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

by Riches, Anthony

  Sigilis stripped, pulling on the rough garment as bidden.

  ‘So what now, stranger, now I look and smell like a working man?’

  ‘Now? Follow me, sir. And I ain’t no stranger. My name’s Avidus. I was here the other day, measuring up this lovely garden.’

  The mysterious figure turned away, taking a few steps before seeming to literally vanish into the earth, and while Sigilis dithered, fighting to master his fear of the unknown, he called out to him again, his voice muffled.

  ‘Come on then, sir! Just a few steps more! Here, you, pass me that lamp!’

  The senator paced forward slowly, his eyes widening as the light revealed the nature of his apparent salvation.

  ‘Ahhhh. I see.’

  Almost an hour after his father had jumped over the garden wall into the centurion’s garden, an increasingly impatient Gaius heard voices from the other side of the street. The garden gate opened, allowing a single figure to exit onto the darkened street with the quick, uncontrolled steps of a man who had been pushed. He stopped, looking about himself with swift, jerky movements, cradling something in his hands as if he were reluctant to put it down.

  ‘Oi, Excingus!’

  The furtive figure started with the child’s whispered challenge, backing away with what sounded disturbingly like a muffled whimper. Gaius rose from his hiding place, crossing the road on quick feet as the informant backed away in apparent terror, still holding whatever it was that he was so unwilling to relinquish.

  ‘What’s that you’ve got th—’

  The child’s question died in his throat as he stared down at the round object in his employer’s hands, shaking his head in shocked disbelief and reaching out to pull the knife from the informant’s belt. Excingus, his mouth bound with a tightly tied gag, shook his head frantically as the boy lifted the blade over his head with a shout of rage.

  ‘You cunt!’

  He slashed at the reeling informant, whipping the blade back up over his head ready to strike again in a scatter of blood. Excingus staggered, his bellow of pain muffled by the gag, dodging the blow with a frantic sidestep before taking to his heels with the desperate speed of a man who knew that he was facing his death. Gaius ran after him, the knife held ready to strike again, his child’s voice raised in a piping shriek of rage.

  ‘Come back, you bastard! Come back and face me!’

  Marcus opened the door the next morning in response to a firm knock, finding a quartet of men in praetorian uniform waiting in the small garden, the foremost of them wearing the plumed helmet of a centurion.

  ‘Marcus Tribulus Corvus?’

  He nodded, looking at their faces one at a time until he found the man who had put his spear through Horatius’s neck the previous evening.

  ‘You’re to come with us.’ The speaker looked at him levelly for a moment. ‘By the order of the emperor.’

  Scaurus stepped up alongside his centurion.

  ‘I presume this invitation also requires my presence?’ His only answer was an imperturbable nod. ‘Very well, in which case I suggest we go?’

  The two men walked down the hill towards the Great Circus and the Palatine’s sprawling palaces in silence, their escort ignoring the inquisitive glances of the pedestrians who cleared from their path willingly enough when they laid eyes on the soldiers’ grim faces and glinting spear heads.

  ‘All in all, Centurion, and whatever it is we’re walking into, I’d have to say we did the right thing. You spent an untroubled night, I presume?’

  Marcus smiled wearily.

  ‘Untroubled by my family’s ghosts? Yes, Tribune. The doctor tells me that my acts of revenge have in some way assuaged my guilt at being my family’s only survivor …’ He sighed. ‘All I know is that where I expected exultation and the joy of bloody revenge, I found only emptiness and self-loathing.’

  The tribune put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘You did what you had to do. And now my advice would be to let the whole thing go. Put any thought of completing your revenge from your mind.’

  Marcus stared up at the looming bulk of the imperial palaces.

  ‘I have. Although I doubt that Velox will take the same attitude …’

  They were escorted through the ring of iron that protected the Palatine, the officers supervising each successive praetorian checkpoint deferring to the dagger-shaped emblems on their escort’s dangling belt ends with an alacrity that made Scaurus smile quietly.

