"In Rome we would have had our work done by now, and be halfway home," whispered'Vespus unhappily. Lars ignored his words as he massaged the circulation back into his fingers. "Something of a fortress, something of a villa, and something else as well," he said as he peered
out over the snow-covered tiles. "Storehouses, workshops, and sharp, strange smells."
"No palace on earth has a layout like this. The slave's map is useless."
"The slave's map brought us as far as we are now. To go further we'll have to earn our one hundred thousand sesterces."
"It's cheap at such a price. 'Find an amphora containing oil such as this' is all that we were told," Vespus said as he held up the tiny phial. "Among all of these rooms, too—and ask the gods how many tunnels and cells lie below. We might as well be looking for a marked grain of sand on a beach."
"Put that away. It cost sixty thousand sesterces and eleven lives."
"Then you should carry it. You carry the nose, and one is useless without the other." Lars frowned, but nodded. Vespus handed him the phial. "An oily, sharp-tasting poison. Who could want such a thing?"
"I followed our go-between and—"
"I know, I know, he met with a man who led you to the house of one who wears the purple stripe on his toga. This still tells me nothing."
"We know that two drops will kill a rat."
"So it's the most expensive rat poison in all of history," suggested Lars.
"Bah. We had to force the stuff down its gullet so vile was the smell and taste, and it died writhing in agony. Hardly a subtle potion to slip into an enemy's wine."
"I cut the finger of a slave and rubbed a little on the wound. It neither stung nor soothed, and the wound healed neither faster nor slower. The slave is still alive, too. Our employers, and even the slave Sextus, referred to them as Immortals, yet how could a poison make men immortal?"
"Perhaps it has a use in impotence," Vespus wondered.
"Do you wish to rub a little onto—"
"No! No, but, well, perhaps it ensures that boy children will be born from a coupling." Lars was impressed. For all his trepidation, Vespus had some skill with lateral thought.
"Now that could well be a use for it. Wealthy families would pay a fortune to be sure of an heir. If one person controlled the supply of such an oil he would command silver by the barrowload."
The inner area was strangely quiet, and the very lack of guards made them uneasy. Once he had rested, Vespus took-off the extra gear that he had been carrying and crawled away across the tiles to explore.
Lars sat alone, longing for Rome, for the familiarity of crowded streets and densely packed buildings, for the roadway of roofs above the streets and alleys that he could run as easily as a cat. Here there was a villa within a fort, but beyond it was nothing but mountains and snow. Once the alarm was raised the pursuers might hunt them down like wild boars; there was no maze of alleyways, roofs, and trapdoors in which they could lose themselves. He looked about again. A villa within a fort, a palace of sorts. The Upper Palace was isolated by a moat and a high wall, and within that wall were only the Temporians. By day some slaves were brought in to do the cleaning and carrying, slaves carefully selected for dull wits. The guards were never admitted. Lars could make no sense of it, except to deduce that something of immense value was being concealed.
In a hall not far from where Lars crouched, every Temporian in the Upper Palace sat in conference discussing the death of Celcinius. His blood was still on the speakers' dais, and nobody had been willing to either clean away the stain or even set foot on the dais since their founder had died there.
"He died of a failed heart, and the fall which followed cracked his head open," Doria explained wearily, but her audience was not really interested. The death of Celcinius was inconvenient, it forced issues into the open.
"But why did his heart fail?" asked Levites.
"He was ninety-four years old! The shock of revival is dangerous enough for a person half of his age." If Lars could have seen the hall he would have been even more perplexed. The Temporians sat on purple cushions in concentric ranks of semicircular stone benches. Both men
and women wore silk trousers and tunics under a purple-edged toga praetexta . . . except that they were not true togas. They were made of silk, had voluminous sleeves, and were tied at the waist by a pinned silk belt. On their feet were sandals, but of a buckled design, and nothing like those that the Roman mortals wore. It was as if some distant Chinese court was having a costume party with a Roman theme. The moderator stood beside the blood-smeared dais as the rest of the company debated.
