The Curse-Maker (28 page)

“So you figured why prolong the inevitable, why drag it out, why wait for your money. Is that it?”

“Yeah—I mean, no. I—I didn't care about the money—”

“Don't try, Sestius. You're too soft and stupid to make a good liar. As it is, you make only a half-assed degenerate. You're a stupid, greedy, indolent bastard, who figured the only thing in between you and a good time was your aunt's life, and that was hanging on by a thread. So you found someone to cut it. Bibax. I know all this, and it doesn't impress me. What I want to know from you is how the blackmail works.”

The tears choked off like a pipe valve. He reached for a sheet and blew his nose on it. Looked at me with what he thought was cunning. “You comin' in for a share? Is that it?”

“Just answer the goddamn questions. How does it work, and when was the last time you were contacted?”

Fear rose in waves from his body and overwhelmed the other smells. The bravado hadn't lasted long. He shrank against the wall. “A-are you going to h-hurt me? I promised I'd pay—”

“For the last goddamn time, Sestius, I want information. Keep your filthy money. The town likes to watch it run through your fingers.”

He whimpered some more and looked at me with doubt in his dull eyes. “Y-you just want me to t-tell you—”

“That's right. That's all I want. Then I'll leave you, and you can go back to sleep.”

The whimper got louder. “You made Hortensia—Hortensia left—”

“She'll come back. Sell another statue.”

He stared at me for a few seconds, and his tongue came out and licked some crust off his upper lip.

“All right. I—I get notes. In the baths. In the cubicle.”

Just like Sulpicia. “Go on.”

“Then—then I leave money—or jewelry—the next day.”

“Where do you leave it?”

“Sometimes in the cubicle. Sometimes—sometimes I have to pretend it's for the temple, and throw it in the spring.”

“When was the last time?”

He fidgeted in bed, scratched the hair on his belly. “I don' know. Last month, I think. Notes come about every month.”

“None since the
Kalends
? Since Bibax was killed?”

He wrinkled his brow with the effort. Not used to that kind of exercise, either. “No. I don't think so. I—I owe a lot of people.”

I studied him for a few seconds. “Do you remember who told you about Bibax?”

The answer came surprisingly without effort. “Yeah. Vitellius. He told me. Said Bibax's curses come true. Any curse. On anybody. No questions.”

“Vitellius Scaevola? Sulpicia's—”

“Yeah. Him. He wasn't with Sulpicia then.”

“So he told you, and then you paid Bibax a large sum up front—and then you put a curse on your aunt.”

His eyes welled up again. “I—I just asked for her suffering to be over. It—it wasn't a curse, not really—a p-prayer—prayer to Sulis—”

“For your aunt to die sooner than later.”

He pulled the covers up to his chin and tried to curl into a fetal position against the wall. The eyes were far away. The voice was a whisper.

“S-sometimes I see her. In the dining room. In the hallway. Even by the s-spring. I hide. In here. She never liked—never liked it when I had girls. So she stays away.”

He looked up at me like a child asking for a sweet. “Would you tell Hortensia to come back?”

“Yeah, Sestius. I'll tell her.”

I turned around to look before I went through the door. He was curled up still, pinned to the bed like a worm on a hook, staring at the ceiling. The slaves would bring more wine, and more women. I left him alone. With his ghosts.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A bath would be nice after Sestius. I rubbed my hands down my mantle and looked up. A few drops were falling, large and loud enough to make a satisfying splat on the golden stone. I didn't have time for a bath. I needed to find a horse.

Thunder shook the town as I walked through the temple precinct. The cheap cloth covering the stalls flapped and snapped in the wind. Even here, the streets emptied except for a few souls so lost they couldn't feel the rain. They wandered to the spring and watched the sky reach out a finger to touch the bubbling surface. I wrapped my mantle around me. At least the smell of Sestius would be washed away.

The rain emptied itself in small fits, drops hammering the soft clay soil, moving on to the next block, the next hill. I reached Secundus's house undrowned. If Materna was home, I wouldn't be let in. I had to mind the legalities around the cancerous bitch.

