Byzantium

crowd someone would walk past him and never remember that they had seen him.

‘Indeed so.’ The eunuch who addressed the Cephalonian was young, still encumbered with a baby’s fat, with puffy red cheeks and a sneering manner. ‘Just who did they tell you to expect?’ He looked around at the candlelit vats and tubs of the small medicinal soap factory, wrinkling his nose at the astringent smell.

‘They told me to expect the Orphanotrophus Joannes’s Chamberlain.’ The Cephalonian looked at the eunuch as if sizing him up, then allowed his expression to indicate that he was impressed with what he saw. ‘That’s what I was told. The Chamberlain himself. Which has to be you, sir, from the look and manner of your Eminence.’

The eunuch, who was in fact a mere cubicularias – a glorified janitor – to the Orphanotrophus Joannes, tried not to look too pleased; indeed he attempted to harshen his demeanour. ‘Well, then, man, they must have told you what I have come for,’ he snapped.

‘That too, Eminence.’ The Cephalonian wiped his hands on his tunic and went to a long, low shelf at the far end of the room. He came back with a little wooden box and displayed it to the eunuch. ‘Just manufactured this morning, special as he likes it. Be assured that the ingredient still has its pharmacological properties intact.’ The Cephalonian opened the box and let the eunuch inspect the foul-smelling piece of soap, laden with special unguents to treat an eczema that afflicted the Orphanotrophus Joannes. ‘I don’t imagine I need to tell your Eminence not to let anyone else use this.’

The eunuch appraised the Cephalonian as if he were some kind of lesser life-form. His lips curled contemptuously. ‘Surely you don’t think we are operating a public bath, do you, man?’

The smoke would kill them before the flame. Then something, perhaps Odin, directed Haraldr’s attention upward. The roof beams. ‘Ulfr,’ he shouted, his sword already poised. The two Norsemen hacked as they never had in battle. But the exertion was suffocating them, the smoke pouring into their lungs.

A muffled crack preceded a stunning cascade of timbers and tiles; not just the ceiling but the pitched roof of the entire building apparently had been supported by the beams. Air rushed in, briefly reprieved their lungs, and then fanned the blazing pitch. ‘Where . . .’ mumbled Ulfr; his head was gashed and he seemed disoriented.

Haraldr glimpsed the moon through the rising smoke. The remains of the roof rose above him like a tiled cliff. ‘Ulfr! We have to climb!’ He scrambled over the tiles with desperate agility and clung to the peak of the roof. Ulfr almost slid to the street but also attained the precarious perch. To the east the lights of the city ran beyond vision. Beneath them, extending south to the seawall and west to the land wall, the entire Studion had erupted into regularly spaced conflagrations, not merely at the street corners but also in dozens of tenements like this.

‘They’re burning it,’ shouted Haraldr. The flames erupted through the tiles and collapsed another section of the roof. The choking smoke thickened and obscured the terrible lights of the Studion. Haraldr crept like a four- legged spider down the eastward pitch of the roof. He yelled up at Ulfr. ‘Balconies!’

Ulfr inched his way down and propped his feet on the cornice. The roof of the balcony below was on fire. ‘We’ll probably fall through the burning timbers until we hit a floor or ceiling that isn’t on fire,’ said Haraldr.

‘Odin has told you this?’ asked Ulfr. ‘What if they’re all on fire?’

‘Then we will not need a funeral pyre.’

Ulfr nodded. ‘I have been ready to die with you more than once.’ He crouched on the cornice and prepared to jump. ‘I will see that a warm bench is waiting for you in the Valhol!’ he shouted, and then he plunged feet first into the inferno.

Haraldr held his breath. He fell almost without impact through the roof of the balcony and felt only a slight scraping as he hurtled through the floor. Almost as soon as he knew that he had crashed through the next roof, his fall ended with sudden impact and he felt a pain in his ankle. The flames were all around him. He smelled his hair singe. He rolled towards the adjoining room. The choking air seemed cool. He sat up and slapped at his smouldering cloak. Ulfr squatted on his haunches, looking at him.

Ulfr and Haraldr descended the stairs, shouting to warn the tenants as they passed each landing. The street was entirely deserted. No onlookers, no panicked residents scurrying out with their meagre belongings. They saw someone running in the next block; behind the flailing figure a wooden hovel, several storeys high, was almost entirely consumed by flames. The upper storeys of the tenement they had just escaped were a blazing crown; the building resembled a giant torch thrust into the night. Embers showered down.

