The Centurion's Empire (9 page)

"Gaius is not an Immortal."

"Gaius has friends among the Immortals. He slept with one of their women when he was younger, now he's a senator."

"I believe none of that. The Sons of Romulus are afraid of me. They want me dead but one hundred thousand sesterces
more will see the end of their plans. Lars has robbed the Emperor himself, he will not fail me."

"He's a master thief in Rome, but Nusquam is a fort in the mountains."

"Lars is a master of his trade. He will steal what I want as a matter of pride, if not for money."

"I want a great deal of money," said a hoarse voice from somewhere above them.

• The two conspirators jumped to their feet, swords in hand. A moment later their lookout, Portulus, was marched in by
the thief's two men.

"They arrived in one of the haycarts," he mumbled, his face flushed with humiliation. 'The thief wanted to spy on you
before talking."

Fortunatus and Viventius sheathed their swords and sat down again. Lars descended from the beams of the roof. He had
an ugly scratch on his arm, and he favored one leg.

"Just the sort of entrance I should have expected from a master thief," said Fortunatus genially.
Lars grinned at the deference. "Here is a little sample of what you wanted," he said, handing a small glass phial to
Fortunatus. "I have twelve sachets of it."

Lars watched as Fortunatus uncorked the bottle and sniffed at the contents. "I know the scent, an Immortal named Rhea
once taunted me with a cup of it." He poured a drop onto his fingertip and licked it. "Pah! Vile stuff. As bitter as gall,"
he said, squeezing his eyes shut.

"A philter for immortality, according to what was on the scroll beside it," said Lars, "but you will need more than this."

"How much?"

"I have enough for fifteen treatments. It's buried safely at a day's journey from here."

"It smells more as if it would kill me than grant immortality."

"I force-fed some to a rat. It died."

"Not surprising. Did you see any of the Immortals?"

"I saw several. They're not good at fighting fires."

"What were they like, apart from that?" Fortunatus asked. "I have only ever knowingly met one."

"They are not truly immortal. They have merely learned to extend their lifespans, and accidents can kill them as easily
as you or me. They do get older, but very slowly."

"The one that I know, Rhea, has not aged in thirty years."

"Not that you would notice but. . ." He reached into his robes and took out a scroll. "Read this. It outlines the use of the

'Venenum Immortale,' as they seem to call it."

Fortunatus snatched the scroll eagerly and began to read. His smile soon vanished.

"This—this is a monstrous trick!" he exclaimed. "This is not immortality at all. It will not renew my youth."

"But it will allow you to cheat death for quite a long time."

"But this says that the Sons of Romulus live such a long time just by freezing each other in ice."

"Yes, they take turns. At any one time four out of every five are frozen, and that means that they are only awake to get
older for perhaps one year in five. At that rate the oldest of them may have been born over four hundred years ago. The
scroll shows that the women look after the revival process, which is dangerous and difficult. The men prepare a philter
which must be drunk before one's body is frozen. It's quite a complex matter, their type of immortality. I was not able to
steal the instructions for the manufacture of the oil itself, but I got you a good supply of it. If you follow the directions in
that
Method and Usage
scroll, and if you have reliable friends to freeze and revive you, well, you can live as long as there
is ice to preserve you. You might find that reliable friends are harder to find than ice, of course."
Fortunatus sat with his mouth open. "But ... in effect they 'live' only as long as any mortal. Why do they do it?"
Lars grinned. "You ask me, a mere thief? What understanding of the affairs of state would I have?"

"Don't patronize me, I know about your background."

"Then you know that one hundred thousand sesterces will not buy what I want. You can grant influence and favors: the
return of my family villa, and the slaves and artisans to make it prosper."

Fortunatus looked from him to the scroll.

"What about the Relagatus faction that ruined your family? Do you want them punished?"

"Oh no, they are to be left alone. I want the pleasure of dealing with their people myself."

"Granted, granted. Now tell me how the Immortals govern."

"They freeze themselves for, say, eight years, then appear again among mortals as if they have not aged at all."

"Yes, yes, that makes sense. They seem to spend a lot of time away on their estates, or on long journeys."

"Now ask yourself how the Emperor governs. Does he train his troops personally, or pave the roads himself? No, he has
trusted minions of one rank or another to run off and see that his orders are carried out. The Immortals work the same
way, with some differences. They work as a team, and they recruit only the most highly skilled administrators and
leaders to their number. They set schemes in motion, long-term schemes that span decades, and they are unfrozen from
time to time to supervise them. They act as if they were gods with lifespans and concerns well beyond those of mortals."

"But the emperors do not disappear for years at a time."

"As far as I can tell, the emperors are never Immortals, Fortunatus. They are their puppets, the same as you and I."
Fortunatus hunched forward, wringing his hands and staring at the phial of oily liquid that Lars had given him.

"This will make me neither young nor immortal," he said in a high, thin voice.

"But you have their secret, and their philter too. Now I want my payment."

"Payment? For something as useless to me as this?" He snatched up the phial and flung it against the wall where it
shattered, leaving an oily, golden patch. "I want to know where that Frigidarium chamber is. If I can't share their
immortality I can at least break their power. Find the Frigidarium and I'll pay you."
Lars glowered, but seemed to have expected such a reaction.

"That was not in our agreement, Fortunatus. Besides, I burned their villa-fortress to cover my escape. They will have ten
times as many guards on everything now."

"If you were stupid enough to start a fire, then that's your business. What you brought me is useless."

"What I brought is what you asked for, even if it is not what you expected. My services don't come free, and I have given
you the best of my services."

