The Sarantine Mosaic by Guy Gavriel Kay Read Free Book Online Page A

shielded from the blazing sun.
    Fotius saw the brooch on the sand beside him. He palmed it quickly. No one else seemed to notice. He would sell it, not long after, for enough money to change his life. Just now, though, he scrambled to his feet. He was dusty, grimy, sticky with sweat, but thought he should be standing when his Emperor was named.
    He was wrong about what was coming, but why should he have understood the dance being danced that day?

    Much later, the investigation by the Master of Offices, through the Quaestor of Imperial Intelligence, proved unexpectedly and embarrassingly incapable of determining the murderers of the most prominent Sarantine aristocrat of his day.
    It was established readily enough that Flavius Daleinus—only recently returned to the City—had left his home on the morning of the death of the Emperor Apius, accompanied by his two older sons, a nephew, and a small retinue. Family members confirmed that he was on his way to the Senate Chamber to offer a formal expression of support to the Senators in their time of trial and decision. There was some suggestion—not confirmed from the Imperial Precinct—that he had arranged to meet the Chancellor there and be escorted afterwards by Gesius to the Attenine Palace to pay his last respects.
    The condition of Daleinus’s body and what remained of his clothing when the dead man was carried on a bier to his home, and then later to his final resting place in the family mausoleum, was such that a widely reported rumour about his attire that morning was also not amenable to official confirmation.
    The clothing had all burned—with or without the much-discussed strip of purple—and most of the elegant aristocrat’s skin had been charred black or scorched entirely away. What remained of his face was horrifying, the features beneath the once-distinguished silver hair a melted ruin. His oldest son and the nephew had also died, and four of his entourage. The surviving son, it was reported, was nowblind and unfit to be seen. He was expected to take clerical vows and withdraw from the City.
    Sarantine Fire did that to men.
    It was one of the secrets of the Empire, shielded with ferocity, for it was the weapon that had guarded the City—thus far—from incursions over the water. Terror ran before that molten, liquid fire that set ships and men alight, burning upon the sea.
    It had never, in living memory or in any of the military chronicles, been used within the walls, or indeed in any land engagement of the armies.
    This, of course, directed informed suspicion upon the Strategos of the Navy and, indeed, any other military commanders who might have been able to suborn the naval engineers entrusted with the technique of training the liquid fire through a hose, or launching it through space upon the seafaring enemies of Sarantium.
    In due course a number of appropriate persons were subjected to expert questioning. Their deaths did not, however, serve the ultimate goal of determining who it was who had arranged the hideous assassination of a distinguished patrician. The Strategos of the Navy, a man of the old school, elected to end his life, but left behind a letter declaring his innocence of any crimes and his mortal shame that such a weapon, entrusted to his care, had been used in this way. His death was, accordingly, not a useful one either.
    It was reliably reported that three men had wielded the siphon apparatus. Or five. That they were wearing the colours and had the Bassanid-style clothing and the barbarian moustaches and long hair of the most extreme Green partisans. Or of the Blues. Further, that they wore the light brown tunics with black trim of the Urban Prefect’s men. It was recounted that they had fled east down an alley. Also west. Or through the back ofa house on the exclusive, shaded street where the Daleinoi’s City mansion could be found. It was declared, with conviction, that the assassins had been