Page 22 of The Hymn to Dionysus

Ours is blasphemous music. We have twelve songs. One for each of the gods. We have sung them for a thousand years, and we will sing them for a thousand more, to remember those who sang them before us. We don’t change them: we keep those songs in the same way other cities keep their temples, without tearing them down and building new ones every second hour. Any other music is unholy. It doesn’t come inside the city walls. I’d never heard it in Thebes. Even when I heard it outside Thebes, it made me itchy and angry.

And now, someone was singing.

Sing, sing to the lord of the dance . . .

Sometimes, because I was going deaf, I heard things. A kind priest told me once that the less you can hear of the world, the more you can hear of the gods, but I’m not that special and it was never that. It was my clockwork trying to make shapes it knew from the scraps of information it could hear, and often those shapes were completely wrong. I once heard a marvel of Hermes in the market tell me not to forget the cheese. I went still now, watching the little knights. There was something between shock and aversion etched on their faces, which probably mirrored mine. So it was real.

It was Amphitrion.

He was staring into space. His sister was shaking his shoulder, her gauntlet clinking against his breastplate, but he didn’t seem to feel it. I got in front of him and held his shoulders to see into his face. His eyes were miles away.

He still didn’t see me. He turned away from me, I thought towards his sister, the leather underplating of his armour creaking, but then he kept turning; halfway round, all the way, and then again, spinning slowly between me and his sister, who was normally so steady she would have taken the sky falling in with perfect knightly equanimity, but she looked scared now.

“Knight,” I said, quietly. “You need to stop. Now.”

“Sing, sing to the lord of dance,

Thunder-wrought and city-razing—”

“Stop. Amphitrion—”

“—king, king of the holy raging—”

Jason smacked him experimentally over the head. “Hey. Shut up.”

Amphitrion didn’t notice.

“I’m going to get him away,” I said, urgency leaning a boot right into my breastbone. If the Guards heard him, he would be arrested and flogged. “Jason, run over to the Ninth Unit, tell his commander quietly that I’ve taken Amphitrion to Ares. Everyone else, wait here.”

Amphitrion let me steer him out through the main courtyard, past the marvel Herakles, and down the long steep stairs towards the lower city, to the white towers of the Temple of Ares. I should have kept one hand on him to make sure he kept going in the right direction, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch him that much. I felt like I was escorting someone with plague.

Ares is where knights go to recover from injuries and battle madness; or to die from them. The sanctuary is quiet, the priests are all veterans, and they make sure nobody fragile visits. I had no idea what Amphitrion’s song was, but it had to be some kind of madness, because he wasn’t suicidal.

I could smell the incense forty paces away, and from somewhere inside, a column of smoke climbed into the baking sky. Amphitrion was still singing. If I let him stand still, he turned and turned, dancing, just slowly, but there was something horrible about the slither of moving mail. Heat blasted off the flagstones and rippled so much it looked as though we were walking through clear water.

I eased him under the archway and into the temple gardens, where a marvel of Ares turned his head to watch us come in. I had to look down, the glare off the bronze too bright. Amphitrion seemed not to notice. He had looped back to the beginning of his song. Sing, sing to the lord of the dance . . .

“I need help,” I said to the priests coming towards us. “I don’t know what happened. We were at the bull sacrifice when the star fell, and now he can’t stop singing.”

As I said it, I heard how strange it sounded, but the priests only glanced at each other, unsurprised. “Thank you, knight. We’ll take him from here. He can go in with the others.”

“Others?” I repeated, to make sure I hadn’t remember-the-cheese hallucinated.

I hadn’t.

There were five others. They were together in a cool underground room that must have been used usually for storage, with only a high thin window to let in the light. Now, though, there were pallet beds set up neat and careful, and a table with a water pitcher, and a priest watching in the corner—and five knights spaced out across the floor, turning in the same slow dance as Amphitrion, and singing.

They were all singing different parts of it, but even I could hear it was the same song.

I looked at the priest who had brought us down.

He shrugged slightly. “They’ve been coming in for the last hour. The Guards have been in and out, but there have been no convictions. It’s obviously madness.”

Sing, sing to the lord of the dance,

Lightning-born and madness-bearing,

Bring, bring to him wine and ivy . . .