‘I do not like this place,’ Ugo muttered. ‘Who knew the Dark stretched to Rome itself?’
‘Are those spiders venomous?’ Dog asked. ‘I have been bitten. Hurts like fire too.’
‘No,’ Kag replied, ‘but if you don’t get them cleaned and treated they will fester. Can you imagine a hundred such bites?’
‘The Praetorians can,’ Quintus muttered.
‘Then let us get out of here,’ Dog said. ‘There will be a decent medicus in the Flavian and I might have to employ him permanently.’
There might have been, but Drust realised they weren’t about to reach the Flavian when the road ended at a blank brick wall. You could see the barrelled arch where the tunnel had once been – and probably still was beyond the bricks – but there was no way through.
‘Blocked,’ Quintus said. ‘Like I said.’
‘What now?’ Kag said wearily, and Drust remembered the open area. There had to be another way up.
Ugo shifted slightly and grunted. ‘It seems those hopper spiders haven’t stopped the Praetorians. Some of them are still upright and headed this way – I can see some lights.’
‘Trapped,’ Kag said and Quintus gave him a sideways scowl.
‘Ha. As long as we know we’re trapped, we still have a chance to escape.’
They moved quickly back to where the tunnel roadway opened out; the oncoming lights were closer and Drust eyed them warily.
Kag stepped off the road, holding up a new-fired torch and reassured by the firmness under his feet. He stopped, crouched and then turned to them.
‘It’s an old quarry,’ he announced. ‘From when Romulus was a youth.’
‘Quarry?’ demanded Dog, scowling, and Kag told him it was worked by slaves who dug in the half-dark for blocks of tufa, the original stones that built the city. They moved off, half stumbling over the uneven ground, which swelled and dipped like desert dunes.
Quintus dipped and came up with a handful of dirt, red in the torchlight. He grinned at them all.
‘This is what they wanted later,’ he said, ‘when tufa was no longer enough.’
He let the dirt trickle through his fingers. ‘Red pozzolana.’
‘Now I know this and I know nothing,’ Ugo muttered. ‘Save that we had better run or turn and fight again.’
‘It’s the main ingredient of pouring stone,’ Quintus told them. ‘This stuff built the harbour at Ostia and elsewhere. It built the Empire – and we should fight.’
‘The way we did in the dunes east of Dura,’ Drust added grimly, and they looked round, remembering.
It was a simple plan. There would be the focus of a light, a glow that would bring them like night insects. It would be held by one man – Kag in this case – crouching on one knee and clearly at the end of his strength, abandoned by the others.
They would close in with snarls and nastiness, set to inflict some damage, enough to pain but not to kill – enough to sate them for the spiders and the big rats and the shock of a harder fight than they’d thought to find.
Then they would drag Kag off to face Verus, using it as a good excuse to get out of this underworld of shrieking horrors.
It was almost as Drust had seen it in his head, a trick they had used many times before, from the bracken wilderness of the lands beyond the northern Walls to the sand-sighing deserts of the lands east of the Empire.
Men are the same everywhere. They came up, cat wary and crouched, turning this way and that until they heard the laboured breathing of the kneeling man, saw how his head hung like a whipped slave.
‘Where are the others?’ demanded the leader.
‘Gone,’ whispered Kag defeatedly.
‘You’d better tell us. The Winter Man is right behind us and he won’t take that for an answer.’
The Winter Man. It did not take Drust much in the way of wits to work that out, which is where the plan changed in a heartbeat. He rose up, yelling, and ploughed over the red dirt slope and down the far side in a staggering run.
The men reacted as he expected, all the same – they whirled, backed off a few paces, brought weapons up. The leader gave a snarling order which was lost in an ending of whimpered scream, because Kag had sprung from kneeling in a thrust that took sharp steel into the base of his belly, just above where his cock began.
Then Kag did a complete forward roll, the sort of flash move a good lanista would beat you with a stick for attempting. While you are turning arse over tip in the sands, your opponent is dropping a net on you and sticking you with a fucking great fork – stay on your feet, you stupidus…
Drust bulled into the man who saw the opening, was about to stick Kag in the side. He gave a yell at the last which made the man spin round from Kag and thrust at him, a perfect legionary move, high up as if over the rim of a shield he did not have.
