Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (66 page)

“All right, let's go,” I whispered. Survival first. Somehow Minerva had heard my plea for forgiveness. I'd managed to regain my life and my freedom, but not without cost. The process of being imprisoned in the ice was hard, perhaps more painful than the worst humiliations the Sertorians had inflicted. But here was hope, a chance to make up for the part I played in visiting destruction and suffering upon them and their world.

Hold my hand. The walls won't close on you.

I put my hand in Lumen's small claw. I expected it to be cold, but a warmth flooded from his hand to my body. It was as if the insides of my bones were filling up with liquid heat.

Lumen's gentle, insistent pull reassured me as I followed him into the crystal wall, and instead of meeting the solid resistance I had encountered before, I felt the wall yield like water. It moved aside, forming a narrow, rippling tunnel as we passed.

I stumbled as I went. My body was still getting its coordination back. If I'd had to fight right then, I'd have been dead meat. The overbearing form of the bull chief followed us.

If you want to call him something, try Concretus,
Lumen said.
Bull chief sounds so … colonial.

“Concretus? You named him?”

Just now. You did so well with Lumen, I thought I'd give it a try. He has a strong, sturdy quality, so it seemed to fit. Don't worry, his function is to guard me and ensure the work proceeds, that's all. He won't hurt you.

“He doesn't speak either,” I said.

All the time. We all do, this whole world does. You just have to learn to listen. Keep listening, and the heart of this world will open to you like a flower. The song of the pin was meant to draw you to me and at the same time help Concretus to find you. Only whenever he came near you, you attacked him. You weren't supposed to have the ambrosia inside you. It's poison to the Hyperboreans, so it stopped you from understanding him, or me, for that matter.

“I needed it to stay alive.”

Fate has not led you on a kind path to me, but I'm glad you're here.

“And what of you? What would my brother think of the cards dealt him?”

That we can work only with what's in front of us. Feeling sore for not getting our way would be childish.

He sounded like Marcus, not my brother Aulus.

When a child is forced to take on the burden of an adult, a part of him ceases to be a child,
Lumen continued, reading my thoughts.
Concretus tried to clear the ambrosia from your system, so he could help you understand that he only wanted to help and teach you this mind-to-mind communication.

That was how it was supposed to be for you and me. The song of the pin was meant to draw us together, and at the same time help Concretus to find you. Only whenever he came near you, you attacked him.

“He tried to kill me. He's been hunting me. Terrorizing me.”

The problem is that the Hyperboreans are reflective by nature. You don't ever really see them.…

“You see yourself,” I finished.

I saw now what he meant. The thing that terrified me, it was what I had become. My own hatred, anger, need for revenge, all reflected back at me, and it was truly horrible.

“I didn't make that easy, I know.” I conceded. “Gods, what a fool I've been. But how could I know? I still don't entirely believe it. This whole business is so…”

Un-Roman?

“Yes. Exactly.”

“And during the uprising? He pulled me onto his spines, tried to steal my ambrosia.”

Concretus lured you to me. I tried to communicate but you weren't supposed to have the ambrosia inside you. Mother never anticipated that. It caused a communication breakdown. Concretus tried to take it out of you. He wasn't stealing your ambrosia, he was trying to cleanse you so that I could speak to you as I do now.

“But I attacked him before he could finish. I see now. I didn't know…”

After that, I've had to keep orchestrating the removal of ambrosia from this world. That is my primary mission.

“I needed to hold on to the ambrosia,” I said. “To stay alive and save Aulus. I couldn't do without it, but it was for a good reason.”

But that wasn't the whole truth.

You should say it, speak that thought you're holding back, or it will linger, like rubbish clogging up a stream, and then other thoughts will cluster to it and pollute your mind.

“And I wanted to kill the Hawks,” I finished. “I wanted to hurt them because they hurt me.”

There, the stream flows once more. You feel it?

“Yes.”

As we walked through the body of the mountain, the surface of the tunnel walls liquefied and rippled. Images began to form.

