An Empire for Ravens

by Eric Mayer

  “What are you thinking, John?”

  “We must start moving.”

  “But—” Clementia leapt to her feet, screaming, shaking her hand. A dark shape flew off into the water. “A rat! A rat!”

  Even after her screams stopped they continued echoing as if she had awakened the legions of Hell.

  John grabbed her hand and ran as he scanned the tops of the columns.

  A pair of demonic eyes met his own. What looked like a gigantic toad stared down from an elaborate capital.

  They had arrived at the entrance to their salvation, the world of the dead.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  “Did you hear that? They’re right behind us!” Clutching John’s hand, Clementia spoke in a whisper verging on a muffled scream.

  “The soldiers wouldn’t have followed us this far. They’d never find their way out.” The corridor was as black as the bottom of a grave.

  “How will we find our way out?”

  “I’ve passed through this part of the catacombs before, when I entered the city. I was following someone but I made gouges in the wall at every turn, in case I had to come back this way.”

  He continued to feel his way along carefully. The marks he had made were not deep and he didn’t dare miss one, a fact he did not mention to his panicked companion.

  “There, John, that slithering sound! Are there snakes down here?”

  “I don’t see what they could eat.” The faint noises Clementia was hearing might be the settling of earth, a draft weirdly magnified, or more probably just her imagination.

  “Where are we?”

  “Somewhere between the cistern and an entrance to this catacomb on the Appian Way.”

  He sat down, back to the wall, to rest and gather his thoughts. His hand was slippery with blood from groping along the rough rock. “You are from an old family, Clementia. Your ancestors must have been pagans a long time ago. Does your family have an ancient mausoleum along the Appian Way?”

  “Not that I have heard. My father never spoke about our oldest ancestors. As you say, they were probably pagans.”

  Had the pyramidal monument belonged to one of the families involved in concealing the treasure? Had it offered a convenient entrance to the underground maze or had the valuables been transported from the church of Saint Minias? The latter seemed more likely since Basilio had the idea the hiding spot was in the church. In fact there was only a doorway to the catacombs under the church. The giant pyramid, however, was an entrance easily identified in a fresco.

  “Did your family have any special connection with the church of Saint Minias?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing was ever said about gifts to the church? About funding for beautification, for instance? Did anyone ever mention a fresco?”

  “No, never. Why are you asking all these questions?”

  Apparently the aristocrats and church had indeed each possessed only half of the information necessary to find the missing artifacts. One of the aristocrats had made up the list and someone connected with the church had commissioned the fresco. The details were now likely unknowable. Both parties to the scheme had done their best to make sure their part of the secret was preserved.

  John stared into the darkness, seeing nothing but what the dead see. “Are you ready to go on?” He helped Clementia up.

  She stood, a faint presence of rustling robes and perfume. He wished she had stayed behind. He wondered again about the earring in the mithraeum. He could believe it had been stolen from her. Hunulf had reputedly stolen certain items when he left her employment. But if she hadn’t been in the mithraeum, who had?

  They went on, burrowing through the darkness.

  The fresco had pointed him toward the location in the catacombs where the ecclesiastical trove was hidden. Felix had not known about the fresco. He only knew he was searching for burial chambers bearing certain names. Why not search near the mithraeum after a ceremony? He was killed in a side corridor where those coming and going from the mithraeum would have had no reason to venture, allowing his body to go undiscovered for days.

  Hunulf, another Mithran, must have been keeping an eye on Felix, who had stolen his mistress. So Hunulf followed Felix and caught up to him.

  It wasn’t a stretch to imagine the two men had fought. Hunulf had killed Felix and, mortally wounded, crawled away leaving a trail of blood. Was that how it had happened?

  John was aware of the ceremonial knife hanging from his belt, lying against his thigh.

  It did not seem the sort of weapon a fighting man like Hunulf would choose to employ against a formidable opponent.

  What if the two men had been followed by another of the masked celebrants?

  The earring suggested a woman’s presence and the knife used to murder Felix, a knife identified as a relic by Archdeacon Leon, again brought to mind Clementia’s possession of a reliquary and John’s suspicion concerning her family’s possible thefts from the church treasure they had helped to hide. But if Clementia had attended the ceremony disguised by a mask and wielded the knife, why hadn’t John noticed the earring the first time he searched the mithraeum following Felix’s death?

  There were any number of possibilities.

  His thoughts were interrupted by furtive noises behind them. Almost imperceptible. Fabric brushing rock, a shoe scuffing. Or did he only think he heard something? When a man couldn’t see, his other senses were free to play tricks.

  Besides, anyone following John and Clementia would have to depend on similarly vague sounds. Would it be possible?

  Clementia squeezed his hand and he was aware of her perfume as she leaned closer. “There is something following us! There is!”

  Something, she said. Not someone.

  John recalled Basilio telling him how his workers insisted that a shade roamed the catacombs. He had followed a hooded figure out of the tunnels but he was certain it had been a human being. Albeit someone who knew the maze well.

