Scorpion Rising

Twenty-Nine

The track to the pit was slippery from mud and hazardous with stones loosened by rain. Claudia noticed none of these things. All she could think was, He'll be all right. Manion was dead, his battle cry died with him, and with neither leader nor deputy, rebellion stood no chance. The monster was nothing without its head.

'I'm here,' she shouted over the storm. 'Orbilio, can you hear me, it's over!'

Now she'd seen the true picture, Beth could raise no objection to him leaving the Pit. Nothing stood in his way.

'It's just a question of finding a rope long enough, and it may be tomorrow, it may be the next day, but I'll send down some food and… Marcus?'

'C–Claudia?'

The voice was faint. She could hardly hear it. More a rasp, a rattle Oh, god.

'Marcus, are you all right?'

A low groan was all that came back. Sweet Janus, no. No. Not after all this…

'Marcus, hold on.' She tried not to let panic affect her voice. 'I'm going to fetch help.'

'Too… late,' he wheezed.

'No, no, Gurdo has herbs, he'll be able to treat you, we'll have you out of there in a jiffy.'

'Can't,' he rasped. 'Compli — ah — cations.'

She wanted to scream.

She wanted to die.

She would follow him even to Hades.

And around the abyss, the storm crackled and howled, and trees bent in the wind.

'Marcus! Marcus, you can't leave me now, do you hear? I won't let you go, I love you too much.'

'Say… say again. Let me hear it before I… before I…'

No, you can't bloody die. I won't let you.

'I said I love you, you fool, I've always loved you.' Rain mixed with the tears. 'Manion was right, I wouldn't let you in, because everyone close to me left and the hurt of rejection was too much to go through again. But I understand now. Clytie's death showed me that. Oh, darling, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, but hold on! You must! I'll go and fetch help-'

'Don't go! P-please." The pause was agonizing. 'What… what did Clytie's death tell you?' he wheezed.

'Everything,' she cried, and suddenly it all came tumbling out. A twelve-year-old girl dies on the spring equinox from wrists that had been slashed on the very rock where she played with her friends…

'You were right about motive being the key,' she sobbed.

First, one had to get inside the skin of the victim. A selfrighteous little prig, Gurdo had called her, adding that she was a pain in the arse. Even Sarra, as gentle and sweet as she was, felt that Clytie put her in a difficult position.

Because she didn't share her friends 'desire to climb rocks, swing from ropes or go poking around in caves and things, she ^y d come to me ostensibly to get thread to sew up a tear in Aridella's robe or a new ribbon because Lin had lost hers, but basically Clytie was lonely and wanted someone to talk to, she said.

The clue lay in the word ostensibly.

At some point in the conversation it would slip out why she wanted these things — and once that happened, I was duty bound to put the girls on report.

Clytie was lonely, indeed she was…

At the Disciplinary, she would rush forward and speak up for her friends, apologizing for landing them in it, but the trouble was, the damage was already done and Beth was left with no choice. She had to punish the girls.

Clytie was the neatest, the tidiest, the cleanest, the cleverest of the four novices, but none of this seemed to matter. It was the flaxen-haired tomboys who were the priestesses' darlings. They would happily turn a blind eye to their scrapes and beside them, Clytie was invisible.

'It wasn't accidental that she "let drop" their escapades.'

She deliberately told tales on her friends, knowing they'd be reported to Beth, but hey presto, this was her chance to shine. She would vouch for her friends! Throw herself at their mercy! Clytie the Heroine would ride to the rescue!

Except there was no rescue. Nothing changed. The flaxenhaired trio did not alter their ways, they were too full of life to cow down. Instead, they resented her tittle-tattling. Perhaps they argued? Perhaps they pretended to shun her, to teach her a lesson? Whatever happened between them, it came to a head on the spring equinox.

Just because we deliver a baby, it doesn't follow that we bond differently with that child than we do from any other.

Unless, of course, you are that child 'Unloved, unwanted, Clytie must have been consumed by grief,' Claudia sobbed.

The last straw would have been the letter. The draft Claudia had found in the urn. The scribbled evidence that would finally convict Ailm.

Clever enough to tell tales, but not clever enough to qualify, are we?

It was too much.

'On the night her mother took centre stage on the dais, Clytie went down to the river and slashed her wrists.'

