Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (87 page)

“Oh, enough of this nonsense,” my uncle said, signaling the advance.

“Take them!” Carbo ordered, but before the Caninines could dismount, the horns sounded again and suddenly the Talonites were on us. Their two chariots approached from behind the Viridians and began firing their ion blasters. The Caninine chariots tried to turn to flee the onslaught, and Carbo fired his ion pistol. I grabbed Lumen and took shelter behind the pillars with Marcus and Julia, raising armilla shields as ions blasted about us.

Thirty seconds. That's how long I thought we could hold.

It will be enough.

There was a great crash, and charging through the forest like a tank, smashing pillars of ice aside as he came, was Concretus. Not dead. Now I understood the confused song signal I was getting in the dark when hunting for Crassus. Concretus was moving beneath us, through the deep tunnels and rivers of this world. Coming back to his master to fulfill his sacred duty.

The giant Hyperborean warrior rushed Carbo's chariot and hurled himself under it before rearing up and throwing his four mighty arms up into the air. The entire chariot flew up, and all five Viridians were cast sprawling into the snow. He was wounded too, cracked apart, plates of ice hanging off him, his body almost entirely coated with hoarfrost like barnacles covering a great whale. He was dying; I could hear his song line flicker and jump like a weak, irregular heartbeat. But Concretus was like a charging bull. Not letting up, he tore at the Caninines with his claws and fired spines of ice from his arms.

The Caninines raced for the safety of their other chariot. “Hurry, we're leaving!” Quintus called to me.

I didn't move.

“Accala, you're making a big mistake. Come back now and all will be forgiven,” he screamed out, then signaled Carbo to flee the raging barbarian.

As my uncle and his men withdrew, Concretus targeted the Tullian chariot, seizing hold of it and flipping it up and into the Arrian craft. Balbus, Calida, and Cynisca screamed as the sharp blades on the side of the Tullian chariot ripped into them. Potitus Tullius and the Ovidians Costa and Spurius fell from the chariot. They tried to run, but Concretus was over them, tearing at them with his spiny fists, slicing limbs and throats.

Then the ion blasters on the Arrian chariot fired, sending burst after burst of blue-black light into the giant's body. Finally, the Hyperborean's spikes were firing uselessly into the ground as his mighty body fell, like the tall pine mast of a sailing ship struck by lightning. He lay unmoving, but I heard Concretus' voice in my mind for the first and last time.

Now you must protect him. Prove I'm wrong about your people. You couldn't hear the song because you left it, turned from it when you rejoined your people. The song is the true path of all beings but your people here do not yet know how to walk it. Don't wander from it again. Stay true.

Then his song line was gone.

We heard more triumphal horns, the sound of the Blood Eagles in the distance. Aquilinus had put them into the field, now that the rest of the Talonites were dead.

“Quick.” Marcus mounted the abandoned Viridian chariot, dragged Crassus' unconscious body with him, and took the reins. I lifted Lumen into the chariot.

“It's okay,” I said. “I'm here now, Aulus, I'm here.” I left my arms around him and pulled his small, cold body to me. I didn't care how much of Aulus he was or wasn't. He was all I had left, and I'd die before I let anyone harm him again.

We raced toward Lupus Civitas until the sound of the Blood Eagles died away, then we slowed to a stop.

“Are you okay?” I asked Marcus.

“Shoulder wound. I'll live. And you?”

“In one side and out the other,” I said. “It hurts like hell, but it's clean. Didn't hit any organs.”

“Accala, Crassus is still alive,” Julia said, “but I don't think he's going to last long.” Although the ion blast had not struck him dead on, a part of his skull was missing, and I could see bright red blood, the color of cough medicine, pumping out onto the chariot's floor. That was not a good sign.

“Can you hear me, Crassus?”

“Tell them,” he said.

“Tell who what?” I asked.

“The gods. Tell them I served you. It was hard. I wanted to devour the boy, to take him away for myself, but I kept thinking of you. The words you spoke at the ice bridge. Mucius Scaevola.”

