Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth

by David Drake

  Varus thought for a moment. He was fully himself again. He noticed at the back of his mind that he was beginning to feel thirsty. There hadn’t been food or water on the vessel, but he hadn’t been aware of their absence during the voyage.

  “Unless Hedia and Melino are still on this island…?” he said to the magician, raising an eyebrow.

  “No, no!” Lucinus said peevishly. “They’re gone and the Book is gone. Don’t you understand? Zabulon’s Book has given Melino all power.”

  The magician could know if Hedia—or at least the Book—was still on the island, though Varus hadn’t seen him do anything to determine that fact. Varus accepted the statement for now. He wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life searching a jungle that probably contained nothing of interest to himself. Which meant—

  “Since our purpose for coming here is now moot,” Varus said, “we’ll return to Carce. If nothing else, my friends there may need my—”

  He twitched at his unconscious arrogance when he heard the words.

  “That is,” he said, “they may be in a situation in which I can help.”

  Varus felt a wave of relief now that he’d examined the choices and determined the best course of action under the circumstances. He gestured to the magician.

  “Come,” he said. “Get in the boat and I’ll push it off the beach.”

  His tone was peremptory, that of a nobleman speaking to a commoner. It wasn’t Varus’ normal way, but Lucinus became an unpleasant companion whenever he thought he was in a position of power.

  “We must stay or we’ll die!” Lucinus said. “You have no choice. You have nothing!”

  He extended his left hand toward the boat and said, “Go your way; your work is finished.” A cloud of tiny red motes sprang from his fingertips.

  Varus turned. Light covered the boat; its lines softened. In the hull Varus saw his sister standing with her sword out. Toward her strode horse-headed Ethiopes, brandishing their weapons. Corylus and Pandareus appeared at her side.

  “You have nothing!” Lucinus repeated.

  I have friends. Varus bent low and dived into the vision.

  * * *

  “I’LL LEAD, MASTER,” Corylus said, walking down the ramp with his sword lifted. A breeze blew from his back, carrying the smoke away. A few puddles of olive oil still burned.

  Molten lead had cooled to a bright silvery smear on the stone at Talos’ heel. There was a sparkling sharpness in the air that reminded Corylus of the odor of a nearby lightning bolt.

  “I would have liked to learn how Talos was powered,” said Pandareus, bending over to examine the frozen figure. “I don’t suppose he could have told me, even if he were willing to.”

  Corylus looked back over his shoulder. “Ah, master…?” he said, hoping he sounded less concerned than he felt. “Ah—Talos is dead, I’m sure. But if your foot slips on the oily floor, those double-edged swords look awfully sharp.”

  The swords looked sharp enough to cut sunbeams. If Corylus was any judge, there had been as much magic in their forging as there was in animating Talos.

  “Ah,” said Pandareus. He straightened and edged carefully around the automaton. “Yes, I see what you mean.”

  “Perhaps we’ll have another chance to look at him,” Corylus said. He winced to hear himself. That’s the sort of nonsense a nurse tells a child! “But I hope we don’t, now that I use my mind instead of letting my mouth talk by itself.”

  “I’m fairly sure that we’ll see other things just as wonderful as Talos,” Pandareus said. The automaton half-blocked the passage. When they passed him, Pandareus had begun walking alongside Corylus. “I’m less certain that the experience will be as survivable as this has proved, but I’ve never been concerned about personal existence.”

  They passed the alcove in which Talos had waited for interlopers. It was just that, a shallow niche of the sort that might have held a statue in a rich man’s house. Corylus walked on, wondering when he would come to the bridge. He saw a glint ahead, but it was too distant to have shape.

  “I don’t believe we’re in the material world anymore,” Pandareus said in his usual tone of polite interest. “The floor and the walls aren’t—”

  He brushed his left hand through what had seemed to be gray stone before that moment. His hand was fully visible.

