Guy Kay - Lord of Emperors

In the Porphyry Room on the night this was set in motion, a door was opened and a man and woman kneeling in prayer before a covered body turned to see a second woman enter.

She stopped on the threshold and looked at them. Leontes stood up. Gisel did not, clasping her sun disk, her head cast down in what might have been thought to be humility.

"You asked for me? What is it?" said Styliane Daleina briskly to the man she had today brought to the Golden Throne. "I have much to do tonight."

"No, you don't," said Leontes, blunt and final as a judge. And was watching her as she registered-quickly, always quickly-the import of his tone.

If he had hoped (or feared) to see terror or fury in her eyes then he was disappointed (or relieved). He did see something snicker there. A different man might have known it for irony, a vast, black amusement, but the man who could have read her that way lay dead on the bier.

Gisel stood up. And of the three of them living, she was the one wearing the colours of royalty in this room. Styliane looked at her for a moment, and what might perhaps have been unexpected was the measure of her calm, approaching indifference.

She looked away from the other woman, as if dismissing her. She said to her husband, "You have discerned a way to claim Batiara. How clever of you. Did you do it all by yourself?" She glanced at Gisel, and the queen of the Antae lowered her eyes to the marble floor again, not in apprehension or intimidation, but so that exultation might be secret a little longer.

Leontes said, "I have discerned murder and impiety and will not live with them under Jad."

Styliane laughed.

Even here, even now, she could laugh. He looked at her. How could a soldier, who judged so much of the world in terms of courage, not admire this, whatever else he felt?

She said, "Ah. You will not live with them? You renounce the throne? The court? Will join an order of clerics? Perch on a rock in the mountains with your beard to your knees? I would never have imagined it! Jad's ways are mighty."

"They are," said Gisel, speaking for the first time, and the mood was changed, effortlessly. "They are, indeed."

Styliane looked at her again, and this time Gisel lifted her eyes and met that gaze. It was simply too difficult, after all, to be secret. She had sailed here utterly alone, fleeing death, without allies of any kind, those who loved her dying in her stead. And now…

The man did not speak. He was staring at the aristocratic wife Valerius had given him in great honour, for shining conquests in the field. He had summoned her here intending to pull back the cloth again from the dead man and force her to look upon the hideous ruin of him, but in that moment he understood that such gestures held no meaning, or not any meaning one might expect.

He had never really understood her in any case, the daughter of Flavius Daleinus.

He gestured to Gesius, standing behind her in the doorway. His wife saw his movement and she looked at him, and she smiled. She smiled. And then they took her away. She was blinded before dawn by men whose vocation that was, in an underground room from which no sounds could escape to trouble the world above.

Through the moonlit streets of the city, past troops of foot-soldiers and mounted men galloping, boarded-up taverns and cauponae and the unlit fronts of houses, past chapels dark and the banked fires of the bakeries, under scudding clouds and stars hidden and revealed, Rustem of Kerakek, the physician, was escorted late that night by men of the Urban Prefect's guard from the Blues" compound to the house near the walls he'd been given for his use.

They had offered him a bed in the compound, but he had been taught long ago that a physician did better to sleep away from where his patients were. It preserved dignity, detachment, privacy. Even bone-weary as he was (he had done three more procedures after cleaning and closing the wound of the boy stabbed from behind), Rustem followed the habits of training and, after turning to the east and praying in silence to Perun and the Lady that his efforts be found acceptable, had asked for the escort promised earlier that night. They'd walked him to the gates again and called for the guards. He'd promised to return in the morning.

The soldiers in the streets gave them no trouble as they went, though there was clearly an agitation among them and the night was raucous with their cries and hammerings upon doors and the horses passing were like drums on the cobblestones. Rustem, in his exhaustion, paid them no attention, moving in the midst of his escort, placing one foot in front of another, using his stick tonight, not just carrying it for effect, hardly seeing where he was going:

At length they came to his door. The door of Bonosus's small house by the walls. One of the guards knocked for him and it was opened quickly. They were probably expecting the soldiers, Rustem thought. The searchers. The steward was there, his expression concerned, and Rustem saw the girl, Elita, standing behind him, still awake at this hour. He stepped over the threshold, left foot first, mumbled a thanks to those who'd walked him here, nodded briefly to the steward and the girl, and went up the stairs to his room. There seemed to be many stairs tonight. He opened the door and went in, left foot first.

Inside, Alixana of Sarantium was sitting by the open window, looking down at the courtyard below.

He didn't know it was her, of course. Not until she spoke. In his dazed, stumbling state Rustem hadn't the least idea why this unknown woman was in his bedchamber. His first, incoherent thought was that she might be someone Bonosus knew. But that ought to have been a boy, surely?

Then he did believe he recognized her-as a patient, one of those who had come to see him the very first morning. But that made no sense. What was she doing here now? Did the Sarantines know nothing of proper conduct?

Then she stood up beside the window and she said, "Good evening, physician. My name is Aliana. It was Alixana this morning."

Rustem fell back against the door, pushing it shut. His legs felt weak. There was a horror in him. He couldn't even speak. She was ragged, dirty, visibly exhausted, looking like nothing so much as a street beggar, and it never for a moment occurred to him to doubt the truth of what she said. The voice, he thought afterwards. It was the voice.

She said, "They are looking for me. I have no right to place you at risk, but I am doing so. I must rely on your compassion for someone you have treated as a patient-however briefly-and I must tell you I… I have nowhere else to go. I have been avoiding soldiers all night. I was even in the sewers, but they are looking there now."

Rustem crossed the room. It seemed to take a long time. He sat down on the edge of his bed. Then it crossed his mind that he ought not to sit in the presence of an Empress and he stood up. He put a hand on one of the bedposts for support.

"How did you… why are… how here?

She smiled at him. There was nothing resembling amusement in her face, however. Rustem had been trained to look at people carefully, and now he did. This woman was at the end of whatever reserves of strength she had. He glanced down. She was unshod; there was blood on one foot, and he thought it might be from a bite. She had mentioned the sewers. Her hair had been cropped off, raggedly. A disguise, he thought, as his brain began to work again. Her garment had also been cut, just above the knees. Her eyes looked hollow, dark, as if one could see into the sockets, into the bone behind.

But she smiled at his fumbling incoherence. "You were much more articulate the last time, doctor, explaining why I might hope one day to bear a child. Why am I here? Desperation, I confess. Elita is one of my women, one of those I trust. I used her to report on Bonosus. It was useful, in obvious ways, to know what the Master of the Senate was doing that he might prefer… not be known."