Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (42 page)

Eden raised a short, curved stick at the end
of an outstretched arm. Before Demosthenes even recognized the
thing for a small, strangely double-curved bow, a groan sounded in
the boat rowing alongside his, and a man by the name of Enytos fell
back with an arrow in his eye. He was dead before he hit the
boards, and his oar flew wild. A quick-thinking benchmate grabbed
it, only to be struck down next by a shaft to the center of his
chest. The boat of the two dead men veered right, one oar lost to
sea, as the living in that craft, and in the remaining three boats,
hunkered down to utter prayers or curses.

A third short, red-fletched arrow fell, and
another rower in the same craft fell dead. No, not dead. Just
wounded, but not for long–the fourth shaft did not fail to steal
his life.

Even a troop of bowmen should have been
capable of nothing more than harassment at this range, killing a
man or two out of every fifty arrows, if luck was with them. But
Demosthenes knew that this shooter's eye and arm were of the stars,
built to kill, and she needed no luck.

The two men who yet lived in the boat of
corpses, seeing that nothing awaited them but death, leaped
overboard and began to swim. The closest shore was the one they had
just left, but to go back there was certain doom. There was no way
they could reach Eleusis either, and so they split the difference
and headed for a point ahead of the invading army, in the hope they
might beat its advance into Attica. If they reached land, perhaps
they would live.

On the heights, Eden lowered her bow and
vanished among the rocks. Demosthenes lost sight of her
momentarily, then found her golden halo again atop the cliffs at
the place where the drop to the sea was sheerest. She made some
strange swift movements which he identified, with a feeling of
dread, as the shedding of her outer clothes. Once those sat in a
pile, she stepped to the cliff's edge and without a second's
hesitation, dove off. Her form cut a smooth, straight line, a pale
dart against the dark brown of the rock behind, and she slipped
into the foaming sea with scarcely a splash.

"Steady on," Demosthenes told the four men
in the craft with him, for lack of anything better. "Be ready for
anything."

He sensed, if not knew, that the warning was
useless.

The three remaining craft rowed on in
silence but for some hushed pleas to the gods for deliverance and
on behalf the shades of the dead. After several minutes of hard
rowing, the oarsmen of each boat eased back, either from weariness
or the belief they were out of bowshot. Whichever was the case,
Demosthenes ordered fresh rowers to take the oars, taking one
himself, and he urged no let-up. Even if they believed the danger
was over and pursuit was impossible, they were stunned by the
sudden loss of their comrades and so obeyed without question.

There were the sounds of a hollow thump and
then screams, and Demosthenes' eyes flew to the source: the prow of
the rearmost boat had dug into the waves, sending the aft flying
upward, as might happen in a violent storm. All five men within
tumbled screaming into the sea, where they treaded water and
scrambled to reoccupy the empty hull.

One man slipped abruptly under the waves, as
if tugged from below; then another. Moments later, both bobbed to
the surface, dead, their dark cloaks billowing. Then a third was
pulled down, thrashing and screaming, and when he surfaced, too,
life had fled his limbs.

The two men left in the sea reached their
boat and clambered aboard, while near them a smooth and flowing
white shape, dolphin-like, grazed the green surface of the bay.

"Swords!" Demosthenes cried. Most of the
surviving volunteers already had drawn the weapons strapped to
their backs, but the rest did so now, all except those manning the
oars, which included Demosthenes.

Three strokes of those oars was all their
hidden enemy allowed. Then another boat lost an oar, yanked from
below out of the rower's grip. The men around him brought their
blades to bear and hacked blindly into the waves on the spot where
it had vanished. While they were thus occupied on the port side,
the boat's starboard lifted, dumping all three in a storm of
flailing limbs. One by one they slipped into the deep and became
prey to a sleek white shape flitting just below the surface, and
then their corpses were set adrift on the gentle waves. The two
rowers of that emptied craft gave up their oars, clasped hands and
raised voices in prayer, and Demosthenes watched helplessly as a
pair of white arms rose from the bay to clap hands on the boat's
topstrake, and Eden emerged from the deep.

