Lord of Emperors. Guy Gavriel Kay
from one off-duty soldier. But this meant that those chasing them would surely be stringing out by now, and might even lose sight of them if Pardos and the doctor—he really was moving quite well for a greybeard—managed to take a sufficiently erratic path.
Glancing up constantly to get his bearings, Pardos glimpsed—through a break in the multi-storied buildings— a golden dome larger than any he’d ever seen before, and he abruptly changed his thinking, even as they ran.
‘That way!’ he gasped, pointing.
‘Why are we running?’ the Bassanid burst out. ‘There are people here! They won’t dare—’
‘They will! They’ll kill us and pay a fine! Come on!’
The doctor said no more, saving his breath. He followed as Pardos cut sharply off the street they were on and angled across a wide square. They hurtled past a bedraggled Holy Fool and his small crowd, hit by a whiff of the man’s foul, unwashed odour. Pardos heard a sharp cry from behind—some of the pursuers still had them in sight. A stone whizzed past his head. He looked back.
One pursuer. Only one. That changed things.
Pardos stopped, and turned.
The doctor did the same. A fierce-looking but extremely young man in green robes, eastern-styled, with earrings and a golden necklace and long, unkempt hair— not one of the original group—slowed uncertainly, then fumbled at his belt and pulled out a short sword. Pardos looked around, swore, and then darted up to the Holy Fool. Braving the maggoty, fetid stench of the man, he seized his oak staff, snapping an apology over his shoulder. He ran directly at their young pursuer.
‘You idiot!’ he screamed, waving the staff wildly. ‘You’re alone! There’s two of us!’
The young man—belatedly apprehending this significant truth—looked quickly over his shoulder, saw no immediately arriving reinforcements, appeared suddenly less fierce.
‘Run!’ screamed the doctor at Pardos’s side, brandishing a knife.
The young man looked at the two of them and elected to follow the advice. He ran.
Pardos hurled the borrowed staff back towards the Holy Fool on his small platform. ‘Come on!’ he rasped at the doctor. ‘Head for the Sanctuary!’ He pointed. They turned together, crossed the square, and raced up another laneway on the far side
It wasn’t far now, as the lane—blessedly level now— gave suddenly onto an enormous forum with arched porticoes and shops all around it. Pardos swept past two boys playing with a hoop and a man selling roasted nuts at a brazier. He saw the looming bulk of the Hippodrome on his left and a pair of huge bronze gates in a wall that had to be the one guarding the Imperial Precinct. There was an enormous equestrian statue in front of the gates. He ignored these splendours for now, running for all he was worth diagonally across the forum towards a long, wide, covered porch with two more huge doors behind it and a dome rising above and behind that would have taken away his breath if he’d had any breath left to lose.
He and the Bassanid leaped and dodged among masons and masonry carts and brick piles and—familiar sight!—an outdoor oven for quicklime near the portico. As they reached the steps, Pardos heard the pursuing cry behind him again. He and the doctor took the steps side by side and stumbled to a stop, breathing hard, before the doors.
‘No one allowed!’ snapped a guard—there were two of them. ‘They are at work inside!’
‘Mosaicist,’ gasped Pardos. ‘Here from Batiara! Those youths are after us!’ He pointed back across the forum. ‘They killed someone already! With swords!’
The guards glanced over. Half a dozen of the young pursuers had now made it this far, running in a tight cluster. They had weapons drawn—in daylight, in the forum. Impossible to credit, or so wealthy they didn’t even care. Pardos seized one of the heavy door handles, pulled it open, pushed the doctor quickly inside. Heard the piercing, satisfying sound of a guard whistling for support. They would be safe in here for now, he was sure of it. The doctor was bent over, hands on his hips, breathing heavily. He gave Pardos a sidelong glance and a nod, obviously registering the same thing.
Later, much later, Pardos would give some thought to what the morning’s sequence of interventions and activities suggested about changes in himself, but for the moment he was only moving and reacting.
He looked up. He reacted, but he didn’t move.
In fact, he felt suddenly as though his boots were set into the marble floor like . . . tesserae in a setting bed, fixed for centuries to come.
He stood so, rooted, trying to deal first with the sheer size of the space encompassed here, the dim, vast aisles and bays receding into an illusion of endlessness down corridors of pale, filtered light. He saw the massive columns piled upon each other like playthings for the giants of legend from Finabar, the lost, first world of the Antae’s pagan faith, where gods walked among men.
Overwhelmed, Pardos looked down at the flawless, polished marble of the floor, and then—taking a deep breath—up again, all the way up, to see, floating, floating, the great dome itself, inconceivably immense. And upon it, taking shape even now, was what Caius Crispus of Varena, his teacher, was devising amid this holiness.
White and gold tesserae on a blue ground—blue such as Pardos had never seen in Batiara and had never expected to see in his life—defined the vault of the heavens. Pardos recognized the hand and style immediately. Whoever had been in charge of these decorations when Crispin arrived from the west was no longer the designer here.
Pardos had been taught by the man doing this, master to apprentice.
What he couldn’t yet begin to grasp—and he knew he would need to spend a long time looking to even make a start—was the colossal scale of what Crispin was doing on this dome. A design equal to the vastness of the setting.
The doctor, beside him, was leaning against a marble column now, still catching his breath. The marble was the green-blue colour, in the muted light, of the sea on a cloudy morning. The Bassanid was silent, slowly looking about. Above the grey-streaked beard his eyes were wide. Valerius’s Sanctuary was the talk and rumour of the known world, and they were standing within it now.
There were labourers at work everywhere, many of them at corners, so distant they were invisible, could only be heard. But even the noise of construction was changed by the huge space, echoing, a hollow resonance of sound. He tried to imagine the liturgy being chanted here, and a lump rose in his throat at the thought.
Dust danced in the slanting beams of sunlight that fell down through the windows set high on the walls and all around the dome. Looking up past suspended oil lamps of bronze and silver, Pardos saw scaffolding everywhere against the marbled walls, where mosaics of interwoven flowers and patterned shapes were being laid. One scaffolding only went all the way up to the dome, towards the northern side of that great curve, opposite the entrance doors. And in the soft, sweet morning light in the Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom, Pardos saw upon that high scaffolding the small figure of the man he’d followed all the way east, unasked, and unwanted—for Crispin had flatly refused the company of any apprentices when he’d set out on his own journey.
Pardos took another steadying breath and made the sign of the sun disk. This place was not formally consecrated yet—there was no altar, no suspended golden disk behind it—but for him, it was holy ground already, and his journey, or this part of it, was over. He gave thanks to Jad in his heart, remembering blood on an altar in Varena, wild dogs on a bitterly cold night in Sauradia when he had thought he would die. He was alive, and here.
Pardos could hear the guards outside—more of them now. A young man’s voice was raised in anger, and was then sharply cut off by a soldier’s reply. He looked at the doctor, and allowed himself a crooked smile. Then he remembered that the Bassanid’s servant was dead. They had escaped, but it was not a moment for pleasure, not for the other man.
Not far away, two artisans stood together, and Pardos decided that if he could make his feet obey commands,