Bridge of the Separator

IX

Himerios and Rhavas rode toward the city of Videssos side by side. To Rhavas' dismay, Himerios had no trouble getting leave from his superior. The other officer just said, "Yes, go on—do what you need to do."

"I know Skopentzana is lost," Himerios said now. "That news came down here some time ago. I had heard you'd got free of the sack, but did not know if it was true. I praise the good god to find it is."

"Er—yes," Rhavas said cautiously. If Himerios already knew he'd got out of Skopentzana, the former garrison commander might also know he'd got out with Ingegerd. He had to watch what he said.

"You will know what happened to my wife . . . ?" By the way Himerios said it, Rhavas couldn't tell if it was statement or question.

Rhavas looked down at the steppe pony's mane. "Yes," he answered, and then, "I am afraid the news is not good. I grieve from the bottom of my heart to have to say this, but it is so."

"Go on," Himerios told him. "I feared it would be so when I saw you ride up alone, but tell me more. Tell me everything you can."

"There is not much I can tell," Rhavas said, and that was true in more ways than he hoped Himerios ever found out. Before he could continue, the sound of hoofbeats behind him made him look back over his shoulder. A couple of men from the troop Himerios had been with were catching up to them. He shrugged to himself. Maybe they had business in the capital, too. He did need to think about what to tell Himerios. The story he'd given Koubatzes wouldn't do. It hadn't done then, in fact. But the jolt of running into the officer dismayed him.

The other riders—not very soldierly looking men, either one of them—came up by Himerios. Rhavas looked a question at him. Himerios nodded. "They're my friends. They can hear whatever you have to say."

"However you like." Rhavas shrugged again. "Ingegerd and I escaped from Skopentzana. We made our way south together for several days." That was all true enough. Rhavas looked over to Himerios to see how he was taking it. Himerios' face showed only intent interest. Rhavas went on, "After we got to Tzamandos, we fell in with some other fugitives—merchants and such—and went south with them."

Himerios nodded once more. "Yes, I had heard that, too. What happened after you joined them, very holy sir?"

How much had Himerios heard? More than Rhavas wished he had, plainly. How much news had come down from the north? Naturally, the officer would have looked for anything he could that had to do with Skopentzana, and especially with Ingegerd. Who were his companions? Whoever they were, he didn't mind their listening to what Rhavas had to say.

"We were attacked by Khamorth," Rhavas said—which was true. "We took refuge in a stand of trees." So was that. Then he parted company with the truth. "We got separated in the woods. I managed to escape, but"—he bowed his head in a good counterfeit of sorrow—"I do not know what became of your wife after that."

"No, eh?" Himerios looked not to him but to the two men who'd ridden up after them. With a jolt of dismay, Rhavas realized who—or rather, what—those men had to be: mages tasting the truth of what he said. Ever so slightly, one of them shook his head. Himerios turned. "No, eh?" he repeated, his voice harsher. "Suppose you tell me now what really happened, very holy sir."

How much did he already know? Had someone found Ingegerd's body in that farmhouse? No way to tell for certain who had ravished her—it might have been the Khamorth. But if those wizards were listening to make sure Rhavas couldn't lie and get away with it . . . "Curse you," Rhavas said, almost casually, and Himerios fell off his horse.

"Phos!" one of the wizards exclaimed. The other sketched the sun-circle over his heart. The one who'd spoken stared at Rhavas in horror. "You're mad!"

He shook his head. "Not I. I know better than to cling to the weak and the outworn." He focused his will on the mages. "Curse both of you, too."

Their faces twisted in torment, but they did not fall. Koubatzes hadn't, either, not right away. Rhavas was braced for their resistance. As Koubatzes had, they tried to work magic against him. He felt it, but it hindered him no more than cobwebs hinder a man crossing a dark room. He knew his own powers now, far better than he had when he faced off against the Skopentzanan sorcerer.

"Curse you!" he said again. "To the ice with both of you!"

Anguish filled their cries. Rhavas looked back over his shoulder, but they'd gone too far for the men back at Maleinos' checkpoint to hear. It was him against them—and he was stronger and more determined. He cursed them once more, and they, like Himerios, slid from their horses and sprawled in ungainly death.

Rhavas had left Koubatzes where he lay, dead in the snow. He couldn't do that here: this road would be used again, and soon. Dismounting, he dragged the bodies behind some bushes. Even that wouldn't do for long; their stench would soon give them away. But he would be long gone by then—and how could one priest slay a stalwart officer and a pair of wizards? For that matter, why would a priest want to do such a savage, senseless thing?

"He has his reasons," Rhavas muttered. "Oh, yes. He does indeed."

He led the other horses for two or three miles. A soldier coming the other way along the road gave him a curious look, but said nothing. Rhavas almost struck him dead, too, but in the end refrained. One more death on this highway would say where the trouble was going.

When Rhavas spied horses grazing in a meadow, he stripped the saddles and reins from the animals he led and let them go mingle with the others. He did not think the man who tended those beasts would mind suddenly acquiring three new ones. Whoever the fellow was, he wouldn't even have to look them in the mouth.

It's over, Rhavas thought as he rode on. I dreaded it, and it's over. Everything seemed so very simple, so wonderfully simple. But then Rhavas realized it was not over, and it was not simple, either. He had left bodies behind him. Someone would remember Himerios had ridden off with a priest. Someone would very definitely remember two mages had ridden after them. When none of those people returned or sent word of their whereabouts . . .

No, it was far from over.

Plucking at his beard, Rhavas kept on toward Videssos the city. How was he supposed to show the Empire—show the world—what needed showing without leaving this trail of corpses in his wake? Of course, the corpses were part of the point, but he didn't think the people with whom he'd be talking would appreciate that.

But what can I do about it? he wondered. Himerios, not unnaturally, had hounded him over Ingegerd. Now no one was left—no one outside of Halogaland, anyhow—to dog him about her. But plenty of people would worry about an imperial officer. Maleinos himself might do that. And those two wizards . . . Rhavas hadn't even learned their names. He'd just overpowered them and slain them.

And that was not something the ordinary priest of Phos, or even the ordinary prelate, either would or could do. People would worry about the wizards, too. Rhavas wished he hadn't killed them. Like a lot of wishes, that one came too late to do him any good.

What will I say when I get to the capital? he thought. Would I do better simply trying to disappear?

Stubbornly, he shook his head. He remained convinced he had found the truth. Like any Videssian convinced of the truth, he was also convinced the rest of the world needed to know it and to adopt it. The only way he could make that happen was through the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

I will persuade them, he told himself. I will persuade them, or they will die in my trying.

