On the cot, Maxian moaned a little and turned over, hiding his face.
The tunnels of the catacombs were narrow and low-roofed. Abdmachus led the way with his lantern, now unhooded, while Maxian carried the bag of tools and the other light. The air was fresh and a soft breeze blew into his face as they clambered through chambers strewn with bones, skulls, and decaying burial goods. After fifteen minutes the Prince realized that they were tending downward. Tunnel after tunnel branched off to the side of their path. A huge warren of narrow holes, pits, and cavities filled with skulls had been dug under the tomb of the Julians. A fine drift of finger bones crunched under his boots as they walked.
“Master Abdmachus, how big is this place?” Maxian asked at last as they descended another ladder.
The Nabatean laughed and stopped at the bottom of a corroded wooden ladder, steadying it as the Roman came down. “This valley has been the burial place of Rome for over a thousand years, my young friend. All of those millions of bodies have to go somewhere. Worry not, we are almost there.”
At the bottom of another ladder, unaccountably, the tunnel veered sharply left and climbed steeply. Maxian scrambled in the loose dirt to climb up, then caught hold of a firm edge of stone. He pulled himself up and found that it was a marble step. A staircase now ascended, and the light of Abdmachus’ lantern“ was far ahead. It was easier going than the loose dirt but still difficult as the steps were tilted sharply to the left. After a moment they joined a wall with a smooth marble facing. Maxian paused, staring in amazement at the bas-relief carved into the marble. A Roman family sat around a table, raising wine-cups in the blessing of the fall harvest. The face of Bacchus was graven above them, laughing from a wreath of holly leaves.
“Come, my friend.” Abdmachus’ voice echoed from ahead. “This is the place.”
At the top of the tilted staircase, Maxian crawled out into a large chamber. High above, a rough earth ceiling showed the twisted roots of trees. The floor was uneven and loosely packed with gravel and dirt. By the light of the two lanterns, three tomb-houses jutted from the floor and walls. Dirt spilled around their marble doorways, but they were unmistakably of the vintage of the temple they had entered through. The Prince stared around in amazement.
“How…?” His voice faltered.
Abdmachus looked up from where he was squatting by the door of the middle tomb-house. “As I said, young master, the people of the city have been burying their dead here for over a thousand years-once the valley that we rode through was not flat and level, but a long, low, swale running south from the city. Hundreds of tombs like these dotted that valley. There was, if Cassius Dio is to be believed, a Temple of the Magna Mater, not too far from where we entered. Then, when during the glory of the Republic it was decided that the Via Appia should be built, the Claudians filled in the valley, burying all of those tombs, temples, and monuments. Like these…“
Abdmachus turned back to the door of the tomb-house. His long fingers traced an inscription cut into the door, brushing dirt away. He grunted noncommittally as Maxian leaned close with the other lantern. The inscription was shallow and hard to read.
“I think that this is the one. The patterns coalesce around it in the right way.”
The Nabatean looked up at the Prince, his eyes shadowed in the lantern-light. “The door is sealed in such a way that I cannot open it. You must, and it will be difficult.. The body within was lain here after a long journey, and the men who buried it feared that it would not rest well-not unexpected from a man foully murdered by his supposed friends. A working was laid on this tomb, particularly upon this door, and it has only grown stronger with age, not weaker. It will take plain force to overcome it in the time available to us.”
Maxian nodded and laid the bag of tools down at his side. Abdmachus moved aside, and the Prince knelt in the loamy dirt before the door with his hands on his thighs. He calmed himself and then silently chanted the Opening of Hermes. After taking a circlet of twisted yew branches from the bag, Abdmachus settled the crown on the Prince’s head. The darkness of the cavern seemed to close in on Maxian for a moment, but then his sight blossomed.
The door to the tomb-house was a deep viridian abyss. Trickling currents of fire crawled across the marble facing and descended into unguessable depths. For a moment he quailed before the strength of the door ward. Then he centered again and reached out to draw power from the crusty loam of the floor and the tree roots high above.
There was an instant of emptiness as the Prince drew on the fabric of the unseen world around him, then a stunning rush of power burst to him from the walls, the floor, from the litter of bones that were scattered about the cavern. Blinding white-hot energy coursed through the corridors of his mind.
In the dark cavern, Abdmachus had closed down all of his othersight and sat, cross-legged, at the side of the young man, his fingertips laid lightly on the pulse at Maxian’s neck. The body of the Prince stiffened suddenly, and Abdmachus struggled to keep from laughing out loud in triumph. The boy twitched and his body convulsed, but his pulse-though it began to race-stayed strong. The Na-batean began a low chant, placing his fingertips lightly on either temple of the Prince. Around him, the detritus of bones trembled in the ground and then each femur, skull, and scapula began to twist itself free of the earth. Finger bones scrabbled in the dirt, then began to rise into the air. Clavicles rose and joined the slowly spinning array of bones. The door of the tomb-house began to flicker with a tremendously deep blue, almost black.
One of the skulls, already missing a quarter of the forehead, suddenly disintegrated in midair with a loud crack as the power Maxian was drawing from the remains of the dead took its physical integrity. There was a rapid popping sound as the smaller fibula and ribs pulverized. The other remains began to erode as an invisible wind lashed across them, spinning them faster and faster around the old man and the Prince.
Maxian felt and saw and heard none of this. His attention was utterly filled by the snarling whirlwind of power that had rushed into him like a mountain torrent. Something in the back of his mind gibbered in fear at the sleeting fire that channeled through his body. But his intellect was soaring on a godlike wave of ability. He directed his will against the tomb door and the ancient ward rang like a porcelain plate as the vast power smote it. The viridian abyss flexed under the assault and then deformed, suddenly becoming an almost silver mirror, throwing back a contorted reflection of the Prince. Then it broke apart in a shower of tiny green flecks. Maxian’s intellect stormed into the tomb-house, greedily swallowing up the long-dormant energies of those buried within. At the center of the tomb, his rush slowed and then.stopped. The body of a man lay on a simple bier. The body, long decayed and shriveled to a bundle of dry sticks, was dressed in the tattered remains of a formal white toga. Once leather-bound sandals had attired his feet, but they were only scraps now.
Maxian struggled to stop the avalanche of power that his initial attempts to draw on the rocks and stones had precipitated. At the edge of his perception, he could sense that the roof of the tomb, the walls, even the floor was beginning to erode. If he did not halt the effect, even the body before him, the lever that Abdmachus had promised him, would be destroyed. Grimly he tried to recenter his thought, and after a seemingly endless period of raging against the dissolution that was tearing at him, he succeeded. Though he could no longer feel it, his body was soaked with sweat and had collapsed in Abdmachus’ arms.
Maxian’s spirit hovered over the ancient body. His shape body was filled with what seemed to be an almost infinite, power, burning white-hot at the core of his form. Mentally he flexed his healing talent and found that it had subtly changed. Before it was a delicate skein, capable of settling with utmost precision into damaged flesh or a wounded organ. Now it throbbed with a visceral power, capable of reforming shattered bones from chips, of reconstructing whole bodies. He wondered with delight at the vision of transformation it showed him. His thought turned back to the body. This will work! he exulted.