Zaya frowned. “I’d noticed she’s hardly ever at sparring anymore—”
“She thought she’d found Vorvena a dryad boyfriend. Turns out, she found herself one. She’s over at his family’s garden more often than not right now. Polishing her grasp of Hellene, she says . . . and if you believe that . . .” Maccis gave her a lopsided grin. “You don’t want to hear the jokes she’s getting from everyone.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Would you get the joke if I told you Enica asked her if her boyfriend’s morning wood actually involves splinters?” Maccis looked away at the question, sheepishly, and Zaya choked, caught between mortification and laughter. “Oh, you do get the joke. Good. They get worse from there.”
“Oh, by the dead gods, that’s horrible.”
“If Fyriacus or I said any of this, we’d get a talking to from Da. So it’s all coming from our sisters.” He was still looking down and away, but grinning, a little sheepishly.
“Tell me some of the others.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Tell me. I want to hear.”
Maccis coughed. “‘So, he’s hard as a board, I hear,’” he mimicked Enica again, faultlessly. “‘Oh, it’s a Hellene that you’re polishing. It’s good to hear that you’re improving your tongue.’”
Zaya gave Maccis a blank look, and he flushed this time as she asked, “Shouldn’t that be tongues, as in languages?”
“No. Definitely tongue. Look it up in the erotic woodcut section of the library. Or pay a little closer attention to the murals at the bathhouse next time you go.”
“Ohhhh. You mean . . . .” Zaya choked again.
“Yes. Pretty much.” He darted her a sidelong glance, and then looked away again, hastily. “If it helps, Vorvena doesn’t laugh at her nearly as much as Enica does.”
For a fleeting instant, Zaya wasn’t sure what to think or to feel. The feelings she had for him, which had, till today, consisted of a sort of sweet longing, the rising urgency as they’d kissed in the park, were suddenly juxtaposed with the raucous sense of humor of his fire-born siblings. It was only to be expected of them, though. They were the offspring of a fertility spirit; Saraid’s children tended to be more reserved. But just for an instant, she was worried that he only thought of her in terms of the bathhouse murals. No. If he did, he wouldn’t have kept going wolf-form around me. That’s how he separated himself from the physical.
The bus pulled up in front of them, and Zaya leaned up on tip-toes for one last quick kiss, before climbing up the stairs into the vehicle. She was immediately beset by a feeling of dizzying unreality as she stared out the window at him. The sensation that none of this had actually happened, and that she’d go back to school in the morning, and it would all just be a dream.
Her mother was angry, but mostly because she’d been worried, Zaya thought, as she explained . . . almost everything that had happened that day in a torrent of words over the pressurized, gas-filled cabinets in the Magi vaults at the university. She generally made a habit of trying not to complain about school—her younger brothers and sisters got lumped in with the Matrugena children in the ‘exceedingly odd’ category by the other students. Her mother snorted over their assignments, muttering, “The Golden Ass is as blatant a piece of anti-magic propaganda as you’ll ever see. No, no, don’t use sorcery yourselves, turn everything over to the gods!” and Zaya filed that comment away to ask her teacher about the next day. Erida’s frown, however, grew more pronounced as Zaya admitted to the harpy boy’s continuing comments, though she added, hastily, “I think it’s resolved. Maccis said his mother would be talking to him.”
“That doesn’t explain how late you were.” Erida’s voice was stern.
Zaya stuttered to a complete halt, and picked up a clipboard with a list of spells she was supposed to be researching for Magi and technomancy students. Basically, this meant finding where the original spell was in the archive, and making a hand-transcription of it; most of the antique parchments and papyrus scrolls were too delicate to be handled or photocopied. The cuneiform ones, she could at least do a rubbing of, before handing the carbon-smeared paper to a student. “Ah . . . well . . . I . . . told Maccis that I’m . . . fond of him.”
She was looking down, so she didn’t see the expression on her mother’s face. She couldn’t even make herself look up. “Did you now? That must have come as a shock to him, if to no one else,” Erida told her, calmly, and Zaya’s head jerked back up.
“Mother!” Zaya’s yelp was strangled.
“Oh, as if none of us have eyes, little one. Have him come over this weekend. Your father and I will want to have a talk with him before anything proceeds much further.”
Zaya looked around the room frantically. Hundreds of locked cabinet niches and drawers, no help there. “It wasn’t his fault I was late; it was mine. He’s the one who reminded me I needed to come here! And . . . I think he’s working in the refugee area again this weekend.” Zaya deflated. Her ability to spend time with her friends had been rapidly dwindling in the last year or so. “But I’ll tell him you asked.” She sighed.
Erida seemed to be biting her lips. “I see. I’ll speak with Master Matrugena myself, and inform him that he’s to bring his son over. I’ll ensure that he and Saraid and one of Lassair’s . . . selves . . . are on the guest list, too, so that you need not fear I am about to cook and eat your young man.”
