Revolving Door: Volume 2
ĪRA DRACONIS - III
Content warnings (may contain spoilers
This chapter depicts animal death and deadly infectious diseases.
Laying her sword in the atrium, Marcia wanders to the edge of Gaian’s courtyard pool. The burble of water weaves through the rustle of leaves, the man himself already waiting amid their music. A servant arrives with a tray of fruit and meats, laying it soundlessly at Gaian's side. She fills his goblet, which he wastes no time in drinking from.
“Tell me about yourself,” says the emperor’s son as she appears, “and how someone of your talents and beauty came to do such perilous work.”
Marcia laughs, descending to the pond-side. “What more is there to say that you cannot tell by looking upon me?” Since she began her new assignment, she has spent many an evening like this, whiling an hour away in the villa of her new employer.
“Keep being an enigma, then,” he answers with a grin. “I enjoy those. But don't mind me if I keep inquiring.”
They sit with the sounds for a while, and he drinks meditatively. Marcia hitches her tunic over her knee and dips a foot in the water. “I was born on the other side of the Mediterranean,” she says, staring at the water, “and I was many things, before I was a gladiator.”
Gaian props his chin up on his knee. “You were a queen, I reckon.”
She chuckles. “I have never been an aristocrat, nor ever will be.”
“And yet you have climbed to the upper echelons by your own prowess and grit. A true icon of the modern Empire…”
Marcia turns away, splashing at the water with her toe, so the reflections of ceiling frescoes are shattered. “I can’t say I have climbed much at all. Some still don't like that I mingle among your kind.”
“A shame, then, that they cannot see past your birth. If you were the heir, if the fluke of your birth had been kinder…you would be adored.” Gaian sighs heavily. “These are warring times, Marcia! They love generals like my father. But not poor me…a man more flattered by peace and festivity. Alas, there are many among the senate who can see that, too.”
“And do you think I can help you with that?” Marcia teases. “Do you think you look more warlike by association?”
“That’s not all of it. I do fear for my life, you know. I do not think all my colleagues above sabotage, or, “ he shudders visibly, “assassination. And so your current post serves a double function. Now, if you were the heir, and I, the warrior…I would have been picked to shreds long ago.”
As he chuckles, she leans to pick a slice of ham out of the tray and nibbles on it. “I reckon I would make an effective noble. Eating olives and throwing feasts all year.” She grins. “But that will never be my life, short of marrying into wealth.”
“Marrying, you say? I can help with that.” Gaian grins, but Marcia knows there is nothing but strife to be found at the end of this line of thought.
“I’m afraid I do not want such a life, even if it were within my reach. I am a free spirit…a villa cannot hold me.”
“Oh, you wound me,” he sighs, clutching his heart in mock agony. “Not even a second’s hesitation in rejecting.”
She watches him closely, and catches the trace of a longing glint in his eye, drawn into stark relief by the wine. “I may be a gladiator, but some games are too dangerous even for me to play,” she answers, withdrawing her hand before he can reach and take it.
In that same moment, Marcia hears a sound that is ill at home in the scene: the gentle scrape of her scabbard on stone, echoing through the villa halls.
Once she hears it, her heart thumps louder, and she pricks her ears. Now, there is only the rustling of leaves across the peristyle, and the gentle lap of water. But Marcia knows she cannot be mistaken.
She rises abruptly from her seat by the pool, water scattering in her wake. “Excuse me for a moment,” she says, stepping backward. Before Gaian can protest, she strides away, and back to the atrium.
*
Marcia’s gladius lies in the same position, but its tip points in the opposite direction from how it was left—inwards towards the hall, like an ominous compass.
She picks it up to inspect, and draws the steel blade to find it has not been altered—but as she does, a small scrap of parchment flutters out from inside.
Marcia swoops the pale scrap from the ground. Upon its face, a note is written in rough, untrained minuscule.
As her eyes take in the words, her insides are eaten by frost. Her hand drops to her side.
beware your next match, she wants you dead - o
*
Gaian finds Marcia leaning against an atrium pillar, the note crushed in her fist.
“I am so very sorry!” is the first thing he gasps, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead. “Oh, Marcia, I must have had more wine than I realised. I did not mean to be so forward. I swear upon my very house that I have no designs upon you.”
“Relax, Gaian!” she sighs. “You really are too dramatic. Even if you did, I would take no offence.”
