Seed of Rage

by Camilla Monk

  He gave a sharp nod, and we raced toward the crowd-smoothed limestone steps as a distant voice in the arena described Parthicus being mortally wounded by the invincible Silverlegs. I smirked under my mask. They’d rewritten that story—made me a legend. If they only knew…

  We flew down the darkened stairs, frenzied moths drawn to the light coming from another corridor at the end of this one. A rush of alert tingled up my spine when, at the bottom of the stairs, a shadow detached itself from the wall to bar our way. I was the closest; I sprang forward for a clean kill. But this time, when my blade swooped down, it met another that wouldn’t yield. Sparkles danced in the dark as steel clashed and ripped.

  I leaped back and swung my sword into a high guard as the dim light coming from the hallway revealed a braided beard and stone-cold brown eyes.

  Victrix summed up my own feelings with his usual gift for concision as he gasped, “Irius, what the fuck?”

  38

  I angled my blade ready to strike again if I must. “The swords, was it you?”

  Irius stepped back, letting the light pouring off the arches gild his hair and scaled lorica. Slowly he sheathed his blade and gazed down at the hilt, his eyes vacant. “In my tribe, we taught children that the first dog was a man named Olr.” Victrix and I listened in growing confusion as he went on. “Olr’s brother was a mad king who thought he was strong enough to conquer hell itself. When he marched down the road to hell with his army, every soldier was turned into a wolf, and they ran away to roam the woods. Olr too was turned into a wolf, but he wouldn’t abandon his brother. He followed him to hell, to his death. And for this, he was no longer a wolf, but a faithful dog.”

  As the meaning of his words registered, my chest tightened unbearably. Victrix’s bloodstained jaw quivered. His blazing eyes sought Irius’s empty ones. “The mad king won’t go back,” he managed, his voice dry and brittle.

  “I pledged my life to your father a long time ago, when no one else would care to save it,” Irius replied. “I’ll walk with him down that road.”

  So no one else would have to, I thought, my heart ripping in half. Clearchos’s Legion, the glory and the gold, the battles and the brotherhood; it was all over.

  Victrix gave a rigid nod. “See him to the end.” He swallowed with difficulty, and his eyes darted to me, a storm swelling in their gray irises, that carried fury, but also hope. “I can’t follow him there.”

  Irius ducked his chin in quiet understanding and turned his head to a single door at the end of the hallway. “This one will take you to the hypogeum.”

  The amphitheatron’s underground. “Thank you,” I rasped, picturing him again in the mine’s pit, hitting my legs, my shoulders, droning the same orders for hours under a burning sun. Head, shoulder, gut, leg, leg, gut, shoulder… “For everything.”

  He gave another absent nod, and his hand clasped Victrix’s shoulder, squeezing once. “Next time we see each other, I’ll have to kill you.”

  The corners of Victrix’s mouth quivered upward. “I’d like to fucking see you try.”

  A rare twitch became a smile on Irius’s lips, before the furtive light died again in his eyes. Beyond the maze of arches, trumpets started blaring a martial tune in the arena. The gladiatorial fight must be nearing its end—and I wagered whoever had been cast in Parthicus’s role would see their last battle today…

  “Let’s go. We don’t have much time,” I told Victrix.

  We raced down the hallway without looking back. As much as I would have wanted to see him one last time, Irius had given us all the help his loyalty to Clearchos would allow. From now on, we were strangers.

  The door wasn’t locked. Victrix pushed it cautiously while I watched the hallway for Western soldiers. Somewhere down the street a voice barked to bring a century at once to the amphitheatron. Our time was running out.

  “Stairs are clear,” he whispered.

  We slipped inside even as nailed boots clattered up the stairs leading to our box. One minute from now they’d find the bodies, give the alert. Maybe they wouldn’t think to search the hypogeum just yet… We progressed down a musty flight of stone stairs to a vast vaulted room where shadows bustled around to entertain the Overseer’s terrified guests on the surface. A hot and dim grotto, where the only hope, the only light was that pouring from the massive iron gate opening to the sands of the arena.

