How many instances of "t" are there in:
Q: Artist painting Sistine Chapel, Old Bull God and talking mechanical birds Its a book that I've read somewhere around late 1990s-early 2000s. Its set in world that reminds a bit of the fall time of the Roman Empire - there is a new monotheistic religion but the military power that created the Empire is crumbling slowly.
The main character is a painter/sculptor that is asked to paint the ceiling in the great cathedral in the Holy City (although if my memory is right, the city itself is more akin to Constantinople rather than Rome). On his journey he meets a slave girl that is supposed to be offered to an Old God that has a form of a giant bull (bison? buffalo?), but in the end she escapes her fate and the villagers are killed instead. There is also an old inventor, who created mechanical birds and then somehow stole the souls of the offers to the Bull God that gave the birds the ability to speak, who wishes to return the stolen souls (it doesn't end well for him....).
I believe it was part of the series, but I've read only the first book...

A: Possibly from the series...
The Sarantine Mosaic
by Guy Gavriel Kay.
From the plot description on wikipedia the following elements seem to match pretty well:

The story's setting is based on the 6th century Mediterranean world, and the looming conflict between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy that had replaced the Western Roman Empire.

Not quite a mural, but a mosaic:

Sailing to Sarantium, the first novel in the saga, was published in 1998. In this novel, mosaicist Caius Crispus ("Crispin"), is summoned from Varena to the great metropolis of Sarantium to create a mosaic for Emperor Valerius II, (modelled on Byzantine emperor Justinian I).

And the mechanical birds you mentioned seem to spot on to be coincidence:

Crispin makes contact with Zoticus's daughter, Shirin, who is revealed to also have one of her father's birds whose thoughts Crispin is able to also hear for unknown reasons....With the help of Zoticus, Gisel is able to escape attempts on her life and journeys to Sarantium. Zoticus, upon learning that the pagan god had not forgotten nor relinquished his right to the souls of the human sacrifices given to him, journeyed to the forested area where Linon had sacrificed herself to the zubir. There he allows the remaining souls in his mechanical birds to be released back to the god and accepts his death from the zubir, a punishment from taking the souls of the sacrificed woman in the first place.


user
The passage contains one hundred and ninety-eight "t"s.
assistant