Air and Darkness

by David Drake

  The painted herdsman gave Alphena a startled look but said nothing.

  Doesn’t the amulet work anymore? Alphena thought. She squeezed the rough iron harder.

  “You’d do better to ask the goat himself than ask old Moschus there,” said the statue of Priapus in the center of the wall painting. “The goat wouldn’t know, either, but he’s smarter.”

  “Hey, Big-Dick!” the herdsman said, turning to face the statue. “There’s no call to be insulting just because I take a while to get my thoughts together.”

  “Right,” said the statue, a rustic figure with a huge member. Just as most houses had little shrines to the household gods, most gardens had a guardian statue of Priapus. “I’ll keep that in mind, shall I? When the lady leaves, we’ll discuss metaphysics, you and I.”

  He looked back at Alphena. “Not that I can help you, either, lady,” he said. “Not that way, at least.”

  He grinned even more broadly and thrust his member in her direction. Before she could respond—coldly—he continued, “I don’t know the people you’re talking about, you see. If you give me a little to work with, maybe I can do better.”

  The cattle on the other side of the painted stream were drifting closer. Can they speak now? The goat that followed Moschus had stopped when he did. It was cropping scattered blades of grass.

  “Well, my mother, Hedia, is beautiful…,” Alphena said, realizing as she spoke that a useful description would be difficult. “Ah, much prettier than I am.”

  Priapus gave a disgusted, “Pfft!” He continued, “Forget about the woman, lady. There’s only been one since I’ve been here on this wall. The master doesn’t have much use for them, you know?”

  He leered. “Say—you are a lady, right? You’re not dressed that way, but you are?”

  “Yes, I am,” said Alphena grimly. This had seemed so simple—dangerous getting in, but she hadn’t expected trouble getting the information after she got to Sentius’ office. “What about the one woman, then?”

  “Oh, she was foreign,” Priapus said. “No kin of yours. Rupa, her name was. Not bad looking, that I’ll say, but it’s the bloody truth that I haven’t met many women I wouldn’t give the time to. You’re not bad yourself, lady.”

  He waggled his member toward her again.

  “What did Rupa say?” Alphena said, jubilant inside. She had been falling into despair. “She’s the one—well, she’s involved in this, anyway!”

  “Ah?” said Priapus. “Well, she was here with a tall young fellow, very nice, with reddish-blond hair.”

  “That’s Corylus!” Alphena said. “Where is he now, do you know?”

  “I haven’t the faintest,” Priapus said. “He didn’t say a thing, just followed along behind Rupa. Now she, she told the master she was going off to his villa west of Carce. Your Corylus was along with her, so maybe he went there too.”

  “He must have!” Alphena said. She knew as she heard her own voice that if her brother heard the words he would frown and say that it didn’t at all follow that Corylus had to be at Sentius’ country estate.

  Well, I won’t say “must” to Pandareus when I see him at the house.

  Alphena dropped the amulet back to the length of the neck strap, then winced; it was heavy enough that she should have let it down in a more gentle fashion. “Thank you, Priapus,” she said over her shoulder as she stepped out of the office.

  Sebethius and her escort were waiting in the corridor; Charias and more toughs would join them in the street outside. “Let’s go!” Alphena whispered.

  They strode into the garden again with Sebethius leading. A pair of gardeners were planting the roses that waited in a handbarrow with their roots balled. The household was awakening, but none of the ten or so servants visible were paying attention to Alphena and her fellows.

  We’ve done it! she thought.

  Taunus stepped in front of them. He must have been waiting behind a pillar of the portico surrounding the garden.

  “You done, now?” he said to Sebethius.

  “What I’m doing is none of your business, German!” Sebethius said.

  “Well, I think it is,” Taunus said, shoving the smaller understeward to the side. “You see, I’ve taken a bit of a fancy to the girl here—”

  He tried to push past Drago and a Spaniard named Chalcus. Chalcus reached under his tunic and came out with a knife.

  “No!” said Drago.