“I said those things to the mob. To please them.”

“No. It was the gods speaking through you. They hear you when you speak. So tell them that I tried to serve them. Maybe Saturn will show me mercy in the underworld.”

“Nothing can be done, can it?” I said to Lumen. His body glittered like a great diamond in the dull light. I was surprised at the sadness in my voice. I never loved Crassus; mostly I hated him. But somehow his salvation was a reflection of my own path back to sanity.

There is something,
Lumen said.
The power of your pin.
Now it must be used to save you.

“I'm fine. It's only a small wound.”

An artery was struck. You're bleeding to death. You need to save yourself.

“How?”

I can be of little help. Even if I could spare the ichor, all of my energy is directed on absorbing and holding it. That is my energetic role between now and the end, should we reach it. If I start the ichor outflowing now, in this cycle, I will be unable to contain it. Look.

He held out his arm and I looked closely to see microfine cracks running the length of the crystal skin.

Even now I'm coming apart.

“What happens if you break apart before we get you to safety?”

I honestly don't know, but I don't think it will be good to find out. Too little ichor is causing this world to collapse about us. Too much …
He shrugged. Another of Aulus' movements that broke my heart.

I reached up to my hair and pulled out Mother's pin.

My mother infused the pin with diamond ichor, the purest, densest concentration of energy. It's very powerful—even healing Crassus and repairing Julia's hand was only a small display of its potency—but like the ichor in me, it will be needed if we are to leave; not an ounce can be wasted. So she has placed a limit on the amount of power that can be drawn from it by me, or you, until we reach her in person.

“But the ichor can't be ingested by humans,” I said. “That's why Aquilinus needs to turn it into ambrosia.”

The ichor in your pin is different. My mother created it specially when I was created. It can be used by a human being, but only for a short time. Your bodies are not designed to contain such power.

“And I can use it to heal my wound?”

Yes. There's enough available power to close your wound and heal you completely. One dose of medicine, but only one. Until mother unlocks the pin's remaining power, there simply isn't any more to spare. I don't want you to die, Accala.

“I don't want to die either,” I said.

There was no pain, but I felt light-headed all of a sudden. Blood was pouring out of the wound in an unstoppable stream.

“One dose…” I said.

Crassus, my enemy, lay dying.

“Accala, don't you even think about it,” Julia said. “This was his choice. He wanted to take his own life. Let him die. For all our sakes. We can't risk Aquilinus possessing him again.”

“All we've got is a chariot now,” Marcus said. “Let the cold take him. He won't last long; it will be a quick death.”

What I saw now when I looked at Crassus was not even a Roman or a human. I saw everything with a single eye. Good, bad, darkness, light—it was all keeping the galaxy turning, a pool of forces in contraposition, turning each other as they sought to resolve back into one.

I leaned over him, the point of the pin dangling over his injured head.

“Accala!” Julia and Marcus yelled as one.

“He's one of us now. He gets help, the same way you'll get help. We're all part of the same machine. If a part is broken you fix it,” I said, quoting Julia.

“Or you throw it out and get a replacement part,” she said.

“We don't have any replacements—you may have noticed that—so we have to repair what we have and hobble along. What do I do?” I asked Lumen.

Touch the pin to his body and imagine him in perfect health, with no illness or injury.

I put the pin to Crassus' tongue, and he pushed up to it like a baby seeking the nipple, so hard and fast that the pin pierced the flesh of his tongue and drew blood. I tried to pull away, but his hands clasped my wrist with a primal force and he sucked what he needed from its tip. Like a weak cub sucking from a mother's teat.

I could feel the strength, the life flowing back into him. Marcus seized my hand and moved it to my side, where my own wound burned.

“Your turn. Don't argue.”

Crassus fell forward into a deep slumber.

Gods. It was agony and ecstasy all rolled into one. Being pulled back from death's door, my body waking as if from a great sleep and at the same time clawing at the remembrance of the nectar, my brain firing, endorphins rewarding me for satisfying its addictive demands.

