by David Drake
The slope grew steeper. The woman turned sideways but continued to walk with apparent confidence.
Varus grimaced. He didn’t want to look silly, but he wasn’t any kind of athlete, and it wouldn’t help if he missed a step and plunged into the nothingness beyond. He turned and continued down backward, gripping out-crops from the slope whenever he wasn’t sure of his footing.
He grinned. The only person who could see him now was his guide. He didn’t imagine that she thought he was silly—or cared.
Varus heard cries as they went—crawled, in his case—deeper. He wasn’t sure whether they were made by humans or animals; perhaps they were even of natural causes. He’d given up thinking anything was impossible, so it could be that what seemed to him wails of agony was really the sighing of the wind.
The slope flattened. Varus hesitated for a few steps more, then stood and resumed walking normally again. The light had color now, or he thought it did: a bluish tinge where there had been only gray.
This place was cold as well; cold mentally. His arms didn’t have goose bumps, but his mind shuddered.
The woman stopped. Varus walked to her side and waited, wondering what to do with his hands. Eventually he clasped them behind his back for fear that he’d otherwise strike a rhetorical pose with his right arm lifted. He was nervous, and his reflex was to fall back into the forms he’d been trained to use.
The region of blue radiance expanded, stretching away on all sides. They were standing on a plain, rocky and as barren as the surface of the sea.
Varus was cold. He was as cold as death, and his mind throbbed in the rhythm of the dance. He couldn’t see the slope they had descended.
“S-Sigyn?” he said. He swallowed. “What do we do now?”
The Cold replied, “PUBLIUS VARUS, YOU HAVE BROUGHT MY BRIDE TO ME. FOR THAT I GRANT YOU A GIFT: I WILL SEND YOU ON THE WAY TO WHAT YOU SEEK.”
Varus licked his lips. His mouth was dry, but he was no longer afraid. He knew what to do, and the realization freed him despite the hammering pressure in his mind.
“Sigyn,” he said, “You can leave here with me. This isn’t a place for anyone, not for anything. Come, we’re going.”
“DO YOU THINK YOU CAN BALK ME, HUMAN?” thundered the Cold through every atom of Varus’s body.
He didn’t speak. I’m going to try, he thought. His lips pursed to speak a verse to rip a path out of this place. He didn’t think that he’d succeed, even with the help of the old woman, but Sigyn’s fate wouldn’t be on his conscience.
She touched his cheek with the fingers of her left hand. “You have removed the compulsion from me, Publius Varus,” she said, “but the truth remains: this is where I belong. I will stay.”
“Sigyn?” he said. He wanted to say more, but he didn’t know what more he could say. The rhythm behind his temples almost blinded him with its angry insistence.
He felt the woman take his hands. “Go back to the waking world, Varus,” she said, “but not as the tool of the Twelve. They lied to you for their own safety, and my husband supports them because of his perversity. Go as your own man.”
She smiled. The ragged wound still gaped in her throat, but Varus no longer found it disfiguring. He supposed he’d gotten used to it.
“You will probably die,” she said. “But you will find death preferable to fulfilling the task the Twelve set for you.”
“What am I to do?” Varus said through the pain. His head might burst. He wished it would, spilling his life out with his brains on this cold stone. The pounding would stop then, must stop then.
“Do as seems right to you, Varus,” the woman said. Her smile grew wider but softer as well. “Your instincts have served you well before.”
“Yes, Sigyn,” Varus whispered. He hurt and he was afraid, but he would go on. He was a citizen of Carce.
“Now,” said the woman. “As you took the compulsion from me, so do I take the compulsion from you.”
She kissed Varus on the forehead. The pounding stopped. He wavered, feeling as if all the bones had been snatched from his limbs. Sigyn held him, feeding strength through her cold hands.
She kissed Varus on the lips and stepped away. She had the same smile.
“Sigyn,” he said, reaching toward her. He felt a relief beyond anything he could have imagined before this moment.
“That was Sigyn,” she said. “But now and forever I am the Bride.”