Here close to Videssos the city, refugees crowded every town, every inn. Some were those who, like Rhavas, had been lucky enough to escape from the far northeast. He even came across a couple of Skopentzanans, though none who had worshiped regularly at the chief temple in the fallen town.

Most of the fugitives, however, had started their flight south of the Paristrian Mountains. The fighting between Maleinos and Stylianos seemed to have dislodged even more peasants and townsfolk than the barbarian invasions had. Rhavas gradually realized that what he saw didn't have to be the same as what was so. Many of those who'd fled from the northlands hadn't lived to fill the inns near the capital.

Survivors were not shy about saying what they thought. "You ask me, Skotos is running the show these days," declared a man missing most of his left ear. He didn't bother spitting after the dark god's name, either.

One of his friends hissed a warning. "Shut up, you fool! Don't you see there's a priest in the taproom?" he added.

The man with the mutilated ear only shrugged. "So what? What can he do to me that hasn't already happened?"

"You don't want to find out," his friend said. Had Rhavas kept his own orthodoxy, the fellow would have been right. As things were, he exclaimed, "Now you've done it, you silly bugger! Here he comes!"

"Let him." By the way the one-eared man spoke, he'd already taken a lot of wine onboard. "I'm not afraid."

"So you think Skotos is stronger than the lord with the great and good mind, do you?" Rhavas rumbled in his most forbidding tones.

"What if I do?" The man stuck out his chin in defiance.

"Do you not know that the holy scriptures say otherwise?" Rhavas demanded.

"What if they do?" The man in the tavern plainly wasn't long on rhetoric. But he continued, "Maybe Phos had the lead when they wrote the scriptures, but it sure looks to me like Skotos is ahead now."

Several people spat in rejection of the dark god. For his part, Rhavas stood irresolute. Here was a man who agreed with him. If he said as much, everyone in here would remember him to the end of time. When Maleinos' men came looking for the priest who might have had something to do with the deaths of Himerios and two wizards and they heard about a priest spouting blackest heresy, they wouldn't need to be geniuses to see there might be a connection.

But if he kept silent, wasn't he yielding to Phos' stifling orthodoxy by default? He and this chance-met stranger shared the same belief. How could he hide it? Slowly, he said, "I have come a long way—all the way from the far northeast. I have seen a great many atrocities, some from the Khamorth, others worked by Videssian against Videssian. These are sorry times indeed."

"And you're going to tell me I'm a heretic anyway," the man said bitterly. "Well, futter you, blue-robe!"

Rhavas shook his head. "No. I was going to tell you I agree with you. Skotos is the stronger of the two gods. No one looking at affairs of the world, affairs of the Empire, today could possibly disagree without being either blind or a fool."

The man who'd also proposed that Skotos was stronger stared at Rhavas as if he couldn't believe his ears. So did everyone else in the tavern. Eyes widened. Jaws dropped. Several men sketched Phos' sun-circle. "Heresy!" somebody exclaimed. "Heresy from a priest! We're in more trouble than I thought."

"I don't know," somebody else said. "When you look at everything that's gone wrong lately, it makes more sense than you wish it did."

"Liar! You're a heretic yourself!"

Heretic or not, the man accused of misbelief punched his accuser in the nose. That set off everybody in the tavern, like a torch flung into oil-soaked wood. People screamed at one another. They punched and kicked and bit. They hit each other with cups and then with jars of wine. The tapman let out a theatrical howl of dismay. No one paid any attention to him.

Someone stomped on Rhavas' foot. He yelled in pain. Someone yelled, "Infamous, shameless heretic!" and hit him in the stomach. He doubled over—which might have been lucky for him, because a hurled winecup just grazed the top of his scalp. If he'd been fully upright, it would have caught him in the face.

He lashed out with a foot against the man who'd hit him. He didn't quite make the fellow into a eunuch, but he didn't miss by much. The follower of orthodoxy let out a horrible shriek and fell to the floor, clutching at himself.

A knife flashed not far away. Rhavas pointed at the man holding it, who was howling out a hymn. The man's eyes glazed. The knife dropped from his hand. He slid to the floor. In the chaos, no one noticed—or cared—he was dead.

Rhavas looked around for the fellow who'd had the courage to proclaim his allegiance to Skotos. He didn't see him. Either the man had already escaped or the orthodox had brought him down. Whichever was true, Rhavas had to get away himself if he could.

It wasn't easy. With his blue robe and his shaved head, he was a target for all of Phos' followers in the tavern. He picked up a stool and swung it like a scythe, clearing a path to the doorway.

"What sort of madness is going on in there?" A crowd had already gathered outside the tavern, too, drawn by the fearful, fearsome racket inside.

"It is a riot of sinners and misbelievers," Rhavas answered. And if the crowd out there judged who misbelieved differently from the way he judged, he did not intend to make any detailed commentary.

A man in a torn tunic staggered out of the tavern door after Rhavas and aimed an index finger at him as if it were an arrow. "There's the heretic!" the man cried.

"Liar!" Rhavas shouted, and threw the stool in the man's face. With a groan, the fellow crumpled. Rhavas nodded to the men and women on the street. "You see how it is?"

"The nerve of that rogue, to call a priest a heretic!" a woman exclaimed. Heads bobbed up and down, there in the crowd.

Another man, this one with blood running down his face from a cut over his left eye, lurched out of the taproom. He could still see out of his right eye, and glared at Rhavas. "Skotos-lover!" he screamed.

"To the ice with you!" That wasn't Rhavas—it was one of the men in the crowd. He ran forward and punched the bleeding man in the face. The fellow with the cut on his forehead was made of stern stuff. He grappled with his new opponent, threw him down, and kicked him in the ribs.

Two other men from the street tackled the bleeding man, stretched him out in the dirt, and started kicking him. Someone else came out of the tavern and tried to rescue his friend. That really started the brawl in the street.

Rhavas didn't laugh, not out loud. But it was funny just the same. The people on the street and most of the people inside the tavern were on the same side. They didn't know it, though, and they lit into one another too ferociously to give either group the chance to find out.

After spending a little while watching the chaos he'd helped spawn, Rhavas went back to the stables. He planned to tell the attendants that he'd decided to lodge somewhere else. He found nobody to tell, though. The stable boys and hostlers had all rushed up to join the fighting. Rhavas rode away.

Instead of choosing another inn, he rode out of town. He was too likely to be recognized and remembered if he stayed. He'd ridden for a bit before realizing he was likely to be remembered even after he left.

Too late to worry about that now. He had to hope the Avtokrator's backers would soon have more urgent things on their minds than a priest around whom strange suspicions accrued. It was spring. The campaigning season was about to begin. Maleinos' men would be on the move. So would Stylianos'. And so would the invading Khamorth.

With all that going on, who could get too excited about one priest? Nobody—or so Rhavas hoped.

