The Legions of Fire (56 page)

The Stolo whirled. Corylus was planted. He brought the tip of his wand down on the creature's right thigh with the strength of both his arms behind the strike. The Stolo took a step toward him and blatted in surprise: the blow had pinched the muscles across the top of the thigh against the massive bone and numbed them. The creature's leg collapsed; it sprawled on the turf.

Corylus lifted his wand, then slammed it against the back of the Stolo's neck. The
cr-crack!
was doubled: the sound of hardwood against bone mixed with the
pop
of vertebrae crushing under the blow.

The Stolo's limbs went as flaccid as raw tripes. Its mouth opened and closed. Corylus fell to one knee, gasping. He planted the wand vertically on the ground and clung to it for support.

“Come along, darling,” said a cheery female voice. “You don't want to stay here when Surtr's on the march. Take my hand.”

He looked up. A young woman, slender and pretty with a roguish tilt to her eyes, held out her hand. When he blinked, he saw the branch of a silver birch which seemed to have drifted from the grove striding along at the end of the great exodus of trees.

“Come!” she repeated, squeezing his hand. Corylus lurched to his feet, guided by the nymph's touch rather than compelled. Yes, he did have to get going, though the future for a youth raised to civilization was bleak, even if he survived. Better than being cooked alive by lava, he supposed, though the choice in his mind wasn't entirely one-sided.

“Thank you, mistress,” he said, but the nymph was handing him on to a sister—a cousin, better; an alder nymph—well ahead. Corylus felt motion, but his feet weren't touching the ground. The landscape rolled beneath him.

Surtr thundered, waving his fiery sword, but Corylus had nothing to fear from the fire god and his legions now. A cancer was burning into the landscape; it already covered a third of the peninsula below the Ice River. In a few places lava had reached the sea, throwing up curtains of steam to roil and dilute the sulfur haze.

Odd's music had drawn a line as straight as a plumb bob's in the path of the oncoming demons; but as the wizard marched at the back of the tribe, the western end of his barrier was giving way. Smoke and fumes marked the passage of lava over prairie from which the trees had fled.

Far away, separated from Corylus by more than distance, Sith lifted her arm in farewell. He would have waved back but the nymphs had his hands and he was moving with breathtaking speed.

“
My,
you're a pretty little fellow,” said a thick-bodied ash nymph, taking him in turn. “Oh, if Fraxina were just the
least
younger, she would
dally
with you, boy!”

She bussed him on the cheek and sent him on to the smiling beech
waiting to receive him. The beech handed Corylus to an oak, a huge matriarch who spread across ground that a forester would have given instead to a grove of a dozen trees more useful for timber.

There were no oaks in Thule—it was too far north. The forest had made Corylus its own, and he was experiencing time and space as it did.

He lost track of the nymphs who patted, hugged, or kissed him as they passed him on to the next smiling kinswoman. A slim, straight girl with green eyes grinned at him from a hazel coppice and said, “Well met, Brother. Mother would be proud of you.” Then she too was behind him.

Corylus didn't have the breath to speak, nor did he stay at any point of his passage long enough to exchange a real question and answer.
Where am I going? When will it be when I get there?

“Now be well, darling,” said a nymph with a smile and shaggy locks. “Don't forget my sisters and me, will you?”

“I won't—,” Corylus started to say. He stood on firm soil beneath a grove of cypresses. The moon, just past full, was at midsky. Lights within the temple to his left gleamed through clerestory windows and the open double doors in the front.

Corylus was on the Capitoline Hill, beside the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. He heard shouts and the sound of fighting. Empty-handed—he must have left the hornbeam staff behind in its own time—he ran toward the steps into the temple.

That was what his father and mother would have expected.

A
lphena was holding her stepmother's hand as they stepped together from the ramp of stars. They were back in the waking world. The noise, the foul yellow light, and the smell of brimstone made her clutch the hilt of her sword.

They'd come out between two pillars on the right side of a large hall. Alphena had never been here before, but she recognized the seated statue of Jupiter from his beard and the brass thunderbolts in his right hand. The size made this the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, where her brother had prophesied to Corylus and their teacher, Pandareus.

Varus lay trussed in glowing cords toward the back of the room, where the great statue sat. On the mosaic pavement near him was Pandareus, rising stiffly into a sitting posture.
Where's Corylus? The others are here
.

Nemastes stood at the foot of the enthroned statue, wearing a desperate expression as he played a black bone flute. Twelve demonic simulacra of the Hyperborean wizard rotated slowly in the air about him, staring avidly down.

Alphena saw the Twelve clearly, but they weren't in the same world as she and her brother were. A pit of sickly light filled most of the center of the hall; it seemed to slant down to the center of the earth. Up that slope crawled figures which might almost have been men. They were squat and terrible, and their bodies were formed by licking flames.

“Where the twisted horn is hid, the Wizard knows,”
Varus shouted. The cord tying him shifted from green to the colors of a rainbow. It moved and changed hue when Alphena tried to focus on it.
“Under the heaven-touching tree that is the world, the tears from Othinn's eye fall on it!”

A demon crawled from the pit. It was no taller than Alphena herself,
though its torso rose in almost straight lines from its hips to shoulders as wide as those of Saxa's new German doorman. Its face was brutishly human until it smiled, displaying not teeth but interlocking fangs.

The creature seemed to shimmer. As it moved, Alphena saw what she had thought to be skin was a transparent membrane which enclosed licking flames. Spreading its abnormally long arms, it stepped toward Varus.