“If ever I dared cross you, you could murder me in cold blood.”
“In a bad mood, perhaps,” she says, then her face hardens. “But, if I may…” She bows her head. “I must confess, I fear my association with you has brought me ill attention.”
At this, Gaian is unusually silent. Then his shoulders sag. “Ah…and for that, I am even sorrier…that was never my intent,” he answers, a mournful look taking hold of his features.
“It is not your fault that your father’s choices have made you enemies. But they may now be my enemies, too.”
He sighs, then eyes her seriously. “Oh, Marcia…now I have brought this upon you, I can only work to fix it. You must know—if there is anything I can buy you to keep you safe—a better home, a better sword—consider it yours.”
Marcia ponders his offer briefly. “If you can buy me the safety of a friend,” she answers, “then that is all I need. Her name is Olivia. She works for the house of Lucia Pollia Diana.”
“Diana.”
“Yes. Lady Diana is where the danger lies.”
There is little need to explain what the danger is. Gaian has already suspected it, and Marcia only leaves the villa once he has pledged his help.
For two dimming days, she awaits her match, casting glances over her shoulder on the streets, watching every passer-by for signs of subterfuge. Olivia does not return. She can only guess what her absence means.
Then the glorious day dawns, all decked in red banners, and the streets are full long before the gates open. There are no clouds in the sky to soften the light upon the colosseum as she turns herself in for match preparations.
“You will be grand today,” Quintus says with a firm hand on her shoulder. He buckles her sword as she rubs oil on her arms with cold fingers. “You are our best fighter. You are better than the odds.”
She smiles at the wrinkled face of her coach. “You know skill alone cannot defeat an unknown beast,” she says. “I will need luck, too. Especially given there may be…interfering circumstances.”
Preparations complete, hands trembling, she turns to the exit arch, swallowing to quell her fright.
“Then may the gods bless your step today!” Quintus calls after her, as she strides into the light of the glowing archway, step by momentous step. “For you will need it… The dragon’s ire is not easily quenched.”
The strange words strike a sour chord as the gate clangs shut between them.
In that moment, Marcia senses some deep, rank wrongness about the scene. Her coach's voice has turned alien. The weight of her gladius instills no certainty.
Fear begins to grip her as she walks into the screams of her spectators and the light that burns the colosseum sand. She marches into their midst with her chin lifted high, and as the sun hits her, she draws—
—Quintus’ wooden sword.
*
Then, at the other end of the arena, she sees the wolves.
These wolves do not howl. They snap and snarl and gnash their frothing teeth. They strain on the ropes, trying to walk like men.
She sees in their eyes the hollowing madness that takes dogs, that infects the humans they bite with the same. She has heard many names, but Tadla called it rabies, the terminal rage. None she saw with it ever survived.
All of the wolves are sick, sick to the brain.
Standing alone on the sand, wielding a blade of blunted wood, Marcia has never quite seen death this close. The gamemakers must have been bought. And so was Quintus, old Quintus, the only man she would trust to hand her her sword.
But the sun is harsh, and this is no dream. Her attention snaps back to the roaring amphitheatre. She marches forth anyway, head pridefully high as if this were not her execution. On the other side of the fence, the blade descends through the thick air, the air of the Bosphorus strait, and slices the wolves’ ropes.
The pack, loosened from their strangling bonds, tear across the sand. The screams rise like a crimson tide, but they cannot drown out the rattle of the rabid wolves.
There is nothing now, nothing between Marcia and the dragon’s ire. Diana’s ire. The ire of centuries of conquest and greed.
She looks up at the audience, turns, and runs.
From the day Orobelle and company make landing in Constantinople, there is an assault of red painted banners declaring, on this very day, a gladiator match for the eons. Upon each banner is a painting of an armed warrior facing a nondescript toothed beast, without enough detail to identify as one species or another. By then, crowds are already thickening on the roads into the arena, stifling their advance through the city.
“Is the match happening now?” Hong Yi exclaims. “No way, can we watch?”
“We don't have time to waste on a tacky blood sport,” Orobelle growls.
But luck has other plans—for as they approach the grand arena of stone and its thousand terraced archways, the corefinder’s needle cleaves to it, and resolutely points into the oval building.
With a loud groan, Orobelle turns to squint at the arena’s curved facade, glancing between the structure and the corefinder’s traitorous needle.
