He thought he might discover-or begin discovering-if this was so tonight. The prospect had enlivened the whole of the Emperor’s banquet with an intense, private anticipation. The privacy of it was central, of course. Scortius was the most discreet of men: another reason the notes came; another reason, perhaps, he hadn’t been killed before this.
Not that there hadn’t been attempts-or warnings. He’d been beaten once: much younger, lacking the protections of celebrity and his own wealth. He had, in fact, long since reconciled himself to the notion that he was not a man likely to die in his bed, though someone else’s bed was a possibility. The Ninth Driver would take him, or a sword in the night as he returned from a chamber where he ought not to have been.
He’d assumed, therefore, that this was the threat tonight, as he slipped out through a small, locked, rarely used gate in the Imperial Precinct wall in the cold autumn dark.
He had a key to that gate, courtesy of an encounter years ago with the black-haired daughter of one of the chiliarchs of the Excubitors. The lady was married now, mother of three children, impressively proper. She’d had an enchanting smile once, and a way of crying out and then biting her lower lip, as if surprised by herself in the dark.
He didn’t often use the key, but it was extremely late and there had been more need than usual for caution earlier. He’d spent an unexpectedly intense time in the room the servant had led him to: not the lady’s bedroom after all, though there was a divan, and wine, and scented candles burning while he waited. He’d wondered if he’d find passion and intimacy beneath the court mask of cool civility. When she arrived- still dressed as she had been at the banquet and in the throne room after -he’d discovered both, but had then apprehended, through a lingering time together as the images of day were made to recede, rather too deep an awareness of the same things in himself for comfort.
That posed its own particular sort of danger. In his life-the life he had chosen to live-the need for lovemaking, the touch and scent and urgency of a woman in his arms, was central and compelling, but the desire for any sort of ongoing intimacy was a threat.
He was a toy for these ladies of the Imperial Precinct and the patrician houses of the City, and he knew it. They addressed a need of his, and he assuaged desires some of them hadn’t known they harboured. A transaction, of a sort. He’d been engaged in it for fifteen years.
In fact, tonight’s unexpected vulnerability, his reluctance to leave her and go back out into the cold, offered a first suggestion-like a distant trumpet blowing-that he might be getting old. It was unsettling.
Scortius relocked the small gate quietly behind him and turned to scan the darkness before proceeding. It was an hour he had known before; not a safe one in the streets of Sarantium.
The Blues’ compound-his destination, honouring a promise to Strumosus of Amoria-wasn’t far away: across the debris-filled, cluttered construction space before the new Sanctuary, along the northern side of the Hippodrome Forum, and then up from the far end, with its pillar and statue of the first Valerius, to the compound gates. Beyond them he expected to find the kitchen fires burning and a fierce, indignant master chef awaiting his declaration that nothing he’d tasted in the Attenine Palace could compare to what he was offered in the prosaic warmth of the Blues’ kitchen in an interlude before dawn.
It was likely to be the truth. Strumosus, in his own way, was a genius. The charioteer even had some genuine anticipation of this late meal, for all his fatigue and the disquieting emotions he was dealing with. He could sleep all day tomorrow. He probably would.
If he lived. Following a habit long entrenched, he remained motionless for a time, screened by bushes and the low trees near the wall, and carefully eyed the open spaces he would have to cross, looking from left to right and then slowly back again.