Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (91 page)

He had to acknowledge me, or that empirewide riot he'd been trying to quell would spin out of control.

Either way, now I'd won. He'd either let me win and honor our bet, or he'd deny me, and the citizens of the empire would riot to destroy House Sertorian.

“No, no. That's not how this is going to end,” he boomed down at me like a disapproving schoolmaster. “Not by a long shot. I am a Sertorian emperor and this is still my game. So you will finish this the Sertorian way. No Sertorian champion is declared winner of a ludus until he or she has overcome the final challenge, a final test of ruthlessness.”

In games in the Sertorian arena circuit, there was always a gladiator, often the most celebrated champion, who stood as the final obstacle before a victor could be crowned. In keeping with the theme of the New Gods, the last obstacle would be Hades himself.

“You are in the arena of the dead,” he continued, “so if you wish to mount the podium and claim the prize, you must overcome death itself. Only then will you prove your thesis and win our wager. If you can do that, then I will gladly admit you are the winner with all it entails.”

The ratings were against Aquilinus, but some of the audience were cheering now. They felt the injustice of this, but they couldn't resist the lure of a final bloody showdown, especially after being cheated of a conclusive result to my fight with Licinus. I considered fleeing the arena as Licinus had done, but I'd lose the crowd in an instant and they were the only thing standing between me and an ion bolt from the orbital cannon.

“Give me your best shot!” I yelled at him. “It doesn't matter what you throw at me. I won't stop until I've brought you down.”

“Then behold Hades,” Aquilinus announced, “the killer of all things, even gods, and certainly of a mangy wolf who doesn't know her place.”

His black form appeared out of thin air between me and the podium steps. Slightly stooped, robed in black from head to toe, a long, shining steel skull mask. Damn. This was why I didn't see him enter the arena before. He had some cloaking technology. It must be a chameleon device, I'd read about them—they used projections of the environment around the device to render the wearer invisible. Still, this coughing, hobbling excuse for an underworld god couldn't be Aquilinus' champion and I was certain it wasn't the same person who'd played the role of Hades earlier in the games. Here was no ambrosia-laden Olympian. He was slow, limping. I wouldn't have a problem taking him, invisibility trick or not.

I strode toward him, Orbis in my left hand, at the ready. He was holding his ground, letting me close the gap. I dropped into my stance and started to wind up for the throw, but before I could cast, he vanished. I dropped low, extending my senses, listening for a clue, watching for some sign of his presence.

In the old stories it was Hades' helmet that gave him the power of invisibility. I cast wide in short arcs, back and forth, cutting the space up into a grid to pinpoint his location.

The sand gave me no clues. He must have antigravity discs on the soles of his boots. That meant he was not only going to leave no tracks but he'd also be able to slide around the arena like quicksilver. That limp wasn't going to slow him down much.

Pain and a pool of blood blossomed on the robes of my unarmored left shoulder. I saw the point of the scythe only as it was passing away from my body. I lashed out with Orbis, but he was gone.

Hades must have been anticipating my plan and moved ahead of the grid I was marking out. Damn smart and I didn't sense him at all. Another hit to my arm, in exactly the same place. I managed to hold in the scream the first time, but the repetitive aggravation of my exposed nerves was more than I could stand, and a cry of pain tumbled out of my mouth.

I swung again. Another miss. I had only my right hand now, my burned hand, which lacked the finesse of my left. Minerva. I couldn't stand here like a training dummy waiting to get hit. I needed to even up the odds. I blinked, clearing my vision, as snowflakes hit my eyes. The snowflakes! That was it! The shields were down now. Aquilinus didn't need to keep us penned in, and the snowflakes were filling the air, falling on the sand, covering up the blood. The snow was the key. I watched the flakes fall. There. A distortion in the air where they stopped suddenly, their path to the ground disrupted by an obstacle—that's my man. I cast, strong and true. There was a loud clang as Orbis struck the helmet, sending it flying from Hades' head. The black-robed man stumbled back, falling to one knee just five feet from me, his head bowed. An old man with a bald spot and white hair. When he looked up, I froze in my tracks. Two eyes—one human, one red and mechanical—stared back at me. Gods, no. It was Father.

