Seed of Rage Page 17

  I looked up to see a scarlet crest and the lifeless eyes of a half dozen golden phalerae staring down at me from across a brawny torso. Under the armor was a centurion about twice my age. His blade swooped down again, powerful enough to nick the edge of my gladius in a flash of sparkles. I jumped to my feet and flipped the two swords in my hands, ready to fly in a blaze of glory to Elysion, the heavenly afterworld where only the bravest were allowed. He was ready too; I could see it in his eyes. I crossed my blades to parry another blow… and everything went white.

  A flash of light blinded me, and noise unlike anything I’d ever heard thundered through my body before a shockwave sent me flying backward under a rain of metal. Everything was at once fast and slow—the screams around me, the iron shards that hailed on us, hitting my lorica, my greaves, slicing my arms. An acrid black smoke soon shrouded the square. Blinking in vain, gasping for breath, I registered a low vibration, a formidable groan that rumbled through my rib cage, seeking its way to my heart.

  The second shock wave lifted me from the ground. In the span of a quivering breath I was weightless. I closed my eyes and saw the gates of Elysion opening before me. It was done. I had lived, fought, died, and I bet Loris had never seen a girl march into his garden.

  But I crashed back to earth and found that my legs could still move. Distant howls of agony laced with the painful buzz in my eardrums. Was I alive after all? I blinked away the mottled spots of color in my eyes. The centurion was staring at me, his eyes wide. His sword shook in his hands and fell to the ground with a muted clatter, right before he collapsed in his turn. Blood trickled from a single iron shard embedded in his nape. I looked up. On the horizon, a thread of molten gold set the clouds on fire. The sun was rising, and Nyos’s Magnatura had fallen.

  21

  Bathed in coppery light, the battlefield froze in complete stupor as lazy tendrils of smoke curled and dissipated in the air. Vanquished, Nyos’s Magnatura lay across the ditch skirting Nyos’s once-impregnable walls, now a dull bluish slab divided in two by a long crack in its center. The paved road leading to the city’s gate had been shattered like clay by the sudden collapse of the Magnatura, and two colossal snakes of iron rested at her sides—the chains, whose links had been pulverized by Hastius’s mysterious Serican bombs.

  Around me, the soldiers who could still move struggled to their feet, reaching blindly for their weapons, some coughing out smoke, others blood. A frayed scream tore the silence, whipping me back onto my legs. I glimpsed Irius’s bloodied blade sweeping down to cut through a spear rod and the neck of its owner. Reality rushed back to me at once. Irius was still alive; the drawbridge had been released.

  I caught movement on the wall-walk and jumped to the ground to grab a shield just before a new volley of arrows hit it, a few iron points piercing threateningly through the layers of plywood and rawhide. “Victrix!” I yelled as the archers readied themselves for a second salvo. “Are you dead?”

  “After you, birdshit!” A ragged voice called from somewhere across the esplanade.

  My heart swelled with hope. And renewed rage. More arrows rained on my shield, but this time a series of cracks in the wood suggested it wouldn’t take a third volley. Folded behind a scarlet shield that now looked like a spikehog, Irius motioned to the wall—where the archers couldn’t hit us. Victrix nodded too, and the three of us sprang at once, racing across the devastated esplanade, jumping over bodies, ramming into others. Arrows whistled from above, but all I saw were the stone stairs leading up the wall-walk, only a few steps away.

  We dove together under the stairs to escape the downpour of iron, and by Loris, I’d never been so happy to find myself huddled against a pair of nutsacks in need of a bath. Irius was covered in cuts, much like Victrix and me, but he seemed well enough to fight—save for a few missing braids in his beard, no doubt following a close encounter with a blade.

  “What now?” I rasped, gripping my sword like a lifeline.

  Victrix drew in a shaky breath. Blood drenched his trousers where either an arrow or a shard from the chains had gotten him. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Hastius?” Irius asked.

  Victrix shook his head. “I don’t know. I think he’s done.”

