Lord of Emperors (15 page)

He and the Bassanid leaped and dodged among masons and masonry carts and brick piles and-familiar sight! — an outdoor oven for quicklime near the portico. As they reached the steps, Pardos heard the pursuing cry behind him again. He and the doctor took the steps side by side and stumbled to a stop, breathing hard, before the doors.

"No one allowed!" snapped a guard-there were two of them. "They are at work inside!"

"Mosaicist," gasped Pardos. "Here from Batiara! Those youths are after us!" He pointed back across the forum. "They killed someone already! With swords!"

The guards glanced over. Half a dozen of the young pursuers had now made it this far, running in a tight cluster. They had weapons drawn-in daylight, in the forum. Impossible to credit, or so wealthy they didn't even care. Pardos seized one of the heavy door handles, pulled it open, pushed the doctor quickly inside. Heard the piercing, satisfying sound of a guard whistling for support. They would be safe in here for now, he was sure of it. The doctor was bent over, hands on his hips, breathing heavily. He gave Pardos a sidelong glance and a nod, obviously registering the same thing.

Later, much later, Pardos would give some thought to what the morning s sequence of interventions and activities suggested about changes in himself, but for the moment he was only moving and reacting. He looked up. He reacted, but he didn't move.

In fact, he felt suddenly as though his boots were set into the marble floor like… tesserae in a setting bed, fixed for centuries to come.

He stood so, rooted, trying to deal first with the sheer size of the space encompassed here, the dim, vast aisles and bays receding into an illusion of endlessness down corridors of pale, filtered light. He saw the massive columns piled upon each other like playthings for the giants of legend from Finabar, the lost, first world of the Antae's pagan faith, where gods walked among men.

Overwhelmed, Pardos looked down at the flawless, polished marble of the floor, and then-taking a deep breath-up again, all the way up, to see, floating, floating, the great dome itself, inconceivably immense. And upon it, taking shape even now, was what Caius Crispus of Varena, his teacher, was devising amid this holiness.

White and gold tesserae on a blue ground-blue such as Pardos had never seen in Batiara and had never expected to see in his life-defined the vault of the heavens. Pardos recognized the hand and style immediately. Whoever had been in charge of these decorations when Crispin arrived from the west was no longer the designer here.

Pardos had been
taught
by the man doing this, master to apprentice. What he couldn't yet begin to grasp-and he knew he would need to spend a long time looking to even make a start-was the colossal scale of what Crispin was doing on this dome. A design equal to the vastness of the setting.

The doctor, beside him, was leaning against a marble column now, still catching his breath. The marble was the green-blue colour, in the muted light, of the sea on a cloudy morning. The Bassanid was silent, slowly looking about. Above the grey-streaked beard his eyes were wide. Valerius's Sanctuary was the talk and rumour of the known world, and they were standing within it now.

There were labourers at work everywhere, many of them at corners, so distant they were invisible, could only be heard. But even the noise of construction was changed by the huge space, echoing, a hollow resonance of sound. He tried to imagine the liturgy being chanted here, and a lump rose in his throat at the thought.

Dust danced in the slanting beams of sunlight that fell down through the windows set high on the walls and all around the dome. Looking up past suspended oil lamps of bronze and silver, Pardos saw scaffolding everywhere against the marbled walls, where mosaics of interwoven flowers and patterned shapes were being laid. One scaffolding only went all the way up to the dome, towards the northern side of that great curve, opposite the entrance doors. And in the soft, sweet morning light in the Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom, Pardos saw upon that high scaffolding the small figure of the man he'd followed all the way east, unasked, and unwanted-for Crispin had flatly refused the company of any apprentices when he'd set out on his own journey.

Pardos took another steadying breath and made the sign of the sun disk. This place was not formally consecrated yet-there was no altar, no suspended golden disk behind it-but for him, it was holy ground already, and his journey, or this part of it, was over. He gave thanks to Jad in his heart, remembering blood on an altar in Varena, wild dogs on a bitterly cold night in Sauradia when he had thought he would die. He was alive, and here.