Zaya nodded hastily, and got to business. She’d grown to enjoy the work. She understood the arcane notation system that catalogued works in Aramaic, Chaldean, Hebrew, the unreadable Linear A, the mostly-translated Linear B, Attic Hellene, modern Hellene, classical Latin, contemporary Latin, Egyptian hieroglyphs, ancient Phoenician, modern Carthaginian, and three or four dialects of Persian . . . and in multiple media, from clay tablets to bronze disks to parchment and papyrus scrolls. She could usually take a scholar’s chicken-scratch question of ancient Hellene rituals for contacting the dead, cf. Odyssey, and turn it into a finished records search within about an hour, and she had asked her mother for permission to start setting up a calculus-searchable catalogue, based on the existing card catalogue and reference books they used to maintain the vast collection. Sometimes, she found related items that the scholar hadn’t asked for, but that she thought would be useful, and supplied those as well . . . and usually got startled words of gratitude in return.
Today’s sheaf of requests were all for banishing rituals and methods of increasing the potency of a banishing or binding ritual. Zaya’s eyebrows rose when she realized how much of the work in this area was recent, and involved journal articles written by Maccis’ father. She was able to photocopy those, at least, and tracked down some of his sources, and provided those, too, along with a rubbing from a cuneiform tablet that spoke of binding a powerful demon called the pazuzu . . . and was startled when her mother removed that from the sheaf of results. “It seems to be relevant,” Zaya objected.
“You didn’t notice the additional three digits of coding on the card catalogue entry. Godslayer-related. Not for general distribution. You take it at face value, because Prometheus lives in a room of our house.” Erida tapped on the cuneiform rubbing. “Go ahead and give me a proper translation of this, however. You need the practice.”
Zaya sighed, and sat back down at her desk in the small office area that she and her mother shared, off of the main vault. After several minutes, her mother ordered, “Do sit still. I realize that you are in the throes of young love, but surely, it should not make you fidget so.”
Zaya flushed to the roots of her hair. “It’s not . . . all right, it might be part of it. But it’s more . . .” She sighed. “Palmyra was attacked today. They went right around the Wall.”
“As the Persians have done at least twelve times since the Wall was built. It served an important strategic function in the era before flight was available to more than sorcerers and god-born. Now, it’s more of a symbol.” Her mother’s voice was so calm it set Zaya’s teeth on edg
e.
“So . . . it’s not important?” Zaya asked. Her voice was a little more challenging than she’d thought it would be.
Erida’s head rose from the papers on her own desk. “What? That the Persians have made a snatch-and-grab raid, and will be turned back, again? Or do you mean, the Wall itself?”
Zaya fidgeted. “All of it, I suppose.” She stared down at her translation. “It’s hard to feel like . . . any of this is important, Mother.”
“And what, precisely, do you think that wars are fought to protect?” Erida’s voice was crisp. “Someone attacks your land, usually for resources or power, and you wind up fighting to protect your people, your civilization, your way of life.” She tapped on the book in front of her. “This is civilization, Zaya. Knowledge. Knowledge accreted painfully, through generations. This is our little termite mound, built up from the desert floor for six or seven thousand years. There is nothing wrong with being part of what needs to be protected and defended. And every time you research a spell or a binding for the people who are currently asking for the information? You’re arming them.” Erida gestured around the room. “If you don’t want to think of this as civilization and history, then at least think of it as the single largest repository of combat magic in the known world. Some of it might be out of date, as my old friend Kanmi undoubtedly would have reminded me. But it’s what we build on.”
Zaya hushed. It still felt uncannily as if she were playing dice on the deck of a sinking ship, but there was nothing she could do, besides translate the godslayer tablet—correctly—for her mother. And make a note of the final three numbers, and start pulling everything she could on the subject, to read about on her own time. The godslayers were supposed to be able to kill anything. The secret of their summoning had been lost. Maybe I can find the ritual again, she thought, uncertainly. That would at least be worthwhile.
She also made a point of, quietly, passing along to her mother what Maccis had told her about Sigrun’s sister, and watched her self-composed mother blanch. “Is there . . . anything I could do?” Zaya asked. “I mean, I don’t know her. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want strangers visiting me if I were in that . . . condition.”
Erida had left her desk to give Zaya an unexpected embrace. “I doubt there’s anything that you can do, besides to be kind to Sigrun when you see her. But you have a good heart, little one.”
The refugee centers in Little Hellas were noisy, crowded, and stank of sweat. Maccis usually spent a few afternoons a week and all of dies Saturni there; it might be a day of rest for the rest of Judea, but refugees arrived every day, regardless of the calendar. Ava, the hveðungr girl, also usually volunteered, and that was a help; she was close to her adult size, so if a minotaur got out of hand, she could help pin him, and Maccis usually went wolf-form, darted in, and then pulled the legs out from under whoever the problematic person was.
