Air and Darkness

by David Drake

  Hedia thought to run along the face of the tower and into the jungle, but that would be pointless. She couldn’t have outrun a healthy man through this undergrowth and broken masonry, and this creature’s legs rippled like water over the obstacles in its planes of existence.

  She climbed over the jewel chest—she couldn’t vault it, not as weary as she was—and ran into the corridor beyond. The creature was twelve feet high, taller than the stone ceiling. Hedia hoped to come to a branching too narrow for it to follow, even on hands and, well, legs.

  The walls were narrowing: they brushed Hedia’s arms on both sides, and the ceiling lowered also. She dropped into a crawl. The passage darkened beyond its initial gloom as something followed her into the corridor.

  “There’s no point in running, Lady Hedia!” a musical tenor voice called. It spoke perfect Latin, the words’ only distortion coming from the echoing stone. “There is no way out of the tower except to me. I will be more merciful than starvation.”

  Hedia didn’t answer. She had no reason to believe the pursuing monster. Even if she had, she would let her blood out with her little knife before she surrendered to those pincers.

  Ahead of her was a ring of light. It was probably very faint, but she could see it the way she could stars on a dark night.

  “Hedia, come back!” the voice called. “You think you see escape, but this passage ends in something far worse than death.”

  The passage continued to narrow; Hedia crawled with increasing difficulty. She reached out with her right arm to cock her shoulders at an angle. She had almost reached the ring of light.

  “Hedia, beyond is only limbo and the Eternals,” the voice said in liquid tones. “You will curse yourself to life without existence, for eternity. If you pass the barrier of light, you will not be able to die, but you will never live. Come back while you can, or you will regret it forever.”

  Hedia squirmed through the ring of light. For an instant she felt a spiderweb drape her bare shoulder.

  Then there was blackness and Eternity.

  * * *

  VARUS FOLLOWED GOVINDA UP the ladder as quickly as he could, even more glad to be out of the vault than he was curious about what was going on in the sanctum. The outside door was now open.

  The king was shouting at the guards clustered there. He pointed at the wall panel that showed the shrine where Bhiku had brought Varus and the officials back to the Waking World. In its background was the jungle-covered ruin that Bhiku had called Dreaming Hill.

  After a moment’s hesitation, the soldiers shuffled into the little building and jumped through the panel as though it were empty air instead of the sheet of alabaster that Varus had seen as they approached. A pair of Tyla followed the soldiers.

  Govinda bent to pick up a piece of iron—a lamp, apparently—giving Varus an unobstructed view of the panel for the first time. The soldiers had spread out and were walking toward Dreaming Hill. They weren’t moving very quickly, and several of the men waved their curved swords in front of them as though they were brushing away spiderwebs.

  “What are they doing?” Varus said, nodding toward the backs of the guards. Presumably if he wished, he could step through into the shrine himself. I didn’t particularly like the place when I was there before.

  Govinda was looking at the iron lamp. He said nothing.

  “Are your men going into Dreaming Hill?” Varus said. He was irritated at being ignored and kept in the dark, though he supposed he shouldn’t be in a hurry to get to the business Govinda planned for him.

  “He could not force his men to enter Dreaming Hill,” said the boy hanging by his hair. His voice was clear, but it roused no echoes. It sounded as though he and Varus were standing on top of a mountain. “Even Govinda could not force them to do that. But sometimes men do enter the hill, because it hides great treasure.”

  “A thief entered my sanctum,” Govinda said abruptly. He opened a waist-high basket and set the lamp inside. The basket appeared to be empty. “Either my men will catch and deal with her, or she will go into Dreaming Hill and the hill will deal with her. It’s no concern of ours either way.”

  He gestured to the couch beside the small table and said, “Lie there while I prepare for your journey.”

  Varus seated himself, then reclined on his left elbow as he would have done at dinner in Carce. He wondered vaguely whether he would ever see Carce again. That wasn’t really a concern.

  He remembered that he had entered the lens at Polymartium in order to prevent King Govinda from bringing the Republic to ruin. Now that he was here, though, Varus was focused on the things he was learning; which he could not have learned in any other fashion.

