The Legions of Fire (48 page)

The sky had been growing dimmer for some time, though. She wondered if there would be stars or a moon when it became darker still.

“Something's moving in the palm trees,” Hedia said. Her voice was clear, but she sounded more as if she were bored than sounding a warning.

“Is there, now?” the faun said, taking the long club off his right shoulder. He sauntered forward; his body was more obviously taut than it had been. “Well, we'll see them off, won't we?”

Alphena stopped uncertainly; she drew her sword. She willed herself to see the movement that Hedia had noticed, but in truth she saw nothing but faint shade and the succulents.

“Come, Daughter,” Hedia said. “We don't want to crowd him, but we don't want to be too far away either. In case something has circled behind us.”

Alphena jerked her head around. There was nothing behind them. The sky seemed noticeably darker. She wished they could have a fire.

“All right,” she said, nervous and frustrated.
She
had the sword, which she was well trained to use. Even so, she felt comforted that Hedia was with her.

What could Hedia do if another sphinx attacked them? Alphena grinned despite herself. Like as not, Hedia would figure something out.

A woman came toward them out of the grove. Though the sky was the pale violet shade of early evening, her eyes flickered like emeralds.

“She's not human!” Alphena said.

“No, she's not,” said Hedia in a grimly ironic tone. “She's
far
too attractive to be human.”

“Well,” said Maron, his voice huskier than it had been a moment before, “at any rate, she doesn't look hostile.”

The woman—the nymph—was tall and slender except for large breasts
which didn't sag the way they should. Her hair was probably black, but it seemed to catch highlights from the sky. She smiled at Maron, but the only sound she made was the whisper of her feet on the sand.

“It may be a trick!” said Alphena.

The faun laughed and continued walking toward the nymph. He twirled his club out at his side, making dips and curlicues with it. He must be remarkably dexterous when you considered that his baton was merely a length of sapling which didn't even have the bark smoothed off.

“Well, it could be!” Alphena muttered angrily.

“I suppose it could,” said Hedia, taking her arm. “But I don't believe it any more than Maron does. That sort doesn't have room in their tiny brains for anything as complicated as treachery.”

Alphena looked at her in surprise. “You've met these,
these
, before?” she said.

“Only the human variety,” Hedia said drily. “I doubt there's much difference, though. Come, let's find the well.”

“Look at her!” Alphena said. “She's holding him by the
cock
! She's
leading
him!”

“Yes,” said Hedia. “Ordinarily I've heard that statement used figuratively, though in this place it may be more common than it is in Carce. Or even in Baiae.”

She tugged Alphena's arm gently. The faun and the nymph had sunk out of sight behind a screen of succulents at the edge of the grove.

“We'll be better for a drink of water,” Hedia said. “I don't think Maron will be ready to leave for some while. He has a great deal of stamina, that one—I suspect.”

Alphena followed her stepmother into the palms twenty feet away from where the other pair had vanished. She didn't look in that direction, but she couldn't help hearing Maron wheezing like steam escaping from under the lid of a pot.

Three more nymphs drifted from the direction of the tomb. They were headed for where the faun and their sister lay.
They can't see him! Do they smell him?

Alphena blushed, realizing that they probably
did
smell him. Smell them.

“Here, dear,” Hedia said. “There's no well curb, but the water seems clean enough. I'll watch while you dip some up in your hand, shall we?”

Alphena knelt abruptly. She wondered if her cheeks would cool if she sank her face in the pool.

H
EDIA WAS ANGRY
, which in itself irritated and angered her. She didn't usually feel this way, not because she was—she smiled at the thought—unusually equable, but because she ordinarily either solved problems immediately or just as quickly moved them out of her life.

“Haw!” Maron snorted from nearby in the darkness. “Haw!
Haw!
”

“What's he doing?” Alphena asked plaintively. “I mean, he
can't
be, can he? How many times would that be?”

“Twelve,” Hedia said. “But yes, I suppose he can. He doesn't just
look
like a goat, my dear.”

