From Unseen Fire

by Cass Morris

  ‘I will need an army,’ he thought. ‘An army like this world has never seen, if I am to protect Aven from these ravages, to bind together what I mean to build . . . A legion, for a start . . . Then the allies, the auxiliaries, to marry their strengths to ours . . . Protection and support, for all the peoples of the Middle Sea . . .’

  Instinct told him the first conflict would be Iberia, and soon. ‘And there’s your chance to show Aven what you can do.’ At this moment, with the city still bleeding from the wounds Ocella had inflicted, power was there for the taking. ‘Elections will have to be held before the end of the year. And I . . .’ Sempronius had already served as aedile, a city official responsible for festivals and public buildings—though his term had been rudely interrupted by his proscription and exile—and so the next step on the ladder was a praetorship. The office was venerable in its own right—praetors were judges, legal magistrates, military commanders, and regional governors, all wrapped up together—and only one step away from the consulship.

  And a praetorship came with legions.

  For this much the mirror had made plain: the key to Aven’s survival lay with him. He would need the love of the people, the loyalty of the legions, and the wit to outmaneuver his opponents in the Senate. ‘What a challenge,’ he thought, and smiled even as it chilled him.

  Cradling the obsidian mirror protectively to his chest, he rose, feeling a stiffness in his legs. “I’ll just take a small plate of bread and cheese in my room,” Sempronius said to Corvinus, as he entrusted his attendant with the dark mirror. It would be wrapped in velvet, stored in its own box and then locked in an inconspicuous trunk among his luggage. “Let me rest an hour, no more, and then I will want to start north.”

  Corvinus moved swiftly to comply, and Sempronius walked, leaden-footed, to his room. Working that magic had taken much of his strength, and he would need time to submerge its signature, that no other mage might observe the mark of it on him. He had spent years building up fortifications in his mind, weaving the patterns of his magic into obscurity. From his earliest awareness of his gifts, he had nourished the secret close to his heart, hiding it even from his parents, young as he had been. Eventually he had chosen to trust Vibia and Corvinus, but none other. The instinct for self-protection went deep, and over time, Sempronius had crafted it to his best advantage. It would now take a dedicated mage indeed to discern his abilities, and they would have to know what to search for. Shadow was not just his gift, not just the name of the energy he could command and to which he was subject: it was the stuff that composed his very being, the natural fiber of his person.

  * * *

  CITY OF AVEN, THE PALATINE HILL

  “Dead!” The two older Vitelliae sisters, Aula and Latona, had been sitting in their father’s garden, relaxing among the narcissi and hyacinths, when the youngest sister, little Alhena, burst in on them, shouting, “He’s dead!”

  Aula and Latona rose from their couches at once. “Who’s dead?” asked Aula.

  “The Dictator!” Alhena gasped, holding a hand to her chest; evidently she had run the entire way home.

  “You’re quite sure?” Latona, the middle sister, asked, reaching out to grasp Alhena’s free hand. “How do you know?”

  The question was not a flippant one, for Alhena had ways of getting information that went far beyond news-criers or slave gossip. “I’m absolutely sure,” she said. “It . . . It happened again.”

  “You needn’t sound so aggrieved,” Aula reprimanded, settling her hands on her hips. “It’s a magnificent gift. One of the most useful the gods can bestow.” Like Latona, Alhena had a magical blessing, but for her, it was the touch of Proserpina, granting the prophetic gifts of time.

  Less strident than Aula, Latona stroked her younger sister’s cheek. “The more you embrace it, the less it will plague you,” she said, brushing back a lock of fire-red hair. The Vitelliae were all flame-colored in one way or another, but where Latona’s wealth of curls burned sun-gold and Aula’s held the soft auburn promise of sunset, Alhena’s head was a vibrant shock of fiercest red.

  “I’m not plagued, I’m annoyed,” Alhena huffed. “I was in the middle of shopping for new silks. I could’ve dropped right there in the macellum if Mus hadn’t had the wit to drag me into a temple before I’d lost all faculty.”

