He hung up, paused, and with a sudden shout, swept everything off his desk, at once. Every paper, every file, every ledger, every pen.
“What happened?” Trennus demanded. Adam rarely lost his temper like this. He didn’t like losing control, and regarded dramatic gestures as little more than temper-tantrums in other people.
Adam planted both fists on his desk, arms fully extended, staring down at the surface for a moment. Finally, he looked up, his face gray under the normal olive tint. “Propraetor Livorus is dead.”
Even prepared by having heard the phone conversation, Trennus couldn’t quite grasp it at first. He’d been prepared for is in the hospital . . . is in serious condition . . . has been poisoned . . . but not the stark truth. “How?” Trennus demanded. The fact that they’d just been talking about Sophia the Pythia’s prophecy of exactly this . . . was unnerving.
Adam scowled. “Remember the veterans who would come to the back entrance of his house every time he had a social function? Remember how he’d walk out to clasp wrists with them? Remember how I pointed out that this was a security risk, and how, every time, Livorus said that he might have been an officer and a patrician, but any man who served in the Legion was his brother, no matter how humble? And that he would do what he could for those of his brothers who were in need, even if it were just to grant them a moment or two of his time?”
The words had been bitten out from between Adam’s teeth. Trennus’ stomach clenched. “Oh . . . gods, no. Where was his security team? He still rated a few Praetorians, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did, and two of them have helpfully committed suicide already from the shame of letting their protectee be killed in front of them by an apparently unarmed man!” The glass panel in the wall beside the door was starting to vibrate. Adam was in parade-ground voice at the moment, not yelling, but projecting vigorously. “The remaining security guards heard the assailant tell Livorus, You killed my wife five years ago, and then Livorus doubled over, and the man managed to flee the scene. They thought Livorus was having a heart attack until they realized from the smell that he was cooking from the inside out.” Adam looked around, and Trennus realized, distantly, that his friend was looking for something else on which to take out the rage. “God damn them.”
“Five years ago,” Trennus said, sharply, his mind clicking along at its usual high speed. “The man who hates your roof. Gods. Adam. The roof of the Colosseum collapsed five years ago. Lots of people died. Lots of people injured—”
“—and there’s Sophia’s fucking prophecy.” Trennus blinked. Adam rarely swore. “There’s our suspect list, right there.” Adam picked up the phone, and addressed his secretary on the other end of the line. “I need both Doctor Minori Eshmunazar and Professor Kanmi Eshmunazar brought here from the university, directly. I need someone to get on a radio to Agent Caetia—she’s what?” Adam tapped the side of his fist against the desk. “Walking the neighborhoods. Of course she is. Right. Flip through my list of contacts, and find Sophia Caetia’s number. Should be under the heading of either ‘Oracle of Delphi’ or ‘pain in my ass.’ Bring it in here, would you, please?” He hung up the phone, and looked at Trennus. “Ask Lassair to get Sig, would you?”
“Already on it,” Trennus said, his eyes half-closed. “We’re going to need a research team, access to the casualty lists. The names of the victims should have been in the newspapers . . . .”
Across town, Sigrun was, indeed, out canvassing the streets of Little Gothia. Someone had to be the visible presence of the law, and while the Judean gardia weren’t precisely frightened of the neighborhood, she liked doing this. It helped her remain in touch with the pulse of the community. And there was really no substitute, in an investigation, for getting out, walking the street, and talking to every person along the route. And at the moment, she was working a missing persons case. She was pretty senior to be out talking to locals directly; task force coordination was where she really should be. But she was a recognizable face to these people, and sometimes, that mattered more than anything else.
Still, ten years on, it was fascinating to see how people had adapted to the new reality. She paused on the sidewalk outside a corner market, as a mated pair of fenris trotted through the crosswalk ahead of her, a couple of puppies in tow. The larger of the two, the male, nudged the glass-and-metal door of the market open with his nose and bodyweight and slid through the narrow opening. Many of the stores in this area of town now had doublewide doors, and automatic door openers, which detected incoming bodies, and reacted by levering the doors outwards in greeting. Sigrun watched, in mild amusement, through the front windows, as the enormous wolf approached the butcher counter, and put a paw on the glass window there, indicating sausages. The butcher weighed the purchase on a silver scale, wrapped the links in paper, and the wolf scratched at his collar until one of the cards there was available for the butcher to take, in gloved hands, and wave over a magnetically-encoded machine. And, purchase in mouth, the fenris trotted back out to the curb, where his family waited, watching the cars go past.
As Sigrun approached, she could distinctly hear the mother chastise the puppies, No. Do not race out into traffic. Yes, I know you want to chase the cars. But even when you get to be our size, the cars will still hurt when they hit you.
“Excuse me,” Sigrun said, politely, walking over to the family. “A young woman has gone missing in this area. Have you seen or smelled this girl recently?” She pulled out two items: a color photograph, which she showed the fenris family, and wax paper bag with one of the missing girl’s shirts, taken from her laundry hamper, so that the wolves could all sniff.
