The sliding divider was in the center, not where the original wall had been. Melino obviously didn’t care about aesthetics: he had made changes only for functional reasons.
Hedia looked at the lizardwoman again. Membranes flicked sideways across the creature’s eyes, but its gaze did not waver. It wasn’t hurting Hedia—she wasn’t even sure it was hostile—but she found the implied judgment irritating.
“Pain?” she said. “It doesn’t seem to be in pain to me.”
“Do you want to see pain?” Melino crowed. He balled his left fist so that the ruby ring faced the lizardwoman. “Do you?”
A tiny voice chirped,
“Faster!”
Melino didn’t speak the word; Hedia wasn’t even sure she heard someone speaking and not wood rubbing wood somewhere close by.
The bands of light holding the captive were a red so dark that it would have passed for black in direct sun. The light became brighter with hints of orange.
The lizardwoman moaned softly. Her limbs quivered, but the movement didn’t reach her torso. Her mouth opened, showing short, pointed teeth. A forked black tongue flicked over and past them.
“Is that what you wanted, Hedia?” Melino repeated. He had been nervous since he opened the door to her, nervous at least since she stroked his cheek. “Is it?”
It was,
Hedia admitted silently.
And I regret it now, but no one will ever know that.
Aloud she said, “You’ve convinced me, yes. Now, let her be so that we can get on to our business.”
Melino laughed. “I can’t let her be,” he said. “Her pain is our lifeline, as I told you. But we can go now, you and I. You and I…”
He clenched his fist again. A mist rose from the ruby, twisted, and congealed into a nude female whose body had no blemish and no humanity despite its shape. The figure was the color of fire, and the same fire burned in Melino’s eyes for an instant.
This is a demon,
Hedia thought, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
“Let the ivory gate open a path!”
Melino and the demon said together. Hers was the voice Hedia had heard in the ring. It was stronger and fuller now, but it had the cold timbre of stone striking stone.
The orichalc mirror changed from solid to a clear depth with highlights of blue. Hedia remembered a grotto on Capri, which she had seen when she was visiting one of the Emperor’s advisors. This color was the same, but the light was as cold as the demon’s voice.
Melino took his staff in his right hand. He and the demon chanted,
“Let there be easy access to the shadows!”
The mirror became a window onto a forest of strange trees. In the distance something monstrous stalked into sight and vanished again behind the trees.
“Let us cut a track to our goal!”
Melino cried, with the demon singing a descant to the verse. The mirror was alive with flames whose heat made Hedia flinch back.
As suddenly as the flames had appeared, they were gone. Instead of a mirror, Hedia stood in front of an opening into another reality. A breeze with the odor of warm compost ruffled her tunic.
“Come!” Melino said. He gestured toward the window with his staff.
Hedia paused. The magician glanced over his shoulder. He didn’t speak, but the demon piped, “Faster!” again.
The rippling light holding the lizardwoman shifted to a bright yellow. She gave a hissing moan and her body arched as though she had been poisoned.
“Sister Venus!” Hedia whispered. She stepped through the window onto soft loam. Melino followed her as the demon sucked back into the ruby.
Sister Venus!
CHAPTER
IX
A hired porter followed with the bundle as Corylus returned to the rear of Melino’s house. He could have used one of his father’s servants, but keeping as close to his assumed identity—a Gallic gentleman in straitened circumstances—seemed better.
Leaving Pulto behind had been difficult. There had been a very loud discussion in which both parties had used the term “Duty” a great deal.
Corylus had won, but only by hinting at the thing he and his servant both wanted to avoid mentioning: Pulto’s knees weren’t up to the quick, silent movement a scouting expedition might require. Melino’s house and grounds were just as uncertain and dangerous as the German side of the Rhine.
“Attention!” shouted Xerxes as the new guard captain approached. He and the other outside man—a fellow Corylus had rented from a gladiatorial school this morning—braced, though they handled their spears differently. Both had military training, but not in the same military.
“Stand easy,” Corylus said. He paid the porter with a ten-bronze coin and took the bundle from him. “Has anything happened since I got my gear?”
