Ten for Dying (John the Lord Chamberlain Book 10) Page 8

  Invisible though he was from the street and the mansion, his terror returned. However, his fear of demonic forces and Antonina were outweighed by his fear for his future. He might have taken consolation in being free of Theodora’s whims, for nobody could have shielded him from her wrath if he had offended her, even if the offense arose, as a storm on the Sea of Marmara, for no other reason than that she was bored. But the fact was, with Theodora gone, he no longer had a place at court.

  The empress had delighted in his magick. Dedi’s talking, human-headed snake might be an obvious fraud, but its often obscene repartee always made the empress laugh. Not that her laughter was a pleasant sound. Thus did the jackal cough over the dead and crows croak over their carrion. Still, coaxing that hellish noise out of her earned him a comfortable place to live, and the jingle of coins in his purse pleased him.

  “Send for Dedi of Egypt,” Theodora would order, and he had never failed to make her scimitar smile appear.

  It didn’t hurt that his shrunken stature almost qualified him as one of the dwarfs on which she doted. He puffed out his sunken chest with pride at the recollection. His elation did not last long. For she and her scarlet smile were gone forever and he had made enemies who sneered at him and whispered of unholy practices as he passed by in the frescoed halls of the Great Palace. And it was true, not all of his tricks were as patently fraudulent as the talking snake. Ironically, the courtiers were afraid of him. Afraid his magick would do them harm. But now, without Theodora’s protection, his reputation was going to harm him.

  During his solitary hours behind Virgil’s toga, Dedi had reached a frightening conclusion. The desecration of the mausoleum was sure to be identified as his handiwork and by extension he would be accused of stealing the sacred icon on the same night.

  Dedi wished he hadn’t forgotten the Egyptian talisman in his panic. Still, he could never have caught all the frogs, and they were equally damning. It was unfair. He had only wanted to bring Theodora back from the halls of the dead, or at least within earshot of the emperor. Who could fault him for that? He had nothing to do with the theft of the holy relic. The Christians did not understand that the magick he practiced was not the same as their magick. What use would their holy charm have been to an Egyptian magician?

  Except now he desperately needed it to save his own ugly little head.

  And how did he plan to regain the shroud of the Virgin? It was one thing to trick the empress into laughing and quite another to do battle with forces of evil. Would the malign spirits he needed to overcome be as powerful as Shezmu, slaughterer of wicked souls in the underworld? He recalled tales he and his childhood friends had used to scare each other. Shezmu employed a press and the heads of such souls to make wine for the virtuous dead.

  Movement at the side of the mansion caught his attention. A figure emerged from the side door, just visible in the light from an open window, and slunk away.

  Things were becoming clearer. But what, exactly, was he going to do now he knew the demon had disguised itself as Antonina’s servant Tychon?

  Chapter Sixteen

  Felix picked himself up off the street, cursing rut-splintered axles, overturned carts, dead bodies, Fate, and skittish donkeys. He took a few tentative steps, making certain he hadn’t broken anything. Fat droplets of rain began beating down on his head, so he cursed the heavens too.

  His cargo lay sprawled at the edge of the colonnade, clearly illuminated by the torch left burning in front of a shuttered butcher’s shop. The blanket had become slightly undone. One hand stuck out, signaling for help.

  Felix looked up and down the street. At present it was deserted. The rain increased, stirring up a smell of dust where it hit. A gust of wind groaned through the colonnade. Lightning flashed repeatedly. The flickering light made the dead hand look as if it were waving frantically. The noise of the accident may have alerted someone. For all he knew the urban watch could be on the way.

  Even if he could push the cart upright it wasn’t going anywhere with a broken axle.

  Did he hear voices? The sound of rain drowned everything out.

  He grasped the blanket-wrapped corpse and lifted it with a grunt, feeling a sharp twinge in his side. Perhaps he’d broken something after all. As he staggered over to the donkey the whole length of an arm freed itself and slapped against his leg.

