III – Ripe Revelations

Yup, there we were. Praetorians, me, room full of shredded corpses, and, last and certainly not least, one dead killer from who knows where. Standing there was not going to get the job done, so I gave my orders.

“Caesar is gonna have to see this for himself. Trouble is, we don’t want to stink up half the palace in the process. Also, I don’t want to bring him here with Jupiter knows what waiting out there. Any ideas?”

My companions looked at each other and back at me. One fellow came up with an interesting solution.

“Have the city watch take it upstairs. It and they both smell about the same. Maybe Caesar won’t know the difference.”

There were brief snickers from the others which stopped under my glare.

“Well, well. Looks like we have a funny man in the group. Y’know, I’ve got an empty billet at the frontier just waiting to be filled. Interested?”

The fellow shook his head to the negative. Then it hit me.

“Get some perfume. A lot of it. Maybe it’ll douse the smell long enough for Caesar to get a good look. After all, we don’t want him barfing on the Tribune again. The poor guy is running out of clothes.”

My boys hurried to comply and soon we had the thing thoroughly doused and on a military litter. The smell was still pretty bad but we couldn’t tell if it was because of the original odor or the perfume we used. Also, our friend was a trifle too big for the litter so his tail sort of drooped over the rear end.

Whatever.

Sending two Praetorians to clear the halls, I had the remaining three haul their cargo up the stairs to a fairly secluded room nearby. Then I went to tell Caesar of our find.

I had forgotten one tiny detail.

Standing so close to mister smelly, the odor had rubbed off on my clothes. Caesar quickly noted the fact.

“Jeez, Varus! What have you been rolling around in! You smell worse than a dung heap!”

I shrugged and tried to look carefree about the whole thing. Didn’t work.

“Well, Boss, we got our hands on the thing that slaughtered our troops. It smells worse than me, but you need to take a gander at it. Once you do, maybe we can bury it deep enough to hide the smell.”

I definitely didn’t want to burn it. The smell would be everywhere. No thanks!

So off we went. Caesar, the private circle, and hangers on. I led the way with plans to scoot to the rear as soon as possible.

You guessed it. Didn’t get the chance.

As soon as that crowd entered the room where we were holding our ‘guest’, things went from bad to worse. White faced and a little shakey, Caesar glared at me with that look I had known since childhood.

“Did you have to bring that thing upstairs? Gods it’s ripe! Uh, by the way, what is it?”

“No clue Caesar, but I’m pretty sure it’s what slaughtered our boys downstairs. Thing is, we don’t know what did it in. We’ve got an unknown down there, so I wasn’t about to risk your hide by bringing you to the scene of the crime, so to speak.”

I could hear the Lady retching in the distance. She wasn’t alone. Everyone else was either sick or backpeddling to a fairly safe distance. The Tribune was standing well away from everyone so as not to become a target.

Janitorial was not gonna be happy.

Chapter IV

Advertisement