The Year's Best Horror Stories 7 (23 page)

"I'm not
sure
the sun will rise in the morning," retorted Dama, "but there's plenty of evidence, yes, that Nemesius' villa was here. He disappeared in the first sack, probably burned with his buildings. His heirs sold the tract to a developer to run up a cheap apartment block-land outside the walls wasn't considered a good place for fancy houses right then. Which shows good sense, because when the Persians came back three years later they burned the apartments too."

There had been signs of that during daylight, ancient scorch marks on the rubble still heaped among the rank weeds. "Strange that no one rebuilt since," said Vettius, squinting to sharpen his twilit image of the barren acre before him.

"The site had gotten a reputation." Dama shrugged his own worn cloak loose, shifting his grip on the leathern chest he carried. "That's really what made it possible to find it." He gestured. "There's a lot of people in the city-the dregs who live here, even the ones a few levels removed who associate with them-who know what you mean when you ask about Nemesius' estate that was somewhere off the Sidon road. 'Oh, yeah,' they say, 'Nemesis Place'. Their faces tighten up and they add, 'What do you want with that, anyway? Nobody goes around there.'"

The little merchant flicked his gaze once more around the darkness. "Not quite true, of course. People cut down saplings for firewood here. Probably some of them sleep in the ruins now and again. They don't stay long, though. Nothing in particular, just uneasiness. 'Nemesis Place'."

"Balls," said Vettius, beginning to stride into the clearing. "I don't feel uneasy."

"You didn't look very comfortable when we slipped out the gate this afternoon," commented Dama as he trotted alongside, casket thumping his thigh. "Second thoughts, or you just don't like to sneak by your own men and not be able to scream that their bronze hasn't been polished?"

Vettius slowed and glanced at his friend. Surprise audible in his voice, he said, "You know me too well. I don't like them thinking they can ignore me just because I've told them we'll be gone three days, hunting in the hills. Dulcitius was supposed to command the gate guard today, but because they think I'm gone already he seems to have traded time with Furianus without having cleared it with me."

Dama stumbled, more in anger than from the fragment of stone in the brush. "Dulcitius," he repeated. "I've seen him hanging around my gate. Tell him for me that I'll kill him if I ever catch him there again."

"Don't fool with that one," said Vettius very softly.

"I'm not afraid," Dama snapped.

"Dama, you know about a lot of things I don't," the soldier said. "But take my word about killers. Don't ever think of going up against Dulcitius alone."

"This is far enough," said Dama, changing the subject as a pile of masonry, loomed up in front of them. Beside it he knelt to light a thick tallow candle with the slow match he had brought in a terra-cotta jar. "They followed the villa's ground plan when they built the apartments," he explained. "Used the old foundations. I checked yesterday and the cap slab over the hidden stairway is still in place."

"Did you open it?"

Dama ignored the suspicion leaking out in his friend's tones. "I couldn't, not without either you or a team of mules. Finally decided I'd use you."

The air was so still that the candle flame pulsed straight up at the moonless sky. By its light Vettius saw set in what had been a courtyard pavement the mosaic slab beneath which Nemesius had described his stairway as lying. The pattern laid over a counter-weighted bronze plate was of two intertwined dragons, one black and the other white. It was impossible to tell whether the beasts were battling, mating, or-just possibly-fissioning. Their tails were concealed beneath a concrete panel which had skewed across the mosaic when the building collapsed.

"I brought a sledge," said Dama, extracting the tool from the double sling beneath his right arm, "but I'll let you do the work."

"Umm," mumbled Vettius, considering the obstructing concrete. It had been part of a load-bearing wall, hand's-breath thick and fractured into a width of about three feet. The far end disappeared under a pile of other rubble. Vettius tossed aside his cloak and squatted over the slab, his hands turned backward to grip its irregular edge.

Dama frowned. "Dis, you'll need the hammer."

"Very likely," Vettius agreed, "but that's a lot of racket that I'd like to avoid if we can." He stiffened, his face flushing as tendons sprang out on his neck. The slab quivered. His linen tunic ripped down to his waist. Then his thighs straightened and the slab pivoted on its buried end, sliding back a foot before the off-balance soldier sat down on it.

