Rope and sack around her neck, Anna rises through a stratigraphy of rotting brick, from the first emperor to the last, and soon the holes Himerius spoke of are upon her: a series of ornamented scuppers shaped like the heads of lions, each as big as she is. She manages to pull herself up and through the open mouth of one. As soon as she has weight beneath her knees, she twists her shoulders, and crawls through a cradle of muck.

Damp and streaked with mud, she lowers herself into what, centuries ago, might have been a refectory. Somewhere ahead rats scrabble in the dark.

Stop. Listen. Much of the timbered ceiling has caved in, and in the fog-scattered moonlight she can see a debris-littered table as long as Kalaphates’s workshop running through the center of the room with a garden of ferns growing on top. A rain-ruined tapestry hangs on one wall; when she touches the hem, invisible things behind it go flapping deeper into the shadows. On the wall her fingers find an iron bracket, perhaps for a torch, badly rusted. Could this be worth something? Himerius had conjured visions of forgotten treasures—she imagined the palace of brave Alcinous—but this is hardly a treasury; everything has been corroded by weather and time; it is an empire of rats, and whatever chamberlain once watched over this place must be three hundred years dead.

To Anna’s right gapes what might be a sheer drop, but turns out to be a staircase. She feels her way along the wall, one step at a time; the stairs twist, branch, and branch again. She tries a third hall and finds cells like the cells of monks running down both sides of a corridor. Here’s a pile of what might be bones, the rustle of dried leaves, a crevice in the floor waiting to swallow her.

She turns around, stumbles forward, and in the spectral quarter-light space and time muddle. How long has she been in here? Has Maria fallen asleep, or is she awake and frightened, still waiting for Anna to return from the toilet? Has Himerius waited for her, is his rope long enough, have he and his derelict skiff been swallowed by the sea?

Weariness crashes over her. She has risked everything for nothing; soon cocks will crow, matins will begin, and Widow Theodora will open her eyes. She’ll reach for her rosary, lower her kneecaps onto the cold stone.

Anna manages to feel her way back to the staircase and climb to a small wooden door. She pushes through into a round room, partially open to the sky, that smells of mud and moss and time. And something else.

Parchment.