They approached a mooring, far down the slip, manoeuvring among the other jostling small boats. Obscenities and jests rang back and forth across the water. Mariscus was only just adequate to navigating his way in. They were loudly cursed, she swore back, crudely, in a voice she hadn't used for fifteen years, and made a caupona jest. Mariscus, sweating, looked quickly up at her and then bent back to his task. Someone in the other boat laughed aloud, back-oared and made way for them, then asked what she'd do in return.

Her reply made them whoop with laughter.

They docked. Mariscus leaped out, tied the boat. Aliana moved quickly, stepping out herself before he could offer a hand. She said, quickly and low, "If all is well you have earned more than you can dream of, and my thanks for a lifetime. If it is not well, I ask nothing more of you than what you have now done. Jad guard you, soldier."

He was blinking rapidly. She realized-with surprise-that he was fighting back tears. "They will learn nothing from me, my lady. But is there nothing more…?"

"Nothing more," she said briskly, and went away.

He meant what he said, and was a brave man, but of course they would learn what he knew if they were shrewd enough to find him and ask. Men had, sometimes, a touching belief in their ability to withstand professional questioning.

She walked up the long slip alone, barefoot, her adornments gone or hidden, her long robe torn into a short, stained tunic (still too fine for her station now, she would need another soon). One man stopped and stared at her and her heart lurched. Then he made a loud offer, and she relaxed.

"Not enough money and not enough man," said the Empress of Sarantium, looking the sailor up and down. She tossed her shorn, ragged hair, and turned away dismissively. "Find a donkey to hump for that price." His outraged protest was drowned in laughter.

She walked on through the thronged, noisy harbour, a silence within her so deep it echoed. She trudged up a narrow street. She didn't know it. So much had changed in fifteen years. Her feet hurt already. She hadn't walked barefoot in a long time.

She saw a small chapel and stopped. Was about to go in to try to order her thoughts, to pray, when-in that moment-she heard from within a known voice speaking her name.

She remained where she was, didn't look around. This was a voice from nowhere and everywhere, someone who was hers alone. Had been hers alone.

She felt an emptiness invade her like an army. She stood very still in that small, steep city street and amid the crowds and bustle, with no privacy at all, she bade a last farewell, by birth name not Imperial one, to the loved soul that was leaving, that was already gone from her and from the world.

She had wanted forbidden dolphins for her room. Had taken the mosaicist, Crispin, to see them this morning. Only this same morning. Petrus had… found them first. Or been found by them, and not as a mosaic on a wall. Was perhaps being carried, his soul, to wherever they carried souls on the way to Jad. She hoped they were kind, that the way was easy, that there had not been too much pain.

No one saw her weep. There were no tears to see. She was a whore in the City, with people to kill before they found and killed her.

She had no idea where to go.

In the tunnel, the two guards made the remarkably foolish mistake of looking back over their shoulders when the Emperor fell. This entire circumstance, the horror of it, had undermined all their training, unmoored them like ships torn from their anchors in a storm. They burned for the error. Died screaming, as the blind man found and pulled the trigger on the nozzle that released the liquid fire. Lecanus Daleinus was cursing, crying, high-pitched and incomprehensible, wailing as if demented in his own mortal agony, but he aimed the nozzle with uncanny accuracy past his sister and brother straight at the soldiers.

They were underground, far from life and the world. No one heard them screaming or the bubble and sizzle of melting flesh save for the three Daleinoi and the gross, avid man beside them, and the other one, standing behind the dead Emperor, sufficiently far away that he felt a wet surge of heat come down the tunnel and a bowel-gripping fear but was not even singed by that fire from long ago.

He became aware, as the heat died away and the screams and the wet moaning stopped, that they were looking at him. The Daleinoi, and the fat man he remembered very well and had not known was in the City. It… pained him that that could have happened without his knowing.

But there were greater sources of distress just now.

He cleared his throat, looked at the bloodied, sticky dagger in his hand. There had never been blood on it before, ever. He wore a blade for display, no more. He looked down at the dead man at his feet.

And Pertennius of Eubulus said then, feelingly, "This is terrible. So terrible. Everyone agrees it is wrong for an historian to intervene in the events he chronicles. He loses so much authority, you understand."

They stared at him. No one said anything at all. It was possible they were overwhelmed by the truth of what he'd said.

The blind one, Lecanus, was crying, making strangled, ugly sounds in his throat. He was still on his knees. There was a smell of meat in the tunnel. The soldiers. Pertennius was afraid he would be ill.

"How did you get in here?" It was Lysippus.

Styliane was looking at the Emperor. The dead man at Pertennius's feet. She had a hand on her weeping brother's shoulder, but she released him now, stepped past the two burned men and stopped, a little way down the tunnel, staring at her husband's secretary.

Pertennius wasn't at all sure he owed any answers to an exiled monster like the Calysian, but this did not seem the right context in which to explore that thought. He said, looking at the woman, his employer's wife, "The Strategos sent me to discover what was detaining the… the Emperor. There have come… have just come, tidings…»

He never stammered like this. He took a breath. "Tidings had just come that he thought the Emperor should know."

The Emperor was dead.

"How did you get in?" Styliane this time, same question. Her expression was odd. Unfocused. Looking at him, but not really. She didn't like him. Pertennius knew that. She didn't like anyone, though, so it hadn't much mattered.

He cleared his throat again, smoothed the front of his tunic. "I have, happen to have some keys? That… open locks."

"Of course you do," said Styliane quietly. He knew her irony well, the bite of it, but there was something bloodless, perfunctory about her tone this time. She was looking down again, at the dead man. Untidily sprawled. Blood on the mosaic stones.

"There were no guards," explained Pertennius, though they hadn't asked. "No one in the corridor outside. There… should have been. I thought"

"You thought something might be happening and you wanted to see it." Lysippus. The distinctive, clipped tones. He smiled, the folds of his face shifting. "Well, you did see, didn't you? What now, historian?"

Historian. There was blood on his blade. Mockery in the Calysian's tone. Smell of meat. The woman looked at him again, waiting.

And Pertennius of Eubulus, gazing back at her, not at Lysippus, did the simplest thing. He knelt, very near the body of the anointed Emperor he'd loathed and had killed, and, setting his dagger down, he said softly, "My lady, what is it you wish me to tell the Strategos?"

She let out a breath. To the secretary, watching her narrowly, she seemed to have become hollowed out, a figure without force or intensity. It… interested him.

She didn't even answer. Her brother did, lifting his hideous face. "I killed him," Lecanus Daleinus said. "By myself. My younger brother and sister… came and… killed me for it. So virtuous! Report it so… secretary. Record it." The whistle in his voice became more pronounced than ever. "Record it… during the reign… of the Emperor Leontes and his glorious Empress… and of the Daleinus… children… who will follow!"