He remained expressionless, as motionless as the sculpted satyr behind him, staring fixedly at the world he had built in his imagination.
“This cannot be,” he said. “The will of the gods shall be done. These men have come to join us! General Felix, kill the Lord Chamberlain immediately!”
Agnes glanced rapidly around. She tugged at Troilus’ arm. “Hurry!”
John expected her to bolt back into the labyrinth through which he had followed her. It would not be difficult to escape in the maze beneath the city.
But Troilus refused to move, even as Felix strode forward to grasp him.
Now he was as good as in the hands of Justinian’s torturers.
Agnes looked around again.
John saw her tense.
Flee, Zoe!
Where had the unworthy thought come from?
Had John spoken it aloud?
No. Or if he had, the girl had not heard.
Agnes did not move. She squared her shoulders. She had chosen to stay with Troilus.
John moved to her side. “Agnes, if-”
Her hand shot out and her fingernails raked down John’s face.
“Filthy eunuch bastard!” she screamed and spat at him.
As the first of the emperor’s men reached the group and formally placed the treasonous pair under arrest, John felt blood welling up and running down his cheek.
Agnes’ eyes remained dark and cold as she was escorted away with Troilus.
Epilogue
“There are some points on which I am not clear,” Anatolius said, taking another honey cake as gusts of wind rattled the dark panes of the window in John’s study.
John poured more wine. He noticed Anatolius kept his eyes averted from the wall mosaic as he munched on the cake, dropping crumbs on his lap. Was he trying to avoid looking at the lewd deities revealed by the flickering lamplight or at the mosaic girl, the innocent cause of so much trouble?
“What is it that puzzles you?”
“For a start, your foolhardy behavior in following that girl back into an underground maze. Suppose Justinian had refused the request I took to him, to send a contingent of armed men, or they had taken too long to arrive? I would’ve put your apparent stupidity down to that knock on the head except, and as an old friend I say this without rancor, you were behaving as if you had been knocked over the head even before you were actually attacked.”
“From time to time it occurred to me it was possible I was being deliberately herded in certain directions,” John replied. “I had obviously been led, in the first place, to the body that was supposed to be Agnes. Had it been meant as a warning to me? Yet the tattoo could have so easily been removed with a sharp knife. Why dye the corpse in an attempt to hide it? It seemed an overly dramatic touch. Then again, there is no guarantee criminals will necessarily follow the most logical course of action.”
“Particularly a callow pair acting out a mime put together from their own delusions.”
“More a tragedy than a mime, Anatolius. At any rate, I decided if I allowed myself to be hooked and pulled in, eventually I could grasp the line and use it to haul out those responsible for the death of Zoe, as I thought of her.”
Anatolius stared at his friend. “The fish capturing the fishers! I never saw you as a fish before!”
John chuckled.
“But wasn’t it a strange coincidence that the man who was chasing poor Vigilia turned out to be Felix?” Anatolius demanded.
“Not at all. It was the two of them arriving at the theater at different times that suggested the plan to the conspirators. Felix tells me he is tormented by the thought had Vigilia not had that remarkable tattoo she would not have died so her corpse could be presented as that of Zoe. Agnes’ tattoo of course was merely a copy drawn on her flesh, probably with henna.”
“Is he also tormented by the thought that if it weren’t for you he would have lost his head, thanks to his treasonable actions?”
“He insists his intent was always to keep an eye on the plotters by staying close to them, in order to make arrests at the appropriate time.”
“And you believe him?”
“Felix has said very little about his role in the matter. It may be right up to the last he wavered between treason and his duty. After all, he’s indicated more than once he considers his work at the palace an insult to a military man and that he would prefer to be fighting for the empire.”
“From what you were telling me earlier,” Anatolius said, “Felix seems to have spent a lot of time following you around at the behest of the conspirators. I suppose that he must have been protecting you as well. I would advise him to curb his restlessness in future, John.”
“Felix may harbor ambitions, but he is not a fool. Even so, I do wonder if his discontent will eventually be his downfall.”
“Affairs of the heart coupled with over-indulgence in wine, as is often the case, can turn anyone into a fool, and Felix has a weakness for both. Luckily he tipped the scales of justice the right way when he learned of Vigilia’s murder.”
“I had deduced the identity of the murdered girl by then, although I didn’t know her name, and I realized Felix must have been unaware of her fate. In connection with this substitution of one woman for another, as I reminded you, Dedi’s trick with the vanishing skull worked because it wasn’t really a skull. Then there was the stylite who was made of metal.”
Anatolius frowned. “But why didn’t this Stephen, the acolyte you mentioned, realize something was wrong when the stylite he served didn’t appear in public for a few days?”
John explained he had learnt from Stephen that the stylite was in the habit of withdrawing into the rough shelter on his platform for lengthy periods of time, and since the food offerings sent up were eaten, by Troilus as it turned out, there was no reason to think further about the matter.
“Thus,” he continued, “this allowed the boy to remain hidden until the men left on guard in the square finally returned to the palace, at which point Menander was able to investigate the supposed miracle and having heard his remarkable story rescue Troilus. At the same time, he substituted one of his automatons for the dead stylite, who in a grisly jest against the official religion became part of the centaur in his shop. Presumably the rest of the body is hidden somewhere in the subterranean warren.”
Anatolius said this seemed to fit the circumstances.
“And once I deduced how Troilus had been saved from discovery, it made me see how easily everything fit together, provided the dyed corpse in the cistern and the prostitute who fled from Theodora’s convent were indeed the same person-but not Agnes.”
“You might call it fitting everything together easily, John. Others might regard it as more of a leap in logic. And what about the dye?”
“Purchased or stolen from Jabesh, whose shop is close to the theater. It was probably its proximity that suggested that part of the plan. When Agnes was leading me back to Troilus’ shop we ran past what I thought was a fountain basin filled with rust-coloured water, but in fact it must have been the red dye used when they were busy preparing the unfortunate Vigilia’s body for its appearance in the cistern.”
“And then there’s Menander,” Anatolius mused. “Now, I do have a notion how that was worked. With artisans repairing your bath mosaic coming and going and only Peter to keep an eye on them, Menander’s body must have been smuggled into your house in a barrel. Doubtless it would be taken to be full of tesserae or plaster like the others, if indeed anyone had seen it brought in. That would be toward evening, like as not, so Menander could be tipped into the bath just after Figulus and his workers had left for the day.”
“Indeed. Figulus wasn’t a party to the plot. As a matter of fact he only agreed to finish work on the bath after I convinced him he would not be stumbling upon any bodies in it.”
“I can see Figulus wasn’t necessarily involved, but what about Petronia? Could she really have known as little as she claimed? She was once a member of court, after all, or so she said.”