Muses of Terra (Codex Antonius Book 2) (41 page)

He swallowed once, then said, “What do I need to do?”

Juno leaned forward, her beautiful face only a foot from his. “Tell us where you are in the Temple below.”

“What’s he doing?” Ulpius asked Aquilina. They all watched the drama unfold on the holo-monitor through Cordus’s eyes. “He’s not going to tell them where we are, is he?”

“No,” Aquilina said. “I believe in him. He will
not
abandon us.”

She glanced at Dariya, who returned a wary one of her own.

I believe in him.

Aquilina unholstered her pulse pistol and held it at her side. Dariya bared her teeth, but turned her gaze back to the holo-monitor.

But I am not a fool.

“I have friends near my body,” Cordus said.

“Your friends will not be harmed,” Minerva said. “Unless they try to stop us.”

“What will you do to me?”

“Enough questions,” Jupiter thundered. “Do you accept the offer or not?”

“It is generous,” Juno said with motherly patience.
 

The man-sized owl on Minerva’s shoulder shifted its head, its black eyes staring at Cordus. Minerva added, “You will have the freedom you desire above all else.”

Cordus glanced at Ocella, then at Kaeso. They both gave him encouraging smiles.
 

“Freedom,” Cordus said. “Like them?”

“It’s not what you think, kid,” Kaeso said. “We’re not chained to a single body anymore. If our golem body dies, we can leave it for another. Quickly, painlessly.
That
is freedom.”

“All we have to do,” Ocella said from the other side, “is give them our loyalty and our experiences.”

“But you’re golems,” Cordus said.

“We’re free,” Ocella countered with a gentle smile. “Tell them where you are so we can be together forever.”

“Come with us, kid,” Kaeso added.

Cordus looked from Ocella to Kaeso. “I want that so much,” he breathed.

Aquilina raised her pulse pistol and put the barrel against Cordus’s head. Dariya and Daryush looked from Cordus to Aquilina. Emotions warred on their faces. They knew as well as Aquilina that if Cordus abandoned them, humanity was lost. They could not let him join the Muses and give them the secrets of his abilities.

Tears clouded Aquilina’s vision as she watched Cordus’s sleeping form. Her pistol hand trembled.

I believe in you. I believe in you…

“I’ve always wanted that,” Cordus said. “I’ve told you both that since we first met. Do you remember what you always said?”

The comforting smiles of Ocella and Kaeso wavered.

“You said that was
not
the man I was meant to be.”

Cordus knew this temple, this world, these “gods” were not physical. This was all a dream world within the alien vessel inhabited by the Muse strain. And in dreams, only imagination and will limited what one could do.

At least that’s how Cordus prayed it worked here.

I need to be bigger,
he thought. Ocella and Kaeso shrank away from him as his body grew to twelve feet tall. He stood eye-to-eye with both Juno and Minerva, their kind expressions turning to shock.

I need weapons.
A pulse pistol appeared in his left hand and a gladius in his right. He thrust the gladius into Juno’s throat, while at the same instant, he shot Minerva and the owl in their heads with the pistol. Minerva fell to the floor on her back, blood pooling around her head. Juno still hung on Cordus’s gladius. Cordus knew they would soon heal themselves. He only had moments to defeat Jupiter.

But Jupiter was ready for him. The god had a fork of blue lightning in his hand and flung it at Cordus before he could remove his gladius from Juno’s throat. He ducked behind Juno, the lightning slamming into her back. It blasted a hole through her chest and then continued on toward Cordus. He rolled out of the way, but lightning singed the top of his arms when it surged past him. He scrambled away from Juno’s body and hid behind a nearby column that no longer seemed so wide now that he was twice as tall as when he arrived.

Jupiter issued a deep sigh, almost like a hum, that rumbled through the halls of the Temple. “So we finally battle,” Jupiter said. “It has been a long time for us. We missed it.”

More lightning slammed into the column Cordus hid behind, sending shards of marble everywhere. He reached around with his pulse pistol and fired several blind shots in Jupiter’s direction. Cordus tried to peer around the corner, but lightning and marble shards kept him pinned down.
 

