The Emperor's Knives (8 page)

He smiled back at her.

‘I understand your fears, but I really don’t have any choice in the matter. And besides, I have Cotta and his men behind me now.’

‘Yes …’

Her tone was dubious.

Marcus laughed softly. He and Cotta had grinned at each other in the square the previous evening, both of them deaf to Albinus’s furious protests as he’d been led away, and the veteran centurion had wrapped him in a bear hug that had squeezed the breath from his body before pushing him away and looking him up and down.

‘I thought you were dead, boy, but look at you, scars and all! You can join my little team of lads any time you like!’

Marcus had stared dumbly back at him, smiling through unexpected tears and was unable to reply. After a moment’s silence, Scaurus had coughed politely behind him.

‘Ah …’

Cotta had straightened, throwing a salute at the senior officer.

‘Tribune, sir!’

‘There’s no need for all that, Centurion, given that you’re retired.’

The veteran had shaken his head dismissively.

‘A man leaves the legion when his twenty years are up, Tribune, but the legion never really leaves the man, does it, sir? Tattoos, scars and memories of dead friends, they’re all still there until the day you die, and since me and my lads are time-served veterans for the most part, we can recognise a fellow professional when we see one. Which means that we’ll be saluting you, and calling you “sir” just as long as we’re working alongside you.’

Scaurus had stepped forward, regarding Cotta from beneath raised eyebrows.

‘As long as you’re working beside us, Centurion? Whatever gave you
that
idea?’

Cotta’s return stare had been utterly unabashed, the tolerant gaze of a career soldier when challenged by his less-experienced senior officer.

‘The fact that me and my lads know Rome a damned sight better than your boys, no disrespect intended, First Spear.’ Julius had nodded his head gracefully, a corner of his mouth lifting in a wry smile at his tribune. ‘The fact that I’ve burned my bridges with one of the most powerful senators in the city by failing to obey his order to kill the centurion there. And the fact that I’ve been beating common sense into this officer of yours since he was half the age he is now, although to little avail given the stories I’ve been hearing about him from your soldiers, once they’ve got a few cups of wine down their necks. Put simply Tribune, you need us. And I’m not about to allow that silly young bugger to get himself killed in Rome, not when he seems to have made a tolerable job of surviving everything else that’s been thrown at him up to now.’

Once the usual dawn officers’ meeting was out of the way, Julius went to report to Scaurus as to the two cohorts’ strength, gathering Marcus and Dubnus to him with a glance as he left the transit barracks’ cold and slightly dingy headquarters building. The tribune greeted them cheerfully, inviting them to join him at his breakfast table where, Marcus was unsurprised to discover, Cotta was already busy ploughing his way through a plate of bread and honey. Scaurus gestured to the empty seats around the scarred and stained table.

‘It isn’t often that a man gets to eat fresh bread of quite such good quality, and the honey’s excellent. Help yourselves, gentlemen.’

He turned to the silent Arminius, who was doing his best to avoid attention in the room’s corner.

‘Don’t you have a young pupil to be teaching the martial arts?’

The German gave him a hard stare before shrugging and making for the door.

‘I’ll find out what you’re planning soon enough, don’t worry.’

Cotta raised an eyebrow at the door as it closed behind him.

‘You’re not beating that slave enough, Tribune.’

Scaurus shrugged.

‘I tried it, in the early days of our relationship, but it seemed to make no difference to his attitude, and it all proved to be rather a lot of energy expended to little effect, so I stopped bothering. He means well enough …’ He took another piece of bread and popped it into his mouth, looking at Marcus with a quizzical expression, and when he spoke again his tone was deceptively soft. ‘So, are you determined to see this through then, Centurion?’

Marcus heard the edge of formality that underlaid his tribune’s apparently disingenuous question, and straightened in his chair.

‘Yes Tribune.’

Scaurus shook his head, his lips pursed in grim amusement.

