Krispos felt his lips move as he added up the sums. He checked himself, then said, 'Seventeen it is. Come along with me; I'll pay you right now.'
'Good,' Trokoundos growled. 'Then I'll never have to come back here again, so I won't run the risk of bumping into his damnfoolness of a Majesty and telling him just exactly what I think of him.'
Hearing a loud, unfamiliar voice coming down the hall, Barsymes peered out of a dining room to see who it was. Hearing what the loud, unfamiliar voice had to say about his lord and master, the eunuch squeaked and pulled his head back in.
Krispos opened a strongbox and counted out coins. Trokoundos snatched them from his hand. 'Now I'm not out anything but my patience and my digestion,' he said, putting them into his wallet one by one.
'May I ask what went wrong?' Krispos said. 'From what his Majesty's been saying, he's felt he's made good progress.'
'Oh, he has. He's a promising beginner, maybe even better than promising. He can be very quick when he wants to be, and he has a good head for remembering what he learns. But he wants everything at once.'
That sounded like Anthimos, Krispos thought. He asked, 'How so?'
'Now that he has some of the basics down, he wants to leap straight into major conjurations—blasting fires, demons, who knows what will cross his mind next? Whatever it is, it's sure to be something big enough and difficult enough to be dangerous if anything goes wrong. I told him as much. That's when he sacked me.'
'Couldn't you have guided him through some of the things he wanted to do, repaired any mistakes he might have made?'
'No, for two reasons. For one, I wouldn't let any other apprentice ask that of me, and his Imperial Majesty Anthimos HI is no Avtokrator of magic, just another 'prentice.' Krispos dipped his head to Trokoundos, respecting him very much for that. The mage went on, 'For another, I'm not sure I
'What happens if he goes on without you?' Krispos asked in some alarm. 'Is he likely to kill himself and everyone for half a mile around?' If he was, then this would be one time for Petronas to clamp down hard on his nephew.
But Trokoundos shook his head. 'I don't think there's much danger of that. You see, as soon as he leaves his little laboratory today, all his books of spells will go blank. He's not the first rich dilettante I've tried to teach. There is magic to reconstitute them, but it has to be performed by the owner of the books, and it's not easy to work. I don't think his Majesty's quite up to it, and I doubt he'd have the patience to retranscribe the texts by hand.'
'I didn't think he'd do it the first time,' Krispos agreed. 'So you've left him without magic? Won't he just find himself another mage?'
'Even if he does, he'll still have to start over from the beginning. But no, he's not altogether bereft—he'll still be able to use whatever he has memorized. Phos willing, that'll be enough to keep him happy.'
Krispos considered, then slowly nodded. 'I suspect it may. Most of what he wanted with it was to impress people at his feasts.'
'I thought as much,' Trokoundos said scornfully. 'He doesn't have a bad head for it, or wouldn't, but there's no discipline to him. You can't succeed at anything unless you're willing to put in the hard work you need to learn your craft.' He glanced at Krispos. 'You know what I'm talking about, I think.'
'I've done some wrestling,' Krispos said.
'Then you know, all right.' Trokoundos' gaze sharpened. 'I remember—you're the one who beat that Kubrati, aren't you? You weren't vestiarios then. I might have connected the name with the story sooner if I hadn't seen you in your fancy robes all the time.'
'No, I wasn't vestiarios, just a groom,' Krispos said. He smiled, both at Trokoundos and at the way his fortunes had changed. 'I didn't think I was
'I've heard that said, yes.' The mage studied Krispos; as he had sometimes with Tanilis, he got the odd feeling he was transparent to the man. 'I'd teach you sorcery if you wanted me to. You'd do what was needed, I think, and not complain. But that isn't the craft you're learning, is it?'
'What do you mean?' Krispos asked. Trokoundos was already on his way out the door and did not answer. 'Cursed wizards always want the last word,' Krispos muttered to himself.
Anthimos was wild with fury when he discovered all his hard-won spells had disappeared. 'I'll have that bastard's balls,' he shouted, 'and his ears and nose, too!'
Normally not a bloodthirsty soul, he went on about pincers and knives and red-hot needles until Krispos, worried that he might really mean it, tried to calm him by saying,'You're probably just as well rid of the mage. I don't think your uncle would like you studying anything as dangerous as sorcery.'
'To the ice with my uncle, too!' Anthimos said. 'He's not the Avtokrator, and I bloody well am!' But when he sent a squad of Halogai to arrest Trokoundos, sending a priest with them in case he resisted with magic, they found his house empty. 'Knave must have fled to the hinterland,' the Emperor declared with some satisfaction when they brought him the news. By then his usual good humor had returned. 'I daresay that's worse punishment than any I could inflict.'
'Aye, good riddance to bad rubbish,' said Krispos, who had quietly sent word to Trokoundos to get out of the city for a while.
To Krispos' surprise and dismay, Anthimos did start recopying his tome of spells. He never quite quit transcribing, either, but before long the pace of his work slowed to a crawl. He turned one of his revels inside out with a spell that made cabbage intoxicating for a night and left wine mild as milk. 'You see?' he triumphantly told Krispos the next morning. 'I am a mage, even if that stinking Trokoundos tried to keep me from being one. Did you hear how they cheered me last night when the wizardry worked just as I said it would?'
'Yes, your Majesty,' Krispos said. His stomach rumbled like distant thunder. He'd eaten too much cabbage the night before. Given a choice, he would far soon have got drunk on wine.
