Chapter 184: The Lone Eagle
Dawn on the Danube was a thing of grey mists and cold, damp air. General Vitruvius Pollio stood on the palisade of the main Roman camp, a steaming cup of watered wine in his hand, watching as the river emerged from the morning gloom. He hated this new kind of war. It was a war of waiting, of reacting, a war fought from behind walls with strange, new contraptions. It lacked the brutal, straightforward honor of a pitched battle. Every day, reports trickled in from the new northern forts—reports of stunning, lopsided victories that felt more like industrial slaughters. They were winning, he knew, but the victory felt hollow, endless.
Suddenly, a sentry on the main watchtower pointed to the sky, his shout a sharp crack in the morning stillness. "Signum! In aere!" A sign in the air.
Pollio’s eyes snapped upwards, following the man’s pointing finger. A single, tiny speck was moving against the low-hanging clouds, flying from the north, from the heart of the enemy’s territory. It flew with a desperate, struggling urgency, battling against the prevailing wind. It was not a wild hawk or a migrating goose. It was a pigeon, a homer, flying with the unmistakable purpose of a creature returning to the only home it knew.
As it drew closer, the handlers from the legion’s small signal corps began to stir, their faces a mixture of excitement and disbelief. It was one of theirs. Specifically, it was one of the birds from the special stock of the scout, Valerius—a man who had vanished into the wilderness weeks ago, a man whom Pollio had privately written off as dead.
The bird, a small creature of dusty brown feathers, was clearly exhausted. It circled the camp once, its wings beating in a ragged, faltering rhythm, as if unsure it had the strength to land. Then, as if sensing the familiar scent of home, it plummeted towards the command tent, landing with a clumsy flutter on the outstretched, leather-gloved arm of the chief handler. The man let out a soft cry of triumph and relief. The bird had made it.
He carefully took the small, lightweight tube, fashioned from a hollowed-out reed, from the bird’s leg. He saw the faint, almost invisible imperial cipher Alex himself had ordered inscribed on it. This was not a standard patrol report. This was a message for the Emperor. Understanding the immense gravity of the small object in his hand, the handler rushed it not to the scribes, but directly to the General.
Pollio took the tube, his heart pounding with a sudden, fierce anticipation. He and his staff gathered around the campaign table, their morning routines forgotten. With fingers that were surprisingly nimble for a man of his size, Pollio carefully worked the wax plug out of the tube and tipped it over. A tiny, tightly rolled scrap of parchment, no bigger than his thumb, fell onto the map.
He unrolled it with the delicacy of a man handling a sacred relic. It was not a formal report. It was a crude, hastily drawn map, sketched with a piece of charcoal on what looked like a fragment of a supply manifest. But the landmarks—a distinctive bend in a tributary river, a trio of hills known to the scouts as the ’Three Sisters’—were clear and unmistakable to a veteran of the frontier like Pollio. And deep within the territory marked as the horde’s, a full week’s march from the Danube, was a single, stark, heavily drawn ’X.’
Below the X, a single word was scrawled in rough, blocky Latin, the handwriting of a man in a desperate hurry.
PRAEFECTUS.