Episode 5.3.b
>Outside Herculaneum, Italy, 79 CE<
You run, and you are good at it: down side streets, through colonnades, into one doorway and out another while the two men crash along behind you, losing your trail, losing each other, their shouts turning from threats into blame. By the time you break out of the last street into open country they are well behind you and you do not look back to count them.
Sextus is waiting on a rise at the edge of the fields, where the ground climbs high enough to see the sea on one side and the mountain on the other. He turns when he hears you coming, and the relief on his face is so plain it is almost painful.
"You're safe," he says. "Good. Good. I stood up here telling myself you were fine and not believing a word of it." He shakes his head once, putting the fear away. "I kept asking myself whether those men had killed you."
Then the lightness goes out of him.
"Listen to me, because this matters. Those two were not a chance pair of thugs. They belong to something. There is a society of powerful men, working together, reaching for the Lapis with both hands, exactly as we are. I have a name for them: the Societas Potentium. The difference between us and them is the whole difference in the world. We want to keep the Lapis safe. They want it for what it can give them."
The inscription comes back to you on its own: the letters hold a road to power. You understand, now, that the stone in the forum was not warning you off. It was telling you what they are after.
"We can't stay here," Sextus says, already looking toward the road home. "We go back to Pompeii, and quickly. You find Caecilius, you make sure Tiberius is safe, and then you come back to my villa, because what we have in front of us is going to take all of us." He glances at you, and some of the old dryness returns. "But I am keeping you in the dark, and you have earned better than that."
He spreads his hands.
"So. Ask me. Anything you like, before we go."
Prompt: Find out what Sextus thinks about Sinistrus, the inscription, and what must be done.
