life that had known neither.

Nor has this changed, though she now knows the most extreme comforts in the world. And to her the most remarkable thing, really, about all of this is how vividly, how intensely, she can still remember being the girl in that small bath.

The next letter, read while the Empress is being powdered, dried, painted, and dressed by her ladies, is from a nomadic religious leader in the desert south of Soriyya. A certain number of these desert wanderers are now Jaddite in their beliefs, having abandoned their incomprehensible heritage built around wind spirits and sets of holy lines, invisible to sight, mapping and crisscrossing the sands, marking sacred places and correspondences.

All the desert tribes embracing Jad have also adopted a belief in the god’s son. This often happens among those converting to the faith of the sun god: Heladikos is the way to his father. Officially, the Emperor and Patriarchs have forbidden such beliefs. The Empress, usefully thought to be sympathetic to such out-of-favour doctrines, tends to conduct the exchange of letters and gifts with the tribesmen. They can be significant, often are. Even with the expensively bought peace with the Bassanids in place, in the unstable regions of the south allies are impermanent and important, valuable for hired warriors, and for gold and silphium—that extravagantly expensive spice—and for offering caravan routes for eastern goods coming around Bassania.

This letter ends without any promise of physical delight. The Empress refrains from expressing disappointment. Her current secretary has no sense of humour and her attendants become distracted when amused. The desert leader does offer a prayer for light to attend upon her soul.

Alixana, dressed now, sipping at a cup of honeyed wine, dictates replies to both communications. She has just finished the second when the door opens, without a knock. She looks up.

‘Too late,’ she murmurs. ‘My lovers have fled and I am, as you see, entirely respectable.’

‘I shall destroy forests and cities searching for them,’ the thrice-exalted Emperor, Jad’s holy regent upon earth, says as he takes a cushioned bench and accepts a cup of the wine (without honey) from one of the women. ‘I shall grind their bones into powder. May I please proclaim that I found Vertigus importuning you and have him torn apart between horses?’

The Empress laughs and then gestures, briefly. The room empties of secretary and attendants. ‘Money, again? I could sell my jewels,’ she says, when they are alone.

He smiles. His first smile of the day, which for him has gone on for some time by now. She rises, brings a plate of cheese, fresh bread, cold meats to him. It is a custom, they do this every morning when demands allow. She kisses his forehead as she sets down the plate. He touches her wrist, breathing in her scent. In a way, he thinks, a new part of his day begins when he first does so. Each morning.

‘I’d make more selling you,’ he says.

‘How exciting. Gunarch of Moskav would pay.’

‘He can’t afford you.’ Valerius looks around the bathing room, red and white marble and ivory and gold, jewelled chalices and drinking cups and alabaster caskets on the tables. Two fires are lit; oil lamps hang from the ceiling in silver-wire baskets. ‘You are a very expensive woman.’

‘Of course I am. Which reminds me. I still want my dolphins.’ She gestures towards the upper part of the wall on the far side of the room. ‘When are you done with the Rhodian? I want him to start here.’

Valerius looks at her repressively, says nothing.

She smiles, all innocence, wide-eyed. ‘Gunarch of Moskav writes that he could offer me delights such as I have only dreamt of in the dark.’

Valerius nods absently. ‘I’m sure.’

‘Speaking of dreams . . . ’ his Empress says. The Emperor catches the shift in tone—she is skilled at such changes, of course—and looks at her as she returns to her own seat.

‘I suppose we were,’ he says. There is a silence. ‘Better than talking of illicit dolphins. What is it now, love?’

She shrugs, delicately. ‘Clever you. The dream was about dolphins.’

The Emperor’s expression is wry. ‘Clever me. I have just been steered like a boat where you wanted to go.’

She smiles, but not with her eyes. ‘Not really. It was a sad dream.’

Valerius looks at her. ‘You really do want them for these walls?’

He is deliberately misunderstanding, and she knows it. They have been here before. He doesn’t like talking about her dreams. She believes in them, he does not, or says he does not.

‘I want them only on the walls,’ she says. ‘Or in the sea far from us for a long time yet.’

He sips his wine. Takes a bite of cheese with the bread. Country food, his preference at this hour. His name was Petrus, in Trakesia.

‘None of us knows where our souls travel,’ he says, at length, ‘in life, or after.’ He waits until she looks up and meets his eyes. His face is round, smooth, innocuous. No one is deceived by this, not any more. ‘But I believe I am unshakeable on this war in the west, love, proof against dreams and argument.’

After a time, she nods. Not a new conversation, or a new conclusion. The dream in the night was real, though. She has always had dreams that stay with her.

They talk of affairs of state: taxation, the two Patriarchs, the opening ceremonies for the Hippodrome, a few days off. She tells him of an amusing wedding taking place today, with a surprisingly fashionable guest list.

‘There are rumours,’ she murmurs, pouring more wine for him, ‘that Lysippus has been seen in the city.’ Her expression is suddenly mischievous.

He looks rueful, as if caught out.

She laughs aloud. ‘I knew it! You’ve been planting them?’

He nods. ‘I should sell you somewhere, far away. I have no secrets. Yes, I’m . . . testing things.’

‘You would really bring him back?’

Lysippus the Calysian, gross of body and of appetite, was nonetheless the most efficient and incorruptible Quaestor of Imperial Revenue Valerius has ever had. His association with the Emperor is said to go back a very long way and involve some details that are unlikely to ever be made known. The Empress has never even asked, in fact; not really wanting to know. She has her own memories—and dreams, sometimes—of men screaming in the street one morning below rooms he’d rented for her in an expensive district, in the days when they were young and Apius was Emperor. She is not overly delicate about such things, cannot be after that childhood in the Hippodrome and the theatre, but this memory—with the smell of charred flesh—has lingered and will not leave.

The Calysian has been exiled nearly three years now, in the wake of the Victory Riot.

‘I’d bring him back,’ the Emperor says. ‘If they let me. I’d need the Patriarch to absolve him and the accursed factions to be calm about it. Best during the racing season, when they have other things to scream about.’

She smiles a little. He doesn’t like the racing, it is an ill-guarded secret. ‘Where is he now, really?’

Valerius shrugs. ‘North still, I assume. He writes from an estate near Eubulus. Has resources enough to do whatever he likes. Is probably bored. Terrifying the countryside. Stealing children by dark of moon.’

She makes a face at that. ‘Not a pleasant man.’

He nods. ‘Not in the least. Ugly habits. But I need money, love, and Vertigus is next to useless.’

‘Oh, I agree,’ she murmurs. ‘You can’t imagine how useless.’ She runs a tongue across her lips. ‘I think Gunarch of Moskav will please me much more.’ She is hiding something, though. A feeling, distant intuition. Dolphins and dreams and souls.

He laughs, has to laugh, eventually takes leave after finishing his quick meal. There are reports from the military and provincial governors to be read and responded to back in the Attenine Palace. She is receiving a delegation of clerics and holy women from Amoria in her own reception rooms, will sail in the harbour after, if the winds are light. She enjoys going out to the islands in the strait or the inner sea, and with winter ending she can do so again on a mild day. There is no formal banquet tonight. They are to dine together with a small number of courtiers, listening to a musician from Candaria.

