The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(32)

And where, exactly, I wondered, was Aquila?

And what was I to do now?

I watched helplessly as the Saturnus gladiators hurried Brutus and a few of the others away before most of the citizenry had even really figured out what had happened. On the other side of the square, a burst of shouting wrenched my attention from the macabre scene, and I looked to see a group of men grappling with each other. Some I recognized as Caesar’s praetorian guard, who—if their uniformly stricken expressions were anything to go by—had most likely been lured away from their master by trickery. I’d heard once that the praetorian guards, on the day they were sworn into service, took a vow not to outlive their lord. If that was true, there might be more dead bodies in the streets before sunset.

In the midst of the guard, I recognized Marc Antony, surrounded by a cluster of his friends, some of whom I recalled seeing at Octavia’s party. Was it only the night before? Suddenly it seemed to me as if years had passed since I woke up that morning. Antony had the look of a man who hadn’t yet been to bed, and his mouth was a gaping hole, howling denial and Caesar’s name. Everything had happened so fast, and there was still a small cluster of assassins remaining, gathered in the portico shadows—shoulders heaving, knives weeping blood—and Antony’s face went rigid with fury at the sight of them. If he’d been able to reach them in that moment, I think he would have torn those men apart with his bare hands. But between them and Antony was the madness of the crowd.

Havoc crashed over them like a rogue wave as the crowd bolted in their direction, and Antony’s friends clustered around him, clutching him frantically by the shoulders and arms, to drag him forcibly away. It seemed almost as if he wasn’t even aware they did so. As he went, his gaze was fixed on the lifeless body of Caesar as if it had been hammered there with nails.

In only moments, the crowded marketplace was almost entirely deserted, everyone else fled and gone. But my feet were rooted as an oak tree to the ground. All I could do was stand there, shuddering, the breath strangling in my throat, staring at the body of the man who had—whether I’d wanted him to or not—been an integral part of my life since I was a child.

Even from that distance, I thought I could see the pale gleam of one of Caesar’s ribs showing through a gaping wound. There was so much blood. I didn’t think I’d ever seen so much blood outside of a body before. It painted the theater steps and the cobblestones below . . . just like the spilled wine that had sent Kassandra into a frenzy of augury on the day of the temple dedication.

“Mars comes for you,” she had warned Caesar.

And then it struck me: According to the Roman calendar, it was the middle of March, the month named after that bloodthirsty deity. Mars, the god of war. And all of Caesar’s civil wars, all of the strife within the Republic, had gathered like a thunderhead that very day and rained down steel and fury upon his head.

And betrayal.

Treachery.

Kassandra had been right all along.

There was a part of me that whispered I should be dancing and giving thanks to the Morrigan for his death. To see the tyrant conqueror toppled from his pedestal and shattered to pieces should have filled me with a savage joy. It didn’t. It took me a moment to realize there were tears on my cheeks.

I wept for Caesar.

Suddenly angry—with myself for mourning or with him for having the audacity to die like that, I didn’t honestly know—I wiped the tears from my face and looked around the now-deserted square, waiting to see who would come to take the body away. But no one did. No one came near. And so, with the streets so completely emptied of all life, I was the only one there to witness Pontius Aquila as he stepped out from behind a pillar on the portico above the bloodstained steps.

I froze, my heart hammering in my throat.

Aquila glanced left and right and, not seeing anyone there to watch him, hurried down to where Caesar’s body lay lifeless in a slowly spreading pool of crimson. I watched him hesitate a moment. Then he drew a long-bladed dagger from the folds of his toga. A large garnet shone in the pommel of the hilt, red as blood, but the blade itself was unsullied with murder and gleamed in the sunlight. It did not remain stainless long. I couldn’t bring myself to move as Aquila knelt beside Caesar’s still-warm corpse and dipped the blade in his blood.

A memento for the Collector? I wondered. A sort of sick keepsake?

Or maybe it was something even more sinister. Perhaps it was some kind of dark offering to his god of death . . .

I was suddenly very glad of the market stall screen, hung with colorful woven shawls, that hid me from his eyes—and for the heavy stillness of the air that kept them from blowing aside in a breeze. I held my own breath as he stood and, casting one long, laden glance back at the body of the man he’d so despised, hurried away south, toward where the River Tiber curved in a wide bend before heading west to the Mare Nostrum.

As he disappeared from view, I heard the sound of running feet, and it was as if the spell that had held me there was suddenly broken. I turned and, searching desperately for a place to hide, sprinted blindly toward the open gates of the now-empty vomitorium of the theatrum. The shadows of the stone tunnel engulfed me in chill darkness for a moment, and then I burst out into the arena . . . and found myself surrounded by a half dozen gladiator practice dummies arranged in a semicircle and crudely decorated with the chalk paint used for the announcement boards in the arena. The Saturnus gladiators must have gotten restless waiting for their masters to commit murder, I thought, and so they amused themselves with a bit of play-fighting. The dummies were all thoroughly hacked to bits. They were also made up to look like females. And I knew, by the double wooden blades bound to its arms, which one was supposed to be me.