Air and Darkness

by David Drake

The scene in the arbor shifted again to the only completely stone building Hedia had seen on Anti-Thule. It was a round temple—a tholos—like the Temple of Vesta in the Forum of Carce. Instead of walls, a dozen pillars carried its domed roof.

  A Tylon with pure white fur stood on the first of the temple’s three steps, holding a rectangular soapstone tablet. He spoke or chanted, probably the latter. Though Hedia couldn’t hear sounds from the image, forty Tyla wearing albatross-plume headdresses faced the one with the tablet and responded together whenever he paused.

  This is the Godspeaker of the Tyla, on the Temple of the Moon, said the spring. He is conducting the morning ceremony with the Priests of the Moon. Without these rites morning and evening, the ice would cover Anti-Thule.

  Hedia’s apparent viewpoint drew back to what it had been when she first glanced toward the arbor: a panorama of the green enclave and the ice cliffs lowering above it. At this scale the Tyla were moving flecks, not figures.

  The streaks of light you see in the sky, said the spring, are meteors: pieces of stone and metal from beyond your world. Some of them come from far away even by the standards of the cosmos.

  Hedia frowned, trying to understand what “beyond your world” meant. “Do you mean they come from India?” she said. She couldn’t fathom how that could be, but she had already seen many things she couldn’t understand.

  India is part of your world, Hedia, said the voice. These objects are from farther away than even Gaius Varus knows.

  I’m imagining the sneer, Hedia thought, but she wasn’t sure that was true.

  Most meteors burn up or at least break up when they hit the atmosphere of your world, the voice said. A very few of them, however, are so large and solid that—

  The streak in Anti-Thule’s black sky was so bright that Hedia blinked. It ended where the ice cliffs met the Tyla’s green fields. Steam blasted skyward and red sparks also sprayed in all directions from the impact. Where the sparks landed on ice they kicked up additional puffs of steam, but those that struck among the houses started fires.

  Ripples spread in circles from the impact, throwing down sheds and other structures in the fields and leaving boundary lines twisted. The soil had settled somewhat by the time the shock waves reached the town, but the Temple of the Moon rocked and some of the houses lifted off their foundations.

  —they reach the ground intact, the spring said.

  The imagery vanished. The arbor remained, but the path ended in brush not far beyond it.

  Hedia swallowed. She said, “What am I to do now, Spring?”

  I told you to follow the path, taking each right turn, the voice said. This time its tone was one that Hedia remembered using on men occasionally. Very, very stupid men, or so it had seemed to her at the time.

  “Yes,” Hedia said. Her voice was calm, but her lips were in a firm line.

  She resumed walking. After a few steps she glanced over her shoulder, but the arbor was as empty as she would have expected it to be a few months ago.

  It was amazing what a human being could become used to in a few months. What she had become used to, at any rate.

  Something flitted across the path just ahead, followed by another of the same things. “Things” because as best Hedia could tell, they were winged horses about the size of sparrows.

  They certainly weren’t dangerous, nor had the turtle been dangerous. It made Hedia wonder what other creatures lived in this woodland, but she didn’t suppose the voice had sent her here to die.

  It was a more comfortable trek than that across the dry valley in which she had found Boest. Though she could use another drink by now.

  The intersection at the end of this stretch of path appeared identical to the first. Hedia now knew to look down the left-hand branch immediately and saw an arbor, woven like the first from living laurels. Again it framed Anti-Thule.

  What would happen if I walked through the arbor? Hedia thought. But the landscape of Anti-Thule hadn’t been one she wanted to visit even when she first saw it. This was a later view of the place, and the changes made it horrible.

  There was a water-filled crater where Hedia had seen the meteor strike. Wisps of vapor rose from its surface, and the ice cliffs appeared to have retreated instead of glazing over the vestiges of the impact.

  A hundred feet of the fields surrounding the crater had become barren except for a smudgy blackness like the ashes of burned wool. When Hedia looked at the black surface closely, she saw that it moved the way a frog’s throat pulses as the animal breathes.