In the event, they will do this, enjoying the elusive, plangent instrumentation, but they will be joined for wine afterwards—some might think unexpectedly—by the Supreme Strategos Leontes and his tall, fair wife, and a third person, also a woman, and royal.

Pardos sprinted for all he was worth, cursing himself all the while. He had spent his entire life in the rougher quarters of Varena, a city known for drunken Antae soldiers and for brawling apprentices. He knew he was an idiot for having intervened here, but a drawn sword and a man slain in broad daylight had taken the laneway encounter past the point of the usual bruises and bangings. He’d charged in, not stopping to think, administered some blows of his own—and now found himself pelting headlong beside a greying Bassanid through a city he didn’t know at all, with a shouting band of young aristocrats in flat-out pursuit. He didn’t even have his staff.

He’d been known for a cautious young man at home, but being careful didn’t always keep you out of trouble. He knew what they had to do, prayed only that the doctor’s older legs were equal to the pace.

Pardos whipped out of the laneway, skidding left into a wider street, and knocked over the first cart—a fish-monger’s—that he saw. Couvry had done that once under similar circumstances. A shriek of outrage followed him; he didn’t look back. Crowds and chaos were what they needed, to screen their flight and to provide some deterrent to fatal violence if they were caught—though he was uncertain how easily deterred their pursuers might be.

Best not to test that.

Beside him the doctor seemed to be keeping up—he even reached over as they careened around another corner and pulled down the awning over the portico of an icon shop. Not the wisest choice for a Bassanid, perhaps, but he did succeed in spilling a table full of Blessed Victims into the muddy street, scattering the beggars gathered around it, creating further disruption behind them. Pardos glanced over; the doctor was grim-faced, his legs pumping hard.

As they ran, Pardos kept looking for one of the Urban Prefect guards—surely they would be about, in this rough neighbourhood? Weren’t swords supposed to be illegal in the City? The young patricians pursuing them appeared not to believe so, or to care. He abruptly decided to make for a chapel, a larger one than the nondescript little hole in which he’d been chanting the morning invocation after arriving in the city at sunrise and weaving his way down from the triple walls. He’d been planning to take an inexpensive room near the harbour—always the cheapest part of a city—and then head for an encounter he’d been thinking about since leaving home.

The room would have to wait.

There were heavy morning crowds now, and they had to twist and dodge as best they could, earning curses and a tardy blow aimed at Pardos from one off-duty soldier. But this meant that those chasing them would surely be stringing out by now, and might even lose sight of them if Pardos and the doctor—he really was moving quite well for a greybeard—managed to take a sufficiently erratic path.

Glancing up constantly to get his bearings, Pardos glimpsed—through a break in the multi-storied buildings— a golden dome larger than any he’d ever seen before, and he abruptly changed his thinking, even as they ran.

‘That way!’ he gasped, pointing.

‘Why are we running?’ the Bassanid burst out. ‘There are people here! They won’t dare—’

‘They will! They’ll kill us and pay a fine! Come on!’

The doctor said no more, saving his breath. He followed as Pardos cut sharply off the street they were on and angled across a wide square. They hurtled past a bedraggled Holy Fool and his small crowd, hit by a whiff of the man’s foul, unwashed odour. Pardos heard a sharp cry from behind—some of the pursuers still had them in sight. A stone whizzed past his head. He looked back.

One pursuer. Only one. That changed things.

Pardos stopped, and turned.

The doctor did the same. A fierce-looking but extremely young man in green robes, eastern-styled, with earrings and a golden necklace and long, unkempt hair— not one of the original group—slowed uncertainly, then fumbled at his belt and pulled out a short sword. Pardos looked around, swore, and then darted up to the Holy Fool. Braving the maggoty, fetid stench of the man, he seized his oak staff, snapping an apology over his shoulder. He ran directly at their young pursuer.

‘You idiot!’ he screamed, waving the staff wildly. ‘You’re alone! There’s two of us!’

The young man—belatedly apprehending this significant truth—looked quickly over his shoulder, saw no immediately arriving reinforcements, appeared suddenly less fierce.

‘Run!’ screamed the doctor at Pardos’s side, brandishing a knife.

The young man looked at the two of them and elected to follow the advice. He ran.

Pardos hurled the borrowed staff back towards the Holy Fool on his small platform. ‘Come on!’ he rasped at the doctor. ‘Head for the Sanctuary!’ He pointed. They turned together, crossed the square, and raced up another laneway on the far side

It wasn’t far now, as the lane—blessedly level now— gave suddenly onto an enormous forum with arched porticoes and shops all around it. Pardos swept past two boys playing with a hoop and a man selling roasted nuts at a brazier. He saw the looming bulk of the Hippodrome on his left and a pair of huge bronze gates in a wall that had to be the one guarding the Imperial Precinct. There was an enormous equestrian statue in front of the gates. He ignored these splendours for now, running for all he was worth diagonally across the forum towards a long, wide, covered porch with two more huge doors behind it and a dome rising above and behind that would have taken away his breath if he’d had any breath left to lose.

He and the Bassanid leaped and dodged among masons and masonry carts and brick piles and—familiar sight!—an outdoor oven for quicklime near the portico. As they reached the steps, Pardos heard the pursuing cry behind him again. He and the doctor took the steps side by side and stumbled to a stop, breathing hard, before the doors.

‘No one allowed!’ snapped a guard—there were two of them. ‘They are at work inside!’

‘Mosaicist,’ gasped Pardos. ‘Here from Batiara! Those youths are after us!’ He pointed back across the forum. ‘They killed someone already! With swords!’

The guards glanced over. Half a dozen of the young pursuers had now made it this far, running in a tight cluster. They had weapons drawn—in daylight, in the forum. Impossible to credit, or so wealthy they didn’t even care. Pardos seized one of the heavy door handles, pulled it open, pushed the doctor quickly inside. Heard the piercing, satisfying sound of a guard whistling for support. They would be safe in here for now, he was sure of it. The doctor was bent over, hands on his hips, breathing heavily. He gave Pardos a sidelong glance and a nod, obviously registering the same thing.

Later, much later, Pardos would give some thought to what the morning’s sequence of interventions and activities suggested about changes in himself, but for the moment he was only moving and reacting.

He looked up. He reacted, but he didn’t move.

In fact, he felt suddenly as though his boots were set into the marble floor like . . . tesserae in a setting bed, fixed for centuries to come.

He stood so, rooted, trying to deal first with the sheer size of the space encompassed here, the dim, vast aisles and bays receding into an illusion of endlessness down corridors of pale, filtered light. He saw the massive columns piled upon each other like playthings for the giants of legend from Finabar, the lost, first world of the Antae’s pagan faith, where gods walked among men.

Overwhelmed, Pardos looked down at the flawless, polished marble of the floor, and then—taking a deep breath—up again, all the way up, to see, floating, floating, the great dome itself, inconceivably immense. And upon it, taking shape even now, was what Caius Crispus of Varena, his teacher, was devising amid this holiness.

