by Cass Morris
The house near the Servian Wall was in a poor district of the city—not a slum like the Subura, but forgotten, squeezed between more vibrant areas. This house looked to have been abandoned for some time. The paint on the door was flaking off, and ivy had overgrown the walls.
“This is it,” Alhena confirmed, then swallowed heavily. “This is what I saw, when I asked Proserpina to show me the genesis of all this malice.”
“It certainly looks like the sort of place a Fracture mage would favor,” Vibia commented.
“Do you think anyone’s in there?” Rubellia asked.
All of the women stared for a long moment, as though merely asking the question might reveal the answer. “Latona, can you tell?” Vibia suggested.
Latona frowned, closing her eyes briefly—then stumbled, at the same moment that Vibia felt a lash of malevolence emanating from within the building. Shaking her head, Latona brought herself back upright. “Whatever’s in there does not like me,” she said. “I mean, maybe not me, it might have just reacted to the Spirit magic, but—”
“No,” Vibia said. “It doesn’t like you, in particular.” She cut her eyes sideways at Latona. “Sorry. But the chain of that magic was too focused to be accidental. Whatever’s going on in there—it recognized your magical signature.”
Latona gave a rueful almost-smile. “Well, if they’re expecting company, I’d hate to disappoint them.”
“Indeed,” Rubellia said, affecting false cheerfulness. “It wouldn’t do to be churlish.”
Alhena’s face had lost all color. Vibia reached out and touched her shoulder. “If you wanted to go back,” she said, in as gentle a tone as she could manage with her nerves thrumming, “no one would think the less of you.”
But Alhena shook her head. “These things have been infecting my dreams. I deserve the chance to confront them.” Her fingers wrapped into the crimson scarf tied about her hair, identical to the ones Rubellia and Merula wore, though shorter than Vibia’s mantle. Latona had been hard at work since absconding from her husband’s house, it seemed—a development Vibia had scarcely had time to process since learning of it a few days earlier. She could hardly blame any woman for wishing to be free of such a creature as Numerius Herennius, and she no longer thought Latona so wantonly ambitious as once she had, but disquiet still lurked in the back of her mind, particularly as concerned her brother.
Merula approached the door first, testing it gingerly, then giving it a hard shove. Another blast of magic emanated from the building. Vibia gritted her teeth against the shock of it. This magic was wild, aggressive, bucking like a horse that had slipped its bridle. Everything she detested in Fracture magic. ‘Even the Bacchan cults constrain their excesses and indulgences to certain festival days, recognizing that such things are best in counterpoint to the rules of civilization. The Discordians would see chaos take over every aspect of life.’
From within the house, a faint keening noise swelled. “Lemures?” Alhena asked, voice trembling.
“Of some sort,” Vibia replied. “Not umbrae, I should think, during the day, but . . .” She sighed, shaking her head.
They all knew what had to be done. They all knew they had to go in. It was what they had come for. But all four mages stood, as though rooted in place, until Vibia puffed out a breath. “Janus protect me.” She lunged for the door, practically hurling herself through it before she could think better of it.
She had only a moment to see what lay beyond—painted columns and walls leading off to inner chambers, dry ivy and dead trees standing in clay pots, a few torches stuck into sconces—before a searing pain seized her head. The air was thick with lemures. More than there had been in the fields and vineyards of Stabiae, more than in the Velabrium warehouse, more than Vibia would have imagined could cram themselves into one place, a choking cloud of black and gray. None had distinct form. Individually, they were weak, but there were many of them, so many, and their keening cries echoed off the neglected walls.
Vibia lurched back, every instinct in body and soul alike telling her to run for her life, but even as she shrank away, Latona plunged forward. Someone slipped a hand into Vibia’s. Alhena, she realized a moment later. The poor thing was all a-tremble, but the look of stubborn determination had not left her face.
“The fiends hunger,” Alhena warbled. “That’s what the voice said, in my vision. The fiends hunger, and our city is a feast.”
