Air and Darkness

by David Drake

  “Give them whatever they want, Baruch,” Teji said firmly. “They came here to help me. They’re friends!”

  The demon smiled, a disquieting expression on a broad mouth with large fangs. “What is it you wish, friend wizards?” he said.

  “Merely to leave, I think,” Varus said. “Unless…?”

  He looked at Bhiku.

  The sage smiled and said, “I would take a few oranges with me, if that were permitted. I rarely get an orange to eat.”

  The demon laughed. “You have my mistress’ permission to pick fruit,” he said. “As much as you like.”

  Varus and Bhiku started for the gate. There was a heavily laden orange tree on the path, which was a further excuse to get farther away from the demon. Friendly or not, Baruch was very large.

  “Young wizard?” the demon called.

  Varus turned with an orange in his hand. Has it been a trick to get me to take fruit? “Yes, Master Baruch?” he said.

  “When you speak your spells,” the demon said, “you have the voice of an old woman. Why is that, please?”

  “I don’t know,” Varus said. “I can only tell you that the old woman herself says that she is a figment of my imagination. I’m not sure that I believe her, however.”

  The demon laughed again. “Go then, friends,” he said. “And may all your enemies be as unwary as I was. Though it seems to me that you could crush even the most cautious.”

  “Thank you, Master Baruch,” Varus said. He walked toward the gateway and through them, with a feeling of relief. Behind him, Bhiku pulled the gate leaves closed.

  “Well, we seem to be exactly where we were to begin with,” Varus said. “Except that I’m trembling and completely exhausted.”

  “The oranges are good, though,” said Bhiku. He had bitten out a piece of the rind and was squeezing the juice into his lips. “Shall we make our way to Raguram’s domains, now? He would protect you from Ramsa Lal regardless of justice … but it is nice to have justice on our side, isn’t it?”

  Varus laughed. “Yes,” he said, “it is. Now, how did you get the rind open? I am the child of privilege, you must remember, and I don’t have your advantages in dealing with adversity.”

  * * *

  “WAIT A MOMENT, IF YOU WILL,” Corylus said as he began stripping ripe—or almost ripe—blackberries from a bush growing beside a small stream. He needed both hands, so he leaned his staff into the crook of his left elbow. His right hand dropped berries into his cupped palm. “How far is the cave we’re going to?”

  “A few days, I suppose,” Aura said. “It depends on how fast we travel.”

  She pointed up the stream. “We cross here and follow the path along the side of the cliff. It’s a box canyon, but the path goes to the top.”

  Corylus tossed the berries into his mouth in two half-handsful, then squatted to wet his palms and rub them together. He didn’t care about the blackberry stain, but he didn’t want his hands sticky if he had to change his grip quickly on his staff.

  “I’ll need something more substantial before long,” he said, “but for now let’s get to the top of this cliff. How steep is it?”

  “Not steep,” said Aura, hopping over the creek. “You won’t have to use your hands to help you climb.”

  The path slowly climbing the cliffside was six feet wide at the beginning but had soon narrowed to four. They were about twenty feet above the valley floor by the time they reached that point.

  “I’ll lead,” Corylus said, and stepped in front of the girl. They could have continued to walk side by side, but there was no reason to.

  The slope to their right was almost vertical. On the left the rock—it was pinkish-gray granite with flecks of fool’s gold—sloped downward sharply. It wasn’t sheer, but only a chamois could walk on it.

  “Did somebody make this path?” Corylus said. The surface wasn’t glass smooth, but it was smoother than the roads leading out of Carce and into the large part of the world that the Republic ruled.

  “I don’t think so,” Aura said. “But I don’t know anything about stone.”

  The valley below was filled with bamboo. Sometimes he heard the creek trickling over its bed, but there was no birdsong or insect murmurs. Often the passage of large animals—and humans are very large in the natural world—silenced the local residents, but Corylus began to feel disquiet nonetheless.

  He stopped, slanting his staff before him. He could see twenty feet up the path ahead.

