The Emperor's Knives: Empire VII (Empire 7) Read online

  There was a moment of silence.

  ‘A barber’s shop?’

  The big man shrugged.

  ‘Why not? Let’s face it, it’ll give us a good reason for having men going in and out of the place, a few of whom can then go to your wife’s house to stand guard. And believe me, we’ve got more than enough men who’ve been cutting their mates’ hair for long enough that they know how not to make too bad a mess of it.’

  Cotta pulled a thoughtful face for a moment.

  ‘You know that very might well be an inspired idea. But who’s going to run it?’

  Dubnus’s smile broadened.

  ‘That’s the best bit. I know just the man. Just make sure you watch him carefully. He’s as slippery as an eel once there’s a sniff of coin on the breeze.’

  ‘Come along now, little one, nearly there.’

  Felicia and Annia had walked down the hill in search of some fresh food once the worst heat of the day had abated, both women carrying their children as usual while a pair of Cotta’s men had walked before them to clear a path through the Aventine’s cosmopolitan hubbub, two more following on behind to discourage any attempt at robbery. With a bag full of fresh produce for the evening meal, they were climbing slowly back up the slope to where the house waited, guarded by another two men.

  ‘Are you sure I can’t take him for you, Domina?’

  Felicia smiled and shook her head at the closest of her protectors, shifting the sleeping Appius from one arm to the other.

  ‘Thank you, but he’s asleep. And we’ll be … home … soon enough.’

  Annia laughed softly behind her, her own child tucked under her chin and tightly strapped to her body with a length of cloth.

  ‘Home! You never thought you’d be saying that again, did you?’

  Her friend stopped and looked up the hill, just able to make out the roof of her father’s house above the walls of the houses that lined the road.

  ‘No. And now that I can, it doesn’t really feel right in my mouth. I’m really just not sure …’

  Annia put an arm around her shoulder, shaking her head at the bodyguards who were gathering around them with faces that spoke volumes for their professional concern.

  ‘You lot can concentrate on making sure that we’re not robbed, and I’ll look after the Domina.’

  She wrapped her arms around her friend, sandwiching the two sleeping children awkwardly between them.

  ‘Now you just listen to me. You’re clever, educated and you’re a success in a profession that a lot of men can’t handle. Your father would have been more than proud of the way you’ve coped since his death, and taking that house back is no more than you deserve. You heard what Excingus said, the previous occupants weren’t harmed when he made them move out, and let’s face it, he’s more than unpleasant enough to have had the measure of your previous husband’s family. So let’s just—’

  She fell silent, looking down to see what it was that was tapping against her leg.

  ‘So much for you lot as bodyguards, eh? You can’t even stop a little dog from getting to us! Look at it!’

  A dog no bigger than a large cat had taken advantage of their pause to make an appearance from the side alley where it had been resting out of the sun, drawn by the scent of cooked meat rising from their bags, and was pawing at Annia’s leg with a hopeful look. The four ex-soldiers turned to look at her, the oldest of them stepping forward and stooping with his hand open, ready to take the animal by the scruff of its neck with a purposeful look.

  ‘Wait!’

  He stopped in mid-lunge and looked up at Felicia, whose command, if softly stated, had been sufficiently terse in tone to momentarily freeze him where he stood.

  ‘Domina?’

  She bent her knees and knelt to caress the dog’s neck. The animal jumped up on two legs, placing its front feet on her thigh and reached up to lick the tip of her nose.

  ‘Such a sweet little thing.’ She nodded to the bodyguard. ‘Pick him up, please, but gently. The poor little man looks just about done in for lack of food; you can see his ribs quite clearly. Pick him up and we’ll take him home.’

  The soldier did as he was asked, holding the animal away from him with the obvious expectation that it would shortly realise that it needed to urinate.

  ‘Are you sure, Domina? These street dogs are well known for carrying diseases, and when your back’s turned he’ll just be stealing food and biting the children. What if he has the madness?’

