Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds (16 page)

The past-seer of the Jani Prime shook like an adder and spit murder at Ladon. He didn’t move, nor did he respond. Ladon only returned his gaze to the
gladius
lying across his knees. He wasn’t surprised. In war, the losers always thought of death as murder.

Time for Ladon to admit that he and the beast slept on a pile of corpses.

For a moment, nothing changed. Nothing moved, but the hot air pushed down on his lungs. The blood in his veins imitated the indistinct roar of the ash pressing into the night. He smelled it, knew it, heard it whisper. The end sat on the back of his tongue like poisoned fruit.

Murder.

He’d expected political retaliation. The Jani worked the machinations of empire. Manipulated from back rooms. They sent others to do their killing. Yet two-thirds of their Prime triad now pointed daggers at his head.

They did not understand what they did. People who knew
what-will-be
should consider their actions. They should not have cut down his niece, unprovoked.
They
started this war. And they suffered a severe retaliation because if it.

He did not understand the behavior of Fates.

Ismene, the dark-haired past-seer, shrieked again. Mira, the fair-haired present-seer, stared at Dragon with eyes as flat and mindless as the dead girl, even though she held her gut and retched from the pain of her sister’s hit.

“Ismene…” Mira’s voice flitted through the noise of the ashfall. The chiming sweetness of her seer lifted its quality above simple panting. “The dragon…”

The past-seer’s arm rose. She’d fling her dagger around Dragon, at Ladon’s head.

Maybe he should allow it to hit. When Dragon awoke, the edges of Ladon’s awareness brightened. The sulfur in the air glistened as it stung. Lightning flashed across the mountain’s face in blazing, blinding streaks, and the noises of the overheated earth—the crackling mud, the breathing of the two women—filled Ladon’s ears.

The beast’s vision made Ladon’s own more than it should be, but Dragon did not work Ladon’s muscles. He didn’t move his bones or lift his
gladius
. And sometimes Ladon needed a sharp point to remind him where he ended and the beast started.

The blade cut through the ash floating down around them. A maelstrom formed behind it, a trail of void where once had been smooth death.

Ladon’s body moved slightly, twisting just enough to save itself. The dagger nicked his cheek anyway.

The sting hit hard—he moved, but a dishonored woman still found a way to slap his face from two dragon-lengths away.

He chuckled as he touched the cut.

I do not see humor in this situation, Human
. The beast growled at the present-seer once more.

Nor did Andreas see the humor. Ladon had signaled his Second to stay back, on the other side of the grove, with the horses. Not to mesh himself into the fury of Jani Fates—there’d be no justice. But warriors were not ones to ignore threats to their commanding officers.

Andreas lifted the past-seer out of the ash by her neck. She croaked, her shrieks silenced. He held her at arm’s length, her feet dangling over the death coating the grove and her fists pounding the muscles of his arms. Small smacking sounds pumped off his flesh, but he did not flinch or move.

“Quiet, harpy,” Ladon’s
tribunus
growled.

***

His orders had been to stay back. To tend the horses, to let what was to unfold, unfold. Ladon had spent the night and the full day under the tree, his head bowed, in reverence. Andreas followed his example, praying to rid his mind of his challenges.

The entire time, they did not speak to each other.

When the ground growled like the beast and the world shook and Ladon did not move, Andreas suspected the truth: Ladon did not rid himself of his challenges. He took them as his purpose.

Long ago, Andreas had leashed his fear. But now it rose in his core, toward his chest, at the same time it rolled down, into his bowels. It flavored the air as much as the stinging stench falling with the ash.

He knew what the fear was. He recognized it.

Fear opened gates best left closed. Doors disrupting the world when they swung open and threw eddies into the currents created by the gods.

The beast breathed out small flames, awake enough they could leave, yet they did not. They’d been trapped on another path into the future shaped by a pair of screeching Fates who should have known better than to follow them into this place.

Fates claimed visions of the past, present, and future, but they knew nothing. They took no responsibility for the ripples caused by their abilities. They believed in nothing more than their own cycles of hate and greed, like a snake eating its own tail.

They balanced nothing and caused their own ill fate, and now they smeared it across his
legatus
like shit from a cow.

The past-seer panted under her scarf, hate crunching her eyes into black stones. For a moment, Andreas wondered if she’d lost what little mind she had.

But her seer danced across his consciousness—semi-discordant jangles that felt the way how cymbals in the wind sounded. Andreas sniffed, his fear responding by squirming in his gut. His face tightened in response, but he did not let go.

“You could have stopped his blade!” Disbelief whistled out her nostrils in high, shrill puffs. “You let him murder. My boys died!” Words dripped from her lips with as much heat and vileness as the detritus spewing from the mountain.

Boys? “What are you speaking of, witch?” There’d been one. A girl.

“Her sons were to become our niece’s triad mates this coming Saturnalia.” The present-seer stood stunned in front of Dragon. “They found the dagger.”

So they’d killed themselves. Andreas would have felt sympathy for their mother, if she’d been worth the effort.

Next to the tree, Ladon’s fingers twitched. But his face did not show change, nor did he move his body.

The past-seer sneered. “Murderer,” she hissed.

“Let her go, Andreas. This is done.” Ladon pointed at the present-seer. “Take your sister. Go to the coast before the mountain kills us all.”

Andreas’s fingers tightened. He could as easily snap the past-seer’s neck as he could whisper scents saying ‘die now’ and watch her breath halt in her throat, enthralled by his gift and willing only to do as he commanded. She’d turn as gray as the ash and as cold as her soul.

If he let loose what sat at the back of his throat, he’d end the Jani Prime. Their brother would drop dead where he stood in whatever hollow he haunted. And his
legatus’s
family would be avenged to the fullest order.

