Sailing to Sarantium

CHAPTER I

The Imperial Post, along with most of the civil positions in the Sarantine Empire after Valerius died and his nephew, having renamed himself appropriately, took the Golden Throne, was under the hegemony of the Master of Offices. The immensely complex running of the mails-from the recendy conquered Majriti deserts and Esperana in the far west to the long, always-shifting Bassanid border in the east, and from the northern wildernesses of Karch and Moskav to the deserts of Soriyya and beyond-required a substantial investment of manpower and resources, and no little requisitioning of labour and horses from those rural communities dubiously honoured by having an Imperial Posting Inn located in or near them.

The position of Imperial Courier, charged with the actual carrying of the public mails and court documents, paid only modestly well and involved an almost endless regimen of hard travelling, sometimes through uncertain territory, depending on barbarian or Bassanid activity in a given season. The fact that such positions were avidly solicited, with all the associated bribes, was a reflection of where the position might lead after a few years more than anything else.

The couriers of the Imperial Post were expected to be part-time spies for the Quaestor of Imperial Intelligence, and diligent labour in this unspoken part of the job-coupled with rather more of the associated bribes-might see a man appointed to the intelligence service directly, with more risks, less far-ranging travel, and significantly higher recompense. Along with a chance to be on the receiving end, at last, of some of the bribes changing hands.

As one's declining years approached, an appointment from Intelligence back to, say, running a substantial Posting Inn could actually lead to a respectable retirement-especially if one was clever, and the Inn far enough from the City to permit rather more watering of wine and an enhancing of revenues by accepting travellers without the required Permits.

The position of courier was, in short, a legitimate career path for a man with sufficient means to make a start but not enough to be launched by his family in anything more promising.

This, as it happened, was a fair description of the competence and background of Pronobius Tilliticus. Born with an unfortunately amusing name (a frequently cursed legacy of his mother’s grandfather and his mother's unfamiliarity with current army vernacular), with limited skill at law or numbers, and only a modest paternal niche in Sarantine hierarchies, Tilliticus had been told over and again how fortunate he was to have had his mother's cousin's aid in securing a courier's position. His obese cousin, soft rump securely spread on a bench among the clerks in the Imperial Revenue office, had been foremost of those to make this observation at family gatherings.

Tilliticus had been obliged to smile and agree. Many times. He had a gathering-prone family.

In such an oppressive context-his mother was now constandy demanding he choose a useful wife-it was sometimes a relief to leave Sarantium. And now he was on the roads again with a packet of letters, bound for the barbarian Antae's capital city of Varena in Batiara and points en route. He also carried one particular Imperial Packet that came-unusually-directly from the Chancellor himself, with the elaborate Seal of that office, and instructions from the eunuchs to make this delivery with some ceremony.

An important artisan of some kind, he was given to understand. The Emperor was rebuilding the Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom. Artisans were being summoned to the City from all over the Empire and beyond. It irked Tilliticus: barbarians and rustic provincials were receiving formal invitations and remuneration on a level three or four times his own to participate in this latest Imperial folly.

In early autumn on the good roads north and then west through Trakesia it was hard to preserve an angry mien, however. Even Tilliticus found the weather lifting his spirits. The sun shone mildly overhead. The northern grain had been harvested, and on the slopes as he turned west the vineyards were purple with ripening grapes. Just looking at them gave him a thirst. The Posting Inns on this road were well known to him and they seldom cheated couriers. He lingered a few days at one of them (Let the damned paint-dauber wait for his summons a little!) and feasted on spit-roasted fox, stuffed fat with grapes. A girl he remembered seemed also to enthusiastically remember him. The innkeeper did charge double the price for her exclusive services, but Tilliticus knew he was doing it and saw that as one of the perquisites of a position he dreamed of for himself.

On the last night, however, the girl asked him to take her away, which was simply ridiculous.

Tilliticus refused indignantly and-abetted by a quantity of scarcely watered wine-offered her a lecture about his mother's family's lineage. He exaggerated only slightly; with a country prostitute it was hardly required. She didn't seem to take the chiding with particular good grace and in the morning, riding away, Tilliticus considered whether his affections had been misplaced.

A few days later he was certain they had been. Urgent medical circumstances dictated a short detour north and a further delay of several days at a well-known Hospice of Galinus, where he was treated for the genital infection she had given him.

They bled him, purged him with something that emptied his bowels and stomach violendy, made him ingest various unpleasant liquids, shaved his groin, and daubed on a burning, foul-smelling black ointment twice a day. He was instructed to eat only bland foods and to refrain from sexual congress and wine for an unnatural length of time.

Hospices were expensive, and this one, being celebrated, was particularly so. Tilliticus was forced to bribe the chief administrator to record his stay as being for injuries incurred in the course of duties-or else he'd have had to pay for the visit out of his own pocket.

Well, a crab-infested chit in a Posting Inn was an injury incurred in the Emperor's service, wasn't it? This way, the administrator could bill the Imperial Post directly-and he would no doubt add to the tally half a dozen treatments Tilliticus hadn't received and designate those sums for his own purse.

Tilliticus left a stiff letter addressed to the innkeeper four days ride back, to be delivered by the next eastbound courier. Let the bitch hump for slaves and farmhands in an alley back of a caupona if she wasn't going to keep herself clean. The Posting Inns on the roads of the Empire were the finest in the world, and Pronobius Tilliticus regarded it as a positive duty to make sure she was gone when next he rode through.

He was in the service of the Sarantine Emperor. These things reflected directly upon the majesty and prestige of Valerius II and his glorious Empress Alixana. The fact that the Empress had been bought and used in her youth in exactly the same way as the chit in the inn was not a matter for open discussion at this stage in the world's progression. A man was allowed his thoughts, however. They couldn't kill you for thinking things.

He lasted a part of the prescribed period of abstinence, but a tavern he knew too well in Megarium, the port city and administrative centre of western Sauradia, proved predictably tempting. He didn't remember any of the girls this time round but they were all lively enough, and the wine was good. Megarium had a reputation for decent wine, however barbaric the rest of Sauradia might be.

An unfortunate incident involving jests about his name-made one night by a loutish apprentice and a trader in Heladikian icons-left him with a gashed chin and a twisted shoulder that called for further medical treatment and a longer stay than anticipated in the tavern. The stay became less than pleasant after the first few days because it appeared that two of the once-willing girls had contracted an affliction unfortunately similar to the one he was to have been cured of by now, and they made no secret about blaming Tilliticus.

They didn't throw him out, of course-he was an Imperial Courier, and the girls were bodies-for-sale, one of them a slave-but his food tended to arrive cold or overcooked after that, and no one rushed to help a man with an awkward shoulder manage his plates and flasks. Tilliticus was feeling seriously hard done by when he finally decided he was well enough to resume his journey. The tavern-keeper, a Rhodian by birth, gave him mail for relatives in Varena. Tilliticus tossed it in a midden-heap by the harbour.

It was much later in the autumn than it should have been by then and the rains had come. He caught one of the last of the small ships tacking west across the bay to the Batiaran port of Mylasia and docked in a cold, driving rain, having emptied his guts over the ship's railing several times. Tilliticus had little love for the sea.

The city of Varena-where the barbaric, still half-pagan Antae who had sacked Rhodias a hundred years ago and conquered all Batiara held their wretched little court-was three days" ride farther west, two if he hurried. He had not the least interest in hurrying. Tilliticus waited out the rain, drinking morosely by the harbour. His injuries allowed him to do that, he decided. This had been a very difficult run. His shoulder still hurt.

And he had liked that girl in Trakesia.

In the good weather Pardos was outside at the oven making quicklime for the setting bed. The heat of the fire was pleasant when the wind picked up, and he liked being in the sanctuary yard. The presence of the dead under their headstones didn't frighten him, or not in daylight at any rate. Jad had ordained that man would die. War and plague were part of the world the god had made. Pardos didn't understand why, but he had no expectation of understanding. The clerics, even when they disagreed about doctrine or burned each other over Heladikos, all taught submission and faith, not a vainglorious attempt to comprehend. Pardos knew he wasn't wise enough to be vain or to comprehend.

Beyond the graven, sculpted headstones of the named dead, a dark earth mound rose-no grass there yet-at the northern end of the yard. Beneath it lay bodies claimed by the plague. It had come two years ago and then again last summer, killing in numbers too great for anything but mass burial by slaves taken in war. There was lime ash in there, too, and some other elements mixed in. They were said to help contain the bitter spirits of the dead and what had killed them. It was certainly keeping the grass from coming back. The queen had ordered three court cheiromancers and an old alchemist who lived outside the walls to cast binding spells as well. One did all the things one could think to do in the aftermath of plague, whatever the clerics or the High Patriarch might say about pagan magics.

Pardos fumbled for his sun disk and gave thanks for being alive. He watched the black smoke of the lime kiln rise up towards the white, swift clouds, and noted the autumn reds and golds of the forest to the east. Birds were singing in the blue sky and the grass was green, though shading to brown near the sanctuary building itself where the afternoon light failed in the shadow of the new walls.

Colours, all around him in the world. Crispin had told him, over and over, to make himself see the colours. To think about them, how they played against each other and with each other; to consider what happened when a cloud crossed the sun-as now-and the grass darkened beneath him. What would he name that hue in his mind? How would he use it? In a marinescape? A hunting scene? A mosaic of Heladikos rising above an autumn forest towards the sun? Look at the grass-now! — before the light returned. Picture that colour in glass and stone tesserae. Embed it in memory, so you could embed it in lime and make a mosaic world on a wall or a dome.

Assuming, of course, there ever emerged a glassworks again in conquered Batiara where they made reds and blues and greens worthy of a name, instead of the muddied, bubbled, streaked excrescences they'd received in the morning shipment from Rhodias.

Martinian, a calm man and perhaps prepared for this, had only sighed when the urgently awaited sheets of new glass were unwrapped. Crispin had foamed into one of his notorious, blasphemous rages and smashed the topmost dirty brown sheet of what was supposed to be red, cutting one hand. "Tins is red! Not that dungheap colour!" he had shouted, letting drops of his blood fall on the brownish sheet.

He could be entertaining in his fury, actually, unless you happened to be the one who had given him cause to lose his temper. When they had their beer and crusts of bread at lunch, or walking back towards Varena's walls at sunset after work, the labourers and apprentices would trade stories of things Crispin had said and done when angry. Martinian had told the apprentices that Crispin was brilliant and a great man; Pardos wondered if a temper came with that.

He'd had some shockingly inventive ideas this morning for how to deal with the glassworks steward. Pardos himself would never have been able to even conceive of broken shards being inserted and applied in the ways Crispin had proposed, swearing violently even though they were on consecrated ground.

Martinian, ignoring his younger partner, had set about accepting and discarding sheets, eyeing them with care, sighing now and again. They simply couldn't reject them all. For one thing, there was little chance of better quality in replacements. For another, they were working against time, with a formal re-burial and a ceremony for King Hildric planned by his daughter the queen for the first day after the Dykania Festival. It would take place here in the newly expanded sanctuary they were decorating now. It was already mid-autumn, the grapes harvested. The roads south were muddy after last week's rains. The chances of getting new glass sent up from Rhodias in time were too slim even to be considered.

Martinian was, as usual, visibly resigned to the situation. They would have to make do. Pardos knew that Crispin was as aware of this as his partner. He just had his temper. And getting things right mattered to him. Perhaps too much so, in the imperfect world Jad had made as his mortal children's dwelling place. Pardos the apprentice made a quick sign of the sun disk again and stoked the kiln, keeping it as hot as he could. He stirred the mixture inside with a long shovel. This would not be a good day to become distracted and let the setting lime emerge faulty.

Crispin had imaginative uses for broken glass on his mind.

So attentive was he to the lime mixture cooking in the oven that Pardos actually jumped when a voice-speaking awkwardly accented Rhodian-addressed him. He turned quickly, and saw a lean, red-faced man in the grey and white colours of the Imperial Post. The courier's horse grazed behind him near the gate. Belatedly, Pardos became aware that the other apprentices and labourers working outside the sanctuary had stopped and were looking over this way. Imperial Couriers from Sarantium did not appear in their midst with any frequency at all.

"Are you hard of hearing?" the man said waspishly. He had a recent wound on his chin. The eastern accent was pronounced. "I said my name is Tilliticus. Sarantine Imperial Post. I'm looking for a man named Martinian. An artisan. They said he'd be here."

Pardos, intimidated, could only gesture towards the sanctuary. Martinian, as it happened, was asleep on his stool in the doorway, his much-abused hat pulled over his eyes to block the afternoon sunlight.

"Deaf and mute. I see," said the courier. He clumped off through the grass towards the building.

"I'm not," said Pardos, but so softly he wasn't heard. Behind the courier's back, he flapped urgently at two of the other apprentices, trying to signal them to wake Martinian before this unpleasant man appeared in front of him.

He had not been asleep. From his favourite position-on a pleasant day, at any rate-in the sanctuary entrance, Martinian of Varena had noticed the courier riding up from a distance. Grey and white showed clearly against green and blue in sunlight.

He and Crispin had used that concept, in fact, for a row of Blessed Victims on the long walls of a private chapel in Baiana years ago. It had been only a partial success-at night, by candlelight, the effect was not what Crispin had hoped it would be-but they'd learned a fair bit, and learning from errors was what mosaic work was about, as Martinian was fond of telling the apprentices. If the patrons had had enough money to light the chapel properly at night, it might have been different, but they'd known the resources when they made their design. It was their own fault.

One always had to work within the constraints of time and money. That, too, was a lesson to be learned-and taught.

He watched the courier stop by Pardos at the lime kiln and he tipped his hat forward over his eyes, feigning sleep. He felt a peculiar apprehension. No idea why. And he was never able to give an adequate explanation afterwards, even to himself, as to why he did what he did next that autumn afternoon, altering so many lives forever. Sometimes the god entered a man, the clerics taught. And sometimes daemons or spirits did. There were powers in the half-world, beyond the grasp of mortal men.

He was to tell his learned friend Zoticus, over a mint infusion some days later, that it had had to do with feeling old that day. A week of steady rain had caused his finger joints to swell painfully. That wasn't really it, however. He was hardly so weak as to let such a thing lead him into so much folly. But he truly didn't know why he'd chosen-with no pre-meditation whatsoever-to deny being himself.

Did a man always understand his own actions? He would ask Zoticus that as they sat together in the alchemist's farmhouse. His friend would it give him a predictable reply and refill his cup with the infusion, mixed with something to ease the ache in his hands. The unpleasant courier would be long gone by then, to wherever his postings had taken him.

And Crispin, too, would be gone.

Martinian of Varena feigned sleep as the easterner with the nose and cheekbones of a drinker approached him and rasped,'You! Wake! I'm looking for a man named Martinian. An Imperial Summons to Sarantium!"

He was loud, arrogant as all Sarantines seemed to be when they came to Batiara, his words thick with the accent. Everyone heard him. He meant for them to hear him. Work stopped inside the sanctuary being expanded to properly house the bones of KingHildric of the Antae, dead of the plague a little more than a year ago.

Martinian pretended to rouse himself from an afternoon doze in the autumn light. He blinked owsley up at the Imperial Courier, and then pointed a stiff finger into the sanctuary-and up towards his longtime friend and colleague Caius Crispus. Crispin was just then attempting the task of making muddy brown tesserae appear like the brilliant glowing of Heladikos's sacred fire, high up on a scaffold under the dome.

Even as he pointed, Martinian wondered at himself. A summons? To the City? And he was playing the games of a boy? No one here would give him away to an arrogant Sarantine, but even so…

In the stillness that ensued, a voice they all knew was suddenly heard overhead with unfortunate clarity. The resonance of sound happened to be very good in this sanctuary.

"By Heladikos's cock, I will carve slices from his rump with his useless glass and force feed him his own buttocks in segments, I swear by holy Jad!"

The courier looked affronted.

"That's Martinian," said Martinian helpfully. "Up there. He's in a temper."

In fact, he really wasn't any more. The blasphemous vulgarity was almost reflexive. Sometimes he said things, and wasn't even aware he was speaking aloud, when a technical challenge engaged him entirely. At the moment, he was obsessed, in spite of himself, with the problem of how to make the torch of Heladikos gleam red when he had nothing that was red with which to work. If he'd had some gold he could have sandwiched the glass against a gold backing and warmed the hue that way, but gold for mosaic was a fatuous dream here in Batiara after the wars and the plague.

He'd had an idea, however. Up on the high scaffold, Caius Crispus of Varena was setting reddish-veined marble from Pezzelana flat into the soft, sticky lime coat on the dome, interspersed with the best of the tesserae they'd managed to salvage from the miserable sheets of glass. The glass pieces he laid at angles in the setting bed, to catch and reflect the light.

If he was right, the effect would be a shimmer and dance along the tall shape of the flame, the flat stones mingled with the tilted, glinting tesserae. Seen from below, it ought to have that result in sunlight through the windows around the base of the dome, or by the light of the wall candles and the suspended iron lanterns running the length of the sanctuary. The young queen had assured Martinian that her bequest to the clerics here would ensure evening and winter lighting. Crispin had no reason to disbelieve it was her father's tomb, and the Antae had had a cult of ancestor-worship, only thinly masked by their conversion to the Jaddite faith.

He had a cloth knotted around the cut in his left hand, and that made him awkward. He dropped a good stone, watched it fall a long way and swore again, reaching for another one. The setting bed was beginning to harden beneath the flame and torch he was filling in. He would have to work faster. The torch was silver. They were using whitish marble and some river-smooth stones for that-it ought to work. He'd heard that in the east they had a way of frosting glass to make an almost pure white tessera like snow, and that mother-of-pearl was available, for crowns and jewellery. He didn't even like thinking about such things. It only frustrated him, here in the west amid ruins.

As it happened, these were his thoughts in the precise moment when the irritated, carrying eastern voice from below penetrated his concentration and his life. A coincidence, or the heard accents of Sarantium carrying his mind sailing that way towards the celebrated channel and the inner sea and the gold and silver and silk of the Emperor?

He looked down.

Someone, short as a snail from this height, was addressing him as Martinian. This would have been merely vexing had Martinian himself-by the doorway, as was usual at this hour-not also been gazing up at Crispin as the easterner barked the wrong name, disturbing all the work in the sanctuary.

Crispin bit back two obscene retorts and then a third response which was to direct the imbecile in the right direction. Something was afoot. It might only be a jibe directed at the courier-though that would be unlike his partner-or it might be something else.

He'd deal with it later.

"I'll be down when I'm done," he called, much more politely than the circumstances warranted. "Go pray for someone's immortal soul in the meantime. Do it quietly."

The red-faced man shouted, "Imperial Couriers are not kept waiting, you vulgar provincial! There is a letter for you!"

Interesting as this undoubtedly was, Crispin found it easy to ignore him. He wished he had some red vivid as the courier's cheeks, mind you. Even from this height they showed crimson. It occurred to him that he'd never tried to achieve that effect on a face in mosaic. He slotted the idea among all the others and returned to creating the holy flame given as a gift to mankind, working with what he had.

Had his instructions not been unfortunately specific, Tilliticus would simply have dropped the packet on the dusty, debris-strewn floor of the shabby little sanctuary, reeking with the worst Heladikian heresy, and stormed out.

Men did not come-even here in Batiara-in their own slow time to receive an invitation from the Imperial Precinct in Sarantium. They raced over, ecstatic. They knelt. They embraced the knees of the courier. Once, someone had kissed his muddy, dung-smeared boots, weeping for joy.

And they most certainly offered the courier largess for being the bearer of such exalted, dazzling tidings.

Watching the ginger-haired man named Martinian finally descend from his scaffolding and walk deliberately across the floor towards him, Pronobius Tilliticus understood that his boots were not about to be kissed. Nor was any sum of money likely to be proffered him in gratitude.

It only confirmed his opinion of Batiara under the Antae. They might be Jad-worshippers, if barely, and they might be formal tributary allies of the Empire in a relationship brokered by the High Patriarch in Rhodias, and they might have conquered this peninsula a century ago and rebuilt some of the walls they had levelled then, but they were still barbarians.

And they had infected with their uncouth manners and heresies even those native-born descendants of the Rhodian Empire who had a claim to honour.

The man Martinian's hair was actually an offensively bright red, Tilliticus saw. Only the dust and lime in it and in his untidy beard softened the hue. His eyes, unsoftened, were a hard, extremely unpleasant blue. He wore a nondescript, stained tunic over wrinkled brown leggings. He was a big man, and he carried himself in a coiled, angry way that was quite unappealing. His hands were large, and there was a bloodstained bandage wrapped around one of them.

He's in a temper, the fool by the doorway had said. The fool was still on his stool, watching the two of them from beneath something misshapen that might once have been a hat. The deaf and mute apprentice had wandered in by now, along with all the others from outside. It ought to have been a splendid, resonant moment for Tilliticus to make his proclamation, to graciously accept the artisan's stammering gratitude on behalf of the Chancellor and the Imperial Post, and then head for the best inn Varena could offer with some coins to spend on mulled wine and a woman. "And so? I'm here. What is it you want?"

The mosaicist's voice was as hard as his eyes. His glance, when it left Tilliticus's face and sought that of the older man in the doorway, did not grow any less inimical. An unpleasant character, entirely.

Tilliticus was genuinely shocked by the rudeness. "In truth? I want nothing whatever with you." He reached into his bag, found the fat Imperial Packet and threw it scornfully at the artisan. The man, moving quickly, caught it in one hand.

Tilliticus said, almost spitting the words, "You are Martinian of Varena, obviously. Unworthy as you are, I am charged with declaring that the Thrice Exalted Beloved of Jad, the Emperor Valerius II, requests you to attend upon him in Sarantium with all possible speed. The packet you hold contains a sum of money to aid you in your travels, a sealed Permit signed by the Chancellor himself that allows you to use Imperial Posting Inns for lodging and services, and a letter that I am sure you will be able to find someone to read to you. It indicates that your services If are requested to aid in the decoration of the new Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom that the Emperor, in his own great wisdom, is even now constructing."

There was a mollifying buzz of sound in the sanctuary as the apprentices and lesser artisans, at least, appeared to grasp the significance of what Tilliticus had just said. It occurred to him that he might consider, at future times, relaying the formal words in this blunt tone. It had an effectiveness of its own.

"What happened to the old one?" The red-haired artisan seemed unmoved. Was he mentally deficient? Tilliticus wondered.

"What old one, you primitive barbarian?"

"Sheathe the insults or you'll crawl from here. The old sanctuary."

Tilliticus blinked. The man was deranged. "You threaten an Imperial Courier? Your nose will be slit for you if you so much as lift a hand to me. The old sanctuary burned two years ago, in the riot. Are you ignorant of events in the world?"

"We had plague here," the man said, his voice flat. "Twice. And then a civil war. Fires halfway across the world are unimportant at such times. Thank you for delivering this. I will read it and decide what to do."

"Decide?" Tilliticus squeaked. He hated the way his voice rose when he was caught by surprise. The same thing had happened when that accursed girl in Trakesia had asked him to take her away. It had made it difficult to impart the proper tone to the needed dissertation upon his mother's family.

"Why, yes," the rnosaicist said. "Dare I assume this is an offer and an invitation, not a command, as to a slave?"

Tilliticus was too stupefied to speak for a moment.

He drew himself up. Pleased to note that his voice was under control, he snapped, "Only a slave would fail to grasp what this means. It seems you are craven and without aspiration in the world. In which case, like a slave, you may burrow back down into your little hovel here and do what you will in the dirt and Sarantium suffers no loss at all. I have no time for further talk. You have your letter. In the Emperor's thrice-glorious name, I bid you good day."

"Good day," said the man, dismissively. He turned away. "Pardos," he said "the setting lime was well done today. And properly laid on, Radulf, Couvry. I'm pleased." Tilliticus stomped out.

The Empire, civilization, the glories of the Holy City… all wasted on some people, he thought. In the doorway he stopped in front of the older man, who sat regarding him with a mild gaze.

"Your hat," Tilliticus said, glaring at him, "is the most ridiculous head-covering I have ever seen."

"I know," said the man, cheerfully. "They all tell me that." Pronobius Tilliticus, aggrieved, unassuaged, reclaimed his horse and galloped off, dust rising behind him on the road to Varena's walls.

"We had better talk," Crispin said, looking down at the man who had taught him most of what he knew.

Martiman's expression was rueful. He stood up, adjusted the eccentric hat on his head-only Crispin among those there knew that it had saved his life, once-and led the way outside. The Imperial Courier, dudgeon lending him speed, was racing towards town. The sanctuary lay in its own enclosure just east of the city walls.

They watched him for a moment, then Martinian began walking south towards a copse of beech trees outside the yard at the opposite end from the burial mound. The sun was low now and the wind had picked up. Crispin squinted a little, emerging from the muted light of the sanctuary. A cow looked up from grazing and regarded them as they went. Crispin carried the Imperial Packet. The name "Martinian of Varena" was writ large upon it in cursive script, quite elegantly. The seal was crimson and elaborate.

Martinian stopped short of the trees just past the gate that led out from the yard to the road. He sat down on a stump there. They were quite alone. A blackbird swooped from their left, curved into the woods and was lost in leaves. It was cold now at the end of day with the sun going down. The blue moon was already up, above the forest. Crispin, glancing over as he leaned back against the wooden gate, realized that it was full.

Ilandra had died at sunset on a day when the blue moon was full, and the girls-sores ruptured, bodies fouled, their features hideously distorted-had followed her to the god that night. Crispin had walked outside and seen that moon, a wound in the sky.

He handed the heavy packet to Martinian, who accepted it without speaking. The older rnosaicist looked down at his name for a moment, then tore open the Chancellor of Sarantium's seal. In silence he began taking out what was within. The weight turned out to be silver and copper coins in a filigreed purse, as promised. A letter explained, as the courier had said, that the Great Sanctuary was being rebuilt and mosaic work was much a part of that. Some compliments upon the reputation of Martinian of Varena. There was a formal-looking document on superb paper which turned out to be the Permit for the Posting Inns. Martinian whistled softly and showed the parchment to Crispin: it was signed by the Chancellor himself, no lesser figure. They were both sufficiently familiar with high circles-if only here in Batiara among the Antae-to know that this was an honour.

Another document proved, when unfolded three times, to be a map showing the location of the Posting Inns and lesser stopping places on the Imperial road through Sauradia and Trakesia to the City. Yet another folded sheet named certain ships calling at Mylasia on the coast as reliable for sea transport if they happened to be in harbour.

"Too late in the year by now for commercial ships," Martinian said thoughtfully, looking at this last. He took out the letter again, opened it. Pointed to a date at the top. "This was issued at the very beginning of autumn. Our red-cheeked friend took his time getting here. I think you were meant to sail."

"I was meant to sail?"

"Well, you, pretending to be me."

"Martinian. What in Jad's-?"

"I don't want to go. I'm old. My hands hurt. I want to drink mulled wine this winter with friends and hope there are no wars for a while. I have no desire to sail to Sarantium. This is your summons, Crispin."

"Not my name."

"It ought to be. You've done most of the work for years now." Martinian grinned. "About time, too."

Crispin did not return the smile. "Think about this. This Emperor is said to be a patron. A builder. What more could you ask for in life than a chance to see the City and work there in honour? Make something that will last, and be known?"

"Warm wine and a seat by the fire in Galdera's tavern." And my wife beside me in the night until I die, he thought, but did not say.

The other man made a disbelieving sound.

Martinian shook his head. "Crispin, this is your summons. Don't let their mistake confuse things. They want a master mosaicist. We are known for our work in the tradition of Rhodian mosaic. It makes sense for them to have someone from Batiara be a part of this, east-west tensions notwithstanding, and you know which of the two of us ought to make the journey."

"I know that I have not been asked. You have. By name. Even if I wanted to go, which I don't."

Martinian, uncharacteristically, said something obscene involving Crispin's anatomy, the thunder god of the Bassanids, and a lightning bolt.

Crispin blinked. "You will now practise speaking like me?" he asked, not smiling. "That will have things even further reversed, won't it?"

The older man was flushed. "Do not even pretend that you don't want to go. Why did you pretend not to know about their sanctuary? Everyone knows about the Victory Pviot and the burning in Sarantium."

"Why did you pretend not to be yourself?" There was a little silence. The other man looked away, towards the distant woods. Crispin said, "Martinian, I don't want to go. It isn't pretending. I don't want to do anything. You know that."

His friend turned back to him. "Then that's why you must go. Caius, you are too young to stop living."

"They were younger and they weren't. They stopped."

He said it quickly, harshly. He hadn't been ready for Martinian's words. He needed to be ready when such things came up.

It was quiet here. The god's sun going down red in the west, preparing to journey through the long dark. In sanctuaries throughout Batiara the sunset rites would soon begin. The blue moon was above the eastern trees. No stars yet. Ilandra had died vomiting blood, black sores covering her, bursting. Like wounds. The girls. His girls had died in the dark.

Martinian took off his shapeless hat. His hair was grey, and he had lost most of it in the centre. He said, quite gently," And you honour the three of them by doing the same? Shall I blaspheme some more? Don't make me. I don't like it. This packet from Sarantium is a gift."

"Then accept it. We're nearly done here. Most of what's left is border work and polishing, and then the masons can finish."

Martinian shook his head. "Are you afraid?"

Crispin's eyebrows met when he frowned. "We have been friends a long time. Please do not talk to me that way."

"We have been friends a long time. No one else will," said Martinian implacably. "One in four people died here last summer, following the same numbers the summer before. More than that, they say, elsewhere. The Antae used to worship their own dead, with candles and invocations. I suppose they still do, in Jad's sanctuaries instead of oak groves or crossroads, but not. Caius, not by following them into a living death."

Martinian looked down as he finished at the twisted hat in his hands.

One in four. Two summers in succession. Crispin knew it. The burial mound behind them was only one among many. Houses, whole quarters of Varena and other cities of Batiara still lay deserted. Rhodias itself, which had never really recovered from the Antae sack, was a hollow place, forums and colonnades echoing with emptiness. The High Patriarch in his palace there was said to walk the corridors alone of a night, speaking to spirits unseen by men. Madness came with the plague. And a brief, savage war had come among the Antae, as well, when King Hildric died, leaving only a daughter after him. Farms and fields everywhere had been abandoned, too large to be worked by those left alive. There had been tales of children sold into slavery by their parents for want of food or firewood as winter came.

One in four. And not only here in Batiara. North among the barbarians in Ferrieres, west in Esperana, east in Sauradia and Trakesia, indeed all through the Sarantine Empire and into Bassania and probably beyond, though tales didn't run that far. Sarantium itself hard hit, by report. The whole world dredged deep by Death's hunger.

But Crispin had had three souls in Jad's creation to live with and love, and all three were gone. Was the knowledge of other losses to assuage his own? Sometimes, half asleep at night in the house, a wine flask empty by his bed, he would lie in the dark and think he heard breathing, a voice, one of the girls crying aloud in her dreams in the next room. He would want to rise to comfort her. Sometimes he would rise, and only come fully awake as he stood up, naked, and became aware of the appalling depth of stillness around him in the world.

His mother had suggested he come live with her. Martinian and his wife had invited him to do the same. They said it was unhealthy for him to stay alone with only the servants in a house full of memories. There were rooms he could take above taverns or inns where he would hear the sounds of life from below or along hallways. He had been urged, actively solicited, to marry again after most of the year had passed. Jad knew, enough widows had been left with too-wide beds, and enough young girls needed a decent, successful man. Friends told him this. He still seemed to have friends, despite his best efforts. They told him he was gifted, celebrated, had a life in front of him yet. How could people not understand the irrelevance of such things? He told them that, tried to tell them.

"Good night," Martinian said.

Not to him. Crispin looked over. The others were leaving, following the road the courier had taken back to the city. End of day. Sun going down. It was quite cold now.

"Good night," he echoed, lifting a hand absently to the men who worked for them and to the others engaged in finishing the building itself. Cheerful replies followed. Why should they not be cheerful? A day's work done, the rains had passed for a time, the harvest was in with winter not yet here, and there was splendid new gossip now to trade in the taverns and around hearth fires tonight. An Imperial Summons for Martinian to the City, an amusing game played with a pompous eastern courier.

The stuff of life, bright coinage of talk and shared conjecture, laughter, argument. Something to drink on, to regale a spouse, a sibling, a longtime servant. A friend, a parent, an innkeeper. A child.

Two children.

Who knows love?

Who says he knows love?

What is love, tell me.

"I know love," says the littlest one….

A Kindath song, that one. Ilandra had had a nurse from among the moon-worshippers, growing up in the wine country south of Rhodias where many of the Kindath had settled. A tradition in her family, to be nursed by them, and to choose among the Kindath for their physicians. A better family than his own, though his mother had connections and dignity. He'd married well, people had said, understanding nothing. People didn't know. How could they know? Ilandra used to sing the tune to the girls at night. If he closed his eyes he could have her voice with him now.

If he died he might join her in the god's Light. All three of them.

"You are afraid," Martinian said again, a human voice in the world's twilight, intruding. Crispin heard anger this time. Rare, in a kindly man. "You are afraid to accept that you have been allowed to live, and must do something with that grace."

"It is no grace," he said. And immediately regretted the sour, self-pitying tone in the words. Lifted a quick hand to forestall a rebuke. "What must I do to make everyone happy, Martinian? Sell the house for a pittance to one of the land speculators? Move in with you? And with my mother? Marry a fifteen-year-old ready to whelp children? Or a widow with land and sons already? Both? Take Jad's vows and join the clerics? Turn pagan? Become a Holy Fool?"

"Go to Sarantium," said his friend.

"No."

They looked at each other. Crispin realized that he was breathing hard. The older man said, his voice soft now in the lengthening shadows,'That is too final for something so large. Say it again in the morning and I'll never speak of this again. On my oath."

Crispin, after a silence, only nodded. He needed a drink, he realized. An unseen bird called, clear and far from towards the woods. Martinian rose, clapped his hat on his head against the sundown wind. They walked together back into Varena before the night curfew sounded and the gates were locked against whatever lay outside in the wild forests, the night fields and lawless roads, in the moonlit, starlit air where daemons and spirits assuredly were.

Men lived behind walls, when they could.

In the last of the light, Crispin went to his favourite baths, nearly deserted at this hour. Most men visited the baths in the afternoon, but mosaicists needed light for their work and Crispin preferred the quiet at the end of day now. A few men were taking exercise with the heavy ball, ponderously lobbing it back and forth, naked and sweating with exertion. He nodded to them in passing, without stopping. He took some steam first, and then the hot and cold waters, and had himself oiled and rubbed down-his autumn regimen, against the chill. He spoke to no one beyond civil greetings in the public rooms at the end, where he had a beaker of wine brought to him at his usual couch. After, he reclaimed the Imperial Packet from the attendant with whom he had checked it and, declining an escort, walked home to drop the packet and change for dinner. He intended not to discuss the matter tonight, at all.

"You are going to go, then. To Sarantium?"

Certain intentions, in the presence of his mother, remained largely meaningless. That much was unchanged. Avita Crispina signalled, and the servant ladled out more of the fish soup for her son. In the light of the candles, he watched the girl withdraw gracefully to the kitchen. She had the classic Karchite colouring. Their women were prized as house slaves by both the Antae and the native Rhodians.

"Who told you?" They were alone at dinner, reclining on facing couches. His mother had always preferred the formal old fashions.

"Does it matter?"

Crispin shrugged. "I suppose not." A sanctuary full of men had heard that courier. "Why am I going to go, Mother, do tell me?"

"Because you don't want to. You do the opposite of what you think you should. A perversity of behaviour. I have no idea where you derived it."

She had the audacity to smile, saying that. Her colour was good tonight, or else the candles were being kind. He had no tesserae so white as her hair, none even close. In Sarantium the Imperial Glassworks had, rumour told, a method of making…

He halted that line of thought.

"I don't do any such thing. I refuse to be so obvious. I may-sometimes-be a little imprudent when provoked. The courier today was a complete and utter fool."

"And you told him so, of course."

Against his will, Crispin smiled. "He told me I was, actually."

"That means he isn't, to be so perceptive."

"You mean it isn't obvious?"

Her turn to smile. "My mistake."

He poured himself another cup of the pale wine and mixed it half-and-half with water. In his mother's house he always did.

"I'm not going," he said. "Why would I want to go so far, with winter coming?"

"Because," said Avita Crispina, "you aren't entirely a fool, my child. We're talking about Sarantium, Caius, dear."

