City of Dust Read online

  ‘I show you Ludi, so you understand the game we play, huh?’ His top lip curled as though he were enjoying a private joke.

  ‘Why don’t you wait here? Let me go with Rajid, scope it out?’ Max offered.

  I took one look at our unlikely guide, his Hades tale still echoing in my ears, and shook my head. We needed to stick together, and once we were close enough, take our chance.

  Securing my jar to my leather rations bag, I reached out for the first rung of the ladder.

  ‘Hanging around is for sloths!’ I threw, before forcing myself up into the narrow gloom.

  The climb was as claustrophobic as I anticipated, and if it wasn’t for Max’s steady pace behind me, I may well have given in to the storm brewing inside within the first few seconds. I tried to fade out my surroundings, to imagine I was shinnying up the Great Oak at the edge of the forest with nothing but wide-open space around me. Hand over hand, foot after foot. It was an exercise in sheer grit over instinct. And when at last the confined air chimney opened out onto a wider rectangular space, I crawled out with a sob of real gratitude.

  For a few moments, I lay with my cheek on the dusty stone floor, filling my grateful lungs with fresher air, and waiting for Max and Rajid to emerge. Then I summoned the courage to lift my head and look round. And any fragile hopes spiralled away.

  We were stuck in yet another stone box, just big enough to sit up in and lie out at a full stretch. I swung my gaze around the new confining walls, fighting a real wave of suffocating anxiety.

  How could this be a good observation point for anything, let alone rescuing Aelia?

  I shot a look at Rajid, sitting cross-legged and apparently unaffected. His face looked sallow in the low light, and as the ugliest suspicion began to rise like a monster from the depths of my mind, the long wall opposite broke into a series of vertical slats, each about a metre long. They moved in unison, letting in an unmistakable chorus of Pantheonite cheering. I froze as the sudden baying and flickering arena lights engulfed the small chamber. The effect was dazzling and disorientating.

  As I tried to peer closer, a vice-like grip closed around my shoulder.

  ‘Watch … like the Cerberus,’ Rajid hissed.

  I scowled and shrugged him off. We’d come here for Lake, Aelia and the Book of Arafel, but there were turning out to be so many more reasons to be wary of Isca Pantheon. Pan’s gentle smile flickered through my head, together with his last words ‘Prot-ect Lake’. The fire in my belly flared. I was going to do everything I could to make his sacrifice worthwhile.

  We waited, the air thick with tension, until the air vents swung open again. And this time they stayed open for longer. I drank my fill of the new view, and tried to control my racing pulse. Rajid’s wormhole had somehow bypassed the Prolet commercial trading world, and brought us right up inside one of the stone archways encircling Octavia’s Flavium.

  Now I was seated directly above one of the dark entrances I’d once faced as a combatant. But our narrow, elongated view couldn’t be more different from the one I remembered. Another thunderous cheer filled the air before the ventilation slats closed, and I shot a look of angry bewilderment at Rajid. He shrugged almost sheepishly. He was clear he needed us to see it, that there were few words to describe the challenge Cassius had designed for his pleasure.

  I dragged my gaze back to the floor, and our new enemy. The dusty Flavium floor was now completely concealed by a huge, black, grilled cage, that rose as high as the topmost tiered seating. I guessed instantly that those forced to enter weren’t average laboratory rats.

  ‘Prolets?’ I whispered.

  Rajid nodded, his eyes clouding, and for the first time I was doubtful. Anyone would close down emotionally under these circumstances. Was this how he’d survived, by detaching himself? Had I been reading the symptoms rather than the condition?

  Silently, I wondered how many of his Prolet friends he’d watched succumb to Cassius’s warped interpretation of the ancient Roman’s Ludi Games.

  ‘Strix?’ I muttered next, the reason for their absence from the tunnels suddenly becoming crystal clear. The word hung in the box-room, like the stench they created.

  He nodded again, his lips tightening.

  ‘But the Prolets are his workforce!’ I protested.

  It made no sense from a practical viewpoint for Cassius to kill off his underclass, no matter how furious he was.

