Out of the Waters-ARC

by David Drake

The entrance to Saxa's suite was open. Varus didn't know which of the ten or a dozen servants clustered there was technically the doorman on duty, so he said, "Ask my father if I may speak with him," in a firm voice and trusted that the right party would hear him.

  Servants oozed away, some turning their backs on Varus and bending away. They left a worried looking footman standing alone. He swallowed and piped, "Your lordship! His lordship has gone downstairs. I don't... I don't... your lordship, his lordship didn't say where he was going!"

  It's quite amazing how useless our hundreds of servants are in a crisis, Varus thought. They're all frightened to death.

  So was he, of course, but that didn't keep him from trying to find a solution.

  Manetho had reattached himself when Varus left his mother's rooms. "I'll find him, Lord Varus!" he cried as he rushed down the stairs.

  Varus managed to keep his expression blank as he followed in the midst of his considerable entourage. Normally he had very little to do with the household staff unless he brought himself to their attention, and even that sometimes took an effort. Lord Saxa's bookish son didn't shout and decree beatings as his sister did, so he could be--and often was--safely ignored.

  Hedia's abduction and the rumors about it--though it was hard to imagine rumors that would be more frightening than the reality--had so unsettled the servants that many were clustering about Varus simply because he appeared calm. He wasn't calm, of course, but his Stoic appearance was sufficient to calm others.

  Master Pandareus will be pleased to learn of this proof of the value of philosophy, Varus thought. And I will be even more pleased to be able to tell him of it.

  Before Varus reached the bottom of the staircase, Manetho came from the side entrance to the office with a wild expression. "The master isn't here!" he said. "They say he's gone to the back garden, your lordship!"

  "Well, then, we'll go to the garden," said Varus. Did everything have to be treated as a crisis? "Or at any rate, I will. I don't believe I need help in accomplishing that, Manetho."

  "Of course, your lordship!" said the deputy steward, striding toward the back of the house with his head high and his chest thrown out. "You two! Take those lamps from their sconces and precede Lord Varus!"

  Varus smiled, though the expression didn't really reach his lips. Apparently I'm still being ignored, he thought. But I'm being smothered rather than shunned by the servants who ignore what I say.

  There were so many people crowded into the rear of the house--the training ground, private bath, storage rooms, and the corridor to the back garden--that it took some moments for Manetho's threats and bluster to clear passage. There wasn't deliberate resistance, just a lack of room for frightened servants to displace into.

  I wonder if Archimedes would have had a better answer? Varus thought. As many times before in the recent past, philosophy brought him a smile in a disturbing situation.

  "I'll announce you, your lordship," Manetho said. Before Varus could decide how to proceed, the deputy steward turned the wooden gate latch and bellowed, "Lord Varus to see his father, the noble Lord Saxa!"

  That probably wasn't the form of address I would have chosen, Varus thought wryly. My fault for not reacting more quickly.

  He stepped into the open gateway and stood, waiting to be recognized from the garden. To his surprise, Saxa was sitting on a bench along the sidewall--he looked up at the announcement--and was accompanied only by his chief secretary, Philon. A single lamp burned on a stake which had been driven into a planter of poppies close to the bench.

  "Oh, I'm glad to see you, son," Saxa said. He sounded more as though he were announcing that the Emperor had ordered him to commit suicide. "It's kind of you to join me."

  "Would your lordships like me to give you your privacy?" Philon said. He moved quickly toward the gateway, ready to slip through as soon as Varus took a step. "I'll be waiting in the passage, your lordship!"

  There was no question that Philon would prefer to be somewhere other than on this haunted site. In all that had happened Varus had forgotten the garden's bad reputation; it was obviously still at the top of the servants' minds.

  He was surprised to find his father here. There were people who liked trees and flowers, but Saxa had never displayed any interest in such things. Varus had expected to find his father in bed, perhaps curled with his knees lifted to his chest.

  "Lord," Varus said, standing formally in front of his father. "I need funds to carry out a project that may put you in a great deal of danger."

