Murena gave no sign that he had been spoken to. He had been expecting the approach, and he did not look around. The frumentarius would have melted back into the crowd.

It had started with an impecunious magician. In a backstreet bar down in the Subura, the down-at-heel charlatan had bragged that he could predict the future. Nothing was hidden from him. His art had divined the nature and time of the death of the Emperor. The drunken boast had been his undoing – the man to whom he spoke was a frumentarius. To meddle in such forbidden things carried the death penalty. After his arrest, in a forlorn attempt to avert his fate, the sorcerer claimed that he knew of a conspiracy against the life of the Emperor. The desperate ploy was unwise. All it had brought was the attentions of the torturers. In a cell in the Camp of the Strangers, under the pincers and the claws, through his agony the magician had gasped out that he had been hired by a senator to discover what would kill the Emperor. The revelation, as so often, was enigmatic, poetically vague: On the Ausonian plains, the sons of Ares, men inured to violence, will ring him around. He will be smitten by gleaming steel, betrayed by companions. The wizard had named the inquisitive senator as Marcus Acilius Glabrio. The unholy rites he had commissioned to reveal what the gods ordained for the Emperor had been conducted in the dead of night in a secluded corner of the Gardens of Lucullus.

The circumstantial details were accurate. The gardens were owned by the family of Acilius Glabrio. They were deserted after dark. Even so, the sorcerer’s confession had been given little credence. Men on the rack always tried to implicate someone. The frumentarii heard the like all the time. Nothing had been done, except open a file, and place a spy in the household of Acilius Glabrio. The magician had been burnt alive in the arena, his tongue prudently removed to prevent him saying anything unseemly.