by Cass Morris
Rubellia nodded, sadness coming over her features. “It chose well, too. The fiend decided to show me the face of someone I failed, back when I was just an acolyte. When the red plague struck the city—well, Vibia may remember, but the rest of you would’ve been too young.” Vibia did remember; Alhena wouldn’t even have been born yet. “It was every man to his post—and every woman, too, and even girls of twelve. Every mage in the city with even the slightest healing power, every soul blessed by Light, Water, or Fire, we were all called to serve.” Rubellia told the story smoothly but with distance in her voice, a pain long since passed but never quite made peaceable. “Fire has a great power to purge, but I was so young, not strong enough. And a woman who put her trust in me died, when I could not cleanse the contagion from her. Looking on the fiend with her shape, I didn’t just see her. I remembered every bit of that failure, and felt its shame and regret tenfold.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Alhena said.
Rubellia smiled and reached out to cup Alhena’s cheek. “I know, sweet girl. I did everything I could, for all that I was young and inexperienced. A great many died even in surer hands. The finest healers in the city couldn’t save everyone.” Her thumb rubbed gently over Alhena’s pale skin, and then she eased back in her chair, folding both hands in her lap. “What the mind knows and what the heart feels are different animals. The umbrae give power to the heart’s most painful instincts.”
“That’s a good way of putting it,” Vibia said, as she took a small knife and began peeling a pear. “I wonder why they choose my father, for me. He was a stern man, with very high expectations for his children, so it’s a bit unsettling, but not a horror. Why he’d be among the restless dead for an umbra to steal his shape, I can’t imagine. He always seemed satisfied enough with his life.”
“But he died before you and Sempronius were fully grown,” Alhena said, with quiet insight. “Before he knew what lives you would make for yourselves. I . . .” She kicked her feet a little, scuffing against the packed earth beneath their benches. “I don’t mean to speak for you, of course. But I know I worry what my mother would think of me. How she would judge me.” Her head sank, hair hanging in curtains on either side of her pale face. “I was so little when she . . .” Alhena’s voice trailed off, and Aula leaned over to kiss her on the temple.
“She’d be very proud and pleased of you, my love. But I take your meaning. We must always wonder what the beloved dead would say to us now, if they could. All the more if they were taken from us too soon.” Aula cast a slightly rueful look across at Vibia. “I must confess a certain relief not to be afflicted with magical gifts that would call upon me to confront these spirits. As much as I would love to see my husband again, I do not think I would care for the version of him they showed me.”
Latona’s eyes were glassy, and she had gone still. Unnatural, on the woman who seemed to always be in restless motion. Vibia wasn’t the only one who had noticed. Empathetic Rubellia cocked her head. “Latona, is something wrong?”
Latona managed a weak smile. “It’s foolish, to be so unsettled just talking about the umbrae. But I must confess, those we encountered last night were . . .” She closed her eyes briefly, then shook her head. “The effects have lingered, I find.”
“We should stop talking about it, then,” Alhena said.
“No.” Latona’s fingers flexed, then curled tight into the sea-green fabric of her gown. “I’m sure I’ll feel better after a bath, but in the meantime . . . Naming a thing that frightens you . . . It makes it less frightening, doesn’t it? You bring a nightmare into the daylight, and it ceases to have power.” She spoke with more hope than conviction.
“It’s Ocella,” Aula said, her voice more somber than was its usual wont. “Isn’t it?”
Latona nodded tightly. “As he was at Capraia.”
The very rumor that had made Vibia skeptical of Latona in the beginning. Dictator Ocella hadn’t summoned stunningly beautiful young women to his court for the pleasure of their conversation, after all, and Latona was then a mage of untested power. ‘Whose gifts did he want more, Juno’s or Venus’s?’ Had he more sought to satisfy his lust for ambition or for the flesh? Vitellia Latona would have been an irresistible prize in either case. A Spirit mage of noble birth, politically connected to every man whose support he needed and every man he hated. A Fire mage with hair of gold and flawless sun-browned skin, sensuality written in every ample curve of her body. ‘Gods. She was eighteen when he pounced on her. Only a year married.’