  “Good girl, that,” Aula said, toying idly with her fan, a spray of feathers dyed bright cerulean blue. “Good head on her shoulders, especially for a Cantabrian.”

  “They aren’t all mindless barbarians, Aula,” Alhena insisted.

  “Did I say—?”

  Latona interrupted, squeezing Alhena’s shoulders. “Nevermind Cantabrian merits right now. Mus did well, yes, but what did you see?”

  With a wearied sigh, Alhena wrenched away and flung herself onto a couch. “The sun set into an ocean of blood, and as soon as it was submerged, the waters ran clear and pure as a mountain spring. All the people of Aven rushed to the water’s edge to drink and drink and had their fill.”

  Aula and Latona exchanged a significant look. “Auspicious, I think,” Aula ventured.

  “Yes, we must hope so,” Latona said.

  “It is so!” Alhena insisted. “You know it is. You remember what I dreamt when he came back to the city that last time? That was when the ocean ran bloody, and it’s been like that in my dreams ever since. If it’s clear now, he must be dead.” She sat bolt upright on the couch, leaning forward avidly. “And you know what that means? Tarpeius will be coming home.”

  Tarpeius, a promising young man from a good family, had been betrothed to Alhena years earlier. As she had been only thirteen at the time, their fathers had decided to hold off on the actual ceremony until she reached full maturity. Unfortunately for both, Tarpeius had been assigned a post as military tribune to a general, who, upon making it onto the Dictator Ocella’s proscription list, decided that fighting barbarians was quite preferable to being assassinated.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? With Ocella dead, there’s no reason for General Aufidius Strato to remain in the field.”

  “Well, there is the small manner of all those Vendelicians yet to be subdued,” Latona pointed out. When Alhena’s face blanched, she hurried on. “I’m teasing, pet. Of course he’ll come back. I wager Aufidius had quite enough of tramping around the swamps, and anyway, he’ll want to stand for consul. A garrison will have to stay, but the tribunes will all come home.”

  Dozens of important men, patricians and plebeians, had packed up and left, either before or after finding themselves on the Dictator’s proscription list, uprooting their families and households as well. Their father, Aulus Vitellius, had only escaped proscription by a hair; with his only son Gaius serving his own term as a military tribune in far-off Albina, Aulus devoted all attention to protecting his daughters. Alhena was then only ten, easily kept out of sight at home, and Aula had already married Quinctilius, but Latona he hastily matched to Numerius Herennius, a provincial aristocrat with considerable wealth, who was meant to keep her at his estates in the north, away from trouble. ‘Men make plans, and the gods laugh at them . . .’ Quinctilius had not been so safe a choice as Aulus had hoped, and Latona had been unwilling to molder in a country villa—a choice that had saved Aula, true, but had also thrown Latona into Ocella’s path. ‘Neither marriage turned out as planned. Oh, please let Alhena have better luck.’

  “Before we start planning any weddings, we should see if we can reach anyone else to confirm the Dictator’s death,” Aula was saying. “Someone who might know more. No offense, my honey, but your visions aren’t precisely abundant with tangible details.”

  Alhena sniffed. “You think Marcia would know—”

  “I do,” Latona said, “but I don’t know how we could safely reach her.”

  “No, not without one of her birds coming to Father first.”

  Talent and ambition made Ocella see a conspirat
or and assassin where a senator stood. Such were the suspicions that had driven Galerius Orator from the city, along with his wife Marcia and their adolescent son. Galerius had used his wife’s magical talents to keep up communication with some of his fellow senators in exile. With Galerius proscribed and Aulus trying to avoid the same fate, no letters could pass between their families without Marcia’s help.

  Aula’s fingers drummed restlessly against her thigh. “I might be able to send word to the Domitiae. It would have to be carefully worded, just in case . . . And some of the Crispiniae are still in Truscum . . .” She sighed. “This scattering of our friends is really most inconvenient.”

