Chapter 1.10

Chapter 1.10

The Son of Rome

If the chanting was any quieter than the funeral drums, it was impossible to tell. Eight voices carried as one from the center of the agora, at a volume that was difficult to believe. In all my life I’d only ever experienced a few things as loud as that concert of voices.

I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, of course. For all that my childhood mentor had taught me the smallest intricacies of Alikoan, he had neglected to mention that the Greek cities each had their own dominant language, and within each language its own varying dialects. Hadn’t cared to mention it, or maybe just hadn’t had the time.

Whatever was being said, it was compelling enough. Griffon, Scythas, and the new arrival in his cloak of crocodile skin watched raptly as the funeral rites progressed. Their eyes traced the coalescent form of a smoking hand, reaching perilously for the heavens. Their gazes were hungry and wanting - whatever was being said, and whatever the hand was meant to convey, they valued it far more highly then the scrap that had just taken place between Griffon and the scarred Heroine.

A citizen of Olympia, resplendent in his indigo tunic and precious stone jewelries, cringed away from me as I knelt down. His hands were pressed against his ears, leaking blood the same as my own. If I’d needed any further indicator that we were closer to this event than we had any right to be, the punishing volume of the funeral rites had been it.

I grabbed the man’s hands and pulled them away from his ears. There were tears in his eyes. He avoided my gaze shamefully. It was one thing to be struck down in a fight, but another altogether to be reduced to this by a simple drum beat. His family was beside him, his wife and two girls that couldn’t have been any older than Myron, crouched in similar states of shock and pain. The younger of the two girls was sobbing loudly while the other rocked back-and-forth on the balls of her feet, shaking her head as if to dislodge the noise from her skull.

“This isn’t the place for you,” I told him quietly. His eyes followed my lips but there was no comprehension there. Either he couldn’t read lips or he didn’t speak Alikoan. Regardless, there was a language that every man understood. I pulled him to his feet, nodding meaningfully to his daughters.

The noble-looking man grit his teeth and scrubbed his ears with sleeves of fine indigo cloth, clearing what blood from them that he could. Then he scooped his daughters up in his arms, shushing them and making for the thinner edges of the crowd. I picked his wife up, an arm under her knees while the other supported her neck. She was stiff in my arms.

The father looked back, and there was something tragic in that look. Outrage, disgust, and a terrible acceptance. The daughter that had been rocking back and forth saw me holding her mother, and she started to scream. It couldn’t be heard above the thunder of the funeral chants. Something told me that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The mother wept silent tears as she watched them go.

I had always known there was a difference between those who cultivated strength and those who did not. But seeing the gap in motion was always unpleasant. I watched the father tuck his daughter’s face against his shoulder so that she wouldn’t see what was happening to her mother. He walked faster still, away from the agora, stepping over other suffering citizens as he went.

This small family - merchants or politicians of some kind, not warriors of any renown - had shown up to attend what they thought was a simple state funeral. More likely than not they lived in the heart of the city already, and had walked out into the streets to observe with everyone else. It likely hadn’t been an intentional power-play on their part the way it had been for Griffon, coming this close. Yet even so, they had been swept up in the business of cultivators. Caught the wrong eye. And now they paid the price.

I followed swiftly after them. The father was terrified now. He had a hand on each of his daughters’ heads, pressing their faces firmly into his neck. He thought I was going to take one of his daughters, too. Perhaps even both. A cultivator’s appetite was insatiable, after all. His wife was shaking in my arms now, such was the force of her sobs.Ñøv€l--ß1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter.

I stopped and set her gently on her feet.

We were far enough now from the noise that I trusted them to make it out safely. Even the citizens of low cultivation had kept their feet at this distance. If and when the funeral drums returned, they’d be alright.

I inclined my head slightly to the father, and then to his wife. She was staring at me, frozen. As if a sudden movement would be the end of her.

“Take care,” I said, a warning in two parts. I turned and began retracing my steps, returning to my idiot companion and his gaggle of new friends.

With any luck they’d all be dead by the time I got back.

The drums returned. They melded seamlessly with the chants, a deafening dread coupling that assaulted the senses.

I’d stopped along the way to shepherd several other hapless citizens out of the immediate danger. Some had gratefully accepted the guidance. Others had been too wrapped up in their own senses to notice. Most, though, had reacted in the same vein as that first family. With tightly leashed fear of the cultivator whose whims could not be predicted or denied.

