'Why don't you close your eyes, dear?' Claudia was anxiety personified. 'Rest a while?'
The question may have sounded solicitous to priestly ears, but the thief wasn't fooled. Substitute mouth for eyes, was the message. Bitch, she mouthed back, when Zer's head was turned, but Flea wasn't really sorry she was on this trip. It was kinda fun, tagging along with Claudia. She saw things she'd not normally get to see, people she'd never normally meet — well, not unless you could call cutting their purses a meeting! And it bloody hurt, binding up yer tits, it was nice to wear a proper breastband for a change, something which supported 'em, made them comfy, and besides, casing this place sounded cool!
She leaned her spine against the woodwork and considered the heavy, grey clouds overhead. There was this bloke, a master thief, who she could approach when she got back to Rome. He was that bloody smart, this bloke, he'd be able to fence the Emperor's personal seal!
The trap joggled along, its cargo of humans and bits and pieces for the commune bumping in time with the wheels. Cauldrons, griddles, in fact lots of iron stuff, she noticed. Three rolls of linen. A sack of hemp, a barrel of pitch, a block of salt — stuff they weren't able to produce on site. Can't imagine what Flavia would want with them. If it were Flea, she'd stick with Claudia, you'd get a ride and half with her, but there was no accounting for tastes, and — funnily enough — she was looking forward to seeing Flavia again. Talk about opposites attracting! But they'd got on well, Flavia and her. An instant rapport, although what Claudia would say when she copped hold of her, Flea didn't like to think, and Flavia deserved it, too. Narking should be punished. She should not have shopped Junius to the rozzers, that was out of order, that. Especially when she, a rich man's brat, would know it entailed certain death.
Idly, Flea fondled Doodlebug's floppy ears and wondered what it would take for Claudia to let her have him for keeps.
She shifted the dead weight of the sleeping pup and glanced at the creepy priest and his pair of followers. Barmy, them two. Pity they weren't wearing jewellery, she'd have whipped it off them in no time, gormless twonks wouldn't even notice! But there'd be stuff at this commune to nick and sell on, she'd stake her life on it. Flea's thoughts settled on the thief master in Rome. Play your dice right, girl, and you could make serious dosh out of this.
As it happened, they were trading in a very different currency in Rome.
Deep inside the dungeons — converted stone quarries which ran underneath Silversmith's Rise — the heat was fiercesome, the stench appalling and the Dungeon Master held half a peach under his nose as Orbilio's steward rattled off a list of his son's misdemeanours. The Dungeon Master listened attentively, amazed by both the range of his son's proclivities and the fact that Marcus Cornelius knew so much about them.
'All he is asking,' the steward concluded, 'is that you let the Gaul go in return for your son's transgressions being, shall we say — overlooked.'
The Dungeon Master considered the steward. A Libyan. A foreigner. A wog. And held the peach that bit closer to his florid nostrils. It was true, then, the rumour that Orbilio was under house arrest, else he'd have come down here personally. Orbilio wasn't the type to be put off by a bit of a stink! Carefully, the Dungeon Master made some holding remark while his mind worked gymnastics, then said (with a firm handshake), 'Tell Orbilio I'll do my best for the Gaul.'
He waited until the Libyan had left before strolling down the rank, stinking corridors to where shackled prisoners languished, raged, pleaded or sobbed against the implacable stone quarry walls. Strangely, Junius the Gaul had done none of these things. No protest, no struggle. In fact, the Dungeon Master believed he had not spoken one word since his arrest. In the spluttering light of a reed brand, the jailer studied the impassive face of the slave who'd been caught red-handed wearing the toga and noted that in spite of the filthy conditions, the intolerable air, the heat, the oppression, the beatings, hard blue eyes stared levelly back. The Dungeon Master tossed a ring of keys from hand to hand. Not a bloody flicker.
'Cocky bastard, ain't yer?' The type who gives the crowd good value for money when it comes to public execution.
Taking a good, long look at the Gaul made the warden's decision easier.
He sighed and wondered how it was that his son, his own flesh and blood, had become such a thoroughly bad lot. Where had they gone wrong, him and the boy's mother? More importantly, perhaps, where would it end? At this rate, someone would die, or at the least end up seriously injured. The warder wiped a hand over his face. What kept the scandal hushed up was an agent of the Security Police who wished to trade the life of a cocky young Gaul. No contest, was it? A half-smile lifted the Dungeon Master's top lip. Gaul… He sniffed the ripe peach. Yes, indeed. Now, were his son to leave, say, tomorrow for Gaul, or Iberia, anywhere distant, there would be no case to answer here, would there? His own position as Dungeon Master would not be compromised and whichever way the wind might then blow for Orbilio, the investigator's wings would be clipped.
The Dungeon Master looked at the scroll listing tomorrow's executions.
And patted it.
Who was he to deny the crowd a worthy competitor?
The Clerk of the Dungeons, delivering yet another batch of paperwork to the Dungeon Master, studied the execution roster, which seemed to be growing longer by the minute. Must be the heat, he reasoned. Tempers fray, feuds boil over, and it can only get worse, now the cloud cover's low. And wasn't that thunder he'd heard in the distance?
The Clerk toyed, just for a fraction of a second, with confiding in the Dungeon Master, man to man, as it were, that he owed Orbilio a favour for the time when he… ahem. Well, he would not mention the actual nature of the debt — not to this burly, tough ox — but the point was, he could perhaps let drop that he owed someone a favour, and that if the Dungeon Master could perhaps see his way clear to excusing a certain young Gaul…
Uh-uh. The fat bastard was more likely to throw him to the tigers as well, for trying to bribe an officer of the Empire!
Nevertheless, as he deposited the product of what some called bureaucracy, others a meticulous attention to detail, on the warder's cluttered desk, the Clerk genuinely regretted that he had not been able to repay the favour that he owed.
In his hidden cave high above the valley, Seth washed himself thoroughly and regarded Berenice. He was wondering now whether he had been right to make her his favourite. Look at her, the bitch. Slumped. Not so much as a shudder of protest when he ran his hands over her, not a ripple of revulsion in the engagingly innovative way he took her.
'God knows, I've tried, Berenice,' he said wearily.
A few tricks that he knew, plus a few more he'd invented, but pain no longer made any impact.
'You can't blame me, if I find myself a new favourite.'
One thing, though, it wouldn't be Flavia. Seth had watched the new arrival carefully, quickly marking her as a firm candidate for his dinner table. She was not the type to make friends easily and that was good, because once they bonded, these girls, there was no chance of picking off one of a crowd. He took loners. Misfits among the misfits. Girls whose abrupt departure no one noticed, much less grieved over, and this Flavia was a perfect candidate — indeed, Seth had already allocated a mask. The vulture. Appropriately ungainly, appropriately ugly, but then her face wasn't important. Only her expressions mattered to him, her reaction to his deviant attentions.
All the same, the Dark One wouldn't choose a lump like that for his consort in the afterlife! He really wished Berenice had tried harder today. Outside, thunder roared like the Minotaur.
'It's your own fault,' he said, 'that you're displaced.'