The Legions of Fire (53 page)

Hedia chuckled. Aloud she said, “Alphena, dear, all that I'm really sure about is that we'll deal with whatever we find when we get back, just as we've dealt with the things that have happened to us here. The women of the Alphenus household are a force to be reckoned with, wouldn't you say?”

She was speaking to cheer the girl up, but part of her mind really did mean it. The other part quivered with formless dread, but
that
part had been
terrified ever since she watched her stepdaughter vanish in the sunlit garden. It hadn't stopped Hedia from dealing with the situation, just as she'd said.

“Here,” said Maron, halting before what seemed at first to be a curving field covered with tiny bubbles. “I have brought you both safely to the portal to the waking world. Is this not so, great lady?”

Hedia stared at the scene before her. The bubbles had fuzzy edges and were moving. The ground on which she and her companions stood faded when it should have come in contact with the plane of bubbles. They spiraled up and to the right, but when she moved closer she saw that they also curled down to the left.

“Maron, where are we?” she asked sharply. No matter how she turned her head or squinted, she wasn't sure that the spiral was a material object or an illusion of light.

“The path …,” the faun said. He took her right hand in his and swept it upward. “
That
path. Will take you to the world where you belong.”

He laughed with some humor. “Do not take the downward path, Hedia,” he said. “That goes to a place from which you will not return, not even with the help of those you called upon to bind me.”

“Can we walk on it?” Alphena said. “It doesn't look solid.”

Hedia took a deep breath. She and Maron both ignored the girl. The time she had spent in this place had been a life separate from the one she had lived for the previous twenty-two years—eventful though they had been.

“Then yes,” Hedia said, her eyes holding the faun's. “Maron, you have guided and protected us as you were compelled to do.”

She stepped to the faun and kissed him passionately while rubbing herself against his own hard body.

She stepped back. “Thank you, dear beast,” she said, her voice husky. “Perhaps we'll meet again.”

Maron laughed harshly. “Perhaps we will, great lady,” he said. “Go back now to your waking world.”

A little taken aback by his expression, Hedia gestured Alphena ahead. The girl looked doubtful—
Does she think I'm using her to test the footing?
—but stepped toward the path.

Maron strutted in front of Alphena and took both her wrists, swinging her to the side. “Go to your world, Hedia!” he crowed. “You and I are done now!”

“Release my daughter,” Hedia said, hearing her voice rise despite her attempt to sound calm. “If you like, I'll stay with you for a time, dear. That's no hardship, is it?”

“I was compelled not to hurt you, great lady,” the faun said, his tone slipping into the gutturals of lust. “There was no such compulsion about the virgin. Though as you said, there needn't be harm in what I intend for her. Maybe I'll even send her up to you when I'm done with her.”

Laughing like the demon he was in fact, Maron bent the screaming, struggling girl over so that he could grasp her ankles with the same hands that held her wrists. He lifted her overhead, helpless as a straw doll, and poised her over his rampant member.

V
ARUS HAD LOST TRACK
of time and distance. The path took all his mind and concentration, the way versification did when he was deep in the moment. Part of his intellect told him that he should be wrung out from the effort of climbing seemingly forever, but instead he felt exhilarated.

The wizards of the Horn, the Twelve, were no longer in his mind. Each rosy step Varus took had a lively sharpness. He was happy, if only because pounding misery no longer gripped him.

In that joyous state, Varus stepped from the glow into a destination that had completely escaped his mind. He stopped with his foot raised, at a momentary loss for where to put it when the path no longer sloped upward. He was in the hall of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest, and it was nighttime.

Lanterns hung from their sconces, casting yellow light on the pillars, the drapery, and the stiff earthenware form of the seated god. An aged senator, Sempronius Tardus, lay slumped on a couch facing the round table on which his dinner sat. He was an antiquarian friend of Alphenus Saxa and, as Varus knew, a commissioner for the sacred rites.

