Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds (14 page)

Four days prior, on the open piazza tiled with scenes of a sea god’s anger, Mira of the Jani Prime, a Fate bound to the fabric of Rome, clenched her hands and stared at the wisps rising above Vesuvius. At that moment, in the now of
what-is
, her present-seeing ability swirled inside her head, screaming
Run! Go!
Though her mind yelled
Get as far away from the mountain as possible, even if you must crawl.

Even if you must scrape your skin raw or take another of your brother’s punches. Mira would have danced her fingers over the deepening purple-green of her tender cheekbone, but her hands held tightly to each other. They would not cooperate.

Yet wincing filtered her every motion. The flinches jiggling her vision and the bites that laid blood on her tongue. The smoke rising from the mountain made it worse.

The sky behind the cinder cone was a deceptively brilliant blue, a color, for Mira, carried the buoyancy of her niece’s happiness. Minerva’s eyes had lit up the evening before, when Mira spread the new silk over the girl’s shoulder. She’d grinned, holding in her bubbly laughter, but Mira knew the soft drape and the vivid green-of-the-leaf had brought joy to the heart of a young woman who, most days—most weeks and years—knew very little happiness.

Her father, Mira’s brother, was not a man who issued caring.

Faustus had left the day before, gone east toward the mountain to attend to their father. Minerva’s grandfather. The man from whom all Fates descended, even if most would rather slice their own wrists and bleed their blood onto the pebbles and moss than live life by their fate.

Mira and her sister Ismene were to follow their brother today, to complete their triad. A future-seer such as Faustus lost value when separated from his triad’s present- and past-seers.
What-will-be
only became clear when its foundations were laid bare.

Yet her seer screamed again:
Take the children! Run to Rome!

But she knew: Beware the dragons. Beware the war your father started.

The beasts did not venture away from the city other than to lead their legion north, into barbarian territory, which was why her brother had brought the children here, against the sea. For safety.

How Minerva and her two nephews—Ismene’s boys Junonius, and Jupiter—were safe here under Vesuvius, she did not see.

“The mountain will blow in five days,” her brother had warned. “And the gods of the underworld will bury these seaside villas in dust and ash.”

She’d asked questions: “Why do you not send the children home now? My seer thrashes and I know they must leave. They
must
go, brother. And we should not venture to the mountain. Why must
we
go? Father does not need us. We should run before Mons Vesuvius kills us all.”

Faustus punched. Mira stopped asking.

On the other side of the villa, by the stables, a horse whinnied. Mira’s seer told her
what-is
: Ismene finished their travel preparations.
What-was
smoothed her riding clothes and admonished a slave for not bringing
what-is
to her with greater speed.

Mira of the Jani Prime triad, the most powerful seer of the present in all the Empire other than her father, slid her foot on the smooth stones of the piazza. If she left now, ducked into the side hallway, the slave would not find her. She’d have time to tell the children to escape.

Once she and Ismene left, the children needed to saddle their own horses and ride northwest, along the coast. They’d be safe there, when the mountain exploded.

The air they’d breathe would not carry the weight of a mountain. They’d be able to sit by the sea, perhaps on a boulder, and watch gulls fish. These three children, one almost a woman and two almost men, would live in a present where they’d be, for a moment, free.

But from the inside, Mira’s seer hit at her bruised cheek. She wasn’t the only Fate in the villa who’d stopped asking questions. Last night, after Mira draped the silk over Minerva’s shoulder, after her smiles faded, the girl wrapped the fabric around her hand and arm. And around her neck.

Her beautiful sky-blue eyes had clouded, her face flat. Then she muttered sounds about her father’s orders. About doing her duty. Because she was a Fate, and fate bound her more than it did any other.

Mira had pulled her close, holding her to her breast for as long as she would have, if the child had been her own. No tears flowed. No scent of fear rose from the girl. Only her shallow breaths moved across Mira’s skin.

Minerva’s seer, though promising, was not yet active and writhing like a temple whore inside her head, as Mira’s did now. Yet as Fates, they were all bound by their fate—a future Mira’s brother, the child’s father, would not let them escape.

