Brehane laid her ear on Calidas’ shoulder and his dour mood lightened somewhat as he ran his finger along the ridge of her jaw.
“Play something chipper!” Calidas called to the musicians behind the curtain, and soon the pipers and cymbalists took up a tune of alleviation, and conversation was rejoined.
Macula leaned over and asked Damis, “What was that name you said earlier? Bacchus?”
“Not Bacchus,” said Damis lowly. “Iacchus. The child of Persephone and Hades, born in the Underworld. “Some say another name for Dionysous, but they are wrong. An earlier god. Darker. Stranger.”
“Something about Eleusis in that?”
“Eleusis?” asked Atomus from across the table. “Did I hear you correctly?”
The chatter at the table died somewhat, Macula noticed, at a gesture of the hand from the Semite.
“I was telling Macula about my own participation in the Mysteries.”
“Ah, you are an initiate then?” Atomus asked.
“Yes. I have been trying to convince Macula to attend in the coming year.”
“Fat chance,” Calidas piped up. “If I remember Macula, he does not believe in the gods. Isn’t that right?”
“I believe in what I can put between my hands,” said Macula.
“Ah! A brimming wine goblet! A fat woman!” Bibaculus laughed, squeezing the girl at his side until she squealed and slapped his hairy arm.
“Or a sword,” finished Macula.
“But wasn’t Apollonius a devotee of Pythagoras?” Atomus asked. “How does one reconcile initiation in a Greek rite with monotheism?”
“By Jove!” Calidas spat into his cup. “You’re not a Christian, are you?”
The room shook with laughter.
Damis smiled thinly.
“In no other manner can one exhibit a fitting respect for the Divine being than by refusing to offer any victim at all; to Him we must not kindle fire or make promise unto Him of any sensible object whatsoever. For He needs nothing even from beings higher than ourselves. Nor is there any plant or animal which earth sends up or nourishes, to which some pollution is not incident. We should make use in relation to Him solely of that which issues not by the lips, but from the noblest faculty we possess, and that faculty is intelligence, which needs no organ. That is what my master taught.”
“Even Jews sacrifice,” said Calidas. “How else can that which is worth attaining be attained, save through offering and hardship?” he went on, squeezing Brehane’s hand. “Without the race there is no victory.”
“Is that what you believe, Atomus?” Damis asked.
“What makes you think I am a Jew?” Atomus countered.
“What are you then? A Simonian? One of these Valentinians?” He leaned closer. “Something else?”
“My father was a priest in the Temple when Titus burned it and carried off the Menorah for the Colosseum. What I knew the glory of the holy city I knew from stories. I grew up in its ruins. I was there when Hadrian burnt the Torah atop the Mount, breaking his promise to rebuild the Temple and renaming Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina.”
The atmosphere around the table had plummeted into a silent coldness, and Damis and Atomus glared at each other with naked but inscrutable dislike.
“This is too heated a discussion for the dinner table,” Calidas said, finding his victorious smile again. “Don’t be boring, Atomus. Macula? What say you, Damis?”
“Soleas poscere,” said Damis, signaling that the dinner had ended for him.
Dutifully, two of the slaves emerged with their sandals.
Macula, mouth full of dormice, got up, blinking in surprise. Something had roused the ire of the old mystic, but he had no idea what.
They got up from the table. Damis took him by the elbow and guided him to the lararium on the wall to pay their respects to the household gods depicted in miniature statuary in the recessed little niche.
As Macula began to bow, Damis gripped him tightly, causing him to straighten, and steered him out into the atrium, where two burly slaves standing in the vestibulum pulled open the doors for them.
Soon they were on the dim, torch lit road winding down the hill, the lights of town below, the moonlight playing on the rippling bay.
“I take it you’ve found something,” Macula said.
“I’m not sure. Take this, for I fear we shall know in a moment.”
From under his voluminous philosopher’s robes, Damis produced a short, glittering pugio in a silver frame scabbard which had been fashioned into a fanciful depiction of a man sinking a sword into the breast of some dragon-like monstrosity.
