"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 spinning. Paul had to brace himself against its curvature to keep his balance. When he could see out again, another glare of lightning showed him the Twins, now poised atop the shattered parabola of Kunohara's bubble. The mantle of wasps squirmed wildly, perhaps struggling to make an entrance for their commanders. A river-tossed stick almost half the size of the house bumped past, caught in the current, and scraped away a few of the hundreds of wasps clinging to the house. Leaves and bits of wood and grass were scattered across the surface of the river. Paul looked up to the cataract behind the house and saw that a great clot of debris had formed, an accidental dam of twigs and leafmold, trembling with the force of the water rushing over it and through its interstices.

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, Hannibal's army had simply appeared as if sprung from a god's hand. Hundreds of years earlier, the Carthaginian's crossing of the Alps had caught the Romans by surprise. This time, Hannibal Barca and his armies had found some even more startling way of traveling. The first anyone knew of his presence was black smoke trailing in the sky just north of the city and the first terrified refugees fleeing down the main roads into Rome itself. Within a few hours fires were burning in many places inside the city walls and the corpses of citizens were being defiled on the Field of Mars.

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, Hannibal's old enemies Scipio and Marcellus were centuries dead.

The Praetorian Guard fought nobly, but against ten thousand shrieking Carthaginians they could do little; Hannibal's armies cut their way down the Via Triumphalis like a knife through hot fat. Emperor Tigellinus was dragged from the Golden House with his arms bound behind him. Hannibal himself climbed down from his black horse and beat the emperor to death with a stick—a mark of respect, of sorts.

The most bizarre thing in what would become a week of horrors too great to comprehend, was not just that the monster Hannibal of Carthage should rise from his ancient grave, but that he should storm Rome with an army of men who looked so much like himself—in fact, some survivors swore that every soldier was absolutely identical. It was at least certain that instead of the diverse band of mercenaries he had used the first time he had come down into Italy in the days of the Republic, Ligurians and Gauls, Spaniards and Greeks, this time there was a strange uniformity to his troops—each and every one small but well-knit, with black skin, long dark hair, and a strange Asian cast to his eyes. Wherever they were from, they burned and pillaged and murdered with a cruelty so savage and arbitrary that even in the early hours of the assault some Romans swore that the very pits of the Earth had opened and belched forth this army of demons. By the end of the first day, scarcely anyone would have argued.

The few who saw him and survived said that Hannibal himself had the same dark skin and oddly hooded eyes as his troops. Other than his gold-shod horse and his banner, went the horrified whispers, Hannibal was only distinguishable from his minions by the silver staff he carried at all times, and by the fact that he alone, of all his implacable army, seemed to find the ghastly events amusing. He laughed as the young men of equestrian families were brought before him to be butchered, laughed just as hard when their sisters and mothers begged for mercy, as though the whole terrible rampage were a kind of performance conducted for his benefit alone.

He is no human, but an evil god, survivors murmured to each other as they huddled in sewers and basements. He may call himself Hannibal, but even the scourge of Cannae was never so cruel.