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Chapter 7:
Mask of Beauty


I


Ciprion’s jaw was still slack in amazement, and he examined Hanuvar’s face with the focus of a man readying to paint it.

Unlike Hanuvar himself, his friend and former adversary had changed very little in the months since they’d last met. His dark hair was just starting to gray. His thick eyebrows lent him a deceptively stern appearance only partially belied by the care lines about his mouth and eyes, which were exaggerated and deepened by the faint light of the lantern hung over their table.

The two men sat across from each other in a curtained booth at the Antyrian Bath, just north of the Dervan forum, a rambling complex of courtyards, gymnasiums, restaurants, and different sized pools offering a wide selection of temperatures. Volanus, too, had maintained public baths, but nothing on such a scale, and Hanuvar still found it strange that so much business was conducted within. The meeting point provided a fine screen. Even if Ciprion had been recognized, no one would be overly suspicious about the identity of a citizen in a private consultation with him here, for this bath house was frequented by both plebeians and patricians, and remained a neutral ground where different social classes and political factions freely intermingled.

Though the spring festival was only a day away, winter’s chill still clung to the capital, and both men wore cloaks over long-sleeved tunics, and boots rather than sandals. The mulled wine Ciprion had ordered was hot enough that steam drifted from their cups.

Ciprion blew across the rim. His voice was low in awe. “It’s uncanny to see you like this.”

“Don’t be too impressed. It’s a mixed blessing.” Hanuvar hesitated, then decided on full candor. “My muscles aren’t stiff in the morning, and I’m more alert at night, and I can see better. But there are other differences you forget about. My temper’s shorter, and I feel like I’m too eager to react. I have to force myself to slow down sometimes. The right words don’t come as easily.” He smiled wryly. “And I’m easily distracted by women.”

Ciprion laughed shortly. “Surely you’re not going to tell me you never thought about sex when you were older.”

“Of course I did. Just not constantly. There are other things, too. It’s strange, not recognizing myself in the mirror. My scars are gone. And some of those were reminders of where I’ve been, and what I’ve done.”

“Forgive me if I pry, but how did this happen?”

Hanuvar had not looked forward to explaining the story again but had known it would be necessary. “Accident. A sorcerer was trying to heal himself and when his spell struck it affected us both.”

“An agent of the revenants, or someone else?”

“No. Someone preying upon an old woman.” He didn’t want to dwell on that part of the story. He turned over his hand. “The effect isn’t permanent. Look. No callouses.”

Ciprion peered with interest. “I assume that you haven’t been living the soft life for the last few months.”

“Not exactly. I’m aging too fast to form them. Last fall I looked like I was seventeen.”

“Seventeen,” Ciprion repeated in disbelief. “I’d gauge you for your mid-to-late twenties now. So you’ve changed a lot in just a few months. And you’ll keep aging this fast?”

“So it seems. At this rate I should be back to my real age by summer or fall.” He did not admit to his growing concern on that account.

Ciprion lightly raised his drink to him, the lines about his mouth shifting into the suggestion of a smile even if his lips did not quite reach it. “Here’s to your luck, though. I should like to taste youth once more, while I’ve the wisdom to appreciate it. I hope you enjoy it while it lasts, mixed though its pleasures are.”

Hanuvar lifted the cup in appreciation. “I’m doing my best.”

The wine was warm and sweet. Hanuvar had accustomed himself to the drinking of heated wine, although he’d never come to enjoy it.

Both of them stilled as a group of men walked past their curtained alcove. The strangers talked loudly about what masks they meant to wear at the Festival of Vanora and debated which sort women liked best.

Ciprion’s lips ticked up in a rueful smile. “I don’t suppose you’re planning on taking in the festival?”

“I may.” Attendance at the city-wide Festival of Vanora, a raucous celebration of spring’s return, wasn’t high upon Hanuvar’s list of priorities, but moving around while masked might prove useful. He waited until the men had moved completely past, then continued in a low voice. “I will never be able to properly thank you for the information you left me. I am deeply grateful for your courage and skill.”

Ciprion passed off the compliment with the lifting of his wine cup in salute. He had somehow obtained and copied most of the recorded sales of Volani slaves, presumably without drawing the scrutiny of the revenants or other suspicious parties.

“I assume that was your work on the treasury a few weeks ago?” Ciprion asked.

“Yes.”

Ciprion looked faintly amused. “I thought as much. Executed with extreme precision, and no one harmed during the entire operation. Starsis questioned and left looking like an impotent fool. You also made a laughingstock of the praetorians and the revenants. The legates of both groups were livid. Did you find what you needed?”

Indeed he had; the paperwork he’d recovered had information on the whereabouts of those few Volani sold by Derva that Ciprion hadn’t been able to track down. “I know where almost all of my people are. Now it’s just a matter of finding a way to them.”

“My heart is with you.”

Hanuvar inclined his head graciously. “What about your own challenges?” He referred specifically to the plot Aminius had hatched to assassinate Ciprion. “I was surprised you had moved again into the emperor’s confidence.”

Ciprion spread his hands as if acknowledging an oversight or failing. “It seemed the simplest way to outmaneuver Aminius. I can’t move against him overtly, but I can help wedge out his relationship with the emperor. He’s no longer the favorite.”

“Enarius is,” Hanuvar said.

“Yes. A few years ago, the emperor asked if I’d like to serve as an advisor to his nephew, and I declined. This fall I asked if the offer remained open. I expected the emperor to be skeptical or even suspicious of my inquiry but he seemed delighted, even though he knows I favor the republic. He told me it’s refreshing to have someone nearby who dares to speak his real opinion. There are only a few who will.”

“Such is the fate of tyrants.”

“Yes. I thought I’d just be shielding the throne from Aminius, but I’m honestly growing fond of Enarius. He seems curious and eager to learn. He’s a far cry from what I’d seen of him previously.”

Hanuvar almost added that he, too, found Enarius forthright and likable, though far too trusting. He said only: “He’s learning from adversity.”

“I think you’re right.”

“What are you going to do about Aminius?”

Ciprion grew somber and his voice lowered, likely not because he feared being overheard, but because he spoke on deeply private matters. “I must be patient. For now, my family’s safe. He can’t move against me when my star’s risen with the emperor, and I think he’s more worried about Enarius than me. He’s angling for a governorship and I’m encouraging the emperor to give it to him.”

“That’s a lucrative post. What’s your reasoning?”

“The emperor’s been ill. He’s about to formally adopt Enarius and announce him as his heir, which will help secure the situation, but if the emperor were to go to his ancestors while Aminius is far from Derva, all the better for the empire.”

Hanuvar tried not to dwell upon the fate of the old man who had ordained the murder of the Volani people. The emperor had lived into old age surrounded by luxuries, with a chosen successor to follow in his steps. Tens of thousands of Hanuvar’s people had perished without anything close to that satisfaction.

He forced his thoughts onto more convivial subjects. “What of your family? How are they?”

“It’s kind of you to ask. My daughter and her husband have returned to their home in Derva and Amelia and I are staying with them while a new home’s being readied for us. My finances are not what they were, but the emperor has been generous.”

“And your grandson is well? He fully recovered?”

“He did, thank you. He’s become fascinated with lizards and snakes of all types. He’s more interested in reading, at least. Especially about snakes and lizards.”

Hanuvar chuckled. “And how is Amelia?”

“Quite well. She’s thriving back in Dervan society. She’s a more adroit politician than I ever was and manages a lot of diplomacy without ever having to hold office. I would have liked to have brought her to meet you today, but the circumstances didn’t feel appropriate.”

He knew then that Ciprion was finally nearing the reason he had invited him to this meeting.

“What are those circumstances?”

Ciprion seemed to choose his words carefully. “I do not wish to know the details of your operations. But I hope you will tell me truthfully. Are you working with the Eltyr?”

The elite, all female fighting corps had originally been established to protect the gate to the Volani military harbor. Hanuvar had helped to free some surviving Eltyr in the far-off city of Hidrestus, and he sought information about his escaped daughter and her friends, all Eltyr, but he wasn’t working with anyone from the corps. “I am not.”

“I was almost certain you were not; I’m glad.”

“Why do you ask?”

Although relieved, Ciprion’s brows were still drawn. “Over the last few months someone has been murdering prominent Dervans. I see from your expression you haven’t heard of this. It’s nice to know that some state secrets don’t leak.”

“And you think it’s one of the Eltyr?”

“The symbol of the corps is drawn beside the bodies, in blood.”

Hanuvar had seen that symbol on standards borne by troops and flown from battlements for as long as he could remember: a half-circle above a horizontal line, contained within an arch, symbolic of an ocean moonrise viewed though the Volanus River Gate.

“Whoever leaves the mark has slain prominent citizens,” Ciprion continued. “Senators. Bankers. Businessmen.”

“Do they have anything in common?”

“They encouraged or profited from the Third Volani War.”

Hanuvar had no love for such men, but he had less love for drawing official attention to Volani. He wondered if he needed to express condolences. “Are they men you knew?”

“Not most of them, at least not well.”

“How many have there been?”

“Six.”

“What does the emperor plan to do about it?”

“I’ve told him that there would be someone eager to take revenge, and I’ve even pointed out it could be someone using the Eltyr as an excuse to settle scores. The revenants think it’s your daughter. They keep trying to get the emperor agitated about you anyway, although he’s starting to question them. I think that’s Enarius’ influence. It doesn’t help them that no one can find you, and that no one’s claimed to have seen you for months.”

“Is there any sign that the Eltyr is my daughter?”

“There’s not nearly enough information. For your sake, I pray she’s not. What do you think?”

