She Walks in Shadows (26 page)

I swore and followed him through the stooped doorway.

“This is madness,” I snarled, a complaint that fell on deaf ears.

Just three feet into the General’s bedchamber, Engatius stood unmoving. Between his old friend and him lay Gratiana’s ornate sleeping couch. The woman herself was held at sword point.

“General,” Engatius began haltingly. “Antonius, what —”

“
She
killed them! Every single one. All the soldiers, all the villagers ….” The General’s forearm bulged with the effort of holding a blade to his wife’s throat. His knuckles whitened around the hilt. “She made a pact with the
di inferi!
She is Discordia-made-flesh!”

“She is your wife.”

“Husband ….” Tears beaded on Gratiana’s spidery lashes.

I squeezed my fist around my dagger. Small as it was, it was our only hope.

“Silence!” The General’s fury sparked like a flint. “Your poison tongue has taken two hundred lives! All my nightmares, all those unanswered questions — it was your doing! I should have slit your throat when you brought that
thing
into the world! Mothers of good Roman legionnaires rejoice! The gods themselves would welcome me into Elysium!”

Engatius inched forward. “Antonius, are — are you injured?”

“What?”

“Your hands. You — is that
blood
?”

The General blinked at him, bemused. His hold on Gratiana slackened. “It … it happened again.” He grimaced, shaking as if in the throes of a seizure, and abruptly doubled over.

As a doctor’s servant, I had witnessed patients expel the contents of their stomach before, but never had their bile contained human eyes, half-digested, yet still distinct on white linen.

“Antonius!”

My master started forward with arms outstretched, heedless of the offal on the bed. He blocked my view of the General but not of his sword.

The
gladius
did not stave him off, though it sank deep into his gut and emerged through the slats of his spine like a needle perforating cloth. A red flower bloomed in its wake.

Engatius buckled, his unbelted tunic catching on the blade. He folded gently.

The General’s face floated above him, blood around the mouth and eyes wide.

I did not think. I hefted my dagger and lobbed it with as much force as I could muster.

Had he worn his plate, the short blade would not have made a dent. Had he woken from his nightmares and come for me rather than the Roman guards standing watch, I would not have been here, now, to pierce his chest. But he had not.

The General crumpled like a puppet, his frown giving way to astonishment. He was not so invincible, after all, if a mere slave — a woman, at that — could fell him with a single blow.

Gratiana crawled away from her husband’s body and dragged herself up with both hands upon the soiled bed. She seemed no more eager to approach his body than I was to check if the Doctor was still breathing.

“It’s over,” I said, swallowing past the lump in my throat.

“Yes.”

“Can you ride? We should ….”
Leave this place. Flee whatever darkness hangs upon this house.
The General was gone, but the forces that had animated his mortal coil still hovered in the air around us. I could hear their whispers. I sensed their bodies rustling in the shadows.

My fear was Roman, but something inside me was awed by such horrific power.

I thought that the General’s wife might refuse. She’d said before she did not wish to leave this house. But Gratiana nodded, her lips curling in distaste as she took in the sprawl of our two masters — Roman, proud and very much dead.

“Yes,” she said again and only briefly hesitated before taking my arm. She seemed stricken, but not out of her mind with grief, as I helped her astride Engatius’ white charger. “Where will we go, Seonag? What are we to do?”

“South.”

Hadrian’s Wall would be our destination for the time being and then, who could say? Calleva? Londinium? As for what to do — I cast one last glance over the lugubrious villa, its walls stooped and dark against the shuddering oak wood.

Something had been awakened in this forest, born of Gratiana’s sacrifice and hatred, an ancient power that stole through the General and turned Rome’s sharpest weapon against itself.

“Does it still hunger?” I asked, scratching my hand into the steed’s snowy hair.

Iunia Gratiana offered a thin smile.

“South,” I repeated. South to Rome itself, to the stretch of a prosperous empire reclining upon stolen land, full of men whose dreams were ripe for plucking like eyes from a human skull.

CTHULHU OF THE DEAD SEA

Inkeri Kontro

“THEN TO MY
conclusions.” Anna wishes her voice would stop shaking. She has done this a hundred times and the nervousness only gets worse with age. One would assume it would get easier, but her hands are shaking more than ever and she has had to do quick, furious circles with the laser pointer to hide how jumpy she is. The ugly truth is that she is running on a fragmented five-hour sleep and she knows it is showing.

“Due to its high salt content, the Dead Sea was previously thought to be a virtually uninhabitable place for even microorganisms, which are present in quite low amounts. The average salt content of the Dead Sea is increasing due to current climate conditions.” Don’t say climate change. Anna has seen one scientific presentation which turned into a proverbial slaughter when some older gentleman took issue with a PhD student’s choice of words. The moderator should have cut the fight short because the old fart was clearly out of line and off-topic, but sometimes, moderators are a bit old-farty themselves. Anna is not taking that chance.

