by David Drake
WHEN NEMASTES’ spell bound Varus, he fell with his face toward the statue of Jupiter. There the wizard fitted a reed to the flute and began to play. Ice shivered through Varus’s mind when he understood what Nemastes was doing.
He realized that the wizard didn’t understand it himself, because he couldn’t possibly have wanted this result. The notes of the black bone flute gouged deep into the cosmos, opening layer after layer until they finally cut down to where Surtr crouched in white-hot splendor. That wasn’t Nemastes’ intention, but the Twelve were twisting the music to their ends rather than his.
Surtr didn’t so much swell as come into focus. His figure rose, piercing the crust of the world and the very clouds in his blazing magnificence. The fabric of the cosmos eroded, spilling down into the pit which spread at the god’s feet. His fiery minions began to climb toward the waking world, mindless and inexorable agents of destruction.
“Sibyl?” Varus said as his body chanted. “What do I do?”
“You have opened the way, Lord Varus,” the old woman said. “Follow it, and when you reach your goal, act as you will know to do.”
That’s not very helpful, he thought; which was silly, when he really thought instead of reacting in his mind. Varus continued to see through the eyes of his body lying on the floor of the temple, but there was now a path leading down from the cloud-wrapped hilltop on which his soul spoke with the Sibyl. Varus followed it.
He remembered Sigyn guiding him on a route much like this one; now he was alone. His lips drew tight as he thought about Sigyn. He wasn’t responsible for her state, but he wished he’d been able to do more for her. And there were the others he’d touched and who had touched him, and whom he couldn’t help either.
That wouldn’t have bothered him in the past—he wouldn’t have thought about it in the past. Gaius Alphenus Varus hadn’t been cruel or even callous, but he’d been almost completely detached.
Varus stepped into the cloud; his skin felt damp, but this time the fog was warm, almost hot. He walked on with long, firm strides, even though he couldn’t see where his feet would come down.
The Sibyl had told him that he’d opened this path. If it was open, then he was fine; if it wasn’t—if it ended in a chasm and he fell to his doom—then he had done a bad job and deserved to die.
Perhaps the waking world deserved to die also, for having picked an inadequate representative. Would a cause of action before the praetor—presumably the praetor for foreign cases—lie against the agent, Gaius Varus, who had failed in his fiduciary duty?
Varus smiled faintly. It helped to imagine Sigyn at his side. His fancies had amused her.
Varus could hear himself chanting the stanza from where his body lay on the temple floor: Where the twisted horn is hid, the Wizard knows! Under the heaven-touching tree that is the world, the tears from Othinn’s eye fall on it.
Were the verses from the Sibylline Books? Their rhythms were wrong and he didn’t think the words were even Greek, though they were easy enough for his tongue to form and perfectly clear to his ears.
The fog that surrounded his spirit suddenly cleared. To his surprise, he was walking through a forest glade instead of down a barren rocky slope. The buttress roots of the largest trees looked like high, slanted walls. Vines clung to their trunks and dangled from branches hidden in the foliage.
Concealed among the vines were cords of silk as thick as Varus’s little fingers. He forced himself to continue walking while his eyes traced the strands up to the webs—he’d thought web but there were at least three—they supported.
Hanging from branches, each front pair of legs on the frame of its web to feel any tremor in the silk, were the spiders. Their bodies were striped green on brown, and each was the size of a calf. They could drain a man—certainly they could drain a very young man, soft and bookish—and leave him as dry as a ruptured wineskin.
Huge as these trees were, they were not the World Tree of the verse. Varus had farther to go unless the spiders were to be his end and the end of his world. The path led between two of the impossibly thick strands of silk. He walked on, his steps measured and his eyes almost blind with his fear.
I am a citizen of Carce; I will be steadfast in the face of my enemies. I am a citizen of Carce.
Varus passed under the web and the monster which had woven it. He was into the forest again, continuing to descend.
