Lysia said, «Some things are better if you don't look at them too closely. Politics are like that, a lot of the time.»
«They certainly are in Makuran,» Roshnani agreed. «Here, too? Lysia nodded. Maniakes immediately thought of the bargain he'd made with Agathios the patriarch to get him to recognize the validity of his marriage to his cousin. He also thought of the scheme for altering Sharbaraz's letter that Roshnani had come up with. Neither of those would have stood examination in the clean, bright light of day, but the one had been extremely effective and the other gave every sign of equaling that.
He raised his goblet of wine in salute. «To Abivard son of Godarz, protector of his tiny nephew.»
Abivard drank, but looked unhappy. He'd emptied his goblet once or twice already. «This isn't what I'd sooner be doing, you know,» he said, as if the notion was likely to surprise Maniakes.
It didn't. «I understand that—you'd sooner take my head,» the Avtokrator said, to which Abivard gave a jerky, startled nod. Maniakes went on, «But since Sharbaraz would sooner take your head…» He let his guest complete the sentence for himself.
«Sharbaraz has never given Abivard his due,» Roshnani said bitterly. «If it weren't for Abivard, Sharbaraz would be dead or locked up in Nalgis Crag stronghold, and Smerdis would still be King of Kings.» And Makuran and Videssos wouldn't have had this war, Maniakes thought. Roshnani pushed ahead in a different direction: «Whatever victories we've won in the fight against your people, Abivard's led our armies. And what thanks does he get from the King of Kings?»
«The same thanks Maniakes gets from the priests and the people of Videssos the city for whatever success he's had against Makuran,» Lysia answered, every bit as bitterly. At least in the matter of the husbands they saw slighted, the two women did understand each other well.
Roshnani pointed to Lysia's swollen belly. «How are you feeling?»
«Pretty well,» Lysia answered. «If I had my choice, though, I'd sooner be pregnant in winter, not through the hottest time of the year.»
«Oh, yes,» Roshnani exclaimed. That made Abivard smile; Maniakes guessed he'd heard the same complaint from her a time or twelve.
«As soon as you have that list ready, I'm going to want to see it,» Maniakes told the Makuraner marshal.
«I expected you would,» Abivard said. «I'll have it for you in a couple of days at the latest, I promise. Names have been running around my head all this time I've been eating your excellent food. One I know will top it, and that's Kardarigan. He stands next after me and Romezan.»
«That's very good.» Maniakes felt like clapping his hands together. «If Romezan thinks Sharbaraz wants him to purge all your officers—»
«—and if the officers think Sharbaraz wants Romezan to purge them,» Roshnani interrupted.
«Yes,» Maniakes said. «If that happens, Romezan won't be happy with the King of Kings, and the officers won't be happy with Romezan or the King of Kings.» He nodded toward Abivard. «You should be able to pick up a few pieces from that, don't you think?»
«What do you have in mind?» Lysia asked. «Once Abivard makes the list of officers, are you going to have Bagdasares sorcerously splice it into the letter Sharbaraz sent, so it looks as if he wants Romezan to do away with all of them?»
«That's exactly what I want Bagdasares to do,» Maniakes said. «If it turns out he can't, life gets more complicated.»
«Life is liable to get more complicated anyhow,» Lysia said. «Abivard's two wizards know what the letter looked like when we got it. If they want to, they can make liars of us.»
«You're right,» Maniakes said. «If they want to, they can do that.» He turned to Abivard. «How do we keep them from doing that?»
«I'm not worried about Panteles,» Abivard said. «His first loyalty is to me, not to Sharbaraz. But Bozorg, now—he could be trouble.»
«What does he want?» Lysia asked with brisk practicality. «Gold? Titles? Whatever it is, promise he'll get all he ever dreamt of if he keeps his mouth shut at the right time.»
«I can arrange that side of it,» Abivard said. «I can also put him in fear. Wizards are stronger than soldiers—when they have the leisure to prepare their spells. When they don't, soldiers can skewer them before they're able to do anything about it.»
