I knelt down and peered closely. Lucius, shedding his patrician dignity, got down on his hands and knees beside me. He wrinkled his nose. “The smell of putrefaction!” he said again.
“Not putrefaction,” I countered. “Common excrement. Come, let’s see where the footprints lead.”
We followed them down the hallway and around a corner, where the footprints ended before a closed door.
“Does this lead outside?” I asked.
“Why, no,” said Lucius, suddenly a patrician again and making an uncomfortable face. “That door opens into the indoor toilet.”
“How interesting.” I opened it and stepped inside. As I would have expected in a household run by a woman like Cornelia, the fixtures were luxurious and the place was quite spotless, except for some telltale footprints on the limestone floor. There were windows set high in the wall, covered by iron bars. A marble seat surmounted the hole. Peering within, I studied the lead piping of the drain.
“Straight down the slope of the Palatine Hill and into the Cloaca Maxima, and thence into the Tiber,” commented Lucius. Patricians may be prudish about bodily functions, but of Roman plumbing they are justifiably proud.
“Not nearly large enough for a man to pass through,” I said.
“What an awful idea!”
“Even so...” I called for a slave, who managed to find a chisel for me.
“Now what are you doing? Here, those tiles are made of fine limestone, Gordianus! You shouldn’t go chipping away at the corners.”
“Not even to discover this?” I slid the chisel under the edge of one of the stones and lifted it up.
Lucius drew back and gasped, then leaned forward and peered down into the darkness. “A tunnel!” he whispered.
“So it appears.”
“Why, someone must go down it!” Lucius peered at me and raised an eyebrow.
“Not even if Cornelia doubled my fee!”
“I wasn’t suggesting that you go, Gordianus.” He looked up at the young slave who had fetched the chisel. The boy looked slender and supple enough. When he saw what Lucius intended, he started back and looked at me imploringly.
“No, Lucius Claudius,” I said, “no one need be put at risk; not yet. Who knows what the boy might encounter — if not lemures and monsters, then boobytraps or scorpions or a fall to his death. First we should attempt to determine the tunnel’s egress. It may be a simple matter, if it merely follows the logical course of the plumbing.”
Which it did. From the balcony on the western side of the house, it was easy enough to judge where the buried pipes descended the slope into the valley between the Palatine and the Capitoline, where they joined with the Cloaca Maxima underground. At the foot of the hill, directly below the house, in a wild rubbish-strewn region behind some warehouses and granaries, I spied a thicket. Even stripped of their leaves, the bushes grew so thick that I could not see far into them.
Lucius insisted on accompanying me, though his bulky frame and expensive garb were ill-suited for traversing a rough hillside. We reached the foot of the hill and pushed our way into the thicket, ducking beneath branches and snapping twigs out of the way.
At last we came to the heart of the thicket, where our perseverance was rewarded. Hidden behind the dense, shaggy branches of a cypress tree was the tunnel’s other end. The hole was crudely made, lined with rough dabs of cement and broken bricks. It was just large enough for a man to enter, but the foul smell that issued from within was enough to keep vagrants or even curious children out.
At night, hidden behind the storehouses and sheds, such a place would be quite lonely and secluded. A man — or a lemur, for that matter — might come and go completely unobserved.
“Cold,” complained Lucius, “cold and damp and dark. It would have made more sense to stay in the house tonight, where it’s warm and dry. We could lie in wait in the hallway and trap this fiend when he emerges from his secret passage. Why, instead, are we huddling here in the dark and cold, watching for who-knows-what and jumping in fright every time a bit of wind whistles through the thicket?”
“You need not have come, Lucius Claudius. I didn’t ask you to.”
“Cornelia would have thought me a coward if I didn’t,” he pouted.
“And what does Cornelia’s opinion matter?” I snapped, and bit my tongue. The cold and damp had set us both on edge. A light drizzle began to fall, obscuring the moon and casting the thicket into even greater darkness. We had been hiding among the brambles since shortly after nightfall. I had warned Lucius that the watch was likely to be long and uncomfortable and possibly futile, but he had insisted on accompanying me. He had offered to hire some ruffians to escort us, but if my suspicions were correct we would not need them; nor did I want more witnesses to be present than was necessary.
A gust of icy wind whipped beneath my cloak and sent a shiver up my spine. Lucius’s teeth began to chatter. My mood grew dark. What if I was wrong, after all? What if the thing we sought was not human, but something else...
“And as for jumping in fear every time a twig snaps,” I whispered, “speak for yourself—”
I fell silent, for at that moment not one but many twigs began to snap. Something large had entered the thicket and was moving toward us.
“It must be a whole army!” whispered Lucius, clutching at my arm.
“No,” I whispered back. “Only two persons, if my guess is right.”
Two moving shapes, obscured by the tangle of branches and the deep gloom, came very near to us and then turned aside, toward the cypress tree that hid the tunnel’s mouth.
A moment later I heard a man’s voice, cursing: “Someone has blocked the hole!” I recognized the voice of the growling giant who guarded the house on the Caelian Hill.
“Perhaps the tunnel has fallen in.” When Lucius heard the second voice he clutched my arm again, not in fear but surprise.
“No,” I said aloud, “the tunnel was purposely blocked so that you could not use it again.”
There was a moment of silence, followed by the noise of two bodies scrambling in the underbrush.
“Stay where you are!” I said. “For your own good, stay where you are and listen to me!”
The scrambling ceased and there was silence again, except for the sound of heavy breathing and confused whispers.
“I know who you are,” I said. “I know why you’ve come here. I have no interest in harming you, but I must speak with you. Will you speak with me, Furia?”
“Furia?” whispered Lucius. The drizzle had ended, and moonlight illuminated the confusion on his face.
There was a long silence, then more whispering — the giant was trying to dissuade his mistress. Finally she spoke out. “Who are you?” she said.
“My name is Gordianus. You don’t know me. But I know that you and your family have suffered greatly, Furia. You have been wronged, most unjustly. Perhaps your vengeance on Titus and Cornelia is seemly in the eyes of the gods — I cannot judge. But you have been found out, and the time has come to stop your pretense. I’ll step toward you now. There are two of us. We bear no weapons. Tell your faithful slave that we mean no harm, and that to harm us will profit you nothing.”
I stepped slowly toward the cypress tree, a great, shaggy patch of black amid the general gloom. Beside it stood two forms, one tall, the other short.
With a gesture, Furia bade her slave to stay where he was, then she stepped toward us. A patch of moonlight fell on her face. Lucius gasped and started back. Even though I expected it, the sight still sent a shiver through my veins.
I confronted what appeared to be a young man in a tattered cloak. His short hair was matted with blood and blood was smeared all around his throat and neck, as if his neck had been severed and then somehow fused together again. His eyes were dark and hollow. His skin was as pale as death and dotted with horrible tumors, his lips were parched and cracked. When Furia spoke, her sweet, gentle voice was a strange contrast to her horrifying visage.