IGMS Issue 44 Page 2

  My feet walked me toward the back of the tomb and then stopped in front of an alcove where bony feet poked from out of the darkness. I directed the spark globe closer to the --

  Shadows from inside the alcove came at me in smoky, finger-sized tendrils.

  I recognized what was about to happen, and fell backward into Vitulus to get out of the way. An instant later, the corpse exploded into a cloud of shadow, bone, and dried flesh. An imprint daemon flew out of the alcove and landed on the brick floor with a wet slap. Imprint daemons can best be described as three-foot slugs with six spidery legs, sharp black teeth, and no eyes. It turned its shiny black head to me, snarled, and then gave me the most terrifying laugh I'd heard since I got stuck in Rome.

  "Looking for something, finder?" the daemon cackled, its voice like bone scraping on the tomb's door. "Stand still so I can give it to you."

  The daemon skittered toward me in blinding speed, its wide jaws exposing jagged black teeth. Vitulus stepped forward with his gladius, and before I could scream, "Wait," he sliced the daemon in two.

  The mouth half of the daemon landed to the left, the back end to the right. The mouth end howled, "That hurt!"

  The back half flopped around a moment, then a new head grew out of the gory stump. Once the head poked through the viscera of the former back end, it cried, "Yeah, that hurt!" The mouth half had grown another rear by now, and they both grinned at us with the same black, slimy teeth.

  "Blessed Juno," Vitulus muttered in shock.

  "You can't cut them in half, dumbass!" I pushed him behind me. "Let me take care of this."

  It had been a long time since I'd had to fight an imprint daemon -- not since my apprenticeship, actually -- so I prayed I still remembered the motions and words to banish them. I touched the tips of my middle and ring fingers to my palms, brought both hands above my head, and drew an interlocking "S" in the air, all while uttering the spell's words in the bastardized Dutch I had learned from my mentor.

  "Dit alles hier worden bewaakt in de tijd, en er in de eeuwigheid!"

  Both daemons leaped at my head just as I finished the spell. The banishment struck one of the daemons. It howled its frustration as it shriveled up in mid-air and dissipated with a pop.

  The second daemon, however, launched a wad of flaming spit at me from its mouth. The fire did not make it past my banishment shield, but one of the daemon's legs slapped me in the forehead, knocking off my ball cap, before it too was banished with a pop.

  I stared in horror at my ball cap lying on the floor even as I reached up to my forehead to wipe away the daemon's slime from where it had touched me.

  "The breastplate!" Vitulus cried. He rushed over to the alcove where the corpse had exploded and pulled the breastplate from beneath the body's remains. The plate's ornate etchings gleamed in my spark globe's white light.

  "You did it, my friend!" he said, smiling triumphantly at the breastplate. "I speak for Salvius Aper when I say he will be forever in your debt." Then he glanced at me. "Why do you look as if we've been defeated?"

  Thoughts and calculations and theories raced through my mind too fast for me to pin down, all resulting in one terrible realization.

  "Up until now," I finally muttered, staring at my ball cap on the floor, "I had thought I was the only magus in Rome. But that's not true. Stealing the breastplate -- it was all a trap for me."

  "You're not making sense, friend Natta. Who's this other magus?"

  I wiped the rest of the slime off my forehead, then picked up my ball cap and set it back on my head. "The friend who abandoned me here. And now he knows how to get into my home. "

  I try to compartmentalize thoughts about my "friend" as much as possible, because he's a sore subject with me, to say the least. If your best friend pleaded with you for help and then intentionally left you in ancient Rome, you'd be a little pissed, too. And as Vitulus and I ran back to my flat, my growing anger gave me the strength to run the whole two miles through Rome's torch-lit streets.

  For the past year I had thought he went back home, but the imprint daemon proved otherwise. Only a fully trained magus from the twenty-first century could conjure one of those nasties; Roman priests barely understood the concept of daemons, let alone how to conjure one specifically designed to fool a finder like me. And not only had it fooled me, but it had touched me without my ball cap on, imprinting all my memories into its nasty slug brain. It now knew how to get into my warded home. Imprint daemons always came in pairs, and I didn't need a finding spell to find the second one.

