Reaching the doorway close behind the soldier, with Tarion at his heels, Marcus looked over the legionary’s shoulder and realised exactly what it was that had drawn him up the stairs with such irresistible power. The room’s interior, dimly lit by another pair of torches jutting away from the walls on either side, was a grotesque combination of shrine and torture chamber. The walls were lined with the decapitated heads of dozens of men, all with skin oddly shrunken and distorted around their skulls, and the air was thick with the aroma of burnt wood underlain by a subtle but unmistakable tang of decomposition. Verus turned back to him, his face pale with tension as he whispered his explanation of the bizarre spectacle before them.
‘They dry the heads just as you might preserve a fish, burning wood chips and sawdust to make the smoke required to preserve the dead men’s flesh.’
Marcus nodded at Verus’s whispered words, pushing the wide-eyed soldier into the room and beckoning Tarion in. The thief closed the door noiselessly behind him, turning to look about him with a grim expression, his attention fixed on the far end of the room with the look of a man who had sight of his objective. At the far end, behind a stone altar whose surface was carved with runnels to carry away the blood that was shed on its smooth surface, stood a tall wooden case whose doors were firmly shut. To either side of the altar were racks of iron bars, each one a different length and thickness, and a heavy brazier stood in one corner with a stack of wooden fire logs piled neatly beside it. Marcus stepped forward to pick a torch from its holder, sweeping the brand’s light across the wall to examine the rows of heads that had been placed on flat wooden platforms to either side of the altar.
‘These men were Roman.’
The heads were unmistakeably those of soldiers, for the most part at least, their hair cut short, some with healed facial scars while others bore fresh and in some cases horrific wounds which had never been granted the time to heal. The young centurion scanned the array of dead men arranged before him, and his gaze was drawn to one man in particular. He reached out and took the head down from its pedestal, looking into the dead eyes of the man he had discovered to be his birth father only after the legatus’s death in defence of his legion’s eagle.
The thief rounded the altar and stopped before the wooden case that was the room’s apparent focus. Reaching out a hand, he flicked away the iron latch holding the case closed and parted its doors, sighing with pleasure as the contents were revealed. Shining dully in the torch light the Sixth Legion’s eagle was perched at eye level atop a wooden staff carved with the symbols of the god the Venicone tribe shared with many of the locally recruited men who manned the Roman wall, Cocidius the hunter. The eagle’s gilded surface was crudely painted with a rough black covering which seemed to have been slopped across it in random patterns, and whose consistency varied enough to allow flashes of the metal’s formerly shining surface to peep out from beneath it. Scratching at the surface he sniffed carefully at the standard, then turned back to Verus with a questioning look.
‘Yes. That’s the dried blood of those men whose heads bear witness to their sufferings. The Venicone priests bring the eagle out to witness their ceremonies, and spatter it with the hot blood of the men they sacrifice to their god, to subdue the standard’s spirit and reinforce their domination of everything it represents.’
Marcus nodded grimly at the soldier’s words, replacing the torch in its holder and pacing across to Tarion, lifting the staff on which the eagle stood out of the case and testing how securely it was fastened to the ornately decorated wooden pole.
‘It’s too firmly fastened for me to get it free, and too noisy to break it off. We’ll have to take it as it is.’ He peered into the case from which their prize had been removed. ‘What’s that?’
Tarion reached in with a smile and lifted out a heavy metal bowl, placing it onto the altar with a reverent care. The size of a shield boss, it was made from solid gold and richly decorated with the same ornate patterns that ran up and down the length of the staff on which the eagle perched.
‘It’s the ceremonial dish they use to collect the blood of the sacrifices, when they’ve done with putting the legion’s standard to shame.’ Marcus raised an eyebrow at the soldier, who shrugged with no sign of emotion. ‘I was made to witness their rituals. I expect that they believed that seeing our eagle so misused would be enough to break my resolve …’
‘And the loss of so precious an object will be enough to leave Calgus in a very exposed position indeed.’
He looked pointedly at Tarion, and the thief nodded his understanding, slipping the bowl inside his cloak and dropping it into a deep pouch sewn into the garment. Seeing that the arrangement left both of the thief’s hands free, Marcus reached out and took the eagle’s staff from its resting place atop the altar, lifting the legatus’s head from its shelf and handing it to the other man.
‘That’s enough risk, if we want to escape with these prizes. We’re leaving.’
As they turned to the doorway the sound of a voice from the landing outside reached them, conversational tones, the speaker apparently on the other side of the door’s thick wood. Marcus put a finger to his lips, glaring sharply at Verus as the soldier flattened himself against the wall to one side of the entrance, sinking into the shadows so that only the contours of his body were dimly visible. Marcus and Tarion ducked behind the altar, putting themselves out of sight from the door, and the thief deftly closed the doors on the wooden case, bargaining that the open latch was a small enough detail to avoid casual scrutiny. The door opened, and soft footsteps paced across its threshold and into the room. The Roman waited until the sound of the door closing reached them and then ushered Tarion to his feet, pulling a finger across his throat.
The newcomer’s back was turned to them as he fiddled with the door’s latch, still muttering quietly to himself in a grumbling tone. An elderly man, his back was stooped and covered in long white hair that had recently been released from a formal plait to judge from its wavy appearance. The thief tensed himself, his right arm cocked to throw the knife that he had plucked from his tunic before his victim turned to see the threat at his back, but as his free hand reached forward to balance the throw, Verus broke the silence with a heart-stopping roar. The sudden scream of rage erupted from him like the pain-crazed bellow of a man undergoing the most savage torture. Springing forward from the shadows with three quick steps, he confronted the old man with his arms spread wide and his face frozen in a rictus of rage, emitting another ear-splitting scream as the terrified priest spun and looked up into his face with an expression of amazement that turned to horror as he realised exactly who the blood-spattered lunatic confronting him was. Raising his hands in a futile gesture of self-defence the priest gabbled something in his own language as the legionary sprang onto him, bearing him to the ground with both hands locked about his throat.
Tarion reacted first, sliding the throwing knife away into its sheath and gesturing to Marcus.
‘Time to leave!’
Shaking himself from the amazement that had momentarily frozen him in place, the Roman followed him across the room, both men stepping past the spot where the old man had fallen to the floor under Verus’s frenzied attack. The legionary was throttling his victim with one hand, and had levered himself off the feebly struggling priest far enough to be able to frenziedly smash a clenched fist down into his victim’s face as he closed the strangling hand about his throat. The priest was emitting a desperate gargling sound, pausing only to grunt every time the berserk soldier smashed a punch into his battered face. Tarion ripped the door open, stepping out onto the broad wooden landing and then recoiled back against Marcus with the shock of what was waiting for him. The Roman pulled him aside with his free hand, thrusting the eagle’s staff at him and drawing his long spatha as he advanced out onto the wooden platform.