Tales of
Cthulhu
Invictus

Edited by

Brian M. Sammons

Copyright ©2015 by Golden Goblin Press, LLC

All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts in the publication and related advertising, artwork original to Tales of Cthulhu Invictus remains the property of the artists, and is copyright by them under their individual copyrights.

Cthulhu Invictus is a Registered Trademark of Chaoisum Inc., and is used with permission.
www.chaosium.com

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Published in the United States by:
Golden Goblin Press
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Queens Village, New York, 11428

ISBN 978-0-9895603-3-7

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Thank You

I’d like to start by thanking the backers of the De Horrore Cosmico Kickstarter for making this book possible.
My thanks to Alberto Guerra for the amazing cover art. Thank you to Brian Sammons for putting such a wonderful collection together for us. My thanks to the authors of these wonderful tales; William Meikle, Christine Morgan, Konstantine Paradias, Pete Rawlik,Edward M. Erdelac, Penelope Love, Tom Lynch, Lee Clark Zumpe, and Robert M. Price. Thank you to Chitin Proctor for your help proof-reading this collection, and to Mark Shireman for layout.
You are all incredible!

Oscar Rios

Publisher and Editor-In-Chief, GGP

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this book to my wife, Mitzi.
Thank you for making every day of my life, for the last twenty five years, one long epic and occasionally horrifying adventure. If we go down, we’ll go down together.

Oscar Rios

Publisher and Editor-In-Chief, GGP

Table of
Contents

Vulcan’s Forge
by William Meikle page 5

Fecunditati Augustae
by Christine Morgan page 15

A Plague of Wounds
by Konstantine Paradias page 30

Tempus Edax Rerum
by Pete Rawlik page 37

The Unrepeatables
by Edward M. Erdelac page 46

Magnum Innominandum
by Penelope Love page 61

Lines in the Sand
by Tom Lynch page 75

The Temple of Iald-T’quthoth
by Lee Clark Zumpe page 88

The Seven Thunders
by Robert M. Price page 101

Vulcan’s Forge

by William Meikle

—Day 1—

They told me it was a temple, one dedicated to a forgotten god from over the seas. The ziggurat builders of Mesopotamia were the main names being mentioned, but as soon as I climbed the smoking slopes and entered the shaft I saw that what the quake had uncovered was something far older—and far more interesting.

I immediately knew one thing for sure—it is certainly no temple, although I am at a loss as to categorize the place in any other fashion. The basalt walls are smooth, as if cut in great precision by a master builder, although there is no sign of any joints, not even where high arches have been formed to mark the passageways. Strange jars line every wall; tall glass vases filled with wonders—and horrors—strange creatures beyond imagining, all of them dead, dissected and floating, specimens of some dark experimentation.

Three long tables, hewn from a strange green marble mark the workspace, and on each lies a range of knives, specula and a variety of objects—obviously tools—that I can only hope to fathom the meaning of. It will take weeks of careful study.

But first, some cleaning will be required. Everything is covered in a thin layer of ash, and I speculate that the place was abandoned in some unimaginable past during a previous volcanic episode, although I will admit to that being no more than a theory at present. I only know for sure that it is old—older by far than the great structures of Rome herself, maybe older still than the Sphinx in the desert, and with as little intention of giving up its secrets.

The place is an enigma—one that I hope to be given time to understand. I must not complain. To be given the task at all is a great honor. There are mysteries—and wonders—here that will do much to advance my reputation should I manage to penetrate the secrets, and the chamber itself is a privilege to behold.

It might never have been found had it not been for the quake that shook the slopes of Vesuvius three days ago. There have been tremors in this area before—of course there have, and some of them large enough to do substantial damage around the region. But none has ever opened up such a gash in the mountainside as this. The fact that so much has survived intact is only one of the many wonders of this place.

I am told by Galvinius the Builder that a new eruption may indeed be imminent, one that might destroy this wonder before we have time to fully understand it, but I cannot allow myself to worry about that at the moment. The marvels I have seen this day must be catalogued and preserved—that is my only priority at this time.

I have a lot of work ahead of me.

—Day 2—

The complex of shafts beneath the main chamber is far larger than we have been led to believe. Galvinius is astounded—something I never thought I would say about such a stout, earthy mason. But the sight of the tunnel network that he uncovered this morning is certainly enough to amaze even the most jaded of minds. It is as if an army of ants—enormous beyond all belief—have hewn and cut out the heart of the volcano for their own as yet unfathomable devices. Galvinius has his young assistants down there now, trying to delve ever deeper

There are many chambers like the one in which I sit penning this—a score at least, with more being uncovered at every turn, each containing more of the glass jars—more monstrosities, more evidence of experimentation on a grand scale. We have seen no sign that men have been the subjects of these grotesque depravities—but I fear what we might find even further in the depths of this infernal place.

Infernal is not a word I use lightly. It is warmer here than the hottest summer’s day, a dry heat that sucks the very moisture out of a man in minutes, leaving him parched and leathery. Great care has to be taken inside the complex, and to tarry too long will only bring quick and certain death. Several of Galvinius’ men have succumbed to heatstroke already, and he is having fresh water brought up by the barrel from the lower slopes in an attempt to keep us hydrated.

As for myself, I have as yet ventured no farther than the initial find—there is more than enough to keep me occupied up here. So far I have identified some of the creatures from the jars—although their forms are strange to my eye, as if not quite fully realized. There is part of a horse that seems too small, a strange lizard thing that seems far too large, and a hairy loathsome beast in a tall jar that I can scarcely look at. It has some resemblance to the monkeys of the Barbary, and an even closer resemblance to a man around the face, but it is far larger than any man—and somehow looks angry despite having been dead for a great length of time.

There are other jars where I can only guess at the provenance of the occupants. Some contain many legged things with membranous wings that look more like a hideous prawn than anything. Others are full of squat leathery eggs that have long since hatched, and insects—huge insects—unlike any I have ever seen.

And then there is the black tarry substance that, on close examination, seems to have coated almost everything at one time. It has long since hardened such that it is almost indistinguishable from rock, but when you break a piece—I did so by banging a fragment hard on the green marble—it shows distinctive internal structure that tells of a once living thing. Not for the first time in these past few days, I am at a complete loss as to what to make of it.

—Day 3—

I had believed myself beyond any further astonishment, but today has proved me quite wrong. Galvinius had sent to Pompeii for rope and tackle last night, and this morning he and his assistants went even deeper into the bowels of the volcano. I was at one of the green marble tables when the mason returned—eyebrows singed, skin covered with a layer of ash and sweat, eyes showing white—and terrified—in a smoke blackened face.

“You must see this, Septimus. Rome must be told.”

He would not elaborate, insisting it was something that had to be seen to be believed. He would only say that it was a greater wonder by far than we had so far uncovered. Of course there was nothing for it but for me to descend to the depths to investigate for myself.

We carried extra flasks of water with us for the descent but even so I was feeling as dry as old leather by the time we arrived at what the mason was so anxious for me to see.

It lies deep inside the volcano, at the foot of the steepest shaft we had traversed—the lowermost chamber of the complex. A vent blew sulphurous belches at us, the heat would have cooked us to a crisp if we had tarried too long, and the very walls of the shaft trembled as a fresh tremor shook through the volcano. I scarcely noticed any of that.

The chamber is a huge forge, vaster by far than even that of the most successful sword smith in Rome, a pit of molten rock and flame fit for the use of Vulcan himself. It is currently plugged with a vast slab of rock, but it is obvious from its design that this has not always been the case. Once again I can only guess at the use to which this might have been put, but there is a most cunning mechanism of gears and pulleys employed, and it was Galvinius himself who spotted their purpose, although even after being told I could scarcely believe it.

The forge itself is acting like a massive bung—a cork if you will, one that can be raised or lowered to selectively increase or decrease any growing pressure in the magma flows. It is a work of engineering genius unparalleled in the world that we know—perhaps the greatest such feat ever undertaken. One thing is certain—it was designed and built by a race long since lost to time—a race of giant intellect so far above ours that we would be mere insects under their boots should they return.

And it is the only thing that is preventing this volcano from blowing its top—and taking us with it.

—Day 4—

The great forge has been much on my mind—and I am only slightly appeased by the fact that Galvinius has pronounced it safe. Indeed he believes he may well be able to use it to prevent what he had previously considered to be an inevitable cataclysm, and if he does so, he will be the most feted man in the Empire.

Word of our find has reached Herculaneum. General Flavius Meranus arrived this morning with a retinue of thirty armed guardsmen, although the dangers present here are not the kind that can be fought with swords and spears. I was in the top chamber when the General arrived, and he did so right at the moment that Galvinius announced that he had found more wonders. Had we been alone I might have counseled the mason to silence, but I was not given that opportunity. He arrived in the chamber at a run, full of excitement.

“There is another chamber,” he announced, even before noticing the General’s presence. After that, of course, there was nothing for it but to show the General the latest find.

I was expecting another chamber similar to the others, but there were no glass jars in the one that Galvinius led us to. Instead there was a single sheet of glass encompassing a whole wall of the cavern—a singular feat of craft and engineering in its own right. At first I could not discern any use apart from decoration, for it was not a window to the outer slopes of the volcano.

It was, however, a window to somewhere—or some when, as we found out when Galvinius walked up to it and stroked its surface—gently, almost a caress.

Several of the General’s guards let out cries of fear as the glass cleared and we looked out over a scene of battle—but what a battle, the likes of which our legions should hope never to encounter.

A great city—spires piled high to the sky, walls almost as tall as the mountain on which they were built—was under siege. The attacking army was not even remotely human, but was little more than a seething mass of black tar, crawling and creeping inexorably closer to its goal, roiling and seething with a strange form of life. Tendrils rose from the tarry surface, as if tasting the air. Wet slits opened and our cavern filled with the sound of a high piping whistle that grated on the ears and sent two of the guard to their knees, bleeding at nose and ears. The rest of us endured as we watched the tar begin its climb up the city wall.

Somewhere on the top of the wall there were defenders, too small for us to make out detail of their form, although they seemed larger than men, with too many limbs. They poured fire down on the tar, but that only seemed to speed the attack. The walls began to crumble and quake, great rifts and cracks appearing in the stone. Spires and turrets fell into dust and the ruin of that great city seemed inevitable.

The mountain smoked and belched then belched again, louder this time. Fire erupted from the summit. The ground—even here in the chamber where we watched, rolled and yawed like a boat in heavy seas.

Then the top of the mountain came off with an explosion of such force that the entire city—what was left of it—crumbled and fell under the blow. Fire ran down the slopes like rivers, and a great ash cloud rose high into the heavens then fell like a blanket, smothering everything until even the black tar was quiet and still and hard.

The last thing we saw before the glass went dark was a scene of utter devastation—all was flat and gray and dead, and no sign remained that the great city had ever stood.

To a man—even including the stoic old general—we were in shock, trying to comprehend what we had seen—some of the guards were calling it a vision from the gods, saying that Vulcan himself had shown us a sign, a portent of a cataclysm to come. They were ready to flee until the General called for order. As for myself, I was thinking more of the engineering skills that had built the great forge, and whether this was no more than another manifestation of the builder’s ingenuity.

Galvinius had obviously been thinking along the same lines as I.

“I think they did it deliberately,” he said. “I think they set off the eruption. And I think they did it from a place like this.”

He went off to one side of the glass panel and I followed him, with the General right behind me.

There is an alcove there, and it only contains one thing. Galvinius explained to the General what he thought its purpose might be, but I am in no doubt.

It is a lever, one that can be pulled to take out the bung, to use a crude analogy—one that will set this volcano to exploding.

—Day 5—

I thought that the General might return to Herculaneum, but he stayed today, taking great interest in everything we have discovered so far. I am not naive enough to think this is in the spirit of intellectual rigor—indeed, that was proved rather early in the day. He has taken special note of the black tar residue, and as ever with a General’s mind, his thoughts have taken a militaristic turn.

“Think of it, Septimus,” he said, hefting a large piece of the black material in his hand. “If we could have a living supply of this material to hand, we need never lose a man in a siege again. We would simply deploy this, and stand well back. The job would be done for us without a single grave needing to be dug.”

I tried to impress upon him the horror I felt in my heart at the very idea, but he was deaf to my implorations, even after I reminded him of the destruction we had seen wrought on the great city in our shared vision. He waved my protests aside.

“I am sure you can devise a means of control to avoid such extreme conclusions. I want this to be your priority, Septimus,” he said, making it clear that he would brook no argument, and that my options for dissent were limited. “I want barrels of this material, alive and flowing, for use on my next campaign—I aim to make my mark on the Empire—I mean to go down in history.”

Quite how history will remember General Flavius Meranus is as yet unclear—it is my own place in the immediate future that concerns me now. I am to begin study of the black tar.

I am to bring it back into a world from which it was banished eons ago.

May the Gods have mercy on me.

—Day 23—

The mountain is angry today. Perhaps it is my actions that have precipitated it—I can only hope not, although my dreams are dark now, filled with visions of the tar overrunning the country.

I have succeeded in the task set before me, although I have not yet informed the General, for my main desire is to destroy that which I have wrought, and to tell him that I have failed. It would mean almost certain death for me—and he would only send another to take my place before the day is out. But I would not have to live with the consequences, and that, perhaps, would be preferable to the alternative.

It has been a hard task getting as far as I have. At first the black tar refused to yield to my efforts to pry into its secrets. I tried water, wine, vinegar and a variety of salts—all of them merely washed off the surface leaving the still solid tar behind.

I only had a breakthrough when I boiled the material in a retort containing salt water, and kept the heat on it until the water had almost evaporated.

All that was left in the retort was an oily residue, and at first I thought it was another failure, but when I put out a finger to scrape at the residue, it flowed away from my digit, as if afraid of the touch. After that it was simply a matter of boiling as much of the material as we could find in the complex—which was quite considerable.

There are two barrels down in the deep parts of the complex, in the nearest chamber to the forge. They seethe and roil. The tar is viscous and things float in it; unformed limbs, suckered tentacles like those of an octopus, moist sucking mouths and—worst of all—pale eyes that stare unblinkingly, dozens of them. At least the amount of material in the barrels seems stable—if the volume had shown any sign of increasing I would have had it all poured into the forge there and then.

The General will arrive tomorrow, I will show him the work, and then I will go down into Pompeii and lose myself in wine and song for a week—it may be the only thing that will save my sanity.

—Day 30—

Has it been a week already?

I woke with a bad head and worse stomach only to be summoned to the mountaintop; it was a journey I did not in any way relish in my delicate condition. I was not in the best of moods when I arrived, and even less so when the General showed me what now occupied the lowermost chambers of the complex.

It has grown and thrived, filling the space allocated to it and spilling over into the surrounding vents. It is down below us in the deep places, seething and roiling, a black pit of fomenting fluid. He has been feeding his men to it, and it is a great horror.

I did not fully comprehend the depths of that horror until the General gave me my new orders.

I am to control it—then I am to devise a means of transporting it to Herculaneum where he intends to make a spectacle of it in front of the council.

I have five days.

—Day 32—

What have we done?

The calamity came upon us in the early morning. I was in a lower chamber, not doing much of anything, just thinking and trying to find a new way to broach my problem, when Galvinius came up at a run from below.

Screams rose from the depths behind him, terrible wails of piteous agony.

Just as Galvinius reached me, one of the General’s guards came up out of the vent. Blood poured from his head where a piece of scalp flapped, showing bone below. He almost fell at the entrance to the chamber, his legs giving way beneath him, but he gave one look back down the vent and squealed in fear before getting to his feet.

We saw the reason a second later. A black sphere of the tar rolled lazily up from below, slumping like a partially deflated wineskin. The soldier squealed again and started out of the vent toward us.

He did not make it.

Behind him the thing opened and stretched, bat-like wings touching the wall on either side. The underside of the wings fluttered… and scores of green milky eyes opened in unison. The thing surged forward. The man had time for one more scream before it fell on him like a wet robe, engulfing him totally in its folds. I moved forward to try to save the man, but was held back by a hand on my shoulder.

“We need to go,” Galvinius said. “You cannot help him.”

One glance showed me he was right. The black mass seethed over the prone body, but the man made no sound, even as a lump of bloody meat was dragged forcibly from this thighbone. He was already gone.

The tar had developed a taste for fresh meat.

Glavinius and I wasted no time in consideration. We fled upward, trying to ignore the searing heat in our lungs, gasping for air as we pushed harder, faster, all too aware that something might come up from the depths and grab us at any moment. By the time we arrived at the uppermost chambers we were in a state of quite some disarray, and it was some time before we could catch a breath and were able to tell the General and his remaining guard the nature of our predicament.

Even then the General refused to believe us, although his refusal was to be his own undoing. He strode toward the main shaft leading downward.

“You have let yourselves be terrified by the strangeness of the thing,” he said, loudly so that his guard might take note. “There is nothing for true Romans to fear here.”

Those were his last words.

A black shape surged up from below, filling the passageway and falling on him before he could do any more than turn around. He earned his place in history seconds later, although by then there was no one there to see it, for we had all fled from an onrushing tide of black tar.

I chanced a look back as we approached the exit to the chamber. The tar was filling the room fast. Tentacles—black suckers glistening—waved excitedly in the air, wet mouths gaped hungrily and a myriad of lidless eyes stared implacably as it came on, relentless in its pursuit.

We had nowhere to go but up, retreating into the top chamber as the black tar swelled and filled the vast voids below us. A high whistling, a chorus of demented flutes, followed us as we ran.

We almost made it, but were caught within sight of the sky—Galvinius and I were separated in the melee as we fought for position with the fleeing guards. Two of them fell at the mouth of the last vent, to be dragged away, screaming. Some of us screamed in unison. I caught a glimpse of Galvinius. He stood at the mouth of the chamber that led to the room with the glass plate that viewed history—and the alcove beyond. We both knew that he could not escape from that place—there was no way to the surface from there.

“We cannot let it out, Septimus,” he shouted. “It cannot get to Pompeii or Herculaneum—think of the carnage. You know what has to be done.”

I realized he was looking for my approval. With that black horror at my heels I was only too keen to give it. I nodded, turned on my heels and fled out into the light.

Even then I did not stop, but careened down the slopes with no heed for care. I looked back once, to see black tar seep out of the hillside vents and start to flow.

Then Galvinius pulled the lever and the roof came off the world in a red blast that wiped everything else from thought.

***

And still I fled, through Pompeii as the ash started to fall, all the way to the harbor at Stabiae where I fought among the throng attempting to make our escape from the choking cloud of death that draped itself around us.

Finally I made it onto a boat—even then it was a perilous sail through seas choked with bodies and rubble and ash, but eventually, after what seemed an age, we reached clearer water and I turned to get my first real look at what was left of the mountain.

The ash rose like a cyclopean tree trunk from the collapsed ruin of the summit before spreading out its branches to let deadly foliage fall on the whole stretch of coastline below, leaving only gray death in its wake.

I searched the cloud as it fell, looking for traces of the black, but all was gray—gray and white and as dry as the cold pit in my heart when I think of the destruction Galvinius and I have wrought in this place.

Then I think of the alternative, and what might have happened had the black replaced the gray.

I believe we have made the right decision.

Fecunditati Augustae

by Christine Morgan

She shivers. She is hot, but she shivers. Cold, but she sweats.

Thirsty, so thirsty, tongue parched, mouth so dry, lips chapped and split, throat a harsh rasp like snakeskin sliding on sand when she breathes.

When she breathes…when she gasps, gasps in those sliding-snakeskin-on-sand wheezes of air. Never enough, a thin whistle as if through a thin reed. And coughing, dusty wracking coughs, chaff in her lungs.

Thirsty, but the freshest water tastes both bitter and sour, and it hurts, how it hurts when she tries to swallow. They spoon in fruit juices sweetened and thickened with honey; she wants it, she craves it, but she gags and spits and cries.

She wants it but not like this, wants it to keep. Not to spew up or spew out, upper end or lower, an upheaving reversal or a helpless squirting and squittering flood.

Her belly gurgles, hollow but cramping, knotted with twists and clenches. Her bottom stings and burns, as if scalded, as if scoured red and raw. Her eyes ache. They feel gritty, swollen, gummed half-shut. Her ears hurt when she rubs at them, hurt more when she does not.

Shivering hot. Sweating cold.

It goes on and on.

Tired, so tired. Sleep brings no rest. Or rest brings no sleep. Waking. Dreaming. Day and night run like wax, making shapes, waxy and strange.

They bathe her with cool, damp cloths. Washing, wiping, wringing rivulets onto her feverish skin. They pat away the moisture. Careful hands touch her with oils and herbal balms.

The shivers become shudders. Her teeth rattle, clicking together. They drape her naked form with a soft blanket. It itches. It is heavy, a sweltering weight. She kicks it aside and then shudders again, so very cold, feeling on fire but so very cold.

Someone sings. It is meant to be soothing. It grinds into her head like pottery shards, like gravel and chipped tiles, like coarse broken glass.

Another cramp grips her bowels, which release in a scalding rush. She whimpers in painful, weary misery. When she seeks to draw in another breath, the reed-thin passage of her throat squeezes down to a pinhole.

She thrashes, limbs jerking, heels drumming. Her head snaps wildly side to side on her neck. Watery acid seems to splash upward from her stomach and into her nose. Her body bucks with strangling convulsions.

Many voices clamor. Many hands close on her. She is lifted. There is shouting. There is panic and terror and confusion. More bile clogs her nose and throat, more lumpy liquid like hot runny mud dribbles down her legs. A fuming darkness clouds her eyes, rising to engulf her.

“Give her to me!”

The command is a shrill bark, almost a bleat, but it is quickly obeyed.

Seized and held. Roughly turned. Upended over a bony, knobby knee. The world tips as if it will spill out, sloshing like a rocked jar or amphora. The tough, callused heel of a hard hand strikes her a firm blow to the back. She utters a bleat of her own, a hideous glottal expulsion. Her throat opens and now she is the sloshing jar, the rocked amphora, contents emptying in a liquid splatter.

Before she can so much as begin to cry again, she is turned again, flipped like a turtle wallowing on its rounded shell. Two gnarled fingers invade her mouth in a scooping gesture. Then a face—what little she sees of it through her gummy, tear-blurred eyes is wizened and unfamiliar, a whiskery old woman, a stranger—descends on hers. A mouth, nearly toothless, closes around her mouth and nose in a slobber of fish sauce and cheap wine.

A great dank humid wind gusts into her, filling her lungs nearly to bursting. The mouth lifts away and she coughs once, then lets out a loud, braying howl. So loud, in fact, that it further hurts her own ears. She sucks in a vast lungful of air on her own and commences wailing in earnest.

All around her now are babbles and sobs of relief. The stranger hefts her by the armpits, holding her up. She squirms and struggles, waving her bunched fists. The stranger smiles a wizened, whiskery, nearly toothless smile.

Then other hands take her, familiar hands, known. She is bathed again, washed and wiped, wrapped in a clean blanket. She cries the whole while, but lacks the strength to continue her earlier loud braying and wails. She aches head to toe. She feels stretched, hollowed and empty, wrung out like the wet cloths.

When they attempt this time to feed her the honey-sweetened fruit juice, she drinks it eagerly from the spoon. She slurps at it, sucks at it, protests when they tell her she’s had enough for now, she must not make herself sick again.

For now, they tell her, she must rest. She must sleep.

Arms cradle her. She huddles, trembling, snuffling, against her mother’s bosom. The rich purple fabric of her mother’s stola is comforting in countless ways. Even now, when she can barely see, as if bleary veils hang in her eyes, she recognizes that deep, lovely shade.

And when her mother speaks, she is further comforted by the gentle voice.

“Leave us now. Send word to my husband that the worst of the crisis has passed.”

There is a general bustling and rustling, followed by quiet.

“You see?” says the stranger, in a bleat less shrill but still unpleasant. “The crisis has passed, yes, perhaps. But for how long? She nearly died, Faustina. She would have, if I hadn’t come.”

“We have the best physicians in Rome--”

“The best physicians in Rome are all Greeks and you know it. Their arts and medicine can only do so much.”

“The priests--”

“The priests. Pfah! The priests follow gold, not the gods, and you know that as well. They were generously rewarded to make sure the omens were auspicious when your father put forth his scheme to amend your betrothal.”

Her mother’s purple stola rises and falls in a deep sigh. “Scheme or not, my father made what he felt was the best decision, for myself and for the Empire. I am pleased to be the wife of Marcus Aurelius. He is a good man. He will be a good emperor.”

The stranger snorts. “But look upon your child. How frail she is, how sickly. If you want to keep the love of your husband, you’ll need to do better than that.”

A many-ringed hand tenderly strokes her head, the fine and downy curls still damp from the bath. “He is devoted to her! He cherishes her, as he does me! It matters not that she is just a girl!”

“And if she dies? As she almost died today?”

A silence falls, a silence somehow terrible and cold. The only sounds come from beyond the room, trickling fountains and the breeze-whisper of shrubs in the courtyard, distant kitchen-noises, the brush of broom-straws on tile as a slave sweeps the walkway.

Sleepy though she is, contentedly drowsy for the first time since the fever began, she stirs in her mother’s embrace. Her small fingers grasp the rich cloth. A fear, nameless and unformed, wells within her like another bitter tide of bile.

“Do not say such things.” Her mother’s voice quavers, turning the words into a plea. Her mother’s heartbeat—remembered as strong and steady, remembered constant in the warm and fluid dark—thumps at an anxious pace.

“Men need children. Think of your own parents and their grief. Your brothers, dead before they could marry. Your sister, who barely lived to her own wedding day. The only reason you alone survived to grown womanhood was because they brought you to me--”

“Stop!” Now the quaver is gone, the voice sharp and strong, that of a princess of Rome.

Yet, the wizened stranger, with gnarled fingers and breath reeking of fish sauce and wine, merely laughs.

“I know what you would have me do,” her mother continues. “Must I? Is there no other way?”

“Of course there are other ways. Take your chances; leave your fates in Fortuna’s hands. Bribe the priests and beg the gods; see how well that serves you. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps your little daughter would have recovered on her own. And perhaps the thin soil of your womb will be blessed with fruitful abundance. What is it to me? I am just an old woman who tried only to help.”

“Capra--”

“No, no, say no more. Give me a scrap of crust, a sip of water, a coin or two if it pleases you. I’ll gather my rags around me and remove myself from your sight. Or have one of your house-slaves whip me through the streets, if that is more to your liking.”

Over her mother’s protestations, the stranger rises from the stool, a laborious effort of creaks and groans.

Her mother outstretches the many-ringed hand. “Stay. Capra, do stay. I’ll send for food and drink. Let us talk. I will listen.”

Mollified, the stranger sits again. Slaves are summoned to bring bread and wine, olive oil, and figs. More fruit juice with honey is brought as well, sweet and good. The drowsiness begins to return. She burrows her head into her mother’s purple-draped bosom, dozing as they discuss politics and poisonings, rivals, risks.

“Can you promise me?” her mother asks, with a suddenness that startles her awake again.

“Promise you?” The stranger sops up olive oil with bread until it is soggy enough for that nearly-toothless mouth. “I can promise you that the goddess does have great power, but the goddess also can be cruel. Demanding. Greedy and capricious. She will give you many babies, but she will take some back.”

“And this one?” A gentle thumb caresses her cheek. Her mother’s loving gaze is all and encompassing, the sun’s own warmth and light.

“Bring her tonight,” says the stranger, crushing a fig until the soft pulp squeezes out and then sucking it from the skin with a wet slurp. “Bring her tonight, to the templum cornua lunae, just after sunset. Bring her, let the goddess taste of her, and we shall find out.”