I knocked again. I told myself it was possible no one could hear me. So I tried the door. Not locked. I pushed it open and entered. An old slave woman, half asleep and all blind, was sitting in a chair, snoring like the thunder. A fire was dying in the main room. Looked around. Nobody but the old lady. So I started down one of the corridors.

Rain pounded against the thatched roof. A placid drip started in the entranceway, forming a puddle underneath the door slave. No sound inside except the ruminating snore of the old and tired. Until I passed a door at the end.

Loud grunt, and rhythmic squeaking. The rhythm was getting louder and quicker, and so was the grunting. It built to a small crescendo much too quickly, and a feminine voice giggled. I guess fucking on a rainy day was the thing to do in Aquae Sulis. I kicked a door open for the second time.

Secunda was still squatting on top of Mumius. They turned toward me, faces shocked and stupid. I grinned. “Don't mind me. I'll be in the barn.”

I left them stuck together and whistled a tune down the hallway. A servant ran out of the kitchen, saw me, ran back. The old lady at the door was still sleeping. I stepped over the puddle and saw myself out.

The barn was warm with hay and horses and smelled even better than the rain. A few slaves were sitting on stacks of straw and oats, one whittling something out of a stick. They quit talking when I walked in, and the biggest one got up to meet me.

“You want something?”

I looked him over. Burly fellow, with short grizzled hair and leathery skin. I didn't want to get him in trouble. Although life in the mines might be preferable to living in the same house as Materna.

I took out a couple of
denarii
from a fold in my tunic.

“Tell you what, boys. I'm not here. You didn't see me, and we didn't talk.” I dropped the coins on the straw-strewn floor. “You found these in the street.”

The others watched the big one. He watched me. He spoke slowly.

“Seems a shame. Too easy, like. I like to earn my money. One way”—he looked toward a pitchfork propped against the barn wall—“or another.”

The others took the hint and got up to stand behind him.

“I work for the governor. I'm trying to figure out why people die in Aquae Sulis.”

One of the other slaves snorted out a laugh. The big one smiled gently. “They die 'cause they're sick.”

“Or murdered.”

That shut them up.

“I was a guest here a few days ago. So was a small, dark man. He was killed—strangled. Out in the cemetery. He was leaving town, and he was riding a good black horse—small and fast.”

The one that snorted made another noise, nudging an old man with a beard. They huddled together behind the spokesman. His face was hard, not giving anything away.

“So why are you here?”

“Because I think he borrowed that horse from your master. Or mistress. I think the horse, being a hell of a lot smarter than the man who rode it, came back home by itself.”

The burly slave spoke to the others in whispers. I heard footsteps behind me. It was Secunda. The slaves scattered, some climbing the ladder to the upper floor. The big one bowed. “Beggin' your pardon, miss, but this man—”

“I'll take care of it, Grithol.”

He said nothing, just started mucking out a stall, every now and then looking at the
denarii
still on the floor.

She was out of breath, and her tunic was crooked. She'd worn a mantle over her head against the rain, and her face was flushed from the exercise. All of it. She said abruptly: “What do you want?”

“To find out who killed Faro. Don't you?”

She was a stupid girl. She tried to give me a withering look but only succeeded in making herself look cross-eyed. “Mama says—”

“I don't give a rat's ass what your mama says. Your mama feeds off hate and throws it back up on everyone she meets. And I suspect—I suspect very much, Secunda—you know it.”

Her eyes took on a kind of animal gleam. “She wouldn't like you poking around.”

“She wouldn't like you getting poked.”

One of the slaves stifled a guffaw. Some straw from the loft fell through a crack and rocked in the air until it landed. Secunda swallowed a couple of times. She was pretty, if you liked them dumb. “You—you—”

“Don't worry. I won't write about it on the temple wall. All I want to know is if you have a black horse that came home riderless the other night.”

She stared at me, her face red. Then she decided to pretend I didn't exist and turned around and marched out the other end. The slaves trickled back to the main room. The big one cleared his throat.

“I—I think you might like the third stall on the right. Nice stall, isn't it, Hamus?”

