The Legions of Fire

by David Drake

  “I have to stop him,” Varus said. He looked at her in concern. “That’s right, isn’t it? Whatever Nemastes wants isn’t for the good of men.”

  “How is a phantom to advise a wizard of your power, Lord Varus?” the old woman said. He didn’t think she was being ironic. “You have the knowledge and the ability to remake the world as you choose it to be.”

  Varus shook his head in horror. “Lady, not I,” he said. But it seemed that there was no one else.

  Nemastes continued to pipe. The statue of Jupiter had withdrawn into earthen silence; it neither watched nor commented on what was taking place in its temple.

  He’s afraid! Varus thought. For a moment he told himself that he was indulging in wishful thinking, but closer observation of the wizard’s strained face convinced him that he was afraid. Though his flute sang with the force of a tornado, Nemastes was a charioteer who had lost his reins but feared to leap from his careening vehicle.

  Around him twelve nodes in the yellow-green haze began to thicken. The Twelve had arrived, at least as observers; with them were the demons from the rocks of the Horn. They began to dance in slow, horrid majesty as before, to the rhythm that had ruled Varus for what had been in its way a lifetime.

  This time Varus was outside it and thought he could smile. When he curled his lip, however, the result had nothing of humor in it.

  “They are not here,” said the old woman, glaring in disgust at the dancing Hyperboreans. “They are not of the waking world or of this world either; they created their own place by walling off the Horn from any existence beyond their own.”

  “They’re watching, though,” Varus said. “Why are they doing that?”

  He was frightened, but that was in a calm fashion now. He expected to fail and expected to die, but he was going forward anyway. He wished he could ask Corylus if that was what soldiers did, but he didn’t suppose he would ever see his friend again.

  “They are gloating, Lord Varus,” the woman said. “Nemastes and his siblings are not human, but they are enough like human beings to share that trait.”

  She looked at him sharply and said, “But you do not gloat, do you?”

  About what? Varus thought. About how great a poet I am?

  Aloud he said, “No, your ladyship. I think that’s discourteous.”

  Varus saw the circling dancers from the peak where he stood with the old woman and simultaneously from where he lay on the temple floor. He considered them with a new feeling of contempt. That relaxed him almost as much as Sigyn’s kiss had.

  The Twelve were prancing bullies, no different from Piso and his cronies in class. Varus had seen Corylus handle the students. Gaius Varus could deal with Hyperborean wizards.

  That’s why I’m with the old woman, he realized. His lips pursed to ask his companion to help him. Before his lips formed the words, Nemastes’ skirling flute moved into a quicker tempo. Beneath the temple, a pit was opening. It grew in a world parallel to that of Carce, but it moved toward the temple with the speed of racing horses. There was movement in the depths, the way the sand on the floor of an ant lion’s lair stirs before the creature strikes.

  “Nemastes is a greater fool than any but you could have fathomed, Lord Wizard,” said the old woman. “He has freed Surtr, but he does not know how to direct the god against his siblings. They had hoped to send the fire demons out the easy passage through Vesuvius. By twisting the path which the flute tore, however, the Twelve are loosing Surtr’s legions in the heart of Carce.”

  Varus stared transfixed. He knew that the dance was syncopating the raging music of the flute, but his understanding was at the visceral level on which the rhythm had toyed with him.

  Nemastes continued to play desperately. He was like a swimmer who has the strength to get out beyond the breakers, but not enough more to fight his way back. Varus felt sorry for him—

  And choked a laugh at his own expense. The old woman had been right that he wouldn’t gloat over a fallen enemy, but this was carrying courtesy beyond a sane level. And of course Nemastes’ death would be followed by the death of all life in Carce and the whole waking world.

  “Sibyl,” Varus said, giving his guide and mentor the title he had long known must be hers, “help me and help the world.”

  She smiled like the sun and her mouth opened. On the floor of the temple Gaius Varus cried, “Where the twisting passage lies, the Wizard knows!”

  ALPHENA PRIDED HERSELF on her physical strength, though she didn’t usually think about it in those terms. It was more a matter of sneering at other women—including her stepmother, sometimes aloud—for being soft and weak.

