Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

“There are sixty-six bullets in these magazines. All sixty-six are for Lune.” I point to three windows. “I want you there, there, and there. Expect snipers. Do not reveal your position, not for any reason, until you have him in your sights. Do you understand?”

“Do you know what he looks like?” Thraxa asks.

They nod. “His face was on a broadcast before the EMP,” the handsome one says in the same accent. Two of them even look alike.

“You all brothers?” I ask.

“Yessir.”

“If this goes tits-up, use the roofs to get to the Mound. Bag me a Lune.”

They take off. Thraxa stares across the plaza. I put a hand on her shoulder. “If they don’t drop him, crush his skull on the way down.”

“Got it.”

She jogs off. Blood sprinkles down from above. I look up and see a man falling from a rooftop. A centurion shouts a warning for enemy snipers. “Where the hell did they get gunpowder?” someone shouts. Where else but from the Heliopolitans. Muzzles flash on northern rooftops.

As the sniper duel rages, the Golds and Obsidians help me drag abandoned ground transports and civilian hovercraft just shy of the southern mouth of the Triumphia where it exits the plaza. We’ve blocked only half of the fifty-meter-wide artery when a spotter calls to Thraxa on a rooftop and she calls down to me: “Enemy cavalry spotted!”

I look to the air instinctively. It is empty. And then I hear the thunder on the ground. My insides twist. He’s emptied the stables. The last time I heard hoofbeats and felt anxiety was nearly sixteen years ago.

The oceanic sound of an army shouting with one voice drifts from the northern city. I can barely make out the words.

“…Invictus! Per ordo…”

“Form up!” I bellow. “Form up! To me! To me! Reds to the roofs! Reds to the roofs! Thraxa!” As the Reds rush up stairwells along the Triumphia, Thraxa peers down at me. “Let them hit, then fall on: red rain!”

She understands what I mean and ducks as a fusillade of enemy fire chews into the façades of the buildings. The Howlers in the bell tower are gone, killed already. Long shadows sprint along the rooftops west and east of the plaza, hurtling six-meter-wide streets as easy as children hop over brooks. Some are shot mid-leap and spin down between the buildings, but in a world without electricity, the Peerless Scarred are kings. They clash into my rooftop elements along our flanks.

The sea of voices is a creeping tide.

“Lune! Invictus! Lune! Invictus! Per ordo. Per ordo…”

I roll up my helmet.

On the ground, every legionnaire without gunpowder rushes for the meager security of our barricade. They look to each other, mouthing the dreaded word: “Lune.” I stand in the empty center around a lone family hovercraft. My thirteen Golds and forty Obsidians cluster around me in their dead armor to make a hedgehog of bristling razors. I wish Alexandar were with me. I wish Sevro had my back. I wish Ragnar were here, and Orion in the sky. But these are my brothers and sisters too.

We toggle the razors so they take on their leanest and longest form, nearly a meter and a half. Not nearly long enough. The lowColors gather on our wings, sixty men deep behind the vehicles, some few holding polearms of metal fence posts or signs, and they shiver in dread as they see what’s coming. Even the droning death chant of the Obsidians stutters when they hear the sonorous lament of the initium horn.

Once, on a mission for Nero, I had the privilege of witnessing something no lowRed of Mars had ever seen before: a race in the Hippodrome of Heliopolis. The sun was bright, the streets filled with music, honey wine, and the smell of spiced ginger locust sweets. Out of respect for my patron, the Votum allowed me backstage before the initium horn to see the riders preparing. In the shadowy recesses of the underground stables, I saw sunblood stallions for the first time. Until then, I’d only known the horses of the Institute, animals of sixteen hands. They were terrifying enough to my mine eyes. But they are little more than donkeys compared to sunbloods. Weighing nearly one ton and twenty-three hands tall, with bone-pale coats and fiery manes, capable of speeds up to eighty kilometers per hour at full gallop, the beasts I saw race were barely horses at all. Monsters, I thought, feeling a kinship with that unnatural bloodline. Beautiful monsters made for one purpose.

The race I watched ended in catastrophe, with the winner’s prize stallion biting off the head of a competitor when he came at the winner waving a whip. The Gold owners were horrified, but how the crowd cheered.

How did I ever think these people would embrace liberty?

Now two, three, four hundred, maybe more, of the most powerful chariot horses that have ever lived have come to war. They rumble into the northern mouth of the Via Triumphia in an avalanche of white muscle and fiery manes and multihued festival saddles, ridden with terrible grace by the equestrians amongst the prisoners of war—Grays and Golds. They’ll go through us like an anvil through glass.

But glass can cut. And if we run, it’ll be massacre.

“Stand fast!” I roar at my veterans, conjuring the only trick I have left. Bullets smack into our armor, sending some stumbling. Grenades detonate amongst the horses, sending some screaming. “When I give the command ‘Line,’ form a line three deep! When I give the command ‘Flat,’ go flat and hold your razor like this! Trust your weapon. Trust your armor! Stand fast!”

Gunshots rattle through the plaza. Ours and theirs. Men are kicked back from windows and duck on the rooftops from precision shots by Lysander’s escorts, dying as they desperately fire down at the horses. Riders spill from saddles. Horses go down with shattered fetlocks and inhuman screams. One takes more than a dozen shots to the neck before it falls full speed into a transport, crumpling the hull and throwing its rider dozens of meters through the air for him to land in a human smear. But the tide does not break. It quickens. The sound of thunder is all. Rattling my eardrums, filling my gut with dread.

“LINE!”

My cluster of armored men unfolds to stand in a thin line at the center of the formation.

Then I see him amongst them, riding at the fore of the charge in white armor, the reins in one hand, a razor in the other. The boy whose grandmother I killed in front of him. The boy I spared for the sake of decency. The boy Aja trained and Cassius raised, who looked me in the eye and mocked me with lies before returning here like a demon to haunt those foolish enough to practice mercy. Frozen in time atop a monstrous steed, bald from radiation, face set not with vanity but grim determination, leaning forward in a saddle that flutters with ribbons of a hundred colors, he looks magnificent.