White and gold tesserae on a blue ground—blue such as Pardos had never seen in Batiara and had never expected to see in his life—defined the vault of the heavens. Pardos recognized the hand and style immediately. Whoever had been in charge of these decorations when Crispin arrived from the west was no longer the designer here.

Pardos had been taught by the man doing this, master to apprentice.

What he couldn’t yet begin to grasp—and he knew he would need to spend a long time looking to even make a start—was the colossal scale of what Crispin was doing on this dome. A design equal to the vastness of the setting.

The doctor, beside him, was leaning against a marble column now, still catching his breath. The marble was the green-blue colour, in the muted light, of the sea on a cloudy morning. The Bassanid was silent, slowly looking about. Above the grey-streaked beard his eyes were wide. Valerius’s Sanctuary was the talk and rumour of the known world, and they were standing within it now.

There were labourers at work everywhere, many of them at corners, so distant they were invisible, could only be heard. But even the noise of construction was changed by the huge space, echoing, a hollow resonance of sound. He tried to imagine the liturgy being chanted here, and a lump rose in his throat at the thought.

Dust danced in the slanting beams of sunlight that fell down through the windows set high on the walls and all around the dome. Looking up past suspended oil lamps of bronze and silver, Pardos saw scaffolding everywhere against the marbled walls, where mosaics of interwoven flowers and patterned shapes were being laid. One scaffolding only went all the way up to the dome, towards the northern side of that great curve, opposite the entrance doors. And in the soft, sweet morning light in the Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom, Pardos saw upon that high scaffolding the small figure of the man he’d followed all the way east, unasked, and unwanted—for Crispin had flatly refused the company of any apprentices when he’d set out on his own journey.

Pardos took another steadying breath and made the sign of the sun disk. This place was not formally consecrated yet—there was no altar, no suspended golden disk behind it—but for him, it was holy ground already, and his journey, or this part of it, was over. He gave thanks to Jad in his heart, remembering blood on an altar in Varena, wild dogs on a bitterly cold night in Sauradia when he had thought he would die. He was alive, and here.

Pardos could hear the guards outside—more of them now. A young man’s voice was raised in anger, and was then sharply cut off by a soldier’s reply. He looked at the doctor, and allowed himself a crooked smile. Then he remembered that the Bassanid’s servant was dead. They had escaped, but it was not a moment for pleasure, not for the other man.

Not far away, two artisans stood together, and Pardos decided that if he could make his feet obey commands, he’d go over and speak to them. Before he could do so, he heard their voices raised in anxious colloquy.

‘Where’s Vargos? He could do it.’

‘Gone to get dressed. You know that. He was invited too.’

‘Holy Jad. Maybe . . . um, one of the mason’s apprentices can do it? Or the bricklayer’s? They may not . . . know him?’

‘Not a chance. They all know the stories. We have to do it, Sosio, right now. It’s late! I’ll dice you.’

‘No! I am not going up there. Crispin kills people.’

‘He talks about killing people. I don’t think he’s ever done it.’

‘You don’t think he has. Good. Then you go up.’

‘I said I’d dice, Sosio.’

‘And I said I won’t go. I don’t want you to go, either. I don’t have any other brothers.’

‘He’ll be late. He’ll kill us for letting him be late.’

Pardos found that he could move, and that—notwithstanding the events of the morning—he was struggling not to grin. Too many memories were with him, sudden and vivid.

He went forward over marble in the serene light. His booted footsteps echoed softly. The two brothers—they were twins, utterly identical—turned and looked at him. In the distance, someone dropped a hammer or a chisel and the sound rang softly, almost music.

‘I gather,’ said Pardos gravely, ‘this is a question of interrupting Crispin on the scaffold?’

‘Caius Crispus, yes,’ said the one called Sosio quickly. ‘You, er, know him?’

‘He has to be at a wedding!’ said the other brother.

‘Right away! He’s in the wedding party.’

‘But he doesn’t allow anyone to interrupt him!’

‘Ever! He killed someone for it once!’

‘Back in Varena. With a trowel, they say! Inside a holy chapel!’ Silano’s expression was horrified.

Pardos nodded in sympathy. ‘I know, I know. He did do that. In a chapel! In fact, I was the person he killed. It was terrible, dying like that! A trowel!’ He paused, and winked as their mouths fell open, identically. ‘It’s all right, I’ll get him for you.’

He went forward, before his smile—which he really couldn’t suppress any longer—completely betrayed him. He passed right under the staggering sweep of the dome. Looking up, he saw Crispin’s rendering of Jad in the east above the emerging details of Sarantium seen as if on the horizon, and because he’d just spent an entire winter in a certain chapel in Sauradia, Pardos perceived immediately what his teacher was doing with his own image of the god. Crispin had been there too. The Sleepless Ones had told him that.

He came to the scaffold. Two young apprentices were standing there, bracing it, as they always had to do. Usually those on that task were bored and idle. This pair looked terrified. Pardos found that he really couldn’t stop smiling.

‘Hold steady for me, will you?’ he said.

‘You can’t!’ one of the boys gasped in horror. ‘He’s up there!’

‘So I understand,’ said Pardos. He could remember, so easily, feeling—and probably looking—exactly as this white-faced apprentice did. ‘He needs to be given a message, though.’

And he grasped the rungs of the scaffold ladder and started up. He knew that high above, Crispin would soon feel, if he hadn’t immediately, the tug and sway. Pardos kept his eyes on his hands, as they were all trained to do, and climbed.

He was halfway up when he heard a well-known voice he’d travelled the world to hear again call down in cold, remembered fury, ‘Another step up and I end your wretched existence and powder your bones into the setting bed!’

That’s very good, actually, Pardos thought. A new one. He looked up. ‘You shut up,’ he cried. ‘Or I’ll carve your buttocks with tesserae and feed them to you in segments!’

There was a silence. Then, ‘I say that, rot your eyes! Who the—?’

Pardos continued upward without answering.

Above him, he felt the platform shift as Crispin came to the edge and looked down.

‘Who are you?’ Another silence, followed by: ‘Pardos? Pardos?’

Pardos didn’t speak, kept climbing. His heart was full. He reached the top and stepped over the low rail and onto the platform under the mosaic stars of a dark blue mosaic sky.

To be enveloped in a hard embrace that almost toppled them both.

‘Curse you, Pardos! What took you so long? I’ve needed you here! They wrote that you left in the fucking autumn! Half a year ago! Do you know how late you are?’

Ignoring for the moment the fact that Crispin, on departing, had explicitly refused accompaniment, Pardos disengaged.

‘Do you know how late you are?’ he asked.

‘Me? What?’

‘Wedding,’ said Pardos happily, and watched.

It gave him even greater pleasure, later, to recollect the appalled dawning of awareness on Crispin’s unexpectedly smooth-shaven features.

‘Ah! Ah! Holy Jad! They’ll kill me! I’m a dead man! If Carullus doesn’t, bloody Shirin will! Why didn’t one of those imbeciles down there tell me?’

Without delaying for the extremely obvious answer, Crispin rushed past Pardos, vaulted recklessly over the railing and began hurtling down the ladder, sliding more than stepping, the way the apprentices did when they raced each other. Before following, Pardos glanced over at where Crispin had been working. He saw a bison in an autumn forest, huge, done in black, edged and outlined in white. It would be very strong, that way, against the brilliant colours of the leaves around it, a dominant image. That had to be deliberate. Crispin had taken the apprentices once to see a floor mosaic at an estate south of Varena, where black and white had been used against colour in this way. Pardos went back down, feeling suddenly thoughtful.

