Even so, I wished I’d brought a lamp. Flame was dangerous in a warehouse, but with the rainy weather today, it was difficult to see into the corners without extra illumination.
But no matter how much I scoured the floor, I found no damp patches at all, no water, no blood. The shelves were neat and mostly bare, as though Chryseis sold her shipments on as soon as she received them. Goods sitting on shelves brought in no money, I supposed, and Chryseis was the sort who’d demand payment as soon as possible.
Not until I reached a gathering of crates on the left side of the building did I find signs of a disturbance. Mud had been tracked in liberally by workers throughout the warehouse, but this section had been scraped clean. I bent down and lifted from the floor a tiny object pushed against the corner of a crate.
It was a feather, broken and limp. I brushed mud from it with my fingers.
The feather hadn’t come from a bird, at least, not recently. The plume was the distinct glossy black of a gladiator’s helmet.
Cassia, with her uncanny knack of knowing when something was amiss, was beside me in a moment, her warm breath brushing my arm.
“It is like the other I found,” she said in excitement. Different color, but same shape and thickness.
I clenched the feather, trying to remain calm. “Chryseis might have been shipping in plumage to sell to helmet makers.”
Cassia sent me a skeptical look. “The chances of a feather dropped here matching the one in the insula, and both matching the ones in Rufus’s helmet, are too great to be ignored. Where would the killer find a gladiator helmet, in any case?”
“From Aemil?” I suggested. “He keeps the gear for the games locked away. It’s costly.”
“Aemil would notice if some went missing, wouldn’t he? And know if the ones on Ajax and Rufus came from his storeroom?”
Aemil had said nothing about it, but perhaps he’d been too unsettled to check. The equipment hadn’t looked familiar to me, but I didn’t pay attention to anyone else’s gear except to look for weak spots on my opponent.
“If the armor was stolen from Aemil that would mean someone at the ludus is involved.” I felt ill as I said this. We always knew we’d be expected to battle one another in the games, yes, but in a fair fight. Not render a fellow gladiator insensible, kill him, and leave his pieces around Rome. Degraded, dishonored.
“I didn’t see Ajax’s body,” Cassia said. “But Rufus’s helmet and greaves looked new, not battered from bouts.”
I opened my hand to stare down at the feather. It was crisp and bright in spite of the mud, no sand from the arena caught in its spikes.
Gallus, who’d followed Cassia, peered at the feather with interest. “Where does your lanista acquire all the gear? Or is it donated by whoever sponsors the games?”
“He orders from an armorer called Volteius,” I kept my gaze on the black quill. “Aemil tells him exactly what to make to fit each of us.”
“You could always pay him a visit,” Gallus said. “Find out whoever ordered the equipment, and there is your killer.” He finished, pleased with himself.
A good idea, but I wasn’t as confident. The killer could hire men to do anything for him or her, and hired men were not always easy to trace.
“Aemil’s armorer is in the Transtiberim,” I said. “Not far over the river.”
“I will walk with you if you are going there now,” Gallus said. “I don’t fancy staying where a man might have been murdered.”
There was nothing to indicate whether Rufus had been killed at this spot or only butchered, if even that. Or perhaps the helmet and greaves had merely been stored here. Lugging Rufus in and out would have involved a large cart and much secrecy.
I did not object to Gallus accompanying us, and we left the warehouse and headed up the river for the Pons Sublicius. No one in the other half of the warehouse noted us leaving or asked our business. They went on with hauling things in and out, oblivious. Not until we reached the Porticus Aemilia did I see guards, but except for a glance at me, they did not stop us.
If this was the usual state of things at the warehouses, then likely no one had paid any mind to those lugging Rufus there the day before. Chryseis’s warehouse was out of the way, out of sight of the usual Emporium traffic, and her tenants in the other half of her warehouse seemed content to mind their own business.
The house of the armorer who turned out leg greaves and helmets for gladiators and breastplates for legionnaires lay near the western edge of the Transtiberim, where hills gave way to marsh. The sound of hammers pounding on bronze reached us long before we turned up at the house’s gate.
Smoke rolled out from somewhere in the courtyard, and a bony young man, an apprentice, opened up to our knock. The lad recognized me and grinned.
“Have you come to outfit yourself for exhibition bouts?” he asked eagerly. “You’re a champion, Leonidas. You had Regulus without a doubt in your last fight. Say you haven’t truly retired.”
“I have,” I said, then softened my tone at his disappointment. “I still train at the bath houses, though. A man never knows when he’ll need to fight.”
“I hope you’re back in an arena soon. Why are you here, then, if you’re not buying armor?”
“To see your master about armor he made for someone else.”
