From Unseen Fire

by Cass Morris

  The steps were wooden and uneven, and getting up them was made more difficult when a fresh wave of horror washed over Latona’s primed empathic senses. Seeing her sway, Merula gave her a little push between the shoulder blades. Few slaves might have dared so much, but Latona had never minded her over-familiarity, least of all when it brought her back to her senses. Seizing her skirts in her hands, Latona climbed the last few steps to the second floor.

  The apartments did not have their own doors, only curtains drawn over the openings. One of these had been torn halfway off its hanging. There were two men and two women inside—a girl of fifteen or so, and her mother. One man had the weeping girl pressed up against a wall. Her gown had been torn from her shoulders, and while one of the man’s hands fumbled to bring up the edge of his tunic, the other was squeezing her breast. The other man held the screaming mother back while she scrabbled at him with her nails, trying to reach her daughter.

  Rage ignited inside Latona. She yearned to set the man ablaze, and Merula’s torch flared in response to that desire—but the close quarters made that action impractical, and Latona suppressed the compulsion. Instead, with a sweep of her hand, she sent a blast of Spirit magic at him, gathering up the fear and revulsion and terror the young girl felt and dumping it back into her attacker. ‘By Juno, I will see you suffer.’ Another nudge of her power magnified the emotions for him, overwhelming his mind’s capacity to manage them. The man staggered, cursing and sputtering. Seeing an opportunity, Merula thrust the torch into Latona’s hand, stepped forward, and gave him a solid shove out the window, sending him tumbling down into the insula’s central courtyard. Latona found herself hoping the fall would break his back.

  The other man released the mother, who ran to cradle her daughter. He took a step towards Latona, but she gave the torch a mental nudge, and its flames turned white-hot. “One more step and I roast you like the pig you are. I will not warn you twice.”

  She felt his emotions sputter, lust turning to anger, anger giving way to panic. “Y-You can’t. The law. You can’t—you can’t use violent magic a-against—”

  “Against a man I’ve caught in the commission of an abominable crime?” Latona snapped. Aventan law, under the leges tabulae magicae, did protect citizens against magical attack, but such did not apply to magic used in the defense of oneself or others, and this criminal knew it. Latona felt the strength his insolence had given him guttering out.

  “Lady— Lady, please— Mercy—”

  “Would you have shown them any?” she snapped. Now it was her fury against the crater of his cowardice, and she pressed the advantage until his knees wobbled.

  Merula moved beside him, twirling her knife. “You want I should deprive this one of his manhood?” Merula said, her lip curling. “Probably little enough to start with. Doubt he will be missing it.”

  At Latona’s nod, Merula moved so quickly that the mother shrieked again. Before the man could react, Merula was behind him, twisting one of his arms behind his back, holding her knife alongside his throat. “Walk, beast,” she snarled. Latona watched them go, aware that her nostrils were flaring as she struggled to maintain a controlled demeanor. Under Aventan law, rapists had the choice to lose their genitals or their hands. Merula would simply speed the process along.

  The mother regarded Latona with awe; Latona could feel her confusion taking over as the immediate threat passed. Grateful as she might be for a rescue, being saved by a mage, and one of an element so unpredictable as Fire, could cause mixed emotions. “Domina—” she began, but was cut off by the daughter, who burst forward, flinging herself at Latona’s feet and sobbing.

  Latona bent, lifting the girl’s tangled hair and placing her hands on shivering shoulders. Skin to skin contact was best for this sort of magic. Closing her eyes, she tried to project calming, soothing sensations into the girl. ‘I cannot undo what they did to you, child,’ she thought, ‘but I hope you will find peace.’ Latona did not have to use her magic to know the revulsion, terror, and frantic shame that the girl was feeling—wounds which were scabbed over in her own heart, but still familiar enough to make bile rise in her throat. Latona, at least, had made something like a choice, and the hands invading her had been cold, but not violent. ‘Blessed Juno, help her to heal . . .’

