Tessio had been startled to see the warmth displayed by the artist, van Leyland, when he’d been summoned and had encountered the duke here. They’d actually embraced—chastely, two men from the north greeting each other with obvious pleasure. The Patriarch took note of the warmth. It meant that there was more to Barratin than they’d thought. Also that the artist would now likely start working for him right away, and Tessio couldn’t even protest, since they’d just compelled the duke to build and decorate a sanctuary!

His mood was, accordingly, foul when he went to sleep, after inadequate assuaging by both his preferred young bed partners. Some nights, especially latterly, they just could not accomplish that for him. Pain and rage undermined. The world intervened.

And so, in the middle of a night, High Patriarch Tessio lay awake and pondered something. He was old now, and Viotti di Virenza was not, and the other man was deeply cunning, had tentacles like an octopus, and he would very likely succeed to the throne of Jad.

It was not to be allowed, the High Patriarch decided, propping himself up on pillows and drinking from one more glass of wine in his canopied bed.

He died that night.

When he was discovered in the morning, there were no signs of foul play to be seen. The most-preferred bed partner had, as it happened, removed the Patriarch’s last glass of wine and poured it out into the slop bucket. Then he’d wiped the crystal glass clean, as instructed.

The young man, who had relied on his beauty and a belief in his own cleverness, also died, a few days later. Also with no clear evidence of how or why, though his youth and vigour suggested it might have been untoward. He didn’t matter much by then. No one investigated.

Chaos in Rhodias followed, and in the whole of the western Jaddite world. An assembly of high clerics was summoned, as was usual, to choose a new Patriarch, with all the extreme, frequently deadly turmoil of that.

—

Laurent de Barratin went home.

He was not about to linger in the cesspool of Rhodias while the clerics schemed a successor. He had received his attestations of pilgrimage, of an endowed sanctuary, and of Patriarchal forgiveness. Those came from the throne, the office, not the pig-eyed man now dead. He could go home carrying his formal exculpation for murder. Why he had come.

The successor, his people told him, would almost certainly be Viotti di Virenza. Barratin had no views on this. He did offer di Virenza a prudent gift before he left, an enormous golden ewer for serving wine at a banquet. Cost him a stupid amount of money.