Out of the Waters-ARC

by David Drake

  The sails continued to beat, but it seemed to Corylus that the strokes were slower and becoming flaccid. The ship was certainly descending, though the keel was still a hundred feet in the air. Almost a hundred feet.

  Something thrust up from the sea about three miles ahead, or it looked like something did. Corylus grasped the sprite's shoulder and said, "There, isn't that an island, Coryla? Or anyway a rock. Is it big enough to land on?"

  "Am I a sailor?" the sprite said. "Or a magician? I don't know what this ship can do."

  Corylus turned toward the Ancient and bowed. The wizard didn't acknowledge his presence except by the focus of his golden eyes.

  "Master," Corylus said. "Would you please take us toward that island--"

  He pointed.

  "--so that I can take a look at it. We're going to need to land, soon."

  Corylus looked beyond the magician, back over the course they had travelled since leaving the Cyclops' island. They had outdistanced the great eel, but he didn't doubt the sprite's warning that it would follow until it died or it caught them. A night spent rolling on the surface would be long enough for the latter--and he didn't see any reason why the monster should courteously manage to die before that happened.

  Corylus had taken his hand from the sprite's shoulder when he turned. She nuzzled close to him again. He eased back, though he didn't break contact. He said, "Is there anything alive on the island? It looks pretty barren to me."

  He couldn't decipher the look that Coryla gave him. "It's barren," she said. "But there is life, of sorts."

  The island was a square-sided vertical pillar that rose out of the sea to the level of the ship's keel. The top was about twenty feet on a side and slightly domed rather than flat. Grass grew in patches and there were occasional bushes, but it was mostly bare rock.

  Because of the island's shape, Corylus wondered if it might be artificial. As they drew closer, he could see that the striations which he'd taken for masonry were actually natural rock layers. Some were reddish, darkened further by the setting sun. Iron had bled from them and draped rusty banners down the paler rocks beneath.

  He estimated how difficult it would be to climb the rock face. He could still do it, he was pretty sure; but he'd been in Carce for long enough that he'd like to have a few days to train on lesser slopes first. He grinned.

  The Ancient made a sound that started low but climbed in pitch and volume. Corylus had his sword out by the time he had faced completely around, expecting to see the eel or something worse rising toward them from the sea.

  He almost didn't recognize the Ancient. The golden fur was fluffed out, making him look more like an angry bear than the starving cat Corylus would previously have used as a comparison. His mouth was slightly open: irregular teeth gave his jaws the contours of saw blades. He extended one long arm toward the island.

  Corylus followed the gesture. A man with wild hair and a dark tunic climbed to the center of the dome. Could he have been hiding in the vegetation? That would seem impossible to a civilian, but Corylus had twice seen a hulking blond German lunge from a bush that shouldn't have been able to hide a coney.

  A dozen more men appeared; they must have come out of the rock or condensed from the air itself. They were gesturing and speaking among themselves. Corylus could hear the sounds, but he couldn't make out words if they even were words.

  The ship wallowed from side to side and lost way. They were sinking as well, though slowly. That wasn't what most concerned Corylus. This savage outbreak on the part of the magician he depended on mattered more than mere details of the ship's course.

  The Ancient extended both arms and shrieked, still louder than before. His hands bent toward one another as though he were holding an invisible globe. Blue-white flashes glittered between his palms; then a line of sparks curved raggedly from them toward the island.

  Scores of men stood now on the rock, impossible numbers to exist on so small an island. Several dropped to all fours and began to howl. Their companions took up the sound.

  As swiftly as images change when a mirror tilts, human forms became wolves and as swiftly changed back to human. The top of the island seethed like water coming to a boil, and the howls seemed to Corylus to echo from the roof of heaven.

  "Sheer off!" he shouted. He stepped between the Ancient and the wolfmen who had driven him to frothing rage. "Take us away! We can't land here, no matter what the choice is!"

