Air and Darkness

by David Drake

  There was a loud whack. The Guardian’s roar choked into a gasp; its arms jerked out straight from its sides as though each pair were being crucified.

  The huge body toppled forward, hitting the ground so hard that it bounced. There was a dent in its back over what would have been the base of the spine in a human. Hedia stood behind the creature, holding the end of the sash that she had tied around a piece of masonry.

  Alphena drove in her short sword, slanting upward across the Guardian’s torso through what she hoped were the heart and lungs. Corylus hacked deep into the back of the neck, then laid the sword aside to finish the task of beheading with his dagger. The blade was orichalc, Alphena saw in surprise.

  She tried to wriggle her sword. Though her wrists were strong, the Guardian’s flesh was as dense as cold mud.

  Corylus finished his task and got to his feet. The head rolled faceup. It looked less human on close examination. The Guardian’s expression was one of pop-eyed fury.

  “Thank you both,” Hedia said. “That was remarkable to watch, the way the two of you moved together.”

  “It would have come out a different way if you hadn’t stunned him when you did, Your Ladyship,” Corylus said, wiping his dagger with a scrap of his own tunic. “He was wearing us down. There’s been other fighters here; I can see armor in the greenery.”

  Alphena was on her knees, working her sword up and down to enlarge the cut. At present she couldn’t withdraw the weapon. She was so tired that she had forgotten her mother’s presence.

  “Do you suppose it can grow a new head?” Alphena said. The idea of fighting the creature again was a bleak gray wasteland in her mind.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Hedia said, her tone a little sharper than usual. “Govinda has your brother in his palace, but alone I couldn’t find him. The three of us may do better.”

  “I have to get my sword out,” Alphena muttered. She had only enough energy for the immediate task. The future was a blur.

  “Leave it,” said Corylus. “There’s more swords out by the shrine. This one—”

  He waggled the sword he’d taken from a man he’d killed.

  “—is the best steel I’ve ever seen, better than Spanish.”

  “It’s longer than I’m used to,” Alphena said. “I’ll get this in a moment.”

  The world began to fall into focus again as she thought about details of equipment and swordsmanship. Familiar considerations grounded her thoughts and allowed everything else to return.

  “Here, I’ll do it,” said Corylus. He sheathed his curved blade and knelt, gripping the hilt of her short sword with both hands.

  Alphena rose. She started to wobble. Her mother steadied her with both hands.

  Alphena looked around for the first time since she had plunged into the jungle. The pillar beside them was made of fine-grained basalt rather than the reddish sandstone of the surrounding ruins. There was a chest in the doorway on this side; the lid was askew.

  Beside them, Corylus braced a boot on the huge carcase. “By Nerthus, you weren’t joking when you put this in, were you?” he said. “Lenatus didn’t skimp your training.”

  “Mother!” Alphena said. “Corylus! That chest is full of jewels!”

  “He used them to trap people into coming here,” Hedia said. “I’m not sure they’re real.”

  “Hercules!” Corylus said as he lurched backward, the sword held safely out before him. “I don’t know how you got that in, girl, but you’ve sure impressed me.”

  A small hawk was perched on a limb twenty feet in the air; his white breast feathers showed in sharp contrast to the moss and ferns covering the bark. Hedia looked at him and said, “He’ll have plenty to eat for a while, won’t he? But then he’ll have to find his own meals.”

  Alphena didn’t understand what her mother had just said, but it didn’t matter. She took her sword by the hilt and walked over to the chest.

  The stones were brilliant, even in the gloom of the jungle. Most were polished smooth, but a few had been cut into angles like no jewels she had ever seen before. Alphena took one of the latter, a clear gem save for the fire it reflected, and rubbed it down the chine of her sword. It cut the steel like a plow furrowing damp earth.

  She dropped the stone into the chest and sheathed her sword. “They’re real,” she said, returning to the others. “That one was a diamond, anyway.”

