He turned to one of his assistants.
‘Cuff them.’
Then he turned to the slave who had denounced Justinus. He was still grovelling hopelessly on the floor. I could now see that the fingers on his left hand were broken and already swollen black.
‘Return to your master’s house,’ he said, his voice silkier than ever. ‘I’ll send for you again when I need you.’
As we left, the restaurant had all the still silence of an hermetic monastery. I looked briefly back. No one moved. No one so much as breathed heavily. On the bright ceramic tiles of the floor, a dark smear showed where the body of Justinus had been dragged along behind us.
The sky overhead was now black, and I felt a chill breeze on my face as we emerged from the restaurant. There was a small crowd in the street outside. Blank faces lit by the flickering of the torches, no one spoke. A few turned their backs to us as the Tall Man looked in their direction.
We were pushed into a black windowless carriage. The possibly still living body of Justinus was thrown in beside us.
11
I’d nearly vomited at my first smell of the place: it was like an unwashed abattoir – all stale blood and rotted offal which almost overpowered the smell of damp.
The creatures running this imitation of Hell kept up the resemblance to an abattoir. They wheeled silently about us in the stained leather aprons you normally see in a butcher’s market. As one whispered with the Tall Man, another darted a hand inside my robe. He squeezed hard on a nipple, all the time looking up at me with the bright, panting smile of a mad dog.
‘Tomorrow!’ he whispered triumphantly – ‘And tomorrow and tomorrow, and all for us!’
I cut him short with a smart head-butt to the face. ‘Fuck you!’ I snarled. The others danced back out of my reach.
I was in the Ministry where I’d earlier visited Theophanes. No – I was in the basement that ran far beneath the Ministry. Once unloaded from the carriage, we had been dragged in through a small side entrance, and then taken down worn steps that had twisted round and round and round on their course into a subterranean world of endless corridors lined every few yards with iron doors.
At first, all down there had seemed quiet. As my ears began to adjust, though, I could hear a chorus of low, despairing moans. They came from behind the closed doors of the cells. They came from all directions. They came from as far as the ears could reach, and from further than the eyes could see in the dim glow of the lamps hung at every junction in that labyrinth of horror.
As the one I’d butted lay grovelling on the floor, the Tall Man pushed his own face close to mine. ‘Tomorrow, indeed, my fine young barbarian,’ he crooned, ‘but not for these trash. You belong to me.’
He stood back and took a deep breath to savour the endless despair of our surroundings before continuing in a tone of eager intensity: ‘I will show you how pain is very like pleasure. It too has its rituals and instruments. It too has its orgasms. It too can be prolonged by those who have studied the responses of the body.’
‘Fuck you!’ I snarled again, though I’d not felt inclined to try anything physical with this living image of Satan. He was on his home territory, and had seemed to grow taller and more substantial with every breath of that foul air.
‘We shall see how long your courage holds up under my personal ministrations,’ he said, turning to rap a few orders to his minions. ‘You will give me the answers to my questions, and much else before the end.’
Still cuffed, we were pushed into separate cells spaced far apart. I don’t know how long I sat in darkness on that damp, stinking floor once the door had swung shut on me.
Few definite sounds now reached me through those stone walls and the heavy door. But I felt aware of continual movement outside, and perhaps the occasional low moan.
‘I’m a guest of the Emperor,’ I shouted in the darkness. ‘I demand immediate release.’
No answer. Instead, the sound of my voice within the invisible walls of that blackness chilled me more than the dank air. The wine fumes that had so far buoyed me up were now dispersing like a morning fog, and I was beginning to realise the full horror of my situation.
Once I did hear voices. Though muffled by the close-fitting iron door, they’d come from just outside my cell.
‘So is this one Justinus?’ one had asked.
‘Nah!’ another had replied. ‘That’s the one back there. We’ll see what we can get out of him come the morning. I don’t think, though, there’s much left for us to do. He’s all smashed up now.’
‘Shame,’ had come the answer. ‘I suppose it is the right Justinus this time. I said the other one was telling us the truth.’
The voices had drifted away, leaving me in a silence broken only by a steady dripping of water somewhere in the dark.
I’ve seen people go mad in prisons. Even a short stay is unnerving. The blackness and the silence are bad enough. Far worse is the uncertainty of how long the stay there will be. Will you be taken out and tortured or killed? Or will you just be left there to rot to death?
I kept my nerve in that cell by refusing to think about what might happen next, and by instead reciting in my head the whole of the Creed, first in Latin then in Greek. Yes, it may be a mass of words made up to torment the devout. But it can also at times have a certain anaesthetic value.
So, for what seemed an age, I sat huddled on the floor, every so often muttering like some novice monk, and willing my teeth not to chatter with fear and the sudden cold of that place.
Then, at last, with a jingling of keys and the creak of unoiled hinges, the door swung open, and I saw Theophanes standing in a pool of light.
‘My dear young fellow, you cannot imagine how embarrassing this is to all of us.’ Speaking in Latin, Theophanes sat behind the desk of his office in the Ministry. He still wore his bedgown under his cloak. The single lamp his assistant had lit for us showed the lines on his unpainted face.
‘I came as soon as Alypius could inform me of the situation.’ He waved with a feeble effort of cheerfulness at his assistant. ‘Alypius’, I thought. I filed the name carefully into my memory.
I took another mouthful of the wine Alypius had poured for me. I tried to think of something ornately suitable for the occasion, but I gave up on the effort, instead asking: ‘Where is Martin?’
‘I took the liberty’, Theophanes said, now in a more businesslike tone, ‘of having your secretary sent back directly to the Legation. Being a person of only middling status, he was given a roughness of treatment on his arrival that might not have been yours until morning.’
He raised his arm to silence me, continuing rapidly: ‘Please be assured, he came to no harm. I was able to prevent that. But I found him somewhat overcome. I thought it best to have a sedative administered and to send him straight off to the Legation.
‘Now, Aelric,’ he continued – he used my proper name. Was it a slip? Was it an intended slip? In any case, how could he have known it? I wanted to break in and ask, but didn’t dare – ‘Now, Aelric, it would not be an act of friendship or convenient to any of us if I were compelled to vary the terms of your residency permit. But I must urge you never again to interfere in the work of the Black Agents. It is of the highest importance to the Empire, and they do not report to me. Do I have your assurance?’ he asked. ‘Next time, I may not be so easily found to help you.’
For the first time since we’d met, he spoke naturally, a look of tired strain on his face. His lank, undressed hair fell around his eyes.
‘Have I your assurance?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Theophanes,’ I repeated, avoiding all the usual circumlocutory courtesy.
He nodded.
Back in the Legation, I went straight to Martin’s room. He was sleeping heavily. He looked unhurt. I asked to be called as soon as he woke. In the meantime, I fell into bed for some sleep of my own. I can’t say it contributed
