by Camilla Monk
“Constanter…”
I flipped my head to Nerie, who held on to the doorframe for dear life as he tried to stand on wobbling legs. What had they done to him in a single night that his entire body was now a mosaic of bruises and welts, that he could barely stand on his legs? All for what, a few drops of water boiling heat could deprive of its powers anyway?
He pointed weakly to a corner of the room, where the platform on which we’d made our entrance remained buried under a stack of broken plywood towers and walls. “I think it’s there.”
I scanned the rubble and balled my fists in silent victory. The key ring lay discarded on the platform, lost by either the old man or one of his slaves when we’d wrecked everything up there with the barrels. I dashed across the room to take it and returned to the grille, flicking through the worn iron keys as fast as my fingers would allow.
Nerie watched me wordlessly, but I sensed life return to his attentive green eyes. He joined his hands on his lap while I tried one key after another angrily.
“So, you’re a mollis?”
His question rammed into my overwrought brain in the same instant that one of the keys sank and clicked in the keyhole. He hadn’t been so out of it after all. He’d seen Victrix caress my neck, probably picked up on the forbidden tenderness of the moment. I hooked my fingers into the grille and hoisted it with a hiss, bunching the muscles in my shoulders. To hell with it all; our world was ending anyway. “No,” I groaned. “Just a girl.”
He stood still, shivered even though it was too hot down here, and said, “Oh. I thought so.”
The grille dropped from my hands with a deafening clank. I looked from the now open well to Nerie, my eyes wide. “Really?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes I listened in Gemina’s tent.” He nodded to himself, blinking as if he couldn’t quite pull himself out of his nightmare yet. “I listened…” He swallowed, tears building in his reddened eyes, rolling down his cheeks. The rest of the words came out drowned in a sob. “They’re going to kill Gemina!”
“No. Victrix is going to save her. And we’ll all get out of here together.” But it had been several minutes already and there was no sound coming from the floor above, nothing.
The ceiling shook. Nerie and I craned our necks in unison, watching sandy dust pour through the cracks between the heavy beams that served as both this room’s ceiling and the upper level’s floor. Wood cracked and moaned as if a giant were walking in the sand above our heads. Trumpets blared a tune of doom in the arena.
Nerie’s snot-soaked lips quivered. “They’re starting.”
40
The cauldron. The slaves were dragging it across the protesting floorboards and into the arena.
My eyes fluttered closed, and I pictured a multitude of doors in my mind, as if I were standing at one end of an endless corridor. Stay or go. Fight or flight. Live or die. Choose. I looked at Nerie, at the hole at the bottom of which the Utur promised either death in its icy depths, or salvation, away from Palica’s hell. I thought of Hastius and Luna, of that place on my nape where Victrix’s tentative touch still lingered in a tingling sensation.
I realized there was no choice to make, and my feet moved. “Stay here,” I told Nerie. “If you don’t see me come back with Victrix… jump. Don’t think, just jump and the Utur will carry you east.” Or it will drown you, I reminded myself with a shiver.
He shook his head, his lips parted in mute horror. I turned around and didn’t look back. He called my name. I clenched my jaw and kept walking to the stone stairs Victrix had taken earlier. I drew deep, steady breaths with each step I climbed, to stop the tremors coursing my body. I trusted my legs to carry me through this, to find a way out of the scarlet woods of Palica.
Step after step, my fear swelled and wailed in my ears, fueled by instinct. I knew before I reached the final step and light poured on my shoulders from the hypogeum’s open gate. I knew before I saw the first glare of gold and steel, the first hint of indigo. The old pig and his slaves were gone. In their place were the Overseer’s praetorians, dozens of them forming a guard of dishonor to the cauldron. Black, and taller, larger than I’d dared to imagine. It hung from a towering wood and cast-iron structure, built on wheels. Encased between four walls and a grille, a furnace burned red under the monstrous swell of its sides. Water boiled with sinister popping sounds, a column of white vapor swirling toward the ashen sky.
