Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Junonius finding the dagger the man had dropped into the crescent of dried death surrounding the girl’s body.

  Then that moment, too, moved into what-was.

  Ismene quivered behind Mira and she rotated in her sister’s embrace, her own hands moving under her seer’s control. One rose to block the racking swipe of Ismene’s nails. The other held her sister’s wrist and the dagger she’d almost whipped at their brother’s head.

  “Why did you let this happen?” The screams pouring from Ismene deafened Mira’s ears. “Why, brother?”

  Mira heard only the rising inflection and panicked tone of her sister’s voice. In her seer, new crescents formed around each boy, but they weren’t as practiced at killing as the human half of the Dracos. He’d been quick. Merciful, even. The boys’ agony spread out through Mira’s seer like wastewater thickened by mud and slaughter.

  Ismene’s breathing faltered. “Why?” She’d blanched as if she bled out, too. But she’d stopped screaming.

  Faustus let go of the rock face. His hands dropped to his sides. “We are all bound by the fate our father sees.” He didn’t look at them—he didn’t turn or acknowledge what was happening behind him. “Bound by his war, no matter the costs.” He just walked away.

  3

  Andreas Theodulus Sisto watched his legatus drop the dagger and back away from the dead girl, not stride out, as he would have expected of a warrior with purpose. Ladon stood rigid in the courtyard, the smell of fresh death spreading through the air like mist, like fine droplets of scarlet Fate blood. He blinked only once.

  For a moment, Ladon looked less the general and more the man. But neither Andreas or Ladon were men. They were the core of the Legio Draconis. Their purpose shaped their bodies and sharpened their minds—and gave a fine edge to their gifts. To Ladon’s beast. To the constant enthralling ‘calling scents’ swirling in the back of Andreas’s throat.

  Losing their reason was not an option. Losing their rules would only loosen their gifts and they’d spin high like a vortex, scouring the world to nothing by white sand and bleached bone.

  So when they walked from the villa, two men and a dragon whose hide gleamed with blindingly bright fury, Andreas held his shoulders square and his stride forward. He led his legatus toward their pawing horses. The animals half-snorted, half-whinnied, both jittering and sidestepping each time a shadow moved or the tail of Ladon’s beast scratched through the sand.

  The horses smelled the death in the air. Andreas patted his stallion’s snout. His beast, too, must hold its purpose.

  They rode west, toward the sea and the ships of Andreas’s father, on the labored backs of their war steeds, Ladon’s Dragon pacing their mounts. Behind them, Vesuvius smoked. Respite at sea would clear away the acrid scents of both blade and mountain, and bring them back to their senses.

  But Ladon slowed his stallion, pulling on the animal’s reins as he looked east. He hadn’t spoken since they’d ridden from the villa, nor had he given voice to Dragon’s lights and patterns. If they conversed between themselves, Andreas did not sense it.

  Not that he could. His gifts did not include sensing the thought-words of the beasts. Only Ladon and his sister, the Dracas, knew the true minds of the dragons.

  Once, long ago, in the first moment Andreas had stepped from behind his goddess mother and into the bright daylight of the Legio Draconis camp—when, for the first time, all colors and all patterns had rolled off the beasts and onto his then-slight frame—he’d halted in his young tracks. The beasts walked free within the encampment, two dragons who were not animals but gods, rubbing against trees and men with joy and trust, breathing out brilliant warmth as flame and spice-scented breath.

  The young Andreas had reached out, his fingers extended, as if to ask the beasts if they, too, would do the same for him. If they would accept his prayers:

  Give my eyes all colors of light and darkness.

  Give my mouth all flavors of spice, my breath your truth.

  Set me here, set me well, set me good.

  And for that moment, he felt certain he understood the meaning of the lights traveling their hides. Understood the weight of structure and the purpose of building. Understood the sacred.

  But he’d blinked his young eyes and the sacred had vanished. Invisible like Dragon, gone to blend into the writhing world.

