Dark Eagle VIII: Shadow Walker, page 1
Dark Eagle
Book VIII
Shadow Walker
by
K. M. Ashman
Copyright K. M. Ashman.
January 2025
All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the copyright owner. All characters depicted within this publication are fictitious, and any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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KMAshman.com
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Prologue
Darkness pressed in from every side, not the darkness of a shuttered room, but a living thing that breathed stale air into his mouth and smothered every attempt at thought. Falco surfaced through it like a man who had fallen into the sea and had forgotten which way was up.
His head throbbed in sickly pulses and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as if it had been glued there. The first breath brought a taste of pitch and blood and old water. The second brought bile.
He rolled slowly and the world lurched under him. His stomach rose and he retched until there was nothing left to give, only strings of spit and a sour burn in his throat. The stink of it coiled about his face and would not move on.
Memory fought to arrange itself. The Forum’s white glare, praetorians shouldering through the crowd. A centurion with iron in his hands, swinging heavily until the brief sweet mercy of a cloth that smelt of poppy. After that, nothing.
He tried to sit but the attempt ended with a bright crack of pain as his skull met something low and unyielding. Stars burst behind his eyes and he fell on to his back with a grunt, one hand pawing at his scalp. The wet sticky patch his fingers found was not fresh, neither was the pain that surged through his head.
He lay still until the ringing dulled, then raised his hands with care. The ceiling sat a handspan above his face, rough boards oozing pitch into the splinters. He turned his palm and felt sideways. Cold iron, a bar as thick as his thumb and pitted with age. He followed it to its mate and then to the next, counting by touch, a habit learned in chains long ago. No hinge and no door within reach, just the bars.
‘A cage,’ he whispered, and the word steadied him.
He pushed again, slower, and slid into a sitting position. The floor beneath him shivered in a rhythm that ran through the iron into his bones. At first he thought of wheels over cobbles, the sway of a cart, but the noise said otherwise. Deep creaks, the long lament of wood under strain, the low slap of something heavy and wet against planking. He breathed, shallow and controlled, and sorted the scents. Tar, rancid fish oil and salt. Along with the sourness of vomit that was not his alone.
Falco closed his eyes and smiled into the dark, a slow curl that had no warmth. Not a cart, not a locked room somewhere in the bowels of the forum, not even in Rome. He was deep under wooden decks, where light did not come, where men were stowed like ballast and left to learn patience.
A soft skittering moved over his ankle, and he reached out to grab his furry inmate.
The animal writhed and bit down on his thumb but he squeezed with absent care until the body went limp, then let it drop. The old reflex warmed him more than the blood on his hand. He had eaten worse in the Ludus.
The ship pressed on with whatever journey it had been tasked, its timbers creaking as the sea hurled itself against the hull, the rhythm steady yet relentless. Somewhere far above, a gull cried once and was swallowed by distance, while the air below thickened and thinned with each opening of the forward hatch before closing again with the same dull slap.
Men shifted in response, their movements muffled and directionless, yet they carried the certainty of a crew bound to duty. Down in the hold, it made no difference whether it was morning or evening; time itself belonged to the sea and to those who served her.
Falco laid his head against the bar, feeling its chill. He set his teeth and started turning his thoughts to his predicament. He was obviously a prisoner being taken somewhere, by whom and to where, he had no idea. The one good thing was if they wanted him dead, then he would already be so, and that was one of the few small victories a caged man can own.
He would eat when food came. He would sleep when his body forced it and he would heal because his blood had learned that habit and would not forget it for a simple beating.
They had taken him from Rome, they had beaten him, drugged him and thrown him into darkness. They, whoever they were, were in total control. But they had made a terrible mistake, the one he always waited for. They had left him breathing!
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Chapter One
Rome
The Subura breathed differently at night. By day it sweated and cursed, elbowing its way through the business of staying alive, but after dark it settled into a watchful quiet, like a predator resting between kills. The narrow streets exhaled the day’s heat in lazy waves whilst shadows pooled thick between the sagging insulae, their upper floors leaning so close together that a man could reach from one window and touch the wall opposite.
Sica walked through it all with the measured pace of someone who belonged, though he had never belonged anywhere. Five days of fruitless searching had taught him to move like the locals, unhurried, eyes forward, no invitation to trouble. The kind of anonymity that let a man pass through the night without drawing the wrong sort of attention.
Behind him, Rome’s seven hills rose into darkness, crowned with marble temples and the emperor’s palaces. Ahead lay the Cloaca Maxima, where the city’s filth flowed into the Tiber, and where men went when they had nowhere left to run. Between the two sat the Subura, feeding on both and belonging to neither.
Sica let it all wash around him. He was heading for the one place that he knew could provide answers, but before he did, there was one more place to try, following a thread of information so thin it might snap at the first hard pull. But it was all he had.
Marcus Lucius Garrulus, once a clerk in the urban praetor’s office, now a seller of information to anyone with coin enough to buy it. Not the sort of man Sica would normally trust with his life, but then these were not normal times.
