‘It will be Iskandr,’ Kag said with relish, studying the half-buried little statue. ‘Look – that’s an old Greek helm he has there. I bet he had a sword or a spear in the other hand, before it broke – or was stole away from him.’
Kisa frowned at it and ran one hand through the wet of his hair.
‘Why is he holding a torch in his one hand?’
‘Ah,’ said Quintus, curdling his brow. ‘You would need such a light if you were going to a dark place. Like a temple.’
‘Small lad, Iskandr then?’ Mule asked pensively. ‘With three heads?’
There was a movement off to one side and everyone tensed, weapons up; Manius slid out like a tendril of the mist and moved through the dripping ranks to Drust’s side, where he took a knee and wiped his face.
‘A dwelling, small, with smoke coming from it. No dog, one cart. Some chickens.’
Drust thought and blinked rain from his eyelids. It had been a blessing, that rain, and they had revelled in it – Quintus and Ugo had stripped naked and danced in it like bacchae, to the cheers and laughing of the others. Even the Empress raised her bandaged, ruined face to it as if it was balm.
That was good for a day, but it wasn’t a downpour, just a sifting, fine as baby hair, out of a mist that clung to everything and did not want to stop. In the end, they started to curse the drip and soak of it.
They were higher in the mountains now, awed by the strange tints and colours – emerald green, grey, ochre, pink – heading up a valley green with juniper and thick with wild grapes, pears and hawthorns, which made the green part feel more like Apulia. Dog was beaming at the statue, for all that it was bird-slimed, pocked with age and might have been anything; beyond it would be more stones, he said, making it clear where the temple would be.
‘Who wants to live up here?’ demanded Kag, and Mule wiped rain from his face and spat.
‘People who skulk and hunt,’ he growled – he was aggrieved because Blessed was dead, killed by an arrow fired from the higher rocks. It had unnerved everyone and no one could be sure whether it had been aimed at the beast or just missed another target. Manius swore he had seen the shooter scampering off and that he had nicked him with a shot of his own; he went off to track the blood, but the rain had made that hope fade quickly.
‘Let’s go,’ Mule urged. ‘I want that bowman.’
Privately, Drust thought the camel’s death the best blessing it would get; its pads were cutting up on the poor ground and there was altogether too much wet for it. All it meant to him and the others was that, yet again, they had to carry what they could and abandon the rest.
Not to Mule, all the same. He was steaming with the heat of his revenge.
Which is, at least, one way to keep a foot travelling in front of the other, Drust thought. The truth was in the weary stumbling, the savage glares folk gave Dog, the way Drust could not look Manius in the eye. All the old breed, he saw, are shackled by their Brotherhood, but the chains of it were straining. He remembered them after the failed assault on the fire temple, how they had snarled at each other like a frustrated dog pack for a day – then braided back together.
‘Well,’ Kag grunted, shaking drips off the noseguard of his helmet, ‘a place with a roof is surely better than sitting in the rain telling lies about this boy and his lost spear.’
Manius uncoiled, glanced at the statue and grunted.
‘That boy has tits,’ he said casually. ‘You should read the scratchings under the vines at the feet, Jew. Might tell you who it is.’
He went sliding off into the rain, leaving everyone squinting – the Greek tunic and hunting boots had thrown them and the misshapen head had been ravaged so that most of it was missing. Kisa went to work, grubbing in the muddy earth, scraping it out, pulling up clinging vines.
‘She Who Works Her Will,’ he read out in Greek. ‘Crone, Maiden and Mother.’
The Empress gave a low moan, which made everyone else jerk. ‘She Who Works Her Will. Hekátē,’ she said in a voice like a broken file on a rough rock. ‘Diana Trivia…’
Like nails on a slate… Drust felt the wind rush through his head. Crone, Maiden and Mother… He peered, wiping rainwater from his face, seeing now that there had once been three faces, not one.
‘She speaks,’ Kag said softly, pointedly.
‘Is this Hekátē not a guardian of the crossroads?’ Quintus asked lightly, and Dog agreed.
‘Huntress, Queen, Moon, that’s Diana…’
‘Goddess of the night, of ghosts and dangerous oracles,’ Kisa said. ‘Of divination from the dead – necromantia, as Origen of Alexandria has it…’
Almost at each word the Empress moaned and growled and shook her head, which wasn’t pleasant.
