Swords v. Cthulhu

Non Omnis Moriar (Not All of Me Will Die) Michael Cisco

Propraetor Marcus Foslius Felix awoke on the kalends of November to find himself acting proconsul for Hispania Citerior. On being acquainted with the reasons for this change, his first act was to appoint Publius Rutilius Grumio legatus of the twelfth legion, and by noon a thousand men were already scaling the pathway Libo’s party had taken into the mountains. They found the spot where their horses had been tied, and did not like the way some of the hoofprints were scuffed, as if the horses had been dragged on braced legs. The dogs found a patch of soil soaked in blood, not far off the track, but no body. It was as if someone had been run down and killed here, and the corpse picked up and taken away.

The trail led, as expected, up a narrow way, folded into a notch in the mountain. Libo’s party had marched through here the night before, up into a dense, but small, stand of trees, and had not come out. Nor had they come back. A large body of men would have torn up and marked the loose, rocky soil of the slopes, but there was no sign that they had left the path. If they had been ambushed, where were their bodies, the blood, the cast-off helmets, the broken gear? It was impossible; they had gone into that copse of trees, they had not come out, they had not retreated, and their bodies did not lie dead beneath the trees.

Grumio sent word back to Pompelo and marched deeper into the mountains.

Four days later, he returned with six captives: all of them Vasco shepherds who looked nothing like the other kind of people, whom Libo’s party had been seeking. The most prominent Vascones contended with Grumio indefatigably to save the lives of these captives and eventually, by going to Felix himself, managed to win clemency for all but one, who was crucified for failing to give adequate warning to Libo and his men. The remaining five, all very much the worse for wear, were quietly remanded to the custody of their own families.

Grumio had been compelled to admit that he had not been able to turn up a single one of the other kind of people. He had not even managed to discover the remains of any of the bonfires that eyewitnesses had reported seeing on that night, burning on the mountain tops.

News from Rome: the senate, the magistracy, all of Rome was aghast, baffled. Filling so many vacancies in high positions all at once was too much like reordering the world in a dream. When they had appointed Publius Strabonius Libo to the proconsulship of Hispania Citerior, they had believed they were rewarding an excellent citizen, not sending him to his doom in an unknown land. Felix was commended for swift action. The failure of Grumio’s expedition elicited indecision from the authorities. In the weeks that followed, a tacit conclusion was reached in Rome: it had been a supernatural thing. It had been the work of those nameless, monstrous gods of the mountain people. By all accounts, the thing had been impossible. At a stroke, a handfull of savages had somehow contrived to wipe out a cohort of three hundred legionaries. Lucius Caelius Rufus, a quaestor. Gnaeus Domitius Balbutius, the legatus of the twelfth legion, gone with them. And Sextus Pomponius Asellius, one of his tribunes, well-liked in Rome. And Strabonius Libo worst of all, the proconsul himself. He had insisted on joining the expedition to the mountains, and vanished with his lictors, with all of them, leaving no trace behind. Sorcery alone could have done it. The senators visited the temples and consulted their diviners. New temples were endowed and old ones were lavishly reappointed.

In the meantime, Felix was officially appointed proconsul, and his selection of Grumio was ratified. A high bounty was placed on those mountain people. The tenth legion, Gemina, was dispatched to the province, and the twelfth legion moved its camp from Calagurris north to Pompelo, fortifying the city and attempting to reassure its people that they were still under Roman protection. In response to rumors that some of the Vascones were known to join the mountain people at their revels, Grumio imperiously summoned the leaders of the Vasco clans to appear before him at Pompelo and give a thorough accounting of all their households, ordering them to surrender any witches that might be among them. The Vascones balked both at this request and at his tone, but Grumio began making arrests shortly thereafter, and whomever he arrested, he crucified.

This response did seem to reassure the people of Pompelo that something was being done, even if it did outrage the Vascones. It also upset Tiberius Annaeus Stilpo, the aedile whose letters had called proconsul Libo’s attention to the problem of the mountain people in the first place. With Felix’s appointment, his propraetorship was open. Stilpo hoped to get it, but he was been passed over in favor of a new man. And now Grumio was rooting out all the witches that it had been Stilpo’s duty to find.