"After-what? Twenty-six years?-you still have the ability to surprise me, Lucius," said Dama. He knelt and twisted at one of the circular tiles in the border until metal clicked. The mosaic rocked upward at an additional finger's pressure on one end.

Vettius stood, shrugged, and straightened his scabbard. "Let's go," he said, reaching for the candle.

"A moment." Dama folded his cloak, lumpy with hints of further preparations against unknown needs. From his sash he stripped everything but an additional candle and his own sword, a foot shorter than Vettius' spatha but heavy and chisel-sharp on both edges. Drawing it before he lifted the casket in his left hand he said, "All right, I'm ready."

"Are you that worried?" Vettius asked with a grin. "And if you are, why're you lugging that box along?"

"Because I am that worried. Nemesius says he carried it, and he knew a lot more about what he was getting into than you or I do."

The flight of brick steps was steep and narrow, dropping twenty feet to a pavement of living rock. The candle burned brightly although the air had a metallic odor, a hint that was more an aftertaste. The gallery into which the stairwell opened was a series of pilastered vaults whose peaks reached close to the surface. The candle suggested the magnitude it could not illuminate.

"Mithra," Vettius said, raising the light to the full height of his arm, "how can you have a secret vault when it's so big half of Antioch must have been down here swinging picks to excavate it?"

"Yes, I've wondered how he got it excavated too," Dama said. He did not amplify on the question.

The walls were veneered with colored marble. A narrow shelf at shoulder height divided the panels, smooth below but relieved with all manner of symbols and fanciful beasts from ledge to ceiling. The technical craftsmanship was good, but execution of the designs showed a harshness akin to that of battle standards.

"He doesn't seem to have needed all this room," the soldier remarked as they entered the third vault. It held a dozen long racks of equipment and stoppered bottles, but even that was but partial use of its volume.

They circled the racks. The last of the four vaults was not empty either. "Oh, dear Jesus," whispered Dama while his bigger companion muttered, "Mithra, Mithra, Mithra," under-his breath. A low stone dais stood in the center of the chamber. Nemesius must have been a tall man. The column of gold he referred to as being as tall as he was would have overtopped even Vettius standing beside it. He must have measured by the long cubit as well, for the diameter of the mass was certainly over five feet. Its surface was irregular, that of waves frozen as they chopped above a rip tide, and bloody streaks shot through the bulk of yellower metal.

"Oh, yes…" Vettius said, drawing his spatha and stepping toward the gold.

"Careful, Lucius," Dama warned. "I don't think we'd better hack off a piece yet. Nemesius gives a formula for 'unbinding' the column. I think I ought to read that first."

Vettius made a moue of irritation but said only, "We haven't found any tricks, but yeah, that doesn't mean that he didn't play some." He held the candle close as Dama opened the casket and unrolled the parchment to the place he needed.

The merchant had sheathed his own sword. Kneeling and drawing a deep breath, he read aloud in Greek, "In the names by which you were bound, Saloe, Pharippa, Phalertos, I unbind you."

Voice gathering strength from the husky whisper with which he had begun, Dama read the next line in Persian, using the old pronunciation: "By the metals in which you were locked in death, lead, sulphur, quicksilver, I free you to life."

There were five more sentences in the spell, each of them in a different tongue; Vettius understood none of them. One reminded him of phrases mumbled by a horseman who rode with a squadron of Sakai irregulars but who came from much farther east. At the climax, Dama's voice was an inhuman thunder explicable only as a trick of the room's acoustics. "Acca!" he shouted, "Acca! Acca!"

The words struck the gold like hammer-blows" and it slumped away from them. The column sagged, mushroomed, and began to flow across the dais before resolidifying. A single bright streak zigged from the main mass like a stream across mudflats. "What in the name of Dis did you do?" Vet-tius cried. The candle in his hand trembled as he held it up.

The metal seemed rigid. It had fallen into an irregular dome over most of the dais and some of the rock beneath it… "As if we'd heated it," Dama said. "But…" He reached up, ignited his other taper from the flame of the first, and set it on the floor beside the leather case. Then he stepped toward the dais while Vettius waited, torn by anger and indecision.