***

“Does Mother seem different to you lately?” Galeria climbed the steps from the tepidarium pool, accepting the long drying-cloth handed to her by a slave and wrapping it around herself. She tucked the ends secure above her breasts, which had even at fourteen not yet ripened as much as she’d like.

In the warm water, her sister kicked lazily, stirring ripples to lap against the tiled edges. Mosaics in shades of blue, green, grey and gold depicted fish, shells, sea-nymphs, dolphins, and waves. More fish and waves, these sculpted in marble, formed the legs of the lounging benches. Graceful columns supported a domed ceiling. Bronze figures of trident-wielding Neptune served as wall-sconces, each with three small lamps hanging from the points of the tridents.

“Shouldn’t she?” Lucilla asked, sweeping her arms back and forth to increase the ripples. Her hair floated around her shoulders, veiling the fact that she, three years younger, still had more the shape of a slender boy than a budding woman. “She is different lately. All of us are.”

“Not so different.”

“Indeed so! With Grandfather dead, she has his entire inheritance…and with Father and Lucius Verus succeeding him, that makes her empress of the whole of Rome!” Giggling, she splashed with both feet. “Until, that is, Lucius Verus is married, and then she shall have to share that title with me!”

“If everyone agrees to the betrothal.”

“Why wouldn’t they? It was Father’s idea.” Lucilla splashed in Galeria’s direction. “Don’t be peevish, sister.”

“I’m not peevish!”

“You are. Peevish and jealous, because I’m to have a handsome, powerful man, while you’re stuck with some dull, dusty old scholar.”

“A senator, and a friend of our father!”

“A philosopher, who’s already been through one wife!”

“Well, at least it meant he was decently married, not passing his time in the company of drunkards and low women!”

Plunging her face beneath the water, Lucilla came up with a mouthful and spouted it like a fountain at her sister.

“Oh, this is your oratory?” taunted Galeria, hands on her hips. “This is your rhetoric, she who would be co-empress of Rome?”

They had the baths to themselves, but for the attendant company of a few slaves of course. So, when Lucilla lunged for the side of the pool to seize Galeria by the knees, toppling her in drying-cloth and all with a tremendous splash, no one of consequence saw them acting importunely. They wrestled, they dunked each other under, and they turned the tepidarium into a turbulent sea. Squeals of indignation and shrieks of laughter rang from the domed ceiling and wall-tiles.

At last, exhausted and gasping, they called truce, ceased their struggles and retreated to the edges.

“He is old,” Galeria admitted of her future husband, by way of concession.

“And I suppose,” said Lucilla, in like spirit, “that some of what they say about Lucius Verus could be true. Consider, though, sister…there’ve been rumors aplenty about our own mother.”

Galeria nodded another concession as she emerged again from the pool, accepting a second drying-cloth.

There had always been such talk, as long as she could remember. Senators who resented their mother’s influence whispered at her involvement in plots, conspiracies and poisonings. Even more vicious lies would cast Faustina as an adultress, cavorting with sailors and gladiators alike.

Cruelest of all were those that tried to make sinister the ill health of her children, as if Faustina were in some way to blame for their sicknesses, their frailty, their tragic and untimely deaths.

Galeria had only the vaguest memories of her brothers; that first set of twins whose birth had been announced across the Empire with coins stamped Fecunditati Augustae in celebration of the royal fertility.

More babies had followed, another set of twins, Lucilla and a weak, tiny boy who had never been long for this world. There had been a sister, another brother…not twins, them, but singletons a year or so apart…and more sisters.

Fecunditati Augustae.

The coins, she remembered better than the babies themselves. She had several such still in her jewelry case, holes bored through them to let them be strung on cords and worn around her neck. Marcus Aurelius had given them to her. How solemn and noble he’d been, her father, presenting her with each new coin…telling her that she was an elder sister, a great honor, a great responsibility.

But subsequent coins had marked sadder occasions. She remembered her mother, distraught, and her father, so sorrowful. Of nine children so far, only four of them—and girls all—yet lived.

“I think she might be pregnant again,” said Galeria now. She gestured to a slave who stood waiting with a tray, upon which were cups and a pitcher of iced water with celery and mint.

“Mother? Again? Are you sure?”

“Not sure, but I think that she might.”

“That’s hardly fair. You’re to be married soon, and I’m almost betrothed. It should be our turn.”

“You say that as if she were ancient.”

“She’s nearly forty!” Lucilla cried.

“Not much older than your Lucius Verus!”

“It isn’t the same for men as for women. And she just had another baby!”

Galeria said nothing, sipping the cool and refreshing liquid, as her sister stomped up the steps from the pool to grab a drying-cloth of her own from the waiting slave.

Her gaze roved the decorative murals of the tepidarium, then fixed upon a particular image that made her pause. She felt a brief, unaccountable chill despite the pleasant warmth of the room. The figure in the mural was ordinary enough, one she’d seen dozens if not hundreds of times before, yet this time, for no reason she could immediately grasp, it struck her as ominous.

She went over to it and traced a fingertip along the curved swoop of tail, scales and fins picked out in blue-green. The tail was the lower half of its body; the upper half sported the cloven fore-hooves, horned head and shaggy pelt.

Capricornus. A mythical creature, and one of the zodiacal constellations. Capricornus, the goat.

The chill swept her again, making her shiver. Though the iced water was flavored with celery and mint, the taste in her mouth somehow seemed more of fruit juice and honey. She thought of her mother, the softness of her purple stola, the gentle caress of her many-ringed hand.

Those should have been comforting.

Why, then, did she find herself suddenly so frightened? Even terrified?

***

She shivers. She is cold, and she shivers, despite the blanket that wraps her, despite her mother’s enfolding arms.

It is not the fever, but the place.

A place that feels…old.

Old when Rome was young. Old when the she-wolf gave suckle to Romulus and Remus. Old…beyond old. Ancient, and wrong.

It is the darkness, black and deep, with shadows closing in on all sides. A single candle serves only to give the shadows shapes, make them loom and waver.

The flame flickers. The stranger’s hand cups around it, gnarled fingers shielding but blocking more of the light.

The air moves steadily past them.

Not as wind, not as breeze, but as a slow and constant draft. Never shifting, never changing direction, its voice a low whisper of endless breath gently blown over hollow jar-openings. It smells of wet stone and mortar, of damp soil and worms. Sometimes, there are drips, faint and far plinks that echo or near ones that catch quick glimmers in the thin, dim glow.

“Tell me she will not be harmed,” says her mother. “I want your assurance.”

“You want me to lie?”

They proceed in silence, the familiar sway of her mother’s stride hampered to short, cautious steps. Perhaps feeling the way along a slick, unseen floor. Staying close behind the stranger, who leads the way.

“Ah, here we are,” the stranger says.

And pinches out the flame with a hiss, with a sputter of smoke.

The shadows descend over them like a dark, chilling mist.

She whimpers. Her mother shushes her, soothes her with a touch, a kiss on the brow. But then, even with the candle snuffed, it is better…her eyes widen, and blink as if waking, and she sees.

High windows shaped like eyes ring the top of a round, narrow chamber. Through them, the sky shows almost as black as the shadows, more purple than the cloth of her mother’s stola, a pomegranate-red richer than wine, the blue of a goblet made from cobalt-infused glass. Here and there, the first stars glint tiny and pale.

In one of the windows hangs a curve of shining white. It is a crescent, a cruel smile, a blade.

“The horned moon,” her mother says.

“The horned moon,” the stranger replies. “The horned moon has chased the sun from the sky. The goddess is at her strongest.”

The moonlight does not so much banish the shadows as paint them, silver-gilt them. It makes her mother’s face into alabaster and sparkles on the jewels of her many rings. It shows the pallid chamber walls, not smooth marble and not rough stone but something of bumpy, knobby, irregular texture. Bones? Some sort of sun-bleached wood?

Spaced at odd intervals are niches that gape like myriad mouths of varying sizes, and spaced at odder intervals around them are glossy, bulging, opaque orbs and protrusions, like staring eyes.

Some of the niches hold stubs of wax and wicks in congealed puddles. Others hold drinking vessels, little pots and jars, clay figurines.

“Strip the child,” says the stranger, “and bring her here.”

“Must I undress her? It is cold down here, dank, and she has been ill.”

“We’ve come all this way, Faustina.”

At the chamber’s center, rising from it, is a…an object…not a table, not a statue, something neither and both…a sculpture such as might be set in a fountain, though no fountain would be set with anything so…hideous.

Seeing it as her mother turns, she begins to whimper again, and then to cry.

“Hush, my pip, my darling, my sweet little lamb.”

The blanket is unwound from her, freeing her arms to wave and her legs to kick as her mother continues on to removing garments.

Or is it the tall stump of some knotted, blighted, dead tree? Bent limbs twist from its top in a crown of curls and stunted spirals. Thick, bark-like stuff covers its squat trunk, split by creases that glisten as if slick. Where the bark-like stuff is not, patches and tufts of dense, spongy, mossy growths seem to cling.

She is naked, wriggling, no longer simply crying but screaming in tempestuous protest. Her howls should have resounded with deafening loudness but do not. They do not carry, do not echo, not at all. The very walls, the walls of that pallid, knobbly texture, seem to drink in the sounds, absorb them the way a dry cloth absorbs water.

“Give her to me.”

The unfamiliar hands take hold of her again. They are bunched and tough, strong. The stranger’s cloak and garments are gone, revealing a scrawny body and skin that is all sags and wrinkles and leathery folds. The stranger’s eyes squint out from holes in a hairy mask that reaches to the nose; beneath it, the nearly-toothless mouth grins, looking more whiskery than ever. The headdress is crooked brown horns, flanking a curve of hammered silver that mimics the shape of the moon.

Her screams fade. Her struggling stops. Hot liquid floods her legs, pattering on the floor. She dangles in the stranger’s callused grasp, limp as a corpse.

“What have you done to her?” demands her mother.

“Nothing at all.”

The object at the chamber’s center—the object that is not a fountain-sculpture, not a table, not the stump of a dead and blighted tree—has a concavity at its top, a kind of bowl-basin, framed by that crown of curls and stunted spirals. The stranger lowers her into this, placing her there.

It is…warm. Not warm like a nice bath, not warm like a fire. But warm in a way that is…meaty and slippery and awful.

She cannot move. She is once again the turned-over turtle, helpless on her back. Her mother is there, nearby, within arm’s reach, but her mother does not come for her, does not pick her up. Does not even look at her.

“Taste of this girl-child, oh Black Queen of the Wood,” the stranger says. “Taste of her, and cast her fate! Spare her or save her, or take her as fodder for your Young!”

Beneath her, surrounding her, the loathsome surface of the basin seems to move somehow. To undulate in pulsing ripples along her skin. It feels moist. She finds her voice, but her silent cries go ignored.

The stranger utters terrible words, chanting in unspeakable languages. The stranger jerks in violent contortions, head snapping back and forth, joints bending in ways that should not be possible.

The crown of curls and stunted spirals around the basin’s rim begin to move. They sway like twisted branches in a wild wind, they writhe like nests of disturbed snakes or worms.

The moist warmth grows to a humid heat. Heat, but she shivers. It is unbearable. Inescapable.

Then it ends in a wash and a rush and a stillness. She whimpers weakly.

“It is done,” says the stranger. “The goddess spares this child, at least for now. But if you would ensure you will have others, we must conduct the other ritual. Disrobe yourself, Faustina, and take your place beneath the seventh window.”

Her mother does so. Off slips the purple stola, off slips the gown beneath it. Unlike that of the stranger, her mother’s nakedness is firm and smooth and beautiful.

The stranger selects from one of the niches a clay figurine, some squat and squatting semblance of a goatish monstrosity, dotted with leering eyes and gaping mouths, wreathed all about with fleshy-looking tendrils. This, the stranger puts into her mother’s hands, and her mother holds it aloft in the silver-yellow beam of the horned moon’s light.

“Hear me further, heed me, Black Queen of the Wood!” bleats the stranger. “This woman begs your intercession!”

Her mother stands motionless, chin lifted, arms upraised, lifting the idol in supplication.

The stranger takes a pot from one of the wall-niches, an ugly pot set upon a base that might have been made out of an animal’s foot, a goat’s cloven hoof. Held to it with a loop of twine is some sort of tool or implement, bone-handled.

“Make her womb a breeding-ground, oh goddess! Let it be spawned of a plentiful bounty!”

Dunking one end of it into the pot, the stranger whirls in a frantic
gyration, then slashes a cruel red moon-crescent across her mother’s unguarded white belly.

“Ia!” they shriek together, the stranger and her mother. “Ia, Ia, Shub-Niggurath!”

***

Galeria tied a robe around her waist and slipped from her room into the slumbering villa’s quiet hall.

The tiles were cool beneath her feet. A breeze wafted in from the garden courtyard, stirring the drapes and hangings, carrying the scent of night-blooming flowers. From the slave-quarters, behind the kitchen, came the sounds of snoring.

She’d left Lucilla peacefully asleep in the sisterly bed they still shared, and would share until Galeria’s wedding. She was glad that her own sudden waking hadn’t startled Lucilla. Glad that she hadn’t sprung up with a shout, clammy and shaking.

The dream, she knew, had been no mere dream alone. It had been something more. Something true, drawn up from the deep well of her memory.

A few men, on late-guard duty, moved about outside the house. A cat padded silently by, giving Galeria an inquisitive glance. An imperial bust of Antonius Pius, her grandfather, stared with aloof sightlessness from a funeral shrine adorned in mourning garlands and offerings of wine, olive oil and grain.

As she approached her parents’ bedchamber, she heard low voices in conversation. One, she recognized as belonging to her mother; the other was that of her slave-woman handmaid. She paused behind a column to listen.

“—no need to send for the physician or to disturb my husband,” Faustina said. “I’ll take the air for a bit, and I’m sure I’ll soon be back to bed.”

“Shall I accompany you, mistress?”

“If you must make yourself useful, I’d like some sliced pear. With bread and cheese.”

Bowing, the slave-woman hurried off. Faustina watched her go, then tied her own robe around her waist much as Galeria had done herself only a short while before. The waist was thicker than once it had been, the hips broader, the breasts both lower and fuller, the form that of matron rather than maiden.

“Mother?” she said, stepping into view.

“Galeria? My pip, what are you doing up at this hour?”

“I woke from a dream.”

“Ah,” said Faustina, and a troubled look clouded her eyes. “So did I, a most unpleasant one.”

“Did you? What was it?”

She hesitated a moment, then smiled at her eldest daughter. It seemed a tense smile. “Come, let us go out and sit by the fishpond, where we might talk.”

Galeria nodded. They went into the courtyard, which was shadowy but not gloomy, catching some light from the lanterns on the walls. Faustina settled onto a bench next to one of the sunken fishponds, where lilies dotted the still water’s surface and vines trailed like delicate green locks of nymph’s hair. She patted the seat beside her, and Galeria took it.

“First,” said Faustina, “I should tell you the happy news.”

“You’re pregnant again.”

“I am, yes. How did you know?”

“I’ve seen it often enough.”

Her mother laughed softly, squeezing Galeria’s knee. “Yes, I suppose you have, haven’t you?”

“Fecunditati Augustae,” she murmured. “But what was your dream?”

Faustina’s laugh drifted into a sigh. “It was…unpleasant, as I said. I dreamt that…that two serpents slithered from my womb. Both were large and strong, but one was fiercer than the other, and struck with fangs and poison.”

“That cannot be a good omen.”

“No.” She sighed again. “No, it cannot.”

“Does it have anything to do with what happened when I was a baby?”

“When you were a baby?”

“When I was so sick. With that stranger, that old woman. Capra, I think her name was. The one who took us to the templum cornua lunae--”

Her mother had gasped more than once as Galeria spoke, and at the last words clapped a hand to her lips as if to stifle a cry. “Who told you of that?” she demanded in a piercing whisper.

“No one told me,” said Galeria. “I remembered. That was the dream that woke me tonight. What did you do there? What did you do to us…to me? Who was Capra? What was that place? The…the horned moon, what--”

“Hush!” She cast a sharp glance about the courtyard.

Yet Galeria, having come this far, would not hush but only lowered her voice. “A temple…a cult…one of the forbidden--”

“You must speak of it to no one,” Faustina said, clutching her wrists. Her fingers felt like bands of ice and iron.

“I saw her cut you.”

“Not cut.” She parted the robe, showing a softened, drooping stomach traced with the lines of motherhood, but no crescent scar. Of course not; had there been one, Galeria surely would have noticed before, at the baths or elsewhere. “Painted me. Marked me with blood.”

“And me? Did Capra mark me? I recall only…being put upon, or within, that…that dreadful thing. Surrounded by the eyes and the mouths in the walls.”

“No. Marking you, that would have come later. If you so chose. If it proved needed.”

“Mother, how could you?”

Desperate tears gleamed in her eyes. “You do not understand. What I did…what I did was what I had to do. I had such trouble conceiving, such trouble carrying you. We both nearly died in your birthing. The physicians thought I might never bear another child. But we had you, our precious daughter. We had you, and we loved you, and your father claimed to care not at all you were only a girl. Has he not always showered you with affection?”

“He has.”

“Then you fell ill. So very ill. It devastated him. If we lost you, and if I could give him no others…” Her breath shuddered. “I pray that you never know such fears.”

“The ritual…is that truly how you had so many more children!”

“And saw most of them die.” Faustina’s countenance wrenched with anguish. “Fecunditati Augustae, indeed.”

“Why didn’t you put a stop to it?”

“I tried. I smashed the idol Capra had given me, to keep beneath my marital bed. I made no more sacrifices. I stopped taking my babies to the templum. If I was to be struck barren after that, so be it.”

“Yet, you weren’t struck barren. Our littlest sisters seem to thrive.”

“So far, though that is why I’ve sent them to your father’s great-aunt for their safe-keeping; she is a devout follower of Diana, and if any influence can protect them…but, oh, I miss my babies!” Her tears fell freely in a rain. “And soon you will be married off, and then Lucilla…”

“Oh, Mother!”

She bent forward, wracked with sobs, face buried in her hands. “All I ever wanted was to be a good wife to your father, a good mother to my children. Now so many tiny urns rest in the mausoleumm and I have serpents in my womb!”

***

The girl sits upright, awake in the darkness. The moon has set, the frightening moon curved like a blade. It has set and the stars shine bright through the window. They shine bright, as if they do not care that another child has died.

Will she never have a brother? He was so very tiny and so very weak; even she understands it was not a surprise. But, will she never?

And what of her sister?

Will they bring her back?

Across the room, on a pallet, the slave-woman who tends the nursery sleeps. The slave-woman snores and snorts like a pig, and sleeps as if an earthquake would not rouse her.

In the girl’s small hands, coins clink. They are bored through with holes, strung on cords so she may wear them as necklaces if she likes. She is supposed to keep them in her jewelry case after bed-time, but she crept to fetch them once the slave-woman’s snores began.

She feels better holding the coins. Safer. As if her father, who gave them to her, is here beside her.

Steps sound, stealthy ones, outside of the room. Hastily, the girl curls on her side, clasping the coins hidden beneath the covers, and feigns her own sleep.

But, she peeks. She watches them come in. First comes the stranger, old and wizened Capra, with her whiskery, nearly-toothless mouth. Next comes her mother, carrying a blanket-wrapped form in her arms. A bare foot protrudes.

Mother carefully places the blanketed bundle in the cradle-bed and unfolds it.

Her sister is there. Lucilla.

Her sister yawns. Her cheeks are rosy and plump. Her eyelids flutter. She smacks her lips, coos, and gurgles.

“Promise me this one will be all right,” begs their mother.

The stranger’s laugh is a bark, a shrill goat’s bleat. “You know full well I cannot promise that. But, rest assured, you can always make another.”

With that, they leave the nursery as stealthily as they’d come. When they are gone, the girl sits up again. She spreads out the many coins, all in a row.

On their surfaces, gleaming by starlight, she sees the noble profiles of her parents. She sees the images of babies, her dead brothers, her sister, herself.

She sees the letters struck into the metal, and though she cannot yet read well, she knows what they say.

Fecunditati Augustae.

***

In the years to come, Galeria would think back often on those dreams and memories.

She would think of her mother, whose womb had borne not serpents, but another pair of twin boys…one of whom, called Commodus, survived.

She would think of how Faustina became revered with great affection by Rome’s soldiers. They had even named her Mater Castrorum, Mother of the Camp, and grieved her terribly when an accident that may have been no accident untimely claimed her life.

Galeria’s own marriage produced but a single son. Once, when the boy fell ill, the household slaves informed her that there was a stranger at the door, a wizened old woman with a whiskery, nearly-toothless mouth.

“Give her a scrap of crust and a sip of water,” Galeria said, “and a coin or two, then tell her to gather her rags around her and remove herself from my sight.”

As for her sister, Lucilla…

Lucilla, two of whose three children by her first husband died while still very young…ambitious Lucilla, who had enjoyed her reign as empress and resented its loss most fiercely…

They never spoke of these things.

But Galeria would think of them. She would think of them often, especially on evenings when the horned moon chased the sun from the sky.

Fecunditati Augustae.

Ia Shub-Niggurath.

A Plague of Wounds

by Konstantine Paradias

It was the ninth day of the month of Av and Judea was burning. From the shores of the Dead Sea to Japha, the synagogues smoldered and the fleeing warriors were hunted like animals, cut down by horse-back legionnaires. In Jericho, the hard earth was soaked with blood. In Bethlehem, the Rabbis were hobbled with mallets and dragged in the streets.

For six years, Bar Kochba the Star-Son had bled the Romans dry, striking them from cover in the caves and the shadows. He and his generals had made the Romans fight for every bush, every step they took. A precedent of costly rebellion was set. Such a thing could put all sorts of dangerous ideas in the minds of the common people.

I had known this day would come. I had dreamt of the horrible stench of the bodies wrapped in Torah Scrolls, the wailing of the widows as they were dragged through the streets by Roman legionnaires. The commander of the Sixth Ferrata Legion and emergency praetor of Judea, Tilius Romanus, had counted on my predictions which is why he called me to attend the ceremony on the hill where he burned the Talmud as an offering to his myriad gods. The sight of the Holy Book smoldering in that great flame, a thousand years of wisdom laid to ash to be scattered in the winds, made the wound on my chest smack its lips in delight.

“Today, we flay the Star-Son. We’ll hang his naked corpse on the Wailing Wall, as a warning to the people. His generals, we will kill in degrees. Their screams should destroy what is left of their spirit. You have done well, Rabbi Rotem,” he tells me, that small man with the head full of storm-clouds pregnant with malice. The soldier by his side looks at me as if I am lower than an insect. A moon-shaped scar runs across his face and over one terminally shut eye.

“I thank you for your mercy, o Praetor.” I all but prostrate myself before him. He thinks himself king of Hell, this tiny man, finds great pleasure in such acts of humility. No matter. It’s what has spared my family from the horrors below.

“Rome is considering the removal of all observant Jews from Jerusalem. Hadrian himself is drafting the laws as we speak. I have decided to negotiate allowing a small number of the population to remain, as a show of the Empire’s boundless mercy. How would you like to be head of Jerusalem’s synagogues, Rabbi?”

“It would be my honor, o Praetor,” I nod, making sure to add that necessary hint of elation in my voice. In the eyes of my people, I shall forever be branded a traitor. My name will be struck from the genealogies, my children will be considered cursed. But they are alive now and this will have to do. This is an empty station, a pointless title. “To be presented with such singular honor.”

“I would have you do something for me, Rabbi. Something that will provide me with a little extra incentive with which to help me change the emperor’s mind to your favor.”

Another trap. Another favor. I smile and nod, like a damned man headed for the gallows. “Of course, o Praetor.”

“There is a small pocket of resistance left in En-gedi, by the shores of the Dead Sea. A group of Bar Kochba’s men who have nested themselves in the mountains and strike at my garrison there. If you could find their positions and lead my men to them, we would put an end to this rebellion and restore order.”

“Won’t they know me, o Praetor?”

“We have kept your name safe, Rabbi. We’ve made sure that every last man that could have known you is either fertilizing the spice fields or about to perish on the chopping block. This should be a simple mission for a man of your cunning. All you have to do is find them. We will take care of the rest.”

I bow and begin to leave without a word. The scar-faced soldier grasps my shoulder, stops me dead in my tracks.

“Balbinus will escort you to keep you safe. And honest,” the praetor says. The soldier gives me a gap-toothed grin. Whatever scarred his face also took his front teeth and a part of his tongue. His mouth is a red gash. “He was stationed in the Ninth Legion, only survivor of his cohort. Hard as nails and good with a bow. It’s what saved him from Bar Kochba’s assault. The experience made him slightly more violent, of course, so you had best try to stay on his good side.”

***

I do not stop by my home that night. The door is still branded with a streak of red. It means ‘friend to the Emperor’. The sight of it makes the wound in my chest itch. I feel it throbbing, at the verge of another outburst. The carnage all around excites it.

Making my way to the back alley, I remove the covering from the hole in the wall. I try to soothe Anna, telling her that I must go on a mission for the praetor. I lie to her that I will be back before she knows it. She makes no effort to speak to me. From the sound of her breathing, I know that she is holding back a torrent of pure hate, biting her lip hard enough to break the skin. Even through the brick wall, I can feel my sons’ eyes branding me. No reason to bother with pleading for forgiveness. They will come to terms with this, thank me when they have children of their own.

I sleep in a corner in one of the back rooms of the Synagogue, miraculously left unscathed by the fire. The wound itches and breaks out into a stream of words, its lips flapping together like gums, its tongue lolling. In Greek and Aramaic and Latin and its own nonsense language, it foretells of the terrible doom that will befall the world. To weather its torment, I bury my face against the mattress and wait for dawn.

We leave Jerusalem on a pair of confiscated Beduin striders, Balbinus and I. We disguise ourselves as spice merchants, hard on their luck due to the war. He lets me ride in front, his bow and quiver in plain sight. We ride across Judea, taking the back roads to avoid the terrible scarecrows of the crucified, laid across the viae glareatae. We make camp in the wilderness, looking for dark places where the smell of the decaying dead and vulture-waste won’t reach us. On a Sabbath, Balbinus catches a fattened crow and makes us dinner. Its belly is fit to burst with plucked eyeballs.

We reach En-gedi in a fortnight, skirting away from the garrison. A pair of sentries hail us but a simple motion from Balbinus makes them look the other way. The praetor has planned this ahead of time to make our entrance as inconspicuous as possible. Once we move past its gates, En-gedi reveals itself to be an unimportant little place laid out in a semicircle with its back against the mountains. It does not seem to have suffered as badly in the war. The synagogue is still standing. Even though I have never been here, I find myself knowing this place. The shape of the mountains flashes before my eyes, revealing strange peaks that defy reason. I brush these visions aside.

“I guess the praetor sees the merit of avoiding senseless slaughter.” I mutter to keep myself occupied.

“It dulls the blades, makes money for greedy blacksmiths,” Balbinus whistles through the hole in his teeth. I all but jump at the sound of his voice.

We find room and board in the house of a lone woman whose husband made for the hills and never came back. There are no effigies on her hearth, not even a shrine. Balbinus finds a little cross scribbled with coal behind one of the beds. ‘Donkey-worshipper’, he calls her. Faithful to the cult of the Nazarene. Except the cross seems to be drawn all wrong; its edges are skewed, there’s a familiar little gap in the center, crudely traced with a finger.

It looks so much like a mouth.

It speaks to me in a hushed whisper that night. It brings me fever-dreams of a great bloated thing, stomping across the face of the world, sucking air through the hole where its neck should be. Its hands dig into the sides of the mountains, claws raking across the rock. Unseen teeth reduce the living to a thin red paste which fills its belly. In its shadow, blind and blighted children trail, picking at the scraps of leftover flesh.

