The Gate of Fire (35 page)

Now it was an
important
part of the day, a time where she needed to be alone, if only for a moment. Within an hour the sun would go down and the Prince's ceremonies would begin in the deep, cold cellars under the house. Thinking of the chill, she drew the shawl tighter around her. Up here, in the open air, it was still warm with heat from the day. There, in the depths below, it would be bone chillingly cold. During their previous stay the cellars had held a pleasant, even temperature. Now the Prince's exercises had leached the heat from the rooms and chambers until frost accumulated in the corners. Thick woolen hose graced her legs, too, and she wore stout leather boots.

Krista smiled, fingering the shawl and thinking of the nimble fingers of her Walach boys. They were clever with any kind of needle, thread, or fabric. The thought made her frown. Emotional attachments were proving dangerous enough as it was. She stood away from the pillar and turned slowly, looking first to the right and then to the left. The vaulted portico was empty, though she could hear noise from the kitchens. Satisfied that she was not observed, Krista raised a small silver mirror—a gift from the Duchess on her fourteenth birthday—and held it up to the sun. She felt the warmth of that distant orb glowing in her hand for a moment and then turned the mirror slowly until it faced the wooded hillside at an angle.

Her hand dipped the mirror once, then twice. Today, flew the signal.

"So," Maxian said, "we come to the crux of the matter."

The Prince stood and rotated a sheet of plain brown parchment on the table. A series of diagrams and symbols had been inked on the double-wide page. The table was crowded with scrolls of papyrus and burnished red-and-black bowls holding half-eaten pheasant, peeled fruit, and shelled nuts. The Prince traced a set of interlocking symbols with one long, thin finger.

"We still have not acquired the text of the original oath, but the tireless efforts of Abdmachus here"—the little Persian was sitting at one side of the table, his dull, flat eyes staring into empty air above the center of the oaken tabletop—"have yielded this much to us. The structure of the Oath—or curse, if you prefer—is built upon a similarity lattice. Well, I should say that it is built upon an interlocking series of lattices."

Krista was also sitting at the edge of the table, though she had commandeered a wing-backed chair with sweeping padded arms and thick cushions. She had a bowl of grapes, cut pears, peeled tangerine sections, and sliced apples in her lap. The little black cat had wormed itself into the crook of her arm and was lying across her stomach, purring like a little mill wheel. Krista's white teeth bit into a slice of pear while she listened with half an ear to the Prince. The little cat yawned, showing a pink mouth in the supple black felt of its face. It nosed at her hand as she reached into the bowl for more fruit. It wanted its tribute.

"Bad kitten," she whispered to it. "You'll be round as a gourd if you keep eating all that bird."

The kitten's yellow eyes blinked up at her, and it squirmed around onto its back. She smiled secretly at it and rubbed its warm tummy with her free hand. The bad little kitten wrapped itself around her palm and bit her fingers lightly. Krista smiled again.

"The lattices anchor the image of the Empire that the curse operates from." The Prince had continued on without noticing the little cat's antics. "Each lattice contains, as best we can tell, one or more
forms
of some aspect of the Empire. The matter in which bread is baked, for example, may exist in one of these lattices. Even the kind of ovens that are
allowed
are held in these patterns of forms. These forms, however, do not exist in the reality that we can feel or touch or see."

The Prince rapped his knuckles on the smooth surface of the table to show his point. Gaius and Alexandros, sprawled on separate couches set beside the dining table, watched him carefully. Krista watched them in turn, which was a task she had taken upon herself once she had marked how much time they spent with one another. The old Roman leaned on one arm of his couch with the ease of long practice and equal patience. The young Macedonian, however, fidgeted constantly. He would recline for a time, then suddenly sit up and plant his elbows on the tabletop. He could not sit still. Krista hid a smile, thinking that he looked like a small boy who desperately needed to go to the privy.

"But these forms of the 'ideal' Empire do have an existence," the Prince remarked. "They must, or otherwise the Oath could not constrain the rest of the Empire to them."

"Lord Prince," Alexandros interjected abruptly. "If they do not exist in a material form, how can they affect anything else?"