  Merula’s footsteps stamped inelegantly back up the stairs. Moving slowly, Latona helped the girl to repin her torn tunic. Then she removed her own mantle and wrapped it around the girl, whose sobs were subsiding into quiet, ragged breaths. Latona looked up at the mother. “We’ll see you out the back way, towards the macellum. You should be able to make it to the Temple of Venus. Their acolytes are gentle ladies. They’ll take care of you both.”

  The woman nodded, still struck dumb by the ordeal. Latona herded them both down the stairs and around to the entrance on the other side of the insula. Merula stuck her head out first, then nodded back at them. “Much less trouble this way. Go quick.”

  Once they were out of sight, Latona turned, moving back towards the tumultuous side of the building, priming her Spirit magic to probe the crowd’s roiling emotional landscape again. All too soon, another scream caught her attention, and another tendril of feminine fear and pain tugged at her: a cry for protection, for rescue. Latona caught the direction it came from, like a hound scenting the wind, and started off in that direction.

  “Domina!” Merula said, moving to step in front of her mistress. Her duty was to protect Latona—a duty that the domina seemed hellbent on making as difficult as possible tonight. “Domina, it is a good thing you did. But there are many bad things going to be happening tonight. You cannot save all of them.”

  Merula’s words were like a punch to the gut. How many times had Latona told herself the same thing? How many nights had she folded in on herself, closing her ears and her magic alike to those in need, convincing herself that any effort she made would be futile at best, a death sentence to her family at worst?

  ‘He. Is. Dead. He cannot hurt you now.’

  Latona’s eyes had a brightness to them that hovered somewhere between fierce and mad. Her hands curled into white-knuckled fists as she said, with unreasoning vehemence, “I can damn well try!”

  And then she was off again, and Merula had no choice but to follow, with torch and knife clutched in blood-spattered hands.

  VII

  As soon as he saw the green door, hanging ajar and splintered, Sempronius knew they had come too late. In the atrium, a trio of roughly-dressed men were taking turns beating and kicking a fourth man, whom Sempronius could only just recognize as Manius Maloricus, uncle to Dictator Ocella’s two young children. General Aufidius, Vatinius Nisso, and the Vitellian bodyguards wasted no time in altering the odds. Aufidius laid out one of the attackers with a single blow to the head. Another, Felix grabbed and quickly subdued. Nisso was still wrestling the third when Sempronius, Galerius, and Aulus Vitellius rushed to Maloricus’s side.

  His mouth was a scarlet ruin, his throat purple and bruised, and one eye was swollen shut. Only then did Sempronius notice two other bodies strewn about the atrium: slaves to the Maloricae, he guessed, though whether they were dead or merely unconscious, he could not say. They lay amid shattered pottery, spilled lamp oil, and broken furniture, though it was impossible to tell if all the damage had been done by the few men still inside the house, or if others had contributed to the looting and already moved on.

  “The children!” Galerius said, kneeling beside Maloricus. “What happened to—”

  Maloricus could not speak, only made a wheezing noise as he pointed towards the sleeping cubicles across the atrium. Galerius started in that direction, then paused, as though his feet did not want to let his eyes make the confirmation. Laying a hand on Galerius’s shoulder, Sempronius moved past him and into the little room.

  For a moment Sempronius hoped that he was mistaken, that they had made it in time after all. The infant Horatius lay on t
he mattress, still half-covered by a blanket. But then Sempronius saw a few spots of blood on the pallet and noticed that the tiny chest was not rising and falling. He stepped closer to confirm. No one had wasted bladework on the boy, not when an infant’s skull was so fragile.

  Sempronius felt a flicker of Shadow magic seeping unbidden into his mind, an undercurrent bearing ideas of what this little Horatius might have grown into. ‘He might have become a great leader,’ Sempronius thought. ‘Or he might have been a pawn for men without scruples. He might have grown bitter and resentful at the fate Fortuna gave him. He might have burned himself out before his twentieth year. Or he might have imitated his father too nearly.’ Potential was not always a positive thing.

  He pushed the nudging intuition of his gift aside. He did not want to think, with the boy’s blood not yet cooled, that it might be better in the long run that Ocella leave no such legacy, that a child not grow to manhood under the shade of such a father’s reputation. There would be a time for such considerations, but even Sempronius’s pragmatism had its limits. He stalked back out into the atrium, where Nisso had pinned to a wall the only murderer left conscious. Obir and the Vitellian bodyguards stood ominously over the others, while Galerius was helping Maloricus to stand, blotting the blood from his face with a strip of cloth.

