You should be Emperor, Marcus, he remembered a woman saying to him once, long ago. Well, now he had his chance. The minutes ticked away, and he sat as still as the statue he could commission of himself by tomorrow morning, if he liked.

He fished for a scrap of parchment. For a pen. For ink. He wrote a single word. A yawning slave, roused from bed, ambled off with it toward the Domus Augustana.

Marcus turned his head into the shadows. He held out his hand and waited with a slow, reluctant flutter of hope for the touch of Calpurnia’s warm fingers.

THEA

THE Empress brought the silence with her into her private tablinum. Outside slaves screamed, guards rushed back and forth, the marble halls echoed with uproar, but she closed the door firmly behind me and locked it all out.

“The noise,” she grimaced. “It’s going to be a very noisy few days, I’m afraid. As soon as the Empire is staggering along under its own power again, I’m going to retire to a quiet little villa in Baiae where you can’t hear anything but birds.” The woman who had just murdered her husband settled down behind her desk with a businesslike air. “Perhaps I shall write my memoirs.”

I blinked. A dozen slave women could testify that the Empress had been sitting innocently at her loom weaving household cloth when her husband was hacked apart, but she had certainly arrived speedily on the scene as soon as everything was done. Before the rush of slaves and guards flooded into the bloody Imperial bedchamber in her wake, Arius and Vix and I had all been efficiently whirled in separate directions. “For anonymity’s sake,’” the Empress had explained as Vix disappeared down one hall, Arius down another, and she had grasped my elbow and escorted me personally from the moonstone-sheathed, blood-soaked bedchamber to her own private tablinum. I had no guarantee that she wouldn’t . . . well, do anything. How well did I really know the Empress? How well did anyone know her?

“So where are Arius and my son?” I said, feeling the words float up from a long distance. “Some quiet little cell where you’ll soon take me, where we’ll all be strangled and disposed of? Is that part of your mopping up?”

“Twenty years ago, yes.” The Empress frowned absently at one of her many lists. “But I’ve grown a trifle wiser with age. You and I, Thea, have the merit of being the only two women in the world to survive Domitian’s affection. Surely a sign of divine favor, and I am not one to tamper with the gods’ chosen.”

“Then where is Arius?”

“Arius.” The Empress checked off a point on one list. “Being privately patched up by my personal physician, who says he’ll be good as new far sooner than any man of his age and habits has a right to expect. Although we’ll put out an official announcement that he’s dead,” she added. “ ‘The slave Stephanus, chief assassin of our beloved Emperor, was mortally wounded himself during the epic struggle’ etc. At least one villain must be publicly accounted for. We’ll find a criminal’s body to display on the Gemonian Stairs.”