by Adam Golden
“Where?” Tulio asked wonderingly, more to himself than to Nicholas, and then his face hardened again. “Where? You ask me that? After all that I have done, after all that has been asked, no, demanded of me?” He didn’t yell, but he wasn’t calm, his face was purple with anger, the sinews of his face and neck bulged with strain.
Nicholas was taken aback, devastated by the vehemence of the tirade.
“You drag me along behind you like a pet! With no more care or consideration than a man gives a mongrel dog, and what do I get for my loyalty? My service? Blood, danger, privation, and damnation, all without end or thanks! Where is my reward, my honored place? Am I consulted? Do you seek my advice? No! I am no higher in your estimations than this . . . thing you’ve made! Just another tool to be used and cast aside. Once I commanded your household, I had your respect, now even your monster sneers at me, and you ask me why?”
Nicholas sagged against the wall behind him as though he’d been struck. He felt as though the man had rained blows down on him rather than just hateful words. The prickle of hot tears at his eyes surged and he felt himself panting as though it had been he, and not Tulio, who’d delivered the impassioned speech.
“Tulio . . . please. I . . . truly, I didn’t know you felt this way,” he started at a loss. He felt as though he were stammering. “You have always had my respect, old friend, always. I love you as I would love a brother.”
For some reason the other man flinched at that.
Nicholas pushed himself forward and advanced toward his friend, disheartened to see the other man step back. “You are my oldest friend, my first ally. I rely on your support and counsel beyond that of any other. Do you truly not know that?” Nicholas asked. “What can I do? How can I show you?” His eyes fell on Prancer and a thought dawned. His hand closed around his knife again.
“Prancer, you are to serve and obey Tulio in all things, as you would me. Is that clear?”
The guttural, strangled groan that emanated from the creature’s hood could have been acknowledgement or denial, it didn’t matter, Nicholas’ power demanded obedience.
“There,” the bishop said searching his friend’s stony face. “It’s a small thing, I know, but please Tulio, please know that I hold you in higher estimation than any other man. Ask and I swear you shall have whatever you desire.”
The old retainer still looked troubled, his frame was still tense, but he moved forward and clapped his open hand companionably around the back of his friend’s neck. “Thank you, Nikki, for the words and the gesture. You have no idea what it means to me.”
Nicholas clasped his friend’s arm and smiled, relieved and hopeful that their old partnership might be salvaged yet.
“Come, we should find shelter,” Tulio said. “You are worn and ragged. Our adventures lay heavily on you, old friend. Hebe withdraws her cup from all men, so they say.”
“What do you mean?” Nicholas asked and Tulio gestured to a rain barrel not five feet from Nicholas.
Nicholas moved to the barrel, looked into the surface of the water, and gasped. The face looking back at him was almost that of a stranger. Tulio was right, had Hebe been more than a pagan fancy? The goddess of youth surely could have been blamed for what he saw looking back. His skin was darker than it had been, long weeks in the hot sun had no doubt done that, but it also seemed rougher, and sagged in places it hadn’t before. Wrinkled folds of flesh suddenly hung at his cheeks and under his chin, dark circles hung under sunken eyes which seemed to have gone from brilliant blue to a sort of muddied iron grey, and even his nose seemed wider, less aristocratically aquiline that it had before. His neat lustrous white beard had become not only longer and more unkempt, but had lost its shine and seemed more coarse and curly. He even seemed to have put on weight against all sense. He looked like a different person. No wonder the gate guards hadn’t matched him to the image.
But how?
This was more than the strain of travel or the grip of age. He was changed, he looked . . .
I look like my father! That was it! The fuller face, broader nose, coarse hair, and dull grey eyes, they were all like his father’s. How? Could she have? For all of these years? Yes. He knew she could.
Fulvia.
He flashed back to Arius’ spiteful words in the council chamber at Nicaea.
“Can whatever monster you turned that woman into actually die? It looked like death.”
