Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (73 page)

“With that slope as a runway ramp, we'd get the sled up to a decent speed,” I said to Julia.

The weather was blisteringly cold. I didn't feel it, but I could see it in the heaviness of the air, which had a blue tinge. The stratospheric stadium was high in the sky, and part of it was still smoking from the assault, but already there was repair scaffolding in place. No one up there would be looking our way—we'd be partly camouflaged by the mild snowstorm whipping a flurry of flakes about the sky. All attention would be focused on whatever torments Aquilinus had dreamed up.

“I thought the stadium was supposed to help regulate the weather,” I said. “It seems to be heavy conditions for tournament viewing.”

“You're right,” Julia said. “Perhaps the atmospheric stabilizers on the stadium were hit when
Incitatus
opened fire.”

It's the planet itself,
Lumen said.
The ichor that formed this world held it together. Without it, it's falling apart.

“How long do we have?” Julia asked after I'd conveyed Lumen's words.

Weeks, months,
he replied.
I can't say for certain. The weather will become increasingly unstable.

“As if things weren't bad enough,” Julia groaned.

There was something going on in the valley, but it was hard to make out at first. We lay on our bellies and slowly moved close to the cliff edge.

Julia scanned the ground below and then passed me binoculars she'd fished out of the mountain stockpile.

“It's not good,” is all she said.

I peered through the binoculars. After a minute or so, a wind came rushing through and whipped aside enough snow that I finally had a clear window. Gods. What mad circus was this?

The arena we faced only two short days ago—the raw environment of this world, bound by energy shields and electric advertisements, enclosed by an empyrean dome to demarcate a sacred gladiatorial testing ground—had been transformed into something else altogether. The clear sky of Olympus Decimus, obscured only by the static of snowfall or the darkness of storms, was now filled with clouds. Not real, actual clouds, but some idyllic simulacrum. Perfect cumulus clusters were ringed by halos of clear white light that projected beams of light onto the arena below. Projections from the station, they didn't move position, no wind affected them—they simply hung in place like ornaments in an overlit stage play.

Below, in a wide valley enclosed by impassable mountains, holographic projections of row after row of vast Grecian columns rose up and vanished into those clouds. It was supposed to be Olympus, the home of the gods. It looked plastic, cheap.

In the valley were three Talonite chariots—Ovidian, Arrian, and Tullian—fully armed with a complete crew complement, twenty-four contestants in all. While the chariot load of Tullians watched on from the sidelines, the Ovidians and two of the Arrian desultore skirmishers harried what was left of the Caninine Alliance, a ragtag crew of ten in two beat-up chariots—five Viridians; three Calpurnians, one of whom rode a desultore skirmisher; and two Flavians. They were alone, all their support teams dead or gone.

The Caninines raced desperately across what appeared to be a giant gameboard of clear, flat ice cut into sixty-four equal-size squares. They were heading for the only exit from the valley—a narrow path that led east between two hills. Beyond the valley, the path ran into a vast forest of crystalline trees that stretched on for miles before the Olympian ranges some three hundred miles away thrust up to touch the clouds: a perfect place to hide if only they could escape the valley and reach it. The exit was marked by a massive dolmen arch that spanned the two central squares on the eastern edge of the board. It was made of three giant pillars, not holograms but solid to my eye, each about two hundred feet in length. Two upright and one running horizontally to cap them.

Above the action, Julius Gemminus buzzed about, his voice projected by the floating spherae, carried and amplified by the valley.

“Here we are on day two in Emperor Aquilinus' celestial testing ground. Who will prove their worth? Will the Caninines come to their senses and bow to the new gods? The ancients had a saying: As above, so below. The choices the Caninines make here in our celestial arena are costing them heavily in the greater empire. Countless lives stand to be lost.”

“Can these obstinate contestants pull themselves forward toward the divine as Emperor Aquilinus once did,” Julius Gemminus continued, “or will they fall to the grave, plowed into the earth with their countrymen, no better than animals and slaves?”