Hanuvar wished he could definitively say he was certain she was uninvolved. His own sources had found no word of her, but if she were laying low, that meant nothing, for she hadn’t known about the existence of Carthalo’s intelligence network to seek it out. “This doesn’t sound like her,” Hanuvar said, finally. “But . . . her city is dead. And her husband. And her children.”

“I had not heard that you had grandchildren,” Ciprion said solemnly. He took a deep breath and said, with great care, “I grieve for you.”

“I never met them,” Hanuvar confessed.

A pensive silence followed before Ciprion spoke haltingly. “If one of your people is this murderer, whoever she is, she will have to be stopped.”

“I understand. And my people might be scapegoated if these attacks continue, so if the murderer is one of my people, she jeopardizes the lives of those few who remain.”

“Then we are in agreement.”

Hanuvar was readying to ask further details about the murders when they heard a man cry for help. Running footsteps echoed on the tile, and someone shouted for a healer.



II


Hanuvar and Ciprion rose as one, Ciprion sweeping the curtain aside, and then both hurried into the hall. A trickle of men and women were running from the restaurant area into the courtyard where little knots of men and women gathered. A man’s body lay with his head in a shaded colonnade, his feet extended into the courtyard’s edge. A small crowd of onlookers watched as a middle-aged man in a plain white tunic knelt and pressed two fingers to the body’s neck.

Hanuvar saw no obvious sign of mortal injury, and as he and Ciprion started forward he shifted his attention to their surroundings.

The nearby onlookers appeared stunned and were talking in hushed awe. One of them was saying something to his companion about a goddess.

The prone man shifted and mumbled a little.

The man checking for a life pulse lifted his fingers and shifted closer. “I’m here, sir.” His accent was Volani. Hanuvar examined him, finding a pleasant-looking intellectual of early middle years that he did not know.

The paunchy nobleman he tended wore only a loincloth. He lay beside a towel. The Volani helped his master to a sitting position.

“Did you see her, Adherval?” the nobleman asked weakly. “She was a goddess.”

“She spoke,” Adherval said in a quiet, reverent voice, “and it was as though my mind went blank.”

The rich man’s eyes settled upon Ciprion and lit with recognition. “Ciprion, old friend! Did you see her?”

“I’m afraid not.”

From around a corner came a man in a formal toga, followed by a pair of lictors, tall, strong men with austere expressions who each carried a heavy ceremonial staff of office. And behind them, Hanuvar saw a woman in a blue stola who could not possibly be here.

He touched Ciprion on the arm. “It was good to see you.”

He did not wish to remain in an area where Dervan lawgivers were in abundance, but more than that, he had to make sure he had really seen who he thought.

Ciprion nodded his farewell, and Hanuvar left him.

Disaster drew interest, almost always, and most who felt it near came closer to learn the details, unless the threat was still ongoing. But some retreated, and one of those was the small, fair-faced woman. Hanuvar left the courtyard for the central hall, trailing her as she moved for the exit. He questioned his own vision and wondered if he were simply imagining a connection that hadn’t been there. Surely, it could not be her.

And then, as she threw on her cloak, she glanced warily over her shoulder, and immediately made note of his watchful gaze. Recognition struck him like a thunderbolt, and he saw in her eyes she felt the same thing, although her smooth brow was clouded with confusion, as if she refused to believe what she was witnessing.

She was Senanara, former wife to his brother Melgar, a beauty in early middle age, with wispy brown hair, a heart-shaped face with broad full lips, and a fine figure, well suited to the Dervan dress. She should not have been here, in a Dervan bath house, and it was nearly impossible to credit that she lived at all. At the door, a blaze of sunlight obscured all but her shapely outline.

He followed her into the street.

Two attendants walked with her, one a young woman, the other a young man. Senanara glanced back when she was a little way into the crowded street, but he contrived to bend and adjust his sandal as he saw her turn and didn’t think she’d noted him. He waited until all three had disappeared across the busy forum and then kept a block distant as they turned down a side street winding around the foot of the Kaladine hill.

Derva always bustled in the late morning, but with the festival tomorrow, out-of-town visitors swelled the usual numbers. Everyone seemed in a lighter mood. Merchants hawked their wares, women and slaves wandered to and from the market with baskets, and messengers dashed through the open space with set, purposeful expressions and flat, short-strapped shoulder bags held tight to their chests. Hanuvar passed a band of workmen pushing wheelbarrows loaded with hammers and saws and dodged a band of rustics too busy staring at the buildings to pay heed to passers-by. Further down the way a band of tall copper-skinned men in orange robes walked the street, visitors from far-off Ilodonea, hard-eyed as veteran centurions, the turban-wearing diplomat in their midst the sharpest of all.

He tracked Senanara and her companions for the next quarter hour. Occasionally he delayed his pursuit when they turned into an empty lane, and then he’d be forced to jog to catch up. At some point the two women lost their male escort. Possibly he’d been dispatched on an errand, but Hanuvar had a different suspicion, and remained alert for him.

Finally, Senanara and her female companion arrived at a small square. Typical of Dervan construction, a wide fountain bubbled in its center. A trio of young women stood beside it with buckets on its ledge, less interested in water filling than making each other laugh.

Senanara approached a recessed red brick doorway to a two-story building squeezed between a garment maker’s shop and a pottery market.

The confrontation he anticipated took place the moment she advanced into the dark alcove.

He’d been listening for the pad of feet to his rear, or he’d have never heard the light footfall. He whirled, ducking as a burly man swung a flattened club at his head. The strike barely missed. Hanuvar drove a blow deep into his opponent’s diaphragm and folded him with a gasp. He pushed him into the younger man a pace behind.

The second attacker was the one who’d been walking with Senanara. The collision with his comrade threw him off balance. Hanuvar grabbed the younger man’s wrist, pulling him forward. He brought the fellow’s arm tightly up behind his back, paused to kick the first man in the stomach when he started to rise, then pushed his prisoner into the square.

“Keep moving or I’ll break your arm,” Hanuvar said into his charge’s ear. His captive had little choice but to cooperate, and received no aid from his companion, still moaning in the street.

Very shortly they were before the door through which Senanara had vanished.

“Open it,” Hanuvar instructed. When his prisoner resisted, Hanuvar pushed up his arm and the young man groaned, then reached for the latch. As the door swung wide, Hanuvar pushed him stumbling ahead then came in and stepped to the left.

Senanara and her female companion waited inside a small atrium, though neither had taken advantage of its couches. Both stood, as if waiting upon a report or the delivery of a body. And both gasped as one of their own tripped inside. Their eyes rounded on Hanuvar, who kicked the door shut and then stepped further to the left, taking in the room.

The young man recovered quickly, turned, and brought his arm in front of him, where he massaged it and glowered at Hanuvar.

“Senanara,” Hanuvar said, “we need to talk. Alone.” His eyes shifted to her companion. She was comely but surely not so radiant that she would have been remarked upon by the men of the bath house in such a glowing term as “goddess.”

“You barge into my dwelling?” Senanara’s voice was strained and husky, her lightly accented Dervan well-educated, distinctive more in the rise and fall of her phrasing than actual pronunciation. “And tell me what you wish?”

“You will want to speak with me,” he said, in Volani.

Her pretense of outrage was subsumed by the wary curiosity he’d detected in her from the start.

“Who are you?” she asked in their shared language. He again saw recognition in her eyes, although it had not quite fit into place for her. “You’re a Cabera.” She spoke as she came to the realization. “I can see it in your face! But I thought I had met you all. Who are you?”

Both his attacker and the other woman eyed him with increasing curiosity. He could tell they were following the conversation. They, too, understood Volani. The door rattled open to his right and the other man entered, club in hand and murder in his eye. He favored his right leg.

“Hold,” Senanara commanded, then repeated the order when the man insisted on advancing. The limping movement seemed a habit rather than a recent injury. At Senanara’s word he stopped and lowered the weapon.

“I may not be who you think,” Hanuvar said to Senanara, addressing her still in Volani. “But we should talk. In private.”

“You’ll talk to all of us,” said the man with the club, also in flawless Volani, then spoke to the room at large. “He’s some kind of Dervan spy.”

All of them were Volani. He could see it now: their garments were appropriate for upper middle-class Dervans, but their hair styles weren’t quite right, and the women’s jewelry was smaller but brighter than the Dervan norm. The men lacked citizen’s rings[12].

“You think we’ll let you speak to her, alone?” the other woman asked.

“I don’t think any of you are in charge of her,” Hanuvar replied with brutal honesty. “No one has been in charge of Senanara since she left her parents’ home. And probably not even before that.”

That acknowledgment of Senanara’s well-known willfulness coaxed a faint smile from her. He felt the scrutiny of those rich brown eyes even more intently. He wanted to get her alone before she announced the oncoming conclusion of his identity to the others. She had always been smart, but she had rarely been subtle. She had both delighted and exasperated Melgar.

“Alone,” Hanuvar insisted.

“Very well.”

The others objected, and she snapped: “Quiet! You, stranger, with me.” And without a backward glance she stepped for the door to a back room. She paused to one side while he opened it for her, for it was her habit to be waited upon. Hanuvar remained alert for someone to creep from behind. No one did.

She passed him and entered the small dining room, arranged Dervan style, with a selection of couches around a low central table. But she did not stop there. After Hanuvar closed the door, she allowed him to open another, then advanced through an archway and into a tiny courtyard, more the feeling of a waterless well bottom than a garden sanctuary, for the building was small and the walls stretched two stories high all around. A little square of greenery stood out from the center tiles, along with a half dead evergreen bush. An empty waist-high pot stood in each of the four corners, and benches faced the center.