  ‘He believes they know where the young ones are.’ Rajid scowled. ‘And has sworn to send one Prolet a day into the Ludi Labyrinth until one of them … sees sense.’

  ‘But they can’t possibly know!’ Max added. ‘There’s a network of tunnels beneath the Dead City. It will have taken the young Prolets days, if not weeks, of wandering before they found the old baths …’

  ‘For the love of Arafel, why?! Why are the young ones so important,’ I interjected, ‘that he would sacrifice the lives of the older Prolets? It doesn’t make any sense!’

  I shot Max a warning glance. I wasn’t comfortable with anyone knowing where the young ones were hiding, let alone crazy Rajid.

  Rajid only stared at me, but he might as well have spoken aloud. The penny dropped, and this one fell with the toll of a smelting hammer.

  The semi-gelatinous creature suspended at the end of an umbilical cord was as clear as if I was staring straight at it, and I knew. Of course, I knew. Cassius’s existing workforce was disposable, because he was creating his own. He was cloning a Prolet underclass that would ask no questions, desire no life beyond what they were given, and work until they day they dropped. If he succeeded, Prolet life would be entirely meaningless. And expendable.

  And yet, there was still a problem.

  ‘But if he can replace them,’ I muttered, suddenly recalling Atticus’s great satisfaction in chewing off a raw rat ear, ‘why are the children important at all?’

  My question was drowned as the air vents groaned open again, releasing a fresh burst of noise into our small space. I stared out, feeling my spirits spiral further away. This time I could see smart Pantheonites milling around the arena as comfortably as though they were attending an auction on market day.

  A flame of revulsion flickered inside. Had they learned nothing? Did it take so little time for the new Senate to disintegrate, and for Octavia’s programme to reverse? August’s face flashed through my head. Or had the will never been there to begin with?

  Just then, the centre of the cage began to move.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I whispered, feeling sick with apprehension.

  And then I saw her. It was only her side profile, but I would know her elfin features and athletic limbs anywhere.

  ‘Aelia!’ I whispered in horror.

  She was standing tall and proud, but her face was covered in dark bruises and she looked as though she hadn’t slept in days. Worse than that, she was also incarcerated within a tight wire mesh ball, and was being slowly pulled up through the centre of the dense cage itself.

  ‘You said we could ambush from here!’ I seethed. ‘But how do we get to her from there?’

  Rajid leaned forward, his face contorted, beads of sweat breaking out across his forehead.

  ‘Give it time.’ He smiled. ‘If she survives, she’ll be given a pardon and taken to the Prolet garrison. I know a shortcut and then we make our move … like the Cerberus.’

  He growled softly as if to enforce his point, and I shot a look at Max. Was it me?

  ‘It’s the dawn of a new Roman era, or as Cassius calls it,’ he continued in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘the era of the black aquila.’

  ‘Black aquila?’ Max repeated, his ears pricking up. ‘Black eagle?’

  I knew exactly which direction his mind was taking. It was rewinding back to the moment the dark shadow had carried Lake away into the gunmetal sky.

  ‘Rajid, what exactly did Aelia work out about the Voynich?’ I demanded, painfully aware of her white pallor in the arena torchlight.

  Just what is it that make
s you so special?

  His question seemed to echo between us as he stared.

  ‘I don’t know all the details,’ he offered at last, ‘but when August left, Cassius took over a wing of the laboratory, installing six of his most loyal Scientific Generals. There were whispers of new experiments. The Prolet gene-isolation work, and of course the …’

  ‘Chimera project?’ I filled in, with a sense of impending doom.

  He nodded, and stared back out at the Flavium arena, which was filled with milling people.

  The thought that Cassius could actually be trying to genetically engineer the mythical creature in the same way as the molossers, haga, manticore and strix, stretched even his murky boundaries.

  I recalled a pencil etching of a fire-breathing hybrid monster from Grandpa’s book of ancient mythology. How could such a creature even be capable of biological life in the first instance, and could there be anything in its supposed omen for disaster? It sounded like pure fantasy, and yet Pantheon had breathed life into so many already.

