Chapter 163: Night Raid on Arretium

February 20, 229 AD.

Apennine Demarcation Line & Arretium, Roman Italy.

Beneath the night sky along the Apennine demarcation line, several thousand coalition legionaries moved through timber-shored sapping tunnels driven 4 kilometers beneath no-man’s-land.

Marcus, serving under the field name Ignis, climbed from the narrow shaft behind his lead point-men.

Dropping to one knee in the brush, he drew a slow breath.

The pre-dawn frost cleared the stale tunnel air from his lungs.

Adjusting his ground-glass spectacles, he swept the dark ridgeline.

Around him, the scouts held brass monoculars to their eyes, finding little contrast against the timbered slope in the dark.

Ignis adjusted his focus, catching a flicker of heat and a reflection of light off an elevated post above the tree line.

Enemy sentry, 400 paces south on a timber watchtower.

Advance through the structural blind spots, he signaled with quick hand commands.

The men moved without hesitation. Having trained under their young sergeant for 4 months, and knowing his section had planned the route, they advanced in staggered bounds, using folds in the ground and the tower’s timber struts to mask their approach.

It was an exacting approach...

Unlike Aurelia’s Umbrae specialists, these troops were standard line infantry.

That limitation was why the sappers had spent months cutting tunnels through the rock, and why Ignis had drilled the cohort on line-of-sight angles.

High on the 30-foot timber deck, the Roman auxiliary sentry, Rufus, leaned against the oak parapet beside his firing slit.

Shivering in his cloak, he dropped pine needles into a clay brazier between his boots, checking the kindling piled beside him to keep the fire going until dawn.

The crack of a breaking branch sounded from the brush below.

Rufus caught his breath. He lifted a torch from the bracket, touched it to the coals, and held it out over the rail.

"Halt! Who goes there?"

His voice carried down into the thicket, his hand tightening on the handle. He strained his eyes into the brush, but nothing moved.

When a minute passed without sound, Rufus lowered the torch into its ring and crouched back beside the embers.

Below in the brush, Ignis watched the sentry’s shadow withdraw against an oak trunk.

Crawling beside the trooper whose boot had snapped the branch, Ignis packed damp earth over the man’s leather sole until the boot was buried under heavy silt. He tapped the soldier’s ankle.

The trooper drew up his knee slowly, lifting his leg with deliberate care.

The sand deadened the splintered fibers beneath, muffling the release.

Forward, Ignis signaled.

Moving past the flank of the tower, Ignis noted the ground.

Two days after heavy mountain rains, brittle, dried branches were laid out across the defile... an acoustic trip line.

Had the sentry blown his horn instead of watching the brush, a carbine round would have dropped him. His hesitation had saved his life.

At that hour, 30 miles behind the front in the garrison town of Arretium...

"The Prefect is down!"

"Assassins in the courtyard! To arms!"

Shouts rose from the villas near the forum.

In a stone cottage behind the magistrate’s quarter, an 8-year-old boy sat up on his straw mat, rubbing his eyes.

A broad hand covered his mouth before he could cry out.

The boy calmed as he caught the smell of stone dust and oil... his father, Cassian.

Cassian signaled for silence. Moving quickly, the stonecutter barred the window shutters, took his son in his arms, and slipped out the back toward the courtyard well.

"Where are we going?" the boy whispered as his father set his feet onto the iron rungs inside the shaft.

"Quiet, Milo," Cassian murmured, keeping his voice low as his heart raced. "Your great-grandfather masoned this shaft 80 years ago during the civil wars. He left a dry chamber above the waterline for when trouble entered the streets. Hold fast."

12 feet above the water, Cassian pushed through hanging moss and backed into a stone recess barely wide enough for two to crouch.

Minutes passed in the dark before the courtyard above erupted.

Rifle fire rattled through the streets, answered by shouts from the garrison.

Detonations shook the masonry overhead, raining dust and chips into the water below.

The boy drew in a breath; Cassian’s hand clamped back over his mouth to muffle the gasp.

Above at the wellhead, boots came to a halt.

"Hold up... Felix, Marcus, check that shaft. Sound came from below," a voice called out in northern-accented Latin.

A magnesium flare hissed into life above, throwing white light down the wet shaft and highlighting the moss.

"A Praetorian taking cover?" another voice asked.

"Let’s see." A trooper lifted a 40-pound stone from the ruined rim and dropped it down the center.

The stone struck with a roar, throwing up a 20-foot column of spray that washed over the rim and soaked the man who had cast it. Laughter broke out above.

Inside the niche, the surge tore away a clump of moss, exposing a 2-inch gap in the greenery.

The laughter stopped.

"Look at that cleft in the stones. Someone is inside."

"Come out on the count of 3, or I put a volley through the vines!"

"Save the rounds... they’re locals; they won’t follow Gallic Latin. Let the scout speak."

Another soldier called down the shaft in a southern dialect: "You inside the wall! Climb out onto the rungs now, or we drop 2 concussion canisters down the pipe and bring down the mortar! You won’t leave enough behind to bury!"

Cassian looked at the walls around them.

Without a sound, he slipped off his tunic.

Before Milo understood, Cassian bound a strip of cloth across the boy’s mouth and tied his wrists and ankles with the torn sleeves.

In the faint light of the dying flare, Cassian looked at his 8-year-old son’s tear-filled eyes.

If left unbound, the boy would follow him onto the rungs, bringing fire down on them both.

Since his wife had died of fever 3 years earlier, the boy had been his sole care...