Drust step-hopped sideways, letting the sharp steel cut air and slamming his full body into the man at the same time as he thrust up. His gladius went in under the chin, came out the bridge of the man’s nose, and he screamed out a bubble of horror and blood; his falling tore the sword out again and Drust turned, looking for another opponent.
Quintus arrived, laughing and slashing, with the Dis Pater horror of Dog behind him – but what broke the Praetorians in the end was none of that. It was Ugo, piling over the top of a ridge of tufa and red dirt, pausing only to throw back his head and howl out to his German gods, spreading his arms to show that he had a dolabra in either fist.
They started to run and were cut like ripe wheat; Ugo brought down two with as many strokes, vicious back-breaker swipes. Quintus made a mistake, the sort of left-or-right choice that Fortuna forces on you, with all the fickleness of that bitch goddess. It got him a slash across the thigh that flushed red all down his leg and set him cursing – not with pain, that came later – because he knew what he had done wrong.
All eight of the Praetorians died, leaving the Brothers pooled in the sputtering wan light of their dropped torches, panting and glazed at having survived yet again. The blood was reeking, and even as they watched, something coiled out of the ground.
‘Gods above and below,’ Kag spat, backing away. They looked in horror as more of them, glistening white, thick as a finger, long as a forearm, curled out of the ground. It made them back off even further, making for the solid ground of the tufa, where they could see the blind, white worms roiling and curling in the blood pools.
‘I would not step down there if I were you,’ Dog advised Quintus as he fell to examining the thigh wound. Quintus spat curses at him for what he was doing and Dog merely grinned and tapped his own scar, making Quintus recall the pain he had caused when fixing it.
‘This place is worse than the Dark,’ Ugo mourned, resting a bloody pickaxe on either shoulder. Drust, who had been worrying at the nag of the Winter Man and his imminent arrival, suddenly saw the weapons.
‘Where did you get them?’ he demanded and Ugo frowned, then smiled and lifted them. He wanted to clean the clot off them in the red dirt but wasn’t going to step anywhere near the milling writhe of white worms, who were now slathering themselves in the slush of blood.
‘I went over that little hill to hide,’ he said, ‘and found them there with a lot of quarry stuff – are those worms poisonous, do you think?’
‘I wouldn’t eat one to find out,’ Kag answered laconically.
‘I mean – do they bite and can you die from it?’
‘Unlikely. They look like worms, same ones who deal with all dead things, only these ones have grown large and pale in the dark. I don’t think these Praetorians have been dead long enough, so they will deal with blood until they are riper.’
‘Best work these Praetorians did,’ Dog noted scathingly. ‘This is a sad sign. Are these the best Rome has to offer in the way of fighting men? I can beat any of them with a meat skewer.’
Drust just wanted to lie down and close his eyes in the silent darkness. To hear his heart and how it was still beating – still fightin
g. To tell himself that he had made it yet again and that he might just make one more.
Instead, he reminded them all of the Winter Man and how it could be no one but Verus; the thought of that white worm lurking in the shadows made them all jerk attentively.
‘Show me this quarry stuff,’ he told Ugo, and they followed, skirting the mass of worms, until they got to it, a litter of two-wheeled carts, shovels, pickaxes, baskets – all the materials you would need, Drust thought, to start heaving pozzolana out of this old quarry.
And it was new.
‘Well, it seems there’s a fresh demand for pouring stone,’ Quintus said, grimacing now because the pain had arrived and the leg would grow stiff enough for him to drag it soon; he needed to be lying down with poultices on it to stop any blood-rot.
‘The Emperor is building a new aqueduct which will have his name on it,’ Kag mused. ‘It is to serve the new baths he is also building with his name on it. That will take a lot of pouring stone.’
‘So where are the slaves working this, then?’ Dog wanted to know. ‘The overseers and the guards?’
They all looked at one another and said it virtually in unison. ‘The Ludi Romani.’
