Air and Darkness (48 page)

The tablet wasn't visible, but one of the blocks of the pediment was a finger's breadth off the ground. He knelt and peered; he could see the rectangular outline of the tablet. It had cracked just back from the edge of the block that had fallen on it.

What if the remainder of the tablet shattered instead of just breaking in half?
But that was a problem for another time.

Varus slid the tapered end of the bar under the block and lifted; the stone pavement provided a solid fulcrum. It wasn't nearly as difficult to raise the block as he had feared. He squatted and reached out with his left hand to feel for the tablet.

A serpent squirmed from beneath the piece of pediment and raised its wedge head with a hiss. Its fangs were over an inch long.

“Waugh!” Varus said, jumping away; he sprawled on his back. The pry bar clanged when he let go of it, dropping the block.

What are you doing?
said the ancestor, looking from the stone to Varus.

“The snake!” Varus said. He pointed. The snake's head wove back and forth, and the fangs dripped pale amber poison. “Don't you see the snake?”

There's no snake here!
said the ancestor. His expression changed, hardened. He grasped the end of the pry bar and lifted the block again, then reached under and snatched out the half tablet.

The snake vanished like a mist at sunrise. For an instant Varus thought he saw the face of the girl whom he and Bhiku had saved from the villagers who wanted to burn her alive as a serpent-demon; then she was gone also, leaving only the memory of her smile.

I have it!
the ancestor cried, holding up the tablet. The only damage was the rough edge where the original had been cracked in half.
My descendent cannot draw me back so long as I have this. I can live
here
forever!

Varus saw the black splotch on the tablet. “Put it down!” he said. He took a step toward the ancestor, then froze. This was much more dangerous than the mirage of a snake that had prevented him from touching the tablet himself.

No, you won't take it!
the ancestor said; he clutched the tablet to his naked breast.
I can live forever!

Varus backed away. The ancestor's face went blank. He gave a high, bubbling scream, an inhuman sound like that of steam escaping from under a pot lid. The black smut was spreading from the surface of the tablet, moving toward his head and legs both the way oil flows in winter.

The pry bar lay where the ancestor had dropped it when he straightened with the tablet. Varus thought of reaching for it as a weapon, but that would take him closer to the ancestor, closer to the Blight.

The old man screamed again. He turned and stumbled into the ruins. He was going in the direction of the pit from which the Blight had come originally.

Varus took a deep breath, then ran back the way he had come. When he reached the shimmering lens of the portal through which he and the ancestor had come to Anti-Thule, Varus looked over his shoulder. The ancestor, now a mass of crawling filth, poised on the edge of the black water, then plunged in.

Varus stepped into the rosy portal and started back to the Waking World. The air in the seeming library was comfortably warm, but he was shivering worse than he had in the frozen winds of Anti-Thule.

*   *   *

A
LPHENA AND HER GUIDE CAME
around another angle of the canyon. The valley broadened so abruptly that she paused, startled by the expanse. The slopes to either side were gentler than the cliffs they had been following, and the stream bubbled visibly over rocks for its whole width instead of carving a channel to either side of a line of islets.

Two serpents on short legs paced before a circular hole in the cliff ahead. They were blue in shadow but as iridescent as old glass where the sun struck them. Both turned their heads when Alphena and her guide appeared, but they continued to make slow circuits at the ends of shimmering leashes.

A man and a woman watched the serpents from a safe distance. The woman's bluish shift was as gauzy as a cloud. She faced around and drew the man's attention to the newcomers.

Neither was armed. Alphena kept her hand away from her sword hilt. She continued to walk at a measured pace. Without looking toward her companion, she said, “Lord Janus, who are those people?”

“I wouldn't know,” he said carelessly. If he'd been human he would have shrugged, but Alphena didn't suppose an iron statue could do that. “The female is a breeze nymph, though. Do you count them as people?”

“I suppose,” Alphena said. “Definitions are the sort of thing you'd better discuss with my brother and Master Pandareus, though.”