XLVIII

“F
ATHER?”

I was so sure he'd been killed when Aquilinus tortured him. He didn't answer. Had they drugged him? Brainwashed him?

“Father?”

“Accala,” he said, just loud enough so I could hear, “you have to understand. I was never going to kill you. Just stop you. I made a deal.”

His speech sounded clear, his eyes were focused, not disoriented. He knew what he was doing. The scythe he'd been holding before was gone, replaced by long, sharp pike.

“A deal? I don't understand.”

“To do what you cannot. To save you, to preserve the remnants of the empire so that House Viridian will have some hope of surviving this … folly of yours.”

I stepped back, looking down at him, barely able to believe what he'd just said.

“What have you done?”

“I've given Aquilinus what he wants: I promised you to him in marriage. You will fall today in the arena, but you will not die, you will live. Your marriage will protect our house from destruction.”

“As a slave. Worse, as a whore to the warlord who usurped the empire.”

“Don't you dare lecture me,” he spat. “I followed you here because I knew someone would have to clean up your trail of destruction. You blunder into everything without thought of the outcome. You don't know what you're doing.”

“I know exactly what I'm doing.”

“You can fool yourself, but I'm your father, I know you.”

I wouldn't let him get to me. I couldn't do this father-daughter nonsense. Not now. Aquilinus put him in here to throw me. This was Aquilinus' final card, the one thing he thought would make me buckle. But I couldn't stop now.

“You still don't see it,” I said to him. “You don't see me, but it doesn't matter. I'm fighting for the empire.”

“
I
don't see it? I might have only one eye, but you're the one who's blind. You're drowning and pulling the entire empire down with you.”

The spherae hovered low. No Julia to stop them now. They wanted to capture every juicy detail. Father versus daughter in a final arena challenge. The ghost audience was up on their feet, cheering. Our pairing was a masterstroke. Aquilinus' downward trend was over. He'd played his hand well. Aquilinus had ridden the wave of the audience's displeasure, knowing that when this turn of events was revealed, his popularity would skyrocket. They wanted it. Every single one of these death-loving bastards in our galactic audience wanted to see this play out. Somehow I had to convince my father to yield and at the same time win the crowd back to my side, but they were not going to settle for any outcome that didn't end with blood on the sand.

“This all hinges on whether you believe that I can triumph,” I said to Father. “Forget my disobedience to you. If I fail, I will have committed the greatest evil, and hubris and the empire will pay the price, you're right. But if I triumph, then it's the greatest good, the empire saved, our enemy dashed and ruined, everything reestablished. It's the highest stakes hanging by a thread, I admit it, but I bet on myself and that the gods are with me. I will not break or yield. I stand for hope, and you are standing against hope. You're bargaining for scraps from Aquilinus' table as if we've already lost, when the last battle is still to be fought and we're in sight of victory.”

The sky was filled with light and choruses of trumpets.

“You won't change my mind,” he said.

“I know.”

A drumroll began to sound above us.

“If you wish to serve, then do it this way, Accala—the only hope is of survival, not victory. Serve your house, serve me and yield,” he demanded as he rose to his feet, pike at the ready.

“I cannot,” I said. “No more than you can.”

His pike drove forward, and I parried with Orbis and swung at him. Even though he was limping, his arms were good and he could bring both of them to bear against my one. His pike was custom-made, short and thin so he could maneuver it quickly.

Now I saw firsthand why he was regarded as one of the last great heroes of the empire. Turning his pike this way and that, he weaved in and out of the defensive pattern I was making with Orbis and my arms. He was skilled, not as fast as he would have been in his youth, but he compensated, using small angles to attack and redirect my discus. He had kept up his training at his private gymnasium; he still had it. With all that experience and know-how, he was through my defenses like water through an aqueduct, slipping this way and that.

