‘If we find the monk, you will live.’ Though not in the least comfort. ‘For now, you will come with me to the palace, until I can judge the truth of your tale.’
Asgard’s eyes widened, and he sank to his knees. ‘No,’ he implored me. ‘Not to the palace. If I go there they will kill me. I have helped you all I can — have mercy on me now. Let me go — give me only an hour to escape, and that will be a fair bargain.’
‘I will decide what is a fair bargain,’ I told him, feeling no pity for this traitor. If he had hoped to win mercy by grovelling, he had misjudged me. ‘Get up.’
But Asgard’s serpent mind had a final draught of venom in it. I must have edged back a little as he rose, and those few inches were all the room he needed to spring forward, crashing into my legs and driving me away. My feet kicked and slipped on the wet stone beneath and I fell, landing heavily on my back. There was a terrible pain in my lungs and throat where the air had been forced out, and by the time I regained my feet Asgard was gone.
I cursed, though it was of little moment. I disbelieved at least half his story, and suspected there was another half as yet untold, but that could wait: doubtless the Watch would have him before nightfall, if the monk did not find him first. For now, the highest imperative was to reach the house in Libos, the house of Vichos the grocer. If the monk truly was there, then even Asgard’s escape would be a small price to have paid.
I climbed back up to the palace and summoned the guard. It was strange to meet Patzinaks, with their short swords and pointed helmets, in the places where Varangians should have been, and my unfamiliarity with them meant further delay until I could explain myself to their captain. He listened to my story with ever greater concern, and rattled off orders to his subordinates as soon as I was finished.
‘We will call out the Watch to find this Asgard, and take a company of men down to the house in Libos.’
I nodded my approval. ‘Good. I will go with you.’
For all that we needed haste it took some time to assemble his men, while I wandered the courtyard and fretted that the monk might even now be fleeing his house, again just a few paces beyond our grasp. I tried to goad the Patzinaks to swiftness, but they treated me with indifference and ignored my pleas. Only when the captain was satisfied that all his men were correctly arrayed and equipped did we march out through the Augusteion.
The crowds in the streets were surging as thick as ever, despite the persistent rain, and a column of a hundred guardsmen in their midst brought constant friction. Feet were trampled, baskets spilled and clothing muddied as the Patzinaks rammed their path through. Sigurd had spoken of their single-minded devotion to the Emperor, but here they seemed like automata, like the lions in the palace whose apparent obedience was entirely free of will or reason. It felt strange, unsettling to be in their company; I would much rather have been with Sigurd and his men. Coarse and wild though the Varangians were, I could at least admire their passion, the unbridled currents which ruled them. There was nothing of that in the unmoving Patzinak faces which followed me.
Nor were they as physically arresting as the giants of Thule. If Sigurd was a bear, then his Patzinak counterpart was more a mule: shorter and stockier, but with a stride I suspected would never falter in a month of hard marches. His arms swung freely at his side, and his head jerked erratically as he walked. He had the face of a man who would prefer to knife his enemy in the back than meet him in a head-on duel, but in a fight, I guessed, he would have the guile and will to wear down mightier opponents. If once he was on the field of battle, I did not think he would leave it lightly.
We passed under the column of Constantine and through the arch of Theodosius, and further along the road to the small square where the Emperor Marcian had found a space for his own monument. No doubt walking in the shadows of the past should have inspired us to rival its legend, but with rain trickling in my ear and the carved figures in the sky almost invisible, it only depressed me. Even the prospect of finding the monk could not inspire me: I had seen too many broken men and women in the last hours for that. And it was hard to lift my mood on the strength of a traitor’s desperate lies.