Crispin was waiting at the bottom, grimacing, dancing from foot to foot in his impatience. ‘Hurry, you idiot! We’re so late it kills me. It will kill me! Come on! Why did you take so poxed long to get here?’

Pardos stepped deliberately down off the ladder. ‘I stopped in Sauradia,’ he said. ‘A chapel by the road there. They said you’d been there too, earlier.’

Crispin’s expression changed, very quickly. He looked intently at Pardos. ‘I was,’ he said after a pause. ‘I was there. I told them that they had to . . . Were you . . . Pardos, were you restoring it?’

Pardos nodded slowly. ‘As much as I felt I could, on my own.’

Crispin’s expression changed again, warming him, sunlight on a raw morning. ‘I’m pleased,’ his teacher said. ‘I’m very pleased. We’ll speak of this. Meanwhile, come, we’ll have to run.’

‘I’ve been running. Through the whole of Sarantium, it feels like. There are a group of young men outside, rich enough not to care about the law, who are trying to kill me and this Bassanid doctor.’ He gestured at the physician, who had approached with the artisan brothers. The twins’ faces were a paired study in confusion. ‘They killed his manservant,’ Pardos said. ‘We can’t just walk outside.’

‘And my man’s body will be thrown into the street by certain of your most pious clerics if he is not claimed by midday.’ The doctor spoke excellent Sarantine, better than Pardos’s. He was still angry.

‘Where is he?’ Crispin said. ‘Sosio and Silano can get him.’

‘I have no idea of the name of—’

‘Chapel of Blessed Ingacia,’ Pardos said quickly. ‘Near the port.’

‘What?’ said the twin named Sosio. ‘What were you doing there?’ said his brother in the same breath. ‘It’s a terrible place! Thieves and whores.’

‘How do you know so much about it?’ Crispin asked wryly, then appeared to recollect his urgency.

‘Get two of the Imperial Guard to go with you. Carullus’s men will all be at the accursed wedding by now. Tell them it is for me, and why. And you two,’ he turned to Pardos and the doctor. ‘Come on! You’ll stay with me for the morning, I have guards.’ Crispin snapping orders was something Pardos remembered. His moods had always changed like this. ‘We’ll go out a side door and we have to move! You’ll need something white to wear, this is a wedding! Idiots!’ He hurried off; they followed quickly, having little choice.

Which is how the mosaicist Pardos of Varena and the physician Rustem of Kerakek came to attend—wearing white over-tunics borrowed from Crispin’s wardrobe— the formal ceremony and then the celebration banquet of a marriage on the day they each arrived in Jad’s holy and august city of Sarantium.

The three of them were late, but not hopelessly so, in the event.

The musicians were lingering outside. A soldier, waiting anxiously by the doorway, saw their approach and hurried inside to report it. Crispin, murmuring a rapid stream of apologies in all directions, was able to hastily take his place before the altar in time to hold a slender golden crown over the head of the bridegroom for the ceremony. His own hair was considerably disordered, but it almost always was. Pardos noticed that the very attractive woman who was to hold the crown above the bride did fist his teacher hard in the ribs just before the service began. There was a ripple of laughter through the chapel. The presiding cleric looked startled; the groom smiled and nodded approval.

The bride’s face Pardos didn’t see until afterwards. She was veiled in the chapel as the words of union were spoken by the cleric and then in unison by the couple being wed. Pardos had no idea who they were; Crispin hadn’t had time to explain. Pardos didn’t even know the name of the Bassanid standing beside him; events had unfolded at an unbelievable speed this morning, and a man was dead.

The chapel was elegant, gorgeous in fact, an extravagance of gold and silver, veined marble pillars, a magnificent altar of jet-black stone. Overhead, on the small dome, Pardos saw—with surprise—the golden figure of Heladikos, carrying his torch of fire, falling in his father’s chariot. Belief in the god’s son was banned now, images of him deemed a heresy by both Patriarchs. It seemed the users of this patrician chapel had sufficient importance to prevent their mosaic being destroyed thus far. Pardos, who had adopted the god’s bright son with the god himself, as had all the Antae in the west, felt a flicker of warmth and welcome. A good omen, he thought. It was unexpected and comforting to find the Charioteer waiting for him here.

Then, partway through the service, the Bassanid touched Pardos on the arm and pointed. Pardos looked over. He blinked. The man who’d killed the doctor’s servant had just entered the chapel.

He was quiet and composed, clad in exquisitely draped white silk, with a belt of links of gold and a dark green cloak. His hair was neatly tucked away now under a soft, green, fur-trimmed hat. The gaudy jewellery was gone. He moved discreetly to take his place between an older, handsome man and a much younger woman. He didn’t look drunken now. He looked like a young prince, a model for Heladikos in splendour overhead.

There were those of the Imperial Precinct and the higher civil offices who actively courted the racing factions, either or both of them. Plautus Bonosus, Master of the Senate, was not one of these. He took the view that a benign detachment from both Blues and Greens best suited his position. In addition, he was not, by nature, one of those inclined to lay siege to the girl dancers and, accordingly, the charms of the notorious Shirin of the Greens were purely a matter of aesthetics for him and not a source of desire or enticement.

As such, he’d never have attended this wedding, had it not been for two factors. One was his son: Cleander had desperately urged him to attend, and to bring him, and since it was increasingly unusual for his son to show the least interest in civilized gatherings, Bonosus had been reluctant to pass up an opportunity to have the boy appear presentable and functional in society.

The other reason, a little more self-indulgent, had been the information, conveyed smoothly by the dancer with her invitation, that the banquet in her home was to be prepared by Strumosus of Amoria.

Bonosus did have his weaknesses. Charming boys and memorable food would probably lead the list.

They left the two unmarried girls at home, of course. Bonosus and his second wife attended—scrupulously punctual—at the ceremony in their own neighbourhood chapel. Cleander arrived late, but he was clean and appropriately garbed. Looking with some bemusement at his son beside him, Bonosus was almost able to remember the dutiful, clever boy he’d been as recently as two years ago. Cleander’s right forearm seemed puffy and discoloured but his father elected not to ask about that. He didn’t want to know. They joined the white-clad procession and the musicians (very good ones, in fact, from the theatre) for the short, rather chilly walk to the dancer’s home.

He did feel briefly uneasy as the musical parade through the streets ended before a portico with a well done copy of a classical Trakesian bust of a woman. He knew how his wife would feel about entering here. She’d said nothing, of course, but he knew. They made their way into a common dancer’s abode, thereby conferring all the symbolic dignity of his office upon the woman and her house.

Jad alone knew what went on in here at night after the theatre. Thenaïs was impeccable, as ever, revealing not the least trace of disapproval. His second wife, significantly younger than he was, was flawlessly well bred and famously reticent. He’d chosen her for both qualities after Aelina had died in a summer of plague three years ago, leaving him with three children and no one to manage the house.