  He and his cousin grabbed Taunus, each by one arm, and slammed him backward into the pillar that had concealed him. Neither Illyrian was particularly big, but the German flew like thistledown in a gale until his head cracked against the marble.

  Taunus slipped down in a sitting position, then toppled sideways. There was blood on the pillar where his head had struck it.

  “Don’t run!” Alphena whispered, but her escort hadn’t been about to run. They moved with stately determination to the rear wing. The gardeners stared after them with their mouths open, but no one else appeared to have noticed.

  Taunus certainly isn’t going to be telling anyone for a while.

  “I’m returning this lot as unsuitable, Olanus,” Sebethius said to the chief cook as they passed through the kitchen, moving a little faster now. “I’ll see if the broker’s man is still in the street.”

  A moment later Alphena was back in the alley, trembling with reaction. Charias was speaking to her, but she simply waved toward the main street beyond. She had no breath now for pointless babble.

  Besides, they had to start planning their attack on Sentius’ country villa.

  CHAPTER IX

  The thirty-foot walls of the demon’s garden were hammered glass, iridescent where a beam of sunlight filtered through the jungle canopy. Varus touched the surface with his hand. It was cool and as undulatingly smooth as a pond on a still day. No one could climb it.

  But of course there was no reason to climb the wall. The gates, complex metal laceworks, were closed but not locked or barred. One could walk right in.

  Out of curiosity, Varus tried to follow a strand of the filigree with his eyes. So far as he could tell, the pattern didn’t repeat from one side of the valve to the other.

  “At first I thought these were made of gold,” Bhiku said, eying them. “But it’s too bright for gold, isn’t it?”

  “The metal is orichalc,” said Varus. The garden beyond the whorls of fiery metal was richly green, but there was no sign of a demon or the missing girl. “It isn’t magical, or at least I don’t think it is, but I’ve only known it to be used by magicians.”

  “I suppose there’s no reason we shouldn’t go on in,” Varus said. He touched the gate, but he didn’t push it open just yet.

  “Apart from the chance of being torn limb from limb by a demon, of course,” said Bhiku. He smiled and put his hand on the left-hand leaf. They looked at each other, laughed, and swung both halves of the gate open as they walked through.

  Facing the gate was an ivy-covered terrace with three levels. Had it been bare stone, it would have been much like the stepped base of a temple. On top of the highest level was a small bungalow woven from glass rods in all the soft shades of the rainbow.

  A pair of pigeon-sized birds flew from a fruit tree and deeper into the garden, hooting. Their feathers flashed like polished bronze. There was no other movement.

  “I can hear other birds,” Bhiku said. “And insects of course. But the roars that drove the peasants away seem to have quieted.”

  Instead of leading straight to the bungalow, the walk curved around a plant whose leaves thrust up like a cluster of green and yellow sword blades. Varus started along the path with the sage falling in step with him.

  At his second step, Varus felt his spirit leave his body and begin to climb the steep hillside of his mind. By now this journey was familiar, though he didn’t understand it any better than he had the first time he had made it.

  Varus smiled. Neither being a philosopher nor being a wizard meant that he knew everything. The
only people who knew everything were those who were too colossally ignorant to understand that they were ignorant.

  Or perhaps dead. The dead might know everything.

  At the top of the ridge, Varus stepped into sunlight. The old woman in blue was waiting for him in a chair that seemed to have been carved from a single block of volcanic tuff. The armrests of porous stone had been worn smooth.

  “Greetings, Sibyl,” Varus said. “Have you called me here to tell me how to free the Princess Teji?”

  He glanced down the other side of the ridge. Far below, but clear in every detail, he and Bhiku were walking in the garden. A stream meandered through fruit groves, every tree different, and the birds flying among them were as varied.

  “Greetings, Lord Varus,” said the Sibyl, rising to stand beside him. “I cannot tell you how to free Teji.”

  She gestured to the garden. “See for yourself.”

  A slender girl in white silk stepped out of the bungalow. The only color in her garments was that of the bright sash twisted around her waist.

  “Why have you come here?” she called down to the visitors. “Go away or you’ll be killed!”