Ruin was looming over him, and the prospect of losing the confidence of the senate and the comitiae chased all tranquility from his mind and home. He decided to try to rehabilitate his reputation by conducting his own investigation, gambling on the possibility that a smaller, less conspicuous party of men, disguised as travellers, could turn up something that a legion of infuriated soldiers might have missed, or frightened away. If his own men discovered a village of those mountain people, then Grumio would march on it, get out of Pompelo, and stop doing Stilpo’s job. In his absence, Stilpo would take over, the tact and discretion of Stilpo would shine all the brighter for the contrast with Grumio’s harshness and indecorum, and the way forward would open again, or, at least, close no further.

He would send Lucius Hosidius Nicostratus, known in Pompelo as Nicostratus Tutor, who had been Rufus’ lictor. Nicostratus was a shrewd man; originally from Athens, he was well-travelled, and had a reputation for being a reader. He’d had his skull cracked defending Rufus from the attack of a madman and was still recovering the night Rufus disappeared, which is why he had not gone with the others. He was fit now, but was no longer a lictor, and made his living as a scribe. Apparently, he was waiting for something better to come along, or for a chance to get back to Rome, and start over. He had debts. Stilpo would pay them.

Tullus Durio was a retired gladiator who had come to Calagurris to open his own ludus. He was a little long in the tooth, but still stout and wiry. His reserves of stamina were bottomless, and nothing fazed him. For a consideration, he would be Nicostratus’ bodyguard.

Finally, they would need a guide. For this duty, Stilpo settled on Otson, a Vasco from the other side of the mountains, up near the border with Gaul. He had been sent south by his family to learn more about Roman ways, and had performed some miscellaneous services for prominent families, both Vasco and Roman, with whom Stilpo had dealings. He seemed like a reliable man, not quite a blockhead for all that he was a rustic, and he had been all over those mountains. Stilpo asked him what he knew about those mountain people, and he said he knew only stories.

“What stories?”

Otson paused, and seemed to steel himself to the recollection.

“There was a man whose name we no longer say. He was going to betray us to some of the Aquitani who were our enemies. He was caught, and we gave him to them.”

“To the mountain people?”

“Yes. Both my parents were there. He was bound and left at one of their circles. He was pleading for death. To make sure he didn’t escape, he was watched from a distance, from a hidden place. They said he was calling to them constantly, over and over, until the sun set. The watchers knew he was still there, because, when it got dark, two torches appeared, coming to the circle from the far side, and his calls became screams. Then stopped. The watchers said they heard the mountain people’s voices speaking, and that there was another voice, that was different. They wouldn’t say anything else about it, only that the traitor was gone that morning when they went to the circle again.”

Before they parted company, Stilpo said, with an attempt at sly joviality that did not suit him, “I have heard, Otsonus, that you have recently lost your dog.”

“Last week,” Otson said, looking a bit bewildered by the change of subject.

At Stilpo’s summons, a servant entered, accompanied by an unleashed dog who trotted along beside him.

“Accept this one, then,” Stilpo said, seeming pleased with himself. “His name is Teuser. May he be of assistance to you.”

Otson looked at Teuser carefully.

“He’s mine?” he asked.

Stilpo laughed.

December was nearing its end when they set out. They would ride as far as a certain hamlet in the foothills, then exchange horses for a donkey.

When Otson admitted he’d never seen a gladiatorial bout in his life, Tullus latched on to him and regaled him en route with repetitive accounts of battles he had either participated in or witnessed up close. He was a good storyteller, with zest for his subject and a surprisingly good ear for mimicking voices, but for the most part he was too technical to follow, so that it seemed like a blur of arms and legs, weapons, shields, elbows and butting heads swarming from his mouth in a baffling succession of decisive maneuvers and spectacular coups.

Meanwhile, Nicostratus glared at the mountains as they slowly approached, already searching them from where he was. The peaks were filmed with a meager snowfall and the weather was clear, if windy. The mountains continued docilely to look like mountains. He found it impossible to attach any special idea of menace to them.

The hamlet in the foothills he found surprisingly large. They would stay the night there. There was an entire house standing empty that was theirs to use, if they wanted it. Otson inquired how it was that they happened to have an empty house, and was told, a little sheepishly, that a family had been living there until early last autumn, when some ailment or other carried off every last one of them.

“We don’t want that house,” Otson said flatly.

