The Emperor's Knives (16 page)

The soldier got up and walked away, muttering to himself loudly enough for the two men to hear as they hustled the praetorian into the house.

‘“
Make yourself smell bad
,” he says, and then when you do all you get is abuse. Fuckin’ officers …’

While Marcus shepherded the praetorian in through the door, Dubnus dragged the prostrate guards in behind them, closing the door and leaving no trace of the ambush before knifing both men in the throat to make sure that they were dead. In the entrance hall there were lamps set out ready for use, and a single flame left burning to light the others. The big Briton lit a pair of them while Marcus held Dorso at knifepoint. He walked forward into a wide inner chamber, then stood and stared in wonder at the sight that emerged from the shadows as the lamplight strengthened. On every side of the room there were weapons racked on the walls: swords, shields, spears and axes, variously scarred, notched and battered by their evident use on combat, each with an engraved bronze plate fastened to the wall on which it was displayed. Released from Marcus’s grip, albeit with the knife still poised to strike if he attempted to fight back, Dorso turned slowly to face them, his expression strangely seeming closer to relief than fear in the dim light. The young centurion narrowed his eyes, lifting the knife close to his face, a shining bar of metal whose dappled surface gleamed in the lamplight, growling out the words he had rehearsed a thousand times as he had dreamed of the moment of his revenge.

‘My name is Marcus Valerius Aquila.’

The praetorian smiled gently, spreading his arms wide in apparent surrender.

‘I know it is. And I know that you intend to kill me.’

Dubnus and Marcus exchanged glances, both men perplexed at the apparent ease with which their quarry was accepting of his fate.

‘And you’re just going to stand there and let it happen?’

Dorso shrugged easily, clearly not troubled by his predicament.

‘You stand before me, Valerius Aquila, with a blade bared and murder in your eyes and ask me if I am ready to die?’ The praetorian laughed softly. ‘If I weren’t, I could easily have thwarted you out in the street, set my men on you and called for help.’

Marcus’s eyes narrowed at the shock of hearing his true name from the emperor’s murderer.

‘You recognised me?’

The praetorian shook his head in grim amusement.

‘You may have forgotten your time with the Guard, young man, but I haven’t. After all, I knew for several days before we received the order to kill your father that as the emperor’s tame murderers my colleagues and I would be the men called upon to deal out imperial “justice”. I used that time to have a good long look at you, Centurion, in readiness for the moment I faced you with a blade in my hand. I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t going to get any nasty surprises.’

‘And?’

Dorso shrugged.

‘You were nothing that special, just another snotty-nosed senator’s son who happened to be a little better trained than the average. You had the speed, and the technique, but you were still soft. You wouldn’t even have seen me coming, although it might be a different story now since you seem to have hardened up a little since then, got yourself a scar or two. Your father sent you somewhere he expected you’d never be found, didn’t he?’

‘Britannia.’

‘Yes, Britannia.’ Dorso nodded and chuckled, clearly confirming something he had already known. ‘Cold, wet and desolate, and forever being attacked by one barbarian tribe or another. I’ll bet you’ve seen more fighting in the last two years than most of us get in a lifetime. And now here you are, hardened from the fire and ready to put your father’s killers in the ground one at a time, eh?’

Marcus raised the knife again, showing the praetorian the pattern that ran through its fire-hardened metal shank. Dorso’s face took on a reverent expression as he stared at the weapon.

‘I’ve only ever seen that sort of metal once before, but the sword from which it was made was a deadly thing, capable of cutting through another blade with ease.’

Marcus looked about him.

‘You seem fascinated with weaponry. You come here every night just to look at a collection of old iron?’

Dorso shrugged impassively.

‘Not just
iron
, Valerius Aquila. This is the history of our people you see on these walls. Take that sword, for example …’

He pointed to a sword on the wall next to Marcus, and as the younger man turned to look at it, Dubnus put a massive hand on the praetorian’s shoulder, digging the fingers into his flesh beneath the tunic, and raised his own copy of the dappled steel knife so that the blade’s glinting edge was visible in the lamplight.

