Tom Harper - The mosaic of shadows

Asgard shook his head so violently that I almost believed him.

‘I will take you to the imperial prisons,’ I told him. ‘Then I will find Sigurd and repeat your story. Perhaps he will remind you of things you have forgotten.’

Asgard cowered back in terror, pressing himself so close against the column he might have been carved on it. ‘Do not take me to Sigurd,’ he pleaded. ‘Not to Sigurd.’ A leering hope entered his eyes. ‘Perhaps there are other things I remember.’

‘What other things?’

Asgard raised his chin in rare defiance. ‘The monk did not leave instructions — but that does not mean I was fool enough not to make enquiries. Asgard always seeks new business.’

I stood very still. ‘What did your enquiries reveal?’

‘That a man who values knowledge will pay for it.’

‘You were involved in a plot to murder the Emperor,’ I reminded him, ‘and your life will be forfeit unless you ransom it with something of singular value. Is your knowledge enough to buy your soul?’

Asgard looked miserably unhappy, but with a knife at his throat and Sigurd’s vengeance to follow, he had little choice.

‘I paid a boy to follow the monk when he left the tavern. A clever lad, and sly. He knew how to find the shadows when the monk looked around. Which he did often, apparently — a suspicious man. But the boy tracked him like a deer, back to a tenement in Libos.’

‘Where in Libos? When was this?’ I raised my knife so that it hovered before Asgard’s eyes. It seemed to make the words come faster.

‘Two weeks ago, perhaps three. I do not know if he has been there since. But that you can find out yourself. It is west from the column of Marcian, near the north bank of the Lycus. A grocer named Vichos keeps his shop on the ground floor.’

I stared into his eyes, trying to judge the truth of his words, but fear had long stripped all honesty from his face and I could not tell.

‘If we find the monk, you will live.’ Though not in the least comfort. ‘For now, you will come with me to the palace, until I can judge the truth of your tale.’

Asgard’s eyes widened, and he sank to his knees. ‘No,’ he implored me. ‘Not to the palace. If I go there they will kill me. I have helped you all I can — have mercy on me now. Let me go — give me only an hour to escape, and that will be a fair bargain.’

‘I will decide what is a fair bargain,’ I told him, feeling no pity for this traitor. If he had hoped to win mercy by grovelling, he had misjudged me. ‘Get up.’

But Asgard’s serpent mind had a final draught of venom in it. I must have edged back a little as he rose, and those few inches were all the room he needed to spring forward, crashing into my legs and driving me away. My feet kicked and slipped on the wet stone beneath and I fell, landing heavily on my back. There was a terrible pain in my lungs and throat where the air had been forced out, and by the time I regained my feet Asgard was gone.

I cursed, though it was of little moment. I disbelieved at least half his story, and suspected there was another half as yet untold, but that could wait: doubtless the Watch would have him before nightfall, if the monk did not find him first. For now, the highest imperative was to reach the house in Libos, the house of Vichos the grocer. If the monk truly was there, then even Asgard’s escape would be a small price to have paid.

I climbed back up to the palace and summoned the guard. It was strange to meet Patzinaks, with their short swords and pointed helmets, in the places where Varangians should have been, and my unfamiliarity with them meant further delay until I could explain myself to their captain. He listened to my story with ever greater concern, and rattled off orders to his subordinates as soon as I was finished.

‘We will call out the Watch to find this Asgard, and take a company of men down to the house in Libos.’

I nodded my approval. ‘Good. I will go with you.’

For all that we needed haste it took some time to assemble his men, while I wandered the courtyard and fretted that the monk might even now be fleeing his house, again just a few paces beyond our grasp. I tried to goad the Patzinaks to swiftness, but they treated me with indifference and ignored my pleas. Only when the captain was satisfied that all his men were correctly arrayed and equipped did we march out through the Augusteion.

The crowds in the streets were surging as thick as ever, despite the persistent rain, and a column of a hundred guardsmen in their midst brought constant friction. Feet were trampled, baskets spilled and clothing muddied as the Patzinaks rammed their path through. Sigurd had spoken of their single-minded devotion to the Emperor, but here they seemed like automata, like the lions in the palace whose apparent obedience was entirely free of will or reason. It felt strange, unsettling to be in their company; I would much rather have been with Sigurd and his men. Coarse and wild though the Varangians were, I could at least admire their passion, the unbridled currents which ruled them. There was nothing of that in the unmoving Patzinak faces which followed me.

Nor were they as physically arresting as the giants of Thule. If Sigurd was a bear, then his Patzinak counterpart was more a mule: shorter and stockier, but with a stride I suspected would never falter in a month of hard marches. His arms swung freely at his side, and his head jerked erratically as he walked. He had the face of a man who would prefer to knife his enemy in the back than meet him in a head-on duel, but in a fight, I guessed, he would have the guile and will to wear down mightier opponents. If once he was on the field of battle, I did not think he would leave it lightly.

We passed under the column of Constantine and through the arch of Theodosius, and further along the road to the small square where the Emperor Marcian had found a space for his own monument. No doubt walking in the shadows of the past should have inspired us to rival its legend, but with rain trickling in my ear and the carved figures in the sky almost invisible, it only depressed me. Even the prospect of finding the monk could not inspire me: I had seen too many broken men and women in the last hours for that. And it was hard to lift my mood on the strength of a traitor’s desperate lies.

Past the column of Marcian, as Asgard had said, we turned left. It was a narrow, unpaved street, turned to mire by the rain and with streaming water gouging a new course down its centre. The buildings were of unpainted wood, dark and rotten with all the moisture they had absorbed, tottering over us like drunken giants. We progressed slowly down the road. The Patzinaks had their swords out, alert for any danger, but there was little life to be seen around us, and the only sound was the constant rattle of raindrops on the puddles and tiles. Though marching soldiers were a common enough sight on the Mesi, a hundred of them prowling through a private neighbourhood would sweep every resident, honest or otherwise, out of their path. With nothing to obstruct us, the grocer’s shop was plain to see, and the faded paint on the lintel — just visible through the gloom — gave me the name: Vichos.

‘So far your informant does not lie,’ muttered the captain. ‘But I wonder what he keeps in his shop.’

‘You should array your men around it before we find out. It will do us no good if there are a hundred of us inside the house while the monk jumps from a window and makes his escape.’

The captain gestured to his sergeants to deploy the men as I had suggested, keeping a dozen close about us. The grocer’s shutters and door were fastened shut, as tight as their skewed hinges would admit, but I thought I saw a shadow within moving across one of the cracks. Was he watching us? Did he realise that he had failed, that soon the Emperor’s torturers would be heating their irons before his eyes? Or did he have a plan, another gambit to outwit us? Was he even there?