Thirty-Six

Despite her head pounding like thunder and the bitter cold chilling her bones, Claudia picked up most of the situation. What Erinna glossed over, Cotta filled in, and frankly she wondered why he bothered. He didn’t seem a particularly vain man, who enjoyed speaking just to hear the sound of his own cultured voice. Then she realized.

He was explaining for the same reason that he hadn’t just let her go.

You could forgive his heavies for snatching both women back in that alley. In the dark, in a hurry, in a crowd, time was not on their side. They could decide later which of the women was which. So why hadn’t the Arch-Hawk let Claudia go? If he’d had Erinna followed, then he obviously knew who Claudia was, and it would have been a simple matter to have his ‘boys’ dump her somewhere while she was still unconscious. She would never have known then who had taken Erinna, much less where or, more importantly, why. Instead, he was dotting the Is and crossing the Ts, briefing his captive in true military style. He had even explained to Claudia how he came to locate the last missing piece of his puzzle.

‘Jupiter alone knows how hard my men tried to find her,’ he said. ‘It was as though Erinna had disappeared from the face of the earth.’

He had expected to trace her through the stolen objects, he added, but inexplicably none of the missing objects turned up. She had simply vanished into thin air, taking with her his plans for the expansion of Rome.

‘How,’ he asked, smiling, ‘could I hope to blow up the Senate House now? With a plentiful supply of the Poseidon Powder, I could have experimented to my heart’s content, but one pouch?’

Claudia didn’t understand. Blow up the Senate? What was he talking about? Blitzing one building would hardly change the course of the Empire. With a rush of freezing ice to her veins, she knew there was only one way history could be altered with one blast. Sweet Janus! Three hundred men would be packed inside, debating, laughing, jeering. With no idea they had minutes to live— No, wait. Cotta would want more. He would be wanting three hundred and one. History could not be changed without changing the Emperor.

She thought of his own history. General to Senator to Emperor in three simple steps.

‘You’re crazy,’ she said, but even as she spoke the words, she knew it wasn’t true. Sextus Valerius Cotta was sane. Excruciatingly sane, in fact. He merely saw the Senate as a dam to be breached. An obstacle to be erased in the name of progress.

‘Then a letter arrived from Frascati,’ Cotta said, as though accusations of psychosis were hurled at him three times a day. ‘A woodsman reported that he’d found the body of my runaway slave and he thought I should know.’

Tactics was one key to winning a battle. Thoroughness another, he added.

‘I had no reason to doubt the woodsman’s account, but felt it sensible to send my steward to verify the discovery. Confirm once and for all that the corpse was Erinna’s.’

Once again, the Arch-Hawk’s celebrated attention to detail had paid off.

‘You can see how the woodsman was mistaken. The body in the grave had long hair, but it was black. Jet black.’ Cotta prised himself away from the soft, bulging sacks and strolled nonchalantly over towards the two women. Wooden boards reverberated dully under his tread, but Claudia could not hear for the drumming inside her head. ‘Erinna’s hair, as you can see,’ he said, stroking it, ‘is pure chestnut.’

Erinna did not flinch when he touched her. She just continued to stare at him, her white face quite without expression. Cotta, on the other hand, looked faintly amused. It took a couple of seconds for Claudia to realize that his overriding emotion was satisfaction. Immense satisfaction. Like his father before him, he was on the point of realizing his dream. And Claudia, goddammit, was the catalyst.

‘I recognized you from the Temple of Janus,’ he told Erinna, lifting her chin with his finger. ‘Oh, not at the time. Unfortunately.’

He’d been minding his own business, dutifully attending the Festival of the Lambs, he explained, when boredom was suddenly alleviated by a group of strolling players launching into an impromptu performance. Fortune had smiled on the Arch-Hawk that day. Had he not attended (and let’s be frank, he only went because the ceremony was less boring than his dear wife), but had he not attended, he would not have been able to put the pieces together.

‘It was, in fact, this magnificent cloak of chestnut hair that triggered my memory. The way you always eschewed fashion in favour of coiling it into a bun.’