“The four new hires arrived,” Xerxes said. “One’s inside with Glabrio; the other two’s at the front with Admetus.”
Corylus unwrapped his cloak from around a simple helmet of spun bronze, a breastplate of glued linen, and a sword with a dagger to balance it on the belt. The weapons had no identifying markings, but anyone who saw them would know that they belonged to an auxiliary cavalryman in the Republic’s service.
Xerxes gave his fellow guard a nod and a knowing look.
“Want to say something, Xerxes?” Corylus said in a cool voice.
“I told Hicafrith here that the new captain knew his way around a battlefield or I missed my bet, sir,” Xerxes said. “That’s all.”
“You don’t miss your bet,” Corylus said as he cinched the sword belt around his waist. “Carry on.”
Glabrio had opened the gate a crack at the sound of Corylus’ voice. Now he pulled it back to pass the captain into the garden.
“Anything new?” Corylus said, looking around as Glabrio slammed the gate behind him. Another of the gladiators hired this morning stood nearby; two more guards were at the porch. No one stood close to the umbrella pine.
“Just the reinforcements,” Glabrio said. “Xerxes sent the other two around to the front. Ah—we don’t go through the house, you know, sir? We take the path around the garden wall. Lord Melino didn’t say anything, exactly, but … we just do.”
“There should be four more recruits in the course of the day, and I plan to hire the rest tomorrow,” said Corylus. “And you’re wise not to enter the house.”
He didn’t add that anyone trying to leave through the front door would have to pass a pair of baboons. He might be facing the same problem. Because of where the baboons were chained, they guarded the stairs to the upper floor as well as the front door.
“Carry on,” Corylus said without looking back at Glabrio. Eye contact would have given the guard an opportunity to prolong the conversation. Corylus walked to the pine tree, stepping carefully over the plantings. The guards were watching him, but none of them chose to—dared to—speak.
Corylus was as much on edge as he would have been while waiting for dark before he crossed the river on patrol. He wanted to talk with the pine sprite as much for her feeling of deep calm as for any information that she might have.
Information would be nice, though.
As before, Corylus laid his left palm against the rough trunk. The green coolness drank him in, absorbing the doubt and tension that had ruled him since Varus prophesied cataclysm in the beast yard.
The dryad smiled with the amused ease of several hundred years of experience. She said, “You fidget like a squirrel, Cousin. But you are as welcome as a squirrel also, because you remind me of how good the peace of my life is.”
“If you’re right about the Worms of the Earth destroying everything unless they’re stopped…,” Corylus said. “Then your peace will end as surely as my fidgeting, Cousin. I want to stop them and save us both for our chosen lifestyles.”
The sprite laughed. “The magician here wants to stop the Worms also,” she said. “He has left the Waking World to halt them. But the Worms will come if it is their time, or they will not come. And if they do, well, all things die.”
Corylus focused on the critical part of what the pine sprite had just said. “Melino isn’t in the house now?” he said. “That is, he isn’t in the Waking World?”
“The magician passed through his mirror,” she said. Behind her spread a forest panorama, firs and hemlocks and pines. They grew so thickly together that when one died and tilted, its neighbors continued to hold the trunk upright. “Out of the Waking World, out of my world. I know no more, Cousin.”
It hadn’t occurred to Corylus that Melino would leave the house. Corylus wasn’t sure what he should do with the opportunity, if it really was one.
I’m not sure of anything!
“Do you know how long the magician will be gone, mistress?” Corylus said. He saw an elephant—a line of elephants covered with long black hair—walking through the trees behind the dryad. Despite the beasts’ size, they didn’t disturb the tightly sewn trees.
“Perhaps as long as a cloud takes to pass the sun,” she said with a quiet smile. She shrugged. “Perhaps he will be gone until the sun burns out. I am neither a magician nor a prophet, and I do not care.”
Corylus laughed in sudden realization. “I came here as a scout,” he said. “Anyone listening to me would have thought that I was afraid to do my job.”
He bowed. “Thank you, mistress,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll meet again.”