  For a moment, Corylus thought that the magician was going to ignore him--or worse, strike with the power which allowed him to lift this ship and drive it hundreds of miles in a day. The armor might protect me, but--

  The Ancient hunched back to the stern where he had been standing until the wolfmen called him forward. His fur began to settle, though hints lasted like the flush on the face of a man who had controlled his anger.

  The sails beat more strongly; the ship rose sluggishly as it left the island behind. The wolfmen continued to howl behind them.

  Only the upper half of the sun showed above the horizon. Corylus hugged himself.

  How long? How long before the eel catches up with us?

  ***

  Varus remembered talking with his father, but now he climbed the craggy, fog-wrapped hillside. He never took the same route to the Sybil's eyrie, though the differences were trivial: here white gravel had spilled across the path, marble chips perhaps; there was an outcrop which in the mist looked like an unfamiliar human profile.

  He reached the top of the ridge. The Sibyl sat like a senator on a folding ivory stool. Beside her was a wicker basket from which she took peas. She was shelling them into an earthenware pot on the other side and tossing the hulls down the opposite slope. She turned to watch Varus as he approached.

  "Mistress, I greet you," he said. "I hope that you are well."

  The Sibyl gave a broken chuckle. "I am the creature of your mind, Lord Magician," she said. "There is no well or ill for me."

  Varus felt his lips wrinkle as though he were sucking a lemon. She knows things that I do not know, he thought, and I'm not a magician.

  Then he thought, But if I were a magician and afraid to admit it to myself, I might know things that I allowed myself to see only in these visions.

  The Sibyl smiled as Varus argued silently with himself. Embarrassed, he looked into the valley beyond. Instead of a landscape, he saw a globe hanging in blackness. Its surface was moving.

  "This is the world, Lord Magician," the Sibyl said. "Not today, but one day."

  "It's a sphere," he said, not asking a question but voicing the statement to file it in his mind. "Then Eratosthenes was right."

  Varus didn't have a mind for mathematics, but Pandareus told his students that they should attend the lectures of Brotion of Alexandria who was visiting Carce. He and Corylus were the only members of our class who did so.

  He grinned at the memory. Corylus seemed to understand what Brotion was saying. Varus himself was pleased just to have remembered Brotion describing Eratosthenes' calculations.

  He looked at the globe. As before, the object of his attention became clear. For an instant he saw the tossing sea; then the surface of the world became a single throbbing creature: a myriad of heads, arms, and legs, but only one monstrous body. The whole world....

  Varus jerked back with a shout, though there was no was no need to react physically. The globe and its pullulating surface first blurred, then vanished completely as fog filled the valley.

  If I even have a body in this place.

  "That is Typhon?" Varus said, trying to prevent his voice from trembling.

  "That will be Typhon," the Sibyl said. "Not today, but one day."

  Varus swallowed. "Sibyl," he said, "how do I stop him? How do I stop that?"

  He nodded toward the vanished image. He didn't want to point, and he particularly didn't want to describe what he had seen in words.

  "Typhon will rule the world," the Sibyl said. She took more pea pods in her right hand. "No one has the powe
r to change that. Not even a magician as powerful as you, Lord Varus."

  Varus made a sour expression again, but he didn't argue pointlessly. "Sibyl," he said, "what should I do? What can I do?"

  "What did the sage Menre tell you, Lord Magician?" the old woman said. She resumed shelling the peas, dropping them one at a time into the jar on her left.

  "That was a dream, Sibyl," he said, thinking back to his vision in the shrine of Serapis. "I dreamed that Menre gave me a book, but when I awoke with Pandareus, it was all as it had been when we entered the chapel. There was no book."

  The Sibyl's jar was decorated with a single long band which wound from the base of the vessel to the rim. People of all ages and conditions walked up the slanting field. When Varus looked at the figures closely, he saw that they were moving, and he thought that some of them were looking out at him.

  The Sibyl smiled. "Was there not?" she said. "What are you holding, Lord Magician?"

  Varus held the winding rods of a large papyrus roll, open before him. He looked down and read aloud, "I remember the names of my ancestors. I speak their names and they live again!"

