The Legions of Fire (41 page)

The woman released his hand. “Come,” she said, starting along the trail. The fog beside them swirled and eddied in the direction they were walking.

“Sigyn?” Varus said, his head turned slightly toward the gorge. The mist moved as swiftly as a millrace. Occasionally he saw the top of a pine tree, and once something in a treetop stared back with unwinking eyes.

“There is no Sigyn, Varus,” the woman said. “Sigyn died in a far place and at another time. If you want an answer, you must ask the Bride.”

Varus didn't speak for a moment. He hadn't been a good poet, but he'd been a meticulous one. He understood the importance of words.

“Sigyn,” he said firmly. “Where are you taking me?”

The woman raised her left hand and traced her fingertips along the line of the cut. She began to laugh; flakes of blood cracked off the skin of her throat.

“We go to pick the fruit of the First Tree, Varus,” she said. “The Tree is on an island in a sea which cannot be crossed. When you have picked the fruit, then we will go to the entrance to the Underworld, where the Guardian waits. You have already met the Guardian.”

Varus thought. “The lizard that Pandareus and I had to run from?” he said.

“The dragon that you ran from,” said the woman. “The Guardian cannot
be harmed. We must pass the Guardian to enter the Underworld, where we will meet my destined husband. My husband will direct you to the end of your route, Varus.”

Varus said nothing for a time. The path was broad enough for two, but he found himself lagging a half step behind his guide. The upward slope to the right was just short of a sheer wall. He saw a few birches and once a squat, gnarled conifer, but all those trees grew from cracks in the rock. Other than that, only lichen provided patches of color.

There was a dot in the sky. Varus stared at it for a moment. It didn't seem to move, but when he closed first one eye, then the other, the touch of blackness remained. It wasn't a speck in his eye.

Now and then a whorl of mist cleared on the left. The glimpses through those eddies showed that the descent into the gorge was equally steep.
What would happen if I fell?

Varus opened his mouth to ask the question aloud, then swallowed the words unsaid. Nothing good would happen. He would die, or he would cripple himself—could he die in this place? Sigyn hadn't—or perhaps he would spend eternity in a dank gray abyss whose walls he certainly couldn't climb. It was better that he not fall.

The path didn't seem to have been cut, but it couldn't be natural given the slope above and below it. It was free of debris. No pebbles had weathered out and fallen onto it from above, nor had slabs cracked into the gorge to narrow the path into a ledge down which Varus would have to sidle with his heart in his mouth.

If I can concentrate on the small puzzles,
Varus thought,
then I don't have to think about the great ones. The latter mean life or death for the world—and I can't solve them either
.

He grinned. His logic was impeccable even though the situation was completely irrational.
Pandareus would be proud of me
.

At first Varus had thought he could see the opposite wall of the gorge, but now the sea of mist spread into the unguessable distance. There was a howl from below. It could have been the wind, but he didn't think it was.

“Sigyn?” he said. “What made the sound I just heard? From down in the valley.”

The woman glanced back at him. She laughed, making the edges of her severed throat wobble.

“Are you afraid, Varus?” she said. “Nothing here can stand against the wizard who dared to steal the Bride of Loki.”

“I'm not afraid,” Varus said. The sudden anger warmed him. “Not about that, anyway—I'm afraid I'll fail, of course. But I want to know what that animal is because I like to know things!”

The woman's mocking smile faded. “It is not an animal,” she said. “Once it was a spirit, but that was long ago. Now it is a hunger and a memory, but it cannot climb to where we are.”

“Thank you, Sigyn,” Varus said. He coughed for an excuse to lower his eyes.

I shouldn't have spoken so harshly. She's been murdered, after all; she has an excuse for being, well, negative
.

“Sigyn knew little and feared much,” the woman said, facing the path again. “All the folk of Thule did. When the Horn, the mountain on the shore, rumbled, they were frightened. The Horn belched smoke that burned our throats and bleached the leaves, so the men of the Tribe gathered in council. They vowed Sigyn to Loki in the Underworld.”

