Flower clutched at Haraldr. Mar had turned away and was bent over a young man who had fallen to his knees; he grasped the man’s forearm in his huge fist. ‘The Squirrel,’ Mar hissed. ‘Your hand in my cloak told me you must know where I can find the Squirrel.’ The foiled cutpurse said nothing; his boyish face reddened and scowled. The crowd began to cluster. There was a snap, and the cut-purse howled and cradled his arm; Mar immediately grasped the other arm. ‘When I finish with your arms, I’ll start with your fingers. That might be a permanent disability in your profession.’ The thief whimpered and blurted, ‘The Devil’s Walking Stick!’ Mar let him stumble off through the crowd.
The Devil’s Walking Stick was an inn situated in an ancient building several blocks closer to the seawall. The name derived from a trident carved in relief, apparently centuries ago, on the stone above the arcade. The street in front of the inn was almost solidly packed with boisterous, shoving young men and a few beleaguered whores. ‘Cutthroats, the lot,’ said Mar, who had virtually hidden Flower inside his cloak. ‘If anyone makes a move towards you, kill them. You cannot expect to bluster past this kind simply because we are Varangians and might reduce the entire Studion to cinders if one of us is harmed here. These men don’t care. They care about the next quarter of an hour and whether it will offer a strong draught and a tight cunt.’
Haraldr and Mar walked side by side through the crowd, their huge shoulders forming a virtual arch over Flower. Hard eyes and scarred faces turned towards them, but the bodies moved aside. They walked beneath the arcade and through the arched doorway of the inn. The air was smoky and redolent of cheap wine and unwashed men. A dice game was under way at the nearer of two large tables; a great cheer accompanied each roll. At the farther table the centre of attention was a small, dark-eyed man wearing an absurd-looking, brand-new brimless silk bonnet like those that were just coming into fashion with the Imperial courtiers. ‘I rescued a miserable cut-purse from the Numera the other day,’ said Mar. ‘He’s over there. I’m sure he can tell me where to find the Physician. Stay with Flower. Remember what I said. They will try to insult you, and perhaps even our Father. Ignore the words. Watch the hands and the feet.’
Mar shouldered through the crowd. The game came to a temporary halt. Flower trembled, her head hidden beneath Haraldr’s arm like a frightened bird under its mother’s wing. Dangerous, snakelike eyes began to examine the partially hidden female form beneath Haraldr’s cloak. Mar reached the table and greeted the man in the red bonnet. A group of men at the near table, already turned to face Haraldr, stood up. They wore cheap silk and clearly fancied themselves successful rogues. The tallest was a giant among Romans; his dark beard stuck out like a shelf, and his eyes sparkled.
‘Let us have a look, Eminence.’ The man’s voice was deep, even unthreatening. He nodded at his fellows. ‘We’ll pay good for just a look at her.’ Haraldr gripped the pommel of his short sword; he wished he had worn Emma. But Mar had warned him that a byrnnie might inhibit the quickness he would need in these streets.
‘He’s dumb as a goat,’ said a smaller man with a sharp white streak in his dark hair. ‘You might as well pay to see a turd walk as see a Varangian talk.’
‘Well, there’s one . . . no, two turds just walked in here!’ a third said, chortling.
‘Shut up!’ barked the big man. ‘He knows what we’re saying.’ The big man swayed as if he would take a step forward, and Haraldr prepared to take his head off. But the man’s legs spread wide and he set himself, as if to declare his observance of a border between himself and the Norse giant. ‘Your Emperor will be dead soon,’ he said, his eyes grim. ‘He’s abed now, dying. He’s not shown himself to us or seen our Mother in all the new year. We’ll put our own man up there before we let a corpse rule us while the unholy monk Joannes grinds us beneath his boot. Now you’ve seen Studion, Eminence. Do you think your Varangians can stop us if we get a will about us?’
Haraldr was taken aback. He had expected simple aggression, not the strange conviction of this criminal. The Emperor’s dying? It was true that he had not been in the city to welcome his wife, or the men who had saved her, and that there had been no procession on his return. But Haraldr had assumed that the Emperor was eluding his wife’s treachery; after all, he could not simply throw the purple-born into Neorion. But this was certainly a new facet to the complex structure of Haraldr’s doubts. If the Emperor was dying, then Joannes, no longer shielded by his Imperial relation, might indeed be driven to extreme measures in order to maintain his power. But why hadn’t Mar told him this? That insight into Joannes’s motives would have been much more convincing than this journey into Hell.
