Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (94 page)

“Stop! Pull up!” I screamed to Lumen, but he couldn't stop now. He had put all his momentum into clearing the canyon entrance.

A blast hit us square in the back. Close range. But that was impossible, we were all clear. I turned in time to see the last of the holographic cloak fade from a Viridian command tank. One of the four command tanks I'd seen earlier must have been a drone as well. My cunning uncle had used misdirection and the same technology that had camouflaged my father in the arena to position himself for the killing shot if all else failed. We were still moving forward, but Lumen had a gaping hole in his midriff from the tank bolt. He was shedding bodies (some of them dripping like melted wax down his front and back) at a great rate. We moved into the canyon, the tank pursuing us, and then the chariot was there. Crassus had sent it right over the edge of the cliff. It was falling, nose-first, like a large javelin. He had timed it so that it would hit the armored vehicle just as it passed into the canyon. The chariot struck the tank and the sharp prow of Crassus' chariot pierced the armor at its weakest point, the entry hatch on top, but not before the turret released another ion charge at Lumen at close range. I saw the chariot split the tank open like a tin can before bursting into flame. Black smoke billowed up from the wreck.

And then I was falling through space. It was so high up. The hard ground rushed up to meet us. There was sudden pain, and then I was a crumpled mess, struggling to keep the darkness at bay.

There was no more Lumen; his mind had crumbled apart as his mind had collapsed. I sensed it dispersing like motes of dust in a windstorm. A light scorched the side of my face. It was coming from the temple ruin at the base of the diamond mountain. We'd made it! Safe for the moment inside the canyon. Rays burst out from Minerva's temple, and long tendrils of light, like curling fingers, gathered up the scattered Hyperborean forms, leading them into the mountain.

The mass of the Hyperborean colossus, the part that had Lumen at its heart—the head, part of the chest, and one arm—began to pull itself forward toward the temple arch. As it crawled, thousands of other bodies, some whole, others in parts, dragged themselves forward as well. On the ground, over each other, over the large mass of the colossus like stampeding horses in slow motion, part solid, part liquid, overlapping waves slowly returning to shore. There were thousands of them and their light was fading. They were so very slow. It would take them more time than we had. It was like a procession of quicksand, fading points of light trying to find their way back to a distant sun. I had to buy them time. The enemy were still outside busily killing one another, but it wouldn't be long before they remembered why they were fighting in the first place and turned their attention back to us. I struggled to my feet and limped toward the wreck of the Viridian tank. Maybe there was a weapon inside, something I could use to guard the mouth of the canyon.

A figure emerged from the black smoke of the tank wreck. Covered in sweat and soot. My uncle, Quintus Viridius Severus, his ion pistol leveled at me.

“Tell the Hyperboreans to stop. Tell them to stop now,” he commanded.

“I won't,” I said.

He shot, but not at me. An ion charge hit the solid ichor rock of the mountain behind the temple arches and, although it wasn't a direct shot into the light, the gateway reacted with a quivering waver that let me know it was part of the queen, and that any harm at this point could jeopardize the mission, perhaps even kill her.

“Let them go,” I yelled.

“Make them stop!” he said. “That ichor is mine!”

He was a seasoned killer. I would never be able to make a cast before he pulled the trigger. But perhaps I could put enough power into it that it would kill him after the fact. We both would die, but the Hyperboreans would have more time. An acceptable outcome.

“I won't tell them to stop and I won't surrender,” I said.

“We don't need you to surrender,” my uncle said.

We? Carbo! Before I could locate him, the strangest sensation hit me, cool and sharp. I looked down to see the shaft of a javelin embedded in my chest, right through my heart. No feeling of hot ambrosial ants this time, just shock and pain. Carbo emerged from the shadows to the northwest, a look of grim satisfaction on his face. They had both been in the command tank. I went to fall back, but the javelin point had traveled clean through my breast to the rocks behind me and they were holding me up, stopping me from keeling over.

Things started moving in slow motion. It was the adrenaline. I was processing information at an increased rate, or maybe this was just what happened when you were dying.

