The Fell Sword

Chapter Eleven

The Sacred Island – Thorn

Thorn had been using the moths more and more – they were tough, agile, and very quick to breed. The spring of power, Deseronto, as the locals called it, now had so many moths and their larvae that the soft beat of their fragile wings was actually a noise when they were disturbed, and Thorn spent more time on them than on some of his more immediate projects. He told himself that they would all be useful in time, but the truth – a truth he admitted freely – was that he had fallen in love with the species and sought to redesign them to suit his many ends and for purely aesthetic expression.

He had a paradoxical thought that he had once hated moths, but he dismissed it.

In the centre of the open, unroofed chamber of natural rock from which both water and raw power gushed, he had placed a low marble table, and on it sat the two black eggs, which had altered in shape and size. They were now the size of a man’s breastplate, and the eggs had developed the ridges of a pumpkin and the warts of an aged animal. Things moved within them, almost visible against the tough elasticity of the shell, and still they grew, and the marble table groaned under their weight.

They generated an effect that was, itself, the cause for concern. All the moths that gestated near the eggs were born wizened and black, as if the eggs leached their essence before they ever had a chance to feed and form a chrysalis.

But because Thorn was a careful observer, he saw that in each generation of moth larvae placed close to the eggs, a few were of remarkable dimensions and weight. The larvae were the size of earthworms or larger, jet black, and without markings.

For three patient generations, he massacred the little ones and bred the large ones – some left close to the eggs, and some given a safer berth.

As summer fled to autumn, and leaves across the Sacred Island went to red and gold, and then began to wither and fall in the driving rains and sudden winds, the black eggs grew as big as witches’ cauldrons. And Thorn watched the first generations of Black Moths emerge from their cocoons – the size of a peregrine falcon, with a thousand matte black eyes and a single probiscus, like a misshapen unicorn.

He dominated them easily and sent them north. One fell victim to a windstorm. One he lost in the woods – possibly attacked by an owl. The remaining three descended on a Sossag village.

They were quick, their needle-like probiscae were deadly, their venom instantaneous, the paralysis and subsequent jellification of the victim magnificent in effect. But the Sossag were themselves agile and strong – a nine-year-old girl scored the first kill with her father’s snow snake, ripping a Black Moth from the air with a practised strike even as her mother’s bones disintegrated. Before he could withdraw his predators, they were dead.

Thorn reviewed their performance and decided that the Black Moths made a better tool of assassination than of terror. He worked on the second generation.

The use of insects as spies now took up a sizeable portion of his attention, but allowed him an unguessed-at level of knowledge. He could watch a person or an event from fifteen or twenty vectors, allowing him a godlike perspective on events. The effort involved was less than he had experienced with mammals but the diffuse creatures and directions required a level of minute adjustment that cost him in both power and time every day.

In return, however, he began to see things that he knew he should have ensured he saw before he attempted Lissen Carrak. The greatest limitations on his newfound powers of espionage lay in the old spells and workings built into the structures and palaces of the powerful – and even into some shepherds’ cots. It took a great warding to resist Thorn for even a moment, but it took only the will of the village witch to keep his ensorcelled insects from the door, and a new commercial hermeticism in Liviapolis – a warded amulet that prevented insects from entering a house, sold to goodwives and travellers by the University – was like to make every home in the Empire immune from his creatures.

But these were the elements that made the life and path of ascent Thorn had chosen so rewarding. That autumn he was challenged and delighted, and he worked hard to prepare his series of strokes.

Thorn waited, and watched.

He tried not to believe that he was a tool.

He watched as his eggs grew and matured, lit from within with a curious black fire that defied his own sorcery.

He watched four ships come up the Great River, their straight masts and round sides utterly alien in the world of trees. He saw them from a great height, circling as an owl, and later, as a raven with a sixty-foot wingspan. His powers had made a great leap forward, and his heart beat with renewed vitality. Once, he had been a man, and he made himself a new form. Now he could adopt many forms, and in adopting them his sense of himself altered.

It is happening he allowed himself to think.

He had access to unbelievable amounts of raw potentia. He swam in it – he bathed in it. He worked small things and great with reckless profusion, making tools for the future.

He went in various forms to the creatures on either side of the Inner Sea, and listened. A few he bound to his will, but now he preferred to whisper some words and let the sweetness of his suggestions work their own magics.

He watched Ghause. For every one of his sendings she destroyed he placed another, and another, until he could watch her all day, from many angles. Naked. Clothed. Working the aether or reading a book, rutting with her lumpen husband or preparing her revenge.

She fascinated him. Repelled him. But she was like the perfect tool, built to fit his hand. And he desired her, as a woman. It was many, many years since he had felt any such desire, and he revelled in it. It was not weakness, but strength, he told himself. He watched her work, naked, and he watched the intent rapture she displayed as she gathered potentia in the aether and cast great gouts of ops and he wanted her. His pale grey moths let him see her from nine directions as she rose on her toes, like a dancer, her belly moving faster and faster in her rhythmic chant-

I will take her, and have her and use her, and she will serve me. And in so doing, I will strike at the King, cripple the Red Knight, and destroy the Earl, and grow yet more powerful. And when I am tired with her, I will subsume her. And grow yet more powerful still.

He was in the body of Speaker of Tongues, and so he could smile.

He was still chuckling when the ambassadors from the Sossag found him.

They were strong men, warriors all, and they hated him. And feared him. He could smell their fear and their hesitation – indeed, he had felt their fear so far away that he’d had time to create a house in which to host them, and a table at which to sit with them, and a fire on a hearth – and to refine this body.

They introduced themselves, one by one, and he admired their courage the way a man buying slaves admires strength.

‘Where is the sorcerer, Thorn?’ asked the bravest. ‘We have come to see him.’

Thorn bowed, the way no Sossag would ever bow. ‘I am he,’ he said.

‘You are one of our own shamans!’ said a man with the scars of nine kills on his right ear.

But the very bravest one shook his head and bent his knee. ‘He is Thorn. I served him this spring, against the rock.’

The old shaman smiled. ‘And we failed, you and I. And you took your warriors and left me.’

The warrior nodded. ‘It seemed best, lord. You were defeated – and you were not my lord, but merely an ally.’

‘Bold talk,’ Thorn said.

‘Now the matrons send me to make peace,’ said the brave one.

Thorn brushed aside the man’s protections, and skimmed his name from the muddle that was his thoughts. ‘You are Ota Qwan, who took the place of Tadaio as paramount warrior,’ he said. He altered the tenor of his voice to make it sound more like Ota Qwan’s own voice. ‘You were the bravest warrior at the fight at the ford.’

The other warriors looked at Ota Qwan with suspicion.

He glanced at them, and Thorn took their names from his surface thoughts.

‘Do the Sossag offer the same sort of lies and betrayal they offered in the spring? I need them not. I have the Huran as my own.’ He didn’t smile, but merely leaned forward like an elder making a point. ‘Ah – you were a lord among men in the south, as well.’

Now the other warriors edged away from Ota Qwan.

He shrugged. ‘Mighty Thorn, we know you have sent the giants to destroy our villages.’

Thorn smiled. ‘No,’ he said.

Ota Qwan took a breath. The other five looked at each other.

‘No,’ Thorn said. ‘I am not some man with whom you can negotiate. These are my terms. You – Ota Qwan – will come and be my captain. I need a man – a man of war – to command my forces. It was for the lack of such a man that I failed at the rock. Among the Huran there is no warrior as redoubtable as you. And you have wide experience in the south, as well. In exchange, I will give you powers beyond anything you can imagine. And I will, if you like, lift my hand from the Sossag, who are merely one hut circle of near-animals in an endless forest of them. I need no more punishment for the Sossag than to leave them to their own devices.’

The least brave of the six – and he was very brave – sprang to his feet. ‘You lie!’ he said.

Thorn laughed and stripped away his soul and subsumed it. The man’s flesh fell with a thump.

‘Lying is for the weak,’ he said. ‘I have no need to lie. You others? Will you serve as my captains?’

Ota Qwan forced a smile. He was nodding.

He has already decided to serve me, but now he will posture a little, Thorn thought. Men bored him.

‘Why would I serve you? I do not crave power.’ The man met Thorn’s human eyes. ‘You have nothing I want.’

You lie, Thorn thought. Then he skimmed along the man’s thoughts again, like a man braiding a child’s hair, feeling the knots, the burrs, the places where the hair hadn’t been brushed. He ran tendrils of power through the man’s head and he read a name.

Orley.

He laughed aloud. It was as if he was destined to attain his desire. Everything fell into his hand. Or had the black place done this?

He no longer cared.

Ota Qwan recoiled from the laughter.

Another of the six drew his short Alban sword.

Thorn cast.

An amulet on the man’s chest flared – the man’s blade cut, and cut well, severing Speaker’s left hand. Blood spurted.

Thorn stumbled out of his chair – and then raised his left arm into the man’s second slash. He sprayed blood into the man’s face and blocked his sword by catching it in the bone of his left arm.

He burned the man’s amulet to dust with one burst using a concoction of minor workings he had designed to baffle amulets. It was foolish of him to forget that these powerful warriors would have some protections.

He touched the man on the arm, and cast a gentle curse that excited every nerve on the man’s skin. Every single nerve.

The man fell screaming, and began to thrash with no regard for his own body – bashing his head, dislocating a shoulder as he lost control of every function. His screams ripped out, one laid over the next like a shingled roof. The remaining four Sossag paled.

Thorn picked up his severed hand and put it back on the end of his arm. Healing was the least of his powers – but this he did to show them. He spent a day’s power profligately, to replace the hand on his arm. It was, after all, merely a form he wore, like a cloak.

The Sossag trembled.

‘I am like a god, am I not?’ he said, conversationally. ‘If any of you would like to try and kill me, I am here. Ready. At your pleasure, as men say.’ His comments were punctuated with the screams ripping out of his victim.

‘You torture prisoners – come, I know you do. You do it to prove their courage. Well – this one has failed, wouldn’t you say?’ He smiled.

The man on the floor had voided his bowels and bladder and still he thrashed, as if in the grip of a monster, and he screamed so fast it didn’t seem that he could catch a breath. As they watched, he fetched his head against the marble table that held the eggs, and one hand was thrown out – touched the rightmost egg, and he was subsumed before their eyes, reduced to ash.

The egg flared for a moment – a purple-black light shot from it, and then it was still.

Even Thorn was taken aback. He stepped over to the eggs, paused to don his most heavily armoured semblance, and looked carefully in all the spectra he could command.

The eggs were drinking potentia. They emitted none.

Thorn knew a frisson of fear, and he backed away from the eggs. But he – even he – dared not show fear in front of his potential servants. So he forced a cruel laugh.

‘Fascinating,’ he said aloud. He whirled, keeping his skeletal tree branch arms well clear of the eggs.

The four Sossag had drawn into a corner, and a thousand moths fluttered around them.

‘Anyone else? You are all free to go. But if you will stay, I will make you great.’ He nodded his head.

Ota Qwan sighed, as if releasing something he held to be valuable. ‘If I serve you, lord, will you hold your hand from the Sossag?’

Thorn nodded. ‘If they serve me loyally.’

‘Will you give me Muriens? The Earl of the North?’ asked Ota Qwan. The lust that flared in him was like a moth being born from its chrysalis. This naked need for revenge – this was the true man.

‘More – I will order you to take him. That will be your first task. And when he is taken, then you may have him.’ Thorn nodded again.

The tallest of the three warriors was also the youngest. He shook with fear, and yet he stood tall. He stepped out of the cloud of moths surrounding Ota Qwan. ‘I will not serve you,’ he said. ‘I have no power of arm or thought to harm you – b-b-but I will n-not serve.’

Thorn watched him, unmoved. In this form, he could shrug off a bolt from a siege engine. He had.

‘Ota Qwan?’ Thorn asked.

‘Call me Orley,’ he said, and plunged a basilard into the young warrior. He turned to the last man, a Western Door Sossag called Guire’lon, even as the younger man’s heels drummed on the rock, trying to outrun death. ‘Go and tell them that Ota Qwan died here, for the People. Tell my wife. Tell the matrons.’ He smiled a horrible, lopsided grin. ‘I will go back to being Kevin Orley now.’

Ticondaga – Giannis Turkos

Turkos left the great fortress no happier than he had arrived, and headed north as fast as he might go. He’d asked the Earl to support him against the Northern Huran, and the Earl, for his own reasons, had declined. And then ordered him off his lands.

Winter was close – three days of rain had soaked the woods. He was cold before he’d crossed the river from the nigh-on impregnable fort that covered the great castle’s river gate. He paddled himself across the river, drifting almost a league on the swollen autumn current, landed, and walked back to the village that served as their northern landing – forty cabins and some lesser huts, mostly broken men and women of a dozen Outwaller clans or no clan. The Muriens had made their move to rule the Outwallers three generations earlier, and their iron fists held sway over a hundred miles of the northern bank and more of the south bank. Many of the Southern Huran, even the free villages and castles, listened to Ticondaga, served in their raids and sent headmen and matrons to council fires on the great meadow at the base of the castle walls.

For Turkos, the situation among the Huran was becoming a nightmare of divided loyalties.

His information – and gathering information was his duty – told him that the Galles, of all people, had landed a strong force among the Northern Huran. Rumour had it that a great sorcerer had moved into the Sossag lands, and Ghause, the Earl of the North’s dangerous wife, had put a name on that sorcerer: Thorn.

The relations between the Northern and Southern Huran were about to grow very complicated.

He spent an afternoon in the village longhouse, listening, telling stories, and writing letters to other men like him. He hired runners in the village, and sent them off with coded messages.

Then he rode west along the river, as fast as he could go, with three spare horses, food for twenty days and two great black and white birds. As a riding officer it was his duty to report.

The woods were oddly quiet. For two nights, he put that down to the omnipresent rain; five consecutive days of rain meant that Turkos had to use his very limited hermetical talents to kindle fire.

There was a village called Nepan’ha at the place where the north bank of the Great River, which had, for twenty leagues, been mired among a hundred islands and as many swamps, at last sprang clear of all that and opened into the Inner Sea. It was not a Sossag village or a Huran village – the people there were from many Outwaller groups, and they were fiercely independent. They had withstood a siege from the Muriens. It took him five days of hard riding, with very little sleep, to make Nepan’ha and once there he bedded his horses and collapsed on a rude sleeping bench near the open hearth of a longhouse and slept for twelve hours, ate four bowls of venison stew, and enjoyed a long pipe with the headswoman.

She said Thorn’s name aloud.

The longhouse grew silent.

‘Naming calls,’ muttered a voice in the dark upper shelves of the house, where neither heat nor light ever reached. ‘Naming calls.’

‘Shut up, old man,’ muttered the headswoman, Trout Leaping.

‘The Sacred Island was for all,’ the man muttered. ‘Now the magic is sucked away as if by some sorcerous leech, and soon our souls will follow until all is black and dead.’

‘You see what I have to put up with,’ Trout Leaping said and shook her head. ‘The ones with talent – they feel it worst. He’s only about seventy leagues away, across the water. Much further by land, of course.’

Later, Turkos reached out with his own art and he felt the void and the feeling of desolation almost immediately, and had the fleeting impression of moths swirling in mist.

Turkos was not a strong talent but he had been trained well. He masked his work and, in the rich garden of his memory, he marked his own location with reference to three of the University’s beacons, and then he laid a vector to the desolation.

After another meal and twelve more hours’ sleep he went west into another day of autumn rain, riding hard. The trail worn into the ground by fifty generations of Sossag and Abenacki and Kree was broad enough for his horse to find even in the dark – not that Turkos was foolish enough to travel in the dark.

On his third day out of Nepan’ha, he spotted a pair of Ruk on the horizon, across more than a mile of tangled beaver swamp. At first he thought they were Great Beaver, but as he picked his way closer, watching the footing not only for himself but for all his animals, he realised that they were not industrious forest giants but the dirtier, more humanoid variety. He retreated as quickly as he could, almost losing a horse in deep mud.

The three Ruk spotted him when he was almost safe, and gave their roaring hunting cry and came after him. The speed with which they could cross a swamp was matched only by the ferocity with which they crashed through heavy brush that would have been impenetrable to men.

He strung his Eastern horn bow, cursing the weather and all sorcerers everywhere, and wishing that he had a partner. Or his wife.

He remounted and rode west along a stream whose deep grass banks offered an escape route. The stream opened into a long meadow over which he cantered, standing in his stirrups and staring at the ground. There were sinkholes made by the spring run-off and he rode like a circus performer, keeping his horses moving with calls and whistles.

He was negotiating the banks of an old beaver pond when he saw the three Ruks. He turned his riding horse and loosed three arrows, but he didn’t pause to see the result, and rode west again.

The problem with Ruk was not that they were particularly good trackers, but that they never gave up. The term, ‘stubborn as a Ruk’ referred to their tendency to prefer following their prey until they killed it, no matter what distractions or opportunities were offered.

Turkos found another trail, this one headed east-west, too. He performed a small working to determine the locations of the Academy beacons and, on comparing them, he decided he was as close as was required and cast another seeking, this one his wife’s way, masking his technical skill with Outwaller charms. When he had his vector, and the sick sense of having contacted something uncanny, he walked his spare horses a league east along the new trail, and then walked his riding horse back, carefully, with an arrow on his string. The Ruk were making poor time in the open ground after his arrows – as he’d hoped – and he paused where his own tracks joined the trail and took three vermilion-dyed feathers from his pouch and tied them in an elaborate web of red yarn to a bush and cast a glamour on them. There was no working under the glamour – but to a raw talent, the whole might appear as a trap.

Then, sitting on his riding horse in a light freezing rain, he waited behind a newly downed spruce, hood up over his beaver fur cap, green cloak pulled over his bow which he held against his body to warm the sinew.

When he heard the Ruk, he cast a light illusion to cover his own scent.

He waited until they were on the trail, in the open, just the length of a large house away. He watched them as they stopped to look at his feathers. They gathered around his bush.

He stood in his stirrups and loosed the arrows he had in the fingers of his left hand – five quick shafts with barbed heads, and every one of them hit. The first three were poisoned.

The Ruk didn’t even grunt when they were hit. They turned as one, bellowed, and gave chase.

He loosed over the rump of his horse four more times, and then he’d lost them. They were not as fast as a horse by any means. By the time he reached his pack horses, they were far behind – but still coming.

He rode east. He trotted for as long as his horses could manage, and then he walked – slowly, but surely – all night. The emptiness of the woods was now explained – when the Ruk walked abroad, the other big animals were cautious.

Dawn brought bright sunshine. Turkos drank water from a stream so cold that the water hurt his teeth and rode east, passed a burned village clearly destroyed by Ruk. And later in the day, another.

At evening, his trail ended abruptly in a deep swamp right at the edge of the Inner Sea. He cast north, trying to get around the swamp, and found a pair of canoes but no path and no good ground.

Just after nightfall, he heard a tell-tale crashing along his backtrail. He filled the canoes with his goods and released the pack horses. He was quite fond of his saddle horse and he tried to entice her out into the black water and, eventually, she followed his canoe as he paddled and she swam. He knew she wouldn’t go far, though, and cast desperately for dry ground in the dark.

Twice, he had to balance his canoe to rest a hand on her head and offer her his store of ops. But as the stars rose, clear and cold, finally he heard the swishing sound of small wind-driven waves on gravel, and she was ashore before he had carefully grounded his canoes. His little mare was none too happy to find herself on a rocky islet with a little shelter and no grass, but she wasn’t drowned and he’d saved all his goods. He put his small wool tent over her and when she was drier and warmer, he pulled her down, threw all his blankets over both of them, and curled up against her back. He fed her oats by hand.

They both slept, and he didn’t wake until she pushed herself against him and got to her feet. The world was nothing but a grey mist; and as soon as he was awake he could hear the Ruk. They were splashing in the fog, and he was afraid – deeply afraid. He had no idea how well they moved in deep water. Could they swim? His experience of them was limited – he’d never been pursued, only read about it.

