Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth

by David Drake

  “Bring a pry bar!” Ceutus said. “Zetes, there’s a pair of boat pikes in the wagon! Get ’em over here now!”

  Four laborers with shovels converged on where the pick had stuck, directly in the center of the forty-foot stretch Ceutus had chosen. They attacked the crumbling face of the slope and quickly laid bare a marble slab that had been inlet into a slot in the coarser living rock.

  The boat pikes—ten-foot poles of stout oak with hooked iron heads—arrived from the wagon of tools at the back of the procession. Harpax, the foreman, placed both points behind the marble; then, with three workmen on each, they levered the slab out. The mortises that held it crunched into sprays of gravel.

  The slab had covered a square opening. Beyond was as black as soot.

  “Bring lights!” said Ceutus. “There ought to be lanterns in the smithy! Light them and bring them now!”

  Paris began chanting in a high-pitched singsong. Alphena didn’t recognize the language, but Etruscan seemed the likely choice.

  Pandareus squatted to look inside. “Nothing,” he said as Alphena stepped beside him. “I hoped if the Egg were glowing, you see…”

  Paris, still chanting, crawled into the tunnel opening before anyone realized what he was doing. Ceutus yelped, “Hey! Get back here!”

  Alphena turned to the nearest member of her escort, a Dalmatian named Vargo. “Give me your sword,” she said. “Now!”

  “You want I should go after him, master?” said Harpax, snatching one of the boat pikes from the trio who had been using it as a tool.

  Alphena couldn’t imagine a less suitable weapon for a cramped tunnel. Nor, for that matter, did she see why Harpax—or even she—should need a weapon to handle a frail old man. There might be something else in the tomb, though.…

  “No, wait for the lamps or we’ll bust up the treasures!” Ceutus said. “Buggering Hercules! What does that snooty little prick think he’s playing at?”

  Alphena followed Paris into the tunnel. The Dalmatian’s sword hung from a belt that she tossed over her right shoulder. The scabbard was tin with a raised design picked out in black enamel. It was attractive, but it would be easy to replace if she damaged it bumping over the tomb’s lintel.

  Paris was chanting ahead. More people entered the tunnel behind her, blocking the light coming through the entrance. Because of that dimming and her eyes’ starting to adapt, Alphena could see the Etruscan priest against the distant back wall, which glowed faintly blue. If it was a wall.

  There was no sarcophagus or grave goods, nor was there any other sign of a tomb. Neither did a many-hued egg hang in the air as the old notebook described, though something was making the light farther down the tunnel.

  Alphena caught up with Paris. He continued to chant, but he had stopped at a ladder of tree roots growing from both directions through cracks in the stone sides. The roots themselves looked natural, but the arrangement certainly wasn’t.

  Paris began to climb.

  Alphena put her hand on the priest’s leg; it was like touching the smooth, flaking trunk of a sycomore. She said, “Where are you going?”

  Paris ignored her and continued to climb. She raised her hand, intending to grab the Etruscan’s ankle and jerk him back into the tunnel, then changed her mind and began to climb also. Light came from above, not the eerie blue coldness from deeper into the tunnel but the warmer color of diffused sunlight. There hadn’t been a visible opening up the hillside, but perhaps a crack…?

  Alphena heard Drago behind her on the ladder, calling to his cousin. Paris was close above, but he was growing dimmer and his voice had become faint. She sprang upward, climbing with her arms as well as the strength of her legs.

  She touched the priest’s bare heel. Paris stepped off the ladder and she followed him with a convulsive lunge, the sword banging against her thigh.

  They were in a circular room perhaps ten feet in diameter. The walls and floor were wood. The floor was solid without the hole or trapdoor by which they had entered.

  Paris had stopped chanting and was gasping for breath. His expression mingled anger and triumph.

  “Where are we?” Alphena said. She touched the hilt of the borrowed sword to make her threat explicit.

  There were doors in opposite walls, and midway between them was what looked like a casement window with four sections. The openings were empty instead of holding panes of glass, and the crossbars themselves were cut from the wood of the wall in which they stood.

