David Drake - Out of the waters

Corylus looked beyond the magician, back over the course they had travelled since leaving the Cyclops' island. They had outdistanced the great eel, but he didn't doubt the sprite's warning that it would follow until it died or it caught them. A night spent rolling on the surface would be long enough for the latter-and he didn't see any reason why the monster should courteously manage to die before that happened.

Corylus had taken his hand from the sprite's shoulder when he turned. She nuzzled close to him again. He eased back, though he didn't break contact. He said, "Is there anything alive on the island? It looks pretty barren to me."

He couldn't decipher the look that Coryla gave him. "It's barren," she said. "But there is life, of sorts."

The island was a square-sided vertical pillar that rose out of the sea to the level of the ship's keel. The top was about twenty feet on a side and slightly domed rather than flat. Grass grew in patches and there were occasional bushes, but it was mostly bare rock.

Because of the island's shape, Corylus wondered if it might be artificial. As they drew closer, he could see that the striations which he'd taken for masonry were actually natural rock layers. Some were reddish, darkened further by the setting sun. Iron had bled from them and draped rusty banners down the paler rocks beneath.

He estimated how difficult it would be to climb the rock face. He could still do it, he was pretty sure; but he'd been in Carce for long enough that he'd like to have a few days to train on lesser slopes first. He grinned.

The Ancient made a sound that started low but climbed in pitch and volume. Corylus had his sword out by the time he had faced completely around, expecting to see the eel or something worse rising toward them from the sea.

He almost didn't recognize the Ancient. The golden fur was fluffed out, making him look more like an angry bear than the starving cat Corylus would previously have used as a comparison. His mouth was slightly open: irregular teeth gave his jaws the contours of saw blades. He extended one long arm toward the island.

Corylus followed the gesture. A man with wild hair and a dark tunic climbed to the center of the dome. Could he have been hiding in the vegetation? That would seem impossible to a civilian, but Corylus had twice seen a hulking blond German lunge from a bush that shouldn't have been able to hide a coney.

A dozen more men appeared; they must have come out of the rock or condensed from the air itself. They were gesturing and speaking among themselves. Corylus could hear the sounds, but he couldn't make out words if they even were words.

The ship wallowed from side to side and lost way. They were sinking as well, though slowly. That wasn't what most concerned Corylus. This savage outbreak on the part of the magician he depended on mattered more than mere details of the ship's course.

The Ancient extended both arms and shrieked, still louder than before. His hands bent toward one another as though he were holding an invisible globe. Blue-white flashes glittered between his palms; then a line of sparks curved raggedly from them toward the island.

Scores of men stood now on the rock, impossible numbers to exist on so small an island. Several dropped to all fours and began to howl. Their companions took up the sound.

As swiftly as images change when a mirror tilts, human forms became wolves and as swiftly changed back to human. The top of the island seethed like water coming to a boil, and the howls seemed to Corylus to echo from the roof of heaven.

"Sheer off!" he shouted. He stepped between the Ancient and the wolfmen who had driven him to frothing rage. "Take us away! We can't land here, no matter what the choice is!"

For a moment, Corylus thought that the magician was going to ignore him-or worse, strike with the power which allowed him to lift this ship and drive it hundreds of miles in a day. The armor might protect me, but- The Ancient hunched back to the stern where he had been standing until the wolfmen called him forward. His fur began to settle, though hints lasted like the flush on the face of a man who had controlled his anger.

The sails beat more strongly; the ship rose sluggishly as it left the island behind. The wolfmen continued to howl behind them.

Only the upper half of the sun showed above the horizon. Corylus hugged himself.

How long? How long before the eel catches up with us?

Varus remembered talking with his father, but now he climbed the craggy, fog-wrapped hillside. He never took the same route to the Sybil's eyrie, though the differences were trivial: here white gravel had spilled across the path, marble chips perhaps; there was an outcrop which in the mist looked like an unfamiliar human profile.

He reached the top of the ridge. The Sibyl sat like a senator on a folding ivory stool. Beside her was a wicker basket from which she took peas. She was shelling them into an earthenware pot on the other side and tossing the hulls down the opposite slope. She turned to watch Varus as he approached.

"Mistress, I greet you," he said. "I hope that you are well."

The Sibyl gave a broken chuckle. "I am the creature of your mind, Lord Magician," she said. "There is no well or ill for me."

Varus felt his lips wrinkle as though he were sucking a lemon. She knows things that I do not know, he thought, and I'm not a magician.

Then he thought, But if I were a magician and afraid to admit it to myself, I might know things that I allowed myself to see only in these visions.

The Sibyl smiled as Varus argued silently with himself. Embarrassed, he looked into the valley beyond. Instead of a landscape, he saw a globe hanging in blackness. Its surface was moving.

"This is the world, Lord Magician," the Sibyl said. "Not today, but one day."

"It's a sphere," he said, not asking a question but voicing the statement to file it in his mind. "Then Eratosthenes was right."

Varus didn't have a mind for mathematics, but Pandareus told his students that they should attend the lectures of Brotion of Alexandria who was visiting Carce. He and Corylus were the only members of our class who did so.

He grinned at the memory. Corylus seemed to understand what Brotion was saying. Varus himself was pleased just to have remembered Brotion describing Eratosthenes' calculations.

He looked at the globe. As before, the object of his attention became clear. For an instant he saw the tossing sea; then the surface of the world became a single throbbing creature: a myriad of heads, arms, and legs, but only one monstrous body. The whole world…

Varus jerked back with a shout, though there was no was no need to react physically. The globe and its pullulating surface first blurred, then vanished completely as fog filled the valley.

If I even have a body in this place.

"That is Typhon?" Varus said, trying to prevent his voice from trembling.

"That will be Typhon," the Sibyl said. "Not today, but one day."

Varus swallowed. "Sibyl," he said, "how do I stop him? How do I stop that?"

He nodded toward the vanished image. He didn't want to point, and he particularly didn't want to describe what he had seen in words.

"Typhon will rule the world," the Sibyl said. She took more pea pods in her right hand. "No one has the power to change that. Not even a magician as powerful as you, Lord Varus."

Varus made a sour expression again, but he didn't argue pointlessly. "Sibyl," he said, "what should I do? What can I do?"

"What did the sage Menre tell you, Lord Magician?" the old woman said. She resumed shelling the peas, dropping them one at a time into the jar on her left.

"That was a dream, Sibyl," he said, thinking back to his vision in the shrine of Serapis. "I dreamed that Menre gave me a book, but when I awoke with Pandareus, it was all as it had been when we entered the chapel. There was no book."