  “I just hope enough of them are ready to return on short notice,” Latona said, thinking of how long it might take just to get word to those farthest-flung.

  “When word got out that Ocella had taken ill, I expect many would have started preparing themselves,” Aula said. “They had to be hoping he wouldn’t last forever.”

  The words prickled something in Latona’s memory: Sempronius Tarren, a longtime friend of the Vitellian family, the night that he had not so much fled the city as sidled out of it. “‘This is Aven. No dictator lasts forever. Indeed, most of them do not even last very long. And I intend to be back as soon as this one trips.’” Ocella had hounded him as far as Abydosia, though rumor in the Stabiae bathhouse was that he was one of those who had crept back into Truscum upon word of the Dictator’s illness.

  Latona found herself slowly pacing, her fingers trailing idly through the clusters of blushing oleander that grew beside the garden’s shallow pool. A strange feeling was growing in her chest. It took her a few minutes to realize that it was relief, the easing of a tension that had been wrapped around her heart for years.

  ‘It’s over . . . If Ocella is really dead, then it’s over.’ She would never be summoned to his court again, never terrorized into submission. She would never again feel his eyes on her, assessing her physical and political worth. He could never again try to compel the use of the gifts of Juno against his enemies—nor command those of Venus for his own amusement.

  The relief hit her with physical force: tears behind her eyes and a prickling warmth in her palms, a hot sunburn-like flush creeping over her skin. Magic, unbidden, rising to the surface. Accompanying it, there was a pressure behind her ribs, an impulse to act, like being pushed from the inside out. She didn’t know if she wanted to sob or scream or set something ablaze.

  She gripped her fists tight, hoping her sisters would not notice her discomfort. After a few deep breaths, the pressure eased and the tingle on her skin abated. ‘Mind yourself.’ Since childhood, she had kept tight control over her emotions and her abilities, not wanting to draw a moment’s more attention than could be helped. Ocella’s death meant some reprieve, but she could not allow it to be like the breaking of a dam.

  Slowly, she uncurled her fingers, smoothing her hands against her skirts. For her, there could be no loosing of discipline.

  II

  LUSETANIA, IBERIAN PENINSULA

  It had started out simply enough.

  At first, Ekialde’s feud was not with the Aventans. There were no Aventans, to speak of, where he lived, on the western side of the Iberian Mountains, which his people called the mendi, where the high steppes and rocky plateaus gave way at last to placidly rolling hills, flat river basins, and beyond, to the ocean without an end. But there were absentee Aventan landowners, and there were relocated peoples, moving westward from other parts of the empire, lured by tales of fantastical wealth and fertile land. And certainly there was gold in the region, so much that it was hardly a thing of value to the people who lived there. The women of Ekialde’s tribe dangled it from their wrists and ankles, their ears and noses and, in the case of a few more intrepid ladies, their nipples; the men banded it about their arms and their throats. There was no peasant so wretched but owned at least one gold ring, a treasured heirloom protected from the ravages of time.

  Word of the riches of the golden sands of the Tagus had spread, and the region was far more crowded now than it had been in Ekialde’s father’s childhood—at least by Lusetani standards. Though communities on the coast, influenced by the large cities of the mercantile Tyrians and Athaecans, were accustomed to such proximity, it was not so in the foothills and the mountains. The Aventans called it peace when the people they had beaten moved at their behest, adopted their gods and their language, wore their flowing, impractical clothes, and coveted the ever-elusive citizenship in their strange government. Aventans pushed in a way that the Tyrians and Athaecans never had.

  The Lusetani had become anxious. They had not seen the legions yet, but they knew that the garrisons were not so very far away: over the mountains in Tarraco, in the southern plains at ancient Gades. Near, too near.