The next day, we resume our role of spice merchants, haggling over cardamon and nutmeg with the farmers in the market. One of them, a pox-marked halfwit by the name of Simon, is the one to provide me with answers.

“You cannot have grown the nutmeg here. The ground is no good for it.”

“No, we bring it from the mountains. Get good price for it, too. Best price in Judea.”

“Who would be so mad to try and grow anything in Masada? The entire place is all but barren!”

“We have people who know. They can make water spring forth from the rock like Moses.”

“Miracle-workers, then?” I laugh, nudging Balbinus. He chuckles with his mouth closed, thankfully. “I would pay good money for a flask of water from a stone.”

“You have the money with you?” the halfwit says. I make a show of producing my pouch, letting the Roman silver rattle on the bench. I slap his hands as he reaches out to grab them, to drive the point home. “Come find me at noon.”

We spend the rest of the day huddled in the cool darkness of a watering hole among hard-faced Beduins and straggler cut-throats trawling around the Roman army, hoping for mercenary work. These are the same creatures that they employed during the height of the fighting. The ones that were sent into the desert or made to patrol the wilderness, to kill the stragglers and break the supply lines. Some of them were Jews, as damned as I was, maybe more so, by virtue of their actions. My wound begins to itch without warning. I trail my eyes across the room and catch one of them making his way towards me.

“I know you,” he whispers hoarsely. He’s young, barely twenty years old. He’s missing the fingers of his left hand, the sign of a petty thief punished under Roman martial law. “Man from Jerusalem, what are you doing here at the edge of the world?”

“I don’t know you,” I lie as the wound lets me know who he is with painstaking detail; his father had been a goat herder in Nazareth. The boy had acted as a messenger for me for two months in the first year of the war.

“You’re that Rabbi, the one that crawled at the feet of the praetor,” he growls a touch louder, just enough to make a few heads turn. “They killed my father, because of you. Took his goats, burned our home; they salted the earth.”

The boy reaches for the knife in his belt. Balbinus is up on his feet before I can even tell he moved, his hand a blur. There’s a flash of metal and then the boy coughs blood as the dagger punches into his belly again and again and again. He’s dead before he’s even hit the floor. The cutthroats blink at the scene. In that small window of opportunity, Balbinus drags me outside by the wrist, into the streets and back alleys as a riot erupts.

“So much for our cover,” he whistles.

“You did not have to kill the boy! I could have stopped him!”

“You had his father killed and his future destroyed. He would have driven that knife into your eye and then he’d have me killed, too, just to make sure,” Balbinus mutters, wiping the blade on a rug that’s been left out to dry.

I put my head in my hands and recite the Sheheheyanu. The wound prays with me, humming the words against my lungs. The vibrations make me sick to my stomach. Above, the noon sun hangs high in the sky. “We need to leave En-gedi. We must make for the mountains as soon as possible.”

“Then let’s go find your halfwit and his rock-water.”

***

Simon lives in a small hut at the outskirts of the town. He has us wait in the hall with a child keeping us company. Its body is ravaged by measles. It’s wearing thick clothes despite the heat. The more I look at the child, the more familiar he seems to me. The wound whispers the child’s name in my brain:

Yuval.

“Shelom, Yuval,” I greet the boy. He looks at me with wide, glassy eyes. He does not seem alarmed that I know his name. If anything, he seems to recognize me. “What are you doing here all on your own?”

“I am here to watch for the Voice of the Mountain,” the boy says without speaking, his words reverberating inside my skull. “The Messiah has come.”

I blink, trying to clear my head. On the boy’s back, a patch of fabric moves, undulating according to the motions of obscene musculature. Lips work to make words. A tongue flaps against gums, pushing against newly-formed teeth. Balbinus looks at me, puzzled.

“Another one of your victims?” he whistles. His voice is cut off abruptly. There’s a hollow, striking sound. I bite my lip so I won’t scream when I see his twitching body, his head crushed against the wall by Simon’s bare hand.

“You will come with us up the Mountain. He is ready for you now.”

It is time, the boy whispers in his non-voice.

***

We move in a solemn procession, they and I, Simon the halfwit at the front with his robes shed from his back, proudly exhibiting the wound on the back of his neck. It’s a vertical slit with long lips, its gums lined with jagged teeth. It sucks in the air hungrily, reveling in its nakedness. Behind me, the children follow in lock-step. The boys and girls of En-gedi, naked from the waist up, proudly displaying the undulating lacerations that cover their bodies. Their mouths whistle and speak with shrill voices, letting out a stream of drivel prophecies.

The path we follow does not exist on any map, endlessly winding, twisting and turning in impossible directions whose names I know but cannot be spoken by a mortal man. The mountains begin to shimmer and fade. Above, a sickly sun hangs in the sky, shedding baleful red light on all. I am no longer in the Masada that I know. The sea that stretches below is not the Dead Sea of Judea. And yet my mind is not reeling by the sight. My step does not falter.

“You have been in this place before,” the children chant in their sing-song voice and I know that they are telling the truth. It is etched in my memory, engraved along the grooves of my brain. I know where they are taking me now, to the cave without a ceiling, to the Wound-Well. I make the token effort to escape, but the wound in my chest burns me, bites into my heart with brand-new fangs.

“Soon, no pain. Soon...” the halfwit says, soothingly. We walk down an impossibly steep path, our feet sticking to the rock in defiance of reason. Down, down, down...all the way into his grasp. And he is beautiful, he is wondrous. He is bloated and infested with sores. The eight digits in each divine hand grasp for the world above, lap at me with their tongues. Their saliva burns through my clothes, singes them to tatters. I am naked, the great sucking thing on my chest plain for all to see.

“Bless us, o Mwyl. We bring you the ultimate offering!” The halfwit calls out. The thing in the pit moves lightning-fast, grasping him in its hand-mouth. It devours Simon whole, crushes him in its teeth. Simon squeals in ecstasy. Such is the fickle nature of the Hungry God, driven by the burning in his belly.

The sacrifices have been made, o Mwyl. The vessel has provided the slaughter, the children sing and my entire life falls into place, each moment arranged like an intricate mural: I taste the black milk that fed me in my mouth, know the kiss of the Hungry God on my chest. Muscle memory flashes me back to the pain of my bare flesh against the hot rocks as I was laid in the desert, raised by parents who took pity on the poor, deformed child. Visions spill out from the halls of memory, a lifetime of subconscious preparation for this: the calculated slaughter of my adopted people. The paving of the way for the Hungry God who would swim across the face of the Earth on a river of blood.

“You know now, don’t you Rabbi?” the children ask over the horrible growl of the Hungry God’s immense thought-projections. “You know what you must do.”

I nod. All it would take would be words, spoken a hundred thousand times by wise men. A spell, cleverly disguised as a verse in the book of Numbers, uttered a hundred thousand times over the course of generations. Nowhere near enough to weaken the fabric of reality, not without considerable sacrifice. As it was expected of me, I had opened the way for the Hungry God. Nothing was left but a mere incantation that would let him loose upon the face of the world.

“Y’golognac,” I spit the Hungry God’s True Name, whispered to me in lullabies in my infancy to bind my soul to his. The children whisper and scatter. The Hungry God reads my mind, knows what I am about to do. It flexes its mind, enveloping my mind with its raw, naked power. “Va’ gull thon’thok!” I speak the incantation backwards, reversing the spell just as part of my skull caves in.

There is a thunderous noise everywhere and lights and a spray of red.

The Hungry God falls down, down, down.

I wail like an infant.

The mountain collapses.

***

I see these things through a crack on the face of the Universe:

Roman soldiers come on horseback. The terrible rumbling sound draws them. One howls in horror, his hair turning white. He catches a fleeting glimpse of the world beyond. The straggling rebels are caught up in it as well. They all but tumble down the mountain. Arrows and pila cut them down to the man.

I watch Judea speed out and away through time, out of my reach. I am in the Wound Well, with him. In his rage, he pulls my limbs apart like an insect. He feeds on the children but lets me linger forever. This is my punishment.

I love him. I betrayed him. I hate him. I saved them.

It goes on and on forever, down there in the dark.

Time Devours All

by Pete Rawlik

It was raining when Vulpinius and his prisoner entered Rome. Two centurions stopped him at the Porta Latina, but a quick flash of his medallion, the one that bore the stylized X symbolizing the Decemviri, made sure that the guards knew who he was. The Decemviri Sacris Faciundis had been the Quindecemviri for more than 400 years, but they still used the old symbol and name, it carried weight, age, and respect. Enough respect to warrant a boy to guide them down the Via Latina and through the city. It had been four years since Vulpinius had been in the great metropolis, and much had changed. Emperor Vespasian had embarked on an unprecedented series of public works projects, and the city was literally littered with construction equipment. Not that it had ever been easy to get around Rome. The city was a conglomeration of roads and alleyways and bridges, and while the great via helped, moving from one via to the other was notoriously difficult. In all truth it was easier to either pass through the center or leave the city entirely, than to move from via to via. It is not that such connections didn’t exist; they were just too small and too crowded to make them viable as travel routes. In a city the size and complexity of Rome, roads themselves were valuable commodities.

If they had been to walk straight, the trip from a main gate to the Temple of Apollo Patronus on the Palatine might have taken little more than an hour, but in Rome such a trip took twice as long and meant moving through secret alleyways and byways and private gardens that the centurions had, through wit or favor obtained the right to pass through. It was a labyrinth and on more than one occasion Vulpinius knew that they had crossed back onto a previous path to access an uncrowded section of road, or to avoid construction. Even in the torrential rain the commerce of Rome and her citizens failed to cease its constant chatter, whether that was in Latin, Greek or Hebrew. Vulpinius, which was not his real name, it was not even good Latin, knew a smattering of all these languages but was most fluent in the growling Germanic tongue his Batavian mother had taught him. His father a retired centurion, had never married his mother, and so he had no proper Roman surname either, but rather went by the Romanized family name his mother had used. Neither was proper, and he would never rise high in the ranks of his profession because of it, but in some circles the name Vulpinius Pistorius was respected, in others it was feared, and as far as he was concerned one was as good as the other.

When they finally made it to the temple, Vulpinius dismissed their guide and then made their way to the base of the bridge that linked the Temple of Apollo to the Bibliotheca Apollonis. There was a fresco there, an idyllic scene of an arched bridge beneath which children and women lounged in the shadows. Few patrons of the temple or library paid it much attention, and fewer more noticed that one of the archways wasn’t painted but real, and the man who lounged in the shadow beneath it was armed and watchful. As Vulpinius and his charge approached he again flashed the seal of the Decemviri and with a quick nod both travelers vanished into a well concealed door.

As they passed the guard nodded and whispered “Welcome home, Vulpinius, you have been...missed.” Whether this was a greeting or a warning the tired agent wasn’t sure.

The way down was old and constructed from stones salvaged from the original headquarters of the Decemviri that had been in the Temple of Jupiter before it had burned a hundred and fifty years prior. That was when Sulla had expanded the collegium from ten to fifteen men, and began the quest to replace the treasure that the flames had devoured, a quest that still continued and gave Vulpinius and others purpose in life. He served the Empire, he served Rome, but before all else he served the Decemviri, and the mission they had set for him. Once they had been guardians and interpreters of the Sibylline Books, three volumes of prophecies that Tarquinius Superbus had purchased from the Cumaean Sibyll. There had been nine books once, but six had been consigned to the fire before Tarquinius had agreed to the oracle’s price. For more than four centuries the Sibylline Books had helped guide the rulers of Rome, and the Decemviri had controlled their reading and interpretation.

Until they were lost.

Most believed that the Temple of Jupiter had been just another victim of the civil war that had placed Sulla on the throne, that the temple and the original Bibliotheca X with it had been destroyed in battle between one faction and another. The Decemviri believed otherwise.

There was a man, a Quaestor by the name of Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who had one day collapsed as he did his work and suffered through a delirious fever for the next day or so. When his strange spell finally broke his family had found that he had undergone a radical change. Of his friends and family he had no memory. Nor did he have any recollection of his own life, his occupation or his own desires and habits. Cases of amnesia were not uncommon, particularly amongst soldiers, and little was thought of the man and his affliction. Doctors and philosophers came to see him, and some commented on his strange manner of speaking, and his own odd questioning manner concerning subjects ranging from philosophy to science to religion and even politics and war. He was suddenly a voracious reader, and devoured not only the news of the day, but the histories of Rome and its predecessors, and he became a common sight amongst the crowds that gathered to hear the orators of the Senate speak. Given his previous position, and his frequent association with Senators and proconsuls, no one gave a second thought when he sought shelter with the other dignitaries within the center of Rome. It came as quite a surprise when he forced his way into the offices of the Decemviri and proceeded to spread oil over the archives that had come to be known as Bibliotheca X. The fire burned the original Sibylline books, their copies and translations, supporting documents and three archivists. Titus Sempronius Blaesus was never seen again, and it was assumed that he too was lost in the flames, or perhaps killed by soldiers when they breached the defenses.

More than one-hundred and fifty years later and the Decemviri had finally rebuilt the archives and was once more able to help the support the Empire through the interpretation of prophecies. The Sibylline books were still lost, but there were other prophets and other prophecies, and the world was full of wonders just waiting for Rome and her agents to grab them. Most of the citizenry, and even the patricians, had thought the scouring of the empire for prophets and prophecies had long been completed. The words of the Tiburtine Sibyl and the Brothers Marcius were the primary texts, but they paled in comparison to what had once been, and so the law concerning oracles still stood. The Senate had, over the decades, simply forgotten to repeal their decree, and therefore the private possession of books of prophecy was forbidden. Even those with the gift itself were compelled into the service of Rome and the Decemviri.

Which was why Vulpinius had gone to Sicilia and returned with the man who had may have been a prophet himself.

The man had arrived in Syracuse from Aegypt with no papers, no money and chattering in the language which no one could understand. The only thing that held any clue to his origin had been a scroll in a language the local officials did not recognize. A scroll tied by an odd chain of rods and crystals. It took weeks for the local constabulary to discover that the man was speaking a dialect from an area far to the East in Parthia. Even once they found someone who could speak his barbaric language, the man still could not provide any information about himself. He had, it seemed, suffered some kind of amnesia. He claimed to be named Beazlae and been a simple scribe from the city of Susa. How he had come to be on board the vessel, or how he had accumulated certain scars and tattoos he could not say. He was confused for when he looked at himself he was older than he remembered, leaner and more muscular as well. It was as if he had aged years and had no memory of it.

All of this would not have been enough to arouse the interest of the Decemviri, but then there were the pages. Pages that Beazlae claimed were written in his own hand, and in his native tongue. Pages and words he had never read before, but somehow knew from the Summa Ysgl, a legendary book of prophecy that was old before even the Akkadians had walked the Earth. The Summa Ysgl, which some claimed to translate as the “The Prophecies of the Monsters of the Earth.” It was a book so rare, so legendary, that even these few pages had attracted the attention of the Decemviri and had forced the dispatch of Vulpinius aboard The Latro to bring Beazlae and his pages to Rome and Bibliotheca X. There, he and his writings were to be interrogated by the Decemviri, perhaps even all fifteen members.

All this ran through Vulpinius’ head as he and Beazlae descended the torch lit steps that led down from the surface and into the vaults beneath the temple that served as the headquarters of the library of prophecies and the men who ran it. Who those men were was a well-guarded secret for while the Emperor ruled Rome, the Decemviri made sure that he knew what he needed to insure the future of the empire. Fifteen men who kept to the shadows and guided the future of the world. Vulpinius had his suspicions, one might have been General Aulus Caecina Alienus who had been charged with suppressing Vespasian’s attempted coup, but then had suddenly switched sides. Another, Vulpinius suspected, might have been Titus Clodius Eprius Marcellus, the current Roman Consul, the leader of the Imperial Senate and Vespasian’s closest advisor. Vulpinius had no proof of this of course, but he had heard these men speak in the Senate, and recognized their voices when he was given his orders in the Shadow Chamber.

The Shadow Chamber was always cold and dark. The only light came from the lamps that silhouetted the members of the Decemviri who deemed it appropriate to be present. Today was no different. He and Beazlae were seated in the dark, the scroll removed from their care and passed to the men beyond the curtain. He could count six men seated back there, six men whose faces he could not see. But he could see their shadows and hear their breathing, and beyond that he could hear the wheezing, labored lungs of a seventh man, an old man, tired and phlegmy. A man Vulpinius had never heard before, a man who didn’t belong. A man who smelled of hemp smoke.

“Your report, Vulpinius.” The voice was cultured and tired, and definitely that of Eprius Marcellus.

“I present to you Beazlae of Susa. A man who cannot recall how he left Parthia, or when, or why, or even how he came to be in Sicilia. He recognizes that his intrusion is an insult and begs our pardon. He wishes nothing more than to return home.”

“And what of this scroll?” There was a rustling of papers and the thin chain of rods and crystal chimed as it was unraveled. “How does he know it to be from the Summa Ysgl?”

“When I and the translator questioned him about this he was very clear that while he had never seen a copy of that book, or could read what he himself had apparently written, he somehow knew beyond all doubt that these words had come from that accursed work.”

“You are sure he has no memory of any of this?”

Vulpinius nodded. “I am sure. Whatever task the Gods used this man for they seem finished with him. He can be of no use to us.”

Alienus spoke next, or at least so Vulpinius thought. “He cannot be returned to Parthia. We offer him a choice, he can travel to Britannia and live out his life there, or we can execute him here.”

“No!” The old man who could barely breathe cried out. “He has no choice. He must go to Britannia. We will have need of him there, someday.” He coughed and gasped for air. Two guards emerged from the darkness, grabbed Beazlae by his shoulders and dragged him away.

After the poor man was gone the old man spoke again. “Bring me the scroll.”

“We must translate it first, our best linguists will be set upon the task.” Alienus again, imperial but rough, a man of action.

“I have no need for your clumsy translators,” coughed the old man, “I can read whatever is written on the page well enough for our purposes.” He took a deep gasping breath. “Bring Vulpinius Pistorius as well, he might as well see what he has brought to Rome.”

The veil was parted and a new lamp lit, General Alienus and Consul Marcellus rose from their seats but the others, the shadowy forms of the other members of the Decemviri remained seated, it was all that they could do for they were nothing more than crude statues, busts of the great men that were meant to be sitting in the great collegium that was the Decemviri Sacris Fundis. Out of respect for the general, Vulpinius went to one knee.

He was immediately chastised by General Alienus. “On your feet. You are no Centurion, and I am not your commander. Here in this place we are equals,” he looked about the room at the missing members of his order that chose to be represented by silent uncaring stones, “though some are more equal than others.”

Through the door in the back of the room the three members of the Decemviri moved. Up small steps and a winding passage to a balcony that overlooked the Shadow Chamber. There in a bed draped in curtains and covered in pale white linens lay a man of such age, such antiquity, that most would have mistaken him for one of the dead, or perhaps a victim of some horrific wasting disease. It was only when he moved and spoke that Vulpinius realized that the poor creature was still alive and still capable of rational thought.

He waved weakly with a single decrepit finger. “Na Marcellus, my pipe.” Here was the smell of hemp, and something more, something Vulpinius hadn’t smelled since his time in the East, an extraction of the black lotus that was known to induce bizarre hallucinations.

Alienus took Vulpinius’ arm and led the imperial agent to the side of the bed. “Vulpinius Pistorius may I introduce Titus Sempronius Blaesus.” The old man waved his pipe in a casual gesture of acknowledgment.

Vulpinius was stunned. “It’s not possible, Titus Sempronius Blaesus burned Bibliotheca X more than a hundred and fifty years ago, he would have to be almost two hundred years old, how is that possible?”

The old man hacked and coughed out thick grey smoke. “One hundred and seventy-six years old Na, and as for how, that is a secret that even your controllers do not know how it is done, though I admit that even my secrets are beginning to reach their limit.” Vulpinius didn’t know what the word Na meant, but it was clearly some sort of title.

“The Decemviri captured Blaesus as he ran from the archive. We’ve kept him all this time, and used him as needed,” announced Alienus.

Vulpinius felt a sense of outrage boiling up within him. “What does ‘as needed’ mean?”

It was Marcellus that responded. “It means that Bibliotheca X is a lie. Oh certainly the Tiburtine prophecies and those of the Brothers Marcius have some value, but it is Blaesus that provides us with most of our foreknowledge. It is through our interrogation of him that we have been able to guide Rome for this last century. It was because of him that we put Vespasian on the throne.”

Vulpinius shook his head. “Vespasian rose to power because the armies lost faith in Vitellius, their commanders came to believe in a Judean prophecy that an Oracle had divined that Vespasian would be “Governor of the habitable world.”

Alienus chuckled. “A prophecy seeded and promoted by our agents. Men, not unlike you Vulpinius, but simply with a very different task.”

The agent collapsed to the ground. “Why, for what purpose?”

“Power Vulpinius, we control Blaesus, and through him we control the Emperor, Rome, and the Empire.”

“Then why was I sent for Beazlae and for the Summa Ysgl?”

The old man blew more smoke. “Enough of this chatter, give me the scroll.” His shaking hand reached out for the roll of paper and the dangling chain of rods and crystals. He unwrapped the thing and fumbled with the chain, losing grip of the roll and handing it back to Marcellus. “Hold this where I can see it Na. As for your questions Na Vulpinius, it seems you are slightly more perceptible than your handlers. The Summa Ysgl was intended for the only being who knew what to do with it.”

Marcellus suddenly ripped the scroll away. “We aren’t fools Blaesus and you cannot manipulate us. After all this time we may not know what you are, where you come from, or how you took over Blaesus’ body, but we know that you aren’t a man, or a god, and you will do what we tell you to.”

The old man was fiddling with the chain and two pieces snapped together. “I will never understand how your kind made it so far without help Na.” Another piece clicked into place. “You are easily manipulated, unobservant and shortsighted. You have no penchant for planning, patience or the complexity of histories and cultures. In words you won’t understand, you simply don’t see the big-picture. Ward am na tak.” Several pieces clicked together and a geometric form seemed to be taking shape in his hands.

Alienus took a step forward and put his hand on his gladius. Vulpinius put a hand on his better’s shoulder, “He’s just an old man.”

The thing in the bed took his pipe and blew out instead of in spraying the three men with the smoke and ash of hemp and lotus. The effect hit Vulpinius and the others almost instantaneously, and they all fell to the floor at the foot of the bed.

“There you see, a perfect example. A hundred years I’ve been smoking this stuff, slowly increasing the strength as I’ve grown accustomed to it. It seemed innocent enough, a habit that kept me calm and compliant. It never occurred to you that I might use it as a weapon. Na Vulpinius, I am much more than an old man.”

He rose out of the bed, stronger, more stable, and more sure-footed than Vulpinius thought he had a right to be. Ringlets of ash and vapor swirled around his ancient and feeble form and seemed to shroud him in wisps of incense and fog. “A smoking man?” Vulpinius managed to whisper as the drug began to overwhelm his senses.

The ancient monster clicked another piece of the chain and crystal into place and the strange geometric formation began to hum, filling the air with weird harmonics and vibrations. “The long game my Na, is played not over days, or weeks, or even years. The game is played with moves that last centuries, and consequences that won’t be felt yet for eons. Even now you probably don’t know what has happened here, what was most important. Was it the placing of Vespasian on the throne? Was it the slow and secret dismantling of the Decemviri? Was it the strengthening of the Empire, or its undermining? What have I done here that was so important?” He spun his ancient and skeletal form around. “I will tell you this much you fools, the burning of the Sibylline Books was only a catalyst, one that I myself set in motion when I wrote and then sold them to you fools in the first place.”

With supreme effort Vulpinius spoke once more, “Beazlae!”

The thing stopped and stared at the prone form of the drugged agent. “Well, well, color me surprised. One of the Na has pierced the veil, and seen one facet of the truth. Is that enough I wonder? What shall you do about it? Do you think that killing him might change things, or is that exactly what I want you to do?” He smiled evilly down at the struggling agent. “Goodbye Na Vulpinius, your name suits you. You are as crafty as a fox. I wish you luck, and good health. I shall be watching you, and hoping you find a way to impress me, but I leave you all with these words, they may help you understand someday. Ward am na tak.” Then he began to laugh, and Vulpinius passed into madness and heard no more.

It took a week for Vulpinius, Alienus and Marcellus to recover from their exposure to the black lotus. The body of Titus Sempronius Blaesus was found lifeless in a nearly forgotten antechamber, the odd device of crystals and rods was nowhere to be found. There was an inquiry, and in this matter the entirety of the Decemviri, all fifteen members, was convened. The three were questioned, interrogated, even lightly tortured over the loss of something of such great value, but in the end they were released. Alienus and Marcellus were demoted, they were still members of the collegium, but now were tasked with reviewing the existing prophecies and performing minor interpretations. Once a part of the Demeviri you could not be removed, or resign, but that did not guarantee your rank.

Vulpinius was relieved of his duties, but after a while found work amongst the guards of the Senate. On occasion he made inquiries concerning Beazlae, but never could bring himself to interfere with the man, his wife or their children. He spent most of his time studying, not in Bibliotheca X, but in several of the other libraries around the city. It took four years, longer than he cared to admit, but eventually he learned enough Akkadian to understand the words that Blaesus had said before the drug took his mind. Four words, “Ward Am Na Tak”, four years, but he finally knew what those words meant.

The scroll that Beazlae had carried with him, the excerpt from the Summa Ysgl, was never translated, and in the opinion of the great linguists and cryptographers of the Empire never could be. The symbols on the page looked like language, but weren’t. It was all nonsense, a clever hoax, and nothing more.

Not long after, a messenger came from Reate, Emperor Vespasian was dead. The new Emperor Titus acted quickly. General Aulus Caecina Alienus and Proconsul Titus Clodius Eprius Marcellus were arrested and the Senate quickly found them guilty of conspiracy.

Marcellus slit his own throat.

Aulus Caecina Alienus waited for the executioner. As Vulpinius Pistorius formerly of the Decemviri Sacris Faciundus, stood over his former employer a mad smile came across his face. He knelt down and whispered the same words that the thing that had pretended to be Blaesus had said years earlier, “Ward am na tak.” But this time the words were followed by a translation, “A slave should know his place.”

Vulpinius’ gladius took General Alienus’ head off in a single stroke.

The Unrepeatables

by Edward M. Erdelac

“You know Vibius Salonius Calidas?” Marcius Turbo asked.

Modius Macula nodded, “I worked for him for a time.”

“You parted amicably?”

Macula nodded.

“He’s the best charioteer the Blues can field,” said Turbo. “He is swiftly approaching the greatness of Scorpus, and will soon eclipse even Diocles. I have a great deal of money invested in the Greens to take the crown at the Consuales Ludi next month. It would be in my interest if Calidas did not compete.”

Macula chewed his lip and narrowed his eyes at the Praetorian prefect, picking grapes from the dish between them. Marcius Turbo’s penchant for gambling was as legendary as his debt.

“I’m a bodyguard, not an assassin,” Macula said cautiously.

Turbo chuckled a little overindulgently.

“My good Macula, I wouldn’t suggest such a thing. I know you’re a bodyguard. Moreover, I know your employer is Damis of Nineveh, who owns the talisman shop on Vicus Caesaris.”

Macula waited.

“I also know you have been concealing a dalliance with Tita, the niece of Petronius Mamertinus.”

Macula balled his fist beneath the table. Tita was married to a minor politician who preferred crawling over bare boys to lying with her. But her uncle was the Prefect of Egypt, necessitating discretion.

“Damis is initiated into the Greater Eleusinian Mysteries, is he not?”

“How would I know?”

“Never mind,” said Turbo. “He is. I should like to procure both your services, if you think Damis would be cooperative.”