"He was our founder," wailed Tullius theatrically. He was one of the more recent recruits, and was barely a century old.
"He was the man who transformed Rome from just another walled city into what it is today. Without him we're lost."
"Lost?" sneered Levites. "We have been without him for five years out of every six since we were founded."
"But in dangerous times we always had him to call upon."
"You rave. Was he revived during Caligula's rule? Or that of Nero? The greatest possible insult to Celcinius would be to say that his work was so poor that we could not survive without him. He was one of the three who shared the secret of the Venenum Immortale, but Lucian and his student are still alive and there is a full store of Venenum left, enough to last through many centuries. Celcinius should be given a hero's funeral, then we must go back to maintaining and expanding his empire."
Lucian stood to speak. "Were I to die now the secret of the Venenum Immortale would not be lost. Quintemes has had enough training to brew up usable Venenum, yet I am worried that there are only two of us. We need to have more of our number trained in its preparation. Two extra at least, perhaps as many as four."
"Four?" exclaimed Levites. "Factions would spring up, breakaway groups would tear us apart. No more than three have ever been able to make the Venenum Immortale at any one time. Three has been sufficient for many centuries. Why change now?"
"Were they to die in the same accident, the secret would be lost," said Regulus. "Why not have a whole trusted group sharing the secret? The women who do the revivals, for example?"
There were cries of dismay and jeers, but scattered applause as well. Regulus waited for the commotion to subside before he went on.
"With four sharing the secret we could have three frozen while the other made more Venenum. That means a longer lifespan for all. Factions are formed by conspirators, not by frozen men. Up to now we have had Celcinius frozen most of the time while another was awake one year in. five to make more Venenum. Lucian and Quintemes have the skill to make the Venenum, it is true, but we have been lucky until now with having'just two trained to make it. Four students must be trained."
"No! Lucian and two students are enough."
"Lucian is sixty-seven years old, and is likely to survive no more than five or ten more revivals. Then what? We must train those who are young, in the prime of life."
"Young men are ambitious, and would use the secret of the Venenum Immortale to seize power for themselves. We cannot afford factions, we are too weak! Gods of Romulus we might be, but we are still mortal. If stabbed we die."
"And we die when our bodies grow old, too," retorted Regulus. "All right then, train only one more new student besides Quintemes, but make him young."
"No, there is no precedent—" Levites began to protest.
"Yes there is a precedent! Our women train all their number in the arts of revival."
"Without the Venenum Immortale there could be no revival at all."
Regulus slumped against the cold marble backrest and pouted sullenly, intractable rather than defeated. "I've made enough concessions," he declared. 'There must be at least one extra student, and she must be less than thirty years of age."
"Below thirty! She! You would have a girl control the destiny of Rome?"
"Why not? It survived Nero."
"We kept Nero in check, and w
hen he defied us we struck him down."
Regulus folded his arms and straightened his back as far as it would bend. A joint popped loudly. Levites began to laugh, but Regulus glared at him angrily until he turned away.
"I'll veto any proposal to train some doddering old goat to make the Venenum," declared Regulus. "This is the time for reform."
Above their heads, at an air vent, Vespus was listening but not comprehending. The debate was in Etruscan, which was the Temporian language for formal and ceremonial occasions. Vespus looked around before moving on. In the distance he could see two guards pacing at the top of a tower at the edge of the Upper Palace. Guards were not permitted into this sanctuary of the Immortals, so what would happen if he were seen? Would the Immortals climb the roofs to pursue them, and how good were they as fighters? He decided that he had seen and heard enough.
"Big meeting, over there," he reported when he had returned to Lars. "They spoke a language that sounded familiar, yet I understood nothing. It might have been Greek."
"A Greek fortress here!" exclaimed Lars under his breath. "Perhaps an attack on Rome is being planned and prepared."
"Some of the speakers were women." "Women! That's odd . . . but no matter. What of the ve-nendarium?"
"I checked the chimneys, every one of them. There's a cluster down there, to the southeast, where the soot is oily, and has a sharp scent about it."