“Our target is inside,” she says. “I guess we’ll watch one fight.”
“‘fraid that's no surprise,” Vesper replies. “Looks like the whole city is here to watch.”
Honourless has stowed in her pocket a small cache of stolen denarii; these, she hands out to her companions as they are ushered through the vaulting arena portal by stone-faced men.
The teeming, muttering crowds flow like molasses through hallways and up the steps, at times so dim that they almost lose each other in the sluggish torrent. As the archway approaches, Orobelle shrills for her companions. They exit between red pillars into the blinding sun, and she turns to see a few dozen concentric tiers of stands rising like a bowl from the sandy oval in the middle. The lowermost are filled with spectators by now, and the higher seats are getting packed as she watches.
A passer bumps her elbow, then another. “Hey!” she spits at their back. Dusting out her rumpled dress, the duchess glances at the corefinder again. The needle points towards the lowest terrace.
She begins to push through the throng, and Dorian pursues with a shout, the rest of the party tailing him. A human chain, they snake through gaps between other visitors.
Then a horn fanfare rips across the arena. The stands explode with a scramble for places, and again they are bounced about into disarray.
Orobelle does not know how many whacked elbows and bruised toes she endures before the lowest bulwark of the arena surfaces from the mass of bodies, and she does not stop pushing till her palm meets its rough concrete. “Here!” she shouts then, turning to wave a hand over the crowd. Dorian shoulders his way between two shorter men to reach her, Honourless’ arm in his grip.
Her companions gather around her, mopping sweat from their brows. “You could not convince me to return here if you paid me,” Honourless mutters, but Orobelle’s eyes have returned to the instrument cradled in her palms.
It points across the oval, at the other end of the arena. She groans. “You cannot be serious.”
The horns die down, and a voice replaces them. “Welcome, welcome all! Are you ready, to witness a game for the ages, a challenge never seen before?” A tidal wave of whistles and screams answers, louder than a storm. “On one end of the arena…a horror beyond your wildest imagination! Behold!”
A gate clangs open beneath them. It emits a splash of water—and then comes the baying, so strangled and ghostly that the crowd falls silent at once.
“What in the Light’s name is that?” Orobelle breathes.
A bristling pack of wolves has scrambled out of the portico, each attached by a rope at the neck to their keeper within. They do not walk like wolves, but like puppets: teetering on their hind legs, jolting across the ground in zigzags, their claws scrabbling as if clinging for their lives. Their mouths pour foaming spittle onto the sand. The person holding their leashes never exits the gate—it crashes shut, louder than a temple bell, separating the keeper from the beasts.
Orobelle has never seen anything resembling the bizarre condition of these wolves. From the way that Vesper and Hong Yi turn to each other, she senses there is something unprecedented about it to them, too.
At the far end, the other gate closes. Out of the shadow marches their vaunted gladiator, answered by a surge of screams. The blood-red flash of their cape is visible even from here, their helmet topped by sinuous horns.
“Who will face them but Marcia, the Brazen Bull? Our finest gladiator, she has bested lions, bulls, and even dragons! But can she best a pack of demon wolves? Or has she met her match today?” The voice pauses. “And what's this? Her weapon! It is not her gladius today, but a dummy sword! The odds are enormous! How will she weasel her way out this time?”
Orobelle hears shrieks around her. “Not Marcia!” cries a woman. “Not she! This is certain death! Can't they end the fight?”
The war drum rolls, like the beating of a heart. The rope is sliced. The wolves tear forth. The gladiator halts, turns, and begins to sprint—away from the pack, towards the banners.
The corefinder needle swings.
Leaning forward, Orobelle grips the device with white knuckles, eyes flicking between its golden face and the warrior. “This can't be,” she breathes, pointing a shaky finger at the woman in red, watching as the needle spins to follow her.
The moment the wolves make their appearance, Vesper and Hong Yi curse in unison. They can hear their hoarse snarling, a scraping noise that throats aren't meant to make.
“You’re seeing this, right?” Hong Yi shouts to Vesper as the gladiator marches into the open. “It can't be right. They can't expect her to win unless she has backup. Right?”
Vesper only concedes a clenching of her jaw. “This is an execution,” she growls. “One rabid wolf, she might be able to take. But fifteen? Oh, and they gave her a bloody wooden sword, too!”