Crammed in a corner by a heap of feebly glowing embers that night, Nicostratus remembered Otson’s refusal and regretted it.

The following day, they set out at dawn. A light morning mist burned off nearly right away and the sky deepened to pure indigo. They ate bread and honey, received more bread and some cheese to take with them on top of their provisions, and Nicostratus left thinking that they would have had that much less to eat, perhaps, if they had slept in that empty house.

By noon, they had reached the spot where Libo’s party must have tied their horses. There was the narrower path leading up, curving out of sight. They found nothing but the tracks of Grumio’s men, and those were nearly fully effaced. Teuser hovered near and scrutinized a patch of ground behind some brush that might have been what Otson called “the bloody place.”

They searched carefully, for an hour. Nicostratus discovered score markings on some of the tree trunks that he believed were made by ropes. There were notches, blackened now, but not very old, where the horses had yanked the ropes tight enough to cut into the bark so deeply he could fit the tip of his thumb into the groove, halfway to the first joint.

“A horse would have to throw itself forward with all its weight to pull that hard on a line,” he said. “You see how, eh — there’s no scraping? It only goes directly in, just here. It was a single tug, and it would have parted the rope.”

They kept the donkey with them when they climbed the path. It was too steep for horses, but, according to Otson, it would level off to an easier grade a bit past the bend.

A wind came up and rustled dead leaves in the copse when they saw it for the first time. The path cut neatly through it, in an unobstructed line right up the slope. The way was stony, but straight, and the slope above it was plainly visible not a hundred yards from where they stood. No one, even at night, could have gone astray on that path.

They kept climbing, assiduously scanning the ground, which was bare and innocent. They entered the copse with a sense of foreboding that could be attributed to nothing in their surroundings. There were dead trees, dead leaves, stones, a blank and traceless path, the slopes to either side, and the open space beyond that had engulfed so many.

They tied the donkey below the copse and began going over the place, inch by inch, turning over stones, brushing fingertips over the tree trunks, checking for broken branches. They spent hours in that copse and, once, Teuser gave a wild yelp and flashed away, running at full tilt down the path and out of the copse. Otson ran after him a little way, then gave up. Nicostratus hurried over to where Teuser had been when he cried, but found nothing. Otson came back, Tullus came over, and they all three pored over that ground, eyeing every piece of grit, even sniffing at the ground themselves, but found nothing. They resumed their search. Nothing.

As they were preparing to give up, Otson saw Teuser standing a few feet away from him, looking sheepish. He did not meet Otson’s eyes when he approached.

“This time you were afraid,” he said to the dog. “Be brave next time.”

They decided to have a little something to eat. Nicostratus climbed a short distance up out of the copse and seated himself on a stone. Otson understood and agreed; he didn’t want to eat in that copse either. They were refreshing themselves in frustrated silence when he stood up, peering intently across the gorge where the road bent below them.

“Do you see those rocks?” he asked, pointing across the gorge.

If the day hadn’t been so clear, he would never have been able to make them out from this far away; a small heap of rocks, high up there on the far side. There was a seam, or projection there; not a path, but a way, at any rate, and, almost hidden beside a boulder, that artificial heap of rocks.

“The top one,” Otson says. “Do you see how it curves out, toward us?”

Nicostratus couldn’t say he did, but the top stone was long enough and thin enough to look a little unnatural standing upright on top of a little heap of rocks.

“That’s how the witches mark their paths.”

“How do you know that?” Tullus asked.

“Because I know them,” Otson said, pointing. “The mountains up north. That’s where I come from. The witches light bonfires and meet their gods in caves, and they mark their paths with rock piles. I’ve seen them.”

“You’ve seen the witches?”

“No, the piles. And the fires. The witches I’ve only heard, never seen them. On the nights when they gathered, we could hear them down in the valley.”

Otson kept gazing at the heap.

“Their voices were very strange.”

They backtracked to a point below the place where Libo’s men had tied their horses, and turned off a little more toward the south. The sun was sinking now, but it was still only just beginning to wester, so that their shadows preceded them as they went. With no path, their progress was slow through the trees, but the ground soon opened out. They were climbing through dead brown brush and rocks along an irregular slope. Teuser darted this way and that, sniffing the ground curiously, but none of the men saw any tracks.

