"You knew?" he asks quietly.

"You were extremely specific about this apartment," she murmurs, "the requirement of a solarium over this particular street. It was not hard to note which doorways could be watched from here. And the theatre or the Blues" banqueting hall are sources of information on Imperial maneuverings as much as the palaces or the barracks are. What is he wearing, Petrus?"

She has a habit of lowering her voice for emphasis, not raising it: training on the stage. It is very effective. Many things about her are. He looks out again, and down, through the screening curtain at the cluster of men before the one doorway that matters.

"White," he says, and pauses before adding softly, no more than a breath of his own,'bordered, shoulder to knee, with purple."

"Ah," she says. And rises then, bringing the bedsheet to cover herself as she walks towards him, trailing it behind her. She is not tall but moves as if she were. "He wears porphyry. This morning. And so?"

"And so," he echoes. But not as a question.

Reaching through the beads of the curtain with one hand, he makes a brief, utterly unexceptionable sign of the sun disk for the benefit of the men who have been waiting in the street-level apartment across the way for a long time now. He waits only to see the sign returned from a small, iron-barred guard's portal and then he rises to cross towards the small, quite magnificent woman in the space between room and solarium.

"What happens, Petrus?" she asks. "What happens now?"

He is not a physically impressive man, which makes the sense of composed mastery he can display all the more impressive—and unsettling— at times.

"Idle torment was offered," he murmurs. "Was it not? We have some little leisure now."

She hesitates, then smiles, and the bedsheet, briefly a garment, slips to the floor.