  Hedia shook the rock out and looped the sash around her waist again. “We should go,” she said. “Though—there’s a shrine outside here that brought me from the palace, but I’m not sure how we can make it take us back.”

  “Don’t worry,” Alphena said, stroking the head of Janus. The rod was still firmly under her sword belt, despite her recent violent exercise. “A friend of mine should be able to help with that.”

  Indeed I can, Your Ladyship, the little iron god said, though she wasn’t sure whether she heard the words through her ears or within her head.

  “All right,” said Corylus. He picked up his damaged buckler.

  “I’ll trade this for one of the others the guards dropped,” he said as he led the way. “I’d like to hang it in a temple as an offering, though. It served me well.”

  “It served us well,” Alphena said as she followed Hedia. I don’t want to lose you, Publius Corylus. I never want to lose you.

  * * *

  VARUS STOOD BESIDE THE SIBYL, gazing down on the world. He hadn’t had the experience of climbing the slope to join her this time. His whole previous life was … not blurred, really—it was all there in his memory—but it was distant, as though it had happened to another person.

  His physical body stood in the courtyard of Govinda’s palace. The central building lay in ruins. Much of the roof was missing, and in some sections all four floors had collapsed. Several fires were burning in the wreckage, and no one appeared to be trying to put them out. The only people Varus saw from this vantage point were fleeing; some were injured.

  “What happened?” he asked in surprise.

  The Sibyl laughed. “You were there, Lord Varus,” she said. “Govinda was a great magician. You shrugged off the bolts he loosed on you, but the power had to go somewhere.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Varus said; he smiled wryly. “The only reason I noticed the water tank bursting was that it freed the fish to attack me. I concentrated on Govinda.”

  “And rightly so,” the Sibyl said. “He was a great magician, even facing you.”

  The fish were still trembling as their nerves died. The head of one lay underwater. Baruch had dropped the second fish on top of the first, so its broad gaping mouth was fully visible. They were catfish, or their ancestors had at one time been catfish.

  “But this matters nothing,” the Sibyl said. “The Blight will soon sweep the world; a wind is rising in Anti-Thule, and it will carry spores of the Blight to every continent as the meteor carried them across the Cosmos to Anti-Thule.”

  Varus looked at the foulness: the swelling, spreading corruption. The ice cliffs of Anti-Thule were coated with black; Varus thought the Blight was already melting them, but that might have been his despair.

  “What can I do, Sibyl?” he said. “How can I destroy it?”

  The black figure raised the reunited tablet high. No trace remained of the features of the Indian magician who had accompanied Varus to Anti-Thule. The Blight was humanoid, but its surfaces flowed like pus from an opened cyst.

  The Blight laughed. The world shook.

  “You can fight it, Lord Wizard,” the Sibyl said. “One can always fight evil, but one cannot always win. The Blight holds the tablet complete now, so it has the entire Cosmos behind it; and you are alone.”

  Varus shrugged. “Then I’ll have to destroy it alone,” he said. He turned to face the Blight.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Varus was aware of his physical body in the courtyard of Govinda’s palace, but his mind—his spirit?—walked toward the Blight on a featureless plain. The black figure advanced
toward him, holding the Godspeaker’s tablet.

  “Be thou smitten with glittering iron!” Varus said. All the pathways of the Sibylline Books were as clear to him as the stone-paved streets of the Forum.

  A meteor screamed from the heavens and smashed into the Blight. The figure flew apart like a soft fruit dropped from a height. The smear of blackness re-formed a little closer to Varus.

  I could back away to keep it from reaching me! Varus thought. He laughed aloud and continued walking forward. He might not be able to destroy the foulness, but he would rather die than run from it.

  Well, he would probably die regardless and all the world with him, but the principle was a good one. Socrates would have approved.

  “Let fire come through the sea and burn you!” Varus cried. Lightning ripped, shearing the Blight in half and flinging the smoking portions to either side. They oozed forward and flowed back together. When they touched, they rejoined; the figure rose to its seeming feet before advancing farther.

