by David Drake
Alphena felt momentarily weightless; the water about her glowed white. Everything returned to normal, except that six flounders rose to the surface and began a round dance on the tips of their tails.
The fish dived back toward the bottom, their white bellies gleaming. Alphena continued to stroke shoreward. Maybe she had imagined the fish, and anyway it didn’t matter.
She didn’t realize how close they had come till her knees scraped sand and bits of shell from the bottom. She gasped in shock and managed to swallow water.
She squatted because she wasn’t able to stand. She laid Uktena’s head in her lap to keep it above water. He was breathing, but he didn’t seem to be aware.
Awareness would come. He was breathing. That was all that mattered.
Alphena didn’t know how long she squatted there with her eyes closed, getting her breath under control and easing the white ache of her right arm and shoulder. The surf only came to her ankles at its flux and retreated well out into the sound.
She heard voices. After a further moment, she raised her eyes. The three sages were coming toward her, chanting in unison. Forty-odd people, probably the whole village of Cascotan, waited at the high water mark.
“Help us,” Alphena said. “He’s all right, he’s just tired. Help us back to the kiva.”
Still chanting what must be a prayer, the sages lifted Uktena from her. Hanno and Dasemunco took the shaman’s arms. Wontosa, carrying the pipe, walked ahead of them. They paid no attention to Alphena.
She got up and wavered. She should have put her hands down to help herself, but she hadn’t wanted to appear weak. I could scarcely appear weaker than I really am. She followed the four men higher up the shore.
Wontosa said, “Here. The sand is dry, so he won’t be able to take power from the water.”
He began to fill the murrhine pipe with herbs from the embroidered deerskin pouch. Uktena had left it behind in the kiva.
“What are you doing?” Alphena shouted. She stumbled forward. Arms caught her from behind—the women Sanga and Lascosa; the latter the mother of the thing Procron had created in the marshes.
“He’s too dangerous,” Sanga said. “Don’t you see? He has to be sent away or we’ll never be safe!”
Uktena sprawled on his back on the sand. The sages squatted around him and continued to chant. Wontosa puffed on the pipe he had taken from the greater magician.
“He saved you!” Alphena said. Her vision blurred with anger and tears. “He saved you all!”
“He’s a monster!” Lascosa said in a venomous tone. “He didn’t save my Mota. He would destroy us all!”
The chant reached a crescendo. Wontosa blew a great jet of smoke over the torso and head of his exhausted rival. Uktena’s form blurred.
“No!” Alphena shouted as she tore loose. She flung herself over her friend’s body.
The world shifted like a mirror tilting. She was alone, falling again through the emptiness from which Uktena had rescued her.
But now he cannot rescue even himself.
* * *
LANN RAN HEAVILY. He was faster when he dropped down and used his knuckles as forehooves, but even then Hedia had no difficulty keeping up. He didn’t seem comfortable on all fours, however. He regularly lurched upright and tried to run on two legs like a man.
He wasn’t a man, poor dear, except in his mind. And not really all of his mind, though enough to satisfy Hedia. She focused on the virtues of the men whom she liked, and Lann had most of the virtues which Saxa lacked. Between them, they made a truly wonderful man.
Hedia smiled. She’d found over the years that if she tried, she could like most men.
The ape-man paused, rose on his hind legs, and sniffed the air. He frowned in doubt. Turning, he looked back the way they had come. He didn’t seem to see any more there than Hedia did—blank grayness—but he noticed the lens she carried.
“Hoo!” he cried, as delighted as if he were meeting an old friend. He snatched the device from her without ceremony.
Hedia felt her lips purse, though she didn’t object. It was his, after all, though he might have been more polite.
Except that Lann couldn’t be more polite. He was a beast, an animal, with major virtues. And, like Saxa, he was devoted to her.
The ape-man held the frame in one hand and touched the lens with his index finger. When he did so, he and Hedia stood on a pavement of dull metal in place of something firm but unseen in the universal grayness. She tested it with her toes.