Right from the start, Claudia was reminded of her own mother's death, was haunted by her suicide. And though she'd come to Gaul to lay the ghosts of her past, she still couldn't see beyond the pain of betrayal.

Clytie wasn't murdered. Not in that sense. But a young girl on the brink of womanhood had received one disappointment too many, and though Beth hadn't told her that she would not qualify for the Hundred-Handed, Ailm couldn't resist 'telling the truth'.

'She chose that particular rock because she wanted her friends to find her.'

Like her mother, Claudia realized too late, she wanted to be found by someone she loved. Someone who would understand…

'But the girls didn't know this.' How could they? It had taken her a lifetime herself. 'They panicked.'

They're children, not adults, and because Clytie had killed herself on their own special rock, they thought she'd done it to get them into trouble. Instead of running for help, they remembered hearing about women who were killed in Santonum and who had had their faces painted.

'They tried to disguise Clytie's suicide.'

Having applied the cosmetics, they pulled her off the rock and left her beside the river, her hair fanned out, her arms outstretched, knowing that either Pod or Gurdo would find her.

'I should have seen it,' Claudia sobbed. 'It was so bloody obvious,'

The peaceful death, just like her mother's…

'It's because I didn't think clearly that you're in this mess, and I'm sorry, but please don't die on me, Marcus.'

'I love you, too,' he croaked back. 'Oh, god, Claudia, I love you so much and if I… if I…'

'Will you stop bloody iffing!' she screamed. 'I've already killed two men tonight, so if you think I'm going to let you sit on that ferry to Hades alongside Ptian-'

'You killed Ptian?'

The voice came from behind, a deep baritone, and it smelled of sandalwood unguent.

'ORBILIO?'

She stared at him. Stared at the abyss. Stared at him once again. Not a ghost. Not a hallucination. The bastard was there in the flesh.

'You said you were dying!'

'I said it was too late.' His face twisted. 'I just omitted the part about getting me out of the Pit, I was already out.'

But 'You said there were complications. You said-'

He took a step forward. The rain had plastered his hair to his face, but his eyes were as dark as the storm. 'And you said you loved me,' he rasped.

'You bastard.'

'Claudia, I'm sorry.' A pulse beat at the side of his neck. 'But it was the only way I could get you to say it.'

'Say what? The first thing that came into my head, so a dying man wouldn't feel he was alone?'

He tricked her and so help her, she'd never forgive him.

'Do you really think I give this for you?' she hissed, snapping her fingers.

'Do not be too hard on him, Merchant Seferius.' A second figure stepped forward and rain or not, you could still kohl your eyes in the shine in his hair. 'Your policeman was only trying to bring my daughter's killer to book.'

'Gabali?'

Janus, Croesus, how many more people had heard her make a fool of herself? Had he hired a team of bloody claqueurs and sold tickets? Then she looked at the Spaniard's face, sunken with grief, at the stipples that stood out on his cheeks.

'Clytie was your daughter!'

Penetrating brown eyes bored through his thin pointed features. 'How could you doubt it?' he asked, and his voice was hoarse with emotion. 'And now you tell me that she killed herself because nobody loved her.'

'No.' Claudia could barely speak the words. 'She killed herself because she had nothing to live for and, believe me, Gabali, there is a difference.'

She would never know what made her mother slit her wrists that afternoon. Was suicide a notion she'd contemplated once, twice, a hundred times before? Was it a spur-of-the-moment decision? An impulse driven by wine? Maybe, like Claudia, it was the not-knowing that finally eroded her strength. Of seeing the man she had married and with whom she'd raised a child march off to war and never come home. Being nothing more than a lowly orderly, his absence, even death, was not worth recording. For four years her mother would have lived with the uncertainty of not knowing if it was her drunkenness that drove him away.

'Suicide occurs when the burdens of life are too heavy to bear and death seems the only way out,' she told Gabali. 'It's not rational, but that's the point. And it certainly isn't because no one loves them.'

It's just that that person's love isn't enough.

A shame Claudia had carried too long 'I hope you are right, Merchant Seferius. I hope to the gods you are right, but with all my heart I thank you for getting to the truth, and I thank you, Marcus, for suggesting I go to her for help.'