The wound had closed over, but it was still bruised, black under the skin.

“You're still hurt, you have to take it easy,” Julia said.

Crassus' eyes flicked open, wide with horror. “You should not have done that,” he said.

The last ghost of ambrosia hunger has left you now, but Crassus' desire for it will return in time. It is embedded in his mind as much as in his body, but until then the power of the ichor will give him some time to think clearly.

Crassus looked up at me in my dirty white armor. I was not afraid of him, but there was an intensity, a focus that matched my own—a synchronous emotion that was frightening. We were driven by the same fuel, but was it for the same purpose?

Crassus scrambled to his feet. “I have to go. I can't stay near you. The craving will return again, and with it, my weaknesses. I can't be too close to him,” he said, pointing to Lumen. “Don't you feel it too? The need for it?”

“Yes.”

“It's like swimming in a freshwater lake as you die of thirst. I can't stand it. I've tried, but it's too hard. I will serve from a distance. I know things about the arena ahead. I know Aquilinus and what he will ask for. I can help.”

He leaped from the chariot and skittered off into the night like a giant spider. Looking at the speed with which Crassus fled, it occurred to me that I might have given him too much of the pin's power and not kept enough for myself.

“Quintus won't leave without Lumen,” I said. “Which means they won't give up on us. They'll be waiting ahead for us, and we've got to move now before the Sertorians catch up.”

“And Crassus?” Marcus asked.

“With him, it's in the lap of the gods,” I said.

Suddenly, a skirmisher pulled up beside us, piloted by Pavo.

“Pax!” he yelled. “I've come to join you. I've deserted Quintus Severus.”

Marcus rounded with his weapon, but I placed a restraining hand on his shoulder.

“Hold. Speak quickly,” I said to him. “I have no time and little patience for tricks.”

“No trick,” Pavo said urgently. “Things are changing. I felt a shadow over us. I heard your speech at the ice bridge. I don't care about the consequences. Let them come, let them kill us, only let me follow you.”

“Quintus has sent him,” Julia said.

Listen to him, as you did with Crassus,
Lumen said.
Each person has their own song. He is following his.

I reached out to Pavo. His thoughts were rough and fast, like an animal rushing through a wood, chasing its prey. But there was an honesty, a nobility. The hunt was a means of completing a circle of life and death, not for sport or cruelty.

“You can come,” I said to Pavo. “Be quick about it.” I was buying life in minutes, and if Pavo bought us more vital time, then he was welcome.

I sat beside Lumen as we raced out of the crystalline forests, holding his hand in mine as they faded behind us. He was weak; there were more cracks than ever in his shell. I tried to talk to him, but there were no more words. Not because I had turned away but because I sensed his every effort was required to keep the power contained within him. Metamorphosis. He was either changing or dying or both, and he needed to keep this form together until he could return to the queen. And what would happen then? What would happen to Aulus?

“Don't you leave me again,” I told him. “I won't lose you.”

One more leg to go and we were home free. As we traveled, Marcus sighted a faint form in the distance. Crassus, infused with ichor, keeping pace with our speedy chariot on foot. But there was no sign of the Viridians.

As we came up over a low rise, we caught sight of an archway, part of a long, crumbling wall that marked the entrance to the ruined city of Lupus Civitas. How many nights had I dreamed of this place? The site of the bombing of Olympus Decimus. Above the gate were large holographic projections of heroic Sertorian motifs. Their generals, their battles, historical revisionism at its worst, created histories to lend credibility to a people who had nothing but greed as their driving force.

As we approached, the archway transformed. All the motifs changed from reflecting Sertorian greatness to the low points of Viridian failure, and then the entire structure burst into holographic flame. Above the archway in a row of curved letters, a sign read

ABANDON HOPE ALL WHO ENTER.

It was a traditional warning above the gates of the underworld.

Julius Gemminus' winged head appeared beside the sign. I would have loved to wipe that plastic grin off of his face.