Mira would try. She’d be stern with the children. Tell them that as the Prime present-seer of their family, they had no recourse. They
must
listen.

Then she’d ride for the mountain.

***

Four days later, after she’d told the children to go, she knew they hadn’t listened. “You tell us to run, yet you go to the mountain? We are Fates, aunt. We follow the threads woven for us.”

She wanted to scream. To turn back and make them go, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. So she rode on, following Ismene up the side of Vesuvius to join their brother.

The heavy air weighed on their seers as much as their noses and throats. They all exhaled, the harshness of the mountain’s heat crushing. They performed their duty to their father.

Now Mira shuffled through the grit coating the crags of Vesuvius’s cone, following her brother down the mountain face and back toward their horses. Time to return home. Time to run from the gods of fire. Her triad walked in shadow; the mountain blanketed each step with gloom and vapors rising from pits. No sun reached this deep inside the mountain’s fractures.

In a shadow, five paces in front of Mira, Faustus stopped pushing forward, stopped moving completely. Stopped and inhaled and would not look at his sisters.

Fear lurched upward into Mira’s chest and constricted around her heart—a wave from her brother’s future-seer hammered through her skull. She could not see what he foresaw, but she felt the coming violence. The cone, perhaps, was about to explode. They, perhaps, were not to escape the mountain.

But the lurching in her chest moved farther up, into her throat. No, what came was not the land under their feet. Mira recognized the truth in Faustus’s posture: He looked down at his sandals for the briefest moment, his hand clutching a nub of Vesuvius’s rock face. Then he sighed, a long push of his breath, as if he’d realized the true meaning of what he’d unleashed in their home. At their villa.

When the
what-will-be
her brother saw moved into
what-is
, Mira felt the actions within the courtyard, down the mountain, near the coast. She felt the slice to her niece’s neck. Felt the sting radiating from skin to muscle to emptying veins.

Mira stumbled backward into her sister. Her blond hair mingled with Ismene’s black, her pale skin contrasted with her sister’s deep glow. Ismene’s gaze locked onto their brother and the shoulders he refused to slump, and his hand on the boulder towering over them all.

“By all the gods,” Ismene whispered, as
what-is
passed into
what-was
, and her ability saw the truth. She pressed against Mira’s back as unmoving as the pumice and rock surrounding them.

Ismene’s son’s triad was now broken. In her family’s villa, down the mountain and toward the coast, the man and the beast—the Dracos—had taken not only a life, but the destiny of two boys.

Burning radiated off Ismene as it did off the stone and the dust and the coming ash. Heat flashed off her, rising from her core to her neck and cheeks, mirroring the path Mira’s fear had lurched across moments before.

Right now, Mira knew the unmoving Ismene erupted inside herself. She agitated her own guts and the roiling snapped the high cymbals of her past-seer into a deafening rattle inside Mira’s head. Mira felt fractures. She tasted metal on her tongue. Saw flashes of nothing in her eyes.

A hole opened across her triad’s interwoven abilities. A cavernous, gaping crevasse that cracked Mira’s soul with the same power and violence as the mountain’s coming vomiting. The same shuddering in her core, the same pulsing constriction in her throat. It all erupted inside her body.

The present rattled inside her skull once more: The whirlwind of the man and the beast spun down. Pushed forward these past days by both the gale force hatred of his sister and his own grief, the man had found clarity in the death dripping from his beast’s talons. But now his task was done.

Mira felt his fracture as well—his own niece’s murder gouged across his world and left him on a cliff’s edge. He raged along the precipice, a sword in each hand and a dragon at his back, making sure every last villain went over with him.

Down into the ash-choked inkiness. Down inside a blistering hole.

A new moment of
what-is
danced into her mind’s eye: Junonius and Jupiter finding their cousin. One boy hiccupping. The reek of blood and the bitter stench of shit. Tears streaking cheeks and the backs of hands. The other boy curling into a ball on the sand and rocking back and forth, back and forth.

Junonius finding the dagger the man had dropped into the crescent of dried death surrounding the girl’s body.

Then that moment, too, moved into
what-was
.

Ismene quivered behind Mira and she rotated in her sister’s embrace, her own hands moving under her seer’s control. One rose to block the racking swipe of Ismene’s nails. The other held her sister’s wrist and the dagger she’d almost whipped at their brother’s head.