  He flung the horrid load over the donkey’s back, undid the traces leaving the bit and a length of rein in place, and urged the animal onward. Forget the cemeteries. He couldn’t be too far from the sea. Judging from the driving rain, blowing straight into his face, the sea was coming to him. He was moving downhill. Water rushed along the street, splashing around his ankles. All he needed to do was follow the gurgling rivulets.

  Soon man, beast, and dead man were soaked. The corpse kept slipping and sliding further out of the blanket until both arms and an elegantly booted foot dangled in plain view. Luckily no sensible person would be abroad in such a torrent, and beggars sheltering in doorways or vacant shops had problems enough of their own without worrying about what others might be doing.

  Thunder reverberated, the ground vibrated. Lightning flashes revealed a city devoid of color, a bas relief in pure white marble. The roar of the rain numbed the senses. Felix was hardly aware of his beard dripping or his saturated clothes. He might have been accompanying his lifeless companion into the land of the dead. The warm bedroom he had so recently shared with Anastasia existed in another world.

  Then he saw an orange light in the thickening mist. A lantern, surely, to be shining in the midst of the downpour.

  The urban watch sometimes carried lanterns.

  Felix froze and pulled awkwardly at his reins, forcing the donkey to stop.

  The light bobbed in the middle of the street. The rain and mist obscured whoever was holding it. A whole contingent of armed men might be staring at him, wondering what sort of madman would be leading a donkey along in weather like this. A madman whose actions required investigating.

  The light moved, crossed the street, and vanished under the colonnade.

  Felix began to breath again.

  The donkey snorted uneasily.

  A lightning bolt struck close enough to make Felix’s ears ring and shook his bones. The donkey let out a bray of terror and ran. Felix clamped his hand shut but there was nothing there but a raw welt where the reins had been. The donkey might have been ridden by Satan himself so quickly did it vanish into the storm.

  There would have been plenty of room on its back for a rider because the courier’s body had returned to the street, one hand resting against the toe of Felix’s boot.

  Felix kicked it off in revulsion.

  “Mithra!”

  Just his luck, the street here was brightly illuminated, this time by a torch in front of a perfumer’s shop. The light reflected from the opaque eyes of the ashen face which had been uncovered in its most recent fall.

  Would he never be rid of the cursed corpse? It pursued him like one of the Furies.

  As the thought crossed his mind, the corpse laughed rudely.

  No, Felix told himself, just noxious gases escaping as the thing started to decay.

  He felt a sudden impulse to simply run, leave the corpse where it was. But that would be like fleeing the battlefield. Felix refused to flee. He must finish what he had begun, somehow.

  He wiped rain out of his own eyes with a shaking hand and looked around. His attention was drawn by the perfumer’s statue of Aphrodite, an exceptionally inept copy of a classical Greek work. The legs were too short. The breasts were almost those of a child’s, but even though the amateur sculptor had apparently whittled first one then the other, he had never got them anywhere near the same size.

  Nevertheless, at that moment, she was the most beautiful woman Felix had ever seen thanks to the recess behind her, large enough to conceal a body.

&nb
sp; Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He dragged the courier under the colonnade. The roaring rush of rain turned into a hollow thudding on the sheltering roof.

  “Let’s get you ready for the goddess!” Felix began stripping off the dead man’s soaked garments. Beggars who died on the streets were invariably found naked, picked clean. And with no garments, the body would probably not be identified quickly, if at all. There was nothing remarkable about it that he could see. A well fed young man whose muscles had not been taxed with labor. The packages he had delivered had never been very heavy.

  Just another man murdered in the street. How could anyone link the captain of the excubitors with a naked corpse discovered far away from the palace?

  He carried the man’s garments back to the public lavatory he remembered passing. The foul weather had kept people off the streets and the long marble bench was deserted. A beggar jumped up from a corner and fled, perhaps mistaking Felix for the urban watch.

