heart leapt at the sound of a familiar voice, and he turned to see a few men behind him on the line, Desmond, Raj, Kaz, and Luzi, his old friends, the four of them all chained, all looking as badly beaten as he must have looked. They all looked at him with relief, clearly happy to see that he was alive.
“Talk again,” a taskmaster seethed to Raj, “and I’ll take your tongue.”
Darius, as relieved as he was to see his friends, wondered about the countless others who had fought and served with him, who had followed him into the streets of Volusia.
The taskmaster moved further down the line, and when he was out of sight, Darius turned and whispered back.
“What of the others? Did anyone else survive?”
He prayed secretly that hundreds of his men had made it, that they were somewhere waiting, prisoners maybe.
“No,” came the decisive answer from behind them. “We’re the only ones. All the others are dead.”
Darius felt as if he had been punched in the gut. He felt he had let everyone down, and despite himself, he felt a tear roll down his cheek.
He felt like sobbing. A part of him wanted to die. He could hardly conceive it: all those warriors from all those slave villages…. It had been the beginning of what was going to be the greatest revolution of all time, one that would change the face of the Empire forever.
And it had ended abruptly in a mass slaughter.
Now any chance of freedom they’d had was destroyed.
As Darius marched, in agony from the wounds and the bruises, from the iron shackles digging into his skin, he looked around and began to wonder where he was. He wondered who these other prisoners were, and where they were all being led. As he looked them over, he realized that they were all about his age, and they all seemed extraordinarily fit. As if they were all fighters.
They rounded a bend in the dark stone tunnel, and sunlight suddenly met them, streaming through iron cell bars up ahead, at the end of the tunnel. Darius was shoved roughly, jabbed in the ribs with a club, and he surged forward with the others until the bars were opened and he was given one final kick, out into daylight.
Darius stumbled with the others and they all fell down as a group onto the dirt. Darius spit dirt from his mouth and raised his hands to protect himself from the harsh sunlight. Others rolled on top of him, all of them tangled up in the shackles.
“On your feet!” shouted a taskmaster.
They walked from boy to boy, jabbing them with clubs, until finally Darius scrambled with the others to his feet. He stumbled as the other boys, chained to him, tried to gain their balance.
They stood and faced the center of a circular dirt courtyard, perhaps fifty feet in diameter, framed by high stone walls, cell bars around its openings. Facing them, standing in the center, scowling back, stood one Empire taskmaster, clearly their commander. He loomed large, taller than the others, with his yellow horns and skin, and his glistening red eyes, wearing no shirt, his muscles bulging. He wore black armor on his legs, boots, and studded leather on his wrists. He wore the rankings of an Empire officer, and he paced up and down, examining them all with disapproval.
“I am Morg,” he said, his voice dark, booming with authority. “You will address me as sir. I am your new warden. I am your whole life now.”
He breathed as he paced, sounding more like a snarl.
“Welcome to your new home,” he continued. “Your temporary home, that is. Because before the moon is up, you will all be dead. I will take great pleasure in watching you all die, in fact.”
He smiled.
“But for as long as you are here,” he added, “you will live. You will live to please me. You will live to please the others. You will live to please the Empire. You are our objects of entertainment now. Our show things. Our entertainment means your death. And you will execute it well.”
He smiled a cruel smile as he continued pacing, surveying them. There came a great shout somewhere off in the distance, and the entire ground trembled beneath Darius’s feet. It sounded like the shout of a hundred thousand citizens filled with bloodlust.
“Do you hear that cry?” he asked. “That is the cry of death. A thirst for death. Out there, behind those walls, lies the great arena. In that arena, you will fight others, you will fight yourselves, until none of you are left.”
He sighed.
“There will be three rounds of battle,” he added. “In the final around, if any of you survive, you will be granted your freedom, granted a chance to fight in the greatest arena of all. But don’t get your hopes up: no one has ever survived that long.
“You will not die quickly,” he added. “I am here to make sure of it. I want you dying slowly. I want you to be great objects of entertainment. You will learn to fight, and learn it well, to prolong our pleasure. Because you are not men anymore. You are not slaves. You are lower than slaves: you are gladiators now. Welcome to your new, and final, role. It won’t last long.”
Chapter Five
Volusia marched through the desert, her hundreds of thousands of men behind her, the sound of their marching boots filling the sky. It was a sweet sound to her ears, a sound of progress, of victory. She looked out as she went, and she was satisfied to see corpses lining the horizon, everywhere on the dried hard sands outlying the Empire capital. Thousands of them, sprawled out, all perfectly still, lying on their backs and looking up to the sky in agony, as if they had been flattened by a giant tidal wave.
Volusia knew it was no tidal wave. It was her sorcerers, the Voks. They had cast a very powerful spell, and had killed all those who thought they could ambush and kill her.
Volusia smirked as she marched, seeing her handiwork, relishing in this day of victory, in once again outsmarting those who meant to kill her. These were all Empire leaders, all great men, men who had never been defeated before, and the only thing standing between her and the capital. Now here they were, all these Empire leaders, all the men who had dared to defy Volusia, all the men who had thought they were smarter than her – all of them dead.
Volusia marched between them, sometimes avoiding the bodies, sometimes stepping over them, and sometimes, when she felt like it, stepping right on them. She took great satisfaction in feeling the enemy’s flesh beneath her boots. It made her feel like a kid again.
Volusia looked up and saw the capital up ahead, its huge golden dome shining unmistakably in the distance, saw the massive walls surrounding it, a hundred feet high, noted its entrance, framed by soaring, arched golden doors, and felt the thrill of her destiny unfolding before her. Now, nothing lay between her and her final seat of power. No more politicians or leaders or commanders could stand in her way with any claim to rule the Empire but she. The long march, her taking one city after the next all these moons, her amassing her army one city at a time – finally, it all came to this. Just beyond those walls, just beyond those shining golden doors, stood her final conquest. Soon, she would be inside, she would assume the throne of power, and when she did, there would be no one and nothing left to stop her. She would take command of all the Empire’s armies, of all its provinces and regions, the four horns and two spikes, and finally, every last creature of the Empire would have to declare her – a human – their supreme commander.
Even more so, they would have to call her Goddess.
The
