The Shadow of Ararat

by Thomas Harlan

  "You've the other tools?" Abdmachus asked, turning back to the Prince.

  Maxian hefted the leather bag he had slung over his shoulder; there was a clank of metal from within. In the moonlight, the Nabatean's head bobbed in acknowledgment.

  "Then let us go," he said, his voice still low.

  The door to the temple was a heavy iron grate, ornamented with a heavy cruciform lock. The bars were closely set and very thick. Abdmachus knelt next to the lock and carefully felt it with his fingertips. After a moment he began chanting in a very low voice, almost inaudible, yet Maxian could feel the shape of the words clearly. The air around the two men changed, becoming oppressively heavy, then there was the sound of rusted gears and rods scraping and the lock clicked open. Abdmachus stood and breathed out a shuddering breath. He wiped his forehead, then pushed the door gingerly open.

  "It's been too long since I practiced that," the Nabatean said, his voice wry.

  Within, a long narrow room led to the back of the building. The walls on either side were lined with deep-set niches, each holding a portrait bust. At the end of the room was a curved wall and a small altar. Behind the altar stood the mossy statue of a woman. Maxian stepped close and could barely make out the visage of a grim-faced goddess. Minerva, he thought to himself. Behind him, the Nabatean was rooting about in the heavy bag.

  "Here," Abdmachus whispered, "there should be a circular hole in the side of the altar." He handed Maxian an iron rod, sixteen inches in length, with a handle at the end. The Prince knelt by the side of the marble block that comprised the altar. He felt along the side in the gloom; the lanterns were almost completely shuttered to prevent their lights from betraying them to passersby. His fingers found a smooth-sided hole, and he guided the bolt into the receptacle. On the other side of the block, Abdmachus had done the same. The Nabatean peeked up over the stone.

  "Are you ready?" he asked. Maxian nodded. "Then on the count of two."

  "One, then two... heave!"

  The Prince grunted as he put his shoulder into dragging at the handle. Between the two of them, they managed to dislodge the block, revealing a dark opening under the altar and a draft of icy air. A smell of dampness and decay rose from the pit as well. Abdmachus shifted the hood on his lantern and peered down into the darkness.

  "Excellent!" he breathed. "There is still a ladder."

  Maxian laughed softly.

  "You've done this before, I see," he said to his companion.

  Abdmachus' white teeth flashed in the light of the lantern. "My family was poor, and the hills around my home city of Petra are riddled with the tombs of the nobility... sometimes an apprentice magi must make do with what he has. It has been some time, but one does remember some things."

  The Nabatean tied off a line on the handle of his lantern, then leaned over the pit and lowered it slowly down. When it rested at the bottom of the pit, he swung his legs over the lip and onto the first rung of the ladder. Maxian watched while the old man's head disappeared into the shaft, then took one last look around. The empty eyes of the ancient heads gazed curiously back at him from the funereal niches. He shook his head in amazement at the desecration he and the old man were about to perform. No matter, he thought, the dead care nothing. I need a tool, and many who would die will live because of what we do.

  —|—

  The tunnels of the catacombs were narrow and low-roofed. Abdmachus led the way with his lantern, now unhooded, while Maxian carried the bag of tools and the other light. The air was fresh and a soft breeze blew into his face as they clambered through chambers strewn with bones, skulls, and decaying burial goods. After fifteen minutes the Prince realized that they were tending downward. Tunnel after tunnel branched off to the side of their path. A huge warren of narrow holes, pits, and cavities filled with skulls had been dug under the tomb of the Julians. A fine drift of finger bones crunched under his boots as they walked.

  "Master Abdmachus, how big is this place?" Maxian asked at last as they descended another ladder.

  The Nabatean laughed and stopped at the bottom of a corroded wooden ladder, steadying it as the Roman came down. "This valley has been the burial place of Rome for over a thousand years, my young friend. All of those millions of bodies have to go somewhere. Worry not, we are almost there."