  Govinda reached into the basket and brought out … brought out nothing, so far as Varus could see, though his fingers were curved as though there was something in them. He placed “it” on the table and returned to the basket.

  Varus stretched out an index finger, moving it to and then into the air where the king had set the invisible object. Air was all Varus found.

  “Are you satisfied?” Govinda said in a sardonic tone. “There is nothing until I bring the ideals to life. There is no other wizard of my power!”

  “Go on, then,” Varus said. In the back of his mind he saw the Sibyl smiling. She was always with him, whoever or whatever she was. Govinda’s boasts did nothing to change reality, and the Sibyl’s view of reality obviously differed from that of the king.

  Govinda took the black speculum from his tunic and set it on the table, then brought out the tablet. He held the tablet in both hands instead of setting it with the speculum. Glaring at Varus, the king began to chant in Indian or at least in an unfamiliar language.

  I wish Bhiku were here, Varus thought. He could tell me what the king is saying.

  But the little sage would be here unless Varus were successful in his task; and Govinda’s offhand comment that on this journey “the beggar-sage” would probably fail—and therefore die—had sounded truthful. Besides, it’s knowledge.

  The air above the table grew hazy, then abruptly coalesced into a flat ruby cup and a steel bar the length of Varus’ extended arm. Govinda stopped chanting and lowered his hands with the tablet. He hunched slightly and seemed for a moment to have shrunk in on himself. Great wizard the king might be, but the incantation he had just performed was more than a conjuring trick.

  Govinda put one hand on the hilt of his curved dagger and took several deep breaths before he raised his eyes and said, “Here are your tools, Westerner. You will drink the juice of the upas tree, then take the speculum and the lever into your hands and lie back. The juice will free you to pass the gate into Anti-Thule.”

  He gestured toward the wall panel filled with swirling blacks and grays like the smoke of a bitumen fire. The others showed images of scenes that appeared real, though only those of the shrine by Dreaming Hill and the altar at Polymartium were familiar to Varus.

  “Well, get on with it,” Govinda said sharply.

  Varus looked at the king. After a moment, Varus smiled. “I daydream, Master Govinda,” he said mildly. “I regret if this inconveniences you.”

  Varus took the cup in his right hand as he would have done at a drinking party and raised it to his lips. The crystal rim was cool as Varus expected, but the clear fluid was icy. Though tasteless, it made his tongue sting.

  He emptied the cup and set it down on the table, then took the pry bar in his right hand and the disk of cannel coal in his left. The steel, as usual for metal, felt cooler than the air around it.

  To Varus’ surprise the black speculum was as warm as though it had been sitting in the bright Indian sunlight. His fingertips flicked away for a moment, but the disk wasn’t hot enough to keep him from holding it normally.

  His hands and feet were prickling. He supposed they would go numb shortly. He crossed the pry bar over his belly, still holding it, and put the speculum on his chest. He would have smiled at Govinda, but his lips were frozen in a rictus.
>
  Govinda held out the tablet in his left hand and chanted in counterpoint to the hanging boy. Both voices seemed muffled and began to fade. Varus could not turn his head, but from the corners of his eyes he saw shapes begin to clarify in the panel of swirling blackness.

  Varus was very cold. I wonder if my body is shivering? He could not tell; he could not feel anything. Govinda drew the dagger from his sash.

  The last thing Varus saw in the Waking World was Govinda leaning forward and drawing the edge of his dagger across the throat of the boy. Blood gushed as though from a fountain.

  * * *

  PORTIONS OF THE ROCKY SLOPE were very steep. Corylus used his staff frequently to support him, while Bion depended on his impressive arms and grip to pull himself over obstacles that his relatively feeble legs couldn’t have managed on their own.

  Aura climbed without effort, never even having to dab a hand down. Corylus had thought of the nymph as slight, which in a manner of speaking she was, but she covered ground with the nonchalant ease of a legionary in light marching order.

