by Will Panzo
“Vorenicus is for peace. This morning may have changed his mind, but I don’t know just yet. Even if it didn’t, though, one more incident like that, and the general will call for blood. He can’t tolerate this kind of violence. It makes him look weak.”
“And once the general declares war, how long until the mainland legions arrive?”
“Less than a month,” Cassius said. “The forces are assembled and ready to sail. They’re waiting on my order.”
“And you need my help in causing this next incident? Like I helped this morning?” She stood. She took a fresh grip on the knife. “I don’t know, Cassius.”
“There’s been a lot of bloodshed. But we’re almost finished. If we stop now, all those deaths will be for nothing. If we continue, any innocents killed will be martyrs for our cause.”
“More like sacrifices.” Sulla chopped the knife into the counter edge, where it stuck.
“When the mainland legions arrive, everything will change. The new government will need people with knowledge of the island then. People with connections. You can start over.”
“Meaning I could serve the new masters?”
“Meaning they could find you a place in the new government. Using your talents to their fullest. You’ve got an opportunity here to remake yourself.”
“Avenge my father’s death and become an honest citizen. It seems too good to be true.”
“Then how could you pass it up?”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “It’s almost like the decision is out of my hands.”
• • •
He left Sulla in the shop on Butcher’s Lane and made his way deeper into Lowtown. It was late afternoon, and through the cloud of smoke spreading from the direction of the Market, the sky was a melt of blood-red sunlight. The streets were still empty. Shops were shuttered, homes barricaded. Occasionally, he passed people who were moving hurriedly through the lanes, and these always made for uncomfortable exchanges, the passerby fingering the hilt of a blade or wielding some blunt weapon, Cassius with his hands hovering over his gauntlets.
He was not used to seeing the city this way. Before, it had seemed a teeming, writhing thing, like a wound infested with maggots. Now it was calm, almost idyllic. Even the tenements seemed quaint in the absence of the squalid life they supported.
He thought about Sulla as he walked. She needed time to think, she said. She would consider his offer and send word if she was interested. She did not say what she would do if she was not interested.
As he neared the Grand Market, he raised his cloak so that it covered his mouth and nose against the smoke. He figured the main avenues to the Market were barricaded, so he crept into an alley off a less-traveled lane.
He moved through garbage heaps and streams of foul runoff. His eyes watered from the smoke and from the smell. He heard movement ahead of him, but here the alley rounded a gentle curve, and he could not see far. He reached for his gauntlets.
He waited but heard no sound of approaching footsteps. He started forward again. It took a second to spot the blind man. He lay in a pile of refuse and seemed part of the heap himself, torn and filthy as the discarded offal about him. He was wounded, his stomach split by a gash that ran crosswise to his right hip. His eyes were closed, his face shiny with sweat.
Cassius felt his stomach turn.
The blind man did not hear him. His hands were folded over his belly wound, and from between his fingers, black blood leaked and ran down his wrists.
“Blessed and merciful. The one true mother. Queen over us all. Keep me safe in your grace.”
Cassius could not see the full extent of the wound, but what he could see looked severe. The blind man would be a long time dying and spared no measure of pain before it was through.
“Let me never grow hungry. Let me never grow parched. Let no hand strike me in anger. And if I die today, walk with me to your sacred forest, where I will abide for all time.”
Cassius retreated until his back was pressed against a damp wall. His legs were weak. He kneeled in the lane.
“Who is it?” the blind man called. He looked up, his milk-white eyes rolling wildly. “Whose man are you?”
“It is me,” Cassius said, slipping into the Khimir tongue.
“Oh.” The blind man seemed to deflate. “Oh my.”
“I can get you to a healer.”
“No.”
“Stay calm. I will lift you onto my shoulder.”
“I am a dead man,” the blind man said, as though just realizing this. He licked his dry lips with a dry tongue.
“Not for a while yet.”
The blind man coughed and spat blood. He swallowed hard. “Will you make me ask for it?”
“For what?”
“The mercy I need.”
“Do not ask,” Cassius said. “Because I will not grant it.”
“What is it to you? You have killed before. What will the life of one old man mean to you?”
The garbage heaped under the old man wriggled. A rat nosed out from under a head of molded cabbage. It made to move toward the blind man and Cassius leapt forward and swatted it, and the rat dove deeper into the heap. He was standing over the blind man now.
“Can you not see why you are here, boy?” The blind man tilted his head. His eyes continued to dart while he spoke. “To release me. The gods have answered my prayers.”
“Do not say that.”
“I asked for mercy, and they sent me a killer. Their will is undeniable.”
“No, I can help you,” Cassius pleaded.
“Do not fight this.”
“Why will you not let me save you?”
The blind man chuckled, then winced from the effort. “We are past that now. You know it.”
Cassius did not respond.
“And knowing that,” the blind man continued, “and knowing that the gods do not act against their own plans, that your being here is part of their design, what must they want from you?”
“I do not believe in the gods.”
“That does not amount to much. Not when they believe in you.”
Cassius kneeled next to the blind man. He touched the blind man’s folded hands.
