by David Drake
He’d never played a flute; it was an art favored by specialists who generally doubled as male prostitutes, not the sort of thing a good-looking youth in an army camp wanted to be found studying. He’d never even played a panpipe of reeds stopped with wax, a different and much simpler instrument. What was he supposed to do—
“Here, silly boy,” said Canina, suddenly at his side. “Goodness, darling, you’re handsome but you’re quite helpless, aren’t you?”
Despite the situation, Corylus felt a shock of outrage. His mouth opened to snap, “In my family, we hired flute girls!” The absurdity of his reaction struck him as so funny that he almost started to giggle, which would have been equally inappropriate.
And there was nothing to say anyway. The tawny-haired nymph seemed to reach not around but into him. With his fingers on three of the stops he put the reed to his mouth and blew.
Corylus didn’t understand what his lips or his dancing fingers were doing, nor did he hear the music. He was watching himself and the whole scene from above as though he were an equal of the fire god who roared and blazed from the pit of the volcano.
The flute song rang across the landscape. The demons marched relentlessly, leaving bubbling rock behind them for their fellows clambering from the pit to follow. Their blight spread in all directions. A yellow brimstone haze hung over the devastation.
The cairn of black rocks on the bank of the Ice River ruptured. More earth shocks, Corylus thought, but the stones he had placed with such difficulty were bursting from inside. The corpse got up, smiled at the stranger who had buried him, and stepped from the scattered tomb.
“I was lucky in who found me,” Odd’s body said. He was beside Corylus, facing the lava. There had been no motion, just there and then here. “Or perhaps someone picked you to find me. I would thank that One, if I knew whom to name.”
Corylus lowered the flute. “Vengeance?” he said.
“No, I’m Odd,” the other said. “Back again.”
He stood as Corylus had buried him: bootless, capless, and wearing a wry smile. Corylus liked him instinctively, but nobody who understood Odd’s smile could doubt that he would be a bad enemy.
Frothi already knew that: he was stumbling to certain death rather than face the man whom his brother’s vengeance had sent to him. And as for the wizard Nemastes …
Nemastes knelt, chanting over the ivory head. He held his arms before him with the palms outward in bar. Lava hissed and spat as it rolled north, closer each moment to the wizard and the tribe praying behind him.
Nemastes shouted a word that glanced off Corylus’s consciousness; his mind could not grasp the shape of its syllables.
The ancient shaman stepped out of the talisman. When Botrug appeared, the silk curtain fell again. Corylus saw the lava as squat sizzling demons whom Botrug threw back with a word and a gesture.
The shaman gave a gurgling laugh. The demons rose to their feet and started forward again.
Spots of blue as hard as congealed starlight formed in the air behind Nemastes, arrayed in a semicircle. In a further moment they swelled to become the Twelve, Nemastes’ siblings. They looked at him with the murderous greed of cats eyeing a caged lark.
Nemastes glanced over his shoulder, then faced the fire god and his minions again as though the Twelve were of no concern to him. Their faces were death’s heads, and they began to dance.
“I’ll take the flute,” Odd said, giving Corylus a hard grin. He held out his hand. “Not that you haven’t done a good job, my friend.”
“Right,” said Corylus, glad to get rid of it. He didn’t like the feel of the instrument. Just as he understood things when handling objects made of wood, he got blurred impressions from this length of thighbone. He wasn’t sure he’d have been willing to blow it had it not been for the reed mouthpiece.
He picked up the staff and immediately felt better. The nymph of the hornbeam watched him with gray eyes, stern but comforting.
“Here,” said Odd, offering the reed to Corylus. He’d replaced it with one of his own. “You may need this later. You never can tell.”
His grin could have been etched on a diamond. “Now, friend, get my people out of the way as you started to. There isn’t a lot of time, even now that I’ve returned.”
Odd put his lips to the mouthpiece and began to play, his fingers lifting and lowering on the stops. They moved like the legs of dancing men; they moved like the Twelve, dancing to exert their power over the renegade sibling who had robbed and betrayed them.
