More often than not her movement would draw the attack on her, but this Ethiope lifted his huge spear and went straight for Corylus. Alphena slashed for the Ethiope’s raised right elbow, clipping the bone.
If she hadn’t been exhausted, she would have thrust with the point, but she didn’t trust her timing. In fact, the stroke was perfect, but if she’d been off a little the edge would still have jolted the Ethiope’s arm and thrown off his thrust.
He bellowed and turned his head toward Alphena. Corylus stabbed upward past the Ethiope’s shield—he’d dropped it slightly at the pain in his other arm—and withdrew his sword in a spray of arterial blood from the Ethiope’s neck.
It was as neat a piece of swordsmanship as Alphena had ever seen in the arena, but she didn’t have time to savor it—let alone to congratulate her partner. “Ware front!” the idol shrieked, and the second Ethiope was on her almost before she could react.
The Ethiope’s pounding hooves kicked a curtain of sand before them. Alphena lifted the idol with her eyes slitted against the dust. First twisted into the path of the point and shattered it on his wooden breast.
He’s a better god for a warrior than any Olympian would be,
Alphena thought. She couldn’t stand against the power of the thrust, but she let it spin her widdershins, hoping to thrust her huge opponent through the body as his rush carried him forward. Instead the Ethiope’s shield hurled her backward like a feather-filled paddleball hit squarely.
Alphena slammed into the sand. Corylus stabbed the Ethiope through the kidneys, spilling him on the ground beside her with a despairing howl. She cut off his right hand with a quick stroke, though the agony of the kidney wound would probably have paralyzed the creature for the few minutes before it bled out.
There was another lull in the fighting. The Ethiopes had bunched up when they ran toward the defenders’ sally. When the defenders fell back, Ethiopes arriving through the portal had resumed their amble toward the battle.
When the later-comers reached the defenders, they wouldn’t be as blown as those previously dealt with. Without this pause, though, Alphena wasn’t sure that she would have been able even to get to her feet.
She rolled onto all fours, still gripping both the sword and the blood-smeared idol. First was licking himself and chuckling with glee. From training, almost mindlessly, Alphena wiped her sword blade, one side and then the other, on the harness of the Ethiope sprawled beside her.
She gasped to bring in air. She seemed to be able to breathe more deeply in this posture than she could while standing.
The Ethiopes were enormously strong. Even the accidental blow from the Horsehead’s shield had thrown Alphena more than her own height backward. Neither she nor any other human could actually stop the creatures’ rush any more than one could stop a ramming warship.
But despite their strength and their numbers, the Ethiopes fought as individuals. They were more likely to get in one another’s way than they were to support a comrade’s attack. The Singiri worked as a team, and so did Alphena and Corylus.
The idol looked back at her, though she hadn’t spoken aloud. “Am I not fighting beside you?” First asked. “Would you rather have a disc of bronze like your other companion?”
“Your pardon, sacred companion,” Alphena said, and meant it. Most of her business with gods in the past had been to watch when the host at dinner offered a crumb and a drop of wine to the household gods.
Alphena would personally burn incense to First if she returned to Carce. Which seemed extremely unlikely at the moment.
She would have worn armor if there’d been any that would fit. Now she thanked Hercules that armor
hadn’t
been available. A helmet and corselet wouldn’t have delayed by eyeblinks the strokes of the Ethiopes’ weapons, but they would have slowed her and confined her breathing. It was difficult enough to suck in air as it was.
Alphena stood up carefully. Corylus was leaning forward slightly to give his lungs more room also, but he looked ready to fight again. Alphena wasn’t sure that she was. The upper rim of Corylus’ Singiri shield was dented, so perhaps he had gotten some benefit from it after all.
Hedia was walking back from some distance into the desert. For a moment Alphena couldn’t imagine what her mother was doing; then she traced Hedia’s course outward and saw the body of the Etruscan crumpled among the ruins.
Alphena felt sudden warmth.
Mother isn’t one to forget, friends or enemies, either one.