  “We’re almost at our destination,” he reassured Clementia, although he had long since lost any track of time or any notion of how near to their goal they might be.

  John told himself he didn’t believe in phantoms. But if there were phantoms, if there was a Hades, perhaps this was what they experienced, endlessly feeling their way along in the dark, unable to see, no expectation of ever reaching any goal. Simply wandering.

  Then, abruptly, John saw light ahead. “Someone keeps torches burning near the entrance from the pyramid,” John said. “The family must still visit their ancestor.”

  They entered the chamber where the massive sarcophagus sat, its marble sides sculpted into bas-reliefs of Roman and Egyptian gods and the tell-tale depiction of Mithra slaying the sacred bull.

  John took a torch from the wall and shone it back into the corridor through which they’d come, saw no one, no movement. In the light the suspicion they had been followed through the Stygian hallways seemed foolish.

  “We’ll start looking here.” John indicated the nearest tunnel.

  Neither needed to consult the list. Both knew it by heart.

  Clementia began to examine the plaques lining the walls. Her eyes glittered and her face was flushed.

  The search didn’t take long.

  “Lucinius!” she called out triumphantly. “Lucinius, my friend! I’ve been looking for you for so long!”

  The name was engraved on a thin marble slab closing off a burial niche.

  John handed the torch to Clementia, got out his blade, and chipped at the plaster holding the slab in place.

  Torchlight flared and shook as John worked. Clementia clenched and unclenched her fist on the torch’s shaft. “Finally, finally,” she murmured.

  Yes, John thought, finally. After Felix had died trying to find this place.

  And what did it really matter what the niche
contained since it wouldn’t bring his friend back to life?

  “Look out!”

  The plaque came loose and fell before John could catch it. The sound of it hitting the floor was deafening in the narrow corridor. Clementia stepped out of the way, then rushed past John and thrust the torch into the opening revealed.

  She screamed.

  John stepped forward and peered inside. Typically the spaces were only large enough to contain a body. This one stretched back and back and was empty save for a thick coating of bone-colored dust, the distillation of time.

  By the time John had taken the torch, illuminated every corner of the space, felt around, and satisfied himself that there was nothing there, no trace of a treasure, no secret panels, Clementia had calmed down. Her face, though, was pale as that of a corpse. Something in her eyes seemed to have gone out.

  “Let’s examine the rest of them,” John told her.

  But both knew what they would find behind the carved names stretching in a line from where Lucinius pointed the way.

  Nothing.

  John’s hand went to the ceremonial knife he carried. Archdeacon Leon suspected some of the church’s valuables had been stolen by those trusted to hide them in darkness and obscurity. The religious items possessed by Clementia’s family, for example. In fact, it appeared that none of those artifacts had ever been safely hidden. All of them had been stolen.

  And so in the end this was what Felix had died for? A fruitless quest?

  Then again, was any amount of money worth dying for? Did it matter that he had been searching for nothing?

  Now what?

  Clementia had begun to sob. John was trying to think of what to say to her when there was an inhuman wail and a robed and hooded figure came flying at him.

  John swung the torch at his attacker, who knocked it out of his grasp and clawed at his eyes. The torch spun across the floor and came to rest, filling the corridor with long, jagged, crazily leaping shadows. John caught a glint of wild eyes and bared teeth.

  For an instant the face was that of Eutuchyus. Then as it pulled a dagger from its belt it became a woman, shrieking “You cheated me! You all cheated me! Hunulf, the bastard, deserted me! He paid for that!”

  John’s assailant continued to shriek at him. “Now, you’ll die too, you meddling creature! Oh, I’ve kept an eye on you, I have!” The figure pivoted toward Clementia, who cowered against the wall. “And you, you miserable whore! You stole Hunulf and you and this half-man meant to steal what the church had hidden, but now you’ll pay for that as well.”

  John leapt forward. He drove the slight body back and down to the floor.

  It lay still.

  John crouched down and extracted the ceremonial knife from the body at his feet.

  The knife he had yanked from Felix’s chest and vowed to use to avenge his friend’s murder. But would Felix have wished him to kill a young woman?

  The creature had called itself Eutuchyus, but the unguarded features were clearly female. A woman he had never seen except when she was posing as his steward but now a mosaic of deductions began to fit together.

  “This woman must be Veneria,” John said.

  Epilogue

  “Why should you regret killing the woman?” Cornelia asked. “She was trying to kill you.”

  She and John walked along the ridge at the edge of their estate. It was a hot, cloudy August day. The sea and sky seemed to be frowning at each other.

  “I could have overcome her without killing her,” John replied without hesitation. While traveling back to Greece he had thought often about what had happened in the catacombs.

  “Then you would have regretted not avenging Felix, as you promised him.”

  “She was hardly more than a child, Cornelia.”

  “A child? Plotting and killing in cold blood, trying to lay her crimes at other peoples’ doors?” She clutched his arm. “What if you had got back to the house an hour later? Diogenes’ men would have been waiting to arrest you for that murderous assault on Viteric and you wouldn’t be here now!”