She cleared her throat to be sure that she wouldn't choke on the words, then called, “I am Alphena, daughter of Senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa. Where is Publius Corylus, whom I've come to this place to”—she stumbled on the thought for a moment before finishing—“to meet.”

She had almost said
to rescue
. With a sudden pang Alphena realized how much she wanted to rescue Corylus, for him to owe his safety to her, to see her as …

Well, she hadn't said that. No one would ever know what she was thinking.

Janus' metallic laugh chimed out discordantly.

“I'm Bion and this is Aura!” the man called. He was a sturdy-looking fellow, but he was clearly uneasy with the situation. “Corylus went into the cave. He hasn't come out yet.”

Alphena stopped at arm's length from the couple. It suddenly struck her that until her father became involved with an ancient wizard she had never met strangers without a bevy of servants present. Now it had become commonplace.

“The dragons were asleep then,” the nymph said. Face-to-face, she had the combination of willowy beauty and ageless eyes that even Alphena would have recognized as not truly human. That was another thing that she had learned about in the past months. “They got up as soon as he'd gone between them. I don't think he can come out now.”

Alphena drew her sword and walked as much closer as she would get while still remaining beyond the reach of the chained guardians. “Corylus!” she shouted. “Publius Cispius Corylus! This is Alphena!”

There was no response from the cave. The dragons paced toward her, their chains clinking along the ground instead of being stretched out. The animals' bodies quivered with taut muscles.

They're trying to lure me closer,
Alphena realized. She had seen gladiators let their shields dip as though they were too tired to hold them up properly, encouraging opponents to rush in for a quick kill.

She eyed the dragons professionally. Their heads were broad and flattened. The fangs in the upper and lower jaws overlapped. Their skins looked as thin as silk, but the metallic sheen made her wonder whether they would resist a sword edge like the iron plates of a segmented cuirass.

There's only one way to tell,
Alphena decided with gloomy certainty.
I'll thrust for the nearer one's neck, just behind the triangular skull, and hope that he writhes into the other one so that I have a chance to get the blade clear.

She poised, her face blank.

Rupa stepped into sight at the mouth of the cave. The disk in her right hand threw back a blaze of reflected sunlight.

“Greetings, Lady Alphena!” Rupa called in her perfect Latin. “When we met before, I tried to take the Godspeaker's ear from you. This time I want you to give the ear to me, in exchange for which I will release—”

She held up the disk, canting it slightly so that the surface didn't catch the sun.

“—your lover, Publius Corylus. If not, he will spend eternity in my speculum.”

Alphena barely heard the words. Her gaze was frozen on the tiny form of Corylus within the circuit of the disk.

“Rupa?” called the man Alphena had found standing with the nymph. “Is that really you, my love?”

*   *   *

C
ORYLUS ALMOST FELL ON HIS FACE.
His feet were solidly planted on the ground just as they had been the instant before Rupa trapped him in the mirror, but in the minutes since then he had forgotten how to balance.

Rupa walked out of the cave. She made a gesture with her left hand. The dragons, nervously alert a moment before, flopped onto their backs and writhed, their legs kicking and their tails sweeping arabesques above them.

“Bion, my love, my life,” Rupa said. Her voice had the same purring passion as the sounds the lolling dragons were making. “You have returned after so many years. You are still mine.”

Bion had been standing with Aura where Corylus had left them. The sailor ran forward and threw his arms around Rupa as though she were an attractive young woman instead of being a powerful Indian magician. She responded as a young woman would to her lover. She
was
still a magician, but at the moment the woman in love was foremost.

While Corylus was in the mirror, Alphena must have joined his former companions. She shot her sword back into its sheath and ran to him. In her left hand was an iron baton with a head forged on to the end.

A dragon's tail whipped in front of Alphena—it was chance, not an attempt to trip her—but she hopped over it with the skill of long practice in the gymnasium. To Corylus' amazement, the girl hugged him as tightly as Rupa did Bion. Corylus stepped back, but Alphena came with him.

