Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (44 page)

“Probably not a good idea. The other Hawks probably know they're out there and will come for them if they don't return. Now listen up, I can come with you, but my shield decoder is only strong enough to open the shield wall from this side; it takes more power than I've got to penetrate it from the outside in. If we're both out there and the Sertorians get back first and close the shield, we'll be the ones stuck outside.”

“What were you saying before about being a coward?”

“It's not cowardice, it's pragmatism. Which of us will go? One must stay behind to ensure the other's return.”

I wanted to show Julia that I was running the show, still in charge, but the idea of going out into the darkness, not only risking being caught by Licinus but also facing the Hyperborean alone, was enough to make me hesitate. I took a deep breath and let the night swallow me. The moment I passed through the shield, the wind hit, whipping to and fro, cutting into my body and all but deafening me. But I had to overcome my fear because out in the darkness, there might well be a hidden storehouse of ambrosia. Ambrosia enough to take on Licinus and the rest of the Sertorians all on my own.

I followed after Licinus and Mania, some crystalline clusters providing cover as I crept around behind them. The rocks seemed dead, devoid of energy; they weren't glowing the way they had the night before. My body started to feel the ambrosia hunger and at the same time, the buzzing was filling up all the space around me, making the air vibrate like a stringed instrument.

As I watched, the Sertorian pair knelt over a cavity in the ground, a sinkhole about five feet across. Mania picked up a small canister and poured some substance out of the barrel into the hole. When she was done, she discarded the canister down the hole and they moved on. Licinus held another one, so I guessed they had more of the same kind of work to do. They were talking, but the howling wind and buzzing song prevented me from catching a word.

They walked off to the south, and as they went, the crystalline outcroppings around them that had glowed with energy began to fade, their light vanishing. I followed on until I reached the spot they'd just abandoned.

Before I had time to investigate, there was movement in the distance and a half dozen Hyperborean warriors emerged from the night like dark rushing waters, heading to strike down the Sertorians. Licinus, in the middle of emptying his canister into what looked like another sinkhole. looked up, completely unconcerned, and then returned to his work. A sudden electrical charge lit the scene for a split second. A black-and-red-armored form with the upper body of a man and spidery metallic legs in place of lower limbs drove a long pitchfork-style weapon into a crystalline barbarian. It was an arachnoraptor. I'd only heard rumors of them from the front lines of the war. They were elite Sertorian soldiers who'd been spared execution after falling in battle and genetically transformed to carry out military espionage and assassination programs. House Sertorian had established its eugenics program to cull those they considered genetically weak from their gene pool, but they didn't eliminate them. They were Sertorian, after all, and the crumbs from their table were still of value—and so they repurposed them. Unable to show them publicly, they genetically modified the men and women, wiped and reprogrammed them to serve behind the scenes, putting their natural cunning, ruthlessness, and fighting ability to covert use. Their upper bodies were recognizably human, but they wore masks with cyborg implants—a telescopic right eye and cone-shaped aural enhancers over their ears. Their lower bodies were set into a black steel cradle, which they shared with an alien life-form that fused to their spinal column. It contained dozens of thin, powerful legs that allowed the hybrid to scuttle along at a rapid pace on any surface at any angle. The aliens lived off the pheromones produced by fear, and so they aided their host in tracking prey, tuning to their human host's nervous system for detection. If the emperor found out that Aquilinus was sending them into his arena, violating the sacred rules of Jupiter's tournament, he'd have him beheaded and thrown off the Tarpein Rock.

If only the threat to Aulus weren't hanging over me. I could end the Blood Hawks' run right here and now.

The crystal body of the Hyperborean warrior vibrated with the electrical charge from the arachnoraptor and then shattered. I could feel it die. Somehow it was connected to the buzzing song I could hear. There was a sudden break or, rather, it was as if a subtle line of music from a symphony, one I hadn't even been aware of, had suddenly vanished, and that I noticed it in its absence.

The Hyperborean warriors were throwing themselves at Mania and Licinus as they poured the substance from the barrel into the sinkhole, dozens of crystal spikes glinting in the faint light of the rocks, and just as many Sertorian shadow warriors rose to drive them back. They had to have at least a contubernium—eight arachnoraptors working together as part of a larger team.

