The Emperor's Knives

2

‘Was it the dream again, my love?’

When Felicia awoke the next morning she found Marcus sitting by their quarter’s window, his eyes fixed on the lights burning on the walls of the city, the impending dawn still no more than a smudge of grey on the eastern horizon. She had lived with him for long enough to know what would have awoken him early, and the answer to her whispered question was already clear in her mind even as she asked it. He nodded, smiling across the room at her in the light of the single lamp burning in the corner, although his expression was more haunted than happy. She beckoned him with a crooked finger.

‘Come back to bed then, before Appius wakes up.’

He padded softly across the room and slid in behind his wife, warming his feet on her calves despite her quiet protests, pulling her to him and cupping her breasts in one hand.

‘Our meeting with Lucius Carius Sigilis’s father yesterday seems to have inspired the ghosts of my family to greater efforts. Twice last night and again this morning they came to me in my dreams, showing me their injuries and entreating me to take revenge for our family’s slaughter.’

She snuggled back against him, reaching a hand up to stroke his face.

‘My darling, you know that this is just-’

‘Just my sleeping mind, working on the events of the day and tortured by my guilt at having survived such horror?’ Felicia turned to face him, her expression growing more troubled as she realised that he was staring at the wall behind her. ‘That may well be the case, but I cannot live the rest of my life haunted by these dreams, whether they be my family’s ghosts or simply my mind’s way of coping with the reality of their horrific murders while I escaped from their killers. And now that I have the names of the four men who murdered my father, my brother, my sisters, and probably sold the rest of our household into slavery, I am bound to act against them.’ He paused before speaking again, knowing that his wife had to know the news he had kept to himself the previous evening. ‘A gang leader, a praetorian, a senator and a gladiator: Brutus, Dorso, Pilinius and Mortiferum. We got their names from an unlikely source though.’

Felicia frowned at something in her husband’s voice and sat up in bed, turning to look down at him in the light of the lamp burning by their son’s cot.

‘Unlikely?’

Marcus looked up at her, clearly trying to gauge her possible reaction before he spoke again.

‘Excingus.’

Her eyes opened wide with shock.

‘Excingus?! The grain officer who kidnapped me and tried to murder us both?’

‘The same.’

‘And you didn’t …?’

‘Kill him? He was under Senator Sigilis’s protection. And taking my knife to him wouldn’t have changed anything, although it would have prevented me from learning the identities of the men who killed my father.’

Felicia looked back at him with a grave expression.

‘And if he hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t be planning to kill them all, would you? This can only end badly Marcus …’

He smiled back at her.

‘I understand your fears, but I really don’t have any choice in the matter. And besides, I have Cotta and his men behind me now.’

‘Yes …’

Her tone was dubious.

Marcus laughed softly. He and Cotta had grinned at each other in the square the previous evening, both of them deaf to Albinus’s furious protests as he’d been led away, and the veteran centurion had wrapped him in a bear hug that had squeezed the breath from his body before pushing him away and looking him up and down.

‘I thought you were dead, boy, but look at you, scars and all! You can join my little team of lads any time you like!’

Marcus had stared dumbly back at him, smiling through unexpected tears and was unable to reply. After a moment’s silence, Scaurus had coughed politely behind him.

‘Ah …’

Cotta had straightened, throwing a salute at the senior officer.

‘Tribune, sir!’

‘There’s no need for all that, Centurion, given that you’re retired.’

The veteran had shaken his head dismissively.

‘A man leaves the legion when his twenty years are up, Tribune, but the legion never really leaves the man, does it, sir? Tattoos, scars and memories of dead friends, they’re all still there until the day you die, and since me and my lads are time-served veterans for the most part, we can recognise a fellow professional when we see one. Which means that we’ll be saluting you, and calling you “sir” just as long as we’re working alongside you.’

Scaurus had stepped forward, regarding Cotta from beneath raised eyebrows.

‘As long as you’re working beside us, Centurion? Whatever gave you that idea?’

Cotta’s return stare had been utterly unabashed, the tolerant gaze of a career soldier when challenged by his less-experienced senior officer.

‘The fact that me and my lads know Rome a damned sight better than your boys, no disrespect intended, First Spear.’ Julius had nodded his head gracefully, a corner of his mouth lifting in a wry smile at his tribune. ‘The fact that I’ve burned my bridges with one of the most powerful senators in the city by failing to obey his order to kill the centurion there. And the fact that I’ve been beating common sense into this officer of yours since he was half the age he is now, although to little avail given the stories I’ve been hearing about him from your soldiers, once they’ve got a few cups of wine down their necks. Put simply Tribune, you need us. And I’m not about to allow that silly young bugger to get himself killed in Rome, not when he seems to have made a tolerable job of surviving everything else that’s been thrown at him up to now.’

Once the usual dawn officers’ meeting was out of the way, Julius went to report to Scaurus as to the two cohorts’ strength, gathering Marcus and Dubnus to him with a glance as he left the transit barracks’ cold and slightly dingy headquarters building. The tribune greeted them cheerfully, inviting them to join him at his breakfast table where, Marcus was unsurprised to discover, Cotta was already busy ploughing his way through a plate of bread and honey. Scaurus gestured to the empty seats around the scarred and stained table.

‘It isn’t often that a man gets to eat fresh bread of quite such good quality, and the honey’s excellent. Help yourselves, gentlemen.’

He turned to the silent Arminius, who was doing his best to avoid attention in the room’s corner.

‘Don’t you have a young pupil to be teaching the martial arts?’

The German gave him a hard stare before shrugging and making for the door.

‘I’ll find out what you’re planning soon enough, don’t worry.’

Cotta raised an eyebrow at the door as it closed behind him.

‘You’re not beating that slave enough, Tribune.’

Scaurus shrugged.

‘I tried it, in the early days of our relationship, but it seemed to make no difference to his attitude, and it all proved to be rather a lot of energy expended to little effect, so I stopped bothering. He means well enough …’ He took another piece of bread and popped it into his mouth, looking at Marcus with a quizzical expression, and when he spoke again his tone was deceptively soft. ‘So, are you determined to see this through then, Centurion?’

Marcus heard the edge of formality that underlaid his tribune’s apparently disingenuous question, and straightened in his chair.

‘Yes Tribune.’

Scaurus shook his head, his lips pursed in grim amusement.

‘Relax man, I’m not intending to try to stop you, far from it, I just want us all to be very clear on the likely consequences of taking action again these men. For a start, there’s our new friend Cleander to consider. I’d imagine that the imperial chamberlain will smell a rat pretty quickly if we start killing the men whom the emperor depends on to carry out the task of confiscating the assets of the wealthy, wouldn’t you? And that’s before we ponder what the reaction of the remaining members of the group might be when they realise that they’re being hunted. If so much as a hint of our involvement in the deaths of any of these men becomes known, then we can expect a violent reaction, to say the least, and even if there’s nothing to point to us, they’re all going to get paranoid very quickly when the first of them dies.’