“It’s not much, compared to what I once had,” she said. “But most of our people have nothing at all.” She gestured to one of the benches and sat on one end, pulling her cloak tight. He sat down on the other, turned toward her.

He had not been in Senanara’s presence in more than five years. She was one of those whose appeal was somehow stronger than her objective beauty. Whether it was a matter of her carriage and confidence or what the poets described as inborn charm he had never been able to tell, but he was keenly aware of her physical presence and that it was distinctly feminine. He couldn’t help wondering if he would have noted her quite so acutely if he were in the body he’d had last year.

“You look an awful lot like Melgar,” she said, softly. “But you move and sound like Hanuvar. And that can’t be, unless he had a son I never heard of.”

“Do you trust your people?”

“With my life. Can I trust you, nameless Cabera?”

“Yes. What is it you’re doing here?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“So I know how your plans will affect my own.”

Her eyes glittered like sharpened knives. “I do what I must, to recover a pitiful handful of our people.”

It might be that, against all odds, he had discovered another useful ally. He would have thought Senanara one of those who would die with sword in hand, even if she had no practice wielding one. She was a fighter. She had survived, and so, like himself, she would find a way to continue the struggle. And it sounded as though she had a similar vision about how that might best be done.

To gain her trust and learn her aims, however, he would have to take a risk. She watched as he debated, and he felt her fascination. Sooner or later she would convince herself of his identity, no matter how strange it seemed, whether he told her or not. Better then to reveal it and use the declaration as a tool to leverage her acceptance.

“What if I were to tell you that I, too, am here to recover our people?”

“Who are you?”

“The first time I met you, Melgar was so proud to have you on his arm he dribbled wine when he tried to toast you. And the last time I saw you, you two were divorced. You loved him still, and I saw his eyes burn when he looked at you. But he remained angry, after the war. You wanted to move past it. And he couldn’t. He told us all he wanted to let go, but I’m not sure he really did.”

Her lips gaped, though there was less surprise and more confirmation in her look.

“Hanuvar.”

She sounded certain as she said his name, then looked confused again. “But how? Our own people saw you die! And you’re so young!”

“I didn’t die. As for this,” he said with a short gesture that swept across his chest, “it’s a temporary effect. I’m using it while I can to help our people.”

“How?”

When he hesitated, she laid a hand across his forearm. Her touch was cool and unmistakably charged with sensuality. “I’ve obtained a small amount of money, and we’re using it to buy and free some of our people. Is that what you’re doing? It’s something more, isn’t it.”

He knew that she wasn’t lying. He just wasn’t sure he could trust her judgment. “And you, a Volani, are allowed to buy them openly?”

“But, you see, I am not openly Volani. I claim to be from Surru. There are many mixed folk there.”

The island city-state of Surru shared ancient cultural ties with Volanus, and remained nominally independent, although it was now a Dervan client state. At one time there had been a thriving community of Volani residents there. “I’m told that the Dervans arrested many of the Volani in enclaves around the empire.”

“Many, but not all.” She moved her hand at last, and it amused him that he wished she had not. “Some of our people live free in Surru. And there are more in Ostra. Did you hear Tannis Lenereva died? Bastard.” She spat, an astonishing gesture from a woman of high breeding. Her head rose nobly, as though by that action alone she restored her dignity. “The free among us have pooled our resources. We don’t have much, but it’s enough to set us up in respectable accommodations for the brief time we’re here, and to seek out and negotiate for the release of our people.”

That she was concerned about the social status of her dwelling place disappointed him, for surely her money would go further if she and her entourage stayed at a humble inn, or some apartment, but it might be that her cover story required certain appearances to be maintained.

He was even more troubled by her overt efforts to seek out Volani slaves.

But he put that worry aside and permitted himself the luxury of sitting beside another free survivor, one who was part of his extended family.

She reached out to squeeze his hand. He looked across at her, then asked, quietly, “How did you escape Volanus?”

“I wasn’t there when it fell,” she said with strange regret. “I was on a pilgrimage to the temple of Danit in Etessus.”

He could not conceal his pleasure and felt a surge of hope. “Was your daughter with you?”

Her chin lifted minutely; her voice was level as an ice field. “My daughter was in Volanus.”

He should not have allowed his hope to rise, but for a brief moment he’d thought kind young Edonia, who couldn’t be older than nine, might still be among the living. His remorse was heartfelt. “I’m sorry.”

She slid her hand away to flick something invisible from her stola, as though casting off her anger.

He opened his palm as if showing a wound, or a span of exposed flesh analogous to his heart. “My daughter lives. At least she did, recently. She escaped Dervan custody, and they haven’t found her yet.”

Her enormously expressive eyes widened. “Narisia’s alive?”

“I think so. I haven’t located her.” He did not add that she might have become a vengeful killer.

“The not knowing must drive you mad,” Senanara said. “Sometimes, I think, perhaps Edonia might live. But in what conditions?” She fluffed her fine hair with her fingers. “I bribed a man to let me look at sales records of the Volani slaves, and her name wasn’t on them. But she’s a clever girl. She might have given a different name, don’t you think?”

“She would have known that the name Cabera would have meant trouble for her,” Hanuvar agreed.

“But then how would I find her?” There was panic in her voice. She stilled it and straightened. “I must assume she’s dead. Only a handful live, and many of them in situations I wouldn’t wish upon an enemy.” Her eyes were dark. “But I wonder what I might do to Derva, had I the chance.”

“What were you doing in the bathhouse?”

“I was there to visit my husband. My second husband,” she added.

“When were you married?”

“Almost three years ago. He’s alive and tending some rich, spoiled Dervan. Eletius Empronius,” she added with distaste.

“Tending?”

“Adherval’s a physician.” Her voice grew bitter. “And his fat bastard of an owner won’t sell him. At least not for what I can afford.”

“Others have had it far, far worse,” he reminded her gently. “He’s apparently healthy and well fed.”

“Should I be grateful to the Dervans?” Her voice was sharp even though soft.

He didn’t bother answering. “Eletius seemed to have suffered some kind of attack at the bath today.”

“I heard. It looked as though he lived.” She sounded disappointed.

“Did you have anything to do with it?”

“If I’d wished to kill him, I’d have done a better job of it. Now tell me, what is it you’re planning? You know you can trust me, or else you’d never have confided your identity to me.”

“I trust you.” She was loyal to the Volani people, but she remained the same tempestuous person he had known for years. He had already risked much by confirming his identity. To share anything about his own operations would be sheer folly. He could not tell her that, so he played to her pride, and vanity, and self-identity. “But to protect our people, you must trust me and wait.”

“Wait? We’re in negotiations right now. My associates have a mother and father who’ve both survived, as well as a young cousin, and they’re reaching out to the men who’ve purchased them. If you want them to wait, you shall have to tell them yourself.”

He made direct eye contact with her, to press home his point. “I’m in the midst of very delicate operations, and there are other events going on, connected with the Volani, that might make things even more dangerous.”

“What kind of events?”

“I can tell you when they’re complete.”

She sighed in frustration. “We are not made of money, Hanuvar. We can’t just wait in the city indefinitely.”

“I’m not asking for an indefinite wait. Supply me with the names of those you’re seeking, and I will see what I can do to help.”

She eyed him shrewdly for a long, quiet moment. “You’re planning something really big, aren’t you.” When he didn’t reply she smiled and answered her own question. “Of course, you are. You never do anything small. I can help. You know I can.”

“I’m certain you can. But first let me see who you’re trying to buy, and then I need to get to know your people.”

“You can count upon them.”

“I’m sure I can. But you must not tell them who I am.”

Her soft lips parted in surprise. “You must be joking. Telling them about you will give them hope.”

“Let their work give them hope. The few Dervans who think me still alive need to continue seeking an old man, not a young one. They assume I’m dead set on killing the emperor. If I’ve any luck, they also think I’m missing an eye and am about a foot taller than I really am. I want them to keep seeking that man. And if any one of us is caught . . . ”

She sagged a little in acceptance, then smiled playfully. “You do know that somewhere there’s a tall, one-eyed middle-aged veteran being interrogated by Dervans right now.”

“That may well be,” Hanuvar conceded.

“You’re really not after vengeance?”

“The living must come first.”

“You’re right,” she said, although he heard a note of disappointment in her voice.

“I can’t be more clear,” Hanuvar said. “Please hold off on any other efforts. Your plans may jeopardize my own. Do you understand?”

“Are you so close to moving forward?”

He nodded, unwilling to say more, and she sighed at him. But her quicksilver mood changed on the moment, and she beamed. “You are still exasperating. If I had any doubt it was you, there could be none now. You used to drive Melgar mad. Where is he? Is he with you?”

His expression must have revealed all.

Theirs had not been an amicable parting, but her grief was genuine. “How did he die?”

“It was a brief sickness. Not battle. The last time he woke, he found the irony of dying in bed darkly funny. You could almost say he died laughing.”

“Not spitting bitterly at his enemies? Had he changed, in the end?”

“He had, a little.”

“I would like to think he had known some happiness.”

“He had.”

“And what of the colony the two of you sailed off to found. Does it prosper?”

“Someday, the Dervans will hunt for it. Maybe they already are. The less known about it, the better.”

“They’ve their hands full with Cerdia and another Herrene rebellion.”

“For now.”

“You’re so cautious. I thought you were the most daring of all your brothers!”

That had likely been Harnil, but he did not say it.

“Very well, then. Caution. What shall I tell my people? Especially since I said you looked like a Cabera.” She spoke again without waiting for a reply. “Perhaps I should not have said that.”