“What?” He pushes his glasses up his nose. “No! No.”
The drums roll. The ropes are cut. The wolves clump in a pack and tide out towards the moving figure.
Sparing only a moment’s hesitation, the gladiator spins, and runs for the gate. The crowd gasps as the red cloak streaks across the arena, the rabid pack closing in upon her from every side.
Vesper can see that the warrior has no interest in some valiant final stand. Every move betrays her shrewdness. She has realised what they have—that there is no winning if she faces them. There is no winning if even one speck of spittle lands in her eye.
It is then that Orobelle flies to the baluster, and raises a shaky hand to point at the gladiator. And when she cries, “It's her! Marcia, the warrior—she's our mark!” a thousand thoughts crash together.
Vesper casts Hong Yi a stricken glance. “We must go help her!” she shouts, tugging on his arm.
“Are you serious?” He frowns, but she can see the fatalistic agreement in his eyes. “We just settled that it's certain death down there!”
Again she watches the gladiator, fleeing for her life across the sand. “How else are we taking her out of there alive? Any bright ideas?”
With both hands on the baluster, Vesper boosts herself onto the barrier. A frantic chorus of panic explodes from the spectators around her, amid which Hong Yi bursts out, “Okay! Okay! I'll help you land, but you're on your own once you hit the ground!”
“That's all I need, thank you!”
“You’re mad, you know that?” He taps her arm, and she feels herself lighten.
With a single dizzying leap, she launches herself right off the barrier.
It feels like sinking through water with her backpack, the way she descends too slowly through the air, among a thousand gazes. But this is no river: the air burns around her as she falls, a wave of cries following her down. She cannot understand much beyond the crackle of fear and awe in their voices, and as her feet meet the sand, she can suddenly hear the whole colosseum—the bellows and whistles and coughs and snarls.
She spends a second sizing up the ring. She can make it across in less than a minute. Then, in full view of the terraces, she takes off after the wolf pack, dodging their trail of spit. By now, Marcia is scrambling up the rungs of the entrance gate. Beneath her, the beasts rear up on their hind legs, piling over each other with fangs flashing at her shins.
The walls blur by, and the cracks in the walls, and the dark pawprints where the wolves pounded their saliva into the sand. As air rubs past, static builds on Vesper’s hands.
She races, eyes narrowing, till there is nothing between her and the gladiator but a roiling pack of wolves. She snatches a rock and hurls it at the pack. As it clangs on the gate, her heart booms louder than their godless snarling.
“Oi! You fiends, over here!”
Sixteen pairs of eyes turn, wolf and human. Vesper’s gaze meets the gladiator’s, three rungs up the gate. Her red cloak billows like a war flag, her stance proud despite the surrender in her gaze. Her eyes widen.
Then the tide of wolves turns upon her.
Stupid bravado has landed Vesper in many a bind, and it still startles her how fast that fire drains away in the face of death. She has watched bombs explode, has gazed down the barrels of cannons. And as she looks these walking corpses in the eye, her blood freezes in the same way.
But this is the nature of her training: the terror has to be separated from the rote actions of her body. The terror can be nursed later. Death is forever.
By now, the wolves have shrunk the gap to metres before her, when that elusive window appears—when they are closer to her than to Marcia.
This is the only moment when she can act. The current is already thrashing to be reunited with the ground, and it needs no telling where to go.
Vesper hears the gladiator scream, a wordless protest.
And then she thrusts a hand forward, and the lightning strikes.
Marcia can barely make sense of what her eyes are seeing, when the rock clangs on the gate, reverberating in her teeth and she turns to see a person, with wild brown hair and nothing but rage in their posture. Perhaps in her terror she is finally hallucinating, three arms above the ground, hands burning on iron.
But there they stand, their hands spitting sparks into the ground as the world blows by. And like a stormcloud, the pack whirls around to close in on the newcomer, and all Marcia can do is cry out—
Lightning booms, not from the sky, but from the stranger's hands. It arcs through the wolf pack, one beast at a time, illuminating everything. She can smell the singed flesh, see the blinding white, feel the hairs on her neck stand.
For three seconds, she watches the wolves twitch and convulse, their last puppet dance before they all crumple to the ground. Fifteen wolves are now fifteen corpses.
