Legions of Fire: Chapter Two

    Corylus let his left fingertips slide along the wooden bench. He couldn’t touch the wood with his right hand, because Alphena was there. She’s pressing so hard that if I stand up suddenly, she’ll go shooting into the aisle.

    “Fiery as always with love of war and battles and struggles with foes,” Varus recited, “our heroic general snatched up his arms!”

    As best Corylus could tell, a giant African dragon had just attacked Regulus’ army. He’d been expecting to hear more about the Carthaginians, though he supposed it didn’t matter much. Varus would have made real history ludicrous, so starting with an absurd notion was perhaps a more efficient plan.

    “Shouting encouragement to his cavalry, tried by the War God on every field, he ordered them to charge the foe,” said Varus. His eyes were staring; Corylus didn’t think he was reading the manuscript at all. He’d committed the work to memory and was letting it spew out like water from a tap.

    Corylus was trying to stay awake. The room was warm, and the rhythm of his friend’s voice affected him the way a tree shivers in a breeze. Corylus would nod off if he concentrated on the poem, and he didn’t dare let that happen.

    It would be awful if he fell asleep during Varus’ reading. It would be far worse if he collapsed in giggles, and that was the likely result if he viewed the verse against the reality of war that he’d grown up with on Carce’s distant frontiers.

    The bench, the touch of wood . . . that was salvation. The boards were merely pine, but they’d been well seasoned and they were joined with mortises and tenons as clean as those of a shipwright. Corylus felt sunlight on the north slope of the valley where the pine had been felled. It was fitting that a straight-grained tree like this one should have been shaped by an expert.

    The Emperor in his wisdom had nominated Saxa to be Governor of Lusitania, the province on the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula. The Senate had agreed by acclamation to the Emperor’s slate of recommendations — which was wise, since the Emperor had never been of an easy disposition and was becoming steadily more irascible as he aged.

    Saxa would need a considerable staff to govern a province. Corylus was pretty sure that he could wangle a junior judicial position through Varus. Saxa probably didn’t know his son’s friend from his cook’s brother, but there was no reason he wouldn’t grant the appointment.

    That might be a quicker route to success than the path Corylus had intended: becoming a staff tribune in one of the legions and following the legionary commander at increasingly higher rank on his future postings. A civil career might even be safer, though Corylus guessed that a judicial gofer in a province as wild as Lusitania would have plenty of opportunity to get his head knocked in.

    He liked the idea of working with words and ideas, and of convincing people to work together rather than forcing them to do as he said . . . but his father had been army, and Corylus’ own upbringing was army. Also, he’d met enough barbarians — that wasn’t just a term of insult on the frontiers — to know that force was the only convincing argument to many Germans and Iazyges and Sarmatians and Jupiter-knew-who-all-else.

    Maybe it was different in the east. There the cultures had been ancient when Carce was inhabited by shepherds who lived on separate hills and stole each others’ sheep, but Corylus knew the Rhine and the Danube.

    “Hunching high and then low again . . . ,” Varus said, apparently visualizing his monster as a giant inchworm. “The creature rushed toward the attacking men.”

    Corylus tried to imagine how you would fight a snake that big. A smile twitched the corners of his lips, so he quickly let his thoughts turn into the grain of the wood again.

    Unexpectedly he entered a world of trees, cool and silent and perfectly graceful. They marched across plains and climbed hills in ragged columns. They sprouted from cliffs, their roots clinging to cracks where no animal could grip; they spread their branches to embrace birds and the breezes.

    He forgot about Varus’ poem; it became as meaningless as the whirl of dust motes in yesterday’s sun. Human activities flashed and vanished before Corylus’ new sensibility registered them.

    The world was an enormous green unity, all times and places in a single spreading carpet of trees. In the distance ice glittered north to all eternity. Fringing that sterile mass were cold marshes sodden with melt-water; spruce and cedars and larches grew there in packed profusion. Dead trunks slanted into the branches of their living kin and rotted in the air.

    Snow had fallen deeply around the trees. Frost drew traceries from the coarse grasses, but the run-off from the glaciers was too vast to freeze over as yet. Corylus understood that. He was part of the forest’s sluggish omniscience.

