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washed down with it, which slammed into his stomach like a punch. How come thoughts of Claudia half the world away could light his loins, while this girl who so closely resembled her could not? Why could he not imagine these were Claudia’s shoulders he nuzzled? Her breasts he cupped—
    ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir.’ Orbilio’s steward tapped at the door. ‘There’s a messenger outside, says it’s urgent—’
    ‘No problem.’ Marcus was out of bed and reaching for his loincloth long before the steward’s knuckles had fallen away. ‘Tell him I’m coming.’
    ‘That’s a joke,’ snapped the girl on the bed, but Orbilio, pulling on his long, patrician tunic, didn’t hear and by the time he’d laced up his high boots, he’d forgotten all about her, including her name.
    In the city centre, public notices were being hammered up, speeches delivered from tribunals, from platforms, from the steps of the Rostra. Marcus was forced to weave his way through the hoarse-throated beggars and skirt porters wiping sweat from their brow as they pushed heavy, wheeled barrows. Around Vulcan’s sacred lotus tree, chickens clucked inside barred wooden crates, baby goats bleated and urchins snatched a spilled melon here, a dropped sea perch there. This being market day, none of the charioteers whose wheels clattered so noisily over the travertine slabs gave a thought as to what might lie beneath them, and the astrologers looked to the stars to draw up their charts, not the bowels of the earth. Yet it was here, right under the Forum, that Marcus Cornelius made his descent.
    ‘Talk about a different world,’ he muttered, raising his torch above his head for a better view of this subterranean warren.
    The air was noticeably stale, for one thing. Certainly none of the tempting aromas from the bakery—the pastries, the buns and the sweetmeats—found their way underground, there was not even a hint of stale wine from the taverns. Just the acid stench of pitch, spluttering and hissing as it burned from the torches, sending out clouds of dark, swirling mist and—he sniffed—something else. Something indefinable in the air. He sniffed again, but still couldn’t identify it. Unless, maybe, it was the smell of utter despair…
    He paused and glanced back. Four, five, yes, six galleries behind him. That’s right. Two to go. He counted again to make sure—it was a veritable honeycomb down here.
    Lights in sconces flickered and sizzled in the narrow stone corridor, casting sinister shadows over the arches and confusing spatial perception. In the distance he heard the well-drilled clomp of military boots. Long before they reached him, they had turned off into another part of the maze to become nothing more than an echo. Orbilio swerved off to his right, passed two enclosed chambers, then took the first gallery left. A man was waiting.
    ‘You found it all right, then?’ He grinned, looping his thumbs into the waistband below the great overhang of his belly. A monster of a buckle glinted in the flickering light.
    Orbilio grunted. Finding the wretched place was one thing, getting out again might be another. These cramped corridors, from which other galleries led off, and then others, each with their own series of subterranean chambers, resembled more the minotaur’s labyrinth than Rome.
    ‘Augustus is converting this site into a holding place for wild animals, in order to put on beast shows up in the Forum,’ said Big Buckle. ‘Windlasses are being installed, winches, the lot.’ In the smoky gloom, Orbilio saw him wink. ‘But the Security Police will still keep a section, don’t worry.’
    Orbilio didn’t. ‘What have you got that’s so urgent?’ he asked, hitching his torch into the bracket which hung on the wall in the hope it would hide the low expectations etched on his face.
    ‘Would you believe’—Big Buckle lowered his voice to an excited whisper—‘a plot to bring down the Empire?’
    Orbilio swallowed his