Prostitutes were offering their trade from the side of the street, calling out – almost heckling – the crowds of night-goers. They were not coy about their business, either – both men and women exposing themselves to anyone who might look their way. Their hands crawled up bare legs like insects. But one might see the inherent loneliness of such a business – the vacant expression, the hollow laughter. Tonight their work possessed a raw, animalistic nature; in fact, one couple was engaged in a feral transaction up against the walls of a tavern, either unaware or delighted that they were providing a spectacle.
Titiana laughed at all the goings-on, finding wonder in the sheer variety of offerings. We continued through this dreamlike neighbourhood, one that seemed utterly detached from the Tryum of daytime, and eventually down some steps, into a small underground tavern.
If all the chaos we had seen outside had been condensed into the large room, that would have been – almost – a sufficient description of the place. Surprisingly, those from the senatorial class mixing with the less fortunate didn’t seem to be the Tryum way. Among the soft light of a hundred lanterns, there were battered cushioned couches, amphorae full of wine, cheap food and generally people not wearing much in the way of clothing. Drinks were thrust into my hand, and I refused them; flesh flashed before my eyes. Both women and men made passes at me, but not the kind that one could take as a compliment. Smoke whirled around my head, a heady, herbal concoction. Despite remaining sober, the rest of the evening became a fast blur of images: expressions of numb ecstasy, Titiana kissing me in a darkened corner of a dingy tavern.
At what point the ghost came to me, it is difficult to say. Titiana had gone to find more drink and I was sitting on a stool in one of the rare quiet spaces, away from the music and other people, as I tried to clear my head from the fug of smoke and stench of spilt wine. If there was another partygoer in the room, they had probably passed out, or were sprawling on a couch, intoxicated on some herbal concoction.
Into this relative calm stepped the eyeless man I had seen in the tombs outside Tryum.
His hair was unkempt, his skin pale, his clothing in tatters, yet he moved with the confidence of someone who was doing very well for himself. I rose to meet him, losing my gaze in the vacant spaces within his head.
‘You are Drakenfeld?’ he rasped, barely audible in these surroundings.
‘What do you want?’
‘My wife,’ he replied.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I’m looking for my wife. Have you seen her?’
‘I don’t know who she is, nor do I know who you are.’
It is difficult to gauge the expressions of another when one cannot see their eyes, but nevertheless he seemed disappointed. There was something about his manner, his slumped shoulders, his slightly bowed head.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked.
‘The tombs,’ came his reply. ‘The mausoleums. I . . . came back from them.’
‘You rose from the dead?’ I asked, incredulous that the words even came from my mouth.
‘I was brought back. A woman greeted me, a rich woman.’ He proceeded to describe Senator Divran, and then his own life as it came back to him. He was the first to admit that he wasn’t entirely certain himself. Though he had no name, he claimed to have once been an important man in the city, a politician or senior administrator; he could not remember the name of the king he served under, nor could he recall his address. All he really remembered were patchy snippets of his life, echoes of his past, but with some clarity he recalled his wife. He asked me once again for my help. He said he had heard my name mentioned about the city as someone who could help the dead.
Who was this figure? Was he a ghost? Had Senator Divran returned him from the dead? I could not say precisely, but if the latter was the case, it wasn’t going to be easy to let him know that his wife had most likely died long ago.
My only suggestion was for him to go back to the mausoleums and scrutinize their facades in the hope that one of them would remind him of his wife – presuming she had been buried alongside him. He left me suddenly when he realized that I could be of little help, and disappeared into the crowd as quickly as he had come.
Had I imagined the whole thing? Had the heady smoke of the room gone to my head? It left open the question: if this ghost’s, or dead man’s, story was real, could Lacanta’s murder have truly been a supernatural act after all? Should Senator Divran be questioned once again?
This was senseless thinking. The ghost surely had nothing to do with the murder, which, as I said to Divran, had the marks of a living human all over it. Unless hard evidence steered me in another direction, I would continue my business with the living.
Much later, deep into the night, after I had driven the ghost from my mind as far as possible, I hauled myself out of the establishment and gasped the blissful, cooler night air. Titiana kissed my face and asked if I was enjoying myself, saying that this was how she liked to spend any free time she had. I couldn’t determine how truthful it was, and how much free time from her family she had.
She was drunk, she was falling over me and, occasionally, when she focused on me properly, she started to cry. Her behaviour was confusing: this was, more or less, what we’d done in our youth, but it didn’t seem the same any more, it didn’t seem as exciting as it used to, and Titiana wasn’t upset back then. She said that this was her life now, but she didn’t seem sincere about it; she said it as if it was a call for help rather than a statement of happiness.
Titiana had not sobered up by the time we returned home. She stumbled through the door and into my bedroom, where she collapsed on the bed and attempted to pull off her dress, all the while asking me to take her. She was not in control of her thoughts. With me almost sober, and Titiana in this state – nothing positive could ever come from such a union. So instead I pulled the blanket across her and kissed her brow before lying down exhausted alongside her.