“They're not armed,” I said to Julia, as I looked on with the binoculars. The Caninines had been stripped of their weapons. Only the Talonites were armed, but I couldn't quite tell with what from where I sat. They looked like large staffs with bright yellow padded tops.

Around the edge of the field, the billboards were now filled with images of Sertorian propaganda—the very same sequences of Sertorian grandeur that Crassus forced me to watch during my time on
Incitatus
—interspersed with advertisements for ambrosia. No longer did we see Crassus and myself. Now there were shining forms of the deceased Mania, Barbata, Licinus, and Castor and Pollux, and the caption in huge letters:
THE ASCENDED MARTYRS, HAWKS NO LONGER, NOW DIVINE EAGLES
.

“What game are they playing?” Julia asked.

“It's petteia,” I replied. “A board game nobles play. Except he's re-created it on a giant stage. Normally you move your pebbles to enclose the other player's pebbles. You win by blocking your opponent in or take a piece by surrounding it on two sides.”

The petteia board was eight by eight squares. The squares in the giant board below us were demarcated with energy shields that soared up to fifteen feet high and changed at intervals. Aquilinus had forced the Caninines to play unarmed against the Talonites, and the shield walls were being manipulated into a labyrinth to force them to move as you would on a petteia board.

Based on their ability to move around without effort, the Talonites knew the pattern of the ever-changing shield walls, but the Caninines didn't have a clue. The Caninines seemed to be trying to reach the end of the course and exit through the archway, but they were obstructed by the ever-changing shield walls, and the enemy, who outnumbered them and outfinessed them with the speed that only ambrosia could impart.

“What's Aquilinus doing, splashing ambrosia about like that?” Julia said. “It was on scarce supply just a few days ago, and now I'd wager there's not a Talonite player down there that's not dosed up to the eyeballs.”

“He's cutting into his own personal reserves,” Crassus said. “He has to keep the empire convinced that he's in control of the ambrosia, even as his own supplies are dwindling.”

“He's buying time until he can get his hands on Lumen,” I said.

The Ovidians and Arrians worked together to flank a Caninine vehicle on either side, then aimed their weapons at it to take it out like a petteia piece. The movement of the shield labyrinth seemed designed to isolate Caninine players and aid the Talonites. The targeted Viridians, Calpurnians, and Flavians didn't stand a chance as the Talonites closed in on both sides and struck again and again.

The colorful staves caused no wounds, though, no contestant deaths; the chariots were too far apart for that. The hits were symbolic. After each successful hit, a flash filled the sky and a projection appeared upon the ice, revealing a horrific tableau. Thousands of faces, magnified so that their expressions were clearly visible to the viewers, appeared beneath the surface of the giant board. Their images were projected from Rota Fortuna and designed to make it seem as if their faces were trapped beneath the clear, flat squares. Men, women, children, all from Caninine houses, their names presented beneath their faces on digital placards. As each strike of the yellow staves hit the Caninine players, the faces registered their varying expressions of death as they were simultaneously executed. Those faces fell away to be replaced an instant later by more, the next in line waiting to die.

“Do you recognize any of the faces?” I asked Julia.

“None.”

“They're a random selection,” Crassus said. “He's demonstrating that the protection a house provides is irrelevant. He can pick anyone.”

The Viridians were cut off from the Calpurnians and the Flavians by a sudden change in the shield formation. They drove forward toward the exit, and yet the Talonite players on the sidelines remained motionless. I thought perhaps they were going to let them pass, but the moment the Viridians moved under the dolmen, the enemy rushed forward, forcing them to retreat back to the gameboard. But why?

I scanned the pillars with maximum magnification. Gods, they weren't pillars. They had large metallic points attached to their pinnacles. “They're giant spears,” I said. “He's making them pass under the yoke.”

There was no greater shame for a Roman than to be forced by an enemy to pass under the yoke, no greater humiliation.

“It's just like the game of trigon,” Julia said. “Aquilinus doesn't want them to exit too quickly. He wants the deaths of the hostages and the dishonor of the Viridians and their allies to be drawn out for the benefit of the audience.”

