by Cass Morris
Laughing half in surprise, Sempronius had to concede that point. “At least.”
The door of Hanath’s house at last opened, revealing a ruddy-haired boy of twelve or thirteen, who exclaimed something in Iberian. Hanath answered in kind. Sempronius could only pick up a few words, but she seemed to be reassuring her servant that she was, in fact, alive. The boy’s eyes darted from her to Sempronius rapidly, and then he scurried off into the rear of the house, leaving the door open behind him.
“Come, General,” Hanath said, gesturing for him to precede her into the house. “Let us sit and eat, like civilized people, and then—” She took a deep breath and released it in a slow sigh. Sempronius saw worry in her eyes, masked by her general demeanor of brisk determination. “Then, I shall tell you a ghost story.”
XII
Near Stabiae
Vibia shivered, despite the warmth of the night. “I don’t like this,” she said, watching as gray clouds drifted high above them, obscuring the stars. The moon’s light was a dim glow near the horizon, soon to slip under and disappear behind the pine trees that stood a short way in the distance.
“Nor I,” said Latona. “But we did promise—”
“Yes, yes, I know.” She sighed. She knew her duty perfectly well. Even though these were not, directly, her people—not tenants or clients belonging to her father or brother—she still felt a dual responsibility, as a patrician and as a mage. These people could not help themselves. They were too poor to get even the notice of their own landlords and patrons, and if there were any mages among them, Vibia had yet to see evidence of it. ‘Some trifling Earth mage, perhaps, helping things grow without even knowing it, or a Fire mage keeping the hearth.’ Outside of the city, that could be the case with the weakly gifted. What a more trained eye might recognize as the gods’ blessing might go unnoticed, thought only a quirk of nature or a peculiar talent. The nearest temple with any mages was ten miles away, back in Stabiae, or up toward the black-soil plains of Pompeii. ‘This little village has no defenses.’
And that made Vibia angry. These were little people, living little lives, and they should be allowed to do so. Little lives were the sinews of Aven’s success. ‘Someone is trifling with them because he thinks it won’t matter, that he’ll never be caught, that these people are so small that they don’t matter.’ Vibia’s assessment of worth was sharper and perhaps less compassionate than her brother’s, but she still had a keen appreciation for everyone’s place in the spectrum of humanity. ‘Even the ordinary has its importance.’
So she little needed Latona reminding her why they were standing in a dirt road—if one could even call it a road, an unpaved muddy track hardly big enough for one cart to rattle down—in the middle of the night, attended only by Latona’s aggressive little maidservant, while a pair of burly slaves from the Vitellian villa waited a small distance away with their carriage. How Latona had managed to get their cooperation, Vibia had no idea; surely if Aulus Vitellius knew what they were up to, he would not approve. But Aulus was off in the nearby town of Salernum for the next few nights, and it was Aula who ran the household, in any case. Vibia presumed the men had been paid well for discretion. ‘And it certainly isn’t as though I was going to walk this far.’
Latona had been all afire to set out for this nowhere-town the very night that Vibia had arrived in Stabiae, but Aula had convinced her to wait. Alhena had wanted to come too, and the girl had only been mollified by being persuaded that there were better ways to serve their needs. She had done much of their preliminary work, helping Latona and Vibia to make acquaintance with the afflicted farmers, but she would be spending the evening in prayer at the Temple of Proserpina in town. Aula and Latona were happy to have their little sister in a safer location, and Vibia had her own reasons for not wanting the girl close at hand. ‘If she hasn’t already realized how little I did to save her sister and how much was Sempronius’s doing, well, all the better that she not witness my frail talent.’
The town was too unimportant to even have a name; in truth, it was only a small collection of houses wedged between olive groves on one side and a muddy-looking field on the other. No market, no shops; these were people who either ate what they grew or surrendered it to their patron—a man Vibia did not know, but of whom she thought little, considering the state of disrepair his tenants’ homes were in. ‘If he checked in now and again, we might not have to be here now.’