  At his touch, the walls grew fainter, melting like fog in the sunlight. The gray was replaced by crystal nothingness sparkling with points of light that must be stars in the infinite distance. Both men stood frozen.

  The ground—the floor of the passage—began to dissolve also. Corylus could see the stars through where it had been, just as far away as they were in all other directions.

  “Oh dear,” said Pandareus. “I’m very sorry, Master Corylus. I fear that my curiosity has killed us both.”

  “The bridge is still here,” Corylus said. “Even if we can’t see it.”

  He tapped his foot down. The unseen surface was as hard as diamond.

  “There was a light in the direction we were going,” he said, focusing his eyes on that point. “You follow directly behind me and we’ll continue on. There won’t be a problem. Ready? We’ll go, then.”

  Corylus strode on with every appearance of confidence. All he was sure of was that if he dropped into nothingness Pandareus would have warning enough to stop. Perhaps the scholar would be able to crawl back to the garden on all fours, keeping one hand on the edge. As for Corylus himself—

  Well, he would have time to think about that if it happened. Probably a great deal of time.

  They walked on. And on.

  “I think the light is coming closer,” Corylus said. “That we’re coming closer to the light, that is.”

  He’d thought that for … actually, he wasn’t sure for how long. He hadn’t been counting his paces, and with no external markers—neither sun nor scenery—he didn’t have a feel for time.

  “I’ve been thinking that myself,” said Pandareus. “I was afraid to say anything, though, because I knew my mind might be tricking me into seeing something I want to be true.”

  Corylus risked a glance over his shoulder. Pandareus was slightly to his left instead of directly behind as Corylus had clearly ordered. He was thus able to see things ahead of him besides the back of the younger man.

  “Master,” Corylus said, grinning. “I thought of saying that you would make a terrible soldier, but I decided that I would be better saving my breath to discuss the question of whether water is wet.”

  “Certainly a matter worth consideration in the unusual circumstances in which we find ourselves,” Pandareus said, nodding. “And Master Corylus? Allow me to congratulate your teacher, from whom you have gathered such skill in the use of praeteritio.”

  They were both laughing as they reached what they had been approaching, an archway curtained in opaque light. It stood in the midst of nothingness.

  “I’ll go through first,” Corylus said after an instant’s consideration. “Follow me immediately. I don’t know that I’ll be able to return to tell you what’s on the other side, and I suspect there’re risks to standing out here also.”

  He grinned. “If you step through into molten lava, I’ll apologize now,” he said. “Because I probably won’t have time later.”

  “Your apology is accepted,” Pandareus said with a smile of his own. “If all my students had been like you and Lord Varus, my teaching career would have been as uniformly joyful as these past few months have been.”

  Corylus stepped into a broad stone room covered with a low dome. In the center, a child-sized man bent over a basin. He was very ugly.

  “Welcome, sir,” the little man said. He reminded Corylus of a wax figure that had started to slump in sunlight, but he turned with a pleasant smile. “Welcome, gentlemen, I should say since I see there are two of you. I get few visitors, so I’m glad to see you.”

  Corylus felt mildly embarrassed to have entered with his sword ready to thrust. I’m not so embarras
sed that I’m going to sheathe it until I know more about this place, though.

  “Pardon us for this intrusion,” he said formally, walking to the center of the hall but angling his approach to keep the stone basin between him and the little man. That made the bare sword less of an overt threat; or anyway, Corylus hoped it did. “We’re looking for a friend of ours, a young girl: Lady Alphena. We were told—we were told by a dryad—that this might be a path—”

  He happened to glance into the six-foot-wide basin. Instead of liquid, he saw Alphena standing on a prairie. Beside her were the three short Nubian dancers he had seen in previous visions.

  “Hercules!” he shouted. “There she is!”

  “Oh, that poor girl,” the little man said. “Yes, she was here. I lost my temper and sent her away. I’m terribly sorry; I was sorry the very moment it happened. Though really, she didn’t know anything about poetry.”