Then they reached a natural terrace and their going became much easier and swifter. The outer edge of the terrace was above the level of the inner, which made it harder to notice from below. Off to the left, they could look down on the copse. When they reached the rockpile, Teuser started scanning the ground. Otson knelt by the pile and pointed to the thin rock on top.

“Where I come from, they turn the curved piece toward the mountain, not away.”

The pile stood at the outer edge of a broad place in the terrace, where it folded back along the mountain almost due south.

“Over here,” Tullus called. “Look at this.”

Nicostratus inspected the medallion closely, holding it up in the light directly before the better of his two eyes. He rubbed away the dirt that clung to it.

“What is it?” Otson asked.

“This is from Emesa,” Nicostratus said thoughtfully. “In the East. It is a talisman of Sol.”

Otson peered at the medallion as Nicostratus held it out for him. “Isn’t that a mountain?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Nicostratus. “In Emesa, they worship Sol under another name — I forget what it is in their own language now — but I know it means ‘the God of the Mountain.’ You can see the writing.”

Otson squinted at the writing for a moment.

“Did any of Libo’s men come from there?” he asked.

Nicostratus looked at them both, momentously.

“Quaestor Rufus visited Antioch,” Nicostratus said. “That’s not far from Emesa. Perhaps he also went there.”

“Or he might have met someone in the one place who came from the other, and gave that to him.”

“Or perhaps, one of the soldiers?”

Otson began perusing the ground again.

“I think that was stolen from one of Libo’s men.”

Tullus squinted at the talisman.

“Here!” Otson called a moment later. He had found footprints in soft earth that lay in a little strip at the base of a low ridge and which was shielded from the elements by a boulder. There were a number of shallow depressions that must have been heel marks, and one distinct imprint of the pad of a bare foot, complete with the four dimples the toes had made. Otson put his hand alongside it, and they saw that the print was smaller than his hand.

Teuser sniffed at the prints and then began tracking. In only a few minutes, they had found a crumbled spot in the rock face that formed a fairly gentle, if rocky, stairway up. Otson turned in place, looking in all directions, when they reached the top of it, then pointed again. Nicostratus saw the second low heap of rocks at once. The shadow that lay beneath them on the slope made them seem to float there uncannily, just above the ground. Standing directly above the pile, Otson could see the first heap, which, although it was below them, was magically visible through what appeared to be a natural scoop in the ground. He drew an imaginary line from that pile to this, turned to see where it pointed, and at once found the next pile. Even in the dimness of the incipient dusk it leapt out at him, neatly framed between a protruding stone and a solitary tree trunk.

They retraced their steps along the natural terrace and found a place to camp. Nicostratus wanted to be out in the open, so they could see everything around them, but Otson pointed out that they would need a windbreak if they didn’t want to freeze. After a hasty meal, Nicostratus sat pondering the talisman they’d found, trying to reconstruct in his mind the long voyage it had taken to get here, the image of a mountain on one side of the world, found on another mountain on the world’s other side.

He awoke once in the night, for a natural enough reason, but he did not budge from his place, nor dare to move. There was motion outside the tent.

“Tullus! Otson!” he said quietly.

Otson awoke first. He looked at Nicostratus, then at Teuser, then snatched at his knife. He dug Tullus in the ribs and Tullus awoke with a start.

“Listen…”

Outside the tent, there was the sound of furtive movement. It was impossible to describe, just a sound of air moving deliberately, like panting, and a rustle that should have been nothing but wind. It did not move like wind. It was now here, now there. The donkey made a sound then, a very strange sound. Tullus got onto his knees and drew his sica, which glinted dully in the gloom. Nicostratus picked up the long stick he had been walking with. Tullus glanced at him and nodded, then at Otson.

They rushed outside all together. Something none of them could see, but that was like a puff of all too solid warm air, streaked toward the slope above them. Tullus ran after it, swiping. They stood listening a long while before they checked the donkey and went back into the tent. Tullus remained sitting by the opening with his sica in his hand until dawn.

When dawn came, Otson and Teuser emerged first into the light, and searched the ground outside for tracks. They found their own.

That day, they followed an invisible thread that linked one cryptic heap of rocks to another. Otson led them, becoming more obviously disconcerted as they went. The way was certain, but the landscape was not. It was only with increasing difficulty that he could identify even major landmarks, including mountain peaks.