He allowed that with a shrug. Melgar had loved her not just because she was beautiful, but because she was bright and fiery and clever, which at one extreme meant she could be rash and impetuous.

“Tell them I’m a remote cousin, if you must. Everyone knows Hanuvar had no sons, and that he is dead.”



III


She told him the names of the three Volani her associates were trying to free and offered to write them down, but it wasn’t necessary. Through dint of long study, Hanuvar had memorized all the enslaved Volani. What he did not know was the extent to which Carthalo’s efforts to free many of the particular individuals had proceeded.

Senanara offered to feed him, but seemed almost glad when he refused, saying he had to leave. She escorted him past her curious underlings, and then Hanuvar returned to Carthalo’s tavern by a circuitous route. If anything, the streets were even more crowded with out-of-town visitors than they had been earlier in the day. Probably the numbers would continue to swell through the afternoon and evening, as long-distance revelers arrived in anticipation of tomorrow’s festival.

Carthalo’s entire complex was overflowing, but Carthalo himself had turned over the running of his cover business to his daughter Lucena. With an influx of strangers through the streets, masked along with Derva’s populace throughout tomorrow’s festival, Carthalo was presented with greater than ordinary opportunities to spirit Volani house slaves away from owners who’d proven unwilling to sell. He was hard at work in his back rooms, arranging final time tables, routes, and assistance for the liberation of fourteen Volani from eight separate households.

Hanuvar almost hated to interrupt, but Carthalo turned the calculations over to his top lieutenant, sturdy, soft-spoken Brutus, and joined Hanuvar in the same small room in the cellar where they’d conferred upon Hanuvar’s arrival.

Carthalo had recently had a haircut, so that his receding black and gray hair was almost a military length. His dark eyes were grave as he listened to Hanuvar’s recounting of his meeting with Ciprion, and his talk with Senanara. His intelligence chief might have insight over anything that was said or even intimated, and so Hanuvar did his best to relay every interchange exactly as it had taken place.

When Hanuvar had finished, Carthalo asked for several clarifications and then sat drumming fingers on the table edge. “I haven’t heard back from our contacts in Surru,” he said after a long moment. “I still think it’s Narisia’s most obvious destination. Your daughter could blend in there relatively easily.”

“If she wants to hide,” Hanuvar agreed. “If she wants to fight, she could have taken up with one of the Herrene city states. Or the Cerdians.”

“Or the Arbateans. Or even the Hadirans or the Ermani, I suppose. I know.” Carthalo turned over his hand, as if to show it still held nothing useful.

They’d debated Narisia’s possible whereabouts again and again, and it was frustrating that they’d made no headway. But it took a long time for messages to travel across the Inner Sea, and they hardly had a surplus of reliable intermediaries. The majority of their efforts had gone into seeing to the men and women who weren’t free, rather than trying to find someone who was.

Carthalo’s look was grim. “You know how closely I considered going after the emperor and his top advisors. Only my love for family and friends kept me from acting. If Narisia doesn’t have that, there’s no knowing what she might do. But then I don’t know her.” He looked to Hanuvar.

“I’ve a hard time imagining it’s her. Even if she were motivated by anger, I’d like to hope that she had a better plan. Unless she has some longer game we can’t see.”

Carthalo nodded agreement. His gaze fell to the tabletop between them, though his thoughts were elsewhere. “I’m bothered by the coincidence of Eletius falling ill at the same time Senanara was present, at the same time she’s angry with him.”

“Exactly. I can’t help thinking she’s doing something she hasn’t told us.”

“Do you think she’ll follow your instructions about waiting?”

“I want to think so. I’d like to speak with her husband myself and ask what she’s told him. Have you been in contact with him?”

“Not directly. I’m aware of him—Horace has even watched him and looked into his situation. Adherval’s owner doesn’t want to sell him. But he’s on my low priority list.” Carthalo had assessed the conditions of all the Volani slaves who were readily observable and ordered them by the relative safety of their circumstances. Those on lower priority were much less likely to suffer mistreatment or abuse and would be left in place until those in far more dire circumstances could be freed.

Carthalo explained further: “If you’re wanting to speak with him, it should be simple. He’s at relative liberty to move about the city to seek supplies for cures. Etulius even hires Adherval out to consult about medical affairs—so long as the prospective patient isn’t riff-raff. If you were to dress as a patrician and call today between meal times to ask for help with some minor complaint you’d probably be let in. The question is how you’ll get useful information out of him.”

Hanuvar had a few ideas in mind, though he’d have to improvise depending upon Adherval’s responses. “I’ll find a way.”

“I bet you will.” Carthalo’s eyes flashed in amusement. “I’m tempted to come with you, but I should really finish here.” He scratched the side of his nose. “Why don’t you let me send Horace? A proper patrician ought to be followed by at least one slave, and he might learn something.”

“Fair enough.”



IV


By early evening, Hanuvar was walking along the forum’s edge in an expensive long-sleeved tunic and cloak, Carthalo’s oldest son Horace following a few paces behind, like a proper slave.

Green and yellow banners had been strung below the pediments of the city’s temples. The forum was always crowded with market stalls, but dozens of brightly colored tents blossomed along them like flowers, and the stalls themselves were freshly painted and decked with garlands.

They passed beyond the forum and a short while later were up the gentle slope of Campion Hill. The villa of Eletius Empronius lay only a little way from its summit. A clean, wintery breeze swept down from on high. Mixed in with the city smells of roasting meat and boiled cabbage, the stench of packed humanity and the faint reek of sewers, was the unmistakable trace of incense, borne by the wind from some nearby rich man’s private shrine.

Eletius’ dwelling was of the old school, with all of its wealth hidden behind a bland two-story front. From the outside it was ostentatious only in its width.

A stooped old house slave opened the door to Hanuvar’s knock, saw by his clothes and amber citizen’s ring that he was a patrician, and bowed his head politely. After Hanuvar explained that he hoped to consult the physician he was asked to wait upon the stoop.

Before long he and Horace were ushered inside and led through a wide atrium decorated not with the traditional masks of ancestors, but with goods from Volanus. One high shelf was lined with diminutive blue and green glass perfume bottles, and another with small, delicate, smiling, terra cotta figures, but the greatest space was allotted to stunning bowls of silver and bronze depicting figures both fanciful and real; griffins bowed to coiling asalda, and winged men flocked to hear the music of women lyrists.

He could not help staring at the display, nor could Horace, which was surely the intention, though a defeated enemy general was surely not the expected audience. He wondered if the boy understood that every item displayed here had been ripped from a Volani home.

He shook his head to clear it and left his feelings unvoiced.

The slave conducted them to a small library, one wall of which was covered in scroll-filled cubbyholes. Adherval sat in a short-backed, blue-cushioned chair, and climbed to his feet at their entrance, steadying himself against one of the two desks.

On second meeting Hanuvar thought the physician younger than he’d initially assumed, likely in his late thirties. His hair was prematurely gray, his face lean and handsome. As before, there was the sense of intelligence in his gaze, along with the slight squint that often denoted long hours spent pouring over scrolls. His fingertips were lightly stained in yellow by some chemical substance. Adherval bowed his head respectfully as the old house slave announced Hanuvar by his assumed name, Relnus Calpurnicus.

Hanuvar said that his own slave would be staying for the consult, and then waited for the old man to withdraw. Someone within the villa was languidly strumming a harp, as if he or she sought to put himself or those listening to sleep.

Adherval stood with one hand upon the desk, watching as the house slave slowly retreated across the atrium. He faced Hanuvar. “How may I assist you?” His accent was clipped, his pronunciation of the Dervan vowels just a little drawn out. “You do not look ill.”

“I’m not the patient. I’ve come to consult about someone else. It’s a private matter and I’m sure the woman would not like to chance her situation being overheard.”

“Of course. Please, be seated.” Adherval stepped past to shut the door. With a hand wave Hanuvar indicated Horace stand nearby, then moved toward a pair of chairs, but did not take either.

Adherval started back toward the desk.

“I’m here regarding a woman who’s facing some difficulties,” Hanuvar said. “I encountered her at the bath. You may know her.”

Adherval stopped at the edge of his desk. His mouth thinned. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I think you do.”

His head rose. “What is this? I already explained to the revenants that I didn’t know anything about what happened to the master in the baths.”

Hanuvar wished that he’d known about the revenants. “I am a friend,” he said, adding, more quietly, “to Senanara as well as yourself.”

Adherval breathed out and put a hand to his head. “I’ve told her she’s got to be more careful with her messages. She’s going to attract attention. Tell her I’m fine, but that Eletius doesn’t want to sell. For any reason.”

The physician clearly wasn’t used to thinking like someone who must act covertly. By assuming that Hanuvar was a messenger in disguise Adherval had left himself wide open for disclosures, so long as Hanuvar acted wisely.

A man shouted from deeper in the house, a call of alarm that shuddered to a halt.

Adherval rose and started for the door. Horace looked as though he was thinking about interposing himself, but Hanuvar motioned the youth aside even as a second cry of alarm rang out. A man called for help. Hanuvar followed on Adherval’s heels, and Horace hurried after. The old house slave stumbled past, pointing over his shoulder, speaking incoherently. He did not look frightened so much as awestruck.

They raced on, and into a courtyard. The physician passed through the open doors to it and slid to a stop just beyond. Hanuvar halted beside him, gaping.

He was only vaguely conscious of the courtyard’s ordinary aspects: a garishly painted stone satyr pouring endless water from a stone pitcher into a pool alive with huge yellow and orange fish. A brazier bright with crimson coals, beside a couch under a shade tree where stout Eletius lay. After that, things were stranger and stranger, for the patrician lolled, a vacant, beatific smile painted numbly over his lips. His harper lay crumpled in the corner by his instrument and stool.