He folded his wool blankets and his small tent while his poor horse stood and shivered, and then he packed his canoe as quickly as he could. The splashing noises went on, the Ruk seemed to be all around him.

He had a notion, drew an arrow from his quiver, and used it as the basis of a very short-range spell of finding.

As quick as he cast, he felt the three, each still wearing one of his arrows. The widest gap among the monsters was to the east so he got the canoes tied together and paddled the lead east. His little horse stood on the islet for a long time, and then, with a horse noise of panic, plunged into the water and swam powerfully after him.

The fog closed in, and he paddled hard, praying to Saint Mary the Virgin and all the saints to preserve him and his horse against the cold, the water, and the giants.

Liviapolis – The Red Knight

Ser Michael had kept the journal since the opening of the siege at Lissen Carrak. He’d changed the format and moved the journal into a large volume bound in dark red leather, acquired using his restored allowance in the endless bazaars of Liviapolis, and he’d decided to count the days from their first contract and work from there. Since he didn’t plan to share the journal with anyone, he didn’t have to account for how he kept it.

Military Journal – Day one hundred and eleven

The defeat of the Etruscan Fleet has had every result that the Captain promised, despite our having failed to entice any part of their squadron into the arsenal after No Head loosed one of his precious engines too early. We captured a single over-bold galley, thus doubling the Imperial Fleet. But the capture of Ernst Handalo, the Etruscan captain, accomplished what his death would not – the near total capitulation of the Etruscans. Handalo is a senator of far-off Venike. Apparently, he has begun to negotiate a peace on his own behalf.

Closer to home, our little victory had procured a certain good-will – or perhaps, as the Captain likes to say, merely the foundations on which future good-will might be laid. The Captain also released all of our prisoners from our battles under the walls; he has arranged with the Princess Irene for all of the prisoners to be cleared of treason. If the knights of Morea have consequently grown to love us for our clemency, they are extremely adept at hiding it.

However, the gates are open, the markets are open, and the harvest is in. Perhaps most importantly, convoys have begun to reach us from over the mountains, via the Inner Sea and the lake country. The Captain has plans for the fur trade and for Harndon. And on that topic, the Captain has arranged a series of loans against our profits that have paid the men, which cured a good deal of grumbling.

And finally, our victory seems to have won us the approval of the Patriarch and the University. The Captain is to meet the Patriarch on Sunday after mass. We have collectively crossed our fingers.

Ser Michael leaned back and licked his fingers to get the ink off.

Kaitlin came and leaned heavily against him. ‘Could you carry this little bastard for a week or so while I have a rest?’ she asked.

Ser Michael turned. ‘Please let’s not call our child a bastard.’

‘He is, you know.’ She smiled. It was a pleasant smile, not a nasty one, and yet Michael knew she meant business. He’d promised marriage, and she, a peasant girl, was currently widely viewed as his whore.

‘Then marry me,’ he said.

‘When? Where?’ she asked. ‘And I really don’t have a thing to wear.’

‘I’m sorry, love,’ he said, and put his hands on her waist. He held her against him so he could feel the swell of her belly against his own stomach. ‘Sorry. I’ve been busy.’ Christ, that sounded lame.

‘There’s a rumour that the Knights of Saint Thomas sent us a chaplain,’ he added. ‘Why don’t we have him marry us when he arrives?’

She sat heavily in his lap. She wasn’t really big yet, but she felt she was the size of a horse – ugly, frumpy, and the very antithesis of all the slim, elegant, perfumed Morean ladies she saw every day in the markets. ‘I suppose that when you asked, I imagined we’d have a wedding in a cathedral, and I’d be – glorious. Somehow.’

‘My father hasn’t said no, but he certainly hasn’t said anything nice, either.’ Ser Michael stared out the window for a moment. In point of fact, the silence from home is rather ominous. I got one allowance instalment and then nothing. And no answer to my letters.

‘Could we be married by the chaplain? Set a date?’ she asked. ‘I think – I think I’d rather be married with a fat belly than not married at all.’

He kissed her. ‘I’ll ask the Captain,’ he said.

‘The Duke,’ she said.

He paused. ‘What’s that mean?’ he asked.

Kaitlin was both his leman and a lower-class Alban woman in the barracks. She heard things he would never hear. Being viewed as Ser Michael’s whore had its positive side – women who wouldn’t dare approach Ser Michael’s wife would happily share hot wine with her.

She shrugged. ‘He likes being called Duke, doesn’t he? The archers resent it. They grumble that he used to be one of them.’

Michael shook his head. ‘Sweet Christ, my love, he’s the Earl of the North’s son; he was born with a bigger silver spoon in his mouth than I ever had. He was never one of them.’ But even as he said the words, he thought of the Captain loosing a bow or fighting in the sheep pens at Lissen Carrak, before the siege started. The common touch.

She kissed him back. ‘Don’t get all huffy with me, love. And do not, I pray, get your ink-stained hands on my one neat kirtle which has a belly that fits. Hands off!’

She slid off his lap. ‘Just tell him.’

Ser Michael nodded.

The Duke of Thrake sat in his new office in the barracks of the Athanatoi and read through a mountain of correspondence. He had a Morean secretary named Athanasios to help Master Nestor, a perfect gentleman who seemed to know everyone at court. The Duke suspected that Athanasios spied on him for the princess, but as he didn’t have anything to hide from the princess, he didn’t rock that particular boat.

‘I can’t read this one – Nestor?’

The company treasurer pushed his black cap back and tugged at his sleeves. ‘Oh! My lord Duke, another note from the Queen of Alba, accusing you of neglect in not replying to her invitation to the tournament.’

‘Addressed to?’ he asked.

‘The warrior styling himself the Red Knight,’ Nestor said, reading the outside of the scroll.

‘Return it as incorrectly addressed,’ said the Duke. ‘Be polite and inform her of my current title. Buy me some time.’

‘A set of reports from our riding officers among the Outwallers,’ Athanasios reported. He had a stack of flimsy sheets – obviously carried by Imperial messenger birds.

The Duke pounced. He took the papers and then looked at his Morean secretary. ‘Give the new Megas Ducas the briefest description of your contacts with the Outwallers,’ he said.

Athanasios nodded. ‘My lord, we have several dozen rangers, let us say, among the tribes and people outside the wall.’

‘That’s the Imperial wall? Or the whole length of the wall?’ the Duke asked sharply. ‘The Alban portion?’

Athanasios shrugged. ‘My lord, we are both intelligent men. I must ask for clearer instructions if I am to give you an explicit answer. As you can, I think, surmise from my hesitation.’

The Duke smiled. ‘If I thank you for your candour, which one of us is lying?’

The door opened, and Ser Michael could be seen, laughing silently, in the hall. Bent, on guard at the door, was grinning.

‘Michael! Would you care to return to being my apprentice? I feel the need to discuss some plans.’ The Duke smiled and took a sip of lukewarm wine.

Michael put a hand to his chest in feigned shock. ‘Discuss your plans? My lord, are you ill?’ He shook his head. ‘I’d be delighted. And I’d like to discuss a few things myself.’

‘Speak,’ said the Captain.

‘Do we have a chaplain on the way?’ he asked.

‘Any day. I have had two messages from the Grand Prior. I gather we’re getting a black sheep, to match our own plumage.’ He shrugged. ‘If I must have a priest I’ll take one of theirs, I suppose.’

‘Will you come to my wedding?’ Michael blurted. The two secretaries worked on, pretending to be furniture.

‘To the beauteous Kaitlin?’ the Duke grinned. ‘Absolutely. Where?’

‘Barracks’ chapel?’ Ser Michael asked hesitantly.

The Red Knight grinned. ‘Do I get to give her away?’ he asked with a leer.

Michael reacted like any young man – he glared, and their glances crossed like swords – but they both laughed.

‘And some shopping?’ asked the Captain. ‘Cloth of gold for the bride? Michael, your father is going to have a cow.’

‘Could you manage an advance against my pay?’ Ser Michael asked. It was odd to ask – the Captain seemed an ageless age, but not yet old enough to be his father and pay his bills. He felt awkward and his eyes kept flitting away from the Captain’s face.

‘And I should mention first that Kaitlin tells me some of the lads mislike your use of your new title,’ he added.

The Duke leaned back after motioning to Toby to pour wine. ‘When they win themselves dukedoms, they can sport the titles, too.’

‘Are you drunk?’ Michael asked.

The Captain poured himself a little more wine. ‘Perhaps,’ he said agreeably.

‘Sweet Jesus, my lord.’ Michael paused and looked at the Captain – really looked at him. He had dark circles under his eyes and the eyes looked old.

His Captain – his rock of certitude – looked afraid. Troubled. Angry.

‘What’s the matter?’ Michael asked.

The Captain looked at him – his eyes narrowed. ‘Nothing,’ he said, but his face worked as if the muscles by his jaw had an independent existence.

‘I’m dealing with it,’ he said.

‘So something is wrong,’ Michael said.

‘My breastplate is as scarred as an old pincushion and I don’t have time to visit an armourer,’ the Duke said. ‘That heads my list of problems. Oh – we have a city of three or four hundred thousand people but fewer than two thousand soldiers to police it and hold the walls; the population distrusts us, and there are so many spies in this palace that it is possible that every word I say to you goes straight to the former Duke, to Aeskepiles and to all of their various henchmen, grain prices are rising, the Etruscans want trading concessions to lift the blockade, I’ve had no letters from Alba in two weeks and the princess thinks I’m a tool, not a man or a knight.’ He sat back and drained his wine cup, and Toby came and took it from his hand. ‘On the positive side of the ledger, you’re getting married and that means a party, and by all that’s holy, our company needs a party.’

‘Could you stop calling yourself Duke?’ Ser Michael asked.

‘No,’ said the Duke. ‘We’re in Liviapolis, and this is the way they are. If I don’t live the role, no one will take me seriously.’ He looked at Michael. ‘You’re a thinking man, Michael – have you ever considered what victory and defeat actually are? They’re ideas, like justice. Different things to different men. Yes?’

‘I’m sure my tutor managed to mention this once or twice,’ Michael said. He fetched his own second cup of wine. Toby was rubbing oil into the shaft of the Duke’s beautiful ghiavarina, a long, heavy spear with flanges. What made this one unique was that the Captain had been given it by a dragon, and the shaft seemed to have been made from the wizard Harmodious’s staff.

The Duke laughed. ‘Mine, too. My point is that if we appear to be winning, we will win. If we appear to be losing, we will most certainly lose. That is the way, with men. I must be the Duke, in order to ensure obedience from Moreans and to encourage them to believe that I will lead them to victory.’

‘You’re not drunk after all,’ Ser Michael said.

The Duke leaned back, took the ghiavarina from Toby’s hands and shot to his feet. He thrust, rolled the weapon around in a long and elaborate butterfly cut and brought it back on guard – cut a candle in half, and then another. ‘I love this thing,’ he said.

Toby grinned.

‘It’s like the company,’ said the Captain. ‘It is so much fun to use that I want to use it. All the time, if possible.’ He grinned, and cut again, and sliced a bronze candlestick in two. ‘Shit,’ he muttered.

‘I take it back. You are drunk,’ Michael said. ‘Glorious Saint George, you just cut through an inch of bronze.’

The Duke leaned over and looked at the mirror-bright cut. ‘I did, too,’ he said. They grinned at each other, and the Duke cut the candlestick again, from the wrists-crossed guard of the window. The blade passed clean through the bronze again. Michael reached out to pick up the fallen piece and recoiled.

‘Hot,’ he said. ‘Can I try?’

He took the weapon, expecting to receive a shock or a prick of poison or some eldritch punishment, but there was none. He cut – and the blade clanged on the candlestick base. It went flying across the room, deeply dented.

‘It’s hermetical, at any rate,’ he said.

The Duke rolled his eyes. ‘Considering the source-’ he said. ‘Listen – I suppose I need a party too. Or perhaps a fight. Or both. I’m due to meet the Patriarch tomorrow – when we’re done there, let’s go into the bazaar and buy some things. Pretty things.’

Michael smiled. ‘Thanks, my lord,’ he said. ‘I agree about the fight, too.’ He nodded out the window. ‘The boys need a fight, too. Pretty soon they’ll start fighting each other.’

The Duke nodded. ‘You may get your wish. I’ve played a small hazard tonight.’ He shrugged. ‘Stay armed.’

Ser Milus shook his head. ‘The Cap’n is letting you three out on a pass? While the rest of us are locked in?’ He didn’t snarl, but Cully, the Captain’s own archer, stepped back. Like Bad Tom, Ser Milus was a force to be reckoned with, and it didn’t do to cross him.

It didn’t do to cross the Captain, either, so the three archers stood silent while Ser Milus looked them over and gave their passes to No Head, who sounded them out, his lips moving carefully. It was an entirely pro forma demonstration, as the Duke’s seal hung from their passes and it was unlikely to be a fake.

‘You’d think that if the Cap’n was only letting three men go and drink outside the palace, he’d pick three as was clean and well kitted,’ Milus said, fingering Long Paw’s threadbare doublet.

Long Paw wanted to say that it was a working evening and he didn’t want to ruin good kit in a fight, but the three of them had the strictest orders about secrecy. So he stood silently.

Ser Milus made a face. ‘I’ll go tell the fucking gate,’ he said, and walked out with the faint rattle and clash of a man in full harness.

‘He’s only in a state as it’s not his watch,’ No Head said to his mates. ‘Ser Alcaeus is on the roster – didn’t show to relieve his nibs.’

They were all back at attention when Bad Tom, announced by his leg armour, clanked back into the guardroom. ‘All right. You’re all clear. Drink for me, you bastards.’ Ser Milus appeared, and Tom whispered to him, and the surly standard bearer’s face cleared. He stepped back and nodded. ‘I’m for bed,’ he said, a little too loudly.

The three archers saluted and moved quickly out the guardroom door into the torchlit Outer Courtyard before Bad Tom could change his mind.

They passed through the gate, exchanged passwords with the Nordikans there, and Cully and Bent went immediately across the Great Square. Long Paw dropped away.

‘Look impressed,’ Cully hissed. ‘We can’t seem too sure of ourselves.’

So they drifted from statue to statue for a while, until Cully was sure. Bent was standing with his thumbs in his belt, admiring one of a naked woman with a sword.

‘We’re being followed,’ Cully said with satisfaction. ‘Let’s go.’

An hour later and the two men sat in a taverna lit by oil lamps, listening to four musicians play Morean instruments. The two archers didn’t know what the instruments were called, but they obviously liked the music, as well as the attention of the two young women who had attached themselves to the foreigners.

The crowd was thick – surprisingly thick for the time of night.

Bent’s girl became increasingly insistent, and he looked at Cully in mute appeal. Cully looked around carefully, and shrugged. ‘Stick it out a while longer,’ he said.

A voice behind Cully said, ‘Just go with the girls,’ but when he turned his head, there was no one there.

Cully leaned forward to Bent and made a sign, and Bent grinned. He dumped his girl off his lap, tossed a silver leopard to the musicians and let her pull him up the rickety stairs to the balcony above, and the tiny rooms behind over-fancy doors.

Cully’s girl took his hand in hers and all but dragged him past the music, and an elderly workman in a crushed straw hat muttered ‘Lucky bastard’ in surprisingly good Alban. Cully gave the man a broad wink and ran up the stairs.

Long Paw pulled the hat down over his eyes, paid for his wine, and slipped through the beaded curtain that served as a main door.

The street outside the taverna wasn’t packed – but there were a dozen or more men leaning against corners and pillars, all wearing swords. He kept his shoulders stooped and shuffled his feet.

One of the bravos in the street bumped into him – hard, and a-purpose. Long Paw allowed himself to lose his footing and fall, like an untrained man.

‘Fuck you, farmer,’ spat the bravo. ‘Stay clear of my sword.’

Long Paw crawled away, turned a corner and bolted. He’d had three days to get to know the area and he still found it difficult in the darkness. He went down an alley, got turned around, and had to climb a rickety fence. A small church gave him his bearings – he was, after all, less than a stadion from the palace.

He tossed his smelly farmer’s overshirt and his straw hat, got his scabbarded sword in his left hand, and ran.

The man sitting on the whore’s bed was wearing mail. His two henchmen filled the rest of the room, and they both had heavily padded jupons and heavy clubs.

‘So,’ the man said. ‘You two want to leave the Emperor’s service?’

Cully shrugged. ‘Maybe, and maybe not,’ he said. ‘I heard there was money in it.’

Bent couldn’t quite squeeze into the room. He watched the young woman slip down the corridor with real regret. He also noted that armed men were starting to fill the common room below.

‘Looks to me like you plan to have us whether we want to come or not,’ he said.

The man on the bed spread his hands. ‘You know,’ he said with a nasty smile, ‘either way, your mates will think you deserted, eh, foreigner?’

The Captain had been firm – they were to play the part of greedy mercenaries all the way to the end. Cully narrowed his eyes. ‘You mean there’s no money?’ he asked. He had a hand on his dagger.

The two thugs in jupons moved towards him, raising their clubs.

‘We’ll talk about money later,’ said the man on the bed. ‘That’s not my decision to make.’

‘I don’t like these odds,’ Bent said. He’d been leaning in the doorway, cramped by his own size and the smallness of the room. Now he seemed to uncoil. He didn’t fully draw his sword, but rather he slammed the pommel into the teeth of the nearest thug, who had somewhat foolishly chosen to ignore him. The man bent over, spitting teeth, and Bent broke his nose and kneed him in the groin in a single breath while Cully drew his dagger right-handed and mystified the other thug by swapping hands – the man blocked his empty right and received the left in his right eye. He fell, dead. Bent’s man fell wheezing, and opened his mouth to scream.

Cully looked at Bent. ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ he said.

Bent stepped on his fallen adversary’s throat.

The man on the bed turned white as a sheet. ‘Don’t you touch me,’ he said. ‘My people are all around you.’

Cully shook his head. ‘So – there’s no money?’

The man bit his lip.

‘If you scream, I’ll gut you,’ Bent said. He pulled the door closed. To Cully, he said, ‘There’s twenty men down there. I don’t think they plan to negotiate.’

Cully shook his head. ‘Fuck me. You thought you could take us down with two fat fucks?’ He sounded annoyed. ‘And now you’re alone with us. Doesn’t that seem like bad planning?’

‘He’s not their boss,’ Bent said. ‘Look at him.’

The man was terrified.

Cully reached for the heavy shutters on the window. Bent stopped him. ‘Crossbows,’ he said.

‘Oh, fuck,’ muttered Cully. ‘What have we got ourselves into?’

Ser Alcaeus spent more time with his mother than with the rest of the company – not by choice, but because the princess’s hold on the throne was more precarious than the Alban mercenaries seemed to imagine and his mother, the Lady Maria, was working very hard to fill the posts of the court and to get the basic machinery of justice and tax collection running properly. In their short time back in Liviapolis, Ser Alcaeus had twice had to debate a point with his mother’s inner council and then sat in on one of the Red Knight’s – the Duke of Thrake’s – meetings and had to debate the same point again. Once, he’d found his view changed and ended up debating the opposite point of view.

Eight days of riding the tiger and Alcaeus was exhausted. He avoided his chambers in the palace – he was too easy to find there – and walked across the Outer Court to the Athanatos barracks. Alone of the men in the company, he knew what a symbolic honour it was for a company of mercenaries to take the barracks of what had once been the Empire’s elite cavalry regiment.

He’d played in the neglected barracks as a child – he’d kissed a pretty Ordinary there and taken her by the hand and run into the barracks as an adolescent, on a perfumed May day.

Now the barracks were clean and full of life, and he passed the outer door as the great gates of the Outer Court were opened behind him.

Bad Tom was sitting at the duty desk. He looked up. ‘Ah! Where the fuck have you been, then?’

