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The imperial servitor vanished round a corner, but he did not go far. Scaurus
heard his own name spoken, heard Thorisin's impatient reply: "Well, fetch
him." The eunuch reappeared, beckoned Marcus on.
The Emperor was leaning forward in his chair, as if willing the Roman into the
room. On a couch beside him sat his niece; Marcus' heart gave a painful thump
to see her. As was often true, especially since her torment at the hands of
Vardanes Sphrantzes, Alypia's face wore an abstracted expression, but warmth
came into her fine green eyes as Marcus entered.
Remembering his etiquette, the tribune bowed first to Thorisin, then to the
princess. "Your Majesty. Your Highness." The eunuch frowned when he did not
prostrate himself, but Thorisin, like Mavrikios before him, had always
tolerated that bit of republican Roman stubbornness.
Now, though, his finger darted forward. "Seize him!" Two Halogai sprang out
from behind the chamber's double doors to lock Scaurus' arms back of him in an
unbreakable grip. Struggle would have been useless; the burly warriors
overtopped even the tribune's inches by half a head. Like some of the sentries
outside, they wore their hair in thick braids that hung down to the small of
their backs, but there was nothing effeminate about them. Their hands were big
as shovels, hard as horn.
Surprise and alarm drove discretion from the tribune. "This is no way to get a
proskynesis," he blurted.
A smile flickered on Alypia's face, but Thorisin's remained hard. "Be silent,"
he said, and then turned to the other occupant of the room. "Nepos, is that
hell-brew of yours ready yet?"
First seeing Alypia and then being collared by the Haloga giants, Marcus had
hardly noticed the tubby little priest, who was busily grinding gray, green,
and yellow powders together. "Very nearly, your Majesty," Nepos replied. He
beamed at the Roman. "Hello, outlander. It's good to see you again."
"Is it?" Scaurus said. He did not like the sound of "hell-brew." Nepos was
mage as well as priest, and a master at his craft, master to the point of
teaching theoretical thaumaturgy at the Videssian Academy. The tribune
wondered if he was so expendable as to be only an experimental animal. He had
no relish for life since Helvis had forsaken him, but there were ends and
ends. Nepos, cheerfully oblivious, poured his mixed powders into a golden
goblet of wine, stirred it with a short glass rod.
"Can't use wood or brass for this, you know," he said, perhaps to Thorisin,
perhaps to Marcus, perhaps only because he was used to lecturing. "They'd not
be the better afterward." The Roman gulped despite himself.
The Emperor fixed him with the same searching glance he had brought to bear in
the Hall of the Nineteen Couches. "After you let the islanders loose,
outlander, my first thought was to put you on the shelf and leave you there
till the dust covered you up. You've always been too thick with the Nam-daleni
for me to really trust you." The irony of that almost jerked laughter from
Scaurus, but Thorisin was going on, not altogether happily, "Still and all,
there are those who think you truly are loyal, and so we'll find out tonight."
Alypia Gavra would not meet the tribune's eye.
Nepos raised the goblet by its graceful stem. "Do you remember Avshar's
puppet," he asked Marcus, "the Khamorth who attacked you with the spell-wound
knife after you bested Avshar at swords?" The tribune nodded. "Well, this is
the same drug that wrung the truth from him."
"And he died when you were done questioning him, too," Scaurus said harshly.
The priest gestured in abhorrence. "That was Avshar's sorcery, not mine."
"Give it to me, then," the tribune said. "Let's be done with it."
At Thorisin's nod, the Haloga who pinioned Scaurus' right arm let go. The
Avtokrator warned, "Spilling it will do you no good. There'll just be another
batch, and a funnel down your throat."
But when the goblet was in his hand, Marcus asked Nepos, "Is there only just
enough, or a bit more?"
"A bit more, perhaps. Why?"
The tribune sloshed a few drops of wine onto the floor. "Here's to that fine
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fellow Thorisin, then," he said. The Videssians frowned, not understanding; he
heard one of the Halogai behind him grunt in confusion. It was the toast of
Theramenes the Athenian to Kritias when forced to take poison in the time of
the Thirty Tyrants after the Peloponnesian War.
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