We were all gathered before this crowd that wouldn’t cheer, for the Overseer’s entertainment. Standing naked and chained to a wooden platform above the bubbling water, Gemina was a shivering rag doll. Faithful dog Irius watched his master from a distance, and Clearchos awaited me in front of the cauldron, next to the author of this macabre play. The Overseer’s pristine toga billowed gently, and his smile spoke of a benevolence and a love too vast to be contained in a decaying human body. Yet Victrix knelt before him, gagged, rope binding his wrists, and the polished blade of a centurion’s gladius pressed to the pulse in his neck.
Towering above us all in the imperial lodge, no more than a toy in a golden throne too big for him, young emperor Nisephorus watched.
The Overseer tilted his head at me. “Our guest of honor has arrived.”
I didn’t bother with a reply. I expected nothing of Aus. It was Clearchos I looked at, searching every crease of ravaged flesh on his face for a sign. A trace of shame, of regret. I swallowed back the furor burning in my throat so I could perhaps reach out to him one last time before he disappeared down the road to hell. “The land never mattered to us,” I told him. “We would have followed you, even if it meant never knowing anything else than a tent for the rest of our lives.”
At his feet, Victrix’s chest heaved from the words the rope in his mouth wouldn’t allow him to shout. Near the hypogeum’s gate, Irius watched us, waited, his mind trapped underneath the emotionless mask he could no more remove than Silverlegs could remove her own.
I thought I saw clouds pass in Clearchos’s eyes, something. Anything. I was wrong. There was nothing but icy contempt in the gray sky of his irises. “I pulled you from your farm not even nine months ago,” he seethed, “and you would pretend to understand the world I have roamed for almost thirty years?”
“I don’t.” I swallowed hard to steady my voice. “But I still know right from wrong. And this, Clearchos… this is wrong.”
“We’re mercenaries!” he suddenly roared. “We haven’t done one thing right in our entire lives.” He placed a hand on Victrix’s shoulder, who tried to shrug his father’s claws off in vain. “I will give my legion a land, and my son a title. This is what I will do right.”
“Bassianus!” We all looked up to the imperial lodge, where Nisephorus sat, wearing an entirely purple toga that matched the Overseer’s gold-embroidered tunic. “When are you going to boil her?” he squeaked, his voice carried over to us by the wind in the anxious silence of the amphitheatron. “My subjects are getting impatient.”
The Overseer raised a hand to signify the emperor had spoken. He directed his piercing blue gaze at me, and I couldn’t understand how I had not seen the madness in them before. Now it shone, clear as divine water. “Silverlegs!” he bellowed, not for my benefit, but for that of the thousands of terrified spectators sitting still in the tiers. “Will you oppose the will of your emperor?”
My spine went rigid. There it was, the plot of today’s play. Would the invincible Silverlegs stand in the way of Aus and be destroyed by its Hand, or would he see the light and allow a witch to be boiled for the greater good of Palica?
Chains rattled to my left, hanging from a pulley, and connected to the irons shackling Gemina’s hands and feet. A pair of praetorians had coiled them around their wrist guards and were starting to pull her toward the cauldron. My heart rammed against my ribs, seeking its way out. I could try to go for them, but there’d still be at least two dozen of them surrounding me and ready to take over.
Gemina had stood petrified un
til that very moment, barely alive. But as her feet resisted the pull in vain and she felt herself dragged toward the sweltering fumes escaping the cauldron, she grew frantic. Raw despair ripped out of her throat. “Clearchos! Don’t let them!” Her voice faltered and rose again, colored with anger. “You took everything from me! Everything! And I… I gave it to you, willingly! I beg of you, don’t…”
Her plea drilled into my skull, made my ears ring, and it was hard to think fast over the noise in my head and the drumming of my heart. My eyes darted lighting fast—at Clearchos, the Overseer, the guards, Victrix. The Overseer. I would only postpone the inevitable if I went for the guards holding Gemina’s chains. But if I went for the Overseer, his dogs would all pounce on me at the same time. They wouldn’t give a flying shit about Gemina or Victrix as long as the old viper wasn’t safe.
I went down on one knee, felt the warm sand of the arena under my palm.
Gemina screamed and screamed, in between exhausted gasps. Victrix tried to spring up, only to be held down by the centurion. I focused on the tension in my calves, my toes, seeking the arena’s grit through the soles of my boots. It always started like this, a rush in my veins, a tension in my legs that build up, higher and higher. Until I felt invincible.
