by Assaph Mehr
She seemed overly keen to learn about my ancestry and position in life until Cornelia said, “Felix works for cousin Lucius Valerius. We’ve recommended him, as he has knowledge of arcane matters.”
“Oh?” said Icilia. “How exciting! Were you a rhone, then? I confess I do not follow their yearly elections and am not intimate with the politics of the Collegium Incantatorum. But I think I remember you were mentioned in the senate —”
“I’m afraid you must have me mistaken with someone else,” I interrupted.
“But you are just the right age! Will you be running to the office of rhone soon? I’m sure you’ll be brilliant at it.” She twirled a stray strand of hair around her finger.
“Felix is a great expert,” said Cornelia, “but isn’t quite from senatorial background.”
A disappointed ‘Oh’ was all I got from Icilia, who mercifully spared me further attentions.
When the meal’s courses changed, we moved to discussing the events of the day. Cornelia seemed more disturbed than her daughter by what we found. I don’t believe Aemilia gave her mother a full account of our investigations the day before, which might have explained some of Cornelia’s distress. Aemilia, meanwhile, had recovered and remained detached when we touched on the subject of human remains. Cornelia paled at the more graphic descriptions, and Icilia nearly fainted.
Cornelia quickly steered the conversation away. “So, what’s next, Felix?” she asked. “Can you resolve this matter for Lucius Valerius?”
“Next is determining the exact cause, for which I’ll need to do some research. Once we do that, we shall see how to go about restoring the insulae to liveable conditions. Having worn our feet out, it is now time to wear out our eyes on ancient scrolls — a task I suspect Aemilia will be happy to take on.”
The meal we were served consisted of classic, simple dishes, done expertly. Lettuce with raw egg yolks and anchovy dressing, whole fish crusted in almonds and fried, and honeyed sesame cakes. The food and sauces were fresh and exquisite, proving once more that skill and elegance beats exotic extravagance.
At dinner’s end Aemilia retired, citing tiredness from walking. I rose too, and bade goodbye to my hostess while Icilia fussed with some loose hair and her many pins. With her coif secure, Icilia said, “I should be going too. I’m afraid the conversation about the unwholesome mess at Varlerius’ insula has given me quite a fright, and I’d rather be home before night sets in.”
Cornelia walked us to the door, embracing Icilia as she departed, but stopping me before I could move beyond the threshold. “Are you in a rush to get somewhere?” asked Cornelia. “I thought you said your next move will be to spend time in libraries, not nocturnal skulking.”
It was, in fact, my plan to return to the insula that night and investigate the remains of the squatters. “I’d like to prepare for tomorrow,” I answered. “Refresh my knowledge with my scrolls, perhaps.”
“She won’t forgive you if you start without her, you know. Why don’t you spend the night here, instead of walking home so late, only to meet Aemilia half way up again tomorrow? It will leave you fresher for the day.”
Her smile was innocence itself, belied only by my memories of our shared past in circumstances that bridged our very different strata of society. Yet here she was, acting contrarily to what I understood when she ended our affair. She hooked her arm through mine and led me to a sleeping cubicle deep inside her mansion.
Her servants, I presumed, were well-trained and well-paid not to gossip, because what happened between us that night was certainly inappropriate for a woman of her social circle.
Chapter VI
Aemilia was only mildly surprised at my presence during breakfast, and she accepted her mother’s explanation about saving valuable research time without comment.
Due to the previous evening’s welcome diversion, I did not accomplish what I had planned — for the second night in a row. That meant I would have to tackle it during the day, with Aemilia at my side.
There were two things I had to do — locate my old acquaintance Araxus hoping he was in one of his lucid states and test some theories about the insulae in ways that are best done under moonlight. Sometimes the bright, warm, yellow light of the sun makes the faint silver traceries of magia fade away. This is especially true in matters of life and death, as the underworld is a world of shadows whose traces are easily banished by the sun. Since all the testimonies we heard attested to paranormal occurrences happening past midnight, I thought it prudent to spend the night there. Well, perhaps not prudent. Or even advisable. But educational, certainly.
Since any night-time activities would now have to wait, that left finding Araxus. He was an old acquaintance, one whom I once called a friend until some bad blood ran between us. I avoided him for most of a decade, until two months back when a complicated case — the one where I met Aemilia and Cornelia — forced me to seek him out.
Araxus and I studied together at the Collegium Incantatorum. Unlike me, he did graduate, after which he dabbled in things he shouldn’t have. He paid the price for it, his mind no longer his to command. But in the process, he had learnt a lot about the darker aspects of magia, including curses and the underworlds. If I got lucky, I’d find him lucid and agreeable. Less lucky but more likely, he’d be lucid but disagreeable. Even likelier, he’d be in a mental state that’d render him about as useful as a barnacle to a blacksmith.
Due to his dementia, he lived on the outskirts of normal society and was usually found out in the purgamenta — the dumps in the hills outside the walls. I warned Aemilia about the location and implored her to stay behind, as we would be traversing areas not fit for young women of her class, yet she insisted on accompanying me. I guess she was curious to meet Araxus, having only seen him once before and under extreme circumstances.
