“I know I have no right to mourn Apollo, Caesar,” I answered, struggling to breathe between my sobs, “but that doesn’t keep me from needing to.”

In another place his black-sleeved fist would have threatened violence. Not here. “You lied, Mycroft.”

“I only slip my tracker when I have to, Caesar. Sometimes—”

“I don’t care about your tracker.” He spoke English, unwilling to exchange Latin with one who has no right to know it. “Apollo’s Iliad. You pretended all these years it was a storybook, a modern retelling of the Trojan War. I never asked to see it because you said Apollo wouldn’t want me to read it before you finished it, the more fool me.”

I shuddered. “It is a storybook, Caesar. Apollo’s unfinished novel.”

“The police know better. It’s a handbook for the Mardis’ war.”

“It’s not.”

His impatient hands grasped at the rain. “Give it to me. I should never have let you keep it.”

“I haven’t been trying to start the war, Caesar, I swear!” I answered. “I tried to stop it. Everything I did, I did to stop it. Do you think I could have done this to Apollo if there was any other way?”

I heard the Emperor’s knuckles crack despite the rain. “What you did to Apollo and the others was sick beyond imagining. If you had just been trying to stop the war, you could have made the murders quick and painless.”

“And what justice would there be in that?” I snapped, startled at my own heat. “The Mardis committed themselves to war and all its consequences: rape, torture, oppression, famine, flame, children half crushed by bombs crying to the dark as they wait for their broken limbs to bleed enough to let them die. What I gave them was a fraction of what they planned to give the world. Aeneas, Geneva, Kohaku, Chiasa, all of them would rather have killed themselves than live to see the future they were trying to create. Painless deaths would not have been just punishment for what they planned, and they knew it.”

“You call it justice?”

MASON stepped toward me, hands hungry for some justice of his own, but he stopped before the somber, staring vizor of Apollo’s statue. It had been a challenge for the sculptor, how to render recognizable in stone a figure so completely shrouded, the too-long sleeves leaving only fingertips peeking out, the mouth and nose barely visible between collar and vizor, hair showing only in moments when the hood fell back. The artist settled on two tricks. Reflections first, polishing the coat so the marble reflects the faces and colors of passersby, much like the Griffincloth reality. Motion was the second trick, a forward momentum in sculpted Apollo’s gait, so winds lift the coat and drive the hood back, as if he were about to leap down from a ship’s prow to make first footfall on a newfound shore, or into battle, to counter Caesar’s violence with his own.