Villages, towns, and fair-sized cities clustered ever more closely together as Rhavas neared Videssos the city. More people were on the road in that populous, relatively secure part of the Empire, too. Rhavas had no trouble losing himself in the crowds. He rode on in high spirits. He'd escaped, and the capital awaited him.

No one challenged him when he got to the next town. He was just another priest there, nobody to get excited about. By now, he was far enough inside Maleinos' territory that no one even thought he might have come from Stylianos', let alone the rude northeast. His accent played no small part there. Even after so many years in Skopentzana, he still talked like what he was: a native of Videssos the city. And Videssos the city still belonged to Maleinos.

"Hello, holy sir," an innkeeper said when Rhavas stuck his head into the man's establishment. "Looking for a meal and a bed?"

"And a cup of wine," Rhavas answered.

The fellow smiled and put his hand on a dipper that would go down into a big jar of wine set under the bar. "Well, I think we just might be able to arrange something along those lines."

"Good." Rhavas came in. The taproom wasn't too crowded. That was a point in its favor. Nobody in it was arguing theology right this minute, either. That was another point, though Rhavas didn't know how long the lull would last—even in a small, nondescript town like this, you never could tell.

No barmaid took his order, but a downy-cheeked youth who looked a lot like the innkeeper. The youth brought him wine and bread and cheese and then left him alone—something not every server had the wit to do.

As Rhavas ate, he pored over the grimoire he'd taken from Koubatzes. The more he learned, the better off he would be. For one thing, he wanted to be able to do more than simply curse people and watch them fall over dead. Archers used different kinds of arrowheads, depending on whether they were after birds or deer or men in mail. The more different weapons he could use, the less he would have to rely on the single brutal one.

And neither Koubatzes nor the mages who'd ridden up to join Himerios had fallen over dead as fast as he'd wished they would. They'd had some kind of defense against his weapon. It hadn't saved them, but it might have if they'd been better prepared—or if they'd been stronger sorcerers.

He couldn't guarantee he wouldn't run into a wizard like that. He flipped through the parchment pages of the codex, looking for warding spells and for what to do about them.

As usual with Koubatzes' grimoire, Rhavas had to try to piece together the things the mage wasn't saying and add them to those he was. Koubatzes had been a man of considerable sorcerous knowledge. He'd known enough to take a lot for granted. That made things harder for an inexperienced would-be mage like Rhavas to follow.

"Excuse me, holy sir, but would you like a lamp for your table?" the innkeeper's son asked. "It's getting dark out."

"Why, so it is," said Rhavas, who'd been putting his nose ever closer to the pages. He got to his feet. "Why don't you take me to my room instead, and give me the lamp there?"

"I'd be glad to," the youth said, and he did.

The room—hardly more than a cubicle—was what Rhavas had expected. It had the usual bed, stool, chest, pitcher, basin, and—under the bed—the usual chamber pot. If smaller than most of the rooms in which he'd slept lately, it was also cleaner than most.

Back in Skopentzana, Rhavas would have lit as many candles and lamps and torches as he pleased. Even then, reading after sunset hadn't been pleasant. By the feeble light of one oil lamp, it proved impossible.

All at once, he laughed at himself. If he couldn't make light, what kind of wizard was he? He remembered a charm early in the grimoire for doing exactly that—and when he remembered something, he remembered it completely and accurately.

One of the things he remembered was that the spell called on Phos. His lip curled. Fixing that would be easy enough. The spell as Koubatzes had written it suited the mage's ignorance. Rhavas, convinced he knew better, intended to revise the cantrip to focus it on the real chief power in the world.

He began to chant. At the appropriate times, he substituted Skotos' name for that of the good god. He held his hand out over the grimoire, so that light could flow from it once he finished the incantation—and that moment was fast approaching. "Let it be accomplished!" he declared.

Darkness flowed out from his hand.

He had always thought of darkness as a mere absence of light, something to be dispelled by sun or moon or torch or lamp or candle. He had thought that way—but now he found himself mistaken. The darkness his spell called up swallowed the lamplight, swallowed whatever moonlight and torchlight came in through the shuttered windows, and left him in night absolute. For all that he could see, his eyes might have been plucked from his head.

No, that wasn't true—he did see one thing. He saw the mistake he had made: if he wanted light, he should not have called on the dark god to produce it.

He wondered if this palpable, aggressive darkness held sway in his room alone or if it somehow spilled out and covered the whole inn, the whole town, the whole Empire. What had he done? After a moment, he realized he heard no screams of terror and dread, so the darkness seemed his alone. That was something, if only a small something.

He began the spell again, this time exactly as it was written in the grimoire. He had no idea what he would have done if he hadn't had it memorized. Either stayed blind forever or gone to a mage and confessed what he'd done, he supposed. In that case, the last light he saw would have been that from the flames consuming him for heresy.

"Let it be accomplished!" he said again, and hoped something, at any rate, would be accomplished. And something was. Light returned to the chamber: lamplight and what little filtered in through the shutters. He breathed a sigh of relief. He had, at least, managed to cancel what he'd done.

Now . . . Would repeating the spell the right way give him the light he'd craved from the beginning? He yawned. A day's travel and the magic he'd already worked had taken too much out of him. He closed the grimoire, lay down on the bed, and blew out the lamp.

Darkness descended again, but not darkness absolute, not darkness impenetrable. He could still make out the spaces between the slats of the shutters. A little light came in under the bottom of the door. Normally, he might not even have noticed it. Now, though, every tiny scrap of light seemed precious.

Rhavas closed his eyes. Even that darkness was less inky, less pitchy, than what he'd conjured up. He knew there was light on the other side of his eyelids. Before, it might have vanished from the universe. Knowing it would be there when he woke up helped him drop off.

And when morning came, he did know it. Knowing it felt good, too. He went downstairs to breakfast in a distinctly happy mood.

He got happier when no one else spooning up barley porridge and drinking the day's first cup of wine complained of going blind for a little while the night before. He hadn't thought the miscast spell went beyond his own room, but being proved right came as a relief.

The stable boys had groomed his Khamorth ponies till they looked as fine as they could—which wasn't very. No, they weren't much to see when set alongside the horses Videssos bred. But looks didn't matter so much to Rhavas. He'd seen that the steppe ponies could keep going long after bigger, handsomer horses would have foundered.

When he rode out the south gate, the guards there asked his blessing. He gave it, and wondered whether it would do them the good they'd hoped or turn on them the way his spell had turned on him when he substituted the dark god's name for that of the lord with the great and good mind. He shrugged. Again, he would be gone before he could find out.