    Elephants with thick black hair and curved tusks moved through the trees in a loose herd. They were bigger than the species from the North African coast that Corylus had seen often in the amphitheater, bigger even than the occasional Indian elephant which had been trekked overland to tower above its African kin.

    The creatures’ feet were the size of storage jars, but for all their bulk they made less sound than men walking. Corylus could hear the deep rumble of their bellies, like sheep only many times louder; their trunks moved constantly to sweep in crackling branches. The elephants’ jaws worked side to side, pulverizing sprays of conifer needles and occasionally dribbling the green mush out the sides of their lips.

    The herd moved on, squealing brief notes to one another. Their dung was green and steamed where it splattered onto the snow; it had a resinous odor.

    A lynx watched from a high branch, showing the same careful interest in the elephants as in the ice cap distantly visible from its perch. It didn’t move. If the cat was aware of Corylus, it gave no sign of the fact.

    Corylus drifted across the dank landscape, fully aware but having no more volition than a tree. The forest exists, but it neither plans nor cares.

    Something cared. It was drawing Corylus along.

    Before him was a grove of twelve great balsams. Water dripped from their dangling fronds, but the ground in their center was higher than the surrounding marshes. There stood two foggy human figures, bending toward a tripod where herbs smoldered on a bed of charcoal.

    On the inward-facing sides, the bark of the balsams had been carved with images of elongated human faces. Corylus drifted into the circle; the trees’ slitted eyes turned to follow his invisible presence.

    The scene sharpened as though someone had opened the shutter of a dark lantern, throwing light on what had until then been shadowed. First Corylus registered the ornate bronze tripod: three chimaeras gripped the edges of the brazier; their snake-headed tails were looped up into carrying handles. The piece was striking and unique, easily identifiable as part of the furnishings of Gaius Alphenus Saxa’s townhouse.

    Saxa, wearing a toga with the broad stripe of a senator, stood on one side of the brazier. Sweat glistened on his pinkish bald spot. He stared at Corylus in amazement.

    The other man was inhumanly tall and so thin that his arms and legs made Corylus think of a spider. He wore a garment pieced together from small skins sewn fur-side in. He was barefoot, though the ground he stood on was frozen; his long black toenails resembled a dog’s claws.

    He glared at Corylus. His irises were a gray so pale that they were almost indistinguishable from the whites of his eyes.

    The cadaverous stranger pointed. Corylus didn’t have a hand to raise to defend himself nor a body to move away.

    The forest fell out of reality. Saxa and the stranger were in Saxa’s back garden. Cold had shattered the pear tree beside them; frost sprang from the pebbles of the walkway. The old coping around the natural spring in the far corner glowed with a faint saffron light.

    Corylus gripped his bench. He was in the Black-and-Gold Hall with the aisle to his left and Alphena beside him. His head buzzed with pulsing whiteness, and everybody seemed to be shouting.

    He was shouting too. “Where am I? Where am I?”

 

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    Off-duty servants — most of household staff was off-duty most of the time — leaped to their feet and bowed as Hedia entered the suite of small rooms leading to the exercise yard. There’d been a game of bandits in progress. An under steward now sat awkwardly on the game board, but one of the knucklebones they’d been throwing had escaped into the middle of the terrazzo floor when the mistress unexpectedly appeared.

    “Go away,” Hedia said in apparent disgust. She didn’t care that the servants were gambling illegally. She knew, though, that if her tone suggested that she was thinking of crucifying them, she would get a degree of privacy that was otherwise beyond imagining.

    The twenty-odd people in the four small rooms scattered like blackbirds startled from a barley field; at least one was still tying his sash. The under steward ducked out but paused in the doorway. One hand stretched toward the loose knucklebone but his eyes were on Hedia; he suddenly vanished after the rest.

    Hedia glanced at Syra. The maid looked studiously innocent. Very likely she was more than a casual friend of one of the people routed by their mistress’ appearance.

    “What’s the name of that under steward, Syra?” Hedia asked in a conversational tone.

    “Ursus, I believe, mistress,” Syra said without meeting her mistress’ eyes. She kept her voice calm, but she blushed down to the top of her tunic.

