Nelo grabbed his weapons and satchel and made for the door. Suniatus couldn’t resist clowning; he walked on exaggerated tiptoe and shoved Nelo in the back, trying to make him stumble. But they got out of the barracks without disturbing anybody else.

They emerged onto a silent street. The sand that had blown in from the desert scraped on the cobbles under Nelo’s boots. Gisco had left a lantern by the barracks door; he raised this now and scrutinised a bit of paper. Nelo saw it was a list of addresses, all in Megara. This barracks, by the city wall, was on the periphery of the suburb.

Suniatus glanced over the sergeant’s shoulder. ‘I know the first address, sir. That street anyhow. There’s a whorehouse where they have these Balearic women who—’

‘All right, Suni. Just lead the way.’

The soldier strode confidently through the darkened streets. With experience Suniatus was becoming a good soldier, Nelo realised, for all his bullying and bluster. The word in the barracks was that he would already have had a few promotions if not for his habit of punching out his comrades when drunk.

The sky was a lid of cloud, the city all but pitch-dark save for the occasional gleam of a lantern in the houses and shut-up shops and shrines. Nelo wasn’t sure what time it was, but these were the hours of the curfew the suffetes had imposed months before, and the streets were empty – silent save only for distant soft whistles, the signals of the patrolling guard. One of Fabius’ iron rules was that the streets had to be kept clear, there could be nobody sleeping out in the open, in alleyways or doorways, as had become common since the city had filled up with nestspills. The rule seemed to be working well. Occasionally you would hear a scurrying in the dark, a rustle, perhaps footsteps, a rat or wild dog, or maybe some human scavenger. But Nelo, eyes wide open, saw nothing.

Once they passed a cart hauled by a couple of beefy-looking Libyans, perhaps slaves, and led by a soldier in a dark cloak, his face hidden. The cart’s load was covered by a thick, bloodstained cloth, and Nelo did not need too much imagination to know what was under there. The deaths continued in a steady trickle, from hunger, from the blood plague and other diseases that swept like fires through the city’s crowded tenements. Nelo had found these deaths horrific when he had first come to live inside the city walls. But Fabius had once told him that cities were always like this, even in the good times, even with plentiful food and water. It made Nelo sharply homesick for the wide, empty, orderly landscape of Northland, where people did not die like this.