The Legions of Fire

by David Drake

  “Twelve,” Hedia said. “But yes, I suppose he can. He doesn’t just look like a goat, my dear.”

  The only real lights in the grove were the occasional flickerings of the nymphs’ eyes, but the sky must not have been perfectly black. The palms stood in vague silhouette, and the girl’s face was a study in pale misery.

  There’d been rustlings in the leaves and whispers in the shadows ever since the light failed. Hedia wasn’t cold, but she would have liked a fire. Even if it didn’t illuminate whatever was making the sounds, it might drive them a little farther away.

  A racking scream sounded. It seemed close as well as loud. Seconds later it echoed from the range of hills Hedia had noticed on the horizon to the left as they approached the tomb.

  Alphena jumped to her feet, waving the sword. The sound didn’t recur—for the moment. Hedia remained where she was.

  The girl gave a shudder. She started to sheathe the sword, but after missing the throat of the scabbard twice, she continued to hold it in her hand.

  “Hedia?” she said. “What are we going to do. Are we just going to wait?”

  Hedia rose to her feet in sudden decision. “I thought we would, yes,” she said briskly, “but I was wrong. I see another of those things headed this way. There may not be an end of them, and it appears that our guide”—she looked sourly in the direction of Maron; a swell of the sandy soil separated her from the faun, but his “Haw! Haw! Haw!” could be heard for miles—“isn’t going to quit until his heart fails. Which would be perfectly all right with me, were it not for the fact we need him to lead us out of this place. So, because I’ve never known any argument to work on a male in a state of rut, we’ll see where those females are coming from. It seems to be the tomb.”

  Nodding to make sure the girl was coming with her, Hedia strode toward the latest pair of lambent eyes. First they had to walk around the pool they’d drunk from. It was about twenty feet in diameter and seemingly shallow, but the water hadn’t been stagnant so it must be fed from a spring. There was a slightly smaller pool to the right, visible mostly as a smoothness where the soil around it was matte.

  The female glided toward them; glided toward Maron, with them standing in the way, at any rate. “Can you speak?” Hedia demanded in the tone she would use on a servant who was trying to get away with something.

  If the female could, she didn’t bother to acknowledge it. Not only did green flames lick from her eyes, but her perfect body had a glow like burnished ivory brighter than could be a reflection of the light reaching the grove. The nymphs were as similar as frogs in a pond, but they weren’t identical.

  “I asked if you can speak, you bitch!” Hedia said, stepping sideways to block the female’s progress. She was furious with Maron. She couldn’t say that publicly—it made her face scrunch up even to admit it in her own mind—but she could certainly treat these gorgeous creatures as the sluts they were.

  The nymph moved around her. Hedia wasn’t sure how it happened: she was beside Hedia, then past, without apparently stepping out of her initial line. Her smile was biting, but Hedia knew the mocking laughter must be in her own mind.

  Alphena raised the sword as though she meant to do something with it, but Hedia touched her shoulder and said, “No, she’s not the problem. Killing a trollop isn’t going to get us out of this place.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t have killed her!” the girl said in amazement. Her expression was if anything more horrified than it had been when she watched Maron going off with the first of the nymphs.

  “Good,” Hedia said as she resumed trudging toward the tomb. “Now, put the sword up so that you won’t get in trouble waving it around. It’s not a magic wand, you know.”

  Alphena successfully got the sword into its sheath this time. She looked crestfallen. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t understand anything at all!”

  Hedia weighed the situation and the long-term results of whatever she said now—or failed to say. Because if she didn’t respond to the girl’s admission of weakness, she would pay for it in Alphena’s resentment of her forevermore.

  Forevermore might not be terribly long, of course, but Hedia wouldn’t have survived if she hadn’t always hoped for a good result. Smiling at the thought, she said, “I understand that I’m boiling with jealousy because that beast who’s supposed to be our guide is so besotted with a crew of sluts that he’s forgotten us completely. Which is exactly what you’d expect a man to do. Because they’re all beasts, I’m afraid.”