She looked at Varus again; he met her eyes by an effort of will. Her smile this time was different from the cold cruelty he'd seen in it before.

“Now I am the Bride,” she said. “I know all things; but I do not fear, and I do not care.”

Varus had a sudden vision of what for him would be Hell … and perhaps was Hell for Sigyn also. He swallowed, then wiped his stinging eyes. She was too young to have done anything that deserved this. Perhaps no one deserved it.

“Where is Thule, Sigyn?” he asked. His throat unclogged as he spoke, as he had hoped it would.

“You speak to one who is dead,” the woman said petulantly; but after a moment she went on. “Thule is in the north. I cannot describe the location in a form you would understand.”

Varus chewed cautiously on the inside of his cheeks to work the dryness out of them. Sigyn might be past fear, but he wasn't. It wouldn't prevent him from going forward, though.

“Sigyn?” he said. “This volcano, the Horn?” She'd described it as a mountain that rumbled and blew out sulfurous smoke. “Do Hyperboreans live on it? Wizards, I think?”

The woman laughed horribly again. “You mean the Twelve,” she said.
“They went to the Horn and walled it off from the waking world when Nemastes left them. But they do not live, Varus, they exist; just as the Bride exists.”

For a moment, the pulse of the dancers in Varus's mind was so strong that he staggered. He dipped to one knee and pressed the fingertips of both hands against the rocky path.

The pressure drained as suddenly as it had begun. Varus got to his feet and said, “I'm sorry. I'm all right now. We'll go on.”

The woman had waited for him; now she resumed her measured pace. In the distance ahead were touches of red and yellow instead of the omnipresent cold white that Varus had seen thus far in the sky here.

“The spells protecting the Horn are stronger than the cosmos itself,” she said, her eyes on the horizon. “So long as the Twelve exist, the spells cannot be breached. Not even the Legions of Surtr can pass them, though they march across the whole waking world besides.”

“
I'm
going to lead the legions,” Varus said. He heard his voice rising. Furious with his weakness, he grimaced.

The woman laughed. After a moment, she pointed ahead of them. She said, “We are nearing the First Tree, wizard.”

The thing in the gorge howled again. In a moment, another of its kind answered in keening despair.

A
LPHENA FORCED HER WAY THROUGH
a clump of plants whose sword-shaped leaves stood vertically. The edges weren't sharp enough to cut, but the underside of her forearms tingled after the contact. She wondered if the soft skin there was going to break out in a rash.

As she'd hoped, she'd reached a clearing. The ground was covered with grass whose blades were as fine as a cat's fur. It was an immediate relief that foliage wasn't touching her as it had done for all the past hour or more. The track had been worn by animals—pigs, perhaps?—whose shoulders came no higher than Alphena's knees. Above that, leaves hung close on both sides.

Round orange fruit dangled from a tree growing from the wall of vegetation across the clearing twenty feet away. Alphena doubted they were really oranges—the tree trunk twisted like the body of a snake, and its branches were lesser snakes writhing from it—but the fruit was certainly edible: scraps
of rind, some of them whole half-spheres, lay scattered on the grass below. The pulp was pallid with a faintly blue cast.

A bird with a long tail flew off with a cry that was more like a cat than anything with wings. Alphena hadn't seen the creature till it moved, which disturbed her.
I have to be more careful. What if it was a snake?

To the right of the fruit tree grew a stand of saplings; their leaves drooped in ribbonlike tassels. In the foliage dangled blue flowers, each as big as a man's head. Alphena couldn't tell whether the blooms hung from the saplings like the leaves did or if their stems dropped from the limbs of trees deeper in the forest.

A Cyclops twelve feet tall stepped through the curtain of leaves; his passage made only a faint rustle. He was clad in skins that had been knotted together, not sewn; they were raw and stank of sour death.

The giant's face was a shaggy mass with only the nose and brow clear of tangling hair. When he opened his mouth in what was either a grin or a silent snarl, his breath was foul as a tannery.

