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  The Portal Series, Book 3

  Richard Bowker

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  Please Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Copyright 2018 by Richard Bowker. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

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  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64457-041-8

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Epilogue

  Reader Invitation

  Also by Richard Bowker

  About the Author

  For Joe and Paula

  Prologue

  Lamathe

  Lamathe heard the news first from Samos, who pounded on his door in the early morning, desperate for admittance. Surely what Samos told him couldn’t be true, Lamathe thought. Perhaps he was still asleep, and this was a particularly bad dream. Perhaps Samos was mistaken; he was young and a bit of a hothead—maybe he’d gotten the story wrong.

  But Samos had not gotten the story wrong. One priest after another showed up at Lamathe’s house, in a small castella not far from the center of Urbis. All were distraught, disbelieving, horrified. All told the same story.

  Urbis—the holy city of the Roman empire and the site of Via, its most sacred object—had been invaded during the night. The invaders had raided the armamentarium and obtained its gants, and with those powerful weapons they could destroy anyone and anything. The soldiers’ barracks and the palatium were ablaze; people were fleeing the city in panic. The pontifex’s palace had been taken, and that meant Tirelius and his associates were dead or in the invaders’ hands.

  And the temple of Via itself?

  Yes, it too was theirs. No one had returned from the sunrise service at the temple. Those who had attended the service were likely dead or prisoners as well.

  Who were the invaders? How had this happened?

  And what was to be done now?

  The priests looked to Lamathe for wisdom and guidance. And Samos was the one to ask him the obvious question: “Is Affron responsible for this?”

  For months the priests had talked of little besides the struggle between Tirelius and Affron for the soul of Urbis. Tirelius had finally arrested Affron and sentenced him to death. But on the eve of his execution he had been freed from his jail cell in the palatium and, along with others, escaped from the city. He had not been seen since.

  Lamathe had supported Affron, but he was not a rebel. He had tried to make peace between Affron and Tirelius, to no avail. And now this. “It is not Affron,” he asserted. “I would stake my life on it. You all know him. Would he sneak into Urbis in the middle of the night? Would he kill our soldiers to seize power? He doesn’t even want power. He just wants to be left alone.”

  “Who then?” Samos demanded.

  “I don’t know. The Gallians? They have reason enough to hate us.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Borafin replied. Like Lamathe, Borafin was a viator—one of the priests allowed to use Via to travel to other worlds. “We have to leave. If we stay, we’ll be captured or killed.”

  “But if it’s Affron—”

  “It isn’t Affron,” Borafin insisted. “Lamathe’s right. Affron wouldn’t do this.”

  “I’m willing to die for Via,” Clovis announced. Another young priest.

  “What is the point of dying?” Lamathe responded mildly.

  “It’s better than running away.”

  “Some of us must survive,” Honoria said. She, too, was a viator. “The time will come when we will be needed.”

  “We are needed now,” Samos retorted. He wouldn’t have dared to speak to Honoria that way in normal times.

  Lamathe tried to make sense of it all. Whoever the invaders were, however they had managed to enter Urbis, they were here. And with the gants, they could not be defeated. And so…

  “We must stop them from using Via,” he said.

  “How can we do that?” Theodosius, another viator, asked. “They possess it. It’s theirs.” He was close to tears.

  “Without Affron or another viator to teach them, they will try to use it, and it will defeat them,” Lamathe replied. “It took us all years of training to master it.”

  “But they have Tirelius, if they haven’t killed him,” Clovis pointed out. “They may have captured other viators as well.”

  “No viator will give up the secrets of Via to an enemy,” Honoria replied.

  “But there is the schola,” Borafin murmured. The schola—where young men and women studied for the priesthood and learned those secrets.

  “Yes, the schola,” Lamathe said. “The books there will tell them all they need to know.”

  “We must destroy the books!” Samos cried.

  “What if the invaders have captured the schola?” Karellia asked. She was not a viator, but someday she would have been, if not for what had happened during the night.