  John had been recounting what had happened in Rome. He had arrived home the previous day but only after a night’s sleep had he agreed to talk. He would have preferred never to speak of Rome again, but Cornelia wanted to know. Had to know, she insisted. There was no arguing with her.

  He had explained Veneria’s quest for both the hidden church treasures and revenge on Hunulf after he deserted her for Clementia. While working at the church of Saint Minias, Veneria had learned about the secret entrance and used it to visit the catacombs. She had been the hooded and robed shade seen roaming their passages, returning again and again in her futile search, even during her time posing as Eutuchyus.

  When John was lost on his first day in Rome, her father Aurelius had brought him to Felix’s house, mentioning how well he knew the area in which it was located. In light of subsequent events, it seemed more than likely his familiarity with it was because he visited his daughter there.

  “Fortuna smiled on me, Cornelia,” John had continued. “Veneria did not know Julius and I were away from the house at the time Viteric was attacked. She had to be there when he was discovered but in order for her plan to succeed, someone had to notify Diogenes, so it’s a good wager her father was there and involved with Viteric’s stabbing.”

  “Hoping you would be arrested for it, thus removing you from the household,” Cornelia replied thoughtfully.

  “That’s my conclusion. After all, who was living there? A timid steward with no reason to hate Viteric, a boy, two women—Clementia and the cook—and myself, the obvious culprit, given Diogenes’ already aroused suspicions and my habit of shaking off Viteric’s company. After all, a man with nothing to hide does not fear a companion.”

  “And Viteric, did he die?”

  John shook his head. “No, although according to the physician it was a close fight to prevent Viteric from setting off on his final journey.”

  He went on to describe Julius accusing Veneria of investigating Clementia’s possessions. “Rather than stealing, I believe she intended to place among them the twin of the earring left in the mithraeum, so as to point a finger at Clementia as responsible for Hunulf’s death. Veneria stole the earrings from Felix’s room after his death and before my arrival. Obviously intended to match the necklace Clementia already had, it’s not surprising she vehemently denied ownership in a panic upon hearing where it had been found and what that could mean for her.”

  “Speaking of jewelry,” he continued after a pause to collect his thoughts “while I was playing knucklebones with Gainus—”

  “Who’s he, John?”

  “One of Clementia’s guards, and before you ask, I won. In any event, during that game Gainus told me he thought Hunulf had pilfered a number of valuable items when he left Clementia’s employment and she herself confirmed some of her possessions, including jewelry, had disappeared.”

  John continued talking, idly swinging a stick as they walked. “Basilio, the man in charge of the church of Saint Minias, referred to Veneria wearing expensive jewelry while working there, and also told me that even after Hunulf left the employment of the church, he continued to visit her there.”

  “And you think Hunulf gave Veneria jewelry stolen from Clementia?”

  “Indeed. Veneria’s parents must have taken a piece of it to the mortuary, where they pretended to find it on an unclaimed body to claim it as proof their daughter was dead, thus freeing her to assume the identity of Eutuchyus. How likely is it anything valuable on a body would still be with it when arriving at the mortuary? So even while Aurelius shouted that he wanted justice for his supposedly deceased daughter, he had been helping her.”

  “And not only that,” he went on, “there is the question of the weapon Basilio identified as a relic. Clementia’s family had been involved in hiding the ecclesiast
ical artifacts and, coupled with her possession of a reliquary, I have no doubt the family also stole the knife which, being valuable, Hunulf stole and gave to Veneria.

  “As for Felix’s death, I can only surmise he met Veneria as she searched near the mithraeum and had to be silenced since he recognized her. She killed Hunulf in a jealous rage near the same spot while they looked for the missing artifacts together.”

  “From your description those catacombs are as black as the humors of a sinner,” Cornelia observed. “How could Veneria follow you and Clementia on your flight through them?”

  “We heard the noise of her pursuit once or twice, showing she could hear us and follow. Given the maze we were passing through, it was a highly dangerous pursuit. I would admire her courage, had it not been driven by murderous intent.”

  Cornelia was silent, considering what John had told her. Finally she expressed puzzlement. “But why such an elaborate subterfuge in the first place, pretending to be a steward?”

  “Hunulf knew about Clementia’s search, having become involved in it during his time as her lover, and what Hunulf knew, Veneria soon knew, including the fact Clementia had begun an affair with Felix. Veneria therefore presented herself to Felix as Conon’s household steward, claiming to have escaped death when the rest of the servants were murdered. This gave her an opportunity to eavesdrop on their conversations in hopes of overhearing useful information.”

  Cornelia frowned. “Given the sort of woman she was, I’ve no doubt she also gloated over being able to observe an unsuspecting Clementia, given she intended to kill her.”

  John had also talked about Basilio. How in retrospect, despite his dismissal of what he called a legend, it was possible the catacomb repairs he had ordered undertaken were an excuse concealing his own search for the lost artifacts reputed to have been entrusted to the care of the dead. “If so, no doubt he’s still looking,” he concluded.