  I heard the first screams when we were a block from my flat. Then people were running toward me in a panic through the Aventine's narrow streets and alleys. Vitulus and I weaved through them, barely avoiding getting trampled. Only the torchlights from surrounding homes lit the streets, which made it easy to see the terrible orange glow above my building. My chest tightened and I picked up my pace even though my lungs were about to burst. Vitulus kept up with me, staying true to his cemetery promise of being in my debt.

  I rounded the corner and was blasted with a wave of heat from my burning flat. The rickety wooden stairs had already collapsed in flames. A fire burned angrily through the building's first level and was consuming the second. Part of the second story structure above my one-room flat had already collapsed, and now the fire was spreading to the adjacent buildings. Citizens had already organized themselves into a water line, throwing bucket after bucket into the blaze. But it wasn't having much of an impact. The second daemon had used its fire spit in my home to devastating effect.

  All my spell components, I thought numbly, staring at my smoking, flaming doorway. Everything I had gathered for over a year. All gone.

  Screams jarred me out of my self-pity. They came from the second-floor room to the left of my flat. The Ben-Asher family was trapped. With the stairs already collapsed, there was no way for them to get down or for anyone else to go up.

  I did an instant mental inventory of the spell components I had on me: a salt pouch, a vial of olive oil, and a dead caterpillar. Great for additional power to my finding spells, but worse than useless for putting out fires.

  "Gods," Vitulus said beside me, "this fire will consume half of Rome. I must go warn the vigiles."

  He was right. Most of Rome in this century was still made of wood and as flammable as a pile of dried kindling.

  He was about to run off when I cried, "Wait! Give me the aurichalcum!"

  "Why do you need --?"

  "Just give it to me!"

  He pulled the leather pouch containing the rare metal off his belt and handed it to me. I upended the pouch with shaking hands and the aurichalcum sliver fell into my right palm. Its magical hum vibrated my teeth. I had never used aurichalcum before, or wielded as much magic as I was about wield, so I prayed I wouldn't explode into dust in the process.

  I turned my ball cap around on my head, clasped both hands on the aurichalcum, raised my hands over my head, and began the bastardized Dutch incantation.

  "Vurige merk , stop je ritme; vurige merk, stop je zweet."

  I closed my eyes, saying the words over and over, clearly envisioning the outcome I wanted. I felt the magical hum from the aurichalcum vibrate louder and harder, this time in my bones and organs. It wasn't a painful sensation, but it was really uncomfortable. My voice seemed to grow louder in my ears, turning into a cold, wet wind that whipped around me.

  My eyes snapped open, and I directed that cold wind into the fire.

  A snowy mist shot out of my clasped hands like a broken fire hydrant from modern times. The magical release was like nothing I'd ever felt: I was a god, able to command the elements to form whatever I wanted. I could create a mountain on this very spot if I chose, or force the Tiber to flow in the opposite direction. I could make a hurricane or cause an earthquake. It would be so easy.

  The second imprint daemon leaped out of my second story flat door and flew directly toward me, fire spitting out of its mouth. But I flicked a tendril of c
old in its direction. The little slug shrank and dissipated with a pop that I barely noticed.

  Through my delusions of godhood, the sane part of my mind noticed the aurichalcum quickly growing smaller in my hands as its magical fuel was consumed. And as the aurichalcum grew smaller, so did my delusions. I realized that I had already put out the fire. Icicles now hung from the burned buildings, but heavy smoke still hung lazily in the air above them. I stopped sending the cold into the buildings just as I used up the last atom of aurichalcum.

  I had time to notice Vitulus and all the people in the water line gaping at me before my legs gave out. I remember falling, but not hitting the ground.