And the goddess who’d stood over him turned at their entry.

She radiated sensual energy. She seemed small, yet somehow mountainously tall. So lovely was her face Hanuvar could not truly fathom it, only the faint suggestion of a corona of hair about her features. She was burning perfection.

Adherval choked on the start of a word then fell silent as the woman lifted a single hand in a fluid, feminine gesture, then pointed it in their direction.

Her voice was like a shimmer of sunlight, a lover’s burning fingertips across the brow. It was smooth as the finest wine on a dry throat. Hanuvar could not stop smiling, to experience it, and to be in her presence.

“Lose yourself in thought of me,” she said. “Close your eyes, and I shall be with you.”

Hanuvar’s lids felt heavy, and he tottered unsteadily. But he retained enough presence of mind to throw a shielding hand before Adherval as he raised the other before himself. He heard the pad of sandaled feet, and at some level he was conscious that she left and that he should follow, but his mind’s eye overflowed with images of her perfectly formed body pressed tightly to him, her garments so light he felt her every curve through them. He imagined his hands in her hair, her cool lips against his face, the fragrance of her in his nostrils.

When he at last shook himself free, he found the woman fled.

“See if you can find which way she went,” he said to Horace, whom he discovered behind him, stupefied. The young man shook his head to pull himself together, though he tripped over his own sandals as he left. Surely there were only a few exits. Surely someone had allowed her in. Unless the woman truly were a goddess?

Adherval had recovered as well. And, seeing him, Hanuvar wondered if his own forehead was as slick with sweat as the healer’s. The physician hurried for his master, lying with that same ecstatic smile. Eletius’ heavy chest rose and fell.

The harper lay motionless. Hanuvar turned for him, wondering why the woman might seek to harm this slave, and not the Dervan master.

The musician still breathed, though he was slow to respond. Hanuvar helped him rise and he blinked, his face still transfixed by awe.

“What did she say?” Hanuvar demanded. “Did she say why she was here?”

“She was beautiful,” the musician said. His voice was reedy and thin. “Did you see her?”

“Did she say what she wanted?”

The musician blinked and shook his head. “She . . . she was talking to the master. About Adherval.”

Hanuvar looked over to Adherval, whose brows were furrowed in worry.

“About me?” The physician looked up from his examination of his senseless master. He sounded genuinely worried. “Why?”

The musician didn’t answer.

“What was she saying about Adherval?” Hanuvar asked.

“She told the master to free Adherval and that she would reward him with all the dreams he could imagine about her.”

Hanuvar groaned inwardly. He no longer had any doubt as to Senanara’s involvement. “And what did Eletius say?”

“He couldn’t answer.” The musician’s chin swung toward his master. “The drug was in him. I’ve seen him like that before—he may look like he hears you, but there’s no one home.”

Hanuvar joined Adherval beside the perfumed bulk of the Dervan nobleman, slack jawed and dreaming wondrous dreams. “You drugged him?”

The physician sounded irritated to be questioned about his treatment regimen. “With the pain from his gout and the overall excitement today, he requested it. He won’t be answering anyone for the next hour or so.”

“What do you know about this?” Hanuvar demanded.

“Nothing!”

Though the healer was obviously frightened, his denial seemed genuine. “You didn’t see the goddess at the baths? With the woman I mentioned?”

“No!”

Either Adherval was a better actor than he seemed, or he was speaking the truth.

Adherval’s anger had turned him indignant. “Who are you, really?”

“A friend.” It was a poor answer, but he left without explaining further and hurried after Horace, whom he found at a servant’s entrance, speaking with an older female slave and a younger male with sleepy eyes.

“She came in through here.” Horace pointed at the door. “She knocked for entry and then used her powers to put the answerer to sleep and work her way through the villa to the courtyard. One slave boy saw her and ran and hid.”

Hanuvar understood why.

“She’s a goddess,” the young male slave said, face flushed. “Vanora come to us.”

“We should go,” Hanuvar said. The house slave started to guide them toward the main entrance, but Hanuvar pointed to the servant’s exit and the bemused slave opened it for them. He and Horace left without a backward glance and started down the back street, past the long high walls of other villas.

“You know something?” Horace said.

“I know she’s not a goddess. A goddess wouldn’t have to knock at a door.”

“But you saw her!”

“I did. But she was no goddess. I’ll have to explain later. You need to return to your father and tell him what happened. Tell him that I’m going to call on Senanara again.”

“I’m supposed to go with you,” Horace objected stubbornly.

“You’re supposed to follow orders. Go on. I’ll be along presently.”

Glumly, Horace headed off to the right. Hanuvar turned left.

It would have taken too long to make things clear to the young man, especially since Hanuvar was unsure of the method Senanara used to wield such power. What he did know was that she had recently visited the temple in Etessus, sacred to Danit, and that there had been many priestesses of Danit among her ancestors, for the goddess of prosperity, love, and fertility was the chosen of their family, just as Varis was the chosen of Hanuvar’s. That Senanara happened to be in the baths the first time the goddess was seen, and that the goddess was asking for the very thing from Eletius Senanara herself wanted could not be coincidence.



V


Dusk was giving way to night by the time Hanuvar neared Senanara’s dwelling. Normally, many Dervan neighborhoods were empty at night, for few streets were lighted, and the vigiles patrolled only the more wealthy and important districts. Tonight, though, most avenues remained crowded, for celebrations had already begun. Taverns overflowed into the public spaces, and impromptu gatherings were underway around many neighborhood fountains, with dancing and music and, naturally, drinking.

Senanara’s neighborhood remained more subdued. With fewer pedestrians present, Hanuvar more easily noticed the Dervan watchmen.

They did their best to blend. Two sat by the fountain in the square beyond Senanara’s home, pretending to be in conversation. Another petted a stray dog in front of the closed tile shop. A fourth watched from the upper window of an apartment across the way. Each was clean shaven and had a military haircut. They were keen-eyed, muscular men too slim to be gladiators, and wore ordinary citizen’s tunics and heavy cloaks, the better to conceal weapons. They were almost certainly members of the emperor’s secret police.

Hanuvar stopped two paces into the square, scratched the side of his head thoughtfully, as if just remembering something, shook his head in disgust at his forgetfulness, then retreated. He felt certain the watcher in the window had seen him, but no cry was given, and he did not hear anyone in pursuit.

He forced himself to retreat without haste, imagining the sentinel in the apartment still watching. What he couldn’t know was if they were aware of him, specifically, or if they were intent upon Senanara or some member of her entourage.

Senanara’s female assistant walked hurriedly along the other side of the street toward the square, a covered basket on her arm. Her eyes flicked warily to Hanuvar, gauging him for a potential threat before she approached the intersection. She hadn’t recognized his face in the shadows.

Hanuvar darted for her.

She gasped at his approach, but he whispered at her in Volani. “Soldiers are waiting.”

It took her a moment for his words to sink in, and even then she raised the basket as if to thump him. She seemed to recognize him, though there was little warmth in her eyes.

“Dervan soldiers are there. You can’t go back.”

She hesitated, then fell in step beside him as he retreated, searching his face apprehensively.

It wasn’t until they reached the closed shoe repair shop at the end of the block that a pair of men stepped around the corner. In the twilight their features were uncertain, but by shape and size and the cut of their hair they could have been brothers to the band waiting in the square. They must have been following her at a distance. Both stepped out to block their way.

They were still twelve paces off and striding forward. “What’s in your basket?” Hanuvar whispered to the woman.

She hesitated, more from surprise than the desire for secrecy, he thought. “Food.”

Before she’d finished the word, he was pulling it from her arm.

Six paces out. One of the men raised his palm while the other slipped a hand behind him, doubtless on the hilt of a truncheon or sword.

Hanuvar tossed the basket at the one in front and ran as the man threw up his hands to block. The other charged. The moment the wicker handle struck the first man’s shoulder Hanuvar drove the knife he’d pulled from his cloak into his opponent’s chest. He’d delivered seven blows with blinding speed before the second man could even come up.

The first hadn’t the breath left to scream. Blood poured from his mouth as he reeled, arms waving ineffectually. The second man presented a gladius, the short sword of the legion, so highly polished its blade edge gleamed in the fading light, as though a fragment of dying sun were caught upon it.

Hanuvar slung his cloak with his off hand even as the attacker with the gladius shouted “Man down!” He punched the sword point at Hanuvar, who swatted it aside with his cloak-wrapped arm; the sharp blade tore into the cloth though it did not cut through. He stepped in close, driving a knee into the soldier’s groin. An armored legionary would have had protective gear about his loins; his opponent, in civilian clothes, did not, and he grunted, leaning forward with a gasp that lowered his head. Hanuvar drove his knife deep into the exposed neck. The secret policeman dropped with a gurgle.

Both men were down and dying. The threat was hardly dealt with, though, because a slap of sandal on pavement sounded from Senanara’s square.

“Hurry!” Hanuvar thrust his dirty blade into its hidden sheath. He grabbed the woman’s hand and sprinted ahead.

They’d only advanced half a block before the woman stumbled, crying out in pain.

“My ankle,” she said. “Go on without me!”

He swept her into his arms and hurried on.

“I’ll slow you down!” she said in Dervan. Unlike Senanara, she spoke the language without accent.

“No one gets left behind.”

She tightened her arms about his neck and he ran, ignoring his body’s reaction to the press of her flesh against his own. He dodged onto a side street that curved along the hillside, heavy in shadow. He wanted to ask if Senanara and the others had been waiting inside, or if she had any suspicion they’d been watched before now, but he saved his breath. When they got clear, he could ask for details.