Ulfr shook his head. ‘What you said is right. The Studion is like no other place.’ Huge timbers fractured and plunged flaming to the street. Haraldr and Ulfr ran west through an intersection to escape the falling debris. They encountered no one. It was as if the devils had claimed all the souls of the Studion and were now razing it with fire. Ahead of them, the wooden building they had seen from a distance collapsed with an explosive whoosh and blocked the street. They went back, skirted the burning tenement they had just escaped, and proceeded north. No side streets intersected this thoroughfare for several blocks, and there were no fires up ahead.

The toughs came out of the shadows like silent, dark spirits. Maybe twenty, but no apparent spear shafts, Haraldr observed calmly; the spear was the only weapon that could reach him before his sword could reach the man who wielded it. Haraldr unsheathed his sword. ‘Too much killing this night,’ he said grimly. The sound of timbers cracking punctuated the enormous sibilation of the flames at their backs. The toughs formed a blockade. Haraldr held the Hunland steel high so that they could all see it. ‘We’ll charge them,’ he told Ulfr.

The toughs scattered before Haraldr had got within a dozen ells of them; they jittered like anxious dogs for a moment before the shadows pulled them back into their lairs. Two blocks south, the entire crown of a tenement fell into the street with a tremendous roar and flash of light. Haraldr and Ulfr turned to watch for a moment, then continued north.

Haraldr rubbed his smoke-fouled eyes. He thought of bathing, he thought of the next time he would hold Maria and feel her silk next to his skin. He could no longer save the Studion. But Odin had given him another day. He was suddenly quite weary. Where was a side street? They needed to turn east.

The street ahead shimmered. The flames behind them soughed like a great wind, and embers floated past. The street was moving. Haraldr felt as if his legs had vanished. His bowels iced. Odin. Clever, tricky Odin. The prankster. The street ahead was alive with people. Not hundreds but thousands, backed up for blocks, a crowd like that on the Mese for the coronation of the Caesar. But this crowd was different, bristling, with shafts sticking up among it like the spikes of a sea urchin. Spears. Hundreds of spears.

‘Nephew. I was told you waited on me.’

How gracious of you to point that out, thought Michael Kalaphates, since I have been waiting here in your ante-chamber since the third hour of the night. And it is now the eighth hour of the night.

‘It is quite late, Nephew,’ said Joannes. ‘Perhaps I was too strident in my previous criticism of your industry, or lack thereof. Since you have attained your lofty dignity, you perhaps allowed the pendulum to pivot too far in the direction of application. It wearies me simply to observe the hours you obviously now devote to affairs of state.’

‘My profound apologies if I have momentarily deterred you from your verily unceasing pursuit of our Empire’s concerns, Uncle, but I did have a matter of grave import to discuss.’

‘Indeed.’ Joannes’s sluglike lower lip lapped over his thin upper one. ‘I had rather hoped to insulate you from grave matters, as your health is so precious to me.’

‘As yours is to me, Uncle.’ Michael paused. ‘I have heard rumours of a plot.’

‘It is not possible to walk beneath the Chalke Gate without hearing rumours of a plot, Nephew,’ said Joannes with deliberate weariness in his deep, growling voice.

‘I believe it is, as much as it tortures my very soul even to contemplate the words, a plot against you, my dearest uncle.’

Joannes’s deeply socketed eyes rolled towards Michael like the swivelling spouts of an Imperial dhromon. ‘Let us not carry this amusement further, Nephew.’ A lightning bolt crashed inside Michael’s skull. Joannes showed his awful teeth. ‘I know Constantine is your favourite uncle.’

‘You are both equally dear,’ Michael somehow replied. He was numb with relief. And fear, the fear of a possibility he had never considered. It had been a mistake to come here tonight, sheer hubris. No. It was not possible that Joannes could know.

‘Well, Nephew, I am touched by your sincere concern for my welfare. But as I am most weary of, as you so graciously phrase it, my unceasing labours on behalf of the state, I would like to bathe first. I see no possibility of assassins lurking in my bath, however customary such venues have become for murders of all sorts, and even