"Inevitably. But this was different: as if the wheel of the world grated against its axle. I thought for a moment that I could not see him, as if I had blinked. Then Scipio made a noise. A dog noise, Learnèd, not a man’s noise at all—not even on the battlefield." An absent recollection, this, but the tesserarius looks at him sharply. Marcus as a soldier, before the cloth? How very unlikely. "I turned and he fell. I want to say I felt a breath on my face, but I think that is my mind adding ornament. The room was still. There was no warning, no sense of the passage of an object. No other person."