"I know what we are talking about. You sound like Martinian."

"He sounds like me." An old jest. Crispin didn't smile this time. He ate some more of the fish soup, which was very good.

"I'm not going," he repeated later, at the doorway, bending to salute her on the cheek. "Your cook is too skilful for me to bear the thought of leaving." She smelled, as always, of lavender. His first memory was of that scent. It ought to have been a colour, he thought. Scents, tastes, sounds often attained hues in his mind, but this one didn't. The flower might be violet, almost porphyry, in fact-the royal colour-but the scent wasn't. It was his mother's scent, simply that.

Two servants, holding cudgels, were waiting to walk him home in the dark.

"There are better cooks than mine in the east. I shall miss you, child," she replied calmly. "I expect regular letters."

Crispin was used to this. It still made him snort with exasperation as he walked away. He glanced back once and saw her in the spill of light, clad in a dark green robe. She lifted a hand to him and went within. He turned the corner, one of her men on either side of him, and walked the short distance to his home. He dismissed his mother's servants and stood a moment outside, cloaked against the chill, looking up.

Blue moon westering now in the autumn sky. Full as his heart once had been. The white moon, rising from the eastern end of his street, framed on both sides and below by the last houses and the city walls, was a pale, waning crescent. The cheiromancers attached meaning to such things. They attached meaning to everything overhead.

Crispin wondered if he could find a meaning to attach to himself. To whatever he seemed to have become in the year since a second plague summer had left him alive to bury a wife and two daughters himself. In the family plot, beside his father and grandfather. Not in a lime-strewn mound. Some things were not to be endured.

He thought about the torch of Heladikos he had contrived today on the small dome. There still remained, like a muted shadow of colour, this pride in his craft, this love for it. Love. Was that still the word?

He did want to see this latest artifice by candlelight: an extravagant blazing of candles and oil lanterns all through the sanctuary, lifting fire to light the fire he'd shaped in stone and glass. He had a sense-honed by experience-that what he'd contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted.

That, Martinian had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect.

He would see it, Crispin knew, at the dedication of the sanctuary at autumn's end, when the young queen and her clerics and pompous emissaries from the High Patriarch in Rhodias-if not the Patriarch himself-laid King Hildric's bones formally to rest. They would not stint on candles or oil then. He'd be able to judge his work that day, harshly or otherwise.

He never did, as events unfolded. He never did see his mosaic torch on that sanctuary dome outside the walls of Varena.

As he turned to enter his own house, key to hand-the servants having been told, as usual, not to wait up-a rushing gave him warning, but not enough.

Crispin managed to lash out with a fist and catch a man in the chest, hard. He heard a thick grunt, drew breath to cry out, then felt a sack dropped over his head and tightened expertly at his throat, blinding and choking him at once. He coughed, smelled flour, tasted it. He kicked out violently, felt his foot meet a knee or shin and heard another muffled cry of pain. Lashing and twisting, Crispin clawed at the choking hold on his throat. He couldn't bite, from inside the bag. His assailants were silent, invisible. Three of them? Four? They had almost certainly come for the money that accursed courier had declared to the whole world was in the packet. He wondered if they'd kill him when they found he didn't have it. Decided it was probable. Pondered, with a far part of his mind, why he was struggling so hard.

He remembered his knife, reached for it with one hand, while raking for the arm at his throat with the other. He scratched, like a cat or a woman, drew blood with his fingernails. Found the knife hilt as he twisted and writhed. Jerked his blade free.

He came to, slowly, and gradually became aware of painful, flickering light and the scent of perfume. Not lavender. His head hurt, not altogether unexpectedly. The flour sack had been removed-obviously: he could see blurred candles, shapes behind them and around, vague as yet. His hands appeared to be free. He reached up and very gingerly felt around the egg-shaped lump at the back of his skull.

At the edge of his vision, which was not, under the circumstances, especially acute, someone moved then, rising from a couch or a chair. He had an impression of gold, of a lapis hue.

The awareness of scent-more than one, in fact, he now realized- intensified. He turned his head. The movement made him gasp. He closed his eyes. He felt extremely ill.

Someone-a woman-said, "They were instructed to be solicitous. It appears you resisted."

"Very. sorry," Crispin managed. "Tedious of me."

He heard her laughter. Opened his eyes again. He had no idea where he was.

"Welcome to the palace, Caius Crispus," she said. "We are alone, as it happens. Ought I to fear you and summon guards?"

Fighting a particularly determined wave of nausea, Crispin propelled himself to a sitting position. An instant later he staggered upright, his heart pounding. He tried, much too quickly, to bow. He had to clutch urgently at a table top to keep himself from toppling. His vision swirled and his stomach did the same.

"You are excused the more extreme rituals of ceremony," said the only living child of the late King Hildnc.

Gisel, queen of the Antae and of Batiara and his own most holy ruler under Jad, who paid a symbolic allegiance to the Sarantine Emperor and offered spiritual devotion to the High Patriarch and to no one else alive, looked gravely at him with wide-set eyes.

"Very… extremely… kind of you. Your Majesty," Crispin mumbled. He was trying, with limited success, to make his eyes stop blurring and become useful in the candlelight. There seemed to be random objects swimming in the air. He was also having some difficulty breathing. He was alone in a room with the queen. He had never even seen her, except at a distance. Artisans, however successful or celebrated, did not hold nocturnal, private converse with their sovereign. Not in the world as Crispin knew it.

His head felt as if a small but insistent hammer inside it were trying to pound its way out. His confusion was extreme, disorienting. Had she captured him or rescued him? And why, in either case? He didn't dare ask. Amid the perfumes he smelled flour again suddenly. That would be himself. From the sack. He looked down at his dinner tunic and made a sour face. The blue was streaked and smeared a greyish-white. Which meant that his hair and beard..

"You were attended to, somewhat, while you slept, "said the queen, graciously enough. "I had my own physician summoned. He said bleeding was not immediately necessary. Would a glass of wine be of help?"

Crispin made a sound that he trusted to convey restrained, well-bred assent. She did not laugh again, or smile. It occurred to him that this was a woman not unused to observing the effects of violence upon men. A number of well-known incidents, unbidden, came into his head. Some were quite recent. The thought of them did nothing to ease him at all.

The queen made no movement, and a moment later Crispin realized that she had meant what she said quite literally. They were alone in this room. No servants, not even slaves. Which was simply astonishing. And he could hardly expect her to serve him wine. He looked around and, more by luck than any effective process of observation, encountered a flask and cups on the table by his elbow. He poured, carefully, and watered two cups, unsure whether that was a presumption. He was not conversant with the Antae court. Martinian had taken all their commissions from King Hildric and then his daughter, and had delivered the reports.

Crispin looked up. His eyesight seemed to be improving as the hammer subsided a little and the room elected to stabilize. He saw her shake her head at the cup he had poured for her. He set it down. Waited. Looked at her again.

The queen of Batiara was tall for a woman and unsettlingly young. Seen this closely, she had the straight Antae nose and her father's strong cheekbones. The wide-set eyes were a much-celebrated blue, he knew, though he couldn't see that clearly in the candlelight. Her hair was golden, bound up, of course, held by a golden circlet studded with rubies.

The Antae had worn bear grease in their hair when they'd first come to settle in the peninsula. This woman was not, manifestly, an exponent of such traditions. He imagined those rubies-he couldn't help himself- set in his mosaic torch on the sanctuary dome. He imagined them gleaming by candlelight there.

The queen wore a golden sun disk about her throat, an image of Heladikos upon it. Her robe was blue silk, threaded with fine gold wire, and there was a purple band running down the left side, from high collar to ankle. Only royalty wore purple, in keeping with a tradition going back to the Rhodian Empire at its own beginnings six hundred years ago.

He was alone in a palace room at night with the headache of his life and a queen-his queen-regarding him with a mild, steady appraisal.

It was common opinion, all through the Batiaran peninsula, that the queen was unlikely to live through the winter. Crispin had heard wagers offered and taken, at odds.

The Antae might have moved beyond bear grease and pagan rituals in a hundred years but they were most emphatically not accustomed to being ruled by a woman, and any choice of a mate-and king-for Gisel was fraught with an almost inconceivable complexity of tribal hierarchies and feuds. In a way, it was only due to these that she was still alive and reigning a year and more after her father's death and the savage, inconclusive civil war that had followed. Martinian had put it that way one night over dinner. The factions of the Antae were locked in balance around her; if she died, that balance spiralled away and war came. Again.

Crispin had shrugged. Whoever reigned would commission sanctuaries to their own glory in the god's name. Mosaicists would work. He and Martinian were extremely well known, with a reputation among the upper classes and reliable employees and apprentices. Did it matter so much, he'd asked the older man, what happened in the palace in Varena? Did any such things signify greatly after the plague?

The queen was still gazing at him beneath level brows, waiting. Crispin, belatedly realizing what was expected, saluted her with his cup and drank. It was magnificent wine. The very best Sarnican. He'd never tasted anything so complex. Under any normal circumstances, he would..

He put it down, quickly. After the blow to his head, this drink could undo him completely.

"A careful man, I see," she murmured.

Crispin shook his head. "Not really, Majesty." He had no idea what was expected of him here, or what to expect. It occurred to him that he ought to feel outraged. he'd been assaulted and abducted outside his own home. Instead, he felt curious, intrigued, and he was sufficiently self-aware to recognize that these feelings had been absent from his life for some time.

"May I assume," he said, "that the footpads who clapped a flour sack on my head and dented my braincase were from the palace? Or did your loyal guards rescue me from common thieves?"

She smiled at that. She couldn't be older than her early twenties, Crispin thought, remembering a royal betrothal and a husband-to-be dying of some mischance a few years ago.

"They were my guards. I told you, their orders were to be courteous, while ensuring you came with them. Apparently you did some injuries to them."

"I am delighted to hear it. They did some to me." "In loyalty to their queen and in her cause. Do you have the same loyalties?"

Direct, very direct.

Crispin watched as she moved to an ivory and rosewood bench and sat down, her back very straight. He saw that there were three doors to the room and imagined guards poised on the other side of each of them. He pushed his hands through his hair-a characteristic motion, leaving it randomly scattered-and said quietly,'I am engaged, to the best of my skill, and using deficient materials, in decorating a sanctuary to honour your father. Is that answer enough, Majesty?"

"Not at all, Rhodian. That is self-interest. You are extremely well paid, and the materials are the best we can offer right now. We've had a plague and a war, Caius Crispus."

"Oh, really," he said. Couldn't help himself. She raised her eyebrows. "Insolence?"

Her voice and expression made him abrupdy aware that whatever the proper court manners might be, he was not displaying them, and the Antae had never been known for patience.

He shook his head. "I lived through both," he murmured. "I need no reminders."

She regarded him in silence another long moment. Crispin felt an unexplained prickling along his back up to the hairs of his neck. The silence stretched. Then the queen drew a breath and said without preamble:! need an extremely private message carried to the Emperor in Sarantium. No man-or woman-may know the contents of this, or that it is even being carried. That is why you are here alone, and were brought by night."

Crispin's mouth went dry. He felt his heart begin to hammer again. "I am an artisan, Majesty. No more than that. I have no place in the intrigues of courts." He wished he hadn't put down the wine glass. "And," he added, too tardily,'I am not going to Sarantium."

"Of course you are," she said dismissively. "What man would not accept that invitation." She knew about it. Of course she did. His mother knew about it.

"It is not my invitation," he said pointedly. "And Martinian, my partner, has indicated he will not go."

"He is an old man. You aren't. And you have nothing to keep you in Varena at all."

He had nothing to keep him. At all.

"He isn't old," he said.

She ignored that. "I have made inquiries into your family, your circumstances, your disposition. I am told you are choleric and of dark humour, and not inclined to be properly respectful. Also that you are skilled at your craft and have attained a measure of renown and some wealth thereby. None of this concerns me. But no one has reported you to be cowardly or without ambition. Of course you will go to Sarantium. Will you carry my message for me?"

Crispin said, before he had really thought about the implications at all, "What message?"

Which meant-he realized much later, thinking about it, reliving this dialogue again and again on the long road east-that the moment she told him he had no real choice, unless he did decide to die and seek Ilandra and the girls with Jad behind the sun.

The young queen of the Antae and of Batiara, surrounded by mortal danger and fighting it with whatever tools came to hand, however unexpectedly, said sofdy,'You will tell the Emperor Valerius II and no one else that should he wish to regain this country and Rhodias within it, and not merely have a meaningless claim to them, there is an unmarried queen here who has heard of his prowess and his glory and honours them."

Crispin's jaw dropped. The queen did not flush, nor did her gaze flicker at all. His reaction was being closely watched, he realized. He said, stammering, "The Emperor is married. Has been for years. He changed the laws to wed the Empress Alixana."

Calm and very still on her ivory seat, she said, "Alas, husbands or wives may be put aside. Or die, Caius Crispus."

He knew this.

"Empires," she murmured, "live after us. So does a name. For good or ill. Valerius II, who was once Petrus of Trakesia, has wanted to regain

Rhodias and this peninsula since he brought his uncle to the Golden Throne twelve summers ago. He purchased his truce with the King of Kings in Bassama for that reason alone. King Shirvan is bribed so Valerius may assemble an army for the west when the time ripens. There are no mysteries here. But if he tries to take this land in war, he will not hold it. This peninsula is too far away from him, and we Antae know how to make war. And his enemies east and north-the Bassanids and the northern barbarians-will never sit quiet and watch, no matter how much he pays them. There will be men around Valerius who know this, and they may even tell him as much. There is another way to achieve his… desire. I am offering it to him." She paused. "You may tell him, too, that you have seen the queen of Batiara very near, in blue and gold and porphyry, and may. give him an honest description, should he ask for one."

This time, though she continued to hold his gaze and even lifted her chin a little, she did flush. Crispin became aware that his hands were perspiring at his sides. He pressed them against his tunic. He felt the stirrings, astonishingly, of a long-dormant desire. A kind of madness, that, though desire often was. The queen of Batiara was not, in any possible sense, someone who could be thought of in this way. She was offering her face and exquisitely garbed body to his recording gaze, only that he might tell an Emperor about her, halfway around the world. He had never dreamed of moving-never wanted to move-in this world of royal shadows and intrigue, but his puzzle-solving mind was racing now, with his pulse, and he could begin to see the pieces of this picture.

No man-or woman-may know.

No woman. Clear as it could be. He was being asked to carry an overture of marriage to the Emperor, who was very much married, and to the most powerful and dangerous woman in the known world.

"The Emperor and his low-born actress-wife have no children, alas," said Gisel softly. Crispin realized his thoughts must have been in his face. He was not good at this. "A sad legacy, one might imagine, of her… profession. And she is no longer young."

I am, was the message beneath the message he was to bring. Save my life, my throne, and I offer you the homeland of the Rhodian Empire that you yearn for. I give you back the west to your east, and the sons to your need. I am fair, and young. ask the man who carries my words to you. He will say as much.

Only ask.

"You believe…" he began. Stopped. Composed himself with an effort. "You believe this can be kept secret? Majesty, if I am even known to have been brought to you

"Trust me in this. You can do me no service if you are killed on the way or when you arrive."

"You reassure me greatly," he murmured.

Surprisingly, she laughed again. He wondered what those on the other side of the doors would think, hearing that. He wondered what else they might have heard.

"You could send no formal envoy with this?"

He knew the answer before she gave it. "No such messenger from me would have a chance to bespeak the Emperor in… privacy."

"And I will?"

"You might. You have pure Rhodian blood on both sides. They? acknowledge that, still, in Sarantium, though they complain about you. Valerius is said to be interested in ivory, frescoes… such things as you do with stones and glass. He is known to hold conversation with his artisans." "How commendable of him. And when he finds that I am not Martinian of Varena? What sort of conversation will then ensue?"

The queen smiled. "That will depend on your wits, will it not?"

Crispin drew another breath. Before he could speak, she added,'You have not asked what return a grateful, newly-crowned Empress might make to the man who conveyed this message for her and had success follow upon it. You can read?" He nodded. She reached into a sleeve of her robe and withdrew a parchment scroll. She extended it a little towards him. He walked nearer, inhaled her scent, saw that her eyelashes were accented and extended subtly. He took the parchment from her hand.

She nodded permission. He broke the seal. Uncurled the scroll. Read.

He felt the colour leave his face as he did so. And hard upon astonishment came bitterness, the core of pain that walked with him in the world.

He said, "It is wasted on me, Majesty. I have no children to inherit any of this."

"You are a young man," the queen said mildly.

Anger flared. "Indeed? So why no offer here of a comely Antae woman of your court, or an aristocrat of Rhodian blood for my prize? The brood mare to fill these promised houses and spend this wealth?"

She had been a princess and was a queen and had spent her life in palaces where judging people was a tool of survival. She said, "I would not insult you with such a proposal. I am told yours was a love-match. A rare thing. I count you lucky in it, though the allotted time was brief. You are a well-formed man, and would have resources to commend you, as the parchment shows. I imagine you could buy your own brood mare of high lineage, if other methods of choosing a second wife did not present themselves."

Much later, in his own bed, awake, with the moons long set and the dawn not far off, Crispin was to conclude that it was this answer, the gravity of it with the bite of irony at the end, that had decided him. Had she offered him a mate on paper or in word, he told himself, he would have refused outright and let her kill him if she wanted.

She would have, he was almost certain of it.

And that thought had come in the last of the darkness, even before he learned from the apprentices as they met at the sanctuary for the sunrise prayers that six of the Palace Guard in Varena had been found dead in the night, their throats slit.

Crispin would walk away from the babble of noise and speculation to stand in the sanctuary alone under his charioteer and torch on the dome. The light was just entering through the dome's ring of windows, striking the angled glass. The mosaic torch seemed to flicker as he watched, a soft but unmistakable rippling, as of a muted flame. In his mind's eye he could see it above burning lanterns and candles. given enough of them it would work.

He understood something. The queen of the Antae, battling for her life, had made something else as clear as it could be: she would not let the secrecy of his message be endangered in any way, even by her own most trusted guards. Six men dead. Nothing muted there at all.

He didn't know how he felt. Or no, he realized that he did know: he felt like a too-small ship setting out from harbour far too late in the year, undermanned, with winter winds swirling all around it.

But he was going to Sarantium. After all.

Earlier, in the depths of the night, in that room in the palace, feeling a stillness descend upon him, Crispin had said to the woman in the carved ivory seat, "I am honoured by your trust, Majesty. I would not want another war here, either among the Antae or a Sarantine invasion. We have endured our share of dying. I will carry your message and try to give it to the Emperor, if I survive my own deception. It is folly, what I am about to do, but everything we do is folly, is it not?"

"No," she said, unexpectedly. "But I do not expect to be the one who persuades you of that." She gestured to one of the doors. "There is a man on the other side who will escort you home. You will not see me again, for reasons you understand. You may kiss my foot, if you feel sufficiently well."

He knelt before her. Touched the slender foot in its golden sandal. Kissed the top of it. As he did, he felt long fingers brush through his hair to the place on his skull where the blow had fallen. He shivered. "You have my gratitude," he heard. "Whatever befalls."

The hand was withdrawn. He stood, bowed again, went out through the indicated portal, and was escorted home by a tongueless, smooth-shaven giant of a man through the windy night streets of his city. He was aware of desire lingering as he walked in blackness away from the palace, from the chamber. He was astonished by it.

In that exquisite, small receiving room, a young woman sat alone for a time after he left. It was rare for her to be entirely solitary, and the sensation was not disagreeable. Events had moved swiftly since one of her sources of privy knowledge had mentioned the spoken-aloud details of a summons conveyed by the Imperial Post to an artisan working at her father's resting place. She'd had little time to ponder nuances, only to realize that this was an unexpected, slender chance-and seize it.

Now there were deaths to attend to, regrettably. This game was lost before it began if it were known to Agila or Eudric or any of the others hovering around her throne that the artisan had had private converse with her in the night before journeying east. The man escorting the mosaic worker now was the only one she fully trusted. For one thing, he could not speak. For another, he had been hers since she was five years old. She would give him further orders for tonight when he returned. It would not be the first time he had killed for her.

The queen of the Antae offered, at length, a small, quiet prayer, asking forgiveness, among other things. She prayed to holy Jad, to his son the Charioteer who had died bringing fire to mortal men, and then-to be as sure as one could ever be sure-to the gods and goddesses her people had worshipped when they were a wild cluster of tribes in the hard lands north and east, first in the mountains, and then by the oak forests of Sauradia, before coming down into fertile Batiara and accepting Jad of the Sun, conquering heirs to an Empire's homeland.

She nursed few illusions. The man, Caius Crispus, had surprised her a little, but he was an artisan only, and of an angry, despairing humour. Arrogant, as the Rhodians still were so much of the time. Not a truly reliable vessel for so desperate an enterprise. This was almost certainly doomed to failure, but there was little she could do but try. She had let him come near to her, kiss her foot. Had brushed his flour-smeared red hair with fingers deliberately slow. perhaps longing was the gateway to this man's loyalty? She didn't think so, but she didn't know, and she could only use what few tools, or weapons, she had or was given.

Gisel of the Antae did not expect to see the wildflowers return in spring, or watch the midsummer bonfires burn upon the hills. She was nineteen years old, but queens were not, in truth, allowed to be so young.

CHAPTER II

When Crispin was a boy and free for a day in the way that only boys in summer can be free he had walked outside the city walls one morning and, after throwing stones in a stream for a time, had passed by a walled orchard universally reported among the young Varenans to belong to a spirit-haunted country house where unholy things happened after dark.

The sun was shining. In an effusion of youthful bravado, Crispin had climbed the rough stone wall, leaped across into a tree, sat down on a stout branch among the leaves and begun eating apples. He was heart-poundingly proud of himself and wondering how he'd prove he'd done this to his sure-to-be-sceptical friends. He decided to carve his initials-a newly learned skill-on the tree trunk, and dare the others to come see them. He received, a moment later, the deepest fright of his young life. It used to wake him at night sometimes, the memory having turned into a dream he'd have even as an adult, a husband, a father. In fact, he had managed to persuade himself that it mostly had been a dream, spun out of overly vivid childhood anxieties, the blazing midday heat, almost-ripe apples eaten too quickly. It had to have been a child's fantasy, breeding ground of nightmare.

Birds did not talk.

More particularly, they did not discuss with each other from tree to tree, in the identically bored tones and timbre of an over bred Rhodian aristocrat, which eye of a trespassing boy should be pecked out and consumed first, or how the emptied eye sockets might then offer easy access to slithery morsels of brain matter within.

Caius Crispus, eight years old and blessed or cursed with an intensely visual imagination, had not lingered to further investigate this remarkable phenomenon of nature. There seemed to be several birds in animated colloquy about him, half hidden in the leaves and branches. He dropped three apples, spat out the half-chewed pulp of another, and leaped wildly back to the wall, scraping an elbow raw, bruising a shin, and then doing himself further damage when he landed badly on the baked summer grass by the path.

As he sprinted back, not quite screaming, towards Varena, he heard sardonic crowing laughter behind him. Or he did in his dreams, after, at any rate.

Twenty-five years later, walking the same road south of the city, Crispin was thinking about the power of memories, the way they had of coming back so fiercely and unexpectedly. A scent could do it, the sound of rushing water, the sight of a stone wall beside a path.

He was remembering that day in the tree, and the recollection of terror took him a little further back, to the image of his mother's face when the reserves of the urban militia returned from that same year's spring campaign against the Inicii and his father was not with them.

Horius Crispus the mason had been a vivid, well-liked man, respected and successful in his craft and business. His only surviving son struggled, however, to shape a clear mental picture, after all these years, of the man who had gone marching north to the border and beyond into Ferrieres, red-bearded, smiling, easy-striding. He'd been too young when the militia's deputy commander had come to their door with his father's nondescript shield and sword.

He could remember a beard that scratched when he kissed his father's cheek, blue eyes-his own eyes, people said-and the big, capable hands, scarred and always scratched. A big voice, too, that went soft within the house, near Crispin or his small, scented mother. He had these. fragments, these elements, but when he tried to pull them together in his mind to create a whole it somehow slipped away, the way the man had slipped away too soon.

He had stories to go by: from his mother, her brothers, sometimes his own patrons, many of whom remembered Horius Crispus well. And he could study his father's steady, incisive work in houses and chapels, graveyards and public buildings all over Varena. But he couldn't cling to any memory of a face that did not blur into an absence. For a man who lived for image and colour-who flourished in the realm of sight-this was hard.

Or it had been hard. Time passing did complex things, to deepen a wound or to heal it. Even, sometimes, to overlay it with another that had felt as if it would kill.

It was a beautiful morning. The wind was behind him, the coining winter in it, but crisp rather than cold while the sun shone, sweeping the mist from the eastern forests and hills to west and farther south. He was alone on the road. Not always a safe thing, but he felt no danger now, and he could see a long way in the open country south of the city- almost to the rim of the world, it seemed.

Behind him, when he glanced back, Varena gleamed, bronze domes, red roof-tiles, the city walls nearly white in the morning light. A hawk circled above its own warning shadow on the stubble of the fields east of the road. The harvested vines on the slopes ahead looked derelict and bare, but the grapes were inside the city, being made into wine even now. Queen Gisel, efficient in this as in many things, had ordered that city labourers and slaves join in the grain and grape harvests, to cover-as much as possible-the loss of so many people to the plague. The first festivals would be beginning soon, in Varena and in smaller villages everywhere, leading up to the wildness of Dykania's three nights. It would be difficult, though, to shape a truly festive mood this autumn, Crispin thought. Or perhaps he was wrong about that. Perhaps festivals were more important after what had happened. Perhaps they were more uninhibited in the presence of death.

As he walked, he could see abandoned farmhouses and outbuildings on both sides of the country path. The rich farmland and vineyards around Varena were all very well, but they needed men to sow and reap and tend, and too many labourers were buried in the mass graves. The coming winter would be hard.

Even with these thoughts, it was difficult to remain grim this morning. Light nurtured him, as did clean, sharp colours, and the day was offering both. He wondered if he'd ever be able to create a forest with the browns and reds and golds and the late, deep green of the one he could see now beyond the bare fields. With tesserae worthy of the name, and perhaps a sanctuary dome designed with windows enough and-by the god's grace-good, clear glass for those windows, he might. He might. In Sarantium these things were to be found, men said. In Sarantium, everything on earth was to be found, from death to heart's desire, men said. He was going, it seemed. Sailing to Sarantium. Walking, actually, for it was too late in the year for a ship, but the old saying spoke of change, not a means of travel. His life was branching, taking him towards whatever might come on the road or at journey's end.

His life. He had a life. The hardest thing was to accept that, it sometimes seemed. To move out from the rooms where a woman and two children had died in ugly pain, stripped of all inherent dignity or grace; to allow brightness to touch him again, like this gift of the morning sun. In that moment, he felt like a child again himself, seeing a remembered stone wall come into view as the path curved and approached it. Half amused, half genuinely unsettled, Crispin added a few more inward curses to his emergent litany against Martinian, who had insisted that he make this visit.

It seemed that Zoticus, the alchemist, much consulted by farmers, the childless and the lovelorn, and even royalty on occasion, dwelled in the selfsame substantial farmhouse with an attached apple orchard where an eight-year-old boy had heard birds discussing with well-bred anticipation the consumption of his eyeballs and brain matter.

"I will send to tell him to expect you," Martinian had said with firmness. "He knows more useful things than any man I know, and you are a fool if you undertake a journey like this without first speaking with Zoticus. Besides, he makes wonderful herbal infusions." "I don't like herbal infusions."

"Crispin," Martinian had said warningly. And had given directions. And so here he was, cloaked against the wind, pacing alongside the rough stones of the wall, booted feet tracing the vanished, long-ago bare footsteps of a child who had gone out from the city alone one summer's day to escape the sorrow in his house.

He was alone now, too. Birds flitted from branch to bough on both sides of the road. He watched them. The hawk was gone. A brown hare, too exposed, made swift, deliberately jerky progress across the field on his left. A cloud swept across the sun and its elongated shadow raced over the same field. The hare froze when the shadow reached it and then hurtled erratically forward again as light returned. On the other side of the road the wall marched beside him, well built, well maintained, of heavy grey stones. Ahead, he could see the gateway to he farmyard, a marker stone opposite it. Unused though it now was, this had been a road laid down in the great days of the Rhodian Empire. In no great distance-a morning's steady walking-it met the high road that ran all the way to Rhodias itself and beyond, to the southern sea at the end of the peninsula. As a child, Crispin used to enjoy the sensation of being on the same road as someone gazing into those distant ocean waters.

He stopped for a moment, looking at the wall. He had climbed it easily that morning long ago. There were still apples in the trees beyond. Crispin pursed his lips, weighing a thought. This was not a time to be duelling with childhood memories, he told himself sternly, repressively. He was a grown man, a respected, well-known artisan, a widower. Sailing to Sarantium.

With a small, resolute shrug of his shoulders, Crispin dropped the package he was carrying-a gift from Martinian's wife for the alchemist-onto the brown grass beside the path. Then he stepped across the small ditch, pushed a hand through his hair, and proceeded to climb the wall again.

Not all skills were lost to the years, and it seemed he wasn't so old after all. Pleased with his own agility, he swung one knee up, then the other, stood on the wide, uneven top of the wall, balanced, and then stepped-only boys leaped-across to a good branch. He found a comfortable spot, sat down and, pausing to be judicious, reached up and picked an apple.

He was surprised to find his heart was racing.

He knew that if they saw this, his mother and Martinian and half a dozen others would be performing a collective rueful headshake like the Chorus in one of those seldom-performed tragedies of the ancient Trakesian poets. Everyone said Crispin did things merely because he knew that he shouldn't do them. A perversity of behaviour, his mother called it.

Perhaps. He didn't think so, himself. The apple was ripe. Tasty, he decided.

He dropped it onto the grass among fallen ones for the small animals and stood up to cross back to the wall. No need to be greedy or childish. He'd proven his point, felt curiously pleased with himself. Settled a score with his youth, in a way.

"Some people never learn, do they?"

One foot on a branch, one on top of the wall, Crispin looked down very quickly. Not a bird, not an animal, not a spirit of the half-world of air and shadow. A man with a full beard and unfashionably long grey hair stood in the orchard below, gazing up at him, leaning on a staff, foreshortened by the angle.

Flushing, acutely embarrassed, Crispin mumbled, "They used to say this orchard was haunted. I… wanted to test myself"

"And did you pass your test?" the old man-Zoticus, beyond doubt- queried gently.

"I suppose." Crispin stepped across to the wall. "The apple was good."

"As good as they were all those years ago?"

"Hard to remember. I really don't-"

Crispin stopped. A prickling of fear.

"How do… how did you know I was here? Back then?"

"You are Caius Crispus, I presume? Martinian's friend."

Crispin decided to sit down on the wall. His legs felt oddly weak* "I am. I have a gift for you. From his wife."

"Carissa. Splendid woman! A neckwarmer, I do hope. I find I need them now, as winter comes. Old age. A terrible thing, let me tell you. How did I know you were here before? Silly question. Come down. Do you like mint leaves in an infusion?"

It didn't seem in the least silly to Crispin. For the moment he deferred a reply. "I'll get the gift," he said, and climbed down-jumping would lack all dignity-on the outside of the wall. He reclaimed the parcel from the grass, brushed some ants from it, and walked up the road towards the farmyard gate, breathing deeply to calm himself.

Zoticus was waiting, leaning on his staff, two large dogs beside him. He opened the gate and Crispin walked in. The dogs sniffed at him but heeled to a command. Zoticus led the way towards the house through a neat, small yard. The door was open, Crispin saw.

"Why don't we just eat him now?"

Crispin stopped. Childhood terror. The very worst kind, that made nightmares for life. He looked up. The voice was lazy, aristocratic, remembered. It belonged to a bird perched on the branch of an ash tree, not far from the doorway.

"Manners, manners, Linon. This is a guest." Zoticus's tone was reproving.

"A guest? Climbing the wall? Stealing apples?"

"Well, eating him would hardly be a proportionate response, and the philosophers teach that proportion is the essence of the virtuous life, do they not?"

Crispin, stupefied, fighting fear, heard the bird give an elaborate sniff of disapproval. Looking more closely, he abruptly realized, with a further shock, that it was not a real bird. It was an artifice. Grafted.

And it was talking. Or else…

"You are speaking for it!" he said quickly. "Casting your voice? The way the actors do, on stage sometimes?"

"Mice and blood! Now he insults us!"

"He is bringing a neckwarmer from Carissa. Behave, Linon."

"Take the neck thing, then let us eat him."

Crispin, his own choler rising suddenly, said bluntly, "You are a construct of leather and metal. You can't eat anything. Don't bluster."

Zoticus glanced quickly over at him, surprised, and then laughed aloud, the sound unexpectedly robust, filling the space before his doorway.

"And that," he said, "will teach you, Linon! If anything can."

"It will teach me that we have an ill-bred guest this morning."

"You did propose eating him. Remember?"

"I am only a bird. Remember? Indeed, I am less than that, it seems. I am a construct of leather and metal."

Crispin had the distinct sense that if the small grey and brown thing with the glass eyes could have moved it would have turned its back on him, or flown away in disgust and wounded pride.

Zoticus walked over to the tree, turned a screw on each of the tiny legs of the bird, loosening their grip on the branch, and picked it up. "Come," he said. "The water is boiled and the mint was picked this morning."

The mechanical bird said nothing, nestled in his free hand. It looked like a child's toy. Crispin followed into the house. The dogs lay down in the yard.

The infusion was good, actually. Crispin, more calm than he'd expected to be, wondered if the old alchemist might have added something besides mint to it, but he didn't ask. Zoticus was standing at a table examining the courier's map Crispin had produced from the inner pocket of his cloak.

Crispin looked around. The front room was comfortably furnished, much as any prosperous farmhouse might be. No dissected bats or pots with green or black liquids boiling in them, no pentagrams chalked on the wooden floor. There were books and scrolls, to mark a learned and an unexpectedly well-off man, but little else to suggest magics or cheiromancy. Still, he saw half a dozen of the crafted birds, made of various materials, perched on shelves or the backs of chairs, and they gave him pause. None of these had spoken yet, and the small one called Linon lay silently on its side on a table by the fire. Crispin had little doubt, however, that any and all of them could address him if they chose.

It amazed him how calmly he accepted this. On the other hand, he'd had twenty-five years to live with the knowledge.

"The Imperial Posting Inns, whenever you can," Zoticus was murmuring, head lowered still to the map, a curved, polished glass in one hand to magnify it. "Comforts and food are unreliable elsewhere."

Crispin nodded, still distracted. "Dog meat instead of horse or swine, I know."

Zoticus glanced up, his expression wry. "Dog is good," he said. "The risk is getting human flesh in a sausage."

Crispin kept a composed face with some effort. "I see," he said. "Well spiced, I'm sure."

"Sometimes," said Zoticus, turning back to the map. "Be especially careful through Sauradia, which can be unstable in autumn."

Crispin watched him. Zoticus had taken a quill now and was making notations on the map. "Tribal rites?"

The alchemist glanced up briefly, eyebrows arched. His features were strong, the blue eyes deep-set, and he wasn't as old as the grey hair and the staff might have suggested. "Yes, that. And knowing they will be mostly on their own again until spring, even with the big army camp near Trakesia and soldiers at Meganum. Notorious winter brigands, the Sauradi tribes. Lively women, as I recall, mind you." He smiled a little, to himself, and returned to his annotations.

Crispin shrugged. Sipped his tea. Resolutely tried to put his mind away from sausages.

Some might have seen this long autumn journey as an adventure in itself. Cams Crispus did not. He liked his own city walls, and good roofs against rain, and cooks he knew, and his bathhouse. For him, broaching a new cask of wine from Meganum or the vineyards south of Rhodias had always been a preferred form of excitement. Designing and executing a mosaic was an adventure… or had been once. Walking the wet, windswept roads of Sauradia or Trakesia with an eye out for predators-human or otherwise-in a struggle to avoid becoming someone else's sausage was not an adventure, and a greybeard's cackling about lively women did not make it one.

He said, "I'd still like an answer, by the way, silly question or not. How did you know I was here all those years ago?"

Zoticus put down the quill and sat in a heavy chair. One of the mechanical birds-a falcon with a silver and bronze body and yellow jewelled eyes, quite unlike the drab, sparrow-like Linon-was fixed to the high back of the chair, screws adjusted so its claws held fast. It gazed intrinsically at Crispin with a pale glitter.

