by P. K. Lentz
Thalassia opted not to lie.
“It is. This is the layer, the planet, of his birth. He cannot be directly destroyed, since the universe won't allow it. But if enough change is made here, then perhaps he can be... averted.”
“Did Magdalen send you on this mission?”
“I learned of the possibility, and the location of this layer, while I was with him. And when she forgave me, I told her all. But no... Magdalen did not send me.”
Eden scoffed. “And why is that, I wonder? If your aim had any possibility of success, she would have known, and acted. She would not have sent you, surely, but some other. Or simply obliterated this world.”
“I can't speak for Magdalen,” Thalassia said. “I came here on my own out of hatred. He used me against all of you, and when I became inconvenient, when I was no longer of any use, he abandoned me. I knew in that moment, it was what he always intended.”
Thalassia spoke the words not with anger but sadness. Rarely did this side of her emerge. Was it genuine or but a tactic?
“But you did not come on your own!” Eden grated. “You brought me, and you brought Lyka!”
“I'm sorry,” Thalassia said loudly, and to Demosthenes' ears, sincerely. “I am truly sorry that I stranded you both here. If there had been another way, I would not have. Maybe there was a better way, and I let hatred blind me to it. Probably. But it can't be undone, and I am deeply sorry.”
From the look in Eden's alien eyes, she gave the copious apologies little value. It seemed her thoughts were elsewhere.
She confirmed it. “Before your time and mine, the heretics in the war that split the Caliate said that Magdalen and the Worm were two aspects of the same being,” she said. “That to destroy the Worm was to destroy Magdalen. In fact, to destroy... everything. It is for this reason, they said, that he cannot be killed. It is the universe acting out of self-preservation. If that is true, do you think the universe will allow your idiotic plans to succeed? He will simply be born in another time, another place, and continue to exist! Are you a heretic, Geneva?”
Thalassia shook her head, but in exasperation rather than any negative. “No,” she answered. “Yes. I don't know. The truth is I want no part of it anymore. The Caliate. Malcolm. Magdalen's Plan. I want out. I'm happy here. I want to stay. I've run out of hatred. I don't hate you. I want you to be happy.”
“You want! You want!” Eden roared, her face twisted. “Your sole concern, then as now! You think I can be happy here? What I want is the Caliate! The Plan! You took them from me! For all I know, your actions will obliterate them and uncreate all of us!” Snakelike, Eden's white arm rose and she pounded a clenched fist into a boulder, sending chips of stone flying and staining the rock with blood. “You fucking bitch! I don't know whether I should kill you or help you!”
“You could step aside,” Thalassia said. “Join Lyka in Nadir. Or go elsewhere.”
“Join Lyka, sleeping until the sun burns out! Or go where? I don't want another chunk of wasteland!” She hissed through clenched, ivory teeth: “I want the universe back!”
“I'm sorry I took it from you,” Thalassia said, sounding truly penitent. “If you still feel you need to destroy me, I understand. But I will not let you.”
Eden aimed a finger at Demosthenes, inspiring in him an involuntary pang of terror. “Maybe I should take away your toy.”
Thalassia glanced at Demosthenes with a calm look which made his fear evaporate.
Then she said to Eden, also calmly: “Then you would truly learn the meaning of vengeance.”
In the silent moment that followed, while Eden seethed, Demosthenes risked speaking for the first time.
“There need not be war between us.”
Eden creased her brow at him, while Thalassia kept her gaze on the enemy whom she did not hate.
“If you care nothing for Sparta,” Demosthenes ventured, “then merely step aside while we destroy it.”
Eden chuckled darkly. “How cute. Your pet turtle thinks it can contribute.”
“Is the one whose word sent you here also a pet?” Demosthenes returned. The remark earned him a look from Thalassia advising caution.
“One makes do with what is available,” Eden said. The words in no way had the flavor of a lie, but here she stood, conversing with her enemy at the urging of 'what was available.'
“Andrea is why she cannot give us Sparta now,” Thalassia declared with confidence.