Haraldr watched while Mar, who had concluded his conversation with the red-bonneted man, made his way back through the crowd. He quickly responded to his impulse. ‘If a man wanted to ... talk more of this, for whom would he ask?’
Now the big man did his own calculating. Finally he put his coarse, broad palm to his beard and compressed the springy mass. A large sapphire with a four-pointed star flashed from a thick finger. ‘The Blue Star,’ he said simply, then bowed curtly, turned, and sat down.
Out in the street, Mar pointed east. ‘Odin favours our enterprise. My friend had an associate who knew where the Physician currently reposes between cures. It is only two blocks away.’ Mar looked at Haraldr quizzically. ‘It is worthwhile to have friends in the Studion. Did you and that big man come to an agreement?’
‘We exchanged greetings.’ Haraldr was acutely wary now. But if he had to fight Mar, he was more than prepared.
‘You must water whatever they tell you here to arrive at the truth. These louts are spreading a rumour that the Emperor is dying. That, of course, is nothing like the truth. He has been ill but will soon recover. But they are worried that Joannes will rule in his stead regardless, and I think they will rise up if they imagine that tyranny to be imminent.’
From what he had seen. Haraldr could believe the last part of Mar’s explanation. But he was more convinced than ever that this ‘proof’ of a plot against him was nothing more than a rambling ruse; was Mar hoping to exhaust him before he killed him?
The hostel where the Physician was reputed to live was perhaps the best-kept building in the Studion; it had been a great town palace once, and fit-looking horses were still stabled in the courtyard. The Physician lived on the third level, his room adjacent to a wooden staircase with rather delicately carved railings. Mar knocked on the door, waited a few seconds, then stepped back and shattered it with one kick.
A naked woman cowered on a small, linen-sheeted bed. Mar stomped round, throwing wide the curtains and rifling a large wooden cabinet set against the wall. He tossed some garish, cheaply dyed linen robes on the floor. He turned to the woman. She clutched the sheet up to her mouth, and her red-rimmed eyes shone with fright. ‘I want to know where the man they call the Physician has gone.’ The woman stared and pressed the sheet between long, pale legs blotched with several livid purple bruises. ‘You have three choices,’ said Mar, looking around the room casually. ‘Tell me now, and I leave you in peace, with a coin to buy you a room somewhere else. Tell me in the Numera, and depart with whatever I have not taken from you there. Third, do not tell me--’
The woman’s trembling arm shot out. ‘I want to see the coin.’ Mar quickly produced a silver nomismata. ‘He went out. He said he was going to deliver a Varangian to the Neorion.’
Mar and Haraldr stared at one another in surprise. ‘You still haven’t told me,’ said Mar to the woman.
The woman stood up and wrapped the sheet around herself. ‘The name of the ... patient was with the money.’ She pushed aside the cabinet, removed a chunk of plaster from the wall behind it, and thrust her hand in the hiding place. She cursed and turned. She held a flaccid leather wallet.
Mar snatched the wallet from the suddenly livid woman, probed with his fingers, and extracted a scrap of parchment. He showed the scrap to Haraldr. ‘Is this Gabras’s hand?’
Haraldr nodded gravely as he read the name. ‘Who is it?’ he asked, totally puzzled.
‘The Strategus ex prosponon of Vaspurakan,’ said Mar, as bewildered as Haraldr. ‘He doesn’t even reside in the City. He is in virtual exile. His wife stayed here. She is a vixen over whom many hounds have run themselves silly.’
The cold realization reduced Haraldr’s gut to an icy knot. ‘Halldor,’ he said weakly.
‘Halldor Snorrason? The cockhound?’ Mar’s face registered the connection. ‘Theotokos! We’ll get horses down below!’
‘How many women do you have in Thule?’ She fluttered her legs in the water and clutched Halldor’s arms tightly around her breasts.
‘Dozens.’
She turned her head slightly and squeezed his arms tighter. ‘Do you keep them in a gynaeceum?’
‘I let them . . . run . . . about . . . free. Naked. In a field. Like . . . deer.’
‘Extraordinary. How often do you make love to them?’
‘Six . . . each night.’
‘How many times?’
‘Once. Each . . . once.’
She wriggled to face him. ‘Six times? One night?’ She put her arms around his neck. ‘So we have three more times?’
