The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  He turned quickly to Galban. “Don’t be tempted to laugh at Regulus’s workload, Thaddeus. Your turn is coming.”

  He looked back to where Culver sat watching him warily. “So,” he said, “you will have three months. Can you be ready? It will probably take that long for you to organize the information flow. Make it clear to all your subordinates throughout the legion that no delinquencies will be tolerated. Every item of record relating to every transaction or shipment over the past four years must be submitted. Records of all that kind of thing must be kept for ten years anyway, so there’s no acceptable excuse for not providing them. Don’t hesitate to demand immediate surrender of everything.”

  He smiled, though it was more with apology than humour. “And in the meantime, you will coordinate similar efforts by your counterparts in the Sixth and Twentieth Legions in Deva and Eboracum. They will undertake precisely the same procedures within their jurisdictions, save that they will submit everything they collect to your own auditors. You will have full authority to demand that because you’ll be acting upon the written orders of our western Caesar, Constantine, who is currently governor of Britannia in addition to his other imperial responsibilities. So you will have no problem with the other primuses, apart from their inevitable gripes about being hard done by.

  “That’s about all of it, as far as your responsibilities go. We will discuss it all in greater detail in the days ahead, but have you any questions now?”

  “One thing,” Culver said. “What’s happening with Constantine, does anyone know? Last I heard, he was somewhere in Gaul, moping because Maxentius had accused him of murdering his father, Maximian. We know that’s nonsense, for Maximian was always a backstabbing, treacherous whoreson and his son’s no better, but what is Constantine up to now? Did he go back up the Rhine frontier to fight the Franks? He’s supposed to be our emperor here, but how can he expect loyalty from anyone if no one knows where he is, or even if he’s still alive? We have more emperors nowadays than hippodromes have horses, and I, for one, have no idea who’s claiming power where these days. Between Maximian and Galerius, Maxentius and Maximinus Daia, Licinius and Eusebius and Constantine, I don’t know who’s who anymore.”

  “Who in Hades is Eusebius?”

  Thaddeus asked the question, and Strabo answered it without looking at him. “He’s a Christian bishop—the leader of the underground resistance in Rome. Maximian afforded him a degree of recognition two years ago, hoping to win some time for other things. But he’s not a politician.”

  “Did I hear that correctly?” This was the adjutant. “Did you say he is not a politician? This bishop, Eusebius—have you ever known a priest of any stripe who was not a politician? I warn you, if you ever meet one face to face and believe what he tells you, you will be wise to buy nothing from him.”

  “I can add a little bit to what you know, Regulus,” Cato said, cutting through the banter. “We had a fellow arrive with dispatches from the Rhine frontier a few days before we left to come here. He told us that the two eastern emperors, Licinius and Maximinus Daia, each of whom called himself Augustus, cancelled each other out last year. Apparently they had half a war and then both resigned and signed a truce, so they’re both effectively out of the struggle that’s still going on among the others—most notably between Constantine and Maxentius. Constantine marched south from the Rhine in the late autumn last year, against the advice of all his advisors, to invade northern Italy and challenge Maxentius face to face. He’s there now, as far as we know, and at last report he was alive and well and angry.”

  “Our thanks, Brother Cato, for your information,” Strabo said. “But we are not yet finished with these plans, so let us return to them.” He pulled his scroll between his fingers so that the part he had read hung down from the back of his hand. “You, young Thaddeus,” he said, picking up his glass cup with his free hand to sip the last of what was left in it. “I can promise you with confidence that you will not be complaining of having too much idle time on your hands in the foreseeable future. You will have the same kind of tasks laid at your door that Regulus will, but the scope of yours will be far wider than the primus pilus’s.” He set down his empty cup, shaking his head when Gaius Valerius moved to pour him more.