Farmers and herdsmen waved to him as he rode by. He waved back—why not? Every so often, he would turn and look northeast over his shoulder. No, no sign of anyone coming after him. He smiled. Either they hadn't found Himerios and the wizards yet or they hadn't figured out he had anything to do with their untimely demises. The same also seemed to hold true for the man he'd felled in the tavern brawl.

It was funny, in a way. He represented a greater threat to long-established Videssian customs than even the civil war between his cousin and Stylianos. No one but himself knew it, though, or cared.

Threats . . .

For a long moment, he paid no attention to the horsemen letting their mounts graze in the middle of a broad meadow. He was looking ahead toward the Long Walls. He couldn't see them yet, but he knew they couldn't be far. And after the Long Walls, Videssos the city.

But those horsemen . . . They weren't Videssians. They were Khamorth, in the nomads' usual furs and leathers. They rode the same sort of shaggy ponies as Rhavas did himself. They made no move toward him. It didn't look as if they were there to murder or to plunder. They were just . . . there, as wild animals might have been . . . there. But they were no wolves or ravens. They were men.

And they'd got through and behind all the imperial defenses as if those defenses not only didn't matter but didn't exist. Rhavas had heard people say the nomads roamed close to the capital. He hadn't believed it, not till now—any more than he'd believed Skotos was more powerful than Phos till now. In both cases, though, what he saw made him change his mind.

He thought about cursing the plainsmen, but what was the point? More he couldn't see would be close by. If these stayed where they were, sooner or later soldiers or even assembled peasants would drive them off. Shaking his head at the sorry state of the Empire, he kept riding.

For that matter, the Khamorth saw that evil was more powerful than good. Maybe that made them closer to him than he'd thought. Maybe it made them closer to him than most of his own countrymen were. There was a truly dispiriting thought.

"I can show Videssos the truth," he said, as if someone had denied it. "I can show the temples the truth."

Before too long, a troop of horsemen in jingling mailshirts under blue surcoats trotted up the road past him. He wondered if the Khamorth still rested in the field. If they did, the imperial cavalry would make them sorry. But the nomads had already made the Empire much sorrier. And Rhavas didn't think that would end any time soon.

When Rhavas rode up to a gateway in the Long Walls, his heart hammered in apprehension. If his name and description had got there ahead of him, the guards might try to seize him. They might even have a sorcerer with them, a man strong enough to help them lay hands on him.

If he was going to get to Videssos the city, though, he would have to run this gauntlet sooner or later. Sooner, he judged, was better. The longer he waited, the longer word about him could spread.

A sentry sketched the sun-sign over his heart. "Good morning, holy sir," he said as Rhavas rode up. "Where are you from, and where are you bound?"

"Phos' blessings upon you," Rhavas said, savoring his own hypocrisy as he too drew the sun-circle. "I was lucky enough to escape from the far northeast, and plan on returning to Videssos the city."

"You've been on the road a long time, then," the guard remarked.

"Oh, by the good god, haven't I just!" Rhavas answered.

Not only was that true, it made the gate guard laugh, as Rhavas had hoped it would. The fellow said, "You were lucky to come through all the trouble along your way, too."

"Yes, I know I was," Rhavas said, more soberly this time. "The lord with the great and good mind let me do it, though. I shall thank him as he deserves when I get to the capital." Just as he deserves, Rhavas thought.

"I have a question for you first." The sentry swung his pike horizontally across his body to block the way. "Who is the rightful Avtokrator of the Videssians?"

"Why, the Avtokrator Maleinos, of course," Rhavas said without a moment's hesitation. He also believed that to be true.

So, plainly, did the guard at the gate. With a broad grin, he swung up the pike once more. "Pass on, holy sir!"

"My thanks." Rhavas made sure the words didn't sound as if they ought to have you chucklehead attached to them. A man of sardonic temperament even before the disasters of the past six months, he didn't find that easy, but he managed.

The country inside the Long Walls—and, indeed, some of the country just on the other side of the Cattle-Crossing as well—counted as suburbs for Videssos the city. Villages and towns clustered thickly. Many on the farms raised fancy fruits and vegetables for the city trade. Here and there stood villas where grandees from the capital maintained country households. Maleinos owned several. Rhavas' family had had one, too, but it lay by the sea and wasn't on his way to Videssos the city. He remembered it fondly.

He remembered everything that had to do with Videssos the city fondly—sometimes a little too fondly. He remembered how hot it got in and around the capital in summertime. In Skopentzana, cool at best and frequently frigid, he'd warmed his hands over those memories more times than he could count.

What he hadn't remembered was that it got muggy when it got hot, and doing anything—or even nothing—on a hot, sticky day quickly turned unpleasant. Sweat streamed off him. The sun beat down on his shaven head with savage force. Now that he thought about it, he remembered a sunburned scalp, too. He wished he could have forgotten.

He'd also remembered how big the capital was, and how many people it held. Skopentzana was a large city, for one out in the provinces, but you could have dropped it into the city without making many people notice. And the countryside around Skopentzana was much more thinly populated than that inside the Long Walls.

Now, on his return, Rhavas saw again that there were mixed blessings in what he remembered. Even before he got to the capital, the surrounding suburbs started seeming unpleasantly crowded. People were everywhere. What were they doing? How could it matter, even to them?

One of the things he hadn't recalled was how mercenary they were. He asked a man standing by a fork in the road which was the shorter way to Videssos the city. The man didn't say a word. He just held out his hand, palm up. He didn't know how close a brush with death he had just then. Fuming, Rhavas gave him a copper—and got his directions.

Something like that never would have happened in Skopentzana. People there wouldn't have expected a reward for anything so small and simple. They would have gone out of their way to help, in fact. Had folk by the capital always been like this? Thinking back on it, Rhavas decided they had. Why would anyone come to Videssos the city or stay there if he didn't have his eye on the main chance?

What would a peasant do if a priest expected payment for a blessing? Fork over? Maybe. But Rhavas thought most of the peasants he'd seen were more likely to break a hoe handle over a greedy cleric's head than to cough up a copper, let alone give over gold.

Toward evening, another peasant called to him as he rode by: "Want supper and a bed here, holy sir? Better and cheaper than what you'd get in town."

That, now, that was legitimate business. Rhavas swung his horse toward the man. "I thank you very much, and I'll take you up on it."

The peasant hadn't been lying. His plump wife served up a fine chicken stew. He had a son whose beard was just beginning to sprout and a daughter a year or two younger than that. People told jokes about peasants' daughters. Rhavas wondered if any of them were true. Eyeing her, he didn't think so—not in her case, anyhow. Too bad, he thought.

Were he a more accomplished wizard, he might have brought her to his bed while the rest of the family slept. He might have arranged it so she either didn't remember what had happened or liked it—was made to like it—so well she never told her kinsfolk. He might have . . . but he didn't know how. That grimoire of Koubatzes' would repay more study.