The only real lights in the grove were the occasional flickerings of the nymphs' eyes, but the sky must not have been perfectly black. The palms stood in vague silhouette, and the girl's face was a study in pale misery.

There'd been rustlings in the leaves and whispers in the shadows ever since the light failed. Hedia wasn't cold, but she would have liked a fire. Even if it didn't illuminate whatever was making the sounds, it might drive them a little farther away.

A racking scream sounded. It seemed close as well as loud. Seconds later it echoed from the range of hills Hedia had noticed on the horizon to the left as they approached the tomb.

Alphena jumped to her feet, waving the sword. The sound didn't recur—for the moment. Hedia remained where she was.

The girl gave a shudder. She started to sheathe the sword, but after missing the throat of the scabbard twice, she continued to hold it in her hand.

“Hedia?” she said. “What are we going to do. Are we just going to wait?”

Hedia rose to her feet in sudden decision. “I thought we would, yes,” she said briskly, “but I was wrong. I see another of those
things
headed this way. There may not be an end of them, and it appears that our guide”—she looked sourly in the direction of Maron; a swell of the sandy soil separated her from the faun, but his “Haw! Haw!
Haw!
” could be heard for miles—“isn't going to quit until his heart fails. Which would be perfectly all right with me, were it not for the fact we need him to lead us out of this place. So, because I've never known any argument to work on a male in a state of rut, we'll see where those females are coming from. It seems to be the tomb.”

Nodding to make sure the girl was coming with her, Hedia strode toward the latest pair of lambent eyes. First they had to walk around the pool they'd drunk from. It was about twenty feet in diameter and seemingly shallow, but the water hadn't been stagnant so it must be fed from a spring. There was a slightly smaller pool to the right, visible mostly as a smoothness where the soil around it was matte.

The female glided toward them; glided toward Maron, with them standing in the way, at any rate. “Can you speak?” Hedia demanded in the tone she would use on a servant who was trying to get away with something.

If the female could, she didn't bother to acknowledge it. Not only did green flames lick from her eyes, but her perfect body had a glow like burnished ivory brighter than could be a reflection of the light reaching the grove. The nymphs were as similar as frogs in a pond, but they weren't identical.

“I asked if you can speak, you bitch!” Hedia said, stepping sideways to block the female's progress. She was furious with Maron. She couldn't say that publicly—it made her face scrunch up even to admit it in her own mind—but she could certainly treat these gorgeous
creatures
as the sluts they were.

The nymph moved around her. Hedia wasn't sure how it happened: she was beside Hedia, then past, without apparently stepping out of her initial line. Her smile was biting, but Hedia knew the mocking laughter must be in her own mind.

Alphena raised the sword as though she meant to do something with it, but Hedia touched her shoulder and said, “No, she's not the problem. Killing a trollop isn't going to get us out of this place.”

“Oh, I wouldn't have
killed
her!” the girl said in amazement. Her expression was if anything more horrified than it had been when she watched Maron going off with the first of the nymphs.

“Good,” Hedia said as she resumed trudging toward the tomb. “Now, put the sword up so that you won't get in trouble waving it around. It's not a magic wand, you know.”

Alphena successfully got the sword into its sheath this time. She looked crestfallen. “I'm sorry,” she muttered. “I don't know what's happening. I don't understand anything at all!”

Hedia weighed the situation and the long-term results of whatever she said now—or failed to say. Because if she
didn't
respond to the girl's admission of weakness, she would pay for it in Alphena's resentment of her forevermore.

Forevermore might not be terribly long, of course, but Hedia wouldn't have survived if she hadn't always hoped for a good result. Smiling at the thought, she said, “
I
understand that I'm boiling with jealousy because that beast who's supposed to be our guide is so besotted with a crew of sluts that he's forgotten us completely. Which is exactly what you'd expect a man to do. Because they're
all
beasts, I'm afraid.”

