From Unseen Fire

by Cass Morris

  ♦ SEXTILIS ♦

  I

  Three Years Later

  689 AB URBE CONDITA

  PUTEOLI, CRATER BAY

  The hand was rigor-stiff when Lucretius Rabirus went to pull the signet ring off of it. Nearby, an Abydosian priest and an Aventan Earth mage prepared to set about preserving the body, so that it would not turn fetid and fester in the stifling late-summer heat before the time was right to bring it back to Aven for display and cremation. Neither showed any signs of minding Rabirus’s interference. They had been well paid not only for their services but for their silence, and if either had privately held notions of carrying tales, the crucified forms of two slaves they had passed on their way into the villa would have dispelled such a temptation.

  Rabirus had to tug hard. The golden band caught at the knuckle, long enough to let a tendril of doubt sprout up in his mind.

  ‘The Dictator of Aven lies dead on this pallet. How long do you think you can keep this a secret?’

  He stared down at Ocella’s body, left pallid and waxy by the disease that had come so suddenly and ravaged through him so quickly. When he began to fall ill, Ocella had taken to the countryside—ostensibly for the restorative powers of fresh seaside air, but more to prevent the city from witnessing his all-too-human vulnerability. His eyes were open yet, but their glossy darkness had lost the power to intimidate. There was nothing behind them now: no otherworldly depths, no fathomless magnetism. Whatever shade had lurked in Ocella’s soul, it lived with Pluto now, and what lay on the table was a bereft shell.

  ‘The secret must stay with me as long as possible.’

  That was why he had crucified the slaves, of course. They were two he had long suspected of passing information to the Dictator’s exiled enemies. Rabirus had never told Ocella. The Dictator’s paranoia had made him short-sighted, and he would have crucified the slaves on mere suspicion, but Rabirus had hoped to trace the spies back to their masters, the banished Senators still working against the Dictator abroad. Now, though, that potential usefulness had been rendered irrelevant, and Rabirus could not risk news of Ocella’s death spreading any faster than could be helped.

  He would have to send to Manius Maloricus, brother to Ocella’s late wife and guardian of the Dictator’s two young sons. Obedient, competent, and without ambition of his own, Maloricus had been the ideal man to hold the city in the Dictator’s stead. ‘But will he have the strength to hold it after his death?’

  Rabirus gave another tug, and the ring came off. He held it up, examining the sigil carved into the jasper: an eye with a thunderbolt for a pupil. With this, Rabirus could tie up loose ends, push through a last few decrees in the Dictator’s name.

  When Ocella had marched an army on the city and taken the Dictatorship by force, Rabirus had swiftly determined that while there might have been dangers in being Ocella’s ally, they were at least known quantities. He weighed the benefits of making himself indispensable to the Dictator, and he judged them worth the risk. For years, he served Ocella not with fawning subservience but with entire and unquestioning obedience, a worthy lieutenant in whom Ocella could see much value and no threat. He learned to judge the Dictator’s moods, knew when to conveniently absent himself from a room, and when to proffer advice in the form of flattery.

  Yet as absolute as Ocella’s power had been at his ascent, Rabirus’s intuition told him that the flame would quickly burn itself out. ‘No one lasts forever,’ he had often thought. And this summer his patience had been rewarded.

  Rabirus briefly considered that he could do as Ocella had done: take command of a legion, seize the city before the exiles returned, turn Ocella’s Dictatorship into his own—but however attractive that dream, his practical mind knew it would never do. The armies would not follow him as they had Ocella, famous victor of so many battles.

  ‘Besides,’ Rabirus reminded himself as he slipped the signet ring onto his own finger, ‘Ocella’s Dictatorship was an aberration—an offense, truly, to the mos maiorum.’ Rabirus was, at heart a member of Aven’s traditionalist party, fervent in upholding ancient laws. Good governance by a select group of the best men, from old and well-established families—that was what the Optimate party stood for. ‘I have survived a Dictator. Gods grant I need never survive another.’ While the Aventan constitution did allow for dictators in times of great crisis, Ocella had manufactured those circumstances, and he had forced his rump senate to extend his term in the extraordinary office far beyond what the law allowed. ‘It is right and just that the very office of the Dictator should die with him. Aven will correct itself now. Things will go back to the way they were. The way they should be.’

