Sheen on the Silk - Anne Perry [205]
He received her in his dim, overhot room with as much curiosity as she had hoped. He hoisted himself onto his elbows, wincing with pain and screwing up his face into a snarl, drawing his lips back from stained teeth. “Come to gloat at my death, Zoe Chrysaphes?” he said, his breath wheezing out of his lungs with a sound like tearing cloth. “Make the most of it. Your turn will come, and you’ll likely see the city put to blood and fire again before that happens.”
She put down the leather satchel in which she had brought the herbs and ointments. They knew each other far too well for pretenses. She would not have come except for good reasons of her own.
“What’s in there?” he asked, eyeing it suspiciously.
“Relief from pain,” she answered. “Temporarily, of course. It will all be finished when God wishes it.”
“You are little younger than I am, for all your paint and perfume. You smell like an alchemist’s parlor,” he responded.
She wrinkled her nose. “You don’t. Rather more like a charnel house. Do you wish a little ease or not?”
“What’s the price?” His eyes were yellowing, as if his kidneys were failing him. “Have you spent all your money? No more charms to get men to give it to you?”
“Keep your money. You can bury it with you, for all I care,” she replied. “Better that than let it fall into crusader hands. They’ll probably dig you up anyway, just to see if there’s anything worth taking.”
“I’d rather they ravaged my corpse than my living body,” he retorted, looking her up and down. His gaze lingered on her breasts and then her belly. “Perhaps you’d better kill yourself before they come.”
“Not before I’ve finished what I mean to do.” She would not be distracted by his spite.
Interest flared up in his face. “What’s that?”
“Revenge, of course. What else is there left?”
“Nothing,” he answered. “Who is there to pay anything now? The Kantakouzenos are all gone, and the Vatatzes, the Doukas, Bessarion Comnenos. Who’s left?”
“Of course they’re gone,” she said impatiently. “But there are new traitors who would sell us again. Let us begin with the Skleros, then perhaps the Akropolites, and the Sphrantzes.”
He breathed out with a harsh rattle in his throat, and a little more of the color drained from his face.
She was seized by a fear that he would die before he could tell her what she needed to know. There was a jug of water on the table. She rose, took a small glass, and measured a portion of liquid into it from one of the vials she had brought, then added a little water. She returned to the bed and held it for him.
He drank the potion and choked. It exhausted him for several minutes, but when he finally opened his eyes again, there was a touch of color in his cheeks and his breathing was easier.
“So what is it you want, Zoe Chrysaphes?” he asked. “Charles of Anjou will burn all of us. The only difference is that I shall not feel it, and you will.”
“Probably. But you know many secrets about the old families of Constantinople.”
“You want to damage them?” He was surprised. “Why?”
“Of course I don’t, you fool!” she snapped. “I want them to crush the rebellions and back Michael. You want my herbs. You may roast in the flames of hell tomorrow, like a pig on a spit, but tonight you can be a lot easier, if you tell me what I want to know.”
“All the shabby and fraudulent secrets of the dissenters to union?” he said, turning the idea over in his mind. “I could tell you those. There are plenty of them.” His smile was cruel and sharp with pleasure.
She remained with Philotheos three long days and nights, portioning out the medicine, keeping him alive using all the skills she had. Little by little, laced with viciousness, he told her the secrets that she could use to bleed the Skleros dry of money, and the Sphrantzes and the Akropolites. It would be worth thousands of gold byzants. Used with skill and care, as she would, it might just foment enough