As things were, he tried to take a spot near the hearth and leave the peasant family to their beds. They wouldn't hear of it. The young man curled up on the floor by the fire. Rhavas slept in his bed. It was more comfortable than what he was likely to have got at an inn, just as the stew made a better supper than most inns would have served up.

Next morning, the peasants woke at dawn. Rhavas wasn't far behind them, not because they were noisy but because only the very wealthy and the very degenerate stayed in bed for long after the sun came up. Daylight was for living; lamps couldn't really push darkness back far enough to make a proper substitute.

"Thank you kindly, holy sir," the farmer said when Rhavas paid the scot. "We enjoyed having you here, and that's the truth. Would you be kind enough to set a blessing on us, too, before you ride away?"

Rhavas looked up to the heavens. "Give these generous people what they truly deserve, and may they truly deserve well of you," he said, a prayer that did not name Phos. He finished with the usual, "So may it be," and hoped the farmer and his family wouldn't notice what was missing.

Luck—or perhaps some power—was with him, for they did not. Maybe they so expected to hear Phos' name, they thought they did even when they didn't. That made as much sense to him as anything else.

He swung up into the saddle and rode away. As he did, the farmer of the farm family headed for the fields, a hoe on his shoulder like a foot soldier's spear. The son went to the barn to tend the livestock. The mother walked back into the farmhouse to start the day's baking and washing and spinning and weaving. The pretty daughter went down on her hands and knees in the vegetable plot by the house and began weeding.

Rhavas sighed. So many better things she might be doing, he thought. In his mind, the better things were all lewd. He sighed again, at the waste. But he shrugged and kept on riding. It wasn't as if she were the only pretty girl ever born. He would find plenty more—he was sure of that.

Thus heartened, he rode on for most of the morning. He didn't suppose he should have been surprised when his thoughts came back to Ingegerd, but somehow he was. She hadn't been a pretty girl; she'd been a beautiful woman. She'd admired him and trusted him—and what had it got her? Ravaged at his hands; slain by his curse.

He wondered if her death was part of the curse he'd called down on his own head. Did it count as part of the fall of Skopentzana? It certainly sprang from that fall. He'd never dreamt the Khamorth would get into the city. He'd never dreamt one of the peasants he'd helped to stay in the city would open it to the barbarians. No matter what he'd dreamt, though, the black hour had come, and he'd made it his responsibility.

Here under the warm southern sun, he shivered as if caught in a Skopentzana blizzard. He'd cursed others, and they'd fallen. There stood a shepherd watching his sheep and lambs. If I point a finger at him, he dies, Rhavas thought. Beyond a doubt, that was true. But he had pointed at himself, up there in Skopentzana. He still lived. He still breathed. Even though he did, he could not believe—however much he wished he could—that he would escape unscathed.

Here came a merchant riding a swaybacked horse and leading three donkeys with thick canvas sacks lashed onto their backs. "May the good god bless you, holy sir," he said as he went by.

"The same to you," Rhavas replied. Up in the north—and, for that matter, in the westlands, too—traders commonly grouped themselves into caravans and hired guards to keep themselves safe from bandits and raiding barbarians. Here, close to the capital, this fellow felt safe enough to travel on his own.

Ideally, that should have been the way things worked all through the Empire. If the civil war and the Khamorth invasions went on much longer, it might not be true anywhere—Rhavas remembered all too well the pair of barbarians in the middle of the meadow not far north of here. They would cheerfully despoil this fellow here, and even more cheerfully murder him.

Slowly, Rhavas nodded to himself. Was that not yet another sign of what he'd first seen up in the north? Was a new might not rising in the land? If Phos had been the leading power, as so many theologians had believed for so long, he was no more. So it seemed to Rhavas, at any rate, and so he intended to show the whole world.

Being so close to the capital, he hurried toward it like a lover hurrying to his beloved—not a priestly comparison, perhaps, but not an inapt one, either. Scribblers wrote romances that largely consisted of the roadblocks fate and villains put in the way of a lover hurrying to his beloved. Rhavas had always looked down his long nose at romances; they were frivolous, and he'd never had time for frivolity.

Now, though, fate seemed to be putting obstacles in his way. When he stopped in a town achingly close to Videssos the city, he found himself waylaid by a local priest. He couldn't even tell the man to go to the ice and leave him alone, not without stirring up scandal; he'd taken his vows together with Arotras.

"By the good god, Rhavas, is that really you?" Arotras exclaimed when he saw Rhavas buying some sausages from a man in the market square.

Rhavas needed longer to recognize his old friend than Arotras had to know him. The other man had a big, comfortable belly, a much rounder face than he'd owned all those years before, and a beard that tumbled in gray waves past his chins and down his chest.

But his voice rang a bell. That hadn't changed so much. "Arotras!" Rhavas said. They embraced: the man who'd kept his faith and the man who'd seen his change.

"You were up—somewhere in the north," Arotras said. Rhavas hid his annoyance: to a man who'd never gone far from Videssos the city, even a town as important as Skopentzana was nothing but a part of the distant, trackless wilderness, and not such a big part, either. Arotras went on, "Phos, you must have needed a wagonload of miracles just to get down here in one piece!"

"Well, so I did," Rhavas allowed. If he didn't think those miracles came from Phos, Arotras didn't need to know that.

His old friend took him by the arm. "Come on, then. You're not going to disappear into Videssos the city—you can't fool me; I know where you must be bound—without sitting down and drinking with me and telling me your story. Come on, I say! I don't aim to take no for an answer."

The only way Rhavas could have detached himself was by making Arotras fall over dead in the street. He didn't want to do that. He didn't suppose he wanted to do that, anyhow. And so he let the priest steer him into a tavern and order wine for him. Along with the wine, Arotras ordered olives and pickled asparagus and almonds and a honey cake topped with candied apricots. By the way he and the taverner chaffed each other, he came in here often.

"You live well," Rhavas remarked.

"Not too bad," Arotras said. "No, not too. I can't screw, but there's nothing in the holy laws that says I can't stuff myself." He ate one of the asparagus stalks, then popped an olive into his mouth and spat the pit on the floor.

Priests were supposed to control all fleshly impulses, not just sensual lust. Rhavas was in a poor position to criticize Arotras, though. He ate an olive himself, savoring the rich, vinegary brine. "How have things been down here?" he inquired.

Arotras raised a bushy eyebrows. "I thought you'd rip me up one side and down the other for letting myself run to fat," he said. "You were always like that in the old days—not an ounce of give anywhere."

"I still am," Rhavas said. "But if you don't think I've seen worse things than a fat priest lately, you're wrong."

