"Of course they will," he said, there in the silent darkness of his room. "They will have to, because I am right." Thus reassured, he resumed his interrupted journey into slumber.
When he came downstairs the next morning, Melias the tapman gave him a knowing smile and said, "I trust you passed a, mm, pleasant night?"
"Pleasant enough, thanks," Rhavas answered. "I would like half a loaf and some oil and a mug of wine to break my fast, if you'd be so kind."
"Of course." Melias gave him what he asked for, and eyed him as he began to eat. "You're a cool one, aren't you?" the taverner said with what sounded like reluctant respect.
"I try to be," Rhavas answered in his usual matter-of-fact tones. "And I will tell you one other thing: after all I have seen, all I have been through, all I have escaped, what happened last night is not so much of a much."
To his surprise, that made Melias laugh. "All right, holy sir. I think I hear what you're saying. You sound like somebody from Videssos the city talking about any place in the world that isn't Videssos the city."
Rhavas laughed in turn. "I suppose I do. And I am from Videssos the city, and I do talk about every other place that way."
"I've never known anybody from the capital who didn't," Melias said. "I've been there a few times, and plenty of people who've never set foot outside the walls in their lives talk the same way."
"I wouldn't be surprised." Rhavas finished his breakfast. When he reached for his belt pouch to pay, the tapman waved for him not to bother. Pleased but hardly surprised, he went out to the stable to get his horses. They had oats and hay in their stalls, and they'd been well tended and groomed. Again, Rhavas was pleased without being astonished.
He'd already ridden out of the stable—in fact, he'd already ridden out of the town—before he realized how much for granted he took horsemanship these days. Just after escaping Skopentzana, he'd been a thoroughly indifferent rider. No more. As with anything else, practice brought improvement.
Even with cursing, he thought, and—smoothly—rode on.
Rhavas felt like cheering when he saw the walls of the capital ahead. For a moment, forgetting himself, he felt like offering up a prayer of thanksgiving to Phos. Not altogether happily, he shook his head. He could never do that again, not without hypocrisy.
He'd thought he would be excited to return, after so many years away. And he was, but not in the way he'd expected. Too much had happened to him—and to the Empire. He'd seen too much in the years since he'd gone, and especially in the past year. This didn't feel like a homecoming. Instead, Videssos the city seemed a new place, one he would have to conquer afresh.
It seemed a formidable new place, too. It occupied a triangle of land, two sides surrounded by the sea; the third, the one he faced, protected by the most formidable walls the mind of man could conceive. Videssos the city was the most of one thing or the other in any number of ways. Thanks to the Cattle-Crossing, trade routes running east and west, north and south all converged here. Videssos the city, then, was the richest city in the world, and the largest, and the most ambition-filled. Men from towns like Skopentzana and Amorion came here to see if they could succeed competing against the best and toughest from all over the Empire and beyond. Plenty of people of placid spirit stayed where they were, content to be tall trees in a garden of bushes. Those who wanted to find out how their trunks measured up against the rest of the tall timber came to the capital.
Before, Rhavas' birth and family had shielded him from all that. With his cousin wearing the Avtokrator's red boots, of course he would succeed. He was able; he knew that. But ability wasn't the only thing that had let him rise so swiftly through the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Who he was had counted for even more than what he was.
Things would be different now. Now he would be trying to succeed in spite of what Maleinos believed, not because of it. Now his own ability would count for everything. He had to persuade a hostile world that he knew a truth of which it was ignorant.
"I have to—and I will," he declared, and urged his horse forward.
He rode in through the Silver Gate, the grandest one in all the city. He could not have chosen a lesser entrance. The drawbridge was down, to let people into the capital. Rhavas took that for a good sign: Maleinos didn't fear Stylianos would try to sneak in soldiers, anyhow.
Guards did give everything and everybody a careful once-over. The fellow in front of Rhavas led several donkeys festooned with leather sacks. He had to open them up to show what he was carrying. The guards poked through his woolens—which looked utterly ordinary to Rhavas—as if they expected to find either jewels or weapons to help Stylianos' supporters in the city rise against Maleinos. Discovering neither, they finally let the man go forward.
One of them gave Rhavas a look anything but friendly. "And who in blazes are you, holy sir?"
"I am Rhavas, prelate of Skopentzana and cousin to Maleinos, Avtokrator of the Videssians," Rhavas replied. He had decided he wasn't going to sneak into Videssos the city. Maybe people were looking for him by name because of what he'd done to Himerios and the mages. More likely, though, he judged, they were after a priest from Skopentzana, or perhaps just a priest from the north. And in that case, they would never dream Maleinos' cousin was the man they sought.
He sounded haughty enough to make his claim convincing to the guards. They almost injured themselves coming to stiff, creaking attention. The one who'd scowled at Rhavas shed his toploftiness like a lizard wriggling out of its skin. "Pass on, holy, uh, very holy sir," he said.
Rhavas inclined his head. "Thank you very much," he said, and urged his steppe pony forward. The guards saluted as he rode into Videssos the city.
His horse's hooves and those of the packhorse drummed on the timbers of the drawbridge, then struck more softly when they reached solid ground again. The sun disappeared from the sky. Rhavas traversed a bricked-in tunnel between the outer and inner walls. Men leered down at him from murder holes, ready to rain boiling water or red-hot sand down on attackers. Several portcullises could fall, one at a time or all together, to delay or even halt assailants.
The works protecting Videssos the city were the mightiest men could devise. No foreign foe had ever stormed them. Rhavas doubted a foreign foe ever could. That did not mean the capital had never fallen. Now and again, in civil strife, it had. Not even the strongest fortifications could hold out treachery.
Treachery, Rhavas thought. The great Videssian sport. Love of controversy, love of surprises flourished inside the Empire. That being so, betrayal also flourished. No wonder Maleinos' guardsmen so carefully scrutinized a mere merchant's goods.
But who scrutinized the guardsmen? There was the really important question. Rhavas could see as much. No doubt his cousin could, too.
Light at the end of the tunnel . . . At another time, Rhavas would have thought about Phos triumphing over Skotos. In fact, such thoughts did still rise to the surface of his mind. His habits had formed over many years. He could not abandon them in the blink of an eye, no matter how much he wished he could.
He scowled, there in the gloom. If he had trouble changing his own way of thinking, how did he dare hope to persuade others to change their minds and recognize that Skotos, not Phos, prevailed in the world? Wouldn't simple habit make people go on believing the way they always had?
His laugh echoed and reechoed along with the clopping of the horses' hooves. "Let them look around," he said. "If they cannot see after that, what are they but blind men?"