Seed of Rage Read online

  I let myself fall on the other side of the wall and landed effortlessly on one knee, before Victrix did the same with a grunt, joined by Hastius and Irius. Victrix looked up at me, his lips quirking in challenge. “Show me what you got, Silverlegs.”

  Oh, I would. The soldiers stopped less than ten feet away, huddled together behind the silvery moons painted on the curve of their long red shields. Their optio shouted for us to stop, but he was no braver than his men. Sweat glistened on his neck, and I relished the sight of fear blooming in his eyes.

  Irius claimed that only idiots flourished their blades in actual combat. He forgot to mention that those idiots did so to feel stronger in the face of the enemy—and perhaps to show off a little. I advanced toward them, my blade spinning and dancing menacingly. They would never know my own terror, simmering safely behind the empty eyes of my mask, the million thoughts racing through my mind as I scanned their short swords, the tremor in my thighs because I was only a sixteen-year-old girl, and this was the first time I made war.

  The optio shouted an order for his unit to attack. They loosened formation to move faster—just as I had been taught they would—with their legs braced behind their shields and their blades pressed to the edge, ready to pierce. Irius charged, with his trademark high guard and reverse grip. He rammed into the shield of the soldier closest to him to unbalance him, and then whirled around, slicing his throat neatly.

  The sight and the smell of first blood were the spark needed to ignite madness on both sides. The optio yelled for the men to stay in formation—his last words before Victrix’s blade thrust under his exposed armpit and down to his lung. A pair of soldiers closed in on me, and for a heartbeat I thought my legs would never move, that I couldn’t do this after all. But watching the two of them take cautious steps, their frightened eyes peeking from under their iron helmets, I felt the hunt come back to me and sizzle in my blood.

  They expected me to either strike or parry; I slipped between them instead, behind their precious shields, and raised my blade to plunge it down in the pulsing vein of a hairy neck. Warm blood gushed and splattered on my mask, my chest. The remaining soldier managed to strike a clumsy blow that ripped across my chainmail and ignited a flash of pain in my side. I whirled around and slashed through the tendons straining in the crook of his elbow. He let go of his sword with a broken wail that ended in a gurgle when my blade pierced his gullet and sliced through his spine.

  A storm raged under the confines of my mask, made of sweat and trembling pants. Their blood was all over me, dripping from my iron eyelids and blinding me. Yet I wanted more. A lean, short boy staggered away from Irius’s sword; he found mine instead, shimmering down to cleave his helmet and the fragile skull underneath.

  I felt the bones cracking, the strength of my own blow juddering through my arms all the way up to my shoulder. And it still wasn’t enough, never enough to satiate my hunger, fill the void inside me. So, I slashed, tore through another, then a fifth, ramming against his shield like Irius had. He fell, rolled terrified eyes. Looking up, he must have seen my mask, drenched in blood, gleaming under the moonlight. His last thought must have been that it was a monster killing him, kicking his shield aside to plunge a reddened blade deep into his heart.

  A hand touched my shoulder. I took a swipe at it, roaring like a berserk beast. Steel clanked against steel, and I saw Victrix’s furious eyes. “What the fuck, birdshit?”

  I drew back with a gasp, blinking frantically at the bodies scattered all around us, the thick blood running on the pavement to trickle down the sewers. Distant shouts echoed in the quiet streets, faint lights flicked behind the windows, one after another.

  “We’re done. We need to get the hell out of here, fast.” Victrix said. He looked around at Irius and Hastius—the latter seemed to have stayed away from the fight. He hadn’t even unsheathed the short sword he carried in his back. Victrix asked, “Where’s Vatluna?”

  A scream of agony drew our attention to the wall. Between the merlons, the grappling hook was missing and there was fighting going on. Something—or more likely someone—hit the wall so hard the painted layer of plaster cracked, baring the bricks underneath. The groan that followed didn’t sound like Vatluna’s, though. I caught a flash of sadness in Hastius’s pale green irises before he called cheerfully, “Should we wait for you, my friend?”

  A booming voice came from the other side of the wall, “I’ll drink the goddess’s wine to your bones!”

