Krispos the Emperor (43 page)

As Phostis soon discovered, that was because the keep was almost empty, too. His footsteps and Syagrios' echoed down the halls that had been crammed with soldiers. At least life did exist inside. A trooper came out of the chamber where Livanios had been wont to hold audiences as if he were Avtokrator. Seeing Phostis leaning on Syagrios, he asked the ruffian, "What happened to him?"

"What does it look like?" Syagrios growled. "He just found out he's been chosen patriarch and he can't even walk for the joy of it." The Thanasiot gaped; Phostis fought not to giggle as he watched the fellow realize Syagrios was being sarcastic. Syagrios pointed to the stained bandage on his shoulder. "He got shot in a scrape with the imperials—he did good."

"All right, but why bring him back here?" the soldier said. "He don't look like he's hurt too bad."

"You likely can't tell under all the dirt and stuff, but this is the Emperor's brat." Syagrios answered. "We need to take a little more care with him than with your regular fighter."

"Why?" Like any Videssian, the Thanasiot was ready to argue about his faith on any excuse or none. "We're all alike on the gleaming path."

"Yeah, but Phostis here has special worth," Syagrios returned. "If we use him right, he can help us put lots of new people on the gleaming path."

The soldier chewed on that: literally, for he gnawed at his lower lip while he thought. At last, grudgingly, he nodded. "The doctrine may be sound."

Syagrios turned his head to mutter into Phostis' ear, "The clincher is, I'd have chopped him into raven's meat if he said me nay." He gave his attention back to the trooper. "Is anybody left alive in the kitchens? We're starved, and not on purpose."

"Should be someone there," the fellow answered, though he frowned at Syagrios' levity.

Phostis had not had much appetite since he was wounded. Now his belly rumbled hungrily at the thought of food. Maybe that meant he was getting better.

The smell of bean porridge and onions and bread in the kitchens made his insides growl all over again. Bowls were piled in great stacks there, against a need that had for the moment gone. Only a handful of people sat at the long tables. Phostis' heart gave a lurch—one of them was Olyvria.

She looked around to see who the newcomers were. Phostis must have been as grimy as Syagrios had said, for she recognized the ruffian first. Then her eyes traveled from Phostis' face to the stained bandage on his shoulder and back again. He saw them widen. "What happened?" she exclaimed as she hurried over to the two men.

"I got shot," Phostis answered. Keeping his tone as light as he could, he went on, "I'll probably live." He couldn't say anything more, but did his silent best to urge her not to give anything away. Having Syagrios find out—or even suspect— they were lovers would be more likely fatal than the shaft the cavalryman had put into him.

They were lucky. Syagrios evidently didn't suspect, and so wasn't alert for any small clues they might have given him. He boomed, "Aye, he fought well—better'n I had any reason to think he would, my lady. He was riding toward the imperials when one of 'em got him. I drew the arrow myself and cleaned the wound. It seems to be healing well enough."

Now Olyvria looked at Phostis as if she didn't know what to make of him. She probably didn't: he hadn't gone out intending to fight, let alone well enough to draw praise from Syagrios. But self-preservation had made him swing his sword against the monk with the club, and the ruffian thought he'd been attacking the imperials, not trying to give himself up to them. The world got very strange sometimes.

"Could I please have some food before I fall over?" he asked plaintively.

Between them, Syagrios and Olyvria all but dragged him to a table, sat him down, and brought back bread, hard crumbly cheese, and wine he reckoned fit only for washing out wounded shoulders. He knocked back a hefty mug of it anyhow, and felt it mount quickly to his head. In between bites of bread and cheese, he gave Olyvria a carefully edited version of how he'd ended up on the pointed end of an arrow.

"I see," she said when he was through. He wasn't sure she did, but then he wasn't exactly sure himself of the wherefores of everything that had happened. She turned to Syagrios. Speaking carefully herself, and as if Phostis were not sitting across from her, she said, "When he was ordered to go out raiding, I thought the plan might be to expend him to bring woe to his father."

"That was in
your
father's mind, my lady," Syagrios agreed, also ignoring him, "but he doubted the lad's faith in the gleaming path. Since it's real, he becomes worth more to us alive than dead. That's what I figured, anyways."

"Let's hope you're right," Olyvria said with what Phostis hoped was a good imitation of dispassion.

He kept munching on the loaf of bread. The falser he was to what Syagrios thought him to be, the better off he did. What was the lesson there? That Syagrios was so wicked being false to him turned good? Then how to explain the way the ruffian had cared for him, brought him back to Etchmiadzin, and now poured more of that vile but potent wine into his mug?

He raised it left-handed. "Here's to—using my other arm soon."

Everyone drank.

Scribbling on a map ruined it for future use
. So
did pok
ing pins into it. Krispos had prevailed upon Zaidas to magic some red-painted pebbles so they behaved like lodestones and clung to their appointed places on the parchment even when it was rolled up. Now he wished he'd chosen some other color: when the map was unrolled, it looked too much as if it were suffering from smallpox.

And every time he unrolled it, he had to add more stones to show fresh outbreaks of Thanasiot violence. Messengers brought in a constant stream of such reports. Most, as had been true the summer before, were in the northwest quadrant of the westlands, but far from all. He glanced at dispatches and put down two stones in the hill country in the southeastern part of the gnarled peninsula that held the Empire's heartland.

That the map lay on a folding table in the imperial pavilion rather than his study back at the palaces consoled him little. The mere fact of being on campaign would have sufficed for some Emperors, giving them the impression—justified or not—they were doing something about the religious zealots.

But Krispos saw in his mind's eye fires rising up from the map where every red pebble was placed, heard screams of triumph and of despair. Even one of those stones should have been too many, yet several dozen measled the map.