    Hedia smiled, not from what she’d learned — she didn’t care about that — but because she’d learned it using observation and her mind. She nodded, silently directing Syra to open the door into the exercise yard.

    Knowing that Pulto and Lenatus were comrades from the army, Hedia had expected to find them sharing a carafe of something from Saxa’s storeroom and chatting about old times. Instead she’d heard slams and grunts as she entered the rear apartments.

    When the door opened, the men sprang apart and faced her. For a moment they were nothing human: they’d been sparring in full armor and now glared at her with eyes slitted between shield tops and the beetling brass brows of their helmets.

    “Hercules!” the man on the right said. He threw down his fat wooden sword and straightened, sweeping off his helmet. He was Lenatus, which meant –

    “Mistress, very sorry!” the trainer said. He hadn’t done anything more than marginally improper, but he obviously considered it a sign of trouble when the lady of the house visited his domain for the first time. “I, ah, needed to keep my skills up, so I asked a friend of mine to exercise with me!”

    – that the other man was Pulto, whom Hedia had come to see. He set his wooden sword in the rack and took off his helmet. He stood with it in his right hand and his shield, a section of cylinder made from laminated wood, still in his left.

    Pulto was politely expressionless, but his stance was wary. He was a free man and not a member of Saxa’s household, but he obviously felt that Hedia’s lack of direct authority over him wouldn’t be much protection if she wanted his hide. She supposed soldiers got used to being in that sort of situation.

    “It’s quite all right, Lenatus,” Hedia said breezily. “I was hoping to have a few words with your guest, here. Master Pulto, isn’t it? That is, while your master is attending my son at the reading.”

    She waved a gracious hand. “If you’d like to go on, please do so,” she said. “I only need a minute or two after you’ve finished.”

    Syra looked at her in shock; that made Hedia want to slap her. Of course I don’t mean it, girl, but these men aren’t stupid enough to think that I do!

    “Time I quit anyhow, ma’am,” Pulto said in evident relief. “I’m so out of shape I embarrass myself. It’s a bloody good thing the Old Man wasn’t watching me waddle around just now!”

    He placed his helmet on top of a post in a wall niche, then unfastened the stout leather thong stretching from the top of his shield to a hook in the armor over his right shoulder blade. That spread the shield’s considerable weight to the other side as well as taking some of it off his arm.

    “Oh, you weren’t doing too bad, buddy,” said Lenatus as he disarmed also. “If you take a couple weeks to shape up, you’ll be ready for carving up Germans and all the other fun and games.”

    Hedia watched the men without expression. They were pretending that things were normal and that the lady of the house wasn’t about to make some unfathomable upper-class demand that they would have to obey. She had spoken only of Pulto, but they were friends; neither was going to leave the other alone in the soup.

    With abrupt decision, she looked at her maid. “Syra,” she said, “go back to my suite and set out clothing for dinner. I’ll wear the violet synthesis, I believe, and the gold jewelry from Ephesus.”

    The men had been unlacing one another’s armor; they paused. Syra blinked in surprise and didn’t move either.

    “Now, girl!” Hedia said. The maid squeaked and vanished back toward the front of the house.

    “You gentlemen can relax,” Hedia said, letting her voice take on a slight throatiness. She closed the door. “I need a favor and I hope you can help me, but you won’t either of you be harmed by this business whatever your answer is.”

    The men looked at one another. “Ma’am?” Pulto repeated, carefully.

    Hedia picked up the sword which Lenatus had dropped. It was startlingly heavy.

    Her surprise must’ve shown. Lenatus took it from her with a grin and set it in the rack below the one Pulto had been using. “They’re wood right enough, mistress,” he said, “but there’s lead in the hilt and they’re double the weight of an issue sword.”

    “You practice with these,” said Pulto, “and it’s like going on leave when it’s the real thing. Well, that’s the idea.”

    “Yeah, except for the spear points coming the other way,” grunted Lenatus.

    Both men chuckled. Their grins made them look both reassuring and ugly beyond words. Well, they were reassuring if they were on your side.

    Hedia nodded toward the rack of swords. “Does my daughter Alphena practice with those swords also?” she said.