“The Caninines don't understand,” I said. I'd sat through all those sessions being tutored in Aquilinus' past. His decisions and precepts, his philosophy. “They think they have to get through the yoke and humble themselves in order to spare the lives of the hostages Aquilinus has rounded up. But you have to understand that's not how Aquilinus thinks. After he destroyed the temples and priests, he was arrested. His own countrymen wished to humble him and make him pass under the yoke. They tortured his allies when he refused, hoping that would motivate him, but he stood strong and let them all die, demonstrating his strength of will. They became martyrs to his ascension. The answer here is not to pass under the yoke. He'll kill them all anyway. They're expected to hold back and emulate Aquilinus.”

“But that makes no sense. You're saying that if they win everyone dies, and if they lose everyone dies,” Julia said.

“It doesn't have to make sense. The ambrosia's the carrot that you dangle in front of the donkey, but you also need a stick to hit the donkey so it knows the carrot is a good option. He's trying to convince the audience that he has the ultimate power to burn the empire and anyone who stands against him.”

“Is that right?” Julia asked Crassus. “That he'll kill his prisoners no matter what?”

“Accala understands us,” he said. “Aquilinus is demonstrating that the Caninines lack the strength to hold to their convictions and watch their countrymen burn.”

“And you love it,” Julia said to him.

“To the contrary, I despise it. There's no competition here, no room for excellence. Only slaughter for amusement. The arena has been denigrated, transformed into a meat grinder. The Caninines have no chance at all.”

“Unless we can give them one,” I said. “We've got to get down there and stop this. At least give the Caninines a chance to escape.”

“Quick! Take cover!” Julia said.

Take cover from what? No one could see us up here. Just the same, Crassus and I followed her lead and we threw ourselves down behind an outcropping of slate-gray rocks. I looked around the see what had alarmed her and then gave her a questioning look. She pointed out over the ledge into the air above the valley. Gods. He was so big and so close to us that I didn't see him at all at first. I thought he was just a visual distortion caused by the flurry of crystalline snow, but then he was impossible to miss. Aquilinus, the new, self-proclaimed Roman emperor, was at least six hundred feet tall. No, not a giant, but rather a giant projection. Three black projection spherae were totally dedicated to creating the massive form.

He wore flowing white robes, the imperial garland about his head, and in his hand he held a great crackling bolt of lightning. Above his head radiated two titles in shining gold letters:
NEOS HELIOS
, the New Sun, and
NEOS JOVIS
, the New Jupiter.

Gods. Aquilinus' ego, fed by the ambrosia, knew no limits. He was playing at being Jove himself. All this talk about the New Gods, enlightenment, and liberation for humanity, and the first chance he had, he was there playing at being the god of gods, and badly at that. This was hubris even beyond ancient Caligula, who sought to be declared a living god but only in Alexandria, never within the bounds of Rome herself, where only a dead emperor could be named a god.

“This was never the idea,” Crassus said. “We were to dispel the myths, enlighten humanity. Not replace the gods and stand over the empire.”

“You must be the stupidest Sertorian in existence,” Julia said to Crassus. “The rest of your kind are in it for the power and the money. How has it taken you this long to work that out?”

The Calpurnian chariot came up to protect the Viridian rear, buying the Wolves time to shoot for the exit. Anticipating the game, as the enemy rushed in for the kill, the Viridian chariot, instead of retreating, turned right into the nearest chariot—the Tullian craft—and forced them to veer off to avoid a catastrophic collision. They'd created a gap, and the desultore skirmisher drove through at breakneck speed, the two Caninine chariots following hot on its tail. It was Marcus! He was driving the skirmisher, I was sure of it. This was the same strategy he taught me in the arena when confronting superior opponents—drive right at them, take them by surprise, and throw them off balance. And it was going to work. They were going to make it! Then the sky filled with thunder and lightning, and Aquilinus scowled with displeasure and threw a lightning bolt at them like a fisherman throwing a spear. Aquilinus' form was perfect, his whole body a flowing wave of movement; the bolt followed a clean and unhesitating line to its target.