The Emperor's Knives (11 page)

He raised a hand to acknowledge Pilinius’s presence, knowing that to delay any longer would be an unnecessary and highly visible snub to the man.

‘And now I can see that the senator would very much like me to stop what I’m doing and go to see him. And while it’s tempting to ignore him for a while longer, I see no value to be had from antagonising him.’

Dropping his training swords to the floor, he walked over to where Pilinius was waiting for him, making a cursory bow of his head in place of the usual obeisance, and fixing the senator with a direct stare.

‘Senator?’

If the patrician was irritated at the apparent lack of respect, he hid it well.

‘Mortiferum. Our partners in crime and I have come to an accommodation as to how we best deal with your request for payment of the sum withheld by our new patron.’

The gladiator nodded.

‘And?’

‘And so here …’ He took a purse from the slave standing behind him, his secretary and accountant. ‘… is your fee. Feel free to count it.’

Mortiferum shook his head.

‘There’s no need for such vulgar display of lack of trust, Senator. I’m happy that any need for unpleasantness has been averted. After all, you do have a rather significant event looming in your calendar. Far better not to have it disrupted by any unpleasant occurrences, wouldn’t you say?’

Pilinius stared at him for a moment before responding, and when he did his voice was acerbic.

‘Quite so, Mortiferum, quite so. But it seems that the details of my evening’s entertainment have spread beyond the circle of men I might usually have trusted with the information. I won’t ask you where you obtained that tasty morsel of gossip …’

Mortiferum bowed his head again, knowing that Pilinius already understood just how unlikely it was that he would ever share such a sensitive source of information.

‘… but I would ask you to pass it no further. The powerful men with whom I share these rather singular pleasures would be far from pleased to have their tastes revealed to the city. And
their
displeasure might be rather more punitive than mine.’

He turned and walked away, his slave shooting the gladiator a swift, unfathomable glance before turning to follow him. Mortiferum weighed the purse for a moment before tossing it to an identically dressed and equipped man who had walked up behind him during the conversation.

‘Here you are brother, this is the fee from the Perennis job.’

His sibling caught the leather bag and also weighed it in his hand.

‘I told you they’d crumble if you applied a little pressure. Even that halfwit Brutus is clever enough to know there’s not a man in the city that could stand against Velox and Mortiferum.’

Mortiferum nodded, turning back to his sparring partners.

‘Indeed. And now, since that little transaction has left me feeling dirty, I think I’ll work up a sweat by turning these three inside out a few times. Remember girls, watch the blade,
not
the eyes!’

The Tungrian officers walked up the Viminal Hill as the sun was approaching its zenith, Julius wiping the sweat from his beard with an expression of disgust as Cotta walked out to meet them.

‘This bloody city’s too hot, too hilly and too bloody full of half-naked women for my liking.’

Scaurus looked about him, mopping at his damp forehead with a handkerchief.

‘At least the ladies distracted our bodyguard enough to cause them to fall behind and thus spare us the usual running commentary on the goods in the shop window.’

Marcus looked back down the hill, to see that the single prostitute their escort had stopped to talk to had swiftly been joined by half a dozen of her fellows. Scaurus grinned knowingly.

‘Well now, that’ll be hard for them to walk away from without incurring the wrath of the ladies. I suggest we get inside, before the shouting starts.’

Cotta tipped his head to indicate an empty shop up a side road opposite the house.

‘Before we do, Tribune, might I suggest that I stroll across and find out who that shop belongs to? If the price sounds sensible my suggestion would be that we rent it for whatever period will make the owner happy enough not to ask any questions as to what we’re doing with it?’

Scaurus looked across the street, sizing up the indicated building.

‘What an excellent idea, Centurion! Please do.’

The officers had only been inside the domus as long as it had taken for the barbarians to extricate themselves from the clutches of the group of irascible prostitutes and walk up the hill under a hail of abuse, look around them and declare that, whilst it was clearly a very nice house if you liked that sort of thing, there was really nothing quite like a wooden hall, when there was a knock at the door. Taking the arrival to be Cotta returning from his errand, Marcus answered it only to find Excingus waiting between a pair of the veteran centurion’s men.

