‘By Jupiter and all the gods!’ Claudius gasped, stumbling back in utter shock and falling hard on his back onto the cold floor. ‘By Jupiter, by Jupiter, by Jupiter!’
‘What trickery is this?!’ cried the flabbergasted Lepidus, whose little eyes were bulging from their sockets and looking twice their normal size, utterly transfixed by the sight of a pacing, spitting lioness occupying the space where the woman had just been. ‘What … what … how?!’
Octavian laughed loudly and slowly, the sound dripping with the smugness of his triumph.
‘I told you, Claudius, I told you! Now, would you gentlemen care to re-enter the bath and discuss what I’ve just shown you?’
‘Is she … is she a real, live goddess?’ a senator stammered, bug-eyed with disbelief, his mouth agape.
‘One may be forgiven for thinking such a thing,’ Octavian remarked coolly, ‘but no, she is no goddess. Whatever sorcery she otherwise possesses, she is still made of flesh and blood and bone, like you or I. Now, Kurush, spear the beast please.’
Kurush sheathed his scimitar and took a long spear from one of the guards – and then he thrust it through the bars of the cage, jabbing the blade between the lioness’s ribs. She roared in pain and sprang back against the bars, trying in vain to escape from the stabbing horror of the steel. Kurush plucked the spear from her ribs, and a flush of bright red blood washed over her tawny flanks. Inside the cramped confines of her cage she writhed, twisted and roared bestially with agony and frustration.
‘Gods, that creature makes an awful racket! Tell that pleb to stop poking it!’ Claudius, who was starting to recover from his initial shock, complained. His eyes, however, remained locked on the lioness, and they still looked as if they were about to pop out of their sockets.
‘Kurush, leave the lioness … for now,’ Octavian ordered.
Kurush did as he was told and stepped away from the cage.
‘Gentlemen,’ Octavian said, ‘let us relax in the bath and talk about this … this wonderful monster that paces and snarls in its cage before us.’
‘What of that man bleeding on your floor?’ Lepidus asked, looking horrified and overwhelmed by everything he had just witnessed, his liver-spotted hands trembling slightly as he wrung them together. ‘It is a most ghastly sight!’
‘Oh yes, the bitch’s lover,’ Octavian grunted coldly. ‘Kurush, put him out of his misery and remove the body.’
Kurush nodded and unsheathed his scimitar, and slashed the blade with cruel precision across the man’s throat. He watched with his dead eyes as his victim’s lifeblood pooled on the floor at his feet, spreading like an ink-stain across tissue paper; taking a human life was obviously something the automaton-like bodyguard was rather scarily familiar with, it seemed. As the unconscious man bled to death, the other guards dragged him out of the room, and two servant boys with a pail of water and some rags hurried over and began cleaning up the blood, while Kurush looked on dispassionately. Inside the cage, the lioness thrashed wildly about, roaring and snarling in a fury of grief, helplessness and tormented rage.
‘By Jupiter, that sound is most awful!’ Claudius snapped. ‘We cannot conduct business while that thing makes such a cacophony!’
Octavian’s glacial gaze hovered on the lioness for a few moments, and the corners of his mouth inched downward in a malicious scowl of revulsion and hatred before he spoke.
‘Very well,’ he growled softly. ‘Guards, silence the beast.’
Kurush and the other guards, who had now returned, readied their weapons and began stabbing the thrashing lioness through the bars with their swords and spears. She roared and spun and slashed helplessly with her claws, but the cold steel of the cage was too strong for her, and the claustrophobic space too confined to dodge the relentless horizontal storm of sword blades and spear-points. Their unyielding sharpness tore through her skin, opening wound after wound, and soon her yellow coat was crimson and wet with steadily flowing blood. Her legs rapidly began to weaken, and finally they gave out beneath her, and she collapsed onto the floor of the cage. Kurush rammed his scimitar into her now-exposed throat, again and again, grunting with an almost carnal satisfaction each time he did, for now his formerly lifeless eyes were bright and glossy, aflame with something malicious and sadistic, a power-lust that gorged itself on cruelty, suffering and violence. The other guards plunged their spears into her underbelly and used the embedded blades to turn her over onto her back, and once in that position they began stabbing at her body with an unrelenting fury.
Eventually the lioness let out one last soft, gurgling growl, and the final dim light faded from her eyes as life left them forever.
‘Thank the gods,’ Claudius muttered in a flat, callous tone, staring with a cold gaze at her corpse. His hands, however, were perceptibly shaking, and he could not completely cover up how shaken up he was. ‘Well, now that this beast is expired and the world is safe from its sorcery, what would you discuss, Octavian? I fail to see how these, these monsters, as remarkable as they are, will have any specific bearing on our business concerns.’
The corners of Octavian’s mouth crept up, bending into a hint of a smile and revealing the cocky flash of a yellowed tooth between his lips.
‘Let me explain, Claudius.’
Claudius folded his flabby arms across his chest and tilted his face up to stare with a contemplative gaze at the paintings that decorated the ceiling. Fresh memories of the hideous violence, committed before his very eyes, though, were raging through the corridors of his mind.
‘Very well,’ he muttered in a put-on tone of indifference. ‘We are all ears.’
‘My friends,’ Octavian said, stretching his arms out as he slipped languidly back into the hot water, ‘the existence of this monster was not a mere once-off occurrence. No, this