Vibia had heard the rumors, and she had worried about their implications for her brother’s growing attachment to the woman, but she had never actually thought about what the truth behind them had done to Latona.
“He had that way of looking at you,” Latona said, so softly that she sounded unlike herself. Where was the strident minx Vibia had once thought Latona? Or the bold defender she had come to expect? She found she would prefer the sly smiles, the half-mad confidence that had sent Latona trekking through muddy fields with her skirts hiked up around her knees. Seeing Latona like this, hearing the hollowness of her soul in her voice, it rattled Vibia. Her own emotions tangled: fury on Latona’s behalf, revulsion at the tale, poignant shame that the woman she had trusted so little was placing so much faith in her, to speak of these things.
Latona went on: “A way of looking at you like you were something to eat. He could feign affability, and did, quite often, but his eyes gave him away. They were so cold. None of his smiles ever touched them, not truly. You never saw a spark of joy there.”
She said “you,” Vibia realized, not “I.” Vibia picked up on the careful grammar because it was a break, a rift—a way for Latona to keep herself at a distance from what had happened to her.
Aula slipped down the couch, looping her arms around her sister. Latona leaned her head on Aula’s shoulder, letting her hair be petted, but her hands were still tight fists in her lap. Across the table, Alhena stared, wide-eyed. ‘Well,’ Vibia reasoned, ‘she was far too young to have known the full truth. Aulus kept her well-hidden in those years, as I recall.’ The redheaded girl looked as though she wanted to go to her sisters, to share in their sorrow, but felt she had no right to do so. Rubellia must have sensed her distress, for she reached out and took the girl’s hand comfortingly.
“Anyway,” Latona said, in a forcedly brighter tone, clearly trying to shrug off the specters of the past, “that’s what the umbrae look like to me. Horatius Ocella, stretching out his hand. So I’m especially fortunate that Vibia has the power to dispel the wretched things.”
Vibia nodded and murmured something about being glad as well, but what she thought was: ‘Sempronius was right to chide me.’
Before he left for Iberia, Vibia had tried to warn her beloved brother away from Latona, worried by the rumors about her, especially those that said she’d developed a taste for powerful men. She feared her brother growing close to someone so brazen and immodest. Sempronius had corrected her in no uncertain terms, insisting that Latona had been Ocella’s victim as much as any man he had proscribed and exiled.
‘More than most,’ Vibia realized now. ‘They might have lost property in the proscriptions, but the ones that got away with their lives lost nothing they couldn’t replace. What he took from Latona . . .’
Vibia set her chin firmly. “Well. All the more reason for us to put an end to this Discordian threat. None of us need reminding of our darkest days.”
Splinter the Fourth
Such satisfaction, in opening a door, and such pain, when it slammed closed.
“I’ve worked so hard,” Corinna lamented to the dormice before her. Easily procured, filched from the kitchens. Why should such sweet little things be eaten, when they could serve such a grander purpose, fueling her efforts? Her bronze knife moved swiftly, splitting fur from flesh. “I have been dutiful. I have opened so many cracks in the world.”
Prideful, perhaps, but she felt she had earned it. The first few rips, there in the countryside, had scarcely survived a few moments before closing again. In winter, she had started, thinking the bleakness would be her benefit. But her skill had not been swift enough, and when spring came, the whole world fought her every effort. Growth hated a breach; it sought to plug all holes, mend all wounds.
“I conquered it, though,” she said, plucking sinews between her slender fingers. “I created gaps and held them open. For a time.”
And then someone had begun undoing her work. So soon, too soon! Corinna had thought she would be safe in the country, and her fellow disciples had agreed. In Aven, there were so many mages living close together. Someone would have noticed her efforts before she’d had a chance to perfect her technique. In isolation, she had not expected anyone capable of countering her magic to discover her rites.
But someone had.
