Seven for a Secret

Chapter Thirty-Three

When John returned home he could not sleep. Every time he began to nod off he dreamed about the strange, living darkness in Figulus’ wall and came fully awake with his heart pounding.

Words came back to him that he had heard once, during an official ceremony he could not recall, in a church he could not immediately place. Something moving upon the face of the deep. What did that mean? Had it been Figulus’ intent to capture that?

The face of the deep.

The very phrase made him shudder.

He needed to walk, to think.

He left the house without waking either Cornelia or Peter. He had learned to move in quiet fashion as a mercenary patrolling the empire’s border and had maintained the skill. He was naturally quiet in his movements. He startled people without meaning to do so by appearing at their elbow as if springing up from the underworld. However, he reminded himself, if palace residents feared the Lord Chamberlain might be with them before they knew it, that was to his advantage.

It was earlier than the time he usually took long morning walks. He followed his accustomed route and had almost reached the square where he had met Agnes before the roofs of the city began to emerge from the night, a mountain range of massive blocks and escarpments, surmounted by countless crosses.

He heard a scuffle, and turning quickly, caught a glimpse of movement. He had the impression something had vanished into a doorway on the opposite side of the street. A feral dog or a cat?

Then it occurred to John that he was near the spot where he had been attacked.

He stepped back against the wall of a closed shop. His side of the street was still sunk in impenetrable shadow.

He waited.

A figure burst out from the doorway and raced across the street at an angle, this time disappearing under an archway. The echoing footsteps seemed to linger in the narrow space between the buildings.

John’s hand went to his blade. Had he been followed? Was the figure he had glimpsed attempting, not very artfully, to outflank and then creep up on him?

He moved toward the archway.

The figure rushed out.

John raised his blade and stepped into the man’s path.

The other came to a sudden halt.

It was the maker of sundials.

“Helias!”

“Lord Chamberlain.” The voice had the same pitch as the squeak of a terrified rat.

“Have you been following me?” John demanded.

Helias threw panicked glances this way and that. “No! I’m just on my way home.”

“You have a stranger manner of it.”

The diminutive sundial maker shifted from foot to foot. “Please, do you mind if we continue while we talk?” Without waiting for a reply, he headed off a trot.

John caught up easily with his long stride. “Why were you darting back and forth like that? Were you trying to elude someone?”

“No, excellency. It’s because of the shadows. Can’t you see them? They’ll trip you up. Nasty things, they are. They move fast.”

To John the street appeared uniformly dark, aside from the deeper shadow along the side they were walking on. He said as much.

“But you don’t work with shadows every day as I do, Lord Chamberlain. My sundials are specially made to display them. You might call my creations shadow traps. Or perhaps time traps. It’s the same thing, you see. It’s all to do with the sun crossing the sky, pulling shadows along with it. It’s enough to make you giddy if you can’t help noticing, as I do.”

During their first meeting Helias had confessed he didn’t like being out in the sun because he couldn’t help calculating the time from the shadows, but it struck John now there was something more to the matter than that.

Or else Helias was lying.

Helias turned and went through the archway leading to the courtyard and his subterranean shop. He stopped abruptly at the edge of the open space and jerked his head around, averting his gaze. “I’m too late!” His squeaky voice rose to an even higher pitch. “I had business to attend to and I lost track of the time.”

The irony of the statement was not lost on John. However, he contented himself with questioning Helias why he conducted business in the middle of the night.

“My clients value my services. They are willing to make arrangements to suit my needs.” Helias replied. “Time is important. They depend on me to supply them with time of the best quality.” The sundial maker kept his gaze pointed toward John’s feet, or perhaps at some indeterminate point on the pavement behind John because the Lord Chamberlain would certainly cast a shadow.

“Time is the same for all of us,” John observed.

“I fear it is not so, Lord Chamberlain. For example, consider the senator who decided to install an antique sundial in his garden. Suddenly he was missing important meetings. The sundial was set for hours in Rome. It wouldn’t work in Constantinople…I don’t know how I’ll get to my emporium now. The courtyard is swarming with shadows. They’re creeping everywhere.”

In fact, John could make out poorly defined shadows, including that of the exedra used by the troupe. “Helias, do you claim you can see these shadows moving?”

“But I can! I can’t help it! Anyone’d see how they move too if they spent all day incising the lines of the hours, each perfectly in their place so shadow fingers would cross them exactly when they should.”

John remained unconvinced on the matter of whether or not Helias had been following him and advised him in a curt voice to admit it if it had been so.

“No, Lord Chamberlain, it is just as I say. And now, I must…try…If I fall, would you pick me up?”

It was evident the little man’s fear had made him forget he was talking to one of the most powerful officials at court.

The sundial maker backed hesitantly into the courtyard. John watched in amazement as Helias crept backward, eyes squeezed shut. He began to veer off course.

“Move the other way,” John instructed.

Helias finally blundered into the wall some distance from the doorway leading to the underground shops. He scuttled crab-like along the wall with his shoulder blades pressed firmly to it, managed to open the door without turning, fell backward into the dark maw revealed, and was gone.

John pondered the strange events. This was the second extremely odd explanation he had encountered for someone’s suspicious actions. Figulus, at least, had obviously been working on his enormous mosaic for years, but Helias might have manufactured his excuse on the spot. Still, John felt Helias was telling him the truth.

Who would make up such a ridiculous ruse to disguise his actions?