The path became mud which the feet of those who had walked it before him had cut deeper and deeper. Before long he was following a slick-walled clay track no wider than his elbows. The trench was already twice his own height, and he was still going down.
In the temple, the wizard Nemastes coughed his life out. His eyes glazed, and the spell which had wrapped the youth Gaius Varus drained away as Nemastes’ blood did. It didn’t matter to Varus now, but his body twisted upright with the help of its right hand. The left hand held what had been the talisman of Botrug until the Sibyl’s greater power had displaced the ancient shaman. He continued to chant.
Something cried out ahead in a series of rising, rasping shrieks: one, and the next, and the NEXT. Varus’s right foot kicked the heel of his left, an excuse for the stumble which he might have made anyhow.
I can’t get away! The walls are too high and too greasy!
But Varus didn’t intend to go anywhere except straight ahead, so it didn’t matter. If there was a leopard waiting in the pathway, he would go through the cat or the cat would kill him; it was that simple. I am a citizen of Carce; I will be steadfast.
Varus grinned. It was easier to be brave while walking toward a leopard which might not exist than toward a giant spider which had been undeniably real. As real as anything in this world was, at any rate.
There was no cat in the trail, and the shadows on the gully’s high rim could have been thrown by clouds. The sky was a narrow ribbon of brightness. How long have I been walking this path?
The trail entered a tunnel marked by two great pilasters carved from living rock. They slanted slightly inward, turning the entrance into a narrow trapezoid instead of a rectangle. Something was carved on the high transom, but the angle and orange splotches of lichen prevented Varus from reading it.
He grinned wryly. He very much doubted that the words would have made him feel better.
Varus was still going down. The only light came from the entrance, and he lost that very quickly. Sometimes he thought he saw purple-outlined groins which arched across the tunnel’s high ceiling, but they were probably just a trick of his eyes.
After a time—he’d lost track of duration—Varus heard water trickling. He couldn’t judge distance or even direction, but it pleased him to hear a sound that wasn’t of his own direct making. His sandals scuffed the stone path, but they raised no echoes.
He wondered where the water came from and where it drained. Perhaps he was going to an underground—Underworld—lake, there to … what?
Where the twisted horn is hidden, the Wizard knows.
This wizard knew nothing but to keep going on, going down. Varus walked briskly as if he weren’t afraid of what waited in the darkness. He was as frightened as he would have been if he’d been flung from a high place onto the rocks below. Fear wouldn’t have helped him to fly to safety then, however; and he wouldn’t allow it to turn him from his course now.
Varus had reached a different level of the Underworld. The darkness was still complete, but he felt it breathing; the air was hot, and sulfur bit at the back of his throat. He thought of Surtr looming above Carce as his demon legions marched upward.
The body of Gaius Varus was in the Temple of Jupiter while his soul walked here in darkness. This was the place where the fire god waited. This was the place where Surtr existed, though Nemastes the Hyperborean had summoned his semblance to scour the waking world with lava and clouds of sulfurous poison.
Was this what Varus’s knowledge had brought him? A path to the flaming death that would shortly visit all the world—but for the Wizard, a qu
icker route so that he didn’t have to watch what his failure had brought on all life besides?
Varus thought of Sigyn’s cold hell. That would be worse. He wished she were walking at his side; for the companionship, but for her sake as well.
Varus’s path was rising, or he thought it was; he knew that his long trek in darkness could have disoriented him. His stride was firm and from the outside would have looked confident; if there had been anyone to watch, and if they could have seen anything in this lightless, lifeless place.
In the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest, Hedia knelt beside Pandareus. She had brought a bowl of mixed wine from the Senator’s table. With a napkin she had dipped in wine, she was wiping the teacher’s brow.
Hedia glanced at Varus—at his body, chanting the verse of power—nearby. Their eyes met, but there was no real connection because Varus’s soul—his soul smiled in the darkness—was in another place. She went back to nursing the injured teacher.
Alphena had risen to her feet. She was pacing back and forth, working the stiffness out of her legs. She snapped her head around at each turn, keeping her eyes forever on the pit. She was ready for the moment that the demons would break free of the hedge of sound.
