Or so it usually unfolded in this sort of alignment.

But Crescens was going to have a slow route down this time, it seemed. Taras of the Blues had his own team out at least as fast. Crescens couldn't cut him off at the chalk without fouling or spilling his own chariot. The two first teams would descend together, and then the Greens would work on the Blue rider in tandem as they had all morning. It was a long race, seven laps. Plenty of time.

Except that everyone knew the starts mattered enormously. A race could end before the first lap was done. And Scortius was in this one.

Cleander turned to see what was happening with the Blues" second team, and then he never looked away. Scortius had brilliantly anticipated the handkerchief and trumpet, had a superb start, was lashing his horses furiously already. He had burst from the line, had opened a gap between himself and the Greens on the rail. He might even be able to get down, take the inside lane away as soon as they hit the white chalk. It would be close.

"Which one is he?" his stepmother said beside him.

"Second lane," he rasped, pointing, never turning away from the track. It only occurred to him later that there had been no need to speak the name. "He's riding Second chariot, not First! Watch him try for the rail."

The horses hit the chalk. He didn't try for the rail.

Instead, he went up the track, slicing sharply right, well ahead of the slower White and Red quadrigas in the third and fourth lanes. Both of them seized the entirely unexpected opening and went down and left behind him, sacrificing a moment of speed for the vital inner lanes.

Later, Cleander would understand how that must have been part of it. They went to the left, had to slow to do it, and so space was created. It was all about space. Cleander felt, in retrospect, as if all these thundering, bunched chariots at the start, spinning wheels, thirty-two flying horses, lashing, straining men, were all like small wooden toys, the sort a boy played with, imagining a Hippodrome on his bedroom floor, and Scortius was moving them the way that boy might move his toys, godlike.

'Watch out!" someone shouted, just behind them. And with cause. The two Blue quadrigas were on a collision course, the boy in the First chariot heading down as expected with Crescens right beside him, Scortius angling straight towards them both, going entirely the wrong way, away from the rail. Scortius's mouth was wide open, Cleander saw, and he was screaming something in that chaos of dust and speed and incoherence.

Then it wasn't incoherent at all, for something exquisite took place, clear as anything in the fury and mire of human life could be, if you understood enough to see it.

And being careful in his recollections, tracking back along the arc of his feelings, Cleander would finally decide that this was the true moment when allegiance and partisanship gave way to something else in him: a desire that never left him, all his life, to see that level of skill and grace and courage again, garbed in whatever colours they might choose to wear for a moment's bright, sunlit glory on the sands.

In a way, his childhood ended when Scortius went up the track and not down.

His stepmother saw only the same initial confusion of dust and fury that Kasia observed from her similar vantage point farther along. There was a roiling tumult inside her, making it quite impossible for her to sort out the chaos below from the chaos within. She felt unwell, thought she might be physically sick, a humiliation in this public place. She was aware of the Bassanid physician on her other side, was half inclined to curse him for being the agent of her presence here, and for seeing what he… might have seen in the dim light under the stands.

If he spoke a single word, Thena'i's decided, if he but asked after her health, she would… she didn't know what she would do.

And that was such appalling, unknown terrain for her-not being sure of exactly what to do. He didn't speak. A blessing. Stick at his side-that ridiculous affectation, as bad as the dyed beard-he seemed intent on the chariots with all the others. It was why they were all here, wasn't it? Well, it was, for everyone but her, perhaps.

I expect you to win this race, she had said. In that strange, filtered half-light. After trying to kill him. Had no idea why she'd said that, it had just come out, from the tumult inside her. She never did things like that.

It was declared and taught in the holy chapels of Jad that daemons of the half-world hovered, always, intimately close to mortal men and women, and they could enter into you, making you other than what you were, had always been. The knife was in her cloak again. He had given it back to her. She shivered in the sunlight.

The doctor looked over then. Said nothing. Blessedly. Turned back to the track.

"Which one is he?" she asked Cleander. He answered, pointing, never taking his eyes from the impossible confusion below. "He's riding Second chariot, not First!" he shouted.

That obviously meant something, but she hadn't the least notion what. Or that it was partly directed at her, and what she had said about winning the race.

Rustem found and began watching his patient from the very start, as soon as he'd sat down again, just as a trumpet sounded. Saw him controlling four racing horses with his left hand, his injured side, while whipping with his right and leaning absurdly far forward on the precarious, bouncing platform on which the racers stood. Then he saw Scortius tilt his body hard to the right, and it seemed to Rustem as if the charioteer was pulling his team that way, with his own damaged body above the flashing, spinning wheels.

He felt suddenly and inexplicably moved. The knife he'd seen flash and fall under the stands had been, in fact, quite unnecessary, he now judged.

The man intended to kill himself before them all.

He had been, in his own day, as celebrated as any racer who'd ever driven a quadriga in this place.

There were three monuments to him in the spina, and one of them was silver. The first Emperor Valerius-this one's uncle-had been forced to summon him from retirement twice, so impassioned had been the beseechings of the Hippodrome crowd. The third time-the last time- he'd left the track they'd made a procession for him from the Hippodrome Forum to the landward walls, and there had been people lining the streets several bodies deep all the way there. Two hundred thousand souls, or so the Urban Prefecture had reported.

Astorgus of the Blues (once a Green) had no false modesty at all, no diffidence about his own achievements on these sands where he had duelled and won, and won again, against a succession of challengers and the Ninth Driver, always, for two decades.

It was the very last of those young challengers-the one he'd retired from-who was before him now, riding Second chariot, with broken ribs and an open wound and no longer young. And of all those watching in those first moments of the race, it was Astorgus the factionarius-blunt and scarred, immensely knowledgeable and famously undemonstrative-who first grasped what was happening, reading eight quadrigas in a single capacious glance, their speeds and angles and drivers and capacities, and who then offered a savage, swift prayer aloud to banned, blasphemous, necessary Heladikos, son of the god.

He was along the outside wall, standing for the start where he usually did, two-thirds of the way down the straight, past the chalk line, in a safety zone carved out for the track officials between the outer railing and the first row of seats, which were set back here. As a consequence, he had the illusion that Scortius was driving straight towards him when he took that absurd, unprecedented careen towards the outside, not the rail.