by Cass Morris
Then, at Aula’s elbow, Latona had received a different kind of education: social graces, household management, and the intricacies of personal relationships that formed the chaotic spiderweb of patrician life. Between Aula’s profitable gossip-mongering and Latona’s Spirit-given empathic insights, it seemed there was nothing her older sisters didn’t know about the city: who was courting whose daughter, who was an unfaithful spouse, who hated whom for what reasons—fresh insults and generations-old grudges alike lay themselves open before the elder two Vitelliae sisters. ‘Me, though . . .’
Aulus had resisted attaching Alhena to a temple—first, because his trust in them had been damaged after Latona’s experience, and second, because during Ocella’s reign, temple life was less safe than homebound seclusion. Too many priests and mages were in the Dictator’s pay or had been coerced into cooperating with him, and a budding young prophetess from a prominent family might have been an irresistible temptation. As a result, Alhena had grown up cloistered, rarely venturing out into public. It had never occurred to her to be bothered by it. She knew she would marry someday, to a nice young man from a good family, and go from one home to another, secure all the while.
Then the Dictator had died, and her intended husband not long afterwards, and Alhena found herself suddenly thrust into a world she felt ill-prepared for. Her father was censor, her brother famous for holding Iberia against the barbarians, her sisters maneuvering to secure alliances, and the family more in the public eye than ever. Parties, dinners, conversations . . . Aven was a constant suffocation of expectations.
So it had been both a triumph and a relief when she had convinced her father to bring her to Stabiae early this year. Aula and her daughter Lucia would come along later in the summer, and Latona, too, if she could get away from her husband without it causing a stir, but Aulus had traveled down to make Stabiae his base of operations while he saw to censorial duties around Crater Bay, and he had allowed Alhena to come along. In Stabiae, she could breathe, and peace came to her under the eaves of the Temple of Proserpina.
In truth, the temple here was little more than a shrine. A large one, with mosaic floors and brightly painted walls to house the statue of the goddess, but nothing to rival the grand temples in Aven. Alhena didn’t mind. A smaller temple meant fewer rituals and fewer ways to put a foot wrong. She had grown fond of the local priestess, Moira, an Athaecan woman with considerable gifts in Time and Earth—a natural historian as well as a steady mentor. A few other girls and young women frequented the shrine, though none of them had magical blessings. Moira introduced her to a few of them, and Alhena had overcome shyness enough for a few short but genuine conversations on the goddess’s doorstep.
Perhaps because she felt safe enough to let her guard down, Proserpina’s gifts came rolling to the surface, swift and unbidden, after she had finished with the pomegranate and while she was lighting incense at the base of the goddess’s statue. A waking dream. Alhena was grateful the goddess’s touch had chosen an opportune moment to come upon her, rather than felling her in the street, as had happened before. The wafting musk from the incense made her head feel heavy, and before she knew it, she had sunk to her knees, the room around her blurring.
A blink, and she was no longer in the temple under the clear light of a warm afternoon; she instead stood on a wide green hill under a gray, cloud-streaked sky. It was no place she recognized—not a place at all, she realized, as the hill started to roll beneath her. Alhena felt her limbs shaking, trembling as the ground shook. She whimpered, looking around the vacant landscape for anyone, anything that might help her—but there was nothing, only an endless, shaking earth.
“Shhhh . . .” Alhena could hear Moira’s voice, though it seemed to be coming from far away, and she could not see her. She felt a soft pressure on her back, too—a reminder that not all of her was Proserpina’s to direct. “Ride it. Don’t let it ride you.”
Alhena swallowed and tried to focus her attention. She could do it, sometimes, in dreams, but here she was groping for purchase with nothing to hold onto. But she took a steadying breath. ‘Show me, Lady Proserpina . . . What is it you want me to see?’
The green earth stopped shaking and began to peel back, like a citron rind, revealing a shining white interior to the hill before Alhena. No, not shining—glistening. Alhena had seen this kind of white before, at sacrifices. It was the white of bones, hewn from flesh, still gleaming with fat. Stacks and stacks of them, locked together, beneath the soil, forming the bonds of the hill itself. Somewhere behind her awareness, Alhena’s stomach roiled. But she forced her mind to focus.
