Lord of Emperors (71 page)

They came to the clearing where men had died on the day Valerius was killed. No one spoke. Crispin became aware, try as he might to quell it, that his principal feeling was dread.

He wished he hadn't come. Couldn't have said with any certainty why he had. His escorts stopped, one of them gestured towards the largest of the houses here. He didn't need the indication.

The same house in which her brother had been. Of course.

A difference, however. Windows open on all sides, barred, but unshuttered, to let in the morning light. He wondered. Went forward. There were guards here. Three of them. They looked past him at his escorts and evidently received some signal. Crispin didn't look back to see. The door was unlocked by one of them.

No words, at all. He wondered if they'd been forbidden to talk, to avoid any chance of being seduced, corrupted. He walked in. The door closed behind him. He heard the key turn. They were taking no chances at all. They would know what this prisoner had done.

This prisoner sat quietly in a chair by the far wall, her profile to him, unmoving. No visible response to the arrival of someone. Crispin looked at her, and dread slipped away, to be replaced by a myriad of other things he couldn't even begin to sort out.

She said, "I told you I am not eating."

She hadn't turned her head, hadn't seen him.

Couldn't see him. Even from where he stood, across the room, Crispin realized that her eyes were gone, gouged out. Black sockets where the brightness he remembered had been. He pictured, fighting it, an underground room, implements, a burning fire, torches, large men with fat, skilled thumbs approaching her.

One more person you might desire to see,
Gisel had said.

"I don't blame you at all," he said. "I imagine the food is dreadful."

She started. There was pity in that, that a woman so flawlessly composed, so impossible to disconcert, should be made to react like this, merely by an unexpected voice.

He tried to imagine being blind. Colour and light gone, shadings, hues, the wealth and play of them. Nothing worse in the world. Death better, he thought.

"Rhodian," she said. "Come to see what it is like to bed a blind woman now? Jaded appetites?"

"No," he said, keeping calm. "No appetite at all, like you, it seems. Come to say goodbye. I leave for home tomorrow."

"Finished so soon?" Her tone changed.

She didn't turn her head. They had shorn off almost all her golden hair. With another woman it might have marred her appearance. With Styliane it only revealed the perfection of cheek and bone below the still-bruised and hollowed eye socket. They hadn't marked her, he thought. Only the blinding.

Only the blinding. And this prison on the isle where her brother had lived his days in darkness, burned and burning within, without any light allowed to enter.

And here was, as much as anything, a mark of the nature of the woman, Crispin thought, of her pride: light flooding the room, useless to her, offered only to whoever might enter. Only the silent guards would come, day by day-but there was no hiding for Styliane Daleina, no shielding herself in darkness. If you dealt with her, you had to accept what there was to see. It had always been so.

"You have finished your work already?" she repeated.

"I haven't," he said quietly. Not bitter now. Not here, seeing this. "You warned me, long ago."

"Ah. That. Already? I didn't think it would be…"

"So swift?"

"So swift. He told you it was a heresy, your dome."

"Yes. Did it himself, I'll grant."

She turned to him.

And he saw that they
had
marked her, after all. The left side of her face was branded with the symbol of a murderer: a crude blade cut into a circle meant to stand for the god's sun. The wound was crusted with blood, her face inflamed around it. She needed a physician, he thought, doubted they'd made arrangements for one. A cheek scarred into ugliness, with fire.

Again, someone with a dark awareness of irony. Or, perhaps, just a person in a locked and soundproof room under the earth, utterly impervious to such things, only following the duly prescribed protocols of justice in the Imperial Precinct of Sarantium.

He must have made a sound. She smiled, an expression he remembered, wry and knowing. It hurt to see it, here. "You are heart-struck by my enduring beauty?"

Crispin swallowed hard. Took a deep breath. "In truth," he said, "I am. I could wish it were not so."

That silenced her a moment.

"That is honest, at least," she said. "I recall that you liked him. Both of them."

"That would have been a presumption for an artisan. I admired him greatly." He paused. "Both of them."

"And Valerius was your patron, of course, surety of all your work. Which will now be lost. Poor Rhodian. Do you hate me?"

"I could wish I did," he said finally. So much light in the room. The breeze cool, fragrant with wood-smells. Birdsong in the trees, all around the clearing. The green-gold leaves. Born now, green in summer, dying in the fall.
Do you hate me?

"Is he marching north?" she asked. "Against Bassania?"

A lifetime in the halls and rooms of power. A mind that could not stop working.

"He is."

"And… Gisel is to negotiate with Varena?"

"She is."

Gisel, he thought, was exactly the same in this. They did live in a different world, these people. Same sun and moons and stars, but a different world.

Her mouth twisted wryly again. "I would have done the same, you realize? I told you the night we first spoke that there were those of us who thought the invasion misguided."

"Alixana was one of them," he said.

She ignored that, effortlessly.

"He had to be killed before the fleet sailed. If you stop to think, you will see it. Leontes had to be in the City. He wouldn't have turned back, once he'd sailed."

"How unfortunate. So Valerius had to die, that Leontes-and you- could rule?"

"I… thought that was it, yes."

He opened his mouth, closed it. "You
thought?

Her mouth twisted again. She winced this time, brought a hand up towards her wounded face, then put it down without touching. "After the tunnel, it didn't seem important any more."

"I don't…"

"I could have killed him years ago. A foolish girl, I was. I thought the thing to do was take power, the way my father ought to have been given power. Leontes ruling, but only needing his soldiers" love and his piety to be content, my brothers and I…" She stopped.

Crispin looked at her. "You think Valerius killed your father?"

"Oh, Rhodian. I know he did. What I didn't know was that nothing else mattered. I… should have been wiser."