    Pulto stiffened into professional blankness. Lenatus clacked the heels of his cleated sandals together and straightened to attention. “Yes, your ladyship,” he said, his gaze directed at something past her left shoulder. “She does.”

    Hedia nodded. The trainer hadn’t lied or made excuses, just stated the flat truth and waited for what would happen next.

    Nothing, or at least nothing bad, would happen to him, because he had proved he was a man. Therefore his friend Pulto was probably equally trustworthy.

    “As her mother, I hope she’ll grow out of it,” Hedia said in a mild, conversational voice. “But I’m very much afraid that if I tried to forbid her, she’d go off to Puteoli and enroll in one of the gladiatorial schools. Not so, Master Lenatus?”

    The men were smiling again. Pulto’s cheeks swelled as he suppressed a guffaw.

    “Your ladyship,” said Lenatus, “I think you’re wise. She can’t get into any real trouble hacking at a post here at home.”

    He nodded to the armored dummy which could be put in the middle of the yard for solo practice.

    “But if she goes outside, she’ll be sparring or worse. And that I won’t let her do here, not if the master come down and ordered me to.”

    “I do not believe my lord and master will give you such an order, Lenatus,” Hedia said, speaking carefully. Nothing in her tone could be read as mockery of her husband, but neither did the words allow any doubt that she meant them.

    She made a moue. She was here to deal with her domestic problems, but not by discussing them with a pair of commoners. Switching the topic slightly to lower the emotional temperature before she got to the real question at issue, Hedia said, “Does anyone else practice here, Lenatus?”

    “Well, the young master does sometimes,” the trainer said, just as careful in choosing his words as Hedia had been a moment before. “And –”

    His eyes flicked left to his friend, but the men didn’t exactly exchange glances.

    “– sometimes he brings his friends here. Master Corylus, for one.”

    Pulto nodded with stolid enthusiasm. Corylus was the only friend Varus brought here, of course: the only one interested in military-style exercise, and probably the only friend Varus had.

 

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    “The boy’s bloody good,” said Lenatus, lifting both fists to display his thumbs.

    “Which the Old Man’s son bloody ought to be,” said Pulto. “And you know, the other kid — sorry, ma’am, Lord Varus . . . .”

    He shook his head, angry with himself to have referred to the son of the house in a patronizing manner. “Sorry!” he repeated, twisting the toe of his right sandal against the sand floor.

    “Lord Varus gets a lot more exercise because of his friend,” said Lenatus with forced calm. “He says he knows he ought to, and having Corylus here helps him do the basics.”

    “Do they spar?” said Hedia, suddenly curious.

    “No, mistress,” said Lenatus, “that wouldn’t be fair. But Corylus spars with me. There’s tricks I can teach him, but I’ll never be as young as he is again. And every time we mix it, there’s less he doesn’t know.”

    “Your son gets a good workout, ma’am,” Pulto said earnestly. “At the start, you don’t want to push them too hard. Then he watches some more and works on, you know, writing on tablets.”

    “He asks Master Corylus words sometimes while he’s sitting there,” Lenatus said, grinning. He nodded to the stone bench built against the wall between the two dressing rooms. “Remember the time he said he needed a word for spear that he could use in a line ending in a spondee?”

    Both men chuckled. They were at ease again, treating Hedia as one of them. They didn’t understand what she was about, but soldiers didn’t expect to understand things. She had known a number of them — officers, all the ones she could think of, but that was the same thing with an upper-class accent.

    Soldiers learned to adapt to situations, though; and if something seemed to be good, well, they were thankful. It would change soon enough, depend on that!

    “I said, ‘A bloody spear has always worked all right for me,’” said Pulto. “And Mercury bite me if the kid don’t say, ‘Yes, my bloody spear. Two spondees! Perfect.’”

    “And Corylus doubled up laughing so I caught him a ripe one on the helmet,” said Lenatus. “Which hadn’t been the way the match going before then, let me tell you.”

    Hedia joined the laughter. Still smiling, she said, “The problem I have is a specialized one, Master Pulto. And of course it requires discretion –”

    “I’ll get right out of here,” Lenatus said. He was still holding his corselet of steel hoops. He turned to swing it into the alcove beneath his helmet.