‘What for? Show me.’
The bones began to clack and clatter, pulling apart from each other in jagged lines to reveal a set of bronze doors, deep underground. Alhena had no wish to draw closer to the tangle of bones, but there was something etched on the doors, and a nudge in the back of her mind told her she needed to see it. Her feet were bare, she realized as she padded along the not-quite-path of torn grass and disturbed earth, and when she grew nearer the hill of bones, she could smell the rankness, putrefying in the buried viscera.
The doors had words upon them, but at first they were in no language Alhena could recognize, not even in Tyrian characters, but strange triangular shapes, then glyphs that she thought might be Abydosian. After a moment, however, they began to morph, reforming first into Athaecan words. She recognized a few—strife, quarrel, pain—before they, too, disappeared, and long chains of Truscan appeared before her. None of the words stayed put; they wandered all over the bronze doors, so fleet that Alhena’s eyes could hardly follow them, and every time she blinked, new ones seemed to appear, etching their way to the surface and pounding the previous sentences down. Her skin felt hot, as though a great fire burned behind the doors, ready to open like an oven, but Alhena forced herself to stand still, bearing the discomfort, and not take her eyes from the doors.
“Chaos is the constant,” one line read. “Her wrath is relentless, she hurls down bitterness from heaven,” said another. “The elder daughter of dark Night” faded before Alhena could catch the rest of the sentence, as did “a man grows eager.” Soon there were so many words that Alhena could hardly separate one from the other, and her eyes watered with the strain of trying. “Reviled” flashed across her vision in searing shapes, and “wrathful,” “justified,” “needing”—“vengeance,” “fury”—“alarms,” “blood,” “city”—Alhena could make no sense of the rolling verbal tide.
Then, just as Alhena thought the swirling scripture would become entirely illegible, it resolved into a single, bright-burning phrase, lit up as though molten: “All worlds shatter.”
At that moment, the ground shook, and around her were other hills, likewise splitting to reveal gleaming bones and bronze doors. The doors opened and clanged shut, never in unison, but nor with any discernible pattern, raising up a bruising cacophony. Underneath it, though, was another noise: a harrowing howl, rising up from within the earth itself.
“The fiends hunger, little mage.”
Alhena whipped around, looking for the source of the voice. It had spoken low but perfectly audible, even amid the banging doors and the keening, as though the speaker were right at her elbow. “Who’s there? What do you want?”
An eerie laughter echoed through the ravaged hills, and for a moment, the banging of the doors seemed to join in its chortle.
“The fiends, little mage, the fiends . . . how hungry they are . . . what a feast your city is . . . the fiends, the fiends . . .” Something snatched at Alhena’s hair, and she whirled again, looking for the speaker. But there was no one there, only a rising wind, plucking at her curls and her clothes, and the echoing words, “The fiends, the fiends, the fiends . . .”
Alhena sat up with a gasp, unsure for a moment where she was. Her skin still felt hot to the touch, as though she had been too long out in the sun, and her throat felt parched. “I need
—!”
“Shhh.” Moira, supporting her shoulders. Alhena realized she had been brought to the small garden beside the shrine. Her already red-stained fingers were smudged with the incense she had been lighting, but she had no recollection either of setting the incense cones down or of walking to the garden. “You fainted, dear. Take some water.”
Alhena’s hands hardly seemed to belong to her, but somehow she managed to wrap her fingers around the cup that Moira offered, grateful for the older woman’s presence. Moira’s cool voice and thick, graying curls put Alhena in mind of the mother she hardly remembered. She liked to think, had Vipsania Vitelliae lived, she would have been like this: steady and serene.
Once Alhena had sipped away half the cup of water, Moira spoke again. “That was quite something, my dear. Can you speak of it, what you saw?”
