Mary Reed - Nine for the Devil

“Your grandmother was very ill,” Joannina pointed out.

Anastasius slid lower on the couch. “But she wouldn’t have died before she saw to it we were married if not for-”

“You sound as if you care more about our marriage than your grandmother!”

Anastasius turned toward Joannina and put his hand out. She moved slightly and the hand brushed her shoulder. “You know I care about you more than anything in the world, Joannina, my little sparrow.”

“Now that’s the Anastasius I love.” She kissed his forehead and her hand went to his belt. “Let the Lord Chamberlain worry about vengeance.”

The carriage was utterly dark. The windows had been covered.

John had caught only a glimpse of the conveyance as he was thrown roughly inside it. It was an imperial carriage in poor repair, nothing the emperor would ride in, and had been relegated to other uses.

He tried the door. Not surprisingly, it was locked. He couldn’t see his hand or anything else. Except that he could feel his breath going in and out he might already have been a disembodied phantom.

The carriage had an unpleasant sour smell. The smell of fear, perhaps, from previous passengers.

At least half a dozen excubitors had come to the house. They hammered on the door loudly enough to wake him in the study where he had dozed off in his chair. Once he confronted them they had become taciturn about their mission and John’s destination.

“Emperor’s orders! That’s all you need to know!” their apparent leader barked when John tried to question him.

John recognized the man by the unruly red hair spilling from underneath his helmet.

He was the excubitor who had summoned Felix from the tavern for an urgent meeting with Justinian.

A meeting to order John’s arrest?

There had been no use resisting. John had not tucked the blade he usually carried into the tunic he had intended to wear to bed. It didn’t matter. A single man, even properly armed, would have no chance against so many trained soldiers.

He fought the only worthwhile battle left, the battle to maintain his dignity.

After so many years of imperial service, was his life going to end like so many others-like the guards outside Theodora’s sickroom, like the imperial cook-unexpectedly, at the whim of the emperor?

Everyone at court heard stories of people spirited away to be summarily executed on Justinian’s orders. Sometimes acquaintances or family members. And then they wondered what would it feel like? How would they react when they were roused from sleep and told they had less than a hour to live, if they were lucky? If they were lucky enough, that is, to be killed simply and cleanly and not taken down to the torturers first.

But however close the victim had been to a particular person, it was like hearing about someone killed by lightning or a run-away cart. An acknowledged possibility, but never something you really imagined would happen to yourself.

John stared into the blackness that pressed in on him like dark water. He feared deep water. Now he fought off the feeling he was drowning. He kept his lips tightly pressed together as if the darkness might get in and choke off his breath.

He didn’t know what time it was. How long had he dozed before waking? It might be the middle of the night or nearly dawn.

One wouldn’t have expected the emperor to schedule a meeting for either time.

He wished he had heard from Cornelia.

The carriage wheels creaked. John was jolted continually. He couldn’t tell where he was being taken. At least the carriage had not been moving downhill, which would indicate that the destination was the docks or some lonely stretch of sea wall beyond which the hungry waters waited for the emperor’s offerings.

Instead, the carriage was going uphill. It slowed, turned, came to a halt.

“Mithra!” John muttered.

The door swung open. Powerful arms pulled him into the night and dragged him along before he had a chance to get his bearings.

Abruptly he was released.

He stood amidst massive sarcophagi illuminated by torches in curving walls.

Was this some kind of horrible jest on Justinian’s part?

John realized he had been brought to Constantine’s mausoleum behind the Church of the Holy Apostles. Around him lay emperors, who having lived in the purple slept for eternity enclosed in the imperial color. Purple porphyry folded angular arms about Constantine, Theodosius, and other departed rulers. Although Zeno lay under dark green Thessalonian stone, veined in white.

Thinking of the emperor reminded John of Anatolius’ uncle Zeno, on whose estate John’s family was currently living.

A hand shoved him forward.

He moved through a haze of incense, its sweet perfume foretelling the gardens of heaven.

He might have been dreaming.

An excubitor stood on each side of him. He could see the steel of their drawn swords glinting.

Light flashed from the mausoleum’s gem-studded gold fittings, icons glittered in lamplight glowing from silver dove-shaped lamps suspended on long chains from the frescoed roof, reflected in marble walls.

They passed out of Constantine’s burial place and into the mausoleum Justinian had only recently had completed.

The excubitor with the red hair stopped and clamped a hand on John’s shoulder. “Far enough!”

The guards at John’s side moved away.

A prickling sensation ran from the nape of John’s neck down his back.

Where would the steel penetrate?

He remembered well the feel of a blade cutting through flesh.

He had endured the pain before and he would endure it one last time.

***

Hypatia stood in the dark kitchen, trying to overcome her fear. The clatter of the carriage moving away across the square still seemed to reverberate through the house,

The Lord Chamberlain may have been called away on business, she told herself. Though it was before dawn, it would not have been impossible. Affairs of the empire did not keep regular hours.

But he would never have left the door open or gone without leaving word with her.

Would he?

Then again, he had been working too hard. He was exhausted. It was plain in his gaunt features.

What about the raised voices? Had they only sounded overly loud and angry because they had startled her in the middle of the night?

She told herself not to leap to conclusions. The Lord Chamberlain did not explain his comings and goings to her.

Perhaps he would return soon.

She preferred not to think the worst.

She pulled a chair up to the table, sat down, and waited.

John waited to die in Justinian’s mausoleum.

But the sudden pressure he felt against the middle of his back was not sharp steel but flesh. One of his guards gave him a shove.

John took three stumbling steps forward before he saw the emperor kneeling by Theodora’s sarcophagus.

How horrified the empress would be if she could see the emperor kneeling in the presence of one of his subjects.

Justinian got to his feet. At those times John had seen him since Theodora’s death his demeanor had been so stolid John had wondered if he really was a demon exhibiting a false face to the world as many believed. Now, however, very human tears glistened on his gaunt cheeks. Justinian’s face had grown so thin it resembled the skulls of Timothy, Luke, and Andrew, three of the most sacred treasures held in the Church of the Holy Apostles. The impression had scarcely formed in John’s thoughts when Justinian smiled wanly in his direction.

“I shall be laid to rest next to the empress in due course,” the emperor remarked in an even tone. “But I feel as if I were already entombed. I feel like Emperor Zeno. The story goes that he was locked in his tomb while still alive and called from his darkness for three days before his voice fell silent forever.”