Swords Around the Throne (24 page)

‘I'm sure you could have handled all three, brother,' Brinno said. ‘But watching you was making me nervous.'

Castus sank down, braced against his knees and fighting for breath. Pain racked his body from his chest to his groin. He rode out a wave of nausea, then straightened and seized Brinno by the shoulder. ‘Why are you here?'

‘I followed you,' Brinno said. ‘I saw you talking to that eunuch in the baths and knew you were doing something... I don't know. I'm sorry, brother – I doubted your loyalty...'

‘Well, thanks anyway,' Castus said. He turned to look around at the courtyard: three dead men, blood spattered on the paving.

‘What were you doing in there?' Brinno asked with a cold frown.

Castus just shook his head. ‘I have no way of explaining,' he said. ‘But you've got to help me get rid of these bodies...'

‘No need for that,' another voice said. Serapion stood in the lamplight at the open doorway. ‘The dead will be disposed of. You need to leave now, though.'

‘I told you not to follow me,' Castus said through his teeth. Despite his warning, the eunuch was still his enemy.

‘There's something I forgot to mention,' Serapion said, stepping out over one of the bodies. ‘If I were found unharmed, it might look suspicious. As if I somehow helped you to escape.'

‘True enough.' Castus glanced at Brinno, who shrugged.

‘Do what you must, then,' the eunuch said.

‘If you insist,' Castus told him.

He stepped up to Serapion, and with one swinging blow he slammed his fist into the side of the eunuch's head.

From the window, Julius Nigrinus watched the horseman crossing the courtyard below. It was night, and summer rain spattered the paving stones and gushed in torrents from the eaves overhead. Closing the shutters, he turned from the window and seated himself beside the brazier. The small room was already uncomfortably warm, but the coals served to dry the air; Nigrinus felt the damp badly. He was tense with anticipation, but he needed to compose himself; he made it a rule never to let his emotions become visible to others. By the time Flaccianus had stamped up the steps from the courtyard and growled his way past the slaves in the antechamber, Nigrinus was perfectly calm, his face blanked, waiting.

Flaccianus threw off his wet cloak, making sure he spattered the notary as he did so. He dumped the leather bag on to the low table.

‘There you go,' he said. ‘You've got it till dawn. Hope it's worth the effort I put in.'

‘I hope you were not too inconvenienced,' Nigrinus replied, forcing himself to take a few slow breaths before reaching for the bag and breaking the seal. Flaccianus stared at him with a sour expression, then slumped down in the facing chair. Nigrinus had ordered him to ride ahead of the normal post schedule, in order to bring him the bag of despatches with enough time to look through it before it was due for delivery. It was risky, but Nigrinus had a suspicion – more of an intuition than he would care to admit – that this time his investigations would bear fruit. The gods knew he needed it; seven months of probing into the imperial communications networks had given him only hints and shadows, suggestions of a conspiracy at work but nothing tangible, nothing that he could use as evidence, nothing sufficient even to bring a suspect to torture and see what he might confess... And Nigrinus knew that the patience of his chief, Aurelius Zeno, was running short. If he failed to find something soon, he would be assigned to other duties, and all the power and influence he had worked so hard to build would be stripped from him. Besides, his subordinates were getting restless.

‘How much longer are we going to be doing this?' Flaccianus said. The rain had dampened his hair, and it flopped over his brow in an oily slick. ‘All this time you've had me sneaking about, putting myself in peril, and what d'you have to show for it?'

‘Patience,' Nigrinus said. He was running quickly through the documents spread on the table, sorting them, starting to lever open seals. He was so agitated it was hard to stop his hands from shaking. Surely it was somewhere here...

Flaccianus made a wet sound with his lips. The heat in the room was making him sweat. ‘All right for you to ask for patience,' he said. ‘You promised me rewards from all this!'

Nigrinus glanced up, hardening his expression. He had taken to paying Flaccianus from his own funds, for expenses, but clearly the man wanted more. They all wanted more in the end.

‘You never even paid me back for that thing in Colonia!'

‘What
thing
?'

‘Gods!' Flaccianus flung up his hands in derision. ‘You've forgotten it already! I kill a man in cold blood, on your orders, and it means nothing to you?'