The father’s nose crinkled. No, I am sorry. I have never smelled her before. The mother sneezed. Too much perfume, she said, apologetically. She must have been near the Argent Club the night she wore this. They spray all the girls who walk in there with this scent.
Sigrun’s eyebrows went up, and she made a mental note to follow up on that. Both adults looked down at their two pups, who had reared back to their hind legs, craning their necks to sniff. Yipe yipeyipeyipe!
Use your words, children. This is Sigrun Stormborn, so mind your manners.
Sigrun squinted at the mother, and recognition finally clicked. Fenris recognition was mostly about the mental voice, eye shape and color, the collar decorations, and the subtle markings of silver in the white fur. “Gretta? Yes? I have not seen you since Gotaland!”
It has been some time. We just came down last year. Gretta looked at her puppies. Calm yourselves, and speak.
Sigrun Stormborn? Really? The one who helped Saraid to teach us to talk? Two small tails wagged furiously.
Sigrun winced. “The Lady of the Wilds is your voice and your able helper,” she corrected, gently. “She has helped thousands of your people, and will help thousands more before she is done. So . . . as to this girl who has gone missing?”
Oh! Yes! I . . . think . . . I think I think I think I smelled her at the park. She smelled really sad, though.
Yes, yes, yes! I remember that, too. She smelled like tears, and a little like this perfume stuff, too.
Gretta intervened. Their Uncle Torir took them to Harfels Park two days ago. Children, which area of the park did you play in? It’s twenty acres in size. A lot of ground to sniff.
Where the jotun playground is!
“Ah, the southeast corner. I will check there next. Thank you all.”
We will keep a nose to the ground for this scent, the father called after her, and Sigrun smiled faintly and turned to wave in acknowledgement.
Murders in Little Gothia were down, and Sigrun and the rest of the gardia and Praetorians attributed that almost entirely to the heavy fenris and hveðungr population in the area. Non-Goths tended to call Ima’s shapeshifting kin lycan, short for lycanthropes, but Sigrun preferred the suggestion that they were Loki’s children.
It was almost impossible to hide the smell of death from a fenris, and the vast majority of them were batt
le-hardened veterans of the Northern War. The emotional content of a person’s scent was also an open book to them, and most of them were skilled enough readers of that kind of writing, that they could take one whiff and tell you where someone had been standing, approximately how tall they were, male or female, and could take a pretty damned good guess at what that person had eaten for their most recent meal. Finding a dead body in Little Gothia attracted the attention of every fenris in a three-mile radius, and whoever’s scents happened to be closest to the body? Could and would be tracked. The local gardia had tried to crack down on this at first, considering it vigilantism. Then they’d decided to call it a Neighborhood Watch, and deputized handfuls of the most verbally-gifted fenris. And periodically reminded the fenris that “citizens’ arrest” meant “please don’t kill the perpetrator before we get there to collect them, unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
Sigrun continued on her way, into the park, and began asking questions of the jotun who were there with their children, and a handful of other fenris. Most of them greeted her with a startled, but friendly, “Waes hael, Sigrun Stormborn!” She wasn’t really sure where that had started. She mostly blamed Lassair and Saraid; the spirits weren’t precisely chary about sharing what they considered to be her Name. But the fenris had adopted it, almost universally. Most of them didn’t remember their family names, only a first name, if they were lucky. Some had to adopt wholly new ones to match their new identities. And Saraid had always called her Stormborn in front of the fenris they were working to help save, so . . . it had stuck. As had, apparently, her correction that her name was Sigrun.
As such, there were days when the name felt like it was trying to crawl into her ears, constantly slithering after her. A susurration on the wind. She’d think she’d heard it, and would turn to answer someone, but no one would be there. She thought these to be artifacts of a tired mind, but it occasionally disquieted her to the point where she found someplace else to be, and louder environs than those she normally sought.
She canvassed onwards, stopping at a phone booth to call for a search team to come to the park and look for anything belonging to the missing girl. And just as the other investigative team arrived, Lassair’s voice rang through her head. Stormborn!
Lassair, you really need not shout. I can hear you just fine.
Steelsoul bids you come to the place of the Praetorians. The one to whom you were all bound, for so many years—he has been murdered. Lawbringer is dead. It was the first time Lassair had ever assigned Livorus a Name, but Sigrun knew to whom the spirit referred, and her heart wrenched.
A thousand memories flitted through her mind. Livorus, pulling the arrows out of her up near the Arctic Circle, where they’d been in negotiations in Raccia, late in 1949. Her first mission with him. The way he’d steadily and calmly found the information they needed to deal with the pazuzu, and had taken charge, again, when they’d needed to pull the beast’s poisoned claws out of her. Calmness. Certainty. Rationality. Pragmatism. Years of regret behind those keen blue eyes, weariness with a world that insisted on irrationality in the face of reason. How he had, time and again, gentled Rome’s fist. He could have brought down the legions in the wake of Fritti’s kidnapping, and wiped out half a kingdom, and the Senate would only have applauded. He could have brought down the legions in Nahautl, and had, instead, allowed the Quecha provinces limited self-rule. He could have ignored the Medians and Chaldeans, but instead, had negotiated their entrance to the Empire—something that had made him few friends within Rome. Some commentators had called the last Rome-Persia conflict Livorus’ War.