  The battle was fought in isolation from the Waking World. Below, the body of Gaius Varus stood in the courtyard of the ruined palace. The fires were gaining strength, but his own strokes—

  “Be there fierce thunderbolts and volleys of lightning!” Varus said, and lightning lashed three times, each fiery bolt splitting the Blight again. The fragments advanced, re-forming as they crawled closer.

  —did not touch the existing ruins. The Blight was not fighting back.

  Why doesn’t it attack me the way Govinda did? Varus thought as he sent down another meteor. Again it smashed the Blight into a stain on the unharmed surface. Again the edges of the blot drew in the way a splash of water runs down the sides of a bowl to pool in the center.

  Govinda had been afraid, at least after his first exchange with Varus. The Blight had no fear, no emotions whatever. It was like the sun that shines on the Earth, unaffected by the concerns of the humans its light falls upon.

  Varus stepped forward. “May heavenly fire fall on you!” he shouted. “May heavenly fire fall on you!”

  At each command the lightning fell, and after each bolt the Blight crawled closer. It rose, no longer man shaped but a mound taller and bulkier than a human. It toppled onto Varus.

  “May heavenly fire fall on you!” he called.

  He could see nothing but a wall of purulent foulness, each bit individual and indescribably filthy. A barrier of crackling blue fire separated him from the Blight.

  “May heavenly fire fall on you!” Varus shouted.

  He felt as though a weight was being lowered onto his shoulders, a burden that slowly increased. Eventually the weight would crush him flat.

  “May heavenly fire fall on you! May heavenly fire fall on you!”

  * * *

  HEDIA FOLLOWED HER DAUGHTER AND CORYLUS, stepping out through the panel in what had been Govinda’s sanctum. The naked boy still hung by his hair, but his blood had flooded out when his throat was cut to the backbone. He was smiling faintly.

  Hedia sneezed at the puff of smoke that blew across them.

  The little building had been wrecked. The panel that she and the others had used to come from Dreaming Hill and the one on the other side of the dead boy were all that remained. The other four had been shattered into alabaster sand.

  The second panel was open to Anti-Thule. A volcano had erupted since Hedia’s escape, and the red glow of lava was the only light under the pall of smoke rising from the crater.

  Things were moving in the ruddy darkness. She couldn’t see them well, and she didn’t want to see them better.

  “This wasn’t the window I jumped through when I was getting away from the king,” Hedia said. “I went through that one.”

  She pointed across the room. That side of the building had been destroyed. The couch in the middle was charred, and the table beside it had overturned.

  The head on top of the iron baton that Alphena was sticking under her belt smirked at Hedia. In a squeaky voice it said, “Are you complaining, lady? I could’ve brought you through the one you left by, but you’d have looked like forcemeat on this side.”

  Hedia bowed and said, “My pardon, master. I applaud your skill and initiative.”

  Courtesy was easy, even in the middle of a disaster. This was certainly a disaster for Govinda, which didn’t in itself bother Hedia. The huge palace had been scarred. The wing to the right had collapsed, the wall of the reservoir across the courtyard had been thrown down, and through missing window casements she could see fires glinting within the central structure.

  The atmosphere was of stench and smoke. Bodies were scattered in the courtyard, many of them soldiers. Some had been killed by fire, but their remaining clothing was sodden and the ground was muddy where it had not been seared to terra-cotta.

  “There’s Varus!” she said.

  In her first glance across the devastated courtyard, Hedia had not noticed that there was a figure still standing. He wore the simple tunic of an Indian peasant—cotton instead of the wool of his Italian counterpart—but he was clearly her son. His arms were folded and his face was as grimly steadfast as that of a general of old Carce.

  His forebears were generals and leaders. Varus was their worthy offspring.

  “Look!” said Alphena. “There, in the sky! It’s Varus!”

  Hedia looked up, frowning. In the sky? She sneezed again—another whiff of smoke—and saw it, saw her son, looming over the world in the same posture as his body standing in the middle of the courtyard.

