For a long moment nothing at all passed Mavius's lips. He sat with the handkerchief bunched in his fingers and folded it and unfolded it again, a motion that became its own little liturgy. Landoff watched the cloth in the man's hands,watched the dark smear of puke and felt the hair rise along his forearms.
The motion went on for a full minute: close, open, close. The thing looked less like a handkerchief and more like a relic of some private sacrament. Then, without warning, Mavius flung it to the floor. The rag hit the marble and slumped there; and from the way Mavius looked at his overturned shivering hand, it was most certainly not by will.
Landoff's throat tightened.
It seemed that his worries were founded: the ritual had taken more than pigment from the Emperor. Sacrificing and eating his son, may have evaded death, but it most certainly did not save him.
He doubted he still had long to live. Which meant he needed to think of what would come after.