“I think . . . I think so.” Many of her visions dissipated like dreams when she surfaced from them, but this one went on resonating in her brain, and she had no trouble recounting it to Moira. “It was . . . unusual,” she said at the end of the tale. “I so rarely have anything . . . well, anything so animate in my visions. Almost never anything that talks. It’s usually just . . . images, feelings . . .”
Moira nodded in understanding. “That is often the way with Time mages, particularly when young. Have you had much training in shepherding your visions?”
“The usual,” Alhena said, then blushed. “Maybe somewhat less. I’ve been close kept. I had a tutor in Aven, but she focused more on controlling the gift, not interpreting what came of it.” Aulus Vitellius had been anxious that Alhena’s talents not make themselves too noticeable.
Moira frowned. “I’m not sure what this might mean—either the vision itself or that it seems to have exceeded your usual gift. But it may be, Alhena, that Proserpina is asking more of you than she has before.”
Alhena held in a sigh, unsure whether that might be a blessing or a curse.
* * *
Toletum, Central Iberia
Gaius Vitellius, Tribune of the Eighth Legion, walked the ramparts of Toletum’s walls, with the rumbling Tagus River far below on his left and a scattering of red-and-brown rooftops to his right.
Toletum stood in a deep bend of the Tagus River, almost in the dead center of Iberia, where a narrow valley provided passage between the high central mountains and the seeming-immeasurable plateaus in the south. It derived its only importance from that position: a crossroads, a meeting-place, and a trading post for Iberians from the Arevaci and other tribes, Tyrian merchants, and intrepid Aventans.
When Vitellius had arrived the prior year, its walls had been a haphazard mix of stonework and earthwork where the city faced land, and hardly anything at all along the river. He was proud of the improvements. ‘We did rather well, for not having any engineers in the vexillation.’ Now all of Toletum was encircled by timber structures, in some places built upon earthworks and in others atop the original stone. The improvements showed he had not been idle, nor allowed his men to be.
Vitellius had come up to the wall with the intent of checking for faults in the mortar, or any place where the underlying earthworks might have shifted with the recent rains. His gaze, though, kept wandering toward the horizon. Not east, though, not towards Aven and his father and sisters, so many thousands of miles away. Downriver went his eyes and his thoughts, down the snaking path of the Tagus.
A figure ascended a ladder and bounded onto the wall a short distance in front of him: Hanath, a tall woman with deep brown skin and an athletic physique. She was Numidian-born, but her husband, Bartasco, was the leader of the local Arevaci tribe, the staunchest allies Aven had in central Iberia.
Both Bartasco and Hanath had proved their worth a hundred times over during these months, within Toletum as well as without. Bartasco had been invaluable in keeping the people of Toletum happy, working with the magistrates to administer rations and adjudicate disputes, while Hanath often rode out with the cavalry to check on the local villages and make sure they were properly supplied. ‘And Hanath,’ Vitellius reflected, ‘has a unique talent for promoting courage.’ Like a lioness cuffing her mate, she had stirred Bartasco into action the previous year. The Numidian-born woman seemed to have a similar effect on the young men of every town she visited, and she almost always returned with more riders than she had left with, new recruits to freshen the patrols.
“Tribune!” Hanath called as she approached. Her voice had the high vowels and clipped consonants of her homeland. “I have been speaking with the men and women whose homes border that empty space near the tinsmith’s.” She settled her hands on her hips, giving Vitellius a satisfied smile. “They are quite amenable to our plan of turning the plot into a garden.”
“Good, good.” Food was beginning to be a worry—ironically more than it had been through the winter. Vitellius had rationed well, and the Lusetani had retreated to less-contested areas, away from the tribes who had allied with Aven. They had set up camps in Vettoni lands, alongside their blood-forged allies, and there they had waited through the snows and rains, rather than facing harassment throughout the lean months.
But spring had come, and with it, new troubles. Reports deluged Toletum, of attacks on towns, villages, mines, fields, and orchards throughout the Iberian plateaus. It was hard to convince anyone to go out to plough or plant with the threat of raids hanging over them, and the weather had been unpredictable ever since the season turned. Vitellius had taken to dispatching cohorts alongside the farmers for the peasants’ peace of mind, and some of the legionaries could even make themselves useful with farming implements. The roads to the east were open yet, and Vitellius had called for grain and other supplies to be brought up from the coastal towns, as much as could be gathered before the Lusetani or Vettoni cut them off.
