The Legions of Fire

by David Drake

  She gave the contents of the cup a doubtful glance, then looked up at Anna. She asked, “Is it ready?”

  The older woman was leaning on one cane; the other lay on the bench. She’d become noticeably more limber since she undertook to help Hedia in this business.

  Anna gestured over the northeast wall of the garden. She said, “The moon’s up. That’s the only thing that matters to me. Are you ready, Lady Hedia?”

  “Yes,” said Hedia, “I suppose I am. Where do I stand?”

  They were in the back garden of the town house; Anna had said that it would be easier to enter the spirit world here because of the rupture which Nemastes had forced. Hedia felt uncomfortable, but she imagined that she would be uncomfortable anywhere doing what she was now.

  “Here, I think,” Anna said, pointing to the ground near the frost-blasted pear tree. “It’s where the Hyperborean had his brazier.”

  She glanced at the peach and added, “Unless you’d prefer to be farther from Persica?”

  Hedia sniffed. “Persica said she’d help,” she said. “If she tries to interfere, I’ll build a fire over her roots and we’ll go on with our business while she cooks.”

  Anna laughed. “You’d have made a good soldier,” she said. “Face the moon, then, and I’ll tell you when to down the draft.”

  Hedia paused. “Anna?” she said. “If we’re successful tonight, there’ll be questions asked and I won’t be here to protect you. I’ve left a note for my husband—”

  Saxa had gone out in the early morning and hadn’t returned yet. He was almost certainly with Nemastes.

  “—telling him I’m going to Baiae, but he’ll question the servants. This may become very difficult for you, especially with Master Corylus missing as well.”

  “You take care of your part, your ladyship,” the older woman said. “Don’t worry about me.”

  She began to chant in a harsh falsetto. The language wasn’t Latin, though the rhythms were similar, nor Greek.

  Hedia vaguely recalled that the Marsians still spoke Oscan in their hill villages. She wasn’t much interested in any of the rural louts south of Carce. They had no culture as she understood the word. They merely provided the Republic with shepherds and soldiers; and with witches, of course.

  From where Hedia stood the moon, still full at least to the eye, was caught in the branches of the peach tree. Were any of the servants listening from behind the walls? Probably not; they’d be afraid that whatever the witch was doing would affect them also. And indeed, it might.

  Hedia thought about Anna’s comment—that she’d have made a good soldier. No. Soldiers had to endure a great deal of physical discomfort, which Hedia disliked; and they had to obey orders that other people gave, which she couldn’t seem to do.

  Drink the wine now, your ladyship.

  Hedia blinked. That’s Anna, and she’s speaking to me!

  Embarrassed by her woolgathering, Hedia lifted the cup—it was silver, chased with dolphins and sea nymphs—and gulped the mixture. She noticed first the cloying touch of the honey, then the gritty aftertaste.

  Latus. Not bitter, but coarse and unpleasant.

  She sipped, then drank down the remainder of the cup without pausing. She’d decided to do this thing, so there wasn’t any question but that she would go through with it.

  The moon blurred and expanded as Hedia stared through the branches. She blinked, but that didn’t clear her eyes. Anna continued to chant; her voice had the timbre of an angry night bird calling. Hedia thought she heard Persica also.

  Will I see Latus’s face in the moon? she thought; and as the words crossed her mind, the bright glow of the moon became a cave before her. She set the silver cup on the ground and walked forward.

  I said I would do this thing.

  For a moment Hedia continued to hear the harsh cadence of Anna’s voice. Then she was striding into the earth, following a path which was a slightly lighter gray than that of the black mouths branching out from it. She was wearing a long tunic and simple house slippers. They were leather dyed red and a little sturdier than silken dress shoes, but they still weren’t what she would have chosen for exploring caves.

  Hedia smiled coldly. Ordinarily she would choose to leave cave exploration to other people, but she’d do whatever was required to get Alphena back where she belonged.