Of course the old man would be cooperative. But Macula hated asking. He hated being in debt. It was why he had resigned his own Praetorian commission years ago, to avoid all the politics. He was just a soldier. And yet, here he was.

“Calidas, too, is an initiate,” Turbo went on, “As is the Emperor. And he takes the laws against divulging the unrepeatable rites very seriously,” Turbo said. “I have heard disconcerting rumors that Calidas and a certain Jew in his employ have been imitating the Mysteries during his drunken parties at Domus Venti, his villa in Baiae. If even the slightest evidence that he were profaning the Mysteries were to be presented to Hadrian by so respected a personage as your Damis, well, at the very least it would hinder his participation in the race.”

And at the worst, it could mean a death sentence. That much Macula knew.

“Damis won’t give false testimony,” said Macula. “He’s an honorable man.”

“I wouldn’t dream of asking him. Why would he lie for a total stranger?” Turbo said slyly. “Even the Praefectus Praetorio.”

The threat was implicit.

“Secure an invitation for yourself and Damis to call upon Calidas. He’s having a party the first Martis of Augustus, I believe. Tell him Damis wants to meet the great charioteer. Does Damis like racing?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t matter. Have Damis keep a weather eye for blasphemy. Help him find it, Macula. I’m sure it is there. When you have proof of Calidas’ malfeasance, I will set things into motion.”

Macula sighed heavily.

***

The first Martis of the month of Augustus in the Year of the Consulship of Commodus and Civica proved sultry down in the valleys, but the hills of Baiae overlooking the bay were cool at night, and the slaves in Domus Venti lit the hypocaust, so the marble floor of the open-air triclinium would be warm and comfortable.

“My feet are sweating,” Macula grumbled to Damis.

The old Assyrian fixed him with a frown over the agate rim of his wine goblet. Despite his age, Damis’ dark eyes retained their sharpness.

“You would lie with Venus and gripe about a lumpy pillow,” Damis said into his cup. “How did Rome conquer the known world with such complainers as you in their ranks?”

“By ignoring the complaints,” said Macula, surveying the room of chattering, richly dressed partygoers with naked distaste.

Calidas’ house was filled with the usual gaggle of young artists and philosophers, giggling, too-pretty girls, and assorted sycophants. He spied the notorious lecher and gambler, Cominius Bibaculus, fawning over a girl as his drink sloshed over. They had already suffered through two impromptu orations and a very amateur bout of song. Slaves kept all constantly supplied with platters of fruit and wine.

“Well old man, have you seen anything yet to incriminate our host?” Macula asked.

“You cannot possibly know how distasteful I find this whole affair,” Damis said. “Entering a man’s house under false pretenses in order to bear witness against him for the purpose of fixing a chariot race.”

“You take these Mysteries seriously, though, don’t you?” Macula said.

“They are a worthy ritual, as such things go. I underwent them years ago with my master, Apollonius. What do you know of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Macula?”

“I know they have something to do with the games held in Athens every four years. The pilgrims dip themselves in the sea, and there’s a lot of branch swinging and cursing along the road to Eleusis. That’s about it.”

Damis smirked.

“You’re referring to the veneration of Lambe, the Goddess of Humor and Poetry. The central inspiration for the Mysteries is the story of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, who was abducted by Hades and taken to the Underworld. Demeter wandered the road to Eleusis searching for her daughter, and it is said Lambe alleviated her grief with bawdy tales along the way.”

“Fascinating,” Macula lied.

“Look beneath your feet,” said Damis, tamping on the floor.

A section of the floor was covered in a complex mosaic Macula hadn’t noticed before. It depicted the goddess of the hearth searching for her daughter and swinging a bacchoi branch, while a mournful waif reached out to her from the swirling black flames of the Underworld, restrained by a grim looking Hades.

“The story is a metaphor for the human soul. The Mysteries are nothing less than an affirmation of the return to the higher state from which all men descend,” said Damis. “A training of the soul for the experience of the incorporeal world which lies beyond physical death. And yet, at its culmination, there is an opportunity for great danger.”

“Danger?”

“A mind awakened to the outer dark,” said Damis, genuflecting now and running his fingers along the mosaic, “without guidance, it can be blasted by what it sees, like a lidless eye exposed to the sun.”

The old man’s hand stopped on a scuffed, dark image at the bottom of the tile.

Macula joined him on the floor, squinting. There appeared to be some small, obfuscated shape among the fanciful black fires, something cradled in the arms of the Persephone figure.

“What is that?” Macula whispered.

“Iacchus,” murmured Damis.

“Modius Macula, my old friend!” came a voice very near to them.

Macula and Damis both looked up and saw the strapping, golden haired Calidas standing before them in a fine, blue silken tunic with gold trim. He was flanked by a man and a woman. The man was Semitic: dark, curly beard, large, staring eyes. The woman, a tall, dark-skinned Ethiopian with close-shaven hair, as striking as Calidas in her physical perfection. She hung on his arm and they were like two statues, one in marble, the other onyx.

“Well,” said Calidas, “I heard your friend was an admirer, but I never expected such overt obeisance.”

The crowd, which had drifted closer to them at Calidas’ arrival, rippled with appreciative, vacuous laughter.

Macula and Damis straightened.

“Excuse us,” Damis said, “we were just admiring the craftsmanship.”

“It came with the house. It’s been here forever, you know.”

“Really? It looked almost new.”

“Vibius Salonius Calidas,” said Macula, “this is Damis of Nineveh.”

Calidas smiled, and at his side, the dark bearded man blurted,

“Damis, the student of Apollonius of Tyana?”

“The same,” Damis said, bowing slightly.

“Well!” chuckled Calidas, looking to the bearded man. “Tell me who I am speaking to Atomus, that I do not embarrass myself in ignorance.”

“Apollonius was a great philosopher and wonder worker,” Atomus said. “He was called The Lord of Talismans.”

“Ah? Perhaps I should be prostrating myself before you, then,” Calidas grinned. “Can you work us a wonder now, Damis? For the amusement of my guests?”

“I’m afraid my teacher’s title is all I inherited from him.”

Calidas looked worse than disappointed. He looked suddenly bored.

“A pity,” he said, eyes drifting over Damis’ balding head now, looking to the slaves setting the banquet table.

“Your taste in ladies has certainly improved,” Macula said, smiling appreciatively at the black woman at his side.

Calidas’s eyes flashed for a moment and his handsome face was grinning again.

“Forgive me, my dear. This is Brehane,” he said, intimately stroking her flawless arm with the end of his middle finger. “Isn’t she lovely? Her father is an Aksumite ivory merchant and a great supporter of the Blues.”

“So I see,” said Macula.

“Well, enough idle chatter anyway,” said Calidas. “You must come to the Circus and see me win the Consuales Ludi in a few days.”

A patter of light applause made its rounds and Calidas bowed his head to his guests.

“Shall we eat?”

***

The dinner was an extravagant affair, worthy of Trimalchio. There were three tables with three blue couches each, and Macula was surprised to find himself and Damis invited to dine with Calidas, Brehane, Atomus, fat Bibacula, and three other guests. After an appetizer of milk-fed snails and lettuce (Damis, a strict vegetarian, consumed only the latter), a course representing the signs of the Zodiac was offered up to the household gods in their niche on the far wall and served. The slaves set lobster, bull testicles, and the tongue of a lion at their table, and other representative dishes at the others. Dessert was dormice dipped in honey and poppy seeds, reared in Calidas’ own glirarium.

The guests talked and laughed of stupid things, until halfway through the dinner, when Bibaculus burped loudly and then asked;

“Calidas, won’t you regale us with one of your death-defying tales of the Circus Maximus?”

There was much applause, many shouts of encouragement, but Calidas, who had been neglecting his food in favor of cup after cup of wine, wore a low expression when he raised his hand for quiet.

“Death- defying? I am twenty-six, Bibaculus. How many charioteers live to thirty? My hands shake to grip the reins, and I ride with my falx between my teeth out of fear I will not be able to cut myself free should I crash. Once I reveled in the Circus. Now, I think the horses of my quadriga pull me speedily to doom. One bad turn, one naufragia, and I die beneath the hooves, or my legs are crushed and I live out my days a broken beggar whining in the street. We do not defy death, we who race. We tempt it. We are dragged by it, like chariots ourselves.”

Brehane laid her ear on Calidas’ shoulder and his dour mood lightened somewhat as he ran his finger along the ridge of her jaw.

“Play something chipper!” Calidas called to the musicians behind the curtain, and soon the pipers and cymbalists took up a tune of alleviation, and conversation was rejoined.

Macula leaned over and asked Damis, “What was that name you said earlier? Bacchus?”

“Not Bacchus,” said Damis lowly. “Iacchus. The child of Persephone and Hades, born in the Underworld. “Some say another name for Dionysous, but they are wrong. An earlier god. Darker. Stranger.”

“Something about Eleusis in that?”

“Eleusis?” asked Atomus from across the table. “Did I hear you correctly?”

The chatter at the table died somewhat, Macula noticed, at a gesture of the hand from the Semite.

“I was telling Macula about my own participation in the Mysteries.”

“Ah, you are an initiate then?” Atomus asked.

“Yes. I have been trying to convince Macula to attend in the coming year.”

“Fat chance,” Calidas piped up. “If I remember Macula, he does not believe in the gods. Isn’t that right?”

“I believe in what I can put between my hands,” said Macula.

“Ah! A brimming wine goblet! A fat woman!” Bibaculus laughed, squeezing the girl at his side until she squealed and slapped his hairy arm.

“Or a sword,” finished Macula.

“But wasn’t Apollonius a devotee of Pythagoras?” Atomus asked. “How does one reconcile initiation in a Greek rite with monotheism?”

“By Jove!” Calidas spat into his cup. “You’re not a Christian, are you?”

The room shook with laughter.

Damis smiled thinly.

“In no other manner can one exhibit a fitting respect for the Divine being than by refusing to offer any victim at all; to Him we must not kindle fire or make promise unto Him of any sensible object whatsoever. For He needs nothing even from beings higher than ourselves. Nor is there any plant or animal which earth sends up or nourishes, to which some pollution is not incident. We should make use in relation to Him solely of that which issues not by the lips, but from the noblest faculty we possess, and that faculty is intelligence, which needs no organ. That is what my master taught.”

“Even Jews sacrifice,” said Calidas. “How else can that which is worth attaining be attained, save through offering and hardship?” he went on, squeezing Brehane’s hand. “Without the race there is no victory.”

“Is that what you believe, Atomus?” Damis asked.

“What makes you think I am a Jew?” Atomus countered.

“What are you then? A Simonian? One of these Valentinians?” He leaned closer. “Something else?”

“My father was a priest in the Temple when Titus burned it and carried off the Menorah for the Colosseum. What I knew the glory of the holy city I knew from stories. I grew up in its ruins. I was there when Hadrian burnt the Torah atop the Mount, breaking his promise to rebuild the Temple and renaming Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina.”

The atmosphere around the table had plummeted into a silent coldness, and Damis and Atomus glared at each other with naked but inscrutable dislike.

“This is too heated a discussion for the dinner table,” Calidas said, finding his victorious smile again. “Don’t be boring, Atomus. Macula? What say you, Damis?”

“Soleas poscere,” said Damis, signaling that the dinner had ended for him.

Dutifully, two of the slaves emerged with their sandals.

Macula, mouth full of dormice, got up, blinking in surprise. Something had roused the ire of the old mystic, but he had no idea what.

They got up from the table. Damis took him by the elbow and guided him to the lararium on the wall to pay their respects to the household gods depicted in miniature statuary in the recessed little niche.

As Macula began to bow, Damis gripped him tightly, causing him to straighten, and steered him out into the atrium, where two burly slaves standing in the vestibulum pulled open the doors for them.

Soon they were on the dim, torch lit road winding down the hill, the lights of town below, the moonlight playing on the rippling bay.

“I take it you’ve found something,” Macula said.

“I’m not sure. Take this, for I fear we shall know in a moment.”

From under his voluminous philosopher’s robes, Damis produced a short, glittering pugio in a silver frame scabbard which had been fashioned into a fanciful depiction of a man sinking a sword into the breast of some dragon-like monstrosity.

“Where did you get that?”

“Master Damis! Master Macula!”

Macula half-turned, to see the two well-built door slaves trotting down the road after them.

They had napkins bundled in their hands.

“Our master begs you not to forget your napkins.”

Macula narrowed his eyes. It was customary for the host of a party to wrap his guest’s personal napkins about some token gift before returning them.

Except they had taken their napkins with them.

As the first of the two big slaves reached them, Macula whipped the dagger free of its scabbard with a ring and thrust the point in his heart to the hilt.

He had to kick the body off the blade as the second slave lunged at him, something flashing in his fist.

Macula ducked under the swing and jabbed upwards, catching the second man under the chin, the point popping out of the crown of his skull.

He retrieved one of the napkins and wiped the blood from the blade.

The napkin of the first man had a dagger hidden in the folds.

“So I was right,” Damis breathed.

“What’s going on? Why did you bring a pugio to the party if you didn’t suspect anything?”

“Traveling with Apollonius I learned to take precautions. The star Sothis is ascendant. It is an ill-omen.”

“I thought you hated astrology.”

“I hate astrologers,” Damis corrected. “I thought very little of this errand of yours, true, when the night began.”

“Till you saw that Iacchus in the mosaic?”

“It raised my suspicions. You may not believe in the gods, Macula, and the guise in which you know them may indeed be a lie, but just as Jove is Zeus, once they had other names and other faces, terrible to behold.”

As he spoke, Damis removed a pouch from his robes and spilled its contents into his hand. There were six rings, each with a different colored intaglio gem, like the one he already wore, engraved with a symbol representing each of the seven stars.

He slipped them on one at a time.

“Iacchus,” he said, “the son of Hades and Demeter, who was later known as Bacchus and Dionysus, whose maenad cult was driven to terrible ecstasies, ripping apart goats with their bare hands. And yet the nameless cult of Iacchus, or Icthiacchilius as he is known, sacrificed a goat without horns beneath the moon and the Star of Sothia, and tore their victim apart with their teeth. And behind him, behind Demeter and Mithras, behind Nuada, Ashur, Neptune and Cthulhu, the great whirling chaos, the Womb of Darkness from which the gods spawned, as far outside our knowing as is dread Tartarus. Chaos. Tiamat. Azathoth.”

Macula shook his head, staring down at the moonlight on the blade of the dagger, which was engraved with seals and unreadable voces mysticae.

“So what do we tell Marcius Turbo?”

“I fear there is no time to return to Rome,” said Damis. “This night, foul things are afoot in that house, and must be stopped.”

At that moment, a shrill scream rang out from high on the hill, a woman’s scream, prolonged in agony, which dwindled till it was lost on the sea breeze.

Macula was already running back up the road with Damis huffing behind.

They found the door to the villa left unlocked by the servants and proceeded swiftly through the quiet house until they were again in the still-lit dining hall.

The tables had been cleared, save for Calidas.

Only two guests remained seated and feasting, but the repast laid out on the table was not the course that had been there when Macula and Damis had dined.

In the middle of the table was the naked, black skinned torso of a woman. Brehane, Macula realized immediately. The limbs and head had been ripped free by the attitude of the ragged flesh and strewn sinew spilling from the joints, and by the copious blood splattered wildly across the floor and the tunics of the two diners, who were busily gorging themselves face first in the open belly, tearing loose organs and raw meat with their teeth.

Macula wretched uncontrollably at the sight, and the two grisly diners lifted their heads at the sound like startled hyenas over carrion, sensing the approach of a lion.

“Macula!” said portly Bibaculus, gore and blood coursing down his fishy lips. He was actually grinning when Macula rushed forward and stabbed him in between the bloody rolls of his second and third chins.

The woman screeched and he silenced her, too, with a backhanded swipe of the keen blade that sent her spinning from the foul table.

“By the gods!” Macula muttered breathlessly, shrinking from the table. He had never retreated from bloodshed before, not in nineteen pitched battles.

“Did you notice the dishes we were served were representative of the zodiac?” Damis asked.

“I did, yes,” said Macula. “Lobster for Cancer. Like in the Satyircon.”

“I’m rubbing off on you,” Damis said. “Yet there were three tables, and the others had four dishes. Four signs.”

“We only had three.”

“We had four,” he said grimly, gesturing to the table. “The fourth was Virgo, the Maiden.”

“I’ve never seen such a thing. Not even among blood-mad Celts. I can’t believe that Calidas….that Jew Atomus must have him bewitched.”

Damis went to the wall of the banquet hall.

“And in the lararium, did you notice the household gods?”

“You pulled me away so fast…” Macula said, stumbling behind him.

“Look,” he said, pointing to the miniature temple in the niche on the wall.

Macula peered at the statues. There was ever-present Augustus, and other innocuous deities. But in the shadows of the recess there was a strange, misshapen statuette carved of some dark substance. It was something not unlike depictions of the fabled Kraken he had seen. Its appearance was only vaguely humanoid, its bulbous head lolling on sagging shoulders draped to the finned, crocodilian feet with fanciful tentacles and a myriad of protruding spikes. Whatever sculptor had executed this horrid work, they had dwelt upon its most repulsive aspects in fine detail.

His lip curled at the vile thing, and he knocked aside the other household gods to get at it and fling it to the floor. Yet when his hand closed on it, he found it attached by some obscure mechanism. The small statue was a fulcrum, and when he drew it forward, something clicked and the panel of the wall swung outward revealing hidden stairs that sank beneath the house.

“A spelaeum,” whispered Damis, looking over his shoulder at the dark stone steps. “An underground temple of the Mysteries of Mithras, repurposed to some evil design.”

From the depths they could hear unified murmurs, and the intermittent clash of cymbals. The thick scent of incense wafted up to them.

“Qetoret,” Damis said, sniffing. “Hold fast to your dagger, Macula,” he urged. “If you let it go it cannot protect you.”

Macula grunted. He hardly needed a weapon against this lot. He was infuriated enough at the death of the girl to kill them all with his bare hands.

He descended first, Damis quick on his heels.

The stair wound once around a central column and emptied into a long subterranean chamber opposite a recessed, apse-shaped wall in which a statue of Mithras slaughtering a bull normally sat. The proper statue was in broken fragments on the floor. There was a slab of stone there, and Calidas lay upon it naked, the gaping, staring head of Brehane propped over his loins.

Atomus stood over him in a flamen’s robe and leather apex cap, dipping a horsehair brush in a bowl of blood and painting every inch of him, muttering in some unidentifiable speech the whole time.

Raised stone benches lined either side of the chamber, and the other party guests reclined there nude, idly chewing on the legs and arms of the dead girl, as a pair of silent slaves clashed cymbals and looked on stoically.

“Atomus!” Damis roared, his voice reverberating in the chamber.

Startled, Atomus interposed himself behind the slab, kicking over the bowl of blood in his haste.

Calidas, too, sat up and swung his long muscular legs over the edge, his toes alighting in the pooling blood.

The slaves discarded their cymbals and rushed them. Macula dispatched them both with two thrusts.

“Calidas,” Macula said, his voice trembling. “Why have you done this?”

Calidas stood, a crimson demigod, the head of the black woman cradled in one arm.

“I am terrified of death, Macula. I sought solace in the Mysteries, but do you know their secret? A sip of kykeon, and the opening of the mind to….gods, Macula. Do you know what horrors lie beyond this life?”

“None worse than those you have enacted this night,” said Macula.

“You’re wrong. You haven’t seen them. I will not die, Macula. I will not go where they are. Atomus promised me immortality. I would devour every girl in Rome to stave off death.”

“Except Atomus lied,” Damis said. “He is a deceiver.”

“No,” said Atomus. “I did not lie. And you are too late, Damis. The rite is completed.”

Calidas stumbled then, and the head of Berhane tumbled from his hand. He leaned back against the altar with its red outline of his body, touched his own face, and then pitched violently forward into the pool of blood on his hands and knees.

The other dinner guests put their backs to the walls of the chamber, warily looking from the men in the doorway to Atomus and Calidas.

“What have you done, Atomus?” Damis breathed, as Calidas shook and groaned on the floor.

“I have given this mighty Roman champion his wish, to have the undying body of a god,” said Atomus.

“Which god?” Damis asked fearfully, as Calidas’ flesh began to tear and burst, long spines like porcupine quills shivering out from his shoulders and arms.

“I served another once,” said Atomus, “when I had another name. I prayed that HaShem might make me His messiah, that I might call upon legions of angels to crush Rome, but my prayers were never answered. So I turned to another to avenge my people.”

“To what? Some evil thing….” Macula stammered, watching Calidas shake and swell.

“The ant you crush beneath your sandal thinks you evil, Roman,” said Atomus.

“Strike, Macula!” Damis shouted, shoving Macula forward.

But as he advanced down the center aisle of the spelaeum, Macula paused.

Calidas rose. He had changed. His bloodstained flesh had flowed and twisted during Atomus’ speech, and what opened its eyes and spread out its long, apish arms was not Salonius Calidas, beloved of the Circus Maximus. What stood at the base of the altar was, he knew, the thing Icthiacchilius, for Atomus called out its name in wild ecstasy.

“Go forth, Dread Icthiacchilus, High Satrap of Xoth!”

It lurched through the dim lamplight, and the remaining cultists shrieked in abject terror at the sight of the blood-red thing they had unwittingly brought forth.

Its bulky head bore a wide maw of serrated teeth half hidden behind a curtain of drooping, questing tendrils, and bulging, frog-like void black eyes that twitched and surveyed its surroundings independently of each other. Its sloping shoulders were draped with long scarlet tentacles that writhed and brushed the floor. The muscular arms that reached from beneath the living mass were covered all over in quivering black urchin-like spines, and terminated in five pulsing appendages that glowed with alien patterns of sickly green luminescence. Its unseen feet slapped the bloody floor as it shambled forward, and oddly situated orifices gasped open on its body and sucked at the air with an alarming, regular hiss.

At the sound of Atomus’ voice, it whirled and splayed one hand of lashing tendrils about his face, engulfing his head. The glowing nodules about its hand shined briefly, and there was a crackling, slurping sound. Copious blood and liquefied flesh flowed over its serpentine fingers, as the headless body first drew in on itself like a draining waterskin, then fell away and crumpled in an unrecognizable heap of sagging matter.

The thing was visibly larger.

The others screamed, men and women, but sank to the floor, unable to flee.

Damis pulled Macula back.

“Up the stairs!” he shouted.

Macula retreated backwards, the dagger held before him. He focused on its shining blade so he would not see the bloody thing Icthiacchilus consuming the others. His whole attention, the entirety of his mind, dwelt solely upon the nine inches of unnaturally bright metal. It was the only thing that existed in this dark, chthonic world of moving nightmares. He even fancied he could hear the metal reverberating, drowning out the insane shrieks and mad, resigned laughter of the other victims.

Damis closed the hidden door behind them as the last of the fear-mad screams subsided.

“Why didn’t they run?” he wondered aloud.

“Paralyzed. The pugio and these rings protect our minds,” Damis said.

There was a wet snort from behind the door, and they heard it ascending heavy step by slapping step.

Macula backed away, brandishing the knife.

“Will this kill it, Damis?”

“I don’t know,” the old Assyrian confessed. “It is like an infant now, at its most vulnerable. Perhaps…”

“If not this, what?” he urged, as something like a great sack of skins thudded against the back of the lararium and a tremendous crack appeared in the door.

In the next instant it burst through the hidden door. It was four times its original size, and had to duck and squeeze through the frame.

Macula and Damis retreated back.

It spied the bodies of Bibaculus and his woman first, and fell upon them, shining brightly as it drew them almost inside out in its violent mastication.

Macula watched the bulk of the thing swell again. It filled the room. When it straightened, its head would burst through the ceiling.

“It will grow larger with every victim,” Damis stammered.

Macula looked at the puny dagger in his hand and scowled. He grabbed Damis by the arm and they ran out the front door.

There was a great crackling behind them as, true to his prediction, the roof burst apart and the shining red monstrosity reared up out of it, pushing aside the walls with a shrug of its writhing shoulders.

Gods, there could be no stopping such a thing.

“It will destroy Baiae and then rampage through Rome herself,” he murmured, feeling his reason slip precariously.

The thing turned toward the closest villa, and Macula heard the goats in their pens bleating in terror. But it did not advance. Instead it turned toward the bay below and began to tread down the hill, each step shaking the earth.

“Why didn’t it go after that house?” Macula demanded.

“It was born in darkness,” Damis said, twiddling his fingers as he did when his mind was working. “And it is but a child. It is very near dawn. It may be that it will seek darkness, incubate until the night comes again.”

“It’s making for the bay,” Macula observed.

“If it reaches the bottom, we won’t be able to prevent it from rising again. And when it rises it will be renewed. Nothing will stop it,” Damis said.

“How can we stop it now?”

Damis snatched Macula by the wrist and held up the pugio to the light. He grabbed the circular pommel with its star design, and twisted it, unscrewing it from the handle.

“What are you doing?”

“The handle of this dagger is a cylinder seal. Its markings may not kill it, but it can create a barrier it will not cross.” He looked Macula in the eyes. “And the shore of the bay down there is clay.”

Macula spun the handle of the dagger, watching the intricate carvings of circled stars, flaming eyes, branches and letters, all whirling and dancing as if animate.

“Trap it in an unbroken circle, Macula,” Damis said.

Macula ran down the hillside for all he was worth. In his youth he had competed in the marathon, and later served as a foot messenger in the legion. But years of promotions and a dying barbarian’s axe had stiffened his legs. They were aflame as he scurried like a mouse alongside the slow-moving giant, and he was nearly snatched up by one of its groping tentacles. A tumble turned into a roll, and he crashed down the hill, smashing into rocks and through bushes, finally coming to a stop in the cool dark mud of the clay beach.

His flesh bore dozens of streaming cuts, and his heart beat on his chest as if to escape, but he had held onto the pugio, and sat up painfully as the colossal thing that had been Calidas bore down, blotting out the moon.

He stumbled to the edge of the lapping waves and pressed the handle of the dagger into the clay. Holding the end and the blade, he began to quickly roll it in a long line. In the darkness he could hardly see the long imprint it made as it rolled, but he pressed hard, praying it would be unbroken.

The shambling monster planted its heavy foot onto the beach, then the other. It strode toward the dark water.

Macula kept scooting along the edge, now backpedaling, to begin the circle. His hunched back burned now, and his calves quivered like taut bowstrings.

It advanced to the water’s edge and stopped.

Macula redoubled his efforts, hobbling behind the thing now as it snuffled the air questioningly. Its many tendrils reached out, unsure, detecting an unseen barrier. If it turned to its left, it would sense the way was unobstructed and plunge into the bay.

It turned right, feeling along Macula’s path, turning in place, even as he scampered like a crafty rat along its side.

When he came to close the circle, he could not find his original marks in the darkness.

Above him, Icthyacchilus gave a tremendous huff. It had spotted him down there, and it fell to its unseen haunches, limbs and tentacles all reaching down for him.

The hidden moon shone now like a crown, and its light fell full upon the beach.

Macula spied the meticulous line of markings three steps to his left, and rolled the pugio furiously toward them, completing the design as it filled his vision. The reaching mass rebounded inches from him, as though it had collided with an invisible screen.

It tested the limits of its prison, shoving back and forth, but even the ends of its many tendrils could not pass over the seal.

Macula sat on the beach and stared up at it as the sky blued. Iccthyacchilus seemed resigned to its fate then, and regarded Macula with its looming eye. That bulging orb seemed like a soothsayer’s bauble. It expanded and grew concave, as the dawning light played upon it and the skin all around began to trickle and run like heated wax.

