The charioteer, coiled and fierce, snapped something confusing about the Emperor’s protection applying to all three of them. Carullus blinked. ‘You thought we were here to harm them?’ he asked. His sword was lowered.
The charioteer’s dagger drifted down, more slowly. The nature of the misunderstanding finally came home to Crispin. He looked at the lithe figure beside him, then back at his broad-shouldered friend at the bottom of the steps. He performed some evidently necessary introductions.
A moment later, Scortius of Soriyya began to laugh.
Carullus joined him. Even Artibasos permitted himself a small grin. When the amusement subsided, an invitation was extended. It seemed that, notwithstanding the absurd hour, the Blues’ champion was presently expected at the faction compound for a repast in the kitchen. He was, Scortius explained, far too cowardly to cross Strumosus the chef in this- and he happened to be, for no very good reason, hungry.
Artibasos pointed out that he’d had a direct command from the
Emperor who had lately left them. He’d been ordered to his bed. Carullus gaped at that, belatedly realizing who it was who had been on the portico while he and the soldiers watched in the shadows. Scortius protested. Crispin looked at the little architect.
‘You think he’d hold you to that?’ he asked. ‘Treat it as a genuine command?’
‘He could,’ said Artibasos. ‘Valerius is not the most predictable of men, and this building is his legacy.’ One of them, Crispin thought.
He thought of his home then, and of the young queen whose message had been exposed tonight. He hadn’t actually done that himself, he supposed. But alone with Valerius and Alixana he had been made to see that they were so far ahead of anyone else in this game of courts and intrigues that… it wasn’t really a game at all. Which left him wondering what his place was here, his role. Could he hope to withdraw to his tesserae and this glorious dome? Would he be allowed? There were so many tangled elements in the tale of this night, he wondered if he’d ever unwind the skein, in darkness or at dawn.
Three of Carullus’s men were detailed to take the architect home. Carullus and two soldiers stayed with Crispin and Scortius. They angled across the windy square, away from the Bronze Gates and equestrian statue, through the Hippodrome Forum and towards the street that led up to the Blues’ compound. Crispin discovered, as they went, that he was drained and over stimulated, in approximately equal measure. He needed to sleep and knew he could not. The mental image of a dome alchemized into that of the Empress, eliding the memory of a queen’s touch.
Dolphins, she wanted. He drew a breath, remembering the sallow secretary delivering a necklace, the man’s face as he looked from Crispin- alone with the Empress, it would have seemed to him-to the woman herself, with her long dark hair unbound in her intimate rooms. There had been layers to that swiftly veiled expression, Crispin thought. These, too, were beyond him just now.
He thought of the Sanctuary again, and of the man who had taken him there along a low stone tunnel and through a door into glory. In the eye of his mind he still saw that dome and the semi-domes around it and the arches supporting them, marble set upon marble, and he saw his own work there, one day to come. The Sanctuary behind them was Artibasos’s legacy, he thought, and it might end up being what the Emperor Valerius II was remembered for, and it could be-it could be-why the world might one day come to know that the Rhodian mosaicist Caius Crispus, only son of Horius Crispus of Varena and his wife Avita, had lived once, and done honourable work under Jad’s sun and the two moons.
He was thinking that when they were attacked.
He had wondered, moments before, if he might be permitted to withdraw to his tesserae: glass and marble, gold and mother-of-pearl, stone and semi-precious stone, the shaping of a vision on scaffolding in the air, high above the intrigues and wars and desires of men and women.
It didn’t appear that would be so, as the night became iron and blood.