  And so they began to push back against their arrogating neighbors. There was no official organization to it, at first. A forager who trespassed into Lusetani territory did not return home. A traveling party had their horses stolen and their purses filched. A village too near the nebulous border was put to the torch. Ekialde, son of a chieftain, was only one of a dozen or so men from various Lusetani villages who began leading raids.

  Eventually, the tribal leaders held a council. Some of the older men favored peace, but there were too many fire-eyed youngsters in the group, too many hot tempers and vengeful heads who had never seen real war, whose only experience of battle and death was in raids like these. They were prime for it now, their bellies full of the sparking coals which make young men seek out bloodshed. Ekialde was only one of several who spoke at the council, but by the judgment of many in the mud-walled meeting hall, he had some of the finest words.

  The young blood overpowered the old, and soon after that, the Lusetani began an offensive, striking not just at those who trespassed on what they considered their lands, but actively venturing into territory claimed by Aven or their traitorous allied tribes. Valley by valley, riverside by riverside, they moved over the conquered areas and reclaimed them. Through spring and summer, the groups splintered and vanquished and re-formed, and as they did, they drew in more followers, more men willing to fight, more women ready to pick up the spoils. And at twenty years old, Ekialde, with his wild black hair and yellow eyes, found that more and more men were looking to him for the answers, for guidance, for their next direction.

  Eventually, pressing at the edges of more heavily settled areas, the Lusetani found themselves running out of tiny villages to overwhelm. The next circle out were fortified towns—not with immense walls, to be sure, but pikes and fences and ditches that many of them had begun to reinforce, as they heard of the western tribes rising up in revolt. So too, these fortified towns were more heavily armed. Some of the men there were veterans, at least of local skirmishes. They would not fall as easily as the smaller villages had.

  And so Ekialde wondered: What to do now? Shy back from harder odds? Recede back into their wilderness, having made their point? It might work. Probably no one would pursue them, and it would be some time before the Aventans and their allies thought to reclaim the center of the peninsula.

  Some time. But it would not last forever. The high plateaus were too rich in metallic ore, the river valleys too fertile, the woodlands too flush with game. The temptations of their high-peaked mendi were too great. Rapacious Aven could not stand so near to it and not feel the desire to seize what it saw—and if not Aven, Ekialde allowed, then someone else. If they did not fight now, they would have to do so later. But now—now there might be opportunity. The scouts and merchants spoke of disarray among the Aventan people, their much-prized order thrown into confusion. Swift action now could take advantage of that weakness.

  Ekialde had no magic himself, but as his victories began to pile up, he had found it beneficial to acquaint himself with those who did. It was to these men he went, one star-spattered night in the hottest part of the summer, when the air b
rushed arid against his bare shoulders. He had begun to realize how men, important men, were deferring to him, but he would not tempt fate by dressing the part. He was his father’s second son, and no chieftain in his own right yet. He would wait to be proclaimed as such before donning a leopard-skin or binding a golden circle around his brow. Until that time, he walked bare-chested in the summer night, wearing only what armbands and greaves and belts he had earned the right to bear.

  With the silvery sheen of the half-moon bleeding through the trees, casting a faint dappled light on the camp, Ekialde gathered the magic-men of the collected tribes. “I wish to know the will of the gods,” he said, and explained what it was he desired. Other men might have sought more mundane counsel—if their plans were feasible, if they could join the tribes, what political alliances would need to be solidified, whose daughter would need to be traded to whose son. The magic-men did not discuss such things; that was not their province. Instead, they told Ekialde what he would have to do to get the answers he required, to submit himself to the will of the gods.

  He let them bleed him, those magic-men with their bony headdresses and ancient pelts. He let them make little cuts in his hand and his upper arm, taking his vitality for their perusal. His wife, Neitin, sat by while they did so, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, murmuring little prayers. His wife did not trust the magic-men and perhaps for good reason; they were not universally recognized to be good men. Some could turn very bad indeed, if the lust for power overwhelmed them. But the men trusted to bear the knives were of his clan, and the blood they let was their own, for one of them was his mother’s brother.