“Time to go upstairs,” Khiron growled, his voice and body equally tense. He shoved a bundle of clothing into Dwyrin’s hands. “Dress in this.”
Dwyrin stripped out of his tunic and breeches. The new clothing was a wadded lump. In it were trousers, a shirt, a cloth belt, and a felt cap. The fabric was plain and gray, with a little embroidery at the cuffs and hems. It was a little too large for him, particularly in his current state. The dead man watched him closely but without overt malice for the time it took him to dress. Flat-bottomed sandals completed the garb. Done, Khiron surveyed him up and down before pushing him toward the iron door.
“No time to dawdle,” he rasped-his voice tighter than usual.
They ascended the long passageway again, returning to the office filled with candles. The stout man, the Bygar, was still seated at his desk, but now two others joined him. Khiron guided Dwyrin to the side of the desk, facing the two new men. Dwyrin felt the dead man recede to the edge of the room, but he did not leave, he merely became less obtrusive. The men in the room had been speaking but had fallen silent upon the arrival of the boy. Now they surveyed him, and he them. The first of the two men was large, taller than Khiron, with a bristling beard and great whiskers. His black hair was curled and fell in ringlets past his broad shoulders. His arms were thick and corded with muscle. He was clad in heavy woolen garments, like a merchant, but they sat uneasily upon him. Dark piercing eyes scanned Dwyrin up and down, then the chin lifted in appraisal, a hand adorned with many rings stroking the lushness of his beard.
“Barely a sprig of a boy.” Whiskers’s voice was like a trumpet, echoing in the confined space of the office. “He should still be watching the sheep, not about on a man’s work.”
The other man was well built too, but next to his companion, he seemed a sapling to an ancient oak. Where Whiskers wore his clothes like a stone, this one was dressed in a flowing black robe of some shining material, with dark cotton trousers and arms graced by many bands of dark gold and red and amber. He too had dark hair, but it hung long and straight on his back, bound back by a silver fillet. His face too was long and straight, with arching eyebrows and a sharp nose. He was clean-shaven, without even the shadow of a beard. Whiskers exuded an aura of strength and vitality, almost abrim with energy. This one was cold and distant, like the ice on a mountaintop. Looking upon, him Dwyrin met his eyes for an instant and quailed away. They were deep pools of darkness, filled with horror and suffering.
Dwyrin felt faint, realizing that if the othersight were still upon him, the true shape of the creature across from him might be revealed, and that knowledge might destroy his mind. Being trapped in the same room with this monster and Khiron seemed to drain all air from the space. Dwyrin could now dimly sense the tightly controlled fear in both the Bygar and, behind him, Khiron. The school and the sun on the bricks in front of the dining hall seemed infinitely far away.
“He has potential, Dracul.” The voice of the creature in black was smooth and cultured. His Greek was flawless and filled with an ironic lilt. “Your servant has done well. You make our journey not only profitable but pleasant as well.”
Dracul made a half bow in his chair, acknowledging the compliment.
“Your presence is a boon as well, Lord Dahak. I know that you are a collector of rare items and so I thought of you when this young man was brought to me. He carries Power within him, waiting to be channeled, tapped, used.”
Dahak nodded, his eyes flickering in the candlelight. “Show us.”›
The Bygar nodded to Khiron, who stepped up behind Dwyrin and rested his bony hands on the boy’s shoulders. The dead man leaned close, his gray presence blotting out the candlelight in the room.
“Now, dear boy, I will lift the ban from you a little. I want you to call fire from the stone.” A gnarled finger drew Dwyrin’s chin around and pointed to a stand of bronze set against the wall beside the entry. Upon it sat an oblong of dark flint. The wall hangings had been taken down, the carpets rolled back from the foot of the stand.
“Not too much, now. Just enough to show our guests.”
A fingernail slid between the chain around Dwyrin’s neck and his skin. The edge, so sharp, cut into his neck, drawing a bead of blood. The veil that had lain over Dwyrin lifted a little, revealing the room awash in a swirl of dark purple, midnight blue, and a nameless color. By utter effort, Dwyrin kept from looking to his left, where Dahak lounged on a divan. The echo of his presence in the room was enough to distort the flow of power around him, drawing it into himself. The flint block was inert, no so much as a spark of its ancestral fire remaining within it.
“Bring the fire…” Khiron crooned in his ear. Dwyrin stumbled through the Opening of Hermes, failing to reach the level of calm needed to exert his will. Khiron’s fingernail dug into his neck. The pain sharpened his focus and he was able to complete the Meditation of Thoth. Now the power in the room, in the bronze stand, even buried deep in the innermost heart of the flint began to expose itself to him. With a deep breath he focused on the block as he had done on the ship, drawing power, first in a tiny thread, then in a surge from the candles, the rugs, the wall, the floor. A bright white-hot point suddenly danced into view in the heart of the flint. Dwyrin fanned it with the flood of power he was drawing from the appurtenances in the room. It began to glow.
Even Dahak flinched back when the flint oblong suddenly flashed into flame, burned white-hot and then shattered with a booming crack, scattering shards of flint across the room. Many bounced back from a sudden, wavering wall of power raised by Dahak’s languid hand. There was a pattering sound as they rained down onto the floor and tabletop. Flames licked at the wall and the bronze stand collapsed, riven into shattered bits. Dwyrin fell forward onto the carpet, his head spinning with the power.
With Khiron’s hand gone from the chain around his neck, the flood of sensations cut off. The room seemed terribly dark.
Dahak laughed, a terrible sound like graves opening. “He will do, my dear Dracul. He will be magnificent.”
The Bygar smiled and gestured to Khiron to take the prize away.
I
Maxian sat amid roses on a mossy stone bench, his face drawn with exhaustion. Despite the calm peace that pervaded the gardens built on the downriver side of the Temple of the Healers, his mind was unquiet. Darkness seemed to hang over the city now, with a flickering dissonance in the shadows under the buildings or along the wharves that lined the river. Since the night that Gregorius had come to him with the two barbarians, the prince had not slept in his rooms on the Palatine. The whispering of the stones had grown too loud. Now he wondered if he could even bear to remain within the precincts of the city.
Here, in the domain of the priests, he found that there was some peace. Whatever power it was that had invaded the city, and was now so obviously crushing the life from its citizens, the god of healing had the power to keep it from his doors. Maxian rubbed the side of his head, trying to relieve the knots of strain that bunched in his shoulders and neck. He snorted to himself, thinking of how little use he was to his brother.
To his great credit, Aurelian had seemed to know that something was weighing on his little brother’s mind and had quietly reassigned all of the tasks that Galen had intended for Maxian. In a way, this made it worse, for now Maxian felt useless. The power that gnawed at the vitals of the people of Rome was so strong that he could not even budge it from a single stone. He was unwilling to bend his thought to dealing with the bureaucracy as his brother needed him to. He groaned aloud and buried his head in his hands.