Willows still lined the channel which they had cracked in the rock; they quivered. As one they lifted their roots from the turf. In graceful undulations they began marching eastward. They moved no faster than sheep, but they were sheep headed for the byre in the evening with udders aching to be milked. Slender trees waved branches in farewell toward Corylus.
Frothi had finally seen where he was running. Fire demons were closing in on three sides of him.
He drew his pick and chopped at one, apparently trying to cut his way through. The deer antler flared white at the demon’s touch.
Several demons—or billows of molten rock? It didn’t matter—converged on Frothi. Though neither the flames nor the brief scream surprised Corylus, the gush of steam made him queasy.
But he had a task now. He strode forward, grasping Gram and Todinn by the collars and lifting their heads to gape at him.
“Run, you fools!” Corylus shouted. “Get your families, get everybody to the east before the lava arrives! Odd is holding it back!”
He looked for Sith. She was already chivying women and children toward safety. Her glance met that of Corylus, but it was just that: a glance and a nod. They both had their duties.
And Odd had his. The fire god’s horde met the icy tones of his flute and rebounded like storm-tossed waves from a breakwater. Demons snarled and wailed, striving to smash their way through to devour the striding trees and terror-numbed folk of the tribe.
“Go on, get moving!” Corylus said. “No, Bearn, take that little girl! Carry her! Or by Hercules, I’ll break both your knees—”
He swished his staff through the air. The men of the tribe generally still carried their spears and daggers, but they were no more willing to fight Corylus than they would stand against the divine horror driving his legions from the reborn volcano.
“—and I’ll carry her myself. Come on! Odd thinks you’re worth saving, so you will be saved!”
The lowering shadow of Botrug kept the demons back in a semi-circle before Nemastes, but the lava was beginning to lap around to either side. Nemastes continued to chant where he crouched, but his eyes darted to left and right. He was looking for a place of safety, which the talisman could not provide for much longer.
The tribe had begun moving quickly. The folk were staying together, the strong helping the weak. They were barbarians, but they were nonetheless human beings—at least after Corylus had reminded a few of them.
It might have been better if the tribe had started running at once instead of falling in prayer, but that was a human choice also. For that matter, if Odd hadn’t appeared to play the flute, running would have been no more useful than prayer. Lava would have cut the escape route before any but the strongest males reached it.
Corylus quirked a smile. Prayer hadn’t brought Odd back—Publius Corylus, with help from a relation on his mother’s side, had done that. But who was to say that prayer hadn’t brought Corylus to this place? He didn’t have a better explanation himself.
And it very much seemed that he would live his remaining however many years here, in Thule. Perhaps he would found a line and grow famous as the man who told fantastic stories about a dreamworld he called Carce.
He wouldn’t be fathering children by Sith, though. While Odd played, the young woman was fitting a boot to his lifted right foot; its mate was already on his left. She must have brought the boots with her, along with a cap of reindeer hide neatly decorated with dyed bone splinters.
> Trees from farther west marched past with swaying grace. Corylus saw birches, willows, alders, and a few splendid spruce trees which must have come from the headland whose fogs implied a warm ocean current.
He supposed he’d best be getting along himself. The lava or fire demons would devour him as surely as they had Frothi—or would a hazel sapling which didn’t heed the flute’s call to flee.
Corylus looked toward the tribe, disappearing over the highest swell of ground to the east. His eyes flicked toward Sith and Odd—and were held by Odd’s penetrating glance.
The burly wizard continued to play. His flute had thrown up a wall before the fire demons. They climbed atop one another in their thunderous desire to reach the trees and men they watched escaping. If Odd stopped, the rush would sweep all before it for a mile or more, up to the bank of the Ice River.
But Odd nodded meaningfully, and the note of the flute changed. The air beside Corylus began to rotate like that of a basin emptying through a pipe. Everything beyond it in the present blurred, but at the heart of the vortex he could see the roofs and temples of Carce as they appeared from the top of the Capitoline Hill.
