Night & Demons (19 page)

“Two months ago, you told me my brother’d been drowned in a shipwreck!” the man shouted into the pause his accusation blew in the proceedings.

The accuser was short and already balding, despite being within a few years of Vettius’s twenty-five; but his features were probably handsome enough at times when rage didn’t distort them.

“Blasphemer!” somebody cried; but most of the crowd poised, waiting for Pyrrhus to respond. The attendants were as motionless as statues.

“His ship was driven ashore in Malta, but he’s fine!” the man continued desperately. “He’s home again, and I’ve married his
widow!
What am I supposed to do, you lying bastard!”

Pyrrhus brought his hands together. Dama expected a clap of sound, but there was none, only the Prophet’s piercing voice crying, “Evil are they who evil speak of God! Cast them from your midst with stone and rod!”

What—

“You’ve ruined my—” the man began.

—
doggerel,
Dama thought, and then a portly matron next to the accuser slashed a line of blood across his forehead with the pin of the gold-and-garnet clasp fastening her cloak. The victim screamed and stumbled back, into the clumsy punch of a frail-looking man twice his age.

The crowd gave a collective snarl like that of dogs ringing a boar, then surged forward together.

The paving stones were solidly set in concrete, but several of the infuriated worshipers found chunks of building material of a size to swing and hurl. Those crude weapons were more danger to the rest of the crowd than to the intended victim—knocked onto all fours and crawling past embroidered sandals, cleated boots, and bare soles, all kicking at him with murderous intent.

Vettius started to move toward the core of violence with a purposeful look in his eye. The merchant, to whom public order was a benefit rather than a duty, gripped the bigger man’s arm. Vettius jerked his arm loose.

Tried to jerk his arm loose. Dama’s small frame belied his strength; but much more surprising was his willingness to oppose the soldier whom he knew was still much stronger—as well as being on the edge of a killing rage.

The shock brought Vettius back to present awareness. The accuser would probably survive the inept battering; and one man—even a man as strong and determined as Lucius Vettius—could do little to change the present odds.

The mob jostled them as if they were rocks in a surf of anger. “Two months ago,” Dama said, with his lips close to the soldier’s ear, “he’d have been one of those kicking. That’s not why we’re here.”

The victim reached the back of the crowd and staggered to his feet again. A few eager fanatics followed some way into the darkness; but Pyrrhus spread his arms on the porch of the church, calming the crowd the way a teacher can appear and quiet a schoolroom.

Whips cracked the worshipers to attention.

“Brothers and sisters in God,” the Prophet called, clearly audible despite the panting and foot-shuffling that filled the street even after the murderous cries had abated.
“
Pray now for the Republic and the Emperors. May they seek proper guidance in the time of testing that is on them!”

“What’s that mean?” Dama whispered.

The soldier shrugged. “There’s nothing special
I
know about,” he muttered. “Of course, it’s the sort of thing you could say anytime in the past couple centuries and be more right than wrong.”

Pyrrhus’s long prayer gave no more information as to the nature of the “testing” than had been offered at the start, but the sentences rambled through shadowy threats and prophetic thickets barbed with words in unknown languages. On occasion—random occasions, it seemed to Vettius—the Prophet lowered his arms and the crowd shouted, “Amen!” After the first time, the soldier and merchant joined in with feigned enthusiasm.

Despite his intention to listen carefully—and his absolute need to stay awake if he were to survive the night—Vettius was startled out of a fog when Pyrrhus cried, “Depart now, in the love of God and his servants Pyrrhus and Glaukon!”

“God bless Pyrrhus, the servant of God!” boomed the crowd, as though the meaningless, meandering prayer had brought the worshipers to some sort of joyous epiphany.

Whips cracked. The musicians behind Pyrrhus clashed out a concentus like that with which they had heralded the Prophet’s appearance—

Pyrrhus was gone, as suddenly and inexplicably as he’d appeared.

The crowd shook itself around the blinking amazement of Vettius and Dama. “I don’t see . . .” the merchant muttered. The torches trailed sparks and pitchy smoke up past the pediment, but there was no fog or haze sufficient to hide a man vanishing from a few feet away.

“Is this all—” Vettius began.

“Patience,” said Dama.

