Night & Demons (21 page)

A hunter learns to wait. It would be dead-dark soon, when the sun set and the moon was still two hours beneath the horizon. Time then to move to the back of the church which he’d reconnoitered by the first light of dawn.

Men left the bath house, laughing and chatting as they headed for their dinners. Vettius watched the three attendants, as motionless as statues on the church porch; as motionless as he was himself.

And he waited.

When Vettius was halfway up the back wall of the church, a patrol of the Watch sauntered by in the street fronting the building.

Watch patrols were primarily fire wardens, but the State equipped them with helmets and spears to deal with any other troubles they might come across. This group was dragging the ferules of its spears along the pavement with a tremendous racket, making sure it
didn’t
come across such troubles . . . but Vettius still paused and waited for the clatter to trail off in the direction of the Theater of Balbus.

Back here, nobody’d bothered to cover the building’s brick fabric with marble, and the mortar between courses probably hadn’t been renewed in the centuries since the structure was raised as a temple. The warehouse whose blind sidewall adjoined the back of the church two feet away was also brick. It provided a similarly easy grip for the cleats of Vettius’s tight-laced boots.

Step by step, steadying himself with his fingertips, the soldier mounted to the clerestory windows beneath the transom of the church. Each was about three feet long but only eight inches high, and their wooden sashes were only lightly pinned to the bricks.

Vettius loosened a window with the point of his sword, then twisted the sash outward so that the brickwork continued to grip one end. If matters went well, he’d be able to hide all signs of his entry when he left.

He hung his cloak over the end of the window he’d swung clear. He’d need the garment to conceal his sword on the way back.

The long spatha was a terrible tool for the present use. He’d brought it rather than a sturdy dagger or simply a prybar because—

Because he was still afraid of whatever he thought he’d seen in Pyrrhus’s eyes the night before. The sword couldn’t help that, but it made Vettius
feel
more comfortable.

There was a faint glow from within the building; one lamp wick had been left burning to light the Prophet’s return home.

Vettius uncoiled his silken line. He’d thought he might need the small grapnel on one end to climb to the window, but the condition of the adjoining walls made the hooks as unnecessary as the dark lantern he’d carried in case the church was unlighted. Looping the cord around an end-frame of the window next to the one he’d removed, he dropped both ends so that they dangled to the floor of Pyrrhus’s sanctum.

He had no real choice but to slide head-first through the tight opening. He gripped the doubled cord in both hands to keep from plunging thirty feet to the stone floor.

His right hand continued to hold the hilt of his naked sword as well. Scabbarded, the weapon might’ve slipped out when he twisted through the window; or so he told himself.

Pyrrhus’s bronze serpent gaped only a few feet from Vettius as he descended the cord, hand over hand. The damned thing was larger than it had looked from below, eighteen—no, probably twenty feet long when you considered the way its coils wrapped the cross. Shadows from the lamplight below drew the creature’s flaring nostrils into demonic horns.

At close view, the bronze head looked much less human than it had from the anteroom. There were six vertical tubes in each eye. They lighted red and green in alternation.

Vettius’s hobnails sparked as he dropped the last yard to the floor. The impact felt good.

Except for Pyrrhus’s absence, the sanctum looked just as it had when the soldier saw it the night before. He went first to the couch that covered the Prophet’s strongbox. It was solid marble, attached to the floor by bronze pivots. Vettius expected a lock of some sort, but only weight prevented the stone from being lifted. So . . . .

He sheathed his sword and gripped the edge of the couch with both hands. Raising the stone would require the strength of three or four normal men, but—

The marble pivoted upward, growling like a sleeping dog.

The cavity beneath was empty.

Vettius vented his breath explosively. He almost let the lid crash back in disgust, but the stone might have broken and the noise would probably alert the attendants.

Grunting—angry and without the hope of immediate triumph to drive him—Vettius lowered by main strength the weight that enthusiasm had lifted.

He breathed heavily and massaged his palms against his thigh muscles for a minute thereafter. Score one for the Prophet.

Vettius didn’t know precisely what he’d expected to find in the crypt, but there
had
to be some dark secret within this building or Pyrrhus wouldn’t have lived in it alone. Something so secret that Pyrrhus didn’t dare trust it even to his attendants . . . .