  ‘You saw the experiment in the laboratory. But that’s only the tiny tip of the iceberg,’ he continued suddenly. ‘Aelia spotted a reference in a small section of Thomas’s research to a near-forgotten legend. It was cryptic, but Aelia being Aelia, well … y’know.’

  I nodded. Of course, I could believe anything of the small, feisty doctor.

  ‘She always believed Thomas knew more and that, buried somewhere in the text of the Voynich, there was coded information about the legendary chimera beast … with unknown speed, strength and agility.’

  He paused to flex his fingers, eyeing me intensely.

  ‘She believes it is a forgotten top predator,’ he continued after a beat. ‘One that would naturally rule the biological world. And that Cassius has known of its coded existence within the pages of the Voynich for a long time. Of course, without Thomas’s cipher and the elusive keyword, he cannot perfect his trials. But that hasn’t stopped his experiments.’

  He paused to smile crookedly, his teeth even more jaundiced in the patchy light.

  I recalled the flickering computer screens in the laboratory, and then the ripped page from the Book of Arafel stuffed into my leather rations bag.

  ‘Which explains why Aelia took the Book of Arafel,’ Max interjected.

  I whipped around, my heart pounding.

  ‘Thomas’s research would give Cassius the coding information he needs to re-create this beast accurately,’ he continued in a low voice. ‘So, taking the Book would have two neat outcomes: it would bring you to Pantheon and give her real power to negotiate for the Prolet insurgents.’

  I stared at Max’s shadowed face. He knew. He shouldn’t – Grandpa had stipulated no one should know. I was a complete failure, but I couldn’t deny the relief flooding my veins all the same.

  ‘How?’ I whispered, though it was more confirmation than a question.

  I imagined Grandpa’s disappointment reaching out across our separation and scowled at my feet, trying to order my thoughts.

  ‘I’ve known for a long while, Tal,’ he answered with a curious, sad smile, ‘and you never told me, no matter how much pressure I put on you. I guessed something was up, when Octavia made such a fuss over the Book. Then you hid it when we got back to Arafel, and it all slotted into place. I hoped you were going to trust me without all this. And before you think it, your grandpa wouldn’t be disappointed. I’ve seen how far you’ll go to protect Arafel. There is no doubt you were born to this … Old George would be proud.’

  The honesty of his simple words burrowed into my chest with the speed of a hummingbird. He still had the power to undo me, even when I’d made up my mind I wasn’t any good for him. I wasn’t so sure Grandpa would be proud, but I was grateful for his conviction anyway.

  I nodded, my eyes prickling with sudden heat, just as a triumphant blast split the air.

  Our collective gaze shot back to the air vents, which were grinding open again enabling a new view of a slight figure dressed head to foot in purple Pantheonite regalia, a gold-edged cape draped from her left shoulder. She was making her way down the central aisle to rapturous applause, only pausing at the bottom to smooth her raven-black hair, pulled back into a tight bun.

  I felt my skin grow cold. She looked no older than me, but she had to be the wicked witch of Rome Aelia had mentioned. Livia? She sneered sharply, and I felt the twist inside my cramped limbs. How did they always know exactly how to screw up their faces? Cassius’s gloating features leered at me from the recesses of my mind. I scowled. I should have let Unus finish him. He was worse than a monster, because he paraded himself as a hero, when nothing could be further from the truth.

  Livia reached the central balcony, a more lavish, ornate structure than the one I’d scaled when Octavia was in charge, and threw her arms skywards as a huge, black haga-aquila dived from the full height of the domed ceiling.

  There was a rush of excitement, swallowed by a thundering swoosh as it skimmed across the labyrinth, before gliding in beside her to perch on the balcony. It screeched loudly as it came to a flapping standstill, creating air ripples through the arena with its powerful, tapered wings. The crowd hushed, and I saw the whole balcony tremble beneath its powerful frame. It was clear this two-headed haga was bigger and sleeker than any of Octavia’s creations. I stared suspiciously at its bright red flight feathers, and golden eyes the size of oranges, which took me back to the City of Dust instantly. Back to the voluminous night, and the figure of a child hanging limply. Was this the black aquila Cassius had dispatched to bring Lake back?

