The august and illuminated, the blessed and revered Eastern Patriarch of most holy Jad of the Sun, Zakarios, had also been awake, and in some distress of body and spirit, in his chamber in the Patriarchal Palace at that same late-night hour.
The patriarchal residence was outside the Imperial Precinct, just behind the site of the Great Sanctuary— both the old one that had burned and the much larger one now risen in its place. Saranios the Great, who had founded this city, had deemed it a useful thing for the clerics and the palace officers to be seen to be separate.
There had been those who had disagreed in later years, wishing they had the Patriarchs more securely under their thumbs, but Valerius II had not been one of these, and Zakarios, who had just come from observing the Emperor’s body where it lay in state in the Porphyry Room of the Attenine Palace, was thinking about that, and about the man. He was grieving, in fact.
The truth was, he hadn’t actually observed the body. It seemed that only some Excubitors had, and the Chancellor, and then Gesius had made the decision that Valerius’s body be covered—entirely wrapped in a purple mantle—and not seen.
He had been burned. Sarantine Fire.
Zakarios found it painful to contemplate. No amount of faith or political worldliness or combination of the two could help him deal easily with an image of Valerius as blackened, melted flesh. It was very bad. His stomach was giving him trouble, even thinking about it.
He had gone—as was necessary and proper—from speaking the holy Words of Passage in the Porphyry Room to the great silver doors of the Reception Chamber in the same palace. And there he had performed the equally holy Ceremony of Anointing for Leontes, now created Emperor in Sarantium by the express will of the Senate, earlier that day.
Leontes, as deeply pious a man as any Patriarch could ask for on the Golden Throne, had knelt and spoken the responses without prompting and with deep emotion in his voice. The wife, Styliane, had stood a little distance away, expressionless. All of the major officials of the court had been present, though Zakarios did note that Gesius, the aged Chancellor (even older than I am, the Patriarch thought) had also stood apart, by the doors. The Patriarch had been in his own office long enough to know that there would be swift changes in power within the Imperial Precinct in the days to come, even as the Rites of Mourning were observed.
There was to be a public crowning of husband and wife in the Hippodrome tomorrow, the new Emperor advised his Patriarch when the anointing was done. Zakarios was earnestly entreated to be present in the kathisma to participate. In times such as this, Leontes murmured, it was especially important to show the people that the holy sanctuaries and the court were as one. It was phrased as a request, but it wasn’t, really. He was on the throne as he spoke, sitting there for the first time, tall and golden and grave. The Patriarch had inclined his head and indicated his acceptance and agreement. Styliane Daleina, soon to be Empress of Sarantium, had favoured him with a brief smile, her first of the night. She looked like her dead father. He had always thought that.
Zakarios understood, from his privy adviser, the cleric Maximius, that it was the brother, exiled Lecanus, who had been behind this profane and evil deed, along with the equally banished Lysippus—a man the clerics of the City had reason to loathe and fear.
Both of these men were dead, Maximius had reported. Leontes had himself slain the gross Calysian, like the mighty warrior he was. Maximius was very happy tonight, Zakarios thought, hadn’t even troubled to hide it. His adviser was still with him now, though the hour was late. Maximius stood on the balcony overlooking the City. Across the way, the dome of the new Great Sanctuary rose. Valerius’s Sanctuary. His vast, ambitious dream. One of them.
Leontes had said that the Emperor would be buried there: fittingly, the first man to be so laid to rest. His regret had seemed genuine; Zakarios knew that his piety was. The new Emperor had views on certain controversial matters of holy faith. Zakarios knew that was part of the reason for Maximius’s pleasure now, and that he, too, ought to be pleased. He wasn’t. A man he had greatly respected was dead, and Zakarios felt too old for the kind of fight that might now begin in the sanctuaries and chapels, even with the Imperial Precinct supporting them.
The Patriarch felt a griping in his belly and winced. He rose and walked out on the balcony, adjusting the ear flaps on his cap. Maximius looked over at him and smiled. ‘The streets are quiet now, Holiness, Jad be praised. Only soldiers and the Urban Prefect’s guards, that I have seen. We must be eternally grateful to the god that in this time of danger he has seen fit to look after us.’