Thenaïs offered a gracious smile and polite murmur as Shirin of the Greens, slender and vivacious, welcomed them at her door. Cleander, between his father and stepmother, blushed crimson as Bonosus presented him, and locked his eyes on the floor as the dancer lightly touched his hand in greeting.

One mystery solved, the Senator thought, eyeing the boy with amusement. Now he knew why Cleander had been so eager to attend. At least he has good taste, Bonosus thought wryly. The Senator’s mood was further assuaged as a servant handed him wine (which proved to be a splendid Candarian) and another woman deftly presented a small plate holding delicate morsels of seafood.

Bonosus’s view of the world and the day grew positively sunny as he tasted his first sampling of Strumosus’s artistry. He let out an audible sigh of pleasure and gazed about with a benign eye: a Green hostess, the Blues’ chef in the kitchen, a number of guests from the Imperial Precinct (making him feel less conspicuous, in fact, as he noted their presence and nodded at one), sundry performers from the theatre, including one curly-haired former lover whom he promptly resolved to avoid.

He saw the rotund head of the silk guild (a man who seemed to attend every party in the City), the Supreme Strategos’s secretary, Pertennius of Eubulus, surprisingly well turned out, and the Greens’ burly, beak-nosed factionarius, whose name he could never remember. Elsewhere, the Emperor’s much-favoured Rhodian mosaicist was standing with a stocky, rough-bearded young man and an older, also bearded fellow, distinctly Bassanid. And then the Senator noticed another unexpected, note -worthy guest.

‘Scortius is here,’ he murmured to his wife, sampling a tiny, pickled sea urchin, in silphium and something unidentifiable, an astonishing flavour that tasted of ginger and the east. ‘He’s with the Green racer from Sarnica, Crescens.’

‘An eccentric gathering, yes,’ Thenaïs replied, not even bothering to follow his gaze towards where the two chariot-drivers were surrounded by a cluster of admirers. Bonosus smiled a little. He liked his wife. He even slept with her on occasion.

‘Taste the wine,’ he said.

‘I have. Candarian. You’ll be happy.’

‘I am,’ said Bonosus happily.

And he was, until the Bassanid fellow he’d noticed with the mosaicist came striding over to accuse Cleander of murder, in an eastern voice that was explicit enough— if blessedly low in volume—to eliminate all possibility of avoiding an unpleasantness.

Chapter IV

He hadn’t known Nishik long at all—only for the duration of their journey here—and he couldn’t have said he liked the man. The stocky soldier made a poor manservant and an insufficiently respectful companion. He hadn’t troubled himself to disguise the fact that he regarded Rustem as no more than a burdensome civilian: the traditional soldier’s attitude. Rustem had made a point in the first days of mentioning his travels a few times, but when that elicited no useful response he stopped, finding the exercise of attempting to impress a common soldier to be undignified.

Having acknowledged this, it remained to note that the casual killing of a companion—whether one was partial to him or not—was hardly something one ought to countenance, and Rustem had no intention of doing so. He was still outraged about the morning’s deadly encounter and his own humiliating flight through the Jaddite city.

This information he conveyed to the big, red-haired artisan at the wedding celebration to which he’d been brought. He was holding a cup of excellent wine, but could take no pleasure in the fact or the reality of his arrival—finally—in the Sarantine capital after a hard winter trek. The presence of the murderer at the same gathering undermined any such feelings and gave an edge to his anger. The young man, dressed now like some Sarantine lordling, bore no resemblance at all to the profane, drunken bully who’d accosted them with his cronies in the laneway. He didn’t even seem to have recognized Rustem.

Rustem pointed out the fellow at the request of the mosaicist, who seemed a brisk, no-nonsense person, belying a first impression of unhealthy choler and passion. The artisan swore under his breath and promptly fetched the bridegroom to their little group.

‘Cleander’s fucked up again,’ the mosaicist—his name was Crispin—said grimly. He seemed prone to vulgar language.

‘Tried to grab Shirin in the hallway?’ The soldier bridegroom continued to present an inordinately cheerful visage.

‘I wish it were that. No, he killed this man’s servant this morning, in the street, with witnesses around. Including my friend Pardos, who just arrived in the City. Then he and a swarm of Greens chased both of them all the way to the Sanctuary, with swords drawn.’

‘Oh, fuck,’ said the soldier, with feeling. His expression had changed. ‘Those stupid little boys.’

‘They aren’t boys,’ said Rustem coldly. ‘Boys are ten years old or such. That fellow was drunk at sunrise and killed with a blade.’

The big soldier looked at Rustem carefully for the first time. ‘I understand that. He’s still very young. Lost his mother at a bad time and left some intelligent friends for a wild group of younger ones in the faction. He’s also hopelessly smitten with our hostess here and will have been drinking this morning because he was terrified of coming to her house.’

‘Ah,’ said Rustem, using a gesture his students knew well. ‘That explains why Nishik had to die! Of course. Forgive me for mentioning the matter.’

‘Don’t be a shit, Bassanid,’ said the soldier, his eyes briefly hard. ‘No one’s condoning a killing. We’ll try to do something. I’m explaining, not excusing. I should also mention that the boy is the son of Plautus Bonosus. There’s a need for some discretion.’

‘Who is—?’

‘Master of the Senate,’ said the mosaicist. ‘He’s over there, with his wife. Leave this with us, physician. Cleander can use a good scare put into him and I can promise you we’ll make it happen.’

‘A scare?’ said Rustem. He felt his temper rising again.

The red-haired fellow had a direct gaze. ‘Tell me, doctor, would a member of the court of the King of Kings be more severely punished for killing a servant in a street fight? A Sarantine servant?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Rustem, although he did, of course.

Pivoting on a heel, he strode past the yellow-haired bride in her white garment and red belt and went right across the room towards the murderer and the older man the artisan had indicated. He was aware that his swift progress through a relaxed gathering would attract attention. A female servant, perhaps sensing a problem, appeared right in front of him, smiling, carrying a tray of small plates. Rustem was forced to stop; there was no room to pass. He drew a breath and, for want of evident alternatives, accepted one of the little plates she offered. The woman—young, full-figured, and dark-haired— lingered in his path. She balanced her round tray and took his wine cup, freeing his two hands. Her fingers touched his. ‘Taste it,’ she murmured, still smiling. Her tunic was cut distractingly low—not a fashion that had reached Kerakek.

Rustem did as she suggested. It was rolled fish of some sort, in pastry, a sauce on the plate. As he bit down, a mildly stunning explosion of flavours took place in his mouth and Rustem could not suppress a grunt of astonished pleasure. He looked at the plate in his hand, and then at the girl in front of him. He dipped a finger in the sauce and tasted it again, wonderingly.

The dancer hosting this affair clearly had a cook, he thought. And comely servants. The dark-haired girl was gazing at him with dimpled pleasure. She handed him a small cloth to wipe at his mouth and took the tiny plate from him, still smiling. She gave him back his wine.

Rustem discovered that his surge of anger appeared to have dissipated. But as the servant murmured something and turned to another guest, Rustem looked at the Senator and his son again and was struck by a thought. He stood still a moment longer, stroking his beard, and then moved forward, more slowly now.

