The Legions of Fire by David Drake

Author:David Drake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

ALPHENA FOUND HERSELF STANDING on turf instead of the stone coping. She flailed her arms instinctively as her cleats dug into the sod. The weight of her shield nearly pulled her over.

It was night instead of noon as it had been in the garden. Besides that, the moon was in its first quarter instead of being a day past full as it would be when it rose tonight in Carce. The warm air was scented with unfamiliar spices, and the trees were nothing like anything Alphena had ever seen.

Something very close by screamed in metallic rage. Alphena turned toward the sound and drew her sword. She didn’t know what was happening, but it obviously wasn’t happening in the garden of the noble Senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa.

The shriek sounded again. Alphena sidled toward it carefully, looking over the top of her rectangular shield. Three layers of birch had been laminated into a sheet so that the grain crossed and then recrossed. The whole was about two inches thick, bulky as well as heavy.

Alphena suddenly didn’t mind the shield’s awkwardness. At the moment it gave her more confidence than the double-edged short sword in her other hand, though that too was of army pattern.

She worked her way around a line of leaves which were each the size of a blanket. Twenty feet away, a cat the size of an ox was clawing at the thin trunk of a tree topped not with branches but rather with what looked like a single dock leaf.

A man in a full cloak balanced precariously on the leaf. His broad-brimmed traveler’s hat lay near the base of the tree where the cat must have surprised him. He met Alphena’s eyes, then looked away. The leaf concealed him from the beast’s vantage, but out of sight obviously didn’t take him out of the creature’s mind.

The cat stretched to its full height, then ripped both forepaws down. Strips and fragments flew from the trunk; the top wobbled, causing the man to adjust his position. The cat couldn’t reach to within fifteen feet of him, but in a few minutes the severed trunk would topple him to the ground.

The cat moved back slightly and paced, its eyes always upward. Alphena had thought it was a cat beyond the size of any lion she’d seen in the arena. When it moved out from the shadow of the leaf, she saw that its head was human—or almost human.

The creature’s long, narrow face wouldn’t have aroused comment on the streets of Carce so long as it kept its mouth shut. When it opened its jaws for another high-pitched, terrible scream, Alphena saw teeth like the points of javelins.

She recognized the creature then: it was a sphinx. Had Persica transported her to the lands below Egypt where such monsters might live?

The sphinx leaped at the tree, slashing furiously with both forepaws. The top swayed, tipping toward the creature despite the attempts of the man hiding there to shift his weight to the back.

His only

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