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

by Riches, Anthony

Marcus waited expectantly, raising an eyebrow at the young centurion who stared back in bafflement for a moment before realising what it was that Excingus was waiting for.

  ‘Wait here, Excingus. I cannot invite you into my wife’s house without her knowledge and acceptance.’

  Felicia frowned in disbelief, and as she opened her mouth Marcus was certain that she was about to flatly refuse the informant access to her house, but then she closed it again, smiled at her husband and nodded.

  ‘By all means, Marcus, invite the man in.’

  Her husband stood and stared at her for a moment in disbelief before turning back to the door.

  Excingus smirked at him before walking into the domus, looking around with an expression of satisfaction.

  ‘It’s nice to see the fruits of one’s labours being employed to good effect.’

  Felicia greeted him with a stony face, her body stiff with anger.

  ‘If you have fond imaginings of some sort of a reconciliation between you and I, you’d be well advised to disabuse yourself of them. I’ll remind you that you participated in the murder of an innocent medical orderly and the abduction of a pregnant woman, in the company of a man whose clear intent was to rape and then kill me once I’d served the purpose of distracting my husband and thereby facilitating his murder.’

  Excingus nodded.

  ‘No more and no less than I had expected, Domina.’

  ‘And if you expect your “only following orders” act to soften my ire, then again you are doomed to disappointment. You could have discharged your duty to seek and apprehend my husband without resorting to the depravity you had planned for me.’

  ‘And which you avoided by the less than civilised expedient of ramming a knife up into my colleague’s jaw?’

  Felicia’s face hardened involuntarily at the memory, and Excingus was unable to prevent himself from flinching minutely at the ferocity of her expression.

  ‘Yes. And be warned, Informant, this is the first and last time that I will willingly accept your presence in this house. The next time you set foot inside my door, whether you come bearing either weapons or flowers, the result will be just the same.’

  Excingus bowed.

  ‘Understood, Domina. But before I take my leave, might I have a brief word with your husband’s commanding officer? I believe he’s here?’

  Scaurus stepped out of the dining room with a curt nod to the informant.

  ‘How can I help you, Varius Excingus?’

  ‘How can you help me? Or how might I help you, Tribune? I have information for you, news of a potential opportunity to strike at one of the Emperor’s Knives.’

  ‘And you want money for this information?’

  Excingus smiled, shaking his head.

  ‘No, Rutilius Scaurus, I’m already quite satisfied financially. Senator Sigilis has established a generous schedule of reimbursement to reward me for the reduction in their numbers, by whatever means …’

  Scaurus favoured him with a jaundiced look.

  ‘I see. And you’re presumably hoping that we will be the “means” by which you collect your payment?’

  The former frumentari shrugged.

  ‘I had assumed that we had a shared interest. Perhaps I was mistaken in my belief that you were burning with the desire to right the wrong done to your centurion’s father, and so many other innocent victims of these men’s depredations?’

  Scaurus nodded briskly.

  ‘Very well, we’ll play your game, Excingus, but not here. We’ll meet tomorrow morning then, as soon after dawn as you like. Come to the transit barracks on the Ostia road and ask for the Tungrians. Your safety is assured.’

  ‘I’d rather not—’

  Scaurus barked a laugh, his grin lopsided with wry amusement.

  ‘I’m sure you’d much rather not come onto our ground, but then the choice isn’t yours to make, not unless you want to miss the opportunity to collect whatever generous bounty the senator has put on our, as yet unrevealed, target’s head. And now, Informant, I’d say that your welcome here has reached its limit. I suggest you leave before the doctor here changes her mind, and requests me to have you killed as recompense for the orderly whose murder you so casually ordered. It would be a request I would find hard to refuse.’

  Excingus nodded dourly and turned for the door.

  ‘If you guarantee my safety then I will come to your camp. But be aware, gentlemen, that should you break that vow I will have left a very clear trail to your door.’

  ‘One more thing, Informant …’

  He turned back in the doorway and made an exaggerated bow.

  ‘How might I help you further, Domina?’