  His attempt to persuade Felicia to see sense petered out as he realised that she was shaking her head in a manner that he had learned, even in his short time as one of her protectors, was utterly unequivocal.

  ‘The madness?’ She put a finger under the dog’s chin and tilted its head, looking into the alert eyes with a smile. ‘There’s no madness here, just a bright little fellow who lacks a meal or two. Bring him along and we’ll give him a little food, see if we can’t fill him out a little.’

  Annia bent to look at the dog more closely, dodging back to avoid an attempt to lick her face.

  ‘You lot haven’t got the sense you were born with! Call that a street dog? No wonder he’s so thin, there’s no way he’s been able to compete for food with monsters like that one.’ She pointed to an evil-looking stray that was lounging further down the alley in the deeper shade. ‘If we throw him back now he’ll be dead in a week. And besides …’ Her face took on a scornful expression which Cotta’s men had come to know all too well. ‘Let’s face it, we’ll all sleep more soundly knowing that we’ve got a guard dog roaming the house. I wouldn’t trust you lot to guard a shit house.’

  Felicia smiled winningly at the veteran in whose big hands the dog was trembling, turning away up the hill and calling back over her shoulder to her friend.

  ‘Come along now Annia, I think you’ve had quite enough sport with these poor men today already. Let’s concentrate our thoughts on what we might call the poor little fellow, shall we?’

  Annia bowed her head in a show of respect, shooting the waiting bodyguards a sideways glance.

  ‘Yes, and what an exciting game! I vote we call him Centurion! It’ll be nice to see this lot having to pay their respects to a skinny little runt like that …’

  ‘All these years I’ve been singing marching songs about a restaurant with bedrooms up the stairs, I can hardly believe that I’m actually sitting in one.’

  Marcus laughed softly at his friend, raising an eyebrow in question.

  ‘And do you fancy making the trip upstairs?’

  Dubnus glanced across the room at the trio of prostitutes who were still sulking against the far wall.

  ‘She’s too old, she’s too young, and she’s rather too skinny for a man with my tastes. And besides …’ He leaned forward to confide in his brother officer. ‘I’ve never found it easy to do justice to a woman I’ve had to pay for.’ He looked down at his crotch with a significant expression. ‘After all, I hardly need to go beg—’

  One of Qadir’s newly trained soldiers walked slowly past the tavern and made eye contact with the centurions in their place at the window, tipping his head back the way he had come, up the hill’s long slope to where the magnificent bulk of the praetorian fortress loomed against the dusk’s purple backdrop. The four men turned away and concentrated on the food set before them. A moment later, the man they had been waiting for strode past them and turned into the tavern, throwing his cloak back over his shoulder and taking a coin from the purse at his belt, slapping it down on the counter in the manner of a man long familiar with the establishment. A pair of guardsmen still dressed in their uniforms had followed him down the hill, and stood waiting at the tavern’s door with expressions of tired boredom. Waving away the customary expressions of respect and greeting that he was offered by the restaurant’s owner, the praetorian graciously accepted a small cup of wine from which he sipped sparingly, nodding gravely to acknowledge the acceptability of the vintage. Dressed in the red off-duty tunic of a pr
aetorian officer, a highly polished vine stick in one hand and a knife hanging from his gleaming leather belt, his thick hair and beard were neatly cut in apparent ignorance of the imperial fashion for long, bushy facial hair. His voice was loud enough to be heard over the buzz of the other customers’ conversation, and the prostitutes looked up with barely disguised boredom.

  ‘Lentil stew again? Go on then, I’ll take a pot full, and some bread to mop it up with. And the same for my men.’

  Dorso leaned against the counter with the look of a man at rest after a long day, his gaze sweeping across the tavern’s customers without any visible sign of interest, and Marcus was careful not to meet his eye. After a short wait the proprietor handed the waiting soldiers three small pots of food and a parcel of bread wrapped in rough cloth, bowed his thanks for the distinguished officer’s custom and escorted him to the door. Marcus spooned up the last morsel of his meal and reached for the cloak in which his knife was concealed, waiting as Dubnus extricated himself from his place next to the window. While Cotta pounced on the untended wine jug, Qadir looked up at Marcus with professional concern, flattening his hands onto the table in the universal gesture for calm.