  Felix stuffed the garments down a hole then relieved himself after them, thoughtfully.

  John might have come up with a better plan. But he wasn’t here—for the time being.

  Given Justinian’s whims, his friend would doubtless be returned to favor soon. It wasn’t as if John were dead.

  DAY THREE

  Chapter Seventeen

  John knew what it felt like to drown.

  The gusting wind whipped rain and blinding, stinging sheets of salt spray across his face. Opening his mouth to gulp in air, he inhaled water instead. He gasped and choked. His boots slid on slick planks as the deck tilted. He grabbed blindly at the rail to avoid falling. A splinter dug into his palm. He didn’t loosen his grip. The Leviathan continued to roll.

  It was going to capsize this time.

  But again, at what seemed the last moment, the ship righted itself.

  He kept a death grip on the rail and stared out into a chaotic, nacreous twilight of roiling fog and rain. It was past dawn but the storm which had kept him awake all night had not abated. The wind had picked up and the waves increased.

  In summer the winds usually came from the northwest, assisting the prevailing currents to hurry ships out of the Sea of Marmara, but the night before they had shifted to the south. It was peculiar, almost inexplicable, as if the hand of evil were upon them. Or so John had been told by one of the rustic fellow travelers he had taken to be a farmer.

  Even farmers knew more about sailing than John. He knew only that he dreaded traveling across the bottomless pit of the sea.

  Why the captain had decided to leave their overnight mooring was a total mystery.

  John had passed the night pressed against Cornelia’s back, listening to rain clattering against the deck above, hearing the mingled moans and cries of the Leviathan and her restlessly dreaming passengers. Cornelia’s even breathing told of the calm oblivion he only wished for. How could she sleep when he could not? In the time they had been together, wounded though he was, she had come to seem a part of him and he part of her.

  In the dark sour-smelling hold, battered by the sea, John found himself staring into the abyss he had confronted so often as a younger man during his first years in Constantinople, when he had still been a slave.

  He was on a voyage to nowhere. An estate in Greece? He couldn’t imagine it. He had lived on the move, on the borders of the empire as a mercenary, had existed as a captive in Persian encampments, and lived in Constantinople as both a slave and a high official in turn. Through all the years he had fought to survive, battled steel and political intrigue to go on living. Was there truly anything else?

  He had dreamt often enough of settling down in the country but now he realized if he did he would be no better than a shade, wandering Hades without purpose.

  When the rain and wind let up for a time, John could here the occasional nightmare-induced cry or groan from a fellow passenger and the low prayers of the aged pilgrim on the other side of the thin partition. She mumbled on tirelessly to her god and the mother of her god. To some of these Christians prayer came as easily as breathing.

  The pilgrim was convinced—or trying to convince herself, judging from the way she kept repeating her prayers—that the Lord would save her, as he had saved Saint Paul. She counted on her Lord’s steadfast love. Or so she said repeatedly.

  So far as John had observed there was no steadfast love in this world except between two human beings and that was rare. To throw oneself on the mercy of some imagined, invisible god of love was nothing more than surrender. Mithra demanded His followers battle the darkness, not meekly await salvation from it.

  And wasn’t John battling the darkness by working for Justinian, who imposed law and justice on the empire? Wasn’t Justinian on the side of the light? Or was the emperor part of the forces of darkness, as many supposed?

  Would John ever be certain?

  Finally he had risen quietly, letting Cornelia sleep, and gone out on deck.

  Captain Theon, a short, rotund man with a fiery red face, was speaking to a sailor who was taking soundings. John overheard bits of the conversation.

  “I expected this to blow over by now,” the captain was saying.

  The other made what must have been a disparaging remark, judging from the captain’s scowl.

  “I’m not throwing out the anchors. If we can’t see the shore we’re not in the shallows. Keep testing the depth.”

  The rattle of wind-driven rain obscured most of the sailor’s reply.

