by David Drake
"It doesn't matter," Varus said. Until he spoke, he hadn't realized how completely true the statement was. "This is my duty, so I'll carry it out to the best of my abilities."
It was easier to get on with life when one disregarded questions of personal survival. Zeno of Citium and those who had developed his Stoicism would be pleased that a young scholar had achieved such understanding.
The Sibyl made a sound like a pour-spout gurgling. It was probably meant for a chuckle. Anyway, it allowed Varus to smile at himself as he walked beneath the pointed crystal arch and felt gray fog enter his bones.
Varus paused. He had expected--without consciously framing the question; Pandareus will be disappointed--the fog to be a membrane, a permeable replacement for the solid doors. Instead it was a dim cave which branched in more directions than he could count on his fingers.
The Sibyl pointed her right arm forward and said, "Grant me a path--"
"--over which I may pass in peace...," continued Varus in the same high-pitched voice. He was reading the scroll open in his mind. "For I am just and true!"
Despite the situation, he felt his lips rise in a smile. Every philosopher should be just and true. I at least strive for those ideals.
A tube of rosy light snaked through the fog, wide enough for two to walk in. It went farther--much farther--than should have been possible within the crystal spire, which Varus had judged to be no more than a hundred feet in diameter at the base.
Still, he couldn't be in doubt as to his path; he strode in and walked as briskly as he would have done in Carce, passing from his father's house to the Forum or perhaps to a temple whose library he wanted to consult.
In Carce Varus would have had a guard of servants, to keep his surroundings at bay; here the light did the same. Occasionally something came close enough to the glowing boundary to give him a good look at it. He passed three slender forms in flowing tunics who stood arm in arm, watching him with wide eyes. They were as supple as the Graces themselves; he couldn't guess at their gender or even--
"Sibyl?" Varus said. "Are they human?"
"What is human?" the old woman said. "Many scholars including Aristotle have debated that. None of them came to a decision that you were willing to accept, Lord Varus."
Then in a less whimsical tone she said, "Their ancestors were human. Whether or not they remain human is a question for philosophers, not for a soothsayer."
I can be a very frustrating person to talk with, Varus thought again. If I'm really talking with myself.
He smiled again. He was amused at the insight--and he was amused that he had found a purely philosophical question to take his mind off the problem of what lay in his own immediate future. Both problems were insoluble, but considering the definition of "humanity," wasn't emotionally trying.
For a moment, Varus saw vast machines beyond the faint rosy membrane, deeper shadows bulking in the purple-gray dusk. They moved repetitively, the movement visible though the forms were only blurs. He could not tell how distant what he saw was, or even if he was truly seeing anything.
As suddenly, he stared upward at horror: Ocean given physical form. A thousand ravening maws slavered toward him, tens of thousands of limbs kicked and clawed and coiled--and then storm-tossed water surged down, a sea greater than the world itself. Froth flicked from the whitecaps. Monster or ocean met eye-searing purple lightning and vanished into haze, through which the reborn terror drove to vanish in turn. The roar was deafening.
"Perhaps, Gaius Varus, you should consider preserving your fine mind by leaving this place," the Sibyl said. "You are still able to, you know."
Varus glanced at her in irritation. "To go where?" he asked. "Back to Carce, where Typhon will be driven if I don't stop Procron here?"
She gave him another enigmatic smile. "You don't mind my suggesting that you are a coward," she said in a musing tone, "but flawed logic offends you. Does that make you a brave man, Lord Wizard, or a fool?"
"Nothing historians have taught me about battles," Varus said, "makes me think that one man cannot be both. Publius Corylus has many stories of the army which have caused me to wonder if it's possible to be a brave man and not a fool."
"'It is a sweet and proper thing for a man to die for his fatherland,'" the Sibyl quoted. "Was Horace a fool, Gaius Varus?"
"No," said Varus. "Because he threw down his shield and ran instead of dying."
