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

  The room was silent for a moment while Bassus digested the offer, and silence hung over the house beyond the study’s stout wooden door. When he answered his voice was edged with incredulity.

  ‘Twenty-five thousand sestertii? But that’s—’

  ‘Everything you have? Not quite. At this point in time, you have this lovely town house, and your good health to boot. There might well come a time not far in the future when you have neither, unless this young man is stopped from carrying through his plans to dispossess you of his wife’s property.’

  Bassus nodded disconsolately.

  ‘Very well, half now and half when the job is complete and proven to my satisfaction.’

  He stood, shaking his head and muttering under his breath, going round the desk and stooping to prise a floor tile up from its place, reaching into the gap beneath it to pull out a good-sized purse. To his surprise the visitor stood up, stretched with a grimace and then called out in a loud voice.

  ‘Very well, Silus, we’re in here!’

  With the same slow creak of hinges in need of oil, the study’s door opened, revealing the bodyguard standing stock-still in the frame. His face and tunic were spattered with blood, and a long dagger dangled from his right hand in an almost nonchalant manner. Bassus gaped at him, finding his voice after a long pause.

  ‘You …’

  Words failed him, and the nameless messenger nodded helpfully.

  ‘Killed your cook, her husband the butler, their daughter the kitchen servant and lastly your wife? That does seem to be the inescapable conclusion. And yes, obviously you’re next, now that you’ve paid to have young Marcus Valerius Aquila murdered. Your desire for the problem to go away will be honoured in full, but just not for your benefit. More for mine, really.’

  Bassus shrank back against the wall behind him, his face twisted in terror as Silus advanced into the room, looking to his master for the signal to make the last kill.

  ‘You … you were just waiting for me to show you where the money was!’

  The anonymous visitor smiled again, shaking his head with a sad smile.

  ‘Not really. Did you not wonder how my price just happened to coincide precisely with the amount of money you have left from that which you inherited when your brother died? There actually was enough there to buy you a nice place, wasn’t there? Not quite this pleasant, but good enough and in a respectable area. Greed got the better of you, I’d imagine. Why buy a house when you already had one, since your brother’s wife showed no sign of returning home, eh? I’ve known what you’re worth down to the last sestertius for a while now, and where you hide the money, but robbery was never my aim. I didn’t want to steal your money, I wanted you to pay me to deal with the Aquila boy, a job which I can assure you I’ll carry through to the full extent of your rather heavy purse and beyond, if need be.’

  Bassus shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘So why …?’

  He waved a hand at the bloody knife, his mouth opening and closing silently.

  ‘Why kill you all? Because I need this house as part of the plan to fulfil your last orders, that’s why, and you and the rest of your household would at best have been inconvenient loose ends.’

  A waved hand set Silus in motion, walking slowly around the desk with his dagger held ready. He raised the knife, speaking to Bassus in a matter-of-fact tone that was clearly calculated to soothe the panicking victim in his last moments.

  ‘Keep nice and still mate. It’ll be a lot quicker and less painful if you do.’

  Bassus looked about him frantically for a way out of his predicament, but before he could make any move the knife man stepped forward quickly, whipping his dagger up and thrusting it deeply into the point where his cowering victim’s neck and shoulder met in the classic street executioner’s stroke.

  ‘Ah! You bast …’

  Clutching reflexively at the wound with blood squirting between his fingers, he tottered, stepped forward one seemingly drunken pace, and then stopped, swaying on the spot. Eyes rolling upwards as consciousness failed, he slumped to the floor and lay still, a puddle of blood spreading from the wound with one small rivulet trickling down into the underground hiding place from which he had taken the purse. The beneficiarius looked down at him with an expression of pity.

  ‘How disappointingly stupid. He fell for the beneficiarius story the moment he saw this meaningless piece of silver.’ He lifted the belt end, smiling down at the faked symbol of patronage. ‘Even when whatever it was that broke during your struggle out there hit the floor, he still wasn’t bright enough to realise what was happening until you came through the door.’ He shook his head. ‘Never mind. Clearly we perform a service to the gods on days like these, ridding this world of the more credulous of our fellow citizens and leaving more room for clever fellows like you and I, eh Silus?’ He slapped the blood-spattered murderer on a relatively clean section of his arm. ‘And well done for a neatly concluded job! Let’s get all that blood washed off the floor and walls shall we, and decide what to do with the bodies?’

  The gory bodyguard stood and looked at him for a moment before speaking.

  ‘Doesn’t it worry you to be alone with a murderer and more gold than I’ve ever seen in my life, with no one else to hand or even knowing that we’re here?’

  His employer raised a sardonic eyebrow, half his face shadowed in the dim evening light filtering through the study’s high window.

  ‘You only ask from curiosity, of course?’

  Silus looked down at his bloody knife.

  ‘That’s right, only my curiosity.’