The young centurion nodded earnestly.

‘Exactly my thinking, sir, and I wasn’t planning on any sort of assistance from anyone within the cohort. This is my debt to pay, and I’ll-’

‘Really?’ Julius shook his head in disbelief. ‘You were expecting that we’d happily sit here getting fat on too much wine and spicy food, while you blunder round this cesspit of a city in search of revenge? What were you going to do, rely on that arsehole Excingus to see you right? That bastard would sell you out in a heartbeat; this man Cleander’s thugs would snap you up and you’d never be seen again. Is that what you were planning?’

Marcus shook his head.

‘No Julius. Credit me with a little intelligence. I know Rome as well as any man, and I have more friends in the city than you might imagine.’

Scaurus pursed his lips, tilting his chair back.

‘All the same, the idea that you might dispose of four men with that sort of profile on your own is perhaps more than a little ambitious. I don’t doubt that your man Cotta here will be able to provide you with some assistance, but perhaps it might be worth reviewing what Excingus told us yesterday and apply a little thinking as to just how hard they’re going to be to kill, shall we?’

He raised a single finger.

‘Let’s start with Senator Pilinius. The man lives in a veritable fortress, far better protected than Sigilis’s domus. Entrants to the place come through the front door in the main, past enough of his bodyguards to weed out any attempt at infiltration without very much effort. If they don’t want to be seen participating in that sort of entertainment, and they’re of sufficient importance, then they slip in via the back door, where his men will all be armed to the teeth with much less work to do and therefore twice as vigilant. Given how Pilinius and his cronies get their enjoyment, I’d imagine that they’ll be more than a little jumpy too. All of which would tend to indicate that he might be easier to get to on the street, but then as I recall it, Excingus told us that the senator goes everywhere with at least half a dozen bodyguards, which means that we’d have to attack him with twice that many men to be sure of getting to him. And I don’t know about you, but the idea of a running knife fight on the streets of the capital doesn’t really fill me with any enthusiasm for the likely success of such a desperate roll of the dice, or for our anonymity being preserved for that matter.’

He raised a second finger alongside the first.

‘Then there’s Dorso. As a serving guard officer he lives in the praetorian fortress which, I hardly need to remind you, contains several cohorts of soldiers, only one of which is on duty in the imperial palaces at any time. Getting into the fortress will be hard enough, but killing Dorso without alerting anyone else, and then getting out of the place undetected? That’s a rather tall order.’

Two fingers became three.

‘Then there’s Brutus, who would be the worst of them if it weren’t for Mortiferum, but let’s worry about the gladiator in a moment. His “Silver Dagger” gang must number at least a hundred men, and that’s before we factor in loosely affiliated members of dozens of the smaller gangs that he tolerates in return for payoffs and instant obedience when he demands it. As soon as he hears of the deaths of any of the others he’ll shut himself up in whatever slum bolt-hole it is that he uses when the heat’s on, with enough men gathered about him to make anything less than a full-blooded attack nothing more than a waste of effort and lives. And there’s no way I can take the cohort on to the streets of Rome, we’d bring the Guard down on us like a hod full of bricks falling from a sixth-floor building site.’

Cotta puffed out his cheeks, shaking his head at the scale of the difficulties they faced.

‘And as you say, if the other three are going to be hard …’

Towards the end of their briefing the previous day, Excingus had turned the conversation to Mortiferum, shaking his head at the very prospect of getting to the man.

‘It can’t be done, gentlemen, because the Death Bringer, crafty sod that he undoubtedly is, hides himself away in the very last place on earth that he’s going to face any threat. He spends all his time, when he’s not out slaughtering rich families for the emperor that is, in the Dacian Ludus.’

Marcus and Scaurus had nodded their understanding, exchanging gloomy glances, but the remainder of the party had stared back at him blankly.

‘The Dacian Gladiator School? No? I see I’ll have to explain. There is an arena in Rome, gentlemen, of which you might have heard. It is the Flavian Amphitheatre, built by the emperor Vespasian a hundred years ago, the foremost arena in the empire and big enough to allow sixty thousand people to watch the games that are held there. Thousands of gladiators fight in that arena every year, and each one of them has to be trained and prepared for his moment on the sand, which is why there are four official training schools for gladiators clustered around the building. There’s one called the Gallic School, where they turn out the heavy boys, fish men, hoplites and the like; there’s the Morning School, where they train men how to fight wild animals …’

‘Why the Morning School?’

The informant had shrugged at Dubnus with an expression of irritation, his tone sarcastic.

‘Perhaps it’s because the beast fights tend to take place in the morning?’

The Briton had shrugged back as he replied, clenching a massive fist.

‘And perhaps I’ll impose on the senator’s hospitality just a little. Don’t forget that I can still remember the stink of the shit running down your legs from the time I missed killing you by no more than a dozen heart beats.’

Excingus had nodded, his smile suddenly dazzling.

‘A fair point, Centurion, and well made. Shall I continue?’

He’d waited for a moment and then resumed his lecture.

‘Then there’s the Great School, which turns out all of the smaller fighting specialisms, spearmen, chariot drivers, net fighters and so on, and last of all, there’s the Dacian School. With a name like that their specialism’s rather obvious, I suppose: lightly armoured sword fighters, originally Dacian prisoners when Trajan set it up since he’d just conquered the province. And if the other three members of this very exclusive gang look hard to get to, just consider how hard it’ll be to get to a man who lives in a cell alongside another two hundred or so like him, all of them worshiping him as the deadliest fighter in the place …’

Marcus nodded at Scaurus, taking another piece of bread from the breakfast table.

‘Excingus was probably correct yesterday when he said that getting to the gladiator’s going to be impossible. I think it’s probably for the best to concentrate on the others for the time being, and wait to see if Fortuna offers us any way to get to this “Death Bringer”.’

Dubnus shifted in his seat.

‘And if you’re right, then the violent death of the first of them will alert the other three that someone’s coming after them.’

Scaurus nodded.

‘It seems likely, Centurion. After all, it’s not as if there’s any shortage of men with a motive, even after their victims’ households have been torn apart. Distant relatives who weren’t actually quite so distant, friends determined to have revenge for the dead … there must be a fair few men in Rome who’d be more than happy to catch any one of these men off guard.’

The bearded Tungrian stared at the map for a moment.

‘It seems like we’ll have to make sure that the first couple of deaths look like accident or incident then, won’t we …?’

When Marcus had given his wife Excingus’s key earlier that morning, her first reaction had been stunned silence. After a moment, he realised that she was welling up with tears.

