The IX Read Online Free

in a . . . more orderly fashion. Why don’t you ensure your paths cross tonight at dinner, so you can have a timely chat with him? I have a feeling a combined approach by our most seasoned officers might sway the general’s mind.”
    Flavius trotted off to issue his orders, leaving Marcus to mull over how to broach the issue. Yes. I’ll speak with him during our evening stop. Better this is done sooner. Drusus can twist the old man’s arm in ways I wouldn’t dare.
    As the vanguard crested the hill the sky darkened to indigo, and through the expanding gap in the clouds, the full moon began its climb into the sky. Casting a critical glance at the heavens, Marcus thought, Why couldn’t the break have occurred just a few hours earlier? It would have raised everyone’s spirits, as well as warmed us up. Still, at least we can see where we’re going now.
    The order was abruptly passed for the column to halt. Intrigued, Marcus trotted ahead to see what the problem was. Topping the crest, he found Quintus deep in conversation with Drusus and several scouts. A number of the sentries were gesticulating wildly, and all of them had a haunted look in their eyes. Moving up, he caught a pair of the outriders glancing nervously down into a glen. “What’s happened? Why are we halting where we’ll be exposed?”
    “Because of that , Sir,” the soldier replied, pointing to a swirling dome of mist coalescing across the center of the basin, not half a mile in front of them. “That and the fact that most of our pathfinders are missing.”
    Marcus’s blood ran cold. In the moonlight, a narrow river could be seen running directly across their path. It looked as if a huge axe had cleft the earth in two, leaving behind an oily scar. A steep-sided ravine ran the entire length of the watercourse, effectively blocking their way. A narrow defile had been formed—most probably the effect of years of attrition from bad weather—which appeared to allow a meager point of access to the mountains. On either side of that chokepoint, stunted oaks hunched like gnarled sentinels in the shadows. To Marcus’s eye, they seemed to highlight the only viable route across for miles in both directions. The Legion was heading straight for them.
    Above the trees, a concentrated bank of fog congealed, apparently out of nowhere. Rotating slowly, as if stirred by a giant unseen hand, the miasma swelled and thickened before tendrils of vapor undulated lazily to the ground. Once there, the mist distended in all directions.
    Voices cried out.
    “That can’t be normal.”
    “Omen!”
    “It’s Charon, come to drag us into the Styx.”
    “Keep that nonsense down,” Marcus commanded. “The next one I hear spouting crap like that will lose a day’s pay. Do you he–”
    A piercing howl resonated through the air.
    All chatter throughout the ranks abruptly ceased.
    Another ululating shriek split the night.
    Marcus closed his eyes and sat forward in his saddle; frowning, listening.
    “Wolves?” gasped the infantryman nearest him.
    “No, soldier, I think this is an animal of an entirely different sort.”
    “Marcus!” snapped the the general. “Your thoughts, please.”
    “That’s easy, Sir,” Marcus replied, spurring his horse forward. “Form up and protect the eagle.”
     

CHAPTER TWO
    The Guidon
    (August 20 1860)
    Eyes streaming, Lexington “Lex” Fox, First Lieutenant of One Platoon, Fifth Company, Second Mounted Rifles Cavalry Unit, leaned into his saddle and spurred his horse to greater efforts. He was already exhausted from the long ride they’d endured, and the combination of harsh sunlight and bitter north winds radiating down off the Rocky Mountains only exacerbated his misery. This journey was turning into a one-way ticket to hell, and he felt as if he were stuck in the first-class compartment of the ultimate train wreck.
    Beside him, their ‘package’, Princess Inuck-Shen — known affectionately among the men as Small Robes — rode