Cora was gone. I could feel her drawing away from me, like a thread tied to my guts being pulled, being twisted tight. My head hurt. My bones hurt. They were the first flutters of pain, and it would get worse.
It was for the best, I told myself. The bond would soon settle into its final shape, and the farther apart we were now the more elastic that would be. The assigned security team would watch over her from a distance, just in case they were needed. They wouldn’t be, of course. This wasn’t the age of poison and dagger, and no one but Tiberius, Etienne, and I suppose Jean and Clarissa should know about her, anyway. But it allayed the worst of my paranoia.
I went to the drinks cabinet and poured out a sherry—a proper sweet end for the day’s endeavors. My hands weren’t trembling anymore, I saw, and I put up the decanter and resumed my seat in the armchair and truly looked out the window that it faced for the first time in…how long? I did not remember.
The side lawn was sere and brown with the unforgiving bite of the cold, but in the pale winter light, I still saw the promise of a near spring. I took a sip of my sherry—
And almost spat it out again. I managed to swallow the mouthful with a shudder, then yanked out my phone and called for my valet.
Donnell entered through the servant’s door.
“This sherry,” I said with a wave. “When was it last changed in the decanter?”
Standing at attention, Donnell looked at the glass of sherry, then at my face. “I’m sorry, sir, but changing the sherry in the decanter has never been a part of my job. I can’t say when it was last done.”
That meant that it had been the same for at least a decade, since Donnell had taken over from his predecessor as my manservant. Had it really been that long since I had poured myself a sherry? My mind traced easily the pattern of my routine for the past several years. Shower. Breakfast in my room. Dressing. Office. Laboratory. Dinner. Meetings, if there were any to have. A brandy as a nightcap. Nowhere in that list was there a place for a sherry, so it had gone untasted, just as my books had been unread, my records unplayed, my planes unflown, my horses unridden.
How narrow my world had become, taking up a mere scrap of a life. And I had not even noticed.
“There must have been a miscommunication, then, Donnell,” I said. “Please have the decanter cleaned and new sherry poured.”
The valet hesitated. “Do you have a preference as to which vintage?”
“Rojek will know what is in the cellar now,” I said. Probably everything that Jean had not managed to work through….
“Very good, sir.”
After Donnell had left with the decanter and wineglass, I returned to the drinks cabinet, took out the bottle of brandy, and poured myself three fingers’ worth into a snifter. Then I returned to my seat with the glass to sip from it slowly while looking out over the lawn and the expanse of Georgetown beyond.
I had declined so quickly after Alys’ death. I could never love her as she’d wished to be loved, but I had loved her all the same, more than I had any agnate that I could remember. Perhaps she’d been the best of us all…or perhaps the most perverse, to go so against her nature. But when our natures were so black, anything might be an improvement.
She had pulled me from the fire not once but twice with her uncanny ability to be exactly where I needed her at precisely the right time. The second time had been the crash during the air show with Bogdan. But the first I had thought at the time to be the end of the world.
When the fire broke out, I had been at the great house of Numerius Fabius Pictor, as he was calling himself then, with Tiberius and another dozen or so agnates and assorted aethers. Fabius Pictor himself was of the race of the djinn, and had returned from the war of Varus in the place of the true son of the Fabii who had been lost to the German hordes. The skill of some djinn is so great that they can take on the appearance of any man, and though their illusions could never fool an agnate, human eyes were readily deceived, and so no one questioned his appearance.
Fabius Pictor was nearing the end of this charade, however. His lucky supposed escape was too well known, and as the years since the ill-fated German campaign were nearing their sixth decade, keeping up the pretense much longer would result in unwelcome scrutiny as his lifespan exceeded that which was possible for mortal humans.
He had decided to throw one last great celebration before arranging for his own official death. Though he had set aside his home in Rome proper, along with his commercial interests there, to his fictitious “nephew,” in which guise he would return, he had chosen to surrender the bulk of his estate in the countryside to the sons that he had sired through his marriage with the now-dead wife of the real Fabius Pictor, and he decided to mark the occasion with style.
For her part, Livia must surely have realized that her husband was an imposter, if not before he bedded her then surely after, but if it had troubled her in any way, she had given no sign of it by the time I met her in her matronly middle age, and she had doted on her two half-djinn children as if they were her world.
