Air and Darkness

by David Drake

  “I’m not going to be able to help you much with magic,” Corylus said. He twisted a shield from the hand of the man he’d stabbed in the head. He had to step on the fellow’s wrist because his muscles had locked when the blade split his brain.

  “Perhaps the ear will help,” Alphena said, “though I don’t suppose so if the Godspeaker wasn’t powerful enough when he was alive. But it doesn’t matter if that’s where Mother is.”

  “No,” said Corylus. “It really doesn’t matter.”

  He started for Dreaming Hill with the buckler advanced and the curved sword slanted upward in his right hand. Alphena was on his left, a half step behind.

  * * *

  VARUS FELT RELAXED SIMPLY because he was in a library. If I opened one of the scrolls, would I be able to read it?

  “Yes,” said the Sibyl. “Do you want to read something? That—”

  She gestured to a series of what Varus thought from a distance were shards of pale pottery. When she and Varus reached the shelves he saw the shards were the shoulder blades of pigs, covered with symbols brushed on in tiny, precise rows.

  “—is the history of the Hsia dynasty of the Serians. You would be the only citizen of Carce to know that history. But of course, if you stay here long enough to read it, there will be no Carce for you to return to.”

  “I am a citizen of Carce,” Varus said with a dry smile. “Duty first, of course.”

  Then he said, “I didn’t know you were with me, Sibyl. I’m glad you are.”

  The Sibyl chirped her laugh. She took three steps to every two of his, but she had no difficulty in keeping up.

  “Where else would I be, Lord Magician?” she said. “I exist only in your mind.”

  Varus didn’t respond this time. The Sibyl knew things Varus had not consciously known until she spoke, and she sometimes described firsthand things from the past before Gaius Varus was born. Common sense told him the Sibyl’s claim to be a construction of his mind could not be true, but the rigorous logic that Master Pandareus had instilled admitted the possibility of matters beyond Varus current knowledge.

  The Sibyl laughed again, as though she were listening to his thoughts.

  The end of the corridor was before them, a blur of brightness. Varus looked at the Sibyl. She smiled and took his hand; her fingers were dry and strong. They walked through the light together.

  Varus opened his eyes and sat up. He was on the couch in Govinda’s sanctum. The boy’s body still hung by its hair, but his face was as white as a bleached toga. Blood from his severed throat painted his torso and legs, and it pooled on the floor. In this hot climate, the body had begun to rot.

  “You’re awake already?” Govinda said. The king held the gory dagger in his right hand, the half tablet in his left. His gold tunic was sodden with the boy’s blood. “You’re all right?”

  “Yes,” Varus said. The Sibyl no longer stood beside him, but he thought he felt the pressure of her fingertips on his right hand. He rolled off the couch and stood on the side opposite the king.

  “But where’s the tablet?” Govinda demanded. “Did you come back without the rest of the tablet?”

  “The tablet is with your ancestor, in Hell,” Varus said. “He loosed the Blight. See for yourself.”

  Varus gestured toward the panel through which he—his soul?—had stepped to reach Anti-Thule. Instead of showing churning blackness as the alabaster had when Varus first saw it, the ruined Tyla community was as clear as the other scenes within this sanctum. The seepage-filled crater was boiling; the bubbles were foul black.

  Govinda glanced over his shoulder at the panel. “You cleared the image,” he said. “How did you—”

  Instead of finishing the thought, he leaned over the couch to stab Varus.

  “You will be utterly destroyed by fire!” Varus shouted in the cracking voice of an old woman.

  A blue flash slammed Govinda out of the sanctum. The door flew off its hinges, and the alabaster panels to either side crumbled to finely divided dust.

  The squad of soldiers guarding the sanctum now sprawled in a semicircle centered on the door. They appeared to be dead. Those in the center had been flung farthest, and their clothes were smoldering.

  Govinda had been thrown to the ground, but he got up without hesitation. He held the tablet in both hands. The dagger lay on the ground halfway across the courtyard behind him. He began chanting.