  At the bottom of another ladder, unaccountably, the tunnel veered sharply left and climbed steeply. Maxian scrambled in the loose dirt to climb up, then caught hold of a firm edge of stone. He pulled himself up and found that it was a marble step. A staircase now ascended, and the light of Abdmachus' lantern was far ahead. It was easier going than the loose dirt but still difficult as the steps were tilted sharply to the left. After a moment they joined a wall with a smooth marble facing. Maxian paused, staring in amazement at the bas-relief carved into the marble. A Roman family sat around a table, raising wine cups in the blessing of the fall harvest. The face of Bacchus was graven above them, laughing from a wreath of holly leaves.

  "Come, my friend." Abdmachus' voice echoed from ahead. "This is the place."

  At the top of the tilted staircase, Maxian crawled out into a large chamber. High above, a rough earth ceiling showed the twisted roots of trees. The floor was uneven and loosely packed with gravel and dirt. By the light of the two lanterns, three tomb-houses jutted from the floor and walls. Dirt spilled around their marble doorways, but they were unmistakably of the vintage of the temple they had entered through. The Prince stared around in amazement.

  "How...?" His voice faltered.

  Abdmachus looked up from where he was squatting by the door of the middle tomb-house. "As I said, young master, the people of the city have been burying their dead here for over a thousand years—once the valley that we rode through was not flat and level, but a long, low, swale running south from the city. Hundreds of tombs like these dotted that valley. There was, if Cassius Dio is to be believed, a Temple of the Magna Mater, not too far from where we entered. Then, when during the glory of the Republic it was decided that the Via Appia should be built, the Claudians filled in the valley, burying all of those tombs, temples, and monuments. Like these..."

  Abdmachus turned back to the door of the tomb-house. His long fingers traced an inscription cut into the door, brushing dirt away. He grunted noncommittally as Maxian leaned close with the other lantern. The inscription was shallow and hard to read.

  "I think that this is the one. The patterns coalesce around it in the right way."

  The Nabatean looked up at the Prince, his eyes shadowed in the lantern-light. "The door is sealed in such a way that I cannot open it. You must, and it will be difficult. The body within was lain here after a long journey, and the men who buried it feared that it would not rest well—not unexpected from a man foully murdered by his supposed friends. A working was laid on this tomb, particularly upon this door, and it has only grown stronger with age, not weaker. It will take plain force to overcome it in the time available to us."

  Maxian nodded and laid the bag of tools down at his side. Abdmachus moved aside, and the Prince knelt in the loamy dirt before the door with his hands on his thighs. He calmed himself and then silently chanted the Opening of Hermes. After taking a circlet of twisted yew branches from the bag, Abdmachus settled the crown on the Prince's head. The darkness of the cavern seemed to close in on Maxian for a moment, but then his sight blossomed.

  The door to the tomb-house was a deep viridian abyss. Trickling currents of fire crawled across the marble facing and descended into unguessable depths. For a moment he quailed before the strength of the door ward. Then he centered again and reached out to draw power from the crusty loam of the floor and the tree roots high above.

  There was an instant of emptiness as the Prince drew on the fabric of the unseen world around him, then a stunning rush of power burst to him from the walls, the floor, from the litter of bones that were scattered about the cavern. Blinding white-hot energy coursed through the corridors of his mind.

  —|—


  In the dark cavern, Abdmachus had closed down all of his othersight and sat, cross-legged, at the side of the young man, his fingertips laid lightly on the pulse at Maxian's neck. The body of the Prince stiffened suddenly, and Abdmachus struggled to keep from laughing out loud in triumph. The boy twitched and his body convulsed, but his pulse—though it began to race—stayed strong. The Nabatean began a low chant, placing his fingertips lightly on either temple of the Prince. Around him, the detritus of bones trembled in the ground and then each femur, skull, and scapula began to twist itself free of the earth. Finger bones scrabbled in the dirt, then began to rise into the air. Clavicles rose and joined the slowly spinning array of bones. The door of the tomb-house began to flicker with a tremendously deep blue, almost black.

