'You are insane. The drug has addled your wits. Let me go.' She stood straight. 'I came to sing for you!' she said.
'If I ordered you stripped, what interesting vials would I find? A quill full of poison, perhaps?' Satyrus shook his head.
'I demand-' she began. Satyrus rose to his feet and she was silent.
'You mistake me for a much nicer boy you once knew. There will be no demands, Phiale. Today – this very hour – you will board a ship for Athens, after you reveal every iota of your plots. You will go there and you will never return to Alexandria. And you will write a letter for me, to your master.'
Phiale was white now. But she held his gaze. 'You are delusional.'
'Entirely possible,' Satyrus said. 'But not in this.'
Sappho came in, with Nearchus behind her. 'You have her!' she said.
Phiale's eye widened. 'We are friends!' she said.
'You have spied on my house for the last time,' Sappho returned.
'Hypocrite!' Phiale spat.
'Not, perhaps, your best defence.' Satyrus walked over to Alcaea.
'Why would I go to Athens?' Phiale asked.
'You lodge all of your earnings with Isaac Ben Zion, do you not?' Satyrus asked. 'I think that when I tell him you betrayed his business partner into captivity, he will perhaps seize your fortune.' Satyrus smiled. 'It was – short-sighted, shall I say? To leave your money where it could be used against you. By tomorrow, every obol will be locked in my aunt's coffers. If you ever want it again, you'll have to obey us. Go to Athens. Stay there. Hate us if you will – but hate us from a distance. And if we ever, ever catch you acting against our interests again – spying, muttering, gossiping – some men like Carlus will appear at your house, seize you and carry you off. And they will take you to Delos – and sell you into slavery. Am I clear? You are not young any more. I do not think you could earn your way free again.'
Phiale began to sob. She went straight from imperious to broken without passing through another emotion. 'It is not fair! You are not fair! You, who were my lover – who has defamed me like this? You would exile me on the word of a slave?'
Alcaea spoke up. 'What of me, lord?' she asked.
Satyrus nodded. 'Death, unless you tell me everything. And I already know a great deal. So much that I have little reason to offer you leniency unless you tell me things that I don't know. Let me offer you a beginning. You meet with Sophokles in the night market, behind the false wall of a certain tavern-'
Phiale's hand went back to her throat, and Alcaea threw herself on the ground. 'I am a slave, master! What else can I do but obey her?'
Sappho crouched on the floor next to the abject slave. 'Obey who, my dear?' she asked.
'My mistress!' Alcaea wailed.
'She will say anything to be saved,' Phiale said.
'I have her notes to the doctor,' Alcaea said, clasping Satyrus's knees in supplication. 'She wrote to him – every week, reporting on your household.'
Satyrus nodded. 'And who have you suborned in this household?' he asked.
Sappho started, and Satyrus put a hand on her shoulder. 'Who provides you with information from within this household?' Satyrus asked.
'I don't know,' Alcaea answered. Seeing Sappho's face, she wailed, 'I don't know! There's a wax tablet left under the rain barrel at our house every week. It's almost always there.'
Satyrus nodded. 'That, I did not know. It is possible you will live. Hama? Would you care to question her?'
Hama nodded. 'At your service, lord.'
Satyrus turned to Phiale. 'Will you go to Athens, despoina? Or shall I take another action?'
She shrugged. 'I will not go.'
'Really?' Satyrus asked. 'I am not sure that my eudaimonia would survive killing you. But please don't mistake me, despoina. I will kill you if I must. I will be king in the Euxine. I will not be stopped by a provincial hetaira and a hired killer. Where do I find Sophokles?'
She shook her head. 'I don't know,' she said. 'I deny your charges. You have no evidence. I will go to Athens and hate you from there.'
'Choose,' Satyrus said. 'Tell me everything, and live. Where do I find him? If you tell the truth, you are off to a new life in Athens.'
'I deny your charge. I don't know anyone named Sophokles. Stratokles hired me as a courtesan and you, apparently, have a mad resentment about it. How could I know? I am a hetaira!' Phiale stood tall.
'I have her notes to him,' Alcaea spat.
'You lie!' Phiale said. 'How could you?'
'You ordered me to burn them,' Alcaea said. 'I kept them against such a day as this.'
'Bah – she could write them herself,' Phiale said. 'She does all my writing for me anyway.'
Satyrus shook his head. 'I don't think you are taking me seriously,' he said.
Phiale crossed her arms over her chest. 'I will not be tricked into condemning myself.'
Hama spoke regretfully. 'I can have her speaking about anything in an hour,' he said.
Nearchus stepped forward. 'I will not be party to torture,' he said.
Satyrus looked around at all of them. 'Once, when I did not kill Stratokles, you all advised me to strike first in the future. Aunt Sappho, this woman is a viper who will hurt us any way she can. Even now, an assassin – her ally – stalks us. He tried to kill Lita, and you took a dagger in the chest to save her. This woman provided the information that prompted that attack, and the information that led to Leon's capture – and she has perhaps done as much against Lord Ptolemy and Diodorus. This is not the time to be soft.'
Nearchus looked at Phiale. Her eyes implored him. 'I am innocent,' she said to him. 'Satyrus is mad.'
Nearchus turned back to Satyrus. He shook his head and turned to Phiale. 'I will not see you tortured,' he said. 'But you, not Satyrus, are mad.'
'I know where you can find Sophokles the physician,' Alcaea said from her position of supplication on the floor.
'As do I,' Satyrus said. He did not want to kill Phiale. But he didn't see much choice. It was the situation on the beach again – more deaths to haunt him. But Satyrus had begun to understand people. If he didn't break her, the hetaira would come back for him.
And then he thought, What would Philokles do? And he saw it. Philokles would never kill her. Philokles would simply draw her fangs and leave her. The moral act.
'Bring her,' he said. They missed Sophokles by the thickness of a door. The Athenian physician vanished into the tunnels behind the tavern even as Satyrus's men broke down the false wall. Hama had his sword at the innkeeper's throat and they flooded the streets with soldiers, but they still missed him. Carlus dragged Phiale wherever they went, on every search, so that every denizen of the night market saw the hetaira's presence with the Exiles.
Later, over hot wine, Satyrus shook his head. 'I was precipitate,' he said. 'I allowed my need to get back to sea to drive my actions. I should have let her develop her plot and taken her in commission. And the same with the doctor. I see that now.'
Hama, sitting by the hearth with his Thracian boots up on the hearth's lip, grinned. 'But every thief, pimp and whore in the market thinks she gave us the doctor, eh?' he said to Neiron, who laughed grimly. His oarsmen had swept the streets with Hama's soldiers.
Satyrus nodded. 'That part went well,' he said.
Sappho came in with cheese and olives, which she set by the men. 'What of the maidservant?' she asked.
'I leave Alcaea to you, Aunt. Kill her, torture her, sell her – her utility to us is done.' Satyrus shrugged.
Sappho looked at him. 'She is a person, Satyrus. She has an existence beyond her utility.'
Satyrus shook his head. 'Perhaps,' he allowed.
'If you propose to become Eumeles, I see no reason to support you,' Sappho said.
'Aunt! I have acted only to save this family! To protect you!' Satyrus was stung – the more so as his aunt
