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  For Glenn Knight, with whom I have spent the past several years proving that a few thousand miles’ separation need not affect a friendship.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A lot of people helped me in the writing of this novel. Among the most significant helpers were Glenn and Helen Knight, who gave me a guided tour of Cilicia and points east; Jim Baen, who was in at the beginning and provided great help and support of various kinds along the way; and my wife, Jo, whose calm support helped me out of a lot of the pits I dug for myself.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The leader of the mob carried the head of a lion with six-inch fangs. It was on a stake just long enough for him to wave it as a standard while he bawled a slogan back to his followers.

  Aulus Perennius, a block and a half down the street, could not make out the words. It was only reflex, anyway, that made him want to jot down the slogan in his mind, to freeze the faces of the mob’s first rank for a later report. Beside Perennius, Gaius reached under his cloak. “Rome isn’t our assignment,” Perennius said to the younger man. “What we do now is get out of the way. It’d peeve Navigatus no end if I got trampled to death a couple blocks from Headquarters after he went to all this effort to call me back to Rome.”

  Perennius had spoken lightly, but he was muttering a curse that was more general than the immediate situation as he stepped into an alcove. A barred door there served one of the larger units of the apartment block. The common stairways to the third through sixth floors were open, but they were already disgorging a rabble which would join the mob for entertainment. Gaius, Perennius’ protégé from his home village of Doklea, slid into the doorway beside him.

  Aulus Perennius was five feet nine inches tall, a touch above the median. He was a blocky, powerful man with hands hard enough to be a stone mason’s and a face as weathered as a field slave’s. His tunic and dark blue cloak were both of better quality than a laborer could have afforded, however. It did not require the angular shape of a short sword beneath his cloak to give him a military appearance. Perennius looked to be a forty-year-old soldier of Illyrian descent. That was what he would in fact have been, had he not become an agent of the Bureau of Imperial Affairs ten years before.

  Gaius was half the agent’s age; taller, slimmer—a cheerful-looking youth, and that not only by contrast to his dour companion. He too wore a sword, a cavalry spatha long enough to project beneath the hem of his cloak.

  Perennius stared at the mob. He knew that it was not the cause of the collapse of everything he had spent his life trying to preserve. It was no more than a symptom of that collapse. The agent’s expression was nonetheless that of a man who had lived so closely with anger and death that they might now be his only friends.

  The bow shock of the mob was clearing the street ahead of it. Rain earlier that afternoon had left a slick shimmer of mud and filth on the paving stones, since the sewer beneath was blocked. A sedan chair came to grief as it tried to turn around. One of the bearers lost his footing and the whole rig came down on him with a crash and a scream. The woman inside tumbled through the curtains and fouled her silk tunics in the muck. “Dressed like a whore!” Perennius whispered savagely, but she was too old to owe her success to that. No doubt she was an official’s wife, tarted up just as his mistresses were.

  Gaius started to go to her aid. The agent’s hand stopped him. The woman stood on her own hefty legs and screamed at her chairmen. An onlooker scooped up a handful of mud from the gutter and flung it at her with a taunt in Aramaic. The woman cursed back in the same language, but there were more hands dipping toward the gutter and the mob itself was closing fast. The woman gathered her skirts and darted for the relatively dry surface of the covered sidewalk to make her escape.

  Her servants followed her. Three of them snatched up their poles and strutted off with the chair. They were in trouble enough for falling. Loss of the vehicle besides would invite a level of punishment worse than anything they could expect at the hands of the mob. The fourth bearer limped along behind his fellows. He squeezed his right thigh with both hands as if to force out the pain of the bruise it had received between a brace and the stone pavement.

  Shops were closing abruptly. Like the upper-class woman, they were obvious targets for the mob that would at other times comprise their clientele. The manager of the wineshop in the alcove next to Perennius slammed down his shutter without even delaying long enough to tug in the cups chained to the counter. His three patrons kept an eye on the approaching tumult as they slurped their mixtures of water and powerful African wine. In a bread shop on the ground floor of the building across the street, a lounger tried to snitch a roll. He squawked as the counterman caught his wrist and pinned his forearm to the limestone counter with the iron-edged shutter. The hasp of the padlock within must have had enough reach to close despite the impediment, because the loafer continued to scream even as the mob boiled past him.

  The counterman was almost certainly a slave, perhaps not even the person responsible to the absentee owner for management of the shop. He had acted not from necessity or even from personal involvement. In frustration and an anger more general than the immediate impetus, he had lashed out against the closest permissible target.

  Perennius felt a rush of fellowship for the counterman as he watched the thief screaming. His palm sweated on the worn bone hilt of his sword.

