She cast her eyes down.
At her movement, the Mayor and Chamberlain bowed deeply. Most of the servants fell on their faces. The effect was a little ruined by the steward, who unrolled a sheet of linen canvas and threw it on the ground before throwing himself on top of it.
The Emperor’s daughter curtsied deep, so that her skirts spread about her like the blossoming of a silken flower.
‘My dear!’ the Emperor said. ‘I thought you were coming with me.’
The magister had thought so, too.
‘I’m most sorry, Majesty.’ She remained in her full curtsey.
The magister thought she must have magnificent legs to bear the strain. Why isn’t she going with him? Does she suspect?
The Emperor smiled beneficently at them all. ‘See you at dinner,’ he said, and put his heels to his mount.
Five miles away outside the walls of the city, Andronicus, the Duke of Thrake and the Emperor’s cousin, was also a handsome man. He was in his mid-forties, wore his age with dignity, and while he had grey in his beard and on his chest, he clearly came from the same stock as the Emperor. He was dressed in plain blue, his favourite colour. He wore the knight’s belt of an Alban – not an affectation, but the sign of his office as Megas Ducas, the commander of the Emperor’s armies.
He waited for his Emperor on the Field of Ares, an enormous grass arena where sixty thousand men could be mustered. Had, in fact, been mustered, many times. He loved to be on the field – to feel the grass where Aetius might have walked – where Livia certainly walked. Where Basil II, Hammer of the Irks, had formed his great armies up and reviewed them.
Today, despite the snappish late spring weather, the sun shone on armour and colourful banners. The Duke had an army on the field – almost three thousand men. The field dwarfed them. They didn’t make a brave display, but instead, seemed to suggest the opposite.
Andronicus reviewed them from habit. He always made sure the turnout was the best possible before his men were inspected by the Emperor. He rode along the front of the Latinikon – mostly Alban mercenaries, with a scattering of Galles and Etruscans.
He turned his horse and rode down a file. ‘What’s this man’s name?’ he asked in Archaic.
Ser Bescanon, an old and very tough Occitan from south of Alba who served as commander of the Latinikon, smiled. ‘Ah, m’lord Duke, I’ll see to this.’
The man in question had a mail hauberk and no more – no helmet, no body armour, and no shield. In fact, he had no saddle. He was sitting bareback on a warhorse.
The Duke leaned over and gave the animal a sharp poke. It backed a step.
‘That is a cart horse,’ he said.
‘I believe Ser Raoul has had a disagreement with his landlord. His armour and horse are not, I think, currently available. I’ll see to it he’s ready for the next muster.’
‘Dismiss him,’ said the Duke.
The mercenary shook his head. ‘Nah – m’lord, that would be hasty. We’re not fighting anyone today – no? No need to make an example, mmm?’
The Duke raised his eyebrows.
Bescanon flinched from his gaze. ‘As you wish. Ser Raoul, you are dismissed.’
Ser Raoul laughed. It was not a normal laugh. ‘Pay me and I’ll go, you useless sack of shit.’
The Duke backed his horse away from the man.
Bescanon nodded. ‘My friend Raoul has a point, messire. None of us have been paid.’ Bescanon smiled softly. ‘In a very long time, messire.’
The Duke’s son, Demetrius, Despot of the North, interposed his horse between the knight and his father. ‘You’ll be paid at the end of this parade. Ser Raoul, you are dismissed without pay. If you don’t like it, I will have the skin stripped from your back and I’ll sell your useless carcass into slavery.’ The younger man’s voice cut like a whip. He had the over-eager aggression of a young man who likes to throw his weight at obstacles.
Ser Raoul’s breathing came very fast. His hair was wild – he was missing teeth and his nose had been broken many times. It was the bulbous red nose of a heavy drinker which suggested where his pay would go if he were given any.
He reached for his sword.
‘Raoul!’ Bescanon snapped ‘Don’t do it!’
Behind the Despot, two blank-faced Easterners had their horn bows at full draw. The Despot never went anywhere without his bodyguard of blood-sworn foreigners.