I tried a different tack and appealed to Cornelia. “Remember when we agreed that if I deem a task too dangerous, Aemilia would stay behind? There is no benefit to your daughter — nor any to Valerius, for that matter — by having Aemilia tramp through one seedy tavern after another, or by galumphing through back alleys in the Campus Civicus, thick with thieves and cut-throats.”
“Don’t even think about it, mother,” Aemilia spoke before her mother could respond. “This was to be my chance to see life across Egretia. To experience everything about it, as well as magia.”
“I’ll report back as soon as I find anything,” I said, “and we’ll take it on from there.”
“But I also want to learn how you find out things. That is a big part of the investigation,” Aemilia countered.
Cornelia vacillated at first, but then, worn down by Aemilia’s pleading, she gave in. She did send an entourage of bodyguards with us, but they were more hindrance than help. At that point, I was almost ready to walk off the case. I didn’t want to take a young woman to meet the man implicated in the death of my first love. But Cornelia reassured me, and, I reasoned, the circumstances were different. It had been a decade since Helena, and, to be fair, Araxus was at fault by negligence rather than malice. If I did quit the case, Aemilia would try to continue it herself. She’d done that before, the idiot girl. While I could not be faulted for anything that might happen to her, I doubted my conscience would let me sleep at night.
And so we set out, taking the quickest route possible — down from her house, angling south of the Forum to the Vicus Petrosa, traversing the length of the Meridionali, crossing the Fulvius at the the Pons Orientalem, then going across the Campus Civicus, and out the Porta Purgamenta. It took more than an hour of brisk walking.
From there we walked to the dumps proper, where I had seen Araxus last. We saw the temple of Libitina with its sacred grove on top of a hill to the south and west, where the undertakers set up their shops. Further eastward, we found the debris and refuse of a city of a million people. From broken furniture to a veritable hill made of shards of discar
ded amphorae and from discarded clothing to the discarded bodies of those who once wore them and could not afford a funeral. If something was unwanted — and if no one was found who could be forced to claim it — the city’s slave-gangs carted it out here.
My luck held, and the fifth derelict misfit we saw sifting through the rubbish was Araxus.
***
“You’re welcome. Well, it was nice seeing you again,” said Araxus when he saw us. I thought he was about to scamper away, but he approached us instead. Araxus was my age, though so unkempt and stooped that he appeared twice that. A face, once fair, was ravaged by the elements. Dank hair hung down around his face and his scraggly beard. He leaned on his crutch, his green right eye was looking at us curiously, while his black left eye never stopped roving about.
“Araxus, I need your help again. I want to ask you some questions,” I said.
“You’ll find the lead merchants you seek right there on the Campus Civicus, in that cluster of buildings across the road from the Emporium Sempronicus.” He waved his hand in the direction we came from.
“What? Why would we be after lead merchants?” asked Aemilia.
“I haven’t even told you what it’s about!” I exclaimed.
“Surely, you remember our training,” Araxus said. “It was one of the fairly basic lessons in cults.”
“Oh, wait, I think I see where you’re going with this,” I said.
“Well, maybe you can tell me,” interjected Aemilia, “because I certainly don’t follow anything you two are talking about.”
“I’m sorry, that was crass of me,” Araxus straightened up. “Of course I’d be glad to help, if you’d just tell me what’s it all about.”
“Huh? But I thought you already knew.”
“Is this the same young woman as last time?” Araxus leered at Aemilia. “We’ve barely been introduced when we met two months ago. It was night when we did, but I bet Felix here was taking all the credit by morning’s light. He still blames me for his love life.”
“Araxus, you fellator asini! How dare you bring up Helena!” I shouted.
“Felix! What brings you here again, my friend?” Araxus asked with a smile of surprise. He then turned and walked away without a word, leaving us gaping at his back.
“What was that all about?” Aemilia asked as we made our way back to the city walls.
“His mind is no longer all there,” I replied. “It’s the effect of a curse he brought upon himself years ago. You can see it in his one black eye. He is not the man he used to be, either in body or in mind.”
“But he was just babbling — and so rude!”
“He wasn’t babbling. He was having the same conversation we did — only he was holding it back to front. As for rude — well, some things don’t change, even with curses.”
“What do you mean, back-to-front conversation?” Aemilia looked at me, puzzled.
“His speciality was the magia inanitas, those forces that lie between things. It’s the hardest, most esoteric branch of incantation. Few people take it up, and fewer still retain their sanity attempting to master it. He was brilliant, but when he brought that curse upon himself his mind became unstuck and permanently buffeted by the flows of magia. Today he experienced the conversation in reverse to how we did. Instead of starting with ave and ending with vale, he just went the other way.” I paused for breath. “Anyway, he answered my question, which is all we came here for.”
“But you never asked any questions, Felix! You never even told him why we came. I don’t understand any of this.”
