The Gate of Fire (90 page)

He turned away. Such reckless abandon had a certain reward. The Engine trembled, fighting through the air. The missing wing crippled it, but Maxian felt such strength at his command that he could will it to fly regardless. He commanded that it soar and seek the cool heavens beyond this inferno. Maxian halted by the big crate, which had jammed itself into the other passageway door. Krista's body, shrunken in death and scored with fire, was still strapped to it. He leaned close and pressed his lips to the charred forehead. Tears fell, sparkling on the ashy flesh.

Then he returned to the command chamber and slumped into the chair that sat there, bolted to the floor. Krista had found it in a shop on the Porticus Aemilla, a heavy block of mahogany carved with ram's head arms and a curved back and covered with soft leather held down by brass nails. The Walach boys had worked for a week to fit it into the control room and get it secured to the decking.

"Rise," he whispered, and the Engine obeyed, soaring into the cold night sky.

Below, a thick choking fog boiled into the air in the wake of the wall of fire. Poison gases curdled and seeped across the land, choking those few animals and men who had survived the first blows. A rain of ash fell as well, settling out of the sky like an ebon blanket. Great stones, flung from the furnace of the mountain, smashed down, sending gouts of water up from the bay at Neapolis. Inland, they crashed into buildings and shattered temples. The coastal towns of Herculaneum and Baiae were first flattened by the blast of burning air, then buried by a thick fall of hot ash and massive stones. Thousands perished trying to flee the conflagration.

The rivers of molten stone continued to rush down the mountainside, burying everything they crossed in a tide of red-hot magma. On the southern side of the mountain, where a gentle slope swept down to the city of Pompeii, there was nothing to arrest the flow. The burning tide rushed on, consuming buildings, barns, fieldstone walls, temples, even the three-tiered bridge on the road to Herculaneum.

Fifteen and twenty miles away, where the distant rumble of the mountain was all but forgotten in the confusion following the earth-shock, the night was disturbed by the whistling impact of foot-wide chunks of superheated lava. The bombs rained down into courtyards and forums, smashing roofs and setting fires in a wide swath across the land.

High above, where the glowing clouds lit by hellish fires and burning cities seemed distant and serene, the Engine flew. A stupendous cloud had formed above the mountain, rising like a temple pillar into the sky. At a vast height, it stalled on a layer of bitterly cold air and began to flatten. The Engine whispered through these rarified strata, circling the mountain and the plume of dust and ash that now leaned away from it.

In the control room, Maxian lay on the heavy chair, his mouth slack, his hands trembling. The gory light reflecting from the windows lighted his face. One pane had survived intact, but the other had cracked and then flaked away, letting chill air whistle into the chamber. The Prince shuddered from foot to crown, his eyes distant and unseeing.

Below him, under the pretty clouds that pulsed and glowed in so many colors, tens of thousands were dying; poisoned by gas, consumed by fire, crushed by falling stones, buried alive in slithery ash, drowned as they attempted to flee in ships from the burning harbors. Others were trampled in the press of the frenzied crowds fleeing the dying cities of Oplontis and Baiae and Pompeii. Each life perished in fear and terror and the minute spark of life that motivated them and drove them into the world was set free.

The Engine plowed through the upper air, heedless of the death and disaster below. The rain of ash was spreading downwind, to the south, and would bury a hundred miles of Campanian countryside under a black shroud. The hammer-head cloud of dust that had vomited into the sky was already beginning to spread in the upper air. By the following noon, the skies over Rome would be a dreary brown and flakes of pumice would rain down for days.

Maxian shuddered, his legs quivering, as he drank in all the power and souls that had been so violently liberated from their mortal shells. He had opened himself on the mountaintop, standing at the maw of the power that now shook the land. He had tasted the dying life of the swordsman and supped greedily at the strength it offered. Now ten thousand times more rushed into him, charging each atom of his being with incalculable force. His mind dissolved, overwhelmed by the millions of memories that rushed past, fleeting and brilliant.

The Engine flew on, drifting out over the sea, a dark shape in a moonlit sky.