  ‘As ever, Cleander seems to have taken Perennis’s informal expedient and turned it to his own ends.’

  The four soldiers guided them through a waiting room filled with supplicants waiting their turn to speak with the chamberlain, many of whom shot them the venomous glances reserved for those who pass unchecked where others are forced to wait their turn. Walking through the door into the chamber beyond, they were greeted by the sound of the chamberlain’s unmistakable voice.

  ‘Justice? If you want justice, Senator, you know what the price is. And now, I’m afraid, your time is at its end. You choose, either make the necessary payment or wait for the wheel of imperial justice to finish its slow and unpredictable revolution. Who knows, you may be lucky enough to draw a magistrate who will sympathise with the injustice that appears to have been dealt out to you …’

  He gestured to an aide, who took the senator in question’s arm in a firm grip, leading the man away while he continued to protest his innocence in whatever matter it was that he had come to bring to the chamberlain’s attention.

  ‘And now … Ah, good, I’ve been looking forward to this all morning. Tribune. Centurion. I see you’ve made your acquaintance with the Emperor’s new Knives? I say “the Emperor’s”, of course, where in point of fact I mean “mine” …’

  He smiled at them, encouraging them to join in his joke, and Scaurus smiled wryly back at him.

  ‘And of course, our pursuit and murder of their predecessors was only ever possible with your active assistance.’

  The chamberlain nodded, his expression sanguine.

  ‘Of course. As I’m sure you’ve worked out by now, Varius Excingus was my creature from the very start, the agent of my helping you on to the scent of each of them in turn. How long did it take you to make the realisation?’

  ‘It was the moment that I found Senator Albinus waiting for us outside Pilinius’s villa. We already knew that Excingus was feeding information to him, but despite his having every opportunity to give us up to his apparent sponsor, he seemed reluctant to do so. Why, I wondered, would he not complete his betrayal of us, unless there was some bigger dog with his throat in its jaws? And what bigger dog could there be than a Roman senator with more than enough gold to buy the loyalties of a single informant? I didn’t have to look very far for the answer.’

  Cleander conceded the point with a smile.

  ‘You’ve played quite a game, haven’t you, Tribune? While it seemed to all appearances as though you were simply supporting this man’s revenge-crazed rampage through the ranks of the man who killed his father, you were in truth once again dabbling in Roman politics, weren’t you?’ Scaurus looked back at him with a nonplussed expression, drawing a reluctant laugh from the chamberlain. ‘Come now, you’re not going to expect me to be taken in by your silent protestation of innocence?’

  Cleander sat back in his chair, waiting for the tribune to answer.

  ‘You do me too much credit, Chamberlain. I am no more than a simple—’

  The other man guffawed loudly, shaking his head in amusement.

  ‘A simple soldier? I don’t think so. I sent my new Knives out yesterday evening for their first task, with orders to remove a substantial problem from my already heavy burden of difficulties. They attended the residence of Senator Gaius Carius Sigilis who, as I’m sure you know, has recently been under something of a cloud for his pronouncements in the senate glorifying the former republic and demonstrating grievous and unforgivable disdain for the imperial cult. Expecting to find the senator
in residence at his domus, since his movements have been tracked for the last few weeks to ensure that he didn’t attempt anything foolish to further undermine imperial rule, they were disappointed to find him absent, and the house completely empty.’

  He fell silent, playing a hard stare across the two men’s faces.

  ‘I trust your men managed to recover the senator’s estate as some means of reparation for his crimes?’

  The chamberlain nodded slowly, clearly unable to fault the concern in Scaurus’s voice.

  ‘For the most part, Tribune, although the fugitive seems to have escaped with a significant fraction of his wealth, which he appears to have been quietly converting into liquid assets for the past few weeks.’

  Scaurus’s tone hardened, a note of disgust entering his voice.

