“Why me? You’re the doctor,” Tero said, but he walked around the couch.

Both on the Rhine and as a vigil in Vesunna, Gaius Tero had seen the results of more violent deaths than he liked to remember. Yet the corpse in this quiet room shook him in a way none of the others, however grisly, ever had. He was in the presence of the unknown, and little fingers of ice crawled up his back as he viewed its handiwork.

Eprius’ body lay on its right side; its right hand still clutched a stick. Tero barely noticed, for his gaze was fixed in horrified fascination at the ruin that had been its head. There was a neat hole about the width of Tero’s little finger over the left eye. A small stream of blood ran down over Epirius’ face to join the pool beneath his head. Already flies were beginning to buzz about it.

Bad as that was, it was far from the worst. Whatever had drilled through Eprius’ forehead had smashed out through the back of his head, tearing his skull open: Much of the left rear quadrant of his head was a sickening soup of brain, pulverized bone, scalp, and hair. It was that which had stained the wall; blood cemented the gory fragments to the plaster.

The hobnails of Larcius Afer’s sandals clicked on mosaic tiles as he came up. Dread was on his face; his fingers writhed in a sign to avert evil. “It was Jupiter’s thunderbolt that slew him.” Afer said. “Two or three of the neighbors heard him cry out, and then the terrible roar of the thunderbolt itself-and not a cloud in the sky. His man Titus had the evening free and when he got home, he found this.”

Tero had never been one to fear the gods unduly, but he felt the little hairs on the back of his neck trying to rise as he listened to Afer. Surely nothing in his experience could have produced the ghastly wound he saw. To have Kleandros throw back his head and laugh was unbelievable. Tero wondered if the doctor had taken leave of his senses, and Afer stared at him indignantly.