Chapter 1.15

Chapter 1.15

The Son of Rome

I woke up and immediately regretted it.

Remnants of the funeral drums echoed behind my eyes, an unbearable throbbing that turned my stomach. My body ached down to the marrow of my bones, and my mouth was drier than a day at the Senate. I shifted, grunting. Even the soft brush of silk sheets was intolerable. I cracked an eye open.

Luxury. It was a sparsely decorated room, but what was there was of an undeniable quality. The floor was smooth stone that reflected the light of the sun, shot through with an electric blue lapis. The walls were covered in hanging tapestries of Olympic scenes painted with the painstaking detail of an artist’s life piece. A single ivory column, waist-high, stood central in the room, with a golden cradle for torch flame perched atop it.

A dining table cut from a fine, dark wood sat off in a corner. Each of its legs had been carved in the Corinthian style, with faux vines winding up their length. Large papyrus charts blanketed the table in place of food, gleaming with recently applied ink.

Upholstered dining couches and bronze-backed chairs were scattered throughout the room, and while those that remained intact were of the utmost quality, most of them had been smashed to pieces.The debut release of this chapter happened at Ñòv€l-B1n.

There were other things, personal items and keep-sakes that I couldn’t be bothered to keep my eyes open for. Satisfied that I wasn’t dead or imprisoned, I rolled over on the blessedly comfortable bed.

Into Griffon’s foot.

I shoved the filthy limb out of my face. He jerked awake, scarlet eyes snapping open.

“What-”

“Get out of my bed,” I said hoarsely. Everything, including my own voice, felt unpleasant. I needed another three days of sleep at least.

“Your bed?” Griffon repeated, incredulous. “Neither of us owns anything. It’s as much mine as it is yours.”

“I don’t care. Get out.”

“Denied.” He rolled over, using the crook of his elbow as a pillow. “Be quiet, will you? I had a long night.” I knew he was smirking as he said it. It was why he’d turned away. It was purely an attempt to get under my skin.

It worked.

Gravitas threw him from the bed, and twenty arms of pankration intent tossed me off the other side in turn. I came to my feet spitting mad, my head pounding and the taste of blood in my mouth. He rose up across the bed, looking far better rested and entirely too smug.

“I’m going to kill you,” I told him.

“You’re welcome to try.”

We both lunged for the bed.

It was Scythas’ room, as it turned out. The Hero in question returned to his room with food and drink in hand, just in time to see us shatter his bed with our wrestling. We both froze, Griffon’s hands wrapped around my throat and my own pressing a pillow down on his face. Hazel-flame eyes, flecked with golden embers, met mine. More than angry, he looked exasperated.

“We have halls for that,” he said, shaking his head and sweeping the papyrus off his dining table with one foot. He laid out three loaves of dark brown bread alongside a long, narrow slab of stone covered with seared fish. A pitcher of water and another of sparkling white wine. “At least eat something first. The two of you necked more kykeon in a day than most senior initiates drink in a week.”

That explained a few things. I cursed my hubris. What sort of fool went binge drinking immediately after a night of brutal fighting? After multiple brushes with death? Men like me were why officers hated the infantry.

“Light work,” Griffon boasted through the pillow, smacking my shoulders in a tap. It was no coincidence that he found the lingering cuts the Crow had left me. A night of work had purged the worst of the cultivator’s poisonous pneuma from my system - but it still stung like a bastard.

I pressed down harder on the pillow. Pankration hands slapped insistently at my shoulders.

The bread was still warm, and the fish was coated in olive oil and richly seasoned with pepper and ginger. After I had forced down a cup of the sweet white wine and several cups of water, I even began to enjoy it. Griffon and Scythas made small talk while we ate, trading stories of the day before. Apparently I had lost an entire day to exhaustion and spirit wine. The sun was just now rising again, a full day after the kyrios’ funeral.

“So this is the Raging Heaven Cult,” Griffon mused, licking a trickle of olive oil off his thumb and surveying the room with a critical eye. “Are all of the initiates given private rooms?”

