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two fingers to his mouth and whistled at the slave with the boat-hook, and made an upwards motion with his hand, at which the slave swung round and flung the end of his pole towards the surface of the eel pond, hooked something and began to drag it in.
    Attilius was almost at the pipes. Closer to, they were larger than they had looked from the terrace. Terracotta. A pair. More than a foot in diameter. They emerged from the slope, traversed the ramp together, parted company at the edge of the water, then ran in opposite directions along the side of the fishery. A crude inspection plate was set into each – a loose piece of pipe, two feet long, cut crossways – and as he reached them he could see that one had been disturbed and not replaced properly. A chisel lay nearby, as if whoever had been using it had been disturbed.
    Attilius knelt and jammed the tool into the gap, working it up and down until it had penetrated most of the way, then twisted it, so that the flat edge gave him enough space to fit his fingers underneath the cover and lever it off. He lifted it away and pushed it over, not caring how heavily it fell. His face was directly over the running water and he smelt it at once. Released from the confined space of the pipe, it was strong enough to make him want to retch. An unmistakable smell of rottenness. Of rotten eggs.
    The breath of Hades.
    Sulphur.

    The slave was dead. That much was obvious, even from a distance. Attilius, crouching beside the open pipe, saw the remains hauled out of the eel pond and covered with a sack. He saw the audience disperse and begin traipsing back up to the villa, at the same time as the grey-haired slave woman threaded her way between them, heading in the opposite direction, down towards the sea. The others avoided looking at her, left a space around her, as if she had some virulent disease. As she reached the dead man she flung up her hands to the sky and began rocking silently from side to side. Ampliatus did not notice her. He was walking purposefully towards Attilius. Corelia was behind him and a young man who looked just like her – her brother, presumably – and a few others. A couple of the men had knives at their belts.
    The engineer returned his attention to the water. Was it his imagination or was the pressure slackening? The smell was certainly much less obvious now that the surface was open to the air. He plunged his hands into the flow, frowning, trying to gauge the strength of it, as it twisted and flexed beneath his fingers, like a muscle, like a living thing. Once, when he was a boy, he had seen an elephant killed at the Games – hunted down by archers and by spearmen dressed in leopard skins. But what he remembered chiefly was not the hunt but rather the way the elephant's trainer, who had presumably accompanied the giant beast from Africa, had crouched at its ear as it lay dying in the dust, whispering to it. That was how he felt now. The aqueduct, the immense Aqua Augusta, seemed to be dying in his hands.
    A voice said, 'You are on my property.'
    He looked up to find Ampliatus staring down at him. The villa's owner was in his middle fifties. Short, but broad-shouldered and powerful. 'My property,' Ampliatus repeated.
    'Your property, yes. But the Emperor's water.' Attilius stood, wiping his hands on his tunic. The waste of so much precious liquid, in the middle of a drought, to pamper a rich man's fish, made him angry. 'You need to close the sluices to the aqueduct. There's sulphur in the matrix and red mullet abominate all impurities. That –' he emphasised the word '– is what killed your precious fish.'
    Ampliatus tilted his head back slightly, sniffing the insult. He had a fine, rather handsome face. His eyes were the same shade of blue as his daughter's. 'And you are who, exactly?'
    'Marcus Attilius. Aquarius of the Aqua Augusta.'
    'Attilius?' The millionaire frowned. 'What happened to Exomnius?'
    'I wish I knew.'
    'But surely Exomnius is still the