briskly, clubbing the sword-wielder hard across the back of the knees. As the man cried out and pitched forward, the new figure stopped, wheeled, and whipped his staff back the other way, clipping a second assailant across the head. The young man let out an aggrieved sound—more a boy’s cry than anything else—and fell, dropping his knife, clutching at his scalp with both hands. Rustem saw blood welling between his fingers.
The third one—the only one left armed now—looked at this compact, bristling new arrival, then over at Rustem, and finally down to where Nishik lay motionless on the street. ‘Holy fucking Jad!’ he said, and bolted past Rustem, tearing wildly around the corner and out of sight.
‘You’d be advised to do the same,’ Rustem said to the pair felled by the man who’d intervened. ‘But not you!’ He pointed a shaking finger at the one who had stabbed Nishik. ‘You stay where you are. If my man is dead I want you brought before the law for murder.’
‘Fuck that, pig,’ said the youth, still clutching at his elbow. ‘Get my sword, Tykos. Let’s go.’
The one called Tykos made as if to claim the blade but the man who’d saved Rustem stepped forward quickly and stamped a booted foot down upon it. Tykos looked sidelong at him, frozen in the act of bending, then straightened and sidled away. The leader snarled another foul-mouthed oath and the three youths followed their vanished friend swiftly down the lane.
Rustem let them go. He was too stunned to do anything else. Heard his own heart pounding and fought for control, breathing deeply. But before turning the corner, their assailant stopped and looked back up, pushing his long hair from his eyes, then gesturing obscenely with his good arm. ‘Don’t think this is over, Bassanid. I’m coming for you!’
Rustem blinked, then snapped, entirely uncharacteristically, ‘Fuck yourself,’ as the young man disappeared.
Rustem stared after him a moment, then knelt quickly, set down his staff, and laid two fingers against Nishik’s throat. After a moment he closed his eyes and withdrew his hand.
‘Anahita guide him, Perun guard him, Azal never learn his name,’ he said softly, in his own tongue. Words he had spoken so often. He had been at war, seen so many people die. This was different. This was a city street in morning light. They had simply been walking. A life was done.
He looked up and around, and realized that there had, in fact, been watchers from the recessed doorways and small windows of the shops and taverns and the apartments stacked above them along the lane.
An amusement, he thought bitterly. It would make a tale.
He heard a sound. The short, stocky young man who’d intervened had reclaimed a pack he must have dropped. Now he was slipping the first assailant’s sword into the ropes on the mule, beside Nishik’s.
‘Distinctive,’ he said tersely. ‘Look at the hilt. It may identify him.’ His accent, speaking Sarantine, was heavy. He was dressed for travel, in a nondescript brown tunic and cloak, belted high, with muddy boots and the heavy pack now on his back.
‘He’s dead,’ Rustem said, unnecessarily. ‘They killed him.’
‘I see that,’ said the other man. ‘Come on. They may be back. They’re drunken and out of control.’
‘I can’t leave him in the street,’ Rustem protested.
The young man glanced back over his shoulder. ‘Over there,’ he said, and knelt to slip his hands under Nishik’s shoulders. He smeared blood on his tunic, didn’t seem to notice. Rustem bent to pick up Nishik by the legs. Together they carried him—no one helping, no one even coming into the lane—up to the small chapel.
When they reached the doorway, a cleric in a stained yellow robe stepped out hastily, his hand outthrust. ‘We don’t want him!’ he exclaimed.
The young man simply ignored him, moving straight past the holy man, who scurried after them, still protesting. They took Nishik into the dim, chill space and set him down near the door. Rustem saw a small sun disk and an altar in the gloom. A waterfront chapel. Whores and sailors meeting each other here, he thought. More a place of venal commerce and shared disease than prayer, most likely.
‘What are we supposed to do with this?’ the cleric protested in an irate whisper, following them in. There were a handful of people inside.
‘Pray for his soul,’ the young man said. ‘Light candles. Someone will come for him.’ He glanced meaningfully at Rustem, who reached for his purse and took out a few copper folles.
‘For the candles,’ he said, extending them to the cleric. ‘I’ll have someone get him.’
The cleric made the coins disappear—more smoothly than a holy man ought, Rustem thought sourly—and nodded briefly. ‘This morning,’ he said. ‘By midday he’s tossed into the street. This is a Bassanid, after all.’
He had been listening, earlier. Had done nothing at all. Rustem gave him his coldest look. ‘He was a living soul. He is dead. Show respect, for your own office and your god if for nothing else.’
The cleric’s mouth fell open. The young man laid a hand on Rustem’s arm and drew him outside.
They went back and Rustem took the mule’s halter. He saw the blood on the stones where Nishik had lain, and he cleared his throat. ‘I owe you a great debt,’ he said.
Before the other man could reply, there came a clattering sound. They both spun to look.
Fully a dozen long-haired youths careened around the corner and skidded to a halt.
‘There!’ cried their first assailant savagely, pointing in triumph.
‘Run!’ snapped the young man at Rustem’s side.
Rustem grabbed his own pack from the mule, the one with his papers from home and the manuscripts he’d bought in Sarnica, and he sprinted uphill, leaving behind the mule, his clothing, his staff, two swords, and all shreds of the dignity he’d imagined himself bearing as he entered the city of cities that was Sarantium.
At this same hour, in the Traversite Palace of the Imperial Precinct, the Empress of Sarantium is lying in a scented bath in a warm, tiled room through which wisps of steam are drifting, while her secretary—sitting on a bench, his back carefully turned to the exposed, reclining form of the Empress—reads aloud to her a letter in which the leader of the largest of the dissident tribes in Moskav proposes that she induce the Emperor to fund his long-planned revolt.
The letter also, with little subtlety, intimates that the writer is prepared to personally attend to the Empress’s physical delight and rapture at some time in the future, should this persuasion of Valerius take place. The document concludes with an expression of well-phrased sympathy that a woman of the Empress’s manifest magnificence should still be enduring the attentions of an Emperor so helplessly unable to conduct his own affairs of state.
Alixana stretches her arms out of the water and above her head and allows herself a smile. She looks down at the curves of her own breasts. The fashion in dancers has changed since her day. Many of the girls now are much as the male dancers are: small breasts, straight hips, a boyish look. This would not be a way to describe the woman in her bath. She has seen and lived through more than thirty quite remarkably varied years now and can still stop a conversation or double a heartbeat with her entrance into a room.
She
