When Charadric took the papyri from under his cloak and gave them to Arcadia, she breathed a prayer of thanks to Blessed Cosmas, a patron saint of physicians. She could think of no other appropriate holy person and had, in fact, not really expected the guard to find the documents.
Later that evening Getorius and Arcadia made love with an intensity they had never reached before. It was as if the end of an age was at hand, and they were not sure that they would survive the resulting chaos. Afterward, Getorius fell into a deep sleep—the type of sleep that had eluded him for weeks because of worries over the forged will and the false accusation against him.
Arcadia lay in a half-doze, but awakened fully when she heard the sixth hour guards talking as they came off duty. It was the midpoint between night and day and, perhaps, she mused, for the life that she and her husband had known—as well as for everyone in the Western and Eastern Roman Empires—if her plan failed.
Rising quietly, Arcadia slipped on her tunic and cloak, then pulled its hood over her head. She eased the twin papyri back into their golden case, concealed the cylinder in the folds of her cape, and stepped out into the winter night. Icy air had followed the earlier rain. Now, frost glistened on the paving stones of the walk leading to the garden. She turned left, toward the kitchen area and its ice storage room.
“You brought this with you, Behan,” she murmured, patting the hard bulge next to her tunic. “Tomorrow you can take it back to wherever you’re going.”
Chapter twenty-three
Arcadia walked quietly, hugging the walls of the imperial apartments. A few sputtering torches threw orange, smoky light on the poplar and black yew trees in the garden. She had once asked the palace cooks to reheat food brought for Getorius and, near the kitchen, saw the ice blocks that had been cut from mountain lakes and stored in a room close to where staff meals were prepared.
Behan’s corpse would be there.
She kept to the shadows and hurried past the wells of flickering torchlight, worried about being seen, and also about having to pass the area where Valentinian kept his menagerie of animals. Fortunately, all the apartment windows were dark, except for a warm glow in two near the end. In a dark area between the torches, Arcadia paused to listen for any noises—footsteps, voices, or the jingle of a patrolling guard’s equipment—that might betray someone’s approach. Waiting, she glanced up. Far above her head the velour blackness of the sky was dotted with the glimmering points of Capricorn, as the Ram constellation swung around to replace the Archer of the past month. Ironic, she mused, Sagittarius had been an appropriate sign for the November deaths, which had begun with the bow bolt that killed Feletheus. And it was fortunate that the winter moon, almost in its full phase, would not rise for more than two hours.
Patting the bulge of the case under her cloak for reassurance again, Arcadia neared the palace chapel dedicated to the Archangel Michael. Sigisvult and Surrus Renatus had been buried from there in hasty, private services.
She had just passed the entrance when a peacock unexpectedly voiced its unearthly, piercing cry from the zoo area across the way. The sudden sound sent a shiver through Arcadia, even as a leopard growled a rumbling warning in response. She froze in her steps and held her breath, silently praying to Cosmas that she had not set off a cacophony of animal calls which would alert the sentries and send them out to investigate the cause.
While Arcadia waited, the smell of offal from the animal cages reminded her of the week she had spent at Maximin’s farm. What role does the senator have in all this? Getorius thinks it might be a bid for power, but Maximin would have to be very desperate to ally himself with an order of monks no one seems to know anything about. Or perhaps he knew Behan from visiting the palace library?
The zoo creatures settled back into quiet. Arcadia thanked Cosmas and slowly exhaled, her breath a cloud of spectral vapor melting into the cold darkness of the garden.
Once she had reached the kitchens in the north wing of the Lauretum, Arcadia recalled that the ice storage room was in an alcove immediately to the right of the kitchen. It had its own door so that the frozen blocks could be brought directly in from outside, without going through the kitchen itself. A lamp hung in the recess, throwing enough light to show that the portal was bolted shut.
My Furcing luck!—Arcadia gave a muffled laugh at her impulsive mental vulgarity—I thought it would be unlocked because there’s no need for ice in the winter. And the presence of a dead body in the room should be enough to frighten slaves away from entering to steal supplies.
After examining the locking wards Arcadia saw that they were a standard design resembling the ones used to secure the outer clinic door. She searched her purse and found the key, eight wards that pushed up their corresponding pegs to release the bolt bar. After working the projections into their slots, she breathed another prayer of thanks to Cosmas. They matched. The bolt rasped through its brackets with a screech she felt could be heard in every room of the palace. Arcadia quickly entered and pulled the door shut after her.
The air inside the small room was damp, and as cold as that of outdoors, but it smelled of mold and rotting food, instead of the pungent evergreens and frost-speckled earth of the garden. Arcadia’s leather boots were instantly saturated with