  “Are we inside a tree?” Alphena said. Paris had been leaning forward to breathe more easily. He straightened, though he was still breathing hard. “But the yew wasn’t as big around as this!”

  Paris steadied himself on the door behind him. “Look out the window,” he said, pointing with his left arm. “Nothing else matters to you.”

  Alphena glanced through the crossbars, onto the rolling meadow beyond. She was not on the Collinus estate or anywhere familiar to her.

  A man with the head of a bull came over the crest of the hill. He was twelve feet tall and carried a double-bitted axe over his right shoulder. His torso and limbs were covered with fine reddish hair, and there was no question at all about him being male.

  The bull-man saw her looking through the window. He laughed thunderously and took the axe helve in both hairy hands. The blade looked the size of a warship’s ram.

  Alphena drew her sword. He’ll tear through the trunk, but if I’m quick I can chop his hands on the axe and—

  The bull-man opened his mouth and blew a ball of red-orange flame, blackening grass, daisies, and yellow flowers that Alphena couldn’t identify. The vegetation was too green to sustain the fire, but the burned swath billowed white smoke.

  The bull-man strode toward her, kicking up whorls of smoke and ash. Small flames curled from his nostrils, then sucked in again. He raised the axe.

  Movement caught the corner of Alphena’s eyes. She turned quickly. Paris had stepped through the door behind him. It closed and vanished before she could reach it. That section of wall was now as featureless as the patterns of wood grain to either side of where it had been.

  The bull-man laughed again. He was almost close enough to swing the axe, or—

  If he blows fire through the window, there’s nowhere for me to escape.

  Alphena pulled open the remaining door—it didn’t have a latch—and dodged through behind the point of her sword. There was at least a chance of taking the bull-man from the side before he could shift the clumsy axe. Though it didn’t seem very clumsy in his powerful hands.

  Alphena froze. Instead of a meadow, she was in a circular stone room. She couldn’t tell where the light was coming from.

  The door closed behind her—and vanished, leaving nothing behind but air.

  * * *

  CORYLUS WENT DOWN THE STAIRS FIRST, then turned to watch the Princess. The long robe was opaque even though it was as thin as gossamer, and the broad, floppy brim of her hat hid her face from an ordinary onlooker; but she didn’t move like a human being. The Singiri legs bent like a man’s, but they seemed to have an extra joint in the ankles, which turned her gait into something instantly noticeable.

  That disturbed Corylus, but it probably didn’t matter. Puteoli was a port city, so it had more than its share of cripples and of foreigners with strange customs.

  The Princess lifted the front brim of her hat. “Is there a problem?” she said. She not only spoke perfect Latin; she also had read the doubt in his expression.

  Corylus grinned. Instead of taking off his sword belt, he’d tossed another of Melino’s robes over him. He patted the hilt outlined beneath the thin fabric and said, “You probably won’t rouse any questions walking to the harbor. And if some busybody does wonder, he’s going to keep his mouth shut so long as you’re with me. I’ll lead, but you stick close.”

  The baboons watched as he and the Princess approached. One rose onto his hind legs, then fell back onto all fours with a whine.

  The Princess hiss
ed. Corylus stutter-stepped: the sound was as chilling as that of an unexpected arrow. The baboons shrieked and leaped away, their feet shooting out in front of them when they snubbed up at the limits of their neck chains.

  “What did you do?” Corylus said.

  “It wasn’t magic,” the Princess said. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the monkeys’ frightened jabbering. “I just told them something that they didn’t want to hear.”

  Corylus pushed the door open and stepped out, suppressing his smile. Admetus and the other three guards might wonder what it meant.

  “Headman?” said Admetus, who seemed to be a Scythian. “Sir, I mean?”

  “Carry on,” Corylus said dismissively. “I expect to be back shortly.”

  The less he said, the quicker he and the Princess would get away from the house. He didn’t want to be here—or have the Princess here—when Melino returned.