  "Sit down, my son," Saxa said. He patted the bench but didn't raise his eyes to meet those of Varus. "And yes, of course you can have whatever you need; just tell Agrippinus. I haven't been a very good father, I know, but I hope--"

  He finally looked up.

  "--that at least you never thought I pinched you for money."

  Varus seated himself gingerly. He hadn't expected to be alone with Saxa, so most of his mental preparation had involved choosing words that he could use in front of the servants without flatly saying what he planned. The plan, after all, would be treated as armed rebellion if it came to the Emperor's notice.

  "L-l...," he said. He caught himself and took a deep breath, then said, "Father, it isn't that. I need you to know that the money will be used for...."

  He swallowed and resumed, "We will be committing treason in the eyes of the Emperor. That isn't our intent, but the means we're using are, well, treasonous, I suppose."

  "Will you be able to bring my wife back?" Saxa said, suddenly speaking with animation.

  "I--" Varus said. This is so hard. "No, I will not. Not tomorrow, or at least I don't think so. I hope that it will help us--"

  He shouldn't have been involving Corylus and the others, even by implication. Well, too late to worry about that.

  "--rescue mother at some later point. If we succeed. If we survive."

  "Well, do what you can," Saxa said sadly. He looked around the garden. "It's my fault, you know. I brought Nemastes here, and that's what started it all. Right here in this garden, we worked a spell that--"

  He gestured toward the gap where magic had blasted the pear tree with unnatural cold.

  "--did this. Caused demons to take my Hedia. I did it."

  Varus took Saxa's right hand in his left. He didn't remember ever doing that before. "Father?" he said. "Look at me, please."

  Saxa turned with a look of mild surprise. "Yes?" he said.

  "I don't understand what's happening," Varus said. "Not even Pandareus does. But I've seen enough to know that you weren't the cause any more than I was or mother was or Alphena. What you did do was to help save Carce; and by providing funds, you'll be doing that again."

  He smiled. "A philosopher should be truthful and precise," he said. "What I should have said is that you will be helping us try to save Carce. I hope we'll succeed, but I'm not a soothsayer to speak with divine certainty."

  In talking to Varus, Saxa had risen enough from the depths to chuckle. "I've known many soothsayers, my son," he said. "I've never known one whose opinion I would take in opposition to yours."

  He pursed his lips and added, "My first wife had a pet sparrow. I would take its opinions ahead of those of most soothsayers, too."

  Varus realized he must have looked shocked. Saxa smiled faintly. He said, "I probably seem rather an old fool to you, son, because I believe in things which cannot be logically proven. Unlike my colleague Marcus Tardus, however, I don't believe in things which have been logically disproven. I place portents of the future found in the shape of an ox liver in the disproven category."

  "I... see," Varus said. He hesitated because he did see, perhaps for the first time, a portion of his father as a man. "I, we will try not to disappoint you, your lordship."

  He rose to his feet. Saxa got up also and unexpectedly gripped his hand. "You haven't disappointed me, my son. You couldn't disappoint me."

  Varus felt a surge of warmth toward his father. He said, "Sir? Why don't you visit
Marcus Priscus tomorrow, since the Senate won't be in session? Get to sleep tonight, then send him a note in the morning saying that you intend to come over."

  "Do you suppose he'd be willing to see me?" Saxa said, noticeably brighter than he had been a moment before. "I don't, I mean we haven't been intimate friends, you know."

  "Priscus will be very interested in what happened tonight," Varus said. Part of his mind wondered just how detailed a description of the event his father would provide. "And he's as able as any man in Carce to explain what it means."

  He and Saxa shared a smile. It was the older man who voiced the thought of both: "Which means the chances are he'll be completely at sea. Well, regardless, I welcome the chance to become better acquainted with so learned a man."

  Varus turned, thinking about the next step. He would offer Corylus a bed, though he wasn't sure that his friend didn't have more preparations to make yet tonight. After Varus confirmed that any necessary sum of money was available for the enterprise, all he had before him was sleep... which he was looking forward to.

