Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (65 page)

Standing on either side of my headless body, they looked in at my head. I wondered if this was alien theater and I was a comedy and a tragedy all rolled up in one. I didn't blame the boy for wanting to watch as the last ounces of ambrosia were siphoned from my body. I knew what it was to burn for revenge.

The boy started to emit an intense glow, which I'd have turned from if I could have. Closing my eyes didn't help a bit. I could still see him, as if my eyelids were slices of transparent film. His presence orchestrated the last of the ambrosia being drawn out through the needles, a muddy brown sludge. Surprisingly, the pain that plagued my body decreased. Although I was still immobile, a gradual sense of well-being spread through my body. My muscles didn't ache at all, and the biting of the cold had vanished.

Now the needles slowly withdrew from my flesh. Then a wavelike ripple passed through the crystal around me, washing my body out into the cell before me like a cow expelling a calf from her womb. The bull chief entered the cell and picked it up from the ground, holding it up firmly by the shoulders. His icy claws dug into the flesh like sharp forceps, but I couldn't feel the body now. No pain but also no sensation. I wondered how long it would be before true death came. Certainly no more than one minute, perhaps two, before my brain would cease to function.

The child came from behind the bull chief to stand before me, placing a small crystal hand on either side of my head. I was raised up so that I was looking right at him. Now he carried me over to the center of the cell. I couldn't see it, but I felt that my head was being lowered onto my body, slowly and reverently like a priest placing an offering upon an altar.

The boy's song stopped, and suddenly I was a burning shuttle on reentry, plummeting down into my body. I was thrown back into myself, and my arms flew up of their own accord, my body thrown on the ground, my mouth wrenched open in an endless scream. The spasmodic movement subsided in decreasing waves.

There was movement in my fingers and toes. Gods. This wasn't an execution. It was a healing. They were curing me, putting me back together minus the ambrosia. It didn't make sense. Perhaps it was a kind of torture—healing me so they could have the pleasure of taking me to the edge of death all over again.

With mind and body reunited, my feelings returned. The images of the massacre, the nightmares, my guilt and fear, my anger and self-loathing all washed into my organs like polluted floodwaters. My stomach clenched and my kidneys ached. Shame, horror, regret. I began to weep and wail, curling up in a ball on the floor of the cell as my stomach cramped. Emotions tumbled out of me like clothing from a dropped case.

I tried to stand up, to say I was sorry, but my vocal cords had frozen, and when I tried to speak I ended up in a coughing fit. I fell to my knees, and a fine sprinkle of blood fell from my mouth onto the clear, crystal floor.

“Gods, I didn't know,” I said when the words finally came. “That you were what you are. The massacre, your city … I was half mad. Gods, I'm so sorry.”

The bull chief lifted me and set me down with my back leaning against the wall. I was like a newborn, a helpless baby. The warmth of circulation coursed through my body. I had to take slow, shallow breaths. Deep breaths left me gulping for air and sent a pain through my lungs. I had to relearn the art of breathing that I'd taken for granted.

I was so certain I was dead, that this was my place of punishment. How did you know in hell if you really were dead or alive? If anything that happened next was real?

The child touched the surface of the wall directly in front of me, and it transformed, becoming a mirror.

I crawled up to it and searched for any mark around my neck where my head had been severed, but it was perfect, the same as it ever was. I looked normal again, all of the Sertorian modifications gone. It was a relief to see that Accala, like running into an old friend I hadn't seen in a long time. And at the same time as I recognized my old self, I realized that I was no longer starving for ambrosia. The hunger was gone. My mind felt like there was a cool breeze running through it. My thoughts were clear for the first time since I'd left Rome. And despite my nakedness, I couldn't feel the cold. I should have been freezing in there, suffering frostbite and hypothermia, but I was pain-free.

The humming song, ever present, was different now, somehow deeper and wider. I had a sense of it coming from behind the boy, through the boy. He was not its source. Rather, he was a conduit of the song, a great river running back to an ocean. His expression of that ocean, his song, took on the rhythmic drone of a beehive on a hot day, a meandering tone that filled me up and vibrated off the walls. It resonated in that chamber, increasing in volume until I was drowning in sound. The inside of my head felt like it expanded to encompass a vast interior space, like that of the hollowed-out mountain that enclosed the hidden city. A thousand hatches had been thrown open in my skull, and the song spread out to fill every part of that space—mixing every thought of mine with the thoughts that were woven into the song that filled the air, the cavern, the mountain.

The sound filled me with … with what? Not words as such, but whole ideas, like sudden inspiration stitching together tumbling cascades of rich, dense images that passed on too quickly to be grasped. There were images of this world, but I sensed that beneath their forms they had a great meaning that I was unable to interpret. Water dropped onto a boulder, one drip at a time, drilling a hole through it over hundreds of years to join the stream below. An icicle slowly melted, not yet water, not fully frozen but hovering in an in-between state. This communication was heart-to-heart, mind-to-mind, like two tributaries running into the same river. This was real seeing, real talking. This was what communication should be, without room for subterfuge, double meaning or mistakes, except I was missing most of it. I couldn't make out the message. I was a dunce, a simpleton with a limited vocabulary.

The child raised an empty hand and reached past my left ear. Like a magician performing a trick, when he drew it back he held my mother's pin in his hand. They found it! He let the pin fall into the center of his palm and offered it back to me.

I snatched it up. It felt hot in my hand, subtly vibrating like the point of friction as fire sticks are rubbed together. All at once, the parcel of images and meanings that I couldn't decipher came into focus. I could feel the child plucking forms from my mind like an angler hooking fish from a river—images, sounds, concepts he needed to communicate. He sampled words from my lexicon like a butterfly tongue uncurling into a pool of nectar. Gradually forms clarified into thoughts, and the buzzing song gave way to intelligible words that passed from mind to mind.