“You have your pet. I have mine. But make no mistake: I would burn the girl in a heartbeat if it could put me in a hardliner.”
Thalassia shrugged and spoke a string of incomprehensible words in the tongue of the star-born.
“That's rude of you, Geneva,” Eden said with a playfully malevolent smile. “It was you who insisted on Greek. Allow me to translate for him. She says, 'If one wishes to keep a pet at one's heel, it helps first to render it rootless.'” Eden raised a blonde brow. “But worry not, tiny turtle. She only wishes to plant an idea in my head, an effort which would have been all too transparent if spoken for you to hear.”
“If you came to talk peace between us,” Thalassia said, “I give it. You need only accept. Unless you want a hug, or you came for some other reason, it sounds as if we are done.”
“Yes...” Eden concurred. “Yes, we are done. You have given me food for thought, Wormwhore and tiny turtle.” She looked at them anew, and present in her eyes again, unmistakable, was the malice of the Eden of old.
“She's going to try to kill us now,” Thalassia said. “Run.”
Demosthenes' reply came instinctively: “Only if you do.”
“Kill you?” Eden said. “No...” Her hands moved to her torso and, from somewhere, produced two small blades. “Well, yes.”
“Run, idiot,” Thalassia hissed, planting a hand on Demosthenes' chest and shoving as Eden lunged.
Trusting in her to follow, Demosthenes faced the direction of the cliffs and set his legs to pumping in breakneck flight. A moment later, when he risked looking, he found Thalassia running just behind him, surely holding back her unnatural speed to match his pace. Past her, he saw Eden racing toward them, gaining.
“Don't look!” Thalassia commanded.
Ahead loomed land's end: a jagged, grassy line above which stood an expanse of sky, below which lay—nothing but wind and sea.
Nearing the edge, Demosthenes gave a command of his own: “No heroics. You come with me.”
Thalassia's attention was on their pursuer as she ran sidewise so as not to fully give Eden her back. “I know!” she roared, and she flew past Demosthenes, grabbing his arm to half-drag him behind her as Eden closed the gap in steady strides, ethereal wisps of flaxen hair a gorgon's crown in the sea wind. She was on them now, mere seconds from striking distance.
Even so, Demosthenes could not help but stop at the threshold between earth and sky. He was human, with human fears.
His companion was not. Thalassia hesitated not an instant, but just jumped, giving Demosthenes scarcely an eyeblink in which to realize that her iron grip was still upon his arm.
* * *
Stomach lurched, breath seized, and heart stopped as the firmament vanished from under to be replaced by nothing but the sea far below. Thalassia's grip on him lent reassurance—but not even a being as powerful as she could slow his descent, soften his predestined meeting with the waves, or still the currents that would fight to drag him under.
He had made this very leap once before, throwing caution to the sea winds at a time when he had not thought life not worth living. Now, he jumped to save that life.
In the first instants of weightlessness, his eyes had been focused (to his stomach's detriment) downward, on his destination. Now, falling, as he felt Thalassia's grip leave his arm, he craned his head back to learn that their escape had been too narrow.
Eden, reaching the edge half a step behind, had thrown herself or rather sprung arrow-like into the void after them, headfirst and on course to collide with Thalassia
, who twisted mid-air to meet the attack. They met, wrestled, and blood flew, Eden's blade plunging into Thalassia somewhere between breast and hip. Thalassia's hands, meanwhile, went claw-like for her enemy's face. One thumb found an eye and pushed. Eden clamped ivory thighs around Thalassia's waist, locking them in a terminal embrace as both fell.
He saw no more. The imminent impact of his fragile body had to be his first concern, and turning his gaze to the frothing sea, he prepared for it. Seconds later, the waves at the base of the cliffs exploded around him with bone-jarring, limb-shattering force. All thought was wrenched from his mind as flesh took command in the battle to live, to find air and breathe again in the hard crush of enveloping, liquid chaos. Tossed like a storm-blown leaf for what seemed an endless time, he kicked and flailed, seeking sanctuary that the sea-god denied.