Being there as his various children had gotten married. Being invited to his late-in-life marriage to Mariana. His standing as her father at her own wedding. She could have asked Brandr, of course. And if Livorus hadn’t been there, she would have. It had just seemed more appropriate at the time to have Livorus, as a mortal, and the reason she had met Adam, to give her away. Thousands of memories. Sparring with Livorus, so he could keep his sword-skills sharp. Watching him age. Watching his children grow up. Being rousted out of bed when off-shift, some nights in the early years, so the sharpest political mind in the Empire had someone close at hand to discuss world events with, and bounce ideas off of, while she suppressed her yawns.
Over thirty years of friendship, wiped out in a heartbeat. Because she hadn’t been there.
Sigrun dropped to her knees, her stomach churning, her eyes stinging, and felt cold tears trickling down her face as the wind ruffled the uncaring leaves overhead. She bit down on the scream that threatened to well forth. He was my friend, and I wasn’t there to protect him.
She put herself back together and waved over the team that had just arrived to beat the underbrush in the park. Made sure they understood the witness accounts that had led her here, and flung herself skywards. She felt mostly comfortable doing this in the streets of New Gothia, but she only flew as far as the outskirts, before finding her motorcar, getting in, turning on the electric engine, and driving away. This wasn’t a question of getting to the hospital before someone died. The dead were . . . patient. And the drive gave her a more time to get the tears out, and regain a little of her composure.
She made her way into the conference room, where Adam and Trennus were already setting up a research team, and she stared at Adam a little blankly as he rapped out that it was all about her sister’s . . . gods-be-damned prophecy, and thus, had to do with someone who didn’t like the roof over the Colosseum. Kanmi and Minori were there, compiling a list of other known enemies of Livorus, just to be thorough—“PG headquarters will want to see the whole list, even if we’re pretty sure we know the answer,” Adam pointed out. Swirl of activity, all seeming to move around her, as if the film in a projector had been sped up to triple normal speed.
Sigrun sat down in a chair at the table, and said, blankly, “Mariana. Was . . . was she at the house?” She blinked, rapidly. “Have Marcus, Aquila, and Amantius, and their families—have they all been moved to safety?”
Adam shook his head. “We’re not on the need-to-know list for that, and I think light would have an easier time climbing out of a black hole right now, than information would have of getting out of Rome. Let’s work the problem in front of us, and we’ll . . . find out how his wife and children are, when we’re able to do so.”
Sigrun nodded, numbly, and moved her chair over to help Kanmi and Minori compile their list. Two interns were helping Trennus look through the records that had so far been put into a calculi database system, which pertained to the roof cave-in five years ago. “Four hundred people hurt. Thirty people died immediately. Of the four hundred injured, twelve more died in the next week and a half,” Trennus reported. “They said the man mentioned his wife being killed. So, half of these people were women. Narrows it down to twenty-one people.” He looked at the interns. “Start pulling their family histories, if you can.”
“Most of it won’t be in the database,” Kanmi warned. “You might not even have copies in the file repository. Not all files get duplicated to every Praetorian branch.”
“Do your best,” Adam told the interns, who looked glum. The file repository building was a warehouse two miles away, and held hundreds of thousands of files. And not a few rats.
Sigrun felt useless. She could remember dozens of threats, mostly non-specific, over the years. Most of them had come to nothing because they’d done their damned jobs. But she helped compile the list. And somewhere around six postmeridian, they’d narrowed that list of potentials down to three names, all bereaved husbands with previous military experience . . . and one of them happened to be a sorcerer. Age fifty-eight, Appius Flavian had just joined the Legion as a combat sorcerer when the Colosseum had been renovated. He’d signed a public petition denouncing the measure as an unnecessary use of public funds (and nevermind that any building, much less one two thousand years old, might require periodic repair, maintenance, and refurbishing), and had gone on to have an unblemished mil
itary career. He’d served during the Rome-Persia conflict, and had retired after thirty years, at the age of fifty . . . and a few years after that? His wife had been killed when they’d been on a holiday from their home in Ravenna. The trip to the Colosseum was apparently part of a package deal put together by a travel agency.
And if the aediles after Livorus had just kept the damned roof in good repair, Sigrun thought, another wave of anger rushing through her, and then leaving again, like the ocean rolling in over the sand, and pulling back again to reveal nothing but broken shells and bits of glass, none of this would have happened.
“All right,” Adam said, wearily. “Send this to Rome by the teleprinter,” he told Trennus. “Put our best guess at the top, let them sort out the . . . several hundred other names we’ve generated. Kanmi, Min, thank you for cancelling your classes and coming in. Go get some dinner. Tren, go home. Sig . . . I . . . think I’m going to be here for the rest of the night.”
The Goddess Denied (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 2) Page 64