The Burning Stone Read online

  “Appius Endor—that was his full name—was a disciple, some say a first cousin, of Carausius. You know who he was, don’t you?”

  “Of course. The Pirate Emperor of Britain. Operated about thirty years ago.”

  “That’s the man, bad luck to his memory. Held to the belief that everything a man does should be purely for his own benefit ahead of anyone else’s. Endor worshipped Carausius and studied his methods—studied them hard, theft and warfare both—until Carausius was murdered by one of his own, another reptile called Allectus. Endor, who must have been about sixteen at that time, and a depraved young bastard, simply vanished for the next three years, until Allectus himself was killed, making it safe for him to come out again. Benigne,” he said then, interrupting himself to thank Leon for the cup being offered him.

  “We don’t know where he went for those three years,” he resumed, “but he was probably in the farthest parts of Cornua, perfecting his murderous ways among the peoples down there, for there’s no Roman military presence there at all, and it’s rife with pirates and savages. After Allectus’s death, though, he reappeared here, and we know he set about establishing himself as a clever and resourceful thief, using the methods of his hero Carausius. We also believe he set himself up as a murderer for hire. He certainly was one, but we believe he started operating openly around here in the beginning.

  “That would have been…” He sucked air between his teeth as he threw his mind back, calculating the passage of years. “I’m going to say twenty-one or twenty-two years ago, just about the time Diocletian was settling his new supply system firmly into place. So the timing is perfect. Endor would have been one of the first to recognize an opportunity to grow fat off the wealth that was beginning to flow across the empire.”

  He sipped from his cup. “That’s when he started shipping his stolen goods to Cornua, because he had contacts there, and safe shipping to Gaul and Eire, where he could sell his spoils far away from our attentions. And he prospered. By all the ancient gods, he prospered to the point where serious investors began to court him. You understand, these were people who believed they had sufficient money to grant them immunity from prosecution, and thought they could do anything they wanted to make more. And Endor took their money and increased the scope of what he did, endlessly—until he encountered us.”

  “But that makes no sense. Why would he take on partners when he already took all the profits?”

  Ajax looked at him levelly. “Because selling part of the ownership, let’s say ten percent to each of nine large investors, would have left him with ten percent for himself, but ten percent of an entity that was two or three times greater in size and scope. That meant that he doubled or tripled his income.

  “I’d like to think we made his life harder when we started investigating him, but I doubt we did. He was too well entrenched by then and he laughed at us, because our efforts were laughable in those days. We grew better with experience, though, and our information about his operations became more and more substantial and perceptive all the time. We began coordinating information among what one twit of an officer called ‘points of strategic power,’ and that made a difference from the moment we started doing it.

  “Rufus was the one thing the five of us here had in common. He brought us together in the first place, back at the outset of what would become the war against the Ring, and from there we all became friends simply by remaining together and sharing all the shit you have to share once you join the army. There were seven of us who ended up together, the five of us here, and Rufus and Ludo. Ludo’s the one I told you about earlier. The one who died.

  “There was one other fellow, a man called Alexander Strabo, who’s important to this tale. He was our first commander when we all came together, and he married Rufus’s sister Maria. Strabo was one of those officers destined for bigger, better things, you knew that on first meeting him, and he ended up as legionary legate of the Second Augusta, in Isca. But he was also one of us—one of the brotherhood.”

  “Another one? How many of you people are there?”

  Ajax shrugged one shoulder. “Thousands. I told you, eighty out of every hundred soldiers in Rome’s armies belong to the order. How many do you think that might be?” When Varrus made no attempt to answer him, he continued, “Thirty legions—that’s the going number—stripped down to six thousand men in each legion, not counting auxiliaries. That’s what? A hundred and eighty thousand men? And take one percent of that number as being the best, eligible for membership in our brotherhood. That’s more than eighteen hundred already, and that’s only being minimal. We have enough, believe me, and we have no attrition. We’re never short of willing, qualified recruits.”

  He flung up a hand, dismissing the digression. “But that has nothing to do with this discussion, so what was I talking about? Strabo, and Isca. Yes…Eight years ago, or it might have been nine, when it became clear to us that the Ring’s main area of activity had been moving more and more rapidly into Cornua, Strabo’s command in Isca became strategically important—the single power base we had in the entire southwestern region.”

  “Wait,” Varrus said, interrupting. “The single power base? Are there no other forts down there?”

  “Of course there are. Fourteen of them, in varying sizes. But they all rely on Isca for everything, and they’re all within a day’s march of it. We have no presence at all in the wilds of the region, and it’s a very large peninsula, with rocky, craggy, treacherous coastlines north and south. Isca’s the end of the road down there. That is not simply a figure of speech. There are no roads south or west of there, so every step, every march, has to cross open country, and Rome’s legions do not fare well in open country on long journeys, or even marches. That’s why the empire is criss-crossed by roads.”

  “Could you not call upon the navy, for coastal patrols?”

  “We could and we did, but the British fleet is not what it used to be, and patrolling the entire shoreline of the Cornua peninsula with four galleys—even if they were the largest, fastest, and strongest ships Rome has—was an exercise in futility. Any contact we ever had with any of the Ring’s ships was completely accidental, because we never knew where they would sail from next.”