According to report, the fiend appeared at random. At least, so far as a group of uneducated villagers could figure out, it did. It had no particular path, did not appear in any particular house on any kind of pattern. All they had definitely been able to determine was that it never appeared when the sun was up. ‘A reason to bless long summer days—and a reason for us to nip this problem in the bud, before they begin to dwindle, now that the solstice is past.’
And so Latona and Vibia were standing in the center of what barely passed for a village, in the dead of the night, waiting for an apparition.
To Latona’s credit, at least she didn’t seek to fill the silence with chatter, as her elder sister doubtless would have. She paced back and forth across the little lane, from fencepost to fencepost, with a thousand thoughts flittering across her face. Vibia guessed that the Spirit mage was trying to use her empathic abilities to get a sense of the sleeping townsfolk, to pinpoint the trouble.
The half-moon slunk lower and lower in the sky, until at last its silver light fell beneath the tree line. Latona’s slave-girl fidgeted. At first, Vibia thought she was merely trying to keep herself awake, but then she caught the look on the girl’s face: alert as a dog on the hunt. A town like this was unlikely to attract bandits or other predators of a mundane nature, but the girl was poised as though she might have to fight off a horde any moment. Vibia felt a grudging respect for her dedication. ‘She’s all sharp edges, like shards of glass.’ A Fracture mage could understand that. Vibia had seen her many times before, of course; she was Latona’s shadow as much as any other patrician lady’s attendant was—though Vibia had not subjected her own to this particular adventure. She had never given the little Phrygian much thought. ‘Perhaps that has been an oversight . . .’ Knowing more about the maid might reveal much about the mistress.
Just as Vibia was beginning to hope the peasants’ stories were foolishness and no true indication of dark magic at work, a high-pitched whistle cut the air.
Merula whirled around, looking for a source, but the noise seemed as though it came from everywhere. Latona stopped in the dead center of the lane, and Vibia felt it: a tear in the world, somewhere, a rift through which a shade might pass. A chill went through her—not fear, but every magical sense she had shivering a warning.
“Do you feel—” Vibia started.
“The cold,” Latona finished. “Unless it’s about to storm—”
“It’s not.”
“—then there’s no reason for that. And it’s against the wind.” Latona’s head whipped about. “I can’t tell from where . . .”
If the village had been large enough to have a crossroads, Vibia would have suggested moving there; such places attracted diversions of the natural order. That was why every major intersection in the City of Aven had its own well-tended shrine, to keep peace and hold the balance. But without such a focus . . .
“I know what might attract it,” Vibia said. She scratched a quick X in the dirt with her foot, then looked over at Merula. “Girl, your knife.” Merula blinked several times, in a way that Vibia might have called stupid, if not for the keen suspicion in her dark eyes. Vibia held out a hand imperiously. “Now.”
Latona was, perhaps fortunately, too distracted to be curious. “Give it to her, Merula.” Her fingers were kneading softly at the air, as though she were trying to find something. Vibia was grateful for that; it spared her explaining that she knew of the girl’s knife-wielding habit because Sempronius had once shared the tidbit with h
er. Scowling, Merula lifted her tunic to the thigh and took out a blade she had strapped to it. With remarkable deftness, she flipped it in the air, caught the blade in her hand, and strode forward to offer it to Vibia, hilt-first.
As soon as she had it, Vibia held the blade aloft, trying to see its edge along what little starlight the sky provided. “Lord Janus and Lady Fortuna, look here,” she said, when she caught the glint. She placed the toes of her left foot carefully at the center of the X she had drawn. “I call your powers to this place. I call your—”
A blast of wind nearly knocked her off her feet. The air had been hot and still when they arrived, and the initial chill had come on like that of a distant storm, but now it was as if a titan were blowing cold air directly down the village lane. ‘If that’s really all it took to catch the thing’s attention . . .’
