by P. K. Lentz
“Meaning you will make a spectacle of yourself.”
Thalassia scoffed. “Hello, I'm Jenna. Have we met?”
“Merely an observation. Not a complaint,” Demosthenes clarified. “I do like to think I have met Jenna... and Geneva, and Thalassia, where most only ever know one.”
“And you survived us all. That's as impressive as anything I've done. Legendary. Poets should sing of it. About the islands, you should know that now that I've said it out loud, that's my plan with or without you. But... given all the sweet things you just said about me to the man you were strangling, I want to believe it's with.”
Looking upon her face, as blue in the moonlight as her wintry eyes were by day, Demosthenes gave his answer.
“We should not pretend the choice is mine. Or yours. We are no longer a choice. Our partnership is the dictate of a mad, mad universe. We deny its will at our peril.”
“Pfft, listen to you, Athenian with his fucking philosophy,” she mocked in her playful way. “So it's with?”
Demosthenes slid closer to her and laid an arm over the cloak which encompassed her damaged flesh. She rested her head on him.
“Your game of island witch could only end in disaster without me along,” he said. “You know that.”
“And?”
“And... I would miss you. Satisfied?”
“So rarely.”
“After Athens,” Demosthenes mused aloud, “we'll find a ship from Corinth. We can pay Ammia a visit. If it's friends you want, you could invite her to join us.”
“Sweet girl,” Thalassia reflected. “Like Eurydike. I'll miss Red. She deserved better from us.”
“Yes... It's strange, though. I know I should feel sorrow, but I cannot. When Andrea saved me, she spoke of monsters. Is that what I've become?”
Thalassia made no direct reply, only said after a while, “Some island life will set us right.”
“I'm not so sure,” Demosthenes protested mildly. “I'm not sure we ought to change. We might be best served by remaining as we are. Whatever the future holds, I do not feel it can include peace for us. Not for long. I thought of you once as madness made flesh. Your madness may have eased somewhat, but I believe that chaos will never be far behind you. Or me, now that the gods have made me your disciple.”
Demosthenes could not see the broken face which rested on his shoulder, but he knew it smiled fondly.
“All the better reason to enjoy ourselves while we can,” she said. “Then, when chaos comes, we'll face it together. In the meantime, we can set ourselves modest goals, such as not killing Alkibiades, or Ammia, or any of our new island friends. Trust me—” She nudged him with her wet scalp. “—we'll have some fun before the next storm hits. I'll make sure of it.”
“Of that,” Demosthenes said, “I have not the faintest whisper of doubt.”
THE END (FOR NOW)
Epilogue One: Chaos comes
60 days after the fall of Athens
“Malcolm...” sighed Sevareem DiRivache, who hated the name her starship captain father had given her. “It's your turn to carry the null-crate.”
“It weighs six-and-a-half pounds,” Malcolm returned.
“It has sharp corners! It's digging into me. Who makes things with sharp corners? Idiots, that's who.”
Sevareem shifted the strap on her shoulder, but the metallic box persisted in poking her in the kidneys. It was not uncomfortable, thanks to neurilace masking any unpleasant sensation that might have resulted, just as it regulated her skin temperature, preventing her from sweating in the summer heat as the pair waded through the tall grass of a meadow. Behind them lay a forest which Sevareem had managed to determine was located somewhere in Northern Europe.
“Will you just take it?” she insisted. “I have a lot of shit in my pack, and you have almost nothing.”
“Traveling heavy is your choice,” Malcolm lectured. “Have you figured out yet how long we're here?”
“No. Well, yes. Sort of. Do you have any conception of how difficult that calculation is?”
“No. Well, yes. Sort of. Hence, it's your job.”
“Asshole...” Sevareem muttered, as she frequently did. “Anyway, the answer is greater than two years, so I have some time. Are you going to take this thing, or what?”
