Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds (15 page)

Dragon’s patterns slowed, then stopped. His hide took on the muted colors of the trunk and the gritty textures of the ground. He blended into the tree, his respiration slowing and his surface cooling to match the land.

Ladon stood under the grand olive tree, next to the mound of his dragon. No birds called. No animals scurried. Only the sound of the salt rustle of branches and the pounding of Andreas’s own heart filled the night.

On the horizon, the haze surrounding the mountain’s crest glowed sick and terrible as the setting sun’s last rays stretched inward from the sea. Ladon would eat now, because his beast requested it. He’d have his fill of olives one last time from this tree that should bring Andreas’s commander calm. This one place in all the Empire where he should be able to think and understand and find his reason again.

Maybe the eruption would come before the beast awoke. Maybe it wouldn’t.

Andreas didn’t think Ladon had the will to fight his way through the ash, if it did.

Mira and Ismene rode five hours before the first explosion blew the top of the cinder cone southwest, away from them and toward Pompeii. Death snowed down as huge flakes, but more like glass than ice. It sliced as it fell. Crunched underfoot, as if Mira and Ismene ran on the broken wares of the gods themselves.

For once, Faustus had not used his future-seer to constrain Mira and Ismene. He didn’t pronounce their fate or issue orders to force what he saw to come to pass. No, this time, he leaped onto his horse and rode away without them. Without anyone, his back to Ismene’s bitter spitting and unending screeches. He vanished into the wilderness.

Mira’s present-seer saw nothing of him. Nor did she care to ask it again and again and again for knowledge of his whereabouts. The gods could take his life and behead their triad for all she cared. She’d suffer that fate to see him punished.

As would Ismene.

For the first time since they were children, since they’d each clung to their mothers’ legs under the watchful eye of their godling father, Mira and Ismene were left to their own fate, free of the knowledge of their future.

Yet here she was, running into the ashfall instead of away from it, dragged forward by
what-was
instead of
what-will-be
.

Ismene pulled her over cracks and between boulders. They moved faster than they should, Ismene demanding Mira use her seer to find the best footing: “Which way? What angle? Tell me!”

The hairs on Mira’s arms stood on end. The air hissed like a cornered creature, a sound she felt more than heard. The ash rubbed against itself in little, shattering clicks.

Mira had wanted to go to the villa, to care for the bodies of the children. They should not vanish forever under a thick layer of ash. But Ismene clawed and screamed and raked her demands over Mira’s mind.

So now, behind them, lightning flashed across the remains of Vesuvius’s summit. Ash hung solid around the split cone as if carved into the sky itself—as if the gods pressed their fury into the clouds like a hoof into mud. Or Ismene’s fingers into Mira’s flesh.

The two Fates rode hard until both mares stumbled and wheezed. Then they left the animals crumpled on the ground, legs folded under them, heads bowed. Ismene paid no heed and did nothing to ease their suffering. She ran away into the gray air, leaving Mira behind.

Mira had no choice but to follow, or she’d lose her sister in the dust. So she left the horses to die alone, slowly. With more pain than the poor mares deserved.

They should not be here, chasing after this war caused by their father, but what she wanted—what her seers saw—meant nothing. The past and future always held more sway than the present.

The groves they ran through smelled of rotting flesh. She pulled tight the wet fabric wrapping her face and peered forward into the gloom. They did not stumble. As it had on their way down the mountain, Mira’s seer whispered:
Move left
.
Duck
.
Jump now!

A fallen branch lay just before them, hidden in the ash. Mira yanked Ismene to the side. “Up!” They landed, their feet crunching into the dullness.

Ismene skidded but stopped, the ash piling like dirt in front of her sandals. Not puffs, not curls—it rolled heavy and thick like sludge and slopped over with a whining thud.

“Is the Dracos here?” Ismene grasped the hilt of her dagger but she did not draw it from its scabbard.

Again, questions: “Where is he, sister? What does he do? Does he sleep? I will cut his throat.
Tell me
!”

Mira told. The words filled in some of the hole in her soul. “His beast sleeps, Ismene.”
Unlike you, they are done churning
, she thought. But her sister asked nothing of the
tribunus
, so she spoke nothing of the man.

Like her, he was a half-godling, a child of a god, but he’d swaddled his gifts to keep them from harming the world. Mira’s gift, though, unraveled and left her flesh naked and cold, its threads pulled first forward, then back, as it lifted from her skin.

She’d met the Dracos’s
tribunus
once, in Rome, when he stood protecting his commander and Faustus while they’d argued over supply routes and political intrigue and the future of the Empire. Andreas Sisto was his name, a huge man, big like all the males of his kind, with deep, richly-colored skin and ocean-tinted eyes and scents capable of enthralling the world as much as his broad physical presence.

He’d looked down at her, his face showing nothing more than the stone façade she saw on all of the Dracos’s warriors, and said nothing when she caressed his present with her seer.

She’d seen only herself reflected back, so she’d paid no heed.

But the menace of the Dracos had crawled her skin and squirmed on her lips and left a taste of terror-spiced awe on her tongue. His beast whipped his big tail and she’d gasped. The man, dressed in a void of black, had looked upon her with the same distaste he held for her brother.

Then, she had not called her seer. One did not poke an irritated godling. Now, pulled by her sister, her seer screamed:
There, under an olive tree. That way. They will not move.

Ismene huffed again. “Tell me, sister. Tell me he’s here.”

Ismene’s seer vibrated across Mira’s mind. The truth of
what-was
laid itself bare for her sister, a flat path to all her sister’s ragings. All that the world was built upon, all which had come before, blossomed somewhere inside Ismene’s mind.

