Out of the Waters-ARC

by David Drake

  Varus struck again with the full strength of his arm. The jaw cracked and a splinter flew away. Varus dropped the hand-axe to catch the spinning bone. He held much of the right mandible including the teeth. It had split from front to back across the jaw hinge, forming a long spike beyond the massive final molar.

  "Well done, my child!" the dead woman cried. "You are worthy of me indeed!"

  She began to laugh again. The sound echoed as Varus felt himself spinning into gray fog.

  "Mistress?" he cried, but he could no longer hear her. He lurched bolt upright.

  He was on a couch in the library. The book he had been reading was on the floor; the lamps were lighted. His father was looking at him in concern while the servants kept to the background.

  "Son?" Saxa said. "What's that in your hand? It looks like a bone."

  Varus stared at the fragment of jaw, just as he remembered it from his dream. "Yes," he said, "it is. But--"

  He smiled lopsidedly at his father.

  "--I'm not sure why I need it, my lord." He took a deep breath and added, "Just that I do."

  ***

  Alphena walked into her dream, a perfectly flat pavement that flickered red/orange/yellow as though it were the heart of a fire. It seemed boundless, but in the far distance a group of people stood about a throne. Almost before she could wonder what they were doing, she was among them.

  The people--women as well as men--with her at the base of the throne were dressed as imperial servants in vividly dyed tunics. Alphena didn't recognize any of them, but they nodded and bowed as though she were known and respected.

  She felt awkward: her tunic was much the worse for wear, and even clean it had not been intended to be seen in august company. For that matter, her person was scarcely fit for the public either. Coiffeur had never been Alphena's concern, but she knew that the events since she mounted the gryphon in her father's garden had left her hair in a state that would have embarrassed a whore at the gate of the gladiator barracks after a hard night.

  The throne was made of ivory and gold. Its frame and high back were carved with the greatest delicacy. Alphena raised her eyes to the man seated on it in imperial splendor.

  "Uktena!" she said in surprise. "What are you doing here?"

  Then, as she heard her initial words, she added, "Where is your pipe, your talisman?"

  The man enthroned leaned toward her with a frown of wonderment. "I know you, do I not?" he said. "Or I knew you once, I believe. Who are you, little one?"

  "I'm your friend Alphena!" she said. Being called "little one" without any recognition in the shaman's tone, hurt her to hear. "We fought--"

  That isn't true.

  "I was with you when you fought Procron," she said. "The Atlantean."

  As Alphena spoke, a vision of Poseidonis formed to her left. She turned. This was a closer view than she had gotten when she approached on the gryphon's back. Something was rising from the harbor--

  Alphena stifled a scream with both clenched fists. When she focused on the image of the city, the silent courtiers in the corner of her eye became brightly colored fishes swimming in a sea of fire.

  Beyond them was a horrific monster, all tentacles and heads and huge beyond fathoming. It was the creature other people had in the Theater of Pompey.

  It was the monster Alphena herself had seen Uktena turn into when Procron's magic lashed him. It was horrible, horrible....

  "Alphena?" the shaman repeated. Her name rolled softly from his tongue. "I have heard the name, or I think I have. Do you know how I came here, Alphena? I was in another place, but I cannot remember where that was."

  "You were in Cascotan, my f-friend," Alphena said. She had closed her eyes. Even when she forced herself to open them, she couldn't bring herself to look up from the pavement to the enthroned figure. "You fought Procron. You fought for your people and for the world."

  She looked up. Uktena's was the same stern, steady visage that she had first seen in the theater. He looked puzzled but not worried. She wondered if anything could really worry him.

  "You fought for me, Uktena," she said. "You drove the Atlantean back."

  And almost died....

  "I don't remember," Uktena said sadly. "But you are welcome here, Alphena. Anyone who says she is a friend of mine is welcome. I do not think I ever had friends; or not at least for many ages. Instead I have power."

  His words echoed about her. Vast though it seemed, this was an enclosure, a prison. But as the sound trembled to silence, the shaman's form began to quiver in turn. The human shape blurred and spread and became again the foul immensity of Typhon.