  When I woke up in an actual bed where my feet didn't hang over the edge, I thought for one glorious moment that I was back in twenty-first century Detroit and that my year in ancient Rome was all a dream.

  But then my eyes cleared, and I knew I was still stuck in the past. The bed had four columns etched with those colorful geometric patterns the Romans seemed to love. The room was about the size of my flat, its walls covered with mosaics and tapestries. Light filtered in through the open doorway beyond the foot of my bed where I saw an atrium with plants and a fountain bathed in sunlight.

  A male slave stood up from a chair to my right, surprising me. When he saw me start, he said, "You are safe, dominus. How do you feel?"

  "Like I chased a barrel of posca with tequila," I croaked. I sat up slowly, waited for the vertigo to come over me and then fade. I brought my feet out of bed and onto the polished stone the floor.

  "I will go get my master," the slave said, and then hurried out the door before I could ask who his master was.

  It didn't take long to find out. A well-muscled man in his forties strode in wearing the purple and gold breastplate that I'd found. Over the breastplate, he wore a traditional white toga. Soldiers traditionally did not wear armor within Rome's borders, but as with most things these days, Imperator Augustus was instituting new traditions.

  Behind Salvius Aper came Vitulus, a grin spreading on his lips when he saw me.

  Aper gently put one large hand on my shoulder. "You should rest, Natta Magus. I'm told your efforts have weakened you terribly."

  "How long have I been here?" I asked. My throat felt scoured, and I had the curious taste of cinnamon on my tongue. I'd never felt so wiped out after a spell, even during my intern years.

  "Since before dawn, when Vitulus brought you here after . . ." He paused, studying me as if I were a religious totem. "I must leave for my inauguration soon, but I wanted to be the first to thank you. I'm told I and all of Rome owe you a tremendous debt."

  I looked at him, the light from the open doorway making my eyes and head ache worse. "The people in my building. Did they . . . ?"

  Vitulus stepped forward. "Your neighbors had minor burns, but they will all live."

  Aper patted my shoulder once. "Get some rest, Natta Magus. I would speak with you when I return." He strode out of the room and into the atrium, where he was joined by more men with togas and gladii strapped to their belts.

  "He wants to be your patron," Vitulus said.

  "Yeah, and I'm gonna have to decline."

  Vitulus frowned. "Salvius Aper would be a generous patron. I've served him for three years and he has been very good to me and my family."

  "Look, I mean no disrespect. I'm truly honored that Aper wants me as a client. But being a client means I need to take an oath to serve my patron. That would be an oath that I knew I could not keep. If I make any commitments in this century, they will magically bind me here and then I'll never get home."

  "So . . . you do not want to be an oath-breaker?" He asked this as if it were the one thing he actually understood from my last sentence.

  "Right. Where I come from, there are serious consequences for breaking oaths."

  Vitulus nodded. "Very well. Aper will be disappointed, but he will understand that and, I dare say, admire your honesty." He cocked his head and then said, "Tell me. The aurichalcum was something you would've used to get back to your home, yes?"

  I sighed. "Yeah. It was the big component I needed."

  "Then why did you use it up? Nobody would've known you could've done something with it. Then you could have used it to return home."

  I gave a mirthless chuckle. "Because I've screwed this timeline all to hell and back the moment I arrived, so I owe it the people here to make their lives a bit easier where I can. But above all, it would've violated the oath I took when I became a magus: I cannot harm people with my magic, or, through inaction, allow people to be harmed. It's what I swore when I became a magus. Asimov the Historian came up with the oath decades before I graduated --"

  "I rarely understand your words, Natta Magus," Vitulus interrupted. "But I hear the honor in them and I see the honor in your eyes. I cannot break my own oaths, but I will help you get home in any way I can. What can I do?"

  I understood how serious that statement was for a Roman and truly appreciated his promise. I still wasn't sure I wanted a patrician friend who could possibly embroil me in patrician games, but Vitulus had handled himself pretty well while facing things he once thought were impossible. I'd been flying solo for the past year, so it would be nice to have a friend again -- especially when it came to finding William Pingree Ford, the mentor, friend, and oath-breaker who lured me to ancient Rome and then abandoned me here.