  He left Ocella’s body in the care of the priest and the mage and returned to his own villa, high atop a hill surrounded by fields of browning barley. It was well past the middle of the night when he strode into his home and immediately began barking orders to have trunks packed, horses readied, and provisions set. His abrupt return woke his wife. Wide-eyed and wrapped in a thick robe, she padded barefoot into the atrium. “Husband? What’s going on? Is there—? Is something wrong?”

  “Ocella is dead. We’re returning to the city.”

  “At this hour?” she said, holding her hand to her chest in what Rabirus considered an unnecessarily dramatic way.

  “I am,” Rabirus said. “And our son. You should go back to bed. Come along in a few days, once you’ve settled things here.” But she trailed after him, a bewildered shadow, as Rabirus went to his son’s sleeping cubicle and shook the young man awake. “Get up and put on traveling clothes. We’re going back to the city.”

  Young Lucretius blinked several times, struggling to his feet. “Back to the city? Tonight?”

  Rabirus suppressed a sigh. For years, he had been hoping that his only son would show some of the mental acuity which Rabirus prized in himself, but as the boy entered adulthood, it was becoming clear that he had inherited his mother’s tendency towards vagueness. Rabirus did not deign to repeat himself, but opened the wardrobe standing in the corner, pulled out a tunic and cloak, and flung them at Young Lucretius. As he went back to his own chamber, he heard his wife attempting to explain.

  Rabirus moved from room to room, snapping instructions at the slaves. Young Lucretius stumbled out of his chamber a moment later. “Dictator Ocella is dead?” he asked, shrugging the cloak on inelegantly.

  “Yes. It will behoove us to be in residence before word gets out and someone thinks to recall the exiles. I have a few matters to see to.” He grasped his son by the shoulder and spun him about, shoving him back towards his chamber. “Pack a bag. A bag. We’ll be home in a few days, your mother will bring any forgotten necessaries with her when she joins us, so don’t waste any weight on frivolities.” With that final instruction to his son and no further word at all to his wife, Rabirus strode back out of the villa to await the horses. ‘If we ride hard, change horses as frequently as we can, and the weather continues fair, we need spend no more than two nights on the road. Surely none of the exiles will make better speed. And we have much to set in order before they can start exerting influence again.’

  Rabirus had navigated Ocella’s reign as deftly as he could manage, but it had been a stifling experience nonetheless. To exert power only on another’s behalf, to work with no recognition, knowing that both failure and success could be punishable by death—it hamstrung his ambitions. ‘But now . . .’ There was a chance, here, in Ocella’s wake, to ride the rising current of power in a way that would re-establish the strength of the mos maiorum, the proper way of things, as set down by Aven’s ancestors centuries before, eternal and inviolable.

  Rabirus looked out into the night sky and nodded with grim satisfaction. ‘It will be good to see the city again. To see it and to claim it, with the grace and sanction of the gods.’

  * * *

  TARENTUM, SOUTHERN COAST OF TRUSCUM

  Semproniu
s Tarren read the words twice, carefully, to make sure he had not misunderstood the message. Then he rolled up the scroll and handed it to the freedman servant waiting at his elbow. “Burn it,” he instructed. “Immediately.” The man nodded his fair head, then melted back into the house. Tapping the knuckle of his thumb against his lips, Sempronius stared for a long moment at the sunlight bleeding into the broad, still blue of the bay. Then he stood, and with a cool breeze whipping at the frayed edges of his tunic, he stalked down towards the pavilion where his sister lay on a couch, enjoying the last fading rays of light.

  As he came down the sandblown stairs, she looked up but did not stir. Even in repose, Vibia Sempronia Mellanis somehow never gave an impression of being at ease; she reclined too stiffly, as though the art of relaxation required great effort and concentration. Both siblings shared the same sable hair and plain brown eyes, and slender Vibia would have been a pretty woman if not for the perpetual scowl that seemed etched into her features. Her best feature was a keen and hungry mind, and for this, along with the many secrets they shared, Sempronius brought the news to her first.