He stopped before the slightly florid figure of the Master of the Sarantine Senate, noting the austere, quite handsome woman beside him and—more to the point— the son at his other side. He felt very calm now. He bowed to the man and the woman and introduced himself formally.

As he straightened, Rustem saw the boy finally recognize him and go white. The Senator’s son glanced quickly towards the front of the room where their hostess, the dancer, was still greeting late arrivals. No escape for you, thought Rustem coldly, and he spoke his accusation to the father in a deliberately low-voiced, cool tone.

The mosaicist had been right, of course: discretion and dignity were critical when people of stature were involved. Rustem had no desire to become embroiled with the law here; he intended to deal with this Senator himself. It had just occurred to him that although a physician might learn much of Sarantine medicine and perhaps hear a little chatter about affairs of state, a man owed a debt by the Master of the Senate might find himself in a different situation—to the greater benefit of the King of Kings in Kabadh, who had things he wished to know about Sarantium just now.

Rustem saw no reason to have poor Nishik, his long-serving, much-loved servant, die in vain.

The Senator cast his son a satisfyingly poisonous glance and murmured, ‘Killed? Holy Jad. I am appalled, of course. You must allow—’

‘He was drawing his own sword!’ the boy exclaimed in a low, fierce tone. ‘He was—’

‘Be silent!’ said Plautus Bonosus, a little more loudly than he’d perhaps intended. Two men not far away glanced over. The wife, all reserve and composure, appeared to be gazing idly about the room, ignoring her family. She was listening, however; Rustem could see it.

‘As I was saying,’ Bonosus continued more softly, turning back to Rustem, his colour even more heightened, ‘you must allow me to offer you a cup of wine at our home after this charming celebration. I am grateful that you chose to speak with me directly, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Rustem gravely.

‘Where would we find your unfortunate servant?’ the Senator asked. A practical man.

‘The body is being attended to,’ Rustem murmured.

‘Ah. So there are . . . others who have already learned of this?’

‘We were pursued through the streets by sword-wielding youths led by your son,’ Rustem said, allowing himself a shade of emphasis. ‘I imagine a number of people did observe our passage, yes. We received assistance in the Emperor’s new Sanctuary from his mosaicist.’

‘Ah,’ said Plautus Bonosus again, glancing across the room. ‘The Rhodian. He does get about. Well, if that matter is attended to . . . ’

‘My mule and all my goods,’ said Rustem, ‘were left behind when we were forced to flee. I have just arrived in Sarantium this morning, you see.’

The wife turned to him then, eyeing him thoughtfully. Rustem met her gaze briefly and turned away. The women here appeared to be rather more . . . present . . . than those in other places he’d been. He wondered if it had to do with the Empress, the power she was said to wield. A common dancer once. It was a remarkable story, really.

The Senator turned to his son. ‘Cleander, you will excuse yourself to our hostess and leave now, before the dinner is served. You will ascertain the whereabouts of this man’s animal and goods and have them brought to our home. You will then wait there for me to arrive.’

‘Leave? Leave already?’ said the boy, his voice actually breaking. ‘But I haven’t even . . . ’

‘Cleander, there is a possibility you might be branded or exiled for this. Get the accursed mule,’ said his father.

His wife laid a hand on his arm. ‘Shh,’ she murmured. ‘Look.’

A hush had descended over the large room full of animated, pleasure-seeking Sarantines. Plautus Bonosus looked past Rustem’s shoulder and blinked in surprise.

‘Now how do they come to be here?’ he asked of no one in particular.

Rustem turned. The silence became a murmurous rustling as those assembled—fifty or more—bowed or sank low in acknowledgement of the man and the woman who stood now in the entrance to the room with the hostess behind them.

The man was very tall, smooth-shaven, compellingly handsome. He was bareheaded, which was unusual and showed his thick golden hair to good effect. He wore a knee-length, deep-blue tunic slashed to show gold at the sides, with gold hose and black boots like a soldier and a dark green panelled dress cloak, pinned at one shoulder with a blue gem, large as a man’s thumbnail. He held a white flower in one hand, for the wedding.

The woman beside him had her own yellow hair gathered up loosely under a white mesh cap, with artful ringlets spilling down. Her floor-length garment was crimson and there were jewels at the hem. She wore gold at her ears and a necklace of gold with pearls and a golden cloak. She was nearly as tall as the man. A sallow, lean fellow materialized at the man’s elbow and whispered briefly in his ear as those attending the celebration rose from homage.

‘Leontes,’ said the Senator softly to Rustem. ‘The Strategos.’

It was a courtesy. Rustem could not have known this man, though for years he had heard of him—and feared him, as did everyone in Bassania. There was a glow cast by renown, Rustem thought, something almost tangible. It was Leontes the Golden (and the origin of the name became clearer now) who had comprehensively beaten the last fully mustered northern army east of Asen, almost capturing the Bassanid general, forcing a humiliating peace. The general had been invited to kill himself when he returned to Kabadh, and had done so.

It was Leontes who had also won lands (and productive, taxable citizens) for Valerius in the great spaces stretching all the way west and south to the fabled Majriti deserts, who had brutally quelled incursions from Moskav and Karch, who had been honoured—they’d heard of it even in Kerakek—with the most elaborate Triumph an Emperor had ever granted a returning Strategos since Saranios had founded this city.

And who had been given the tall, ice-elegant woman beside him as a further prize. They knew of the Daleinoi in Bassania, as well—even in Kerakek, which was on the southern trade routes, after all. The family’s wealth had begun with a spice monopoly, and the eastern spices usually came through Bassania, north or south. Ten or fifteen years ago, Flavius Daleinus had been killed in some appalling fashion at a time of Imperial succession. A fire of some kind, Rustem recalled. His elder sons had been killed or crippled in the same attack, and the daughter was . . . here in this room, brilliant and golden as a prize of war.

The Strategos gestured briefly and the dark-haired serving girl hurried over with wine for him, her cheeks flushed with excitement. His wife also accepted a cup, but stayed behind as her husband stepped forward so that he appeared alone now, as if an actor on a stage. Rustem saw Styliane Daleina glancing around slowly, registering, he was certain, presences and alignments utterly invisible to him. Her expression was as unrevealing as that of the Senator’s wife, but the impression given by the two women was in no other way the same. Where the wife of Plautus Bonosus was reserved and detached, the aristocratic spouse of the most powerful soldier in the Empire was cold and brilliant and even a little frightening. Awesome wealth and great power and violent death were in her lineage. Rustem managed to look away from her just as the Strategos began to speak.

‘Lysurgos Matanios once said that it is a finer thing to see a friend well wed than to sip from even the rarest wine,’ Leontes said, lifting his cup. ‘It is a pleasure to enjoy both today,’ he added, pausing to drink. There was laughter: well-bred from the courtiers, more obviously excited from the theatre and army people.

‘He always uses that line,’ murmured Bonosus to Rustem, drily. ‘I wish I knew why he was here, though.’

As if answering, the Strategos went on. ‘It seemed proper to stop and lift a cup in honour of the marriage of the only man in the army who could talk so much and so well and so much and . . . so much, that he extracted the arrears of payment for the soldiers from the Precinct coffers. I do not urge anyone ever to put themselves in the position of being persuaded by the tribune of the Fourth Sauradian to do anything . . . unless they have a great deal of time to spare.’

