1.49

The Son of Rome

Solus. The wind carried my name to me, a whisper with no visible source. I grunted and stood up, shrugging the weight of command off my shoulders.

“Ninety-three?” Selene asked, disappointed. She was perched on her scarlet tripod, legs kicking beneath her while she kept count of my repetitions. “I was sure you’d break a hundred today.” One hundred repetitions of any given exercise was the mark Socrates had set for me and my physical training. Once I could do a hundred I increased the weight of gravitas until I could barely do one, and then I worked my way back up.

“The spirit is willing, but the body is weak,” I lied, standing tall and stretching. When I winced it was only partly an act. I could have pushed through and reached a hundred today, but I would have suffered for every last repetition.

As an excuse it would do. I glanced meaningfully at the Scarlet Oracle as I stretched. Her head tilted, golden hair spilling over one shoulder.

“Would the barbarian like a massage?” As always, the old crone of the Broken Tide read my intentions before anyone else in the courtyard. The ancient woman leered at me with her blind, trisected eyes. “How conceited, to think your ugly, rugged body worthy of an Oracle’s holy hands.”

“Oh!” Selene’s back straightened suddenly, the girl drawing her golden veil back down over her face. “I see. Well, I suppose…”

“You don’t have to force yourself, dear. These things are difficult for a girl your age,” came the sympathetic sounds of a woman with nothing but bad intentions. I stared flatly at the Oracle from the Alabaster Isles, a woman named Chara with lips painted white-gold, with a line of the same color running from the tip of her tongue to the back of her throat. She smiled, her right leg curled up against her chest with her cheek resting on her knee. “I suppose there’s nothing for it. Come and let this one ease your aching body.”

Slim hands wrapped around my bicep, and before I could respond Selene had already pulled me halfway to the Scarlet Oracle’s private quarters with the overwhelming strength of a Heroic cultivator. Melodious laughter and ugly cackling followed us all the way into the room, ceasing only when Selene slammed the door shut behind us.

Each of the oracles enjoyed the privilege of a personal living space, tucked away behind the walls of the late kyrios’ octagonal courtyard within Kaukoso Mons.

Before the Tyrant’s death these quarters had been reserved for sleeping and bathing only. The kyrios wasn’t cruel enough to require the holy women to do their bathing and sleeping in his presence, but he also wasn’t kind enough to give them private leisure. If an oracle was not asleep, in a bath, or in her public temple where mystikos and made men could seek her wisdom, the kyrios had decided she would be in his courtyard. Waiting on one of the tripods he had chiseled himself – in case he ever had a need for her.

Though there was no one left to enforce it after the kyrios’ death, some of the oracles still maintained the habit. For them – the oracles from the City of Squalls, the Alabaster Isles, and the Coast – I assumed it was the inertia of long practice as much as it was a desire for company. The other holy women mostly kept to themselves in their private quarters.

Whether that was because of my continued presence, I couldn’t say. It hardly mattered. Unlike Griffon, I hadn’t come to Olympia in search of an Oracle’s wisdom.

Selene pressed her back against the door to her personal quarters, the entire piece a broad slab of bone-white wood with dyed carvings of a bisected sun sprawled across it. Her veiled face pointed towards me. For a long moment, neither of us spoke.

“How did I do?” she hesitantly asked. I smirked.

“Well enough.”

The Scarlet Oracle slumped in relief, and the torchlights in the room shifted as Scythas stepped out of the open air beside me.

“Were you seen?” I asked him. He shook his head.

“No further than the stairway to heaven.”

“Even by the elders?”

“I swung wide around each of their domains,” he said firmly. “And I waited until the Oracle was lost in her fumes before I moved.”

Thus far, the veil of shifting wind that Scythas had been using to obscure his movements around the mountain had been flawless. Though he wasn’t confident in much, the Hero of the Scything Squall had been adamant that he could avoid detection better than Selene. It was the only reason I had allowed him to leave the kyrios’ estate – if he was to be believed, the only entities on the mountain that he couldn’t slip past with his veil were the tyrants in their domains and the Oracle of his own Howling Wind Cult.

