Hey Everyone
I’m a little all over the place today, but good news! I finished the first draft of ‘A Dance of Thieves and Oracles’ last Friday. My brain is mush, but I’m so ridiculously happy.
It has almost been three years to the day that I first wrote ‘A City of Hearts and Feathers’ and I feel like my whole world has been turned upside and had the shit shaken out of it like a snow globe. I had to delay releasing it for nearly a year and half as I fought to get my rights back in 2024 and suddenly had a whole back catalogue to edit, cover and re-release.
I finally got it out last year and was all ready to the write the next one…and my mother died and the great fuckening happened. That took over a year to be sorted and now I’ve gone full circle to come back to Azize, Kerem and the whole Order of Anubis crew. Not to mention my beloved magicians that I never would have been able to write again if I hadn’t gone through the publishing shit fight of ’24.
Speaking of Magicians and Con, he finally turns up today in our chapter of ‘Immortals & Ink’ and it also ended up being the day I went to the Hellenic Museum to get a behind the scenes look at the exhibit I’m sponsoring and specifically, you guessed it, an icon of Constantine. That’s going to be its own blog because it deserves it.
I swear life is so fucking weird sometimes but today was definitely a good day.
***
Chapter Sixteen
The wall walk above the Saint Romanus Gate was crowded, even at the second hour after noon. Men in armor, priests’ habits, and nothing more than padded jerkins moved along the parapet with water and weapons.
Alexis came up the steps of the inner gate-tower with Arslan’s token in one hand. The Greek captain at the top of the steps looked at the token and stepped aside.
“The last I saw him, the Strategos was on the bastion,” the captain said in Greek. “If you find him, tell him that we collapsed another tunnel.”
Alexis nodded and followed where the captain had pointed. To the east, beyond the moat and the outer wall, across the great cleared kill-ground that ran the length of the Theodosian line, the Ottoman camps were thick with tents, smoke from cook-fires, and timber being shifted into earthworks at the edge of the Lycus valley.
Mio Dio. They will start those damns cannons again soon.
Alexis hadn’t been there a day, and his nerves were already jangled by their booming. It was no wonder that wherever he went in the city, all the people looked exhausted and hollow.
Closer to him on the parapet was the scent of blood, mud, men, and a particular bread the Greeks of the city had always made from chestnut flour when grain was short. He drew the hood of his plain gray cloak further down over his face and squeezed around groups of soldiers and civilians doing their best with their horrible odds.
He came round the bend at the great bastion and spotted Constantine. He was standing with his back to Alexis, his hands clasped behind him, and listening to the men around him talk. He was armed in a working plate of blackened steel over leather, scarred at the pauldron from a glancing blow. His hair, longer than Alexis had ever seen him wear it, was tied back with a strip of plain cord.
Around him were captains, sergeants, two of the Genoese in the colors of Giustiniani’s house, and an old monk with a sword belt buckled crooked over his cassock. Con said something, and they all laughed.
His back straightened, sensing someone behind him, and he turned his head a fraction. His eyes found Alexis, and the laugh on Con’s face went still before relief flooded it. That made Alexis feel like the worst of bastards.
“Salve, magister,” Con said in Latin, moving away from his men to greet him.
“Salve, Caesar,” Alexis replied, with a slight incline of his head.
“This,” Con said to the captains in Greek, “is the friend I told you would come. He might look tall and scrawny, but he’s a devil with a sword, just you wait and see.”
“Vaffanculo,” Alexis whispered, but played along and bowed to the captains.
One of the Genoese, a broad man with a scar that ran from his lip into the gray of his beard, grinned and saluted Alexis with his cup. The old monk, who had a face like a walnut and eyes far too bright for the rest of him, made the sign of the cross over Alexis without seeming to notice he had done it.
Con clapped a captain on the shoulder, said something to him too low for him to catch, and moved back toward Alexis.
“Walk with me, Alecto,” he said. “There is a space we can talk.”
“Lead on, Strategos,” Alexis replied with a touch of sarcasm.
Con only winked at him, and they went off the wall together. Behind them, the men resumed their work and their laughter.