Laughter again. The man was smooth as a courtier but his manner was direct and unassuming, the teasing rough and easy as a soldier’s. Rustem watched the military men in the room as they gazed at the speaker. There was adoration written in their features. The wife, motionless as a statue now, seemed vaguely bored.

‘And I fear,’ Leontes was saying, ‘that we do not have a great deal of time today, so the Lady Styliane and I are not able to join you in sampling the delights prepared by Strumosus of the Blues in a Green household. I do commend the factions for this rare conjunction and hope it bodes well for a peaceful racing season.’ He paused, an eyebrow raised for emphasis: this was an authority figure, after all. ‘We came that we might salute the groom and his bride in Jad’s most holy name, and to convey a piece of information that may add in some small way to the felicity of the day.’

He paused again, sipped his wine. ‘I addressed the bridegroom as tribune of the Fourth Sauradian just now. I was behind the tidings, as it happens. It seems that some Supreme Strategos or other, anxious to put a certain mellifluous voice far away from his overburdened ears, rashly signed papers this morning affirming the promotion of the tribune Carullus of Trakesia to his new rank and appointment . . . as chiliarch of the Second Calysian, such position to be assumed in thirty days . . . which will allow the new chiliarch time here with his bride, and a chance to lose some of his increased pay at the Hippodrome.’

There was a shout of pleasure and laughter, nearly drowning out the last words. The bridegroom came quickly forward, his face flushed, and knelt before the Strategos.

‘My lord!’ he said, looking up, ‘I am . . . I am speechless!’

Which elicited its own burst of laughter from those who knew the man. ‘However,’ added Carullus, lifting a hand, ‘I do have a question I must ask.’

‘Speechlessly?’ said Styliane Daleina, from behind her husband. Her first comment, softly spoken, but everyone heard it. Some people did not need to raise their voices to be heard.

‘I lack that skill, my lady. I must use my tongue, though with far less skill than my betters. I only wish to ask if I may decline the promotion.’

Silence fell. Leontes blinked.

‘This is a surprise,’ he said. ‘I would have thought . . .’ He let the sentence trail off.

‘My great lord, my commander . . . if you wish to reward an unworthy soldier, it will be by allowing him, at any rank at all, to fight at your side in the next campaign. I do not believe I am saying anything untoward if I suggest that Calysium, with the Everlasting Peace signed in the east, will be no such place. Is there nowhere in . . . in the west where I might serve with you, my Strategos?’

At the reference to Bassania, Rustem heard the Senator beside him shift a little, uneasily, and clear his throat softly. But nothing of note had been said. Yet.

The Strategos smiled a little now, his composure regained. He reached down, and in a gesture almost fatherly, ruffled the hair of the soldier kneeling before him. His men loved him, it was said, the way they loved their god.

Leontes said, ‘There is no campaign declared anywhere, chiliarch. Nor is it my practice to send newly married officers to a war front when there are alternatives, as there always are.’

‘Then I can be attached to you, since there is no war front,’ said Carullus, and he smiled innocently. Rustem snorted; the man had audacity.

‘Shut up, you idiot!’ The entire room heard the redhaired mosaicist. The laughter that followed affirmed as much. It had been intended, of course. Rustem was quickly coming to realize how much of what was being said and done was carefully planned or cleverly improvised theatre. Sarantium, he decided, was a stage for performances. No wonder an actress could command so much power here, induce such prominent people to grace her home—or become Empress, if it came to that. Unthinkable in Bassania, of course. Utterly unthinkable.

The Strategos was smiling again, a man at ease, sure of his god—and of himself, Rustem thought. A righteous man. Leontes glanced across at the mosaicist and lifted his cup to him.

‘It is good advice, soldier,’ he said to Carullus, still kneeling before him. ‘You will know the pay difference between legate and chiliarch. You have a bride now, and should have strong children to raise soon enough, in Jad’s holy service and to honour his name.’

He hesitated. ‘If there is a campaign this year—and let me make it clear that the Emperor has offered no indications yet—it might be in the name of the poor, wronged queen of the Antae, which means Batiara, and I will not have a newly married man beside me there. The east is where I want you for now, soldier, so speak of this no more.’ The words were blunt, the manner almost paternal—though he wouldn’t be older than the soldier before him, Rustem thought. ‘Rise up, rise up, bring us your bride that we may salute her before we go.’

‘I can just see Styliane doing that,’ the Senator beside Rustem murmured under his breath.

‘Hush,’ said his wife, suddenly. ‘And look again.’

Rustem saw it too.

Someone had now come forward, past Styliane Daleina, though pausing gracefully beside her for an instant, so that Rustem was to carry a memory for a long time of the two of them next to each other, golden and golden.

‘Might the poor, wronged queen of the Antae have any voice at all in this? In whether war is brought to her own country in her name,’ said this new arrival. Her voice—speaking Sarantine but with a western accent— was clear as a bell, bright anger in it, and it cut into the room like a knife through silk.

The Strategos turned, clearly startled, swiftly concealing it. An instant later he bowed formally and his wife—smiling a little to herself, Rustem saw— sank down with perfect grace, and then the entire room did so.

The woman paused, waiting for this acknowledgement to pass. She hadn’t been at the wedding ceremony, must have just this moment arrived. She, too, was clad in white under a jewelled collar and stole. Her hair was gathered under a soft hat of a dark green shade and as she shed an identically hued cloak now for a servant to take, it could be seen that her long, floor-length garment had a single vertical stripe down one side, and it was porphyry, the colour of royalty everywhere in the world.

As the guests rose in a rustle of sound, Rustem saw that the mosaicist and the younger fellow from Batiara who’d saved Rustem’s life this morning remained where they were, kneeling on the dancer’s floor. The stocky young man looked up, and Rustem was startled to see tears on his face.

‘The Antae queen,’ said the Senator in his ear. ‘Hildric’s daughter.’ Confirmatory, but hardly needed: physicians draw conclusions from information gathered. They had spoken of this woman in Sarnica, too, her late-autumn flight from assassination, sailing into exile in Sarantium. A hostage for the Emperor, a cause of war if he needed one.

He heard the Senator speak to his son again. Cleander muttered something fierce and aggrieved behind him but made his way out of the room, obeying his father’s orders. The boy hardly seemed to matter just now. Rustem was staring at the Antae queen, alone and far from her home. She was poised, unexpectedly young, regal in her bearing as she surveyed a glittering crowd of Sarantines. But what the doctor in Rustem—the physician at the core of what he was—saw in the clear blue northern eyes across the room was the masked presence of something else.

‘Oh dear,’ he murmured, involuntarily, and then became aware that the wife of Plautus Bonosus was looking at him again.

A feast for fifty people was not, Kyros knew, particularly demanding for Strumosus, given that they often served four times that number in the Blues’ banquet hall. There was some awkwardness in using a different kitchen, but they’d been over here a few days earlier and Kyros—given larger responsibilities all the time—had done the inventory, allocated locations, and supervised the necessary rearrangements.