    “No!” said Hedia. “Master Lenatus, I said discretion. If Pulto wouldn’t discuss the situation with the friend on whom his life has depended, he’d be a fool. I don’t need fools.”

    She looked between the two men and said, “That’s correct, isn’t it?”

    Pulto shrugged. He didn’t meet her eyes. “I guess neither of us would be standing here now if it wasn’t for the other, a time or two,” he muttered.

    “Yes,” said Hedia crisply. Then, “Master Pulto, I need magical help. I understand that your wife is a witch.”

    Lenatus grunted as though he’d been punched low. Pulto grimaced and said to the sand, “Your ladyship, Anna is a Marsian and they always say that about Marsians. You know that.”

    “I’m in need, Master Pulto,” Hedia said. “We all in this family are in danger, as I suspect you know. I would like to speak with your wife Anna.”

    Lenatus played with the sash of his sweat-stained tunic, then looked at his friend. Pulto raised his eyes to Hedia and said, “Lady, Anna has rheumatism and can’t manage stairs very well. Even if she, you know, did know something. We’re up on the third floor, you see; not a, not a private house like this.”

    “In fact I intend to visit Anna rather than bring her here,” Hedia said, which hadn’t been her plan until the words came out. It really was a better idea, though. There’d be whispers that Saxa’s wife was looking for a love charm or an abortion — but nothing nearly so dangerous as the truth. “Tomorrow, shall we say? At about midday?”

    She phrased the statements as questions, but of course they weren’t.

    “Ah . . . ,” said Pulto. His friend was watching but keeping silent. Ah, I guess all right if, you know, if the Senator is all right with it?”

    “My husband does not insult me by trying to control my comings and goings, sirrah!” Hedia said. She hadn’t raised her voice but there was a whip on the end of her tongue.

    The men straightened to attention. “Yes sir!” Pulto said.

    There was shouting — screaming, some of it — from the front of the house. “Whatever is that?” Hedia said.

    Lenatus tossed one of the practice swords to Pulto and kept the other. They went out the door together.

    Hedia ran after them. Lengths of hardwood wielded by these old veterans were good things to have in front of you in trouble.

 

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    “If the monster’s breath has unmanned you, I will ride on boldly and fight it alone!” Varus said. As he declaimed, he heard a distant rhythm. He supposed it was his fearful heart beating.

    Pandareus took notes with an odd expression. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, and surely Varus was proving himself a fool like few others.

    His soul had shriveled in misery. He was a clumsy wordsmith. He’d managed to conceal that from himself until now, but when he performed his work in public, his mind compared it with all the other literature he’d read or heard.

    Varus had known he wasn’t Vergil, but he wasn’t even Ennius who had the excuse of antique coarseness. His words had no soul, and because he did have a soul, he couldn’t deny his failure.

    I can see you, Varus whispered to the Muse. I see you, but my tongue doesn’t have the words to describe you.

    His voice sang on, empty and pointless. He wished the earth would open beneath him, but the poem continued to roll on like the Tiber in muddy spate.

    Varus mind slipped, step by shuddering step, out of the present. The insistent rhythm was outside of him, outside of the world. Its beat filled the empty vessel which failure had left of Gaius Alphenus Varus, would-be poet. Voices were chanting.

    A cone of raw, rust-colored rock lifted from the ocean. It was hard to see. A dank northern mist bathed it, but there was something wrong with the air also. It was as though Varus were watching through layers of mica.

    Things moved on the narrow beach below the cone. Portentous things, but they were invisible except –

    The cosmos toppled like a lap marker at the racetrack, bringing up a different face. Varus still felt the disjunction, but he was on the other side of it.

    The cone was a great volcano. The sides were too steep to have a real beach where they rose from the sea, but waves had battered a notch in the coarse rock. On it, licked by spray, twelve tall men danced about the ivory image. They were nude and hairless.

    Hyperboreans, Varus thought, for they were all so similar to his father’s friend Nemastes that they could have been copies of the same statue. Their expressions were cold and angry, and they looked more cruel than stoats.

    As the tall men danced, they chanted. At first the sound was as raucous as crows calling in a field of stubble and seemed empty, but Varus began to understand its patterns. Similarly, the rhythms of the dance wove together into a great whole and merged with the dancers’ wild cries.

