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Corelia in front now, leading him down, past statues, fountains, watered lawns, across a mosaic floor inlaid with a design of sea creatures and out onto a terrace with a swimming pool, also blue, framed in marble, projecting toward the sea. An inflatable ball turned gently against the tiled surround, as if abandoned in midgame. He was suddenly struck by how deserted the great house seemed and when Corelia gestured to the balustrade, and he laid his hands cautiously on the stone parapet and leaned over, he saw why. Most of the household was gathered along the seashore.
    It took a while for his mind to assemble all the elements of the scene. The setting was a fishery, as he had expected, but much bigger than he had imagined—and old, by the look of it, presumably built in the decadent last years of the republic, when keeping fish had first become the fashion—a series of concrete walls, extending out from the rocks, enclosing rectangular pools. Dead fish dappled the surface of one. Around the most distant, a group of men was staring at something in the water, an object that one of them was prodding with a boat hook—Attilius had to shield his eyes to make them out—and as he studied them more closely he felt his stomach hollow. It reminded him of the moment of the kill at the amphitheater—the stillness of it, the erotic complicity between crowd and victim.
    Behind him, the old woman started making a noise—a soft ululation of grief and despair. He took a step backward and turned toward Corelia, shaking his head. He wanted to escape from this place. He longed to return to the decent, simple practicalities of his profession. There was nothing he could do here.
    But she was in his way, standing very close. “Please,” she said. “Help her.”
    Her eyes were blue, bluer even than Sabina’s had been. They seemed to collect the blueness of the bay and fire it back at him. He hesitated, set his jaw, then turned and reluctantly looked out to sea again.
    He forced his gaze down from the horizon, deliberately skirting what was happening at the pool, let it travel back toward the shore, tried to appraise the whole thing with a professional eye. He saw wooden sluice gates. Iron handles to raise them. Metal lattices over some of the ponds to keep the fish from escaping. Gangways. Pipes. Pipes.
    He paused, then swung around again to squint at the hillside. The rising and falling of the waves would wash through metal grilles, set into the concrete sides of the fish pools, beneath the surface, to prevent the pens becoming stagnant. That much he knew. But pipes —he cocked his head, beginning to understand—the pipes must carry freshwater down from the land, to mix with the seawater, to make it brackish. As in a lagoon. An artificial lagoon. The perfect conditions for rearing fish. And the most sensitive of fish to rear, a delicacy reserved only for the very rich, were red mullet.
    He said quietly, “Where does the aqueduct connect to the house?”
    Corelia shook her head. “I don’t know.”
    It would have to be big, he thought. A place this size . . .
    He knelt beside the swimming pool, scooped up a palmful of the warm water, tasted it, frowning, swilled it round in his mouth like a connoisseur of wine. It was clean, as far as he could judge. But then again, that might mean nothing. He tried to remember when he had last checked the outflow of the aqueduct. Not since the previous evening, before he went to bed.
    “At what time did the fish die?”
    Corelia glanced at the slave woman, but she was lost to their world. “I don’t know. Perhaps two hours ago?”
    Two hours!
    He vaulted over the balustrade onto the lower terrace beneath and started to stride toward the shore.
     
    Down at the water’s edge, the entertainment had not lived up
to its promise. But then nowadays, what did? Ampliatus felt
increasingly that he had reached some point—age, was it, or wealth?—when the arousal of anticipation was invariably more