‘Ah, Centurion, how nice to find you’ve already made yourselves at home. I was hoping that my small gesture wouldn’t go astray …’

Marcus waited expectantly, raising an eyebrow at the young centurion who stared back in bafflement for a moment before realising what it was that Excingus was waiting for.

‘Wait here, Excingus. I cannot invite you into my wife’s house without her knowledge and acceptance.’

Felicia frowned in disbelief, and as she opened her mouth Marcus was certain that she was about to flatly refuse the informant access to her house, but then she closed it again, smiled at her husband and nodded.

‘By all means, Marcus, invite the man in.’

Her husband stood and stared at her for a moment in disbelief before turning back to the door.

Excingus smirked at him before walking into the domus, looking around with an expression of satisfaction.

‘It’s nice to see the fruits of one’s labours being employed to good effect.’

Felicia greeted him with a stony face, her body stiff with anger.

‘If you have fond imaginings of some sort of a reconciliation between you and I, you’d be well advised to disabuse yourself of them. I’ll remind you that you participated in the murder of an innocent medical orderly and the abduction of a pregnant woman, in the company of a man whose clear intent was to rape and then kill me once I’d served the purpose of distracting my husband and thereby facilitating his murder.’

Excingus nodded.

‘No more and no less than I had expected, Domina.’

‘And if you expect your “only following orders” act to soften my ire, then again you are doomed to disappointment. You could have discharged your duty to seek and apprehend my husband without resorting to the depravity you had planned for me.’

‘And which you avoided by the less than civilised expedient of ramming a knife up into my colleague’s jaw?’

Felicia’s face hardened involuntarily at the memory, and Excingus was unable to prevent himself from flinching minutely at the ferocity of her expression.

‘Yes. And be warned, Informant, this is the first and last time that I will willingly accept your presence in this house. The next time you set foot inside my door, whether you come bearing either weapons or flowers, the result will be just the same.’

Excingus bowed.

‘Understood, Domina. But before I take my leave, might I have a brief word with your husband’s commanding officer? I believe he’s here?’

Scaurus stepped out of the dining room with a curt nod to the informant.

‘How can I help you, Varius Excingus?’

‘How can you help me? Or how might I help you, Tribune? I have information for you, news of a potential opportunity to strike at one of the Emperor’s Knives.’

‘And you want money for this information?’

Excingus smiled, shaking his head.

‘No, Rutilius Scaurus, I’m already quite satisfied financially. Senator Sigilis has established a generous schedule of reimbursement to reward me for the reduction in their numbers, by whatever means …’

Scaurus favoured him with a jaundiced look.

‘I see. And you’re presumably hoping that we will be the “means” by which you collect your payment?’

The former frumentari shrugged.

‘I had assumed that we had a shared interest. Perhaps I was mistaken in my belief that you were burning with the desire to right the wrong done to your centurion’s father, and so many other innocent victims of these men’s depredations?’

Scaurus nodded briskly.

‘Very well, we’ll play your game, Excingus, but not here. We’ll meet tomorrow morning then, as soon after dawn as you like. Come to the transit barracks on the Ostia road and ask for the Tungrians. Your safety is assured.’

‘I’d rather not—’

Scaurus barked a laugh, his grin lopsided with wry amusement.

‘I’m sure you’d much rather not come onto our ground, but then the choice isn’t yours to make, not unless you want to miss the opportunity to collect whatever generous bounty the senator has put on our, as yet unrevealed, target’s head. And now, Informant, I’d say that your welcome here has reached its limit. I suggest you leave before the doctor here changes her mind, and requests me to have you killed as recompense for the orderly whose murder you so casually ordered. It would be a request I would find hard to refuse.’

Excingus nodded dourly and turned for the door.

‘If you guarantee my safety then I will come to your camp. But be aware, gentlemen, that should you break that vow I will have left a very clear trail to your door.’

‘One more thing, Informant …’

He turned back in the doorway and made an exaggerated bow.

‘How might I help you further, Domina?’

Felicia walked forward and stared into his eyes.

‘What did you do with the previous occupants of this house?’