A red-hot block of
ejecta
, trailing a long streamer of smoke, plunged into the sea not more than a dozen yards off the bow of the
Pride of Cos
. The sea heaved at the impact, throwing up a billowing cloud of steam. Spray pattered down on the foredeck of the
Cos
, hissing and steaming. Clinging to one of the guy lines, Shirin stared at the shore in utter horror. The sky was streaked with falling stones, glowing and smoking in flight. The debris from the burning mountain rained down all across the bay, intermittently lighting the thick murky night.

Ash was falling too, and it slithered down out of the sky to coat everything—her hair, the deck, the ropes, the other passengers huddled below. Landward, huge fires were burning. Smoke belched from glowing windows. A long line of villas crowded the beach of Oplontis, the
Cos's
destination of record, and most of them were afire. In the dim flickering light, Shirin could see that the beach itself was crowded with thousands of people fleeing the ruin of their homes. Many were in the water, bundles of belongings held over their heads, wading out as far as they could. The air was foul and filled with noisome vapors. Above the town, rivers of flame crawled down the flanks of the mountain, carrying burning trees, wagons, and all kinds of debris.

Another stone shrieked down out of the heavens and arrowed into the sea within a dozen feet of the ship. Shirin, her face wrapped with a gauze veil to keep the hot ash from her throat, turned and shouted at the ship's captain.

"Get us away from the shore, fool! We'll be holed by one of these meteors! Back us away!"

The captain stared back at her, his face blank with fear. He had been useless since the shockwave from the exploding mountain had torn the sail away and nearly capsized the ship. Shirin had been below, in her tiny cabin, sleeping, when the sky lit up with a sudden new dawn. The
boom
of the eruption had shocked her awake, just in time to be thrown fiercely against the wall. She would sport a fine bruise on the right side of her head for that. By great good luck, the ship had been angled almost directly in line with the mountain, and the hell-wind that had rushed after the sound had only torn the lesser mast away and shredded the main sail.

By rights, the
Cos
should have been moored off one of the headlands by Surrentum for the night. But this same captain had thought that he could make up time lost off the coast of Sicilia by tracking on the lights of Oplontis and Baiae and Herculaneum to bring him into harbor. Now his fat-bellied merchant-man wallowed in an uneasy sea just off the burning shore.

"You men, put out the harbor oars!" Shirin strode across the deck, her cloak billowing behind her in the hot fetid air. She had taken to wearing a long severe gown with a veil and a woolen wrap. Since taking passage on a leaky coaster from the island port of Naxos, she had been forced to do bodily harm to five or six different men who thought that a woman traveling alone was fair game. Too, at Brundusium, she had purchased a fine knife, two hands long, with a glittering sharp edge. "Now!"

The sailors stared up at her in fear. They had been praying and sacrificing grain and wine from the moment that the mountain had cracked open. They cowered on the main deck, huddled and miserable. Shirin cursed and jumped down the steps among them.

"The oars!" She shouted, kicking the nearest sailor. The man rolled over, curling up into a ball. "We must move away from the shore!"

The others inched away, avoiding her eyes. The Khazar woman stepped to the railing. It was no more than a mile to the beach. She squinted. The strand was seething with dark figures outlined against the burning buildings behind them. More meteors lashed down out of the sky. It seemed that the ash-fall was becoming heavier.
I could swim that
, thought Shirin, sorting possibilities in her mind like a gambler shuffled ivory tokens. She wrenched the cape loose, ignoring the tugging of a cheap copper brooch that snapped and skittered away across the deck. Quick fingers checked her belt, her money, and the knife. Red burned at her throat, where the Eye lay, reflecting the sullen glow in the sky.

A glowing meteor the size of a chariot screamed down out of the sky and crashed through the rear deck of the
Cos
, shaking the whole ship from stem to stern. The deck jumped like a goosed horse and Shirin went sprawling, banging her head on the planks. Splinters and lengths of wood scythed across the deck, killing three of the sailors instantly. Black water vomited up from the gaping wound and the whole ship groaned in pain. Its hull shattered, the
Cos
tipped as the rear hold filled with rushing water.