‘That’s the key to your father’s house in the city?’

His wife’s reaction was wordless, a tear trickling down her cheek as she fought for composure, and Marcus spoke gently into the silence.

‘And now a calculating animal like Excingus hands it to me with a smile. What to make of that, I wonder?’

Taking a deep breath Felicia managed to speak, her voice trembling with emotion.

‘I doubt it would stand much comparison with what you were used to when your father was still alive, but it’s a quiet enough little place, and I was so fond of it before we left Rome. I grew up in that house, and it’s my last link to my mother and father. When I married that bastard Bassus, he took the key off me and sent it to his brother. He said that we would live in it when he was posted back to Rome, but that we might as well get some use out of the place in the meantime. I’d all but forgotten it, with everything that’s happened since, until you put this key in my hand. But how did that awful man come by it, I wonder?’

She fell silent again, lost for words at having the means of access to a house she had long since abandoned to the wreckage of her previous marriage. Marcus shook his head.

‘He wouldn’t tell me, but I doubt there was very much subtlety to his taking possession of the place. Where is the house?’

‘It’s up on the Aventine Hill.’

He wiped her tears away and took her hands in his.

‘I’ll ask Cotta if a few of his brighter men might escort you into the city later, and you can go and have a look around the place and decide what you want to do about it. Half a dozen scar-faced veterans ought to be enough to deter the most determined of thieves. Why not take Annia with you, and make a morning of it? After all, there are plenty of shops on the way, and you were saying that you needed to find some better clothing than the stuff you’ve been wearing for the last few months. Why not treat her, and buy the children something new to wear as well?’

Rummaging in his purse, he’d spilled a handful of coins onto the bed between them, eliciting a tearful smile from his wife.

‘Well now, Centurion, what a nice idea! It’ll make a change from all of our money going to fund exotic swords and the latest fashion in helmets …’

When Marcus had requested Cotta to lend him a few of his men to escort Felicia and Annia into the city, and explained the real purpose of the expedition, the veteran’s response had been swift and unequivocal.

‘That’s a job for me. If your women and children are going to set foot outside of this barrack then I’ll be the man escorting them, me and a few of my choicest lads, the best combination of bright and nasty, if you know what I mean. If Senator Albinus wanted you dead to teach the tribune here a lesson, then I can’t see him hesitating to kill or abduct your wife if he sees the opportunity. And from what you’ve told me about this Excingus character, he won’t hesitate to inform the senator about your circumstances if he gets to hear about our little falling out with Albinus. So I think I’ll take a careful look around the place before there’s any talk of moving in, shall I?’

The Tungrian officers watched as the small party headed for the barracks’ gate before turning back to their training duties. Scaurus and Julius had decided to maintain the two cohorts’ fitness and weapons skills regimes while the Tungrians were in barracks awaiting their next orders, reasoning that whether they were sent back to Britannia or elsewhere in the empire, they were likely to be in the thick of the action soon enough. The hulking first spear nodded happily at the sight of his men working hard at their weapons skills.

‘Not bad, if I say so myself. Not bad at all.’

The transit barracks’ parade ground had been converted into a training area, with dozens of pairs of men sparring with wooden swords while others looked on and offered derisory advice before taking their own turn. A piece of open ground alongside the barracks had been commandeered, with twenty wooden posts having been erected at one end. In front of each post a tent party of seven or eight men took turns to hurl their spears at the man-sized wooden target from twenty paces; those men who missed being detailed off to run the field’s perimeter with the offending weapon held over their heads before rejoining their comrades.

‘Infantrymen sweating their bollocks off in the sunshine. What an agreeable sight!’

The three centurions turned to see who was addressing them to find themselves under the scrutiny of an amused-looking man in an anonymous tunic, his boots scuffed and battered from continual heavy use and only cursory attention. Every inch as tall as Dubnus, if nowhere near as massive in build, his heavy beard was flecked with grey, and his brown eyes were set in a face whose skin resembled aged leather.

‘And you are?’

The newcomer nodded to Julius, ignoring the harsh tone of his question with a good-natured smile.

‘Avidus, Centurion, Third Augusta. You?’

The first spear stared at the other man for a moment with his eyes narrowed, and for a moment Marcus spoke quickly, convinced that Julius was on the verge of setting about the stranger with his vine stick.

‘You’re not an infantry officer, are you Avidus?’

The weathered face turned to look at him with its amused expression untroubled by Julius’s glare.

‘Infantry? Fuck no! I, sonny, am one of that glorious band of men who get the opportunity to march at the head of the legion. I’m a pioneer, gentlemen, or to be more precise, a surveyor in command of a detachment of pioneers.’

Dubnus looked at him for a moment with an expression of growing glee before finding his voice.

‘You’re a road mender!’

Avidus rolled his eyes, shaking his head in disgust.

‘And here was me thinking that I might receive a more sympathetic reception from a member of the auxiliary forces, but clearly one bone-stupid grunt is much like every other, whatever armour they’re wearing.’

Julius found his voice, putting out his hand.

‘Julius, First Spear, First Tungrian Cohort. I was going to beast you for being out of uniform but since you’ve clearly got a pair on you, I won’t waste my breath. What brings you to a transit barracks on the road from Rome to Ostia?’

The surveyor shrugged.

‘You tell me. Me and my lads have been here for the best part of a month.’

‘You mean you’ve been sent here and then left to rot?’

‘You’ve got it. Nobody seems to know where we’re supposed to be going. We were detached and shipped over here in response to a request for skilled manpower from a legion somewhere else in the empire, but by the time we got here the original request had been mislaid.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘Knowing my luck, we’ll end up getting sent somewhere really fucking cold where the only work going is digging out blocked latrines.’

Dubnus spread his hands in a gesture of disbelief.

‘Come on though, a whole month without orders this close to Rome? Have you seen the whores they’ve got in there?’

Avidus nodded wearily.

‘We felt the same, for the first fortnight or so. A different girl every night, and how long was that likely to last, so we went at it like prize-winning chariot horses until we realised that we weren’t going anywhere any time soon. Now our money’s more or less gone, so we’re limited to the occasional walk into the city to look at the women.’

‘Look but don’t touch?’

The surveyor nodded knowingly.

‘Exactly. A duck’s arse and an unpaid whore, the two tightest holes you’ll ever find.’

Julius stroked his chin thoughtfully.

‘So you know the best places to go, where the value’s to be found, right?’

Avidus nodded, pursing his lips in the manner of a man considering his expertise.

‘You could say that. We certainly spent enough silver finding out where not to go!’

‘In that case, Centurion, I think we can provide each other with some mutual service. You can tell me where best to send my lads when we allow them into the city for a wet, and in return I can ask my tribune if we can spare a little money to let you spend the rest of your time here in some degree of comfort. Which legion did you say you were from?’