While Mania and Licinus were distracted, I looked down into the sinkhole at my feet. There was a strong, radiant light emitting from the octagonal cells that lined the walls of the small cavern below. A white-and-blue fluid moved through the cells and over the walls. It looked identical to the combination of fluids contained within Hyperborean bodies
.
Could this be ichor? The blood of the gods? It seemed it might well be, and I decided to consider it as such until I had evidence that led me to formulate another theory. It was like looking at a glittering crown from the top down, only as I watched, the black fluid that the Sertorians had poured down into the hole was moving quickly to smother the light like tendrils of ivy spreading across a wall.

I touched the black liquid with my glove and sniffed it. It was acidic and it wasn't ambrosia, at least not the substance I'd been taking. I scanned it with my armilla, and it registered as being highly toxic and radioactive. I wiped it off in the snow and backed up a few feet.

Whatever Licinus and Mania were up to, the Hyperboreans clearly didn't like them poisoning their land. Julius Gemminus had called it a barbarian uprising, but judging by what I'd seen, they were fighting to protect their lives and their land and the thing that connected both—the ichor.

I turned over the idea that the white-and-blue substance might be a kind of ambrosia, but that didn't make sense. The Sertorians would never intentionally destroy ambrosia; they were in desperate need of it. As the black substance spread over the interior of the sinkhole, the light faded and looked set to vanish entirely.

There was a faint glimmer of light down in the depths of the hole. I picked up a small pebble and dropped it down the well. It fell for some time before it came near the glow, and I didn't hear it strike bottom. The cavern must have been bigger than it looked. Was the canister of black fluid enough to contaminate and swallow all of the shining ichor below?

As the last of the light in the sinkhole faded, the buzzing song diminished too, becoming a peripheral noise, coming from somewhere distant, over where the Hyperboreans were battling. From the bottom of the sinkhole a familiar smell now rose up—ambrosia. In between the flashes of light generated by the arachnoraptors' weapons, I could just make out the the walls of the sinkhole. In place of the substantial amounts of white-and-blue ichor, thin trickles of ambrosia lined the walls, dripping down to the cavern below. I scooped up as much as I could with my glove but didn't have time to climb down and get more or even eat what I had, because more figures emerged from out of the darkness, moving in on my position, forcing me to retreat. Arachnoraptors, but they weren't looking for a fight. Their spidery legs helped them navigate easily down into the hole. They weren't down there for more than a minute before the first surfaced with a casket in hand, the same kind I'd seen in Licinus' quarters aboard
Incitatus.
They were mining ambrosia.

I was about to take them, even though I was unarmed. I had to injure only one and steal a casket, more ambrosia than I could dream of, but Mania and Licinus had driven off the Hyperboreans and were now walking back to camp. There was no time to return through the gap in the shield wall ahead of them, not without being seen. I backed away into the darkness until they passed by my hiding place where I crouched, concealed behind a snowbank. Mania paused, scanning her surroundings, and then both she and Licinus passed through the gap and sealed it behind them. After their efforts at poisoning the surrounding environment, there was plenty of darkness to go around, and scanning the landscape I couldn't see any trace of the arachnoraptors. They worked fast and had already cleared out.

Julia had taken cover, and I knew she must be nearby, but until it was all clear and she could call me, I was on my own. Crouched in the darkness, I had a moment to think over what I'd seen.

The Sertorians weren't poisoning the wells, destroying the ichor; they were transforming it. I'd been witness to a dark alchemy. This was how ambrosia was made, by poisoning the blue-and-white fluid that the Hyperboreans and the land they inhabited had in common. That's what I had seen—the Sertorians desperately creating ambrosia and their arachnoraptors stealing it away, while the Hyperboreans tried to flee with the essential ingredient—the ichor. While Romans played blood sport for empire during the day, the Hyperboreans were fighting their own small-scale war at night. Now it became clear how the uprising was affecting the flow of ambrosia and what a precarious situation Proconsul Aquilinus was in!

