‘Tertius Daleinus, you are forbidden the City and know it. Guards, arrest this man. He is banned from Sarantium as a traitor.’ His voice crackles with vigour; they all know this tone of command in him.
It is Styliane, of course, who breaks the spell with her laughter. I’m sorry, the Emperor is thinking. My love, you will never know how sorry.
They hear footsteps approaching from the other end. He turns, apprehensive again. A pain in his heart, a premonition.
Then he sees who has come—and who has not—and that pain slips away. It matters to him that someone is not here. Odd, perhaps, but it does matter. And replacing fear, swiftly, is something else.
This time it is the Emperor of Sarantium, surrounded by his enemies and far as his own childhood from the surface world and the mild light of the god, who laughs aloud.
‘Jad’s blood, you have grown fatter, Lysippus!’ he says. ‘I’d have wagered it was impossible. You aren’t supposed to be in Sarantium yet. I intended to call you back after the fleet had sailed.’
‘What? Even now you play games? Oh, stop being clever, Petrus,’ says the gross, green-eyed man who had been his Quaestor of Revenue, exiled in the smouldering, bloody aftermath of riot two years and more ago.
Histories, thinks the Emperor. We all have our histories and they do not leave us. Only a handful of men and women in the world call him by his birth name. This hulking figure, the familiar, too-sweet scent surrounding him, his fleshy face round as a moon, is one of them. There is another figure behind him, mostly hidden by the spilling shape of Lysippus: it is not the one he feared, though, because this one, too, is hooded.
Leontes would not be.
‘You don’t believe me?’ the Emperor says to the vast, sweating bulk of the Calysian. He is genuinely indignant, no need to pretend. His back is now fully turned to the woman and her cloaked, craven brother and the renegade guards. They will not stab him. He knows that with certainty. Styliane means for this to be theatre, ceremony, not only murder. A lifetime’s worth of . . . expiation? For history. There are steps yet to this dance. His dancer is somewhere else, up above, in the light.
They will not let her live.
For that as much as anything he will keep trying here underground, probing, subtle and quick as a salmon, which is holy in the north among the pagans his people once were before Jad came among them. And Heladikos, his son, who fell.
‘Believe that you were about to call me back?’ Lysippus shakes his head, jowls quivering. His voice is still distinctive, memorable. Not a man, once met, who can ever be forgotten. His appetites are corrupt, unspeakable, but no man had ever managed the Imperial finances with such honesty or skill. A paradox never fully fathomed. ‘Must you, even now, assume all others are fools?’
Valerius gazes at him. He’d actually been a wellformed man once, when first met, handsome, educated, a patrician friend to the young, scholarly nephew of the Count of the Excubitors. Had played a role in the Hippodrome, and elsewhere, on that day when Apius died and the world changed. Rewarded for it with wealth and real power and with eyes averted from what he did in his city palace or in the litter that carried him at night through the streets. Then exiled, of necessity, to the countryside after the riot. Bored there, of a certainty. A man inextricably drawn to the City, to dark things, blood. The reason he is here.
The Emperor knows how to handle him, or did once. He says, ‘If they behave as fools, I do. Think, man. Did the country dull you entirely? Why did I have the rumours started that you were back in the City?’
‘You start them? I am back in the City, Petrus.’
‘And were you two months ago? I thought not. Go ask in the faction compounds, friend.’ A deliberate word, that last. ‘And I will have Gesius give you names. Half a dozen. Ask when word first began to spread that you might be here. I was testing it, Lysippus! On the people and the clerics. Of course I want you back. We have a war to win—probably on two fronts.’
A bit of new information dropped there for them. A hint, a tease. To keep the dance going, in any way. Keep holding to life here. They will kill her after him.
He knows Lysippus very well. The torches are bright where they are standing and he sees the registering of a fact, then conjecture at the hint, then the watched-for doubt in the remarkable green eyes.
‘Why bother? No need to ask anyone,’ says Styliane Daleina behind him, breaking the mood like a glass dropped on stone, shattering into shards.
