Swords v. Cthulhu

by Jesse Bullington

  This response did seem to reassure the people of Pompelo that something was being done, even if it did outrage the Vascones. It also upset Tiberius Annaeus Stilpo, the aedile whose letters had called proconsul Libo’s attention to the problem of the mountain people in the first place. With Felix’s appointment, his propraetorship was open. Stilpo hoped to get it, but he was been passed over in favor of a new man. And now Grumio was rooting out all the witches that it had been Stilpo’s duty to find.

  Ruin was looming over him, and the prospect of losing the confidence of the senate and the comitiae chased all tranquility from his mind and home. He decided to try to rehabilitate his reputation by conducting his own investigation, gambling on the possibility that a smaller, less conspicuous party of men, disguised as travellers, could turn up something that a legion of infuriated soldiers might have missed, or frightened away. If his own men discovered a village of those mountain people, then Grumio would march on it, get out of Pompelo, and stop doing Stilpo’s job. In his absence, Stilpo would take over, the tact and discretion of Stilpo would shine all the brighter for the contrast with Grumio’s harshness and indecorum, and the way forward would open again, or, at least, close no further.

  He would send Lucius Hosidius Nicostratus, known in Pompelo as Nicostratus Tutor, who had been Rufus’ lictor. Nicostratus was a shrewd man; originally from Athens, he was well-travelled, and had a reputation for being a reader. He’d had his skull cracked defending Rufus from the attack of a madman and was still recovering the night Rufus disappeared, which is why he had not gone with the others. He was fit now, but was no longer a lictor, and made his living as a scribe. Apparently, he was waiting for something better to come along, or for a chance to get back to Rome, and start over. He had debts. Stilpo would pay them.

  Tullus Durio was a retired gladiator who had come to Calagurris to open his own ludus. He was a little long in the tooth, but still stout and wiry. His reserves of stamina were bottomless, and nothing fazed him. For a consideration, he would be Nicostratus’ bodyguard.

  Finally, they would need a guide. For this duty, Stilpo settled on Otson, a Vasco from the other side of the mountains, up near the border with Gaul. He had been sent south by his family to learn more about Roman ways, and had performed some miscellaneous services for prominent families, both Vasco and Roman, with whom Stilpo had dealings. He seemed like a reliable man, not quite a blockhead for all that he was a rustic, and he had been all over those mountains. Stilpo asked him what he knew about those mountain people, and he said he knew only stories.

  “What stories?”

  Otson paused, and seemed to steel himself to the recollection.

  “There was a man whose name we no longer say. He was going to betray us to some of the Aquitani who were our enemies. He was caught, and we gave him to them.”

  “To the mountain people?”

  “Yes. Both my parents were there. He was bound and left at one of their circles. He was pleading for death. To make sure he didn’t escape, he was watched from a distance, from a hidden place. They said he was calling to them constantly, over and over, until the sun set. The watchers knew he was still there, because, when it got dark, two torches appeared, coming to the circle from the far side, and his calls became screams. Then stopped. The watchers said they heard the mountain people’s voices speaking, and that there was another voice, that was different. They wouldn’t say anything else about it, only that the traitor was gone that morning when they went to the circle again.”

  Before they parted company, Stilpo said, with an attempt at sly joviality that did not suit him, “I have heard, Otsonus, that you have recently lost your dog.”

  “Last week,” Otson said, looking a bit bewildered by the change of subject.

  At Stilpo’s summons, a servant entered, accompanied by an unleashed dog who trotted along beside him.

  “Accept this one, then,” Stilpo said, seeming pleased with himself. “His name is Teuser. May he be of assistance to you.”

  Otson looked at Teuser carefully.

  “He’s mine?” he asked.

  Stilpo laughed.

  December was nearing its end when they set out. They would ride as far as a certain hamlet in the foothills, then exchange horses for a donkey.