  There was no time for regrets, or even an acknowledgment of his sacrifice; the four of us bolted as soon as he’d said this, racing through narrow paved streets, away from the shouts of the urban cohorts’ reinforcements.

  When a blue band of sky on the horizon flashed between two houses, Victrix asked: “Hastius, how far’s the gate?”

  “It’s southwest, less than a half a league away. But there’s an entire legion stationed along the walls. These guys were just appetizers.”

  Registering the sound of water flowing, I glanced at the stream running along the gutter to pour into a vaulted stone mouth further down the street. “Can we get there through the sewers?”

  “I was hoping no one would suggest that,” Hastius whined.

  Without waiting for collective approval, I ran to the man-sized hole and jumped in feet first. Swill splashed everywhere and rose up to my knees. I breathed through the stench of unidentified refuse and trudged as fast as possible, followed by the sounds of water sloshing and Victrix swearing behind me. As the tainted waters settled, the dark bowel came alive with an ominous flurry of squeaks and pit-patting. Hastius pulled out his divine water tube, and sure enough, sewer rhagamuses swarmed on the narrow ledges running along the walls in a viscous, glistening mass that shrunk away from the greenish light.

  “Put that shit away, moron! You’ll get us caught,” Victrix ordered.

  “So testy…” Hastius muttered, tucking the tube back in his satchel.

  I pointed to the barely discernible shadows of two openings in the walls—a crossing ahead. “Hastius, if we go right, we should be heading south. What do you think?”

  “You’re asking me? I’d say you already took the lead, Silverlegs.” His tone was teasing, but I sensed no reluctance; I decided to trust my instinct and headed right.

  What little moonlight spilled inside the main tunnel was now lost. Blinking in the dark, I whispered, “I don’t think we can do without the divine water in here, Victrix. They couldn’t see it from the street anyway.”

  “All right.” He conceded.

  Hastius pulled out the tube again, and immediately the walls seemed to stirr and crawl away from us. An otherworldly screech had us all freezing in the murky water as a rather fat rodent flew past our heads and went to smash into a wall, prompting the rest of his pack to scatter with panicked squeaks. Hastius turned around to direct the light at Irius, who stood behind him, his face as impassive as ever. “It was trying to get into my trousers,” was his only explanation.

  The rhagamuses thankfully kept their distance after the incident, observing our progress through Nyos’s cloaca through indifferent beady eyes. The ground progressively sloped underwater, and the farther we slogged, the steeper the angle, until I noticed that I was now immersed waist-deep, and Hastius struggled to keep his satchel dry, raising it over his head.

  “Hastius, are you sure it’s the way?” Victrix asked. “You’re going to drown us at this rate. Or poison us, I’m not sure which.”

  The culprit swiped his glowing tube at the walls on which signs had been engraved, the same on the pipes back in the mine. “We’re walking south under the Via Prefecta, so the esplanade of the Magnatura should be…”

  Straight ahead, where a dim light and the sudden fracas of voices and the clatter of metal poured from a vaulted opening high on a glistening wall.

  20

  Huddled in the dark under a sewer opening with my companions, words failed me as I took in the majesty of Nyos’
s Magnatura. Dozens, hundreds of men bustled all over the esplanade and atop the fortifications, but they were little more than iron-clad ants compared to the gate they guarded; a slab of petrified wood the size of several houses, so polished it shone like glass in places. I had never seen, or even dreamed, anything like it. Victrix had said everwood was blue, but in truth, it was impossible to assign a single color to the swirls, veins, and rings running under the sleek surface. Some were the color of clear skies, others dark as the depths of Bride’s Lake. It was all the blues and none at once.

  Hastius tucked the tube of divine water back into his satchel and whispered, “They’re getting ready for battle. They must have realized that Clearchos and Spurius are making a move.”

  Most of them wore either bronze cuirasses or chain-mail shirts over the same sort of scarlet tunics as the urban cohorts, short glaives and iron helmets that shone golden in the torches’ light. Archers were lining up along the wall-walk, counting the arrows in their quivers, while their centurion barked orders for them to prepare seventy each, and be ready to rain hell on the maggot-infested cunts of the West—his words, not mine. My companions’ tightly clenched jaws mirrored my own as they appraised the troops readying themselves for battle above our heads. We had been sent here to die. It couldn’t be any other way, not with so many soldiers guarding the Magnatura.