  "I am your friend, Uktena," Alphena said. Her eyes stung with tears, but she wouldn't look away, wouldn't permit herself even to blink. "I am your friend!"

  "Little one?" said a voice from outside her. "Are you having bad dreams?"

  Alphena sat upright. She had been curled on the floor of the shaman's kiva; the promise of dawn brightened through the reeds of the mat over the entrance. Uktena was looking down at her, his pipe in his hands.

  She got to her feet. "It was nothing that matters, Uktena," she said. She looked at the axe in her right hand, then hefted it. "Is it time to go?"

  "Yes, child," Uktena said with a faint smile. "It is time."

  He paused to light the herbs in his pipe bowl with a pinch of punk which he kept smoldering in a hollow gourd.

  "And perhaps it is the last time," Uktena said.

  CHAPTER 16

  "I was talking with my friend Marcus Priscus last night, Varus," Saxa said.

  Even half-dazed by the dream of his conversation with the corpse, Varus felt his lips lift in a tiny smile. His father was so proud to be able to claim Priscus as a friend.

  A man as wealthy as Saxa could easily have scraped acquaintance with military, political, or social leaders. What he had wanted, however, was to join those whom he regarded as truly wise, the only group which could not be bought with money. The disasters threatening his family and the world had at least allowed Saxa to achieve his greatest ambition.

  "He pointed out that Hedia's disappearance," Saxa said, "and that of Master Pandareus as well, of course, weren't the start of this business. It started with the vision of the monster that we saw in the theater."

  He cleared his throat and added in a small voice, "I talked to Meoetes, you see. The climax of the mime wasn't his doing after all. It was a real vision that surprised him as much it did the rest of us. In fact--"

  Saxa smiled ruefully.

  "--it surprised him more than it did me, because I thought it was a trick that I was watching."

  Varus looked at the splinter of bone. It fitted his hand like a leatherworker's awl. He thought, I can't have been dreaming. But what does it mean?

  Aloud he said, "I don't know the answer any better than you, father. There's nothing in the books I've read--and Lord Priscus would know better than I anyway. Though--"

  As he spoke, an answer presented itself.

  "--there is a person I could ask. I'm not sure she would tell me, though."

  Or even that she exists outside my own imagination--since she claims she doesn't.

  As suddenly as the thought, Varus felt himself dropping out of the present, onto a fog-ridden hillside. Instead of the familiar track which would him to the Sibyl's eyrie, this was bare black rock. The Sibyl waited for him at the foot of the slope.

  "Sibyl?" he said. "Why are you here?"

  "You have need of me, Lord Wizard," she said. Her smile was unreadable, another seam in the wrinkles that covered her aged face. "Where else should I be, since I am wholly a part of you?"

  "Mistress, tell me what I should do," Varus said. He didn't care what meaning she gave to the question. He needed help in so many fashions that any answer would be welcome.

  "Come with me and meet your enemy, your lordship," the Sibyl said, taking him by the hand. She started up the slope. Ancient though she seemed, her pace was both quick and steady.

  Sh
e doesn't have a body, of course. And neither do I in this place. I don't think that I have a body in this place.

  Varus didn't ask further questions: he would have his answer when the Sibyl chose to volunteer it or he had the wit to determine it for himself. If she is really part of me, I'm a difficult person to get information out of.

  They reached the top of the hill. In front of them stretched a bleak moor. The sparse grass or sedge--he couldn't be sure--was gray with hoarfrost; the sky was gray as well. The sun, huge but orange, hung in mid sky; its light did nothing to temper the bitter wind.

  A spire of black crystal stood on the moor half a mile away. From horizon to horizon, it was the only object which was taller than the occasional black bush which might have risen to Varus' knee.

  "Is that Procron's keep, mistress?" he said. "Or is there another Minos in this place?"

  "This is where Procron hides," the Sibyl said. She continued to walk forward; Varus kept pace. "This is your enemy, Lord Wizard."

