IGMS Issue 44 (2 page)

As if sensing my hesitation, Vitulus said, "You will be well-compensated for your services
if
you find the breastplate before dawn." He reached for the leather pouch tied to his belt and took out a small slab of silvery metal with gold flakes on it.

I felt my jaw drop open.
Aurichalcum.
I could feel its arcane hum as a small vibration in my teeth.
Of all the components I needed, aurichalcum was the rarest.
Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap.

I struggled to keep my face impassive, but I don't think I did a good job. Vitulus grinned. "I understand this trinket is something for which you've been searching. Salvius Aper took this as a souvenir from Egypt when he marched with Augustus against Marcus Antonius."

Wow, this guy did his homework. He must've heard that I had asked about aurichalcum at every religious relic kiosk in the Forum and every temple across the Seven Hills. I'd been laughed out of each one of them. "Aurichalcum doesn't exist," they'd said. Or, more commonly, they'd try to sell me an obvious counterfeit.

My heart thumped as I stared at the aurichalcum.
It was just a breastplate,
I thought. It's not like he was asking me to assassinate anyone, or draw up a love potion, or curse a rival gens. And that aurichalcum could get me home
today
.

I looked back at Vitulus. "When do you want to start?"

He put the aurichalcum sliver back in his leather pouch and tied it to his belt.

"Now," he said.

While I'm competent in all forms of magic, finding things has always been my specialty. I had apprenticed under the great finder William Pingree Ford, who himself apprenticed under his great-grandfather Henry Ford the Watch-Maker. In other words, if I had access to someone who had touched the missing person, object, or animal, I could find said missing person, object, or animal in my sleep.

I held my hand out to Vitulus. "I need your permission to look for the breastplate in your mind."

"What?"

"This is how I find things. If you give me permission to look into your mind, take my hand."

Vitulus looked as if he'd rather face down a cohort of Persian Immortals than take my hand, but he slowly raised his right hand and put it in mine. "Do what you need to," he said.

"Don't worry," I said, "you won't feel a thing."

I turned my ball cap around so that the bill and logo were facing backward, concentrated my magic into my lungs, and then exhaled slowly at Vitulus. My breath reached out to Vitulus and was drawn into his lungs when he inhaled. With my eyes closed, I directed my breath to work its way from his lungs into his bloodstream and then up to his brain. Crossing the blood-brain barrier was tricky for novices, but I wasn't a novice. My breath molecules slipped through the barrier (thanks to his permission) and I was in his mind.

His thoughts and memories inundated my mind's eye, but I quickly shut off the deluge and focused on the breastplate. I found the memory and did a spiritual fist pump: Vitulus stood at Aper's side as he accepted the breastplate from Augustus. Aper thanked Augustus with a bow and then handed the breastplate to Vitulus. Vitulus not only carried it back to Aper's home, but he had also studied it, taking in every detail of its master-crafted etchings and purple and gold painting. It was a beautiful piece of art that I could imagine as the prized possession of a twenty-first century museum, sitting in a glass box illuminated by spark globes.

I withdrew from Vitulus's mind and back to my stool in ancient Rome. I turned the bill of my ball cap around so that the logo was facing Vitulus again. He stared at me with raised, questioning eyebrows, so I gave him a triumphant smile.

"Let's go get your breastplate," I said.

Once I had the breastplate's look and feel firmly set in my mind, it was simply a matter of walking to where it was hidden. I could do a finding based on one sense, but it was hard. This time I had
two
senses to work with -- sight and touch -- and I had never failed with two senses.

Vitulus and I set out immediately from my Aventine flat. He seemed doubtful that I knew where the breastplate was, but he followed me nonetheless. It was still a cultural shock for me to be surrounded by people who doubted the workings of magic. But, ironically, that made it easy for me to set up shop as a magus: most people saw me as a quirky foreigner at best, an
insane
foreigner at worst.

But the people I had helped knew differently.

I kept my focus on the breastplate and didn't speak to Vitulus as we walked south along the Via Ostiensis and down the Aventine. As any finder will tell you, I don't see the lost object's actual location in my mind; I simply follow my feet. My feet know where the object is, and I never really know the location until my feet stop.

Which was why I ignored Vitulus when he constantly asked me where the breastplate was.

"Seriously, I don't know," I finally said after he asked a third time. "But I will when I find it."

"That makes no sense at all," he grumbled. "In fact, nothing you say makes sense." But he continued to walk beside me through the Roman crowds.

"Magic is not meant to make sense. It's meant to be felt."

Vitulus glanced at me curiously, and not for the first time today. "Just where are you from, exactly? You look Roman but I cannot place your accent."

"I come from an alternate timeline over two thousand years in your future where magic is ubiquitous. I got stuck here because I was dumb enough to help a friend."

He gave me that "insane foreigner" look I knew so well.

"You asked," I said.

"Well. I don't care where you're from, so long as you find that breastplate before dawn." Vitulus looked up at the setting sun. "Night approaches. How much longer before we arrive?"

"You ask me one more time and I'll --"

My feet had stopped walking in front of an archway into a cemetery. Beyond the archway, old sarcophagi, mausoleums, and tombstones cast shadows in the setting sunlight.