  We flattened our bodies to the malodorous slime drenching the wall and held our breaths when a cluster of leather boots and shields the color of blood trampled past the sewer opening. As soon as the legionaries were gone, Victrix asked Hastius, “What’s your plan?”

  He scratched his head with a wince. “Well, I’d been hoping to throw Vatluna in there and have him entertain them with the strength of ten demons.”

  “Too bad,” I whispered. “Now, let’s say someone else distracts them, what’s the rest of the plan?”

  Hastius pointed to the gate with his chin while he retrieved a strange little jar, the size of a fist, from his magic satchel. “See the chains?”

  I crept closer to look up through the opening, feeling Irius’s solid frame pressing against my back as he did the same. Two chains, thick as my legs, held the gate shut on each side and disappeared inside the open mouths of huge sculpted fish. “They lift the gate so it can pivot?”

  “That’s how a drawbridge works, Silverlegs. Were you born yesterday?”

  I shrugged off the jab. “It didn’t look like a bridge from the outside.”

  “There’s a ditch ten feet wide, fifty feet deep around the walls. They can lower the Magnatura to cross it. In times of peace, the gate is almost never shut,” Victrix supplied almost kindly.

  Having ascertained that everyone in his audience was up to speed with the wonders of modern warfare, Hastius went on. “The wheels are under the esplanade. Biggest things you’ve ever seen, each moved by eight oxen. It’s useless trying to destroy the gate itself; the chains are the weak link.”

  He chuckled at his own pun, the sound deafening in our collective silence. His eyes darted to Victrix, then to me, perhaps hoping for some sort of snarky comeback to lighten the mood. He wouldn’t get any; there were at least a hundred archers out there, and as many swordsmen waiting for us. Plastering a sober expression on his face, he held out the mysterious jar for us to see, turning it around to reveal a big iron hook and a sizable length of twine sticking out from the bottom, that he had folded so it wouldn’t get wet, I gathered. “Ever seen this?”

  The only reply was a rhagamuse squeak coming from the depths of the sewer. Hastius’s grin returned. “It comes from the East. Not Loria, Serica.”

  Irius’s brow wrinkled and Victrix’s mouth fell in boyish shock. “Does that place even exist?”

  Hastius tossed the jar in his palm under our confused eyes. The thing looked quite heavy. “Well at least one man sailed there, and I bought them from him.”

  I had never heard of any place called Serica, but one word stood out. “Them?” I murmured.

  “I got two.” He nodded to his satchel, wiggling his eyebrows in a way that made me want to smack him over the head. “The twine goes inside the jar, which is filled with a fascinating sort of powder the people of Serica invented. Once you set the twine on fire, start counting to sixty in your head. That’s about how long it takes for it to burn entirely. The flame reaches the powder, then, and…” His cheeks swelled to mimic a silent explosion. “This,” he tapped a gloved forefinger against the clay recipient, “is the future, gentlemen.”

  “Then why can’t it just take the gate down?” Victrix spat.

  Hastius shrugged and fished in his satchel for the second jar to give it to Victrix. “It’s science, not magic.”

  “And this is to hook it into the links?” I touched said hook gingerly.

  “Ah, yes. Added it myself.”

  “What about the fire?” Victrix mused quietly, weighting the jar in his hand. “How will we light up the twine?”

  “Uncle Hastius has a trick for everything.” As soon as he’d stated this, our ‘uncle’ produced a tiny wooden stick from his bag, whose end had been coated with a pale paste—I couldn’t quite make out what it was in the dim light. He scratched it against the back of his glove, and it immediately caught fire and produced an odd blue flame. He blew it out and tossed it in the sewer water. “Lightstone powder and sulpuris, crushed and melted. Burns with the slightest touch—like yours truly.” He thought it useful to add with a wink.

  I tipped my head to the soldiers outside, busy hauling a ten-foot-tall ballista across the esplanade. “I don’t suppose you have any tricks left in your bag for them?”

