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Pertennius, kneeling next to him, was white-faced, he saw.
'By whom?' Gesius released the table and took a step forward. He stood alone,
a little apart from everyone else. A man who had served three Emperors,
survived two successions.
Was unlikely to last through a third, asking these questions in this way. It
occurred to the Senator that the aged Chancellor might not care.
Leontes looked at his wife, and again it was Styliane who replied.
'My brother Lecanus. And the exiled Calysian, Lysippus. They seem to have
suborned the guards at the tunnel door. And obviously my brother's guards on
the isle.'
Another murmuring. Lecanus Daleinus and fire. The past here with them in the
room, Bonosus thought.
'I see,' said Gesius, his papery voice so devoid of nuance it was a nuance of
its own. 'Just the two of them?'
'So it would seem,' said Leontes, calmly. 'We will need to investigate, of
course.'
'Of course,' agreed Gesius, again with nothing to be discerned in his tone.
'So good of you to point that out, Strategos. We might have neglected to think
of it. I imagine the Lady Styliane was alerted by her brother of his evil
intent and arrived tragically too late to forestall them?'
There was a small silence. Too many people were hearing this, Bonosus thought.
It would be all over the City before sunset. And there was
already violence in Sarantium. He felt afraid.
The Emperor was dead.
'The Chancellor is, as ever, wisest of us,' said Styliane quietly.
'It is as he says. I beg you to imagine my grief and shame. My brother was
also dead, by the time we arrived. And the Strategos killed Lysippus when we
saw him there, standing over the bodies.'
'Killed him,' Gesius murmured. He smiled thinly, a man infinitely versed in
the ways of a court. Indeed. And the soldiers you mentioned?'
'Were already burned,' Leontes said.
Gesius said nothing this time, only smiled again, allowing silence to speak
for him. Someone was weeping in the crowded chamber.
'We must take action. There is rioting in the Hippodrome,' Faustinus said. The
Master of Offices finally asserting himself. He was rigid with tension,
Bonosus saw. 'And what about the announcement of the war?'
'There will be no announcement now,' said Leontes flatly. Calm, assured. A
leader of men. 'And the rioting is not a cause for concern.'
'It isn't? Why not?' Faustinus eyed him.
'Because the army is here,' Leontes murmured, and looked slowly around the
chamber at the assembled court.
It was in that moment, Bonosus thought afterwards, that he himself had begun
to see this differently. The Daleinoi might have planned an assassination for
their own reasons. He didn't believe for a moment that Styliane had arrived
too late at that tunnel, that her blind, maimed brother had been able to plan
and execute this from his island. Sarantine Fire spoke to vengeance, more than
anything else.
But if the Daleinus children had also assumed that Styliane's soldier husband
would be a useful figure on the throne, a gateway for their own ambition . . .
Bonosus decided they might have been wrong.
He watched Styliane turn to the tall man she'd married on Valerius's orders.
He was an observant man, Plautus Bonosus, had spent years reading small
signals, especially at court. She was arriving, he decided, at the same
conclusion he was.
The army is here. Four words, with a world of meaning. An army could quell a
civilian riot. Obvious. But there was more. The armies had been two weeks away
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and divided among leaders when Apius died without an heir. They were right
here now, massed in and all about the City, preparing to sail west.
And the man speaking of them, the man standing golden before the
Golden Throne, was their dearly beloved Strategos. The army was here, and his,
and the army would decide.
'I will attend to the Emperor's body,' said Gesius very softly. Heads turned
back to him. 'Someone should,' he added, and went out.
Before nightfall that day the Senate of Sarantium had been called into
imperative session in its handsome, domed chamber. They accepted formal
tidings from the Urban Prefect, clad in black, speaking nervously, of the
untimely death of Jad's most dearly beloved, Valerius II. A show-of-palms vote
led to a resolution that the Urban [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]