Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (17 page)

Lucius Viridius Camillus' face was red, his body trembling with anger. A man who prided himself on discipline, I'd never seen him so close to losing control. I tried to pull Crassus as discreetly as I could toward the shuttle, but there was no escape. My father barreled through the ring of journalists to confront me.

“You're going to walk out of here with me right now,” he said. “No arguments.” His words were not loud, but they spat and crackled like angry flames burning damp wood. While he spoke, the Praetorian who'd tagged along with him decided that the best course of action would be to leave my father be and clear the space of reporters.

“Please leave, Father. You shouldn't be here. It will only make things worse.” My mouth was dry and my words sounded thin and desperate.

“Worse? You have no idea! The entire Senate is in chaos over this incident. You are noble born. What you do, the decisions you make, they impact the world around you, they change things. You're going to come home now. Right this instant.”

“Father, I cannot.” I fixed my eyes on my feet, refusing to meet his gaze.

“Why? Why have you done this? Tell me, it's not too late. We can still fix this. If they're pressuring you in some way, blackmailing you…”

I wanted to grab his robes and scream that that was exactly what they were doing, that I was working for Uncle Quintus, that Aulus was alive and I was going to save him, but Crassus was watching me like a hawk. I could say nothing that would expose our deal, so I looked back down at the ground and tried my best to keep the shame in my heart from my face.

“She's made her choice,” Crassus said, putting his arm around me as if we were some eloping couple. His grin made my skin crawl.

“Get away from her before I kill you where you stand,” Father growled at Crassus.

They were about to start up a fight over me right there. I placed a restraining hand on Crassus' chest. “He's my father. I'll make him understand.”

Crassus shrugged and backed off a few feet but made sure to stay within earshot.

“Accala?” Father asked.

The Praetorian had succeeded in keeping the reporters at bay, but their media spherae still hovered above us, capturing every word.

“Horace says that a person who can be both useful and agreeable will win every point,” I said. “I tried my best but since my own house considers me both disagreeable and useless, perhaps another house will see value in my skills.”

“I can't believe that,” Father said. “Change your mind, say what's really in your heart. Speak again.”

“I must do what I must do,” I replied. It was the closest I could come to the truth.

He pulled me to him in a strong embrace and whispered, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry I wasn't there for you after they died. Please, you are my child. I don't want to have to disown you. Come home, Accala. I don't want to lose you.”

He'd never apologized to me before. Never. And he chose that moment? He sought to find a soft place inside me by using soft words, but I couldn't allow him to steal my momentum. Not now. All the secrets I'd so rapidly acquired were burning inside of me—hot embers I couldn't spit out. There was nothing I could say, no words that would bring him the least amount of comfort. Pulling away from him, I said, “I will swear allegiance to House Sertorian and fight for them in the Ludi Romani.” There, that could not be clearer. I'd closed the door, stated my case in a public forum. Father glanced up at the hovering media spherae. I was a lost cause. He had to think about his reputation, and the best interests of House Viridian.

“You've chosen to renounce your family, to sour the noble blood that runs through your veins and become a common slave to this Sertorian man.” His words were deliberate, his face heavy with disappointment. “We are done,” he said to me. “Make your own choices and survive them if you can. You are no longer my daughter, you may no longer bear the name Viridius. You are outcast.”

And then Lucius Viridius Camillus, senator, hero, my father, whom I had now publicly betrayed in word as well as in deed, turned his back on me and walked away.

The spherae dispersed; the journalists had their juicy footage. The rest of the Sertorian team had already boarded. Crassus waited for me by the shuttle entrance, tapping his foot like an impatient master waiting for his dog to come to heel. Playing my part, I obeyed.

IX

T
HE MOMENT THE SHUTTLE
ramp closed behind us, I confronted Crassus. “What in the hell is going on? Why is Marcus there? This wasn't part of the deal.”

The other members of the team had already moved along the corridor to the main cabin, the door sliding shut behind them.

“I am not Jupiter on high, controlling everything that transpires in the universe,” Crassus said. “I had nothing to do with it.”

“Then who? Was he forced to join the contest? A way to punish him for supporting me?”