  “Of course. How could you? They could have been loaded anywhere. Forgive me. I talk too much at times. You were talking about Isca’s importance to your campaign.”

  “Aye. So we reinforced its strength, and its information-gathering capabilities, and we began re-examining the written requisitions and shipping records of every base in Britain for the previous four years, looking for identifiable patterns that might lead to the instigators of the raids—the people within our own ranks who were feeding information to Endor’s thieves about what was being shipped, from where, and precisely when. We had our quaestors and logistics clerks in Deva and Eboracum collecting the same material from their legionary outposts at the same time, and everything they gathered was shipped to Isca, where we eventually built up an army of clerical staff.

  “But it was worthwhile, and soon we were able to start identifying the collaborators among our own people. We scooped up supposedly trustworthy citizens—career officers and long-serving functionaries—by the barrel-load. And don’t think that didn’t cause upheavals in the halls of power.

  “That was how we were able to establish, finally, that Appius Endor was the main man behind everything the Ring did. Several of these people we picked up were more than happy to name him and some of his associates, in return for a lessening of their punishments. Mind you, the lessening did not amount to much. They cut back on the torture, but they were all imperial employees, guilty of treason, and they all faced court martial. They all died, too.” He eyed Varrus. “That’s where Castor Lepodos enters the picture.”

  “The fellow who walked into an arrow?”

  “That’s the one. He was second-in-command of the Second Cohort of Strabo’s Second Legion at that time, and he was an ambitious, crawling snake of a c
reature. His men detested him. Called him Lepidus, after the third man in Julius Caesar’s triumvirate—the nonentity. No one could ever explain how he attained the rank he held, because he was clearly unfit for it. But we know now. The word is nepotism. Anyway, he was based in an auxiliary fort called Isca Tertia, which lay about twenty miles from Isca itself, and he would not normally have had anything to do with any of this, but there was nothing normal here.

  “We finally had some hard, factual information we could act on, and we were in what we believed to be the final stages of planning the destruction of the Ring, and with it, Appius Endor. Rufus was in Londinium when things came to a head, and couldn’t break away from what he was doing in time to reach Isca for the final confrontation, but he knew what was going on. Dispatches had been flowing back and forth between provincial headquarters in Londinium and Strabo’s headquarters in Isca for weeks. Everyone knew what his own part would be in the coming operation.

  “What Rufus did not know—what none of us knew, and no one even suspected—was that this idiot centurion in Isca Tertia had an uncle in Londinium, in the provincial governor’s department, who decided that his inept nephew Castor might find an opportunity to distinguish himself, were he in possession of sufficient information on what was about to happen. And so Uncle Andrew sent a private letter to his nephew, delivered incidentally by the official courier who carried the military dispatches, telling him, from the perspective of the governor’s office, what was about to happen, and advising him to be on the alert for any opportunity he might find to distinguish himself in the service of the colony and its governor.

  “The night before the attack, though, a man called Calvus, or Caldus—something like that—ate some bad mushrooms and poisoned himself. He died the following day. But he had been First Spear of the Second Cohort, and so his second-in-command, the very same Castor Lepodos, took over.

  “Castor decided he knew better than Strabo or anyone else what needed to be done, and so he made up his mind to pre-empt everything by making a decisive move of his own. He committed his cohort to attack early, cutting off the enemy’s escape route rather than leaving it open as he had been ordered. His troops were spotted as soon as they began to move, the trap was prematurely sprung, and Appius Endor, as always, managed to escape. It was a complete fiasco.

  “And that was merely the start of the disaster. Appius Endor hadn’t become the man he was by being unprepared for reversals, and he’d been planning just as carefully as Strabo and his crew had. He had people of his own inside Strabo’s organization, and so he knew he was being watched, and he knew that Alexander Strabo, the imperial legate of Isca, was the man in charge of the campaign to destroy his organization in Cornua.

  “No one ever discovered how the word was passed—though it must have been by a messenger pigeon—or who was responsible for what happened next, but that same afternoon, twenty miles away, a party of senior officers, escorting a finely appointed travelling carriage, entered the Isca fortress through the principal gate—their papers and permissions were flawless, perfect forgeries—and went directly to the legate’s house, where they informed the legate’s wife, Maria, that Legate Strabo had been forced to change his plans in reaction to an unexpected reversal that they were not permitted to discuss, and that he would be reconvening his court of inquiry in Camulodunum. They explained that they had been sent by the legate himself to bring her and her young son with them to join him there. And of course the lady went with them within the hour, accompanied by the boy, who was four years old and their only child, and her official equerry, a young subaltern.

  “When questioned later, no one admitted to having recognized any of the officers in the escort party, and no one had thought to challenge them. They appeared to be precisely what they purported to be, an honour guard of tribunes and senior officers, and since it was common knowledge that the entire Second Legion was out there in the field, with no more than a skeleton force to hold the fortress, it appeared reasonable that the men in question should be unrecognizable, dressed as they were in full ceremonial armour with matching parade helmets that concealed their faces.”

