Night & Demons (29 page)

“A monster that rises beneath a raft,” Antheia said. Her thin voice suggested her nostrils had tightened with anger at being called by implication a liar. “A monster that plucks the limbs from men as they try to swim to safety. A monster which leaves the bodies of those
who sink for the squids with armored shells, which would be danger enough.”

Where the giant fish had leaped a moment before, a fifty-foot shadow rose to the surface. The head made Cormac think of a smooth-skinned crocodile, but crocs were neckless. This creature had a neck half the enormous length of its head.

The body was barrel-shaped and powerful. Instead of legs it had flippers which, as the Gael watched, rotated like a seabird’s wings for another stroke. The creature drove forward at speed remarkable in something so large. Its hide was black and shiny; conical teeth to cut as well as pierce filled the long jaws.

Another age would call the creature a Kronosaur. Cormac had no word for it, but
sea monster
was both accurate and evocative.

The Kronosaur submerged with no more commotion than an arrow makes slicing the water. No sign of the creature remained on the surface, though waves of its swift underwater passage buffeted the margins of the land.

As the monster dived, Cormac caught a glimpse of movement on the shore of the ring island. It could have been a goat rising on hind legs to nibble leaves, or even a trick of light and breeze which fluttered the pale undersurface of foliage into the semblance of a human figure. The distance was too far for certainty.

Cormac was certain nonetheless: there were men across the haunted water. He started down, moving with the same easy caution as he had mounted to the vantage point.

The view had given him information, but that opened more questions than it answered. The only thing of which Cormac Mac Art was certain was that he had to get out of this place—though escape meant drowning in the clean salt seas of his own world.

Perhaps the color of the light here made him uneasy. There was nothing else to justify the loathing he felt.

“Who did this, then?” Wulfhere demanded. “Who cut this place off and left it as a trap for decent seamen?”

The Dane’s great fingers played with his axe, lifting it a few inches and then slapping it down against the supporting belt. If his agitation continued to build, he was likely to slide the weapon free and begin making passes that were the last prelude to berserk rage.

If frustration drove Wulfhere berserk without an obvious enemy, well . . . the Dane would find an enemy.

“The continent of Atlantis had been raised from the sea by the might of its wizards,” Creon said. “The land was always unstable. The Atlanteans turned their wizardry against us—against our Athenian ancestors when our fleet approached. When we broke through their defenses, the whole system began to collapse. Only enough of the power remained to save the very citadel—this island, and the first of the rings surrounding it.”

Cormac dropped to the stone beside the Greeks and Wulfhere. Brown-skinned servants watched from the interior of the temple, but none of them came out to join their rulers.

“There’s men across the water!” Cormac said cheerfully, clasping his friend enthusiastically by the shoulders. He had to deflect Wulfhere from the path his mind was treading or they’d none of them be safe. “People, at any rate—women as well as men, I suppose.”

He fixed Creon with hard eyes. “That’s correct, isn’t it? There
are
people on the outer island?”

“Yes, certainly,” Creon agreed without hesitation. “Some scores, perhaps hundreds of Atlanteans. They’re taller and straighter than their relatives here—”

He gestured dismissively toward the servants waiting within the aisle of the temple.

“—but they’ve sunk even deeper into savagery. They live like beasts.”

Cormac gave Wulfhere a friendly shake and released him. The Dane would be all right now. The trouble with Wulfhere was that in a doubtful situation, he always turned to his axe for succor. In the bloody age left by Rome’s collapse, Wulfhere’s instinct for slaughter had proved a major survival trait, but here it could cause problems.

“We’re fortunate that the water provides a barrier,” Antheia added coolly. “Otherwise they would have slaughtered us long since. And probably have killed their own kin, too. Mere animals.”

Cormac looked at the woman. “If the Atlanteans were such great magicians . . .” he said, his tones rasped like steel on a whetstone, “how is it you could crush them to their present state?”

“Because,” Antheia responded with a smile as shimmering and hard as a sword edge, “we were greater magicians yet. And before you ask—I have no Atlantean blood myself. Some of the greatest Athenian wizards were women, and one of them reached the citadel before the collapse.”