First revealed was a slick sheet of flaxen
hair; below that, a slim torso and rounded backside clad in nothing
but white linen rendered translucent by the sea. Then came bare
legs which flew, first one and then the other, into the hull, and
finally the killer stood fully revealed. Standing at the prow, she
gazed upon the victims who cowered at the boat's far end hurling
useless prayers at Olympus.

Rowing on in spite of the near certitude
that there could be no escape, Demosthenes watched Eden run the two
men through with a sword she stooped to pick up from the boards.
They had accepted death, it seemed, and chosen to go this way
rather than beneath the waves. This way, they could hope for
eventual burial, that their shades might not drift eternally.

The white daimon of the bay turned in the
empty hull to face the final craft, Demosthenes' boat, which had
never stopped moving and which now plied the waves some twenty
yards from her. With scarcely a pause, she cast her sword aside and
dove into the water. The four men around Demosthenes wailed in
despair, knowing they were next.

Demosthenes stopped rowing, dropped his oar
and drew the sword on his back. He had seen Eden heavily mutilated,
seen her lose an arm, even if she showed no trace of missing it
now. Granted, another of her kind had inflicted those wounds, but
the fact remained, she could be hurt.

"I say we kill the bitch," he said, rising
from the bench and adopting a low, stable crouch in the rocking
vessel. "If we fail, at least we can die well."

The response was not what it might have
been. The other rower shipped his oar, and one by one, eyeing the
ominously quiet surface of the bay, the four muttered reluctant
assent. They carefully stood and arranged themselves in a tight
ring at the craft's center, all eyes facing out. Every man's sword
rose; every set of shoulders tensed. The man to Demosthenes' left
drew a shuddering breath and resumed a rambling prayer.

Something slapped the hull. It was no wave,
no bit of flotsam: eight white fingers appeared on the prow. The
boat rocked, and in one swift motion the daimon came aboard. Golden
hair longer than a Spartiate's streamed water onto the benches and
along the contours of a body clad so thinly that every detail was
visible. The ring of Athenians broke, and its members turned swords
shaking in unsteady hands to oppose her.

She had the face of Leda, this glistening
goddess of death, and it showed first interest and then amusement.
She smiled wickedly, and without warning she lunged, forming raised
hands into claws while hissing loudly through teeth bared in a
snarl.

The move was a feint, but four screams split
the air, four swords clattered onto the boards, and four of Athens'
bravest men, men who had volunteered to ambush a Spartan army of
thousands, jumped into the Bay of Eleusis and swam for their
lives.

Their commander stood alone, pointing a
feeble short sword at a being he knew could, with the barest of
effort, rend him in two.

The eyes of Eden were a richer, deeper blue
than Thalassia's and harder by far, and the stare they leveled
across the rocking boat at him was a measuring one. She came
forward and sat facing Demosthenes on the forward bench with her
legs parted, putting all she had on display without any thought for
modesty.

She had this in common with Thalassia
then.

"Like what you see, Athenian?" she taunted.
She overenunciated as Thalassia once had, and her words were a mix
of Attic and Doric. "Or do you prefer darker meat, like Geneva's?
Or Seaweed, or whatever it is you're calling her."

Demosthenes stood frozen. His sword's point
was still aimed at her, for what little it was worth.

The deadly nymph scoffed. "I know you,
Demosthenes. I remember you from Pylos. I will not go so far as to
say that I owe you my life, but..." She smiled. "Your intervention
was timely. A shame that the decision to put a sword in Geneva was
the last good one you made. You have become her pet, no? Are you a
good dog, Athenian? Do you bend over when she tells you, and yelp
when she–"

"Enough," Demosthenes said, lowering his
blade. "I care nothing of your feud with Geneva. My one concern is
the safety of my city." In the long seconds which Eden had spent
taunting him, Demosthenes' mind had not been idle, nor was it now.
His words had purpose. "A mere human cannot deceive your kind, so
you must know I speak truly. Perhaps I am possessed of other truths
which might be of interest to you?"