  ‘Well in that case I shall enlighten you as to the source of my boundless confidence with regard to your continued flawless execution of my orders. And it really is very simple. Once a day, every day, I report to a very, very important man. I provide him with the information I glean as I go about my job, information which is particularly important to him. He expects results from me, Silus, and I expect that he would be more than vexed if the admittedly small matter of my death were to get in the way of my achieving those results. Be assured that he knows all about you, and indeed all about the seemingly immeasurable number of family members whose main breadwinner you would appear to be – how many children is it that you have?’

  ‘Seven.’

  His employer clapped his hands together softly.

  ‘Seven indeed, and they all survived the plague the last time it stalked the city? That really is quite astonishing good luck! I know of whole families that were wiped out in less than a week. You’re a lucky man, Silus, but it might just be that you’ve used up all that luck. Were I to go missing, even for a day, this man is the type to assume the worst and set investigators on my trail. A trail which I have ensured will lead straight to your door. So, were you to make this simple and entirely understandable mistake, you would soon enough find yourself and every one of your seven children, and that fat wife of yours and her brother, and his wife and children too, all enjoying a brief unscheduled trip to dark rooms buried far beyond any thought of rescue. There are men who ply their trade in those badly lit places, Silus, who make a simple schemer like me and a murdering thug like you appear to be men of the highest virtue. Your family, once in their power, would be abused, degraded and tortured in ways that even a man with your broad experience of the world cannot begin to imagine, since these men’s depravity is limited only by the bounds of their particularly savage imaginations.’

  He stared at the killer for a moment, opening his arms wide.

  ‘So if you’d like to play through that possible future for your family, you go right ahead and put the knife into me.’

  Silus shook his head.

  ‘No, my curiosity is quite satisfied. Funny though …’

  His employer raised an eyebrow.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I was just thinking that you’re not quite right in the head, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  The other man smiled at him broadl
y.

  ‘Many men have tried to offend me Silus, it’s in the nature of my business to attract insults, but very few of them have ever succeeded. After all, none of this is personal, it’s simply business. And trust me, there is a method in my apparent madness. I have a plan that will bring this man Aquila to justice at last, and in doing so more than likely perform the other task that my rather impatient sponsor wishes to see completed. So, let’s be about it shall we? These bodies aren’t going to bury themselves.’

  1

  Rome, September AD 184

  ‘Close your mouth, Dubnus, or something will fly into it.’

  The heavily built and bearded soldier walking alongside Julius, senior centurion of the First Tungrian Cohort, gave his superior officer a disparaging look before resuming his perusal of the inhabitants of the Aventine district through which they were progressing. When he spoke his voice was awestruck, as if he could barely believe the scene before him.

  ‘But they’re bloody everywhere, Julius! Bar girls, shop girls, girls on the street, girls on the corner, girls writing graffiti on the wall about how their clients made them scream with pleasure!’ He pointed to a prostitute leaning against the door of a house, her pitch marked out by several lewd and enticing statements as to her abilities and offerings scrawled on the wall behind her. ‘That one will even …’

  He swallowed, and shook his head in amazement at the debauched act that was apparently on offer for the price of a decent meal.

  ‘Yes, the city can be rather overpowering for the first-time visitor, but then you would insist on accompanying us. Perhaps you should concentrate on the architecture instead?’

  Julius turned and nodded to his tribune who was walking a few paces behind the two centurions, resplendent in a pristine toga and with his hair cut and combed to glossy perfection, even if his clean-shaven face was in defiance of the latest fashion. Dubnus drew breath to speak again, managing with some reluctance to drag his attention away from the prostitute who was so enticingly crooking her finger at him while lasciviously teasing the digit’s end with her tongue, but was rudely interrupted by Julius before he could open his mouth.

  ‘That’s a good idea, Tribune. That way he won’t embarrass the rest of us by walking round with a damp spot in the front of his tunic. You’re not wearing armour now Dubnus, look to your decency man!’

  The big Briton gave his friend a hard look before gazing up at the buildings on either side of the road along which they were walking, craning his neck to stare up at the five- and six-storey insulae towering over them.

  ‘You’re the funny man today, are you Julius? As it happens, I was just thinking that I still can’t get used to the idea that people actually live in those things. Imagine having to climb all the way up there and then discover that you’ve forgotten something. And what happens if there’s a fire on the ground floor, and you’re all the way up there?’

  Tribune Scaurus laughed grimly.

  ‘In that case, Centurion, you would at least have the gratification of knowing that you would be the last to burn, unless of course the screams of the better-off tenants in the lower floors gave you the time to ponder the choice of a slow death by fire or a quick one by impact with the ground. In the event of fire, I believe the rule of thumb is that the lowest tenant usually gets out with at least some of his possessions, the next highest occupant usually escapes with his life, and the next highest, if they’re blessed by Fortuna’s smile. After that it seems to be a simple question of either burning to death or jumping.’

  The man walking beside Scaurus followed up on the tribune’s comments in a more serious tone of voice. Equally formally attired and groomed, he was tall and limber in appearance, muscular in an athletic way rather than any tendency to the hulking power of the centurions walking before him. His skin, darker by contrast than that of his fellow officers, advertised the fact that he had not been born in Dubnus’s native Britannia.