  When Otson admitted he’d never seen a gladiatorial bout in his life, Tullus latched on to him and regaled him en route with repetitive accounts of battles he had either participated in or witnessed up close. He was a good storyteller, with zest for his subject and a surprisingly good ear for mimicking voices, but for the most part he was too technical to follow, so that it seemed like a blur of arms and legs, weapons, shields, elbows and butting heads swarming from his mouth in a baffling succession of decisive maneuvers and spectacular coups.

  Meanwhile, Nicostratus glared at the mountains as they slowly approached, already searching them from where he was. The peaks were filmed with a meager snowfall and the weather was clear, if windy. The mountains continued docilely to look like mountains. He found it impossible to attach any special idea of menace to them.

  The hamlet in the foothills he found surprisingly large. They would stay the night there. There was an entire house standing empty that was theirs to use, if they wanted it. Otson inquired how it was that they happened to have an empty house, and was told, a little sheepishly, that a family had been living there until early last autumn, when some ailment or other carried off every last one of them.

  “We don’t want that house,” Otson said flatly.

  Crammed in a corner by a heap of feebly glowing embers that night, Nicostratus remembered Otson’s refusal and regretted it.

  The following day, they set out at dawn. A light morning mist burned off nearly right away and the sky deepened to pure indigo. They ate bread and honey, received more bread and some cheese to take with them on top of their provisions, and Nicostratus left thinking that they would have had that much less to eat, perhaps, if they had slept in that empty house.

  By noon, they had reached the spot where Libo’s party must have tied their horses. There was the narrower path leading up, curving out of sight. They found nothing but the tracks of Grumio’s men, and those were nearly fully effaced. Teuser hovered near and scrutinized a patch of ground behind some brush that might have been what Otson called “the bloody place.”

  They searched carefully, for an hour. Nicostratus discovered score markings on some of the tree trunks that he believed were made by ropes. There were notches, blackened now, but not very old, where the horses had yanked the ropes tight enough to cut into the bark so deeply he could fit the tip of his thumb into the groove, halfway to the first joint.

  “A horse would have to throw itself forward with all its weight to pull that hard on a line,” he said. “You see how, eh — there’s no scraping? It only goes directly in, just here. It was a single tug, and it would have parted the rope.”

  They kept the donkey with them when they climbed the path. It was too steep for horses, but, according to Otson, it would level off to an easier grade a bit past the bend.

  A wind came up and rustled dead leaves in the copse when they saw it for the first time. The path cut neatly through it, in an unobstructed line right up the slope. The way was stony, but straight, and the slope above it was plainly visible not a hundred yards from where they stood. No one, even at night, could have gone astray on that path.

  They kept climbing, assiduously scanning the ground, which was bare and innocent. They entered the copse with a sense of foreboding that could be attributed to nothing in their surroundings. There were dead trees, dead leaves, stones, a blank and traceless path, the slopes to either side, and the open space beyond that had engulfed so many.

  They tied the donkey below the copse and began going over the place, inch by inch, turning over stones, brushing fingertips over the tree trunks, checking for broken branches. They spent hours in that copse and, once, Teuser gave a wild yelp and flashed away, running at full tilt down the path and out
of the copse. Otson ran after him a little way, then gave up. Nicostratus hurried over to where Teuser had been when he cried, but found nothing. Otson came back, Tullus came over, and they all three pored over that ground, eyeing every piece of grit, even sniffing at the ground themselves, but found nothing. They resumed their search. Nothing.

  As they were preparing to give up, Otson saw Teuser standing a few feet away from him, looking sheepish. He did not meet Otson’s eyes when he approached.

  “This time you were afraid,” he said to the dog. “Be brave next time.”

  They decided to have a little something to eat. Nicostratus climbed a short distance up out of the copse and seated himself on a stone. Otson understood and agreed; he didn’t want to eat in that copse either. They were refreshing themselves in frustrated silence when he stood up, peering intently across the gorge where the road bent below them.

  “Do you see those rocks?” he asked, pointing across the gorge.

