The silence in the room was a razor's edge, sharp enough to cut a soul.
Lycomedes's hand rested on the pommel of his sword, a promise of swift, brutal justice. Lucilla's serene smile was a mask of certain victory. Marcia opened her mouth to speak, and the world narrowed to this single, impossible moment. A man's life hung on her next words.
She did not condemn Cassian.
She did not expose herself.
She screamed.
It was a raw, unearthly sound that clawed at the air. Her eyes went wide, staring past the trembling steward, past Lucilla's suddenly startled face, and fixed on the open doorway. She raised a trembling finger, not at her ally, but at one of the hulking zealot guards standing sentinel there. A man named Geta, one of Lycomedes's most trusted captains.
"THERE!" she shrieked, her voice cracking with a terrifying, divine madness. "THE SERPENT! Not in the frail flesh of this old man! It hides in the heart of the faithful!"
Chaos erupted. The accusation was so insane, so utterly unpredictable, that it shattered the scene's perfect, cruel geometry.
Geta, the accused guard, stared at her, his jaw slack with disbelief. His expression morphed into pure, animal terror. "What? No! I am loyal!"
Lycomedes was frozen, his face a mask of tormented conflict. His fanatical faith in his Oracle was at war with his absolute loyalty to his men. Lucilla's victorious smile had vanished, replaced by a flicker of genuine confusion. This was not part of her plan. This was a variable she had not calculated.
Before anyone could react, before the questions could form, Marcia's eyes rolled back in her head. With a final, shuddering gasp, she collapsed to the floor in a convincing, theatrical faint.
The inquest was over.
For a moment, no one moved. Then Lycomedes roared. He chose his Oracle.
"Seize him!" he bellowed at his other men.
Geta screamed his innocence as they grabbed him. "She lies! It's a trick! I am faithful! I swear it on the Emperor's holy name!"
They dragged him away, his pleas echoing down the marble corridor until they were finally silenced by the slamming of a distant door.
Marcia had survived. She had saved her ally. More than that, she had just proven her divine sight in the most brutal, irrefutable way possible. No one would ever question her visions again.
But as she lay on the cold floor, feigning unconsciousness, she felt a piece of her own soul die. She had just sent an innocent man—a true believer—to a certain and horrible death.
The Emperor of Rome was watching a nightmare take shape.
He stood in the flickering torchlight of the Praetorian training grounds, a place of order, discipline, and gleaming armor. But the men gathered before him tonight were not soldiers.
They were monsters.
Crixus's ghost army was a collection of scars and broken teeth. They were gaunt, wiry men with the dead eyes of killers, and hulking brutes with knuckles like stones. Instead of gleaming gladii, they sharpened crude knives, wicked-looking hand-axes, and strange, hooked blades Marcus didn't recognize. They didn't stand in formation. They lounged, squatted, and paced like a pack of wolves waiting to be unleashed.
This was his brilliant, strategic plan made flesh. And it was hideous.
"They are… ready?" Marcus asked, his voice rough.
Crixus stood beside him, a giant in the flickering shadows. "They were born ready, Caesar," he said, his voice a low rumble. "They only need to be pointed at a throat."
Marcus watched a man with a latticework of scars across his face test the edge of his blade on his own calloused thumb. He felt a wave of nausea. On the map in his war room, this had been a clean, elegant solution. A surgical strike. Here, in the dirt and the torchlight, he saw it for what it was: he was about to unleash five hundred murderers on the world.
This was the price of saving Rome. This was the blood on his hands.
A sudden commotion at the gate of the training grounds broke his dark reverie. A horseman galloped in, his face streaked with dust and panic. He wasn't a military courier. He was a sailor.
He practically fell from his exhausted horse, pushing a second man before him, his hands bound. The captive was a merchant captain, his face a swollen, bloody mess.
"Caesar!" the sailor gasped, falling to one knee. "A dispatch from Ostia! We were attacked!"
Marcus's blood ran cold. The Egyptian mission. "Parthian raiders?"
The beaten captain spat a bloody tooth onto the dirt. "No, Caesar," he rasped. "Worse. It was a Roman."
He described the attack. A fleet of swift, black-sailed ships that had appeared out of the dawn mist like ghosts. They flew no legionary eagle. Their banner was a stark, black flag, emblazoned with a single, silver eagle clutching a trident.
The attack had been a masterpiece of naval warfare. Brutal, precise, and utterly devastating. The commander, the captain said, was a man who moved with the arrogance of a king. A man with a famous name.
"He called himself Sextus Pompey," the captain croaked. "He said to tell the new Caesar that the blood of Pompey the Great still rules the seas."
Sextus Pompey. The last descendant of the great general who had been Julius Caesar's most bitter rival. A ghost from Rome's past, returned to haunt its present.
"He is no mere pirate," the captain continued, his voice trembling with a mixture of fear and awe. "He sends you this message."
He took a ragged breath. "He said: 'Tell the new Caesar he can have his grubby little empire on the land. But every ship, every man, and every grain of salt he needs to fight his northern war must now pass through me. And the toll… the toll will be steep.'"
A second front.
The words slammed into Marcus with the force of a physical blow. It was a strategic masterstroke. A naval blockade, run by a brilliant, charismatic Roman with a legitimate, centuries-old grudge against the title of Caesar.
His supply line for the Sal Ammoniac, the one thing he needed to counter Celsus's fire, was cut before the mission had even begun.
Marcus stared at the beaten captain, the news a roaring in his ears. His ghost army was leaving to fight one fire, and a second, equally deadly one, had just erupted behind him, threatening to isolate his empire and starve it into submission.
His gaze drifted across the training ground and landed on Narcissus. The giant was standing among Crixus's men, his arms crossed, watching the scene. His face was a mask, his expression completely unreadable.
The whisper of treason in the north. A pirate king on the seas. An Oracle who was a prisoner of her own terrible power.
He felt the entire world tilting on its axis, ready to slide into the abyss.