Ancient Fire by Mark London Williams

answers. “You and Thea still here. I
hide, too.” I hear a loud splash as Clyne
dives into the stream.
    “Up ahead!” The torches are getting closer.
Thea is still carefully touching the faces of the bodies around
her.
    “Don’t move,” I hiss again.
    From the footsteps, I can tell they’re nearly
on us. I shut up and roll over, lying still, but I bump the
decaying body next to me, and part of it gives way with a squish , like a Jell-O mold collapsing. The
whole thing is really gross, but there isn’t much time to be
scared. The men are too close.
    “We’ll never find them down here,
Tiberius.”
    “We will. Heaven commands us to.”
    “This place, Tiberius, has little to do with
heaven.”
    “You are a nervous fool, Praetorius.”
    “Only a fool would not be nervous. It is dark. Our clothes are heavy with
water, and these pillars are groaning. And I can smell smoke even
down here. You should not have let this grow out of control.”
    “The fire started at the harbor. There was a
ship…bringing in more scrolls for that witch-woman’s library.
Foreign scrolls. The crowd wanted to put a stop…to strange ideas.
The flames are a sign of their righteous passion.”
    “All this death down here…it’s evil.”
    “Listen. Shh.”
    “What?”
    “Hear that? Like a faint echo.”
    I peek and see Tiberius peering in our
direction. The water is coming in more heavily. Some gets on my
face, and I try not to sputter.
    “Death is natural, Praetorius. But life,
spinning out of control— that is evil.”
There’s a constant rumble now as water comes in. But that’s not our
only problem: Tiberius is staring right where Thea has wedged
herself between a couple of bodies.
    “Tiberius? What do you see?”
    “I believe I see a strange twist of fate,
Praetorius — or a witch’s trick.”
    He steps toward Thea just as the rumble turns
into a low, steady roar, and then it feels like I’m back in the
Fifth Dimension, because several things happen at once:
    Tiberius touches Thea, who stops pretending
to be dead long enough to scream.
    Tiberius screams back, “Sorceress! I have you!”
    As he grabs for her, I reach out and yank his
ankle. I guess he thinks Thea is bringing the dead to life, because
his scream changes from rage to terror…
    …just as water sprays down on his torch,
snuffing it out and surrounding all of us with total darkness…
    …just as whatever was controlling the flow of
water into the harbor gives way, and half the Mediterranean comes
roaring into the catacombs and sweeps us up. I reach out for Thea,
for someone or something to hold on to, but grab only water, which
fills my ears, my eyes, my nose…
    …and then I go black. And this time, there
are no colors to wake up to.
     
     
     
    Chapter Thirteen
    Thea: Survivor’s Tale
    415 C.E.
     
    After seeing so much, it would have been far
easier to tell myself I had gone mad. I was soaking wet and trapped
in the lighthouse, where a mob had assembled—for the second time
that day—calling for me to be burned. Mother was gone, taken by the
same crowd, and I was left with a talking reptile and a boy trying
to be a wizard as friends. And my city was burning. How much easier
to tell myself it was all some kind of insane vision. But the
vision wasn’t insane. The city and its people were.
    I had been with my mother, Hypatia, in that
very lighthouse the day before as she con- ducted an experiment on
the nature of time. That had been at noon.
    By then, Mother already stood accused of
being a witch. Me too, not only for being her daughter, but also
for knowing stars the way I do and for suggesting once that our
Earth is not the center of divine creation, but a piece of it.
    Just for surviving the flood in the
catacombs, they would suspect me of black magic. Eli the boy
wizard, K’lion the lizard man, and I were all in the tunnels,
trying to escape from the great library, which had been put to
flame.
    I am glad, at least, that Mother did not see
the