WarGod

by Steven Savile

  Before Labienus could cross half the distance, Caesar had reached Nennius.

  The two men met in a clash of iron and steel.

  Sunlight danced like flames on the edge of the Roman leader’s sword. It was a stark contrast to the dull reddish-grey iron of the Briton’s blade.

  Both men moved with the grace of killers.

  Both men moved with the precision of survivors.

  Labienus yelled a warning but it was lost beneath the fury of the battle.

  Caesar swung.

  Nennius staggered back as Caesar’s sword hammered into his own.

  The young man tried to raise his blade to parry another punishing blow, and barely succeeded. Caesar’s blade slid along the upraised sword and struck a glancing blow to the side of the prince’s head. Nennius’ helmet saved his life. It was torn free by the impact, exposing matted flaxen hair and a wound that streamed scarlet down his face. The prince staggered away, disoriented, and Caesar drew back for a final swing.

  At least it will be over quickly, Labienus thought.

  And then the unexpected happened.

  The gods laughed at them.

  As Caesar brought the sword down, Nennius somehow succeeded in getting his shield up to catch the blow. The Roman’s sword cleaved the wood, splitting it down to the iron bands that held the shield together. It stuck fast. Caesar desperately fought to wrench the sword free, but in the same instant Nennius hauled back savagely on the shield, and the mud beneath their feet betrayed them. As both men stumbled, Labienus was stunned to see that the sword had been torn from Caesar’s grasp.

  Time on the battlefield held, one second becoming one minute as both Nennius and Caesar seemed unable to grasp what had just happened.

  Caesar stared at his empty hands, slick with the blood of fallen enemies, while Nennius gazed over the top of his shield, waiting for Caesar to finally deliver the killing blow. Then realization dawned. Nennius lowered his shield and wrapped his fingers around the hilt of Caesar’s sword.

  “Protect Caesar!” Labienus screamed, spurring his horse forward, crossing the ground at a gallop.

  Nennius ripped the sword free of the shield, a sneer on his battle-scarred face, and held Crocea Mors, Caesar’s gladius up triumphantly. “Now you die,” he said, then loosed a harsh cry of exultation. His eyes gleamed with renewed vigour. He would not die. Not now. Not here. The Briton advanced on his unarmed foe.

  Half a dozen legionaries, responding to Labienus’ battle cry, shifted formation to make a protective wall around Caesar, blocking Nennius’ path to the WarGod.

  Without shield or helm, and still reeling from the head blow, the prince seemed little match for these battle-hardened legionnaires, but the young warrior trod relentlessly forward, and when the first of the soldiers tried to attack, he was ready. The captured sword flashed out and the Roman before him fell in an arc of arterial blood. Another went down, his body toppling over like a fallen tree to lie beside his severed head.

  The carrion birds would feed well that day, no matter what happened next.

  The Britons rallied at the sight of their leader’s heroics, and suddenly what had been a skirmish verged on a catastrophic rout for the Romans.

  Nennius continued cleaving through the wall of Romans, cutting good men down and moving faster than Caesar’s protectors could retreat with their charge.

  Labienus angled his horse toward Nennius, but before he could add his own sword to the fray a sling-shot stone cast from the midst of the enemy horde struck the animal squarely in the skull. It went down in a tangle of limbs, and Labienus was pitched headlong, his sword lost to him in the fall.

  He hit the ground hard. Through the cloud of pain, Labienus was aware of just how vulnerable he was lying there sprawled out like a whore in the mud. He struggled to rise and fumbled for the hilt of his sword. Through the mask of mud that clung to his face, he saw death come striding towards him in the guise of Nennius.

  The Briton raised the gleaming gladius.

  Still on his knees, Labienus wrestled with his own sword, struggling to drag it free of its scabbard. He barely managed to raise it as the young prince brought Caesar’s blade scything down at him, parrying it. The impact sent him sprawling flat on his back. A shock of pain lanced up his forearm. He lost his grip on the hilt of his sword as his nerveless fingers sprung open. The blade spilled from his hand.

