"You are?" Kameniates looked at him in astonishment. "Why?"
Yes, that was comfort speaking. Comfort brought with it the inability to understand what might bother a man like Rhavas, a man who had seen the worst both his own folk and the barbarians could do. "Why, most holy sir? Because recent events have compelled me to reevaluate the fundamental relationship between the lord with the great and good mind and the dark god."
That put it as abstractly as Rhavas knew how. He waited to see what Kameniates would make of it, and to see how long the ecumenical patriarch needed to realize exactly what he was saying. The longer Kameniates took, the stupider Rhavas reckoned him. Much more slowly than he should have, Kameniates finally figured out what Rhavas' innocuous-sounding words had to mean. When he did, he got it into a handful of words of his own, blurting, "You worship the dark god!"
"No," Rhavas said, meaning, Yes. "But I do think our easy lives in the Empire have left us complacent. We have taken Phos and his power for granted for a very long time. As we gain more experience with the world as it really is, shouldn't we use that experience to help us understand who the stronger god is?"
"Heresy!" Kameniates sketched Phos' sun-sign and spat in rejection at the same time, as if he urgently needed to do both and couldn't decide which to take care of first.
"Asking a question is not heresy." Rhavas kept his voice mild.
"Asking this question is," the ecumenical patriarch declared. "Don't play logic-chopping games with me. If you say Skotos may be stronger than Phos, what do you do but undermine the faith?"
He was right. Rhavas knew as much. He gave back the only answer he could: "What if I speak the truth in saying that, most holy sir? Everything I have seen lately makes me believe I do."
"What if you speak the truth? Well, so what?" There was cynicism to rock even Rhavas. "So what?" Kameniates repeated. "Do you want people going around robbing and raping and killing because they think the dark god wants them to? Do you want them thinking they've got nothing to look forward to but the eternal ice when they die? Does that do anybody any good? I don't think so, and neither do you, not if you've got a copper's worth of sense."
Rhavas had raped and killed, thinking Skotos wanted him to. He still thought so, and he still thought it was important. He said, "I am the prelate of a city of the first rank." The Empire of Videssos had six or eight of those. The city was not one of them; it was in a class by itself. Rhavas went on, "Because of what I am, I have the right to call for a synod on doctrinal matters. I have the right, and I intend to use it."
"I have the right to tell you you're a troublemaking idiot, and I intend to use that," Kameniates retorted. "Go ahead. Put out your call for a synod. You'll get one. It's within your rights, as you say. And you'll be sorrier afterward than you ever thought you could be. Do you understand that? You will be asking your fellow ecclesiastics to condemn you for the worst heresy we know. And they will. Being the Avtokrator's kin won't save you, not if you try to worship Skotos. Nothing will save you if you do that."
"We'll see." Rhavas thought about telling him what Arotras had said, and about what Maleinos had. In the end, he held his peace. Arotras was too small a fish to matter, and too vulnerable. And the Avtokrator could speak for himself in his own good time. It wasn't Rhavas' place to speak for him. If Rhavas hadn't understood that himself, Maleinos had made it very clear in short order.
"If you go forward, you are the one who will see," Kameniates said. "What you propose is madness."
"There, most holy sir, we agree," Rhavas replied. "Madness has swallowed the world. You want everyone to think that isn't so. You want people to believe things are the way they've always been. You want them to think everything is fine, and all they need to do is go on the way they always have. I'm sorry, but that won't do the job any more."
"Nothing else will," Kameniates said. They eyed each other, both of them realizing they'd been doing nothing but talking at cross purposes.
"We'll see," Rhavas said once more. "Oh, yes. We will indeed."
When Maleinos summoned Rhavas into his presence, Rhavas was glad to go. He even prostrated himself before his imperial cousin without the slightest notion anything was amiss. Even going down on your belly before the Avtokrator of the Videssians was a singular honor: most people never had the chance to do so.
Maleinos spoke to his servants: "I would talk with my cousin alone. Leave us." Watching them shuffle out of the audience chamber in the imperial residence made Rhavas prouder yet. Then Maleinos looked at him with a face full of winter and said, "You bloody fool."
"What?" Rhavas blinked.
"That's, 'What, your Majesty?'" Maleinos snarled. "Get on your belly again,cousin "—he turned that into a curse—"and tell me why I shouldn't take your head this instant."
He wasn't joking. Rhavas realized that, and did prostrate himself again. He was groveling in front of his cousin before he remembered that he had but to say the word, and Maleinos was a dead man. Whether he himself could survive saying the word was a different question.
With his forehead knocking against the floor, he quavered, "What—what's wrong, your Majesty?"
"Phos!" Maleinos exclaimed. "Are you really that naïve? I think you may be. I wouldn't believe it if I didn't see it with my own eyes. Get up, you miserable idiot, and I'll tell you."
Cautiously, Rhavas rose. "Yes, your Majesty?"
"You've decided to have a synod convened," Maleinos growled.
"Yes, your Majesty." Now Rhavas was on firmer ground.
"No, very holy sir," the Avtokrator said. "No. I didn't think you were such a blockhead, especially after we talked before. What will happen when the synod comes to order? I'll tell you what. Stylianos will start screaming, 'Look! Maleinos' cousin worships Skotos! Maleinos must worship Skotos, too!'—that's what. And that would do me a whole lot of good, wouldn't it?"
Once that was pointed out to him, Rhavas saw it plainly enough. "But you said—" he began.
Maleinos cut him off with a sharp chopping motion of his right hand. If he'd held a sword, he might have taken Rhavas' head with it just then. In tones of infinite disgust, he said, "What I tell my cousin over wine when we're both getting sozzled is one thing. If I don't want to remember it the next morning, I don't have to. What I say publicly, or what anybody in my family says publicly, is something else again. We talked about that, too, but you seem to have forgotten it. Now do you follow me, very holy sir?"
"Yes, your Majesty," Rhavas answered. "But there is something you may not see."
"Oh?" An ominous rumble came into the Avtokrator's voice. "And what, pray tell, is that?"
"The truth is the truth no matter whether we're talking about it over wine with no one else around or in front of a crowd in the market square—or in front of priests and prelates in the High Temple," Rhavas said.
His cousin scowled at him. "I told you what the truth was. The truth is, no kinsman of mine is going to cause that kind of trouble right now. I can't afford it, and the Empire can't afford it, either. Do I make myself plain enough?"
Rhavas gathered himself. He had always favored Maleinos in the civil war, not just because they were kin but because he himself was—well, he had been—a sound conservative by nature, opposed to change in general and to usurpation in particular. He was still opposed to usurpation. Change in general . . . "Your Majesty, I honor you and I obey you to the extent I can, but here I will go where my studies of the good god and of the dark lord take me. I do not see what else I can do, not if I want to cleave to the truth."