Even though the girl outside the Temple of Janus had been veiled, when her tunic came away in Ion’s hands, Cotta had glimpsed the bun. At the time, it hadn’t registered as significant, but his memory was trained to recall details. Reading the result of his steward’s investigation, another snippet of gossip came back. About the troupe of strolling players who had been hiring in Frascati last October. At which point, everything fell into place.

‘Caspar’s Spectaculars,’ he said silkily. ‘Sponsored by one Claudia Seferius.’

‘Let her go,’ Erinna pleaded. ‘Please, Senator. Let her go.’

Claudia swallowed. ‘He can’t,’ she said thickly. Why the hell did Erinna think he was telling Claudia this?

‘She doesn’t know anything about the experiments,’ Erinna continued. ‘I’m the only one who knows the secret.’

Claudia’s teeth began to chatter, and not from the cold. Erinna still didn’t get it, did she? Sextus Valerius Cotta, that handsome Arch-Hawk of the Senate, had tried every trick in the book to make her disclose the formula that would blow the Senate House into three thousand pieces. In his storeroom back in Frascati, he’d tried bribing her, he’d made threats, and although he hadn’t tortured her, he had little hope that she would actually impart the knowledge he so desperately sought.

But there was a way. There was always a way. The solution was in front of him now.

From the depths of his toga he drew out a candle, lit the wick from the solitary oil lamp. Oh, god. Panic filled Claudia’s veins. Not burns. Oh, please. Anything but that. Please. Not burns.

Slowly, with the flame flickering like a yellow demonic tongue, Cotta advanced towards her. She tried to wriggle out of his range, just as Erinna, seeing what was about to happen, squirmed backwards as fast as she could. Cotta didn’t bother with his ex-slave girl. A strong hand reached out and grabbed Claudia’s hair, jerked her spine so hard against his thigh that she cried out. With his prisoner bound hand and foot, Cotta was still taking no chances. The boot pressing down on her calves was implacable.

Like a hare petrified into immobility by a night torch, Erinna stared open-mouthed at the tableau of horror. ‘D-don’t. I beg you, Senator. Don’t do this.’

He had, at last, found her weak point. Out of stubbornness, honour, who knows what, Erinna might hold out against whatever he threw at her. But few people can stand by while an innocent third party is tortured.

Cotta ripped away the cloth from Claudia’s shoulder.

‘Master, please. I beg you.’ Tears coursed down Erinna’s cheek. ‘She’s done nothing, let her go.’

‘If you give me the formula, you have my word, Erinna, that Claudia will go free.’

Meeting Erinna’s terrified eye, Claudia shook her head as far as Cotta’s grip would allow. His word meant nothing. He was going to kill them both anyway. No point in letting him take three hundred more lives. Or rather, three hundred and one.

‘No?’ Cotta sighed. ‘That is a pity, Erinna. A real pity.’

At first, Claudia felt nothing but the heat from the flame. Then an excruciating pain shot up her neck and she heard someone screaming. There was an acrid smell in her nostrils. A combination of burned linen and charred skin, and she thought she was going to be sick.

‘For gods’ sake, woman, do you think this gives me pleasure?’ Cotta rasped. ‘Erinna, I am going to get my formula in the end, so I beg you, the quicker you tell me, the easier it will be for her.’

In front of her, Erinna opened her mouth to speak.

‘The only thing you will tell him,’ Claudia said, amazed that there was no sign of fear in her voice, ‘is to go to hell. Understood?’

Tearful and terrified, Erinna didn’t know what to do. Claudia skewered her with her eyes. Finally, Erinna nodded. Turned her face up to Cotta. ‘No matter what you do, I will not give you the secret,’ she said sadly.

‘No?’ The Arch-Hawk wasn’t convinced. One burn was merely a start. There were the hands, yet, the soles of the feet, the breasts, the face, ah yes, the face. When Erinna saw Claudia’s pretty features melt like beeswax, she would talk.

He applied the candle to another part of her shoulder, and was surprised at how hard he had to grip the girl to keep her upright. Poor bitch, she didn’t deserve this. Too much pain for just one woman’s stubbornness. But his heart was hardened. One girl suffers, but millions of people gain. All the same. Cotta swallowed. It did not have to be like this—

‘For heaven’s sake, Erinna, have you no pity?’

The only reply was an animal whimper from deep in Erinna’s throat.

