Lord of Emperors (53 page)

Whatever the story of the death of Valerius turned out to be-the exiled Lysippus had been declared to be back in the City, and involved, as was the banished and imprisoned Lecanus Daleinus-there was no real question as to who should succeed the slain Emperor.

Or, putting it a little differently, thought Bonosus, there were reasons for Leontes to proceed swiftly,
before
such questions might arise.

The Supreme Strategos was, after all, married to a Daleinus, and there might be those who took a reflective view of assassinating one's predecessor on the Golden Throne. Especially when the murdered man had been one's own mentor and friend. And when the deed was done on the eve of war. It could be called-by someone
much
more reckless than Plautus Bonosus-a vile and contemptible act of treachery.

Bonosus's thoughts kept whirling about. Too many shocks in one day. The return of Scortius, that astonishing race that had turned from glory into riot in a heartbeat. And then, just as the fighting began, there had been the voice of Leontes's grey secretary in his ear:
'Your presence is Immediately requested in the palace.

He hadn't said by whom. It didn't matter. Senators did what they were told. Bonosus had risen to go just as he realized something had happened in the spina-he would learn the details afterwards-and he heard a deep-throated roar as the Hippodrome erupted.

He suspected, looking back, that Leontes (or his wife?) had wanted him to come to them alone, as Master of the Senate, to learn the tidings before anyone else did. That would give them time to quietly summon the Senate, control the release of the terrible news.

It didn't work out that way.

As the stands exploded into fury and a rush for the exits, the inhabitants of the Imperial Box rose to their feet and made a collective rush of their own for the doors leading back to the Attenine Palace. Bonosus remembered the expression on the pallid secretary's face: startled and displeased, and afraid.

When Bonosus and Pertennius did make it back through the long walkway to the palace's audience chamber, it was crowded with noisy, frightened courtiers who'd fled the kathisma ahead of them. Others were arriving. In the centre of the room-near the thrones and the silver tree-stood Leontes and Styliane.

The Strategos lifted a hand for silence. Not the Master of Offices, not the Chancellor. Gesius had just entered the room, in fact, through the small door behind the two thrones. He stopped there, brow furrowed in perplexity. In the stillness his gesture shaped it was Leontes, blunt and grave, who said, "I am sorry, but this must be told. We have lost our father today. Jad's most holy Emperor is dead."

There was a babble of disbelief. A woman cried out. Someone near Bonosus made the sign of the sun disk, then others did. Someone knelt, then all of them did, the sound like a murmuring of the sea. All of them except Styliane and Leontes. And Gesius, Bonosus saw. The Chancellor didn't looked perplexed now. His expression was otherwise. He put out a hand to steady himself on a table and said, from directly behind those tall, golden figures and the thrones, "How? How did this happen? And how is it that you know?"

The thin, precise voice cut hard through the room. This was Sarantium. The Imperial Precinct. Not a place where certain things could be easily controlled. Not with so many competing interests and clever men.

And women. It was Styliane who turned to face the Chancellor, Styliane who said, her voice oddly without force-as if she'd just been bled by a physician, Bonosus thought-'He was murdered in the tunnel between palaces. He was burned, by Sarantine Fire."

Bonosus remembered closing his eyes at that. Past and present coming together so powerfully he felt dizzied. He opened his eyes. Pertennius, kneeling next to him, was white-faced, he saw.

"By whom?" Gesius released the table and took a step forward. He stood alone, a little apart from everyone else. A man who had served three Emperors, survived two successions.

Was unlikely to last through a third, asking these questions in this way. It occurred to the Senator that the aged Chancellor might not care.

Leontes looked at his wife, and again it was Styliane who replied. "My brother Lecanus. And the exiled Calysian, Lysippus. They seem to have suborned the guards at the tunnel door. And obviously my brother's guards on the isle."

Another murmuring. Lecanus Daleinus and fire. The past here with them in the room, Bonosus thought.

"I see," said Gesius, his papery voice so devoid of nuance it was a nuance of its own. "Just the two of them?"