‘I wish he’d attend to my stomach,’ Zakarios said, ungratefully.
Maximius assumed an expression of sympathy. ‘Would a bowl of the herbal—’
‘Yes,’ said Zakarios. ‘It might.’
He was unreasonably angered by his adviser tonight. Maximius was too cheerful. An Emperor was dead, murdered. Maximius had been put in his place more than once by Valerius over the years, something Zakarios ought to have done more often himself.
The cleric betrayed nothing with his expression now, no response to the Patriarch’s bluntness—he was good at that. He was good at a number of things. Zakarios often wished he didn’t need the man quite so much. Now Maximius bowed, and went back into the room to summon a servant and have the drink prepared.
Zakarios stood alone at the stone rail of the high balcony. He shivered a little, for the night was cool and he was susceptible to chills now, but at the same time the air was reviving, bracing. A reminder (he suddenly thought) that if others were dead, he himself, by the grace of Jad’s mercy, was not. He was still here to serve, to feel the wind in his face, see the glory of the dome in front of him with the stars and—just now—the white moon to the east.
He looked down. And saw something else.
In the dark street where there were no soldiers passing now, a litter appeared from a narrow lane. Moving quickly, unlit by any runners, it was carried up to one of the small rear doors to the Sanctuary. These were always locked, of course. The builders were not yet finished, nor were the decorations complete. Inside was scaffolding, equipment, decorative materials, some of it dangerous, some of it expensive. No one was allowed in without cause, and certainly not at night.
Zakarios, feeling an odd, unexpected sensation, watched as the curtain of the litter was pulled back. Two people emerged. There were no lights, the Patriarch couldn’t make out anything about them at all; both were cloaked against the night, dark figures in darkness.
One of them went to the locked door.
A moment later it opened. A key? Zakarios couldn’t see. The two of them went inside. The door was closed. The bearers did not linger, carried the exquisite litter away, back the way they had come, and an instant later the street was empty again. As if nothing had ever been there, the whole brief, puzzling episode a fantasy of some kind beneath the starlit, moonlit dome.
‘The infusion is being prepared, Holiness,’ Maximius said briskly, reappearing on the balcony. ‘I pray that it will bring you ease.’
Zakarios, looking down thoughtfully from beneath his hat and ear flaps, made no reply.
‘What is it?’ Maximius said, coming forward.
‘Nothing,’ said the Eastern Patriarch. ‘There’s nothing there.’ He wasn’t sure why he said that, but it was the truth, wasn’t it?
He saw one of the small, fleeting fires appear just then, at the same street corner where the litter had gone. It, too, vanished a moment later. They always did.
She entered the sanctuary ahead of him after he’d turned the two keys in the two locks and swung the small oak door open and stood aside for her. He followed, closed the door quickly, locked it. Habit, routine, the things done each and every ordinary day. Turning a key, opening or locking a door, walking into a place where one has been working, looking around, looking up.
His hands were shaking. They had made it this far.
He hadn’t believed they would. Not with the City a
s it was tonight.
Ahead of him, in a small ambulatory under one of the semi-domes behind the enormous one that was Artibasos’s offering to the world, Gisel of the Antae cast back the hood of her cloak.
‘No!’ Crispin said sharply. ‘Keep it up!’
Golden hair, dressed with jewels. The blue eyes bright as jewels, alight in the always-lit Sanctuary. Lamps everywhere here, in walls, suspended on chains from the ceiling and all the domes, candles burning at the side altars, even though Valerius’s rebuilt Sanctuary had not yet been opened, or sanctified.
She looked at him a moment but then, surprisingly, obeyed. He was aware that he had spoken peremptorily. It was fear, not presumption, though. He wondered what had become of his anger; he seemed to have misplaced it today, tonight, dropping it the way Alixana had dropped her cloak on the isle.