  Nennius recovered quickly.

  He raised the captured blade for another attack.

  A strange numbness flooded through the Roman; it was death. The dawning realisation that there wasn’t a single thing he could do to prevent the sword from sweeping down to cleave his body open. But some animal part of him refused to die. Fate was not written. It was made. He rolled to his side and reached out, desperately clawing at the mud for the hilt of the fallen sword. His fingers caught the wrapping. His grip was clumsy; his hand felt like so much dead meat attached to his wrist, but with every ounce of will left to him Labienus brought the steel blade up to deflect Nennius’ killing blow.

  The gladius came down and the blades rang together for an instant, and then the tone shifted, no longer singing the song of battle. The final note fell flat as Labienus’ blade snapped in two.

  The blade of the broken sword spun away as a fresh wave of agony surged up all the way to his shoulders but the sensation was mercifully brief. He tried desperately to fend off the next blow with nothing more than the hilt of the sword, but Nennius’ blade slipped easily past it and hammered into the side of Labienus’ helmeted head.

  The Roman warrior saw nothing but darkness and beyond it thought he saw Elysium.

  “NENNIUS KILLED FOURTEEN men with that sword. Fourteen. Every single man that stood against him and felt the touch of that blade died.”

  “Except you,” Marcus observed dryly. “But then you always were too cantankerous to be allowed entry to Elysium. I’m not surprised they sent you back to the land of the living.”

  Labienus smiled patiently. “The Britons believed that Nennius had slain me, so as far as they were concerned I died on that field. I awoke two days later in the care of Caesar’s physicians. It was a month before I was able to stand.

  “Nennius’ victory counted for little in the grand scheme of things, of course, it didn’t even slow us down. The legionaries were relentless. They advanced, driving on until he was forced to flee. The land was ours. Our army forded the river and scattered the Britons. Nennius himself died ten days later, a victim of the wound Caesar inflicted before losing that damned blade.

  “The Britons, like all of their Celtic ancestors, live and breathe superstition. They are simple minded. They believe in wraiths and vengeful spirits and bury their dead in barrows inside the earth, equipping them with grave goods for the afterlife. Nennius was entombed near their settlement, Caesar’s sword buried with him. The Britons believed it was a thing of power. They called it ‘yellow death’ because of the way it shone with golden light on the battlefield. As I said, they were simple people.”

  Marcus leaned forward. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Labienus gave a grim smile but did not answer directly. “Did you know that before he became a leader of armies, Julius Caesar was a candidate to become the high priest of Jupiter?”

  The centurion shook his head. “No. And none of the tales I have heard about him include that ‘fact’.”

  “A political reversal stripped him of that destiny. He chose to become a soldier. When he left Rome, he carried that sword with him. It was a sacred relic from the Temple of Jupiter, which he took when the temple was destroyed during Sulla’s wars. It was reputed to be the sword of Mars himself, forged by Vulcan and possessed of divine power. Venus bequeathed it to Aeneas, who in turn brought it to Rome.”

  “And you said the Britons were the superstitious fools,” Marcus scoffed.

  Labienus raised an eyebrow. “One does not preclude the other, my friend. I am not about to pretend to know the truth. The sword may well possess
unearthly properties; equally it may not. I cannot say, but think on this: with that sword, Caesar carved out an even greater destiny for himself than the priesthood.”

  “And that makes it magical? There is a flaw in your reasoning, old man. The sword was lost long before he became the dictator of Rome.”

  Labienus nodded. “Ah, indeed it was. But that is only ever part of the story. An aspect. When I learned of Nennius’ death, I proposed leading an assault on the Briton stronghold to retrieve the blade from the prince’s tomb. Caesar refused my request. ‘It is only a sword,’ he told me. ‘If I take it back from them, they will believe it is the sword that has conquered them, not the man who wields it.’ And of course he was correct. He did not need the sword to defeat Cassivelaunus, nor to take Rome.”

  “Then I ask again, why are you telling me this?”