“And yet here you are, setting your sights on the Conqueror’s Path,” Griffon said with no particular judgement. There was scarlet laughter in his eyes as Scythas jerked the charts from his hands.

“Forget it,” Scythas muttered sourly. His eyes flickered to me, chagrined, as if my opinion somehow mattered to him. How absurd.

I reached over and clapped him on the shoulder. I had to reach for it. The two of them were laid out on their dining couches in the indolent Greek style, an unpleasant reminder of younger days in Rome. I sat on my own couch like it was a bench. Old habits.

“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” I told him truthfully. Griffon had a way of getting under the skin. It was as much a skill of his as his pankration intent and his rosy fingers of dawn. But whatever it was that Scythas had asked our help for last night, I could tell that it was a difficult subject for him. It wasn’t something he’d shared lightly, even with the addition of alcohol.

He relaxed at the small gesture, nodding once. “Thank you again,” he said quietly. “I didn’t stop to think when you pointed out those Crows. You probably could have handled it yourself, but I would have been in over my head if you hadn’t come with me. So thank you.”

“You handled yourself well. You all did.” It was a gross understatement. My recollections of that night were a blur of pain and single-minded focus, further muddled by potent spirit wine, but what I did remember of Scythas and the other two evoked memories of the best days in Gaius’ legions.

Heroic cultivators were impossible legends, myths made reality. I was reminded of that fact over and over again, in the aftermath of the kyrios’ funeral, while we stalked the stalkers and chased them from their shadows.

My contribution to the list of miracles performed that night was to somehow not die, not even once, and to come out of it with my reputation intact. Admittedly, that might have been the unlikeliest occurrence of the night.

Speaking of. “Where are Jason and Anastasia?” I asked him. I remembered them surviving the night, but not much more than that.

“Jason’s sleeping yesterday off, along with the other three if I had to guess.” He shifted on his couch. His faint green cult attire, a marked difference from the royal indigos of the sanctuary city, shifted with the motion. It fell away from tanned muscle and sinew. He had no scars.

“And Anastasia?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care to, either.” His lip twitched towards a sneer, but he seemed to think better of it. “She is... not a woman I would associate with freely.”

“Ho?” Griffon leaned forward on his dining couch, suddenly invested. “And why is that?” I vaguely remembered him grilling me in a private moment, while we’d walked the streets of Olympia surrounded by rowdy Heroes, about the new additions Scythas and I had returned with.

“Where that one goes, disaster surely follows,” Scythas said darkly. “She’s an ill omen in silk robes and a widow's veil.”

The investment grew. “Go on.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Scythas snapped. Then, to me, “Just keep an eye on her. You may be able to take care of yourself, but with her that isn’t always enough. She has a way of... tempting.”

Ah. I smiled, in the distant way of my adopted father.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Right,” he said, averting his eyes.

“I think I’ll pay her a visit anyway,” Griffon said, winking when Scythas glared at him. “My master often tells me I’m a foolish man.”

“For all the good it does,” I returned wryly.

“I warned you,” Scythas said. “What follows is on your head.”

There came a crack, a mechanical crunch of sliding bolt locks being forced out of place. Light flared along the surface of Scythas’ door, bronze script burning with a visible light that seared the senses, alerting anyone within view of an imminent breach. Then, as quickly as it had come, it flickered and went out as the door was forced open.

Anastasia leaned against the mangled door frame, a vicious smile in her eyes. A massive Roman messenger eagle was perched on her right shoulder, which beat its wings and swept across the room to land on the curve of my dining couch, looking expectantly up at me. In lieu of a message, I offered it a scrap of fish.

Scythas came to his feet, fists clenched.

“My, my,” the Heroine said. “You three have certainly been busy.” Smoldering green eyes surveyed the mangled room, drifting past Scythas without truly seeing him. They lingered for a moment on Griffon, and the charming grin he reserved for strangers that didn’t know him yet.

But they settled, inevitably, on me.