“The farther we go on like this,” he said, “the more dependent we are on these piles to get us back.”

“It has to end,” Tullus said, and Nicostratus agreed. They would go on.

It happened when the sun was nearly overhead. Otson had reached the fifteenth heap of stones in the line, and was turning in place to site the next, when his eyes went wide and he shouted with surprise and alarm.

In order to make himself understood, after many failed attempts to say what had happened, Otson took Nicostratus by the shoulders and compelled him to do as he had done. Nicostratus approached the pile, raised his eyes, and turned in place… and it was like looking around the corner of a building. A whole other landscape turned into position before his eyes, as if the pile of rocks at his feet had been the corner of a vast wall, painted with a blandly benign landscape so expertly reproduced that he had mistaken it for the real thing. Now he was seeing behind that wall.

The terrain was riddled with cave mouths. The mountains must have been honeycombed with them. And there were much vaster structures of heaped rock, and rings of upright slabs. The light, too, was different. Unclean. It was like looking through an empty bottle of cloudy glass. The light had warps in it, and an actinic bite that he somehow could taste, like a dry bitterness in his throat. The sun overhead was transformed into a slanted nexus of steely knife edges, cold and venomous. Then, with a start, Nicostratus saw a black object standing motionless in the sky, perhaps half a mile away. It reminded him of a huge black kite, but it was bizarrely fixed in place, like a hole in the sky. The path was entirely distinct now, and it would take them in the direction of that black thing.

Tullus grunted when he observed the change, and Teuser went completely silent and sat down firmly in place, refusing to budge.

“That’s where they went,” Nicostratus said. “I’m sure of it.”

He had formed the idea that perhaps not all of Libo’s party were dead. The prospect of what they might be going through at this moment, if this was the way they had gone, was a strong incentive to find them.

Otson ventured out into the transformed landscape. As he passed by, from Nicostratus’ point of view, Otson almost immediately changed, taking on a bizarrely overcast sort of look, as if there were a dulling film over his image. He was as sharply outlined as everything else, with an even exaggerated clarity, but his appearance took on an artificial lifelessness in there. When he returned again, there was a brief instant when he seemed to loom out at Nicostratus, and then he was standing in the natural sunlight, himself natural again.

The animals took a great deal of persuading, but eventually all of them crossed into that other landscape. A new silence received them on the other side. The air did not move. They passed solitary standing stones with dubious, almost living shapes, and the sun seemed to be plunging toward the horizon more rapidly than it ought to. Nicostratus looked at his own hands in its sickening glare, and saw his own flesh grey as lead and the veins and arteries a curiously pronounced green.

That black thing in the sky watched them come. It shed a polluting radiance. Whenever he looked at it, a sharp aversion lanced Nicostratus’ eyes and brain, and yet he couldn’t stop himself from repeating the experience. They discovered what lay directly beneath the thing after they’d climbed a while. It was a colossal mound which loomed from out of a dense crowd of dead trees whose roots were hidden within a shallow tarn. The top rose high above them, but they looked down at the tarn, which seemed to cling to the ground, a little sideways. But now the glare from that black thing was intolerable up close and they hurried to gain the cover of the trees.

They all expected to have to wade in the water, but, as they followed the path, the tarn veered unnaturally away toward higher ground.

It was a relief to have that thick ceiling of dead branches between them and that black thing. Flat stone chimes were tied to those branches, and hung motionless and hushed in the dull air. There were no birds, no sounds at all except for some faint insect noises. The tepid air was pungent with dead leaves, moldy earth, stagnant water. There was no snow.

The clearest way took them around to the east side of the mound, overgrown with trees and dense brush that rattled. Neither Teuser nor the donkey would set foot on it, so they tied the donkey and left the dog.

The mound was covered in stone circles, only about a foot across, hidden everywhere among the brush. At the first turn in the slender path that led up toward the top, the opening appeared. It was a black hole about halfway up the mound, and a deadening flatness fell on them the moment they set eyes on it. The hole was round, and punched into the dead hulk of the mound like a worm hole in an apple. They all knew at once that it was the way in. They all knew at once that the black kite overhead had emerged from it, was tethered to it, and in communication with it. Nicostratus gazed at the pit, the tips of his front teeth rattling against each other, and suddenly Tullus was shouting, sprinting awkwardly back down the path, and sounding through his shouts came wild barking and the shrill screams of the donkey, and Nicostratus remembered the animals, and Libo’s horses.