“Yeah. Damn nice stall.”

They all looked at me expectantly. I walked to the third stall.

Inside was a small black horse with a fine-boned, intelligent head. I climbed in with him, calming him down because he didn't recognize me.

“ 'S'all right, boy. Easy.”

I stroked his neck while his nose took in my equine history. He decided I was all right. I rubbed him under the heavy part of the jaw and scratched a spot on his right front flank. He extended his neck for me. Now he knew I knew the secret spots of horses, so he let me pick up his hooves.

They'd been cleaned, but he was the one. I explored his haunches, found a minor scrape. Probably went through a bramble on his way home. I scratched between his ears, while he rubbed his head on my chest. I murmured: “I wish you could tell me what you saw.”

A sharp whistle from one of the slaves brought me out of the stall in a hurry. Hustling down the barn to meet me was Mumius, still hiking his belt into place. His face looked dipped in beet juice.

“Arcturus. You should know—Secundus left for Londinium. Yesterday. I wouldn't—Secunda said—”

“I don't care who you fuck, Mumius. I'm just here to do a job.”

He drew himself up, which was difficult considering his belt was still falling down. “I—I just want you to know—I didn't talk. You know—about Faro. I didn't.”

“You want a prize for valor?”

He kicked at a clump of horse manure and didn't say anything. I studied him for a few minutes. He was still staring at the floor when he muttered: “I'm going back to camp.” His voice held disgust. “I'm through with that family.”

“Well, at least you got something out of it.”

He shrugged and grinned. “Any port in a storm.”

Then he laughed and held out his hand. Considering where it had been, I didn't want to grasp it, but I figured the rain would clean me off again.

He turned around and disappeared back inside the house. I gave the black gelding one more pat over the stall door. The slaves were nowhere to be seen. I stared up at the loft. More straw was falling like snow. Time to get home.

*   *   *

The rain didn't touch me. All I could see was Faro, and somebody nailing that mask on his face. Not sure why it bothered me so much. Maybe because I wanted to hurt him, and finding his dead body on my doorstep made me feel guilty. Because despite what he did to my wife, I felt—pity. Pity for him, and this whole goddamn town.

That old bastard
haruspex
at dinner, the first night. He was right. The place was rotten. Maybe not once, when it was younger and not so famous, but now it was as soft and swollen and stinking as a dead man in the summer sun. I wondered if the mine poisoned Aquae Sulis or whether the venom was old and always there, waiting to be dug up like silver.

Grattius was just a stooge, a nobody who could be pushed and pulled and led around. Someone else in town was doing the leading. I wondered who.

A lot of people seemed to know about Bibax. Vitellius. Grattius. Sestius and Sulpicia. Whoever told Grattius to arrange Aufidio's death. Calpurnius knew, and knew enough to die for it. And wherever you turned in Aquae Sulis, whatever mean, crooked street you walked down, you always came back to the temple. The temple where the goddess collected her blackmail payments to the tune of bubbling water. Where the head priest drank Caecuban wine.

And there were the baths, of course. Notes left in cubicles, notes directing murder, and payoffs, and other business not clean enough to be done in the water. Octavio was always ready to bow and scrape at the important ones, patching a pipe here and picking up a note or two there, running errands like a rat in a sewer. I wondered about Octavio.

I wondered, too, about Bibax. Was he, after all, a murderer for hire, the netherworld's assassin? Or was he a tool, like Grattius, who was paid to curse certain people, and maybe started to believe in his own powers—until the belief got in the way? Bibax. He was the root of what was growing in Aquae Sulis.

The rain stopped, and the world was at that silent point between storms, when the wind isn't blowing anymore but the birds are still afraid to sing. I took the mantle off my head and smelled the air. The earth was cleaner—the town still filthy.

Faro was paid off. By Materna or Secundus. Who was now on a suddenly convenient trip to Londinium, out of reach from suddenly inconvenient questions.

I scratched my chin. The night he was killed, Faro was given a horse—a good horse, from their precious stable. It was as if—as if someone knew they'd be getting it back.