The surveyor grinned, pulling up his tunic sleeve to reveal a tattoo of a winged horse.

‘The Third Augusta, First Spear, Africa’s finest!’

Excingus walked into Albinus’s office between a pair of the senator’s newly recruited bodyguards and bowed deeply, but when he raised his head the expression on his face was anything but subservient. His host waited in silence while the informant looked about him with naked curiosity.

‘So, do you like what you see?’

Excingus smiled gently at the acerbic note in Albinus’s voice, and inclined his head slightly as he replied.

‘Indeed, Senator, you are clearly a man of some considerable learning, if I am to judge by the large number of scrolls on your shelves.’

Albinus laughed tersely.

‘You understand flattery then.’

The informant bowed, his lips twitching in another smile.

‘Indeed I do, Senator. And a good many other things besides. Although the principal subject I thought to discuss with you is betrayal.’

The senator sat back.

‘Is it indeed? My secretary gave me to believe that you have something greatly to my advantage to offer?’

Excingus pursed his lips.

‘I believe that I can persuade you that the two are one and the same, Senator Albinus, if you’ll allow me to explain?’

Albinus waved a patrician hand.

‘I can spare you a little time.’

‘Thank you. I will deal with betrayal first. As the story has reached my ears, your previous associate Gaius Rutilius Scaurus has of late chosen to play a game more suited to his own ends than those which align with your own, and without any of the respect that ought to be forthcoming from a man in his position to a man of your status. I believe that a recent attempt to teach him some manners foundered on the rock of another man from whom you might have expected somewhat more loyalty than was in fact displayed when the moment arose?’

The senator’s face darkened.

‘If you’ve come to rake over the coals of my recent disappointments then you’ll very shortly find yourself on the street with a new set of lumps, Informer.’

Excingus opened his arms wide, tilting his head in question.

‘I simply seek to establish the facts, Senator. I’ve found in the past that the redress of injustices is more easily achieved when all parties are clear as to what needs to be achieved.’

He waited for a moment, and at length Albinus waved a hand.

‘Then continue. But move to what you have to offer to my advantage sooner rather than later.’

‘Indeed. To illustrate that potential benefit, I must first point out that I have achieved a position of some influence with your senatorial colleague Gaius Carius Sigilis. He purchases information from me with regard to the activities of certain men who are, shall we say, loosely aligned with the imperial household. Men who provide the emperor with their services when the occasional need arises for prominent members of society to be removed from their positions.’

Albinus leaned across the desk.

‘Sigilis buys information from you in order to understand whether he’s likely to be murdered for his estate?’ The informant nodded, and Albinus leaned back, looking at the ceiling as he spoke again. ‘As well he might. I may be safe from such threats due to my recent services to the imperial chamberlain, but he most certainly is not, from the rumours I hear. But what does this have to do with Scaurus?’

Excingus smiled.

‘The tribune has recently contacted Senator Sigilis, and indeed visited him, with the sole intention of using the information I sell to him to track down and murder each of the four men who have become known as “The Emperor’s Knives”. He is accompanied, as I am sure you will be aware, by a young centurion who goes by the name of Corvus, although he is in reality the son of Appius Valerius Aquila. And this young man is consumed with the need to have his revenge for the destruction of his family. It seems that now his main target is dead, killed by the emperor as a direct consequence of your recent visit to the palace bearing an obscene quantity of stolen gold, he has resolved to deal with his father’s murderers in person.’

‘And the benefit that this might have to me is …?’

‘Given that I will be feeding Scaurus and Aquila with the information they will then use to hunt down the emperor’s tame killers, it would be remarkably easy to point them in the direction not of their intended target, but instead send them head first into a trap of our devising.’

Albinus nodded slowly.

‘I like the way you think, Informant. And your price for delivering these ungrateful bastards into that trap would be what exactly?’

‘A modest one. I’m already very well paid by Senator Sigilis. This is more of a personal matter than for financial benefit, so I can afford to make my fee for the job a modest one. Shall we say ten aurei in gold, to be paid when Scaurus and Aquila are delivered to you?’

The senator smiled.

‘Two and half thousand sestertii? I would have paid a good deal more, but you know your own price. So, our interests are aligned then, it seems. Very well, come back to me when you have information upon which I can act. And in the meantime, I think it best if you do not come to my house again. Send a messenger with a proposed meeting place, somewhere public, and we can contrive to meet and talk with a lower profile than will be the case if you’re seen entering my property.’

Excingus inclined his head again.

‘As you suggest, Senator.’

‘There’s no need for you to struggle with all that baggage, Domina. My young lads will be happy to carry your purchases for you.’

Cotta had been a provider of bodyguards to Rome’s ruling class for long enough that he knew the ways of the women with whose safety he was entrusted, which was why he had brought a pair of his younger recruits along on the shopping expedition. Taking Felicia’s load of fresh food and clothing from her, he distributed it between the pair, giving them a significant look as he did so.

‘And what you learn from this, my lads, is that you never take just enough men on a shopping trip. Someone’s going to end up holding whatever it is that you’ve all gone looking for, and we can’t allow good manners to compromise good security, can we?’ He turned back to Felicia with a smile. ‘Shall we be on our way to your house, Domina?’

The doctor raised an eyebrow at him.

‘There’s really no need to call me that, Centurion. My name will make a perfectly adequate form of address.’

Cotta shook his head with a tight smile.

‘Sorry, Domina, but whether you appreciate it or not, you’re the wife of a Roman senator, even if he has fallen on rather harder times than we might like. One of these days that young man’s family name will be restored to its previous status, and I see no reason not to show due respect to it in the meantime. Now, where is this house of yours, exactly?’

They climbed the Aventine Hill at a pace sedate enough for the women, who were both carrying their children, until at length Felicia stopped and stared in a combination of hope and trepidation at a house of moderate size in its own modest garden, protected from casual onlookers by a six-foot-high wall. Overlooked on three sides by larger buildings, it was nevertheless clearly still the sort of residence that only a well-to-do and moderately wealthy family would be able to afford. The district was of a decent quality, with nothing more jarring to Cotta’s trained eye than a pair of roughly dressed children playing with a wooden hoop on the corner. Taking in Felicia’s determined expression, the veteran officer held out his hand.

‘Perhaps I ought to go in first, Domina. After all, we have no idea what might be waiting for us inside. If I might have that key please?’

