“Chrysis was found in the woods. The wolves had ripped most of the meat from her body and so we can’t tell how she died. The two posted there with her, however”—he gestured at the fresh gap in the Cult circle—“died by spear and sling.”
“The sister,” dozens rumbled.
“We should raise one of our silent regiments, send them to Argolis to hunt her. She may be fast and strong, but nobody can fight one thousand spears.”
“She is no longer in the Argolid,” the man in the center snapped. “Her boat remains moored there, but she has moved off overland, alone.”
“Then where—”
He threw up a finger for silence, then stepped over to a tessellated section of the floor, showing a map of Hellas. With the toe of his soft leather slipper, he traced a line, from Argolis, moving north across the countryside and to the collarbone of land bordering the Megarid, halting at the dark tile on the coast, underlined by one word.
Korinthia.
One Cultist let a dry laugh spill from his lips. A moment later two more joined in and soon all were enraptured. One—built like an ox and breathing heavily like one too—stepped into the center and revolved on the spot, arms outstretched in glory. “There, her journey will end. It is time for me to return home.”
* * *
• • •
Kassandra felt her lungs working harder than usual as she strode through Korinthia’s streets. The city was enveloped in a yellowish haze of temple smoke and dust, and the garishly painted and overly high tenements and villas loomed over the road. She had heard much of this city: bustling, Spartan-allied and wealthy. But today the streets were deserted.
The market was but a carcass of empty stalls, untended carts and stockpiles of the region’s famous pots and vases—some bare clay, others etched with black-and-orange images of gods and ancient heroes. The taverns were but a sea of empty benches and stools. No citizens, no traders, no children at play, no voluptuous and purring pornai—prostitutes for which Korinthia was well-known—in the tight alleys. The steps to the High Temple of Aphrodite were bare too. Every so often she heard the creak of a shutter or a snatched whisper, her head swinging to catch sight of pale faces ducking from sight. The people were here, but they were in hiding. Terrified, as if fearing an approaching storm. The war? she wondered. The war had not scarred this place yet—Korinthia was the naval superpower upon which Sparta heavily relied to fend off the Athenian navy, but as of yet, the city’s high, grubby walls were intact. She spotted a tavern keeper then. His eyes grew moonlike and he ducked behind a barrel. Unfortunately for him, he was about three times fatter than the barrel. She stomped over to him and kicked the barrel. “Out,” she demanded.
The fleshy tavern keeper rose, pretending he had only just seen her, taking to wiping at the barrel top with a cloth. “Oh, greetings. Wine, food?”
“Anthousa,” Kassandra replied.
The man winced and glanced at his feet again, as if contemplating hiding behind the barrel once more.
She leaned across the barrel, grabbing the man’s tunic collar and pulling him over so he was nose to nose. He reeked of onions and his skin was riddled with oily black pits. “I have walked for a day and a night all the way from Argolis to get here. Where is Anthousa, mistress of the Hetaerae?”
Just then, Ikaros swooped in through the tavern’s open front, landing on a counter with a shriek, pacing up and down, kicking over a few empty cups.
Another whimper, and then the man answered at last. “The Hetaerae women are all gone. They have abandoned the High Temple. They could not risk staying here.”
Kassandra’s brow furrowed. The Hetaerae were held in great esteem here. Temple-endorsed mistresses, blessed by the Gods, highly educated and often living in luxury. If anyone was to be chased from the city, the Hetaerae would surely be the last.
“Where?” She squeezed his collar.
“They’re at the Spring of Peirene,” he croaked, pointing off toward the south.
Why?”
“Because he . . . he’s supposed to be returning to the city today.”
“Who?”
“The giant—the Monger. He runs the streets where once Anthousa did. Anthousa is cold and cruel at times, but nothing compared to . . . him. Many have felt his wrath. He took every coin I had stored in here and I was sure he would take my head too.”
Her eyes darted. I don’t care who this brute is. I must find Anthousa.