  My heart tightened. Maybe I’d miss his crass charm a little. I gritted my teeth through the pain flaring all over my body; we’d survived the fall of the gate, but the Western troops and Clearchos’s legion were nowhere in sight and death whispered in our ears, flitted ever closer around us. In the streets nearby, a din made of shouted commands and hundreds of boots and hooves trampling the ground announced reinforcements. Nyos’s walls were wide-open, but the Lorians wouldn’t give up just yet.

  “They’re coming,” Irius stated, as if he’d have commented on the weather.

  War horses barreled down the Via Prefecta in the distance, while boots clattered above our heads—Lorians were coming down the stairs from the wall-walk to finish us. Victrix and I exchanged a look. He smiled, and I felt a wordless bond weave itself between us. Or maybe it existed already, and it had taken this desperate battle for me to realize that somewhere along the way, the two of us had become friends.

  He rose with a grunt of effort. “Don’t bother with the small fry. Take down their centurion if you can.”

  My head and my heart were pounding in tune, but I couldn’t hold back a bitter chuckle at his optimistic command. I stared ahead at the warhorses tearing through the dust straight toward the esplanade. I counted two cavalry squadrons, whose hooves made the ground shake. Add to that the dozens of legionaries now surrounding us on the esplanade. Shields, swords, and spears: scarlet and steel everywhere in sight.

  Ignoring Irius’s precepts, Victrix flourished his sword threateningly at the shields slowly closing in on us. “Come on! Drop the shields and die like men! Can’t you hear the ground shake? Can’t you fucking feel it?”

  Irius and I looked at each other, the wrinkle on his brow mirroring mine. Victrix was right. I could feel it up my spine—the equites? No… At our feet, gravel quivered slightly from a deep rumble that became the clamor of thousands of voices. We all turned to the fallen drawbridge. It was coming, growing, roaring, raging beyond the hazy dawn. The horses and the men; Legate Spurius’s Thirteenth Legion and our comrades.

  The equites fisted their reins tight and brutally halted their horses, who reared and neighed in protest. Someone shouted for the legionaries to back away and form a tortoise. They clambered away toward the buildings lining the esplanade, gathering their shields in front of them and over their heads to form tight squares from which only anxious eyes and booted feet peeked.

  But no formation could stop the flaming boulders suddenly hissing through the open gate—only the everwood of the Magnatura would have. The projectiles arched over the esplanade, and for a suspended moment Victrix, Irius, and I just watched, powerless. It was only when they crashed into shields and horses that our legs found the strength to move, away, anywhere, as if pure lightning flowed through our veins. Behind us, the boulders turned our enemies into a howling, neighing mass of bone, bronze, and blood, soon swallowed by chaos as the Thirteenth Legion’s equites galloped across the fallen Magnatura and into Nyos.

  Irius shoved a wounded Lorian off his horse to steal it and Victrix rammed his sword into the side of another to do the same. He held out his hand for me to climb behind him and steered the panicked mount between clashing swords and fallen shields across the esplanade. The remnants of a broken chain still hung from the lips of one of the two fishes who guarded the gate. Lying prone under the statue was a body wearing a familiar satchel and lorica.

  I jumped down from the horse, deaf and blind to the storm of gore and smoke raging around me. “Hastius!”

  Victrix yelled. “Birdshit, get back here now! It’s too late.”

  I pressed my fingers to Hastius’s blood-soaked neck. “But he’s alive!” His head was bleeding too much, though. I turned him over to check
the damage and bit back a gasp. Where his right eyelid had once been was a pulp of mangled flesh, and I knew without a doubt that the eye buried under this bloody mess was blind. The clatter of hooves behind me had me reaching for my sword, but when I looked up, it was Clearchos’s scarred face looking down at me, next to Irius.

  “He can live,” I stressed to them, sensing that theirs would be a life or death decision made in the span of a heartbeat. I hooked my arms under Hastius’s to haul him up, feeling a rush of elation when he let out a weak groan.

  I registered the movement of Clearchos’s lips, but amidst the hell of battle I didn’t hear what he told Irius. All I knew was that Irius jumped off his horse to help me carry Hastius onto the saddle—it was all that mattered.

  “I’ll take care of him,” Irius said, clasping his hand around my shoulder once. “Go back to the temple and see if Vatluna made it too.”