"You think you can play games with me,
Athenian?" Eden asked with a malevolent smile. Then, "Very well...
until it grows dull. Tell me a truth."

"I know Geneva's purpose, the one which has
stranded you here in a... I believe you would call it a Severed
Layer?"

"Go on," Eden said. Interest was apparent in
her sharp, pale features.

"According to her, this layer, this world,
are those which shall give birth to the being you call the Worm. I
can guess from your face that this comes as news to you. Geneva
knows not the precise time or place, but she hopes that if the
course of history is thrown far enough from the path which leads to
him, the Worm might be... uncreated."

Demosthenes paused, and Eden glared, tight
of lip and narrow of eye. "No," she concluded at length. "If that
is possible, why did Magdalen not order it so? Unless Geneva acts
under Her command?"

"She does not," Demosthenes was pleased to
inform her. "As to your other point, I can hardly say. Geneva was
the Worm's lover. Perhaps that gave her insight which your Magdalen
lacks. I only know that Geneva came here by her own design with the
aim of uncreating the Worm–an aim which," Demosthenes added
calculatedly, "she believes that you, in lending your knowledge and
assistance to Sparta, are presently helping her to achieve."

He watched Eden absorb this in silence,
betraying no outward reaction for some seconds. When she did react,
it was to smile. Demosthenes had come to hate that thin, cold
smile. He still had not forgotten it from Pylos.

"Astonishing," Eden remarked. "The
Wormwhore's mouth is good for but two things. Lying is one of them.
Yet I believe in the truth of what she has told you. Just as I see
why you wish for me to know it." Her smile became a sneer. "You
hope it will save your city. It will not. No more than will the
damage you have done today to a few machines. More of them
follow... and they are not our only surprises."

Star-born, nearly naked Eden stood, a
graceful movement that interrupted the rhythm of the hull's gentle
rolling not one iota.

"You have given me much to think on,
Athenian," she said. "For the future. For now, our little contest
must have resolution. There is pride at stake. Which will triumph,
her city... or mine?

"Go back to your mistress now, pet," she
commanded. "Tell the Wormwhore I will see her on the day of battle.
Hope for the sake of Athens that she chooses to stand and fight.
Should she run, I will have little choice but to see
my 
frustration 
taken out on your people." A sick
gleam tainted Eden's eye. " In exchange for your having helped me
once, I grant you your life today, along with those others I
spared. Make them last, if you can, and use them well."

Sleek Eden turned to face the cliffs.
Setting one bare foot on the boat's topstrake, she dove and slipped
beneath the waves, leaving cold corpses bobbing in her wake.

END OF PART IV

Beaching their two boats at Eleusis,
Demosthenes and the eight survivors of Eden's attack loaded onto a
cart the five bodies they had managed to fish from the bay and by
twilight completed the grim overland return to Athens. A rider
carried word ahead of their return, delivering it straight to
Nikias that he might meet them alone at the Sacred Gate. Though
Nikias had withheld his support for the ambush on Skiron's Road,
Demosthenes had informed him of his intention to undertake it. Such
defiance had not displeased Nikias, who was content to wait and see
the raid's outcome before deciding whether to bestow his approval
retroactively and perhaps claim a share of the credit with no risk
of blame.

As the slain volunteers were carted away,
the survivors swore to make no mention to anyone of Eden, the
she-daimon whose name they still did not know. Eden would remain a
state secret, as were the siege engines which had been the raid's
target. Better that the populace not be thrown into a senseless
panic. Rumor eventually would take to her wings and flit over the
city sowing seeds of fear, but for now, only those Athenians who
had just escaped Eden's wrath, and Nikas, would know of her
existence.

Nikias's weathered skin turned the color of
bone when he heard that as many as eleven men (three were last seen
living, but remained unaccounted for) had died this day at the
hands of a lone female.

"Some god has finally seen fit to join our
war directly," old Nikias reflected, his gray eyes misting. He was
never one to take lightly the gods' favor; in years past, he had
spared no public expense in attempting to gain it for his city.
"Will another come down on our side, I wonder?"