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

by Riches, Anthony

  ‘The gratitude is mine, Tribune, for your kindness in expressing the desire to speak with me of my son’s last few weeks of life. I would imagine that most soldiers would prefer to forget the men they have left on the battlefield, much less actually come face-to-face with a grieving parent. Please come this way, and do bring your, ah … familia … with you.’

  They followed the senator through the archway into a large garden in which a pair of slaves were tending the already immaculately manicured plants and flowers.

  ‘Over here.’

  He led them to a seating area at the garden’s far end, stone benches arrayed around a flat gravelled area large enough to act as a small stage, or for a group of musicians to play their instruments, and protected from the sun’s heat by a circle of carefully planted cedar trees. At the butler’s command, the gardeners went into the domus and carried out a padded chair, into which the senator lowered himself with a grimace, then vanished back into the house leaving only the butler, who, satisfied that his master was comfortable, retired out of earshot.

  ‘Forgive my ostentation. A decade ago good honest marble would have sufficed for my backside, but these days I find the stiffness in my joints eased a little by a touch of luxury. I thought we might best speak out here in the garden, given that walls frequently hear more than would appear possible, even, I suspect, in my house.’ Sigilis played his bleak stare over each of them, his eyes assessing every man in turn before moving on. ‘You bring a large party with you, Tribune, larger than I expected, and yet you provide me with some small distraction by doing so. If I might speculate as to the origins of your people …?’

  Scaurus smiled back at him.

  ‘By all means, Senator. We must present something of a mixed bag.’

  ‘Indeed you do, although some of you are easier to read than others.’ He looked at the tribune. ‘You, of course, are already known to me, Rutilius Scaurus. I remember your father well, and the disappointment we all felt when he was obliged to take his own life after being landed with the blame for that shabby little affair on the other side of the Rhenus. I am, of course, on excellent terms with your sponsor …’ He smiled thinly. ‘I find it ironic that his fortunes should be recovering so strongly with the praetorian prefect’s death, while my own seem to be in a terminal decline, but I can’t hold it against the man. He tells me that you’ve grown no less headstrong for your years of service. He also tells me that you’ve been dabbling in politics of late?’

  Scaurus shook his head.

  ‘Not me, Senator, I’ll leave that to men with more ability and stronger stomachs than mine.’

  Sigilis raised an eyebrow.

  ‘So it wasn’t you that marched ten boxes of gold into the palace and got the praetorian prefect murdered by the emperor a few nights ago?’

  The younger man shrugged, his face commendably impassive.

  ‘I was no more than a small part of that night’s events, Senator. Most of the hard work was done by your colleague Clodius Albinus, in league with the emperor’s freedman Cleander.’

  Sigilis chuckled mirthlessly.

  ‘How very self-effacing of you. You carried a cargo of gold, proving the praetorian prefect’s ambitions to take the throne all the way from the northern frontier … Where was it again?’

  ‘Britannia, Senator.’

  ‘Yes, all the way from Britannia, along, I’m reliably informed, with the lost eagle of the Sixth Legion, which you then used to tip Commodus over the edge to murder his own praetorian guard commander. Somewhat to the amazement of the hapless Clodius Albinus, I would imagine, and much to the delight of that conniving snake Cleander.’

  Scaurus returned his level gaze in silence, until the senator nodded slowly.

  ‘Just as your sponsor intimated to me. You’re shot through with granite, aren’t you Tribune, and a dangerous man to cross for all of your modesty and self-effacement?’

  He turned his stare to the younger man sitting next to Scaurus.

  ‘And what have we here? Early twenties, Roman in appearance, and muscled like a man used to carrying the weight of weapons and armour on a routine basis. I did my time in the service, and, believe it or not, I once had much the same build. You’re fresh from battle too, if appearances are any indication, unless of course you did that shaving …’ He raised a hand to point at the scar across the bridge of Marcus’s nose. ‘It looks too light to have been a sword. A spear, perhaps?’