The chamber in the tower had been a chapel once, but had been pressed into service as something between an officer’s quarters and a war room. A trestle table sat in the center, weighted at one end with rolled charts and at the other with a wine jug. There were two cots against the walls, and a small triptych of the Pantocrator, with a candle that had been lit recently. The window in the eastern wall looked out across the Lycus valley and onto the Ottoman lines.
Con closed the door behind them and shot the bolt. For a moment, neither of them said anything. Con’s face was a little older and harder, but his dear friend all the same.
Con crushed him in a hard embrace, a hand to the back of Alexis’s neck, and held on for a long moment. “I’m so glad you came, Alecto.”
“I had to see things for myself,” he replied, and let him go. He rapped his knuckles on Con’s breastplate. “Old thing still fits, I see.”
“And still keeps me in one piece.” Con turned away to the wine-jug and poured two cups. “Drink. The wine is bad, I’m afraid. The good wine has been sent to Galata, where the Genoese won’t fight without it. Ad fundum.“
“Ad fundum, fratello.“
They drank, and it was as bad as Con claimed. It didn’t matter. Alexis needed a drink before the arguing inevitably started.
“How long can you stay?” Con asked, getting right to it.
“That depends on you, old friend.”
Con’s face settled into his general-of-the-army stare. The one who didn’t bargain or back down. “I’m not leaving.”
“I have not asked you to yet.”
“You came from Venice through seas full of enemies to ask me to abandon the city, so you might as well get it over with.”
Alexis set his own cup down on the table. “Con, please—”
“No, Alecto.”
“You will die.”
“Sumus quod sumus.” The Latin came out flat and unbothered, the way Con used Latin when he had finished thinking about an argument and had moved on to ending it.
“You aren’t the emperor,” Alexis said quietly. “You aren’t the Great Constantine of the East any more. You are an old friend of mine who has been wandering this earth for eleven hundred years and who has finally found a wall he wants to die on. One you didn’t even build.“
“I’m a part of every wall in this city, Alecto,” Con said flatly. “The harbor walls. The land walls. The Theodosian was my reach extended. I planned this city. I named her. She is my empress, and if it is my fate to die in her arms to save her, I will.“
“You aren’t going to die for a city. You are going to die for a piece of vanity dressed up as a city,” Alexis growled.
Con reared back like he had been slapped.
Too far. I have gone too far.
“That was unworthy of you,” Con said quietly.
“It was, but it is still true.” Alexis didn’t look away. “She will endure, just in a different way, Con. All things change whether we like it or not. I thought you would have learned that by now.”
“There are things in this city that I can’t lose,” Con said, lifting his chin. “Not to the Ottomans. Not to anyone.”
“Then take them with you,” Alexis snapped. “Pack these things you can’t lose into a crate, and we’ll load it onto the Hésperos with you. You can sit in the hold with them because you’ll still be alive to do so. Don’t ask me, Caesar, to admire a man who would die for objects when his friends are still on the earth who care about him.”
Con turned away to the window. He stood there with his hands behind his back in the way Alexis had seen him stand in council chambers when he was choosing what to say next.
When he spoke again, the warmth had gone out of his voice as cleanly as wine being poured out of a cup.
“You didn’t come from Venice to insult me,” he said to the window. “I assume you came to make a final offer.”
“No offer, I came to bring you home with me.”
“I am home.” Con turned, and the face he now wore was one Alexis had only seen aimed at his enemies. “And you, magus, have never understood this connection I have to this place. Not when I first found her and not now. Go back to Venice. Tell Aelia to sing at my funeral and Zo to write me a damn good poem. I will see them in the next world.”
“Constantine.“
“No. Get out, Alecto. Before I say something I can’t take back. Go back to your boat. Sail home.”
Alexis put his wine down. “I won’t go home without you.”
“Then you had best get comfortable and sharpen your sword.”
They stared at each other across the small chamber for a long moment before Alexis turned and went to the door.
His hand was on the bolt when Con said softly, “I’m still glad you came. I’ve missed you.”
“I missed you, too,” Alexis whispered and left without looking back.
***
Thanks so much for reading this week’s instalment. Want to catch up on the other chapters? Click here
If you want to learn more about Alexis’s adventures, check them out here. Or, if you are curious about who Arslan, Kerem, and Azize are, then click here.
I’m off to recharge my brain and begin allllll the editing ahead of me lol
Ames xx