Perhaps there was a list of high government personnel who were clients of Pyrrhus—or who supplied him with secret information. The emperors were—rightly—terrified of conspiracies. A list like that, brought to the attention of the right parties, would guarantee mass arrests and condemnations.

With, very probably, a promotion for the decurion who uncovered the plot.

If necessary, Vettius could create such a document himself; but he’d rather find the real one, since something of the sort
must
exist.

The bronze lamp had been manufactured especially for Pyrrhus. Counterweighting the spouts holding the three wicks was a handle shaped like a cross. A human-headed serpent coiled about it.

Vettius grimaced at the feel of the object as he took it from its stand. He prowled the sanctum, holding the light close to the walls.

If there was a hiding place concealed within the bricks, Vettius certainly couldn’t find it. The room was large and clean, but it was as barren as a prison cell.

There was a faint odor that the soldier didn’t much like, now that he’d settled down enough to notice it.

He looked up at the serpent, Glaukon. Lamplight broke the creature’s coils into bronze highlights that swept from pools of shadow like great fish surfacing. Pyrrhus might have hidden a papyrus scroll in the creature’s hollow interior, but—

Vettius walked through the internal doorway, stepping carefully so that the click of his hobnails wouldn’t alarm the attendants outside. He’d check the other room before dealing with Glaukon.

He didn’t much like snakes.

The anteroom had a more comfortable feel than the sanctum, perhaps because the goods stored around the walls gave it the look of a large household’s pantry. Vettius swept the lamp close to the top of each amphora, checking the tags scratched on the clay seals. Thasian wine from the shipowner Glirius. Lucanian wine from the Lady Antonilla. Dates from—Vettius chuckled grimly: my, a Senator. Gaius Cornelius Metellus Libo.

A brace of rabbits; a wicker basket of thrushes sent live, warbling hopefully when Vettius brought the lamp close.

In the corner where the stacks of figured bowls had been, Vettius found the large chest he’d watched the porters stagger in with that evening. The label read:
A gift of P. Severius Auctus, purveyor of fine woolens.

A small pot of dormice preserved in honey. Bunches and baskets of fresh vegetables.

The same sort of goods as had been here the night before. No strongbox, no sign of a cubbyhole hidden in the walls.

Which left Vettius with no better choice than to try that damned bronze serpent after—

Outside the front doors, the pins of a key scraped the lock’s faceplate.

Bloody buggering Zeus! Pyrrhus should’ve been gone for hours yet!

Vettius set down the lamp with reflexive care and ran for the sanctum. Behind him, the key squealed as it levered the iron dead-bolts from their sockets in both doorframes.

He’d be able to get out of the building safely enough, though a few of the attendants would probably fling their cudgels at him while he squirmed through the window. The narrow alley would be suicide, though. They’d’ve blocked both ends by the time he got to the ground, and there wasn’t room enough to swing his spatha. He’d go up instead, over the triple-vaulted roof of the warehouse and down—

The door opened. “Wait here,” called the penetrating, echoless voice of Pyrrhus to his attendants.

Vettius’s silken rope lay on the floor in a tangle of loose coils. It couldn’t have slipped from the window by itself, but. . . .

The door closed; the bolts screeched home again.

Vettius spun, drawing his sword.

“Beware, Pyrrhus!” cried the bronze serpent. “Intruder! Intruder!”

Vettius shifted his weight like a dancer. Faint lamplight shimmered on the blade of his spatha arcing upward. Glaukon squirmed higher on the cross. Its somewhat-human face waved at the tip of the bar, inches from where the rope had hung. The creature’s teeth glittered in wicked glee.

A chip of wood flew from the cross as Vettius’s sword bit as high as he could reach; a hand’s breadth beneath Glaukon’s quivering tail.

“Come to me, Decurion Lucius Vettius,” Pyrrhus commanded from the anteroom.

He couldn’t know.

The flickering lamplight in the other room was scarcely enough to illuminate the Prophet’s toga and the soft sheen of his beard. Vettius was a figure in shadow, only a dim threat with a sword even when he spun again to confront Pyrrhus.