As the ceiling slowly came into focus, I wondered, sadly, if the dead man would find rest tonight, or if I was right to be so sceptical of the supernatural as I had been through my life.
Suicide?
News of General Maxant’s suicide reached us not long after dawn.
A messenger had contacted several senators just before midday, including Senator Veron, who was present at my house, and delivered the tragic news. It had been an odd morning: Titiana had left again during the night, leaving only her impression in the pillow, and her scent within the ruffled bedsheets.
My morning had been spent organizing the new offices of the cohort, with Veron arriving purely to order Constable Farrum about like a slave; he grew so increasingly disdainful towards the man that I took the senator to one side and spoke of the importance of these men feeling valued if they were to do a decent job. The news concerning Maxant was very clear and very simple: the general had killed himself on the beach in front of his villa – a knife to his chest, his hands around the blade – and had been discovered by his servants first thing that morning. I stressed the urgency of getting to the scene of the incident before others could disturb it too much, and Veron immediately sent for horses so that we could ride out to the coast.
I hastily scrawled a note to my superiors concerning Maxant’s death, thinking it powerful enough information to request assistance; I stuffed it in a messenger tube before issuing it to one of the men from the Civil Cohorts, demanding he dispatch it immediately.
Within the hour, Leana, Veron, myself and Constable Farrum were riding out of the city at a ferocious speed.
Along the coast the wind was strong, and the skies were as usual clear and mesmerizing. Little licks of white surf littered the sea and birds sliced through the sky in all directions. There was a pungent, vegetative tang, which cleared my head. It was an invigorating change from the odours of the city.
The journey had not taken long and just after midday we came on the final stretch of road, which led to Maxant’s villa. Though much of the land on the a
pproach had been put aside for agricultural use, a few olive and fig trees were dotted about the local landscape. Either side of the road, enormous, narrow poplars reached up like the fingers of a god.
Eventually we reached Maxant’s villa, a splendid, sprawling red-roofed, limestone house with several similar, smaller structures nearby. The estate was large enough that I guessed some of these may have been for religious purposes or were even purely ornamental. A soft haze had rolled in from the sea, and so his formal gardens to our right had taken on the appearance of some mythological scene. The rest of the property seemed to be in the middle of being refurbished, which was not unusual considering he had spent many of his recent years abroad on military campaigns.
One of the servants stumbled out to greet us – a pale-skinned, old, bald man wearing a grubby white tunic. With tears in his eyes he told us, much to my relief, that we were the first people from Tryum to have arrived at the scene. The servant fell to one knee after Veron announced who he was, but the senator picked the old man up by the shoulder with a tenderness that surprised me. When he began to tell us what had gone on, the servant babbled incoherently. I asked him to speak more clearly and he said, ‘Thank Trymus you’ve come so soon. We . . . we were going mad. We don’t know what to do.’
‘You need not worry now,’ Veron said calmly, glancing towards me. ‘Please, show us the way.’
Three other servants gathered in the villa, their concerned expressions obvious: probably worried what their future would now hold for them given their master was dead. They ushered us outside, through the house itself, which was also in some state of renovation, out through the ornamental gardens and down to the beach. The servant gestured for us to stop, and he indicated the footprints in the sand. ‘These are the master’s steps. They lead down to his body.’ My gaze followed the footprints to the high-tide mark, the sea having receded into the distance, where wading birds strode through the shallow pools.
‘Where are your footprints?’ I asked.
‘Mine?’ he asked, his eyes wide in fear. ‘No, I came from another way – they are over there. That is the route I took.’
‘Why did you go that way and not straight down to the shore from the house?’
‘Each morning before dawn I walk the beach. When the sun rises there is little chance to stop working. I came from that direction. We do not like to disturb the firmer sand around where master likes to look. It isn’t proper and it annoys him greatly.’ He pointed along the shoreline. ‘Those are the steps I made on the way back.’
‘And it was you who sent the messenger.’
‘I sent the boy with a note and some coin to go to the nearest town for help, very early on. He was lucky to find someone to send a message so soon.’
‘You said it was suicide.’
‘Yes,’ the servant said. ‘I hope I did not do wrong.’
I shook my head. ‘Can I confirm you found the body before sunrise?’
‘I did not hear the master return last night, but he is a man of exquisite skill and such a quiet return would not be surprising. Sometimes . . . sometimes we were going about our work and he would suddenly be there, talking to us, ordering us about. Like a spirit he could move through rooms.’
‘You’ve not known him long have you?’
‘Many years, though I have not seen him for much of this time. I help manage the estates while master is away.’
I examined the one set of footsteps, Maxant’s own as he moved down the beach from the garden. I asked the others politely if they could refrain from disturbing the tracks for the time being, and so we took a long looping route to the body.
When we arrived it was clear to see that only one other set of footprints led here, along the shore – tracks that belonged to the servant. There was hardly anything to suggest signs of a disturbance. The sand here was well compacted, meaning that the wind would not create ripples – any disruption to the surface would have been by a human or animal. But there was simply nothing else.