  Alphena looked at her sidelong, obviously grappling with the possible implications of what her stepmother had just said. Hedia gave the girl a lopsided smile and put an arm briefly around her shoulders.

  She said, “Don’t worry, dear. You and I will take care of this business and get back to Carce where we belong. And nobody but the two of us will know anything about it.”

  If Hedia had misjudged her stepdaughter, she’d made a great deal of future unpleasantness for herself; but she almost never misjudged another woman. Her success in predicting men wasn’t nearly as good. That, she knew, was because her mind was rarely in control when she was dealing with an attractive—or reasonably attractive—man.

  They’d reached the side of the tomb. The sheer sides were even more impressive now than they had been from a distance. She didn’t see an entrance.

  “I think we should go around to the right, Mother,” Alphena said in a determinedly calm voice. “The, ah, women were coming more from that way.”

  Hedia smiled with satisfaction at the way the girl was reacting. “Thank you,” she said, turning to skirt the mound about ten feet out from the bottom. “I don’t think we can assume that since those females are safe we’ll be safe also, but I’m going to hope that’s the case.”

  The darkness was disquieting. In Carce there would normally be stars and a lantern visible somewhere. Even during a drenching midnight rainstorm, the sky was likely to be lit by occasional lightning.

  “There must be some light,” Alphena whispered. “Otherwise we couldn’t see the building even. But where does it come from?”

  Hedia grimaced. She wasn’t willing to say that she “saw” the tomb, but its presence beside them was blurrily separate from the lesser darkness of the sky. She opened her mouth to speak just to show she was listening. Before she got a word out, Alphena said, “There! There’s a hole!”

  Either the girl’s eyes are a great deal better than mine, Hedia thought, or we aren’t seeing with our eyes here. Since Alphena hadn’t seemed unusually sharp-sighted in Carce before these things began happening, it was probably the latter.

  Now that Hedia had been alerted, though, she noticed that the sandy soil had been thrown back not far in front of them. Alphena’s hand hovered near the sword hilt again.

  Hedia smiled wryly. In Carce she had disapproved strongly of the girl’s fooling around with a sword: it wasn’t just unladylike, it was unwomanly. That was a very different thing and one which offended Hedia’s sense of rightness. She didn’t claim a sense of decency, and certainly she’d been told by enough other people that she didn’t have one.

  Now … Well, the skill might still be unwomanly, but Hedia was rather glad that Alphena had gained it nonetheless. It was certainly more comforting than being with Varus, unless the monsters intended to hold a poetry-reading contest.

  They stood side by side, staring into the hole, which slanted down toward the tomb. It looked rather like where a mole had surfaced in a garden, except that the opening was much too large.

  “There’s a light down there,” Alphena said. Her voice was firm, but she gave the older woman a doubtful glance with the words.

  “Yes,” Hedia decided aloud. “It’s … almost pink, wouldn’t you say?”

  Actually, it wasn’t so much a color that Hedia saw in the light as a sense of stickiness. She would much rather not do what was necessary, so she did it immediately.

  “Watch things up here,” Hedia
said, crawling in headfirst. “I’ll be back as soon as I learn what’s happening.”

  “I’m coming too!” Alphena said, as Hedia had very much hoped she would. Her voice was muffled because Hedia’s body was in the way. It would make much better sense for the girl to stay guarding the entrance, but Hedia really didn’t want to come down here alone.

  The tunnel in the dirt was no more than ten feet long, though that would certainly be enough to bury her for life. She hiked her long tunic up above her knees and quickly scrambled the rest of the way to the stone at the end of the tunnel.

  A hole had been ground through it from the other side as if a giant worm had been gnawing. There might be huge worms in this world, but the only thing Hedia had seen here was the nymphs. Surely they couldn’t have been responsible for the hole and the tunnel beyond?

  But this was where they must be coming from. Hedia wriggled through the hole, onto the floor of an arched corridor almost six feet wide and over eight feet high in the middle. It was made of blocks of rusty granite like those facing the exterior of the mound; the light, faint and diffuse, came from the rock itself.