  I wasn’t given any time to reply. A strong hand grabbed me by the scruff, and its owner would have gladly strangled me if I hadn’t consented to climb back on the horse behind him. Victrix heeled the horse’s flanks hard to crack a path through the sheer mass of men butchering each other. We jumped over a cluster of shields, and when Lorian legionaries tried to slash at our mount, I grabbed a spear that was at hand’s reach to plunge it deeply into a red-shirted shoulder. The Lorian fell and joined his brothers, drowning in the sea of blood at our feet.

  We raced up the Via Prefecta behind a squadron of western equites and their indigo tunics. Once we were in the small street winding up toward the Meditrinal temple, the tumult became that of panicked Nyseites desperate to flee the carnage. I tried not to look, but I couldn’t block the wails of women and children, the ear-piercing screams erupting from a red haze as the equites hacked their way through the crowd. I gripped Victrix’s waist tighter while our horse dashed across the blood-soaked pavement and told myself over and over that we weren’t responsible for this. The Nyseites had brought this battle upon themselves. They could have negotiated with Spurius; they could have…

  “Ram the doors down!”

  The booming voice of the equites’ Decurion put a brutal end to my guilt-laden pondering. In the light of dawn, I recognized the street, the brick wall where Vatluna’s impossible strength had cracked the plaster and bared the bricks underneath. The bodies of the urban cohorts still lay on the pavement near the temple’s closed gates, eyes wide open but unseeing, their skin pasty white under dark stains of dried blood.

  “You boys did that?” asked a Decurion barely older than we were, while a group of legionaries jogged toward us carrying a battering ram.

  Victrix gave a shrug. “Clearchos’s Legion doesn’t take prisoners.”

  The young Decurion chuckled, the sound lost in the din of the ram wrecking through the temple’s gates. After the cloud of dust and wood splinters had settled, we were enveloped by a bubble of uncanny silence, as if even the tumult of the battle raging outside couldn’t breach the walls of Meditrina’s realm. Bodies littered the courtyard, some gutted, their heads twisted at odd angles. A shiver that was equal parts horror and admiration raised the hair on my forearms. Such was Vatluna, the man with nine fingers and the strength of twenty bulls—if the camp’s gossip was to be believed.

  There was no trace of him, though. The Decurion and his men progressed warily under the shade of the Piricarias, taking in the devastation around them. “You did that too?” he asked in breathless awe.

  “Not all of it,” I informed him as we stepped over the body of an archer whose own arrows had been used to stab his throat. “Do you think he could have survived?” I whispered to Victrix, who shook his head in response, his brow furrowed in quiet astonishment.

  Behind us, one of the legionaries wondered aloud, “Where’s everyone? The priestesses… Are they all dead already?”

  Good question. Our gazes swiped around the garden, the temple’s deserted hall, the low buildings where the priestesses and their servants lived. There was no trace of them, only the warble of a few grilli, and the murmur of divine water rippling and lapping at the pool’s edges from a sudden gust of wind.

  Call it a gut feeling; I didn’t like this silence. I drew out my sword, and Victrix did the same, his footsteps crushing the courtyard’s gravel with infinite precaution. In the living quarters’ western wall, one door remained ajar and creaked softly, nudged by a draft—the very door we’d come through hours ago, and which led down to the cellar. Clattering arose from the darkened stairs, followed by a grunt. Steel scraped leather as all legionaries unsheathed their gladius in turn.

  “Luna?” Victrix called, edging toward the door, while I cut across the gravel to flatten myself against the building’s wall, ready to strike the first thing—or man—I saw.

  The door slammed open, and I sprang to press the tip of my blade to the newcomer’s throat. It was a big throat, sitting atop an equally big body, whose cuirass no longer shone, and which bore countless phalera all smeared with dried blood. I drew away with a sigh of relief as Vatluna proudly lifted a clay jar of the goddess’s consecrated wine and took a gurgling chug. He roared a sigh and wiped his bristly black beard with the back of his arm. “To immortality!”

  The legionaries around us seemed to have a hard time believing he was their ally—or even human, for that matter. It took them a little while to lower their swords, darting wary looks at his powerful physique from under their helmets.