‘Bind your mouth,’ Ugo growled at Kisa.
‘I preferred it when she was mute,’ Mouse added, but Kisa gave a half-smile and glanced from one to the other.
‘Not only can she speak, but her mind is not scraped clean after all.’
‘Which makes her worthwhile again,’ Dog flung in cheerfully and hefted his swords. ‘Onwards, brothers…’
There were mutters about him and the Empress and the rain – and then the vicious insects which appeared when the rain stopped and heat came back,; the wet earth steamed with a feral breath, adding to their discontent and Drust felt their eyes, felt the dark looks they shot him. Gods-cursed, he fancied them saying, and all of us caught up in it.
Suck it down, he snarled silently back at them. Swallow it like bitter wine, for you die if you do and die if you don’t…
‘Are you well?’ Praeclarum asked, falling in beside him. ‘You have a face like that dead camel.’
He laughed despite himself and was lifted by it and her. They went on up the valley, following the others. They saw nothing save some little sheep, nub-horned like goats and thick with fleeces that made them look like bracken haystacks that had learned to walk.
The villa was a tumble of stones and timbers in the rough shape of four walls, the roof turfed and allowed to grow out as shaggy as the sheep. There was a sagging outbuilding or two, chickens and no dog, as Manius had said, but he had omitted the slow curve of the shallow stream – and what was in it.
‘Dead sheep,’ Mouse declared when Quintus cried out with delight and pointed. No one who had the stink in the back of their throat could disagree, but Quintus turned on him and spat with disgust.
‘You would miss riches in a treasure room,’ he growled back, and then everyone peered and saw the fleeces, just under the shallow run of the stream, pegged out. Everyone frowned at Quintus’s delight.
‘Not a dead sheep, then,’ Dog said wryly, ‘but a sodden skin.’
‘Gold,’ Kisa said, and Quintus clapped his hands together and pointed as if he had made a killing point in a Senate debate.
‘They do this across the ocean, where I come from,’ Kisa went on, as Quintus splashed into the water to wrench one free. ‘My people were famed for it, so much so that Apollonius Rhodius told of a band of Greeks led by King Jason who came to the land to steal the wealth they made.’
Quintus dragged the dripping thing back and heaved it onto the bank where it leaked and smelled. Then they looked more closely at the sharp glints of light which caught the eye. It was gold – at least some of it – caught as grains in the fat-rich fleece as it washed down from the mountains above. Now they saw six or seven such fleeces pegged out and went splashing after them, shouting out.
‘These sheep farmers herd gold too,’ Quintus declared triumphantly. ‘Now you know why they live up here.’
‘Beware the dog,’ Drust called out and men cursed, spun round with their weapons ready and found only a hard stare. With a cold-water shock they realised they had let their guard down, and the thought of what might have come at them brought them back to sense.
Dog toed the fleece soggily to one side. ‘Hardly riches,’ he pointed out, scattering droplets as he waved one hand at the villa. ‘If they harvest gold with fleeces here, then it is not enough to afford a decent door.’
The others laughed shame-facedly. Then the sagging door moved back on its poor leather hinges and figures came out – a woman, a girl and a boy.
The woman was in a patched and stained dress, the girl and boy held close to her. She had never been pretty, Drust thought, so age and care had less trouble to ravage her face and turn her hair to raggles of grey. Her eyes were rheumed, but defiant even in fear.
‘We have found the Crone,’ Mule grunted which raised a laugh. Quintus shouted out to search harder and uncover the Maiden, but Drust glared at them and they fell silent. Then he sent them right and left to search anyway, but for any menfolk that were hiding. The woman watched them, spilling out incomprehensible words to which Drust replied in Greek, but got no response and turned to find Kisa. The boy stared at him with naked hatred.
There was a clatter and a crash and the woman yelped, one hand flying to her throat. Mule and Praeclarum appeared, dragging someone up to Drust; Mule pitched him to the ground. A man, bearded and exhausted, with a bloody cloth round his leg.
‘Hiding under fodder,’ Praeclarum declared and Mule kicked out at the fallen man. The woman flung herself forward, but Praeclarum caught and held her while she babbled. Drust knew pleading no matter the language and thought the man was her son, or her husband.
‘Or both,’ Kag added in Greek at the end of this, and others laughed.
