Out of the Waters (55 page)

The ape-man dropped to all fours. Hedia thought he planned to run in his chosen direction until the ships caught them; and perhaps that was all that had been in his bestial mind until his knuckle touched the crystal disk.

Lann paused, as motionless as a statue covered with shaggy fur. Then, with the deliberation of a torturer raising the poker he had heated, he turned with the disk toward the unseen barrier between them and Typhon.

Hedia wrung her hands. She shifted her eyes from the crouching ape-man, back to the way they had come. She couldn't see the Minoi, but expectation of their arrival frightened her less than what the ape-man was doing.

She couldn't bring herself to look at what was happening beyond the barrier. Even so she was aware at the corners of her eyes that something twisted and flowed. It moved like a serpent or a thousand serpents, and she knew what it was even without looking; what it was, and how huge it was.

The ape-man grunted with angry satisfaction. He was using both hands to force the edge of the disk against
nothing
. The crystal suddenly lurched forward against his pressure.

He drew back quickly and got to his feet. The lens swung in his left hand; it appeared unharmed.

“Lann, what have you done?” Hedia said. Tiny cracks were running across the surface of the unseen, like tendrils of mold through bread.

The ape-man grunted and gestured her on. When she hesitated, he caught her shoulder with his free hand and dragged her. She stumbled for a dozen steps before she properly got her feet under her so that she could keep up. Lann released her only when he was sure that she would follow at his own best speed.

Hedia glanced over her shoulder as she trotted beside the ape-man. The cracks were expanding swiftly.

And the immensity beyond writhed closer.

*   *   *

V
ARUS STOOD IN A CORNER
of the Forum, looking up at the Citadel and the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. It was past the close of business, but the pavement was still crowded.

The son of Gaius Saxa wasn't being jostled, of course. A contingent of servants faced outward around him, shoulder to shoulder. That kept him clear to the length of his arm.

No one, including Candidus who was in charge of the escort, had asked Varus why he wanted to stand by himself in the Forum. He wasn't sure that any of the servants had even wondered.

Everyone in Saxa's household knew that the master's son was a literary sort who pondered things that no ordinary person could even imagine. A reputation for being unfathomably strange seemed to buy one a degree of tolerance for acts that would have aroused comment if committed by someone normal.

Varus smiled wistfully. He wasn't sure himself why he had chosen the Forum for what he had come to do. This wasn't where Carce had first been settled: traditionally, that had been the Palatine Hill, behind him. The Citadel would have provided a better view of present-day Carce, and it had been the religious and military core when the city first came to prominence.

But the Forum had been and to a degree remained the civil heart of Carce, and a city
was
its citizens. The first great act of the citizens of Carce had been to drain the Forum through the Cloaca Maxima, transforming a marshy pasture into a plain in which they could assemble and decide their laws. Rather than to look down on the Forum from the Citadel, Varus had chosen to stand where his forefathers had gathered in times of peace.

His vision had shown him Typhon engulfing the Forum. But Typhon, the Sibyl had told him, was not the business of Gaius Varus.…

Varus unrolled the book of Egyptian magic in his mind. He found the verse and read in a loud voice, “I open the doors of heaven!”

A jagged gash tore soundlessly through the sky, splitting it down to the pavement beside Varus—where the Sibyl was now standing. There were no stars in the gap between halves of cloud-swept blue.

“Sibyl?” he said in surprise. “I thought … that is, you've never come to me this way before. In Carce. I thought I'd be climbing the hill to see you as usual.”

The Sibyl sniffed. “All this is mummery, Lord Varus,” she said, gesturing toward the crack in the sky. “I am a shadow of your will, no more. How shall a shadow direct the wizard who casts her?”

She gave him one of her unreadable smiles and patted his arm. Looking about the Forum, she said, “In my day, Evander pastured his cows in this valley. Everything changes, Lord Varus. Everything changes, and eventually everything ends.”

If you're not real, then how can you talk about Evander?
Varus thought.

