Shivering, I hurried toward the gate, trying to think where Neri might be. What had he told me this morning? Sword practice with Placidio? Work at the Duck’s Bone alehouse? Something. My fogged brain could not catch hold of it.
“Do you think the monster might be free? Is that why you’re shaking?” The youth had caught up to me again. “You know … Dragonis. My uncle told me there’s not been a sorcerer arrested since spring, and some folk back there were saying this is a sign.”
“There is no monster under the earth. Dragonis is just a story, and sorcerers don’t work to free him. They just—” I bit my idiot tongue. “I need to find my brother.”
Leaving the boy behind, I hurried through the gate, dodging past the fallen pediment. Someone had thrown an apron over the dead man. The bells yet clamored the alarm.
The destruction along Via Salita in the Asylum Ring was much the same as what I’d seen. Heaps of debris here and there. But everything else remained standing. Panic had already smoothed to acceptance. People with cuts and scratches were digging out their neighbors or bandaging scrapes. Some were setting up braziers or beds in the streets lest the earth shake again in echo of the first, as so often happened. The streets were mobbed with people shouting out names. Here and there someone sat weeping beside a body much too still.
The thud of hooves emptied the center of the road as a rider careened around the corner from the Asylum Ring Road onto the Via Salita.
“Heed, heed!” shouted the rider. “Cave-in at the coliseum site! Cave-in! Hundreds buried! Heed, heed…”
Still crying his message, the horseman vanished up the Via Salita.
A ripple of determined motion threaded the crowd. Anyone who was not already digging moved to join others, many of them bleeding, to form a processional heading east on the Ring Road. Some carried shovels or picks or hatchets; some had naught but a spoon or a stick, anything that might dig. Others pushed barrows or pulled sledges or wagons, or carried bundled sheets or jugs of water.
The coliseum construction was still in its beginnings—deep digging, laying foundation walls. Neri’s first paying work had been as a digger …
By the Twins! Placidio had a midday match at the old barracks training yard—a common location for refereed challenges that employed professional duelists. Neri might have been there to cheer his swordmaster on. It was only a short walk from the coliseum site.
I joined the throng on the Ring Road. Urgency pushed me between and around and through, leaving them behind when the road took a sharp bend to the southeast toward the coliseum.
The barracks yard was north and east. I’d never visited there, but it was easy to spot. Long, low, derelict buildings of wood upon stone—eight or ten of them—wrapped three sides of a rectangular yard. Several stretches of roof were fallen in, but only one large section at a corner looked freshly broken. The collapse had taken down the walls at that corner, as well.
Once used to house and train Cantagna’s small legion, the barracks had been abandoned when the city chose to retain only a small local constabulary and hire condottieri for any real fighting. Besides hosting refereed duels, the yard served as training ground for those mercenaries and some smaller family cohorts, and as a ball court for Cantagnan children.
A steep hillside of sunburnt grass and scrub footed by a low wall formed the fourth side of the rectangle. That would be where onlookers sat.
It appeared as if a giant mole had burrowed a tunnel up the hillside. The section of wall at the foot of the disturbed ground had slumped, spilling dirt and stones onto the hard-packed yard. The sections of wall on either side of the breach were profoundly misaligned.
No one sat on the hillside. The yard was abandoned. Everyone would have run for their homes … or to help at the cave-in site. Placidio and Neri would not have ignored the call for help. Neither could I.
2
DAY OF THE EARTHQUAKE
AFTERNOON
After two years of labor, the foundation of the coliseum had begun to take shape. The huge oval was dug into Cantagna’s steep flank, the uphill side far deeper than the downhill side to leave the floor level for races or jousts or other grand entertainments.
I followed the parade of citizens down a hardened dirt ramp into the works. The dug-out boundaries of the oval had been stabilized with walls of timbers and brick, and around the far western end the floor had started to sprout great stone piers—giant mushrooms that would support the layered arcades of the facade and the banks of seating.
Just where the tighter curve of the oval’s west end stretched into the longer, shallower curve of the uphill wall, the hillside had slumped, just as in the barracks yard. But instead of crumbling a short section of rubble wall, the shifting earth had toppled huge timbers, swathes of brick, and two of the massive piers. The mushroom pillars had shattered on the flagstones, crushing everything and everyone within range. Half the hillside had buried the busiest area of the works. And a crowd of Cantagnese citizens were scraping away at it, hoping to free the buried workers with shovels and spoons.
Though I kept my eye out for Neri and Placidio, I could not turn away. A huge crowd dug at the pile. The rest of us carried water, bandages, and sheets to cover the wounded or wrap the dead. I paired with an elderly man to carry a hastily built litter across the oval and up the ramp to add another corpse to the rows of the dead. At least twenty lay under a makeshift tent already.
As we returned to the coliseum to ready another poor soul for that brief journey, a murmur rippled through the crowd. A well-dressed man of middling height moved along one wall, taking a moment with each of the injured and those caring for them, speaking to the workers seated against the wall to rest, laying a hand on the shoulders of those diggers and haulers within reach. Even if I’d not recognized the newcomer’s every movement, no matter the distance, I would know the two who flanked him—tall men, white-haired though they were scarce older than I. Il Padroné and his twin bodyguards were instantly recognizable. I could have predicted, too, that once he had spoken to each person in the crews, my former master would toss his doublet to his bodyguard Gigo, take up a shovel, and start to dig.
It was impossible to ignore the renewed vigor in every man and woman in the place. Yet what hope could there be? More than two hours had passed since the earthshaking.
“They say there’s coves dug into the side wall where a man could shelter,” said Benedetto, my litter partner, as if he’d read my thoughts.
“And fallen scaffolding might leave a space for someone to breathe,” I said, thinking of the pottery woman.
We touched our latest charge’s head and feet in respect, then wrapped him carefully in a patched sheet.
“Aye,” said Benedetto. “That fellow over there with the red shirt was one of the first they found alive who hadn’t crawled out on his own. He says there’s a sizeable shed built down toward the end to keep dry their tools for when the rains come. Could be some sheltered under there.”
He pointed to the deepest part of the landslide—surely the height of five men. Someone more optimistic than I had climbed the mound of dirt, rock, and death to attack it from the top. Risky, as huge sharp rocks, brick, and splintered timber poked from the dirt everywhere, and the mound was continually resettling as the diggers removed debris from the bottom. But then—