Give Way to Night

by Cass Morris

  “We will.” Sempronius’s eyebrows arched as he caught sight of Corvinus. “Letters from Tarraco?”

  Corvinus nodded. “I haven’t sorted them yet.” Sempronius gestured for him to proceed, so Corvinus went to the desk and pulled open the cord that held the leather packet closed. “Generals Onidius and Calpurnius checked in. The Eighth is well-settled and will be ready to march at first light; the Fourteenth has leveled the ground for their camp and expects the tail of their train in another hour.”

  “Good.”

  “Their riders await any messages you may have for the other camps.” As Corvinus shuffled the papers, he examined the seals and any notations scribbled onto the edge. “Two from Consul Galerius Orator,” he said, setting them to the right. Senate business, no doubt, which the dominus would be eager to stay abreast of. “A few messages from our suppliers in and around Tarraco.” Those, he set to the left, to be passed along to the prefect, though he knew Sempronius would glance through them first. “One from Marcus Autronius—no, two, but one’s for the tribune.” Corvinus passed that one over to Felix, setting the other with the letters from Galerius. “And one from—” Corvinus’s brow arched; he recognized the name, but could not imagine what would be making the man write to Sempronius here in Iberia. “Shafer ben Nissim? Is that not the Asherite we dined with in Tamiat?”

  Sempronius’s dark eyes lit with pleasure. “Indeed!” he said, striding forward and holding out a hand for the letter. As he popped the seal, grinning, he explained, “My friend Shafer has taken up residence in Gades.”

  Corvinus’s head bobbed in understanding, and Felix laughed. “I confess, Sempronius, I thought it might take you longer to establish a spy in Rabirus’s camp.”

  “Not a spy, merely a good friend and loyal correspondent. And not in his camp, precisely,” Sempronius said, as his eyes scanned the words printed in a slightly heavy hand. The letter was written, Corvinus noticed, in both Athaecan and Petraean, alternating line by line. Corvinus suspected the dominus would write back in the same fashion, in the Athaecan he and Shafer shared and in Truscan, that both men might have the opportunity to practice reading in languages less familiar to them. “But close enough, at least until Rabirus takes the field.”

  “If he even intends to do so, rather than holing up just like Fimbrianus did,” Felix commented, lifting his eyes from his brother’s letter.

  “He will,” Sempronius said, with quiet surety. “However little he likes this fight, he won’t allow himself to be called a coward while I’m fighting for the honor of Aven.”

  Splinter the Second

  She was close, so close, to having enough power. She had importuned Discordia in the north and the south, the east and the west. She had begged favor at sunrise and sunset, at the turning-edge of the half-moon, in the midst of late spring storms. Every advantage she could seize, Corinna had taken.

  It was not, yet, enough.

  Corinna took up her stylus.

  There had been a time when she might have made a fine poet. More usual for those blessed with Light or Air, but not all of humanity’s gifts came channeled through magic. Corinna had loved words for themselves. She could have been quite happy, left alone to that love.

  The Fates would not permit her to only love words.

  A girl with talents like hers, she had been told, could not languish in seclusion. Peace was not her destiny. How could it be, for one gifted by Discordia? Fortuna, Janus, no, those were not the gods watching out for Corinna. Certainly not Felicitas or Sors, the gods of luck.

  No. The Fates had made themselves clear. Discordia and Discordia alone had laid a hand upon Corinna’s brow.

  But she could still use her neglected talents of composition in that lady’s honor.

  Arise, o daughter of dark night,

  Flashing-eyed mother of hardship and pain,

  From exile come to rule again.

  Arise, dreadful mistress of bane and blight,

  Quarrel’s dam, Lady of Sorrow.

  Ascend until all earth lies in your shadow

  And from those heights, hurl down all strife,

  All bitterness, all blots to precious life.

  This gift we make, of blood and bone,

  And supplicate ourselves before your throne,

  To call you forth where you might thrive

  And feed where you have been so long deprived.

  Arise, o daughter of dark night.

