Dark Horse

Fifty-Three

Sunshine was reflecting off the cloud concealing the peak of Sorcerer's Mountain on the Istrian mainland, turning it into a soft cap of baby hair. Fine and golden, wispy and innocent, it belied a horror, which had not been played out on the Isle of the Dawn in three and a half centuries.

Orbilio was the first across the threshold of Clio's hilltop cottage, Jason and the others hot on his heels. He hadn't slept. For the second time in less than a week, he had been scouring the villa and its outbuildings for a woman with more courage than sense, and this time it was he who turned on Junius, not the other way round. Why had he left her? he'd demanded to know. He was her bodyguard, it was his bloody job to watch over her! White-faced and stiff with shame the young Gaul explained his orders. Goddammit, did that woman never listen to a damn word he said? Orbilio's fist punched into his open palm. He'd bloody told her it wasn't Jason behind the killings, proved the point several times over, but what does she do? Tells Junius to stick closer than a bud graft, because she's too damn stubborn to admit she was wrong!

Mother of Tarquin, if he's killed her.

Orbilio tore up every room, every shed, every store, but nothing. No sign of her anywhere. Someone had seen her near the stables, Qus said, and sure enough, there was an ivory hairpin stuck in a hay bale, but an ivory pin, goddammit, meant nothing. Orbilio clenched it in his fist until the blood oozed through his fingers and someone prised it out of his hand.

If she's dead.

Then one of the slaves said rumours were going round that the vampire had returned. Lights had been seen in the middle of the night in the stone cottage up on the hill. Orbilio's ears pricked up. Clio? Or did the answer lie in something more sinister?

The answer, it transpired, was both.

The pitiful creature that had once been a vibrant young woman with a cloak of black hair lay in a pool of blood on the mattress. The blood wasn't all hers. In his neck, where it had been twisted with a savagery which Marcus had rarely seen, even in battle, protruded the hilt of a thin-bladed stiletto. The neck into which it had been plunged belonged to the priest. His eyes and his mouth were open, as though caught by surprise, and he had been dead barely a few minutes. The blood hadn't even congealed. But the effort of stabbing him, of not letting go of the knife, had been too much for Clio. It had, Marcus thought as he closed her staring eyes, been a merciful release. His body started to tremble.

'Where's Claudia,' he rasped, grabbing Llagos by his thin shoulders. 'What have you done with her, you bastard?'

It was Jason who pulled him off. 'He's dead, Marcus. The priest can't give you answers.'

He knew that, of course. But if Llagos couldn't, who the hell could?

Strapped into her blackened oaken hell, Claudia experienced the first small fluttering of panic.

Once she realized that Llagos intended to torture her by suffocating her almost to, but not beyond, the point of death, she began to plan. In the hourly intervals during which she was trapped in the box, she could niggle away at the ligatures round her arms in the hope that she might be able to pull at least one hand free. One hand meant the other hand, meant the neck, meant the feet. It would take time, of course, but time was all she had. In fact, it was the only thing on her side.

Slowly, as it climbed above the hills, sunlight began to stream in through the glass panel in the lid. If only she could be sure that was responsible for the increase in temperature in here. She breathed slowly to conserve air, bracing herself for the moment when the gloating apparition appeared at the window, loathing herself for wanting to see it, but praying all the same, because with it came release, however short.

He was going to pay a call on Clio, he'd said, but Claudia knew that control was Llagos's stock in trade and that he would not submerse himself in one victim's torment at the expense of losing another. She waited, forcing herself to be calm. He would be back.

Her mind wandered. To a different place. A different time. Still black. The fire in the granary was raging. Two figures tussling on the stone steps leading up to it.

Act I. The stage props were already set in place. When the pirate ship dropped anchor, that was Leo's cue to drug his own nightwatchmen and pour oil around the grain store. Like any theatrical production, the principal character wouldn't know that the villain had seen him lugging jars of oil up from the cellar. Or that he intended to use those same props to his own unspeakable end by luring Bulis to the building while the soporific took effect.

Act II. Leo sets the first flame to the oil. The fire quickly takes a hold. The corn crackles. Bulis, gagged in all probability, struggles helplessly against his shackles.

Act III. Llagos enters, villain disguised as priest. 'Please let me pass,' he pleads, as the flames lick ever higher. 'I muss try put fire out.' Knowing damn well Leo would not allow him to enter the burning building, it was too dangerous, and besides, it was only grain.

Another badly scripted, badly acted drama.

Except it wasn't a theatrical production, was it? It was every bit as real as the coffin which held her prisoner.

Still no face appeared. No smirk to block the sunlight from the panel in the lid, and all the while the air grew thinner, the heat intensified, and the blood thundered in her ears. At this point, Claudia realized something had gone badly wrong.

Llagos wasn't coming back.

He had killed her, and buried her, and now he would never know where.

Spewing his fear over the path outside the cottage, a nightmare vision swam before Marcus of Claudia's body being dug up by foxes. It was the rasp of the crickets in the coarse grass, of course, but equally, it might have been the sound of their teeth crunching into her bones.

