“Did you tell her your name?”
“Of course, I introduced myself quite politely.”
“Did she recognize it?”
Gaius Julius smiled broadly. “Of course, but it is a common name, she had no inkling of who I truly am. Doubtless, if she thinks of it at all, she will assume that my family is of poor nature but great ambitions. Really, my Prince, who is going to think of me being meT
Maxian shook his head sharply. “Did she tell you her name? Was she, perhaps, a slave in the garb of one of the great houses?”
Gaius Julius paused, thinking. It was evident that he had not thought it important to remember the cognomen of his afternoon’s dalliance. By the wall, Abdmachus muttered something under his breath as he resumed painting.
Maxian had caught it, though, and repeated it aloud, his grim humor melting a little. “Husband to all the wives, and wife to all the husbands.”
“I have it,” said the dead man, now sitting up. “It was Christina, or Christiane, or something like that.”
Maxian snarled, his face contorted with rage. “Not Christina, but Krista. She wore an emblem of three flowers intertwined with the head of a ram. Her hair is wavy with curls and it falls just past her shoulder. She has deep-green eyes. She is a slave.”
Gaius Julius blinked in surprise. “That is the very woman!”
Maxian dragged the dead man up off the floor as if he weighed nothing. There was a blur of dim radiance along his arm, and he threw the dead man against the nearest wall. Gaius Julius, his mouth open in an O of surprise, crashed heavily against it and then slid down with a sickening crunch to the floor. The Prince stalked across to where the dead man lay, gasping, on the ground.
“Fool! You would bugger your way into our common destruction! That slip of a girl, all breezy ways and innocent desire, is the agent, the very eyes, of the mistress of the Imperial Office of the Barbarians!”
Abdmachus caught his breath and turned his full attention, at last, to the confrontation between the two men. Maxian had seemingly grown in the last little while. His rage was palpable in the room and the barely harnessed power that the Persian had tricked out of him in the tomb under the Via Appia was leaking into the air around him. The scrolls on the table rustled and glass tinkled in the other room. Despite the late-afternoon sun outside, within the long narrow room it had grown dark. Gaius Julius cringed on the floor, seeing his final and utter dissolution reflected in the enraged eyes of the Prince.
“Office… Office of Barbarians?” he wheezed.
“Yes,” Maxian bit off. “Her mistress, well known to me, is Anastasia de’Orelio, the so-called Duchess of Parma. She sits in the shadows behind the Emperor and pulls many strings. Though I have long accounted her a friend, both personally and politically, she knows nothing of what I have discovered and is unlikely to apprehend it even if I did tell her. Further, since I have accepted the assistance of our Persian compatriot here, I could now be well accounted a traitor. Coupled with my mysterious absence of several weeks, I expect that she has her agents about, quietly looking for me.”
Gaius Julius flinched away from the Prince and his scathing voice but pulled himself back to his feet, leaning against the wall. His voice was quiet, showing restored composure. “Enough. I am no stranger to plots and politics, boy. You can destroy me, but then you will not have my skills or service or leverage. If this de’Orelio is on the lookout for us, then we will have to move, disappear. I can deal with anyone, man or girl, that is watching us.”
Maxian continued to stare at him, anger smoldering in him.
Gaius Julius stepped away from the wall and made a little, hesitant half bow. “Apologies, Prince Maxian, I did not mean to endanger our enterprise. I will make sure that it does not happen again.”
Abdmachus held his breath for a moment, but then the Prince nodded and turned away, going back to the books on the table. Gaius Julius looked after him for a moment, then shrugged. He had plenty of perspective on the matter; he had already been dead once.
“Ah, my lord,” Abdmachus said.
Maxian looked up, his face a rigid mask.
“My lord, Gaius Julius-for all his faults-is right about one thing. We must move from these rooms. Not immediately, but surely within the week.”
“Why so?” the Prince growled, but his anger was beginning to fade.
“Here, my lord.” Abdmachus brushed the section of wall behind him. The symbols that he had been drawing were pale and faded. Under his fingertips, the plaster shaled away from the wall in a big chunk, clattering to the floor. Behind it, the lathes of the wall were revealed, corroded and eaten by termites and worms.
“You see? The building itself is being eroded by the power of the curse. Soon the walls and ceiling will collapse. I have checked the upper floors-they are no longer safe to walk on. There is a sewer main under the northern corner of the house. I fear that the mortar of its walls is weakening as well. If we remain, the building may soon collapse.”
Maxian sighed and slumped back in his chair. The weight of the effort was telling upon him. Each day some new complication arose, and still they had found nothing of note in the old books and records. The public histories of the early Empire were filled with nothing but praise for the first Emperor. The other records were all horrifically mundane-the daily accounts of clerks and scribes. Any books of sorcery or magic from the dawn of the Empire were well hidden away by the thaumaturges of the time or their current contemporaries. Maxian was sure that a single circumstance had precipitated this chain of events, but so far there was no sign of it. Further, there must be some mechanism, or several, that promulgated the curse through the centuries. Again, there was nothing that had stood out from the reams of dry parchments and papyrus.
“Then we will have to move. Where to?” The Prince’s voice was exhausted.
Abdmachus frowned now; this was an important consideration. Slowly he spoke. “Someplace near the city, but not within it. The curse is too strong within the walls. Someplace that is free from this influence… I don’t know. The suburbs are unknown to me.”
Gaius Julius, still rubbing the knot on the back of his head, spoke up. “If I understand you, magician, it should be a place that was not built by Romans. Perhaps someplace where the owner used imported laborers?”
Maxian slowly turned and stared at the dead man for a long moment. Then he smiled a little. “Abdmachus, our dead friend has the right of it. We need a villa or a summer house outside of the city, one built by a foreign ambassador, or merchant, or exile. Somebody that wanted a taste of home in their new surroundings. But it will have to be built by foreign hands, perhaps even with materials from beyond Italy or at least Latium. Can you find such a place while I pack the books and other materials?”
Gaius Julius raised a hand. “I will find the place, Prince. Abdmachus has important chanting and mumbling to get to. I will start this very evening.”
Maxian nodded. They needed a safe haven.
“I feel three and a half kinds of a fool, Prince Maxian,” Gaius Julius said as the two of them topped the rise on their horses. Maxian was riding a dappled chestnut he had borrowed from the stables maintained by his brother. The dead man was riding a skittish black stallion. Though he was obviously a masterful rider, the horse was tremendously nervous around him. Behind and below them, the vast sprawl of the city filled the valley of the Tiber. They were northeast of the city, not too far from the famous estate of the Emperor Hadrian at Tivoli. Here, low rolling hills rose up from the swampy bottomlands toward the distant spine of the Apennines.
The road they followed was in poor repair. The stone blocks were ridged by grass and some trees had sprouted at the edge of the road, cracking the carefully fitted stones. Still, the air was clear and the smell of orange trees filled the air with a heady scent. Maxian felt better already, just being out of the city. The contagion exerted ever more pressure on him now, and he felt it as a bone-deep weariness. They came to a high dark-green hedge and followed it through a tunnel of overarching trees to an ancient gate. Maxian pulled up, surprised to see that there were two sphinxes flanking the gateway.