Wulfhere shook himself like a bear drying its fur in the shelter of a cave. His eyes were bright, but they had lost the glaze of madness which had begun to shutter them.

“I want food,” he said in a deep rumble. “And I don’t mean muck like what those midgets were offering us. I want meat!”

Creon smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I asked the servants to begin boiling a goat as soon as you arrived. We’ll go to the palace now.”

Antheia laughed and laid the tips of her slim fingers on Cormac’s armored shoulder. “And if one goat isn’t enough,” she said, leading the Gael toward the front door of the temple as though her touch was a leash, “then we will cook more until you’re satisfied. After that we can consider your other appetites, not so?” Her laughter was birdsong in shadowed jungle.

The palace was the metal-clad building facing the temple. Antheia led the way there with her hand resting lightly on Cormac’s arm. She talked not of the present but of the Atlantis that once had been, of the time when the island on which they stood was only the governmental complex controlling a continent. The city proper was built on the mainland beyond the ring island—lost for thousands of years beneath the storm-tossed seas.

The Gael looked over his shoulder when they were midway between palace and temple. The latter actually looked larger from the outside than it had when he was within. A pediment bright with statues of unblemished gold glared down, supported on four sweeping pillars. Though the peak was only half as high as the curve of the dome, it gave the impression of looming upward.

The temple’s interior closed in on itself. Creon and Antheia had come from the vaults under the nave to greet the reivers. Cormac wondered what lay there.

The palace looked increasingly run-down as they drew closer. The silver had been applied in finger-thick slabs rather than mere foil over the stone, but many plates hung skewed from their rivets or had fallen away completely. Though the surfaces were black with oxide, they still reflected the sickly light of the false sun.

“Doesn’t that thing ever set?” Cormac demanded harshly. The shock of anger he felt as he spoke warned him that his nerves were nearly as close to the edge as Wulfhere’s.

“It will burn so long as this world remains,” Antheia said. “The highest wizards of Atlantis created this place to be their final refuge, the den in which they could survive though all the continent else were conquered by an enemy.”

She showed Cormac a smile as bitter as that of a victim for her executioner. “They didn’t expect that we would penetrate their sanctum so swiftly and displace them,” she said. “But on the other hand, we—my ancestors—didn’t expect to be trapped here forevermore.”

She hugged herself close to the Gael, as though she were unaware of his salt-crusted armor and his lack of response. “We have lamps within the palace,” she said. “We’ll shutter the windows while we eat. And afterwards—”

Antheia gave a throaty chuckle. “Afterwards, there’s no need for light at all, unless you want one.”

Under other circumstances, Wulfhere might have complained that the goat wasn’t well enough done—and in all truth, it was scarcely cooked at all. The longship had been tossed for a day and a half, giving the crew no opportunity to eat more than mouthfuls of hard bread washed down with ale heavily salted by the spray.

Hunger conquered the Dane’s normal insistence on meat boiled till it fell off the bones. He wolfed down chunks of the dark, grainy goat, tearing it away with his strong teeth. The servants provided wine and, when the Dane asked for it, mead with a musty, powerful kick that he drank with still greater gusto.

Wulfhere was relaxing, though he still wore his iron corselet. He hung his axe from the top of the table beside him without consideration for the scar its hook put in the ivory inlays. Creon and Antheia didn’t appear to notice.

The four of them sat on backless stools of bronze cast in a filigree. The furniture was draped with wool dyed muddy purple. The fabric was obviously of more recent manufacture than the metalwork.

Cormac looked around. A thought had frozen his jaws midway through a morsel of shoulder muscle more red than pink. Atlantis was a display of human progress, from the magnificent past to a present of near-bestial savagery. And wasn’t this a description of the outer world as well, where Rome’s collapse had loosed on the seas creatures like—

Creatures like Cormac Mac Art.

Cormac gave a choking snarl of a laugh.
He
hadn’t made the world. If Mankind’s natural state was barbarism—so be it. And so much the worse for soft folk who lacked Cormac’s strength, his speed, and his absolute willingness to die so long as he was able to kill . . .