“You even came wearing the instruments of your destiny.” The blind man smiled at the feel of Cassius’s gauntlets on his skin. “Now do what you are here to do.”
The blind man closed his eyes. Cassius placed two fingers on the blind man’s forehead, and the blind man began to pray again.
The spark that jumped from Cassius’s fingers made the blind man’s body jerk. He exhaled slowly. He seemed about to sit up, lifting from his chest, then he settled back down and his hands shook and his legs kicked and a tremor passed through his body and he was dead.
Cassius folded the corpse’s arms across its chest. He composed the legs and the head so that if the man were alive, he would be lying comfortably. He removed his cloak and draped it over the corpse and pressed a coin into the corpse’s palm, for any payments that might be required of the soul when passing into the land of the dead. He felt a hypocrite for doing so, but doing so made him feel better.
When he reached the Market, he found the dead piled along the main avenue. Workers were hauling the unclaimed corpses, which had been picked clean by the men of both bosses, into mule-drawn wagons. The wagons, supplied by churches, would transport the bodies for burial in unmarked graves. The rest would become pig feed for ranchers in the jungle.
The fires had mostly died although a few of the stalls near the Lowtown border still smoldered. Many of the storefronts were now charred husks, and wide sections of the Market proper were ash. In that moment, he wanted nothing so much as to make of it all a funeral pyre large enough to blot out the sun.
ENTER BOLDLY
In Diadora, they called him Marcellus, or the Little Warrior. A bo
y of fourteen, he spent his days begging and stealing, his nights angling for pickup matches at the pit-fighting dens and back-alley rings of the Marble Hill slums. He possessed only a few spells and so fought only other novices like himself, boys who owned at most a fire ward and one or two offensive spells, enough to give a crowd a show and earn a few coppers from a fight promoter.
Over the last six months, he had made something of a name for himself. He was known as a tenacious fighter, fearless of fire, and unwilling to throw a match. The last helped grow his following amongst the degenerate gamblers who stalked the Hill for action. If Marcellus was fighting, it might not be a spectacle of spellfire and monstrous horrors summoned from across the veil, but it would be a fair fight at least.
Spellcasters flocked to Diadora. It had a large coliseum, a rich black market for rare spells and spell indices, and most of the great mercenary houses maintained guild halls in the city. It was also the closest port in the Republic to the Isle of Twelve.
Marcellus had heard about the Isle while still training with the legion. On the drill field one day, while sparring with other spellcasters in his unit, a fit had overtaken him. One minute, he had been standing upright, preparing to snuff a wall of fire with a gust of wind, and the next he was on the ground, his trainers standing over him. He was unsure what had happened, and the trainers did not offer much information. They talked amongst themselves for a while, then canceled the drill and ordered everyone back to barracks.
When another of the boys told Marcellus he had taken a fit, he thought this the end of his career in the legion. How could he fight if his body betrayed him on the field of battle?
“Don’t you know anything?” his bunkmate Claudius said that night. “You’re touched.”
“What does touched mean?”
“It means you’re going to be a great spellcaster. It means you don’t belong here.”
He had fled the legion within the month, making his way down to Diadora by wagon train and by foot, Along the way, he heard many stories of the Isle of Twelve. Most everyone warned him away. Demons ruled the Isle, they said, or creatures that fell from the stars or vile cults intent on birthing their dark gods into this world. No two people agreed on who controlled the Isle, but they all agreed the Masters were powerful beyond measure. That was enough for Marcellus.
On the Hill, they said the Masters themselves stalked the streets of Diadora. They dressed as beggars and missionaries and prowled darkened alleys, searching for others of their kind, eager to seduce the young and touched, that they might pass on their dark arts. Marcellus knew better than to announce that he was touched. More than just the Masters of the Isle hunted such spellcasters.
In Murondia, inquisitors from the Order of the Stag viewed the touched as abominations against the gods, killed every one of them they found. And agents from the Spellwrights College in Antioch City performed unspeakable experiments on the touched, in search of the secrets locked in their blood.
Marcellus wanted no such trouble. Better to remain discreet, save his coin, amass spells. He would find his own way to the Isle then. The trick was not to lose his gauntlets, or his life, in the ring before that moment.
He fought four or five matches a day. Quick bouts that usually ended with one man or the other pushed from the fighting ring. At his level of skill, neither spellcaster had the power to force a man to yield. The matches did not tax him much, but with the frequency of the fights and the training he did each day to test the limits of his powers, he feared overextending himself. He had not suffered a fit since that first one in the legion, but he knew there would be more. The fear of it weighed on him daily.
The inevitable happened on an overcast night in early summer, while standing in the ring behind the Club and Fang. He had just chased his opponent out of the ring at the point of an ice lance and was basking in the scattered applause and drunken catcalls of the crowd, when he felt his scalp grow hot and his eyes lose focus. He kneeled down in the ring, not wanting to fall from standing, and found himself floating in a void.
A dark so total it seeped into his body through his mouth and nose and ears, filled him inside with shadow. He seemed to float in the void forever, adrift between this world and the next. He was afraid. And then the voice called to him.