“Where did you get that?”
“Master Damis! Master Macula!”
Macula half-turned, to see the two well-built door slaves trotting down the road after them.
They had napkins bundled in their hands.
“Our master begs you not to forget your napkins.”
Macula narrowed his eyes. It was customary for the host of a party to wrap his guest’s personal napkins about some token gift before returning them.
Except they had taken their napkins with them.
As the first of the two big slaves reached them, Macula whipped the dagger free of its scabbard with a ring and thrust the point in his heart to the hilt.
He had to kick the body off the blade as the second slave lunged at him, something flashing in his fist.
Macula ducked under the swing and jabbed upwards, catching the second man under the chin, the point popping out of the crown of his skull.
He retrieved one of the napkins and wiped the blood from the blade.
The napkin of the first man had a dagger hidden in the folds.
“So I was right,” Damis breathed.
“What’s going on? Why did you bring a pugio to the party if you didn’t suspect anything?”
“Traveling with Apollonius I learned to take precautions. The star Sothis is ascendant. It is an ill-omen.”
“I thought you hated astrology.”
“I hate astrologers,” Damis corrected. “I thought very little of this errand of yours, true, when the night began.”
“Till you saw that Iacchus in the mosaic?”
“It raised my suspicions. You may not believe in the gods, Macula, and the guise in which you know them may indeed be a lie, but just as Jove is Zeus, once they had other names and other faces, terrible to behold.”
As he spoke, Damis removed a pouch from his robes and spilled its contents into his hand. There were six rings, each with a different colored intaglio gem, like the one he already wore, engraved with a symbol representing each of the seven stars.
He slipped them on one at a time.
“Iacchus,” he said, “the son of Hades and Demeter, who was later known as Bacchus and Dionysus, whose maenad cult was driven to terrible ecstasies, ripping apart goats with their bare hands. And yet the nameless cult of Iacchus, or Icthiacchilius as he is known, sacrificed a goat without horns beneath the moon and the Star of Sothia, and tore their victim apart with their teeth. And behind him, behind Demeter and Mithras, behind Nuada, Ashur, Neptune and Cthulhu, the great whirling chaos, the Womb of Darkness from which the gods spawned, as far outside our knowing as is dread Tartarus. Chaos. Tiamat. Azathoth.”
Macula shook his head, staring down at the moonlight on the blade of the dagger, which was engraved with seals and unreadable voces mysticae.
“So what do we tell Marcius Turbo?”
“I fear there is no time to return to Rome,” said Damis. “This night, foul things are afoot in that house, and must be stopped.”
At that moment, a shrill scream rang out from high on the hill, a woman’s scream, prolonged in agony, which dwindled till it was lost on the sea breeze.
Macula was already running back up the road with Damis huffing behind.
They found the door to the villa left unlocked by the servants and proceeded swiftly through the quiet house until they were again in the still-lit dining hall.
The tables had been cleared, save for Calidas.
Only two guests remained seated and feasting, but the repast laid out on the table was not the course that had been there when Macula and Damis had dined.
In the middle of the table was the naked, black skinned torso of a woman. Brehane, Macula realized immediately. The limbs and head had been ripped free by the attitude of the ragged flesh and strewn sinew spilling from the joints, and by the copious blood splattered wildly across the floor and the tunics of the two diners, who were busily gorging themselves face first in the open belly, tearing loose organs and raw meat with their teeth.
Macula wretched uncontrollably at the sight, and the two grisly diners lifted their heads at the sound like startled hyenas over carrion, sensing the approach of a lion.
“Macula!” said portly Bibaculus, gore and blood coursing down his fishy lips. He was actually grinning when Macula rushed forward and stabbed him in between the bloody rolls of his second and third chins.
The woman screeched and he silenced her, too, with a backhanded swipe of the keen blade that sent her spinning from the foul table.