‘And a pleasant evening to you, too, Ser Thomas,’ said the Morean.

Tom rose from behind the desk. ‘You have the duty, ser.’

The Morean groaned.

‘And you can have it again tomorrow – just to teach ye to read the roster. Eh?’ Tom grinned, and got up – all six foot five inches of him – from behind the desk. ‘All yours, with my compliments.’

‘Oh, Tom,’ Alcaeus moaned. ‘I’m shot! I’ve done the throne’s paperwork all day. I’m not even armed.’

Ser Thomas grinned. ‘You need more exercise, boyo. Let’s fight tomorrow.’

Alcaeus met the big man’s eye and matched his grin. ‘Horse or foot?’

‘That’s my boy. Let’s be a-horse. I’ll be gentle on ye, and let ye sleep in after yon stint at the night watch. Go get your armour.’

Alcaeus found Dmitry, his squire, awake, and managed to get himself armed in less than fifteen minutes. The Morean boy was all contrition. ‘I tried to find you and tell you you had the duty, ser!’ and so Alcaeus learned that the Imperial Ordinaries had turned the boy out of the palace. He sighed, scraped his knuckles on his vambrace, and ran back to the guard room with Dmitry following him carrying his sword and helmet.

Tom nodded. ‘All yours. Long Paw is out in town on a pass with Cully and Bent. The rest are in barracks. The Captain – the Duke – doesn’t want the lads and lasses loose in the fleshpots until we’re better liked here so you should have a quiet night.’ He paused. ‘The – er – Duke ordered that the quarter guard keep their horses saddled and ready though. You might want to order the same for your own.’ He smiled nastily. ‘Perhaps not such a quiet night after all, eh?’

Tom clapped his shoulder and retired, sabatons snapping crisply on the stone floor. Alcaeus leaned back in the heavy chair, breathing hard, and cursing his luck. He waved Dmitry to see to his horse, and the younger man went out into the cold night. Alcaeus leaned back in the big seat – big enough for a man in armour. His eyelids were heavy and he cursed.

The last thing I need is to fall asleep on duty.

He poured himself some mulled cider, heating on the hearth, his arms heavy in harness, drank it off, and felt a little better.

No Head sat at the other table, and he was writing furiously. Alcaeus leaned over and found that the man was copying a poem from a copybook – in low Archaic.

As Alcaeus loved poetry, he began to follow along.

‘Do ye mind?’ No Head asked. ‘I don’t like to be watched.’

Alcaeus rose and apologised. He could hear commotion in the courtyard. ‘That’s good stuff. Where’d you get it?’ he asked.

No Head looked up. ‘No idea. Ser Michael gave it to me to copy.’ The man stretched his right hand. ‘He’s teaching me to read and write.’

Alcaeus, who took literacy for granted, paused and then reordered his thoughts. ‘Ah – I crave your pardon. I wasn’t watching you write, I was reading the poem.’

No Head laughed. ‘It is a poem, I suppose. I can’t read it. I’m just copying the letters.’ He leaned back. ‘And it cramps my hand worse than a sword fight. But I’m keen to learn – I want to write a book.’

Alcaeus thought he should stand watch more often. He’d seldom met anyone who struck him as less bookish than No Head. ‘Really?’ Alcaeus asked, worrying in the same moment that he sounded a little too surprised.

No Head leaned over. ‘I hear you are a writer, eh?’

Alcaeus nodded. ‘I think I write all the time. In my sleep, even.’ He shrugged. ‘If I’m not scribbling, I’m thinking about it.’

No Head nodded. ‘That’s just it, ain’t it? It is like a bug that bites you, and then you can’t let it go. What do you write about?’

Alcaeus shrugged. ‘Life,’ he admitted. ‘Love. Women. Sometimes war.’ He shrugged. The commotion in the courtyard was growing closer. ‘And you?’ he asked.

‘I want to write a book about how to conduct a siege,’ No Head said. ‘How to build the big engines – how to choose the wood, how to make the torsion ropes, how to site ’em. How to dig a trench, and how to hold it. How to make fire.’

Alcaeus laughed. ‘That’s a good title. How to Make Fire.’ He sighed. ‘Or maybe Kindles Fire. It sounds different from my books – but half the world would want a copy, I suppose. Have you thought that you might be telling someone how to lay siege to you? You could be on the receiving end of your own-’

At that moment, the doors to the guardroom opened and a pair of Nordikans stood there with a tall, bearded man in a black travelling gown.

‘Your man doesn’t know the passwords,’ said the smaller of the two Nordikans. He grinned at Alcaeus.

Alcaeus had never seen the man before, so he shook his head. Then he thought of the latest command meeting and the Duke’s instructions about spies. His mother’s comments in the same vein.

‘Bring him here,’ Alcaeus ordered.

‘I’m not a member of the company,’ the man said quietly.

Alcaeus shook his head in exasperation. There was more commotion out in the courtyard, and the door was open and cold air was pouring into the guardroom.

Long Paw came through the door with three more Nordikans.

‘Quarter guard,’ Long Paw shouted.

Alcaeus choked. It was the company’s habit to keep almost a quarter of their men in full harness, archers with bows strung, at all times when under threat, but in barracks in the palace, they’d reduced this commitment to just twenty men. And he hadn’t inspected them-

But of course, Tom had. And as the shout went up, they came pounding down the corridors – Oak Pew was the first one through the double doors at the barracks’ end of the guardroom. She had a war bow in her fist and she already had a steel cap on her head. Ser Michael was next, and then the Captain himself, appearing fully armed from his office with Toby at his heels, and then the rest of them – Gelfred looked as if he’d been asleep in full harness while John le Bailli looked fresh, and right behind him was one of the new men-at-arms – Kelvin Ewald, a small man with a long scar. He wore a fancy harness.

‘To horse,’ said the Captain.

Long Paw said, ‘There are twenty or thirty men to take them. It was an ambush.’

The Captain was already getting his leg over his new gelding, bought from the Imperial stables. He cursed.

Long Paw rolled onto a small Eastern horse, and they were off, and the Nordikans had the gate open. Then they rode across the square and thought the streets – first a broad street, and then a sharp corner, and then another, the street narrowing all the way, and then another turn, a Y intersection . . .

Long Paw raised his arm.

There were two more men – dead or dying – in the doorway of the tiny room, and Bent had a dagger wound in his left arm.

The man on the bed was unconscious, as Cully had punched him in the head.

‘My turn,’ Cully said. ‘Make room.’

He and Bent switched – even this movement was the result of practice, and they changed like dance partners. Cully had his buckler off his hip, and he wrapped it around Bent from the left, caught a blow intended for the wounded man and made a short slash with his arming sword as Bent ducked away behind him. His new adversary didn’t really want to be there, alone, against a much better swordsman, and he backed away, assuming that Cully wouldn’t follow him from the safety of the doorway.

He was wrong, and he died for it, and then Cully was loose in the corridor, and he cut down two men – whirled, and managed to slam his buckler into the archer’s head – there was an archer in the corridor, looking for a shot he never took. Cully’s point sliced through the candle in a wall sconce, and a kick smashed the table with a dozen small oil lamps.

In the comparative saftey of a considerably darker corridor he got his back into the room, and took a knee.

‘I’m too old for this shit,’ he said.

Bent cackled.

And then a faint smell of smoke caught at the back of Cully’s throat.

Long Paw sent half a dozen archers down the black maw of an alley. He turned to the Duke and shook his head. ‘Never thought they’d have so many men. They have archers on two buildings, that I saw – maybe more.’

The Duke scratched under his chin. ‘I’d like to take them all.’

‘We’d lose Bent and Cully,’ Long Paw said.

The Duke grinned. ‘Can’t have that. Well, Michael said he wanted a fight. If the men in harness go on foot to clear the tavern we can let the archers try and clear the roofs. Yes?’

Ser Alcaeus nodded. ‘We’ve got a handful of Scholae. They followed us.’

The Duke whirled his horse. ‘Watch them.’

‘Watch them?’ Ser Alcaeus asked. ‘I’m related to half of them.’

The Duke wasn’t to be swayed. He leaned in close. ‘Alcaeus, this is all an elaborate attempt to catch a spy. This place is riddled with traitors, and the palace-’

Long Paw was motioning. ‘The taverna’s afire,’ he called.

The Duke shrugged. ‘Too late for talk. Dismount – horse holders. Helmets on, armoured men on me, unarmoured go with Long Paw. I want as many prisoners as can be taken, commensurate with not losing one of you.’

Oak Pew laughed aloud. The Duke frowned at her, and Sauce swatted the top of her steel cap with a gauntlet. ‘Prisoners,’ Sauce said with a nod.

Then they were off into the dark. Alcaeus knew this part of town well enough from his Academy days, but not in the dark – or rather, the streets he knew in the dark were closer to the waterfront. He followed Ser Michael, who followed Ser Alison, who followed the Duke.

They didn’t have to go far. They crossed one intersection and jogged noisily down a very narrow alley full of rubbish, and then they emerged into a small square lit by a burning building.

Ser Alcaeus saw a man right where he expected to, making for the mouth of the next street, and he ran across the flagstones of the ancient square, missed his quarry but cut another man off and knocked him down with an armoured arm to the face. A sword struck his back, rang off his backplate, and then the fighting was over – Alcaeus whirled to find Ser Michael had cut his assailant’s arm off at the elbow. The bravos were armed with side swords, daggers, and clubs – they couldn’t stand even a moment against armoured men, and they ran or surrendered very quickly.

Ser Alison and the Duke went straight into the taverna. It wasn’t fully afire – the only bright flames were coming from the roof.

A fire company appeared – forty men with buckets. The buckets went down into the cisterns, and the water started to go onto nearby houses first, to prevent the spread.

Someone slammed into Alcaeus from behind, and he sprawled on the flagstones – a crossbow bolt slammed into the stone nearest his outstretched hand. He rolled – life at the Morean court encouraged quick responses to assassination – and saw the man who’d knocked him flat. He got a knee under him, got his dagger in his right fist-

The man raised his visor. ‘I’m on your side,’ he hissed. He offered a hand, but Alcaeus was not quick to trust in a fight – he backed away, and an arrow struck him.

The stranger waved him away. ‘Get under cover!’ he shouted, and turned.

Presenting his back to Alcaeus seemed a gesture of trust – Alcaeus took it and followed him, dimly recognising the black cloak of the stranger that the Nordikans had brought to him in the guardroom, what seemed like hours before.

The black-cloaked stranger found an external staircase and pounded up it, his heavy boots making the stairs shake, but Alcaeus followed him, and felt the second-storey balcony move. Behind him, he saw that the square had emptied as more and more bolts were shot at anyone moving in the light.

Suddenly, the rooftops were bathed in light – a light suspended above the centre of the square, dazzling in its brightness. Even in the confines of a helmet, Alcaeus could see that there were archers on some of the rooftops. Even as he looked, they realised that they were visible. Some ducked, others took arrows from the company archers in the streets.

The stranger leaped up, grabbed a lead gutter, and swung himself onto the sill of a thousand-year-old window. ‘On the roof!’ he called to Alcaeus.

Ser Alcaeus had a moment to imagine that this might be a very clever plot to kidnap him, and then he followed the stranger – up onto the roof, and then, panting inside his helmet, over a roof-edge wall and down onto the next roof – a tiled roof that hadn’t had its tiles changed in so long that they just peeped out from a layer of moss and lichen. He could hear old tiles breaking under his feet, but the foliage was good footing and he followed the stranger over the peak-

And into a trio of desperate men. All three wore dark clothing and facemasks. The furthest took one look at the two coming over the roofline and simply jumped over the roof edge to die on the cobbles below, or not.

The other two attacked the stranger. He absorbed a blow in his heavy black cloak, drew his sword and cut into the second man’s attack. Alcaeus was fully armoured and considerably less elegant – he fell into the nearest opponent, ignored two cuts that he didn’t see in the dark. The other man chose to wrestle, and Alcaeus broke his arm and then knocked him unconscious against his armoured knee.

The stranger had disarmed his man and was tying his hands with his belt.

Alcaeus opened his visor and breathed. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

The man’s smile shone in the bright white hermetical light that still hung over the square in front of the taverna. ‘I’m your new chaplain,’ he said.

The Duke went into the taverna and found Cully and Bent lying flat in the taproom with their prisoner wedged between them. He got them out the door, a bolt zanged off his helmet, and he ducked back into the doorway of the taverna.

Your men need better light, Harmodius said.

He cast that working himself, and he was surprised at the brilliance of his light. Then he added to it by putting subsidiary workings over the houses surrounding the little square – tall, stuccoed houses with a variety of rooflines perfect to hide assassins and archers.

The roar of the fire alerted him, and the fire company in the square wasn’t going to accomplish anything – one or two had already been hit by arrows, and the rest were taking cover, and the bucket chain was irretrievably wrecked.

But somewhere under his feet was a cistern with thousands of gallons of water. He worked a displacement-

He was in his place of power, locating the water with one very small working while manipulating its location. On the marble plinth, Harmodius nodded.

Well done, boy. So much simpler than creating the water. No – not over the roof – under the roof. You aren’t limited in your placement. Right on the fire-

The Duke cast. As he cast his working, Harmodius said, Aren’t we standing right under-

The wall of water extinguished the blaze instantly.

The new Duke of Thrake was not as elegant as he would have liked to be when he met his new chaplain a few minutes later – soaked to the skin in the chill autumn air, he was already shivering under his armour, despite the heavy cloak that Ser Michael produced and threw over him. Another cloak went over Bent, who’d been knocked flat by the water and was still having trouble breathing.

The Duke sneezed again.

‘So the man Cully took . . . ?’ he asked.

Bad Tom shook his head. ‘He knows some names and two locations. He’s paid a day-labourer in the Navy Yard, and he’s used to picking up a package from the palace every day.’

‘This wasn’t a complete waste of time, then,’ the Duke said, and sneezed again.

‘You might have told me,’ Ser Milus said.

The Duke nodded. ‘I probably should have,’ he admitted.

Ser Gavin came in and threw himself down on a stool. ‘Sellswords and thugs. The two that Alcaeus and the priest caught are merely more expensive thugs. They were hired to ambush anyone who came to the taverna.’

Cully, who had been sitting listening, shook his head. ‘Give me a straight-on battle anytime,’ he said. ‘They offered to pay us to desert, but they never meant to pay us, they only meant to kill us. We never meant to desert – we meant to capture them. They expected us to double-cross them and laid an ambush, but they didn’t expect you to bring the whole quarter guard with you, so we fucked them up.’

The Duke nodded. ‘That’s about it. So now we follow our leads: watch part of the laundry service to see who follows the directions our captured bully is used to leaving; pick up the day-labour spy at the Navy Yard-’

‘Who won’t know anything,’ Bad Tom spat.

The Duke shrugged, and then sneezed twice. ‘It was worth a try,’ he said.

Ser Gavin said, ‘You should dry your hair.’ He got a towel and tossed it to his brother. ‘Now what do we do?’

Ser Milus was still annoyed. ‘It sounds like you had a fight and I wasn’t in it,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Three in a secret,’ the Duke muttered. ‘I’m sorry, Milus, I wasn’t thinking clearly.’ He spread his hands. ‘I think I’m trying to do too many things.’ To Gavin he said, ‘Now let’s try a poison pill.’

‘What’s that?’ Gavin asked.

‘I tell several people that I suspect a secret has been betrayed – a very hot secret. I give them each a slightly different secret, and then I see what happens. It’s like dropping dye into a sewer, to see where it comes out.’

‘And then what?’ Ser Gavin asked.

‘No idea,’ the Duke answered. ‘But it’s time. We need to take the war to Andronicus, before he gets in here.’ He sneezed. ‘First we have to bring in the fur caravans.’

‘What fur caravans?’ Gavin asked.

The next day, the Duke of Thrake rode across the square to the tall onion-topped spires of the Academy and was admitted with much fanfare. He dismounted at the hundred steps that rose from street level all the way to the base of the ancient Temple of Poseidon – now the church of Saint Mark the Evangelist – and he walked up the steps accompanied by Ser Alcaeus and his new chaplain, Father Arnaud. He sneezed every few steps, and he didn’t move very quickly.

He paused at eye level with the ancient statue to Cerberus, guardian of the underworld. The statue was enormous, and each of the dog’s three great heads had its mouth open and fangs bared.

‘Why does it feel so empty?’ Father Arnaud asked.

The Megas Ducas patted a head affectionately. ‘The statue is itself an hermetical void. Students can throw anything they like inside. And they do. This is where they rid themselves of anything that went wrong.’ He grinned. ‘And no questions asked.’

‘Where does it go?’ asked the Alban.

The Megas Ducas smiled wickedly. ‘The Chancellor’s office? The Patriarch’s desk? Hell?’ He shook his head.

Ser Alcaeus looed at him. ‘Admit it! You were a student here.’

‘Never,’ said the Megas Ducas. ‘Come! Until we reach the antechamber, we have not yet begun to wait.’

At the top, they were met by a pair of priests who led them along the magnificent colonnade under the heavy marble decoration of the ancient architrave and into the right-hand building, another ancient temple, smaller, but gemlike in its perfection with gold inlay in marble and a row of statues that made the Duke pause in admiration.

The lead priest smiled indulgently. ‘Pagan heroes,’ he said. ‘The statues were brought from the old world.’

Ser Alcaeus had seen them every day of his Academy career, and he smiled to see his Captain admire one, and then the next.

‘Superb,’ he said.

Father Arnaud shrugged. ‘Why is our ability to duplicate God’s work in lifeless marble so attractive to men?’ he asked.

The Duke raised an eyebrow at him. He seemed to be saying, ‘Is that the best you can do?’

Father Arnaud shrugged.

They were led past the statues, through a palatial set of arches that were themselves part of one of the city’s most ancient pieces of fortification, and then into a relatively modern hall of stone and timber. There were several young men and four gowned nuns sitting primly on benches. The priests bowed and waved to servitors, who brought small glasses of wine – the precise quantity that travellers were usually offered at monasteries.

The young people watched the Duke carefully, as if he might be dangerous. Ser Alcaeus leaned over. ‘That’s the Baldesce boy,’ he breathed. ‘His father is the Podesta of all the Etruscans in the city.’

Father Arnaud sat on one of the long benches. ‘If I put my feet up and go to sleep, will the Patriarch be offended?’ he asked. He did pull his black cloak about him.

The Duke snapped, ‘As he’s the most powerful prelate in Nova Terra, yes. I’d rather you were polite, Father.’

The Baldesce boy rose from his friends and came over. ‘You are the new Duke of Thrake,’ he said with a pretty bow.

The Duke rose. ‘It’s all true,’ he said.

The young man smiled. ‘My father hates you,’ he said. ‘I should hate you too, but you are cutting a fine figure here. Is the Patriarch keeping you waiting?’

Ser Alcaeus tried to throw the Duke a warning glance, but the Duke nodded. ‘I suppose, but it’s scarcely waiting yet. Waiting, as such, only really starts after the first hour, or that’s what I’m told.’

The Etruscan boy laughed. ‘Well, I just thought someone should tell you that our friend is having his examination, and it is running long over time – but the Holy Father isn’t making you cool your heels.’

Noting that their friend hadn’t been eaten by the Duke, the four nuns and two other young men were drifting very slowly towards the conversation.

The Duke was interested. ‘Why is your friend being examined? For heresy?’

One of the nuns laughed. ‘He’s not a heretic as far as I know,’ she said. She looked confused. ‘Actually, he is. Now that I think of it, he’s a barbarian like you-’

The Duke paused and then sneezed into his sleeve. ‘Don’t worry, sister. Where I come from, barbarian is the very highest of compliments.’

There was some shuffling of feet.

‘Besides,’ the Duke went on, ‘almost no one is a barbarian like me.’

Baldesce laughed. ‘Is it true that you are making a truce with the Merchant League?’ he asked.