But in the eye lay swirling pictures that tugged something in Macula. It showed him the many sins of his life, the slaughtering fields through which he had waded, the infants wailing at dead mothers’ breasts, the men pleading for clemency in foreign tongues as their mouths flooded with blood, the women and girls ruined by his lust, like Aelia, the potter’s daughter whose father had thrown her to her death on the tiles below their balcony when he’d heard of their indiscretion.

These and a thousand other misdeeds weighed like a necklace of millstones about his shoulders, and the blackness within those oily eyes seemed peaceful, welcoming. These were the lightless seas of Elysium, where floated the Isles of the Blessed, over which hung ancient, hungry stars unnumbered by man.

He felt a hand close around his arm and shrugged it off. Then something cold and metal pressed into his hand, and his fingers closed, and the eyes were merely the eyes of a melting monster again.

His sandal was poised to blot out the seal in the clay.

He stepped back.

Damis stood with him.

“You dropped the pugio,” he said. “I thought perhaps….”

“You thought right, old man,” Macula said. “Thank you.”

They waited until the black eyes of Iccthyacchilus were two mounds of agate floating in a murky red puddle of slime.

Then, as the sun rose, they sank within and dissipated, the whole reeking mess seeping into the ground within the circle.

Magnum Innominandum

by Penelope Love

“As for the dream itself…My name appeared to be Lucius Caelius Rufus.”
—H.P Lovecraft, letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer

“Tibi, magnum Innominandum, signa stellarum nigrarum et bufoniformis Sadoquae sigillum.”
— H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Robert Bloch

Helvia was in her cozy nook in the foyer, mulling over her dinner plans, while Thallus, an elderly Greek slave with a grey fringe of beard, translated aloud from some old scrolls. The morning salutio had come and gone. Lucretius had been admired, dandled and returned to his nursemaid for a nap. Uncle Marius was snoozing over On the Nature of Things in his study.

The sound of frantic knocking broke into the tranquility of the house. Thallus left to speak to the guards at the front door.

Helvia patiently awaited his return. She was tall and calm, with long, sloe-black eyes. Her hair was coiled in an elaborate head-dress. She was a widow. Little Lucretius was born five months after her husband left on a trading voyage, and she learned of her husband’s death a year after he died in some wretched Iberian backwater. Widowhood suited her. She had money and independence. She managed her husband’s affairs in the name of her little boy, saw off the suitors that Uncle Marius tried to introduce, and resisted all efforts to send her to raise her son in the peaceful rusticity of the family estate at Tusculum. Uncle Marius was a mild old man, guardian in name only. If he was ever offended or upset by her ways she bought him a new book.

Despite marriage, childbirth, and a fondness for dinner parties, Helvia maintained her supple figure by religiously following the regime laid out in Galen’s On Exercise with a Small Ball at the women’s gymnasium. She worshipped at Galen’s altar and wasted no opportunity to practice her medical learning.

Thallus returned, flustered. “Domina,” he started, as a young woman burst in and threw herself, weeping, at Helvia’s feet.

Uncle Marius was woken by the noise. He poked his bald head around the entrance, saw it was women’s business, and withdrew.

“Carvillia!” Helvia exclaimed, recognizing the girl’s pretty, delicate features, swollen and distorted by tears. She was flattered that Carvillia came to her in her hour of need but then, she complacently reflected, ever since she had become a devotee of the Good Goddess the local girls had sought her advice. She embraced her. “Oh my dear, what’s wrong?”

“My father is dead,” Carvillia wept.

“My condolences,” Helvia said, taken aback. “Why, only yesterday you told me he was in fine health.”

“He was. I do wish you could find out why,” Carvillia begged.

“I, a mere woman? I couldn’t,” Helvia was thrilled by this gesture of respect.

“Please help! This was no normal death.”

“Good Goddess! What do you mean?” Helvia remembered that Old Scipio Carvillius had a wicked temper. He had taken his rivals to the courts and cleaned them out. So many lawsuits, so many enemies as the old adage had it.

“He came down to breakfast this morning in a bad temper, so we all avoided him. He ate alone,” Carvillia said. “I heard him cry out but by the time I arrived—he was dead.”

“My dear, what makes you think it was foul play?” Helvia asked.

“His face,” Carvillia whispered.

Helvia rose. It would do no harm to have a look at the corpse, she decided, if only to set Carvillia’s mind at rest. She bid Carvillia farewell, and told her she would be with her shortly. She sent Thallus to fetch his medicine bag. She paused only to look in on her son before she left the house. His bedroom was on the other side of the garden, a paved courtyard with potted fig and date trees. In the center of the garden a cool fountain played.

As she walked across the garden she noticed with irritation that the nursemaid was not at her post at Lucretius’ door. Gossiping in the kitchens again! She stepped into the bedroom. To her utter consternation a small dark-haired, dirty, half-naked man wearing a slave collar leaned over her son’s crib.

She stepped forwards, grabbed the back of the collar and hauled. The slave choked and sprawled, rapping his head on the tiles. Helvia stepped over him to Lucretius, who was sleeping soundly, unmarked and unharmed. She stroked her sleeping son, marveling at his downy dumpling cheek. She turned back in time to see the slave bolt across the garden and dive into the kitchen.

Felix, the head of the household slaves, appeared in the kitchen entrance. He was a big, burly man, naked to the waist.

“I am not pleased,” Helvia stated.

Felix dropped to his knees, bowed his head and spread his arms. “A thousand apologies, Domina, Iberius shall be flogged.” The name told Helvia the slave came from Iberia.

“Whip the nursemaid as well. Now order my litter. I am going out,” she said.

A litter ride through the busy streets of the Esquiline Hill brought Helvia to Carvillia’s house. The blank façade had no windows facing onto the street and the front door was locked and guarded.

The guards opened the door and Carvillia rushed forward to greet her. Helvia noted, with disapproval, the dirty floor where people had been tramping in and out with the corpse. Carvillia ushered her into the family dining room. The room was shabby and old fashioned, not the grand dining room where Old Carvillius entertained his patrons. The couches and table were good quality but they had been broken and repaired several times.

“You’re sure he was alone?’ she said to Carvillia.

“Certain. He was in a bad temper,” Carvillia said, simply. Helvia understood. The broken furniture spoke for itself. None of his household wanted to be near the paterfamilias when he was in a foul mood or he would break a chair over their heads.

Old Carvillius’ body had been removed to his bed but the meal was left untouched; bread, figs and wine. Thallus sniffed the food, and rolled pieces between his fingers to check for discoloration. He carefully ate a small piece of fig, a crumb of bread and took a sip of wine. “No poison,” he said.

“The only fig that needs be poisoned is the one he ate,” Helvia reflected. She was startled by movement behind her. A blonde-haired, blue-eyed slave woman lay on a fringed shawl near the door.

“What is that?” she said to Carvillia.

Carvillia gazed vaguely in the direction of the corner. “Servia,” she said.

Servia meant Slave. No-one had bothered to even give the woman a name.

“You said no-one was here,” Helvia pointed out.

Carvillia grew even more vague. “Oh but that is just Servia,” she said.

“Come here,” Helvia ordered.

Servia crawled towards Helvia using her elbows to propel herself forward. She wound her shawl around her elbows to protect them. The fringe of the shawl left a pattern of pock-marks in the dirt on the floor.

Thallus knelt by the creeping slave. He pulled up her shawl. Thick scars stood out in ridges across her spine. “She is paralyzed from the waist down.”

Carvillia excused herself to write letters. Helvia had clearly embarrassed her hostess by talking of old broken belongings.

Helvia stepped into the master’s bedroom to view the body. Thallus smothered a shriek. Helvia had steady nerves but she took one look then stepped back, clapping her hand to her nose. The room stank. The old man lay contorted on his bed, his face distorted, his eyes glaring. Bloody foam disfigured his lips.

Thallus crept forwards at Helvia’s gesture. He tasted the foam and spat it out at once. “Bitter.” Then he drew aside the toga to check the chest. He screamed again at what he saw. The old man’s skin was swollen tight and shiny, mottled black and green, in diamond shapes. Bloody broken skin oozed between the mottled diamonds, so they stood out like the scales of a snake.

“Carvillia was right, by the Good Goddess. This is no natural death,” Helvia said, excitement overcoming her respect for the dead.

Her next stop was the kitchens to talk to the household slaves. “You are sure there was no-one in the room when your master died?”

“Sure.”

“No-one?”

“No-one.”

“What about Servia?”

“Oh. But she is always there.” Once the slaves grasped Helvia’s insistence in regarding Servia as something other than a permanent fixture of the dining room, along with the couches and tables, they were more forthcoming. The Dominus had won Servia as part of a settlement of a lawsuit well over fifteen years ago when she was a young and valuable slave girl. He prized her as evidence of his victory over his rivals. He always kept Servia near him, and she suffered the worst of his rages. Ten years ago he broke a table over her back and crippled her, but that made no difference to his liking for her. Of course Servia would have been in the room when the Dominus ate breakfast, along with all the other old and broken furniture.

Helvia returned to the dining room and knelt by Servia. “Did you see anything strange this morning?” she asked.

Servia’s blue eyes glittered. “I saw nothing.”

Helvia rose. Had she imagined it, or had there been a glint of malicious triumph in Servia’s eyes? She studied the slave, thoughtfully. She was clean. She was able to move enough to wash herself. Helvia retraced her steps through the house to the garden, shamefacedly looking for the slave’s latrine. She found it in the damp nook off the garden. Nearby she saw the dimpled marks of Servia’s shawl in the mud.

Helvia spoke reassuringly to Carvillia and departed. Once home, she retired to her cozy nook in the foyer and considered what to do next. The house was locked and guarded. There was no way for an assassin to get in. Only a member of the household could have poisoned Old Carvillius. Servia had the opportunity and the motive: fifteen years of savage treatment. But how could a cripple crawl from the house to buy an exotic poison, and why would the master of the house wait patiently while she crept over to poison him?

Should she consult with the city magistrate? She could not bring the case directly to him, unless she involved Uncle Marius, but she could bring the matter to the attention of the magistrate’s wife, the chief priestess of the Good Goddess. She was uneasy that she had no proof. If a slave was found guilty of killing their master then all the slaves of the household were put to death. She had to consider the matter carefully before she involved the authorities.

Thallus broke into her meditations to tell her that Iberius had a broken leg. Helvia descended on the kitchen. “Was this necessary?” she snapped at Felix. Iberius’ back was a sodden mass of bruises and his shin was snapped.

“He tried to escape,” Felix growled, unrepentant.

“Never mind, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at a splint. Thallus, I want half his back covered in a poultice of cobwebs, the other half in dried boar’s dung. We’ll see which works best.”

Felix held Iberius down as she fixed the splint. “Watch out, Domina, he bites,” he said.

The splint was crooked and Iberius would walk with a limp if the limb set, but all in all she was satisfied with it as a first attempt. Iberius spat a string of threatening gibberish as she stood back to allow Thallus to lay on the poultices.

“What is he saying?” she asked.

“We don’t know, Domina,” Felix said. “It’s not Latin or Greek. We even asked an Iberian over the way to interpret and he couldn’t understand a word.”

“Now Felix, I have checked my books and I find that I have not bought an Iberian slave,” she said, pleasantly.

Felix flushed. “I was offered Iberius cheap. It was too good an opportunity to refuse,” he said.

“I was not aware that Titus dealt in such inferior stock,” she said.

“It was not Titus, but a new man, Zoninus. He had a job lot of Hispanics he wanted to get rid of.”

She decided to pay a visit to the slave market. “Return Iberius to the store once I have seen which of my poultices work best. I don’t want such a savage near my son.”

Iberius scrambled to his feet, screamed gibberish at Helvia, then spat. A small shiny pebble shot from his mouth and rolled near her feet. She took a second look and realized it was a tiny, glazed pottery toad. It gave her a start but she kept her cool, and did not recoil. Iberius’ eyes glittered with malicious triumph. She had seen the same look in Servia’s eyes. She was sure of it. She crushed the toad beneath her sandal. “Put the dust in a bowl, mix it with wine, and make him drink it,” she said.

As she returned to the foyer, she passed Lucretius playing with his nurse in the garden. Lucretius laughed when he saw her, and held up his arms to be embraced. She picked him up and kissed him on the top of his head. She greedily inhaled the clean, sweet scent of her son, olive oil, honey and cumin. A great gust of love welled up from within. She kissed him a second time and reluctantly set him down again. She wanted to visit the slave markets today. The afternoon was drawing on and as a respectable matron she couldn’t be on the streets after dark.

The slave markets were behind the Forum and the Basilica of Julius. The auctions always drew a lively crowd but Helvia viewed the drama from her litter with a distracted eye. Titus saw her coming and hurried over to welcome her. He was a large, solid man with a booming voice and a square face and a black beard. He ushered her into a curtained alcove at the back of his booth, while a favored slave brought dates and figs. She let him chat about the state of trade for a while before she introduced the real object of her visit. What had he heard of these cheap Iberians?

Titus’ genial face darkened into a scowl. “Cheaper than a Sardinian,” he grumbled. Zoninus was a newcomer, and in Titus’ opinion a fly-by-nighter. He didn’t even worship at a proper Roman temple but at some new Iberian cult by the Public Baths near the Forum. This gimmick of selling slaves cheap was a trick. Titus thought the slaves were sick and Zoninus would collect his profits then skip Rome before they died. Half the patrician families of Rome had been at that booth getting their cheap slaves, putting a dent in the profits of loyal traders like himself. When she asked if she could see Zoninus, Titus parted a curtain at the back of his booth and pointed him out.

Zoninus sat in his own curtained booth. He was a dark-headed man, like Titus, but his bulk was all fat. Helvia shuddered and looked away. The man’s face was disfigured by a birthmark. It was puffy and shiny, patterned blue and black.

“Did Scipio Carvillius get one of these cheap slaves?” she asked.

“The old skinflint was one of the first. But it didn’t work. The slave was returned a week ago. I urge you to return yours before Zoninus skips town.”

Helvia thanked Titus and left. It disturbed her that one of the Iberian slaves had been at Carvillia’s house, too. She noticed a small, raw-looking temple squatting by the wall of the Public Baths, and ordered her litter to halt. Two short, sallow foreigners rose from the steps as she got out.

“I want to talk to your priest,” she said.

They looked at her blankly, then spoke. In Hispanic. She strode up the stairs.

One of the men followed her into the temple precincts and gestured for her to wait. He ran through the dark entrance into the inner precincts. She had leisure to look around her. The temple was new and crude. The walls of the outer precincts were whitewashed but had no frescoes, and there were no statues or offerings. It was a place of stark light and deep shadows. Several snakes sunned themselves in patches of sunlight. The temple of the Good Goddess also had pet snakes. They were symbols of protection and regeneration. Although Helvia had never been here before she couldn’t shake off a puzzled feeling that the layout was deeply familiar.

A scream made her jump until she identified the sound of an animal in pain. She relaxed. It was only a sacrifice.

A tall woman wearing long robes slid from the dark entrance. She had a haughty foreign face and wore glittering earrings and a necklace of jet beads. The robes covered her feet, and gave the impression that she was gliding. She bowed her head, sinuously, as she approached. “To what do we owe the honor of your visit?” she asked, speaking Latin with a thick accent.

The wait had given Helvia time to think of a reason. “This is the new Hispanic cult?” she inquired.

“Yes,” the affirmation was a hiss.

“I was just wondering which one,” Helvia said, innocently. “My husband wrote to me from Iberia of several fertility cults which he found fascinating.”

The animal scream went on and on and on. The sacrifice was no short one.

“You are interested in our gods?” the priestess’ eyes widened into dark pools.

“I obey my husband,” Helvia said.

“Come. I will show you.” The priestess plucked a torch from the walls and glided into the dark entrance, which led into a maze of small rooms.

As Helvia followed she at last pinpointed the source of the persistent feeling of familiarity. With the identification came a sharp spurt of indignation. The temple was laid out, on a much smaller scale, in an identical manner to the temple of the Good Goddess on Aventine Hill. Why it was a deliberate desecration. Blasphemy! It was filthy, for a start. Mud and blood were tracked all over the floor. Besides, in the temple of the Good Goddess the small rooms were dispensaries, places of healing. In this black maze each room was in darkness until the priestess’s torch lit it. In each tiny, suffocating chamber an animal was being sacrificed—dogs and cats, then cows and goats, and in the innermost, sows and horses. The sight of the animals made Helvia nauseous; they were part flayed, eviscerated, crippled, yet kept alive in a most abominable manner. She gulped and stopped, trying not to be sick.

The priestess’ eyes glittered with dark, malicious humor. She knew what ailed Helvia. “These sacrifices are for the glory of our god, the great Not-to-Be-Named,” she said.

“That’s—fascinating,” Helvia managed. A snake slithered past. Startled she saw it was no harmless python but a hooded Egyptian cobra. “Look out, it is venomous,” she gasped.

“Ah, the pet, he will not harm me,” the priestess said fondly.

As Helvia watched the snake she saw a peculiar track along the floor, a pattern of pock-marks in the mud as if left by the fringe of a shawl. The pattern was unmistakable. How could Servia, the crippled slave, have crept all the way here? She recovered her composure. The priestess was watching her intently. “How interesting,” Helvia murmured.

“So your husband wrote to you from Iberia?” the priestess said. “Then perhaps you understand. If a people have been invaded, conquered and enslaved don’t they have the right to use any weapon they have to wage war on their oppressor, even terror?”

This nonsense restored Helvia to herself. “We brought civilization to the Iberian savages. You should kiss the hems of our togas,” she said.

They had stopped by the dark door to the inner sanctum. A damp, earthy draft came from the door. A muffled drumming came from below, then suddenly a shrill scream. Helvia jumped. It was an animal. It must be an animal. Yet it sounded human.

“You have seen enough, I think,” the priestess said.

Helvia agreed. She returned to her litter, and measured the distance from the Iberian temple to Carvillia’s house. Her confidence wavered. There was no way a cripple could crawl that far without being trampled into the muck. The marks in the temple must be the tracks of a snake.

The next morning she dispatched Thallus to the libraries. “Look for any reference to an Iberian god called the great Not-to-Be-Named,” she said. She sent a letter to Carvillia, asking after her Iberian slave. Then Felix reported that Iberius had caught fever.

Helvia rose, exasperated by the slave’s obstinacy. “Fetch the longest tooth of a black dog,” she ordered.

Iberius’s face shone with sweat, and his eyes were sunken. Helvia checked her poultices. She was pleased to see that the wounds under the cobwebs were healing, while those under the boar’s dung were suppurating. Her experiment was a success.

Felix fixed the dog’s tooth on a chain around Iberius’ neck. That brought Iberius round. He muttered something that sounded like sense. Helvia leaned close to hear. “To you, great Not-to-Be-Named,” he muttered, disjointedly. He opened his eyes, malicious triumph shining in his gaze. He spat.

Helvia stepped swiftly back as a small shiny object shot from his mouth and rolled near her feet. She thought it was another pottery frog until it uncoiled itself, pallid and glistening, and spread out two toad-feet. She did not hesitate. She squashed it flat. Blood spurted beneath her sandal. She scooped the remains into a cup then added wine. “Drink your own curse, you foul Iberian dog.” She poured the crushed toad straight back down his throat again.

Iberius screamed, a long low animal whine. His eyes glazed, and he convulsed. Bloody froth ran from his lips as he bit his tongue. Then his body contorted and stiffened. Black and green markings appeared on his skin in diamond patterns, then the skin broke. Foul black blood spurted around the diamonds. He writhed and died like a crushed snake.

Thallus returned in the afternoon. He had found a reference to the great Not-to-Be-Named in a military records office. It was a god worshipped by wild hill tribes of the Pyrenees near the town of Pompelo. Several centuries ago, a provincial quaestor called Lucius Caelius Rufus had filed a report on them. Rufus called the hill tribes the Miri Nigri, the Strange Dark Folk, and said the local Celtiberians feared them. The Miri Nigri spoke a language that no Roman, Celtiberian, nor Gaul could understand. That sounded like Iberius all right. They were rebellious and Rufus led the 5th cohort of the XIIth Legion against them. The record ended abruptly on the eve of the last day of October.

“Caelius Rufus was a civil official. We can find out all about him,” Helvia said, impatiently, sending Thallus straight back out again, this time to the Tabularium, the official records office near the Forum Romanum. “You’ll be there and back before nightfall, if you run.”

As Thallus left, a slave arrived with a letter from Carvillia which said her Iberian slave had been returned to the dealer after he was caught talking to Servia. Helvia shuddered. She wondered if one of those poisonous toads, placed among the fruit, could be mistaken for a fig.

She was inattentive during the morning salutio, and forgot several of her clients’ names. Afterwards, she dictated a report on the new Iberian cult, that the so-called Iberian slaves were the Miri Nigri, part of a rebellious plot by Zoninus and his priestess. The slaves were sent into households to find weak points. In Carvillia’s house they discovered Servia. Helvia was proud of herself. There were no weak points in her house. Iberius had been reduced to creeping around to spy on a sleeping child. She waited impatiently for Thallus to return. The afternoon wore on. At last she could endure no more. She ordered her litter and returned to slave market, determined to talk to Zoninus.

Titus met her with raised hands. “Too late,” he boomed. “The snake has fled.” Zoninus’ stall was empty, his stock gone. Titus thought he was already halfway back to Iberia.

She had one other trail to follow. She headed for the Public Baths near the Forum, and left her litter in the courtyard. She walked through the baths, past the gymnasia, libraries and shops, and into the public lavatory at the back. The lavatory, she calculated, shared a wall with the Iberian temple.

The latrine was paved in marble and ornamented with a statue of Hygeia. It was roofed but there was a gap between the roof and the top of the walls, to air the chamber. The walls were too high to climb but the statue provided convenient hand-holds. The gap at the top was wide enough for a nimble woman to crawl through. Praising Galen for his ball exercises, Helvia climbed the statue. From the top of the wall she looked down into a dirty, deserted courtyard. Several snakes lay sleeping in the sun.

There was no handy statue or vine to climb down. Making a mental note of the location of the snakes, she lowered herself over the wall and dropped. She sprawled backwards, rolled over on her stomach and came to an abrupt halt. A cobra reared before, his hood extended. She had missed him by a hands-width. “Praise Hygeia!” she gasped.

She lay still until the snake lowered his hood. Then she rose, slowly, crossed the courtyard and peered through the doorway into the temple. She hurried into the dark, anxious to leave the snake behind, and headed towards the inner sanctum. She had no doubt what to do next. The city magistrate could not act on reports of animal sacrifice, however cruel. The cult would argue they were sacred mysteries. But if she uncovered evidence of human sacrifice he would be forced to act.

She stole along the dark passageways, expecting with every footfall to find a snake. Pitiful cries came from the mutilated beasts left to die in the dark. Then she heard footsteps ahead. She whisked aside into one of the rooms. A torch flared. She glimpsed a familiar face; the mottled features of Zoninus. He had not fled Rome after all.

A faint twittering sounded around her, and the air was filled with fluttering. In the torchlight she saw that larks were pinioned to the walls by their wings. Their breasts were flayed so she could see their tiny hearts beat. Zoninus passed by. The torchlight faded. She slipped out of the room with a shudder.

She reached the inner sanctum at last. The air was foul, the chamber dark, and the only sound was from below: the monotonous distant rhythm of the drums and screams. For the first time she hesitated. “I am not going to be scared by this pack of jackals,” she told herself. But she could not take one step inside. Bona Dea! This sanctum held a perversion of all that was good and great and holy. Such vile mysteries should not be lightly disturbed.

Torchlight shone from around the corner. Someone was coming. She overcame her reluctance and hurried into the sanctum. An indistinct mass moved and rustled on the left-hand wall. She wondered what animal was being tortured, but whatever it was made no sound.

A strong draft came from the far side of the sanctum, where deeper darkness pooled—stairs leading down. From below came the maddening sound of drums and screams, and a new sound of rushing water. She remembered the great Cloaca Maximus sewer ran below. The Forum baths fed their wastewater into it. Then the torchlight came nearer. She heard the voice of the priestess.

On the right hand wall stood a statue, a huge, rough toad-like lump. She whisked herself behind it and flattened herself against the stone. It was cold and slimy and unpleasant. She was just in time. The priestess came in talking to someone, thankfully in Latin.

“All Praise the great Not-to-Be-Named for our success,” the priestess chanted.

“All praise!” echoed another voice—which Helvia recognized.

Helvia peered around the statue. The priestess stood alone, hands raised before the mass on the wall. Helvia saw with fright and disgust that it was a writhing curtain of snakes.

“All praise,” the voice said again. “They threw me out as rubbish. They threw out the murderer without a thought.”

At last Helvia realized the direction of the sound. She looked down.

Servia lay coiled on the ground. She moved into the sanctum on her shoulders and ribs, her arms clapped flat to her side and her head raised. Her body moved with sinuous grace, inhuman, boneless and fluid. She reached the far side but the wall did not stop her. She simply wound her way upwards. Halfway up she turned her head one-eighty degrees to watch the priestess.

Helvia flattened herself behind the statue again.

The priestess started chanting, in the same gibberish that Iberius had spoken. The writhing curtain of snakes parted.

Helvia abruptly realized she could not stay here one more moment. There was a darkness in the sanctum that was animate and implacable. Her sanity would not survive. With a detached medical eye she noticed the first proof she was losing her senses, as the clammy stone of the statue stirred.

Servia and the priestess were intent on their devotions. Helvia crept from the room without looking at what they worshipped. She fled through the maze of torture without heeding where she trod. She slipped out the entrance, and thankfully gulped the sane, smoky, fishy air of Rome. She returned to the baths, flung herself into her litter and thrust the curtains closed. “Home!”

Thallus waited for her in the foyer. His news was grim. Caelius Rufus’s expedition against the Miri Nigri was a debacle. The entire cohort, three hundred men, were massacred. Lucius Caelius Rufus perished with them.

This was what she needed, proof that the Miri Nigri were dangerous. She finished her report, and her fright receded as she reviewed her results. She had not uncovered evidence of human sacrifice but she had uncovered something equally damning: black magic. She added a letter and signed it Marius, then went straight to the wife of the city magistrate.

There the matter rested for a few days. Helvia held her salutio and attended a lavish dinner. She ordered Lucretius sets of carved ivory letters in Latin and Greek, so he could learn his alphabet by playing with them. Then a bewildered Uncle Marius received a letter from the city magistrate. Helvia soothed him, and read the letter. It promised swift action. At her next salutio she heard the result. The Iberian slaves were rounded up and executed. Zoninus’ shop was sealed. The Iberian temple was shut. She heard nothing of Servia, Zoninus or the priestess but the news sounded final enough.

Helvia gave thanks at the temple of Hygeia, then visited Carvillia. As she entered the house she stepped into the shabby family dining room. This time she looked up. Imprinted in the soot on the ceiling was the final, irrefutable proof: the pockmarks of Servia’s shawl. She shuddered at the horrible dark vision of Servia creeping across the ceiling and spitting the murderous toad into her master’s meal.

Helvia sat down with Carvillia, and broke the news of the murderer. “Savage usage drove Servia mad so she sought vengeance with black magic,” she explained.

Carvillia’s soft, pretty features collapsed. “But I threw her out with the rest of the rubbish,” she wailed.

“Do not fear, my dear,” Helvia embraced her. “The city magistrate will not let her escape.”

Carvillia pushed her away, and stood with fists clenched. The murderous rage of her father suddenly shaped the young bones of her face. She summoned her guards. “Take the slaves away. Kill them all,” she ordered.

“You don’t have to put them all to death,” Helvia said, horrified. “Servia is the only guilty one, and she is gone.”

“It is the law. It is my right,” Carvillia proclaimed.