Fortunatus slowly got to his feet, suddenly smiling and affable. "Lars, friend, we are of a kind. You brought no
more than a taste of Venenum here, while I brought no more money than you brought Venenum—"
A sign to Portulus sent him lunging at the nearest thief with a dagger in his hand. The point stopped in hidden mail, and
Lars flung a pugio that plunged into his neck. Fortunatus raised his gladius as the second thief leaped at him, chopping
it into the side of his head as Viventius' sword messily hacked into the thief pinned under Portulus. Fortunatus closed
with Lars, sword in one hand and a stool in the other.

Lars's blade dug into the stool, stuck and snapped. For all the pain in his leg, Lars still managed a heavy kick to
Fortunatus' groin, just as Viventius' sword burst through the light mail under his tunic and slid a short way between his
ribs. Lars rammed the stump of his blade into Viventius' face, and was rewarded with a scream of pain. The conspirator
blundered into Fortunatus, blinded by his own blood, and hacked at him in panic. With quizzical detachment Lars stood
watching them fight for a moment, then drew another heavy pugio and flung it. It buried itself up to the hilt in
Fortunatus' back. Lars picked up a fallen gladius.

"Fortunatus, is it over?" panted Viventius as the blade descended.

With the room again quiet, the innkeeper entered. He was no stranger to brawls, but the ferocity of the brief fight left
him shaken. One of the town loafers peered around the door and stared at Fortunatus' two companions for a moment.

'These be gladiators, sir," he said in awe. "Auctorati, and good 'uns too. Seen 'em fight at Verona."

'These are gladiators too," panted Lars, gesturing to his companions. "Humiliores, and not from Verona."
Nusquam: 29 December 71, Anno Domini

The rubble was cold as Regulus and Doris directed the slaves who were searching for what they already knew was lost.
Light snow was falling.

"The work of at least two men, that is for certain," Regulus said as he looked over charred fragments of scrolls that
had been collected from the ruins. "If it was a plot to kill the Venenum Masters, they did succeed. The snow cat got one
assassin, but died killing him. We found their bodies together on the roof. Nothing outside the venendarium was
touched."

"The other assassin was one of our slaves, Sextus Clodius. He fell to his death while trying to escape."

"Or so the report of the guards speculates. I saw the body, but it was not clothed for a long flight through the mountains
in winter. He had neither food nor weapons."

"Perhaps he was truly loyal to us, and was chasing another assassin when he slipped from the rope," said Doria
hopefully.

"Without weapons? The guards waited until the crane, was repaired before descending the cliff to recover Sextus' body.
If there was another, then he had a long start, and the new snow had covered his tracks. It all gathers itself into a plot:
the vote to train your women to make the Venenum was won, and almost as soon as the meeting ended the only two men
who shared its secret were killed and their venendarium was burned. I just don't understand. Many disagreed with the
meeting's decision, but who could profit by the loss of the Venenum Immortale's secret?"

"It might have been a monstrous accident," suggested Doria.

"There are too many odd clues that suggest otherwise. Still, we can't be concerned with them. Our immediate problem is
the Venenum Immortale. Does any other person know its secret, or know of someone who knows it?"

"Someone who is frozen might."

"If so, then we have a terrible choice. We do not have enough Venenum left to revive, then refreeze, every Temporian in
the Frigidarium."

Snow eddied down around them more thickly, and the slaves digging in the distance began to curse. Doria pulled her
robes more tightly about her as Regulus examined the charred fragments of scrolls.

"There is nothing in these scraps," said Regulus. "It's not surprising. The instructions for brewing the Venenum
Immortale were not meant to be written down."

"Some mortal outside Nusquam knows of us," said Doria. "If another assassin escaped into the snow, might he have
stolen a scroll with the Venenum's secret written out?"

Regulus pulled a scroll out from his robes and checked what the guards had found again.

"That man on the roof was a stranger to everyone here. His body had the scars of a gladiator and the muscles of an
acrobat. He was probably a thief, trained to leap about on roofs as silently as a cat. I've also been told that a mule column
was ambushed on the way here, yet the mules were recorded as reaching here with their loads intact. The thieves were
hiding within the packs, according to the accomplices that were caught and tortured. It all adds up to a plot. Someone is
out to steal our secret again, one of those fools in Rome."

"They have tried before. Samples of the Venenum Immortale and the antidote have been stolen a dozen times over the
centuries. What harm has it done? The Venenum is of no use without the Frigidarium Glaciale, and we Temporians who
operate it. Why, it would be like one man trying to steal a battle galley and operate it alone. He could not tend the
rowing, the sails, the steering and the catapults all by himself. If the thief drinks some stolen Venenum without proper
preparation and antidote, he will die."

"Except that this thief might well have taken us with him. We have limited stocks of the Venenum, enough to last only
about two hundred freezings."

"That at least gives us a margin of centuries," said Doria, squeezing Regulus' arm. "Time enough to rediscover the
method of preparing the Venenum."

"We have no such margin," he said peevishly. "We have no more than our normal lifespan: seventy or eighty years at
best, and a lot less is left for us two. What good is having two or three centuries of life if you lie frozen for most of that
time? This is hopeless, I feel so tired."

He shrugged snow from his cape as a slave came running up with more charred pieces of scroll. He glanced at them.

"Pah, the list of new Temporian recruits to be gathered in for initiation, training and freezing. Gollak Paginius,
Vitellan Bavalius, Markus Morilian ... I can't read the rest but

no matter. These young Romans will never know the taste of the Venenum Immortale now. There's barely enough to
keep us going until..."

He stared intently at a large scrap with small, close writing, holding it out at the focus of his eyes.