  Livia pulled a dead rabbit from her white Diasord belt, but before she had chance to offer it, the bird’s closest rapier beak dived in, making short shrift of the treat with one resounding snap. It lifted its wing and preened, as Livia threw an indulgent smile at the crowd, but it was clear to see the bird was no pet. I swallowed hard. So much for aquila, this creature was some kind of hybrid cross between a haga and mythical phoenix firebird.

  ‘More chimera trials?’ I shot at Rajid, as Livia turned her attention back to the crowd.

  ‘Friends, it is my very great delight to welcome you here today for Ludi Pantheonares, on behalf of your Director General: Cassius. And even though he is working through today’s special Ludi holiday, he sends his best wishes for a victorious celebration!’

  She paused to allow for fresh cheering. Her voice was smooth and young, but there was something else too. Octavia always let it be known she was enjoying every painful moment, but this new adversary wore a mask of detachment, which gave nothing away.

  The crowd roared their approval.

  ‘Ludi is a salute to the glory days of our ancestors – the finest civilization this world has ever known,’ she continued as the cheering died away. Her dark eyes gleamed.

  ‘They were glory days built on our ancient values of honour, valour and allegiance! And yet, even recently we were in danger of forgetting these values, of forgetting all we have worked so hard for …’ she paused to eyeball the crowd ‘… thanks to the dangerous rhetoric of Commander General Augustus Aquila!’

  She gave an authoritative nod, as the large screens around the arena lit up. And I could only watch, my world hollowing out, as August’s regal face flickered into view once more.

  ‘Of course, at first we listened, as any great democracy must,’ she continued, ‘but after our great Civitas descended into chaos after only three weeks, it was clear his ideas were both radical and treasonable.’

  Her voice rose, provoking the crowd into a chorus of booing and hissing. I bit my lip; friend or foe, August was being played to perfection.

  ‘This is an inaugural moment,’ he proclaimed proudly over the crowd’s jeers, ‘for every man and woman in Isca Pantheon to own … a moment when divisive barriers are finally removed, and a new Civitas is born. A Civitas born out of our peace and progression. Progression towards an outside life!’

  I stared at the hope in his face, at the way his eyes
darkened to sea-ink whenever they were alive with passion. I’d nearly forgotten that.

  The crowd fell silent as the screens flickered to two Prolet youths sitting astride a well-dressed Pantheonite. One pressed a butcher’s knife to the victim’s white throat as the second rifled through his pockets.

  The pregnant hush continued as the image changed again to the Pantheon civic centre.

  A single-storey market building was engulfed in smoke and flames, while a group of blurred figures stood around, watching.

  The crowd booed, and the screen changed again.

  This time there was a poorly dressed Prolet man and well-coiffured Pantheonite woman standing together in the shadows of a flickering street lamp. A moment later I realized that they weren’t standing together at all. I flushed and stole a swift look at Max who was staring stoically ahead. They could have symbolized hope in such a fractured society, but the crowd were booing already.

  ‘Friends … we know …’ Livia held up her hands as though to appease ‘… the violence and debauchery knew no limits. And, in the end, even Augustus Aquila had to concede his notions were little better than distorted fairy tales; ideas that were born out of a type of fevered lunacy.’

  The screen flickered again, and we were back with August.

  ‘The early integration analysis indicates a common stress symptom among the Prolet class, which may be a reaction to the existing vaccine to suppress independent will. Of course, the recent rioting cannot be tolerated,’ he repeated, his traitorous voice echoing from every corner of the arena. ‘Because of this, and the new investigation required, I would recommend a temporary suspension of all new Prolet privileges and reinstatement of the existing Pantheonite system.’

  ‘But, at least he saw sense before we were all murdered in our beds,’ Livia concluded with a dead smile.