She released him and clicked her fingers, beckoning Ikaros. Ikaros kicked over one last cup and pluckily jutted his head in the tavern keeper’s direction. The tavern keeper fell into a ball, covering his head and wailing, before the eagle hopped from the counter and took flight.
Out through the city gates she went. In the hazy light, she thought she spotted the guards up on the gatehouse walkway eyeing her carefully. Or was it just a trick of the light? She cared little and turned her gaze to the high, dusty bluffs about four miles inland and the imposing rocky mount rising from them. The ancient Spring of Peirene lay up there, if the tavern keeper’s directional sense was anything to go by. She and Ikaros trekked across the flats, the first winds of autumn scudding across their path, blowing dust onto her sweat-soaked skin as they rounded the many gaping clay pits dotting the plain.
When she reached the bluffs, she climbed the track that wound up the mount, her head pounding with the effort of the at-times-treacherous scramble. One section was a sheer climb with a deadly drop, and she felt the high winds claw at her as if trying to pull her from the fingertip-thin handholds. When she reached the top, she slung a thankful arm onto the flat ground and began to lever herself up . . . only to stare into the tip of a well-honed sword.
“Another step without my say-so and I’ll slit you from neck to groin,” the hard-faced woman spat. On either side of her, she heard the creak of drawn bows, saw two more women training their nocked arrows on her.
Kassandra rose slowly, hands outstretched, palms upward to show she held no weapon.
The woman flicked her head to the right. Kassandra edged onto the plateau mountaintop in that direction, guided by the sword point. Ikaros screeched and seemed set to come in at a dive, but Kassandra shot him a look and he pulled back. She looked around the windswept heights, dotted with a few cypress and fir trees, but otherwise barren. Then her gaze halted on the low, ancient and gold-painted edifice near the center. Ashlar blocks and cataryid pillars closed off a small square space inside. In the shade of the columns, women mended clothing, worked wood and carried caught game around on poles. When they saw Kassandra, many froze or backed away. That same look as the Korinthians. She saw a young girl squatting beside a cat, stroking the creature’s belly. The grubby stola, the unkempt hair . . . for a moment, she was almost tricked into saying “Phoibe?” but the girl turned, saw her, and scuttled away. The Spartan bars around Kassandra’s heart shuddered as her fears for Phoibe tried to escape once more. She dug her nails into her palms to quash such feelings of weakness.
The woman guided Kassandra into the golden building. The wind fell away; there was darkness for a few steps before she emerged into the building’s interior: the centerpiece was a wondrous teal set into a smooth basin of snow-white marble. Water bubbled through a small natural vent in the pool floor. Some said the ancient spring was born of the eponymous founder’s shed tears; others claimed it was created when Pegasus’s hoof struck the ground. Scenes of Odysseus’s travels adorned the enclosing walls, and some of the women were busy repainting the flaking sections.
The guiding woman halted Kassandra by the poolside. “Beautiful, isn’t it? Well the most recent of his mercenaries who came up here drowned in that pool.”
“His? You mean the Monger?”
“Don’t play the fool,” she said, jabbing the sword into Kassandra’s back.
“I do not know and do not want to know the Monger. I come to speak with Anthou
sa.”
“You have found her.”
Kassandra’s mouth dried up. “I, I am seeking my mother,” she said, trying to turn and face Anthousa. Another jab of the sword kept her facing the pool.
“Who sent you?” Anthousa barked.
“Alkibiades.”
The sword pressure lessened a little. “He stopped rutting long enough to speak? Impressive.”
“My mother fled from Sparta, long ago. She may have gone by the name of Myrrine.”
“Myrrine?” The sword point fell away completely now. Kassandra dared to turn to her captor. Anthousa’s granite features had softened, a faint glow of fondness in her eyes.
“She was here, wasn’t she?”
“Aye,” Anthousa said quietly, “and she left again all too soon.”
It all changed in the blink of an eye, and the sword point rose again. “She taught me to be who I am now: forged in flames, unbending. A businesswoman. I do not deal in emotions anymore. You want to know where she went, I presume?”
