‘They’re burning it,’ shouted Haraldr. The flames erupted through the tiles and collapsed another section of the roof. The choking smoke thickened and obscured the terrible lights of the Studion. Haraldr crept like a four-legged spider down the eastward pitch of the roof. He yelled up at Ulfr. ‘Balconies!’
Ulfr inched his way down and propped his feet on the cornice. The roof of the balcony below was on fire. ‘We’ll probably fall through the burning timbers until we hit a floor or ceiling that isn’t on fire,’ said Haraldr.
‘Odin has told you this?’ asked Ulfr. ‘What if they’re all on fire?’
‘Then we will not need a funeral pyre.’
Ulfr nodded. ‘I have been ready to die with you more than once.’ He crouched on the cornice and prepared to jump. ‘I will see that a warm bench is waiting for you in the Valhol!’ he shouted, and then he plunged feet first into the inferno.
Haraldr held his breath. He fell almost without impact through the roof of the balcony and felt only a slight scraping as he hurtled through the floor. Almost as soon as he knew that he had crashed through the next roof, his fall ended with sudden impact and he felt a pain in his ankle. The flames were all around him. He smelled his hair singe. He rolled towards the adjoining room. The choking air seemed cool. He sat up and slapped at his smouldering cloak. Ulfr squatted on his haunches, looking at him.
Ulfr and Haraldr descended the stairs, shouting to warn the tenants as they passed each landing. The street was entirely deserted. No onlookers, no panicked residents scurrying out with their meagre belongings. They saw someone running in the next block; behind the flailing figure a wooden hovel, several storeys high, was almost entirely consumed by flames. The upper storeys of the tenement they had just escaped were a blazing crown; the building resembled a giant torch thrust into the night. Embers showered down.
Ulfr shook his head. ‘What you said is right. The Studion is like no other place.’ Huge timbers fractured and plunged flaming to the street. Haraldr and Ulfr ran west through an intersection to escape the falling debris. They encountered no one. It was as if the devils had claimed all the souls of the Studion and were now razing it with fire. Ahead of them, the wooden building they had seen from a distance collapsed with an explosive whoosh and blocked the street. They went back, skirted the burning tenement they had just escaped, and proceeded north. No side streets intersected this thoroughfare for several blocks, and there were no fires up ahead.
The toughs came out of the shadows like silent, dark spirits. Maybe twenty, but no apparent spear shafts, Haraldr observed calmly; the spear was the only weapon that could reach him before his sword could reach the man who wielded it. Haraldr unsheathed his sword. ‘Too much killing this night,’ he said grimly. The sound of timbers cracking punctuated the enormous sibilation of the flames at their backs. The toughs formed a blockade. Haraldr held the Hunland steel high so that they could all see it. ‘We’ll charge them,’ he told Ulfr.
The toughs scattered before Haraldr had got within a dozen ells of them; they jittered like anxious dogs for a moment before the shadows pulled them back into their lairs. Two blocks south, the entire crown of a tenement fell into the street with a tremendous roar and flash of light. Haraldr and Ulfr turned to watch for a moment, then continued north.
Haraldr rubbed his smoke-fouled eyes. He thought of bathing, he thought of the next time he would hold Maria and feel her silk next to his skin. He could no longer save the Studion. But Odin had given him another day. He was suddenly quite weary. Where was a side street? They needed to turn east.
The street ahead shimmered. The flames behind them soughed like a great wind, and embers floated past. The street was moving. Haraldr felt as if his legs had vanished. His bowels iced. Odin. Clever, tricky Odin. The prankster. The street ahead was alive with people. Not hundreds but thousands, backed up for blocks, a crowd like that on the Mese for the coronation of the Caesar. But this crowd was different, bristling, with shafts sticking up among it like the spikes of a sea urchin. Spears. Hundreds of spears.
‘Nephew. I was told you waited on me.’
How gracious of you to point that out, thought Michael Kalaphates, since I have been waiting here in your ante-chamber since the third hour of the night. And it is now the eighth hour of the night.
‘It is quite late, Nephew,’ said Joannes. ‘Perhaps I was too strident in my previous criticism of your industry, or lack thereof. Since you have attained your lofty dignity, you perhaps allowed the pendulum to pivot too far in the direction of application. It wearies me simply to observe the hours you obviously now devote to affairs of state.’
‘My profound apologies if I have momentarily deterred you from your verily unceasing pursuit of our Empire’s concerns, Uncle, but I did have a matter of grave import to discuss.’
‘Indeed.’ Joannes’s sluglike lower lip lapped over his thin upper one. ‘I had rather hoped to insulate you from grave matters, as your health is so precious to me.’
‘As yours is to me, Uncle.’ Michael paused. ‘I have heard rumours of a plot.’
‘It is not possible to walk beneath the Chalke Gate without hearing rumours of a plot, Nephew,’ said Joannes with deliberate weariness in his deep, growling voice.
‘I believe it is, as much as it tortures my very soul even to contemplate the words, a plot against you, my dearest uncle.’
Joannes’s deeply socketed eyes rolled towards Michael like the swivelling spouts of an Imperial dhromon. ‘Let us not carry this amusement further, Nephew.’ A lightning bolt crashed inside Michael’s skull. Joannes showed his awful teeth. ‘I know Constantine is your favourite uncle.’
‘You are both equally dear,’ Michael somehow replied. He was numb with relief. And fear, the fear of a possibility he had never considered. It had been a mistake to come here tonight, sheer hubris. No. It was not possible that Joannes could know.
‘Well, Nephew, I am touched by your sincere concern for my welfare. But as I am most weary of, as you so graciously phrase it, my unceasing labours on behalf of the state, I would like to bathe first. I see no possibility of assassins lurking in my bath, however customary such venues have become for murders of all sorts, and even palace coups. I would like to think that my demise would require more imagination on the part of the miscreant.’ Joannes’s Chamberlain opened the door to a hallway. As Joannes stepped beneath the lintel he whirled dramatically and faced Michael. ‘You have whetted my curiosity, Nephew. Why don’t you join me in my baths and tell me of the imminence of this danger to my person.’
Haraldr looked south. Flaming wreckage completely blocked the street. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said to Ulfr as he turned back to face the mob. ‘They have seen us. We cannot let them know that we are afraid of them, or the lives of my pledge-men will be worth nothing on these streets.’
Ulfr drew his sword. ‘An axe age, a sword age. The ravens will drink well tonight. And this mob will soon know with how many lives the corpse of a Varangian is purchased.’
‘No.’
Ulfr looked at Haraldr incredulously.
‘Not yet.’ Haraldr unbuckled his breastplate and sword belt, took off his helm and cloak, and handed all of his weapons to Ulfr. ‘Odin permitted me this once before,’ he said.
‘My friend . . .’ Ulfr trailed off. There was no use protesting; Haraldr had made too many mad ruses work in the past. But for a Varangian to perish unarmed, a prisoner, perhaps tortured, was a fate literally worse than death; his bench in the Valhol would wait, empty, until the last dragon flew.