Farther away still was a dazzle of gray light reflecting over the ring of hills. The roar that Alphena had ignored in the stress of battle reached her consciousness:
The Worms. The Worms of the Earth.
Doom, eating its way toward them from the south and—she turned her head—north as well.
The next wave of Ethiopes approached at a measured pace. More were appearing through the portal; the priest’s death had changed nothing. The sand of this beach had once been solid rock, but the waves had ground it down.
Alphena glanced behind her. The Daughters lay on the ground, exhausted or perhaps dead. It probably didn’t matter which.
Pandareus and Tassk were deep in conversation. Surely they weren’t having a philosophical discussion at
this
time?
But again, it probably didn’t matter. The old men were as useful talking about the nature of the firmament as they would have been with swords. Indeed, in the long run their talk would be as useful as anything Alphena and Corylus were doing with swords.
Within the circle of the slumped Daughters, the air was gray and metallic. Alphena could see two figures through the translucence, but she didn’t know who—or what—they were. She hoped one was her brother, because otherwise she didn’t know where he was.
The Egg, instead of being dimmed by the barrier of air, was as brilliant as a jewel in sunlight. Alphena looked away instantly, but she still had to blink at afterimages dancing across her vision. What was going on?
But that didn’t matter, either. All that mattered for the moment, and probably for eternity, was the line of horse-headed giants. The leading Ethiopes broke into a clumsy trot as they neared.
“The next course of the banquet!” First chirped. “Oh, never has a god been fed so well by his worshiper!”
I’m glad someone is happy,
thought Alphena. She shifted to the left to draw the first Ethiope’s attention away from her partner.
A wind from the sea was picking up. It sent stinging whips of sand across her calves.
* * *
T
HE
S
IBYL AND
G
AIUS
Alphenus Varus watched from a high ridge. Below them humans and Singiri fought horse-headed savages, while the Singiri princess and Gaius Alphenus Varus chanted spells through Zabulon’s
Book.
“I don’t understand what is going on,” Varus said.
He didn’t remember joining the Sibyl this time. Half of him thought—imagined—that rather than looking down from their usual detached viewpoint she was standing beside him as he faced the Princess across the glowing majesty of the Egg.
Of course none of it was real. But what
was
real? Was anything real?
“You are great magicians, Lord Varus,” the Sibyl said. “You are bringing the Egg into the Waking World before its Saeclum of Saecla is accomplished, and the
Book
is your lever.”
A
saeclum
was a period of either one hundred years or one hundred and ten years; the best sources that Varus had found didn’t agree. An insistently pedantic voice at the back of his mind wanted to ask the Sibyl which figure was correct.
The Worms were already larger than the basalt escarpment that they were devouring from north and south. They scoured a hundred feet deep, well into the bedrock. Their heads cast sideways, back and forth, in arcs like those of maggots in dead flesh.
Rock, the flesh of the Earth, vanished down the crystal maws. The immense forms grew with each pass, and the jaws swept deeper into the basin where Varus and his companions fought.
Sunlight glanced off them, refracted into shades of gray instead of rainbows. It reminded Varus of feathery variations in smut that rotted wheat while it was still alive.
Varus looked at the Egg. He was even less able to judge its size now than he had been earlier. It
must
be huge, but his body could have reached across it and touched the hand of the Princess whose lips moved in silent synchrony with his own.
Varus glanced at the Sibyl. “Lady?” he said. “Shouldn’t I be below? Shouldn’t I, my spirit … shouldn’t it be with my body?”
“To do what, Lord Varus?” the old woman said. “Are not you and the Princess, your fellow magician, already doing all that mortals can do to save the world?”
Varus shook his head, trying to clear it of the fog that seemed to be clogging his attempts to think. He said, “I’m not doing anything! I’m just watching!”
The heads of the Worms continued to sweep side to side, deeper into the basin. The … things, creatures,
cancers,
however you described them. They didn’t so much crawl forward as grow outward, absorbing more of the Earth and expanding by that ever-increasing amount. The range of hills had vanished except for the nub remaining between the arcs that the two Worms had devoured.