I did not think this out well.
Juno and Minerva would heal soon, and then he’d be surrounded. He was on their vessel; they knew their terrain better than he did. They inhabited the vessel like the memories of Ocella and Kaeso inhabited in their golem bodies.

Cordus looked around. This place was the center, where the vessel was controlled. It had to be. So where were the controls?

He saw the vacated thrones to his left. All three glowed a faint blue, but Jupiter’s throne seemed more vibrant.

Cordus needed to get to that throne and then…well, he wasn’t sure after that. Was it the real gods urging him on? The residue of Marcus? He didn’t know, but he felt it to the core of his being that the key to defeating these Muses was on those thrones.
 

Another lightning blast hit the column, and this time the entire thing shook. Cracks appeared all around it, and he didn’t think it could take another blast. He fired more blind pulse shots at Jupiter.

A humming sigh to his left. Cordus had no time to turn before a hand was around his throat. The hand lifted him off his feet and turned him around. He dropped his pulse pistol. Jupiter’s face was no longer that of a benevolent father. His skin had turned a sickly green, his hair hung in greasy black strands, his teeth were sharp points, and his eyes were completely black. Cordus knew his Pantheon. This was Orcus, a god of the underworld and punisher of broken oaths.

Orcus's breath was foul when he snarled at Cordus. “I will feast on your soul, boy.”

As soon as the battle started, Ocella had dropped to her knees and assumed a prostrate form before the Originators. Kaeso had done the same as they both awaited the inevitable conclusion of the battle.

Cordus will lose,
she thought.
He will die. My poor, dear boy will die…

Her body trembled as the shock of that realization roiled through it. This was not right. She should not feel these things. The Originators had assured her she would no longer be distracted by emotions. She was free, they said.

Why couldn’t Cordus see this opportunity? Why couldn’t he just accept the will of the Originators and do what he always wanted?

Lightning exploded against a column to her right. She risked a glance up from her prostration. Cordus hid behind the column, gripping the pulse pistol. Jupiter strode over to him, flinging lightning blasts upon the column. Cordus fired wildly at Jupiter, but the pulse pellets never got close. Jupiter’s body melted into the sickly form of Orcus.

He’s going to kill Cordus now.
This couldn’t happen. She was his protector. She had been since the moment she met him seven years ago, and especially since she helped him escape Roma. And all the years since then, keeping him safe from bounty hunters, Praetorian assassins, and Umbra Ancile eager to avenge their losses in Roma.
 

Ocella noticed Kaeso had turned his head toward the column as well. She could see his hands shake as he watched the terrible scene unfold. Was he feeling the same urge to protect Cordus as her?

His head suddenly turned toward Ocella and their eyes met. His desperate voice filled her mind.
What do we do?
 

She was too paralyzed to respond.
My creators…my boy…

Orcus lifted Cordus by the throat and told the boy he was going to die. Cordus’s face turned purple, his tongue flapped from his mouth as he struggled to breathe. Orcus punched Cordus in the face several times, breaking his nose. Blood spurted. His struggles weakened.

A low moan originated deep in her chest and then emerged from her lips. It grew in volume and intensity into a scream and then a raging howl. Something in her mind snapped and figurative chains fell from her body. She leaped up from the floor, all her focus on Orcus. This monster held her dear boy—
her son!
—in his rotting hands. She charged toward the monster, protecting Cordus her only concern. Her body grew larger to match Orcus's height and mass, though she never consciously willed it. All she felt was rage toward this thing that was hurting one of the two people in the universe that she loved more than her own life.

Orcus turned at the last moment. He seemed much smaller now, almost a head shorter than Ocella. She felt a savage glee as she slammed into him with her shoulder and knocked him into a marble wall a dozen paces away. Cordus fell to the floor gasping and coughing.

But Ocella followed Orcus. She leaped on top of him and hammered her fists into his grotesque face. She rained blows on Orcus, now almost half her size, until his head was an unrecognizable pulp of green meat and white bone.

Cordus rasped, “Behind you!”