  Marcus tipped his head in recognition.

  ‘Yes, Senator. I didn’t get my head out the way fast enough.’

  Sigilis pursed his lips.

  ‘You were still lucky, that’s a scratch compared with some of the facial wounds I saw serving as a tribune with the Thirtieth Legion in Caesarea. Well, scar or no scar, you remind me in your manner of a man I used to know, a highly respected fellow senator who was clearly too well thought of to survive under this regime. He died a good three years ago, and his entire family with him, dragged from their beds at night and carried away to a fate the thought of which makes me shudder. Only the older son remained unaccounted for, or so the informed gossip from the palace had it. He had been serving with the praetorian guard as a centurion, but vanished only days before his father was arrested and was last seen heading for Ostia with orders to take ship on a courier mission – or at least that was the story that got him out of the praetorian fortress.’

  He locked gazes with the centurion.

  ‘Your name, young man?’

  The Roman rose from his seat and bowed.

  ‘I am known as Marcus Tribulus Corvus, Senator, Centurion, First Tungrian Cohort, but I am indeed the fugitive son of your friend Appius Valerius Aquila. You now hold my life, and that of my family, in your hands.’

  Sigilis smiled back at him with apparent genuine pleasure.

  ‘Rest assured that your secret is safe with me. It is indeed an honour to make your acquaintance, Marcus Valerius Aquila. The letters my son wrote before he died in Dacia made generous mention of you, although he was clever enough to do so in veiled terms that he knew only I would understand. And now you have returned to Rome with the fire of revenge bright in your eyes, even though you have no idea where to find the men upon whom you would visit your violence?’

  The young Roman’s tone hardened, no longer deferring to the status of the man to whom his words were directed.

  ‘I will find them, Senator, with or without the help your son told me you would be able to offer. And when I find them, I fully intend to subject them to the same indignities my father, my mother, my brother and my sisters suffered before they died.’

  Sigilis sat back and stared at him with grim amusement.

  ‘That’s more like the way I’d expect a man of your class to express himself, under the circumstances. So, a tribune with a propensity for righting old wrongs, and a centurion set on vengeance for his dead family. That would be a combination to strike fear into the men responsible for the destruction of your family, I’d say, if they were to find out that they were being hunted. And what sort of supporting cast do we have for this pair of furies?’

  He looked across the remaining members of the party with an expression turned bleak again, locking gazes with each man briefly before speaking.

  ‘Two more soldiers, officers to judge from their apparent confidence, both scarred and both with the look of killers.’ He smiled grimly at Julius and Dubnus. ‘Some men find themselves unable to kill, even when their lives are at risk in battle, and others kill but are for the most part unchanged by the experience, apart from the inevitable nightmares and regrets that will trouble them until they come to terms with the fact. And there is a third type of man, gentlemen, men whose eyes lose just a hint of what they were before once they have stood toe to toe with other men and taken their lives, while also gaining something else that’s impossible to define. I saw battle more than once with the Thirtieth, and I saw sleepy farm boys become executioners in the space of one swift engagement, once they’d undergon
e their blood initiation. Their eyes were just as yours are now, windows on souls with some small part torn away and replaced with something else, no more evil than they were before, just with a fraction of their humanity excised. They scared me more than the enemy we were fighting, if I’m honest with you …’ He smiled bleakly. ‘Which was the point at which I realised I probably wasn’t fitted to military service.’

  The senator laughed grimly, shaking his head and turning his attention to the remainder of the party.

  ‘And a trio of barbarians, each of you bigger and uglier than the last. Now that isn’t something a man sees every day, not without chains and collars at any rate. You, with your hair worn in a topknot, you are a German I presume?’

  The slave nodded.

  ‘I am Arminus, Senator. I was taken prisoner by the tribune in battle, and he saw fit to spare my life and bind me to his service. Now I guard his back when he is foolish enough to leave it uncovered … which is often.’

