“I presume His Majesty has been in it. And probably found good hunting.”
“As well he might. In heaven.”
Hamilton grinned at the oddness of that. “How do you make that out?” It felt like the boy wanted to debate with his father. Wanted to test the bars of his cage. Perhaps he’d felt like that, at that age, but his own father’s failure had meant he never felt able to, or perhaps had never felt the need. A place where there was no identity for him and no reason to do anything? More like the hell with no balance that the boy came from.
“It’s more … real … than where either of us are from. And I say it’s obviously heaven, because nobody got here.”
Hamilton had heard the smile in his voice. “Except us. Are you sure it’s not the other place?” A curious thought came to him. “Is that why you want me to stay?”
“I mean that if I went back, they wouldn’t search in here. You could wait a few days, go anywhere you want.”
Hamilton grimaced at that lack of meaning in the boy’s life. “You think I’d abandon my duty?” He had a vision for a moment of being replaced in his life by the younger man. It felt like an invasion of himself. But also there was the frightening feel of temptation to it.
“I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that, old man.” He meant it too. “I mean you could take advantage of this game. They need one of us to die, so …”
Where had he got that idea? Turpin would have liked to see the boy hauled back as a trophy, but the Palace was decidedly lukewarm on the matter, and Hamilton couldn’t see any way in which any of the interested parties would be satisfied with the boy, rather than himself, emerging from the forest. “Who told you that?”
A pause. “Are you trying to lie to me?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it … old man. I’m just here to bring you back.” The boy might assume that Hamilton had been given covers he had not, lies that could fool ears that could detect lies. Or he might know whatever he had in his head was in advance of anything Hamilton had as standard issue. But they knew each other’s voices too well.
There was a sound from a direction Hamilton didn’t expect. He turned, but he made himself do it with his gun lowered. There stood the boy. He had his gun lowered too. Hamilton stepped towards him. He allowed himself to make the first honest eye contact he’d had with his younger self. To see that face looking open to him was truly extraordinary, a joy that needed to be held down, a kindness worth crossing the waves that held worlds apart. He took a deep breath of an air that was indeed better than any he’d tasted. Whether or not this was heaven, he could imagine His Majesty walking in it and its giving him ideas of what should belong to him, of hunting endlessly here, with new youth for himself whenever he wished, and younger versions of every courtier and courtesan at his command. There would be, thanks to this boy, if some sort of misunderstanding could be proved, new manners forever. But that was hardly the boy’s fault. And in that moment, Hamilton decided to lead him back to the clearing, and to another thing often denied to their kind: explanations.
“I was told,” began the boy, “that I could only secure my place in society, in your world, by killing you. That that was why we had been brought together in … different contests.”
Hamilton realized this was exactly what he had once himself imagined. “Who—?”
A shot exactly like his or the boy’s rang out across the absolute clarity of the sky. The boy’s face bloated, in a moment, his body deformed by the impact, blood and the elements of a name bursting from his mouth. The collapsar shell sucked in again and the body dropped to the ground, emptied.
She stepped forward, lowering her gun. At least she had the grace to look sad. “Miss Nothing,” she said.
She was still wearing that bloody dress. She slipped her gun back inside it, hiding it again. She and Hamilton stood looking at each other for a while, until Hamilton understood that if he wanted to shoot her, she was going to let him, and angrily holstered his gun.
She immediately started back towards the house. He considered the idea of burying the boy. The absurdity of it made something catch in his throat. He marched after her and caught up. “Damn you. Damn both of us for not seeing you coming.” He grabbed her by the arm to stop her. “I take it you were never truly out of favor with the College?”
She looked calmly at him. “We don’t mind the idea of raiding optional worlds. We don’t mind stealing new bodies for old minds. Up to a point. But we draw the line at them replacing us. We’re the bloody College of Heralds, Major. Without family trees, we’d be out of business.”
“And by setting up the boy to look like he was capable of theft, kidnapping, and treachery, to the point of even being a threat to His Majesty—”
“We’ve proven such replacements to be unreliable. They never had the balance, you see.”
“And you’re telling me this because—?”
She looked truly sad for him in that moment. She understood him. “Because you’re going to let me get away with it.”
They emerged into the clearing. As they did so, Precious immediately became the model of a trembling, rescued victim. “He was a monster!” she cried out, supporting herself on Hamilton’s arm.
“Was?” asked the voice of Turpin from the trees.
Hamilton kept his expression calm. “The boy is dead now,” he said.
Steven Saylor
Bestselling author Steven Saylor is one of the brightest stars in the “historical mystery” subgenre, along with authors such as Lindsey Davis, John Maddox Roberts, and the late Ellis Peters. He is the author of the long-running Roma Sub Rosa series, which details the adventures of Gordianus the Finder, a detective in a vividly realized Ancient Rome, in such novels as Roman Blood, Arms of Nemesis, The Venus Throw, Catilina’s Riddle, A Murder on the Appian Way, Rubicon, Last Seen in Massilia, A Mist of Prophecies, The Judgment of Caesar, The Triumph of Caesar, and The Seven Wonders. Gordianus’s exploits at shorter lengths have been collected in The House of the Vestals: The Investigations of Gordianus the Finder and A Gladiator Dies Only Once: The Further Investigations of Gordianus the Finder. Saylor’s other books include A Twist at the End, Have You Seen Dawn?, and a huge non-Gordianus historical novel, Roma: The Novel of Ancient Rome. His most recent books are the big second volume in the Roma sequence, Empire: A Novel of Ancient Rome, and a new Gordianus novel, Raiders of the Nile. He lives in Berkeley, California.
Recently, as recounted in The Seven Wonders, Saylor has introduced a whole new series of tales that take a teenaged Gordianus to visit the Seven Wonders of the World with his traveling companion, the elderly Greek poet Antipater of Sidon. Set in the fabled city of Tyre in 91 B.C., “Ill Seen in Tyre” is a previously untold episode from the journey of the young Gordianus. As Gordianus discovers, Tyre was also the location, a hundred years before his visit, of the only known earthly adventure of two of the greatest rogues in literature, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (as recounted in Fritz Leiber’s 1947 novella Adept’s Gambit, later included in the Leiber collection Swords in the Mist). This mulitdimensional crossing of paths in Tyre might seem a mere coincidence, but as Gordianus learns, on earth as in Nehwon, all stories and storytellers are subtly, even magically, connected.