“However, we have discovered a new type of Archaea, belonging to the class
Halobacteria
, which appears to be thriving. The organism appears unrelated to previously discovered species, therefore we named it
Halofractal cthulhu
.”

The name felt like an excellent idea when she came up with it. Most of the lab sided with her immediately. The professor actually is a huge horror fan, and was completely overjoyed over being able to name something
Cthulhu
. The thing did look a lot like a Little Old One, though, to be fair, it resembled a mash-up of Cthulhu and a Pac-Man ghost more, with its short and thick tentacles. You just can’t name a new species Pac-Man; that would be completely unprofessional.

The genus was the difficult part. Little
cthulhu
did not seem to fit in any existing slot, so the laboratory decided to name it according to the surface structure. Anna was not really familiar with the concept of fractals, but the more mathematically inclined scientists were overjoyed with the creature’s tendency to pack into clusters that imitated the shape of a single critter. Also, the electron microscope images showed that the “tentacles” were covered in little bumps, which also seemed to have a tentacle-like structure going on, so salt-loving fractal god it was.
Halofractal cthulhu.

“The species thrives in very high salt concentrations. In our laboratory, we have observed it surviving and even reproducing in salt concentrations exceeding fifty-two percent, which is markedly higher than previously reported for any
halophile.
We hope studying this species will shed more light into the fascinating range of conditions in which life can survive on Earth.” A quick round of acknowledgements means the majority of the presentation is cleared. Only the worst remains.

“I am happy to answer any questions.”

The moderator stands up. The applause doesn’t even have time to die out before hands are shooting in the air. Damn it. The compulsory hammer guy goes first. Every conference has one: a scientist so blinded by the excellence of his own technique that he asks a question about it — regardless of how out of place it is. Anna has seen enough presentations at this conference to know that the small-angle X-ray scattering guy is a typical hammer scientist. SAXS is his tool and when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Also, if someone dares tell you they actually have a screw, you can still bludgeon the person into submission with your hammer.

“No, we have not done SAXS,” Anna replies with a polite smile. Someday, she will have to find out what that is, but ultimately, it is not of importance. Hammer guys come in all flavors. “I am personally not familiar with the technique, but we shall certainly consider it.”

An urgent hand is raised from the other side of the room, but the moderator ignores it in favor of the waiting ones. Anna clears the rest of the questions with enough grace and the moderator cuts the discussion when the merciful clock reaches the end of the session. The angry hand is left without a turn.

The owner of the angry hand comes up to Anna during the coffee break. She is a woman in her mid-forties, dressed in a well-fitting blazer and little black dress, with a whimsical necklace with plastic cut-outs draped around her neck. If it weren’t for the neon-pink tights drawing attention to her legs, which end in yellow boots, she would look like a businesswoman out of place at the science conference. Now she just looks out of place.

Most women at the conference dress in a fairly casual, masculine manner. The few exceptions mostly aren’t program participants; a few elderly ladies clearly accompanying equally elderly professors, dressed in pastels accented with pearl necklaces, golden rings and the most sensible high heels you can find for money.

“Professor Jacobsen,” the woman introduces herself. “I really enjoyed your speech. I just wanted to let you know that you should not care about Max. SAXS is a complete waste of time.”

Before Anna has a chance to reply, Max the SAXS guy materializes from thin air. His affect is chilly and he neither introduces himself nor waits for Anna to. He clearly knows Professor Jacobsen from before and the argument is on with full force. Anna nods politely, though she hardly understands a word. When a third scientist comes to congratulate her on the presentation, she gratefully bows out of the conversation.

The coffee break is almost over when professor Jacobsen finds Anna anew. She apologizes and tells Anna she would love to have her visit her laboratory. Anna thanks her and brushes it off as ordinary politeness. She is genuinely shocked, a week later, when the renewed invitation appears in her inbox.

Anna feels out of place at Lise Kjær Jacobsen’s laboratory. Most people speak Danish to each other and though they always switch to English when they feel she should be included, she finds herself often hanging on the outskirts of the group, guessing whether it would be rude of her to remind them she is present.

When they do remember her, though, they are warm and welcoming. They ask her to join them for after-work beers, make sure she has something to do on the first weekend, and offer to take her sight-seeing. They seem genuinely invested in making her enjoy her few weeks in Copenhagen. Especially the young post-doc, Bianca, wants to spend time with Anna.

Bianca is a bubbly personality, but her English skills are obscured by her thick French accent, which makes parsing the sentences hard work. She carries around a bag of crisps and eats them everywhere except in the wetlab. “Ee like ze salt. Like
cthul’u.
” she laughs. She is also fascinated with Anna’s samples, and goes on and on about her love for supernatural things. Anna nods politely.