“Why did you let this happen?” The screams pouring from Ismene deafened Mira’s ears. “Why, brother?”

Mira heard only the rising inflection and panicked tone of her sister’s voice. In her seer, new crescents formed around each boy, but they weren’t as practiced at killing as the human half of the Dracos. He’d been quick. Merciful, even. The boys’ agony spread out through Mira’s seer like wastewater thickened by mud and slaughter.

Ismene’s breathing faltered. “Why?” She’d blanched as if she bled out, too. But she’d stopped screaming.

Faustus let go of the rock face. His hands dropped to his sides. “We are all bound by the fate our father sees.” He didn’t look at them—he didn’t turn or acknowledge what was happening behind him. “Bound by his war, no matter the costs.” He just walked away.

Andreas Theodulus Sisto watched his
legatus
drop the dagger and back away from the dead girl, not stride out, as he would have expected of a warrior with purpose. Ladon stood rigid in the courtyard, the smell of fresh death spreading through the air like mist, like fine droplets of scarlet Fate blood. He blinked only once.

For a moment, Ladon looked less the general and more the man. But neither Andreas or Ladon were men. They were the core of the
Legio Draconis
. Their purpose shaped their bodies and sharpened their minds—and gave a fine edge to their gifts. To Ladon’s beast. To the constant enthralling ‘calling scents’ swirling in the back of Andreas’s throat.

Losing their reason was not an option. Losing their rules would only loosen their gifts and they’d spin high like a vortex, scouring the world to nothing by white sand and bleached bone.

So when they walked from the villa, two men and a dragon whose hide gleamed with blindingly bright fury, Andreas held his shoulders square and his stride forward. He led his
legatus
toward their pawing horses. The animals half-snorted, half-whinnied, both jittering and sidestepping each time a shadow moved or the tail of Ladon’s beast scratched through the sand.

The horses smelled the death in the air. Andreas patted his stallion’s snout. His beast, too, must hold its purpose.

They rode west, toward the sea and the ships of Andreas’s father, on the labored backs of their war steeds, Ladon’s Dragon pacing their mounts. Behind them, Vesuvius smoked. Respite at sea would clear away the acrid scents of both blade and mountain, and bring them back to their senses.

But Ladon slowed his stallion, pulling on the animal’s reins as he looked east. He hadn’t spoken since they’d ridden from the villa, nor had he given voice to Dragon’s lights and patterns. If they conversed between themselves, Andreas did not sense it.

Not that he could. His gifts did not include sensing the thought-words of the beasts. Only Ladon and his sister, the Dracas, knew the true minds of the dragons.

Once, long ago, in the first moment Andreas had stepped from behind his goddess mother and into the bright daylight of the
Legio Draconis
camp—when, for the first time, all colors and all patterns had rolled off the beasts and onto his then-slight frame—he’d halted in his young tracks. The beasts walked free within the encampment, two dragons who were not animals but gods, rubbing against trees and men with joy and trust, breathing out brilliant warmth as flame and spice-scented breath.

The young Andreas had reached out, his fingers extended, as if to ask the beasts if they, too, would do the same for him. If they would accept his prayers:

Give my eyes all colors of light and darkness.

Give my mouth all flavors of spice, my breath your truth.

Set me here, set me well, set me good.

And for that moment, he felt certain he understood the meaning of the lights traveling their hides. Understood the weight of structure and the purpose of building. Understood the sacred.

But he’d blinked his young eyes and the sacred had vanished. Invisible like Dragon, gone to blend into the writhing world.

That day, the two dragons had opened his eyes. The gods gave the world an order, a set of instructions, and those instructions spun across the beast’s skin. If Andreas was to be a man, he’d heed the sacred. He’d take his vow to the
Legio
. And he’d work every moment—every single second—to earn the trust of the beasts and their humans.

Andreas knew what lay to the east. The grand olive tree whispered to the beast, as it often did, and Ladon turned them away from the coast, toward the grove.