The Duke managed a smile. ‘Are you usually this bold?’ he asked.

‘My father is the Podesta,’ Baldesce said.

The Duke smiled. ‘In that case, it will do me no harm to say that we have released all of our Etruscan prisoners. The rest is between your father and the Merchant League.’

Father Arnaud rolled his eyes.

The double doors opened.

Morgan Mortirmir wore a smile as radiant as a hot fire on a cold day. Behind him, the Patriarch stood in robes that had once been black and had faded over many years to a dark blue-grey. The Patriarch had his arms in his sleeves and he was smiling, too.

He walked out into the antechamber. The young man’s friends walked over to him, shook hands, and in the case of two of the nuns, chaste embraces were exchanged. The young man continued to beam happily. ‘I passed,’ he said, six or seven times.

Baldesce pumped his hand. ‘You really are an idiot,’ he remarked. ‘Of course you were going to pass.’

The Duke walked over, inserted himself among the young man’s classmates – he was not more than five years older than the eldest – and shook the young man’s hand. ‘I gather we are countrymen,’ he said. ‘You are Alban?’

‘Oh yes, sir,’ Mortirmir said. ‘I know who you are – I’ve seen you at the palace!’ He beamed at the Duke.

Now there is power. Hermes Trismegistus, that boy has power.

Please efface yourself. How much do I need to drink, to rid myself of you?

‘You are a student here, I understand?’ the Duke asked.

‘Yes, my lord Duke.’

‘Study hard. Ever thought of a career as a professional soldier?’ the Duke asked.

‘Yes, my lord!’ the boy said.

‘I see you wear a sword,’ the Duke continued.

‘I’ve told him it’s a foolish thing for a practitioner,’ Baldesce said.

The Duke smiled. ‘I’ve never found it that foolish,’ he answered, and then ruined his patronising look with a heavy sneeze.

He walked from Mortirmir to the Patriarch, who allowed him to kiss his ring. ‘There goes a most entertaining young man,’ said the Patriarch. ‘Very late to his power – very powerful, I think. Perhaps not the most powerful in his class, but very bright. A pleasure to test.’ He bowed and led them down another corridor, this one a row of cloisters facing into a beautiful courtyard with four quince trees trained to heavy wooden screens. One was in flower; one was just budding, one was in fruit, and one was green and empty.

The Patriarch led them along the cloisters and into a small office with a single massive desk covered in books and scrolls. ‘Find room where you can,’ he said, a little absently. ‘How can I help you, my lord Duke?’

‘Holy father, I’ve come-’ the Duke was looking at a scroll. ‘This is an original copy of Hereklitus?’ he said. ‘But the Suda says he offered his book as a sacrifice to Artemis!’

The Patriarch smiled. ‘The Suda says a great many foolish things. You read High Archaic?’

‘Very slowly, Holy Father.’ His finger was following his eyes.

Ser Alcaeus tried to attract his Captain’s attention.

Father Arnaud stood rigid as a board.

The Patriarch looked at Father Arnaud. ‘You are a knight of Saint Thomas, I think?’

‘Yes, Holy Father,’ the chaplain said. ‘A priest.’

‘A priest? That must be very difficult, Father. The teachings of Jesus are not easy to reconcile with violence.’ The Patriarch leaned forward. ‘Or how does it seem to you?’

Father Arnaud bowed. ‘I have had struggles,’ he admitted.

The Patriarch nodded. ‘You would be a mere brute if you had not.’ But he seemed well satisfied, and offered his ring to the priest to kiss.

‘Ser Alcaeus,’ he said. ‘How is your lady mother? Busy hatching plots?’

Rather than taking offence, Ser Alcaeus nodded. ‘Truthfully, Holy Father, she is too busy to hatch the least plot. Her only plot now is to save the Empire.’

The Patriarch raised an eyebrow at this but he chuckled warmly and turned to the Duke. ‘You must pardon me, my lord, but Alcaeus was one of my students – not much of a practitioner, but a fine mind and a very able poet, when he chooses to use his powers for good. He wrote many scurrilous verses about his teachers.’

Alcaeus writhed.

The Patriarch’s heavily lidded eyes fell back on the Duke.

‘Surely you can read faster than that,’ he said.

The Duke looked up. ‘The Academy is choosing to remain neutral,’ he said.

Alcaeus blanched.

The Duke went on, ‘The University’s neutrality is close to treason, Holy Father. The Emperor has been taken, and the traitor who took him has already offered to sell a portion of the Empire to get what he wants. The Emperor’s own magister, who must have been appointed by the Academy, has proven a traitor. He is a man of exceptional power. Why is the Academy so chary of taking sides?’

The Patriarch’s face gave nothing away. ‘I’m sorry that you feel we’ve been neutral,’ he said carefully. ‘The Academy is at the service of the palace – now and any time in the future.’

‘Couldn’t you have prevented the Emperor’s capture?’ the Duke asked. He sat up. ‘At least one of your astrologers must have predicted it.’

The Patriarch steepled his fingers. ‘And we informed the palace.’ He made a motion with his hands. ‘Sadly, through Master Aeskepiles, who really is a traitor – to the palace, and to his training. But that is not the fault of the Church or the University.’ He leaned forward. ‘You are a mage yourself,’ he said. ‘But something about you is quite odd – as if you have two souls.’

The Duke leaned back.

Hide.

Silence . . .

‘I had a tutor in the ars magicka who was trained here. I practise when I can.’ The Duke nodded. ‘If I had any time at all, I’d ask to attend some classes.’

‘The capture of another soul is necromancy, is heresy and is an illegal hermetical act,’ the Patriarch said. He leaned forward. ‘Is that another soul I sense?’ he asked.

‘No,’ the Duke lied smoothly.

The Patriarch narrowed his eyes.

‘Holy Father, if I were a daemon I’d hardly have strolled into your office . . .’

The Patriarch leaned back and laughed. ‘I sometimes wonder. But it may just be my age. Sometimes I sense doubles in the aethereal.’ His gaze sharpened. ‘And sometimes I sense heresy where there is none. You bear the reputation as the very spawn of Satan, despite saving Lissen Carrak from the Wild.’

‘Really?’ asked the Duke. ‘I also saved this city from treason, I believe. And my people have been attacked by hermeticism – right here, under your very nose, Holy Father.’

The Patriarch leaned back. ‘I am hardly your foe, here.’

The Duke nodded. ‘I never thought you were. May we speak privately?’

Father Arnaud led the procession out of the Patriarch’s private office.

The two men were entirely amicable when they emerged. The Patriarch held the Duke’s arm, they embraced, and then the Duke kissed the Patriarch’s ring.

‘Save the Emperor,’ the Patriarch said.

‘I’m doing all I can,’ said the Duke.

Father Arnaud stepped forward. ‘Holy Father, I have a message from Prior Wishart.’

The Patriarch nodded. ‘I have never met him, but he has a great reputation. Yet your order has, in the past, remained aloof from us and even leaned towards Rhum.’

Father Arnaud merely held the scroll out and said nothing.

The Patriarch laughed. ‘Old men will go on,’ he allowed, and took the scroll. He read quickly, and then looked over the top of the scroll at the Duke. ‘The King of Alba is appointing a Scholastic Bishop of Lorica?’ he said.

The Duke was, for once, obviously taken aback. He glared at Father Arnaud and bowed to the prelate. ‘My apologies. I had no idea.’

The Patriarch tapped the scroll on his teeth. ‘I will see you in less than a week. Let me think on this. ‘He raised a hand and made a full benediction. ‘Go with God.’

That was far too close.

Harmodius, you are becoming a liability.

I’m working on it! The old man shook the head of his statue. I’m finally in a town where I can buy things I need. Things you need. I just need more time.

Old man, you have taught me well; you have saved the company at least once; without you, I’d have lost the siege at Lissen Carak. But my headaches are worse every day, and I’m starting to make mistakes – mistakes that will kill people I love.

I just need more time. A few weeks. Must I beg?

No, said the Red Knight.

Harmodius made an extra effort to go deep.

When they left the Patriarch, the Duke took his friends shopping. Ser Michael and a deeply blushing Kaitlin met them at the foot of the Academy steps, as did Ser Gavin and Ser Thomas and Ser Alison. They all wore a minimum of armour – just breastplates – and carried swords and wore their jewels. They were attended by forty pages in the scarlet company livery, and even though they were riding almost every horse the company possessed, they looked very capable.

‘Look rich and dangerous,’ he told them.

Shopping in the city was an endless set of nested choices – tables of wares and booths and shops with polished hardwood walls and glass – real glass – in the windows, or small stalls made of hand-woven carpets from the far east, or simply a rude box of barn boards. There was a square of jewellers, a square of glovers, a square of sword smiths and a square of armourers, of silk weavers, of tailors, of veil makers, of perfumers.

The ostensible purpose of the expedition was to buy everything required for a wedding, but the Duke clearly had his own agenda, and in the square of the jewellers, he led them to the most elegant shop in the middle of the long block, where he was received like a visiting prince. He turned to Ser Michael and took him by the hand. ‘You are rich,’ he said. ‘Buy this beautiful young woman a trinket or two.’

‘With what?’ Michael spat.

‘Just choose some things,’ the Duke said, and followed his host through a door which closed behind him.

Sauce, of all people, chose a comb with red and green enamel. The comb depicted two knights locked in mortal combat – dagger to dagger – in lovingly detailed harness, and she took off her hat, put it in her hair, and smiled into a mirror – and then closed her mouth to hide the missing teeth. ‘How much?’ she asked.

A shop boy was sent for sweet tea.

Ser Michael found his lady-love a wild rose in gold and garnets. She loved it, and he loved her. He put it on the padded silver tray.

Ser Gavin wandered from shelf to shelf, and finally chose a pair of bodkins for lacing and a set of buttons – cunning, tiny buttons for a lady’s gown, all filigree with tiny bells hidden inside that made a lustrous sound.

The other knights tried not to damage anything.

The Duke emerged with a tight smile, and he and the jeweller embraced. He examined Ser Michael’s choices and his smile grew broader.

‘On my tab,’ he said quietly.

Sauce paid in hard silver and softer gold, from a bag she produced.

Ser Michael noted that Sauce and the Captain exchanged a long glance as the bag was closed and she stowed it away.

In the square of the glovers, all discipline broke down, and the knights began to spend money like the mercenaries they were. Gloves were one of a soldier’s most precious possessions – along with boots, an item upon which a man’s comfort depended utterly. Good gloves were essential under gauntlets and just as necessary for archers.

Master Baldesce, Master Mortirmir and the nuns were also buying gloves, and by a gradual process of social osmosis, they were absorbed into the company and joined the knights, squires and pages at a tavern for wine.

The Duke walked from cup to cup, dipping the point of his roundel dagger into each pitcher before the wine was served, and the pages served it themselves. Michael could see his Captain was taking no chances.

Young Baldesce turned to Mortirmir. ‘He’s a magister! Look at his casting. Clean!’

Master Mortirmir watched the Duke’s simple working with an avid curiosity.

After wine, they visited armourers. The Captain went from shop to shop for an hour, and while Kaitlin might have been bored, her husband-to-be entertained her by singing romances in a street-side wineshop. A pair of Morean street singers were attracted – they listened first, and then began to play accompaniment so good that all the knights who weren’t avid for new armour applauded, and the pages were smitten. Then the street singers sang. The knights distributed largesse, and by the time the Captain had been carefully measured for a new breast and back in hardened steel, a small theatre had been set up and one of the ancient plays was being performed by a troupe of mimes in antic clothes.

Kaitlin, despite her pregnancy and fatigue, was delighted.

The Duke stopped by the singers and engaged them for the wedding party, and the actors as well. He paid them a fair amount of money, which was as well, because all of them subsequently received visits from Bad Tom that might have caused them to question their luck.

Every knight, man-at-arms and page had his sword sharpened in the street of cutlers, and the young Etruscan watched, delighted, as twenty mercenary swordsmen tested blades, so that wherever one looked, there was the soft slip of a balanced blade through the air – wrist cuts, overhand thrusts, imbrocattae. The sword smiths earned more hard coin in an hour than they usually saw in two weeks.

The Duke prowled the street like a predator in search of prey, swishing an arming sword through the air, admiring a brilliantly made Tartar sabre in green leather, fondling a roundel dagger – until he settled on one shop which was neither grander nor shabbier than the rest.

He went in. There were a dozen swords on the walls, and he could see the workshops built into the stone of the hillside beyond and smell the fires and the metallic odour the grinding wheels gave off. The master cutler came out in person, wiping his hands. He was small, wiry, and looked more like a schoolmaster than a smith.

Ser Michael stood at the Duke’s shoulder. He was part of an impromptu conspiracy – with Tom and Sauce and Gavin – to keep the Captain under their eyes all the time. He was odder than usual; too often drunk, and too often irritable.

But not in the cutler’s shop. There, he was more elated.

‘You make the best blades,’ the Duke said.

The cutler pursed his lips. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, as if it displeased him. ‘That is, Maestro Plaekus makes them, and I turn them into weapons.’ He frowned again. ‘What is it you want?’

There followed a long exchange. Apprentices ran for wooden forms, for swords – at one point, a dagger was borrowed from a Morean nobleman’s house two streets way.

In the end, the Duke settled on a length, a hilt, a pommel, blade shape, a cross section, a weight. And a matching basilard.

‘Jewels?’ the cutler asked.

Michael had seldom seen so much disdain packed into one word.

‘No,’ said the Duke. ‘Ghastly idea. But red enamel. Red scabbard.’ He smiled. ‘Red everything. And gold.’

The cutler nodded wearily. ‘Of course, gold.’

The Duke leaned forward. Michael saw the change – a subtle change in body language, a change in tone. He didn’t know what it meant, but he’d seen it happen once or twice.

‘May I ask a personal question?’ the Duke said.

The cutler raised an eyebrow, as if the ways of the gentry and the killers who bought his wares were so alien that he couldn’t be expected to know what was next. ‘Let’s ee, my lord,’ he said smoothly.

‘Wasn’t the Emperor’s magister once one of your apprentices?’ the Duke asked.

The cutler sighed. ‘Aye.’ His Morean was difficult to follow, accented the way the Morean islanders spoke. ‘He was here twenty years.’ He frowned. ‘More than an apprentice.’

The Duke nodded. ‘Do you – perhaps – have anything of his?’

To Ser Michael, it was that moment when your opponent was a little too eager to draw the next card. The Duke was up to something.

‘When he left-’ The cutler shrugged. ‘He left all his work things. When he came into his powers.’ He looked away. ‘He was already thirty years old. Very late.’

Wine was served, and sugared nuts.

A tall woman appeared with a bundle. ‘Two work smocks, and a cap.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘I made him the cap, before he was so high and mighty. Kept sparks out of his hair.’

The Duke took the cap carefully – almost reverentially. ‘Such a famous man,’ he said.

Harmodius released control of his host and slammed his aethereal fist into his aethereal palm.

The Captain was shaken – scared, and betrayed. ‘How dare you!’

Harmodius raised an aethereal eyebrow. ‘You want rid of me. I want to be out of you. I have a plan. Sometimes, I need your body to make it move along.’

The Captain felt as if he might vomit. But it was – again – his body. He surfaced not in conscious control and found that he was sitting in a chair. In the moment of confusion, his body had apparently let go a cup of wine. Ser Michael was looking at him as if he’d grown a second head – Gavin was standing with a hand on his shoulder.

‘Brother?’ he asked. ‘You were not yourself.’

The Megas Ducas grunted. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he said.

He looked down, and in his right hand, wound around his index finger, he had a hair – a thick, coarse black hair.

Don’t lose that! Harmodius said.

Nor was that the limit of the Duke’s odd behaviour.

He made some odd stops. He spent so much time in a street of apothecaries and alchemists that the rest of the company moved on and began selecting fabrics for Kaitlin’s dress, a subject on which, it turned out, every knight had an opinion. But when Kaitlin and her sisters had found a shop they liked, they went in with Mag the seamstress and Lis the laundress and didn’t emerge until the Duke was long returned from the alchemists. He bought scarlet wool for the company, and brocades for others; velvet for a purse, and a few other pieces.

Quite late in the day, Father Arnaud watched him. ‘Are you unwell?’ he asked.

The Duke turned to Father Arnaud. ‘May I refresh your clothes, Father?’ He met the priest’s eye easily enough. ‘I’ve been better. But I’m hoping to – rid myself of a malady.’

Arnaud was leaning against an ancient column that helped to support a booth that sold nothing but silk gauze. He nodded. ‘If you offer me charity, you gain in honour; if you mean to make me look better as an adornment of your power – well, you still gain, I suspect.’ He smiled. ‘Either way, I’d very much appreciate a new cloak.’

The Duke reached down and lifted the hem of his chaplain’s cloak. ‘It’s good cloth, but something lifted the black dye-’ Indeed, the whole lower half of the cloak was dun brown instead of the deep, rich black of the order.

‘Giant shit,’ the priest said carefully.

The Duke’s eyebrows shot up.

The priest leaned in. ‘I have letters for you. I assume you are spending all this money to a purpose?’

The Duke managed a thin-lipped smile. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Arnaud shrugged. ‘I know you aren’t used to having a chaplain, but I have this task as a penance and I mean to do it.’ He leaned forward. ‘What malady?’

The Duke’s eyebrows shot up further and he furrowed his brow a moment, as if listening to someone. Then he shrugged. ‘I might like having someone to bounce things off,’ he said. ‘As long as you aren’t too talkative.’ Kaitlin and Michael had their heads together and were as pretty as a picture of two saints. ‘Will you marry them?’

‘Saint Michael, it would be a sin not to wed them. Of course I will.’ The priest smiled.

‘We’re spending money to show what nice, rich mercenaries we are. We need to win these people over, and lately I’ve been losing.’ The Duke smiled at Sauce, who was waving a beautiful piece of scarlet velvet.

‘Are you expecting to be attacked?’ the priest asked. He was losing track of the number of conversational threads that his new employer could weave at one time.

‘Only six people knew where we were going after the Patriarch,’ the Duke said. ‘If one of them has turned, I’ll know it in an hour.’

‘You are the only soldier I know who doesn’t swear,’ Father Arnaud said.

‘Is that a sin? God and I have our own arrangement.’ The Duke’s smile was cold as ice. ‘My company needs a chaplain. I do not happen to need a confessor.’

Father Arnaud leaned close. ‘But you like a challenge,’ he said.

‘I do,’ said the Duke.

‘Me, too,’ said the priest.

They made it back to the palace without being attacked, having spent a staggering sum on jewels, another on gloves, and yet more on cloth. Even the pages had new daggers. The Duke insisted on taking them back to the square of armourers so that they could all see the model for his new breast and back, in the new Etruscan style.

The priest rode with Ser Alison. She’d craved a blessing from him as soon as he joined them, identifying herself as one of the few truly devout knights in the company, not so much by her words but actions.

‘I haven’t seen him so happy in a long time,’ she said to the priest. ‘It’s a little scary.’

Father Arnaud nodded. ‘I met him the day after the siege was lifted – in the stable. He didn’t seem this dark.’ The priest looked at the woman in armour. ‘You’ve had your hand on your sword this last half an hour. Do you know something I should know?’

Ser Alison laughed her full-throated laugh. ‘See the leather bag under my right leg?’ she said. ‘Full of gold coin. Sixty thousand florins, give or take.’

Father Arnaud paused, and then whistled. ‘Sweet gentle Jesus and all the saints. That’s what he did at the jewellers.’

Sauce grinned as the guard called out their challenge and the Duke answered. ‘You’re quick, Father. You’ll fit right in.’

They rode into the palace with all their purchases, and all their friends, intact. The group of Academy students had swelled as they went, picking up anyone they knew, and many of them returned to the Outer Court of the palace. By ancient tradition, students at the Academy were allowed in the Outer Court. The Duke broached a cask of wine and served them himself, to the scandal of the Ordinaries, and later that night there was dancing in front of the stables. Nordikans, Scholae, and the company mingled with their camp women, their wives, and their whores and a hundred Academy students.