Her form faded, all but the smile; and at last the smile as well. In her place brightened a path of rosy light slanting upward.
CHAPTER XVII
This is quite fast enough, Maron,” Hedia said sharply as he started to lope ahead.
The faun turned with a petulant scowl. “Come!” he said. “The gate’s not far ahead now.”
Then, “I can carry you again, woman. Here, I’ll do that.”
He knelt with his back to her, his head turned over his shoulder. He placed his hands on his hips as before so that his wrists were ready to support her thighs. Alphena looked from the faun to Hedia, then back again.
“We will not,” Hedia said. “We will walk as we’ve been doing, and if this gate is close by, then we’ll get there shortly.”
Maron glared at her, then burst into unexpected laughter. “Yes, great lady,” he said. “I am yours to command and keep safe, as I will continue to do.”
He held out his right hand to her and his left to Alphena. The girl made a moue and brushed the offer away, but Hedia touched her fingertips to the faun’s for a moment before lowering her hand again. This wasn’t terrain to stumble through linked to a neighbor, but she was willing enough to accept the gesture.
Alphena wasn’t up to moving quickly either. The girl’s footgear was more suitable for rough country, but it was heavy and would pull on groin muscles unused to hiking. Hedia’s objection saved her stepdaughter from having to admit weakness.
There were red hills to either side, barren but wind-carved and not especially steep. The soil of the valley was largely sand that had worn from those rocks. The only vegetation was yuccas; they bunched their leaves in star-bursts on the ground and sent up a single spiky stem from the center. On some of the stems were small yellow flowers.
Boulders ranging from the size of a man’s head to the size of an ox were scattered across the plain. Bright green and ocher faces had been painted on several. As Hedia proceeded at the faun’s side, faces appeared on other rocks as well. The features were stylized, with square mouths, four-pointed eyes, and a single thick brow.
“Mother?” Alphena said. “I think that rock just turned around. It’s looking at me.”
“It doesn’t appear to have arms to grab us,” Hedia said, keeping her tone carefully cool. She herself thought that the faces were appearing on what had been blank surfaces, not that the stones themselves were moving. “Maron, are these painted rocks dangerous?”
“Painted?” the faun said in an ironic tone. “But just keep away from them, why don’t you? You can manage that.”
Hedia looked at him appraisingly. Maron wasn’t her servant, and she had to admit that the task of guiding and protecting her had been a considerable burden to him. Though she hoped there’d been what the faun considered fringe benefits.
She grinned wickedly but quickly hid it behind her hand. It wouldn’t do for Alphena to see the expression and wonder.
“Mother?” the girl said. “What do we do when we get back to Carce?”
Hedia bent forward to look at her past the faun’s muscular torso. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” she said honestly. “Nothing until we’ve talked with Anna, certainly. And, ah, we don’t know what else might have happened while we were gone.”
She thought about Corylus having vanished, which the girl didn’t know about. And Maron saying that her brother had smashed down the forest, including the giant centipede. She didn’t—
Varus had disappeared when he chased the sacred chickens. He came back that time, and likely he would this time also.
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Hedia chuckled. Aloud she said, “Alphena, dear, all that I’m really sure about is that we’ll deal with whatever we find when we get back, just as we’ve dealt with the things that have happened to us here. The women of the Alphenus household are a force to be reckoned with, wouldn’t you say?”
She was speaking to cheer the girl up, but part of her mind really did mean it. The other part quivered with formless dread, but that part had been terrified ever since she watched her stepdaughter vanish in the sunlit garden. It hadn’t stopped Hedia from dealing with the situation, just as she’d said.
“Here,” said Maron, halting before what seemed at first to be a curving field covered with tiny bubbles. “I have brought you both safely to the portal to the waking world. Is this not so, great lady?”
Hedia stared at the scene before her. The bubbles had fuzzy edges and were moving. The ground on which she and her companions stood faded when it should have come in contact with the plane of bubbles. They spiraled up and to the right, but when she moved closer she saw that they also curled down to the left.