Nicholas clutched the sides of the barrel until his knuckles popped and ached. A glamour. She’d used a glamour on him! She’d changed his face. Fulvia. Again. Always Fulvia, prying, prodding, meddling, and when she’d died all of her works had begun to unravel. That had to be it. What was he to do now? He couldn’t return to his office, to his life, not like this!
Nicholas was so ensnared by the stranger’s face looking up at him in the barrel, so entwined by his rage and helplessness in the face of his mother’s trickery that he never saw the small upturn of Tulio’s lips, or the growing tumult of grinding stone and screaming people, or felt the tremors that shook the very heart of the city. His world was compressed to the sight of the alien visage staring back at him and the word that spat from his lips again and again with both hatred and disbelief.
Fulvia.
Upheaval
“Move!” Tulio’s shoulder took the other man low in the right side before the warning was even out of his mouth.
Nicholas crumpled under the force of the stronger man’s weight as the bodyguard’s momentum drove them both to the paving stones. A cloud of shrapnel and dust exploded outward as an avalanche of concrete, wood, and tile buried the spot where Nicholas had been standing.
Blinking furiously, Tulio tried to clear a jumble of blurry, clouded images which spun before his eyes. He couldn’t see! Half a building had just slid off itself for no reason, and he couldn’t see. Panic threatened and was quickly suppressed. God but his head hurt. He brought a hand up to rub at the throbbing behind his eyes and winced, pulling back bloody fingers. Gingerly, Tulio probed the flesh of his brow and discovered a ragged tear that ran the length of his forehead below the hairline. His whole head felt as though it were packed in cotton, and it pulsed as though his heart beat behind his eyes rather than in his chest. No time for that now. The stoic manservant closed his eyes tightly and shook his head. I need to see!
When he opened his eyes, a hazy sort of clarity had returned, but his confusion and disorientation only increased.
A moment ago, they’d been standing on a busy street packed with citizens and travelers going about their lives, visiting shops, browsing market stalls, hauling goods, griping about the press of traffic. It was chaotic and offensive to the senses, but it was normal, a regular day like any one of a thousand others in cities all over the world. This—he wasn’t sure what to call this—was certainly anything but normal.
In the space of a single blink the city itself had come alive, groaning and rumbling like some massive leviathan waking from a long slumber. Wherever Tulio turned his gaze, the rousing monster twisted and bucked. The everyday clog of crowds had turned into dozens of little riots as knots of roaring, jostling animals desperately scattered in every direction.
Unwillingly, Tulio flashed back to the milling press of Pylae Wharf. He heard the screaming and felt the choking, smoke-filled air in his lungs all over again. He saw the ships, so many ships aflame that the water seemed to burn, and dead littered everywhere. Ghostly black zephyr forms shrilled, swooping and diving in his memory as they did in the nightmares that plagued him, and then the hard punch of the arrows . . .
He stomped down on the memory. Not now! The ground under Tulio rumbled and trembled as though the cobbles themselves were trying to pull themselves loose and flee.
“Up! Get up, now!” Tulio barked over the din of blaring crowds and the grinding uproar of the street trying to tear itself apart.
He grabbed Nicholas roughly by the arm and dragged the other man to his feet. The Bishop’s eyes were open, but his head lulled
to one side and he swayed drunkenly on his feet. He was conscious but dazed. He must have hit his head harder than Tulio had.
“Snap out of it!” the bodyguard growled, shaking the other man by the shoulders. “Come on! I’ll not die goggling on the street because you don’t have the sense to flee!”
‘I could go.’ The thought came like lightning from a cloudless sky and, for an instant, Tulio was stunned. ‘I could just go, leave him to his monster and his fate and go.’
Duty. The old mantra flared up inside him. How could he go? Turn his back on a lifetime of service? Abandon his friend?
‘Is he that? My friend? Or . . .’ His mind skittered away from the other, as it did from the memories of the wharf before he’d fallen. He remembered the dream, or whatever it had been, in foggy broken snatches. Snatches that seemed to replay themselves before his eyes in an endless looping jumble whether he was asleep or awake.
Fulvia.
The young mistress wiping away his tears with her fine silk wrap, the warm smile and soft comforting words.
Fulvia.