The tavern squatted at the intersection of two nameless alleys, its entrance marked by a clay lamp that guttered in the night breeze. No sign, no name painted on the lintel, just the sort of place that survived by being forgettable. Sica paused at the corner, scanning the approaches. The street felt wrong. Too empty for this hour, too quiet for this district.
He counted doorways, noted the placement of windows, marked the routes to higher ground. Old habits, learned in places where mistakes were measured in heartbeats.
The tavern’s interior was a cave of smoke and shadow, lit by oil lamps that seemed to throw more darkness than illumination. A dozen men sat hunched over wine cups, their faces hidden beneath hoods or turned away from the light. The kind of crowd that minded its own business because it had too much to hide.
Garrulus sat alone at a table near the back wall, his nervous energy betraying him even at this distance. Thin shoulders hunched beneath a threadbare cloak, fingers drumming against the wood, eyes that darted to the door each time it opened. He looked like a man who had been waiting too long for something he wasn’t sure he wanted to happen.
Sica bought wine at the counter, exchanged a few words with the keeper about the weather, then carried his cup across the room. Normal movements, nothing to draw attention. He slid onto the bench opposite Garrulus without invitation.
‘You look nervous, friend.’
Garrulus started, wine sloshing over the rim of his cup. Up close, he was worse than Sica had expected. The man’s face was grey with exhaustion, his eyes bloodshot and darting. Sweat beaded on his forehead despite the night’s chill.
‘Nervous?’ Garrulus laughed, high and brittle. ‘Why should I be nervous? Just having a quiet drink, minding my own business. Nothing wrong with that, is there?’
‘Nothing at all,’ Sica agreed. ‘Though you might want to drink that wine instead of wearing it.’
Garrulus looked down at his sodden hands, then back at Sica.
‘You’re him, aren’t you? The Syrian. The one who’s been asking questions.’
‘I’m someone who needs information. You’re someone who sells it. Simple transaction.’
‘Simple.’ Garrulus wiped his hands on his cloak. ‘Nothing’s simple anymore. Not since the arrests. Not since they started dragging senators from their homes in the middle of the night.’
Sica leaned forward.
‘What arrests?’
‘You don’t know?’ Garrulus’s laugh turned harsh. ‘Course you don’t. That’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? Clean as you please. No trials, no proclamations, no explanations. Men just... disappear.’
‘I need to know about a man called Seneca.’
The name hit Garrulus like a physical blow and he flinched back against the wall, eyes wide.
‘Are you mad? No, I won’t talk about that.’
‘Five aurei,’ Sica said quietly.
Garrulus shook his head.
‘Not for fifty. Not for a hundred. You don’t understand what you’re asking.’
‘Then explain it to me.’
The former clerk looked around the tavern, then leaned across the table. When he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper.
‘Three days ago, a friend of mine, a good friend, someone I’ve known for years, he c omes to me with a story. Says he heard something in the palace, something about your Seneca and his men. Says maybe there’s coin in it for both of us if we’re clever.’
Sica waited.
‘Next morning, they pulled my friend from the Tiber. His throat was cut, and his body weighted with stones, but the rope came loose and he floated up near the Campus Martius. Know what the vigiles called it? Suicide. Poor bastard threw himself in the river, they said. Case closed.’
‘What did he hear?’
‘I don’t know!’ Garrulus’s voice cracked. ‘Don’t you understand? He died before he could tell me. And I’m not about to join him at the bottom of the river.’
Sica studied the man’s face, reading the fear there. Not the calculated caution of a professional informer, but the raw terror of someone who had glimpsed something too dangerous to survive knowing.
‘My friends are missing,’ Sica said. ‘Good men. Romans who’ve bled for the empire. I need to know what happened to them.’
‘Your friends are dead.’ Garrulus drained his wine in one swallow. ‘Or they will be soon. That’s what happens to men who know too much about the wrong things.’
He started to rise, but Sica’s hand shot out and gripped his wrist. Not hard, but with enough pressure to make the message clear.
‘Then give me something else. A name, a place, anything that might help.
The man pulled his arm free.
‘Take some advice, Syrian. Whatever happened to your friends, it’s bigger than you, bigger than them, bigger than anything you can fight. Walk away. Find somewhere else to be. Live to see another sunrise.’
With that, he hurried towards the door, shoulders hunched as if expecting a blade between them.
Sica watched him go, then turned his attention back to his wine. The conversation had given him little, but it had confirmed his worst suspicions. Seneca and the others hadn’t simply been arrested. They had been erased, wiped from existence as if they had never been.
He was halfway through his second cup when he noticed the silence.
The tavern’s low murmur of conversation had died away, replaced by a tension that pressed against his shoulders like a physical weight. Men who had been talking were now studying their wine and the keeper had vanished into his back room. Even the oil lamps seemed to burn lower, as if the very air had grown thicker.
