Prostitutes were offering their trade from the side of the street, calling out – almost heckling – the crowds of night-goers. They were not coy about their business, either – both men and women exposing themselves to anyone who might look their way. Their hands crawled up bare legs like insects. But one might see the inherent loneliness of such a business – the vacant expression, the hollow laughter. Tonight their work possessed a raw, animalistic nature; in fact, one couple was engaged in a feral transaction up against the walls of a tavern, either unaware or delighted that they were providing a spectacle.
Titiana laughed at all the goings-on, finding wonder in the sheer variety of offerings. We continued through this dreamlike neighbourhood, one that seemed utterly detached from the Tryum of daytime, and eventually down some steps, into a small underground tavern.
If all the chaos we had seen outside had been condensed into the large room, that would have been – almost – a sufficient description of the place. Surprisingly, those from the senatorial class mixing with the less fortunate didn’t seem to be the Tryum way. Among the soft light of a hundred lanterns, there were battered cushioned couches, amphorae full of wine, cheap food and generally people not wearing much in the way of clothing. Drinks were thrust into my hand, and I refused them; flesh flashed before my eyes. Both women and men made passes at me, but not the kind that one could take as a compliment. Smoke whirled around my head, a heady, herbal concoction. Despite remaining sober, the rest of the evening became a fast blur of images: expressions of numb ecstasy, Titiana kissing me in a darkened corner of a dingy tavern.
At what point the ghost came to me, it is difficult to say. Titiana had gone to find more drink and I was sitting on a stool in one of the rare quiet spaces, away from the music and other people, as I tried to clear my head from the fug of smoke and stench of spilt wine. If there was another partygoer in the room, they had probably passed out, or were sprawling on a couch, intoxicated on some herbal concoction.
Into this relative calm stepped the eyeless man I had seen in the tombs outside Tryum.
His hair was unkempt, his skin pale, his clothing in tatters, yet he moved with the confidence of someone who was doing very well for himself. I rose to meet him, losing my gaze in the vacant spaces within his head.
‘You are Drakenfeld?’ he rasped, barely audible in these surroundings.
‘What do you want?’
‘My wife,’ he replied.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I’m looking for my wife. Have you seen her?’
‘I don’t know who she is, nor do I know who you are.’
It is difficult to gauge the expressions of another when one cannot see their eyes, but nevertheless he seemed disappointed. There was something about his manner, his slumped shoulders, his slightly bowed head.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked.
‘The tombs,’ came his reply. ‘The mausoleums. I… came back from them.’
‘You rose from the dead?’ I asked, incredulous that the words even came from my mouth.
‘I was brought back. A woman greeted me, a rich woman.’ He proceeded to describe Senator Divran, and then his own life as it came back to him. He was the first to admit that he wasn’t entirely certain himself. Though he had no name, he claimed to have once been an important man in the city, a politician or senior administrator; he could not remember the name of the king he served under, nor could he recall his address. All he really remembered were patchy snippets of his life, echoes of his past, but with some clarity he recalled his wife. He asked me once again for my help. He said he had heard my name mentioned about the city as someone who could help the dead.
Who was this figure? Was he a ghost? Had Senator Divran returned him from the dead? I could not say precisely, but if the latter was the case, it wasn’t going to be easy to let him know that his wife had most likely died long ago.
My only suggestion was for him to go back to the mausoleums and scrutinize their facades in the hope that one of them would remind him of his wife – presuming she had been buried alongside him. He left me suddenly when he realized that I could be of little help, and disappeared into the crowd as quickly as he had come.
Had I imagined the whole thing? Had the heady smoke of the room gone to my head? It left open the question: if this ghost’s, or dead man’s, story was real, could Lacanta’s murder have truly been a supernatural act after all? Should Senator Divran be questioned once again?
This was senseless thinking. The ghost surely had nothing to do with the murder, which, as I said to Divran, had the marks of a living human all over it. Unless hard evidence steered me in another direction, I would continue my business with the living.
Much later, deep into the night, after I had driven the ghost from my mind as far as possible, I hauled myself out of the establishment and gasped the blissful, cooler night air. Titiana kissed my face and asked if I was enjoying myself, saying that this was how she liked to spend any free time she had. I couldn’t determine how truthful it was, and how much free time from her family she had.
She was drunk, she was falling over me and, occasionally, when she focused on me properly, she started to cry. Her behaviour was confusing: this was, more or less, what we’d done in our youth, but it didn’t seem the same any more, it didn’t seem as exciting as it used to, and Titiana wasn’t upset back then. She said that this was her life now, but she didn’t seem sincere about it; she said it as if it was a call for help rather than a statement of happiness.
Titiana had not sobered up by the time we returned home. She stumbled through the door and into my bedroom, where she collapsed on the bed and attempted to pull off her dress, all the while asking me to take her. She was not in control of her thoughts. With me almost sober, and Titiana in this state – nothing positive could ever come from such a union. So instead I pulled the blanket across her and kissed her brow before lying down exhausted alongside her.
As the ceiling slowly came into focus, I wondered, sadly, if the dead man would find rest tonight, or if I was right to be so sceptical of the supernatural as I had been through my life.
Suicide?
News of General Maxant’s suicide reached us not long after dawn.
A messenger had contacted several senators just before midday, including Senator Veron, who was present at my house, and delivered the tragic news. It had been an odd morning: Titiana had left again during the night, leaving only her impression in the pillow, and her scent within the ruffled bedsheets.
My morning had been spent organizing the new offices of the cohort, with Veron arriving purely to order Constable Farrum about like a slave; he grew so increasingly disdainful towards the man that I took the senator to one side and spoke of the importance of these men feeling valued if they were to do a decent job. The news concerning Maxant was very clear and very simple: the general had killed himself on the beach in front of his villa – a knife to his chest, his hands around the blade – and had been discovered by his servants first thing that morning. I stressed the urgency of getting to the scene of the incident before others could disturb it too much, and Veron immediately sent for horses so that we could ride out to the coast.