Death was too good for him. Clio meant well, but in killing Llagos she had denied Orbilio that most primeval right, the right of revenge.

All he could do was hope, and pray, that somewhere in the middle of this theatre of horrors, Claudia was still alive.

She was.

Just.

But the red mist was forming, and her throat had arched back, and her breath was shallow and rapid.

'Beware the Trojan Horse,' a voice lisped in the stillness of the dawn light outside Clio's cottage.

Orbilio wiped the bile from his mouth. 'Excuse me?'

In the early morning sunshine, the gold bands in Shamshi's ears glinted obscenely. 'It was the warning I gave to Claudia,' he said smugly. 'Beware the Trojan Horse.'

'So?' Orbilio had no time for the Persian's oily bragging.

'So.' Shamshi tapped the side of his hooked nose with a long, skinny finger. 'I think I might know where she is.'

Sandalwood. She could smell it. No, wait. She could taste it. On her lips, on her tongue, on every part of her, inside and out.

This is it, then. I'm dying.

I know this, because I feel I'm returning to consciousness, but I still can't breathe. And what does it feel like? Dear Diana, it feels wonderful! No longer afraid of the dark, of dying, of being alone, Claudia succumbed to the kiss of the Ferryman.

Except Charon didn't kiss his passengers.

She opened her eyes and found another pair staring straight into hers. Dark eyes. Misted with something that couldn't possibly be tears. I don't kiss killers. But other men kill in the course of their duties. Just that Jason's were the wrong lips. The right lips, as she'd known all along, would taste ever so faintly of sandal 'Wood.'

'The wooden horse. Yes.' Orbilio had turned into a frog. He was croaking. 'Odysseus broke the siege of Troy by smuggling men inside a horse fashioned from wood.'

'How…' long I have waited for this.

'How did we find you?' The lips drew slowly away from hers and she felt cheated. 'That was Shamshi. He noticed the box in the olive-oil cellar and put two and two together.' Orbilio knuckled something away from the corner of each eye. 'So I fancy you have Shamshi to thank for saving your life.'

Her? Fancy Shamshi? 'You,' she corrected.

Strong arms hoisted her out of the coffin. 'Don't try to talk, you're still very weak.'

No, you don't understand. I'm talking about you, you — 'Dope.'

Incredibly, he began to laugh. 'You're not still on about that, are you?'

What? She'd been paddling in the shallows of the River Styx, and he thinks all she was worried about was that business on the Field of Mars? But he was right. She was too weak to argue, and his arms around her felt good, and the sunshine was warm on her hair.

'You didn't honestly think you were in trouble?' He chuckled. His boots echoed on the stone cellar floor.

'Course not.' Orbilio, I will kill you for this.

'The thing is, until then, I'd had no angle with which to get at Hylas the Greek. You thoughtfully provided me with the ticket to nail the cheating bastard.'

Were her ears still in a coma? 'Hylas?'

'Contrary to popular opinion, his winners owe less to training or breeding and more to the stimulants he slips his horses.' He navigated a careful path through the terracotta forest, the tangy smell of olives warm and familiar. 'Thanks to the mix you used to sedate White Star, your trusty Security Policeman can now go undercover, worming his way into Hylas's organization and get him bang to rights, as my boss likes to say.'

Then — this made less and less sense. 'Why did you get Leo to invite me to Cressia?'

Her human carriage faltered imperceptibly. Must be the stairs, she thought. Difficult to manoeuvre.

'Well?'

Orbilio blinked. Truth or dare? He pretended that negotiating the door to the cellar was more difficult than it actually was. Should he tell? Dare he tell? The violence of the moment when he knew for sure that his life had restored hers would remain with him for ever. Then, when she clasped her hands round his neck, so close that he inhaled her fear as well as her relief, he feared he would explode.

For the right woman, I would lay down my life.

Truth or dare.

'Don't you know?' A pain like none he had ever known shot through him.

How could she not realize? That the prospect of spending weeks on end tying up his cousin's felonious affairs on the paradise island of Cressia with her four hundred miles away was too bleak to contemplate. There had, whether she admitted it or not, always been this raw energy between them. Who knows how it might have been harnessed if they spent the summer together under the shimmering sky as terns dived among violet-blue coral and a thousand herbs on the hillside wafted out their enticing scents?

Truth or dare?

He looked down at her in his arms as he carried her along the marble portico. At the hair plastered flat to her face. At the gown so wet it looked like paint on her body.

Truth or dare.

He lowered her gently on to the damask counterpane in her bedroom. Felt a rush of tenderness that threatened to choke him.

'The honest answer — ' He cleared his throat, flexed his shoulders, spiked his fringe out of his face with his fingers. 'The honest answer, Mistress Seferius, is that I knew you'd want to check out Leo's revolutionary method of training the vines.'

Deftly, he ducked the green, narrow-necked vase that whizzed past his ear, but was too slow for the jug and the bolster.

And Claudia thought, I could get used to paradise.