GALLUS IACTA EST

"The Winter Vestige is now departing!" came the hollow resounding from the cylindrical bronze cone. The long-haired man in scale armor announced this three more times as sullen clouds milked sunlight through its openings and the bleak shadow of a Veneti longship lurched overhead.

Sounds and shadows. Ardonix entered the port city of Melvini under shouts and shadowy imagery. Wooden buildings dotted the port, new structures supported by robust oak columns, paraded by tribal soldiers in scale, sandals and blue capes. Leather scraping wood. The port busy at sea with the hundred pairs of tanned hands laboring to load and unload ships bound for exotic lands.

But Ardonix rode in the Vestige, a new device made from the curious minds of the seafaring Veneti tribe. Built up on a private aqueduct twenty meters high, the Vestige presented a narrow ship powered by wind and the release of steam on still days. It appeared as a slight crescent ship, a boiler at the rear in the form of a bronze bull whose nostrils let slip hot air. A triangular sail of crimson hung taut, a good sign that the wind was at the ship's aft. This vessel floated in enough water to hurl it down the artificial waterway from Melvini to Ardonix's bemoaned destination.

"Name and purpose," stated the guardian at the gangplank.

"Arvernius. Ardonix Arvernius. My scroll states all." He produced a scroll in a copper tube and slapped it into the guardian's armored hand.

He pulled out the scroll and read Gallic words in Latin script. "A surveyor, are you? Rome, does it say? A lover of garbage heaps?" He eyed Ardonix up and down as the breeze blew. Slender build. Olive skinned. Wide, almond-shaped eyes of liquid hazel behind a blowing mass of curly sandalwood hair. High cheekbones. Full lips. Scars formed squares and swirls on exposed shoulders. A bronze gladius lay concealed behind the flowing layers of three cloaks.

"It does."

"Rome it is. She is the final stop before we turn back. No help down there for many a day, my friend. Trouble. Bandits. Foreigners."

"I am aware of the risks. But I go where the Legion sends me." Ardonix stirred lies into his pot of truth. While there were an infinite number of Legions in the Gaul States, from militant to mercantile, he did not declare from which sent him abroad. To say so would have been tantamount to arrest and prosecution. His Legion had no formal name in the tribes, though its works were vital to their existence.

The lie came in the form of the scroll. A surveyor. If a spy surveys land and enemies for ensnaring, then let it be true. But Ardonix had no legal claim to surveying land for engineering works. He sought a different sort of staking in the ruins of Rome.

"Come along, surveyor! Vestige blows on soon enough!"

ASHES OF WHAT ONCE WAS

ROME

Wreckage.

Ardonix walked down the thousand steps from the Great Aqueduct to ground level. He alone let off in Rome, while other wealthy passengers had departed much earlier in the finer Gaul vineyards and estates to the north. Rome seemed to smolder. Even nine hundred and a score of years since Caesar escaped the claws of Pompey and returned with a joint Gaul-Roman army to level this place, she had the appearance of a city recently sacked. Burned earth. Broken columns. Were bandits setting fires to this day?

The Theatre of Pompey remained as a cracked open shell, a center for trading used by the nomadic Romani, Umayyad warriors and temperamental Ostmen. Strangers, all of them. He would stand out in their presence. Few from Gaul would dare set foot here, even though their sweet victory paved the way for the expansion of these other peoples.