At his side, Katakolon also stared glumly at the scarlet stones. "They're everywhere," he said, shaking his head in dismay.

"They do seem that way, don't they?" Krispos said. He liked the picture no better than his son did.

"Aye, they do." Katakolon still eyed the stippled parchment. "Which of these shows where Livanios and his main band of fighters are lurking?"

"It's a good question," the Avtokrator admitted. "The Empire would be better off for a good answer. I wish I could give you one. Trouble is, the heresiarch is using all the little raids as cover to conceal that main band. They could be almost anywhere."

Put that way, the thought was especially disquieting. His own army was only a few days out of Videssos the city. If Livanios' fanatics fell on it before it was ready to fight— Krispos shook his head. It wasn't as if he didn't have sentries posted. Anyone who tried surprising him would be roughly handled. If he started jumping at shadows, Livanios was ahead of the game.

Katakolon looked from the map to him. "So you're going to have yourself another brat, are you, Father? At your age?"

"I've already had three brats. One more won't wreck Videssos, I expect, not if the lot of you haven't managed it. And yes, at my age, as I told you back in the city. The parts do still work, you see."

"Well, yes, I suppose so, but really ..." Katakolon seemed to think that was a complete sentence. It probably meant something like
just because they work doesn't mean you have any business going around using them.

Krispos parried, "Maybe you'll learn something watching how I handle things. The way you go on, boy, you're going to sire enough bastards to make up your own cavalry company. Katakolon's Whoresons they could call themselves, and be ferocious-sounding and truthful at the same time."

He'd hoped to abash his youngest son—he'd long since given up trying to shame him over venery—but the idea delighted Katakolon. He clapped his hands and exclaimed, "And if I sire a company, Father, the lads can father themselves a couple of regiments, and my great-grandsons will end up being the whole Videssian army."

Every so often with Iakovitzes, Krispos had to throw his hands in the air and own himself beaten. Now he found himself doing the same with Katakolon. "You're incorrigible. Go tell Sarkis I want to see him, and try not to seduce anyone between this tent and that one."

"Haloga guards are not to my taste," Katakolon replied with dignity bordering on hauteur. "Now, if their daughters and sisters took service with Videssos—" Krispos made as if to throw a folding chair at him. Laughing, the youth ducked out of the tent. Krispos remembered the exotically blond and pink Haloga doxy at a revel of Anthimos, a generation before. Katakolon surely would have liked her very well.

Krispos forced his wits away from lickerish memories and back toward the map. As best he could tell, the Thanasioi were popping up everywhere at once. That made it hard for him to figure out how to fight them.

One of the guards stuck his head into the tent. Krispos straightened, expecting him to announce Sarkis. But instead he said, "Your Majesty, the mage Zaidas would have speech with you."

"Would he? Yes, of course I'll listen to what he has to say."

As usual, Zaidas started to prostrate himself; as usual, Krispos waved for him not to bother. Both men smiled at the little ritual. But the wizard's lips quickly fell from their happy curve. He said, "May it please your Majesty, these past few days my magic has enabled me to track the whereabouts of the young Majesty Phostis."

"He's not stayed in the same place all the while?" Krispos asked. "I thought he was still at Etchmiadzin." Because Zaidas hadn't detected any motion from Phostis since he'd managed to pierce the screen of Makuraner magic, Krispos had dared hope his heir was prisoner rather than convert to the gleaming path.

"No, your Majesty, I'm afraid not. Here, let me show you." Zaidas drew from his belt pouch a square of leather. "This is from the tanned hide of a deer, the animal having been chosen because the melting tenderness of its gaze symbolically represents the affection you feel for your kidnapped son. See these marks—here, here, here?"

Krispos saw the marks: they looked as if the deerskin had been burned here and there with the end of a hot awl. "I see them, magical sir, but I must say I don't grasp what they mean."

"As you know, I've at last been able to locate Phostis

"I see." Krispos scowled down at the piece of deerskin.

"And why do you think he's been making these—-movements?"

"Your Majesty. I am sufficiently pleased to be able to infer that he
has
moved, or rather moved and returned. Why he has done so is beyond the scope of my art." Zaidas spoke with quiet determination, as if to say he did not want to know why Phostis had gone out from the Thanasiot stronghold and then back to it.

The mage was both courtier and friend; no wonder he found discretion the easier path to take. Krispos said harshly, "Magical sir, isn't the likeliest explanation that he went out on a raid with the fanatics and then rode—rode home again?"

"That is certainly a possibility which must be considered,"

Zaidas admitted. "And yet, many other explanations are possible."

"Possible, yes, but likely? What I said fits the facts better than anything else I can think of." Half -a lifetime of judging cases had convinced Krispos that the simplest explanation was most often the right one. What could be simpler than Phostis' joining the rebels and going out to fight for them? Krispos crumbled the deerskin in his fist and threw it to the ground. "I wish that cursed Digenis were still alive so I could have the pleasure of executing him now."

"I sympathize, your Majesty, and believe me, I fully appreciate the gravity of the problem this presents."

"Problem, yes." That was a nice, bloodless way to put it. What were you supposed to do when your son and heir turned against you? However fond he was of making plans, Krispos hadn't made one for that set of circumstances. Now, of necessity, he began to. How would Evripos shape as heir? He'd be delighted, certainly. But would he make a good Avtokrator? Krispos didn't know.

Zaidas must have been thinking along with him. The wizard said, "No need to deal with this on the instant, your Majesty.

Perhaps the campaign will reveal the full circumstances of 
what's gone on."

"It probably will," Krispos said gloomily. "The trouble is, the full circumstances may be ones I'd sooner not have learned."