I set the bag of scrolls on the floor and took hold of one of the smaller pipes, wrenching it free of the pins that held it against the wall. I didn’t jerk it all the way from its position but used it to slam through the hole that had already formed around it.
The smell of smoke increased. Cassia unwound her cloak and shoved it against the crack between the door and floor.
I continued to work the pipe in its fitting. Small chunks of concrete rained down on me, rough on my flesh. I bashed that pipe upward until no more bits fell, then I started on the next one.
My hands were slick with sweat, and I wiped them impatiently on my tunic. I realized when I returned my grip to the pipe that it was warming. If the fire had reached the pipes below, they’d grow hot like a stove.
I resumed my quest. The pipes had been placed into lead shafts in case crumbling concrete didn’t support them, but everything had sat unused so long that the shafts themselves were loose.
I sent up a prayer to any gods who’d listen for the builder who’d trained me all those years ago. In his gruff way, he’d taught me how walls, floors, ceilings, foundations, supports, and weight worked to keep a structure, even the humblest, together.
I put his teaching to use now in tearing this one down from the inside.
Cassia huddled in the corner to shield herself from the rain of pebbles as I continued to pull at the pipes. She had drawn the bag of precious scrolls into her lap, cradling it protectively.
The afternoon breeze poured in as I widened the hole, bringing with it the strong scent of smoke. I heard shouting, but it was far away and dim. The vigiles were busy fighting the original fire they’d gone after, while this one burned, not yet detected, in the quiet lane.
“He’s a madman,” I growled as I wrenched one of the pipes completely free of the wall.
“Not as mad as Cloelius,” Cassia said.
“Cloelius?” I’d already formed a hazy theory about what had happened but had no evidence of anything.
Cassia held up a scroll that she’d partly unrolled. She’d started going through the bag, probably to check that I’d retrieved all her scrolls from Cloelius’s tablinum after he’d had his fit.
“They are all there,” I said irritably.
“This one was not in my bag when we left the house this morning.” Cassia held the papyrus close to her face to read it in the bad light. “It’s from a play about an ancient king of Rome, returning to claim his rightful place.”
She turned it around to show me, though I could not see it in the dimness and wouldn’t have been able to read it anyway.
“Proof,” I said before returning to my labor.
“Possibly.” Cassia gently re-rolled the scroll and returned it to the bag. “We will have to compare it to his handwriting or ensure that someone else didn’t add it to my scrolls.”
The bag hadn’t been out of her control until she’d handed it to me in Cloelius’s house, so the scroll must have come from there.
I hadn’t been able to speak to Cassia after Cloelius’s majordomo had shoved me out the gate. Now I told her, when I could drag in a breath during my efforts, what had happened in Cloelius’s tablinum. Aelia herself had dumped the scrolls across his desk—easy for her to make certain this one had become mixed in with Cassia’s.
No matter how the scroll had ended up in the sack, the question still remained—who had been the dead man under the foundation? Why had he been worth all this?
I used the pipe I’d freed to widen the hole between the wall and roof. What we’d do when we finally climbed out of the hole—if we even could—I didn’t know. But one thing at a time. I’d learned to fight the sword thrust coming at me, not the one that might happen later.
With a sharp tearing sound, a corner of the wall collapsed in a shower of concrete and filler. A slab of wall tumbled with terrible swiftness toward Cassia, who was still absorbed in the scrolls.
I had the pipe flung aside and was across the room before I knew I’d moved. I wrapped both arms around Cassia and rolled with her to the still-solid walls on the other side of the small chamber.
We landed in a heap, me protectively over her. Cassia coughed, struggling for air. I rolled over again, pulling her out from under me then scooped her against me, my face in her hair and my heart thudding hard.
“I’m all right,” she whispered.
I barely heard her. I could only cradle her and inhale the fragrance of her skin—a lavender scent of oils from the baths that drowned out the dust and smoke in the room.
My panic had transported me to the past. I saw myself walking into a muddy field to find rubble everywhere and my mentor trapped, dead, under the walls that he’d built. I recalled the disbelief that it had happened, my certainty that I’d gone to the wrong site. The builder would come walking along any time now, chiding me for tarrying, and my life would carry on.
Cohorts had surrounded me, fought me down, beaten me until I could barely walk. They’d tied a rope around my neck and hauled me away to face long days of darkness.
The distant terror blended into the stinging smoke and heart-thudding fear of the present.