‘Relax man, I’m not intending to try to stop you, far from it, I just want us all to be very clear on the likely consequences of taking action again these men. For a start, there’s our new friend Cleander to consider. I’d imagine that the imperial chamberlain will smell a rat pretty quickly if we start killing the men whom the emperor depends on to carry out the task of confiscating the assets of the wealthy, wouldn’t you? And that’s before we ponder what the reaction of the remaining members of the group might be when they realise that they’re being hunted. If so much as a hint of our involvement in the deaths of any of these men becomes known, then we can expect a violent reaction, to say the least, and even if there’s nothing to point to us, they’re all going to get paranoid very quickly when the first of them dies.’

The young centurion nodded earnestly.

‘Exactly my thinking, sir, and I wasn’t planning on any sort of assistance from anyone within the cohort. This is my debt to pay, and I’ll—’

‘Really?
’ Julius shook his head in disbelief. ‘You were expecting that we’d happily sit here getting fat on too much wine and spicy food, while you blunder round this cesspit of a city in search of revenge? What were you going to do, rely on that arsehole Excingus to see you right? That bastard would sell you out in a heartbeat; this man Cleander’s thugs would snap you up and you’d never be seen again. Is that what you were planning?’

Marcus shook his head.

‘No Julius. Credit me with a little intelligence. I know Rome as well as any man, and I have more friends in the city than you might imagine.’

Scaurus pursed his lips, tilting his chair back.

‘All the same, the idea that you might dispose of four men with that sort of profile on your own is perhaps more than a little ambitious. I don’t doubt that your man Cotta here will be able to provide you with some assistance, but perhaps it might be worth reviewing what Excingus told us yesterday and apply a little thinking as to just how hard they’re going to be to kill, shall we?’

He raised a single finger.

‘Let’s start with Senator Pilinius. The man lives in a veritable fortress, far better protected than Sigilis’s domus. Entrants to the place come through the front door in the main, past enough of his bodyguards to weed out any attempt at infiltration without very much effort. If they don’t want to be seen participating in that sort of entertainment, and they’re of sufficient importance, then they slip in via the back door, where his men will all be armed to the teeth with much less work to do and therefore twice as vigilant. Given how Pilinius and his cronies get their enjoyment, I’d imagine that they’ll be more than a little jumpy too. All of which would tend to indicate that he might be easier to get to on the street, but then as I recall it, Excingus told us that the senator goes everywhere with at least half a dozen bodyguards, which means that we’d have to attack him with twice that many men to be sure of getting to him. And I don’t know about you, but the idea of a running knife fight on the streets of the capital doesn’t really fill me with any enthusiasm for the likely success of such a desperate roll of the dice, or for our anonymity being preserved for that matter.’

He raised a second finger alongside the first.

‘Then there’s Dorso. As a serving guard officer he lives in the praetorian fortress which, I hardly need to remind you, contains several cohorts of soldiers, only one of which is on duty in the imperial palaces at any time. Getting into the fortress will be hard enough, but killing Dorso without alerting anyone else, and then getting out of the place undetected? That’s a rather tall order.’

Two fingers became three.

‘Then there’s Brutus, who would be the worst of them if it weren’t for Mortiferum, but let’s worry about the gladiator in a moment. His “Silver Dagger” gang must number at least a hundred men, and that’s before we factor in loosely affiliated members of dozens of the smaller gangs that he tolerates in return for payoffs and instant obedience when he demands it. As soon as he hears of the deaths of any of the others he’ll shut himself up in whatever slum bolt-hole it is that he uses when the heat’s on, with enough men gathered about him to make anything less than a full-blooded attack nothing more than a waste of effort and lives. And there’s no way I can take the cohort on to the streets of Rome, we’d bring the Guard down on us like a hod full of bricks falling from a sixth-floor building site.’

Cotta puffed out his cheeks, shaking his head at the scale of the difficulties they faced.

‘And as you say, if the other three are going to be hard …’

Towards the end of their briefing the previous day, Excingus had turned the conversation to Mortiferum, shaking his head at the very prospect of getting to the man.