A metal lantern lay on the floor beside Pandareus. He flung it, striking the demon in the chest. Instead of bouncing off, the bronze sheeting burst like a thunderbolt. The grinning demon continued forward.

“Get my brother free!” Alphena cried, drawing her sword and placing herself in the demon's way. She didn't expect to do any good, but if an old Greek scholar could try to save Varus, then a healthy young woman with a sword had to do
something
.

The demon's chest quivered as though it were laughing, but Alphena couldn't hear sounds well over the roaring chaos from the pit. The only thing she
could
hear clearly was the phrase Varus was chanting; that must have been more than sound. Had her brother become a magician?

Behind her, Hedia bent over Varus; either she'd heard Alphena's demand over the cacophony or she'd come to the same conclusion on her own. Hedia wasn't somebody who needed to be told the obvious.

Alphena shuffled forward, though the demon also continued to advance. She wished she had a shield, but the way the lantern had burned suggested that the creature's gripping hand would turn laminated wood into an inferno. She didn't know why she hoped for better from the blade of her sword; perhaps because there was nothing else to hope for. That was a good enough reason.

The demon made a quick snatch for Alphena's face with its left arm. She responded the way Lenatus had trained her to do if an opponent attacked with his spear high: she swiped her sword sideways, chopping the demon's hand off. The blade went through the creature's arm as easily as it would have through water.

Fire gushed from both edges of the wound. The hand flexed, then in an eyeblink drained to a glistening patch on the stone floor. The demon's body flailed, spewing flames like the flue of an overstoked oven. It lost shape and shrank in on itself as it tumbled, still blazing, into the pit from which it had climbed.

Two more demons appeared over the rim. Alphena thrust one through
the face. It curved back into the depths, its head a roaring torch, but its right hand had swept close enough to singe the hairs on her lower leg. She'd forgotten how long the creatures' arms were, so her instinctive response had almost been fatal.

Her sword gleamed like sunlight. The other demon hunched onto the temple floor. Alphena slashed at the creature's elbow. It twisted quickly to snatch the blade from her, so her edge sheared its hand and forearm, opening them wide. A flaring bloom sucked out the demon's life, leaving only a slick gleam on the stone.

Demon flesh made no more resistance to this blade than fog would. Alphena panted, dizzy from exertion and the reek of sulfur that the demons brought with them.
I can do this! I am good for something!

Alphena looked into the pit. A demon near the rim reached for her ankle. She took its hand off at the wrist but jumped back instead of watching the creature bounce down the slope as a fiery pinwheel: two more demons were so close that they would have had her if she'd hesitated.

Beyond those two, stretching down into the hazy depths, were thousands more. Thousands of demons, and likely thousands of thousands besides crawling up from deeper yet.

Alphena took a quick glance behind her. Hedia was fussing over Varus, but the fetters of light still bound him. Alphena started to snarl a curse, but she bit the words off. She'd seen her mother respond to a crisis. If Hedia was having trouble cutting Varus loose, then very likely anyone would have had trouble.

And besides, Alphena didn't have time to worry about what other people did.

She'd given back a step when she saw how close the pair of demons were. A hand reached over the rim of the pit, its claws shrieking against the stone.

Alphena thrust, taking off a finger and sparking a divot from the floor. Her blade sang, but its edge remained sharp as sunlight. She backhanded the blade through the face of the other demon.

That one simply dropped toward its oncoming fellows, but the first tried to continue climbing. It stumbled and fell when the scintillant roar from its missing finger devoured its hand. Destruction was working up its arm before the last of the fire drained out. Its casing gleamed on the stone like a slug's trail.

More demons were coming. Infinitely more.

Alphena poised, her left arm advanced slightly to balance the weight of her sword. Her brother couldn't move, so she was going to stand here until he was freed or she was killed.

Or perhaps she would kill all the demons, too many for her even to count. That didn't seem likely, but right now it didn't seem likely that Varus could be freed either.

Three demons came at her together. Alphena had her rhythm now; she would nick each one and it would bleed into a fiery spectacle.
These
wouldn't get past her.

Eventually a creature from the hordes climbing upward would turn Alphena, daughter of Gaius Saxa, into a stench and a few scraps of charred bone; but not yet. She thrust, and slashed, and thrust again; and more demons shoved their way past the blazing torches of their fellows.

U
NDER OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES
Hedia would have reacted vividly at being ordered around by a chit of a girl, but this wasn't the time for it. Besides, Alphena had jumped into the path of a fire demon without being told. Hedia wasn't sure she'd have been willing to do that even if there was no one else available. The girl could be forgiven for blurting something silly in the heat of the moment.

Hedia knelt at the side of her son. Whatever Varus had been doing, he seemed healthy enough now. He'd lost his toga during the ceremony before all this started to happen, but his tunic wasn't torn or bloody.

Hedia knew she herself must look a fright. The first thing she'd do when it was over would be to take a bath. And she'd have these clothes burned, including the slippers that she'd worn through! Why, she didn't know when her feet could be pampered back to normal.

Part of her mind laughed at herself—her worst enemies wouldn't claim that she was either stupid or lacking in self-awareness. Another part really was worried about her appearance, however. It wasn't the part that was in control, though; not now or ever.

The ligature holding Varus wasn't a shimmering rope, and it didn't have a knot. Colors rippled along it in a fashion that subtly reminded Hedia of the way a snake slithered—but this snake had its tail in its mouth. She tried to grip it, then jerked her hand away with a shout.
It bit me!

But it hadn't, or anyway no more than the prickle that she sometimes
got from touching an amber bead. It was not knowing what was happening that had made her react as though a viper had struck out of the dark.