“Maron, where are we?” she asked sharply. No matter how she turned her head or squinted, she wasn’t sure that the spiral was a material object or an illusion of light.
“The path …,” the faun said. He took her right hand in his and swept it upward. “That path. Will take you to the world where you belong.”
He laughed with some humor. “Do not take the downward path, Hedia,” he said. “That goes to a place from which you will not return, not even with the help of those you called upon to bind me.”
“Can we walk on it?” Alphena said. “It doesn’t look solid.”
Hedia took a deep breath. She and Maron both ignored the girl. The time she had spent in this place had been a life separate from the one she had lived for the previous twenty-two years—eventful though they had been.
“Then yes,” Hedia said, her eyes holding the faun’s. “Maron, you have guided and protected us as you were compelled to do.”
She stepped to the faun and kissed him passionately while rubbing herself against his own hard body.
She stepped back. “Thank you, dear beast,” she said, her voice husky. “Perhaps we’ll meet again.”
Maron laughed harshly. “Perhaps we will, great lady,” he said. “Go back now to your waking world.”
A little taken aback by his expression, Hedia gestured Alphena ahead. The girl looked doubtful—Does she think I’m using her to test the footing?—but stepped toward the path.
Maron strutted in front of Alphena and took both her wrists, swinging her to the side. “Go to your world, Hedia!” he crowed. “You and I are done now!”
“Release my daughter,” Hedia said, hearing her voice rise despite her attempt to sound calm. “If you like, I’ll stay with you for a time, dear. That’s no hardship, is it?”
“I was compelled not to hurt you, great lady,” the faun said, his tone slipping into the gutturals of lust. “There was no such compulsion about the virgin. Though as you said, there needn’t be harm in what I intend for her. Maybe I’ll even send her up to you when I’m done with her.”
Laughing like the demon he was in fact, Maron bent the screaming, struggling girl over so that he could grasp her ankles with the same hands that held her wrists. He lifted her overhead, helpless as a straw doll, and poised her over his rampant member.
VARUS HAD LOST TRACK of time and distance. The path took all his mind and concentration, the way versification did when he was deep in the moment. Part of his intellect told him that he should be wrung out from the effort of climbing seemingly forever, but instead he felt exhilarated.
The wizards of the Horn, the Twelve, were no longer in his mind. Each rosy step Varus took had a lively sharpness. He was happy, if only because pounding misery no longer gripped him.
In that joyous state, Varus stepped from the glow into a destination that had completely escaped his mind. He stopped with his foot raised, at a momentary loss for where to put it when the path no longer sloped upward. He was in the hall of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest, and it was nighttime.
Lanterns hung from their sconces, casting yellow light on the pillars, the drapery, and the stiff earthenware form of the seated god. An aged senator, Sempronius Tardus, lay slumped on a couch facing the round table on which his dinner sat. He was an antiquarian friend of Alphenus Saxa and, as Varus knew, a commissioner for the sacred rites.
Around the dinner table and elsewhere in the big room sprawled attendants—Balaton and the temple staff as well as the servants who must have come with the commissioner; they appeared to be sleeping. Varus supposed they’d been drugged, but a spell might have been involved instead.
He felt a touch of vertigo and rubbed his eyes. The lamplight wavered. All the light he’d seen since Oannes accosted him in the Grove of the Muses had been flat, sourceless, and constant.
Pandareus lay on the floor, midway between the entrance gates and the statue of the god. A helix of green flame flowed up and down between the teacher’s ankles and throat. His eyes stared at Varus. Though he was obviously straining, no words came out of his part-open mouth.
Nemastes knelt, before the statue of Jupiter, Varus thought; but then he saw the triangle of three small fires on the floor in front of the Hyperborean. In their midst was a human skull.
Nemastes was working a spell. It had nothing to do with worship of the greatest god of the Republic.
Sigyn had told Varus to follow his instincts. He would do that because there was no better alternative—and instinct told him to oppose any and every action that Nemastes took.
