‘And this other one that you speak of … he still walks free?’ Lepidus asked in a hushed tone, with a flush of panic quickening his pulse and brightening his eyes. ‘Gods! How shall we be safe from such a terror?’
‘His name is Lucius Sertorius, and we have nothing to fear from him. He does not even know of my existence – but I know all about his.’ Octavian paused here for a self-congratulatory chuckle before he continued. ‘He is a petty gambler who makes his profits from trading slaves and betting on gladiatorial games. Granted, he has amassed a small fortune in this field, but despite his ostentatious trappings of wealth and his garish and distasteful display of coin, he remains a low-born pleb at heart.’
‘But he is more than that,’ Claudius hissed, ‘for if he is a creature like this lioness, then he is a monster! How do these beasts maintain their magical powers? Surely only by the most potent and evil of gods, and by frequent blood sacrifices to them, could such sorcery be possible? He must slaughter people by the thousand to appease whatever dark powers have granted him this ability!’
‘These creatures perform neither blood sacrifices nor rituals,’ Octavian said dismissively. ‘Trust me. I have been secretly observing them for many years – both this Lucius fool and the lioness we just killed. My eyes and ears in other provinces have also been making reports to me of others like them.’
‘How on earth do they obtain such powers then?’ Lepidus asked.
‘I am not sure of that, exactly,’ Octavian admitted. ‘I know it has something to do with their blood, and the transferral of that blood from one of them to one of us has the ability to change us into one of them.’
‘By the gods!’ Claudius exclaimed with a gush of sudden and almost frantic excitement. ‘The possibilities for this may be endless!’
‘Not so fast, my friend,’ Octavian cautioned. ‘It is not as simple as that, unfortunately. Believe me, due to my long-term interest in these creatures I have been conducting many experiments in secret. The transferral rate of their powers is absolutely minimal … perhaps one in a thousand, if luck was on my side. Maybe one in ten thousand, more likely.’
‘What do you mean?’
Octavian’s eyes blazed with a flicker of arrogant triumph.
‘I have been extracting blood from this lioness from the past year in an attempt to create my own beast. Not on myself, of course! That would be too much of a gamble for my conservative temperament. No, I have been transfusing the blood to slaves; cheap chattel who I got for next to nothing from the quarries, those who had been worked near to death. I own an estate in a distant part of Egypt, you see. It has proved, by virtue of its remoteness, to be quite convenient for these experiments.’
‘And the results?! What of the results of these experiments?!’ Claudius demanded with greedy eagerness, snatching a bunch of grapes from a passing serving boy; the trauma and disgust that had unsettled him so greatly just a minute earlier had now been displaced by greed, ravenous and lusty.
‘As I said, maybe one in a thousand, and that is discounting the possibility of sheer good luck, which would most likely set the odds much higher. The lioness’s blood killed over two hundred slaves.’
Claudius spat out a mouthful of half-chewed grapes as his eyes widened with shock.
‘Two hundred! Killed?! How so? By the gods, was there any method to your madness?’
‘Claudius, Claudius, you have too little faith in me,’ Octavian retaliated. ‘I took slaves who were weak and exhausted, but otherwise healthy. I fed them well and gave them plenty of rest and relaxation to restore their strength before subjecting them to a dose of the lioness’s blood. And, as I said, the blood happened to kill over two hundred of them. They would start to have violent convulsions upon receiving it, via a small incision in the veins of their forearms, and then the unfortunate slaves would slip into unconsciousness, and finally death.’
‘And you persisted with this two hundred times?!’ Lepidus gasped. ‘What on earth made you continue after the first two or three failures?’
‘Curiosity,’ Octavian murmured with a shrug and a cold smile, an evil darkness gathering in the shadows on his face as he grabbed a sliver of roast pork from a serving boy’s platter. ‘Curiosity, and a certainty that it would eventually work. I just had to find the right man, my friends. You see, the lioness told me that she became a creature like this after being attacked by a strange hyena out in the desert wastes of her homeland. So, from this I knew that blood or other bodily fluids had to be the method of transferral.’
Lepidus scratched at his chin with contemplative fingers.
‘She was a lioness, yet she was made this way by a hyena?’
‘That’s what she told me. She had no reason to lie, at that time; the foolish whore was quite trusting of my intentions, before I imprisoned her and began my experiments, of course. The method of who can and cannot successfully receive the transferral of powers, well, that is yet another of the myriad mysteries of their kind which remains unsolved. But I knew that if I kept trying, I would eventually find a subject who the blood would transform. And surely enough, I did.’
‘You created one of these beasts?’ Lepidus cried, standing up with shock, the hot water cascading off his hunched, geriatric form.
Octavian leaned back, spreading his arms out across the rim of the bath, revelling in his success with relaxed smugness.
‘I did, and
