The Alexandrian Embassy by Robert Fabbri Page B

who had been keeping watch on the handcart, shouldered him into the gutter – the man’s head narrowly missing the wheel of a passing wagon – and then walked at pace straight down the raised, ill-lit pavement, forcing other pedestrians to stand aside for him. His five brethren scurried after their patronus, placing the strongbox under a pile of rags on the cart, pushing it out into the constant delivery traffic that plagued Rome’s streets at night and shoving the filth-splattered slave back down into the gutter as they did so.
    â€˜So he didn’t have it then, Magnus,’ Marius asked as they finally managed to catch up with their leader as they passed the Temple of Juno Lucina towards the base of the Esquiline and in the shadow of the Viminal.
    â€˜No, he didn’t have it,’ Magnus growled, kicking at the corpse of a dog.
    â€˜Then what will we do?’
    â€˜We need to get onto the roof in order to break in through the ceiling. We can’t get the rope across without a Scorpion, and therefore if we don’t have a Scorpion until the night of the Ides we’ll just have to do the job then. So let’s not moan about it and find something to occupy ourselves with in the meantime.’
    â€˜Right you are, Magnus.’ Marius grinned. ‘We could always stop at one of the brothels on the Via Patricius on our way back.’
    â€˜No, I ain’t going to go into the West Viminal Brotherhood’s territory with this amount of cash on me; that would be asking for—’
    A cry of agony cut him off.
    Magnus spun round to see three figures hacking at the two brothers pushing the handcart whilst Sextus fought off another couple of assailants, smashing at them with ham fists; the fifth brother, who had been pulling the cart, was struggling to relieve the ever tightening grip of vice-like fingers around his throat. As one, Magnus and Marius pulled their knives from the sheaths on their belts and crashed back into the fray as more attackers materialised out of the night. Leading with his left shoulder, as if he bore a shield, Magnus cracked into the ribcage of the nearest shadowed threat, stamping his left foot down on the man’s own, fracturing many bones, as he thrust his knife forward, military-style, underarm and low, with a short, powerful jab. Blood slopped over his wrist as the breath rattled out of the assailant. Magnus twisted the knife left and then right, shredding groin muscles and drawing a satisfying howl from the core of his victim’s being, as next to him Marius punched his leather-bound stump into the mouth of his adversary, shattering teeth and pulping his upper lip as he slashed the point of his blade to his right, taking one of the men hacking at the brother pulling the cart in the back of the neck, severing the spinal column; down he went like a stringless puppet.
    Magnus wrenched his weapon free of the tangle of ripped tissue, releasing the foul faecal stench of evisceration; he thrust his dying opponent aside and spun, one hundred and eightydegrees, his forearm raised, to block the downward stroke of a new entrant into the fight. The blow thwarted, he let his arm give a little, allowing the man to close with him, before jamming his knee up between his legs, rupturing a testicle, and doubling him over with a strangled intake of breath as three more shadowy figures emerged from the crowd – watching but making no attempt to intervene – and headed directly for the cart. Magnus felt the wind of a thrown knife hiss past his right cheek and instinctively ducked in the opposite direction as a blade from behind stabbed at the place his head had been an instant before; he turned to see a squat man staring cross-eyed at a knife juddering in the bridge of his nose. A sharp flick of Magnus’ right wrist opened the man’s throat as Marius crunched his forehead into the face of one of the new attackers, crashing him back with blood spurting