If there’s one thing I enjoy, it’s being stuck up a blind alley in a grim province on a gloomy evening, while an unknown number of the military prepare to disembowel me.
“Shit,” muttered Petronius succinctly.
“Shit on a stick,” I qualified. We were in big trouble. No doubt of it.
I wondered where in Hades they were hiding. Then I didn’t bother. They came swarming out of nowhere until they filled the alley. The big boys in red raced up in at least two directions. Others piled in on us through the back of the bar. Some leaped over barrels showily. A few squirmed around on their bellies. None of these tough lads felt it necessary to drop from the eaves or swing on a lintel, though to my mind it would have made the picture prettier. Why be restrained? With only two targets—both of us caught out and startled—their officer had had scope for dramatic effects. Properly stage-managed, the demise of M. D. Falco and L. P. Longus could have been a feast of theater.
Instead of which, lazily, the soldiers just flung us back against the wall, yelled at us, and made us keep still by applying swords to places we preferred not to have cut. I mean, all over us. Petronius and I endured it patiently. For one thing, we knew this was a big mistake on their part, and for another there was not much choice. The legionaries were menacing; they all clearly hoped for an excuse to kill us.
“Steady on, lads.” I cleared my throat. “You’re making asses of your whole damned cohort!”
“What legion?” Petro asked the nearest one.
“Second Adiutrix.” He should have been told not to communicate with us. If he had, he was shamefully forgetful. Still, every cohort carries some dopey boy who spends his entire service on punishment, eating barley bread.
“Very nice.” Now Petro was being sarcastic. They were amateurs. Amateurs can be very dangerous.
Whatever their outfit, they knew how to invest a quiet night in a dead-end town with the urgency factor. Petronius and I watched and felt like jaded old men.
Our backup arrived. Helena Justina had emerged angrily from her chair and was demanding to speak to the officer in charge. Helena did not need to mount a tribunal to sound like a general in a purple cloak. Petronius turned to me and raised his eyebrows. She weighed straight in: “I insist you let these two men go at once!”
A centurion emerged from the scurrying mass: Crixus. Just our luck. “Move along there, madam, or I shall have to arrest you.”
“I think not!” Helena was so definite I saw him backstep slightly. “I am Helena Justina, daughter of the senator Camillus and niece to the procurator Hilaris. Not that this entitles me to interfere with military business—but I advise you to be cautious, Centurion! These are Didius Falco and Petronius Longus, engaged on vital work for the governor.”
“Move along,” repeated Crixus. He failed to note that she had noted his rank. His career meant nothing, apparently. “My men are searching for two dangerous criminals.”
“Florius and Norbanus,” Helena sneered. “These are not them—and you know it!”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” Cheap power makes for obnoxious clichés..
“He knows damn well,” drawled Petronius loudly. “Don’t worry about us, sweetheart. This is men’s business. Falco, tell your bossy wife to hurry along home.”
“That’s right, love,” I agreed meekly.
“Then I’ll just go and feed the baby, like a dutiful matriarch!” sniffed Helena. “Don’t be late home, darling,” she added sarcastically.
As if huffiness was in her nature, she stormed off. Disposing of a senator’s daughter was a problem the soldiers had not preconsidered, and even these renegades balked at it. They let her go. More fool them.
They were waiting until she was off the scene before they dealt with us. I watched her leaving. Tall, haughty, and apparently self-possessed. No one would know how much anxiety she felt. The soldiers had now brought up torches, so light gleamed on her fine dark hair as she stormed past them, with a toss of her head, flinging one end of a light stole back over her shoulder. An earring glinted, her garnet-and-gold drop. It had caught in the delicate fabric; impatiently she freed it with those long, sensitive fingers that our daughters had inherited.
My own stomach was in a brutal knot until she left safely. If this was the last time I ever saw her, our life together had been good. But my heart ached for the grief she would feel if she lost me now. If I were taken from Helena, my ghost would come raging back from the Underworld. We had too much living left to do.