Horses’ tails swished, and spring flies droned.
Raoul sighed. He reached behind himself and very carefully scratched his arse. Turned his horse. And rode off the grounds.
Half a mile to the east of Ser Raoul, Harald Derkensun stood tall in the sentry box at the gate of the city.
Nordikans almost never served as gate guards. They were far above such things. But the Logothete of the Drum had ordered that the gate guards be changed a week ago.
He had further ordered that the Nordikans stand guard in the plain tunics and cloaks of the City Militia.
Derkensun thought it was all foolishness. He was head and shoulders taller than almost any Morean and he suspected that every man passing the gate knew him for what he was, but that was the way with Morea. Wheels turned, sometimes inside wheels, and sometimes for no other reason than the turning. There were plots, and plots to cover plots, and some men, Derkensun had discovered, would plot merely to hear themselves talk.
This morning, however, the Logothete’s precautions showed some sense, as Derkensun had enough experience of the palace to know that the party riding towards him was led by the Emperor. He drew his sword, and held it before his shield.
The Emperor reined in his horse. Just past him, Garald Gurnnison, the most dangerous man in the Guard, met his eye and gave a very slight nod.
The Emperor knew him immediately, of course. He knew all his guard. His fingers moved. He said, ‘Good that you are on guard here. Be wary.’ Then the Emperor returned Derkensun’s salute. ‘Guardsman Derkensun! Are you being punished for some transgression?’
Behind the Emperor, Derkensun saw the Logothete. The slim man raised an eyebrow. Derkensun allowed himself to look embarrassed. If the Emperor hadn’t been told about the heightened security, it was not Guardsman Derkensun’s job to inform him.
The Emperor laughed. ‘Poor Nordikans. Too much discipline.’ He raised his riding whip in token of farewell, and rode through the gate.
Ser Raoul was still scratching – mooning the Duke – when he passed the Emperor riding well out of the city without an escort. Out of habit he stopped scratching and bowed in the saddle. The Emperor gave him a little wave.
Behind them, the Despot turned to his father. ‘Where are the Vardariotes?’
The pride of the household cavalry, the Vardariotes were Easterners from across the ocean, and further yet. They were a remnant of a bygone time, when the Empire ran from the steppes of Dacia across the sea all the way to the mountains of Alba and beyond. No Emperor had ridden the steppes in twenty generations, but young men and women still left their clans and came to the Emperor as their kin had done half a thousand years before. Like the Nordikans, they were loyal.
The Duke watched the Emperor approach. ‘The Vardariotes were not interested in my muster,’ he said mildly. ‘So I ordered them to stay in their barracks.’
The Despot turned to his father. ‘What are you doing?’
The Duke shrugged. ‘Something that should have been done a long time ago.’
‘Pater!’
The Duke whirled on his son as a tiger turns on wounded prey. ‘It is now, you little fool. Comport yourself like my son, or die here with anyone who will not support me.’
The Despot looked for his bodyguard, and saw them fifty horse lengths away, surrounded by his father’s household knights.
Father and son glared at each other.
‘I’m doing this for you,’ the Duke said softly.
The young despot met his father’s eye and held it. His own eyes narrowed. He loosed a long sigh – and grinned.
r /> ‘Then I want the Lady Irene. As my wife.’ The Despot looked at the Emperor.
‘Done,’ said his father. That would have complications, but he was happy – truly happy – to have his son beside him.
The Despot shook his head. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
The Duke raised his hand. ‘I didn’t tell anyone. That’s how you keep a secret.’
The magister watched them carefully as they rode up to the Duke. His men were well arrayed in ranks, their armour polished, and their pennons flapping in the late spring breeze.
Duke Andronicus’s eyes met the magister’s.
The magister rose in his stirrups, extended his wand, and blew the heads off two of the Emperor’s guard. They continued to sit on their horses, headless, as he turned, pointed his wand at the two junior Nordikans and struck them – one with a massive kinetikos blow to the chest that shattered the man’s ribs through his breastplate, and the other with a neat cut that opened his neck. He was showing off for his new master, and wanted the man to remember exactly what he could do.
