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The Scorpion Obsidians die first from the heat. Then many of the Grays, including my Praetorians. Only the hardiest amongst them stagger with us now. We have little water to share.
Seven Golds remain, including Kalindora and Cicero. To the west, the mountain peaks ride the waves of the heat-warped horizon. To the east, the waste stretches as if it were all that existed. War machines move beyond the irradiated clouds.
Desiccated tanks from Darrow’s surprise retreat across the Ladon stand blackened in the distance, victims of lucky hits by naval guns through the mess of the electrical storm. How Darrow slipped the noose is beyond understanding. Or it would be if the Golds fought as an army instead of as a collective of greedy autarchs.
We did this to ourselves. And our men, my Praetorians, millions of civilians and loyal legionnaires paid the price.
Umbra visit us as we walk. White chalk twisters that spin ninety meters high. They cake us with chalk and coat our lungs with a thin white film that comes out in clumps wh
en we cough.
A fever has gripped me since I was pulled from the killing field. Reveries come and go. I see my father and grandmother often. Sometimes there is a chair. Great and silver and carved with eccentric faces. I have never seen it before. And there is a white door that appears always on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of cicadas and the crashing of waves.
I have seen it before in my dreams.
Sometimes I reach it.
It swings open to reveal nothing but shadow. And then it is on the horizon again.
I stumble often on the unstable sand and chalk, but Kalindora steadies me. She cauterized her left arm just beneath the shoulder where Darrow’s blade hacked it off. Still, she is the source of our momentum, the quiet, optimistic heart of our desperate push toward Erebos. We will not make it, I think. With the interference from the storm disrupting our trackers, our best hope is a chance encounter with Society forces. If any still remain.
In late afternoon, we discover the remains of a stork crashed into the sand. We harvest it for supplies, and gather around to see if its coms are working. They are not. But at least we have water and rations. Kalindora declares it our camp for the night. Five Praetorian Grays and seven Golds hunker between the boulders to wait for the sun to depart.
Soon after nightfall we hear ships in the sky.
“They can’t see us,” Cicero says from the nest he’s made in the dirt. Of all the survivors, he seems the only one to retain any of his humor.
“Thirty million soldiers fought in that battle,” Kalindora says. “Even if they could, you try picking up all those pieces.”
“But we are the scions of ancient houses,” Cicero protests. “The very desert should lift us to salvation. I tell you. When I saw the Morning Star emerge from the storm, I thought I’d take any form of possible future as grace. But between the heat, the sun, this blasted sand, the nightcrawlers, and Rising hunting parties, I have the sneaking suspicion that we are going to die in the most worthless fashion.”
“Pulvis et umbra sumus,” I reply.
“That was a Raa, wasn’t it?” Cicero asks. “The one who tried to dance with the rail slug?” I nod. “I swear, those fuckers quote themselves almost as much as the Augustans. Here be lions indeed. What I’d give for a nice lion hunt right now. Sherry by the fire on the savanna as a nice flank of meat bubbles over the fire.”
“You eat lion?” I mumble, though the act of speaking makes my face feel as though it will fall off. “Isn’t it—”
“Stringy? Oh indeed, it’s more about the aesthetic and political innuendo really. Actually, I have a tale! You lot look like you could use one.” He rubs his hands together. He always did love the limelight. “Father let me join when he took old Nero au Augustus himself for a hunt once—my, but that man was mad. Refused to eat anything he didn’t kill with a razor. He was fast, though, almost caught a white gazelle at a watering hole. Two more strides and he would have had him in the sprint.”
“No one can catch a desert gazelle. I don’t care how ancient one’s genes are,” Kalindora says. “The Augustans were no faster than anyone else.”
Cicero pauses, cocking his head toward the desert as if he heard something. With a shake of his curled hair, he returns to his story, frowning when a clump of it falls out. “That’s what Father told old Telemanus. But Kavax just told him to watch. You know what Nero did when the gazelle escaped? He kept running, even when it had him by two kilometers. He was gone the whole night. And then he came back with it on his shoulders while the Browns were laying out breakfast the next morning. All covered in cuts and dirt. I’ll remember what he said till the day I’m shot into the sun.” He takes on a very obnoxious rendition of Augustus’s Martian timbre. “Beasts must stop for water. I carry mine.”
Kalindora belts out a laugh that startles one of the sleeping Grays. “That’s a load of shit.”
Cicero looks direly offended. “How dare you impugn my honor. As sure as Heliopolis is the second most beautiful city in the worlds, Tyche being the first, of course.”
Kalindora snorts. “More like Elysium. No arguments for Hyperion, Lysander?”
I shrug.
“Elysium is as cold as a logos’s groin,” Cicero crows. “And he said what he said, ‘I carry mine.’ What a man, Nero. But that’s not the best part. Father doesn’t like to be the small man on his own planet. So the next day, he shot himself one of those big Nemean lions and tried serving it up to Augustus at dinner.”
“I imagine that went well,” Kalindora says.
“Surprising fact about Nero,” Cicero says with a wag of the finger. “Vast sense of humor.”
“Like you knew him.”
