"What?" said Saxa. He looked at her, blinking. He seemed surprised to hear words in the midst of applause that had as little content as a crashing thunderstorm. "The emperor, my dear? No, Meoetes did all this, but he was doing it for me."

"My lord and master," Hedia said, chipping the words out and no longer trying to hide her frightened anger. "Tell Carce that it owes this entertainment to the emperor. Otherwise you and Meoetes and your family will be entertaining the city from the tops of crosses!"

Saxa looked blank for an instant. "Oh!" he said. "Yes, this was… this was…"

Apparently he couldn't decide how to describe the vision any better than Hedia could have, so he lurched to his feet instead of finishing the sentence. He raised his arms. For a moment the cheers increased, but Saxa turned his palms outward as though pushing the sound away.

Hedia sank onto her stool, feeling unexpected relief. She couldn't do anything about the glass figures of her dreams, but at least she had gotten Saxa-gotten her whole family-out of the immediate trouble. At any rate, she had done what was humanly possible to avoid immediate repercussions from this vision, this waking nightmare.

The curtain was canvas and split ceiling to floor down the middle. Ordinarily only half was used at a time, concealing set changes on a portion of the long stage. Now both right and left portions began to move toward the center, but they jerked and stuttered instead of sliding smoothly as they had before. By leaning over the railing, Hedia could see that three and four men were manhandling the heavy curtains rather than the dozen stagehands in each of the original crews.

Candidus must have carried the message successfully; that, or Meoetes had come to the same conclusion on his own. The actors still on stage looked like casualties of a gladiatorial show that the doctors and Charon-the costumed slave who drove the dead wagon-hadn't gotten to yet.