On the evening when the famous orator and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero was proclaimed consul of the Roman Republic, he was urgently summoned to the piers on the Tiber embankment. It was here that the body of a young slave who belonged to one of the most prominent citizens of Rome was caught. Based on some signs on the body of the murdered man, Cicero determined that the slave had been sacrificed in the course of some strange rite. But which Roman was capable of this? And for what purpose was the sacrifice carried out? Cicero does not yet know that this tortured slave is a thread leading to one of the most dangerous conspiracies in the history of the Republic, directed against himself; a conspiracy in which Gaius Julius Caesar himself participates...