Maxian smiled, his handsome face marked by a long-held weariness.

"Not all things," he said, "that exist can be touched or felt or seen. There are things that affect each of us every day that are not... um, material, I suppose."

"Like what?" Alexandros was sitting up again, seemingly poised to leap to his feet. "How can something affect me if it does not have a means to effect me? Something cannot touch
me
unless it itself can be touched."

Maxian sighed and seemed on the verge of glaring openly at the young man. Then he took a deep breath and rubbed his chin in a nervous gesture.

"Ideas," the Prince said slowly, "affect the world. They affect you. You are constrained by honor, are you not?"

"Yes," the Macedonian said equally slowly. The young man's eyes narrowed, and Krista was put in mind of a cagey horse suspecting that the man with an apple might have a lasso behind his back. "I must act as honor and the gods demand. To be otherwise is to court the fates and disaster."

"Exactly," Maxian said sharply, "but you cannot touch
honor
. You cannot see it, or feel it. But it affects you, it affects me, and through us it affects all around us. So it is with the curse—this idea of an Empire of Rome—all fixed in its expression at the time of the Divine Augustus."

Gaius snorted and made to sit up, his eyes dancing with indignation. "Puppy!"

Maxian smiled crookedly and waved for the older man to sit back down.

"The traditions of the Senate promulgate this idea, too, and its expression is written down and passed from father to son throughout the generations." The Prince paused, looking thoughtful. "This is the core of the power of the Oath—the Empire that
should
exist lives in the minds of men, in their memories of the past and belief of how things should be. So are these lattices of form maintained, but then the Oath has the ability to seek out and destroy those who would change that fabric of memory. Too, it can exalt those who would reinforce or maintain these beliefs. So do our armies still fight in the way that they have for two thousand years. Our language maintains, unchanged, such that a man of Alexandros' day can still understand our speech today. The Oath freezes the Empire in amber, a trapped fly with a beating heart. A bee constantly building and reinforcing its own prison."

The Prince's voice ran down, and a cloud seemed to pass over his face. Krista leaned a little forward, her liquid brown eyes watching him carefully. After a moment, Maxian shook his head and looked up again.

"All these lattices, my friend, give the Oath its shape, its purpose, and a form. They interlock in a manifestation of dazzling proportions, reaching from one end of the Empire to the other. They penetrate into the very blood and bone of the people. It is mindless, but subtle. It has no forethought, but it has great purpose. As we have seen, it is surpassingly powerful."

"And you, my Lord Prince, will overturn all this?" Gaius' words seemed mocking, but his face and voice were utterly sincere. "In previous discussions, you and the Persian felt there had to be a keystone that tied all of this together. I know what I believe that key is. Have you found the thing itself?"

Maxian's eyes glinted in anger, but it did not reach his face.

"Yes, Gaius Julius, we have found this key and anchor. It is—I grant you—as you suspected."

"The Emperor," Alexandros said, grinning. "Your very brother."

Cold air lapped at Krista's ankles, seeping through her woolen hose like the icy water of some black Germanian river. She shuddered as she descended the stairs, feeling the clammy air lapping up around her waist. Even here, at the top of the steps, she could hear the droning chant rising from the hidden rooms. The sound set the hairs on the back of her neck up. The Walachs—her Walachs—could be heard as a basso counterpoint to the higher pitch raised by the Persian and Nabatean servants that Abdmachus had gathered. The sound echoed and rolled around the ceiling of the long hallway. For all the volume of the humming drone, it did not pass the top of the steps. There on the crumbling slate a line of pale green glyphs shimmered in the near-darkness, forming a barrier to stop the cold murk and the odd sounds that emanated from the basement.

Icy air closed over her head, and she shuddered, but then smoothed her features and straightened her shoulders. Lanterns gleamed in corroded green sconces, lighting the hallway with pools of pale blue light. Inside each sphere of glass something buzzed and flicked against the glass, casting vague shadows. At the end of the hallway was a turn, and a flight of narrow steps led down into the central room that lay at the base of the house. Here, standing in the doorway of the room, the hum and drone and buzz was loud, like the roar of the crowd in the circus at midday. Even the half-hidden smell of old dried blood that hung in the air was reminiscent of the Games.