  That is the Blight, said the voice in Hedia’s mind. It will continue to grow unless it is stopped.

  The Godspeaker of the Tyla stood at the edge of the blackened area, holding out his soapstone tablet. The Priests of the Moon were arrayed to either side of him, facing the Blight also. They chanted in unison.

  The water filling the crater was opaque, but something beneath occasionally lifted to the surface. It rippled like thick sludge.

  The Tyla attempted to stop the Blight by their magic, said the spring. Their power slowed the Blight’s advance across Anti-Thule.

  The crater sloshed violently. At first Hedia thought it was erupting like pools of hot mud on the margins of Vesuvius. A flat head rose from the water and squirmed onto the blighted margin of the land.

  It was a catfish, or its ancestors had been catfish. It wriggled from the crater, pulling itself along on fins. Its body was greater than that of an ox, greater than an elephant’s. It had no scales, but much of its skin was blotched and scarred. The barbels fringing its lips waved like tentacles.

  The Blight changes what it does not destroy, said the spring.

  Hedia watched the monstrous fish writhe forward, leaving a smeared trail on the smutty blackness. Many of the priests retreated; even those who stayed where they were showed signs of nervousness.

  The Godspeaker continued to chant, changing his stance slightly to the right so that he faced the oncoming fish. The fish lurched forward. Its stiff front fins raised the broad head ten feet in the air.

  The Godspeaker gestured with his tablet. Lightning struck from the clear sky, blasting the fish. The spines stood out on fins from which the skin had been burned away and fluids leaked from the corpse.

  “They’re stopping it,” Hedia said. As she spoke, she knew that she was really praying that her words were true. “They’re stopping the Blight!”

  She expected the voice to speak. Instead the answer came silently from the image: a deep crescent of the crater rim fell into the water, enlarging it. The blackness on the margin crept forward visibly, expanding the barren area except for a dimple of unblighted ground where the Godspeaker stood.

  The Godspeaker lowered the tablet and backed away, shaking with exhaustion. The Blight oozed over the soil he had vacated.

  The image faded. A breeze touched the arbor, making the leaves of the laurel shiver.

  She turned abruptly and resumed walking. Toward the next branching, toward the next vision. She shivered also.

  Hedia wanted to scream questions at the voice, but it would either ignore her or perhaps sneer as it had when she asked why it was showing her Anti-Thule. She wasn’t willing to surrender her dignity for nothing, and besides, it didn’t matter. She hoped that the visions had no purpose at all. Any information she got that disproved that hope would be bad news.

  Hedia grinned. She knew people who tried to plan everything. She had decided when she was very young that she would never be able to foresee all the problems that could arise, so she was better off learning to deal with the unforeseen. Thus far that had worked out well … and, indeed, had often proved to be a great deal of fun.

  Grunts and crackling brush came from the woods to her left. Hedia glanced toward the noise but couldn’t see anything through the leaves. What I’m hear—

  She looked up. A one-eyed giant and a huge ape were wrestling, each of them at least twenty feet tall. They were almost motionless, gasping with the strain. Occasionally a tr
ee limb cracked when they swayed into it.

  The cyclops was watching her over the ape’s shoulder.

  Hedia walked on, holding her head high. She was afraid, but she would not display her fear. She never displayed fear.

  Life would often be easier if I weren’t afraid, though, she thought. This was one of the times that was true.

  She came to the third branching and took a breath. She was half-glad that she would put the struggling monsters out of sight when she turned but half-fearful of what vision she would see this time.

  Nobody’s making me look, Hedia thought. But she didn’t actually know that the spring couldn’t force her to see what it wanted to show her, and besides, neither fear nor disgust had prevented her from doing things in the past. The Otherworld wasn’t the place to begin showing weakness.

  Hedia looked immediately for the vision, hoping that this time there wasn’t one. Reality, as often, was less pleasant than what she wished.

  The arbor showed her that the crater had devoured half the green enclave. The filthy blackness had continued to advance into what had been cultivated fields; the ice that covered most of Anti-Thule had eased back from the margins also.

