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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.