Pardos could hear the guards outside-more of them now. A young man's voice was raised in anger, and was then sharply cut off by a soldier's reply. He looked at the doctor, arid allowed himself a crooked smile. Then he remembered that the Bassanid's servant was dead. They had escaped, but it was not a moment for pleasure, not for the other man.

Not far away, two artisans stood together, and Pardos decided that if he could make his feet obey commands, he'd go over and speak to them. Before he could do so, he heard their voices raised in anxious colloquy.

"Wheres Vargos?
He
could do it."

"Gone to get dressed. You
know
that. He was invited too."

"Holy Jad. Maybe… um, one of the mason's apprentices can do it? Or the bricklayer's? They may not… know him?"

"Not a chance. They all know the stories. We have to do it, Sosio, right now. It's late! I'll dice you."

No! I am
not
going up there. Crispin kills people."

"He talks about killing people. I don't think he's ever
done
it."

"You don't
think
he has. Good. Then you go up."

"I said I'd dice, Sosio."

"And I said I won't go. I don't want you to go, either. I don't
have
any other brothers."

"He'll be
late.
He'll kill us for letting him be late."

Pardos found that he could move, and that-notwithstanding the events of the morning-he was struggling not to grin. Too many memories were with him, sudden and vivid.

He went forward over marble in the serene light. His booted footsteps echoed softly. The two brothers-they were twins, utterly identical-turned and looked at him. In the distance, someone dropped a hammer or a chisel and the sound rang softly, almost music.

"I gather," said Pardos gravely, "this is a question of interrupting Crispin on the scaffold?"

"Caius Crispus, yes," said the one called Sosio quickly. "You, er, know him?"

"He has to be at a wedding!" said the other brother.

"Right away! He's in the wedding party."

"But he doesn't allow anyone to interrupt him!"

"Ever! He
killed
someone for it once!"

"Back in Varena. With a trowel, they say! Inside a holy chapel!" Silano's expression was horrified.

Pardos nodded in sympathy. "I know, I know. He did do that. In a chapel! In fact, I was the person he killed. It was
terrible,
dying like that! A trowel!" He paused, and winked as their mouths fell open, identically. "It's all right, I'll get him for you."

He went forward, before his smile-which he really
couldn't
suppress any longer-completely betrayed him. He passed right under the staggering sweep of the dome. Looking up, he saw Crispin's rendering of Jad in the east above the emerging details of Sarantium seen as if on the horizon, and because he'd just spent an entire winter in a certain chapel in Sauradia, Pardos perceived immediately what his teacher was doing with his own image of the god. Crispin had been there too. The Sleepless Ones had told him that.

He came to the scaffold. Two young apprentices were standing there, bracing it, as they always had to do. Usually those on that task were bored and idle. This pair looked terrified. Pardos found that he really couldn't stop smiling.

"Hold steady for me, will you?" he said.

"You
can't"
one of the boys gasped in horror. "He's
up
there!"

"So I understand," said Pardos. He could remember, so easily, feeling- and probably looking-exactly as this white-faced apprentice did. "He needs to be given a message, though."

And he grasped the rungs of the scaffold ladder and started up. He knew that high above, Crispin would soon feel, if he hadn't immediately, the tug and sway. Pardos kept his eyes on his hands, as they were all trained to do, and climbed.

He was halfway up when he heard a well-known voice he'd travelled the world to hear again call down in cold, remembered fury, "Another step up and I end your wretched existence and powder your bones into the setting bed!"

That's very good, actually,
Pardos thought.
A new one.
He looked up. "You shut up," he cried. "Or I'll carve your buttocks with tesserae and feed them to you in segments!"

There was a silence. "Then, I say that, rot your eyes! Who the-?"

Pardos continued upward without answering.

Above him, he felt the platform shift as Crispin came to the edge and looked down.

"Who
are
you?" Another silence, followed by: "Pardos?
Pardos?