  Bhiku glanced at the physical Varus, but the body standing beside him said nothing. Varus knew from his friends that when his spirit was absent in these trances he was oblivious of the Waking World.

  “My friend and I are here to rescue the Princess Teji from a demon,” Bhiku said, handling the unexpected situation with the aplomb that Varus had already learned to expect from him. “Are you Teji, mistress?”

  “I don’t want to be rescued!” Teji said. She was untying her sash. “The demon rescued me. Now go away or you’ll be torn to pieces!”

  “Princess,” said Bhiku, “come back with us, please. When you’re home, we can discuss this—”

  “I warned you!” the girl screamed as she lifted the sash by its two ends and let it unroll. For an instant Varus saw the image painted on the silk: a bright blue demon with six arms.

  The demon stepped off the silk and gave a terrible roar. He was twelve feet tall and his fangs were as long as a tiger’s.

  “Sibyl!” Varus cried. “How do I stop the demon?”

  “How am I to help one so powerful as yourself, Lord Wizard?” the Sibyl said.

  The demon crouched to leap down on the two men. Bhiku pressed his palms together before him. He stood as straight as his little body could.

  * * *

  “YOU WILL PLACE YOUR NECK under my yoke!” the Sibyl shouted.

  Varus stood in his physical body, looking up. A web of lightning wrapped the demon in crackling brilliance. His roar choked to a startled yelp. Off-balance, he toppled like a boulder.

  Varus half-lifted Bhiku and jumped sideways as the quickest means of getting them both out of the way. The demon crashed onto the path, scattering sparkling gravel in all directions. He rolled into a stand of blooming rhododendrons beyond. The lightnings binding the demon continued to sizzle.

  The girl was staring down at them with a dumbfounded expression. She held the sash loosely in her hands. The silk was spotlessly white, like her other clothing.

  Bhiku bounced to his feet while Varus was still lifting himself onto all fours. “That was very impressive, Lord Varus,” the sage said. “Rhetorical training is obviously different in Carce from what it is here.”

  Varus dusted his hands. The pea-sized gravel of the path appeared to be beads of multi-colored glass rather than crushed stone.

  He thought of saying that he had been pleasantly surprised, but then he would be expected to explain the situation. Which he was unable to do.

  The demon continued to grunt, but all his straining merely meant that his bundled body rocked among the bushes, sometimes making branches crack. Varus led the way past, giving the demon as wide a berth as the bamboo on the other side of the path allowed.

  “The claws on his hands are as long as a tiger’s,” Bhiku said. “I don’t doubt that he was able to rip that poor soldier apart.”

  “I’ll do the same to you when I get free!” the demon said in what Varus could best describe as a rasping wheeze. The crackling bonds weren’t strangling the demon, but he obviously wasn’t getting as much air as he would have liked.

  “Then we’ll have to make sure that you don’t get free,” Varus said. He wasn’t so much nonchalant as giddy with relief. He had no idea how long the spell would last—or anything else about it, really. All he knew was that for now he was better off than he had expected to be a minute or two earlier.

  Teji had gone back inside. The bungalow didn’t have a door. Varus looked in and saw the girl sitting on a couch, wringing the blank sash between her hands.

  “Princess?” he said. She did not look up.

  He stepped inside. Light coming through the colored glass gave the single room a soft, shadowless feel. Bhiku followed him and spoke softly in Indian.

  The girl looked up and said in Greek, “What are you going to do with me?” She was trying to sound angry, but the words came out desperate instead.

  “As I told you, Princess” Varus said. “We’re here to bring you back to your father. You don’t have to worry about the demon. He can’t get free.”

  “My father!” Teji said. “Rupa saved me from my father! She brought me here and set Baruch to guard me!”

  She looked at Bhiku and snarled out a rapid string of words in Indian. The sage stiffened, looking shocked. He said in Greek, “Repeat what you just said in Greek so that my friend can understand you, Princess.”

  Teji stood up, still twisting the sash. At her full height, she was considerably shorter than Varus. He had taken her for fourteen years old, but close to her like this he realized she might be younger.