  When Hedia saw the figure in the sky, he was solid—but half the time she didn’t see him. It was as though chain lightning were rippling across a dark meadow; the man standing on the meadow was visible only during the flashes.

  “We’ve found Varus,” said Corylus. “Can we take him home through—”

  Corylus looked back at the panel they had stepped from. Hedia turned also and saw a thing that was mouth and great bulging eyes squirming through the other panel, the one that had been open to Anti-Thule. The splayed hind feet suggested the thing had kinship with a frog or perhaps with a tadpole on the verge of becoming a frog, but it had grown to the size of an ox.

  Hedia shouted, more surprised than frightened. The creature lunged, opening its mouth wide enough to engulf her. Corylus stabbed through the black palate and withdrew. The move was so swift and graceful that only the blood and matter gleaming halfway down his blade showed that he had driven his sword as deep as the monster’s brain.

  The three of them retreated into the courtyard proper. Instead of a panel of thin stone, the entrance to Anti-Thule had become a boundary, as at the seashore where land and water mingle: now wet, now dry—but never certain.

  The image in the sky darkened slowly. The figure of Varus faded as though smoke were drifting between him and those in the Waking World.

  A grub with long jaws crawled from Anti-Thule; it moved on a dozen stumpy legs attached to its thorax and dragged a long abdomen behind. Two similar monsters followed, not far back over the black wasteland. Except for size—except for their great size—they looked like creatures one might find in the mud of a fishpond.

  That wasn’t something Hedia normally looked at.

  She smiled. I don’t have a choice this time.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” Corylus said, backing. His shield was before him, and he held the curved sword in his right hand.

  “We won’t be able to get Gaius Varus away,” Hedia said. She had seen her stepson in this state before: his body was in the Waking World, but his spirit was far distant. They would have to carry his body to move it quickly, and even a youth as strong as Corylus couldn’t carry Varus for any distance with creatures from Anti-Thule harrying them.

  “Right,” said Corylus. “We’ve got to keep them off him. Alphena, take my left.”

  “Wait,” Alphena said; she sheathed her sword and ran out into the courtyard. If Corylus was surprised, he gave no sign of it.

  The grub humped forward. Corylus par
ried one blade of the jaws with his shield and struck hard at the base of the other blade. His sword sank deep into the chitin. A quick twist on the hilt cracked away that half of the jaw.

  The grub’s head was the only part of the creature with a hard shell. It flailed from side to side. The jaw could no longer pinch, but the remaining blade was an edged club that could kill and possibly dismember a man it hit squarely. Corylus backed farther.

  Alphena ran to him carrying a pair of twelve-foot spears that the guards had dropped. She gripped the spears below the balances in her right hand but laid the upper portions over her left forearm so that she could still hold her buckler.

  These were proper cavalry lances. The shafts were of heavier canes than the simple peasant weapons, and they had steel blades instead of flint or the bamboo itself cut at a sharp slant.

  “Keep clear!” Corylus warned, and stepped back again. He sheathed his sword, then tossed his shield behind him. The grub gathered itself for another lunge.

  Corylus took a spear with both hands, then butted it firmly on the ground with the point slanting up toward the grub’s head. He hunched over the weapon, holding the shaft in both hands with his right sandal resting on the bronze ferrule that counterweighted the head.

  The monster drove forward, ramming several feet of the spear through its mouth and brain. The body humped and then slammed back, shaking the ground.

  The grub’s head and the soft abdomen thrashed in opposite directions. Corylus kept his grip and the bamboo flexed but did not crack. Even so the monster would have battered him against the ground if Alphena hadn’t tossed her shield away and gripped the shaft behind him.

  Backing together, Alphena and the youth pulled the spear free. The point and several feet of shaft glistened with white slime, but the weapon was undamaged.

  Alphena let go and stepped to Corylus’ side. They stood together, hunched and breathing through their mouths. More grubs were nearing the boundary between the courtyard and Anti-Thule. The boundary between life and Hell.