Chapter 18: The Crack In The Wall
Chapter 18: The Crack In The Wall
"Take him away." Ignatius waved at Akosa. "He has some lessons to learn."
Aurellia hadn’t moved from her seat.
"What, exactly." She said, "do you have in mind for him?"
Ignatius’s eyes flicked toward her. "The pit." He said. "A night in filth tends to correct most attitudes."
Something in Aurellia’s expression went very still.
"The pit." She repeated, as though tasting the word and finding it lacking. "He humiliated me in front of witnesses, Ignatius, and you propose to send him to bed early?" Her wine cup turned once in her fingers, slow and deliberate. "I want blood. I want his arm, so he remembers this every single time he reaches for a sword."
Marcus Porcius’s hands stilled on the arms of his chair.
Ignatius held her gaze without flinching, though something in his jaw tightened. "With respect, my lady, I cannot grant that." He said evenly. "He is an asset. A maimed gladiator earns nothing in the arena, and I have already turned down considerable gold to keep him whole. I will not have his value plummet even further over an afternoon’s pride."
"My pride..." Aurellia said softly, "is worth considerably more than your gold, lanista."
A long, dangerous silence.
Ignatius inclined his head slightly — not agreement, but acknowledgment that the conversation required careful handling now. "Then let me offer this instead." He said. "A public flogging. Severe. Witnessed by the entire ludus, so the lesson is not lost on anyone else who watches him too closely." A pause. "And you may choose the hand that delivers it, if that would satisfy you."
Aurellia considered this. The anger in her face hadn’t vanished, but something colder and more calculating moved in behind it now, replacing the heat with something far more patient.
"Samir." She said, without looking away from Ignatius. "Karim. Muktar."
Ignatius’s expression didn’t change. But something behind his eyes did.
"As you wish." He said.
Alex, several paces away, hadn’t heard most of this — but he saw the three men step forward from among Aurellia’s retinue when their names were called, and something in his chest dropped through the floor of the courtyard entirely.
He knew those faces.
He’d watched them clean their blades on a dead man’s tunic.
’Oh God. I’m starting to regret my decision.’
Akosa grabbed him by the arm and steered him away from the courtyard without ceremony.
Alex went. He didn’t have much choice in the matter, and also his legs had apparently decided cooperating was the wiser option, even if the rest of him was still catching up to the situation.
Behind them, he could hear the low murmur of voices at the table, but didn’t look back again.
They moved through the corridor in silence for a while. The guards fell in step behind them. Akosa’s grip on his arm was firm but not rough — the grip of a man performing a task rather than enjoying it, which was somehow more unsettling than cruelty would have been.
Then Akosa spoke.
"You know." He said, conversationally, eyes forward. "In my years at this ludus, I have seen men refuse to fight in the arena. I have seen men attack their guards. I have seen a man bite Ignatius once." A pause. "Once." He added, with the particular emphasis of a man who remembered how that had ended.
Alex said nothing.
"I have never." Akosa continued. "Seen a gladiator stand in front of two powerful houses and refuse both. To their faces. While one of them was still holding her wine cup." Another scoff. "That woman has had men killed for less."
"I’m aware." Alex said.
"Are you?" Akosa glanced at him sideways. The corner of his lip, creeping up. "Because from where I was standing it looked considerably more like you weren’t thinking about that at all."
Alex opened his mouth, but closed it.
"I was thinking about it." He said finally.
"And?"
"And I did it anyway."
Akosa was quiet for a moment. They turned a corner, the corridor narrowing, the smell of the ludus’s lower levels beginning to assert itself in the air around them.
"Hm." Akosa said.
It wasn’t admiration exactly. But it wasn’t contempt either. It sat somewhere in the middle, in the particular register Akosa reserved for things he hadn’t decided what to make of yet.
"That’s either the boldest thing I’ve seen in twenty years of this work." He said. "Or the stupidest."
"Which do you think?" Alex asked.
Akosa considered this with apparent seriousness.
"Ask me again after the flogging." He said.
They stopped in front of a heavy wooden door at the end of the corridor. One of the guards stepped forward and pulled it open.
The smell hit Alex first. Damp. And smelled like rot.
Then the dark.
He looked at Akosa.
Akosa looked back at him with the expression of a man who had delivered a message and considered his professional obligations complete.
"In." He said.
The room was small and low-ceilinged, carved directly into the stone of the ludus’s lower level, the kind of room that had been built for one purpose and had never pretended otherwise. Dried blood painted most of the wall, and floor.
A single torch bracket on the wall. Iron rings bolted into the stone at varying heights — some at chest level, some near the floor, some overhead, their purposes left to the imagination of whoever looked at them. A wooden rack along one wall held its collection without apology: barbed whips coiled like sleeping things, leather straps stained dark with old use, iron pincers of various sizes hanging on hooks, a wooden board studded with iron nails, a brazier cold and unlit in the corner with a set of iron brands resting inside it. A heavy wooden beam ran across the center of the room, worn smooth in the middle, chains hanging from either end.