“By the gods!” Macula muttered breathlessly, shrinking from the table. He had never retreated from bloodshed before, not in nineteen pitched battles.
“Did you notice the dishes we were served were representative of the zodiac?” Damis asked.
“I did, yes,” said Macula. “Lobster for Cancer. Like in the Satyircon.”
“I’m rubbing off on you,” Damis said. “Yet there were three tables, and the others had four dishes. Four signs.”
“We only had three.”
“We had four,” he said grimly, gesturing to the table. “The fourth was Virgo, the Maiden.”
“I’ve never seen such a thing. Not even among blood-mad Celts. I can’t believe that Calidas….that Jew Atomus must have him bewitched.”
Damis went to the wall of the banquet hall.
“And in the lararium, did you notice the household gods?”
“You pulled me away so fast…” Macula said, stumbling behind him.
“Look,” he said, pointing to the miniature temple in the niche on the wall.
Macula peered at the statues. There was ever-present Augustus, and other innocuous deities. But in the shadows of the recess there was a strange, misshapen statuette carved of some dark substance. It was something not unlike depictions of the fabled Kraken he had seen. Its appearance was only vaguely humanoid, its bulbous head lolling on sagging shoulders draped to the finned, crocodilian feet with fanciful tentacles and a myriad of protruding spikes. Whatever sculptor had executed this horrid work, they had dwelt upon its most repulsive aspects in fine detail.
His lip curled at the vile thing, and he knocked aside the other household gods to get at it and fling it to the floor. Yet when his hand closed on it, he found it attached by some obscure mechanism. The small statue was a fulcrum, and when he drew it forward, something clicked and the panel of the wall swung outward revealing hidden stairs that sank beneath the house.
“A spelaeum,” whispered Damis, looking over his shoulder at the dark stone steps. “An underground temple of the Mysteries of Mithras, repurposed to some evil design.”
From the depths they could hear unified murmurs, and the intermittent clash of cymbals. The thick scent of incense wafted up to them.
“Qetoret,” Damis said, sniffing. “Hold fast to your dagger, Macula,” he urged. “If you let it go it cannot protect you.”
Macula grunted. He hardly needed a weapon against this lot. He was infuriated enough at the death of the girl to kill them all with his bare hands.
He descended first, Damis quick on his heels.
The stair wound once around a central column and emptied into a long subterranean chamber opposite a recessed, apse-shaped wall in which a statue of Mithras slaughtering a bull normally sat. The proper statue was in broken fragments on the floor. There was a slab of stone there, and Calidas lay upon it naked, the gaping, staring head of Brehane propped over his loins.
Atomus stood over him in a flamen’s robe and leather apex cap, dipping a horsehair brush in a bowl of blood and painting every inch of him, muttering in some unidentifiable speech the whole time.
Raised stone benches lined either side of the chamber, and the other party guests reclined there nude, idly chewing on the legs and arms of the dead girl, as a pair of silent slaves clashed cymbals and looked on stoically.
“Atomus!” Damis roared, his voice reverberating in the chamber.
Startled, Atomus interposed himself behind the slab, kicking over the bowl of blood in his haste.
Calidas, too, sat up and swung his long muscular legs over the edge, his toes alighting in the pooling blood.
The slaves discarded their cymbals and rushed them. Macula dispatched them both with two thrusts.
“Calidas,” Macula said, his voice trembling. “Why have you done this?”
Calidas stood, a crimson demigod, the head of the black woman cradled in one arm.
“I am terrified of death, Macula. I sought solace in the Mysteries, but do you know their secret? A sip of kykeon, and the opening of the mind to….gods, Macula. Do you know what horrors lie beyond this life?”
“None worse than those you have enacted this night,” said Macula.
“You’re wrong. You haven’t seen them. I will not die, Macula. I will not go where they are. Atomus promised me immortality. I would devour every girl in Rome to stave off death.”
“Except Atomus lied,” Damis said. “He is a deceiver.”
“No,” said Atomus. “I did not lie. And you are too late, Damis. The rite is completed.”