"Well, I believe that," Arotras admitted. "You asked how things were? They're bad. I suppose they're worse up north, with the barbarians running everywhere, but they're pretty cursed rotten here, too."

"It's . . . not good up there," Rhavas said. "Skopentzana—the place is dead, I think, and I doubt it will come back to life. The Khamorth were sacking it when an earthquake knocked it flat." He didn't tell Arotras he'd had anything to do with either of those disasters.

The other priest clucked sympathetically. "You were lucky to get away with a whole skin. We'd heard something about all this here, but you know how news is when it's come a long way. Who can tell what to believe and what not to, especially when you hear four different stories?"

"I certainly do know," Rhavas said. "With news from the north, though, it's pretty simple: the worse things sound, the more likely they are to be true."

"That's a bad business. It's what I was afraid of, but it's a very bad business." Arotras waved for more wine. When the tapman filled his cup again, he raised his hands to the heavens and spat on the floor. Then, in a low voice, he went on, "Things are just about as bad down here. The civil war goes back and forth. The soldiers slaughter each other and plunder the peasants. I tell you, Rhavas, it's enough to make you wonder whether Phos is looking the other way."

Rhavas stared at him in astonishment. That a priest of Phos should say such a thing—and to another priest! Rhavas himself had had such thoughts, of course, but he hadn't dreamt anyone else had.

Arotras turned red. "I knew I shouldn't have told you anything like that," he muttered, misunderstanding why Rhavas was amazed. "You always took to doctrine the way ducks take to water. If you want to flay the hide off me now, you can go ahead and do it."

If Rhavas spoke in the right ears in Videssos the city, he could do worse than that. He and Arotras undoubtedly both knew it. He could cost the other priest his place here. He could have him tortured for heresy, maybe even for apostasy, and exiled to Prista, the lonely outpost across the Videssian Sea from which the Empire kept an uneasy eye on the Pardrayan steppe.

Much good that did us, Rhavas thought bitterly. But Prista was far from the border between the Empire and the nomads. No one there could have known of the frontier disaster till too late.

Now he had to think about what Arotras had said. He picked his own words with care: "As it happens, some of the things I have seen have also made me wonder about what the lord with the great and good mind is doing—and whether he is doing anything at all."

"You?" Arotras sounded as if he couldn't believe his ears. "Forgive me for saying so, very holy sir, but you are perhaps the last person from whom I would have expected to hear that."

Rhavas shrugged. "A year ago, I would have said something different. A year ago, I would have thought differently. With what I have seen since then . . . A man might reasonably wonder, I believe, who holds the greater power in this world."

He waited. He hadn't said he thought Skotos was mightier than Phos. But even saying there was room to wonder, room to doubt, made him a heretic, subject to anathema and, in the eyes of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, bound for the ice. If Arotras wanted to shout curses at him now, how could he answer—except with curses of his own, curses that would show where the strength lay?

Arotras still eyed him as if unable to believe what he was hearing. "You say this, very holy sir? You, who were always such a pillar of perfect orthodoxy?"

"I say it. I mean it. With what I have seen, the only thing I do not see is how I could say anything else," Rhavas replied. If Arotras shouted of heresy . . . well, so what? When Rhavas got to Videssos the city, ecclesiastics far more prominent than Arotras ever dreamt of being would shout the same thing, and shout it louder and more ferociously.

"You sound like a man . . . Meaning no offense, Rhavas, but you sound like a man who has lost his faith," the other priest said.

Rhavas shook his head. "I have not lost it. I have had it turned into a new channel. Faith abides. Faith always abides." Some of his earliest lessons also abided, lessons so early he had no conscious memory of them.

Now Arotras looked around nervously and lowered his voice. "Do you say you would sooner reverence . . . him?" He did not name Skotos, but spat on the floor to show whom he meant.

"I have not said anything of the sort," Rhavas told him. "And I have said more than a little, and you not nearly so much. How do you feel about these things? What do you think about them, I should say? For it is only through thought that we can hope to come to understanding."

Arotras looked unhappy. He hadn't wanted to be put on the spot. Rhavas had a hard time blaming him for that—who did? But the other priest said, "Answers for answers—only fair, I suppose. How can anyone look at everything that's happened lately and say the lord with the great and good mind surely rules the world and just as surely will triumph at the end of days? Other things"—he spat on the floor once again—"are bound to be going on."

"I agree," Rhavas said crisply. "We have been blind and deaf to this for too long. If we cannot see it after the madness of civil war and the barbarian invasions, though, when will we?"

He'd jolted Arotras again. The other priest glanced fearfully toward Videssos the city. "If we say that there, very holy sir, they will make us sorry we ever opened our mouths."

"I am not afraid," Rhavas said, which overstated the case more than a little. "If we tell them the truth, they will have to see it."

"Nobody has to do anything." Arotras spoke with great and mournful certainty.

"Coward!" Rhavas said scornfully. "I have the truth behind me, and those stodgy ecclesiastics can tell me otherwise until they are blue in the face. They will not persuade me."

"They won't care, either." The other priest sounded even more mournful—and even more certain—than before. "They'll anathematize you, they'll scourge you, they'll excommunicate you, and they'll burn you. That's what happens when they decide you're a heretic—especially when they decide you're that kind of heretic."

"They will not do that to me," Rhavas declared.

"You think they won't? You think they won't on account of you're the Avtokrator's cousin?" Arotras was given to repeating himself. "They won't care, not if you're that kind of heretic."

He was probably right; Rhavas' family connections alone wouldn't be enough to save him. Rhavas shrugged even so. "Oh, I expect I can find one way or another to persuade them. Will you come with me and help guard my back? The truth needs all the defenders it can find—and we both know what the truth is, don't we?"

Arotras licked his lips. "You must be mad if you think you can persuade people the dark god is stronger than the light one. You'll die, that's what'll happen, and you'll take a long time doing it. I want to live a full life. If you don't, that's your business." He shivered theatrically.

"Do you not have the courage of your convictions?" Rhavas demanded.

"I believe what I believe," Arotras said. "I'll tell you something else, too: one of the things I believe is that you're not going to change these people's minds. They're too set in their ways. And besides, they live in the imperial city, and everything is normal there, or as normal as it is anywhere. You might as well try telling them the world is round."

Rhavas had had the one thought himself. He laughed at the absurdity of the other. Every so often, ships would sail east from Kalavria, the easternmost island the Empire owned. None had ever come back. If they hadn't fallen off the edge, what had happened to them? No one had any idea. No ship had ever come out of the east from foreign lands, either.

"You know what I mean," Arotras said defensively. "Converting them won't work. You can't make it work."