Around the dinner table and elsewhere in the big room sprawled attendants—Balaton and the temple staff as well as the servants who must have come with the commissioner; they appeared to be sleeping. Varus supposed they'd been drugged, but a spell might have been involved instead.

He felt a touch of vertigo and rubbed his eyes. The lamplight wavered. All the light he'd seen since Oannes accosted him in the Grove of the Muses had been flat, sourceless, and constant.

Pandareus lay on the floor, midway between the entrance gates and the
statue of the god. A helix of green flame flowed up and down between the teacher's ankles and throat. His eyes stared at Varus. Though he was obviously straining, no words came out of his part-open mouth.

Nemastes knelt, before the statue of Jupiter, Varus thought; but then he saw the triangle of three small fires on the floor in front of the Hyperborean. In their midst was a human skull.

Nemastes was working a spell. It had nothing to do with worship of the greatest god of the Republic.

Sigyn had told Varus to follow his instincts. He would do that because there was no better alternative—and instinct told him to oppose any and every action that Nemastes took.

“Nemastes!” Varus said, walking deliberately toward the wizard. He gripped the ivory talisman with his left hand. “Your brethren on the Horn sent me to you.”

The wizard jumped to his feet and turned toward Varus. He had cast off the singlet he'd worn until now. Nude, he looked only marginally human; his genitals were tiny, more like those of an infant than a grown man's.

“Fear me, boy!” Nemastes said in a high-pitched voice. Varus hadn't heard him speak in the past. “You see your teacher, helpless against me. Run away now or you will be bound like him for eternity!”

He's bluffing,
Varus thought. He took another step. Nemastes threw a handful of softly shining objects toward him.

Snake ribs!
Varus thought as they pelted him, light taps and quite harmless. Nemastes shouted a word that human ears could not register.

One end of the green flame lifted from Pandareus's body. The coils abruptly unwound and writhed toward Varus.

Varus kicked at the serpent of fire. It slid up his leg and around his waist. He kicked vainly again and toppled paralyzed to the floor not far from his teacher.

Nemastes stared at him in satisfaction. “If my siblings sent you,” he said, “and I suppose they did, since I see you have the head of Botrug … If they did, then they picked a poor tool to save themselves.”

The Hyperborean squatted and resumed his chant toward the skull. One of the stones in the statue's plinth was glowing with its own pale light.

Varus could feel the coil of vivid green loop up and down his body; his
skin felt brittle beneath its touch. He could breathe, but he couldn't move his arms or legs. He could still speak, though—

“Nemastes!” he said. “They're coming for you. You can't escape your brothers!”

Varus didn't know that, nor did he know anything else that could give him hope. He suspected that it was a threat the Hyperborean might believe, though, and that it might throw him off his stride.

Nemastes shouted a word that made the lanterns wink. A stone of the plinth powdered, vanishing like a bubble in a marsh. The wizard reached into the cavity it had left. He came out with a curved black bone which was pierced for fingerings.

Rising, Nemastes fitted a short reed into a hole in the knuckle end of the flute. Looking at Varus again, he said, “This is Odd's flute, boy. Have you any conception of how long I've waited to hold this? But the wait was worth it. All power in this world is
mine
!”

“Till your brothers come for you,” Varus said. The cold from the helix of fire was seeping into his bones, but he continued to fight it. “You're doomed and you know it, Nemastes!”

“Spurius Cassius told me where he'd hidden this,” the wizard said. Varus had never seen his face without an unpleasant expression, but the grin this time seemed exceptionally nasty. “He didn't know how to use it, but I do. In exchange,
Lord
Varus, I gave him your sister. He's pleasuring himself with Lady Alphena in Hell right now, I believe.”

Varus lunged against the bonds of light. They continued to slip over him like greased copper; there was no give. The cold sank deeper, through the youth's muscles and into the marrow of his bones.
I'll never move again, and I'll never be warm
.

Nemastes raised the flute. “I've seen Odd use it!” he said. “I have Odd's power now!”

He's lying,
Varus thought. He was sure of that, though he had no conscious evidence for his belief.

