Black Salamander (36 page)

A betting man would have laughed and walked away.

Claudia wouldn’t have blamed him.

Maybe, though… Maybe there is another way…

‘This is better,’ she called out to Arcas. ‘I can take off my thong without falling over.’

The misty silhouette did not require intimate details. It shuffled in acute embarrassment and stared at the cave roof and did not see the figure which flitted past him on the floor of the cave. Before the ice rose up into a wall again, Claudia pulled off her shoes, stuffed them into the waistband of her thong and jumped. Her fingers caught the ledge of the walkway and quickly she heaved herself up. Keeping her back to the rock, she scuttled barefoot up the spiral tunnel.

‘Claudia?’ Anger echoed round the grotto. ‘Come here, you bitch!’

Arcas held up his torch. No one! He swore under his breath.

‘I’ll find you,’ he yelled. ‘You won’t get far.’

In the darkness, his ears strained for sounds. They heard nothing. Just a drip-drip-drip from the roof.

‘Even if you make it to the entrance, I can track you,’ he shouted. Track-you-ack-you-ack-you echoed back at him, that was all. No frantic footsteps, no scrabbling against rock.

‘You can’t get away from me, Claudia.’ He paused to listen. ‘I have your cat,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to harm it, but if I have to, I will.’

Still no sounds. Where the hell was she? Hiding on the flat part of the ice? He sprang down and made a quick search. Maybe hiding between the rock and the ice? His light moved back and forth over the gap. Nothing there.

‘You can’t stay hidden,’ he called. ‘I’ll find you. Frozen to death, more than likely.’

Goddammit, she was hiding somewhere. He looked around, hoping to see telltale steam from her breath. She could not have gone far. He’d have seen her.

‘That’s it,’ he said warningly. ‘I’m coming after you, Claudia.’

He ran back up the walkway to the little cave. Carefully he approached the entrance. Could she have made it this far without him hearing her? He didn’t think so. His memory replayed the sounds when he’d guided her down the ramp. The sounds their shoes made on the stone, her ragged breathing, the shivering, the chattering of her teeth with the cold. Pausing in the doorway, he saw that nothing had changed. The blankets she’d wrapped round herself were still heaped. Coils of smoke rose from the fire. He listened hard. Nothing. Confident, he strode inside and reached down for his sword.

‘Meeowrrrr.’

Something black flew at his face. ‘Aaargh!’ As the torch fell from his grasp, blood streamed from his face, where the cat’s claws had left wide open gashes.

‘
Mrrrrrow!
’ Drusilla, incensed that she’d been used as a weapon, shot past his legs.

‘Bitch,’ he cried, but before his hand closed over his weapon, the full force of a log sent him spinning sideways, knocking his sword out of reach. ‘I’ll see you pay for this.’

‘You and who else?’ Claudia sneered. Think he was the only one who had tactics? What’s the first thing a child learns when it grows up in the slums? The art of invisibility. When your parents are drunk, fighting drunk, pulling the hair out of one another drunk, you learn pretty fast. Flatten yourself against the wall. Take short, soundless breaths through your nose. Never seen. Never heard. Hey presto. Invisible.

In the last rays of guttering torchlight, Claudia saw him draw a dagger from his belt. She lunged for the sword and swung. It swooshed through the blackness and clanged against the stone wall, sending shock waves up to her shoulder. Shit! She hadn’t realized it would be so heavy.

‘Think you can fight me and win, do you?’ he hissed. ‘Well, I have news for you, pretty lady. We need that map, and by old Father Dis, I’ll see that we get it, and if you think my brother’s tactics are brutal, think again, because I won’t just kill that fucking cat of yours.’

He lunged in the darkness, and she knew he’d mistaken her for the log with which she’d hoped to poleaxe him. With a clang, the log bounced down the walkway. He wouldn’t make that mistake twice.

She held the sword in both hands. Holy Jupiter, what a weight!

‘I swear I’ll torture that cat before your very eyes. In the end, I’ll have you begging to hand over that map.’

She believed him! ‘You’re two of a kind, you and your brother. One a repellent insect. The other vermin.’ Whoooosh. Again the sword sliced through thin air. ‘That’s how foxes are viewed, isn’t it, Arcas? As vermin?’

