Lord of Emperors. Guy Gavriel Kay

Jad. Maybe . . . um, one of the mason’s apprentices can do it? Or the bricklayer’s? They may not . . . know him?’

      ‘Not a chance. They all know the stories. We have to do it, Sosio, right now. It’s late! I’ll dice you.’

      ‘No! I am not going up there. Crispin kills people.’

      ‘He talks about killing people. I don’t think he’s ever done it.’

      ‘You don’t think he has. Good. Then you go up.’

      ‘I said I’d dice, Sosio.’

      ‘And I said I won’t go. I don’t want you to go, either. I don’t have any other brothers.’

      ‘He’ll be late. He’ll kill us for letting him be late.’

      Pardos found that he could move, and that—notwithstanding the events of the morning—he was struggling not to grin. Too many memories were with him, sudden and vivid.

      He went forward over marble in the serene light. His booted footsteps echoed softly. The two brothers—they were twins, utterly identical—turned and looked at him. In the distance, someone dropped a hammer or a chisel and the sound rang softly, almost music.

      ‘I gather,’ said Pardos gravely, ‘this is a question of interrupting Crispin on the scaffold?’

      ‘Caius Crispus, yes,’ said the one called Sosio quickly. ‘You, er, know him?’

      ‘He has to be at a wedding!’ said the other brother.

      ‘Right away! He’s in the wedding party.’

      ‘But he doesn’t allow anyone to interrupt him!’

      ‘Ever! He killed someone for it once!’

      ‘Back in Varena. With a trowel, they say! Inside a holy chapel!’ Silano’s expression was horrified.

      Pardos nodded in sympathy. ‘I know, I know. He did do that. In a chapel! In fact, I was the person he killed. It was terrible, dying like that! A trowel!’ He paused, and winked as their mouths fell open, identically. ‘It’s all right, I’ll get him for you.’

      He went forward, before his smile—which he really couldn’t suppress any longer—completely betrayed him. He passed right under the staggering sweep of the dome. Looking up, he saw Crispin’s rendering of Jad in the east above the emerging details of Sarantium seen as if on the horizon, and because he’d just spent an entire winter in a certain chapel in Sauradia, Pardos perceived immediately what his teacher was doing with his own image of the god. Crispin had been there too. The Sleepless Ones had told him that.

      He came to the scaffold. Two young apprentices were standing there, bracing it, as they always had to do. Usually those on that task were bored and idle. This pair looked terrified. Pardos found that he really couldn’t stop smiling.

      ‘Hold steady for me, will you?’ he said.

      ‘You can’t!’ one of the boys gasped in horror. ‘He’s up there!’

      ‘So I understand,’ said Pardos. He could remember, so easily, feeling—and probably looking—exactly as this white-faced apprentice did. ‘He needs to be given a message, though.’

      And he grasped the rungs of the scaffold ladder and started up. He knew that high above, Crispin would soon feel, if he hadn’t immediately, the tug and sway. Pardos kept his eyes on his hands, as they were all trained to do, and climbed.

      He was halfway up when he heard a well-known voice he’d travelled the world to hear again call down in cold, remembered fury, ‘Another step up and I end your wretched existence and powder your bones into the setting bed!’

      That’s very good, actually, Pardos thought. A new one. He looked up. ‘You shut up,’ he cried. ‘Or I’ll carve your buttocks with tesserae and feed them to you in segments!’

      There was a silence. Then, ‘I say that, rot your eyes! Who the—?’

      Pardos continued upward without answering.

      Above him, he felt the platform shift as Crispin came to the edge and looked down.

      ‘Who are you?’ Another silence, followed by: ‘Pardos? Pardos?’

      Pardos didn’t speak, kept climbing. His heart was full. He reached the top and stepped over the low rail and onto the platform under the mosaic stars of a dark blue mosaic sky.

      To be enveloped in a hard embrace that almost toppled them both.

      ‘Curse you, Pardos! What took you so long? I’ve needed you here! They wrote that you left in the fucking autumn! Half a year ago! Do you know how late you are?’

      Ignoring for the moment the fact that Crispin, on departing, had explicitly refused accompaniment, Pardos disengaged.

      ‘Do you know how late you are?’ he asked.

      ‘Me? What?’

      ‘Wedding,’ said Pardos happily, and watched.

      It gave him even greater pleasure, later, to recollect the appalled dawning of awareness on Crispin’s unexpectedly smooth-shaven features.

      ‘Ah! Ah! Holy Jad! They’ll kill me! I’m a dead man! If Carullus doesn’t, bloody Shirin will! Why didn’t one of those imbeciles down there tell me?’

      Without delaying for the extremely obvious answer, Crispin rushed past Pardos, vaulted recklessly over the railing and began hurtling down the ladder, sliding more than stepping, the way the apprentices did when they raced each other. Before following, Pardos glanced over at where Crispin had been working. He saw a bison in an autumn forest, huge, done in black, edged and outlined in white. It would be very strong, that way, against the brilliant colours of the leaves around it, a dominant image. That had to be deliberate. Crispin had taken the apprentices once to see a floor mosaic at an estate south of Varena, where black and white had been used against colour in this way. Pardos went back down, feeling suddenly thoughtful.

      Crispin was waiting at the bottom, grimacing, dancing from foot to foot in his impatience. ‘Hurry, you idiot! We’re so late it kills me. It will kill me! Come on! Why did you take so poxed long to get here?’

      Pardos stepped deliberately down off the ladder. ‘I stopped in Sauradia,’ he said. ‘A chapel by the road there. They said you’d been there too, earlier.’

      Crispin’s expression changed, very quickly. He looked intently at Pardos. ‘I was,’ he said after a pause. ‘I was there. I told them that they had to . . . Were you . . . Pardos, were you restoring it?’

      Pardos nodded slowly. ‘As much as I felt I could, on my own.’

      Crispin’s expression changed again, warming him, sunlight on a raw morning. ‘I’m pleased,’ his teacher said. ‘I’m very pleased. We’ll speak of this. Meanwhile, come, we’ll have to run.’

      ‘I’ve been running. Through the whole of Sarantium, it feels like. There are a group of young men outside, rich enough not to care about the law, who are trying to kill me and this Bassanid doctor.’ He gestured at the physician, who had approached with the artisan brothers. The twins’ faces were a paired study in confusion. ‘They killed his manservant,’ Pardos said. ‘We can’t just walk outside.’

      ‘And my man’s body will be thrown into the street by certain of your most pious clerics if he is not claimed by midday.’ The doctor spoke excellent Sarantine, better than Pardos’s. He was still angry.

      ‘Where is he?’ Crispin said. ‘Sosio and Silano can get him.’

      ‘I have no idea of the name of—’

      ‘Chapel of Blessed Ingacia,’ Pardos said quickly. ‘Near the port.’