These memories are of what has been,
Lumen said.

I found myself surrounded by Lupus Civitas, the Viridian outpost as it was before the bombing. It was just like walking through a holoprojection. There were gold-and-green-armored Viridians going about their day's business, leaving trails in the snow. I saw clean, shining buildings laid out in orderly rows. Members of the other houses roamed the streets—Tullians, Numerians, Atilians, even Sertorians.

When the Romans arrived and built their cities, the Hyperboreans kept themselves hidden.

The cavern that appeared now was larger, the architecture similar, but there was no cluster of six great crystals, no Lumen at its heart. The focus was on a vast central reservoir of ichor and massive crystalline stalactites dripping with Hyperborean bodies. Some lay within the transparent ceiling, others were partly ejected, in the process of being born, arms and legs sticking out of the tapered deposits like spare parts in a sculptor's workshop. Crystals bursting with Hyperborean bodies grew out of every wall, at crisscrossing angles. A powerful, clear light, like a small sun, was floating above the lake of ichor. At its heart was a continual energetic motion, like thousands of flowers opening at the same time only to be replaced by the next batch an instant later.

“Is this where the Hyperboreans are born?” I asked.

It is.
The voice in my mind changed, became older and wiser as Lumen explained.
This place is the interior of the Hyperborean queen's body, as it was before the bombs struck. She is the place where all ichor is pooled, as well as the vehicle that will carry us to the celestial realm. We come from one source and we go back to one source.

“Death? You're talking about dying?”

There is no death. Only a return to the source—a remembering. While the droplet is cast from the crest of a wave, for the instant that it flies through the air it forgets that it is part of the sea. When it returns, it remembers.

There was a pause, then the voice resumed in the tone of Aulus.
The only difference is that the Hyperboreans don't forget. They're still connected to the before and after. Life or death doesn't matter to them, only completing their great work.

“And that is…?”

Mother will explain.

As I looked up at the ceiling, I noticed something out of place: thick pipes, definitely Roman plumbing, that looked like the kind they used to stream hot water into the public baths.

“This place you're showing me, the queen's body. If this scene is set before the bombing, then she must be right under the old settlement of Lupus Civitas
,
” I said.

Not under it but near enough. The hiding place worked well for a time, but the Hyperboreans never anticipated that we would seek to destroy our own kind. Romans killing Romans. It's not how their minds work. They thought they would be safe if they stayed hidden near the city.

A new scene appeared.

I saw my mother approaching the entrances to the hives in the mountainside. Thick strands of black and white hair escaped the confines of her hood and flickered about her face in the freezing wind. The image was so real that I had to resist the urge to run toward her.

Mother took samples from an ichor stream that ran out from a large hexagonal hive entrance, and behind her my little brother rode on the shoulders of Concretus. It was like a weird family snapshot, the ice world equivalent of the scene I had of them in front of our country estate. I felt a pang of jealousy. That I wasn't there for those last, happy moments. That they bonded so quickly with alien beings instead of being at home, with me.

The Hyperboreans could sense she was here to learn,
Lumen explained,
to seek wisdom and understanding. They were close to the source in spirit, they shared a like mind, an open heart that transcends appearances or even interspecies difference. For the source, there is always only one unity. Mother offered an understanding of the Romans and how to deal with them to ensure the survival of the queen and her people. An alliance would have been forged for the betterment of the entire empire, but then the Sertorians came.

The scene changed, and now we walked through a dark laboratory lit by red lights. Hyperborean workers were strapped to operating tables by metallic bands. Sertorian scientists experimented upon them. Large drill bits cut into their bodies, extracting each Hyperborean's precious cargo of ichor.

Mother didn't realize she was being spied on,
Lumen said.
The Sertorians ventured into the hives. They wanted to know if the ichor Mother was taking samples of had any strategic value. They started rounding up Hyperboreans for experimentation.