‘Give me an excuse and I’ll do the job for him.’

Marcus took the sword down from the wall, turning back to display the weapon to its owner.

‘So what’s so special about this then?’

Dorso shrugged again, ignoring the Briton’s tight grip on his arm.

‘In truth, it’s really not all that distinguished, a nameless sword from the civil wars with no provenance other than its obvious age. It pales into insignificance when compared to the dagger carried by the blessed Julius’s standard bearer, the man from the Tenth Legion who jumped into the surf when his follow soldiers were too frightened to set foot on the beach during the first invasion of Britannia – that’s over there, behind you on the far wall. And yet you’ve found what used to be one of my most treasured pieces. Some poor anonymous grunt fought and most likely died with that in his hand, back in the days when the battles were massive day-long affairs with half-a-dozen legions on either side, and the fate of the republic rested on the outcome. Sometimes I just get that down and sit with it in my lap, wondering what happened to the poor bastard that carried it. After all, if he managed to survive the fighting, he’d probably have found his family starving when he got home. Too many of the middle-class men the armies depended on were killed in the civil wars, you see, and the day of the gentleman farmer was long gone by the time that Augustus put an end to it all by declaring himself emp—’

Marcus stalked back across the room with the antique sword in his hand.

‘Spare me the history lesson, Dorso, before I allow this sword to taste blood one more time.’

The praetorian shook his head, the faint smile back on his face.

‘You’d be better not leaving any visible wounds, wouldn’t you Centurion? You need make it look like natural causes, I’d say, or the rest of our merry band of murderers will smell a rat and go to ground. I might have chosen to meet my fate head on, but I can assure you that they won’t be as accommodating.’

The younger man stared at him for a moment before speaking again, his voice edged with disbelief.

‘You really knew we were hunting you?’

The praetorian nodded.

‘I had a fairly good idea. Unlike my fellow players in this dirty, bloody game that we play at the emperor’s command, I heard the full detail of what happened in the throne room when Perennis died. You can imagine the chaos in our fortress when the guards on duty who witnessed it came back up the hill, and I was fortunate enough that the officer of the guard on the Palatine that night was a friend of mine, which meant I got to hear the full story, and without any of the interesting detail censored.’

The praetorian smiled bleakly at Marcus.

‘I managed to get him on his own, once he’d been debriefed by Perennis’s senior officers, and he told me the whole story, including the apparent involvement of a centurion from
Britannia.
He told me how that centurion, who, I should point out, apparently had a fresh scar across the bridge of his nose, looked as if he’d have dearly liked to have been the one that did for the prefect. And then, Valerius Aquila, just when I was wondering who that centurion might be, and why the emperor’s new favourite Cleander had allowed him to vanish off into the night, my friend told me something which gave me the answers to questions I hadn’t even asked. He told me that he was sure he knew that mysterious centurion from somewhere, but he just couldn’t work out
where.
’

‘He knew me from my time with the Guard.’

‘Yes. But fortunately for both of us, the two of you didn’t serve in the same cohort. He knew you as a face he’d seen around the fortress, if only he could have remembered, but he didn’t make the connection I did. But then he hadn’t listened as your former tribune suffered under the undivided attentions of the emperor’s torturers. Having taken money from your father to send you away on the false errand that saved your life, the fool sobbed and screamed and bellowed out the place to which your faked orders had sent you, even before they subjected him to the necessary amount of agony to verify his story. And that place was Britannia. Britannia was the key to the puzzle, Valerius Aquila. The tribune told the torturers that your father sent you to Britannia, to the Sixth Legion in the province’s north, and here was a centurion from Britannia bearing that legion’s lost eagle
and
the severed head of its commanding officer. Your father sent you to the Sixth because of some previous relationship he had with that legatus, am I right?’

Marcus nodded.

‘Legatus Sollemnis was my birth father. Appius Valerius Aquila took me on as a baby to save him the embarrassment and encumbrance of a child.’

Dorso nodded slowly.