He grinned in sudden realization. The statement had brightened his mood by posing him the kind of question he understood: a literary question. Now he could smile as he considered the matter that had brought him—brought them—here.

“Sibyl,” he said, “what is Procron doing that I should stop? If he simply lives in that barren world, what harm can he do to Carce?”

“That place, that barren world…,” the Sibyl said. She turned away from him to view the huge hall which Aemilius Paullus had built from the spoils of conquered Greece. “Is this world, this Earth, Lord Varus. In the distant future when there are no men save Procron himself in exile, but still the Earth. He hates his fellow Minoi, because they drove him out of Atlantis.”

She paused to look up at the Citadel. Seemingly off the subject, she said, “You thought Evander was a myth, did you not, Varus?”

Varus felt his smile spread wider. “I thought
you
were a myth, Sibyl,” he said. “I have made other mistakes besides that.”

“If it is a mistake,” the Sibyl said musingly. “If it really is.”

In a businesslike, relatively firm, voice, she went on, “Procron cannot return from his place of exile, but his powers gain him agents in other times. He works to loose Typhon from the place he was bound. Typhon will destroy Atlantis and the Minoi; but he will destroy all things, save Typhon himself.”

Varus took a deep breath. Members of a family—two families, he realized—were sacrificing at the altar in front of the ancient Temple of Saturn. The heads of house were probably consecrating a marriage contract. They were planning for the future; a future which would not exist, for them or for anyone, unless Gaius Varus prevented an Atlantean sorcerer from freeing the greatest of the Earthborn Giants.

The Sibyl looked at him and smiled again, this time without the gentle humor she had shown before. “You cannot prevent Procron from loosing Typhon,” she said, responding to Varus' unvoiced thoughts, “because Typhon is already loose. What you must do is to slay Procron before he does further harm. And you see—”

Her lined face was suddenly grim, as fearsome as a bolt of lightning.

“—Procron is no more. His body is dead, and the skull that rules him is in a dimension that nothing human can reach; not even the Sibyl, who once was human and is now the shadow of a great wizard.”

A small fire smoked on the altar. The families watched in satisfied silence as the priest, his arms lifted, prayed to Saturn … the king of the gods before his son Jupiter supplanted him. Saturn, who presided over the Golden Age, when all men were happy and the world was at peace.

From the crack in the sky oozed Typhon in hellish majesty: swelling, spreading, devouring all things and crushing all things. Destroying the great buildings of Carce, then destroying the very hills on which the city had been founded. All things for all time—dead and gone.

“Strong necessity demands—”
the Sibyl cried.

“—that these things be accomplished!” Varus concluded in a thin, cracked voice.

Candidus turned, frowning as he tried to understand the words. Whatever he saw in his master's face prevented him from speaking.

*   *   *

C
ORYLUS FELT THE RAILING
grow firm again beneath his gauntleted grip. He breathed a sigh of relief that reminded him of how disconcerted he had been when reality dissolved.

He wasn't a good sailor. The way a ship's deck moved even when it was tied up in harbor affected a part of him beyond the real danger involved. He liked to keep one hand on a rope or, better, the mast or a railing. What was true on water was doubly true on this vessel, floating several hundred feet above the ground.

Except that the ship
was
on water, snugged to a bollard in the stern and with the bow anchor hooked into a niche in the quay. They were in Ostia, the old port at the mouth of the Tiber, at one of the berths on the breakwater which Corylus remembered were generally used by small trading vessels from the west. The sunlit stone pavement reeked with the odor of Spanish fish sauce, the residue of decades of jars dropped during unloading.

The sprite chirped in excitement as she looked around; the Ancient slouched in the stern, much as he had done during the whole voyage. So far things were the same; but this
wasn't
the ship they'd boarded in the dream world.

