Chapter LV
LV
MY SISTER AND I USED TO PLAY A GAME AS WE WALKED through our family’s palace, trying to imagine the builders’ aims for each room.
Function for the kitchen, intimacy for the lounge.
Warmth and light for the guest quarters, sealed-off intimidation and power for the Great Hall.
Every stone, we were told by our tutors, every corner and every crevice had a purpose.
A design. The best buildings were made to speak to their occupants.
The best rooms, you understood what they were the moment you entered, no matter their furnishings.
This is a room where decisions are made, and men die, and empires fall.
The three-sided chamber is massive. One wall is consumed with a gilded Hierarchy symbol set into polished obsidian, the entire thing shining and reflecting the light from the fire that sits dramatically beneath it in a long, straight line.
On a second sits an enormous plate of bronze onto which is inscribed a massive, intricately detailed map.
Stones of various colours and sizes are affixed to points on it everywhere.
Will-based tracking for ships and armies and everything in between, if I had to guess.
The third wall—containing the great archway through which we have just walked—is covered in a frieze that is as lifelike and stunningly crafted as anything I have seen in the Forum, the temples, or anywhere else.
A great battle, chariots and legionnaires clashing with some enemy in violent, visceral, glorious combat.
I take it in at a glance, but as the men sitting at the triangular table rise as one at our intrusion, it is the massive stone circle on the floor that commands my attention.
Nine sections. Six numbered with a III, two with a II, and the last with a I.
It’s the source of the low grinding sound, the entire thing slowly turning.
To my mind, it glows like the sun.
“Who are you?”
“What is the meaning of this?”
“How did you get in?”
A stunned pause to both the surprised cries and the movement of the circle as I send several shards of sharpened metal to hover threateningly in front of them.
Ostius takes advantage of the silence, sauntering into the centre of the room.
Enjoying this as much as I am not. “Gentlemen!” he says, issuing a calming motion.
“How very nice to see you all again. Please. Don’t get up on our account. ”
“Ostius?” It’s the man I know straight away is the Princeps, though I have not before seen him in the flesh.
Tall and broad-shouldered, his square jaw depicted surprisingly accurately on every gold coin, with images of the other Princeps on either side of him.
He is at least seventy. He looks closer to forty.
He’s staring at Ostius with an immediate, plain shock that I don’t think I’ve ever seen from a Catenan politician.
The name seems to stir some remembrance in most of the other men too; they refocus on Ostius, really examining him. I use the moment to edge behind Ostius and lightly touch the first stone segment of the circle with my bare foot. Will quivers beneath my toes.
I focus. Brace myself. Taking on this much Will, just holding it all within myself, is going to be a shock.
It only takes a second; I can barely prevent a gasp as the concentrated power shivers out of the stone and into my control.
I don’t self-imbue it—I’m not even sure how my body would react to so much at once—but its sense of availability, as if it had been freshly ceded to me, is abruptly there.
Surging through me. Making my perception of everything around me almost painfully sharp.
“It’s so very nice to see you again, Uncle. How long has it been? Nine years?”
The words hang and I’m distracted from the exhilarating, sick thrill, glad of the metal hiding my face.
“Ostius, by all the gods we thought you were dead! What are you doing here? And who is this?” Exesius is flummoxed, though to his credit it already sounds a more controlled, measured confusion. “I’m so glad to see you again, lad. But perhaps we should have this reunion in private.”
Not smiling, either, despite his words. Something in his eyes as he looks at Ostius.
All the attention is on them, even my threatening, hovering blades temporarily forgotten. I take two steps to the next stone segment set into the ground. Power shudders through me, another heady rush but not as much a shock as the first time. Two. No outcry. No sign anyone has noticed anything.
“Nonsense!” Ostius smiles broadly. He strolls over to the wall, where the symbol of the Hierarchy glimmers.
Casually drawing their attention farther from me.
“I am certain everyone will want to hear how you sent me to Solivagus before anyone thought it had value, so that our family alone could make the most important decision to be made in three hundred years. Or how you let Princeps Pitorius outmanoeuvre you—not to do the same, but to try and avoid that decision and save everyone?”
