Polo was incoherent.

He needed a healing brother. Soon.

Pinkus Ghort did not dispute possession of the prisoners. "Just let me have one healthy one, Pipe. A trophy. So I don't have to listen to Principate Doneto bark."

"Take your pick. Take two if you want." Hecht was confident that nothing useful could be gained from any of the prisoners. "That'll ease my budget." Working for Sublime, even indirectly, included an endless, thankless, continuous scramble for money. The Patriarch had no comprehension of economics. He could not be made to understand that he had to have income if he wanted to spend. He resented any effort to explain by those whose wages had to be paid and whose costs had to be underwritten.

Sublime was convinced that the Lord would provide. And that hired hands should be happy with what the Lord provided.

They were crossing the vast limestone sprawl of the Closed Ground, so-called since antiquity because the wings of the Chiaro Palace enfolded it completely. The Palace was three and four stories high, its limestone architecture classically simple. The eastern face, in the direction of the Holy Lands, boasted balconies where the Patriarch and senior Principates presented themselves on Holy Days. There were always scaffoldings somewhere around the marges of the Closed Ground. The Chiaro Palace was under continuous rehabilitation.

The Palace was built of stone from the same quarry as the pavements but the coloring did not match. The pavements had been in place for only three centuries. Parts of the Palace went back fifteen centuries. They showed the effects of all those years of weather and bad air. The stone was streaked brown, yellow, or pale pink.

The first foundations of the Chiaro Palace had been laid down before the Old Brothen Empire recognized itself as such.

Parts of Brothe were older, still. But Hecht was not impressed. His boyhood had passed in a city where structures still in daily use were three times the age of the oldest in Brothe.