  “The priestesses? Where are they?” the Decurion inquired, sheathing his sword last.

  Vatluna’s chest heaved, and he considered the jug pensively. “What do you think? They sent them away long ago. Not a virgin cunt left to reward noble heroes in here.”

  I held my breath, while at my side, Victrix’s lips pursed tight. His clear gaze locked on Vatluna’s dark one, but he didn’t deny the lie, didn’t react when the Decurion spat to the ground and muttered, “Slippery snakes… May every Lorian’s gut rot.”

  The Decurion removed his helmet to run a hand through sweat-soaked brown curls. “Get some water boiling!” he ordered his men.

  I tilted my head at him. “What for?”

  “To get rid of all that,” was his answer, with a weary gesture to the long pool of emerald water shining brightly under the first rays of sunlight.

  My eyes darted to Victrix and Vatluna, hoping to find some sort of explanation on their shuttered faces. But Victrix contented himself with an eye roll, while Vatluna took a long sip from the jug and held it out for us. “Not the best I ever had, but close enough,” he noted.

  I shook my head absently, watching the legionaries struggle across the courtyard with two buckets full of water they’d fetched from the well. Clouds of smoke soon escaped one of the living quarters’ chimneys. Victrix accepted the jug from Vatluna and tipped it over to drink a couple of huge gulps. He gave him the wine back with a sigh. “I needed that.” His thirst quenched, Victrix waited for the pair of soldiers standing behind us to go steal piris in the orchard, before he cocked an eyebrow at Vatluna. “No priestesses here, huh?”

  The interested party crossed muscular arms over his chest. “No man goes to Elysion who slaughters Meditrina’s priestesses.”

  As good as a confession. I turned to him. “They’re in the caves?”

  He lowered his voice to reply. “They took enough bread and water for a few days. There’s a way out, under the lake, to the southern bank.”

  “Do you think they can make it?” I whispered.

  His answer came with a shrug and a sip of wine. “Hope they will. The elder says the water will guide them.”

  Meanwhile, grunts of efforts and hisses of pain drew our attention to the bunch of idiots trying their best to carry a cauldron toward the pool without getting burned by the drops of scalding water splashing their tunics.

  I moved to follow them. “What the hell are they trying to…”

  I jolted back in surprise when they tilted the massive receptacle with a collective groa
n of effort and poured the boiling water into the pool. The effect was immediate: almost a quarter of the pool lost its shimmer, while the rest of the Meditrinal water seemed, on the contrary, to shine even brighter, the luminescent tendrils swirling wildly. Desperately. The Decurion ordered his men to boil more water, and when they returned to pour another cauldron, my chest was tight with the certainty that they were killing it. Killing something inside. Never had I imagined it was possible to do this, to destroy something made by the gods themselves.

  After the second cauldron, there wasn’t much luminescence left, and once they were done pouring the third, it was just dead water in the pool. Even so, I couldn’t take my eyes off of the scarce bubbles floating on the surface and the dark sheen of moss covering the marble edges. It looked a dull green now.

  Beyond the temple’s wall, the roar of battle had quieted. The onagers were no longer firing boulders into Nyos’s walls. As minutes passed and we prepared to leave the temple, the uncertain silence became a vibration, a joyful clamor—thousands of men celebrating the fall of Nyos.

  22

  The indigo tunics and shields of Emperor Manicus’s thirteenth and twentieth spilled inside Nyos like ink. All the red that was left was the blood covering the pavement, running down the gutters to vanish in the sewers. I rode behind Victrix, following the equites’ squadron along streets where Western Legionaries gathered citizens and a few men who no longer wore any armor, but retained the red tunic of Nyos’s urban cohorts and soldiers. I avoided their gazes on my mask. I wished I’d been stronger, but their despair clung to me, so thick I could almost feel it stick to my skin like sweat and blood.

  “Where are they taking them?” I asked Victrix.

  “The forum. Clearchos and Spurius will probably gather our men there. They’ll want to take control of the prefectural palace as soon as possible. After that, it’s over for good.” And Nyos will be theirs, I concluded in my mind.