The youth gave me a puzzled look but gestured for me to follow him. Gallus shuffled behind me, glancing with interest at the breastplates, helmets, and assorted arm, leg, hand, and foot guards that were lying on benches, shelves, and tables around the courtyard in various stages of production. Men stripped to the waist worked metal both in the courtyard and in open-fronted sheds.
“Beautiful things.” Gallus paused to admire a shin guard that had been embossed with the portrait of a reclining goddess. “Made for deadly combat, but works of art.”
“My master is the best,” the lad said proudly.
I watched a man fashioning what must be a sword. He pounded and pounded the edge with a hammer, then heated the metal in a pit of fire before laying it aside to cool slowly. Unlike iron, which was worked when molten, bronze would crack if the metal was too hot.
The apprentice led us into a room that wasn’t much larger than one of the sheds. A thickset man in a tunic was carefully tracing a design with a stylus on a thin sheet of bronze.
“Who is it, and what do they want?” he barked without looking up.
“It’s Leonidas the Spartan.”
At the lad’s excited words, the man, Volteius, raised his head. He had a flat face, the nose also flat as though his entire head had been squashed against one of his own breastplates. Two shrewd eyes peered at me from under a shock of graying dark hair.
“Are you placing an order?” Volteius demanded. “Or picking up one? Did Aemilianus send you? Why are so many people in here?”
“Admiring your excellent work, sir,” Gallus said quickly. “I’m Gnaeus Gallus, builder. I may have need of bronze adornments.”
“Talk to my scribe, then. What do you want, Leonidas? I’m busy.”
Cassia, as usual when we went anywhere public, faded behind me and became an unmoving bundle. She simulated a meek, obedient slave, but I knew she listened to every word said around me, storing them all in her memory, and would ask pointed questions when she noted everything down later.
“I’m not here to retrieve an order,” I said. “But to ask about one you filled recently.”
Volteius turned an incredulous stare on me. “Recently? You will have to be more precise. Look around you. I am constantly filling orders. Not only for the gladiators in this city but in surrounding towns, plus mending battered gear for men of the legions or the Praetorian guard, or the vigiles, or anyone who needs to swing a sword or protect their chest. The spring games are coming up, and every lanista wants his men to be more grand and posturing than ever.”
I waited until his diatribe trailed off into a mutter. “A Thracian and a secutor. The Thracian helmet had black and white plumes.”
Volteius shoved his stylus behind his ear. “I don’t do the plumes here—I send out for that—but yes, I did finish armor for a Thracian and a secutor. Albus!”
His shout brought the young man instantly to his side. “Sir?”
“When did I do the Thracian?”
Albus stared at a corner of the ceiling as he considered. “About a month ago. Together with the secutor. Leg greaves molded with warriors from the Trojan war. One was Ajax, I think.”
I jumped. The dead Ajax’s leg guards had held the relief of a warrior on each. I hadn’t studied them closely, but they could have been the Trojan War hero Ajax. The specific request meant that the killer hadn’t targeted a random gladiator, but Ajax himself.
“Who made this order?” I leaned over Volteius’s worktable, my large shadow blotting out the etching of a half-clad nymph.
Volteius’s thick brows rose. “Aemilianus did.”
“Aemil?” I stared at him in amazement, and I heard Cassia rustle behind me. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” Volteius snapped. “I do much work for him—you know that.”
“I mean, he came himself to place the order?”
“No, he sent someone.” He waved a blunt-fingered hand. “I don’t know who. I don’t keep account of who all works at your ludus. Man says Aemilianus wants armor, I provide it.”
I turned to Albus. “Do you remember who collected it?”
“Big man,” Albus said at once. “Never seen him before. He wasn’t a gladiator. I thought Aemilianus had hired him to fetch and carry. Thick dark hair, big nose, tall and broad. Didn’t hear his name.”
“Didn’t give a name,” Volteius said. “Why should he? Set down the money, took the goods. I usually keep a running tally for Aemilianus that he pays after the games are done, but I didn’t mind having the cash right away.”
The information helped, but at the same time, the man could have been anyone. It would be difficult to trace him, even with Albus’s observant description.