His soul turned and stepped out of the pine tree. He stood in the garden again. The guards were all looking at him, but they glanced away as soon as he moved.
If people didn’t offer you information, you went out and got it. That meant danger on the river frontiers, the Rhine and the Danube both; and if it meant danger here, what of it?
Corylus loosened his sword and dagger in their sheaths, then walked into the arbored porch of the house. He didn’t acknowledge the guards’ interest.
He stepped past two empty bedrooms and through the office to the reception room. The baboons sat, facing the front door. When they heard his step, they turned their heads to look over their shoulders at him. Their manes swelled as the individual hairs stood on end.
Corylus touched his sword hilt, then took his hand away. He continued toward the stair alcove with a firm stride. Aloud he said, “If you want a problem, I’ll give you one.”
Neither baboon moved in his direction, though one growled deep in its throat. Corylus took the stairs normally instead of backing up them so that he could continue to face the animals.
They had seen him with Melino, which was enough reason for them to have let Corylus go without violence this time. He gave a sigh of relief when he was sure that he was beyond the reach of their chains, though.
Of course, there was always the matter of getting past the baboons when he left. He grinned. It would be time enough to worry about that if he survived to leave.
Corylus had left his sword sheathed while he was downstairs so as not to show weakness to the baboons. At the head of the stairs he drew the long cavalryman’s blade before he used his left hand to open the room where the lizardwoman was imprisoned.
He walked in behind the tongue of sharp steel. He hadn’t seen any dangers when he viewed the room with Melino, but it would be only common sense for the magician to arm a trap when he left.
“There is no danger,” said a voice. “Melino doesn’t believe that anyone would have the courage to enter his domain uninvited.”
The lizardwoman—the Singiri princess—had spoken.
Even though he knew she was present, it took Corylus a moment to see the captive. Her bonds of light were brighter this time, almost yellow, but the light drew and held his eyes instead of illuminating the limbs it gripped.
“Can all your people speak?” Corylus said. Those words replaced, “I didn’t know you could speak!” before that, his—foolish—original thought, had reached his tongue. “There are four of you, males, in the harbor.”
“Not all, n—
oh
!” the Princess said, arching suddenly in an apparent convulsion. Then she said, “Not all of my people can speak Latin, but a few can.”
She closed her eyes momentarily; the lids were a soft reddish hue that contrasted with the pale beige—almost cream—color of her skin. Her limbs appeared swollen above and below the bands of rippling light.
She caught her breath and said almost in a whisper, “My people have come for me. I don’t know how, but they have come.”
Corylus felt silly with the sword in his hand. He understood now who he was guarding against—and why. He slid the round-tipped blade home in its sheath. “Are the manacles too tight?” he said, reaching for the band above the lizardwoman’s right ankle.
“Don’t!”
the Princess said. She gasped and closed her eyes again.
Corylus by reflex gripped his sword hilt again, then took his hand away. He waited stone-faced for the captive to resume speaking.
She opened her eyes and said, “If you touch the gyres, they will burn you as they burn me. I would not have another being feel what I feel. But if my people have arrived to free me, I can continue to resist the pain.”
“Why are you here?” Corylus said. He wanted to release her, but he had watched people suffer before. Sometimes that was necessary, as it was sometimes necessary to suffer oneself. He would know more before he acted.
“I found the wizard Melino trapped in the Otherworld,” the Princess said. “I released him. When he was freed, he made me a prisoner as an aid to his own magic. He is a great magician.”
But not much of a man.
And because the lizardwoman hadn’t said that or made any other complaint, Corylus said, “How can I free you?
Can
I free you?”
“Iron will cut the gyres,” the Princess said.
Corylus gripped for his sword. The hilt was hazelwood from the grove his mother and grandmother had tended when she met his father.
“No,” said the Princess, as gently as a sudden gasp of pain permitted her to speak. “Not a good sword, a warrior’s sword. The legs of the lampstand are iron.”
Corylus took the adjustable lampstand in his hand. The shafts had been turned from delicately patterned walnut. The tripod legs were iron, as the Princess had said.