Shirin lay, dazed, on the decking, staring at the sky swimming queasily above. It was a constant roil of black and red and deep orange. Clouds billowed and surged, driven by the columns of heat rising from the burning cities. Meteors streaked across the sky. Above everything, the mountain glowed and pulsed as it bled fire onto the surrounding land. She blinked, trying to clear hot ash from her eyes. The deck was tipping fast and she began to slide down toward the gaping hole. Struggling, she tangled a hand in a rope and swung to a halt. Soon the ship would be near vertical as it slid into the depths of the sea.

Fighting off vertigo and a pounding headache, Shirin crawled up the rope and hooked an arm over the railing. She had no time to kick off her boots, so she would have to do that in the water. With a great effort, she managed to get both arms over the railing. The ship was settling faster now, sliding down into the oily black water. Swinging a leg, she managed to get her foot over the side.

Able to see the surface of the water once more, she cast about for the shore, trying to get her bearings. She was facing the wrong way, looking out to sea. There was something odd about the water and she paused for a split second.

The waves were gone. The sea seemed oddly flat, like the surface of a still pool. Then it tilted up and Shirin shook her head in puzzlement. That made no sense, the ship should be tilting, not the water. Something appeared up at the mouth of the bay, a white line in the darkness. Then the ship shuddered again, its keel grounding on the seabed. Water rushed past and Shirin felt the
Cos
topple over. The sea was running out, and strongly too, like a racehorse on the home stretch. She clung grimly to the rail as the ship slewed sideways and ground to a halt in suddenly shallow water.

Only a mile away, a wall of black water sixty feet high rushed toward the shore.

Shirin looked up. There was a sound, a sound like a thousand elephants stampeding on a plaza of stone. The wall loomed over the ship, curling up and up and up, its surface slick and shiny, the rumble of its passage filling the world. The
Cos
spun in the eddy before the tidal wave.

She threw up a hand, heedless of the uselessness of the gesture. There was no blur of life images before her eyes, only a deep and abiding anger at being delayed from seeing her children.

Dwyrin started awake, his bare skin flushed and slick with sweat. Fragmentary images of a man flying amid a sea of burning clouds faded. The air in the tent was cold. Once night stole over the hills of this barren land, it grew chill very quickly. Given his dubious rank as the senior thaumaturge of Nicholas' detachment, the Hibernian had quarters in the
principa
all to himself. Normally, four men would bunk down in a room this size. Now he was alone. The night was quiet and the deep rumbling sound that he thought he had heard was nowhere in evidence.

He sighed, wiping sweat from his forehead and tucking his long braids behind his ear. Since returning to the desert, the evil dreams that had haunted him on the road from Antioch had passed. He hoped that they were not beginning to recur. Dwyrin sat up and pushed the blankets aside. He felt better in the cold night air. His skin was flushed and hot.
Perhaps I should forgo these blankets
... He froze, suddenly aware that someone was sitting in the room with him.

There was only a dark shape, but against the dim light of the lanterns hung along the
Via Principa
outside the building, he could see the silhouette of a man. There was one wooden folding chair and a little collapsible desk that one of the engineers had loaned him. The man's presence, once noticed, was unmistakable. It filled the chamber like a stormcloud.

"Who are you?" Dwyrin was absurdly pleased—his voice was level and calm.

There is the fire that man makes, and this can be turned to evil use
.

Dwyrin's eyes widened in the dark and he closed them, letting the mediation steal over him, opening his sight. When he had done so, he perceived that an old man with a long white beard, matted and tangled with bits of leaf and twig, was sitting in the chair. There was a subtle light that illuminated him from within, showing strong Persian features and a prominent nose. He was garbed in muddy brown robes and a white scarf that lay down on his chest.

"I say again, who are you and what do you want?" Dwyrin tested the hidden waters, feeling the air around him for threat or menace. All seemed unusually still and quiet. A deep sleep lay on the camp, filling men's dreams with thoughts of home and family.

There is the fire that makes men, and this cannot be touched by corruption.

The old man stood, moving in complete silence, and looked down on Dwyrin. The boy felt a shock of recognition—he had seen the old man before, had insulted him, had reviled him. But now he looked down with kind eyes, ancient and filled with hard-won wisdom. Dwyrin saw, too, that the man bore a ring on one hand, shaped like a leaping flame.