Nothing Helvia could say would persuade the girl to mercy. Sickened by the injustice, she left Carvillia as the guards whipped the weeping slaves from the house.

She visited Titus, and found him poor company. Legionaries had ransacked Zoninus’ shop, and taken all his records. Such violence was bad for business, Titus complained. Indeed, the slave market was not its usual bustling self. Trade was slack and crowds were thin. Many stalls were empty.

Smoke rose from fires on the horizon. There were always fires, somewhere in Rome, but this smoke struck Helvia as ominous. It was as though it obeyed some sinister yet undefined pattern.

She turned for home. As her litter passed the Iberian temple she raised the curtain and looked out. The building had collapsed. Smoke rose from the ruins. Would she ever know the fate of Servia, Zoninus or the priestess?

The bathhouse next door was intact. She stopped to talk to the proprietor. He was a tall, ascetic man with a shaved head, a disciple of Aesculapius, and normally a picture of calm. Today his serenity was shattered.

The water of the baths ran thick, red and stinking. All customers had fled. The cause was the temple next door, the proprietor said. Legionaries had gone in and not returned, so their legatus ordered the building razed. After its collapse the Cloaca Maxima was blocked, the water flooded red, and noises were heard in the depths.

Helvia felt a vast pounding beneath her feet, as though a giant were running the length of the sewer. The murky water bubbled and heaved. The proprietor’s face showed his utter fright.

The visit intensified her unease. She hurried home, seeking refuge from this strange, foreign Rome. As she alighted from her litter at her front door a man brushed past and muttered. “To you, great Not-to-Be-Named.”

Had she imagined it? The man was gone.

She hurried inside and felt reassured by calm and tranquility of her house. Uncle Marius dozed over Cato’s On Agriculture in his study. She kissed his bald head. He woke with a start. “Has anyone come in?” she asked.

“Not a mouse,” he replied.

“Are you sure?”

“I have been reading here. I would have noticed any visitor,” he said, with quiet dignity.

She stepped out into the garden. The fountain played soothingly, but the water was tinged red. The smoke from the fires filled the air until even the sunlight seemed congealed. The nursemaid sat at Lucretius’ door, shelling peas. She looked up as Helvia appeared.

“All well?” Helvia asked, reassured.

The girl smiled.

A cry came from inside the room.

“Lucretius,” Helvia cried, and rushed for her darling boy. The sluggish sunlight dissolved into dreadful memory: Iberius leaning over the cradle. That was when she knew, with dreadful certainty, that the Miri Nigri had found a weak point after all.

The thing in the cradle was mottled and shapeless like a toad, but it raised two boneless arms to be embraced.

***

It fell to Uncle Marius to tell the family’s clients that Helvia had retired to the country to raise her son in the peaceful rusticity of the family estate at Tusculum.

Lines in the Sand

by Tom Lynch

Caius stood by the columns just inside the house and looked out onto the balcony and beyond. Her ladyship, Domina Julianna, was busy reclining on her new silk couch behind imported lace curtains, which, frankly, was the best way to behold her. The years had not been kind. Mind you, she’d never been the great beauty she considered herself to be, but people put up with it because her late husband, General Arrius Primus, had been so kind and charming to everyone. It was serving in the army with that great man that led Caius here. Officially, his title was attaché to his lordship, but his role went way beyond that. Given his military background, and his work with spy networks, he was more of an underestimated bodyguard and finder, in addition to being responsible for the day-to-day management of the estate. After the general left this plane for the Underworld, Caius had stayed on as “head of household” while continuing his previous work for his lord’s widow, out of respect for the late general.

And now, here they all were, exiled to Syria by Roman society. It was quite funny if you thought about it. Julianna was so loathed by absolutely everyone, that her circle conspired a way to be rid of her. They convinced her multitude of surgeons, priests, and healers that the only way she could live more than a few months would be to relocate to these desert climes. Upon suggesting somewhere in Eyptos, Julianna was told that humidity from the Mediterranean and the Nile would irritate a rare skin condition, turning her ever-so-lovely complexion greenish. So putting her bravest face on it, Domina Julianna relocated here. Alone. With none of her “friends” to accompany her.

It wouldn’t be so bad, Caius thought, if she wasn’t convinced that she was Venus incarnate. It was one thing to be at least moderately attractive and throw yourself at every male in the vicinity, but when someone like Julianna did it, the result was horrifying. Bachelors were caught unawares and netted by her overly-perfumed, meaty hands. Caius shuddered. She’d even approached him shortly after the general’s death, but with some quick thinking, he’d lied saying he was a eunuch, and would be unable to satisfy her needs. He shuddered again, and walked back into the house.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of running sandaled feet. One of the maidservants dashed up to him. All of the servants in the household were female for the simple reason that it helped to avoid uncomfortable situations. There were male slaves who were used for such purposes, though. “Oh!” she breathed. “I found you. Good. Her ladyship has a visitor! A man!”

Caius’ eyes bulged. “She has what? Say it again, Antonia.”

“She has a gentleman visitor!” Antonia cried.

“Gods! Very well. Where is this visitor?”

“He’s in the vestibule. It is just one man, but he says he represents a powerful neighbor and asks for an audience.”

“He will have it. This will lift her spirits no end. Is he at least well-formed? Her ladyship will most certainly need a good servicing.”

The young woman shuddered. “I, uh. I don’t know, Sir.”

“How can you not know?”

“His raiment is strange to me. He is completely covered in loose garments, and his face is behind a veil.”

“In this heat? Gods. A local minor noble, perhaps. Well, he’ll have to do. You go tell her ladyship while I alert the kitchens to send refreshment.” Caius had served in the legion in this part of the Empire almost 20 years ago during the wars with Parthia, and the description didn’t sound familiar. Nevertheless, he wouldn’t let that stand in the way of satisfying Lady Julianna’s needs.

Sometime later, with slaves waving palm fronds about overhead, they all sat in the shade watching the shadows lengthen between the dunes. Platters of seasoned dates and carafes of chilled, spiced wine were passed around frequently, yet their guest remained covered. He slipped food and drink behind his veil while he talked of the wonders they could achieve if some agreement were met.

“Your ladyship would have riches beyond imagining,” their guest said.

Her ladyship sighed. “Money I have, Sir. What I miss, what I no longer have, what I truly pine for is companionship. Specifically,” she continued, favoring her guest with a yellow-toothed smile while waving everyone away, “male companionship.”

Caius led the staff in a subtle, quiet retreat from the balcony, but he himself stayed behind one of the columns, in case he was needed. He still served as bodyguard for her ladyship, and he hoped his services would not be needed, since no one really knew who this visitor was.

He did his best not to hear the muttered whisperings and the hushed chuckles, until he was jolted forward by a shriek of terror.

“Get him away from meeee!” Julianna cried.

Caius launched around the corner, gladius in hand, to see the guest concealing himself behind his flowing robes and veil. “Back, servant!” the man hissed. Caius stopped, finding himself unable to move further. “Beware, harlot! You have offended me, so you have offended my king. In so doing, you have cursed yourself and all in this house.” He then spun and leapt over the balcony railing. Suddenly released, Caius ran forward to look for a sprawled form below, but saw their guest running faster than the swiftest steed out into the twilit desert.

He turned back to his mistress who was weeping uncontrollably, clutching her semi-removed clothing to her body. Try as he might, Caius was unable to soothe her. Moments later, her personal maid arrived, and Caius had the maid escort her ladyship to bed with instructions to give her a powder to help her relax and sleep. He then stalked back to the balcony’s edge, and looked out into the growing darkness. Just who or what was that visitor? There were questions that needed answers.

“I-i-it was a creature from Haaaadeeees!” her ladyship wailed the next morning as her staff sat around her in the bedroom.

“Domina, please,” Caius said. “I need details! I will find this demon, but I need information!”

“How can you be so calculating at a time like this, Caius? The Underworld is rising up to swallow us all! We’re doomed!”

Caius sighed, “Very well, Domina. As you say.”

“You see?” she declared with renewed vigor. “Even the wise Caius agrees!” and then she began to weep and wail again.

Caius strode out of the house and gestured to the stable boy for his horse. He wasn’t sure who he’d go see first, but he had to figure out who this bastard was, and what he wanted with Lady Julianna. The young slave boy brought Caius’ horse over to him and held the animal so Caius could mount up. As he trotted out the main gate, he stopped suddenly. There, sticking in the stout wood of the gate, was an ornate dagger holding a strip of fabric to the door. Caius leaned over in his saddle to examine it. While it has once been a very fine blade indeed, it was now old, pitted, and hadn’t been well cared for. His years of military training railed against this offense to such fine craftsmanship. The strip of fabric was a faded off-white color made of a loose weave, and it fluttered in the light breeze. Caius looked closer, but the strip of cloth wouldn’t stop moving. He was sure there was writing there, but he simply couldn’t read it.

“Slave!” he called out. The young stable boy rushed forward again, bowing and wiping his hands on his dirty loincloth. He was a native to these parts, maybe eleven years of age, sold to them as part of the estate. “Fetch that blade for me.”

The boy reached up, and stopped. His eyes grew wide, and he stumbled back.

“What is it?” Caius asked. “Do as you’re told, or you will be beaten!”

“Sir!” he cried. “Dominus. Please. You do not understand. This is a very bad thing. A curse. The whole house is doomed now.”

Caius hawked and spat in the dirt. “Bring me a rag. Now.”

The slave dashed off to do as he was bidden, and came back with a large piece of cloth. Caius snatched it out of the slave’s hand and wrapped it around the dagger, and wrenched it out of the door, being careful to get the ribbon of fabric fixed to the door by the dagger, and wrapped the whole thing in the square of cloth. He pulled his horse’s head around and galloped off to the local garrison.

***

“I don’t give damn what you think, Centurion!” boomed the voice from inside the garrison’s headquarters. “I want evidence! I didn’t ask for analysis, but I did ask for facts. You have six hours to provide those facts or your head will decorate a pilum at the gates!”

Caius’ face split into an evil grin. It felt like yesterday that he served in this region under Furius Magnus, known by his men as “Hell Belly.” He’d been on the receiving end of that thunderous voice more than once. It was a joy when the General Arrius came into camp and commandeered the “promising young tribune” and made him his attaché.

The centurion trotted out of the legion commander’s office and disappeared out into the square. Caius poked his head in. And pulled it back as a wine goblet hurtled at his head. “Gods, man! Is this how you treat old friends?”

“Who’s there?” shouted the commander from inside. “Another of my useless staff?”

“I’ve been called many things, Magnus, but ‘useless’ was never one of them,” Caius said, peering around the corner again.

“Caius, you sneaky bastard!” the commander strode forward with arms open.

The two men embraced. “Much better,” Caius said. “That’s a description I agree with at least.”

“How long has it been? Not almost 20 years!”

“Eighteen years since I was allowed to leave Damascus.”

“You could have served the legions so much better if you’d stayed here by my side as spymaster. You had such promise as my tribune.”

“That’s a matter of opinion, Magnus. I rather like how things have turned out, and I’m in a better position now than I would have been if I’d stayed in the military. Besides, had I stayed, you might not have climbed to Legion Legate. You’ve done well for yourself, my friend.”

“I love it here. Just think if you’d stayed, though. Gotten yourself a nice local girl for a wife as I have. Talk about exotic spices, let me tell you!” he boomed. Then leaned in to whisper loudly, “And I’m not talking about the food, either!”

Caius grinned and shook his head. “My path was a good one. I’m pleased how it turned out.”

The commander shrugged. “There is that. As you say: a matter of opinion. Now what brings you to my camp?”

“This,” said Caius, bringing out the dagger and unwrapping it, holding it out for him to see.

Magnus cried out and leapt back, as if confronted by a basket of writhing asps. “Get that thing away from me! Out! Get it out of here, Caius! Now!”

Caius paled. Anything that scared a man like Magnus must indeed be a terrible thing. Caius hurriedly wrapped his bundle and left the building. He went around to his horse, and looked around. Now what was he going to do? He’d have to rely on a local sage, which meant money, and likely a great deal of it to keep minds focused and mouths shut. He was about to mount up, when a legionnaire approached him. He saluted, and at Caius’ return salute, he said “The legate will see you by the gate, but…um…he told me to say to ‘keep your bloody curses to yourself.’”

Caius grinned. “Very well, Legionnaire. Thank you.”

He stuffed the bundle in a saddle bag, noticing that the fabric wrapping the dagger had started to pull apart. He’d been sure it was a fresh piece of cloth earlier. He’d have to talk with that slave in the stables when he got back: giving his betters tattered rags was unacceptable. Leaving his horse where it was, he walked over to the gate. Magnus came out shortly and took him by the arm. “Listen, Whiplash,” the commander said. Caius smiled at the use of his old nickname. He still liked that moniker. “I have enough trouble with the Jews making as much trouble as they are. The last thing I need is any of the locals seeing a death curse like that in the camp.”

“A death curse? But what can you tell me about it?”

“Not much, but every time anything like that has appeared, decay and death have followed, and it was never pretty. A wasting disease, open sores, and a slow cruise across the Styx.”

“How do I protect Her Ladyship? Can you spare me some regulars so I have some bodies to put between this threat and her?”

“That I cannot my friend. With the troubles off to the south and west, I don’t even have enough men here to form a solid cohort. However, I think I can help guide you to one who can help. There’s a man in the market you can go see. Give him this coin. It’s a sign. He’ll know that I sent you. He may look like a local beggar, but he’s one of my best operatives, even compared to you.”

Caius arched an eyebrow.

“Yes, Caius, he is that good. And don’t show him the bloody dagger in public. I don’t want a riot in the market on my hands, but describe it, and he can tell you what he knows. He’s closer to this sort of thing than I am.”

“This thing is that bad?”

“The locals certainly think it is. It’s only happened a handful of times in the years that I’ve been stationed out here, but every time, we all hear about it and no good comes of it.”

Caius shook his head and sighed.

“Caius,” the commander said. “If anyone can find a way to beat this thing it’s you. I believe that. But other than this, how are you enjoying life back in the Eastern Provinces?” Magnus grinned at him and winked.

“Between the complete lack of weather other than hot and dry, and the complete lack of diversion for her ladyship, I do believe I’m coming to my wits’ end!”

The commander thumped Caius on the back. “That’s the spirit old friend. Off with you. Happy hunting.”

***

Caius flipped the crippled beggar the coin he’d been given, and the little man on the ground let out a cry, “Ah! Efendi! How may I serve your graciousness?”

“Walk a ways with me, my good man, and tell me a story.”

“Oh-Ho! Hassan knows a great many stories,” said the cripple as his clambered to his twisted feet.

Caius beckoned, and Hassan followed. “I’m interested in one story in particular, and it involves a pitted dagger with a strip of fabric hanging from the tip of the blade.”

Hassan stumbled and Caius spun to catch him. As he did, Hassan leaned in and whispered in his ear, “Ride home with haste, Efendi, and I will see if the legate can spare any men. I will meet you at Lady Julianna’s estate within two hours. Pray to your gods that you are not too late.”

The cripple turned and hobbled off in the opposite direction, leaving Caius feeling a sudden chill.

***

Charging up to the gate, Caius could already see that something was very wrong. The heavy wooden doors hung open, but that was nothing unusual. The way they hung, though, spoke volumes. There was a feel of impending desolation about the place, and it filled Caius with dread. He looked closely at the doors as he rode up, and they looked as if they’d aged years in the hours he’d been away, the wood now dried and split.

He entered the courtyard, and his fears were confirmed. He heard the sound of a wailing woman. He dismounted and called for a slave, but it was a slave woman who came out, weeping and collapsing with grief. “My son!” she said. “He was my only son. My only boy.”

Caius looked at her. “What happened, Slave?”

“He fell ill after you left, Dominus. In his ravings from a high fever, he said ‘The King is coming!’ Then he fainted and never woke up! Oh, my poor boy!”

Caius swore, and brought his horse into the stable himself. He ran into the house and checked with her ladyship’s head maid. “How is her ladyship, Sabina?”

“Still troubled, Caius, but otherwise she is well.”

“Good. Keep an eye on everyone who comes close— On second thought, don’t let anyone other than yourself into her presence for the time being. One of the stable boys fell ill and died.”

“Oh my g—”

“Be still! We mustn’t let too many suspect anything is wrong, but that visitor we had may well have caused some real trouble. A dagger I found stuck in the door frightened the boy badly, and though he touched it, he wouldn’t fetch it down for me, and now he’s dead, mere hours later.”

“Fates preserve us!”

“I hope that they may. I have one of Magnus’ men coming over shortly, please have one of your girls show him straight in to me.” Caius spun on his heel and walked out.

Once in his rooms, being careful not to touch any part of the dagger or strip of cloth, he spread them out on his table to examine them both. The cloth he had wrapped them in crumbled and turned to dust as he unfolded the fabric. He wrenched his hands back and away. Somehow, this dagger was infecting everything that touched it with a wasting disease. Swallowing hard, Caius continued his examination. The dagger had a curved blade, in keeping with the style of the area. The blade, as he’d noted before, was pitted, but was once made of very good quality metal. It was as if it had been left to the elements, and exposed to considerable mistreatment over years and years, just as it did to everything that it touched over the span of hours.

Moving over to the cloth, he looked closely at the yellowed strip. For some reason, this was immune to the effects of the dagger, and that made it important. There were ink markings over it, seemingly in a random pattern. He looked at where the ink ran off the edges and then it hit him. “How could I have been so stupid?” he hissed at himself. It was a scytale; he was sure of it. Spies had been using this method of communication since the Spartans started doing it over 500 years ago. He looked around the room, and finally his eyes settle on a pole with a hook on one end that he used to open the windows set high in the wall of his room. Carefully taking a corner of the fabric, pinched between folds of a fresh rag, Caius lifted the strip and wound it around the pole. His pole was a little too thick, but now he could see the beginnings of writing, and what it spelled.

“Sir?” came a voice from the doorway.

Caius’ head shot upright as he reached for a weapon.

The man backed away, and Caius recognized him as the beggar from the marketplace, but cleaned up, and without faking twisted legs. “Ah! Sorry…you startled me. Come, see what I’ve found so far.”

The beggar-spy came over next to Caius, and the two shifted the fabric back and forth until they worked out what it said: “Welcome, supplicants, to the Court of the King.”

The two men looked at each other, Caius wearing an expression of confusion and the spy an expression of worry. “What is it?” Caius asked.

Before he heard an answer, a loud clattering sound startled both men. They looked down, only to see the pole had broken, right where the fabric had been wrapped around it. Caius grabbed the pole, and looked at it. The whole section that had been covered by the fabric had completely rotted through, and as it grew weak, the weight of both ends snapped it in half, dropping both halves to the floor.

“What in Hades is going on here?” Caius roared.

“This is a terrible curse indeed, Sir,” the spy answered. He then turned and looked at the table again. “See! Look at your table around the dagger!”

Caius looked and saw that the wood all around where the dagger lay was dried out, twisted, and cracked, and the decay was spreading. Almost as he watched, Caius could see the dry rot spreading out over the table. His eyes wide, Caius snatched the dagger off the table with his rag.

“So,” Caius began. “You’re saying that these items: this dagger and this strip of cloth, are somehow causing things and people to decay and die simply by touching them?”

“I’m not saying that, Sir, but the evidence is there. That would be my assessment based on what we’ve seen, and what you’ve told me.”

Caius shivered despite the heat. He was sweating more than he should have been, too. His stomach twisted. How was he going to get out of this one? He’d been in plenty of bad situations in his past, as regular military, as a spy, and even as the finder and head-of-household for his lordship the general. Caius took a deep, long breath and rubbed his face. “All right. What can you tell me about who sent this? Who are these people, and what king are they talking about.”

The spy turned to the door, and walked over and closed it. “I apologize for the presumption, Sir, but some of what I have to say may unsettle some in the house. I don’t have much, though, because we’re dealing with local myths and legends. These curses, though, when they happen, are very real, and I’ve never heard of anyone surviving them.”

“Charming,” Caius growled. “Now some information, please.”

“Very well. According to what information I have, we’re dealing with the inhabitants of Carcosa, a mythical place not of this earth. People are taken there, and they never return. The king they mention is often called the King in Yellow, but there is no record of any name for that sovereign. They attack by attempting innocuous contact, and if all goes well, then people are invited to join the visitor on a trip back to his land. The guests go with him, to this Carcosa, and never return, their fate a mystery. If the initial visit does not go well, they deliver curses like the one you have here, and the people gradually sicken and die, and buildings decay and turn to dust. All of this usually happens in the course of days.”

Caius stood silent for a moment. “Very well, now what do we do? What can we do?”

“I have no information of anyone combating this and being victorious.”

Caius narrowed his eyes. “Combat you say? What if we bring the fight to them?”

“There was one story of a cohort north of here. They were being menaced by shadowy beings in the distance who, it turns out, were denizens of Carcosa. The legionnaires attacked. They charged into the desert.”

“And?”

“And nothing! That’s all. They charged into the desert and were never seen again. Almost five hundred men. Gone.”

Caius blew out a breath. “All right. Well, we have to leave, but while we do that, we’ll need to build up some outer defenses. The dagger was left in the door, which is already showing signs of rot. If we build outer walls and fences, that should buy us some time, no?”

“Perhaps. I’ve not heard of anyone trying that approach to this. Hopefully, this will be successful, and I’ll pass on the information.”

“Speaking of passing on information, please tell Magnus of my plans, and ask again for some men to help me. We now know what we’re dealing with, and how little time we have—”

A series of muffled thuds came from outside. Caius reached into a trunk and strapped on his sword, and ran to the door. He was met by one of the younger maids. “Sabina bids you come outside to the eastern wall.”

“Let’s go,” Caius said, and the three ran outside.

What they found stopped Caius in his tracks. His mouth hung open. There, all along the eastern edge of the estate, was a crumbled wreck of a wall. No siege engines had been used. No catapults had leveled these stones. No, this wall that had been perfectly sound just the other day was now a waist-high mound of chipped boulders and rubble. This was no longer a wall, but a broken farmer’s fence that would fail to keep goats contained. Caius ran a hand over his graying, close-cropped hair.

“Look!” the beggar-spy cried, pointing out into the desert to the east.

Caius looked up, and saw there, among the wavering heat-shimmers and phantom bodies of water caused by mirages, stood several figures. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, or perhaps it was the heat, but the people standing out there seemed to fade in and out of visibility. One minute they were there and solid, the next they were only partially there, and then they were gone. Then the process started all over again.

Caius turned to the spy. “Tell Magnus that we are about to be invaded by men from Carcosa, and we need his legion to muster just beyond our eastern wall. The enemy is at Rome’s eastern gate, and we must not let them in.”

The spy saluted, and dashed away.

Caius turned to the girl that Sabina had sent, who was still gaping at the destruction and the ghostly creatures in the distance. “Tell Sabina to make ready for immediate travel. Her ladyship leaves tonight. We travel light and fast, as if Cerberus were nipping at our very heels.”

The girl nodded and ran off.

***

Within an hour, Lady Julianna had been sedated and laid on a curtained litter in the courtyard. Meanwhile slaves and servants bustled to pack horses and camels with the essentials to a trip south to Damascus and then on to points west.

At the opposite end of the estate, Caius sat atop his horse, armored as he’d been years ago with Magnus in the First Adiutrix, carrying his shield emblazoned with the company’s emblem: the Pegasus. He shifted and adjusted the 20-year-old armor, listening to the leather straps creak. He could have worn some something newer, but he liked the idea of standing with his old commanding officer in uniform. If he arrived in time. Or at all.

Standing by his side were the few able-bodied males he had on staff. They were really just five untrained male slaves and two boys. They held their spears as ordered, but fear rose off them like a stench. Caius trotted his horse to the ruins of the eastern wall, now little more than a mound of heavy sand. He kept glancing back toward the road, hoping Magnus’ men would arrive. While it hadn’t yet been an hour, it felt like several lifetimes to Caius.

The sound of distant marching feet had never thrilled Caius so much. There, riding at the head of a column of 300 men, rode Legion Legate Furius Magnus, and even though it was fully 180 men short of a fully cohort, the sight would make any enemy tremble. Even with only that many men, Roman Legions were a sight to behold, putting steel in allies’ spines and water into enemies’ veins. Caius looked sidelong at the phantom enemy in the desert, and hoped they felt such fear.

He rode over and stood with the legate as the men gathered into formation, and he could feel their hesitation as the enemy loomed on the horizon. Their usual resolve lagged and shifted as they stood awaiting orders. He could see the men shifting their weight from foot to foot, adjusting their grips on their weapons. The same feeling ran through his own stomach. Caius turned to Magnus. “Yes, Caius, I feel it too. We’d be best served getting this done sooner rather than later, so the men don’t have too much time to think about it.”

Caius’ mouth was too dry to speak, so he only nodded.

“Men!” roared Hell Belly. “The Roman Legion has faced enemies untold and emerged victorious. That will not change today. No force on earth is as feared as we are. Our enemies quake as we stand before them. We are Rome. And today, we are here to send these creatures back where they came from!”

The men cheered, and even Caius grinned. Hell Belly was good. He was very good.

They turned and rode out to face the invaders, gaining speed as they got nearer. The opposing army started to move, but not advance. They seemed to be shifting position. As the First Audiutrix bore down on them, all they did was part so there was a path down the middle, and someone was coming forward. Riding on a palanquin born by men crawling on all fours was a tall, gaunt figure, dressed entirely in yellow, with a hood concealing his face.

Despite themselves, the Roman advance slowed. Their enemy wasn’t riding out to meet them. So what were they doing?

“Legate? Magnus! What now?” Caius asked.

“The time for talking is passed. If they’d wanted to parley, perhaps they shouldn’t have cursed your household.”

“Good,” growled Caius, and dug his heels into his horse’s flanks, and drew his gladius.

The charge began again, but it had lost momentum. The infantry behind had fallen out of step. Faces could be seen paling as the silent enemy merely sent the one man forward. The slender figure raised his hands. In his right hand, he held a staff with a strange insignia at one end. The symbol seemed to shift and twist the longer it was beheld. The left hand was empty, and with it, he motioned for the advancing army to halt.

Caius heard Hell Belly try for a contemptuous chuckle, but the sound became an uncomfortable cough and the legate signaled a stop. “Caius,” his old commander started. Caius turned to him, and saw that his face was pale and sweaty. This was the man who’d led hundreds in battle in the campaign against Parthia almost 20 years ago. This was a career soldier, a commander, the fearless leader, and he looked like he was ready to drop to the ground and vomit. “I don’t know if we can win this,” Magnus said.

“I- I understand.” Caius stuttered. He felt the sweat trickle down his back. As a spy, he dealt with intelligence. Knowledge. Knowing what he was up against. This was different. He knew little, and what he did know did not bode well at all.

Magnus turned to his men, and ordered them to stand at attention, doing his best not to let his fear be seen by his men. They felt it though, as Caius did. They all felt it. These creatures were doing something, unmanning them all. Caius wished he could feel righteous fury at the insult, but his own innards quailed at the sight of this enemy.

Towers taller than the grandest in Rome floated into view behind the opposing army. Through a haze, over a distant lake, lofty towers pulled the entire cohort’s focus. Everyone watched as the ethereal edifices soared toward the sky, until something…changed. Faces fell as the beauty began to fade. Columns cracked, facades crumbled, and friezes fell. Caius realized that music had been drifting on the wind, and it was now different. Where it had been blissful and bright, now it had turned dark and morose, as if it were weeping set to music. The water in the lake turned murky and ashen where it had been crystalline.

The figure in the lead had turned away, gazing back at his domain, and as it began to fade, fall, and decay, his shoulders dropped and his head fell forward. Caius could feel the torment flowing from the enemy. The anguish twisted into anger, then raging fury. The leader brought his head up.

