Page 5

“Ah, but there are others of his kind too, are there not? Seven, to be exact.”

So tall and growing still, its face shimmering with darkness, eaten away from within; Locusta gives a stark cry at the sight, falls to her knees, buries her face heedlessly in her polluted palms and smears them back and forth, back and forth. Lets her well-coiffed hair rush down to straggle in the blood-mud, without regard for the result.

With bleak glee: “Did you really think none of us would also come when you called, little lady?”

For: Ah yes, Marcilla thinks. Those others.

You who sew things, each to each. You who wear us as robes . . . seasonless, timeless, faceless, nameless . . .

Perhaps the world does end tonight, after all—in one way, or another.

And: “Bugger all this,” Gnaius says, hoisting Chryse once more, so he can run faster. But before he’s so much as taken a single step, the black watchers are already on him. They bring him down, and her, as Dromio just stands there, frozen. While the ghost-clad thing that was Marcilla simply laughs and grows on, unstoppable, and Locusta sobs over the wreckage of her grandest plans.

Time to go, Marcilla reckons. Yet finds herself hovering on, still somehow obscurely sorry for her former mistress, almost wanting to touch her, to offer comfort.

Beside the lady, a new spectre rises—smaller, wavering, yet just as uncomfortable. The half-crushed figure of Locusta’s son has exited the mundus unnoticed, on unsteady tiptoes. His grave little face is a bloodless parody of hers, aside from the eyes: like purple butterflies set sidelong, opening and closing their spotted wings as lashes, pupils golden in the gathering storm.

“I failed you, master,” Locusta weeps, burying her face against his tiny feet. “It goes on and on, the same as ever. I failed.”

“You could not help it,” he says, and touches her ruined hair, gently.

The Marcilla-thing shakes itself, impatiently. It sends its shadow out further yet, summoning its acolytes from their work; to a one, they leave Marcilla’s former friends where they’ve fallen and gather close, surrounding Locusta and her lich-baby alike. Their teeth gleam, reflecting lightning.

But you and she are done, nevertheless, it says, no longer bothering to speak at all. The door is closing. This stops here.

“Oh, yes,” the little boy agrees. “It does.”

And his gentle touch on Locusta’s shaking shoulder wakes a last thunderclap that rips the night asunder, as a wall of boiling mud vomited up from Gaea’s guts rushes down out of the dark. Walls shatter, stones fly; slate tiles burst in the heat; bodies curl fetally and parboil into shells, black mirror of the wombs in which they once dreamed. The lid slams down over the mundus-pit, its foulness and its secrets locked away once and for all as molten earth drowns and buries it.

The pyroclastic flow rips through Hercules’ city, scouring all in its path away forever.

***

After, Marcilla feels herself peel away up into the exploding sky. Sees Locusta engulfed below her, along with what’s left of Dromio, Gnaius, poor Chryse and her child, if child there even was.

She briefly finds time to hope, absently, that someone—her real son, perhaps?—will care enough to show Locusta which way to go, so she doesn’t wander eternally. Her intentions were better than might be expected, especially from a Roman.

First the flow, the flaming gases, followed then by mud, by rock, by time. The city will be seeded over and forgotten, found again by chance, unearthed once more, visited, studied. The Villa Locusta will become only one of many necropoli, each equally important. Each equally misunderstood.

She knows this, somehow, just as she somehow knows her own sad tale to have been only one of many near-apocalyptic stories—all of them different, all of them the exact same. Except, on occasion, for some minor difference in the way they reach their appointed end.

Herself, however, Marcilla is free, of all of it. Of everything: pain, past, world, time, name. Too free even to appreciate her own freedom.

Simple and plain, free and clear; here, then not. And then, at long last, very gratefully indeed—

—gone.

TRAP-WEED

For their land-longing shall be sea-longing and their sea-longing shall be land-longing, forever.

—An old legend of the Orkneys, concerning those seals who shed their skins to become women and men

Any selkie can be Great, if he fights for it when challenged. We are by no means a democracy.

But for myself, I did not care to, and was driven forth, into deeper waters. So I swam until my fat and fur could no longer warm me, ‘til the chill had almost breached my heart. I swam ‘til my lungs gave out, then sank, deep into darkness.

When I woke, I found myself aboard-ship, peltless and doubly nude. A lean man stood looking down on me, his elegant face all angles, while others watched from behind, above . . . so many, for this creaking wooden shell to carry oceanbound in safety. I had never seen such a number before, all in one place.