  His feet crunched on the sere vegetation. Something small--perhaps a rabbit, though it didn't move like one--scurried ahead of them; Varus thought he heard it squeal. The air was thin, and it didn't seem to fill his lungs.

  "Why did--" Varus began. He caught himself, grinning with what he thought was a pardonable degree of self-satisfaction.

  "Sibyl...," he said, a philosopher and a lawyer now instead of a youth too frightened to use his education. "Did Procron abduct my mother? Because I know that the Sages took Corylus and Master Pandareus. I was there when it happened."

  The old woman glanced toward him. He thought she was smiling again, but he couldn't be sure.

  "Procron did not take Hedia," she said, "but those who took her are for others. Your duty is to deal with Procron, for no one else can."

  The Sibyl made a chuffing sound that Varus thought was a laugh. "And even you may be unable to stand against Procron, Lord Wizard; though your world will end if you fail."

  Varus sniffed; for a moment he was solely a son of Carce. "My world will certainly end if I fail," he said in a haughty tone, "for I will have died in the attempt. Of course."

  They had come within a furlong of the crystal fortress, the length of a foot race. The high-arched door at ground level remained sealed, but the top of the spire split open. The angled sides moved soundlessly, catching sunlight and scattering it across the bleak landscape in a shower of orange droplets.

  A figure in fiery armor slid from the fortress, standing on the air. He did not wear a helmet. In place of his head was a skull carved from diamond.

  "Who are you who dares come to me?" the figure said. "I am Procron, Lord of the Atlantis! Submit or I will crush you as I crush all my enemies!"

  "I saw you run from your fellow Minoi, magician!" Varus said. The words leaped to his tongue without his conscious volition. "And you must have run again, or I wouldn't find you here. Bow to Carce or take the consequences, barbarian!"

  Procron raised a hand, but it was from his glittering skull that purple fire leapt at Varus and the Sibyl. The ground in a circle about them flashed into steam and bitter smoke.

  Varus started back, but the bolt had halted at arm's length from him and splashed in all directions. The Sibyl stood, smiling faintly. The sparse vegetation could not sustain the fire.

  Am I physically here in this cold wasteland?

  Embarrassed to have recoiled from the purple fire, Varus strode forward. He didn't know why it hadn't incinerated him, and he certainly didn't know whether he'd be as lucky the next time. Besides which, the Atlantean wizard was a hundred feet in the air; unless Varus had developed an unexpected ability to fly, he couldn't get at his enemy even if Procron failed to blast him to ash in the next instant.

  No matter. I am a citizen of Carce. If I don't know what to do in a crisis, I will go forward.

  The flame-scoured moorland was hot beneath his feet. He was wearing silk slippers, suitable for a gentleman doing research in his family library. He grinned wryly. Blistered feet were the least of his worries.

  Procron's diamond jaws opened as if to shout, but no sound came out. He spread his hands. Light the color of orichalc danced from his gauntlets. It formed walls in the air, tumbling and joining until they locked suddenly into a faceted sphere. It surrounded Varus and the Sibyl, slanting into the hard soil beneath their feet.

  "Did you think you were safe because you could block my spells?" Procron said. "Stay here and starve! You cannot return to the world from which you came. I will watch you die and rot and crumble to dust--and even the dust will remain, for all eternity!"

  Varus reached out with his left hand, touching the tip of his little finger to the amber gleam. The light was as solid as bronze. It had neither texture nor temperature, but he could no more step through it than he could the doors of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest.

  "Die, you puppy!" Procron said.

  The Sibyl said, "May the doors--"

  "--of heaven be opened to me!" Varus said, completing the phrase in a cracked, ancient voice which caused his father to jump back in alarm.

  "My son?" Saxa said. "I don't understand."

  Varus rubbed his forehead, then bent and picked up the book he had dropped: a copy of the Aetna, the Stoic response to Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. He had always been in sympathy with Lucretius' Epicurean disbelief in the gods, but recent events had made him think the Stoics might be right after all.

