Many outsiders to Chrysopolis, ally and enemy to the Empire alike, believed that the rgest building in the entire Macarian domain—and therefore very likely the rgest building in the world—was the Imperial Pace. Considering the vast power of the Emperor, this was not an entirely foolish supposition. But any native to the city, or indeed anyone who spent more than a few days in Chrysopolis, knew that this was incorrect. The Imperial Pace could cim nothing more than second pce in the competition of grandeur. No, the rgest building in Chrysopolis, Macaria, and the world, was the hippodrome.

  One hundred and eighty thousand spectators in rows upon rows of bench seating, sixteen horses, countless hundreds of sves working the heating, the concessions, assisting the teams, and at the top of it all, one Emperor. The hippodrome was a vast dispy of opulence, greater than any army or wall, louder than a thunderstorm, surging with life and energy. Men would make fortunes or sink into great debt based on which team’s chariots were the fastest, and a bad loss could spell doom as the teams rioted in the streets. The whole of the city’s soul was bundled up, for but a few hours, within that massive nexial structure. What better pce for a foundering Emperor to show that he still cared?

  And, for once, Shirrin was at his side. She was already regretting the decision. There was no proper smoke in the air, and it had rained recently enough that there was no dust, but smoke and dust hardly mattered when the air was thick with perfumes and the stink of humans and animals. She clutched anxiously at her bone-charm neckce.

  Peleus had done everything he could to show his people that he was present, wearing only his purple toga and gazing intently at the games below. At his left side was Athan, Aissa seated in her p. At his right side, meanwhile, was General Cychreus, a slim and athletic man who, as of two days prior, was Peleus’s chosen successor. He was exactly the sort of man one would pick as successor immediately after killing your st successor for adultery: that is to say, a boring sycophant shrouded in rumors that he preferred the company of young men.

  The pn was to show strength, to honor the Golden Lord with observance of the holy celebrations, and to make the people think of Peleus as just another man. It wasn’t working. The first race of the day was just ending, the greens having won out this time, and already the energy in the hippodrome was growing angry. Mutterings about the murder of Eteocles were heard from one end of the hippodrome to the other, and thanks to a few special charms, Shirrin heard them all. Her presence, a sign of the supposed Trabakondai corruption infecting the Emperor, did not help.

  And then the second chariot race began, and nobody was speaking a word. Shirrin’s eyes were locked on the field, chariots and horses and drivers turning and charging, but she saw nothing: her mind was entirely consumed thinking about the pn. She had spent days working to make sure that today’s races would be as tense as possible. In a dozen forms and under a dozen names, Shirrin had seeded rumors that the Emperor was showing favoritism to one chariot team over the others, though which team varied based on who was listening. In the form of Imperial officials she had handed out bronze to the masses, and in the form of rabble-rousers she had howled about the Emperor’s audacity to attempt such a bribe. The crowd was flush with coin, but they weren’t happy about it.

  Shirrin’s focus ruptured under a horrible ripping noise, followed by a hundred thousand inarticute screams. There had been a crash, four horses and a man mangled under a pile of splintered wood, and the crowd loved it. A flicker of magic flew off, a minor spirit that had done the deed. Shirrin raised an eyebrow; apparently one of the teams had gathered enough occult power to pull off some minor magic. Rare that such a thing actually worked

  The crowd was enthralled. Boasts and slurs in a dozen nguages rang out, an overwhelming bst of excitement directed at the carnage. Sves rushed out onto the field, dragging the bloodied and broken chariot driver out of the way before his fellows finished another p and crushed him into the soil. The greens were winning yet again.

  And as the chariots went about their ps, as the broken horses and shattered wreckage were further scattered by those who failed to fully avoid it, as the second victory of the greens grew more and more certain, something else was brewing beneath the stands. Food and drink was as important a part of the hippodrome festivities as were the horses. Fried bread, fried fish, wine and beer and oysters cooked in their shells, brought out in great armfuls by sves and given out for free or sold fresh and hot. The quantities of foodstuffs necessary to meet the appetites of the crowd were vast, but the numbers were known, and making sure the pantries underneath the hippodrome remained well-stocked was a crucial task.

  Shirrin had interfered. A line of ink repced here, a fistful of coins stolen here, a merchant repced and his goods sent in the wrong direction, dozens of little pranks that all built to the same conclusion: shortage. There wasn’t enough bread, enough fish, enough wine and oysters for everyone. And midway through the second race of the day, that fact became known. Even the sves could see how little remained in the pantries, and their masters recognized it by instinct. There would be enough for the third race, maybe, but not the whole day.

