A scream tore at his ears, and moonlight washed through as a man behind him dropped away, only for darkness to return as another stepped into his place.
There was no time for mercy, no time to think of anything but getting to those doors.
“Go!” Cade yelled. “Go, go, go!”
The world turned dark as they entered the fortress’s shadow, and now the scattered projectiles turned into a torrent. His arm numbed as the shield above splintered and shuddered, a spear tip erupting through to glint before his eyes, slicing his wrist to the bone.
He felt no pain, only the frantic beating of his heart.
“Faster,” he yelled. “Come on!”
The cart’s wheels crackled as they entered the rocky foreground of the doors, and now Cade shoved with all his might, Quintus heaving beside him.
And then the thud of the doors. Men pressed into his back, momentum crushing him against the cart’s rear, his shield pushing up into the straw to leave him exposed.
He could hear the fluting calls of the enemy above and around him, and a rock thudded down behind him. Blood sprayed his hair.
His hand grasped the torch, and touched it to the trailing twine coated in gunpowder that ran into the main cannon’s touch hole.
Light flared, casting the gateway in a flickering glow, as men sobbed and yelled at the torrent of spears, rocks, and arrows that tore at them.
The light sputtered out, the flame disappearing into the cannon’s top, leaving its charred remains behind.
One second.
Two.
Boom.
CHAPTER
26
The explosion sent the cart barreling back, the world flipping as Cade fell into a mass of fallen men. Smoke billowed, filling the cave-like doorway with acrid fog.
Cade staggered upright, his arm aching as he stared through the gray mist, where the metal doors had bent back to the walls and revealed a tunnel beyond.
Miraculously, the onslaught of projectiles paused, the shock of the sound and smoke stunning the defenders.
“With me,” Cade yelled in Latin, half choking from the smoke. “We stand here!”
He snatched up the torch from where it had fallen and stumbled past the cart, using it to hold himself up. The doors, though warped by the cannonball, were still intact and on their hinges. The splintered, broken bar was on the floor, but a spear haft could easily replace it if the Grays closed the doors again.
They had not secured the entrance yet.
Soldiers pressed forward, raising shields peppered with broken javelins and arrows. They stood shoulder to shoulder beside him, Quintus to his right, Amber to his left. The other contenders, miraculously, seemed to be alive and well, mixed in among the Romans. In the lee of the entrance, the javelins could not reach them, but Cade saw that hardly ten soldiers had survived their charge. Their shield wall was awfully thin, and most, if not all, of his small squad were injured.
He was only grateful that his own team had been protected by the grass bales and the bulk of the cannons beneath, having been positioned just behind the cart. Those farther back had not been so lucky, and a glance back revealed the broken trail of bodies they had left behind them.
By now near two hundred legionaries would be charging toward the fortress, then running along its sides to reinforce them. Two hundred soldiers against a thousand were thin odds. But right now, it was less than a score, holding the doors. And the Grays would be coming.
Already he could see shapes moving in the darkness beyond, and Cade’s fear was confirmed. The Grays worked in darkness. There were no artificial lights here. Only a strange, blue glow emitting from the walls, which were covered in luminescent lichen. Cade might have been fascinated were he not trying to keep his heart from beating out of his chest.
The screeches of the enemy were intensifying, and the shapes were taking form. A shield wall.
“Hold,” Cade growled, lifting the blazing torch.
The sounds of trilling voices echoed down the tunnel. It was melodic, rising and falling in tandem with the crash of spear against shield.
They were singing. A battle song to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies, but all Cade felt was pity. These were not enemies of his choosing. In another world, another time, they might have spoken. Learned from one another.
He was the aggressor here, and they were only defending their home. Their species. Their planet.
But he had a job to do. He was going to kill them.
“We can’t hold against that lot,” Scott called. “What do we do?”
“We won’t have to,” Cade yelled back. “Stand firm.”
The Romans were snarling in Latin, calling for the enemy to come closer. This was their last stand. Their revenge. There was anger here, borne from years of misery and conflict.
The Grays advanced in response, stepping forward with each crash of spear on shield. Slowly at first, but as Cade’s pitiful numbers became apparent, their tempo increased.
Now, Cade could see the dark globes of their eyes, and see their slitted mouths open as they screeched their fury. Twenty steps away. Ten.
“Get down!” Cade bellowed.
He dropped to his knees, even as he ignited the second and third cannons, each trailing fuses that hung from the cart’s front. The powder-encrusted twine flared and sparked. Cade stared as the flame traveled up and into the cart, his back turned to the enemy. Around him, the Romans fell to the floor, calling prayers to their gods.
He cursed the slow travel of the fire, expecting a blade to stab home at any second. Instead, he heard the Grays’ song stop, and the clatter of weapons being dropped. He turned to see the Grays nearest pushing back, screeching at those from behind who could not see what was about to happen.
But it was too late for them. Too late for all of them.
He put his fingers in his ears.
Cade’s world erupted in smoke, the force of the explosion rippling above him and throwing him forward. For the second time in as many minutes, Cade stumbled through smoke and sputtering flames.