Unfortunately, Griffon and his friends were still there when I returned. The Heroine was back as well, and from the looks of it had tried to pick up where she’d left off with Griffon. For whatever reason, though, the hulking cultivator in the crocodile skin had decided to step in. He was currently holding her back with a massive forearm wrapped around her throat. It wasn’t a cruel hold, but try as she might she couldn't break out of it.

They'd even picked up a new addition. Standing on the opposite side of Griffon and Scythas, another of the Heroic cultivators that I had accidentally tagged with my awareness was staring up at the undulating cloud of torch smoke. He was whipcord lean, dressed in robes of fuchsia and ebony trim, with a bow as tall as he was slung diagonally over his shoulder. He was the spitting image of every bowman I had ever known in the legions.

The archer wore armor of nicked and faded bronze beneath his cult attire. The fine robes were worn almost as an afterthought, parted at the chest and only negligently belted around his waist. Worn because they needed to be, and for no other reason.

He didn’t seem aggressive, and as I approached he didn’t pay me any mind. He was riveted on the smoking silhouette that hung over the agora. As the chanting reached an apex, Griffon and the Heroic cultivators winced as one. Even the Heroine stopped struggling just long enough to grimace up at the sky.

“What are they saying?” I asked Griffon, moving up beside him and speaking directly into his ear.

“Something stinks,” the Heroine said, a ferocious scowl on her lips. She tapped the large cultivator's forearm twice and he let her go. She flicked her pure bronze blade back through the loop on her belt. She wasn’t raring for a fight now, but she looked even less pleased than she had before.

Griffon shifted his stance, just slightly enough for his shoulder to bump mine. We shared a glance in the corners of our eyes, and it wasn’t difficult to guess what the other was thinking.

We’d passed the point of no return about three Heroic cultivators ago. The only way out now was through.

“You can’t possibly think they’re connected,” Scythas protested. For all the good it did. Scythas may have been our superior in cultivation, but he was the runt of this particular group. The looks the Heroine and the archer gave him only cemented it. “They wouldn’t move now, not so soon. There’s a limit to shamelessness!”

“Careful now,” the archer said, his tone an uncomfortable mix of airy and tense. “They have eyes and ears that we can’t perceive. Whether or not these two are involved, he said it himself. We’ve been marked.”

“They wouldn’t,” Scythas insisted. “Not now. Not while the body is still warm.”

Griffon realized something - I saw it in his face. I braced myself.

“The whims of tyrants aren’t moved by such petty concerns as propriety or filial duty,” he said blithely. The cultivators surrounding us flinched.

I tasted salt in the air. It coated my tongue, in the same manner as the cypress smoke.

Someone was watching us.

“You haven’t been here long, have you,” the cultivator in the crocodile skin said. It wasn’t a question.

“You won’t be for much longer,” the Heroine said. It wasn’t a threat.

“Is that so?” Griffon asked, pearl white teeth glinting in the low light of his cultivation technique. “What a shame. I think I’m starting to like it here.”

The taste of salt on my tongue doubled and redoubled. It became overwhelming, worse than any overseasoned ration that I’d been forced to eat in the legions. There was sudden movement in my peripheral vision. A flurry of motion on the western edge of the crowd nearest to the agora, by the alleys that wound through one of Olympia’s business districts.

“You’re tempting the Fates,” the archer promised us both. “Some things aren’t meant to be said.”

“Ho? I thought it was our providence to be reviled by the Fates?” Griffon planted a hand on his hip, the other bleeding palm still negligently resting on the pommel of his stolen sword. “Are you Heroes or not?”

“Enough of this,” Scythas snapped. He glared, first at Griffon, then at his fellow Heros. “The elders are the elders. This isn’t the time nor the place to guess at their motives. The kyrios is dead. Can we not set aside petty politics for a single night? In his memory?”

His resemblance to the young soldiers of the fifth, and the truly frustrated grief in his voice, made me hesitant to speak up. But I couldn’t ignore what I was seeing forever.

“It seems not,” I said. When he turned his glare on me, I flicked my eyes to the western edge of the crowd.

At the edge of the funeral, where the fringes of Philosophers and Citizens in low favor gathered, one of the presences I had noted earlier was being dragged into an alleyway by a pair of similarly monstrous existences.

A Hero was being kidnapped.

“Crows!” Scythas snarled. He took off sprinting through the crowd. His fellow cultivators made no move to follow, nor to stop him. A sensible choice. No wise man ran full tilt into an ambush.

Scythas raced into the alleyway and I followed at his heels.

I am who I am.