The Princess Irene leaned against a window seat set in the walls of the Old Library, watching the Outer Court. Eventually, her ladies found her, and Lady Maria came and bowed.

‘My lady,’ she said carefully.

‘Why can’t I put on a plain dress, go down and dance?’ she asked.

Lady Maria sighed. ‘Because an assassin would put a dagger in your back before you crossed the yard.’

‘He’s right there – like a beacon. Look at him!’ The Princess Irene pointed at a figure in a scarlet doublet and hose. As she pointed, he leaped a bonfire and whirled in the air.

Lady Maria sighed again. ‘Yes – he is very flamboyant.’ Not for the first time, she cursed her son’s choice of leaders. The man was too intelligent and too charismatic by far.

Mercenaries had made themselves emperors before. And one of the easiest paths lay between the thighs of a princess.

‘I will go,’ Irene said.

Lady Maria balanced her options, as she always did. Any lover would supplant her instantly; that was a game she’d played herself. For an elderly matron to hold the position of favourite was rare, and in this case, an artefact of events.

She was bound to lose her position. But it mattered enormously to whom she lost it.

In addition, the threat of assassination was not an idle one. Two of the princess’s ladies had been killed in just a week.

‘If I promise to find you an occasion to attend and dance informally, will you restrain yourself tonight and go to bed, Majesty?’ She tried to remember what it was like to be so young. The princess had skin like ivory, breasts as high as the branches of an oak, eyes without a single mark of age. Her entire being yearned for the Outer Court – for fire, and dance. And for a man.

But Irene was a warrior, in her way. She had already made difficult choices and lived with the consequences. And she’d been tutored well in the ways of the ancients. She stood straight and faced her favourite. ‘Very well, Maria,’ she said, so quietly that it was almost a whisper.

Half an hour before midnight the gate watch rang the alarm bell on the orders of the Megas Ducas. In a twinkling, the entire garrison formed on the square – drunk or sober, armed or stripped for dancing. Most of the Nordikans were half-naked and their muscles gleamed in the dark, while the Scholae looked like the courtiers that many of them were. The company were in all the colours of the rainbow – most of them in drab everyday clothes, a few nearly naked. They had been wrestling.

Two archers rolled a cask to the middle of the Outer Court. The Academy students were standing in a huddle by the stables, unsure what to do, and they were reassured when the Megas Ducas himself – in stripped-down scarlet – walked by and winked at them.

Then he leaped up on the barrel.

‘I thought it was time we all got to know each other,’ he said in good Archaic. Most of the soldiers laughed.

‘Tomorrow we will start training together – all four regiments. We will march through the countryside, we will practise riding over broken country, we will practise with arms at the wooden stake, we will shoot bows and throw javelins and cut things with axes. There will be tilting and mounted archery. And I’m going to trade men around inside the guard – so that there are Nordikans who have served with the company, and Scholae who have ridden with the Vardariotes. We will ride abroad every day where people can see us. We will take our meals in roadside tavernas. We will behave fearlessly, and if our enemies attempt to interfere, we will kill them.’

There was a nervous titter. Not much of one. Bad Tom said, ‘That’s the way!’ loudly enough to sound like a shout.

‘We’ve kept our heads down long enough. Time to do some work.’ He smiled genially, but in the torchlight he looked like Satan.

No one laughed, and no one cheered.

‘And next Saturday, the Feast of the Saint Martin, we will all relax and have a day of rest. During which day, we will conduct a pay parade in this very yard-’ the rumbling of a cheer began ‘-and see to it that every man receives his back pay to one year-’

‘That’s more fewkin like it! ’

‘Yes, yes! ’ Men were pumping their fists in the air. Oak Pew kissed Cully. This sort of thing was repeated in all directions, and not just among the company. The Scholae seemed delighted to be paid – amazed, even. The Nordikans smiled broadly.

‘And then, in the evening, we’ll hear mass – said by the Patriarch, no less. After mass, Ser Michael and his lady Kaitlin will be wed, right here in the chapel of the company barracks. The Athanatoi barracks. And we’ll have a little party.’ He smiled benignly, and all around him soldiers cheered.

‘Full discipline begins now. On parade, full kit, at daybreak. Any man who has questions about what full kit means is to ask the Primus Pilus. That’s Ser Thomas. On the word dismiss, go to bed. Any questions?’

A thousand men on parade. There was silence. Not a joke, not a titter.

Even the Academy students were silent.

The Megas Ducas bowed to the students. ‘You are all invited, as well,’ he said. ‘We will see you escorted home, unless some of you want to practise marching.’

He hopped down off the barrel, and Bad Tom emerged from the ranks. He was wearing a shirt of saffron linen over trews in black and red tartan, and he looked to be ten feet tall. He grinned at them.

‘I’m just this eager for morning,’ he said. He looked around in midnight silence. ‘Dis – miss!’

In heartbeats, the Outer Court was empty, the guardrooms crammed with men pushing to be off parade. The same joke was repeated in three languages, as old soldiers encouraged each other to sleep fast and hard.

Daybreak – and the sun was just a streak of pink and gold above the spires of the churches.

The gates of the Outer Court opened and the Guard poured out into the square. They formed long ranks, two deep – much less cramped than parading in the Outer Court – making up three sides of a square, and stood silently, at attention, in full armour.

The Nordikans wore hauberks which came to their knees, with hoods of fine mail, mail gauntlets and arms. Many had further reinforcements of splint or scale; a few wore Morean breastplates of moulded leather, both painted and gilt, and two wore the new Etruscan style mixed with their traditional mail. Their cotes were of dark blue, and they wore cloaks of Imperial purple, many decorated in gold – with gold plates, gold embroidery, gold scales, some with pearls or diamonds.

The Scholae wore red – red leather cotes or heavy, tailored tunics under breastplates and backs of bronze scale polished like gold, or alternating steel and bronze. Many of them wore arm harnesses in the new Etruscan style, and a few had leg armour as well. They were beautifully mounted on sturdy black horses.

The company were in scarlet too, but their only uniformity was in their surcoats. Most had breast- and backplates; they wore twenty styles of helmets, from Bad Tom’s towering back-pointed and brimmed bassinet to Cully’s fluted kettle hat. The men-at-arms were all in plate; most of the squires had the same. The pages wore lighter armour, although Morea was already having an effect – some few pages already had curved swords and scale cuirasses. The archers were more conservative, and only one man had a turban on his open-faced bassinet. The Captain stopped during the first inspection and looked at him – Tom ‘Toes’ Larkin, a new man in good, clean kit and spotless breastplate.

‘I like your turban,’ the Duke said.

Larkin flushed. ‘Sir!’ he said, eyes fixed firmly on a point somewhere out in the middle of the Great Square.

‘Show the rest of the archers how to make them,’ the Duke said. He moved on.

Two spots to the right of Larkin, Cully said, ‘That’ll teach you, you fucking popinjay.’ He said it without appearing to move his mouth.

If the company looked good from the standpoint of sartorial splendour, their horses didn’t match the quality of their surcoats – even their old ones. Only the men-at-arms were mounted, and they rode an appalling collection of nags.

Officers conducted inspections, and then the whole of the Guard stood like additional polychromatic statues, completely at home with the other thousand bronze and marble figures in the Great Square. The Megas Ducas and his Primus Pilus rode to the centre of the three-sided square on borrowed horses and waited. They were joined by Count Darkhair and Count Giorgios Comnenos – both officers appointed to those ranks that morning.

The clock at the Academy struck six.

On the fifth strike of the wooden mallet against the great bell, the sound of hooves could be heard ringing on the frosted cobbles of the city.

As silence throbbed in the aftermath of the sixth ring, Count Zac rode into the Great Square followed by three hundred Vardariotes. They formed at the trot – formed line from street column, and then the line rode at a slight oblique – a very showy technique – to fit perfectly from the right marker of the company to the left marker of the Nordikans, facing the Scholae across the square.

Count Zac rode to the centre of the square and saluted the Megas Ducas with his heavy riding whip.

The Megas Ducas returned the salute and nodded. ‘Order of march – the right squadron of the Vardariotes, followed by the Scholae, followed by the Nordikans, followed by the company, followed by the left squadron of the Vardariotes. When we reach the gate, we will turn to the left and march around the city, returning by the Gate of the Vardariotes. We will maintain a practical march order all day; we will deploy into line of battle on my commands, we will make an impromptu camp at the Plataea on the Alban road for lunch. Any questions?’

Count Zac grinned. ‘Want a better horse?’ he asked.

The Duke managed a smile. ‘Very much. For me and everyone else in my company.’

Zac shrugged. ‘Those traitors who kill your horses – they did you a favour. Get better horses!’

‘You could help?’ the Duke asked.

Zac smiled. ‘I said I would – eh? Why have you not visited me?’

The Duke shook his head. ‘I’ve been sick,’ he said. ‘I’ll remedy that. Ready?’ He nodded and raised his baton.

Zac pulled his horse’s head around and galloped the few yards to his men, and barked commands and the right half of his regiment split off and filed away at a trot – headed south and east to the Gate of Ares. Their departure left a gap seventy files wide, and the Scholae, under orders from their new count, filed off by fours. The Nordikans simply marched – every right foot moving off together without the company’s shuffling, as they all seemed to wait for their file leaders and consequently accordioned over the square.

And finally, the last eighty files of the Vardariotes closed the rear. The whole process took almost ten minutes, and there was, on balance, more shouting than was probably needed.

The next day, Ordinaries from the palace took up flagstones across the square and revealed deep cylindrical holes. They opened a storeooom in the Imperial stables and produced cedar poles more than a foot thick, hard as rock, which they fitted into the holes so that the entire square seemed to sprout dead trees. There were new, green cedar trunks, too, stacked neatly by the gate, which the Guard had fetched in on their return the evening before, footsore and armour chafed. Men who had remained behind on guard duty or as escorts or workers in the Navy Yard were cursed as slackers.

The cedar trunks were stripped of branches by Nordikans and erected. In the Outer Court, the regiments paraded in armour, but without weapons, and officers of the Ordinaries opened the Imperial Armoury and handed out wooden swords, wooden axes, and wicker shields. From the full plate and chain of Francis Atcourt to the squat leather-coated Vardariotes’ youngest and slightest female archer, the whole of the Guard – again, with the exception of watch and escort detachments – formed up at the wooden posts. There were more than a hundred posts, and every one of them received ten soldiers and an officer.

Ser Milus was in his element. With a slim Imperial messenger as a translator, he strode to the central wooden post. ‘This is today’s enemy!’ he roared, and the translator repeated his words in shrill intensity. As she was barely clear of adolescence and only five feet tall, her version of his words lost something.

‘I don’t want to see this,’ Ser Milus shouted, and he took a few casual pokes at the pell with his wood and leather pole-axe. ‘Any man who can cut all the way through his pell will receive an extra ration of wine tonight. So I want to see this!’ The knight danced forward and flicked his pole-axe at the heavy cedar pole. The head struck perfectly – his second strike caused the heavy cedar trunk to move slightly. He stopped and raised his visor, which had fallen over his face as soon as he lowered his head. ‘Fight the pell as you would fight a man,’ he called. He backed away and danced up again, and his pole-axe licked out and the blow was so powerful that every man on parade could feel the impact. The knight leaped away, recovering his guard, and struck again – an overhand thrust to the centre of the wood. ‘Make every blow count!’ he roared. ‘Hit his head, hit his arms, hit his thighs. Let me see you do it!’ he called. ‘Begin!’

They began. Each in turn would face the pell, move into range, and hit it. Some men were awkward, and some very unimaginative – some swung the same way at the pell every time. Some men understood intuitively and began to fight the pell, filling in both sides of a real fight. A few men rained blows down on it, the flurry meant to earn an extra tot of wine.

The officers bore down – singling one out for praise, and ordering another to take another turn.

The Primus Pilus went from pole to pole, taking men out of one line and marching them to another, so that by the time the most heavily armoured men were panting with exertion, there were members of all four regiments in every line. Wooden scimitars vied with wooden pole-axes to rock the heavy wood. Archers fenced with bucklered alacrity and Scholae threw blows from behind long, tapered shields while Nordikans chopped, sometimes like woodcutters and sometimes with blows as subtle as the lighter blades. The stakes were battered and rocked.

At noon, when the sun was high in the sky and there were five thousand people gathered in the square to watch, the men dispersed to tavernas and inns around the square to eat.

Ser Gavin and Count Zac sat on their horses just inside the gate of the Outer Court, at the head of a powerful troop – selected from all four regiments. As the Guardsmen ate and drank, fifty sentries watched the square, and Ser Gelfred and his huntsmen were out on the rooftops, watching.

But nothing happened.

By the time the sun began to set, most of the soldiers could no longer raise their arms above their shoulders.

That was the second day.

On the third day, there were archery butts standing in the square, and hundreds of yards of white rope to keep the spectators back. On foot, with longbow and horn bow, the men and women of all four regiments stepped up in one hundred and twenty lines at one hundred and twenty butts. As the day before, the Primus Pilus mixed every line.

Cully stood forth. ‘I want to see good clean hits at each range,’ he said. He walked over to a Vardariote and bowed. ‘May I use your bow?’ he asked.

The man drew his bow from its hip scabbard. It was horn and sinew, quite short. He also drew an arrow from his quiver on the other hip.

Cully turned to face the butts. He nocked, drew, and loosed. His shaft landed in the straw, a finger off dead centre, with a hearty thunk.

‘Don’t get fancy. Don’t show off.’ Behind him, a surprisingly pretty Imperial messenger repeated his words in Vardar and in Morean. ‘Remember that short range has its own challenges.’ He grinned. ‘Every line contains a few archers and a lot of soldiers who’ve never loosed a bow. The line with the best score overall gets a gold florin a man. Second and third best scores get a double wine ration. So – better teach your duffers to shoot!’

He stepped out of the way. ‘Begin!’

On Thursday, they threw javelins.

On Friday, the infantrymen ran, and the horse soldiers rode across broken country. More than a dozen horses were injured and had to be put down. Men twisted ankles, and a great many of them cursed the Duke. At noon, the tired infantrymen ate in the chilly autumn sunshine under the cover of olive trees whose fruit was so near ripe that olives fell on men’s heads – they threw them at each other.

The cavalrymen arrived by a separate route, having used guides and picked up a troop of the local stradiotes – the first tentative sign of the local men showing even lukewarm support for the palace. More than a hundred men came; all of them had fought under Duke Andronicus’s banner within a month. Any who represented the local regiment came.

‘Half of them will be traitors,’ muttered Ser Gavin.

The Duke shrugged. ‘I want my new breastplate,’ he said. He looked under his hand at the local troops wheeling a long line of horsemen. ‘I don’t think we need to care if they are traitors, Gavin. Whatever they think in their hearts, they’re here.’

Under the olive trees, men of the five regiments shared apples and watered wine, almonds in honey and hard sausage.

When the trumpets sounded, they fell in with alacrity.

They marched away in column, and twice they deployed from road column to fighting columns. Then the columns themselves deployed into line – by filing, by inclining, and then, to the Duke’s satisfaction, by inclining from the centre to the flanks, so that each column opened like a flower in spring and suddenly his whole little army was formed up in a long line, infantry in the centre, cavalry on the flanks.

Ser Gavin watched it happen. He rode with his brother, these days, in what had come to be known as ‘the household’. Ser Milus carried the standard; the trumpeter acted as their page; Ser Gavin and Ser Michael shared some of the duties of battlefield organisation and elite messenger service, and Ser Alcaeus translated, while Ser Thomas seemed to issue all the orders – the Duke seldom spoke. Gavin worried about him, because he so often seemed to be absent. He would gaze vacantly at nothing. And he drank.

All day. Toby, his squire, provided him with a succession of flasks.

Gavin thought, If I drank like that, I wouldn’t be able to ride.

The company had, at best, five hundred men. Today, they were commanding fourteen hundred men in three languages, and they were learning new skills at every turn.

The Duke rode across the front – he’d halted on a small hill to watch the deployment – and he pulled up by Ser Thomas. ‘Wheel by companies from the right and form a column of march on the road. The Alban road.’

‘Where did you learn all these commands?’ Gavin asked. His brother certainly didn’t seem drunk when he did speak.

‘There’s books,’ Gabriel said. He smiled at his brother. ‘I’ll share them if you like. The Imperial Library has – fifteen? twenty? – books on strategy and tactics.’

Ser Gavin laughed. ‘This is the new knighthood,’ he said. ‘We’ll all be scholars.’

His brother made a face, as if he smelled something bad. ‘Wait until we fight someone who hasn’t read the books,’ he said.

Meanwhile, Ser Thomas showed his surprise only in the fidgeting of his horse, and then the little army was wheeling from line into column, every company of fifty tracing a quarter of a circle and then stepping off by fours from the right – threes for the cavalry – so that the shield wall turned into a long snake with Vardariotes at its head and tail, and the snake wriggled off into the hills north and west of the city. It was mid-afternoon, and the Duke was marching the army towards Alba. Leaving the city empty.

Kronmir spread some coins out on the table. ‘I want complete reports on how he deploys his forces – in what order, who is in the centre – everything you see. Nianna, I would like the muster list of the local militia who are following his banner.’

The madam shook her head. ‘I might be able to get it, but if Duke Andronicus uses it to kill men then I’m dead too. I’m too exposed.’

One of the sellswords laughed at her unintended pun.

Kronmir glared at the man. Nianna was his best agent, and her other roles – as a woman, as a prostitute – were of no interest to Jules Kronmir whatsoever, except in the degree to which they made her more or less useful as a source.

‘If I swear that the information will never be used for a cleansing?’ he asked.

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘I know who could provide it. What’s it worth?’

He sucked his front teeth. ‘Three hundred florins,’ he said.

She shrugged.

Kronmir hated having these conversations with multiple agents – hated the loss of compartmentalisation, hated that they’d even seen each other, much less that they might start something like collective bargaining. But the foreigner moved so quickly, and made so few mistakes, that he had to strike while the iron was hot.

‘You gentlemen – get in the saddle. Be wary – the Vardariotes are rumoured to be picking up every rider on the road. But bring me some information.’ Kronmir motioned to the door.

‘If’n the lady stands to earn three hundred florins,’ said a former soldier with an Alban accent, ‘Mayhap me and me mates might receive a slightly more marvellous remuneration, eh?’ He grinned a gap-toothed grin. ‘I have information to sell, too.’

Kronmir narrowed his eyes. ‘Well?’

The man shook his head. ‘Well,’ he said, suddenly unsure of himself. Something in Kronmir’s body language scared him. ‘Well – Ser Bescanon says the new Duke’s going to reinstate the Latinikon. Hire back all the mercenaries.’ He shrugged. ‘What’s that worth?’

Kronmir pursed his lips. ‘Ten ducats,’ he said, and counted them down.

‘Fuck that! She got three hundred florins.’ The Alban threw the coins into Kronmir’s face.

None struck him.

Kronmir was fussy and hated waste; but he was also a craftsman, and while he might make an error in haste, he usually retrieved it. He moved under the coins, flowed around the table between them, crossed the floor to the two sellswords, and killed them. His first dagger blow – from the sheath – went into the Alban’s throat, and his second blow, turning into his front leg, went into his partner’s head at the temple – two blows, and both corpses fell.

‘My mistake,’ he said to Nianna. ‘Their type is ten a florin, and I’ll get more. I wanted to save time with a single briefing, and instead I endangered the whole plan.’ He shook his head, cleaning his weapon on the Alban’s shirt even as his dead heels drummed on the floor.

Nianna paled and put a hand to her throat. ‘Blessed Virgin protect me,’ she said aloud. But she paused and spat on the Alban’s corpse.