"So it would seem," said Leontes, calmly. "We will need to investigate, of course."

"Of course," agreed Gesius, again with nothing to be discerned in his tone. "So good of you to point that out, Strategos. We might have neglected to think of it. I imagine the Lady Styliane was alerted by her brother of his evil intent and arrived tragically too late to forestall them?"

There was a small silence. Too many people were hearing this, Bonosus thought. It would be all over the City before sunset. And there was already violence in Sarantium. He felt afraid.

"The Chancellor is, as ever, wisest of us," said Styliane quietly. "It is as he says. I beg you to imagine my grief and shame. My brother was also dead, by the time we arrived. And the Strategos killed Lysippus when we saw him there, standing over the bodies."

"Killed him," Gesius murmured. He smiled thinly, a man infinitely versed in the ways of a court. Indeed. And the soldiers you mentioned?"

"Were already burned," Leontes said.

Gesius said nothing this time, only smiled again, allowing silence to speak for him. Someone was weeping in the crowded chamber.

"We must take action. There is rioting in the Hippodrome," Faustinus said. The Master of Offices finally asserting himself. He was rigid with tension, Bonosus saw. "And what about the announcement of the war?"

"There will be no announcement now," said Leontes flatly. Calm, assured. A leader of men. "And the rioting is not a cause for concern."

"It isn't? Why not?" Faustinus eyed him.

"Because the army is here," Leontes murmured, and looked slowly around the chamber at the assembled court.

It was in that moment, Bonosus thought afterwards, that he himself had begun to see this differently. The Daleinoi might have planned an assassination for their own reasons. He didn't believe for a moment that Styliane had arrived too late at that tunnel, that her blind, maimed brother had been able to plan and execute this from his island. Sarantine Fire spoke to vengeance, more than anything else. But if the Daleinus children had also assumed that Styliane's soldier husband would be a useful figure on the throne, a gateway for their own ambition… Bonosus decided they might have been wrong.

He watched Styliane turn to the tall man she'd married on Valerius's orders. He was an observant man, Plautus Bonosus, had spent years reading small signals, especially at court. She was arriving, he decided, at the same conclusion he was.

The army is here.
Four words, with a world of meaning. An army could quell a civilian riot. Obvious. But there was more. The armies had been two weeks away and divided among leaders when Apius died without an heir. They were right here now, massed in and all about the City, preparing to sail west.

And the man speaking of them, the man standing golden before the Golden Throne, was their dearly beloved Strategos. The army was here, and his, and the army would decide.

"I will attend to the Emperor's body," said Gesius very softly. Heads turned back to him. "Someone should," he added, and went out.

Before nightfall that day the Senate of Sarantium had been called into imperative session in its handsome, domed chamber. They accepted formal tidings from the Urban Prefect, clad in black, speaking nervously, of the untimely death of Jad's most dearly beloved, Valerius II. A show-of-palms vote led to a resolution that the Urban Prefect, in conjunction with the Master of Offices, would conduct a full investigation into the circumstances of what appeared to be a foul assassination.

The Urban Prefect bowed his acceptance and left.

Amid noises of clashing weapons and shouting in the street outside, Plautus Bonosus spoke the formal words that convened the Senate to use its collective wisdom in choosing a successor for the Golden Throne.

Three submissions were made to them from the mosaic star on the floor in the midst of their circle of seats. The Quaestor of the Sacred Palace spoke, then the principal adviser to the Eastern Patriarch, and finally Auxilius, Count of the Excubitors, a small, dark, intense man: he had broken the Victory Riot two years ago, with Leontes. All three speakers urged the Senate, with varying degrees of eloquence, to choose the same man.

After they were done, Bonosus asked for further submissions from guests. There were none. He then invited his colleagues to make their own speeches and remarks. No one did. One Senator proposed that an immediate vote be taken. They heard a renewed sound of fighting just beyond their doors.