  That day, the two dragons had opened his eyes. The gods gave the world an order, a set of instructions, and those instructions spun across the beast’s skin. If Andreas was to be a man, he’d heed the sacred. He’d take his vow to the Legio. And he’d work every moment—every single second—to earn the trust of the beasts and their humans.

  Andreas knew what lay to the east. The grand olive tree whispered to the beast, as it often did, and Ladon turned them away from the coast, toward the grove.

  Two centuries Andreas had ridden with the dragons. Two centuries watching over both the brother and the sister. Andreas rose to the level of tribunus, the Second of the Legio Draconis, Ladon’s right hand, though he could have been his own legatus. He could have been Emperor, if he’d wanted. If he’d loosen his strength and taken what, for him, would have been power easily grasped.

  But his mother’s enthralling gifts were both prize and curse: Every gain cost a portion of soul. A slice of mind. A splinter of family. When design was disrupted in one place, the pattern compensated somewhere else. If it didn’t, it could not vanish into the world.

  So Andreas trusted in the designs of the beasts and in his rules and his ways.

  He stopped with his legatus and his legatus’s dragon in the grove, under the grand olive tree. He offered savory dried meats and crisp bread, but Ladon did not eat. Ladon stared down at the meal held in Andreas’s hand, his eyes without need, and proclaimed, once again, that he touched no food when he fought. Neither did the beast, though the patterns circulating over Dragon’s hide told Andreas a different story of hunger.

  Again, he said nothing. A ‘calling scent’ crept into the back of his mouth and nose—a wave of ‘command’ that if Ladon breathed it in would compel him to eat—but Andreas swallowed it down into his own gut.

  Every gain cost a grain of soul and Andreas only paid when gain and grain balanced perfectly.

  So he set about collecting olives from the singing branches of the miracle tree. He’d sat under it before, seen its glow in the darkest of nights, the ghost lights dancing along its twisted and rough bark the same way they danced in great clarity over Dragon. Sitting with his back against a cold boulder and staring unendingly at a tree three times the size of the other olive trees, he watched its leaves flitting as if they were birds, alive and separate, his awe seeping from his pores like sweat.

  The first time, he’d come alone as a child and without orders, before he’d taken his position within the Legio Daconis. He’d wanted to see for himself. To know this sacred place. To understand the godlings who had dropped naked into this world and to whom he now dedicated his life.

  So Andreas, the half-godling born of a goddess—the same as, yet very different from, his legatus—collected olives from the singing branches of the tree. The smooth skin of each fruit felt firm between his fingers, their scent sweet and poignant and alive. They shimmered with hidden lights, glimmers which would not become visible until full night, but he knew they were there, waiting.

  Beyond the tree, on the horizon, Vesuvius smoldered. Curls rose into the darkening sky, and under his feet the ground grumbled in response.

  Perhaps he should argue with his legatus. Three paces away, Ladon leaned against his beast, the black of his tunic and leathers as dark as what remained of his hair. He’d nearly shaved his head when the Fates murdered his niece, the Dracia, cutting his black hair shorter than was customary for a man of his station. Ladon’s sister had done the same.

  Andreas took this self-mutilation as both a sign of mourning and an omen of danger. Ladon and his sister paid this grain of their bodies to fuel the rage that would gain them
revenge.

  A shiver had taken Andreas’s bones when Ladon stalked through their villa in Rome, gladius drawn, bellowing answers to his sister’s shrieks. Both Dracae had gone into the markets shortly after, vanishing into the crowds, their dragons hiding themselves in patterns mimicking the world.

  Many Fates died that day, ripped to stinking meat by invisible dragon talons.

  One more had died the noon of this day, the final retribution for the evil of Fates.

  Evil which made no sense. Stupid and violent, it gouged the grand design set by the gods the same way Dragon’s talons gouged the dirt. The Jani caused the death of their own child when they cut down the Dracia and her father outside the Dracas’s villa.

  Faustus knew what would happen. Of this, Andreas was certain. Fates knew the fates of their own. Yet he did it anyway. Andreas’s jaw clenched. And the Fates called his breed malevolent.