  “Aura, I smell something dead,” he said. He didn’t look back at her. “Have you come this way before?”

  “Yes, Zetes and I came this way long ago, before he died,” the sprite said. “I’ve come alone many times since. The path leads to the top of the cliff. Would you like me to lead?”

  “Of course not,” Corylus muttered.

  He moved forward, lifting his sandals only high enough that the soles didn’t brush the surface; he set them down with no more sound than a falling leaf. He had once crept into a Sarmatian encampment to determine which wagon was the chieftain’s. This was the same, though Corylus didn’t know what the danger here was.

  In the bamboo below was the body of a great spotted cat. The flesh had rotted away, but enough of the ragged hide remained over the bones to explain the miasma of old death. Its falling weight had splintered canes, but fronds now grew through the ribs and skin.

  The cat had been bigger than any leopard Corylus had seen in the arena, and the fangs in its upturned jaw were six inches long.

  Now that he was looking into the gully, Corylus noticed other skeletons and scraps of fur among the bamboo. Many of the bones were broken. The fall could have been responsible for some of the breaks, but some of the bones appeared to have been sheared through.

  Corylus looked up. The cliff was bulged outward thirty feet up. The full height of the cliffs across the canyon was seventy or eighty feet higher yet. The rock was as smooth as sandstone ever was: a few cracks, a few knobs or pockets. There were occasional splotches of green where a plant had managed to take root, and Corylus saw a single stunted cedar tree.

  He couldn’t possibly climb the rock face, though. He didn’t know a man who could.

  Corylus eased forward, looking in all directions before he took the next cautious step. All directions but back—

  He turned his head sharply. Aura was a proper six feet behind him, plenty of space for him to move fast if he had to … and too far for her to slip a knife into the back of the man in front of her. Her fingers were tented before her, and her expression was calm.

  “I will lead if you like,” the girl said. Corylus looked forward again.

  The bones of a human hand and forearm lay ten feet below the edge of the path. The bones were more or less articulated because, though the sinews had shriveled and cracked, ivy vines had wound around them. On the middle finger was a ring of sunbright orichalc set with a brilliantly blue stone.

  “There’s something here…,” Corylus said softly. Or are the bodies being flung from the top of the cliff?

  He looked up, then down. Perhaps something was crawling up from the canyon, a huge snake that slid out of the bamboo and crushed its victims’ bones?

  The corner of his eye caught the movement above: a dog-like head the size of a crocodile’s was stabbing down at him on the end of a neck thirty feet long. The jaws were open.

  Ambush! But Corylus had been on the wrong side of ambush before. He ducked, holding the staff upright with his left arm while his right hand reached for his dagger.

  The open maw slammed down on the end of the staff. The butt was resting on the sandstone trail, and the cornel wood didn’t flex or split at the terrific impact.

  “Nerthus!” Corylus shouted, not really a prayer to the Batavians’ goddess but the reflex of surprise. He brought the dagger around and stabbed its twelve-inch blade through the base of the creature’s skull where the spine entered. He jumped back, leaving both his weapons because he had no choice.

  Au
ra had retreated a few steps, but she hadn’t fled. Corylus looked up as the enormous neck swung side to side, banging the head against the cliff. It looked more reptilian and less like a dog when he saw it in profile. The staff dropped from the monster’s palate; by good luck it fell onto the path where it might be retrieved.

  Corylus knelt, trembling and gasping for breath. It had happened so quickly that he shouldn’t have expended much energy, but his muscles wobbled like those of an old slave in a chain gang.

  He’d driven the dagger in with the strength of desperation. It had sunk through spongy bone and brain tissue almost to the cross guard.

  The head continued to wave back and forth, but more slowly now; the monster’s neck was drooping. Corylus couldn’t see where the animal’s body was, but there must be a cave concealed by the bulge in the cliff face directly overhead.

  The head and neck stiffened. Corylus heard scraping and clattering, like the start of a landslide; then the whale-great body to which the neck was attached launched itself outward. Its four legs were as broad and flat as paddles, but their black claws scarred the rock when they ticked against it.