The skill he couldn’t display in the real was that every attack had to overcome the complex, layered, and in some cases quite brilliant artefactual defences that the Nordikans carried. The lead Spatharios, for example, had tattoos that should have defended him – which would have, against a lesser caster.
As far as Aeskepiles knew, no practitioner had ever succeeded in killing a member of the Guard by the art – much less four in ten heartbeats.
He allowed himself a moment of triumph, and took a dagger in the side as a result.
The Logothete.
The magister had never imagined him a man of blood. He produced a sword – quite a long one – from the air, and rode to the Emperor’s side.
Aeskepiles raised a series of shining shields – too late, as the dagger’s bite was deep and his side was growing cold. He could feel the poison on the blade.
It was like getting a test back in Academy and finding that he’d forgotten one small thing and, as a result, all his answers were invalid.
He knew counter-spells for poison. He just had to stop panicking for long enough to think of one . . .
The Despot saw the Logothete bury a slim dagger in the magister’s side and draw a sword from the air. In the same breath, the Duke’s household knights made for the Emperor’s reins, and an unarmoured man sitting on a fine Eastern horse behind his father raised a light crossbow. He took a shot – and it went right past the Emperor.
The Logothete seemed to flow under the crossbow bolt. It should have been impossible.
His slim sword cut through a knight’s vambrace – right through his wrist, so that the man’s reaching hand dropped into the grass. The Logothete’s back-cut took out another knight’s eyes. He screamed.
The Emperor backed his horse – obviously uncertain what to do.
The Guardsman whose chest had been shattered by the showy sorcery was not dead. Somehow, he got his axe up – one-handed. His blow cleaved the helmet of another of the Duke’s knights, spattering every man present with his brains.
The Logothete got his hand on the Emperor’s bridle. He made a parry with his sword, turned the Emperor’s horse—
—and the Despot’s sword beheaded him. He had leaned out, horse already at a canter, and swung as hard as he could, afraid that the man had phantasmal protections. But the sword struck as it should have, and the Logothete’s head, containing every scrap of every secret that the Emperor had, rolled away in the grass.
The Guardsman, drowning in his own blood, pitched from the saddle.
The Duke took the Emperor’s reins.
The Emperor was looking at his Logothete’s headless body. Tears welled in his eyes.
‘Majesty, you are my prisoner,’ said the Duke.
The Emperor’s eyes met his. The contempt there was absolute.
‘You have just killed the Empire,’ he said.
Ser Raoul watched the taking of the Emperor from the edge of the Field of Ares, where rowan and quince grew wild. He’d seen the violence in the magister and in the Duke.
He shook his head. ‘Son of God,’ he said, and turned his cart horse towards the city gates.
He wanted to think it all through. He owed the fucking Emperor nothing – the catamite never paid him.
But he’d made a decision. He couldn’t have said why, although a hankering to be more than a hedge knight with a placid cart horse might have played a role. By slamming his spurs into his mount he got it to something that might have been called a canter, and he rode for the gates.
At his back, he heard the Despot calling for his Easterners.
He turned to look back. Six of the little men on piebald horses had separated themselves from the mass and were coming after him. Their horses were no more than ponies, and they rode like centaurs.
He threw himself as low on his horse’s neck as he could manage; he was halfway to the gate when his pursuers began to shoot.
The third arrow struck him squarely in the back. It hurt like hell but the mail must have taken some of the power off it, because he wasn’t dead. The head had penetrated his back – he could feel it in every pace of his miserable horse.
A lifetime of tavern brawls had prepared him to bear pain, and he was an Iberian, and Iberians were famous for their ability to accept pain.
‘Mother of God!’ he spat.
Sometime in the next fifty paces, he was hit again.