The honey in the Overseer’s voice dripped in my eardrums, coating Gemina’s desperate pleas for mercy. He said, “Good little spado. Now surrender your sword, and you may be forgiven by Aus.”
I reached for my scabbard, sensing all hearts pulsating around me in tune with mine. They were watching me. Fingers crept to gilded pommels, wrapped around their wooden grips. Ready, just like I was. I pushed on my legs and exploded from the ground. It was only a few steps, and my feet barely made contact with the floorboards under the sand. I angled my blade, and I could see it all, like the broken pieces of a mosaic coming together before my eyes. The centurion, lifting his gladius from Victrix’s neck to lunge in front of the Overseer. Clearchos, drawing his own blade, trying to read my next move. The praetorians, dropping Gemina’s chains to run to their master’s rescue, like the rest of their unit.
I drove my blade upward like a dart, and plunged it into the centurion’s chin, all the way to his brain. I drew it out just as fast, crouched too low for Clearchos to take a swipe at me. I rolled back as the Overseer’s savior collapsed and his men closed in on me. The edge of a blade singed my arm, drawing blood. The sudden pain only served to kindle the fire blazing in my legs; I leaped to dodge and sliced through the cartilage of an exposed throat. Through the red drizzling upon my mask, I focused on the Overseer’s wide eyes, his pale arms rising to shield his face. The prey.
I caught a glimpse of Victrix bending to his side toward the centurion’s fallen gladius to cut the rope binding his wrists, while Clearchos thrust himself in my way, allowing the praetorians to form a tight carapace around the Overseer as they took him to safety.
Clearchos shouted for Irius, who stood still near the hypogeum’s gate. His faithful dog didn’t move.
“Irius!” Clearchos roared again, as I circled around him and Victrix, now free, tore the rope from his mouth.
Irius observed the chaos unfolding through inscrutable eyes. No words were needed. He would never raise his blade against his master, but wouldn’t come to his aid either. In spite of the oath he had taken, Irius’s feet refused to take him down the road to hell with Clearchos.
Clearchos’s nostrils flared as he cast one last glance at his dog before he turned his attention to me. He spat the very same question he’d asked me in the pit nine months ago. “Do you want to die here like a man?”
Did I? All around us, in the amphitheatron, I felt the silent crowd stir awake, thousands of spectators who murmured where they couldn’t speak, bodies that rustled and shivered. I remembered the cheering and the madness in the darkness of the pit. “Fuck, yes!” Silverlegs hissed, a vociferation I didn’t recognize as my own voice.
Steel clashed and sparked. The shock of our blades colliding sung up my arm as I pushed my weight on my sword and his, bringing the crimson edge ever closer to the devastated flesh of his face. He wouldn’t yield. The muscles in his forearms bulged tightly, and he shoved me away with a feral growl. I landed on one knee, ready to pounce again, only to be stopped by a gladius slashing across the scales of my lorica. Shit. Half of the Overseer’s guard had stayed behind to get rid of us.
I coughed out the agony in my ribs and scrambled up to face them. But it wasn’t my blade that ripped the air and came crashing on a praetorian’s face like an axe. Victrix swung the centurion’s discarded gladius to block two swords at once, his feet skidding in the sand under the pressure of his adversaries’ combined weight. “Get Gemina!” he shouted.
I looked up, at the cauldron’s looming black belly. On the platform above, Gemina had fallen to her knees and crawled as far away from the iron lip as the loose chains would allow. She saw me racing toward her. Her eyes grew wide with hope. “Constanter!”
Black leather flashed to my right, and I blocked Clearchos’s blade once more. “I’ll give you a gladiator’s death,” he snarled.
As we looked into each other’s eyes, I saw the storm surging in his. At last it roared unchained, Clearchos’s anger. His beast, like Victrix’s and mine. He stepped back, before his sword drew a lethal arc and hissed downward again. His furor hailed on me, forced me away from the cauldron, blow after blow. His blade swirled and clashed against mine, fast and precise, unsurpassed in its ferocity. I couldn’t find a weak spot, an open flank. Breathless, sweat matting my hair to my mask, I resisted, like Victrix resisted the praetorians right behind me and kept them away from his mother, even as his shoulder and side were stained crimson.