  Corylus led the Princess across the porch and down the front steps. The guards didn’t ask about the captain’s companion. They probably didn’t guess she was female, let alone that she was Singiri. He motioned her to his side as they started down the short pathway to the street.

  In mid-step they crossed a barrier. It had been invisible until they were through it and into a jungle at sunset.

  Corylus was so shocked that he snatched at the hilt of his sword, forgetting that he’d tossed a robe on to conceal the weapon in public. The fabric was so thin that he could have drawn the sword—but he certainly couldn’t swing a blade wrapped in a garment he was wearing.

  “Melino’s trapped us,” he growled, pulling the robe over his head and tossing it onto a bush whose leaves looked like a walnut’s but were spiked like a holly. He drew the long sword now.

  That could have gotten us killed. I’ve got to pay attention.

  “Not Melino,” the Princess said. “We stepped beyond Melino’s defenses and fell into a trap laid by his enemy.”

  She had doffed her garments without the drama Corylus had put into the process. Her upturned hat lay on its low crown, and the white robe was folded over it. He grinned in amusement at himself.

  “I don’t know whether the trap was laid for Melino, or for us,” the Princess said. “Or—”

  With a solemn logic that Pandareus would have applauded.

  “—whether some third party was the intended victim.”

  “Which way do we go, Princess?” Corylus said, looking about them without moving his body any more than he had to. “To get out of here. Because I’d really like to get out of here.”

  The sky was still bright, though the sun was almost below the red horizon. The leaves let only dapples of light through to the undergrowth and ground.

  The plants weren’t familiar. He and the Princess were in a stand of smooth-barked trees whose trunks were sinuous. Sometimes they rose braided in pairs, and there was even a triplet.

  “I don’t know where we are,” the Princess said. Her wrists and shins were red and still slightly swollen, but she seemed to move without difficulty. “I will try to learn, and then I will try to learn how we can go elsewhere.”

  She plucked off a round, fleshy leaf the size of her face. It was so dark a green that it could pass for black in the red light of sunset. She held it before her with her left hand and began to trace patterns on it with her right index finger. She didn’t score the leaf, and Corylus couldn’t be sure that her finger even touched the surface.

  Clouds shifted beyond the trees in the west, reflecting rosy light. Their movement made Corylus uncomfortable. He’d thought he was seeing birds, or something with red fur hunting birds, or something hunting him.

  He shot the sword home in its scabbard, then touched the trunk of the nearest tree. “Neither of us will do you any harm,” he said through closed lips. “We were placed here by an enemy, and we’d like to get out.”

  The dryad stepped into sight, seeming to come from behind a trunk too slim to conceal her body. She smiled uncertainly, clearly ready to vanish again.

  Corylus smiled back, lowering his hand to his side. “Good evening, mistress,” he said. “My friend and I are lost—in many senses. I hope you can help us find a path back to our own world.”

  “She’s a Singiri, isn’t she?” the dryad said, eyeing the Princess doubtfully. “Why has she come here?”

  “We were both sent here by an enemy,” Corylus said. “We didn’t come by choice, and we’d like to leave as soon as possible.”

  It wouldn’t do any good to press the nymph, a small, slim woman with skin the color of polished bronze. Her hair was straight and black and fell to her ankles.

  The dryad gave him a speculative look. “You don’t have to leave,” she said. “I don’t think the Singiri belong here, though.”

  Corylus glanced toward the Princess; her finger continued to move back and forth across the leaf. Nothing else had changed. Her mouth was open wide enough to display teeth like rows of tacks, but he didn’t think that she was speaking.

  “Is there a way out, mistress?” Corylus said. A bird—or was it a bat? The sky had become much darker—flew by, carrying something in its talons. There was a squawk from nearby, but it didn’t seem to come from the flying creature which he’d seen. “I really think the Princess and I should leave.”

  “Why would you want to leave?” said the dryad. “I don’t know how anyone would leave. Although—”

  She frowned. “There are Ethiopes coming here, and they don’t belong, either. If you brought them—”

  She drew away, not so much physically as through a psychic chill.