Two centuries Andreas had ridden with the dragons. Two centuries watching over both the brother and the sister. Andreas rose to the level of
tribunus
, the Second of the
Legio Draconis
, Ladon’s right hand, though he could have been his own
legatus
. He could have been Emperor, if he’d wanted. If he’d loosen his strength and taken what, for him, would have been power easily grasped.

But his mother’s enthralling gifts were both prize and curse: Every gain cost a portion of soul. A slice of mind. A splinter of family. When design was disrupted in one place, the pattern compensated somewhere else. If it didn’t, it could not vanish into the world.

So Andreas trusted in the designs of the beasts and in his rules and his ways.

He stopped with his
legatus
and his
legatus’s
dragon in the grove, under the grand olive tree. He offered savory dried meats and crisp bread, but Ladon did not eat. Ladon stared down at the meal held in Andreas’s hand, his eyes without need, and proclaimed, once again, that he touched no food when he fought. Neither did the beast, though the patterns circulating over Dragon’s hide told Andreas a different story of hunger.

Again, he said nothing. A ‘calling scent’ crept into the back of his mouth and nose—a wave of ‘command’ that if Ladon breathed it in would compel him to eat—but Andreas swallowed it down into his own gut.

Every gain cost a grain of soul and Andreas only paid when gain and grain balanced perfectly.

So he set about collecting olives from the singing branches of the miracle tree. He’d sat under it before, seen its glow in the darkest of nights, the ghost lights dancing along its twisted and rough bark the same way they danced in great clarity over Dragon. Sitting with his back against a cold boulder and staring unendingly at a tree three times the size of the other olive trees, he watched its leaves flitting as if they were birds, alive and separate, his awe seeping from his pores like sweat.

The first time, he’d come alone as a child and without orders, before he’d taken his position within the
Legio Daconis
. He’d wanted to see for himself. To know this sacred place. To understand the godlings who had dropped naked into this world and to whom he now dedicated his life.

So Andreas, the half-godling born of a goddess—the same as, yet very different from, his
legatus
—collected olives from the singing branches of the tree. The smooth skin of each fruit felt firm between his fingers, their scent sweet and poignant and alive. They shimmered with hidden lights, glimmers which would not become visible until full night, but he knew they were there, waiting.

Beyond the tree, on the horizon, Vesuvius smoldered. Curls rose into the darkening sky, and under his feet the ground grumbled in response.

Perhaps he should argue with his
legatus
. Three paces away, Ladon leaned against his beast, the black of his tunic and leathers as dark as what remained of his hair. He’d nearly shaved his head when the Fates murdered his niece, the Dracia, cutting his black hair shorter than was customary for a man of his station. Ladon’s sister had done the same.

Andreas took this self-mutilation as both a sign of mourning and an omen of danger. Ladon and his sister paid this grain of their bodies to fuel the rage that would gain them revenge.

A shiver had taken Andreas’s bones when Ladon stalked through their villa in Rome,
gladius
drawn, bellowing answers to his sister’s shrieks. Both Dracae had gone into the markets shortly after, vanishing into the crowds, their dragons hiding themselves in patterns mimicking the world.

Many Fates died that day, ripped to stinking meat by invisible dragon talons.

One more had died the noon of this day, the final retribution for the evil of Fates.

Evil which made no sense. Stupid and violent, it gouged the grand design set by the gods the same way Dragon’s talons gouged the dirt. The Jani caused the death of their own child when they cut down the Dracia and her father outside the Dracas’s villa.

Faustus knew what would happen. Of this, Andreas was certain. Fates knew the fates of their own. Yet he did it anyway. Andreas’s jaw clenched. And the Fates called his breed malevolent.

He now leaned against the grand olive tree’s twisted trunk, a satchel of olives in his hand. He would not taste the true beauty filling his bag. It was not his place to partake of the tree’s fruit. Barbarians might drop to their knees at his feet and Fates run from his sword, but the sacred was not a line he crossed.

The setting sun blazed in the grand olive’s branches, filling its leaves and fruit with the same violence sure to erupt soon from the cinder cone on the horizon. The gentle breeze blew in from the sea full of salt and the calls of distant gulls. It glided over Andreas’s tongue as much as it tickled his skin.