By the time Malcolm answered, “Fine,” the overly-angular null-crate was deposited in his arms. Its contents weighed vastly more than six-and a half-pounds and were quite a lot larger than the crate's size would indicate.
Only moments after winning the meaningless victory, Sevareem cursed under her breath and informed Malcolm: “Locals...”
Lacking even the simplest of enhancements to his flesh, muscle, and brain, Malcolm squinted at the faraway treeline across the meadow. He likely saw the six men as little more than dark shapes. With her vision magnified by neurilace optics, Sevareem could practically see their body lice.
“Vikings,” she groaned. “I fucking hate Vikings.”
“I'm sure they're not Vikings,” Malcolm said. Hoisting an arm, he called out in a tongue these folk could not possibly understand, “Hello there! We are peaceful!”
Of an instant, the six alerted and ran in the direction of the two visitors. Malcolm, as was typical in such situations, put on a broad smile and held open palms aloft to show he was unarmed.
Sevareem wore her usual frown and wrapped the fingers of her right hand around the grip of the GiG-97 machine pistol slung on a strap around her neck. She had acquired it several layers ago, named it Emma, and applied a rainbow decal which disappointingly had begun to rub off.
“I'm just gonna shoot them,” she said as the 'Vikings' made their way in haste across the meadow.
“No! We've talked about this. Bad Savvy.”
“'Bad Savvy,'” Sevareem mimicked. “Am I your dog?”
At a sharply spoken word from the apparent leader, the six locals, clad in garments of stitched hide, halted meters away to brandish a mix of well-used swords and slender spears.
Sevareem sighed. “Fucking Vikings.”
Still smiling at them with open hands, Malcolm said, “They're not Vikings. They're... Gauls or Goths or something.”
“Vikings, Goths, Huns. They're all the same. Hairy, nasty-smelling monkey-men who want to paw me. I'm a city girl.”
“Try a few languages. Tell them we're peaceful.”
“We're not.”
“Tell them anyway.”
“Go fuck yourselves, you brainless rat-fuckers,” she told the six in Gaulish, which happened to be one of the seventy-seven languages presently imprinted on her brain. Many were of no relevance to any earth, much less this particular iteration of it. Gaulish was on queue for deletion. Some Vikings she had tolerated long ago in some other layer must have been Gauls.
The men showed no sign of taking offense, so evidently they were not the Gaulish variety of Viking.
“I know you said something nasty,” Malcolm correctly surmised. Lacking neurilace, he spoke only a couple of dozen languages, which he knew on account of being very, very old, though he did not look it. As in Sevareem's case, many of the tongues were not of this earth. “I would try Latin myself, but if I recall correctly, chances are if they know Rome, they won't react well.”
When Sevareem opened her mouth to speak Latin, ideally provoking them, Malcolm warned her, “Don't.”
Sighing, she picked at a peeling edge of Emma's rainbow decal.
Malcolm spoke his own name loudly, gesturing at himself. He pointed at his companion and said, “Sevareem.”
“Sav!” Sevareem corrected him. “Sav! Why do you do that to me every time?”
Ignoring her, Malcolm resumed addressing the Viking-types, now in Middle French: “We would like to travel to your village. Will you take us?”
Whatever they spoke, it was not Middle French or any close relative thereof. Whatever it was, they conversed in it excitedly among themselves while keeping wary eyes and weapons upon the travelers.
“Allow
me to translate their conversation,” Sevareem meanwhile said aloud to Malcolm. “'The smiling idiot is unarmed. Let us stab him a hundred times and take the pretty little one with the colorful hair—'”
“That's enough.”
“'—back to our village and rape her. Then we'll pick lice off each other and—'”
“Enough.”
“'—rape her some more.' I'm done.”
The lead primitive, an older man whose face was hairier than the rest, began to address Malcolm in angry, aggressive tones. Sevareem took the opportunity to raise Emma and aim it at the man, who ceased speaking. Evidently he was possessed of enough warrior instinct to recognize the thing as a weapon.