  Alphena’s scabbard clinked on the stone as she squirmed through the opening and jumped to her feet. She looked around in concern. “What is this?” she said. “I thought we’d be in a room.”

  To the left, the passage ended in a blank wall; to the right, it curved to the left out of sight. “Well, my dear …,” Hedia said. She felt elated simply to have gotten out of the narrow tunnel alive; they were still entombed if the dirt collapsed behind them, but at least they wouldn’t be instantly suffocated. “Let’s follow the corridor and see if it leads us to one.”

  Their feet echoed on the dry stone floor. The quiet whisk-whisk-whisk of Hedia’s sandals was almost lost in the ring of the younger woman’s hobnails.

  Alphena’s feet sound angry, Hedia thought; and perhaps they were. Anger wasn’t a bad emotion for a woman in a difficult situation. It had gotten Hedia out of places where panic and resignation—and especially resentment—would have done her no good at all.

  “How far have we come?” Alphena asked in a little voice.

  Hedia had been lost in musings. She glanced at the girl and smiled. Alphena held her hands primly before her with the fingers lightly interlaced. Otherwise she’d be groping for the sword, and she doesn’t want to seem frightened in front of me.

  “We’ve made at least half a circuit,” Hedia said. “Of course there may be another blank wall at the far end so we’ll have to turn around and come back, but at least it’s an alternative to listening to Maron grunting.”

  Her head was turned to the side, looking at her companion. Because they’d come so far without anything happening, the flicker in the corner of her eye didn’t register as movement quite soon enough. Another flame-eyed nymph was coming up the corridor in the opposite direction.

  Alphena cried out in surprise. The creature passed between them, gliding rather than walking. There wasn’t room for the three of them to cross without touching, but Hedia had no physical sensation. Her mind was on fire with a surge of lust beyond anything she’d ever felt before, even the night Pansus had whisked the cover off the lantern during the orgy in his garden. The emotion was so intense that she staggered to her knees.

  The nymph vanished around the curve of the wall, going toward the hole to the outside through which so many of her sisters had already passed. The floor of the passage was gritty, but her feet hadn’t left marks.

  “That was awful,” Alphena whispered. “Are you all right, Mother?”

  Hedia rose. “It was certainly disquieting,” she said. Rather than start off immediately, she waited a moment to make sure that she was steady on her feet again.

  She chuckled, grinning at the girl. “I could almost feel sorry for Maron,” she said. Then, briskly, “Well, let’s see where she was coming from.”

  They started in unison, but Alphena was on the inside of the curving passage and quickly became a half step ahead. She shortened her step then, but she didn’t give up that half step—and Hedia certainly wasn’t going to run to catch up.

  “There may be another door,” Hedia said. “Even a stone—”

  There wasn’t. The room at the end was an open circular expansion of the corridor. In the center was a stone bier, complete with pillow, on which an old man lay. No one and no thing else was present.

  Hedia strode to the man and touched his neck. His flesh wasn’t cold, but she didn’t detect a pulse in his throat. The gods knew what was wrong with him, but Hedia had few options and very little time: she shook him by the shoulders.

  “Wake up!” she said. “Waken! My daughter and I need to know what’s going on here!”

  The man’s eyes opened and met hers. He gave a piercing scream and tried to roll off the other side of the bier. Alphena caught him. He saw her in turn and screamed again.

  “Stop that!” Hedia said. “We’re not going to hurt you, but we need some answers.”

  His mouth opened. Despite what she’d said about not hurting him, Hedia was going to slap him hard if he screamed again.

  Instead the man’s eyes widened in surprise. “But …?” he said in a rasping voice. “Why, you’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, of course we are,” said Hedia. “There are some creatures, nymphs, in this place. We need to know how to get our guide away from them.”

  The man was short, slight, and nondescript. The sheen of his robe had made her think that it was silk, but touch proved it to be finespun metal. On his chest was an ankh. The chain from which it hung was gold, but the pendant seemed to be cold blue fire.

