Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

He said mildly, still looking upwards, not at the Master of Offices, "A rnosaicist spends much of his life going up and down on a variety of platforms and hoists. I can suggest some contrivances the Imperial engineers might employ to silence the mechanism, for example."

He was, as he spoke, aware of the Empress regarding him from her throne. It was impossible not to be aware of her. Alixana wore a headdress more richly ornamented with jewellery than any single object he'd ever seen in his life.

He kept his gaze fixed overhead. "I should add that it might have been more effective to position the thrice-exalted Emperor directly in the moonlight now entering from the southern and western windows in the dome. Note how the light falls only on the glorious Imperial feet. Imagine the effect should Jad's Beloved be suspended at this moment in the luminous glow of a nearly full blue moon. A turn and a half less, I surmise, on the cables, and that would have been achieved, my lord."

The murmuring took a darker tone. Crispin ignored it. "Any competent mosaicist will have tables of both moons" rising and setting, and engineers can work from those. When we have set tesserae on some sanctuary or palace domes in Batiara it has been our good fortune-Martinian's and mine-to achieve pleasing effects by being aware of when and where the moons will lend their light through the seasons. I should be honoured," he concluded, "to assist the Imperial engineers in this matter."

He stopped, still looking up. The murmuring also stopped. There was a silence that partook of a great many things then in the candlelit throne room of the Attenine Palace, among the jewelled birds, the golden and silver trees, the censers of frankincense, the exquisite works of ivory and silk and sandalwood and semi-precious stone.

It was broken, at length, by laughter.

Crispin would always remember this, too. That the first sound he ever heard from Petrus of Trakesia, who had placed his uncle on the Imperial throne and then taken it for himself as Valerius II, was this laughter: rich, uninhibited, full-throated amusement from overhead, a man suspended like a god, laughing like a god above his court, not quite in the fall of the blue moonlight.

The Emperor gestured and they lowered him until the throne settled smoothly to rest beside the Empress again. No one spoke during this descent. Crispin stood motionless, hands at his side, his heart still racing. He looked at the Emperor of Sarantium. Jad's Beloved.

Valerius II was soft-featured, quite unprepossessing, with alert grey eyes and the smooth-shaven cheeks that had led to the attack on Crispin's own beard. His hairline was receding though the hair remained a sandy brown laced with grey. He was past his forty-fifth year now, Crispin knew. Not a young man, but far from his decline. He wore a belted tunic in textured purple silk, bordered at hem and collar with bands of intricately patterned gold. Bach, but without ornament or flamboyance. No jewellery, save one very large seal ring on his left hand.

The woman beside him took a different approach in the matter of her raiment and adornment. Crispin had actually been avoiding looking directly at the Empress. He couldn't have said why. Now he did so, aware of her dark-eyed, amused gaze resting upon him. Other images, auras, awarenesses impinged as he briefly met that gaze and then cast his eyes downwards. He felt dizzied. He had seen beautiful women in his day, and much younger ones. There were extraordinary women in this room.

The Empress held him, however, and not merely by virtue of her rank or history. Alixana-who had been merely Aliana of the Blues once, an actress and dancer-was dressed in a dazzle of crimson and gold silk, the porphyry in the robe over her tunic used as an accent, but present, unavoidably present, defining her status. The headdress framing her very dark hair and the necklace about her throat were worth more, Crispin suspected, than all the jewellery in the regalia of the queen of the Antae back home. He felt, in that moment, a shaft of pity for Gisel: young and besieged and struggling for her life.

Her head held high despite the weight of ornament she carried, the Empress of Sarantium glittered in his sight, and the clever, observant amusement in her dark eyes reminded him that there was no one on earth more dangerous than this woman seated beside the Emperor.

He saw her open her mouth to speak, and when someone, astonishingly, forestalled her he saw, because he was looking, the quick pursing of lips, the briefly unveiled displeasure.

"This Rhodian," said an elegant, fair-haired woman behind her, "has all the presumption one might have expected, and none of the manners one dared hope for. At least they chopped off his foliage. A red beard along with an uncouth manner would have been too offensive."

Crispin said nothing. He saw the Empress smile thinly. Without turning, Alixana said, "You knew he was bearded? You have been making inquiries, Styliane? Even newly married? How very characteristic of the Daleinoi."

Someone laughed nervously and was quickly silent. The big, frank-looking, handsome man beside the woman looked briefly uneasy. But. from the name that had been spoken, Crispin now knew who these two people were. The pieces slotting into place. He had a puzzle-solving mind. Always had. Needed it now.

He was looking at Carullus's beloved Strategos, the man the tribune had come from Sauradia to see, the greatest soldier of the day. This tall man was Leontes the Golden, and beside him was his bride. Daughter of the wealthiest family in Sarantium. A prize for a triumphant general. She was, Crispin had to concede. She was a prize. Styliane Daleina was magnificent, and the single, utterly spectacular pearl that gleamed in the golden necklace at her throat might even be…

An idea came to him in that moment, anger-driven. Inwardly he winced at his own subversive thought, and he kept silent. There were limits to recklessness.

Styliane Daleina was entirely unruffled by the Empress's remark. She would be, Crispin realized: she'd revealed her knowledge of him freely with the insult. She would have been ready for a retort. He had an abrupt sense that he was now another very minor piece in a complex game being played between two women.

Or three. He was carrying a message.

"He can beard himself like a Holy Fool if he chooses," said the Emperor of Sarantium mildly, "if he has the skills to assist with the Sanctuary mosaics." Valerius's voice was quiet, but it cut through all other sounds.

It would, Crispin thought. Everyone in this room would be tuned to its cadences.

Crispin looked at the Emperor, pushing the women from his mind. "You have spoken persuasively about engineering and moonlight," said Valerius of Sarantium. "Shall we converse a moment about mosaic?"

He sounded like a scholar, an academician. He looked like one. It was said that this man never slept. That he walked one or another of his palaces all night dictating, or sat reading dispatches by lanternlight. That he could engage philosophers and military tacticians in discourse that stretched the limits of their own understanding. That he had met with the aspiring architects of his new Great Sanctuary and had reviewed each drawing they presented. That one of them had killed himself when the Emperor rejected his scheme, explaining in precise detail why he was doing so. This much had reached even Varena: there was an Emperor in Sarantium now with a taste for beauty as well as power.

"I am here for no other reason, thrice-exalted," Crispin said. It was more or less the truth.

"Ah," said Styliane Daleina quickly. "Another Rhodian trait. Here to converse he tells us-no deeds. Thus, the Antae conquered with such ease. It is all so familiar."

There was laughter again. In its own way, this second interruption was intensely revealing: she had to feel utterly secure, either in her own person or that of her husband, the Emperor's longtime friend, to break into a colloquy of this sort. What was unclear was why the woman was attacking him. Crispin kept his gaze on the Emperor.