  Varus walked forward. As I would have moved across the Rostrum while delivering an oration, he realized. He thought with a pang of regret of classes in the Forum and how he had struggled, planning every word and motion. Life was so much easier then.

  “My anger sends you headlong to dust!” he shouted.

  This time the shock made Varus stagger, but again it threw Govinda backward in a sprawl. The courtyard had emptied of the people who had been thronging it, save for the scattered dead. Soldiers, courtiers, and the hawkers who had been chaffering with them lay as spills of clothing. Some were seared or even burned, but others had no obvious injuries.

  Magic of the sort that was being used was dangerous even at a distance from the intended object. Magic of the sort that I am using.

  Varus felt as though he were on a high pinnacle, viewing the conflict in cool detachment. He stepped forward, shouting, “My wrath rains down on you!”

  This time his spell met Govinda’s in iridescence. Varus felt a push like a warm breeze, much milder than that of previous blasts.

  The king had been thrown almost back to the reservoir. The marble sides of the tank bulged outward, then cracked in two places. Water gushed, then shoved over the wall between the breaks in a slopping flood.

  It rushed across the ground, dividing around Govinda in a screen of blue fire with attendant pops and crackles. It continued to spread over the courtyard, shoving a berm of mud before it. Water flashed to steam twenty feet from Varus but flowed by to either side.

  Varus walked forward. He was breathing hard.

  Something huge and gray—a wave?—lurched over the fallen wall of the tank. It was the head of one of the fish from Anti-Thule, grown monstrous in the crater of the Blight. It flopped forward on its pectoral fins like a catfish on a mud bank. A second fish followed the first.

  Govinda raised the tablet in both hands and began to chant. The fish writhed past him. Both angled toward Varus.

  Varus shouted, “Let fire flame beneath you and burn you up!”

  Govinda fell back again. The flash buffeted both fish sideways, but they rolled onto their flat bellies and gathered themselves to make the final leap toward Varus.

  The scale of everything changed. He and Govinda were tall pillars on a plain in which the king’s palace was a shadowy outline.

  Separately—in another time or place, but visible here—was Baruch, the blue demon who had guarded the Princess Teji. He towered above the giant fish in his frame of reference.

  “My mistress sent me to you, Lord Varus,” Baruch said. “She thought—”

  Baruch seized each fish with two arms and lifted them overhead, twisting and helpless. He brought them down with a double crash, one crushing a wing of the palace with its head, the other slamming a dent in the packed soil of the courtyard.

  “—you might welcome a visit,” the demon concluded. Booming laughter, he dropped the fish back into the reservoir. Their slimy bodies trembled, but they were dead. Varus had seen fishermen kill fish of normal size with similar motions on the shore of the Bay of Puteoli.

  “I’ll leave you to it, then,” Baruch said. “Little folk like me have no business getting involved with great magicians.”

  Baruch laughed again and added, “Not that you need any help, Lord Varus.”

  The demon was gone. Varus stood in the courtyard of Govinda’s palace. The plane in which Baruch stood had vanished when the demon did. The tail of one of the dead fish stuck fifty feet out from the reservoir, quivering with tetanic motion as the nerves continued to die.

  The fish were hundreds o
f feet long. If Teji hadn’t sent her demon to help me, I would be in the belly of one of them.

  Varus breathed deeply. He was for the first time aware of the smells of powdered stone and burned flesh, as well as an odd effluvium that probably came from the fish, though they hadn’t had time to begin to spoil.

  Govinda got up slowly from the ground. His lips continued to chant or pray, but he seemed to have shrunk in the past minutes. His eyes were those of a trapped rabbit, desperate with fear; his head darted from side to side, looking for escape.

  There was no escape. No, I don’t need help with Govinda.

  As Varus’ lips opened to form the words, the king straightened. Instead of shouting another spell as he had been doing, Govinda hurled the half tablet with more than human strength.

  At me, Varus thought, but the block of soapstone sailed well over his head. He’s defenseless now.

  “You will be devoured by fire!” Varus said.

  A blue flash enveloped Govinda; he shattered like a like a glass figurine on a blacksmith’s anvil. Nothing remained: no blood, no smoke, not even a thread of his cloth-of-gold garments.

