Air and Darkness (51 page)

 

CHAPTER
XVII

Alphena had seen Corylus fight in the past, but it continued to thrill her. He wasn't more skilled than the gladiators she was used to watching: they had nothing to do all day except practice their swordsmanship, while that was only a small part of a soldier's duties on the frontiers. The style, the
tone,
of Corylus' movement in battle was nothing like the business of the arena.

“You fight as though you don't care if you survive,” she said.

Corylus pushed through a line of saplings: each spindly trunk reached waist high, with a pair of oversized leaves on top to catch the sun if one of the giants shading it were to fall. He muttered, “I guard myself.”

Stepping over a fallen cornice, he said, “Watch your footing here.” Then he added, “I guess it's from being with the Scouts. If we got into in a fight, we were usually outnumbered and in a hurry. You had to take the locals out fast. If that meant you got carved some yourself, well, that was better than if you got captured. The Sarmatian women knew how to make it last if they got hold of you.”

She and Corylus had just entered the jungle, but Alphena couldn't see the shrine or even daylight back the way they had come. The Tylon had pointed in this direction, but until she had rushed through the outer curtain of vegetation she hadn't appreciated how dense the interior was. The steep mounds to either side must have been buildings, but only occasional stone edges protruded from the leaf mold and fallen branches to indicate that.

“Are you tracking Mother?” Alphena asked.

“No. I can't track in a jungle,” Corylus said. “Figuring how many horses were in a raiding party on a dry plain, sure. But I can ask. Keep an eye out.”

“What?” said Alphena, but Corylus had already set his shield upright between the prop roots of an odd-looking tree—a palm, she supposed.

Corylus put his free hand against the smooth bark and said, “Cousin, I need your help.”

Nothing happened for a moment. Then a slender man stepped out from behind the trunk. “Well, dearie, I couldn't very well say no to you, could I?”

The newcomer glanced at Alphena and added, “Is she joining the party too?”

He isn't a man,
she
has breasts, and the tree hadn't been thick enough to hide her anyway! But there's a man's member bulging the thin shift over his groin.

“It's not that kind of party, Pandan,” Corylus said easily, retrieving the buckler. “Lady Alphena's mother came running in here a minute or two ago. Where did she go, please?”

“Well, she
went
that way,” the hermaphrodite said, pointing to their left. Alphena started that way but paused when she saw that Corylus was still waiting.

“
But,
” continued Pandan, smirking at her, “she met a bird there and he led her in a big circle around to the tower. It's right there—”

Pandan pointed again, this time in the direction Alphena and Corylus had been going.

“—but
you
don't want to go there, dearie. My sisters there say that the Guardian has her. It would be a crime to lose you too.”

Pandan nodded to Alphena. “Or even that one.”

Alphena started in a clumsy run in the direction Pandan had pointed. Her shield was out in front of her to batter a way through the undergrowth, but she couldn't see the ground. She tripped almost immediately on a block carved with a dancing monkey in low relief.

“Cousin, don't go that way!” Pandan called. “You'll meet the Guardian!”

“That's what we're here for!” Corylus shouted as he leaped past Alphena; his shield was at his side, edge on to the undergrowth he was running through.

He's graceful as a chamois on a broken slope,
Alphena thought. She rolled to her feet and followed. She hadn't dropped her sword or shield when she fell, and the scrape on her right forearm wouldn't keep her from fighting.

Corylus rounded a tree with wide buttress roots. Alphena thought he was slanting to the right of the proper line, but she was too focused on not losing her footing to pay attention. Roots had lifted the blocks of the pavement into a semblance of a storm-tossed sea.

It was easier to follow than to argue, and there was no time to argue anyway. It was very easy to follow Corylus.

“Mother, we're coming!” she shouted. Corylus cocked his head slightly, perhaps enough that he could see her out of the corner of his eye; his expression was fixed and grim.

“Mother, it's me! We're coming for you!”