"You do know I am an alchemist."

"Martinian said as much. I also know that most who use that name are frauds, hooking coins and goods from innocents."

Crispin heard a sound from the direction of the fire. It might have been a log shifting, or not.

"Entirely true," said Zoticus, unperturbed. "Most are. Some are not. I am one of those who are not."

"Ah. Meaning you know the future, can induce passionate love, cure the plague, and find water?" He sounded truculent, Crispin knew. He couldn't help it.

Zoticus gazed at him levelly. "Only the last, actually, and not invariably. No. Meaning I can sometimes see and do things most men cannot, with frustratingly erratic success. And meaning I can see things in men and women that others cannot. You asked how I knew you? Men have an aura, a presence to them. It changes little, from childhood to death. Very few people dare my orchard, which is useful-as you might guess-for a man living alone in the countryside. You were there once. I knew your presence again this morning. The anger in you was not present in the child, though there was a loss then, too. The rest is little enough altered. It is not," he said kindly, "so complicated an explanation, is it?"

Crispin looked at him, cupping his drink in both hands. His glance shifted to the jewelled falcon gripping the back of the alchemist's heavy chair. "And these?" he asked, ignoring the observations about himself.

"Oh. Well. That's the whole point of alchemy, isn't it? To transmute one substance into another, proving certain things about the nature of the world. Metals to gold. The dead to life. I have learned to make inanimate substance think and speak, and retain a soul." He said it much as he might have described learning how to make the mint tea they were drinking.

Crispin looked around the room at the birds. "Why… birds?" he asked, the first of fully a dozen questions that occurred. Tire dead to life.

Zoticus looked down, that private smile on his face again. After a moment, he said, "I wanted to go to Sarantium myself once. I had ambitions in the world, and wished to see the Emperor and be honoured by him with wealth and women and world's glory. Apius, some time after he took the Golden Throne, initiated a fashion for mechanical animals. Roaring lions in the throne room. Bears that rose on their hind legs. And birds. He wanted birds everywhere. Singing birds in all his palaces. The mechanical artisans of the world were sending him their best contrivances: wind them up and they warbled an off-key paean to Jad or a rustic folk ditty, over and over again until you were minded to throw them against a wall and watch the little wheels spill out. You've heard them? Beautiful to look at, sometimes. And the sound can be appealing-at first."

Crispin nodded. He and Martinian had done a Senator's house in Rhodias.

"I decided," said Zoticus,'I might do better. Far better. Create birds that had their own power of speech. And thought. And that these, the fruits of long study and labour and. some danger, would be my conduits to fame in the world."

"What happened?"

"You don't remember? No, you wouldn't. Apius, under the influence of his Eastern Patriarch, began blinding alchemists and cheiromancers, even simple astrologers for a while. The clerics of the sun god have always feared any other avenues to power or understanding in the world. It became evident that arriving in the City with birds that had souls and spoke their own minds was a swift path to blinding if not death." The tone was wry.

"So you stayed here?"

"I stayed. After… some extended travels. Mostly in autumn, as it happened. This season makes me restless even now. I did learn on those journeys how to do what I wanted. As you can see. I never did get to Sarantium. A mild regret. I'm too old now."

Crispin, hearing the alchemist's words in his mind again, realized something. The clerics of the sun god. "You aren't a Jaddite, are you?"

Zoticus smiled, and shook his head.

"Odd," said Crispin dryly, "you don't look Kindath."

Zoticus laughed. There came that sound again, from towards the fire. A log, almost certainly. "I have been told I do," he said. "But no, why would I exchange one fallacy for another?"

Crispin nodded. This was not a surprise, all things considered. "Pagan?"

"I honour the old gods, yes. And their philosophers. And believe with them that it is a mistake to attempt to circumscribe the infinite range of divinity into one-or even two or three-images, however potent they might be on a dome or a disk."

Crispin sat down on the stool opposite the other man. He sipped from his cup again. Pagans were not all that rare in Batiara among the Antae- which might well explain why Zoticus had lingered safely in this countryside-but this was still an extraordinarily frank conversation to be having. "I'd imagine," he said, "that the Jaddite teachers-or the Kindath, from what little I know-would simply say that all modes of divinity may be encompassed in one if the one is powerful enough."

"They would," Zoticus agreed equably. "Or two for the pure Heladi-kians, three with the Kindath moons and sun. They would all be wrong, to my mind, but that is what they'd say. Are we about to debate the nature of the divine, Caius Crispus? We'll need more than a mint infusion in that case."

Crispin almost laughed. "And more time. I leave in two days and have a great deal to attend to."

"Of course you do. And an old man's philosophizing can hardly appeal just now, if ever. I have marked your map with the hostelries I understand to be acceptable, and those to be particularly avoided. My last travels were twenty years and more ago, but I do have my sources. Let me also give you two names in the City. Both may be trusted, I suspect, though not with everything you know or do."

His expression was direct. Crispin thought of a young queen in a candlelit room, and wondered. He said nothing. Zoticus crossed to the table, took a sheet of parchment and wrote upon it. He folded the parchment twice and handed it to Crispin.

"Be careful around the last of this month and the first day of the next. I It would be wise not to travel those days, if you can arrange to be staying at an Imperial Inn. Sauradia will be a… changed place." Crispin looked his inquiry.

"The Day of the Dead. Not a prudent time for strangers to be abroad in that province. Once you are in Trakesia you'll be safer. Until you get to the City itself and have to explain why you aren't Martinian. That ought to be amusing."

"Oh, very," said Crispin. He had been avoiding thinking about that. Time enough. It was a long journey by land. He unfolded the paper, read the names.

The first is a doctor," said Zoticus. "Always useful. The second is my daughter."

"Your what?" Crispin blinked.

"Daughter. Seed of my loins. Girl child." Zoticus laughed. "One of them. I told you: I did travel a fair bit in my youth."

They heard a barking from the yard. From farther within the house a long-faced, slope-shouldered servant appeared and made his unhurried way to the door and out. He silenced the dogs. They heard voices outside. A moment later he reappeared, carrying two jars.

"Silavin came, master. He says his swine is recovered. He brought honey. Promises a ham."

"Splendid!" said Zoticus. "Store the honey in the cellar."

"We have thirty jars there, master," said the servant lugubriously.

"Thirty? So many? Oh dear. Well… our friend here will take two back for Carissa and Martinian."

That still leaves twenty-six," said the glum-faced servant.

"At least," agreed Zoticus. "We shall have a sweet winter. The fire is all right, Clovis, you may go."

Clovis withdrew through the inner doorway-Crispin caught a glimpse of a hallway and a kitchen at the end before the door closed again.

"Your daughter lives in Sarantium?" he asked.

"One of them. Yes. She's a prostitute."

Crispin blinked again.

Zoticus looked wry. "Well. Not quite. A dancer. Much the same, if I understand the theatre there. I don't really know. I've never seen her. She writes me, at times. Knows her letters."

Crispin looked at the name on the paper again. Shirin. There was a street name, as well. He glanced up. Trakesian?"

"Her mother was. I was travelling, as I say. Some of my children write to me."

"Some?"

"Many are indifferent to their poor father, struggling in his aged loneliness among the barbarians."

The eyes were amused, the tone a long way from what the words implied. Crispin, out of habit, resisted an impulse to laugh, then stopped fighting it.

"You had an adventurous past."

"Middling so. In truth, I find more excitement now in my studies. Women were a great distraction. I am mostly freed of that now, thank the high gods. I actually believe I have a proper understanding of some of the philosophers now, and that is an adventure of the spirit. You will take one of the birds? As my gift to you?"

Crispin put his drink down abruptly, spilling some on the table. He snatched at the map to keep it dry. "What? Why would you-?"

"Martinian is a dear friend. You are his colleague, his almost-son. You are going a long way to a dangerous place. If you are careful to keep it private, one of the birds will be of assistance. They can see, and hear. And offer companionship, if nothing else.'The alchemist hesitated.'It… pleases me to think one of my creations will go with you to Sarantium, after all."

"Oh, splendid. I am to walk the arcades of the City conversing with a companionable jewelled falcon? You want me blinded in your stead?"

Zoticus smiled faintly. "Not a choice gift, were that so. No. Discretion will be called for, but there are other ways of speaking with them. With whichever of them you can hear inwardly. You have no training. It is not certain, Caius Crispus. Nothing is in my art, I fear. But if you can hear one of the birds, it may become yours. In the act of hearing, a transference can be achieved. We will know soon enough." His voice changed. "All of you, shape a thought for our guest."

"Don't be absurd!" snapped an owl screwed onto a perch by the front door.

"A fatuous notion!" said the yellow-eyed falcon on the high back of Zoticus's chair. Crispin could imagine it glaring at him.

"Quite so," said a hawk Crispin hadn't noticed, from the far side of the room. "The very idea is indecent." He remembered this Jaded voice. From twenty-five years ago. They sounded utterly identical, all of them. He shivered, unable to help himself. The hawk added,'This is a petty thief. Unworthy of being addressed. I refuse to dignify him so."

"That is enough! It is commanded," said Zoticus. His voice remained soft but there was iron in it. "Speak to him, within. Do it now."

For the first time Crispin had a sense that this was a man to be feared. There was a change in the alchemist's hard-worn, craggy features when he spoke this way, a look, a manner that suggested-inescapably-that he had seen and done dark things in his day. And he had made these birds. These crafted things that could see and hear. And speak to him. It came to Crispin, in a rush, exactly what was being proposed. He discovered that his hands were clenched together.

It was silent in the room. Unsure of what to do, Crispin eyed the alchemist and waited.

He heard something. Or thought he did.

Zoticus calmly sipped his drink. "And so? Anything?" His voice was mild again.

There had been no actual sound.

Crispin said, wonderingly, fighting a chill fear, "I thought. well, I believe I did hear… something."

"Which was?"

"I think… it sounded as if someone said, Mice and blood."

There came a shriek of purest outrage from the table by the fire.

"No! No, no, no! By the chewed bones of a water rat, I am not going with him! Throw me in the fire! I'd rather die!"

Linon, of course. The small brown and dark grey sparrow, not the hawk or owl or the imperious yellow-eyed falcon, or even one of the oracular-looking ravens on the untidy bookshelf.

"You aren't even properly alive, Linon, don't be dramatic. A little travel again will be good for you. Teach you manners, perhaps."

"Manners? He sloughs me off to a stranger after all these years and speaks of manners?"

Crispin swallowed and, genuinely afraid of what underlay this exercise, he sent a thought, without speaking: ‘I did not ask for this. Shall I refuse the gift?"

"Pah! Imbecile."

Which did, at least, confirm something.

He looked at the alchemist. "Do you. did you hear what it said to me?"

Zoticus shook his head. His expression was odd. "It feels strangely, I confess. I've only done this once before and it was different then."

"I'm. honoured, I think. I mean, of course I am. But I'm still confused. This was not asked for."

"Go ahead. Humiliate me!"

"I daresay," said Zoticus. He didn't smile now. Nor did he seem to have heard the bird. He toyed with his earthenware cup. From the chairback, the falcon's harsh eyes seemed fixed on Crispin, malevolent and glittering. "You could hardly ask for what you do not comprehend. Nor steal it, like another apple."

"Unkind," Crispin said, controlling his own quick anger.

Zoticus drew a breath. "It was. Forgive me."

"We can undo this, can we not? I have no desire to become enmeshed in the half-world. Do the cheiromancers of Sarantium all have creatures like this? I am a mosaicist. That is all I want to be. It is all I want to do, when I get there. If they let me live."

It was almost all. He had a message to convey if he could. He had undertaken as much.

"I know this. Forgive me. And no, the charlatans at the Imperial Court, or those casting maledictions on chariot racers for the Hippodrome mob cannot do this. I am more or less certain of it."

"None of them? Not a single one? You, alone, of Jad's mortal children on earth can. make creatures such as these birds? If you can do it-" "-why can no one else? Of course. The obvious question." "And the obvious answer is?" Sarcasm, an old friend, never far away of late.

"That it is possible someone has learned this, but unlikely, and I do not believe it has happened this way. I have discovered. what I believe to be the only access to a certain kind of power. Found in my travels, in a… profoundly guarded place and at some risk."

Crispin crossed his arms. "I see. A scroll of chants and pentagrams? Boiled blood of a hanged thief and running around a tree seven times by double moonlight? And if you do the least thing wrong you turn into a frog?"

Zoticus ignored this. He simply looked at Crispin from beneath thick, level brows, saying nothing. After a moment, Crispin began to feel ashamed. He might be unsettled here, this staggering imposition of magic might be unlooked-for and frightening, but it was an offered gift, generous beyond words, and the implications of what the alchemist had actually achieved here..

"If you can do this… if these birds are thinking and speaking with their own… will.. you ought to be the most celebrated man of our age!"

"Fame? A lasting name to echo gloriously down the ages? That would be pleasant, I suppose, a comfort in old age, but no, it couldn't happen… think about it."

"I am.Why not?"

"Power tends to be co-opted by greater power. This magic isn't particularly… intimidating. No half-world-spawned fireballs or death spells. No walking through walls or flying over them, invisible. Merely fabricated birds with… souls and voices. A small thing, but how could I defend myself, or them, if it was known they were here?"

"But why should —?"

"How would the Patriarch in Rhodias, or even the clerics in the sanctuary you are rebuilding outside Varena, take to the idea of pagan magic vesting a soul in crafted birds? Would they burn me or stone me, do you think? A difficult doctrinal decision, that. Or the queen? Would Gisel, rising above piety, not see merit in the idea of hidden birds listening to her enemies? Or the Emperor in Sarantium: Valerius II has the most sophisticated network of spies in the history of the Empire, east or west, they say. What would be my chances of dwelling here in peace, or even surviving, if word of these birds went out?" Zoticus shook his head. "No, I have had years to ponder this. Some kinds of achievement or knowledge seem destined to emerge and then disappear, unknown."

Thoughtful now, Crispin looked at the other man. "Is it difficult?"

"What? Creating the birds? Yes, it was."

"I'm certain of that. No, I meant being aware that the world cannot know what you have done."

Zoticus sipped his tea. "Of course it is difficult," he said at length. Then he shrugged, his expression ironic. "But alchemy always was a secret art, I knew that when I began to study it. I am… reconciled to this. I shall exult in my own soul, secretly."

Crispin could think of nothing to say. Men were born and died, wanted something, somehow, to live after them-beyond the mass burial mound or even the chiselled, too-soon-fading inscription on the headstone of a grave. An honourable name, candles lit in memory, children to light those candles. The mighty pursued fame. An artisan could dream of achieving a work that would endure, and be known to have been one's own. Of what did an alchemist dream?

Zoticus was watching him. "Linon is… a good consequence, now I think on it. Not conspicuous at all, drab, in fact. No jewels to attract attention, small enough to pass for a keepsake, a family talisman. You will arouse no comment. Can easily make up a story."

"Drab? Drab? By the gods. It is enough! I formally request," said Linon, speaking aloud,'to be thrown into the fire. I have no desire to hear more of this. Or of anything. My heart is broken."

Several of the other birds were, in fact, making sounds of aristocratic amusement.

Hesitantly, testing himself, Crispin sent a thought: ‘I don't think he meant any insult. I believe he is. unhappy that this happened."

"You shut up," the bird that could speak in his mind replied bluntly.

Zoticus did indeed look unsettled, notwithstanding his practical words: visibly trying to come to terms with which of the birds his guest seemed to have inwardly heard in the room's deep silence.

Crispin-here only because Martinian had first denied being himself to an Imperial Courier, and then demanded Crispin come to learn about the roads to Sarantium-who had asked for no gift at all, now found himself conversing in his mind with a hostile, ludicrously sensitive bird made of leather and-what? — tin, or iron. He was unsure whether what he most felt was anger or anxiety.

"More of the mint?" the alchemist asked, after a silence.

"I think not, thank you," said Crispin.

"I had best explain a few matters to you. To clarify."

"To clarify. Yes. Please," Crispin said.

"My heart," Linon repeated, in his mind this time, "is broken."

"You shut up," Crispin replied swiftly, with undeniable satisfaction.

Linon did not address him again. Crispin was aware of the bird, though, could almost feel an affronted presence at the edge of his thoughts like a night animal beyond a spill of torchlight. He waited while Zoticus poured himself a fresh cup. Then he listened to the alchemist in careful silence while the sun reached its zenith on an autumn day in Batiara and began its descent towards the cold dark. Metals to gold, the dead to life.

The old pagan who could breathe into crafted birds patrician voice, sight without eyes, hearing without ears, and the presence of a soul, told him a number of things deemed needful, in the wake of the gift he'd given.

Certain other understandings Crispin obtained only afterwards.

"She wants you, the shameless whore! Are you going to? Are you?"

Keeping his expression bland, Crispin walked beside the carried litter of the Lady Massina Baladia of Rhodias, sleekly well-bred wife of a Senior, and decided it had been a mistake to wear Linon on a thong around his neck like an ornament. The bird was going into one of his travelling bags tomorrow, on the back of the mule plodding along behind them.

"You must be so fatigued," the Senator's wife was saying, her voice honeyed with commiseration. Crispin had explained that he enjoyed walking in the open country and didn't like horses. The first was entirely untrue, the second was not. "If only I had thought to bring a litter large enough to carry both of us. And one of my girls, of course… we couldn't possibly ride just alone!" The Senator's wife tittered. Amazingly.

Her white linen chiton, wildly inappropriate for travelling, had-quite unnoticed by the lady, of course-slipped upward sufficiently to reveal a well-turned ankle. She wore a gold anklet, Crispin saw. Her feet, resting on lambswool throws within the litter, were bare this mild afternoon. The toenails were painted a deep red, almost purple. They hadn't been yesterday, in their sandals. She'd been busy last night at the inn, or her servant had been.

"Mice and blood, I'll wager she reeks of scent! Does she? Crispin, does she?"

Linon had no sense of smell. Crispin elected not to reply. The lady did, as it happened, have a heady aroma of spice about her today. Her litter was sumptuous, and even the slaves carrying it and accompanying her were appreciably better garbed-in pale blue tunics and dark blue dyed sandals- than was Crispin. The rest of their party-Massina's young female attendants, three wine merchants and their servants journeying the short distance to Mylasia and then down the coast road, a cleric continuing towards Sauradia, and two other travellers heading for the same healing medicinal waters as the lady-walked or rode mules a little ahead or behind them on the wide, well-paved road. Massina Baladia's armed and mounted escort, also clad in that delicately pale blue-which looked significantly less appropriate on them-rode at the front and back of the column.

None of the party was from Varena itself. None had any reason to know who Crispin was. They were three days out from Varena's walls, still in Batiara and on a busy stretch of road. They had already been forced to step onto the gravel side-path several times as companies of archers and infantry passed them on manoeuvres. There was some need for caution on this road, but not the most extreme sort. The leader of the lady's escort gave every indication of regarding a red-bearded mosaicist as the most dangerous figure in the vicinity.

Crispin and the lady had dined together the night before, in the Imperial Posting Inn.

As a part of their careful dance with the Empire, the Antae had permitted the placement of three such inns along their own road from Sauradia's border to the capital city of Varena, and there were others running down the coast and on the main road to Rhodias. In return, the Empire paid a certain sum of money into the Antae coffers and undertook the smooth carriage of the mails all the way to the Bassanid border in the east.

The inns represented a small, subtle presence of Sarantium in the peninsula. Commerce necessitated accommodations, always.

The others in their company, lacking the necessary Imperial Permits, had made do with a rancid hostel a short distance farther back. The Lady Massina's distant attitude to the artisan who had been trudging along in their party, lacking even a mount, had undergone a wondrous change when the Senator's wife understood that Martinian of Varena was entitled to use the Imperial Inns, and by virtue of a Permit signed by Chancellor Gesius in Sarantium itself-where, it seemed, he was presently journeying in response to an Imperial request. He had been invited to dine with her.

When it had also become clear to the lady, over spit-roasted capons and an acceptable local wine, that this artisan was not unfamiliar with a number of the better people in Rhodias and in the elegant coastal resort of Baiana, having done some pretty work for them, she grew positively warm in manner, going so far as to confide that her journey to the medical sanctuary was for childbearing reasons.

It was quite common, of course, she had added with a toss of her head. Indeed, some silly young things regarded it as fashionable to attend at warm springs or hospices if they were wed a season and not yet expecting. Did Martinian know that the Empress Alixana herself had made several journeys to healing shrines near Sarantium? It was hardly a secret. It had started the fashion. Of course, given the Empress's earlier life-did he know she had changed her name, among. other things? — it was easy enough to speculate what bloody doings in some alley long ago had led her to be unable to give the Emperor an heir. Was it true that she dyed her hair now? Did Martinian actually know the luminaries in the Imperial Precinct? How exciting that must be.

He did not. Her disappointment was palpable, but short-lived. She seemed to have some degree of difficulty finding a place for her sandalled foot that did not encounter his ankle under the table. The capons were followed by an overly sauced fish plate with olives and a pale wine. Over the sweet cheese, figs and grapes, the lady, grown even further confiding, informed her dinner companion that it was her privy belief that the unexpected difficulties she and her august spouse were experiencing had little to do with her.

It was, she added, eyeing him in the firelight of the common room, difficult to test this, of course. She had been willing, however, to make the trip north out of too-boring Rhodias amid the colours of autumn to the well-known hospice and healing waters near Mylasia. One sometimes met-only sometimes, of course-the most interesting people when one travelled.

Did not Martinian find this to be so?

"Check for bedbugs."

"I know that, you officious lump of metal. "He had dined a second time tonight with the lady; they had had a third flask of wine this time. Crispin was aware of the effect of it on himself.

"And talk to me in your head, unless you want people to assume you are mad."

Crispin had been having difficulty with this. It was good advice. So, as it happened, was the first suggestion. Crispin held a candle over the sheets, with the blanket pulled back and managed to squash a dozen of the evil little creatures with his other hand.

"And they call this an Imperial Posting Inn. Hah!"

Linon, Crispin had learned quite early in their journeying together, was not short of opinions or shy with regard to their expression. He could still bring himself up short in a quiet moment with the realization that he was holding extended conversations in his mind with a tempera- mental sparrow-like bird made of faded brown leather and tin, with eyes fashioned from blue glass, and an incongruously patrician Rhodian voice both in his head and when speaking aloud.

He had entered a different world.

He had never really stopped to consider his attitude to what men called the half-world: that space where cheiromancers and alchemists and wise-women and astrologers claimed to be able to walk. He knew-everyone knew-that Jad's mortal children lived in a world that they shared, dangerously, with spirits and daemons that might be indifferent to them, or malevolent, or sometimes even benign, but he had never been one of those who let his every waking moment be suffused with that awareness. He spoke his prayers at dawn, and at sunset when he remembered, though he seldom bothered to attend at a sanctuary. He lit candles on the holy days when he was near a chapel. He paid all due respect to clerics-when the respect was deserved. He believed, some of the time, that when he died his soul would be judged by Jad of the Sun and his fate in the afterlife would be determined by that judgement.

The rest of the time, of late, very privately, he remembered the unholy ugliness of the two plague summers and was deeply, even angrily unsure of such spiritual things. He would have said, if asked a few days ago, that all alchemists were frauds and that a bird such as Linon was a deception to gull rustic fools.

That, in turn, meant denying his own memories of the apple orchard, but it had been easy enough to explain away childhood terrors as trickery, an actor's voice projection. Hadn't they all spoken with the same voice?

They had, but it wasn't a deception after all.

He had Zoticus's crafted bird with him as a companion and-in principle, at least-a guardian for his journey. It sometimes seemed to him that this irascible, ludicrously touchy creature-or creation-had been with him forever.

"I certainly didn't end up with a mild spirit, did I?" he remembered saying to Zoticus as he took his leave from the farmhouse that day.

"None of them are," the alchemist had murmured, a little ruefully. "A constant regret, I assure you. Just remember the command for silence and use it when you must." He'd paused, then added wryly, "You aren't particularly mild yourself. It may be a match."

Crispin had said nothing to that.

He had already used the command several times. In a way it was hardly worth it… Linon was almost intolerably waspish after being released from darkness and silence.

"Another wager" the bird said now, inwardly, "leave the door unlocked and you won't sleep alone tonight."

"Don't be ridiculous!" Crispin snapped aloud. Then, recollecting himself, added silently, "This is a crowded Imperial Inn, she's a Rhodian aristocrat. And," he added peevishly, "you have nothing to wager in any case, you lump of stuff."

"A figure of speech, imbecile. Just leave the door unbolted. You'll see. I'll watch for thieves."

This, of course, was one of the benefits of having the bird, Crispin had already learned. Sleep was meaningless to Zoticus's creation, and as long as he hadn't silenced Linon he could be alerted to anything untoward approaching while he slept. He was irked, though, and the more so because a fabricated bird had roused his temper.

"Why would you possibly assume you have the least understanding of a woman like that? Listen to me: she plays little games during the day or over dinner out of sheer boredom. Only a fool would regard them as more." He wasn't sure why he was so irritated about this, but he was.

"You really don't know anything, do you?" Linon replied. Crispin couldn't sort out the tone this time. "You think boredom stops with the meal? A stable boy understands women better than you. Just keep playing with your little glass chips, imbecile, and leave these judgements to me!"

Crispin spoke the silencing command with some satisfaction, blew out his candle and went to bed, resigned to being night food for the predatory insects he'd missed. It would be much worse, he knew, at the common hostel the others in the party had been forced to continue on towards for the night. An extremely small consolation. He didn't like travelling.

He tossed, turned, scratched where he imagined things biting him, then felt something doing so and swore. After a few moments, surprised at his own irresolution, he got up again, walked quickly across the cold floor, land slid home the bolt on the door. Then he crawled back into the bed. He had not made love to a woman since Ilandra died. He was still awake some time later, watching the shape of the waning blue moon slide across the window, when he heard the handle tried, then a very soft tapping at the door.

He didn't move, or speak. The tapping came again, twice more-light, teasing. Then it stopped, and there was silence again in the autumn night. Remembering many things, Crispin watched the moon leave the window, trailing stars, and finally fell asleep.

He woke to morning noises in the yard below. In the moment he opened his eyes, surfacing from some lost dream, he had a swift, sure realization about Zoticus's bird, and some wonder that it had taken him so long.

He was not greatly surprised to discover, when he went downstairs for watered ale and a morning meal, that the Lady Massina Baladia of Rho-dias, the Senator's wife, and her mounted escorts and her servants had already left, at first daybreak.

There was a mild, unexpected regret here, but it had been almost intolerable to envisage his re-entry into this sphere of mortal life as a coupling with a Jaded Rhodian aristocrat playing bed games on a country night- not even knowing his true name. In another way, it might have been easier that way, but he wasn't.. detached enough for that.

On the road again in the chill early-morning breeze, he soon caught up with the merchants and the cleric who had waited for him at the inn up the road. Settling into the long day's striding, he remembered his realization upon first awakening. He drew a breath, released Linon from silence in the bag on the mule's back, and asked a question.

"How dazzlingly brilliant of you," the bird snapped icily. "She did come last night, didn't she? I was right, wasn't I?"

White clouds were overhead, swift before the north wind. The sky was a light, far blue. The sun, safe returned from its dark journey under the icy cold rim of the world, was rising directly in front of them, bright as a promise. Black crows dotted the stubble of the fields. A pale frost glinted on the brown grass beside the road. Crispin looked at it all in the early light, wondering how he'd achieve that rainbow brilliance of colour and gleaming with glass and stone. Had anyone ever done frost-tipped autumn grass on a dome?

He sighed, hesitated, then replied honestly, "She did. You were right. I locked the door."

"Pah! Imbecile. Zoticus would have kept her busy all night long and sent her back to her own room exhausted."

"I'm not Zoticus."

A feeble answer and he knew it. The bird only laughed sardonically. But he wasn't really up to sparring this morning. Memories were too much with him.

It was colder today, especially when the clouds passed in front of the rising sun. His feet were cold in their sandals; boots tomorrow, he thought. The fields and the vineyards on the north side of the road were bare now, of course, and did nothing to stay the wind. He could see the first dark smudge of forests in the far distance now, north-east: the wild, legendary woods that led to the border and then Sauradia. The road would fork today, south towards Mylasia, where he could have caught a ship earlier in the year for a swift sailing to Sarantium. His slow course overland would angle north, towards that untamed forest, and then east again, the long Imperial road marching along its southernmost edgings.

He slowed a little, opened one of his bags as the mule paced stolidly along over the flawlessly fitted stone slabs of the road, and took out his brown woollen cloak. After a moment, he reached into the bag again and withdrew the bird on its leather thong, dropping it around his neck again. An apology, of sorts.

He'd expected Linon's brittle, waspish tone after the inflicted silence and blindness. He was already growing used to that. What he needed to do now, Crispin thought, closing and retying the bag and then wrapping himself in the cloak, was come to terms with a few other aspects of this journey east under an assumed name, bearing a message from the queen of the Antae for the Emperor in his head, and a creature of the half-world around his neck. And among the things now to be dealt with was the newly apprehended fact that the Grafted bird he was carrying with him was undeniably and emphatically female.

Towards midday, they came to a tiny roadside chapel. In Memory of Clodius Paresis, an inscription over the arched doorway said. With Jad now, in Light.

The merchants and the cleric wanted to pray. Crispin, surprising himself, went in with them while the servants watched the mules and goods outside. No mosaics here. Mosaic was expensive, a luxury. He made the sign of the sun disk before the peeling, nondescript fresco of fair-haired, smooth-cheeked Jad on the wall behind the altar stone, and knelt behind the cleric on the stone floor joining the others in the sunrise rites.

It was rather late in the day, perhaps, but there were those who believed the god was tolerant.

CHAPTER III

Kasia took the pitcher of beer, only slightly watered because the four merchants at the large table were regular patrons, and headed back from the kitchen towards the common room.

"Kitten, when you've done with that, you can attend to our old friend in the room above. Deana will finish your tables tonight." Morax gestured straight overhead, smiling meaningfully. She hated when he smiled, when he was so obviously being pleasant. It usually meant trouble.

This time it almost certainly meant something worse.

The room overhead, directly above the warmth of the kitchen, was reserved for the most reliable-or generous-patrons of the inn. Tonight it held an Imperial Courier from Sarnica named Zagnes, many years on the road, decent in his manner and known to be easy on the girls, sometimes just wanting a warm body in his bed of an autumn or winter night.

Kasia, newest and youngest of the serving girls at the inn, endlessly slated for the abusive patrons, had never been sent to him before. Deana, Gyrene, Khafa-they all took turns when he was staying here, even fought for the chance of a calm night with Zagnes of Sarnica.

Kasia got the rough ones. Fair skinned, as were most of the Inicii, she bruised easily, and Morax was routinely able to extract additional payment from her men for damage done to her. This was an Imperial Posting Inn; their travellers had money, or positions to protect. No one really worried about injuries to a bought serving girl, but most patrons-other than the genuine aristocrats, who didn't care in the least-were unwilling to appear crude or untutored in the eyes of their fellows. Morax was skilled at threatening outraged indignation on behalf of the entire Imperial Posting Service.

If she was being allowed a night with Zagnes in the best room it was because Morax was feeling a disquiet about something concerning her. Or-a new thought-because they didn't want her bruised just now.

For some days, she had seen small gatherings break up and whispering stop suddenly as she entered a room, had been aware of eyes following her as she did her work. Even Deana had stopped tormenting her. It had been ten days, at least, since pig swill had been dumped on the straw of her pallet. And Morax himself had been far too kind-ever since a visit late one night from some of the villagers, walking up the road to the inn under carried torches and the cold stars.

Kasia wiped sweat from her forehead, pushed her yellow hair back from her eyes, and carried the beer out to the merchants. Two of them grabbed at her, front and rear, pushing her tunic up as she poured for them, but she was used to that and made them laugh by pretending to stamp on the nearest one's boot. These were regulars, who paid Morax a tidy private sum for the privilege of staying here without a Permit, and they wouldn't be trouble unless they had much more beer than this.

She finished pouring, slapped away the hand still squeezing her breast-making sure she never stopped smiling-and turned to go. The evening was young, there were dishes and flasks to be served and cleared and cleaned, fires to be kept up. She was being set free of the drudgery, sent up to an easy man in a warm bedroom. Uncertainly, Kasia walked out from the common room into the darker, colder hallway.

A sudden, nauseating fear gripped her as she began climbing the stairs in the guttering candlelight. She had to stop, leaning sideways against the rail to control it. It was quiet here, the noise from the common room muted. Sweat felt cold on her forehead and neck. A trickle ran down her side. She swallowed. A stale, sour taste in her mouth and throat. Her heart was very fast, her breathing shallow; the blurred shadows of trees beyond the unshuttered, smudged window held terrors without name or shape.

She felt like crying for her mother-a childlike panic, unthinking and primitive-but her mother was in a village three weeks'journey north around the vastness of the Aldwood, and it was her mother who had sold her last autumn.

She couldn't pray. Certainly not to Jad, though she'd been brusquely converted with the others in a roadside chapel at the orders of the Kar-chite slaver who'd bought them and taken them south. And prayers to Ludan of the Wood were hopelessly beside the point, given what was to happen soon.

It was supposed to be a virgin, and it had been once, but the world had changed. Sauradia was nominally Jaddite now, a tax-paying province of the Sarantine Empire supporting two army camps and the troops based in Megarium. and though certain of the ancient tribal rites were still quietly observed, and ignored by the Jaddite clerics if they weren't forced to notice them, no one thought it necessary to offer their maiden daughters any more.

Not when a whore from the Posting Inn would do.

It was certain, Kasia thought, gripping the railing, looking out the small window at the night from halfway up the stairs. She felt helpless, and enraged by that. She had a knife, hidden by the smith's forge, but what possible good was a knife? She couldn't even try to run. They were watching her now, and where could a female slave go in any case? Into the woods? Along the road to be hunted with the dogs?

She couldn't see the forest through the streaky glass, but she was aware of it, a presence in the blackness, very near. No deceiving herself. The whispers, the watching, those inexplicable kindnesses, a never-before-seen softness in the eyes of that bitch Deana, the moist hunger in the face of Morax s fat wife, the mistress, looking too quickly away whenever Kasia met her gaze in the kitchen.

They were going to kill her two mornings from now, on the Day of the Dead.

Crispin had used his Permit to take a servant at the first Posting Inn in Sauradia just past the marker stones at the border with Batiara. He was in the Sarantine Empire now, for the first time in his life. He considered taking a second mule for himself, but he really didn't like riding, and his feet were bearing up surprisingly well in the good boots he'd bought. He could lease a small two-wheeled birota and a horse or mule to pull it, but that would mean an outlay, over and above what the Permit allowed him, and they were notoriously uncomfortable, in any case.

Vargos, the hired servant, was a big, silent man, black-haired-unusual for an Inici-with a vivid cross-hatched scar high on one cheek and a staff even heavier than the one Crispin carried. The scar looked like a pagan symbol of some kind; Crispin had no desire to know more about it.

Crispin had refused to bring any of the apprentices with him, despite Martinian's urging. If he was doing this crazed journey under a name not his own to try to remake his life or some such thing, he was not going to do so in the company of a boy from home. He'd quite enough to deal with without bearing the burden of a young life on a dangerous road, to an even more uncertain destination.

On the other hand, he was not going to be an idiot-or an imbecile, as Linon was altogether too fond of saying-about travelling alone. He didn't like being outside the city walls, and this road through western Sauradia, skirting the brooding forest with the wind-scoured mountains; to the south, was not even remotely the same as it had been in densely settled, heavily trafficked Batiara. He'd ascertained that Vargos knew the road to the Trakesian border, sized up the man's obvious strength and experience, and claimed him with the Permit. The Chancellor's office would be debited by the Imperial Post. It was all very efficient. He just" didn't like how black the forest was, north of the road.

The merchants and their wine had forked south well before the border, following the path of Massina Baladia, half a day ahead of them. The decent, good-natured man-had only been going as far as a holy retreat just inside Sauradia. They had prayed together and parted company early of a morning before the cleric turned off the road. Crispin might join up with other travellers heading east-there should be some coming up from Megarium-and would certainly try to do so, but in the meantime, a large, capable person walking with him represented minimal good sense. It was one of the virtues of the Post system: he could claim a man like Vargos and release him at any Posting Inn on the road for travellers going on, or coming back the other way. The Sarantine Empire today might not really be akin to Rhodias as it had been at the apex of its glory, but it wasn't so very far from it, either.

