Carretius the rent-taker climbed the stairs to the sixth level between his two assistants, Smiler and Ox. Carretius was wheezing. It was growing dark, this was the third and last building on the day's rounds, and each flight of stairs grew longer as the day dragged on.
Besides, he'd been a fool at one of the initial stops. A cobbler rented a nice ground floor location for his shop and workroom that should have guaranteed a decent living, had the fellow not insisted on drinking all his profits—and the rent money. In a voice thick with tears and redolent of the heavy, sweet wine lees to which poverty had reduced him, he had offered the services of his daughter in exchange for the rent money. Carretius had badgered him down to an extension—a minor misjudgment for which he would have to account next month when the craftsman inevitably missed another payment, and the bailiffs were sent to seize the fellow's chattels.
As her father had promised—saying that he should know—the girl was quite accomplished. Too accomplished for a man of Carretius' flabbiness and years. He had only a hazy remembrance of that morning's dalliance, and now he was not only running behind schedule, but his back ached beyond endurance.
The close weather amplified the odor of the huge waste jar at the bottom of the stairwell. It held the contents of the chamber pots—at least those of the tenants sophisticated enough to understand what a chamber pot was for. The upper levels, not only of the units Carretius serviced but of all apartment blocks in Rome, primarily held displaced country folk of one sort or another. One lot of Numidians had been found keeping a live sheep on their balcony, planning to slaughter it for a wedding feast in a day or two. They had objected strongly when the animal was removed, but that sort of discussion was what Ox and Smiler were along for.
Smiler led on the stairs as he always did. Carretius himself, with the wooden-backed wax tablets of the account clattering on waist thongs, was in the middle. Ox closed the rear. He carried the collected rents in a leather pouch hung against his chest on a neck strap. The real advantage of Ox's size was that he literally blocked the staircases in the buildings Carretius serviced. It was impossible for a footpad or desperate tenant to reach the rent-taker from behind.
Nor was Carretius worried about a frontal attack. Smiler was a nondescript fellow, a Gaul by birth, Carretius suspected. The rent-taker had never asked; questions about his assistant's background were at best impolitic. Smiler's nickname—and the only name by which he was known in the city—had nothing to do with his expression. He was a generally morose man but no stone-face, especially when he had downed enough wine to loosen up a little. But when his hand moved just so, the razor he carried could open a throat all the way around before the victim even felt the sting of the metal.
However, there was no potential for danger on the sixth floor here. The whole area, a loft whose ceiling was the tiled roof and the laths on which the tiles were laid, had been rented for over a decade by a white-bearded patriarch named Mephibaal. He and a woman who was either his wife or mother housed a troop of beggars, whom they directed with a rigid discipline of a sort from which the Jewish revolutionaries of twenty-five years earlier could have benefited.
Carretius dealt with no one but Mephibaal himself or sometimes the woman of whose name he was as innocent as he had been when the couple first rented the loft. The type and numbers of the subtenants would normally have been a matter of concern, even on the top floor. Rogues too poor to own a brazier had been known to cook over sand spilled on the bare floor boards, and the chance of saving a building if a fire took hold was no better than Carretius' personal chance of deification. Mephibaal would not permit any such nonsense, let alone allowing one of his charges to get out of hand to the point of trying to rob the rent-taker. In fact, a detail of the beggars on the sixth floor carried the chamber pots every morning to the shop of a nearby wool-finisher. The urine was used in the fulling process, and Mephibaal collected a modest commission for what would otherwise have been refuse. Carretius both admired and envied Mephibaal's industry.
The door at the stairhead was a solid one, set there by the tenant himself—more to restrain his charges than out of fear of burglars. Smiler knocked on it with his left hand. It was late in the evening. Even here at the top, very little light ever came through the slats of the cupola that covered and ventilated the staircase. They would have to light a torch on the way back.
"They don't answer," said Smiler puzzledly. He rubbed his knuckles against his cheek instead of the opposite palm. "I hear them inside, but they don't answer." He openly displayed the razor which was normally covered, with his hand, beneath a fold of his tunic.
"Do you suppose something happened to Mephibaal?" Carretius wondered aloud. He was too tired at the moment to respond with real enthusiasm to any unexpected difficulty, but he saw the dim crescent of the blade in Smiler's hand. "Pollux! He always seemed like he was older than Numa, but I never thought he'd die in bed. Do you suppose that lot have murdered him?"
Ox looked up stolidly at the two smaller men. "Should I?" he asked in a voice thick with his German accent. His short hair was so pale that it seemed to disappear in bright sun, but here on the stairs he seemed to be wearing a casque of fine gold. When he hunched, the points of his shoulders lifted but he still had no neck—only a triangle of muscle where lesser men had necks.
"Wait a minute," the rent-taker said. His mind had aroused itself from dull fatigue to a state of general concern. He took a tinder pump and a wax candle from his wallet. "Knock again," he ordered, as he rotated the thumb-sized pump to unlock it.