‘And so the last pieces of the puzzle slide neatly into place. And when I saw you in the tavern with that rather distinctive scar across your nose, I knew that my time to meet with Our Lord Mithras was at hand.’

Marcus stared uncomprehendingly at the older man.

‘You recognised me, and yet you still chose to come here knowing that it would be your death sentence? Why?’

Dorso shook his head slowly, rubbing a hand across his face.

‘Why just walk into your trap? I’m
tired
, young man. Tired of committing murder in the name of a man who isn’t fit to be on the throne, tired of watching my fellow murderers indulging their sick fantasies with the innocent members of blameless families. I’m even tired of all this …’

He looked around at the room’s panoply of antique weapons with a sigh.

‘I used to come down here with a light heart, overjoyed to own such a fine collection of weapons from some of the most noteworthy periods of both the republic and the empire. See that?’ He pointed to a long sword on the wall to their left. ‘That’s the blade that killed the Dacian emperor, Decebalus. I purchased it last year with my share from the murder of a particularly rich senator. It is an antique of almost inestimable value, and when I bought it I was filled with pleasure, and pride that a man from my relatively humble origins might own such a thing …’ He paused, looking down at the floor and shaking his head. ‘But over the last few months that pride has turned into disgust. Call it religion, call it conscience, but I am no longer able to take any pleasure from treasures purchased with innocent blood. In truth, Valerius Aquila, I’m more than tired. I’m
sick
, sick at heart, disgusted with myself for the things I allowed to happen in front of me, without intervening to offer some shred of dignity in death for so many innocents. I deserve to die, and offer some small recompense for their suffering.’

Dorso closed his eyes for a moment, then snapped them open and shot a pleading stare at Marcus.

‘You will struggle to believe this, but I am at heart a decent man. My father taught me from my earliest days to do the right thing …’ He waved a hand at the weapons that festooned the walls about them. ‘But I allowed myself to be corrupted by my desire to own Rome’s history, something I could never have achieved on a centurion’s salary. Oh, I might have managed to buy one or two of the pieces you see before you, but I can assure you that this is the finest collection of weaponry you’ll find anywhere in the city. Anywhere in the empire!’ The praetorian’s face, momentarily lit by the pleasure of his private museum, abruptly fell back into despair. ‘And all of it tainted by the blood of those who had no need to die at all, or to undergo the suffering to which they were subjected.’

He shook his head, his lips twisted in disgust.

‘Having accepted the role of imperial murderer, I quickly realised that I had already done too much and seen too much to ever be allowed to end my participation in that evil. The only way for a man to stop being a member of the Knives is for the other three to raise their blades and make a victim of him in his turn, and thereby ensure his silence. And so I participated in crimes of the most despicable nature, in the company of one man who can only be described as insane, another whose urge to prey upon the helpless is as disgusting as any vice I’ve ever witnessed, and a third who is only truly alive when he’s in the act of killing. For all the evil that I have done, and for which I am truly disgusted with myself, I can assure you that what you will find when you track them down will be infinitely more base and revolting. I caution you, Valerius Aquila, to be careful that in dealing out the justice that you so badly desire, you do not find yourself taking on their worst character traits.’

He took a deep breath.

‘And now, if you will, all I ask is that you make my end swift. When I’m gone I suggest that you burn this place, and destroy these grisly instruments of slaughter. It used to be that their antiquity, and what I assumed would have been their honourable use in defence of the city and people of Rome, provided me with some small measure of relief from the nagging self-hatred that my role as an imperial executioner caused me to feel. Now all I can feel is revulsion at the potential atrocities that may well have been committed with them in Rome’s name with these weapons. Their destruction can only be for the good.’

Marcus walked away from Dorso, looking about him at the shadowed ranks of weapons that lined the walls around them.

‘I had intended for you to die slowly, in an apparent eternity of agony, but it seems to me as if you’ve undergone much of that suffering already.’ Marcus picked up the large jar of oil from which the lamps were refilled each night. ‘There is a quick way for you to die, and one which will give little clue to your comrades that their destiny is upon them. Do you believe that you could tolerate the pain?’