“A conspiracy of truth.”
“Of course, Athanasius, of course. But the end would be the same — you dead, me dead, all of us dead, and Domitian triumphant and living long past September 18.”
“But he is triumphant already. What other choice do we have?”
“Only one,” Maximus said. “Dillian!”
Athanasius heard a footstep behind and spun around. The slave Dillian was lunging at him with a sword. Athanasius grabbed his arms, his fists sliding down to his wrists, bending them back until the Syrian released his grip on the sword and it fell with a clank to the travertine floor.
The slave tried to grab it, and Athanasius countered with a knee to his face. He recoiled in pain, his hands reaching for his face, exposing himself. Athanasius whipped out his own sword, and as the Syrian straightened up, plunged his sword into the slave’s chest, driving him back against the wall. The light of life flickered in his dark eyes, and when Athanasius pulled the sword out, Dillian slid to the floor in a pool of blood, dead.
“Your first kill, Athanasius?” said Maximus from behind.
Athanasius felt something on his back and spun around to see old Maximus holding a tiny stick. His mentor had tried to prick him with it, but it had broken on an armor plate. Athanasius grabbed it from Maximus with one hand and shoved the old man back onto his bed with the other.
“Athanasius, please,” Maximus said, his lips bloodied by the blow.
Athanasius sniffed the tip of the broken stick.
Poison.
“Et tu, Maximus?” Athanasius said, dropping the stick to the floor and moving in with his sword.
Maximus smiled as he looked at the corpse of his servant Dillian. “You surprise us all, Athanasius. You really are a butcher, aren’t you?”
Athanasius put the tip of his sword to Maximus’s saggy neck. “And what are you, Maximus? Who are you, friend?”
Maximus nodded as if to say, “I’ll tell you,” and Athanasius pulled back the tip of his sword slightly. Then Maximus wiped his bloody lips with the back of his hand and coughed.
“The Dei are everywhere, Athanasius. They cannot be defeated. You cannot defeat them. In a few short years they will take over the world.”
“Names, Maximus. I want names.”
Suddenly Maximus gagged and went limp, collapsing to the floor.
Athanasius stared into his face. The old man’s eyes were wide — and dead.
Kneeling over the body of his dead mentor, Athanasius noticed the ring on Maximus’s gnarled forefinger. It reminded him of the one on his own hand, the one Marcus had given him.
The finger was already cold when Athanasius slipped the ring off and noticed the tiny hole. He sniffed.
Poison. Just like the stick.
Athanasius could hardly believe it. Maximus had sucked poison out of his ring rather than reveal anything more about Dominium Dei.
What more could there possibly be?
Athanasius then peeled away Maximus’s robe to examine his mentor’s barrel chest. Something had caught his eye during their struggle.
There it was, under the left armpit: a jagged death cross tattooed in black on the pasty white skin. It was a Chi symbol — the mark of an invisible army with legions around the world.
Dominium Dei.
They were indeed everywhere.
A piercing scream filled the air. Athanasius looked up at the slave girl standing in the doorway, peering in. “You killed the senator!”
He heard movement through the walls. The whole house was stirring. Athanasius picked up his helmet. He had to get out of there.
“Silence!” ordered Athanasius, releasing his grip on the robe and slipping Maximus’s ring on the opposite hand of the one with Marcus’s. “This is state business.”
“You are defiling him!” she screamed. Her piercing cry reverberated off the walls like an alarm, and suddenly the siren of a horn blasted outside, alerting the entire hillside.
Athanasius rushed past her as she flattened herself against the wall and ran down the hallway to the front door. Maximus’s carriage was at the gate, but it was too late to reach it now. Already a squad of Urban Cohorts, swords and spears out for attack, were running toward the villa, attracted by the sound of the horn.
Athanasius turned back and ran through the rooms of the house, waving his sword and knocking slaves over. When he reached the back balcony overlooking the old Republic Wall, he leaped off it, landing on the hillside behind the villa and sliding down the slope toward the grim apartment blocks in the vast slums below.
Arrows zoomed past his head as he ran toward the roof of a long apartment block built into the hill.
He was almost there when an arrow struck his helmet, sending him tumbling down and crashing onto the red clay tiles, terrorizing the screaming family in the room below. He rolled off into the rooftop courtyard, found the narrow stone steps and commanded his tired legs to race down six flights. A moment later he burst out of the stairwell and disappeared into the dark alleys of the city’s slums, cursing himself for missing his only escape out of Rome.
X
Athanasius ran on through the tangled streets in the dark, racing past the archways of the booths and shops boarded up and bolted shut for the night. The apartment slums above the tabernae on either side rose up six stories tall. He could easily lose himself in this jumbled maze of alleys until morning, blowing any hope of making his rendezvous with the Ferryman. Even if he reached the Cloaca Maxima beneath the Basilica Julia, he doubted the Ferryman would still be waiting for him. But if he didn’t try, he was dead already.
He looked up for breaks along the seemingly endless ridge of black rooftops for a clear line of sight to the Temple of Jupiter and the Arx atop Capitoline Hill to orient himself. He couldn’t go back the way he came, so he would have to circle around the northern base of the hill to reach the west side of the Forum — through these infernal alleys with their forgotten denizens, the hundreds of thousands of people who were born, lived and died in this cesspool of human misery.
And now he was one of them.
All of a sudden the blood-chilling blare of the First Spear horn thundered across the skies. It was the official signal from the Urban Cohorts headquarters to the roaming gangs of the district that there was a fugitive on the loose, and a reward for his capture, dead or alive. Even the official urbani patrols avoided this graveyard of danger at night.
Almost immediately shouts and torches burst forth from all directions. He heard the crash of pots and cursing and looked over his shoulder to see a gang of four shadowy figures floating toward him like malevolent spirits in their odd, mismatched pieces of old infantry armor. The gruesome sight made him recall one of Juvenal’s few good jokes about life in modern Rome: that only the careless dared venture out after supper without having first made their will.
I am not going to die in this piss pot tonight, Athanasius vowed to himself, breaking into a sprint. Better to go out in a blaze of faux glory in the arena than go face down here in some ditch.
The apartment slums on either side of him closed in like walls, the snaking alley narrowing into a dirt path. Now he was splashing through an open cess trench that reeked with the foul stench of human waste, dumped from the pots of the inhabitants in the insulae above him. The goo caked his aching calves, and it was all he could do to keep his heavy legs moving and not turn his face up toward the windows.
The muck had slowed the ill-clad gangs behind him, however, and he could no longer hear their shouts. But at the end of the alley was a veritable bonfire of thugs at an intersection waiting for him. He couldn’t go back, and he couldn’t move forward. He looked around frantically until he found an open laundry pit between two buildings. It was filled with sanitizing urine.