Ocella whirled around as two arrows hit her chest from Juno and Minerva, both of whom aimed longbows at her. The arrows knocked her back against the wall. She slid to the floor, her feet unable to support her. She felt herself shrinking in size to her normal height. Juno and Minerva both nocked another arrow and aimed at Ocella. Their faces were impassive, as if they were about to step on a roach.

Kaeso rose up behind them, a gladius in his hand. With one gigantic swing, he decapitated Juno and Minerva. Their heads flew into the air and their bodies slumped to the floor.

Kaeso stood over them, blood dripping from the gladius. “Heal that,” he growled at their bodies.

Ocella wanted to smile, but she couldn’t do much more than look at him. There was no pain from the arrows, but her mind was slipping away. She knew that if she closed her eyes, she’d never open them again. Not even in a new body.

Cordus was by her side. Blood streamed from his broken nose. She found the strength to smile at him. He was alive. It was all that mattered.

Cordus stared at the arrows in Ocella’s chest, willing them to go away in the same way he had willed himself to grow into a giant. He drew from the power of the golems on Terra. He took more than he knew he should, releasing them to potentially kill and hurt other people. He didn’t care. His mother was dying.

When the arrows would not disappear, he tried pulling them out with his hands. They would not budge, no matter how hard he pulled or how much strength he willed into his arms. Ocella was unconscious, but moaned with each pull.
 

He cursed in frustration. “Why can’t I remove them?” he cried.

Kaeso knelt beside Ocella and took her hand in his. Cordus had never seen such pain on his typically stoic face.
 

“Why can’t I remove them?” Cordus repeated to Kaeso.
 

Without taking his gaze off Ocella, Kaeso said, “This isn’t your world. It’s theirs.”

A wet chuckle came from behind Cordus. He whipped around to see Orcus beginning to move. His head was still a mash of green tissue and bone, but it restructured itself before Cordus’s eyes.

“We are gods here, boy,” Orcus gurgled through his ruined mouth.

The headless bodies of Juno and Minerva twitched as white bone slowly grew out of their neck stumps. The bone took the form of skulls, and then tendons crawled up the skulls.

Cordus jumped up and ran to Jupiter’s glowing blue throne. Juno’s hand grabbed for his legs. He leaped over her grasping hands. He charged up the steps and then sat down in Jupiter’s throne.

Nothing happened. There was no change in the throne’s glow. He didn’t know what he expected. He scanned the throne for an interface, but it was all smooth white marble.

What am I supposed to do?
He instinctively reached for the Muses, but recoiled in despair when all he got was silence. Their underlying whispers had always been in his mind, even when they did not answer his queries. The silence was maddening and sad.

Orcus laughed again. His head was looking more like the hideousness of Orcus than some one who had been beaten. “
We
are the gods here, boy,” he repeated.

Juno and Minerva had also sat up. Veins, muscles, and fascia crept up their skulls. Eyes expanded into their empty sockets, and their fleshless mouths pulled back into ghastly smiles.

Cordus searched the throne again for anything that might let him gain control of the vessel.

Orcus stood, took two strides toward Ocella and Kaeso. Kaeso swung at Orcus with his gladius. Orcus knocked the weapon out of Kaeso’s hand and grabbed him by the throat. He reached down and grabbed Ocella with his other hand. He held them both out to Cordus. Kaeso’s eyes bulged as he struggled in Orcus grasp. Ocella hung limp, the two arrows still in her chest, her eyes closed.

“Submit to us, or we will erase them from our archives.”

“You can be with them forever if you submit,” Juno said. Pink flesh now covered her hairless head.

“Give us the location of your body,” Minerva said. Dark hair sprouted from the top of her head and looped down around her shoulders.

Cordus stared at Kaeso and Ocella. Tears formed in his eyes.

I don’t know what to do…

Cordus heard Marcus Antonius’s voice from his memories.
Everyone has responsibilities. Some men must toil in the fields to feed their families; others have to rule an empire.

Cordus clenched his teeth.
It’s not what I
want
to do.
But it’s what I
must
do.

He rose from the throne and willed his height to match that of the three gods below him.

“I am Marcus Antonius Cordus, descendent of Marcus Antonius Primus and Consular Heir of the Roman Republic.
You
will submit to
me
.”