A foul wind blew, and Magnus and Caius nervously rode forward to speak to the form in front of his army. As they advanced, wings burst forth, unfolding from the creature’s back, and the sleeves of his tunic slid up his arms, revealing mottled, wasted flesh. His right hand lowered, and rested the staff on the platform, the eerie yellow insignia continuing to shift. His left hand went to his hood.

Caius heard Magnus grunt. He turned and saw Hell Belly lifting his hand, his face contorted in fear with tears streaming down his face. “No,” cried Magnus, “don’t!”

Magnus dropped from his horse, landing on all fours, and vomited. The men behind saw this but remained transfixed. Caius widened his eyes as the rest of the men dropped to their knees, covered their eyes with their fists, and then collapsed to the ground bursting into explosions of rotten sand. As he watched helpless, every single member of the cohort disintegrated into putrid mist, and blew away on gusts of an ill wind.

Caius turned back to the King in Yellow, who pulled his hood away from his face. Caius’ stomach wrenched as his eyes told his brain what he was seeing. He shook his head as his brain denied it. He looked away, and he, too, dropped to his knees.

He couldn’t.

Wouldn’t.

None of them.

No!

All-

Had to get up!

Had to run!

All of them!

Get away!

Sweet Juno, NO!

The Temple of Iald-T’quthoth

by Lee Clark Zumpe

I.

During the Siege of Jerusalem, 70 A.D.

“And indeed the multitude of carcasses that lay in heaps one upon
another was a horrible sight, and produced a pestilential stench, which was a hindrance to those that would make sallies out of the city, and fight the enemy…”

—The War of the Jews, Book VI, Chapter 1; Josephus

A leaden grey sky—like death—hovered over Jerusalem.

“They turn upon each other in these desolate days, pale with famine, demoralized by the prospect of defeat,” Caius said. “Hunger and desperation has driven them to acts of savagery and cannibalism. It is no wonder so many undertake reckless campaigns against us. It is neither faith nor duty that inspires them so much as hopelessness.”

“This one is different,” Quintus said as he prepared to drive a thick iron nail through the man’s right wrist, adding further support to the cord fastening him to the crossbeam of the crucifix. “He was cast out of Jerusalem by one of those treacherous factions vying for control of the temple and the Tower of Antonia. It is said he was banished for excessive malice and violence visited upon his own people, according to Josephus who made inquiries on behalf of Titus.”

Even before Titus marched to Jerusalem and surrounded it with four legions of Rome’s finest soldiers, a civil war raged within its walls that left sepulchral mounds of corpses amidst lakes of blood in the city’s holy courts. Common citizens found themselves hemmed in by grave circumstances, with stalwart Roman soldiers keen to quell the revolt in the province of Judea on one side and perfidious zealots correspondingly eager to kill those that were for peace with the Romans on the other side.

Quintus had been informed that the prisoner was a particularly vicious Sicarii named Jaddus, and that he had committed atrocities too ghastly to catalog publicly.

“If no one inside the walls of Jerusalem will mourn him, crucifying him is a waste of materials,” Caius said. “In what manner did he approach our ranks?”

“He certainly did not beg Titus for mercy following his expulsion from the city,” Quintus said. “He bypassed our defenses in the night, infiltrated the camp and butchered a dozen men as they lay asleep. He sliced their throats and, I am told, cut open their bellies and ripped out their entrails. He was found just before daybreak yesterday, feasting on the innards of one of his victims like some famished jackal.”

Jaddus, though conscious, offered no resistance. Whatever malicious intensity he had formerly possessed had been purged by the prolonged scourging he had endured following his capture. Even when Quintus’ hammer struck the nail, driving it through flesh and bone and deep into the wood of the cross, Jaddus lacked the strength and will to protest in any perceptible manner. Instead, his eyes rolled horribly and he muttered a mix of Aramaic and gibberish.

When the Roman soldiers had finished securing his left arm with ropes, Quintus repeated the process. This time, a geyser of blood erupted as the nail dug into Jaddus’ right wrist. The crimson fountain splattered Caius and several others administering a dozen crucifixions that morning.

“What ill omen is this,” Caius said, examining the blood as he wiped it from his brow. Each droplet seethed with minute life; tiny, crawling bugs scurried in every direction, trailing thin streaks of haematic fluid. “Foul nits and vermin dwell within his very veins.”

Caius, incensed and alarmed, seized the hammer from Quintus. Gripping Jaddus’ leg, he placed one foot on top of the other and pounded the final iron nail through the arch of both feet. As blood surged from this new wound, the crucified man erupted with sudden rage and animosity. The raving Sicarii discharged a stream of obscenities and admonishments targeting Jew and Roman alike.

“Useless, frail beings,” Jaddus howled. “Arrogant empire-builders! Fanatical dissidents!” He eyed his executioners contemptuously as his grievances grew less explicit and increasingly cryptic. As a moment of cogent clarity overtook him, he simultaneously squirmed against the spikes that held him to the cross. With each violent spasm, muscles split and tissue ripped. “Such contemptible creatures, endlessly engaged in inconsequential matters—conquests, rebellions, preservation of your insignificant civilization. You are too primitive to perceive of the formidable entities cohabiting this trivial world. You are oblivious to their dominion over all your pathetic endeavors.”

By this time, the soldiers had dutifully secured several lengths of rope to the bottom of the cross, and coiled the ends of these lines around a nearby beam fixed confidently in the earth. Using the ropes, the soldiers promptly raised the cross before plunging it down into a small notch primed for it in the ground. It fell into place with such strength that each participant heard the snapping of bones and the rending of flesh.

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! A plague of darkness shall fall upon your world!” Jaddus plummeted back into anguished madness, moaning and yowling like a wounded beast awaiting inevitable slaughter. Torrents of blood streamed from his extremities forming sanguineous pools that undulated unnaturally. His expression became increasingly gruesome and contorted, his skull seemed to bulge and distend. His lamentations and condemnations deteriorated into incomprehensible burble, vented with ever diminishing fervor. “Darkness, occupied by nameless horrors, taints your unsettled slumbers even now! Ph’mkrou sh’gfy’oth Iald-T’quthoth ut-ma G’zsharhu! Itharhuac ho’narubol ichacanogot laegggu! Lhathut! Ihaualak…nasho-bornt…noth…”

“Let him die on that cross,” Caius said. “Let the sun scorch his lifeless body as it grows bloated and corrupted. Let his corpse be carrion for a sacrifice that the gods will bring this war to a speedy end, with victory and glory for Rome.”

At that moment, the crown of Jaddus’ skull burst wide open, its gory contents spurting through the air. The thick, viscid substance—a repugnant mix of brain, blood and gore—rained down on those soldiers ill-starred enough to be in close proximity. Despite his proven fearlessness, even Quintus fell back a few steps, gasping at the startling loathsomeness of the episode’s aftermath. From the oozing, shattered husk of Jaddus’ head, a black swarm of small winged things, unseated from their nest, took flight with much commotion, congregating briefly in a burgeoning, shadowy cloud that resembled an impossibly gargantuan monster.

Though the nebulous swarm quickly dispersed, Caius and Quintus both glimpsed this unsettling aspect—and, at that moment, both Romans found reason to believe in the formidable entities and nameless horrors Jaddus had divulged in his dying testament.

II.

During the Inaugural Games of the Flavian Amphitheatre, 81 A.D.

“There were some dreadful disasters during his reign, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Campania, a fire at Rome which continued three days and as many nights, and a plague the like of which had hardly ever been known before.”

—The Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius

The day’s violent revelries had mercifully ended.

Emperor Titus had launched a seemingly interminable inauguration to commemorate the completion of his father’s massive amphitheater situated in the heart of the Rome. Daily festivities featured the macabre spectacle of midday executions, recreations of famous military engagements and other cruel contests as well as savage gladiatorial combat. Animal entertainments included elaborate hunts and bloody skirmishes between fantastic creatures imported from the farthest reaches of the empire.

The endless carnage delighted the masses and placated the Emperor, who undoubtedly sought to appease the gods as much as honor the legacy of his father, Vespasian. Following months of celebratory bloodshed, however, an unfavorable omen lingered over the rooftops of Rome. To those same citizens who relished the mayhem of the amphitheater, a series of inexplicable deaths presaged an ill-starred tempest gathering above the city.

“Another victim has been found,” Demas said, his eyes adjusting to the dimly lit ostium in the house of Remistus the Physician. A terracotta lamp, suspended from the ceiling, offered little relief from the chamber’s rampant shadows. Its inadequate radiance revealed few details of the frescoed walls and marble floors. Outside, the evening had grown darker and colder than the season should permit and Rome was unnaturally still with an unspoken, endemic trepidation. “Shall I have the body taken to the Aesculapium for review?”

“How many does this make—twenty?” Remistus rubbed his forehead fretfully. “Two dozen? More? How many corpses must I evaluate before this matter is brought before the Emperor? How many men must be butchered in this city before this situation is recognized as a threat to public safety?”

“Domitian has entrusted you with bringing about an end to these deaths,” Demas said, his tone expressing a stoic acknowledgment of Remistus’ hopelessness. “It is his aspiration that his brother, Emperor Titus, should not be burdened by it at a time when so many other challenges face Rome.”

“If it were a plague—a disease—that extinguished the lives of these poor men, I would gladly consent to Domitian’s request and shoulder the responsibility of restoring well-being to the city.” Gathering his gear, Remistus shook his head and shrugged. “I am asked to solve an equation in which the variables have not been clearly defined. It is a purposeless endeavor and my involvement is destined to bring shame to my family.”

The two men had just passed through the vestibulum of the physician’s residence when an unfamiliar figure severed itself from the shadows on the street and approached. This haggard stranger with dark hair and grim, deep-set eyes deliberately impeded their progress. The fact that he wore only a tunic suggested he was too poor to afford a toga. At first, Remistus thought him a beggar or someone seeking his services as a healer. Something solemn in his countenance, however, suggested he sought a consultation to discuss something far more ominous.

“Pardon my imposition, sirs,” the stranger said. “My name is Quintus. A colleague of mine is missing and,” he hesitated, clearly unconvinced that he could speak freely without arousing unjustified suspicion., “I believe the body recovered in the countryside earlier this evening may be that of my friend, Caius. May I accompany you?”

“Most certainly not,” Demas said flatly. As one of Domitian’s personal guards, the young soldier possessed a rigid diligence in regard to regulations and propriety. “This matter is not a public affair.”

“Is it not?” Remistus, offering a mollifying smile as he put a calming hand on Demas’ shoulder. “These victims are citizens of Rome, Demas. We have seen among the dead, examples from all stations in society—from common tradesmen to revered Centurions. Each victim has a family, a circle of friends and business associates. This rash of slayings is no secret. To think otherwise is an act of self-deception.”

“Nevertheless, I cannot permit an ordinary laborer admission to the Aesculapium.”

“Demas: Let me remind you that I am the one who has been tasked with defeating this scourge. If I feel this man has information that will help me achieve that end, it would be irresponsible of you to get in the way of what might be potential progress.” Remistus spoke with such tenacity he allowed no room for debate. “You are welcome to come with us to view the body,” the physician said, turning toward Quintus. “Understand, however, that what you see will likely disturb you.”

“I know what to expect, sir,” Quintus said. “I have seen many victims of the Temple of Iald-T’quthoth.”

***

By the time the company reached the Aesculapium, the remains of the victim had arrived.

Like all those before him, the man’s abdomen had been split open, its contents meticulously extracted for some sinister, unknowable purpose. The body had also been almost thoroughly drained of blood.

Remistus retrieved his surgeon’s kit which contained the standard tools, including scalpels, forceps and catheter. He had augmented the kit by adding a skull borer, bone drills and arrow extractors. He beckoned to Quintus, silently imploring him to join him beside the corpse. Quintus fought back waves of unexpected nausea as he moved toward the man he had known for more than a decade.

“Is this your friend,” Remistus said. “What did you call him—Caius?”

“Yes,” Quintus said, covering his mouth and nose with a trembling hand. The stench nearly overwhelmed him. “It is Caius.”

“You need not stay,” the physician said. “Though they are not keen to admit it, even the bravest men do not linger in the company of death.”

“I have seen many terrible things,” Quintus said, fighting back tears. “But I have never seen mortality in the face of a friend.”

“I understand,” Remistus said. He draped an arm over Quintus’ shoulders and escorted him toward the door. He continued talking, but spoke in a muted voice. “Demas has no stomach for this business, either. He usually finds some reason to excuse himself at the earliest opportunity. I will furnish one for him tonight,” the physician said. “Demas, please see to it that Quintus does not leave the premises. I would still like to speak with him when I am finished here.”

Turning to the corpse, Remistus marveled at the meticulousness with which the assassin had accomplished his undertaking. As with each of the previous victims, the abdominal cavity had been excarnated and utterly emptied of its viscera. The bones had been stripped clean of even the tiniest morsel of meat. Scanning the body’s extremities, the lack of abrasions on the wrists and ankles gave evidence that the subject had not been bound prior to death. The physician could find no trace of trauma to the head nor bruising around the neck that would suggest the man had been strangled.

The precision with which the flesh had been removed left Remistus both awestruck and alarmed. The exactitude of the cut insinuated that the killer possessed the exactness of a surgeon—and that the victim offered little or no resistance.

Remistus worked expeditiously but took care to account for even the most insignificant detail. He kept scrupulous notes, recording them with a stylus on thin slips of ivory covered with wax. At home, he would transfer his comments onto parchment. His final chore was to collect the dead man’s personal belongings. Not surprisingly, Caius possessed one item that connected him to all the other victims of this insidious menace: Upon his finger, Remistus found a carnelian intaglio ring bearing the image of what appeared to be a lion-headed serpent.

Stepping into the adjoining chamber, the physician observed that Quintus wore the same adornment.

“Demas, see to it that the body is attended to promptly,” Remistus said. “Forgo the customary funeral traditions as we have done in the past. There is no need to darken Rome’s mood further by turning the burial into a public spectacle—even though such grim spectacles seem to bring ecstasy and exultation when presented in the amphitheater.”

“I shall make the necessary arrangements. What shall I report to Domitian?”

“Tell the Emperor’s brother that I am interrogating a colleague of the most recent victim.” Remistus shot a consoling smile at Quintus to assure him the questioning would not be punitive. “If I learn anything of consequence, I will send for you.”

***

The morning’s earliest light illuminated the skies as Remistus led Quintus back to his home. The men spoke little during the journey, other than to comment on the unseasonable chill in the air and the curious quietude that had settled over the city.

The physician left his guest in the dining room temporarily and disappeared into another chamber where he conversed with a servant. A short time later, he returned, accompanied by a young man carrying a serving tray.

“I am famished,” Remistus said, reclining on one of the couches in the room. “I hope you will join me. I do not enjoy eating along.”

The meal was simple enough: bread, cheese, olives and dried fruits.

“How did you and Caius become acquainted?”

“We served together,” Quintus answered. He ate as politely as his hunger would allow. He had not had the benefit of a formal meal—even a minor one—in several days. “We were auxilia with the Fifteenth Apollonian Legion.”

“You served under Titus when he was a general?”

“Yes, sir.” Quintus grimaced when he realized he already devoured all the bread. Remistus saw his lingering hunger and with a gesture sent a servant off to bring more food. “We were there at the capture of Jotapata and Gamla. I remember the day Josephus surrendered.”

“What about Jerusalem?”

“Yes,” Quintus said, his tone growing more melancholy. “We watched Jerusalem fall and saw the temple burn. We saw boundless death and a perpetually expanding mound of corpses—the bloated bodies of Romans and Jews, of men and women and children, of soldiers slain in battle, of defectors stoned to death by zealots, of deserters crucified and of whole families who perished by famine.”

“History will record it as Titus’ greatest victory,” Remistus said. “You cannot deny that you were a part of it.”

“In military terms, it was a victory for Rome,” Quintus said. “But for many soldiers, the atrocities committed at Jerusalem spawned an enduring nightmare. The horrors I beheld during the course of the siege still torment me. Some of those undying horrors may threaten the empire itself.”

“You are destined to meet the same fate as your friend Caius.” Remistus softly uttered the revelation as it occurred to him. “You share the same experiences. You wear the same ring.”

“We all live a hollow life waiting for this terrible, unsolicited end.” Quintus had finally sated his appetite. He stood, his anxiety rekindled. He feared that his capacity to share the tale of his impending doom might soon recede. “My time has come,” Quintus said. “I will be the one to come forward at the next new moon to offer myself to the high priest of the Temple of Iald-T’quthoth. I cannot resist the urge to comply. They compel me to sacrifice myself.”

“Who asks you to sacrifice yourself? What power do these men hold over you?”

“Not men—things,” Quintus said. “Things that live inside me. Things that permeated the blood of a Sicarii madman I helped put to death. Many of the soldiers present that day now suffer the same infestation. I share their fate.”

“I have seen my share of tapeworms and other forms of parasitic organisms, but I have never heard of anything like this.”

“I would not expect you to believe me,” Quintus said. “Lend me a blade that I may show you.”

“Very well,” Remistus said, reluctantly retrieving his surgeon’s kit. “But I insist upon doing the bloodletting in this house.”

Carefully, he drew his scalpel across the man’s palm, causing a small bead of blood to form. It quickly fell upon the marble floor where it created a petite pool.

“Watch closely, now,” Quintus said.

Over the next few moments, slender tracks advanced in several directions as the tiny entities scattered. Remistus squatted and glared at the little horrors scuffling across his floor.

“By the gods,” the physician said. He stood and squashed the things beneath his sandal before summoning a servant to clean up the mess. “From distant lands come perils unknown.”

“By some device, these creatures control our actions and ensure our silence. The only reason I am able to reveal any of this to you is that I found a means to suppress their influence temporarily. An old Syrian—a slave who serves as a mule driver on the outskirts of the city—learned of my predicament and offered a temporary remedy. He shared his knowledge of the cult with me but said he could not keep me from sacrificing myself when the time came.”

“How many more carry these things within their blood?”

“I believe I am the last of those who became cursed in Jerusalem,” Quintus said. “But now, the Syrian tells me, the blight spreads like a plague through the streets of Rome. I have seen new faces at the Temple of Iald-T’quthoth—the faces of Rome’s own citizenry, newly brought into the fold.”

“There must be a way to stop this scourge,” Remistus, an uncharacteristic dread assailing him. “This Syrian must know of a means to put an end to it.”

“The high priest must be captured and killed,” Quintus said. “More importantly, that which has lodged itself within him must be destroyed.”

“Then that is what must be done,” Remistus said. “I can have any number of soldiers ready at a moment’s notice. All you have to do is tell me where to find this high priest.”

“The identity of the high priest is a well-guarded secret,” Quintus said. “When he appears, his face is completely covered by a hood drawn over his head—an extension of the long, scarlet robes he wears. When the time comes to receive the sacrifice, the victim is brought before him and placed upon the altar.” Quintus winced. Inside of him, the things had begun to reassert their authority. In little time, he would once more become their pawn and his ability to reveal any more details would be thwarted. “It is upon that stone the men’s guts are ruptured. It is there that they offer up their innards to satisfy the appetite of the thing that dwells within the high priest.”

“Caius’ body was found along the banks of the Teverone, not far from where it joins the Tiber,” Remistus said. “Most of the others were found in the same vicinity. Is the Temple of Iald-T’quthoth in that area?”

“It lies within a crypt beneath an old farmhouse between Via Ficulensis and Via Salaria,” Quintus said, his hands clasped and knuckles white. His head throbbed with spiraling pain. “Wait…for the next new moon. It will call for me. Find it…destroy it.”

Quintus staggered off without uttering another word. Remistus thought about having his servants restrain the man, to keep him from wandering throughout the city waiting for the eve of his own death. Fearful that he might somehow suffer the same fate by association, the physician watched helplessly as the former soldier disappeared into the streets of Rome.

***

“I expected a visitor,” the Syrian said, his hand swatting futilely a cloud of swarming flies haunting the stables. “I sent him off to find some suitable counselor. It seems he choose wisely.”

“Tell me what you know of this Temple of Iald-T’quthoth.” It had taken Remistus three weeks to locate the Syrian slave. A new moon would soon rise into the dusky night sky and poor Quintus would be obliged to become the next victim in this cycle of ritual slaughter. “Why do these cultists commit such heinous acts?”

“These are no common cultists.” The bronzed old mule driver chuckled as he swept the stalls. “Before I was sold to the family who owns this villa, I saw a great many things—from the monuments that bake beneath the desert sun in the land of the pharaohs to lost Irem, City of a Thousand Pillars. In all of the world, there is no band of cultists like those of the Temple of Iald-T’quthoth. Do you know why that is, good sir?”

“No. Tell me.”

“Because these devotees worship without consent,” the Syrian said. “Not one is in control of his faculties—not even the high priest. They are bound to an entity by compulsion and unable to quit their allegiance.”

“The thing that lives within the high priest must control the other parasites,” Remistus said. That much, he had deduced for himself. “What must be done to eradicate it?”

“You are surgeon, I presume,” the Syrian asked. “First, extract it. When you have it in view, kill it as you would any beast—but be quick about it, or it will fly off to find a new host.” The slave paused, eyeing Remistus with a look of ineffable contempt. “Damn Romans and your thirst for conquest. You will unsettle one nest of vipers too many someday, and the consequences will endanger all civilization.”

Remistus wanted to contest the man’s assertion but could find no plausible rebuttal. Speechless, he turned to leave.

“Physician: Remember to have a skull borer on hand when you confront the high priest,” the Syrian shouted. Tapping his head with a gnarled finger, he added “It lives in his skull.”

III.

En Route to the Sabine Territories, 81 A.D.

“When [Titus] landed, the gnat came and entered his nose, and it knocked against his brain for seven years.”

—Babylonian Talmud: Gittin 56

Demas had assembled a small contingent of soldiers. They donned cloaks to conceal their identities and, in the darkness, they waited for his orders.

His scouts had located the Temple of Iald-T’quthoth days after Remistus described what Quintus had revealed to him. They found the abandoned farmhouse not far off Via Salaria on the route to the Sabine Territories. Sentries had been posted and kept watch over the grounds day and night. Not a single person visited the hidden temple in the ensuing weeks.

In Rome, word of Caius’ death spread sluggishly through social channels. The chatter of commoners gradually found sympathetic ears amongst a handful of Titus’ staunch opponents. Even Domitian—who was rumored to envy his brother’s power—denounced the sluggishness of an official response…though it was Domitian who had hindered it in the first place.

Mercifully, the Inaugural Games had finally concluded. On the final day, according to various accounts, Titus wept openly in the amphitheater.

“You seem troubled, Demas.” Remistus fidgeted in his robes. The garments provided little warmth and the cold night air stung tediously. “Leading this mission will surely bring you a commendation from Domitian. Your service may even win praise from the Emperor.”

“This night will restore peace to Rome,” Demas said. “I am afraid that it will be less auspicious for the rest of us.”

“Your lack of confidence is not reassuring. I hope you withheld your reservations from your troops.”

“These men know their duty,” Demas said coldly. “They will act accordingly. I hope you will do the same.”

Not long after this exchange, the first cultists arrived. Shambling out of the night like somnambulant nomads, they entered the farmhouse and descended into darkness. Following their appearance, a ruddy glow materialized, emanating from within the clandestine crypt. The new moon made its debut at the same moment, the clouds that had kept it concealed finally swept aside by propitious zephyrs.

As the worshippers continued to emerge from the darkness, Demas tapped his soldiers—two at a time—to infiltrate the group.

Though the darkness remained nearly impenetrable, Remistus caught sight of an unmistakable figure slogging toward the farmhouse. He nudged Demas with an elbow and pointed toward the seemingly intoxicated Quintus, plunging headlong toward his death.

“We should go,” Remistus whispered. “It would be better to attack before it has an opportunity to feed.”

Demas nodded in agreement and the two men followed Quintus into the hypogeum.

Candles illuminated the interior of the Temple of Iald-T’quthoth. A winding corridor gradually sloped downward, leading to the inmost chambers of the complex. At length, they arrived at the spelaeum. This long, narrow chamber featured raised benches along the side walls where cultists would gather to witness the ghastly ritual meal.

Quintus had already taken up residence on the stone altar when a lone figure fully cloaked in scarlet robes entered the chamber. Unlike the others, his face remained concealed. Unlike the others, he proceeded with a single-mindedness of purpose. He was driven and determined, focused and unwavering.

The high priest hovered over his intended victim for a moment, his hands gliding over the edge of the sacrificial stone. Remistus had positioned himself directly to one side of the altar, his back to the wall of the spelaeum. Opposite him, Demas waited patiently. Neither man wanted to act prematurely.

When the thing that dwelled within the high priest began to feed, both men froze in terror at what they beheld.

First, a pair of tapered appendages appeared from beneath the high priest’s hood, each tipped with a knife-like projection that resembled a curved dagger. These reedy, black limbs looked like something that would be found on some exotic insect. The sharp extremities simultaneously pierced Quintus’ abdomen, carving out a sizable portion of flesh and muscle which the thing quickly tossed to the floor.

When its limbs had been retracted, the thing’s ravenous maw appeared. Its head rested on the end of a serpentine stalk. As it began to feast, an array of feelers and tentacles followed it into the gaping wound, helping to extract every bit of viscera. It slobbered hungrily, tearing at the entrails and savoring every morsel.

Demas never issued a command. He acted on instinct, and his loyal troops intuitively followed. He hacked off the beast’s head as it greedily gobbled Quintus’ innards. What remained of its snake-like trunk quickly withdrew back into the high priest’s mouth.

At the same moment, Demas troops made quick work of the remaining cultists, cutting them down mercilessly. The floor of the chamber quickly grew slick with blood.

Remistus—who lacked the reflex of a soldier—was slowest to react. He swallowed the fear that temporarily immobilized him and approached the altar where Demas had restrained the high priest. The soldier was barking commands now, trying to prod the physician to work more speedily. Remistus heard not a single word. He focused only on the face of the man before him, his eyes glassy and unresponsive, his mouth caked with blood.

“Do it, Remistus!” Demas glared at him with a mix of sorrow and disgust.

Remistus placed the instrument upon the head of Emperor Titus and burrowed into his skull.

Almost immediately, Titus’ head exploded and the wounded creature within struggled to liberate itself. It extended countless, flailing members—more than a few possessing those dagger-like tips. It spread horrid, black wings and squirmed against its former host with writhing tentacles.

Demas hacked it with his sword until it stopped its wretched squirming and writhing and twitching and gurgling.

In the silence that followed, the survivors of the massacre heard an unexpected voice.

“In my sleep, I see things that cannot be—things that no reasonable man could ever envision in his most lurid nocturnal reveries.” Slumped against the sacrificial altar, Titus spoke his final words, though the upper part of his skull had been obliterated and large portions of his brain spilled over the cusp of his wound. “Scattered throughout this empire are unseen enclaves that meet in secret sanctuaries to worship gods deemed ancient when this world was nothing but a lifeless, hot cinder with oceans of molten rock. These entities are undying and incomprehensible, their influence on the universe so profound it is undetectable. Such gods may, upon a whim, disembowel the very heavens of its host of stars and render the cosmos a dark, sorrowful abyss.”

Titus shuddered as death claimed him.

“I have made but one mistake,” he muttered with his final breath. “It is the mistake all men of power are doomed to repeat. The world will suffer endlessly for our ignorance and vanity.”

The Seven Thunders

by Robert M. Price

Apollonius of Tyana had entered Ephesus to teach and to heal. Apollonius taught the precepts of the great Pythagoras, and indeed some deemed him the very reincarnation of that worthy, while others hailed him as the son of Proteus, as Pythagoras had been the son of Apollo.