"I can. I intend to." Pride rang in Rhavas' voice: the pride of an ecclesiastic who knew what he knew, and also the pride of a scion of the imperial family, a man who knew others would pay attention to him simply because of who he was.

"Well, good fortune go with you," Arotras replied. "If orders come from Videssos the city to stop believing one thing and start believing another, you can be sure that I will. If they don't, I won't, not where it shows. I'm sorry, very holy sir, but I haven't got the stuff of martyrs in me. I like life too well to want to end it, especially that way." He shuddered again.

"No god cares for a lukewarm worshiper," Rhavas warned, but Arotras only shrugged. Rhavas wondered if he ought to curse the other priest. With some regret, he decided not to. If he cursed everyone who was lukewarm, half the Empire would perish. Once he did what he set out to do, Arotras would be free to turn into what he was supposed to be.

Arotras probably had a good idea of what he was thinking. In slightly sullen tones, the plump priest said, "You want to be right more than you want to be safe. I'm sorry, Rhavas, but I've never been that way."

"We are right, you and I and those who think as we do—and there are bound to be many of them." As usual, Rhavas spoke with great conviction. "And, because we are right, we have the right—no, we have the duty —to bring our truth to everyone in the Empire." Missionary zeal blazed in him.

In him, yes, but not in Arotras. "As I say, good luck to you. I will stay where I am, stay a small man, and try to stay a safe man."

"Follow what is true wherever it leads you," Rhavas said.

"I know what I think," the other priest said unhappily. "And I know what will happen if the wrong people find out what I think. What I don't know is how I ever had the nerve to open my mouth to you." He got to his feet. "I don't know that things will turn out just the way you hope they do. I fear they won't, and I'm sorry for that. I'd better go now." With a shy dip of the head, he scurried out of the tavern.

"You didn't do anything to the holy sir, did you?" the tapman asked. "We like him here. We don't want any trouble for him."

"Neither do I," Rhavas said. "We have the same doctrine. He just doesn't want to follow it as far as I do."

"I don't care about his doctrine," the tapman said, which, if true, came close to making him unique in the history of Videssos. "But he's a good fellow, and I don't want anything bad happening to him."

"I told you—neither do I. And nothing will, nothing that has anything to do with me," Rhavas said.

"It had better not." The tapman ran a damp rag over the polished wood of the bar, giving himself a chance to think. Rhavas had seen that gesture from more tapmen than he could remember. This fellow went on, "Tell you what, holy sir. If you want to, you can spend the night here, and spend it on the house."

The attempt at a bribe was about as subtle as a kick in the teeth. Rhavas thought about saying so, but kept quiet. The tapman was doing what he could, offering what he had to give. "That's very kind of you," Rhavas replied after his moment of thought. "I do believe I'll take you up on it."

"Good. That's good!" The tapman looked relieved. "I thought you looked like a sensible fellow. Is there anything else I can get you while you're here so you'll have a better time?"

Rhavas wasn't about to demand anything a priest wasn't supposed to have—not in so many words he wasn't. He shrugged and said, "Why don't you surprise me?"

"Well, holy sir, I'll see what I can do," the man said. "You just leave everything to me."

He served up a huge bowl of beef-and-barley soup—a supper Rhavas might have had up in Skopentzana, too. The bowl held several bones with lots of rich, fatty marrow inside. Rhavas sucked it out. The tapman only smiled at his slurping noises.

When Rhavas went upstairs, he found his room not much better or worse than others he'd taken at inns across the Empire. He was settling down for the night when someone knocked on the door.

At some of the places he'd been, he wouldn't have opened the door if his life depended on it. This wasn't one of those. When he swung the door open perhaps a palm's breadth—ready to slam it shut in a hurry if he had to—a woman looked back at him from the hallway. "What do you want?" he asked.

She shook her head. "No, holy sir—what do you want? Melias said to make you happy, if you felt like that."

"Melias?" Rhavas found himself at sea.

The woman pointed downstairs. "The tapman."

"Oh." With the name and the person joined, things made more sense. "He told you that, did he?"

She nodded. "Can I come in?"

He opened the door wider. She stepped into the room. She was pretty in a haggard way, and had probably been prettier before hard living took its toll. Rhavas asked, "Did he tell you I was a priest?"

She looked at him. "Does it matter? If it matters, you'll throw me out. If you don't throw me out, it doesn't matter."

He'd heard the same cynicism from the first barmaid he bedded. "It doesn't matter, not like that," he said roughly.

"All right, then." She pulled off her long tunic. "Let's get on with it."

When they lay down together, Rhavas learned a few things he hadn't known before. That wasn't because she was anything out of the ordinary, or he didn't think it was, anyway; more that his own experience was still scanty. She didn't take pleasure in it herself, and didn't bother pretending she did. When it was over, he asked, "What do I owe you?"

"Nothing. It's taken care of." She got out of the bed, dressed quickly, and left the room. As her footsteps faded down the hall, Rhavas realized he'd never asked her name. Melias was doing everything he knew how to do to keep Arotras from finding trouble. The tapman might even be able to blackmail Rhavas if he turned on his fellow priest.

Rhavas had never intended to do that. He'd told Melias as much. The man hadn't listened to him—and how often did anyone ever really listen to anyone else? This time, Rhavas had got a fine supper, a room, and a woman because the tapman wouldn't listen. To him, it seemed a good exchange.

He slid toward sleep. He'd almost got there when a sudden thought brought him back to wakefulness. How often did anyone ever really listen to anyone else? When he got to Videssos the city, would his fellow ecclesiastics pay attention to the new doctrine he brought them?

"Of course they will," he said, there in the silent darkness of his room. "They will have to, because I am right." Thus reassured, he resumed his interrupted journey into slumber.

When he came downstairs the next morning, Melias the tapman gave him a knowing smile and said, "I trust you passed a, mm, pleasant night?"

"Pleasant enough, thanks," Rhavas answered. "I would like half a loaf and some oil and a mug of wine to break my fast, if you'd be so kind."

"Of course." Melias gave him what he asked for, and eyed him as he began to eat. "You're a cool one, aren't you?" the taverner said with what sounded like reluctant respect.

"I try to be," Rhavas answered in his usual matter-of-fact tones. "And I will tell you one other thing: after all I have seen, all I have been through, all I have escaped, what happened last night is not so much of a much."

To his surprise, that made Melias laugh. "All right, holy sir. I think I hear what you're saying. You sound like somebody from Videssos the city talking about any place in the world that isn't Videssos the city."

Rhavas laughed in turn. "I suppose I do. And I am from Videssos the city, and I do talk about every other place that way."

"I've never known anybody from the capital who didn't," Melias said. "I've been there a few times, and plenty of people who've never set foot outside the walls in their lives talk the same way."