  One of the skulls, already missing a quarter of the forehead, suddenly disintegrated in midair with a loud crack as the power Maxian was drawing from the remains of the dead took its physical integrity. There was a rapid popping sound as the smaller fibula and ribs pulverized. The other remains began to erode as an invisible wind lashed across them, spinning them faster and faster around the old man and the Prince.

  Maxian felt and saw and heard none of this. His attention was utterly filled by the snarling whirlwind of power that had rushed into him like a mountain torrent. Something in the back of his mind gibbered in fear at the sleeting fire that channeled through his body. But his intellect was soaring on a godlike wave of ability. He directed his will against the tomb door and the ancient ward rang like a porcelain plate as the vast power smote it. The viridian abyss flexed under the assault and then deformed, suddenly becoming an almost silver mirror, throwing back a contorted reflection of the Prince. Then it broke apart in a shower of tiny green flecks. Maxian's intellect stormed into the tomb-house, greedily swallowing up the long-dormant energies of those buried within. At the center of the tomb, his rush slowed and then stopped. The body of a man lay on a simple bier. The body, long decayed and shriveled to a bundle of dry sticks, was dressed in the tattered remains of a formal white toga. Once leather-bound sandals had attired his feet, but they were only scraps now.

  Maxian struggled to stop the avalanche of power that his initial attempts to draw on the rocks and stones had precipitated. At the edge of his perception, he could sense that the roof of the tomb, the walls, even the floor was beginning to erode. If he did not halt the effect, even the body before him, the lever that Abdmachus had promised him, would be destroyed. Grimly he tried to recenter his thought, and after a seemingly endless period of raging against the dissolution that was tearing at him, he succeeded. Though he could no longer feel it, his body was soaked with sweat and had collapsed in Abdmachus' arms.

  Maxian's spirit hovered over the ancient body. His shape body was filled with what seemed to be an almost infinite power, burning white-hot at the core of his form. Mentally he flexed his healing talent and found that it had subtly changed. Before it was a delicate skein, capable of settling with utmost precision into damaged flesh or a wounded organ. Now it throbbed with a visceral power, capable of reforming shattered bones from chips, of reconstructing whole bodies. He wondered with delight at the vision of transformation it showed him. His thought turned back to the body. This will work! he exulted.

  He placed his hands, shimmering in and out of mortal sight, on the withered body. He muttered a low chant and dust puffed from the floor into a great cloud that filled the chamber. He spoke again, strange inhuman words, and the dust congealed into the visage of a dull red heart suspended over the body of the dead man. Stiff fingers sank into the chest of the corpse, peeling back dry leathery skin to expose the corroded organs. The dust-heart began to beat, stiffly at first, but then filling with blood. The organ steamed and smoked. Maxian seized it from the air and crushed it in his invisible fingers. Hot blood, almost boiling, spurted between his fingers and flooded into the exposed cavity.

  Maxian steeled himself, bringing the words of an old spell to his mind. Abdmachus had shown him the crumbling parchment and he had labored to make out the words, crudely scribed in the tongue of ancient Thessaly, but now they were clear and bright in his mind. Ghostly lips moved, saying:

  "O Furies and horrors of hell! Dread Chaos, eager to destroy countless worlds! O Ruler of the underworld, who suffers for endless centuries because the death of the gods above cannot come too soon! Persephone, who hates and reviles her own mother in heaven! Hecate, goodness of the dark moon, who grants me silent speech with the dead! O Custodian, who feeds the snake-crowned Dog with human flesh! Ancient ferryman who labors to bring souls back to me on his ship of bones! Heed my prayer!"

  The blood, steaming and hot, settled in the inner cavity of the body, soaking into long-closed arteries and veins. A sucking sound filled the dank chamber and the corpse trembled, filling with the burning liquid.

  "If these lips of mine that call you have been tainted enough with hideous crimes, if I have always eaten human flesh before chanting such spells, if I have cut open the breasts of new mothers and washed them out with warm brains, if any baby could have lived, once his head and organs were placed in your temple—grant me my desire!"

  The corpse, its lips flushed a pale rose by the blood curdling within it, did not move.

