His friend would spend the next few weeks doing exactly the kinds of things Marcus was trying to make him stop doing, or he would risk having to leave the station forever. Marcus didn't want to lose a friend, any more than the Downtimer Council would want to lose a "Lost One" located and identified by one of their members. Marcus prayed to any Roman or Gaulish gods and goddesses that might be listening that Skeeter would win this bet, not Goldie.

She could afford to start over somewhere else.

Skeeter Jackson couldn't.

In that moment, Marcus felt a loathing of Goldie Morran he couldn't begin to put into words. He turned away, busying himself behind the bar, as Brian Hendrickson finished laying down the rules. He didn't notice when Goldie left. But when he glanced around the room and failed to find her, the relief that flooded through him left him weak-kneed. Conversation roared to a crescendo and he was so busy serving drinks, he didn't see Skeeter leaving either. He swallowed hard, sorry for the lost opportunity to speak with his friend, but he still had work to do.

So, very quietly, Marcus served drinks, collected bar tabs, and stuffed tips into his jeans, all the while worrying about the fate of his one good friend in all the world-or time.

CHAPTER FOUR

Lupus Mortiferus had not survived a hundred combats in the Roman arena by giving up easily. He waited from the Kalends of the month until a single day remained before the Ides, either he or his slave following the strangers who had emerged from that wine shop on the Via Appia in the middle of the night. Lupus watched men, women, quarrelsome children, and puckish teens gawk at marble temples, enter brothels with erect-phallus signs poking out of the sides of dingy brick buildings, or file excitedly into the circus to watch the racing and the combats.

For all that time, nearly half the lunar month, Lupus bided his time and whetted the edge on his gladius as sharp as he whetted his desire for revenge. He endured stoically the jokes and jibes that still continued. A few of the jokesters took their jests to the grave, blood and entrails spilling on the sands of the arena while the crowd roared like a thousand summer thunderstorms in his ears.

And then, the waiting was done.

They left in the middle of the night, as before, slaves showing the way with lanterns. Following them was ridiculously easy. Lupus ordered his slave home and slipped from one shadowed shopfront to another, booted feet soundless on the stone paving of the sidewalk. Several of the young men had clearly drunk too much; they reeled, clutching at slaves or at one another, and tried to keep up. As the group approached the wine shop on the Via Appia, Lupus quietly insinuated himself into the group, hanging near the back.

A slave near the front called out something in a barbarous tongue. The group entered the wineshop by twos and threes. Lupus noted uneasily that the slaves assigned to guard the group were carefully taking count of those who passed into the shop's warehouse. Just when he feared discovery, one of the young men near him began to void the contents of his alcohol-saturated stomach. Lupus hid a grin. Perfect! Slaves converged on the boy, holding his head and trying to urge him forward. The sight and smell of the boy's vomit triggered a chain reaction amongst the drunken youths. Another boy spewed as he stumbled into the warehouse. Lupus took his arm solicitously, earning a smile of gratitude from a harried woman wearing a slave's collar.

Elated, Lupus dragged the sick youngster into a corner and let him throw up the wine and sweetmeats he'd obviously gorged on during the day. Yet another boy in the group began to throw up. Women in stylish gowns moved away, holding their breath. Frowns of disgust wrinkled painted lips and manicured brows. A little girl said very distinctly, "Yuck." Lupus wasn't certain just exactly what the word meant, but the look on her face was clear enough. Even the older men were giving the sick boys a wide berth. Lupus was pressed into the corner with the sick youngsters, ignored by everyone except the boy who clung to his arm and groaned.

Then the air began to groan:

It wasn't an audible sound, but it was exactly like the painful buzzing in his skull the last time he'd been close to this warehouse. Lupus swallowed a few times and tried to find the source of the noise that wasn't exactly a noise. A hush fell over the crowd, punctuated messily by the sounds of wretchedly ill boys and a few murmured words of encouragement from their slaves. Lupus glanced at a blank stretch of wall, wondering yet again why everyone had crowded into this particular warehouse

The wall began to shimmer. Colors scintillated wildly through the entire rainbow. Lupus gasped aloud, then controlled his involuntary reaction. A quick glance showed him that no one had noticed the sweat that had started on his brow. That was a relief, but it still took all his courage to continue looking at the pulsing spot on the wall. Captivated by the sight, he couldn't look away, not even when a dark hole appeared in the scintillating, circular rainbows, his hindbrain whispering to run! The hole widened rapidly until it had swallowed half the warehouse wall. Lupus fought back once more the instinct to run, then swallowed instead and whispered softly, "Great war-god Mars, lend me a bit of your confidence, please."

People started stepping into it.

They flew away so fast, it was as though they'd been catapulted by a great war machine. Someone took the other arm of the boy Lupus was "helping" and pulled him toward the gaping hole in the wall. Lupus wanted to stand rock-still, terrified of that black maw that swallowed people whole down its gullet. Then, thinking of vengeance and his carefully sharpened gladius, he drew a deep breath for courage and moved forward in the midst of the half-dozen boys who were manfully struggling to overcome their illness. Lupus hesitated on the brink, sweating and terrified-

Then squeezed shut both eyes and stepped forward.

He was falling ...

Mithras! Mars! Save me

He went to his knees against something rough and metallic. Lupus opened his eyes and found himself kneeling on a metal gridwork. The boy who had gone through with him was vomiting again. Men hauling baggage stumbled past them, struggling to get around. Lupus hauled the kid to his feet and dragged him in the direction the others had taken, down a broad, gridwork ramp. Chaos reigned at the bottom, where several other of the boys were still holding up the line, vomiting piteously all over a young woman in the most outlandish clothing Lupus had ever seen. Everyone in line was trying to slide some sort of flat, stiff vellum chip into a boxlike device, but the boys were making a mess of the entire procedure. The young woman said something that sounded exasperated and disgusted and glanced the other way

Lupus, who had no flat, stiff vellum chip to insert into the device, slipped quietly past and fled for the nearest concealment: a curtain of hanging vines and flowering shrubs that screened a private portico. Panting slightly and cursing the fear-borne adrenalin that poured through his veins the way it did just before a fight, Lupus Mortiferus took his first look at the place where the thief who'd stolen his money had taken refuge.

He swallowed once, very hard.

Where am I? Olympus?

He couldn't quite accept that explanation, despite the terrifying magic of a hole through a wall that sometimes existed and sometimes didn't. Atlantis, perhaps? No, that had been destroyed when the gods were young. If it had ever existed at all. Where, then? Rome was civilization in this world, although traders spoke of the wonders of the far, far east, from whence expensive silk came.