Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth (46 page)

Lucinus raised his
athame
and pointed with it as he intoned, “
Let the spirits send to me—
”

Varus sank into himself. He clearly remembered slapping back the dog and dragging Lucinus into the tomb. He had watched it through his own eyes and from a disembodied viewpoint that was still his own … but he had no idea of how he had done it or even why he had decided to do it.

Yes, of course—he’d been irritated when the magician accused him of cowardice and stupidity. If someone had asked Varus at that moment what the result of stepping within the guardian’s reach would be, though, he would have said that the dog would tear him to bits.

Even so, he hadn’t been courting suicide. Some part of Gaius Alphenus Varus had known exactly what he was doing.

“—
truth through the membrane of black horn!
” Lucinus shouted. Into the air before him lifted a spiral of sand that caught sunlight and formed itself into images:

Melino scuttled from the cave, bent over something that he held to his chest
.

Lucinus was breathing deeply. He no longer chanted, but his
athame
continued its complex rhythm as though his arm’s motion wasn’t connected with the deathly fatigue Varus saw in his eyes.

A bitch came out of the cave, whisking her tail in wide sweeps. The three-headed guardian followed her, but she ignored its fawning attempts to attract her attention. It snubbed up at the end of its chain; the bitch continued through the curtain of grass and rubbed against Melino’s leg
.

Melino spoke a word, unheard in the vision. Hedia rose from where the bitch had stood, slender and startlingly beautiful. Her garments lay on the ground; she donned them with her usual grace
.

Melino lowered his arms to look at the thing he had brought from Zabulon’s tomb. It was a codex bound in black leather, with iron mountings
.

Lucinus gave a stifled groan; the vision collapsed into a cascade of sand without form or meaning. He wailed, “We’ve lost. That woman gave Melino the key to Zabulon’s
Book
. With the
Book
he will destroy the Earth, demon that he is. There is no hope for the world, and there is no hope for us except that we stay here on the island which Zabulon took out of space and time.”

Varus frowned as he considered what he had just seen. “I don’t believe that,” he said. “My mother would never help destroy the world. There’s some other thing going on.”

“You saw her, you fool!” Lucinus cried, too miserable and desperate to choose his words. “You saw her, didn’t you? She distracted the guardian and Melino has the
Book
!”

Varus got to his feet. “That is bad logic,” he said, as coolly as though he were addressing another member of Pandareus’ class. “Even if the vision is to be trusted, and I don’t think we
can
trust the vision. We’ve seen other things in this place which indicate that it has its own laws.”

“Your mother is a fool and you are a fool, boy!” the magician said. “Melino tricked her. It’s obvious that she was helping him!”

Another man—his friend Corylus among them—would have reacted a different way. Varus laughed.

“Little man,” he said, drawling his words like the most affected member of his noble circle. “Fooling me would be easy enough. Fooling my mother would be quite another thing. You would more easily trick me with a forged stanza of Sappho than you or
any
man would mislead my mother regarding his intentions.”

Varus thought for a moment. He was fully himself again. He noticed at the back of his mind that he was beginning to feel thirsty. There hadn’t been food or water on the vessel, but he hadn’t been aware of their absence during the voyage.

“Unless Hedia and Melino are still on this island…?” he said to the magician, raising an eyebrow.

“No, no!” Lucinus said peevishly. “They’re gone and the
Book
is gone. Don’t you understand? Zabulon’s
Book
has given Melino
all
power.”

The magician could know if Hedia—or at least the
Book
—was still on the island, though Varus hadn’t seen him do anything to determine that fact. Varus accepted the statement for now. He wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life searching a jungle that probably contained nothing of interest to himself. Which meant—

“Since our purpose for coming here is now moot,” Varus said, “we’ll return to Carce. If nothing else, my friends there may need my—”

He twitched at his unconscious arrogance when he heard the words.

“That is,” he said, “they may be in a situation in which I can help.”

Varus felt a wave of relief now that he’d examined the choices and determined the best course of action under the circumstances. He gestured to the magician.

“Come,” he said. “Get in the boat and I’ll push it off the beach.”

