Search the Seven Hills by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online Page B

own family.
    Arrius said you’d hear from him. Shouldn’t that be enough?
    School your heart to accept what must be.
    But the consolation of philosophy was ashes in his mouth.
    He moved slowly down the steps, exhausted and lightheaded, wondering what he would say to Lady Aurelia Pollia. Maybe Felix was right, and he could give her only his presence, to wait at her side until Arrius brought them news.
    The centurion’s words returned to him, that it might be a slave within Varus’ own household. How could he ever tell her that?
    Who? he wondered. The sleek Syrian doorkeepers? The boy who carved game birds at the feasts and, as far as Marcus knew, didn’t do much else? One of the secretaries? Varus’ personal barber? Nicanor? Which one of them had relayed the information, through such swift channels as only slaves can know, that Tullia Varia would be coming home at such and such a time?
    Which of them was a Christian?
    And abruptly, bitterness over the evils of the world vanished in the sudden thought: Churaldin might know.
    If he were a slave himself, he might have picked up information, rumors of other slaves.
    If he’s a slave he might be a Christian himself.
    Not if he ran to her rescue, he wouldn’t be.
    Wild elation went through him, and desperate hope. A slave’s testimony was useless in a court of law, of course, but he might be able to give them some kind of lead...
    There was neither despair nor the quietude of philosophy in his heart as he hastened across the square, dodged past the affronted priests at the tail end of the procession, stumbled over the flapping ends of his own toga in his haste, and hurried on down the hill.
    Churaldin had said that his master’s name was C. Sixtus Julianus, and that his house lay somewhere close to that of Consul Tullius Varus. On his way through the crowded lanes north of the Forum, Marcus tried to remember such a person, or at least hearing mention of the name. Back in the days when he, Felix, and Tullia had run wild like a pack of ill-assorted wood-sprites through the aristocratic upper slopes of the Quirinal Hill, he had been familiar with the names of the owners of all the big houses there, and the name was unknown to him. But as he passed the sidewalk booth of an astrologer, gaudy with painted signs and bronze amulets, and heard the crier there advertising cut-rate horoscopes and conversations with the dead, he remembered Quindarvis’ words, “I thought he was dead.”
    And it occurred to him that Sixtus Julianus was probably the owner of the haunted house.
    As children they’d often scrambled up adjacent trees to get a look down into the overgrown jungles of its gardens. Once they’d seen a slave moving about, but that was all. Nevertheless the run-down walls had exerted a kind of fascination on them all. Tullia, who had followed the brothers in and out of scrapes with a stubborn courage remarkable in so young a girl, had surmised that the owner of the house was a sorcerer who kidnapped children and made magic with their bones: this despite the utter dearth of evidence of anything of the kind. In spite of his more adult awareness that the master was a retired general turned scholar, Marcus had still thought of the place, when he remembered it at all, as a kind of haunted house whose ghost had not yet died, and it was with an illogical feeling of trepidation that he knocked at those bronze-bound doors.
    In the harsh light of late afternoon, the house was no longer mysterious. It simply had the dilapidated air of a place whose owner no longer concerns himself with keeping up any semblance of a position in society. Yet to have a house at all, instead of spacious apartments on the bottom floor of a multiple-family dwelling, argued considerable wealth; certainly to have a house in this quiet tree-grown quarter did.
    When the door was finally answered, it was by a breathless, chubby slave who had obviously run all the way from the kitchen, and Marcus’ first