With her skin on fire, Claudia prayed. She didn’t know who to pray to in times like this, so she prayed to them all. To Diana the huntress, that she would strike Cotta dead with her arrows. To armoured, striding, strident Minerva, that she would smite him with her dagger to avenge her sisters. And, in desperation, to Lua, who wards off calamity.

‘Don’t make me do this, Erinna,’ Cotta growled, but there was no shake to the candle flame as he held it high to show her Claudia’s burns.

That was his mistake. In lifting the tallow, he revealed what Erinna had not been able to see before. That he was holding them prisoner on the upper floor of a warehouse. In the circle of light cast by the yellow flame, she saw the brown stone walls, an array of pulleys, winches, cogs and handles, hooks and ropes. More importantly she could see the edge of the platform on which the fleeces were stacked. Dropping away into nothingness—

Claudia watched the change on her face. Erinna’s beauty became suffused with a peace and radiance she had not seen before and in that terrible, heart-stopping instant, she realized what Erinna was planning.

*

By jumping, Erinna could not hope to save Claudia’s life, but she could save her from prolonged and hideous torment, and the Assembly and the Emperor would be safe. Death was the one thing Erinna did not fear. Every night and every day, she relived the moment when she rolled the bloodied corpse into its unmarked shallow grave. Now, with one final lurch, she could find the release that she craved.

Her expression was calm, her lips almost smiling, as she turned glistening eyes upon Claudia. She mouthed one word. ‘Sorry.’ Then launched herself over the side.

*

‘NO-O-O-O-O-O!’

The scream which followed was primal and shocking. Visceral in its intensity, deafening in its volume, the sound chilled Claudia to her marrow. It filled the warehouse, reverberated its wooden floorboards, jerked the winches into motion. She had never known a sound so animal, so gut-wrenching in its agony, that it could move machinery, but beside her, the rope was definitely swinging.

‘No-o-o-o-o-o-o!’

But screams can’t turn cogs, however primitive they might be. The only way machinery moves is when someone operates it, and Claudia’s second surprise was that the scream wasn’t coming from Cotta’s throat.

When Erinna threw herself off the edge, he had raced to the side of the platform and he, too, had been disorientated by the echoing yells. The Hades effect, Claudia realized. Just as she had expected the sound to have come from him, furious at having his plans thwarted, so Cotta had interpreted the scream to have been Erinna’s soul being wrenched from her body. In that moment of shock, he hadn’t understood that the reverberations were footsteps. That the pulleys were being operated by two strong hands.

That the scream was only the start of one man’s outpourings of grief.

Kneeling on the edge of the platform peering into the dark, he didn’t hear the swing of the winch. Only when he heard a hiss and a whoosh did the Arch-Hawk look round. Too late. The giant hook caught him square on the jaw. His neck snapped like a twig.

Claudia blinked. It had happened in seconds. Literally. Seconds. She couldn’t believe it.

One minute, Erinna was alive. The next—

And Cotta. A heartbeat ago he was burning her flesh with a flame. Now his handsome, blond head lay at an angle hideously out of line with the rest of his body.

How quickly human life could be extinguished. How precious that which had been spared…

Above, the hook ceased to swing.

Creak, creak, creak. Slowly the cranking of the machinery died away. Then finally, nothing.

Nothing, save a primeval howl.

Skyles. No one else would mourn Erinna like that.

Shaking uncontrollably, Claudia fell back against the fleeces, her face wet with tears. She was safe now. No more pain. It was finished. Over. Her life was spared. She could go home. Why, then, lying on this soft, fluffy cloud, did she feel no relief? Oh my god. She sat up.

‘Skyles! Skyles, quick.’

‘I’m coming,’ he sniffed. ‘Give me a minute.’

‘Not me, you big oaf. Erinna!’

For heaven’s sake, this was a wool warehouse. Up here was where the fleeces were stacked. Which meant downstairs was where they stored the wool. No wonder Cotta hadn’t roared with frustration. No wonder he had simply knelt at the edge of the platform, peering into the darkness below. He was the Arch-Hawk, the Arch-Tactician of military campaigns, for heaven’s sake. He would have planned for every contingency.

As if to confirm it, a low moan filtered up from below.

Skyles’ scream was no less loud than before. But this time it was a yelp of pure joy.