Blue moon westering now in the autumn sky. Full as his heart once had been. The white moon, rising from the eastern end of his street, framed on both sides and below by the last houses and the city walls, was a pale, waning crescent. The cheiromancers attached meaning to such things. They attached meaning to everything overhead.
Crispin wondered if he could find a meaning to attach to himself. To whatever he seemed to have become in the year since a second plague summer had left him alive to bury a wife and two daughters himself. In the family plot, beside his father and grandfather. Not in a lime-strewn mound. Some things were not to be endured.
He thought about the torch of Heladikos he had contrived today on the small dome. There still remained, like a muted shadow of colour, this pride in his craft, this love for it. Love. Was that still the word?
He did want to see this latest artifice by candlelight: an extravagant blazing of candles and oil lanterns all through the sanctuary, lifting fire to light the fire he’d shaped in stone and glass. He had a sense-honed by experience-that what he’d contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted.
That, Martinian had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect.
He would see it, Crispin knew, at the dedication of the sanctuary at autumn’s end, when the young queen and her clerics and pompous emissaries from the High Patriarch in Rhodias-if not the Patriarch himself-laid King Hildric’s bones formally to rest. They would not stint on candles or oil then. He’d be able to judge his work that day, harshly or otherwise.
He never did, as events unfolded. He never did see his mosaic torch on that sanctuary dome outside the walls of Varena.
As he turned to enter his own house, key to hand-the servants having been told, as usual, not to wait up-a rushing gave him warning, but not enough.
Crispin managed to lash out with a fist and catch a man in the chest, hard. He heard a thick grunt, drew breath to cry out, then felt a sack dropped over his head and tightened expertly at his throat, blinding and choking him at once. He coughed, smelled flour, tasted it. He kicked out violently, felt his foot meet a knee or shin and heard another muffled cry of pain. Lashing and twisting, Crispin clawed at the choking hold on his throat. He couldn’t bite, from inside the bag. His assailants were silent, invisible. Three of them? Four? They had almost certainly come for the money that accursed courier had declared to the whole world was in the packet. He wondered if they’d kill him when they found he didn’t have it. Decided it was probable. Pondered, with a far part of his mind, why he was struggling so hard.
He remembered his knife, reached for it with one hand, while raking for the arm at his throat with the other. He scratched, like a cat or a woman, drew blood with his fingernails. Found the knife hilt as he twisted and writhed. Jerked his blade free.
He came to, slowly, and gradually became aware of painful, flickering light and the scent of perfume. Not lavender. His head hurt, not altogether unexpectedly. The flour sack had been removed-obviously: he could see blurred candles, shapes behind them and around, vague as yet. His hands appeared to be free. He reached up and very gingerly felt around the egg-shaped lump at the back of his skull.
At the edge of his vision, which was not, under the circumstances, especially acute, someone moved then, rising from a couch or a chair. He had an impression of gold, of a lapis hue.
The awareness of scent-more than one, in fact, he now realized- intensified. He turned his head. The movement made him gasp. He closed his eyes. He felt extremely ill.
Someone-a woman-said, ‘They were instructed to be solicitous. It appears you resisted.’
‘Very . . . sorry,’ Crispin managed. ‘Tedious of me.’
He heard her laughter. Opened his eyes again. He had no idea where he was.