«And, maybe most important of all, you can convince him he's doing the right thing for Makuran,» Roshnani said. «By what you've told me, husband of mine, he didn't want to believe Sharbaraz could stoop so low as to send out orders for your murder.» «Sharbaraz has stooped lower than that,» Maniakes said. «I'd like to know how!» Roshnani said indignantly.
Maniakes told her and Abivard about the shrine to the God his soldiers had come across in the Land of the Thousand Cities—or rather, the shrine to Sharbaraz in the role of the God. The two Makuraners exclaimed in their own language and made signs Maniakes presumed were meant to ward off evil. Slowly, sadly, Abivard said, «This is the curse of the court of the King of Kings, who never hears the word no and who comes to decide he can do exactly as he pleases in all spheres. I shall pass it on to Bozorg. If he needs one more reason to reject Sharbaraz, he'll have it.»
Roshnani said, «If you'd known about that, you would have rebelled against the King of Kings a long time ago.»
«Maybe I would have, but I didn't know,» Abivard answered; Maniakes got the feeling this was an old argument between them. Abivard went on, «It doesn't matter any more. I have to go into rebellion now.»
Roshnani muttered something. Maniakes wasn't quite sure he heard it, but thought it was about time.
Abivard nodded to him. «I'll have that list for you as fast as I can write it. The longer we delay, the more it looks as if we're plotting something. Since we are, we can't afford to look like it.» Maniakes gave him a thoughtful nod. With a bit of practice, he would have made a good Videssian himself.
Late the next afternoon, Abivard handed Maniakes a large sheet of parchment. «Here you are, your Majesty,» the Makuraner marshal said. «If this doesn't do the job, nothing will.»
«I thank you for your diligence,» the Avtokrator answered. He looked down at the list Abivard had compiled. Because it was written in the Makuraner script, he could read not a name, not a title. Somehow that made it more impressive, not less: thanks in no small measure to its unintelligibility, it seemed magical to him.
But he knew the difference—and the distance—between what seemed magical and what was. Abivard had given him a tool through which he might accomplish his ends. To get the most from the tool, he had to understand how best to use it. He summoned Philetos from the Sorcerers' Collegium.
The healer-priest arrived promptly, no doubt expecting he would be called. He studied Abivard's list for a little while, then looked up at Maniakes and said, «He has been most thorough, your Majesty.»
«I thought so,» Maniakes said. «There's a lot of writing here, even if I can't make sense out of any of it.»
«He begins with Kardarigan, who ranks just after Romezan, and continues through division commanders and regimental commanders, and he gets all the way down to troop leaders.» Philetos looked awed. «If it is made to appear that Sharbaraz intended Romezan to execute all these officers, your Majesty, he would barely have enough high-ranking men left alive to let him lead the army.»
«Good,» Maniakes said. «That's the idea.» He carried the parchment to Bagdasares.
The Vaspurakaner mage studied it. «It's longer than I thought it was going to be, your Majesty,» he said. «That complicates things, because I'll have to sorcerously stretch the substance of the parchment on which Sharbaraz wrote so that it can accommodate all these names.»
«Not a difficult spell, thanks to the law of similarity,» Philetos murmured, which earned him a venomous glance from Bagdasares: like men of any other trade, mages did not appreciate being told how to do their jobs.
«It may not matter,» Maniakes said. «We still have to see if Panteles and Bozorg will play along.»
Leaving Bagdasares t
o prepare his spell, Maniakes approached the two wizards who had come to confirm for Abivard that the letter ordering his execution truly had come from the King of Kings. As he'd expected, Panteles gave no trouble; his loyalty and hopes rested with Abivard, for whom he was prepared to say almost anything.
Bozorg proved a tougher nut to crack. He stood stiff and erect, wearing not only his caftan but also a nearly palpable cloak of virtue. «A wanton lie is the surest way for a man's soul to fall into the Void and be lost forever,» he said. «If Romezan son of Bizhan asks me whether the King of Kings included all these names on the letter, I shall have to tell him no.»
He had spirit. He also, perhaps, had confidence that Maniakes could not afford to get rid of him before he'd spoken to Romezan. In that, he was unfortunately—at least from Maniakes' point of view—correct. Eyeing his stern face, Maniakes got the idea he would not be so amenable to bribery as Roshnani had suggested. Again, he wished a foe's principles more flexible.