  A pair of giant fish, bigger, if anything, than the one Hedia saw in the previous vision, had crawled beyond the blighted area. Ordinary Tyla, females as well as males, battled the monsters with spears that glittered like glass.

  Occasionally a fish lurched forward. The Tyla scattered, but barbels wrapped around any who might be slow and swept them into the toothless jaws.

  The white-furred Godspeaker faced the center of the blighted area with the tablet held before him. Two human males flanked him.

  The Godspeaker could not destroy the Blight with only the aid of his priests, said the voice of the spring, its first comment on the scene. He cast forward in time and brought back two human wizards to help him.

  The man on the Tyla’s left was squat and broad shouldered. He wore a tunic of unbleached wool and bound his hair with a cloth fillet. If Hedia had seen him on the streets of Carce, she would have taken him for a countryman visiting the city and paid no more attention. He brandished a short iron rod whose end was crudely forged into the two-faced head of the god Janus.

  The other human was dark-skinned and dressed in a loose silk jacket and trousers. He was lightly built and could have passed for one of the Indian noblemen whom Hedia had seen at Polymartium. He gestured with an ivory wand.

  All three magicians were chanting. The black arc of the Blight had retreated where it was nearest to them.

  “Why did the Godspeaker take humans?” Hedia said. “Why didn’t he find Tyla wizards instead?”

  A fish in squirming effort flopped half its length beyond the edge of the Blight. Four Tyla ran forward, holding an exceptionally long pike as though it were a battering ram. They buried their weapon deep in the monster’s side, then started to run back.

  The fish thrashed reflexively. The pike-shaft flailed to one side and back again, knocking the Tyla down. It swept the pair nearer the crater into the blackness. The other two crawled away, one helping the other.

  The pair in the Blight got up also, but one immediately fell again. The other staggered almost to the edge of the foulness before sinking to all fours. Feathery blackness crawled up his limbs before covering his torso and head like a filthy blanket. His body sank to the ground. The lumps where the Tyla lay would soon be indistinguishable from the desolation about them.

  There are no Tyla in the future, said the spring. You see the last of them here.

  The scene framed by laurel saplings faded. Hedia took a deep breath, then turned and started down the right-hand path.

  She didn’t care about the Tyla any more than she cared about the many hundreds of animals—and humans, if it came to that—she had seen slaughtered in the arena, but now she had a notion of why the spring had shown her Anti-Thule.

  The spring had said the Tyla were gone, but it had not spoken of the Blight. She chose not to ask it that question.

  Hedia was sick with dread.

  * * *

  CORYLUS SAT CROSS-LEGGED IN A GLADE near a rivulet dripping down a series of rocky pools. He had gathered a pile of hickory nuts to his left, just as they had fallen from the tree, and to the right was a much smaller pile of nuts that he had husked.

  The dryad Carya had lost interest in what Corylus was doing, but she stood beside her tree and watched nonetheless. He smiled and thought, She hasn’t lost interest in me.

  He used his dagger to slit the husk of the next nut, then wrenched it off in four pieces. He tossed them deeper in the woods and dropped the nut itself on the small pile.

  “How long are you going to do that?” Carya asked. She was tall and slender, with red-brown hair and amber eyes. The shift she wore was pale yellow, but light reflecting from the leaves gave the fabric a greenish cast.

  “I’ll do another five or six now,” he said. “Then I’ll smash them and set them in water to float the shells off the meat while I husk the rest.”

  “I get bored, you know,” she said. “The other sprites don’t like me because I’m prettier than they are. I’m not from around here, you know?”

  Carya was pretty and certainly exotic, though from what Corylus had seen, dryads of different species were generally catty about their neighbors anyway. He could see other sprites watching from behind trees nearby, but none called to him while he was sitting at the base of the hickory.

  “Well, these are vary tasty nuts,” he said as though he hadn’t heard any implications in what Carya had said. “I’ll have to move on as soon as I’ve eaten, though, since you don’t know how I can get back to the Waking World.”

