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.

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.

He didn’t look away from the smoke. It had changed its shape at some point - it was no longer a hand reaching futilely up to heaven. It was a towering blade now, and its edge was ember flames.

Griffon‘s lips moved silently, but I read them easily enough.

“It’s a eulogy. These were his final moments.”

“How did he die?” I asked.

Griffon smiled wonderingly as the smoke changed shape one more time. A pair of smog-soot wings spread wide over the agora of the city of Olympia. Their feathers were ash and embers, and their wingspan stretched from horizon to horizon. They beat against the air once. The weight of tribulation fell upon my shoulders.

“He challenged the heavens."

A bolt of lightning fell from a clear night sky and struck down the apparition of smoke and flame.

Citizens, Philosophers, and Heroes alike all flinched back from the heavenly tribulation. I saw silent cries of disbelief and horror ripple through the masses. I was sure we were all thinking along the same lines.

Was the kyrios really dead? What was more absurd, a Tyrant faking his own death or the heavens taking offense to his funeral? What sort of man was so reviled by the Fates that they would spit on his eulogy?

There had only been one bolt of lightning, if such a thing could be considered in terms of “only”. The searing after-impression of light that it had left behind, burnt into my eyelids when I blinked, was the only evidence it had happened at all. Relative silence settled like a blanket over the agora.

Screams and curses were smothered as people realized that the funeral rites had stopped. No, not stopped. The drums were still beating, and the men were still chanting, but the chants were now murmurs and the drum beats were bare thrummings now.

In the ringing aftermath of the post-mortem tribulation, the Heroic cultivators surrounding Griffon and I seemed to suddenly remember why they’d gathered here in the first place. I met the challenging eyes of the archer in bronze and ruffled fuschia cloth. He looked me up and down, appraising me, but the tribulation had stolen most of the heat from the gesture.

“You're the one,” he spoke into the yawning silence. “Marking us all like that. Jerking us around like dogs. Either you’re an idiot or you’re out of your mind - why did you call me here?”

I appraised him the same way he’d appraised me, made a show of it, and then shrugged.

It was an impossible question to answer, because the truth was that it had been a mistake. But to admit that now was to admit to at least one hostile Heroic cultivator that Griffon and I were pretenders. That we really were exactly as we appeared to be. That was unacceptable. So instead, I took a page out of Griffon’s book and spoke the truth in the most disingenuous way possible.

“I wasn’t the one marking you,” I told the Heroic archer honestly. The smell of cypress smoke on his skin was faint now, but it was still there without a doubt. “I only made you aware of it.”

It was the right thing to say. The archer stared at me searchingly, and slowly paled when he found no deceit.

“What are you trying to say?” he asked. I didn’t respond. Somehow, I knew that silence was the best answer now.

“Who are you two?” The Heroine demanded.

“You don’t know?” Griffon asked her, as if it was the most natural thing in the world that she would.

“You’re from the Rosy Dawn,” the man in the crocodile skin said. Somehow, the atmosphere became even more tense.

It was understandable that they hadn’t noticed until now. The classic attire of the Rosy Dawn, the fine crimson and white robes that all initiates wore, had been thoroughly defiled by the time we came to shore in Olympia dock city. Griffon’s scarlet robes were torn and bloodied, and he had used parts of them to wrap the puncture wound to his gut that the little pirate boy had given him. The faded golden shawl he’d picked up about an hour ago only further confused his allegiance.

For my part, I’d long ago soiled my cult attire with the unpleasant duties of slave work. There were some stains that didn’t wash out, and I’d lost what little bargaining power I had within the cult when Griffon lost interest in me following the daylight games. A fresh set of robes hadn’t been an option for me, and I hadn’t cared enough to press the issue.

“You’re from the Broken Tide,” Griffon returned. The larger cultivator inclined his head in acknowledgment.

“After all this time, they finally send a competitor.” The archer fingered the string of his bow, frowning. It was glossy in the torch light. Spun gold, I realized. “And when they do, they sneak you in like thieves in the night. They douse your heart flames and smother your virtues.”

“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.