Paradoxes have layers, irony can be double-edged. He didn't yet know of his wife's death.

In the Senate Chambers they were waiting for others of their number to arrive through the unruly streets. The Excubitors were out and about, collecting Senators, escorting them as quickly as possible. Not surprising, that speed. Most of the City was unaware of the Emperor's death, so far. That ignorance wouldn't last long, not in Sarantium, even in the midst of a riot. Perhaps especially, Bonosus thought, reclining in his seat, in the midst of a riot.

Many levels of memory were competing in his mind and he was also trying-unsuccessfully-to come to terms with the fact that Valerius was dead. An Emperor murdered. It hadn't happened in a very long time. Bonosus had known better than to ask questions.

The soldiers had reason to want the Senate assembled expeditiously.

Whatever the story of the death of Valerius turned out to be-the exiled Lysippus had been declared to be back in the City, and involved, as was the banished and imprisoned Lecanus Daleinus-there was no real question as to who should succeed the slain Emperor.

Or, putting it a little differently, thought Bonosus, there were reasons for Leontes to proceed swiftly, before such questions might arise.

The Supreme Strategos was, after all, married to a Daleinus, and there might be those who took a reflective view of assassinating one's predecessor on the Golden Throne. Especially when the murdered man had been one's own mentor and friend. And when the deed was done on the eve of war. It could be called-by someone much more reckless than Plautus Bonosus-a vile and contemptible act of treachery.

Bonosus's thoughts kept whirling about. Too many shocks in one day. The return of Scortius, that astonishing race that had turned from glory into riot in a heartbeat. And then, just as the fighting began, there had been the voice of Leontes's grey secretary in his ear: 'Your presence is Immediately requested in the palace.

He hadn't said by whom. It didn't matter. Senators did what they were told. Bonosus had risen to go just as he realized something had happened in the spina-he would learn the details afterwards-and he heard a deep-throated roar as the Hippodrome erupted.

He suspected, looking back, that Leontes (or his wife?) had wanted him to come to them alone, as Master of the Senate, to learn the tidings before anyone else did. That would give them time to quietly summon the Senate, control the release of the terrible news.

It didn't work out that way.

As the stands exploded into fury and a rush for the exits, the inhabitants of the Imperial Box rose to their feet and made a collective rush of their own for the doors leading back to the Attenine Palace. Bonosus remembered the expression on the pallid secretary's face: startled and displeased, and afraid.

When Bonosus and Pertennius did make it back through the long walkway to the palace's audience chamber, it was crowded with noisy, frightened courtiers who'd fled the kathisma ahead of them. Others were arriving. In the centre of the room-near the thrones and the silver tree-stood Leontes and Styliane.

The Strategos lifted a hand for silence. Not the Master of Offices, not the Chancellor. Gesius had just entered the room, in fact, through the small door behind the two thrones. He stopped there, brow furrowed in perplexity. In the stillness his gesture shaped it was Leontes, blunt and grave, who said, "I am sorry, but this must be told. We have lost our father today. Jad's most holy Emperor is dead."

There was a babble of disbelief. A woman cried out. Someone near Bonosus made the sign of the sun disk, then others did. Someone knelt, then all of them did, the sound like a murmuring of the sea. All of them except Styliane and Leontes. And Gesius, Bonosus saw. The Chancellor didn't looked perplexed now. His expression was otherwise. He put out a hand to steady himself on a table and said, from directly behind those tall, golden figures and the thrones, "How? How did this happen? And how is it that you know?"

The thin, precise voice cut hard through the room. This was Sarantium. The Imperial Precinct. Not a place where certain things could be easily controlled. Not with so many competing interests and clever men.

And women. It was Styliane who turned to face the Chancellor, Styliane who said, her voice oddly without force-as if she'd just been bled by a physician, Bonosus thought-'He was murdered in the tunnel between palaces. He was burned, by Sarantine Fire."

Bonosus remembered closing his eyes at that. Past and present coming together so powerfully he felt dizzied. He opened his eyes. Pertennius, kneeling next to him, was white-faced, he saw.

"By whom?" Gesius released the table and took a step forward. He stood alone, a little apart from everyone else. A man who had served three Emperors, survived two successions.

Was unlikely to last through a third, asking these questions in this way. It occurred to the Senator that the aged Chancellor might not care.

Leontes looked at his wife, and again it was Styliane who replied. "My brother Lecanus. And the exiled Calysian, Lysippus. They seem to have suborned the guards at the tunnel door. And obviously my brother's guards on the isle."

Another murmuring. Lecanus Daleinus and fire. The past here with them in the room, Bonosus thought.

"I see," said Gesius, his papery voice so devoid of nuance it was a nuance of its own. "Just the two of them?"

"So it would seem," said Leontes, calmly. "We will need to investigate, of course."

"Of course," agreed Gesius, again with nothing to be discerned in his tone. "So good of you to point that out, Strategos. We might have neglected to think of it. I imagine the Lady Styliane was alerted by her brother of his evil intent and arrived tragically too late to forestall them?"

There was a small silence. Too many people were hearing this, Bonosus thought. It would be all over the City before sunset. And there was already violence in Sarantium. He felt afraid.

The Emperor was dead.

"The Chancellor is, as ever, wisest of us," said Styliane quietly. "It is as he says. I beg you to imagine my grief and shame. My brother was also dead, by the time we arrived. And the Strategos killed Lysippus when we saw him there, standing over the bodies."

"Killed him," Gesius murmured. He smiled thinly, a man infinitely versed in the ways of a court. Indeed. And the soldiers you mentioned?"

"Were already burned," Leontes said.

Gesius said nothing this time, only smiled again, allowing silence to speak for him. Someone was weeping in the crowded chamber.

"We must take action. There is rioting in the Hippodrome," Faustinus said. The Master of Offices finally asserting himself. He was rigid with tension, Bonosus saw. "And what about the announcement of the war?"

"There will be no announcement now," said Leontes flatly. Calm, assured. A leader of men. "And the rioting is not a cause for concern."

"It isn't? Why not?" Faustinus eyed him.

"Because the army is here," Leontes murmured, and looked slowly around the chamber at the assembled court.

It was in that moment, Bonosus thought afterwards, that he himself had begun to see this differently. The Daleinoi might have planned an assassination for their own reasons. He didn't believe for a moment that Styliane had arrived too late at that tunnel, that her blind, maimed brother had been able to plan and execute this from his island. Sarantine Fire spoke to vengeance, more than anything else. But if the Daleinus children had also assumed that Styliane's soldier husband would be a useful figure on the throne, a gateway for their own ambition… Bonosus decided they might have been wrong.

He watched Styliane turn to the tall man she'd married on Valerius's orders. He was an observant man, Plautus Bonosus, had spent years reading small signals, especially at court. She was arriving, he decided, at the same conclusion he was.