It was a cacophony. Torches flashed; people stamped and dogs howled.
‘We need to capture one of them,’ said Loys to the Varangian nearest to him. He needed to ask some questions.
‘Our sort of work. Wait until they separate. If one goes off on his own we’ll have him.’
‘And if he doesn’t?’
‘We’ll have him anyway.’
The ceremony continued, with singing and chanting and invocations to the lady of the moon, she that is three, the lady of the cypress, warden of graves, lady of the yew, filler of graves, lady of the mandrake whose birthplace is the grave.
More flames flared. Loys guessed they were burning branches held up high.
Then there was shouting and moaning and a voice cried out loudly, ‘Do not drive these demons on to us, we who have evoked your displeasure. Three black lambs have been sacrificed, as you require, three times nine torches, as you require; the invocations have been observed, the three directions faced and the three names called. Do not abandon us.’
A word came from all around that sounded very much like ‘Amen’ and the torches began to move away.
‘We’ll take the last to leave,’ said Loys.
‘If only to get their light,’ said Vandrad. The fog was truly freakish — Loys could see no more than five paces ahead.
The torches filed away, dark figures passing them clambering over the rocks. As careful to conceal their own identity as to demonstrate their lack of curiosity in that of others, none paused to look at the Varangians.
Only one or two torches remained, up near where the ceremony been conducted.
Loys heard voices through the still air.
‘We need to open the gate again.’
‘Not yet. I stepped through it years ago. That way is a hard one and I will not walk it while there are alternatives.’
‘But the comet, the sky, these deaths. You need to look for an answer.’
‘I can scarcely hold what I have inside me. You don’t know how it costs me — what might be asked.’
‘If you went within you might rid yourself of the magic. It is that which causes these abominations to afflict us.’
‘I do not know. I do not know.’
‘Could the Christians be right? Could this be the end of the world?’
‘Or the Norsemen or the Arabs. They both seem to agree a one-eyed god must emerge, and we haven’t seen him yet.’
‘I’m glad you can joke about it, sir.’
‘I don’t joke. Who knows what is happening?’
‘You have taken from the goddess; now she wants something back.’
‘I don’t know. The wolfman. What about him?’
Loys edged closer with the Norsemen. One of the voices was high-pitched — a eunuch. The chamberlain? He told himself not to be ridiculous. The chamberlain grubbing in the dirt with heathens? Impossible. The other voice was familiar to him, he thought. But who? He stumbled on a rock.
‘Is there someone there?’
Silence.
‘We need to go.’
The torches moved off, but the Varangians had clearly decided they were in striking distance of their prey. They ran forward. Confusion, shouts.
‘Hey! Let me go!’
‘Run!’
A torch fell and someone cried out in pain, but the other torch went bobbing across the rocks, down and away. Loys crawled forward. Someone jumped at the limit of his vision — a shadow across the torchlight, no more. Then, leaping from rock to rock through the mist, came a figure. It crashed straight into Loys, knocking him down.
‘Who the-’
The man had hold of Loys by the tunic. He wore a desert hood but Loys saw clearly who it was.
‘Isias!’
The spymaster said nothing, just drew a knife.
Loys could not say if it was the instant before or the instant after that he thought of the spymaster’s threat to Beatrice, thought of the impossible task he had been set and the creeping anxiety about what would happen if he failed, thought of the peril in which he had been forced to put his soul, of the tensions he had felt even before coming to Constantinople as he cast aside his life as a monk to take up one of poverty with his lover, the lady of Rouen.
His life seemed to revolve around that moment on the rocks. Everything he had ever done divided into before and after he took his little knife from his belt and stabbed Isais in the neck. He did it without thought, but when it was done, thought came in on Loys like a wave into a headland.
The spymaster lost his footing and slipped between the rocks, blood pulsing from a terrible wound. He tried to speak, but his voice was a rasp and he lay back on the jagged boulders, kicked twice and died.
Someone came towards him — crawling quick as a cat, though he carried a torch. A Varangian.
‘The others are gone. Is this one useful to you?’
Loys was breathless, more with shock than exertion. What had he done? He had killed. He was a murderer.
The Varangian went to the body.
‘Dead,’ he said, and immediately started looting the corpse, stripping him of his soldier’s padded jacket, his boots.
Loys crossed himself and tried to gather his thoughts.
‘What now, boss?’
‘Where are the others?’
The Varangian gave a couple of sharp whistles and waved the torch. There was a scurrying on the boulders and the other three appeared.
‘They got away from us. You run in this gloom and you only break an ankle.’
Vandrad examined the corpse. ‘A rich man?’
‘Money enough,’ said the first Varangian.
‘Can you hide him?’ asked Loys.
‘We’ll get him in between these rocks with a bit of effort.’
‘Good. Let’s do that and get back down.’
Isias was a short man, if a stocky one, and it was not too difficult to push him into a cleft.
Loys forced himself to think logically. Would the stolen clothes identify the Varangians? He doubted it. Isias had been dressed as a simple soldier and the Varangians had looted hundreds of such men at Abydos.
‘Let’s go,’ said Loys. ‘Who knows who might come looking up here if we stay too long.’
They made their way off the hill, down to the fires of the Varangian camp. Loys would stay there until dawn and then enter when the city gates opened. They reached Vandrad’s tent and Loys watched while the men built a fire. His heart was racing and his head ached. Murder. The word resonated in his head like a struck gong. Sin begets sin, so his abbot had said. First fornication, now murder. He stared into the Varangians’ fire, trying to anchor his thoughts. He had acted in self-defence, against a heathen too, very likely. But why had Isais been there? He was too prominent, too well known. He ran the spy network; he surely didn’t take part in individual operations.
It had all happened so quickly and reason had given way to animal instinct. But another, darker thought was building. If he had captured Isias, could he have allowed him to live? Would he have told the Varangians to cut his throat? Could he have risked letting Isias know he had been spied on, to return to the palace and move against Loys in whatever terrible way he chose? Loys shivered, though he sat near to the fire. He concluded he had done in anger something that cold reason may have commanded, had he time to think about it.
The more he did think, the more worried he became. Isias was the head of the messenger service. It was he