“Quite the contrary,” Crassus said. “Marcus volunteered.”

“He what? I don't believe it.”

Crassus turned to a screen on the wall and brought up the morning news clips with a few deft touches of his fingers. My lanista appeared, standing before the altar at the feet of the Palladium, surrounded by a crowd of cheering admirers and journalists, all eager to hear his reaction to my betrayal. Although the patron god of the Calpurnians was Saturn, the Palladium Minerva was the guardian of Rome itself, linked to both the city and the empire's fate, and any citizen could pay to make an offering at her feet. But Marcus was never one to make a public spectacle of his religion. No, this was a statement, letting everyone know that he planned to act on behalf of the whole empire. A large white cow entered the scene, a rope attached to a ring through her nose allowing the beast to be pulled into position before the altar by a robed priest. Ready for the offering, the cow's body was adorned with ribbons and strips of scarlet wool. Three priests consecrated the animal, pouring wine upon her forehead, trailing the sacrificial knife across her back.

“As Accala Viridius Camilla has betrayed you, so has she betrayed me—the lanista whom she vowed to honor and obey,” Marcus announced. “She has broken a sacred trust.” His face was white, his jaw tense like granite.

The cow lowered her head, a sign that she was willing to be sacrificed, and Marcus cut her throat, quickly and efficiently. The animal's legs gave out and she fell forward to her knees, a river of blood flowing down the front of her white chest and onto the stained marble slab at the base of the altar. She bled out and died in less than a minute. A haruspex, the soothsayer of sacrificial animals, cut the cow's underside open and pulled at the animal's entrails like a greedy crow securing his share. A half dozen Iceni slaves hefted the body onto the hot coals of the ritual fire, the flesh mingling with the smoke, her spirit offered up to the heavens. Then Marcus spoke. “I have dedicated my life to the service of the empire, and so for this last public offering of Minerva's festival, I swear that I shall have justice. I will use all my skills to challenge Accala Viridius Camilla, to prevent her from giving aid to the Blood Hawks and, if Minerva blesses me with the opportunity, to return victorious with the traitorous bitch's head as my trophy.”

A bad heat rushed to my head, and the nausea that had been threatening me all morning finally won. I fell to my hands and knees, and vomited onto the shuttle's cold steel floor. Marcus' haruspex must have completed his series of arcane gestures over the mess of organs, because as I retched on my hands and knees, unable to stand, I heard him deliver his prognosis. “The organs are healthy and without flaw. Minerva has accepted the sacrifice!” The crowd cheered and yelled out their approval.

I had meant to make an offering to Minerva that day, first at my altar and then at the Palladium temple, but everything had happened so quickly that I'd forgotten. So focused on solving my own problems, I had also forgotten my obligation to Marcus, and in breaking the bond between us, I had insulted and dishonored him. He had no choice but to act or be shamed and disgraced as my chief supporter. And what of the gods? The goddess knew my heart, but had Marcus' offering and my neglect been enough to make Minerva turn from me?

In four weeks, Marcus and I would meet on a distant world and he would single me out, my death his only goal, and if I wanted to complete my mission and save all that was dear to me, I would have to steal his life instead.

Rome was visible through a series of transparent panels set low into the shuttle wall. The city fell away, like a coin dropped from a great height, until it resembled a white barnacle on the curve of Mother Earth's back. The die was cast. There was no going back.

“Come,” Crassus said, gently pulling me to my feet. “You were very brave. That was a great ordeal, but now it's over.”

“I don't need your help or your false courtesy.”

“Come now, lady. That's not how the game is played. You don't have to like this, but you do have to play along. You're not in a position to be discourteous, and although I am, I refrain from a display of bad taste. Isn't that how civilized people should conduct themselves?”

I was a loathsome being, covered with sweat and the acrid stink of vomit. “You forget, I've been disowned, I'm humiliores. I'm no longer a lady, not even a member of a noble house. I'm a plebeian with no aspiration to civilized manners.”

“Breeding tells,” he stated. “Your bloodline, your performance in the arena indicate that you have superior genetics, and that can't be taken away by removing a title. In the Sertorian utopia, your unique bloodline will be all the currency you need to prosper.”