With no one displaying any sign of disagreement to this proposition, a vote was, accordingly, proposed by Bonosus. The pebbles were distributed in pairs to all present: white meaning agreement with the only name put forward, black indicating a desire for further deliberation and other candidates to be considered.

The motion passed, forty-nine Senators approving, one electing to demur. Auxilius, who had lingered in the visitors" gallery, hastily left the chamber.

As a consequence of this formal vote, Plautus Bonosus instructed the senatorial clerks to draw up a document under seal indicating that the august body of the Sarantine Senate was of the view that the successor to the lamented Valerius II, Jad's Holy Emperor, regent of the god upon earth, ought to be Leontes, currently serving with honour as Supreme Strategos of the Sarantine army. The clerks were instructed to express the collective and fervent hope of the Senate that his would be a reign blessed by the god with glory arid good fortune.

The Senate adjourned.

That same night, in the Imperial Chapel inside the walls of the Precinct, Leontes, often called the Golden, was anointed Emperor by the Eastern Patriarch. Saranios had built that chapel. His bones lay within.

It was decided that if the City grew quiet overnight there would be a public ceremony in the Hippodrome the next afternoon, to crown both the Emperor and his Empress. There always was. The people needed to see.

Plautus Bonosus, escorted home that night by a contingent of Excubitors, fingered the unused white pebble in his pocket. On reflection, he cast it away into the darkness.

The streets were indeed much calmer by then. The fires had been put out. Contingents of the army had been sent up from the harbour at sundown and from the temporary barracks outside the walls. The presence of heavily armed soldiers, marching in order, had ended the violence very smoothly. It had
all
gone smoothly today, Bonosus thought. Not like the last time there had been no heir. He was trying to understand why he felt so much bitterness. It wasn't as if there was anyone else more suited to the porphyry robes of Empire than Leontes. That wasn't the point though. Or was it?

The soldiers were still moving through the streets in tightly banded, efficient clusters. He couldn't remember ever seeing the army making itself so obvious within the City. Walking with his escort (he had declined a litter) he saw that the patrols were knocking on doors, entering houses.

He knew why. There was a heavy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He'd been trying to suppress certain thoughts, but not very successfully. He understood too well what was taking place. This happened, it
had
to happen, whenever a violent change of this sort occurred. Valerius, unlike Apius before him, or his own uncle, had not passed to the god in peace, in old age, to lie serenely in state in the Porphyry Room robed for his passage. He had been murdered. Certain things-certain other deaths, if Bonosus was honest with himself-would have to follow upon that.

One, in particular.

And so, these soldiers, spreading through the City with their torches, combing the lanes and alleys near the harbour, porticoes of the wealthy, warrens within the Hippodrome, chapels, taverns, cauponae (even though those were closed by order tonight), inns and guildhouses and workshops, bakeries and brothels, probably even down into the cisterns… and entering citizens" homes in the night. The heavy knock on the door in the dark.

Someone had disappeared, needed to be found.

Hearing his own doorway, Bonosus saw that the house was properly barricaded against a riot. The leader of his escort knocked, politely in this case, and declared their identity.

Locks were unbolted. The door was opened. Bonosus saw his son. Oleander was weeping, his eyes swollen and red. Bonosus, with no premonition at all, asked him why, and Cleander told him.

Bonosus went into his house. Cleander thanked the guards and they went away. He closed the door. Bonosus sat down heavily on a bench in the hallway. His whirling thoughts were stilled. He had no thoughts at all. An emptiness.

Emperors died, before their time. So did others. So did others. The world was what it was.

'There's a riot in the Hippodrome. And there was another bird in the City today!"
Shirin said urgently, as soon as Crispin entered his house and saw her waiting in the front room, pacing before the fire. She was agitated: had spoken the words with a servant still in the hallway.

'Another bird!"
Danis echoed, silently, almost as upset.
Mice and blood,
Linon would have said. And called him an imbecile for walking the streets alone just now.

Crispin took a deep breath. The half-world. Did you ever leave it, once you entered? Did it ever leave you?