The sides of the hood came forward, shadowing Gisel’s features again, hiding the almost frightening brilliance of her tonight, as if the woman here with him was another light in this place.
In the litter, he had been made aware of desire, forbidden and impossible as mortal flight, or fire before Heladikos’s gift: a stirring, utterly irrational, equally unmistakable. Riding with her, aware of her body, her presence, he remembered how Gisel had come to him shortly after she’d arrived here, climbing up to the scaffold where he’d stood alone, and had had him kiss her palm in full view of all those watching, agape, from below. Creating a reason, false as alloyed coins, for him to visit her: a woman alone, without advisers or allies or anyone to trust, and tangled in a game of countries where the stakes were as high as they ever became.
Her reputation was not, he had come to see, what Gisel of the Antae was trying to protect. He could honour her for it, even while aware he was being used, toyed with. He remembered a hand lingering in his hair the very first night in her own palace. She was a queen, deploying resources. He was a tool for her, a subject to be given precise orders when he was needed.
He was needed now, it seemed.
You must get us into the Imperial Precinct. Tonight.
A night when the streets rang with the tread of soldiers looking for a missing Empress. A night after a day when flaming riot and murder defined Sarantium. When the Imperial Precinct would be in a fever and frenzy of tension: an Emperor dead, another to be proclaimed. An invasion from the north, on the day when war was to be proclaimed in Batiara.
He had heard Gisel’s words almost without hearing them, so improbable did they seem. But he hadn’t said to her, as he’d said so many times before to himself, to others, I am an artisan, no more.
It would have been a lie, after what had happened this morning. He was irrevocably down from the scaffolding, had been brought down some time ago. And on this night of death and change, the queen of the Antae, as forgotten here by everyone as a trivial guest might be at a banquet, had asked to be taken to the palaces.
A journey through most of the City, and in the dark, in a litter that turned out to be gilded, sumptuously pillowed, scented with perfume, where two people could recline at opposite ends, bodies unsettlingly near to each other, one of them alight with purpose, the other aware of the degree of his own fear, but remembering—with a wryness that spoke to his nature—that less than a year ago he had had no desire for life at all, had been more than half inclined to seek his death.
Easy enough to find tonight, he’d thought in the litter. He’d dictated to the bearers the route to take and forbidden any torches at all. They had listened to him, the way his apprentices did. It wasn’t the same, though: that was his craft, upon walls or domes or ceilings, something touching the world but apart from it. This was not.
They were borne swiftly, almost silently, through the streets, keeping to shadows, stopping when boots were heard or torches seen, crossing squares the long way, through the covered, shadowed colonnades. Once, they’d stopped in the doorway of a chapel as four armed horsemen galloped across the Mezaros Forum. Crispin had drawn back the curtain of the litter to watch, and did so again at intervals, looking out at stars and barred doors and shop fronts as they passed through the night city. He saw the strange fires of Sarantium flare and disappear as they went: a journey as much through a starlit half-world as it was through the world, a feeling that they were travelling endlessly, that Sarantium itself had somehow been carried out of time. He’d wondered if anyone could even see them in the dark, if they were really here.
Gisel had been silent, nearly motionless throughout, adding to the sense of strangeness, never looking out when he pulled the curtains. Intense, coiled, waiting. The perfume in the litter was of sandalwood and something else he didn’t recognize. It made him think of ivory, in the way that all things reminded him of colours. One of her ankles lay against his thigh. Unaware: he was almost certain she was unaware of that.
Then they had come, finally, to the door behind the Great Sanctuary and Crispin had put into motion—a movement into time again, as they left the enclosed world of the litter—the next part of what he supposed would have to be called a plan, though it was hardly that, in truth.
Some puzzles, even for one engaged by them, were intractible. Some could destroy you if you tried to solve them, like those intricate boxes the Ispahani were said to devise, where turning them the wrong way caused blades to spring out, killing or maiming the unwary.
Gisel of the Antae had handed him one of those. Or, seen another way, shifting the box a little differently in his hands, she was one of those tonight.