  “I saw the way Ramsa Lal looked at me,” she said. She was facing Varus, but her face was pale and her eyes were unfocused. “My father! He said to his advisors, ‘If I plant a field, do I not have a right to eat the crop?’ And they stroked their beards and nodded to him and said, ‘Yes, certainly, Your Lordship.’ And I went to Rupa because she was a woman and I begged her to save me and she did!”

  Teji began to cry. She turned away and flung herself on the couch, still sobbing.

  Varus looked at the sage. He said, “Logic would point out that she could be lying.”

  Bhiku raised an eyebrow. “Then logic would be a fool, would it not?” he said.

  Varus grimaced. “That’s certainly my opinion,” he said. “Though it leaves the problem of what we’re to do now.”

  Bhiku pursed his lips, then said, “Princess Teji? What would you like us to do? Ah. I have no power over my lord the rajah Raguram, but I’m sure that he would give you shelter to spite your father if for no better reason. Though Raguram has shown himself a decent man in the past, within the limitations of the flesh.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere,” the girl said. She sat up on the couch and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “I just wanted to stay here, but without Baruch to protect me I can’t do that. Oh, I’m so unhappy!”

  She flung herself back on the couch and resumed crying.

  “I can probably free the demon,” Varus said, speaking to Bhiku just loudly enough to be heard over the muffled sobs. “Of course, he may tear us limb from limb if I do.”

  Bhiku shrugged. “Well, we accepted that risk when we entered the garden,” he said. “Given that we came to make Princess Teji’s situation better, and instead we appear to have made it worse, I think we’re bound by justice to take the risk again.”

  “That’s my analysis also,” Varus said. He smiled wryly. “Unfortunately.”

  “It is not unfortunate that you are an honorable man,” said Bhiku. Raising his voice slightly, he said, “Princess? My colleague is going to release your guardian.”

  “We’re sorry for our mistake,” Varus said as he walked out of the bungalow. To Bhiku he added, “I am sorry, but I honestly don’t think I made the wrong decision on the information I had.”

  “I see no
way we could have gotten better information,” the sage said. “Nevertheless, it’s an unfortunate circumstance.”

  The demon continued to grunt and—to the extent he could—thrash in the rhododendrons. Varus grimaced and said, “Master Bhiku, there’s no reason you shouldn’t leave the garden before I do this.”

  “I think the reasons for staying with a courageous colleague are better, however,” Bhiku said. “Who knows? Your rhetorical training may rise to this test as well.”

  Varus managed a laugh, but he couldn’t pretend that the irony of the situation amused him very much at the moment.

  “You wizards!” Teji called from behind them. “Are you really going to free Baruch?”

  “Yes,” said Varus. He halted close to the struggling demon. He gave off a musky odor.

  Varus put his hands on his hips and stood arms akimbo. He was looking down from the vantage point high above reality. “Baruch!” he said. “Arise as you were before and go forth!”

  The bonds of lightning vanished with seven distinct pops. The demon shook himself and rose to his feet, doing further damage to the bushes.

  “I suppose he put them here in the first place,” Bhiku said calmly. “Presumably he can replant if necessary.”

  “My present concern is that he’ll use bonemeal to nourish them,” Varus replied in the same tone. Corylus talked about trees and shrubs quite a lot, and Varus had learned to be interested in everything that came before him.

  Even fertilizer, apparently, though I hadn’t been aware of the fact until now when an opportunity to use the information presented itself.

  Baruch turned to face them, flexing his six arms. He was even taller than he had seemed when Varus looked up at him on top of the terrace.

  “Do you think you can bind me again before I tear your head off, wizard?” the demon said. He spoke in a quiet voice like the rumbling of a lion’s throat.

  “I don’t know,” Varus said. “Under other circumstances I would apologize, but given your behavior at the moment I acted, you didn’t give me much choice.”

  Baruch laughed. “Missy?” he said to the princess. “I am here to serve you. What would you have me do with these men?”