  “Well, I still have a couple of stinkwitch bombs left.” His gaze flitted between me and Irius, and there it was again, that frosty glint I had glimpsed earlier. “But the two of you will have to be the life of this party. I need you to survive long enough for me and Victrix to reach the chains.”

  Hearing this, Victrix stiffened and tossed his jar for me to catch. “Running is the only thing Constanter is any good at. He’ll take care of hooking that piece of shit to the chain.”

  Hastius’s eyes narrowed cunningly. “Are you sure about this?”

  Good question. Hastius needn’t know that my counting skills were subpar; what mattered was that I was faster than Victrix with a sword, and he knew it. I sensed his wounded pride and rising ire as if they were my own, igniting the air around us. I braced myself for his temper to erupt as usual, but Irius’s hand landed on his shoulder, squeezing it once. Not for the first time, I was struck by the man’s ability to command and compel through his presence alone. A wordless understanding passed between them. Victrix took the jar back from me and considered with stormy gray eyes. “Impress me, then.”

  “You know I will,” I retorted.

  Hastius rolled his shoulders. “All right. Scarves up.”

  Mine wasn’t so much a scarf as a rag around my neck to prevent the lorica from chafing my skin, but I wrapped it over the nostrils of my mask anyway. Given how unbreathable the air would soon become, better hedge my luck.

  His voice muffled by the linen covering his mouth and nose, Hastius added, “Remember, all we have going for us are surprise and panic. The bloodier, the better.”

  Something splintered inside me when he said that, and it was as if I watched the girl who nodded her assent from a distance. Hastius was asking that she wound and maim as many men as possible in the time she had left to live before the legionaries killed her, and she didn’t really think anything of it. Splatters of blood and gore already stained her clothes and armor anyway. It didn’t really matter; only the thrill of the hunt did.

  We gathered unseen on the stone ledge right under the sewer opening, our skylight in the dark. Leather rustled and knuckles cracked. Even then, half of my mind remained safely bottled deep in a place none could ever touch, the rest of me a spectator to Hastius lighting up the linen twines. I mentally tried to gauge how long it took for one to count to six
ty. How many breaths? How many heartbeats left? Time stretched along each powerful thump against my ribs as Hastius threw the remaining stinkwitch bombs. The soldiers immediately started to shout and scatter as the suffocating stench enveloped them.

  Being the lightest and fastest, I went first, hauling myself out of the narrow opening to land in a ditch full of oily, putrid water. Irius followed, and Victrix and Hastius. The splashing sound alerted the man closest to us, who staggered around. He didn’t scream; I sliced his throat before he could. All the polluted air carried was a gurgle as I took his sword and made it mine, flourishing both once to get a good grip on them. Near me Irius started hacking away at the limbs of a cluster of terrified men—some of them mere boys—while a centurion bellowed that they were under attack.

  Fifty. I leaped to dodge a spear and slashed through a crimson tunic and the thighs beneath. I didn’t want to see his face; I found a weak spot in his armor and plunged my blade deep into his gut. I’d only ever tried two-swords combat with the harmless wooden blades we trained with, but it came easily, using the short gladius I’d stolen to parry while my long Lorian sword butchered faceless men. I stopped counting and surrendered to Silverleg’s dark hunger. The screams. The hunt. The preys desperately trying to heed their centurion’s order to get into formation. What fucking formation? I was behind their shields, whirling left and right, leaping above their heads like a demon with gleaming orichalcum legs.

  Bolts brushed me and left sizzling trails across my arm, my hip; I didn’t feel the pain. I didn’t exist under this mask; only Silverlegs did. How long did we have left? I couldn’t see Hastius and Victrix, but amidst the Stinkwitch fumes and carnage a scarlet shield was tossed my way—courtesy of Irius. He yelled for me to watch out, before tearing a second shield from the hands of a dying soldier. An order to fire resonated from above. Shit, the archers! I curled under the blood-soaked shield just in time before a hail of arrows thudded into the plywood and splintered it. The moment after, a powerful blow sent me reeling backward and cracked the shield in half.