Hello, Accala.

The voice. It was Aulus. My brother.

XXXV

“A
ULUS?”

It couldn't be. It couldn't. It was some kind of trick.

No trick.

A rippling wave moved over him, and his body of ice and cold was suddenly gone, replaced by the image of Aulus as he was. Small and thin with brown hair the color of mouse fur. Two big front teeth and gaps on either side as he waited for his grown-up teeth to come in. A mischievous smile and bright eyes. He was perfect. I reached out to touch him, but there was no flesh, no warmth. Only coldness, hardness. It was a projection.

“Stop it,” I warned. Tears flowed, I could barely speak without wanting to vomit. I couldn't bear to see this. Aulus was dead. “Stop it now.”

The image vanished, and once again I was looking at the small crystal child.

I am Aulus. And at the same time I'm not Aulus. A little of this and a little of that. It's not easy to explain. It's like clusters of oil on top of water. I'm the collected droplet of Aulus floating in a new form.

“This doesn't feel right.”

It was Mother's idea,
he said.
Come. She can explain.

“My mother? She's alive?”

No. I'm sorry. Communicating like this makes it hard to differentiate between the past and the future. Come, I'll show you.

He held out a small crystal claw toward me. His other hand reached out to touch the solid cell wall. It rippled and yielded to his touch.

But I couldn't follow.

“She's not your mother. You're not my brother,” I stated. That feeling of being adrift had not abated. I was clinging to reality. After Crassus and his machine, after all the Blood Hawks put me through, I wouldn't let someone warp and dictate my perceptions.

I told you. I'm a mixture. Aulus is in here. This body has a great deal of work to do. It encompasses many things, many beings. And I won't hurt you. I'm here to make things clear. That's my role.

I saw Aulus die, saw the life run out of his eyes. This wasn't my brother.

You're partly right. There was only a little of me left in that body
.
I tried to tell you that. Remember.

Aulus' last words—
Look for me.

I can see you're having some trouble with this. I don't blame you. Romans place so much importance on appearances. It tells you how to treat people, how to categorize them.

He studied me a moment and then continued.
Names. I think you're stuck on my name. I'll tell you what the Hyperboreans call me. Actually, I can't really work out how to say it. It's easier if I just show you.

From the center of his chest came a powerful glow, a light from his heart that was so strong it forced me to shield my eyes. And yet with it came a message of light—strong, a powerful flood of clarity that illuminated, that made things transparent. I could barely stand to look at it.

“Lumen,” I said suddenly. The word seemed to fly out of my mouth.

Lumen,
he agreed.
That's a good fit. I think it might be easier for you if you call me that instead of Aulus.

“Lumen.” He was right. It did help to not call him by my brother's name.

Lumen had been responding to my thoughts as if I were talking out loud. He didn't have a mouth, and hadn't actually said a thing. How could I trust anything he said?

Because we're hearing each other's thoughts, communicating mind-to-mind, at the stage before things come into conscious realization, when they're still packages filled with potential. It takes careful listening to catch our thoughts. The process you've been through here helps, but as time passes you'll slip back into your old way of listening and it'll become harder to hear me. So you should practice. Try to find the way to respond to me in a similar way. Try to communicate without moving your lips.

How long have I been here?
I formed the words in my mind.

Try again. You've started with a difficult question. Anything involving time and the self is difficult.

I knew then why I couldn't hear the buzzing song anymore. That light, that direct communication, was the song, only now I could understand it. No more unintelligible alien static—I'd been pulled apart, cleaned out, and put back together. Inside me was the space that had allowed the muddy waters of my heart and mind to settle and dissolve.

He asked me questions, and we went back and forth while I tried to copy him. It involved catching the thought before it became fully realized—that was the ignition point, the wind, and then stopping short of speaking it so that the wind had something to catch, like a sail.

You're getting it
, he said.
Words on the edge of thoughts
.

“You're being kind.” I said aloud. “I'm hardly getting it at all. It's very difficult. A very subtle thing. I might get the hang of this if we had a few years to practice with no distractions, but time is something I don't have to spare. I don't have a problem hearing you in my mind, but do you mind if I talk to you with words?”

Go ahead, only speak quietly while in these caves. I can hear you through the filaments on my head, which are tuned to pick up vibrations in the air, among other things.

“Please, how long have I been here?”

Listen.

When my question caught the right impetus, the sense of myself in a place was conveyed and the answer was already there, bound up in the package of the question. I saw the sun rising and setting and my body deep below the mountain to the west of where the city came tumbling down—two cycles of the rise and fall of the golden sun.

Two days? Gods, anything could have happened in that time! Did Aquilinus' attempt to take over the stadium succeed? Was the tournament already over? Did Marcus and the Viridian team survive?

If you come with me, I'll show you what's been going on, but you have to come now. There's great danger if we stay.

A ripple passed over the wall, and I saw an image of dark shadows scuttling through the shining Hyperborean tunnels.

“Arachnoraptors,” I said in as low as whisper as I could manage.

I wagered that these were the very same ones I saw that night collecting ambrosia from Mania and Licinus' poisoned ichor wells. Dozens of alien legs emerged from the steel cradles that held their human upper bodies. The skittering legs along with the black uniforms and hoods, with listening devices and shock staves, gave them a frightening insectile appearance.

They're about a mile away from here. Your body creates heat, and our movement, any word you speak, sends a vibration through the rock,
Lumen explained.
They can detect it, but the rock is thick and the transmission is slow. It takes many minutes, sometimes hours, for those signals to reach them.

The sight of them snapped me back into action. I was still at sea over this situation, but I knew one thing—I didn't want to be captured by the Sertorians again.