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he
thought.
    He looked up, tears in his eyes, pain taking his breath away.
Excubitors. Of course. Three of them had come. Armed, impersonal,
merciless. They could kill him as easily as crack him across the
knees, and with as much impunity. This was Sarantium. Commoners died
to make an example every day. A spear point was leveled at his
breast.
    'Next man who strikes another here gets a spearpoint, not a shaft,'
the man holding the weapon said, his voice hollow within his helmet.
He was utterly calm. The Imperial Guard were the best-trained men in
the City.
    'You'll be busy, then,' said Daccilio bluntly, unintimidated. 'It
seems the spontaneous demonstration arranged by the illustrious
Daleinoi is not achieving what might have been desired.'
    The three Excubitors looked up into the stands and the one with the
levelled spear swore, rather less calmly. There were fistfights
breaking out now, centred around the men who had been shouting that
patently contrived acclamation. Fotius lay motionless, not even
daring to rub his legs, until the spear point wavered and moved away.
The green-eyed imposter in the torn blue tunic was no longer among
them. Fotius had no idea where he'd gone.
    Pappio knelt beside him. 'My friend, are you all right?'
    Fotius managed to nod. He wiped at the tears and sweat on his face.
His tunic and legs were coated with dust now, from the sacred ground
where charioteers raced. He felt a sudden wave of fellow-feeling for
the balding glassblower. Pappio was a Green, to be sure, but he was a
decent fellow for all that. And he had helped unmask a deception.
    Asportus of the Blues! Asportus? Fotius almost gagged. Trust the
Daleinoi, those arrogant patricians, to have so little respect for
the citizens as to imagine this shabby pantomime could get Flavius's
rump onto the Golden Throne!
    The Excubitors beside them suddenly pulled themselves into a line,
bristling with military precision. Fotius glanced quickly past them.
A man on a horse had entered the Hippodrome, riding slowly along the
spina towards the midpoint.
    Others saw the rider. Someone cried his name, and then more voices
did. This time it was spontaneous. A guard of Excubitors moved into
place around him as he reined the horse to a stop. It was the formal
array of their ranks, and the silence of them, that drew all eyes and
compelled a gradual stillness of twenty thousand people.
    'Citizens of Sarantium, I have tidings,' cried Valerius, Count of the
Excubitors, in the rough, unvarnished soldier's tones.
    They couldn't all hear him, of course, but the words were repeated by
others-as was always the case here-and ran through that vast space,
far up into the stands, across the spina with its obelisks and
statues, through the empty kathisma where the Emperor would sit for
the racing, and under the arches where some charioteers and
Hippodrome staff were watching, shielded from the blazing sun.
    Fotius saw the brooch on the sand beside him. He palmed it quickly.
No one else seemed to notice. He would sell it, not long after, for
enough money to change his life. Just now, though, he scrambled to
his feet. He was dusty, grimy, sticky with sweat, but thought he
should be standing when his Emperor was named.
    He was wrong about what was coming, but why should he have understood
the dance being danced that day?
    Â 
    Much later, the investigation by the Master of Offices, through the
Quaestor of Imperial Intelligence, proved unexpectedly and
embarrassingly incapable of determining the murderers of the most
prominent Sarantine aristocrat of his day.
    It was established readily enough that Flavius Daleinus-only recently
returned to the City, had left his home on the morning of the death
of the Emperor Apius, accompanied by his two older sons, a nephew,
and a small retinue. Family members confirmed that he was on his way
to the Senate Chamber to offer a formal expression of support to the
Senators in their time of trial and decision. There was some
suggestion-not