This is what we’ve been walking on all the time. This isn’t a mirage of the past, this is real.
Other paths branched from this one. Each was of a different material: brick laid in various patterns; concrete; a hard material as black as muck from a swamp; and uncountably many others. Some tracks were dirt, sunbaked or rutted or even grassy.
One of the paths was leaf mold on which Hedia could see her own footprints pressed delicately onto the broad, splayed marks of the ape-man who had led her. An Atlantean airship flew above that side-branch and vanished through the portal at the end; the second ship followed only moments later.
The hunters who had chased Hedia and the ape-man on foot were also running back the way they had come, but it was too late for them. Typhon crawled on its many legs from the prison which Lann had breached.
The monster seemed deceptively slow because it was so large, but its tentacles swept fleeing humans into its slavering maws. Typhon had as many heads as it had legs. They were equipped with beaks and fangs and muscular gullets to squeeze and crush and swallow. Some of the victims turned to fight, but that was like watching mice bare their teeth at a forest fire.
None of the hunters reached the jungle path. Instead of stopping when it engulfed the last of them, Typhon swelled through the portal with scarcely a pause.
For an instant Hedia thought she saw not a monster but a man in a loincloth who wore his iron-gray hair in braids. Then Typhon again filled the path from its ruptured prison to the portal, flowing onward without seeming to diminish.
The ape-man hooted joyfully and resumed his journey. He held the lens in his left hand, walking on either his legs or his legs and the knuckles of his right hand. He continued to chortle.
Hedia swallowed. The Atlanteans weren’t her friends, Venus knew, but … all of them, the Minoi and their servants and their little dogs and the very worms in the dirt of their gardens? Because she didn’t imagine Typhon would halt while there was still something to destroy.
She mentally shrugged as she accompanied the ape-man. The pavement was wide enough that she could stay within half a step of him while keeping far enough to the side that they wouldn’t collide if he stopped abruptly.
She wouldn’t have chosen that end for the Atlanteans … but she hadn’t chosen it. Besides, it was done now. In this world—in all worlds—women get used to making the best of situations which they can’t change.
Hedia grinned. Men really weren’t much better off, but they were less likely to accept reality. That was another case of the woman having the advantage, if she had wit enough to use it.
They had passed numerous branchings, but Lann continued to follow the central metal path. Now at last he bore to the right, onto flagstones of volcanic tuff which appeared to have been set in concrete. Though a byway, it was wide enough that Hedia didn’t feel uncomfortable as long as she kept to the middle of it. She wasn’t sure it was possible to fall off the path, but the thought of drifting forever in this limbo frightened her more than the risk of death.
The ape-man paused again and concentrated on his lens. Hedia bumped him because her thoughts were elsewhere. That was no harm done: it was rather like walking into a tree with furry bark.
For a moment Lann and Hedia were in a vision of a bleak waste on which Procron’s fortress stood under an orange sun. The ape-man made an adjustment by changing the angle of his right index finger. Their viewpoint shifted to the air above Poseidonis as Typhon advanced on the city like a tidal wave.
In the distance was the ring island outside the one on which Poseidonis stood. The monster had torn a gap the size of itself in the land as it emerged on the site of Procron’s keep.
Typhon was larger than that now. It would continue to grow for as long as there was space for it, spreading like the sea.
Nothing can stop it. Hedia swallowed again.
Ships were rising from the harbor as they had done in the vision of the theater, but in this reality they were not attacking the monster. Instead, heavily laden with liveried retainers, they wobbled toward a shimmering disk hanging above the pinnacle of the great tower. The portal rested on the orichalc finial, which blazed now brighter than the sun.
The Minoi and their households were abandoning Atlantis rather than struggle against an inexorable doom. Typhon would triumph, but not over them.
Perhaps some of the women have carried along their little dogs, Hedia thought. The worms and the common people could take care of themselves. Though as an aristocrat herself, who was she to object?