  “Regulus will deal with the military end of things. You, on the other hand, will be dealing with the suppliers who equip and feed the armies, with the sole exception of the minting authorities who make the coins the paymasters use. We already know how those are processed, and each shipment from our paymasters is counted by hand before being dispatched, so there is no need to investigate any of that. Everything else, though, including complete information about every single individual who knows anything about or is involved in the transfer of bullion from the paymasters’ depots to its final destination, has to be intensely scrutinized, because someone among those people—at least one person and almost certainly more than one—is feeding information to the thieves. We will expect you or your people to discover who that is.

  “You will have noticed, I hope, that I spoke of your people. No one expects you to do all of this alone. Like Regulus, you will have a team to assist you. Your primary task, beginning tomorrow, will be to establish a new corps of auditors. And before you say it, I know there is already such a corps in existence. But clearly, judging by the widespread evidence of its incompetence, it is untrustworthy and will be disbanded. It will be replaced by your new corps, and no one who served in any capacity in the old body will be permitted to join the new one. You will build your new organization with no other restrictions. As with the primus pilus’s task, you will have a three-month preparation period, and beginning tomorrow, you will have access to all the information we have on the best people at our disposal. Anyone you want, you may take.”

  “Question,” said Culver. “Will all these people be brethren?”

  “No. That simply would not be possible. But at the supervisory levels and above, yes, the personnel will all be brethren.”

  “Records collection,” Galban added. “How will that be handled? It’s not inconceivable that I might end up with ten times the volume of material the primus receives.”

  “No doubt,” Strabo agreed. “Probably fifty times as much. Bear in mind that you won’t be bothering with local requisitions, however. The expenditures and purchases would be too small to provide evidence of theft on an Olympian scale. And as I said, you will not lack either help or resources. The word has already gone out to a number of our brethren who will be glad to work with you on organizing this. The men I’ve summoned should start to arrive in the next week or so.”

  Galban frowned, instantly cautious. “Won’t people take note of a new influx of men? How will we explain them?”

  “Thaddeus,” Strabo said, grinning because he had known the question would be asked. “On any single day in Isca, there are more than six thousand men, sometimes ten thousand during summer training exercises, and they come and go all the time. You think a mere hundred more officers will draw any attention? Besides, there’s nothing secret about what we’ll be doing. We’ll be establishing another system of auditors—more regulatory horseshit. That’s the extent of what people will think, if they think anything at all.”

  He drew himself erect and looked around the table. “I believe we’re finished now, my friends. For tonight, at least. I suggest another glass of Gaius’s magnificent wine, and then lights out. We have busy days ahead of us, starting tomorrow. Except for Cato here, of course, and his friends. They are officially on furlough, having delivered their cargo safely.”

  Gaius Valerius stood up and began to replenish their wine glasses, and Strabo turned to Cato. “I haven’t even asked. How long will you be staying? Not that I want you to go, mind you,” he added, laughing.

  Cato shrugged, watching idly as Valerius filled his glass. “I don’t really know, Alex,” he said, nodding his thanks to the adjutant as he picked up his cup and swirled the wine under his nose, savouring its aroma. “I
haven’t really thought about it. We’ll stay for a day or two at least, give my lads some time to rest and recuperate. They’ve earned some time off and we’ve no immediate urgencies clamouring at us, so we’ll wait and see what happens when the paymaster’s wagon train arrives from Londinium.”

  Valerius returned to the table and settled in to listen, as did the others, all of them waiting to hear what Cato would say next about the paymaster’s wagon train.

  He looked around the table and smiled. “No point in looking at me,” he said to all of them. “Whether the contents of the train are intact or not will be your problem to deal with, my friends. I’ll simply want the information for the sake of curiosity, and to update our records in Eboracum. By the time we get back home I have no doubt someone will have found plenty for us to do.”

  “On that topic of things to do,” Strabo said, “what can you tell us about this Basilisk fellow? I think Regulus and Thaddeus will find it useful to know whatever is known. Endor was his name, was it not? Appius Endor?”