The cruel laughing monster who taunted and teased him, who made him take part in her sadistic rituals, who controlled him.
Tulio’s jaw hurt. He was clenching, his whole body was rigid and tense, and his grip on Nicholas’ shoulders made the other man wince and had brought back some semblance of attentiveness to the other man’s face.
Nicholas. His oldest and dearest friend, who’d shared a thousand boyhood pranks and misadventures. A thousand whispered secrets, snickered jokes, and teary-eyed punishments, they’d shared them all. It had been Nicholas, that brilliant, luminescent boy, too serious for his years and too constrained for his spirit, who’d helped him learn to read. He’d guided Tulio through geometry and philosophy and a hundred other things with careful, supportive dedication. Nicholas. Fulvia’s son, and like his mother, he tied Tulio in knots of duty, loyalty, and obligation so tangled he could scarcely tell it was a knot, let alone begin to understand how he might get free, or if he wanted to get free.
“Ahhh!” the roar that ripped out of him held all the anger, frustration, confusion, sadness, and terror that milled about inside him. It felt like the only thing to do, the only possible expression of the quagmire of conflicting feelings. There was no time for this!
He tossed the senseless bishop over his shoulder and turned.
“Monster, you stay in front of me and keep my bloody path clear!” he yelled at Prancer and then he ran, and everything else was gone.
—
The revenant shed its nondescript cloak and pulled the leather thong hanging across its chest over its head to bring the massive bone club on its back to hand. Tulio never wondered what animal the strange pale leather of the halter was made of, he didn’t want to know. His concern was balance and speed, nothing more.
‘Keep your footing, keep it moving!’ His internal voice was all but panting the words in an endless chant.
The monster worked its grotesque weapon back and forth before him with the even methodical strokes of a farmer scything wheat. Those unfortunate bodies who were unwilling or unable to make room crumpled as if their bones had turned to water. Tulio found himself running on a writhing, moaning carpet of human misery while roads tossed and buildings all around him twisted and shook like maddened animals shaking off roofing tiles and whole floors, like fleas.
The monster stopped dead and Tulio, with no warning and far too much momentum, ran headlong into the thing’s back. If the undead creature even felt the impact it gave not so much as a twitch. Tulio, on the other hand, the larger and heavier of the two, felt as though he’d run at full speed into a stone wall. He staggered backward, pulled off balance by the weight of Nicholas over his shoulder. His ankle rolled as his boot slid on the face of one of Prancer’s flattened victims, and both Nicholas and Tulio went down hard once again.
‘What the hell?’ Tulio wondered as he planted a hand on someone’s blank staring face and pushed himself back to his feet.
“You goddamned monstrosity, what the bloody . . . ?” Tulio roared.
The monster turned its deep, bone bejeweled cowl on Tulio and then looked back, utterly unperturbed as always.
Tulio stomped forward and smacked a hand down on the creature’s stone hard shoulder.
“Now you look here!” he roared, but whatever he’d been about to say died as he saw what had halted Prancer’s trek.
He felt himself gaping and couldn’t make himself stop. The road was gone! The paving stones ended abruptly in a clean line directly under Prancer’s booted feet. The creature teetered, no, Tulio amended mentally, a person would have teetered. The monster stood with that eerie stillness, rooted like a hundred-year-old oak on the edge of a slowly spinning whirlpool of thick liquid limestone. Tulio could think of no better description for the syrupy looking substance than goop. He’d seen the molten liquid that sometimes bubbled up through cracks or spewed forth from volcanoes in his travels at Nicholas’ side, this wasn’t that. There was none of the incredible heat, no sulfurous smoke, and no orange black color of liquid fire. This was as though stone had simply melted, like a sheet of ice becoming water.
‘Nicholas!’ The rage was instant and blinding. This was nothing natural. This was his fault.
“What did you do?” He’d dragged the other man up by the front of his tunic before he realized he was moving. It had to be.
Again! Thrown into madness and death without so much as a ‘by your leave’, just like Pylae. Tulio’s internal voice was snarling, where it wasn’t jibbering in wordless terror that he tried hard to ignore.