  Felicia walked forward and stared into his eyes.

  ‘What did you do with the previous occupants of this house?’

  Excingus laughed softly.

  ‘Ah, so now that you have possession of your father’s house, you wonder what price was paid to allow you to walk back in. Worried that I had your former husband’s family put to the knife, are you?’

  She held the stare, her lip curling in disgust.

  ‘It did cross my mind.’

  His face creased into an affronted frown.

  ‘Then put it out of your mind, madam. This is Rome, not the sort of frontier village you’ve become used to, and I am most assuredly not given to the wanton acts of murder that are the emperor’s preserve. Your former brother-in-law and the rest of his family are safely tucked away somewhere not too far from here.’

  He turned and left without waiting for a reply, leaving the Tungrians staring after him and the barbarians in particular fingering the hafts of the knives they had secreted about them. Julius shook his head in disbelief, raising an eyebrow at Scaurus.

  ‘Really, Tribune? We’re going to work with him after what he did in Britannia? He’ll sell us out without any hesitation whatsoever.’

  The senior officer answered, still staring at the door through which Excingus had made his exit.

  ‘I see little choice. As of now we don’t even know which of the four of them he has in mind for this “opportunity”, so we either take the chance he’s presenting, with an eye open to the risk he presents, or we let it pass and give up on the whole thing.’

  The two men stared at each other in silence for a moment before Cotta interjected.

  ‘I’d say that you’re both right.’ He gestured to Scaurus. ‘The tribune has it correct when he says that there’s no way we can take the vengeance we’re seeking without that man. But on the other hand, the first spear is right to say that we can trust that odious bastard no further than we can piss … begging your pardon ladies.’

  Felicia and Annia smiled demurely, and the former soldier continued with his face slowly reddening.

  ‘Anyway … what I was going to say was that there might be a way to bring a greater element of trust to the relationship.’

  Julius frowned in disbelief.

  ‘Greater trust? You’re suggesting that we might give that boot-scraped piece of shit the benefit of the doubt?’

  Cotta shook his head.

  ‘Not exactly. The problem is that right now we only have two choices: either to trust him blindly or to kill him. One choice is recklessly naive, while the other ends any hope we have of taking revenge for the death of Marcus’s father. What I have in mind might just give us a third option.’

  ‘You don’t want to know, Marcus, leave it at that.’

  Cotta shook his head firmly at his former protégée, his mouth set in a tight line of determination.

  ‘I have to know. I need to understand just how bad it—’

  The veteran cut him off with a sweeping chop of his hand.

  ‘Just about as bad as you can imagine, for all the fact that you’ve seen the ugly face of war. Some things are just better not being discussed, or you’ll end up going mad simply because they were here and you weren’t.’

  Marcus stood up and paced away across the small garden. Beyond th
e house’s wall the sounds of the city were ever present: the slap of feet on cobbles, the shouts of shopkeepers and street hawkers rising in an incessant discordant chorus. Scaurus had taken his escort of barbarians back down the hill, leaving the young centurion to spend the evening with his wife under the watchful eyes of his friend and several of Cotta’s men.

  ‘And that’s my point. I wasn’t here, but they were. My entire family gone, overnight, and me never any the wiser as to what happened to them. For all I know they may have been sold into sl—’ He fell silent at the look on his friend’s face, as Cotta’s last line of resistance crumbled. ‘What?’

  ‘Lucius.’

  His face took on a haunted expression, and Marcus recalled that Cotta and the gladiator had started training his younger brother only the year before his own enforced exile to Britannia. He waited patiently for the former soldier to compose himself.

  ‘I heard later that Lucius was sold to one of Pilinius’s friends. Seems that the senator had no need of him, given the number of women who were taken from your father’s villa, so he disposed of him in return for enough money to buy himself a formal toga.’

  Having broken his silence he was unable to stop talking.