The man growled and spat. ‘She is my ma, rot you…’
He saw Kag’s slow smile and clicked his teeth together at having given himself away, but it was too late for that, as Drust told him.
‘You shot at us, that is clear,’ he added, squinting at the cloth. ‘That’s the arrow you had in return.’
‘You killed Blessed,’ Mule roared out and lashed out with his foot, only to have Dog take him by the collar and haul him back, hard enough to pitch him on his back. Mule sprang up, face a mask of snarl, but Dog simply stood and looked at him; Mule muttered and folded his arms sullenly.
Manius knelt by the man and unpeeled the cloth as gently as he could while the woman and girl whimpered; the boy, Drust thought, was pale, with lips like a thin wire and eyes trying to be hard and failing under wetness.
‘There you are,’ Manius said when the cloth was off and everyone saw the ragged hole and the clotted blood. ‘Went in only a little way, but it cracked the shin.’
‘I was running,’ the man said through grimaces ‘I thought you were raiders.’
‘You did well to get all the way home with that, then,’ Kag offered admiringly, and Mule flung up both arms in frustration.
‘Suck his cock, why don’t you?’
Kag looked levelly at him. ‘I know you miss that beast and can only presume that you fucked it nightly while the rest of us were asleep. But if you speak like that to me again I will make you a second mouth.’
Dog laughed, a nasty sound, but whether it was at Kag or Mule was hard to tell. Probably both, Drust thought.
‘There are more important matters,’ Mouse said seriously. ‘Is there food here?’
Everyone else groaned; the man twisted a grin onto his pain-ravaged face.
‘Look at us closely. We are trying something different to eating.’
Mouse scowled while Drust squatted by the man. ‘Name,’ he said and the man hesitated, then his shoulder slumped a little; his mother and sister were wailing now.
‘Bahar.’
‘A father? Brothers?’
He shook his head, which was only to be expected, but if he had any male relatives around, Drust was sure they were nowhere helpful.
‘We seek a temple – you know of it? Where it can be found?’
His mother had stopped wailing as soon as the word ‘temple’ was mentioned and Dog did not miss it either. Bahar’s head wobbled slightly as he hovered on the edge of losing all sense.
‘No one goes there,’ he managed. ‘The ghost…’
He was gone into oblivion and the woman and children wailed, thinking he was dead, so Dog kicked him so that the pain brought him round with a scream.
‘Where?’ he demanded, looking at the woman this time. She stared defiantly back at him and made a warding sign.
‘Tie him by the ankles,’ Dog said, ‘and haul him up.’
‘Leave him,’ Drust snapped, and Dog turned. Perhaps he had a mild stare – it was hard to tell with that face – but his voice was flat and level.
‘We need to know.’
It took time to find a bast line good enough for the task, and all the time Bahar’s mother and little sister pleaded and cried, while the boy clenched himself like a knot and made no sound. Until Bahar screamed. It was a heart-scrape that sound, which was only to be expected, Drust thought, when you are hauled up by a broken leg. He clenched his fists until the knuckles creaked and felt sick with the knowledge that he should never have allowed this.
‘This is not right,’ Praeclarum said, and Drust felt ripped open by it – he knew she was right and he knew Dog was right and he said so. Dog asked the question; the woman had subsided, melted into sobbing and clutching the little girl, who had exhausted all her own screams. The Empress seemed to catch what was flung out from all this and started to moan and make hoarse noises which might have been screams once.
In the end, Bahar put them on the trail, but he had thrown up twice and passed out four times – he was tough, as Kag pointed out admiringly.
‘If you like him so much you can take him down,’ Drust harshed back, made bitter by it all and still slathered with the loss of Sib and what Manius had to do with it, the sickness of the rage that had taken him over, and the way Dog kept pushing him. ‘Get Mouse to help, since he is only poking about looking for coin or food.’
Mouse started guiltily since that was exactly what he was doing, but Kag scowled, paused, then shook his head and loosened the rope so that the man fell badly, on his wounded leg. He shrieked at the pain and then went limp; that was when the boy broke.
He made his first sound, a harsh growling scream, and ran for Dog, hauling out a little knife from his boot. He had courage but his timing was off; Dog sidestepped neatly and whicked out one banging stroke with the gladius, slamming the boy straight in the kidneys in midstep; the woman shrieked.
