The Anonymous caught her hand, in those days not yet brightened by the sparkle of a wedding ring. I pitied him. No monarchy has ever had so suspenseful a succession. An impotent king may wait decades for an heir, but at least he can try aphrodisiacs, affairs, placebos. The Anonymous can only wait and hope for the day some bright young thing will reason him out and come to claim the apprenticeship, as he came to his predecessor, and she to hers, back through six generations. Such a helpless wait, and now the bright young thing had appeared before him, but I had already thrown my life away. Yes it’s true. I could have been the next Anonymous, the second most powerful political voice on Earth. But I gave that up to teach you, gentle reader, what violence the human beast can sow when we are free. It was hardly the greatest sacrifice I made—I sacrificed my life as well, and worse, I would die in a hangman’s arms, and not my Saladin’s.

“I know Mycroft can’t be the successor now,” the Anonymous answered, “but however sick they are there’s so much potential there! They’re seventeen, for goodness sake! A child! We all heard the hopes the Mardis had for Mycroft.” He turned from Power to Power, searching for one whose eyes would not shy away. “Andō, you were there when Kohaku and Chiasa first brought Mycroft to my office. Ten years as Deputy Censor and Kohaku was barely faster than Mycroft aged nine. We all know Aeneas was grooming them for the highest office, and Felix!” He turned to Headmaster Faust, on the couch behind. “You had Mycroft at the Institute. You know we can’t throw a mind like that away.” He choked. “Murderer or no, Mycroft’s all we have left of the Mardi bash’ now, and of Apollo. We—”

“Mycroft Canner will live.”

No stone on stone, no hammer on anvil, no thunderbolt striking the heart could fall so heavily as the Emperor’s words. I spotted him now too, the seventh of the Seven, sitting at the room’s end, his uniform of imperial gray like ash against the festival of silk and gold that played across the walls. He would spare me? MASON, who had glowed in Apollo’s presence like a dead coal brought to life, the one among the Powers I had trusted to crush my throat with his own hand if the others faltered—now he talks of sparing me? It was beyond my ability to even think it. That cage was my coffin. I had sacrificed my life eight days earlier when, hand in hand, my Saladin and I set the torch to the wicker prison which held the maimed but living remnants of Luther Mardigras. Luther was the fifth to die, but was the turning point, the moment that we knew I had left traces enough that the police would catch me, not right away, but someday, even if I stopped. For the week since I lit that torch, I had lived in the unique and absolute philosophic calm of one who has already drunk the hemlock, or already sees his heart’s blood streaming from the wound. A dead man’s philosophy. When Hope left she took Doubt with her, leaving only resolution, and a quiet curiosity about the larger nature of the universe. I mused, those seven nights, abstractly about what forces had conspired to put me in such a place, and make me such a person that I would choose this. I almost thought the dread word ‘Providence.’ But my path was set, and the possibility that I would be denied death was not hope to me now—it was betrayal. How dare the world make me do what I had done and then threaten to deny me my execution! I opened my mouth to object, to scream, to spit my curses at the Powers and demand death, but Caesar finished first: