Air and Darkness

by David Drake

  The dwarf who had lit the lamp held his hand out flat again. “Set it here for a moment, missy,” he said. “You will see.”

  “She will not see,” said his brother.

  Both Cabiri laughed.

  Hedia put the lamp on the dwarf’s palm, wondering what she was supposed to see. Or not see. When she released the loop, the lamp and the dwarf holding the lamp vanished. All that remained was the shimmer at the spout.

  She reached forward very carefully, felt the iron loop, and lifted the lamp again. The dwarf reappeared, smiling broadly. A spark had burned his lower lip; the sore oozed pus.

  “Get back in the chariot, woman,” Ampelos said, his voice too thin to be a snarl. “You have what you need. We’ll finish this.”

  “See you soon, handsome,” said one of the Cabiri to their backs.

  As Hedia stepped into the car after Ampelos, the other called, “Don’t forget, sweetheart. You swore, you know!”

  “Are you aboard?” said Ampelos.

  “Yes,” said Hedia, her arm gripped tightly to the railing. As the leopards jolted off, she added in a falsely sweet voice, “I hope you three will be very happy together … handsome.”

  The youth hunched and slapped his reins against his team’s necks. He didn’t speak.

  The landscape they bounced over was grassy and spotted with circles of large, vividly colored mushrooms. The fungi were larger than Hedia had seen before. Our cooks would love them. They’d turn them into a whole village for a banquet centerpiece.

  As the thought formed, the chariot passed close to a stand of mushrooms. A gathering of mice wearing tunics and caps scattered on two legs into mushrooms, snapping doors closed behind them.

  Indeed, they’re very like a village already.

  On the horizon ahead was a mound of deep green, a striking contrast to the yellowish grass and the brightly polka-dotted fungi. Ampelos drove into it without slowing the chariot.

  He didn’t explain to Hedia what was happening. He didn’t speak when he could see me, so this shouldn’t be a surprise.

  They drove down and into a spiraling aisle between walls of oversized versions of ordinary flowers: foxgloves, hollyhocks, delphiniums, and a score of varieties that Hedia didn’t recognize. In the center of the spiral was a circular wooden bench built around a grapevine with the diameter of a large oak tree. Unsupported, it reached up to a hazy blur.

  Ampelos drew back on the reins and the leopards cantered to a halt. They were breathing through open mouths, and their tongues lolled. Hedia wondered how fast the chariot had been driving, though distance wasn’t always a useful measure in the Otherworld.

  “Get out here,” said Ampelos. “This is the vine. Climb it until you find yourself in King Govinda’s courtyard, then enter his sanctum and take the tablet. The sanctum is only twenty feet away from the vine. No one will be able to see you.”

  Hedia paused. “How do I get back?” she said.

  “The same way you got there!” Ampelos said. He glared at the vine, not the sound of her voice. “Is that so hard?”

  “And how will this help Varus?” Hedia said, still in the chariot.

  “He won’t be fed poison!” Ampelos said. “You’ll be able to trade the tablet to Govinda to get the boy back and then you’ll both be able to get home. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Yes,” said Hedia. At last she stepped off the back of the car and walked to the vine.

  She looked down at her legs scissoring crisply across a bed of moss as soft as velvet, but the Cabiri had demonstrated that the Lamp of Darkness really did work. She didn’t think the dwarfs would have helped Ampelos trick her, at least not without an additional payment.

  Hedia grinned. It appeared that Ampelos was already paying with everything he had.

  Tendrils sprouted from the vine at frequent intervals. Each one reached upward to where it, like the main stem, vanished hazily in the air. This would probably be a simple enough climb for someone who was used to climbing—no doubt there were such people—but it a was daunting prospect to Hedia, and she had the lamp in her left hand besides.

  It wasn’t going to get easier if she stood staring at the prospect, though. Besides, Ampelos was watching from the chariot, though he presumably wouldn’t know what Hedia was doing so long as she held the lamp.

  Hedia stepped onto the circular bench, then put her left foot on the next wrist-thick tendril above it. She grasped a higher tendril with her right hand and raised herself enough to put her right foot on a tendril on that side. Though her left hand was occupied, she managed to brace that elbow on another branching tendril.

  The vine’s outer surface was smooth, so she wasn’t tearing her skin on bark as she had feared. I won’t say this is fun, but it isn’t as bad as I thought. And it’s almost fun.

  A pair of little eyes glittered at her from over the edge of the tendril she was about to grasp. “Go away!” she said, shouting because she was surprised. A perfectly formed man the length of her middle finger flew off on two pairs of wings like a dragonfly.

  Hedia wasn’t looking back or looking down. She wondered how she would know when she had reached her goal. Perhaps Ampelos intends me to climb into thin air and vanish.

  She looked up—that wouldn’t give her vertigo or cause her to topple backward—and to her surprise saw just above her the cross timbers of a gazebo over which grapevines wrapped like knots of vipers. Gripping with both arms and her right hand, she dared to look down. The bench seats on the inside of the gazebo were within an inch of her toes.

  Hedia tested the wood; it held her weight. She stepped onto the bench, then down to the ground.

  Though the grape leaves shaded her, the dusty courtyard beyond was dazzling in sunlight. The air Hedia breathed was hot and dry.

  The opening in the gazebo faced a separate building of much the same size but with a tile roof and walls of polished alabaster. A score of soldiers wearing curved swords guarded the closed door. With them were four of the furry dogs-on-two-legs the voice of the spring had called Tyla, when it showed Hedia visions of Anti-Thule.

  The guards didn’t look especially alert, but neither would Carce’s legionaries in heat like this. An awning bleached to a pale cream protected them from the direct sun, but it would do nothing for air that could have come from an open oven.

  Hedia stepped out, holding the lamp firmly in front of her. This was the first real test of the lamp’s power. She realized that her gut was tense in expectation of shouts and a sudden rush by the guards.

  They ignored her. One squat man with a scar across his forehead was facing directly toward Hedia, but his eyes were as unfocused as those of a painting. I really am invisible.

  Hedia walked briskly toward the hut, the sanctum, as Ampelos had named it. Her sandals kicked up dust, but not appreciably more than the cat’s-paws of breeze.

  The palace itself was huge. The courtyard made her think of the Forum and the dozens of buildings surrounding it, but this was a single structure.

  Hedia paused at arm’s length from the troop of guards. There was room for her to step through them at several places, but she would have to be careful.

  One of the Tyla was restive, looking about and sniffing the air. Occasionally he chirped querulously, but his fellows ignored him.

  Hedia took a deep breath and strode forward. A guard turned to speak to his neighbor as she passed between them, but even then they didn’t notice her.

  Hedia slid the door handle to the left and heard the bolt withdraw. She opened the door and stepped in, closing the panel behind her as guards gabbled in surprise. She moved to the side so that if they burst in they at least wouldn’t trample her, but nothing happened except that the chatter—they sounded like a cage of startled birds—died down after a moment.

  Hedia let her breath out. I wonder if they’re telling themselves that they only imagined that the door had opened? She had seen things herself that she found hard to believe.

  She hadn’t really regis
tered the hut’s interior until she started to relax. The couch on which Ampelos had shown her Varus drinking the poison was empty, but so was the table on which the magical tablet was supposed to be.

  The boy hanging by his hair across from the room opened his eyes and stared at Hedia. He had been so still that until that moment he might have been a statue.

  Hedia met his stare. The boy did not speak or otherwise react to her presence. She swallowed and decided to ignore him.

  Since the tablet wasn’t on the table, she had no obvious way to proceed. She might try to search the palace itself, but there must be a thousand rooms and no reason to believe that the prize was in any of them.

  Hedia examined the walls. She had taken their different scenes as paintings on the alabaster. Close up she could see leaves shivering in breezes; the men and women lolling around the vine newly planted at Polymartium were eating the oversized grapes that festooned nearby trees. One of the men was a member of the entourage that had accompanied her to the rites for Mother Matuta.

  The images didn’t bring Hedia closer to finding the tablet. Nothing was helpful.

  She turned toward the door, planning to search the palace until some better plan occurred to her. A creak behind her made her look back. A section of floor was lifting on hinges. Govinda’s head and torso rose through the opening. He held the inscribed tablet in his left hand.

  Govinda shouted a word. Hedia’s left hand stung and the lamp flew out of it.

  She grabbed the handle and shoved the door open. The guards all faced the doorway; many had drawn their swords. Two Tyla pointed at her.

  Without bothering to think about what she was doing, Hedia flung herself into the nearest alabaster panel. Instead of shattering the thin stone, she fell onto a small circular temple set in high grass.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Hedia’s feet landed in a round shrine. The floor was unexpectedly a foot higher than that of the room from which she had leaped to save herself from Govinda, so she stumbled. She was very nearly as supple as a professional dancer, however. She righted herself without falling and sprang out onto the grass rather than grabbing a pillar to halt herself.

  She looked in all directions. There were no humans about, and the only animals were birds in the high sky. The sun rippled the plain with its heat; the only shade was the domed shrine and the jungle-covered hill directly in front of her.

  The bare shrine was scarcely welcoming, but Hedia found the notion of the jungle even less attractive. She turned to put herself under the dome again while she made her mind up as to what to do. Maybe being a little higher will help me see something.

  A soldier stepped into the middle of the shrine. He saw Hedia and drew his curved sword. More soldiers followed him.

  Hedia ran for the mound of jungle. If Govinda’s troops had been keen she couldn’t have escaped, but these men seemed uncertain. They were probably afraid.

  Hedia was completely certain that she wanted to get away. As for fear, she was too familiar with being afraid to let it affect her behavior.

  She wriggled between creeper-festooned trees and scrambled through a curtain of brush. It concealed a pile of tilted blocks that tripped her.

  She got to her feet and struggled deeper into the ruins. Leaf litter had decayed to yellow-brown soil dripping from one slanted surface to the next. Some of the blocks had been decorated.

  The roots of multi-trunked trees had levered the buildings apart but often held the individual blocks in much the same relationship to one another that they had originally. Occasionally a distorted doorway or a window survived, but generally tree trunks or a wall of earth blocked further passage.

  The jungle was so much darker than the grassland that Hedia had come from that she assumed that foliage covered the sky completely. To her surprise she saw many patches of brightness through the leaves when she glanced up. The gloom she felt was more than just a matter of shade after sunlight.

  Hedia paused. She thought someone had walked in front of her, a slender man in orange robes; and perhaps he had, but he had walked through a giant tree and the stone blocks around which its roots were wrapped.

  The figure vanished. There was other movement nearby, but it was only shimmerings at the corners of her eyes. There was nothing to see when she looked straight toward it.

  What are Govinda’s men doing? Hedia looked back, but she saw nothing except foliage. She didn’t think she’d come far into the jungle, but she might as well try to look through the stone as through the leaves hanging between her and the shrine.

  Hedia moved aside the thin canes of a stand of bamboo that she didn’t remember going through. Beyond was a heavily overgrown parapet that wasn’t familiar, either. Have I gotten turned around?

  She didn’t like the feel of this place. Partly that was because of the things she saw or almost saw among the roots and ruins, but her disquiet was from more than that. There was nothing more tangible, though.

  Knowing that she was taking a risk, Hedia crawled onto the parapet and eased her arm through the next layer of undergrowth, then withdrew it and peered down the hole. Whether or not she was going back on the same line by which she had arrived, she was close enough to the edge of the jungle that she could look out at the plain.

  The shrine was a little to the left; she had gotten off-line in a matter of twenty feet or less. She could see ten soldiers, though there might be more. Some remained close to the base of the shrine, and none of them had followed Hedia more than halfway to the jungle.

  Two Tyla with feather headdresses stood within the shrine. From what the Spring of True Answers had said, the headdresses marked them as Priests of the Moon. They appeared even less willing than the humans to approach the jungle.

  She couldn’t go back out the way she had come, but this patch of jungle might be narrow enough for her to hike through to the other side. This wasn’t a plan for which she could muster any enthusiasm, but she didn’t see a better choice.

  When she got to the other side, she would consider her next step. At present she couldn’t imagine what she would do if faced with another stretch of uninhabited plain.

  Hedia struggled over a fern-covered jumble of what had been a balustrade; instead of true rails, the horizontal piece was supported by a sheet of stone into which pilasters had been carved in high relief. For a moment she saw a nude woman spread-eagled on a slab and a group of men in pale robes standing around her. One of the held a stone hand axe high.

  The arm that extended from the robe to hold the axe was not human. Neither, in a flash of better light, were the faces of the robed figures. The image dissolved before the axe fell.

  Hedia scrambled on, her face set. She had seen hundreds, probably thousands, of people die in the arena, but she was just as glad to have missed the rest of that scene.

  A tree had fallen across the direction she was going. The trunk was more than four feet in diameter, but the wood was rotten. Bright yellow shelf fungi stuck out like fins from the bark, and saplings grew upward every few feet along the bole.

  Rather than go around—and probably meet some similar obstacle—Hedia gripped a sapling in either hand and pulled herself onto the log. It wasn’t graceful, and the garment Bacchus had clothed her in was irretrievably smeared green. It had not stretched or torn, though; what she thought was sheer silk must be some tougher material.

  Beyond the tree was a building: a tower with ornate carvings at each of the three levels she could see. The structure rose higher, but vines completely cloaked the upper reaches.

  The ground between the tower and the trunk on which Hedia perched was the usual tumble of sandstone blocks and cloaking vegetation. There were also bits of bronze armor, rusted iron that may once have been weapons, and a human skull barely visible through the leaf litter that filled an upturned helmet.

  Hedia paused instead of jumping down as she had intended to do. She could see the equipment of several men, and the remains of many times that number might lie concealed in the u
ndergrowth.

  She looked around, then sneered coldly at herself: there was nothing to see but trees, vines, and fallen masonry—just as everywhere else in this ruin. Though it couldn’t be called a clearing, the area immediately around the structure wasn’t as badly overgrown as most of the region, however.

  Hedia slid down from the log and walked toward the tower. The many carved projections at least provided the possibility of climbing high enough that she could see beyond the jungle. It wasn’t likely, but she didn’t see anything better on offer.

  Vines draped the tower, but the structure remained intact, unlike the other buildings, which roots had torn apart. Time had crumbled the door in the center of the ground level—Hedia could see holes in the stone jambs to anchor the hinges—but there was a passageway beyond.

  On the threshold was a chest of carved stone. A small sarcophagus, she thought at first glance, but the lid was slightly askew and she caught a glitter from the interior. She walked to it, more from curiosity than for any real purpose.

  As best Hedia could tell, nothing she could do had any real purpose. Ampelos had tricked her into this business in order to get her away from Bacchus.

  Hedia smiled grimly. She had been well and truly fooled, but Ampelos might not be so pleased with his success if she managed to survive and find him again.

  She gazed into the corner of the chest and saw polished jewels. She pushed the lid farther open with the scrape of stone on stone, thinking that it might be this corner only. The chest was as full of jewels as a transport urn is of grain coming from Africa. There were rubies, sapphires, and at least one emerald the size of her fist. The gems glowed with rich color even in the jungle’s gloom.

  Movement flickered. Hedia turned, jumping away from the chest. She did not see a thing, but a tunnel in the air behind her fractured into planes as jumbled as the blocks of the fallen buildings.

  A figure moved toward her from one plane to the next nearer one, the way a ball bounces among the surfaces of the handball courts at the baths. It was tall. The head was human, but the torso was not. The long upper pair of arms ended in fanged pincers, but there were three tentacle-like pairs lower on the body; the legs squirmed like snakes.