Mary Reed - Nine for the Devil

John decided his friend was intoxicated beyond reason. He changed the subject. “Tell me about Peter. He is over the worst, you say?”

Gaius wiped his nose with the heel of his hand. “Yes. That is to say barring a relapse. See,” he burst into shrill laughter, “I am covering all eventualities. But I think he will mend. Possibly with a more pronounced limp than before, but he’ll be able to race up and down stairs again soon enough. He attributes his recovery to holy oil. I suppose it was unbelievable to him my own ministrations might have had some benefit.”

“Peter is a Christian,” John reminded him.

Gaius snuffled. “If healing were that simple all I’d need to do would be to travel from shrine to shrine collecting souvenirs. Holy water and oil and those blessed coins made from the mud at the bottom of stylites’ columns. Just give those to my patients. The Christian ones, at least.”

“I am sure Peter appreciates your efforts.”

“Perhaps. Well, it might be that the oil had an effect, if he believed it did. What if our thoughts affected our humors?”

John had no opportunity to answer. The conversation was interrupted by rapping at the front door. The sound was not loud, but under the circumstances it might have been a peal of thunder.

“It’s them!” Gaius cried, his face, aside from the reddened nose, paler than John had ever seen it.

“I don’t think they would bother to knock so politely.” John went downstairs, not at all confident it wasn’t more trouble for him.

He hoped it would be news from Cornelia, but the heavy door swung open to reveal Joannina, panting and disheveled.

“Lord Chamberlain,” she cried, gulping back tears. “Vesta’s been taken away! Please help her!”

John drew her in and closed the door.

Gaius had staggered to the top of the stairs. “Don’t worry,” he called up to the physician. “It’s only Joannina.”

He lead the sobbing girl into the garden, trying to calm her by assuring her he would do what he could once he knew what her visit was about.

“Vesta, my lady-in-waiting, was just arrested by the excubitors!” Joannina managed to blurt out.

It was fortunate Gaius was safely upstairs, no doubt with his nose buried in a wine cup again, so he did not hear the statement. John encouraged the girl to continue.

“We had been out together looking at jewelry and when we returned, there were excubitors waiting for her. They said incriminating herbs had been found in her room, ingredients for poison.”

Though unable to speak, rooms were more forthcoming than many people, John thought. “How did they know they were poisonous rather than cosmetic?”

“I don’t know but that’s what they said. And they said Vesta had murdered Theodora.”

John wondered who had told the excubitors about the herbs.

“Why would Vesta want to murder the empress?” Joannina was saying. “Anastasius and I, our marriage, the empress wished it. Now she’s gone and my parents can interfere…it may never happen…my lady-in-waiting was devoted to me, why would she try to thwart it? And now she’s in the hands of the imperial torturers and…and…what will happen to her?”

It was a reasonable question, but not one John was prepared to answer, given Joannina was upset enough without knowing any details of what went on in underground cells.

Justinian was not in the great reception hall or his personal quarters. An assortment of silentiaries, eunuchs, courtiers, and servants sent John here and there and as time passed he couldn’t help imagining what horrors the emperor’s torturers might already be applying to Joannina’s young lady-in-waiting. In his role as Lord Chamberlain, John had been obliged to attend several inquisitions. He had not been able to eat for a long time after any of them.

John finally found the emperor hunched over a table in the imperial library, surrounded by disordered mounds of codexes and scrolls of a religious nature according to the few titles he could make out. Justinian often spent entire nights poring over religious tomes, assisted by theologians in his employ, trying to come to some understanding of the unknowable or, lately, attempting to forge a compromise between beliefs which by their very nature admitted of no compromise. It was a strange occupation for a man who had just sent a girl to be tortured,

Justinian looked up, clearly annoyed. His eyes glittered feverishly. “What is this, Lord Chamberlain? You have broken my chain of thought.”

“My apologies, excellency. It is a matter of urgency.”

“It usually is an urgent matter, isn’t it?” Justinian folded over the corner of the illuminated page of his codex and closed the jeweled cover. “We will dispense with the usual amenities for that reason. Proceed.”

“A lady-in-waiting has been arrested after a search of her room led to the discovery of-”

“Yes, yes, I have given orders concerning the girl,” Justinian interrupted, fingering his ruby necklace in an absent-minded fashion.

John realized with a shock the emperor was wearing a piece of Theodora’s jewelry. A cold chill ran up his spine as if a snake was wriggling up his back. With a silent prayer to Mithra for aid, he said, “I believe this is a grievous error, excellency.”

“Do you expect me to countermand my orders?” Justinian asked. “Much blood has been shed on the matter you are investigating. What is a little more if it leads to the truth? You may speak frankly.”

“I wish to point out that if the girl dies, we have lost a valuable source of information.”

Justinian waved his hand. “Consider this beautiful necklace, Lord Chamberlain. Rubies as red as blood, each connected to its neighbor by a fine golden chain. We might draw a comparison between your investigation and the truth. The golden chain of truth, dotted with regrettably bloody incidents, leading finally to the clasp to be undone, the solving of the mystery.” He smiled and fondled the necklace again.

“Still, I am reluctant to shed innocent blood,” he went on, a statement of such immense hypocrisy John wondered the emperor did not choke on his words, “and on the other hand we must not lose a possible source of information.”

“Indeed, excellency,” John agreed.

“Why did they search the room?” Justinian asked.

“I do not know at present,” John admitted.

“It is of no importance. What is important, if indeed she poisoned our dear empress, is establishing on whose behalf she was working. The real murderer is whoever hired her, the name of whom my torturers are bound to discover.”

“I confess I am worried, excellency. A delicate young girl like that might not survive questioning long enough to reveal her employer. The culprit could well be counting on that.”

Justinian acknowledged it was a possibility.

John offered another silent prayer to Mithra and continued his persuasive efforts. “Another difficulty is she could say anything, give any name that occurs, and then I would waste time following a false trail, giving the murderer an opportunity to elude justice.”

“Yes, I see your point, Lord Chamberlain,” Justinian replied. “We must have a proper inquiry You may rescue her, assuming you arrive in time. I will send for you when I wish to have a full account of what you have learned.”

As John bowed himself out of the library, the emperor opened his codex and bent his head over it. He held the sullen red-gemmed necklace flat against his chest, as if again embracing his dead wife.

John raced down the stone steps leading to the dungeons in a controlled fall and then sprinted along the corridor at their foot. His chest burned with exertion. He had run all the way from the meeting with Justinian.