  Corylus reached a broad ledge, or at any rate a twenty-foot-wide shelf where the slope was gentle enough to hold soil and therefore grass. Bion was struggling below; he had grabbed a bush that came out by the roots instead of holding him.

  “Let’s take a break,” Corylus said. He moved sideways till he was above the sailor, then lay flat and stretched down his staff. Bion grabbed the end gratefully and hauled himself up with Corylus anchoring him.

  The sailor flopped onto his back and gave a great sigh. “Give me a rope,” he said with his eyes closed, “and I’ll climb all day. If I liked rocks, I’d have stayed a goatherd like my old man.”

  “What are your plans, Bion?” Corylus said. “We’re glad to have your company—”

  He was, at any rate; Aura probably didn’t care.

  “—but when we reach the Cave of Zagreus, I hope to return to Carce in the Waking World. Do you want to come with me?”

  “I don’t know where Carce is,” said Bion. He didn’t move from where he lay, but he had stiffened. “I want to go back to India, to my wife. I didn’t want to leave in the first place, but Nearchos didn’t give me a choice. Well, he gave me the choice of helmsman on the Bird or pulling an oar on one of the crappy barges the Indians use on the river. We brought some along as lighters.”

  Bion rolled onto his elbow and opened his eyes. “It was just bad luck,” he said. “I’d gotten permission to stay back with my wife. Arrios, the port helmsman, could handle my job at the starboard oar, and he could train up a bosun’s mate for his place. But then the day before the supply fleet started downriver Arrios caught a fever and died,” blip!—

  Bion snapped his fingers.

  “—and Nearchos came looking for me. The Bird of the Hydaspes was one of the ninety-four big ships, and he was going to have a trained helmsman on her. That was all there was to say about it.”

  Corylus was looking back down the slope they were climbing. It seemed farther than he remembered to the green plains they had left that morning. He thought he saw a herd of goats ridden by dwarfs gamboling on the lower slopes. When a pair faced off on an outcrop long enough for Corylus to get a good look, however, he saw that they were unicorns as big as horses and the riders were apes who looked like men in fur garments.

  “Well, I’d married a local woman, a princess I guess,” Bion said. “I loved her right enough, and I didn’t think anything of it when she said that if we married it’d be us for the rest of our lives. I guess people mostly don’t think about that, right? And I’m a sailor.… But you see, she really did mean it. And she was a wizard. I’d known that, but I hadn’t known how much of a wizard she was. She couldn’t stop Nearchos and the king above him, but she bound her soul and mine together the night before the fleet raised anchor.”

  “I only know of one Nearchos,” Corylus said. He didn’t believe what he was thinking, but the thought wouldn’t go away. “He was the admiral of the fleet Alexander sent to Babylon while he marched his army back from India through the Gedrosian Desert.”

  “Right, that’s Nearchos,” Bion said, nodding. “You’ve heard of him in Carce? That’d please him to learn. He’s a vain bastard, but I guess he had to be to take the job on. I heard there’s two thousand—that’s thousand—ships all told.”

  He laughed. “Not that I can count that high,” he said. “It’s a lot, anyhow; that much I can see. Well, I could see before Calaia grabbed me.”

  “She’s a sea breeze,” said Aura. “I’ve never met a nice one yet.”

  “Well, I’m glad to be shut of her; that I’ll tell you,” the sailor said. “We were out to sea; that’s a true fact—”

  He looked at Corylus. “But say, friend—the king wasn’t marching through the desert; there’s no food to speak of there. He’s coming back along the shore and we’ll meet him every night with the supplies. That’s what we’re doing, you know? We’re the supply fleet. Only the winds had been against us the whole two weeks before I was taken, so we had to stand out to sea.”

  “The winds never did change,” Corylus said. “They never do in summer. Nowadays captains use the seasonal winds to go to India and come back when they change, but nobody knew about them in Alexander’s day.”

  Corylus wished Pandareus and Varus were here to hear the helmsman … but he wished even more that Bion had stayed back in India as he wanted and none of this had happened. He seemed a decent fellow; not so different from Publius Cispius and the soldiers Corylus had grown up with on the frontiers.