And if Gisel, the young queen of the Antae, was correct, Valerius II wanted to restore the western empire, one way or another.

As far as the Rhodian mosaicist Caius Crispus of Varena was concerned, unhappy and cold in autumn rain, any and all measures that increased the degree of civilized order in places like this were to be vigorously encouraged.

He really didn't like the forest, at all.

It was interesting, the degree of uneasiness he'd felt as the days passed and they walked the road within constant sight of it. He was forced to acknowledge, with some chagrin, that he was even more a man of the city than he'd known himself to be. Cities, for all their dangers, had walls. Wild things-whether animals or men without laws-could generally be assumed to be outside those walls. And so long as one took care not to be abroad alone after dark or enter the wrong alleyway, a purse-snatcher in the market or an overly impassioned holy man strewing spittle and imprecations was the greatest danger one was likely to encounter.

And in cities were buildings, public and private. Palaces, bathhouses, theatres, merchants" homes, apartments, chapels and sanctuaries-with walls and floors and sometimes even domes whereon people with sufficient means sometimes desired mosaics to be designed and set.

A living, for a man of experience and certain skills. There was extremely little call for Crispin's particular gifts in this forest, or the wild lands south of it here. The feuding Sauradian tribes had been a byword for barbaric ferocity since the early days of the Rhodian Empire. Indeed, the worst single defeat a Rhodian army had ever suffered before the slow decline and final overthrow had been not far north of here, when a full legion sent to quell one tribal rising had been trapped between swampland and wood and cut to pieces.

The legions of reprisal had waged war for seven years, according to the histories. They had succeeded. Eventually. Sauradia was not an easy place to fight in phalanx and column. And enemies that melted like spirits into the trees and then dismembered and ate their captives in blood-soaked ceremonies in the drumming, shrouded forests could inspire a certain apprehension in even the most disciplined soldiery.

But the Rhodians had not taken most of the known world under their aegis by being reluctant to employ harsh measures themselves, and they had the resources of an Empire. The trees of the Sauradian woods had ultimately borne the dead bodies of tribal warriors-and their women and small children-with limbs and privates hacked off, hanging from sacred branches by their greased yellow hair.

It was not a history, thought Crispin one morning, calculated to elicit tranquil reflection, however long ago it had taken place. Even Linon had fallen silent today. The dark woods marched beside the road, very near at this point, seemingly endless ahead to the east and when he looked back west. Oak, ash, rowan, beech, other trees he didn't know, leaves fallen or falling. Smudged black smoke rose at intervals: charcoal-burners, working the edgings of the forest. To the south the land swept upwards in a series of ascents towards the barrier of mountains that hid the coastline and the sea. He saw sheep and goats, dogs, smoke from a shepherd's hut. No other sign of human life. It was a grey day, a fine, cold rain falling, the mountain peaks lost under clouds.

Beneath the hood of his travelling cloak, Crispin tried-with only marginal success-to remember why he was doing this.

He attempted to conjure forth bright, multihued images of Sarantium-the fabled glories of the Imperial City, centre of Jad's creation, eye and ornament of the world, as the well-known phrase had it. He couldn't.

It was too far away. Too unknown to him. The black forest and the mist and the cold rain were too oppressively, demandingly present. And the lack of walls, warmth, people, shops, markets, taverns, baths, any man-made images of comfort, let alone beauty.

He was a town person, it was simply the truth. This journey was forcing him to accept, however ruefully, all the associations that carried… of decadence, softness, corruption, overbred luxury. Those last sardonic caricatures of Rhodias before it fell: effete, posturing aristocrats who hired barbarians to fight for them and were helpless when their own mercenaries turned. He and the lady Massina Baladia with her cushioned litter, her exquisite travel garb, her scent, and her painted toenails were more akin than unlike, after all, whatever he might wish to say. Town walls defined the boundaries of Crispin's world as much as hers. What he most wanted right now-if he was honest with himself-was a bath, oiling, a professional massage, then a glass of hot, spiced wine on a couch in a warm room with civilized talk washing over him. He felt anxious and disoriented, exposed out here in this wilderness. And he had a long way to go.

Not so far to the next bed, however. A steady pace through the steady rain, with only a brief halt for a midday piece of cheese and bread and a flask of sour wine at a smoky, mitten-smelling tavern in a hamlet, brought them by late afternoon near to the next Imperial Inn. The rain had even stopped by then, the clouds breaking up to south and west, though not over the woods. He saw the tops of some of the mountains. The sea would be beyond. He might have sailed, had the courier come in time. A wasted thought.

He might still have a family, had the plague bypassed their house.

Behind them, as he and Vargos and the mule went through another cluster of houses, the sun appeared for the first time that day, pale and low, lighting the mountain slopes, underlighting the heavy clouds above the peaks, glinting coldly in pools of rainwater in the ditch by the road. They passed a smithy and bakehouse and two evil-looking hostelries in the village, ignoring the scrutiny of the handful of people gathered and i coarse invitation from a gaunt whore in the laneway by the second inn.

Not for the first time Crispin offered thanks for the Permit folded in the leather purse at his belt.

The Posting Inn was east of the village, exactly as indicated on his map. Crispin liked his map. He took great comfort in the fact that as he walked places appeared each day when and where the map said they should. It was reassuring.

The inn was large, had the usual stable, smithy, inner courtyard, and no piles of rotting refuse in the doorway. He glimpsed a well-tended vegetable and herb garden beyond a gate towards the back, sheep in the meadow beyond and a sturdy shepherd's hut. Long live the Sarantine Empire, Crispin thought wryly, and the glorious Imperial Post. Smoke rising from broad chimneys offered the promise of warmth within.

"We'll stay two nights," Linon said.

The bird was on the thong around his neck again. She hadn't spoken since morning. The blunt, sudden words startled Crispin.

"Indeed? Why? Your little feet are tired?"

"Mice and blood. You are too stupid to be allowed out of doors without a nursemaid. Remember the calendar and what Zoticus told you. You're in Sauradia, imbecile. And tomorrow is the Day of the Dead."

Crispin had, in fact, forgotten, and cursed himself for it. It irritated him, however unreasonably, when the bird was right.

"So what happens?" he demanded sourly. "They boil me into soup if I'm found abroad? Bury my bones at a crossroad?"

Linon didn't bother to reply.

Feeling obscurely at a disadvantage, Crispin left Vargos to see to the mule and his goods while he strode past two barking dogs and a scatter of chickens in the sodden courtyard. He walked through the doorway into the front room of the inn to show his Permit and see if a hot bath could be had immediately for coinage of the Empire.

The entranceway was encouragingly clean, large, high-ceilinged. Beyond it, through a door to the left, the common room had two fires going. A cheerful buzz of speech in many accents drifted out to him. After the wet, cold road all day it was undeniably alluring. He wondered if someone in this kitchen knew how to cook. There had to be deer and boar perhaps even the elusive Sauradian bison in these woods; a well-seasoned platter of game and a halfway adequate flask or two of wine would go some way to easing him.

It occurred to Crispin, looking around, noting the swept, dry tiling on the floor, that this inn might indeed be a perfectly decent place to rest his feet for two days and nights. Zoticus had been unambiguous in advising him to stay in one place and indoors on the Day of the Dead. For all his sardonic attitude to such things, it wouldn't do to be foolish merely to win a battle with an artificial bird. If nothing else, he thought suddenly, Linon was proof that the half-world was real.

Not an entirely comforting reflection.

He waited for the innkeeper, blessed Permit in hand, letting himself relax already into the sensation of being dry with the near prospect of warmth and wine. He heard a sound from the back of the inn, behind the stairs, and turned, a civil expression ready. He was aware that he was hardly distinguished-looking at the moment, nor did travelling on foot with one temporarily hired servant commend him as affluent, but a Permit with his name elegantly written upon it-or Martinian's name-and the privy Seal and signature of no less a figure than the Imperial Chancellor could make him instantly formidable, he'd discovered.

It wasn't the innkeeper who came from backstairs. Only a thin serving girl in a stained, knee-length brown tunic, barefoot, yellow-haired, carrying a stoppered jug of wine too heavy for her. She stopped dead when she saw him, staring openly, wide-eyed.

Crispin smiled briefly, ignoring the presumption of her gaze. "What do they call you, girl?"

She swallowed, looked down, mumbled, "Kitten."

He felt himself grinning crookedly. "Why that?"

She swallowed again, seemed to be having trouble speaking. "Don't know," she managed finally. "Someone thought I looked like one."

Her eyes never left the floor, after that first naked stare. He realized he hadn't spoken to anyone, other than some instructions to Vargos, all day. Was odd, he didn't know how he felt about that. He did know he I wanted a bath, not to be making talk with a serving girl.

"You don't. What's your proper name, then?" She looked up at that, and then down again. "Kasia." "Well, Kasia, run find the "keeper for me. I'm wet outside and dry within. And never dream of telling me there are no rooms to be had."

She didn't move. Continued to stare at the floor, clutching at the heavy wine jug with both hands beneath it. She was quite young, very thin, wide-set blue eyes. From a northern tribe, obviously. Inicii, or one of the others. He wondered if she'd understood him, his jest; they'd been speaking Rhodian. He was about to repeat his request in Sarantine, without the witticism, when he saw her draw a breath.

"They are going to kill me tomorrow," was what she said, quite clearly this time. She looked up at him. Her eyes were enormous, deep as a forest. "Will you take me away?"

Zagnes of Sarnica had not been willing, at all.

"Are you simple?" the man had cried the night before. In his agitation he had pushed Kasia right out of the bed to land sprawling on the floor. It was cold, even with the kitchen fires directly below. "What in Jad's holy name would I do with a bought girl from Sauradia?"

"I would do anything you like," she'd said, kneeling beside the bed, fighting back tears.

"Of course you would. What else would you do? That is not the point." Zagnes was quite exercised.

It wasn't the request to buy her and take her away. Imperial Couriers were used to such pleas. It must have been her reason. The very immediate, particular reason. But she'd had to tell him… otherwise there was no cause at all for him to even consider it, among all the usual requests. He was said to be a kindly man.

Not enough so, it seemed. Or not foolish enough. The courier was white-faced; she had given him a genuine fright. A balding, paunchy man, no longer young. Not cruel at all, merely refusing prudently to involve himself in the under-the-surface life of a Sauradian village, even if it involved the forbidden sacrifice of a girl to a pagan god. Perhaps especially so. What would happen if he reported this story to the clerics, or at the army camp east of them? An investigation, questions asked, probably painful questions-even fatal ones-for these were matters of holy faith. Stringent measures to follow against resurgent paganism? Fulminating clerics, soldiers quartered in the village, punitive taxes imposed? Morax and others might be punished; the innkeeper could be relieved of his position, his nose slit, hands cut off.

And no more of the best treatment, the warmest rooms at this inn or any of the others in Sauradia for Zagnes of Sarnica. Word travelled swiftly along the main roads, and no one, anywhere, liked an informer. He was an Imperial Officer, but he spent most of his days-and nights-far from Sarantium.

And all this for a serving girl? How could she possibly have expected him to help?

She hadn't. But she didn't want to die, and her options were narrowing by the moment.

"Get back in bed," Zagnes had said brusquely. "You'll freeze on the floor and then you're no good to me at all. I'm always cold, these days," he'd added, with a contrived laugh. "Too many years on the road. Rain and wind get right inside my bones. Time to retire. I would, if my wife wasn't at home." Another false, unconvincing laugh. "Girl, I'm sure you are frightened by nothing. I've known Morax for years. You girls are always afraid of shadows when this silly. when this day comes round."

Kasia climbed silently back into the bed and slipped under the sheet, naked, next to him. He withdrew from her a little. No surprise, she thought bitterly. Would any wise man bed a girl marked for Ludan of the Wood? Her sacred death might pass straight into him.

That wasn't it, though. It seemed Zagnes was a more prosaic sort. "Your feet are cold, girl. Rub them together or something. And your hands," he said. "I'm always cold."

Kasia heard herself make an odd sound; half a laugh, half a renewed struggle with panic. She rubbed her feet obediently against each other, trying to warm them so she could warm the man beside her. She heard the wind outside, a branch tapping against the wall. The clouds had come with rain. No moons.

She'd spent the night with him. He hadn't put a hand on her. Stayed close, curled up like a child. She'd lain awake listening to the wind and the branch and the fall of rain. Morning would come, and then night, and the next day she would die. It was amazing to her that she could shape this sequence, this thought. She wondered if it would be possible to kill Deana before they bound her or bludgeoned her unconscious. She wished she could pray, but she hadn't been raised believing m Jad of the Sun, and none of his invocations came easily to her. On the other hand, how did the sacrifice pray to the god to whom she was being offered? What could she ask of Ludan? That she be dead before they cut her in pieces? Or whatever they did here in the south. She didn't even know.

She was up well before the sleeping courier in the black, damp chill before dawn. She pulled on her underclothes and tunic, shivering, and! went down to the kitchen. It was still raining. Kasia heard sounds from! the yard: the stableboys readying the changes of mounts for the Imperial Couriers and the horses and mules of those who had brought their own or claimed them. She gathered an armful of firewood from the back room, returned for two more, and then knelt to build up the kitchen fire. Deana came down, yawning, and went to do the same for the front-room fires. She had a new bruise on one cheek, Kasia saw.

"Sleep well, bitch?" Deana said as she walked by. "You'll never get that one again, trust me."

"He told me you were as sloppy below as you are above," Kasia murmured, not bothering to turn. She wondered if Deana would hit her. She had firewood to hand.

But they didn't want her bruised, or marred in any way. It might almost have been amusing… she could say whatever she wanted today, without fear of a blow.

Deana stood still for a moment, then went past without touching her.

They were watching her closely. Kasia had been made aware of it when he snatched a moment from emptying the chamber-pots to stand on the norch in back of the inn to breathe the cold, wet air. The mountains were wrapped in mist. It was still raining. Very little wind now. The chimney smoke went straight up and disappeared in the greyness. She could barely see the orchard and the sheep on the slopes. Sounds were muffled.

But Pharus the stablemaster was casually leaning against a pillar at the far end of the porch, whittling at a wet stick with his knife, and Rugash, the old shepherd, had left his flock to the boys and was standing in the open doorway of the hut beyond the orchard. When he saw her glance at him he turned away and spat through the gap in his teeth into the mud.

They actually thought she might run. Where could a slave girl run? Barefoot up the mountain slopes? Into the Aldwood? Would a death by exposure or animals be better? Or would daemons or the dead find her first and claim her soul forever? Kasia shivered. A wasted fear: she would never even make it to the forest or the hills, and they'd track her if she did. They had the dogs.

Khafa appeared in the open doorway behind her. Without turning, Kasia knew her step.

"I tell mistress, you get whipping of idleness," she said. She'd been ordered to speak nothing but Rhodian, to learn it adequately.

"Fuck yourself," Kasia said without force. But she turned and went in, walking straight past Khafa, who was probably the most decent of them all.

She put all the chamber-pots in their rooms, going up and down and up and down the stairs, and then went back into the kitchen to finish with the dishes of the morning. The fire was too low; you were beaten or locked in the wine cellar among the rats if your fire was too low-or too high, wasting wood. She built it up. The smoke stung tears into her eyes. She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands.

She had that blade hidden in the smith's shed by the stables. She decided she would go out for it later in the day. She could use it on herself tonight, if nothing else. Deny them what they wanted. A kind of triumph, that.

She never got the chance. Another group of merchants came in, stopping early because of the rain. They had no Permits, of course, but paid Morax, after the usual quiet exchange, for the right to stay illegally. They sat by one of the fires in the common room and drank a considerable amount of wine very quickly. Then three of them wanted girls to pass a wet afternoon. Kasia went up with one of them, a Karchite; Deana and Syrene took the others. The Karchite smelled of wine, wet fur, fish. He put her face down on the bed as soon as they entered the room and pushed up her tunic, not bothering to take it offor his own clothing. When he finished he fell immediately asleep, sprawled across her. Kasia squirmed out from beneath him. She looked out the window. The rain was easing; it would stop soon.

She went downstairs. The Karchite was snoring loudly enough to be heard in the hallway; she'd no excuse for lingering. Morax, crossing through the front room, looked closely at her as she came down-checking for bruises, no doubt-and gestured to the kitchen wordlessly. It was time to begin readying dinner. Another cluster of men were already in the common room, drinking. The inn would be crowded tonight. Tomorrow had people nervous, excited, wanting a drink and company. Through the archway Kasia saw three of the villagers with a fourth glass at their table. Morax had been with them.

Deana came down a little later, walking carefully, as if something hurt her inside. They stood opposite each other, slicing potatoes and onions, laying out olives in small bowls. The mistress was watching them; neither spoke. Morax's wife beat the girls for talking while they worked. She said something to the cook. Kasia didn't hear what it was. She was aware that the mistress kept looking at her. Keeping her head down, she carried out the bowls of olives and baskets of small bread from the bakehouse and set them on the tables beside the jars of oil. This was a Posting Inn; amenities were offered-for a price paid. The three villagers became engaged in animated talk as soon as she walked in. None of them looked up as she gave them their olives and bread. The two fires were low, but that was Deana's job.

In the kitchen the cook was cutting up chickens now and dropping pieces in the pot with the potatoes and onions for a stew. Already there wasn't enough wine to hand. A wet, cold day. Men drank. At a nod from the mistress, Kasia went towards the back again to the wine storage, taking the key. She unlocked and pulled up the heavy, hinged door set in the floor and hoisted a jug from the cold, shallow cellar. She remembered that when Morax had bought her from the trader a year ago she hadn't been able to lift them out. They had beaten her for that. The large, stoppered jug was still heavy for her and she was awkward with it. She locked the cellar and came back through the hallway and saw a man standing alone in the front room by the door.

It was the wild look of him, she decided later. The full red beard, disordered hair when he pushed back the hood of his muddy cloak. He had large, capable-looking hands with red hairs visible on the backs of them, and his soaked brown outer garment was bunched up at his waist, hoisted above his knees and belted for hard striding. Expensive boots. A heavy staff. On this road of merchant parties and civil servants, uniformed army officers and Imperial Couriers, this solitary traveller reminded her of one of the hard men of her own distant, northern world.

There was an extreme irony to this, of course, but she had no way of knowing that.

He was standing alone, no companion or servant in sight, and there was no one nearby, amazingly, for this one moment. He spoke to her in Rhodian. She barely heard him or the replies she managed to mumble. About her name. She stared at the floor. There was an odd sensation of roaring in her ears, like a wind in the room. She was afraid she would fall down, or drop the wine jug, shattering it. It occurred to her, suddenly, that it didn't matter if she did. What could they do to her?

"They are going to kill me tomorrow," she said.

She looked up at him. Her heart was pounding like a northern drum. "Will you take me away?"

He didn't recoil like Zagnes, or stare in shock or disbelief. He looked at her very closely. His eyes narrowed; they were blue and cold.

"Why?" he said, almost harshly.

Kasia felt tears coming. She fought them. The… the Day of the Dead," she managed. Her mouth felt full of ashes. "The. because of the oak god… they…"

She heard footsteps. Of course. Time had run. Never enough time. She might have died of the plague at home, as her father and brother had. Or of starvation in the winter that followed, had her mother not sold her for food. She had been sold, though. She was here. A slave. Time had run. She stopped abruptly, stared straight down at the floor, gripping the heavy wine. Morax walked through the arched door from the common room. "About time, "keeper," said the red-bearded man calmly. "Do you normally keep patrons waiting alone in your front room?"

"Kitten!" roared Morax. "You little bitch, how dare you not tell me we had a distinguished guest?" Her own eyes down, Kasia imagined his practised gaze assessing the unkempt man in his front room. Morax switched to his formal voice. "Good sir, this is an Imperial Inn. You do know that Permits are required."

"I rely upon it to ensure fellow guests of some respectability," said the man coolly. Kasia watched them, from the corners of her eyes. He was not a northerner, of course. Not with that accent. She was such a fool, sometimes. He had spoken Rhodian, was regarding Morax bleakly. He glanced through the archway at the crowded common room. "It appears that a surprising number of Permit holders are abroad on a wet day, so late in the year. I congratulate you, "keeper. Your welcome must be exceptionally gracious."

Morax flushed. "You have a Permit then? I am delighted to welcome you, if that is so."

"It is. And I wish to see your delight made extremely tangible. I want the warmest room you have for two nights, a clean pallet for my man wherever you put the servants, and hot water, oil, towels, and a bathtub carried to my room immediately. I will bathe before I dine. I will consult with you as to the food and wine while the bath is being prepared. And I want a girl to oil and wash me. This one will do."

Morax looked stricken. He was good at that. "Oh dear, oh dear! We are just now preparing the evening meal, good sir. As you see, the inn is crowded today and we have far too little staff. I am grieved to say that we cannot accommodate bathing until later. This is merely a humble country inn, good sir. Kitten, get that wine into the kitchen. Now!"

The red-bearded man lifted a hand. He held a paper there. And a coin, Kasia saw. She lifted her head. "You have not yet asked for my Permit, "keeper. An oversight. Do read it. You will no doubt recognize the signature and the Seal of the Chancellor himself, in Sarantium. Of course, a great many of your patrons probably have Permits personally signed by Gesius."

Morax went from red-faced to bone white in a moment. It was almost amusing, but Kasia was afraid she was about to drop the wine. Permits were signed by Imperial functionaries in various cities or by junior officers at army camps, not by the Imperial Chancellor. She felt herself gaping. Who was this man? She shifted her grip beneath the wine jug. Her arms were trembling with the weight. Morax reached out and took the paper-and the coin. He unfolded the Permit and read, his mouth moving with the words. He looked up, unable to resist staring. His colour was slowly coming back. The coin had helped. "You. your servants you said are outside, good my lord?" "Just the one, taken at the border to get me to Trakesia. There are reasons why it is useful to Gesius and the Emperor for me to travel without display. You run an Imperial Inn. You will understand." The red-bearded man smiled briefly, and then held a finger to his lips.

Gesius. The Chancellor. This man had named him by name, and had a Permit with his privy Seal and signature.

Kasia did begin to pray then, silently. To no god by name, but with all her heart. Her arms were still trembling. Morax had ordered her to the kitchen. She turned to go.

She saw him give the Permit back. The coin was gone. Kasia had never yet learned to follow the motion with which Morax palmed such offerings. He reached out, stopped her with a hand on the shoulder.

"Deana!" he barked, as he saw her walking through the common room. Deana quickly set down her armful of firewood and hurried over. "Take this jug to the kitchen, and tell Breden to carry the largest bathtub to the room above it. Kitten, you will take hot water from the kettle up with Breden. Immediately. The two of you will fill the bath. You will run as you do so, to keep it hot. Then you will attend upon his lordship, here. If he complains in the least regard you will be locked in the wine cellar for the night. Am I understood?"

"Do not," said the red-bearded man quietly, "call me your lordship, if you will. I travel this way for a reason, recall?"

"Of course," said Morax, cringing. "Of course! Forgive me! But what shall…?"

"Martinian will do," said the man. "Martinian of Varena."

"Mice and blood! What are you doing?"

"I'm not sure," Crispin replied honestly. "But I need your help. Does her story sound true to you?"

Linon, after that first ferocity, grew instantly subdued. After an unexpected silence, she said, "It does, in fact. What is more true is that we must keep entirely out of this. Crispin, the Day of the Dead is not a thing to meddle with." She never used his name. Imbecile was her preferred form of address.

"I know. Bear with me. Help, if you can."

He looked at the pudgy, slope-shouldered innkeeper and said aloud, "Martinian will do. Martinian of Varena." He paused and added confidingly, "And I will thank you for your discretion."

"Of course!" cried the innkeeper. "My name is Morax, and I am entirely at your service, my… Martinian." He actually winked. A greedy, petty man.

"The best room is over the kitchen," Linon said silently. "He is doing what you asked."

"You know this inn?"

"I know most of them on this road, imbecile. You are taking us into perilous waters."

"I'm sailing to Sarantium. Of course I am," Crispin replied wryly, in silence. Linon gave an inward snort and was still. Another girl, with a purpling bruise on one cheek, had taken the wine jug from the yellow-haired one. Both of them hurried away.

"May I suggest our very best Candarian red wine with your dinner?" the innkeeper said, gripping his own hands in the way all innkeepers seemed to have. "There is a modest surcharge, of course, but…"

"You have Candarian? That will be fine. Bring it unmixed, with a jug of water. What is dinner, friend Morax?"

"Aren't we the lordly one!"

"We have some choice country sausages of our own making. Or a stew of chicken, even now being prepared."

Crispin opted for the stew.

On the way up to the room over the kitchen he tried to understand why he'd done what he'd just done. No clear answer came. In fact, he hadn't done anything. Yet. But it occurred to him, with something near to actual pain, that he'd last seen that huge-eyed look of terror in his older daughter's face, when her mother lay vomiting blood before she died. He'd been unable to do anything. Enraged, nearly insane with grief. Helpless.

"They perform this abomination all over Sauradia?"

He was naked in the metal tub in his room, knees drawn up to his chest. The largest tub wasn't particularly large. The yellow-haired girl had oiled him, not very competently, and was now scrubbing his back with a rough cloth, for want of any strigil. Linon lay on the window-sill.

"No. No, my lord. Only here at the southing of the Old Wood… Aid-wood, we say. and at the northern edge. There are two oak groves sacred to Ludan. The… forest god." Her voice was low, close to a whisper. Sound carried through these walls. She spoke Rhodian acceptably, though not easily. He switched to Sarantine again. "You are Jaddite, girl?"

She hesitated. T was brought to the Light last year." By the slave trader, no doubt. "And Sauradia is Jaddite, is it not?" Another hesitation. "Yes, my lord. Of course, my lord." "But these pagans still take young girls and… do whatever they do to them? In a province of the Empire?" "Crispin.You are better not knowing this."

"Not in the north, my lord," said the girl. She scrubbed the cloth across his ribs. "In the north a thief or a woman taken in adultery… someone who has already forfeited their life is hanged on the god's tree. Only hanged. Nothing… worse."

"Ah. A milder barbarism. I see. And why is it different here? No thieves or adulterous women to be had?"

"I don't know." She did not react to his sarcasm. He was being unfair, he knew. "I'm sure it isn't that, my lord. But… it may be that Morax uses this to keep peace with the village. He… allows travellers without Permits to stay, especially in autumn and winter. He's wealthy because of it. The village inns suffer. Perhaps this is his way of making it up to them? He gives one of his slaves. For Ludan?"

"Enough. It is blindingly obvious no one has ever taught you how to give a rubdown. Jad's blood! An Imperial Inn without a strigil? Disgraceful. Get me a dry towel, girl." Crispin was aware of a familiar, hard anger within him and struggled to keep his voice down. "A fine reason to kill a slave, of course. Relations with the neighbours."

She rose and hurriedly fetched a towel from the bed-the excuse for a towel they had sent up. This was not his bathhouse in Varena. The room itself was nondescript but of decent size, and some warmth did seem to be rising from the kitchen below. He had already noted that the door had one of the newer iron locks, opened with a copper key. The merchants would like that. Morax knew his business, it seemed, both the licit and the illicit sides of it. He was probably wealthy, or on the way to it.

Crispin controlled his anger, thinking hard. "I was correct down below? There are people here tonight without Permits?"

He stood up and stepped, dripping, out of the small tub. She was flushed from his rebuke, anxious, visibly afraid. It only made him more angry. He took the towel, rubbed his hair and beard, then wrapped himself against the cold. Then he swore, bitten by some crawling creature in the towel.

She stood by, hands awkwardly at her sides, eyes downcast. "Well?" he demanded again. "Answer. Was I correct?"

"Yes, my lord." Speaking Sarantine, which she clearly understood more readily, she sounded intelligent for her station, and there was life in the blue eyes when the terror was at bay. "Most of them are illegal. Autumn is a quiet time. If the taxing officers or soldiers come he bribes them, and the Imperial Couriers are back and forth too often to complain… so long as they are not put out by the other patrons. Morax takes good care of the couriers."

"I'm sure he does. I know that kind of man. All for a price."

Absently, Crispin nodded his agreement with the bird and then collected himself. He began to dress. Dry clothes from the satchel they had brought up for him. His wet outer garments had been left to dry by a downstairs fire.

"Quiet, Linon. I'm thinking!"

"May all the powers gather to protect us!"

It had grown gradually easier to ignore this sort of thing over the past little while. Something in Linon was peculiar today, however. Crispin put that away for later, along with the rather deeper question of why he was involving himself in this. Slaves died all over the Empire every day, were abused, whipped, sold-made into sausages. Crispin shook his head: was he really so simple that the ridiculous association of a terrified girl with his daughter was drawing him into a world that had no safe place for him at all? Another hard question. For later.

Back in the days when he still enjoyed things, Crispin had always had a puzzle-solving mind. In work, in play. Designing a wall mosaic, gambling at his bathhouse. Now, as he dressed quickly in the twilight chill, he found himself engaged in slotting pieces of information like tesserae within his mind to make a picture. He turned it, tilted it like glass to catch angles of light.

"What will they do to her?" He asked it impulsively.

Linon was still for so long this time he thought the bird was ignoring him. He put on his sandals, waiting. The voice in his mind when it came was cold, uninflected, unlike anything he had heard before from her.

"She will have the juice of poppies in the morning, with whatever she drinks. She will be given to whoever comes for her. From the village, probably. They will take her away. Sometimes they mate them with an animal, for the sake of the fields and the hunters, sometimes the men do it themselves, one after another. They wear masks then, of animals. After, a priest of Ludan cuts out her heart. He may be a smith, a baker in the village. The innkeeper downstairs. We would not know. it is considered a good omen if she lives until the heart is removed. It is buried in the fields. They peel her skin from her and bum it, as the dross of life. Then she is hanged by her hair from the holy oak at the moment the sun sets, for Ludan to take as his own."

"Holy Jad! You can't be-"

"Be silent! Imbecile! I told you, you were better off not knowing!"

The girl had looked up, startled. Crispin glared at her and her glance instantly dropped away, a different sort of fear in her now.

Sickened, unbelieving, Crispin began worrying the puzzle again with a part of his mind, struggling for calm. Turning pieces of glass to find the light. Even a dim, precarious light, like candles in a breeze or a slant of winter sun through an arrow slit.

‘I can't let them do this to her," he said inwardly to Linon.

"Ah! Let sound the soldiers" drums! Cams Crispus of Varena, bold hero of a later age! You can't? I don't see why not. They will only find someone else. And kill you for trying to interfere. Who are you, artisan, to step between a god and his sacrifice?"

Crispin had finished dressing. He sat down on the bed again. It creaked.

‘I don't know how to answer that."

"Of course you don't," said Linon.

The girl whispered, "My lord. I will do anything you like, always."

"What else does a slave do?" he snapped, distracted. She flinched, as if struck. He drew a breath.

‘I need your help," he said again to the bird. The puzzle had taken a shape, poor though it might be. He rocked back and forth a little, creaking the bed. "Here's what I want to happen.»

A few moments later he explained to the girl what steps she, in her turn, had to take if she wanted to live through the day to come. He made it sound as if he knew what he was doing. What became almost intolerable was the look that entered her eyes as he spoke and she understood that he was going to try to save her. She wanted to survive, so much. It burned in her, this desire to live.

He had told Martinian, back home, that he felt no real desire for anything, not even life. Perhaps, Crispin thought, that made him the perfect man for the folly of this.

He sent the girl downstairs. She knelt in front of him first, looked as if she wanted to say something, but he quelled that with a glance and gestured to the door. After she left he sat for another moment, then stood up and began attending to what needed to be prepared in the room.

"Are you angry?" he asked Linon suddenly, surprising himself.

"Yes," said the bird, after a moment.

Will you’d tell me why?"

"No."

Will you help me?"

‘I am a lump of leather and metal, as someone once said. You can render me blind, deaf, and silent with a thought. What else can I do?"

Going down the stairs towards the noise and warmth of the common room, Crispin glanced outside. It was full dark outside, the forest lost to sight in the black. Clouds again, no moons or stars to be seen. He ought to have been going down with no more on his mind than the anticipation of a good red wine from Candaria and some modest hopes for the stew. Instead, every shadow, every movement in the shadows beyond the streaked windows, carried an aura of dread. It is considered a good omen if she lives until the heart is removed.

He was committed, just about. He carried the copper key at his belt, but he had left the door to his room ajar, like an ineffectual Rhodian fool unused to the harsh realities of travel, the real dangers of the road.

It had become clear that the red-bearded Rhodian drinking and even sharing a steadily replenished quantity of expensive wine was travelling all the way to Sarantium with a Permit signed by the Imperial Chancellor himself. The entire common room knew it by now. The man kept dropping the name of Gesius into every third sentence. It would have been irritating, had he not been so genial. and generous. It appeared he was an artisan of some sort, a soft, city fellow summoned to help with one of the Emperor's projects.

Thelon of Megarium considered himself adept at sizing up such men, I and the opportunity they represented.

For one thing, the artisan-Martinian, he'd named himself-was quite evidently not carrying his purse. Which meant that the Permit, and whatever moneys he had been advanced or had carried with him from Batiara-obviously a sufficient sum to allow the real indulgence of Candarian wine-were not on his person, unless he'd stuffed them in his underclothes. Thelon grinned behind his hands at the thought of a crumpled, shit-smeared paper being presented at the next Posting Inn. No, the Imperial Permit was not in Martinian's clothing, he'd wager a good deal.

Or if he'd had a good deal to wager, he would have. Thelon was without resources and attached to his uncle's mercantile party only out of the goodness of his uncle's heart-as his uncle was prone to remind him. They were on their way home to Megarium, having made some useful transactions at the military camp towards Trakesia where the Fourth and the First Sauradian legions were based. Useful for Uncle Erytus, that is. Thelon had no direct interest in any profits. He wasn't even being paid. He was here merely to learn the route, his uncle had said, and the people to be dealt with, and to show he could conduct himself properly among a class of folk better than waterfront rabble.

If he proved a decently quick study, Uncle Erytus had allowed, he might be permitted to come into the business at a fair salary and lead some minor trading expeditions himself. Eventually, perhaps, after time had run and maturity had demonstrated itself, he might become a partner with his uncle and cousins.

Thelon's mother and father had showered Uncle Erytus with abject, embarrassing gratitude. Thelon's creditors, including several shit-faced dice players in a certain caupona by the harbour, had declined to express similar enthusiasm.

All things considered, Thelon had to admit that this had been a usefully timed journey away from home, though the weather was ghastly and his pious uncle and bloodless cousins took the sunrise invocations too seriously by more than half and frowned at the very mention of whores. Thelon had been actively pondering how to arrange a quick tension-relieving encounter with their pretty blond serving girl tonight, when the artisan's voluble indiscretions at the next table had steered his thoughts in another direction entirely.

Certain hard facts were unfortunately inescapable. He was going to be home in a few too-short days. There had been an intimation from some parties that if he wished to continue enjoying the use and comfort of his lees he had best be prepared to make a significant payment towards eliminating his dicing debt. Thelon's uncle, as mulishly stupid about a little gambling as he was about girls, was not about to advance him any sums. That much had become obvious, despite Uncle Erytus's almost reluctant good humour after his successful transactions in boots and cloaks and whatever for the soldiers, and the purchase of crudely carved religious artifacts in a town east of the army camp. Trakesian wooden sun disks, he'd informed Thelon, were much in demand in Megarium, and even more so across the bay in Batiara. There was a good profit to be made, as much as fifteen per cent, after all expenses. Thelon had heroically refrained from yawning.

He had also decided, long before this, not to point out that his uncle's piety and scruples appeared not to make him averse to bribing innkeepers-all of whom appeared to know Erytus well-to allow them to stay illicitly at a sequence of Imperial Inns along the road. Not that he was complaining, mind you, but there was a principle here, somewhere.

"Would it be a very great presumption," Uncle Erytus was now saying, leaning towards the red-bearded man, "to ask to be honoured with a glimpse of the illustrious Permit you are honoured with?" Thelon cringed at the fawning, unctuous language. His uncle, licking someone's boots, was an ugly sight.

The artisan's face darkened. "You don't think I have it?" he growled, affronted.

