Air and Darkness (50 page)

Alphena pointed her sword in the direction of the peasants like a bloody extension of her arm. “Go!” she shouted. “Or die!”

Where's the second magician?

The peasants fled in shouting panic, most of them dropping their spears on the way. Corylus hadn't expected them to fight, but he wouldn't have been surprised if one had thrown a spear at them before he turned. He had batted a spear aside on the Danube, and that one had been cast by a Sarmatian who wasn't shiveringly afraid.

Alphena slowly lowered her arm and sword, though she continued to watch the direction in which the peasants had gone. Corylus checked the swordsmen. The fellow Corylus had knifed in the kidneys remained alive, but he was as harmless as if he were encased in lava. Kidney wounds seemed to be as painful as blazing rock.

The one with the knife stuck in his skull was dead, and the man with the broken arm was unconscious. That last man was the sort who got an extra spear thrust in the ribs as a Scout passed, just to be sure, but he wasn't shamming. Corylus had heard the bone crack under Alphena's sword edge: a numbing blow until the shock set in, and the shock was generally fatal.

The second Tyla magician crawled on the ground, his arms stretched out toward Alphena.
Did she kill him?

But the creature was chittering and meeping: therefore alive, therefore dangerous. Corylus stepped over the body of his second swordsman to finish the job. Despite the tulwar's curved blade, the point would be effective with a straight thrust.

“Don't!” Alphena said. “He's telling me about Mother.”

The satyr's ear had bounced out from under Alphena's tunic in the fighting, but she now held it in her left hand. The Tylon had lost his feathered headdress. He writhed on his belly, but his eyes never left the rough iron amulet.

“Go, then,” Alphena said, this time speaking to the Tylon. “Get as far away from here as you can. You'd do better to dance on a pony in a traveling menagerie than to go back to Govinda, but I don't care so long as I never see you again.”

She sounds just like Lady Hedia,
Corylus thought.

The Tylon turned—it was like watching a snake move—and scampered briefly on all fours before rising to his hind legs and disappearing into the grass in the direction in which the peasants had gone.
They probably weren't returning to King Govinda's service, either
.

Alphena slipped the amulet back within her tunic. “He won't harm us,” she said. “Where's the—oh.”

The Tylon Corylus had swatted with the staff lay where he had fallen. The back of the creature's skull was dished in; they had much lighter frames than humans, even slender humans.

“He's not going to harm us, either,” Corylus said. “What did yours say about Lady Hedia?”

Corylus gripped the dagger hilt with both hands and put his left foot on the head in which it was stuck, then withdrew the blade. He wiped the orichalc clean on the dead man's shirt. Cotton waste would have been better, but the silk was sufficient.

“She ran past them into the jungle,” Alphena said. “She didn't have any weapons. He and the other magician were afraid to be so close to the ruins, but they had to obey Govinda's orders.”

Alphena had wiped and sheathed her sword; now she picked up a buckler. The pair of parallel handles on the inner curve were intended to be held in one hand. Fortunately, the Indian soldiers were relatively slight; Alphena's hand could grip the shield adequately.

“He said there are terrible monsters in Dreaming Hill,” she said, “and there is magic too great for even the Godspeaker.”

“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.

*   *   *

V
ARUS 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 of 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.