Ironhold — The Administrative Corridor — Minutes Later
Valerius had been in the corridor because the corridor connected the throne room's service entrance to the armory, and Valerius had been moving equipment between the two, which was the kind of work that kept a man in the right corridors without requiring him to be in the room itself.
He had heard enough through the service entrance's gap.
He had heard the petition. He had heard the signatures. He had heard Lorenzo's Rune surface and the crack of the floor and then the silence and then the doors.
He left the equipment where it was.
The Artisan Quarter was twelve minutes on foot. Eight at a run. Valerius had been running — the specific, efficient run of a man who had been a soldier for twenty years and whose legs understood that speed was not the problem, pace was, and that the wrong pace killed you sooner than the right pace sustained. He was at the tier junction when he heard his name.
"Valerius."
Torsten of Crestfall was at the junction's east side, which was not where Torsten had been ten minutes ago. He had moved faster than a man of Torsten's build should have moved, which told Valerius that the movement had been anticipated — that Torsten had not been moving from the throne room but had already been at the junction, placed, waiting.
Valerius did not stop running. He tried to pass on the west.
Two of Torsten's household guard stepped out of the alcove on the west side.
He stopped.
He looked at Torsten. Torsten looked at him with the expression of a man who has done the arithmetic and knows the result and is not particularly pleased with it but is going to see it through because that is what he does.
"I need to go," Valerius said.
"I know where you're going," Torsten said. "That's why I'm here."
"Lord Torsten. Move your men."
"Valerius." Torsten's voice was not threatening. It was the voice he had used in the corridor with Lorenzo — the voice of a man who operated in facts and preferred the conversation to stay in the space where facts lived. "I have watched you for six years. I know what you are to him. I know what he is to you. I am not your enemy and I am not his. But you have thirty seconds to understand what happens if you reach the Artisan Quarter before the Guard does."
Valerius looked at the two household men. They were not reaching for weapons. Neither was Torsten. The restraint was itself a statement — this was not an arrest. It was a delay.
"He runs," Valerius said. "If I reach him first, he runs."
"I know," Torsten said. "And if he runs, the petition is fulfilled by absence. The Church declares him condemned by flight. He spends the rest of his life hunted on the continent." He paused. "Whereas if the Guard takes him, the Emperor can negotiate. The Emperor has a room to work in. He has the treaty and the lords and the mechanisms of governance that a man in exile does not have."
"You're telling me this is better."
"I'm telling you this is different," Torsten said. "And different is what's available."
Valerius looked at him. He looked at the junction. At the Artisan Quarter twelve minutes away.
"How long," Valerius said.
"As long as it takes," Torsten said. "Come inside. Sit down. When it's done the Emperor will send for you."
Valerius stood very still for a moment.
He thought about Alexander in the sub-level, hand on the iron, nose bleeding, keeping the working in place. He thought about Alexander on the wall at dawn watching the two armies without showing what he felt watching them. He thought about a sixteen-year-old boy on a cold corridor floor with a book he was using the way other people used walls.
He thought about what Torsten had said: the Emperor can negotiate.
He went inside.
The household guards took positions at the junction.
Twelve minutes away, in the Artisan Quarter, the Guard was already moving.