Excingus laughed softly.

‘Ah, so now that you have possession of your father’s house, you wonder what price was paid to allow you to walk back in. Worried that I had your former husband’s family put to the knife, are you?’

She held the stare, her lip curling in disgust.

‘It did cross my mind.’

His face creased into an affronted frown.

‘Then put it
out
of your mind, madam. This is Rome, not the sort of frontier village you’ve become used to, and I am most assuredly not given to the wanton acts of murder that are the emperor’s preserve. Your former brother-in-law and the rest of his family are safely tucked away somewhere not too far from here.’

He turned and left without waiting for a reply, leaving the Tungrians staring after him and the barbarians in particular fingering the hafts of the knives they had secreted about them. Julius shook his head in disbelief, raising an eyebrow at Scaurus.

‘
Really
, Tribune? We’re going to work with him after what he did in Britannia? He’ll sell us out without any hesitation whatsoever.’

The senior officer answered, still staring at the door through which Excingus had made his exit.

‘I see little choice. As of now we don’t even know which of the four of them he has in mind for this “opportunity”, so we either take the chance he’s presenting, with an eye open to the risk he presents, or we let it pass and give up on the whole thing.’

The two men stared at each other in silence for a moment before Cotta interjected.

‘I’d say that you’re both right.’ He gestured to Scaurus. ‘The tribune has it correct when he says that there’s no way we can take the vengeance we’re seeking without that man. But on the other hand, the first spear is right to say that we can trust that odious bastard no further than we can piss … begging your pardon ladies.’

Felicia and Annia smiled demurely, and the former soldier continued with his face slowly reddening.

‘Anyway … what I was going to say was that there might be a way to bring a greater element of trust to the relationship.’

Julius frowned in disbelief.

‘Greater trust? You’re suggesting that we might give that boot-scraped piece of shit the benefit of the doubt?’

Cotta shook his head.

‘Not exactly. The problem is that right now we only have two choices: either to trust him blindly or to kill him. One choice is recklessly naive, while the other ends any hope we have of taking revenge for the death of Marcus’s father. What I have in mind might just give us a third option.’

‘You don’t want to know, Marcus, leave it at that.’

Cotta shook his head firmly at his former protégée, his mouth set in a tight line of determination.

‘I have to know. I need to understand just how bad it—’

The veteran cut him off with a sweeping chop of his hand.

‘Just about as bad as you can imagine, for all the fact that you’ve seen the ugly face of war. Some things are just better not being discussed, or you’ll end up going mad simply because they were here and you weren’t.’

Marcus stood up and paced away across the small garden. Beyond the house’s wall the sounds of the city were ever present: the slap of feet on cobbles, the shouts of shopkeepers and street hawkers rising in an incessant discordant chorus. Scaurus had taken his escort of barbarians back down the hill, leaving the young centurion to spend the evening with his wife under the watchful eyes of his friend and several of Cotta’s men.

‘And that’s my point. I wasn’t here, but they were. My entire family gone, overnight, and me never any the wiser as to what happened to them. For all I know they may have been sold into sl—’ He fell silent at the look on his friend’s face, as Cotta’s last line of resistance crumbled. ‘What?’

‘Lucius.’

His face took on a haunted expression, and Marcus recalled that Cotta and the gladiator had started training his younger brother only the year before his own enforced exile to Britannia. He waited patiently for the former soldier to compose himself.

‘I heard later that Lucius was sold to one of Pilinius’s friends. Seems that the senator had no need of him, given the number of women who were taken from your father’s villa, so he disposed of him in return for enough money to buy himself a formal toga.’

Having broken his silence he was unable to stop talking.

‘Your mother and sisters were served up as part of one of Pilinius’s parties. I don’t know what happens behind the walls of his villa, but I do know what the end result is. One of the servants who got away in the confusion came to find me a few days later, and took me to the illegal dumping ground out past the Esquiline gate. Your sister Livia’s body was lying there naked, with its eyes already pecked out by the crows. We buried her, and searched the pits for anyone else from the household, but we didn’t find anything to tell us the fate of the rest of your family, or any of their household for that matter.’