Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth (35 page)

The basin was six feet in diameter. Across it from her was a short figure—a wizened child rather than a little man—who glared at her in fury.

“Who are you?” he shrieked. “Who?
Who?
”

Alphena drew up to her full height, which, slight though it was, made her taller than the Child. She sheathed the borrowed sword with a
sring!
clink against the lip of the scabbard. She didn’t need a weapon for this little fellow, and showing contempt helped her state of mind.

She wasn’t afraid of the Child. She
was
afraid, though: afraid of the unknown, which was most of her present situation.

“I am the Lady Alphena,” she said. She tried to project a ringing tone, but the hall seemed to drain her voice to a querulous squeak. “I am the daughter of Gaius Alphenus Saxa, Governor of Lusitania and former consul, and the Lady Hedia.”

She paused, then added, “And who, sirrah, are you?”

The Child rocked back on his heels and buried his face in his hands. For a moment Alphena thought he was going to cry.

He lowered his hands and looked at her again but without the anger that had flared so brightly when he first saw her. “Who indeed?” the Child said bitterly. “A halfling, an abortion. I was the greatest magician of all time, and I am
nothing
!”

He stared into the basin. The liquid contents suddenly cleared. As though through a high window, Alphena looked down on a village of grass shacks. She saw no living humans, but corpses sprawled among the huts.

In the central plaza was a small wooden idol. On the ground around it were the skulls of human beings and crocodiles.

“Where…?” Alphena began, but she swallowed the rest of her question because the scene had changed.

She saw Hedia and Melino, but they were in a jungle of strange trees and huge, bright-colored flowers. The magician had the staff and ring with which he had worked his illusions at the dinner party, but he was also carrying a leather-bound codex closed with iron latches.

Hedia looked regal and so unconcerned that she
had
to be exerting all of her control. Only a terrible situation could bring her to that fierce resolution. Beside her and Melino, apparently with them, was a column of flame, orange and hungry.

Alphena swallowed. The Child made stirring motions with his left index finger; the images began to succeed one another more quickly. Some she didn’t recognize, but she saw her brother, Varus, on a boat of some sort, which was being rowed by—

By horrible things, worse than demons. There were six of them, voids of aching hunger without shape or being. Varus ignored them, as did the older man in the stern at the steering oar.

Alphena’s mouth was dry. She was no longer afraid for herself. She imagined a world without Varus. He had been the only thing stable and constant while she was growing up with a father who ignored his children and their birth mother, who was even more distant.

Again Alphena might have spoken, but the scene became flat, yellow thornbush in which stood a tree with a huge trunk and limbs like roots thrusting into the air. The leaves were in sprays at the tips of tiny branches, completely out of scale on a trunk fifty feet in diameter.

Beside the tree danced the three brown-skinned girls. In the center of their circle was the glowing Egg that Alphena was seeking.
The way to it was here in the tomb after all!

“There!” she cried. “Who are the women? And what’s that in the middle of them?”

The Child sidled around the basin toward her. He cackled and said, “They are the Daughters, and that is the Egg. Some call them the Daughters of the Egg, but they call themselves the Daughters of the Mind.”

“Is it a gryphon’s egg?” Alphena said, pointing.

She jerked her arm back. She’d almost touched the image. She suddenly realized that she didn’t know what would happen if she did. She had a feeling that it wasn’t merely an image.

“The Daughters do not think that it is a gryphon’s egg,” said the Child slyly. “But time will tell.”

Alphena was so engrossed in the dancers that she wasn’t aware of what the Child was doing until he put his arm around her waist. She cried out and jumped away.

“What are you trying to do?” she shouted. If she hadn’t been so shocked, she would have slapped him.

The Child looked away, grimacing, and wrung his hands. “I don’t know what you mean,” he muttered.

Meeting her eyes again, he said,
“Wholly a goddess, her white arms drew him in though he tried to resist!”

“I want to go back to—” Alphena then thought again. “I want to go to my mother. You showed her to me. Can you take me there?”

