The Gate of Fire (37 page)

"This is the body of our Emperor," Maxian declared to the still air. Even the odd mist along the ceiling had stilled, ceasing its constantly roiling movement. "This is the body of the state, of the Senate, of the people, and of the city of Rome. Praise him, our Emperor, from whom all order and justice flow."

Maxian bent over the marble table and took the bag in his left hand. With a quick movement he unknotted the string with his right hand and took the cord in his teeth. Carefully, he opened the top of the bag and shook it lightly to break up any clumps that might have formed inside. On the tabletop, the outline of a man with arms at his sides had been marked in purple chalk. The Prince's forehead creased in concentration, and he bowed his head, holding the open bag in front of him cupped in both hands. His eyes closed.

Krista started nervously and cocked her head. Some sound trembled in the air, just past hearing. A thin hum filtered out of the stones under her feet, and the shimmering echo of a distant gong. The sound rose, pulsing like a beating heart, making the air quiver in anticipation. The sound of horns rang, and the wail of the bucina—all faint, like the memory of some ancient battle renewed by the light of a dying sun—then a vague tremor of men's voices raised in a thunderous shout. Krista's head snapped around, her eyes wide in alarm, and a flickering glow of ultraviolet and static blue washed over her face.

Power crackled in the air around the Prince, a slow dance of standing lightning flaring between the Prince and his three companions. The air shifted, wind rising up and blowing past Krista, rushing out the door of the chamber. The Nabateans and Persians and Walachs bowed their foreheads to the paving stones of the floor and—almost unheard over the building roar of lightning and thunder that growled at the center of the room—they began to chant again.

The Prince forced his hands apart, crackling and burning with crawling rivers of red and electric blue. His eyes were black pits, thrown in sharp relief by the flare of light that streamed out of his hands. The bag disintegrated, but the pale ashy dust inside did not. Wind caught at it and swirled it up, whipping the dust this way and that. The Prince's mouth moved, speaking a single word.

The air boomed, and Krista found herself on her knees, gasping for breath, one hand skinned on the stone floor, reaching for some support. At her fingertip a lead cone rattled, almost unbalanced. A smear of blood marked the paving stone. The green mist rushed away, spilling through the doorway in flight, and the ceiling, now revealed, seemed to recede into an infinite distance.

The dust whirled in a broad circle over the marble surface, still just contained by the boundary of gold and lead that circumscribed the table and the Prince. Maxian, his face marked with concentration, pushed his hands against the air, drawing them farther and farther apart.

Krista, crouched within the pentacle by the door, could hear his voice at a great distance, speaking like a god in the mountains, a vast and enormous sound.

"We honor and obey our Lord, the Emperor of all Rome, the master of the world."

The dust whirled even faster, but now grains of it, sparkling in the shuddering light, flashed out of the stream and snapped to the tabletop. One by one, the grains flew to lie within the outline of the man marked on the marble. One by one, they rushed together, piling higher and higher.

Krista squinted. It was hard to see with the shimmering heat haze in the air and the rippling lightning that still danced between the three men. Gaius Julius and Alexandros seemed to be screaming, or crying out, but she could not hear their voices, only that of the Prince. Abdmachus had only slumped to one side, dull eyes staring straight ahead.

A body formed with dizzying speed on the table; that of a man of middle height, stooped by age, his face lined with wrinkles and long-held care. One foot was a little twisted, some ancient injury leaving a long scar along his leg. The Prince raised his hands up, into the air, and the last of the dust settled. The corpse was whole, knitted together by sorcery and trapped lightning.

"We honor him, the Emperor, and make sacrifice to him, blessing him and his regal name, Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus."

Thunder rattled the wooden window shutters that lined the upper floor of the house. A blue-white crack sizzled in the air, sending echoes rolling over the hills. Rain continued to pour down, filling the dead garden with slowly spreading pools of mud. Along the main hall of the villa, now empty and dark, was a flicker of red light along the floor. Tiny signs and symbols of protection marked there months before by the Persian sorcerer Abdmachus flared up brilliantly and then died. A tide of black mist began to creep in from the garden doors. Where the mist touched, the
tesserae
of the floor crumbled to dust, and the stones and wooden supports of the roof and the walls began to flake away, eroding at a fantastic pace.