Lann grunted in disgust and resumed his swaying course up the stone pavement. Hedia looked down at the blocks with a sudden question—and a recognition.
Where are the Minoi going in their flying ships? And—
The ball on top of the Atlantean temple is the same as the one we saw on the sundial in the Field of Mars.
* * *
“I’M VERY GLAD TO SEE YOU, Master Corylus,” Pandareus said as Corylus finished undoing his bonds. He pursed his lips and added, “How did you know the westerners were carrying me to their ship, if I may ask?”
Corylus had untied the knots instead of cutting them because he was trembling in reaction to the fight. It had involved every fiber of his being—but only for a few heartbeats. It was over now, but his blood was still flooded with the emotions which had carried him through.
“I didn’t know,” he said. His mouth was dry as sunbaked sand and he felt a wash of dizziness as he finished freeing his teacher’s wrists. He stepped back. “I don’t think it was luck, though. My companion—”
He nodded to the Ancient, who was grooming his fur with his tongue.
“—is a great magician, and I’ve found him a better friend than I had any reason to expect would be the case.”
“I see,” said Pandareus in a neutral voice. He turned his head; Corylus followed his eyes toward the sprite.
“Ah!” Corylus said. He’d gotten so used to Coryla that he’d completely forgotten about certain matters that should have been obvious. “Cousin, while we’re here in, ah, the waking world, would you put some clothes on, please. Ah, I think this fellow’s tunic—”
He toed the corpse with the stuffed bird in its hair. The two he’d killed were covered with blood … as was his own right forearm, now that he noticed it.
“—will do.”
“He can see us too?” Coryla said, giving Pandareus a thoughtful look as she walked over to the dead man. “Is it because we’ve been in the dreamworld, do you think? Or are you that great a magician?”
“I’m not a magician,” Corylus said. He said to his teacher, “She’s a cousin of mine, master. A very distant cousin.”
There were quite a number of people watching them now—a score or more openly, and doubtless many times that number peering from cover or through slatted shutters from the buildings facing the harbor. The mule cart had drawn attention, which the sudden bloody violence would have multiplied.
Nobody had tried to interfere: a gang which killed three men in broad daylight wasn’t anything for civilians to trifle with. A section of the Watch was bound to be arriving shortly, though.
“Master, where were they taking you?” Corylus asked. “That is, if you know.”
He had already decided that they had to use the ship to escape Ostia, though there weren’t any good places to fly to. They would have to land in daylight unless he wanted to wait six hours for nightfall. Even then someone would probably notice them in the air unless they landed in a barren location or came down at sea and rowed in, as presumably the glass men had done when the sages arrived.
Corylus couldn’t handle both sweeps by himself. Pandareus wasn’t strong enough to help, and asking the Ancient to do that sort of physical labor would be … a matter for cautious negotiation.
“I think they were taking me home,” Pandareus said. “To their home in the Western Isles, that is. They were joining my mind to theirs to force me to use my powers of magic—”
His smile was wry.
“—to control the monster Uktena, so my consciousness listened to their discussions. They had decided to leave because the fleet of their enemies, the Minoi, was going to attack Carce at any moment.”
The Watch had arrived at the end of the quay. Though—if he was reading the standards correctly, they were accompanied by a number of Marines as well. Part of the detachment at Misenum must be stationed in Ostia.
“The Atlanteans here?” Corylus said. “I thought Atlantis was destroyed thousands of years ago. That is, if it were even real to begin with.”
“So did I,” Pandareus said with a rueful smile. “If I understood the westerners’ discussion correctly, Atlantis was destroyed but its rulers are coming here to escape. The sages couldn’t stand against them, so they were taking me home to continue trying to find a way to control Uktena.”
He looked down the quay toward the armed men advancing, then looked back at Corylus. He said. “I suspect that the Minoi will only put off their danger by fleeing to Carce. If their weapons are as terrible as the westerners seem to believe, however, Carce’s present population won’t survive to be threatened by the monster.”