A bucket of salt water sat on the floor near the door.
Alex felt his heart rate skyrocket. His stomach knotting within itself. He swallowed hard, his palms sweaty.
He was guided to one of the walls, and stood with his wrists chained above him to the overhead ring, his back bar, they’d ripped everything off of him — including the bandages — the stone cold against his feet. The chains were tight enough that he was almost on his toes. His ribs still ached from the lion, and the position pulled at everything that hadn’t finished healing yet.
He stared at the wall in front of him and breathed steadily and tried not to think about the torture equipments he had seen laying around.
The door opened.
Ignatius entered first. Then Aurellia, unhurried, her pale silk catching the torchlight. She moved to the side of the room with the particular ease of a woman settling in to watch something she’d arranged herself, and let her eyes move over Alex’s back with an expression that was almost clinical.
Alex looked behind, ahead of the two like he was expecting someone else.
Ignatius noticed. "Lord Porcius sends his regrets." Ignatius said, without inflection. "He found he had other matters to attend to."
Behind Aurellia, the door opened again.
Samir came through first. Then Karim. Then Muktar.
Each of them carried a barbed whip, with the leather wrapped around metal hooks at intervals along its length, designed not just to cut but to catch and tear. Samir held his loosely at his side. Karim was already flexing the handle in his grip. Muktar’s expression was what it always was — almost gentle, almost forgettable, completely at odds with what he was holding.
Alex’s jaw tightened.
He looked back at the wall.
’Alright.’ He thought. ’Let’s fucking go.’
Samir moved first.
The first lash landed across Alex’s shoulders like a line of fire being drawn slowly and deliberately across his back, the barbs catching as it pulled away, blood and flesh ripping away.
Alex’s breath hissed out through his teeth. His hands gripped the chains above him hard enough that the iron bit into his palms.
’Ping! +2 vitality.’
He would have laughed if the pain had allowed it.
Karim took the second. Lower. Diagonal. Overlapping the first cut in a way that suggested either carelessness or expertise, and given what Alex knew about these three men, it wasn’t carelessness.
’Ping! +2 vitality.’
Alex felt the warmth of his own blood, trickling down his skin. Beads of sweat forming on his forehead, as he clenched his teeth, not giving the red haired Domina the satisfaction of a yelp.
Muktar took the third. Quieter than the other two, somehow, with a splatter of blood, falling on his cheek. Yet, he didn’t blink, didn’t flinch. Just the same terrible economy of motion Alex had watched in the arena. Nothing wasted, nothing performed.
’Ping! +2 vitality.’
"Put your backs into it." Aurellia said, from her corner. Her voice was composed, almost conversational, the same tone she might use to direct servants arranging flowers. "He’s still breathing too easily."
They put their backs into it.
Alex lost track of time after a while. The lashes came in rotation, methodical, each one finding new skin where the previous ones hadn’t reached yet, covering the ground with little puddles of blood dripping from Alex’s back.
They continued with the systematic thoroughness of men who understood that efficiency was its own kind of cruelty. The wall in front of Alex blurred occasionally. He kept his jaw shut and his eyes open and focused on a specific crack in the stone inches away from his face, the same way he’d focused on the ceiling of Gaius’s ward, and breathed through his nose, and refused to make a sound that would give Aurellia anything.
’Ping! +2 vitality.’
The vitality points arrived with the serene indifference of a system that acknowledged suffering without caring about its source.
Then — "Stop."
Ignatius’s voice rang out. Even. Flat.
The whips stilled.
The room went quiet except for Alex’s breathing, which was considerably less controlled than it had been twenty minutes ago, though he was working on that.
Ignatius crossed the room until he was standing beside Alex, close enough that Alex could smell the whiff of perfumed oil oozing from him, which was a contrast to the pungent metallic smell of the room. He looked at Alex’s back for a moment — the expression of a man taking inventory rather than feeling anything about the inventory’s contents.
Then he looked at Alex’s face.
"Is there anything you wish to say?" He asked. Quiet. Almost private, in a room full of people. "Now would be the appropriate time."
Alex looked at the crack in the wall.
His jaw tightened.
He said nothing.
’Ping! +10 points for tenacity.’
Aurellia made a small sound from her corner. Not quite a laugh. More like a low growl. When Alex glanced sideways at her, her expression was no longer the composed and pleasant mask she always bore. Her eyes were fixed on him with pure, undiluted rage.
He held her gaze a moment longer, before turning back to face the crack in the wall.
Ignatius studied him a moment longer.
"Continue." He said, stepping back and out of the way.
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