Malcolm touched the machine pistol's muzzle and nudged it down. Begrudgingly, Sevareem permitted it.
He smiled again at the leader and said, “We'll just be on our way.” Since it hardly mattered, he said it in the spacer tongue which the two had grown accustomed to using between themselves down the layers. “Sorry to have bothered you.”
As Malcolm began to step away, the head primitive spoke some words to his comrades, who cautiously began to fan out as if to surround the strangers and prevent their departure.
“Oh, come on,” Sevareem complained. “I'm just gonna do it.”
“Relax.”
The leader spoke more nonsense at Malcolm while one of the others stepped close to Sevareem. One hand pointed its ridiculous bronze weapon at her, while the other reached toward her pack.
“Don't touch my stuff,” she warned.
He grabbed it. She yanked it away. He grabbed it again.
“Sav...” Malcolm admonished. His tone said he knew protest was by now pointless.
This time, as she yanked the pack away, Sevareem swung Emma round and squeezed its trigger.
She loved the stuttering sound of Emma's voice, and the weapon spoke in it now as a short burst of projectiles tore through the chest of the offending Viking, or whatever he was.
While Malcolm stood beside her, surely wearing that judgmental look of his, and as the other five primitives cried out in anger and terror, making to attack, Sevareem brought Emma to bear on them all, sweeping it left and right, firing without hesitation.
The five fell quickly in heaps of blood-soaked animal skins.
Sevareem sighed at the bodies, putting off turning to see Malcolm's disapproving look.
“So... that's done,” she said at length, rubbing Emma's rainbow decal.
“Give me that,” Malcolm said, snatching the slung machine pistol by its muzzle. Sevareem bent her head down and allowed it to be removed.
“We don't need to be friends with people like that,” she said by way of explaining herself. “It ends with us living like animals in some hut for much too long. And he touched my pack. What am I supposed to let him touch next? Where does it end? Let's just assume he intended to molest me.”
At a swift pace, Malcolm started away from the scene of the massacre on a course slightly altered from what it had been. “Honestly,” he said, “I don't know why I keep you around.”
Sevareem caught him up. “That's the hundred-and-sixty-seventh time you said that. You know the answer: I'm as useful as I am entertaining, and we're not the least bit attracted to one another.”
“That is important.”
“Plus, I realized something else, too.”
“I know you'll tell me.”
“When you keep someone around who's even more of a psycho than you are, you get to look like the sane one while I do nasty things that you would have done yourself anyway. Admit it.”
“It's... not completely wrong,” Malcolm said as they left the meadow behind. “But in every single layer do you have to kill the first people we meet?”
“I don't have to...” Sevareem said. “Look, you have your compulsion, I have mine. So? No harm done. Where are we headed, anyway? I already hate this place.”
“You want a city, I'll give you a city. If this earth has a Rome, it should be this way.”
“Rome again?” Sevareem groaned. “Didn't go well last time. But it beats mud huts, I guess.”
“This time we bear gifts. They'll appreciate what's in this crate. It'll be fun. Just, please, try to make them like you.”
“You're joking! I'm vastly more likable than you, space marine. It's not even close.”
“Go tell that to the Vikings.”
* * *
Epilogue Two: The Wolves of Eris
There was another name by which they called themselves on their inviolable island stronghold, but to most they were the Wolves of Eris. On this, the last of a desperate hundred-day march through marsh, forest, plain, steppe, and finally mountain, beset at every turn by enemies of all kinds, at the head of the ragged remains of an army the command of which he had but recently inherited, Nausis stood among nine Wolves.
The nine were women, as most of the Wolves were. The small number of males among them were said to have been born on the island. Many of the females were, too, but the tales were well known of young girls, frequently orphans, always willing, being carried off to the island not to be seen again on the mainland for twenty or thirty years, if ever.
