“So you’ve promised gods know how much money out of my purse for gods know what kind of testimony?”

“That’s about the long and short of it.” Faustina dimpled up at him: fresh and rosy in her airy pink silks, looking as innocent as a newborn lamb. Her dark eyes danced.

Titus closed his own eyes. “Tempted into crime by a slip of a girl,” he murmured. “Well, I’m in deep now. Let’s hear what your freedman has to say.”

Bassus was sweating openly when Faustina led him over. “I don’t want trouble, sir,” he mumbled. “I just want out. Back to Athens where I can get a post copying lectures. I tell you what I know, and I have to be gone afterward. You understand, sir?”

“A ship to Athens and a purse to keep you there a full year,” Titus said. It still astounded him that he could snap his fingers and dispense such sums without even blinking—that he could simply throw money at a problem until it was solved. “What do you have to tell me, Bassus?”

The freedman’s eyes slid sideways. Faustina squeezed his arm, giving the kind of smile that had probably served Helen of Troy well when persuading a decade’s worth of Trojans to march to their death on her behalf. Bassus gulped.

“The things I’ve seen,” he blurted. “It’s not just your bathhouse fund, though that’s certainly been milked for all it’s worth. Money comes in from a hundred different places, sir, and it goes right back out. Bribes, gifts, loans under the table. Posts being promised or traded or outright sold. People being blackmailed, and there’s more than one been banished outright. Lady Faustina’s notes; I can show you—”

“Who?” Titus cut in. “Who is doing this? The stealing, the bribing, the blackmailing?”

“Haven’t you figured that out, sir?” Bassus looked blank. “Empress Plotina.”

VIX

Hatra was a hellhole. I cursed the minute I laid eyes on it. A dusty citadel squatting on the eastern road toward Babylon; nothing but sand and buffeting winds stretching around for miles. The men were bitching about the flies before they even had their tents unfolded, a hot and furious summer rain poured down amid cracks of thunder just long enough to get all the kindling wet, and the legionaries I saw in their camps looked like desiccated mummies with their parched lips and the scarves they’d wrapped around their noses to keep out the blowing sand.