‘Ah, yes, that,' Nigrinus said, stooping again to his work. He remembered now: one of the clerks in the financial offices had found information about a supposed plot against the emperor. He had known too little to be useful, no names or real evidence, but enough to alert the plotters and put them on their guard. Nigrinus had tried to buy the man off, but he had wanted to take it further, in the hope of greater compensation no doubt. In the end Nigrinus had ordered Flaccianus to make the man disappear. A regrettable necessity, for the higher good. It meant nothing to him now.

‘Do you know how hard it is,' Flaccianus said, ‘to strangle a man and make it look like he drowned? Do you?'

‘You didn't have to get your own hands dirty,' Nigrinus said. He glanced up. ‘Do you still have that man you employed for the business? The big idiot?'

‘Glaucus? Yes, I do. And he's not cheap either.'

‘Pay him what you need to. We might need him again.'

Flaccianus sighed and subsided onto the couch, and Nigrinus directed his full attention to the documents. His eyes smarted as he flicked his gaze over close-written scrawls, stylus on wax tablet or sooty ink on wood or papyrus. Nothing. There was nothing. He dragged scrolls from tubes, slipped his pin under wax seals, ran his reddening eyes down columns of figures, lists, brief communiqués, endlessly boring family news...

‘I hear Maximian's going south,' Flaccianus said. ‘What's that all about? I though the old man was safely buried in the Villa Herculis?'

‘Change of plan,' Nigrinus told him, not looking up. ‘Maximian goes to Arelate, supposedly as a private citizen, but there's a field force going with him to watch the western Alpine passes. The former Augustus is supposed to be rallying the provincials to Constantine's cause, in case his son decides to invade. He's still very popular down there...'

He became aware that he was breathing hard, and his hands were sweating. He let the last document, an administrative report from the office of the Prefect of the Grain Supply in Rome, slip from his fingers. Something had escaped him – somehow in all these millions of words and figures some vital scrap of information had eluded his eye. And now he was left with nothing. He felt the black weight of defeat in his gut.

‘You know,' Flaccianus said with a crafty smile, ‘it's often occurred to me that I could do well for myself if I let certain people know what you've been up to recently.'

‘What do you mean by that?' Nigrinus's voice was hoarse, the words clipped hard. He stared across the table at the agent, who remained smiling.

‘Oh, you know,' Flaccianus said. ‘Just an idle thought...'

‘Then let it stay idle. Such thoughts are ill conceived.' He tried to control himself, and not let the churning sense of despair that possessed him show in his manner or expression. But he felt as though the air was slowly being sucked from the room. Think, he needed to think... He needed cool, calm reflection...

With a sharp gesture he shoved the lamp away from him. Flaccianus raised an eyebrow.

‘Is that it?' the agent said. He shrugged, and reached for a tablet lying beside the lamp. His gesture drew Nigrinus's eye.

‘Wait,' Nigrinus told him.

Hardly daring to breathe, he dipped his head and angled his gaze over the tablet beside the lamp, fearing that all he had seen was a trick of the light. He picked up the tablet, slowly and carefully, and held it close.

There. Sure enough, the angled lamplight picked out the traces of something beneath the wax, showing where the stylus had dug deep. Nigrinus felt a glow of victory rising through him. He smiled; he wanted to laugh. Flaccianus too was bending closer, frowning, quizzical.

‘There's writing on the wood, under the wax,' Nigrinus breathed.

‘You think? But how can you read it without destroying the message on top?'

‘Precisely...' The message itself was almost laughably dull, a simple list of crop yields for various estates in Italy over the last year. He should almost have guessed – nobody would be sending such banal stuff by the imperial post... But doubtless the list concealed a code, and whoever was expecting the message would recognise if it did not arrive intact.

He held the tablet up to the lamp flame, watching the wax begin to soften and sweat. If there was some way to make the wax transparent... But already the writing was beginning to blur.

‘Pass me the ink, and a fresh sheet of papyrus,' he said. He carried the tablet to the window, and held it in the damp draught through the shutters until the wax had hardened again. Then he went back to the table and dipped a soft rag in the pot of ink. Slowly, carefully, he wiped the inky rag over the surface of the tablet. Flaccianus was watching him, wide eyed.