The Great Games were about to start, the Emperor’s own, and everyone employed by him in Rome got two weeks off to enjoy it. Everyone but slaves, but without overseers or guards, they couldn’t work either – but they had to have a way to get in and out.
‘Find it,’ Drust said.
Chapter Sixteen
It was a shaft with stairs carved out of the tufa and the holes to take the poles of lifting cranes up through a double-doored trap in the floor. It was greased and opened quiet and easy, up into one of the disused rooms of that old edifice, the Temple of the Divine Claudius. The room had been one of a cluster which had originally schooled some of the smarter Imperial slaves – they saw the discarded desks and benches. Now, instead of slates and rote, this room had baskets of red dirt, more tools, and a little track with moveable carts for running the pozzolana out to bigger ox-drawn wagons in the dead of night.
Best of all, the door out brought them to the street, with the bulk of the Flavian on one side, the squat travertine square of Ludus Magnus on the other, and the Sweating Post fountain offering a chance to splash water.
We look like slaves now, no doubt of it, Drust thought. Clothes filthy with red dirt and tufa dust, sweat and worse, cloaks ragged at the hem and some of us nursing wounds bound with rags; Kag limped fiercely and even the balm of the fountain failed to bring a smile.
‘What now?’ Ugo asked, mournful about being told to drop the dolabrae beside the other builder’s mess before they came out into the street; but he saw the sense in it when the milling crowds round the Flavian rippled away from them.
‘Curtius,’ Drust said. They looked like slaves and, if not exactly gladiators, then some ragged form of trainer, and that excited little attention and no censure around the Ludus Magnus. Curtius wasn’t hard to find, but he was amazed to see the condition they were in and led them out to the trainers’ balcony overlooking the little amphitheatre; it was busy with fighters and the entire Ludus buzzed back and forth with a scurry of people – the Games were a week old and took a lot of organising.
‘What did you do – dig a hole and jump in?’
‘Wrong way,’ Kag muttered, wincing, and Curtius squinted expertly, unpeeled the blood-stuck binding and hummed to himself.
‘Fresh. Through and through – clean cut but it sliced muscle, so you will take a while to get back from that. Needs attention – gladius, was it?’
Drust told him in fits and starts between swallowing wine and bread and olives. A medicus appeared, was introduced as Anaxi since the full version, Curtius said, was a mouthful.
‘One of the best we have. He can Orpheus a man out of Hades with a skilful touch and some of his Ptolemy magic.’
Anaxi grunted, clearly used to Curtius. ‘I am not an Alexandrian, I am from Palmyra. And I know mostly how slashed and stabbed a man needs to be before you knock him on the head and mark him as six.’
He was light-fingered and expert, cleaned, stitched, slathered ointment and rebound the worse of the wounds with clean linen windings.
‘What happened to Lentulus?’ Curtius asked and Drust told him.
‘I do not know if he still lives,’ he added. ‘I hope so – he kept his word and was braver than he first appeared.’
Curtius merely grunted. ‘I knew he was a follower of Mithras,’ the rut-faced old lanista mused, ‘but I did not know he was so far up the ladder. That explains why Antyllus was so deferential to a barber – is the general dead?’
‘A mercy stroke – Verus had already killed him,’ Dog growled, shying away from the medicus, who scowled and waited patiently, saying nothing. Reluctantly, Dog let him work.
‘You will have a mighty great scar for a mighty long time,’ the medicus told him. ‘Try not to pick the scab of it off or you will have a face like a bad cobbler’s thumb. Well, a long-dead bad cobbler’s thumb.’
He took up his bag of tools, nodded to Curtius and strode off.
Curtius watched the fighters for a time, then sighed. ‘That Brasus – he has been tagged yet again, the stumble-foot. By the retiarius he is matched with for tomorrow.’ He drank moodily. ‘They will both be sixed… Did you find what Lentulus had hidden?’
Drust unshipped the scroll case from his shoulder and sat it on the table for Curtius to look at with a rheumy, jaundiced eye. He put his hand in his lap and clasped it, feeling it shake and trying to hide it.
‘That it? Doesn’t look much – what’s in it?’