He fought thus until it seemed his head would burst open and skull slip loose from its embrace, and when he could fight no longer, he bid goodbye to life, surrendering it unto sea and Fate.
* * *
He awoke, slowly, to pain. Rocks scraped his chest and cheek, and his arm was taut with such tension as to tear loose from its socket. He was glad at least to know he was alive; the pain told him that much.
His last memories, ones of watery death, flooded back. Eyes, when he opened them, told him more. He lay face-down on a beach of pebbles, onto which surface, he managed to surmise, he had just been dragged by the wrist.
He coughed, gulping precious air. His body begged him to let consciousness flee once more.
But there was yet to be learned the outcome of a vicious battle on which much depended—if indeed it did not still rage in the sea that presently lapped his calves, or on the cold shore kissing his cheek.
With difficulty, he moved his head and saw the sandaled foot of a woman.
Its skin was pale.
He lifted his gaze to look upon his rescuer, seated on the pebbles just upslope of him.
Eden's face was covered with shallow scratches. Triumph shone in her unnaturally blue eyes.
“Wormwhore got away, turtle,” she taunted. “But I have a feeling she will come for you.”
* * *
5. Omega's men
Two dawns after the exile of Agis, the ship Sorrowful Wind set sail from Sparta's port. It was a freshly built vessel designed for speed, close in size to a trireme but with triangular rather than square sails affixed by complicated rigging to its twin masts. The ship was of a type called a delphine, and Sparta possessed ten of them now in her new navy, with as many intensively trained crews of step-brothers to sail them. Warships dubbed skolopendrai were also being purpose-built and crewed to replace the modified triremes which had conquered Athens.
The voyagers on Sorrowful Wind, Styphon among them, were on no mission of war. Neither was it a mission of peace exactly. It was a matter of imperial administration which sent this sleek ship north on a one-day voyage which on a trireme would have taken two.
A new tyrant was to be installed in a conquered city, the same city which until this year had ruled the very seas over which the Wind now flew. The city was Athens, and her tyrant-in-waiting was Alkibiades, until lately a prisoner-of-war. The Athenian had, by the mercy of all the gods, refrained from pestering Styphon for nearly the whole of the voyage. Instead he spent most of his time with his two countrywomen from Agis's trial: Aspasia, the courtesan Alkibiades called step-mother, and the young widow whose womb was swelling with a child that the elders of Sparta had decided to believe belonged to Agis. Myrinne was her name, and she seemed in better spirits now, not least because of the affections Alkibiades bestowed upon her with un-brotherly interest.
It came as a mild surprise to Styphon that the girl was being allowed to return to her home with a royal child in her womb, bastard or no. A potential reason for that decision was, of course, the widely known but unspoken possibility that the child was not Agis's at all. (In Styphon's unformed, entirely masculine opinion, Myrinne seemed rather too round to have been impregnated so recently.) Sure, the child would be half-blooded and therefore have no claim even to citizenship, much less a throne; but who could ever know what choices might be faced by generations to come? When a throne was judged better filled than left cold, half-legitimate blood was warmer by half than none at all.
Perhaps that explained Alkibiades' interest in Myrinne. Certainly he was clever enough to be thinking ten or twenty years into his future. And if he was not, then the middle-aged brothel mistress whispering in his ear unquestionably was.
Brasidas had such foresight, too, and maybe it was he who saw reason to stash the child away in Athens in the care of an Athenian traitor.
Let them all scheme. Styphon was grateful that his own mind failed to function in such a manner. He was content to live in the moment.
If only Fate would consent to make his moments duller.
Now, as Attica came into sight over the prow of Sorrowful Wind, was one of those moments which Fate was more accustomed to handing him.
Piraeus, the port of Athens, stood aflame.
* * *
“Looks as though I've arrived just in time.”
The ambiguity of this statement by Alkibiades as he came alongside Styphon on the deck forced the latter to wonder just what was meant. Given that it appeared a rebellion might be underway, had Alkibiades arrived in time to suppress it—or support it?
“If I suspect at any time that you intend to betray us,” Styphon was glad to take the opportunity to point out, “I am fully authorized to kill you.”