A fair exchange: Corylus had returned Odd to his world, and Odd was returning his savior to Carce. Smiling with not only triumph but joy—which Corylus hadn’t felt in some while—he waited for the opening between worlds to spin wide enough to pass a human being.
The Twelve wheeled like skeletal vultures, waiting in certain knowledge that their prey would soon fall. Greed and excitement shone in their evil faces.
Nemastes shouted urgently, his tone very different from his singsong above the talisman. The demons bulged toward him, but he resumed his chant in time. Botrug drove them back again, though it would not be long before the ends of the encircling lava closed behind the wizard.
The Stolo obediently turned and shambled toward Odd. The creature hunched forward and spread its arms wide as it advanced. With its bared fangs, it looked like a huge spider advancing on its victim.
Odd had already begun to sidle eastward. He moved as quickly as he could, but he couldn’t both run and play. Sith shouted and put herself between her lover and the monster.
The window to Carce was wide enough for Corylus to jump through it. Odd was repaying him: they were quits now.
Except that friendship didn’t work that way. Corylus, the soon-to-be storyteller of Thule, shoved Sith out of the way.
“Go on!” he said, poising his staff. “Make sure Odd doesn’t stumble. I’ll take care of this one.”
“Publius Corylus,” Sith called urgently. “Shall I bring you spears?”
“Hell take you, woman!” he said. “I’m busy! Take care of your man!”
Corylus spread his legs slightly, working the balls of his feet into the turf. He wished he were wearing cleated boots, both for their grip on the soil and the very useful punch of their iron-shod soles. He held the hornbeam staff by the end in both hands, the right leading. This would do.
Nemastes rose like a stork lifting from its nest, abandoning the ivory head on the ground behind him. Elbows flailing, feet splaying to the side, the hairless wizard galloped toward the gate to the world Corylus had come from. He was uncoordinated and looked ridiculous when he flung himself toward the vortex, but he vanished into its haze. As he did so, the gate collapsed on itself like a sand sculpture.
When Nemastes stopped chanting, Botrug’s shadow vanished like raindrops on the sea. With the shaman gone, the demons burst into the salient, but the Twelve swooped even more swiftly onto the talisman. For a moment the cabal of wizards was a sapphire bubble surrounded by red bubbling lava; then the Twelve were gone. In the instant before fire engulfed the place where they had been, the turf was empty. The ivory miniature of Botrug had disappeared with the wizards.
The Stolo didn’t seem to notice that Nemastes had abandoned it, but it slowed its pace when Corylus stepped into its way. Its shoulders dipped and it began to sidle to the left, though it still advanced.
It isn’t contemptuous of me, Corylus thought. That was a pity.
He stepped toward the Stolo, lifting his thumb-thick wand slightly. He could wish for a heavier staff, but the gray nymph watching him from a distance through time was a comforting presence. She understood, and she would not fail him.
The Stolo snatched at the end of the wand. Corylus slashed down, smacking the side of the creature’s left knee. A human’s joint would have broken, but the Stolo snarled like a rock slide and rushed forward. Instead of dodging, Corylus brought the wand backhand across the creature’s face, turning it away from him. Its flailing right arm missed his head by the width of a hand. The fingernails were black and as powerful as a bear’s claws.
The Stolo whirled. Corylus was planted. He brought the tip of his wand down on the creature’s right thigh with the strength of both his arms behind the strike. The Stolo took a step toward him and blatted in surprise: the blow had pinched the muscles across the top of the thigh against the massive bone and numbed them. The creature’s leg collapsed; it sprawled on the turf.
Corylus lifted his wand, then slammed it against the back of the Stolo’s neck. The cr-crack! was doubled: the sound of hardwood against bone mixed with the pop of vertebrae crushing under the blow.
The Stolo’s limbs went as flaccid as raw tripes. Its mouth opened and closed. Corylus fell to one knee, gasping. He planted the wand vertically on the ground and clung to it for support.
“Come along, darling,” said a cheery female voice. “You don’t want to stay here when Surtr’s on the march. Take my hand.”
