To my wonderful and very patient returning readers: Here at last is Chapter four of Imperius. Your feedback has been enduringly helpful, and I look forward to any that you can continue to provide.
To any new readers: This is the 4th part of a series, and this installment in particular might be difficult to follow without the context of previous chapters. I suggest that you give chapter one a try before reading this one.
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Lilah startled awake at the feeling of cold water being poured over her naked body, the sounds of a stirring Imperial encampment permeating her senses. Mairi, at Lilah's side, cried out with a whimper at the shock, her head of shining brown hair lifting off of Lilah's shoulder.
"Wake up, wake up all!" Caius, the commander in charge of wrangling the Illythian captives was calling out airily as he strode amidst the caravans. His manner was brisk and businesslike, as though rousing inattentive students. He had been in charge of them for two days since their capture, and throughout the transportation he had proven himself indisposed to temper. His response to delay or defiance was a kind of amiable intolerance, readily prepared to offer punishment, but without any particular malice.
All around them, their fellow prisoners—each one caged like an animal—were being roused in the same way, gasping and shivering in the morning chill as Imperial soldiers doused them with hoses.
The caravans used to transport them over the rolling emerald hills of Illythiel had come to a halt in an open clearing, hovering less than a meter above the ground and surrounded by war tents as far as any of them could see. There, the soldiers with hoses began their work, and the sounds around them were rising to a cacophony that the prisoners would not have slept through even without the hoses.
With the prisoners awake, a crowd of Imperial soldiers began to form outside their cages.
"Lilah, they're all staring," Mairi whispered, half-petrified by the sight of a crowd of legion soldiers watching her.
"Try to ignore them," Lilah murmured back, her own expression determinedly calm. "Don't let them see your fear."
"Pretend they're all wearing silly underwear," Antony suggested mildly from the next cage over, his Valencian accent lilting at the edges. "That's what I do."
Mairi made a small, panicked sound in response, and hid her face against Lilah's shoulder.
Mairi had taken the capture the hardest of them. There was no guile or secrecy in her nature, and throughout her several months near the war-front, she had been among the least suited to it. Her hands, warm and gentle as they were, shook at the sound of every shell strike. Lilah had done her best to look out for her. For all the good it had done.
Lilah murmured to her comfortingly, ashamed that it was all she could do and even moreso that it was as much for her own sake as it was for Mairi's. That she was burying her anger and pain beneath the shadow of someone else's.
She glanced back at Antony over Mairi's head.
He sat directly behind Lilah, his back parallel to her's, slender and urbane. His tawny, sun-kissed skin marked him as unusual amongst the mostly blonde and red-haired Illythian captives just as much as his unruffled demeanor.
He had been unusually quiet as they travelled, and Lilah was struck with such a sense of contemplation from him that she had let him be. There was no comfort she could offer him now anyway. He had defied the orders of his own country in joining the Illythian cause, though doing so had been as much of Valence's sake as Illythiel's. He had striven to stem the tide of the Imperius and prevent it coming that much closer to conquering his own country.
That he would be taken at the very moment the Imperial onslaught had begun to overwhelm their every effort, when he had been at the center of so much hope only months before was a cruelty beyond measure.
Sitting motionless across from Antony was Diarmuid, his bear-like, thickly muscled build taking up a good portion of the space, hunched as he was. He was the palest of all of them, his hair a copper flame in the gloom of the day, matched by his short beard. Though they were faint, Lilah knew the scattering of freckles across his nose by memory just as she knew that his grim silence was not a sign of temper, but of guilt. Their capture weighed heavily on his shoulder—much more heavily than he deserved, she thought, though she couldn't tell him so now.
"Did you see if Eris got away?" she asked Antony in a low murmur instead, her lips barely moving.
Lilah could barely discern the minute shake of his head. "We can only hope," he said.
Each captive was guided out of their cage amidst a tumult of attention. The soldiers seemed amused to observe them stumbling on their sore legs and trying in vain to cover their nudity with their shackled hands.
Lilah helped Mairi find her footing, her efforts complicated by the restrains. Behind her, Antony was all ease and grace, his wavy dark hair tied back and romantically windswept after two days in a cage, traveling over rolling terrain. Diarmuid looked as though he saw none of the commotion and merely gaze forward with solemn dignity.
Lilah was surprised to see the same bone-deep weariness in the soldiers' eyes that she knew in those of the regiment. These soldiers had initially been promised a brief campaign in Illythiel, where the technology was decades behind their own, the weather was temperate, and the enemy was mostly cloth makers and farmers. And where the few true soldiers among their military would value honor too highly to dedicate much time to tactics or strategy.
What they had found instead was a place where the enemy had a singular knowledge of how to use the landscape, rarely fought straight on, and introduced startling mechanical innovations to the battlefield when they did. The clockwork Goliaths the Illythian regiment employed at the front line, mechanical men that wielded astounding force and power without risking a single Illythian life in the process, were just one example. It hadn't been far into the war before the Illythian troops suddenly seemed able to command mist itself, hurling mechanisms at the legion horde that released a scentless white smoke in their midst and turned all to confusion. The short campaign they had expect stretched on, and now it had lasted longer than any other nation they had conquered, a fact that gave the Illythians a sense of grim pride.
They were lined up against a wall, and before many of the captives knew what would expected of them, they were hosed down yet again, cringing and cowering against the frigid torrent. Lilah was amongst those who tried to stand erect in the face of this humiliation and pain, but she did resort to covering her private parts against the force of the water. The effect was a Venus-like pose that drew her some notice in the crowd.
She looked up to find numerous pairs of eyes fixed on her, each glittering with lurid insinuation. One of them, she was unnerved to see, was Commander Caius himself, though his manner was more dignified than many in the crowd.
He waited, calm and genial, for the crowd to quiet before he began to saunter his way down the line, and imperial archivist and a lieutenant following at his shoulder.
Lilah lowered her eyes to the ground as they came nearer, though they stopped in front of Diarmuid first.
"Well, here is quite a figure," said Caius, taking in his height appreciatively. "A fighter?"
"His tags list him as an officer. He was found guarding an enemy medical team," said his lieutenant at his side in a guttural voice. Lilah had heard him referred to as Gracchus. He was a broad man, dark and thickly bearded, with an air of experience and scars to testify it. His eyes were deep set and vaguely animalistic enough to be intimidating, but there was a deep sense of professionalism as well, rigid yet oddly reassuring. Like Caius, Gracchus observed the captives without malice, which could not be said for most of the crowd.
Diarmund stood expressionless in the face of their scrutiny, the kindness in his grey green eyes dimmed to something stoic.