  The mob streamed past with the ragged implacability of the tide on a strand. The front ranks were of husky men who probably had a purpose. They were shouting, “Down with Baebrio!” The slogan meant little to Perennius and perhaps less to the jeering multitude following those leaders. This was simply entertainment for most of the crowd, the landless and jobless, the helpless and hopeless. They would pour on, shouting and smashing, until a company of the Watch was mustered to block them. Perhaps by that time, their numbers would have grown so that it was the Watch instead that scattered in a hail of bricks and roof tiles. If the riot went that far, it would last a day or more before squadrons of imperial cavalry arrived from Milan to wash the streets clear with blood.

  Thugs with cudgels were running down the sidewalks like outriders, banging on doors and shutters. Gaius and the agent were hidden by their dark cloaks and the shade of the pillar-supported sidewalk covering. A thug who had just bellowed something back at his companions recoiled in surprise from the alcove. He was young and burly, with a touch of Germanic pallor to his face. The cudgel that had halted in surprise he now cocked back with a snarl and a curse. He did not know the pair of them or care about them as men, but license faced control and reacted to it like acid on lime.

  As the cudgel rose, Perennius grinned and spread his cloak with his left hand
. His sword had been slung centurion-fashion from the left side of his equipment belt. It was that sword rather than the ball-pommeled dagger in the other scabbard that poised to respond to the club. But it was the grin that froze the thug, not the twenty inches of bare steel in Perennius’ hand. The fellow dropped his weapon and rushed on.

  “Let him go,” Perennius ordered as Gaius lunged to catch the man. He was nothing but flotsam on a dirty stream. Perennius, a cloaked figure in the shadows, would be forgotten by nightfall. The death the agent had been so willing to offer would be forgotten also, until it came calling again in a tavern brawl or a drunken misstep. The thug did not matter to the world, and to Perennius he was only the latest of the hundreds who, for one reason or none, had considered killing him.

  More interesting than that exchange was the head of the cat which was both banner and probable occasion for the mob. The great canines winked like spear-points from the upper jaw. Perennius had seen cats as big, but he had never seen one similarly armed. The folk surging down the street past the agent were inured to strangeness by the beast shows of the Circus, but this was to them also a unique marvel, an omen like a cow which spoke or thunder from a clear sky. It was reason enough for riot; it, and the barren wasteland of their lives.

  Perennius felt the cat grin at him as it was swept past; but the feeling, of course, was nonsense.

  * * *

  Ten minutes after the head of the mob had passed, the street was empty enough that Gaius and Perennius could walk against what had been the flow. The agent was weary from a journey of over a thousand straight-line miles—and he had not traversed them in a straight line. He was used to being weary. He was used to being delayed as well. Throughout the past six months, Perennius had been delayed repeatedly because the draft transferring funds to his account in Antioch had not arrived.

  The agent had made do because he was the sort of person who did make do. Perennius had never learned patience, but he knew the value of restraint and the power of necessity. The banker in Antioch had advanced some money and more information when he understood precisely what alternatives the stocky Imperial agent was setting before him. The sum Perennius had set as the bottom line for both of them to walk out of the room alive would not bankrupt the other, even if the “mistake” in Rome were never cleared up.

  The banker never seriously considered the possibility that Perennius was bluffing.

  The mob had not done a great deal of damage, since its racket was warning enough for most potential victims to drop their shutters or scamper out of the way. Half a dozen shopkeepers had dared a police fine by spreading their merchandise out on the sidewalks in front of their alcoves. Anarchy had punished them more condignly and suddenly than anything the law might have meted out. One old man moaned in the remains of his trampled, looted woolen goods. His wife was chattering in Egyptian as she dabbed blood from the pressure-cut in the fellow’s scalp.

  Perennius picked his way past them with more anger than sympathy. The Empire would work if everyone obeyed its rules. No one knew better than the agent how great was the Empire’s potential if it would cling together, if its millions would accept what the Empire offered them in the knowledge that it was more than they would get from chaos if each went his own way.

  But no, Britain and Gaul separated, as if they could deal with the Franks better alone than if they waited for the central army to handle the irruptions across the Rhine after it had blunted more pressing threats. Generals and governors repeatedly tried to parlay their commands into the Imperial regalia. The attempts guaranteed death for the usurpers, death for their rivals, and almost certainly death for the system over which they squabbled and slew. On a lower level, the rabble, dissatisfied with unproductive sloth, rioted in the streets in an apparent desire to smash the mechanism that fed it.

  And shopkeepers defied ordinances aimed at keeping open the thoroughfares on which their business depended. Well, let them lie in the street and moan. They’d made their choice.

  Somewhere in the building toward which Aulus Perennius walked was a clerk who had made a similarly bad decision. The clerk had siphoned off funds meant for secret intelligence of the Autarch of Palmyra; intelligence that Perennius was risking his life to supply.