He looked up. A young woman, slender and pretty with a roguish tilt to her eyes, held out her hand. When he blinked, he saw the branch of a silver birch which seemed to have drifted from the grove striding along at the end of the great exodus of trees.
“Come!” she repeated, squeezing his hand. Corylus lurched to his feet, guided by the nymph’s touch rather than compelled. Yes, he did have to get going, though the future for a youth raised to civilization was bleak, even if he survived. Better than being cooked alive by lava, he supposed, though the choice in his mind wasn’t entirely one-sided.
“Thank you, mistress,” he said, but the nymph was handing him on to a sister—a cousin, better; an alder nymph—well ahead. Corylus felt motion, but his feet weren’t touching the ground. The landscape rolled beneath him.
Surtr thundered, waving his fiery sword, but Corylus had nothing to fear from the fire god and his legions now. A cancer was burning into the landscape; it already covered a third of the peninsula below the Ice River. In a few places lava had reached the sea, throwing up curtains of steam to roil and dilute the sulfur haze.
Odd’s music had drawn a line as straight as a plumb bob’s in the path of the oncoming demons; but as the wizard marched at the back of the tribe, the western end of his barrier was giving way. Smoke and fumes marked the passage of lava over prairie from which the trees had fled.
Far away, separated from Corylus by more than distance, Sith lifted her arm in farewell. He would have waved back but the nymphs had his hands and he was moving with breathtaking speed.
“My, you’re a pretty little fellow,” said a thick-bodied ash nymph, taking him in turn. “Oh, if Fraxina were just the least younger, she would dally with you, boy!”
She bussed him on the cheek and sent him on to the smiling beech waiting to receive him. The beech handed Corylus to an oak, a huge matriarch who spread across ground that a forester would have given instead to a grove of a dozen trees more useful for timber.
There were no oaks in Thule—it was too far north. The forest had made Corylus its own, and he was experiencing time and space as it did.
He lost track of the nymphs who patted, hugged, or kissed him as they passed him on to the next smiling kinswoman. A slim, straight girl with green eyes grinned at him from a hazel coppice and said, “Well met, Brother. Mother would be proud of you.” Then she too was behind him.
Corylus didn’t hav
e the breath to speak, nor did he stay at any point of his passage long enough to exchange a real question and answer. Where am I going? When will it be when I get there?
“Now be well, darling,” said a nymph with a smile and shaggy locks. “Don’t forget my sisters and me, will you?”
“I won’t—,” Corylus started to say. He stood on firm soil beneath a grove of cypresses. The moon, just past full, was at midsky. Lights within the temple to his left gleamed through clerestory windows and the open double doors in the front.
Corylus was on the Capitoline Hill, beside the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. He heard shouts and the sound of fighting. Empty-handed—he must have left the hornbeam staff behind in its own time—he ran toward the steps into the temple.
That was what his father and mother would have expected.
CHAPTER XVIII
Alphena was holding her stepmother’s hand as they stepped together from the ramp of stars. They were back in the waking world. The noise, the foul yellow light, and the smell of brimstone made her clutch the hilt of her sword.
They’d come out between two pillars on the right side of a large hall. Alphena had never been here before, but she recognized the seated statue of Jupiter from his beard and the brass thunderbolts in his right hand. The size made this the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, where her brother had prophesied to Corylus and their teacher, Pandareus.
Varus lay trussed in glowing cords toward the back of the room, where the great statue sat. On the mosaic pavement near him was Pandareus, rising stiffly into a sitting posture. Where’s Corylus? The others are here.
Nemastes stood at the foot of the enthroned statue, wearing a desperate expression as he played a black bone flute. Twelve demonic simulacra of the Hyperborean wizard rotated slowly in the air about him, staring avidly down.
Alphena saw the Twelve clearly, but they weren’t in the same world as she and her brother were. A pit of sickly light filled most of the center of the hall; it seemed to slant down to the center of the earth. Up that slope crawled figures which might almost have been men. They were squat and terrible, and their bodies were formed by licking flames.