He paused, rolling the thought around in his head. Very precisely he went on, "Horace was not a fool; but he was worse than a coward to urge others to act and therefore die in what he thought was a foolish manner."
Varus cleared his throat and continued, projecting as though he had an audience beyond monsters and a figment of his imagination, "I honor Horace as a poet, perhaps the greatest of our poets. But I would prefer to die at the side of my friend Corylus than to live with the soul of Horace."
The Sibyl chuckled. Unexpectedly, she reached out and squeezed his hand. "The men of Carce have not changed since my girlhood," she said.
Which is a puzzling thing to hear from a figment of my imagination.
They were walking down a tube through darkness again. Varus hadn't missed a stride beneath the threat of Typhon--or of the sea, if there was any difference--but he felt more comfortable in this neutral setting. Well, he felt less uncomfortable.
He glimpsed movement to the side and turned, wondering if he would see another of the androgynous maybe-humans. Instead he frightened into scurrying panic a handful of the rabbitlike animals which he had seen scampering outside on the moor. They disappeared into the shadows of the low, black vegetation.
"Their ancestors were human also," said the old woman. She was watching Varus, perhaps to see how he took the revelation. "The world grows old, and her children age with her."
"I see," said Varus. The only emotion he felt was wonder. He was beginning to understand the passage of long ages, which had been only a concept to him in the past.
The Sibyl gestured toward flickering brightness ahead of them. "There is your goal, Lord Wizard: Procron the Atlantean. Are you his master, do you think?"
Varus sniffed. "It doesn't matter what I think," he said.
The light was a doorway barred by sizzling lightning; the smell of burned air made Varus sneeze. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and said, "Grant me a path over which I may pass in peace!"
And stepped through, into Procron's sanctum. The Sibyl had vanished as though she never was.
Procron stood upright in the middle of a vast room. He was nude: an aged man whose chest had sunk and whose limbs were withered. Violet light flickered in the depths of the diamond skull which had replaced his head
The firmament of heaven formed the room's walls; a needle of light from each star pierced the magician's body. Varus' presence blocked a few of the beams, but they shifted and reformed as he walked forward.
"Why do you come here, infant?" a voice boomed. Procron wasn't speaking, or at least his body wasn't; the words came from the air.
Four Servitors walked toward Varus at a deliberate pace. He didn't know whether they had just appeared or if he had failed to notice them when they stood motionless in the light of stars as blinding as a dust storm. The glass men were bare-handed, but they scarcely needed weapons to deal with a young scholar.
Varus continued forward. The scroll written in Egyptian holy symbols was unrolling in his mind.
"Look above you, infant!" the voice said. "Look! Is this what you want to bring upon yourself?"
Varus looked up, though he knew what he would see. Typhon and Ocean, the presence flicking from one to the other more quickly than his mind could process... or perhaps they were the same, infinitely huge, ravening against the barrier of hissing light; a pressing, roaring, mindless fury oblivious of pain.
Varus walked on. The Servitors stepped close, their arms lifting to seize him.
"May the gods be at peace with me...," Varus said. "That I may crush my enemies!"
; He started to raise his hand to point at the Servitors in turn. At his words alone they shattered into dust so fine that it seemed to sink through the solid floor.
Varus smiled grimly. Sometimes being a scholar was better than being a swordsman.
He had walked to within a few paces of the Atlantean wizard.
"What do you think to accomplish?" the voice thundered. "Even if you are willing to feed yourself to Typhon, still you cannot affect me. My soul is one with my talisman in a universe nothing can reach; the wizard Uktena slew my body thirty million years ago. What escaped to this time is dead and immune to further harm!"
"May the gods be at peace with me," Varus said, "that I may crush my enemies!"
A ripple quivered through the chamber, like heat waves stirring the stars on a summer night; the dust that had been the Servitors danced in fitful eddies. There was no greater result.
Procron's laughter echoed like mountains crashing. "You cannot harm me," the voice said, "because I am dead!"
As my ancestor, who gave me her jaw, is dead.