  ‘Keep well back from him until the last moment. It would be a shame if he were to take fright at this late stage. Just remember what I told you.’

  Marcus nodded.

  ‘We’re simply out for an evening stroll, nice and easy.’

  The Hamian waved the two men away, and emerging into the street they found the soldier Saratos leaning against the far wall with his eyes locked on a point further down the hill. They set off in Dorso’s wake at a gentle pace, their tracking of the praetorian made simple by the vivid red of his finely woven cloak and the two soldiers strolling close behind him. After another hundred paces or so he turned left, off the main street and into an narrow side street that ran away down the hill at an angle, and Dubnus slowed his pace momentarily.

  ‘Let’s not dive into the alley too quickly, or he might hear us behind him.’

  Marcus nodded, reaching into his cloak to ready his knife. Emerging from the alley’s shadows they saw the praetorian thirty paces or so ahead of them with his men on either side, all three of them bending over a man dressed in rags who was squatting against the wall to one side of a heavy wooden door. His powerful voice carried effortlessly to the two men as they approached the small group silently from behind.

  ‘Ex-soldier, are you? Gods below man, but you stink!’ He rummaged in his purse, pulling out a coin. ‘Here’s a denarius, which I suggest you use at the nearest bathhouse …’

  Marcus and Dubnus had closed the gap between them quickly but silently in their leather-soled boots, Dorso’s raised voice covering the faint creaking of their stitching. The praetorians never saw what had hit them as the two men struck. Dubnus smashed his man to the ground with a hammer blow from the lead-cored truncheon that had been hidden up his sleeve, the soldier more than likely already dead before he hit the cobbles, and Marcus struck his target with a bladed hand in the throat, dropping him kicking and choking to the cobbles, then put the point of his knife to Dorso’s throat with a growl of barely restrained anger.

  ‘You can die here and now, if you choose!’

  The praetorian froze, but when he spoke his voice sounded more composed than Marcus would have expected, given the knife’s harsh touch at his throat.

  ‘It’s true then. No good deed goes unpunished …’

  Dubnus took the pot from his hand, reaching into their captive’s cloak for the key they knew would be hanging from his belt. He opened the door and waved a hand at Sanga in dismissal.

  ‘Let’s go inside, shall we, and find out what it is that you come here to gloat over? You can be on your way, Sanga, although I’d recommend you do indeed find a bathhouse and sweat out whatever it is that’s making you stink like a donkey’s arse crack before you go back to barracks.’

  The soldier got up and walked away, muttering to himself loudly enough for the two men to hear as they hustled the praetorian into the house.

  ‘“Make yourself smell bad,” he says, and then when you do all you get is abuse. Fuckin’ officers …’

  While Marcus shepherded the praetorian in through the door, Dubnus dragged the prostrate guards in behind them, closing the door and leaving no trace of the ambush before knifing both men in the throat to make sure that they were dead. In the entrance hall there were lamps set out ready for use, and a single flame left burning to light the others. The big Briton lit a pair of them while Marcus held Dorso at knifepoint. He walked forward into a wide inner chamber, then stood and stared in wonder at the sight that emerged from the shadows as the lamplight strengthened. On every side of the room there were weapons racked on the walls: swords, shields, spears and axes, variously scarred, notched and battered by their evident use on combat, each with an engraved bronze plate fastened to the wall on which it was displayed. Released from Marcus’s grip, albeit with the knife still poised to strike if he attempted to fight back, Dorso turned slowly to face them, his expression strangely seeming closer to relief than fear in the dim light. The young centurion narrowed his eyes, lifting the knife close to his face, a shining bar of metal whose dappled surface gleamed in the lamplight, growling out the words he had rehearsed a thousand times as he had dreamed of the moment of his revenge.

  ‘My name is Marcus Valerius Aquila.’

  The praetorian smiled gently, spreading his arms wide in apparent surrender.