‘Fortuna’s arse,’ Kag said bitterly. ‘That was poorly done.’
Praeclarum and Kisa sprang to the boy and began to help, while Mouse held the mother from doing something rash and adding to the bad cess of the moment. The others looked at the ground and shook their heads, but Dog simply wiped his blade on the grass.
‘Kits breed rats,’ he said coldly, and there was silence for a moment, broken only by the mewling woman.
‘In the back?’ Kisa said, scrambling up. ‘You could not kill a boy from the front, to his face? Truly, that face marks you.’
Dog turned, and his look when it crashed on Kisa was a grue of ice.
‘Anyone who knows me will tell you I am tender to children,’ he answered levelly, ‘and do not like them to see their death. But I will stick this in your face, little Jew, should you give me more cause.’
‘Easy,’ Kag said warningly, and then Praeclarum rose up and said wearily that the boy was dead. She looked at Drust, who felt the weight of it all, felt the disappointment in her shoot through him from heel to crown.
Kisa turned and walked away in silence. Kag drew in a breath and looked sorrowfully at Drust, who had had enough of being blamed for this.
‘Find a spade,’ he growled, ‘and bury the boy.’
‘What will we do with the woman?’ Mouse demanded loudly. ‘And the girl?’
It was such a loaded question that Drust’s head thundered but he did not turn from looking at the dead boy when he spoke.
‘Eat them or fuck them, Mouse. I have no preference.’
They came on the great wheel of stone not long afterwards, wide as outstretched arms, thick as a handspan.
‘Just as the man said,’ Kisa said, wiping his streaming face. It was raining, a light mirr that at least helped wash the sweat and stinging insects away. He did not look at Dog when he said it, but everyone else did; Drust did not like it. The moment at the farmstead had stained them all, it seemed.
It was just as Bahar had told them – great tumbles of stone like slices from a tree, all parts of tall pillars once. Now that they saw them they also saw the faint outlines of flagged floors under a nap of green and tangle.
Half crouched and wary as kicked dogs, they went on, weapons unashamedly gripped in fists and their backbones curled with a sweat that had nothing to do with the fetid heat of this strange mountain.
The fallen pillars had once been thick as a forest and were now scattered down like windblown trees, the last stumps forming an avenue leading up to the wall of rock they had been heading towards for some time. Grey-green and grim, it now towered over them, while the avenue of mossy stumps led to root-tangled steps and then up to a pillared portico, set right into the rock face.
‘Is this the place?’ whispered Mule and Kag snorted.
‘Does it look like a fitting place for ghosts?
He spoke normally, unfazed by the hush that seemed to have fallen over everyone else, but it boomed loud and folk winced. Quintus put his uncaring foot on a tilted statue of a woman, right on the carved jut of her breasts, and squinted at the steps and the entrance. He grinned, bright as sunlight, and Praeclarum offered a toothless reply; it went some way to banishing the memory of Bahar’s ‘ghost’.
‘We will need torches,’ Drust said. ‘We can build a fire in the shelter of that pillared place.’
They moved off, leaving Drust staring at the statue, this one holding a torch in either hand. She had three faces this time, two in profile and one staring, fixing him with a sightless glare; and, peculiarly, seemed to have one foot bare and the other with a lace-shoe which had once been bronze but was now green. Drust felt his flesh ruche to gooseskin; there was altogether too much of the gods around, and the Empress was now sitting and rocking, making baby sounds.
Fires were lit and smoke shrouded the dim, though the talk was muted and folk looked to their ties and straps and edges as the day dimmed to blue twilight. They bound up torches with what rags they could scavenge from old serks and hems, and Drust moved among them, offering small comment and praise. Kisa did nothing but drink; they had found skins of a thin, vinegary wine and the little Jew had been pouring it down his throat since they had left the farm.
By the time pots had been scoured of the last gruel, the fires were red blossoms in a bowl of night and Drust sat at the edge of matters, his head whirling like a mad chariot race. He was grateful when a shadow shifted out of the dark, became Praeclarum and hunkered beside him; someone laughed from the fire, a nasty sound, and Drust suspected it was Mule.
‘Do we go in?’ she asked, and Drust looked at the black maw of the entrance.
‘Wait until light.’
‘It will be dark inside anyway.’
‘Let us have this peace and sleep,’ he answered. ‘That was a bad business.’
