Anthony Riches - The Emperor's Knives

‘A more detailed investigation of the senator’s domus this morning revealed the means by which he escaped, a tunnel that had been dug from a shop in an adjoining street, and which ran a full one hundred and ten paces into the senator’s garden before coming to the surface. A tunnel which, I’m told by those that know what to look for, displayed all the hallmarks of military engineering …’ He allowed the silence to play out, waiting for some response from Scaurus. ‘Nothing to say, Tribune?’

Scaurus shook his head.

‘There’s nothing I can say, Chamberlain, without sounding disrespectful to the emperor’s own legions, and therefore I shall say nothing.’

Raising an eyebrow, Cleander resumed his story.

‘And so we come to the facts surrounding a man with whom we’re both well acquainted, our mutual associate Tiberius Varius Excingus.’ He waited in silence again, but Scaurus made no more attempt to comment than before. ‘Excingus was found on the street in the Aventine district this morning, close to death as a result of several knife wounds of varying severity, apparently delivered by his own weapon since it was missing from the scene. Held in his hands …’ One of his aides leaned forward and whispered in his ear. ‘I stand corrected. Nailed to both of his hands was a severed man’s head, that of one of several men who were also found dead in the same area at much the same time. They had, apparently, been killed with long bladed weapons of the type used by your Tungrians. The head in question has been identified as belonging to one of Excingus’s closest associates, a man by the name of Silus, and it seems that it had been secured in place by means of the type of nails usually used for military crucifixions, two of which had been driven through each of his hands and into the dead man’s head in an X-shaped pattern, making it impossible for him to pull them out without assistance.’

Scaurus shrugged.

‘I won’t pretend that the man was any friend, Chamberlain. Let his family mourn for him, I have no tears to waste on the man.’

Cleander’s voice hardened.

‘Excingus was at the point of death when he was discovered, having been mortally wounded by some street scum or other, but he did manage to say one thing before expiring.’

The tribune smiled slowly.

‘Killed with his own knife? That seems poetic …’ He shrugged. ‘Did he say anything of note?’

Cleander stared at him for a long moment.

‘Not really, on the face of it. He was rambling, it seems, unmanned by loss of blood. Apparently his only discernible statement before he died was a single word. The word “impossible”. Having mused in the subject for a short while, I found my thoughts wandering back to the tunnel through which Senator Sigilis was spirited away under the noses of the men who were watching all of the exits from his property, including the two previously secret doors in the walls of his domus. A tunnel to the senator’s estate, which it seems was dug by men who had the gall to pose as workers refurbishing a shop. And it struck me that our mutual acquaintance, for all of his cunning, might have been tricked by something as simple as just such a tunnel? Perhaps, I mused, in overzealous pursuit of the centurion here, and in defiance of my orders, he led this collection of street thugs in seeking furtive access to the house in which your colleague’s wife has taken up residence, only to find several heavily armed men waiting for him? A tunnel would have been an excellent way for your men to take up their positions to wait for his intrusion without their presence being obvious to anyone watching the property on his behalf?’

‘A tunnel?’ Scaurus shrugged. ‘It’s a little far-fetched, Chamberlain. We’re infantrymen, not engineers. And besides, a tunnel from where?’

The chamberlain leaned forward with a hard smile.

‘From a certain recently opened barber’s shop, perhaps? I forgot to mention that the landlord of the property whose tunnel abetted Senator Sigilis’s escape from justice is the very same man who owns, or rather owned the shop in which your men have been practising the tonsorial arts for the last week or so. A landlord who appears to have sold up his properties for a bargain price and vanished, quite possibly on the same ship which I think it safe to assume carried Sigilis away on this morning’s tide. And by some strange coincidence, it seems that the entire block in which this shop of yours was located collapsed this morning, rather fortuitously without any loss of life. It seems that the occupants heard the structure creaking and fled the building before it caved in.’

He shook his head at the two men.

‘Doubtless, were I to order a sufficiently thorough investigation, my men would find some form of evidence as to your involvement in the senator’s escape and my informant’s regrettable demise. The former occupants of the collapsed insulae will doubtless surface soon enough, having spent whatever coin they were given in return for their absence when the block was pulled down by the same engineers who dug the tunnel in question as a means of disguising its presence. Were I to order this collapsed apartment block to be removed, piece by piece, I suspect that my men might well find its remnants, running from that shop straight to the house owned by Centurion Corvus here. Further, were I to order the fleet at Misenum to sea, with orders to overhaul and search every ship that left Ostia in the last day, I suspect that both senator and landlord would be back in Rome and awaiting their eventual punishments within another day or two. And were I to have you tortured, Tribune, or you, Centurion, or better still your doubtless wholly innocent wife and child, I expect the whole clever little deceit would be laid bare with remarkable speed.’

He sat back, waiting in silence for a response.

‘And the reason why we’re not being tortured at this very moment is …?’

The chamberlain nodded.

‘I thought that might provoke some comment from you, Valerius Aquila. The reason you’re not being tortured for your tribune’s transparent scheming — yet — is twofold. Firstly, I’m grateful for the brutally efficient manner in which you personally performed a series of badly overdue executions on my behalf. The Emperor’s Knives were an embarrassment waiting to happen, too secure in their positions for any other solution, given the need for their depredations to remain a closely guarded secret. And, to be frank with you, Excingus’s death is no more than the tying up of another loose end which would otherwise have required the attention of the men standing around you. So let me turn your question around, Centurion, since you’ve found your voice at last. Why is it, do you suppose, I haven’t ordered my men to slit your throats and dump you in the city sewer?’

Marcus shook his head in dark amusement.

‘That’s easy enough to work out. In less than a month, we’ve been instrumental in the death of the one man who was standing in the way of your absolute grip on power, destroyed a cabal of assassins who still owed some degree of loyalty to the emperor himself, and opened the way for you to replace them with your own men. We’re useful to you, aren’t we, Chamberlain?’

Cleander nodded.

‘Exactly. You’re resourceful, cunning, and, it has to be said, you take a rather more direct approach to whatever gets in your way than most of the men in my service. But as my father used to say to me, a man needs to be careful what he wishes for, given that wishes are rarely granted in exactly the form that we hope for. You came seeking the destruction of the men who killed your family, to release you from the unbearable pressure of your wounded honour, but was the end result really to your liking?’