Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay

begin preparing to go out. It was wrong, in truth, to say that nothing ever surprised her. There
had
been unexpected developments.
    In the wake of one of them, involving a dancer who happened to be the daughter of that same grey-haired man who had left her in Megarium, she'd accepted an invitation for this afternoon.
    And that reminded her of the other man she had enlisted to her service back home, the red-haired mosaicist. Caius Crispus would be present today as well.
    She had ascertained that he was in Sarantium shortly after her own arrival. She'd needed to know; he raised considerations of his own. She had entrusted him with a dangerously private message, arid had no idea if he'd delivered it, or even tried. She'd remembered him to be bitter, saturnine, unexpectedly clever. She'd needed to speak with him.
    She hadn't invited him to visit-as far as the world knew, he had never met her, after all. Six men had died to preserve that illusion. She'd gone, instead, to observe the progress being made on the Emperor's new Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom. The Sanctuary wasn't yet open to the general public, but a visit was an entirely appropriate-even a pious-outing for a visiting monarch. No one could have possibly queried it. Once she'd entered, she'd decided, entirely on impulse, on an unusual approach to this matter.
    Thinking back to the events of that morning in early winter, as her women now began preparing her bath, Gisel found herself smiling privately. Jad knew, she wasn't inclined to give way to impulse, and few enough things ever gave her occasion to be amused, but she hadn't conducted herself in that stupefying place with what might be considered decorous piety, and she had to admit she'd enjoyed herself.
    The tale had run around Sarantium by now. She'd intended it to.
    A man on a scaffold under a dome with glass in his hands, trying to make a god. More than one, in truth, though that particular truth was not one he proposed to reveal. Crispin was, that day-early winter in Jad's holy city of Sarantium-happy to be alive and not anxious to be burned for heresy. The irony was that he hadn't yet realized or acknowledged his own happiness. It had been a long time since he'd known the feeling; he was a stranger now to such a mood, would have glowered in vexation and snapped off a brittle insult to someone who'd dared make the observation that he seemed content with his lot.
    Brow unconsciously furrowed, mouth a line of concentration, he was attempting to finally confirm the colours of his own image of Jad above the emerging skyline of Sarantium on the dome. Other artisans were creating the City for him under his supervision; he himself was rendering the figures, and he was beginning with Jad, that an image of the god might look down upon all who entered here while the dome and semidomes and walls were being achieved. He wanted the god he made to echo, in a tacit homage, the one he'd seen in a small chapel in Sauradia, but not slavishly or too obviously. He was working on a different scale, his Jad a ruling element of a larger scene, not the entirety of the dome, and there were matters of balance and proportion to be worked through.
    At the moment, he was thinking about eyes and the lines in the skin above and below them, remembering the wounded, haggard vision of Jad in that chapel he'd seen on the Day of the Dead. He'd fallen down. Had literally collapsed beneath that gaunt, overpowering figure.
    His memory for colours was very good. It was flawless, in fact, and he knew this without false humility. He'd worked closely with the head of the Imperial Glassworks to find those hues that most precisely matched the ones he remembered from Sauradia. It helped that he was now in charge of the mosaic decoration for the most important, by far, of all Valerius II's building projects. The previous mosaicist-one Siroes-had been dismissed in disgrace, and had somehow broken the fingers of both hands that same night in an unexplained