"And killed sooner?"

"I was eight years old," she said. And stopped. The birds were loud outside. "I think my life ended then. In a way. The life I was… headed towards."

The son of Horius Crispus the mason looked at her. "You think this was
love,
then? What you did?"

"No, I think it was vengeance," she said. And then added, with no warning at all, "Will you kill me, please?"

No warning, except that he could see what they had done and were doing to her, in the guise of mercy. Knew how desperately she would want this to end. There weren't even logs here for a fire. Fire could be used to kill oneself. They would probably force food into her, he thought, if she refused to eat. There were ways of doing that. Leontes intended to demonstrate his generous nature by keeping a murderous woman alive for a time, because she had been his wife in the eyes of Jad.

A pious man, everyone knew it. They might even bring her out at times, on display.

Crispin looked at her. Could not speak.

She said, softly, that the guards would not hear, "You have known me a little, Rhodian. We have… shared some things, however briefly. Will you leave this room and leave me… in this life?"

"I am-"

"Just an artisan, I know. But-"

'No!"
He almost shouted. Then he lowered his own voice. "That isn't it. I am… not a man… who kills."

His father's head, flying from his shoulders, blood spurting from the toppling body. Men telling the tale in a tavern in Varena. A boy overhearing them.

"Make an exception," she murmured lightly, but he could hear desperation beneath the cool tone.

He closed his eyes. "Styliane"

She said, "Or see it another way. I died years ago. I told you. You are just… signing a deed already executed."

He looked at her again. She was facing him directly now, eyeless, marred, exquisitely beautiful. "Or punish me for your lost work. Or for Valerius. Or for
any
reason. But please." She was whispering. "No one else will do it, Crispin."

He looked around. Nothing remotely resembling a weapon in here, guards at all the iron-barred windows and beyond the locked door.

And then, belatedly, he remembered how he had gained admission to this isle, and something cried out within him, in his heart, and he wished that he were already gone from here, from Sarantium, for she was wrong. There was someone else who would do it.

He took out the blade and looked at it. At the ivory carving of Hildric of the Antae on the hilt. Fine work, it was.

He didn't know, he really didn't know, if he was being made into an instrument yet again, or was being offered, instead, a dark, particular gift, for services, and with affection, by an Empress who had declared herself in his debt. He didn't know Gisel well enough to judge. It could be either, or both. Or something else entirely.

He did know what the woman before him wanted. Needed. As he looked at her and about this room, he realized that he also knew what was proper, for her soul and his own. Gisel of the Antae, who had carried this blade hidden against her body, sailing here, might also have known, he thought.

Sometimes dying was not the worst thing that could happen. Sometimes it was release, a gift, an offering.

Amid all the turning gyres, all the plots and counterplots and images begetting images, Crispin made them come to a stop, and he accepted the burden of doing so.

He took the ivory handle off the blade, as Gisel had done. He laid the knife down on the table-top, hiltless, so slender it was almost invisible.

Amid the glorious springtime brightness of that room, that day, he said, "I must go. I am leaving you something."

"How kind. A small mosaic, to comfort me in the dark? Another gem-stone to shine for me, like the first you gave?"

He shook his head again. There was a pain in his chest now.

"No," he said. "Not those." And perhaps something in the difficulty with which he spoke alerted her. Even the newly blind began to learn how to listen. She lifted her head a little.

"Where is it?" Styliane asked, very softly.

"The table," he said. He closed his eyes briefly. Towards me, near the far side. Be careful."

Be careful.

He watched her rise, come forward, reach her hands towards the table edge to find it, then move both palms haltingly across-still learning how to do this. He saw when she found the blade, which was sharp and sleek as death could sometimes be.

"Ah," she said. And became very still.

He said nothing.

"You will be blamed for this, of course."

"I am sailing in the morning."

"It would be courteous of me to wait until then, wouldn't it?"

He said nothing to this, either.

"I'm not sure," said Styliane softly, "if I have the patience, you
know.
They… might search and find it?"

"They might," he said.

She was silent a long time. Then he saw her smile. She said, "I suppose this means you did love me, a little."

He was afraid he would weep.

"I suppose it does," he said quietly.

"How very unexpected," said Styliane Daleina.

He fought for control. Said nothing.

"I wish," she said, "I'd been able to find her. One thing left unfinished. I shouldn't tell you that, I know. Do you think she's dead?"

The heart could cry. "If not, I think she will be, most likely, when she learns… you are."

That gave her pause. "Ah. I can understand that. So this gift you offer kills us both."

A truth. In the way they seemed to see things here.

"I suppose it might," Crispin said. He was looking at her, seeing her now, and as she was before, in the palace, in his room, in her own, her mouth finding his.
Whatever else I do…

She had warned him, more than once.

She said, "Poor man. All you wanted to do here was leave your dead behind and make a mosaic overhead."

"I was… overly ambitious," he said. And heard her laugh, in delight, for the last time.

"Thank you for that," she said. For wit. There was a silence. She lifted the sliver of the blade, her fingers as slim, almost as long. "And thank you for this, and for… other things, once." She stood very straight, unbending, no concessions to… anything at all. "A safe journey home, Rhodian."

He was being dismissed, and not even by name at the end. He knew suddenly that she was not going to be able to wait. Her need was a hunger.

He looked at her, in the brightness she'd elected to offer here that all might see clearly where she could not, the way a host forbidden drink by his physician might order forth the very best wine he had for his friends.

"And you, my lady," he said. "A safe journey home to the light."

He knocked on the door. They opened it for him and let him out. He left the room, the glade, the woods, the stony, stony beach, the isle.