measure introduced a long time ago.
There are torches at intervals in the tunnel, lit and supervised by the guards. It is well ventilated, comfortably warm even in winter or, as now, on the cusp of spring. Quickening season, season of war. Valerius nods to the two guards and passes through the doorway alone. He enjoys this short walk, in fact. He is a man in a life that allows of no privacy at all. Even in his sleeping chamber there is always a secretary on a cot and a drowsy messenger by the door, waiting for the possibility of dictation or a summons or instructions to be run through the mysteries and spirits of a dark city.
And many nights, still, he spends with Alixana in her own intricate tangle of chambers. Comfort and intimacy there, and something else deeper and rarer than either-but he is not alone. He is never alone. Privacy, silence, solitude are limited to this tunnel walk underground, ushered into the corridor by one set of guards, received at the other end by another pair of the Excubitors.
When he raps and the doorway is opened at the Attenine Palace end, a number of men are waiting, as they always are. They include the aged Chancellor Gesius; Leontes, the golden Strategos; Faustinus, Master of Offices; and the Quaestor of Imperial Revenue, a man named Vertigus, with whom the Emperor cannot say he is well pleased. Valerius nods to them all and ascends the stairs quickly as they rise from obeisance and fall into place behind him. Gesius needs assistance now, at times, especially when the weather is damp, but there has been no sign of any similar impairment of the Chancellor's thinking, and Valerius will trust no one in his retinue half so much.
It is Vertigus he briskly quizzes and unsettles this morning when they come to the Audience Chamber. The man is hardly a fool-he'd have been dismissed long ago if he were-but he cannot be called ingenious, and almost everything the Emperor wishes to achieve, in the City, the Empire, and beyond, turns upon finances. Competence is not, unfortunately, sufficient these days. Valerius is paying a great deal for buildings, a very great deal to the Bassanids, and he has just yielded (as planned) to entreaties from several sources and released the final arrears of last year's payment for the western army.
There is never enough money, and the last time measures were enacted to try to generate a sufficiency Sarantium burned in a riot that almost cost him his throne and his life and every plan he'd ever shaped. It had required some thirty thousand deaths to avoid those consequences. Valerius is of the hope that his unprecedented, almost-completed Great Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom will serve as his expiation before the god for those deaths-and certain other things-when the day for such a reckoning comes, as it always does. Given this, the Sanctuary serves more than one purpose in his designs.
Most things do.
It was difficult. She was aware that Carullus loved her and that an astonishing number of people were treating their wedding as an occasion for celebration, as if the marriage of an Inici girl and a Trakesian soldier were an event of significance. She was being wed at an exquisite, patrician chapel near Shirin's house-the Master of the Senate and his family were among the regular attendees there. The banquet would take place back here in the home of the Greens" Principal Dancer. And the round, fierce man acclaimed by everyone as the finest chef in all the Empire was preparing Kasia's wedding feast.
It was hard to believe. Mostly, she
didn't
believe it, moving through events as in a dream, as though expecting to wake up in Morax's inn in a chill fog with the Day of the Dead still to come.
Kasia, who had been seen as the clever one by her mother, and unmarriageable, the daughter sold to the slavers, was aware that all of this extravagance had to do with the people they knew: Crispin and his friends Scortius the chariot-racer and Shirin, into whose house Kasia had moved
There are torches at intervals in the tunnel, lit and supervised by the guards. It is well ventilated, comfortably warm even in winter or, as now, on the cusp of spring. Quickening season, season of war. Valerius nods to the two guards and passes through the doorway alone. He enjoys this short walk, in fact. He is a man in a life that allows of no privacy at all. Even in his sleeping chamber there is always a secretary on a cot and a drowsy messenger by the door, waiting for the possibility of dictation or a summons or instructions to be run through the mysteries and spirits of a dark city.
And many nights, still, he spends with Alixana in her own intricate tangle of chambers. Comfort and intimacy there, and something else deeper and rarer than either-but he is not alone. He is never alone. Privacy, silence, solitude are limited to this tunnel walk underground, ushered into the corridor by one set of guards, received at the other end by another pair of the Excubitors.
When he raps and the doorway is opened at the Attenine Palace end, a number of men are waiting, as they always are. They include the aged Chancellor Gesius; Leontes, the golden Strategos; Faustinus, Master of Offices; and the Quaestor of Imperial Revenue, a man named Vertigus, with whom the Emperor cannot say he is well pleased. Valerius nods to them all and ascends the stairs quickly as they rise from obeisance and fall into place behind him. Gesius needs assistance now, at times, especially when the weather is damp, but there has been no sign of any similar impairment of the Chancellor's thinking, and Valerius will trust no one in his retinue half so much.
It is Vertigus he briskly quizzes and unsettles this morning when they come to the Audience Chamber. The man is hardly a fool-he'd have been dismissed long ago if he were-but he cannot be called ingenious, and almost everything the Emperor wishes to achieve, in the City, the Empire, and beyond, turns upon finances. Competence is not, unfortunately, sufficient these days. Valerius is paying a great deal for buildings, a very great deal to the Bassanids, and he has just yielded (as planned) to entreaties from several sources and released the final arrears of last year's payment for the western army.
There is never enough money, and the last time measures were enacted to try to generate a sufficiency Sarantium burned in a riot that almost cost him his throne and his life and every plan he'd ever shaped. It had required some thirty thousand deaths to avoid those consequences. Valerius is of the hope that his unprecedented, almost-completed Great Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom will serve as his expiation before the god for those deaths-and certain other things-when the day for such a reckoning comes, as it always does. Given this, the Sanctuary serves more than one purpose in his designs.
Most things do.
It was difficult. She was aware that Carullus loved her and that an astonishing number of people were treating their wedding as an occasion for celebration, as if the marriage of an Inici girl and a Trakesian soldier were an event of significance. She was being wed at an exquisite, patrician chapel near Shirin's house-the Master of the Senate and his family were among the regular attendees there. The banquet would take place back here in the home of the Greens" Principal Dancer. And the round, fierce man acclaimed by everyone as the finest chef in all the Empire was preparing Kasia's wedding feast.
It was hard to believe. Mostly, she
didn't
believe it, moving through events as in a dream, as though expecting to wake up in Morax's inn in a chill fog with the Day of the Dead still to come.
Kasia, who had been seen as the clever one by her mother, and unmarriageable, the daughter sold to the slavers, was aware that all of this extravagance had to do with the people they knew: Crispin and his friends Scortius the chariot-racer and Shirin, into whose house Kasia had moved
Similar Books