  Either William had returned home and then come back, or he had never left in the first place. He must've still seen me as a threat, which was why he had laid that trap for me so he could get through my flat's wards and destroy my spell components. I had to find him before his madness ended up taking this timeline into a darkened age through which it was never meant to suffer.

  "First," I said, "we need to find that friend who betrayed me."

  Vitulus nodded. "When do we start?"

  "Now."

  The End . . .

  for now.

  Look for the further adventures of Natta and Vitulus in the May issue of IGMS.

  Look After Your Brother

  by Holliann R. Kim

  Artwork by Dean Spencer

  * * *

  At the base of jagged blue mountains rising out of the morning mist, Three inspected the new prisoners, who were learning to work in the fields.

  Four patrolled the main prison gate, her paws making prints in the dust.

  Five sat near the gingko trees on the eastern border, eyes half-lidded, nostrils flaring at the scent of pine blowing down from the mountaintops.

  Watching through their eyes, I leaned back in my rickety wooden chair and took a sip of tea.

  One of the newcomers in the fields, a woman just out of girlhood, turned in the corner of Three's vision. Something about her chin, the flash of her eyes . . .

  My hand jerked violently. Tea splashed across my lap. I set the sloshing teacup on the table and wiped my palms against the rough cloth of my shirt before instructing Three to move closer.

  When I was first imprisoned here in the camp, I mistook strangers for relatives or friends nearly every week, but that yearning for the past had faded long ago. This too was probably nothing, just another memory surfacing like a bubble from the bottom of a lake, but I had to make sure.

  Three stalked closer until he was only a few feet away. The girl pretended not to notice the wolf, but the muscles on her back tightened as she pulled a bunch of carrots from the ground and shook the dirt loose.

  I concentrated on her face until the teacup in front of me faded away, replaced entirely by Three's vision.

  The resemblance to my younger brother's wife was unmistakable.

  My chest tightened, suddenly finding it hard to inhale. Could this girl be Ah-ni's younger sister? No, she would be too old by now. Maybe a niece, or a cousin?

  I instructed Three to keep watch on the girl, and Four and Five to continue their own surveillance. Then I concentrated on the teacup again until my wolves were only dim nudges in my mind and I was bac
k in my tiny, windowless room in the guardhouse, with its single flickering supai stone lamp.

  To still my shaking hands, I tried smoothing back my hair and realized it had become matted. My chin was scratchy and unshaven, and my skin had grown furrowed with wrinkles and scars like the hills near the capital where I had once lived. If the girl was anything like Ah-ni, she could forgive my rough appearance. But would she forgive me for becoming a Sneak Lord?

  The door creaked open. "Cha-be, check."

  "Check," I replied automatically, and the door clicked shut. The guards didn't even bother coming inside my room anymore. I never gave them trouble in all these years.

  I let my mind drift back into Three, watching the girl. So strong was my desire to contact her that it bled over into Four and Five, and soon she was encircled by all three wolves. Other prisoners pointed and whispered, but she didn't seem to notice until Five tentatively licked the back of her arm. She sprang back, yelling, and I pulled my wolves away, still keeping her within eyesight.

  I needed to talk with her. The yearning was so strong, it felt as if my ribcage would pull me toward her by itself. It had been so long since I'd seen a friendly face.

  But what if instead of a smile, I got a sneer? My hopes had been dashed against the rocks so many times, I didn't know if I could take it again.

  I inhaled deeply to draw in strength, then coughed, choking on the spicy tang of supai stone dust from the nearby mines. I needed to face this like a man. Or at least the man I had once been, rather than what I had become.

  Knocking twice to let the guards know I was coming out, I opened the door, planning on giving a line about needing to use the toilets.

  As I stepped into the hallway, the words died on my lips.