Ser Raoul had not lived a good life. In fact, it was absolutely typical of his performance as a soldier and as a knight to appear at a routine muster without his horse or arms. He didn’t pray, he didn’t do penance, he scarcely ever practised at a pell or in a tiltyard. He was overweight, he drank too much, and he had an endless predilection for attractive young men that guaranteed that he could never hold on to a single copper coin.
Despite all this – or, just possibly, because of it – Raoul refused to fall off his horse despite being struck by a third arrow. It would be hard for anyone to explain how, exactly, he continued to ride for the gate, cursing all the way.
The Despot was laughing, watching his favourites track the man and hit him repeatedly. It was a lesson to every slovenly soldier, he hoped.
The tall, unarmoured man with the crossbow raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought we planned to surprise the gates?’ he said quietly. ‘And capture the Logothete?’
The bad knight and his six pursuers were riding flat out along a quiet, morning road raising dust. His pursuers were still shooting at him.
The Duke reined in his mount, speechless with rage. His fist shot out and caught his son, who reeled away and almost fell from his horse.
The Duke spat. ‘Idiot,’ he said. ‘Right. Attack.’
The unarmoured man shook his head. ‘Too soon. None of our people are in place for another half an hour.’
The Duke whirled on him. ‘You want to keep your place, spy?’
The unarmoured man met his master’s eyes. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said. ‘But if we make a premature attack, we expose our agents and we will fail.’
‘We will not,’ said the Duke.
His spurs were drawing blood from the cart horse, which continued to rumble towards the gate.
The six Easterners were twenty horse lengths behind him and gaining. They were all shooting.
And laughing.
The outer walls of Liviapolis were as ancient as the palaces and the stoa – and just as well built. They towered three storeys high, smooth yellow fire-baked brick with decorations in red brick marking every storey; magnificent mosaics rose over every gate, and each tower – there was one every fifty paces – was capped with a red tile roof. The walls appeared impregnable. There were, in fact, two complete lines of walls.
Of course the gates were open. Wide open.
Which was more than Ser Raoul could say for his eyes, which were closing. It was as if he was looking at the gate, and it was drawing away, further and further down a long tunnel—<
br />
When he hit the ground he was already dead, and his horse shuffled to a halt, just a few paces short of the great gate.
The Easterners whooped with delight.
Derkensun was watching a pretty woman walk past while waiting for a Yahadut scholar in his little cap to cough up a passport. Derkensun did not, himself, care one way or another – the man didn’t look dangerous – but while he was on the gate, rules were rules.
‘My daughter warned me that this would happen,’ said the scholar. He opened his leather bag and went through it. Again. ‘Please, lord. It is a day’s walk back to my village.’
Derkensun shook his head. ‘I uphold the law,’ he said.
The Yahadut nodded wearily. ‘As do I.’
Derkensun saw a man riding for the gate from the Field of Ares. He was on a bad horse and riding hard.
There were men behind him.
As a Guardsman, Derkensun had participated in his share of stupid soldier pranks, and he knew one when he saw one. His attention went back to the scholar.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, with a little warmth, ‘it is in your bedroll?’
The Yahadut were fanatics for cleanliness, and the scholar had a mattress stuffed with sheep’s wool, and two thick wool blankets rolled on his back.
His face went through one of those engaging transformations that let Derkensun know he’d scored a hit.
‘The blessings of the Lord be on your head!’ The man put his blanket roll on the table and unlaced the thongs.
Something was very wrong at the edge of Derkensun’s peripheral vision. He turned his head and took in the whole thing in one glance.
The man who fell from the horse was Ser Raoul Cadhut, an Iberian mercenary. They’d chewed on each other a few times in fights, but right now the Iberian knight had arrows in him, and half a dozen whooping Easterners were circling the corpse with arrows on the strings of their bows.
Knowing Raoul caused Derkensun to hesitate for one fleeting heartbeat, wondering if it was possible that the Iberian had got what was coming to him.
But even as he thought, he stepped back into his cupola and rang the alarm bell there. The shrill sound carried over the morning air.