  ‘I know it is. And I know that you intend to kill me.’

  Dubnus and Marcus exchanged glances, both men perplexed at the apparent ease with which their quarry was accepting of his fate.

  ‘And you’re just going to stand there and let it happen?’

  Dorso shrugged easily, clearly not troubled by his predicament.

  ‘You stand before me, Valerius Aquila, with a blade bared and murder in your eyes and ask me if I am ready to die?’ The praetorian laughed softly. ‘If I weren’t, I could easily have thwarted you out in the street, set my men on you and called for help.’

  Marcus’s eyes narrowed at the shock of hearing his true name from the emperor’s murderer.

  ‘You recognised me?’

  The praetorian shook his head in grim amusement.

  ‘You may have forgotten your time with the Guard, young man, but I haven’t. After all, I knew for several days before we received the order to kill your father that as the emperor’s tame murderers my colleagues and I would be the men called upon to deal out imperial “justice”. I used that time to have a good long look at you, Centurion, in readiness for the moment I faced you with a blade in my hand. I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t going to get any nasty surprises.’

  ‘And?’

  Dorso shrugged.

  ‘You were nothing that special, just another snotty-nosed senator’s son who happened to be a little better trained than the average. You had the speed, and the technique, but you were still soft. You wouldn’t even have seen me coming, although it might be a different story now since you seem to have hardened up a little since then, got yourself a scar or two. Your father sent you somewhere he expected you’d never be found, didn’t he?’

  ‘Britannia.’

  ‘Yes, Britannia.’ Dorso nodded and chuckled, clearly confirming something he had already known. ‘Cold, wet and desolate, and forever being attacked by one barbarian tribe or another. I’ll bet you’ve seen more fighting in the last two years than most of us get in a lifetime. And now here you are, hardened from the fire and ready to put your father’s killers in the ground one at a time, eh?’

  Marcus raised the knife again, showing the praetorian the pattern that ran through its fire-hardened metal shank. Dorso’s face took on a reverent expression as he stared at the weapon.

  ‘I’ve only ever seen that sort of metal once before, but the sword from which it was made was a deadly thing, capable of cutting through another blade with ease.’

  Marcus looked abou
t him.

  ‘You seem fascinated with weaponry. You come here every night just to look at a collection of old iron?’

  Dorso shrugged impassively.

  ‘Not just iron, Valerius Aquila. This is the history of our people you see on these walls. Take that sword, for example …’

  He pointed to a sword on the wall next to Marcus, and as the younger man turned to look at it, Dubnus put a massive hand on the praetorian’s shoulder, digging the fingers into his flesh beneath the tunic, and raised his own copy of the dappled steel knife so that the blade’s glinting edge was visible in the lamplight.

  ‘Give me an excuse and I’ll do the job for him.’

  Marcus took the sword down from the wall, turning back to display the weapon to its owner.

  ‘So what’s so special about this then?’

  Dorso shrugged again, ignoring the Briton’s tight grip on his arm.

  ‘In truth, it’s really not all that distinguished, a nameless sword from the civil wars with no provenance other than its obvious age. It pales into insignificance when compared to the dagger carried by the blessed Julius’s standard bearer, the man from the Tenth Legion who jumped into the surf when his follow soldiers were too frightened to set foot on the beach during the first invasion of Britannia – that’s over there, behind you on the far wall. And yet you’ve found what used to be one of my most treasured pieces. Some poor anonymous grunt fought and most likely died with that in his hand, back in the days when the battles were massive day-long affairs with half-a-dozen legions on either side, and the fate of the republic rested on the outcome. Sometimes I just get that down and sit with it in my lap, wondering what happened to the poor bastard that carried it. After all, if he managed to survive the fighting, he’d probably have found his family starving when he got home. Too many of the middle-class men the armies depended on were killed in the civil wars, you see, and the day of the gentleman farmer was long gone by the time that Augustus put an end to it all by declaring himself emp—’

  Marcus stalked back across the room with the antique sword in his hand.