  Hedia reached toward the ankh to see if it existed physically, then jerked her hand away. The internal light moved like a viper. Touching it might prove to be an equally bad idea.

  “They’re loose in the world!” the man said. “Oh my heavens! I’m so very sorry!”

  He sat upright and swung his feet over the edge of the bier, but he didn’t try to stand up. He laced the fingers of both hands on the upright of the ankh and raised it. As he did so, his face changed.

  Hedia walked behind him around the bier and put her arms around Alphena. The girl was trembling.

  The little man didn’t speak, but the air trembled with portent. “What’s he—,” Alphena said.

  The man spoke a four-syllable word. White light flared.

  Hedia blinked. She was lying on the stone floor. Alphena hadn’t fallen, but she looked stunned. The man was awkwardly trying to stand.

  Hedia’s skin prickled. She felt as though a thunderbolt had struck very close to her. Her senses were unusually sharp, however, and she bounced to her feet feeling full of energy.

  “Alphena!” she said, taking the girl’s hands in her own. She glanced toward the little man, her eyes hardening. If she’s been harmed—

  Alphena clutched her suddenly; her eyes cleared. “What was that?” she said. She sounded as though she’d been asleep.

  “You’ve saved me,” said the man. “I thank you with all my heart. If you hadn’t rescued me, I might have … I might never …”

  “Are they gone now?” Hedia asked. “The ones outside too?”

  “Yes, they’re quite gone,” he said with a shudder. “That will never happen again, I assure you.”

  He shook his head and said, “I can’t believe that they got out. I wonder how long it’s been? It felt like eternity, and I suppose it almost was. Except for you.”

  “What were they?” Alphena said. “Demons?”

  The man gave her a wry smile, then turned his head away. “They weren’t intended to be,” he said in obvious embarrassment. “They—but please, I appreciate what you’ve done for me, but you really must leave at once. I don’t want anyone around me now. Especially not women!”

  “I don’t want to stay here either,” said Alphena, looking toward the corridor. “Maron may be wondering where we are.”

  “Wait,” Hedia said, putting her hand on the girl
’s arm. “We’ll leave as soon as you tell us what was going on, sirrah!”

  The man looked at her. She couldn’t have described the change in his face, but she was suddenly reminded of his expression before he spoke the word that knocked her down.

  “Will you give me orders, woman?” he said with a tiny smile. “But you have a right to know. Though it will be no benefit to you.”

  He touched Alphena’s face lightly, turning her profile to him. He dropped his hand and smiled at Hedia again. She wondered how she had ever imagined that he was a helpless little rabbit.

  “I studied for a very long time,” he said, “and gained certain knowledge. I’m older than you might think.”

  Hedia looked into his eyes and immediately wished that she hadn’t. What she’d thought at first glance were gray irises instead opened into infinite distances.

  “At last I found this amulet”—he gestured toward the ankh, now hanging on his breast again—“and learned the ways of it. You should understand that until I gained all power, I had no power. Do you understand that, woman?”

  “I hear what you said,” said Hedia. “No one is really that powerless, though.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” the man said, shaking his head with a sad smile. “But I thought it was true, which is the same thing.”

  His face lost its weakness again. “With the amulet, I resolved to make a paradise for myself,” he said. “So I thought. A living paradise for my mind alone. I knew nothing of women, you see, except that I desired them. And so in my ignorance I created”—he turned both hands upward and moved them apart: the gesture included more than the physical presence of the chamber and the tomb—“this. And found myself trapped in it, with the figments of my desires—as I imagined them to be.”

  Hedia nodded. “Thank you for the explanation,” she said. “Daughter, we should be going. We have a great deal to do yet.”

  She and Alphena walked quickly up the corridor. The chamber and the man in it were lost behind the curve of the stone.

  “I’ve sometimes wished that I had more power,” Hedia said quietly. “But in truth, I’ve never been so badly harmed by a lack of power as I have by the lack of judgment to use the power I have. That would seem to be the general fate of humanity.”