  Sempronius moved beside Nisso. “Where’s the other?” Sempronius demanded of Nisso’s captive. When the man didn’t answer, he gestured to Nisso, who shook him again, slamming his head against the wall. Groaning, the man gestured towards the back of the house. Sempronius ignored Galerius’s stricken expression and Maloricus’s agonized moan as he went to investigate.

  Ocella’s older son, it seemed, had tried to run—or someone had tried to run with him. ‘And they nearly made it.’ Sempronius found the boy crumpled on the kitchen floor, just inside the door leading to the alley behind the house. The slashing wounds on his nursemaid’s hands and arms showed that he had been defended, however briefly. The murderers’ knives had found both their hearts all the same.

  Sempronius returned to the atrium and shook his head in answer to an unasked question. Maloricus slumped to the floor again, keening. Galerius was trembling with rage as he approached the man Nisso held against the wall. “The punishments of Tartarus,” Galerius said, fiercer than Sempronius had ever seen him, “will be a mercy compared to what I intend for you. I will see you chained and bound in some dank Pannonian mine and left there to rot, until one day you choke on your own— Do you realize, do you even comprehend what a disgrace this is? Not only to yourself, but to the city? We do not— We do not murder children!” Galerius’s horror, Sempronius knew, was not for Ocella’s children themselves so much as for the sacred protection that gods and men alike were meant to extend to all innocents. It was not naivete, but faith, and the pain of its wreckage was writ clear on Galerius’s face.

  “Whelps,” the murderer spat, finding courage in the surety of his doom, as men sometimes did. “Their father butchered his share of children. It’s no more sin to rid the world of his brats than it is to drown a cat.”

  Nisso growled, wrapping a hand around the man’s throat. “I can deprive this accursed beast of his tongue, if it pleases the Senators.”

  “Not quite yet,” Sempronius said, holding up two fingers. “We’ll make an example of him.” He swiftly analyzed the assets available to him with the men in the room. Aufidius and Felix were spoiling for a fight, and Galerius looked angry enough to join them in it. The noise from outside suggested the riot had in no way abated. “Aufidius, this may get worse before it gets better. Go, fetch some of your men from the Campus Martius. No blades!” he hastened to add. “You’re bringing them within the bounds of the city, so they may bear clubs only, and should not use them unless at dire need. Felix, go with him.”

  It was a bit of a legal dodge, to allow soldiers within the city at all, but with no elected officials serving at the moment, there were no lictors and no urban praetor to dispatch any kind of pacifying force.

  Sempronius looked down at Maloricus, still half-swooning. “Aulus, he needs a healer, and fast. If you take him out the back, you should be able to skirt down the far side of the hill towards the Temple of Asclepius. Obir, can you spare a man or two to accompany them?”

  “Yes, Senator.”

  “And you and I, Sempronius?” Galerius asked.

  By way of answer, Sempronius gestured out at the portico. “Time to live up to your cognomen, friend.”

  * * *

  In two more houses, Latona had interrupted crimes in progress, though fortunately neither had gone so far as the girl in the first house. Merula’s face was set in strict lines, and Latona guessed she was torn between worrying over her mistress and enjoying the acts of retribution. Latona had never shared the excitement that Merula found in a fight, but now, she began to understand. There was a thrill in vengeance. Years’ worth of stifling herself, of squelching her power so it would not draw unwanted notice, of closing her eyes to injustices beyond her capacity to correct, all now poured forth, setting a rush of fury in her blood and fingertips.