  Cato studied his brother-in-law from beneath a cocked eyebrow as he savoured a mouthful of wine. “That is his name,” he said eventually. “He came to our attention about five years ago, appearing from nowhere, it seemed. He’s an obscure creature, tends to shun the light. We’ve had some of our best people watching out for him for more than three years now, but he has been remarkably difficult to pin down. So we don’t know much about him, but I’ll tell you what I can. We know he’s a peasant from northern Gaul, a Belgian, a kinsman to Carausius, the upstart emperor. He’s well up in middle age, and stronger than most men half his age.

  “We know little more about him, and much is pure hearsay. The gist of it, though, is that he’s a bad man to antagonize—ruthless, merciless, savage, all the usual frown-inducing words come to mind, but none of them are adequate. The truth is that this swine is inhuman in his dealings with people. He lacks any of the normal restraints and moral limitations that govern people. He is a butcher, unbelievably brutal, and defiantly, deliberately appalling in the atrocities he inflicts upon anyone unfortunate enough to come between him and what he wants. And what he wants is total dominion—over everyone and everything within the scope of his influence. His own people live in fear of him, for when they displease him he’s likely to disembowel them or hack off their heads. He is dangerous, unpredictable, and completely savage. And evil. That is a word I seldom use, though in his case it might be appropriate. The sole sin I have not heard attributed to him is that he eats the flesh of those he kills. Apparently he has not sunk that low…or not yet.”

  “Sol Invictus!” Strabo mouthed the words reverently, as a prayer rather than an expletive. “Do you know where he is based?”

  “No. He moves around frequently, roaming far and wide, so we never know where he will appear next. For all I know he could be here in your area now.” Cato grimaced. “We suspect he is dealing nowadays with the local warlords down here in the far southwest, many of whom have galleys. Have you heard anything like that?”

  The legate shook his head slowly. “No,” he said quietly. “Not a thing. We find the occasional bandit around here, but it’s far quieter than it was ten years ago. I know most of the Celtic chiefs in the region, and none of them has given me any reason for concern—and I think they would if there was any danger of something serious happening. They remember too well what happened last time they singed the Eagle’s wings, about fifty years ago.”

  “We’ve heard rumours,” Cato continued, “that large amounts of stolen goods are being shipped from local ports along the coastline here across the sea to Gaul. We have naval vessels out there watching, but nowhere near enough of them, and our information is not reliable enough to justify our asking the fleet for more.” His eyes sharpened, and he leaned in closer to speak urgently to his brother-in-law. “But hear me clearly, Alex, and mind what I’m telling you. If the son of a whore does turn up in your jurisdiction, treat him as you would a venomous snake. Or even more aptly, treat him as you would his namesake, a basilisk. Kill the creature as soon as you see it, before it can kill you or anyone close to you. Don’t try to reason with him, don’t try to negotiate, don’t try to come to terms with him on any grounds. Kill him.”

  “You make him sound immortal.”

  “Then I’m misrepresenting him. He is as mortal as death and pestilence, and there’s nothing even remotely godlike about him. Here are a few more things we know about him. We know he spent his early years in the legions, and he served well, too, it seems, because to this day he wears a medallion presented to him by Carausius himself. He wears that medallion all the time—he’s never been seen without it. And he has been said to wear a necklace of human ears, too. From what I know about the man, I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true, though I suspect that might have been something he did one time only, for effect. Anyway, he went to sea when Maximian gave Carausius command of the British fleet and ordered him to destroy the Frankish and Saxon pirates in the seas around Britain. And we all know how that turned out.”

  “I don’t,” Galban said.

  Cato grinned savagely. “It must be wonderful to be as young as you are, Thad,” he drawled. “I’m talking about something that happened twenty years ago.”

  “Twenty years ago I was three years old, playing in the streets of Deva. What did Carausius do to the pirates he was sent to destroy?”