  If the day hadn’t been so clear, he would never have been able to make them out from this far away; a small heap of rocks, high up there on the far side. There was a seam, or projection there; not a path, but a way, at any rate, and, almost hidden beside a boulder, that artificial heap of rocks.

  “The top one,” Otson says. “Do you see how it curves out, toward us?”

  Nicostratus couldn’t say he did, but the top stone was long enough and thin enough to look a little unnatural standing upright on top of a little heap of rocks.

  “That’s how the witches mark their paths.”

  “How do you know that?” Tullus asked.

  “Because I know them,” Otson said, pointing. “The mountains up north. That’s where I come from. The witches light bonfires and meet their gods in caves, and they mark their paths with rock piles. I’ve seen them.”

  “You’ve seen the witches?”

  “No, the piles. And the fires. The witches I’ve only heard, never seen them. On the nights when they gathered, we could hear them down in the valley.”

  Otson kept gazing at the heap.

  “Their voices were very strange.”

  They backtracked to a point below the place where Libo’s men had tied their horses, and turned off a little more toward the south. The sun was sinking now, but it was still only just beginning to wester, so that their shadows preceded them as they went. With no path, their progress was slow through the trees, but the ground soon opened out. They were climbing through dead brown brush and rocks along an irregular slope. Teuser darted this way and that, sniffing the ground curiously, but none of the men saw any tracks.

  Then they reached a natural terrace and their going became much easier and swifter. The outer edge of the terrace was above the level of the inner, which made it harder to notice from below. Off to the left, they could look down on the copse. When they reached the rockpile, Teuser started scanning the ground. Otson knelt by the pile and pointed to the thin rock on top.

  “Where I come from, they turn the curved piece toward the mountain, not away.”

  The pile stood at the outer edge of a broad place in the terrace, where it folded back along the mountain almost due south.

  “Over here,” Tullus called. “Look at this.”

  Nicostratus inspected the medallion closely, holding it up in the light directly before the better of his two eyes. He rubbed away the dirt that clung to it.

  “What is it?” Otson asked.

  “This is from Emesa,” Nicostratus said thoughtfully. “In the East. It is a talisman of Sol.”

  Otson peered at the medallion as Nicostratus held it out for him. “Isn’t that a mountain?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Nicostratus. “In Emesa, they worship Sol under another name — I forget what it is in their own language now — but I know it means ‘the God of the Mountain.’ You can see the writing.”

  Otson squinted at the writing for a moment.

  “Did any of Libo’s men come from there?” he asked.

  Nicostratus looked at them both, momentously.

  “Quaestor Rufus visited Antioch,” Nicostratus said. “That’s not far from Emesa. Perhaps he also went there.”

  “Or he might have met someone in the one place who came from the other, and gave that to him.”

  “Or perhaps, one of the soldiers?”

  Otson began perusing the ground again.

  “I think that was stolen from one of Libo’s men.”

  Tullus squinted at the talisman.

  “Here!” Otson called a moment later. He had found footprints in soft earth that lay in a little strip at the base of a low ridge and which was shielded from the elements by a boulder. There were a number of shallow depressions that must have been heel marks, and one distinct imprint of the pad of a bare foot, complete with the four dimples the toes had made. Otson put his hand alongside it, and they saw that the print was smaller than his hand.

  Teuser sniffed at the prints and then began tracking. In only a few minutes, they had found a crumbled spot in the rock face that formed a fairly gentle, if rocky, stairway up. Otson turned in place, looking in all directions, when they reached the top of it, then pointed again. Nicostratus saw the second low heap of rocks at once. The shadow that lay beneath them on the slope made them seem to float there uncannily, just above the ground. Standing directly above the pile, Otson could see the first heap, which, although it was below them, was magically visible through what appeared to be a natural scoop in the ground. He drew an imaginary line from that pile to this, turned to see where it pointed, and at once found the next pile. Even in the dimness of the incipient dusk it leapt out at him, neatly framed between a protruding stone and a solitary tree trunk.