“Publius Corylus, I love you and I want you!” Alphena said. “I don't care what rank you are; you're made for me and I want you!”

“Lady Alphena…,” he said. He didn't know what to say next. Half of him wanted the girl to be a thousand miles away, but the other half was a young man against whom an attractive woman was rubbing her warm body. “You're enchanted and…”

“No, I'm not,” Alphena said. She stepped back and looked fiercely up at him. “You think this is Bacchus talking or wine or something else forcing me, but it's not. I've gone awful places with you and I've fought beside you. I love you and I want to, I want
you
to make love to me!”

Corylus swallowed. He didn't retreat, because Alphena was now standing a proper distance away and he didn't want to spur her to grab him again. He opened his mouth to say, Lady Alphena, then closed it again. He took her hands between his fingers and said, “Alphena, we'll talk about this later, when we're … well, when we're not here.”

He swallowed again and added, “And I'll tell you what I think. When I know what it is.”

His body certainly knew what
it
thought. His mind thought several different things at the same time. All the choices were bad for one reason or another.

“All right,” Alphena said. “But we
will
talk.”

She looked at the baton in her hand with a puzzled expression, then thrust it under her sword belt. “Do you know how we can get back to the Waking World? I think Janus could help if we could bring him back.”

What she said made no sense to Corylus. He frowned as he considered how to reply. Before he could, Rupa joined them. Bion followed her closely, but his expression was one of blissful vacancy.

“Publius Corylus,” Rupa said, “Bion has told me how you saved him and brought him back to me. We will go off shortly to where the troubles of this world and the Waking World both have no meaning; we will not be separated again.”

She looked at Bion; puzzlement had edged into his expression. “I have learned many things while I was searching for you, my love,” she said in a voice thickened with warm emotion. “I did not find you, but I have learned how to keep us safe from any power in the Cosmos.”

Bion took her left hand in both of his; he did not speak.

“Before I leave, Corylus…,” Rupa went on, “what is there that I can provide?”

Corylus pondered the question. His mind was spiky and uneven from the time he had spent trapped in the mirror.

“Mother and Varus,” Alphena said before his thought formed. “We came to the Otherworld to find them. And to find Corylus.”

“Can you help us to find Lady Hedia and Gaius Varus?” Corylus said. “Mistress Rupa, I—I'm glad that you and Bion are together, but I didn't know I was bringing him to you. If you can help us, we'll be grateful and our friends will be grateful, but I don't want you to misunderstand what happened.”

He didn't know what happened. The trek across the Otherworld had been much like a patrol on the east side of the frontier, where none of the events had been planned and you were just happy to survive.

“Your friends are both in the Waking World, in Govinda's kingdom,” Rupa said. “I can send you to either through the mirror here, as easily as I used it to trap you, Corylus. They are not together, however. Hedia is at Dreaming Hill while Varus is about to enter Govinda's palace from Anti-Thule.”

Corylus looked at Alphena. He wanted to say,
Send us to Hedia!
but he wasn't sure how Alphena would react. Varus was Corylus' friend and a magician who might be able to get them back to the Waking World. Despite those things, thought of Hedia's icy practicality was somehow more reassuring.

“Both your friends face danger,” Rupa said, “but there is little you could do to help Gaius Varus. Lady Hedia, however, is menaced by armed men.”

“Is she?” said Corylus. He heard the tone of his voice change into something like a lion's cough. He placed both hands on his staff and worked his shoulder muscles.

“Mistress Rupa,” Alphena said. “Please send us my mother.”

Corylus looked out past the playful dragons and noticed Aura. “Wait!” he said. “I need to…”

He strode back to the sprite. He didn't run, just in case the dragons' kittenish behavior included snatching at anything moving quickly in front of them.

“Aura?” he said. “Can we help
you
? For bringing me here, as you promised.”