The images around us vanished, and we were surrounded by darkness, illuminated only by a faint trail of light surrounding Lumen's small body. He ran his hand over the surface of the wall next to him and it became transparent.

Two feet away were a half dozen arachnoraptors. Some of them were upside down, some at right angles to the tunnel floor. Their predatory, frightening sensor staffs slowly swept the walls.

Do not fear. They can't hear or see us. At least they won't for a few minutes. Let them pass, and then we can continue.

Don't fear. Easy to say. My heart rate was accelerating, my mouth felt dry. One of them paused and looked right in our direction. The small suction pads on the ends of long black fingers touched the surface of the tunnel wall. Fine, sticky bristled hairs on their tips listened for vibration.

They could not detect our noise or heat, but somehow they could sense my fear, I was sure of it.

No sudden noises,
Lumen said.
They have suction bombs they can use to blast their own rough passages between our tunnels.

I could hear the sound of my heart pounding in my ears. I was sure the one before us was about to blow the wall away, when he unexpectedly turned and scuttled away with the others.

The tunnel was suddenly illuminated, and I nearly yelped when I found myself confronted by my own reflection. It was me but not me. I had wrinkles and looked old, determined, and urgent. No, not me. It was my mother. She was in the hive beneath Lupus Civitas. Suddenly she started talking, looking directly at me.

“Accala. If you are hearing this, then it means you have arrived on Olympus Decimus and have found Aulus. I wish I could have told you my plan, but the Sertorians are monitoring every signal I try to send out, and that would have jeopardized our best chance of defeating them.”

Then the whole shining cave she was in began to rumble. Stalactites laden with alien bodies fell from the ceiling to crash to the floor behind her.

“Please listen carefully. There is much to explain and not much time. It begins with the gods.” She took a deep breath before continuing. “I know you've never heard me speak much of the gods. That's because I didn't understand them until I came to this place. They're not as most Romans see them—giants sitting on high, above the clouds in a place with pillars and temples, or in some distant realm in outer space. The gods are great Platonic forms, vortexes of pure thought and feeling. From them radiate millions of lesser expressions of life, including human beings. Listen. During the period of foundation, when these primeval forces shaped the universe, they left in their wake a reserve of pure creative power. The remnants of this energy congealed into a perfect sphere, and the sphere attracted passing matter over time. It acquired an atmosphere and became a world—this world. The ichor is the key to everything on this world—it sustains the atmosphere, it holds the elements in check. The Hyperboreans are born of it, and their great work, their sacred charge, is to gather up the ichor from this world, refine it, and transport it to the celestial sphere where the energy vortexes that we'll call gods dwell. The ichor is fuel to the gods. They require it to sustain creation. For millennia the Hyperboreans have carried out their duty. They're celestial agents, servants of the gods. Only now, as their work draws to a close, we have interfered.”

Gods? Aliens serving gods. Our gods. If it weren't my own mother telling me this in her final moments, I'd have dismissed it as nonsense. She was always a rationalist, a scientist and philosopher, always so focused on her research. She'd be charged with heresy if she said such things out loud on the streets of Rome. And yet, after seeing the city hive, the forces at play in there, I knew I must keep an open mind.

“I'd hoped that the ichor would help bring about a golden age, but now that I know the secret of the Hyperboreans, I know that can never be. No house can be permitted to possess it. Not the Sertorians, the Viridians, the emperor's house, none of them. It is pure power, and great power laid upon weak shoulders will warp and deform the noblest frame. If the Sertorians can work out how to integrate it with their genetic program, the ichor will grant them great power but also magnify all the impurities of the human spirit—fear, desire, bitterness, self-pity, anger, pride. Men embodying those energies will rule the empire as demons rule the halls of the underworld. Imagine the wars among houses magnified tenfold in cruelty and obsession. No reasoning voice, no compassion or common sense, only Aquilinus leading the empire to his tune—evil fueled by idealism—sustained by holding every spirit in the empire in dark bondage. It would be an era where the human spirit is enslaved as never before. It must be avoided at all costs.”