Two rivulets streamed outward to meet the Cappadocian's approach. He paused. Vettius shifted the spatha in his hand and said, "Dama, I-"

Dama sprang back as the golden streamlets froze, then scissored through the air. Hair-fine and rigid as sword edges, they slit the flapping hem of his tunic but missed the flesh. The dome itself lurched toward the men, moving from the dais with the deceptive speed of a millipede crawling across a board set in its path.

Dama scooped at the handle of the leather box. He caught it, missed his footing, and skidded it a dozen feet across the stone. Vettius had turned and run back toward the chamber's entrance. His candle went out at his first loping stride but the " one still lighted on the floor caught a glittering movement ahead of him. "Lucius!" Dama shouted, but the big soldier had seen the same tremor and his sword was slashing up and outward to block the golden thread extruded when the column first collapsed. Steel met gold and the softer metal sang as it parted. The severed tip spun to the floor and pooled while the remainder of the thin tentacle wavered, still blocking the only exit. Ruddy streaks rippled through the main bulk as it closed on its victims.

Vettius cut again at the gold before him but it had thickened after its initial injury, forming a bar that only notched on impact. With a python's speed it looped on the blade and snatched it from the Spaniard's grip. Dama had taken two steps and jumped, using his left hand to help boost his whole lithe body up onto the shoulder-high ledge. Vettius saw the leap, spun like a tiger to follow. Nemesius' casket was open on the floor. Dama stared, understood, and cried, "The quicksilver! Break it on-"

Vettius bent and snatched up the glittering bulb of liquid. He raised it high as the fluid mass threw out a sheet which lapped across his ankles. Able but unwilling to act he moaned, "Oh dear Gods, the gold!" and the sheet bulged into a quilt as the whole weight of metal began to flow over him.

Dama leaned forward, judging distance with the cool precision with which he would have weighed a bolt of silk in his warehouse. The swift arc of his sword overbalanced him as he knew it would. He was falling onto the swelling monster below at the instant his point shattered the glass ball in his friend's hand. Droplets of mercury spewed across the mass of gold and fused with it.

The chamber exploded in a flash of red. Momentarily the walls blazed with the staring, shadowless eyes of the beasts limned on the frieze. Slowly, dazzled but not blinded, the two men pulled themselves free of gritty muck while their retinas readapted to the light of the single candle. Where they had been exposed to the flash their skins had the crinkly, prickly feel of sunburn.

"You took a chance there," Vettius said matter-of-factly. Most of the gold seemed to have disintegrated into a powder of grayish metal, lead, to judge by its weight. Where the mercury had actually splashed were clinging pools with an evil, silvery luster. "When I locked up like I did, you could have gotten out along the ledge."

"I've got enough on my conscience without leaving a friend to that," Dama said.

"I knew what had to be done, but I just couldn't… destroy it," the soldier explained. He was on his knees, furrowing the edge of the lead dust deeply with his hands. "That gold… and I'm damned if I can understand why, now, but that gold was worth more to me than my life was. Guess that's what you need friends for, to do for you what you won't do for yourself."

Dama had retrieved the candle and held it high. "Some other time we'll talk that over with a philosopher. Now let's get out of here before we find some other goody our friend Nemesius left."

"Give me a moment. I want to find my sword."

The merchant snorted. "If you cared as much about some woman-
one
woman-as you do about the sword, Lucius, you'd be a happier man. You know, right now I feel like I had been gone the three days I told Sestia I would."

"Found it," said Vettius, carefully wiping hilt and blade on his tunic before sheathing the weapon. "Let's go back and greet your wife."

Later that night Dama understood a number of things. As stunned as a hanged man, he gurgled "Sestia!" through the shattered door to his wife's chamber. The centurion's sword and dagger were on a table near the bed, and Dulcitius was very quick; but Vettius had drawn before he kicked in the panel. Nothing would stop the overarm cut of his spatha, certainly not the bedding nor the two squirming bodies upon it.

13: Michael Bishop - Collaborating

How does it feel to be a two-headed man? Better, how does it feel to be two men with one body? Maybe we can tell you. We're writing this-though it's I, Robert, who is up at the moment-because we've been commissioned to tell you what it's like living inside the same skin another human being inhabits and because we have to have our say.