  Something in a left-branching tunnel screamed. Hedia put her hand on her girdle, but she didn’t take out the little dagger. She’d first thought the cry was angry; after consideration she decided it was probably desperate misery instead.

  It didn’t matter. Her business was with whatever lay at the end of the path she was following. Assuming there’s an end. But she would keep walking until she dropped.

  The path blurred into a jungle of trees with snaky branches. Their leaves variously resembled ribbons and spikes and blankets. They were a thousand shades of gray, and the sky was lighter gray. There were no stars and no moon.

  Out of curiosity—not fear—Hedia looked back the way she had come. The jungle surrounded her. Fruit the size and shape of tight leather hand-balls hung from a branch that she should have walked under. She doubted anything in this place would be edible, but she supposed she would try if she had to.

  Lightning flashed across the sky, briefly silhouetting the foliage. She thought she saw branches move, but that was probably an illusion. There was no thunder.

  There was no longer a lighted path. Hedia stepped forward, using her left arm to swing aside a bunch of fruit so heavy that it bent the top of the stalk it grew from. Beyond was a clearing, and in it stood her late husband, Marcus Calpurnius Latus.

  “Greetings, dearest Wife,” Latus said. He giggled. “I won’t say I’m surprised that you would join me here, but I’ll admit that I didn’t expect you to seek me out while you were still alive. Am I so dear to you that you can’t live without me?”

  The silent lightning rippled and rippled again across the gray heavens.

  Latus looked as she remembered him. He wore a tunic with the broad stripe of a senator. He had wanted all those who met him to be reminded of his rank, even when he was relaxing at home without a toga.

  “I’ve come to ask you to do something decent for a change, Latus,” Hedia said. “A girl, the daughter of my husband, has been lured into the spirit world. I need a guide to find her and bring her back. I’m told—a witch tells me—that you can show me to such a guide.”

  Latus threw back his head and laughed; lightning trembled above the treetops in time with his merriment. He had been a short man and sensitive about it; in this place he retained the thick-soled buskins that he’d worn in life. He tended toward fleshiness, and though he’d died at age twenty-five his hairline had already begun to recede. Even so he had the face of a young god.

  He sobered with the suddenness of a switch being thrown. “Why should I do that for you, dear Wife?” he said. “How can you even imagine I would do that for you?”

  “I was always a better wife than you deserved, Latus,” Hedia said. “But no, I don’t expect you to do anything for me. The girl is innocent, though. I ask your help for Alphena.”

  She kept her voice steady and her eyes on his. She wanted either to flounce off or to slap him, but those things wouldn’t help. Slapping him probably wouldn’t help.

  Hedia saw movement in the treetops. At first she thought small animals were scurrying in line; then she realized a large snake was crawling along the branch.

  “Will you give yourself to me, dear Hedia?” Latus asked archly. His voice trailed up into a titter.

  “You know I never refused you, Husband,” Hedia said, trying to keep the tone of disgust out of her voice. She opened her cloth-of-gold girdle and hung it over a bush whose leaves looked black—they were probably dark red—but which sent up spikes with large white flowers. “Though it was obvious that you preferred boys.”

  The broach fastening the left shoulder of her tunic was in the form of a serpent with ruby eyes, swallowi
ng its tail. She unpinned it and let the garment shimmer to her feet. She hoped the ground wasn’t damp, but there was no help for that. She stepped forward, out of it.

  “Where do you want me?” she asked.

  Latus reached out to embrace her, but his arms passed through her body without contact. Laughing with a bitterness she hadn’t heard from him this night, he stepped back.

  “Put your clothes on, Hedia,” he said harshly. “I’m no good to you now. I’m no good to anybody, and myself the least of all.”

  Hedia half knelt to retrieve her shift. Lightning had been constant in the sky a moment before; now it had stopped. She let the garment fall over her head rather than pulling it up. As she repinned the tunic while watching Latus, she said, “Will you send me a guide, Husband?”

