The Claudia Seferius Mysteries, Bundle #3 by Marilyn Todd

Author:Marilyn Todd [Todd, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2015-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

XX

An eagle owl, swooping over the seven hills of Rome, had a clear view of the wreckage left behind by the midsummer storm. Flash floods. Clogged and overflowing drains. A tenement struck by lightning, palls of smoke and flames ripping through the night, along with the sickly stench of burning flesh from those trapped inside.

The owl did not wish to singe its feathers. It moved on.

Soaring above streets whose stinking, rotting refuse had been flushed downhill by the torrential rains, piling the debris against buildings and in the doorways of those not privileged enough to live up higher up on the bluffs. The owl’s penetrating amber scrutiny picked out some interesting enough titbits in the wreckage—a drowned kitten, several live rats—but the bird was a creature of the open woods and forests and thus attracted more to fawns and wolf cubs. It was simply passing through.

Northwards it swept, on silent, eerie wings, over the shrine tended by the Vestal Virgins, above the coins twinkling at the bottom of Juturna’s healing pool, above dungeons awash under two finger widths of filthy water. The owl could not see, even if it wanted to, the small phalanx of soldiers splashing their blood-stained prisoner through the foetid underground chambers of this former stone quarry. The prisoner was a slave, an Armenian, who’d stabbed his master twenty-seven times in the chest and neck and stomach. His only regret was being captured before he’d been able to stab him another twenty-seven.

“Name?” the Clerk asked wearily.

The prisoner sympathised. It was late. It was hot. Outrageously hot, the storm hadn’t cleared the stickiness, if anything it had added to it. The Clerk would be tired, because weather such as this forces a man to breaking point and as long as the jails continued to fill (which they would, while this heatwave continued), the shift would get no reprieve. Standing ankle deep in sludge, the Armenian wondered whether the Clerk might be sickening for marsh fever. He looked ghastly. Haggard. Lined. As though he carried some terrible burden. The prisoner regretted his lack of consideration, not killing the vicious bastard at a more convenient hour, so men like the Clerk could go home to their wives and their families.

He did not wish to cause any trouble.

He gave his name.

“It’s a sad day,” said the Clerk of the Dungeons, staring past the shackles and the soldiers, “when decency is repaid with inhumanity.”

The prisoner, smelling his master’s blood on his hands and tunic, saw no point in trying to explain to this hollow-eyed Roman the true definition of savagery.

“Yes, sir,” he said meekly, his heels sinking deeper into the sludge.

What use was there in telling them he was glad the cruel bastard was dead and that in killing him, he’d spared others the same ordeal? He really did not wish to be any trouble. Saturday was not far away. He watched the gaunt Clerk lay down his nib. No point in trawling for remorse where it didn’t exist, even though a grovelling apology always went down well with the crowds.

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