  ‘Your mother and sisters were served up as part of one of Pilinius’s parties. I don’t know what happens behind the walls of his villa, but I do know what the end result is. One of the servants who got away in the confusion came to find me a few days later, and took me to the illegal dumping ground out past the Esquiline gate. Your sister Livia’s body was lying there naked, with its eyes already pecked out by the crows. We buried her, and searched the pits for anyone else from the household, but we didn’t find anything to tell us the fate of the rest of your family, or any of their household for that matter.’

  Marcus looked at him for a moment, and imagined the revolting task of searching the infamous dump, strewn with rotting corpses and infested with vermin and wild dogs.

  ‘Thank you.’

  The two men were quiet for a moment.

  ‘Your father was tortured, of course. They will have thrown his body in the main sewer to be flushed into the Tiber, I’d imagine.’

  Marcus was silent for a moment longer.

  ‘I’m going to kill them all. Each and every one of the men who did this to my family are going to look me in the eyes as they die, and realise that they are no better than wild animals. And when I’ve killed all four of these Knives, I’ll only have one more man to deal with.’

  Cotta put a hand on his arm, shaking his head slowly.

  ‘Do you remember when I used to tell you never to back down from a fight, or a slur on your honour? To hit any man that threatened you with either first, any way you could, and to keep on hitting him until he’d stopped fighting back?’

  ‘Yes. My father said much the same thing to me more than once, albeit somewhat less graphically.’

  The veteran’s face was deadly serious.

  ‘Just this once, ignore us both. You have a wife and child, you have friends who respect you and a new life to enjoy. Take that prize and run with it Marcus, and ignore the bloody path that leads to revenge, or you’ll end up losing everything! There are more important things, as you’ll only find out the hard way if you go up against these men.’

  He stared at his friend, and Marcus shook his head helplessly.

  ‘I know! Pilinius is too rich, Brutus is too well protected, Dorso lives in the praetorian fortress and Mortiferum is too fast with a sword even if I could get to him! But I have to try! Can’t you see that?’

  Cotta nodded sombrely, his shoulders slumping in defeat.

  ‘Yes. Only too clearly. I just wish I could make you blind to it.’

  The first cohort’s 6th Century were sitting around outside their barracks in the late-evening sun exchanging weary insults, bone-tired from a full day of exercise and training, when Qadir, the centurion commanding the 9th Century, walked around the corner with a dozen men in his wake. Quintus, the century’s chosen man and its leader in Marcus’s absence, leapt to his feet and bellowed for his men to do the same.

  ‘Attention! Get on your feet, you maggots!’

  Qadir, the only one of the cohort’s officers to hail from the eastern end of the empire, waited until the soldiers were all standing erect before speaking, his heavily accented voice deceptively soft as he addressed Quintus.

  ‘Good evening, Chosen Man, and my apologies for interrupting your evening. The tribune has detailed me to form a small unit of men for a special task, and there are one or two of your men who, your centurion tells me, should have the requisite skills for the job.’

  ‘Yes, Centurion! What skills are you looking for, Centurion?’

  Qadir smiled faintly at Quintus’s bellowed response.

  ‘I think the main requirement for the role would be that the soldiers in question must have absolutely no scruples, be possessed of a strong disregard for authority and be willing to do anything, no matter how unpleasant or indeed contrary to accepted standards of right and wrong. I told Centurion Corvus, of course, that he could be describing nine men out of ten in this cohort, but he replied that he had two very special individuals in mind. I presume that you have some idea of who he might have meant?’

  Quintus nodded.

  ‘Oh yes, Centurion, I know exactly who the young gentleman had in mind.’ He raised his voice in a parade-ground bellow again.

  ‘Sanga and Saratos, front and centre!’

  3

  Excingus presented himself at the barracks’ front gate an hour after dawn, and was only slightly perturbed to find himself being collected from the guardhouse by Dubnus and a half-dozen of his hulking soldiers. The centurion wordlessly escorted him to the headquarters building, their path taking them past a group of twenty or so soldiers, stood rigidly to attention, who were the unhappy subjects of the long and inventive stream of invective being spat at them by an irate chosen man, while their centurion, a man of eastern appearance, stood to one side with a faint smile. The informant felt their eyes on him, every single man doubtless wishing that he were anywhere other than under the lash of the deputy centurion’s tongue. The shouting died away behind him as he entered the headquarters, although the sound of impassioned disgust could still be heard as he waited for Scaurus to enter the room.