    In the center of the ring was an ivory carving of man’s head. It wore a fur cap over its ears and was no bigger than a thumb. The figurine drew Varus inward.

    The dancers watched Varus as they shuffled on their round; their eyes were hungry. Flickers like the blue flames of sulfur began to lift from the broken rocks. The wisps waved in time with the dance, rising and keeping pace with the jerking feet of the dance.

    The flames brightened and became demons of blue fire. Ribs showed beneath their tiny scales, and their very bodies were translucent. Their skulls were like those of lizards, and their lipless mouths twisted in grimaces of fury. They danced like marionettes, under the compulsion of the Hyperboreans.

    The chant roared in Varus’ ears. The dancers, human and demon alike, stared at him as they paced their circle.

    Varus reached out to the ivory miniature. He wasn’t sure he had a body, but he could feel the vague, slick warmth of the yellowed ivory.

    Almost Varus could grasp the pattern of the dance. That pattern was that of the whole cosmos. He raised the figurine, staring into the carven eyes of someone more ancient than Varus could grasp even with his new understanding.

    The Hyperboreans grinned, and the demons licked slaver from their pointed jaws. The chant was too loud for the cosmos to hold. Varus almost –

    There was a crash and blinding light; the pattern burst. Varus pitched forward. He was shouting.

 

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    “Fearlessly with a winged arm our Regulus hurled his spear through the air like a thunderbolt,” Varus droned.

    Does that the sort of thing make sense to men? Alphena wondered. Certainly the freedmen farther down the row from her looked comatose. As for Corylus, he might as easily be carved from a tree trunk.

    When Varus spoke normally he sounded, well, normal. His voice had been spiky and nervous when he started his reading, but it was lots worse now. He seemed dead, or at least like he wished he was dead.

    Though at this moment, Varus’ voice sounded like blocks of stone being dragged across each other at a building site. Alphena remembered that she’d come here by her own choice when nobody would’ve forced her to come. Listening to her stepmother go on about Alphena having to get married didn’t seem like such a bad thing now.

    She couldn’t walk out once she’d sat down, though. She and Varus hadn’t been close, exactly, but they’d bumped around together in a household where their father didn’t pay much attention and there wasn’t anybody who even pretended to be their mother. Varus had never tried to tell his sister how to behave. There were plenty of brothers who tried to be stricter than their fathers were, she knew.

    Alphena didn’t feel that she owed Varus support in this silly poetry business, but it would be stabbing him in the back if she came to his reading and then walked out in the middle of it. He cared about his poetry, though Juno knew why. Insulting it publicly would be the worst thing she could do, and he didn’t deserve that.

    What was wrong with Corylus? Alphena pressed her thigh against his again, but it was like hitting a padded wall. He didn’t even feel warm any more. His eyes had narrowed to slits, and his breathing was so light that she had to watch carefully to see the tiny flutters of his chest.

    “The earthborn monster blazed with rage,” Varus said. “He was a stranger to fear and had never before known pain.”

    He recited like he was running through the list of vegetables which he’d been asked to return with from the family villa just east of Carce. His eyes were open and staring, but he’d stopped turning the scroll forward. His body was as rigid as that of Corylus here on the bench.

    Why doesn’t Corylus notice me? Alphena had seen the way he looked at Hedia out of the corners of his eyes when they happened to meet. When Corylus realized Alphena was watching him watch her stepmother, he’d blushed. He trotted toward the gymnasium so quickly that he trod on the heel of his own sandal and almost fell.

    I don’t care about Publius Corylus!

    She went white with rage — at herself, though she was imagining Corylus strapped to a wooden colt so that she could flog him bloody with a switch. With her own hands!

    Pandareus was seated at the left end of the front bench. Alphena leaned forward so that she could see him. He was jotting notes, using a brush and a notebook of thin boards. His outer garment was a light cape instead of a toga, because he wasn’t a citizen of Carce. He’d hung a miniature inkwell fashioned from the tip of a cow’s horn to the broach pinning the neck closed.

    Varus stumbled. His recitation had been so dull that his stuttered — “horny-hoo . . . horny . . . horny-hoofed –” almost passed unnoticed. The audience was asleep or lost in a world where this wasn’t happening.