“I don't know a single Sertorian who is worth his salt. What does that say about your genes?”

One moment he stood before me, the next he was behind me so suddenly I didn't even see him move. He was fast, supernaturally fast. My arm had been seized and was being twisted up into the small of my back. “I've improved since we last sparred, Lady Accala,” he said, his head beside mine, his hot breath on my cheek. “You're the one who's going to have to work hard to earn your salt on our team.” And then he was in front of me again. Gods, how did he get so fast?

“Come. It's time to meet your teammates. I think you'll find them rather impressive.”

Courage. I needed more than I had. Crassus stopped outside the door to the cabin.

“Remember, whatever happens in there, you must remain calm. Do not raise a hand to any of them.”

My heart was beating like I was entering the arena. I tried to recall all I had read about these competitors in my research. When the door slid open, I found that there were only six in the cabin. Licinus was absent—a small mercy—he must have been in the partitioned cockpit at the front of the craft.

“Did you see them out there? They loved us!” Lurco crowed. He had his back to the door and hadn't realized Crassus and I had entered.

The sultry, dark-haired Barbata silenced him with a gesture and then smiled at me, a frighteningly warm smile. Her teeth were perfect, like shining pearls. “Welcome, sister. Come, join us.” She was beautiful, confident, and flawless, dressed in a body-hugging red leather gladiatorial outfit. Black stripes down the sides and horizontal ring designs about the torso accentuated her curves, and lines of sharpened steel studs glinted in the shuttle's bright light. By contrast, I was a self-conscious mess, dressed in vomit-spattered novice's robes.

Crassus wanted me to play it humble and submissive, but I couldn't afford to show weakness so early on. A wolf understands pack dynamics. You never wanted to be the weakest member of the pack. They needed to know I wasn't an easy target.

Ignoring Barbata, I left her standing there expectantly, and scanned the room. The identical twin brothers, Castor and Pollux Sertorius Corvinus, stared at me with cold, expressionless faces. They were dressed in neatly pressed black robes with thin, angular scarlet lines running their length. The oddest thing was that they had only two arms between them and sat together, giving the appearance of one wide body with two heads. Each one had a long knife strapped to his belt. They would have looked a perfect mirror image, but for their hair—they were both blond, but Castor wore his short hair straight up like he'd just received an electric shock, while Pollux's was combed back to give the impression of a hawk's plumage.

“No arms, huh? Get caught on either side of a land mine?” I asked. They didn't bite, though, not even a hint of an expression.

“We know this must be hard for you, but there's no need to be unpleasant,” Barbata said. When she spoke, I saw an unsettling, reptilian glimmer in her eyes. “Come, we mean you no harm.”

“Unless you don't follow the rules,” Castor Corvinus said matter-of-factly. “Then you will be punished.”

“You won't need to punish her,” Mania Sertorius Curia said. The skinny, pale little girl with white hair didn't seem any more imposing than when I observed her on the float. In fact, if anything, she looked smaller, like I could have snapped one of her arms in half like a twig. “We're going to be best friends, I just know it,” she said to me in her childish voice. “We'll share everything. All our secrets. All our hopes and dreams.”

The brothers made their disdain clear as day, but Mania had a kind of faux innocence that was genuinely frightening. She projected the essence of a child who mindlessly pulls the wings from flies. Another might have set upon her as an obvious target, but Mania wasn't weak; she was deadly, a bear trap waiting to snap shut, and I wasn't going to put my hand in to see what happened—not yet, anyway.

“Thank you, Mania,” Crassus said, cutting her off. “You must learn not to go on and on.”

Team Blood Hawk was like a circus act in an insane asylum. The ancient Julii were inbred, and it led to all sorts of problems. The Sertorians had not learned from this and continued to breed among themselves, eliminating the weakest and least aggressive from each generation and enhancing the tendencies of the cunning and violent with the science of genetic streamlining. It seemed to me likely that every Sertorian had a genetic predisposition toward psychopathic megalomania. That left Lurco, then, the only other non-Sertorian in the room. He was an outsider, like me, and the Sertorians wouldn't be as irritated if I took him down. At the same time, he was almost twice my size. Humbling him would make the others think twice about harassing me.