Yet she still hounded Mira.

“Mira, is he here?” Ismene pulled her wrap higher over her nose and her dark eyes receded farther into the fold’s shadows. They were sisters, but not of the same mother, as was the same with their brother. Born on the same day, at the same moment, and bound forever as tightly as if they had come from the same womb, they were a Prime triad. Escape was not Mira’s fate. It was none of their fates.

Yes, he is here
. Mira’s seer dropped as if a ghost whispered into her ear. She nodded.

Ismene drew her blade. “Where?”

The trees sank under the same colorlessness as the other groves. What had been green now withered. The fruit remaining on the branches had turned the same consistency as the ash. The land no longer smelled of olives and the salt of the sea, but of hot mud and rotting death.

A grand olive with a twisted trunk dwarfed the other trees at the center of this grove, its branches spread as wide as it reached tall. Once, its leaves swayed in the breeze, murmuring like a brook rushing over rounded rocks. The sky above it had glowed brighter than the other trees. The sun smiled upon it more than any other living thing in the world.

No longer.

“We should not be here, Ismene.” They should have gone to the children. Caring for their bodies would have given both Mira and her sister closure. A cupful of relief to begin filling the new hole in their lives. Much more relief than Ismene sought now. She only gouged at the the side of the crevasse, widening the burden they’d all carry for the rest of their lives.

Ismene’s eyes blazed, and for a moment Mira wondered if her sister would slap her unbruised cheek.

“Under the tree.” Mira made no motion to indicate which tree. Her sister knew.

Ismene’s seer pulsed. “We haven’t much time. His beast has slept a full day.”

Another reason to leave. If they were anywhere near his human when the dragon woke, he’d gut them. He’d stretch his long neck and extend his talons and she and Ismene would become nothing more than crimson released into this sea of gray.

Though maybe death was their fate. Maybe this, too, was to be the end of the Jani Prime. The Dracos would be gentle, if they asked. The man would end this phantom her sister had become, a shade who reflected into the real world only the moment of her sons’ deaths. Then he’d end Mira, dropping her into the hole once and for all.

Ismene pointed. The man knelt, his back to them, hidden in shadows. Ash coated his armor with the same even layer of flatness as it coated the grove; he must have dropped to his knees before the eruption.

He’d been here, under the tree, since he’d left their villa.

Ismene crept forward.

“Leave us alone.” His words rolled from his throat at the same time a rumble pulsed from the mountain. The sounds mixed, Vesuvius filling the man’s already resonant voice with an edge so deep both Mira and Ismene halted, frozen in the presence of a human as much a child of the gods as their own father.

Mira watched him now, the debris of the mountain mixing heavy and flat into what remained of his black hair. The ash pushed him down, as it pushed down Mira, but
his
body did not bow under the pressure.

What were they doing? Mira’s seer screamed
Run! Go! Ismene’s hate cannot stand against this godling.

Mira felt pushed. Pulled. Yanked on as if someone had tied the rope of a stone anchor around her leg and dropped the rock into the hole. The ash obscured the stone’s descent, but she heard it smashing against the walls.

And the rope went taut.

On the mountain, she’d watched her brother walk away after accepting a fate he should have had the spine to fight. Watched her sister balance on her heels as she tempted a fate threatening to rupture her bones. But now, here under this olive tree, the hole ceased to be something her imagination fabricated to give her mind understanding of what she felt. The hole became a real part of
what-is
.

Her sister lifted her dagger.

The mound under the trunk cracked.

Mira’s seer erupted: The hiss of the ash took on tonal variations—a little more here, a little less there, and it curved with the trajectory of lunging talons and breathed fire.

Mira understood what woke under the ash. She’d seen both dragons vanish and reappear, both moving with such speed neither man nor animal could counter. Each time, she’d stared, awed, even though she knew she shouldn’t. She was a Prime Fate, a woman of good breeding and great power. But the beasts never missed.

She and Ismene were about to bleed out, like the children. They had to run. Mira’s seer forced her to move, made her turn her sister away from the threat lunging from the ash under the dying tree.

But Ismene countered. She would not leave. She punched Mira hard in the belly, the hilt of the dagger she held angled to cause as much pain as possible. “You will not take this from me!” Ismene screamed. “You won’t—”

Mira had been focused on the dragon, not on her sister’s rage. She thought her sister still had some sense in her head. But now agony poured up into Mira’s throat. They were going to die. She saw no other fate.

The ash on the dragon’s back broke into dried, hexagonal plates. Some dropped to the ground, hitting like boulders and splashing the gray at the beast’s feet. Some clung to his ridges, a great coat of thick stone armor. But none of it slowed him down.

A great, six-taloned claw-hand swept between Mira and Ismene. It cupped away from Mira just before it vanished, mimicking Ismene’s ash-encrusted clothes.

Mira’s sister skidded through the mud. The gray billowed around her as the air frothed, and the ash on the ground piled high like grabbing fingers. Ismene twirled her arms, but it did no good. She dropped to the ground.

The great beast growled, his warm-scented breath washing across Mira’s face, though she saw nothing puff out the air. She looked into the visually hollow space under the cracked ash-armor, the place where a dragon tensed, but did so without being seen. He mimicked the inside of his shell of Vesuvius’s ashes, living, breathing, but beyond her comprehension.

“He wants you to leave.” By the tree the man straightened slightly, his head rising. The ash coating his back popped with a dull crack and slid off his armor. The metal of his back and chest plates no longer gleamed. And the blackness of his
legatus’s
tunic had faded to the same final gloom as the air and trees surrounding them.

Next to Mira, Ismene shrieked. “Murderer!”