Thomas Harlan - The Gate of fire

She swung out of her hiding place, any thought of pain or broken bones banished by the sight of that ragged rectangle and the earth below. Wincing at another tear in her flesh, she pushed the ruined door aside. The wind lashed at her, tearing at her hair. The Engine was still streaking across the flat plain north of the mountain at tremendous speed. Grunting, she put her shoulder against the cargo door and felt it give. There was a giddy sensation of standing at the edge of a vast chasm. She did not look down.

– |"Stop!" A man's voice, hoarse and ruined by the scalding air, rang out behind her. Thyatis turned and saw the Prince, standing in the doorway from the front of the machine. He was haggard, his dark gray cloak in shreds, his face matted with blood. Curlicues of pale blue-and-gold flame flickered around him in an oblate spheroid. When he moved, reaching toward her, it moved like a shadow with him. "You mustn't! The height!"

Thyatis, her face a grim mask, holding only hate in her eyes, pushed away. She fell. Air whipped past and the last thing that she saw was the agonized face of the boy-prince silhouetted in the shattered door of the Engine.

"Fool of a girl!" Maxian reached the cargo door too late. She was gone, sucked away by the whistling blast of wind that roared outside the Engine. "A certain death…"

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.

The Sea Off of Neapolis

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.