Pardos didn't speak, kept climbing. His heart was full. He reached the top and stepped over the low rail and onto the platform under the mosaic stars of a dark blue mosaic sky.

To be enveloped in a hard embrace that almost toppled them both.

"Curse you, Pardos! What
took
you so long? I've
needed
you here! They wrote that you left in the fucking autumn! Half a year ago! Do you know how late you are?"

Ignoring for the moment the fact that Crispin, on departing, had explicitly refused accompaniment, Pardos disengaged.

"Do you know how late
you
are?" he asked.

"Me? What?"

"Wedding," said Pardos happily, and watched.

It gave him even greater pleasure, later, to recollect the appalled dawning of awareness on Crispin's unexpectedly smooth-shaven features.

"Ah!
Ah!
Holy Jad! They'll
kill
me! I'm a dead man! If Carullus doesn't, bloody Shirin will! Why didn't one of those imbeciles down there
tell
me?"

Without delaying for the extremely obvious answer, Crispin rushed past Pardos, vaulted recklessly over the railing and began hurtling down the ladder, sliding more than stepping, the way the apprentices did when they raced each other. Before following, Pardos glanced over at where Crispin had been working. He saw a bison in an autumn forest, huge, done in black, edged and outlined in white. It would be
very
strong, that way, against the brilliant colours of the leaves around it, a dominant image. That had to be deliberate. Crispin had taken the apprentices once to see a floor mosaic at an estate south of Varena, where black and white had been used against colour in this way. Pardos went back down, feeling suddenly thoughtful.

Crispin was waiting at the bottom, grimacing, dancing from foot to foot in his impatience.
'Hurry,
you idiot! We're so late it kills me. It
will
kill me! Come on! Why did you take so poxed long to get here?"

Pardos stepped deliberately down off the ladder. "I stopped in Sauradia," he said. "A chapel by the road there. They said you'd been there too, earlier."

Crispin's expression changed, very quickly. He looked intently at Pardos. "I was," he said after a pause. "I was there. I told them that they had to… Were you… Pardos, were you
restoring
it?"

Pardos nodded slowly. "As much as I felt I could, on my own."

Crispin's expression changed again, warming him, sunlight on a raw morning. "I'm pleased," his teacher said. "I'm very pleased. We'll speak of this. Meanwhile, come, we'll have to run."

"I've
been
running. Through the whole of Sarantium, it feels like. There are a group of young men outside, rich enough not to care about the law, who are trying to kill me and this Bassanid doctor." He gestured at the physician, who had approached with the artisan brothers. The twins" faces were a paired study in confusion. "They killed his manservant," Pardos said. "We can't just walk outside."

"And my man's body will be thrown into the street by certain of your
most
pious clerics if he is not claimed by midday." The doctor spoke excellent Sarantine, better than Pardos's. He was still angry.

"Where is he?" Crispin said. "Sosio and Silano can get him."

"I have no idea of the name of-"

"Chapel of Blessed Ingacia," Pardos said quickly. "Near the port."

"What?" said the twin named Sosio.

"What were you doing
there?
said his brother in the same breath. "It's a terrible place! Thieves and whores."

"How do
you
know so much about it?" Crispin asked wryly, then appeared to recollect his urgency.

"Get two of the Imperial Guard to go with you. Carullus's men will all be at the accursed wedding by now. Tell them it is for me, and why. And you two," he turned to Pardos and the doctor. "Come on! You'll stay with me for the morning, I have guards." Crispin snapping orders was something Pardos remembered. His moods had always changed like this. "We'll go out a side door and we have to move! You'll need something white to wear, this is a
wedding!
Idiots!" He hurried off; they followed quickly, having little choice.

Which is how the mosaicist Pardos of Varena and the physician Kustem of Kerakek came to attend-wearing white over-tunics borrowed from Crispin's wardrobe-the formal ceremony and then the celebration banquet of a marriage on the day they each arrived in Jad's holy and august city of Sarantium.

The three of them
were
late, but not hopelessly so, in the event.