  X

  Stabiae, Crater Bay

  “Burn it all,” Latona instructed, “and dump the ashes in the river.” The two slaves Latona had brought along to clear the Discordian sacrifice nodded, but Latona could see confusion on their faces at what seemed a wasteful order. Bones and sinew were always useful, and some of the entrails might still be edible, for those who weren’t too picky. But these remains were cursed, and Latona would take no chances on Discordian madness spreading into someone through them. “Then make sure you wash yourselves, thoroughly. Evil has been at work here.” She would venture no more explanation, but none was needed. The slaves nodded their understanding and set to work.

  Latona would have done it herself, however gruesome the spectacle, but her head swam when she drew too close to the desiccated remains. ‘If I actually tried to lay a hand on them, I suspect I could not long remain conscious. Or sane.’ While the young men worked, she sat down as near as she could manage and gestured for Merula to bring her the scrolls they had hauled up the hill.

  She might have waited for Vibia to arrive and offer advice. Latona had dispatched a letter as soon as they had returned home the prior evening, but it would still be several days before her ally reached Stabiae. Latona could not stomach the notion of letting this wretched display remain intact, so near her home, for that long. ‘And if Alhena’s visions are any indication, we won’t be wanting for horrors for her to turn her hand to.’

  Discordian magic had never been particularly well-regarded in Aven, but the cult had had its periods of popularity throughout the centuries, and so she hoped some of the historical texts on Aventan magical theory would mention them. ‘One of which will hopefully give me some idea of how to cleanse this place . . .’ Spirit and Fracture were inimical elements: each dangerous and vulnerable to the other. If anything could wipe away the miasma, it would be Spirit magic. But Latona had to figure out how to apply it.

  One of the texts in her lap was medicinal in nature, a text used by the priests, magical and mundane, of the Temple of Asclepius. It had occurred to Latona that the procedure of cleansing the grove might not be unlike what she had done the previous year, purging poison when Sempronius had been shot with a tainted arrow during an autumn hunt. That had been Fire magic, not Spirit, but the principles might be similar. ‘Seek it out, chase it down, then burn out . . .’ If she could find the right pattern, the push and pull that had guided her in healing Sempronius, then perhaps she would meet with luck in healing the grove.

  With Merula at her side, occasionally handing her another text to reference, Latona kept her head bent over the scrolls while the two men worked to clear away the physical remnants of the Discordian rites. She had set out early in the morning, to give them as much time to work as possible—and herself as much time after they were done. She had no desire to be caught in this place after dark, particularly if her attempts to cleanse it failed.

  “Domina?” After some time, one of the young men, his hands reeking with viscera, approached her. “Domina, we’ve completed the work.”

  “Mm?” Latona surfaced from her reading. “Oh. Excellent. Thank you. Oh!” She stopped them before they could wheel the remains away. “The ground, too. Any dirt that the remains touched.” The two men looked at each other, then set to work scraping away at the ground. Latona looked up at Merula. “I suppose it’s about time to try, then.”

  “You are knowing what to do, Domina?” Merula
said, gathering the scrolls back from her.

  Latona laughed. “Knowing? Of course not. But . . . I think I have a good guess.”

  Once the men had taken away the cart with the remains of the carcass, and with Merula standing protective watch, Latona found herself pacing back and forth within the grove, sending out tendrils of Spirit magic to test the energy of the place. A sense of oddness hung amid the leaves, setting a prickle up on her neck. ‘A distortion, that’s what it is. Whatever the natural energies are here, they’ve been warped.’ As surely as if someone had stuck a knife’s point deep into the heartwood of a living tree, the energies here had been ruptured. That had been the effect of the sacrifice, its power channeled into the tree’s destruction. ‘But why? What purpose could someone having blighting this single tree?’

  A warning to her, perhaps, as her sisters worried. But Latona wasn’t sure.