“A
saeclum
is not an age of years,” the Sibyl said, “but an age of the Earth, a period of the Cosmos. You are at the close of one
saeclum
and the beginning of the next. In one age—”
She gestured. Varus saw from an enormous distance but with perfect clarity the Worms of the Earth writhe and absorb and grow until there was nothing to absorb but a bead of fire like the heart of a volcano, over which the pair of foul crystal Worms twitched untouched.
“And the other age—,” the Sibyl said.
The Egg was blue light and all light and all colors, resting in the basin on the edge of the sea but greater in another sense than all the Waking World. The Egg
was,
and then it cracked open, spilling light that expanded without any more boundary than sunlight itself.
For a moment, Varus thought he saw the form of a bird, splendid and perfect.
Then, as his spirit reentered his body on the sand, he heard the Sibyl say, “Well done, Lord Magician. You have hatched the Phoenix.”
* * *
W
INDBLOWN SAND WAS TORTURE
on the back of his calves, his arms, and especially his neck.
I’ll be bleeding tomorrow,
Corylus thought. He started to laugh but gagged on an incoming breath, so he had to thrust for the Ethiope’s upper thigh while off-balance.
His sword went home anyway. He withdrew the blade. Blood from the creature’s femoral artery gushed as though the valve of an aqueduct had opened. The Ethiope turned toward his slayer but crumpled before he could raise his spear for a stroke.
Alphena had been ready to put in a finishing blow, but there was no need for that. Earlier in the fight she would have stabbed the Ethiope through the kidneys as soon as he turned away from her. Now, neither she nor Corylus had energy for any unnecessary movements.
The wind was punishing to the defenders, but it blinded the Ethiopes who were attacking into it. Stolid though the half men were, they could not look into sand that literally wore their eyelids away and then ground their corneas opaque. They advanced with their shields lifted to cover their eyes. The first they knew of their opponents was when a sword licked below or beside their shield, dealing a lethal blow.
Corylus and Alphena had been retreating slowly, driven back by the bodies piling into a windrow before them. Their worst danger was that they would be hemmed in by the twitching dead and unable to avoid a wild swipe from a stone axe or a spear as thick as a ship’s jib.
The next danger—the one they wouldn’t be able to avoid—was that they would become too exhausted to raise their swords. The Ethiopes could slaughter the Daughters and anyone else in their way just by falling dead on top of them; their massive bodies weighed hundreds of pounds apiece.
“Corylus!” Alphena shouted. She pointed outward with the blood-covered stick in her left hand. “Look! Look!”
For a moment, Corylus couldn’t see what she was pointing to.
There are no Ethiopes close enough to—
The head of a Worm swept by sunwise with the slow majesty of a waterfall. It towered above them, higher perhaps than the escarpment that it had devoured.
The ocean followed the Worm’s body. At the far end of its stroke, the Worm had gouged deep into the seabed, and the water rushed to fill the new embayment. Eventually the Worms would between them drink the seas as well as the land, but for now the ocean laughed thunderously at its new conquest.
The Worm didn’t
eat
the land the way a caterpillar did sections of a leaf. Rather, its dark-glimmering head passed by, absorbing all that had been in its path. Rock and sand fell, no longer supported by the ground beside it, but the process of destruction itself was as silent as thought.
The Worm continued on—toward the remaining mountains and into the desert beyond. It did not seem a swift process, but Corylus realized that a galloping horse could not have kept pace with the Worm’s head. Only the creature’s enormous size concealed the speed of its movements.
Corylus looked for the Ethiopes. There were none nearby except the scores of sprawled corpses. Survivors loped clumsily back toward the portal by which they had entered the Waking World. Over the ocean’s gurgle, Corylus heard the Ethiopes hoot and bellow.
Varus said that the Ethiopes had been wiped out in their own time, so their return would bring them doubtful safety. That was a matter between them and their gods, however, if they had gods.
The wind stopped. Corylus sprawled backward—as did Alphena. He—they—had been leaning against the pressure without being aware of it. Normally they would have been able to catch their balance without falling down, but Corylus wasn’t sure for a moment that he would be able to stand again ever.