The dawn after the council was not a gentle one. It was a grey, practical light that exposed the full extent of the wreckage. Londinium was a skeleton picked clean by war and time, and now it was theirs to re-flesh. The silence of the supernatural had been replaced by the cacophony of recovery: the ring of hammers on stone, the grunt of men hauling timber, the sharp, authoritative voices of centurions and the deep-throated commands of Saxon thegns echoing through the ruins.
Marcus stood at the edge of the forum, his arm still bound, watching the new world being born in fits and starts. A team of Roman engineers, their discipline a comforting anachronism, directed a mixed group of Celtic tribesmen and Saxon warriors in clearing a collapsed portico. The Saxons, used to building in wood, loo