  Sigilis snorted a laugh.

  ‘A slave with a sharp tongue in his head, and yet unmarked by any sign of the lash. Either your master is a gentler man than I’d imagined, or your service to him has value that outweighs such minor irritations. And beside you, a one-eyed man with more scars than I’ve ever seen on a warrior, looking back at me as if I am the subordinate in our brief relationship. Royalty?’

  His question was directed at Scaurus, but Martos answered the question directly, gesturing to the tribune.

  ‘I was a prince, before I was betrayed to this man by a mutual enemy who took my throne and abused my people. The tribune spared me from the execution that was my fate by rights, and now I am an ally of Rome.’

  ‘And the eye?’

  ‘I ran amok among my enemies when we recaptured my tribe’s capital, and I lost my reason to an unthinking rage for their blood. When I regained the ability to think clearly I was painted from toe to hair with the blood of a score of dead and mutilated men. My eye was the price that my god exacted for that revenge, it seems …’ He paused for a moment, shaking his head sadly. ‘I would have traded every life I took to have found my son alive, but my betrayers had already thrown him from the highest rock to feed the crows, and caused my woman to take my daughter’s life to spare her the indignity of their abuse. She killed herself …’

  ‘And you felt unable to remain in the place where your family was destroyed as a consequence of your having trusted this betrayer?’

  Martos nodded.

  ‘I have entrusted my future to these men.’

  The senator nodded, turning his attention to the last of them, taller than either of the other two barbarians by a head and whose body was almost a parody of the human frame, such was its size and musculature.

  ‘And you, the giant. Who are you?’

  The big man’s voice rumbled a one-word reply.

  ‘Lugos.’

  He pondered Scaurus’s turned head and raised eyebrow for a moment before speaking again.

  ‘My pardon. Lugos, Lord.’

  Sigilis chuckled, the flesh around his eyes crinkling with the pleasure.

  ‘There’s no need to call me “Lord”, barbarian, I do not expect you to obey the formalities of our society since you are so clearly a newcomer to our city, although a simple “Senator” would suffice if you feel such a need.’

  Sigilis returned his attention to Scaurus.

  ‘And now, with our introductions made, perhaps you will indulge the wishes of a grieving father and tell me how it was that my son came to die in Dacia? I received the official communication, of course, and my senatorial colleague Clodius Albinus was able to fill in a few of the gaps given that he was in command of the Thirteenth Legion in Dacia, but you are the first men I’ve met who were actually present when he died. Tell me all about that day, if you will, and provide me with some feel for the way in which my Lucius went to meet our ancestors?’

  The second of the audience chamber’s two doors opened, on the other side of the wide airy room from which its four occupants had entered. They had been ushered one at a time into lamp-lit opulence by the stony-faced praetorians who had escorted them through the palace, then left to their own devices with the politely delivered, but nonetheless firm instruction to wait for their host. A single man dressed in a formal toga stepped inside, glancing around the table at which they were sitting waiting for him. All four stirred in their seats at his entrance, even the gladiator who prided himself on his self-proclaimed imperturbability shifted his position minutely, and the newcomer smiled at their reaction, opening his hands in greeting.

  ‘Gentlemen, my apologies for keeping you waiting. Affairs of state, you know how these things are …’

  The squat, ugly man sitting at the table’s far end cracked a slow, lazy smile.

  ‘We know, Cleander. There’s not one of us that hasn’t kept a man waiting for one reason or another, to make him nervous or to piss him off.’ He gestured to the man beside him. ‘Even our gladiator here has been known to toy with a man for a while before taking him down with a single sword blow. The old tricks are the best, eh?’

  The imperial chamberlain smiled back at him.

  ‘Indeed, although I’m not exactly here to have one of your fingers cut off for refusing to pay your protection money, am I Brutus?’

  The other man shrugged, but before he could answer another of them spoke, his voice crisp with authority, clearly used to issuing commands and having them obeyed without question. He had removed his armour when he received the summons to attend the gathering of the Knives, but his red praetorian tunic and the vine stick lying on the table before him told their own story as to his role in the palace.