Thelon lifted a hand quickly, to hide another smirk. His uncle, drinking a polite cup of the other man's Candarian, flushed red as the wine. "No, not at all! I am sure you… of course you… it is just that I've never actually seen the Seal or the signature of the august Chancellor Gesius. So celebrated a man. Three Emperors served! You would be honouring me, good sir! A glimpse… the handwriting of so glorious a figure… an example for my sons."

His uncle, Thelon reflected sourly, had all the social-climbing traits one might expect in a modestly successful provincial merchant. He would endlessly regale his family with the unspeakably trivial story of this Permit if he saw it, and would probably find a religious moral to impose upon them, too. Virtue, the rewards thereof. Thelon diverted himself by imagining just what sort of example a eunuch was for his cousins.

"S'all right," the Batiaran artisan was saying with a lordly gesture that nearly toppled his latest flask of wine. "Show you tomorrow. Permit's up'n the room. The best room. Over the kitchen. Thash mush too far away t'night!" He laughed, finding himself extremely amusing, it seemed. Uncle Erytus, visibly relieved, also laughed loudly. He had a terrible, unconvincing laugh, Thelon decided. The red-bearded man stood up, swayed towards their table, poured again for Erytus. He lifted the flask in unsteady inquiry; Thelon's cousins hastily covered their glasses and so he, of necessity, had to do the same.

It was, quite abruptly, too much to endure. Candarian on offer and he was forced to decline? And here he was, in the midst of some utterly unholy nowhere, without any funds at all and only a few days from an encounter that placed his legs-and Jad knew what else-at more than some risk. Thelon made his decision. He'd just had a confirmation of his earlier guess in any case. The man was such a fool.

"My excuses, Uncle," Thelon said, standing, a hand at his belly. Too much of the sausage. Must purge myself, I fear."

"Moderation," said his uncle predictably, a finger lifted in admonition, "is a virtue at table, as elsewhere."

"I agree" said the fatuous artisan, sloshing his wine.

This, Thelon decided, heading towards the archway to the shadowed front room, was actually going to be a pleasure. He didn't go to the latrine across the hall. He went up the stairway, quietly. He was quite good with locks, as it happened.

As it happened, he didn't even need to be.

"Be ready," Crispin said inwardly, ‘I believe we have landed our fish."

"How very nautical of you," Linon replied sardonically. "Do we eat him in salt or sauce?"

"No wit, please. I need you."

"Witless?"

Crispin ignored this. "I'm sending the girl up now."

"Kitten!" he called out, his voice slurred, too loud. "Kitten!"

The girl who had called herself Kasia came over quickly, blue eyes anxious, wiping her hands on the sides of her tunic. Crispin gave her a brief, very direct look, then tilted sideways, spilling some more of his wine, as he pulled the room key from his belt.

He'd had, truly, no idea who might fall for the baits he was offering… the unlocked door, the garrulous drunkenness, crude hints dropped over dinner and wine. Indeed, it had been entirely possible no one would succumb. He had no fall-back plan. No brilliant constellations of tesserae. A door left foolishly open, careless words about a purse upstairs… all he'd been able to devise.

But it seemed someone had risen to his lure. Crispin refused to let himself ponder the ethics of what he was doing when the sullen nephew he'd been watching gave him a too-naked glance and excused himself.

He squinted owlishly up at the girl and pointed an unsteady finger at Erytus of Megarium. "Thish very good friend of mine wants to see my Permit. Gesius's Seal. S'in the leather purse. On the bed. You know the room, "bove the kitchen. Go get it. And Kitten…" He paused, waggled a finger at her. "I know "xactly how much money's in the purse, Kitten."

The Megarian merchant was protesting faintly, but Crispin winked at him and squeezed the girl's rump as she took the key. "Room's not too far for young legs," he laughed. "Might let her wrap "em round me, later, too. One of the merchant's sons let out an alarming giggle before blushing ferociously under his father's swift gaze.

A Karchite at a table across the room laughed loudly, waving his beer at them. Crispin had thought, when he'd first entered the common room, that one of that group might slip away and up. He'd spoken loudly enough for them to hear… but they'd been drinking steadily since mid-afternoon, it seemed, and two of them were fast asleep, heads on the table among the food. The others weren't moving anywhere quickly.

Erytus's bored, angry nephew with the thin mouth and long, fidgety hands had said he was going to the latrine. He wasn't. Crispin was sure of it. He was the fish, and hooked.

If he goes into a room intending to steal, he told himself, he deserves whatever happens. Crispin was utterly sober, however-having spilled, or shared, almost all of his wine-and he didn't really convince himself. It occurred to him, suddenly, before he could push the thought away, that it was possible that a mother, somewhere, loved that young man.

"He's here," Linon said, from the room upstairs.

She went up the stairs again, moving quickly this time past the wall torches, her passage making them waver, leaving a casting of uneven brightness behind and below her. She carried a key. Her heart was pounding, but in a different way this time. This time there was hope, however faint. Where there has been uttermost blackness a candle changes the world. There was nothing to be seen through the windows. She could hear the wind.

She reached the top, went straight on back to the last room over the kitchen. The door was ajar. He had said it might be. He hadn't explained why. Only that if she saw anyone in there when he sent her up, anyone at all, she was to do exactly as he told her.

She entered the room. Stood in the doorway. Saw the outline of a startled, turning figure in the blackness. Heard him swear. Couldn't tell who it was, at all.

Screamed, as she had been told.

The girl's fierce cry ripped through the inn. They heard it clearly, even in the noisy common room. In the sudden rigid silence that ensued, her next frantic shout rang clearly: "There is a thief! Help me! Help!"

"Jad rot his eyes!" roared the red-bearded fellow, first to react, leaping to his feet. Morax rushed out of the kitchen in the next moment, hurrying for the stairs. But the artisan, ahead of him to the archway, went the other way, inexplicably. Seizing a stout stick from by the front door, he stormed out into the black night.

"Mice and blood!" Linon had gasped. We're jumping!" The inner words came right on the heels of the girl's cry.

"Where?" Crispin demanded as he scrambled to his feet downstairs and snarled a curse for the benefit of the others in the room.

"Where do you think, imbecile? Courtyard out the window. Hurry!"

The wretched girl's scream had frightened him almost out of his head, that was the trouble. It was too loud, too. piercingly terrified. There was something raw in it that went far beyond spotting a thief in an upstairs room. But Thelon had no time at all to sort out why; only to know, almost immediately after he did the wrong thing, that what he ought to have done turn calmly to her and, laughing, order her to bring a light so he could more easily fetch the Imperial Permit for the Rhodian to show his uncle, as promised. He'd have so easily been able to talk his way through an explanation of how, on an impulse, a desire to be of assistance, he had come up to the room. He was a respectable man, travelling with a distinguished mercantile party. What else did anyone imagine he was doing? He ought to have done that.

Instead, panicked, stomach churning, knowing she couldn't see him clearly in the dark and seizing that saving thought, he'd grabbed the leather satchel lying on the bed, with papers, money, and what felt like an ornament sticking out halfway, and darted for the window. He'd banged the wooden shutter open hard, swung his feet out and jumped. It took courage in the darkness of night. He'd no idea what lay below in the courtyard. He might have broken his leg on a barrel or his neck when he landed. He didn't, though the blind fall drove him staggering to his knees in the muck. He kept hold of the satchel, was up quickly, stumbling across the muddy yard towards the barn. His mind was racing. If he dropped the satchel in the straw there, he could double back to the front of the inn and lead the chase out onto the road in pursuit of a thief he'd glimpsed on his way back from the latrine after the girl screamed. Then he could reclaim the satchel-or the worthwhile parts of it-before they left.

It was a good strategy, born of swift thinking and urgent cunning.

Had he not been felled by a blow that knocked him senseless and nearly killed him as he angled across towards the shadow of the barn under scudding clouds and a few faint, emergent stars, it might even have worked.

"Imbecile! You could have hit me!"

"Learn to duck," Crispin snapped. He was breathing hard. "I'm sorry. Couldn't see clearly enough." There was only a faint spill of light from the shuttered windows of the common room.

He shouted, "Over here! I've got him! A light, rot you all! Light, in Jad's name!"

Men calling, a confusion of voices, accents, languages, someone rasping something in an unknown dialect. A torch appeared overhead, at the open shutter of his own room. He heard footsteps approaching, the loud voices nearing as men from the common room and the servants from the other side streamed out the front door and rushed over. Some excitement on a wet autumn night.

Crispin said no more, looking down in the light of the single overhead torch, and then in the gradually brightening orange glow as a ring of men surrounded him, some with light in their hands.

The merchant's nephew lay at his feet, a black flow that would be blood seeping from his temple into the mud. The strap of Crispin's satchel was still looped through one of his hands.

"Holy Jad preserve us!" Morax the innkeeper said, wheezing with exertion. He'd raced upstairs and then back down. Robbery in an inn would hardly be unknown, but this was a little different. This was no servant or slave. Crispin, dealing with complex emotions, and aware that they were only at the beginning of what had to be done here, turned and saw the innkeeper's frightened gaze shift quickly from his own face to that of the merchant, Erytus, who was now standing over the body of his nephew, expressionless.

"Is he dead?" Erytus asked finally. He didn't kneel to check for himself, Crispin noted.

"What is happening? I can't see! He shoved me inside!" "Listen, then. Little to see. But be quiet. I need to be careful, now." "Now, you need to be careful? After I'm almost broken in pieces?" "Please, my dear."

It occurred to Crispin that he'd never said anything like that to the bird before. It might have occurred to Linon, too. She fell silent.

One of the cousins did kneel, head bent to the prone man. "He's alive," he said, looking up at his father. Crispin closed his eyes briefly; he had swung hard, but not as hard as he could. He was still holding the staff.

It was cold in the courtyard. A north wind blowing. None of them had had time for cloaks or mantles. Crispin felt mud oozing beneath his sandalled feet. It wasn't raining now, though there was a feel of rain in the wind. Neither moon was visible, and only a changing handful of stars where the racing clouds parted to the south towards the unseen mountains.

Crispin drew a breath. It was time to move this forward and he needed an audience. He looked directly at the innkeeper and said, in his most frigid voice-the one that terrified the apprentices at home-'I wish to know, "keeper, if this thief, indeed his entire party are in possession of Permits that allow them to stay at an Imperial Posting Inn. I wish to know it now." There was an abrupt, shuffling silence in the courtyard. Morax actually staggered. This was not what he had expected. He opened his mouth. No words came out.

New voices now. Others approaching, out of the dark towards the circle of torches. Crispin glanced over and saw the girl, Kasia, being hustled over, two of the inn's servants on either side of her, hands gripping her elbows. They weren't being gentle. She stumbled and they dragged her forward.

"What is happening? I can't see!"

"The girl's here."

"Make her the hero."

"Of course. Why do you think I sent her up?"

"Ah! You were thinking, this afternoon."

"Alarming, I know."

"Let her go, rot you!" he said aloud to the men jostling her. "I owe this girl my Permit and my purse." They released her quickly. Crispin saw that she was barefoot. Most of the servants were.

He turned deliberately back to Morax. "I haven't had an answer to my question, "keeper." Morax gestured helplessly, then clasped his hands together pleadingly. Crispin saw the man's wife behind him. Her eyes were burning: a rage without immediate direction, but deep.

"I will answer that. We have no Permit, Martinian." It was Erytus, the uncle. His narrow face was pale in the ring of torches. "It is autumn. Morax has been kind enough to allow us his hearth and rooms on occasions when the inn is less busy."

"The inn is full, merchant. And I assume Morax's kindness has a price and the price is of no benefit to the Imperial Post. Was I to pay a surcharge to your nephew?"

"Oh, well done! A bowshot at both of them!" "Linon! Hush!"

The satchel strap remained in the nephew's hand. No one had dared touch it. Lying on his back in the mud, Thelon of Megarium had not moved since Crispin felled him. He was breathing evenly, though. Crispin saw it with relief. Killing the man had not been part of his plans, though he was unavoidably aware that someone else might. In the north, a thief is hanged on the god's tree. He was moving quickly here, little time to assess, and less to sort out why he was doing it.

Erytus swallowed, said nothing. Morax cleared his throat, glanced at the merchant, then back at Crispin. His wife was right behind him and he knew it. His shoulders were hunched forward. He looked like a hunted man.

Crispin, no longer a fisherman with a lure but a hunter with a bow, said icily, "It becomes clear that this contemptible thief was staying here illicidy with the sanction of the authorized "keeper of an Imperial Posting Inn. How much are they paying you, Morax? Gesius might want to know. Or Faustinus, the Master of Offices."

"My lord! You will tell them?" Morax's voice actually squeaked and then broke. It might have been comical, in another setting.

"You wretched man!" It wasn't hard for Crispin to summon a tone of fury. "My Permit and purse are stolen by someone who is here only because of your greed-and you ask if I will complain? You haven't even said a word about punishment yet, and all I've seen so far is a manhandling of the girl who stopped this! He would have got away if not for her! What do they do to caught thieves here in Sauradia, Morax? I know what they do in the City to Imperial "keepers who breach their trust for private earn. You imbecile!"

"Hah! But be careful. He could kill you. His livelihood is at risk in this."

"I know. But there is a crowd."

Crispin was painfully aware that no one in this courtyard could be considered an ally, though. Most of them were staying illegally and would want to continue to be able to do so. He was a threat to more than Morax right now.

"All of the. my lord, in autumn, or winter, almost all the Imperial Inns allow honest travellers to stay. A courtesy."

"Honest travellers. Indeed. I see. I will be prompt to offer this in your defence, should the Chancellor ask. I have put you another question, though: what do you do with thieves here? And how do you recompense aggrieved patrons who are here legitimately?"

Crispin saw Morax glance quickly again at Erytus. The innkeeper was almost cringing.

It was the merchant who spoke. "What compensation would assuage you, Martinian? I will accept responsibility for my nephew."

Crispin, who had spoken of recompense in the fervent hope of hearing exactly this, turned to Erytus and let the anger seem to drift from his voice. "An honourable thing to say, but he is of age, is he not? He answers for himself, surely."

"He should. But his… failings are manifest here. A grief to his parents. And to myself, I assure you. What will serve to make this right?"

"We hang thieves back home," one of the Karchites growled. Crispin glanced over. It was the one who'd raised his beer mug to him, earlier. He had a bright, inebriated glint in his eye. The prospect of violence, to cheer a dull night.

"We hang "em here, too!" said someone else, unseen, at the back of the crowd. There was a sharp murmur. An edge of excitement now. Torches danced, pressed nearer in the cold.

"Or cut off their hands," said Crispin, feigning indifference. He pushed away a torch that came too close to his face. "I care not what the course of law dictates here. Do with him what you will. Erytus, you are an honest man, I can see it. You cannot redress the risk to my Permit, but match the sum in the purse-the sum I would have lost-and I will accept that."

"Done," said the merchant, without a pause. He was a dried out, humourless man, but impressive in his way.

Crispin said, trying to keep the same casual tone, "And then buy me the girl who saved my purse. I will let you fix your price with the "keeper. Don't let him cheat you."

"What?" said Morax.

"The girl!" said the wife from behind him, urgently. "But…"

"Done," said Erytus, again, quite calmly. He looked faintly disapproving and relieved, at the same time.

"I will need household servants when I reach the City, and I owe her for this." They would think he was a greedy Rhodian pig; that was all right, that was fine. Crispin bent down and hooked the satchel strap from the fingers of the prone man. He straightened, and looked at Morax.

"I am aware that you are not the only "keeper to do this. Nor am I, by nature, a teller of tales. I would suggest you be extremely fair with Erytus of Megarium in naming your price, and I am prepared to report that because of the intervention of one of your honest and well-trained serving girls no lasting harm has been done."

"No hanging?" the Karchite complained. Erytus looked over at him stonily.

Crispin smiled thinly. "I have no idea what they will do to him. I don't care. I won't be here to see it. The Emperor has summoned me and I will not linger, even for justice and a hanging. I do understand that the good-hearted Morax, deeply contrite at our having been driven outside into the cold, now offers Candarian wine to all those who feel the need of warmth. Am I correct, "keeper?"

There was a burst of raucous laughter and agreement from the men crowded around them. Crispin let his smile deepen as he met a few glances.

"Nicely done, again. Mice and blood! Will I be forced to respect you?"

"How would we ever deal with that?"

"Husband! Husband!" the wife was saying urgently, for the third or fourth time. Her face was a blotchy red in the torchlight. She was staring at Kasia, Crispin saw. The girl looked stunned, uncomprehending. Either she was, or she was an extremely good actress.

Morax didn't turn to his wife. He drew a shaky breath and took Crispin by the elbow, walking him a little way into the dark.

"The Chancellor? The Master of Offices…?" he whispered.

". have more pressing concerns. I will not trouble them with this. Erytus makes good my risk of loss, and you sell the girl with all her countersigned papers as compensation. Make the price fair, Morax."

"My lord, you want… that girl, of all of them?"

"I can hardly use all of them, "keeper. That is the one who saved my purse." He let himself smile again. "She's a favourite of yours?"

The innkeeper hesitated. "Yes, my lord."

"Good," said Crispin briskly. "You ought to lose something in this, if only a yellow-haired bed-partner. Pick another of your girls to mount in the dark while your wife sleeps." He paused, his smile disappearing. "I am being generous, "keeper."

He was, and Morax knew it. "I don't… that is, she isn't… my wife…" The innkeeper fell silent. He drew a shaky breath. "Yes, my lord," he said. Tried to smile. "I do have other girls here."

Crispin knew what that meant, as it happened. "I told you," Linon said.

"No help for it," he replied, silently. There were questions embedded in this that he could not answer. Aloud, he said, "I mean it, Morax… a very fair price for Erytus. And serve out the wine."

Morax swallowed, and nodded unhappily. Crispin was uncontrite. The expensive wine would be the innkeeper's only real loss, and Crispin needed the other patrons to feel kindly towards him now, and for Morax to know that they did.

It began to rain. Crispin looked up. Dark clouds blotted all the sky. The forest was north, very near, a presence. Someone approached them from beyond the torches: a hefty, reassuring figure, with Crispin's cloak in his hands. Crispin smiled briefly at him. "It's all right, Vargos. We're going inside." Vargos nodded, his expression watchful.

They had picked up Thelon of Megarium and were carrying him in. His uncle and cousins walked beside him; servants carried torches. The girl, Kasia, lingered uncertainly, and so did the innkeeper's wife, her gaze poisonous.

"What is happening?"

"You heard. We are going in."

"Go upstairs, Kitten," Crispin said mildly, walking back towards the light. "You are being sold to me. You have no more tasks in this inn, do you understand?" She didn't move for a moment, her eyes enormous, then she nodded once jerkily, like a rabbit. She was shivering, he saw. "Wait for me in the room. I've some good wine promised me, before I come up. Warm the bed. Don't fall asleep." It was important to be casual about this. She was a slave, bought on impulse; he knew nothing more than that.

"About the wine, my lord?" Morax's voice at his elbow was low, complicitous. "The Candarian? It is wasted on almost all of them, my lord." That happened to be true.

"I don't care," Crispin replied icily.

That happened to be untrue. He found it almost painful. Candarian island wine was celebrated, it was far too good to waste. Under ordinary circumstances.

"Mice and blood, artisan. You are still an imbecile. You do know what this means for tomorrow?"

"Of course I do. No help for it. We won't be able to stay. I count on you to protect us all." He meant it ironically but it didn't quite come out that way The bird made no reply.

There was a god's tree somewhere in that forest beyond the road and tomorrow was the Day of the Dead. And despite what Zoticus had advised him, they were going to have to be away from here and travelling at sunrise or before.

He went inside with the innkeeper. Sent the girl upstairs with the key. Sat again at his table in the common room to drink a flask or two of the wine, prudently watered, and earn what goodwill he could from those who shared in the liquid bounty. He kept his purse on him this time, with his money, his Permit, and the bird.

After a time, Erytus of Megarium reappeared, having concluded an encounter with Morax. He presented Crispin with certain papers that indicated that the Inici slave girl, Kasia, was now the legal property of the artisan, Martinian of Varena. Erytus also insisted on finalizing the financial compensation upon which they had agreed. Crispin allowed him to count the contents of his purse; Erytus produced his own, and matched it. The Karchite merchants watched them but were too far away to see anything clearly.

Erytus accepted only a very small cup of wine, in earnest of goodwill. He looked weary and unhappy. He extended renewed apologies for his nephew's disgraceful conduct and rose to leave a few moments later. Crispin stood and exchanged a bow with him. The man had behaved impeccably. Crispin had, in fact, relied upon that.

Looking at the papers and the quite heavy purse on the table beside him, Crispin sipped the good wine. He expected the Megarium party to be gone even before he was in the morning-if the nephew was allowed to leave. He suspected that some further outlays on Erytus's part would achieve that end, if they hadn't done so already. He found himself hoping so. The young man was a rogue, but he'd been seduced into this crime, had his skull dented for it, and would doubtless suffer extremely at his family's hands. Crispin did not particularly want to be the agency of his being hanged from a pagan oak in Sauradia.

He looked around. The revived Karchites and several of the other guests-including a cheerful, grey-clad courier-were quaffing Candarian red wine unwatered, downing it like beer. He managed not to wince at the sight, raising his own glass in a genial salute. He felt very far from his own world. Ordinary circumstances had been left a long way or, at home, behind city walls. Where he ought to have stayed, shaping images of beauty with such materials as came to hand. There was no beauty here.

It occurred to him that he ought not to leave his new slave alone for too long, even with a lock on the door. There wasn't much he could do if she went missing now and never turned up. He went upstairs.

"Are you going to stick it in her?" Linon cackled suddenly. The crude-ness and the patrician voice and Crispin's mood were all janglingly at odds with each other. He made no reply.

The girl had the key. He knocked softly and called to her. She unbolted to his voice and opened the door. He stepped inside and closed and bolted it again. It was very dark in the room. She had lit no candles, had closed the shutters again and latched them. He could hear the rain outside. She stood very near to him, not speaking. He was embarrassed, surprisingly aware of her, still wondering why he had done what he had done tonight. She knelt with a rustle, a blurred female shape, and then bent her head to kiss his foot before he could withdraw. He stepped quickly back, clearing his throat, uncertain what to say.

He gave her the topmost blanket from the bed and bade her sleep on the servants pallet by the far wall. She never spoke. Aside from that instruction, neither did he. He lay in the bed listening to the rain for a long time. He thought of the queen of the Antae, whose foot he himself had kissed, before this journey had begun. He remembered a Senator's wife, tapping at his door. Another inn. Another country. He finally fell asleep. He dreamt of Sarantium, of making a mosaic there, with brilliant tesserae and all the shining jewels he needed: images on a towering dome of an oak tree in a grove, lightning bolts in a livid sky.

They would burn him in the City for such an impiety, but this was only a dream. No one died for his dreams.

He woke in the darkness before dawn. After a moment of disorientation, he swung out of bed and crossed the cold floor to the window. He opened the shutters. The rain had stopped again, though water was still dripping off the roof. A heavy fog had drifted in; he could scarcely see the courtyard below. There were men stirring down there-Vargos would be among them, readying the mule-but sounds were muted and distant. The girl was awake, standing beside her pallet, a pale, thin figure, ghostlike, silently watching him.

"Let's go," he said, after a moment.

Not long afterwards they were on the road, three of them walking east a mist-shrouded half-world as dawn came without a sunrise on the pay of the Dead.

CHAPTER IV

Vargos of the Ihicii was not a slave.

Many of the Posting Inns" servants-for-hire along the main Imperial roads were, of course, but Vargos had chosen this job of his own will, as he was quick to point out to those who erred in addressing him. He'd signed his second five-year indenture with the Imperial Post three years ago, carried his copy of the paper on his person, though he couldn't read it, and collected a payment twice a year, in addition to his guaranteed room and board. It wasn't much, but over the years he'd bought new boots twice, a woollen cloak, several tunics, an Esperanan knife, and he could offer a copper follis or two to a whore. The Imperial Post preferred slaves, naturally, but there weren't enough of them, since the Emperor Apius had elected to pacify the northern barbarians rather than subdue them, and stout men were badly needed for parties on the roads. Some of those stout men, including Vargos, were northern barbarians.

At home, Vargos's father had often expressed-generally with spilled ale and a table-thumping fist-his views on working or soldiering for Sarantium's fat-rumped catamites, but Vargos had been of the habit of disagreeing with his parent on occasion. Indeed, it had been after the last such discussion that he had left their village one night and begun his journey south.

He couldn't remember the details of the argument any more-something to do with a superstition about ploughing beneath a blue full moon-but it had ended with the old man, blood dripping from his scalp, deliberately branding his youngest son on the cheek with a hunting knife while Vargos's brothers and uncles enthusiastically held him down. Vargos, for all his violent, injurious struggling at the time, had had to concede to himself afterwards that the scarring had probably been deserved. It was not really acceptable among the Inicii for a son to hammer his father half to death with a stick of firewood in the course of an agrarian dispute.

He'd chosen not to linger for further debate or familial chastisement, however. There was a world beyond their village, and precious little within it for a youngest son. He had walked out of the house that same spring night, the two nearly full moons high above the newly planted fields and the dense, well-known forests, and had set his marred face to the far south, never looking back.

He'd expected, of course, to join the Imperial army, but someone in a roadside caupona had mentioned positions on offer at the Posting Inns, and Vargos had thought he might try that for a season or two.

That had been eight summers ago. Amazing, when you thought about it: how quickly-made decisions became the life you lived. He'd his share of newer scars since then, for the roads were dangerous and hungry men turned outlaw easily enough in Sauradia, but the work suited Vargos. He liked open spaces, had no single master to knuckle his forehead to, and didn't share his father's bone-deep hatred of the Empires-either Sarantine or the old one in Batiara.

Even though he was known as a keep-to-himself man, he had acquaintances at every Posting Inn and roadside tavern from the Batiaran border to Trakesia by now. That meant decently clean sleeping straw or pallets, a fireside sometimes in winter, food and beer, and some of the girls could be soft enough on the occasions when they weren't commanded elsewhere. It helped that he was one of the freemen, and had a coin or two to spend. He had never been out of Sauradia. Most of the Imperial Post servants stayed in their province, and Vargos had never had the least desire to wander farther than he already had eight years ago, cheek dripping blood, from the north.

Until this morning, on the Day of the Dead, when the red-haired pvhodian who'd hired him at Lauzen's inn by the border set out in fog from Morax's with a slave girl marked for the oak god.

Vargos had converted to the Jaddite faith years ago, but that didn't mean a man from the northern reaches of the Aldwood couldn't recognize one who'd been named to the tree. She was of the Inicii herself, sold off to a slave trader, perhaps even from a village or farm near his own. In her eyes, and in the looks given her by some of the men and women at Morax's, Vargos had read the signs the night before. No one had said a word, but no one had to. He knew what day was coming.

Vargos's conversion to the sun god's faith-along with a contentious belief in the holiness of Heladikos, the god's mortal son-had been a real one, as it happened. He prayed each dawn and at sunset, lit candles at chapels for the Blessed Victims, fasted on the days that called for fasts. And he disapproved now, deeply, of the old ways he'd left behind: the oak god, the corn maiden, the seemingly endless thirst for blood and human hearts eaten raw. But he'd never have dreamt of interfering, and certainly hadn't done so, the two other times he'd been here at Morax's, close to the southern godtree on this day.

None of his business, he'd have said, if the thought had even occurred to him or been raised by anyone else. A servant didn't summon the Imperial army or clergy to halt a pagan sacrifice. Not if he wanted to go on living and working on this road. And what was one girl a year, among all of them? There had been plagues two summers in a row. Death was everywhere in the midst of them.

The red-headed Batiaran hadn't raised anything at all with Vargos. He'd simply bought the girl-or had her bought for him-and was taking her away to save her life. His choice of her could have been an accident, chance, but it wasn't, and Vargos knew it.

They'd been planning to stay here two nights, in order not to be travel on this day.

That intention had been in line with what every halfway prudent man on the roads of Sauradia was doing on the Day of the Dead. But late last night, before going up the stairs to his room after the extremely strange capture of the thief, Martinian of Varena had summoned Vargos out to the hallway from his pallet in the servants" room and told him they'd be leaving tomorrow after all, before sunrise, with the girl.

Vargos, taciturn as he was, had been unable not to repeat, "Tomorrow?"

The Rhodian, unexpectedly sober despite all the wine they'd been noisily drinking in the other room, had looked at Vargos for a long moment in the dimly lit corridor. It was difficult to make out his expression behind the full beard, in the shadows. "I don't think it is safe to stay here," was all he'd said, speaking Rhodian. "After what has happened."

It wasn't in the least safe outside, Vargos thought but did not say. He'd considered that the other man might be testing him, or trying to say something without putting it into words. But he hadn't been prepared for what came next.

"It is the Day of the Dead tomorrow," said Martinian, speaking carefully. "I will not make you go with us. You do not owe me that. If you prefer to stay, I will release you freely and hire another man when I can."

That wouldn't be tomorrow, Vargos knew. There would be expressions of regret but no one would be free to travel with the artisan tomorrow. Not for a fistful of silver solidi.

No one would have to.

Vargos had made a swift decision or two in his day. He shook his head. "You asked for a man to come to the Trakesian border, I recollect. I'll be ready with the mule before the sun-up prayers. Jad's light will see us through the day."

The Batiaran was not a fellow with an easy smile, but he'd smiled briefly then and placed a hand on Vargos's shoulder before heading up the stairs. He said, "Thank you, friend," before he went.

In eight years, no one had ever offered to release him from duty in that way before, or offered a thank-you to a short-term hired servant for simply performing-or continuing-his contracted service.

This meant two things, Vargos had finally decided, back on his narrow pallet, elbowing away a too-close, snoring Trakesian. One was that Martinian had known exactly what he was doing-somehow-when he'd had the merchant buy him that girl. And the other was that Vargos was his man now.

Courage spoke to him. The courage of Jad in his chariot battling cold and darkness each long night under the world, of Heladikos driving his horses far too high to bring back fire from his father, and of a single traveller risking his own death for a girl who had been named to a savage ending on the morrow.

Vargos had seen some celebrated men in his time on this road. Merchant princes, aristocrats from the far-off City itself, clad in gold and white, soldiers in bronze armour and regimental colours, austere, immensely powerful figures in the clergy of the god. Some years ago, memorably, Leontes himself, Supreme Strategos of all the Empire's armies, had passed with a company of his own picked guard on their way back east from Megarium. They'd been riding to the military camp near Trakesia, then heading north and east against the restive Moskav tribes. Vargos, in a dense press of men and women, had caught only a flashing glimpse of golden hair, helmetless, as people screamed in ecstasy beside the road. That had been in the year after the great victory against the Bassanids beyond Eubulus, and after the Triumph the Emperor had granted Leontes in the Hippodrome. Even in Sauradia they had heard about that. Not since Rhodias had an Emperor granted a strategos such a processional.

It was this artisan from Varena, though, a descendant of the legions, the Rhodians, the blood Vargos had been raised to hate, who had done the bravest thing he knew, last night and now. And Vargos was going to follow him.

They were unlikely to get far, he thought grimly. Jad's light will see us through, he'd said in the hallway the night before. There was no light to speak of as they led the mule out of the courtyard in a black, blanketing thickness of pre-dawn fog. The pale autumn sun would be rising ahead of them soon-and they would have no way of even knowing.

The three of them walked from the yard in an unnatural, muffled stillness. Men-or the blurred outlines of men-stood and watched them pass. No one offered to help, though Vargos knew every man there. They had tasted no food or drink, on Martinian's instructions. Vargos knew why. He still wasn't sure how Martinian knew.

The girl was barefoot, wrapped in the artisan's second cloak, the hood hiding her face. No other travellers were moving, though the Megarian merchants had left earlier, in full darkness, carrying the wounded man in a litter. Vargos, awake and loading the mule by torchlight, had seen them go. They wouldn't travel far today, but they had little choice but to move on. Where Vargos came from, the apprehended thief would have been an obvious candidate to be hanged from Ludan's Tree.

Here, he wasn't sure. The girl had been named. They might choose another, or they might not relinquish her, fearing a year's bad luck if they did. Things were different in the south. Different tribes had settled here, different histories had set their stamp. Would they kill him and the Batiaran to take her back? Almost certainly, if they wanted her and the two men resisted. This sacrifice was the holiest rite of the year in the old religion; men interfered at absolute peril of their lives.

Vargos was quite certain Martinian would resist.

He was somewhat surprised to feel an equal certainty in himself, a cold anger overriding fear. As they passed out from the courtyard he walked past the stablemaster, Pharus, a burly figure in the mist. Pharus was staring at them in a certain way, no proper respect in his bearing at all, and though Vargos had known him for years he did not hesitate. He stopped in front of the man just long enough to swing the bottom of his staff upwards, hard, hammering Pharus right between the legs without a word spoken. The stablemaster let out a high-pitched screech and crumpled in the mud, hands clutching for his groin as he thrashed on the cold, wet ground.

Vargos bent low in the fog and spoke softly in the ear of the gasping, writhing man. "A warning. Leave her be. Find another, Pharus."

He straightened, carried on, not looking back. He never looked back. Not since he'd left home. He saw Martinian and the girl gazing at him, cloaked shadows on the almost invisible surface of the road. He shrugged, and spat. "Private quarrel," he said. He knew they would know it was a lie, but some things were best not spoken aloud, Vargos had always felt. He did not, for example, tell them he expected to die before midday.

Her mother used to call her erimitsu, "clever one" in their own dialect. Her sister was calamitsu, which was "beautiful one." and her brother was, of course, sangari, which was "beloved." Her brother and father had died last summer, black sores bursting all over their bodies, blood running from their mouths when they tried to scream at the end. They buried them in the pit with all the others. In the autumn, faced with winter coming, imminent starvation, and two daughters, her mother had sold one to the slavers: the one who had the intelligence to perhaps survive in the harsh world far away.

Kasia had had a reputation already that made her almost unmarriage-able at home. Too clever by half, and too thin by more than that in a tribe where women were valued for full hips and soft figures-promise of comfort in the long cold and children easily birthed. Her mother had made a bitter, brutal choice but not a unique one that year as the first snows fell on the mountains above them. The Karchite slave traders knew what they were doing that season, travelling the northern villages of Trakesia and then Sauradia in a slow circuit of acquisition.

The world was a place of grief, Kasia had understood, beyond tears, after the first two nights journeying south with shackles on her wrists. Man was born to sorrow, and women knew more of it. She'd lain on the cold ground, head averted, watching the last sparks of the dying fire as she lost her maidenhead to two of the slavers in the dark.

A year in Morax's inn had done nothing to change her thinking, though she had not starved and had learned what to do to avoid being beaten too often. She was alive. Her mother and sister might be dead by now. She didn't know. Had no way of knowing. The men hurt her sometimes, upstairs, but not always and not most of them. You learned, if you were clever, to shield that cleverness and gather a blank, stolid endurance about you like a cloak. And you passed days and nights and days and nights that way. The first winter in this alien south, spring, summer, then the coming of autumn again with turning leaves and memories you wanted to avoid.

You tried never to think of home. Of being free to walk out of doors when work was done, following the stream uphill to places where you could sit entirely alone beneath circling hawks and among the small quick woodland creatures they hunted, listening to the heartbeat of the world, dreaming in daylight with open eyes. You didn't dream, here. You endured, behind the cloak. Who had ever said existence offered more?

Until the day you understood they were going to kill you, and you realized-with genuine astonishment-that you wanted to survive. That somehow life still burned inside like the obdurate embers of a fire more fierce than desire or grief.

On the almost-invisible road, walking east with two men in grey, sound-swallowing fog on the Day of the Dead, Kasia watched them dealing with fear and the rawness of their danger and was unable to deny her joy. She struggled to hide it, as she had hidden every emotion for a year. She was afraid if she smiled they would think her simple, or mad, so she kept close to the mule, a hand on its rope, and tried not to meet the eyes of either man when the mist swirled and showed their faces.

They might be followed. They might die here on the road. This was a day of sacrifice and the risen dead. There might be daemons abroad, in search of mortal souls. Her mother had believed that. But Kasia had claimed her knife in the mist before dawn, darting through fog to the smithy and taking it from its hiding place. She could kill someone, or herself, before they took her for Ludan.

She had seen the shape of Pharus the stablemaster in the courtyard as they walked past. He had been leaning forward intently, still watching her as he had for the past two days. And though his eyes had been almost hidden in the enveloping greyness she could feel the fury in him. She had wondered suddenly if he was the oak priest here, the one who offered the heart of the sacrifice.