After a moment’s thought she surrendered the iron key, and with a word to his men to stay on their toes, Cotta opened the gate and looked cautiously through it into the garden, a well-tended paved affair with flower beds and plant pots that had clearly been weeded and watered recently. Slipping though the gateway he pushed the door back into place, sliding a dagger free from its sheath on his upper-left arm as he turned to stare at the house. Padding softly across the paving slabs, he walked quickly to the window on the front door’s left, peering through the glass’s rippling sheet into the room behind it. Nothing was moving. Walking on round the house, he found a door, and, lifting the latch, was surprised to find it unsecured. It opened with a gentle creak that announced his presence as obviously as if he’d knocked, and, abandoning stealth, he went through the doorway with his knife held ready to fight, finding himself in a well-sized kitchen which had been left scrupulously clean by the previous inhabitants. The plates and pans were clean, and stacked in orderly piles, and there was none of the smell of rotting food he had expected. Moving through the house he found the same situation in every room, the floors clean, the furniture well ordered, but no trace at all of whoever had lived in them previously, and after a few minutes of cautious searching he shrugged, sheathed the knife and made his way to the front door.

‘The place is empty, my lady, with nothing more troubling than a slightly musty smell — will you come inside?’

The two women walked into the house, Felicia looking about her with a mix of wonderment and disbelief, while Annia simply stared at the rooms’ relative opulence with unabashed approval.

‘Soft furniture? Glass windows? It’s lovely, Felicia! You’re so lucky to have something like this!’

The doctor nodded in a distracted manner, turning to Cotta with a questioning look.

‘And there’s no sign of anyone?’

The veteran shook his head.

‘No, Domina, nothing to give any clue as to who was living here before the place was emptied out.’

She took a deep breath and then, with a brisk nod of her head, made a decision.

‘Very well. This house belonged to my father, and since it was never transferred to my first husband’s ownership whoever was living here would have known they had no claim to it when he was killed in Britannia. They were probably just hoping that I would never return.’ She looked about her again with a new light in her eyes. ‘This is my house, and I shall treat it as such. Centurion, would you be so good as to inform my husband that I will be taking up residence here for the period that we are in Rome, and request him to send up my clothes?’

‘I will, Domina. And I’ll arrange for a standing guard to be mounted on the property, to make sure that you and the child aren’t bothered.’

Felicia smiled gratefully at him before turning to Annia.

‘Will you stay and keep me company? It’ll make a pleasant change from repairing broken soldiers, and we can pretend that we’re a pair of respectable Roman matrons for a few weeks.’

Her friend looked about her for a moment before grinning at her mischievously.

‘I think I can bear the hardship, Domina. After all, the last time I had a proper roof over my head for more than a day or two I was running a brothel, so it’ll make a novel change not to have a constant stream of soldiers walking in with their pricks tenting their tunics.’

A spluttering cough behind Annia coupled with the sudden look of amusement on her friend’s face made her turn back to Cotta, whose face was a picture of uncontrolled amazement. Putting a hand on his arm, she favoured him with a sweet smile of apology, patting his hand as he fought to regain his composure.

‘I’m sorry, Centurion, I’d completely forgotten that you don’t yet know who we are and where we’ve come from. You and I must sit down over a glass of wine when all this excitement is done with, and I’ll explain the finer workings of a city whorehouse to you. And now, Domina, shall we go and have a look around your lovely home?’

‘So tell me, Centurion, what sort of engineering tasks are you and your men trained for?’

Avidus raised his eyebrows disapprovingly.

‘Which tasks, Tribune? All of them.’

Scaurus frowned.

‘Really? I thought there was a tendency to specialise?’

The engineer nodded knowingly.

‘Well there is, sir, except you have to bear in mind that we’re the only legion on the entire African coast. If our bridge builders got lost in a sandstorm or ambushed by the locals, then we’d look a bit stupid when we got to the next river only to find the crossing burned out. Third Augusta has always made sure that every man in the pioneer centuries is skilled for every task, which means that when we’re not on the march we don’t get sent to bring in the harvest or pick stones out of the fields, we get sent for training.’

‘So you can genuinely carry out any feat of military engineering?’

Avidus raised a hand and tapped the raised digits with his other forefinger.

‘Road repair, mining operations, bridge building, demolition, siege machinery-’

‘What, you mean you can build bolt throwers?’

He smiled at Dubnus’s question.

‘Yes. But not just bolt throwers. Siege towers, catapults, battering rams … you name it, me and my lads can do it.’

Julius walked around the desk from his place behind Scaurus to stand beside the engineer.

‘The centurion here and his men have been lost in transit, from the look of it. Wherever it is they’re supposed to be going, the idiots in charge of manpower appear to have mislaid the instructions. And of course, no one wants to ask the grown-ups for fear that they’ll end up looking stupid. So at some point soon these poor sods are going to find themselves being assigned to a legion just to get them out of the way before they become a serious embarrassment, and they’ll probably end up freezing their balls off in Germania. Or …’

He let the word hang in the air, and Scaurus raised a jaundiced eyebrow.

‘Or? Or what? The last time we had this discussion I ended up taking on a half-century of disgruntled legionaries and having more than one interesting conversation with the Sixth Legion’s camp prefect. It was a good thing he was feeling friendly towards us in the wake of our having rescued their eagle from the Venicones, wasn’t it? And now you want me to quietly fold a century of engineers into your cohort?’

‘It’s only thirty men, tribune, hardly a-’

Scaurus shook his head.

‘No you don’t. He’s a centurion, they’re a century. And what makes you think that the man in charge of troop allocations won’t smell a rat when you slide this man and his soldiers up your sleeve?’

Julius’s face went blank, and Scaurus’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

‘You’ve already made the deal, haven’t you?’

His first spear shook his head.

‘Not my place to do so, Tribune, but the officer in question tells me that he’s open to reallocating Avidus to us if we’re happy to make a modest donation to his temple.’

He stared at the wall behind the tribune and waited for Scaurus’s reaction in silence, knowing better than to attempt any form of persuasion on a man who he knew to be stubborn in the extreme once his mind was made up.

‘So you’ve offered him a bribe?’

Julius shook his head.

‘Not at all. I simply enquired as to where Avidus’s century was likely to end up, and then let slip that we’d be happy to look after them for a while. The request for the donation was all his idea. Apparently they want to put in a new altar stone …’

‘And you, Centurion? What do you think of the idea?’

Avidus shrugged.

‘I’m a soldier, Tribune. I go where the army tells me to, dig holes while unfriendly natives practise their archery skills on me, fill them in again and then start marching. As long as our pay and conditions aren’t changed, my lads and I will happily tag along with you for a while. Preferably somewhere warm?’

Scaurus frowned and turned away, looking out through the unshuttered window at the barracks buildings that faced the headquarters.

‘I won’t deny that you’d be useful to us …’ He turned to face Julius. ‘How much does this transit officer want then?’