He’d uphold his goddess mother’s orders to protect the Dracae, but not his commander’s order to allow
what-will-be
to be.

One trust granted him with little effort, confirmed. One he’d only earned with centuries of effort, broken.

The present-seer stepped back from Dragon’s snout, a slow measured movement. She trembled as if fighting her body’s need to run took more strength than she had. But she pushed her leg back anyway, determined to survive.

“All I see is death,” she whispered. “I see an open void. I see no choice.”

Andreas turned his attention back to the wild past-seer. Of course only death filled the present. The past had brought them here, to this grove under the mountain. Brought them all into a moment where Ladon, the godling whose soul and body Andreas had sworn to protect, asked one more time for an action which whipped Andreas’s gut into his throat:

“Put her down, Andreas. Let them be.”

***

Both men flooded Mira’s seer: The giant gripping her sister danced in precise steps with his own fate. The other wrestled with his decisions, ones he had not questioned since he’d walked from his god-world into the world of humans.

Mira stood between them now, watching, pulled and pushed and held over the gaping maw that was her life—the hole in her soul through which all that mattered, all that sang or sweetened or lived—fell into Hades.

The godling with his scraped-off black hair and brilliant eyes glanced from her to her sister and back. His body reflected his truth: He’d commanded Ismene’s release not because he cared, but because he didn’t. What was to happen was what would happen. He would not fight it. There was no need or cause to care.

The giant behind her, holding her sister, breathed the ash—his own and what swirled in the air—because he’d weighed his choices and chose his options.

Neither man cared about her.

Mira glanced at Ismene. Her sister writhed in the big
tribunus’s
grip, venomous but just as enthralling as the man. Mira had followed her into the ashfall, after all.

Her sister did not care about Mira, either. Mira had known this her entire life. Felt it in the constrained hugs. In every moment Ismene’s glances dismissed a fear or a moment of caring. Tied as tightly together as they were, her triad could not hide their individual narrowness from each other.

Skinny in mind and hungry of soul, they sought, single-mindedly, what their seers showed them—what they thought they needed more than anything else in this world. What fate told them they must have, no matter what they truly wanted.

But it did not matter. They were sisters. And they were Fates. And so they would continue until the moment they died here now, or centuries in the future.

The beast-dragon snorted again. By the remains of the great tree, his human echoed his sound. “He says the sun rises. The sun sets. Everyone sees death, little Fate.” The human half of the Dracos dusted ash from his knees. “The emptiness of death is the easiest memory to make.”

***

Death was as easy as kneeling under a tree, waiting for a mountain. Easy as taking the hand rage offered and allowing it to guide Ladon into his future.

A low grumble washed from Dragon.

Mira’s brow crunched. Her ability sounded through the grove, raining like chimes onto Ladon’s skin as much as his mind. She peered into the space Dragon’s invisible body occupied, but she still did not back down.

Long ago, Ladon awoke under this tree, his blood boiling for a fight. This Fate’s father awoke not far from where she now stood. At that moment centuries before, when five humans and two dragons blinked into existence, this Fate’s father had branded onto Ladon’s soul a look of pure hatred. That look, flung from eyes narrowed to slits and a face more vicious than Ladon’s own, had shaped his centuries. His command.

His family’s pain.

What was he, in all this? The Fates acted—passively, yes, but still acted—and he reacted. They triggered. He and the beast exploded. They blew into the wind and he became the gale sweeping in off the Mediterranean.

The Empire teemed with the murder of the small and insignificant, the rich and powerful. Dead slaves, dead leaders, dead Emperors littered its streets. Dead fishmongers and traders from the far-flung corners of the Empire piled up in its corners. Whores and gladiators floated face down in its rivers. Soldiers and senators mortared its walls. And the spilled blood of dead children and dead Fates painted all the gates of all its villas with the fresh markings of war.

Death crawled in Ladon’s muscles and made him dance. It tarnished iron and stole even the strongest will.

Ladon exhaled. He remembered much death. Much hate.

The present-seer said nothing, only dropped her gaze to the mud as she shuffled away from the beast. Dragon tossed his head and the remaining hardened ash slid from his back, but it smeared his hide with a shadow. He mimicked the night and became a shade haunting the dying grove.

Ismene wheezed in Andreas’s grip. “My boys.”

***

The past-seer stared, her eyes glossy and malevolent. Now they spoke of death. Because only death filled their minds. Hers. Ladon’s. Andreas’s own.

His commander had missed the folly of his decision. Letting her go would serve nothing.

Andreas held the woman firm.

This place had once been holy. He’d seen it with his own eyes, the brilliance. He’d walked behind a godling for two centuries. But the true gods—the ones above who looked down on him and Ladon, Human and Dragon, on his
legatus’s
sister and her dragon, on Andreas’s wildling goddess mother who’d given him a gift too vile to use, on these two Fates and their Hades-bound father, on their sour and twisted future-seeing brother, on all the normals rubbing against each other in the streets of Rome, on the scents of slaughter and the grating shrillness of a land determined to kill and destroy and end it all—those gods in the heavens, they rained death on this place. On this tree. On Andreas.

Where was the balance here? Ladon had allowed the mountain to mortar him into his place under the corpse of a sacred tree. He’d allowed his beast to become nothing more than a boulder. The beast stirred from his sleep, forcing the cracking of the ash, yet they did not leave. Ladon tempted the gods by refusing to step out of the way of their descending god-foot. He called death. His own, his dragon’s, and that of these two shrill Fates whose only purpose seemed to be to reinforce Ladon’s dour inaction.