A moment for the ink to dry a little, then Nigrinus laid the papyrus sheet over the tablet and rubbed his thumb over the back. He exhaled. Sweat was prickling along his hairline. He took one edge of the papyrus and lifted it gently, peeling the sheet from the tablet. When he looked at it, there was a near-perfect reverse print of the writing. Good enough to copy onto new wax, with every mark and flourish preserved, when the original was destroyed.

Holding the tablet close over the lamp flame, Nigrinus watched the wax begin to melt and run. He was being so careful not to scorch the wood that he did not notice as runnels of hot wax coursed over his fingertips. A few heartbeats, and it was done. He seized a scraper and ran it over the face of the tablet, scouring away the oily residue of the wax to expose the wood. Only then did he focus his eyes on the three short lines of writing that the wax had concealed.

He drew a sharp breath, and his brow turned cold.

‘What is it?' Flaccianus whispered.

Nigrinus placed the tablet face down on the table.

‘It seems the game has changed,' he said. He was still digesting the importance of what he had read.

Flaccianus sat back; clearly he knew Nigrinus too well to expect an explanation. ‘Well,' he said, and gestured at the tablet. ‘I'm impressed.'

‘I don't need you to be impressed. I need you to do what I tell you. We have to go south, and soon.'

‘With Maximian, to Arelate?'

Nigrinus nodded quickly.

‘I hope you know what you're doing,' Flaccianus said as he got up to leave.

‘Of course I know what I'm doing,' Nigrinus said. ‘Just pray that nobody else does.'

‘Now this is more like living,' Sallustius said, wiping his mouth and taking another draught of wine. ‘I feel like the rat who fell into the cooking pot:
I have eaten, I have drunk, and now I am ready to die!
'

On the broad outdoor terrace of a tavern overlooking the river, the four Protectores lay reclining around a low stone table, shaded from the sun by a trellis hung with intertwining vines. On the table were earthenware dishes of thick beef and olive stew, hunks of fresh bread and a large jug of rich dark wine. It was, Castus had to admit, pretty close to the good life. But Sallustius could not help reminding them of it.

‘Look at that,' he cried, flinging an arm towards the river. ‘That's the Rhodanus, flowing south towards the Mediterranean. We're out of the northern lands now, brothers. We're heading into the heart of the civilised world!'

‘Will he continue like this all the way to Arelate?' Brinno asked. The young Frank tipped back his head and let the sunlight bathe his face. If he missed the colder climes of his homeland, he was not showing it. Over the eighteen days of their journey southwards, the weather had changed only gradually. Only the day before, the skies had been grey, but here, at Lugdunum, they had emerged into the full glory of a southern summer.

But the weather was not the main reason for Castus's relief at leaving the north. Ever since that strange, violent scene at the garden house of the Villa Herculis, he had felt like a condemned man. Although he could barely believe it, there had been no repercussions. It was as if the night and the mist had eclipsed utterly what had happened. Even so, Castus had dreaded daily the summons to punishment. Surely he could not have escaped? He had killed men, probably Praetorians, and worse – so much worse that the thought woke him regularly in a cold, delirious sweat of terror – he had laid his hands upon the body of the emperor's wife... more than that, in fact. However much he tried to erase the memory from his mind, he could not. Whoever had planned that encounter knew his name, knew how to find him and knew what he had done. Impossible that he should be allowed to go free.

And yet here he was, still alive, accompanying the former emperor Maximian southwards to his new home at Arelate. Castus did not bother himself with the reasons behind the move – it was enough for him to be away from the villa, far away from Treveris, the emperor, and the emperor's wife.

The worst thing about that night, now, was the sourness that remained between himself and Brinno. He had given the young barbarian a suitable story, a suitable lie – an assignation with the wife of a palace official, killers hired by the cuckolded husband – and Brinno had pretended to believe him. But it was clear to Castus that his friend no longer entirely trusted him. Sometimes he caught Brinno watching him with the flicker of a frown, and that pained him even more than the lie.