In an hour he’d hired four men for less money – through a cut-out, of course – and dispatched them. He regretted his quick disposal of the Alban – the man had good skills and might have made a competent scout, with time. Kronmir was mentally penning a third letter requesting some Easterners from his master, who didn’t seem to read his reports.

Still, Nianna had committed to providing the list.

He stayed to write a report that included a small number of triumphs: poisonings, public outrages, two deserters suborned from the Nordikans who were even now reporting on military affairs in the palace.

‘At your command, I can snuff out the parvenu Duke,’ he finished. ‘In the meantime, he drills his troops . . .’ He raised his pen. He’d complete the thought when his agent returned with the reports of the four hirelings. Kronmir spent an hour in the early afternoon contemplating how much easier all this might be if he did everything himself. He didn’t mind taking risks. And the use of agents was painfully slow and the information second hand. And he wondered, as he had all his professional life, if the use of hermetical powers would help him. If only he could recruit an utterly reliable, skilled practitioner.

Except such men were too committed to other paths to power.

He shook his head. Spying was difficult enough.

The army turned onto the Alban road and marched at its fastest step, up into the hills. The Vardariotes swept the flanks like a curry brush on a dirty horse, making dust fly, and two of Kronmir’s hirelings watched the show from a high olive grove, lying on their stomachs at the edge of an ancient stone terrace, their horses hidden away among the trees.

‘He’s marching away,’ Antonio said.

‘Our employer will want to know that,’ said Alphonso.

‘Duke Andronicus, you mean,’ Antonio spat.

‘Must be,’ agreed the other. ‘Who else is in this game?’

The two men wriggled back from the edge of the terrace and ran for their horses.

Both were knocked to the ground and pinned with boots against their necks by Amy’s Hob and Dan Favour. Gelfred nodded to them.

‘You know the drill,’ he said. ‘Take your report to Ser Thomas.’

They were sellswords. They didn’t hesitate to talk but, as Gelfred quickly found, they had very little to say.

The Duke’s army marched north almost six leagues as the shadows grew longer.

‘Where the fuck are we going?’ Wilful Murder spat in the autumn dust.

Toby shrugged and pulled another biscuit from his saddle bags.

Bent leaned over his horse’s rump. ‘Not far,’ he said.

Wilful Murder glared at him.

‘No wagons, no food. And Ser Michael’s gettin’ wed tomorrow afternoon, eh? So we won’t go far.’ Bent took a pull from his canteen and offered it to Toby, who shook his head.

‘Fewkin’ bastard would love to use Ser Michael’s wedding to fool us and that fewkin’ Andronicus. We’ll have a battle – mark my words.’ Wilful Murder spat. ‘An’ we won’t get paid either.’ He took the flask and drank. ‘Mark my words.’

They halted in a valley between two steep ridges. There was talk all along the column – flankers went out, and the younger and faster men ran to the top of the hills.

As the church struck five, the advance guard of Vardariotes returned at a fast trot. With them came a long column of wagons and Ser Jehan with his twenty lances.

The army formed an open rectangle on the march and passed the defile at the end of the valley and then marched back towards the city. All could see what the wagons held.

It was full dark by the time the column passed the Vardariotes Gate, and the Eastern regiment dropped off on either side and saluted until the last company in the column passed them. Then, at a shrill whistle, they all dismounted together.

By then, the wagons were deep in the city, and their cargo was safe from attack or ambush.

Kronmir stood on the wall above the gate and counted forty-seven wagons. Some were merely a pair of wheels at each end with the cargo providing the wagon bed, because the forty-seven loads were all felled trees and dried lumber – an enormous quantity. Enough, in fact, to build a fleet of warships.

He also noted two of his hirelings riding with their hands bound.

Back in the Inn of the Nine Virgins, he put pen to parchment – in code. ‘The parvenu has stolen a march by bringing in wood,’ he admitted. ‘I need trustworthy men and devices, preferably hermetical, for communications and for demolitions.’ He made his sign, appended his expenses, and walked out into the cool evening air. He walked through the farmer’s market, and at the third butcher’s from the end of the second row he leaned for a while against the front off wheel of the butcher’s wagon while he cleaned horse manure out of his boot. Then he walked around the front of the stall.

‘Two cuts of spring lamb,’ he said.

The butcher waited on him personally, with a wink, and the letter was on its way.

By nonnes the next day, every man and woman who could sew was sitting in the sun outside the stables, hemming Kaitlin’s wedding dress. Four women had run it up the night before, after Gropf, the master tailor turned archer, cut the cloth. Now the overdress – in red and gold satin – rested on burlap sacks while thirty people sat around it in a circle. The kirtle was deep gold with gold buttons, and Mag sat with Liz and Gropf, working the buttonholes in burgundy silk twist. Squires and pages brought them wine.

The Outer Court had a festive air. All the soliders behaved as if they’d won a victory the day before. No one had opposed them, and they’d marched well out into the countryside. Fetching the wood was anything but a symbolic victory, and the archers talked about the ramifications of having a fleet with the Nordikaans and the Scholae. Twenty Vardariotes stood guard at the palace gates.

Two hours later, the dress was done. Gropf and some of his cronies were tacking ermine to the sleeve openings – borrowed ermine, but there was no need for the lass to know that. The hem was done and the magnificent overdress was folded carefully into muslin and taken to the barracks.

In its place, two barrels were placed on their ends in the courtyard, and four heavy planks were laid across. Then a guard composed of two men of each regiment – two Vardariotes, two Scholae, two Nordikans, and two Athanatoi – marched into the courtyard under the command of Ser Thomas. They halted at the table made of barrels and stood behind it. All were in full harness and all had their weapons naked in their hands.

The company notary came out with Ser Michael. Chairs were brought, and the two men sat.

Francis Atcourt came out chatting with the Captain, who was dressed, not as the Red Knight, but as the Megas Ducas, in purple and gold. As he entered the yard, Ser Thomas blew a whistle, and all three regiments pushed and shoved their way onto parade. None of them were in fighting clothes – every man and woman was in their finest.

There was cloth of gold, and cloth of silver, silk brocades, rich wools like velvets, and silk velvet, too. There was an abundance of linen as smooth as cream, and a quantity of gold and silver – heavy chains, rings, brooches. Soldiers tend to wear their capital – soldiers’ women much the same.

Closer attention might have revealed some paste, some gilded copper, and some tin; some brocades on their third or fourth wearer, some carefully coloured glass, and some leather tooled to look like rich embroidery.

But in general, the eight hundred soldiers present would not have disgraced some courts, albeit in a slightly more raffish manner. Clothing tended to fit more tightly and show more muscle than was usual – from Ser Thomas’s padded, quilted and embroidered silk hose that showed every ripple of muscle in his thighs to Ser Alison’s skin-tight red silk kirtle that left almost none of her physique to a viewer’s imagination, the clothing demanded attention.

Parading in their finery made them more like a boisterous crowd and less like a disciplined army. And when two heavy iron-bound chests were marched through the crowd by palace Ordinaries surrounded by fully armoured Scholae, there was outright applause.

The chests were placed on the heavy oak boards, and the escort saluted and was ordered to retire. Ser Michael produced a key and opened the two chests. Every soldier in the front two ranks could see the gleam of gold and silver. A sigh of contentment ran through the Outer Court.

High above, in the Library, the Princess Irene stood on tiptoes to be able to see the whole of the parade and the two chests. Lady Maria hovered behind her. The princess was dressed in a plain brown wool overdress – very like a nun’s habit. Underneath she wore a much less plain kirtle, but it would only show at the wrists.

‘That is not my money he is disbursing,’ Irene said.

‘I agree that he is a cause for worry,’ Lady Maria said.

‘My own soldiers already love him. Look at them!’ she said.

‘Your father’s soldiers,’ Lady Maria said.

An expectant hush fell over the parade. All the women who were not themselves soldiers were gathered at the corners of the square. Anna and a hundred other wives and near-wives from the Nordikan barracks, as well as some of the great ladies of the city, gathered near their husbands and brothers of the Scholae to see the fun – four nuns stood together with Morgan Mortirmir and a young despoina of the Dukae, who was greeted with respectful admiration – and some wolf whistles – by the Alban mercenaries. The new Count of the Scholae smiled at her every time he turned his head. Ser Giorgios Comnenos and his beloved were to have their long-delayed nuptials with Ser Michael and Kaitlin.

The expectant hush lasted long enough that Wilful Murder turned to his whispering colleagues and hissed, ‘Shut the fuck up!’

Veterans of the company knew that no one would be paid until the Captain had complete silence.

When he had it, the Megas Ducas stood and walked in front of the table. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Our first pay parade together. You will be called by name, in order of the alphabet. If your pay is incorrect, you will leave it on the table and go to the end to speak directly to the notary and to me. You will not slow the process. The princess has graciously given us a hogshead of malmsey to serve when we are halfway through the list of names. If your name is missed, wait until the end of the parade to make a fuss.

‘Every man and woman on this parade is looking forward to spending their pay – but no one will leave this yard until we’ve witnessed the weddings of Ser Michael to Kaitlin Lanthorn, and Ser Giorgios to Despoina Helena Dukas. Further to that, if you choose to take your pay into the city, be aware that there are at least a hundred men in this city hired just to kill you – that in addition to the usual crowd of ruffians who wait to rob soldiers rolling in gold. Not to mention the crooked innkeepers and whores. Caveat emptor. I expect every one of you on parade on Monday at matins.’

He smiled at them tolerantly. ‘Very well, my companions. Let’s get this under way.’

He leaned back and looked at the rolls. ‘Archer Benjamin Aaron!’ he called.

A small man in black wool with a fine belt of enamelled plaques and a little black skull cap swaggered out of the ranks. By tradition, the first man to be paid shook the Captain’s hand – he grinned, the Megas Ducas grinned back, and Ser Thomas called out: ‘Aaron, mounted archer: seventy-two florins, nine silver leopards, six sequins, less thirty-one leopards stoppages, four leopards, six sequins hospital, extra four leopards, four sequins, hard lying total: seventy florins, eighteen leopards, two sequins! Sign here.’

Aaron signed the book, scraped his coins – ten years wages for a peasant, or a year’s wage for a highly skilled artisan, and all in cash – into his hand. He gave a little bow to the Captain and also Ser Michael and marched himself back to his place in the ranks, where he immediately settled a year’s worth of small debts.

Men and women who came to the company without surnames – few runaway peasants had one – tended to adopt names that occurred early in the alphabet. Brown was a remarkably popular name, as was Able.

However, the parade also encompassed Akritos, Giorgos, and Arundson, Erik.

Ser Francis Atcourt was the first knight to collect, and conversations stopped as his wages were read out.

Ser Thomas read: ‘Atcourt, man-at-arms: three hundred and sixteen florins, no leopards, no sequins, stoppages none, sixteen leopards, six sequins hospital, extra four leopards, four sequins, hard lying extra, thirty-one florins dead warhorse, total: three hundred forty-seven florins, twelve leopards, two sequins.’

Men sighed to hear how much a man-at-arms could earn. It seemed like nothing when your blood ran over the surface of your skin on a cold spring morning, facing a Wyvern with nothing but a bit of steel between you and the monster’s teeth, but on a fine autumn morning in the courtyard of a magnificent palace, it seemed a fortune. All a man could ever want.

‘And one share,’ the Megas Ducas added.

‘Put it on my account,’ said Ser Francis, who was sitting at the table, and the men laughed.

From Atcourt it took almost an hour to reach Cantakuzenos. But after Dukas, the process moved faster – there were fewer mercenaries after D, and the Nordikans and the Scholae had got the rhythm of the thing so that if a man was ready, he could march up while his account was read, sweep the silver and gold into his hat, and walk back as the next lucky fellow pushed forward. A few awkward sods came out of each regiment – men disposed to debate the fine points of what was withheld for medicine, or what had been awarded as punishment – but in general, they went forward with almost three hundred men an hour.

Among the company, the pay parade was an opportunity for practical jokes and levity – wives would press forward to collect a husband’s pay, and then again to collect their own, for example, and a man unlucky enough to be absent – Daniel Favour was not present when his name was called – was helped by mates who shouted, ‘’E wants it all given to the poor!’

Shortly after, Gelfred, the Hunt Master and an officer of the company – highly paid and thus always good for entertainment – was also absent.

Wilful Murder, who had a real name and had already collected his pay, grinned at his nearest neighbour. ‘None o’ they scouts is on parade,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t all wrong yester e’en. Someone’s gonna cop it.’

At Hannaford the parade paused, and every man and woman present was served a fine cup of malmsey wine, heavy and sweet, by troops of Ordinaries with trays. The Megas Ducas jumped up on the table and raised his cup – everyone in the courtyard including the visiting students raised theirs, and the Megas Ducas shouted, ‘To the Emperor!’

Twelve hundred voices echoed his shout.

The Imperial servants cleared away the cups – red clay with Imperial wreathes of olive leaves – and the parade recommenced at Hand, Arthur, mounted archer, and carried straight through to Zyragonas, Dmitrios, stradiotes. The sun was setting, the air was chilly, and the courtyard was packed with deeply satisfied soldiers.

In keeping with an established tradition, Dmitrios Zyragonas – a pleasant-looking man with ruddy cheeks, bright red hair and the last name on the whole parade – was greeted as he left the parade by the company’s oldest camp follower, Old Tam, with every available child gathered about her. She put her arms around him before he even thought to resist, being a well-born Morean and unused to what passed for humour in Alba, he was unready when she put a hand in his pocket and equally unready when she began to kiss him, while forty children shouted and called him ‘Papa’ and ‘Daddy’ and demanded money.

‘There’s my honey,’ croaked Old Tam. She was smiling as broadly as an escaped lunatic and licking her lips. ‘So young!’ she cackled. ‘I only want yer better part, love!’

The Scholae, among whom Zyragonas was a staid and upright figure – were laughing themselves silly as the poor man tried to escape the harridan and the children, many of whom played their parts with touches of realism that might have chilled a less hardened crowd.

Zyragonas fled as soon as he was free of their outstretched hands – ran back into the ranks of his comrades like a one-man rout – and then had to endure the laughter as Old Tam raised high his purse, neatly cut off his belt.

‘I have yer best part, love!’ she yelled.

There were plenty of linguists to translate the jest into Nordikan and Morean.

But then, when everyone had laughed long, the Megas Ducas rose from his chair, and the old woman turned, curtsied, and handed over the blushing man’s purse, and the Megas Ducas restored it to its rightful owner who couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

‘Gentlemen and ladies – benches, wine, and food. Many hands make light work – let the wedding begin.’ He clapped his hands, and everyone ran for their task – assigned at the morning parade.

Bent reappeared from the kitchens, where he and four men and four of Gelfred’s dogs had sampled the malmsey and most of the food. Now they went into the towers around the yard, taking an early dinner and a cup of wine to the Vardariotes who were on duty so that the other soldiers could drink.

Tables appeared, and long, low benches, and a line of men went through the yard like dancers, putting beeswax candles in tall bronze sticks on every table. Men looked at the sky – darkness was coming with heavy grey clouds.

The princess’s confessor came through the Outer Yard in full ecclesiastical regalia. The Scholae murmured. As the first cups and plates began to accrete on the tables, they heard the Officer of the Day shout his challenge, and after the reply the outer gate opened.

The Moreans in the yard froze.

All of them fell to one knee.

The Megas Ducas walked out into the Outer Court, and Bent whispered in his ear – and he hissed an order and fell to his knees – in his best hose, on cobbles. Most of the company didn’t need the whispered order – they could see Ser Michael on his knees in his wedding clothes, and Ser Thomas too, in his magnificent quilted hose.

The Patriarch walked into the yard at the head of twenty professors of the Academy and another ten priests and bishops.

He beamed at the soldiers, and walked among them, bestowing blessings in all directions. He placed his hand on Ser Thomas’s bowed black head – his chin went up as if he’d received a shock, and then he smiled like a man who has won a great prize, and the Patriarch passed to the next man. He blessed Ser Alison and, eventually, he came to the Megas Ducas, placed his hand gently on his head, and nodded.

No lightning struck.

The Megas Ducas kissed his ring.

Very low, he said, ‘I hope Your Holiness is here for the wedding?’

The Patriarch’s eyes twinkled. ‘You mean I’m too late to get paid?’ he asked.

After that, there was nothing that could have made Kaitlin’s wedding any less than a great feast. She herself – when she appeared – looked sufficiently magnificent to quell the rumour among the Moreans that she was a low-born farm girl. It was obvious that she was a duchess. She and Despoina Helena vanished together and as preparations were made their giggles and snorts of laughter could be heard peeling out of the Scholae guardroom, which had temporarily been co-opted as the bridal chambers.

Ser Michael – most everyone knew he was the Earl of Towbray’s eldest son – walked like an earl. It was possible, watching him, to see the Red Knight and the King in his back and his legs, in the way his right hand rested on his dagger, in the arrogance of his jaw – or in the delight of his eyes when he took back his bride’s veil of seven yards of Hoek lace. Ser Giorgios was less showy, but had the dignity that most Moreans seemed to carry, and he smiled at everyone who caught his eye. And at his bride, who didn’t seem to mind that her beautiful gown of golden satin and seed pearls had been upstaged.

Gropf’s thin mouth smiled at those gowns and he flicked his eyes at the bride when she kissed her husband. Five months pregnant? Sweeting, that’s what the overgown is for! He had no one to tell that his greatest triumph as a cloth cutter now came in front of a patriarch in the Imperial Palace – two years after he’d turned his back on his trade and gone to war.

But he couldn’t stop smiling.

Neither could Wilful Murder, who’d just received the fullest pay day of his adult life and not a sequin in stoppages. He wandered the feast, wagering on anything that anyone would accept a wager on – the time in pater nosters until the bride next kissed the groom was a favourite. He offered odds that the whole company would march the next morning at sunrise.

Mag had a brief and sobering interview with the Captain, and took notes – but the moment the service began and she saw Kaitlin Lanthorn, whom she’d known as a puking, tiny baby not expected to live, now going to the altar to wed a man who was arguably the wealthiest young man of his generation, in front of some of the most famous people in Christendom, she cried. She cried steadily through the service. But she’d made every stitch of linen the bride was wearing, and she’d woven in every scrap of happiness she could draw from the aether. And she’d made a weather working too – her first – that roofed the Outer Court like a bowl of fire.

When the wine began to flow and people walked about freely, the Patriarch came and sat by her. ‘They tell me you cast that,’ he said pleasantly.

She smiled and looked at her feet.

‘These same people tell me you’ve never had an education in the ars magicka.’ He smiled.

She almost said she’d been tutored in Dar-as-Salaam – it was on her lips, one of Harmodius’s memories imprinted in her head. She hadn’t fully assimilated what she’d learned from Harmodius and from the Abbess in the last days of the siege, but she spent time working through what she could remember, every day. Hence her first weather working. But as usual, she found it easiest to be silent.

So she raised her eyes.

They met, eye to eye, for a moment.

The Patriarch broke the contact politely, and shook his head. ‘The north of Alba must be rolling in talents,’ he said.

Mag nodded. ‘It is,’ she agreed.

‘May I invite you to visit the Academy?’ he asked. ‘For more than two thousand years, we have served the needs of men and women with special gifts – hermetical, or scientific, or musical, or scholarly.’

She smiled and looked at her hands. ‘Do you offer a course in embroidery?’ she asked, thinking that he sounded just a little like the dragon on the mountain.

After the boards were cleared, the musicians – who had eaten the dinner and watched the wedding with everyone else – came forward. While they tuned their instruments, the students gave a display of the hermetical art – air bursts of fire, tableaux of the heroes of the past striding across the yard – Saint Aetius fought a great horned irk twice his height, and fought so well that the soldiers roared their applause-

‘I told you that nothing would look as good as a real fight,’ Derkensun said, picking himself off the second-storey floor of the Imperial horse barn. It was not just a new working but a set of nested new workings – it had taken four of them, the two Comnena nuns, Baldesce and Mortirmir. Mortirmir had fought – sparred, at least – with Derkensun, and the working had transmitted their images – subtly altered – to the courtyard below. As the soldiers roared their approval, Mortirmir embraced the Nordikan.

