Chapter 18: A MEETING OF THIEVES

The dawn came grey and mean over the Aventine, the kind of morning that made men count their blessings and find them wanting. I had not slept. The ring sat on my finger like a brand, and Caesar’s claim burned through the metal into the bone. Tiro had left at first light to follow the thread he had pulled from the dead courier’s purse—a name, a place, a time. The Three Owls had been Caesar’s messenger station, and the man who had killed their courier had left a trail that Tiro could read better than any augur.

I dressed in my plainest tunic, the one with the mended hem, and pulled a worn cloak over my shoulders. A senator who wished to move unseen through the fish markets of the Tiber did not wear the broad stripe. I had learned that lesson early, in the years when I had nothing but the stripe and the shame that came with it.

The warehouse stood on the river’s edge, its timbers black with age and damp. The smell of brine and rot hung thick as a curtain. Two men lounged by the door, their tunics stained, their eyes sharp. They did not look like stevedores.

“Corvus,” I said. “Sent by the man who owns the night.”

The taller one spat. “We don’t know no Corvus.”

“You know the man who sent me. The one who bought the grain ships last month. The one who pays your master in silver stamped with a serpent.”

The tall one’s eyes flickered. He jerked his head toward the door. I stepped inside.

The warehouse was dim, stacked with amphorae and sacks of grain that had gone musty. At the far end, a man sat at a crude table, a lamp burning low beside him. He was thin, with the haunted look of a man who had spent too many years looking over his shoulder. His name was Marcus Licinius Crassus’s man—no, that was a lie. He belonged to no one but himself, which was why he was still alive.

“Corvus,” he said. “I heard you were asking about Labienus.”

“I heard you were the man who knew where Labienus went when he wasn’t asking questions about me.”

He smiled, a thin slit of yellow teeth. “He went to see Pompey. Three days ago. Not through the front door, mind you. Through a bathhouse on the Esquiline, the one where the whores charge double for discretion.”

“And what did he tell Pompey?”

“He told him that a young senator named Corvus was building a network of spies, that he had the ear of Cicero’s freedman, and that he had friends in the banker’s quarter who might be persuaded to open their ledgers.”

I felt the cold settle in my gut. “And what did Pompey say?”

“Pompey said nothing. He listened. That’s what he does. He listens, and then he moves.” The man leaned forward. “But there was another man in that bathhouse. A man who doesn’t belong there. A man who wore the ring of the Julii.”

Caesar again. Always Caesar. The name was a curse and a blessing, a shadow that followed me through every corridor I walked.

“What did he look like?”

“Tall. Bald. A scar on his left cheek, like a knife wound poorly healed. He spoke to Labienus after Pompey left. They were gone a long time.”

The description meant nothing to me immediately, but Tiro would know. Tiro knew every face in Rome that mattered, and many that didn’t.

“You’ve done well,” I said, sliding a pouch of silver across the table. “There’s more if you can find out what they said.”

The man weighed the pouch in his hand, his eyes calculating. “There’s always more, Senator. But some knowledge comes with a price that silver can’t pay. The man with the scar—he knows your name. He said it out loud, in the steam, like he was tasting it. ‘Corvus,’ he said. ‘The crow that thinks he’s an eagle.’ And then he laughed.”

The laugh echoed in my skull as I left the warehouse. The river was rising, grey and swollen with the spring rains. I stood at the water’s edge, watching the debris float past—a broken crate, a dead dog, the branch of a tree torn from some distant estate. Rome was like that river. It carried everything away eventually, the strong and the weak alike, and only the ones who learned to swim against the current survived.

Fabius found me there. I heard his boots on the wet stones before I saw him, that heavy soldier’s tread that had carried him through a dozen campaigns.

“You look like a man who’s seen his own ghost,” he said.

“Perhaps I have. Perhaps I’m looking at him now.”

Fabius’s face tightened. “I came to warn you. Labienus has been asking about Livia Drusa. About her late husband’s estates, about the letters she keeps in her house on the Palatine. He wants something, and he’s willing to dig deep to find it.”

“Why do you care?”

“Because I’m not the man you think I am, Corvus. I’ve never been. I serve the Republic, yes, but the Republic is made of men, and some men are worth saving even when they don’t deserve it.”

He turned and walked away before I could answer, his broad back disappearing into the morning mist. I stood there, the river lapping at my feet, and I felt the weight of everything pressing down on me—Caesar’s claim, Pompey’s attention, Fabius’s warnings, and the woman who had given me the ring and the name, who had told me to choose what I was willing to become.

A courier found me at noon, a boy with dirt on his face and a message clutched in his fist. He pressed it into my palm and ran before I could ask his name. The wax seal was unfamiliar—a crescent moon, stamped in black.

I broke it open. The handwriting was Livia’s.

*The river is rising faster than I said. Come tonight. Bring the ring. And bring a knife. You will need both.*

I folded the letter and slipped it into my tunic. The boy was gone, lost in the crowd. The river kept its patient, hungry course, and somewhere in the city, a man with a scar on his cheek was saying my name again, tasting it like wine he meant to drink.

I had wanted to stand at the center of the new world. I had not realized the center was a whirlpool, and the only way out was through the dark, with a blade in one hand and a ring on the other.

Tonight, I would learn what Livia had become. And what I would have to become to survive her.