  We slinked behind a stack of barrels and crouched there, watching as four emaciated men turned a man-sized wooden capstan to lift the gate open under the whip of a gray-haired pig wearing a leather cuirass over a grimy tunic. I remembered old Spurius’s great display of freeing Nyos’s slaves, heard him again, gloating that we were all free in Aus’s kingdom: yet another rotten lie hidden underneath Palica’s flower garlands. Huddled in a corner, more slaves awaited the orders of their master, clad in nothing but a loincloth. As soon as the gate was opened, the old man cracked his whip against the dusty floor, and they ran to collect the dead bodies in the blood-matted sand of the arena.

  The reenactment of Parthicus’s so-called death had been a massacre. Only a handful of gladiators staggered through the gates alive. His cheek nearly pressed to mine, Victrix swore under his breath when my victorious double appeared, haloed by shimmering dust. “This is bullshit…” he murmured, taking in the iron mask that looked nothing like mine and the silvery greaves, on a bare-chested gladiator with arms as big as Vatluna’s. Slaves brought fresh towels to wipe the dirt and blood from his muscular body, while the dead were being dragged inside.

  “Parthicus” was predictably among them, his golden cuirass soaked with blood that left a trail on the floor as the slaves pulled his body out of the way. The bear had met his end at the hand of Silverlegs, as well. His big body was an indiscernible bloody mess under the fur, spiked with spears. No wonder Silverlegs’s opponents had barely fought back: irons around their ankles were here to make sure the legend wouldn’t lose. This was no fight, no “reenactment,” just a staged execution. Fake and vicious, like everything else about this city, I thought, rage pulsing under my temples.

  A man wearing a black tunic came carrying a hot iron, which he pressed to the false Parthicus’s thigh. Burnt flesh hissed under the iron’s touch, but it made no difference to a corpse.

  “What the hell is he doing?” I whispered.

  “Checking if he’s dead,” Victrix replied, just as low.

  A slave ripped off one of the bear’s paws so that the black-clad man could do the same on the human hand underneath the fur.

  I watched the glowing red-hot tip smoke as it imprinted a big hand that didn’t jerk. A four-fingered hand.

  My heart stopped, became heavy as a rock in my chest, its weight crushing my lungs. The missing half-thumb. The thumb. My eyes darted to the dead Parthicus in rising panic. Under his bloodied helmet, I glimpsed sun-browned skin and the hint of a leather eyepatch. “Victrix,” I croaked.

  He muttered “What?” But then he too saw. Vatluna and Hastius. Air whizzed out of his throat; his jaw quivered from the effort not to roar, not to produce a single sound as the slaves stripped their bodies bare, revealing tattoos we knew, faces of the brothers we’d fought with. In the dark, his hand searched mine and crushed it so hard I feared my bones would break. But I didn’t free my fingers. I let him ride the pain out as he stared at our friends, his breath coming in short pants.

  The slaves rolled the lifeless bodies onto a wooden platform. Their lean muscles strained under the effort to turn the capstan that would lower it somewhere deeper in the entrails of the hypogeum. Hastius and Vatluna slowly disappeared, engulfed with the rest of that pile of gore-smeared limbs and faces. A series of creaking sounds filtered from under the wooden floorboards we stood on. I picked up the roar of water… splashing sounds.

  Victrix’s hand let go of mine. “They’re dropping the bodies in the Utur,” he stated, his voice a remote whisper, his face blank, drained of any emotion.

  “There mu
st be an underground arm,” I murmured in response.

  Beyond our hiding spot, the gray-haired master of the amphitheatron’s bowels cracked his whip against the back of a slave, who stumbled and fell to his knees. “I said move! Go help the others bring the cauldron!”

  “We need to get out of here and find Gemina now,” I urged Victrix.

  His gaze scanned the hypogeum, darting from the barrels shielding us to another platform across the room. The slaves were busy lowering it to store away wooden planks painted with the flaming watchtowers of the Castraviemna. He propped his right foot against one of the barrels. “Ready?”

  I braced my legs in the same fashion. “To the towers?”

  “Try to be fast.”

  A bitter chuckle breezed past my lips. “Same for you.”