Throughout the winter Hanuvar had walked Derva so he now knew the city not just by the maps he’d long since memorized but by the character of its avenues, and he recognized the entrances to the safe spaces kept by Carthalo. None were close, but beyond the next intersection lay a maze of smaller streets, and if he could reach them, he’d easily lose his pursuers.

Up ahead he heard a curious wailing, the clangor of trumpets, the beating of a drum. It reminded him of a Ruminian ceremony he’d witnessed to banish demons from a sick child. While there must certainly be Ruminians living in Derva, such a loud clamor made no sense to him, and it took a moment for him to sift through the possibilities.

Lantern light glowed from poles ahead. A crowd waited on either side of the street intersecting their own, and it was only then that Hanuvar understood. This was a Dervan funeral procession. That shrieking was no one under attack, but the wail of professional mourners. A mass of people followed the lead women along the cross street, accompanied by pipers and drummers. Hanuvar slowed as he came up, casting a single glance behind him. As yet the soldiers were lost in the dark, but could not be far away.

A trio of young men surveyed a cart hung with festival masks that some enterprising merchant had rolled onto the street. They turned at Hanuvar’s approach, appraising the woman as he sat her down and steadied her. Probably they wondered at her disheveled stola, and the way she leaned against Hanuvar.

“A jest for you,” Hanuvar said, with a grin. This younger body was so fit he wasn’t even out of breath.

“Oh?” the nearest boy said. He looked just this side of earning his man’s toga. His two companions took their eyes from the woman and considered Hanuvar.

“Cause some mischief.” His hand extended with enough coins for a fair day’s wage. “All you need do is run straight through the funeral procession, and on for two blocks.”

Just audible over the commotion of the procession was the pounding of feet behind them.

“Alright,” the boy said. He looked a bit confused, but grinned and scooped up the coins. He turned and started forward.

“You’re really going to?” one of his friends asked.

“You bet!” And, laughing, he pushed straight into the crowd and cut into the procession. His two companions came after.

The wake they left would have been obvious from far back up the street.

Hanuvar carried the woman to the side of the mask seller’s wagon and slipped into the shadow of a doorway, putting her behind him.

Four more of the emperor’s finest tore into the intersection, following the obvious disturbance through the observers and the crowd. The moment they had moved beyond, Hanuvar turned back to the woman. “We have to keep moving.”

“Very well,” she said, a little hesitantly.

He swept her into his arms, then passed into the crowd, chuckling as though he were drunk, muttering slurred endearments and promises. The throngs lined the street side for many blocks, and he walked parallel to them as the long procession wound past, lanterns swaying. Bystanders muttered at their interruption. He overheard enough of their conversation to understand they witnessed the funeral of a priestess of Cerica, the moon goddess, which explained both the timing of the procession and its length.

Finally, Hanuvar was able to duck into another side street and drop the charade of a drunken lover. The young woman introduced herself as Diravel and thanked him, and when he told her they would be safe with friends, she did not object. Soon they were secreted in the backrooms of Carthalo’s tavern.

Carthalo’s daughter Lucena treated Diravel’s ankle and instructed her to keep it elevated and to stay off it. Hanuvar set a pillowed stool across from her so that she could prop her leg.

Diravel looked no older than her middle twenties, with light brown eyes, a short nose with a rounded tip, and a slim, pointed jaw. She said she was too worried to be hungry, but once the spiced sausages, hardboiled eggs, and nuts were placed in front of her she set to them with vigor, downing cups of Carthalo’s wine.

After a while, she blushed, apologizing for being such a glutton.

“No apology’s needed. Diravel, Senanara is likely in danger, and I need to know what she’s capable of.”

The young woman’s gaze grew guarded.

“I saw her. I was at the villa of Eletius when the goddess came and demanded he release Senanara’s husband from slavery.”

Diravel’s eyes were huge and white and young.

“I think it was Senanara, and I think it was Senanara at the baths. And I think you know it.” Diravel didn’t answer, so he gently pressed on. “What kind of power is this? How does it work?”

She hesitated only for a little longer before confessing all. “She stole the sacred mask from the temple of Danit. In Etessus.”

Of course she had. “Tell me about the mask.”

“Do you know the story of Sedeno?”

Hanuvar humored her. “I do. His lover had been imprisoned in Etessus by an evil queen.”

“A queen who was the daughter of Danit herself,” Diravel added.

Hanuvar knew that and encouraged her to continue with a polite roll of his hand.

“She ruled men by her tremendous beauty and presence. She thought she could command Sedeno as well, but so pure was Sedeno’s love for his missing princess that the queen’s powers had no effect upon him.”

“So he killed the queen and freed the princess,” Hanuvar finished succinctly, waiting to see if Diravel would correct him. “But from the queen’s blood an ash tree grew. It became sacred to the people of Etessus, who built a temple around it.”

“Yes.”

“But how is this connected to the mask?”

Diravel pushed a strand of hair behind an ear. “The tree was struck by lightning and died. Its wood was used to create an altar to Danit, and many other artifacts.”

Now he understood. “Including a mask.”

“Yes.”

“What are its powers?”

“It enables the wearer to . . . to channel the powers of Danit, or at least some small part of them, for limited times. Not just any wearer, though. You have to be schooled in the rites of Danit, and it’s dangerous to wield such power.”

“I can imagine. And Senanara’s learned the rites.”

“She planned to use the powers only if we couldn’t work things out ordinarily. That’s how she got access to the slave records,” Diravel added, proudly.

Hanuvar imagined the pained expression Carthalo must be wearing as he listened around the corner. He worked not to let his own exasperation show. “Did she tell you I suggested she refrain from any further action until I looked into trying to free the people you were after?

Diravel bobbed her fair-haired head reluctantly. “Yes.”

He let out a sigh of disgust, although it was anger he felt. “And did my advice give her any pause? Or was she just telling me what she thought I wanted to hear?”

“She said she couldn’t stomach seeing her husband in slavery one day longer, and that she would go quiet after she freed him.”

That willfulness was typical of Senanara, who assumed she always knew better than everyone around her. Although, were their positions reversed, would he have done any different? “Do you have any idea where she might be?”

“No. I don’t. She’s very smart, though. She’s probably safe. I just hope Matho and Hinelcar are with her.”

Hanuvar leaned back against the chair and rubbed his forehead. Very briefly he’d thought he’d found another ally. Instead, he’d encountered a dangerous liability. If Senanara and her people were rounded up and captured, the Dervans would be alerted to the existence of a small group working toward the same goals as Hanuvar’s own. It didn’t matter that they were two separate organizations; the Dervans would thereafter be alert for similar activity. And that might be the end to all of their carefully laid plans.

He bade Diravel to be comfortable and take her rest.

He retreated to counsel with Carthalo. Their forces were already stretched thin by the operations planned for tomorrow, so Hanuvar changed clothes again and returned to the streets himself, accompanied by the only two operatives Carthalo could spare, and together they kept watch on both Senanara’s home and its sentinels.

Neither she nor her followers returned, and some member of the secret police seemed always to be watching, which meant Senanara’s band had not all been apprehended by the authorities.

When Hanuvar finally returned to Carthalo’s complex in the early morning, he learned grim news. One of their informants had passed along that Adherval the physician had been carted away by revenants for interrogation. Rumors were already flying through the city that he’d been arrested for practicing sorcery in a bath house and might even be behind a series of dreadful murders.



VI


Another Volani was in danger, and likely slated to die, one whose fate had been completely avoidable. That dawn Hanuvar pushed through his anger, more frustrated by his own helplessness than anything else. Senanara had to be found.

Today was the Festival of Vanora, the Rite of Winter’s Unmasking. As the city was overflowing with people in full or partial masks until midnight, Senanara could be anywhere amongst tens of thousands. It was the one day every year where social station meant almost nothing. House slaves were traditionally granted a small gift and twenty-four hours of freedom. Masked men and women alike wandered in clothing that would normally be scandalous. Not for nothing was there a famous joke about Vanora’s second festival of delivery, nine months later.

Almost surely Senanara would know of her husband’s capture, and how impossible Adherval’s recovery would be. Even if she were to charm a revenant into cooperation, they were unlikely to know what cubbyhole her husband had been thrust into. She, too, would be feeling helpless, and angry. But unlike him, she had extraordinary power.

At that thought, he guessed what she must be planning.

He would have liked to have run his conclusion past Carthalo, but his old friend was directly overseeing today’s rescue plans. His youngest son Kester was one of the few left in the inn, and from him Hanuvar obtained a brown cloak and a half mask with wide, laughing eyes and outrageous eyebrows, a gaily painted thing of pressed fibers and resin with a long pointed nose and small cut outs to see through. He gave the boy a note, telling him to have his father open it if he didn’t return.

Kester eyed him in alarm, then promised that he would.

Inside the sealed paper Hanuvar had instructed that if Senanara drew undue attention to the Volani, Carthalo was to lay low. If there was no way to carry on, he was to implement their contingency plan to deploy the rest of their financial resources evacuating with everyone they’d recovered so far and attempt to free the others at some future date.

He prayed it would not come to that.

There was enough of a nip in the air that heavy cloaks were perfectly comfortable, which suited Hanuvar, though it probably disappointed a whole host of those who would have preferred to head forth in more daring attire. The garment allowed him to conceal a sword in a shoulder sheath, a weapon illegal for any but praetorians and revenants[13] to carry within city limits.