The images in the basin were shifting, changing, but they no longer had her attention. She clasped her arms before her.

“You see this body, the result of treachery,” the Child said. His expression was meant to be wheedling, though the result was ugly beyond Alphena’s previous imagination. “But this is not me—my genius remains. My verse makes me a god! You should feel honored at the chance to become the consort of a god!”

Whatever happened to his body,
Alphena thought,
must have damaged his mind too. But he’s my best hope of escaping.

“I don’t care about poetry,” she said, flicking the fingers of both hands contemptuously. “My brother is a poet too. If I wanted to listen to poetry, I’d listen to his. I want to get
out
of this place. If you help me, my father will reward you.”

“You heifer!” the Child shrieked in berserk fury.

He lunged forward, shoving Alphena hard. She reached for his ear to twist him away, but the lip of the porphyry basin behind her caught her knees.

She tumbled over backward. As she plunged into the basin, she saw the village around the hideous black idol. The corpses scattered on the ground had decayed to skeletons.

*   *   *

C
ORYLUS TURNED AND WENT
back up the walk to Melino’s house. He wasn’t running, but he strode as quickly as his tired muscles let him.

Corylus wasn’t sure he
could
run. He had pushed himself pretty hard following the Princess through that jungle.

He grinned. He wasn’t exactly out of condition, but he didn’t have the edge he’d gotten when he lived with his father on the Danube. There had been very little to do
except
keep in shape in the barracks town of Carnuntum, of course.

“Headman!” Admetus said. He’d lifted his spear, and the three men with him also had their weapons ready. “What Hell did you drop from?”

Hecate take me if I know,
Corylus thought, but he didn’t let the words come off his tongue. Even his grin seemed to take the nervous guards aback.

Aloud he said, “Has Master Melino said anything to you?”

“What!” said Gittus. “What would he say to us?”

That was as informative an answer as Admetus’ own, “No, sir, we haven’t seen him all day.”

He took a better look at Corylus. “Sir,” he said, “did you just hack your way through the Dacian army? What’s going on here?”

“There may be some trouble,” Corylus muttered. “Ah—it’s not my blood.”

Mostly it wasn’t his blood. The jagged pain across the right side of his ribs reminded him that some of it certainly was his blood.

Corylus had been thinking about his strained muscles and the amount of work it would take to sharpen his sword back to fighting condition. He hadn’t been concerned about the state of his skin and clothing, because those weren’t important concerns. They
were
fairly important if he was to be seen in public.

“Do you have a cape?” he said, glancing around the detachment. He could wash his arms and legs in the watering tank, but his tunic was more clotted red than its creamy natural wool color.

The men looked at him blankly. They were ill at ease, doubtful about what had happened, and worried about what would come next. Rather than shout pointlessly, Corylus said, “Never mind; I’ll check the troops in the garden.”

He went around the side this time. He didn’t know what the baboons would do about someone who stank of blood and didn’t have the escort of a magician.

Corylus grinned.
And
whose sword needed sharpening, though he’d make do if he must.

The detachment in back was if anything more surprised than Admetus and his men had been. They didn’t recognize their captain. Xerxes shouted, “Look alive, Glabrio!” through the gate, and drew his short, incurved sword.

The blade had gold inlays, suggesting that Xerxes had been a man of some significance before circumstances caused him to leave his home in the East to see what Carce offered. Corylus suspected the main thing Xerxes had found in the Republic was a lack of death warrants with his name on them.

“It’s all right!” Corylus said. “I need to wash off. But keep an eye out; there may be trouble that I haven’t already taken care of.”

He slipped into the garden—Glabrio had opened the gate to see what was going on—without further discussion. By warning the guards to watch for something coming after him, he hoped to avoid a long discussion.

Instead of washing off in the trough, Corylus strode past it to the umbrella pine. He laid his left hand on the bark and leaned against it as before.

“Captain?” Glabrio said at his shoulder. “What—”

“Not now!” Corylus said. “Don’t disturb me or it’s all our lives!”