But for now, Corylus played. With the eyes of his soul, Varus saw the shadow of a woman standing so close to his friend that half the time he thought they were one.
The flute’s song was a continuous sapphire wave, coiling about and freezing back the fire demons. It couldn’t stop them forever. Nothing could stop them forever, for Surtr was a god and they were his minions. But while Corylus played, they were not free to ravage Carce and through Carce the world.
You’re a good soldier, my friend Corylus. The Republic is lucky to have men like you, from whom the rest of us can learn our duty.
Varus saw light ahead of him. He felt an urge to run, but measured paces had brought him from Carce to this sight of his goal. He continued to walk in the appearance of glacial calm; and in ten steps more, or perhaps twenty, he stepped into a cold wind.
The sky was the color of watered milk, and the sun was low on the southern horizon. The ground was a bare slope of rocks reeking of sulfur. Open water lapped the shore of the island, but the sea beyond the wizards’ barrier was a crinkled mass of pack ice.
Varus stood on the lip of a tall volcanic cone. On the strand below him, manlike figures danced with capering demons for partners. He had come to the Horn, the home of the Twelve.
This was where he had first seen the Twelve in a vision. They danced as they had done when they made Varus their slave, but their spells would not help them now. The Wizard whom the Twelve created had returned, not to rule but to destroy them.
Far to the east were hills, snowbound but brushed with the green of spruces and stippled by slender hardwoods which would bloom again in spring. Between the mainland and this volcanic island was a strait whose swift currents washed even the far shore clear of the ice which otherwise covered the surface for miles in all directions. The slumped basalt columns of the cliffs on the mainland had been shattered when the sea flooded onto molten rock.
Surtr was great, but when the Horn became an island the fire god had not been driven to exert his whole strength. This time, Surtr was not in control: the Wizard was.
“Out I go at once,” Varus shouted, “flinging wide the doors!”
He felt the rumble through the soles of his feet. Pebbles—cinders flung from the fires in ancient times—began to patter down the slope, their bonds shattered by the new tremors. The Twelve had closed the twisting ways to the Horn with their spells, but the Wizard had walked them. Now he opened those passages to the heart of fire.
The ground gave a violent shudder. They were coming. The legions of fire were coming.
The Wizard bestrode the Horn like a god. His left hand clasped the ivory talisman and his head scraped the clouds. The Twelve called to him in prayer, not command.
“I have no fear as I welcome my kinsmen!” the Wizard shouted.
The rim of the volcano crumbled as the fire demons tore it away in their haste to reach the outer world. Sulfur clouds belched up, wreathing the giant figure of Varus. He was beyond any human concerns.
Orange-red lava or red-orange demons pushed and bubbled from the crater, cascading down the steep slope to the sea. The Twelve waded into the water, but Varus knew they could not go far: the barriers they had set to bar entry to their fortress were now the walls of their prison.
The lava hissed and thundered in its descent. The demons whom the Twelve had forced to their will laughed as they continued to dance. Surtr’s legions swept through them, mixing as completely and harmlessly as water with wine. The Twelve’s minions were blue sparks in the red-orange sea, whirling in slow evolutions, and the Wizard heard their laughter.
Varus did not laugh. The Twelve had used him as they used the demons. They would have made him the instrument by which they destroyed all men, for which they had to be utterly destroyed: more thoroughly even than Carthage.
But the only pleasure Varus felt was the sense of a duty well performed. I am a citizen of Carce. I have been steadfast.
The wave of lava splashed into the sea, boiling it away and pushing farther out. The roar would have deafened human ears. Steam and sulfur mixed in a foul, clinging blanket which hid everything but the screams.
These screams continued for longer than the Wizard would have guessed; but when they ended, Varus sat on the floor of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. The ivory head of Botrug was in his left hand, and his friends were around him.
Nemastes lay dead by the statue of Jupiter. The Twelve had vanished, as had Surtr and the pit which had reached down into the fiery core of the world.