  The vision of Alphena had drawn a sword, not a surprise for anyone who knew her: she practiced in the family gymnasium with the determination of a gladiator whose life depended on his skill. Her life and those of her friends, Corylus included, had depended on her skill.

  Alphena was small and a woman besides, with less strength than an equally trained man of the same size. That said, she was very skilled for a woman, better than many soldiers who assumed their rear-area billets kept them safe. Every once in a while, a German raid would prove that some quartermaster’s clerk should have been spending more time on the practice field than in the wineshops of the Strip.

  “I wonder, gentlemen?” the little man said. “You appear to be cultured fellows. I’m trying to remember a line—”

  Switching to Greek, he said, “‘The boy is only a baby.…’”

  “Yes, of course,” said Pandareus. “‘Your son and my son, his mother and father both doomed.’ Andromache is speaking to the corpse of her husband Hector before his pyre is lighted.”

  “Yes,” said the little man. “Yes, of course. I—”

  Unexpectedly he began to weep. For a moment he covered his face in his wizened hands, but then he thrust them down at his sides and faced his visitors.

  “I had the world,” he said, making a broad gesture. “Now I am a ruin and will never be anything more than a ruin. If I leave this room, I will die. I, who was ruler of poetry and of the unseen world!”

  Pandareus watched the speaker with consuming interest. Corylus instead surveyed the hall now that he was sure the little man didn’t have a weapon or, apparently, any wish to harm them. There were no doors or passages in the walls. The arch by which Corylus and Pandareus entered was blank stone from this side, identical to the rest of the walls.

  “You see my body, crippled!” the little man said. “But my mind, that’s the horror. That’s crippled too, stunted. I who was the greatest of men and more than a man, look at me now! I should better step out of this place and crumble away entirely, body and mind.”

  “We were discussing Lady Alphena,” Pandareus said. He opened his left hand toward the vision in the basin. “You said she was here and you sent her away, master?”

  The little man slid up from his grief like a casement suddenly opening. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “She must have been a magician herself to have come here. I wasn’t; I shouldn’t have.…”

  He began to cry again. Corylus wondered what had happened to bring the fellow to his present state. Age alone would not have been enough.

  “Can you summon her back from where you sent her, master?” said Pandareus, gesturing again to the basin. “My friend and I have come to return Lady Alphena to the Waking World, you see.”

  “Really?” said the little man. “There was a time I would have been able to do that, you know. I was powerful; I had all power, except over time. I tried to become young again, but it all went wrong, so badly wrong.…”

  He’s about to cry again, Corylus realized. He put his left hand on the little man’s shoulder and said, “Master? Can you help us with Lady Alphena? Can you help our friend, please?”

  The little man shook himself free of Corylus. “No, no,” he said querulously. “I can’t; and anyway, why would I want to? She’s a fool! She didn’t respect poetry and she didn’t respect me!”

  He looked into the basin and added, “She knows to respect me now, though!”

  Ethiopes, the horse-headed giants whom Corylus had fought when he fled with the Singiri princess, were advancing on Alphena and the Nubian dancers. Scores of them were visible already and more appeared with every breath at the misty edge of the vision.

  Corylus considered the twisted little creature who had sent a young woman into the hands of monsters. His mind bubbled with cold anger.

  “If you cannot return Lady Alphena to us…,” Pandareus said, “… can you send us to her?”

  The teacher’s clear, calm voice brought Corylus back to … not his senses, because he had never lost either awareness or control. Rather, it put him back in the mind of a scholar, or of a soldier. Not of a skin-clad barbarian looking for a chance to kill something because he was in a bad mood.

  “What?” said the little man. “Of course. Or you can simply go, step into the image yourself. That’s all that’s required.”

  “Then if you will give me a hand, Master Corylus…?” Pandareus said, putting his left foot on the lip of the basin—it was almost knee height above the floor—and holding out his right hand to his younger friend. He smiled.