The snarl chased Glabrio back toward the gate; none of the other guards showed a willingness to pursue the matter. Corylus hoped he was lying, but the chance the statement was true was better than he liked.

Corylus slipped into the green coolness. He felt … it wasn’t peace, though that was the first word he might have used. Rather, he was aware of time and of the length of time … and of the insignificance of everything except the sun and the rain and the earth itself.

“Mistress,” he said to the old woman waiting for him. “I feel better just for seeing you. Thank you.”

“We are cousins, after all,” the dryad said, matching his gentle smile. “Should I not greet a cousin? Even your human relatives would do that.”

“Lady, I freed the Singiri princess,” Corylus said. He grimaced, frustrated with himself for saying what the pine already knew. “Do you know—can you tell me, I mean, what Melino will do when he learns that I released her?”

“The magician is on Zabulon’s Isle,” the sprite said. “I cannot say what he is doing, for when you freed the Princess you broke the magician’s bond with the Waking World and with me. I suppose he will try to leave Zabulon’s Isle, but—”

Her smile had an edge.

“—without the Singiri to bring him back here, the only place he can go is to the Otherworld from which the Singiri freed him. He has no friends there and many enemies, so he will hesitate to do that.”

She smiled more broadly and added, “He is cruel, even for the cruel race of men. I do not trouble myself with human matters generally, but I am pleased with what you have done, Cousin.”

“He can’t come back, then?” said Corylus, trying to keep the surge of hope out of his voice. Even if Melino wasn’t the danger to the world that Lucinus had claimed he was, Corylus didn’t mind the thought of never seeing the fellow again.

“The female with him is no magician,” the dryad said. She shrugged. “They will stay where they are or they will go to a worse place, but they will not return to the Waking World unless a great magician helps them again.”

Smiling more broadly, she added, “I do not think the Singiri princess will help this magician again, now that you have freed her.”

Because it was so unexpected, it was a moment before the dryad’s offhand reference to “the female with him” really sank in. Corylus swallowed and said, “Who is the female? You hadn’t mentioned her before.”

“I don’t pay attention to humans,” she said with another shrug. “And why should I have mentioned her? I told you she isn’t a magician, so she doesn’t matter.”

Corylus felt a jolt of fury, but the dryad was right. He was angry because he hadn’t bothered to ask for information that a pine tree wouldn’t see any reason to volunteer. Pines scatter thousands of seeds every season, so to them the concepts of kinship and family were broader and much more shallow than they were to humans.

And of course he might be wrong to fear that Hedia was the woman with Melino. There were many other women.…

“Thank you, mistress,” Corylus said as his spirit withdrew from the dryad’s world. “I have work to do now, and perhaps a mistake to repair.”

If it could be repaired.

Corylus shook himself as his soul and body merged. The bark was a rough presence under his left hand.

The guards were staring at him; he still held his bare sword. He sheathed it with care, using both hands. Heavy use had warped the blade slightly as well as dulling it.

“Glabrio?” he called over his shoulder as he bathed his arms to the shoulders in the irrigation tank. He splashed water on his legs, but if he moved fast enough nobody was likely to ask him about what looked like blood. “Did a woman come by this gate to see Master Melino this morning?”

“No, sir,” Glabrio said. “But the same one that came to the front yesterday was here again today, only she didn’t have her servant this time, Admetus says. I guess she’s still in there.”

I’m afraid you guess wrong,
Corylus thought, but he nodded assent and went out through the gate to jog around the house. He felt cold in the heart as he rejoined the guard detachment in front.

“Admetus, did a woman visit Master Melino this morning?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Admetus said. “He let her in himself. I guess she’s still in there, right?”

“Captain, she’s real class,” volunteered Magnus, one of the newly hired gladiators. He had a thick German accent, but that was nothing new to Corylus. “I seen her last year, watching us train with some fancy friends of hers. She keeps covered up when she comes visiting here, but her name’s Lady Hedia.”

“All right,” Corylus said. His mind put together a course of action, just as he would have done if the transport in which his patrol had crossed the Danube ripped its bottom out on a snag. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”