A knock at the door interrupted Julius before he had a chance to reply, and one of Cotta’s men was escorted into the room by the duty centurion, the battered pugilist Otho. Jumping to attention, the bodyguard explained that he had been sent to inform Julius and Marcus of the fact that their women had decided to remain in the city overnight, and would they mind sending up some clothing and bedding?

‘Well now, I suppose that’s not entirely unexpected. I don’t suppose we should expect your ladies to stay cooped up in this rather stark barracks when there’s a house on the Aventine Hill going begging, should we? Perhaps we might go for a look at this place, the three of us, and you, Centurion Avidus, if you fancy a walk.’

Scaurus grinned at his officers with the look of a man relishing the prospect of a break from the usual routine.

‘And who knows, if we’re really lucky, we might get out of the gates without an escort of jealous barbarians.’

Mortiferum was hard at work on the Dacian Ludus’s practice ground when Senator Pilinius appeared at the door of the enclosed rectangle of sand-strewn ground on which they were sparring. He looked across the ranks of trainee gladiators as they toiled at the repetitive exercises that would build their strength and muscle memory, clearly searching for his comrade in the emperor’s service.

One of the three men sparring with Mortiferum noticed his glance up at the senator, and relaxed his defence on the assumption that their opponent would break off the fight to speak with such an important visitor, but the champion gladiator seized his chance with the speed for which he was famed.

‘Ignore him!’

He danced forward to attack with both swords raised, parrying the man’s clumsy defensive cut with one blade while flashing the other wide to his right, forcing the other two back as he swiftly stepped in closer and shoulder-barged his victim over a hooked ankle to send him reeling. As the helpless gladiator sprawled on the hard, sandy surface, Mortiferum lunged in, tapped him delicately on the throat with the tip of his heavy wooden practice sword, and then flung himself forward, somersaulting over the fallen man’s prone body to land on his feet with the downed fighter between them, spinning as his feet hit the sand and raising his swords to fight, shouting a command.

‘Stop!’

He looked at his remaining two sparring partners with a questioning look.

‘Look where we are. You, stay down, you’re dead! You two, what do you do now?’

The brighter of the trainees answered first.

‘We either split and come at you to either side of the corpse …?’

Their teacher shook his head.

‘Not the best answer, Felix. First rule of fighting as a pair — never fight alone if you can avoid it, or a good swordsman will simply kill one of you quickly and take his time with the other.’

‘Or we could come at you together around him to one side or the other …?’

The champion gladiator shrugged and grinned.

‘We can play at going round and round him all day, I’d say. The crowd would lose interest in that long before I would, and everyone knows what happens when the crowd gets bored.’

Felix nodded glumly.

‘We have to jump the corpse together?’

Mortiferum nodded.

‘That’s the best approach, nine times out of ten. One of you might stop a blade, but the other ought to get a chance to return the compliment, at least against a good to average opponent. In this case, of course, you’d both be dead before you could regain your footing. So, what was the mistake that Sergius here …’ He prodded the recumbent trainee with the boot of his toe, shaking his head at the man. ‘And you can stop giving me that look unless you want me to prod you somewhat harder with my sword next time. What did you do wrong that allowed me my opening?’

The fallen man, who had propped himself up on his elbows to listen, replied, ‘I followed your eyes, Death Bringer.’

‘You followed my eyes. In point of fact, you all followed my eyes, but I went for you, Sergius, for two reasons. Firstly, because you were the closest, and secondly because you were perfectly positioned so that your corpse would put an obstacle between me and these two. Get up then.’

Sergius rolled to his feet away from Mortiferum, knowing better than to put himself inside the reach of the deceptively dangling wooden swords. The champion fighter raised one of them to point at his training partners.

‘Don’t I keep telling you that watching your opponent’s eyes only tells you where he’s looking, not where his sword’s going. You need to watch the point, ladies, nothing else matters.’

Sergius cocked his head in puzzlement.

‘Don’t we need to watch the other man’s body as well?’

Mortiferum nodded, grinning back at his training partner.

‘When you’re ready my friend, yes you do. The time will come, if you’re good enough, that you’ll know what’s coming next just from the set of a man’s body, the twitch of a muscle, the way his eyes flicker-’

‘But you told us not to look at the eyes!’

The champion gladiator’s grin widened.

‘Yes. I told you that, because you’re only capable of watching one thing at a time. When I face a man, I can see everything, every twitch and blink, every little tell as to his next move, and I absorb and understand them all without ever having to think through what’s happening. I see how much blood there is on the sand behind him, and whether he might slip if I push him backwards. I see the faces in the crowd, and whether they’re shouting acclaim or just baying for blood. I see the men in the imperial box and what their mood is, so I can put him down quick if they’re looking forgiving or let him make a decent show of it if I think they’ll need convincing that he’s worth saving. I can see the wounds I’ve already given him, how much they’re bleeding and how dark the blood is, so I know how badly I’ve hurt him and whether it’d be kinder to kill him clean.’ He grinned again, shrugging at the skill with which he had been gifted. ‘I see so much more than you do, a little of which is training, but most of which is just how I was born. And now …’

He raised a hand to acknowledge Pilinius’s presence, knowing that to delay any longer would be an unnecessary and highly visible snub to the man.

‘And now I can see that the senator would very much like me to stop what I’m doing and go to see him. And while it’s tempting to ignore him for a while longer, I see no value to be had from antagonising him.’

Dropping his training swords to the floor, he walked over to where Pilinius was waiting for him, making a cursory bow of his head in place of the usual obeisance, and fixing the senator with a direct stare.

‘Senator?’

If the patrician was irritated at the apparent lack of respect, he hid it well.

‘Mortiferum. Our partners in crime and I have come to an accommodation as to how we best deal with your request for payment of the sum withheld by our new patron.’

The gladiator nodded.

‘And?’

‘And so here …’ He took a purse from the slave standing behind him, his secretary and accountant. ‘… is your fee. Feel free to count it.’

Mortiferum shook his head.

‘There’s no need for such vulgar display of lack of trust, Senator. I’m happy that any need for unpleasantness has been averted. After all, you do have a rather significant event looming in your calendar. Far better not to have it disrupted by any unpleasant occurrences, wouldn’t you say?’

Pilinius stared at him for a moment before responding, and when he did his voice was acerbic.

‘Quite so, Mortiferum, quite so. But it seems that the details of my evening’s entertainment have spread beyond the circle of men I might usually have trusted with the information. I won’t ask you where you obtained that tasty morsel of gossip …’

Mortiferum bowed his head again, knowing that Pilinius already understood just how unlikely it was that he would ever share such a sensitive source of information.

‘… but I would ask you to pass it no further. The powerful men with whom I share these rather singular pleasures would be far from pleased to have their tastes revealed to the city. And their displeasure might be rather more punitive than mine.’

