The entire world was a single, held breath.
Titus's question hung in the air, a blade at Marcus's throat, poised to sever either his authority or his heart. What are your orders?
Marcus did not look at his Prefect. He did not look at Marcia's pale, pleading face. He looked at the crowd.
His gaze swept over the senators and courtiers, a slow, deliberate appraisal that made them feel like insects pinned to a board. He saw their hungry, predatory curiosity. He saw the flicker of hope in the eyes of his enemies. He saw Lucilla on the balcony, a serene marble statue of victory.
He began to walk.
It was not the panicked rush of a man rushing to his lover's side. It was the slow, inexorable pace of a god descending from a mountain. Every step was a hammer blow against the silence. The court held its breath, waiting for the verdict.
He stopped directly in front of Marcia, so close he could feel the tremor of fear running through her. But he did not touch her. He did not offer a single word of comfort.
Instead, he raised his hand and pointed a single, imperial finger at his Praetorian Prefect.
His voice boomed, imbued with all the arrogant, divine authority of Commodus, a sound that echoed off the marble and rattled the bones of every man and woman present.
"You question this woman, Prefect?"
He then turned his hand, the gesture a sweeping arc of sanctification that encompassed Marcia.
"This woman," he declared, his voice rising, "is my Oracle."
A collective, disbelieving gasp rippled through the colonnade.
"Her counsel is the counsel of the gods!" he thundered. "Her whispers are the whispers that guide this Empire to glory! Her sight pierces the veil of the future!"
He had not denied the rumors of her influence. He had confirmed them in the most absolute and terrifying way imaginable. He had weaponized their superstition. He had turned a political smear into a holy decree.
He took another step, his gaze now locking with Lucilla's across the space. Her serene smile had vanished, replaced by a mask of pure, unadulterated shock. She had laid a perfect trap, and he had just turned it into a throne.
"To question her," Marcus's voice dropped to a menacing growl that carried to every corner of the hall, "is to question the divine will that protects Rome. It is no longer slander." He let the words hang in the air for a terrible second. "It is treason."
The game had changed. The board was shattered.
Titus, the unshakeable, by-the-book soldier, dropped to one knee. His head was bowed, his face ashen. He had not been reprimanded. He had been rebuked by a living god.
"My apologies, Caesar," he stammered, his voice rough with shock. "I was… mistaken."
Marcus gave him a dismissive wave. He finally turned to Marcia, took her hand in his, and lifted it as if she were a priestess. "Come," he said, his voice now gentle. "The Oracle has duties to attend to."
He led her away, the crowd parting before them like the sea before a prophet. No one dared meet their eyes. They had come to see a concubine's downfall. They had instead witnessed the birth of a saint.
The moment the heavy, bronze-plated doors of his private chambers closed, the performance ended. The divine emperor vanished, and the grimly satisfied project manager returned.
Marcus released her hand and turned to her, a look of triumph on his face. "It's done," he said, the adrenaline of the gambit still coursing through him. "No one will dare question you again. I turned their own weapon back on them."
He expected relief. He expected gratitude.
He got rage.
Marcia's body was trembling, not with fear, but with a white-hot fury. Her eyes, which had been wide with terror in the colonnade, now blazed with it.
"An Oracle?" she hissed, her voice shaking. "An Oracle?! Do you have any idea what you have just done?"
Marcus's triumphant smile faltered. He was baffled. "I saved you, Marcia. It was the only logical move. She backed me into a corner, so I broke the corner."
"You didn't save me!" Her voice rose, cracking with a pain that was deeper than any public humiliation. "You put me in a cage and painted it gold! You think those people will respect me now? They won't. They will fear me. They will resent me. You haven't made me safe; you've made me a target for every fanatic, every ambitious priest, and every true believer in this entire city!"
He stared at her, the cold logic of his solution crashing against the wall of her raw, human emotion.
"You didn't save me, Marcus," she whispered, and the words were a knife in his gut. "You protected an asset. You saw a threat to your stability, and you neutralized it. That's all I was. A problem to be solved."
The core of their conflict was laid bare. He saw the world as a system to be optimized. He had seen her predicament as a strategic problem and had executed a brilliant, cold, and inhuman solution. He had won the public battle for his reign, but in that same moment, he had shattered the private trust between them.
Before he could find the words to defend himself, to explain the impossible choice he'd faced, the chamber doors burst open.
Galen swept into the room, his robes flying behind him, his eyes wild with the manic light of discovery. He carried a small, heavy bronze canister, clutching it to his chest like a holy relic. He was so consumed by his breakthrough that he failed to notice the arctic tension in the room.
"I've done it, Caesar!" he proclaimed, his voice breathless. He slammed the canister down on the table between Marcus and Marcia. It was a simple, ugly thing, about the size of a wine jug, with a small valve at the top.
"A prototype!" Galen declared. "Crude, but the principle is sound!"
He pointed at a lit brazier in the corner of the room, its coals glowing a cheerful orange. "Observe!"
With a flourish, he twisted the valve on the canister.
A thick, white gas hissed out, completely silent save for the rush of its passage. It wasn't smoke. It was heavy, dense, and rolled through the air like a ghostly fog.
The effect on the fire was instantaneous and deeply unnatural. The flames didn't sputter. They didn't die with a cloud of smoke. They simply vanished, erased from existence in the blink of an eye. The coals went from glowing orange to dull, dead black in a single, silent moment.
Marcus stared, his argument with Marcia completely forgotten. It was magic.
"Carbon dioxide," Galen said, practically vibrating with intellectual ecstasy. "It displaces the air, suffocates the flame. This is the solution to Celsus's fire!"
He closed the valve, his excitement finally giving way to the cold light of logistics. "But to build thousands of these, enough for every cohort in the legions, we need a key reagent in massive quantities. A crystalline salt. Sal ammoniac."
He strode to a map on the wall, his finger jabbing at a remote, desolate point in the southeast.
"The purest, most abundant deposits in the known world are here," he said. "The Oasis of Amun. Deep in the Egyptian desert. A dangerous and difficult journey, I'm afraid."
A new front in the war had just opened. A war of supply lines and resources.
Marcus stared at the map, his mind already churning, calculating, planning. The fight with Marcia, the weight of her anger, was a painful pressure in his chest, but he brutally pushed it down. A problem he couldn't solve. This, however… a mission, a logistical challenge… this was a problem he could wrap his mind around.
Egypt was Roman territory, but the route was long and notoriously plagued by Parthian-funded desert raiders. He couldn't send a legion; it was too slow, too obvious. It would be an open invitation for an ambush.
He needed ghosts. He needed men who knew the shadows.
He turned to a scribe who had been waiting silently by the door. "Find me the records of the merchant guilds from the past five years. I want the name of every trader who was financially ruined by Parthian control of the Palmyra route."
The scribe looked up, confused by the strange request.
Marcus's eyes gleamed with a cold, strategic light. He wasn't just going to get his chemical. He was going to recruit an army of vengeful smugglers, unleash them on Parthia's soft underbelly, and make his enemy pay for his supplies.