  He now leaned against the grand olive tree’s twisted trunk, a satchel of olives in his hand. He would not taste the true beauty filling his bag. It was not his place to partake of the tree’s fruit. Barbarians might drop to their knees at his feet and Fates run from his sword, but the sacred was not a line he crossed.

  The setting sun blazed in the grand olive’s branches, filling its leaves and fruit with the same violence sure to erupt soon from the cinder cone on the horizon. The gentle breeze blew in from the sea full of salt and the calls of distant gulls. It glided over Andreas’s tongue as much as it tickled his skin.

  He glanced up at the wisps above Vesuvius. This far away, they’d probably survive, if the mountain decided to burst tonight.

  Probably.

  “We should move closer to the coast.” He nodded toward the mountain.

  Ladon’s shoulders moved only enough to show he heard Andreas’s words. He did not respond.

  A twinge of anger poked up from Andreas’s gut. A prick, like a needle to the skin. And just enough to pull into his consciousness the reality of his mother’s gift.

  He felt his ‘calling scents’, his enthralling ways, rise in his throat and into his breath. He could compel both man and beast to leave, if he chose that path. They’d bow to his will. Only he and his mother had the strength to manipulate the dragons in such a way. Only they were powerful enough.

  Every day Andreas faced the greatest temptation of any man: He could wield a weapon beyond any other—the force of the Dracae—but he did not. He would not. What he lost should he do so went far, far beyond what he might gain. The dragons trusted him.

  Behind him, the beast snorted, setting his big head on his forelimbs as he fully retracted his talons. His colors and patterns slowed and lost their vividness, a dragon response to fatigue akin to the dark patches under Ladon’s eyes and Andreas’s own drooping eyelids.

  They’d traveled hard, once they’d known where the Jani Fates hid. Ridden and run and stalked with nothing more than retribution spinning the minds of the man and beast. The Jani were to learn what it felt like to lose someone so important. Ladon took payment.

  Andreas stepped aside as the beast undulated over the tree’s roots. Dragon settled himself into the folds, contorting like a giant cat. Bigger than a work horse but smaller than some of the exotic animals he’d seen imported from Africa and the Far East, the beast wouldn’t stand out when he fell into sleep. He’d appear as a mound built of the tree’s roots.

  Andreas dropped away from the trunk as the beast took up his place. “Resting here is not wise.” But neither man nor beast listened to his words.

  “The land may growl but we will face whatever the mountain spits.” Ladon placed his hand on the beast’s neck.

  Andreas understood: The choice to leave did not matter. Not anymore. The beast and the man had set this pattern.

  “He wishes to rest here one last time. Before the mountain takes this place.” Ladon nodded toward Vesuvius. He stroked his hand across the back of his shaved head.

  Two centuries and Andreas had never seen such behavior from either Ladon or his sister. Could his legatus regret his actions? Which made no sense. The Fates called this war. Philosophy was not the correct, core response, nor should it be. Justice was served, rules followed. No patterns displaced.

  But Ladon stared toward the mountain, his thoughts obviously not on his settling dragon. And he rubbed his head again. The faint whiff of his too-short hair against the skin of his palm sent renewed shivers through Andreas’s bones. An omen, it was. Andreas should have understood when both of the dragons’ humans cut away their dark hair. An omen of death.

  “You go, my friend. No need for you to face this problem with us.” Ladon had spoken the same words many times since they tracked the Jani Fates.

  “Where would I go?” Andreas threw the satchel of olives toward Ladon’s face. The need to make his commander see reason slid into his vision. His mind conjured a reasonable version of Ladon, one without this stupidity: the man he’d served these centuries, clear-minded and well-groomed. Andreas’s imagination held out the ideal as comparison to the real man standing in front of him now with a bowed head and hands gripping a fruit-filled bag.

  But the vision was a phantom of Andreas’s wants. Nothing more. Unlike a Fate, he did not see, only viewed his own needs. And also unlike a Fate, he served his godling. He did not agitate violence in order to destroy.