  Outside, Quintus waited until the headquarters’ door was firmly shut before pausing for breath, clenching a fist around the brass-bound and knobbed pole that was both his symbol of office, and his means of pushing his men into their places in the century’s formation.

  ‘So that was him, gentlemen. You all got a good look at the man, now store his face away in your tiny little minds and I’ll march you away for your morning of playing at being informants yourselves.’ He swept a withering glare across their ranks. ‘Informants? I wouldn’t trust any of you to know the crack of your arses from the cleft in your fucking chins! You’ll all be back with your centuries by lunchtime! Anyway …’

  Shaking his head in apparent disgust he took a deep breath and then reverted to parade-ground volume.

  ‘Stand still, you monkeys! Right … turn! Quick … march! Your left, your left, your left, right, left! You with the fat arse! Get in fucking time or I’ll tickle your fucking piles with the end of this fucking pole!’

  Inside the headquarters, Excingus raised an inquisitorial eyebrow at Dubnus, who had dismissed his men and now waited, still silent, in a corner of the room.

  ‘So, Centurion, do you intend to persist in this attempt at intimidation for the rest of the day?’

  The massively built Briton shook his head in disgust.

  ‘I have nothing to say to you. Shut your mouth or I’ll loosen a few of your teeth and give you a reason for silence. When the tribune arrives you can talk all you like, but until then—’

  Scaurus walked briskly into the room and took a seat behind the desk, Marcus and Julius following him in and taking positions to either side of their tribune.

  ‘S
it down, Informant, and tell me what it is you have for us that presents so great an opportunity?’

  Excingus wordlessly unrolled the large scroll that he had carried into the fort, and Scaurus weighted down the paper’s corners while the informant smiled tightly at the men gathered around him.

  ‘You will recognise this map as a plan of the city, Tribune, but your provincial colleagues may not share your familiarity with Rome.’

  He pointed at a spot to the south of the city’s walls.

  ‘We, Centurions, are here.’

  His finger moved, indicating in turn a succession of points on the map.

  ‘This is the Palatine Hill, where the emperor has his city palaces. This is the Flavian Arena, where the gladiators fight, this—’

  Julius leaned forward and put his face close to Excingus’s, his voice heavy with irony.

  ‘We know, Informant, that gladiators fight in the arena. We’ve seen the Palatine, and the Great Forum, and we know that these …’ He pointed to a massive shape on the map to the north of the Colosseum. ‘Are the Baths of Trajan. Dubnus had his purse stolen there and spent an hour threatening various lowlifes with violence before he gave up on the prospect of ever seeing it again. Get to the point.’

  The informant smiled cheerfully back at him.

  ‘So nice to hear that you’re assimilating quickly, you’ll be surprised at the number of men from the provinces who can never get past how many prostitutes there are in the city.’ He met the first spear’s narrow-eyed gaze with a look of innocence. ‘So, without the lesson in the city’s landmarks, here’s the thing. This …’ He pointed again, ignoring Julius. ‘Is the praetorian fortress. I mention it because it’s important, and because I very much doubt that you’ve ventured all the way across the city just to look at yet another fortress, although you really should. It’s a rather impressive pile of stones – although I’m forgetting, Centurion “Corvus” here began his military career in there, didn’t you, Centurion?’

  Marcus locked stares with him, and the informant quickly decided that coming to the point might be the most sensible choice.

  ‘Anyway, as you know, one of the men you’ve decided to hunt down and kill lives in that fortress. And while you might just manage to get in there, dressed in the right uniform and with a great big smile on your plan from Fortuna herself, I really can’t see you getting out again, even if you managed to find and kill him which, I have to admit, I think unlikely. For one thing, you have no idea where his quarters are in the fortress, and for another, there’s always the risk that the hard-eyed young centurion here will be recognised by one of his ex-colleagues as a former praetorian who left informally and under something of a cloud.’