“No,” said the quiet raspy voice of Nomeric. “That is from a new bolt of cloth. It was woven no less than four weeks ago. The weavers, at the last report, are still alive, even hale and hearty.”
Maxian slowly turned, his eyebrow raised in question. The half-completed theory that he had been slowly working on shuddered in his mind, and various bricks threatened to fall out of it. “How, may I ask, did you accomplish that?”
Nomeric smiled and deferred to Gregorius. The old man coughed, then shook his head.
Nomeric steepled his fingers, gazing at the Prince over them. “The manufacture is in a holding of my family in Siscia. In Magna Gothica.”
Maxian turned to Gregorian in puzzlement, saying “I fail to see the connection.”
Gregorius nodded and cleared his throat. “Siscia is the city the Goths built as their capital after the peace of The-odosius. It is a Gothic city, under Gothic rule, with Gothic law. It is, so to say, not a Roman city. There is no… Imperial presence there. Do you see my meaning?”
Maxian leaned back on his couch, rubbing the side of his face. With his other hand, he toyed with the length of cloth. He thought now that he saw what Gregorius was driving at. “By your logic, then, if the investment that our mutual British friend had made had been undertaken outside the borders of the Empire, it would have been… successful.”
Gregorius nodded, tapping his walking stick on the mosaic floor in excitement. “That has been my thought for some time! You see then, my young friend, why you may need help from outside the state?”
Maxian nodded, lost in thought.
Gregorius and his companions left long after midnight. Maxian was even more exhausted than before, and now he sat on the edge of his bed, the room lit only by the light of a solitary wax candle. On the little writing desk next to the bed lay a package of items that he had gathered. He knew that he should wait until the next day, after he had slept, but the curiosity that had been gnawing at him would not let him wait. He unwrapped the cloth of the package; inside were several items-a swatch of the sericanum that Theodelinda had left, the tiny lead slug from the house of the scribes, a boat nail from Dromio’s workshed in Ostia. Each thing he placed on the floor at the foot of the bed in an equal triangle, then he settled himself on a quilted rug from the chest. He considered calling for a servant to summon Aurelian to watch over him while he was meditating, but then put the thought away-his brother was busy enough and Maxian, really, had nothing to tell him yet.
He arranged himself, sitting cross-legged, and then began breathing carefully, in the manner that he had learned at the school in Pergamum. After a moment the room began to recede from his vision, then there was a sense of slippage and the vision of coarse stone and wood was gone. In its place dim shadows of the wall, the bed, the door remained, but each was an abyssal distance filled with the hurrying lights of infinitely minuscule fires. Maxian calmed himself further, letting his mind discard the illusions that his conscious mind forced upon the true face of the world.
All sense of matter was shed, leaving only these tiny rivers of fire tracing at impossible speeds the outlines of the chair, the writing desk, and the three things on the void-surface of the floor. Maxian focused his sight upon them, seeking to find their resonance. The lead slug expanded in his sight, becoming impossibly large. The whirling motes that formed its surface, to his first sight so heavy and solid, to his second a ghost, and now, to the third, nothing but emptiness filled with a cloud of fire, parted. There was a sudden sense of dissipation, and Maxian stumbled in that strange realm. Something beyond the matrix of the lead slug was suddenly drawing him, tugging at his perception and even his essential self.
Maxian willed his sight to fall back, to resume the greater vision apart from the distracting detail that formed the slug. Now he could see the resonance that echoed and impinged upon the tiny weight of lead. Wonder at first, and then a numbing horror, pervaded his consciousness. The slug, the cloth, the nail were the center of a maelstrom of forces. Dark energies of corruption and dissolution spiraled out from them, flaying at everything they touched. Now that he was aware, Maxian felt them pricking at his own core of being, like a cancer, eating away at In’s own strength and vitality.
A curse, he thought wildly, some malefic power summoned by a great sorcerer! I must destroy these things immediately! The urge was so strong that he almost cast off the meditation right there and ran with the objects out of the room. But his inner calm held, and Maxian realized with a start that his own thought and will were being bent by the forces that were collecting in the room. Destroy them, the vortex whispered, smash them, burn them up.
With a great effort, he called up the Shield of Athena, as had been taught him in his first days at the school of Asklepios in Pergamum. By this means, all dire forces could be turned away from the body of healers, allowing them to engage a diseased or corrupted form and perhaps, if they were very lucky and skilled, drive from it the deadly humors that arose in men and ate away at them from within. A shining band of blue-white flickered into being around him, struggling against and finally severing the tendrils of night-black that,had been digging into his self. Immediately he felt better, his mind clearer, his thoughts ordered and his own again.
Now he made a curious discovery, seeing the strength arrayed against him. The three objects on the floor were not the source of the corrosion that still flashed and burned against the flickering blue-white shield. Rather they had drawn it, like a shark is drawn to blood in water or the wolf to the wounded in the flock. As he watched the weave of the cloth began to unravel, breaking down into single strands, then to wisps of fabric. It will be utterly gone in a day or two, the Prince thought, marveling at the power of this curse. Even the lead of the slug and the iron of the nail were deforming under the crushing power of the black tendrils. What can give it such awesome strength? A feeling of familiarity tugged at his thought, something he had seen before…
Ignoring the three tokens for the moment, Maxian gave his thought flight and rose up in vision through the wooden timbers that made the roof of his apartments, through the floors above and then into the night sky over the Palatine and the city. From this vantage, the city was a pulsing sea of light-the people, the buildings, the river, all shimmering with their own rivers of hidden fire. And through it all, Maxian was stunned to see the blue-black power rise, swirling around his rooms at the palace like a ‘whirlpool. The curse rose from the very stones of the city, from the sleeping people, from the statues of the Forum and the sand on the floor of the Circus.
It is the city! he realized in awe. The city is purging itself of an enemy, of a… a disease.
That was what he had seen before in the third sight, the body collapsing upon a cancer and destroying it. An invader, something inimical to the body. His vision collapsed then, suddenly, and in less than a grain, he was lying on the floor of his room, bathed in sweat, his palms and forehead so hot as to burn.
THE ISLANp OF DELOS, THE AEGEAN THEME
Dwyrin woke to the wailing of slaves and the crack of the lash. His head had a strange, light feeling to it, but the riot of colors and space-bending distortions of vision were absent. He lay back on a smooth marble bench, feeling fully awake for the first time. His stomach growled with hunger and his mouth was parched, but he could think and see. A low vaulted ceiling stained with soot stood above him. Sore, he tried to move, but iron chains were shackled around his arms and legs. This is not good, he thought, peering around the room. A high window stood at the left, letting a shaft of sunlight in to light up the far wall. Through the window, he could see clear azure sky.