Alone among them, Rubellia was looking at the other mages rather than at the wispy figures darting and weaving around them. “Latona . . . Latona, something strange is happening, I can feel it, but not quite . . . I can’t quite tell . . .”
All four mages reacted in a shared instant. Latona gave a violent jerk, as though something had speared her through the middle. Alhena shrieked, her knees going out from under her. Rubellia gasped, clutching at her chest. And Vibia reeled, the pain in her head turning to a radiant flash of agony. Merula alone seemed unaffected, flattening herself against a wall and looking about to find a mortal assailant.
Rubellia’s highly primed empathy must have sensed it first. Latona’s energies had been focused elsewhere, but Rubellia had picked up on it—and Vibia could tell what had happened. She wasn’t sure if the fiends themselves were doing it, or if the women had tripped some curse by entering the space, but Fracture magic had ripped into each of them. A sucking, draining force, tearing their own magic out of them. ‘Gods, this had better not create another void,’ Vibia thought through the drumming pain in her head, ‘because without Sempronius here, I really don’t know how to deal with that.’
Vibia’s mantle was blazing hot against her skin; the others’ must have been, too. ‘How much worse would this curse be without its protection?’ Then, a more alarming thought: ‘How much can the Fire magic in these consume before they lose their strength? What if they give out entirely?’ Alhena’s might have done so already; she had pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and was kicking her feet against the ground, caught in the throes of some horrific vision. Merula dove for her, strong arms locking about the young woman to keep her from hurting herself.
“Get her out!” Latona yelled over the fiends’ howling. Wretched conflict wrote itself on Merula’s face as she looked from her mistress to horror-stricken Alhena, but at last she nodded and started dragging Alhena toward the door. Or trying to, anyway. Alhena was half a dead weight and half a struggling wildcat, tasking even Merula’s abilities in wrestling.
Vibia could feel Fracture magic rising in her, like calling to like, bubbling up from within, eager to join its fellows. She clenched her fists, struggling to keep control. If she let loose, her magic might multiply the fiends around them into a veritable army, or it might amplify what was already happening to the other three.
‘And what is happening to—’ But that answer came swiftly enough. Rubellia’s magic was strongest in empathy, and now she was laughing and sobbing at the same time, gasping and wailing and sighing. Vibia could sense the shape of what the Discordian magic had done: wrested control from Rubellia, then tumbled her emotions like dice. Rubellia clutched at the wall, frantic with her efforts to master herself.
“No!”
It was Latona who shouted, a defiant bark over the howls of the lemures. As Vibia watched, one of the fiends flickered and guttered out. Latona had her hand toward it and was making a pulling motion back toward her own chest. Her face had contorted with rage, eyes blazing. She wasn’t scared—or if she was, no trace of it showed in her body. She was furious.
‘Is that her? Or is it something of the fiends getting into her?’
Vibia’s own control was slipping. The wild magic that had whipped loose was an aggravation. Her own magic resonated with it, and for the first time since she had been very young, she felt the unwelcome sensation of something inside her chest yearning to burst free. Like an unbroken yearling stamping and tossing its head, her magic wante
d to be given head.
‘Stop it,’ she thought, ordering her powers to calm themselves. ‘Discordian magic is seductive, but it is everything we have set ourselves against.’
But it howled in her ears, and its pull drew her like a lodestone. ‘Is this how Sempronius felt, facing that void?’ A temptation of magic, dangled before her eyes like a jewel on a chain, and all she would have to do was grab for it. These fiends didn’t care who made them; they knew no loyalty. They knew only power; they respected only power.
Vibia shook her head violently. ‘Stop!’ Since childhood, she had learned control. ‘And I will be damned if I relinquish it to some half-baked terrors now.’
But on they came, the smoky wisps darting around her. A metallic scent hung in the air, bronze and blood, and Vibia wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep her own thoughts barricaded against the intruding onslaught from the fiends.