“We came to ask about a possible cause for the strange occurrences. I thought it might be a curse of some sort, and Araxus agrees. There are several ways to effect curses and using lead sheets inscribed with the right formulae is one of the oldest. It’s not much in use anymore — more of an old wives’ technique with dubious results.”
“So that is why he mentioned lead merchants?”
“Correct. The rhones cracked down decades ago on the real practitioners and eventually made the practice illegal. The Collegium locked the knowledge behind thick doors and wards. They turn a blind eye towards the charlatans though, so you’ll see mock curse tablets show up occasionally. The rhones round up the foreign wizards and witches when they need something to distract the public’s opinion. But it would seem someone managed to uncover the lost knowledge and craft a real tabula defixionis.” I stopped my lecture to catch my breath under the shade of a tree.
“And the lead merchants would be able to tell us who bought lead tablets?” Aemilia asked.
“Regular lead tablets are available for sale all over town, for less nefarious reasons. But I imagine whoever made a tablet for a real curse would need specific, high quality alloy, the kind available only from an artisan metallurgist. These wouldn’t be the vendors supplying large volumes of lead to the city’s aqueducts, but a retailer specialising in refined materials and supplies to the incantatores and other knowledgeable persons. Before we try to find the right one, however, I want to consult someone else — even though it means walking back to the Forum then coming back here to the Emporium on the Campus Civicus.”
“Ah, I see,” she said. “Only one more question, if you please.”
“What is it?”
“Who was the girl he mentioned — Helena?”
I blinked. “No one you should concern yourself with.” I resumed our walk at a quickened pace.
“Felix, you’re hiding something. I can tell. Is she relevant to this case? Does she know anything of such curses?”
I stopped, looked her dead in the eye and said through gritted teeth, “She was someone I loved. She was your age when she poked her nose into the affairs of dark magia, just like you are now. The next time I saw her she was floating down a well, dead and rotting, her arms and legs hacked off. So, shut up and listen when I say things are too dangerous for you, or you’ll end up the same.”
We trudged the rest of the way in silence.
I cooled down after a while but kept a gruff expression and a quick pace. Aemilia stayed a respectful step behind me, and her bodyguards brought up the rear. She didn’t deserve my outburst — it wasn’t her fault Araxus had dredged up awful memories. Still, she was on the same track as Helena had been. I told myself this rough treatment was for her own good, that I needed to beat some sense into her. But just like with my Helena, I knew she wouldn’t let go easily.
***
I led us back to the shop of my acquaintance Quintus Sosius, a renowned trader of scrolls. “While he also deals with the usual plays and memoirs, his expertise is in works of an occult nature. He has agents roaming far and wide, locating rare manuscripts for him. He employs teams of scribes to copy them and sells the copies to discerning customers at a hefty profit. He knew my father and has had a soft spot for me since my father passed away,” I explained as we neared his offices in the Basilica Antonia.
“Why can’t we go to the great library of the Collegium Incantatorum?” asked Aemilia as we stepped under the porticos of the basilica.
“Because they won’t let us in. You need special permission to access those sections, or at least a bribe so high even your uncle Valerius would baulk at it. Besides, you have to be a graduate to use the master index. Without the visus verum, it’s practically useless.”
Sosius’ private study was an airy space, dominated by the large glazed windows. Tables and pigeon-hole shelves for scrolls occupied corners and spaces between columns, while his main massive desk sat right under the windows for the best light. Sosius’ appearance was as impeccable as always, grey hair cut short in a classic style and toga draped meticulously. We exchanged greetings, and I introduced Aemilia.
“Ah, yes, I remember,” he said. “The young woman who came looking for the non-existent first edition of Liberalis.”
I saw her blush and intervened, lest w
e get distracted by how I originally set her on that wild goose chase. “This time we’re after some known manuscripts, of which I was hoping you might have copies. All to do with curses, unfortunately.” I gave him a few names of authors and works relevant to the case.
He didn’t even blink. “You do realise that over half those scrolls are contraband? Anyone caught with an unauthorised copy will have to answer to the rhones of the Collegium Incantatorum.”
Crestfallen, Aemilia asked, “Then how are we to proceed with the investigation?”
Sosius and I smiled. “You’ll note that dear Quintus Sosius was just making an observation. An opening statement for negotiations, to set the background for an atrocious price.”
“You wound me,” Sosius said, placing his right hand on his heart and feigning insult. But the gesture lost something with the twitch of his mouth. “But Felix is correct, of course. While I only deal with legal manuscripts and transcripts, I might be able to put you in touch with those less upright citizens who take a dimmer view of the sanctity of law. Let’s start with what I have in stock, though, and we can take it from there should you need more information.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon in a side cubicle at his offices, but the scrolls in his possession proved useless to us. The knowledge they contained was restricted to describing some of the curses and their effects but did not provide the technical details I needed to be able to devise a method of divination.
Sosius ended up writing us a letter of introduction to a man he was certain would have the required works. “I wouldn’t dream of charging the son of Spurius Vulpius money for any of this,” he said, “but I might have a service I would require from you later. Call it a favour for now.”