  The creature started to tumble as it plunged, toward the gully. It disappeared into the tall bamboo, then bounced briefly visible before it vanished for good. A distant crashing went on for some time, but the springy canes closed over the track the body had plowed through them.

  “Hercules our protector…,” Corylus breathed. He wasn’t of a religious mind, but a sincere prayer of thanks seemed the right thing to do at this point.

  He stood up, feeling better—feeling exhilarated, even. I’m alive!

  Corylus walked to where his staff lay and examined it. Six inches of one end were smeared with blood and mucus; the other end was scratched from transmitting the shock of the monster’s lunge to the sandstone. It remained perfectly functional, though: the tough cornel wood was essentially undamaged.

  Corylus wiped the messy end with the leaves of a bamboo cane leaning on to the path. Then, holding the staff in both hands, he walked back to where Aura waited.

  * * *

  HEDIA CAME TO THE END of the fourth leg of the path she had been following through the woods. She wasn’t back where she had started, as she would have been if the woods were in the Waking World. In fact, she wasn’t in the woods at all.

  “Good,” she muttered, because the visions of Anti-Thule had disturbed her. Although that might have been because she wasn’t allowing herself to think about matters that were really disturbing, like being lost in the Otherworld with no clear way either to find her son or to get home.

  Still, while Hedia cared even less about the Tyla than she did for the throngs of Levantine beggars clogging the Milvian Bridge, the Blight—as the voice had called it—was evil. Further, she had seen too much of the world and of this Otherworld to believe that she had been shown the visions for no reason.

  Before her was a rolling grassland dotted with groves of trees, mostly in swales. The grass had been burned off within the past few months, but new growth had spurted waist high through the layer of soot.

  Not far to Hedia’s right, a track of dark green vegetation snaked toward the horizon. At first she thought she was seeing willows with stunted trunks, but after a moment’s consideration she realized that the trees grew in the bed of a river.

  At least there’s water, she thought. Though I may have to dig down for it.

  She looked up. A pair of birds—hawks or buzzards—wheeled slowly in the cloudless sky. When she lifted her face toward them, one bird and then the other also began to drop toward the ground.

  Hedia grimaced. Well, if they thought she was dead she would convince them otherwise quickly enough. She shifted her little knife so that its hilt stuck out of her sash. This wasn’t polite society, where people would be shocked to see her openly armed.

  The trees in the grove behind Hedia were spiky and rough-barked, nothing like those of the wood through which she had walked a moment ago, and the track through them was low and narrow as though it had been worn by pigs. Well, she hadn’t wanted to go back anyway.

  There wasn’t any obvious better direction for her to go, however. The choices were to slide down the bank of the watercourse—an overhang had collapsed nearby—or to strike off across the grassland to another stand of trees. The nearest grove was less than a mile away. Since the sunken river bent in that direction, she could easily try that option if there was nothing useful to be found in the grove.

  As Hedia started toward the grove its side seemed to bulge outward as if a boulder had rolled through it. She paused and squinted to focus.

  An elephant had just walked out of the trees. It had walked over a tree, though it took a moment for the crackling to reach Hedia. The beast was bigger even at this distance than the many hundreds of elephants she had seen—seen slaughtered—in the arena, and its heavy tusks pointed down.

  A second and a third elephant followed the first. One lifted slightly on its hind legs, then lowered itself with a lesser crackling; it had hooked a large branch and broken it off to chew.

  Well, that’s not the direction I want to go, Hedia thought.

  A shadow passed overhead. She jumped back, fumbling for her knife. One of the birds settled in front of her. Its feet kicked up spurts of dust and soot.

  I’m starting at shadows! That was embarrassing, but the shadow could have meant anything in this place.

  The second bird landed near the first; it hopped around a quarter turn to face Hedia as its fellow did. From their talons and hooked beaks they were hawks, but beak to tail they weren’t as long as her forearm. Their backs and wings were rich chestnut, and their breast feathers were white with thin black ticking.

