His grin widened as he saw the uncertainty growing on his opponent’s face. With deliberate slowness, he drew the blade back out of the neck, giving it a slight twist to make sure that every possible clicking, cracking and sucking noise it could make echoed around the chamber.
Slowly, he straightened and raised the blade, beckoning to the smaller man.
‘Come on. Just you and me now.’
He watched the man’s legs for some tell-tale hint of what move he was about to make and frowned as the gladiator lowered the knife hand and reached up with the other one in a gesture of submission. He was so surprised by the gesture that he didn’t notice until too late that the man’s other hand was not making to drop the knife on the floor, but simply lowered and reversed his grip before hurling it underarm with surprising accuracy.
A man with lesser reflexes would have spent the next few moments wondering how to remove the blade from his eye socket before toppling over dead. Rufinus, trained to a high degree of agility and fitness both by the army and his hobbies, threw himself to the side at the last moment, realising what a close call it had been as the blade carved a bloody line down his cheek, and ripped open his ear.
He staggered, blood running into his eye and occluding his vision.
The shock had been so complete he barely had time to straighten before dropping toward the floor as the man’s second knife, drawn from some unseen location by his other hand, hurtled across the open air between them and scraped across his shoulder.
‘You sneaky bastard!’
Slowly, he pulled himself upright, watching his opponent intently in case the man pulled a third knife from somewhere. He gripped the gory, glistening gladius with his right hand and reached up with his left, testing the cut on his shoulder. Deep.
‘Right!’ he snapped angrily, stepping across the body of the fallen man, sizzling flames bubbling and blistering the flesh and filling the chamber with the most odious, pungent smell. In a move that Rufinus had almost deemed inevitable, the smaller man broke and ran, hurtling down the corridor towards the light.
The injured Rufinus, coated with soot, blood and sweat, resembling one of the dread spirits of the underworld, straightened. How the three had cottoned on to him he had no idea, but that little knife-throwing turd couldn’t be allowed to report back to the villa. Taking a deep breath and uttering the briefest of prayers to Mercurius for a turn of speed, he turned and raced off down the corridor after the knife man, who was already close to the exit.
Rufinus puffed and panted as his boots pounded along the passage, the din echoing around the walls and back down to the furnace room. The figure of the smaller gladiator ducked to the right as he exited the tunnel. The rectangle of grey light grew wider as Rufinus approached, pushing his tortured body for an extra turn of speed. Not stopping to check the surroundings for anyone who might observe him emerging, he raced around the corner to the right after the small man…
…and ran into the large shield, almost knocking himself unconscious on the bronze boss at the centre. The unexpected blow threw him backwards and he fell, rolling, and shaking his head on the damp grass. Slowly the shape of the shield coalesced in his foggy vision, followed by the large figure behind it, holding a sword raised.
With a sinking feeling his head turned this way and that to take in the semi-circle of a dozen guards, all the toughest gladiators and the more solid and long-standing men the captain could gather. All surrounding him now, drawing into a circle, weapons at the ready with shields raised.
The small knife-throwing man loitered behind the cordon of men, breathing heavily and clutching his knees, spitting on the ground.
Too many to fight.
There was no hope of success. The three men in the furnace had just been the ones sent to bring him out. The circle opened slightly and the figure of Phaestor appeared, shaking his head, his face a mask of cold contempt.
‘Rustius… if that is your name?’
‘What’s going on?’ Rufinus hoped he’d managed to inject enough baffled innocence into the words.
Phaestor’s expression suggested otherwise. ‘A clever man, but not clever enough.’ He folded his arms. ‘I presume it was you that killed Dis? You are Frumentarius? The one we attributed to my second-in-command? Clever… you even had me believing. Me and Vettius and even the empress. You must have butchered him just before you arrived back at the villa. Impressive! And I’d love to know how you managed to take out the dogs. Did you plant the tracks somehow, or did you have help from cavalry?’
Rufinus pulled himself up onto his elbow, opened his mouth and took a moment through the soot and panic to find his voice. ‘I didn’t…’
His sentence ended as one of the gladiators put a foot on his chest and pushed him forcefully back to the damp ground.
‘Fastus?’ Phaestor went on. ‘Was he something special? Did he discover who you were? I am fascinated in the tangled web you’ve woven around the villa over more than a year. You seem to have involved yourself in every corner. I even understand you’ve been infiltrating the slaves and involving yourself with master Pompeianus.’
‘No! I just…’
Again the foot pushed him back, driving the breath from him.
‘And you almost got away with it, but you underestimated the inquisitiveness of slaves.’
Rufinus frowned. How had they found out about him?
‘An obvious failure, really. You can’t take the running of the library furnace out of the hands of its assigned slave repeatedly without him eventually questioning what you’re doing. Yet we still had to keep an eye on you in order to find out what it actually was that you were doing. Eavesdropping on a secret meeting with the empress? Tut-tut my young spy.’
‘She has to be stopped!’ Rufinus blurted. ‘She’s going to…’
This time he was interrupted by Phaestor who, unfolding his arms, gave him a backhand across the mouth, three finger rings ripping into Rufinus’ lip and drawing blood.
‘I know what she’s planning, you idiot.’
Rufinus looked around at the men. The expressions told him that, while Phaestor might be aware of the Domina’s plans for the emperor, the bulk of the men were not. But, being mostly slaves offered their manumission by Lucilla, they would hardly harbour any loyalty for Commodus. No help would be forthcoming there.
‘I regret nothing.’
Phaestor smiled an unpleasant smile, reminding him of the serpentine look he had first attributed to the captain so long ago in the marketplace of Tibur. The wicked side of the man had finally been released.
‘That will change.’
The captain gestured to a big man with a cestus, a leather glove fitted with iron plates over the knuckles. The gleaming plates were the last thing Rufinus saw before his world went black.
XXIV – Paying the price
CONFUSION flooded Rufinus’ mind as his consciousness slowly bubbled to the surface and his good eye opened. Then pain came in waves like the pounding of the sea on the rocks, making his head jerk, adding to the confusion. A gritty, brown surface moved back and forth sickeningly in front of his vision. He closed his eye again, recognising at that moment that the other eye was welded shut from the beating he had taken.
The beating…
His eye snapped open again, this time recognising the surface before him as a floor. He tried to turn his head to see how he was swinging above it, but the effort was too much and he hung limp. A quick exploration of body parts revealed that he could wiggle all his fingers and toes, but that he appeared to be trussed somehow, so further movement was impossible.
He’d failed. After everything he’d gone through, everything he had achieved, he’d failed in the end, right on the cusp of success.
Fortuna, you fickle bitch.