  ‘Of course these days, now that they’re mainly built with brick rather than timber, the main risk isn’t fire, it’s collapse. People lie in bed at night in those things listening to the building creaking around them, and wondering if they’ll be crushed to death if someone sneezes too loudly and brings the whole thing down. The bases aren’t broad enough for the height they build them up to, you see, since no one bothers to obey the height regulations.’

  Scaurus raised an eyebrow at the younger man, and his reply carried an undisguised sardonic undertone.

  ‘Crushed under several tons of bricks? Much what anyone seeking to bother me this afternoon might feel like, I expect, given the number of escorts we managed to collect between my quarter and the transit barracks’ main gate.

  One of the three obviously barbarian men bringing up the rear shook his head in disgust.

  ‘It’s a good thing I heard you discussing this little afternoon stroll with Centurion Corvus, before you had the chance to sneak off into this cesspit on your own.’

  Scaurus shook his head in irritation without looking back.

  ‘Indeed, Prince Martos, what was I thinking? Why in Jupiter’s name would we have wanted to make our way to our meeting with one of Rome’s most influential senators in a discreet and, dare I say it, sober manner, when instead we could be preceded by a pair of swaggering centurions with obvious hard-ons for anything female under the age of sixty …’ He shook his head at Julius’s wounded expression. ‘I saw you eying up that little blonde, First Spear, so stop pretending you’re immune to the attractions of the opposite sex now that your woman has your balls firmly clamped between her thighs. Now, where was I …? Ah yes, preceded by a pair of priapic officers and trailed by a trio of barbarians, at least one of whom is equally intent on impressing every working girl we pass with the glory of his manhood.’

  He shook his head with amused irritation.

  ‘If I’ve told you once Arminius, I must have told you a hundred times in the last ten years, they simply will not have sex with you without payment, no matter how muscular you are or, for that matter, how much you attempt to demonstrate that you have a penis that would make a donkey feel inadequate.’ He paused for a moment, listening for any retort, before continuing. ‘As for the need to protect us, Centurion Corvus here and I both walked these streets for years without ever attracting anything worse than an unkind glance, and that was when we weren’t in the company of the five biggest and ugliest men under my command. But no matter, you have at least provided us with some measure of entertainment during our walk. And here we are – this is our destination.’

  He waved a hand at a sizeable domus, a rich man’s house set in enough ground for the construction of half a dozen of the towering insulae, each side of the large detached property shielded from casual view by mature trees that had grown almost as high as the neighbouring apartment buildings.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll all be a little less bumptious now that we’re no longer at such imminent risk of being robbed and murdered? And remember, we’re here to provide the senator with some consolation for the death of his son, so just mind your manners or you’ll have the pleasure of a long wait on his doorstep.’

  An apparently imperturbable butler greeted them with an impressive lack of any reaction in the face of so large a party of men, most of whom were clearly disreputable types to judge from their scars, tattoos and in one case the absence of an eye, even if the barbarians among them were all dressed in clean tunics and had well-polished boots. Bidding them to remain in the house’s entrance hall, he withdrew to inform his master of their arrival, leaving the party to consider the murals that adorned the room’s walls. Dubnus leaned closer, admiring the detail in a representation of a goddess frolicking in a woodland glade seen through a window painted onto the plaster.

  ‘Nice work.’

  Julius raised an eyebrow at his friend, shaking his head in apparent bafflement.

  ‘Nice work? Since when, oh Prince of the Axe Men, have you had any ability to recognise the difference between good painting a
nd that done by a Greek pot painter using a brush poking out of his arse to slap the colours on? All you’re doing is admiring her tits, you dirty bastard …’ He leaned closer, pursing his lips in approval. ‘Although on closer inspection I’m forced to agree with you that they are a most lifelike representation, what with—’

  Dubnus interrupted him, pointing at the view through another ‘window’.

  ‘I know. And look at what this satyr’s doing to the maiden he’s captured! I swear he’s got it up her—’

  A voice from behind them had the two men start.

  ‘Greetings, esteemed visitors. I sometimes have to leave my clients waiting here for hours, given the number of visitors I routinely receive, men seeking either my favour or assistance, and these murals provide them with some small measure of distraction. Given long enough, I’m told, it is possible for the diligent hunter to discover over two hundred such visions of loveliness around the room, although I must confess I’ve never found the time …’

  Scaurus stepped forward with a solemn expression, bowing deeply to the toga-clad man who stood in the doorway that linked the hall to the rest of the house.

  ‘Greetings, Senator Sigilis. Please accept our humble gratitude for your kindness in agreeing to meet with us.’

  Their host returned the bow, albeit in the more cursory manner due to a member of the equestrian class from a senator, the taut smile of greeting on his face the expression of a man who had not shown genuine pleasure for a long time. He was as tall as either of the Tungrian centurions, although his body was whip thin by comparison to their muscular bulk, and his hair was silver-grey over a lean and heavily lined face.