Chapter 99: The Debt of the Ninth Hour (II)

The man at the corner did not move until I was three paces from him, and then he moved all at once, the way a snake does when the shadow of the hawk crosses the stone.

"You are late," he said.

"I am early," I said. "The ninth hour has not yet struck."

He pushed back the hood. I had expected my father's face, or the face of the courier who wore my brother's face, or any of the masks the mountain had sent down to try me. Instead I saw a man of perhaps fifty, with the flat nose of a pugilist and a scar that split his left eyebrow like a river through a field. I did not know him. That was the first thing that frightened me.

"You do not know me," he said, reading my face the way Tiro read a page. "That is correct. You are not meant to. I am the man who carries the message, not the man who writes it. The message is this: the red door is open, and the man behind it is not the man you think."

"You said that already. Through Tiro."

"Tiro," the man said, and spat. "The freedman. Cicero's leavings. You trust him."

"I trust no one. That is why I am still alive."

"Then you are a fool," the man said, "because a man who trusts no one trusts himself, and you are the one man in Rome you cannot see clearly." He turned and began to walk down the slope of the Palatine toward the Velabrum. I followed, because the stylus was cold in my hand and because I had no better answer.

The dawn was the color of watered wine. The city was waking—bakers, water-carriers, the first clients hurrying to their patrons' doors with hands outstretched and faces composed for begging. None of them looked at us. That was the second thing that frightened me. We were two men walking through the most crowded street in Rome and no one saw us. It was as if we wore the air itself.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"To the red door."

"Which is where?"

"Where it has always been," he said. "Beneath the Velabrum, where the river turns. Your father opened it. You walked through the third door. Did you think the third door was the last? There are more doors than there are names in your ledger, Corvus. That is the lesson the mountain teaches."

I stopped. "You know my father."

"I served your father," he said, and did not stop walking. "Before the proscription. Before the mountain. Before the list. I served him when he was a man and not a scratching in the dark. He sent me to find you because he cannot leave the house where you were born, and because the thing behind the red door will not wait for a man who hesitates."

I caught up to him. "What thing?"

He did not answer. We had come to the Velabrum, that low quarter between the Palatine and the Capitoline where the ground is always damp and the air smells of the Cloaca Maxima and old vegetables. The stalls were not yet open. A dog nosed at a heap of refuse. The man turned into an alley so narrow that two men could not walk abreast, and I had to follow him single file, my shoulder scraping the brick.

At the end of the alley was a wall. In the wall was a door. It was painted red, the red of old blood, and it was open.

"Go in," the man said.

"You first."

"No," he said. "I am the messenger. I do not enter. I wait. That is the whole of my office." He stepped aside and pressed his back to the brick, and the dawn light fell across his face and I saw, for the first time, that his eyes were the same grey as my father's.

"Who are you?" I said.

"I told you. The messenger."

"Who are you to my father?"

He smiled, and the smile was not a pleasant thing. "I am the man he sent to die in his place," he said. "The proscription took me instead of him. He has never forgiven me for it, and I have never forgiven him. And yet here I stand, at the red door, doing his errand. That is what family is, Corvus. A debt that outlives the debtor."

I looked at the door. Beyond it was dark, and the dark smelled of water and iron and something older, something like the inside of a tomb.

"Tiro," I said. "Where is Tiro?"

"Your freedman is where you left him," the man said. "He read the name. Now he is deciding what to do with it. That is the danger of giving a scribe a name, Corvus. They can copy it. They can sell it. They can write it somewhere you will never find it."

I thought of Tiro's memory, that library of every word ever spoken in the Curia, and I thought of the name at the bottom of the list—the name of the man who had taught me to read. I did not know if Tiro was my hand or my knife. I did not know if I had ever known.

"Go in," the man said again. "The river is rising. The ninth hour is near. And the man behind the red door is not the man you think."

I stepped through the door.

Inside was a room cut from the living rock, low and round like the inside of a drum. A single lamp burned on a stone shelf, and by its light I saw a table, and on the table a wax tablet, and on the tablet a single line of writing in a hand I knew as well as my own.

*Marcus Aurelius Corvus, first citizen of Rome, owes the river one name.*

I turned. The messenger was gone. The red door was closed. And from somewhere beyond the wall, from the deep place where the Cloaca Maxima emptied into the Tiber, I heard the sound of water rising—and beneath it, faint but unmistakable, the scratch of a stylus on wax, writing a name I could not yet read.