The haze cleared faster than the others, for the cannons were smaller. But the devastation they had wreaked was far greater than he could ever have imagined.
The smaller cannons had been packed with scraps of metal taken from the Sulphur Queen, sharpened upon the coarse stone of Jomsborg’s walls and packed inside the black cylinders from base to tip.
In the explosion, the metal had come flying out, an oversized shotgun blast that had funneled through the tunnel, ricocheting off the walls and into the crowd of enemies beyond.
He hurled his torch down the tunnel, and choked in horror at the devastation he had wrought.
It was a charnel house. Blood, blue and caustic, coated the walls. Grays lay dead and dying, packing the tunnel in a gory mess. It was a wall of bodies, and those that had survived the mincer were dragging themselves back to the safety of the tunnel depths.
“Attack!” Cade roared, drawing his sword and staggering forward.
There were living among the dead. Wounded beyond belief, such that Cade felt little guilt as he stabbed and stabbed again, aiming through the gaps in their helmets, gritting his teeth as the blade scraped through bone and sinew.
It was a mercy, he told himself. That, and the fact that every Gray needed to die. There was no room for pity here. Only the butchery of all-out war.
Around him, the Romans followed suit, finishing the bloody business alongside his contenders. They shouted with joy. With pride. He did not begrudge them their feelings, even as he choked back his own sobs of horror and relief. It was a heady mixture, one he hardly understood.
Soon, they were virtually crawling over the mass of bodies, stabbing their blades like ski poles as they hurried to progress the slaughter.
Behind, he heard the roar of their reinforcements, the trample of feet. Men overtook him, and it was only when a rough hand dragged him back did he allow himself to falter, right at the edge of the sprawling mass
of the dead.
“Cade,” Marius said, snapping his fingers in front of Cade’s face. “Are you all right?”
Cade nodded dumbly, swaying with exhaustion, dizziness, and shock. There was a wild excitement in Marius’s eyes, and Cade could only stare back as the world shook and spun around him.
“Thank you, Cade,” Marius breathed, pressing him into the wall as men thundered past him.
“We haven’t won yet,” Cade croaked. “There are hundreds more.”
Marius shook his head before calling on his bodyguards to move on as they paused at his side and stemmed the flow of soldiers. He turned back and planted a kiss on Cade’s bloodied, sooty cheek.
“That was the flower of their army you just killed. Their greatest warriors. The workers, the children, that is all that is left. We will kill them all.”
Cade’s mind reeled. He hadn’t imagined there would be innocents here. Civilians.
“You stay here,” Marius said, pushing Cade down to his knees and crouching beside him. “My men will finish what you started.”
Then he was gone, his figure disappearing into the crowd of charging bodies flowing through the tunnel. He could hear the crash of battle, and screams of pain and fury ahead.
Cade’s squad pressed against the walls, alongside him, their identities obvious from their wounds and soot-streaked faces. They cringed as their comrades thundered past, shell-shocked by the horror they had witnessed, too exhausted to match the pace as more and more Romans poured into the fortress.
It felt like hours before the Roman army had finally passed by, though Cade knew it was only a few seconds. Only then did he allow himself to bury his head in his hands. Only then did he allow himself to cry.
CHAPTER
27
“Cade.”
Amber’s voice seemed distant, yet he felt her arm wrap around his shoulders as he rocked back and forth among the dead.
It was as if a dam had broken in him. And all that was left was a flood of … nothing. Not despair. Not relief. Not even something in between. Just an emptiness. A dark pit at his center, devoid of hope or happiness.
He only knew he wanted to get away.
“We won, Cade. Did you hear? The Codex just announ- ced it.”
Cade shuddered at Amber’s words. He never wanted to see that thing again.
He stood, swaying as the world came into focus. Outside, the first rays of sun were rising. Had he slept? It was impossible to say.
The Romans had gone, including those in his squad. Only the contenders remained, watching him from where they sat, concern in their eyes.
“You’ve been out for ages, man,” he heard Yoshi say. “We were worried. It was like you couldn’t hear us.”
Cade felt numb. Maybe once he would have felt proud, but now it all felt so pointless. No matter what he did, no matter who he killed. It was all for the entertainment of some sick master.
He was a pit bull in a dogfight. Even if he won, he didn’t win. It was back in the cage, back to being kicked and beaten. Only his master won. Only Abaddon won.
Worst of all, he knew it was just a passing amusement. One fraction of focus. Abaddon had said so himself. The alien’s mind was so advanced, he had thousands upon thousands of thoughts at once.
“Cade, talk. Please,” Quintus said, struggling to his feet. The legionary’s arm hung limp by his side, where some spear or javelin had sliced deep.
But it was Cade’s arm that took Amber’s interest.
“You’re hurt!” Amber cried, grasping at him.
Cade looked down to see red dripping between the joints of his armor. He had a flash of memory from their headlong charge, where a javelin had broken through his shield.
The others crowded in, pawing at his arm to see the extent of the damage. Pain. Pain that had always been there, like a dull drumming at the back of his mind. Blood dripped from his armor, and Cade could see where the javelin had skewered between the plates. A lucky shot, though one he had hardly noticed in the battle as adrenaline drove him on.