  The Headquarters of the Bureau of Imperial Affairs, Western Division, was a converted town-house on the edge of the Caelian Hill. It was a two-story structure, lowered over by the six-floor apartment blocks more prevalent in the district. There was little to distinguish Headquarters from private houses elsewhere in Rome. Its façade was bleak and completely windowless on the stuccoed lower story. The upper floor, beyond the threat of graffiti and rubbing shoulders, had been sheathed in marble. The veneering was not in particularly good repair. Missing chips revealed the tufa core. The windows were narrow and barred horizontally. Most of the glazed sashes were swung open for ventilation despite the nip of a breeze to which spring was coming late.

  Originally, the lower story had been flanked on all sides by shops just as the neighboring apartment blocks were. The shop doorways had been bricked up when the building was converted to its present use almost eighty years before, during the reign of Commodus. Even at that distance in time, the windows and doors could be deduced from shadows on the stucco caused by a moisture content in the bricks differing from that of the surrounding stone.

  The main entrance was off a closed court, not the street Perennius had been following. He paused on the corner, sighed and cinched up his equipment belt. The agent was used to palaces, to great houses, to headquarters of many sorts; but he had never felt comfortable in this one. It occurred to him that it was because he had no real business there. There were Imperial agents and informers throughout Rome, and no doubt the Emperor had as much need for them here as he did for them anywhere else in the Empire.

  That was not a duty Perennius thought he could live with, however. On the borders or across them, the agent could convince himself that he was working to preserve the Empire. When he was at the core of that Empire, he saw that the rot, the waste and treachery and peculation, was as advanced as any nightmare on the borders. What the dour agent was about to do to a finance clerk was a personal thing. If Perennius permitted himself to know that a similar tale could be told of a thousand, a myriad, highly-placed bureaucrats in the capital, he would also have had to know that nothing whatever Aulus Perennius did would have any significant effect.

  A pair of armed guards stood in the entrance alcove of the building. Their round shields, stacked against javelins in opposite corners of the short passage, were marked with the blazons of a battalion of the Palatine Foot. The Palatines were one of the elite formations the Emperor was forming as a central field army. All the Empire’s borders were so porous that there was no longer a prayer of dealing with hostile thrusts before they penetrated to the cities and farmland of the interior. Because the Palatines were an elite, it was all the more frustrating to Perennius that the younger of the guards had not bothered to wear his body armor.

  Both of the uniformed men straightened when they saw that Perennius and Gaius were not sauntering toward the apartment block at the end of the court. The lower floors of that building seemed, from the advertisements painted on the stucco, to have been converted into an inn and brothel. The guard who called out to Perennius was the older of the pair, a man not far short of the agent’s own forty years. “All right, sir,” the guard announced with no more than adequate politeness, “if you’ve got business here, you’ll have to state it to us.”

  “Get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, straight-leg?” snapped Gaius in reaction to the tone. The young man flopped back the edge of his cloak to display his chest insignia, medallions of silvered bronze. Gaius had been an aide in the Bodyguard Horse before Perennius arranged his secondment to the Bureau as a courier. The morning before, when they had reached Italy—and very nearly the limits of friendly territory—the younger man had unpacked and donned his uniform trappings. That was harmless enough in its
elf, a boastfulness understandable in an orphan from an Illyrian village no one had ever heard of. What had sent a chill down Perennius’ spine was the realization that Gaius had been carrying the gear when he arrived in Palmyra to deliver an urgent message to Perennius.

  The situation between Gallienus, who styled himself Emperor of Rome, and Odenathus, who claimed less but perhaps controlled more, was uncertain. The two were not friends … nor, at the moment, were they clearly at swords’ points. Perennius travelled as a spice trader, but that was only a veneer over his claim to be a secret envoy from Postumus, Emperor of the Gauls. Given what the agent had learned in those paired personae, there was very little doubt as to what the Palmyrenes would have done if Gaius’ vanity had unmasked the pair of them as agents of the central government.

  Of what liked to think of itself as the central government, at any rate.

  * * *

  The older guard reacted about the way Perennius would have reacted had he been on entrance duty. “Don’t worry about how I slept, sonny,” he said. “Let’s just see your pass.” The guard wore a shirt of iron ring mail over his tunic. The metal had been browned, but the linen beneath his armpits bore smudges of rust nonetheless. It was that problem of maintenance which led many men to prefer bronze armor or even leather despite the greater strength of the iron.

  Of course, a lot of them now were like the younger guard who wore no armor at all. Blazes! See how comfortable they’d be the first time a Frank’s spear slipped past the edge of their shields.

  The agent reached into his wallet and brought out one of the flat tablets there. It was of four leaves of thin board. The outer two acted as covers for the inner pair. “These are my orders,” Perennius said, holding out the diploma. “If they’re forgeries, then I’ve made a hell of a long trip for nothing.”