“How do you know that?” Batiatus asked, shutting the curtain on Varro.
“Timarchides admitted as much himself when I went to parley with the witch. He spoke of her overpowering Verres, and thence proceeding to her murders.”
“Verres unlocked the door to her cell? It was him? While tormenting the Getae girl. Successa did not name him, but if that is the case…”
The bearers came to a halt before the lone house of the undertakers, far from any other dwelling, set within wide-set grounds of ponds and orchards.
“Business is good, I see,” Cicero commented.
“Death is sure investment, one with guaranteed buyers,” Batiatus said with a shrug, swinging his legs out of the litter.
Cicero chuckled.
“Stay in the litter,” Batiatus said. “We shall but be a moment.”
“Considering last night’s events,” Cicero said, “I would feel safer accompanying you and your bodyguard.”
“Of course. Come, then.”
Batiatus advanced through the gateway, seeing no sign of the skulls and bones that would characterize the carvings in a cemetery. Instead, the decoration of the undertakers’ residence was all flowers and beasts, gods and piety. And yet, the grounds seemed unkept, the hedges untrimmed. Apples, newly ripe but worm-eaten, were scattered on the flagstones.
“Where are their slaves to tend to such disarray,” Batiatus murmured, as the trio reached the house. “They take such pride in disposition of dead, but not their own residence.”
A gust of wind tugged at their clothes, causing a shutter to slam in on itself and creak open again. Varro reached out to stay his master, drawing his sword.
“What is it, Varro? Has the Getae witch infected your mind? Now you see the future, too?”
“Not the future, dominus. A trouble past.”
Varro advanced slowly toward the house.
Batiatus began to register the signs of a dwelling deserted. Torn curtains, damp from earlier storms, flapped in the gusts of the wind. The door stood open. The ponds were not merely untended, but overflowing; their drains clogged with weeds and fallen leaves, their waters forming a new-made stream that trickled between the flower beds, toward the gutter in the road outside.
With the tip of his sword, Varro pushed the door open and peered inside.
The house was arranged around a central atrium, open to the sky, with a colonnade around its edge leading to the various rooms. In its midst was a continuation of the external garden. Or rather, had been.
It was different now. The entire walled garden was now a barren waste of blackened timbers and scorched bones.
“A bonfire has burned here,” Batiatus said, following behind Varro.
“Of corpses,” Varro said, poking at a skull with his blade.
“What has occurred…?” Batiatus breathed.
Varro squinted thoughtfully at the walls.
“The fire was some days ago. Note the dust carried into doorways and splashed by rain on walls.” He stepped down onto the charcoaled timbers, bones snapping beneath his sandals. “I count perhaps a dozen skulls,” he said. “Maybe more.”
“A funeral pyre?” Batiatus said, surveying the scene in bafflement. “For what reason?”
“It is hidden,” Varro said, “within the eaves, and few houses stand near by, who would know?”
He pushed aside a charred timber, to find a nest of edged weapons, bent and blackened by the heat, their hilts burned away. Turned from a soldier’s tools into so much scrap metal.
Batiatus peered into the closest room, finding a sleeping pallet spread out upon the bloodstains, and scattered breadcrusts and animal bones.
“Someone has taken up residence here after the bodies were burned,” Batiatus said. “But why kill the undertakers?”
“Whoever the killers were,” Cicero said, “they dwelt for several days among swords and ashes.”
Now, the House of Pelorus had but two occupants. The putative owners and hospes had gone into town. The slaves on loan from the House of the Winged Cock had returned to their home. Cooks and cleaners, serving girls and workmen, all were gone. The manifold guests had long departed, leaving little of the wine cellar but piss in the cisterns. And Spartacus, guardian to a hollow mansion.
Wearily, Spartacus approached the cell of Medea. The barred door still sat ajar. The resident of the cell still sat on the floor wreathed in her chains.
“Alone at last,” she said calmly. “And the door to my cell is open.”
“I am not here for you,” he said.
“From free Thracian to man with a mop? Such a Tarpeian plummet.”
“Eat this,” he said, throwing her a hunk of bread. “I must remove your cellmate before he starts to smell.”
“Gratitude,” she said, “for his elimination from this world, and from this place.”
Spartacus grabbed at the corpse’s arm. The flesh was already strangely yellow, the blood having pooled lower down the sprawled body. On the face bruises and the flower-shapes of popped veins attested to last moments of strangulation. Spartacus dragged the body toward the door, its clothes snagging on the rough stone floor, pulling back its sleeves and half-opening its tunic.
Suddenly, Spartacus stopped.
“What is it, Thracian?” Medea asked.
“He has a mark,” Spartacus said, “upon his arm.”
“So noted,” she said. “What does it mean?”
“Such a mark denotes current or former status.”
“As a criminal?”
“As a gladiator who has passed the test of his house.”
“Just like yours.”
“Not so,” he said, brandishing his forearm for her to see. “Mine is B, for Batiatus. His is P.”
“But I thought the slaves of Pelorus all dead?”
Spartacus stared down at the arm, thoughtfully. His mind spun with the events of the last few days, with arguments in cells and whispers in corridors; with threats in hot moments and chilly reason. He thought of all the possible reasons why a man with the brand of Pelorus could somehow appear in the dark of night, when the brand of Pelorus was supposedly banished from the world of the living. And then he realized.
Spartacus dropped the body and darted from the cell.
“Where are you going, Thracian?” Medea called after him.
“To retrieve key to your manacles,” he replied. “We must leave. Now.”
“Gaius Verres, welcome, welcome,” the magistrate said. “And congratulations upon your appointment!”
“Gratitude,” Verres laughed. “Magistrate Gnaeus Helva, it has been too long since we last met.”
“And will be long again, if you soon sail for Sicilia.”
“Duty calls.”
“It surely does. Be seated, be seated.”
Helva beckoned to a slave to bring a small stack of scrolls, and took the topmost one from it. Verres slumped into a chair, his leg hooked over one of the armrests in a languorous pose. Timarchides sat carefully in the next chair, his back straight, and his expression serious.
“This seems a simple matter requiring little more than seal and salutation,” Helva said. He glanced down at the papyrus, his eyes running along the neat letters written in a scribal hand, then frowned. “The death of Pelorus was indeed unfortunate,” he continued, “but these are straitened times. One murder still moves me, even after the purges of the Social War when such things were commonplace and found in their myriads.”
Verres nodded in a conciliatory fashion.
“I loved Pelorus dearly,” Timarchides said, his interjection attracting a scowl from Verres. “His sudden death was tragedy.”
“Indeed, indeed,” Helva said, “and at the hands of a slave. So… the value of the estate is considerably diminished?”
“There is little here but the tying of loose ends and the agreement of settled accounts.” Verres said. “As familiae emptor, I carried out the necessary disbursements of Pelorus’s funeral. Unfortunately, that also included the necessary execution of the entire household.”
“Entire?”