Varus held the splinter in his left hand. He didn't bother taking it in his right, his master hand, because he was certain that physical strength and dexterity had nothing to do with this.
He thrust the jawbone toward Procron's chest. It slid through the wizard's ribs like a spear driving into loose sand. There was a sound as if the world itself was screaming.
Above, the net of lightning that held back Typhon vanished; the monster began to pour down through the sky. The myriad lights around the vast room went dark.
Procron's body crumbled like rotten wood, but the diamond skull blurred. It was vanishing by becoming more diffuse, the way fog lifts as the sun climbs higher.
The scream grew fainter also, but it continued for a very long time.
Varus turned and walked back toward the entrance. There he would wait for horror to engulf him. I am a citizen of Carce.
***
"Where are we going?" Alphena asked. "Ah--that is, if you please, Lord Gryphon."
The gryphon's muscles rippled over his bones with the rhythm of a dance. His fur lifted and settled like the surface of a pond when something very large swims beneath it. Even as keyed up as Alphena was, she found the movement entrancing.
"To your world, little one," the gryphon said, cocking his eagle head just enough that he could look at her with his right eye. "To your world, though not to your time."
He gave a throaty chuckle and added, "We are going to your brother; or to where your brother died, if we are not in time."
Alphena tried to prevent her muscles from tensing. She couldn't, of course; and even if she had, the gryphon would probably have smelled her sudden fear.
"Thank you, lord," she said, proud that at least her voice didn't quaver. "I'll hope that we arrive in time."
Images began to pick themselves out the hazy light ahead. As before, their destination became clear but did not swell as her mount's wings beat.
At first Alphena thought the gryphon had made a mistake: the bleak world before them was nearly featureless. It was the Moon glimpsed in the moments before the Atlantean guardians lifted from it on their vultures, not the blue seas and green continents of the Earth.
The fortress of Procron the Atlantean stood on a plain covered with plants whose leaves were the color of charcoal. Alphena tensed again; then she smiled.
Uktena saw you off once, she thought. Since apparently my friend didn't finish you, I'll see what I can do to what's left.
She thought again about the axe, lost off the shore of the Western Isles. She flexed her fingers in the gryphon's fur. Perhaps she could find a rock when they landed on that stark plain. If not, well, she would do what she could with her hands and teeth.
"Such a brave little warrior," the gryphon said affectionately. "It is not Procron with whom you have to deal; your brother has settled that."
The world before Alphena changed. A mesh of glittering fire surrounded it, the violet fury which Procron had used to lash his enemies. As suddenly, the shield of lightning vanished and--unseen till that moment--a torrent of fangs and claws poured down to cover the stark plain on which the Atlantean's fortress stood.
The crystal spire itself remained untouched for the moment. As Alphena watched, her brother stepped through the gateway and stood facing his monstrous doom.
"I can try to snatch him up," said the gryphon. He sounded reflective, not frightened. "I will not be able to rise before Typhon catches us, however; and I'm not sure that your brother will survive the haste with which I will be forced to act."
He added, "I am not sure why Typhon hesitates. Typhon is destruction; it has no purpose but to destroy."
"No," said Alphena, her lips dry. "He isn't destruction. Set me down beside my brother. If--"
She sat up stiffly. She had been about to say, "If you dare."
"If you please, Lord Gryphon," she said. Since he knows my thoughts, he knows that my apology is sincere. "I regret the danger that I cause you to face."
The gryphon's laughter was cruel and triumphant. "What warrior expects to die in his nest, little one?" he said in a voice so rumblingly deep that the words were scarcely distinct. "Did I not know who you were when I chose to accompany you?"
His broad wings fanned and his forequarters reared, halting him in mid flight. Alphena hugged herself to the feathered neck. With no transition that she could see, the gryphon's hind legs touched the narrow strip between Varus in the gateway of the crystal spire and Typhon's looming presence. The wings beat once more; then the cat torso settled and Alphena slid to the cold ground.
"Sister?" Varus said. The gryphon, stretching his great body in studied unconcern, was between them now. "Alphena, what are you doing here?"
