For weeks the city had been colder than living memory could recall, with ice crusting the banks of the Tiber and aqueducts freezing. The shivering poor kept indoors whenever their time and labour allowed, while in contrast to such plebeian trevails, the luxury in the palace up on the Palatine Hill happily defied the weather. In gilded rooms warm air rose from underfloor furnaces, creating a comfortable cocoon untouched by the cold that bit into the world beyond.

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Most within the palace were therefore relatively content with their lot. One man however proved the exception. Appearing a little hunched as he clutched his right arm, he had left his small office on a lower floor. From there he climbed a series of stairs until he reached a modest-sized room with a low ceiling and white-washed walls lined with tall wooden bookcases. The shelves in the bookcases held rolls of scrolls, some old, others new, smelling collectively of dust and secrets.

 

He didn’t care for the dust or secrets but the isolation of the room served a useful purpose. Being a private man, it was somewhere he could find the privacy to suffer alone an infrequent but intense pain in his right shoulder, beneath a raised scar no wider than a sword's blade. He had grown used to permanent discomfort and limited movement in the same arm, but very occasionally it felt like a rod of forge-red iron had been thrust deep into his flesh, not far removed from the truth of the matter.