  “I’ve already done that,” Latus said. He’d backed to where Hedia had first seen him, almost engulfed by a plant. Its leaves shot almost straight up from the ground; they had pale edges and darker cores. “Go find your girl and bring her back—if you have the strength.”

  Hedia sniffed. “Indeed, if I have the strength,” she said.

  The girdle fastened behind her. Ordinarily a maid would buckle it, but there was no one to help her here. She wasn’t sure that she would have asked Latus even if he’d had a physical presence.

  Fully dressed again, she raised her face to him. “Where do I find the guide?” she said.

  Latus gestured to what Hedia had taken for a boulder part-shrouded by saplings whose leaves drooped like wax ornaments. “There,” he said. “It looks like darkness, doesn’t it? I assure you that it’s not nearly as dark as the place I’m in, dear Wife.”

  Hedia nodded curtly. “Thank you, Husband,” she said.

  She stepped toward the place he indicated. Up close she saw that it was an absence rather than a presence: it was emptiness made manifest in the heart of lush gray jungle.

  “Hedia?” Latus said.

  She looked over her shoulder. The plant was even more closely about the figure of her husband.

  “I’m not doing this for some fool girl,” he said. His voice sounded muffled. “Now go!”

  Hedia nodded. Head high, she walked into darkness.

  ALPHENA FOLLOWED Deriades through the strange forest. The light was vaguely green, as though it were straining through a canopy of leaves. If there was such a canopy, it must be unthinkably far above them: the trees through which she and Deriades walked swiftly were only twenty feet high—or at most thirty—and didn’t block sight of what she thought was the sky.

  Something hooted above her, then burst into a cackle. She looked up. A bird sailed away, dipping out of sight into the forest beyond. It looked like an owl, but Alphena had never known an owl to make a sound like what she had just heard. It carried something in its beak.

  Deriades said, “Here we are.” He touched a globe the size of a thatched hut. Except for size, it looked like a spiny puffball. Darkness spun open in the side, a motion like that of water swirling down a hole in the bottom of a bucket.

  Deriades glanced back. Then, instead of offering Alphena politely to precede him, he stepped into the opening with a sweep of his long robe. He had to duck to clear the lintel.

  Alphena bent forward also, though intellectually she knew she needn’t have. Many puffballs grew near the threshold, but they were no more than the familiar inch or two in diameter.

  The interior of the hut was pitch dark until the opening reversed itself and spun shut. Light, a brighter version of the green tinge outside, flooded them.

  The room was huge. Alphena stopped in wonderment. There were no straight lines; it was more like imagining the fibrous insides of a squash with all the seeds removed. There was furniture, but like the walls it appeared to have grown rather than been built; the pieces didn’t seem to be intended for human beings.

  “I have brought a guest, children,” Deriades called. A chorus of high-pitched cries responded. Only then did Alphena realize that what her light-struck eyes had taken for shadows were actually smaller versions of Deriades, all caped and hooded in gray. They streamed out of the great room, disappearing around partitions and into niches which might until then have been crinkled portions of a wall.

  “Children, you are being discourteous to our guest!” Deriades said in a tone of reproof but not anger. “Alphena has saved me from a sphinx at great risk to herself. Greet her with the honor her selfless courage deserves.”

  Gray figures, some of them as tall as Alphena herself, crept back into view. After a moment, the taller ones began to edge closer with their heads bowed. The others followed carefully, apparently in order of height.

  “That’s better, children,” Deriades said with satisfaction. He turned to Alphena and said, “You’re more than our guest, Alphena: you are our friend. We will send you on your way better for the meeting, as we are certainly better for having met you.”

  This was the first time Alphena had seen her host face-to-face in good light. Though Deriades remained hooded, she should have been able to make out his features; instead, she was looking into a gray fog in which two red coals glowed.

  She restrained herself from jumping back. She was already disquieted because he knew her name, though she hadn’t spoken it.

  “I don’t know what my way is,” Alphena said honestly. “I—I just want to get back to Carce. I don’t know where I am.”

