A Dream of Mortals

CHAPTER FOUR

Darius felt his face sprayed with blood, and he turned to see a dozen of his men cut down by an Empire soldier riding an immense black horse. The soldier swung a sword larger than any Darius had ever seen, and in one clean sweep he chopped off twelve of their heads.

Darius heard shouts rise up all around him, and he turned in every direction to see his men being cut down everywhere. It was surreal. They swung with great blows, and his men fell by the dozens, then the hundreds—then the thousands.

Darius suddenly found himself standing on a pedestal, and as far as the eye could see lay thousands of corpses. All his people, piled up dead inside the walls of Volusia. There was no one left. Not a single man.

Darius let out a great shout of agony, of helplessness, as he felt himself grabbed from behind by Empire soldiers and dragged off, screaming, into the blackness.

Darius woke with a start, gasping for air, flailing. He looked all around, trying to understand what was happening, what was real and what was a dream. He heard the rustling of chains and as his eyes adjusted in the darkness, he began to realize where the noise was coming from. He looked down to see his ankles shackled with heavy chains. He felt the aches and pains all over his body, the sting of fresh wounds, and he saw his body covered in wounds, dried blood caked all over him. Every movement ached, and he felt as if he had been pummeled by a million men. One of his eyes was swollen nearly shut.

Slowly, Darius turned and surveyed his surroundings. On the one hand he was relieved that it had all been a dream—yet as he took it all in he slowly remembered, and the pain came back. It had been a dream, and yet there had also been much truth in it. There returned to him flashbacks of his battle against the Empire within the gates of Volusia. He recalled the ambush, the gates closing, the troops surrounding them—all of his men being slaughtered. The betrayal.

He struggled hard to bring it all back, and the final thing he remembered, after killing several Empire soldiers, was taking a blow the side of his head from the blunt end of an ax.

Darius reached up, chains rattling, and felt a huge welt on the side of his head, coming all the way down to the swelling in his eye. That had been no dream. That was real.

As it all came back, Darius was flooded with anguish, with regret. His men, all the people he had loved, had been killed. All because of him.

He looked around frantically in the dim light, looking for any sign of any of his men, any sign of survivors. Perhaps many had lived, and had, like him, been taken prisoner.

“Move on!” came a harsh command in the blackness.

Darius felt rough hands pick up him up from beneath his arms, drag him to his feet, then felt a boot kick him in the back of his spine.

He groaned in pain as he stumbled forward, chains rattling, feeling himself go flying into the back of a boy before him. The boy reached back and elbowed Darius in the face, sending him stumbling backwards.

“Don’t touch me again,” the boy snarled.

There stared back a desperate-looking boy, in shackles like he, and Darius realized he was shackled to a long line of boys, in both directions, long links of heavy iron connecting their wrists and ankles, all of them being herded down a dim stone tunnel. Empire taskmasters kicked and elbowed them along.

Darius scanned the faces as best he could, but recognized no one.

“Darius!” whispered an urgent voice. “Don’t collapse again! They’ll kill you!”

Darius’s heart leapt at the sound of a familiar voice, and he turned to see a few men behind him on the line, Desmond, Raj, Kaz, and Luzi, his old friends, the four of them all chained, all looking as badly beaten as he must have looked. They all looked at him with relief, clearly happy to see that he was alive.

“Talk again,” a taskmaster seethed to Raj, “and I’ll take your tongue.”

Darius, as relieved as he was to see his friends, wondered about the countless others who had fought and served with him, who had followed him into the streets of Volusia.

The taskmaster moved further down the line, and when he was out of sight, Darius turned and whispered back.

“What of the others? Did anyone else survive?”

He prayed secretly that hundreds of his men had made it, that they were somewhere waiting, prisoners maybe.

“No,” came the decisive answer from behind them. “We’re the only ones. All the others are dead.”

Darius felt as if he had been punched in the gut. He felt he had let everyone down, and despite himself, he felt a tear roll down his cheek.

He felt like sobbing. A part of him wanted to die. He could hardly conceive it: all those warriors from all those slave villages…. It had been the beginning of what was going to be the greatest revolution of all time, one that would change the face of the Empire forever.

And it had ended abruptly in a mass slaughter.

Now any chance of freedom they’d had was destroyed.

As Darius marched, in agony from the wounds and the bruises, from the iron shackles digging into his skin, he looked around and began to wonder where he was. He wondered who these other prisoners were, and where they were all being led. As he looked them over, he realized that they were all about his age, and they all seemed extraordinarily fit. As if they were all fighters.

They rounded a bend in the dark stone tunnel, and sunlight suddenly met them, streaming through iron cell bars up ahead, at the end of the tunnel. Darius was shoved roughly, jabbed in the ribs with a club, and he surged forward with the others until the bars were opened and he was given one final kick, out into daylight.

Darius stumbled with the others and they all fell down as a group onto the dirt. Darius spit dirt from his mouth and raised his hands to protect himself from the harsh sunlight. Others rolled on top of him, all of them tangled up in the shackles.

“On your feet!” shouted a taskmaster.

They walked from boy to boy, jabbing them with clubs, until finally Darius scrambled with the others to his feet. He stumbled as the other boys, chained to him, tried to gain their balance.

They stood and faced the center of a circular dirt courtyard, perhaps fifty feet in diameter, framed by high stone walls, cell bars around its openings. Facing them, standing in the center, scowling back, stood one Empire taskmaster, clearly their commander. He loomed large, taller than the others, with his yellow horns and skin, and his glistening red eyes, wearing no shirt, his muscles bulging. He wore black armor on his legs, boots, and studded leather on his wrists. He wore the rankings of an Empire officer, and he paced up and down, examining them all with disapproval.

“I am Morg,” he said, his voice dark, booming with authority. “You will address me as sir. I am your new warden. I am your whole life now.”

He breathed as he paced, sounding more like a snarl.

“Welcome to your new home,” he continued. “Your temporary home, that is. Because before the moon is up, you will all be dead. I will take great pleasure in watching you all die, in fact.”

He smiled.

“But for as long as you are here,” he added, “you will live. You will live to please me. You will live to please the others. You will live to please the Empire. You are our objects of entertainment now. Our show things. Our entertainment means your death. And you will execute it well.”

He smiled a cruel smile as he continued pacing, surveying them. There came a great shout somewhere off in the distance, and the entire ground trembled beneath Darius’s feet. It sounded like the shout of a hundred thousand citizens filled with bloodlust.

“Do you hear that cry?” he asked. “That is the cry of death. A thirst for death. Out there, behind those walls, lies the great arena. In that arena, you will fight others, you will fight yourselves, until none of you are left.”

He sighed.

“There will be three rounds of battle,” he added. “In the final around, if any of you survive, you will be granted your freedom, granted a chance to fight in the greatest arena of all. But don’t get your hopes up: no one has ever survived that long.

“You will not die quickly,” he added. “I am here to make sure of it. I want you dying slowly. I want you to be great objects of entertainment. You will learn to fight, and learn it well, to prolong our pleasure. Because you are not men anymore. You are not slaves. You are lower than slaves: you are gladiators now. Welcome to your new, and final, role. It won’t last long.”