“Stop this. It doesn't have to be this way,” I said.

“You always talk too much. Like your mother. If I stop, then he will kill all of the prisoners aboard the stadium,” he said. We traded blows, like running an exercise. Testing each other, trying to find a way through each other's defenses. This was like the game we played when I was a child, when he trained us at home. Except now the odds were much higher, and no quarter was given. He was pushing me to my limits. “How did you think it would be otherwise? Your mother and I taught you to assess the odds, to think logically. You're surrounded. Aquilinus looks down over us. This is his game, he holds all the cards. It's the empire at stake here, Accala. They all came to the games, the most powerful senators, the leaders of the noble houses, the artists and celebrities. It's the empire in microcosm, all its best and brightest. Do you understand? These are our stars, our constellation. If they die, then the empire is truly lost forever. Now yield.”

“And if I don't?”

“You will,” he insisted.

Father's pike shot for my eye, I blocked and it had already circled around, sweeping at my thigh. I sidestepped and threw an elbow into his face that caught him unawares, forcing him a step back to recover his guard.

He held a finger up, touching the blood that ran from his broken nose.

“That was impressive,” he grunted. And then the pike came again.

“Aquilinus has bought you,” I said, trying to keep the anger from my voice. “And cheaply.”

They hadn't brainwashed him; they'd just given him an ultimatum: the death of everything he held dear—the empire he'd spent his entire life upholding, creating, forging in the Senate—or rein in his daughter. I understood even if I didn't approve. In his eyes, filled with sorrow and rage, I could see that if I didn't yield, he was going to kill me. In his mind he was choosing the empire, putting it first; only he was wrong. He thought I couldn't do it. That was the real reason he was here. Otherwise he'd have told Aquilinus to go to hell. He was here because deep down he didn't think his little girl had it in her to come through, to overcome the enemy, to be victorious in battle.

I couldn't believe it had come to this. A family row in this godsforsaken arena, in this place of all places, with so much at stake. This was not what I wanted. I couldn't do it. For all the grief he'd caused me, for all the suffering, he was still my father. He'd been kind to me, loved me. Before the bombing, he was there for me. If I killed him, that father would die as well, along with any chance that he could recover his life, refind who he was before it all went bad.

“I won't yield, but I won't kill you either,” I said.

The crowd roared their disapproval. The voices of the mob fill the air about us. “Kill! Kill! Quick!”

“Daughter, I have taken the poison given to criminals and the damned, the same that Seneca took to end his life. It was part of the deal. I'm already dead. Any honor I achieved in this life is already washed away. You cannot spare me here. Do not force me to keep going. Make it so that only I die in the arena today. Yield.”

I couldn't stop the tears from flowing, from the cry in my heart. Dead already. I couldn't allow myself to waver, even for him.

“You're wrong to trust Aquilinus. He will never honor his word,” I said. “There might still be a way to save you, but only if you stop this and lay down your arms.”

“He has written an executive order and signed it,” Father said. “All the prisoners will be permitted to live. Set free beyond the Barbaricum Wall. There will be hope of raising a resistance there.”

“He will never do that.”

“He will if it means getting his hands on the alien child. I've been watching from above. That's what he wants. That is his ticket to power. That's why he sent me.”

“To talk sense into your hysterical daughter?”

He slid in under my guard again, and I took a cut to the shoulder.

“To stop you from crushing what is our only remaining hope,” he said. “You have crushed everything else; not one decision you have made has borne fruit. You have taken an event that should have resolved a civil war and turned it into a deadly coup d'état that has destabilized the empire and nearly destroyed our house. All to satisfy your own need for revenge.”

“You're right. But I'm on the right path now. I've died to that idea, and now I fight for the empire. It is our own proconsul's decisions that have doomed us. He has played a game for glory and power instead of the common good. I was a pawn in that game, but no more. Nothing can come by following the path of appeasement.”