“He’s painted a picture.”
“It’s not a crime, Jennek, even if it doesn’t reach your aesthetic standards.”
He took a step closer and recognized the painter who had unmasked an
assassination conspiracy a few years back. “You’re Lalo, aren’t you?”
“It’s not a crime-like you said, My Lord Hierarch-it’s not a crime. I’m an
artist, a painter of portraits. I paint the faces of the people I see to keep in
practice-like a soldier in the arena.”
Yet the Ilsigi painter was plainly afraid that he had committed a crime.
“Let me see your picture,” Molin ordered.
Lalo broke free of the Beysibs, but not quickly enough. Molin’s fingers latched
onto the painter’s neck. The three of them: Molin, Lalo and the portrait moved
back into the carriage lantern-light just as a shaken, sober Niko emerged.
“Nikodemos,” Molin said as he studied the unfinished, frayed canvas tacked onto
a battered plank, “look at this.”
The limner had painted Niko, but not as a drunken mercenary in a whitewashed
tavern. No, the central figure of the painting wore an archaic style of armor
and looked out with more life and will than Niko, himself, possessed. And yet
that was not the strangest aspect of the painting.
Lalo had included two other figures, neither of which had set foot in the
Alekeep. The first, staring down over Niko’s shoulder, was a man with glowing
blue eyes and dark-gold hair: a figure Molin remembered as Vashanka moments
before the god vanished into the void between the planes. The second was a woman
whose half-drawn presence, emerging from the dark background, overshadowed both