Carullus would have known what to say to them. But Crispin was not a soldier. Nor had his father been. Though that hadn't stopped Horius Crispus from dying in battle, had it? Styliane's father had burned. That abomination on the isle had been handsome once, and proud. Crispin thought of the god's image on the dome in Sauradia, his face grey, his fingers broken in the struggle against evil.

And he was falling, piece by piece.

They lowered the wide plank to the dock. They didn't unroll the carpet. The Empress was not here. Crispin went down and away from all of them amid the bustle of a harbour preparing for war, and no one stopped him, no one even noted his passing.

In the distance as he walked from the sea he could hear a roaring sound. The Hippodrome. Men and women watching horses run for their delight. There was a sickness within him, a black foreboding in the day. Some events must happen now.

He had no idea where to go, what to do. The taverns would be quiet, with so many at the Hippodrome, but he didn't want to sit somewhere and get drunk. Yet. With the chariots running, Carullus wouldn't be at home, he thought, nor would Shirin. Artibasos would be in the Sanctuary, and so would Pardos and Vargos, almost certainly. He could go to work. He could always do that. He had been working this morning when she'd come for him. He'd been trying to summon the distance and the clarity to render his daughters on the dome, that they might be there for as near to forever as an artisan could dream of achieving.

He didn't have any of it now. Not the girls, or distance or clarity. Not even the simplicity of anger any more. For the first time Crispin could remember, the thought of going up and absorbing himself in craft repelled him. He had seen men die this morning, had struck a blow himself. Going up the ladder now would be… a coward's retreat. And he would badly mar whatever work he tried to do today.

Another huge roar from the Hippodrome. He was walking that way.

Entered into the Hippodrome Forum, saw the vast bulk of the building, the Sanctuary across the way, the statue of the first Valerius and the Bronze Gates beyond it, leading into the Imperial Precinct.

Events were happening there now, or had already happened. He looked at those gates, standing very still in a huge space. Imagined walking up and seeking admittance. An urgent need to speak to the Emperor. About some aspect of his dome, colour choices, the angle of tesserae. Could he be announced and presented?

Crispin became aware that his mouth was very dry and his heart was hammering painfully. He was a Rhodian, from a fallen, conquered land, one that Valerius was proposing to visit again with devastating war. He'd sent messages home, to his mother, his friends, knowing they would mean nothing, could achieve nothing.

He ought to hate the man who was readying this fleet, these soldiers. Instead, he was remembering Valerius one night in the Sanctuary, running his hand through the hair of a rumpled architect, like a mother, telling him-ordering him-to go home and sleep.

Were the Antae better than what Sarantium might bring to the peninsula? Especially the Antae as they would be now, civil war savagely portended. There were more deaths coming, whether Valerius's army sailed or not.

And assassination attempts were not confined to barbarians like the Antae, Crispin thought, looking at the proud glory of those bronze gates. He wondered if Valerius was dead; thought again of Alixana. On the beach just now, the surf-washed stones: When your wife died… how did you go on living?

How had she known to ask that?

He ought not to care so much. He ought to still be a stranger here, detached from these glittering, deadly figures and whatever was happening today. These people-women and men-were so far beyond him they moved through an entirely different space in Jad's creation. He was an artisan. A layer of glass and stone. Whoever ruled, he had told Martiman once, in his anger, there would be work for mosaicists, why should they be concerned with what intrigues happened in palaces?

He was marginal, incidental… and burdened with images. He looked at the Bronze Gates, still hesitating, still imagining an approach, but then he turned away.

He went to a chapel. Randomly chosen, the first one he came to along a lane running down and east. Not a street he knew. The chapel was small, quiet, nearly empty, a handful of women, mostly older, shapes in shadow, murmuring, no cleric at this hour. The chariots taking the people away. An old, old battle. Here the sunlight almost disappeared into a pallid half-light filtering through too-small windows ringing a low dome. No decorations. Mosaics were expensive, so were frescoes. It was obvious no wealthy people attended here, salving their souls with gifts to the clerics. There were lamps suspended from overhead in a single line from altar to doors, a handful of others at the side altars, but only a few of them were lit: they would be frugal with oil, at winter's end.

Crispin stood for a time facing the altar and the disk, and then he knelt-no cushions here-on the hard floor and closed his eyes. Among women at prayer he thought of his mother: small and brave and exquisite, scent of lavender always about her, alone for so long, since his father died. He felt very far away.

Someone rose, signed the disk, arid walked out. An old woman, bent with her years. Crispin heard the door open and swing shut behind him. It was very quiet. And then, in that stillness, he heard someone begin to sing.

He looked up. No one else seemed to stir. The voice, delicate and plaintive, was off to his left. He seemed to see a shadowy figure there, at one of the side altars where the lamp was not burning. There were a handful of candles lit by the altar but he couldn't even tell if the singer was a girl or an older woman, the light was so subdued.

He did realize, after a moment, collecting his meandering thoughts, that the voice was singing in Trakesian, which was entirely strange. The liturgy here was always chanted in Sarantine.

His command of Trakesian-the old tongue of those who had ruled much of the world before Rhodias-was precarious, but as he listened it came to Crispin that what he was hearing was a lament.

No one else moved. No one entered. He knelt among praying women in a dim, holy place and listened to a voice sing of sorrow in a ancient tongue, and it occurred to him that music was one of the things that had not been in his life since Ilandra died. Her night songs for the girls had been for him, as well, listening in the house.

Who knows love?

Who says he knows love?

This singer, a shape and barely that, a voice without a body, was not singing a Kindath lullaby. She was offering-Crispin finally understood- an entirely pagan sorrow: the corn maiden and the antlered god, the Sacrifice and the Hunted One. In a chapel of Jad. Images that had already been ancient when Trakesia was great.

Crispin shivered, kneeling on stone. Looked again to his left, eyes straining to pierce the gloom. Only a shadow. Candles. Only a voice. No one moved.

And it came to him then, feeling unseen spirits hovering in the dimness, that Valerius the Emperor had been Petrus of Trakesia before he came south to his uncle from the northern fields, and that he would have known this song.

And with that, there came another thought and Crispin closed his eyes again and named himself a fool. For if this were true-and of course it was-then Valerius would also have known exactly what the bison in Crispin's sketches for the Sanctuary was. He was from northern Trakesia, the forests and grainlands, places where pagan roots had been in the soil for centuries.

Valerius would have recognized the zubir as soon as he'd seen it in the drawings.