At the center of the floor, a circle seven feet wide had been incised in the paving stones and marked with salt and green powder. Outside that circle lay six more layers of ever-expanding rings, each cut an inch or more into the floor of the room. Signs and symbols had been precisely marked into the spaces between each circle until they filled the room from wall to wall. Beneath these new markings, the remains of older signs and symbols could still be seen. This was not the first time the Prince had attempted such a working in these dank chambers. The servants sat along the outside of the outermost ring, each in their own carefully marked space. Candles burned at the cardinal points of each servant's tetrahedron and at the corners of the room.

In the center, at the heart of the innermost ring, lay a marble table the length and breadth of a man. Within the central ring, three triangles formed of silver and gold lines converged upon the table, making a hexagon out of their intersection. Above, the ceiling shimmered and gleamed with a layer of oddly colored green mist that cast a sallow pall across the faces of those gathered in the room.

Prince Maxian stood at one side of the innermost ring. He wore long dark blue silk pantaloons and a belt of lead links. His chest was bare and smooth, anointed with marks and signs painted in white and purple. His long dark brown hair was tied back behind his head and fell in a tight braid to the small of his back. While the Prince stood, Gaius Julius, Abdmachus, and Alexandros knelt in the triangles, their bodies naked to the waist, free of the kabalistic symbols that marked the Prince. On each forehead, an inverted triangle had been marked in purple dye.

Krista entered the room quietly and stepped off the lowest stair into a pentacle of miniature lead cones that stood nearby. This was her place in the ceremony, where she could watch both the door and the room, and stand apart—or so the Prince had promised—from the power that he sought to unleash here.

Within a grain of entering the room, her hair began to rustle and lift away from her shoulders, charged by unseen forces building in the air and stone around her.

"Yes, the Emperor is the focus and anchor of the curse." Maxian's voice was cold and hard, admitting no interruption. "Through him, as in the state, all things flow. But I warn you, Gaius Julius, that attempting to murder him will not only fail to break the power of the curse, but is the surest road to annihilation that you can possibly devise."

"Surely," Gaius responded with an easy air, "any direct attack upon the person of the Emperor would only draw the full power of the thing upon us. But, I say in all deference to your familial love, there is
no way
the curse can be broken without the Emperor—he who is the very keystone of this thing!—being removed from that position. An arched bridge can carry an enormous burden—a hundred wagons or more—when fully intact. But remove the one stone at its heart? Then it is torn apart by its own weight!"

Maxian was silent for a moment, his eyes locked with the older man's.

Finally, Gaius looked away and raised his hands in surrender. "So be it, my Lord Prince. We will undertake whatever plan you have devised to circumvent this problem. Please, enlighten us!"

"Wait," Krista said quietly, drawing all eyes to her. She had sat through countless sessions among these men, but rarely spoke herself. That she did so now gained her their undivided attention. A knot of tension began to grow in her stomach. "I have a question."

"What is it?" Maxian seemed relieved that the nascent argument had been interrupted. But there was irritation and wariness in his expression, too.

Krista suppressed a raised eyebrow at the look on his face.
So the pretty girl might have a mind and you're surprised? Even disappointed?

"If, my lord, there is an... an image of how the Empire is supposed to be, something like the time of the Principate, then why are there two Empires today?" She smiled slyly sideways at Gaius Julius. "Surely the Divine Augustus would have been displeased with such a division..."

Gaius ignored her barb and stared up at the ceiling. Beyond him, however, Alexandros chuckled in delight to see the discomfiture evident in the set of the old Roman's shoulders. Maxian turned a little to Abdmachus and indicated the old Persian with one hand. "I had the same thought when first Abdmachus and I discussed this. Abd'?"

The Persian roused himself, his head rotating slowly first to look to the Prince and then back again to view the others. Krista crushed an instinct to flinch away from the cold, dead eyes and expressionless face and remained seated, smiling pleasantly at the old man.