  “Perhaps they haven’t,” Lamathe replied. “In any case, that is where we must make our stand.”

  “And if we succeed?” Theodosius asked. “The invaders will still con
trol Urbis, and the empire.”

  “Then, as Honoria says, we must survive—and prepare for the moment when we are needed.”

  “When will that be?” Clovis asked.

  “I do not know,” Lamathe replied. “Tirelius has many flaws. Each of us has flaws. But whoever these invaders are, they will not rule as wisely and justly as we have ruled. The time will come when people will understand this and long for our return. We must be ready. Now come, there’s no time to waste.”

  The priests returned to their own houses and changed out of their colored robes to make themselves less conspicuous. They then filled jugs with lamp oil and lugged them back to Lamathe’s house. Samos had obtained a horse and cart somehow; they loaded the jugs into the cart and finally set off for the schola.

  Lamathe still could not believe this was happening. They were about to set fire to books that had been studied for generations—the accumulated wisdom of Hieron and all who had come after him. And if they couldn’t succeed in burning them, they would die trying.

  Yet it was the right thing to do.

  He looked at Honoria; she had tears in her eyes. “This is awful,” he said.

  “It is.”

  “Do you think the Gallians are responsible?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. It makes sense, though.”

  The Gallians had rebelled decades ago, and the priests had used gants to defeat them. But they had been loyal enough since then. “King Carolus wouldn’t try something like this,” Borafin said.

  “Perhaps he’d do it if he knew it would work.”

  “It doesn’t matter, I suppose,” Lamathe murmured.

  “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”

  They fell silent as their journey continued. Along the way a few other priests joined them. It felt like a procession. They skirted the main road and approached the schola from behind. Students were milling about on the playing field, looking dazed. When they spotted the priests they surrounded them, begging for news and guidance.

  The enemy had not attacked the schola, it turned out. Everyone was safe. So that was good news. Lamathe had to give the students the bad news. He pointed to the cart laden with the jugs full of oil. “We cannot let the schola fall into the hands of the enemy,” he told them. “We are here to burn it down.”

  The students were stunned. They wept. They protested. They begged for a different solution. Like Samos, they wanted a call to arms. Their lives here were just starting, and now Lamathe was telling them those lives were over. They might never become priests or viators. They might never see Urbis again.

  But Lamathe would not relent, and the students did as they were told.

  Everyone brought jugs into the schola and up to the library where they had spent so many happy hours. Shelf upon shelf of wisdom, reaching up three stories. Lamathe had grown up in Alexandria and had spent many happy hours in its great library, but he knew that many of the books there were filled with nonsense. Here was the truth, of this world and many others. And above all the truth of Via, which provided the entranceway to all those other worlds.

  How could this wisdom ever be replaced?

  He and the other viators went into the special locked room containing the records of every journey they had taken to other worlds, back to the days of Hieron. They doused the records with oil and departed.

  When everyone was back outside, the sun was setting; this felt appropriate. And it was left to Lamathe to take a torch, go inside the schola one final time, and set it ablaze.

  He came out afterward and joined them all as they watched the smoke start billowing out of the schola’s windows. No one spoke until finally Samos said, “Whoever they are, I will kill them all.”

  Lamathe put his arm around the young priest’s shoulder, and Samos turned and sobbed uncontrollably into the viator’s chest.

  “It cannot end here,” Honoria said.

  “It won’t,” Lamathe replied. “This is what we will do.”

  And in the gathering darkness he explained his plan.

  One

  Liber

  “Io Saturnalia!”

  The masked, drunken revelers shouted the ancient exclamation as they pushed past Liber on the crowded street. It was the beginning of Saturnalia, the week-long festival when servant mocked master, the ruled mocked the ruler, and all celebrated the end of the old year and the beginning of the new.

  What was there to celebrate? Liber wondered glumly. The old year had been bad enough, but the new year could only be worse.