It was a vessel of the same design, its sails now folded vertical against the mast, but the bits of gear on the deck or hanging from the railing—a painted water jar; leather pouches embroidered with spines of some kind; a broken stone knife with a grip of deer horn—hadn't been on the ship which they had sailed into the brightness. The deck wasn't scarred by claws from when the Ancient leaped aboard, but there were nicks and dents which Corylus—who
noticed
wood—hadn't seen before.

Four Servitors stood amidships, as motionless as glass statues.

He turned to the sprite, but before he could ask a question she bubbled, “This ship brought the magicians from the Western Isles! It must be the only one left, whenever in time this is.”

She looked thoughtful again. “I wonder if we would have had to stay in the ghost world if this ship had been destroyed along with everything else about Atlantis?”

The harbor was busy, but a sunken hulk lay in the berth between the Atlantean ship and the end of the quay, and no one was aboard the undecked vessel to sternward except for a cat—which was sleeping. The ship's arrival would have aroused interest at least from the customs authorities, though, even if the westerners had paddled in on the surface at night.

Corylus wondered if they had used magic on the officials as they had on Sempronius Tardus, or if they simply paid them off. The latter would have been good enough and had less risk of arousing suspicion. Though the glass men …

“Cousin?” he said. “Are the Servitors, ah—”

Alive was the wrong word.

“—able to move, or is it just the Atlanteans who can make them do that?”

“Oh, one of the magicians has the key from a Minos,” the sprite said. “His talisman. That's how they managed to fly the ship, and they use the Servitors too. Though right now—”

She stepped to the nearest of the four and tapped her finger against the hollow of its ear, a ridged dimple in the smooth skull.

“—they've been ordered to wait unless someone tries to board the ship. You're all right unless you get off and try to get back on.”

She looked around again, her enthusiasm waning. “What are you going to do, cousin? There aren't any trees around here. We should go somewhere that has trees.”

Corylus sucked in his lips sourly. He didn't know what to do. He hadn't thought that far ahead.

He grinned suddenly.
Well, I didn't know I'd be arriving in Ostia until this moment, so I don't think I'll flog myself too severely
.

Aloud—to settle his thoughts; neither of his companions could be of the slightest help with the question—he said, “I don't have money—”

Pulto had carried his purse.

“—and I don't imagine a port hostler will give me mules and a cart on credit, even if I take off this armor.”

Which I'd better do. Swanning about armed and wearing armor that shines like a bonfire is pretty well guaranteed to bring the attention of the Watch Detachment here in Ostia, not to mention the Praetorian Guard if I somehow reached Carce
.

Corylus took off the helmet and started turning the latches of the breastplate. “I guess,” he said to the sprite, “that I'll hike into Carce, go to—”

His apartment or Saxa's house? The latter, because it was closer to the Ostian Gate where he'd enter the city. The servants knew him as a friend of the family; someone would find him a clean tunic and give him a meal.

His stomach growled at the thought. He wasn't starving, but food—a loaf of real bread in place of the bland
putty
in the ship's hold—was suddenly his first priority. That too would have to wait till he reached Carce, unless he tried snatching a loaf from a stallkeeper here.

Unless—

“Can we fly here, cousin?” he asked. “I mean, now that we're back in the—”

What term had she used?

“—the waking world?”

“Of course,” the sprite said. “At least if he—”

She nodded toward the grinning Ancient.

“—is more powerful than the western magicians. I think he is, but there
are
three of them.”

She looked at the open cart which was clattering down the quay toward them behind a pair of mules. One of the magicians who had accompanied Tardus to the theater was driving; the other two were in back with a bundle which squirmed beneath the mat that concealed it.

Pandareus, trussed but conscious
.

The cart pulled up alongside the ship. The driver was the North African. He slid from his seat, drawing a curved knife. A second magician got out of the back of the wagon, holding an axe with a stone head. The ship floated with its deck almost level with the pavement.

They're seeing a ragged stranger whom they probably take for a sneak thief,
Corylus realized. He bent.

The westerners glanced at one another to coordinate their attack. They jumped aboard simultaneously, to either side of him.