'WHAT?'

'If I lied to you, I apologize,' he said. 'But the HundredHanded-'

'Lied to me?'

'- refused to even meet with me when I turned to them for justice-'

'Gabali, you threatened me with-'

'- and if they would not help, nor the local judiciary, Manion said my only recourse then was the Security Police.'

Claudia's anger found a new outlet. 'Manion said?'

'I did not lie when I said I worked for the Scorpion,' he said in his soft Andalus accent, and did nobody care about the storm crashing around them? 'I merely omitted that, from time to time, I also undertake certain contracts for your friend here, contracts that might be too sensitive, leastways politically, for Rome.'

'You work for Orbilio?'

It must have been the wind screaming through the branches, because he didn't seem to hear her.

'Through my contacts with the College, I wangled Ptian a job as a guard, then engineered Manion a place in the slave auction, even though he was expecting an attempt on his life. That was why he joined the queue at the last minute, switching places with your friend here-'

'He is not a friend, and he certainly isn't mine,' Claudia hissed.

'- to throw the sniper off guard, but the attempt was more subtle than that.'

'The raven.' She refused to even look at Orbilio. 'But if it wasn't Manion who shot that bird, who on earth wanted the Scorpion dead?'

'Ptian, of course.' Ptian had no intention of sharing power, he explained. 'He wanted to be known as the man who led Aquitania to freedom, so he killed a raven with an arrow flying Manion's colours in a plan that should have been foolproof.'

Foolproof? Then Claudia remembered the way Ptian had blown on his ring, buffing it up on his pants like Manion. The ring was silver — like Manion's. Engraved — like Manion's. Doubtless one of many characteristics that Ptian had copied to mould himself into what he assumed was the embodiment of a rebel leader. Were we only able to see ourselves as other people see us, she reflected wryly. Because then he'd see that he was nothing but a shallow imitation, a thug and a bully, without character of his own. But bloated on self-importance mixed with smugness and a certain native cunning, Ptian would have considered himself the intelligent one, not Manion. He was the hero, the man to lead Gaul, and no wonder the emblem on his ring was the phoenix. It symbolized a new leader rising from the ashes of subjugation. But Ptian was also a coward. If he was to kill Manion, he had to be sure to succeed.

No one crosses the Scorpion and lives.

No indeed. Just as no one thrown into this pit ever comes out, not even their bones.

'You anticipated the attempt on Manion's life to be through trickery not direct action,' she told Gabali. 'That's why you brought a long rope.'

And who better to smuggle one in than the man who used to throw victims into the Pit?

'Si.' Gabali's smile lacked warmth. 'To think like an assassin, it is best to be an assassin. To shoot the Scorpion in public would draw too much attention and risked killing the wrong man.'

'Yet Manion believed Ptian would still take the gamble?'

'He was closing in on him and needed to stop him. Ptian knew this-'

'Wait.' Too many things had happened in too short a time. Her head pounded from overload. 'Wait. He needed to stop him?'

'Manion knows that sedition is not the answer. Unlike Ptian, he truly appreciates how immense your empire stretches, how powerful its authority, how mighty its retribution, whereas Ptian continually underestimated its strength and chose to disregard its…'

Claudia had ceased to listen.

I've read a lot about Rome and its conquests lately. There was so much to learn, too.

'Gabali, when Manion talked about the civil wars that tore us apart, yet said how Caesar still managed to conquer much of Gaul, he wasn't suggesting Aquitania could follow suit at all, was he?'

He was telling her that he understood how powerful the Empire was.

'Here.' Orbilio wrapped his strong arm around her. 'You're shivering.'

But not with the cold, and though she tried to shake his arm off, the strength had leached from her body.

'And the fact that we annexed Egypt while still bitterly divided didn't mean Gaul could do the same,' she said dully.

Gabali's face changed from anguished to something approaching alarm as he picked up the tone of her words. 'No, Merchant Seferius, it did not.'

'I want what's best for my people, he said, and when he said victory, I thought he meant over us, but dear god, he meant victory over Ptian. Sweet Janus, Orbilio, don't you see what I've done?' She could hardly speak from teeth that wouldn't stop chattering. 'Manion was the second man I killed tonight.'

May the gods have mercy, she'd just murdered an innocent man.