  It was past sunset, although the leaden December sky had offered no glimpse of the sun. Liber hurried down the Palatine, elbowing his way through the crowds, wrapping his cloak tightly around his body to protect it from the biting wind. The sky had been leaden for days now. Perhaps Roma would never see the sun again, he thought. His satchel, filled with books, was heavy, and he felt the urge to throw it into a rubbish barrel. Much good the books would do him now! He had lost his last pupil—a dim-witted youth named Nicomedes who could scarcely remember his own name, much less how to do multiplication and division. His father, a stout, oily merchant, had given Liber the news as he was leaving.

  “You are not a bad tutor,” the merchant had told him—how gracious of him! “But of course the political situation is so unsettled. Who knows what will happen? We all must be prudent about expenses until we see how events turn out. I’m sure you understand.”

  Prudent about expenses! And how was Liber supposed to be prudent when he had no money whatsoever?

  That wasn’t quite true, of course. The merchant, who was a nice enough fellow, had given him a few extra sesterces as a parting gift, and the coins were jingling in Liber’s pocket. But what could he do with a few sesterces?

  He knew what he wanted to do.

  He walked along the winding street that led down past the Forum into the poorer sections of the city. Soon the fancy houses were gone, and he was walking through a castellum where tired people huddled around smoky fires or in doorways protected from the wind. He thought of his drafty room on the fourth floor of a dreary insula nearby. He had plenty of blankets to pile on top of himself, but in weather like this they weren’t enough to keep him warm.

  He passed a tavern. Inside, he could hear people laughing and singing a bawdy song. There was a tavern on every block hereabouts. Taverns were where you spent your life on cold winter nights, instead of lying on a thin bed covered with blankets.

  He kept walking, but he paused in front of the next tavern. More laughter, more singing, a shouted curse. He could smell cabbage, and boiled mutton, and stale red wine. He had failed to eat lunch, he realized. His stomach started to growl, but he didn’t enter the place.

  Now he was in the castellum where he lived, and he was approaching the tavern where he spent most of the sesterces he managed to earn by tutoring young blockheads like Nicomedes. The Hungry Lion, it was called. On the outside it was no different from all the others, merely a wooden door with a sign above it, and next to the door shuttered windows that were open in the summer so passersby could buy wine without having to bother going inside. He opened the door.

  But inside, oh! The warmth, the noise, the smells! This was his place; these were his people! He went in. A few men greeted him, raising their cups and calling out “Io Saturnalia!”. He waved to them and found his usual spot in the corner.

  These were his people, but he liked to drink alone.

  He set his satchel down and warmed his hands over a charcoal brazier next to his table. Janina came over with jugs of wine and water and a cup. She was heavyset and good-natured, and as always she wore an apron stained with food and wine. “Cold out there, eh, my lord?” she said over the din. My lord. A joke.

  “Bitter cold,” he replied.

  “Tough on the revelers,” she noted.

  “They’re too drunk to feel the cold.”

  “True enough. And little enough to celebrate. Will you be eating tonight?”

  Sometimes when he was low on
money he only drank. But tonight he was hungry, and he had those coins from the merchant. “I will,” he replied. “What do you have?”

  “What do we always have? Stew, and don’t ask me what Iovus put into it.”

  “I’m sure it will be delightful.”

  Janina laughed at his joke and went off to fetch the stew.

  Liber poured himself a cup of wine, adding a little water, and took his first sip of the night. And then his second, and then his third. Before he knew it, the cup was empty, and now he felt better than he had felt all day.

  He looked around. A few men were playing dice, shouting and cursing and laughing. An argument was raging at the next table; he tried not to listen. A stocky man he didn’t recognize was drinking by himself in another corner and reading a small book. Reading? That was out of place in The Hungry Lion. Likely he was the only man here besides Liber who had that particular skill.

  If only he could afford to buy books other than the ones he carried around in his satchel for his students—books of mathematics and grammar and history and rhetoric, most of which he had all but memorized. He too would spend his evenings reading at a table, alone.