I enquired if anyone had moved Maxant’s body at all. The servant said he had pulled the corpse over onto its back to see if he was truly dead, but other than that no one had touched it.
The hilt of a blade stuck out of Maxant’s chest directly over his heart, and his clothing was soaked with blood. The general had been wearing the same formal garb he had on yesterday, at the Stadium of Lentus, including his crimson military cloak. Though he had been quite a presence in life, his dead body was just like all the others, and it was a cold, grim reminder of one’s own mortality.
This was such a waste of a life. The servant began weeping once again and I asked him to leave us in peace for the time being.
Rigor mortis had set in some hours ago, and Maxant’s skin was currently in the process of changing colour; but none of these signs told me anything more than I knew already. We had all seen him late yesterday afternoon and now we could all see him here. If indeed this was a suicide – and all the signs did appear to indicate this – then he would have returned late from the Blood Races and in the hours of darkness seen that his own life was ended.
What reason could a victorious general – one who had been experiencing glories that hadn’t been seen since the days of Empire – possibly possess for killing himself ?
‘Well, Drakenfeld,’ Veron called over above the wind, ‘what do you make of this suicide business? Maybe the general suffered from some military trauma and could no longer stand to be around. It happens to veterans, now and then, so I hear. Being around death so much can do that.’
As I crouched down over Maxant’s corpse, Constable Farrum leaned in. ‘I would see it as an honour, sir, if you could teach me something about the signs you’re looking for on this body?’
‘Oh, come on,’ Veron scoffed. ‘Now’s not the time, surely? Let the man do his work, Farrum. We can play such games later. Besides, what’s to see, other than that sword?’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘there is much to learn here at the scene. And I think I am starting to piece together exactly what might have happened.’
‘How do you mean?’ Veron asked.
‘I do not believe this to be a suicide,’ I announced above the sound of the surf.
Veron gave an expression of surprise. ‘I’ll be impressed if you can explain how it is not.’
‘Constable, have a sniff of this.’ I beckoned Farrum forwards, to his knees alongside the corpse, so that he could smell a dubious stain on Maxant’s cloak. The constable leaned forward eagerly.
Then he wrenched his head back, creasing his face in disgust. ‘Gods’ breath. What on earth is that?’
‘It is vomit,’ I suggested. ‘And you can see there is another stain on the front of his tunic, but it has been slightly obscured by the blood.’
‘Some last-minute fear?’ Veron wondered.
‘For a man of his reputation?’ I replied. ‘No. I’d suggest that Maxant’s body was attempting to rid itself of poison.’
‘Poisoned?’ Veron said. ‘And then stabbed . . .’
‘Indeed.’ I opened up Maxant’s mouth and sniffed the rancid contents. There were traces of vomit there, too. ‘What a perfect location to stage a suicide attempt,’ I continued. ‘We have the ideal set-up: one set of footprints with no one else around, and a clear method of death. If we hadn’t arrived here, Maxant’s death would have almost certainly been registered as a suicide. But you see, the general once told me in person and with some conviction that suicide was a “cowardly way out” and that the gods didn’t look kindly on those who took their own lives. I came here with doubts, certainly, but these were confirmed when I realized there was too little blood on the sand for such a wound. Something like this would have created far more of a mess.’
Constable Farrum frowned. ‘How could it ’ve been done? Maxant’s a heavy man. No one could’ve just killed him, dragged his body here. I mean to say, there should be signs of some kind of effort, something of a struggle?’
‘What’s to say they
used the beach? The murderer could have sailed here with the body. We’re standing just a fraction on the other side of the high-tide mark.’ I indicated the vegetative detritus. ‘Yes, a small boat could easily have pulled up here some hours ago at high tide with Maxant’s pre-prepared body, dumped it overboard and . . . Now here’s the interesting thing. The killer could have walked towards the garden, creating the illusion that Maxant came out here himself, knowing there was no one else around and that the beach was private property. That strikes me as a very important point. It’s all very well planned, but whoever had done this hadn’t taken into account Maxant’s vomit.’
‘Vomit,’ Veron chuckled grimly.
‘A common problem with failed poisonings,’ I observed. ‘And, let’s face it, poisoning was really the only way someone was going to get the better of a physically superior warrior.’
Leana said, ‘The person who is doing this – perhaps they were not alone.’
‘Unless they worked alone and let the tide take the boat out to sea. I’d say, though, that whoever did this must have had some level of access to the general to be able to poison him, one of his own men or a rival in the Senate, someone who may have despised his war efforts even.’
Veron scratched his head and took slow steps around the body, his cloak flapping in the breeze. ‘There were several men I know who loathed the attention and favour he was getting from the public, not to mention from Licintius. Generally he was loved though. Some of the republicans secretly wanted him to lead further campaigns. No, surely not a senator. Do you think the servants could have been involved? Whenever I’ve known there to be poisonings, it’s usually involved sneaking something into their food by the cook.’
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