  The tension accumulated in my muscles released in a single kick that thundered all the way down to my toes. Victrix did the same, and then the sudden chaos… it felt so good, like a black wave washing over me. The slaves scattered in every corner and wailed in panic as the barrels rolled and crashed against the walls, vomiting a clear yellow liquid. Oil. This could work to our advantage. I leaped, sliding across the floorboards in the golden slime, perhaps more gracefully than Victrix, who drifted to the half-lowered platform with a series of colorful expletives.

  Moments later we tumbled down the elevation ramp, along with the wooden ruins of Castraviemna, a few gallons of pepo oil, and the underground master’s whip. His gravelly voice was nearly lost in the din of stage props crashing on the floor below and over our heads. “What the fuck happened here? Which one of you did this?”

  I shoved a plywood tree off my back and took in our new surroundings while next to me, Victrix cussed and kicked away the remnants of a section of fortified wall. Cells everywhere, lining the walls of a square room and housing the prisoners destined to die in the arena. I was given no time to figure out which one might be Gemina and Nerie’s. Air whistled to my right, and I rolled to my side just in time to dodge a spear. I looked up… and saw myself. The gladiators.

  Above us, their master hollered, “Double pay to whoever skins their asses!” Victrix and I sprang to our feet and circled, back to back, our swords drawn. I counted five, still wearing their shitty indigo costumes and battered grilled helmets. The gleaming swords and spears were, however, very real.

  The one dressed as me took a step forward—Hastius’s killer, I realized, rage boiling in my temples. He flourished his pair of heavy gladii in wide swipes, like a showman, not a soldier. A raspy treble escaped his iron mask. “Are you who I think you are?”

  My own voice sounded icy even to my own ears as I replied. “It’s your lucky day, Silverlegs.”

  39

  The other Silverlegs’s breathing grew frantic as he towered over me and shouted to his brothers, “This one is mine! You hear me? He’s mine!”

  “Oh, he’s all yours!” Victrix growled, the words soaked in a venom I knew all too well. The beast that slept inside him had woken up.

  As my double lunged at me and Victrix dodged a blade to plant his own deep into an unguarded gut, I glimpsed with scathing clarity the essence of that bond between us. His beast, mine, dancing, roaring. You’re never truer than with a sword in hand, Clearchos had said. And Victrix and I were never closer than when we fought.

  Twin gladii swooped down on me, which I knew I wouldn’t be able to block without chipping the razor-sharp edge of my blade. I plunged to the ground to dodge low, between his big, clumsy legs, with his shiny greaves that were just silvered iron. As I angled my sword, I remembered that nasty thrill in my rotten heart when I’d sliced Ulpinus’s hand off. I could feel it again, guiding my aim. Ulpinus had been the first man I had genuinely ever been cruel to. Hastius’s executioner became the second.

  My double looked down as his swords missed my head and I slid under him. I saw his eyes through the holes of his mask, a dull brown, the same color as mine. They grew wide and desperate when the pain registered and the part of him that contained him whole as a man hit the floor in a crimson splatter. He dropped his swords and let out a never-ending wail as I jumped back to my feet behind him. A lump of gore lay in the dirt between us, still trapped in a piece of loincloth. The sight of it made me nauseous and delirious in the same breath, but I was growing tired of his howls. Lightning-fast, I flipped my blade and slashed his tendons to bring him to his knees like a disarticulated doll. Right before I ended it, as the edge of my blade kissed the panicked pulse in his neck, I murmured to him, “Now you are Silverlegs.”

  But not for long—already he was going limp in my arms, hot blood gushing from the cut under his ear. I wished he’d have suffered a moment longer, but there was no time to savor my revenge. A chipped Spathian blade swung toward me in a whiff of sour sweat and unwashed man. I crouched and headbutted the owner’s indigo tunic in the sternum. He reeled back and fell to one knee. The last thing he saw in this life were flowers, finely engraved in the orichalcum of my right greave as it smashed into his helmet and crushed his skull.

  I turned around to see Victrix straddling another indigo tunic, the muscles in his arms bulging as he forced his blade ever closer to the fragile apple rolling in the gladiator’s throat. I scanned the room with narrowed eyes, seeking the fourth indigo tunic I had counted moments ago.

