“When you’re Emperor?” Sabina turned, skirting the dogs, and glided away. “You talk to your puddle about that, and I’ll talk to the Emperor. Let’s see which of us has better luck.”

CHAPTER 23

VIX

It was two days before I found them.

I tore at the heap of stones with my bare hands. Boil pitched in silently beside me, his voice subdued as he organized my men into teams. They worked at my side, joining forces to shift some chunk of rock too big to move alone. Antinous mutely moved whatever stones were small enough for him to lift. I ignored them all, digging frantically through the heap of stone and wood and brick that had been a tenement building. Four stories had all come crashing down, and dear God, my Mirah had been on the bottom. I found the still and battered body of a woman, and my heart hammered, but it was an old woman; her hair only looked red because it was bloody. The woman’s daughters wailed, and I realized there were more people digging through the wreckage, neighbors of mine who had lived in the rooms above or beside me, looking for their buried families. All through the city, people were digging and calling for husbands, sisters, children. There were looters all through the city too, men combing the wreckage for valuables. I saw a young man eagerly searching the pockets of a woman with a crushed leg lying in the street—sifting through her clothes, ignoring her whimpers of agony. I came up silently behind the young man and snapped his neck between my hands. Antinous stared at me, but I couldn’t find a word to say.

Boil made me sleep sometimes. I tumbled down on the ground in my cloak and slept till I could rise and start digging again. My hands were two bloody slabs of meat. “We won’t find her, Centurion,” a big African who was one of my best fighters told me, and I ignored him.

On the morning of the third day, Boil found a foot.

A small high-arched foot and a trim ankle, peeking out from a heap of stones and fallen beams.

A lean Spaniard I’d had to flog last month for insubordination put a hand on my shoulder. I shook it off and fell on the pile of ruins, clawing the stones away. Two splinters ran under my thumbnail clear up to the knuckle, but the pain was distant.

Boil and the massive African grunted to shift a fallen beam, while I uncovered my wife’s little foot, then a shin gray with dust, a leg with a tattered woolen hem lying limp over the knee…

A voice sounded somewhere from the heap of fallen beams, weak but still waspish. “Took you long enough, husband.”