"David Drake - Birds Of Prey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

But no, Britain and Gaul separated, as if they could deal with the Franks better alone than if they waited
for the central army to handle the irruptions across the Rhine after it had blunted more pressing threats.
Generals and governors repeatedly tried to parlay their commands into the Imperial regalia. The attempts
guaranteed death for the usurpers, death for their rivals, and almost certainly death for the system over
which they squabbled and slew. On a lower level, the rabble, dissatisfied with unproductive sloth, rioted
in the streets in an apparent desire to smash the mechanism that fed it.

And shopkeepers defied ordinances aimed at keeping open the thoroughfares on which their business
depended. Well, let them lie in the street and moan. They'd made their choice.



Somewhere in the building toward which Aulus Perennius walked was a clerk who had made a similarly
bad decision. The clerk had siphoned off funds meant for secret intelligence of the Autarch of Palmyra;
intelligence that Perennius was risking his life to supply.

The Headquarters of the Bureau of Imperial Affairs, Western Division, was a converted town-house on
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the edge of the Caelian Hill. It was a two-story structure, lowered over by the six-floor apartment blocks
more prevalent in the district. There was little to distinguish Headquarters from private houses elsewhere
in Rome. Its facade was bleak and completely windowless on the stuccoed lower story. The upper floor,
beyond the threat of graffiti and rubbing shoulders, had been sheathed in marble. The veneering was not
in particularly good repair. Missing chips revealed the tufa core. The windows were narrow and barred
horizontally. Most of the glazed sashes were swung open for ventilation despite the nip of a breeze to
which spring was coming late.

Originally, the lower story had been flanked on all sides by shops just as the neighboring apartment
blocks were. The shop doorways had been bricked up when the building was converted to its present
use almost eighty years before, during the reign of Commodus. Even at that distance in time, the windows
and doors could be deduced from shadows on the stucco caused by a moisture content in the bricks
differing from that of the surrounding stone.

The main entrance was off a closed court, not the street Perennius had been following. He paused on the
corner, sighed and cinched up his equipment belt. The agent was used to palaces, to great houses, to
headquarters of many sorts; but he had never felt comfortable in this one. It occurred to him that it was
because he had no real business there. There were Imperial agents and informers throughout Rome, and
no doubt the Emperor had as much need for them here as he did for them anywhere else in the Empire.


That was not a duty Perennius thought he could live with, however. On the borders or across them, the
agent could convince himself that he was working to preserve the Empire. When he was at the core of
that Empire, he saw that the rot, the waste and treachery and peculation, was as advanced as any
nightmare on the borders. What the dour agent was about to do to a finance clerk was a personal thing.
If Perennius permitted himself to know that a similar tale could be told of a thousand, a myriad,
highly-placed bureaucrats in the capital, he would also have had to know that nothing whatever Aulus
Perennius did would have any significant effect.