Nemastes put his lips to the reed he'd inserted. Varus shouted, “You'll die for a fool if you try that, wizard! You'll die and know you'll die!”

Nemastes blew, starting on a high note and wobbling down the scale. Varus wasn't sure whether it was music or if the sound was a side effect, like the ringing of iron as it was beaten on an anvil.

Light itself contracted in a violent convulsion. The interior of the
temple glittered like an array of crystal prisms. There were thousands of identical
everything
—except the Hyperborean wizard alone, standing in the center and playing with the order of the universe.

Varus stood beside the old woman on a mountaintop; she held a sprig of mistletoe. Snow lay all around, but the two of them were on bare rock. The scene being acted inside the temple was far below but as clear to him as the wrinkles on the woman's face.

“Nemastes has power,” she said. Her voice quavered, but there was iron in it. “But not judgment. He thinks it shows patience that he has waited ten thousand years, but he has not waited long enough.”

“I have to stop him,” Varus said. He looked at her in concern. “That's right, isn't it? Whatever Nemastes wants isn't for the good of men.”

“How is a phantom to advise a wizard of your power, Lord Varus?” the old woman said. He didn't think she was being ironic. “You have the knowledge and the ability to remake the world as you choose it to be.”

Varus shook his head in horror. “Lady, not I,” he said. But it seemed that there was no one else.

Nemastes continued to pipe. The statue of Jupiter had withdrawn into earthen silence; it neither watched nor commented on what was taking place in its temple.

He's afraid!
Varus thought. For a moment he told himself that he was indulging in wishful thinking, but closer observation of the wizard's strained face convinced him that he
was
afraid. Though his flute sang with the force of a tornado, Nemastes was a charioteer who had lost his reins but feared to leap from his careening vehicle.

Around him twelve nodes in the yellow-green haze began to thicken. The Twelve had arrived, at least as observers; with them were the demons from the rocks of the Horn. They began to dance in slow, horrid majesty as before, to the rhythm that had ruled Varus for what had been in its way a lifetime.

This time Varus was outside it and thought he could smile. When he curled his lip, however, the result had nothing of humor in it.

“They are not here,” said the old woman, glaring in disgust at the dancing Hyperboreans. “They are not of the waking world or of this world either; they created their own place by walling off the Horn from any existence beyond their own.”

“They're watching, though,” Varus said. “Why are they doing that?”

He was frightened, but that was in a calm fashion now. He expected to fail and expected to die, but he was going forward anyway. He wished he could ask Corylus if that was what soldiers did, but he didn't suppose he would ever see his friend again.

“They are gloating, Lord Varus,” the woman said. “Nemastes and his siblings are not human, but they are enough like human beings to share that trait.”

She looked at him sharply and said, “But you do not gloat, do you?”

About what?
Varus thought.
About how great a poet I am?

Aloud he said, “No, your ladyship. I think that's discourteous.”

Varus saw the circling dancers from the peak where he stood with the old woman and simultaneously from where he lay on the temple floor. He considered them with a new feeling of contempt. That relaxed him almost as much as Sigyn's kiss had.

The Twelve were prancing bullies, no different from Piso and his cronies in class. Varus had seen Corylus handle the students. Gaius Varus could deal with Hyperborean wizards.

That's why I'm with the old woman,
he realized. His lips pursed to ask his companion to help him. Before his lips formed the words, Nemastes' skirling flute moved into a quicker tempo. Beneath the temple, a pit was opening. It grew in a world parallel to that of Carce, but it moved toward the temple with the speed of racing horses. There was movement in the depths, the way the sand on the floor of an ant lion's lair stirs before the creature strikes.

“Nemastes is a greater fool than any but you could have fathomed, Lord Wizard,” said the old woman. “He has freed Surtr, but he does not know how to direct the god against his siblings. They had hoped to send the fire demons out the easy passage through Vesuvius. By twisting the path which the flute tore, however, the Twelve are loosing Surtr's legions in the heart of Carce.”