Praeclarum leaned against him and he hesitated a moment, then put an arm round her.
Across the way Mule looked at the two-headed shadow and spat in the fire.
‘No sleep for them,’ he growled. Kag said nothing.
Mouse, scraping his spoon raw on the inside of an empty pot, looked up bitterly.
‘Eat them or fuck them,’ he said and shook his head. ‘That was no way to speak.’
Dog grinned across at him, his skull-face leaping with bloody firelight. ‘Which did you do?’ he demanded, but no one laughed and Mouse shot him a sorrowed glare.
The night grew chill, tendrilled with witch-hair mist and threaded with screeches from owls. Or the mysterious ghost, Kisa slurred, which made Quintus tell him to fasten his teeth on that.
The little Jew shifted up unsteadily and those who watched him could see he was not happy with matters. Not that that was any help to anyone. He stood up, bowed slightly, nearly fell and recovered himself.
‘I am sorry for your losses, in every way,’ he declared, speaking slow and solemn, so he would not fall over the words. ‘I would like to help, but I am not the sort to halt such terrible matters, as we all knew at the start of this enterprise. Now you are fucked and I am fucked for being part of it, and Uranius is fucked for having thought of it, and the Empress is fucked because people will not believe she has no power.’
He pouted like a baby.
‘We are all fucked. This is what happens when you outrage God. Now I am going to get drunk.’
He started to reach for the slack wineskin, stumbled and almost fell. ‘More drunk,’ he corrected.
Kag and Dog laughed and watched the little man until he fell asleep, mumbling. They waited another suitably polite interval and then moved to where Drust and Praeclarum shared the same blanket.
The frantic gasping and clutching had been done, the fever ebbed and, for Drust, the best part of the affair was now being shredded to mist by the pair’s arrival. Praeclarum shared that view, scowling while Kag held up his hands in placating apology; Dog said nothing, simply squatted and seared them with his face.
‘The other side,’ Dog said simply, and Drust got on one elbow, feeling the night chill his skin. ‘It may not be entirely free of threat.’
‘You said no one knew of this mousehole.’
Dog made an ambivalent side-to-side head movement. ‘That Bahar did. And his ma.’
‘Possibly the boy,’ Praeclarum added, soft as bitter aloes, ‘but he is no threat now.’
‘None,’ Dog answered. ‘Might have been better if we had finished the business and left those who follow us in the dark.’
‘Are there still those who follow us?’ she demanded and Kag laughed.
‘You leave tracks…’ he said.
‘What of the other side?’ Drust interrupted and Dog nodded.
‘Just saying. If people here knew, perhaps people there do as well. And that is the side where the garrison of the Red Serpent – if there is such a thing now – might be more easily found.’
‘So,’ Drust concluded, ‘what you are saying is that your escape hole is no escape.’
‘What we are saying,’ Kag answered, ‘is that it is a long way back to Dura.’
‘Even there,’ Dog said simply, ‘we might not be safe. Shayk Amjot will know the truth by now, and even to get there we will have to avoid all the trouser-wearers this side of the Euphrates. We have no mounts and no supplies.’
‘So there is no hope?’ Praeclarum exploded. ‘Is that what you came to tell us?’
‘There is always hope,’ Kag answered smiling. ‘I came in the hope of seeing your tits – no offence.’
‘Now you know the true measure of hope,’ Praeclarum said, gathering the blanket round her, but she smiled all the same. Drust neither smiled nor spoke and the silence stretched. Finally he turned out one hand like a beggar and made an impatient glare.
‘Right,’ Kag said, looking at Dog, who grinned.
‘There is a camel trail a day down the other side of the mountain,’ he explained. ‘It is the one that comes from the Oxus down to Zadracarta, the Yellow City, and is well known for fat caravans. We can sell ourselves to a train as guards.’
‘If they don’t kill us on sight,’ Drust pointed out. ‘And Zadracarta is right behind the Wall,’ he added, remembering Kisa’s droning on the subject. ‘It is a base for the Persian soldiers.’
Kag nodded, beaming. ‘They will not think to look for us there if they are not waiting outside the mousehole.’
It was yet another tenuous plan, more a thread of hope than anything else, but it was all they had. As Praeclarum said when they had left, Kag had more chance of seeing her naked.