“We should wrap it…”
“… stitches…”
“Don’t touch it.”
“… had some water…”
The voices swirled and merged, a crescendo in Cade’s ears. He pulled away, staggering a few feet to the side.
“Please,” Cade said. “I just … I need to be alone.”
“Cade…,” Amber pleaded.
But already his feet were moving, taking him deeper into the tunnel.
It was a strange home, this place. Walls that glowed blue, blue as the blood that seemed to drip from the very ceilings, so brutal had the butchery of the Romans been.
The bodies were nowhere to be seen, and he spun to make sure he was not mistaken, looking back at where the falconets had fired. Understanding dawned as he spotted the flames at the end of the tunnel, where the purple of the grass had been replaced by orange flames. The Romans were burning the bodies outside.
And then he saw it. The Codex, following him. No timer this time. No new challenge just yet. Even so, he knew Abaddon—at least in some fraction of his focus—was watching.
With the Romans burning the bodies, Cade had a chance to see the place the Grays had called home. He staggered on, ignoring the calls of his friends, taking one branch, then another, passing by splintered doors. He caught glimpses of bunks carved into walls, but his curiosity was tempered by the hints at the massacre that the Romans had enacted within.
His feet took him deeper into the depths of the warren, passing by the occasional Roman carrying weapons and armor. The tunnels opened up, even as they moved higher and twisted in angular slopes. There was beauty in the design, alien though it was. Brutalist and empty, yet sculpted with precision and care.
He walked through great chambers, strewn with the wreckage of the assault. Tables and chairs, carved from that strange grass-glue wood. The legs widened and narrowed in geometric shapes he could not name, only admire the artistry that had gone into their design. Tables, flat topped though they were, followed similar patterns in the light and dark purple patterns, kaleidoscopic and ever-shifting as his eyes drifted across their surfaces.
But there was more than furniture. Musical instruments lay in splinters along the ground, smashed by Roman boots and blades. Stringed ones, not unlike violins, but coupled with holes along their sides and spouts where mouths would have blown.
There was artistry here. Beauty, even. He could see those who had lived here, eating and singing in their fluting voices. Delicate fingers plucking strings and dancing along the sides, while eerie notes drifted from the eaves.
He had enabled a genocide. That was the word for what had happened here. An entire species wiped off a world. An entire planet brought one step closer to annihilation.
Perhaps their red line on the leaderboard had been higher than Earth’s. He might be responsible for the deaths of billions.
On he walked, his eyes taking in the spatters of blood. He imagined the legionaries rampaging through the place, putting innocents to the sword with wild abandon.
This was different from before.
These were not savage beasts. This had not been an act of self-defense. The choice he had been given by Abaddon had been an impossible one, but that did little to ease his guilt.
There was life here. Sentient life. Life that loved. Life that created.
And he had ended it all.
Cade walked on, letting the horror of it all sink in. He dared not enter the chambers scattered throughout the fortress, the rooms of those he’d had murdered. Where he would see more of their possessions, those little hints of culture that spoke to the horror of what he had done.
In another time, another place, he would have been fascinated to see an alien civilization up close. And not just in its present form, but one he knew would be an amalgamation of the species’ entire history.
Instead, he let his eyes skip across the detail of the place, wanting to see and yet not wanting to
at the same time. Some legionaries still remained, wandering the halls as he was. He ignored these men, sickened by what they had done. Then again, was he any better?
His feet wandered, even as blood dripped from his arm, and the Codex watched with a silent stare. Was Abaddon watching too? Reveling in the misery he had caused?
He did not even know what Abaddon could see. Was his vision limited to what could be seen through Codexes? A billion eyes, scattered across the vast universe, watching as species evolved, rose and fell?
And then … he smelled it. It was fleeting. Yet so pleasant that he could not help but stop and turn his head, seeking the scent’s source.
He followed his nose, turning his head left and right, taking him back the way he had come. Deeper into the spiraling tunnels.
Soon, the sloping tunnels were narrowing, and the chambers on either side becoming fewer and fewer, until there were none left at all. With each twist and turn, the smell grew stronger.
It was a strange fragrance. Almost floral, but at the same time making him salivate. His empty stomach twisted with hunger.
He was almost suspicious of it, but curiosity outweighed his fear. That, and the fact that there was no blood here. In fact, from the dust that gathered on the walls, it seemed nobody had been here for many years. His own feet left prints where he walked, showing no one before had passed this way, and the luminescence of the walls dimmed with every step he took.
Finally, the tunnel stopped. Its ending was rough, as if this tunnel had been left incomplete, abandoned halfway through its boring.
The smell was now overpowering, yet there was no source of the heady aroma that had drawn him here. He stood there, silent in the darkness, wondering if the ceiling would collapse upon him, a trap he had fallen into of his own volition.
“Well, this was a waste of time,” he said aloud.
The Codex, his only companion, remained silent, staring at him through its unreadable lens. He stared back at it, waiting for a response. Wondering if Abaddon had drawn him here for a private audience.
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