Terra Incognita

50

Ruso burst out of Metellus’s office with an energy that made the sentries guarding the headquarters shrine grab at their weapons. He strode across the torchlit courtyard, then turned on his heel and scrunched down the graveled street in the direction of the infirmary. He was going to see Tilla. He just needed to collect a few things on the way.

The sword swung against his thigh as Ruso shrugged on his body armor. His fingers fumbled with the buckles and thongs that joined the iron plates together. He lowered the heavy helmet onto his head and tied the strips of leather beneath the cheek pieces. He was not going to put up with any nonsense from anyone out there tonight.

Valens wandered out of one of the wards just as he was leaving his room.

“Goodness, Ruso, where are you going looking like that?”

“Out,” said Ruso, without breaking his stride.

The guard on the east gate saw the medical case in his hand and opened up for him immediately.

The sound of his boot studs rang out in the quiet night, and he was conscious of the brass belt fittings jingling with every step. As he passed the shrine, a dog began to bark in one of the houses. It set off a yappy, irritating reply farther away. Ahead of him, a window squeaked open. It closed again as he approached.

A rat scuttled across the shuttered entrance to We Sell Everything. Ruso kept to the main thoroughfares and to the center of the street. Nobody, antlered or otherwise, was going to creep up on him and drag him into one of those dark gaps between the buildings. Not without a fight.

He approached the last house along the east road. He knew he was in the right place. The air was thick with the smell of the brewery next door.

By the third attempt, he was thumping on the door with the hilt of his sword. A muffled voice from somewhere down the street shouted, “Hey! Clear off!”

That was when he noticed that the shutter on the small window nearby had swung open. A woman with an accent like Tilla’s demanded to know what he wanted. As soon as he stepped left to address her, the shutter slapped back into the frame.

“Is this the house of Catavignus the brewer?” he asked the shutter, hoping that she was still listening behind it.

“The brewery is closed,” came the reply. “Come back in the morning.”

“I’m looking for a girl called Tilla.”

“Well, look somewhere else.”

He tried, “I’m a doctor.”

“Nobody is ill.”

Were all the women of Tilla’s tribe-whatever it was called-this difficult? Why couldn’t she at least open the shutter to talk to him?

He was not going to bawl his name down the quiet street. He leaned closer and said in a hoarse whisper, “I’m an officer with the Twentieth Legion. Ruso. Catavignus invited me here. Tilla is my… Tilla knows who I am. I have to talk to her.”

There was a pause, then a reply of, “There is no girl called Tilla here.”

“Darlughdacha,” he corrected himself, trying to remember how Tilla had taught him to pronounce it. “I’m a friend.”

“I thought you said you were the doctor?”

“I am,” he said, adding, “she has two names,” lest the woman should wonder why someone claiming to be a friend had got it wrong the first time.

“No Darlughdacha either.”

“She told me she would be here,” he insisted. “She will be expecting me.” This was not strictly true, but he felt it would lend weight to his case.

Silence.

“This is the house of Catavignus the brewer?”

The voice confirmed that it was. Then it wished him good night. After that, he might as well have been speaking to a wall. As indeed he was.

Curled up together like kittens. Metellus’s words seemed to echo around the empty streets as Ruso strode back past the deserted bathhouse, the shrine with a lamp flame wavering on it, We Sell Everything, and the alleyway where most of Felix had been found. The murder was something Ruso felt he should care rather more about than he did at the moment. And the fact that he did not care was Tilla’s fault. He had behaved perfectly reasonably. More than reasonably: generously. He had traveled to the very edge of the civilized world out of consideration for her: something most men would not do for their wives or mothers, let alone for a slave. He had even tried to help that arrogant bastard Rianorix with the black eye and the gappy tooth and the silly horsetail hair. What a naive fool he had been.

Unless Metellus was lying. But why would he do that?

He would give Tilla a chance to tell her side of the story. He was a reasonable man. He would ask her, calmly, to explain where she had been last night. Where she was now. That was the point. She had expressly said she was going to her uncle’s house tonight. He had hinted that he might visit. So why wasn’t she there?

Perhaps there was an innocent explanation. Perhaps Tilla had been called to… no. The woman behind the shutter had not said, “She has gone out.” She had said they did not have a girl with either of Tilla’s names.

He should have let Ingenuus cut Rianorix’s throat at the clinic. It was too late for that now. Instead, he was going to leave him to Metellus.

Back at the infirmary, he found his bed already occupied by Valens. He woke him for a brief altercation, which revealed that Valens had assumed this to be the on-duty bed, while Ruso’s proper quarters were somewhere else. “I did say I’d cover night duty for you,” Valens reminded him. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“Never mind,” said Ruso, shedding his armor and kicking it under the bed. “Just go back to sleep.”