Free Savage City by Sophia McDougall Page B

So Sulien did not listen to whatever she said next but restedthrough it, just waiting for her to finish speaking. ‘Can you come here?’ he asked. ‘I have to go somewhere and I can’t leave Una alone.’
    The basilica housing the Department of Information was only a couple of hundred yards from the gates of the Palace, closer still to the Colosseum. Drusus’ car pulled up outside and he said to one of his slaves, ‘Go ahead and tell them the Emperor is coming.’
    He closed his eyes, feeling fear thrill through him once more, heady and pure and almost sweet, like a ringing high note of a song. Here again he might be on the point of walking into humiliation, failure – perhaps even death, if Salvius had discovered where he was and what he was doing. He had walked out of the Palace as soon as the wreath was on his head, pausing only to study himself with elation and unease in a mirror he passed. But they had bowed, everyone who saw him – just servants, but it meant that he did not look an impostor, he did not look ridiculous. It meant that people could understand he was showing them the truth.
    His slaves opened the doors for him. The atrium was full of startled, uncertain people, hastily gathered, some still hurrying in at the back, and they all bowed at the sight of him. He saw bewilderment and shock on many of their faces as they bent forward. But they did it, regardless. Drusus felt their attention flow into his bloodstream like a painkiller and held himself up straight with greater ease.
    He said, ‘If you were not already aware of what has happened today, of what Rome has lost, then my presence here must make it all too plain. I wish I were meeting you in other circumstances. But we must show the cowards who did this how strong we remain. I need a longvision crew at once. And I need you to be ready to clear the airwaves.’
    Varius witnessed nothing stranger than heavy traffic as he drove back into Rome. He didn’t speak to anyone on the way into his flat, could see nothing from his window but rain over the Aventine streets. He had stood in the rain at Gemella’s grave for some time, but his drenched clothes had partly dried in the car. He flicked on the longvision while he tried to decide whether it was still worth changing, but did not really look at it for a while. Militantly cheerful music and a voice droning on about the patriotism and commitment of the women dancing to it filled the flat and Varius only noticed the message on the screen when the sound had grown irritating enough for him to make the effort to turn it off.
    An incident at the Colosseum. Salvius had called a session of theSenate. Varius felt his waterlogged clothes suddenly icy and heavy on his skin, even before he’d made conscious sense of what he was reading.
    There was a scale of possibility, and a number of plausible culprits, but he already knew the nature of what had happened.
Not Marcus
, he thought fervently, knowing that it was; it had to be: Salvius would not be calling sessions of the Senate if either Marcus or Faustus were in any position to do the same thing.
    He might only be hurt – only seriously hurt—
    Already he was entering the code for the Palace into the longdictor. For a long while he could not get any answer at all, swearing and pleading into the longdictor’s oblivious buzz. The lines must be jammed. He tried a different code, and this time managed to speak briefly to a shaken young man in the Palace main exchange who was unable to tell him anything more than what was being repeated on the longvision, and whose attempt to put Varius through to Glycon’s office produced only a dead connection.
    Somewhere outside he heard the siren of a military vehicle, a muffled loudspeaker. He thought, whatever has happened, perhaps it is Salvius’ work; perhaps this is a coup. For a moment he hoped passionately that it was, because it was possible in that case that Marcus might not have been physically harmed, at least not