"Then we should go there at once. Pray that their speakers are long-winded."
Vespus went ahead and Lars followed, carrying their gear. The snow had made the tiles treacherous, even though it dampened the sounds that they made. Suddenly a white shape detached itself from a wall and fell upon Vespus with a hissing yowl. Lars drew his pugio and scrabbled toward the struggling flurry of snow and limbs, but even as he drew near Vespus pushed the big cat's face away with bloodied fingers and stabbed repeatedly at its ribcage. Lars seized it by the scruff of the neck, jerked it back and slashed the dagger across its throat.
For a moment they lay silent, but no alarm had been raised. They had rolled into deep snow between roofs, and this had muffled the sounds of the struggle.
"Are you hurt?" Lars whispered as he rolled the cat's body to one side.
"Mauled my hand," Vespus gasped. "Clawed me here and there ... but nothing bad."
"Your hand is badly mauled, no more climbing for you tonight. I'll bind it and you can stay on the roof while I go below and force a few doors."
"Strange, it doesn't hurt much. Did it get you?"
"A scratch on the arm. Nothing more . . . but what's the matter?"
"Resting, just a moment."
"Are you sure you're all right?"
"Tired, just tired."
Vespus began to curl up in the snow as Lars wrapped a strip of cloth around his hand. The cat lay beside him, a mound of blood-streaked white about the size of a common dog.
"Not a real killer, it's probably trained to pounce and cause a commotion, raising the alarm," said Lars. "Lucky you didn't cry out. It's as white as snow, I've never seen one like it."
He lifted a paw with the blade of his pugio.
"There's something buckled to its paws—Vespus?"
Vespus was no longer breathing. Shivering, alert for more cats, Lars again lifted the animal's paw on his blade. The sharp metal spikes were coated in something dark and sticky. They too would tear skin when the cat used its claws. The coating of poison had killed Vespus in moments.
Lars sank to the snow, clutching his arm, fighting down despair and panic. Minutes passed, his heart pounded—yet he did not become drowsy. The scratch was ugly, but had been from one of the cat's natural claws. He flexed his limbs. Vespus lay curled up in the snow as if asleep. He patted the dead man's shoulder, pausing for a moment to find words to speak. He had seen death many
times and was not used to feeling sorrow in its presence. He spat on the body of the white cat.
"They will regret making the roofs so dangerous," he told the corpse of Vespus as he turned to go. Lars moved slowly across the roofs with his gladius in his hand. It was a weapon that might keep another cat at a distance
. . . perhaps. Nothing else stirred on the snow-shrouded tiles. Across a courtyard Lars could see the chimneys that Vespus had described to him: strange, squat, pentagonal towers of brick.
He was ready to drop to the ground and enter one of the inner buildings when he had noticed a movement in the shadows. A very large dog, perhaps a wolf. So, there were many guards beyond the inner wall after all, but none of them were human. The slave had not known of them, but he had only been there during the day. The wolves and cats were probably let loose at night, and they were undoubtedly trained to distinguish between their masters and mortal intruders. It all made sense. Animals could not be bribed to turn traitor and betray secrets. Lars's skin was smeared with astringent and he had kept some of his clothing in a bag of pigeon feathers while they hid in the tower. Thus his scent was masked, even if he did not look like a pigeon. So far the wolves had taken no notice of him ... or perhaps he was being stalked and did not realize it.
Fight fear, fear stinks, Lars told himself as he shivered and wedged himself into a corner beside a smoking chimney. He sat massaging his limbs and looking for further movement. The warmth from the chimney revived his spirits as much as the scent of roast that was on the air. So the Immortals did eat, just like everyone else. The voices from below were muffled by the tiles and snow, but were distinguishable as both male and female. The slave had said nothing about women, but perhaps these were mere harlots for the Immortals' amusement.