Three. Four. I make my movements small and casual. Every nerve firing, so unbearably energised that the terror is somehow secondary.
“You’re not making any sense, Ostius.” Exesius says it gently, and outwardly he appears unconcerned, but he’s off-balance. Too eager to muzzle his apparent nephew. “I don’t know what’s happened to you or where you’ve been these past years, but my boy, let’s—”
“I would like to hear more,” says Dimidius Quiscil suddenly. A glint in his eye. “Your nephew has found his way past guards and security measures and seems to know quite a bit, Exesius.”
Five. Six. The shock is less again. So much Will already at my fingertips that adding even this preposterous amount is more jostle than dazing blow to my senses, now.
“Thank you, Dimidius.” Ostius gives a casual salute to Indol’s father.
Then he spins and gestures to the Hierarchy symbol on the wall.
“Why don’t you start by telling them what this really represents, Uncle?
” He traces the lines in the air, almost absent in the motion.
Seven. “We say it is for the three pillars of the Senate. But it has two other meanings. The first, and oldest, I will not go into right now as I know how confusing it will be.” He smiles condescendingly over his shoulder at the assembled senators.
“But the second? The real reason this is the symbol of the Catenan Republic?” Eight.
“Ostius, stop.” Exesius’s muscles are tensed. Silence hangs, suspended.
Ostius smiles, and opens his mouth.
Nine.
Exesius moves. Eyes black as he leaps at Ostius.
It’s so easy. I self-imbue my entire body, using the tiniest fraction of a fraction of what I now have at my disposal.
Glide forward. Catch his downward strike and expect resistance of some kind, but instead Exesius screams in stunned, horrified pain and I can see from the way his hand dangles at the wrong angle that his wrist is broken.
“Three Princeps,” finishes Ostius quietly, face inches from his uncle’s, gazing into his eyes as if nothing had happened. “All ceding to the man who is planning to kill us.”
I release Exesius’s wrist, letting him slump to the floor. The other senators’ eyes have gone black as well. Insane to think that even after all the Will they’ve imbued, they still have more in reserve. But it’s nowhere near enough to face me. Not now.
Quiscil and Werex are first to act, diving not for me or Ostius but for the stone circle. They skid to their knees, each with a hand pressed against one of the stones marked with II.
Their expressions go from grimly triumphant, to confused, to horrified.
Exesius sees it too and seems to understand.
His shoulders slump. “The Cataclysm is necessary, Ostius. You know that.” He’s dropped all pretence.
A desperate man now, as he gasps it between groans, still clutching his dangling wrist. “I sent you because it can be us who decides, or it can be him. But we can’t—”
“What in all the gods’ graves, Exesius?” It’s a shaken interjection from Dimidius Werex, quickly echoed by the others.
They’ve joined him and Quiscil in trying to take back their Will.
Wear identical, almost comically lost expressions.
I almost feel the same myself, even as the inordinate amount of Will running through me steadies my mind.
The Princeps are ceding? Ostius has to be lying.
It’s contrary to everything I know about the Republic.
To everything everyone knows. “Is he telling the truth?”
“Always, Dimidius. Always!” Ostius smiles at the man still on his knees with hand against cold stone, as if hoping the process of regaining his Will was simply taking longer than it should.
“Trust. Trust! Such a difficult thing. I imagine he just felt a little awkward telling you. Seeing as it involved you all dying, and so on.”
“Ostius. Please. We just voted for peace.” Exesius gestures to the stone circle. “Nothing is more important than preventing bloodshed right now. I know you to be a gentle man, and—”
“‘A gentle man’?” The lightness, the casualness, the humour has fled from Ostius’s eyes.
Only the ice of his rictus smile remains, and he leans back and kicks his uncle in the face; there’s a spray of blood and a groan from around the room as the Princeps of Military flails backward, his cry somewhere between a shout and a squeal.
“Gentle men are the products of love and protection, Uncle.” Another kick, cold and powerful and brutal.
I hear something crack. “They are the offshoots of shelter and na?vety.” Another to the face, and this time the cry is more of a wheezing gasp.
“If there are gentle men in our family, Uncle, it is because you have not yet met them.”
He raises his foot again, as if to stomp down.