“Here, Praetor,” said one of the men. He had found a narrow slot in the ceiling. It was as long as a finger and no wider. I held a torch to it and the flame fluttered slightly away from it.
“Probably a ventilation shaft,” I said. “But I can’t imagine how they cut so fine a hole. Whoever did this did things with stone I can’t comprehend.” We found more such slots, evenly spaced about every five paces along the shaft. The walls, however, yielded no secrets, nor did the floor. In this laborious fashion did we make our way to the chambers at the bottom. First, we searched of Hecate’s shrine. The men were apprehensive at first, working under the gaze of the uncanny statue of Hecate.
“It’s just stone,” I said. “And not very well carved stone at that.”
“Maybe you should perform a little propitiatory rite,” Hermes whispered. “It might make them feel better.”
So I asked the goddess’s indulgence for thus profaning her shrine, pleading the necessity of one bound by duty and on the service of the Senate and People of Rome. Then I cut off a small lock of my hair and burned it on her altar among all the other rubbish. Then my men set about their work with lightened spirits. I resented losing the lock. My hair had been getting thinner of late and I could ill afford to lose more.
This work was even more tedious than searching the tunnel, though far less cramped. The roughness and irregularity of the stone walls made it difficult to detect cracks or protuberances that did not belong there. Polished or at least smooth stone would have been far more accommodating.
“There’s something odd about this,” Hermes said, as the other men worked over walls, ceiling, and floor.
“You mean there’s something about this that isn’t odd?” I said.
“It’s just that the tunnel is so straight and relatively smoothsided—a bit rough, but flat and true all the way down, while this chamber and the Styx chamber below are no more regular than a cow’s stomach. They’re more like natural caves.”
“It’s another oddity to go along with all the others,” I commented. “I suppose it should be no surprise. If the tunnelers could drive their shaft through solid stone straight to the river, why shouldn’t there already be some natural caves already down here to make their task a bit easier?”
I personally searched Hecate’s altar and her statue. First I had one of the men clear away all the accumulated rubbish from the altar, a task he performed efficiently but with no small repugnance. I could hardly blame him. Along with everything else, I inspected the altar litter and it was as strange an assortment of items as I had ever run across. Predominating were bones, some of them quite familiar, including the aforementioned skeletons of infants. These gave us pause.
“Could we prosecute them for human sacrifice?” Hermes asked. “It’s strictly forbidden.”
“Do you see any traces of blood?” I asked him. “As near as I can see, nothing living has been sacrificed here. These could be the skeletons of stillborns for all we know. It’s bizarre, but in violation of no law familiar to me.”
There were other bones, the skeletons of birds, of small animals, nothing bigger than a fox, a great many dogs, and some of creatures never native to Italy, at least not in many generations. One appeared to be the skeleton of a tiny man, but I recognized it as a monkey. I had seen the skeletons of monkeys and apes on display in the Museum at Alexandria. There were reptiles of conformations I had never seen anywhere.
“Remind me to ask Iola about this,” I told Hermes.
“I will. Speaking of that woman, she says she’s from Thrace, but she doesn’t have a trace of Thracian accent.”
“She has a rather odd accent,” I said, “but I agree it doesn’t sound Thracian.”
“I think it’s fake,” he said. He would know. As a slave, he had socialized with other slaves from the far parts of the world. We masters tend not to notice these things.
The altar itself, cleared of its exotic detritus, was a natural block of stone, hewn from the same rock as the floor. At first it seemed awfully convenient that an altar-shaped stone should be here, but then I saw that the statue of Hecate, too, was in one piece with the floor. I saw how they lined up, and that the wall behind Hecate was planed smooth, unlike the rest of the chamber wall.
“There used to be a rock outcropping coming out from that wall,” I said. “The tunnelers, or at least whoever converted this place into Hecate’s shrine, carved the altar and the statue from that outcropping.”
“You don’t think it was the same people?” Hermes said.