The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(32)

That someone was probably going to be him. The girls surrounding him might not have been armed, but they were the embodiment of strength in numbers. I just wished Tanis could see that.

With a huff of frustration, Aeddan slammed his sword back into its sheath. “If you stay here, you will die,” he said.

“It’s a ludus.” Tanis kept up her sullen argument. “Dying’s pretty much the point, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said. “Fighting is the point. At least, it was. Pontius Aquila is different.”

But some of the younger girls had begun to frown and shift uneasily. I couldn’t blame them. All they knew—really knew—about the situation was that something had happened to the Lanista, and a rival ludus owner was now in charge of the academy. Nyx had gone on to fight for him, and Nyx had been one of us. How bad could it really be? I realized, then, that I was the only one of the Achillea gladiatrices who understood just how dire the situation was. Cai and Aeddan knew, but I’d never spoken to any of the other girls about the horrors I’d encountered in the Domus Corvinus. I hadn’t even told Elka. I’d never wanted to relive those memories.

“Fallon is right,” Cai said, stepping forward. “And so is he.” He nodded at Aeddan. “Pontius Aquila is a respected citizen. He is the Tribune of the Plebs and an influential politician. He is also mad and dangerous. And utterly ruthless.”

Even Tanis went still at that.

“The arena games aren’t just sport to him,” I said, my voice ragged in the sudden silence. “They’re . . . rituals. Twisted blood rites. He belongs to a secret society of men who stage private munera where the fighters are nothing more than sacrifices to a dark god they call Dis.”

I looked up to see Elka’s gaze fastened on me. “How do you know this?”

They all stared at me, wide-eyed and skeptical, waiting for some kind of an explanation that would make sense of what Aeddan was saying. I took a breath and told them all what I’d experienced after Elka and I had been lured by Nyx to the Domus Corvinus with the promise of an evening of harmless—if forbidden—fun. It had turned out to be quite the opposite. “Forbidden” in reality was more like “outlawed,” and “fun” translated horribly as “nightmare.”

I told them what I’d witnessed in the catacombs of the palatial house that night while the rest of the party guests carried on, reveling in the thrill of a gladiatorial duel that had proved salaciously lethal. The guests didn’t know that the loser of the bout was taken away and laid out on a marble slab, like a sacrificial altar to a dark god. They didn’t know that his chest was split open like a roasting carcass, his still-warm heart torn from the cavity and weighed on a golden scale. And they most certainly did not know that, after that, it was consumed by masked men who called themselves the Sons of Dis. Devoured in a bloody, horrifying ritual. But I knew. I’d seen it happen with my own eyes.

Dis, I’d later learned, was the dark incarnation of the Roman god Saturn—ruler of the Underworld, a pitiless deity who could grant his worshippers strength and power but would only be placated with blood. As I told my friends the tale, Aeddan stood at my side, his face pale and his jaw tight, nodding confirmation of everything I’d said.

“They . . . ate the heart of the man you killed?” Tanis asked, one hand creeping up to cover her own breastbone.

Aeddan nodded.

Heron ran his fingers over his beard, regarding Aeddan with scholarly detachment. “And yet, you still fought for Aquila,” he said.

Aeddan met the physician’s gaze with an unblinking one of his own. “At the Ludus Saturnus. I did. Until he made me a member of his elite guard.”

Heron nodded, and said nothing more. The girls stared at Aeddan with varying expressions of wariness, curiosity, and revulsion. I had my own ideas as to why Aeddan had stayed in close proximity to Aquila. He wasn’t a slave. Even if he wasn’t welcome in our own land, he still could have left at any time. But if he had, he wouldn’t have been at the Ludus Achillea now. And I’d still be locked up in Tartarus.

I turned away from him to find Elka staring at me.

“I had no idea,” she said. “That night . . . after I lost track of you. That’s . . .” She trailed off, unable to put into words what she was thinking.

“Evil,” Neferet finished her sentence for her. “What they did was evil. In Aegypt, when we die, Anubis, the god of the dead, carves out our heart and weighs it against Ma’at, the feather of truth.”

My hand went to the wound on my wrist—the one Aquila had carved with his feather—and a shiver of dread ran through me, scalp to sole.

“But Anubis is a god,” Neferet continued. “And only a god has that prerogative.”

“Aquila thinks of himself like that,” Aeddan said. “He thinks the heart of a warrior gives him strength. Power.”

Ajani stepped forward. “The hearts of these warriors”—she gestured to the girls gathered around—“will not give him power. We will give him nothing but pain.”

? ? ?

When I’d told Aeddan that I wasn’t leaving without the others, I think I knew that the likelihood of all of us escaping was a remote possibility. The Amazona girls and their guards outnumbered us, and unless all the luck and every benevolent god who chose to turn an eye on our plight was with us, some of us simply weren’t leaving the ludus that night.