She heard him scuttle across the cave and so she dodged sideways. ‘You think I give a fuck about your Roman insults?’ A hand lashed out and grabbed hold of her tunic. Another trap. He’d anticipated such a move.

So had she. Like an earwig, she wriggled free of the shirt. The cold air against her naked flesh made her gasp. He heard the sound and his arm followed instinctively. The blow caught Claudia full in the mouth. Sent her reeling. Blood spurted out.

‘All I care about is freeing my people,’ he said, and she caught the sweet whiff of dried ceps. ‘You should have given me the map when I asked.’

Why didn’t I? she wondered. Why didn’t I just hand it over?

Her head was pounding from the force of the blow. She saw stars.

Dammit, she’d landed right in the hearth. Blood from her mouth dripped into the ashes. The air here was dry. Tickly. Any second now she would—‘Atchoo!’

Bugger. The sounds in her head intensified, the stars grew ever brighter. She was cold. Bitterly cold. The heat from the fire had long died. She was weak from the cold, the sword was a ton weight in her hand…

‘So that’s where you’re hiding.’ His laugh was soft and gentle. Superior in victory. ‘Very smart.’ A fist grabbed her hair and yanked her bodily out of the hearth.

‘No, you don’t,’ she spluttered, and threw a handful of ash in his face. Choking, Arcas released her.

Claudia took a wild swing with the sword. Whoooosh, through thin air. Frantically she swung it backwards. There was a crack. A dull thud. Then a roll. Great shot, girl. You’ve cut down a ham.

Suddenly the stars in her head became lanterns. The pounding in her ears turned to voices. Male voices. The Spider’s men! A crowd filled up the doorway. Clamouring. Shouting. With both hands, she hefted the sword. By the gods, it was heavy, but they wouldn’t take her alive. She would fall on it first.

‘Claudia?’

Tears streamed down her face, runnels in the blood and the ash. Sweet Janus, I’m hallucinating with fear. Now I’m seeing—

It was a trick. Another of the Spider’s ruses. That in the sudden burst of lamplight, she’d mistake his man for Marcus. Look, that one even looks like Junius. His arm and shoulder bandaged convincingly—

‘Claudia?’

Both men rushed towards her, but it was the patrician who reached her first. ‘Arcas,’ she babbled. ‘You have to arrest him.’

Dammit, he’d escaped! He’d known they weren’t his allies and scarpered.

‘I know where he’s hiding,’ she said. ‘Down—’

‘He’s dead,’ Orbilio cut in, wiping her face with the hem of his tunic. ‘You killed him, remember?’

‘Me? Don’t be daft.’ One minute we were fighting. I
threw ashes at him. He choked. I slashed with the sword. Cut down a ham…

Claudia’s
stomach
flipped somersaults.

‘Oh, no…’ She could hardly form the words.

‘You didn’t realize?’ Gently Marcus blotted the cut on her lip.

Her heart set to burst free of her ribcage, Claudia grabbed the torch from his hand and with quaking hands held it aloft. It can’t be…

Arcas lay sprawled across the slimy cavern floor, his russet pantaloons the colour of dried blood, his double tunics barely concealing the bulging muscles of his arms and chest. The dagger was still clutched tight in his hand.

Claudia’s trembling eyes moved across to the hearth, where a mane of silver hair was camouflaged in a pile of white ash.

In the little cavern, Claudia swayed, and before the blackness closed in to swallow her up she finally accepted that it was not Arcas’s smoked ham she’d chopped down from the beam.

Claudia had chopped off his head.

XXXIV

The fluting trill of a nightingale brought Claudia back to consciousness, and fluttering hands felt the touch of the fine linen which encased her nakedness. As her eyelids flickered open, she smelled sandalwood.

‘You’ll catch your death,’ she told him, then realized that she was warm, that sunshine was washing over her, flooding the bowl in the hills with its liquid, golden heat.

‘Me?’ His laugh made something jump under her ribs. ‘It’s you who insists on dicing with death, Mistress Seferius. Will you never learn?’

