He smiled again. He was amused at the insight-and he was amused that he had found a purely philosophical question to take his mind off the problem of what lay in his own immediate future. Both problems were insoluble, but considering the definition of "humanity," wasn't emotionally trying.
For a moment, Varus saw vast machines beyond the faint rosy membrane, deeper shadows bulking in the purple-gray dusk. They moved repetitively, the movement visible though the forms were only blurs. He could not tell how distant what he saw was, or even if he was truly seeing anything.
As suddenly, he stared upward at horror: Ocean given physical form. A thousand ravening maws slavered toward him, tens of thousands of limbs kicked and clawed and coiled-and then storm-tossed water surged down, a sea greater than the world itself. Froth flicked from the whitecaps. Monster or ocean met eye-searing purple lightning and vanished into haze, through which the reborn terror drove to vanish in turn. The roar was deafening.
"Perhaps, Gaius Varus, you should consider preserving your fine mind by leaving this place," the Sibyl said. "You are still able to, you know."
Varus glanced at her in irritation. "To go where?" he asked. "Back to Carce, where Typhon will be driven if I don't stop Procron here?"
She gave him another enigmatic smile. "You don't mind my suggesting that you are a coward," she said in a musing tone, "but flawed logic offends you. Does that make you a brave man, Lord Wizard, or a fool?"
"Nothing historians have taught me about battles," Varus said, "makes me think that one man cannot be both. Publius Corylus has many stories of the army which have caused me to wonder if it's possible to be a brave man and not a fool."
"'It is a sweet and proper thing for a man to die for his fatherland,'" the Sibyl quoted. "Was Horace a fool, Gaius Varus?"
"No," said Varus. "Because he threw down his shield and ran instead of dying."
He paused, rolling the thought around in his head. Very precisely he went on, "Horace was not a fool; but he was worse than a coward to urge others to act and therefore die in what he thought was a foolish manner."
Varus cleared his throat and continued, projecting as though he had an audience beyond monsters and a figment of his imagination, "I honor Horace as a poet, perhaps the greatest of our poets. But I would prefer to die at the side of my friend Corylus than to live with the soul of Horace."
The Sibyl chuckled. Unexpectedly, she reached out and squeezed his hand. "The men of Carce have not changed since my girlhood," she said.
Which is a puzzling thing to hear from a figment of my imagination.
They were walking down a tube through darkness again. Varus hadn't missed a stride beneath the threat of Typhon-or of the sea, if there was any difference-but he felt more comfortable in this neutral setting. Well, he felt less uncomfortable.
He glimpsed movement to the side and turned, wondering if he would see another of the androgynous maybe-humans. Instead he frightened into scurrying panic a handful of the rabbitlike animals which he had seen scampering outside on the moor. They disappeared into the shadows of the low, black vegetation.
"Their ancestors were human also," said the old woman. She was watching Varus, perhaps to see how he took the revelation. "The world grows old, and her children age with her."
"I see," said Varus. The only emotion he felt was wonder. He was beginning to understand the passage of long ages, which had been only a concept to him in the past.
The Sibyl gestured toward flickering brightness ahead of them. "There is your goal, Lord Wizard: Procron the Atlantean. Are you his master, do you think?"
Varus sniffed. "It doesn't matter what I think," he said.
The light was a doorway barred by sizzling lightning; the smell of burned air made Varus sneeze. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and said, "Grant me a path over which I may pass in peace!"
And stepped through, into Procron's sanctum. The Sibyl had vanished as though she never was.
Procron stood upright in the middle of a vast room. He was nude: an aged man whose chest had sunk and whose limbs were withered. Violet light flickered in the depths of the diamond skull which had replaced his head
The firmament of heaven formed the room's walls; a needle of light from each star pierced the magician's body. Varus' presence blocked a few of the beams, but they shifted and reformed as he walked forward.
"Why do you come here, infant?" a voice boomed. Procron wasn't speaking, or at least his body wasn't; the words came from the air.
Four Servitors walked toward Varus at a deliberate pace. He didn't know whether they had just appeared or if he had failed to notice them when they stood motionless in the light of stars as blinding as a dust storm. The glass men were bare-handed, but they scarcely needed weapons to deal with a young scholar.
Varus continued forward. The scroll written in Egyptian holy symbols was unrolling in his mind.
"Look above you, infant!" the voice said. "Look! Is this what you want to bring upon yourself?"
Varus looked up, though he knew what he would see. Typhon and Ocean, the presence flicking from one to the other more quickly than his mind could process… or perhaps they were the same, infinitely huge, ravening against the barrier of hissing light; a pressing, roaring, mindless fury oblivious of pain.
Varus walked on. The Servitors stepped close, their arms lifting to seize him.
"May the gods be at peace with me…," Varus said. "That I may crush my enemies!"
He started to raise his hand to point at the Servitors in turn. At his words alone they shattered into dust so fine that it seemed to sink through the solid floor.
Varus smiled grimly. Sometimes being a scholar was better than being a swordsman.
He had walked to within a few paces of the Atlantean wizard.
"What do you think to accomplish?" the voice thundered. "Even if you are willing to feed yourself to Typhon, still you cannot affect me. My soul is one with my talisman in a universe nothing can reach; the wizard Uktena slew my body thirty million years ago. What escaped to this time is dead and immune to further harm!"
"May the gods be at peace with me," Varus said, "that I may crush my enemies!"
A ripple quivered through the chamber, like heat waves stirring the stars on a summer night; the dust that had been the Servitors danced in fitful eddies. There was no greater result.
Procron's laughter echoed like mountains crashing. "You cannot harm me," the voice said, "because I am dead!"
As my ancestor, who gave me her jaw, is dead.
Varus held the splinter in his left hand. He didn't bother taking it in his right, his master hand, because he was certain that physical strength and dexterity had nothing to do with this.
He thrust the jawbone toward Procron's chest. It slid through the wizard's ribs like a spear driving into loose sand. There was a sound as if the world itself was screaming.
Above, the net of lightning that held back Typhon vanished; the monster began to pour down through the sky. The myriad lights around the vast room went dark.
Procron's body crumbled like rotten wood, but the diamond skull blurred. It was vanishing by becoming more diffuse, the way fog lifts as the sun climbs higher.
The scream grew fainter also, but it continued for a very long time.
Varus turned and walked back toward the entrance. There he would wait for horror to engulf him. I am a citizen of Carce.
"Where are we going?" Alphena asked. "Ah-that is, if you please, Lord Gryphon."
The gryphon's muscles rippled over his bones with the rhythm of a dance. His fur lifted and settled like the surface of a pond when something very large swims beneath it. Even as keyed up as Alphena was, she found the movement entrancing.