"I wouldn't be surprised." Rhavas finished his breakfast. When he reached for his belt pouch to pay, the tapman waved for him not to bother. Pleased but hardly surprised, he went out to the stable to get his horses. They had oats and hay in their stalls, and they'd been well tended and groomed. Again, Rhavas was pleased without being astonished.

He'd already ridden out of the stable—in fact, he'd already ridden out of the town—before he realized how much for granted he took horsemanship these days. Just after escaping Skopentzana, he'd been a thoroughly indifferent rider. No more. As with anything else, practice brought improvement.

Even with cursing, he thought, and—smoothly—rode on.

Rhavas felt like cheering when he saw the walls of the capital ahead. For a moment, forgetting himself, he felt like offering up a prayer of thanksgiving to Phos. Not altogether happily, he shook his head. He could never do that again, not without hypocrisy.

He'd thought he would be excited to return, after so many years away. And he was, but not in the way he'd expected. Too much had happened to him—and to the Empire. He'd seen too much in the years since he'd gone, and especially in the past year. This didn't feel like a homecoming. Instead, Videssos the city seemed a new place, one he would have to conquer afresh.

It seemed a formidable new place, too. It occupied a triangle of land, two sides surrounded by the sea; the third, the one he faced, protected by the most formidable walls the mind of man could conceive. Videssos the city was the most of one thing or the other in any number of ways. Thanks to the Cattle-Crossing, trade routes running east and west, north and south all converged here. Videssos the city, then, was the richest city in the world, and the largest, and the most ambition-filled. Men from towns like Skopentzana and Amorion came here to see if they could succeed competing against the best and toughest from all over the Empire and beyond. Plenty of people of placid spirit stayed where they were, content to be tall trees in a garden of bushes. Those who wanted to find out how their trunks measured up against the rest of the tall timber came to the capital.

Before, Rhavas' birth and family had shielded him from all that. With his cousin wearing the Avtokrator's red boots, of course he would succeed. He was able; he knew that. But ability wasn't the only thing that had let him rise so swiftly through the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Who he was had counted for even more than what he was.

Things would be different now. Now he would be trying to succeed in spite of what Maleinos believed, not because of it. Now his own ability would count for everything. He had to persuade a hostile world that he knew a truth of which it was ignorant.

"I have to—and I will," he declared, and urged his horse forward.

He rode in through the Silver Gate, the grandest one in all the city. He could not have chosen a lesser entrance. The drawbridge was down, to let people into the capital. Rhavas took that for a good sign: Maleinos didn't fear Stylianos would try to sneak in soldiers, anyhow.

Guards did give everything and everybody a careful once-over. The fellow in front of Rhavas led several donkeys festooned with leather sacks. He had to open them up to show what he was carrying. The guards poked through his woolens—which looked utterly ordinary to Rhavas—as if they expected to find either jewels or weapons to help Stylianos' supporters in the city rise against Maleinos. Discovering neither, they finally let the man go forward.

One of them gave Rhavas a look anything but friendly. "And who in blazes are you, holy sir?"

"I am Rhavas, prelate of Skopentzana and cousin to Maleinos, Avtokrator of the Videssians," Rhavas replied. He had decided he wasn't going to sneak into Videssos the city. Maybe people were looking for him by name because of what he'd done to Himerios and the mages. More likely, though, he judged, they were after a priest from Skopentzana, or perhaps just a priest from the north. And in that case, they would never dream Maleinos' cousin was the man they sought.

He sounded haughty enough to make his claim convincing to the guards. They almost injured themselves coming to stiff, creaking attention. The one who'd scowled at Rhavas shed his toploftiness like a lizard wriggling out of its skin. "Pass on, holy, uh, very holy sir," he said.

Rhavas inclined his head. "Thank you very much," he said, and urged his steppe pony forward. The guards saluted as he rode into Videssos the city.

His horse's hooves and those of the packhorse drummed on the timbers of the drawbridge, then struck more softly when they reached solid ground again. The sun disappeared from the sky. Rhavas traversed a bricked-in tunnel between the outer and inner walls. Men leered down at him from murder holes, ready to rain boiling water or red-hot sand down on attackers. Several portcullises could fall, one at a time or all together, to delay or even halt assailants.

The works protecting Videssos the city were the mightiest men could devise. No foreign foe had ever stormed them. Rhavas doubted a foreign foe ever could. That did not mean the capital had never fallen. Now and again, in civil strife, it had. Not even the strongest fortifications could hold out treachery.

Treachery, Rhavas thought. The great Videssian sport. Love of controversy, love of surprises flourished inside the Empire. That being so, betrayal also flourished. No wonder Maleinos' guardsmen so carefully scrutinized a mere merchant's goods.

But who scrutinized the guardsmen? There was the really important question. Rhavas could see as much. No doubt his cousin could, too.

Light at the end of the tunnel . . . At another time, Rhavas would have thought about Phos triumphing over Skotos. In fact, such thoughts did still rise to the surface of his mind. His habits had formed over many years. He could not abandon them in the blink of an eye, no matter how much he wished he could.

He scowled, there in the gloom. If he had trouble changing his own way of thinking, how did he dare hope to persuade others to change their minds and recognize that Skotos, not Phos, prevailed in the world? Wouldn't simple habit make people go on believing the way they always had?

His laugh echoed and reechoed along with the clopping of the horses' hooves. "Let them look around," he said. "If they cannot see after that, what are they but blind men?"

The more Rhavas looked around, the more obvious it seemed—to him, anyway. How would it seem to the comfortable ecclesiastics who'd lived here for years if not for their entire lives? They had not seen Skopentzana fall. They had not seen men robbed and murdered, women raped and murdered. They had not seen the Empire's whole northeast fall to demon-loving savages monstrously good at war, savages whose sorcery outdid anything the proud Videssian mages aimed at them.

But I have, he thought, and I will make them see.

Part of him wondered why he couldn't just go along with what everyone else in Videssos believed. But, for one thing, it was only a small part. If Videssians were given to controversy, they were also given to the conviction that they were right and they needed to bring the benighted rest of the world around to their point of view. And, for another, how many others in the Empire already had quiet doubts about the way things were? Arotras did. He couldn't be the only one. Most folk, though, even if they thought such things, would not have the nerve to say them out loud. Rhavas had, if nothing else, the courage of his convictions.

They'll burn you, he thought, or take your head, or maybe, because you're the Avtokrator's cousin, they'll just exile you to Prista, where no one will care what you say.

He laughed again. Not very long before, he'd thought that Videssians loved surprises. Well, he had a few of his own to show the assembled ecclesiastics and theologians of the Empire. Yes, they might have a little trouble working their will on him—they just might. Laughing still, he rode on into the capital.