Sica set down his cup and let his hand drift towards the knife at his belt. In the polished bronze of a lamp reflector, he caught a glimpse of movement near the entrance. Black cloaks, the dull gleam of mail beneath. Professional stillness that spoke of training and discipline.
Praetorian Guards, and they were moving with the careful precision of men who had found their quarry.
He came to his feet in one smooth motion, overturning the table as he rose. Wine and pottery crashed to the floor, but the sound was lost beneath the scrape of hobnailed boots as the guards charged into the tavern. Three of them, swords already drawn, moving to block the exits.
The first one reached him as he cleared the wreckage of the table, a young face beneath the helmet, eager for glory and promotion. Sica let him come close, then drove his knee into the man’s groin and relieved him of his gladius as he doubled over. The blade felt good in his hand, familiar weight and balance.
The second guard was more cautious, circling to Sica’s left while his companion moved right. Standard tactics, well-drilled and effective against most opponents, but Sica had been killing men before either of them had learned to shave.
He feinted towards the left-hand man, drawing his guard out of position, then spun and opened the right-hand man’s throat with a backhand cut. The arterial spray painted the wall behind him as the guard dropped his sword and clapped both hands to his neck.
The remaining guard had recovered from his initial shock and was advancing with more care, shield up, sword poised for a thrust. But he was thinking like a soldier, not like a man with nothing left to lose.
Sica threw the gladius across the room towards his antagonist. It wasn’t a particularly elegant throw, more of a desperate heave than a calculated strike, but it caught the guard off-balance. He twisted aside, shield rising to deflect the spinning blade, and in that moment of distraction, Sica was upon him.
His dagger punched through the gap between helmet and mail shirt, finding the soft hollow at the base of the throat. The guard made a sound like air escaping from a punctured wineskin and toppled backwards, his sword clattering away across the floor.
The tavern was silent except for the sound of blood dripping and the wheeze of the dying guard. The other patrons had melted away like smoke, vanishing through back exits and hidden passages that Sica hadn’t even noticed. In the space of thirty heartbeats, he had become the tavern’s only living occupant.
He cleaned his dagger on the nearest corpse’s cloak and sheathed it, then began searching the bodies. The guards carried nothing unusual, regulation kit, a few coins, letters of transit that told him nothing. But their presence here, now, could only mean one thing. He was being followed.
He moved towards the rear exit, stepping over the bodies without looking down. Behind him, the untended oil lamps guttered and eventually went out one by one, leaving the tavern to darkness and the smell of spilled blood.
The alley beyond was empty, but he could hear the sound of running feet echoing off the walls, more guards, converging on the tavern from multiple directions.
The narrow streets blurred past him as he put distance between himself and the tavern. Left, right, left again, following routes that took him deeper into the district’s heart. Behind him, voices shouted commands and hobnailed boots rang on cobblestones, but the sounds were growing fainter.
He ducked into a doorway and pressed himself against the wall, controlling his breathing while he listened. The pursuit was still there, but scattered now, the hunters spreading out to cover more ground. They would search through the night and into the dawn, turning over every stone until they found him or gave up in frustration.
But they wouldn’t find him. Not here, not in the Subura’s twisted embrace. He knew these streets better than they did, knew which doors would open to the right word and which shadows would hide a man from imperial eyes.
What worried him was the larger implication. If they had found him this easily, tracked him to an obscure tavern in the city’s bowels, then his movements were being watched. Possibly had been watched from the beginning. Which meant his other contacts might be compromised as well.
He thought of Seneca, Marcus, and Talorcan, locked away in some imperial cell while he fumbled about in the dark like a blind man. How much time did they have? How long before someone decided they knew too much to live?
----
Chapter Two
Mare Atlantica
The ship’s belly had its own seasons. Dawn brought the scrape of feet above and the creak of rigging under strain. Noon was marked by the hatch opening, spilling light and curses in equal measure. Evening came with the smell of cooking and the distant sound of men at their meal, whilst night settled with the rhythm of waves and the whisper of canvas.
Falco had counted three full cycles since he had first regained consciousness, three turns of light and dark that told him they were well away from any coast he might recognise. His beard had thickened, his muscles had stiffened, and the rust under his fingernails from the iron bars had grown into a small pile of reddish dust.
The hatch opened with its usual clatter, but this time the routine had changed. Instead of water and curses, a different man descended into the hold, carrying a pot that steamed in the thin light and smelt of fish bones and salt.
‘Food,’ he announced in accented Latin, his voice flat and uninterested. He was younger than the usual guard, with the soft hands of a servant and eyes that looked past the cages rather than into them.
He ladled soup through the bars, thin grey liquid with scraps of flesh floating in it. When he reached Falco’s cage, he paused only long enough to fill a wooden bowl and push it through the gap. No words, no meeting of eyes, nothing but the mechanical distribution of sustenance.
Falco studied him whilst accepting the bowl. The man’s tunic was clean, his sandals unpatched. Someone’s house slave, pressed into service. Not a sailor, not a soldier, just another piece of property doing as he was told.