Though even then I’d had little affection for most djinn and absolutely no use for his sons, Fabius Pictor had been the exception. I was laboring under the weight of endless tedium, for it had been many years since even the glitter of Rome could fascinate me, and a brief stint in the Han court a few centuries previous had done little to cure my ennui. Fabius Pictor was clever, as most djinn were, and as long as I was never fool enough to enter into a contract with him, that cleverness provided a welcome respite amid the endless days. He told the funniest stories and brought in the most interesting scholars, and he bought the most skilled slaves from the farthest reaches of the world to sing, dance, and perform acrobatics while his cooks produced dish after rare dish from his well-provisioned kitchens.
So when I received his invitation, I instantly resolved to go and made arrangements with my slaves to be borne in a veiled litter to his grand home near the Circus Maximus before the sun went down.
Out of courtesy for his agnatic guests, he had ordered great swathes of curtains hung around the atrium and the peristyles to block the light that flooded into the courts through the open roofs. In the shadowed spaces I mingled with the others that he had invited, some of whom had traveled up to a hundred leagues to take part in the evening’s entertainment. There were beautiful virgin slaves, male and female alike, for the members of the party who were interested in such diversions. Never were we far from the sweet strains of music, for there were Greek slaves in the atrium, Egyptians in the front peristyle, and Syrians in the back peristyle, each playing their native songs.
I spotted Tiberius with three soft, blue-eyed German maidens lying about him as he sipped his Falernian wine.
“You’re starting early,” I observed, nodding at the women. “And you seem to be taking more than your share.”
He smiled toothily, letting his fingers play over the bare shoulder of one of the slaves, whose eyes went half-lidded as she let out a small moan. “One must play the odds, Maximus. Your cousin does lay an excellent table—of all delights.”
I had also taken on the mantle of the gens Fabia as my own, having adopted the name Marcus Fabius Maximus some centuries before. “Yes, he does,” I said, going along with the joke. “But you should leave some for the rest of us.”
Tiberius laughed as the women clung to him dreamily. “How about a contest? We could ask them to choose.”
I played with the idea for a moment, but it was more effort than I chose to summon at that time. “I’ll leave the games to the youngsters,” I told him.
“You’re just here for the philosophy?” Tiberius raised an eyebrow.
I smiled back at him, raising my translucent murrina cup. “And the wine.”
As darkness fell across the capital, the curtains were pulled down, and oil lamps were set out around the perimeter of the public spaces as the revelry grew louder. Fabius Pictor moved among the throng, kissing his friends in greeting and raising his wine cup with loud cheers to the health and happiness of the gathering.
The noise and the stench of so many bodies and the burning of so many open flames were such that it was not until ropes of smoke began rolling through the assembly that the first person raised up the cry of “Fire!”
I looked up through the open roof and realized then that the sky was not a star-studded black but was instead a glowing and ghastly orange.
I leaped up to the second floor of the arcade, and from there, it was one more leap amid the screams of the women to grab the overhanging eaves and haul myself onto the roof. Tiberius was beside me in an instant. Shoulder-to-shoulder, we looked out from the roof to the maze of tall insulae of the district, the blocks of apartments that rose five, even seven stories high. Flames spewed from the windows of nearest one, and the streets were full of people running and yelling. In every direction, there was more smoke, and ashes fell like a strange, dry snow.
Rome was burning, and we were in the center of it. The thickness of the stone walls of Fabius’ mansion had protected us from the heat and stench of the fire and the screams of men, but now, it blasted our faces. It ran through the bakeries with their sacks of flour, fabric merchant stalls, and oil vendors whose shops were on the ground level, devouring the goods and sending great jets of flame up into the upper floors. The smoke was acrid with burnt flesh, and everywhere, there was screaming.
Tiberius looked at me, and in his eyes, I saw that he recognized the end—the end of us, the end of everything. Rome was burning like it had never burned before, and in its destruction, the fire swept everything before it.
Then Tiberius was gone, jumping down into the streets crowded with weeping people and bellowing animals, and the smoke swallowed him.
I dropped back down lightly, landing in the rainwater pool in the middle of the atrium, which came up only a handspan beyond my ankle. Chaos reigned in the great house of Fabius Pictor, the music turned to shouts of confusion as people tried to leave through the great doors but were driven back by the flames. The djinn among them had already dematerialized; they claimed to be from a dimension of fire, so the heat could not harm them. Only much later would I learn that Fabius Pictor’s own sons had set the blaze to deprive their father of the inheritance that he had kept back for himself.
A panicked slave grabbed the fold of my toga that formed its sleeve. “What’s happening?”
I realized I was looking at a dead man, but I said, “Fire has seized the district. You must flee if you can.”