  Varus wobbled on his feet. He thought he might have to drop to one knee to keep from toppling over, but he got control of his body without that. Not that it would matter.

  Steam hissed. The water remaining in the reservoir had been heated by the bolt that had finally destroyed Govinda, Varus supposed.

  That didn’t matter, either. Varus turned.

  The palace was half in ruins. There was no sign of life, even in the sections that hadn’t been damaged in the battle.

  Where the separate sanctum had stood within the courtyard, a portal high into the sky opened to Anti-Thule as it had been when Varus left it seeming minutes before. A figure of black slime climbed from the seething crater and stood on the lip. It held half the soapstone tablet in either hand.

  As Varus watched, the figure brought the parts together, mating them perfectly.

  The figure of Blight began to grow; and as it grew, it laughed thunderously.

  CHAPTER XVII

  Alphena had seen Corylus fight in the past, but it continued to thrill her. He wasn’t more skilled than the gladiators she was used to watching: they had nothing to do all day except practice their swordsmanship, while that was only a small part of a soldier’s duties on the frontiers. The style, the tone, of Corylus’ movement in battle was nothing like the business of the arena.

  “You fight as though you don’t care if you survive,” she said.

  Corylus pushed through a line of saplings: each spindly trunk reached waist high, with a pair of oversized leaves on top to catch the sun if one of the giants shading it were to fall. He muttered, “I guard myself.”

  Stepping over a fallen cornice, he said, “Watch your footing here.” Then he added, “I guess it’s from being with the Scouts. If we got into in a fight, we were usually outnumbered and in a hurry. You had to take the locals out fast. If that meant you got carved some yourself, well, that was better than if you got captured. The Sarmatian women knew how to make it last if they got hold of you.”

  She and Corylus had just entered the jungle, but Alphena couldn’t see the shrine or even daylight back the way they had come. The Tylon had pointed in this direction, but until she had rushed through the outer curtain of vegetation she hadn’t appreciated how dense the interior was. The steep mounds to either side must have been buildings, but only occasional stone edges protruded from the leaf mold and fallen branches to indicate that.

  “Are you tracking Mother?” Alphena asked.

  “No. I can’t track in a jungle,” Corylus said. “Figuring how many horses were in a raiding party on a dry plain, sure. But I can ask. Keep an eye out.”

  “What?” said Alphena, but Corylus had already set his shield upright between the prop roots of an odd-looking tree—a palm, she supposed.

  Corylus put his free hand against the smooth bark and said, “Cousin, I need your help.”

  Nothing happened for a moment. Then a slender man stepped out from behind the trunk. “Well, dearie, I couldn’t very well say no to you, could I?”

  The newcomer glanced at Alphena and added, “Is she joining the party too?”

  He isn’t a man, she has breasts, and the tree hadn’t been thick enough to hide her anyway! But there’s a man’s member bulging the thin shift over his groin.

  “It’s not that kind of party, Pandan,” Corylus said easily, retrieving the buckler. “Lady Alphena’s mother came running in here a minute or two ago. Where did she go, please?”

  “Well, she went that way,” the hermaphrodite said, pointing to their left. Alphena started that way but paused when she saw that Corylus was still waiting.

  “But,” continued Pandan, smirking at her, “she met a bird there and he led her in a big circle around to the tower. It’s right there—”

  Pandan pointed again, this time in the direction Alphena and Corylus had been going.

  “—but you don’t want to go there, dearie. My sisters there say that the Guardian has her. It would be a crime to lose you too.”

  Pandan nodded to Alphena. “Or even that one.”

  Alphena started in a clumsy run in the direction Pandan had pointed. Her shield was out in front of her to batter a way through the undergrowth, but she couldn’t see the ground. She tripped almost immediately on a block carved with a dancing monkey in low relief.

  “Cousin, don’t go that way!” Pandan called. “You’ll meet the Guardian!”

  “That’s what we’re here for!” Corylus shouted as he leaped past Alphena; his shield was at his side, edge on to the undergrowth he was running through.