  “You mean Endor abducted Strabo’s wife and child?”

  “Of course he did, and that’s not all he took. Less than two weeks earlier, Strabo had issued a summons to all the senior officers in his command, throughout Britain, and they were all on their way south to Isca at the time of the abduction. The purpose of that assembly was to have been the presentation of damning evidence, collected over years of painstaking observation, of the complicity of several of this colony’s most prominent figures—politicians, financiers, and merchant bankers—in financing the Ring’s activities. When Strabo’s wife and child were taken, those records were in the possession of Strabo’s records-keeping staff, being held inside his personal quarters for additional safety. Four clerks were found dead in there and all the records had vanished, clearly taken out in one of the packing cases loaded into the carriage with Maria Strabo and her son.”

  “So do we know who these financiers were?”

  Ajax ignored the question. “The next day, a young equerry presented himself in Strabo’s camp and told the legate what needed to be done. He could barely speak, because his hands and his forearms had been crushed. Strabo was to meet with Endor, the messenger told him. Alone. To discuss terms. The lives of Strabo’s wife and son were the price of his compliance.”

  Ajax fell silent, as though he no longer had the strength to talk. But Varrus would not let him leave it there.

  “And? What happened then?”

  Ajax sucked in a great, shaky breath. “What would you think happened? The equerry died, and Strabo went to meet Endor. Alone, as ordered. Threatened to court-martial anyone who sought to interfere…We found the bodies three days later, Strabo, Maria, and the boy, mutilated and burned on the open heath, and Endor was gone again, for three more years.”

  Varrus had been unaware that he was holding his breath, but now he exhaled noisily. “And the financiers? Do we know who they were?”

  “Yes, damn it! Of course we know! But we have no proof. The records were stolen, so all we could do was point fingers but with no hope of proving anything. And when you are talking about people as powerful as those we were naming, pointing your fingers counts for nothing—other than bringing you unwelcome attention from people being well paid to notice you.”

  “So who were they?”

  “Does the name Seneca mean anything to you?”

  “Of course it does. My father’s mother was a Seneca.”

  “That’s the Roman branch. I’m talking about the offshoots here in Britain. The most powerful merchant bankers in the colony.”

  “In the whole empire, if you want to go that far and say what everyone knows anyway. The Seneca family has always been wealthy beyond most men’s dreams. What of it?”

  Ajax looked at him sardonically, one eyebrow raised. “Do you believe they grew that rich by being philanthropists?”

  “What? No, of course not. But they’re rich enough now to be philanthropists.”

  “Aye, perhaps…But we had evidence to prove that one of them at least—the eldest son, called Vassos, who operates from Londinium and Verulamium and should have been stifled at birth—was among the largest of Endor’s financial backers, so make what you will of that. I’m not trying to denigrate your family, Magister Varrus. You asked me and I’m telling you what we knew to be the truth.” He stopped, sounding disgusted, then added, “Oh, and that young equerry who died from having his arms destroyed? His name was Britannicus. He was our new legate’s youngest brother, Cassio.”

  “I know Metellus Seneca,” Varrus said. “The senior British Seneca. I met him years ago when he came to visit my grandmother. She was his aunt and he admired her. He is an old man now, and honourable, to the best of my knowledge.”

  “Aye, as you say, to the best of your knowledge. But he has five sons, and not one of them is worthy of spit when it comes to honour. Th
ey are parasites, every one of them. Leeches. And Vassos is the worst of them all. Rich as Croesus and absolute human filth.”

  “Well.” Varrus shrugged. “I will accept your word on that. I know none of them, and I don’t care about any of them. But what about this Lepodos fellow? Was he ever charged with anything?”

  “Oh, there was a full inquest after the dust all died down, but nothing came of it. No one was ever blamed—not at that stage, anyway. The truth came out eventually, but not until much later, after Endor was dead.”

  “And Rufus killed Endor.”

  “Not quite. But it was certainly Rufus who brought about his death. He asked for and received a commission to find Endor, who by then had been tried and convicted in absentia for the torture and murder of Strabo and his family. Rufus became obsessed with the task. Nothing else in the world mattered to him. Strabo and his wife and son had been his closest family—his only family, really. His own wife and son had left him several years earlier and he hadn’t seen them since. Didn’t even know where they were…So he landed this new commission and vanished soon after that, for more than a year, without a word of his whereabouts to anyone.

  “Within a few weeks a new legate took over at Isca. The investigations into the Ring continued, but their activities were almost non-existent by then, and from our viewpoint, nothing was ever the same again. We felt defeated and disheartened. But then, more than a year and a half later, Rufus appeared again, out of nowhere, and sent word to us that Endor had resurfaced north of the Thamis, near Londinium, and he was going after him. He was still under commission to find him and he had at least a couple of score of men with him, but he called on us to go with him if we could.

  “We had all earned ample leave, and we all had it granted without a hitch. We had a month, we reckoned, and we set out to get the whoreson. And we did, near Londinium, in a place that we discovered he had owned for years, using a different name. I never did find out how Rufus had found him, but he had, and we moved in to take him. He was a condemned fugitive, so anyone finding him was expected to kill him. And this time, we did it.”