Carthalo’s headquarters lay only a few blocks from the forum. Normally Hanuvar might have reached the city center quickly, but with parties under way on every street, nearly a quarter hour of constant effort was required. Musicians stood in every other doorway, surrounded by dancers, almost all masked and many already blind drunk. Heedless of the weather, the younger men and women had stripped to revealing garments. Some of the men went shirtless, their skin dimpling in the cold. The women were wiser, donning heavy cloaks that swirled as they danced, permitting tantalizing glimpses of flesh barely hidden by thin scraps of material.

Many of the masks were simple affairs of leather or cloth, but others were painted to look like gods and goddesses or even famous Dervan soldiers, politicians, and entertainers. Hanuvar did a double-take at one mask, so fine was the representation of Ciprion’s proud nose and sad thick eyebrows, but the man wearing it was too tall, and too young.

He demurred numerous invitations to dance or drink or eat, pushing his way through one raucous party that had encompassed an entire lane. Finally, he turned the corner into the forum itself.

Never before had he seen the space so crowded. When he’d first arrived in the city, it had amused him to stroll through the very center of the Dervan Empire, though he had never made a habit to do so, thinking such hubris invited the wrath of the gods. The famed spot had proved smaller than he’d anticipated, even after long familiarity with the city’s maps, a rectangle of five hundred yards total length and two hundred in width, lined with shop stalls and fronted on every side with pillared buildings. Some were temples, one was a law court, and one was an extended wing of the imperial palace. Today almost all were hung with banners and decorated with greenery.

He kept to the forum’s edge, circulating past the busy vendors selling steaming mugs of mulled wine and cider and the ubiquitous spiced meats. Normally the steps and pillar footings and porches of the great buildings were occupied only by important dignitaries, but on festival days plebeians and patricians alike took their ease upon them, some crowded about warm braziers, gathered to watch the entertainments and the running of the supplicants. By age-old tradition the race’s runners bore willow reeds with which they would slap the offered body parts of women who wished the special blessing of Vanora.

Those women were now gathered in little groups near the runners, who stood in a small, cleared area at the foot of Vanora’s temple. Many of the athletes stretched their calves, but others oiled their bodies or simply stood and drank wine near a big brazier. The waiting runners went maskless. Here were the most famous of the young and near young among the equites and patricians, vain of their looks and eager to curry favor or simply attention. The more muscular and handsome preened for admiring onlookers.

All of this Hanuvar took in from behind his own mask. He had not seen Senanara at any of the merchant stalls. If she meant to work her magic, any of the temple fronts could serve as a platform, but he could guess which one she would find most attractive. So far there was no sign of her upon the steps or peristyle of the temple of Vanora, Danit’s Dervan counterpart.

He paced slowly among the merchant stalls and their supply tents. Here and there he saw praetorians, and they, too, were masked, though by bronze faces attached to the visors of their helmets. Probably there were secret police and revenants among the onlookers somewhere, or at least their informants. Nowhere, though, did he spy Senanara.

He was halfway through a second circuit of the forum when he spotted a limping man.

There were a small number of limping figures to be seen, of course, for veterans were in attendance, but this man favored his right leg in just the same way as one of Senanara’s male protectors.

His back was to Hanuvar, who followed him, pushing through a crowd lining up for wine.

From the rear the man was nothing remarkable—just a dark-haired plebeian in a brown cloak with old boots. He stepped beyond one of the vendor tents, wineskin in hand, pausing at the last moment to look behind him. He wore a half-mask, so his eyes and forehead were obscured, though not the aggressive thrust of his chin.

He didn’t seem to recognize Hanuvar behind the mask or understand that he was being followed. He turned on his heel, lifted the flap of a small tent to enter, and then dropped it behind him.

Hanuvar maneuvered through the crowd to the back side of the tent, found a different gap in the fabric, and stepped inside.

He hadn’t accounted for a rope placed at ankle height. It sent him sprawling, though he tumbled smoothly and came up in a crouch. Unfortunately, the mask had slipped and obstructed his vision. Even though his knife was in his hand, he was at a grave disadvantage. He tore the mask free and climbed to his feet.

It was good that he had, for two men were there, and the limper had the same flattened cudgel he’d meant to use the night before. He halted with the weapon half raised. “You,” he said.

Hanuvar heard Senanara speak with weary rancor. “Drop your blade.”

She sat on a stool on the far side of the little tent, her booted feet resting on its support strut. She wore a dark green cloak and a light green stola with a low neckline. Her eyes were hard and sad.

“What will you do if I don’t?” Hanuvar asked.

“You mean to stop us,” she countered.

“It depends on what you intend.”

“Put up your blade, Hanuvar. I won’t have them kill you, but they’ll certainly hurt you.”

The two young men exchanged a confused glance and then considered him in perplexity. She had casually mentioned his name as the secret seemed no longer important to her.

He could take them both, but not without killing them. And too many Volani were dead already. He slowly eased his knife away then adjusted his tunic, covertly ensuring his gladius was in place in its shoulder sheath. He’d felt it as he rolled, but it had not come loose.

“Diravel’s safe,” he said. “I got to her before the Dervans did.”

“I’m glad of that.” Senanara’s stiffness modulated only slightly.

The two men looked surprised, and the limper’s shoulders visibly eased. “Praise Danit,” he whispered.

Hanuvar took in the tent with a look. “Were you planning this from the beginning, or did you use your powers to steal this hiding place?”

“How long have you known it was me?”

“You should not have lied to me. I understand your rage. But this will help nothing.”

She shook her head. Though she looked toward him, her gaze was inward. “You ask me to be slow, and patient, and clever. But I’ve never been patient. You know that.”

“You shouldn’t have tried to free your husband.”

Her eyes flashed and she cast off her mood of weary resignation with an imperious lift of her head. “You wanted him to fester there, in a home stuffed with looted Volani treasures? Jumping at his master’s every whim? Adherval was one of the finest physicians in all Volanus. And here he was following the fat fool around like a dog, having to ask permission every time he had to urinate.”

“His position doesn’t seem that bad.”

“Says you, walking free. How long were you going to wait before you got my husband released?”

“Compared to some, he was practically in a vacation home. But now the revenants have him. Because you drew too much attention.”

She climbed from the stool, her eyes flaring, a small woman towering in her anger. “Is it my fault my husband is a Dervan slave? They will kill him, as they killed my daughter! And yours! Oh, don’t look at me like that. You’re deluded if you think you’ll find Narisia alive. They would have killed us all, if they could. All!” She was working herself up, like an actor, although her words were sincere. She suggested the forum beyond the tent with a grand sweep of her arm. “I’m going to show them what it’s like to face destruction!”

He spoke quickly. “I will try to find a way to free Adherval—”

Her laughed cut him off. “Even you can’t get a man away from revenants. Maybe at your prime. But now you’re afraid to take risks.”

“I was always afraid to take the wrong risks. We have to pick our battles carefully. If you call more attention down on the Volani you’ll make the rest of our rescues impossible. More than a dozen are under way right now.”

“So you’re saving them. I thought as much. Probably slowly, cautiously. Nicely.” She said the last as though it were a deadly insult. “What does any of that matter, Hanuvar?”

At the second mention of his real name her two followers traded another bemused look.

She struck her chest with a fist. “They have destroyed us! Saving one or two doesn’t save our people! There’s not enough of us left to matter.”

“That’s not true.”

“You’ve deceived yourself. Do you honestly do this for their sake, or your own? You fight for them to stave off the emptiness. The sense of failure. Because you cannot bear to see yourself in the mirror.” He opened his mouth to object but she spoke over him, saying “There’s no point in anything, apart from vengeance!”

He called her name, but she stepped over the trip wire and left, a plain wooden mask clutched in her hand.

The two men kept wary eyes upon him.

“Let me stop her.”

“Are you really Hanuvar? The Hanuvar?” the limper asked.

“He can’t be, Matho. He’s too young,” the other man countered. He, then, was Hinelcar.

Hanuvar spoke directly to Matho. “I’ve been disguised by sorcery. If a Volani sets the Dervans at each other’s throats, what do you think the Dervans will do to the Volani slaves? Or any others they can lay their hands on?”

They stared at him. He was about to tell them he didn’t want to fight them, but Hinelcar waved his cudgel toward the exit. “Go. She’s headed for the temple of Vanora.”

Of course she was. Hanuvar grabbed his mask and hurried into the forum. He heard the others behind him and turned to find they followed, wearing simple cloth masks.

He didn’t see Senanara, yet. Far away, on the temple of Vanora’s pillared portico, a short fat man in a ridiculous orange toga and a half mask with a bulbous nose finished a sentence about a senator that sent waves of laughter through the crowd.

Hanuvar thought about the chain of decisions that had brought him to this moment. If he had told her more about New Volanus sooner, might he have changed her mind? Or would even that have been enough?

Maybe nothing was enough when your people’s goods decorated their conqueror’s walls, and their crafters were murdered or enslaved, when your daughter was presumed dead, when your lover was in the hands of torturers. When nearly all you cherished was as less than dust and those who’d made it thus ruled the world.

He understood her, and how enervating it was to try to root strength in the anger and the hate. In the darkest watches of the night, he had even asked himself the kind of questions Senanara had demanded of him. He wondered sometimes if he always wore a kind of mask, pretending everything he did was rational and sane because if he were to pause, he’d be overcome by rage and despair. And he had wondered, too, what difference to his people one or two or even ten more could mean.

Yet after lengthy consideration he had arrived at an answer different from hers, and he wished she’d given him time to explain. He could have reminded her that if you reduced men and women to numbers, losing one or two or ten or a thousand became an abstraction you could measure against another, like the numbers needed to till a city’s fields, or assemble an army. By that reckoning, the thousand he fought for meant very little.