Then Vargos-who had simply been one of many servants on the road, a man who'd slept here so many nights without exchanging a single word with her-had stopped in front of Pharus and clubbed him upwards between the legs with his staff.

It was when Pharus collapsed with an appalling inhalation of breath that Kasia had begun struggling not to show the fierceness of her joy. With every step they took down the road after that blow-wrapped in fog as in a blanket, a womb, unable to see ten paces ahead or behind- she felt herself being reborn, remade.

It was wrong, she knew it was. There was death out here today, and no sane person ought to be abroad. But death had been summoned and waiting for her at the inn already, a certainty, and it might or might not find her out in the mist. Any way you looked at it, a chance was better than none at all. And she had her little knife.

Vargos was leading them, the Rhodian behind. They walked in silence, save for the muffled snorting of the mule and the creaking of the weight on its back. They listened. Ahead and behind. The world had shrunk nearly to nothingness. They moved, unseeing, in an endless grey on a straight road the Rhodians had built five hundred years ago in their Empire's bright glory.

Kasia thought about the artisan behind her. She should be ready to die for him, given what he'd done. She might be, in fact. But she was the erimitsu, and thought too much for her own good. So her mother used to say, and her father, brother, aunts-just about everyone.

She wasn't sure why he hadn't touched her last night. He might prefer boys, or find her thin, or simply have been tired. Or he might have been being kind. Kindness was not a thing she knew much about.

He had cried a name in the middle of the night. She'd been dozing herself, on the pallet, fully clothed, and had startled awake to the sound of his voice. She couldn't remember the name and he'd never quite awakened, though she'd waited, listening.

The other thing she didn't understand was how he'd known to run to the courtyard instead of up the stairs with everyone else when she screamed. The thief might have escaped, otherwise. It had been black in the room; she couldn't have identified anyone. Pacing along by the mule, Kasia worried that puzzle like a dog with a scrap of meat on a bone and eventually gave it up. She wrapped herself more tightly in Martinian's cloak. The cold was damp, penetrating. She had no shoes, but she was used to that. She looked over to left and right, couldn't see a thing beyond the road, could barely see the road itself beneath her feet. It would be easy enough, actually, to fall into the ditches. She knew where the forest was, to their left, knew it would draw nearer as they continued east.

Around mid-morning-at a guess-they came to one of the small roadside chapels. Kasia hadn't even seen it until Vargos spoke softly and they stopped. She peered through the greyness and made out the dark outline of the tiny chapel. They'd have gone right past had Vargos not been looking for it. Martinian called a halt. Standing where they were, listening all the time for sounds in all directions, they quickly ate chunks of dark bread with some beer, and shared out a wheel of cheese Vargos had taken from the servants" table. When they finished, Vargos looked an inquiry at Martinian. The red-bearded man hesitated, then Kasia saw him nod. He led them into the empty chapel for the invocation to Jad. Somewhere the sun had risen by now, was shining. Kasia listened to the two men hurry through the litany, and joined them for the responses she had been taught: Let there be Light for our lives, lord, and Light eternal when we come to you.

They went back out into the fog, untied the mule, began walking again. There was nothing to be seen at all. In front of her the world ended beyond Vargos. It was like walking in a dream, no passage of time, no sense of movement, the slabs of the road cold underfoot, walking away and away.

Kasia's hearing was extremely good. She heard the voices before either of the men did.

She reached back, touched Martinian on the arm, pointed back down the road. In the same moment Vargos said, very softly, They are coming. Left, just up here. Cross over."

There was a short, flat cart bridge spanning the ditch, leading into the fields. She wouldn't have seen that, either. They took the mule across, went a short way through the muddy stubble in the dense, impenetrable greyness, and stopped. Listening. Kasia's heart was racing now. They had come for her, after all. It was not over. They ought not to have stopped to pray, she thought.

Let there be Light. There was no light. At all.

Martinian stood on the other side of the mule, his red beard and hair dulled by the greyness. Kasia saw him hesitate, then slip an old, heavy sword silently free of the ropes that strapped it to the mule's side. Vargos watched him. They heard the noises clearly now, voices approaching from the west, men talking too loudly, to encourage themselves. Footsteps now on the road-eight men? ten? — muffled but very near, just across the ditch. Kasia strained to see, prayed she would not be able to. If the fog lifted for even a moment now they were lost.

Then she heard growling, and a sharp, urgent bark. They had brought the dogs. Of course. And they all knew her scent. They were lost.

Kasia laid one hand across the mule's shoulders, felt its nervousness, willed it to silence. She fumbled for her knife. She had the power to die before they took her, if no other power at all. Her brief, mad joy had gone, was lost, swift as a bird into greyness all around.

She thought of her mother a year ago, alone on a leaf-strewn path with a small bag of coins in her hands, watching the slave train take her daughter away. It had been a brilliantly clear day, snow gleaming on the mountain peaks, birdsong, the leaves red and gold, and falling.

Crispin considered himself an articulate man and knew he was a reasonably educated one. He'd had a tutor for many years after his father died, at his mother's insistence and his uncle's. Had struggled through the classical authors on rhetoric and ethics, and the tragic dramas of Arethae, greatest of the city-states in Trakesia: those thousand-year-old confrontations between men and gods written in an almost-lost form of the language men now called Sarantine. Writings from a different world, before stern Rhodias had shaped its empire and Trakesia's cities had dwindled into islets of pagan philosophy and then, latterly, not even that, as the Schools were closed. It was merely another province of Sarantium now, barbarians in the north of it and beyond its northern borders, and Arethae was a village huddled under the grandeur of its ruins.

Even more than his education, Crispin thought, fifteen years of working for and then alongside Martinian of Varena would have honed the thinking of any man. Gentle as his older partner might be in manner, Martinian was unrelenting and even joyful in chasing a dialectic down to its conclusions. Crispin had learned, of necessity, to give as good as he got and to derive a certain pleasure in marshalling words to guide premises to resolutions. Colour and light and form had always been his chief delight in the world, the realm of his own gift, but he took no little pride in being able to order and formulate his thoughts.

It was therefore with real distress that he had come to understand earlier this morning that he wasn't even dose to having words to express how uncomfortable he was out here in the fog. He couldn't begin to say how passionately he wanted to be anywhere else but here in Sauradia on an almost-invisible road. It went beyond fear and awareness of danger: his was the distress of a soul that felt itself to be in entirely the wrong sort of world.

And that was before they'd heard the men and dogs.

They stood now in the wet earth of a bare field, in silence. He was aware of the girl beside him, her steadying hand on the mule, keeping it quiet. Vargos was a shrouded shape a little ahead of them, with his staff. Crispin, on a thought, turned and carefully worked his sword free of the ropes on the mule's back. He felt awkward holding it, a fool, and at the same time genuinely afraid. If anything at all turned on the swordplay of Caius Crispus of Varena. He expected Linon, on her thong about his neck, to say something caustic, but the bird had been silent from the moment they awoke this morning.

He had brought the sword at the last moment, an impulse, an afterthought, and only because it had been his father's and he was leaving home and going far away. His mother had said nothing, but her arched eyebrows had been-as ever-infinitely expressive. She'd sent a servant for the heavy footsoldier's blade Horius had carried when summoned to militia duty.

In the house where he'd grown up, Crispin had drawn it from its scabbard and noted with surprise that blade and sheath were oiled and cared for, even after a quarter of a century. He'd made no comment on that, merely raised his own eyebrows and then offered a few dramatic, self-mocking passes with the sword in his mother's receiving room. He'd struck a martial pose, weapon levelled at a bowl of apples on the table.

Avita Crispina had winced to see it. She'd murmured drily, "Try not to hurt yourself, dear." Crispin had laughed, and sheathed the blade, claiming his wine with relief.

"You are supposed to tell me to come home with it or upon it," he'd murmured indignantly.

"That's a shield, dear," his mother had said gently.

He had no shield, no real idea how to use the sword, and there were dogs here with the hunters. Would the fog impede them, or the water in the ditch by the road? Or would the hunting hounds simply follow the girl's known scent right across the small bridge and lead the men right to them? The barking grew strident in that moment. Someone shouted, almost directly in front of them:

"They've crossed to the field! Come on!"

One question answered, at any rate. Crispin took a breath and lifted his father's blade. He did not pray. He thought of Ilandra, as he always did, but he did not pray. Vargos spread his feet wide and held his staff before him in both hands.

"He's here! "said Linon suddenly, in a tone Crispin had never heard from the bird. "Oh, lord of worlds, I knew it! Crispin, do not move! Don't let the others move."

"Hold still!" Crispin said sharply, instinctively, to Vargos and the girl.

In that moment several things seemed to happen at once. The accursed mule brayed stridently, legs gone rigid as tree trunks. The dogs" triumphant barking went suddenly high with shrill, yelping panic. And the shouting man screamed in terror, the sound ripping through the fog.

The mist swirled about the road, parted for a moment.

And in that instant Crispin saw something impossible. A shape from tormented dream, from nightmare. His mind slammed down, desperately denying what his eyes had just told him. He heard Vargos croak something that must have been a prayer. Then the fog closed in again like a curtain. Sight was gone. There was still screaming, high-pitched, appalling, from the vanished road. The mule trembled in every stiffened limb. He heard the streaming sound of it urinating beside him. The dogs were whining like whipped puppies. They heard them fleeing, back to the west.

There came a rumbling sound, as of the earth itself, shaking beneath them. Crispin stopped breathing. Ahead of them, among the hunters, the first man's scream went sharply, wildly higher, and then was cut off. The rumbling stopped. Crispin heard running footsteps, men screaming and the dogs" yelping sounds receding swiftly back the way they had come. Vargos had now dropped to his knees in the cold, sodden field, the staff fallen from his fingers. The girl was clutching at the trembling mule, struggling to steady it. Crispin saw that his hand holding the sword was shaking helplessly.

"What is it? Linon. What is this?"

But before the bird on his neck could make any reply, the mist parted again ahead of them, more than a swirling this time, a withdrawal, revealing the road across the narrow ditch for the first time that morning, and Crispin saw clearly what had, indeed, come on this day. His understanding of the world and the half-world changed forever in that moment as he, too, sank to his knees in the mud, his father's sword dropping from his fingers. The girl remained standing by the mule, transfixed. He would remember that.

Very far to the west in that moment the autumn sun had long since risen above the woods near Varena. The sky was blue and the sunlight caught the red of the oak leaves and of the last apples on the trees in an orchard beside a road that joined the great highway to Rhodias a little farther south.

In the courtyard of the farmhouse adjoining that orchard an old man sat on a stone bench by his door, wrapped in a woollen cloak against the crispness of the breeze, enjoying the morning light and the colours. He held an earthenware bowl of herbal tea in both hands, warming them. A servant, grumbling out of ancient habit, fed the chickens. Two dogs slept by the open gate in the sunlight. In a distant field sheep could be seen but no shepherd. It was clear enough to make out the towers of Varena to the north and west. A bird trilled from the rooftop of the farmhouse.

Zoticus stood up, very abruptly. He set down his tea on the bench, spilling some of it. A watcher might have seen his hands tremble. The servant was not watching. The alchemist took a step or two towards his front gate and then turned to face the east, a grave, intent expression on his weathered face.

"What is it? Linon!" he said sharply and aloud. "What is this?"

He was, of necessity, unaware that he was echoing another man's question. He received no reply, either. Of course. One of the dogs stood up, though, head tilted a little to one side, questioningly.

Zoticus remained that way for a long time, motionless, as if listening for something. He had closed his eyes. The servant ignored him, used to this. The chickens were fed, and then the goat, and he milked the one cow. The eggs were collected. Six of them this morning. The servant carried them inside. All this time the alchemist did not move. The dog hesitated, and then padded over to lie down beside him. The other dog remained by the gate, in the light.

Zoticus waited. But the world, or the half-world, gave nothing more back to him. Not after that one sharp vibration in the soul, in the blood, a gift-or a punishment-offered someone who had walked and watched in shadows most men never knew.

"Linon," he said again, at length, but softly this time, a breath. He opened his eyes, looking out at the distant trees of the forest through the gate before his home. Both dogs sat up this time, watching him. He reached down without looking and patted the one at his knee. After a while he went back into the house, leaving his forgotten tea to grow cold on the stone bench outside. The sun rose higher through the morning, in the clear and cloudless blue of the autumn sky.

Twice in his life Vargos thought (he was never entirely certain) he had seen one of the zubir. A glimpse in half-light, no more than that, of the Sauradian bison, lord of the Aldwood and all the great forests, emblem of a god.

Once, at summer sunset, working alone in his father's field, he had looked up squinting to see a bulky, shaggy shape at the edge of the wood. The light had been fading, the distance great, but something too large had moved against the dark curtain of the trees and then disappeared. It might have been a stag but it had been enormous, and he hadn't seen the high, branched horns.

His father had beaten him with an axe handle for suggesting that evening that he might actually have seen one of the sacred beasts of the wood. To see a zubir was an awesome thing, reserved for priests and sacred warriors consecrated to Ludan. Fourteen-year-old boys with a disrespectful turn of mind were not granted such felicities in the scheme of the world as the Inicii-and Vargos's father saw it.

The second time had been eight years ago on his solitary springtime journey south with a branded cheek and a hard, sustaining anger. He had fallen asleep to the howling of wolves and awakened in moonlight to the sound of something roaring in the woods. He had heard an answering roar from nearer yet. Peering into a night made strange by the noises and the blue moon, Vargos had again seen something massive move at the forest's edge and withdraw. He had lain awake, listening, but the roaring had not come again, and nothing else appeared at the limits of his sight as the blue moon swung west after the white one and then set, leaving a sky strewn with stars, and the distant wolves, and the murmuring of a dark stream beside him.

Twice, then, and uncertainty both times.

This time there was no doubt. The fear that went into Vargos lodged like a knife between two ribs. In fog and a damp cold on the Day of the Dead he stood in a stubbled field between the ancient Rhodian high road to Trakesia and the southernmost edgings of the infinitely more ancient forest and fell to his knees at what he saw on the road when the mist parted.

There was a dead man there. The others had already fled, and the dogs. Vargos saw that it was Pharus, the stablemaster from Morax's. He lay flat on his back, limbs wide outflung like a child's discarded doll. It could be seen-even from there-that his entrails were spilling out. Blood was spreading all around him. His belly and chest had been ripped apart.

But that wasn't what drove Vargos to his knees as if felled by a blow. He had seen men die badly before. It was the other thing in the road.

The creature that had done this to the man. The zubir that was-Vargos knew this in that moment as he knew his own name-more than only an emblem, after all, however awesome that might be in itself. His ideas of faith and power crumbled in that cold muddy field.

He had adopted the teachings of the sun god, had worshipped and invoked Jad and Heladikos his son almost from the time he had first come south, forsaking the gods of his tribe and the blood-soaked rituals as he had forsaken his home.

And here now was the presence of Ludan, the Ancient One, the oak god, before him in a swirling away of greyness on the Imperial high road, in one of his known guises. Zubir. The bison. Lord of the forest.

And this was a god who demanded blood. And this was the day of sacrifice. Vargos's heart was pounding. He saw that his hands were shaking and was not ashamed. Only afraid. A mortal man in a place where he should not have been.

The mist swirled again, fog wrapped the road like a cloak. The obliterating bulk of the bison was lost. And then it was not. It was, somehow, in the field right beside them, enormous and black, an overpowering presence, a rank smell of animal and blood, wet fur and rotting earth, leaving the dead man alone on the empty road, torn apart, his heart exposed to the day this was.

Her hand on the neck of the shuddering mule, Kasia saw the mist part, saw what had come to be in the road, and she went straight through her own fear and beyond in an instant.

In a kind of trance of unfeeling, she watched the fog descend again, and was utterly unsurprised when the zubir materialized in the field beside them. Vargos had fallen to his knees.

How, she thought, how should one be surprised at what a god could do? She realized suddenly that the donkey had stopped trembling and was standing very still, unnaturally so, given the smell and presence of the monstrous creature not ten paces away now. But what could be strange, what could be strange when one had strayed from a known road this far into the world of the powers? A bison stood before them, so big it would have blotted half the road from her sight if the road had not been lost. Three men could sit between the sharp, short curving of its horns. She saw blood on those horns, and streaky, viscous matter dripping slowly from them. She had seen the stablemaster in the road, ripped into meat.

She had thought this morning, foolishly, that she might escape.

She knew now-oh, she knew! — that Ludan was not to be escaped. Not like this. Not by some clever Rhodian with a scheme. Not by a girl named, however unfairly, however cruelly, to the god. Cruelty had no… place here in the field. It was a word that had no meaning, no context. The god was, and did what he did.

In this suspended state of calm, Kasia looked into the eyes of the zubir, eyes so deep a brown they were black, and she saw them clearly even in mist, and seeing, she surrendered her mortal will and the meaning of her soul to the ancient god of her people. What man-what woman, even more than man-had ever been immune to destiny? Where could you run when your name was known to a god? The secret pagan priest here, the whispering villagers, Morax's gross, small-eyed wife… none of them mattered. Their own destinies awaited them, or had found them already. Ludan signified, and he was here.

Kasia was serene, unresisting, as one drugged with the juice of poppies, when the bison began moving towards the forest. It looked back at the three of them, slowly turning its massive shaggy head. Kasia thought she understood. She had been named. He knew her. There was no path in the world that would not lead her here. Her tread, barefoot in the mud and crushed grass, was steady as she began to follow. Fear was behind her, in another world. She wondered if she would have time to wish a prayer that mattered, for her mother and her sister far away, if such things were allowed, if they were still alive, if the sacrifice had any power in what she was. She knew without turning back that the two men were coming behind her. Choice was not granted here, to any of them.

They went into the Aldwood on the Day of the Dead following the zubir, and the black trees swallowed them even more completely than the fog had done before.

"The numinous," the philosopher Archilochus of Arethae had written nine hundred years ago, "is not to be directly apprehended. Indeed, if the eods wish to destroy a man they need only show themselves to him."

Crispin struggled to barricade his soul behind ancient learning, a desperately conjured image of a marble portico in sunlight, a white-clad, white-bearded teacher serenely illuminating the world for attentive disciples in the most celebrated of the city-states of Trakesia.

He failed. Terror consumed him, asserting mastery, dominance, as he followed the girl and the stupefying creature that was. more than he could grasp. A god? The showing forth of one? The numinous? Upwind of them now, it stank. Things crawled and oozed through the thick, matted fur that hung from its chin, neck, shoulders, even the knees and breast. The bison was enormous, impossibly so, taller than Crispin was, wide as a house, the great, horned head vast and appalling. And yet, as they entered the woods, the first black trees like sentinels, wet leaves falling about them and upon them, the creature moved lightly, gracefully, never turning after that first look back-certain they were following.

And they were. Had there been choice, any kind of volition here, Caius Crispus of Varena, son of Horius Crispus the mason, would have died in that wet cold field and joined his wife and daughters in the afterworld- whatever it turned out to be-rather than enter the Aldwood as a living man. The forest had frightened him even at a distance, in sunlight, seen from the safety of the road in Batiara. This morning, this otherworldly morning in Sauradia, there was no place on the god's earth he would not rather be than here in this dank, inhuman wilderness where even the smells could horrify.

The god's earth. What god? What power ruled in the world as he knew it? As he had known it: for this unnatural creature appearing in fog on the road had changed all that forever. Crispin spoke in his mind to the bird again, but Linon was silent as the dead, hanging about his throat as if she were, truly, no more than an amulet, a pedestrian little creation of leather and metal, worn for sentimental reasons.

He reached up with one hand on impulse and clasped the alchemist's creation. He flinched. The bird was burning hot to the touch. And this, as much as any other thing-this change where no such change should have been possible-was what made Crispin finally accept that he had left the world he knew and was unlikely ever to walk back into it again. He had made a choice last night, had intervened. Linon had warned him. He regretted Vargos, suddenly: the man did not deserve a fate such as this, randomly hired at a border inn to attend an artisan walking the road to Trakesia.

No man deserved this fate, Crispin thought. His throat was dry; it was difficult to swallow. The fog drifted and swirled, trees disappeared then loomed around them, very close. Wet leaves and wet earth defined a hopelessly twisting path. The bison led them on; the forest swallowed them like the jaws of a living creature. Time blurred, much as the seen world had blurred; Crispin had no idea how far they had come. Unable not to, awed and afraid, he reached up and touched the bird again. He couldn't hold her. The heat had penetrated now through his cloak and tunic. He felt her on his chest like a coal from a fire.

"Linon?'he said again, and heard only the silence of his own mind.

He surprised himself then, and began to pray, wordlessly, to Jad of the Sun-for his own soul, and his mother's and his friends', and the taken souls of Ilandra and the girls, asking Light for them, and for himself.

He had told Martinian little more than a fortnight ago that he wanted nothing in life any more, had no desires, no journeys sought, no destinations in a hollowed, riven world. He ought not to be trembling so, to be so profoundly apprehensive of the shifting textures of the forest around them and the mist clinging like fingers to his face, and of the creature that was leading them farther and farther on. He ought to be ready to die here if what he'd been saying was true. It was with a force of real discovery that Crispin realized he wasn't, after all. And that truth, a hammer on the beating heart, smashed through the illusions he'd gathered and nourished for a year and more. He had things unfinished in his mortal house, it seemed. He did have something left.

And he knew what it was, too. Walking in a world where sight was nearly lost-tree trunks and twisted branches in the greyness, heavy wet leaves falling, the black bulk of the bison ahead of him-he could see what he wanted now, as if it were illuminated by fire. He was too clever a man, even amid fear, not to perceive the irony. All the ironies here. But he did know now what he wanted, in his heart, to make, and beyond cleverness, was wise enough not to deny it in this wood.

Upon a dome, with glass and stone and semi-precious gems and streaming and flickering light through windows and from a glory of candles below, Crispin knew he wanted to achieve something of surpassing beauty that would last.

A creation that would mean that he-the mosaic-worker Caius Crispus of Varena-had been born, and lived a life, and had come to understand a portion of the nature of the world, of what ran through and beneath the deeds of women and men in their souls and in the beauty and the pain of their short living beneath the sun.

He wanted to make a mosaic that would endure, that those living in after days would know had been made by him, and would honour. And this, he thought, beneath black and dripping trees, walking over sodden, rotting leaves in the forest, would mean that he had set his mark upon the world, and had been.

It was so strange to realize how it was only at this brink of the chasm, threshold of the dark or the god's holy light, that one could grasp and accept one's own heart's yearning for more of the world. For life.

Crispin realized that his terror had gone now, with this. More strangeness. He looked around at the thick shadows of the forest and they did not frighten him. Whatever lay beyond sight could not be half so overwhelming as the creature that walked before him. Instead of fear, he felt a sadness beyond words now. As if all those born into the world to die were taking this shrouded walk with them, each one longing for something they would never know. He touched the bird again. That heat, as of life, in the damp, grey cold. No glow. Linon was as dark and drab as she had ever been. There was no shining in the Aldwood.

Only the awesome thing that led them, delicate for all its bulk, through the tall, silent trees for a measureless time until they came to a clearing and into it, one by one, and without a word spoken or a sound Crispin knew that this was the place of sacrifice. Archilochus of Arethae, he thought, had not been born when men and women were dying for Ludan in this grove.

The bison turned.

They stood facing him in a row, Kasia between the two men. Crispin drew a breath. He looked across the girl at Vargos. Their eyes met. The mist had lifted. It was grey and cold, but one could see clearly here. He saw the fear in the other man's eyes and also saw that Vargos was fighting it. He admired him then, very much.

"I am sorry," he said, words in the wood. It seemed important to say this. Something-an acknowledgement-from the world beyond this glade, these encircling trees where the wet leaves fell silently on the wet cold grass. Vargos nodded.

The girl sank to her knees. She seemed very small, a child almost, lost inside his second cloak. Pity twisted in Crispin. He looked at the creature before them, into the dark, huge, ancient eyes, and he said, quietly, "You have claimed blood and a life already on the road. Need you take hers as well? Ours?"

He had not known he was going to say that. He heard Vargos suck in his breath. Crispin prepared himself for death. The earth rumbling as before. The ripping of those horns through his flesh. He continued to look into the bison's eyes, an act as courageous as anything he'd ever done in his life. And what he saw there, unmistakably, was not anger or menace but loss. And it was in that moment that Linon finally spoke. "He doesn't want the girl," the bird said very gently, almost tenderly, in his mind. "He came for me. Lay me on the ground, Crispin." "What?" He said it aloud, in bewildered astonishment. The bison remained motionless, gazing at him. Or not, in fact, at him. At the small bird about his throat on the worn leather thong.

"Do it, my dear. This was written long ago, it seems. You are not the first man from the west to try to take a sacrifice from Ludan." "What? Zoticus? What did-"

His mind spinning, Crispin remembered something and clutched it like a spar. That long conversation in the alchemist's home, holding a cup of herbal tea, hearing the old man's voice: "I have the only access to certain kinds of power. Found in my travels, in a guarded place. and at some risk."

Something began-only just began-to come clear for him. A different kind of mist beginning to rise. He felt the beating of his own heart, his life.

"Of course, Zoticus, "Linon said, still gently. "Think, my dear. How else would I have known the rites? There is no time, Crispin. This is in doubt, still. He is waiting, but it is a place of blood. Take me from your neck. Lay me down. Go. Take the others. You have brought me back. 1 believe you will be permitted to leave."

Crispin's mouth was dry again. A taste like ashes. No one had moved since the girl sank to her knees. There was no wind in the clearing, he realized. Mist hung suspended about the branches of the trees. When the leaves fell, it was as if they descended from clouds. He saw puffs of white where the bison breathed in the cold.

"And you?" he asked silently. "Do I save her and leave you behind?" He heard, within, a ripple of laughter. Amazingly. "Oh, my dear, thank you for that. Crispin, my body ended here when you were still a child in the world. He thought the released soul might be freely taken when the sacrifice was made. In the moment of that power. He was right and wrong, it seems. Do not pity me. But tell Zoticus. And tell him, also, for me.»

An inward silence, to match the one in the grey, still glade. And then: "There is no need. He will know what I would have said. Tell him goodbye. Put me down now, dear. You must leave, or never leave."

Crispin looked at the bison. It still had not moved. Even now, his mind could not compass the vastness of it, the presence of so huge and raw a power. The brown eyes had not changed, ancient sorrow in grey light, but there was blood on the horns. He took a shaky breath and slowly reached up with both hands, removing the little bird from his neck. He knelt-it seemed proper to kneel-and laid her gently on the cold ground there. He realized she was no longer burning, but warm, warm as a living thing. A sacrifice. There was a pain in him; he had thought he was past such grief, after Ilandra, after the girls.

And as he laid her down, the bird said then, aloud, in a voice Crispin had never heard from her, the voice of a woman, grave, serene, "I am yours, lord, as I ever was from the time I was brought here."

A stillness, rigid as suspended time. Then the bison's head moved, down, and up again, in acquiescence, and time began once more. The girl, Kasia, made a small, whimpering sound. Vargos, beyond her, put a hand to his mouth, an oddly childlike gesture.

"Go quickly now. Take them and go. Remember me." And in his mind now Linon's voice was that same mild woman's voice. The voice of the girl who had been sacrificed here so long ago, cut open, flayed, her beating heart torn out, while an alchemist watched from hiding nearby and then performed an act or an art Crispin could not begin to comprehend. Evil? Good? What did the words mean here? One thing to another. The dead to life. The movement of souls. He thought of Zoticus. Of a courage he could scarcely imagine, and a presumption beyond belief.

He stood up, unsteadily. He hesitated, utterly uncertain of rules and rituals in this half-world he had entered, but then he bowed to the vast, appalling, stinking creature before him that was a forest god or the living symbol of a god. He put a hand on Kasia's arm, tugging her to her feet. She glanced at him, startled. He looked at Vargos, and nodded. The other man stared, confused.

"Lead us," Crispin said to Vargos, clearing his throat. His voice sounded reedy, strange. To the road. He would be lost, himself, ten paces into the forest.

The bison remained motionless. The small bird lay on the grass. Tendrils of mist drifted in the utterly still air. A leaf fell, and another. "Goodbye," Crispin said, silently. "I will remember." He was weeping. The first time in more than a year.

They left the glade, Vargos leading them. The bison slowly turned its massive head and watched them go, the dark eyes unfathomable now, the horns wet and bloody beneath the circling trees. It made no other movement at all. They stumbled away and it was lost.

Vargos found their path, and nothing in the Aldwood stayed them upon it. No predator of the forest, no daemon or spirit of the air or dark. The fog came again, and with it that sense of movement without passage of time. They came out where they had gone in, though, left the forest and crossed into the field. They reclaimed the mule, which had not moved. Crispin bent and picked up his sword from where it had fallen; Vargos took his staff. When they came to the road, over the same small bridge across the ditch, they stood above the body of the dead man there, and Crispin saw amid all the blood that his chest had been torn entirely open, both upwards from the groin and to each side, and his heart was gone. Kasia turned away and vomited into the ditch. Vargos gave her water from a flask, his own hands shaking. She drank, wiped her face. Nodded her head.

They began walking, alone on the road, in the grey world.

The fog began to lift some time afterwards. Then a pale, weak, wintry sun appeared through a thinning of the clouds for the first time that day. They stopped without a word spoken, looking up at it. And from the forest north of them in that moment there came a sound, high, clear, wordless, one sung note of music. A woman's voice.

"Linon?" Crispin cried urgently, in his mind, unable not to. "Linon?"

There was no reply. The inner silence was absolute. That long, unearthly note seemed to hang in the air between forest and field, earth and sky, and then it faded away like the mist.

Later that day, towards twilight far to the west, a grey-haired, grey-bearded man rode a jostling farmer's cart towards the city walls of Varena.

The farmer, having had more than one animal cured of an ailment by his passenger, was happy to oblige with irregular rides into the city. The passenger, at the moment, could not have been said to appear happy, or pleased, or anything but preoccupied. As they approached the walls and merged with the streaming traffic heading into and out of Varena before sunset closed the gates, the solitary passenger was recognized by a number of people. Some greeted him with deference and awe, others moved quickly to the far side of the road or fell back making a sign of the sun disk as the farmer's cart passed carrying an alchemist. Zoticus was, in fact, long accustomed to both responses and knew how to deal with each. Today he scarcely noticed them.

He'd had a shock this morning that had greatly undermined the wry detachment with which he preferred to view the world and what transpired within it. He was still dealing-not entirely successfully- with that.

‘I think you should go into the city," had said the falcon earlier that day. He'd named her Tiresa when he'd claimed her soul. ‘I think it would be good for you tonight."

"Go to Martinian and Carissa," little Mirelle had added, softly." You can talk with them." There'd been a murmur of agreement from the others, a rustling of leaves in his mind.

"I can talk with all of you," he'd said aloud, irritated. It offended him when the birds became solicitous and protective, as if he were growing fragile with age, needed guarding. Soon they'd be reminding him to wear his boots.

"Not the same," Tiresa had said briskly. "You know it isn't."

Which was true, but he still didn't like it.

He'd tried to read-Archilochus, as it happened-but his concentration was precarious and he gave it up, venturing out for a walk in the orchard instead. He felt extremely strange, a kind of hollowness. Linon was gone. Somehow. She'd been gone, of course, since he'd given her away, but this was… different. He'd never quite stopped regretting the impulse that had led him to offer a bird to the mosaicist travelling east. Or not just east: to Sarantium. City he'd never seen, never would see now. He'd found a power in his life, claimed a gift, his birds. There were other things he would not be allowed, it seemed.

And the birds weren't really his, were they? But if they weren't, then what could they be said to be? And where was Linon, and how had he heard her voice this morning from so far?

And what was he doing shivering in his orchard without a cloak or his stick on a windy, cold autumn day? At least he had his boots on.

He'd gone back inside, sent Clovis off, complaining, with a request to Silavin the farmer down the road, and had taken the birds" collective counsel after all.

He couldn't talk to his friends about what was troubling him, but sometimes talking about other things, any other things, the very timbre of human voices, Carissa's smile, Martinian's gentle wit, the shared warmth of a fire, the bed they'd offer him for the night, a morning visit to the busde of the market…

Philosophy could be a consolation, an attempt to explain and understand the place of man in the gods" creation. It couldn't always succeed, though. There were times when comfort could only be found in a woman's laughter, a friend's known face and voice, shared rumours about the Antae court, even something so simple as a steaming bowl of pea soup at a table with others.

Sometimes, when the shadows of the half-world pressed too near, one needed the world.

He left Silavin at the city gates, with thanks, and made his way to Martinian's home late in the day. He was welcomed there, as he'd known he would be. His visits were rare; he lived a life outside the walls. He was invited to spend a night, and his friends made it seem as if he was doing them a great honour by accepting. They could see he was disturbed by something but-being friends-they never pressed him to speak, only offered what they could, which was a good deal just then.

In the night he woke in a strange bed, in darkness, and went to the window. There were rights burning in the palace, on the upper floors where the beleaguered young queen would be. Someone else awake, it seemed. Not his grief. His gaze went beyond, to the east. There were stars above Varena in the clear night. They blurred in his sight as he stood there, holding memory to himself like a child.

CHAPTER V

They walked for a long time, moving through a world becoming gradually more familiar as the mist continued to lift. And yet, for all the re-emergence of the ordinary, Crispin thought, it had also become a landscape changed beyond his capacity of description. Where the bird had been about his neck there was an absence that felt oddly like a weight. There were crows in the field again, towards the woods, and they heard a songbird in a thicket south of the road. A flash of russet was a fox, though they never saw the hare it pursued.

At what must have been mid-afternoon they stopped. Vargos unwrapped the food again. Bread, cheese, ale for each of them. Crispin drank deeply. He looked away to the south. The mountains were visible again, rifts in the clouds above them showed blue and there was snow on the peaks. Light, shafts of colour, coming back into the world. He became aware that Kasia was looking at him. "She. the bird spoke," she said. Apprehension in her face, though there had not been in the forest, in the grey mist of the field.

He nodded. He had made himself ready for this during the silent walking. He had guessed it would come, that it had to come.

"I heard," he said. "She did."

"How? My lord?"

Vargos watched them, holding his flask.

"I don't know," he lied. "The bird was a talisman given me by a man said to be an alchemist. My friends wanted me to have such a thing for protection. They believe in forces I do not. Did not. I… understand next to nothing of what happened today."

And that was not a lie. Already the morning felt to be a recollection of being wrapped in mist, with a creature in the Aldwood larger than the world, than his comprehension of the world. Thinking back, the only vivid colour he could remember was the red blood on the bison's horns.

"He took her, instead of… me."

"He took Pharus, as well," said Vargos quietly, pushing the stopper back into his flask. "We saw Ludan, or his shadow today." There was something near to anger in the scarred face. "How do we worship Jad and his son after this?"

Real anguish here, Crispin thought, and was moved. They had lived through something together this morning. Wildly different paths to that glade seemed to matter less than one might have expected.

He drew a breath. "We worship them as the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do." He surprised himself. "We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can't even stop children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another?" It was posed as a rhetorical question, a flourish, but the words hung in the brightening air. A blackbird lifted from the stubble of the field and flew away west in a low, sweeping arc, wings beating.

"I do not know," said Vargos, finally. "I have no learning. Twice, when I was younger, I thought I saw the zubir, the bison. I was never sure. Was I being marked? For today, in some way?"

"I am not the man to answer that," said Crispin.

"Are we… safe now?" the girl asked.

"Until the next thing comes," Crispin said, and then, more kindly, "Safe from those who followed, yes, I believe so. From whatever was in the wood? I… also believe so." He doesn't want the girl. He came for me.

It took a certain act of will, but he kept his mind from calling out again to the silence. Linon had been with him for so little time-abrasive, unyielding-but no one else, not even Ilandra, had ever been within him in that way. My dear, she had said, at the end. Remember me.

If he understood any of this rightly, Linon had been a woman, named as Kasia had been named to the forest god, but she had died in that grove a long time ago. Heart cut out, body hanging from a sacred tree. And soul…? Soul claimed by a mortal man who had been watching, insanely daring, and drawing upon some arcane power Crispin's mind could not compass.

He remembered, unexpectedly, the look on Zoticus's face when it had emerged that of all his birds it was Linon whose inward voice Crispin had heard. She was his fast, Crispin thought, and knew it was true.