He laughed his great laugh. ‘Bah – it was you witches who made the glamour!’ But he accepted their plaudits, and he and Anna sat with the students for the next course.

Anna put her hand on Derkensun’s arm suddenly – they were being served beautiful custards, obviously the product of the Imperial kitchens. Anna was ignoring the magical shows to enjoy the food – she’d never had enough to eat in in her entire life and the custards-

But a woman in a plain brown overgown had appeared by Megas Ducas’ side. Anna noticed her immediately.

She pointed, her mouth full of delicious custard.

Beside her, Derkensun was grinning at an Ordinary. ‘Is that Quaveh?’ he asked.

The servant bowed. ‘It is, sir.’

‘Anna, this is Quaveh from the other side of Ifriqu’ya!’ he turned. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘Who is that woman?’ Anna asked.

The Megas Ducas was enjoying himself far more than he’d expected to. Some of the drugs worked – and Harmodius was obviously doing his best to hide himself. While the Duke suspected that had to do with the presence of the Patriarch – just a sword’s length away in his throne of ebony and gold – a holiday was a holiday. He was alone.

Or at least, he felt alone.

He was considering sending Toby for his lyre when he caught a hint of scent and then she was at his side.

‘I am incognito,’ declared Princess Irene. ‘Please call me Zoe.’

The Duke girded himself. So much for being alone.

Ser Gavin was sitting with the groom’s party and flirting somewhat automatically with the Lanthorn girls. Ranald Lachlan was staring into darkness and drinking steadily and being a dull companion.

Ser Alison leaned back her chair. She was dressed as a woman – magnificently dressed – except for the knight’s belt at her hips. ‘Who’s that sitting with the Captain?’ she asked.

Gavin did a double-take and smiled knowingly. ‘Well, well,’ he said. He dug an elbow into Ranald, who looked and shrugged.

Ser Michael was an arm’s length away, kissing his wife. He rose for air and caught Gavin’s eye.

‘Get a room,’ said Gavin.

‘We have one,’ said Michael, brightly. ‘What are you and Sauce staring at?’

Kaitlin, who looked like an angel come to earth, leaned forward, being exceptionally careful of her train and her ermine and her jewels and all the other things that didn’t matter as much as the man who had just kissed her, and said, ‘It’s the-’

Ser Giorgios paled, and his new wife had to use years of courtly training not to spit her wine. ‘The Porphyrogenetrix!’ she said. ‘At my wedding!’

Gavin grinned. ‘Good. That’s what I thought, too.’

Ser Thomas appeared and leaned down among them, bowing to – of all people – Sauce. ‘May I have the honour of a dance?’ he asked.

‘Horse or foot?’ Sauce said, automatically. She was ready to fight, and despite her gown and her tight kirtle, she looked like a warrior in that moment.

Bad Tom just laughed. ‘Got you. But-’ he swept a comically exaggerated bow ‘-but I mean it. They’re about to play for dancing. Come and dance.’

‘Why?’ Sauce asked suspiciously. ‘Ain’t you doing Sukey?’

Tom raised an eyebrow. ‘Not for another few hours. Come on, Sauce – come and dance.’ He looked at Gavin. ‘What are you all looking at?’ he asked with his usual air.

‘Not you,’ Gavin said. He indicated the Patriarch’s table without actually pointing.

‘All the big hats,’ Tom agreed.

‘So who’s sitting with the Captain?’ Sauce asked. She rose to her feet and put her hand on Tom’s arm. ‘If you make this a mockery of me, I’ll have your guts out right here, so help me God and all the saints.’

Bad Tom grinned. ‘Are you like this with all the boys?’ he asked. Then his half-mocking grin vanished. ‘Sweet Jesu, it’s the princess.’

‘Got it in one, boyo,’ drawled Sauce.

While Bad Tom was gawking, Ser Jehan and Ser Milus came around the wedding table and each took their turn to kiss the brides and kneel before Kaitlin, slap Michael and Giorgios on the back, and then – Jehan first – crave a dance of Sauce.

‘Am I the only girl you boys know?’ she asked.

Ser Jehan – almost fifty, all muscle and gristle and hard-won chivalry – blushed.

Tom pointed at the Megas Ducas, who was rising with the woman in brown – really, the girl in brown – on his arm.

‘Don’t point,’ hissed Gavin.

Jehan smiled. He turned to Ser Milus, and whispered something.

Milus grinned at everyone. ‘Suddenly, everything makes sense,’ he said.

‘Do you dance?’ the Red Knight asked the princess.

She looked at him.

‘I gather that was a foolish question,’ he said. ‘But as you are incognito, I assume I can ask you direct questions and get direct answers, so let’s start small. What are you doing here?’

She rose. ‘Dancing,’ she said. ‘I confess that I’ve never danced in public with a mercenary.’

He nodded and pursed his lips. ‘It’s not as hard as it looks,’ he said.

‘I cannot get over the quality of your Archaic,’ she said, as they moved out from the tables. Just at the edge of the Red Knight’s peripheral vision, the Patriarch started – sat up, turned his head, and said something that caused the young priest next to him to turn his head suddenly too.

He smiled down at her. ‘I learned it right here,’ he said. ‘Or rather, I learned it at home from my tutor, and then practised here.’

‘The Academy?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said enigmatically.

The musicians obviously knew who she was. There was some discordant fumbling.

‘Can you dance?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said, smiling brilliantly.

One of the street musicians appeared at his elbow. He had a hat in his hands, and his hands were shaking. ‘My lord. We- What- That is . . . what should we play?’ he finally got out.

The Red Knight – he refused to play the Megas Ducas tonight – bowed to his lady. ‘Whatever the lady asks for,’ he said.

Every Morean within earshot sighed with relief.

Zoe raised her fan to cover most of her face, but allowed the musician some little bit of her smile, which was quite real. ‘Something fast,’ she said. She turned graciously to the brides, who stood by with their new husbands. ‘Anything they ask for. You are the ladies of this merry meeting, not I.’

Kaitlin curtsied and then grinned impishly. ‘Well-’ She grinned at Despoina Helena. ‘We have practised a Morean dance, and it’s fast,’ she said. ‘Let’s dance a Moresca.’

A few couples away Lady Maria gasped, and her son winced.

She leaned over to her son and said, very softly, ‘What have you done?’

He stood his ground. ‘What you told me to do.’

The music was fast. Almost a third of the couples and interested bystanders hurried off the wooden floor as soon as the music began – a combination of Albans who needed to see the dance, and Moreans who feared it.

Bad Tom and Sauce were not one of those retreating couples.

She looked up at him – not as far as other women. ‘You know this?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You?’

She shook her head and laughed. ‘Just what I needed,’ she said. ‘A fearless partner.’

Mostly – with a few exceptions – the gentry of Morea and Alba shared some common tastes. The gentry often danced stately processions, in couples, or pairs of couples – while the lower orders usually danced in groups, in rings.

The dance that followed didn’t fit well into either category. It featured pairs who turned with each other – not a horrifying innovation, but a daring one. It was obvious that Lady Kaitlin and Ser Michael knew the dance, and had practised with the Morean couple.

In the best traditions of weddings, and women who loved to dance, the two couples danced all the figures alone, first.

When Giorgios picked Helena up and whirled her in the air, Zoe nodded and a tiny smile played at the corners of her lips. ‘Ahh,’ she said, very softly.

They turned outwards from one another and clapped – their time was perfect – and the music swept them on – around, turn, clap, around, together . . .

Everyone applauded. The servants applauded, even the drunks applauded – they were that good. Kaitlin burst into tears and grinned at her husband. Helena threw her head back in delight.

Sauce looked at Tom. ‘Got that?’

He nodded sharply, like a man going into action. ‘Got it.’

John le Bailli looked down at Mag. ‘Perhaps we should sit this out?’ he attempted.

‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Men like you have been finding excuses not to dance since the fall of Troy.’

Harald Derkensun dragged Anna by the hand to the centre of the temporary wooden floor.

‘I can’t dance on the same floor as the Empress!’ Anna protested.

But she pivoted on her toes as she said it.

A dark-eyed young woman with plucked brows and a severe, elegant face cleared her throat just behind Morgan Mortirmir. He had a cup in his hand – he’d thought of asking Anna, but he couldn’t, and he’d obviously been right. She looked very happy with Harald.

He turned and looked at the young woman by his shoulder.

She raised an eyebrow.

He turned back to the dancers and she kicked his ankle lightly. ‘Hey, Plague,’ she said.

His head shot around fast enough to leave his eyebrows behind.

He mustered up every shred of composure he had. ‘Would, um . . would you?’ he asked. He bowed.

She sighed. ‘Blessed Virgin,’ she said, not at all piously, and pretended to follow him onto the dance floor while in fact leading him. ‘If the princess can dance with a barbarian, I suspect it’s all the fashion.’

‘I don’t . . . dance,’ Mortirmir managed to say, as the music began.

‘Tap your foot to the music and look elegant,’ she said, rising on her toes. ‘I’ll do the dancing.’

‘You’re a nun!’ he said.

She frowned. ‘You are an ignorant barbarian,’ she said.

The Patriarch indicated the young Alban mage in training to Father Arnaud. The Hospitaller nodded. The young woman danced beautifully, and the young man was – literally – suffused with light. He lit the centre of the dance floor, and she danced around him as if he was a lantern. It couldn’t last, and eventually he had to move, but the effect was done well and the two laughed together when he stumbled.

But the Patriarch watched the princess as she went by – first in a ring of women, inside a ring of men, and then outside the ring of men after a complex passage of hands, and then the men shot off into the near darkness and the women danced; the women went off and the men danced, more brightly lit by young Mortirmir than by the torches. The two sexes formed chains, and the chains intertwined – leaned to the left, leaned to the right, shot around, with women’s legs and men’s legs flashing out. Then the women leaped and the men caught them.

The Red Knight turned a full circle with the Emperor’s daughter held high above his head.

The Patriarch sat back suddenly, and then frowned, and held up his cup for more wine.

They danced for four hours. They danced until most of the men and women who fought for a living were as sober as when they had started, and as tired as if they’d fought a battle. They’d danced in lines and circles and pairs and fours and eights and every figure known to Alba, Galle, and Morea. Count Zac and his officers demonstrated Eastern dances, and the Red Knight and his officers had to try them. Bad Tom fell full length trying to kick out his legs, and laughed at his own antics, and Sauce clapped her hands and imitated the Easterners only to discover that it was a man’s dance. But Count Zac put an arm around her shoulders and they drank together, and went on to another dance, and later, she went and caught Milus and Jehan by the hands and dragged them across the great circle of watchers – off-duty Ordinaries, female students from the Academy, and other unattached women.

With unerring professional sense, she marched the two knights to a gaggle of Anna’s friends and peers who had made their way in under various pretences.

‘Gentlemen, these women are whores. Ladies, these gentlemen are shy.’ She grinned to show she meant no harm, but one of the harder women took offence anyway.

‘Who you calling whore, bitch?’ she said.

Sauce smiled. ‘I was one, honey. I know the look.’

‘Really?’ the other woman said. ‘And now what are you?’

‘Now I’m a knight,’ Sauce said. Count Zac was making eyes at her, and she walked away.

Ser Jehan looked down into the deep brown eyes of his sudden new friend. ‘Is she really a knight?’ the girl asked.

‘She really is,’ Ser Jehan agreed. And then he was dancing.

The Red Knight and Zoe danced – on and on. Once they stopped when the Ordinaries came like an avenging army bearing ice – actual ice from the mountains. The Red Knight met them well across the floor, asked who had sent the ice, and then took her some, and watched her eat it.

And again, when the servants came with a bubbly purple wine, he swept her across the floor to see that she had the very first glass.

Everyone commented on how attentive he was.

Wilful Murder sat back and drank his fifteenth jack of cider. He glared at Cully. ‘Thin,’ he said.

Cully rolled his eyes. ‘Not hardly,’ he said. ‘It’s just – different. Sweeter?’ he asked the air.

‘Mark my words,’ Wilful said. ‘He’s going to march us all somewhere horrible in the morning. This whole party was nothing but a cover – we’re going after the false Duke.’

Cully made a face, and shook his head. ‘We won’t have ten men fit for service in the morning,’ he said.

‘Mark my words,’ Wilful said, and belched carefully.

The Red Knight escorted the mysterious Lady Zoe all the way to her door. If he noticed that six heavily scarred Nordikans shadowed them every step through the palace, he didn’t pay them any apparent heed. If he noticed his own Ser Alcaeus or his mother Lady Maria or a long train of Imperial ladies dressed as Ordinaries – all breathless and a few perhaps a little more than breathless – following them along the marbled corridors, he said nothing.

At the doors to the Imperial apartments, he bowed over her hand, not quite touching it with his lips.

She smiled. ‘I expected more boldness from the famous warrior,’ she said.

‘I’m only really bold when I’m paid,’ he said, pressing her hand. ‘Nor do I think that the audience is apt to the purpose,’ he said softly.

She looked into the gloom of the long corridor and gave a sudden start. ‘Ah,’ she said, and vanished into the Imperial apartments. He had a glimpse of serried ranks of maids waiting to take her clothes, and a whiff of perfume, and then the door was closed in his face.

A young shepherd boy stood and gawped at the guard post on the Thrake road. There were twenty of Duke Andronicus’s soldiers, a pair of armoured noblemen, and six Easterners with horn bows. The boy ate an apple and then led his sheep through the roadblock. He was dumb, and made a pantomime of it, and the men laughed gruffly, took two of his sheep for dinner, and promised to beat him if he made a fuss.

He shuffled off to stand on the next hillside, watching them.

A wagon rolled up to the post in the last light of the sun.

The shepherd boy reached into the grass and fetched out a javelin, and then another, and then a sword.

Just as the wagon – a butcher from the city – was clearing the roadblock there was the sound of hoof beats. The men at the roadblock sprang to arms, but it was all too fast, and they were captured or dead in a matter of moments.

The Easterners covering the roadblock, all hardbitten steppe men under a khan, didn’t fight. They ran north, having been mounted.

The shepherd boy and a dozen other men and women who’d passed the roadblock in the last two days fell on the Easterners and the wagon, taking two prisoners and killing the rest.

Daniel Favour trotted down the hill after cleaning his spear on the dead man’s cloak and taking his purse, to find Gelfred sitting on his horse on the road in the fading light.

Gelfred nodded. ‘Well done,’ he said.

Daniel grinned. ‘I thought they was going to beat me. And I was wondering how long I’d take it before I fought back.’ He shrugged.

Gelfred nodded. ‘I did some praying,’ he admitted.

‘You see the wagon that got through?’ Favour asked.

Gelfred nodded. ‘He had a pass. I’ll question him separately.’

Two hours later, the Duke sat with Alcaeus and Father Arnaud, playing music in the yard. A handful of diehards were still dancing, including a remarkably bedraggled Ser Jehan and a very young Morean girl.

‘Will you fall in love with her?’ the poet asked.

‘Are you asking the Red Knight or the Megas Ducas?’ the possessor of both titles asked.

‘Surely you are a man, with a man’s appetites and a man’s desires, and not a pair of empty titles and a suit of armour,’ Alcaeus said. ‘Christos, I’m drunk. Ignore me.’

Father Arnaud watched him like the conscience most of his men assumed he didn’t have. ‘Do you fine gentlemen know Et non est qui adjuvet, by any chance?’ he asked.

They played it, and then they all drank wine. People applauded.

‘She’s watching you from the Library,’ Father Arnaud said.

Ser Gavin appeared with a small drum. ‘If I play, am I allowed in the club?’ he asked.

‘A drum?’ his brother asked.

‘It looks easy enough.’ Gavin laughed.

‘Anyway, you don’t need an instrument to join. You need only be celibate,’ Alcaeus said.

Father Arnaud spat some of his wine. He drank a little more, wiped his chin, and shook his head.

‘Someone choose a song,’ the Captain said.

‘It’s your turn,’ Alcaeus insisted.

‘ “Tant Doucement”?’ asked the Captain.

‘Must we?’ asked the priest.

‘You don’t love her?’ Alcaeus asked.

‘Who, the princess?’ asked Gavin. ‘My brother is very particular. He probably has his heart set on-’

The elbow in his ribs was not brotherly, and he was unprepared for it. ‘What the fuck!’ he said in a distinctly unchivalrous and quite believably brotherly way.

‘My brother was going to say that I had my heart set on the priesthood, but they insisted that I love God, and there’s things I just can’t lie about,’ he said.

Father Arnaud looked away.

‘You are an evil bastard,’ Gavin said, and he laughed and slapped his brother on the back.

The Captain took a deep breath. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I am.’ He turned on his heel and walked away.

The priest watched him.

‘We don’t know, either,’ Alcaeus said.

Gavin followed his brother into the stable, up the long ramp to the second storey, and his footsteps echoed hollowly on the wooden floor. His brother was standing with a horse, in near darkness.

‘Only the Emperor would have a two-storey stable,’ he said.

Silence.

‘I’m sorry, but you know, if you have to be all strong and long-suffering and commanderly, none of us will ever know exactly why you are sad or angry or whatever in the devil’s name you are.’ Gavin smiled. ‘And may I point out that whatever your troubles, you don’t bear the actual mark of the Wild on your body? I have scales. Every day. Mary saw them and she-’ Gavin paused. ‘Are you listening?’

Gabriel reached out in the darkness and embraced his brother, and they stood there for the count of ten.

‘Do you at least like her?’ Gavin asked.

‘No,’ Gabriel whispered. ‘As you so astutely noted, I like someone else. I need more music. Thanks for coming in after me.’

In the morning, Wilful Murder was the first man on parade, while the sun was still below the horizon. He farted repeatedly, he had a hard head, and he’d done his share of dancing, but he was ready – his horse’s feed bag was full, his armour polished, oiled, and stored, his heavy winter cloak rolled behind his saddle, ready to march anywhere.

An hour later, when no alarm bells had rung, he cursed and went back to bed. In the next rack, Bent was too smart to laugh aloud.

The new week saw changes – small ones that heralded larger changes to come.

For example, a hoard of tailors descended on the company and cut new cloth delivered from the market stalls and suddenly the company had uniform scarlet hose and doublets, and new surcoats over their armour. Every man and every horse had Morean-style horsehair tufts in red, green, and white – one on each shoulder, and one atop their horse’s head. A set of standards appeared in the yard, made up outside the palace. One had Saint Katherine and her wheel, and the others had three lacs d’amour in gold – one pennon on white, one on green, and one on red. In the process of learning where they were to stand by the standards, the company learned that a substantial remnant of the mercenaries – the Gallish and Iberian mercenaries – who had served Duke Andronicus were now members of their company.

Ser Bescanon, for example, was now the second standard bearer, carrying Saint Katherine. Ser Milus carried the company banner – black, with three lacs d’amour. The company was divided into three parts, of unequal numbers; the first band, of one hundred lances, was commanded by Ser Jehan, with four corporals, Ser George Brewes, Ser Francis Atcourt, Ser Alfonse d’Este and Ser Gonzago d’Avia, the last two new men from the former Latinikon. The second band, of fifty lances, was commanded by Ser Gavin, and had Ranald Lachlan and Ser Michael as corporals. The third band, also of fifty lances on parchment but smaller in reality, was commanded by Gelfred, and had two corporals, one of whom was Ser Alison, and the other Ser Alcaeus. Ser Jehan’s band was white, Ser Gavin’s was red, and Gelfred’s was green. Each lance had a man-at-arms, a squire almost equally well armed and mounted, a page aspiring to become a man-at-arms, and an archer or two.

