All nine of the enormous canvas panels froze – the ruddy light flared and vanished. A careful observer could still note a line of light edging each panel, as fine as a thread.
The master grammarian nodded. ‘Lovely, Master Mortirmir. Multiple shields, not just one.’
‘If one fails, the others will keep people dry,’ Mortirmir said.
‘And each panel is its own unity,’ the grammarian went on. ‘Do you see a problem with that?’
Mortirmir shook his head. ‘No, Maestro.’
‘You’ve never built a roof, have you?’ The master grammarian was smiling, so Morgan began to experience real triumph. The sailors were applauding.
‘No, Maestro.’ Mortirmir looked up.
The maestro lifted his staff and said, ‘Scutum.’
With no flare at all, something changed. Mortirmir ran his tongue over the edges of his working – in his mind. All solid.
‘Between the panels, my young scholar. You made every panel whole. But you didn’t unify them. Snow would come in between them. Not much, and to be frank, I doubt anyone would notice. Your work is well done. You understood all of the principles involved, and your grammatical expression was excellent.’ The man bowed slightly. ‘Mind you, you have good teachers.’ He smiled. ‘But a roof is always a unity.
Mortirmir sighed. ‘I feel like a fool,’ he admitted.
The master grammarian nodded. ‘Good. That’s the feeling we all get when we learn something. I try to experience it once a day. Now go joust. I may even come back and watch.’ He paused. ‘You really must work on your memory, my boy.’
‘Yes, Maestro.’ Mortirmir bowed, and the master grammarian returned his bow.
He walked off the sand, and several sailors came and shook his hand. Their praise delighted him.
The Nautarchon bowed to him. ‘If you ever pass as a weatherworker, Master, I’d be delighted to have you on my ship.’ He pointed above them. ‘You treated the canvas – well, I saw it. Lovely. In a storm, a good mage can hold the sails like that – with ops. A well-found ship can stand a winter storm with a mage holding the rigging.’
Mortirmir hadn’t expected so much praise. He flushed, looked at the ground, and muttered something that he wasn’t sure of himself.
And his feet tangled around the blade of his sword as he walked away. Which hadn’t happened to him in weeks. He stumbled, looked around, and saw a dozen Academicians standing at the great entrance, in their robes. They were clapping.
Antonio Baldesce was laughing.
Mortirmir didn’t blame him. And he summoned up a smile as he crossed the sand, mindful that resentment at the needling he was about to receive would only make the whole thing worse.
Tancreda put a hand on his arm as he walked up. ‘He smiled! Gracious Mother of God, Plague! You made the master grammarian smile!’
Mortirmir shook his head.
Baldesce grinned. ‘And old Donatedello. He seemed to like you.’
Mortirmir’s arm tingled where Tancreda had touched it. He blushed.
‘Where are you going?’ asked the others.
‘I’m – I’m in the Christmas tournament.’
Baldesce laughed again. ‘I hope you remember the little people like us who helped you on your way,’ he said.
Kronmir read the message written in wax on the blade of a scythe and winced. The code was old and the message was baldly done, the wax visible to anyone, and the messenger – a girl no more than seven years old – had waited in the snow by his inn, thus making it possible for an enemy to take her and her message – and him. It hadn’t happened, but he shook his head, patted the girl, and gave her a gold piece.
‘Do you have a mother, girl?’ he said.
She shook her head. In that head-shake, she revealed the whole of her future – a future Kronmir wouldn’t wish on an enemy. Especially not at Christmas.
He added a second gold byzant, a valuable coin. And the thirty copper coins he had in a bag.
‘Listen, child,’ he said. ‘Men will kill you for the gold I’ve given you. Can you leave the city?’
She nodded.
‘Will you go to Lonika, if I send you?’ he asked.
She nodded again.
He took a piece of Eastern paper and folded it in a particular way, and wrote on it in lemon juice. ‘Take this to the same blacksmith who sent the scythe blade, child.’ He put a hand on her head, which was very warm – almost hot. It gave him great pleasure to do such a good deed at Christmas.
However much she might bridle at a life spent in a convent, it would be better than what awaited her in the city, without parents.
When she was gone, he rubbed the wax twice to make sure the message said what he thought it said, and then he tossed the scythe blade in the fire until the wax was utterly gone.
Then he set out across the city to find himself an assassin.
He went to a certain door, and knocked six times, and then walked away. That was all that was required to order the death of the Megas Ducas.
He went back to gather the strands of his extrication network, because in a day or so, a great many of his people were going to need to flee the city.
The assassin watched a mime come along the street, dressed all in red and green, with a wreath of berries in her hair. He had been expecting her – she came each day at the same time, and did the same dance. But today she did a different act, and he felt the spirit of action flood him as she stooped, as part of her dance, and made a snowball of the filthy mush in the street. She threw it with neat accuracy at his shutters. Then she did a cartwheel, heedless of the freezing slush.
She stopped under his window and did a handstand, and then pulled from her bag a puppet dressed all in red, and dropped it in the snow.
And stepped on it.
She left the scarlet thing behind her as she danced away.
He rose from the narrow bed in his garret and pulled on a plain, much-mended dirty-white hood, and then put a tinker’s basket over his shoulder.
An hour after first light, the princess processed from the Inner Court to the Outer Court, where she was met by her new Master of the Palace and the Megas Ducas. In the Outer Court the entirety of the Guard stood, shivering and magnificent, in their finest uniforms, a sea of scarlet and purple and gold and shining steel like a mosaic in which each man was a single tessera.
Her Ordinaries and the Nordikans marched to the centre of the Outer court and the Guard marched out by files from the right and left, and the Imperial chariot – empty, but for a driver – proceeded to the princess.
‘I thought that you had betrayed me,’ the princess whispered. She was like an icon brought to life – her face as white as milk, her body adorned in stiff cloth of gold encrusted with jewels and edged and accented in pearls.
‘Majesty,’ the Duke said, very softly.
The procession rolled across the square – a square nigh on packed with the people of the city who followed the princess and her Guard into the great cathedral where the Patriarch said mass.
The Megas Ducas accepted communion and did not burst into flames. Wilful Murder lost a small amount of money over it.
After mass the whole army, with most of the palace staff and the whole of the Academy, instructors, students, and servants in the Academy’s black livery, as well as the greater part of the population of Liviapolis, processed around the city carrying the relics of forty saints.
The aura of potentia so permeated the city that when the Megas Ducas was given wine, he could taste the raw power.
After the procession and a snatched meal, eaten cold from golden plates, the Megas Ducas took most of his knights, as well as some Scholae and a dozen knights of the Latinikon to the hippodrome, where heated pavilions had been set.
The crowd was already in the hippodrome – most had gone there straight from mass and the solemn procession. The crowd was so dense that they had raised the temperature inside. The knights were greeted with cheers as they appeared, and then they went into their tents – Ser Michael, as the master of the tourney, had divided them somewhat artificially into two teams.