Krispos the Emperor

'Young Majesty!' The call came again.

This time he recognized the voice: it was Olyvria's. 'What do you want with me?' he growled. 'Haven't you seen me mortified enough, here and back in the city?'

'You misunderstand, young Majesty,' she said in injured tones. She held up something; in the dark, he couldn't tell what it was. 'I have here a decoction of the wild plum and black pepper that will help relieve your distress.'

Had she offered him her body, he would have laughed at her. He'd already declined that when he was feeling perfectly fine. But at the moment, he would have crowned her Empress for something that stopped his insides from turning inside out.

He hurried over to her, skipping across slit trenches as he went. She held a small glass vial out to him; distant torchlight reflected faintly from it. He yanked off the stopper, raised the vial to his lips, and drank.

'Thank you,' he said—or started to. For some reason, his mouth didn't want to work right. He stared at the vial he still held in his hand. All at once, it seemed very far away, and receding quickly. Agonizingly slow, a thought trickled across his brain: I've been tricked. He turned and tried to run, but felt himself falling instead. I've been— Unconsciousness seized him before he could find the word stupid.

IV

'Let's get moving,' Krispos said irritably. 'Where's Phostis taken himself off to, anyhow? If he thinks I'll hold up the whole army for his sake, he's wrong.'

'Maybe he's fallen into the latrine,' Evripos said. Bad food was a risk on campaign; plenty of Halogai had been running back and forth in the night. The gibe might have been funny had Evripos sounded less hopeful it was true.

Krispos said, 'I haven't time for anyone's nonsense today, son—his or yours.' He turned to one of his guardsmen. 'Skalla, stick your head into his tent and rout him out.'

'Aye, Majesty.' Like a lot of his fellows, Skalla looked even fairer—paler was probably a better word—than usual this morning. He strode off to do Krispos' bidding, but returned to the imperial pavilion a moment later with a puzzled expression on his face. 'Majesty, he is not there. The coverlet is thrown back as if he'd got out of his cot. but he is not there.'

'Well, the ice take it, where is he, then?' Krispos snapped. What Evripos had said sparked a thought. He told Skalla, 'Pick a squad of guards and go up and down the slit trenches in a hurry, to make sure he wasn't taken ill there.'

'Aye, Majesty.' Skalla's voice was doleful. For one thing, now that morning had come, the latrines were busy. Anyone who spotted Phostis there would have raised an uproar. For another ...

'Pick men the flux missed,' Krispos said. 'I wouldn't want the stink to make them sick all over again.'

'I thank you, Majesty.' The Halogai were not what one would call a cheerful folk, but Skalla seemed more pleased with the world.

That did not mean he and the squad of guardsmen had any luck turning up Phostis. When he came back to report failure to Krispos, the Avtokrator said, 'I'm not going to wait for him, by the good god. Let's get everyone moving. He'll turn up— where else is he going to go? And when he does, I shall have a word or two with him—a pungent word or two.'

Skalla nodded; from everything Krispos had gleaned of how life worked in Halogaland, sons there knew better than to give already grizzled fathers more gray hair. He let out a mordant chuckle—it sounded too good to be true.

The imperial army did not get moving as fast as he would have wanted; it was newly mustered and still shaking down. He'd been sure Phostis would appear before the troops really started heading south and west. But his eldest did not appear. Evripos opened his mouth to say something that surely would have proved ill-advised. Krispos' glare made certain it never crossed the barrier of his son's lips.

By the time the army had been an hour on the road, Krispos' anger melted into worry. He sent couriers to each regiment to summon Phostis by name. The couriers returned to him. Phostis did not. Krispos turned to Evripos. 'Fetch me Zaidas, at once.' Evripos did not argue.

The wizard, not surprisingly, had a good notion of why he'd been summoned. He came straight to the point. 'When was the young man last seen?'

'I've been trying to find out,' Krispos answered. 'He seems to have been taken with the same flux that seized a fair number of the Halogai last night. Several of them saw him once, or more than once, squatting over a latrine trench. No one, though, has any clear memory of spotting him there after about the seventh hour of the night.'

'An hour or so past midnight, then? Hmm.' Zaidas' eyes went far away, into a place Krispos could not follow. Despite that, though, he was a thoroughly practical man. 'The first thing to determine, your Majesty, is whether he be alive or dead.'

'You're right, of course.' Krispos bit his lip. For all his quarrels with his eldest, for all his doubts as to whether Phostis

was his eldest, he discovered he feared for Phostis' life as might any father, true or adoptive. 'Can you do that at once, eminent and sorcerous sir?'

'A hedge wizard could do as much, your Majesty, with the abundance of Phostis' effects present here,' the mage answered, smiling. 'An elementary use of the law of contagion: these effects, once handled by the young Majesty, retain an affinity for him and will demonstrate it under sorcerous prodding ... assuming, of course, that he yet remains among the living.'

'Aye, assuming,' Krispos said harshly. 'Find out at once, then, if we can go on making that assumption.'

'Of course, your Majesty. Have you some artifact of your son's that I might use?'

Krispos pointed. 'There's his bedding, slung over the back of the horse he should be riding. Will that do?'

'Excellently.' Zaidas rode over to the animal at which Krispos had pointed and pulled a coverlet from the lump of cinched-down bedding. 'This is a very basic spell, your Majesty, one that requires no apparatus, merely a concentration of my will to increase the strength of the link between the blanket here and the young Majesty.'

'Just get on with it,' Krispos said.