“Nicholas! Damn you, snap out of it and do something!” Tulio was shaking the other man roughly. The shaking, and Tulio’s blustering had as much effect as the rain of spittle that bathed the Bishop’s senseless face. None.
A heavy hand came down on Tulio’s shoulder. Prancer.
“Do not think to stop. . .” Tulio started, but the words died on his tongue as the silent creature raised its club to point back the way they’d come.
The wreckage that had been a street swirled, scooped up in a windless pulsing funnel cloud. There was no more screaming, Tulio realized after a stunned moment of staring. Or, if there was, it was covered by the shrill grinding that filled the world. Building materials, road stone, animal carcasses, and even dead humans where thrown up on every side, pulled inexorably into . . . that.
The hard-bitten bodyguard was suddenly freezing cold, as though all of the blood had been drained from his corpse, he felt himself quivering violently. The . . . mass pulsed with sound, a splintering, shrieking sort of groan that seemed to vibrate in everything: the air, the ground, and terrifyingly, even in Tulio himself. It wanted something. It demanded something.
‘Give.’
It wasn’t a word, or even a coherent concept, but it was most certainly a demand. Was it in his mind? Was it everywhere? What? Who? Tulio didn’t know, couldn’t know. A snarled wave of confused clarity battered him. There was nothing to know, no him, no there, and yet there was. Existence was a smooth jumble. He was too weak to stand. He held Nicholas easily up above his head. He wanted to run and be swept up. He wanted nothing, was nothing, never had been and always would be.
‘Give!’
Something like stone closed around him. He felt it and didn’t care and couldn’t resist and surrendered all at the same time, and then the wonderful hideous madness of the thing was receding. The pulsing shimmy in his soul was clearing, being torn away.
‘Give.’
For a moment reality seemed to scream and Tulio made out a form in the bedlam, a vague person-shaped mass. Twisted, beautiful, gut-wrenching, and wondrous.
Maelstrom.
The word tore at him with torturous, orgasmic madness. He was bombarded with riotous emptiness, and then it was gone.
Tulio blinked. His forearms were on fire. Fire? Arms? Oh, yes! Pain, that was pain! His hands were locked into white knuckled fists around something. Fabric? Lea
ther? Clothing? The words and sensations came to him slowly, as though he were learning and thinking them for the first time. The riot of sensations slowly formed back into concrete forms of thought. He was Tulio. He was holding something . . . a man . . . Nicholas! He was moving but also still. Senseless, unreasoned terror took him by the throat. It didn’t make sense. Nothing did, there was no sense but . . . no . . . he still felt himself. There was still himself there. It wasn’t the chaos returning, he realized slowly. Not that, he was being carried, that was all, carried.
Prancer’s thin, strong arms encircled both Tulio and Nicholas, and the sleight monster’s form ran at such speeds that Tulio could see nothing but a streaking blur on either side of them.
Maelstrom.
Tulio’s soul lurched at the thought. Pure living madness, senselessness given senses, that was Maelstrom. His mind flitted away from what memory he had of it, and yet there was a pull to remember as well, like a moth trying to keep back from the flame while inexorably flitting closer and closer.
Tulio didn’t know if it was alive, but he knew that it wanted, wanted desperately, wanted—
The lurch into the air obliterated the train of thought. The ground was gone! He would have screamed, should have screamed, but he didn’t.
Shock.
Some part of his mind supplied the word unbidden. He was in shock, it would clear eventually, and he would feel . . . what? He couldn’t imagine. He felt as if something had broken away, and a sort of uncomfortable freedom bubbled in the always-reserved manservant’s heart.
The bundle that was the three fugitive travelers slammed into something hard. Not stone, not that hard. There was a creaking. A slight sway, and a . . . sloshing? A ship?
Tulio untangled himself from Nicholas and the monster, still moving in a stunned daze, and looked back at the chaotic ruin that had been Byzantium’s harbor. Memories of another panicked, destroyed harbor flitted unnoticed around the stunned numbness that was Tulio’s mind. The creature must have leapt a full score of long strides to land here, but where was here?