  Fracture magic, by its very nature, played with boundaries—points of change, of chance, the thin line between reality and dreams. Mages like Vibia spent their lives trying to keep hold of the balance; Fracture mages who didn’t fell to madness. ‘Or worse. Or this.’ The place where change became catastrophe, where boundaries opened up into chasms and a little disorder whorled into utter chaos. ‘That there are mages who seek to loose this on the world . . .’

  Latona went to the base of the tree, where the ground had been scraped away from the roots. She ran her hands over the gnarled brown twists, then tried to scoop some of the earth back toward them. “Poor thing . . .” she murmured. There was little she could do for it directly. ‘If Terentilla were here, or Marcus Autronius . . .’ Setting the grove entirely to rights would be the domain of an Earth mage; all Latona could do was try to get rid of the lingering, pestilent Fracture magic, lest it poison the ground any further.

  Latona made herself stand just where the carcass had hung, slipping out of her sandals so her bare feet touched the freshly exposed earth beneath where the entrails had lain. The wrongness hit her like suffocating incense, cloying and dizzying. ‘You’re not scaring me off, whatever you are.’ She closed her eyes, held her hands out, palm-up, and began an invocation. “Blessed Lady Juno, hear me, help me. Look on me with favor, help me to right the wrong that has been done here . . .”

  The overhanging trees were thick, allowing hardly any sunlight through, but as Latona chanted, warmth blossomed on her shoulders. Her skin began to heat, and she tasted cinnamon on her tongue—magic at work, building up in her and then flowing back out. She let it ebb from her, trying to soothe the land as she had sometimes soothed her sisters, or as she had influenced the mood at dinner parties. It was a different thing, a strange challenge, to use Spirit magic to affect a place rather than a person. Reaching out to the plants and earth felt in no way like reaching out to a person’s emotions. Those all had a similar shape, even with a stranger. The tree was something else entirely. ‘I wonder, if I had Tilla here . . .’ Mages did sometimes combine their talents toward a common purpose, and Latona suspected that channeling Spirit’s energy to dispel Fracture’s curse from the earth would be much simpler with her Diana-blessed friend to help direct her efforts.

  ‘Although Spirit can see the workings. It’s not a skill I’ve much practiced, but maybe . . .’

  Worrying her lower lip, Latona thought of all she had read regarding the visualization of magic. She was so used to operating on intuition above all else that it felt odd, calling on her eyes to aid her. It happened incidentally sometimes, usually when many mages were working all at once, as at the Cantrinalia rituals, or when so many had joined forces to fight the Aventine fires. Sheer magnitude would bring the proof of magic to her sight. Recalling what that felt like, Latona focused on summoning it to the forefront of her mind.

  After a few moments, Latona chanced opening her eyes a bit, then gasped at the swirl of color in front of her: chains of gold emanating from her own form, twisting and twining around a hazy column of bronze that spurted up from where the entrails had been spilt. As her attention fluttered, the gold faded for a moment, until Latona refocused.

  Her instinct was to pull the chains tight, squeezing the remnants of the Fracture magic into oblivion. ‘No . . .’ she thought. ‘No, see if you can find a signature . . . anything that might help you recognize this again . . .’

  Upon closer examination, it was no column: more like a jagged rock, jutting up out of the ground, uneven, cruelly broken, half-crumbling. Latona could get a feel for it as she wound her own magic around it, slowly sliding her way over the cracked edges—more crumbling now, with the locus of the spell removed from proximity. The sense of taint and invasive festering was similar to Pinarius Scaeva’s, but she could not find anything more specific, nothing that might allow her to tie this working to a particular mage, should she encounter it again.

  Latona sighed. ‘Another thing I must learn more of.’ But now was not the time to lament the gaps in her magical education. Instead, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes to concentrate, focusing on her own magic. ‘Burn brighter, burn harder. Burn it out, hunt it down, restore balance to this place.’

  The curse fought her, reminding Latona unpleasantly of facing Scaeva. The jagged edges spiked at her, like slivers of shattered glass trying to work their way beneath her skin. Now, though, there was no one to direct the Fracture magic, much less to set it on her blood like a hound. Spirit’s strength attacked Fracture’s weak points, and without the anchor of the sacrifice to reinforce it, the remnants of the Discordian curse began to crumble.

