The Gate of Fire (89 page)

With a heave, she leapt up and grabbed the edge and swung herself onto the ramp as it descended.

By all accounts,
she thought, rolling up into the cargo hold,
this thing can fly us away from here!

Maxian staggered, feeling poison flood into his skull like a black river. The Oath had come against him, all disguised in the face of love, and now it clawed at his mind and body. Even the power of the mountain seemed faint and weak beside the concentrated venom that hissed like acid inside his head. The Prince felt memories of joy and love and pain and hate flee, consumed by the damage to his mind.

Enough!
There was power enough and more at his command. Was not his the will that could mend the shattered body, restore the dead to life, bring fruit from barren soil? He opened his thought to the full power of the mountain and let all restraint flee.
I will live!

In darkness, crowned with a haze of smoke, the mountain trembled. Far down the cone, on slopes covered with woodlots, pasture, and vineyards, the earth shifted and trembled. Stone grated on stone, and in every farmyard the animals were bawling with terror. Men woke from troubled sleep and stared out into the night. But there was nothing to see save some dim lights on the height.

Clouds had gathered, thick and dark, around the periphery of the mountain. Yellow lightning flickered and rumbled in them, but they formed a swirling broad ring a dozen miles out. No rain fell from them, but in the streets of Cumae and Herculaneum, late-night revelers marked the oppression in the air and the feeling of tension. Some, suddenly nervous, went home in haste. It did not feel safe to be out.

The iron spike oozed from the side of Maxian's head, making a popping sound as it came free. The Prince was on his knees, thrown down by the incessant shaking in the earth. He stared at the bloody bit of metal with his one working eye. The other shimmered with cerulean waves of power as the optic nerve was rebuilt and the eyelid regrew an atom at a time. His lips contorted in something like a laugh—he knew this thing. Once he had touched it with his own power, making it a puissant weapon. With a jerk, he threw it aside and rose up, floating above the quivering ground.

Krista, her body burned beyond recognition, lay at his feet, twisted into a curl. The Prince gulped, his mouth twisting into a grimace.
Come my love
, he whispered to his thought. The corpse rose up, shedding ash and burned cloth. Conveyed by his will, it floated before him into the maw of the Engine, which had lowered itself to receive its master.

The fury of the mountain was about to find release and Maxian, mindful of his own existence, put forth his strength to form a sphere of ward around himself and the Engine. Flying, his cloak fluttering behind him, he soared up and into the cargo hold of the iron drake. The forest that had ringed the grotto was almost burned out, leaving only smoldering patches. Smoke and fumes still rose up, however, and steam jetted from cracks yawning in the ground.

Above the summit of the mountain, a haze was billowing up, climbing into the clear night sky.

Maxian settled onto the honeycombed decking of the Engine and laid Krista's corpse on a crate of books lashed to the metal floor. Numbly, he lashed the body to the crate with leather straps. His mind whirled with thoughts and it seemed that his hands and the charred skull of the young woman were very far away. Only the trembling in the air and the mounting pressure from the mountain could catch his attention.

"Away," he whispered to the Engine that enclosed him. "Take us away."

Outside, iron wings extended, bolts and cogs whining with the strain, and then the Engine kicked off from the ground and soared up into the night sky. In the hold, Maxian gripped one of the wall struts with a white-knuckled hand. The steed born from the forge climbed steeply, sending unsecured crates and boxes sliding across the metal decking. In a moment, wind rushing under its wings, it burst free of the haze collecting above the summit of the mountain and flashed east into the clear air.

An ewer of wine rattled sharply, then danced across the edge of the tabletop and tipped clattering to the floor. Galen leapt up at the unexpected sound and then swayed drunkenly. Anastasia, still holding Aurelian's arm, felt the room jump and the rattle and crash of toppling vases and statuary was obscenely loud. Plaster dust cascaded from the ceiling in a white mist. The Emperor fell backward, striking the dining couch, and fell over onto the floor. Distantly, the Duchess could hear shouts of fear and the clanging of alarm bells. The floor steadied, though there was still a queasy feeling in the air.