  He didn’t think Carya had been lying when she said she said she didn’t know how he could return; most of the tree spirits he’d met were shallow, easily distracted, and often spiteful, but he couldn’t remember one lying to him. Just in case this was the exception, he was offering Carya a chance to change her story.

  “I don’t see why,” she said pettishly. She turned away.

  The nuts were very good, but the meat could scarcely have been harder to get to. The husks were simply messy: they stained his hands a yellow that he suspected would have to wear off. That wasn’t a real problem. If Corylus hadn’t thought of crushing the hard shells and floating them away, he would have starved while he was eating.

  A young woman—she looked young, anyway—walked out of the woods. She saw Corylus and said, “Hello, there. Where did you come from?”

  “She isn’t from around here, either,” Carya said in a peevish tone. “Why are you dropping by now when I’ve got a visitor, Aura?”

  “Because you have a visitor, dear,” Aura said. Her blond hair was as pale as sunlight glancing from ashes, and her shift shimmered with no color at all. “I’m Aura, master, and I’m glad to see you. I’m from the far south; I’m a breeze.”

  Corylus dropped the nut and rose. He dusted his palms together, though that wouldn’t do anything about the sticky brown sap from the hickory husks. It isn’t going to look any better as a dry yellow stain, either, he thought.

  “I’m Publius Corylus,” he said. “I’m here by accident. I’d like to get back to the Waking World, where I’ve come from.”

  He was embarrassed at his appearance because she was a pretty woman. It didn’t matter to him what he looked like—or to her, either, he supposed, under these circumstances—but reacting to a strange woman as a potential mate was as natural to a young man as breathing was.

  “You have a friend, Aura!” the dryad snapped. “I don’t! Not since Faunus wandered off.”

  “I came here with my lover Zetes,” Aura said. Her voice was gentle and liquid. “We left Anti-Thule because of the ice. But Zetes was killed. I’ll never love again, but I’m not dead.”

  She stood hipshot, looking at Corylus.

  “Do you know how I can return to the Waking World?” he said. He had grown up in the cantonments around military
bases. He’d become a handsome youth, and his father was a senior officer. Soldiers weren’t allowed to marry while on active duty, but they formed attachments. There were always widows and the girlfriends of men who were on detached service.

  Corylus was used to forward women, so Aura didn’t shock him. But he was also aware that detached troops generally came home at some point and that not all widows were that in strict fact.

  “I could lead you to the Cave of Zagreus,” Aura said. “The dragons who guarded Persephone may still be there. I suppose if you got by them you could reach the Waking World through it.”

  She chipped out a laugh. “The dragons didn’t save Persephone’s maidenhead,” she said bitterly, “but they may be able to keep you out of the cave.”

  “Is there another path into the Waking World?” Corylus said. He bent and picked up a handful of fallen leaves, then wiped the dagger blade. The juice from the husks might be corrosive as well as sticky. He didn’t want to step away from Aura to clean his steel in the stream, but this would do.

  “Are you a magician?” Aura said.

  “No, nothing like that,” said Corylus. “Ah—my friend Varus is, and I think he’s here in the Otherworld. If I could find him, that would be as good as getting back home.”

  Aura shrugged. “I haven’t met your friend,” she said. “And I don’t know any other way for you to return to the Waking World. What do you want to do?”

  “You could stay here with me,” said Carya. I’d forgotten her. “Just a little while?”

  Corylus sheathed his dagger and lifted the cornelwood staff that he had leaned against the hickory’s shaggy trunk.

  “I’m sorry, Carya,” he said. “I have business to attend to.”

  To Aura he said, “I’m ready to go to the Cave of Zagreus, then. I didn’t have much to pack.”

  As he strode off beside the air spirit, he heard Carya behind them say plaintively, “Just a little while.”

  * * *

  “MASTER HERDSMAN,” ALPHENA SAID in a firm voice. “Tell me what you know about Lucius Sentius’ plans for my mother and brother. And Publius Corylus, if you’ve heard anything of him.”