I was desperate for ambrosia and about to lick at the residue on my glove when the buzzing song that had been running in the background grew suddenly louder, reminding me that I was outside the shield wall with no light source, alone with Hyperboreans. Angry Hyperboreans. I couldn't see them, but if the sound was any indication, they were moving in on my position. The noise grew to a skull-shattering pinnacle, a deep chord and at the same time the sharpest treble tone. Looking around, I saw a dark silhouette emerging from the rocks. The largest of the barbarian warriors; the Hyperborean from my nightmare. The bull chief was coming for me.

“Accala! Quick!”

I sprinted for the shield wall and Julia waited until the last possible moment before activating her armilla. The purple field flickered, and I threw myself through it. There was a crashing sound behind me, more light and sparks, and I spun about to see the Hyperboreans retreating into the night, the giant warrior already gone.

Julia ran to rejoin the immunes' tent and I climbed back into my tent just as the sound of my teammates' boots came crunching past. The Sertorians chatted for a little and then dispersed. From the snippets of conversation I could pick up, they dismissed the noise for what it was—a final disturbance from the Hyperboreans who'd tried to breach the shield wall. I sat on my bed licking at my glove like a cat lapping up milk, cleaning it of every drop of ambrosia. Then I collapsed back on the bed, enjoying the relief that came as the withdrawal symptoms were washed away. The Hyperboreans were the ones pulling the rug out from under the Sertorians, jeopardizing the supply of ambrosia. That gave me ideas for helping the crystal barbarians in their efforts against the Sertorians. For whatever damage I had to do to my Caninine allies in the daytime, however much my deal to save Aulus bound me to follow the Blood Hawks like an obedient dog, in the darkness, I could fight in this secret war for ambrosia. I could strike back from behind the scenes, and if I managed to secure some of the dark liquid for myself, then all the better. If it weren't for the small quantity I'd scooped out of the sinkhole wall, I'd have been broken, desperate, and willing to do anything Crassus wanted for my next hit. I couldn't allow that to happen; I had to secure my own supply of the drug at the first opportunity. There was one nagging problem that wouldn't go away, though—it seemed irrefutable that my pin was a detector, an antenna as Julia had posited, albeit an intermittent one. A device that located not my missing brother, as my mother had suggested, but rather the alien Hyperboreans and their ichor.

The pin was putting me on a collision course with the bull chief of the Hyperboreans who was out there in the dark, waiting to kill me. And worse, it meant I was reliant upon Gaius Sertorius Crassus because without the pin to point me in the right direction I couldn't think of any other way to find Aulus.

XXIII

E
ARLY THE NEXT
morning, Julia came to me on the pretense of helping me prepare and we tried to make sense of the events of the night before. I explained to her all I'd seen and my conclusion. “So I'm certain that the ichor is the substance that infuses this world, the substance the Sertorians are mining, not ambrosia. Ambrosia is the product the Sertorians create using the ichor,” I said. “Ambrosia is contaminated ichor.”

“Contaminated is right. The residue you scanned is radioactive as hell. I can't believe it would be part of making anything. If you'd ingested the amount you had on your glove, it might have been enough to kill you.”

“What I do know is that if the Hyperboreans are hurting the Sertorians, then I want to help them.”

“Stay focused,” Julia said. “We need to work out why we're not getting a result from your mother's pin.”

“Maybe the problem is the very nature of the pin. Marcus Aurelius says that we must ask of anything what it is in and of itself. Those are the first principles for understanding.”

“You say it seems to activate sometimes and not others? And that it seemed to have something to do with being near the Hyperboreans?” Julia asked.

“Yes, but not because of the aliens themselves per se. It's the ichor they carry within their bodies—it's also present in the rocks and ground. The Hyperboreans are leaching it out of the earth and trying to transport it away from the Sertorians. The Blood Hawks are poisoning the earth to transform the ichor into ambrosia and take it for themselves. The problem is that I'm starting to believe that the pin doesn't detect Aulus, despite my mother's claim. The pin, in and of itself, is set to detect the ichor.”