Corylus lowered the bone flute, looking dazed. Alphena stumbled toward him, holding her sword to the side instead of trying to sheathe it in her present state. Hedia was helping Pandareus to his feet, and the temple servants seemed to be coming around also.
Gaius Alphenus Saxa pushed through the front door. Immediately behind him followed a company of servants led by Lenatus and Corylus’s man Pulto. The two old soldiers carried bare swords in defiance of the laws of the Republic.
“Varus!” Saxa said. “What’s happened here, my Son?”
Varus stood and staggered into his father’s embrace. He knew it would take him some time to decide how to answer the question, though.
EPILOGUE
Alphena felt drained. She’d trained hard many times in the past, but she’d never felt like this before. The exhaustion was more a matter of her soul than of her body, though when she moved she found that all her muscles—especially her thighs and her pectorals—ached.
Servants had intercepted her before she reached Corylus. She shouldn’t have run to him anyway.
“Your ladyship!” said Agrippinus, looking more agitated than Alphena had ever seen him before. He held a gold-banded ivory baton which would probably make an effective weapon—in the hands of someone other than the majordomo himself. “Your ladyship, what are you doing with a sword here in the temple?”
“I’ll take care of the girl, buddy,” said Lenatus, stepping close to Alphena and crowding the majordomo back with his outstretched arm. “Look to her mother, why don’t you?”
“You buffoon!” Agrippinus said. “She has a sword, don’t you see?”
“Yeah, by Hercules, I surely do see,” growled Lenatus. “Which is why I’m telling you to leave her to me, got it?”
The trainer had slipped his own weapon out of sight. When he and Pulto burst into the temple, their cloaks had been wrapped around their left forearms to give them some protection if they had to face enemies with swords of their own. As soon as it became clear that the fighting was over, the swords were sheathed again and the cloaks concealed them.
“Lenatus, you trained me,” Alphena gasped. Her head was spinning. The air was clear now, but the stench of sulfur had flayed her nostrils while she faced the demons. “May Juno the Mother bless
you for training me so well!”
Her tunic was charred just above the knee, and there was a long blister on the flesh beneath that mark. One of the creatures had almost gotten its grip when it snatched at her. She didn’t remember that happening, but the injury was inarguable. Reaction to the burn might explain why she was remembering events that now seemed to be delirium.
“Is this a real sword?” Lenatus said, surprise replacing concern in his voice. “By hell, what is this? Pulto, come here. What kind of metal—”
His face blanked as he remembered whom he was talking to. “Your ladyship, I apologize,” he said; he was contrite but he was still a free citizen of Carce. “I spoke without thinking. But please, may I take a closer look at this blade?”
Pulto waved away Lenatus’s summons. He stood with Corylus, watching over the youth much as the trainer did with Alphena.
She smiled wearily, wondering what Corylus was telling his servant. Alphena didn’t know how she could explain what had happened—if in fact it had happened outside of her dreams.
Hedia was talking earnestly with Saxa. Alphena came to a sudden ordering of priorities. The blade was clean and her hand didn’t tremble anymore, so she sheathed the weapon smoothly.
“Yes, you can look at the sword, Master Lenatus,” she said. “At leisure, when we’re back at the house. But for now, do you have something to put on this burn? I’m not sure how it happened.”
The trainer turned and bellowed to a servant keeping out of the way at the front of the hall. The fellow trotted over, opening his case of medical supplies. Trust an old soldier like Lenatus to prepare for the aftermath of a fight as well as the fight itself ….
But first—
“Mother Hedia?” Alphena called in a clear voice that everybody in the hall could hear. Her father and stepmother broke off their conversation to look inquiringly toward her.
“Thank you!” Alphena said. “I wouldn’t have survived without you, Mother.”
She seated herself on the floor, stretching out her leg so that Lenatus could get to it with a jar of ointment. His blunt fingers were gentle, though in the past she’d seen how much strength there was in his hands if he chose to exert it.
