Marcus was frozen, staring at the map. The panicked shouts of his generals faded into a dull, distant roar, like the sea crashing against a cliff face far below.
He's coming for Rome.
The words were a drumbeat of doom in his skull, a death sentence for an empire. The air in the war room, once charged with the energy of creation, was now thick with the cold, heavy certainty of defeat.
He snapped back to life, the paralysis breaking. The fear was a live thing in his throat, a cold, liquid panic, but he shoved it down. There was no time for fear. Fear was a luxury for men who weren't about to lose the world.
"Fabius!" he barked, his voice sharp and brittle. The old general, who was in the middle of a sputtering protest, flinched as if struck. "Galen! Engineers! To the map. Now."
They gathered, their faces grim, a circle of condemned men. Marcus's finger stabbed down on the crude drawing from Narcissus, tracing the treacherous, spidery lines of the mountain passes.
"He's coming through here. The Julian Alps," Marcus said, his voice flat. "No legions, no fortresses. A ghost army through the mountains. How long until he reaches the plains of Italy?"
General Fabius, a veteran of a dozen campaigns, ran a trembling hand over his bald head. His lifetime of military certainty had just been rendered obsolete. "The passes are treacherous, Caesar. Even for a genius like Celsus. There are rockslides, flash floods… but unopposed, with his engineers clearing the way…" He hesitated, as if afraid to speak the number aloud. "Three months. Maybe four, if the gods are merciful."
Three months. A hundred days.
Marcus turned his gaze to the main map of the Empire, to the little wooden markers representing his legions, proudly arrayed along the Rhine frontier hundreds of miles away. "How long," he asked, his voice dangerously quiet, "to recall the nearest legions from Germania?"
Fabius looked like he was going to be sick. "To pull them from the line, turn them, and march them south? Five months, Caesar. And that's if we march them to death through the winter. Six months is more realistic."
The numbers hung in the air, brutal and simple. An executioner's math.
Five is more than three. Six is more than four.
They were too slow. Valerius Celsus, the ghost he had helped create, would be sacking cities in Northern Italy before the legions even received the order to march. The Roman wolf was about to have its throat cut while its fangs were still bared at the wrong enemy.
ASSESSING… JARVIS's voice was a cold whisper in his mind. PROBABILITY OF CATASTROPHIC TERRITORIAL LOSS: 92%. PROBABILITY OF THE FALL OF ROME: 78%. PROBABILITY OF YOUR DEATH…
Shut up, Marcus snarled in the privacy of his own skull. He didn't need a calculator to tell him he was dead. He needed a miracle.
While the Emperor of Rome was being suffocated by impossible logistics, Marcia was being suffocated by faith.
Her chambers had become a shrine, and she was the relic trapped inside. Lycomedes's zealots stood guard at her door, their faces impassive, their eyes burning with a terrifying light. They brought her food on a silver tray, but first one of them would eat a piece, chewing slowly and deliberately, tasting for a poison she knew was not there. They followed her with their eyes as she paced the room.
She was not a prisoner. She was a holy object. And it was infinitely worse.
A young serving girl, the same Livia who had delivered Lucilla's threat, managed to slip in with a stack of fresh linen. Her eyes were wide with a mixture of awe and terror. As she laid the linen on the bed, she leaned close, her back to the guards in the doorway.
She whispered one thing, her voice trembling. "My lady… they are saying in the kitchens… that the Holy Oracle no longer needs the protection of the Emperor." Her eyes flickered with fear. "They say the people are your true guardians now."
Livia was shooed out by a hulking guard before Marcia could respond, but the words remained, hanging in the air like poison smoke.
Marcia finally understood. Lucilla's endgame was brilliant. It wasn't just about imprisoning her. It was about severing her from Marcus. It was about stealing his Oracle, his symbol of divine right, and making her the figurehead of a populist religious movement that Lucilla could then twist to her own ends.
She was being reforged, reshaped into a weapon to be used against the very man she loved.
Rage, cold and sharp, cut through her fear. She would not be a pawn. She would not be a weapon. She called for the guard.
"I must speak with Lycomedes," she said, her voice imbued with a calm authority she did not feel.
The zealot entered her chambers and bowed low. "Holy Oracle. How may we serve you?"
Marcia met his burning gaze. She would use the cage they had built for her. She would use their faith as her key.
"The gods have granted me a vision," she said, her voice taking on a strange, distant quality. She let her body tremble, just slightly. "A great serpent, cloaked in piety, coils around the heart of this palace. It seeks to poison the God-Emperor by striking at his most trusted and loyal servants."
Lycomedes's hand went to the hilt of his sword. "A traitor?"
"A shadow," Marcia whispered, her eyes unfocused. "The gods demand a test of loyalty. Bring me the palace steward, Cassian. The gods wish to speak the truth through him."
She was playing with fire. But her only way out was through the heart of the flames.
Back in the war room, the generals were still arguing. Futile plans were proposed and discarded. A defensive line here. A legion recalled from there. They were trying to solve a new problem with old, broken tools.
Marcus was silent, his back to them, staring at the map. His mind was racing past their legions, past their walls, past the entire concept of conventional Roman warfare.
He couldn't move his army. So he wouldn't.
With a sudden, violent motion, he swept his arm across the map. The little wooden markers representing the pride of the Roman military went flying, scattering across the marble floor like discarded toys.
"They are irrelevant," he snarled, turning to face the shocked generals. "Useless."
His eyes found Crixus, who had been standing silent and watchful by the door, a pillar of calm in the storm of their panic.
Marcus's voice was low, intense. "Crixus. How many men from the arenas—gladiators, beast handlers, pit fighters—are still living in this city?"
Crixus, startled to be addressed, straightened up. "Thousands, Caesar. They live in the Subura. They fight for scraps."
"They're survivors," Marcus said, a wild, dangerous light in his eyes. "They're killers. They fight dirty because their lives depend on it. We cannot move an army in time." His lips peeled back in a grim smile. "But we can move a plague."
He strode towards Crixus, his plan forming in a torrent of desperate inspiration. He would not send legions to meet Valerius's army in glorious battle. He would send Crixus and a hand-picked force of the five hundred deadliest gladiators, criminals, and forgotten soldiers in Rome.
Their mission was not to fight. It was to bleed.
"You will not engage his army," Marcus said, his voice a low, urgent command. "You will go into those mountains ahead of him. You will be a ghost army. A campaign of pure terror. You will start rockslides to block the passes. You will poison their wells. You will raid their supply lines at night and vanish into the rocks. You will make them fear every shadow."
He gripped Crixus by the shoulders, his eyes burning with the force of his conviction. "You will not stop him. You cannot. But you will slow him down. You will buy me time, one bloody, agonizing day at a time."
The generals were aghast. "Caesar, this is madness!" Fabius protested, his face pale with horror. "This is not the Roman way of war! It is barbarism!"
Marcus rounded on him, his composure finally snapping. The face of the emperor was gone, replaced by the cold, desperate fury of a cornered animal fighting for its life.
"Valerius is bringing a new kind of war to our doorstep!" he roared. "And I will answer it in kind! The 'Roman way of war' is about to get our cities burned and our children enslaved! I will not let honor be the epitaph on this empire's tomb!"
He turned back to Crixus, his voice dropping to a deadly serious whisper.
"Go. Go to the slums. Gather your monsters. The fate of Rome rests on the blades of forgotten men."
Crixus's face was a mask of stone. He had been given an impossible, suicidal mission. And he had never looked more alive. He gave a single, sharp nod.
"For the Emperor," he said.
He turned and strode from the room, the most important mission in the history of the Roman Empire entrusted to a man who was supposed to die in the sand.