At the center of the house, in the barren inner courtyard, where once ten thousand flowers had bloomed in spring to bring a smile to the face of a young queen, a figure stood, alone, exposed to the fury of the storm that rippled and cracked in the heavens above. Dark clouds swirled in the sky, glowing with the constant flash of lightning. Ice and rain fell, lashing the tiled roof. The garden was filling with water from the torrential rain.

The figure stood, inviolate and uncaring, in the storm. A dull yellow gleam marked the slits of its eyes. Water sluiced off a bony skull, ridged with long, twisting lines of tiny stitches. The
homunculus
, Khiron, waited patiently, watching and listening to the roar of the storm. Hail drummed on its ancient flesh, but the thing did not feel the blows.

The mist drifted into the rooms on the main floor, filling them slowly with dark poison.

"Here is our Lord, the Emperor of all men, we praise him!"

Maxian struggled in the grip of lightning, his voice rasping with the effort of forcing words from his throat. The vertices of power—ultraviolet and pale green—that whirled around him, linking him, the old man, the Persian, and the youth in a blizzard of hurtling sparks, were enormously strong. The power inherent in the youth and his legend, coupled with the ever-growing strength of the Prince and the bedrock solidity of the old man, cascaded into a dizzying pattern. At the center, now whole and fleshed, the corpse of the first Emperor twitched and shuddered in time with the beat of Maxian's heart. The circles of ward and protection were ablaze with light, straining to contain the maelstrom that the Prince had unleashed.

"Here is the ruler of the world, Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus! Emperor of Rome!"

Maxian opened his hands, spreading them out and away from him. As he did so, his sight expanded, swelling beyond the immediate confines of the buried chamber and the rings and circles of power. He descended into the universe of forms, and there he beheld the full power of his enemy.

The curse had come against him with all power, a black tide that overtopped the house and filled the whole land around and about him. Maxian shuddered, seeing the enormous malignant strength that arrayed itself against the villa. He felt the bones of the house corrode as the black mist attacked them. He felt the dying of every living thing that did not hew to the Oath for miles around. Inverted lightning rippled along the face of the storm front, black tendrils of corruption lashing at the shields that protected the chamber and those within it. Abdmachus' painstaking work was dying, ground down by the massed will of tens of millions of people, all bound to the Oath and the destruction of this threat.

Maxian's hands blurred into motion, the vortex that roared and raged around him would smash down the barriers in a little time, so he worked quickly. The form and substance of the first Emperor shifted and shuddered on the table before him. He must now find the keystone and invoke it, passing the anchor of the Oath from his brother to this ancient thing. His thought leapt out, burning blue-white through the storm and chaos around the villa.

At a great distance, he could feel the thought and shape of his brother.

"Go!" Nikos chopped his hand down, pointing off through the blinding rain in the direction of the villa. The boom and crack of the storm had risen to a pitch that constantly lit the air with a blaze of lightning. Hail and rain were smashing the canopy of the trees to nothing. Men moved in the murk, all around him, running forward down the hill. Nikos held his round shield over his head, trying to keep from being struck down by the fist-sized ice that was falling out of the sky. The temperature had continued to drop, and it was well below freezing.

The Illyrian loped down the face of the hill, feeling the ground sliding and gelatinous under his feet. So much rain had fallen that the ground was beginning to liquefy. Jusuf was hard at his heels, running flat out. Twenty or thirty other men ran at their side—the praetorians had finally managed to reach the hill. Their commander had tried explaining why they were late, but Nikos had been unable to hear him over the thunder. Regardless, the praetorians, bulky in their heavy armor and thick red cloaks, rushed forward with them. The band of men hit the edge of the gardens and scrambled over the brick wall at the bottom of the hill. The wall crumbled under their boots, the bricks shattering and breaking apart at the touch of a hobnail. Two men went down, struggling in the mud. Nikos ignored them and pressed on, bent nearly double in the face of the howling wind.