As Smiler, his face gone blank, obeyed, Carretius gave the bronze piston two quick strokes, then withdrew it. The shaved bay twigs in the chamber, heated by the sudden compression of the air, flared into open flame. The rent-taker ignited the wick of his candle—a poor light, but more practical to carry against the need than was a lamp with oil sloshing in the bowl. His fingers were trembling, and when he had a proper candleflame he dropped the pump onto the landing. The tube and piston were hot from use as well as the resulting tiny fire, and at the moment Carretius did not have the patience to put the pump carefully back in his wallet.
"All right," he said to Ox, glancing to see that the tinder was only a dying glow on the boards.
Both of the smaller men flattened against the lath and plaster partitions as the grinning German advanced. Smiler held his razor vertical beside his right ear. Its edge and its wielder's eyes were equally chill in the candlelight.
Ox tested the panel with his fingertips. It was meant to open inward. Smiler fretted impatiently, as uncomfortable with the big man's plodding deliberation as was Carretius himself. The door creaked beneath Ox's touch, and there was an expression of childish delight on Ox's innocent face.
"Open it, damn you!" Carretius demanded.
Ox slammed his palm against the point on the door at which he had felt the resistance of a bar. The staples that held the bar in place within ripped free at the impact. Ox shouldered the sagging panel inside, ahead of his rush. Carretius and Smiler lunged in at either heel—half expecting the onslaught of up to a score of beggars, desperate from the murder of their master.
The smell was not expected.
The loft was crisscrossed by the studs that supported the tile roof above, but it had no interior walls. The stench permeated the loft's entire expanse—a miasma that choked them despite their acquaintance with the filth commonplace in such dwellings.
The candle's circumscribed illumination hid the outstretched interior. There were windows—in fact, the outer walls were comprised of removable wicker screens in order to reduce the weight upon the exterior walls beneath—but none of them was open. There were rat-scuttling sounds, but not the anticipated assault by beggars. What it looked like, huddled on the floor and even hanging from the rafters, could not possibly be. . . .
"Get some more light in here!" Carretius shouted to his henchmen. The dagger he always carried, but had never had to draw, was free in his left hand as he held the candle high in his right.
Ox threw down the door panel and started across the creaking floor toward the screens. He shouted and snatched at the back of his neck. Wood splintered as Ox's berserk rush carried him through a roof stud.
Smiler spun about, searching for an unseen threat. His razor flicked through something in midair that was neither a bat nor a pigeon. Something else that had clung to the tiles overhead dropped silently onto Smiler's face.
Carretius screamed in terror—an instant before he felt the pains that lanced through both ankles. He bent and hacked with the point of his dagger at the agony, oblivious of the fact that the blade was cutting his own flesh as well.
A new rush of pain seemed to dip Carretius' right hand into molten lead. He flung away the candle, killing the light. The rent-taker's throat was already locked in a cry for which his lungs no longer held breath, but he straightened and slashed his weapon toward the unseen bulk that was savaging his right hand. The blow brought relief, even though the steel gouged along his wrist and the back of his hand—ripping something loose from his flesh.
For an instant, the only light in the loft was the dim rectangle of the doorway through which the men had entered. Then there was an explosion of laths and wicker as Ox plunged blindly through fragments of screen, out into the twilight and a fifty-foot drop to the street below. Carretius could not possibly have scrambled across the stretch of timbers and horror between him and that new opening, even if it held hopes of anything but a fatal drop. The doorway was only a few yards behind him, but as he turned both the rent-taker's ankles gave way. It was more than mere pain—the Achilles tendons were severed. Carretius crashed to the floor—still trying to crawl toward the door.
A figure appeared in silhouette against the open doorway. It was small and hunched—a woman with the tail of her mantle flipped over her head for propriety's sake, or a short man in a hooded Gallic cloak. The figure paused, just inside the loft and not quite close enough for Carretius' desperate hands to touch.
"Help me!" the rent-taker shouted, knowing the other could not see him in the darkness. His calves prickled as tiny needles advanced, tearing into his flesh. The pain cut through the anesthesia of his fear. Dimly he was aware of other tiny assailants, dropping unseen onto his writhing body.
"Pull me out of here, and you'll never want for anything!"
The figure stepped past the rent-taker and disappeared as it moved out of the light. Carretius clutched toward the whisper of legs on heavy cloth—the only sound the figure made—but his bloody right hand touched nothing, or felt nothing it touched.
The figure reappeared. It was carrying the door panel that Ox had flung away as the three men had burst into the loft. The open doorway, the last hope in the blackness of Hades, disappeared as the figure carefully fitted the door back into place. There was a gentle tapping, as a scrap of timber was wedged between jamb and panel to hold the door in place until permanent repairs could be made. Carretius felt, rather than saw, the figure as it turned back to him.
The jagged touch of unseen climbing things had already shredded the rent-taker's garments across his back. His ragged breath was the only sound in the foetid loft—that and a scrambling, tearing sound, as of many crabs in a wooden trap.
He still had time to wonder what had become of Smiler, and in another moment he knew.