  “Are you planning to steal those deinotheres?” the hawk on the left said. “We saw you looking at them.”

  “She’d better not,” said the hawk on the right. “The herdsman wouldn’t like it.”

  “He might like her, though,” said Left. They were as similar as a pair of shucked oysters. Both birds cackled.

  “I’m not going to steal anything,” Hedia said, emphasizing her upper-class accent. Could the birds distinguish Latin accents? Since they spoke cultured Latin, they very well might. “I am the Lady Hedia, and I’m looking for my son, Gaius Alphenus Varus. Have you seen him?”

  “Is he dead?” said Right. “We only pay attention to people when they’re dead.”

  The birds cackled again.

  “I trust that my son is not dead,” Hedia said calmly. She’d met this sort before, though they were mostly women and the poncy boys her first husband had favored. I wonder if these birds are hens? “And since you’re talking to me, you do pay attention to living people.”

  “Well, yes,” said Left. “But you’re going to be dead soon, so it’s all the same.”

  Hedia sheathed her dagger. She was glad she’d snatched it out now, because putting it back with a flourish was a more effective way to show contempt than words would have been.

  “Perhaps,” she said. “Where does the river—”

  She gestured.

  “—go, if you will?”

  “There’s hills to the north,” Right said. “A hundred miles or so. South it feeds into a swamp. That’s about as far away.”

  “There isn’t much water at this time of year,” said Left. “A few pools along the way is all.”

  “She won’t care about water,” Right said. It bent its head back and combed its outstretched wing, its beak making little clicking noises as it did so. “The king will get her if she goes down to the river.”

  “Oh, I hope not,” Left said. “The king won’t leave anything for us.”

  “Who is the King?” Hedia said, smiling pleasantly. If my servants were here, I’d have them wring the neck of one and hold the other until it explained the situation clearly. And then I’d have its neck wrung also.

  “You’d better hope you don’t learn!” said Right.

  “We hope you don’t le
arn!” said Left.

  The birds cackled together.

  Hedia squeezed her lips into a grim line. She could see a grove beyond the nearest one, another mile or so distant. She could bear left to skirt the elephants. There was no reason the big beasts should pay any attention to—

  A man with one large eye in the middle of his forehead stepped out of the nearer grove. He was taller than the elephants and broad in proportion. His staff had been roughly shaped from a tree; the branches had been broken away, but much of the bark still remained on the trunk.

  The cyclops looked at Hedia, then stepped between two of the elephants and started toward her. The smallest elephant started after him, but one of the larger pair screamed and swatted it back with her trunk.

  A calf and its mother, Hedia thought. Which didn’t matter, but it kept her from focusing on the speed at which the cyclops strode toward her.

  The giant moved with the jerky awkwardness of a jagged boulder bouncing down a hill, but he stood fifteen feet tall and his legs were half his height. Each clumsy step covered more ground than Hedia could have run in the same time.

  “Oh, good!” said one of the hawks. “The herdsman leaves as many scraps as a lion does. We’ll eat well!”

  Running is unladylike, Hedia thought. She turned and trotted to the fallen bank. As with showing her dagger, propriety could be buggered under these circumstances. The dagger would be useless against a giant, but she’d manage to scratch him for all that.

  The slope to the streambed hadn’t been packed down. Crumbs of dirt got between her sandals and the soles of her feet, but she didn’t sink in.

  Hedia looked left and right. Willow saplings grew in the dry streambed, but they didn’t form a real barrier. The cyclops wouldn’t be able to run between them, but he didn’t need to: like the elephants of his herd, he could crush his way through without slowing.

  Hedia saw a darker patch in the far bank beyond the screen of willows. A cave? Something’s cave, no doubt, but she would take her chances with a hog rather than wait for the cyclops to catch her.

  She ran through the willows, trying not to leave footprints. Her sandals scuffed the dry, sandy soil, but the marks were nothing more than the wind had done at various places on the surface.