Lars slowly twisted, pressing his back against the warm bricks. His survey of the roof was done, he knew where he could escape once he had burgled the venendarium, and where he would retreat if seen and challenged. The shapes remained near the door as he began to unpack the bag
strapped under his white cloak. His little bow consisted of two short lengths of ashwood which he fitted into a brass sleeve. It had a light draw, but its arrows were poison tipped. The first shot missed, and the wolves started awake at the clink of metal on stone. Lars drew back his bow again, but this time the target was standing and more distinct. There was a snarl as it hit The wolf was already staggering when its companion was struck, and the second wolf dropped at once. A lucky shot had found its heart, Lars surmised while he waited for the first wolf to stop twitching. He slung the bow over his shoulder and dropped softly to the courtyard. Both wolves were dead, and he dragged them back to where they had been sleeping beside the door. There had been little noise or blood, but he smoothed out the snow anyway. Now he had no reason to hurry. Lars doubted that the wolves would be checked until morning, and who would want to begin work in the middle of the night? The door had a latch, but was not locked. The wolves had been trusted to keep it secure. Once inside Lars took out a tiny phial of wormglow compound to light his way, then unstrapped a cylinder of butt-leather. A tiny dog licked his fingers, a dog worth at least its weight in gold coin. It was trained to be silent, and it had a sharp sense of smell.
Lars glanced around as he fumbled for his phial of oil. Having negligible experience in the methods of physicians was a hindrance. He knew little of how the mortars and pestles, jars, glassware, tubs of dead insects, oils, and masses of parchments might relate to what he wanted. The slave who called himself Lacerna had never seen a jar of the oil put away, so Lars had no clues to begin with. The dog would not be overawed by the trappings of arcane knowledge, however: he let it sniff at the oil in the phial, then set it free.
They make the Venenum Immortale here but store it in some unknown place, his informant had said. Perhaps a load had just been sent out, he wondered as he watched the dog wandering about and sniffing. He quickly dismissed the thought, it was too much to bear. The little dog began to scratch at a floorboard. Lars walked over and held his glow- ing phial near the wood. A trapdoor. He scooped up his tiny dog and returned it to the butt leather roll. The well was beneath a hinged cover, with a tiny
lever at one edge that would, when the cover was lifted, press on a rod that protruded through a hole in the wall. Lars examined the lever, and found that it was on a hinge and held in place with a pin. With the lever safely unpinned, he lifted the trapdoor.
Snow and ice were packed around three amphorae. The oil slowly grew too toxic to use if not stored cold; his employer, Fortunatus, had told him that when he had accepted the contract. How slow was slowly? Thirty or forty years, Fortunatus had replied. It could easily last a few months at body temperature.
One amphora was empty, another sealed and full, and the third was near full and not sealed. He sniffed the stopper, then smeared a little of the contents on one finger and tasted it. Bitter! Sharp, oily and bitter, just like what was in the phial. This had to be it. He unpacked a dozen goatskin pouches and began to pour the viscous philter out into them. If carrying the same amount in a jar he would have barely been able to walk, let alone climb. As each pouch filled he strapped it to his body, arranging them to look as if he had a more corpulent build. The twelve pouches were filled before the amphora's level had dropped by even a third.
Lars checked the door and the courtyard beyond. All was as he had left it. Now he hastily scanned the scrolls that had been kept near the cold store. Some were in Latin, some in a language like Greek. There were notes about the purity of oils and how many tuhs of snow insects had been collected by the slaves. Method and Usage of Venenum: these were instructions about the philter! Such incredible good fortune, thought Lars, surely some god was smiling on him—a loud clack echoed through the darkened room.
Lars froze for an instant, then rammed the glowing phial under his cloak. No movement, no light. He hastily folded the scroll into his pouch. The clack had come from the ice tub in the floor, yet he had put everything back as he had found it—but not quite. He dropped to his knees and let a little of the phial's glow leak between his fingers. He had not bent the triplever back to its former position, and now the rod that it would have pressed against protruded a handspan from the wall: the accursed device not only warned when the cover had been lifted, it could also be used to remotely check that the lever was pinned in place!
The Centurion's Empire Page 5