  “What do you mean, ‘Alexander’s day’”? Bion said, sitting bolt upright. “Look, how long has it been since that bitch took me? Just the night before the day you saved me, right?”

  “Three hundred and fifty years,” Corylus said quietly. He couldn’t remember precisely how long it had been before Alexander’s death during the 114th Olympiad that the king had left India, not long, though. “A little longer, I suppose.”

  “Oh, by Fortune!” Bion said. He leaned his face into his hands, then repeated in a whisper, “By Fortune…”

  “I suppose Calaia brought you here because you would have died in the Waking World,” Aura said, considering the matter as a puzzle rather than a tragedy. “She didn’t care if you died, but you wouldn’t have been much use as a lover if you were dead, would you?”

  “I couldn’t touch her!” Bion said. “Oh, I was willing enough—it’d been two weeks since we sailed, like I said. Nearchos didn’t let any women come on board, but they came with the army onshore, you know? We were going to land every couple days, so that was fine for the ones whose women were coming along. And there was plenty of slaves and freelancers besides, for the fellows who hadn’t brought their own.”

  The failure of the fleet to land had been a near disaster for the army. Alexander had marched inland because the desert, though harsh, was better than the coastal strip where there was no drinkable water and no food at all. When Corylus learned about the event as history, he had never thought to wonder what it had meant to the crews manning the ships.

  “It was in the middle of the night,” Bion said. He’d taken his hands away from his face, but Corylus wasn’t sure that the sailor was actually looking back the way they had come. The unicorns and their riders had disappeared. “I was on watch, but it got very still and the corposants were dancing on the mast and rigging. I called to Hermes—he was the captain—because I thought we might be about to get a storm … but everybody was asleep, not just Hermes. Everybody but me.”

  Bion rubbed his forehead with both hands. His fingers were thick as tent pegs, with pads too callused to show wear from the rocks they had recently been gripping.

  “I can’t believe it’s been so long,” he muttered. “And for what? It was just a quick tumble for her, but for me…”

  “Breezes are usually whimsical,” Aura said. “It’s easier that way.”

  Her eyes glazed, focusing on the past. “It would be much easier for me,
” she said in an afterthought.

  “There was a little whiffle of wind,” Bion said. “It’d been dead still or I maybe wouldn’t have noticed it. And there she was standing beside me, Calaia was. She ran her fingers over my shoulders and told me how strong I was, and she riffled my hair.”

  “You were in the stern?” Corylus said, trying to imagine the scene. He didn’t know how big the Bird of the Hydaspes had been, but he supposed it was at least three or four hundred tons like the ships from North Africa that brought grain to Carce. A good-sized vessel, certainly.

  “Right, standing by the crossbar of the steering oar,” said Bion. “I was too surprised to do anything, but then she started to touch me—and it didn’t do any good because my wife, you know? She’d fixed me so it wouldn’t. And Calaia got mad and just grabbed me, and we were here.”

  He rubbed his head again. “What will she think?” he said. “What will my wife think after all these years?”

  “I think we’d best get on,” said Corylus, getting to his feet.

  He didn’t give the obvious answer to Bion’s question, because that would be cruel: Your wife, your new bride, doesn’t think anything. She’s been dead for centuries.

  * * *

  “ARE YOU SURE—” Alphena said to the iron face when her second step into the short passage brought nothing but echoes. It was a silly question, it just meant she was nervous, and she hated being nervous—

  The third step took her out of the urine-smelling enclosure and onto the bank of a stream running quickly enough that the pebbled streambed was distorted by the current. There were clumps of reeds in eddies where an outcrop had deflected the flow, but for the most part the water was clear.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” said Janus. “I told you that I open things, lady. I close them, also, but that’s not what you asked for.”

  No longer was Alphena’s guide the baton in her right hand: Janus was a man-sized figure standing beside her with what was probably meant for a sardonic smile. The iron’s crude workmanship didn’t improve from becoming larger. He had arms and legs, but they were just as coarsely modeled as the head of the original had been.