“And you’re sure you didn’t see Leukos here before he was found dead in the alley?”
“I’m certain. I would have-” Darius’ reply was interrupted by a shriek from upstairs. He leapt up, an erupting volcano. “Someone’s hurting one of the girls!”
He pounded for the stairs but had barely set sandal to step when a terrified, half-dressed girl flung herself downstairs into his arms. She clung to him, sobbing.
“There now, Helena.” His voice was surprisingly tender. “Show him to me and I’ll…. “
“No,” wailed the girl louder. “It’s not me. It’s Berta!”
When John reached the second floor cubicle that reeked of perfume, he saw Berta reclining languidly on her bed, her short tunic hiked up teasingly. Half leaning against the wall, she stared wide eyed, as if surprised by the girls who crowded around her doorway, whimpering and exclaiming over the discovery.
Berta could no longer be anyone’s wife.
She was dead.
John pushed through the girls in the doorway. He could see the mark of a powerful hand on Berta’s slim neck.
“Strangled,” he muttered to Darius.
Darius began to snarl a string of oaths, biting them back as Isis arrived from downstairs.
“Who would do this to one of my girls?” the madam wailed.
The room contained little, John thought as he glanced around. Little except perhaps the dreams any young girl might spin. There was a bed, its coverings rumpled. Berta had been a slight girl, obviously unable to put up much of a struggle against her attacker. On a table nearby, the wine and sweetmeats awaiting visitors were undisturbed beside a few pots of makeup and a jar of perfume. The water clock in the corner, John noted, was still nearly full. Had she filled it in anticipation of a client?
“Felix! Stay back!” Darius warned a newcomer.
The excubitor captain pushed past to stoop over the girl’s body. He was silent but tears streamed down his bearded face. He was familiar with the death of fighting men on the field of battle, but this was a much more terrible scene to contemplate.
“Mithra,” he entreated his god softly, “so you send a stealthy murderer to my lover? I wonder, would the Christian’s god be so cruel?”
“Zurvan!” Darius swore with belated caution. “Who’s guarding the front door?”
John heard him pound away, but did not follow.
There was something unnatural in Felix’s strangely calm tone, as if his lips were forming words of their own volition while his brain ignored their content.
Then he howled. It was a wolf’s howl, a battle cry, a sound of pain and fury. The girls clustered in the doorway began to scream. Some fled hysterically down the hall to their rooms.
Felix stopped, turned away from the bed, and left the room in grim-faced silence, having paused just long enough to adjust Berta’s displaced tunic to cover her decently.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Excited shouts greeted Cornelia as she and Europa walked into the courtyard of the Inn of the Centaurs. Unlike at the Hippodrome, the shouts were not directed at Europa. The crowd was clustered around a circle inscribed in the dirt.
“My money’s on my plump friend!” cried a rotund man Cornelia guessed was the innkeeper Kaloethes from descriptions she’d been given by members of the troupe. He clutched a quail.
The man the innkeeper addressed resembled a quail himself. He was short and soft looking and wore a dalmatic covered with feathers.
Cornelia halted. “Let’s see what this game is about. It might be useful to the troupe.”
“That bird’s better fit for the table than winning you gold,” jeered a young man dressed as a charioteer. He was as short as the feathered man but more muscular.
“We’ll let the Master Quail Filliper decide that,” Kaloethes replied. He bent over with a grunt and placed his bird on a board in the center of the ring. It stood there blinking stupidly.
The filliper made a show of shaking his hands as if to limber them, sending a few pinfeathers flying off his peculiar garment. He bent forward with an expression of keen concentration and snapped a finger sharply against the quail’s head.
The quail instantly fluttered out of the circle and wobbled over toward the women. Europa giggled and scooped the disoriented creature up. “What a silly game!”
“Lost again, Kaloethes,” said the charioteer. “Tomorrow I’ll bring my bird. It’s so well-trained it sits on the board as if it was nailed there!”
“Hand over the bet,” the filliper ordered.
The innkeeper glared as coins changed hands. “One more wager! I have another quail and I’ll wager both birds it won’t stir if you kick it in the beak.”
“You’re a man who never learns from experience. I’ll double your wager.”
“Done!” Kaloethes went to the door of the inn and Cornelia and Europa followed. Europa handed him the still groggy bird. “Here’s your quail back. Better luck next time.”
“He’s lucky I don’t feel like plucking him or he’d go into the stew pot within the hour,” Kaloethes growled.
“We’ve come to talk to the bull-leaping troupe staying here,” Cornelia said.
“Oh, that bunch? They’re somewhere about the city.” He vanished inside and emerged with a new quail, noticeably less plump then the first. He frowned at Cornelia. “Still here? I haven’t seen those rascals. What’s your business with them?”
“That’s for their ears.”
“Ah, that kind of business is it? They have the first room on the second floor.”
Without waiting for a response Kaloethes strode back to the ring in the dirt, brandishing his new avian champion. “He can’t wait to pluck your coins,” he told the filliper, as he sat the quail on the board. He grinned. “Try to beat that, my friend.”
The filliper went through his routine of waggling his hands and shedding feathers. He bent, snapped his finger against the quail’s head.
The quail fell over on its side.
“Still in the circle,” crowed Kaloethes. “I win!”
The filliper reddened with rage. “It’s dead!”
“Nothing in the rules about the bird having to be alive.” Kaloethes extended his hand for his winnings.
The filliper leapt forward and grasped him by the throat.
The charioteer took a step toward the fighters as if ready to break them apart, but he was saved the effort.
Cornelia, standing near the inn door, was almost knocked over by the cursing Fury that burst forth.
“You fool! You’ve been losing wagers again!” screamed the innkeeper’s wife. “You ought to be a magician! You can make coins disappear faster than anyone I know!”
She belabored both men with her fists. They retreated into the circle with the dead quail.
“Excuse me. If it’s magick you want, I can show you an excellent example.” The voice was quiet yet somehow, like magick, it cut through the hubbub. The speaker, a wizened ancient, got up from the bench beside the fountain.
Hadn’t Cornelia noticed the bench when she and Europa arrived? Why hadn’t she seen the old man sitting there?
Mistress Kaloethes turned her attention from the cowed men. “No! We’ll have no more trouble today, Ahasuerus. Off with the lot of you!”
She made shushing motions and the crowd began to disperse, grumbling.
“Come on,” Cornelia told Europa. They went into the inn and up to the second floor. There was no one in the troupe’s room. She rifled through satchels. “Not here!”
“What are you searching for?” It was Kaloethes, suspicious and out of breath, after running upstairs.
“Our costumes. We thought our colleagues had inadvertently packed them with their clothes,” Cornelia said.
When she and Europa went downstairs they found Mistress Kaloethes seated at the table with the man she had called Ahasuerus.
“Where did you get that egg?” Mistress Kaloethes was demanding of him.
“From the kitchen this morning,” Ahasuerus replied.
“What? If my husband doesn’t wager this place away you’ll steal it!”