Tell him goodbye, the bird had said silently at the end, in what would once have been her own voice. Crispin shook his head. He had thought once, in his arrogance, that he knew something of the world of men and women.

"There is a chapel we will come to soon," Vargos said. Crispin pulled his thoughts back, and realized they had both been watching him. "Before sunset. A real one, not just a roadside shrine." "Then we will enter it and pray," said Crispin.

There would be comfort in the well-worn rituals, he realized. A returning to the customary, where people lived out their lives. Where they had to live their lives. The day, he thought, had done all it could do, the world had revealed all it would just now. They would calm themselves, he would order his thoughts, begin adjusting to the absence about his throat and in his mind, begin thinking of what to say in a difficult letter to Zoticus, perhaps even begin looking forward to wine and a meal at tonight's inn. A returning to the customary, indeed, as if coming home from a very long journey. Men, when they think in this way-that the crisis, the moment of revealed power, has passed-are as vulnerable as they will ever be. Good leaders of armies at war know this. Any skilled actor or writer for the stage knows it. So do clerics, priests, perhaps cheiromancers. When people have been very deeply shaken in certain ways they are, in fact, wide open to the next bright falling from the air. It is not the moment of birth-the bursting through a shell into the world-that imprints the newborn gosling, but the next thing, the sighting that comes after and marks the soul.

They went on, two men and a woman, through an opening world. No one else was on the road. It was the Day of the Dead. The autumn light became mild as the sun swung west, palely veiled. A cool breeze moved the clouds. More rifts of blue could be seen overhead. Crows in the fields, jays, and another small bird Crispin didn't know, swift-flying on their right, with a bright tail red as blood. Snow far off, on the distant mountain peaks emerging one by one. The sea beyond. He could have sailed, if the courier..

They came to the place of which Vargos had spoken. It was set behind iron gates, some distance back from the road on the south side. It faced the forest. The chapel was much larger than the usual roadside places of prayer. A real one, as Vargos had put it: a grey stone octagon with a dome above, neatly cropped grass around it, a dormitory beside, outbuildings behind, a graveyard. It was very peaceful here. Crispin saw cows and a goat in the meadow beyond the graves.

Had he been more aware of time and place, had his mind not been wrestling with unseen things, he might have realized where they were and been prepared. He did not, and he was not.

They tied the mule by the low wall, went through the unlocked iron gate and up the stone path. There were late-season flowers growing beside it, lovingly tended. Crispin saw an herb garden to the left, back towards the meadow. They opened the heavy wooden door of the chapel and the three of them went in and Crispin looked at the walls, as his eyes slowly adjusted to the muted light, and then, stepping forward, he looked up at the dome.

Divisions of faith in the worship of Jad had led to burnings and torture and war almost from the beginning. The doctrine and liturgy of the sun god, emerging from the promiscuous gods and goddesses of Trakesia during the early years of the Empire of Rhodias, had not evolved without their share of schisms and heresies and the frequently savage responses to these. The god was in the sun, or he was behind the sun. The world had been born in light, or it had been released from ice and darkness by holy light. At one time the god was thought to die in winter and be reborn in the spring, but the gentle cleric who had expounded this had been ordered torn apart between cavalry horses by a High Patriarch in Rhodias. For a brief time, elsewhere, it had been taught that the two moons were Jad's offspring-a belief more than halfway to the doctrines of the Kindath, who named them sisters of the god and equal to him in disturbing ways. This unfortunate fallacy, too, had required a number of deaths to extirpate.

The varying forms of belief in Heladikos-as mortal son, as half-mortal child, as god-were only the most obdurate and enduring of these conflicts waged in the holy name of Jad. Emperors and Patriarchs, first in Rhodias and then Sarantium, wavered and grew firm and then reversed their positions and tolerance, and Heladikos the Charioteer moved in and out of acceptance and fashion, much as the sun moved in and out of cloud on a windy day.

In the same way, amongst all these bitter wars, fought with words and iron and flame, the rendered image of Jad himself had become a line of demarcation over the years, a battlefield of art and belief, of ways of imagining the god who sent life-bringing light and battled darkness every night beneath his world while men slept their precarious sleep.

And this modest, beautifully made old chapel in a quiet, isolated place on the ancient Imperial road in Sauradia was that dividing line.

He'd had no warning at all. Crispin took some steps forward in the subdued, delicate light of the chapel, noting, absently, the old-fashioned mosaics of intertwined flowers on the walls, and then looked up.

A moment later, he found himself lying on the cold stones of the floor, struggling to breathe, gazing up at his god.

He ought to have known what was waiting for him in this place. Even setting out from Varena it had crossed his mind that the road through Sauradia would take him past this chapel at some point-he wasn't certain exactly where, but he knew it was on the Imperial road-and he'd even been looking forward to seeing what the old craftsmen had done in their primitive fashion, rendering Jad in the eastern way.

But the intensity and the terror of what had happened this morning in the fog and the wood had driven that thought so far from him that he was wide open, defenceless, utterly exposed to the force of what had been done by mortal men on this dome. After the Aldwood and the bison and Linon, Crispin had no barriers within himself, no refuge, and the power of the image above hammered into him, driving all strength from his body so that he fell down like a pantomime grotesque or a helpless drunk in an alley behind a caupona.

He lay flat on his back staring up at the figure of the god: the bearded face and upper torso of Jad massively rendered across virtually the entirety of the dome. A gaunt image, battle-weary and grim, weighted down- he registered the heavy cloak, the bowed shoulders-by his burdens and the stern evils of his children. A figure as absolute and terrifying as the bison had been: another dark, massive head, against the pale, golden tesserae of the sun behind him. A figure seeming as if it would descend in overwhelming judgement from above. The image encompassed the head and shoulders, both lifted hands. No more, no room on the dome for more. Spreading across the softly illuminated space, gazing down with eyes large as some figures Crispin had made in his day, it was so out of scale it should never have worked, and yet Crispin had not in all his life seen anything made that touched the strength of this.

He had known this work was here, westernmost of all the renderings of the god done with the full dark eastern beard and those black, haunted eyes: Jad as judge, as worn, beleaguered warrior in deathly combat, not the shining, blue-eyed, golden sun-figure of Crispin's west. But knowing and seeing were so far from the same thing it was as if… as if one was the world and the other the half-world of hidden powers.

The old craftsmen. Their primitive fashion.

So he had thought, back home. Crispin felt an aching in his heart for the depths of his own folly, the revealed limitations of his understanding and skill. He felt naked before this, grasping that in its own way this work of mortal men in a domed chapel was as much a manifestation of the holy as the bison with its blood-smeared horns in the wood, and as appalling. The fierce, wild power of Ludan, accepting sacrifice in his grove, set against the immensity of craft and comprehension on this dome, rendering in glass and stone a deity as purely humbling. How did one move from one of these poles to the other? How did mankind live between such extremes?

For the deepest mystery, the pulsing heart of the enigma, was that as he lay on his back, paralysed by revelation, Crispin saw that the eyes were the same. The world's sorrow he'd seen in the zubir was here in the sun god above him, distilled by nameless artisans whose purity of vision and faith unmanned him. Crispin was actually unsure for a moment if he'd ever be able to get up, to reassert his self-control, his will.

He struggled to disentangle the elements of the work here, to gain some mastery over it and himself. Deep brown and obsidian in the eyes, to make them darker and stronger than the framing brown hair, shoulder length. The long face made longer by that straight hair and the beard; the arched, heavy eyebrows, deeply etched forehead, other lines scoring the cheeks-the skin so pale between beard and hair it showed as nearly grey. Then down to the rich, luxurious blue of the god's robe beneath his cloak which was shot through, Crispin saw, with a dazzling myriad of contrasting colours for a woven texture and the hinted play and power of light in a god whose power was light.

And then the hands. The hands were heartbreaking. Contorted, elongated fingers with the ascetic spiritualism suggested by that, but there was more: these were no cleric's fingers, no hands of repose and clasped meditation, they were both scarred. One finger on the left hand had clearly been broken; it was crooked, the knuckle swollen: red and brown tesserae against white and grey. These hands had wielded weapons, had been cut, frozen, known savage war against ice and black emptiness in the endless defence of mortal children whose understanding was… that of children, no more.

And the sorrow and judgement in the dark eyes was linked to what had happened to those hands. The colours, Crispin saw-the craftsman in him marvelling-brought hands and eyes inescapably together. The vivid, unnaturally raised veins on the wrists of both pale hands used the same brown and obsidian that were in the eyes. He knew, intuitively, that this precise pairing of tesserae would exist nowhere else on the dome. The eyes of sorrow and indictment, the hands of suffering and war. A god who stood between his unworthy children and the dark, offering sunlight each morning in their brief time of life, and then his own pure Light afterwards, for the worthy.

Crispin thought of Ilandra, of his girls, of the plague ravaging like a rabid carnivore through all the world, and he lay on cold stone beneath this image of Jad and understood what it was saying to him, to all those here below: that the god's victory was never assured, never to be taken for granted. It was this, he realized, that the unknown mosaicists of long ago were reporting on this dome to their brethren with this vast, weary god against the soft gold of his sun.

"Are you all right? My lord! Are you all right?"

He became aware that Vargos was addressing him with an urgency and concern that almost seemed amusing, after all they had survived today. It wasn't especially uncomfortable on the stones, though cold. He moved a hand vaguely. It was still somewhat difficult to breathe, actually. It was better when he didn't look up. Kasia, he saw as he turned his head, was standing a little apart, staring at the dome.

Looking over at her, he grasped something else: Vargos knew this place. He'd been along this road, back and forth, for years. The girl would never have seen this incarnation of Jad either, had most likely never even heard of it. She'd only come from the north a year ago, forced into slavery and the faith of the sun god, had only known Jad as a young, fair-haired, blue-eyed god, a direct descendant-though this she wouldn't know-of the solar deity in the pantheon of the Trakesians centuries ago.

"What do you see?" he said to her. His voice rasped in his throat. Vargos turned to follow his gaze to the girl. Kasia looked over at him anxiously, then away. She was very pale.

"I… he…" She hesitated. They heard footsteps. Crispin struggled to a sitting position and saw a cleric approaching in the white robes of the order of the Sleepless Ones. He understood now why it was so quiet here. These were the holy men who stayed awake all night praying while the god fought daemons beneath the world. Mankind has duties, the figure overhead was saying, this is an unending war. These men believed that and embodied it in their rituals. The image above and the order of clerics praying in the long nights fit together. The men who made the mosaic, so long ago, would have known that.

"Tell us," he said quietly to Kasia as the white-clad figure, small, round-faced, full-bearded, came over to them.

"He.. doesn't think he is winning," she said finally. "The battle."

The cleric stopped at that. He eyed the three of them gravely, apparently unsurprised to find a man sitting on the floor.

"He isn't certain he is," the cleric said to Kasia, speaking Sarantine, as she had. "There are enemies, and man does evil, abetting them. It is never sure, this battle. Which is why we must be a part of it."

"Do we know who achieved this?" Crispin asked quietly.

The cleric looked surprised. "Their names? The craftsmen?" He shook his head. "No. There must have been many of them, I suppose. They were artisans. and a holy spirit possessed them for a time."

"Yes, of course," Crispin said, rising to his feet. He hesitated. "Today is the Day of the Dead here," he murmured, not sure why he was saying that. Vargos steadied him with a hand at his elbow and then stepped back.

"I understand as much," the cleric said mildly. He had an unlined, gentle face. "We are surrounded by pagan heresies. They do evil to the god."

"Is that all they are to you?" Crispin asked. In his mind was a voice- a young woman, a crafted bird, a soul: I am yours, lord, as I ever was from the time I was brought here.

"What else should they be to me?" the white-robed man said, raising his eyebrows.

It was a fair question, Crispin supposed. He caught an anxious look from Vargos and let the matter rest. "I am sorry for.. how you found me," he said. "I was affected by the image."

The cleric smiled. "You aren't the first. Might I guess you are from the! west.. Batiara?"

Crispin nodded. It wasn't a difficult conjecture. His accent would have given that away.

"Where the god is yellow-haired and comely, his eyes blue and untroubled as summer skies?" The white-robed man was smiling complacently.

"I am aware of how Jad is rendered in the west, yes." Crispin had never been much inclined to be lectured by anyone.

"And as a last hazarded guess, may I assume you are an artisan of some sort?"

Kasia looked astonished, Vargos wary. Crispin eyed the cleric coolly, "A clever surmise," he said. "How would you know this?"

The man's hands were clasped at his waist. "As I said, you aren't the first westerner to react this way. And it is often those who make their own attempts at such things who. are most affected."

Crispin blinked. He might feel humbled by what was on the dome, but "attempts at such things" was not acceptable.

"I am impressed by your sagacity. It is indeed a fine piece of work. After I attend to certain requests from the Emperor in Sarantium, I might be willing to return and supervise the needed repairs to the erratic groundwork done on the dome."

The cleric's turn to blink, pleasingly. "That work was done by holy men with a holy vision," he said indignantly.

"I have no doubt of it. One shame is that we don't know their names, to honour them, another is that they lacked technique equal to their vision. You do know that tiles have begun to dislodge towards the right side of the dome, as we face the altar. Parts of the god's cloak and left forearm appear to have recklessly chosen to detach themselves from the rest of his august form."

The cleric looked up, almost reluctantly.

"Of course you may have a parable or a liturgical explanation for this," Crispin added. In the oddest way, fencing with the man was restoring his equilibrium. Not necessarily a proper thing, he supposed, but he needed it just now.

"You would propose changing the figure of the god?" The man seemed genuinely aghast.

Crispin sighed. "It has been changed, good cleric. When your extremely pious artisans did this work centuries ago, Jad had a robe and a left arm." He pointed. "Not the remains of dried-out groundwork."

The cleric shook his head. His features had reddened. "What manner of man looks up at glory and speaks of daring to set his own hands upon it?" Crispin was quite calm now. "A descendant in the craft of those who did it in the first place. Lacking, perhaps, their piety, but with a better understanding of the technique of mosaic. I should add that the dome also appears near to losing some of its golden sun, to the left. I'd need to be up on a scaffold to be certain, but it seems some tesserae have dislodged there as well. If that goes, then the god's hair will soon begin to fall out, I fear. Are you prepared to have Jad come down upon you, not in a thunderous descent but in a dribble of glass and stone?"

"This is the most profane heresy!" the cleric snapped, making the sign of the disk.

Crispin sighed. "I am sorry you see it that way. I do not mean to provoke you. Or not only that. The setting bed on the dome was done in an old-fashioned way. One layer, and most likely with a mixture of materials we now understand to be less enduring than others. It is-as we all know-not holy Jad above us, but his rendering by mortal men. We worship the god, not the image, I understand." He paused. This was a matter of extreme contention in some quarters. The cleric opened his mouth as if to answer, but then closed it again.

Crispin went on. "Mortals have their limitations, and this, too, we all know. Sometimes new things are discovered. It is no criticism of those who achieved this dome to note such a truth. Lesser men may preserve the work of greater. With competent assistants I could probably ensure the restored image above us would remain for several hundred years to come. It would take a season of work. Perhaps a little less or more. But I can tell you that without such intervention those eyes and hands and hair will begin to litter the stones around us soon. I would be sorry to see it. This is a singular work."

"It is unmatched in the world!"

"I believe that."

The cleric hesitated. Kasia and Vargos, Crispin saw, were eyeing him with astonishment. It occurred to him-with a restorative amusement that neither of them had had any reason to believe he was good for anything to this point. A worker in mosaic had little enough chance to show his gifts or skill walking the emptiness of Sauradia.

In that moment, in an intervention Crispin could have called divine a tinkling sound was heard across the floor. Crispin repressed a smile and walked over. He knelt, looking carefully, and found a brownish tessera without difficulty. He turned it over. The backing was dry, brittle. It crumbled to powder as he brushed it with a finger. He rose and walked back to the other three, handing the mosaic piece to the cleric.

"A holy message?" he said dryly. "Or just a piece of dark stone from'- he looked up-'most likely the robe again, on the right side?"

The cleric opened his mouth and closed it, exactly as he had before. He was undoubtedly regretting, Crispin thought, that this had been his day to be awake in daylight and deal with visitors to the chapel. Crispin looked up again at the severe majesty overhead and regretted his bantering tone. Attempts at such things had rankled, but it hadn't been personal, and he ought to have been above such pettiness. Especially today, and here.

Men, he thought-perhaps especially this man, Caius Crispus of Varena — seemed to escape so rarely from the concerns and trivial umbrages that made up their daily lives. He ought to have been moved beyond them today, surely. Or perhaps-a sudden, quite different sort of thought-perhaps it was because he'd been taken so far beyond that he needed to find his way back in this manner?

He looked at the cleric, and then up again at the god. The god's image. It could be done, with skilful people. Probably close to half a year, however, realistically. He decided, abruptly, that they would stay the night here. He would speak to the leader of this holy order, make amends for irony and levity. If they could be made to understand what was happening on the dome, perhaps when Crispin reached the City bearing a letter from them, the Chancellor, or someone else-the Imperial Mosaicist? — might be enlisted in an attempt to preserve this splendour. He'd teased and been flippant, Crispin thought. Perhaps he'd make redress by an act of restoration, in memory of this day and perhaps of his own dead.

In the unfolding of events, of a man's life, so many things can intervene. Just as he was not to see his torch of Heladikos in the chapel outside Varena by glittering candlelight, so this, too, was a task Crispin was never to perform, though his intentions in that moment were deeply sincere and nearly pious. Nor did they, in fact, end up spending that night in the dormitory of the ancient sanctuary.

The cleric slipped the brown tessera into his robe. But before anyone could speak again, they heard a distant and then a growing thunder of horses from the road.

The cleric looked to the doors, startled. Crispin exchanged a sharp glance with Vargos. Then they heard, even through the doors and well back from the road, a loudly shouted command to halt. The hoofbeats stopped. There was a jingling, then boots on the path and the voices of men.

The doors burst open admitting a spearshaft of daylight and half a dozen cavalry soldiers. They strode forward, heavy steps on stone. None of them looked up at the dome. Their leader, a burly, black-haired, very tall man, carrying his helmet under one arm, stopped before the four of them. He nodded to the cleric, stared at Crispin.

"Carullus, tribune of the Fourth Sauradian. My respects. Saw the mule. We are looking for someone on this road. Would you be named Martinian of Varena, by any chance?"

Crispin, unable to think of any adequate reason to do otherwise, nodded his head in agreement. He was, in fact, speechless.

Carullus of the Fourth's formal expression gave way on the instant to mingled disdain and triumph-a remarkable conjunction, in fact, a challenge ever to render in tesserae. He levelled a thick, indicting finger at Crispin. "Where the fuck have you been, you shit-smeared Rhodian slug? Sticking it into every poxed whore on the road? What are you doing on the road instead of at sea? You've been awaited in the fucking City for weeks now by his thrice-exalted Majesty, His Imperial Magnificence, the fucking Emperor Valerius II himself. You turd."

"You are a mentally defective idiot of a Rhodian, you know."

An entirely unexpected memory came to Crispin with the words forming slowly, retrieved from some lost corner of childhood. It was amazing, really, what the mind could dredge forth. At the most absurd moments. He had been stunned unconscious when he was about nine years old, playing «Siege» with friends around and on top of a woodshed. He'd failed to repel a ferocious Barbarian assault from two older boys and had pitched from the shed roof, landing on his head among logs.

From that morning until the guardsmen of Queen Gisel had clapped a sack of flour over his head and clubbed him into submission the experience had not been repeated.

It had now, Crispin grasped through the miasma of an excruciating headache, been duplicated twice in the same autumn season. His thoughts were extremely muddled. For a moment he'd attributed the obscene words he'd just heard to Linon. But Lmon was sardonic not profane, she called him imbecile not idiot, spoke Rhodian not Sarantian, and she was gone.

Recklessly, he opened his eyes. The world shifted and heaved, appallingly. He closed them again quickly, near to throwing up.

"A genuine fool," the heavy voice went on implacably. "Ought never to be allowed out of doors. What in holy thunder do you expect to happen when a foreigner-a Rhodian at that! — calls a Sarantine cavalry tribune a fart-faced goat-fucker in the presence of his own men?"

It wasn't Linon. It was the soldier.

Carullus. Of the Fourth Sauradian. That was the swine's name.

The swine went on, his tone a gross exaggeration of patience now. "Have you the least idea of the position you put me in? The Imperial army is entirely dependent on respect for authority. and regular payment, of course. and you left me next to no choice at all. I couldn't draw a sword in a chapel. I couldn't strike you with my fist… giving you far too much dignity. Flattening you with a helm was just about the only possible course. I didn't even swing hard. Be grateful that I'm known for a kindly man, you snot-faced Rhodian prig, and that you've a beard. The bruise won't show as much before it heals. You'll be as ugly as you've always been, not more than that."

Carullus of the Fourth chuckled. He actually chuckled.

He'd been slugged with a helmet. It was coming back to him. On the cheekbone and jaw. Crispin had a memory of a swift, heavy arm coming across, then nothing more. He attempted to move his jaw up and down, and then from side to side. A searing pain made him gasp, but movement was possible, it seemed. He continued to try opening his eyes at intervals, but the world insisted upon moving about in a sick-making fashion whenever he did.

"Nothing's broken," Carullus said easily. "Told you, I'm a good-natured man. Bad for discipline, but there it is. There it is. The god made me what I am. You really must not think you can walk the roads of the Sarantine Empire making insults-however clever-to the face of military officers in the presence of their troops, my western friend. I have fellow tribunes and chiliarchs who would have dragged you straight outside and run you through in the graveyard to save lugging your corpse anywhere. I, on the other hand, do not entirely subscribe to the general loathing and contempt for the sanctimonious, cowardly, shit-smeared Rhodian catamites that most soldiers of the Empire profess. I actually find you people amusing at times and, as I said before, I'm a kindly man. Ask my troops."

Carullus, a tribune of the Sauradian Fourth, liked the cadences of his own voice, it appeared. Crispin wondered how and how soon he could kill this kindly man.

"Where.. am I?" It hurt to talk.

"In a litter. Travelling east."

This information brought no inconsiderable relief: it seemed the world was indeed moving, and the perception of a weaving landscape and an up-and-down-bobbing military conversationalist beside him was not merely a product of his braincase having being rearranged again.

There was something urgent to be said. He struggled and then remembered what it was. Forced his eyes open again, finally grasping that

Carullus was riding beside him, on a dark grey horse. "My man?" Crispin asked, moving his jaw as little as possible. "Vargos."

Carullus shook his head, his own mouth a thin line in a smooth-shaven face. "Slaves who strike a soldier-any soldier, let alone an officer-are torn apart in a public execution. Everyone knows that. He nearly knocked me down."

"He's not a slave, you contemptible shit!"

Carullus said, mildly enough, "Careful. My men might hear you, and I'd have to respond. I know he isn't a slave. We looked at his papers. He'll be whipped and castrated when we get to camp, but not killed between the horses."

Crispin felt his heart thump then, hard. "He's a free man, an Imperial citizen and my hired servant. You touch him at absolute peril. I mean it. Where s the girl? What's happened to her?"

"She is a slave, from one of the inns. And young enough. We can use her at camp. She spat in my face, you know."

Crispin forced himself to be calm; anger would make him nauseated again, and useless. "She was sold from the inn. She belongs to me. You will know this, having gone through those papers, too, you pustulent excrescence. If she is touched or harmed, or if the man is harmed in any way, my first request of the Emperor will be your testicles sliced off and bronzed into gaming dice. Be clear about this."

Carullus sounded amused. "You really are an idiot, aren't you? Though pustulent excrescence is good, I must say. How do you tell anything to the Emperor at all if it is reported that you and your companions were found by our company to have been robbed, sexually penetrated in various ways, and foully murdered by outlaws on the road today? I repeat, the man and the girl will be dealt with in the usual manner."

Crispin said, still struggling to keep his composure, "There is an idiot here, but he's on the horse not in the litter. The Emperor will receive a precise report of our encounter from the Sleepless Ones, along with their earnest petition that I return to supervise the restoration of the image of Jad on the dome, as we were discussing when you burst in. We were neither robbed nor killed. We were accosted in a holy place by slovenly horsemen under an incompetent dung-faced tribune, and a man personally summoned by Valerius II to Sarantium was struck by a weapon in the face. Do you prefer a reprimand leavened by my conceding I provoked you, or castration and death, Tribune?"

There was a satisfying period of silence. Crispin brought up a hand and tenderly touched his jaw.

He looked over and up at the horseman, squinting into the light. Odd specks and colours danced erratically in his vision. "Of course," he added, "you could turn back west, kill the clerics-all of them will know the story by now-and claim we were all robbed and violated and killed by those evil brigands on the road. You could do that, you dried-out rat dropping."

"Stop insulting me," Carullus said, but without force this time. He rode some further distance in silence. "I had forgotten about the fucking cleric," he admitted, at length.

"You forgot about who signed my Permit, too," Crispin said. "And who requested me to come to the City. You've read the papers. Get on with it, Tribune: give me half a reason to be forgiving. You might consider begging."

Instead, Carullus of the Fourth Sauradian began to swear. Impressively, in fact, and for quite some time. Finally he swung down from his horse, gestured at someone Crispin couldn't see, and handed off the reins to the soldier who hurried up. He began walking alongside Crispin's litter. "Rot your eyes, Rhodian. We can't, have civilians-especially foreigners-insulting army officers! Can't you see that? The Empire is six months behind in their pay. Six months, with winter coming! Everything's going for buildings." He said the word like another obscenity. "Have you any notion what morale is like?"

"The man. The girl," Crispin said, ignoring this. "Where are they? Are they hurt?"

"They're here, they're here. She's not been touched, we've no time for play. You are late, I told you. That's why we were riding to look for you. An undignified, Jad-cursed order if ever there was one."

"Oh, shit yourself! The courier was late. I wrapped up affairs and left five days after he came! It was past the season for sailing. You think I wanted to be on this road? Find him and ask questions. Titaticus, or something. An idiot with a red nose. Kill him with your helmet. How is Vargos?"

Carullus looked back over his shoulder. "He's on a horse."

"What? Riding?"

The tribune sighed. "Tied across the back of one. He was… worked over a little. He struck me after you fell. He can't do that!"

Crispin tried to sit up, and failed, miserably. He closed his eyes and opened them again when this seemed practical. "Listen to me carefully. If that man has been seriously injured, I will have your rank and your pension revoked, if not your life. This is an oath. Get him in a litter and have him tended to. Where s the nearest physician who doesn't kill people?"

"At camp. He struck me," Carullus repeated, plaintively. But he turned, after a moment, and gestured again, behind him. When another soldier trotted up on his horse, Carullus murmured a rapid volley of instructions, too softly for Crispin to hear. The cavalryman muttered unhappily but turned to obey.

"It is done," Carullus said, turning back to Crispin. "They say he's had nothing broken. Won't walk or piss easy for a while, but nothing that won't pass. Are we friends?"

"Fuck yourself with your sword. How far to your camp?"

Tomorrow night. He's all right, I'm telling you. I don't lie."

"No, you just shit all over your uniform when you realize you've made the mistake of your life."

"Jad's blood! You swear more than I do! Martiman, there is fault here both ways. I am being reasonable."

"Only because a holy man saw what happened, you bloated fart, you pantomime buffoon."

Carullus laughed suddenly. "True enough. Number it among the great blessings of your life. Give money to the Sleepless Ones until the day you die. Bloated fart is also good, by the way. I like it. I'll use it. Do you want a drink?"

The situation was outrageous, and he was only moderately reassured about Vargos's condition, but it did begin to appear that Carullus of the Fourth Sauradian was not entirely a lout, and he did want a drink

Crispin nodded his head, carefully.

They brought him a flask, and later an aide to the tribune cleaned Crispin's bloodied cheek and jaw line with decent care when they halted for a brief rest. He saw Vargos then. They had indeed worked him over, and more than a little, but had evidently chosen to reserve more substantial chastisement until such time as everyone at their camp could watch the fun. Vargos was awake by then. His face was puffy from the blows and there was an ugly gash on his forehead, but he was in a litter now. Kasia was led up, apparently untouched, though with that furtive, doe-like look in her eyes again, as if caught in torchlight by night hunters and frozen in place with apprehension. He remembered his first sight of her. Yesterday at about this time in the front room of Morax's inn. Yesterday? That was astonishing. It would give him another headache if he dwelled on it. He was an idiot. An imbecile.

Linon was gone, to her god, into silence in the Aldwood.

"We have an escort to the military camp," Crispin said to both of them, still moving his jaw as little as possible. "I have achieved an understanding with the tribune. We will not be harmed further. In return I will allow him to continue functioning as a man and a soldier. I am sorry if you were hurt, or frightened. It seems I am now to be accompanied to Sarantium the rest of the way. There was more urgency to my summons than was evident in the documents themselves or their delivery. Vargos, they have promised a physician at their camp tomorrow night to tend to you, and I will release you from my service then. The tribune swears you will come to no harm and I believe he is honest. A gross pig, but honest."

Vargos shook his head. He mumbled something Crispin couldn't make out. His lips were badly swollen, the words garbled.

"He wants to come with you," Kasia said softly. The sun was low, now, behind her, almost straight along the road. It was growing colder, twilight coming. "He says he cannot serve on this road any more, after this morning. They will kill him."

Crispin, after a moment's thought, realized that had to be true. He remembered a blow struck by Vargos in the dark of the innyard before dawn this morning. Vargos, too, had intervened in this sacrifice. His own was not the only life in the midst of change, it seemed. In the last bronze glow of the sun under-lighting clouds he looked closely at the man in the other litter. "This is correct? You wish me to retain your services all the way to the City?"

Vargos nodded his head.

Crispin said, "Sarantium is a different world, you know that."

"Know that," Vargos said, and this time he heard it clearly. "Your man."

He felt something unexpected then, like a shaft of light through everything else that day. It took him a moment to recognize it as happiness. Crispin stretched out a hand from his litter and the other man reached across the space between to touch it with his own.

"Rest now," said Crispin, struggling to keep his own eyes open. His head was hurting a great deal. "It will be all right." He wasn't sure he believed that, but after a moment he saw that Vargos had indeed closed his eyes and was asleep. Crispin touched his bruised chin again and struggled not to yawn: it hurt when he opened his mouth so much. He looked at the girl. "We'll talk tonight," he mumbled. "Need to sort out your life, too."

He saw that quick, flaring apprehension in her again. Not a surprise, really. Her life, what had happened to her this year, and this morning. He saw Carullus coming over: long strides, his shadow behind him on the road. Not a bad man, really. An easy laugh, sense of humour. Crispin had provoked him. In front of his soldiers. It was true. Not the wisest thing. Might admit that later. Might not. Might be better not.

He was asleep before the tribune reached his litter.

"Don't hurt him!" Kasia said to the officer as he came up, though Crispin never heard it. She stepped quickly between the litter and the soldier.

"I can't hurt him, girl," said the tribune of the Fourth Sauradian, shaking his head bemusedly, looking at her. "He has both my balls on a smith's anvil and the hammer in his hand."

"Good!" she said. "Keep remembering that." Her expression was fierce, northern, not at all doe-like just then.

The soldier laughed aloud. "Jad rot the moment I saw the three of you in that chapel," he said. "Now Inici slave girls tell me what to do? What ere you even doing abroad on the fucking Day of the Dead, anyhow? Don't you know it is dangerous today in Sauradia?"

She went pale, he saw, but made no reply. There was a tale here, his instincts told him. They also told him he wasn't likely to hear it. He could have her beaten for disrespect, but knew he wouldn't. He really was a kind-hearted man, Carullus told himself. The Rhodian didn't know how lucky he was.

Carullus also had a sense-a mild one, to be sure-that his own future might possibly be at risk as a result of this encounter at the sanctuary. He'd seen, a little too late, the Rhodian's Permit, and who had signed it, and had read the specific terms of the Emperor's request for the presence of a certain Martinian of Varena.

An artisan. Only an artisan, but personally invited to the City to lend his great expertise and knowledge to the Emperor's new Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom. Another building. Another fucking building.

Wisdom, holy or wholly practical, suggested to Carullus that he exercise a measure of caution here. The man talked a very confident game, and he had papers to back him up. He did own the girl, too; those documents had been in the satchel as well. Only since last night, mind you. Part of that story he wasn't going to learn, Carullus guessed. The girl was still glaring at him with those blue northern eyes. She had a strong, clever face. Yellow hair.

If the cleric hadn't been watching what had happened, Carullus could have had the three of them killed and dropped in a ditch. He probably wouldn't have. He was far too soft, he told himself. Hadn't even broken the Rhodian's jaw with his helmet. Shameful, really. Respect for the army had disappeared in this generation. The Emperor's fault? Possibly, though you could be drummed out of the ranks with a slit nose for saying as much. Money went to monuments these days, to Rhodian artisans, to shameful payments to the butt-fucked Bassanids in the east, instead of to honest soldiers who kept the City and the Empire safe. Word was that even Leontes, the army's beloved, the golden-haired Supreme Strategos, spent all his time now in the City, in the Imperial Precinct, dancing courtly attendance on the Emperor and Empress, playing games of a morning with balls and mallets on horseback, instead of smashing Bassanid or northern enemies into the puling rabble they were. He had a rich wife now. Another reward Wives could be a world of trouble to a soldier, Carullus thought, had always thought. Whores, if they were clean, were much less bother.

They had halted long enough. He gestured to his second in command. Darkness was coming and the next inn was a ways yet. They could only move as fast as the carried men. The litters were hoisted, the litter-bearers" horses collected and led along. The girl gave him a last fierce glare, then began walking between the two sleeping men, barefoot, looking small and fragile in a brown, too-large cloak in the last of the light. She was pretty enough. Thin for his taste, but spirited, and one couldn't have everything. The artisan would be useless to her tonight. One had to exercise a bit of discretion with the personal slaves of other men, but Carullus wondered absently what his best smile might achieve here. He tried to catch her eye, but failed.

He was in some real pain but his father and brothers had given him worse beatings in his day and Vargos was not by nature inclined to feel sorry for himself or surrender to discomfort. He had struck an army tribune in the chest today, nearly felled him; by rights they could kill him for that. They had intended to, he knew, when they reached the camp. Then Martinian had intervened, somehow. Martinian did… unexpected things. In the darkness of the inn's crowded main-floor sleeping room, Vargos shook his head. So much had happened since last night at Morax's.

He thought he had seen the old god this morning.

Ludan, in his guise of the zubir, in the Aldwood. In a sacred grove of the Aldwood. He had stood there, knelt in that grove… and had walked alive from there out into the misty field again because Martinian of Varena had carried some kind of magicked bird about his neck.

The zubir. Against the memory of that, what were bruises or a swollen mouth or a stream of red when he pissed tonight? He had seen what he had seen, and lived. Was he blessed? Could such a man as he be blessed?

Or was he being warned-a sudden thought-to forsake the other god, the one behind the sun, Jad and his chariot-driving son?

Or was Martinian right about this, too: that the one power need not mean a denial of the other? No cleric Vargos knew would accept that, but Vargos had already decided that the Rhodian was worth listening to.

And staying with.

All the way to Sarantium, it seemed. There was apprehension in that thought. Megarium, on the coast in the west of Sauradia, was the largest city Vargos had ever seen, and he hadn't liked it. The confining walls, the crowded, filthy, noisy streets. Carts rumbling by all night long, brawling voices when the taverns spilled their denizens, no calm or quietude even in the dark when the moons rode. And Vargos knew by tale what Sarantium was: as much beyond provincial Megarium as golden-haired Leontes, Strategos of the Empire, was beyond Vargos of the Inicii.

He couldn't stay here, though. It was the simplest of truths. He'd made a decision in the dark of a hallway in Morax's late last night and had sealed it with a blow of his staff in the pre-dawn courtyard amid smoky torches and fog. When you can't go back and you can't stay still, you move forward, nothing to think about, get on with it. The sort of thing his father would have said, draining another flask of home-brewed ale, wiping his moustache with his wet sleeve, gesturing with a thick arm for one of the women to bring more beer. It wasn't a complex decision, seen a certain way, and the grace here was that there was a man worth following and a place to go.

Vargos lay on a perfectly decent cot in the next inn east from Morax's and listened to snoring soldiers and laughter from the common room. They were still drinking there, Martinian and the tribune.

He lay quietly, unable to sleep, and thought of the Aldwood again. Of the zubir in the middle of the Imperial road in a swirling away of fog, then appearing-somehow-right beside them in the misty field an instant after. He would think of these things all his days, Vargos knew. And remember how Pharus had looked in the road when they came back out.

