Already – already – the stench of burning flesh pierced the smoke and the screaming panic of men, women, children, mules, pigs, dogs, rats sliced the air. It was Gaul again, only greater. Hannah wiped the grime from her face and considered how it would feel to strangle Faustinos, the Iberian water engineer, with her bare hands. He had been unbearably slow to rouse from his dinner couch. In that first bubble of time, in the agony of explanation, while Pantera selected and saddled a horse from his stable, while Mergus and Shimon together impressed on him the truth of the catastrophe, while Faustinos finally saw the water flooding past his open door and grasped the fact that his trust had been betrayed and that only the emperor could save his beloved aqueducts, while he was physically lifted into the saddle by Pantera and made to repeat his mission and finally, tardily, departed … in that time, the lazy thread of smoke stitching the evening sky had been joined by a dozen others and others and each had broadened to a feather, to a flag, to a tidal wave of flame, sent roaring east towards the heart of the city by the rising wind.
What do You think about Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1?