Pyrrhus couldn’t know. But he knew.

“Put your sword down, Lucius Vettius,” the Prophet said. For a moment, neither man moved; then Pyrrhus stepped forward—

No, that wasn’t what happened. Pyrrhus stepped
away
from himself, one Pyrrhus walking and the other standing rigid at the door. There was something wrong about the motionless figure; but the light was dim, the closer form hid the further . . .

And Vettius couldn’t focus on anything but the eyes of the man walking toward him. They were red, glowing brighter with every step, and they were drawing Vettius’s soul from his trembling body.

“You are the perfect catch, Lucius Vettius,” Pyrrhus said. His lips didn’t move. “Better than you can imagine. In ten years, in twenty . . . there will be no one in this empire whom you will not know if you wish to, whom you cannot sway if you wish to. On behalf of Pyrrhus the Prophet. Or whatever I call myself then.

“Put your sword down, Lucius Vettius.”

The hilt of Vettius’s sword was hot, as hot and glowing as the eyes of the approaching Pyrrhus. He couldn’t hold the blade steady; light trembled along its sharp double edges like raindrops on a willow leaf.

But it didn’t fall from his hand.

Pyrrhus stepped through the doorway between the rooms. His shoulder brushed the jamb, brushed through it—form and stuccoed brickwork merging, separating; the figure stepping onward.

“I will have this empire,” Pyrrhus said. “And I will have this world.”

Vettius stared down a black tunnel. At the end of the tunnel glared Pyrrhus’s eyes, orange-hot and the size of the universe. They came nearer yet.

“And when I return to those who drove me out, when I return to those who would have
slain
me, Lucius Vettius,” said the voice that echoed within the soldier’s skull, “they will bow! For mine will be the power of a whole world forged to my design . . . .

“Put down your sword!”

Vettius screamed and swung his blade in a jerky, autonomic motion with nothing of his skill or years of practice to guide it. Steel cut the glowing eyes like lightning blasting the white heart of a sword-smith’s forge—

The eyes gripped Vettius’s eyes again. The Prophet’s laughter hissed and bubbled through the soldier’s mind.

“You are mine, Lucius Vettius,” the voice said caressingly. “You have been mine since you met my gaze last night. Did you think you could hide your heart from me?”

Vettius’s legs took a wooden, stumbling step forward; another step, following the eyes as they retreated toward the figure standing by the outer door. The figure of Pyrrhus
also,
or perhaps the only figure that was really Pyrrhus. The soldier now understood how the Prophet had appeared and vanished on the church porch the night before, but that no longer mattered.

Nothing mattered but the eyes.

“I brought you here tonight,” said the voice.

“No . . .” Vettius whispered, but he wasn’t sure either that he spoke the word or that it was true. He had no power over his thoughts or his movements.

“You will be my emperor,” the voice said. “In time. In no time at all, for me. With my knowledge, and with the weapons I teach you to build, you will conquer your world for me.”

The glowing eyes shrank to normal size in the sockets of the thing that called itself Pyrrhus. The bearded phantasm moved backward one step more and merged with the figure that had not moved since entering the church.

“And then . . .” said the figure as all semblance of Pyrrhus drained away like frost in the sunshine, “ . . . I will return home.”

The toga was gone; the beard, the pudgy human cheeks. What remained was naked, bone-thin, and scaly. Membranes flickered across the slit-pupiled eyes, cleaning their surfaces; then the reptilian eyes began to carve their path into Vettius’s mind with surgical precision.

He heard the creak of hinges, a lid rising, but the sound was as faint and meaningless as a seagull’s cry against the thunder of surf.

“Pyrrhus!” shrieked the bronze serpent. “Intruder! Guards! Guards!
Guards!”

Vettius awakened, gasping and shaking himself. He felt as though he’d been buried in sand, a weight that burned and crushed every fiber of his body.

But it hadn’t been his body that was being squeezed out of existence.

The chest—
A gift of P. Severius Auctus, purveyor of fine woolens
—was open. Dama was climbing out of it, as stiff as was to be expected when even a small man closed himself in so strait a compass. He’d shrugged aside the bolt of cloth that covered him within the chest, and he held the scabbard of an infantry sword in his left hand.