“Nemastes!” Varus said, walking deliberately toward the wizard. He gripped the ivory talisman with his left hand. “Your brethren on the Horn sent me to you.”
The wizard jumped to his feet and turned toward Varus. He had cast off the singlet he’d worn until now. Nude, he looked only marginally human; his genitals were tiny, more like those of an infant than a grown man’s.
“Fear me, boy!” Nemastes said in a high-pitched voice. Varus hadn’t heard him speak in the past. “You see your teacher, helpless against me. Run away now or you will be bound like him for eternity!”
He’s bluffing, Varus thought. He took another step. Nemastes threw a handful of softly shining objects toward him.
Snake ribs! Varus thought as they pelted him, light taps and quite harmless. Nemastes shouted a word that human ears could not register.
One end of the green flame lifted from Pandareus’s body. The coils abruptly unwound and writhed toward Varus.
Varus kicked at the serpent of fire. It slid up his leg and around his waist. He kicked vainly again and toppled paralyzed to the floor not far from his teacher.
Nemastes stared at him in satisfaction. “If my siblings sent you,” he said, “and I suppose they did, since I see you have the head of Botrug … If they did, then they picked a poor tool to save themselves.”
The Hyperborean squatted and resumed his chant toward the skull. One of the stones in the statue’s plinth was glowing with its own pale light.
Varus could feel the coil of vivid green loop up and down his body; his skin felt brittle beneath its touch. He could breathe, but he couldn’t move his arms or legs. He could still speak, though—
“Nemastes!” he said. “They’re coming for you. You can’t escape your brothers!”
Varus didn’t know that, nor did he know anything else that could give him hope. He suspected that it was a threat the Hyperborean might believe, though, and that it might throw him off his stride.
Nemastes shouted a word that made the lanterns wink. A stone of the plinth powdered, vanishing like a bubble in a marsh. The wizard reached into the cavity it had left. He came out with a curved black bone which was pierced for fingerings.
Rising, Nemastes fitted a short reed into a hole in the knuckle end of the flute. Looking at Varus again, he said, “This is Odd’s flute, boy. Have you any conception of how long I’ve
waited to hold this? But the wait was worth it. All power in this world is mine!”
“Till your brothers come for you,” Varus said. The cold from the helix of fire was seeping into his bones, but he continued to fight it. “You’re doomed and you know it, Nemastes!”
“Spurius Cassius told me where he’d hidden this,” the wizard said. Varus had never seen his face without an unpleasant expression, but the grin this time seemed exceptionally nasty. “He didn’t know how to use it, but I do. In exchange, Lord Varus, I gave him your sister. He’s pleasuring himself with Lady Alphena in Hell right now, I believe.”
Varus lunged against the bonds of light. They continued to slip over him like greased copper; there was no give. The cold sank deeper, through the youth’s muscles and into the marrow of his bones. I’ll never move again, and I’ll never be warm.
Nemastes raised the flute. “I’ve seen Odd use it!” he said. “I have Odd’s power now!”
He’s lying, Varus thought. He was sure of that, though he had no conscious evidence for his belief.
Nemastes put his lips to the reed he’d inserted. Varus shouted, “You’ll die for a fool if you try that, wizard! You’ll die and know you’ll die!”
Nemastes blew, starting on a high note and wobbling down the scale. Varus wasn’t sure whether it was music or if the sound was a side effect, like the ringing of iron as it was beaten on an anvil.
Light itself contracted in a violent convulsion. The interior of the temple glittered like an array of crystal prisms. There were thousands of identical everything—except the Hyperborean wizard alone, standing in the center and playing with the order of the universe.
Varus stood beside the old woman on a mountaintop; she held a sprig of mistletoe. Snow lay all around, but the two of them were on bare rock. The scene being acted inside the temple was far below but as clear to him as the wrinkles on the woman’s face.
“Nemastes has power,” she said. Her voice quavered, but there was iron in it. “But not judgment. He thinks it shows patience that he has waited ten thousand years, but he has not waited long enough.”