“So it is.” His pacing brought him in a spiral to the middle of the courtyard. To the candles, the charcoal, the wax tablet with the symbols Gaius had copied for practice. The precious lamp. For a moment, he was afraid Lucien would break it. That he was some crusader who had somehow gotten wind of his plan.
Lucien had just tossed a two-thousand-year-old vampire out on the street. Gaius was fairly certain he wasn’t powerful enough to stop this man—this whatever-he-was—from doing whatever he wanted.
Lucien turned to him and stopped smiling. “I know your plan. I support your plan. Be my general, Gaius Albinus. Gather my army for me. And you will have power.”
“What . . . what army?” Gaius asked.
“Ones like you. There are more than you think, and by rights they should serve me. Also the werewolves, the demons, the succubi—”
“Werewolves?”
Lucien smiled. “You’ll meet them soon enough. Use that army, destroy what you must. And hand it all over to me at the end of days. Agreed?”
A cause to march with. Gaius had missed the structure of direction, of order delivered for a righteous cause. And here this man appeared. This easy, smiling patrician with an answer and quip for everything. Gaius could see a moment, some years or decades—or even centuries—in the future, when Lucien would turn his back on him. Literally throw him on the street as he had done with Kumarbis. This man used and disposed of tools as needed.
But at least Gaius understood his role here.
Lucien offered his hand. “Come, my friend. I can make sure your talents don’t go to waste.”
Stepping forward, Gaius placed his hands between Lucien’s and pledged his loyalty. He was surprised at how warm Lucien’s skin was against his own chilled, bloodless hands. As if the man were made of fire.
And then he was at the door, a light of victory in his face. “Good journeys to you, until next we meet.”
“When will that be?”
/> Lucien shrugged, his lips pursed. He might have known, he might not have. Maybe he wanted to keep secrets.
Gaius said, “Then I will simply go on as I see fit. Gather this army for you. Gather power.”
“And this,” Lucien said, “proves that I have chosen well this time. Vale, my Dux Bellorum.”
“Vale,” Gaius said softly, but the man was already gone.
Gaius had work to do.
He assumed that Kumarbis still rested in Herculaneum. That he had somehow found a safe place to sleep out the day, as he had every day for the last however many hundreds of years. Gaius couldn’t confirm this, and he had no desire to waste time looking for the old man, however much a thread of worry tugged at him. That thread was false, and Gaius owed it nothing. But the suspicion determined the target of his strike. Of his masterpiece.
The next night, he woke at dusk and gathered his tools: flint and steel, chalk and charcoal and ash for making marks, candles for light, his own will for power. The lamp to ignite it all. He slung the bag containing everything over his shoulder, wrapped his cloak around himself, and took the road out of town.
Some half hour of walking brought him to a field where goats grazed in the day, at the foot of the great mountain Vesuvius. The eaten-down scrub gave him a surface on which to write, after he kicked away stones and goat droppings. The open space gave him a vista in almost every direction; the lamplight of the towns along the coast; the bulge of the mountain blocking out stars behind him. He had some six hours of night in which to work. He moved quickly but carefully—he had limited time but needed perfection.
Once he began he could not stop. No different than any other campaign march. He cleared a space some twenty cubits across. Marked the center with a stake. Then, he began writing in powdered charcoal carefully poured out from a funnel.
The first circle of characters was an anchoring to drive the spell deep underground, hundreds of feet, to the molten fissures that fueled the mountain. The next ring of symbols built potential, stoked fires that already existed within the mountain. The third ring directed those energies outward. Then the next, and the next. Thirteen layers of spells on top of the work he’d already sealed within the lamp. The casting took all night. He almost wouldn’t have time before the sun rose and destroyed him. He didn’t think so much of the time that passed, only of the work that needed to be done, methodically and precisely. The good work of a Roman engineer.
The thirteenth circle, the outermost ring, was for containment, protection. The power he raised here would not dissipate, but would instead burst out at once, and only at his signal. As great a show of power as any god could produce.
A deep irony: magic provided him with the knowledge that gods did not operate the Earth and Heavens. A volcano’s fury was not the anger of Vulcan making itself known. No, it was a natural process, pieces of the world crashing together and breaking apart. The resulting energies caused disasters. Sparks from the striking of flint and steel, writ large. The fires of the Earth bursting forth under pressure.
Magic didn’t create. It manipulated what was already there. Placed the power of the gods in human hands. Or vampire hands.
At last the text was done. The moon reached its apex; dawn approached. He had finished in time, but only just. He went to the center of his great canvas and placed the lamp.
The object served as a focus and a fuse. A battle of primal elements and energies, a physical poetry. Words only captured a shadow of the true forces. Many languages, symbolic conventions, all of them together were still an imperfect representation and only approached the sublime. Magic was the art of trying.
In the middle of it all remained a need for brute force. The inchoate power of the Earth itself. He lit the lamp and waited a moment. Another moment. The lamp burned with a single buttery flame. The terra-cotta orange of the clay seemed to glow, and he couldn’t tell if this was the natural light or burgeoning magic. The slight, rounded shadow of the lamp on the ground shuddered. Then vanished, as a circle of illumination spread out, stretching along the pasture and up the side of Vesuvius. The scrub-covered ground seemed to glow with the same light. People in the town would think the hillside had caught on fire.
Gaius waited, the nails of his hands digging welts into his palms. He didn’t know what would happen, what signal he should wait for. He only knew what he wanted to happen, and waiting for that was agonizing. To the east the sky faded with a hint of the gray of dawn. He had to get out of the open, but he wanted to see the spell ignite.