  Ladon’s face changed—he spoke inside his head to the beast. Andreas knew of only one way to describe the expression: When the human communicated with the beast, the man’s eyes looked as if they viewed something very far away, something which appeared to everyone else as tiny. But Ladon saw it in minute and exquisite detail.

  “He wishes me to eat.” Ladon looped the satchel of olives over his shoulder and his gaze dropped from the mountain to the beast’s elongated head.

  They spoke their silent words and a small flame curled from Dragon. A brief smile touched Ladon’s mouth and he patted the beast once more. “I will. Rest, my friend.”

  There’d be no leaving for a full day, if the beast slept. They’d be stuck here as the mountain spit vile fumes and coated their skin with cutting dust. Andreas nodded and stepped back. He’d get his pack and tend the horses. He could do nothing else.

  Dragon’s patterns slowed, then stopped. His hide took on the muted colors of the trunk and the gritty textures of the ground. He blended into the tree, his respiration slowing and his surface cooling to match the land.

  Ladon stood under the grand olive tree, next to the mound of his dragon. No birds called. No animals scurried. Only the sound of the salt rustle of branches and the pounding of Andreas’s own heart filled the night.

  On the horizon, the haze surrounding the mountain’s crest glowed sick and terrible as the setting sun’s last rays stretched inward from the sea. Ladon would eat now, because his beast requested it. He’d have his fill of olives one last time from this tree that should bring Andreas’s commander calm. This one place in all the Empire where he should be able to think and understand and find his reason again.

  Maybe the eruption would come before the beast awoke. Maybe it wouldn’t.

  Andreas didn’t think Ladon had the will to fight his way through the ash, if it did.

  4

  Mira and Ismene rode five hours before the first explosion blew the top of the cinder cone southwest, away from them and toward Pompeii. Death snowed down as huge flakes, but more like glass than ice. It sliced as it fell. Crunched underfoot, as if Mira and Ismene ran on the broken wares of the gods themselves.

  For once, Faustus had not used his future-seer to constrain Mira and Ismene. He didn’t pronounce their fate or issue orders to force what he saw to come to pass. No, this time, he leaped onto his horse and rode away without them. Without anyone, his back to Ismene’s bitter spitting and unending screeches. He vanished into the wilderness.

  Mira’s present-seer saw nothing of him. Nor did she care to ask it again and again and again for knowledge of his whereabouts. The gods could take his life and behea
d their triad for all she cared. She’d suffer that fate to see him punished.

  As would Ismene.

  For the first time since they were children, since they’d each clung to their mothers’ legs under the watchful eye of their godling father, Mira and Ismene were left to their own fate, free of the knowledge of their future.

  Yet here she was, running into the ashfall instead of away from it, dragged forward by what-was instead of what-will-be.

  Ismene pulled her over cracks and between boulders. They moved faster than they should, Ismene demanding Mira use her seer to find the best footing: “Which way? What angle? Tell me!”

  The hairs on Mira’s arms stood on end. The air hissed like a cornered creature, a sound she felt more than heard. The ash rubbed against itself in little, shattering clicks.

  Mira had wanted to go to the villa, to care for the bodies of the children. They should not vanish forever under a thick layer of ash. But Ismene clawed and screamed and raked her demands over Mira’s mind.

  So now, behind them, lightning flashed across the remains of Vesuvius’s summit. Ash hung solid around the split cone as if carved into the sky itself—as if the gods pressed their fury into the clouds like a hoof into mud. Or Ismene’s fingers into Mira’s flesh.

  The two Fates rode hard until both mares stumbled and wheezed. Then they left the animals crumpled on the ground, legs folded under them, heads bowed. Ismene paid no heed and did nothing to ease their suffering. She ran away into the gray air, leaving Mira behind.

  Mira had no choice but to follow, or she’d lose her sister in the dust. So she left the horses to die alone, slowly. With more pain than the poor mares deserved.

  They should not be here, chasing after this war caused by their father, but what she wanted—what her seers saw—meant nothing. The past and future always held more sway than the present.