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?’