A weary-looking woman came to him, dragging a pallet on which lay her son. “O master, I brought to you my poor son, who has never been able to walk. I love him and carry him, but I grow old and tired, and I fear I cannot carry him much longer. Have mercy on us, son of Proteus.” Withal, she lowered her eyes before him.

The sage closed his eyes for a moment, then replied, saying, “What if the cost for the cure you seek were for you to take his infirmity for your own? Would it be worth it to you?”

Without hesitation, she answered, “In truth, it would, O lord. I am ready!”

Apollonius said, “O mother, great is your devotion! You have already paid the price.” He stooped by the side of the young man and whispered some words in his ear. The man shuddered as if with sudden cold. And at once he climbed easily to his feet. His mother wept for joy as the two walked away, this time with her leaning upon him as they went. The crowd gasped, then rejoiced with much shouting.

The wonder-worker went on from there, and his disciple Damis accompanied him. The two came upon a well where a man was beating his slave for some perceived disobedience. Damis flinched as if he had received the blows in his own flesh. Would his master intervene?

Apollonius knelt on the ground and gathered a pile of pebbles and withered leaves, holding them in a fold of his robes. Then he approached the two men, both of whom turned to face him.

“Sir, I would purchase this slave from you. Would this sum suffice?”

Looking at what the sage held out to him, the slave-owner’s eyes widened, and he said, “Most certainly, my good man! Here, let me record the transaction, and you may keep the note as a bill of sale.”

Damis looked on in bafflement as the man cradled the trash Apollonius had traded for the silent slave. As the man strode off with his newfound “wealth,” Damis gazed at his master, his expression asking his question for him.

“This man has eyes but for gold. He can see nothing else. And so in this case, though when he reaches his home, things may look different to him. And if he is fortunate, he will come to realize that gold is of no more value than what I gave him. As for you, my friend,” and here he turned to the waiting slave, “you may go your way, henceforth in servitude only to your own conscience.”

Apollonius the sage did numerous such feats wherever he and Damis journeyed, but Damis urged him to conceal himself, for it was rumored that the Emperor Domitian was looking to slay him. But he continued undeterred. At Hierapolis, he was met by an embassy of men carrying torches and swords. They recognized him and beseeched him, “O son of the gods, our city is beset by violent men. They murder without reason or goal, like wild bears. Our streets run with blood.”

He considered their words, then asked, “Are these men native to your city? And are they led by a single man?”

“They are men of the city, and known to us, but there is no mob. Each acts alone, and in turn. Another arises as soon as the last is slain!”

“Then it is a demon with whom you deal. He casts off one body for another, as a man changes his tunic. I see you are pursuing him now. Permit me to join you.”

The group passed down street after street until they found their quarry at the end of a blind alley. He had none of the look of a cornered beast. Instead, he looked as if he were waiting for them. The torchbearers paused to see what Apollonius would do.

He stepped calmly toward the murderer, foolishly endangering himself, as it seemed to the witnesses.

“Come out of him, unclean spirit, I adjure you by the sacred numbers 153 and 888, and enter none other in this city!”

At this command, the demoniac sank to his knees and began to writhe and to cry out. The words were punctuated by the sounds of crackling flames, though none were to be seen. The possessed man collapsed in a heap, and the echoing voice of the demon, now seeming to come from no single source, spoke: “I gladly depart, for I must prepare for the triumph to come! The coming of Leviathan who sleeps in his house at R’lyeh!” There was no more.

The sage graciously refused the reward offered him by the city, accepting only the price of passage from the Asian mainland to his next destination, the Isle of Patmos.

On board ship, Damis waited till his mentor had finished his daily meditation, then asked, “Master, are you now heeding my urgings to hide yourself from the Emperor?”

“I am not, my friend, for he cannot harm me. But there is great danger ahead, and not just for us. We go now to inquire of an old friend of mine. It has been many years, and he may not recognize me. But I think he will not turn us away. In this form, I cannot see certain things that he can. I believe he can be of great assistance to us.”

***

They had no trouble finding the aged seer. The island was home to two major concerns. One was a tin mine, the other a penal colony. The Roman overseers pressed the prisoners into service in the mine, at least the able-bodied ones. The man the visitors sought was under house arrest adjacent to the main prison. He had arrived on Patmos to preach his doctrine to the prisoners. The Romans would not tolerate this and imprisoned him. But he was so old and frail that they decided to treat him gently. Some said he had recruited a few secret believers among the guards, and they allowed their mentor special privileges, such as writing materials. They would bring him letters from the mainland congregations over which he presided, and pass his own epistles to the messengers who awaited them outside the prison.

The guard to whom Apollonius and Damis were directed turned out to be one of those friendly to the man they sought, and he led them to a small, spare cell. The furnishings consisted of little more than a straw pad and a crude chair and writing table apparently fashioned from a shipping crate. The old man slowly rose and gestured welcome. “Who are you, my friends?”

“Damis, this is the Elder John, or John the Revelator. He possesses great prophetic gifts.”

“You are well met, friend Damis! And who may you be, sir?”

“I must confess to being Apollonius, from Tyana. Some consider me a sage. But it is your wisdom we seek.” Withal, he bade John return to his chair, while he and Damis happily sat cross-legged on the floor. The Elder listened with rising interest as Apollonius recounted the recent episode of the demoniac and his ominous parting words.

“O John, you hear the trumpets of angels and the chitterings of devils. I very much hope you may know more of these impending horrors and the rising of Leviathan.”

The Elder sighed. “’I shall open my mouth to speak mysteries hidden from the foundation of the world.’ The end is the return of the beginning, and in the beginning was Leviathan, the father of the Elohim, which is to say, the gods. They trembled at his thrashings in the depths of Chaos and Old Night. They feared that he who had begotten them would turn and devour them. Then one of the Elohim, Yahve by name, stepped forth to issue a challenge to his elders: he would face the Dragon in pitched combat if they would vow to reward him with the divine throne. Being much afraid, they readily agreed.

“Yahve, who is also called Marduk and Indra, Aliyan Baal and Nodens, armed himself with many lightnings and went forth to harpoon the Dragon, he who is called Leviathan and Rahab, Tiamat and Vritra, Lotan and Cthulhu. Long did they struggle, until at last the warrior god imprisoned him in the Great Abyss, in his house at R’lyeh. Kings and priests and sages have sought to blot out these things from the memory of men.

“But scripture speaks of ‘those who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan.’ Certain cults have long wished to destroy a world in which they have no share. They crave a freedom from all restraints. When their ancient god returns, they, too, will be destroyed, but, being fools, they do not know their foolishness.”

“Who are these men?”

“Let the wise man reckon the number of the Beast, for it is the number of a man. His number is 666.”

Apollonius was quick with an answer. “I have learned from Pythagoras the deeper meaning of numbers. This is the sum of the name ‘Neron Caesar,” is it not? But he is dead nearly thirty years.”

“That is not dead which can eternal lie. Many believe that Nero’s foul spirit has retaken the throne of the Caesars under another name.”

Damis gasped, “Domitian!”

The Elder nodded gravely. “It was he who gave the order to confine me. And the angels tell me he is soon to unleash a great persecution against the saints. I have made an account of what I saw and heard and sent it to my seven congregations, directing each to make a copy to study during the terrible days to come.”

Apollonius pondered, “Why would the Roman Caesar seek to destroy his own realm? And how does he know the means to rouse up Leviathan?”

“Remember, O Apollonius, though he is called Domitian of the house of Flavius, the spirit that animates him is that of the Antichrist Nero. His own guards cut his throat. His desire now is for vengeance against the empire of the Tiber.

“As to how he knows the secret of releasing the monster,” and here a tear traced down his wrinkled cheek, “I fear I am to blame. May Christ forgive me on the day he comes in power to vanquish the Beast I have helped to unleash!”

Little surprised the sage of Tyana, but these words shocked him. “You? How?”

“I told you I wrote down what was revealed to me. There were many, many revelations that day. One of the most frightful was that of the Seven Thunders. I heard great thunderclaps, and in my spirit I discerned their meaning, and it was terrible indeed. Here was the secret of Leviathan and how to summon him. I hastened to write it down, as I had all the rest. But after I had sent my scroll to the seven congregations, my angelic guide rebuked me, saying, ‘Seal up what the Seven Thunders said! They are the crafty interjections of Satan!’ At once I sent word to the leaders of my congregations, ordering that they strike out the revelation of the Seven Thunders. Soon I learned that one of them defied me, a man named Diotrephes. He recognized the great danger of the forbidden oracle. But, being a man who enjoys nothing more than pre-eminence, he saw here a rare opportunity.”

Here the tired old man paused and covered his face in shame and pain.

“He promised his copy to the agents of the persecutor Domitian in return for protection and patronage. I am told Diotrephes remains in Pergamum, where Satan has his throne, but he will make for Rome as soon as his new master summons him there.”

“Then,” said Apollonius, turning to Damis, “we must find him before he gives the incantation to the Emperor.”

“I will pray for you, my new friends. You may have success, for, as you know, Pergamum will be in easy reach once you return to the mainland. I would offer you such accommodations as I myself enjoy, but I fear that, if the wrong guard should discover you here, you might become my permanent companions!”

***

The voyage was short and the journey took but a few days once they begged a ride with a wine merchant who had room in his wagon. Next they found an inn willing to let them bed down in the stable for as long as they needed shelter while they sought out the man Diotrephes. He was known as a tanner and a maker of sail-cloth, and they located his place of business, only to find it closed. Apollonius assured Damis, however, that there was another avenue they might pursue. The two of them trod the dusty streets, examining the ground in front of every door. It was a good two hours before they found what they were looking for: the rough figure of a fish traced in the dust.

“You recognize this, Damis, do you not?”

“It is the secret sign of our fraternity, whereby the brethren may know that a friend dwells here.”

“The Christians have adopted the sign of the fish for similar reasons, desiring secrecy at a time when the clouds of persecution gather. I am hoping that a Christian of Pergamum, one of John’s flock, may help us find this Diotrephes.”

Damis gave the door a vigorous knock. When it opened, a woman’s face peeked out from behind it.

“Whom do you seek, sirs? I do not know you.”

Apollonius answered, “I am sent by John of Patmos. My name is Apollonius.”

She opened the door wider and allowed her face and form to be seen, a matronly woman with long silver hair piled atop her head and held in place by jeweled combs.

“I have heard of you: the wizard from Tyana.”

With a slight smile, Apollonius replied, “I prefer the term ‘philosopher,’ but yes, I am he. I seek him who shepherded your congregation till recently.”

Suspicion darkened her expression. “You are not in league with him, are you?”

“No, my sister. In truth, we aim to prevent him from doing great mischief.”

She seemed relieved. “Now I know why Diotrephes forbade us to receive wandering strangers. Come in, good sirs. I am Maximilla.”

They reclined at table as their hostess directed one servant to prepare a meal and another to round up a few of her Christian brothers and sisters. When an hour had passed, two young mothers, their babies in tow, and an elderly man, arrived. Servants brought a modest spread, mainly fruits, cheese, and bread, with one pitcher each of wine and of water.

“It is a shame,” the old man offered, “about Diotrephes. A proud man. He began with a servant’s heart, but in time, as he was entrusted with ever greater responsibility, he lorded it over those who allowed him to. Come, let me show you the man’s folly.”

He led the group to a closed room in which the tiny congregation of Pergamum’s believers met each Sunday at dawn. There was a cupboard containing a few scrolls. Wall murals depicted scenes from the scriptures, and in front, on a pillar beside a lectern, was an expensive-looking marble bust.

Apollonius, admiring the workmanship, inquired, “Does this represent one of your prophets? Isaiah, perhaps?”

“No,” the old man replied. “It depicts the vain Diotrephes himself. He had it made and placed here.” Everyone laughed.

Apollonius came to the point. “And where is he now? John the Revelator believes Diotrephes plans a trip to Rome.”

“Plans?” said their hostess. “He has already departed.”

Damis looked as if she had slapped him. “When did he go?”

One of the young women said, “No one has seen him for two days.”

Apollonius, rising to his feet, said, “Thank you, my friends. You have been a great help. Our quarry has a head start on us, but we may yet overtake him, I think.”

The party broke up and returned to their daily routines. When well out of sight of the house, the sage motioned Damis to follow him into an alley between two tenements.

“Diotrephes means to deliver the papyrus to Domitian in person, as we supposed. There is no time to waste.”

“I understand, master. But how are we to overtake him?”

“You will seek passage on a ship, as he did. As for me, I have other plans. And you cannot go with me now. We will find one another in Rome.”

Damis’ puzzlement turned into utter amazement when, away from all prying eyes, the son of Proteus vanished from his sight! In that moment he felt he had woefully underestimated Apollonius of Tyana, whose true nature he had now begun to suspect.

***

Apollonius appeared, though invisible to others, on the road leading into the city. In his unseen form, really a kind of mesmeric aura that simply kept all near him from noticing him, he passed through the gates of Rome amid a group of chained slaves destined for gladiatorial training.

He continued in the company of a set of white-clad nobles on their way to the Senate. Outside stood a mob chanting, “Increase the dole!” They shouted louder once they beheld the senators approaching. But these paid their complaining public no mind as legionaries appeared from nowhere to safeguard their masters’ passage. He watched the self-important mortals sitting on their marble benches and fine purple cushions and thought how like children playing games of pretend they looked.

He circulated among the senators once the session broke up, listening to discover who might have business with Domitian. It did not take long to locate what he sought. A tall, gaunt man with iron gray hair and a confident stride left the building, accompanied by a soldier. Apollonius followed him as he walked.

They passed a number of fine statues of previous Caesars as well as of the heroes and deities of Rome’s myths. There were Romulus and Remus, then another depicting Romulus in his exalted form as the god Quirinus. Next was Minerva, then Jupiter, Juno, Mercury, Hercules. Even the ancient Etruscan god Tinia found a place in the ranks of the petrified immortals.

At once, Apollonius halted and almost lost the concentration enabling him to evade their notice when he caught sight of him who had posed for a marble bust in far-away Pergamum: Diotrephes! How could the man have preceded him here? He, too, must have had some occult means at his disposal. The papyrus of the Seven Thunders must contain revelations beyond that which the Elder John had implied. Diotrephes must have studied the Satanic verses in some depth before arriving here. Had he already delivered it over to his patron Domitian? The little man slipped away into the shadows.

Entering the palace, the senator, his bodyguard, and an unseen third man proceeded to the station where an officer of the Praetorian Guard screened visitors. The tall man was expected; his name, Publius Janus Garba was at the head of the list. On they went into the presence of the divine Domitian. Had Apollonius not long ago eschewed the taking of life, this would have been a prime opportunity to rid the world of the wicked tyrant and the cataclysm he threatened to create. He was obliged to take a more indirect approach, and, for this, too, he faced a prime opportunity.

Domitian sat on his throne of judgment. His countenance was stonily impassive, as if it were only a ceramic vessel for an alien consciousness. Swathed in late afternoon shadow, his staring eyes were nonetheless easily visible. At first his unseen observer thought a stray bar of setting sunlight lay across them. But on closer scrutiny, Apollonius saw that the Emperor’s eyes emitted their own, rather baleful, illumination.

When the tyrant recognized his visitor he descended the steps from the dais and motioned Garba to join him on a luxurious couch. Domitian was very obviously disturbed. He glanced at his attendants who were just then lighting the bracketed torches around the audience chamber. When they were finished and left the room, Domitian again faced his confidant and resumed speaking his worries.

“I knew I should not have trusted the Christian apostate! My spies have learned that he plans to deceive me. He has decided to keep the true papyrus for himself and to give me a forgery that vitiates the crucial lines of the incantation! I confirmed this out of the mouth of the scribe whom the cursed Diotrephes paid to fabricate it. My torturers got to the truth quickly enough. They always do.”

The senator considered what he had heard. “My lord, I believe I understand your own intention, and you know that I am at one with you. As the high priest of the secret cult of Pluto, my goals are very much the same. I, too, wish to see the Titan Saturn, whatever we like to call him, rise from Galiyeh to sink the dry lands and raise up the sunken realms. If this man Diotrephes wishes to chant the invocation himself, how does that harm our plans? The same result will follow, will it not?”

“Let me tell you, my brother, what difference it will make! When Leviathan, Saturn, arises in his ancient glory, the man who releases him from the Bottomless Pit will rule the world as his vicar! That must be me! Of course, you will reign at my right hand. The Titan will rise in any case, that is true enough, but you and I must rise with him. So you see…”

The Emperor stopped mid-sentence and gaped at the sight of Apollonius the sage suddenly standing before him. Senator Garba leaped to his feet and tried to call for the guards. But he found he could not speak. That was Apollonius’ doing.

“Sires, you have naught to fear from this old man. But I think you will want to hear what I have to say.”

Domitian set aside the outrage that should have moved him to have this interloper seized and killed on the spot. He reasoned that a man who could thus reveal himself was likely someone privy to secrets he needed.

“Say on, wizard. We will hear you.”

“My lords, forgive me, but I fear you have fallen into the same error which has captured the upstart Diotrephes. The Being whose advent you avidly await cares naught for any mere mortals except as pawns, even you, the mighty of the earth. If Leviathan returns, there will be no one to rule over, no one human at any rate. He will have no need of you or of any viceroy. Do you not see that? You are seeking but to hasten your own obliteration.”

Both Romans sat in silence for a long time. Confusion and dismay marked their faces. It took no prophetic telepathy to see that the warning of Apollonius was nothing that had not occurred to them before, though neither had mentioned it to the other—or even allowed themselves to face the possibility. If justice is blind, it is no more blind than ambition.

Finally Domitian stood to his feet. His face registered an attitude of good-fellowship, almost certainly a feigned pose. He placed a powerful hand on Apollonius’ shoulder and looked him in the eye.

“I believe you are the renowned Apollonius, the magician from Tyana, a man with great knowledge of secret matters. I will consider what you have said. Meanwhile, allow me to provide you with an apartment here in the palace.”

By now the senator had regained his voice and gone to summon the guards. The Emperor pointed to two of them. “You, Septimus, and you, Gaius. Attend our distinguished guest. He will be with us for a few days.” Domitian said to him, “I will speak with you again when I have decided my next step.” Then he turned to Garba, placed his arm about the senator’s thin shoulders and walked away.

***

Some weeks passed as Apollonius, essentially under house arrest, redeemed the time with meditation to strengthen his abilities. He surmised that Domitian, paying no heed to his words of caution, was frantically searching for Diotrephes, hoping to seize the papyrus from him before he could use it himself. And why had he not? Perhaps the incantation was in some strange, glossolalic tongue difficult to pronounce correctly? If so, Apollonius could imagine Diotrephes’ fear of experimenting with the formula.

***

And it was even so. Shortly after his arrival in Rome, the scheming Diotrephes had sought out the Sybil, whose famed oracular prowess seemed to offer his best hope for getting the conjuration right. But the would-be awakener of Leviathan came away from her grotto with only a cryptic prophecy:

Apollo’s spirit speaketh now:

To work the work he’ll show thee how.

Be sure thou speakest without fear,

And if thou dost, the god shall hear.

But Diotrephes reflected how this left him exactly where he was before! He supposed the Sybil meant to assure him that the exact pronunciation mattered less than the earnestness with which he uttered the spell. But how could he not be filled with apprehension that he was not speaking with no grain of doubt? Ah, it was all quite maddening! Just like that baffling promise of Christos that one might gain any desired boon if he prayed without doubt! As if it were possible to banish all qualms. A cruel joke, and so was this.

Did he dare go through with his plan? It might be too great a risk, and, come to think of it, perhaps an unnecessary one. Had he not already gained formidable powers with the aid of the papyrus, even from the lesser mysteries it contained? Perhaps this world need not pass away to usher in a new one for him to rule. Perhaps this one would be satisfactory…

***

Apollonius had the honor of a private interview with the Emperor, several such meetings in fact. Invariably Domitian’s polite conversations eventuated in offers to pay the sage to teach him the art of going unseen, as well as other abilities he rightly suspected his guest possessed. But Apollonius was steadfast in his refusals. Today, however, the tyrant tried a different lure.

“I believe, sir, that you have an assistant called Damis. At least I hope I am not mistaken, for I have gone to some considerable trouble to locate him. He is at present being held by my guards, awaiting your decision, even as I do. You are in a position to do a good deed both for your disciple and for your emperor, who himself asks only to become your disciple. Teach me what I wish to know, O Apollonius, or I cannot be too optimistic about your apprentice’s future. Septimus, you may bring him in now.”

The Praetorian Guards appeared with a manacled Damis in tow. He had plainly been pummeled, though recently washed, his cuts and bruises treated. Apollonius was both delighted to see his young friend and dismayed at the treatment dealt him. Damis made to greet his master, but one of the guards dealt him a silencing blow.

Domitian began again. “Now we will see if…” But a commotion outside preempted his threat. “What is it? Guards! Report!”

As the doors opened for some of the men to leave and investigate, the sounds became louder and more distinct. There were crashing noises as well as the roaring of a conflagration, and also much screaming as of a panicked crowd stampeding here and there. The guards pivoted and reentered the audience chamber, having been intercepted by other soldiers on their way in to tell their lord what transpired without.

“By Hecate, will no one tell me what is afoot?” Domitian slapped the face of a stammering guard.

The shaken man replied, voice uneven, “Your majesty, you will call me mad, but here it is! The very streets of Rome are erupting! Fire rages everywhere! But the worst is… the worst is…”

“Damn you! Tell me, or I will strike off your head this very minute!”

“My lord, the gods have returned!”

“I knew we had waited too long! The accursed Diotrephes has completed the chant, and the terror has begun! If you fools had been able to find him, it would have been I who…”

Just then Publius Janus Garba rushed through the cordon of soldiers, breathlessly exclaiming, “No, Lord Domitian! He means the gods of Rome! Their statues have stepped off their bases and are wreaking havoc with their marble thews! The soldiers are no match for them! Some sorcerer commands them!”

Domitian’s gaze turned away, and he stared at nothing, the light dawning within.

“It is Diotrephes nonetheless! And it is good news for us, Garba! It means he has been unable to master the spell to rouse up Leviathan. Our next move must be to wrest the papyrus from him.”

“Yes, my lord, but something must be done to stop the present chaos! The people may rise up! Or,” and here he looked worriedly at the soldiers with them in the room, “the Praetorian Guard!”

“Of course. Of course, senator, you are right. Other matters must wait. But what to do?”

Apollonius spoke up. “I believe I may be of some help, your highness. Let us go outside.”

Domitian looked both puzzled and relieved. He gestured to the soldiers, who formed a protective ring around their Emperor, the senator, and the two philosophers. The party exited the great building and descended the marble steps to the street. About this time, an astonishing sight emerged from around the street corner. An insignificant-looking man, whose balding, chinless likeness Apollonius and Damis had seen before, drove a golden chariot drawn by mighty griffons. He was flanked by fearsome defenders, ten feet tall and bearing the traditional images of the Olympian gods. Even the Emperor recoiled at the sight.

Apollonius stepped through the ring of Praetorian Guards. “Most impressive, Diotrephes, for a beginner! But haven’t you frightened these poor Romans quite enough?” With a swift display of complex gestures, the sage caused the massive illusion, for that is what it was, to drain away. And then it could be seen that the shivering Diotrephes rode only in a miserable apple cart pulled by a pair of goats.

There had been no damage, no destruction, no fire. Only panic induced by mesmeric phantoms. Domitian looked amazed but was not paralyzed by astonishment as his soldiers were. His barked orders snapped them out of it: “Seize him! Search him!”

The guards secured the no longer impressive little man with ease, then stripped his clothing off him, as if he were a slave on the auction block. A few moments of turning pockets inside out and ripping seams disclosed what Domitian was looking for. In triumph, he held aloft a sealed scroll, small in size and easily concealed.

“I have it now! And with it a greater throne than Rome’s!”

Apollonius dared interrupt the madman’s exultation. “But, sire, you forget! Your monstrous master will cast you aside as a man dismisses a harlot when he is done with her!”

Domitian’s eyes blazed with the light Apollonius had glimpsed when he first saw the man in his throne room weeks before.

“You do not fool me, you old charlatan! You never did! You wanted this power for yourself, but you shall not trick me! What Diotrephes could not or dared not do, I dare!”

Damis was alarmed, but Apollonius seemed to expect some outcome and patiently awaited it. The Emperor fingered the seven waxen seals and saw that one had already been broken, no doubt by Diotrephes, who must have feared opening the scroll any farther. Domitian fumbled with the second till it broke apart and crumbled.

He paused for a moment, waiting to see what might happen next.

What did happen was the rapid spraying out of a stream of black smoke which expanded till it formed the cloudy outline of a great black warhorse which reared menacingly over the Emperor. To his credit, Domitian did not cower.

“Is this another of your parlor tricks, charlatan?”

At once the figure of a featureless rider appeared astride the still-solidifying steed. Wordlessly, he unsheathed his blade and swept it back and forth through the air. Blue lightning flashed from it. At the sight of this, Domitian’s bravado fled from him, and he made to run. But one of the levin-bolts caught him right between his shoulders, and he fell headlong.

His guards were afraid to approach him till the dark horseman dissipated into fading mist. Then one knelt beside the body, turned it over, and regarded the face.

“He lives! Great Caesar lives!”

Apollonius bent down to retrieve the papyrus scroll. No one made a move to prevent him, not even Domitian, who was returning to full consciousness with surprising swiftness.

“You are… Apollonius of Tyana? I seem to recognize you, though I am sure we have never met.”

Apollonius took his offered hand and helped him up. “Do not trouble yourself, my lord. You have not been… yourself for some time. Let us talk when you have recuperated.”

***

Apollonius and Damis were soon on their way again, making for the harbor where a grateful Domitian had arranged a comfortable voyage back to Asia, where they should inform the Christians what had befallen their one-time leader, now assigned to stable duty in Caesar’s palace. And to spread the news of the Emperor’s pledge no more to persecute them or the followers of any religion.

Apollonius reached into the folds of his robes and drew forth the coveted scroll. “This shall no more trouble the world of men.” He hurled it mightily into the salty air. In mid-arc, the rolled papyrus exploded into blinding flame.

Damis could contain himself no longer. “Master, the Emperor! Was he not struck dead? And yet he was taken up alive! And his madness had been driven from him! This was your doing, was it not?”

“Alas, I cannot take credit for the feat. It was the scroll itself that struck him down. At least poor Diotrephes, despite being such a fool, had the sense to study what little of the text he dared to read before attempting to draw upon its power, and you saw what he did with even its lesser mysteries. He must have feared he would not have been equal to the challenge of the greater arcana. But Domitian, or the entity we knew as Domitian, was by no means so cautious. Accustomed to commanding at a whim, he ventured to wield the scroll like a magic bludgeon, and it destroyed him.”

Damis was not satisfied, however. “What do you mean, master? Destroyed? But he lives!”

“Domitian lives, but that which possessed him has been destroyed. Do you recall what the Revelator said concerning him? Domitian had been taken over by the vengeful ghost of the bloodthirsty Nero. The horseman has banished Nero’s spirit to the Pit from whence it strayed. It was he who moved Domitian to his crimes and persecutions.”

Quoth Damis: “We owe a great debt to the Christian seer John. With his help we have turned back the predicted Tribulation. And yet it was that reign of terror which was to usher in the return of their Christ! That will be a blow to him, surely?”

“We have not cheated him of the return of his lord, Damis. For, if you are willing to accept it, I who speak to you am he.”

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Vulcan's Forge

Fecunditati Augustae

A Plague of Wounds

Time Devours All

The Unrepeatables

Magnum Innominandum

Lines in the Sand

The Temple of Iald-T’quthoth

The Seven Thunders

Thank You

Dedication

Table of Contents