Deadly curses were dropped on wax tablets into graves, wells, cisterns, were buried at crossroads, hurled into the sea by moonlight from the City walls. Alchemists and cheiromancers-real ones and charlatans-were paid to cast ruinous spells against named riders and horses. In the hippodromes of the Empire the charioteers raced with Death-the Ninth Driver-as much as with each other. Heladikos, son of Jad, had died in his chariot, and they were his followers. Or some of them were.

The two racers stood in silence a moment, watching the tumult from the shadowed arch. If the crowd spotted them, Scortius knew, they'd be besieged, on the spot.

They weren't seen. Instead, Astorgus said very softly, after a silence, "That man. The group just there. All the Blues? He isn't. He isn't a Blue. I know him. I wonder what he's doing?"

Scortius, only mildly interested, glanced over in time to see the man idicated cup hands to mouth and shout, in a patrician, carrying voice: "Daleinus to the Golden Throne! The Blues for Flavius Daleinus!"

"Oh, my," said Astorgus, First Chariot of the Blues, almost to himself. "Here too? What a clever, clever bastard he is." Scortius had no idea what the other man was talking about.

Only long afterwards, looking back, piecing things together, would he understand.

Fotius the sandalmaker had actually been eyeing the heavy-set, smooth-shaven man in the perfectly pressed blue tunic for some time.

Standing in an unusually mixed cluster of faction partisans and citizens of no evident affiliation, Fotius mopped at his forehead with a damp sleeve and tried to ignore the sweat trickling down his ribs and back. His own tunic was stained and splotched. So was Pappio's green one, beside him. The glassblower's balding head was covered with a cap that might once have been handsome but was now a wilted object of general mirth. It was brutally hot already. The breeze had died with the sunrise.