Morning took an age to drag itself over the horizon. Their battered pots were cleaned and stowed, fires kicked out, torches gripped in fists, and when Drust eventually moved to the middle of them, they shot sideways glares at him, like a pack of feral dogs.
They looked like a long walk of bad road, he thought, scored by lines of weariness and bruise-eyed from lack of sleep; he would not look any different.
He stretched out his hand, knuckles up, and one by one they added their own, broken-nailed and grimed. They said the words, looked in each other’s eyes and felt the burn of it, that glow that told them they were still Brothers of the Sand. Drust took a torch from Manius and led the way inside, gladius ready and the flame held high.
The inside smelled of old stone dust and bad air – and taint, harsh as old piss. Everyone smelled it and Manius tasted it with flicks of his tongue, like an adder, then spat.
‘Not right,’ he said.
‘Now there is a surprise,’ Kag growled. ‘It smells like every bad camp I have ever been in where the shitter is anywhere you squat.’
Which was true enough for folk to laugh a little and be eased. Yet Manius prowled, looking this way and that as they came into an open area where the floor was solid with old stones and the curve of the walls covered in faded paint. A solitary statue stood sentry, with what seemed an inscription on the base.
Kisa, who had spent his time being whey-faced sick, was now prodded towards them, Kag holding a torch so he could see better. ‘Read it out, scholar,’ he growled.
The writing, if that’s what it was, seemed a meaningless procession of figures to everyone but Kisa, who started to mumble until Mule called attention to the statue itself; the Empress, tethered to him, was on her knees before it, but whether that was because she was crazy or because she was worshipping was not clear. Either was an unnerving thought.
What was clear was that the statue stood at the exact point where the floor stones crossed, leading to three identical dark ways.
‘Your three-headed wife, little Jew,’ Kag declared, and his echoing voice made folk wince. Kisa waved one hand and the noise of him being sick in the dark grated on everyone.
It was the same statue as outside, only taller and with all three faces intact, stone stares as haughty as the Empress’s had once been; now she whimpered and mumbled and had to be jerked upright by Mule.
The torches in the statue’s hands could be lit, Drust saw, save that they were withered, but a face stared blankly down each path; it was not hard to work out what was meant here, but no one cared for it, Kisa least of all.
‘The smell is wrong in here,’ he muttered.
‘Stop puking,’ Kag advised. ‘Anything useful to tell us?’
The little Jew looked down the dark ways and frowned, swallowing bile. ‘I think this might be a labyrinth.’
The moment hung on the shaky hook of this for a moment while everyone raked their head for what they knew of labyrinths. All knew of the Cretan one, simply because every other mosaic floor of a fashionable Roman atrium was based on the design of it. No one wanted to think of the monster which had lurked in it.
Ugo knew more. ‘A Spiral Dance.’
‘A what?’ demanded Mule sourly.
‘A Spiral Dance,’ he repeated, ‘with Máni in the middle.’
‘The Moon Goddess,’ Kisa muttered and Ugo nodded sombrely.
‘You choose the right way, you get to the centre and the goddess will grant your request.’
‘That’s a dark way,’ Mouse declared in a harsh whisper, ‘no matter the path.’
‘The light at the end of it,’ Dog answered carelessly, echoingly loud, ‘is the shine of a way out.’
‘Or the eye of a giant fucking draco,’ Mule grunted.
‘There is no such beast,’ Quintus told him, grinning. ‘If there was, we’d have netted it for the Flavian long since.’
‘Attilius Regulus killed one,’ Kisa declared suddenly. ‘During the fight against Carthage at Bagrada River, a dragon attacked his army, or so he claimed. The battle took many soldiers to kill this dragon – many soldiers were taken by the dragon’s vicious mouth and many others were crushed by its tail. Its hide was too thick for their weapons to get through so they started using the siege weapons to crush it with heavy stones. When it was dead, they skinned the creature and sent it back to the Roman Senate. When the Senate measured the skin, it was one hundred and twenty feet in length. The hide was on display in Rome for a hundred years.’
‘I never heard of such,’ Quintus said, scowling suspiciously.
‘Is this the same Regulus who got his arse kicked by Carthaginians and was taken prisoner?’ Drust fired back drily. ‘If so, I fancy the dragon story was better than telling the Senate he had lost an army to bad generalship.’
Mule laughed and Quintus joined in. No one else did and the feral stink of the place now began working on everyone’s worst fears.