His tone was peremptory, that of a nobleman speaking to a commoner. It wasn’t Varus’ normal way, but Lucinus became an unpleasant companion whenever he thought he was in a position of power.

“We must stay or we’ll die!” Lucinus said. “You have no choice. You have
nothing
!”

He extended his left hand toward the boat and said,
“Go your way; your work is finished.”
A cloud of tiny red motes sprang from his fingertips.

Varus turned. Light covered the boat; its lines softened. In the hull Varus saw his sister standing with her sword out. Toward her strode horse-headed Ethiopes, brandishing their weapons. Corylus and Pandareus appeared at her side.

“You have nothing!” Lucinus repeated.

I have friends.
Varus bent low and dived into the vision.

*   *   *

“
I
’LL LEAD, MASTER,”
Corylus said, walking down the ramp with his sword lifted. A breeze blew from his back, carrying the smoke away. A few puddles of olive oil still burned.

Molten lead had cooled to a bright silvery smear on the stone at Talos’ heel. There was a sparkling sharpness in the air that reminded Corylus of the odor of a nearby lightning bolt.

“I would have liked to learn how Talos was powered,” said Pandareus, bending over to examine the frozen figure. “I don’t suppose he could have told me, even if he were willing to.”

Corylus looked back over his shoulder. “Ah, master…?” he said, hoping he sounded less concerned than he felt. “Ah—Talos is dead, I’m sure. But if your foot slips on the oily floor, those double-edged swords look awfully sharp.”

The swords looked sharp enough to cut sunbeams. If Corylus was any judge, there had been as much magic in their forging as there was in animating Talos.

“Ah,” said Pandareus. He straightened and edged carefully around the automaton. “Yes, I see what you mean.”

“Perhaps we’ll have another chance to look at him,” Corylus said. He winced to hear himself.
That’s the sort of nonsense a nurse tells a child!
“But I hope we don’t, now that I use my mind instead of letting my mouth talk by itself.”

“I’m fairly sure that we’ll see other things just as wonderful as Talos,” Pandareus said. The automaton half-blocked the passage. When they passed him, Pandareus had begun walking alongside Corylus. “I’m less certain that the experience will be as survivable as this has proved, but I’ve never been concerned about personal existence.”

They passed the alcove in which Talos had waited for interlopers. It was just that, a shallow niche of the sort that might have held a statue in a rich man’s house. Corylus walked on, wondering when he would come to the bridge. He saw a glint ahead, but it was too distant to have shape.

“I don’t believe we’re in the material world anymore,” Pandareus said in his usual tone of polite interest. “The floor and the walls aren’t—”

He brushed his left hand through what had seemed to be gray stone before that moment. His hand was fully visible.

At his touch, the walls grew fainter, melting like fog in the sunlight. The gray was replaced by crystal nothingness sparkling with points of light that must be stars in the infinite distance. Both men stood frozen.

The ground—the floor of the passage—began to dissolve also. Corylus could see the stars through where it had been, just as far away as they were in all other directions.

“Oh dear,” said Pandareus. “I’m very sorry, Master Corylus. I fear that my curiosity has killed us both.”

“The bridge is still here,” Corylus said. “Even if we can’t see it.”

He tapped his foot down. The unseen surface was as hard as diamond.

“There was a light in the direction we were going,” he said, focusing his eyes on that point. “You follow directly behind me and we’ll continue on. There won’t be a problem. Ready? We’ll go, then.”

Corylus strode on with every appearance of confidence. All he was sure of was that if he dropped into nothingness Pandareus would have warning enough to stop. Perhaps the scholar would be able to crawl back to the garden on all fours, keeping one hand on the edge. As for Corylus himself—

Well, he would have time to think about that if it happened. Probably a great deal of time.

They walked on. And on.

“I think the light is coming closer,” Corylus said. “That we’re coming closer to the light, that is.”

He’d thought that for … actually, he wasn’t sure for how long. He hadn’t been counting his paces, and with no external markers—neither sun nor scenery—he didn’t have a feel for time.