In the main, however, his job was to listen to people’s stories. Catalogue them, match them with the whisper in his mind that was his mother’s presence, and try to help them find their families. His sense of smell was a help with that; one family member tended to have a similar smell profile as the others. Part of it was DNA and body chemistry, part of it was dietary and soap similarities. If he filtered out the diet and soap, since everyone in the refugee center was either using whatever random cleansers had been donated, or had not yet had a chance to wash, he sometimes got lucky and was able to put a family back together. Not often. It helped if a harpy was able to tell him that all of her family had stayed human, or if a dryad remembered one of his sisters turning into a female minotaur before madness descended. Because in some of these people, their original biochemistry was at a very far remove, indeed.
Today, he met one of the rarest creatures: a centaur who’d never actually lost his mind. “I came close a few times,” the male admitted tiredly. He was covered in fading bruises and healing scabs. “Name’s Nikolaos. Nikolaos Dmitrou.”
“That’s a really big help,” Maccis told him in relief. “A family name means I can put you in a different section of the database, and will make it much easier for your relatives to find you, if they’re here, or if they’re calling in from other refugee centers, like the ones in Egypt and Sicily?” He tapped carefully at the calculus’ fields, adding the name. “How come you didn’t go crazy like almost everyone else?”
“I honestly don’t know. I was a forester. I was helping some . . . idiotic campers with their tent and fire when the change hit me. Wasn’t as torturous as what some of the others experienced. And I . . . kept up with the work, after I got used to my body.” Nikolaos grimaced. “Made it easier to get to some places, but a lot more physical work. Not like I could drive my own truck anymore. Still went after illegal loggers, poachers, vandals, helped out lost hikers. People were trying to get on with their lives, in the interior of the country. The coast and the islands were hard-hit, but the interior was safe. And the change really didn’t affect my life. I was still . . . outside, where I liked being anyway.” He sighed. “And then the mad gods came back again, when I was out in the wilderness. When I got back from deep in the forest, there were people killing each other at the campground closest to my station. And after that, no matter where you went, there were harpies swooping down from the sky and tearing at you, or naiads creeping out of the rivers and pools to strangle you, and there were blockades on the roads to keep us monsters from getting in among the real people.” Nikolaos turned his face away, his expression haunted. “I finally found a group of my own kind. They were brutish. Thugs. But I had to stay alive, so I joined them.” He closed his eyes. “But they were mad. Just as mad as everyone else. I just looked past it, because with them, I could eat and maybe sleep at night. They set on a woman a few days ago. I tried to stop them, I swear it . . . and then they beat me half to death while making me watch what they did.” His voice was sick.
Maccis had frozen in place, his stomach churning. “What happened?”
“I thought there were no gods left. Sotiris, the leader, kept saying there were none left to help or hinder. No punishment, no rewards, besides what we made for ourselves.” His voice was dazed. “And then a goddess descended from the sky and slew every motherloving one of them. In her mercy, she spared me, and bade me call on her sister, who came in the form of a white wolf, and healed me. Bade me come here, and led me to the cities of the coast. Told the guards that would have turned me aside to stand down. And there, I took passage.”
Maccis’ eyebrows had risen, and he managed to swallow down his bile at hearing the other half of how Aunt Sig’s sister had been attacked. But the centaur’s scent was . . . definitely not one of the ones he’d caught on Sophia’s body. He wasn’t entirely sure what he’d have done if it had been. Tearing out someone’s throat in the middle of the welcome area, with hundreds of people around them, in chairs and in lines, all filling out forms, didn’t seem a good option, but it had flashed through his mind for a moment. “I’m sorry, but that wasn’t a goddess,” he said, politely. “That was a valkyrie. Sigrun Caetia. Saraid’s not a goddess, either.”
The centaur’s mouth dropped open, and Maccis gave him an encouraging nod. “I’ve got you in the database. The next desk will get you someplace to stay. We’ve got horse trailers set up for the new centaurs—sorry, I know that sounds bad. But there’s hay to sleep on, and a separate cafeteria line, since your dietary needs are a little different than anyone else’s. I’ve got your previous profession here, and we’ll try to get you matched up with a job as soon as possible.”
Maccis watched the man’s jaw slowly close and his expression turn thoughtful, and had a sinking feeling he’d made a mistake somewhere as the centaur trotted away, looking back over his shoulder once or twice. Maybe I just took his hope away. But it’s important for people to understand that just because someone has power, doesn’t make them a god or a goddess.
By that evening, he was tired. Tired of smelling grief, fear, and despair all around him. And he
had dinner at Zaya’s house ahead of him, too. He showered, hoping the hot water would revive him, changed into a shirt and kilt that didn’t reek of sweat and desperation, and hoped, fervently, that the butler wouldn’t make comments about dog hair all over the couch cushions.
His parents had been invited, too, and Maccis was delighted to see his mother in a physical form. It had been a few weeks, and he bounded down the stairs to catch her in a tight hug. “Wolf ears and a tail tonight?” he asked her. “Should I go matching, Mother?”
If you wish to do so, you certainly may, Saraid told him fondly, brushing his hair out of his face. You have always made a point of appearing human at your place of learning.
It’s a special occasion, Mother.
So it is.
His father cleared his throat. “Yes. And, speaking of which, before we leave, a few words? Zhi is very likely to have a conversation with you tonight.”
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