‘He is an old, frightened man,’ Bonosus said. His first words in that room. ‘He has no ambitions. They are using him.’
‘I know that,’ Valerius said quietly.
Auxilius of the Excubitors said, ‘They are trying to get Tertius Daleinus to come out to them. They broke into his house, but word is, he’s already left the city.’
Valerius did smile then, but not with his eyes. ‘Of course he has. A cautious young man.’
‘Or a coward, thrice-exalted lord,’ said Auxilius. Valerius’s Count of the Excubitors was a Soriyyan, a sour-faced, often angry man. Not a disadvantage, given his office.
‘It might be he’s simply loyal,’ Leontes said mildly, with a glance at the other soldier.
It was possible but unlikely, Bonosus thought privately. The pious Strategos was known for offering benign interpretations of other men’s actions, as if everyone might be measured by his own virtues. But the youngest son of the murdered Flavius Dalemus would not have any more loyalty towards this Emperor than he’d had for the first Valerius. He would have ambitions, but would be unlikely to reach for the dice cup so early in a game this large. From the Daleinoi’s nearest country estate he could gauge the mood of the City and return very swiftly.
Bonosus, in the tight grip of his own fear, was unable not to look over and glare at the man sitting near him: Lysippus the Calysian, Quaestor of Imperial Revenue, who had caused all of this.
The Empire’s chief taxation officer had been silent throughout the discussions, his prodigious bulk spilling over the edges of the carved bench on which he sat, threatening to bring it crashing down. His face was blotchy with strain and fear. Perspiration stained his dark robe. His distinctive green eyes shifted uneasily from one speaker to another. He had to know that his public execution-or even throwing him through the Bronze Gates to the enraged mob-was a perfectly viable option at this moment, though no one had yet spoken it aloud. It would not be the first time an Imperial Revenue officer had been sacrificed to the people.
Valerius II had shown no signs of such an intent. His loyalty to the fat, gross man who had so efficiently and incorruptibly funded his building schemes and the expensive co-opting of various barbarian tribes had always been firm. It was said that Lysippus had been a part of the machinations that brought the first Valerius to the throne. Whether that was true or not, an ambitious Emperor needed a ruthless taxation officer as much as he needed an honest one: Valerius had said that once to Bonosus, in the most matter-of-fact way-and the enormous Calysian might be depraved in his personal habits, but no one had ever been known to bribe or suborn him, or quarrel with his results.
Plautus Bonosus, at prayer beside his wife and daughters two years after, could still recall the chaotic intermingling of admiration and terror he’d felt that day. The sound of the mob at the Precinct doors had penetrated even into the room where they were gathered around a golden throne, amid artifacts of sandalwood and ivory and birds crafted of gold and semiprecious stones.
Bonosus knew that he himself would have offered the Quaestor to the factions without a second thought. With taxation levels rising each quarter for the past year and a half, continuing even after the debilitating effects of a plague, Lysippus ought to have known better than to arrest and torture who well-liked clerics for sheltering a tax-evading aristocrat he was seeking. It was one thing to pursue the wealthy (though Bonosus did have his thoughts on that). It was another to go after the clerics who ministered to the people.
Surely any sane official would have made allowance for the unrest of the City, how volatile it was on the eve of the Autumn Festival. The Dykania was always a dangerous time for authority. Emperors walked carefully then, placating the City with games and largess, knowing how many of their predecessors had lost sight, limbs, life in those turbulent days at autumn’s end when Sarantium celebrated-or went dangerously wild.
Two years later Bonosus lifted his strong voice, intoning, ‘Let there be Light for us, and for our dead, and for us when we die, lord. Holy Jad, let us find shelter with you and never lie lost in the dark.’