Alphena shouted, “Wau!” and jumped backward. When she was five years old and playing in the garden of the family villa in the Sabine Hills, a large grasshopper had lighted on the back of her neck. That was the only time she could remember having been equally startled.

The Cyclops stepped toward her. Despite his size, he moved gracefully. In vegetation as thick as that around her, Alphena was sure that the monster's weight and strength would allow him to catch her in a few strides if she turned and ran.

She had been startled, not frightened. She drew her sword. Well, she was frightened too, but she was going to fight.

The Cyclops's eye was red and bloodshot around a black iris; each lash was as thick as a tiger's bristle. It focused on the rainbow beauty of Alphena's sword. She waggled the blade, wondering if it was long enough to reach the creature's body if he stretched out a hand for her neck.

With a bellow like a bullock in the jaws of a bear, the Cyclops spun and leaped back the way he had come. He was looking over his shoulder toward Alphena—or at least toward her sword—so he collided with the fruit tree instead of vanishing through the hanging leaves which had hidden his presence. The tree was six inches thick where his shoulder struck it, but the trunk cracked and a split ran down it almost to the roots.

The impact jolted the Cyclops to his right and half turned his massive body. He didn't lose his footing, however. Pivoting like a dancer, he crashed through the screen of saplings and into the forest beyond. Alphena heard the sound of smashing vegetation and the Cyclops's cries of wild terror.

She straightened from the crouch she'd dropped into when the monster came at her. She was gasping for breath, though the only effort she'd expended was to draw a sword that seemed as light as a willow withy.

Alphena looked at the blade, shimmering more like a piece of jewelry than a weapon. It was so highly polished that she had difficulty seeing the metal. The reflections from its rounded surface seemed to be brighter than the light filtering through the treetops which woke them.

Is it magical?
The Cyclops had certainly seemed to be afraid of something more than a sharp point in the hand of a girl. Maybe that was what Deriades had meant when he'd given her this weapon in particular.

Alphena had her breath back. She started to sheathe the sword again, but her hand was trembling with reaction. There hadn't been fighting to burn the emotions out of her. She didn't want to stab herself in the thigh, and besides … well, after the surprise she'd just survived, keeping the sword in her hand didn't seem like such a bad idea. It didn't weigh much, after all.

The giant had proved when he appeared that he could slip through the forest without leaving a trail, but in the panic of his flight he was tearing a path that a blind man could follow. Some of the more supple trees had merely been pushed down and were springing up again, but anything more than an inch in diameter had been either snapped off or torn out and cast aside.

Alphena eyed the pig track she'd been following, then looked at the gap the Cyclops had made. In a way it seemed foolish to go in the same direction as a monster she'd been only too glad to see the back of, but he hadn't been willing to face her sword before, so there was every reason to expect he'd flee again if they met. Besides, she was tired of having to almost swim through the foliage. She set off on the Cyclops's trail.

That curved slightly to the left, through an understory of small hardwoods. Many of the saplings had been pulled out of the soft ground. Tiny movements—Alphena saw colors rather than shapes—shifted about the dying trees. She thought of Dryope, then remembered Persica.
Yes, of course! Persica!

In anger she squeezed the sword hilt harder—but Persica had been a jealous bitch, not a monster. Alphena had met plenty of girls who behaved
as badly as Persica, but she wouldn't think of killing them. Well, she wouldn't
really
have killed them, though she might have said something like that.

When the sphinx poised to rip Alphena's throat out, she had gotten a better understanding of what killing meant—and of death.

She might have the servants cane Persica when she got back, though. Or bruise the bark of the peach tree, if they couldn't find Persica in the garden.

Right now Alphena was feeling sorry for the flecks of light hovering around the uprooted trees, just as she would for kittens she found drowned in the gutter. She hadn't been responsible, except that she'd frightened a monster that was otherwise prepared to eat her alive. She wasn't so sorry that she would die to save sprites, if they were what she was seeing.

The trampled path jerked to the right as though the Cyclops had run into a stone wall and caromed off. Alphena paused in surprise, then used her left arm to part the line of sedges which the giant had been tall enough to look over. She kept a tight grip on her sword.