was just my way of avoiding a fight that could only end badly for you, and then for her.’
The door to the corridor shook in its frame as whatever reinforcement had arrived in response to the bodyguard’s shout attacked it with their boots and shoulders, but the sturdy timber and heavy iron bolts seemed to be resisting their assault easily enough. Julius tipped his head to Annia, who had risen from the bed and was putting on a tunic. Slap nodded slowly, then reached down with his good arm to his dying comrade and pulled the knife free with an audible sucking noise, watching as Stab convulsed for a moment and then subsided back into the spreading crimson puddle of his lifeblood. Slap’s reply was tight with the pain of his injuries, but an angry light was burning in his eye.
‘Fair enough, hard man. Let’s see if you can do knife work as well as you can talk.’
He came forward, crablike, his wrecked arm turned away from the Tungrian while the knife weaved a deadly pattern in front of him. Julius stepped forward cautiously to meet him, swaying back as the knife hand darted for his eyes, then wincing as the blade sliced across his gut, leaving a line of blood weeping through the slashed tunic.
‘Now you’ve done it. The soldier that lent me this tunic’s going to shit when he sees what a mess you’ve made of it.’
He danced in fast, catching Slap’s good hand in his right fist as the bruiser made to repeat the cut, holding it steady in mid-air as the bodyguard grunted and strained in a fruitless effort to break the powerful grip on his hand. Julius tensed the bulging muscle in his right arm, physically forcing the other man’s hand down his body and turning the blade in towards him.
‘ No…’
Realising his intention Slap redoubled his efforts, butting the Tungrian in the face only for Julius to ball his other hand into a fist and smash it into Slap’s face with a crack of bone. With a single, powerful, grunting shove Julius forced the knife’s blade into Slap’s crotch, sawing it to and fro while the bodyguard screamed hoarsely at the blindingly intense pain. Pulling the weapon free from the other man’s failing grasp, he pushed him away, and the bodyguard tottered backwards with his good hand gripping his ruined manhood, his wide eyes fixed on Julius as blood flowed down his legs and onto the floor in thick rivulets.
‘And that’s enough punishment, I’d say. Are you ready to leave?’
He turned to find Annia lacing her shoes, her face turned away from the ruined bodyguard. She spoke without looking up.
‘Everything I thought I had here has turned to ashes… and it was all a lie in any case.’
The Tungrian strode across to the door, now silent as the men outside realised the futility of their efforts to break it down with anything less than an axe.
‘You men outside! Tell Petrus that I’ll be back for him. And tell him that I’m planning to take more time over his death than I did with these two fools.’ He turned for the hidden door, taking Annia gently by the arm. ‘Let’s go, before they realise there’s another way out of here.’ He paused at the top of the stairs, shaking his head at Slap as the bodyguard stared at him through eyes slitted with the agony of his wound.
‘Remember when you called me an amateur, and how I smiled and ate shit for the sake of seeing her? There was only one amateur in the room that night, and it wasn’t me! Die slowly, amateur.’
Escorted away from the basilica by the city guard after delivering the revelation of his master’s murder and the slaughter of the bandit hunters, Tornach had sunk gratefully onto a pallet bed in one of the jail’s empty cells and quickly fallen asleep, his equipment stacked against the wall next to the tiny stone room’s open door. He had swiftly been forgotten by the guards, consigned to the status of ‘that poor bastard’ and the subject of idle discussion as they went about their business as ordered by Scaurus, keeping the city secure against any potential attack. As the shadows had begun to lengthen in the street outside the cell’s barred window he had risen from the bed and strapped his belt and weapons about his waist, walking out to the jail’s front office with a sheepish wave of his hand to the officer in charge.
‘Slept like a baby.’
The guard nodded sympathetically.
‘Understandable. What you saw…’
He left the sentiment incomplete, but Tornach pursed his lips gratefully.
‘That’s done now, and it’s time to get on with life. I’ve nothing else to do, so I might as well help you boys. Where do you need another man?’
The watch commander snorted a mirthless laugh.
‘Where don’t I need another man? There’s twenty-five of us to secure eight gates and keep the city calm.’ He looked at the bandit hunter with an appraising eye. ‘Why don’t you go out to one of the gates and send a man back here? That’ll let me put another body out on the streets.’
He took a tablet from a stack perched tidily on his desk, wrote a brief statement of his orders into the wax and then embossed the soft surface with the engraved official ring on his right hand. He passed the tablet to the waiting Tornach, who nodded and tipped him a respectful salute and then strode out of the door with a purposeful look on his face, just as one of the officer’s men burst into the office.
‘There’s five hundred or so men coming up the west road, and we’re pretty sure they’re not the lads that went out this afternoon.’
The watch commander frowned.
‘If it’s not the army coming back home, there’s only one other man with that sort of force to command, and the gods only know what he’ll do if he gets inside these walls.’ He stood, reaching for his helmet and sword. ‘If it is Obduro we’ll just have to pray he’s got no means of getting in. I’m going down to the south-west gate to see what he’s got to say for himself.’
‘ Centurion! Soldiers on the main road! ’
Sergius mounted the grain store’s wall two steps at a time in response to his chosen man’s call, responding more to the urgency in the man’s voice than the words themselves. He stood alongside his deputy breathing heavily and staring out into the evening sun’s radiance, and at length shook his head in disgust.
‘I can’t see a bloody thing, what with the setting sun and the fact that my eyes are twenty years older than I’d like. Who spotted them?’
The chosen man ushered a soldier forward, and as Sergius turned to speak with the legionary he realised that the boy was barely old enough to shave. He sprang to attention, saluting his centurion with a look of uncertainty.
‘No wonder you’ve got sharp eyes, man; you’ve not spent a lifetime straining them to stare at the horizon in fear of what might be waiting for you just over it.’ He pointed to the distant horizon. ‘Now then, in your own time, tell me what you can see, eh?’
He turned back to face the western horizon, waiting as the soldier stared out into the evening’s long shadows, and watching as the sun’s orange ball sank to meet the land’s smooth black line.
‘Not as much as I could just now, Centurion. They’re soldiers, marching on the main road. I can see their shields.’
Sergius blew out a long sigh of relief.
‘Thank Mithras for that. For a moment I thought they might be Obduro’s men, but if they’re carrying shields then they must be-’
‘No, Centurion, I don’t think they’re ours. They’re not in any sort of formation, for one thing, and they don’t look… well, tidy enough to be Roman soldiers.’
Sergius stood on the wall in the dying sun’s light, and as the dimming orb met the horizon it silhouetted the oncoming men, now less than a mile away, throwing them into sharp relief. The chosen man shook his head, screwing his eyes up in an attempt to make sense of what he was seeing.
‘What in Hades? They’re waving something over their heads, something on their spears. They look like…’
‘Heads.’ Sergius’s voice was flat with disappointment. ‘So much for our chances of a quiet life, eh?’ He turned back to the men waiting below him in the grain store’s wide expanse. ‘ Stand to! Let’s have you up on the wall! ’
The young legionaries watched as the bandit gang marched up the road towards Tungrorum in total silence, the distant rapping of their hobnailed boots on the hard surface the only sound to be heard. Sergius stared out at them, calculating the odds as he counted their heads for a third time and came up with the same depressing
