Chapter 99: The Emperor Walks the Walls (II)

The wind off the Marmara carried the smell of scorched timber and something sweeter beneath it, the rendering fat of the tanneries in the lower city where the fire had reached before the wind turned. Leo held his ground in the saddle, the crown pressing cold through the wool of his tunic, and watched John Tzimiskes walk his horse forward until the two men were close enough to speak without raising their voices. The emperor's escort hung back a dozen paces, spears angled, watching the walls.

"You cost me a night's sleep," Tzimiskes said.

"You cost yourself a crown," Leo answered. "I only counted the hours you wasted."

Something moved behind the emperor's eyes, quick and dangerous, like a fish turning under ice. He was a handsome man still, though the weeks since the murder had hollowed him at the temples. The beard he had worn as a general was trimmed close now, imperial fashion, and his hands—Leo noticed this, because Leo noticed everything—rested on the reins without gloves, as if he wanted the city to see him unarmed among enemies.

"The Blachernae Gate commander," Tzimiskes said. "Andronikos. He was mine. I gave him the rank myself."

"He was yours until he wasn't."

"Men do not simply change masters."

"They do when the old master cannot pay them." Leo let that sit. "You emptied the treasury to buy the Varangians, Basileus. I did not buy Andronikos. I merely showed him the ledger page that proved his pension had been sold to cover your debts."

Tzimiskes was silent a moment. Then he did something Leo had not expected: he laughed, one short breath through the nose, and shook his head.

"Theophano warned me about you," he said. "She said you were a clerk who thought like a general. I told her a clerk is a clerk."

"She was right about you as well."

"And what did she say about me?"

"That you would come to the wall yourself, because you cannot bear to send another man to do what you might do better." Leo inclined his head, not a bow. "I told her you would come at dawn, because a man who kills an emperor in his bedchamber never sleeps well again. We were both right."

The emperor's jaw tightened. Beyond him, along the length of the wall, the fire had guttered in the lower wards and the smoke was thinning to a grey veil. The second dawn was full now, the light the color of watered wine. Somewhere in the city a bell began to ring the hour—not one of the great bells, but a parish bell, small and stubborn, keeping its own account of time while empires changed hands.

"You have something of mine," Tzimiskes said again, and this time the words were not a challenge but a statement of fact, almost weary.

"I have many things." Leo reached inside his tunic and drew out the ledger, binding worn, the corner of the missing page visible as a ragged edge. "But if you mean this, I have only most of it. The last page is elsewhere."

"Basil."

"Basil." Leo watched the name land. "You made the same mistake I did, Basileus. You thought the parakoimomenos was a servant. He is not a servant. He is a ledger himself, and every man in this city has been entered in him twice—once for what he owes, once for what he fears."

Tzimiskes turned his horse a half-step, looking back toward the Great Palace, where the twelfth bell had answered the eleventh. The imperial banners hung limp in the damp air. "He summoned you back. My men watched you enter the city through the sea gate, and I knew then that he had chosen you over me." He looked at Leo. "Do you know why I did not have you killed in the street?"

"Because you wanted to know what he had promised me."

"Because I wanted to know what you are." The emperor's voice dropped. "I have killed one emperor. I will not be the second. Tell me what Basil wants, and I will give you the rank of your choosing—chartophylax, logothete, whatever your ambition will hold. You will have your desk and your seals and your name in the archives, and you will die old."

It was the most reasonable offer Leo had heard in months. He knew, with a clarity that felt almost like grief, that it was also a lie—that the moment Basil's final page was in Tzimiskes's hand, the scribe who had outwitted him would be found floating in the cistern with his throat cut, and the archives would record that Leo Anatolius, low-born, had drowned by accident.

"I want the throne," Leo said.

The words came out before he had decided to speak them. The escort stirred. Tzimiskes did not move.

"You are a scribe," he said.

"I am the man who rang the eleventh bell. I am the man who sealed the Blachernae Gate against the emperor of the Romans. I hold the crown of Constantine against my chest and a ledger that names every traitor in your court, and you offer me a desk." Leo smiled, and it was not a kind smile. "Theophano told me once that history is written by the men who survive the writing. I intend to be one of them."

For a long moment the emperor looked at him the way a man looks at a wound he has not yet decided to cauterize. Then he gathered his reins.

"Keep the gate," Tzimiskes said. "Keep your bell. Keep the crown, if it pleases you. But hear me, scribe: I hold the City. I hold the fleet. I hold the eastern themes, and when the harvest is in I will hold the west as well. You have a door and a piece of paper. I have an empire." He wheeled his horse. "When you tire of playing emperor, come to me. I will still be on the throne."

He rode back toward the Great Palace without looking behind him, and his escort closed around him like water closing over a stone. Leo watched until the column vanished into the smoke-hazed streets, and only then did he let out the breath he had been holding, and feel how his hands had begun to shake.

Behind him, Theophano stepped from the shadow of the postern where she had been listening. She wore a dark cloak over her silks, her hair bound tight, and her face was pale with the long night.

"You lied to him," she said.

"I told him the truth. It is a better lie."

"You told him you want the throne."

"I do want the throne."

She looked at him for a long time. The parish bell had stopped. Far off, on the walls, a sentry called the change of watch, and the sound of it was ordinary and eternal, the sound of a city that had outlived emperors before and would outlive them again.

"Then you will need more than a ledger and a door," she said. "You will need the last page. And Basil will not give it to you."

"No," Leo said. He looked down at the ledger in his hands, at the ragged edge where the final page had been torn away. "But he will show it to me. That is what he has been doing all along—showing me the shape of the thing without the thing itself. He wants me to want it."

"Why?"

"Because a man who wants something can be steered." Leo tucked the ledger back against his chest, beside the cold iron of the crown. "So we will let him steer. And when he reaches for the reins, we will cut them."

Theophano's eyes narrowed. "We?"

"You tied your fate to mine the night we fled this city," Leo said. "It is too late to untie it now. Unless you would rather take your chances with the man who killed your husband."

She did not answer. But she did not leave, either, and when Leo turned his horse toward the chapel—toward the thirteenth bell that was still ringing, faint and patient, in the small stone tower above the Blachernae—she followed.

The bell was not ringing for the hour. Leo understood that now. It was ringing for the page, and for the hand that held it, and for the name that would be written at the bottom of the ledger when all the accounts were finally called.

Somewhere in the city, Basil the Parakoimomenos was waiting with a torn page in his sleeve and a smile on his ancient face, and the game was not over.

It was only, Leo thought as the chapel door opened before him, beginning to be worth playing.