  He’s graceful as a chamois on a broken slope, Alphena thought. She rolled to her feet and followed. She hadn’t dropped her sword or shield when she fell, and the scrape on her right forearm wouldn’t keep her from fighting.

  Corylus rounded a tree with wide buttress roots. Alphena thought he was slanting to the right of the proper line, but she was too focused on not losing her footing to pay attention. Roots had lifted the blocks of the pavement into a semblance of a storm-tossed sea.

  It was easier to follow than to argue, and there was no time to argue anyway. It was very easy to follow Corylus.

  “Mother, we’re coming!” she shouted. Corylus cocked his head slightly, perhaps enough that he could see her out of the corner of his eye; his expression was fixed and grim.

  “Mother, it’s me! We’re coming for you!”

  She knew she was warning the Guardian, whoever it was, but she wanted to turn its attention away from Hedia. Alphena and Corylus had weapons; Hedia did not, according to the Tylon who had seen her run past.

  “Mother—”

  And they were there, in a space covered by vines and creepers but free of trees and the brush—saplings, mostly—that had been so dense until now. A pylon, perhaps the tower the hermaphrodite had spoken of, rose to their right.

  I must have run right along the side without noticing it!

  A monster on two legs, twelve feet high, stood near the end of the cleared space. When it turned to face them, Alphena saw that it had the head of a man with hair like a lion’s mane. The uppermost pair of arms were huge pincers, while below there were several sets of tentacles.

  Hedia stood beyond the monster.

  “So!” said the monster in a cheerful tone. “The first course has brought two more bites with her.”

  Then in a changed voice it went on, “And don’t think that your amulet will help you, little wizardess! Your magic can’t touch me!”

  “Can my sword?” said Alphena, moving in on the monster’s right side.The tentacles were coiling and uncoiling. The uppermost pair appeared to be over six feet long.

  The monster—the Guardian, but what was it guarding?—shot its upper left tentacle out to the side. It’s feinting—

  She stepped back and the right pincer extended on a jointed arm. The toothed edges clacked together where Al
phena’s head would have been if she hadn’t moved. Corylus lunged, pricking the Guardian’ chest where a human’s ribs would have been. The monster seemed to have an outer covering like a turtle’s shell, but the point of the curved sword slid deep enough to draw a line of purple blood.

  The middle tentacle wrapped the blade like honeysuckle around a fence post. Corylus drew back sharply. The end of the tentacle writhed like a broken-backed snake, attached to its base by little more than a tag of skin. The Indian sword was impressively sharp.

  “I’ll heal!” the Guardian said. “You can’t do me real harm with those swords!”

  Corylus lunged again. The Guardian whirled and reached out with both pincers.

  Corylus jumped back. Instead of lunging, Alphena closed with two quick steps and banged the boss of her shield into the side of the monster’s scaly leg. It was like hitting a tree, but she knew how a blow on the thigh felt.

  The Guardian’s right tentacles gripped the edge of her shield, as expected; she slashed them and stepped back. Purple blood oozed for a few moments, but the creature really did heal quickly. The tentacle that Corylus had cut most of the way through was rejoining, though the end still hung limp.

  The Guardian roared, spraying spittle in its fury. Corylus retreated. There was a notch out of the upper edge of his shield; a length of its brass strapping dangled loose from the leather base. His counterstroke had sheared off the tip of the upper blade of the Guardian’s right pincer; there was a smaller chip missing where the buckler’s edge had acted as a butcher’s block for the sword.

  The Guardian looked at Corylus, then looked at Alphena as a feint obvious to an eye trained by watching so many gladiators in the arena. When the monster lunged at Corylus with another roar, she darted in again. She tried to stab through where the knee would be in a human, but her point struck low and gouged a hand’s breadth deep in the calf muscle.

  The Guardian turned toward her, gripping her shield with his tentacles and reaching for her head with its right pincer. It would have crushed her skull while she levered her sword loose if the pincer had been whole; instead the lower blade gave her a buffet under the jaw, but the tip of the upper blade was a bloody stump from which muscle had swollen through where the chitin had been lopped off.