  Labienus let him think about it for a moment, then said: “The sword of Julius Caesar would be a powerful symbol for anyone standing in his place, don’t you think?”

  Understanding dawned on the centurion’s face. “Whoever holds that sword... they would be more than just Caesar’s heir, they would be chosen by the gods.”

  “Now you understand why I have told you this old story of mine again.”

  “But who is worthy of that honour? Octavian? Marc Antony?”

  “As Caesar said, it is only a sword. A symbol. Important in and of itself but only a symbol. More important is the character of the man chosen to wield it.” Labienus leaned back in his chair and waved a hand. “Of course, given the fact that the sword is not in our possession, this entire conversation is a little presumptuous.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Right where it has been these ten years, with Nennius, in his tomb, in Britain.”

  Marcus stood up abruptly, his features taut with purpose. “Then that is where we must go.”

  Labienus smiled. “That is where we must go.”

  PART ONE: EMPIRE

  1 Brothers in Arms

  Now, London—1955 UTC (Universal Time, Coordinated)

  R

  onan Frost easily picked out the two men from the mass of people idling along the narrow pavement of Kensington High Street, looking in the shop windows and pretending to belong.

  There was nothing particularly remarkable about them.

  They wore blue jeans and anoraks over bright red Arsenal tee-shirts. Short hair, but not too short; rough features, but not too rough...unremarkable.

  He spotted the first of the pair lounging on a plastic bus stop bench in front of the Royal Garden Hotel. The man was reading a copy of The Sun. His eyes came up every few seconds to sweep the street. His head never moved. The second man leaned against the wrought iron fence near the park entrance a hundred metres further down, smoking a cigarette and simply watching people come and go. Trying too hard to be inconspicuous and blend into the background. Frost immediately pegged them as watchers.

  Amateurs, he thought, but that was what bothered him.

  Had he been meant to notice them? Were they a distraction to throw him off balance? Were there others following him? Ones who knew what he’d look for and therefore more adept at escaping his notice?

  I’m overthinking this, he decided. But sometimes that was good. He thought about the phone call that had summoned him.

  “Someone just tried to kill me,” Tony Denison had said before Frost could even digest the fact a ghost had called. They’d kept in contact for a while after Frost’s selection for the SAS, but their lives had taken different paths and they were guys, so it wasn’t like they sent Christmas cards and birthday wishes. The first thing Frost had thought on hearing Denison’s voice after all this time was: ‘why?’ His second thought had been: ‘why me?’

  The answer to the latter was obvious—at least on the surface.

  Denison knew better than anyone that Ronan Frost was the kind of guy you wanted watching your back. They’d served together in 1 PARA—Denison a Lieutenant Colonel and battalion commander, Frost an infantry sergeant. Denison had given him the nickname ‘Robin’ like Del Boy’s car, the Reliant Robin, because old Reliable Ronan never let you down. It could have been worse, all things considered. But it deflected attention from his Irish heritage and among a group of men whose collective—inherited—memory of Bloody Sunday was just a bit different than what the history books said. Robin—disciplined, impeccable, unflappable, drama-free, deadly—that was who and what he was. That was why he’d been such a damn good soldier, and why he’d eventually wound up working for Sir Charles Wyndham as part of his Ogmios Team—the blackest of black ops.

  Denison couldn’t know about that last bit, but he absolutely knew the rest.

  “Someone just tried to kill me,” he’d said, his laboured breathing audible in Frost’s Bluetooth earbud.

  “Hang up and call the police.”

  “No. Can’t trust the police. I don’t know who to trust.” Except for you, he didn’t have to say that bit.

  After Kosovo—after Frost had left for the SAS—Denison had risen, almost effortlessly to the rank of Brigadier, but then his military career had stalled. A vocal critic of Blair’s support for the United States’ adventure in Iraq—he’d been quoted as calling it “the worst sort of collusion with the devil”—Denison had retired and gone to work for some kind of policy think tank. He’d written a couple of damning books and was always popping up on Sky News to drive another nail in Blair’s political coffin, but beside being a talking-head there was nothing that would explain why he was the subject of a death mark.