  There he was, scrambling toward a flight of stone steps, the sleeve of his tunic soaked a deep shade of purple that became a sticky red as blood trickled down his arm. I flitted to him across the room, hauled him back. His sword clawed at the air in a clumsy bid to save himself. I struck it off from his hands and gave his balls a taste of my greaves. A whistling groan ripped through his lips, and the moment his knees hit the floor, I pulled my dagger to his neck and punctured his skin. “The witch and the boy,” I gritted out, fisting his hair to press the tip of the blade deeper into his gullet. “Talk and you live.”

  Air came into his lungs in panted gasps. He swallowed, blinked sweat from his eyelids. “Took her… upstairs.” Shit.

  “And the boy?” I urged, tightening my grip on his hair.

  He waved a quivering hand to the nailed door of a cell opposite to the stairs. I dropped him, only for Victrix to catch him as he abandoned the lifeless body of the last gladiator. Somewhere along the way, the broken spear he had used to block Victrix’s blade had been shoved down his throat. His wide eyes stared at us, unseeing, as a red mirror spilled around him.

  Victrix cast an icy look at the man at our feet and said, “Thank you.”

  Before I could even process my surprise at this uncharacteristic display of courtesy, he plunged his sword into the gladiator’s shoulder, straight to his beating heart. I hid a bitter quirk of my lips under my mask. That was more like him.

  I didn’t wait for the man to collapse and ran to the door he’d pointed out. “He says they took Gemina up there already.” I kicked the iron lock sealing the door with all my strength. “And Nerie.” I stepped back, steeled every muscle in my leg, and kicked again. Victrix joined me, and soon, the satisfying crack of wood splintering rewarded our efforts. The door slammed open. My heart pounded in my ears as I took in the battered, naked form huddled in a corner of the squalid cell. “Nerie!”

  I bombed into the cramped space, kneeling by his side. His back was covered in deep welts, and he wouldn’t stop shaking, wouldn’t look up. His cheeks were cold as ice as I took his face in my hands. “Nerie, we’re taking you out of here. But you need to get up!”

  His head lolled, empty, sunken green eyes blinking up at me. I barely heard him croak, “Constanter?”

  “Yes. Now…” I hooked my hands under his armpits. “You need to get up. We don’t have time.”

  Victrix’s hand landed on my shoulder before I could haul Nerie to his feet. “You take care of him. I’ll go get Gemina.”

  A tendril of fear squeezed my lungs. “The old bastard up there must have given the alert.”

  A snarl curled up his upper
lip. “I’m a whoreson, but no one is going to fucking boil my mother alive. Clearchos and Bassianus can go suck Aus’s cock in hell.” His narrowed gaze cut to an iron grille at the center of room sealing a hole at the bottom of which the underground arm of the Utur could be heard heaving and seething. My stomach clenched with revulsion of the memory of Hastius’s and Luna’s bodies tossed down there like trash. “Find something to open it.”

  “You think we can make it?” I asked, battling a dire presentiment about our chances.

  “It’s our only way out of Palica. We’ll never make it through the gates.” He glanced at Nerie’s trembling form. “I hope he can swim.”

  “He will,” I assured him, praying it wasn’t mere wishful thinking when Nerie’s head lolled and he remained silent.

  Victrix’s shoulders jerked as if he were about to get up, but he paused, his hand reaching for my nape. For a moment suspended in hell, his touch was infinitely gentle, raising goose bumps in its wake. His tongue darted to lick a fleck of crusted blood on his upper lip. “Constanter…”

  I forgot. About Nerie in my arms, the room, Palica. Servilius. In the silvery lakes of his eyes, I forgot.

  But he broke the spell and freed me, ducking his head to conceal a smile. “No. I’ll tell you once we’ve made it out of this shithole.”

  And he was gone. Running out of the cell, up the stairs leading back to the arena level, to face alone whatever obstacle would stand in his way to save Gemina. I hurried out of the cell in my turn and tore out an indigo tunic from one of the dead gladiators. I tossed the garment to Nerie. “Put this on and try to get up.”

  Had he even heard me? I waited, waited even as time slipped through my fingers like water down a stream. When Nerie reached for the garment with shaking hands, I could have wept from relief. But there wasn’t a moment left to waste. While he labored to slip on the bloodstained tunic, I ran to the iron grille sealing the well. An iron lock riveted it to a hook wedged into the floor. I looked around the gore-splattered walls. How the hell did the slaves open this?