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"They have seen us!" Florimel shouted, and for a moment Paul had no idea what she meant—the Twins and Wells were surely too far away to attach any significance to their bubble, surrounded as it was by others kicked up naturally in the rain-pummeled water. Then he saw that some of the mutated wasps were swimming toward them, floundering across the water with purpose in their movements if not on their blank faces. Several had already been swept away by the roiling waters, but dozens more were still paddling on with the awkward determination of dogs.
Their spherical ark was splashed by another massive raindrop and slipped sideways, bobbing and spi
The rains, he thought distractedly, so much rain. There must be a lot of water and other things trapped behind that rubbish.
What had Kunohara said? "There is another thing I must do. . . ."
"Oh my God!" Paul shouted. "Hold on—brace yourselves!"
"We are already fighting just to keep upright. . . ." Florimel began, but Paul put his foot against her hip and pushed her back against the curve of the bubble. "Just brace yourself. It's going to be. . . ."
As the lightning flashed again, he saw the great wedge of debris lurch and change shape across the top of the cataract. For a moment the waterfall was almost completely choked off—a change so great that even the misshapen pair on top of Kunohara's house turned to look behind them. As the effect of this throttling of the flow reached Paul and the others the current grew momentarily mud and their bubble settled deeper in the water. Then the clot broke apart and the river surged over the fall like a fist made of green water and white foam, smashing down on Kunohara's house and the insects, driving the whole mass beneath the surface in an explosion of spray.
The wall of water rushed across the surface of the pool toward Paul and his companions, caught them up, then hurled them screaming out over the lower cataract, so that for a moment they were freefalling through the air above the dark, rain-whipped river like a star that had plummeted from the heavens.
The destruction of Rome was in full swing now, and the smoke of the burning could be seen as far away as the vineyards of Campania—a defeat of staggeringly unprecedented proportions. But the Romans, citizens and slaves, could have been forgiven for being caught unprepared, since the massive assault had arrived out of nowhere, and almost three hundred years late.
Before this day had dawned, Tigellinus had reigned two years as emperor. The onetime horse trader was still popular, not so much because of his own acts, although he had been a careful steward, but because of the hatred in which the people of Rome had come to hold his predecessor Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, in the days before his assassination. It was not just Tigellinus, many Romans suggested—even one of his horses would have been an improvement over Nero.
In fact, as of the day before, all had seemed more than well in the Mother of all Cities. A March tramontane wind had swept the skies clean, and spring had seemed to sprout almost immediately in its wake, luring buds out of the branches of the chestnut trees, turning the hills green. Strangely, even the College of Augurs had offered no warning of anything amiss—the most recent sacrifices had gone smoothly, and all the signs had suggested a happy year for the emperor and his people. The empire itself was quite secure. There were still skirmishes at the outer fringes of the Roman world, but generally the idea of war had become little more than the setting for stories told by old soldiers in the wineshops who had fought in Britain or the forests of Gaul. No one had expected any sort of attack. let alone one by a long-dead enemy—especially when that enemy's city had been dust almost as long as he had.
On that late March morning, Ha
The city was largely undefended. The Senate had fled south down the Via Appia at the first reports of invasion, some of the senators making themselves notable by crushing other refugees beneath the wheels of their carts in their hurry to escape. The most respected men of the day were far from Rome, in large part because Tigellinus had preferred it that way, all Rome's defenders and generals scattered. And, of course, Ha
The Praetorian Guard fought nobly, but against ten thousand shrieking Carthaginians they could do little; Ha
The most bizarre thing in what would become a week of horrors too great to comprehend, was not just that the monster Ha
The few who saw him and survived said that Ha
He is no human, but an evil god, survivors murmured to each other as they huddled in sewers and basements. He may call himself Ha