A spear took Carbo, right through the side of the neck. The Viridian leader fell to his side, and my uncle was shooting up into the rocks above. I spied Crassus darting back out of range—it was he who had killed Carbo.

Then a familiar weapon speared my uncle in the midriff, sending him stumbling backward. The sharp points of the arachnoraptor transmission staff. Julia's weapon. She emerged from her hiding place on the rocky ledge above. She'd taken her due, paid my uncle for betraying her, for betraying us. Except he was not falling. He was stubborn, and now, even as he died, he was leveling his pistol at Julia.

Crassus dropped down on my uncle from on high like a giant spider. He was wielding a gladius. I knew that weapon. Even from this distance it had an ethereal sheen: Marcus' gladius.

My uncle turned reflexively and fired at Crassus. The gladius flashed, and the Sertorian actually blocked the ion bolt with his sword in midflight, deflecting it. I'd never seen a move like that. So fast, so precise. It must have been the ichor from my pin. Then he was moving past my uncle, the gladius flashing as it stole his life. Quintus fell at Crassus' feet, his hands clawing at the Sertorian's legs as he died.

Julia was yelling my name as she climbed down.

Was this how it would end? What would Crassus do now? Would he help or hinder my mission? His addiction and his loyalties were tearing him apart. Would he stand with me and Julia? Or would he try to seize the day for himself? I slid backward down the javelin until I hit rocky ground. My limbs had stopped moving. The hit to the solar plexus had short-circuited my nervous system. I was like a heavy rag doll.

Then the same light that moved to envelop the Hyperboreans reached out for me. Long tendrils, rays like rosy fingers wrapped around my body, enfolding me in pure light.

I was walking. Effortlessly, free from pain. My body was all light. Beside me walked the other aliens, into the shining light at the heart of the mountain. I was inside the temple, and then through it, inside the mountain itself.

The radiant brightness increased to the point where I lost a sense of where the walls and ceiling were, if there were any at all. A sea of light. Was this it? Was I dead? Was this truly Olympus? Mortals were not meant to behold the gods. The gods had to appear in disguise. They were too bright, too powerful for us to behold them in their true form. Unless we were dead. I felt a moment of panic. I needed to go back. To help Crassus and Julia.

At the center of the sea of light was a shimmering pool, even brighter than the light around us. That was where the procession was leading. Or was it a burning jewel like I saw in the great city beneath the ice? Reality wasn't clear-cut here. As the crystalline aliens ahead of me merged themselves in the pool, they melted, dissolving, mixing with the light, vanishing into it. Caretakers no longer, the Hyperboreans returned their essence, their energy, to the source from which they came.

This is Mother.

“Where are you?”

Here. Outside. In many places. We need time to complete our work.

“Then let me go back,” I said.

I was drawn along with the procession; my body of light couldn't resist the call of the pool. And I could feel the queen. She was sentient, powerful, she was the light-filled pool and her power was intense, exposing my every thought and feeling, unpacking me until, like Lumen, I was spread out in the light, in many places at once. Was this what it was like to stand before a god?

Brilliant, ecstatic, unendurable, humbling. I felt more myself than I'd ever been at the same time as I was fading apart into something bigger, like droplets of blood being diluted in an ocean. It was like waking up and dying, coming home and departing all at once.

Her light was so bright. I tried to look into it but had to turn away. When I turned from her, it was into darkness, like falling under the dark waters below the ice. Her illumination was suddenly gone, and I was drowning in fear and confusion and relief. Yes—the darkness was comforting and also enveloped me. It took me in like a weary stranger and stripped away pain and memory until I was blissfully confused and could barely remember why I was here at all. And then the radiance shone again. As if on a turntable, I was spinning. I couldn't tell whether it was fast or slow, only that I couldn't bear the brightness. It was too much, and yet turning from it was pain and darkness. How could I bear to exist like this?

As you have done your entire life. It is not the darkness we fear. It is the light. We are comforted by death and the promise of silence, the quiet of the underworld. We turn from the light because we cannot bear our own divinity. You want to know if you're going to die? Tell me, can you bear the light of life?