It was for that reason that we never met outside of his Oracle’s working hours, while her senses were addled by the toxic fumes that holy women used to invoke prophecy. It was common knowledge that the oracles could no longer deliver prophecies, but the old practices had their own timeless momentum.

“Good.” I sat down heavily on a cushioned lounge, snapping off the buckles and straps affixing my breastplate to my body with practiced motions. A gift from Socrates, insomuch as he was capable of giving gifts. I’d asked the old philosopher how much it had cost him, where it had come from, but he’d only waved me off and thrown rhetoric in my eyes for my trouble.

It was a good piece of armor. Strong, scraped and worn but undeniably whole. It was carved in the usual fashion, in the image of a man’s bare torso. Moving in it while I trained was comforting in a way that I couldn’t explain.

“Tell me what you’ve heard,” I bid Scythas, setting aside the armor and rolling my shoulders, gripping the juncture between my collarbone and my neck when the muscles clenched painfully. I didn’t allow it to show on my face. Not in front of him.

I tensed as slim hands brush mine aside, digging into the knots and snarls of overburdened muscle. I glanced up at Selene. Her veil still covered her face, golden silk with vibrant red threads winding through it like sun rays.

Her hands froze as I looked up at her. Then, slowly, they resumed their kneading.

“Selene,” I said quietly. “The massage was just a cover to get us in here.”

“Certainly.” Her voice was light, gently amused. “But the best lie is a truth repurposed. What will we do if Chara notices you’re still stiff when we leave the room?”

The better question was what I would do if I had to continue living among handsy Greeks. I let it be, returning my attention to the first hero I’d met in this city. The first man to suspect Griffon and I of malintent, and now the first man to act as my scout within the cult.

“Things have slowed down since the two of you encountered the Gadfly,” he said, and there was still a bit of wonder there. He hadn’t fully believed it until I’d told him myself, despite tracking me through the rumors spread about Socrates walking me down the mountain. “If the other elders are anything like mine, things would have escalated very quickly if the two of you had kept on the way you were. Especially after you got the others involved.”

He shook his head, leaning against the wall beside me. He still looked exhausted, with dark bags beneath his eyes, but the flecks of color in those hazel flames had brightened from copper to gold again.

“The Raging Heaven is an institution that attracts men from all over the continent,” he said. “There’s always been a large portion of initiates with no ties to any other cult, success stories from nameless settlements or cultivators recovering from disgrace in other institutions. When the kyrios was alive they served directly under his banner, like everyone else. But now they have no master to serve. The elders are focusing on these initiates first.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Jason mentioned coercion through lectures.” I noted the way his eyes flickered when I said the name. “They’ve moved fully onto that?”

He nodded. “It’s… The situation has not improved at night, but it’s stopped escalating. I don’t think they intended to be this far out in the open this early on with their Crows, but you left them no choice. Now it’s a question of who will withdraw first.”

“Hardly a question at all.” How could any of them, when the game had only just begun?

“Exactly. But for the moment, it isn’t getting any worse. Instead the senior philosophers are out in force, offering lectures on every topic under the sun. It’s a good time to be a junior in search of knowledge.”

“And if the lecture happens to lead into other topics, how can a man be blamed for following the natural flow of discourse,” I concluded. “What else?”

“Preparations for the Games are underway. The kyrios was already in talks with the city’s officials, foreign dignitaries, the other city-states and their cults – but with his passing, negotiations are up in the air. The men of the city offered to shoulder the burden while the Raging Heaven mourns, of course, but the elders couldn’t allow them to carry that alone.”

It was a unique bitterness with which the Howling Wind’s Hero spoke. I remembered the night of the funeral, when Scythas was the only one out of all his peers to defend the elders’ intentions. That hadn’t been so long ago, but the events that followed had tainted that optimism.