Ah, crap.
I hated Roman cemeteries. In my time, we had wards and enchantments that kept all the nasty
things
away that fed off the dissipating energies of the dead. However, those wards were beyond the Romans of this century, so this cemetery could be infested by a host of things I'd rather not encounter.

But my ticket home lay in there, so I really had no choice but to go and get it.

"This is it, I guess," I said.

"Finally," Vitulus said. He started toward the archway, but I put a hand on his forearm to stop him.

"Um, just so you know, I tend to . . . attract things because of my abilities."

"What kind of things?"

I shrugged. "Hard to say. Just keep your eyes open, okay?"

"Why would I shut my eyes?"

I shook my head. "Just an expression. Let's do this before the sun goes down."

I let my feet guide me through the arch. We passed ancient sarcophagi from Republican times -- though Imperator Augustus would argue Rome was still a Republic -- and mausoleums that held the remains of entire patrician families, some going back hundreds of years.

The sun had already set beyond the hills to the west, and the cemetery was cast in darkness beneath a red sky. My feet took me through the cemetery along a sandstone walkway. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw wisps of gray mist peeking at us from behind large tombstones. I sensed their curiosity and, more disturbingly, their hunger for my magic. I prayed my feet wouldn't take me off the sandstone path.

My feet stopped abruptly at an old tomb built into a hill at the very back of the cemetery. It had a brick walkway and walls carved into the hill that led to a heavy wood door beneath an ornate archway. "Aemilius'" was inscribed above the door.

"The tomb of the Aemilii," Vitulus said. "An ancient and wealthy
gens
. Is it here?" His hand rested on the hilt of his
gladius
, and his eyes darted from side to side. He looked as nervous as I felt. He couldn't see the hungry wisps, but he clearly sensed them.

"Yes," I said, "and it appears to be unlocked."

There was no lock on the door, and the fading light showed recent scratches and dents where a padlock should've been. We both stared at the door.

"Aren't you going in?" Vitulus asked quietly.

"I was waiting for you."

"You're the magus."

I sighed. "Fine."

I urged my feet toward the unlocked door. I stopped in front of it, ensured my ball cap was securely fastened to my head, and pushed the door open. It made that creaking noise all doors make in horror movies, which raised the hairs on my neck and arms. It was pitch black in the tomb, so I snapped my fingers. A little spark globe popped into existence and floated above us, illuminating the one-room tomb.

"Gods!" Vitulus cried, staring at the globe. "You're . . . you're a real magus?"

I looked at him. "Well, yeah. If you didn't think so, why did you come to me in the first place?"

"Because Salvius Aper is my patron and wished it so," he said, as if I'd just asked if water was wet. He looked from the light back to me. "What else can you do?"

"A lot of things," I said, "but right now I'd like to find that breastplate and get out of here. I don't know about you, but this place gives me the creeps." I felt more shadows and wisps gathering behind us. I hated feeling like a suckling pig on Saturnalia.

"The 'creeps'?"

"Scary, uneasy. Creeps."

Vitulus nodded, looking around. "Yes, I too have creeps."

The tomb was about twenty feet deep and ten feet wide, and smelled like how you'd expect a tomb to smell: moldy and decayed. Shrouded, desiccated bodies lay on stone alcoves built into the walls near the back of the tomb, with only their feet visible. Cremation was in style now, so the front of the tomb had shelves lined with ornately painted clay urns.

My feet walked me toward the back of the tomb and then stopped in front of an alcove where bony feet poked from out of the darkness. I directed the spark globe closer to the --

Shadows from inside the alcove came at me in smoky, finger-sized tendrils.

I recognized what was about to happen, and fell backward into Vitulus to get out of the way. An instant later, the corpse exploded into a cloud of shadow, bone, and dried flesh. An imprint daemon flew out of the alcove and landed on the brick floor with a wet slap. Imprint daemons can best be described as three-foot slugs with six spidery legs, sharp black teeth, and no eyes. It turned its shiny black head to me, snarled, and then gave me the most terrifying laugh I'd heard since I got stuck in Rome.

"Looking for something, finder?" the daemon cackled, its voice like bone scraping on the tomb's door. "Stand still so I can give it to you."

The daemon skittered toward me in blinding speed, its wide jaws exposing jagged black teeth. Vitulus stepped forward with his
gladius
, and before I could scream, "Wait," he sliced the daemon in two.

The mouth half of the daemon landed to the left, the back end to the right. The mouth end howled, "That hurt!"

The back half flopped around a moment, then a new head grew out of the gory stump. Once the head poked through the viscera of the former back end, it cried, "Yeah, that hurt!" The mouth half had grown another rear by now, and they both grinned at us with the same black, slimy teeth.

"Blessed Juno," Vitulus muttered in shock.

"You can't cut them in half, dumbass!" I pushed him behind me. "Let me take care of this."

It had been a long time since I'd had to fight an imprint daemon -- not since my apprenticeship, actually -- so I prayed I still remembered the motions and words to banish them. I touched the tips of my middle and ring fingers to my palms, brought both hands above my head, and drew an interlocking "S" in the air, all while uttering the spell's words in the bastardized Dutch I had learned from my mentor.

"
Dit alles hier worden bewaakt in de tijd, en er in de eeuwigheid!
"

Both daemons leaped at my head just as I finished the spell. The banishment struck one of the daemons. It howled its frustration as it shriveled up in mid-air and dissipated with a pop.