  They retraced their steps along the natural terrace and found a place to camp. Nicostratus wanted to be out in the open, so they could see everything around them, but Otson pointed out that they would need a windbreak if they didn’t want to freeze. After a hasty meal, Nicostratus sat pondering the talisman they’d found, trying to reconstruct in his mind the long voyage it had taken to get here, the image of a mountain on one side of the world, found on another mountain on the world’s other side.

  He awoke once in the night, for a natural enough reason, but he did not budge from his place, nor dare to move. There was motion outside the tent.

  “Tullus! Otson!” he said quietly.

  Otson awoke first. He looked at Nicostratus, then at Teuser, then snatched at his knife. He dug Tullus in the ribs and Tullus awoke with a start.

  “Listen…”

  Outside the tent, there was the sound of furtive movement. It was impossible to describe, just a sound of air moving deliberately, like panting, and a rustle that should have been nothing but wind. It did not move like wind. It was now here, now there. The donkey made a sound then, a very strange sound. Tullus got onto his knees and drew his sica, which glinted dully in the gloom. Nicostratus picked up the long stick he had been walking with. Tullus glanced at him and nodded, then at Otson.

  They rushed outside all together. Something none of them could see, but that was like a puff of all too solid warm air, streaked toward the slope above them. Tullus ran after it, swiping. They stood listening a long while before they checked the donkey and went back into the tent. Tullus remained sitting by the opening with his sica in his hand until dawn.

  When dawn came, Otson and Teuser emerged first into the light, and searched the ground outside for tracks. They found their own.

  That day, they followed an invisible thread that linked one cryptic heap of rocks to another. Otson led them, becoming more obviously disconcerted as they went. The way was certain, but the landscape was not. It was only with increasing difficulty that he could identify even major landmarks, including mountain peaks.

  “The farther we go on like this,” he said, “the more dependent we are on these piles to get us back.”

  “It has to end,” Tullus said, and Nicostratus agreed. They would go on.

  It happened when the sun was n
early overhead. Otson had reached the fifteenth heap of stones in the line, and was turning in place to site the next, when his eyes went wide and he shouted with surprise and alarm.

  In order to make himself understood, after many failed attempts to say what had happened, Otson took Nicostratus by the shoulders and compelled him to do as he had done. Nicostratus approached the pile, raised his eyes, and turned in place… and it was like looking around the corner of a building. A whole other landscape turned into position before his eyes, as if the pile of rocks at his feet had been the corner of a vast wall, painted with a blandly benign landscape so expertly reproduced that he had mistaken it for the real thing. Now he was seeing behind that wall.

  The terrain was riddled with cave mouths. The mountains must have been honeycombed with them. And there were much vaster structures of heaped rock, and rings of upright slabs. The light, too, was different. Unclean. It was like looking through an empty bottle of cloudy glass. The light had warps in it, and an actinic bite that he somehow could taste, like a dry bitterness in his throat. The sun overhead was transformed into a slanted nexus of steely knife edges, cold and venomous. Then, with a start, Nicostratus saw a black object standing motionless in the sky, perhaps half a mile away. It reminded him of a huge black kite, but it was bizarrely fixed in place, like a hole in the sky. The path was entirely distinct now, and it would take them in the direction of that black thing.

  Tullus grunted when he observed the change, and Teuser went completely silent and sat down firmly in place, refusing to budge.

  “That’s where they went,” Nicostratus said. “I’m sure of it.”

  He had formed the idea that perhaps not all of Libo’s party were dead. The prospect of what they might be going through at this moment, if this was the way they had gone, was a strong incentive to find them.

  Otson ventured out into the transformed landscape. As he passed by, from Nicostratus’ point of view, Otson almost immediately changed, taking on a bizarrely overcast sort of look, as if there were a dulling film over his image. He was as sharply outlined as everything else, with an even exaggerated clarity, but his appearance took on an artificial lifelessness in there. When he returned again, there was a brief instant when he seemed to loom out at Nicostratus, and then he was standing in the natural sunlight, himself natural again.