Latona’s expression had become a bit more frantic, and she came to stand at Vibia’s side. A bitter gust tangled Vibia’s skirts between her knees. Her mantle was wrapped securely around her body, but Latona’s hung loose, only pinned into her hair, and she had to snatch at it to keep the wind from stealing it away.
After a moment, though, the air went still again, seeming to sit even heavier than before—but clammy now, a damp and unpleasant chill. Thinking perhaps she had failed to call down the appropriate attention, Vibia started to raise the knife to the starlight again, but before she could get a word out, the fiend appeared.
The shade manifested as if congealing out of the air. It didn’t come from anywhere, but Vibia watched it piece itself together in front of them. At first, the form was blurry, like something seen through water. Then, it bobbed closer, and Vibia’s breath froze in her throat as unbidden fear swelled within her.
‘No.’ She drew in air deeply, filling her lungs all the way down to her gut. ‘It’s tricking you. Don’t let it.’ So much of fear was physical, the body trying to convince the mind to flee from a hazard. Vibia had to control her breath and blood in order to remain out of the fiend’s influence.
Next to her, Latona swayed unsteadily. Concerned that the other woman was less prepared to steel herself against the shade’s powers, particularly with Spirit’s vulnerabilities to Fracture, Vibia reached over and gave her a pinch.
Latona scowled, but seemed more focused afterward. “What are you sensing from it?” she asked in a whisper.
“Definitely one of the lemures,” Vibia said, in a tone that was not as centered and grounded as she would have liked. “Of what sort, I’m not—”
Suddenly, the shade’s figure sharpened: no longer a vague human-like form; now it looked as much like a real, living man as something translucent and colorless could. Thick eyebrows, a tremendously prodigious nose, a thick-set scowl. ‘Father?’ Again, she stamped down hard on the thought. ‘Dammit, Vibia, focus. That’s only what the damn thing wants you to think.’
She glanced over at Latona, astonished to see there were tears glimmering on the younger woman’s cheeks. ‘Who is she seeing, I wonder?’
But in that, the shade had given itself away. Now Vibia could put a name to it: an umbra mortuora, a shade that took the shape of the dead. No true spirits, not the actual dead drawn back into the living world, but cruel imitations. Through their insidious magic, the stronger of them could reach into a person’s anima and decide what form would be most likely to unsettle. For Vibia, the father she chiefly remembered as a stern taskmaster was as good a guess as any. “Enough of that, you,” she hissed. Next to her, Latona still had damp cheeks, but her hands were clenched into fists, and she was muttering beneath her breath. ‘Good. Not overwhelmed by it, then.’
As Latona kept muttering, the umbra began to lose its unsettling shape—and yet, at the same time, it grew brighter, a silver cloud against the darkness. Vibia reached out, trying to trace its path, but her own magic was too thin, too weak to pick up on the trail. Her teeth ground into each other in frustration at her inability to perform, but then Latona asked, “What are we dealing with?”
‘I suppose I can, at least, provide information. That makes me not completely useless.’ Vibia sighed. “It’s an umbra mortuora. Nasty work. The magic that calls to it is particularly gruesome Fracture magic.” She frowned, reaching for the right words. “You don’t get an umbra without tearing a rent from the world of the living into the world of spirits. For some reason . . .” Since Latona’s eyes were fixed on the fiend, Vibia risked glancing around the village. “Someone chose this place to make that tear.”
“Someone chose . . . There would be a—a—”
“Something like what you described, remnants of a ritual, yes.” Nothing useful was coming to Vibia’s sight, nothing to let her know where the fiend might have been summoned from or if any other mage was around, directing its actions.
“If we can find out where it’s coming from—what called it here, or where the—the crack between the worlds is—” Latona’s words were strained; Vibia suspected she was having difficulty focusing, but she admired the effort. “The locus, the . . .” Her throat worked; Vibia wondered if she was having trouble swallowing or if she was trying not to retch. She shook her head, golden curls bobbing. “I can’t follow it, Vibia. I can feel the wrongness, but it’s not my element. I can’t follow its path.” She looked over at Vibia; her green eyes seemed unnaturally bright against the darkness. “You have to find it, Vibia. Find the tear in the world.”
