Empire by Steven Saylor Read Free Book Online

those who wish me harm. To divulge such a secret is a crime punishable by death.”
    He led them to a courtyard. The neatly trimmed hedges and paving stones glistened. The rain had relented; only a light mist descended on them. The courtyard was dominated by a bronze statue of the emperor himself, painted in lifelike colors.
Did he ever look like that?
wondered Lucius, for the statue of the serenely self-assured, handsome young warrior scarcely resembled the shaken old man standing beside him.
    As they stepped closer to the statue, Lucius’s torch illuminated something on the ground, on the far side of the pedestal. It was the dead bodyof a young man, dressed in the charred remains of what once had been the tunic of an imperial slave.
    “Look there!” cried Augustus. “Wisps of smoke still rise from the corpse. He burns from the inside, like a coal in a brazier.”
    Claudius pursed his lips. “This slave—he was k-k-killed by the first lightning bolt, the one that struck while Lucius and I were in the Temple of Apollo?”
    “Yes. Lightning struck the statue. The slave must have been standing too close. See the damage to the statue—the places where the paint has been scorched, the way the ivory inlays for the whites of the eyes have turned black!” Augustus sucked in his breath. “By Hercules, the statue has been struck again, by that second lightning bolt, the one we felt down in the Lupercale! It’s incredible. . . .”
    “Impossible!” protested Claudius. “All authorities agree, lightning n-n-never strikes the same spot twice. Such a thing is unheard of.”
    “And yet, it’s true. The bronze plaque on the pedestal wasn’t damaged before, I swear to Jupiter it wasn’t—but now, see how the letter
C
is missing, blasted into nothing.” Augustus swallowed hard. His face was ashen.
    Looking closer, Lucius saw that the damage was just as the emperor had described. On the bronze plaque with an embossed inscription, the first letter of CAESAR had been melted away, leaving almost no trace.
    “What does it mean, Claudius?” asked Augustus. “Such freaks of nature are always signs from the gods. Useless as you are for most things, skulking in that library of yours, you do know everything there is to know about omens.”
    Claudius touched his fingertips to the scorched bronze plaque, then quickly drew them back. “Too hot to touch!” he gasped, then stared at the plaque and whispered,
“Aesar.”
    “What’s that you say?”
    Claudius shrugged. “I was simply reading the word that remains, without the letter
C.
”
    “But
aesar
is not a word.”
    “I think it might be, in Etruscan. I’m not sure.”
    “Then find out!”
    “T-t-time, Great-Uncle. It will take time to properly interpret such anomen. Do you not agree, Lucius? We must know to the minute the time of the two lightning strikes. We must know the name of the dead slave. Even the name of the sculptor who made this statue might be significant. I must retire to my library to look through the literature, to c-c-consult my Etruscan dictionaries, to study previous omens derived from lightning.”
    “How long will this take?”
    Claudius furrowed his brow, then brightened. “Lucius will help me. As you yourself noted, Great-Uncle, it’s no accident that Lucius was with me when you sent that summons. Together, I promise you, Lucius and I will determine the meaning of this omen.”
    “Do it quickly!”
    “Qu-quick as asparagus, Great-Uncle!” Claudius smiled crookedly and wiped a bit of drool from the corner of his mouth.

    “Perhaps our fortunes are about to improve, Lucius,” said Claudius. “We’ve just been given a very important task by the emperor himself. That makes us important men. We’d better get started.”
    They were in Claudius’s library. The room was brightly lit by many lamps. Lucius had never seen so many scrolls and scraps of parchment in one place, all neatly, even obsessively, filed and sorted. There were histories,