Crispin took a long breath, and realized that they weren’t together any more. Gisel had stopped, was behind him, looking up. He turned back and followed her gaze to the dome that Artibasos had made, that Valerius had given to him—to Caius Crispus, widower, only son of Horius Crispus the mason, from Varena.
The lamps were burning, suspended from their silver and bronze chains and set into the brackets that ran with the windows all around. The light of the white moon, rising, was coming in from the east like a blessing of illumination upon the work he had achieved here in this place, in Sarantium after his sailing.
He would remember, he would always remember, that on the night when she herself was burning with directed intent like a beam of sunlight focused by glass onto one spot, the queen of the Antae had stopped beneath his mosaics upon a dome and looked up at them by lamplight and moonlight.
At length she said, ‘You complained to me, I remember, about deficient materials in my father’s chapel. Now I understand.’
He said nothing. Inclined his head. She looked up again, at his image of Jad over this City, at his forests and fields (green with spring in one place, red and gold and brown as autumn in another), at his zubir at the edge of a dark wood, his seas and sailing ships, his people (Ilandra there now, and he had been about to begin the girls this morning, filtering memory and love through craft and art), his flying and swimming creatures and running beasts and watchful ones, with a place (not yet done, not yet) where the western sunset flaming over ruined Rhodias would be the forbidden torch of falling Heladikos: his life, all lives under the god and in the world, as much as he could render, being mortal himself, entangled in his limitations.
Much of it done now, some yet to do, with the labour of others—Pardos, Silano and Sosio, the apprentices, Vargos working among them now—taking form under his direction on walls and semi-domes. But the shape of it, the overarching design, was here to be seen now, and Gisel paused, and looked.
As her gaze came to him again, he saw that she seemed about to say something else, but did not. There was an entirely unexpected expression on her face, and long afterwards he thought he understood it, what she had almost said.
‘CRISPIN! HOLY JAD, you are all right! We feared—’
He held up a hand, imperious as an Emperor in this place, urgent with apprehension. Pardos, rushing up, stopped in his tracks, fell silent. Vargos stood behind him. Crispin felt a flicker of relief himself: they had obviously elected to remain in here all day and night, were safe
. He was sure Artibasos was somewhere about as well.
‘You haven’t seen me,’ he murmured. ‘You are asleep. Go now. Be asleep. Tell Artibasos the same if he’s wandering here. No one saw me.’ They were both looking at the hooded figure beside him. ‘Or anyone else,’ he added. She was unrecognizable, he devoutly hoped.
Pardos opened his mouth and closed it.
‘Go,’ said Crispin. ‘If I have a chance to explain after, I will.’
Vargos had come quietly up beside Pardos: burly, capable, reassuring, a man with whom he had seen a zubir. Who had led them out of the Aldwood on the Day of the Dead. He said, quietly, ‘Is there no help we can offer? Whatever you are doing?’
He wished there were, Crispin realized. But he shook his head. ‘Not tonight. I am glad to see you safe.’ He hesitated. ‘Pray for me.’ He’d never said anything like that before. He grinned a little. ‘Even though you haven’t seen me.’
Neither man smiled. Vargos moved first, taking Pardos by the elbow, leading him away into the shadows of the Sanctuary.
Gisel looked at him. Did not speak. He led her across the marble floor and the vast space under the dome into an ambulatory on the other side, and then to a low door set in the far wall. There he drew a deep breath and knocked—four times quickly, twice slowly—and then a moment later he did it again, remembering, remembering.
There was a stillness, a waiting time, as long as a night. He looked at the massed bank of candles at the altar to their right, thought of praying. Gisel stood motionless beside him. If this failed, he had nothing in reserve.
Then he heard the lock being turned on the other side. And the low door of the only plan he’d been able to devise swung open before them. He saw the white-robed cleric who had opened it, one of the Sleepless Ones, in the short stone tunnel behind the altar at the very back of the small chapel built into the wall of the Imperial Precinct, and he knew the man and gave thanks—with his whole heart—to the god, and he was remembering the first time he’d passed through this same door, with Valerius, who was dead.