Maxian's thought arrowed out over the broad ocean, his spirit seeing waves and islands and the coastline of southern Italia flash past under him. The sun had set, dropping behind the curve of the world, and the night was dark and moonless. Miniscule lights of cities and towns fell away behind him, and then, sparkling on the surface of the waters, his spirit eye saw the gleam of lanterns. A fleet plunged through the dark sea, great ships cutting through the waves, driven by an eastern wind.

There, in the cabin of the flagship, his brother lay in sleep, dreamless and content in his thoughts of victory. Maxian's will penetrated the walls of the ship, passing guardsmen and sailors on watch, passing unhindered through planks and stays. His brother slept. His thin, narrow face, usually so marked with worry and grim with the concerns of Empire and the state, was peaceful in the light of a single candle. One hand was clasped on his chest, covering an unopened letter.

Maxian hovered over him, looking down on the face of Galen, seeing in him an echo of their gruff father and warm mother. For an instant, memories of old times—in childhood and youth—flooded over him: Galen laughing, holding up a brace of tigery kittens that the barn cat had birthed one summer in Narbo. Galen and Aurelian rolling on the lawn of the summerhouse at Cumae, brambles and twigs in their hair. Maxian reached down, his spirit hand ghostly and indistinct, wavering in the dim light, and brushed back the lock of lank, dark hair that always fell over Galen's forehead.

Pain flashed at the touch, and Maxian froze, feeling the black corruption welling up around him, seeping out of the timbers of the ship, from the close weave of the linen sheets, even from blood and bone of his brother. The Prince felt threat hanging around him, but he steeled his will and made a sign in the air.

The glyph sputtered and flashed, hanging afire in the world of forms. Maxian summoned up a long invocation—carefully memorized and drilled over and over—and let it form in his mind. Despite the lurid descriptions of the popular ballads, the words he summoned did not shape the world. Instead, they served as a mnemonic that described patterns of force that he put into play with his will. Into the shape of his brother as Emperor—a thing that hung like a shroud around the bright golden flame of Galen himself in the world of forms—he sank deep hooks of intent and desire and thought. The curse boiled up around him, black as the pit, and attacked, lashing at him with fangs of deep blue night.

Maxian howled in anguish, feeling the teeth bite into him. But his will did not waver. The shroud of Empire was torn away from the sleeping Emperor, and Maxian fled, all thought focused upon returning to the Egyptian House and the shuddering half-alive corpse of Augustus.

A burly praetorian with shoulders like Atlas crashed through the wooden door. It shattered as soon as he put his full body against it, sending the soldier sprawling on the ground amid a cloud of sawdust and broken hinges. Nikos leapt over the man without even pausing and darted down a long hallway. Black mist boiled around his feet, but the dreadful corruption did not touch him. It was a tremendous relief to be out of the storm and under shelter. The hallway was dark, but Nikos had come prepared. He skidded to a halt and unclipped a storm lantern from his belt. Behind him, more praetorians clambered through the doorway, their swords out. Every third man fell aside as they entered and shifted lanterns from their backs. Leather hoods were removed, and flints sparked in the darkness. A flame leapt up, casting a pale yellow glow on the walls and the faces of the men.

Thunder rumbled in the sky, and the crack of fresh lightning sent white bursts of light through the windows. Nikos looked around, finding his squad leaders by the plumes on their helmets. "Break out in groups of five," he rasped in his command voice, "two lanterns with each. Check each room, each hallway, each cupboard. Prisoners are to be taken alive if possible. There is one friendly, a young woman with dark red-brown hair. Go!"

The praetorians clattered off down the hallway, their swords and spears bright in the lantern light. Nikos looked over at Jusuf, who had unslung his bow and had a long dark arrow fitted to the notch. Here, in the darkness, with unknown enemies about, with some undefined conspiracy against the Emperor afoot, the Illyrian wished devoutly for the presence of his old commander, Amazon Thyatis. She never had a queasy stomach on an operation like this.
Enough moping
, he snarled to himself. He moved forward through the dark house, Jusuf ready at his back with a strung arrow.