She knew she was warning the Guardian, whoever it was, but she wanted to turn its attention away from Hedia. Alphena and Corylus had weapons; Hedia did not, according to the Tylon who had seen her run past.

“Mother—”

And they were there, in a space covered by vines and creepers but free of trees and the brush—saplings, mostly—that had been so dense until now. A pylon, perhaps the tower the hermaphrodite had spoken of, rose to their right.

I must have run right along the side without noticing it!

A monster on two legs, twelve feet high, stood near the end of the cleared space. When it turned to face them, Alphena saw that it had the head of a man with hair like a lion's mane. The uppermost pair of arms were huge pincers, while below there were several sets of tentacles.

Hedia stood beyond the monster.

“So!” said the monster in a cheerful tone. “The first course has brought two more bites with her.”

Then in a changed voice it went on, “And
don't
think that your amulet will help you, little wizardess! Your magic can't touch me!”

“Can my sword?” said Alphena, moving in on the monster's right side.The tentacles were coiling and uncoiling. The uppermost pair appeared to be over six feet long.

The monster—the Guardian, but what was it guarding?—shot its upper left tentacle out to the side.
It's feinting—

She stepped back and the right pincer extended on a jointed arm. The toothed edges clacked together where Alphena's head would have been if she hadn't moved. Corylus lunged, pricking the Guardian' chest where a human's ribs would have been. The monster seemed to have an outer covering like a turtle's shell, but the point of the curved sword slid deep enough to draw a line of purple blood.

The middle tentacle wrapped the blade like honeysuckle around a fence post. Corylus drew back sharply. The end of the tentacle writhed like a broken-backed snake, attached to its base by little more than a tag of skin. The Indian sword was impressively sharp.

“I'll heal!” the Guardian said. “You can't do me real harm with those swords!”

Corylus lunged again. The Guardian whirled and reached out with both pincers.

Corylus jumped back. Instead of lunging, Alphena closed with two quick steps and banged the boss of her shield into the side of the monster's scaly leg. It was like hitting a tree, but she knew how a blow on the thigh felt.

The Guardian's right tentacles gripped the edge of her shield, as expected; she slashed them and stepped back. Purple blood oozed for a few moments, but the creature really did heal quickly. The tentacle that Corylus had cut most of the way through was rejoining, though the end still hung limp.

The Guardian roared, spraying spittle in its fury. Corylus retreated. There was a notch out of the upper edge of his shield; a length of its brass strapping dangled loose from the leather base. His counterstroke had sheared off the tip of the upper blade of the Guardian's right pincer; there was a smaller chip missing where the buckler's edge had acted as a butcher's block for the sword.

The Guardian looked at Corylus, then looked at Alphena as a feint obvious to an eye trained by watching so many gladiators in the arena. When the monster lunged at Corylus with another roar, she darted in again. She tried to stab through where the knee would be in a human, but her point struck low and gouged a hand's breadth deep in the calf muscle.

The Guardian turned toward her, gripping her shield with his tentacles and reaching for her head with its right pincer. It would have crushed her skull while she levered her sword loose if the pincer had been whole; instead the lower blade gave her a buffet under the jaw, but the tip of the upper blade was a bloody stump from which muscle had swollen through where the chitin had been lopped off.

There was a loud
whack
. The Guardian's roar choked into a gasp; its arms jerked out straight from its sides as though each pair were being crucified.

The huge body toppled forward, hitting the ground so hard that it bounced. There was a dent in its back over what would have been the base of the spine in a human. Hedia stood behind the creature, holding the end of the sash that she had tied around a piece of masonry.

Alphena drove in her short sword, slanting upward across the Guardian's torso through what she hoped were the heart and lungs. Corylus hacked deep into the back of the neck, then laid the sword aside to finish the task of beheading with his dagger. The blade was orichalc, Alphena saw in surprise.

She tried to wriggle her sword. Though her wrists were strong, the Guardian's flesh was as dense as cold mud.

Corylus finished his task and got to his feet. The head rolled faceup. It looked less human on close examination. The Guardian's expression was one of pop-eyed fury.