‘It can’t be done, gentlemen, because the Death Bringer, crafty sod that he undoubtedly is, hides himself away in the very last place on earth that he’s going to face any threat. He spends all his time, when he’s not out slaughtering rich families for the emperor that is, in the Dacian Ludus.’

Marcus and Scaurus had nodded their understanding, exchanging gloomy glances, but the remainder of the party had stared back at him blankly.

‘The Dacian Gladiator School? No? I see I’ll have to explain. There is an arena in Rome, gentlemen, of which you might have heard. It is the Flavian Amphitheatre, built by the emperor Vespasian a hundred years ago, the foremost arena in the empire and big enough to allow sixty thousand people to watch the games that are held there. Thousands of gladiators fight in that arena every year, and each one of them has to be trained and prepared for his moment on the sand, which is why there are four official training schools for gladiators clustered around the building. There’s one called the Gallic School, where they turn out the heavy boys, fish men, hoplites and the like; there’s the Morning School, where they train men how to fight wild animals …’

‘Why the
Morning
School?’

The informant had shrugged at Dubnus with an expression of irritation, his tone sarcastic.

‘Perhaps it’s because the beast fights tend to take place in the morning?’

The Briton had shrugged back as he replied, clenching a massive fist.

‘And perhaps I’ll impose on the senator’s hospitality just a little. Don’t forget that I can still remember the stink of the shit running down your legs from the time I missed killing you by no more than a dozen heart beats.’

Excingus had nodded, his smile suddenly dazzling.

‘A fair point, Centurion, and well made. Shall I continue?’

He’d waited for a moment and then resumed his lecture.

‘Then there’s the Great School, which turns out all of the smaller fighting specialisms, spearmen, chariot drivers, net fighters and so on, and last of all, there’s the Dacian School. With a name like that their specialism’s rather obvious, I suppose: lightly armoured sword fighters, originally Dacian prisoners when Trajan set it up since he’d just conquered the province. And if the other three members of this very exclusive gang look hard to get to, just consider how hard it’ll be to get to a man who lives in a cell alongside another two hundred or so like him, all of them worshiping him as the deadliest fighter in the place …’

Marcus nodded at Scaurus, taking another piece of bread from the breakfast table.

‘Excingus was probably correct yesterday when he said that getting to the gladiator’s going to be impossible. I think it’s probably for the best to concentrate on the others for the time being, and wait to see if Fortuna offers us any way to get to this “Death Bringer”.’

Dubnus shifted in his seat.

‘And if you’re right, then the violent death of the first of them will alert the other three that someone’s coming after them.’

Scaurus nodded.

‘It seems likely, Centurion. After all, it’s not as if there’s any shortage of men with a motive, even after their victims’ households have been torn apart. Distant relatives who weren’t actually quite so distant, friends determined to have revenge for the dead … there must be a fair few men in Rome who’d be more than happy to catch any one of these men off guard.’

The bearded Tungrian stared at the map for a moment.

‘It seems like we’ll have to make sure that the first couple of deaths look like accident or incident then, won’t we …?’

When Marcus had given his wife Excingus’s key earlier that morning, her first reaction had been stunned silence. After a moment, he realised that she was welling up with tears.

‘That’s the key to your father’s house in the city?’

His wife’s reaction was wordless, a tear trickling down her cheek as she fought for composure, and Marcus spoke gently into the silence.

‘And now a calculating animal like Excingus hands it to me with a smile. What to make of that, I wonder?’

Taking a deep breath Felicia managed to speak, her voice trembling with emotion.

‘I doubt it would stand much comparison with what you were used to when your father was still alive, but it’s a quiet enough little place, and I was
so
fond of it before we left Rome. I grew up in that house, and it’s my last link to my mother and father. When I married that bastard Bassus, he took the key off me and sent it to his brother. He said that we would live in it when he was posted back to Rome, but that we might as well get some use out of the place in the meantime. I’d all but forgotten it, with everything that’s happened since, until you put this key in my hand. But
how
did that awful man come by it, I wonder?’

She fell silent again, lost for words at having the means of access to a house she had long since abandoned to the wreckage of her previous marriage. Marcus shook his head.