  Varus reached for the gate latch. Without warning, he was in the midst of a vision as sharply defined as the one that had filled the stage of the theater. He could no longer see the side of the house, and he turned to find the garden and his father had also been replaced by a crystal fortress squatting on a crag in the midst of jungle.

  Huts not greatly different from those of a village in Greece or Lucania had been built around the fortress and spread halfway down the slope. They were burning now. The jungle smoldered in places, but the thick foliage was too green to sustain fire on its own. With the thought, Varus saw humans, some of them injured, crawling among the vines at the buttress roots of huge trees: refugees from the dwellings.

  The fortress was shaped like an eight-pointed star. It was small and squat, no more than ten feet high from the ground to the flat roof and only 50 feet from point to the opposite point, but it remained untouched by flames from the score of flying ships which encircled it a quarter mile distant.

  Some had penetrated closer: the wreckage of three vessels lay on the outskirts of the burning village. Each was charred around a hole the size of a bushel basket which had been burned through its hull.

  A single flying ship moved slowly, bow-on, toward the fortress. The other vessels had hulls and masts of wood, but this one was of the same fiery metal as the armor of the figure in its stern. There were no other crewmen.

  A bolt ripped from the fortress: not fire like what the ships had squirted on Typhon as it rent Poseidonis but rather a jet of white channeled lightning; the air glowed in its wake. The ship gleamed as if every surface was covered with ghostly corposants; it staggered, then resumed its slow progress.

  A second bolt hit the vessel, then a third. The figure in the stern raised its hands to the flaring helmet, then lifted it off. Instead of a human head beneath the armor, Varus saw a grinning diamond skull.

  Purple light flashed from the skull and licked across the face of the fortress. The wall crumbled like a streambank during a freshet.

  The light cut off; the ship wallowed closer. Overhead, what had been a clear sky now roiled with lightning and stormclouds.

  Again the purple glare ate into the heart of the fortress, revealing an armored figure in a bubble of clear light against which the purple raved. In one metal gauntlet he held a murrhine bar crossways toward the attacking vessel.

  The murrhine split; the halves flew out of sight in either direction. It had been a hollow tube.

  Instead of blasting the figure as it had the fortress which sheltered him, a third spurt of purple light plucked the armor off like a diner shelling a crayfish. The mouth of the diamond skull opened: the victor was laughing.

  The vision blinked away. Varus fell forward, but his father caught him.

  Saxa's expression was as blank and frightened as Varus himself felt.

  ***

  Hedia gasped, trying to get her breath. She thrashed for a moment, but that was pointless. The creature grasping her waist from behind had let go, but the two beside her each held a wrist. Their glassy hands were not uncomfortably tight, but they had no more give in them than if they had been carved out of stone.

  She twisted to look at them. The creatures had opposable thumbs, but their fingers were fused into flat paddles. They were translucent, as though made from a dozen sheets of mica stacked together; she could see her wrists faintly through them.

  She straightened again. The creatures seemed to pay her no attention. In silhouette they would have seemed human, but all the detail had been smoothed off. Hedia thought of statues worn by windblown sand.

  She felt a smile twist the corners of her mouth. At least they don't terrify me now, the way they did in my nightmares.

  She forced her body to relax. "Do you have names?" she demanded.

  The figure on her left turned its head toward her, then turned back. It didn't speak, if it was even able to. The curves of its lips met in a shallow Vee and were seemingly carved from a single block.

  "Where are you taking me?"

  That brought no response at all. Well, she hadn't expected it to. She looked about her for the first time.

  Hedia and her captors stood as though in clear air. At first she had thought she was falling, but now she wasn't sure. Things half-glimpsed swirled about them the way bubbles dance below a mill flume.

  A man covered only by his gray beard and long hair suddenly was close: she didn't see movement. From the way his face contorted as he shook his fist, he was shouting curses; Hedia couldn't hear them; she heard only the shush of her own pulse in her ears. The figure shrank to a point and spun away, vanishing as suddenly as he had appeared.