Kassandra nodded.
“Then you must do something for me.” She flicked her eyes toward the enclosure opening and the distant, hazy smudge that was Korinthia. “The Monger is rumored to be returning to the city and his harbor warehouse. Free my home. Kill the Monger.”
Kassandra gazed at the distant city with her. “I will do anything to find my mother. But tell me: who is the Monger?”
“He is a bloodthirsty fiend. As big as a bull and even stronger.” Anthousa’s face crumpled in disgust as she spoke. The women nearest her shrank away at the words. “He has killed three of my girls already, and holds two more—Roxana and Erinna—hostage. Do you know what he does to his victims? He melts off their flesh, piece by piece, with a hot poker. Only one of my girls has ever escaped his den.” She looked over to the poolside. A girl sat there, head bowed. Kassandra could just make out the featureless mesh of scars and the two hollow eye sockets.
Kassandra’s mind shot back to the Cave of Gaia—recalling the excitable brute who had been burning out a poor wretch’s eyes with a white-hot brand. She realized she knew exactly who and what the Monger was. “I will kill him, or I will die trying.”
* * *
• • •
Erinna held out a hand and clasped Roxana’s. Both held on tight as the heavy footsteps approached. They stared at the gaunt man sitting opposite them. He was as filthy, bruised and scared as they were. The footsteps were joined by heavy breathing. Louder, louder . . . and then it all stopped. The cell door clicked and groaned open. The two girls hugged one another, closing their eyes tight, wanting to make these last few moments together count, waiting on the Monger’s meaty hands to snatch one of them away.
But it was the man who screamed. They blinked and looked around just in time to see the fellow on his front, clawing at the floor, aghast, the Monger’s oily hand wrapped around his ankle, dragging him like a toy. “Time to burn,” the giant brute grunted as he hauled his latest victim into the dock warehouse’s main chamber.
The cell door clicked shut.
“There is no one else,” Roxana whispered, looking around the filthy cell at the places where others had been sitting until one by one each had been dragged away like that. “Next time, it will be one of us. We will never see Anthousa again.”
Both of them jolted in fright when the cell door clicked again. They stared, seeing the reed that had been skillfully wedged in the door’s bolting mechanism—preventing it from locking—floating to the floor, then gawping at the woman standing in the doorway, draped in leathers and weapons. She paced over to them and crouched, her eyes like flint as she waved them up. “Go, stay low and head for the main doors. Make haste for the spring in the mountains.”
“Will you guide us?”
“I cannot,” said the woman. “My business here is not done.”
* * *
• • •
The chamber at the heart of the warehouse was a world of darkness, the air warping with heat and flying orange sparks and rife with the stink of smoke. The Monger stoked the crucible and lifted an iron rod from it, delighting in the white-hot soup that dribbled from the end. The scrawny man tied to the table convulsed and screamed as the rod moved over his face. A single droplet of molten iron landed on the man’s cheek, sizzled through his flesh and made its way deep into his skull. His screams grew inhuman. The Monger gripped his head. “Shut up, dog—you make my head throb with your whimpering.”
“Please, please. No more. I’ll do anything, I’ll—”
“You’ll tell me where in those cursed hills Anthousa and her girls are hiding?” the Monger finished for him.
A silence passed.
Then the chained man sobbed. “I cannot. That is the one thing I simply cannot do. Nor can any in this city. To betray her is to betray Aphrodite, to offend all of the Go—” His voice rose into a scream as the Monger raised his poker like a cudgel . . . then brought it swishing down, breaking the man’s bonds and tossing the poker to the floor. For a moment, the fellow was free. He gawped in disbelief.
And then the Monger grabbed the table at one end, tilting it.
“No . . . no . . . Nooo!”