He turned and walked away, his slave shooting the gladiator a swift, unfathomable glance before turning to follow him. Mortiferum weighed the purse for a moment before tossing it to an identically dressed and equipped man who had walked up behind him during the conversation.

‘Here you are brother, this is the fee from the Perennis job.’

His sibling caught the leather bag and also weighed it in his hand.

‘I told you they’d crumble if you applied a little pressure. Even that halfwit Brutus is clever enough to know there’s not a man in the city that could stand against Velox and Mortiferum.’

Mortiferum nodded, turning back to his sparring partners.

‘Indeed. And now, since that little transaction has left me feeling dirty, I think I’ll work up a sweat by turning these three inside out a few times. Remember girls, watch the blade, not the eyes!’

The Tungrian officers walked up the Viminal Hill as the sun was approaching its zenith, Julius wiping the sweat from his beard with an expression of disgust as Cotta walked out to meet them.

‘This bloody city’s too hot, too hilly and too bloody full of half-naked women for my liking.’

Scaurus looked about him, mopping at his damp forehead with a handkerchief.

‘At least the ladies distracted our bodyguard enough to cause them to fall behind and thus spare us the usual running commentary on the goods in the shop window.’

Marcus looked back down the hill, to see that the single prostitute their escort had stopped to talk to had swiftly been joined by half a dozen of her fellows. Scaurus grinned knowingly.

‘Well now, that’ll be hard for them to walk away from without incurring the wrath of the ladies. I suggest we get inside, before the shouting starts.’

Cotta tipped his head to indicate an empty shop up a side road opposite the house.

‘Before we do, Tribune, might I suggest that I stroll across and find out who that shop belongs to? If the price sounds sensible my suggestion would be that we rent it for whatever period will make the owner happy enough not to ask any questions as to what we’re doing with it?’

Scaurus looked across the street, sizing up the indicated building.

‘What an excellent idea, Centurion! Please do.’

The officers had only been inside the domus as long as it had taken for the barbarians to extricate themselves from the clutches of the group of irascible prostitutes and walk up the hill under a hail of abuse, look around them and declare that, whilst it was clearly a very nice house if you liked that sort of thing, there was really nothing quite like a wooden hall, when there was a knock at the door. Taking the arrival to be Cotta returning from his errand, Marcus answered it only to find Excingus waiting between a pair of the veteran centurion’s men.

‘Ah, Centurion, how nice to find you’ve already made yourselves at home. I was hoping that my small gesture wouldn’t go astray …’

Marcus waited expectantly, raising an eyebrow at the young centurion who stared back in bafflement for a moment before realising what it was that Excingus was waiting for.

‘Wait here, Excingus. I cannot invite you into my wife’s house without her knowledge and acceptance.’

Felicia frowned in disbelief, and as she opened her mouth Marcus was certain that she was about to flatly refuse the informant access to her house, but then she closed it again, smiled at her husband and nodded.

‘By all means, Marcus, invite the man in.’

Her husband stood and stared at her for a moment in disbelief before turning back to the door.

Excingus smirked at him before walking into the domus, looking around with an expression of satisfaction.

‘It’s nice to see the fruits of one’s labours being employed to good effect.’

Felicia greeted him with a stony face, her body stiff with anger.

‘If you have fond imaginings of some sort of a reconciliation between you and I, you’d be well advised to disabuse yourself of them. I’ll remind you that you participated in the murder of an innocent medical orderly and the abduction of a pregnant woman, in the company of a man whose clear intent was to rape and then kill me once I’d served the purpose of distracting my husband and thereby facilitating his murder.’

Excingus nodded.

‘No more and no less than I had expected, Domina.’

‘And if you expect your “only following orders” act to soften my ire, then again you are doomed to disappointment. You could have discharged your duty to seek and apprehend my husband without resorting to the depravity you had planned for me.’

‘And which you avoided by the less than civilised expedient of ramming a knife up into my colleague’s jaw?’

Felicia’s face hardened involuntarily at the memory, and Excingus was unable to prevent himself from flinching minutely at the ferocity of her expression.

‘Yes. And be warned, Informant, this is the first and last time that I will willingly accept your presence in this house. The next time you set foot inside my door, whether you come bearing either weapons or flowers, the result will be just the same.’

Excingus bowed.

‘Understood, Domina. But before I take my leave, might I have a brief word with your husband’s commanding officer? I believe he’s here?’

Scaurus stepped out of the dining room with a curt nod to the informant.

‘How can I help you, Varius Excingus?’

‘How can you help me? Or how might I help you, Tribune? I have information for you, news of a potential opportunity to strike at one of the Emperor’s Knives.’

‘And you want money for this information?’

Excingus smiled, shaking his head.

‘No, Rutilius Scaurus, I’m already quite satisfied financially. Senator Sigilis has established a generous schedule of reimbursement to reward me for the reduction in their numbers, by whatever means …’

Scaurus favoured him with a jaundiced look.

‘I see. And you’re presumably hoping that we will be the “means” by which you collect your payment?’

The former frumentari shrugged.

‘I had assumed that we had a shared interest. Perhaps I was mistaken in my belief that you were burning with the desire to right the wrong done to your centurion’s father, and so many other innocent victims of these men’s depredations?’

Scaurus nodded briskly.

‘Very well, we’ll play your game, Excingus, but not here. We’ll meet tomorrow morning then, as soon after dawn as you like. Come to the transit barracks on the Ostia road and ask for the Tungrians. Your safety is assured.’

‘I’d rather not-’

Scaurus barked a laugh, his grin lopsided with wry amusement.

‘I’m sure you’d much rather not come onto our ground, but then the choice isn’t yours to make, not unless you want to miss the opportunity to collect whatever generous bounty the senator has put on our, as yet unrevealed, target’s head. And now, Informant, I’d say that your welcome here has reached its limit. I suggest you leave before the doctor here changes her mind, and requests me to have you killed as recompense for the orderly whose murder you so casually ordered. It would be a request I would find hard to refuse.’

Excingus nodded dourly and turned for the door.

‘If you guarantee my safety then I will come to your camp. But be aware, gentlemen, that should you break that vow I will have left a very clear trail to your door.’

‘One more thing, Informant …’

He turned back in the doorway and made an exaggerated bow.

‘How might I help you further, Domina?’

Felicia walked forward and stared into his eyes.

‘What did you do with the previous occupants of this house?’

Excingus laughed softly.

‘Ah, so now that you have possession of your father’s house, you wonder what price was paid to allow you to walk back in. Worried that I had your former husband’s family put to the knife, are you?’

She held the stare, her lip curling in disgust.

‘It did cross my mind.’

His face creased into an affronted frown.

‘Then put it out of your mind, madam. This is Rome, not the sort of frontier village you’ve become used to, and I am most assuredly not given to the wanton acts of murder that are the emperor’s preserve. Your former brother-in-law and the rest of his family are safely tucked away somewhere not too far from here.’