  Corylus smiled back as he mounted the lip, then braced the older man to stand beside him. The teacher’s calm good sense made him a better companion in this business than any number of additional swordsmen would have been.

  “Ready?” he said.

  “But wait!” said the little man. “Do you have to—”

  “Yes,” said Pandareus. Together he and Corylus stepped into the vision of another world.

  * * *

  THE CLIFFS ON EITHER SIDE of the chasm glowed faintly red. The color put Hedia in mind of the magic Melino worked, but this was none of his doing.

  The bridge they were crossing was very like the structure of cane over which the demon had led them into the Underworld in the beginning. This time the “floor” was a hawser of silk as thick as Hedia’s thigh and the “handrail” was a wrist-thick silken cord. Whatever would the Serians who sent fine silk garments to Carce think of this industrial use of their luxury fabric?

  Hedia walked without difficulty along the hawser. It didn’t spring upward when her foot or the magician’s lifted, though it always quivered with a high-pitched vibration of its own.

  She kept her right hand above the lighter rope in case something unexpected happened. “Unexpected” in this place meant “even more horrible than everything else is.” Hedia had decided that being ready to grab the handrail did not cause her to lose her dignity, or at least not an unacceptable amount of dignity.

  Smiling wryly at the mental games she was playing with herself, Hedia said, “What is the name of this gorge, if you please?”

  “Be silent, woman!” Melino said from immediately ahead of her. He didn’t turn his head.

  “The gorge has no human name, Hedia,” said the demon, leading the procession. Her voice was emotionless, but Hedia was sure that there was a note of dry humor in the words. “No human who crossed it returned alive.”

  After a step and another step, the demon added, “Not all of them were alive to begin with, of course.”

  Hedia giggled. The situation wasn’t funny—she had no doubt that the demon had stated the literal truth—but Hedia was amused at the way she and the demon were baiting Melino in response to his surly arrogance.

  Hedia was used to men assuming they were her superiors, generally for no better reason than the fact they were men. She had never come to like the experience, however. She found the game she and the demon were playing to be deeply satisfying.

  Hedia had kept her eyes trained along the course of the bridge in a conscious attempt to keep from looking downw
ard. Movement drew her glance reflexively: something as large as a warship under sail had swept under them. She couldn’t tell what it was, but she had the impression of scales rather than feathers.

  “Nothing will attack you while you are with me,” the demon volunteered. “If you fall from the bridge, something may catch you in the air. You will fall for a very long time unless that happens.”

  The magician hunched lower. He clutched the Book to his chest with his left arm but kept his right hand and the staff firmly over the upper line.

  Hedia laughed. Speaking so that the demon could hear also, she said, “You should have been taught to walk gracefully the way I was, Master Melino. My teacher was Narcissus, the most esteemed pantomime in Carce during my childhood.”

  She lowered her right hand to her side. She was no longer afraid of falling. The echoing hiss she had noticed when they began crossing the gorge might come from water running somewhere in the depths, but in this place it might not be water; and it didn’t matter anyway.

  They had been walking uphill since before the winged thing flew under them: the hawser sagged under its own weight. Ahead of them were a gleaming metal arch and double doors of the same bright metal. Hedia thought it must be orichalc, but she couldn’t be sure in this dim red light.

  The demon halted in front of the doors. Melino moaned something, a prayer or perhaps merely a groan, and raised Zabulon’s Book. The doors groaned inward even before the Book spoke.

  White light flooded from the opening, turning the demon into a crimson silhouette of herself. She walked through the doorway; Melino followed; and Hedia, squinting so that she could see in the sudden brightness, followed also. Behind her the great metal valves closed with a sound like souls in torment.

  They had entered a domed vault, flooded with light from the floor and the domed ceiling. Hedia couldn’t be sure how big the space was because the material was so dazzling. It glittered like clear white sand, but at least what she was standing on was solid and as smooth as a bronze mirror.