  The sun climbed high above her, and Latona could feel its heat piercing through the trees, but she stood still, murmuring invocations. Each time the Fracture magic shivered or shuddered and tried to slip her grasp, she spun the net of her own magic another direction. She could give it no quarter, no avenue for escape.

  Slowly, the wound that the terrible sacrifice had left in the world began to knit back together. Slowly, the sense of pollution dwindled.

  Latona kept her eyes closed until her lingering nausea faded and she could no longer feel the taint of poison in the land around her. Tilla, she was sure, would have felt the ground give a sigh of relief; Latona simply had to keep pushing until nothing pushed back at her, and hope that was enough.

  As she released the flow of magic, Latona felt a stiffening pain taking over her muscles. ‘Oof.’ Some of the ache was from standing in one position for too long, but much of it was also from the exertion of magical energy. She made a mental note to have Ama Rubellia work with her on guarding against the negative effects of using her powers so strongly. Her calves would ache for days, she was sure, and she already felt lethargic, heavy-lidded. ‘There must be better ways of replenishing one’s energy than simply falling asleep for the better part of the day. That’s not just pathetic, it’s dangerous.’ For she remembered, too, what had made her so vulnerable to Pinarius Scaeva’s predations: pouring too much of herself out through her magic, without a core of strength left in reserve to hold her up.

  Groaning, Latona rotated her shoulders and stretched her neck. She ruffled her hair and looked around the grove. She grasped Merula’s hand, taking comfort in her attendant’s solid presence. ‘Let this land be at peace, by Juno’s grace.’ Peace such as she knew she would not find for herself, so long as Discordian mages freely roamed.

  * * *

  Toletum, Iberia

  “Will it happen again tonight, do you think?”

  “Shades of Dis . . .”

  “I wish we had a mage with us . . .”

  “What could a mage do against those demons?”

  “Well, something, surely!”

  Vitellius hated to hear the fear in his centurions’ voices. These were battle-hardened men. Nearly all had fought the blue-painted Armoricans, the sound of their horns and war harps reverberating in the chilly air. Some had ventured across the border into Vendelicia, where berserker warriors fought while under
the thrall of maddening potions. Others had been in Numidia years earlier, where arrows could come rushing down at a man out of a sandstorm.

  They did not scare easily.

  But now, they huddled together as the sun eased its way below the horizon, whispering about the terrors of the coming night. Vitellius hated to hear it and hated more knowing how rational the fear was.

  Nearby, the centurions continued their fretting. “We’ve got the Arevaci mages, and they haven’t figured anything out yet.”

  “Yeah, but that’s barbarian magic, not good Aventan magic. We need good Aventan magic . . .”

  “Can’t use it in battle, thick-head. We’d offend Mars.”

  “We’re not in battle now, are we? Anyway, he doesn’t mind it as protection. Good Aventan magic, I’m telling you—”

  ‘Good Aventan magic.’ Vitellius touched the focale at his collar, the scarlet neck-scarf that had, he was sure, saved his life by protecting him from Lusetanian ensorcellment. His sister Latona’s magic infused it—good Aventan magic in no uncertain terms—and though he had no idea how it worked, it seemed to be guarding him still.

  “North wall, section eight!”

  The shout came, but Vitellius did not turn his head. The necessary men would move to reinforce that portion of the wall without his direction. The legions were becoming as well-practiced at this as at setting their camp, thanks to near-nightly repetition.

  The wind changed direction suddenly, a fierce gust out of the north, far colder than it should have been—a wind for Januarius, not Junius, and in its wake came the unnatural mist, sour-scented and heavy. Across the walls, a thousand men muttered prayers and readied their weapons. Vitellius glanced down toward the eastern sally gate, where Hanath and the rest of the auxiliary cavalry, Arevaci and Edetani men and women, waited. Hanath’s face was serious, her horse’s reins tied around her waist and a spear sitting across her lap. If there was a chance—