She ignored him. "Uktena?" she said. Before her, surrounding her and now dwarfing Procron's fortress, rose a solid wall: it was snarling flesh where she focused but in the corners of her eyes the foaming, high-piled ocean. "My friend Uktena!"
The wall trembled toward her: a cliff crumbling, a wave breaking. Alphena stood, looking up: scratched, naked; her eyes on the verge of tears, but she wouldn't cry, she wouldn't.
The shaman Uktena brushed a lock of her hair out of her eyes with his left hand. "I did not expect to find you in this place, little one," he said.
"You're back," Alphena whispered, the words choking her throat. She gripped the shaman's hand and held it to her cheek with both of hers. "I was afraid I'd never see you again."
She couldn't see him now, because of the tears. She squeezed harder. Uktena's hand was as firm as a hickory root.
"I will never come back, child," he said quietly, stroking her hair with his free hand. "What I was in my home is gone forever, just as the wizard Procron is gone."
"Uktena," she said. "Please. Please, my friend. Let my brother go and the gryphon too. He's a brave warrior, you'd like him."
She drew a deep breath. She didn't open her eyes because she was afraid of what she would see.
"Let them go," Alphena said, "and I will stay. My life for my brother's. That's fair, isn't it?"
Uktena laughed the way thunder boomed when he fought Procron in the sea. "Fair?" he said. "What is fair? Everyone dies and everything dies, and I destroy all things. I am the destroyer!"
"You are my friend," Alphena said against the shaman's hard chest. "You are my friend, no matter what anybody says. I don't care!"
"Little one, little one," Uktena said. "You stood by me in good times and bad. Indeed--"
He chuckled again, but this time there was humor in the sound.
"--a person less fearless than yourself might have said that there were only bad times. Go, take your brother and the mount who glares at me like a frog preparing to fight a stork. You will all die, for all things die. But not today, and not at my hand."
"Uktena, you deserved better," Alphena said. Her voice was so low that that she heard the words mostly in her mind.
"I have the world to myself, Alphe
na," he said. "Who is there greater than I?"
He laughed, but the humor was missing.
"Sister?" said Varus at her side. "You might be more comfortable wearing this."
He offered Alphena his tunic. He must have taken it off, then put his toga on again with the coarse wool directly against his bare flesh as though he were a sturdy plowman of ancient Carce.
Which he was, Alphena realized, in the fashions that mattered. She had learned what a man was in these last few weeks; and her bookish brother, to her astonishment, was a man in all the best senses.
"Anyway," he said, smiling as though he were unaware of the horror poised over him, "I would be more comfortable if my maiden sister weren't prancing around as naked as a plucked squab."
"Your brother," said the gryphon, "cannot hear your conversation with the person whom you call your friend. I heard, however. May I suggest that this would be a good time for me to deliver you to your stepmother in Carce?"
"Yes," said Alphena, her voice muffled as she pulled the tunic over her head. She turned. Varus was staring at the shaman. She said, "Brother, what do you see?"
"I can't describe it," Varus said, wetting his lips with his tongue. It was a moment before he met her eyes and forced a weak smile. "But part of the time I'm seeing Ocean, if that's what you mean. I don't know why the wave doesn't fall on me. On us."
"Get on the gryphon's back," Alphena said, swallowing. "I'll get up behind you. He has kindly agreed to take us to mother, who is back in Carce."
Varus looked doubtfully at the gryphon, who said in a tone of drawling boredom, "Or if the boy would prefer to stay, I won't object to leaving him."
"I don't know how--" Varus said tartly. He was probably going to say something about not knowing how to mount so large an animal.
He jumped up before Alphena could offer to help, throwing himself across the gryphon's back like a pair of saddlebags. He must have realized that this wasn't a time for debate or the decorous behavior of the Forum, though he really wasn't much of an athlete. Alphena grabbed his right ankle to keep him from sliding completely over their mount and landing head-first on the other side.