More water—rain or waves, I couldn’t tell—poured down into the hold from the hatch grate above our heads, and Elka and I clung to each other and the ladder, hunched against the deluge. From up on deck, we could hear frantic shouts and barked commands, the thunder of running feet. And then the clashing of iron—blade upon blade.
We hadn’t run aground. We hadn’t been swamped by a rogue wave or drawn the wrath of some god of the deep. The galley had been rammed, and we were being boarded by pirates. Not so imaginary after all. The wound in the galley’s flank from the pirate ship’s ram was a mortal one. The vessel groaned like a great beast in its death throes as water rushed in through the shattered timbers. From above, an angry orange glow and the acrid tang of oily smoke filtered down into the hold. Fire. The ship’s coal braziers must have been knocked over. If they had set any of the oil stores alight, the wooden deck would burn, no matter the rain.
“We have to get out of here,” Elka shouted, gesturing up toward the deck. I turned and scurried up the ladder to the top. But, of course, the hatch grate was securely latched from the other side. I thrust upward with all the strength of my legs, jamming my shoulders against the iron bars. The grate didn’t give so much as a hairsbreadth. I squeezed my fingers together and thrust my hand through one of the square gaps in the grate, but I couldn’t get the leverage I needed to budge the latch. I slumped back down onto the top rung of the ladder, panting, blood from scrapes on my knuckles and wrist bones running down my arm. Above us, the deck planking thrummed with the impact of feet and bodies.
“It’s no use!” I called down to Elka. “Is there any other way to—”
Suddenly there was a crashing thud, and the body of a man fell across the grate. His mouth and eyes were frozen open in a horrible death grimace. Wine-dark blood flowed from a gaping wound to his chest, but I saw that he was still clutching a dagger. I stuck my hand through the grate again and held my breath as I carefully worked the weapon free from the dead man’s fingers. If it fell, if I dropped it, I’d never find it again in the darkness and the rising water. Slowly, I coaxed the hilt into the cup of my palm until I could get a firm grip. Then I worked at the grate latch with the blade. Sweat, rainwater, and the dead man’s blood poured down my face and arm and made my fingers slick and clumsy, but agonizing bit by creaking bit, the latch moved . . . and slid free.
I shoved my body against the grate, and it swung up on oiled hinges. The dead man rolled off to one side, and I scrambled upward out of the hold, groping wildly for the dagger as it skittered across the deck and disappeared over the side into the waves. Elka surged up the ladder after me, followed close behind by the rest of Charon’s captives. We poured up out of the hatch opening like ants from an anthill, hoping for a chance at survival. But as nightmarish as it was belowdecks, it was arguably worse above. Under a fearsome sky, the deck of the galley was a maelstrom of bloodthirsty pirates, ruthless legionnaires, and angry slave traders.
The pirate vessel was painted black, with black sails and a high curving bow with a stout ironclad battering ram fixed beneath wicked-looking painted eyes. The ram was buried in the side of our ship like the goring tusk of a wild boar. On the other side of the galley, a smaller vessel with sleek lines—the Decurion’s ship, I guessed—was moored to ours with ropes. The legion soldiers were firing arrows into the throng of pirates hurtling over the galley’s opposite rail and leaping from their own vessel onto the deck of the galley to fight hand to hand. In the light of the fire, I looked up to see Decurion Varro balanced like a cat upon the galley rail, the flames reflecting off the blade of the sword in his hand. Lit by the fire against the flashing thunderclouds, he looked magnificent. Like a god. No, like a conqueror.
Something snapped in my mind.
The noise all around me receded in a wave until all I heard was a distant, throbbing pulse like a muffled heartbeat. A legionnaire gutted one of the pirates not three strides in front of me, and the man twisted in a horrid dance as his guts spilled. He dropped his weapons—a pair of short, curved swords—and one of them landed at my feet.
I picked it up.
Through the red mist that drifted down before my eyes, I no longer saw a ship, or pirates. I could see only soldiers. Legionnaires in their uniforms, hacking and slashing and killing. Where the young, arrogant Decurion stood, I saw only a nameless, faceless commander of Caesar’s legions.
I saw only the man who’d murdered my sister.
In that moment, Caius Varro was Rome. And I . . . I was Vengeance.
I ran at him, howling. If I was going to die on a cursed ship in the middle of a cursed ocean, I was going to die a proper Cantii warrior and take a soldier of Rome down with me to our watery graves.