The attendants—who hadn’t moved during the near riot—formed a double line up the stepped base of the building to where the drummer opened the door. Worshipers from the front of the crowd, those who’d paid for their places and could afford to pay more for a personal prophecy, advanced between the guiding lines.

Vettius’s face twisted in a moue as he and Dama joined the line.
He
shouldn’t have to be counseled in patience by a silk merchant . . . .

The private worshipers passed one by one through the door, watched by the attendants. A man a couple places in front of Vettius wore an expensive brocade cloak, but his cheeks were scarred and one ear had been chewed down to a nub. As he stepped forward, one of the attendants put out a hand in bar and said, “No weapons. You have a—”

“Hey!” the man snarled. “You leave me—”

The attendant on the other side reached under the cloak and plucked out a dagger with a wicked point and a long, double-edged blade.

The pair of women nearest the incident squealed in horror, while Vettius poised to react if necessary. The man grabbed the hand of the attendant holding his dagger and said, “Hey! That’s for personal reasons, see?”

The first attendant clubbed the loaded butt of his whip across the back of the man’s neck. The fellow slumped like an empty wineskin. Two of the musicians laid down their instruments and dragged him toward the side of the building. Twittering, the women stepped past where he’d fallen.

Vettius glanced at Dama.

“I’m clean,” the merchant murmured past the ghost of a humorless smile. He knew, as Vettius did, that the man being dragged away was as likely dead as merely unconscious.

That, along with what happened to the fellow who’d married his brother’s wife, provided the night’s second demonstration of how Pyrrhus kept himself safe. The Prophet might sound like a dimwitted charlatan, and his attendants might look as though they were sleepwalking most of the time; but he and they were ruthlessly competent where it counted.

As he passed inside the church, Dama glanced at the door leaves. He hoped to see some sign—a false panel; a sheet of mirror-polished metal;
something
—to suggest the illusion by which Pyrrhus came and left the porch. The outer surface of the wooden leaves had been covered with vermillion leather, but the inside showed the cracks and warping of age.

These were the same doors that had been in place when the building was an abandoned temple. There were no tricks in them.

A crosswall divided the interior of the church into two square rooms. The broad doorway between them was open, but the select group of worshipers halted in the first, the anteroom.

Crosswise in the center of the inner room, Pyrrhus the Prophet lay on a stone dais as though he were a corpse prepared for burial. His head rested on a raised portion of the stone, crudely carved to the shape of an open-jawed snake.

Behind the Prophet, against the back wall where the cult statue of Asklepios once stood, was a tau cross around which twined a metal-scaled serpent. The creature’s humanoid head draped artistically over the crossbar.

Pairs of triple-wick lamps rested on stands in both rooms, but their light was muted to shadow by the high, black beams supporting the roof. A row of louvered clerestory windows had been added just beneath the eaves when the building was refurbished, but even during daylight they would have affected ventilation more than lighting.

Vettius estimated that forty or fifty people were allowed to enter before attendants closed the doors again and barred them. The anteroom was comfortably large enough to hold that number, but the worshipers—he and Dama as surely as the rest—all crowded toward the center where they could look through the doorway into the sanctum.

Bronze scales jingled a soft susurrus as the serpent lifted its head from the bar. “God bless Pyrrhus his servant!” rasped the creature in a voice like a wind-swung gate.

Vettius grabbed for the sword he wasn’t carrying tonight. He noticed with surprise that Dama’s arm had curved in a similar motion. Not the sort of reflex he’d have expected in a merchant . . . but Vettius had already decided that the little Cappadocian wasn’t the sort of merchant one usually met.

“God bless Glaukon and Pyrrhus, his servants,” responded the crowd, the words muzzed by a harshly echoing space intended for visual rather than acoustic worship.

“Mithra!” Dama said silently, a hand covering his lips as they mimed the pagan syllables.

He knew the serpent was moved by threads invisible in the gloom. He knew one of Pyrrhus’s confederates spoke the greeting through a hole in the back wall which the bronze simulacrum covered.

But the serpent’s creaking, rasping voice frightened him like nothing had since—

Like nothing ever had before.