Then, fingers grasped her, an arm went around her shoulders, and the air seemed to clear. Latona had worked her way over, and Vibia felt the same lessening of pressure as she had in the warehouse, along with that sunburn-warm sensation on her skin: Latona, flooding her with Spirit magic, gifting her energy and focus. It hurt now as it never had before, the invasion of her inimical element, driving out the Discordian influence, but Vibia welcomed the pain, like plunging into a cold bath, a clarifying shock.
There was a curtain at the far end of the vestibule, ragged and half-torn from its rod. When Latona pulled it aside, both women fell over as the blast of magic beyond hit them—or perhaps it was only the overwhelming odor of death and decay.
There, in the middle of the atrium, in the dry impluvium pool, was a pile of bones as tall as a man, knotted together with dirt-smeared and rotting fibers.
“They’re all coming from that,” Vibia said, trying to stand back up, but only able to get as far as her hands and knees. The Fracture magic rolling off the mass of bones was staggering. “I can’t—It would take me ages to unravel all of that, even with the consecrated knives.”
Frowning, Latona looked around them. She crawled over to the wall, using it to help herself stand back up. Then she snatched at one of the torches jammed in a sconce. ‘Someone had to light that,’ Vibia thought. All the other charms had been laid some time before Vibia and Latona had found them—maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe only hours, but long enough that the mage left no trace of themselves. ‘Someone is here, or was within the hour.’
Latona tossed the torch at the pile of bones, but though a few of the scraps of fabric holding the mess together caught flame, it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough to consume the curse. They’d all be driven mad long before the fire had time to do its work, and already Vibia could see the Fracture magic picking the flames apart, threatening to douse them.
Latona walked toward the heap, staggered to her knees, gritted her teeth, kept crawling. Vibia, still on the floor, shook her head in disbelief. “Latona, what are you—Oh!” Vibia cried out as Latona shoved her hands right into the flames where they were brightest. Gaping in awe and terror, Vibia watched as the fire grew, all around Latona’s fingers, yet Latona showed no sign of fear or pain. She withdrew her hand, cupping a tiny blaze in her palm as though it were some small pet. This she deposited higher on the pile, where it caught and burned white. Again and again, Latona plucked flames with her hand and redistributed them. Only once did she glance over her shoulder at Vibia. “I-It’s working!” Vibia croaked. As the conflagration grew, it ate at the curse.
The lemures could feel it too. They shrieked louder and left off tormenting Alhena and Rubellia, swarming to defend their gateway from the netherworld.
Latona’s hands might have been immune to the fire, but her clothing was not. When a flame snapped out at the edge of her gown, she had to leap back, frantically beating the fabric to extinguish it. Rubellia lurched toward them, her face streaked with tear-tracks. She kept her distance from the pile of bones, but reached out with both hands, and the fire grew brighter, hotter. Vibia felt the Fracture magic snapping, and where it did, the flames turned an unnatural blue.
With hungry eyes, Vibia watched the heap of sacrificial remains, though she was hardly aware of the gruesome spectacle of bones and rotting sinew anymore. All her senses were primed for the magic gorging forth from the mound. As Rubellia and Latona worked together to heighten the blaze, a tendril of the curse whipped loose from the whole. Vibia seized on it with her own magic, giving it a mental yank.
The howling cacophony around them grew sharply louder, protesting her work. Vibia ground her teeth together, despite the pain that shot through her temples, and redoubled her efforts. ‘Unwind, unbind. I can break you, I know I can. My magic is that of beginnings and endings, and you? You end here, now.’
Now the entire pile of bones was ablaze, all the flammable material catching. The lemures left in the room vibrated with anger, their cries surging to a roar of indignant fury. Behind them, Alhena had stopped sobbing; Vibia hoped it was because Merula had finally hauled her out of the building. With sweat drenching her forehead and back, she continued tearing at the bindings of the Discordian curse, ripping each tangled strain of magic from its moorings. As the fire devoured the charm, Vibia shredded its power with her own.
A blast of frigid air blew through the house. No, not blew, Vibia realized—it was sucking in, into the void that lay invisible, somewhere beyond the mound of tangled carcasses. The lemures were being dragged back to their home, whatever part of the netherworld they had come from. Their smoky forms distended and stretched, and Vibia could feel the splintering Fracture magic as each one lost its grip on the world and sank back into oblivion.