  She paused, drawing strength for another empathic search, when Merula jostled her, crying, “Look!” Latona followed her pointed finger and saw Sempronius Tarren and Galerius Orator climbing the outdoor stairs which led to the second level of the tavern at the corner. There was a little platform at the top, barely large enough to hold them both. They had taken the traditional oratory pose with one hand held aloft, despite their lack of togas, and both were shouting to be heard. Two dark-skinned men stood at the bottom of the stairs. One had a whistle in his mouth, which seemed to summon some of the brawlers to order. The other bellowed instructions, pointing emphatically. Both Sempronius and Galerius were known to the mob, by name if not by face, and as word spread that there were senators present, famous exiles from Ocella’s reign, curiosity began to turn some heads. They could not win full silence, but it did quell the shoving matches and fistfights in the immediate area, and several of the stone-throwers paused mid-hurl.

  Latona stared, wondering what they were doing, where her father had gone, how they had enlisted the aid of the men of the college. Then something lurched in her chest, as though a fist had clenched around her heart and given a little tug. ‘Oh, what now?’

  Sempronius Tarren began to speak, and she realized how she could help.

  “Citizens!” Sempronius began, and his voice cut as well over the din from the surrounding streets as it would over a battlefield. “Citizens, hear me! I implore you, cease this brawling! Three men here are already guilty of heinous sacrilege! Do not join their number!” The word “sacrilege” pricked a few more ears. Latona noticed then that there were a few bloodied men at the bottom of the stairs, their hands roughly bound. Two barely seemed conscious. “These men,” Sempronius went on, gesturing to them, “have used your discontent, your righteous anger, as a cover for their own misdeeds. They are infanticides. Lucius Galerius Orator and I have seen, with our own eyes, the broken bodies of the children these men murdered, children who were under the divine protection of Juno and Diana. They have defiled themselves, and they have risked bringing the wrath of the gods down on us all!”

  As Sempronius went on, Latona focused on the platform, trying to block out all other noise. ‘I can do this. I can help. Please,’ she silently implored. ‘Juno, great lady who protects this city, please, let this work.’

  It would have taken an extraordinary mage to influence the crowd itself, to siphon off the harmful emotions and douse the rising heat of the situation. Trying to move multitudes in their full vigor was a power beyond what any Spirit mage in generations had evinced—not to mention that it occupied shady legal ground. She might not be able to control the crowd itself, but she could help the two senators to achieve a similar effect through their words. She concentrated now on pouring that edge of influence into Sempronius and Galerius, particularly as Galerius took over. �
�Let his words be golden, let his charisma shine through him, let him find the right way to reach their hearts . . .’ she thought, feeling her skin grow warmer with the force of the magic pouring through her.

  * * *

  “Gentlemen!” Galerius Orator said. “I know you have suffered! I know you feel yourselves wronged! But this is not how we settle such disputes! We are not barbarians, to solve our problems by slinging rocks and mud! We are not animals, to befoul our own home out of spite or ignorance! And we do not punish children for the sins of their fathers! We are Aventan. We are better than that.” He took a deep breath. “Any grievance you have will be settled in the law courts once there is a new urban praetor—elected by your votes. But we cannot hold those elections if the city is in chaos!”

  As Galerius went on, speaking of ancient laws, legendary heroes, the will of the gods, and anything else that he thought might strike an empathic chord with his audience, Sempronius surveyed the crowd, watching for any shifts in their temperament, or for Aufidius, Aulus, or Felix’s returning. What caught his eye first, though, was a shock of golden hair showing above a shimmering bronze gown: Vitellia Latona, staring right up at the tavern stairs, mouthing words to herself.

  He looked away quickly, suspecting she would not like to find herself caught out by him, but he couldn’t help quirking a small smile. He knew an invocation when he saw one. ‘Well done, my lady. Well done.’

  Her incongruous presence reminded Sempronius of another night, years earlier, when they had encountered each other in similar circumstances. Ocella had sent his lictors out to execute more proscribed unfortunates, but several neighborhoods had erupted into rebellion. Ocella had been forced to dispatch his troops to quell the unrest, but the sight of them in the streets had only fueled the panic. Sempronius, aware that his name had landed on a proscription list, took advantage of the chaos to slip out of the city and into exile—but before leaving, he made one last sacrifice at the Hut of the Twins, swearing to the Founders of Aven and all his gods that he would return. Amid the turmoil, he had encountered the Lady Latona and her handmaiden, alone in the streets, tearful and harried.