Guy Gavriel Kay - Lord of Emperors

He nods. ‘I should sell you somewhere, far away. I have no secrets. Yes, I’m . . . testing things.’

‘You would really bring him back?’

Lysippus the Calysian, gross of body and of appetite, was nonetheless the most efficient and incorruptible Quaestor of Imperial Revenue Valerius has ever had. His association with the Emperor is said to go back a very long way and involve some details that are unlikely to ever be made known. The Empress has never even asked, in fact; not really wanting to know. She has her own memories—and dreams, sometimes—of men screaming in the street one morning below rooms he’d rented for her in an expensive district, in the days when they were young and Apius was Emperor. She is not overly delicate about such things, cannot be after that childhood in the Hippodrome and the theatre, but this memory—with the smell of charred flesh—has lingered and will not leave.

The Calysian has been exiled nearly three years now, in the wake of the Victory Riot.

‘I’d bring him back,’ the Emperor says. ‘If they let me. I’d need the Patriarch to absolve him and the accursed factions to be calm about it. Best during the racing season, when they have other things to scream about.’

She smiles a little. He doesn’t like the racing, it is an ill-guarded secret. ‘Where is he now, really?’

Valerius shrugs. ‘North still, I assume. He writes from an estate near Eubulus. Has resources enough to do whatever he likes. Is probably bored. Terrifying the countryside. Stealing children by dark of moon.’

She makes a face at that. ‘Not a pleasant man.’

He nods. ‘Not in the least. Ugly habits. But I need money, love, and Vertigus is next to useless.’

‘Oh, I agree,’ she murmurs. ‘You can’t imagine how useless.’ She runs a tongue across her lips. ‘I think Gunarch of Moskav will please me much more.’ She is hiding something, though. A feeling, distant intuition. Dolphins and dreams and souls.

He laughs, has to laugh, eventually takes leave after finishing his quick meal. There are reports from the military and provincial governors to be read and responded to back in the Attenine Palace. She is receiving a delegation of clerics and holy women from Amoria in her own reception rooms, will sail in the harbour after, if the winds are light. She enjoys going out to the islands in the strait or the inner sea, and with winter ending she can do so again on a mild day. There is no formal banquet tonight. They are to dine together with a small number of courtiers, listening to a musician from Candaria.

In the event, they will do this, enjoying the elusive, plangent instrumentation, but they will be joined for wine afterwards—some might think unexpectedly—by the Supreme Strategos Leontes and his tall, fair wife, and a third person, also a woman, and royal.

Pardos sprinted for all he was worth, cursing himself all the while. He had spent his entire life in the rougher quarters of Varena, a city known for drunken Antae soldiers and for brawling apprentices. He knew he was an idiot for having intervened here, but a drawn sword and a man slain in broad daylight had taken the laneway encounter past the point of the usual bruises and bangings. He’d charged in, not stopping to think, administered some blows of his own—and now found himself pelting headlong beside a greying Bassanid through a city he didn’t know at all, with a shouting band of young aristocrats in flat-out pursuit. He didn’t even have his staff.

He’d been known for a cautious young man at home, but being careful didn’t always keep you out of trouble. He knew what they had to do, prayed only that the doctor’s older legs were equal to the pace.

Pardos whipped out of the laneway, skidding left into a wider street, and knocked over the first cart—a fish-monger’s—that he saw. Couvry had done that once under similar circumstances. A shriek of outrage followed him; he didn’t look back. Crowds and chaos were what they needed, to screen their flight and to provide some deterrent to fatal violence if they were caught—though he was uncertain how easily deterred their pursuers might be.

Best not to test that.

Beside him the doctor seemed to be keeping up—he even reached over as they careened around another corner and pulled down the awning over the portico of an icon shop. Not the wisest choice for a Bassanid, perhaps, but he did succeed in spilling a table full of Blessed Victims into the muddy street, scattering the beggars gathered around it, creating further disruption behind them. Pardos glanced over; the doctor was grim-faced, his legs pumping hard.

As they ran, Pardos kept looking for one of the Urban Prefect guards—surely they would be about, in this rough neighbourhood? Weren’t swords supposed to be illegal in the City? The young patricians pursuing them appeared not to believe so, or to care. He abruptly decided to make for a chapel, a larger one than the nondescript little hole in which he’d been chanting the morning invocation after arriving in the city at sunrise and weaving his way down from the triple walls. He’d been planning to take an inexpensive room near the harbour—always the cheapest part of a city—and then head for an encounter he’d been thinking about since leaving home.

The room would have to wait.

There were heavy morning crowds now, and they had to twist and dodge as best they could, earning curses and a tardy blow aimed at Pardos from one off-duty soldier. But this meant that those chasing them would surely be stringing out by now, and might even lose sight of them if Pardos and the doctor—he really was moving quite well for a greybeard—managed to take a sufficiently erratic path.

Glancing up constantly to get his bearings, Pardos glimpsed—through a break in the multi-storied buildings— a golden dome larger than any he’d ever seen before, and he abruptly changed his thinking, even as they ran.

‘That way!’ he gasped, pointing.

‘Why are we running?’ the Bassanid burst out. ‘There are people here! They won’t dare—’

‘They will! They’ll kill us and pay a fine! Come on!’

The doctor said no more, saving his breath. He followed as Pardos cut sharply off the street they were on and angled across a wide square. They hurtled past a bedraggled Holy Fool and his small crowd, hit by a whiff of the man’s foul, unwashed odour. Pardos heard a sharp cry from behind—some of the pursuers still had them in sight. A stone whizzed past his head. He looked back.

One pursuer. Only one. That changed things.

Pardos stopped, and turned.

The doctor did the same. A fierce-looking but extremely young man in green robes, eastern-styled, with earrings and a golden necklace and long, unkempt hair— not one of the original group—slowed uncertainly, then fumbled at his belt and pulled out a short sword. Pardos looked around, swore, and then darted up to the Holy Fool. Braving the maggoty, fetid stench of the man, he seized his oak staff, snapping an apology over his shoulder. He ran directly at their young pursuer.

‘You idiot!’ he screamed, waving the staff wildly. ‘You’re alone! There’s two of us!’

The young man—belatedly apprehending this significant truth—looked quickly over his shoulder, saw no immediately arriving reinforcements, appeared suddenly less fierce.

‘Run!’ screamed the doctor at Pardos’s side, brandishing a knife.

The young man looked at the two of them and elected to follow the advice. He ran.

Pardos hurled the borrowed staff back towards the Holy Fool on his small platform. ‘Come on!’ he rasped at the doctor. ‘Head for the Sanctuary!’ He pointed. They turned together, crossed the square, and raced up another laneway on the far side