Her voice, continuing, is a knife now, precise as an executioner’s edge. ‘This much is perfectly true. A good liar mixes truth in his poison. It was when I first heard those tales and realized what was happening that I saw the chance to invite you back to join us. An elegant solution. If the Trakesian and his whore heard tidings of you they would assume they were their own false rumours.’
Which is what, indeed, has happened. He hears that word whore, of course, understands what she so passionately wants from him. He will not give it to her, but is thinking how she is so much more than clever. He turns. The soldiers remain helmed, her brother hooded, Styliane is almost glowing in her intensity. He looks at her, here under the earth where old powers dwell. He thinks that what she would like is to unbind her hair and claw his beating heart from his breast with her fingers and nails like the god-drunk wild women on hills of autumn long ago.
He says, calmly, ‘You use a foul tongue for someone of breeding. But it is an elegant solution, indeed. My congratulations on the cleverness. Was it Tertius who thought of it?’ His tone is mildly acerbic, giving her nothing of what she wants. ‘The loathed, godless Calysian enticed to become a perfect scapegoat for the murder of a holy Emperor. Does he die here with me and these soldiers, or do you hunt him down and produce a confession after you and poor Leontes are crowned?’ One of the helmed men behind her shifts uneasily. He is listening.
‘Poor Leontes?’ She simulates her laughter this time, is not truly amused.
And so he gambles. ‘Of course. Leontes knows nothing of this. Is still waiting outside the far doors for me. This is the Daleinoi alone, and you think you’ll control him after, don’t you? What is the scheme? Tertius as Chancellor?’ Her eyes flicker. He laughs aloud. ‘How very amusing. Or no, I must be wrong. Surely I am. This is all for the greater good of the Empire, of course.’
The craven brother, named twice, opens his mouth within the hood and then closes it. Valerius smiles. ‘Or no, no. Wait. Of course! You promised that position to Lysippus to get him here, didn’t you? He’ll never have it, will he? Someone must be named and executed for this.’
Styliane stares at him. ‘You imagine everyone treats people as disposable, in the way you do?’
His turn to blink, disconcerted for the first time. ‘This, coming from the girl I let live against all advice and brought into my court with honour?’
And it is then that Styliane finally says, with a glacial clarity, the words slow as time, inexorable as the movement of stars across the night sky, an indictment carrying the burden of years (so many nights awake?) behind it: ‘You burned my father alive. I was to be bought with a husband and a place on the dais behind a whore?’
There is a silence then. The Emperor feels the weight of all the earth and stone between them and the sun.
‘Who told you that absurd story?’ Valerius says. His tone is light, but it costs him something this time.
Still, he moves, swiftly, when she swings a palm to strike him in the face. He catches her hand, holds, though she twists savagely, and he says, in turn, through gritted teeth, ‘Your father wore purple in the street on the day an Emperor died. He was on his way to the Senate. He could have been killed by any man in Sarantium with respect for tradition, and burning would have suited so much impiety.’
‘He did not wear purple,’ says Styliane Daleina, as he lets her tear her hand free. Her skin is almost translucent; he sees the marks of his fingers red on her wrist. ‘It is a lie,’ she says.
And now the Emperor smiles. ‘In the
god’s most holy name, you astonish me. I had no idea. None at all. All these years? You honestly believe that?’
The woman is silent, breathing hard.
‘She does . . . believe it.’ Another voice, behind him. A new one. ‘She is wrong, but it . . . changes . . . nothing.’
But this mangled, whistling voice changes everything. And it is with a bone-chill now, as if a wind crossing from the half-world has blown into him, bringing death truly into this tunnel where walls and plaster and paint hide the roughness of earth underground, that the Emperor turns again and sees who has spoken, stepping out from behind the obscuring bulk of the Calysian.
There is something this man holds. It is actually tied to his wrists, for his hands are maimed. The tube-like implement, attached to something that rolls on a small cart behind him, is one the Emperor recognizes and remembers, and so it is with a struggle, a real one, that Valerius remains motionless now, betraying nothing.
