THE EGYPTIAN HOUSE, OUTSIDE OF ROME
H
Thunder growled in a dark sky. Lightning flashed between clouds pregnant with rain. In the face of the storm, a cold wind gusted across the arcades of the veranda around the house, driving leaves and straw before it. The trees on the hill above the house bent in the wind, and the grass on the hillside below the garden rippled in long waves with each gust. Inside, a fire burned in every room-in bronze braziers, in grates built against the outer walls, in a deep brick-lined pit that had been excavated in the floor of the basement room. In the buried room, cylinders were suspended from the ceiling, holding captive a harsh white light that shone down upon smooth stone moist with blood and salty water. In the unseen world below the stones of the house, a river of power surged blue-black, grinding against the restraint of the earth.
Fierce tentacles of blue fire rippled against a glittering shield-of rose-colored light that encompassed the house and the basement. Around the periphery of that invisible barrier, grass crisped and shriveled. Trees that had stood for two hundred years rotted away, leaving only a husk of bark and limb. Leaves that touched the ground smoked into ash, never bursting alight. Stones cracked to gravel and gravel ground to dust. Five miles away the inhabitants of the house of Junius Alpicius Niger were all struck dumb in their sleep and rose to find every animal-domesticated or not- within the grounds of their estate dead upon the ground. The sky, anguished, vomited lightning and rolling thunder against the house in the hills. The rose-colored shield held, turning aside the stabbing fingers of lightning that grasped and tore at it. The stones shuddered in time with the leaping blasts of light. In the front foyer, the face of the Alexander was constantly lit by the strobe of each strike. In that hellish light, it seemed that he smiled.
Maxian screamed aloud in torment, his fingers half buried in the chest of a small, thrashing body. Energy surged over his body like a second skin of pulsing red and deep purple. The muscles of his face, his chest, his legs twitched uncontrollably with each surge. A great triangle had been carefully cut into the stone of the floor and filled with aconite and silver. It was etched within a greater circle of worked gold. Maxian stood at one vertex, while Abdma-chus and Gaius Julius shuddered in pain at the other two. Each had stripped to only palecotton loincloths, and each lay within a three-ringed circle of colored chalk and gold wire. Snakes of ultraviolet fire hissed from their bodies, crackling and snapping. The power flooded the air and sluiced into his body through a tattoo of an inverted pyramid that had been cut into Maxian’s chest.
Within the mewling body of the tiny child, squirming in a pool of blood, urine, and feces, Maxian’s fingers danced frantically. The power he drew from the earth, from the sky, and from the dead man and all that he represented warred inside that tiny frame with a bubbling black corruption that tore and gouged at the child’s internal organs. Maxian’s face was chalky and dry, he had sweated out all the water his body could yield sixty grains ago, but despite a nearly blinding headache that sent clouds of white sparks across his vision, he continued to battle the contagion. It would not die, no matter how thoroughly he tried to drive it out. He had rebuilt entire organs from the soup of bone, blood, and tissue that churned in the child’s torso, but each one, no sooner than he had sketched it anew, began to corrupt and decay.
One hundred and sixteen grains after he had started, Maxian staggered back from a flash of black light, edged with corroded red, and collapsed to the ground. Falling, his body cut across the edge of the triangle and with a thunderclap that shook a great burst of dust from the stones of the room and broke every glass, jug, and plate in the house, the chain of ultraviolet fire collapsed into nothing. In the silence that followed even the raging storm above seemed muted and distant. Maxian moaned and rolled over, his body convulsing with the aftereffects of the procedure. On the table, the body of the infant corrupted with a slick sucking sound into a spreading pool of black-green bile. It puddled and then began to run off the edges of the table, spattering against the floor.
Still within his circle of protection, Abdmachus quivered, his mouth drooling and his eyes glazed over with pain. Gaius Julius twitched once like a gaffed river pike and then lay still. After a moment his eyes flickered open and cleared. The pain that had racked him like a lash was gone. Stiffly he sat up, his head turning jerkily from side to side. Dust puffed from his bare skin. Absently he brushed it off, leaving only clotted trails where his old wounds were damp with new blood. He looked carefully around, though he was having trouble seeing, and marked the position of the prince. The dead man considered the steps up to the house. His master was unconscious at least, perhaps dying. He could believe that the Persian was wrong, that he could have a life without the power flickering dimly in the young man, or he might collapse to dust and bones as he rode away over the hill.
Sighing, he gingerly crossed the circle and bent down over the Prince. The boy’s left pupil was huge, filling his whole eye. His breathing was very shallow and intermittent. His hands and arms were red and cracked as if they had been plunged into a fire. The Prince’s lips were blue and his pulse was thready. Gaius Julius sighed again and hoisted the boy up in his arms. When he turned toward the stairs, something sharp pricked his neck.
“An admirable choice, old man.” Krista kept the spring gun close to his neck. “Just take the boy Prince upstairs and I’ll see to him. You get to clean up down here. Make sure the Easterner doesn’t drown in his own vomit.”
Gaius Julius grunted, his left eye twitching in suppressed anger. The girl, dressed now in a simple black tunic and a midlength gray skirt, slid past him and out of his line of sight. The razor-sharp iron tip of the spring-dart traced a line along the folds of skin at his neck. / never should have caught her that day, the dead man growled to himself. / should have let her go…
Upstairs, the rain had settled into a steady downpour, intermittently lit by the rumble and crack of lightning in the hills around the villa. The dead man carried the Prince to the north bedroom and lay him in a bed that had been carted up from the city a week before at Krista’s command. Gaius Julius pulled heavy quilts over the trembling figure of the boy, while the girl relit the fires in the grate and the braziers near the windows. The heavy shutters had blown open; now she closed them again, securing bronze wheel latches shaped like asps. The sound of the storm receded and Gaius Julius suddenly felt weak himself. His hands shook as he sat down. The boy’s color had grown worse.
Krista caught the dead man’s eye and nodded.
“You will die as he dies,” she said. “I saw you thinking, down there, that you might be free. You won’t. If he dies, you go back to the worms. Do you want that?”
Gaius Julius did not answer. She met his gaze.
Finally he shook his head. “No. I want to live.”
“Then go and bring strong wine, whatever broth or soup you can find, and more firewood.”
Krista searched the other upstairs rooms while the dead man was gone, finding two more blankets and another brazier. She dragged the heavy thing, ornamented with legs carved like dolphins, their mouths holding up the corners of a fluted shell, back to the bedchamber. Her fingers were quick to sprinkle oil over the dead coals and then to strike flint. Little flames curled up and she blew gently on them. When Gaius Julius returned, laden with a stewpot, two amphorae, and three stout logs, the room was lit with a cheerful glow.