Phoenix Rising (3 page)

I should feel lucky
, Conlan brooded,
that they consider me too costly to replace. Too precious to damage permanently.
Everyone knew the stories of the hangings and floggings that were rampant in the legions that men like Turbis and Martius had inherited.
 

It was said that many of the soldiers in the old days – all citizens of the Empire – had baulked at wearing heavy armour and carrying extensive field kits; the result had been an army that was hopelessly prepared for attack or defence. The sand wars and the later rising of the hill tribes had demonstrated very effectively that the legions were no longer up to the task of defending the Empire. Some generals had taken to training and kitting out their own legions at this time. The result could so easily – if history were to be believed – have been civil war and chaos. However, one of them, by lucky chance, was Antius Turbis, who led his men to defeat the desert tribes and later rose to be the preeminent power in the Empire. After the Emperor, of course.

The lesson had been learned: the legions reorganised and the army completely restructured, thanks to Felix Martius. Under Martius, there would be no more hanging, no more flogging; men would be treated with respect and they would treat others in kind. No appalling physical punishments for the men in the new regime.
 

This was how the Hole had been conceived. A psychological punishment that caused no physical harm. It was a bare brick room, four yards square with one small, high window and one iron bound door. A hole in the floor, beneath which – a long way down – water ran, serving as the latrine. There was no bed or seat, just a hard-packed dirt floor, whilst food and water was pushed through a small port at the bottom of the door twice a day. Half ration, of course; it was a punishment, after all... and short-term hunger would do no permanent harm.

 
The trick of the Hole lay in sensory deprivation. No sound reached the prisoner, no stimulus; nothing was left in the cell that would keep the mind occupied. The food plate and water cup were secured to chains and withdrawn within minutes, forcing eating and drinking to become a frantic exercise.
 

The first day dragged; the second spanned a lifetime; the third seemed aeons. On the fourth, Conlan almost lost himself to the abyss…

He knew he had been without stimulus for ten days now because, with nothing else to occupy him, he had focused on this one task. Ten long days remembered that merged into one but separated into what seemed like individual lifetimes. He had a lot of time to think; time to brood over recent events.
 

Conlan had been indoctrinated in the legion to believe the legend of Felix Martius – the great war cat, people called him, in reference to his house. The great cat that changed it all. The great beast that ordered the Twelfth legion decimated and erased from existence.
 

“No!” Conlan had shouted with all the strength of his horror as he stood on the balcony overlooking Empire Square.

Martius had turned to look at him with murderous intent in his eyes; his answer to the challenge a nonchalant flick of the wrist, barely pausing whilst Villius, acting on this barely perceptible order, his eyes red rimmed – perhaps also mourning the Twelfth – had stepped in front of Conlan.

“You must be silent,” Villius had whispered, putting his hands on Conlan’s shoulders. It was a move that would have ended in disaster if General Turbis had not appeared at his side, eyes wide and intense.

“That’s enough, boy,” Turbis had said, his voice curiously gentle. “You are a legionary. Be strong. Stay silent.” The last words were delivered through lips drawn tight. Beads of sweat clung to the old general’s ruddy face.
 

Conlan had found himself nodding slowly as shock set in. He knew then that he had crossed a line. The malaise that had been afflicting him since the battle at Sothlind had finally led to a directly insubordinate and destructive action. This was the new legionary army, yes, but tolerance did not stretch to insurrection.

And so Conlan had stood, dumb and impassive, Villius holding his right arm, Turbis his left, and watched fifty-one men die in agony.

The priests of the dark god had seemed to take an age to make their slow procession from the temple. As they approached, the gathered crowd appeared to draw back as if in fear of their power. The power of the priests of the Sender. Representatives of the one god that all men would eventually meet. The god who chose to send the immortal soul to live with the gods in eternal summer or scream with the damned in the demon pits of the underworld. There had been fifty priests in all, and they had approached in two morbid columns. Conlan had marvelled at their number. They rarely appeared in public and were rumoured to be a small sect, but clearly this was not the case.

Martius had stood, his hands fixed to the balustrade, his attention fixed on the procession for the most part, his eyes flitting occasionally to the Twelfth, his expression unreadable.
 

You cold-hearted bastard,
Conlan had thought.
To show no emotion at this monstrous act. Are we not supposed to be the civilised? Are you not the man who saved the Empire?
The great cat, they called him, fierce but fair, they said. How little they knew.

The priests had formed in front of the Twelfth. They flowed like wraiths into the ranks, until they stood, evenly spaced, between the rows of men.
 

Conlan had known what was coming and the knowledge made it all the more difficult to bear. He could only guess – as he stared down at them from the balcony – at the terror the men of the Twelfth must be experiencing.
 

But none of the doomed legion had tried to move or run – although some appeared to be straining at their bonds – and none made a sound. Most stood stock still, as if at attention on the parade ground, maybe imagining a better reality, or perhaps locking themselves away from what was to come.

The priests were silent as death throughout. Then, as a bell tolled in the temple they had issued from, they had begun their grisly task. The dark god would decide who should be taken. The decision was made by poison.
 

Conlan knew from his time in the academy – where military history was a key component of officer training – that each priest would carry many vials. The dark elixir, they called it; and rumour was that it played some part in the initiation of the priests themselves. On this occasion, it had another purpose.
 

With practised moves, as if they performed the ritual every day of their lives, the priests opened vials and offered them to one legionary at a time. To begin with, the soldiers complied with little fuss, some shook their heads, but then as if under some kind of trance, swallowed the draught the priest held to their lips. They would have known, or hoped as Conlan did, that only one in ten of the vials contained poison.

Decimation. The execution of one tenth of a legion as an example to the remainder. Who would dare to run from battle if they risked such punishment?
 

