Two for the Lions
Chapter One
My partner and I had been well set up to earn our fortunes until we
were told about the corpse.
Death, it has to be said, was ever-present in those surroundings.
Anacrites and I were working among the suppliers of wild beasts and
gladiators for the arena Games in Rome; every time we took our
auditing note tablets on a site visit, we spent the day surrounded
by those who were destined to die in the near future and those who
would only escape being killed if they killed someone else first.
Life, the victors' main prize, would be in most cases temporary.
But there amongst the fighters' barracks and the big cats' cages,
death was commonplace. Our own victims, the fat businessmen whose
financial affairs we were so delicately probing as part of our new
career, were themselves looking forwards to long, comfortable
lives-yet the formal description of their business was Slaughter.
Their stock-in-trade was measured as units of mass murder; their
success would depend upon those units satisfying the crowd in
straightforward volume terms, and upon their devising ever more
sophisticated ways to deliver the bl ... read full excerpt from Two for the Lions ebook