“I’ve been thinking that myself,” said Pandareus. “I was afraid to say anything, though, because I knew my mind might be tricking me into seeing something I want to be true.”

Corylus risked a glance over his shoulder. Pandareus was slightly to his left instead of directly behind as Corylus had clearly ordered. He was thus able to see things ahead of him besides the back of the younger man.

“Master,” Corylus said, grinning. “I thought of saying that you would make a terrible soldier, but I decided that I would be better saving my breath to discuss the question of whether water is wet.”

“Certainly a matter worth consideration in the unusual circumstances in which we find ourselves,” Pandareus said, nodding. “And Master Corylus? Allow me to congratulate your teacher, from whom you have gathered such skill in the use of
praeteritio.
”

They were both laughing as they reached what they had been approaching, an archway curtained in opaque light. It stood in the midst of nothingness.

“I’ll go through first,” Corylus said after an instant’s consideration. “Follow me immediately. I don’t know that I’ll be able to return to tell you what’s on the other side, and I suspect there’re risks to standing out here also.”

He grinned. “If you step through into molten lava, I’ll apologize now,” he said. “Because I probably won’t have time later.”

“Your apology is accepted,” Pandareus said with a smile of his own. “If all my students had been like you and Lord Varus, my teaching career would have been as uniformly joyful as these past few months have been.”

Corylus stepped into a broad stone room covered with a low dome. In the center, a child-sized man bent over a basin. He was very ugly.

“Welcome, sir,” the little man said. He reminded Corylus of a wax figure that had started to slump in sunlight, but he turned with a pleasant smile. “Welcome, gentlemen, I should say since I see there are two of you. I get few visitors, so I’m glad to see you.”

Corylus felt mildly embarrassed to have entered with his sword ready to thrust.
I’m not so embarrassed that I’m going to sheathe it until I know more about this place, though.

“Pardon us for this intrusion,” he said formally, walking to the center of the hall but angling his approach to keep the stone basin between him and the little man. That made the bare sword less of an overt threat; or anyway, Corylus hoped it did. “We’re looking for a friend of ours, a young girl: Lady Alphena. We were told—we were told by a dryad—that this might be a path—”

He happened to glance into the six-foot-wide basin. Instead of liquid, he saw Alphena standing on a prairie. Beside her were the three short Nubian dancers he had seen in previous visions.

“Hercules!” he shouted. “There she is!”

“Oh,
that
poor girl,” the little man said. “Yes, she was here. I lost my temper and sent her away. I’m terribly sorry; I was sorry the very moment it happened. Though really, she didn’t know
anything
about poetry.”

The vision of Alphena had drawn a sword, not a surprise for anyone who knew her: she practiced in the family gymnasium with the determination of a gladiator whose life depended on his skill. Her life and those of her friends, Corylus included,
had
depended on her skill.

Alphena was small and a woman besides, with less strength than an equally trained man of the same size. That said, she was
very
skilled for a woman, better than many soldiers who assumed their rear-area billets kept them safe. Every once in a while, a German raid would prove that some quartermaster’s clerk should have been spending more time on the practice field than in the wineshops of the Strip.

“I wonder, gentlemen?” the little man said. “You appear to be cultured fellows. I’m trying to remember a line—”

Switching to Greek, he said,
“‘The boy is only a baby.…’”

“Yes, of course,” said Pandareus.
“‘Your son and my son, his mother and father both doomed.’
Andromache is speaking to the corpse of her husband Hector before his pyre is lighted.”

“Yes,” said the little man. “Yes, of course. I—”

Unexpectedly he began to weep. For a moment he covered his face in his wizened hands, but then he thrust them down at his sides and faced his visitors.

“I had the world,” he said, making a broad gesture. “Now I am a ruin and will never be anything more than a ruin. If I leave this room, I will die.
I,
who was ruler of poetry and of the unseen world!”

Pandareus watched the speaker with consuming interest. Corylus instead surveyed the hall now that he was sure the little man didn’t have a weapon or, apparently, any wish to harm them. There were no doors or passages in the walls. The arch by which Corylus and Pandareus entered was blank stone from this side, identical to the rest of the walls.