‘Ah, yes, but matters have called me south.’ Nigrinus gave a thin smile, and his face under its mask of dust appeared ghoulish. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘at some point soon, we might speak together? I’m sure you must have learned a great deal during your time with the former Augustus?’
‘Nothing that need concern you,’ Castus said. He had hoped to have no more dealings with the notary, or his repulsive assistant.
Nigrinus’s smile did not slip. ‘Well,’ he said, with a few last dabs at his dusty mantle. ‘I’m sure there will be plenty of time for you to think about that!’
He made a curt stabbing gesture, and the driver flicked the reins. The mules heaved forward again, and Castus and Brinno stood aside as the cart, the wagon and the riders moved past them towards the outlying buildings of the city. Flaccianus, the last rider, glanced back as he passed with an expression of knowing disdain.
Brinno spat in the dust after them.
It was past midnight when Castus was woken suddenly by the sound of a cry from the courtyard, a slamming door and voices from the room downstairs. He lay on his bed for a moment, disorientated; he felt he had not been properly sleeping, but the memory of a dream was still vivid in his mind: Sabina, an underground room, terror in the darkness and a man with the face of a white dog…
He heard another shout, and his mind returned to clear focus. With one roll he was up off the bed, dragging on his tunic and snatching up his swordbelt as he moved for the door. Stepping out onto the wooden balcony, he leaned over the railing and looked down into the large chamber below.
The scene was lit by two flickering oil lamps. Sallustius had come in from the night dragging a thin man behind him. Victor was there too, both of them with drawn swords. Castus took the stairs in four leaps and went to join them.
As Castus reached them, Sallustius flung his prisoner against the central table, then wrestled him down onto a bench. The man was ragged and unshaven, dressed in a tunic almost black with mud and old stains. His face was swollen and bruised on one side, and his lips were flecked with blood. Sallustius held his sword at the man’s throat.
‘Please, domini… Please forgive me if I’ve wronged you!’ the man cried. ‘I told you what I was doing! This is a mistake, an error. Please, there’s no need for violence!’ Tears were running down his bruised face, and he was cringing on the bench, clasping his arms around his chest.
Castus went to the table and poured himself a cup of water from the jug. He took two long swallows, then dashed the rest of the water in the man’s face.
‘Shut up,’ he said.
The man fell silent at once, swaying on the bench with his mouth open in shock.
‘What happened?’ Castus asked. Brinno was coming down the stairs now, blinking sleepily.
‘We caught him on the rear portico,’ Sallustius said, ‘coming up from the river towards Maximian’s apartments. Victor challenged him and he ran – but unfortunately for him I was at the other end of the portico, and he ran right into my fist…’
‘He had this,’ Victor said, and threw a short dagger in an ornate scabbard down on the table. ‘That’s no weapon for a beggar like you!’ he sneered at the prisoner. ‘You were planning to get into the apartments and murder somebody. Eh?’ he added, smacking the cringing man across the top of his skull.
‘Domini, please, I told you,’ the man said. ‘I was paid to deliver it to the eunuch Gorgonius. That’s all – I can show you the gold piece they gave me to do it!’
‘Who paid you?’ Castus demanded.
‘I don’t know, dominus! I’m a poor man – I don’t know the imperial officers! A soldier, I think… A fine man, such as yourselves…’
Castus looked at the dagger on the table. The hilt was silver, although a little tarnished, but the scabbard had a gold-plated framework. He picked it up and drew the blade. Clean and sharp.
‘Could be a message hidden in the scabbard?’ Sallustius said.
Castus had been thinking the same. If the weapon was for Gorgonius, and came from a soldier, it could be a communication from the troops across the river. He stared down the throat of the scabbard, but there was no folded slip of papyrus hidden inside it. He sheathed the dagger and placed it back on the table again.
‘What do we do with him?’ Brinno asked, sitting on a bench with his elbows on his knees. He stretched his mouth in a long yawn.
‘There are notaries and quaestionarii with Maximian’s staff,’ Sallustius said. ‘We can deliver him to them in the morning. And they, my friend,’ he told the man, ‘will soon use their hooks and irons to drag the truth from you!’
The man had started gasping and shaking again. Castus looked back at the dagger. Something about it was not right. He picked it up again, turning it in his hands, rubbing at the scabbard with his thumb. One side looked fine, but on the other was a line of crude stitching. Inside the flashy framework, the leather of the sheath was just thin rawhide, poorly sewn together.
Drawing the blade again, he slid the tip beneath the brass lug that held the scabbard frame together and twisted hard. Sallustius and Victor were peering at him, perplexed. The rivet broke without much effort, and then it was a simple task to lever open the framework and cut the stitches along the tube of the rawhide sheath.
‘What is it?’ Brinno asked, looking more awake now.
Castus unrolled the tube and flattened it on the table as Sallustius gazed over his shoulder. There were letters painted in black ink on what had been the inside of the sheath. Castus leaned closer, his mouth moving as he carefully read them aloud.
‘I don’t understand it,’ he said, frowning in disappointment. Had he read it wrong? His knowledge of letters was still not too good – the terrible weight of his ignorance pressed on his mind. ‘Calvikal Sepihn? What does it mean?’
For a moment he remembered the strange incantations that the sorcerer in the necropolis of Treveris had intoned. A slight flicker of superstitious dread ran through him. Sallustius had snatched up the message and was peering at it in the light of the lamp. His lips moved for a moment, then suddenly his face cleared and he laughed.
‘It’s a date and time!’ he said. ‘The second part anyway. The first must be either a name or a place. Look…’ He took a wax tablet and pen and began tracing the letters, then turned it so Castus could see. For a moment it still did not make sense.
CALV.VI.KAL.SEP.II.HN.
Then Sallustius placed his thumb over the first four letters, and Castus saw the rest jump into recognisable shape.
‘The sixth day before the kalends of September, at the second hour of the night,’ he said. ‘That’s tomorrow night.’
‘Must be an arranged meeting,’ Victor said, leaning closer. Even the man on the bench had ceased trembling and was looking interested. ‘But who, or where, is Calv?’
Castus took the message back from Sallustius. He had known already what he would have to do, although the thought filled him with angry foreboding.
‘Leave this to me,’ he said.
Julius Nigrinus had initially appeared annoyed to be disturbed in his chambers in the dead of night – if not, Castus thought, all that surprised. The lamp had already been burning when he had arrived. Now, with the message before him, the notary seemed his usual devious self.
‘Calvisiana,’ he said, looking up from the message with a knowing smile. ‘It’s a villa, a few miles south-east of Ucetia. A day’s ride from here. If you can get out of the city tomorrow without attracting attention you’ll easily be there by the appointed time.’
‘Then what?’ Castus said. He was standing before the table in the small dimly lit anteroom of the notary’s bedchamber.
‘And then,’ Nigrinus said, casting the message aside and rubbing at his eyes, ‘you can observe, and if possible apprehend, whoever is attending this meeting – this no-doubt treasonous meeting!’