Over them, the lightning winks out as fast as it appeared. The arena is too silent. Now, Marcia can hear herself panting, the air like hot coals in her lungs. Beneath her, the person—a woman perhaps, but she isn't sure—towers over the dead wolves with bolts crackling off her palms, and meets Marcia’s eye again.
Amid the first rousing whistles and whoops of the audience, she begins to descend the lattice of the gate, a tremor in her step.
“Who…who are you?” she calls.
“Ah… Vesper!” the stranger answers.
“Vesper? Never have I been so happy to see the evening star,” Marcia cries, dodging around the corpses and stumbling as her knees wobble. She is all too aware of the crowd watching, yet as Vesper offers her arm, she could imagine they are alone in the world.
“You…are…Marcia?” asks Vesper.
“Yes,” Marcia says, eloquence evaporating. She takes Vesper’s arm, the relief almost bowling her over. “How did you do that? With the lightning?”
Vesper seems briefly confused. “How… Fulgur…fuego? O, el rayo! Ah…” She laughs awkwardly. “I don't…Latin.”
“But—”
They are awakened then to the thud, thud, thud of armoured footsteps, as the gate begins to creak upward again. Over their heads, a voice bellows, “Halt, intruder!”
All at once, they crash back into the world. Marcia yanks on Vesper’s arm. “Run!” she screams, and Vesper seems to understand, for they both take off into the arena at the same time—only to find another rank of guards closing in from the other gate. Without a word, they swerve in a perpendicular direction, and the two bands arc towards them, swords flashing. She can feel the surge of lightning in the air as her companion begins to gather another strike…
A flash of a face. A third person blinks into existence—tall, pale, scarred–muttering in a language she doesn't know. Vesper cries, honour—, voice edged with relief. Before Marcia can even comprehend what she is seeing, nor the infinity of other sounds beyond their voices, the new stranger seizes their arms with talonlike fingers, and the world turns inside out.
They are in a forest. Vesper barely reacts, so Marcia steels herself too. The stranger cries out, a roar without words, agony comprehensible.
The world turns inside out again.
When they land, they are gazing over the arena from which they just fled, from an overlooking baluster. At once, the watchers in the stands scatter and point and scream her name, and a girl with pale hair and an extravagant pink tunic steps in front of her. “Marcia!” she shouts. “I am Orobelle, Duchess of Diamonds, Knot of Worlds. We are about to take you elsewhere. Any objections?”
“Not at all, I’m in danger—we must go!” Marcia answers as the shouting crescendos around them.
Orobelle turns back to the stranger. “Honourless, let's go. You can do this, right?”
Honourless—ah, that's what Vesper said—shouts something whose warlike spirit carries across the language barrier. She feels Vesper snatch her right hand, and a man she doesn't know, her left. Then the world begins to warp and ripple, and Orobelle says, “Hong Yi! Whatever you did when she ghosted with you—it helped.”
Hong Yi—the one holding her left hand—nods once, and as he does, everything around them, every seam between the blocks, every frightened bystander, lengthens into stripes, like threads in a loom, no picture or design discernible in them.
The world ripples, and her stomach lurches, but her discomfort cannot compare to that of Honourless, whose scream fills every gap of this incomprehensible weaving.
In what feels at once like a second and an hour, the colours snap back in place different.
It is silent here. The echo of the colosseum still crowds Marcia’s head, but they are not in the colosseum anymore.
They are standing atop a small hill. A lake shines blue by a town of cuboid buildings, plains rolling away in every direction. The wind blows by, carrying a gentle chill.
Thud. Beside Orobelle, Honourless tumbles onto her side, motionless.
”Honourless.” Orobelle stares down at her, crouches, and shakes her shoulder. Honourless does not so much as twitch. The girl rises again. “She's out cold. Dorian—”
Before she has completed her request, Dorian has already knelt to scoop her up. The duchess waves for her companions, and points down the hill at a cluster of buildings. “We must lodge somewhere, and catch Marcia up.”
Without another word, they begin their trek towards the buildings. She becomes aware of Vesper strolling up beside her, a strident worry in her gaze. “What is it?” asks Marcia, trying not to feel as if those eyes were burning into her.
“Lobos— wolf teeth,” she says simply, pointing at Marcia’s leg.
She glances at her shins for the first time since the battle, and sees a gash where one of the beasts’ fangs raked her skin, blood staining her sandal straps.