Tarnished Empire - Danielle L. Jensen

1

Marcus

The camp was eerily quiet given the number of men dying.

Legionnaires carrying stretchers raced toward the medical tent, their faces grim, the injured writhing in pain.

But where there should have been screams, the only sound was wheezing gasps for air through lips frothed with foam and blood.

Marcus stepped inside the tent, the heat from several braziers warding off the chill of the morning air though they did nothing for the icy bite of trepidation he felt over what was to come.

Medics moved between the cots, pulling off armor and clothing and discarding them in heaps to be taken away by the men who’d brought in the injured. Yet there was no urgency in their motions, only quiet resignation as they dosed dying men with narcotics, easing their path to the end.

Spotting Racker, Marcus wove between medics toward the Thirty-Seventh’s head surgeon, who had his ear pressed against an unconscious man’s chest. “Can they be saved?”

“Quiet,” Racker snapped, his dark eyes shifting up to fix on Marcus. “That’s precisely what I’m trying to determine.”

If it had been anyone else, a reprimand would have already been on Marcus’s lips, but he only rocked on his heels, his eyes jumping from cot to cot, watching men gasp for breath. Seeing the panic in their eyes. The pain. The fear.

“No.”

The word made him jump, the finality in it making his stomach twist as he turned to look at Racker. “You’re certain?”

“Whatever the Bardenese burned to make the smoke, it’s pure poison.” Racker smoothed his white apron as he straightened, a full head taller than Marcus but skinny as a rail. “Their lungs are destroyed. They’re drowning in their own blood.”

Exhaling slowly, Marcus scanned the tent. Every bare chest he saw was tattooed with a black 29. “How many Thirty-Seventh?” He knew some of his men had been killed when the Bardenese had broken through the tunnel and caught them by surprise, but that should be the extent of it.

Hostus, the legatus of the Twenty-Ninth Legion, used the Thirty-Seventh like mules—making them excavate his tunnels, build his walls, and dig his latrines—however it was the Twenty-Ninth that led the assaults. Not because the older legatus wished to protect the younger legion, but because he wanted the glory of victory all for himself.

Except glory always had a price.

“A few inhaled some of the smoke while dragging out the injured,” Racker answered, gesturing to the far end of the tent, where several still forms lay covered by blankets. “They’ll live, although only time will tell whether they recover fully enough to endure a hard march ever again. You may need to discharge them.”

Marcus’s jaw tightened. Trained from age seven as soldiers only to have their careers ended at sixteen. The Senate’s army of administrators would take charge of them, pay out the balance of their earnings, and see them settled in one of the provinces. Except Campus Lescendor trained soldiers, not civilians, and discharged men usually ended up dead or in prison, poorly suited to life outside the legion. “Don’t make that decision before you have to.”

“Yes, sir.”

Abandoning the tent, Marcus blinked against the bright morning sun, vision clearing to find Felix standing outside. His second-in-command was in deep conversation with the Thirty-Seventh’s primus, Agrippa, although both straightened at the sight of him.

“Hostus requests your presence, sir,” Felix said, unease clearly visible on his face. “Immediately.”

Trepidation bit at Marcus’s insides, but he nodded, striding through the camp with the two following at his heels. To his right, the fortress city of Hydrilla rose in the distance. The high walls were patrolled by Bardenese warriors, their catapults ready to be deployed at the slightest sign of aggression, their vats of tar never without fire beneath them.

For months, they’d been laying siege to this last holdout of rebels, but it couldn’t last much longer. Not with the smell of snow in the air—the winters in Bardeen were notoriously vicious. The legions would have to retreat to the coast, which meant another year would pass with Bardeen still unbroken, still defiant against the Empire.

Marcus suspected that was what this conversation would be about.

Command was a large tent at the center of the camp surrounded by a perimeter of guards whose attention was not outward, as it should have been, but rather inward. Angry shouts and the sound of smashing furniture spoke to the reason why.

“Oh, this is going to be delightful,” Agrippa said. “Gird your loins, sir, for it sounds like our patrician overlord is not best pleased he isn’t moving