The two Greeks stared at him. He’d drawn their eyes when he laughed, though they might not have realized the sound
was
laughter. Wulfhere slammed down an agate cup for the servant with the sack of mead to refill—again. He fished a gobbet of meat from the pot with his dagger.

“Just thinking about how we were going to get out of here,” Cormac lied to the Greeks.

“You bet we are,” the Dane muttered. If he’d waited for an Atlantean to serve him, the meat would have been sliced into at least a dozen bites before it was transferred to Wulfhere’s plate. “But first we’re going to have a little something to eat . . .”

The walls of the dining room were covered in brass with low reliefs depicting planting and harvest. Reed torches, their pith soaked in oil, burned in free-standing sconces of delicate bronze. The wavering rushlights emphasized the artistry of the ancient furnishings.

The ceiling had painted decorations within the coffers, but these were by now no more than shadows. The soot of millennia caked them. That brought home to Cormac the age of this place better than did the deteriorated stone of the temple.

Cormac reached for his wine cup, a broad goblet of silver-mounted rock crystal. Only lees remained in it. Before a servant could act, Antheia took the footed bowl herself and filled the cup with unmixed wine. The local vintage was raw, but its alcohol content was higher than that of any wine which Cormac had drunk before.

Perhaps something about the light affected the vines, or it might be that the fermenting culture was an ancient one.

“Are you becoming—satisfied?” Antheia asked coquettishly, apparently oblivious of her father across the round table. She had doffed her outer robe for dinner. The inner tunic was white also and diaphanous. Antheia wore a girdle and bandeau of metal network, confining but not in the least concealing her breasts and hips.

The ruby brooch, pinned now to the shoulder of the tunic, glowed with an internal fire which owed nothing to the quivering torches. The bezel was of untarnished electrum, cast in the shape of a serpent swallowing its own tail. Cormac looked at the stone, wondering how much of the ancient wizards’ magic remained under the control of their descendants.

Antheia’s breasts were small but full enough to sag slightly within the mesh bandeau. She deliberately brushed her bosom across Cormac’s eyes as he stared at the ruby. The fabric of her tunic was slick as glass, and her nipples were erect.

“So you’re only interested in my jewelry?” she gibed, straightening away from the Gael. “And I took you for a man!”

Wulfhere flung a rack of rib bones under the table, then slurped his mead bowl empty. The floor was of stone hexagons like those of the temple, though these were all of the yellow marble. The masons had set them so that the red veins matched from slab to slab, with only the metal edging to break the pattern.

There were no hounds under the table to devour the Dane’s leavings. Cormac supposed the servants would clean up after the guests left the room. Creon, nibbling on fruit throughout the meal, smiled indulgently at the Dane. If he noticed his daughter’s interest in Cormac—and he could scarcely not have noticed—then he was complaisant regarding her behavior.

Not that the slim Greek could stop the reivers from doing anything they pleased . . .

Cormac looked at Antheia. She smiled and tossed her head. A golden net gathered the hair at the base of her skull, but beneath that the black strands fell free to her supple waist.

He was fed and rested and out of the sickly glare of the false sun. Antheia did please him. She would have pleased a monk vowed to celibacy.

Cormac lurched to his feet. The wine had even more of a bite than he’d realized, but he’d never in his life drunk so much that he couldn’t prove himself a man in whatever terms the arena required.

Antheia slipped a rushlight from its sconce. Her smile was enchantment itself. “Come,” she said. “There are some remains of the old magic in my apartment that will amuse you.”

Wulfhere set down his empty goblet. The servant bent to it. The Dane gave a rumbling belch that startled the little Atlantean away with a squeal.

“Be well, my daughter,” Creon said. “I’ll endeavor to entertain our other guest while you’re gone.”

Cormac followed the woman into a hallway which once had been paneled with ivory and rare woods. The organic materials had rotted to dust, leaving only the frames of precious metals clinging to the stone core. Servants peered nervously from alcoves.

Twenty yards down the corridor, Antheia opened a door and motioned Cormac inside before shutting it behind them. There was a latch but no lock. The panel was leather-covered wood. Curlicues of brass nails studded it in an attempt at decoration. The Gael could have punched his fist through the door.