The gong rang with nine deep booms over in the temple of Apollo, announcing the ninth hour of the night across the dark cityscape. So the gong must have disturbed him. He’d been asleep five hours. Amazing that Masgava hadn’t come for him yet. Lucilia would be livid when he got back. He decided it might be a good idea now to cut his losses and spend the rest of the night in the warehouse.
He frowned.
Wait a moment. He’d heard the nine gongs for the hour. If he’d been woken by an earlier clang, that would make it the tenth hour at least, if not the eleventh. And he’d spent enough nights in this warehouse over the winter to know that by the tenth hour, the first faint stain of morning light was starting to show through the upper window, highlighting some of the beams in the roof.
Above was just as dark as below.
Logic began to tug at his tired brain. It was still dark, so from experience it could not be later than the ninth hour. And he had heard nine clangs, so that confirmed the precise time. Which meant that there had been no earlier gong. And that meant that something else had woken him.
Fronto the soldier was suddenly in charge again, pushing down the tired, miserable Fronto the Merchant and taking his place, alert and concerned. The hairs stood proud on the back of his neck.
The warehouse was pitch black and utterly silent. So silent he could hear the padding paws of that mangy animal Trojan, who belonged to a family across the road but had taken to the habit of urinating on the warehouse doors at every opportunity.
And something else.
He was not alone in the warehouse.
Thoughts ran through his head swiftly. Intruders. Clearly, it was intruders. Anyone official or friendly would have opened the door and called out, bearing a lamp or torch. Anyone skulking around in the darkness was up to no good. He listened carefully and was sure he could pick out more than three distinct footsteps at the far end of the warehouse. They were creeping around, but they seemed to be wearing heavy leather boots, and so even creeping they made plenty of noise. Fronto carefully, silently, reached down to his sandals, which had been unfastened for comfort, and slipped them off. With a nimbleness which he still owed to Masgava’s ongoing training and exercise program, he slipped out from the seat without nudging the table or the chair. He’d not made a single noise as he rose in the darkness. On the balls of his feet, he padded over to roof support, where he knew Masgava kept a handy length of ash for poking stuck pulleys in the ceiling. His fingers closed on the reassuringly seasoned wood.
Despite the near-complete darkness, his eyes were starting to pick out the faintest shapes of things. He heard a whisper of muttering in Greek across the warehouse, and then a crescent of golden light bloomed behind the racks of amphorae. He could see the shadows of two people thrown onto the wall in that warm glow. There were at least two more, still.
He hefted the staff, wishing he could twirl it to get the measure of its weight and balance, but that would be risking clattering it on a shelf or the floor or ceiling and giving the game away. Masgava had insisted that he learn as many different weapons as possible over the past three years, and it was moments like this he found himself once again grateful to the former gladiator for his enforced lessons.
Almost silently, he padded three shelf-bays towards the glow, ducking sideways into the gloom and protection of the aisle just as the golden glow filled the main hall of the warehouse, right to the table and chair where he’d so recently been in repose.
Thank you, decades of military instinct.
Damn it. At least five of them, he now reckoned as they moved in. The intruders seemed to have decided that the place was empty, and now they began to speak and a second lamp bloomed into life. Fronto was no past master at the Greek language. He couldn’t have written poetry or translated the great Gortyn codes, or suchlike. But his basic written and spoken Greek was as good as any high-born Roman with years of tuition under his belt.
‘Three each side,’ a hushed voice commanded, and Fronto felt his heart lurch. Six! No… seven. Even in an indistinct whisper, that was not a voice used to including himself in the action. That was a man giving orders to six others. He could hear faint muttering among the others. Some of them had strange accents, telling him that they were not native Massiliot, but probably Sicilians or Cretans or some such, come to Massilia for work. They were thugs or hirelings. Nothing more.
His deductions proved slightly askew as he heard a second strong voice telling the others to shut up. So… at least one other proper fighter. They would be the two to take down first, given the chance.
‘Check every aisle. Make sure we’re alone. Then get to work, but make sure you take only the valuable stuff. This has to look like a genuine theft.’
Fronto felt his blood surging and boiling. No name had been mentioned, but given that little slip, there was absolutely no doubt in his mind who was behind this ‘incident’.
He pressed himself back against the roof support, the ash pole vertical and pulled in tight. He watched the first two men pass, peering in half-heartedly, making only a cursory check for lurking figures and completely missing the Roman hidden behind the thick wooden pillar. On the assumption the three at the other side were moving at roughly the same speed, that would leave three men at the rear still to come. It was tempting to wait until everyone passed and then strike, but that was too dangerous. While moving now risked landing himself with enemies on both sides, if he waited, the more experienced men might well see him and he’d lose the element of surprise, ending up trapped in this aisle.
It was fifty-fifty whether that second authoritative speaker would be on this side of the warehouse or the other. He counted under his breath and heard the footfalls of the third man behind the pillar. Taking a silent breath, he stepped out from the support, levelling the staff as he moved. As the figure of the third man came into view, the iron-hard butt of the staff hit the man in the stomach, hard enough to burst organs. There was an explosive rush of air from the man’s mouth, almost masking the grunt of pain as the figure fell away with a clatter to the darkened floor.
He knew that the thug in charge would not be so foolish as to walk into the same position – that commanding voice belonged to a man who knew his business. And so, keeping as much of the initiative on his side as he could, he stepped around the corner into the main hall of the warehouse. The leader turned out to be too far away to attack, since he had stayed close to the entrance.
Fronto momentarily weighed up the value of running over and taking down the leader anyway, against the likelihood that the result would be him being brought low by the other five interlopers in short order and then beaten to death. Instead, he decided upon a path of creating as much chaos and confusion as possible. When a legion lost cohesion, men stopped listening to the calls of their cornicen and to their centurions’ whistles, and there was a true danger of complete failure. Such was all the worse when a force did not have the discipline of a legion to begin with. If he could keep them off-balance, the leader could not control them and Fronto would have a chance.
‘Over by the door!’ he shouted in a passable Massiliot Greek. Two of the hired morons turned to look at the second warehouse door, past the empty table, while one was already running back towards his boss. Fronto lashed out with the spinning staff and swept the running man’s feet from under him. As the lad fell with a squawk, his legs flailing up in the air, Fronto spun on his heel, allowing the staff to build up momentum as it circled until it struck the flailing legs with the crack of breaking bone.