He’d somehow overlooked the absence of sea salt and knew Strumosus wouldn’t soon forget it. The master chef was not—to put it mildly—tolerant of mistakes. Kyros would have run back to their own compound to fetch it himself, but running was one thing he wasn’t at all good for, given the bad foot he dragged about with him. He’d been busy by then with the vegetables for his soup in any case, and the other kitchen boys and undercooks had their own duties. One of the houseservants had gone, instead— the pretty, dark-haired one the others were all talking about when she wasn’t nearby.

Kyros seldom engaged in that sort of banter. He kept his passions to himself. As it happened, for the last few days—since their first visit to this house—his own daydreams had been about the dancer who lived here. This might have been disloyal to his own faction, but there was no one among the Blue dancers who moved or sounded or looked like Shirin of the Greens. It made his heartbeat quicken to hear the ripple of her laughter from another room and sent his thoughts at night down corridors of desire.

But she did that for most of the men in the City, and Kyros knew it. Strumosus would have declared this a boring taste, too easy, no subtlety in it. The reigning dancer in Sarantium? What an original object of passion! Kyros could almost hear the chef’s astringent voice and mocking applause, the back of one hand slapping into the palm of the other.

The banquet was nearly done. The boar, stuffed with thrushes and wood pigeons and quail eggs, served whole on an enormous wooden platter, had occasioned an acclamation they’d heard even in the kitchen. Shirin had earlier sent the black-haired girl to report that her guests were in paroxysms of delight over the sturgeon—king of fish!—served on a bed of flowers, and the rabbit with Soriyyan figs and olives. Their hostess had conveyed her own impression of the soup earlier. The exact words, relayed by the same girl with dimpled mirth, were that the Greens’ dancer intended to wed the man who’d made it before the day was done. Strumosus had pointed with his spoon to Kyros and the dark-haired girl had grinned at him, and winked.

Kyros had immediately ducked his head down over the herbs he was chopping as raucous, teasing voices were raised all around, led by his friend Rasic. He had felt the tips of his ears turning red but had refused to look up. Strumosus, walking past, had rapped him lightly on the back of the head with his long-handled spoon: the chef’s version of a benign, approving gesture. Strumosus broke a great many wooden spoons in his kitchen. If he hit you gently enough for the spoon to survive you could deduce that he was pleased.

It seemed the sea salt had been forgotten after all, or forgiven.

The dinner had begun on a high-pitched note of distraction and excitement, the guests chattering furiously about the arrival and immediate departure of the Supreme Strategos and his wife with the young western queen. Gisel of the Antae had arrived to join the banquet here. An unanticipated presence, a gift of sorts offered by Shirin to her other guests: the chance to dine with royalty. But the queen had then accepted a suggestion made by the Strategos that she return with him to the Imperial Precinct to discuss the matter of Batiara—her own country, after all—with certain people there.

The implication, not lost on those present, and relayed to a keenly interested Strumosus in the kitchen by the clever dark-haired girl, was that the certain person might be the Emperor himself.

Leontes had expressed distress and surprise, the girl said, that the queen had not been consulted or even apprised to this point and vowed to rectify the omission. He was impossibly wonderful, the girl had added.

So, in the event, there was no royalty at the U-shaped table arrangement in the dining room after all, only the memory of royalty among them and royalty’s acid, castigating tone directed at the most important soldier in the Empire. Strumosus, learning of the queen’s departure, had been predictably disappointed but then unexpectedly thoughtful. Kyros was just sorry not to have seen her. You missed a lot in the kitchen sometimes, attending to the pleasure of others.

The dancer’s servants and the ones she’d hired for the day and the boys they’d brought with them from the compound seemed to have finished clearing the tables. Strumosus eyed them carefully as they assembled now, straightening tunics, wiping at spots on cheek or clothing.

One tall, very dark-eyed, well-made fellow—no one Kyros knew—met the chef’s glance as Strumosus paused in front of him and murmured, with an odd half-smile, ‘Did you know that Lysippus is back?’

It was said softly, but Kyros was standing beside the cook, and though he turned quickly and busied himself with dessert trays he had good ears.

He heard Strumosus, after a pause, say only, ‘I won’t ask how you came by that knowledge. There’s sauce on your forehead. Wipe it off before you go back out.’

Strumosus moved on down the line. Kyros found himself breathing with difficulty. Lysippus the Calysian, Valerius’s grossly fat taxation master, had been exiled after the Victory Riot. The Calysian’s personal habits had been a cause of fear and revulsion among the lower classes of the City; his had been a name used to threaten wayward children.

He had also been Strumosus’s employer before he was exiled.

Kyros glanced furtively over at the chef, who was sorting out the last of the serving boys now. This was just a rumour, Kyros reminded himself, and the tidings might be new to him but not necessarily to Strumosus. In any case, he had no way to sort out what it might mean, and it was none of his affair in any possible way. He was unsettled, though.

Strumosus finished arranging the boys to his satisfaction and sent them parading back out to the diners with ewers of sweetened wine and the great procession of desserts: sesame cakes, candied fruit, rice pudding in honey, musk melon, pears in water, dates and raisins, almonds and chestnuts, grapes in wine, huge platters of cheeses—mountain and lowland, white and golden, soft and hard—with more honey for dipping, and his own nut bread. A specially baked round loaf was carried up to the bride and groom with two silver rings inside that were the chef’s gift to them.

When the last platter and tray and flask and beaker and serving dish had gone out and no sounds of catastrophe emerged from the dining hall, Strumosus finally allowed himself to sit on a stool, a cup of wine at his elbow. He didn’t smile, but he did set down his wooden spoon. Watching from the corner of his eye, Kyros sighed. They all knew what the lowered spoon meant. He allowed himself to relax.

‘I imagine,’ said the chef to the room at large, ‘that we have done enough to let the last of the wedding day be mild and merry and the night be what it will.’ He was quoting some poet or other. He often did. Meeting Kyros’s glance, Strumosus added, softly, ‘Rumours of Lysippus bubble up like boiled milk every so often. Until the Emperor revokes his exile, he isn’t here.’

Which meant he knew Kyros had overheard. He didn’t miss much, Strumosus. The chef looked away and around the crowded kitchen. He lifted his voice, ‘A serviceable afternoon’s work, all of you. The dancer should be happy out there.’

‘She says to tell you that if you do not come rescue her immediately she will scream at her own banquet and blame you. You understand,’ added the bird, silently, ‘that I don’t like being made to talk to you this way. It feels unnatural.’

As if there was anything remotely natural about any of these exchanges, Crispin thought, trying to pay attention to the conversation around him.

He could hear Shirin’s bird as clearly as he’d heard Linon—provided he and the dancer were sufficiently close to each other. At a distance, Danis’s inward voice faded and then disappeared. No thoughts he sent could be heard by the bird—or by Shirin. In fact, Danis was right. It was unnatural.

Most of the guests were back in Shirin’s reception room. The Rhodian tradition of lingering at table—or couch in the old-style banquets—was not followed in the east. When the meal was done and people were drinking their last cups of mixed or honey-sweetened wine, Sarantines tended to be on their feet again, sometimes unsteadily.

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