Alphena looked at her sidelong, obviously grappling with the possible implications of what her stepmother had just said. Hedia gave the girl a lopsided smile and put an arm briefly around her shoulders.

She said, “Don't worry, dear. You and I will take care of this business and get back to Carce where we belong. And nobody but the two of us will know anything about it.”

If Hedia had misjudged her stepdaughter, she'd made a great deal of future unpleasantness for herself; but she almost never misjudged another woman. Her success in predicting men wasn't nearly as good. That, she knew, was because her mind was rarely in control when she was dealing with an attractive—or reasonably attractive—man.

They'd reached the side of the tomb. The sheer sides were even more impressive now than they had been from a distance. She didn't see an entrance.

“I think we should go around to the right, Mother,” Alphena said in a determinedly calm voice. “The, ah, women were coming more from that way.”

Hedia smiled with satisfaction at the way the girl was reacting. “Thank you,” she said, turning to skirt the mound about ten feet out from the bottom. “I don't think we can assume that since those females are safe we'll be safe also, but I'm going to hope that's the case.”

The darkness was disquieting. In Carce there would normally be stars and a lantern visible somewhere. Even during a drenching midnight rainstorm, the sky was likely to be lit by occasional lightning.

“There must be some light,” Alphena whispered. “Otherwise we couldn't see the building even. But where does it come from?”

Hedia grimaced. She wasn't willing to say that she “saw” the tomb, but its presence beside them was blurrily separate from the lesser darkness of the sky. She opened her mouth to speak just to show she was listening. Before she got a word out, Alphena said, “There! There's a hole!”

Either the girl's eyes are a great deal better than mine,
Hedia thought,
or we aren't seeing with our eyes here
. Since Alphena hadn't seemed unusually sharp-sighted in Carce before these things began happening, it was probably the latter.

Now that Hedia had been alerted, though, she noticed that the sandy soil had been thrown back not far in front of them. Alphena's hand hovered near the sword hilt again.

Hedia smiled wryly. In Carce she had disapproved strongly of the girl's fooling around with a sword: it wasn't just unladylike, it was unwomanly. That was a very different thing and one which offended Hedia's sense of
rightness
. She didn't claim a sense of decency, and certainly she'd been told by enough other people that she didn't have one.

Now … Well, the skill might still be unwomanly, but Hedia was rather glad that Alphena had gained it nonetheless. It was certainly more comforting than being with Varus, unless the monsters intended to hold a poetry-reading contest.

They stood side by side, staring into the hole, which slanted down toward the tomb. It looked rather like where a mole had surfaced in a garden, except that the opening was much too large.

“There's a light down there,” Alphena said. Her voice was firm, but she gave the older woman a doubtful glance with the words.

“Yes,” Hedia decided aloud. “It's … almost pink, wouldn't you say?”

Actually, it wasn't so much a color that Hedia saw in the light as a sense of
stickiness
. She would much rather not do what was necessary, so she did it immediately.

“Watch things up here,” Hedia said, crawling in headfirst. “I'll be back as soon as I learn what's happening.”

“I'm coming too!” Alphena said, as Hedia had very much hoped she would. Her voice was muffled because Hedia's body was in the way. It would make much better sense for the girl to stay guarding the entrance, but Hedia
really
didn't want to come down here alone.

The tunnel in the dirt was no more than ten feet long, though that would certainly be enough to bury her for life. She hiked her long tunic up above her knees and quickly scrambled the rest of the way to the stone at the end of the tunnel.

A hole had been ground through it from the other side as if a giant
worm had been gnawing. There might be huge worms in this world, but the only thing Hedia had seen here was the nymphs. Surely they couldn't have been responsible for the hole and the tunnel beyond?

But this was where they must be coming from. Hedia wriggled through the hole, onto the floor of an arched corridor almost six feet wide and over eight feet high in the middle. It was made of blocks of rusty granite like those facing the exterior of the mound; the light, faint and diffuse, came from the rock itself.