"Item: you tried to keep them from coming into Skopentzana in the first place. Item: you tried to throw them out once they did take refuge here." Rhavas ticked points off on his fingers as he spoke. "Item: you don't think they ought to get rations, even though they grew the food you're eating. Item: militiamen harry them every chance they get. Item . . . Shall I go on?"
The new head of Skopentzana's militia lacked Toxaras' imposing physical presence. He was a shrewder man, though; Rhavas watched the calculation in his eyes. "What do you suppose we ought to do about that?" he asked, licking his lips.
"Not much you can do about it now, is there?" Rhavas said. "If all of you had let up on the peasants after Toxaras had his accident"—he wouldn't call it a curse, or think of it as one—"that might have done some good. If you leave those people alone from now on, that may help some, but to the ice with me if I think it will do a whole lot."
"If they're traitors, we ought to put 'em out of the city, by the good god," Voilas said viciously. "How else are we going to keep Skopentzana safe?"
"Don't you think that would make matters worse?" Rhavas inquired. "Can you be sure you'd hunt them all down? Can you be sure none of them has kin living inside the walls? Don't you see? You'd make those people hate you, too, but you wouldn't know who they were so you could watch out for them."
"You're no help at all, very holy sir," Voilas complained.
"Why? Because I don't give you leave to do what you want to do anyhow? I intend to lose not a minute of sleep over that," Rhavas said. "The most you can do is keep an eye on the noisiest troublemakers—and maybe on some of the quietest one, too, since they might be smart enough to cause trouble without trumpeting out a warning ahead of time. Do you see what I'm saying?"
Plainly, Voilas didn't want to. Just as plainly, he recognized that he had no choice. His hand fell to the hilt of the sword on his belt. But he also recognized that wouldn't do what he wished it would. Voice choked with fury, he said, "Remember, very holy sir, you called down a curse on your own head if anything went wrong. If I were you, I'd be praying hard that it doesn't come true."
He stormed away, and was gone before Rhavas could even try for the last word. The prelate made a horrible face, though no one was in the study to see it. Even had Voilas stayed to listen, how could he have responded? He had no idea. His right hand shaped the sun-sign. "I have prayed," he said. "I do pray. I intend to keep on praying." Every word of that was true. How much good would it do him—or Skopentzana?
He hated Voilas for making him think such thoughts. When he came to this distant place, he'd never dreamt a potter could shake his faith worse than any of the clever, even brilliant, theologians in Videssos the city.
For the first six weeks after Midwinter's Day, or even a little longer, the weather in Skopentzana remained mild by northern standards. Oh, there was snow on the ground, and it seemed bitterly cold to anyone who'd grown up in the capital, but no great blizzards came roaring through, as sometimes happened every other week in winter in this part of the world.
And then all that abruptly changed. For three days, howling wind and swirling snow filled the air in Skopentzana. At first, when the snowstorm descended on the city, Rhavas hoped it would either drive the Khamorth away or freeze them in place. He didn't need long to realize that was a forlorn hope indeed. The nomads endured dreadful winters on the Pardrayan steppe. Just because a blizzard afflicted Videssian soil instead wouldn't make it anything out of the ordinary for them.
It wasn't anything out of the ordinary for the Skopentzanans, either. They simply started digging out, as they did whenever winter dealt them a buffet. They took a sardonic pride in enduring the worst the season could throw at them.
"Still alive, are you?" one man would greet another as they shoveled their walks clear.
"Oh, no, not me," the second Skopentzanan might reply. "I froze to death day before yesterday." They would both laugh and get on with their work.
After two days' respite, another blizzard slammed the city, and yet another two days after that. By then, even the longtime inhabitants weren't laughing anymore. Even in a city as ready for it as Skopentzana was, too much winter could kill.
Had the Khamorth set scaling ladders against the walls when the snow was at its worst, they might easily have gained the top—who could have seen them till they were there? But they didn't. Truly, they knew nothing of siegecraft. A good thing, too, Rhavas thought.
Yet another blizzard dumped still more snow on Skopentzana a few days later. Had Videssos the city faced such weather, everything in the capital would have ground to a halt. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people would have frozen. In Skopentzana, it happened almost every winter. No one got too excited about it. Men and women had furs and thick woolen blankets. They had houses made snug against the worst winter storms could do. Even with less firewood than they might have liked, they got by.
When that latest snowstorm blew itself out at last, one of Zautzes' servants came across the square to the prelate's residence. "Very holy sir, the eparch would like to talk with you about the ration," the man said.
"I'll come," Rhavas said at once; the ration was serious business. "Is he going to cut it again?"
"Sir, that's what he wants to talk to you about," the servant replied.
Rhavas decked himself out in his warmest hooded robes. Zautzes' servant wore enough clothes to keep himself warm in Skotos' frozen hell. The blizzard might have stopped, but it remained bitterly cold outside.
Despite the hood, Rhavas felt the weather more than a secular man might have; as soon as he got outside, heat poured from the top of his head like water out of a cracked pot. He refused to let it get him down. "Good to see the sun again," he remarked.
"That's the truth, very holy sir," Zautzes' servant agreed.
Drifts of snow clotted the square and made the statues at the center of it hard to recognize. The sun shone dazzlingly. Rhavas squinted against the glare. The servant's footprints were almost the only marks in the smooth expanse of white. "Shall we follow your track back to the eparch's?" the prelate asked.
"Suits me," the servant said. "I got here, so I expect we can get back."
Almost like sled dogs, he and Rhavas plunged into the snow. The going was hard. No crust had frozen yet, so they had to flounder through the drifts instead of surmounting them. Before Rhavas got anywhere near the statues, he began to sweat. The perspiration started to freeze on him whenever he slowed, even for a moment. But he needed to pause every so often to catch his breath.
At one such halt, he pointed to an odd-shaped lump in the snow near the base of Stavrakios' statue. "What's that?"
Zautzes' servant shrugged. "Just a drift. The wind can do all kinds of funny things—you'd better believe it can."
"Oh, I know it can, but that doesn't look like anything the wind shaped to me." Rhavas started shoving snow aside with mittened hands. Even through thick felt, the cold bit into his hands.
The servant, a younger man, stood watching him for a little while, then, with an exaggerated sniff, started pushing snow around himself. "You'll see," he said. "There won't be anything except—"
"Oh, but there is." Rhavas' mittens had just bumped something firmer than the soft, fluffy snow. "It's . . . Phos!" He sketched the sun-sign. "It's a body, dumped into the drift."
Eyes wide enough to show white all around the iris, the servant signed himself, too. "You—you were right, very holy sir," he stammered. "Who—who could have done such a wicked, sinful thing?"
"Let's find out who's dead," the prelate said grimly. "That may tell us something about who killed him."