When Corinna could no longer evade her rival, she fled back to the city. She had learned enough, anyway, and her talents were needed. She returned to Aven and taught her fellows what she had learned. None of them were as deft as she had become with the charms yet. Some still flinched from what was necessary, and Corinna laughed at them. “If I’m not squeamish, I don’t see why they should be,” she said, rolling a tiny wet skull thoughtfully in her palm. But enough of them had the idea of it by now. They had been able to open so many doors! Across the hills and valleys of Aven, bronze doors giving passage between the worlds!
And then someone closed them again.
“I will find them,” she vowed, tying together the charm that would unlock a new door. On the Aventine, perhaps, this one. Or deep in a crowded market. “I will find who keeps closing my doors, and they will wish they had not interfered.”
XXX
Toletum
Slowly, with reluctant fingers, Vitellius unknotted the focale at his throat.
He disliked taking it off even for a moment these days, but it needed washing, or else it would chafe and leave his skin open to infection. That was not something Vitellius could risk, not now, not with disease stalking through the city on the heels of ill-blown winds. His sister’s charms seemed powerful, but he could not be certain that they were infallible: not here, so far from home and the weaver’s hands. Best not to tempt Fortuna.
For fifteen days now, Vitellius had been losing men to a swift, wasting illness. The vexillation’s medic claimed this was like no other plague he had ever seen, and so far as Vitellius was concerned, that confirmed his suspicions. Whatever wretched magic the Lusetani were working now, it was no longer going after the souls of his men, but their bodies.
Once, he might have been glad for that, might have thought it an easier battle to win. But he couldn’t fight the little red spots that appeared without warning on a soldier’s skin, nor the fatigue and fevered shaking that followed. No sword could strike them down, no strategy outwit them. Within days, all the afflicted man’s strength would seem to be stripped away, his muscles dwindling as though he had starved for a month.
‘And we’re all thin enough as it is,’ Vitellius thought. His rationing had thus far kept the city from starvation, but by a slender margin. Meat had been a luxury in Quintilis, and even then it was best not to question its origins; in September, it was impossible to find. Even fish had become hard to acquire. There were still men brave or desperate enough to leave the dubious safety of the city walls and creep down the cliffside to the waters of the Tagus, daring Lusetani raiders to find them, but lately their catches had been meager.
The only boon was that the disease did not appear to pass from man to man. If it had, Vitellius thought the entire city would have perished by now. No, it came with the strange Lusetani-summoned mists.
After the first men fell ill, Vitellius had wanted to order all his men off the walls and behind barred doors—but the Lusetani warriors were still out there. They didn’t seem to fear the plague-mist. They might have some immunity-granting charm, like Vitellius’s. ‘Or perhaps the king of blood doesn’t mind sacrificing a few dozen of his own in the name of his cause.’ And standing on the walls when the mist rose was not a certain death sentence. One man might fall desperately ill and be dead the next day, while the guards on either side of him remained hale. ‘No pattern, no reason to it.’ Vitellius wanted to tear his hair out.
With no idea how the curse chose whom to strike down, Vitellius set the legionaries and townspeople alike to finding some sort of protection. Most legionaries carried something of the sort with them, carved amulets or tokens made of twisted reeds. The water Vitellius washed his focale in now was no mere well-water, but infused with a variety of herbs and tree barks.
All the men of the legion had been ordered to wash their focales similarly, and to tie the red neck-scarves over their noses and mouths when the mists rose. Good water against bad air. Solid logic, supported by the theory of the humours, all the medics agreed. Was it helping to slow the spread of the disease? Vitellius had no idea, no proof. But he couldn’t just do nothing while this Lusetani curse ravaged his ranks.
Vitellius had overseen the preparation of the tinctures himself, summoning the Aventan medics and Iberian magic-men alike to put their heads to the task. He had even taken the advice of one of his centurions, whose brother, a mage of Light and a healer, was pledged to the service of Apollo. The centurion knew little of his brother’s art, but he could remember a few remedies that his brother had given him over the years. Vitellius was willing to try anything.