The stablemaster had been dead before they went into the wood, but when they stood above his body, after, they saw what else had been done to him. Vargos would swear by his mother's life and his own soul that no man had walked up to where the dead man lay. Whatever had claimed the man's heart had not been mortal.

He'd heard a lifeless bird speak aloud with a woman's voice to the zubir. He'd led a man and a woman through the Aldwood and out. He'd even-and here, for the first time, Vargos smiled a little in the close darkness-struck a Sarantine officer, a tribune, and they'd only roughed him up a little, and then they had put him in a litter-a litter! — and carried him to this inn, because Martinian had made them. That memory, too, would stay with him. He would have enjoyed having his Jad-cursed father watch cavalrymen dismount to carry him along the Imperial road like some senator or merchant prince.

Vargos closed his eyes. An unworthy, vain thought, today of all days. Pride had no place in the soul tonight. He struggled to shape a proper prayer to Jad and to his son, the fire-bearer, asking guidance and forgiveness. In his mind's eye, though, he kept seeing again and again that ripped-open chest of a dead man he'd known and the black zubir with blood on the short, curved horns. To whom did one pray?

He was going to the City. Sarantium. Where the Imperial Palace was and the Emperor, the Triple Walls and the Hippodrome. A hundred holy sanctuaries, he'd heard, and half a million people. He didn't really believe that last. He wasn't a northern lout any more, to be gulled with gross, exaggerated tales. Men told lies in their pride.

Growing up, he had never imagined himself living anywhere but in their village. Then, after that changed one mild, bloody spring night, he'd expected to spend his days going back and forth along the Imperial road in Sauradia until he grew too old for that and took a position at the stable or the forge in one of the inns.

Life did unexpected things to you, Vargos of the Inicii thought in the darkness. You made a decision, or someone else made one, and there you were. There you were. He heard a familiar rustling sound, then a grunt and a sigh; someone had a woman with him on the far side of the room-He turned over on his side, carefully. He'd been kicked in the lower back. That was why his piss was red, why it hurt to turn.

They had a phrase along the Imperial road. He's sailing to Sarantium, they said when some man threw himself at an obvious and extreme hazard, risking all, changing everything one way or another, like a desperate gambler at dice putting his whole stake on the table. That's what he was doing.

Unexpected, really. Not his nature. Exciting, he had to admit. He tried to remember the last time he'd felt excited. Perhaps with a girl, but not really, that was different. Nice enough, though. Vargos wished he felt a little better. He knew two of the girls here fairly well and they liked him enough. On the other hand there were soldiers here. The girls would be busy all night. Just as well. He needed his sleep.

They were still laughing-and starting to sing now-in the common room. He felt himself drifting off. Martinian was there with the burly, smooth-faced tribune. Unexpected.

He dreamt that night that he was flying. Out of the inn and across the road under both moons and all the stars. West first, over the chapel of the Sleepless Ones, hearing their slow chanting in the night, seeing the candles burning through the windows of the dome. He flew past that image of holy Jad and turned north over the Aldwood.

League upon league he flew above the forest, north and farther north and farther, seeing the black trees touched by mingled moonlight in the iron cold. League upon league the great forest rolled, and Vargos wondered in his dream how anyone could do other than worship a power that dwelled therein.

Then west again for a time across the grass-covered ridges of soft hills and over the wide, slow river meandering south with the road beside it. Another forest on the other side of the gleaming water, as black, as vast, as Vargos flew over it, north and north in the clear, cold night. He saw where the oaks ended and the pines began, and then at last he saw by the moons a range of mountains he had always known, and he was flying lower over fields he had tilled himself in childhood, seeing a stream he had swum in during summers gone, and the first tiny outlying houses of the village, his own home near the small shrine and the Elder's house with the branch bound above the door, and then he saw the graveyard in his dream, and his father's grave.

It was unusual for a man to travel any distance with a female slave, but it was learned by the soldiers of the Fourth Sauradian that the artisan had taken possession of the girl only the night before-some sort of wager won, the story went-and it was not at all unusual that a man might want a body with him on a windy autumn night. Why pay for a whore when you had your own woman to do the needful? The girl was too skinny to be really warm, but she was young, and yellow-haired, and probably had other talents.

The soldiers were aware by now that the Rhodian was more important than he looked. He had also formed an unlikely bond with their tribune over dinner. This was sufficiently surprising as to elicit its own measure of respect. The girl had been escorted, untouched, to the room assigned the artisan. Orders had been explicit. Carullus, who liked to describe himself to anyone who would listen as a gentle soul, was known to have had men crippled and turned out of his company to beg for botching orders on an assignment. His principal centurion was the only one who knew that this had been done once only, soon after Carulluss promotion to tribune and his command of five hundred. The centurion was under standing orders to make certain all new recruits knew the tale, properly embellished. It was useful for soldiers to be somewhat afraid of their officers.

Kasia, about to sleep under a different roof than Morax's for the first time in a year, had settled beside the fire in the bedroom, feeding it the occasional log, to wait for the man who owned her now. The room was smaller than the better ones in Morax's inn, but it did have this fire. She sat on her cloak-Martinian's cloak-and gazed into the flames. Her grandmother had been skilled at reading futures in tongues of fire, but Kasia lacked any such gift and only found her mind drifting as she watched the fire dance. She was sleepy but there was no pallet in the room, only the one bed, and she had no idea what to expect when the Rhodian came upstairs. She could hear singing from below: Martinian and the man who had knocked him senseless. Men were very strange. She remembered the night before, in Morax's, when she had been sent up to find a thief in Martinian's room and everything had changed. He had saved her life twice now. At the inn and then, somehow, with a magical bird in the Aldwood.

She had been in the Aldwood today.

Had seen a power of the wood, known only in her grandmother's tales told by another smoky northern fire. She had walked from the sacred glade and the black forest alive, unsacrificed, to see that someone else's heart had been torn from his chest. A man she had known, had been forced to sleep with more than once. She had been violently ill, looking down at what remained of Pharus, unable not to remember him using her body, seeing what had now been done to his. She remembered the mist in the field, her hand on the mule. Voices, and the dogs hunting her. Martinian drawing his sword.

Already, curiously, the interlude in the forest itself was receding, blurring, becoming lost in a kind of fog of its own, too difficult to master or retain. Had she actually seen a zubir with those dark eyes, that dwarfing size? Had it really been that large? Kasia had the strangest sense, drowsy and half-entranced by the fire, that she was meant to have been dead by now, that her entire being was.. unrooted, oddly light, because of that. A spark flew and landed on the cloak; she brushed it quickly away. Could the future of such a person be known? Could her grandmother have seen anything at all in this fire, or was Kasia now a blankness, unwritten from this moment forward, unknowable? A kind of living ghost? Or freed from fate because of that? We'll talk tonight, Martinian had said in the litter, before drifting to sleep again. Need to sort out your life.

Her life. A north wind was blowing outside; a clear night tonight but very cold, winter behind the wind. She put more wood-a little waste-fully-on the fire. Saw that her hands were shaking. She laid one palm against her chest, feeling for the presence, the beating of her heart. After a while she realized her cheeks were wet and she wiped away the tears.

She had fallen into a shallow, fitful sleep, but they made a great deal of noise coming up the stairs and one of the merchants in the room across the hall shouted at them, causing a soldier to pound truculently on the shouter's door, eliciting further laughter from his fellows. Kasia was therefore on her feet in the middle of the room when they pushed open the unlocked door and Martmian stumbled in, supported-almost carried, in fact-by two soldiers of the Fourth Sauradian, with two more behind.

Weaving erratically, they led him over and spilled him onto the bed, good humoured and amused, despite-or because of-another furious volley of shouts from the room across. It was very late and they weren't being quiet. Kasia knew all about this: by law, the Imperial Inns had to put up as many as twenty soldiers at a time free of charge, doubling up paying guests to make room for them. They had to do it, but no one needed to enjoy the disruption of those nights.

One of the soldiers, a Soriyyan by his colouring, gazed at Kasia in the flicker of the firelight. "He's all yours," he said, gesturing to the man sprawled untidily on the bed. "Not much to you. Want to come down with us? Men who can hold their wine then hold a girl?"

"Shut fucking up," another said. "Orders."

The Soriyyan looked for a moment as if he'd object, but just then the man on the bed intoned, quite clearly, though with his eyes closed, "It is considered indisputable that the rhetoric of Kallimarchos was instrumental in the onset of the First Bassanid War. Given this as a proposition, ought later generations then lay the blame for so many cruel deaths at the philosopher's tomb? A vexing question."

There was an extreme, disconcerted silence, then two of the soldiers laughed. "Go to sleep, Rhodian," one of them said. "With luck, your head will be working again in the morning. Better men than you have been knocked senseless or bested in a drinking bout by the tribune."

"Not too many've had both happen," the Soriyyan added. "All hail the Rhodian!" More laughter. The Soriyyan grinned, pleased with himself. They left, closing the door with a bang.

Kasia winced, then walked over and slid home the bolt. She heard the four of them pound, in sequence, on the merchant's door across, then their boots sounded on the stairs descending to the ground-floor sleeping room.

She hesitated, then walked back towards the bed, looking uncertainly at the man lying there. The firelight made unstable shadows in the room. A log settled with a snapping sound. Martinian opened his eyes. "I begin to wonder if I was meant for the theatre," he said, speaking in Sarantine and in his normal voice. "Two nights in succession I've had to do this. Have I a future in the pantomime, do you think?" Kasia blinked. "You aren't. drunk, my lord?" "Not especially." "But…?"

"Useful to let him best me in something. And Carullus can hold his wine. We might have been down there all night, and I need to sleep."

"Best you in something?" Kasia heard herself say, in a voice her mother and others in the village would have recognized. "He knocked you senseless and nearly broke your jaw."

"Trivial. Well, for him it was." Martinian rubbed absently at his bearded cheek. "He had a weapon, no great achievement. Kasia, they carried me here. And carried a servant who struck an army officer. I made them do that. He lost a lot of prestige, Carullus did. Decent-enough man, for an Imperial soldier. And I wanted to sleep." He lifted a booted foot and she wrestled the boot off and then did the same with the other.

"They said my father could drink most men down onto the tavern floor or off their couches at a banquet. Guess I inherited that from him," Martinian murmured vaguely, putting his tunic over his head. Kasia said nothing. Slaves did not ask questions. "He's dead," Martinian of Varena added. "On campaign against the Inicii. In Ferrieres." He wasn't entirely sober, she realized, whatever he might say. The drinking had gone on a long time. He was bare-chested now, had matted curls of dark red hair on his chest. She had seen that when she bathed him yesterday. "I'm.. Inici," she said, after a moment. "I know. So's Vargos. Odd, in a way."

"The tribes in Sauradia are… different from those who went west to Ferrieres. The ones who went are… wilder." "Wilder. I know. Why they went."

There was a silence. He pushed himself up on an elbow and looked around the room in the wavering light. "A fire," he said. "Good. Build it up, Kasia." He didn't call her Kitten. She went over quickly and knelt putting on another log, pushing at it with the stick.

"They didn't bring you a cot," he said from the other side of the room "They'll assume there's only one reason I bought you. I must tell you I was informed at great length downstairs that Inici girls, especially skinny ones, are evil-tempered and a waste of money. Is this true? Carullus did offer to spare me the duty of bedding you tonight while I was in pain. Nice of him, I thought. They should have put a cot in here."

Kasia stayed where she was, looking at the fire. It was difficult to sort out his tone sometimes. "I have your cloak to sleep on," she said finally. "Over here."

She busied herself sweeping ashes into the hearth. He probably did like boys, she decided. The pure-blooded Rhodians were said to be inclined that way, like Bassanids. It would make her nights easier.

"Kasia, where's home? Your home?" he said.

She swallowed abruptly. This was not what she'd expected.

She turned, still kneeling, to look at him. "North, my lord. Most of the way to Karch." He had finished undressing himself, she saw, and was under the blanket now, sitting up, arms around his knees. The firelight moved on the wall behind him.

"How were you captured? Or were you sold?"

She clasped her hands in her lap. "Sold," she said. "Last autumn. The plague took my father and brother. My mother had no choice."

"Not so," he said quickly. "There's always a choice. Sold her daughter off to feed herself? How civilized."

"No," Kasia said, clenching her fists. "She… we… talked about it. When the slave train came. It was me or my sister, or we'd all have died in the winter. You won't understand. There weren't enough men to do the fields or hunt, nothing had been harvested. They bought six girls from my village, with grain, and coins for the market town. There was a plague. That.. changes things."

"Oh, I know," he said softly. Then, after another silence, "Why you? Not your sister?"

She hadn't expected that, either. No one had asked these things. "My mother thought she was. more likely to marry. With nothing to offer but herself."

"And you thought?"

Kasia swallowed again. Behind the beard and in the dim, uneven light it was impossible to discern his expression.

"Why… how does this matter?" she dared to ask.

He sighed. "You're right. It doesn't. Do you want to go home?"

"What?"

"Your village. I'm going to free you, you know. I have not the least need for a girl in Sarantium, and after what… happened to us today I do not propose to tempt any gods at all by making a profit on you." A Rhodian voice, a firelit room. Night, the edge of winter. The world being remade.

He said, "I don't think that. whatever we saw today. spared your life to clean house or heat bath water on a fire for me. Not that I have any notion why it spared my life. So, do you want to go back to your… oh. Jad. Jad's blood. Stop that, woman!"

She tried, biting her lip, wiping with the sooty backs of her hands at her streaming face. But how did one not weep, confronted with this? Last night she had known she would be dead today.

"Kasia, I mean it. I will throw you downstairs and let Carullus's men take turns with you! I detest crying women!"

She didn't think he really did. She thought he was pretending to be angry and fierce. She wasn't sure of what else she thought. Sometimes things happened too quickly. How does the riven tree explain the lightning bolt?

The girl had fallen asleep, close to what remained of the fire's warmth. She was still in her tunic, wrapped in one cloak, pillowed on the other, under one of his blankets. He could have had her come into the bed, but the habit of sleeping alone since Ilandra died was entrenched by now, had become something mystical, talismanic. It was morbid and spirit-ridden, Crispin thought sleepily, but he wasn't about to try to break free of it this night with a slave girl bought for him the night before.

Though slave girl was unfair, really. She'd been as free as he was a year ago, a victim of the same plague summer that had smashed his own. There were, he thought, any number of ways a life could be ruined.

Linon would have declared him an imbecile for having the girl sleep by the fire, he knew. Linon wasn't here. He had laid her down on wet grass; by wet leaves in a forest this morning and walked away. Remember me.

What happens to an unhoused soul when a body and its heart are sacrificed to a god? Did Zoticus know the answer to that? What happens to" the soul when the god comes to claim it, after all? Could an alchemist know? He had a difficult letter to write. Tell him goodbye.

A shutter was banging along the wall. Windy tonight; would be cold on the road tomorrow. The girl was coming east with him. It seemed, both of these Inicii were. So odd, really, the circles and patterns one's life made. Or seemed to make. Patterns men tried to impose on their lives, for the comforting illusion of order?

He'd overheard men talking in a cookshop one day when he was still a boy. His father's head, he'd learned, had been completely severed from his shoulders. By an axe blow. Had landed some distance away, blood spraying from the toppling, headless body. Like a red fountain, one of the I men told the other in an awed voice. It was dramatic enough, unsetding enough even for soldiers, to have become a tale: the death of the stonemason, Horius Crispus.

Crispin had been ten years old when he'd heard that. An Inici axe. The tribes that went west to Ferrieres had been wilder. Everyone said that. The girl had said it tonight. They'd pressed south into Batiara constantly, harrying the northern farms and villages. The Antae sent armies, including the urban militia, into Ferrieres just about every year. Usually they were successful campaigns, bringing back needed slaves. There were casualties, however. Always. The Inicii, even outnumbered, knew how to I fight. A red fountain. He ought not to have heard such a thing. Not at ten years of age. He'd had dreams after, for a long time, had been unable to tell them to his mother. He was certain, even then, that the men in that cookshop would have been appalled had they known Horius's boy had been listening to them.

When her tears had stopped, Kasia's explanation tonight had been clear enough: there was no place for her at home any more. Once sold, once a slave, sent up or down a hall to any man's room, she had no hope of a life among her own people. There was no going back, marrying, raising a family, sharing in the traditions of a tribe. Those traditions did not allow space for what she'd been forced to become, whatever she had been in the time before the plague when she had a father and brother for shelter.

A man captured and enslaved might escape and return to his village with honour and status-a living emblem of defiant courage. Not a girl sold to the traders for winter grain. The village of her childhood was barred to her now, on the far side of a doorway to the past and there was no key. One could feel some sorrow for other's griefs, Crispin thought, awake and listening to the wind.

In the crowded, roiling streets of Sarantium, amid the arcades and workshops and sanctuaries and so many people from so many lands she could-perhaps-create a life for herself. Not an easy or a sure thing for a woman, but she was young, had intelligence and spirit. No one need learn she had been an inn girl in Sauradia, and if they did. well, the Empress Alixana herself had been little better in her day. More expensive, but not different in kind, if any of the rumours were true.

Crispin supposed they slit your nose, or worse, for saying that. It was blowing hard outside. He could hear that shutter banging and the high keening of the wind. The Day of the Dead. Was it the wind?

The fire had taken the edge off the chill in the room, and he was under two good blankets. He thought, unexpectedly, of the queen of the Antae, young and afraid, her fingers in his hair as he knelt before her. The last time his head had been cracked like this. He was tired and his jaw hurt. He really shouldn't have been drinking with the soldiers tonight. Extremely stupid. Imbecilic, someone would have said. Decent man, though, Carullus of the Fourth. A surprise. Liked to hear himself talk. That image of the god, on the chapel dome. Mosaicists had made it, artisans, like himself. But not. Something else. He wished he knew their names, wished someone did. Would write to Martinian about that; try to order his thoughts. He could see the god's eyes in his mind right now.

As vividly as he had ever seen anything. That fog this morning, nothing to see at all, all colours leached from the world. Voices pursuing, the dogs the dead man. The forest and what took them into it. He had feared those woods at first sight, all the way back at the border, and yet he had walked in the Aldwood, after all, black, dense trees, leaves falling, a sacrifice in the glade. No. Not quite. The completion of a sacrifice.

How did one deal with so much? By drinking wine with soldiers? Perhaps. Oldest refuge, one of the oldest. By pulling blankets up to one's bruised face in bed, and falling asleep, sheltered from the knife of wind and the night? Though not the night that was always there now.

Caius Crispus, too, had a dream in that cold dark, though in his he did not fly. He saw himself walking the echoing corridors of an empty palace and he knew what it was, where he was. Had been there with Martinian years ago: the Patriarchal Palace in Rhodias, most glittering emblem of religious power-and wealth-in the Empire. Once, at any rate. In its day.

Crispin had seen it in dusty, emptied-out decay, long after the Antae sack and conquest: most of the rooms looted and empty, closed up. He and Martinian had been walking through it-a cadaverous, coughing cleric as their guide-to view a celebrated old wall mosaic a patron wanted copied for his summer house in Baiana by the sea. The two of them had been admitted, reluctantly, by virtue of a letter-and probably a sum of money-from their wealthy patron, to walk through echoing emptiness and dust.

The High Patriarch lived, worshipped, schemed, dictated his ceaseless flow of correspondence to all quarters of the known world on the two upper floors, seldom venturing from there save on holy days, when he crossed the covered bridge over the street to the Great Sanctuary and led services in the name of Jad, bright gold in glory on the dome.

The three men had walked endless empty ground-level corridors- their resonating footsteps a kind of reproach-and had finally come to the room with the to-be-copied work. A reception hall, the cleric muttered, fumbling through a ring of keys on his belt. He tried several, coughing, before finding the correct one. The mosaicists walked in, paused, and then set about opening shutters, though from the first glance they had both seen there was little point.

The mosaic-running the length and full height of a wall-was a rum, though not from the wearing of time or the effects of inadequate technique. Hammers and axes had been taken to this, daggers, sword hilts, maces, staves, boot heels to the lower parts, scrabbling fingers. It had been a marinescape-they knew that much. They knew the studio that had been commissioned, though not the names of those who had actually done the work: mosaicists names, like those of other decorative artisans, were not deemed worth preserving.

Hues of dark blue and a splendid green were still there as evidence of the original scheme near the wood-panelled ceiling. There would have been precious stones used here: for the eyes of a squid or sea-horse, the shining scales offish, coral, shells, the gleam of eels or undersea vegetation. They had all been looted, the mosaic hacked apart in the process. One would feel ill, Crispin thought, were this not so much the expected thing in Rhodias after the fall. There had been a fire set in the room at some point. The charred walls bore black, silent witness.

They stood gazing a while in silence, noses tickled by stirred dust in streaming sunlight, then methodically closed all the shutters again and walked with the afflicted cleric back down the same branching corridors and out into the vast, nearly empty spaces of the city once the centre of the world, of an Empire, once thronged with teeming, vibrant, brutal existence.

In his dream, Crispin was alone in that palace, and it was even darker, emptier than he had known it that one time in a life that seemed fright-endingly remote now. Then, he'd been a newly married man, rising in his guild, acquiring some wealth, the beginnings of a reputation, flush with the wondrous, improbable reality that he adored the woman he'd wed the year before and she loved him. In the corridors of dream he walked a palace looking for Ilandra, knowing she was dead.

Door after locked door opened somehow to the one heavy iron key he carried, and room after empty room showed dust and the charred black evidence of fire and nothing more. He seemed to hear a wind outside, saw a blue slant of moonlight once through broken slats in shutters. There were noises. A celebration far away? The sacking of the city? From a sufficient distance, he thought, dreaming, the sounds were much the same.

Room after room, his footprints showing behind him in the long-settled dust where he walked. No one to be seen, all sounds outside, from somewhere else. The palace unspeakably vast, unbearably abandoned. Ghosts and memories and sounds from somewhere else. ‘I m is my life, he thought as he walked. Rooms, corridors, random movement, no one who could be said to matter, who could put life, light, even the idea of laughter into these hollow spaces, so much larger than they had ever needed to be.

He opened another door, no different from any of the others, and walked into yet another room, and in his dream he stopped, seeing the zubir.

Behind it, dressed as for a banquet in a straight, ivory-coloured gown banded at collar and hem with deep blue, her hair swept back and adorned with gems, her mothers necklace about her throat, was his wife.

Even dreaming, Crispin understood.

It wasn't difficult; it wasn't subdue or obscure the way dream messages could be, requiring a cheiromancer to explain them for a fee. She was barred to him. He was to understand she was gone. As much as his youth was, his father, the glory of this ruined palace, Rhodias itself. Gone away. Somewhere else. The zubir of the Aldwood proclaimed as much, an appalling, interposed wildness here, bulking savage and absolute between the two of them, all black, tangled fur, the massive head and horns, and the eyes of however many thousand thousand years teaching this truth. He could not be passed. You came from him and came back to him, and he claimed you or he let you go for a time you could not measure or foretell.

Then, just as Crispin was thinking so, struggling to make a dream's peace with these apprehended truths, beginning to lift a hand in farewell to the loved woman behind the forest god, the zubir was gone, confounding him again.

It disappeared as it had in the road in fog, and did not reappear. Crispin stopped breathing in his dream, felt a hammer pounding within him, and did not know that he cried aloud in a cold room in a Sauradian night.

Ilandra smiled in the palace. They were alone. No barriers. Her smile cut the heart from him. He might have been a body lying on a road then, his chest torn open. He wasn't. In his dream he saw her step lightly forward: nothing between, nothing to bar her now. "There are birds in the trees," his dead wife said, coming into his arms," and we are young." She rose up on her toes and kissed him on the mouth. He tasted salt, heard himself say something terribly, hugely important, couldn't make out his words. His own words. Couldn't.

Woke to the wild wind outside and a dead fire and the Inici girl-a shadow, a weight-sitting on his bed beside him wrapped in his cloak. Her hands clutched her own elbows.

"What? What is it?" he cried, confused, aching, his heart pounding. She had kissed..

"You were shouting," the girl whispered.

"Oh, dear Jad. Oh, Jad. Go to sleep…" He struggled to remember her name. He felt drugged, heavy, he wanted that palace again. Wanted it like some men want the juice of poppies, endlessly.

She was silent, motionless. "I'm afraid," she said.

"We're all afraid. Go to sleep."

"No. I mean, I would comfort you, but I'm afraid."

"Oh." It became unfairly needful to order his thoughts. To be here. His jaw hurt, his heart. "People I loved died. You can't comfort me. Go to sleep."

"Your.. children?"

Every word spoken was drawing him farther from that palace. "My daughters. Last summer." He took a breath. T am ashamed to be here. I let them die." He had never said this. But it was true. He had failed them. And had survived.

"Let them die? Of the plague'?" the Inici woman on his bed said, incredulous. "No one can save anyone from that."

"I know. Jad. I know. It doesn't matter."

After a moment, she said, "And your… their mother?"

He shook his head.

The god-cursed shutter was still banging. He wanted to go out into the savage night and rip it from the wall and lie down in the icy wind with Ilandra. "Kasia," he said. That was her name. "Go to sleep. It isn't your duty to comfort here."

"Not a duty," she said.

So much anger in him. "Jad's blood! What do you propose? That your lovemaking skills transport me to joy?"

She went rigid. Drew a breath. "No. No. No, I… have no skills. That wasn't.. what I meant."

He closed his eyes. Why did he have to even address these things now? So vivid, so rich a dream: on tiptoe, within his arms, a gown he remembered, the necklace, a scent, softness of parted lips.

She was dead, a ghost, a body in a grave. I am afraid, Kasia of the Inicii had said. Crispin let out a ragged breath. That shutter still banging along the wall outside. Over and over and over. So inane. So… ordinary. He shifted in the bed.

"Sleep here then," he said. "There is nothing to fear. What happened today is over now." A lie. It didn't end until you died. Life was an ambush, wounds waiting for you.

He turned on his side, facing the door, making room for her. She didn't move at first, then he felt her slide under both blankets. Her foot touched his, moved quickly away, but he realized from the icy touch how cold she must have been with the fire dead. It was the bottom of the night. Spirits in the wind? Souls? He closed his eyes. They could lie together. Share mortal warmth. Men bought tavern girls on winter nights for no more than this sometimes.

The zubir had been there in the palace and had disappeared. No obstacle. Nothing between. But there was. Of course there was. Imbecile, he could hear a voice saying. Imbecile. Crispin lay still for another long moment then, slowly, he turned.

She was lying on her back, staring up at darkness, still afraid. She had thought for a long time that she would die today, he knew. Die brutally. He tried to comprehend what such an expectation would be like. Moving as if through water, or in dream, he laid a hand to her shoulder, her throat, brushed some of the long golden hair back from her cheek. She was so young. He took another breath, deeply unsure, even now, still half lost in another place, but then he touched one small, firm breast through the thinness of her tunic. She never took her eyes from his.

"Skills are a very small part of it," he said. His own voice sounded odd. Then he kissed her, as gently as he could.

He tasted salt again as he had in the dream. Drew back, looking down at her, at the tears. But she lifted a hand, touched his hair, then hesitated as if unsure what to do next, how to move-how to be-when it was by choice. The pain of others, he thought. The night so dark with the sun beneath the world. He lowered his head very slowly and kissed her again, then moved and brushed her nipple with his lips, through the tunic. Her hand stayed in his hair, tightening. Sleep was a refuge, he thought, walls were, wine, food, warmth, and this. And this. Mortal bodies in the dark.

"You are not at Morax's," he said. Her heart was so fast, he could feel it. The year she must have lived through. He intended to be careful, patient, but it had been a long time for him, and his own gathering urgency surprised and then mastered him. She held him close after, her body softer than he would have guessed, hands unexpectedly strong against his back. They slept like that for a while and later-nearer morning when they both awoke-he guided their pace more attentively, and in time he heard her begin to make her own sequence of discoveries, on a taken breath and another-like a climber reaching one ridge and then a higher one-before the god's sun finally rose in testament to battles won again, if at cost, in the night.

The senior physician at the army base was a Bassanid, and skilful. The former was strictly against regulations, the latter so rare-and valuable-as to have caused the military governor commanding southern Sauradia to ignore all applicable bureaucratic and ecumenical rules. He wasn't, as it happened, the only senior military official in the Empire to take this view. There were openly pagan physicians, Bassanids worshipping Perun and Anahita, Kindaths with their moon goddesses, all through the army. As between a regulation and a good doctor… there was no decision at all.

Unfortunately, from a practical viewpoint, the physician took a careful look at the mildly admonished Inici servant, examined a red sampling of his urine, and declared he was unable to ride a horse for a fortnight. This meant they had to commandeer a cart or a wagon for him. And since the girl was travelling east as well and women couldn't ride horses, the wagon had to be large enough for two.

Then the artisan revealed that he had an acute dislike of riding, and since they were using wheeled transport in any case…

The military governor had his secretary sign the papers, wasting no more time than absolutely necessary on this distraction. The Emperor in his supreme wisdom wanted this man for something to do with the newest sanctuary in Sarantium. The newest, insanely expensive sanctuary. He had-through the lofty offices of the Chancellor-ordered good soldiers to spend their time tracking a Rhodian artisan on the road. A four-person military carriage was only one more insult.

In the prevailing circumstances the governor proved amenable to a diffident-if loquacious-suggestion from one of the tribunes of the Fourth Sauradian, the man who had found this party.

Carullus proposed that he accompany the artisan, following in the wake of a rapidly couriered letter from the governor, to add a direct personal appeal to the Master of Offices and to the Supreme Strategos, Leontes, that the arrears of pay be attended to as expeditiously as possible. The god knew, Carullus could talk, the governor thought glumly, dictating his letter for the military messenger. Might as well put his tongue to use.

It also appeared that the Rhodian had not, after all, been lax in responding to his invitation. The postal courier charged with the Imperial papers had taken an unconscionably long time to reach Varena. His name and civil service number were, as usual, on the envelope below the broken seal- the governors secretary had recorded them. Tilliticus. Pronobius Tilliticus.

The governor spent an irritated moment pondering what sort of foolish mother gave her son a name almost identical to that for female genital organs in current military slang. Then he dictated a postscript, suggesting to the Master of Offices that the courier be reprimanded. He was unable to resist adding an offer that important communications west to the Antae kingdom in Batiara might better be entrusted to the military. Despite his recently chronic stomach pains, the governor did smile sourly to himself, dictating that part of the letter. He sent off the messenger.

The artisan's party stayed at the camp for two nights only, though the physician was unhappy about this speed. During the brief stay a notary attended upon the Rhodian to record and archive in his files-and forward copies, as requested, to the civil registry in the City-documents attesting to the freed status of the woman, Kasia of the Inicii.

At the same time, the recruiting centurion of the Fourth Sauradian cavalry dealt with the necessary protocols for the military conscription of the man, Vargos-a procedure that released him from his contract with the Imperial Post and triggered the immediate right to all moneys owing under his civil contract. Paperwork arranging the transfer of the appropriate sums to the military paymaster in the City was also processed. The centurion was entirely happy to do this, in fact… relations between the military and the civil service were about as cordial here as they were anywhere else. Which was to say, not at all.

The centurion was markedly less enthused about signing the release of the same fellow from his all-too-transitory military service. Had his instructions not been explicit about this, he might well have demurred. The man was strong and fit, and once he recovered from his accidental injuries would make an excellent soldier. They'd been coping with desertions-with pay more than half a year in arrears, it was not in the least surprising-and all the units were undermanned.

It was not to be. Both Carullus and the governor appeared anxious to get the red-bearded Rhodian and his party on their way. Imperial papers signed by Chancellor Gesius himself could have that sort of effect, the centurion supposed. The governor was near enough to his retirement to have an extreme disinclination to ruffle feathers in the City.

Carullus, for his own part, was apparently going with the artisan to Sarantium, leading an escort himself. The centurion had no idea why.

In fact, there were several reasons, the tribune of the Fourth Sauradian cavalry thought, during the days of travelling east and then, in Trakesia, curving gradually down south. A tribune commanded five hundred men was much more significant than any messenger bearing yet another letter of complaint. He could have a legitimate expectation of at least being received and obtaining a formal answer as to the arrears for the Saura-dian troops. The Master of Offices might not give him more than platitudes, but Carullus had hopes of seeing either Leontes himself or one of his personal cadre of officers and getting a clearer picture.

In addition, he hadn't been to Sarantium in years, and the chance to visit the City was too appealing to be passed up. He'd calculated that they could arrive-even moving slowly-before the season-ending races in the Hippodrome during the Dykania Festival. Carullus had a lifelong passion for the chariots and his beloved Greens that found little satisfaction in Sauradia.

Beyond this, he had developed an unanticipated but quite genuine liking for the red-bearded Rhodian he'd clipped with his helmet. Martinian of Varena was not an especially genial man-not that Carullus really needed other people to keep a conversation going-but the artisan could hold his wine almost as well as a soldier, knew a number of startlingly obscene western songs, and showed none of the arrogance most Rhodians displayed when confronting an honest Imperial soldier. He also swore with an inventiveness of phrase worth copying.

In addition, Carullus had reluctantly come to acknowledge to himself-looking around to determine the whereabouts of certain others in the party as they rode-that he was being continually assailed by an entirely new emotion.

It was the most unexpected thing.

For centuries, the journals and correspondence of seasoned travellers had made it clear that the most imposing way to first see Sarantium was from the deck of a ship at sunset.

Sailing east, the god's sun behind you lighting the domes and towers, gleaming on the seaward walls and the cliffs that lined the infamous channel-the Serpent's Tooth-into the celebrated harbour, there was no way, all travellers reported, to escape the awe and majesty Saranios's city evoked. Eye of the world, ornament of Jad.

The gardens of the Imperial Precinct and the flat churkar ground where the Emperors played or watched the imported Bassamd game of horses and mallets, could be seen from far out at sea, amid the gold- and bronze-roofed palaces-the Traversite, Attenine, Baracian, all of them. The mighty Hippodrome could be descried, just beyond: and across the forum from it-in this year of the reign of the great and glorious beloved of Jad, the thrice-exalted Valerius II, Emperor of Sarantium, heir of Rhodias- could be seen the tremendous golden dome, the latest wonder of the world, stretching across the new Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom.

From out at sea, sailing to Sarantium, all of this and more would spread itself out for the traveller like a feast for the famished eye, too dazzling, too manifold and vividly manifest to be compassed. Men had been known to cover their faces with their cloaks in awe, to close their eyes, turn away, to kneel in prayer on the ship's deck, to weep. Oh City, City, my eyes are never dry when I remember you. My heart is a bird, winging home.

Then the ships would be met by the small harbour boats, officials would board, papers would be cleared, customs documents affirmed, cargoes examined and duly taxed, and finally they would be permitted to sail up the curve of the Serpent's Tooth-the great chains drawn back in this time of peace-passing between the narrow cliffs, looking up at walls and guards on each side, thinking of Sarantine Fire unleashed on hapless foes who thought to take Jad's holy and defended City. Awe would give way to-or be joined by-a proper measure of fear. Sarantium was no harbour or haven for the weak.

To port, as instructed by the Harbour Master with shouts and signal horns and flares, and then, papers examined and cleared yet again, the traveller could at last set foot on land, upon the thronged, noisy docks and quays of Sarantium. One could stride unsteadily away from the water after so long at sea and come into the City that was, and had been for more than two hundred years, both the crowning glory of Jad and the eastern Empire and the most squalid, dangerous, overcrowded, turbulent place on earth.

That was if you came by sea.

If you first approached by land down through Trakesia-as the Emperor himself was known to have done thirty years ago-what you saw before anything else were the Triple Walls.

There were those dissenters, as there always are among travellers-a segment of mankind inclined to have, and voice, strong opinions-who urged that the might and scale of Sarantium were made most evident and overwhelming by these titanic walls, seen gleaming at a sunrise. And this was how Caius Crispus of Varena saw them on a morning exactly six weeks after he had set out from his home to answer an invitation from the Emperor addressed to another man, and seeking to discover a reason to live-if they didn't kill him as an imposter first.

There was a paradox embedded in that, he thought, gazing at the brutal sweep of the walls that guarded the landward access to the City on its promontory. He didn't have the frame of mind just then to deal with paradoxes. He was here. On the threshold. Whatever was to begin could now begin.