Tullus was barrelling toward the source of the screams, whipping his cloak around his right arm and fumbling his small shield around with his left. He drew his sica and left the path, crashing down through the bracken. Otson flew after him, his bow in his hand. Nicostratus stayed on the path and followed it around — there was Teuser, barking, the whites of its eyes showing all around the iris. Nicostratus turned, but Teuser snatched his cloak in his jaws and held on, tugging him back. Nicostratus saw the donkey, lying on its side, legs thrashing in dead leaves, disappearing into the trees.

Otson appeared first, above him, and stopped, open mouthed, seeing what Nicostratus could not see from where he stood. Tullus lumbered heavily past Otson, saw what he saw, and kept going, his shield held out before him, raising his sica. Nicostratus ripped free of Teuser’s jaws and, with a sick impotence, closed in on the noise.

The donkey lurched and tumbled out of the brush before him, screeching and screeching, Nicostratus saw what had attacked it, and a howl that began in the pit of his stomach rose effortlessly up through his body to his throat. An enormous length, like a centipede as big as a fallen log, was softly weaving in silhouette through the trees, spangled with the ugly diamonds of corrupted sunlight shining through the dead branches. The thing swayed with a seeking, flexing mobility, fondling the ground with its stubs. A shaft from Otson’s bow flitted across the light. He couldn’t tell if the thing was hit or not, but the surprise freed him from his trance and he stumbled away, clutching his face, turning again to see Tullus closing with the thing, feinting with his small shield and brandishing his sica. Nicostratus could not muster the strength to beg Tullus not to get near it, not to touch the thing. Otson shot at it again, and the thing writhed like a flabby insect.

Tullus darted in then, bringing his sica down over the top of his shield. The thing reared up and seemed almost as if it were trying to embrace Tullus, then the sica darted at the body. The thing warbled, and flashed away, a weightless ribbon of shadow, vanishing into the densest part of the brush. Tullus stormed after it, charging, stopping, charging again, leading with his shield. Nicostratus was gibbering when Otson came over to him.

“Asellius,” he groaned. “Asellius! Asellius!”

The donkey stopped screeching. Tullus had cut its throat.

For a time, Nicostratus was out of his mind. He would turn his head now this way, toward the carcass of the donkey, seeing the bore-holes in its body, evenly spaced and round, and hideously bloodless, then recoil… then turn his head again. Otson tried throwing Nicostratus’ torn cloak over his head, but Nicostratus flailed at it in a paroxysm of fright. Then his madness abruptly left him.

The daylight was fading.

The sun was still in the sky, and yet a sooty, granular darkness was dimming the air, as if a vast insect swarm were creeping across the sky. It was like a swarm, too, in that it seemed to be living, aware, ravenously searching. That kite — it was calling that swarm to itself. Numbly, Nicostratus followed Otson into the trees. It was, he saw, the only place to go. Somehow they all knew they were liable to be seen out in the open, that something was coming, a gathering presence. Teuser was with them, and he was silent.

They were nearly at the top of the mound when Nicostratus thought he heard a whisper, almost behind him. He whipped his head around and saw nothing, but he knew something was approaching up the path. They all did.

They were being herded up the mound, toward the pit. While he feared what was coming behind them, Nicostratus knew that the pit was no refuge and that going down there would be the worst thing that could conceivably happen to him.

That swarming darkness dimmed the air like an impending storm, and seemed to arrange itself in the vicinity of the kite. Soon they would be groping along the path, and that foulness behind them was rising like flood water. Suddenly, Otson grabbed them both, each by a free arm, and then they all saw the tiny man, a dwarf, wrapped in rags, waving to them from between the trees.

They looked at each other. The dwarf was beckoning them frantically, retreating by fits and starts. He would wave, then point toward the ground, at something they couldn’t see behind some trees and heaped stones. After a few moments, he darted out of sight.

As fantastic a figure as this little creature might have been, seen under other circumstances, now its gestures and attitude expressed a humanity that drew them like a beacon. They blundered after the dwarf as passively as men in a dream, and found him standing just within an open burrow mouth beneath a big tree, camouflaged between two enormous projecting roots and a sort of makeshift blind of dead leaves. The dwarf was muffled up to his imploring, panic-brightened eyes, and waved at them again before scuttling inside. He seemed to have only one arm.