‘Notes, letters, accounts – enough to bring down a lot of important people and save a lot more. We have to get it to the Emperor and no one else.’
‘We?’ Curtius spat back suspiciously. ‘There is no “we” in this. Is that pale knife-man still out there?’
‘He is,’ Quintus said and added a pungent curse involving the fickleness of Fortuna.
‘Well then,’ Curtius replied. ‘I can offer you some treatment for what ails you, some food, a little wine, and if you like, a pallet for the night in a safe cell. Beyond that – I am a little old for taking on killer knife-men.’
‘Nothing like that needed,’ Drust answered, ‘but I have to talk with my brothers first. Then I will ask for your help.’
Curtius looked bemused and even more suspicious, then glanced at the sky and the head of the gilded bronze Nero peeping over the rim of the amphitheatre and throwing sunrays off his crown. ‘Well, the Colossus Nero says I should have some lunch. When I come back, you had better be ready to ask the favour I will almost certainly refuse – it is a busy day. Forty good men will walk the harena tomorrow and only two will leave.’
They watched him walk, a stiff affair of battered knees and ankles and one bad hip, and then Drust turned to the others.
‘We will never get this into the hands of the Emperor,’ he said, ‘simply by walking up to the purple seat at the Games tomorrow.’
‘A score of Praetorians and assorted flunkeys will get in the way of that,’ Kag agreed. ‘So what’s your plan?’
Drust took a breath and told them, aware of the tremble in his hand.
‘There is only one way for the likes of me to stand next to the Emperor with a bundle of scrolls. That’s if I am being awarded the Palm of Victory and the right to present written petitions to young Alexander in person.’
There was a stunned silence, then Dog’s voice, swaddled by the fresh pack of bindings, said what they all thought.
‘Wait – what? Palm of Victory? For what?’
‘Winning the Circle of Treachery.’
There was a pause, then Dog laughed and winced. ‘Jupiter’s cock – you have made me burst one of these new stitches.’
‘Are you serious?’ Kag demanded. ‘How would you even do that?’
‘You’ll be sixed,’ Quintus growled morosely. ‘Even with Dog.’
‘Not Dog, not
with that wound,’ Drust said quietly. ‘Nor Kag, nor Quintus, for the same reasons. I do not want to ask the last man standing, but I must.’
For a moment they stood, until Ugo felt the eyes on him, blinked once and then spread his face in a wreath of grin.
‘I will stand with you. Fuck Fortuna in the arse.’
‘Gods above and below,’ Kag exploded. ‘Pull your thinking out of your sponge-holes, the pair of you – you are too old, too slow… and besides, you will have to bind yourself to an owner. Take the oath. Become a fucking slave again in all but name.’
‘With thirty-eight other fighters, younger, stronger and desperate to live,’ Dog said. ‘That’s not a battle you can win. I have seen you fight recently, Drust, and have seen some god-touched moves from you. But you would have to be a true son of Mars to win this. You will get yourself sixed.’
He stopped, looked Drust steadily in the face. ‘You will get Ugo sixed.’
‘Ho,’ Ugo rumbled, annoyed. ‘My exit through the Death Gate is between me and Mars Ultor, no one else.’
‘Not that German arse-sponge, then?’ Kag spat back. ‘The one you kept calling out to in the Dark?’
‘That was there, this is here,’ Ugo growled, half embarrassed. ‘One is fine for making the sky flash and bang in a forest. The other is the god of the harena.’
‘This is madness,’ Quintus shouted. ‘What does it profit us if you die? What of the plot against the Emperor then? The only blessing of the gods in it is that you won’t find anyone willing to throw two old farts like you into the harena.’
Even as he said it, he knew; they all did. Curtius would. He had Brasus the Dacian and his second, some retiarius who was only marginally better. Here he would save money, save them, and still keep the numbers up.
‘Look,’ Drust said. ‘The only other way is for us to run and the Empire is not wide nor long enough for us to escape. Even beyond it is no longer safe and we will never – NEVER – be able to return.’
There was silence at the truth of that, then Kag scrubbed his head with irritated confusion.
Beasts From the Dark Page 24