“I worried I would never see you again.” The voice came from behind. Deep and strong, it filled the void around him and within him.
“Where am I?” the boy asked.
“The place between. And I have been waiting for you.”
“Who are you?”
“You should know,” the voice said. “You brought me here.”
“You speak in riddles.”
“You know everything you need to know. You just don’t remember.”
“Then help me,” the boy said.
“You have fire in your blood,” the voice said. “It will burn your mind. Others will tell you to be afraid of it.”
“But what is the truth?”
“The fire is cleansing. It burns only weakness, like steel in a forge.”
Marcellus opened his eyes. The sky above him was dark and overcast. The air felt still. He sat up and saw that the ring was empty, the alleyway deserted but for stray dogs. He wondered how long he had been out.
His feet felt cold and, looking down, he saw they were bare, his sandals missing. His belt and his dagger were missing as well. He reached for his coin purse but found the inside pocket of his tunic empty. He thought about his gauntlets, then cursed loudly.
He staggered to his feet, wondered where he would spend the night. He had no money and nowhere to go. No gauntlets. No spells.
He was just a boy again. Alone. Helpless. The thought nearly crushed him.
But there was another thought in his head, one spoken in a dark and quiet voice, a thought that felt alien to him, like a hand that has fallen asleep.
Steel in a forge.
He could not recall where he had heard that.
Two days later, he was sweeping horse stables to earn a dinner when a small girl approached him. She was olive-skinned, with long dark hair. She wore a sackcloth dress and wore also a knotted black kerchief that marked her as a mute orphan, the kind sent to the richer parts of the city to beg coins off patrician women. She brought him a small oilskin bundle and left without incident.
He found his dagger tied to the outside of the oilskin bundle, its blade polished to a sheen, its old sheath replaced by one decorated with three onyx stones bound by black silk. A folded piece of vellum was tucked into the sheath, and this he removed and unfolded and brought beneath a nearby candle to read. The note was written in red ink that shimmered like dancing flames.
We heard about your recent misfortune. It troubles us to learn when one of our brotherhood suffers such a setback. You’ll find your dagger returned in good condition. We were unable to retrieve your gauntlets. The thief had sold them before our arrival, but we managed to secure the contents of this bundle from him as payment instead. Please accept them in good faith. And if you ever wish to further your arts, you need only visit us. Your sheath will serve as ticket of passage for any ship in this port.
Marcellus refolded the note and tucked it into his inside pocket, along with the dagger. He untied the oilskin bundle and, reaching inside, felt something cold and wet. He held the bundle up to the candle, and by its light, he glimpsed two severed hands.
12
Piso’s nephew died in the night, and the next morning a priest arrived to supervise the preparation of the corpse. Afterward, he remained in the plaza and offered blessings to any who cared to receive them. He was a young man, this priest, and timid. He had dark hair that was shaved on the crown of his head, and he wore the rose-colored robes of the order of the goddess Vinalia, the goddess of beauty, of art and poetry. She had few worshippers in Scipio. But the boy had been born under her sign, had been anointed by her priests
at birth, had passed into manhood in her temple.
From the front door of the dining hall, the priest stood with a bucket of water mixed with rose petals at his feet and he dipped his scepter in this water and shook the scepter at the crowd and the people knew themselves blessed.
At midday, a crier emerged from the hall and announced that the nephew’s corpse would be sailed back to the mainland for burial. There was to be a pig roast at dusk to commemorate the boy’s passing.
In the plaza, the same tasteless joke repeated for hours. “If I knew we’d get a pig roast out of it, I’d have killed the kid myself.”
Twoscore spits were assembled. Tents to house the butchers and cooks. Casks of wine and mead arrived by the cartload. The pigs were slaughtered in public, each killing overseen by the priest and the last performed by his own hand with his own dagger. Blood was streaked on the door of Piso’s hall, and bowls of salt and blood were set in the lanes as offerings. Vermin gathered to feed, rats and stray dogs and scavenger birds.
When the legionnaires arrived, they were thirty strong, geared in full armor, segmented steel plate that lent the men the look of strange, carapaced insects, wide-brimmed helmets that blazed in the light of the sun, bowed shields, glittering spears. A contingent of Piso’s men escorted them through the crowd that had formed in the plaza although it was not clear if these men were protecting the crowd from the legionnaires or the legionnaires from the crowd.
At the front ranks, Cassius could see Vorenicus’s helmet and the white eagle feathers standing tall. Vorenicus entered the hall along with a dozen of his men, and the others assumed a post outside the door, some of the men visibly wounded from yesterday’s skirmish.
From the window of his barracks, which was empty now, its occupants all dead but him, Cassius watched the crowd swell and the first of the spit fires lit. He watched as the legion entered the hall, and he knew then that his work of the last few weeks was nearly ruined, if not completely destroyed. He decided it was time to leave this place.
He had seen enough of Scipio. Enough of death and killing. The Masters had dedicated themselves to the idea that few could stand against many, could overcome great odds with power and strategy. But Scipio resisted him at every turn.