  "I don't understand either, father," Varus said. "And I'm afraid I don't know what has happened to mother. But I know what I must do."

  Unfortunately, I don't have the faintest notion of how to do it.

  ***

  Corylus awakened when he felt the ship begin to tremble. The sky had brightened, and the sails were quivering.

  Corylus ached pretty much everyhere. He had slept on the ground beside the tilted keel, using a biscuit--or whatever they were--to cushion his head. They did better for that than they did as food, though he supposed they would sustain life.

  He'd had a few bites of one to supplement the raw fish. He would probably eat more today, because he didn't trust the remaining fish to be safe without smoking or at least a drying rack. Though being doubled up with the runs didn't seem quite as terrible as it would have been if the alternative were something other than the chalky blandness of the ship's stores.

  Coryla was watching him. "Good morning, cousin," he said politely. She pouted.

  The Ancient had stopped shrieking some time in the middle of the night, but he still sat in the ruins. Under other circumstances, Corylus might have built the scattered stones into a shelter; the ship lay almost crossways to the prevailing wind, which was as bitter as that of the Hercynian forest in November. It was better to feel chilled to the bone than to cannibalize the Ancient's shrine, however.

  The same concern, perhaps even more strongly, had convinced Corylus not to use the sprite's warmth to shelter him. He needed the Ancient as an ally if they were ever to get off this needle of rock. Even without that, he was sure that the result of provoking the golden-furred wizard into a rage would be unsurvivable, and he'd seen more than one man knifed or battered to death because of a disagreement over a woman. The sprite's pique was a cheap price to pay for avoiding that risk.

  Water slapped loudly, then rebounded from the base of the rock. The eel hadn't slept during the night either. Judging from the sound, none of his leaps had equalled his first attempt. Corylus hadn't looked over the edge again, however, for fear of spurring the creature to a sufficiently greater effort.

  The Ancient squatted with his wrists resting on his knees. His fingertips dangled almost to the ground. He watched as Corylus approached.

  Corylus bowed. "Master Magician?" he said. He doubted whether the Ancient could understand his words, but he thought it was better to speak directly rather than to use the sprite as an intermediary. "I would like to leave as soon as you determine that there is light enough to lift the ship."

  He gestured toward
the brightening east without turning his head. He bowed slightly. The Ancient simply stared.

  I depend on his good will, Corylus thought. He turned his back and began walking toward the ship. When both parties know that one cannot force the other to his will, then only a fool attempts to threaten.

  There was a scrape on the dirt behind him. Corylus started to look over his shoulder. The Ancient shot past him in a flat leap that carried him to the stern of the ship. He slammed into the deck and straightened, his claws biting the wood. He grinned at Corylus.

  Corylus grinned too, then broke into laughter.

  "Men!" the sprite said. Her voice held a mixture of amazement and disgust.

  "Time to board, cousin," Corylus said as he lifted himself over the railing. "And very glad of it I am, too."

  He continued to smile. The sprite was quite correct. He and the Ancient were both men--not just males--in all the important senses. That had risks if you weren't properly courteous in the other fellow's terms, but Corylus understood that: he'd grown up with the Batavian Scouts.

  If you were in a hard place, you wanted your companions to be men also. Corylus was in a very hard place now.

  The hull rocked upright. When the first bright edge of the sun showed above the horizon, the sails gave a mighty stroke and the ship lifted. Below and behind, the sea slapped to the desperate fury of the monster eel.

  The moon, just short of full, hung in the western sky as though it were the beacon toward which the Ancient was steering. For an instant, Corylus thought he saw an angry woman standing astride the orb; then she was gone, but two specks lifted from the silver surface.

  Corylus watched the specks, his eyes narrowing. He couldn't be sure, but they seemed to be swelling... which meant they were headed toward the ship.

  "Cousin?" he said. "Do you see those dots? Are they coming toward us?"

  The sprite joined him in the bow; she seemed to be over her irritation. She had a basically sunny personality, which made up for an obvious lack of intellect.