David Drake - Out of the waters

Hedia glanced over her shoulder as she trotted beside the ape-man. The cracks were expanding swiftly.

And the immensity beyond writhed closer.

Varus stood in a corner of the Forum, looking up at the Citadel and the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. It was past the close of business, but the pavement was still crowded.

The son of Gaius Saxa wasn't being jostled, of course. A contingent of servants faced outward around him, shoulder to shoulder. That kept him clear to the length of his arm.

No one, including Candidus who was in charge of the escort, had asked Varus why he wanted to stand by himself in the Forum. He wasn't sure that any of the servants had even wondered.

Everyone in Saxa's household knew that the master's son was a literary sort who pondered things that no ordinary person could even imagine. A reputation for being unfathomably strange seemed to buy one a degree of tolerance for acts that would have aroused comment if committed by someone normal.

Varus smiled wistfully. He wasn't sure himself why he had chosen the Forum for what he had come to do. This wasn't where Carce had first been settled: traditionally, that had been the Palatine Hill, behind him. The Citadel would have provided a better view of present-day Carce, and it had been the religious and military core when the city first came to prominence.

But the Forum had been and to a degree remained the civil heart of Carce, and a city was its citizens. The first great act of the citizens of Carce had been to drain the Forum through the Cloaca Maxima, transforming a marshy pasture into a plain in which they could assemble and decide their laws. Rather than to look down on the Forum from the Citadel, Varus had chosen to stand where his forefathers had gathered in times of peace.

His vision had shown him Typhon engulfing the Forum. But Typhon, the Sibyl had told him, was not the business of Gaius Varus…

Varus unrolled the book of Egyptian magic in his mind. He found the verse and read in a loud voice, "I open the doors of heaven!"

A jagged gash tore soundlessly through the sky, splitting it down to the pavement beside Varus-where the Sibyl was now standing. There were no stars in the gaps between halves of cloud-swept blue.

"Sibyl?" he said in surprise. "I thought… that is, you've never come to me this way before. In Carce. I thought I'd be climbing the hill to see you as usual."

The Sibyl sniffed. "All this is mummery, Lord Varus," she said, gesturing toward the crack in the sky. "I am a shadow of your will, no more. How shall a shadow direct the wizard who casts her?"

She gave him one of her unreadable smiles and patted his arm. Looking about the Forum, she said, "In my day, Evander pastured his cows in this valley. Everything changes, Lord Varus. Everything changes, and eventually everything ends."

If you're not real, then how can you talk about Evander? Varus thought.

He grinned in sudden realization. The statement had brightened his mood by posing him the kind of question he understood: a literary question. Now he could smile as he considered the matter that had brought him-brought them-here.

"Sibyl," he said, "what is Procron doing that I should stop? If he simply lives in that barren world, what harm can he do to Carce?"

"That place, that barren world…," the Sibyl said. She turned away from him to view the huge hall which Aemilius Paullus had built from the spoils of conquered Greece. "Is this world, this Earth, Lord Varus. In the distant future when there are no men save Procron himself in exile, but still the Earth. He hates his fellow Minoi, because they drove him out of Atlantis."

She paused to look up at the Citadel. Seemingly off the subject, she said, "You thought Evander was a myth, did you not, Varus?"

Varus felt his smile spread wider. "I thought you were a myth, Sibyl," he said. "I have made other mistakes besides that."

"If it is a mistake," the Sibyl said musingly. "If it really is."

In a businesslike, relatively firm, voice, she went on, "Procron cannot return from his place of exile, but his powers gain him agents in other times. He works to loose Typhon from the place he was bound. Typhon will destroy Atlantis and the Minoi; but he will destroy all things, save Typhon himself."

Varus took a deep breath. Members of a family-two families, he realized-were sacrificing at the altar in front of the ancient Temple of Saturn. The heads of house were probably consecrating a marriage contract. They were planning for the future; a future which would not exist, for them or for anyone, unless Gaius Varus prevented an Atlantean sorcerer from freeing the greatest of the Earthborn Giants.

The Sibyl looked at him and smiled again, this time without the gentle humor she had shown before. "You cannot prevent Procron from loosing Typhon," she said, responding to Varus' unvoiced thoughts, "because Typhon is already loose. What you must do is to slay Procron before he does further harm. And you see-"

Her lined face was suddenly grim, as fearsome as a bolt of lightning.

"-Procron is no more. His body is dead, and the skull that rules him is in a dimension that nothing human can reach; not even the Sibyl, who once was human and is now the shadow of a great wizard."

A small fire smoked on the altar. The families watched in satisfied silence as the priest, his arms lifted, prayed to Saturn… the king of the gods before his son Jupiter supplanted him. Saturn, who presided over the Golden Age, when all men were happy and the world was at peace.

From the crack in the sky oozed Typhon in hellish majesty: swelling, spreading, devouring all things and crushing all things. Destroying the great buildings of Carce, then destroying the very hills on which the city had been founded. All things for all time-dead and gone.

"Strong necessity demands-" the Sibyl cried.

"-that these things be accomplished!" Varus concluded in a thin, cracked voice.

Candidus turned, frowning as he tried to understand the words. Whatever he saw in his master's face prevented him from speaking.

Corylus felt the railing grow firm again beneath his gauntleted grip. He breathed a sigh of relief that reminded him of how disconcerted he had been when reality dissolved.

He wasn't a good sailor. The way a ship's deck moved even when it was tied up in harbor affected a part of him beyond the real danger involved. He liked to keep one hand on a rope or, better, the mast or a railing. What was true on water was doubly true on this vessel, floating several hundred feet above the ground.

Except that the ship was on water, snugged to a bollard in the stern and with the bow anchor hooked into a niche in the quay. They were in Ostia, the old port at the mouth of the Tiber, at one of the berths on the breakwater which Corylus remembered were generally used by small trading vessels from the West. The sunlit stone pavement reeked with the odor of Spanish fish sauce, the residue of decades of jars dropped during unloading.

The sprite chirped in excitement as she looked around; the Ancient slouched in the stern, much as he had done during the whole voyage. So far things were the same; but this wasn't the ship they'd boarded in the dream world.

It was a vessel of the same design, its sails now folded vertical against the mast, but the bits of gear on the deck or hanging from the railing-a painted water jar; leather pouches embroidered with spines of some kind; a broken stone knife with a grip of deer horn-hadn't been on the ship which they had sailed into the brightness. The deck wasn't scarred by claws from when the Ancient leaped aboard, but there were nicks and dents which Corylus-who noticed wood-hadn't seen before.

Four Servitors stood amidships, as motionless as glass statues.