Free The Emperor's Knives by Anthony Riches Page A

past enough of his bodyguards to weed out any attempt at infiltration without very much effort. If they don’t want to be seen participating in that sort of entertainment, and they’re of sufficient importance, then they slip in via the back door, where his men will all be armed to the teeth with much less work to do and therefore twice as vigilant. Given how Pilinius and his cronies get their enjoyment, I’d imagine that they’ll be more than a little jumpy too. All of which would tend to indicate that he might be easier to get to on the street, but then as I recall it, Excingus told us that the senator goes everywhere with at least half a dozen bodyguards, which means that we’d have to attack him with twice that many men to be sure of getting to him. And I don’t know about you, but the idea of a running knife fight on the streets of the capital doesn’t really fill me with any enthusiasm for the likely success of such a desperate roll of the dice, or for our anonymity being preserved for that matter.’
    He raised a second finger alongside the first.
    ‘Then there’s Dorso. As a serving guard officer he lives in the praetorian fortress which, I hardly need to remind you, contains several cohorts of soldiers, only one of which is on duty in the imperial palaces at any time. Getting into the fortress will be hard enough, but killing Dorso without alerting anyone else, and then getting out of the place undetected? That’s a rather tall order.’
    Two fingers became three.
    ‘Then there’s Brutus, who would be the worst of them if it weren’t for Mortiferum, but let’s worry about the gladiator in a moment. His “Silver Dagger” gang must number at least a hundred men, and that’s before we factor in loosely affiliated members of dozens of the smaller gangs that he tolerates in return for payoffs and instant obedience when he demands it. As soon as he hears of the deaths of any of the others he’ll shut himself up in whatever slum bolt-hole it is that he uses when the heat’s on, with enough men gathered about him to make anything less than a full-blooded attack nothing more than a waste of effort and lives. And there’s no way I can take the cohort on to the streets of Rome, we’d bring the Guard down on us like a hod full of bricks falling from a sixth-floor building site.’
    Cotta puffed out his cheeks, shaking his head at the scale of the difficulties they faced.
    ‘And as you say, if the other three are going to be hard …’
    Towards the end of their briefing the previous day, Excingus had turned the conversation to Mortiferum, shaking his head at the very prospect of getting to the man.
    ‘It can’t be done, gentlemen, because the Death Bringer, crafty sod that he undoubtedly is, hides himself away in the very last place on earth that he’s going to face any threat. He spends all his time, when he’s not out slaughtering rich families for the emperor that is, in the Dacian Ludus.’
    Marcus and Scaurus had nodded their understanding, exchanging gloomy glances, but the remainder of the party had stared back at him blankly.
    ‘The Dacian Gladiator School? No? I see I’ll have to explain. There is an arena in Rome, gentlemen, of which you might have heard. It is the Flavian Amphitheatre, built by the emperor Vespasian a hundred years ago, the foremost arena in the empire and big enough to allow sixty thousand people to watch the games that are held there. Thousands of gladiators fight in that arena every year, and each one of them has to be trained and prepared for his moment on the sand, which is why there are four official training schools for gladiators clustered around the building. There’s one called the Gallic School, where they turn out the heavy boys, fish men, hoplites and the like; there’s the Morning School, where they train men how to fight wild animals …’
    ‘Why the Morning School?’
    The informant had shrugged at Dubnus with an expression of irritation, his tone