  The present journey through a dreamworld had forced her to revise her estimate of Hedia’s softness, and all illusions about her own strength vanished the instant Maron gripped her.

  Alphena screamed and tried to pull herself free. The faun’s muscles didn’t budge, and his fingers were like steel clamps on her wrists. Her hands were going numb.

  Alphena opened her mouth to cry “You’re hurting me!” but she caught herself before more than a tongue-muffled moan had come out. She wouldn’t lower herself by pleading!

  Besides, she knew it wouldn’t do any good.

  Proud of her resource, Alphena clamped her legs together and locked her ankles. Maron slammed her heels to the ground and bent her torso over her legs. Her scream wasn’t at all muffled this time: youth and exercise had kept Alphena flexible, but this brutal manipulation happened whether or not her muscles and sinews were ready to stretch that far, that fast.

  Guessing what was to come, Alphena kicked her legs to the left. The faun threw her over on her left side, pinned her left ankle with his right hoof, and then jerked her left wrist down so that he could grasp that wrist and ankle in the same hand.

  She hadn’t believed anything could hurt as much as this did. For an instant she was aware of nothing but whiteness that buzzed like a hive of bees in her skull. When her vision cleared, Maron gripped her arms and legs as easily as he might hold two lengths of worn rope. He raised her high.

  “Do you want to watch, Hedia dear?” the faun cried, his voice raw with lust. “Watch, then! I like it that way!”

  Hedia got up from the ground: the faun must have knocked her down when she tried to interfere, though Alphena didn’t remember that happening. She wondered if she’d blacked out while she was being manhandled.

  Maron’s face seethed with desire that had more of cruelty than love overlying it. The skirt of Alphena’s short tunic flapped as she hung suspended in the air. Perhaps it’ll get in the way and—

  The faun’s member stood like an ivory battering ram, fully extended from its sheath. If he—when he—pulled Alphena down on it, it might not rip the woolen fabric but it would certainly carry the skirt along into her. The pain would make her forget the strain on her joints.

  “Mother, help!” she shrieked, but she knew there was nothing Hedia or anyone could do. Except, as Maron had said, to watch. Alphena hurt too much even to feel her normal disgust at the thought.

  “Now, virgin!” the faun said. Hedia stepped behind him and seemed to pat his ribs.

  Maron’s mouth opened and his tongue protruded silently. He stumbled forward a step and then another. His hands spasmed, hurling Alphena free; she hit the ground near the base of one of the yuccas. When she tried to stand, her groin muscles protested. She fell back with a squeak of further pain.

  The faun fell prone. His mouth opened and closed. Blood cascaded down his right buttock and leg, matting the fur; it pooled on the ground beneath him.

  Maron’s hooves hammered the dirt, as though he was trying to run while lying on his belly. His head and hooves arched; then his body went flaccid. Though his eyes remained open, they were beginning to glaze.

  Hedia stepped to the corpse, holding in her bloody hand the knife that Alphena had thought was a toy. She wiped the blade on the fur of the faun’s left thigh, then gathered a fistful of the loose soil and rubbed her hands with it.
Last she finished cleaning the knife with a fibrous yucca leaf.

  There was a six-inch cut in the faun’s right side and back, just below the ribs. The blade of Hedia’s knife was no longer than her little finger, but when thrust there and pulled, it must have sliced the right kidney in half.

  “M-Mother?” Alphena said.

  “Yes, dear,” Hedia said. “Are you all right? Can you walk now?”

  “I think so,” the girl whispered. She tried to stand, gasped, and lurched to her feet. “I’m all right. I’ll be all right.”

  “Good,” Hedia said, tucking her dagger away again in its ivory sheath. “Because I think the sooner we get out of here”—she nodded to the path rising into the fuzzy infinite: it reminded Alphena of the milky stain across the night sky which myth said was the River Eridanus—“the better off we’ll be. There’s nothing about this place that makes me want to extend our stay.”

  “No,” whispered Alphena. She forced herself to walk forward. After she started moving, further steps were an ache and memories, but no longer fresh stabbing pain. “I can leave now.”

