“A fine tale. It is true that you speak with the accent of the eastern border, and certainly you look as if you’ve walked a long way with nothing more than the clothes on your back and, so I hear, a goat. But a fine tale may be nothing more than a brightly woven tapestry thrown up on the wall to conceal an ugly scar which lies hidden behind it. The Quman brand their slaves with a mark.”
Shaking, Zacharias stood. He turned, pulling the torn shoulder of the robe down to reveal his right shoulder blade and the brand, healed badly enough that skin still puckered around it, marking him as slave of the Pechanek begh. Releasing the cloth, he turned back to confront the margrave. “So stands the mark of the snow leopard’s claw, my lord.”
“A desperate man can have himself cut to lend credence to his story,” remarked Villam pleasantly.
“Would a man cut himself in this manner, merely to lend credence to his tale?” Zacharias demanded, boldly lifting his robe.
At the sight of Zacharias’ mutilated genitals, Villam actually gasped out loud, lost color, and groped for his wine cup. He gulped it down, and then signaled to his steward, the slender man who had stationed himself at the door. “Bring wine for this man, if you please. He must be desperately thirsty.”
Zacharias drank deeply. The wine was very good, and he saw no reason to waste it. Perhaps the shock of his mutilation would throw Villam off the scent.
But the margrave was too old and too crafty, he had played the game for too long, to be thrown off his attack even by such a vicious strike. Once he had taken a second cup of wine, he gestured to his servant. “Humbert, bring me the man’s pack.”
Resigned, Zacharias watched as Villam emptied the pouch and, of course, picked up the one thing that would condemn any man. He displayed, for Zacharias’ edification, the parchment scrap covered with Liath’s writing, the scribblings of a mathematici.
Zacharias drained the last of his wine, wondering what he would get to drink when he languished in the skopos’ prison damned as a heretic. “You’re holding it upside down, my lord,” he observed after Villam said nothing.
Villam turned the scrap over and studied it again. “It means even less to me this way.” He looked up with the sharp gaze of a man who has seen a great deal of grief and laughter and trouble in his time. He was getting impatient. “Are you a sorcerer?”
No such interrogation could end happily, but Zacharias refused to collapse in fear as long as his tongue seemed safe. “Nay, my lord, I am not.”
“Truly, you do not resemble one, for I have always heard it said that a sorcerer has such magnificent powers that she will always appear sleek and prosperous, and you, my friend, do not appear to be either. Why are you seeking the prince?”
“To find out where that parchment came from, my lord. I have reason to believe that he knows who made those marks on that parchment. That person must know some portion of the secret language of the stars. I have no wish to be a sorcerer, my lord. But I was vouchsafed a vision of the cosmos.” He could not keep his voice from trembling. The memory of what he had seen in the palace of coils still tormented him; he dreamed at night of that billowing cosmos, rent by clouds of dust and illuminated by resplendent stars so bright that, like angels, they had halos. His loss of faith in the God of Unities no longer troubled his sleep, because the desire to understand the workings of the universe, a dazzling spiral wheel of stars hanging suspended in the midst of a vast emptiness, had engulfed his spirit and consumed his mind. “That is all that I fear now, my lord: that I might die before I understand the architecture of the universe.”
That I might die before I see another dragon. But that thought he dared not voice out loud.
Villam stared at him for a long time. Zacharias could not interpret his expression, and he began to fidget nervously, waiting for the margrave’s reply. He had told the truth at last. He had no further to retreat except to reveal the one thing which would damn him most: that he had traveled as a servant with the Aoi sorcerer and witnessed her humbling and frightening power. Once they discovered that, they would not care that she had, in the end, discarded him as thoughtlessly as she would a walking stick she had no further use for.
“I am at your mercy, my lord margrave,” he said finally, when he could bear the silence no longer.
“So we come to her again,” murmured Villam. “Can it be true, what the prince said of her ancestry? Is it not said of the Emperor Taillefer that ‘God revealed to him the secrets of the universe?’ The virtues of the parent often pass to the child.”