From downriver, they heard more and more stories of fields set ablaze, towns ravaged, and worse. Strange tales, carried by fleeing peasants, of haunting wraiths, howling the names of the living, crying to them in the night. Vitellius might not have given the tales credence, but he remembered the strange potion Ekialde had tried to use on him, how it had nearly robbed him of his will until countermanded by his sister Latona’s protective magic, woven into his clothing. Thinking of that, anything seemed possible. ‘All downriver . . .’
Hanath cocked her head. “You are distracted, Tribune.”
“Hmm?” Vitellius realized a moment too late that the mindless response had proved her point. “Oh. I suppose I am.” He cleared his throat. “I apologize. I did not mean to be inattentive. I’m very glad to hear it, about the empty plot. I know the herbalists want a portion of it, but we should ask the farmers what will give the best yield for the rest.” They had discussed all those details previously, but Vitellius used the repetition to ground himself back in the present moment.
Hanath’s perception, however, would not let him off so easily. “You are missing your friend.”
Vitellius scuffed his boot on the rampart, hobnails scraping against the wood. “I am worried for my cohort.” Then, at Hanath’s knowingly arched eyebrow, he added, “And yes, I am worried about Mennenius. He should have been back long before now.”
Tribune Titus Mennenius had been due back in Toletum five days before the Kalends of Maius. His cohort was on patrol, marching from a village on the Tagus River up toward the mountain line, while Vitellius’s cohort stayed in fortified Toletum with the few Fourth Legion men sent up from Gades the previous year. It was a path they had marched before, one of several that Vitellius had determined necessary to maintain awareness of the enemy’s movements and to protect the nearby farmers as best they were able. An easy path, a familiar path. But now they were on the third day past the Kalends, with still no sign of Mennenius.
“I should have . . . I don’t know, I should have found a better way, to keep everyone safe.” Vitellius passed a hand over his brow and scrubbed it through his gingery hair.
“But I needed men in the field to protect the villages. If we’d all stayed holed up in here, we’d have been no better than Fimbrianus, damn his coward’s heart.” He still hadn’t forgiven the ex-governor of Baelonia for refusing to march north all the past year. “There are simply . . . there are not enough of us, Hanath.” A plaintive moan was perilously close to entering his voice. Not the sort of tone a commander hoped to affect.
Hanath, though, was strangely comfortable to be around. She was a comrade now, but neither under his command nor someone on whom his advancement depended. He could be honest with her, and with Bartasco, in a way he could risk with few others. Even with Mennenius, he tried to put on a brave face.
“It is a hard task the gods have set us, Tribune,” Hanath said. “We are all doing the best we can. And you are right—if you did not send a cohort out to patrol, we could not guarantee the farmers a safe perimeter, and our survival depends on theirs. You made the right choice.”
“I could’ve gone out myself.”
“You are the ranking Aventan,” Hanath pointed out. “What happens if you die out in the wilderness, eh?” She clapped his shoulder lightly. “This is the curse of authority. I had to learn it when I married Bartasco. You must learn it now.”
She had the right of it. Vitellius did consider it his duty to stay and fortify the stronghold. Toletum was the largest settlement for a hundred miles; from here, the Aventans could hope to hold out until reinforcements arrived. And they would. In Aprilis there had been news from Aven: the legions, on the move, into the heart of Iberia. Sempronius Tarren, leading the Tenth and the Fourteenth, and Onidius Praectus, bringing the rest of the Eighth to finally rejoin their comrades-in-arms. They heard, too, that Lucretius Rabirus was headed for Gades to relieve Fimbrianus of his command—welcome news to the cohort from the Fourth, who likewise sought reunification of their legion. Vitellius knew enough about Rabirus to be skeptical that his command would yield favorable results. But whenever someone did arrive, Vitellius would need to be on hand to coordinate further efforts.