Picking his words with care, the Avtokrator said, «If Romezan doesn't ask that exact question, you don't have to blurt out all you know, do you? You can truthfully say Sharbaraz did send this letter. You can say he ordered Abivard killed.» He realized he should have brought a priest of Phos, to discuss with Bozorg the propriety of telling only part of the truth and lying by omission.
The Makuraner mage chewed on the inside of his lower lip. At last, he said, «I am of the opinion that Sharbaraz has acted unjustly in the matter of Abivard. If my silence helps justice be restored, then I am willing to be silent. But I tell you once more: I shall not lie.»
Maniakes ended up agreeing to that, having no better choice. It left him discontented. It left him worse than discontented—it left him nervous. The whole plan rested on a gamble now: the gamble that Romezan would not ask the damning question. What they would do if Romezan did ask that question was something he knew he'd have to worry about, but not yet. Bagdasares' magic came first.
When the Avtokrator returned to the mage's chamber, Bagdasares had already succeeded in expanding the strip of parchment on which the order for Abivard's death was written to a size that would also let it hold the names from the Makuraner marshal's list.
«Not a difficult sorcery, your Majesty,» he said when Maniakes praised him. He'd grown angry when Philetos had said the same thing, but now he was extolling his own skill, which was a different matter altogether. «Instead of changing the substance of the parchment, as I had first planned, I merely fused its edge with another, having taken care to secure a good match in appearance.»
Picking up the extended sheet, Maniakes nodded. Neither his eyes nor his fingernail could detect the join. A sorcerer probably would have been able to do so, but he counted on no sorcerers analyzing the document till it was too late to matter.
«And now,» Bagdasares said, «if you will forgive a homely metaphor, I aim to cut the list of names and ranks from the parchment whereon Abivard wrote it and to paste it into the appropriate Place on the one written by Sharbaraz' scribe. I shall attend to the cutting first, as is but fitting.»
The parchment Abivard had given to Maniakes lay on a silver tray. Bagdasares had set a silver arket with a portrait of Sharbaraz on top of the parchment. Now he began to chant and to make passes above it. Some of the chanting was in the old-fashioned Videssian of the divine liturgy, the rest in the Vaspurakaner tongue. Sweat ran down Bagdasares' face. Pausing for a moment, he turned to Maniakes and said, «I have created the conditions wherein cutting is possible and practical. Now for my instrument.»
Instead of producing an ensorceled knife, as Maniakes had expected, the mage walked over to a cage and pulled out a small, gray mouse. The little animal sat calmly in his hand, and did not try to escape even when he dipped its tail into a bottle of ink.
«You understand, your Majesty, that the animal is acting under my sorcerous compulsion,» Bagdasares said. Maniakes nodded. The wizard went on, «It will—the good god and Vaspur the Firstborn willing, it will—precisely pick out the text to be shifted from one document to the other.»
He removed the arket from Abivard's list, then set the mouse at the head of the parchment. Whiskers twitching, the mouse ran down to the bottom of the list. Maniakes feared its inky tail would smear Abivard's writing. Nothing of the sort happened. Bagdasares' sorcery must have kept anything of the sort from happening. Instead, the unintelligible—at least to Maniakes—characters Abivard had written now turned a glowing white, while the parchment beneath them went black as soot.
Bagdasares let out a sigh of relief. Evidently, that was the effect he had wanted to achieve. Maniakes let out a sigh of relief, too, because he had achieved it. The mage said, «Now to paste.»
He coaxed the mouse back up into the palm of his hand. It stared at him with beady little black eyes. Maniakes wondered what, if anything, it thought of its role in the sorcery. One more thing he'd never know.
Bagdasares carried the silver arket of Sharbaraz' over to the letter the King of Kings had sent to Romezan. «I have learned enough of the Makuraner script to be able to recognize Abivard's name,» he said, «and I am going to set this coin immediately after it, so as to indicate the insertion point for the text to be shifted.»
