was looking away, and Isaak was speaking with Sigurd. A bow of light played across the blade as it swung past a pendant lamp, and a roar rose in Aelric’s throat.
For an instant it seemed as if my heart stopped, and with it all time, but mercifully my body continued to move. I dived for Aelric’s feet, flailing my arms forward to catch him. His axe was slicing through the air as I felt my fingers make contact with his brass-ringed boots; I fastened my grip around them and let my full weight meet his legs.
There were many shouts, but his was one. His knees buckled and he tumbled forward, tangling me between his shins as his axe struck the floor. What else it might have hit in its path I could not tell. Our momentum carried us sliding across the marble a few feet, until at last we came to a halt. Even then he was not defeated; he pulled free of my grasp and began to rise to his feet, his axe still in his hand.
A roar sounded from above, and I looked up. Sigurd was standing over me, a tower of rage and fury. His face was ashen, shaken, but there was not the least compunction in his eyes.
‘You betrayed us,’ he breathed. ‘Everything.’
His axe swung down, and hot blood splashed against my cheek. At a little distance, Aelric’s head rolled free across the floor.
18
For a moment we were still as the icons on the walls — Sigurd, Alexios, Krysaphios, Isaak and I. Blood welled from the stump of Aelric’s neck, soaking through my robes, but I had not the wit to move. A bead of sweat or tears sank down Sigurd’s cheek, and the rings of his armour tensed and slacked as his chest heaved beneath it.
The Sebastokrator Isaak was the first to find his voice. ‘The barbarians,’ he hissed. ‘They must have planned this, to murder you in your own hall and seize the crown as it slipped from your head. Let us kill them now, and then fall upon their kinsmen in their camp.’
I saw Krysaphios nodding behind him, but Alexios raised a weary hand to still them. There was a gash in his sleeve where Aelric had landed his final, glancing blow. ‘Do not touch the ambassadors,’ he commanded, imposing authority on his shaken voice. ‘Why would they attempt such a crime when they were my hostages? They must have known their lives would be forfeit if anything happened to me while they were here.’ He paused. ‘Unless, of course, there was another candidate ready to take the diadem and command the mob to save them.’
His sharp eyes glanced at each of us in turn, fixing — so I thought — a second longer on Isaak than any other.
‘We will seek out all who have a claim to the throne and establish their whereabouts,’ said Krysaphios. ‘And we should deploy the guard in the streets, lest in haste someone has already started to move against you.’
‘Can we rely on the guard?’ asked Alexios. ‘If one of my longest-serving Varangians will betray me, whom then can I trust?’
Sigurd winced; he seemed on the edge of tears. ‘The Varangians will defend you to the death, Lord. But if you do not trust us, then take our arms and make us your slaves.’ Dropping to his knee, he held his axe by its blood- swathed blade, and offered it to the Emperor.
‘Take it, Lord.’ Krysaphios kicked angrily at Aelric’s headless corpse. ‘If you do not know why a Varangian should have done this terrible thing, you cannot tell us why another may not try again. Was he a traitor all this time, waiting for his moment to strike? If so, why now? Was it a moment of madness? Or did he indeed act for a wider cause among his legion?’
‘On balance,’ I observed, ‘it would have been useful if Sigurd had not been so quick to dismember him.’ I looked at the staring, lifeless eyes and shuddered. This was a man who had ridden at my side and eaten in my home: it was not easy to see him now. ‘It would have been worth everything to know his motives.’
Sigurd, still on his knee, growled. ‘You can wrestle a snake to the ground, Demetrios, but to be sure it will not bite you must behead it. My duty is to keep the Emperor from harm — yours is to find those who would harm him
‘My task would be easier if you did not help the monk by destroying every link with him.’
Sigurd looked as though he might like to use his axe again, but Isaak spoke to me first. ‘What of the monk? There is a greater power at work when the Emperor is almost murdered in his own palace, and you think only of spies and foot soldiers. Forget the monk, if he even exists, and instead seek out his masters.’
I was about to retort unwisely, for in all this argument it seemed my own role in bringing down the assassin was forgotten, but I was forestalled by an urgent rapping on the door, and the sound of voices in the passage beyond. We turned, and Sigurd raised his axe, though Alexios stayed unmoved.
‘Who disturbs the Emperor?’ Krysaphios’ fear wrought anger in his voice.
‘Your pardon, Lord, but it is urgent,’ said a voice behind the door. ‘The watchmen on the walls report smoke rising from the outlying villages. The barbarian army has begun to riot, claiming that we hold their embassy hostage and demanding their release.’
Isaak exploded. ‘You see brother — already they are moving. Their haste betrays them. Let us chain the hostages and ride out to face our enemies.’
Alexios ignored him. ‘Captain,’ he said, beckoning Sigurd. ‘I will not disband your legion. Long service has proven their value; I would be an ingrate and a fool to squander it because of a single man’s treachery.’ More immediately, I thought, he could ill afford to lose good troops with the barbarians so near. ‘Fetch your company and escort the envoys to the gates. Explain that I will await their answer in the coming days.’ He pulled his lorum straight, wiping a drop of blood from one of its gems. ‘If so much as a single strand of their hair is harmed, either by your men or by the mob in the city, you will answer for it personally, Captain. Is that clear?’
Sigurd nodded, bowed, and backed from the room, while Isaak glowered in the corner.
‘Now,’ continued the Emperor. ‘Find me the captain of the Patzinaks. I have forgiven the Varangians the traitor they unknowingly harboured, but I cannot keep them in the palace if even a single man is suspected. I will need men about me I can trust, for it will be another day at least before we know if the danger is passed.’
‘The danger will never pass so long as the barbarians live outside our walls,’ muttered Isaak.
‘Unless the danger is already within.’ Krysaphios turned to me. ‘Demetrios, you remember the list I showed you once?’
It was almost two months since I had seen it, but I remembered enough of its eminent names to manage a convincing nod.
‘Then take a company of Patzinaks and find where those men are as quickly as you can. Any who have taken sudden trips to their country estates, or who have hoards of arms cached in their cellars, or who have tried to slip through the gates in disguise, report back to me. I will be at the new palace with the Emperor.’
I nodded my obedience. ‘And what of Aelric? Someone must know, or guess, the motive for his treachery. Some of his comrades? His family, perhaps?’
Krysaphios shrugged impatiently. ‘Perhaps. You can ask Sigurd when he returns. Though do not seek him in the palace — by nightfall all the Varangians will be at their barracks by the Adrianople gate.’
I made my obeisance and left, stepping over Aelric’s riven head as I did so. The blood had matted through his greying hair, and the jaw was slack, but the eyes remained as firm as ever, fixed where Sigurd’s vengeful blade had swung.
The next few hours passed in a daze. The shock of what I had witnessed, the disaster which had almost befallen and my improbable part in averting it, occupied my soul as I marched my squadron of Patzinak mercenaries between the houses of the nobility. I quizzed their gatekeepers and stewards, searched their halls and cellars for signs of flight or rebellion, but found little. Most had been in the palace, watching the ambassadors; some were away in the country, and a few were at home attending to their private business. All of them I noted in the thin book I carried, recording their excuses and alibis with reflexive thoroughness. Krysaphios could scour it for whatever incrimination he sought, but none of the men I saw seemed seized by manifest guilt.
And hour after hour, as I asked the expected questions and heard the expected answers, I struggled with the motive of the crime. Aelric could not have hoped to gain from his treachery, for even had he felled the Emperor he would have died the next instant. Unless madness or an evil spirit had taken hold of him, someone must have driven him to attempt the murder with a threat greater than certain death. What could that be — and who? It might have