  ‘He’s right though, isn’t he, Chamberlain? My tribune, the praetorian prefect above him, you, you’re all in the game of imposing your will on other men. We used to work for the praetorian prefect, but now that the Emperor’s stuck the blunt end of a spear through him and left him to bleed to death in the dark, we work for you. That’s the point you’re making, I assume?’

  Cleander dipped his head in a sardonic acceptance of the truth in the centurion’s statement.

  ‘You assume correctly, Fabius Dorso, since I will certainly be the man keeping your new prefect waiting from now on, when I feel the need to impress him with my authority, since I shall be his master in all but name.’

  The praetorian dipped his head in return and kept his mouth shut, wisely deciding to let his fellow conspirators mount any further challenge to the chamberlain’s apparently unquenchable ambition. Unsurprisingly, it was the man sitting opposite him, resplendent in a spotless toga of the very finest quality wool, who took up the unspoken challenge. His voice was acidly sardonic, a weapon perfected over years of debate.

  ‘However will you find the time to manage the detail of such a large and important role, Aurelius Cleander?’

  ‘Ah, well you know how it is as well as I do, don’t you, Senator?’ The chamberlain smiled back at him with a shrug. ‘Some men, Asinius Pilinius, have a talent of making a life’s work out of something that needs nothing more than a swift decision and the right delegation. There’s always someone with the right skills and motivation to carry out your orders, if you look hard enough for him, and I seem to have the skill of finding that man and putting him to work. I’ll answer the big questions and leave the people that I select to enact them to work out how best to achieve my desires. A bit like the way we’ll be working from now on, in fact. I’ll decide which men are deemed to have committed treason, and you four can deal with them in the usual fashion, take your share of the spoils, have your fun and make sure that the throne receives the condemned man’s assets. Speaking of which …’

  He unrolled a scroll, stretching out the silence as he read down the items listed. At length he looked up again, gazing around the table at each man in turn, his stare level and direct.

  ‘Gentlemen, I think it’s important that we have a clear understanding at the start of this new relationship. It seems
to me that you may have become used to taking a little more than your agreed share under Prefect Perennis, to judge from this inventory of the proceeds of his estate.’ He raised the scroll. ‘There’s nothing really valuable missing of course, all of the major assets are accounted for, but there seems to be a disappointing amount of portable wealth that has, for want of a better term, gone for a walk.’ He looked up at the four men around the table, pursing his lips in amusement at his own joke, although not one of them had showed any sign of reaction. He shrugged. ‘Here’s an example. There seems to be a suspiciously small number of slaves available to sell, and none of them, it appears, the prefect’s family members. Which is disappointing since, as we all know, the children of the rich and famous command such high prices from the men who appreciate that sort of thing.’

  The praetorian’s eyes flicked momentarily to look at the senator, and Cleander smiled inwardly at the realisation of one of his suspicions.

  ‘Yes, there are a great many valuable items that we expected to recover which seem to have gone missing, which has piqued the emperor more than a little. A rather splendid collection of antique swords which apparently dated back to the time of Alexander, for one thing. He had his eye on those, as you can imagine. There were some rather splendid marbles that seem to have vanished too, rather pornographic in nature and, while not all that valuable they were, it seems, on the list of things that the emperor expected to receive as his compensation for the former prefect’s treason. Their absence has left him somewhat piqued, and a piqued Commodus is not a safe man for any of us, you can be assured of that. So, given that the safe delivery of the Perennis estate to the throne was your collective responsibility, I think the fairest solution to this problem is for you all to waive your fees and percentages for the job on this occasion, as a means of reassuring the emperor that you remain his loyal and attentive servants and that you intend to protect his property somewhat better next time. I’m sure that you can see the sense in that, or would anyone like to argue the point? You would like there to be a next time, I presume?’