That done, he put the mouse back in its cage. It began to lick the ink off its tail with a tiny pink tongue. Bagdasares began another incantatory chant. His long-fingered hands moved in swift passes. His tone went from beseeching to serious to demanding. He shifted into throaty Vaspurakaner, a good language for demanding if ever there was one.
Maniakes exclaimed. There, starting where the arket lay, were the names and titles to be shifted to Sharbaraz' letter. The characters in which those names and titles were written remained white, though, and the portion of the parchment on which they appeared, black.
«Here,» Bagdasares said, «we have an exact copy of the list Abivard wrote.»
«Too exact, maybe,» Maniakes observed, examining the document. «For one thing, the margins of the added text are different from those of the letter from Sharbaraz to Romezan.»
«I have not yet completed the sorcery,» Bagdasares said with a touch of annoyance. The Avtokrator waved for him to go on. He did, muttering now in Videssian, now in the Vaspurakaner tongue. When he stabbed out his forefinger at the parchment, the region of white characters on black grew longer and narrower; names and titles seemed to crawl downward to accommodate themselves to the change.
Watching words move made Maniakes vaguely seasick. Once having written, he expected what he wrote to stay put. But the result was no small improvement over what had been there before. It was, however, not yet perfect. Pointing, Maniakes said, «I don't read Makuraner, but even I can tell two different hands did the writing here.»
Bagdasares exhaled through his nose—and a fine nose he had for exhaling, too. With the air of a man clutching for patience as it slipped through his fingers, he said, «I am aware of this, your Majesty. I have a remedy for it.» He walked over to the cage to which he had returned the mouse. After he took it out once more, he let out another exasperated exhalation. «A pestilence! The foolish creature has done too good a job of cleaning itself. I shall have to reink it.»
He dipped the mouse's tail into the jar of ink again, all the while murmuring the cantrips that made the black liquid part of his sorcery rather than a messy nuisance. That done, he set the mouse at the top of the document, allowing its sorcerously inked tail to slide across a couple of lines of text there.
«That should do it,» he said, and picked up the little beast again. «Now we apply the law of similarity to the names pasted onto the Parchment…»
He set the mouse down at the top of the area where the words were still white and the parchment black. His magic made it walk down the black area to the very end, its tail twisting this way and that till it touched all the names and titles in Abivard's pasted list. And as its tail touched them, they—changed. Now they were written in the same style as the words of the document to which they had been ap
pended.
Once the change of scripts was complete, Bagdasares again caged the mouse. He turned to Maniakes. «Is this indeed how you wish the final document to appear, your Majesty?»
«Well, I'd be happier if it were all black on white instead of half the other way around,» the Avtokrator answered.
Bagdasares snorted. «The reversal shows that part of the text still remaining mutable. Has it now been changed to your satisfaction?»
«Yes,» Maniakes said. «I hope turning it back into black on white isn't too complicated for you.»
«I think I can manage that, your Majesty,» Bagdasares said with a smile. Tongue between his teeth, he made a single sharp clicking sound. All at once, white letters turned black, black parchment white. «There you are: one long, bloodthirsty letter, ready to befuddle Romezan.»
Maniakes studied the letter. As far as he could tell, it might have come straight from the chancery of the King of Kings. The only trouble was, he couldn't tell much. «We'll let Abivard have a look at it and see what he thinks,» Maniakes said. Bagdasares nodded. When the Avtokrator stepped out of the wizard's workroom, Kameas stood waiting for his command. Half of him was surprised to find the vestiarios there; the other half would have been surprised had Kameas been anyplace else. «I shall bring him here directly,» the eunuch said, almost before Maniakes could tell him what he wanted.
Bozorg came up the hallway of the imperial residence with Abivard. Maniakes was glad both of them would be reviewing the document before Romezan set eyes on it. Abivard looked at it first. He read it through, read it again, and then read it a third time. Having done that, he delivered his verdict: «Romezan will have kittens.»
«May I see, lord?» Bozorg asked. Abivard passed him the altered letter. He studied it even longer than the Makuraner marshal had done. When he was finally finished, he looked not to Maniakes but to Bagdasares. «This is very fine work,» he said, admiration in his voice.
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