  “The dictator is dead,” he said, simple and emotionless.

  Vibia sat up, dark eyes narrowing. “Ocella?”

  “Do we have another dictator?”

  Her lips twitched in irritation. Sarcasm was something Vibia considered her personal weapon, and she never responded well to having it turned on her. “How did it happen?”

  “According to Galerius Orator, a swift and sudden fever, at his villa in Puteoli.”

  “Ha.” Vibia swung her legs around to one side of her couch. “I’m only surprised to learn it wasn’t his spleen, finally bursting out of so many years of concentrated hate.” Sempronius put out a hand to help her rise. “He heard from Marcia Tullia, I take it?” Galerius’s wife, a mage of Air, had a particular talent when it came to gathering and disseminating information. “One of her little birds . . . You must go, as swiftly as you can,” Vibia said, starting up the stairs. “You must be established in the city before the Senate reconvenes. Let me and Taius see to closing the house. Take only what you need and get as far up the road as you can.”

  “I will,” Sempronius said. “But there’s one thing I must do first.”

  Vibia caught the intent in her brother’s eyes. “Make yourself ready, then. I’ll send Corvinus to you with the mirror.”

  * * *

  As Vibia moved about the house, giving instructions for Sempronius’s departure, Sempronius changed into a plain tunic, charcoal-gray and free of ornamentation. He washed his hands and face, sloughing off the grime of the day, and letting go some of his tensions with it. Corvinus, the fair-headed Albine freedman who was Sempronius’s steward and chief attendant, waited outside Sempronius’s sleeping cubicle. Balanced in his hands was Sempronius’s most valuable possession: a dark mirror, procured at great cost from the East, not polished bronze or silver, but volcanic glass, black and glossy.

  “Attend me,” Sempronius said, taking the mirror from him. “Just in case.” Corvinus nodded solemnly and followed.

  The rented house had a small garden protected by high walls, blocked from the prying eyes of either neighbors or the household, ideal for Sempronius’s purposes. Though he had never intended to stay in Tarentum long, he had taken care to set up an altar here. He would never want the gods to think him negligent.

  As he sank to his knees, placing the dark mirror into its allocated place, he said, “I call upon Pluto, Lord of the Underworld; I call upon Nox, Lady of the Night; I call upon Neptune, Master of the Seas; I call upon Lympha, Reader of Souls. Blessed lords and ladies, governors of Shadow and of Water, I, Vibius Sempronius Tarren, entreat you. Look here, gods; look here and hear me.”

  Corvinus had just enough Water magic in him to see the signs: a plum-purple haze, seeping up out of the terra cotta tiles; a silver rain, hailing down from the sky; indigo sparks setting on the shallow pool just beyond the altar. The physical manifestations provided both source and channel for magic to work, and the prayers were not those of a common citizen: Sempronius Tarren was blessed and, true to the Shadow of his nature, had hidden his blessings from the world.

  By law, it was sacrilege to conceal his gifts, but Sempronius felt confident of the gods’ tolerance. He believed he knew the thread the Fates were spinning for him, and that mandate took precedence over the customs forged by man. And so he defied the lex cantatia Augiae, the law laid down in the Republic’s earliest days to prevent men of magical talent from assuming high political office. No one man should hold so much power, the Republic’s founders had determined, after the first man to try to wield magic and government alike had nearly brought the fledgling nation to ruin with his hubris.

  ‘My aims are different,’ Sempronius avowed. ‘Not for my own glory, but the good of the city. The gods know this.’ Behind that thought prickled another: that the law was, fundamentally, unjust—not merely a protection for the Republic, but a means of keeping magically-gifted plebeians from rising too high above their station. Bar them the rank, and bar them power. ‘Talent,’ in Sempronius’s opinion, ‘ought to be encouraged to flourish, wherever it springs.’ And so he felt no moral quandary in working his will.

