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words, ‘I will perform what I have promised . . . in the name of the gods.’
    ‘There,’ breathed Makaria, bowing her head.
    The ring of office was loose, as it had been the first time he’d worn it as Regent, not like the months afterwards when it had fitted his index finger so closely he scarcely felt its weight as separate from his body, grafting authority onto him, and still there had been so much he couldn’t do. And now?
    ‘Then I say that . . . Then I . . .’ How had he imagined this happening when the time finally came? What words had he been going to use? For of course he had thought about it, over the years, weighing different phrases that had sounded good, enough to string something simple together, at least . . . ‘Slavery is to be abolished,’ he said, ‘everywhere in the Empire.’
    Makaria nodded. ‘All right.’
    He didn’t quite like the way that sounded, too mild and soft, as if she were only humouring him and it didn’t matter what he said. He urged, ‘Write it, write it down.’
    Makaria looked anxiously round at the ruins, letting out a small grunt of powerlessness, but the Praetorian felt in the ragged remains of the jacket he’d laid over Marcus and handed her a little pad and a pen.
    ‘From now,’ Marcus rasped out as she wrote. ‘From right now.’
    She folded his fingers around the pen and guided it through the shapes of his long name.
    Marcus felt a thin flow of relief, and with it, some slight remaining strength suddenly spilling out of him. What little force of his own had been in the hand that held the pen lapsed away.
    Makaria bent closer, pale stripes of tears on her face. ‘Look, Marcus— Don’t just— I can hear them coming, I can
see
them. Just keep listening to me, just wait a little longer, you’ll be fine . . .’
    Marcus said, ‘You wouldn’t have done this if you thought that,’ and then realised dimly that he hadn’t said it, hadn’t spoken at all. It didn’t seem worth the effort of trying again, only to say that.
    He turned slow eyes up to the punctured roof again. The Colosseum had been built for people to die in. That thought should have been chilling, but somehow it was not, it almost comforted him in the solitude that crept through him inch by inch, for all that Makaria hadn’t let go of his hand.
    Then the medics did climb in, on ladders propped against the walls of the box, over the wreckage of the screens. The colours of their uniforms flashed around Marcus indistinctly, like wings. Then there were fingers on his throat again, and pain and cold hollowing him out. So many people, so much noise and movement filling the place, piling over him, that Marcus felt himself recede, helplessly, to make room for them.
    Something he should have made sure of, something forgotten and terrible scratched like a rat in a wall at the edge of his mind, requiring him to try, reluctantly, to remember.
    Makaria, further away from him now, repeated his name: ‘Marcus. Marcus.’
    From this approach, the Colosseum looked unscathed, but he’d seen ambulances and vigile vehicles swerving through cross-currents of a loose, complex mass of people spreading down the broad street, under the mirrory surfaces of the courts and temples of the Sacred Way, limping and pushing along in the rain.
    They were turning back cars on the Sublician Bridge, but Sulien, half-guiltily, slid the trirota out of the choked traffic and between the tight-faced officers before they could decide it was worth stopping him. He swung straight from the saddle into a run, leaving the trirota by a Praetorian car at the end of the Sacred Way.
    There was already a short, tidy line of corpses under plastic sheeting outside the Colosseum, and a rough cordon of vigile officers around it. Sulien ran up, feeling hastily in his pockets for identity papers, wishing he’d brought his pass from the clinic.
    ‘Move back, move back.’
    ‘My name’s Novianus Sulien; I—’
    ‘Move back,’ repeated the nearest