There is fear in him, however, for the first time since he heard the tunnel door open behind him and understood he was not alone. Histories returning. Sign of a sun disk given to a watching man below a solarium, years and years ago. Screaming afterwards, in the street. He has reason to know that this is a bad way to die. He looks briefly at Lysippus and from the expression there understands something else: the Calysian, being what he is, would have come here to see this used, if for no other reason at all. The Emperor swallows. Another memory reaches him, from even further back, childhood, tales of the old dark gods who live in the earth and do not forget.
The high, wheezing sound of the new voice is appalling, especially if one recalls—and Valerius does—the resonance of it before. This hood is thrown back now. The man, who is eyeless and whose face is a melted ruin, says, ‘If he . . . wore purple to go before . . . the people it was as the . . . proper . . . successor to an Emperor who . . . had named none.’
‘He didn’t wear purple,’ Styliane says again, a little desperately.
‘Be silent, sister,’ says the queer, high whistling voice, the authority in it startling. ‘Bring Tertius here . . . if his legs . . . will move him. Come behind me.’ The blind, disfigured man wears a trivial, incongruous amulet around his neck, a small bird, it looks like. He shrugs off his cloak now onto the mosaic floor. Those in the tunnel might wish he had not done so, had kept the hood, save for Lysippus. The Emperor sees him regarding the hideous figure of Lecanus Daleinus with the moist, wide, tender eyes one might fix upon an object of yearning or desire.
All three Daleinoi then. The contours of this now terribly clear. Gesius had, discreetly, obliquely, implied they ought to be attended to, at the time the first Valerius took the throne. Had suggested the Daleinoi offspring be regarded as an administrative matter unworthy of the attention of the Emperor or his nephew. Some things, the Chancellor had murmured, were beneath the proper consideration of rulers taxed with the burden of far greater issues on behalf of their people and the god.
His uncle had left it to him. He left most such things to his nephew. Petrus had declined to kill. Had his reasons, different in each case.
Tertius was a child and then later was manifestly a coward, insignificant, even during the Victory Riot. Styliane he saw from the outset as important, and more so as she grew up through a decade and more. He had plans for her, the marriage to Leontes at the heart of these. He’d thought—arrogantly?—he could use her ferocious intelligence to win her to a larger vision. Had thought he was doing so, if slowly, that she grasped the unfolding stages of the game that would have her Empress after all. One day. He and Aliana had no heir. He’d thought she understood all this.
Lecanus, oldest of the three, was something different. Was one of the figures that haunted the Emperor’s dreams when he did sleep, seeming to stand like a deformed, dark shadow between him and the promised light of the god. Were faith and piety always born of fear? Was this the secret all clerics knew, foretelling eternal darkness and ice under the world for those who strayed from the light of the god?
Valerius had given orders that Lecanus not be killed, whatever he did, even though he knew that for all real purposes, by any honest measure, the eldest child of Flavius Daleinus, a better man than his father had ever been, had died in the street outside their home when the father had. He had just kept on living. Death in life, life in death.
And what he holds now, tied to his wrists to more easily handle it, is one of the siphons that disgorge the same liquid flame, from the canister rolling behind him, that was used on that morning long ago to make a point, an overwhelming assertion, one that every man and woman in the Empire could understand, about the passing of an Emperor and the coming of a new one.
It seems to Valerius as if they have all moved straight from that morning sunlight long ago to this torchlit tunnel, with nothing in between. Time feels strange to the Emperor, the years blurring. He thinks of his god, then, and his unfinished Sanctuary. So many things intended and unfinished. And then again of Aliana up above, somewhere in the day.
He is not ready to die, or to have her die.
He makes the blurring memories stop, thinking quickly. Lecanus has summoned his brother and sister to cross to him. A mistake.
Valerius says, ‘Only the two of them, Daleinus? Not these loyal guards who let you in here? Have you told them what happens to those in the line of the flame? Show them the rest of your burns, why don’t you? Do they even know this is Sarantine Fire?’
He hears a sound from behind him, one of the soldiers.
‘Move now, sister! Tertius, come.’
Valerius, staring down the nozzle of the black tubing that holds the worst death he knows, laughs again in that moment and turns to the other two siblings. Tertius has taken a tentative step forward, and now Styliane moves. Valerius backs up to stand right beside her. The soldiers have swords. He knows Lysippus will have a blade. The big man is more nimble than one might imagine.
‘Hold them both,’ the Emperor snaps to the two Excubitors. ‘In the god’s name, are you fools that wish your own deaths? This is fire. They are about to burn you.’
One of the men backs up then, an uncertain step. A fool. The other puts a tentative hand to his sword hilt.
‘Do you have the key?’ the Emperor snaps. The nearer man shakes his head. ‘She took it. My lord.’
My lord. Holiest Jad. He may yet live.
Tertius Daleinus twists suddenly and sidles forward against the tunnel wall to cross to his brother. Valerius lets him go. He is not a soldier, but this is his life now, and Aliana’s, and a vision of a world, a legacy, in the shaping. He seizes the woman, Styliane, by the upper arm before she can move past him, and he takes his small knife in his other hand and puts it to her back. It has an edge that can scarcely break skin; they will not know that.
But Styliane, who does not struggle at all, who has not even tried to avoid his grip, looks at him even as he holds her, and the Emperor sees a triumph in her gaze, not far from madness: he thinks again of those women on the hill slopes of myth.
Hears her say with a frightening calm, ‘You are mistaken yet again if you believe my brother will refrain from burning you in order to save me. And equally mistaken in thinking that I care, so long as you burn as my father did. Go ahead, brother. End it.’
Valerius is shaken to the core, struck dumb. Knows truth when he hears it; she is not dissembling. End it. In a sudden stillness of the soul he hears, then, a faint, far sound like a tolling bell struck once.
He had thought, had always believed, intelligence could overmaster hatred, given time, tutelage. It is not so, he sees now, too late. Aliana was right. Gesius was right. Styliane, brilliant as a diamond, might welcome power, and wield it with Leontes, but it is not her need, not the key to the woman. The key, beneath the ice of her, is fire.
The blind man, uncannily precise in where he aims the siphon, moves his gash of a mouth in what Valerius understands to be a smile. He says, ‘Such . . . a waste, alas. Such skin. Must I . . . dear sister?
Then so be it.’
And the Emperor understands that he will do it, sees an unholy, avid hunger in the gross face of the Calysian beside the maimed Daleinus, and with a sudden furious motion—awkward, for he is not a man of action—he snatches at the waist purse of the woman and pushes her forward hard so she stumbles and crashes into her blind brother and they both fall. No fire. Yet.
Backing up, he hears the two guards retreating behind him and understands that he has turned them, they are with him. He would pray now, but there is no time. At all. ‘Move!’he snaps. ‘Get the siphon!’
Both guards spring past him. Lysippus, never a coward, and having cast his dice with the Daleinoi here, goes for his sword. The Emperor, watching, backing up quickly now, fumbles in the cloth purse, finds a heavy key, knows it. Does pray then, in thanks. Styliane is already up, pulling at Lecanus.
The first Excubitor, upon them, levels his blade. Lysippus steps forward, slashes, is parried. Lecanus is still on his knees, mouthing wild, incoherent words. He reaches for the trigger of the flame.
And it is then, just then, even as he sees this, that the Emperor of Sarantium, Valerius II, Jad’s beloved and most holy regent upon earth, thrice-exalted shepherd of his people, feels something white and searing and final plunge into him from behind as he backs towards the door, towards safety and the light. He falls, and falls, his mouth opening, no sound, the key in his hand.
It is not recorded by anyone, for it never is nor ever can be, whether he hears, as he dies, an implacable, vast, infinite voice saying to him and to him alone in that corridor under palaces and gardens and the City and the world, ‘Uncrown, the Lord of Emperors awaits you now.’
Nor is it known if dolphins come for his soul when it leaves, as it does leave then, unhoused, for its long journey. It is known, but only by one person in the god’s world, that his last thought as a living man is of his wife, her name, and this is so because she hears it. And hearing—somehow hearing him—understands that he is going, going from her, is gone, that it is over, ended, done, after all, the brilliant dance that had begun long ago when he was Petrus and she was Aliana of the Blues and so young, and the afternoon sun is bright above her and all of them, in a cloudless springtime sky over Sarantium.