Alder wood and angelica flowers, juniper and vine, crushed together and made into a tincture. ‘Thank the gods that Toletum had a few healers who were well-supplied before the siege started, and that we planted in those empty lots.’ Even as it stood, Vitellius was worried their supplies would run short. ‘Those supplies, like everything else . . .’
A pang of guilt throbbed inside him as he rubbed dirt from his focale with his thumb. For all his efforts, no other man had protection like this. ‘And who am I to keep it for myself?’ But the answer came swiftly. He was the senior tribune of the Eighth Legion, the leader of this vexillation. And a leader had to keep himself safe if he was to have any hope of protecting his men. A cold calculation, but a necessary one.
He wished Bartasco would stay inside and well away from the evil mists, but the burly Arevaci chieftain would not hear a word of such suggestions. Instead, he strode forth as boldly as could be, looking to hearten his own men and the Aventan legionaries alike, as though he could defy the plague through sheer force of personality. Mennenius, too, dutifully carried out his tasks, though Vitellius tried to keep him away from the walls. More than once, Vitellius had been tempted to swap his focale for his friend’s, to give Mennenius that extra defense. ‘And what stopped you?’ He reasoned with himself that he could not be sure the enchanted garment would work on another man: it had been made by his sister, for him.
A darker awareness whispered that this was merely a rationalization, that the truth lay in his own fear and selfishness. ‘Gods help me to know the right path. I am doing the best I can.’
Vitellius wrung the focale out, water dribbling back into the bowl. He didn’t re-tie the scarf while it was wet, but he did drape it over the back of his neck. September had dawned with no less blasting heat than Sextilis, and the cooling effect was pleasant: a single spot of relief in the increasing agonies of the siege. ‘Heat and hunger and terror of the night were all quite enough to be getting on with. Plague on top of it . . .’ Only the knowledge that the legions were out there, trying to break the siege, was keeping general pessimism to a manageable level. ‘But it’s been so long with no sign of progress . . .’
The door opened, and Vitellius shook his head, trying to clear morose thoughts from his mind as he turned to face the centurion who entered. He could not feign Bartasco’s resolute buoyancy, but he would show strength and stalwartness nonetheless.
“Sir.” T
he centurion saluted. Vitellius had not allowed them to get sloppy about such things, even under the stress of siege and strange magic. Lax discipline could incline men toward mutiny and riot. An Aventan legion adhered to form, no matter the circumstances. Vitellius nodded his acknowledgment. “Sir, more men have fallen ill, and—” His voice hitched slightly.
Bad news, then. Not that any sentence beginning that way was likely to turn out well. Not that he expected any other sort of news, at this point. “How many?”
“Nine since this morning, sir. And—”
Vitellius frowned, wondering what could be so dire that the centurion hesitated to frame his words. “Out with it, centurion.”
“The new sick men, sir. Tribune Mennenius is among them.”
* * *
Camp of Legio X Equestris, Outside Toletum
The Tartessi were across the Anas River and, by the scouts’ reports, advancing swiftly.
“The weather, it seems, has been favoring them.” Sempronius glared at the map, as though that might change the distance between the Anas and the Tagus. He wished he had a mage with him who could read the winds and tell him if a helpful sandstorm might whip up on the plateau and stymie the Tartessi’s progress. Eustix had no such talent, however; he had been blessed with the Air of the birds, not the weather. All Sempronius could do was guess and rely on luck. ‘And Fortuna has not been smiling upon me thus far.’
“They will likely travel just north of us and cross the river here,” Hanath said, gesturing. “The same point my riders used when we needed to swing south of Toletum.”
“We cannot still be here when they cross. We must either be inside Toletum before they reach the river, or well away from this place.”
Fleeing was one option, abhorrent though it would be to suffer such an ignominious defeat. But Sempronius could not stomach the notion of leaving the cohorts inside Toletum and the town’s citizens to the predations of the Lusetani—nor was he at all certain that Hanath would agree to such an abandonment, with her husband and so many of their people still inside the walls. He could not risk losing the Arevaci cavalry, nor the loyalty of the Arevaci themselves.