  “I was attacked in the car park. I gave him the slip...I think.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I ran. Safety in visibility.”

  “Where are you now?” Frost had repeated, enunciating each word in an effort to both calm Denison and get him to focus.

  “Kensington High Street, just across from the Royal Gardens. I’m at a Starbucks, sitting in the back.”

  Bloody Starbucks. He knew it. It was a small hole-in-the-wall coffee shop with maybe twenty seats inside. Dark from the outside. It was a decent choice. “Don’t move. I’m on my way.” Frost didn’t waste time on more questions. Denison said he needed his help, and that was enough. He’d grabbed the shoulder holster rig which held his Browning Hi-Power 9mm and two spare magazines, donned his leather motorcycle jacket and headed for the door.

  On the way out he called Lethe.

  Jude Lethe was the man behind the curtain; Sir Charles’ technical wizard. He was arguably the most important member of the team. He was certainly irreplaceable. Frost and the others were just the muscle, going where, doing what and killing whomever they were told, but Lethe—navigating his computer network like a conductor leading an orchestra, accessing CCTV feeds and real-time satellite imagery, hacking into whatever needed hacked, laying down false trails and masking real ones—was the brain that guided their deadly efforts.

  Frost needed to know why someone wanted Tony Denison dead.

  Lethe was the best hope he had of finding out fast.

  A heavy backbeat was the first thing Frost had heard as the connection was made.

  “Frosty?” Lethe’s reedy shout was barely audible.

  “Lethe. Turn down the music and listen. I need you to look into something for me.”

  “You’ll have to speak up, fella,” Lethe replied. “I can’t hear you over the music. Top tune this, by the way. Really gets into your bones.”

  Frost growled and repeated himself.

  “Let me try to get outside. Stay on the line.”

  Frost sighed.

  Outside? Frost had always assumed that Lethe spent every waking minute chained to his desk in Nonesuch Manor—and probably the sleeping minutes, too—working his cyber-magic for the team during on-duty hours, and probably painting his little plastic Warhammer figures when off. It hadn’t occurred to him that Lethe could have a life outside the Ogmios HQ.

  Bollocks. “Never mind,” he’d said, and clicked off.
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  He kept constant pressure on the throttle of his Ducati Monster, matching the flow of evening traffic as he cruised past the Starbucks without a glance, and proceeded to the intersection with Kensington Court. He turned right and steered to the curb. He pushed back the visor on his helmet and made a casual sweep of the street, making sure he was out of the line of sight for the man at the park gate before ringing Denison’s mobile number.

  “Robin?”

  “More like Batman. I’m here. Just outside. I’m going to come in for a quick recce and an overpriced coffee. Don’t react when you see me.” When Denison didn’t reply, Frost continued. “The man who jumped you; do you see him there?”

  “I don’t think so. No.”

  “Good. There are at least two outside. It looks like they sent a team for you. Now I need you to tell me who ‘they’ are.”

  “Not over the phone.”

  “Bloody hell, Tony, what sort of trouble are you in?” Before he could press the issue, a beep in his ear signalled another call coming in. He checked the display on the mobile unit and recognised the number; one of Nonesuch Manor’s outside lines. “Just sit tight,” he told Denison. “We’ll get this sorted.”

  Without waiting for a response, he tapped the screen to accept the incoming call. “Lethe?”

  “No.” Sir Charles Wyndham’s slightly rheumy voice crackled in his ear. “But as we’re presently on stand down Mr. Lethe was understandably very concerned to receive an after-hours call and a hang-up.”

  It wasn’t a rebuke, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it stung all the same. Using Ogmios resources for something off the books? Must be serious. Red alert. All hands to the pump. Battle stations. The sky is falling.

  “No cause for concern, sir. An old oppo needs some help. I thought I could get our boy wizard to Google something for me.”

  The old man wasn’t buying it. “The fact that your old oppo would come looking for the particular brand of help that you specialize in is what interests me. Does he have a name?”