  The news spread. Sves were sent up with half-loads of refreshment or less, and the prices for that which had to be bought spiked sharply. Some men of influence rose from their seats and rushed down to the kitchens, demanding to know who had allowed for this stinginess, only to return with sneers of annoyance and grumbling compints. Even if Peleus had known what was going on—and he did not—no amount of force could have prevented the news from spreading. All across the hippodrome, thousands upon thousands of men and women learned that there simply wasn’t enough to go around. There was one man whose job it was to ensure that the people were fed, one man who had gone to great effort to remind everyone that, as the representative of the Empire, he was the one who provided all the food and all the entertainment. And he was right there in pin view.

  Shirrin could hear it all developing through her scattered charms. Things were about to get chaotic, and her muscles stiffened in preparation. It was a war, a war between her own anxiety and the knowledge that she could not look as though she had seen anything coming. Again and again the Witch-Queen gnced down and to her left, where Athan and Aissa watched the games.

  The third race of the day came to an end, with the reds having finally pulled off a victory. There would be a lull as the st bits of wreckage were cleared away and the blue and white teams prepared to begin their contests. But the roaring of the crowd did not abate. From somewhere off toward the southern end of the hippodrome, a growing cmor of rage could be heard.

  At first the noise had little impact upon those vaunted individuals within the Imperial booth. They talked amongst each other, or more often stayed quiet and watched the proceedings down on the field, sves and drivers skittering about on their business. Minutes passed, however, and the noise grew closer and louder. Peleus had had enough. He turned to one of his bodyguards and ordered the man to go find out what the commotion was about.

  They didn’t have to wait for his return. As the roaring of the crowd grew even closer, it became possible to hear individual voices, screams of anger and frustration that rose above the general noise. All of those voices had a common theme.

  “Give us our due, greedy bastard!”

  “Murderer! Thief! Adulterer!”

  “He’s barely even the Emperor anymore!”

  “Are you afraid now? You forgot what you’re here for!”

  A hippodrome riot was in full swing, gaining momentum with each passing moment. Just as the hippodrome brought the people together under the beneficence of the Emperor, so too did it bring together their rage. Once a generation or so, more frequently during times of strife, that rage would boil over, and once it had done so the anger of tens of thousands was difficult to stop. Peleus believed he still had a chance, though, for the riot had started at one point and not yet spread to surround him on all sides. He rose from his seat and began handing out orders, orders for the races to be cancelled and postponed, orders for his soldiers to begin forcing people out, quelling the rioters, and calling for reinforcements.

  The casual, pleasant Peleus was gone, repced once more by the leader of troops. He was at war once more, though this time against an enemy that had to be dealt with using a softer-than-usual hand. Aissa, just barely old enough to have something of a grasp of what was happening, turned to her mother with a desperate frown.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said. “What’s happening?”

  “Do you know how your father gets when he’s had too much to drink? Imagine ten thousand of your father. Things are chaotic, but he’s fixing it. He’s going to keep us safe.”

  Shirrin stepped in. “My Empress, though I have no doubt that the Emperor will keep us safe, it might become… gruesome. I believe it would be best if Aissa left the vicinity sooner rather than ter.”

  Athan looked up at Shirrin as though she’d forgotten the Witch-Queen was there, though Shirrin knew from observation that that wasn’t the case. After a moment, Athan looked away, flushed. “I will not abandon my daughter.”

  “But keeping her in harm’s way…?” Shirrin said grimly.

  “Can you get her out of here, then?” Athan said. “With your magic?”

  “If you mean to ask whether I can speak a word and have her spirited instantly to the pace, no. But I have a charm I can pce on any soldier you name which will allow him and the girl to pass by unrecognized and unharmed.”

  Athan worried at her bottom lip, caught in a moment of indecision. Shirrin didn’t have to say a word. But that was because fate made the decision for her. A scream, a horrible shrill scream, rang out from somewhere in the crowd. It was the sort of awful, guttural, lung-expending noise of inhuman pain that could be produced only at the moment of death or severe injury, and in its wake, the rage of the riot was half-transformed into terror. Shirrin didn’t know exactly how it had happened, but she didn’t need to know; someone had lost control, and that was that.

  Instantly, Athan rose, depositing her daughter on the ground but keeping one tiny hand in hers. As soldiers scattered all around, rushing to face the riot head-on, she found one and with her free hand plucked him from the flow.