Calidas stumbled then, and the head of Berhane tumbled from his hand. He leaned back against the altar with its red outline of his body, touched his own face, and then pitched violently forward into the pool of blood on his hands and knees.
The other dinner guests put their backs to the walls of the chamber, warily looking from the men in the doorway to Atomus and Calidas.
“What have you done, Atomus?” Damis breathed, as Calidas shook and groaned on the floor.
“I have given this mighty Roman champion his wish, to have the undying body of a god,” said Atomus.
“Which god?” Damis asked fearfully, as Calidas’ flesh began to tear and burst, long spines like porcupine quills shivering out from his shoulders and arms.
“I served another once,” said Atomus, “when I had another name. I prayed that HaShem might make me His messiah, that I might call upon legions of angels to crush Rome, but my prayers were never answered. So I turned to another to avenge my people.”
“To what? Some evil thing….” Macula stammered, watching Calidas shake and swell.
“The ant you crush beneath your sandal thinks you evil, Roman,” said Atomus.
“Strike, Macula!” Damis shouted, shoving Macula forward.
But as he advanced down the center aisle of the spelaeum, Macula paused.
Calidas rose. He had changed. His bloodstained flesh had flowed and twisted during Atomus’ speech, and what opened its eyes and spread out its long, apish arms was not Salonius Calidas, beloved of the Circus Maximus. What stood at the base of the altar was, he knew, the thing Icthiacchilius, for Atomus called out its name in wild ecstasy.
“Go forth, Dread Icthiacchilus, High Satrap of Xoth!”
It lurched through the dim lamplight, and the remaining cultists shrieked in abject terror at the sight of the blood-red thing they had unwittingly brought forth.
Its bulky head bore a wide maw of serrated teeth half hidden behind a curtain of drooping, questing tendrils, and bulging, frog-like void black eyes that twitched and surveyed its surroundings independently of each other. Its sloping shoulders were draped with long scarlet tentacles that writhed and brushed the floor. The muscular arms that reached from beneath the living mass were covered all over in quivering black urchin-like spines, and terminated in five pulsing appendages that glowed with
alien patterns of sickly green luminescence. Its unseen feet slapped the bloody floor as it shambled forward, and oddly situated orifices gasped open on its body and sucked at the air with an alarming, regular hiss.
At the sound of Atomus’ voice, it whirled and splayed one hand of lashing tendrils about his face, engulfing his head. The glowing nodules about its hand shined briefly, and there was a crackling, slurping sound. Copious blood and liquefied flesh flowed over its serpentine fingers, as the headless body first drew in on itself like a draining waterskin, then fell away and crumpled in an unrecognizable heap of sagging matter.
The thing was visibly larger.
The others screamed, men and women, but sank to the floor, unable to flee.
Damis pulled Macula back.
“Up the stairs!” he shouted.
Macula retreated backwards, the dagger held before him. He focused on its shining blade so he would not see the bloody thing Icthiacchilus consuming the others. His whole attention, the entirety of his mind, dwelt solely upon the nine inches of unnaturally bright metal. It was the only thing that existed in this dark, chthonic world of moving nightmares. He even fancied he could hear the metal reverberating, drowning out the insane shrieks and mad, resigned laughter of the other victims.
Damis closed the hidden door behind them as the last of the fear-mad screams subsided.
“Why didn’t they run?” he wondered aloud.
“Paralyzed. The pugio and these rings protect our minds,” Damis said.
There was a wet snort from behind the door, and they heard it ascending heavy step by slapping step.
Macula backed away, brandishing the knife.
“Will this kill it, Damis?”
“I don’t know,” the old Assyrian confessed. “It is like an infant now, at its most vulnerable. Perhaps…”
“If not this, what?” he urged, as something like a great sack of skins thudded against the back of the lararium and a tremendous crack appeared in the door.
In the next instant it burst through the hidden door. It was four times its original size, and had to duck and squeeze through the frame.
Tales of Cthulhu Invictus Page 7