With that small and useless advice, I shook him off my arm and dropped onto my belly in the pool, rolling about until I had soaked through the layers of my toga and the tunic beneath. Then I pulled the fibula pin from the cloth and refashioned it so that the toga’s cloth covered my entire body, from the crown of my head to my feet, leaving only my hands and a slit for my eyes exposed.
Ignoring the increasingly panicked yells of the guests, I launched myself back up to the banister on the second floor of the arcade and then flung myself through space onto the clay tiles of the roof, which cracked with the impact of my landing.
Palatine Hill was my goal, for it had few insulae and more grand houses and even gardens and fields among the properties of the rich. Much less fuel for the belly of the voracious fire, and it was also at the edge of the city, from which I might make an escape into the countryside.
If only I could make it.
The house of Fabius Pictor sat on the corner spanning the full width of the block, which was why only ash and not falling timbers had landed upon it so far. But the insula next to it had flames blasting from the windows, while the houses and insulae across the street had already burned straight through to their roofs. As I hesitated, getting my bearings, there was a sharp cracking sound, louder than anything I had ever heard, and the screams below grew more frantic as the nearest insula across the street began to fall with a slow and terrible majesty.
I ran, glancing back over my shoulder even as my body arced off the roof and over the teeming citizens on the street. The building and I fell at the same speed, terracotta tiles showering off the roof behind me to reveal the blazing timbers, eaten by fire, that were now snapping under the great weight of the many floors of the insula.
I was as fast as only an aether could be, the momentum of my leap putting me well in front of its path. The people in the street weren’t as lucky. The clay bricks rained down over them, the fiery timbers smashing into the screaming masses.
I landed in a brief opening on the cobbles created by the swirling of the crowd, and I surged forward instantly, deaf to cries around me, the stench of blood and charred flesh pounding like a spike into my skull.
I flung aside all those who slowed me. In another time, I might have called these humans mine and rolled my influence over them to try to calm and concentrate their efforts. In still another, I might have whipped them to a more frenzied madness and rejoiced in their annihilation. But I had stopped caring about such things long ago, and now I hoped only to save myself from the inferno that had once been houses and shops, insulae and temples.
I burst through a tangle of carts into a semicircle of soot-blackened men who held torches aloft and brandished swords in their other hands. Their white grins and wild eyes were terrible in the flame light.
“We act under orders!” their captain shouted as the men threw their burning brands through the doorways of shops on either side. “No one may pass!”
I dropped a corner of the toga and bared my own teeth, for the scent of blood had sharpened my thirst into a ravening beast. I let it slip among them, flying forward so fast that the captain was still smiling at the pleas of the mothers who were begging for mercy when I ripped his throat out.
The splash of blood was no more than a drop against the fire of my craving, and I took down two others before they raised a shout. The fourth had time only to scream, but the last two were able to turn and even take a step or two in flight before their bodies, too, crumpled to the stones of the street.
The people who had been desperately trying to crowd forward to save themselves had recoiled at my attack, but I turned to throw at them a small piece of encouragement before I continued up the street.
“You are free now! Flee the flames!”
Then I ducked through an alley, and they were lost from my sight.
Smoke was everywhere, hanging low and thick over the streets of the city, and down every road, it seemed like fire had turned to flank me when I thought for certain I must be well beyond the flames. It would jump from window to window across the narrowest streets and crawl through the attics, giving no sign that the building was on fire until suddenly its upper floors tumbled onto the cobbles below and I danced back beneath the burning shower.
There should be a moon, somewhere, but the world was black and orange, and the smoke worked through the drying wool of the toga deep into my lungs so that I coughed as I ran. Even my speed served me nothing, for I did not know where I was going. The fire and the chaos of the flight had erased familiar landmarks. Where the sound of the flames did not roar in my ears, they were filled with the clamor of the injured and dying and those who had not saved the ones they loved.
Finally, I turned down an alley only to realize that I had reached a dead end, and flames were already devouring the buildings that surrounded me. I turned back just as I heard a series of sudden cracks that seemed to spear my heart with the horror of their significance, for I had heard that same sound when I had passed a yard of the great oil merchant Cassius Parmensis.
The oil, already aflame, escaped its amphorae, broken by the heat, to pour out of a doorway at the end of the alley. There was no escape but through it—and with the oil clinging to my body and toga, now dried by exertion and the fire, I would be devoured in it. The blaze crackled in the buildings around me, so fierce that the bricks radiated like an oven, proved that there would be no escape that way.