"An earth tremor?" Galen grasped the edge of the couch and pulled himself up. "I've never heard of such a thing in Rome!" Plaster dust settled on his brown hair.

Aurelian stood as well, his bearded face streaked with tears. "What do we do?"

"A doorway or arch," said Anastasia, striding to the heavy archway that led out onto the balcony overlooking the Forum. "It is safest there."

Galen hurried to her side, dragging his brother behind him.

The earth trembled again, but it was not as sharp. Only an echo of what had gone before. The marble flooring quivered and the walls gave forth an alarming groan, but nothing fell and there were no screams of pain.

Anastasia looked out over the rooftops, her dark eyes seeking out the shape of the Quirinal and her house. Lights still sparkled there and the city seemed the same. She felt herself breathe at last.
Perhaps there will be only one tremor?

"Look!" Aurelian shouted in fear. The Duchess turned and saw, to the south, over the roofs of the palace and the walls of the circus, a great red glow filling the night sky. It flickered and pulsed and then suddenly died away.

"Fire in the city," whispered the Duchess, voicing the single great fear of the urban Roman. Despite the presence of numerous public and private fire brigades and strict building codes, the tenements of Rome, particularly those on the Aventine and beyond, were deathtraps waiting for a stray spark to set them alight. With the earth shaking, it would be nothing to have an oil lamp skitter off a table and fall into papers or hay or old clothing. A tiny apartment would be an inferno in moments, wicking up the poorly plastered walls and catching the dry exposed roof beams. Thousands could die in such an inferno. She grasped the Emperor for support.

His face grim, Galen stared at the southern horizon.

"That is not a fire in the city," he said. His voice was like iron, inflexible and certain sure. "That is far away and big, bigger than any fire we have ever seen."

Long-lashed eyelids flickered open, revealing pupils of a rich yellow. Narrow irises of red flickered and a membrane occluded the surface of the eye, then slid away. The eye moved in darkness, seeing that the candles had burned down to stubs on the copper holders. There was movement and a rustling like beetles squirming in a dry well and the figure stood up.

Dahak, scion of the House of Sassan, once brother of the King of Kings, raised a hand. A leprous pale light sprang from the walls, flickering with viridian and indigo. The sorcerer stood in a small bare chamber buried deep under the Palace of Seven Gates. It was round and lined with walls of flat ochre bricks. There was one door, still closed. The floor was covered with hexagonal tiles, each incised with a single spiky glyph.

The sorcerer hissed in wonder, his will and thought turned inward. Far to the west, beyond the curve of the world, enormous power had been uncorked with traumatic results. Even from here, from within a shielded chamber built by the Old Ones, he could taste the death-flower. It was bitter on his tongue, attenuated with such distance. He craved it and his body trembled with need.

Someone drinks deep tonight
, the sorcerer's thought was sick with envy.
Another power is waking
. He wondered whom this new one served. Then Dahak shivered, feeling the cold of the abyss between the stars and he put the thought away. Even in memory, the will of his master burned him. Day would come soon and he would need to take a pleasing shape. It was a small effort, but it whetted the edge of his hunger.

Garbing himself in black and gray and crimson, the sorcerer went out, closing the lead door behind him. Despite its vast weight, it moved gently, like a feather.
That fat priest is still about
, he thought, smiling to himself.
Very plump indeed
.

The Engine screamed high into the air, shedding a contrail of white behind it, letting the power of the thick crystalline spheres in its heart find full release. It was not enough. Below it, below the layer of cloud and haze, the mountain—at last released from ancient constraint—gaped wide and let fury spew.

The top quarter of the cone ripped away in one all-encompassing titanic blast of superheated compressed gas. A mile of corroded lava and soil vaporized in an instant and the sky lit up with a conflagration like the heart of the sun unfolding on earth. Pumice and ash and boulders bigger than the Flavian were ejected into the air, shrieking upward like comets. A shockwave of sound thundered across the land, shattering windows, knocking down trees. It was the fore-front of an incandescent cloud of burning gas that swept down the side of the mountain.