  "Tisiphone and Megara! Are you listening to me? Will you not use your savage whips, studded with hooks and teeth, to drive this ancient wretch from the wasteland of Erebus? Shall I conjure your true names to call you forth into dreadful light? Shall I follow you over graves and burial grounds, driving you away from every tomb and urn? You, Hecate, shall I drag you before the gods in heaven and show them your true aspect, pale and morbid, always hidden behind artifice? Shall I tell the gods, O Persephone, what kind of dear food it is that keeps you under the earth, what bond of love unites you with the gloomy king of night, what defilement you welcomed that makes your mother deny you?"

  The stones of the tomb echoed with the violence in Maxian's shout. The air crawled with strange lights and shuddering darkness. Still, the body on the slab did not move, though now wisps of steam and smoke issued forth from its eyes and mouth.

  "Upon you, you lowest rulers of the world, shall I focus the sun—breaking open your caves—and daylight shall strike you. Will you obey my will? Or must I call him who makes the earth tremble when his name is invoked, who can look upon the Gorgon unveiled, who lashes a frightened Fury with her own whip, who dwells in the depth of Tartarus that is hidden even from your view, for whom you are the 'gods above,' who commits perjury in the name of Styx?"

  The clotted blood, thick and viscous in the open pounds of the body, suddenly boiled up again. The limbs of the corpse twitched as it circulated, reaching the extremities. Flooded with the black liquid, the tissues in the cold breast began to vibrate, new life stealing into organs long unaccustomed to it, struggling with death. Every limb began to shake, the sinews stretching, the tendons popping. Eyelids flickered open, revealing dead white orbs. Stiff lips twitched and the chest, its gaping wounds closed and puckered, heaved with breath.

  Maxian was giddy with triumph, seeing life and vitality flow throughout his creation. His head began to spin and he clutched at the stone lip of the table. His ghostly fingers fell through the platform.

  In the cavern, Abdmachus stared up at the ceiling with near terror. The whirlwind of bones was gone, all of the remains consumed by the young master. The roots that anchored the roof were gone as well, and a steady trickle of gravel and stones rained down onto the floor of the chamber. The tomb door was gone, dissolved into dust, and a strange wind now blew into the open tomb. For all his long years scrabbling in the earth of graveyards, ossuaries and among the remains of the dead, the Nabatean harbored a carefully concealed fear of close spaces. The earth groaned around him as abused stones shifted. He cowered over the body of the young man, his own talents extended to the utmost to hold up the pattern of protection that kept him from being consumed.

  The body of the young Roman twitched in his hands, and suddenly a s
craping sound came from the open door of the tomb. The Nabatean twitched around to face the opening, his mind gibbering to him of cold-eyed ghouls and the other denizens of the dead places. In the ruddy orange light of the remaining lantern, the hand that suddenly came out of the darkness and gripped the door frame was smeared with red blood. Abdmachus flinched back and scuttled away from the body of the Prince. Another hand joined the first, and then the naked body of an elderly man heaved itself out of the doorway. He was almost bald, with thinning gray hair and a strong, patrician nose. His body was well muscled yet showing age despite an active life. A welter of scars marked his chest and the side of his neck. The dead man sneered, seeing the little oriental cowering in the dirt before him.

  "Get up," the man snarled in an archaic accent. "Bring me clothing."

  Abdmachus crept across the floor to the bag of tools and began rummaging in it, one eye on the dead man. The corpse pushed away from the wall and shook its head like a dog shedding water. It raised its hands and turned them over, seeing their pale flesh. It felt its chest and traced the scars and old wounds. At last it looked down on the unconscious body of the Prince.

  "This is the one who has given me life again?" the dead man rasped.

  Abdmachus looked up from the tunic, boots, undershirt, and cowled robe that he had removed from the tool bag. "Yes," he said, "he is your master now."

  The dead man snorted and dust puffed from his nose. Puzzled, he dug a bony finger into each nostril and dragged out dirt and the desiccated remains of worms.

  "Pfaugh!" The dead man cursed and tried to spit. A fine cloud of white powder drifted out of his open mouth. "Have you any wine?" it asked in a querulous voice.