The Mosaic of Shadows Read Free Page A

life out. In no more time than you’d need to blink. And straight through his armour, too,’ he added in wonder. ‘Like it was made of silk.’
    ‘His right side or his left?’
    The guard turned to face up the street, clearly mimicking the last steps of his dead companion, and thoughtfully lifted a hand to his right breast. ‘This one,’ he said slowly. ‘The side where the Emperor rode.’
    ‘So the arrow must have been fired from high up, or it would never have passed over the Emperor on his horse, and from across the street – from the carver’s house.’
    ‘Where the captain’s waiting for you,’ prodded the guard, the merest hint of impatience edging his voice.
    ‘Stand here, then. I want to see what the assassin saw.’ I walked slowly back across the road and up the steps between the columns, to the barred gate on the carver’s door. Little light fell within, but I could see the scaly gleam of ringed armour not far back.
    ‘Demetrios Askiates,’ I called, putting my face up to the bars. The carver would have mounted them to protect his home and his goods; now, I suspected, they were become his prison.
    ‘I know who you are, Demetrios Askiates,’ said a gruff voice from inside. He stepped into the slatted light by the door, the red-headed Varangian captain of the previous night, and I saw his vast fist turning a key in the lock. The door swung inwards, opening onto a dim room filled with every manner of trinkets, reliquaries, mirrors, and caskets. Rich men and women would pay handsomely to own one of them, but in the present circumstances they put me more in mind of a tomb, a crypt, than of conspicuous luxury.
    ‘The bone scratcher’s upstairs,’ said the captain. ‘Lives over his workshop.’ He jerked a thumb up at the ceiling. ‘We’ve got two apprentices up there too. And his family.’
    Had they been kept captive all night, I wondered, as I climbed the steep steps in the corner. I came onto the first floor, another large room covered in white shavings as fine and deep as snow. Long tables stood in the centre, still strewn with abandoned tools and half-finished artefacts, while tall windows looked out over the sloping tiles of the arcade’s roof. Beyond it, I could just see the top of a helmet: Aelric the Varangian, standing where I had left him.
    ‘The arrow wasn’t fired from here,’ I said, to myself as much as to the captain who had thudded up behind me.
    We mounted to the next level. Here woollen curtains hung from the ceiling, dividing the room into private spaces; I brushed through them, to the front of the building where more windows – shorter, now – again looked down onto the street. We were at some height, but still there was only a narrow gap between the edge of the arcade and the dome of Aelric’s helmet. I beckoned the captain to come and stand beside me.
    ‘Were you there when he was killed?’ I asked, naturally slowing my speech for the benefit of his foreign ears.
    ‘I was.’
    ‘And could you see – was he standing directly beside the Emperor’s horse?’
    ‘He was.’
    ‘And do you think,’ I persisted, ‘that an arrow could be fired from here and pass over something the height of a horse – and maybe its rider too – yet still strike a man standing in the horse’s shadow?’
    The captain frowned as he stared out of the window. ‘Maybe not,’ he grunted. ‘But then I don’t know any arrow that would go through a coat of mail, whether a horse was in its path or otherwise. Ask the carver.’
    ‘I will,’ I said, more abruptly than was wise to this axe-bearing giant. ‘But first I want to examine the roof.’
    ‘The carver and his apprentices were on the steps outside when we found them,’ countered the captain. ‘None of them would have had time to get down from the roof so soon.’
    ‘Then maybe they weren’t responsible.’ I pushed through another curtain, into a back room where there stood a table and some stools, with a ladder leading to