‘And what shall we do with you now?’ The question had been much on Valens’s mind. He had reached no conclusion.

The man spread his hands in supplication. ‘I will tell him that I have done what he told me, that you are lost, that you will never find your way out of the mountains.’

‘And when he asks for the jewels?’

‘I will say they were too well guarded. It is revenge he really wants, revenge for the retainer you killed.’

‘You will tell him that we are a day’s ride away,’ Iudex said, ‘and he will send riders after us.’

‘I would never do such a thing!’

‘Not a man like you.’ With one fluid motion, Iudex drew his sword and struck. There was a sound like someone breaking the carcass of a chicken or some other roast fowl as the blade bit into the man’s skull.

Lucia gasped.

‘You said you would be happy to see him dead.’ Iudex smiled. ‘Consider yourself divorced.’

‘You should have waited for my order,’ Valens said.

‘Then it would have been on your conscience,’ Iudex replied. ‘Mine is clear.’

Iudex cleaned his sword on the dead man’s tunic before sliding it back into its scabbard. He took the purse from the belt, gathered the guide’s sword and knife, and handed them to Lucia. ‘Do you want his rings?’

Holding the things she had been given, as if unsure of what to do with them, Lucia shook her head.

Iudex went back and crouched over the corpse. With his dagger he severed two of the fingers, which, after he had removed the rings, he tossed aside.

‘In the strict letter of the law, all manubiae goes to the Emperor,’ Iudex said, again wiping the blade on the dead man’s clothes. ‘But this booty is a long way from Rome. They might fit you, Narses. You like pretty things.’

The Persian caught them in mid-air and, grinning, examined them before slipping them on his fingers.

Iudex regarded the man’s boots. ‘Shoddy local workmanship. You would have thought a well-travelled merchant would have owned better.’

Valens thought he ought to reassert his authority. ‘Get rid of the body.’

‘The dead tell no tales.’ Iudex took the man by his unwanted boots and dragged him to the precipice. The ruined head left a trail of gore on the track. A shove and he was gone.

*