  She lifted her sword slightly to be sure it was free, then let it fall back in the scabbard. She’d been so proud of the weapon, so sure of what she could accomplish with the gleaming blade.

  She’d done nothing to save herself. The sword and all her training had been a waste of time!

  “Hedia?” she said. “Mother.”

  She stopped and swallowed. The faun’s corpse drew her eyes no matter where she tried to look.

  “Yes, dear?” Hedia said patiently. She must know what I want to say! “Mother,” Alphena blurted. “I thought you, well, liked him. The way you kissed him and, and everything!”

  “Yes, dear,” Hedia said calmly. “I rather did. But in this world, a woman must often do things she would rather not. In the waking world, I mean, but in this world too.”

  She put her hand on Alphena’s shoulder. “Ready to come now? Here, I’ll start and you follow if the footing is firm.”

  “No, we’ll go together,” Alphena said primly, taking her stepmother’s hand. “We are together, after all.”

  The path of bubbles felt like polished marble underfoot. They climbed deliberately, Hedia obviously measuring her gait by what Alphena could manage without pain.

  After a time, the girl glanced over her shoulder. The path curled back without end. She didn’t see the world they had just left, nor the faun’s sprawled body.

  “My sword wasn’t any use,” Alphena said. “I was so proud of what I’d be able to do with it.”

  “Well, dear,” the older woman said. They were still hand in hand. “There are different kinds of training. Mine was more useful than yours for the situation in which we found ourselves.”

  Hedia cleared her throat. “Daughter?” she said. “It’s often better not to bother men with things that they wouldn’t understand. Do you know what I mean?”

  Alphena looked at her. Hedia’s profile was as sharp and clean as a cameo. She was beautiful, as coldly beautiful as this pathway of glitter and stars.

  “Men?” Alphena repeated. “You mean my father, don’t you?”

  “I mean ‘men,’ Daughter,” Hedia said with a wry smile. “But yes, your father is a man in his own fashion.” She paused, then added, “A very dear man. I wouldn’t want to hurt him in any way.”

  “I understand,” Alphena said. She felt sad—not for Saxa, who would be safe and happy in his own world if they could only rid him of Nemastes.

  Alphena felt sad for herself. She’d been such a child, but she was happier then than she would ever be again. She thought back to how the world had looked to her only days before, when she had pretended she was the equal of any man because she trained in the gymnasium.

  “We won’t hurt my father,” she said. But when next I see Nemastes, she thought, I’ll see if this sword is good for something after all. For what he did to Saxa, and for what he did to my own innocence.

  “FROTHI!” CORYLUS SHOUTED. The chief and the rest of the tribe were two hundred feet away. “I have fulfilled the task you set for me. Now, give me the flute which Odd your brother made mine!”

  Steam bright with sparks shot from the reborn volcano. Corylus poised on his toes. The earth shock came seconds before the sound. It knocked down several of the tribesmen, but Corylus, facing the blast, rode it easily.

  “Give me the flute or even worse will happen, Frothi!” he said. That was a bluff. Oh, worse things were certainly going to happen, but that had nothing to do with whether Publius Corylus was holding the flute. Channeling ice water into the heart of a volcano was very like rolling a boulder off a cliff: what happened afterward was out of human control.

  “No!” Frothi shouted, fitting the base of a javelin into his spear thrower. He straightened, stepped forward on his left foot as his arm drew back, and strode into his release of the missile.

  The dart snapped toward Corylus in a flat arc. The chief probably hadn’t been an active hunter for many years, but his aim was still deadly. Corylus raised the hornbeam staff and ticked the javelin harmlessly to the side. There was no great trick to that, but it was a good test of dexterity and timing. Arrows were much harder to deflect, but even that was possible perhaps one time in three.

  Corylus grinned as he continued to walk forward. You practiced with blunted arrows, though, unless you were too drunk to have much chance of succeeding anyway.

  “Give me the flute, Frothi!” he said.

  Nemastes had been at the chief’s side; the Stolo kept a pace back from its master. The wizard stopped and turned, gesturing his servant brusquely to the side so that he had an unimpeded view of the crater.