  Cato, still grinning, continued. “It wasn’t what he did to them that scandalized the world. It was the fact that he himself became a bigger pirate than all of them combined. He didn’t waste a moment before he started to line his own pockets. From the day of his appointment as high admiral of the British fleet, Carausius skimmed every treasure hoard he recaptured. It was blatant, and yet no one could gainsay him. He would take a pirate ship at sea, slaughter its crew, and confiscate its cargo. But who was then to say how large, or how rich, that cargo had been? No one could tell, except his own men, and he paid them well to keep silent.

  “But he hanged himself with his own greed. Easy success bred laziness, and greed and laziness led to overconfidence. He took to following pirate ships at a distance, allowing them to carry out their raids while he anchored offshore from the targeted towns and ports, waiting for the thieves to sail back out. He would then capture them, slay their crews, take the booty, and sink the ships. People everywhere complained bitterly, for he didn’t even have the decency to hide what he was doing, and Maximian condemned him to death, at which point Carausius defied the whole world and proclaimed himself emperor of Britain and northern Gaul. He almost made it work, too. He ruled for seven whole years—longer than most of his contemporary usurpers—before one of his own commanders assassinated him.”

  “Allectus,” Galban said. “I remember hearing about him.”

  Cato nodded. “That’s the man. He didn’t last long, either. Three years was all he had before they killed him in Britain. I was in the legions by then. That was only sixteen years ago.” He swept the backs of his fingers along the underside of his chin. “Endor stayed with Carausius to the end, they say, but he wasn’t there when Allectus killed him, and he certainly didn’t give the new emperor any opportunity to do the same to him. He disappeared, for years, and only resurfaced after Allectus himself was dead—” He broke off, then shook his head, smiling wryly.

  “Something amusing?” Strabo prompted.

  “Nah,” came the reply. “Typical, though. I’ve heard the same story three different times from three separate sources.” He looked around at the others. “The story is that when Constantius’s army finally hammered Allectus’s rabble, wiping them out north of the place they call Stonehenge, Allectus stripped off his armour and every vestige of anything that might identify him, and fled on foot, fulfilling everyone’s expectations of what he might do in a crisis. But as he was scampering bare-arsed across the battlefield, he heard his name being called and turned to find himself face to face with one of Carausius’s avenging kinsmen, who had ample cause to
recognize his cousin’s murderer, be he naked or fully clothed. The fellow apparently gutted Allectus on the spot, then beheaded him and left his head jammed onto the end of a spear stuck in the ground.” He cocked his head. “Now, we know Allectus shed his armour, because the armour was found afterwards. We know, too, that someone killed him before he could escape. But can we believe that he was killed by a vengeful kinsman of Carausius? Could that be true? We have no way of knowing yea or nay. But as I said, I’ve heard three different versions of the tale and all of them named Appius Endor as Allectus’s executioner.”

  He took a swig of his wine. “Speaking for myself, I would be surprised if it were not true, knowing what I know now about Endor. I find it totally credible that he might have been stalking Allectus from afar, waiting for a chance to avenge his adored leader. True or not, though, the mere fact that people can imagine that offers an insight into what kind of man the fellow is—a veteran soldier and a wily, world-wise survivor, trusted and trained by one of the greatest, most rapacious, and successful thieves of recent years. He wastes no time on petty things, he has no hesitation in killing wantonly, and if he is to steal, he will steal on an epic scale.” He paused again, then added, “I firmly believe he has the intellect, and the vision, to dream up thievery on the scale we are dealing with here, but I cannot believe he has the kind of wealth or the connections he would need to finance such a huge enterprise. No, no matter how brilliant the man may be, he has hidden, powerful allies at his back, funding him. And they trust him because they know he will go to any extremes to protect himself, and them, and their joint enterprise.”

  He looked directly at Strabo. “Make no mistake, Alex,” he said, then turned his head to include the other three men at the table. “And I’m including all of you, because this affects our brotherhood and everything we do. We are contemplating a conspiracy that might be unequalled in the empire’s history—a criminal organization on a scale to daunt the gods themselves, and led by a formidable and unpredictable warrior.”