  “—then you should go. And take the Ethiopes with you, because they destroy everything. They’re worse than elephants.”

  “I didn’t bring them,” Corylus snapped, drawing his sword. He no longer cared if he frightened this maddening sprite. “How many Ethiopes are there?”

  The dryad spread her fingers and looked at them, pursing her lips. She shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Many. Many many.”

  Nerthus knew what that meant, but it probably meant too many. Corylus would have chanced his luck with three and possibly with four of the horse-headed monsters, but more than ten—probably—would be suicide.

  “Which direction are they coming from?” he said. “Quickly, now.”

  “You don’t have to shout,” said the dryad. “I don’t think I like you very much.”

  Then, either because of a dryad’s usual kindliness or because she correctly read his mood as approaching violence, she added, “From that way, I guess.”

  She pointed to brushes whose limbs rose nearly straight up. Their leaves were almond shaped and so bright a yellow that they stood out from the shadows even now at dusk.

  “They’re smashing everything, even when it’s not in the way.”

  Corylus took the leaf away from the Princess with his left hand. “Mistress, Ethiopes are coming,” he said, wondering if there was comprehension in her slit-pupiled eyes. “There’re too many for me to fight, so we’ve got to run if we can.”

  “Yes, I can run,” the Princess said. “For a time.”

  “Go ahead that way,” Corylus said, gesturing in what he thought was the direction opposite to where the Ethiopes were coming from. “Unless you know a way out?”

  The Princess set off at a lope around the trunk of a fallen tree that was being consumed by mushrooms the size of purple helmets. Corylus had sent her ahead to put himself between her and the danger, but she obviously had better night vision than he did.

  “There is no way out from the inside,” she said. Her steady pace didn’t affect her speech, as it would have that of most human beings. “It is a trap like the one which held Melino until I freed him. We will be released from outside, or we will die here.”

  Or we’ll be killed, Corylus added silently, but he supposed being killed was a special case within the general category “Dying.” He thought of classes with Master Pandareus, and thought of the recent past, when his concern had been to decid
e with which legion to seek an appointment as tribune, the first step on his career.

  They reached a creek. It was only about twenty feet wide and sluggish; motionless lilies floated on it, their flowers closed at nightfall. It couldn’t be too deep or the plants wouldn’t have been able to root in the bottom, but the Princess followed its bank in a gentle slant to the left.

  Corylus didn’t object. She seemed to know what she was doing, and he had no reason to believe that crossing the stream would bring any real advantage.

  A pair of naiads watched from behind a lily pad, ready to hide if threatened. Corylus thought of calling to them, but he didn’t have anything to say.

  The Princess didn’t seem winded and he was keeping up thus far without showing the strain, but they couldn’t run forever. He couldn’t at least. His sword dipped and bobbed, its long blade a lever that increased the effort of holding it across his chest. He would have liked to take the tip in his left hand, but he was afraid that as tired as he was, he’d manage to cut off his fingers on the naked edge if he tripped.

  From the left a pair of horse-headed silhouettes stepped out from behind a tall shrub whose bi-colored leaves pointed stiffly upward. The Princess shied to the right with a hiss of surprise. Corylus thrust the leading Ethiope through the solar plexus, his blade horizontal. Momentum carried him around, slicing almost completely through his victim’s torso.

  The Ethiope’s arms flailed sideways, one hand knocking his companion’s spear aside and the other flinging his own stone-headed axe into the undergrowth. His mouth opened to a spray of blood. He couldn’t shout because the stroke had severed his diaphragm.

  As his sword came free on the other side of the falling body, Corylus raised the point as much as he could as he struck. The second Ethiope got his right arm in the way of the stroke, but the edge cut through one bone of his forearm and so deeply into the other that it cracked when Corylus levered his blade free.

  The Ethiope bellowed and stabbed, but the weight of his own right arm weighed the spear down and the point slipped past Corylus’ knee. Corylus lunged as though he were trying to tackle his opponent, but his point was forward. It split the Ethiope’s breastbone.