  ‘And presumably he’s been doing that in such a way as to make it untraceable? These people leave me speechless, seeking to undermine the throne and then running away with their money when an attempt is made to bring them to heel!’

  Cleander stared at him for a moment longer before speaking again.

  ‘A more detailed investigation of the senator’s domus this morning revealed the means by which he escaped, a tunnel that had been dug from a shop in an adjoining street, and which ran a full one hundred and ten paces into the senator’s garden before coming to the surface. A tunnel which, I’m told by those that know what to look for, displayed all the hallmarks of military engineering …’ He allowed the silence to play out, waiting for some response from Scaurus. ‘Nothing to say, Tribune?’

  Scaurus shook his head.

  ‘There’s nothing I can say, Chamberlain, without sounding disrespectful to the emperor’s own legions, and therefore I shall say nothing.’

  Raising an eyebrow, Cleander resumed his story.

  ‘And so we come to the facts surrounding a man with whom we’re both well acquainted, our mutual associate Tiberius Varius Excingus.’ He waited in silence again, but Scaurus made no more attempt to comment than before. ‘Excingus was found on the street in the Aventine district this morning, close to death as a result of several knife wounds of varying severity, apparently delivered by his own weapon since it was missing from the scene. Held in his hands …’ One of his aides leaned forward and whispered in his ear. ‘I stand corrected. Nailed to both of his hands was a severed man’s head, that of one of several men who were also found dead in the same area at much the same time. They had, apparently, been killed with long bladed weapons of the type used by your Tungrians. The head in question has been identified as belonging to one of Excingus’s closest associates, a man by the name of Silus, and it seems that it had been secured in place by means of the type of nails usually used for military crucifixions, two of which had been driven through each of his hands and into the dead man’s head in an X-shaped pattern, making it impossible for him to pull them out without assistance.’

  Scaurus shrugged.

  ‘I won’t pretend that the man was any friend, Chamberlain. Let his family mourn for him, I have no tears to waste on the man.’

  Cleander’s voice hardened.

  ‘Excingus was at the point of death when he was discovered, having been mortally wounded by some street scum or other, but he did manage to say one thing before expiring.’

  The tribune smiled slowly.

  ‘Killed with his own knife? That seems poetic …’ He shrugged. ‘Did he say anything of note?’

  Cleander stared at him for a long moment.

  ‘Not really, on the face of it. He was rambling, it seems, unmanned by loss of blood. Apparently his only discernible statement before he died was a single word. The word “impossible”. Having mused in the subject for a short while, I found my thoughts wandering back to the tunnel through which Senator Sigilis was spirited away under the noses of the men who were watching all of the exits from his property, including the two previously secret doors in the walls of his domus. A tunnel to the senator’s estate, which it seems was dug by men who had the gall to pose as workers refurbishing a shop. And it struck me that our mutual acquaintance, for all of his cunning, might have been tricked by something as simple as just such a tunnel? Perhaps, I mused, in overzealous pursuit of the centurion here, and in defiance of my orders, he led this collection of street thugs in seeking furtive access to the house in which your colleague’s wife has taken up residence, only to find several heavily armed men waiting for him? A tunnel would have been an excellent way for your men to take up their positions to wait for his intrusion without their presence being obvious to anyone watching the property on his behalf?’

  ‘A tunnel?’ Scaurus shrugged. ‘It’s a little far-fetched, Chamberlain. We’re infantrymen, not engineers. And besides, a tunnel from where?’

  The chamberlain leaned forward with a hard smile.

  ‘From a certain recently opened barber’s shop, perhaps? I forgot to mention that the landlord of the property whose tunnel abetted Senator Sigilis’s escape from justice is the very same man who owns, or rather owned the shop in which your men have been practising the tonsorial arts for the last week or so. A landlord who appears to have sold up his properties for a bargain price and vanished, quite possibly on the same ship which I think it safe to assume carried Sigilis away on this morning’s tide. And by some strange coincidence, it seems that the entire block in which this shop of yours was located collapsed this morning, rather fortuitously without any loss of life. It seems that the occupants heard the structure creaking and fled the building before it caved in.’