  A causeway stretched before him, over the mists which hid the valley where Varus had watched the triumph of Typhon. The Sibyl crooned softly as she resumed shelling peas, paying Varus no attention.

  He walked onto the causeway. He glanced over his shoulder once, toward the Sibyl. He wondered whether she was counting years or lives or some further thing... but it didn't matter to him.

  Gaius Varus was going to meet with his ancestors; and perhaps he would one day return.

  ***

  Alphena woke suddenly from a fitful sleep. Throughout the night she had been dozing off and on. Whenever she wakened, Uktena remained sitting cross-legged in the center of the chamber, smoking his pipe and mumbling rhythmically under his breath. Now he had gotten to his feet.

  "Is it time?" she asked. Her voice caught. The acrid smoke--dried willow-bark mixed with some broad-leafed local herb--had flayed the back of her throat. She coughed to clear it.

  Uktena thrust the stem of his pipe beneath the cord of his breechclout and stepped to the simple ladder. Either he didn't hear her, or he was ignoring her.

  Alphena got up. She had sat, sleeping and waking, with the copper axe in her lap. She gripped the haft firmly as she waited to follow the shaman. She wasn't used to the way the axe balanced in her hand, but it was lighter than a sword and she ought to be able to handle it without strain.

  Uktena lifted the mat away from the kiva's entrance. His movements were slow and exaggerated, as though he were performing a ritual dance.

  Alphena scrambled to catch up as the shaman strode through Cascotan. Villagers watched silently; no one was working.

  The sky seemed bright after the smoky kiva. Though Alphena couldn't see the sun from where she stood, dawn had turned the tip of Procron's fortress to black fire.

  Uktena walked with deliberation toward the shore. He didn't look to either side.

  The three sages waited midway between the village and the salt water. As before, Wontosa stood a half step ahead of his companions. He said, "Greetings, Master! Are you ready to drive the monster away from our shores?"

  Uktena did not speak, but for the first time since he emerged from the kiva, he turned his head--toward Wontosa. The sage stiffened and his eyes lost focus momentarily.

  Alphena followed Uktena. As she passed, Hanno called, "You, girl." He didn't shout, but he managed to put a threat in his tone. "Where are you going?"

  "I'm going to stand with my friend," she said, pausing to look squarely at the sages. The axe head rose slightly as she spoke. "Come with us, why don't you? Aren't you all magicians?"

  Hanno didn't respond. Wontosa and Dasemunco were looking out to sea, pretending that they weren't aware of Alphena's presence. She spat on the ground and hurried on to join Uktena.

  The shaman had reached the shore and stopped; his bare feet were just above the tide line. He dropped the murrhine pipe on the beach behind him. The surf was sluggish, like the movements of the chest of a sleeping dog.

  Lightning flashed in the far distance; no thunder accompanied it. Alphena looked up in surprise. The morning had been clear when she saw the sky from the mouth of the kiva, but a scud of clouds was racing in from the west.

  The sun rose, throwing the shadow of the black spire toward Uktena. He lifted his right arm, the palm toward the east.

  Alphena, to the shaman's left side and a pace behind him, glanced at his shadow. It was elongated but as sharply chiseled as the reliefs on a temple facade, then--

  Something squirming and huge spread across the shoreline and beyond, covering the land. It was not a shape but a blackness too pure to have form.

  The shadow was gone as suddenly as it had appeared. Uktena faced east.

  The top of the black fortress split open. Procron, a figure in orichalc armor without the helmet, drifted out like a wisp of gossamer. In place of his human head flashed a diamond skull brighter than the fiery metal.

  Uktena walked forward with the same awkward determination as before. His feet touched but did not sink into the slowly moving water. He raised his right arm, bent at the elbow; his left hung at his side. He was chanting, but Alphena could not make out the words.

  She went out fifty feet from the shore, trying to follow. There the low waves caught the hem of her tunic and with that purchase threatened to pull her over. She lifted the garment, preparing to fling it away, but she stopped when she thought about what she was doing. Grimacing, she backed to where the water reached only to mid-shin.