  Could he have touched me? Would the glass men have protected me if he tried?

  A snake squirmed into view. Her captors faced it as stiffly as gladiators preparing to salute the Patron of the Games.

  Why are they afraid? Hedia wondered. It seemed an ordinary blacksnake like the one in every temple of Apollo, fed by the priests on bread and milk when worshippers paid to receive the god's attention.

  The snake looked toward Hedia; its forked tongue quivered from between its closed lips. As suddenly, it loomed like an avalanche before them; its jaws opened wide enough to swallow a cart and oxen. Releasing Hedia, the glass figures raised their arms at angles like the Egyptian dancers painted on the walls of a temple of Isis.

  Hedia felt a wrenching. The snake was no longer visible. She sank to her knees, raising her hands to her face but not--quite--covering her eyes. She began to sob loudly.

  Her misery was perfectly believable; it always was. Hedia was young and fit, but she wasn't large, and she tended to favor men of an athletic turn. Knowing when and how to weep had saved her from a beating or worse a number of times in the past, generally when a man entered unexpectedly and found her occupied in a fashion to which he took exception.

  Once in fact she had been with the messenger who had brought a mistaken message saying his master, a military tribune, would be detained. The tribune had unfortunately hastened when his schedule had cleared again almost immediately. Hedia suspected things had gone very badly with the servant later that night, but she herself had come out of it with nothing worse than a bruised cheek and a table to replace.

  It worked this time too. Her captors hedged her closely on three sides, but they didn't take her wrists again as she knelt weeping.

  A blue sphere took form below them, growing denser the way fog rises from a pond on a cool evening. It swelled as it came into better focus, becoming a mass of forested islands. The surrounding sea was ultramarine in the distance, but the water was pale and greener where it fringed the curving shores of an island.

  The figure behind Hedia began to gesture with its hands while the other two remained still. Her head was at the level of his knees; she wondered what would happen if she lunged against him.

  Very likely I would cut myself as badly as if I'd slammed into the Templ
e of Jupiter. Certainly their hands are like stone. Hedia smiled in her mind, though she was careful not to let the humor reach her lips. She began to sob as though her pet kitten had died.

  The island now looked as solid as if she were viewing it from a high tower. She and her captors slid over the tops of giant trees, still descending at a flat angle. The air was humid and thick with the smell of rotting leaves.

  When Hedia first had glimpsed the forest, it had seemed a solid green mass. Close up she could see not only different shades of green but also masses of yellow blooms among the leaves or even purple and bluish white. Birds shrieked at them; once a lizard as long as a canoe barked an angry challenge from the top of a tree limb. Her captors didn't react.

  Ahead was a hilltop which had recently been burned clear. It was enough higher than the ridge to either side that even bare it rose above the surrounding trees. The line on which they were moving passed very close above the crag.

  Sunlight reflected in a dazzle. A building had stood here, but it had been shattered to stub walls and glittering debris over which the fronds of great fern were already curling.

  A red-furred ape clambered through the wreckage; it turned and looked up at them. Its head was human with a pentacle tattooed in blue on its forehead. It screamed in fury.

  The line of travel flattened still further; now Hedia and her captors were coursing parallel to the treetops ahead. There won't be a better time.

  Without hesitation, she threw herself forward. The figures to either side grabbed for her, but they were too slow. Hedia somersaulted in the air and hit the slope feet-first. She couldn't stay upright, but she somersaulted again. Bouncing up, she threw herself into the shadows among the giant trees.

  ***

  "Oh, Lady Alphena!" Anna said as two members of the escort started to hand Anna into the double litter. A third servant carried the old woman's walking sticks. "This is much too fine for me! I'll just hire a common chair, let me."

  "I'm sure mother would say that nothing is too good for the guest of our noble family," Alphena said, trying to speak in a properly arch tone. She thought she had ome fairly close, which made her giggle. That didn't spoil the effect, since after she spoke she realized that Anna might not otherwise have realized she was joking. "Anyway, we'll talk on the way back to the house."