The voice was so familiar, so comforting.

“I can't look at you,” I said. “But I can't die. My people have done terrible things to your people. I have committed acts of which I am ashamed. I must be allowed to go back. I have to set things right. I have to fix things. I need just a little more time.”

It's all right. You can look at me.

“I can't.”

The light dimmed. It became less raw, less intense, so that I could look into it. She was taking on a form, just like in the old stories. She was clothing herself in human form so that I could stand to look upon her. Like blurry eyes wiped clean, I began to make out a body. Her helmet shone bright like the sun, her spear glinted in the light. The first Romans who came to this world built a great temple to Minerva in this place, and here she was. My goddess. And she looked so familiar, not like the goddess depicted in the statues.

Accala. Come closer, darling.

It was her voice. The voice of my dead mother, Alexandria Viridius Camilla.

LI

C
OME,
A
CCALA.
C
OME, IT'S
all right. You've grown so much. Let me look at you.

She gestured to me and I moved to stand before her. The same green eyes flecked with hazel, the same face and body that I remembered, not the haggard and anxious face I last saw in the recording Lumen showed me.

She wrapped me up in her arms, drawing me close. And then Aulus was there, no more body of diamond and ice. We were back together again. A family. Heat, warmth, love rushed over me. But it was not right. It was not them. Those beings were more than my mother and brother, and therefore less.

Not less,
she said.

“You're not my mother,” I said. “Lumen's not my brother. They were put into the ichor, their life and memories absorbed into the Hyperborean sum total. That's what you do, isn't it? Absorb and reflect.”

He is and he isn't,
my mother said.
I am but I am not. Who are you? Are you Accala your father's daughter? Accala your mother's daughter? Accala the gladiator, Accala who grows fruit trees on her balcony? The Accala before the fires that rocked this world, or the one after?

“I'm all of those things.”

All of those experiences are inside the container that is Accala. A prism that captures experience, sensation, feeling, thought, all bundled up into one. A shining droplet of water. Now imagine all the other droplets, every separated being in the galaxy, and then every separated thing in existence, see all those droplets coming together to form a vast sea. An infinite number of prisms, all together. This is the sense in which I am your mother, your brother, your goddess. We are all one.

“The droplet has no sense of itself as part of the sea,” I said. “While we are droplets, we must behave as droplets. Some parts of my mother might be within you, but that does not make you her. Or the goddess Minerva.”

I am simply more droplets, a bigger container. If you call that a goddess, then it is a goddess. I am like a wave, a tide. I have brothers and sisters. We do not interfere with the world as a child plays with a toy, but I am in the manifest universe. I am a force that has movement on the outside and inside people's hearts.

“But now you are trapped here.”

Even the tide is beholden to the forces of giants. Much power has been put elsewhere; cause and effect shape us also, only on a bigger scale. There is a greater force beyond us, a container that holds us that we are gradually dissolving into as you are dissolving into us.

Her words shook me. The sense they carried frightened me, threw me into a state of trembling and awe. Her words were like swift birds flying to somewhere I couldn't follow.

Your deep soul knows I speak the truth, though, doesn't it? It remembers the greater nation of which it is a citizen. It pines to return there, knowing that it is not annihilation but addition, not forgetting but the ultimate remembrance of all that we are. The rainbow is not less for its interrunning rays of color, nor the sea for its waters. It is the individual united as one thing that brings beauty and power, the greatest expression of creation.

The words fell away as I beheld the vision of creation of which she spoke. A cascade of images and feelings. Images of my mother. My childhood. Our time together. Like the flickering images of my cameo back in Rome but with feeling, presence, as if I were there, completely there in each image so that each second of change felt like hours, days. My memories were stretched out before me like an unraveling bandage, like a series of cameo slides. There was a nostalgia, as if I were viewing my past from a great distance away, like an old woman at the end of her life. Things seemed faded and bright at the same time. Certain memories shone more brightly than others. As the stream of images drew closer toward the bomb blast that shook this world, the light became intense, blotting out all images before and after it. She reached out and took the tape of images and folded it into a loop, like an infinity strip.