He suspected, looking back, that Leontes (or his wife?) had wanted him to come to them alone, as Master of the Senate, to learn the tidings before anyone else did. That would give them time to quietly summon the Senate, control the release of the terrible news.
It didn't work out that way.
As the stands exploded into fury and a rush for the exits, the inhabitants of the Imperial Box rose to their feet and made a collective rush of their own for the doors leading back to the Attenine Palace. Bonosus remembered the expression on the pallid secretary's face: startled and displeased, and afraid.
When Bonosus and Pertennius did make it back through the long walkway to the palace's audience chamber, it was crowded with noisy, frightened courtiers who'd fled the kathisma ahead of them. Others were arriving. In the centre of the room-near the thrones and the silver tree-stood Leontes and Styliane.
The Strategos lifted a hand for silence. Not the Master of Offices, not the Chancellor. Gesius had just entered the room, in fact, through the small door behind the two thrones. He stopped there, brow furrowed in perplexity. In the stillness his gesture shaped it was Leontes, blunt and grave, who said, "I am sorry, but this must be told. We have lost our father today. Jad's most holy Emperor is dead."
There was a babble of disbelief. A woman cried out. Someone near Bonosus made the sign of the sun disk, then others did. Someone knelt, then all of them did, the sound like a murmuring of the sea. All of them except Styliane and Leontes. And Gesius, Bonosus saw. The Chancellor didn't looked perplexed now. His expression was otherwise. He put out a hand to steady himself on a table and said, from directly behind those tall, golden figures and the thrones, "How? How did this happen? And how is it that you know?"
The thin, precise voice cut hard through the room. This was Sarantium. The Imperial Precinct. Not a place where certain things could be easily controlled. Not with so many competing interests and clever men.
And women. It was Styliane who turned to face the Chancellor, Styliane who said, her voice oddly without force-as if she'd just been bled by a physician, Bonosus thought-'He was murdered in the tunnel between palaces. He was burned, by Sarantine Fire."
Bonosus remembered closing his eyes at that. Past and present coming together so powerfully he felt dizzied. He opened his eyes. Pertennius, kneeling next to him, was white-faced, he saw.
"By whom?" Gesius released the table and took a step forward. He stood alone, a little apart from everyone else. A man who had served three Emperors, survived two successions.
Was unlikely to last through a third, asking these questions in this way. It occurred to the Senator that the aged Chancellor might not care.
Leontes looked at his wife, and again it was Styliane who replied. "My brother Lecanus. And the exiled Calysian, Lysippus. They seem to have suborned the guards at the tunnel door. And obviously my brother's guards on the isle."
Another murmuring. Lecanus Daleinus and fire. The past here with them in the room, Bonosus thought.
"I see," said Gesius, his papery voice so devoid of nuance it was a nuance of its own. "Just the two of them?"
"So it would seem," said Leontes, calmly. "We will need to investigate, of course."
"Of course," agreed Gesius, again with nothing to be discerned in his tone. "So good of you to point that out, Strategos. We might have neglected to think of it. I imagine the Lady Styliane was alerted by her brother of his evil intent and arrived tragically too late to forestall them?"
There was a small silence. Too many people were hearing this, Bonosus thought. It would be all over the City before sunset. And there was already violence in Sarantium. He felt afraid.
The Emperor was dead.
"The Chancellor is, as ever, wisest of us," said Styliane quietly. "It is as he says. I beg you to imagine my grief and shame. My brother was also dead, by the time we arrived. And the Strategos killed Lysippus when we saw him there, standing over the bodies."
"Killed him," Gesius murmured. He smiled thinly, a man infinitely versed in the ways of a court. Indeed. And the soldiers you mentioned?"
"Were already burned," Leontes said.
Gesius said nothing this time, only smiled again, allowing silence to speak for him. Someone was weeping in the crowded chamber.
"We must take action. There is rioting in the Hippodrome," Faustinus said. The Master of Offices finally asserting himself. He was rigid with tension, Bonosus saw. "And what about the announcement of the war?"
"There will be no announcement now," said Leontes flatly. Calm, assured. A leader of men. "And the rioting is not a cause for concern."
"It isn't? Why not?" Faustinus eyed him.
"Because the army is here," Leontes murmured, and looked slowly around the chamber at the assembled court.
It was in that moment, Bonosus thought afterwards, that he himself had begun to see this differently. The Daleinoi might have planned an assassination for their own reasons. He didn't believe for a moment that Styliane had arrived too late at that tunnel, that her blind, maimed brother had been able to plan and execute this from his island. Sarantine Fire spoke to vengeance, more than anything else. But if the Daleinus children had also assumed that Styliane's soldier husband would be a useful figure on the throne, a gateway for their own ambition… Bonosus decided they might have been wrong.
He watched Styliane turn to the tall man she'd married on Valerius's orders. He was an observant man, Plautus Bonosus, had spent years reading small signals, especially at court. She was arriving, he decided, at the same conclusion he was.
The army is here. Four words, with a world of meaning. An army could quell a civilian riot. Obvious. But there was more. The armies had been two weeks away and divided among leaders when Apius died without an heir. They were right here now, massed in and all about the City, preparing to sail west.
And the man speaking of them, the man standing golden before the Golden Throne, was their dearly beloved Strategos. The army was here, and his, and the army would decide.
"I will attend to the Emperor's body," said Gesius very softly. Heads turned back to him. "Someone should," he added, and went out.
Before nightfall that day the Senate of Sarantium had been called into imperative session in its handsome, domed chamber. They accepted formal tidings from the Urban Prefect, clad in black, speaking nervously, of the untimely death of Jad's most dearly beloved, Valerius II. A show-of-palms vote led to a resolution that the Urban Prefect, in conjunction with the Master of Offices, would conduct a full investigation into the circumstances of what appeared to be a foul assassination.
The Urban Prefect bowed his acceptance and left.
Amid noises of clashing weapons and shouting in the street outside, Plautus Bonosus spoke the formal words that convened the Senate to use its collective wisdom in choosing a successor for the Golden Throne.
Three submissions were made to them from the mosaic star on the floor in the midst of their circle of seats. The Quaestor of the Sacred Palace spoke, then the principal adviser to the Eastern Patriarch, and finally Auxilius, Count of the Excubitors, a small, dark, intense man: he had broken the Victory Riot two years ago, with Leontes. All three speakers urged the Senate, with varying degrees of eloquence, to choose the same man.
After they were done, Bonosus asked for further submissions from guests. There were none. He then invited his colleagues to make their own speeches and remarks. No one did. One Senator proposed that an immediate vote be taken. They heard a renewed sound of fighting just beyond their doors.