David Drake - Out of the waters

She ignored him. "Uktena?" she said. Before her, surrounding her and now dwarfing Procron's fortress, rose a solid wall: it was snarling flesh where she focused but in the corners of her eyes the foaming, high-piled ocean. "My friend Uktena!"

The wall trembled toward her: a cliff crumbling, a wave breaking. Alphena stood, looking up: scratched, naked; her eyes on the verge of tears, but she wouldn't cry, she wouldn't.

The shaman Uktena brushed a lock of her hair out of her eyes with his left hand. "I did not expect to find you in this place, little one," he said.

"You're back," Alphena whispered, the words choking her throat. She gripped the shaman's hand and held it to her cheek with both of hers. "I was afraid I'd never see you again."

She couldn't see him now, because of the tears. She squeezed harder. Uktena's hand was as firm as a hickory root.

"I will never come back, child," he said quietly, stroking her hair with his free hand. "What I was in my home is gone forever, just as the wizard Procron is gone."

"Uktena," she said. "Please. Please, my friend. Let my brother go and the gryphon too. He's a brave warrior, you'd like him."

She drew a deep breath. She didn't open her eyes because she was afraid of what she would see.

"Let them go," Alphena said, "and I will stay. My life for my brother's. That's fair, isn't it?"

Uktena laughed the way thunder boomed when he fought Procron in the sea. "Fair?" he said. "What is fair? Everyone dies and everything dies, and I destroy all things. I am the destroyer!"

"You are my friend," Alphena said against the shaman's hard chest. "You are my friend, no matter what anybody says. I don't care!"

"Little one, little one," Uktena said. "You stood by me in good times and bad. Indeed-"

He chuckled again, but this time there was humor in the sound.

"-a person less fearless than yourself might have said that there were only bad times. Go, take your brother and the mount who glares at me like a frog preparing to fight a stork. You will all die, for all things die. But not today, and not at my hand."

"Uktena, you deserved better," Alphena said. Her voice was so low that that she heard the words mostly in her mind.

"I have the world to myself, Alphena," he said. "Who is there greater than I?"

He laughed, but the humor was missing.

"Sister?" said Varus at her side. "You might be more comfortable wearing this."

He offered Alphena his tunic. He must have taken it off, then put his toga on again with the coarse wool directly against his bare flesh as though he were a sturdy plowman of ancient Carce.

Which he was, Alphena realized, in the fashions that mattered. She had learned what a man was in these last few weeks; and her bookish brother, to her astonishment, was a man in all the best senses.

"Anyway," he said, smiling as though he were unaware of the horror poised over him, "I would be more comfortable if my maiden sister weren't prancing around as naked as a plucked squab."

"Your brother," said the gryphon, "cannot hear your conversation with the person whom you call your friend. I heard, however. May I suggest that this would be a good time for me to deliver you to your stepmother in Carce?"

"Yes," said Alphena, her voice muffled as she pulled the tunic over her head. She turned. Varus was staring at the shaman. She said, "Brother, what do you see?"

"I can't describe it," Varus said, wetting his lips with his tongue. It was a moment before he met her eyes and forced a weak smile. "But part of the time I'm seeing Ocean, if that's what you mean. I don't know why the wave doesn't fall on me. On us."

"Get on the gryphon's back," Alphena said, swallowing. "I'll get up behind you. He has kindly agreed to take us to mother, who is back in Carce."

Varus looked doubtfully at the gryphon, who said in a tone of drawling boredom, "Or if the boy would prefer to stay, I won't object to leaving him."

"I don't know how-" Varus said tartly. He was probably going to say something about not knowing how to mount so large an animal.

He jumped up before Alphena could offer to help, throwing himself across the gryphon's back like a pair of saddlebags. He must have realized that this wasn't a time for debate or the decorous behavior of the Forum, though he really wasn't much of an athlete. Alphena grabbed his right ankle to keep him from sliding completely over their mount and landing head-first on the other side.

Varus spread his legs on opposite sides of the gryphon's back. Uktena watched with a slight smile; his arms were crossed.

Alphena forced her lips together and hopped onto the gryphon, folding her legs under her. The other choice would have been to seat herself behind the wings, where she wouldn't have anything to hold onto unless she grabbed handsful of flight feathers. She gripped her brother's waist with both hands, hoping he had enough sense to cling to their mount's neck.

"Lord Gryphon," she said, "we are ready."

The gryphon turned his head to stare at Uktena, then dipped it in what must have been a sign of honor. He rose onto his hind legs and sprang upward, slamming his great wings down with the same motion.

Varus rocked violently, but he managed to hang on. Alphena suspected that the gryphon was deliberately keeping his back more level than he had bothered to do when she alone rode him. She wasn't used to riding, but she was an athlete and had a sense of balance.

They rose swiftly, curving away. Alphena looked back over her shoulder.

The world behind them tossed and turned in the grips of colossal violence. Procron's spire shattered under what must have been an enormous impact from all sides at once. Reduced to powder, the crystal walls spurted upward like the flume of a spouting whale.

Uktena, a giant standing astride the world, looked up at Alphena from the midst of the destruction. He raised his hand in salute; then the scene became a spherical mirror and faded into the distance.

Goodbye, my friend.

Corylus waited. His thumbs were consciously raised above the triggers as his ship slid toward the stern of the vessel which had just come through the portal. The target slanted downward, trying to reach the ground under control instead of plunging from the sky as a flaming wreck.

The Servitors in the bow had rotated their weapon as much as they could, but that was only sixty degrees off axis, and the ship itself couldn't turn quickly enough to face the renegade vessel which had already destroyed the two preceding Atlanteans. Escape was the best choice, but it wouldn't be possible.

The Minos controlling the ship looked back at their pursuer. Corylus triggered his weapon, touching the top of his target's mast but not igniting the beating sails. Most of the jet sprayed across the passengers crowding the bow. The humans burst into screaming flame, but fire ran off the Servitors without affecting them.

Corylus let their speed carry him closer, then squeezed the triggers again. The muzzle spat a fiery gobletful. It splashed the right-hand wing of the sail which blazed like dry grass. Still forty feet in the air, the Atlantean vessel rotated to starboard and spilled its human freight before nosing down into field.

Corylus turned. "The flame stopped!" he shouted to the Ancient. He didn't know whether the fox-faced magician could understand Latin-or any other human language-but he was pretty sure that he could figure out what was going on even without words. "We don't have any more fire!"

The sprite sat disconsolately on the deck between Corylus and the mast. She didn't look up when he shouted. Violence didn't disturb her, but the use of fire had obviously affected her the way wanton destruction of books would have done Pandareus, who stood at the railing near her.