1.27

The Son of Rome

Griffon and I made our rounds through the streets of Olympia, seeing what there was to see and balancing political intrigue with simple curiosity. The Half-Step City was a sharp contrast to Rome in almost every way. Especially when it came to the tongues spoken.

My mentor had taught me the Alikoan dialect well. I hadn’t had much use for it in the legions, but my time as a slave had seen my grasp on it perfected. But that was only one language. There were dozens of tongues being spoken in the Half-Step City, at least three at any given time on any given street. It was fascinating and disorienting in equal measure. I had grown used to hearing everything there was to be heard years ago, one of many skills that Gaius had hammered into me. That awareness worked against me now, made it hard to think straight.

It would’ve been hard to focus regardless. What conversation I could understand was conducted at blistering paces, about topics of politics and law that I had no frame of reference for as a foreigner. Children laughed and shrieked, running about naked or in simple genderless tunics. Figs, grapes, turnips, pears, apples, honeycombs, chickpeas, and myrtle berries abounded. Periodically, Griffon would snatch a handful of something with a pankration hand while the Metic selling it wasn’t looking. Occasionally, he even offered me some.

The fruits were all incredibly sweet, decadent beyond belief. In general, that was probably how I would describe this place. With its grand public buildings and massive, riotous agora.

And that was before taking into account Kaukoso Mons, the gemstone-lined mountain that served as a monument to all of man’s excesses.

I would give the Greeks one thing. In their virtues and their vices, they held nothing back.

“Well, this is my stop,” Griffon suddenly said, alighting on something that deserved his extended attention. I caught him by the arm before he could fully step away. The laurel leaf crown wrapped around his bicep was curiously warm to the touch.

“Not yet,” I told him, glancing meaningfully towards the greater mayhem of the agora. We’d been traveling side streets for the most part, just in case. Griffon raised an eyebrow.

“Ho, is that what last night was about?”

“What do you think?”

Griffon smirked and pulled his arm free. “Fine then, give me a moment.” That said, he turned and walked confidently into a residential building with no defining characteristics that I could see. It was a squat, almost ugly thing compared to the splendor of the public constructions.

I closed my eyes and focused on breathing while he did whatever it was he was doing. Counting today, it had been four days since I slept. Three days since Griffon and I had met at the eighth wonder of the world and consumed the starlight marrow of a crow.

Sleep was something that a cultivator of sufficient advancement didn’t really need, and it was something that a soldier of sufficient rank could rarely afford. I was out of practice, ironically, my days as a slave having been far more restful than my time in the legions, but some things were never truly forgotten. If anything, my advancement… at the end, had made it even easier to keep moving with the sun and the moon. The marrow helped as well, in a nebulous, unsettling way that I still hadn’t pinned down.

But even so, the mind needed a moment from time to time. I focused on breathing in the steady rhythm of a proper cadence, allowing my plans, my doubts, and my fears slip away for just a moment as I unwound.

Griffon wasted no time ruining my short peace, leaping out of the second story terrace of the unassuming home with pankration hands blazing around him.

I inhaled sharply, calling the captain’s virtue to my hand as I expanded my senses through the building in search of the threat.

I found it at the same moment that a wooden dining table came hurtling out of the building after Griffon. The former young aristocrat deflected the projectile furniture with his violent intent, sending it spiraling into another building where it exploded into shrapnel upon impact. He landed adroitly behind me, leaning back-to-back with his elbow propped up on my shoulder

“Give me a hand, will you?”

“You have enough,” I said flatly. He clicked his tongue, utterly unashamed of himself.

The scarred Heroine, Elissa, slammed open the door on the first floor, murder in her desert heat eyes. They went first to Griffon, seething annoyance in them that I fully empathized with, before settling on me. The Heroine sighed explosively.

“Solus. This lowly sophist would like to offer your student some guidance.”

A pankration hand dug its middle and index fingers into the small of my back, the heat of the Rosy Dawn’s flames growing steadily hotter.

“I can think of nothing better for his development,” I said, and was promptly jabbed by several more burning fingers. “Unfortunately, we have somewhere to be.”

Elissa scowled fully, resting a hand on the bronze blade at her hip. She wasn’t wearing her usual cult attire, I realized. She wasn’t even wearing the finery of a normal citizen of Olympia. She was dressed like a Metic, in drab white cloth with only a sash around her waist that held her sword, and a necklace of simple iron thread around her neck. She looked about as unassuming as a cultivator of her standing possibly could.

“So you came into my home, drank my wine, for what? Just to ruin my day?”

I glanced back at Griffon. He shrugged.

“I thought you might like to join us”

“Why would I-” Elissa stopped short, looking at me closer. Warily. Her eyes flickered up and down the street and all its people. “Now?”

Griffon smiled pleasantly at her over his shoulder. “Would you rather wait until dinner?”

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The Heroine snarled a curse.

S

We found Jason sitting on the lip of a fountain that was as wide around as the entire bathhouse that Griffon and I had made use of earlier that morning. It wasn’t a fountain in the same sense that Rome had fountains. It was not acts of engineering that made this water flow.

The water within the fountain simply fell up. It streamed into the air as if the whole world was upside down, and the sky above was as the ground beneath our feet. Past a certain point, some thirty or forty feet in the air, those streams spiraled out in every direction and suddenly returned to normalcy, falling back into the pool below. It made for a dazzling sight.

And it also obscured everyone on the other side of the fountain from view. The sound of rushing water obscured most small sounds. For all that Jason was lounging with a young woman at his side, exchanging pleasant conversation without a care in the world, he had chosen his spot with care.

He noticed me shortly after I noticed him, his expression lighting up in a more genuine sense. Without looking, he placed a hand on the face of the woman beside him and pushed her back into the fountain. She shrieked as the odd currents of the structure carried her away.

“Solus,” he called, raising that same hand and greeting. Then his eyes slipped past me and noticed who I had brought with me and all that excitement fell away.

“You.”

“Him?” I asked, glancing back at Griffon.