* * *
• • •
Kassandra was crawling along the top of a high pile of grain sacks, watching the gruesome spectacle, when the sweating, hulking giant tilted the table toward the crucible. The scrawny man scrabbled like a cat on a polished floor, before sliding into the molten soup with a piercing death cry. The giant watched, his gleeful face uplit by the glow. It was a mercy that he wore a mask when with the Cult, she thought, for without it, he looked like an ogre—heavy-jawed with no front teeth, his thick bottom lip and dark beard wet with saliva. Suddenly, he switched his head toward the sack pile. Whips of fright struck through her, and she dropped down through a small gap in the pile before he spotted her, into a deep, dark niche. There was a gap through the sacks ahead, affording a view of the crucible and the goings-on. She watched as the Monger edged around to stoke the crucible again, staring at his back and seeing the opportunity to leap through the gap and deal him a clean strike—right between the shoulder blades. She reaffirmed her grip on her spear. The gang of thugs standing in front of the grain sacks, between him and her, numbered twelve in total. They bore cudgels and maces. They can be tackled, she told herself. Don’t be a fool, she concluded moments later.
“Fun’s over all too quickly. Who do I burn now, eh? One of the whores?” the Monger snarled, then stared at one of his men. “Or maybe one of you!”
The man emitted a high-pitched yelp and then pointed at one of his comrades, who gawped in horror. The Monger grabbed the other and dragged him over to the crucible, pushing his face toward the surface, only to stop at the last moment, releasing the guard. “Ha!” he roared at his “joke.”
She watched as the Monger briefed them on their business for the next day: their extortion rounds, the muscle that needed to be shown to those who had not coughed up enough . . . and another scouting party into the hills in search of the Hetaerae leader, Anthousa. On and on for what seemed like hours he blared, and Kassandra felt her eyelids growing heavy. She had not slept the night before in her haste to reach Korinthia. Her limbs were sore and her belly untended. She pinched her fingernails into her palm to waken herself. Mother’s voice echoed from memory: Hesitation only hastens the grave! You have to act; you will only grow weaker. Twelve guards or not, it’s now or never.
She settled into a sprinter’s crouch, wiggled her hips a few times, and set her eyes on the Monger’s back. He was her target. Kill him and the rest might scatter. Might. She gritted her teeth to chase her doubts away, then tensed, ready to lurch from the sack pile . . .
. . . when a cold blade touched the small of her back.
She half gasped.
“Don’t be a fool. Make a move and we’re both dead,”
a man’s voice rumbled.
She rolled her eyes around to see a young dark man in here too, just behind her. He was broodily handsome, bearded and with long hair. She noticed his red cloak. Not one of the Monger’s men.
“Aye, a Spartan, and an enemy of the Monger, just like you,” he hissed, reading her mind.
“Who in Hades are you?”
“I am Brasidas,” he whispered.
She had heard the name—spoken in war talks she had overheard on her travels. “The adviser, the officer?”
“A spy, for now. When messengers stopped coming to Sparta from this place, the ephors sent me to be their eyes and ears here, to find out what is going on. I have found out—that massive bastard has taken this city for himself. Anthousa was a scheming wretch, but the Monger is far more trouble than she ever was. I have not yet even been able to send word back to the ephors about all of this.”
“Why not?” she hissed as if she were a reprimanding ephor.
He frowned angrily. “Because I have been hiding among these bags for six damned days”—he caught his voice just as it threatened to rise beyond a whisper—“waiting for the chance to catch that sack of shit alone. This is the closest I have come so far, then you turn up and ruin it.”
She noticed a faint air of mushrooms wafting from him. “You’ve been hiding in here for six days, you say?”
“I made this space inside the sack pile. There’s a hole in the floor I’ve been using as my latrine, and a purse of salted meat and a few flasks of water have kept me strong.”
“Strong indeed.” She sniffed the air again.
But he did not reply. Instead, he was staring at her Leonidas spear, having just noticed it. “I guessed from your accent that you were from my homeland, but now I know you are . . . and that you are no ordinary Spartan.” He lowered the blade from her back as he said this.
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