She struggled into a sitting position, and saw that most of the others had melted away, presumably off to hunt spiders. Only Junius remained, hard-faced and sulking, and she wondered why his expression should be so unutterably sour. After all, if the Spider’s plan had gone according to schedule, he’d be dead.

Claudia turned her face to the sun, and flinched at the swollen tender lump that used to be her mouth. ‘How did you find me?’ she asked.

Inside her crate, a hard-boiled glare blazing in opposite directions, Drusilla yowled out her objections, at being used as a weapon and that if it ever happened again, she didn’t want Claudia to think she’d lap
her
cream any more, and as for sleeping on her counterpane at night,
think again.

‘For a man of my calibre, it was nothing.’ Orbilio grinned. ‘Despite being left for dead, Junius somehow raised the alarm but was mystified why your possessions should have been taken from outside the Neptune Gate. I made enquiries of the sentry, who reported that a chap with grey hair took them. The reason was obvious, the next question was where.’

‘You didn’t think of the roundhouse?’

‘It was a possibility, but—’ shamefaced he glanced away, mumbling something under his breath.

‘You
what
? Didn’t know where to find it?’ Actually, neither did she, but that wasn’t the point. This was the man who was supposed to be a hero, remember? Heroes don’t mislay roundhouses all over the place.

‘Luckily,’ manfully he ploughed on, ‘our Silver Fox was well known in Vesontio, someone mentioned the ice cave where he holes up in winter, someone else guided us here. So you see, a few logical steps, one lucky hunch—’

‘Hunch?’ Claudia’s voice rose in outrage. ‘I could have died back there.’

‘Ah, but you didn’t,’ Orbilio said, passing her a goblet of fresh mountain water. ‘Hades is not up to the challenge. Ice?’

‘Very funny.’ She snatched the goblet from his hand. ‘Anyway, who needs the cavalry?’ she snapped. ‘I saved the Empire single-handed.’

One lazy eyebrow rose in query.

‘I’ll have you know, the Spider had every piece of the map, except mine,’ she said haughtily. ‘Without me, he’d have his grubby paws on the entire State Treasury.’

‘Oh.’ Orbilio rubbed his hand back and forth over his jaw. ‘Did I give you the impression the map pinpointed the Treasury?’

If Claudia had had claws, they’d be out. ‘Why?’ It was no mean feat, talking through both a fat lip
and
gritted teeth, but she managed.

‘No, it’s just that… Well, I apologize if you believed…’ He decided that staring at ferns was a better course of action than being speared by her lacerating scowl. ‘It was Galba’s supreme double-cross, you see. The whole point… Ah, how can I put this? There…never was any great cache of treasure.’

‘Orbilio, I’m warning you, I do not find this amusing.’

‘Neither, I’m sure, would the Treveri. Let alone the Helvetii.’ He tried for a smile. And failed. ‘I—I did tell you that the Security Police would know about any large sums on the move. I mean—’ He tried for a laugh. This was worse. ‘Surely—ha, ha—you didn’t imagine Galba could spirit away the entire Treasury of Rome—gold, silver, paintings, gems—and nobody notice?’

Claudia said nothing. She was too busy deciding whether flaying him alive was too good for him, or whether she should simply settle for throttling him with her bare hands.

Finally she asked, ‘Do they know yet, the tribes?’

‘They do.’ He quickly befriended a different fern. ‘My…boss doesn’t, though.’

Claudia blinked. She blinked again. In the end, her lids could hardly stand the pace. ‘Marcus Cornelius, I do declare! You haven’t sent a report back to Rome at all
, have you?’
Still intent on the fern, he merely gave a tight-lipped shrug.

‘You scuppered Galba’s chance of setting up a new Republic through the back door.’

She pushed a hank of hair out of her eyes and ticked the sequence off on her fingers.

‘Once you realized what was happening, you sent word to the Treveri and Helvetii that there was, in fact, no treasure trove. They’d immediately check with their spies in Rome, where one quick visit to the Temple of Saturn would put them right, because they’d see it snoring contentedly in the temple basement. At this point, the chieftains would want a quiet word in the senator’s ear’—after which they’d probably chop it, and many other bits, off—‘and doubtless tell him what he could do with his seditious ideas before they roasted him slowly over an open fire then boiled his gizzards for tea.’