  She tried to avoid sounding terrified, but she knew she hadn’t been completely successful.

  “We will put you on the way to your home, Alphena,” Deriades said with quiet assurance. “Through your skills and with the help of your friends, you have a very good chance of reaching it.”

  Alphena’s smile was wry. She supposed she should appreciate the candor, but at the moment she would have preferred some unfettered optimism. “Thank you,” she said. “I hope you’re right.”

  On the walls were what seemed to be washes of light when she looked straight at them, but out of the corners of her eyes she saw complex pictures: castles and rocky landscapes. Among them were figures too elongated to be human. When each time by reflex she turned to get a better view, the image vanished into flooding color.

  The children, if that’s what they were, came closer. Alphena heard them whisper among themselves, but the sounds were too faint for her to catch words. It was more like passing close to a hedge after sunset and rousing the birds nervously from their repose.

  “We’d normally have dinner as soon as I returned home,” Deriades said. “Would you care to join us, Alphena? You’ll find the meal nutritious; and I hope tasty as well.”

  I am hungry, she thought. She’d had only a few figs when she got up; she hadn’t wanted her stomach full before a heavy workout in the gym.

  She’d had a workout, certainly; and the tension of the past several hours had probably taken even more out of her than fighting the sphinx had. But to eat here—

  “Yes, thank you,” she said. She had to eat somewhere unless she got back to her home very quickly. Deriades and his home were very strange, but the sphinx proved that there were stranger things in this—this dreamworld?—and that some of them were openly hostile.

  “Children,” her host said, “lead our friend to the dining area.”

  The family streamed out of the large hall with its members cheeping and chittering among themselves. The tallest led, but the smaller members—some barely came up to Alphena’s knees—clustered around her like doves in hooded garments, urging her forward.

  The children’s touch was as light as that of leaves fluttering in a zephyr. Alphena went along with them, wondering what would have happened if she’d refused.

  Nothing, she guessed. Some people would say that she couldn’t afford to trust anybody in her present situation, but since she couldn’t get out of this place—whatever it was—by herself, she couldn’t afford not to trust others who weren’t openly hostile.

  She grinned. Deriades, walking at her side, noticed the expression. “Our dwellin
g pleases you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Alphena said truthfully. “But I smiled because I was wondering whether the sphinx might not have had the secret which would return me to Carce.”

  “She may indeed have known that secret,” said Deriades solemnly. “But she would have imparted it only after she ate you.”

  He paused, then added, “I can find another sphinx if you care to make the trial, Alphena. Though you’ll pardon me if I keep my distance during the interaction. Since you won’t be around to save me afterward.”

  Alphena giggled. She felt better than she had since Persica tricked her into this place.

  They entered a room paneled with glittering brightness. Here the furnishings were of precious metals. The low tables were shaped like clumps of algae in eddies; their tops were silver and their legs gold. The couches followed the sinuous curves of the tabletops. The cushions looked like bark but were firmly resilient to Alphena’s touch, and the frames had a fiery luster like no metal she had ever seen before.

  “That’s orichalch,” Deriades said with quiet pride. “Not the brass that some folk in your world call by the name of the metal their ancient ancestors saw on the walls of Atlantis.”

  “Atlantis was real?” she said.

  “Yes, Alphena,” said her host. She was sure that if she could have seen his face, he would have been smiling. “As real as I am.”

  Some of the taller figures had vanished into rooms beyond. Deriades gestured her to a bench. When she hesitated, he twisted onto one himself. Though he sat upright, she suspected that they were really intended to be curled up on.

  Regardless, Alphena seated herself as decorously as she could at the other end of Deriades’ bench. Four—at first she thought five—of the smallest offspring crowded opposite them, and the remainder took places around the room.

  Immediately those who had bustled off initially reappeared with platters of food and drink, and place settings made of the brilliant orichalch that she’d remarked already. The plates were only slightly concave; their rims had the same organic outlines as the tabletops against which they blazed.