So I stood, my feet braced squarely under my shoulders, and I gave a bitter laugh of despair. I, who had fought the hordes of Avalon and driven the dragons back to their world—I was going to be defeated by some slattern’s escaped cook fire.
And that was when Alys had appeared.
I had not believed my eyes at first, for her snow-white mount had stepped as casually through the flames as if it had been made of smoke itself. For a mad instant, I thought of the peoples who imagined that death comes to claim your soul on a horse—the barbarians of the far north and the Jewish cult that had just begun to spread. But then the figure on its back became clear, and I drew in a breath to call out but doubled over as the smoke filled my lungs.
“Ah, Maximus, are you so easily defeated?” the woman called out from the back of the horse, laughing, and then she bent over and with her agnate’s strength plucked me up and across the withers of her mount.
Somehow, the air around her was cool and clear, and where the horse stepped—with a calmness that no horse had ever shown when faced with flames—the fire died down to nothing. I managed to fling my leg over the mount’s neck and straighten into a sitting position. That was when I noticed that it wore no bridle and had a horn sprouting from the center of its head.
“Now I can’t see,” the woman said—Adara, as I knew her then, the name by which she had been known at that point for some two millennia. Her voice was colored with amusement.
“I’ll duck,” I managed to rasp through my raw throat, and I did, lying against the unicorn’s neck. “How in the name of the bastard son of Hades did you find me? And get through the fire? How are we getting through the fire now?” I would have asked more, but another fit of coughing overtook me.
“You don’t remember Mycenae?” she asked. For all her casual tone, she was leading the creature with deftness and speed through the burning streets. I was grateful for her sense of urgency. Whatever charm she might have at her disposal, I doubted that it would withstand thousands of pounds of clay bricks cascading onto our heads.
“I remember Mycenae well enough,” I said stiffly.
That was only partly true, for what we had done upon that battlefield before the cyclopean walls seemed to always slip from my memory, the elven glamor’s power so strong that it even twisted agnate minds.
But at her mental nudge, I saw again the scarlet-dyed crests of the Hellenes bristling atop their helms, the spears raised as they bellowed and leaped forward in a teeming black swarm to descend on the endless shining hosts of Arturus of Avalon. I waited at the rear with my guard of immortals, ready to fling myself forward and die. But then Adara had appeared like a prayer from the east with her battered and bloody Asiatics to tip the balance in the favor of those who dared to rebel from the elven emperor.
“Some of the elves of the Shi-under-Autavin still remember their blood debt,” she said as the unicorn picked up speed. “And I called in a favor.”
Her arms were like steel bars on either side of me as she grasped her mount’s mane, and I was still woozy enough with the smoke that I was glad of their strength.
“An elf-steed,” I said. Now I remembered Mycenae in truth—our chariots crushed under the silver hooves, the horns that had stabbed with the accuracy of a spear. The rebel elves, who had fought on our side, had been on foot in that battle.
“Our side won the battle—and the unicorns, apparently,” Adara said. “I don’t pretend to understand it, but there was an elf in Nero’s retinue at Antium when we got word of the fire, and I knew that you were meant to be in the Circus Maximus as Fabius Pictor’s party.”
“So you bargained for a unicorn to get back in time,” I said, hardly believing it. “To save me.”
“As you saved me once,” she said even as the creature leaped nimbly over a twenty-foot-wide mass of burning timbers.
I shook my head, absorbing the landing. “I don’t remember.”
“You wouldn’t,” she said lightly. “Those were the early days, when empires were only a dream.”
The unicorn sped up, and suddenly, we were climbing upwards, moving out of the thick pall of smoke and into the reaches where the dry wind carried the scent of the sea under the smell of ash.
“And now we are even?” I asked with a regret that surprised me.
Adara laughed, spinning the unicorn about at the edge of a terrace that overlooked the lower reaches of the city. We were on Esquiline Hill, I realized, for the Palatine was already burning. From this vantage, the lines of the fire were clearly visible, reaching out tentacles into regions that at first appeared unaffected. The district of the Circus Maximus itself was decimated, nothing at all visible but an undifferentiated mass of smoke and flame.
She swung off the unicorn, nodding to me to do the same. I followed, and she patted its shoulder.
“I promised to release him as soon as we reached safety,” she said. “We can out-walk the fire now.”
The unicorn ducked its head as if in acknowledgement, and then it danced away.
“Well?” I asked because she had not answered my question.
She turned to me, and her big black eyes were puzzled. “No, Maximus. We aren’t even now. Now we are friends.”
She turned her back on the flames that were tearing through the greatest city on earth and walked into the darkness. And I followed.