  Alphena had seen many gladiatorial battles. Splashing in water that would shortly be over her head, she would be completely useless in a fight against an enemy who walked on air.

  Worse, if Uktena took notice of her, she would handicap him. She didn't mind risking her life, but she dared not risk the life of the friend she was supposedly helping.

  Brilliant purple light flashed from Procron's skull, sizzling against a clear barrier an arm's length short of Uktena's chest. The bolt dribbled off like rain blown against a sheet of metal.

  The sea beneath Uktena hissed. Alphena--near the shore now, a quarter mile behind him--felt her legs tingle and the hair rise on her arms and the back of her neck.

  Uktena continued forward. Alphena thought she heard his voice in the thunder rumbling overhead.

  Procron drifted closer, his arms folded across his chest. He slammed out another bolt, brighter than the sun at noon.

  Uktena staggered, half-turning. Alphena fell backward in the water from the visual shock. She blinked furiously, trying to clear the orange afterimages flaring across her eyes.

  Uktena resumed his advance. His form was shifting, swelling.

  Alphena squeezed her eyes closed, pretending that what she saw was because afterimages were distorting her vision. She whispered, "Vesta, make him safe. Make him not be changed."

  Huge, tentacled, and many-legged, the thing that had been Uktena approached the Atlantean. Both hung in the air. Procron loosed a series of dazzling, crackling bolts, flinging Uktena back. Tentacles shriveled and the swollen body seemed to deflate, though the purple haze which spread about the scene blurred the forms of both combatants.

  The sea beneath them was bubbling. Dead fish and stranger creatures rocked on the surface, many of them boiled pink or red. Alphena's skin itched as though she had gotten a bad sunburn.

  Uktena surged toward Procron again. A purple flash and thunderclap drove them apart short of contact.

  Procron tumbled, his armor flashing brightly, but he regained control above the water. Wobbling, dipping like a skylark instead of rising smoothly, the Atlantean took an aerial post midway between the shore and his gleaming fortress.

  Black and smoking, the creature Uktena had become dropped into the sea. Spray and steam spouted fifty feet in the air.

  The wave from the impact sent Alphena tumbling. She got to her feet and began sloshing toward where the
shaman had hit. She screamed and raised her axe to threaten anybody who came close to her.

  Uktena bobbed into view. For a moment he lay sprawled face-down on the slow swell; then his head lifted and he shook himself.

  Treading water, Uktena looked out toward his opponent. Procron showed no signs of returning to try conclusions again. Carefully, painfully, the shaman began to stroke for shore.

  Alphena, waist deep when the sea was at rest, watched for a moment in hesitation. She bent and took off her sandals, throwing them to shore. Holding the axe helve with her knees, she pulled her tunic over her head. After rolling it into a loose rope and retrieving the axe, she walked in the shallows toward the line Uktena was taking.

  Overhead, the clouds were breaking up again. Alphena thought it had rained briefly, but the swirling battle had whipped the sea to froth; the spatters she felt might have come from that.

  Uktena had paused. A swell lifted him; when it dipped away again, he lay as motionless as a mass of seaweed.

  Alphena sloshed forward. "My friend!" she called. "My friend Uktena!"

  The black spire had closed again. Procron must have returned to his fortress; at any rate, Alphena couldn't see him any more.

  Uktena roused and splashed feebly. Alphena shouted, but it wasn't a word. She bobbed out as far as she dared and flung the end of her rolled tunic toward the shaman. For a moment she was afraid that he wouldn't take it; then one of his sinewy hands twisted itself into the fabric.

  Alphena's feet didn't touch bottom when her nose was above water. She dipped, digging her toes into the sand as she pulled hard on the makeshift rope. With the slack that gave her, she fought a foot or two closer to shore and repeated the process. She could swim, but not well and not while holding the axe. She wasn't going to let go of the axe.

  After a very long time, she could walk normally. Uktena tried to get to his feet. His eyes were blank. Alphena threw his right arm over her shoulders and gripped that wrist with her left hand. Staggering--she was exhausted, and the shaman was a solid weight, not large but all bone and muscle--she started for the kiva.