The atmosphere of sullen acceptance had evaporated when the first man died. It was not a swift and painless death. The legionary emitted a piercing scream as his body arched upward at an unnatural angle, arms rigid behind his back. Standing on tiptoe, he spewed black vomit over the cloak of the man in front of him, then jerked forward and span as he fell, hitting the men around him, his body heaving in spasms as he emitted harrowing mewls of pain.

 
It must have taken two minutes for the man to die. The priests continued, unperturbed, whilst the legionaries became ever less submissive. Some backed away and shook their heads, whilst others clamped their mouths shut and refused to swallow.
 

As the death toll mounted, the crowd, initially silent, had begun to buzz, first as people pushed for a better view, and then as polarisation occurred.
 

Some seemed to be enjoying the spectacle, even calling out encouragement.

“Good riddance, you bloody cowards!” someone shouted.
 

“Ye spineless pricks!” another screamed at the hapless Legionaries.

Others looked appalled, and some of these pulled away. They left the square in disgust, covering their children’s faces as they did to shield them from the macabre spectacle.
 

In others, these emotions turned to anger. Fights erupted as arguments broke out in the crowd. The scene in the square soon regressed into chaos and the militiamen moved to quell a potential riot.

Meanwhile, the other legions stood by in shocked silence, impotent despite all their power to intervene. Shackled by nothing more than rigid discipline and loyalty.
 

They could have stopped it. That was the pity of it all, Conlan thought. If only they could have thrown off the mental shackles that bound them, they could have saved their brothers and taken the Empire for themselves, claiming it back from vile despots like Martius and the Emperor. Taking it for the people.

As the sun progressed through the heavens, the priests delivered their dark elixir to every member of the forlorn Twelfth Legion. In many cases, towards the end, by clamping their hands over mouths and forcing a gagging swallow.
 

When the pitiful mewling finally ceased, fifty-one hideously contorted bodies lay on the hard stone slabs of Empire Square.

Conlan wished he could forget the scene, erase it from his memory and from history. It had joined his other nightmares now, so that every night – as if deprived of stimulus, his mind had nothing better to do than to relive past horrors – he returned to experience it over and over again.

He sighed and allowed his body to fold slowly to the floor until he was sitting, legs crossed.
 

He stared at the door, as he was in the habit of doing at about this time every day. His stomach ached urgently as his thoughts drifted to food. Any minute now, it would arrive and he would force the meagre portion down. Then he would meditate; then exercise; then sleep, if that was what it could be called, returning again to the maelstrom of his subconscious. Most nights he would drift on the edge of sleep for hours, trapped between dream and reality. Often he returned to consciousness with a start, his heart thumping in his chest, cold sweat cooling his body.

Syke
. She was the only relief he would get. But even the memory of her would twist and the goddess’s crimson hair would become blood. Blood that flowed to cover her white armour at the battle of Sothlind, drowning her exquisite features in gore as it coated and transformed her face so that she became something hideous and unnatural, a true creature of nightmare, more gorgon than god.

The door rattled.
 

Conlan shifted his weight minutely, barely able to hold his anticipation. His stomach growled now at the thought of food.
 

It opened wide. Shocking brilliant light surrounded the silhouette of a man in the doorway, a silhouette that slowly resolved into the form of the proctor, Danus Villius.

Villius looked down on Conlan, his expression seemingly a mixture of guilt and empathy. “Cohort Commander.” Villius’s tone, in contrast to his expression, was strictly formal, brusque even. “General Martius will see you now.”

THE SUN DRIFTED LOW in the west, the sky reddening as the afternoon transitioned to evening. Martius sat on a plain veranda overlooking the ornamental pool in the central courtyard of his townhouse.
 

His wife, Ellasand, and his two sons, Ursus and Accipiter, sat upstairs on the balcony of the east wing. Ellasand looked to be reading, happily absorbed in her favourite pastime. The boys were fixated on a game board in front of them, no doubt playing ‘steal the king’ as usual, obsessively dedicated to besting each other, as ever.

With the exception his southern estate and villa, the courtyard of the town house in Adarna was Martius’s favourite spot on earth. So many good memories permeated the house that they blended into one long continuum of contentment and safety.
 

Directly in front of him, down three steps from the veranda, the ground down to the pool was split into vegetable patches and small stands of dwarf fruit trees. He was proud of this place. There was, of course, no need for a man in his position to do any gardening, but he did it for the sheer relaxation. There was something hypnotic and medicinal, he found, in getting his hands dirty and nurturing plants to bear fruit or yield sustenance. For most of his life, he had studied the arts of death but in this place he repaid the earth for his sins, often spending hours pruning tomatoes or setting seeds. It was a tranquil penance, one he longed for often when out on campaign.

The other side of the garden belonged to Ellasand. It stood awash with colour, the result of her dedication to the blooming flowers and shrubs she nurtured. Truth be told, Ellasand believed more in delegation and often enlisted the aid of servants or freedmen in completing the grand design for her half of the courtyard. A design which, Martius found, constantly morphed and refreshed. Barely a month went by in Ellasand’s garden without a major change being instigated.
 

Horticulture had become a form of friendly competition over the years, as if Ellasand was trying to outdo Martius’s efforts, to eclipse his garden with the beauty of her own.

Hearing footsteps approach, Martius turned to see his servant, Darcus, escorting Turbis, Villius and the troubled young officer, Conlan, towards his table.

The boy looks nervous
, he noted, although at twenty-five he doubted many would call Conlan a boy.
He has much to learn about life, but there is iron in him; he may have potential if he can control his recklessness.
 

Martius doubted that Conlan knew how close he had come to execution for his protestations during the decimation. If the Emperor – who grew keener every day on martial punishment – had been present, Conlan would probably be dead.