“Thank you both,” Hedia said. “That was remarkable to watch, the way the two of you moved together.”

“It would have come out a different way if you hadn't stunned him when you did, Your Ladyship,” Corylus said, wiping his dagger with a scrap of his own tunic. “He was wearing us down. There's been other fighters here; I can see armor in the greenery.”

Alphena was on her knees, working her sword up and down to enlarge the cut. At present she couldn't withdraw the weapon. She was so tired that she had forgotten her mother's presence.

“Do you suppose it can grow a new head?” Alphena said. The idea of fighting the creature again was a bleak gray wasteland in her mind.

“That doesn't matter,” Hedia said, her tone a little sharper than usual. “Govinda has your brother in his palace, but alone I couldn't find him. The three of us may do better.”

“I have to get my sword out,” Alphena muttered. She had only enough energy for the immediate task. The future was a blur.

“Leave it,” said Corylus. “There's more swords out by the shrine. This one—”

He waggled the sword he'd taken from a man he'd killed.

“—is the best steel I've ever seen, better than Spanish.”

“It's longer than I'm used to,” Alphena said. “I'll get this in a moment.”

The world began to fall into focus again as she thought about details of equipment and swordsmanship. Familiar considerations grounded her thoughts and allowed everything else to return.

“Here, I'll do it,” said Corylus. He sheathed his curved blade and knelt, gripping the hilt of her short sword with both hands.

Alphena rose. She started to wobble. Her mother steadied her with both hands.

Alphena looked around for the first time since she had plunged into the jungle. The pillar beside them was made of fine-grained basalt rather than the reddish sandstone of the surrounding ruins. There was a chest in the doorway on this side; the lid was askew.

Beside them, Corylus braced a boot on the huge carcase. “By Nerthus, you weren't joking when you put this in, were you?” he said. “Lenatus didn't skimp your training.”

“Mother!” Alphena said. “Corylus! That chest is full of jewels!”

“He used them to trap people into coming here,” Hedia said. “I'm not sure they're real.”

“Hercules!” Corylus said as he lurched backward, the sword held safely out before him. “I don't know how you got that in, girl, but you've sure impressed me.”

A small hawk was perched on a limb twenty feet in the air; his white breast feathers showed in sharp contrast to the moss and ferns covering the bark. Hedia looked at him and said, “He'll have plenty to eat for a while, won't he? But then he'll have to find his own meals.”

Alphena didn't understand what her mother had just said, but it didn't matter. She took her sword by the hilt and walked over to the chest.

The stones were brilliant, even in the gloom of the jungle. Most were polished smooth, but a few had been cut into angles like no jewels she had ever seen before. Alphena took one of the latter, a clear gem save for the fire it reflected, and rubbed it down the chine of her sword. It cut the steel like a plow furrowing damp earth.

She dropped the stone into the chest and sheathed her sword. “They're real,” she said, returning to the others. “That one was a diamond, anyway.”

Hedia shook the rock out and looped the sash around her waist again. “We should go,” she said. “Though—there's a shrine outside here that brought me from the palace, but I'm not sure how we can make it take us back.”

“Don't worry,” Alphena said, stroking the head of Janus. The rod was still firmly under her sword belt, despite her recent violent exercise. “A friend of mine should be able to help with that.”

Indeed I can, Your Ladyship,
the little iron god said, though she wasn't sure whether she heard the words through her ears or within her head.

“All right,” said Corylus. He picked up his damaged buckler.

“I'll trade this for one of the others the guards dropped,” he said as he led the way. “I'd like to hang it in a temple as an offering, though. It served me well.”

“It served
us
well,” Alphena said as she followed Hedia.
I don't want to lose you, Publius Corylus. I never want to lose you.

*   *   *

V
ARUS STOOD BESIDE THE
S
IBYL,
gazing down on the world. He hadn't had the experience of climbing the slope to join her this time. His whole previous life was … not blurred, really—it was all there in his memory—but it was distant, as though it had happened to another person.