Tullus would go first, Otson last. Teuser had already darted past them all and into the burrow.

Nicostratus crawled on his belly after Tullus. Fading sunlight filtered into the burrow through small gaps among the heaped rocks that comprised part of the ceiling. The space inside was gamy with an acrid sickroom smell. Otson slithered in behind Nicostratus, and they huddled in silence against the wall of packed dirt, directly by the opening. The dwarf compressed himself into a tangle of exposed roots above them all.

A humming shiver rose up the mound. As they listened, the sound of wings descended to meet it. The burrow became a bubble of space in a torrent of unrecognizeable noise, an eerie, groaning hum that wailed and plunged like alien grief. The wind rose outside, and in the midst of that terrible sound came a discordant clatter of flat stone chimes and the eager clacking of dead branches together.

The mound shuddered. Otson had the despairing impression that it might be rising in the air. To Nicostratus, it seemed as if something enormous had landed on it, nearby. They were not alone on the mound, but the noise of the wind, the humming, the clamor in the trees, was like concentrated isolation. They were cut off from any world. A palpable weight seemed to batten on them, the near proximity of something massive.

The humming noise faded very slowly, like an army marching away. The tumult outside ceased more rapidly. With a wild feeling of relief they saw the daylight begin to brighten.

But the situation had changed. Although there were now distinct shafts of light streaking the burrow, that sense of weight had not departed with the noise.

The men looked at each other.

“Let’s go,” Tullus croaked.

The dwarf watched as Tullus, then Otson left. Nicostratus gestured to him to go next, but the dwarf only stared. Finally, Nicostratus pulled him down and thrust him through the burrow mouth, shoving him ahead. They would go together. He would bring this miserable creature with him back to town.

Once outside, he took the dwarf in his arms and, carrying him, followed the other men. The woods around him were as still as a painting. The sense of weight seemed to be centered on the pit above them, or to depend from the kite, and they hastened down the off the mound through the trees. Otson looked all about him as he went, looking for Teuser. The dog was nowhere to be seen. They were leaving, but they had no real idea what they were doing.

There was a greyish movement off the path. Tullus made an abrupt rasping sound in his throat. He flashed into the gloom the next instant, something grey, narrow and murmuring was descending, or stretching out, from the treetops…

Then, as if he’d blundered against some unseen obstacle, Nicostratus fell, and slid on one side along the ground. He was dragged all the way down to the base of the mound in a cascade of dead leaves, grating to a halt nearly where the trees gave out. There was no sound at all and the air was still when he rose, and he was not ready to call Tullus or Otson. He was not alone, because he had not released his grip on the dwarf. The rags had come loose and fallen away from its legs. The dwarf had neither feet, nor knees. The dwarf, Nicostratus realized, had not been born a dwarf. Unmistakably, both legs had been amputated well above the knee. Sandals stuffed with rags were imperfectly bound to the stumps, and he had been trying to keep up with them on those “feet.”

The dwarf was crawling, with its one arm, back toward the trees, helpless to prevent the rags from being dragged off his body. Nicostratus tried to gather him up again. The dwarf resisted, then his eyes suddenly went wide, staring. His eyebrows lifted, and then Nicostratus could feel the little body begin to heave in his hands. It convulsed. Soft, voiceless huffs came from the hidden mouth. The dwarf was laughing, silently, at him. He looked up into Nicostratus’ eyes then, reached out with the stub that was all that remained of his index finger and tapped the talisman from Emesa that Nicostratus was wearing around his neck.

Nicostratus set the dwarf down and snatched away the shredded remains of a quaestor’s toga that had concealed the face that now laughed at him, with sheared, toothless gums and the stub of a tongue, still pointing at the talisman he had brought west with him from Syria.

Somehow, he had hold of Nicostratus’ knife, and, still coughing voiceless laughter and staring at Nicostratus, he threw aside his rags and plunged the knife wildly into his own body again and again and again. Nicostratus shouted and lunged forward to prevent him, then froze when he saw the exposed body honeycombed with slippery pockets. Each one sprouted a wet black filament. The dwarf drove the knife urgently into his pulpy body, eyes popping, sweat running down his face, desperately probing with the blade for the spring of his own life. Then at last came a rill of thin, stinking blood, and he slumped forward, spasming.