He turned and left without waiting for a reply, leaving the Tungrians staring after him and the barbarians in particular fingering the hafts of the knives they had secreted about them. Julius shook his head in disbelief, raising an eyebrow at Scaurus.

‘Really, Tribune? We’re going to work with him after what he did in Britannia? He’ll sell us out without any hesitation whatsoever.’

The senior officer answered, still staring at the door through which Excingus had made his exit.

‘I see little choice. As of now we don’t even know which of the four of them he has in mind for this “opportunity”, so we either take the chance he’s presenting, with an eye open to the risk he presents, or we let it pass and give up on the whole thing.’

The two men stared at each other in silence for a moment before Cotta interjected.

‘I’d say that you’re both right.’ He gestured to Scaurus. ‘The tribune has it correct when he says that there’s no way we can take the vengeance we’re seeking without that man. But on the other hand, the first spear is right to say that we can trust that odious bastard no further than we can piss … begging your pardon ladies.’

Felicia and Annia smiled demurely, and the former soldier continued with his face slowly reddening.

‘Anyway … what I was going to say was that there might be a way to bring a greater element of trust to the relationship.’

Julius frowned in disbelief.

‘Greater trust? You’re suggesting that we might give that boot-scraped piece of shit the benefit of the doubt?’

Cotta shook his head.

‘Not exactly. The problem is that right now we only have two choices: either to trust him blindly or to kill him. One choice is recklessly naive, while the other ends any hope we have of taking revenge for the death of Marcus’s father. What I have in mind might just give us a third option.’

‘You don’t want to know, Marcus, leave it at that.’

Cotta shook his head firmly at his former protégée, his mouth set in a tight line of determination.

‘I have to know. I need to understand just how bad it-’

The veteran cut him off with a sweeping chop of his hand.

‘Just about as bad as you can imagine, for all the fact that you’ve seen the ugly face of war. Some things are just better not being discussed, or you’ll end up going mad simply because they were here and you weren’t.’

Marcus stood up and paced away across the small garden. Beyond the house’s wall the sounds of the city were ever present: the slap of feet on cobbles, the shouts of shopkeepers and street hawkers rising in an incessant discordant chorus. Scaurus had taken his escort of barbarians back down the hill, leaving the young centurion to spend the evening with his wife under the watchful eyes of his friend and several of Cotta’s men.

‘And that’s my point. I wasn’t here, but they were. My entire family gone, overnight, and me never any the wiser as to what happened to them. For all I know they may have been sold into sl-’ He fell silent at the look on his friend’s face, as Cotta’s last line of resistance crumbled. ‘What?’

‘Lucius.’

His face took on a haunted expression, and Marcus recalled that Cotta and the gladiator had started training his younger brother only the year before his own enforced exile to Britannia. He waited patiently for the former soldier to compose himself.

‘I heard later that Lucius was sold to one of Pilinius’s friends. Seems that the senator had no need of him, given the number of women who were taken from your father’s villa, so he disposed of him in return for enough money to buy himself a formal toga.’

Having broken his silence he was unable to stop talking.

‘Your mother and sisters were served up as part of one of Pilinius’s parties. I don’t know what happens behind the walls of his villa, but I do know what the end result is. One of the servants who got away in the confusion came to find me a few days later, and took me to the illegal dumping ground out past the Esquiline gate. Your sister Livia’s body was lying there naked, with its eyes already pecked out by the crows. We buried her, and searched the pits for anyone else from the household, but we didn’t find anything to tell us the fate of the rest of your family, or any of their household for that matter.’

Marcus looked at him for a moment, and imagined the revolting task of searching the infamous dump, strewn with rotting corpses and infested with vermin and wild dogs.

‘Thank you.’

The two men were quiet for a moment.

‘Your father was tortured, of course. They will have thrown his body in the main sewer to be flushed into the Tiber, I’d imagine.’

Marcus was silent for a moment longer.

‘I’m going to kill them all. Each and every one of the men who did this to my family are going to look me in the eyes as they die, and realise that they are no better than wild animals. And when I’ve killed all four of these Knives, I’ll only have one more man to deal with.’

Cotta put a hand on his arm, shaking his head slowly.

‘Do you remember when I used to tell you never to back down from a fight, or a slur on your honour? To hit any man that threatened you with either first, any way you could, and to keep on hitting him until he’d stopped fighting back?’

‘Yes. My father said much the same thing to me more than once, albeit somewhat less graphically.’

The veteran’s face was deadly serious.

‘Just this once, ignore us both. You have a wife and child, you have friends who respect you and a new life to enjoy. Take that prize and run with it Marcus, and ignore the bloody path that leads to revenge, or you’ll end up losing everything! There are more important things, as you’ll only find out the hard way if you go up against these men.’

He stared at his friend, and Marcus shook his head helplessly.

‘I know! Pilinius is too rich, Brutus is too well protected, Dorso lives in the praetorian fortress and Mortiferum is too fast with a sword even if I could get to him! But I have to try! Can’t you see that?’

Cotta nodded sombrely, his shoulders slumping in defeat.

‘Yes. Only too clearly. I just wish I could make you blind to it.’

The first cohort’s 6th Century were sitting around outside their barracks in the late-evening sun exchanging weary insults, bone-tired from a full day of exercise and training, when Qadir, the centurion commanding the 9th Century, walked around the corner with a dozen men in his wake. Quintus, the century’s chosen man and its leader in Marcus’s absence, leapt to his feet and bellowed for his men to do the same.

‘Attention! Get on your feet, you maggots!’

Qadir, the only one of the cohort’s officers to hail from the eastern end of the empire, waited until the soldiers were all standing erect before speaking, his heavily accented voice deceptively soft as he addressed Quintus.

‘Good evening, Chosen Man, and my apologies for interrupting your evening. The tribune has detailed me to form a small unit of men for a special task, and there are one or two of your men who, your centurion tells me, should have the requisite skills for the job.’

‘Yes, Centurion! What skills are you looking for, Centurion?’

Qadir smiled faintly at Quintus’s bellowed response.

‘I think the main requirement for the role would be that the soldiers in question must have absolutely no scruples, be possessed of a strong disregard for authority and be willing to do anything, no matter how unpleasant or indeed contrary to accepted standards of right and wrong. I told Centurion Corvus, of course, that he could be describing nine men out of ten in this cohort, but he replied that he had two very special individuals in mind. I presume that you have some idea of who he might have meant?’

Quintus nodded.

‘Oh yes, Centurion, I know exactly who the young gentleman had in mind.’ He raised his voice in a parade-ground bellow again.

‘Sanga and Saratos, front and centre!’