  Orange fire and dense yellow smoke blasted upward. Nemastes dropped to his knees and placed the ivory talisman on the ground in front of him.

  This time the blast knocked everyone in the tribe down. Even the Stolo dropped to all fours, but the wizard rode it as though he were kneeling on rock.

  The tribesfolk turned to stare, even before they rose to their feet. Steam shrieked and with the crackling of rocks smothered the children’s wails.

  Frothi rolled to his feet. He shot another javelin at Corylus, who again batted it away with equal practiced skill.

  People joined hands and began to wail “Surtr! Surtr!” in what Corylus decided must be a prayer. They knelt, bowing in supplication to the crater from which they had fled.

  The pillar of sulfurous smoke spread into a flat top like an anvil two miles in the air. Though the sky was otherwise clear, lightning began to dance between the cloud and the ground in its shadow.

  The air shuddered as though a thin silk curtain had been drawn across the line of Corylus’s vision. In place of the rising smoke, he saw a god of yellow fire holding a sword. The god laughed, and the earth roared.

  Demons in the fire god’s image boiled out of the pit and began to advance. Grass, trees, and the rock itself swelled upward in curling flames.

  “People of Thule!” Corylus cried. He didn’t understand the situation, but he understood what the situation would mean for ordinary folk if they were trapped. “Run to the east! Run now! Don’t be caught on this peninsula!”

  Frothi shot his last javelin from fifty feet away; Corylus touched it almost absently, sending it like the others to quiver with half its length buried in the turf.

  Had the chief heard him? He seemed lost in the terror of the moment. The wizard was about his own business, and Frothi’s three henchmen knelt praying with the rest of the tribesfolk.

  “Run!” Corylus repeated. He knew only one of the tribe well enough that she might listen to him. “Sith, lead your people east, get them away from here! Otherwise they’ll be trapped by the, by the lava!”

  He’d almost said “by the demons.” There was little to choose between his vision and the reality for those caught in the path of blazing rock, however.

  The volcano belched again. For an instant, Corylus saw sprays of red-orange lava burst skyw
ard and fall back in sequence: to the left, to the right, and then mounting a full thousand feet in the center. When the curtain slid back, the fire god roared. He flexed muscles of flame and lifted his blazing sword overhead.

  Demonic miniatures of the god climbed from the fiery cauldron and marched in all directions, devouring the landscape as they marched across it; moments before they had been sluggish billows of lava, rolling their black crusts under fresh orange fire as they lurched from the volcano’s throat.

  Corylus walked on at a deliberate pace, unaffected by anything the chieftain did. They were now within twenty feet of each other. Frothi was a powerful man. Though he’d spent his javelins, he had a long flint knife and a pick of sharpened reindeer antler which was weighted with stone.

  Corylus was sure that with his hardwood staff, he could deal with the chief and two more like him. Even if he’d been unarmed, he would have gone on. He had turned the Ice River into the crater as the chief had demanded, and in doing so he had ripped the chief’s world apart. Frothi could not stand against him in this moment.

  Frothi screamed in rage like a big cat. Reaching under his tunic, he came out with the black bone flute. He flung it at Corylus’s face.

  Corylus caught it in his left hand. Frothi ran—not toward anything, simply away. His gait was shambling and graceless, like that of a wounded bear.

  He must not be looking where he’s going, Corylus thought. Then, He must be blind. He’s running straight toward the lava.

  But that didn’t matter now, because Corylus had the flute which Odd had ordered him to get. Odd—Odd’s Vengeance—hadn’t said what to do with the instrument when he got it, but that question didn’t require deep thought.

  Regretfully, Corylus dropped the hornbeam staff. The flute was a section of thighbone, though he couldn’t guess at the animal it came from. It had been cut to something less than its full length, but one knuckle—what had been the knee joint, not the hip—remained. It was drilled through to the core from which the marrow had been sucked.

  Corylus found the length of hollow reed behind his left ear, where the nymph Canina had tucked a lock of her auburn hair. He fitted the reed into the hole drilled for it, then lifted the flute to his lips.