A pit settled into Vibia’s stomach; Latona had no idea what she was asking. Of course she didn’t. For all she knew, Vibia was the one who had defeated Pinarius Scaeva in that warehouse. The one who had rescued her. Why wouldn’t such a heroine be able to find the gap between the worlds that had let this thing through?
‘Well. Why wouldn’t you?’ She knew the principle. Her powers were weak, but she was blessed by Janus and Fortuna nonetheless. If Vitellia Latona could cast into the ether and sense whatever it was that had her gazing about like the gods themselves were whispering in her ears, then surely Vibia could reach out and find that tear. Edges—if a Fracture mage knew nothing else, she knew about edges. And that’s what this was, what she had to find: an edge where none should be. A gap in the natural world.
Sucking in a long breath, Vibia widened her stance until she was straddling the X she had drawn in the dirt. Whether or not that would help, she had no idea, but she figured it couldn’t hurt. Fracture mages pulled power from boundaries—and she had no intention of sitting astride a nearby fence. “All right, you,” she hissed at the fiend, who was starting to regain its shape. “Show me what made you.”
Like a musician tuning a cithara, Vibia threaded her magic, thin though it was, seeking the point of harmony that might lead her to something useful. ‘How did Sempronius always talk about it?’ For him, it always seemed like the elements lay down to do his bidding at the gentlest nudge. She was sure the truth was more complicated, but it had been so hard, when she first learned of her little brother’s hidden talents, all those years ago. Vibia had struggled and grasped for all she had, and it felt barely enough to count as a blessing sometimes. Envy had threatened to devour her, and she had defeated it by devoting herself to Sempronius’s cause, helping him to keep his secret. She had tried to learn theory from him, even if she couldn’t practice. ‘Use that now. He always says it’s like the elements fall into place, clicking like a puzzle-box.’
And as soon as she thought of it like that, something did fall into place—or, rather, Vibia could feel where it ought to, but would not. A jagged gap where there ought only to have been smooth night. “This way.” Hesitantly at first, then with a greater sense of confidence, Vibia started down the path.
XIII
Latona’s senses felt muddled, as though the umbra had clogged her ears and blurred her vision. She had to keep refocusing; the more heavily she relied on her Spirit magic, the easier it was to clear the sludgy sensations away.
A little more than halfway down the
lane, Vibia jerked to a halt. The trail turned sharply off to the right, behind one of the peasants’ huts. The sensation of pollution here was not as overpowering as it had been in the mountain grove, but it was similar: a roiling aversion, like smelling rotten meat and knowing, instinctively, not to eat it.
“It’s near,” Vibia said, gazing about. “Quite, quite near.”
A frown pinched her features as she continued to search. Then Vibia led Latona and Merula around the side of the house, where a little orchard stood behind a droopy herb garden—an orchard hardly worth of the name, a spare half-dozen trees half-heartedly bearing pears. Vibia touched the trunk of the first she came to. “No. But close.”
At the third tree, Vibia stopped and looked up. Latona followed her gaze. There, bound to a branch, was a little bundle: white cloth wrapped with black thread.
“Merula,” Latona called. “Could you—”
“Yes, Domina.” In a trice, Merula had grasped the lowest-hanging branch, braced a foot against the trunk, and hauled herself into the tree.
Vibia looked behind them. “It’s following, the umbra,” she said, “but it doesn’t want to come too close to here, for some reason.” Then she glanced up at Merula, already halfway up the tree. “My, she’s a sprightly little thing, isn’t she?”
Latona wasn’t sure that Vibia had meant that as a compliment to Merula, but her head was too swamped with the Discordian taint to parse the comment. “Indeed . . .”
From above them, Merula made a disgusted noise. Then the bundle dropped out of the tree, landing at Latona’s feet. Vibia took a step back. “That’s definitely it.”