Alkibiades grinned. “No worries, friend,” he reassured. “I will not lie: I wish my city stood where yours does now. But that is not how the bones fell. I am finished fighting Fate. It's better to be on her side, and from all I've seen, Fate stands with Sparta.”
Though nothing had been said to alter Styphon's near-certainty that this Athenian's loyalties were a dynamic thing, subject to change at any moment, he offered no argument, only scowled at the smoke rising skyward from the port which had been their destination.
But no longer: the captain, with Styphon's consent, gave his crew new orders to moor Sorrowful Wind at the fishermen's jetties a short way up the coast from Piraeus. It was one disadvantage of these new vessels that they could not, as triremes could, put to shore almost any place where the waves broke gently on a smooth slope. In fact, Styphon had learned from crewmen, the new ships were built from different, harder woods, and spent their lives in water rather than ever being dragged ashore at all.
That fact caused a second drawback about which it was best not to think: unlike buoyant galleys, these new ships, if their hulls were holed at all, would quickly vanish into the depths.
As the sun sank, Sorrowful Wind dropped anchor some two miles from Piraeus. Styphon, the three Athenians, the ship's crew, and thirty-six Spartiates under arms went ashore alongside fishermen and their full nets. The odd-looking sails had not gone unnoticed from afar, which meant three relieved looking sycophants of the tyranny were there waiting. Speaking over one another, they scrambled to explain what had transpired whilst simultaneously attempting to divest themselves of all blame.
Styphon absorbed what was relevant, which was that Athenian rebels had seized and barricaded the port. He interrupted their squawking to ask the rebels' numbers. No one knew. Were they Omega's men? Had to be. Was Omega with them in Piraeus? Unknown. What had been tried so far to retake the town?
Little. The tyrants lacked enough men they trusted to kill their countrymen rather than join them. There was a loose cordon of Athenians and Scythians along the port's mostly-demolished walls, and nothing more. The small Spartan garrison had refused to leave Athens, lest the seizure of Piraeus prove to be a deliberate diversion.
Save us, these officials begged, and there was one fresh arrival in particular who was more than happy to oblige them.
Alkibiades, who had listened intently to every word, abruptly demanded, “What remains of the citizen cavalry?”
The ol
igarchs gave him looks that ranged from skepticism to disgust.
“Answer,” Styphon said in a voice of authority.
“Maybe twenty that can be called upon,” one official offered.
“And trusted,” added a second.
“Get me forty,” Alkibiades commanded. “Tell them the request comes from me and that I want them here tonight. Round up as many mounted Scythians as you can, too.”
The three men looked to one another, complaints and curses caught in their throats by the presence of Styphon, who yet again felt forced to compel an answer by asking them, “What is your objection?”
In a trio of glances, they elected a spokesman, who replied, “He has no authority.”
Styphon produced a folded bit of parchment and thrust it into that sycophant's hands. “He has been appointed to your council. Is that enough? On top of that, my Equals do not clean up your messes or fight rabble. This man is presently your only hope. He may be a braying ass and a libertine, but he very nearly has the brains and bravery to back up his own opinion of himself.”
Alkibiades flashed Styphon a sidelong smile of gratitude which went unreciprocated.
Looking as though they regretted having come to beg help, the trio of humbled officials did as requested while Styphon's men made camp for the night. The women, Aspasia and Myrinne, bid Alkibiades warm goodbyes (the latter's looking decidedly less than final), politely thanked Styphon and the ship's captain for their service, then shared an ox-cart to Athens with a fisherman and his catch.
When the females were gone, Alkibiades shouldered up to Styphon and said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Your trust.”
“Trust?” Styphon gave the preener a rare gift: a laugh. “I do not trust you one iota, Athenian. I just believe you are marginally more competent than those other traitors. Not to mention that if you put down this rebellion, I look good. If you fail, I can do the job for you and still look good.” He wiped all trace of humor from his rough features, which was not difficult. “And if it turns out you are up to no good, I get to kill you. Whatever happens, I win.”
