Chapter 98: The Emperor Walks the Walls

The Pharos bell did not stop. It tolled the slow, gravid measure of a heart too vast for any single chest, and each stroke rolled down the Mese and into the cisterns, into the barracks, into the marrow of every man who heard it. Leo had heard that bell a hundred times in his life as a scribe, copying the ceremonial rolls: the emperor walks the walls, and the city holds its breath.

He had never heard it ring for a man coming to kill him.

He stood on the broken stair below the Blachernae chapel, the iron crown heavy against his ribs beneath his cloak, and he did what he had done since the first day he had picked up a stylus: he counted. The intervals between the strokes. The direction of the sound. How long it would take a procession to move from the Chalke Gate to the Blachernae along the land walls, even at the fast pace of an emperor who had spent his life in the saddle and despised ceremony.

Not long. Tzimiskes would come fast. He would come with the Varangians at his back, their axes dull in the second dawn, and he would come because Leo had left him no choice. A throne that was not the emperor's. A gate sealed against him. A scribe who would not kneel. Word of that would already be moving through the city like fire through dry tinder, and an emperor who did not answer it was no emperor at all.

Andronikos appeared at the top of the stair, his face streaked with soot and sweat. "He's coming," he said. "The watch on the Fifth Tower counted a hundred torches and more. He's brought the Hetaireia. He's brought the Varangians."

"How long?"

"Less than an hour. He's moving along the outer wall." Andronikos hesitated, and that hesitation told Leo more than the words that followed. "My men are asking which side of the gate they're on."

Leo climbed the last steps and stood beside him, looking east along the line of the wall. The city burned in pockets—smoke rising in columns from the district of the Argos, from the warehouses by the Neorion harbor—but the fire was not the fire of a sack. It was the fire of a city tearing at its own seams. Theophano's work, he thought. Or Basil's. Or his own.

"They're on the side of the gate," Leo said. "That's all that matters. The gate does not choose. The gate holds."

"That's a fine answer for a man with a crown in his shirt," Andronikos said. "It's a poorer one for a man with a wife and sons in the city."

Leo turned to face him. In the grey light, Andronikos looked old—older than he had in the throne room, older than he had when he had chosen to open the Blachernae Gate to a scribe with no name. "Then send them out through the sea gate while it still opens," Leo said. "The harbor's not yet closed. But if you send them, send them with a message. The eastern legions are three days out. They march under the eagle of the Phokas, and they march because the eleventh bell rang. Tell your wife that. Tell your sons. Tell your men."

"The eastern legions answer to Bardas Phokas," Andronikos said quietly. "And Bardas Phokas is Tzimiskes's man. He was at the coronation."

"Was he," Leo said.

He had not known that. It was a small thing, a detail he should have carried in his ledger, and the fact that he had not carried it was a crack in the wall he had built around himself. He filed it away, the way he filed everything, and did not let it show on his face.

Below them, a horn sounded from the direction of the Fifth Tower. Not the deep bronze of the Pharos. A field horn, sharp and impatient, the horn of an army on the move.

"Theophano," Leo said. "Where is she?"

"In the chapel. She would not leave it."

Leo went down the stair and through the low door of the Blachernae chapel. The air inside was cold and smelled of wax and old stone. Theophano knelt before the icon of the Theotokos, her dark hair loose beneath a veil, her hands folded. She did not turn when he entered, but she spoke.

"He is coming."

"Yes."

"Then you have what you wanted." She rose, and when she faced him her eyes were dry and very bright. "You have made him come to you. Now you must decide what you are when he arrives."

"I know what I am."

"Do you?" She stepped closer. "A scribe who sealed a gate is a rebel. A rebel with a crown is a usurper. But an emperor who walks the walls and finds the gate held against him—that is a thing the city will remember. They will ask who held it, Leo. They will ask why. And the answer will be whatever you write."

"Or whatever you write," he said.

She smiled, and there was no warmth in it. "I have written enough for one lifetime. I told you in the cistern: history is a ledger, and the man who keeps it decides what is owed. You have the ledger. You have the crown. You have the gate. The only thing you do not have is the last page."

"Basil has the last page."

"Basil has everything," Theophano said. "That is why he has survived three emperors. And that is why you should be more afraid of him than of Tzimiskes."

The horn sounded again, closer now, and beneath it the tramp of many feet on stone. Leo went to the chapel door and looked out. Along the outer wall, coming around the curve of the land walls from the east, a column of torches moved against the paling sky. At its head rode a man in a white cloak over gilded armor, his beard dark, his shoulders broad, his horse stepping high as if it knew the city belonged to it.

John Tzimiskes. The emperor who had killed his own uncle for a throne he could not quite sit.

Behind Leo, Theophano said, very softly, "He will offer you terms. He will offer you your life. He will offer you a rank, a pension, a quiet monastery on a hill where you can copy psalters until you die. He will mean none of it. You know that."

"I know that."

"Then do not let him reach the gate."

Leo turned. "You want me to kill an emperor."

"I want you to survive," Theophano said. "Those are not always different things."

He walked out of the chapel into the grey light. Andronikos was waiting at the head of the stair with a dozen men behind him, their faces hard and uncertain. Leo looked at them, and then he looked down at the crown beneath his cloak, and then he looked east, where the column of torches came on.

"Open the small postern," he said. "Not the gate. The postern, the one that takes one man at a time. And bring me a horse."

Andronikos stared at him. "You're going out to him?"

"I'm going to meet him," Leo said. "He came to the wall for me. It would be rude to keep him waiting."

He mounted the horse the stable boy brought, and he rode down the ramp toward the postern, and behind him he heard the fourteenth bell of the Pharos toll once more, slow and deep, as if the city itself were counting the seconds of a life.

At the postern, the iron-studded door stood ajar. Beyond it, on the killing ground between the inner and outer walls, the emperor's column had halted. Tzimiskes sat his horse at the head of it, and when he saw the lone rider come through the postern, he raised one hand and the column went still.

For a moment there was only the sound of the wind along the wall, and the far-off crackle of burning.

Then Tzimiskes spoke, and his voice carried the way a commander's voice carries, pitched to reach the last rank and the first.

"Leo Anatolius," he said. "You have something of mine."

Leo reined in. He did not bow. He looked at the man who had killed an emperor and would kill him too, and he felt the crown cold against his chest, and he said, "I have many things of yours, Basileus. The question is which one you've come to collect."