He glanced up at the wisps above Vesuvius. This far away, they’d probably survive, if the mountain decided to burst tonight.

Probably.

“We should move closer to the coast.” He nodded toward the mountain.

Ladon’s shoulders moved only enough to show he heard Andreas’s words. He did not respond.

A twinge of anger poked up from Andreas’s gut. A prick, like a needle to the skin. And just enough to pull into his consciousness the reality of his mother’s gift.

He felt his ‘calling scents’, his enthralling ways, rise in his throat and into his breath. He could compel both man and beast to leave, if he chose that path. They’d bow to his will. Only he and his mother had the strength to manipulate the dragons in such a way. Only they were powerful enough.

Every day Andreas faced the greatest temptation of any man: He could wield a weapon beyond any other—the force of the Dracae—but he did not. He would not. What he lost should he do so went far, far beyond what he might gain. The dragons trusted him.

Behind him, the beast snorted, setting his big head on his forelimbs as he fully retracted his talons. His colors and patterns slowed and lost their vividness, a dragon response to fatigue akin to the dark patches under Ladon’s eyes and Andreas’s own drooping eyelids.

They’d traveled hard, once they’d known where the Jani Fates hid. Ridden and run and stalked with nothing more than retribution spinning the minds of the man and beast. The Jani were to learn what it felt like to lose someone so important. Ladon took payment.

Andreas stepped aside as the beast undulated over the tree’s roots. Dragon settled himself into the folds, contorting like a giant cat. Bigger than a work horse but smaller than some of the exotic animals he’d seen imported from Africa and the Far East, the beast wouldn’t stand out when he fell into sleep. He’d appear as a mound built of the tree’s roots.

Andreas dropped away from the trunk as the beast took up his place. “Resting here is not wise.” But neither man nor beast listened to his words.

“The land may growl but we will face whatever the mountain spits.” Ladon placed his hand on the beast’s neck.

Andreas understood: The choice to leave did not matter. Not anymore. The beast and the man had set this pattern.

“He wishes to rest here one last time. Before the mountain takes this place.” Ladon nodded toward Vesuvius. He stroked his hand across the back of his shaved head.

Two centuries and Andreas had never seen such behavior from either Ladon or his sister. Could his
legatus
regret his actions? Which made no sense. The Fates called this war. Philosophy was not the correct, core response, nor should it be. Justice was served, rules followed. No patterns displaced.

But Ladon stared toward the mountain, his thoughts obviously not on his settling dragon. And he rubbed his head again. The faint whiff of his too-short hair against the skin of his palm sent renewed shivers through Andreas’s bones. An omen, it was. Andreas should have understood when both of the dragons’ humans cut away their dark hair. An omen of death.

“You go, my friend. No need for you to face this problem with us.” Ladon had spoken the same words many times since they tracked the Jani Fates.

“Where would I go?” Andreas threw the satchel of olives toward Ladon’s face. The need to make his commander see reason slid into his vision. His mind conjured a reasonable version of Ladon, one without this stupidity: the man he’d served these centuries, clear-minded and well-groomed. Andreas’s imagination held out the ideal as comparison to the real man standing in front of him now with a bowed head and hands gripping a fruit-filled bag.

But the vision was a phantom of Andreas’s wants. Nothing more. Unlike a Fate, he did not
see
, only viewed his own needs. And also unlike a Fate, he served his godling. He did not agitate violence in order to destroy.

Ladon’s face changed—he spoke inside his head to the beast. Andreas knew of only one way to describe the expression: When the human communicated with the beast, the man’s eyes looked as if they viewed something very far away, something which appeared to everyone else as tiny. But Ladon saw it in minute and exquisite detail.

“He wishes me to eat.” Ladon looped the satchel of olives over his shoulder and his gaze dropped from the mountain to the beast’s elongated head.

They spoke their silent words and a small flame curled from Dragon. A brief smile touched Ladon’s mouth and he patted the beast once more. “I will. Rest, my friend.”

There’d be no leaving for a full day, if the beast slept. They’d be stuck here as the mountain spit vile fumes and coated their skin with cutting dust. Andreas nodded and stepped back. He’d get his pack and tend the horses. He could do nothing else.