Maxian turned and his face was dark, turned away from the lantern light. “Yes. Subtle and almost unnoticeable- unremarked by anyone because Romans do not, as a matter of course, drink their water straight. Anyone who did notice the taste would assume that it was river water. So! Another piece of the puzzle.”
Gaius Julius stood up and stretched, groaning at the ache in his old bones. “Not the whole answer then? Is lead poisonous? Would it cause these things that you see?”
Abdmachus cleared his throat. “I doubt not that this much lead in a man’s organs is cause for concern and may have hastened his death, but the thing that we are seeking is sorcerous in its base nature. Lead, my dear general, is most assuredly inimical to sorcery.”
“He’s right, Gaius. Generally when you desire to prevent sorcery from affecting something you wrap it or stop it up with lead. It is a neutral metal, neither positive nor negative in influence. The unseen powers slide off of it like water off glass.”
Gaius Julius’ answer was interrupted by a sudden bark of laughter from Abdmachus. Both the Prince and the dead man turned, their faces pqzzled, to look at the Persian.
“All this time…” Abdmachus put his hands to his face, though his body shook with laughter. “All this time, we wondered and argued and plagued the gods with our pleas for knowledge…”
“All this time-what?” Gaius Julius snapped.
Abdmachus held up a hand and pinched his nose to stop giggling. “All this time, my dear fellow, the Kings of Persia have made one unceasing demand upon the magi-why is the Roman Legion immune to sorcery? Have you not considered it yourselves? Rome marches out without sorcery and nearly conquers the world-smashing Egypt, a veritable den of wizards-crushing the remains of Alexander’s empire, breaking the backs of the Gaels and their druids, the Germans and their witchmen. Who thinks of a Roman sorcerer?”
“No one!” Gaius Julius huffed. “Sorcery is the work of weak Easterners and Greeks. Roman spirit conquered the world!”
Maxian laid a hand on the dead man’s shoulder and shook his head slightly.
“You think that each soldier marched out from Rome with a belly full of lead,“ he said quietly, watching the little Persian. ”Each man carried, all unknowing, a puissant shield against the wizardry of his enemies.“
“Yes,” Abdmachus said, his face weary. “Workings and patterns that could lay waste to whole nations of warriors fail or falter when directed at the ranks of a Roman army. I am a fool not to think of it before. Even some of your weapons are made of lead… all innocently impervious.”
The dead man rubbed the stubble of beard that had accumulated while he had been passing on sleep and rest for the pleasures of digging in body yards and rubbish dumps. “Well, all that aside, do the bodies show the influence of this ‘dark power’ that you two can see pervading the city?”
Maxian breathed deep and sattdown in the high-backed chair again. His head was splitting again, this time with a fatigue-induced ache. Though he felt stronger than ever after the ill-remembered events in the Appian tomb, the kind of detail work that he had done with the two bodies carried its own price.
“The old man’s body carries it like a mother cat her kittens. It hides in his blood and crawls, unseen, along his bones. It seems… it seems to be almost a part of him. The African has none of it. He is a clean slate.”
“Again, something tied to the city, to Rome,” Abdmachus said. “And you? Could you find it in you as well?”
“Yes,” Maxian said, his face drawn with fatigue. “As strong, or stronger, than the old man. It seems to be quiescent now, but I fear that it is waiting for the opportune moment to come out and destroy me somehow. I could try removing it from my body, perhaps here, where it is attenuated by this foreign building. I could succeed…” He shook his head to try to dispel the gloom that threatened to overwhelm him.
“Odd,” the Persian said. He picked up his note tablets and began shuffling through them. “Pardon me if I pry, but you were born in the provincial city of Narbo, if I remember correctly. You have come only recently to Rome-no more than, what, twelve years ago? Yet you say that you.show as much effect of this curse as a man who has lived in the city all his life. This augurs that the curse is not borne by something specific to the city of Rome at all.“
Maxian considered this-it could be true. But if so, then what carried the curse? Something that affected men thousands of miles apart, yet possibly only within the confines of the Empire. What commonality did they hold that subjected them to this?
He and Abdmachus continued talking and the afternoon whiled itself away. Gaius Julius took the opportunity to slip away and sleep in the shade of the cedar trees in the garden. They would argue for hours, he knew, and never realize that he was absent. The sun was hot, and the afternoon still and quiet. He yawned mightily. Even a six-hundred-and-forty-year-old needs a nap now and then, he thought.
Krista crept through the wild irises and lilies that grew on the northern side of the house like a slinking cat. She had traded her bright shift for a dusty gray tunic, nondescript and already worn. Her feet were bare, though the calluses that she had acquired on the hard floors of the house of de’Orelio served her well as she moved through the overgrown bower. Her long hair was tied back behind her head. She had left the broad-brimmed straw hat she favored for going out in the sun back at the tree line. Coming to an old aisle in the garden, she peered out from the high grass. There was no one to be seen, or heard. She darted across to the foundation wall that held up the northern end of the portico.
Again she paused, listening. Very faintly from inside the house, she could hear the banging of a hammer and chisel on stone. Well, that’s at least one of them, she muttered to herself, under her breath. Fear churned slowly in her belly-fear not only of being caught by the men here at the house but also of what would happen to her if she was not able to complete this excursion before the Duchess no ticed that she had been on her trip to the flower market in the Forum Boarium for a very long time. Luckily, no one had bothered to tell the stable master that she was no longer taking the white pony out to the hills with Sigurd. It was tied off to a tree in a field almost a half mile away, downhill.
The prospect of being seriously whipped or even losing a foot for running away did not please her at all, but she was bone-certain that the pretty Prince and his foreign companions were up to something dangerous. She had wrestled with her feelings for the Prince on the long ride up from the city and had come to the sobering conclusion that though he was quite nice, for a Prince of the Empire, and seemed to like her quite a bit, if he was up to something that would hurt the Duchess, then he would have to pay for it. This digging up of bodies and carting them about secretly put her on edge. That and the odd feeling she had gotten about the old man she had waylaid in the Archives. He looked like a grandfather, but he had been far too active in their little tryst than he had a right to be. His eyes and skin were funny too. She had dreamed bad dreams about him for a week after that.
She pattered down the line of the portico wall, keeping her head low, to the end. There she peeked out and saw that the back garden was also empty. The sharp crack-crack of the chisel continued to echo from inside. She glanced around again. Twenty steps and she could get up the. stairs and inside, or maybe she should climb this little wall and go in through the portico?
An iron clamp suddenly closed on “her left arm and a heavy hand, smelling of freshly turned dirt and worse, closed over her mouth. She nearly screamed, but twisted aside instead and lashed out with a long brown leg. Her heel caught something soft and fleshy and there was a sharp grunting sound behind her. The clamp released on her arm and she darted away from the wall. Her heart pounding with fear and her veins afire, she sprinted off down the hill, leaping over the broken fountains and the scattered bushes. A rock, thrown with a keen eye, clipped her on the side of the head as she vaulted the crumbling brick wall at the bottom of the garden, and she tumbled, senseless, down the hillside to crash into a rosebush. The last thing she heard were boots clattering over the wall.