  “Take my daughter to safety. Shirrin, the charm?”

  Shirrin already had the charm, a piece of carved bone on a neckce of shell beads, waiting in hand. She pressed it into the soldier’s palm while he struggled to pick up the growing princess.

  “Let go of this only when you are absolutely certain you are safe,” Shirrin said. “So long as you hold it, it will blunt the rage of all who see you.”

  The soldier nodded. He was young, no older than thirty, and his smooth face was wrought with stress. No wonder, when he had just had the Emperor’s own daughter entrusted to his safety. But the man did his duty, rushing away from the riot.

  A smaller riot, perhaps, or one cking the weight of all the weeks of chaos and death and accusation that had come before, might have been blown away. A wiser Peleus, one not so tormented by buried guilt or drained by nights without sleep, might have realized that a softer hand was needed, that promises of recompense and future beneficence would pcate the crowd. Instead he chose the path of violence, and nobody could control anything any longer.

  The scream of the dying man, soon accompanied by others, was a lightning bolt, a punch to the gut, inspiring action wherever it was heard. In a matter of minutes, the riot had spread, fueled not only by anger over the Emperor’s past actions, but now by indignity that he dared to meet the people’s rage with the edge of a sword. Screams, the hammering of fists against armor, the rush of boots on wood, men falling and being slicked in the blood of other men, all these sounds were a great storm rotating fast about the eye of the Imperial booth. Peleus, disarmed, demanded to take the sword off of one of his bodyguards, and held the weapon tightly in his hand, ready to make use of it.

  Shirrin was calm. None of these men could harm her, and now that her pn had brought forth violence and death, she was once more in her element. Her attention was centered squarely on Athan. Athan, one of the few people in the booth who had never been in battle, Athan who Shirrin had promised to steal, Athan who was with each passing moment growing paler and more breathless with fear.

  Slowly, Shirrin moved closer to the Empress, let her looks linger just moments more. She was far past the point of true predictability, her pn unleashing chaos which she could only adapt to, but Shirrin knew that eventually the right moment would arrive. It did, in the form of a wounded man. Who he was, Shirrin did not know, nor would she ever; but what he did y on the very dividing line between bravery and madness. He rushed in on the Imperial booth, somehow already past the cordon of guards, though three of them were following him. He was a young man, wide-eyed and desperate with fury, his wiry limbs allowing him to outrun the guards with ease.

  “Traitor! Traitor! Whore to Trabakond, your reign ends here!”

  He was never going to come within ten paces of the Emperor, as was his apparent goal: a dozen men closed in on him from every side, even the weak-minded General Cychreus drawing a bde and preparing to attack him. He fell beneath a dozen impalements, and only after he had died and the knife cttered onto the floor did anyone even realize he was armed.

  “My Emperor, we need to leave!” Cychreus said. “This has gotten fully out of hand!”

  Peleus nodded, wordlessly gesturing for his guards to circle around him and prepare to move. One man objected.

  “My Emperor, there is no way out except to cut our way through the crowd. It will be dangerous.”

  “And you think I quail from danger? Any man who raises arms against me is a traitor, and will be dealt with as such.”

  Shirrin made her move. As Peleus drew his entourage about himself, she pivoted around the chair that Athan appeared glued to, then dropped to one knee to look into the Empress’s eyes directly.

  “There will be blood, My Empress. Oceans of it. Or you can come with me.”

  Athan remained frozen. Her chest was falling, but it quaked as it did, and her pupils dited unnaturally. This was a feeling with which Shirrin was somewhat familiar.

  She cupped her hands over Athan’s ears and moved closer, so that all the Empress could see or hear was her. “I will not oblige you to be apart from your husband. But it would pain me endlessly if you should come to harm from accompanying him, be that harm of the body or of the heart. Breathe slow, my Empress, and answer with care.”

  Several seconds ter, Athan nodded. “Take me with you,” she said.

  Shirrin nodded. “This may be disorienting. I swear on my power as a witch that I will hold onto you tightly.”

  And with that, the Empress and the Witch-Queen were gone. Instead there was a great raven and a tiny mouse. The mouse squeaked and squealed with upset, but the raven ignored it, taking the mouse in both talons. Nobody noticed amidst the chaos as the bird rose out of the Imperial booth and took to the skies.

  Shirrin had done it once again. Athan was in her power, and soon enough the two of them would be entirely alone.

  SaffronDragon