Marcus unbuckled his lorica segmentata. The heavy iron plates clattered to the dirt.
Next came the greaves. Then the imperial purple cloak, stained black with soot and dried blood.
He stood in his tunic, the night air cooling the sweat on his skin. He didn't look like an Emperor. He looked like a slave.
Around him, forty thousand men did the same.
They stripped off the gleaming armor that marked them as Roman legionaries. They cast aside the heavy scuta shields that made a shield wall possible. They lightened the load.
Tonight, they wouldn't need defense. They needed speed.
"Caesar," Narcissus grunted, stepping into the firelight.
The gladiator was naked from the waist up. He dipped his hand into a pile of cold ash from the burned palisade. He smeared the grey soot across his chest, his arms, his face.
He disappeared. In the flickering light, he became a shadow.
"Do it," Marcus ordered the men. "Cover yourselves. Tonight, we are not the Fourth Legion. We are not the Tenth. We are the ash."
The men moved silently. They scooped up the carbonized remains of their own fort. They painted themselves like specters. Eyes became white circles in black masks. Teeth shone like bones in a grave.
They looked like an army of the dead risen to drag the living down to hell.
Marcus smeared the ash on his own cheeks. The grit scratched his skin.
He climbed onto a supply crate. He didn't raise his voice. The silence in the camp was so profound that a whisper carried for fifty yards.
"There is no speech tonight," Marcus said. "I have no gold to promise you. I have no land to give you."
He raised his hand. The bloody ring—Marcia's ring—glinted dully on his finger.
"Rome has fallen," he told them. "Your wives are in chains. Your sons are hostages. The Senate has betrayed us."
A ripple of rage went through the ranks, a low, guttural growl.
"The only way home," Marcus pointed north, toward the enemy lights on the ridge, "is through Valerius. He has water. He has food. And he has the road that leads to the men who took your families."
He drew his sword. It was the only piece of steel he had kept.
"We do not fight for the Empire tonight," Marcus hissed. "We fight for revenge. We are the punishment."
"Punishment," the men whispered back. It wasn't a cheer. It was a vow.
METEOROLOGICAL ALERT.
JARVIS's text scrolled across Marcus's vision, green against the darkness.
ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS OPTIMAL.
SURFACE TEMP: 18°C.
GROUND TEMP: 12°C.
RESULT: DENSE FOG FORMING IN VALLEY FLOOR.
VISIBILITY: < 5 METERS.
"The gods are with us," Marcus lied. "The fog is rising."
Galen appeared at his side. The physician held a bucket of the black, oily sludge they had filtered from the sinkhole.
"The metal," Galen whispered. "It shines in the moonlight. Coat it."
Marcus nodded. "Dip the blades."
The order went down the line. Thousands of gladii and pugio daggers were dipped into the foul-smelling mud. The steel was dulled. No reflections. No gleam to warn the sentries.
Varus stepped forward. The traitor general had stripped his armor too. He held two short swords, his arms coated in black ash.
"Caesar," Varus said. "Give me the vanguard."
"You will die first," Marcus warned.
"I know," Varus smiled. It was a terrifying expression on his blackened face. "Let me clear my ledger."
"Granted," Marcus said. "Take the center. Break the line."
The fog rolled in ten minutes later. It was a thick, white soup that clung to the ground, swallowing the world.
"Move out," Marcus whispered. "On your bellies."
Forty thousand men dropped to the dirt.
They didn't march. They crawled.
It was a nightmare in slow motion. An ocean of men slithering through the mud, silent as snakes.
The wet earth soaked Marcus's tunic. The smell of decay and wet grass filled his nose. He could hear the heart of the man next to him beating like a drum.
Crawling, the Ghost of Commodus sneered in his mind. An Emperor does not crawl.
A survivor does, Marcus shot back. He dug his fingers into the soil, pulling himself forward.
They moved for an hour. Inch by inch. Yard by yard.
PROXIMITY ALERT.
ENEMY PICKET LINE: 30 METERS.
Marcus stopped. He raised a hand. The motion rippled back through the fog.
Ahead, the faint glow of a campfire cut through the mist. Two of Valerius's sentries were sitting on a log, warming their hands. Their spears were leaning against a tree.
They were laughing. They thought the enemy was trapped in a hill fort miles away. They had no idea that death was lying in the grass ten feet from their boots.
"Crixus," Marcus breathed.
The gladiator leader didn't make a sound. He slipped forward, melting into the fog. Three of his "Ghost Army"—gladiators trained in stealth—followed him.
Marcus watched.
Crixus rose from the mist behind the first sentry.
There was no scream. Just a wet gurgle.
Crixus clamped a hand over the man's mouth and drove a dagger into his kidney. The sentry went limp. Crixus lowered him gently to the ground.
The second sentry turned. "Did you hear—"
A garrote wire whipped around his throat. One of the gladiators pulled tight. The sentry thrashed, clawing at the wire, his eyes bulging.
Snap.
The neck broke. The body was dragged into the darkness.
"Clear," Crixus signaled.
The army began to crawl again.
They reached the slope of the enemy ridge. The fog was thinner here, shredded by the wind.
Above them loomed the wooden palisade of Valerius's camp. It wasn't a fortress like the hill fort. It was a marching camp—hasty earthworks and sharpened stakes lashed together with rope.
STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS:
DEFENSE TYPE: CLASS II PALISADE.
ANCHOR DEPTH: 0.5 METERS.
WEAKNESS: LEVERAGE.
They didn't have ladders. They didn't have rams.
"Narcissus," Marcus whispered. "The stakes."
The giant crawled to the base of the wall. He was joined by fifty of the strongest men in the legion.
They didn't try to climb over. They dug their hands into the loose earth at the base of the logs. They gripped the bottom of the timber wall.
"On my signal," Marcus hissed. "Lift."
Valerius's sentries were walking the perimeter above them, looking out into the empty darkness, oblivious to the thousands of men lying in the shadow of their own wall.
"Now!"
Narcissus roared—a silent, internal exertion of pure force. The muscles of his back bunched like iron cables.
Fifty men heaved upward.
The earth groaned. The ropes lashing the logs creaked.
The wall didn't break. It lifted.
The shallow anchors pulled free of the soil. A ten-foot section of the palisade rose six inches. Then a foot.
It was enough.
Varus and the vanguard scuttled under the gap like cockroaches swarming into a pantry.
Then it went wrong.
One of the ropes snapped. CRACK.
The sound was like a gunshot in the silent night.
"Who goes there?" a voice shouted from the watchtower.
A torch came flying down from the wall. It landed in the grass, right in front of Marcus.
The light flared up.
It illuminated the scene perfectly.
The sentry looked down. He didn't see grass. He saw thousands of black-masked faces staring up at him, eyes wide and hateful.
The sentry froze. His brain couldn't process the sheer scale of the horror.
"ALARM!" the sentry screamed. "THEY ARE HERE! THE DEAD ARE HERE!"
The element of surprise was gone.
Marcus didn't crawl anymore. He scrambled to his feet.
"WAKE THEM UP!" Marcus screamed. "KILL THEM ALL!"
Narcissus let go of the wall. The heavy timbers crashed down, crushing two Roman soldiers who hadn't cleared the gap in time. Their screams were lost in the roar of forty thousand throats.
The ash-covered legion poured through the breach. They scrambled over the stakes. They tore the wall apart with their bare hands.
The camp of the Philosopher-King was asleep.
The nightmare had just kicked in the door.