Dread snaked cold fingers around my nape, raising the hair there. He was wounded, couldn’t keep up like this.
I hammered my sword against Clearchos’s with renewed rage. If he could rely on superior physical strength and experience, then I maybe could rely… on him. He wouldn’t give me an opening to slice his throat, but when he bent his right leg to effortlessly block my feint I jumped on his knee, light as air. My hands pushed on his shoulders, the prop I needed to wheel myself over him. His blade rose to stop me, sparking across my mask. I saw myself die, and without this shield of iron it would have been a glorious, gory end. But I had to live, for Gemina who had given me that mask, for Victrix and Nerie. I flew over Clearchos, and landed behind him, my back to the furnace blazing under the cauldron.
Flames licked the skin of my forearm and sparks blinded me as I sheathed my sword and ran around the wheels of the seething iron monster to the wooden poles supporting the platform. Clearchos was on my heels, his fingers clawing, missing. I leaped, grabbed the nearest pole. The wood was hot to the touch and splinters bit into my palms as I climbed and reached for the ledge. Pain flared in my shoulders from the supreme effort to hoist myself atop the platform.
Victrix’s voice croaked from below, “Get her!”
My eyes swept around the arena frantically. No, no… No! Victrix lay in the sand and the blood was everywhere—on him, on the blade of the gladius swooping down toward him. I was too far. Gemina needed me. He needed me. The praetorian’s blade gleamed above his head, and when I thought it was over and my heart pounded in agony, the clang of steel against steel stopped time. Irius had chosen to bite his master’s hand after all. His long blade ripped along the soldier’s, before he sent him flying back into one of his squad mates with a ferocious kick.
I silently entrusted Victrix’s life to Irius while I rushed to Gemina. Her hand reached for mine; she wailed my name. Warm relief pumped in my veins with each step I took toward her. I crouched, and our fingers strained, laced, before the chains slithered and clinked across the wood, hauling her back toward the cauldron. Her screams grew hysterical. “Constanter! Constanter!”
I clamped my fingers around Gemina’s bare arms to hold her back, my eyes darting around frantically to see Clearchos standing under the platform, t
he chains wrapped around the black leather of his wrist guards.
“Don’t!” I rasped.
From the imperial lodge, Nicephorus’s delirious shrieks ricocheted in the air. “Boil the witch for us, Clearchos! Boil—”
“Clearchos!” A foreign thunder boomed in the arena, covering the young emperor’s exhortations. Irius’s voice was louder and more powerful than I had ever imagined as he implored his mad king. Surrounded by the praetorians, with Victrix at his feet, he tried to steer toward Clearchos in vain.
The chains tightened again and ripped through the pulley hanging above the cauldron. Gemina was yanked backward toward the bubbling hell, howling my name as I lunged to catch her. Her fingers curled around mine. I had her! But another yank rattled the chain, tore us apart.
I didn’t see her fall, only heard her bone-shattering screech.
41
The moment after, I saw her crimson hand emerge from the boiling water, her scalded fingers clawing at the air in vain. The air of the arena went solid in my lungs and I couldn’t breathe. I remember Victrix staring up, his face blood-soaked and stunned. Gemina’s face came out of the water, disfigured. Her beauty and kindness had melted into a mass of agonizing flesh; her eyes were milky, burnt blind, and she screamed, screamed. Screamed as I tried to take her hand and my own skin flushed from the scalding vapor. Drops of burning water splashed my thighs, but the pain was nothing compared to the suffocating horror pounding in my chest when Gemina went limp on her stomach in the cauldron’s womb.
She floated, her golden hair one with the abominable foam seething at the water’s surface, her body… I closed my eyes, but the sight of the maroon flesh peeling off her body was there, carved behind my eyelids, never to be unseen. Clearchos let go of the chains, his face blank. His hands shook a little. Victrix groaned out a sob, another, and they became a wounded howl. His hoarse lament filled the arena, while Irius’s and the praetorians’ blades went still.