  Shadow and Water both moved in him, a blend that lent itself to a strange intuition, an ability to hear words unsaid and see things not yet done. Drawing energy from the dark corners of the garden, from the dimming sky above, from the water that flowed into the peristyle, Sempronius concentrated on what it was he needed to know, willing the answers to come to him, etched on the surface of the obsidian mirror. His heartbeat slowed; his muscles relaxed as he eased into that place where body and mind flowed synchronously with his elements. Thus settled, Sempronius passed a hand over the dark glass and waited, all patience, for something to surface.

  As was the nature of Shadow, the images did not come through clearly. Faces were obscured, shapes moving against the black of night. These were not the crystal-clear visions of Light, nor the coded symbols of Time; for Sempronius, they were far more valuable because they were less precise. They showed alternatives, possibilities, might-bes and not-yets. Sempronius cherished that lack of finality. The future was so marvelously open-ended—and that meant there was always room in it for a man to assert his influence. Too, the visions did not come unbidden, as they so often did for the prophets of Time; Sempronius had to dig for the answers he sought, like feeling his way through a maze of ever-shifting curtains. Only through great force of will could he direct the power to show him something useful.

  “I have great opportunity before me,” Sempronius said, his voice pitched low—not that he did not trust Corvinus, but some things were private, standing between him and the gods alone. “I seek guidance. What paths will be open to me, and which must I take?”

  He worked hard to keep his mind clear while a smoky haze danced on the glass; the balance was a delicate thing to hold, and his suggestion could influence what he saw. An answer came in a swirling rush: a lush, rolling countryside, hills that teemed with trees and—ah! Mines. Iberia, then, where farmers and slaves picked up their hoes and forged them anew into swords. Leading them, a man crowned with the stars—young and fresh-faced, scarcely bearded, though his cheeks were painted with blood.

  As quickly as they appeared, these images melted into something else: Shadows, tangling with each other by a river with water as black as the night, and a woman standing on the shore, holding a skull in her hand. She smiled, and the skull’s empty eye sockets glowed with a strange blue light.

  Finally, a third vision, briefest of all: the splash of blood across white marble, scintillating in the light of the sun.

  Before Sempronius could grasp what that might mean, the image dancing on the glass swirled into something new, such that he seemed to see two things at once: the city of Aven, larger and more glorious than it was now, the teeming center of life for all the peoples of the Middl
e Sea, wealthy and prosperous and strong, so strong that no one could challenge its dominance; the city of Aven, diminished, failing, emptying, its temples stripped for their stones, the sacred fires gone cold. Intuition whispered to him that these were Aven’s two futures. Swift and correct action would lead to the former, the Aven of his dreams, the nexus of a web of allied states greater than even Parthia could dream of—Aven, the beating heart of a strong body, where the brightest minds and most talented hands of a thousand peoples would join in federation. The image gave breath to the voice of his heart, a yearning that had churned in him since the first time he had looked out over Aven’s ragged red rooftops . . .

  But the alternate vision hit him like a lash: a city and a people blinking out of importance without making a mark on the world, subject to the mercies of more robust civilizations. The Curia would stand empty, no longer echoing with senators’ arguments, and strange armies would march in Aven’s streets. Even her magic would die out, weakened when its people scattered, lost faith in their gods, rejected their blessings in favor of those of their conquerors. This, the price of failing to meet the challenges the mirror had shown.

  And then he saw himself: himself, wearing the distinctive scarlet cloak of the commander of legions; himself, with a chaplet of golden leaves bound about his head, cheered in the streets; himself, seated in the consul’s chair, though with an empty seat beside him—first among men, first among the greatest that Aven had to offer. But there were others, too—a Sempronius Tarren dying, suffocated by dust on a foreign field; a Sempronius Tarren dying, choked with his own blood in a crowded street; a Sempronius Tarren dying, elderly and friendless and exiled in a cold and barren place.

  That appeared to be all the gods were willing to impart, for the dark mirror took on a misty quality. With whispered thanks, Sempronius drew a hand down over the obsidian, wiping it clean. The swirling energy around him began to dissipate, receding to the adumbrate corners of the garden, sinking down into the water of the impluvium, evaporating back into the sky. Sempronius sat back on his heels, considering.