Latona was caught off guard by the sudden rush of air and might have stumbled fully into the flames, had Rubellia not seized her by the elbows and jerked her back. They both fell then, landing in a heap near Vibia. Latona flung out an arm. Vibia grabbed it, then reached for Rubellia with the other, the three women clinging to each other as the fiends shrieked their displeasure, whirling and twisting around them in a malignant haze.
XLVII
When the last of the lemures disappeared, its howl echoed behind it. The tear in the world still throbbed like an open sore, a blight on the fabric of the world.
The flames blazing on the heap of bones were wrong now, not the healthy orange glow Latona had seized from the torch. Now the fire burned cerulean and azure. ‘The effect of the curse? Or because they’re now burning on the boundary between two worlds?’ Breaking the curse-charm alone had not been enough, not when such a gash had been rent in the natural world. Something had to be done to seal it. ‘Fire magic can cauterize a wound, and Spirit magic can counter Fracture. Maybe if I . . .’
Latona’s forehead creased as she contemplated what she could sense and see of the metaphysical laceration. Jagged bronze edges, where the curse had torn through, visible to her magical sensibilities beneath the fire and bones that her eyes perceived. She reached out for the flames with her magic, drawing power from them, then focused all her attention on that gash. ‘Like a blade over flesh,’ she thought. Then she swallowed uncomfortably. ‘Not that I’ve ever done such a thing.’ But she had heard about it, read about it. ‘And you did heal Sempronius. And you’ve healed these tears in the earth before. This one is just . . . much, much larger.’
She used the Fire to fuel her Spirit, blending the two together as she sought to draw the ragged edges of the world together. She heard, as if from far away, a hissing noise. ‘I hope that means this is working . . .’
Perhaps because they had already incinerated the charm that had forced open the crack between the worlds, this gash did not fight her as others had done. No sensation of splinters beneath her skin, no pricking at the edges of her mind. Just a massive hole, gaping open, which her Spirit magic struggled to close. She felt a hand on her back—Rubellia’s, she thought, though she did not turn to look—giving her support when her body began to
sag with the effort. Slowly, finally, the balance of power shifted, and Spirit began to close the wound that Fracture had left.
Vibia let out a reedy sigh, and then the flames went out all at once. Latona felt their sudden absence like a dousing of cold water over her head, and from Rubellia’s shiver, suspected she felt the same.
The air inside the house brightened, the smoke wafting away like an early morning fog burned off by the sun. Latona exchanged nervous looks with Rubellia and Vibia, their limbs still all in a tangled heap, none willing to believe the fight was over yet. Just as Pinarius Scaeva had used her own magic against her, tearing into her well of power and churning it into the void he had created, the lemures had reached into each of the mages present and taken their strength. ‘Or tried to, at least.’ They had not reckoned with the fortitude of Latona’s fury.
A high, girlish scream started in the vestibule and rushed toward them. Vibia spun around, hands outthrust, as though to intercept whatever new demon the Discordian magic had hurled at them—but there was no demon. Only Alhena, wild-eyed, with Merula at her heels and a branch clutched in her pale hands, evidently torn from one of the long-dead trees which must once have decorated the atrium in verdant splendor.
Alhena ran straight for the charred and sagging mound of bones and whacked it with the branch, sending bones and other crisped remnants of the curse scattering with an almost comical clatter. Screaming in rage, Alhena knocked at the pile again and again, until her breath grew ragged and her violent cries gave way to hysterical sobs.
Eventually, she let the branch drop from fingers that were now red and swollen, then collapsed backward, joining the heap of mages on the floor. Latona scooted closer to her, releasing her grip on Rubellia and Vibia so that she could wrap her arms around her sister. “Damn them,” Alhena rasped. She swiped inelegantly at her nose with the back of her hand. “May Dis devour their rotten souls, every one of them.” Latona wasn’t sure if she meant the lemures or the Discordians who had summoned them into this world, but in either case, she agreed.