Mar swung Flower off his wheezing, lathered horse and leapt to the ground. ‘Don’t tether them,’ he yelled to Haraldr. He looked up at the sheer facade of the big town house. A light showed in a third-floor window. Mar pounded once on the great iron-studded wooden door and it immediately flew open. He turned back to Haraldr. ‘The lock has been broken.’
A few candles in sconces lit the entrance hall. Mar motioned to the spiral staircase. They left Flower in the entrance hall and climbed silently to the third floor, short swords unsheathed. Haraldr put his hand down and felt the sticky, slippery texture of freshly pooled blood. In the dim light Mar pointed to the body lying at the top of the steps; the man was dressed like a typical servant in a wealthy household.
Mar signalled Haraldr to stay back and crept towards the light that filtered around a door, slightly ajar, at the end of the hall. Haraldr heard a noise at the second-floor landing. He looked down. Flower was crawling up the steps. Something crashed in the hall. Mar was on his feet whirling, his hands at his throat, a black shape like a giant hump clamped to his back. A horrible gagging came from Mar’s throat, and Haraldr leapt for the deadly parasite on Mar’s back, but before he could reach him, Mar turned and smashed his back against the wall, flying through the wood-and-stucco interior construction as if it were paper. Haraldr charged into the room through the hastily improvised opening, only to see Mar propel his unwanted passenger into the thick masonry exterior wall with a sickening crunch. The impact brought down great chunks of the ceiling and sent roof tiles clattering to the street below.
Mar staggered forward and the hump slid off his back like a half-empty sack. He pulled the attacker’s silk cord from around his neck and rubbed his throat. ‘Bring Flower in here,’ he said raspily.
The attacker’s face, unlike the back of his head, was intact. Haraldr took a candle from a wall sconce and held it above the inert form. Flower bent over, studied the face for a moment, and shook her head. ‘That is not the man,’ she said.
Extraordinary, thought Halldor. In spite of his conviction that it was never wise to let a woman know she had given unusual pleasure, he groaned with enjoyment. He would indeed dine in this house again.
She sat up straight and let him take her breasts in his mouth. Her pelvis shuddered and contorted. ‘Do you want your Thule women now?’ she teased, following with a hiccup-like laugh. ‘Thule is so cold. Here it is so hot. I will go around naked all day if you want.’
Ohhhh,
thought Halldor,
have I finally met an adversary equal to my skills? Freyja! Bitch! The woman can make the house shake. My teeth are rattling!
Halldor was not at first certain what it was that plunged through the oculus high above the pool. It hit the water with a resounding impact, floundered, and then leapt for him. He knew when he saw the silver glint that it was a knife. He tried to throw his lover off him, but she held him with that particularly potent grip, and pain shot through his groin. He felt a searing in his left pectoral and plunged under the surface. The water immediately reddened.
Whether I live or die,
he thought with characteristic clarity,
no one will believe this.
She still had him, apparently thinking this was a game; then her eyes opened and she saw the blood and released him. Where was the knife! He saw the tunic billowing out in the water, away from him, and he realized that the assassin had come for his hostess, not for him. The knife shone with a terrible metallic brilliance through the steam, and it lifted over her bare white breast. Halldor could not reach it, but he splashed water at the assassin’s face and the knife halted for an instant in mid-air. Halldor leapt like a dolphin. The man was strong but not nearly strong enough. For a moment the knife slashed like a silver fish just beneath the surface. Bubbles roiled the water above the man’s head, and he went limp.
Halldor threw the body onto the tiles and took the lady in his arms. She cried for a moment and then kissed him, smiling through her tears. ‘Who wants ... to kill you?’ he asked. ‘Your husband?’
‘No. He is happy for me to have lovers since it relieves him of a duty he finds--’ She broke off in alarm.
Halldor looked towards the rinsing tub in sickening astonishment. Two more killers . . . where was that knife! Through the rapidly clearing steam he recognized Haraldr and Mar.
‘Halldor!’ yelled Haraldr; he jumped in the water and embraced his friend. Mar disappeared for a moment.
‘What happened?’ asked Haraldr.
Halldor casually pointed to the shattered oculus in the dome. ‘A spectacular leap. For some reason he wanted to kill this beautiful lady.’ The lady smiled at Haraldr, apparently concerned about neither her recent peril nor her present state of undress.
Mar reappeared with Flower and led her to the body. ‘It is the man I saw,’ she said immediately.