The new men were cursed, and nearly everyone on the rolls declared that the company would never recover – too many new faces, with bad attitudes and personal enmities and different languages and customs. The new archers weren’t any good, and the new men-at-arms were scarcely able to ride. Or so men said.

There were four new women among the new recruits – all Easterners from the steppes, all archers, on horse or foot. They kept to themselves and rebuffed any advances from Oak Pew or from Sauce. Or anyone else. The steppe men steered clear of them as well.

Bad Tom’s anodyne for new recruits was work.

Men with hangovers can survive being fitted by tailors. Mag led the seamstresses to work, and if she put her head on her knees once or twice and smiled a bright and brittle smile at the world, she also looked as happy as a woman can look – perhaps not quite as happy as Lady Kaitlin, who attended her wedding breakfast and then sat and sewed hose with the other skilled seamstresses under Lis the laundress’s command.

Count Zac delivered three hundred horses at the gates of the Outer Court – one he led himself. He presented it to the Megas Ducas, who accepted it with pleasure – a tall gelding, sixteen hands, jet black. Strong, but with clean lines and a fine head and a remarkably intelligent eye for a warhorse.

‘He can be a bastard,’ Zac said. He shrugged. ‘So can I. Is your Sauce single?’

If the change of subject took the Megas Ducas by surprise, he didn’t show it. ‘She virtually defines single,’ he said.

Count Zac cleared his throat. ‘She has had lovers – yes?’ His expression indicated that he was embarrassed to ask.

The Megas Ducas allowed himself the very slightest of smiles. ‘It is possible,’ he allowed.

Count Zac sighed. ‘May I court her?’ he asked.

‘Will you always bring me horses like this if I say yes?’ asked the Megas Ducas. He vaulted onto his new horse, bareback, and shot away.

An hour later, still bareback, he pulled up by Sauce, who was still being fitted for her hose by some very straight-faced tailors. She had just offered to strip to her braes.

‘Alison? I’ve traded you to Count Zac for three hundred horses,’ he said. ‘It’s not a bad deal – he’ll marry you.’

She frowned, and then nodded. ‘Three hundred sounds like a good price,’ she agreed. ‘He’s short, but I fancy him.’

He grinned at her. ‘Long time since you fancied anyone,’ he said.

‘Besides you,’ she said.

He flushed, and she laughed in his face.

‘Well, I’m glad it’s mutual,’ he said. ‘Be nice to the tailors.’

He rode to find Ser Michael, who was running the remnants of a small wedding breakfast while checking the company accounts with the notary.

The Captain came in, bowed to the remaining ladies, kissed their hands and their cheeks, and took Michael by the shoulder. Michael was instantly alert.

The two men walked out of the guardroom where the guests were drinking wine, followed by Father Arnaud, who walked with them, chatting pleasantly and in an extremely artificial way until they were inside the Captain’s rooms.

Ser Michael looked around. Toby poured him hot wine from a jug by the fire and walked out, closing the door.

The Captain took a deep breath. His chin went up – one of his rare signs of nerves.

‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ he said. ‘It’s not good, and I’ve hidden it from you so you could enjoy your wedding.’

Michael looked around. ‘Sweet Jesu, what is it?’

Father Arnaud shook his head. ‘Gabriel, that was not well done.’ He nodded to Michael. ‘Your pater has been taken as a traitor by the Captal de Ruth, acting for the King. There has been a battle, and your father lost. Badly. If he is attainted-’

Michael sat down, hard, face unmoving.

The Captain glared at the priest, who smiled beatifically.

‘I’ve called him a traitor a hundred times,’ Michael said. He looked up. ‘And he used your name.’

The Captain twitched like an angry cat. ‘I knew it was a mistake to get a chaplain.’ He looked at the priest, and then said, ‘The prior sent me a set of messages. He says Father Arnaud is to be trusted. Despite playing fast and loose with my identity. In fact, since I’ve discovered that my brother has written to my mother I suppose it doesn’t matter any more.’ He looked at Michael. ‘I’m babbling. Michael, I need you. I plan a winter campaign here – you know what that means.’

‘Par Dieu, have my pater’s troubles driven you to share your plans?’ Michael said. But he felt numb. ‘I have to help my pater.’

‘The King and the Constable have sent every Jarsay knight away from court,’ Father Arnaud said. ‘It was not done with ill will. There is some question as to whether the Captal’s actions are actually within the law, or done with the King’s sanction. The King is, not to put too fine a point on it, trying to keep the lid on the situation by keeping your pater’s supporters away from the Galles and the men who arrested the Earl.’

The Captain poured himself some wine. ‘In this, for once, I must support the King, Michael. If you insist on going – well, I won’t arrest you or use force to stop you, although I did consider it. But short of force, I’ll use any argument to keep you from going.’

Father Arnaud nodded. ‘When I left, the rumour was that your father was going to demand trial by combat. At the tournament in the spring.’ He glanced at the Duke. ‘The other matter is the new Bishop of Lorica. He’ll be elevated tomorrow and he has made his views plain – about the use of hermeticism, about the Patriarch here, about my order.’ The priest shrugged. ‘De Vrailly may be virtual master of the kingdom by summer. The Queen is virtually under siege by the Gallish faction. They hate her, and we don’t even know why.’

The Captain leaned forward. ‘We’ll be finished here by then. We could go to the tournament.’ He smiled, and it was a wicked smile. ‘Visit all together, so to speak.’

Ser Michael took a deep breath. ‘You plan a winter campaign, and you’ll escort me to Alba in the spring?’ he said. ‘You don’t plan to marry the princess and make yourself Emperor?’

The Captain looked out the window, wrinkling his nose in frustration at having to reveal anything of his plans. But he finally looked at Michael and grinned. ‘It may yet come out that way,’ he admitted. ‘But it’s not how I want it to go.’

Ser Michael chewed on that for a moment. ‘It’s not?’ he asked. He looked at Father Arnaud, who looked equally surprised. In fact, he looked like a man who’d just made an important connection.

The Captain propped his chin on his hands, elbows on his knee which was in turn propped on a stool, and looked surprisingly human. ‘Sometimes I have to change my plans,’ he said. ‘This is one of those times. For various reasons, I’d say that yes, we’re going to the Queen’s tournament, and no, I don’t think I’ll marry the princess.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m sorry about your pater. I liked him.’

Michael shrugged. ‘I left for many reasons. I’m here because of them, and I shan’t go running off. I think I am glad you didn’t tell me until my wedding was over.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I think I’ll go and tell my wife,’ he said. He rose, found that the world was stable, and bowed. At the door he paused. ‘May I call you Gabriel?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said the Duke.

‘Yes,’ said the priest. ‘At every opportunity.’

Ser Michael nodded. ‘Got it,’ he said, and withdrew.

The priest turned to his new charge. ‘To the best of my understanding, you’ve chosen to be a human being again. Having a name is part of that.’

The Captain’s face was still balanced on his hand. He was looking out the window. ‘Is it an act?’ he asked. ‘Or do you think that if I spend enough time pretending to be a human being, I’ll become one?’

Got it in one, muttered Harmodius – his first comment in days.

The priest came and stood by him.

‘Who gave you power over me?’ Gabriel asked, but his voice was not unfriendly.

‘The Bon Soeur du Foret Sauvage sends her greetings,’ he said.

The second day after the party, the army – now including almost two hundred local Morean stradiotes – rode into the hills towards Thrake. The Nordikans had ponies, and the entire company was remounted. They moved fast, covered almost twenty miles, and returned through the hills to the west without meeting any opposition. Selected men were counted off and practised storming a small castle that had been built to the purpose – it was only waist high, but rooms were laid out clearly.

Watchers noted too late that they went out without Gelfred’s men and returned with them, as well as a wagon and twenty prisoners.

On the following day, the feast of Saint George, they drilled in the Great Square – even the stradiotes. There were sword drills, and spear drills, and tilting by the mounted men. The Vardariotes came and shot from horseback, joined by a handful of Gelfred’s men and some pages who had become interested in mounted archery – or had been ordered to take an interest. Gelfred’s men vanished for two hours and returned to announce that they all had new hose and new doublets – all green, not red.

Workmen came and built a toy castle – just two towers and a timber hall. None of the buildings had walls – just skeleton structures, so that the crowd could watch all the fighting inside. Forty picked men stormed the castle, to the cheers of the onlookers.

The newly recruited knights jousted with the likes of Bad Tom and Sauce and the Captain, to the satisfaction of all the old company men. Ser Bescanon was unhorsed so hard that he was knocked unconscious – Bad Tom was the culprit.

Thousands of citizens of the city watched, and cheered.

The stradiotes tilted at rings and cut fruits in half with their swords and did some trick riding.

The Nordikans cut through their drill posts with their real axes so fast that the crowd laughed to see pages and Ordinaries running about trying to fit new posts.

The Scholae demonstrated their skills, from wrestling to swordsmanship, and then a team of six of them jousted in borrowed armour. Giorgios Comnenos, who had received a fair amount of private coaching from Ser Michael, managed to keep his seat and score against Ser George Brewes. Ser Alison unhorsed Ser Iannos Dukas, deftly knocking his lance to the ground in a display of perfect martial control, and the crowd cheered her and threw flowers. Moreans were growing used to a female knight.

Morgan Mortirmir, in borrowed armour, ran three courses with Ser Francis Atcourt, scoring on the older knight’s helm in the first pass, exchanging shattered lances on the second, and being unhorsed on the third. Out of practice, he fell badly.

The twenty prisoners sat alone and untended in solitary cells beneath the palace. They were not tortured on the feast of Saint George. They were merely kept awake.

Kronmir had seen the wagon coming back into the city, and he knew what that meant.

He sat thoughtfully with his fingers steepled for some time. He contemplated how long it would take for the foreigners to break his agent, and what that agent could tell them. He reviewed his message system, and assured himself from his code book that he knew the ‘cease all activity’ messages for his three most important agents. Then, when his inn had fallen quiet, and even the lowliest serving maids were asleep, he emptied his room, packed his valise, and pondered the deaths of the innkeeper, his wife, and the young woman Kronmir had slept with from time to time. Killing the three of them would leave the enemy with no witnesses to his presence, but he disliked such waste and he had his own rules. He smiled wryly and admitted to himself that he liked the girl and he couldn’t really muster the sang froid to kill her. Instead, he carefully blocked the chimney in the inn’s common room with flammables and relaid the fire for morning, taking care to relay it exactly the way the night maid had put it down.

He walked past Nianna’s bordello and left a white cross in chalk on the door of the saddler’s across the street. He walked through the deserted streets to the slums by the warehouses on the eastern shore, and left a lamda inside a circle in white chalk on a door across the street from a man who was still recovering from his wounds – the captain of the professional assassins he’d hired from Etrusca, who’d almost died storming the palace.

Then he sat in a waterfront soup house for an hour, watching his back trail, before walking uphill to the old aqueduct, removing a stone, and leaving forty silver leopards in a bag in the gap behind it. He replaced the stone, walked down the hill, and stuck a silver pin into the olive tree that stood in the centre of a tiny square near the assassin’s house. He placed the pin so that it was very hard to see – but easy to find if a man leaned casually against the tree to prise a stone from his shoe.

Then he walked along the sea wall and left two more lamda-in-circle signs tucked in among the graffiti of a hundred generations.

He sat on the wall and waited to see if he had been followed. He walked right down his back trail – bad practice, but he was in a hurry and the sun would be up soon. Then he went to the drop where his Navy Yard contact left his messages – badly spelled, scrawled on leather, rolled up and fitted inside an abandoned clay water pipe from a system half a thousand years old. Kronmir knelt in the dark, felt the presence of leather, and nodded. He withdrew the report, put it in his valise, then put a bag of gold in its place, sealed the pipe, and sketched a broad black ‘X’ in charcoal across it.

He had other agents, but they could rot or be captured. None of them had ever seen him – nor had they ever provided him with anything worth having. And he didn’t think the butcher knew they existed.

Then he walked across the city to the western walls, where the lampmaker’s guild had failed for years to keep the walls in good repair. His rope – cunningly woven of grey and brown horsehair – was right where he wanted it to be. He slipped over the wall, and climbed the ditch, cursing middle age and the sword at his side. He climbed the outer wall at its most ruinous point and jumped down the far side, walked half a league across the fields to a farm, and stole a horse.

The taken wagon had told Kronmir a great deal. It told him that the Red Knight controlled access to the mountains to the north. He rode west, not north, into the hills.

Two days after the feast of Saint George, the Scholae went to two houses in the city. Both of them were empty, and the inn they had intended to raid was found to have burned to the ground. The inn staff had gone to stay with relatives.

The Duke rode through the Navy Yard gates with a handful of armoured men-at-arms led by Francis Atcourt. At his side rode an unarmoured man, who sat and watched the work of the yard with professional admiration – and some obvious discomfort.

The Duke dismounted and went into the main building, so old that it was built of the same red and yellow brick as the main walls of the city. ‘Look at everything,’ he said casually to the unarmoured man.

‘Who is he?’ asked the master shipwright, William Mortice of Harndon. He’d arrived two weeks before, overland.

The Duke smiled. ‘Master Mortice, he is none other than the Mighty and Puissand Lord Ernst Handalo of Venike.’ The Duke nodded.

‘He’ll burn my pretty sharks on their stocks!’ Mortice said, rising.

‘No, no. He’ll go home and tell his city to ally itself with us.’

Sparrow was still getting used to the Red Knight and to Liviapolis. ‘Us? Who is “us”? Alba? Nova Terra? The Empire?’

‘You and me and the new navy,’ the Duke said, swirling wine in his cup and adding something from a flask.

An hour later, in the biting wind on the sea wall, Handalo stood with his short cape whipping behind him. He had to shout to be heard. ‘You can’t sustain the expense!’ he roared. ‘Not without trade and a merchant fleet.’

‘I agree!’ roared the Duke.

‘And winter is here!’ shouted Handalo. ‘It would be insane to put to sea this late in the year.’

‘I agree!’ roared the Duke.

‘Then why don’t you just buy us off and stop this?’ Handalo said.

The Duke smiled. ‘Every archer in my company carries two bowstrings in a small waxed pouch. When they are inspected, the master archers check for them. Because once, I was caught unprespared by a loss of bowstrings.’

Handalo raised an eyebrow.

The Duke looked out over the sea. ‘I could make a mercantile agreement with you right here, messire. But in three years or less, it would be . . . inconvenieint for you. And you would abrogate it – or your successor would.’ He met the Etruscan’s eye. ‘I can defeat you militarily, but not for long. Am I correct?’

Handalo nodded. ‘You have a good head.’

‘Both bowstrings. I build a fleet and then I’ll offer a trade agreement, and you and the Genuans will have every reason to keep it.’ The Duke shrugged.

‘The princess is lucky to have you,’ the Venike captain said.

The Duke shook his head. ‘The Emperor is lucky to have me,’ he said.

Two weeks later, the first Morean galley built in the city in twenty years slipped down the ancient stone slipway and splashed stern first into the ocean, watched by the Etruscan squadron from across the strait. The next day the captured Etruscan galley was repaired, and by week’s end the new Imperial Navy had four hulls in the water.

There followed the first winter storm, a vicious display of nature’s power over water, when all work in the yard had to be halted and a small fortune in lumber, left uncovered, was blown into the sea and lost. The new Imperial ships uncrossed their yards and were stored in covered ship sheds – sheds built a thousand years before.

The Eturcans didn’t have thousand-year-old stone ship sheds, so they had to strip their ships, turn them over, and store them under temporary shelters for the winter. Morea got snow and ice despite its warmer clime and the warm current off the straits, and winter was brutal for galleys.

Two days after the storm, the Etruscans had all their ships stowed safely away. They could only watch in horror in the cold and watery sunlight, as the new Imperial squadron put to sea and cruised to the mouth of the gulf unopposed. The Imperial fleet returned from a day at sea with a trio of great Alban round ships. As there was no blockade, the Alban ships docked without danger, packed to the gunwales with wool, leather and other Alban wares, and a hundred grateful merchants met the Alban traders on the docks. Meanwhile the Imperial ships dashed across the straight under the command of the Megas Ducas, landed marines, and burned the whole Etruscan squadron in their sheds.

Before the fires were out, Ser Ernst Handalo led a deputation of the Merchanter League to the palace from which he had so recently been released. That afternoon, the Etruscans abandoned their alliance with Duke Andronicus and signed a peace with Princess Irene and her father, the Emperor, and a document demanding that ‘The traitorous usurper previously known as the Duke of Thrake’ immediately restore the Emperor to his throne. They paid an indemnity and their Podesta signed a set of articles guaranteeing their tax rate – a rate on which they made a sizeable initial payment. All of the Etruscan officers were released.

The Imperial Army continued to drill. Every day, more of the local stradiotes reported. And every day, a few more merchant ships appeared in the gulf – all from Alba. The round ships were at less risk in the late autumn than galleys. But someone was taking a risk nonetheless.

On the next Monday, the whole of the Imperial Army formed on the Field of Ares; almost a thousand of the company, almost five hundred Scholae, three hundred Nordikans, and as many Vardariotes with nearly a thousand Tagmatic infantry from the city and four hundred stradiotes cavalry from the countryside. Most of the army was clothed in white wool – fresh, new Alban wool, heavy as armour, the colour of snow. The new winter gowns were the products of feverish sewing by every tailor and sempter in Liviapolis.

Ser Gerald Random sat on a horse with the Red Knight and his staff and watched them. He shook his head in wonder. ‘You have your own army!’ he said.

‘You should know,’ the Red Knight said. ‘You’re paying them.’ He smiled. ‘And bringing the wool.’

Random laughed with all the knights. ‘You realise that if this doesn’t work, I’ll be broken – I have, in effect, risked the entirety of my fortune on you.’

The Red Knight looked over his army with satisfaction. ‘It looks like a good bet so far,’ he said. He looked around. ‘The Etruscan indemnity should have paid your bills.’

‘But she spent it elsewhere,’ Random said.

The Red Knight shrugged.

Random glared. ‘While you continue to spend money like a drunken sailor in a whorehouse.’

The Red Knight shrugged again. ‘You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy skill with weapons, bravery, and fine equipment.’ He scratched his beard. ‘They aren’t cheap.’ And he looked back at the merchant. ‘Anyway, you are made of money. Why will this break you?’

‘I agreed to manage the Queen’s tournament. That reminds me – here’s your official invitation. I’m to tell you to your face that you are required, as a knight and a gentleman, to open it and answer her. What happened to the others?’ Random was playing with his reins and trying to judge how much the lack of a foot was going to change his balance if he rode hard.

‘I ignored them.’ The Red Knight opened the scroll tube, unrolled the scroll, and a small working took place and flew off in the form of a tiny dove which hovered like a white hummingbird.

The Queen is gaining in skill, Harmodius said.

‘You’ve been knighted, and now you are in charge of the Royal Tournament?’ the Red Knight asked.

Gerald nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘And the cost is staggering?’ the Red Knight asked.

Random grimaced. ‘Yes.’

‘And you are fronting the money,’ the Red Knight continued.

Random shrugged. ‘She’s the Queen. The King knighted me.’ He grinned. ‘I love a good tournament,’ he added.

The Red Knight glared at him. ‘And yet, despite that, you came here and risked your fortune to pay my bills.’

Random met his eyes squarely. ‘That’s right, Captain.’

The Red Knight looked at Ser Michael. ‘I think that I’m learning the meaning of largesse from a merchant,’ he said.

‘I plan to joust, at the tournament,’ Random said. ‘I’ll take it out of you in lessons.’

The Red Knight looked at the hovering dove. ‘I will attend, with all my knights, fair Queen,’ he said formally.

The little dove bobbed, and flew away.

The Red Knight – the Megas Ducas, the Duke of Thrake, Gabriel Muriens – turned his horse and made it rear slightly, and raised his baton. Every eye followed him.

‘Now let’s show this so-called Duke Andronicus how to make war,’ he said.