But it mattered to every one of them. And each mattered to him.

He saw the commotion she caused before he spotted her. There to the right of where the comedian addressed the crowd a mass of people suddenly parted, and then Senanara was climbing the steps. She looked over her shoulder once, her features disguised by a roughhewn wooden mask with red lips and huge eyes and arched brows. When she arrived upon the portico a blue-cloaked man reached to pull her away.

Senanara slipped from him, faced the crowd, thrust back her shoulders, and transformed. No longer a curvaceous woman in a strange mask, she was beauty incarnate, a vision of Danit. The man who’d tried to pull her off staggered as if physically struck. The comedian faltered to a stop, turned, then tottered backward down the temple steps. No one tried to steady him: everyone stared at the vision as she lifted her arms.

She was glorious.

Hanuvar could not take his eyes from her. He forced himself to breathe and fought his way forward. No one paid any attention to his jostling.

Senanara spoke, and her voice was smooth and sweet and shining like warm honey. It rang through the forum. “Look upon me, people of Derva! Behold my beauty. It is without parallel. I am everything you wish for!” She lowered her arms and opened her hands to the crowd. “I am tender, and sharp. I am demure, and passionate. And I am skilled and giving and soft and warm.”

Only forty feet separated Hanuvar from the steps now, but it might as well have been forty leagues.

Her voice rose. It struck as a wave, to reverberate through him like the heaviest drumbeat. It lingered with the potent sting of desire. “All my love can be yours,” she promised.

Hanuvar hoped it could be so, for he craved to possess her love above all things. Those around him shifted and he could feel it in them as well, men, women, even the children. They had eyes only for her. What they each saw he could not guess, for he could not have hoped to describe it himself.

“Prove yourselves deserving!” she cried, spreading her arms wide. “Only the greatest among you is worthy of my embrace!”

The fighting began immediately. Some called that she would be theirs, and others mouthed insults and slurs to their neighbors, but everywhere fists rose.

Hanuvar struggled on, fending off blows, consumed by the craving to earn the love of the magnificent vision.

Senanara called to the throngs, enflaming them further. “Am I not more magnificent than any other? I will transport you to greatness!”

Before Hanuvar an old man bludgeoned a boy with his fists and sent the child down in a rain of blood. A scream of agony rose behind him. Hanuvar was struck in the shoulder and arm. He blocked a kick to his groin and maneuvered one of his attackers into a group of fighters on his left. On his right, three women bit and scratched at one another while a fourth fought them with fists.

Step by step, Hanuvar advanced. He was no stranger to setting impossible goals and working to reach them. He found a way ahead, his eyes set, though he wasn’t fully sure what he intended. He had never wanted anyone as much as he wanted the goddess at the temple. Unbidden, images of the women he had loved rose before him. He examined and dismissed them as though each were nothing more than their physical attributes. How could any compare with the peerless perfection before him?

Rank after rank of the crowd he diverted or defeated until there were only scattered knots of figures left upon the temple stairs ahead. He felt her eyes. She had recognized him.

“Only the most worthy earn the power of my pure love!”

One of her words struck reason even as lust warred to rule him. Pure.

His instinct was to prove to her that he was the best of all possible lovers, and he was turning to fight the muscular man winning the brawl on his right when he halted with fist raised and considered her again.

Yes, she was unutterably beautiful. And he did wish to love her. But this love wasn’t pure; it was all consuming. It was like a drunkard’s thirst for the bottle.

He had known a purer love.

He had seen the sea beating against the quays as twilight fell and the silver towers gleamed in the sunset. His city had not lacked troubles, but from humble beginnings his people had forged a society in which men and women chose their rulers. A city where they could speak their mind to power, and where laws were not tools of the mighty. Volanus had been a bastion of learning, and art, a great city of the world. As his fleet had sailed away in the pre-dawn gloom, off to found New Volanus, he had heard the priestesses in the seaside temple welcoming the sun with song, and his heart had ached, knowing it might be long years before he’d hear them again.

Now those voices were stilled forever. Their song had vanished with his city.

He started up the stairs.

She addressed him directly, her voice rising with wonder. “How do you resist? Do you not wish to prove your love by triumph? Do you not love me?” He felt the full force of her power, and his heart raced. Yet with him still was the vision of that shining city, forever lost. Tears tracked down from behind his mask.

“Stop him!” she shouted.

Those behind grabbed for his legs and his arms, but they were enthralled still by her beauty, and he was free, and he was Hanuvar. They came high and low, swinging and kicking, and he blocked and weaved and threw them off and emerged at last at the height of the steps.

She pulled back, her confidence wavering, and he saw her again for just a woman in a mask.

“There is more to love than this.” He tore the mask from her.

The woman who had been a goddess covered her face with her hands and shuddered. Hanuvar looked down at the thing in his hands without daring to meet the blank gaze of it and broke it over his knee into two pieces. The resounding crack echoed through the forum like a thunderbolt.

Senanara slumped. Behind him the sounds of conflict continued, although it seemed to him the noises had already begun to change.

Her eyes fluttered, and he bent to scoop her into his arms. He had little time. The fights were breaking up and people were shaking off their confusion. He darted to the left and dropped off the side of the portico. Not so long ago his old knee injury would have made such an act challenging, but even with her in his arms his legs absorbed the drop without complaint. He was soon passing through a group assisting each other to stand after knocking each other bloody and bruised. He hissed to make way for a wounded woman and pushed on through other groups, some bent beside the injured. He passed into a side street.

When he finally reached Carthalo’s tavern, Senanara was stirring fitfully in his arms. Kester and Lucena eyed him strangely as he worked through the celebratory crowd, and then he had passed into the back rooms and found the small chamber he’d made his own. He closed the door and was readying to lay her gently upon the couch when she feebly whispered his name.

He tipped up his mask so that she might see his face.

She was spent and drained. Whatever she had done with the mask that day had left her with nothing more. She was empty.

Her grip upon his arm was weak. Only a short while before her voice had been molten gold. Now it was the barest whisper. “Adherval,” she said.

“I will find him,” he pledged.

Her lips moved toward a smile and never reached it, for her expression went blank in death.

He stared down at her placid face and discovered he was weeping. Whether it was for who she had been, or who she might have grown to be, or for Melgar who had loved her, or for all the vanished past and impossible future he could not have said, but he crushed her body to him and rocked her and kissed the top of her head, wishing she had found a different path.

***

By the next day, rumor on the street held that Vanora herself had appeared at the festival. The priests announced that her manifestation had been a blessing and that it boded well for the health of the empire in the coming year, despite the carnage. More than a dozen had been killed and hundreds were injured.

The Dervans remained blissfully unaware of any connection between what happened at the temple and Senanara herself, especially since all Adherval knew of his wife was that she was free, as had been learned by the emperor’s spies, for she had been too bold. Fortunately, Hanuvar had rolled up any of her connections before the secret police could learn her true aims, and Diravel and her compatriots were welcomed into Carthalo’s organization.

At some other time any hint of Volani involvement might have drawn greater scrutiny from the authorities, but with news spreading about Enarius’ coming adoption by the emperor, and his well-publicized support for the Lenereva family, any outright slander against Volani was seen as an attack against Enarius himself. Not even the revenants were that daring, especially with the emperor growing increasingly frustrated with them.

As for poor Senanara, she was interred after a private ceremony in a courtyard in Carthalo’s complex. I myself observed the grave, and once saw Hanuvar standing with head bowed before it.

Carthalo’s carefully crafted festival escapes came off with near perfection, although one had nearly been ruined by the commotion in a street beside the forum. I’m told that the festival inspired hundreds of slaves to attempt escape every year thereafter. Most of these later ones were caught; the Volani slaves, though, were not, and before too long were well on their way north to Selanto, accompanied by guides and carrying forged identity papers.

Though determined now to find the Eltyr, Hanuvar had sworn an oath to a dying woman. And so over the next few weeks he and Carthalo bent their considerable intellects toward a single, impossible objective: the recovery of Adherval, and the liberation of the Volani prisoners in the hands of the revenants.

If he had shared his plans with me, I’d have told him they were lunacy. For Hanuvar meant to take the fight to the empire’s most dangerous and magically skilled defenders, in the very heart of their remote fortress.

—Sosilos, Book Nine


Footnotes


12) This is not to suggest that all citizens bothered with a ring, or even that those who possessed them wore them every day. The citizen ring was not, strictly speaking, a necessary status symbol, for some aristocrats wore gaudy ones and others wore nothing, thinking it gauche to advertise what was obvious from their clear wealth or well-known features. The old maxim is that freedmen and the lower classes were most determined to demonstrate that they were not slaves, but that didn’t hold true either, for many of the poor didn’t expend the resources and those involved in manual labor, be they freed or lower or middle class, didn’t want to risk damaging or losing their rings during their work day. Thank goodness that in our current times such jewelry is no longer necessary.

Andronikos Sosilos


13) And the secret police, whom no one was supposed to acknowledge. Even today it is hard to be precise about the numbers of the emperor’s private security force, because so few records were kept about their organization. Estimates range from as few as fifty to upward of five hundred, a number that seems difficult to credit. Their duties were different from those of the praetorians, who were conspicuous guardians of state buildings, the emperor’s holdings, and the emperor’s family, as well as the revenants, ever vigilant for enemy sorcery. While the revenants were alert for more mundane threats to the empire as well, they were not as adept at monitoring the general public as the secret police, who were based primarily in Derva and Ostra, although rumors persisted that they were to be found in all of the empire’s largest cities.

—Andronikos Sosilos


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