Why they were called Wolves was no mystery, for each was a finely honed instrument of death. They appeared on the mainland just often enough to put fear into any who might oppose the Royal House. Their connection to Eris was less clear, since by all accounts the dark goddess whom the Wolves honored above all was one called Magdalen.
Some said that the Wolves' warrior-priestess leader, the most feared among them, was none other than the slaughtergod's sister. But standing within inches of her on a snow-dusted mountainside beyond the Scythian plains, and having been near to her for many days of the journey here, Nausis rather doubted that.
Three Wolves had died in getting here, as had many hundreds of soldiers of the empire. The less unlucky comrades of the latter were encamped lower down the mountain, licking frostbitten wounds. By all rights, Nausis should have remained down there with his own kind while the Wolves alone climbed higher on the journey's final leg.
That army which had set out with the Wolves had taken on faith that salvation lay here in these mountains. Those who had laid down their lives had done so not knowing what it was they sought, only that something could be found in these mountains capable of reversing the past season's disastrous defeats. Reluctant to take on mere faith whether the death and suffering of the march had been in vain, Nausis had trailed the Wolves.
Their leader, on seeing him, granted her approval with a smirk, and so he was permitted into their company.
Quite deliberately, Nausis hiked close to her, stumbling more than once over the jagged rocks because he found it hard not to stare. A handful of days ago, he had been nowhere near the command of a force like this. A few deaths had changed that and placed him here, beside a figure known throughout the empire, a woman said to be deathless, having led the Wolves since their foundation a great many generations ago.
She did not look old. Quite the opposite. Her skin was maiden-smooth and the long, straight hair which fell upon the steel shoulders of her dented armor was of a rich brown, lighter when the sun passed through blown wisps of it. Nausis might have thought the legend of her immortality a mere trick had he not seen her fight. It seemed impossible that a girl so young could battle thus, kill thus.
He had also seen her wounded. But instead of killing or permanently incapacitating her, as such wounds as hers surely should have, they had only pained her for a few days. By now, quite impossibly, they were fully healed.
It was no myth, Nausis accepted now. Andrea Styphonides, warrior-priestess, leader of the Wolves of Eris, feared enforcer of the Royal House to which she was cousin, a woman who looked hardly seventeen, was in truth a deathless being.
“Here,” the Styphonides announced, stopping by a steep crag which resembled a great many other steep crags they had passed. “This is the place.”
The Wolves and Nausis ha
lted in a loose ring around the Styphonides, who drew a deep breath and cried out, “Lykaaaaaaa!”
The syllables carried far, echoing off the rocky slopes.
“Lyka!” she called out again. “I know you are in there! I know you can hear me! Answer!”
No answer came.
“The House I have kept upon the throne for three hundred years has fallen. I seek your help! I would not have come were the need not dire. Lyka!”
After a long minute of silence in which no woman, and certainly no man, dared speak, there came a laugh as if from the air or the rocks. It was a brief, soft laugh. A woman's.
“Andrea!” said the invisible laugher “Darling! Such a surprise.”
“Please let us in, Lyka. Me, at least, so we can speak. I need your help. I need... Nadir. There are men below in need of food, water and med—”
Another laugh. “You're boring me, dumpling. What do I care if your little house fell down? Build another!”
“Lyka!” Andrea Styphonides yelled. “Stop! What I ask of you is next to nothing! All you need do is allow me to enter and leave again. It costs you—”
“Needy, needy!” the rocks exclaimed. “You really are boring me, sweetness. I shall have to ask you to leave.”
“No!” the Styphonides cried in rage. “Lyka, I beg of you!”
“Sorry, duckling. Bye-bye!”
“Lyka!” the warrior-priestess screamed. “Lyka!”
Again and again she screamed it, but the rocks and the air remained silent.
Then the cried name became a guttural scream as the Styphonides strode to the nearest crag and pounded her fist into it, then drew back and struck it again, repeating the action as if she might crack the stone.