  “…besides we’re well past…Yes, I know when the wind shifted. That’s why…you think I’m a fool? Who’s captain on this ship?”

  John told himself to be calm. Theon obviously did not consider their situation to be as dire as it seemed. This was a normal squall, terrifying only to a person unfamiliar with sailing.

  The crew were doing whatever needed to be done, whatever that might be. It made John furious to be rendered helpless by his ignorance, dependent on these strangers.

  The sea, vast and mindless, was not amenable to reason nor could it be vanquished by steel.

  The deck shook as a wall of water smashed into the hull.

  John knew he should return to Cornelia below, protected from the sea only by fragile timbers.

  He hesitated to take his hand off the rail. He had been squeezing it so tightly his fingers were white, except where they were stained with red. He was bleeding freely from the splinter in his palm.

  He paused, allowing a gust to die before releasing his grip.

  Then he was hurtling forward, smashing into the back of the cabin. There was a shrieking, grinding noise and the ringing snap of splintering wood, a sound he had heard long ago when his company had battered down the gates of a besieged town.

  He tried to brace himself against the cabin as the Leviathan began to swing around abruptly, as if trying to shake off the crew. Shouts and curses rang out over the groaning of the hull.

  John had to reach Cornelia.

  Another jarring crash vibrated through the ship and he found himself on his hands and knees, crawling up a tilting deck. Up and up the deck rose, a wooden cliff rearing itself in front of him.

  Disoriented, he glanced around. He appeared to be suspended over the black water.

  A wave hit him like a giant’s hand and he felt himself sliding down the impossibly tilted deck.

  ***

  Cornelia woke from a nightmare.

  No, not a nightmare. The jolt and the deafening crack of breaking wood had been real. Passengers shouted and screamed.

  She turned toward John as the ship rolled.

  She felt his absence before she saw he was gone.

  There was another crash and the ship rolled again and settled back down with a concussion so jarring Cornelia was surprised the hull didn’t disintegrate immediately. It was in the process of doing so, to judge by the tortured grat
ing and creaking filling the dark cavern below deck.

  John must have gone up on deck while she slept.

  She scrambled from the compartment and climbed out into the gray rain that rattled onto the deck with a noise resembling thousands of games of knucklebones.

  The captain was bawling orders to the crew.

  Cornelia scanned the deck in a panic.

  Only strange faces, not the face she sought.

  “John!”

  There was no answer.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In the morning as Felix rode to the Church of the Holy Apostles, the naked corpse he had hidden behind the statue of Aphrodite kept threatening to leap into his path. He couldn’t put the dead man’s specter out of his mind. The pallid revenant kept flickering into view, only to turn into a foraging cat or a slinking dog.

  Anastasia, Felix’s personal Aphrodite, had found his solution amusing. Or at any rate she had laughed hysterically when he related his misfortunes with the cart and the eventual disposal of their unwanted visitor. A release of tension or a manifestation of horror. She had been drinking by the time he’d arrived home. He couldn’t blame her. He was shaking himself and not merely with the cold and wet.

  Well, that was over now, he told himself.

  Had the body been discovered yet?

  Probably not. The streets were still nearly empty. The storm had passed but the morning remained dark. Ragged black clouds torn to shreds against the rooftops raced away across a slate-colored sky. Mist rose from puddles. From everywhere came the sounds of water, gurgling in gutters, dripping from colonnades.

  The sound of something that should have been dead shuffling noisily through the standing water at the mouth of an alley.

  No, Felix reminded himself. The victim—the intruder in his courtyard—had been perfectly and completely dead.

  Inside the church it was as bright as a sunny midday. Felix blinked. Reliquaries glittered in the illumination of countless lamps, their gold decorations glowing. Felix’s vague speculations on why the Virgin’s relic had been taken and by whom, meant to banish thoughts of the dead man, were interrupted by rapid footsteps ticking across the marble floor.