Goods of various types were disposed around the walls of the anteroom. Sealed amphoras—sharp-ended jars that might contain anything from wine to pickled fish—leaned in clusters against three of the four corners. From wooden racks along the sidewalk hung bunches of leeks, turnips, radishes—and a pair of dead chickens. In the fourth corner was a stack of figured drinking bowls (high-quality ware still packed in scrap papyrus to protect the designs from chipping during transit) and a wicker basket of new linen tunics.

For a moment, Vettius couldn’t imagine why the church was used for storage of this sort. Then he noticed that each item was tagged: they were worshipers’ gifts in kind, being consecrated by the Prophet’s presence before they were distributed. Given the number of attendants Pyrrhus employed in his operation, such gifts would be immediately useful.

Pyrrhus sat up slowly on the couch, deliberately emphasizing his resemblance to a corpse rising from its bier. His features had a waxy stillness, and the only color on his skin was the yellow tinge cast by the lamp flames.

“Greetings, brothers and sisters in God,” he said. His quiet, piercing voice seemed not to be reflected by the stone.

“Greetings, Pyrrhus, Prophet of God,” the crowd and echoes yammered.

A pile of tablets stood beside the couch, skewed and colorful with the wax that sealed each one. Pyrrhus took the notebook on top and held it for a moment in both hands. His fingers were thin and exceptionally long, at variance with his slightly pudgy face.

“Klea, daughter of Menandros,” he said. The elder of the two praying women who’d stood in front of Vettius during the open service gasped with delight. She stepped through the doorway, knelt, and took the tablet from the Prophet’s hands.
“
Remarriage,” Pyrrhus said in the singsong with which he delivered his Verses, “is not for you but faith. You may take the veil for me in death.”

“Oh, Prophet,” the woman mumbled as she got to her feet. For a moment it looked as though she were going to attempt to kiss Pyrrhus.

“God has looked with favor on you, daughter,” the Prophet said in a distant, cutting voice that brought the suppliant back to a sense of propriety. “He will accept your sacrifice.”

From the bosom of the stola she wore, Klea took a purse and thrust it deep within the maw of the stone serpent-head which had served Pyrrhus as a pillow. The coins clinked—gold, Dama thought; certainly not mere bronze—beneath the floor. The bench served as a lid for Pyrrhus’s treasury, probably a design feature left from the days the building was a temple.

“Oh, Master,” the woman said as she walked back to her place in the anteroom.

Tears ran down her cheeks, but even Vettius’s experience at sizing up women’s emotions didn’t permit him to be sure of the reason. Perhaps Klea cried because she’d been denied remarriage during life . . . but it was equally likely that she’d been overcome with joy at the prospect of joining Pyrrhus after death.

The Prophet took another from the stack of tablets. “Hestiaia, daughter of Mimnermos,” he called, and the younger of the pair of women stepped forward to receive her prophecy.

Pyrrhus worked through the series of requests tablet by tablet. A few of the responses were in absolute gibberish—which appeared to awe and impress the recipients—and even when the doggerel could be understood, it was generally susceptible to a variety of meanings. Dama began to suspect that the man who’d been stoned and kicked from the gathering outside had chosen the interpretation he himself desired to an ambiguous answer about his brother’s fate.

A man was told that his wife was unfaithful. No one but the woman herself could know with certainty if the oracle were false.

A woman was told that the thief who took her necklace was the slave she trusted absolutely. She would go through her household with scourge and thumbscrew . . . and if she found nothing, then wasn’t her suspicion of this one or that proof her trust hadn’t been complete after all?

“Severiana, daughter of Marcus Severianus,” the Prophet called. Vettius stiffened as the Prefect’s simpering wife joined Pyrrhus in the sanctum.

“Daughter,” said Pyrrhus in his clanging verse, “blessed of God art thee. Thy rank and power increased shall be. Thy husband’s works grow anyhow. And morrow night I’ll dine with thou.”

Dama thought: Pyrrhus’s accent was flawless, unlike that of the Prefect’s nomenclator; but in his verse he butchered Latin worse than ever an Irish beggar did . . . .

Vettius thought: Castor and Pollux! Bad enough that the Prefect’s wife was involved with this vicious phony. But if Pyrrhus got close to Rutilianus himself, he could do real harm to the whole Republic . . . .