The spasms did not cease. The ruin of that familiar face turned toward him again and the lips moved in a futile attempt to speak. At once with a strangled cry Nicostratus sprang up with a heavy stone between his hands and pounded with it wildly at the skull. It was like ramming at a stone with another stone. The body fluttered against the ground. It did not stop suffering. Nicostratus stared until something gave way inside himself. Then he ran from the thing he knew was somehow still Caelius Rufus.

Otson caught up with him on the path, not far from the first heap of stones.

“Where are you going?” he demanded.

Nicostratus turned to look at him, puzzled. He gestured toward the west.

“Back,” he said. “Back to town.”

“I didn’t find Tullus,” Otson said. “We were separated on the mound. He attacked something. I didn’t see it. You — you were gone.”

“Tullus?”

His tone threw Otson off. There was no sense of emergency.

“Tullus,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know whether or not he’s still alive… Aren’t you coming back with me?”

“I was waiting for you,” Nicostratus said. “Now, what is this about a mound? What mound?”

Otson’s brow clouded.

“You coward!” he snarled.

Open-mouthed, Nicostratus stared at Otson. His dumbstruck expression only made Otson angrier.

“You’re coming back with me!”

He seized Nicostratus. They struggled, then Nicostratus pivoted, throwing Otson heavily to the ground.

“Have you gone mad?” Nicostratus shouted.

Otson sprang to his feet and seized him by his clothes.

“You’re coming back with me!”

“Of course I am!” Nicostratus cried. “I’ve been waiting for you!”

“Not back to town, back to the mound! To find Tullus!”

“What Tullus?! I don’t know any Tullus! You’ve gone mad!”

Again Nicostratus broke free. The two men stood facing each other on the mountainside.

“You ran!” Otson said with contempt. “You left him.”

Nicostratus began to speak.

“— Don’t deny it!” Otson cried.

“You know I would not do a thing like that. I…”

“Don’t talk to me like a sober man reasoning with his drunk friend! I was there.”

“Where?”

“On the mound!”

“What mound? I’ve seen no mound!”

“We were there, we saw it, we all saw it. We just came from there. You saw the thing, Tullus attacked it. You called it Asellius. The dog held you back but you saw it.”

Otson snatched Nicostratus’ cloak and held it up before him.

“Teuser held you back and tore your —”

The cloak had no tear in it. Otson stared at the cloak. He stared at Nicostratus, who returned his gaze levelly, even coolly. Then he noticed that the talisman from Emesa was no longer around Nicostratus’ neck, and took a few steps back.

“Where is the talisman?”

Nicostratus opened and closed his mouth. He seemed genuinely at a loss.

“So you threw it away,” Otson said. “What will you tell them when you get back?”

“That we found nothing,” Nicostratus said, sounding genuinely perplexed.

Otson flung away from him then. His mind a blank, he made his way back toward the mound on his own, ignoring Nicostratus’ voice calling, falling away behind him. The mountains seemed to fold and refold themselves around him. The path quivered and swam back and forth through frothy turf and went on too far, but he couldn’t find the next stone marker. There was a sort of bare place where the stones might have been. He kept checking to see where the sun was in the sky, but it didn’t seem to draw any closer to the high mountain horizon. He couldn’t spot the black kite anymore.

Eventually he moved out into wide open plains of grass so green it looked black beneath a sun that was still no closer to the horizon, but which seemed to have drawn nearer to him, as if he were steadily walking into the image on the talisman. He had this feeling even as he crossed wide valleys, and forded broad, flat streams he didn’t know, and whose banks were lined with trees whose branches were adorned with flat stone chimes. Birds called with new voices. New tracks scored the muddy banks of the streams. The current plucked his bow off his back and swept it out of sight before he knew what was happening.

The light finally began to fail when, with aching legs and nodding head, he found himself surrounded once more by trees, and by those mountain people. They stood in between the trees like scrawny saplings, marking him silently as he went by. Silence, their eyes, and the gloom were smothering him, poisoning him. He reached for his knife, but it was already in his hand.

“Do not stop,” he told himself. “Do not let them near you. Keep going. Do not stop. Do not stop until you reach home again, where your own people wait for you.”