Past the column of Marcian, as Asgard had said, we turned left. It was a narrow, unpaved street, turned to mire by the rain and with streaming water gouging a new course down its centre. The buildings were of unpainted wood, dark and rotten with all the moisture they had absorbed, tottering over us like drunken giants. We progressed slowly down the road. The Patzinaks had their swords out, alert for any danger, but there was little life to be seen around us, and the only sound was the constant rattle of raindrops on the puddles and tiles. Though marching soldiers were a common enough sight on the Mesi, a hundred of them prowling through a private neighbourhood would sweep every resident, honest or otherwise, out of their path. With nothing to obstruct us, the grocer’s shop was plain to see, and the faded paint on the lintel — just visible through the gloom — gave me the name: Vichos.
‘So far your informant does not lie,’ muttered the captain. ‘But I wonder what he keeps in his shop.’
‘You should array your men around it before we find out. It will do us no good if there are a hundred of us inside the house while the monk jumps from a window and makes his escape.’
The captain gestured to his sergeants to deploy the men as I had suggested, keeping a dozen close about us. The grocer’s shutters and door were fastened shut, as tight as their skewed hinges would admit, but I thought I saw a shadow within moving across one of the cracks. Was he watching us? Did he realise that he had failed, that soon the Emperor’s torturers would be heating their irons before his eyes? Or did he have a plan, another gambit to outwit us? Was he even there?
‘My men are ready,’ the captain told me. Though there was nothing the least secretive about our actions, his voice was hushed. ‘Shall I send for the stone-throwers and ballistas, or do you think we can break this siege ourselves?’
I ignored his sarcasm. ‘This monk commands weapons whose power you could not conceive. Tell your men to beware, for their armour may be no protection.’
The captain shrugged, and fell silent as his men moved towards the building. The sergeant at their head banged on the door but there was no answer.
‘Break it,’ said the captain.
Water was dribbling behind my ear and off my nose; my breaths emerged in ragged clouds, but despite all the misery of cold and damp I felt my heart beating faster, my mind awakening with the hope of success. At the door, the sergeant now had a mattock in his hands, and was swinging it hard against the fractured timbers. The wood did not groan or crack under the impact, for it was too sodden and rotten for that; instead the blow knocked one of the panels clean out of the frame. The sergeant bellowed an order and his men piled forward, driving their boots and shoulders against the flimsy barrier. It did not hold for more than a second. With swords outstretched and shields held before their faces the men charged in, disappearing into the dim room beyond. I heard shouts and the screams of women, the crash and clatter of upturned tables, then the curt staccato of commands.
I could not stay in the street. I ran across to the house, stepped heedlessly over the broken threshold and took in the carnage before me. Two soldiers were kneeling over an elderly man and his wife, pinning them to the ground amid a sea of broken pottery and scattered vegetables. Dried fish lay in pools of olive-oil, while pickled sauces were splashed across the earthen floor. In less than a minute, the soldiers had left barely a single thing in that room untouched.
‘Where is the rest of your company?’ I demanded.
One of the Patzinaks jerked a thumb towards the spindly ladder in the corner. I climbed it two rungs at a time, hoping it would not crack apart under me, and hauled myself through a narrow gap onto the floor above. Frayed curtains had once shielded the room from the stairs, but they were pulled down and bunched on the floor, revealing more carnage: rudimentary pieces of furniture overturned, clothes and keepsakes tipped out of trunks, and even an icon of the holy virgin ripped off the wall. But no Patzinaks.
A second ladder continued the ascent to the topmost level, from where I could hear shouts of triumph and anger. Without another thought I leapt up the ladder, vaulted into the room above, and set my eyes on our new prisoner.
Two Patzinaks were holding his arms, their fingers squeezed tight into his skin as he writhed and struggled between them. He was not dressed as a monk, but in a nondescript woollen tunic which reached almost to his ankles; there was fresh mud on his boots, and dampness on his clothes which suggested he was only recently returned here. His skin was dark and his features hard, set with black eyes which flickered desperately around the room. He was thinner than I had expected; his garments hung from his shoulders like shrouds, and there was a stoop which had not seemed so obvious when I chased him through the snowbound streets. He gave no sign of recognising me.
In a corner, the sergeant stood with his arms crossed over his chest, surveying his achievement. ‘Is this the