It was never going to happen. Petro and I were finished. The mood had turned even more ugly. Young faces, dark with fright and false bravado, stared at us. These troops knew they were in the wrong. They could not meet our eyes. Crixus, the mad bastard in charge, must realize that if Petro and I survived and told the governor what went down here tonight, the game was up. He came and stood in front of us, baring his ugly teeth. “You’re dead!”
“If you’re going to kill us, Crixus,” Petronius said quietly, “at least tell us why. You’re doing this for the Jupiter gang?”
“You’re sharp!”
“Paid or pressured by Florius? So did he tell you to kill us? I thought that he wanted to finish me himself.”
“He won’t object.” I reckoned Crixus was making up his mind as he went along. That meant rash decisions. Decisions that could only be bad for us.
It was no use consoling ourselves that if he killed us, he could never get away with it. Helena had gone to fetch assistance. In a moment even Crixus would work out that letting her go was a fatal error.
The centurion was crazy, and his youthful, inexperienced men were becoming hysterical. The Second Adiutrix were a new legion, cobbled together from scratch using naval ratings; they were a Flavian creation rushed into service to fill urgent gaps in the army after other, older legions had been massacred or corrupted to the point where they were past saving. These raw, mad boys were now jostling one another in what they mistook for camaraderie; then they barged forward and started pushing us around. We tried not to retaliate. They laughed at us. Disarmed, we stood no chance. They were taunting us to make a move so they could tear us to pieces.
We knew better than to hope for escape now. Sure enough, the situation grew a great deal worse. We heard the measured approach of yet more soldiers, and lest it raise our spirits, the Second Adiutrix greeted these newcomers cheerily. Crixus swore affectionately at that other lag of a centurion, Silvanus. Silvanus and his men scowled at Petronius and me.
And then the unexpected happened. I never heard an order given, but the new boys all whipped out their swords and fell on the careless bastards who were holding us. Next moment, we were being grabbed once again, but this time to be thrown from hand to hand up the alley, until we were clear of the conflict.
The fight was disciplined and dirty. The Crixus century gathered their wits and fought back. It all took longer than it should have done. Slowly, however, the Crixus men were rounded up and stripped of their weapons. Crixus himself, fighting like a beer-crazed barbarian, was overcome, grounded, and placed under arrest. Silvanus read him the order, which came straight from the governor. Crixus was the defaulter who had “lost” Splice. He had been on the loose ever since, carefully avoiding barracks, but his good times were over. There are centurions who survive for years, famous for corruption and bribe-taking, but he had overstepped the mark by a mile.
Whether Silvanus himself had ever been on the take was unclear. He had made a choice today. We could only see it as a good one.
There seemed to be a reason for it. He came up and spoke to us. “I hear you were in the Second, Falco.”
I took a breath. This was the big question, the embarrassment I had avoided when I first met him. Owning up to service in the Second Augusta, during the Rebellion, could lead to bitter accusations. “Yes,” I said levelly.
But Silvanus gave me a rueful grin, full of shared grief. Wearily he put out an arm to grasp wrists in the soldiers’ salute, first with me, then with Petronius. This was something I had not allowed for: Silvanus was in the Second Augusta too.
It was one of those moments when all you want to do is collapse with relief. Petronius and I could not even consider it. We still had to find and rescue Maia.
Petronius marched up to the prostrate Crixus. “Do yourself a favor. Tell me what you were told to do. I am supposed to be a hostage exchange for Falco’s sister. The whole point was for Florius to capture me and make me suffer—so why did he send you to do the job?”
“He knows I’m more competent!” sneered the centurion.
I elbowed Petro aside. He was too angry; he was losing control. “You’re so competent you’re now in chains, Crixus,” I pointed out. “So what was the intention here tonight?”
“I don’t know.” I stared him out. He lowered his voice. “I don’t know,” he repeated.
I believed him.