  He shook his head at the two men.

  ‘Doubtless, were I to order a sufficiently thorough investigation, my men would find some form of evidence as to your involvement in the senator’s escape and my informant’s regrettable demise. The former occupants of the collapsed insulae will doubtless surface soon enough, having spent whatever coin they were given in return for their absence when the block was pulled down by the same engineers who dug the tunnel in question as a means of disguising its presence. Were I to order this collapsed apartment block to be removed, piece by piece, I suspect that my men might well find its remnants, running from that shop straight to the house owned by Centurion Corvus here. Further, were I to order the fleet at Misenum to sea, with orders to overhaul and search every ship that left Ostia in the last day, I suspect that both senator and landlord would be back in Rome and awaiting their eventual punishments within another day or two. And were I to have you tortured, Tribune, or you, Centurion, or better still your doubtless wholly innocent wife and child, I expect the whole clever little deceit would be laid bare with remarkable speed.’

  He sat back, waiting in silence for a response.

  ‘And the reason why we’re not being tortured at this very moment is …?’

  The chamberlain nodded.

  ‘I thought that might provoke some comment from you, Valerius Aquila. The reason you’re not being tortured for your tribune’s transparent scheming – yet – is twofold. Firstly, I’m grateful for the brutally efficient manner in which you personally performed a series of badly overdue executions on my behalf. The Emperor’s Knives were an embarrassment waiting to happen, too secure in their positions for any other solution, given the need for their depredations to remain a closely guarded secret. And, to be frank with you, Excingus’s death is no more than the tying up of another loose end which would otherwise have required the attention of the men standing around you. So let me turn your question around, Centurion, since you’ve found your voice at last. Why is it, do you suppose, I haven’t ordered my men to slit your throats and dump you in the city sewer?’

  Marcus shook his head in dark amusement.

  ‘That’s easy enough to work out. In less than a month, we’ve been instrumental in the death of the one man who was standing in the way of your absolute grip on power, destroyed a cabal of assassins who still owed some degree of loyalty to the emperor himself, and opened the way for you to replace them with your own men. We’re useful to you
, aren’t we, Chamberlain?’

  Cleander nodded.

  ‘Exactly. You’re resourceful, cunning, and, it has to be said, you take a rather more direct approach to whatever gets in your way than most of the men in my service. But as my father used to say to me, a man needs to be careful what he wishes for, given that wishes are rarely granted in exactly the form that we hope for. You came seeking the destruction of the men who killed your family, to release you from the unbearable pressure of your wounded honour, but was the end result really to your liking?’

  He turned his attention back to Scaurus.

  ‘You leave me with only two alternatives, Tribune, given that I won’t be the only person with the wit to connect the events of the last few days and come to an accurate conclusion. I can wrap the protection of the state around you, and make you part of the organisation that runs the empire for a ruler who is, to be brutally honest with you both, far more interested in the contents of his bed than the incessant demands of governing one hundred million people. Or I can unearth your conspiracy to murder imperial officials and assist a known traitor in evading justice, with the inevitable result that you and your officers, and their families, will all be subjected to the full weight of the emperor’s justice. What do you think?’

  Scaurus pursed his lips, looking back at the chamberlain with a steady gaze.

  ‘If it were my choice, I’d be tempted to take the hard way out.’

  Cleander nodded.

  ‘I can see it in your eyes. But it isn’t simply your choice, is it, Rutilius Scaurus? And even you, seemingly without dependents, still have a sponsor whose eminence in Roman society might be more than a little dented were I to make it my business to take an interest in his doings.’

  ‘No, it isn’t my choice.’ The tribune shrugged. ‘What is it that you want from us, Chamberlain? I think I can speak for my officers when I tell you that we won’t be party to any “confiscatory justice”.’