Pandareus coughed into his hand and added, “Uktena appears to be the westerners’ name for Typhon.”
Corylus sighed. Taking longer to think wouldn’t give him a better result. There were no good results.
“Come, master,” he said, offering Pandareus a hand more to get him moving than because he needed help getting up. “We’d best get aboard the ship.”
The Watch and Marines were advancing at a deliberate pace, but they would arrive soon even if they didn’t decide to make a final rush. Corylus had a frontier soldier’s contempt for the Watch—and even more for the Marines, who filled their ranks with freed slaves. Even so there were forty of them, and some of the Marines were carrying long pikes.
Pandareus moved with commendable speed, hesitating only when he reached the edge of the quay. Before Corylus could speak, the Ancient took the teacher in his long arms and hopped with him across the three feet of open water to the ship’s deck before setting him down.
Pandareus remained tense for an instant, then broke into a broad smile. “Publius Corylus,” he said. “You have in one fashion and another added more to my education than I can possibly have done to yours. Where are we going now?”
“To Carce,” Corylus said, tossing the anchor aboard and trotting to the stern to loose the hawser there. “A moment ago I wondered what people would say if we flew over the city, but it sounds as though there’ll be a good deal more to worry about than our presence.”
The oncoming troops raised a shout, but it didn’t look like any of them wanted to double-time into the kind of trouble which had brought them out in such numbers. They would be here in a moment regardless.
Corylus tossed the hawser aboard and leaped to the deck himself. He could have cut the rope easily, but he didn’t want to give the Watch a chance to gloat.
The ship wobbled, then started to rise without Corylus needing to give an order. Well, it would have been a request. The Ancient was at his post in the stern, laughing in his fashion.
Corylus saluted him, then strode to the bow where the sprite waited. The sails beat strongly above them. The company on the quay had scattered, all but three Marines who butted their pikes on the stone and tried to follow the rising ship with the points of their weapons.
“Cousin,” Corylus said, patting the tangle of dull black tubes which mus
t be the flame-spitting weapon which he had seen in visions. “Can you teach me how to use this? Because if you can’t, I’m going to have to fight shiploads of Atlanteans with just a sword.”
He patted the hilt and grinned. “And I don’t fancy my chances,” he said.
* * *
VARUS STOOD IN THE BACK GARDEN of his father’s house. He was alone.
A few days ago he had believed that none of the servants would have been willing to join him here even if he ordered them to do so under threat of torture. Today, Lenatus and three of the just-freed slaves in the new squad of servants had offered to stay with him. Lenatus said that the whole squad would attend if Lord Varus ordered them to.
Varus had found his voice growing thick as he assured the men that it would be better for him to be alone. He knew they were all afraid of magic, and he was sure that they had a good idea of how dangerous this was going to be … though probably not a real understanding of the ways it was going to be dangerous. It didn’t make any sense that they should volunteer.
Nobody had ordered Gaius Varus to take on this duty either, but he was a philosopher: he knew that the flesh was of no importance. He didn’t imagine that the squad of bruisers was nearly so blasé about questions of being and nonbeing … but they were willing to stand with him
Varus swallowed. He was beginning to understand what it meant to be a man. And perhaps that was because he was becoming a man himself.
He took a deep breath. He didn’t have a weapon, just a splinter of bone. He had his mind and the knowledge in it. Those, not steel points or edges that would be more danger to him than to an enemy, were the tools with which he would fight Procron.
Varus wore a toga and leather-soled walking shoes. Remembering the terrain in which Procron’s fortress stood, he had been tempted to get a pair of cleated army sandals. He wouldn’t find them comfortable, though. He instead put on a pair of the shoes he would wear if he were going out on the streets of Carce.
“May the doors of heaven…,” Varus said, reading aloud from the book which unrolled in his mind. “Be opened to me!”