    Varus released the book’s take-up wand. The tension of the coiled papyrus made the glistening roll spring closed. He stopped speaking.

    Alphena glanced around the hall. Pandareus looked quizzical, his brush poised; no other member of the audience appeared to have noticed the change. Corylus remained in his silent reverie.

    “Comes Surtr from below,” said Varus, his voice suddenly thunderous. “With him comes Fire, which sings in the forest!”

    Members of the audience came alert, mumbling in surprise. The hall had been uncomfortably warm with the press of bodies, but a clammy breeze made Alphena shiver.

    A short freedman wearing a simpler toga than most of those present stood and pushed toward the door. Sweat gleamed on his high forehead.

    Varus gripped the top and bottom of his scroll and twisted. The winding sticks crackled like the bones of a strangled chicken. One of the gold knobs popped loose and rattled to the floor.

    “Surtr’s sword is drawn,” said Varus. Or at least the words came from his mouth. His eyes were wide and staring, and veins stood out on his throat. “Like the sun it shines!”

    The room shuddered. It was dark as night save for a sort of yellow-green foxfire which came up from the earth itself. The doorway was a blur and the light sconces had become dull sparks as though their wicks were starved of oil.

    The air was cold. At the edges of her consciousness, Alphena was aware of watching figures.

    Alphena heard an angry squeak. The central image of the wall panel to her right was a sphinx no larger than a clenched fist, painted in the same delicate gold as the dividers which mimicked lathe-turned rods. It fluttered its wings. With another peevish cry, the little creature flew off the plaster and circled upward.

    Instead of a molded ceiling, there was open sky. Storm-clouds flashed lightning across it.

    Alphena stood and took a step forward. The look on her brother’s face stopped her. His eyes were bright with a wild malevolence which she’d never seen before. The figure shredding the lovingly prepared scroll wasn’t Varus; it wasn’t anything human.

    “Surtr’s legions will feed on the flesh of fallen men!” shouted her brother’s mouth. “Their blood will dim the summer sky forevermore!”

    Alphena stumbled forward, crying with the effort. Lightning as red as banked coals flashed. That and the glow where the floor should be were the only light in the room.

    Men shouted; benches toppled over. Alphena supposed the audience was trying to escape. Did the door to the courtyard still exist? All she could see over her shoulder was blackness.

    “Varus!” she said. Something tangled her feet. The foetid light from below was getting brighter; she could see things moving in the depths. “Brother, you have to stop this!”

    “From the Iron Woods comes the Wolf’s brood!” thundered the speaker.

    Pandareus gripped Varus by the forearm. “Lord Varus, attend to me!” he said in a voice of command.

    Alphena reached them. The dais seemed a steep wall, but she forced herself up it. The shapes in the greenish light were crawling upward.

    Circling the terrified audience, skeletally thin figures danced in the shadows. Almost visible, they leered in the darkness.

    “In Hel’s dark hall the horror spreads!” shrieked the white-faced youth. Alphena slapped him with all the strength of her right arm.

    There was a thunderclap. Varus staggered; he would have fallen if Pandareus hadn’t held him upright. There was no storm; the triple lamp stands seemed brighter for the hell-lit dimness which Alphena had imagined a moment before.

    Her palm stung. Her brother’s cheek was crimson and already swelling around the imprint of her hand; that much at least was real.

    Varus blinked in dull wonder. He held something, but she couldn’t see it properly.

    Corylus joined them on the dais. He clasped his friend warmly, but Varus could only mumble in reply.

    Alphena looked over her shoulder. The audience milled in confusion, bleating. The freedmen were afraid to go or stay, despite the sudden return to normalcy.

    Saxa and the wizard Nemastes stood in the doorway. The Senator looked puzzled, but naked fury blazed on the Hyperborean’s face. He stared at Corylus.

    Nemastes turned and rushed from the scene, drawing Saxa with him. They would have trampled Hedia in their haste if Lenatus and Corylus’ servant Pulto hadn’t put themselves in the way.

    Alphena met her stepmother’s eyes. Hedia looked calm and very cold; as cold as the blade of a dagger.