The Engine, feeling the power hurtling toward it, banked sharply and screeched off to the north in a steep dive. Air whipped past, over surfaces poorly designed for such velocities. Iron scales tore loose from the skin and sailed away in the slipstream. The great iron wings groaned in torment and in its heart, the pressure of such speed caused the crystal spheres to ring and crack. Tiny fissures rippled over the surface of the globes, spalling flakes of microthin glass into the air. Still, the Engine hurtled on, speeding away in front of the wall of fire.

Seconds after the roof of the mountain had torn away, the deserted villa at Ottaviano was smashed flat by the near-solid wave of air that pressed before the gas cloud. Then the fire swept across it and the trees and fences were consumed. The incandescent gas cloud boiled downslope, consuming everything in its path.

On the seaward side of the mountain, the rupture tore a vast chasm in the side of the cone and the molten heart surged forth, spilling down cliffs and over pastures in a swiftly flowing river. Within minutes, the first vomit of fire had separated into dozens of rivers that rolled inexorably down toward the shore.

At the back of the Engine, in the cargo hold, Thyatis clung for dear life to a metal spar. The wooden crates had crashed forward with the steep dive, tearing loose from their moorings. After climbing into the hold, she had crawled into a space along the wall where she would hide. Now she braced one leg, bleeding from a long slashing cut, against the forward support and put her back to another. Air roared around her, but she was close to blacking out as a vacuum formed in the hold.

The front of the incandescent cloud smashed over the Engine and it lost all flight control. It spun like a leaf in a tornado, cartwheeling through the sky. One wing, stressed beyond even the powerful incantations of the Persian magi, tore from its moorings and vanished into the night. Only the wavering, simmering ward that the Prince had summoned allowed the body of the machine to survive.

In the forward control space, his face smeared again with blood from an exploding glass plate, Maxian clung to a metal support, his fingers white on the iron. Everything tumbled around him, flying up into the air, as the Engine plummeted toward the earth. Outside the oval windows at the front of the Engine, the sky was a blanket of flame. The Prince struggled to maintain the sphere of defense, drawing on the reservoir of power that still spewed from the mountain.

The initial shockwave of superheated air rushed past them, leaving the Engine spinning out of the sky. Maxian dragged himself to the window, his thought stiffening the machine, willing it to restore control. Like a snake, it writhed sideways but suddenly leveled off and hurtled through the air.

Thyatis collapsed back against the spar in stunned relief. With the drop in speed, air circulated in the hold once more and she could breathe. She turned in her little sanctuary, seeing crates slide past her. The rear cargo door, half-twisted by the shock of the wing tearing free, hung open. Scrolls and papers fluttered out of broken crates, snatched by a vicious wind that howled and tore at the chamber. Out there, in the open air, she could see that the world was on fire. But they were low, very low. Burning trees and then a ruined two-story house flashed past.

She swung out of her hiding place, any thought of pain or broken bones banished by the sight of that ragged rectangle and the earth below. Wincing at another tear in her flesh, she pushed the ruined door aside. The wind lashed at her, tearing at her hair. The Engine was still streaking across the flat plain north of the mountain at tremendous speed. Grunting, she put her shoulder against the cargo door and felt it give. There was a giddy sensation of standing at the edge of a vast chasm. She did not look down.

"Stop!" A man's voice, hoarse and ruined by the scalding air, rang out behind her. Thyatis turned and saw the Prince, standing in the doorway from the front of the machine. He was haggard, his dark gray cloak in shreds, his face matted with blood. Curlicues of pale blue-and-gold flame flickered around him in an oblate spheroid. When he moved, reaching toward her, it moved like a shadow with him. "You mustn't! The height!"

Thyatis, her face a grim mask, holding only hate in her eyes, pushed away. She fell. Air whipped past and the last thing that she saw was the agonized face of the boy-prince silhouetted in the shattered door of the Engine.

"Fool of a girl!" Maxian reached the cargo door too late. She was gone, sucked away by the whistling blast of wind that roared outside the Engine. "A certain death..."