The Hour of the Gate

by Alan Dean Foster

  As the dust began to settle among cries of pain and fear, there came a second, deeper, more ominous rumble as the entire left side of the Jo-Troom wall collapsed in a heap of shattered masonry and stone. It brought the great wooden gates down with it, supporting timbers splintering like firecrackers as they crashed to the ground.

  "Diversion," muttered Flor. "The aerial attack, the parachutists, the beetles… all a diversion. Bastardos; I should have remembered my military history classes."

  Jon-Tom moved shakily to the edge of the wall. If they'd been on the other side of the Gate they'd all be dead or maimed now.

  Small white shapes were beginning to emerge from the ground in front of the ruined wall. Waving picks and short swords they cut at the legs of startled warmlander soldiers. Like the inhabitants of Ironcloud they too wore dark goggles to protect them from the sunlight.

  "Termites," Jon-Tom murmured aloud, "and other insect burrowers. But where did they get the explosives?"

  "Little need to think on that, boy," Clothahump said sadly. "More of Eejakrat's work. What did you call the packaged thunder?"

  "Explosives. Probably dynamite."

  "Or even gelignite," added Flor with suppressed anger. "That was an intense explosion."

  Sensing victory, the Plated Folk ignored the depradations of the swooping arboreals overhead and swarmed forward. Nor could the hectic casting of spears and nets by the Weavers hold them back. Not with the wall, the fabled ancient bottleneck, tumbled to the earth like so many child's blocks.

  It must have taken an immense quantity of explosives to undermine that massive wall. It was possible, Jon-Tom mused, that the Plated burrowers had begun excavating their tunnel weeks before the battle began.

  Without the wall to hinder them they charged onward. By sheer force of numbers they pushed back those who had desperately rushed to defend the ruined barrier. Then they were across, fighting on the other side of the Jo-Troom Gate for the first time in recorded memory. Warmlander blood stained its own land.

  Jon-Tom turned helplessly to Clothahump. The Plated Folk soldiers were ignoring the remaining section of wall and the few arrows and spears that fell from its crest. The wizard stood quietly, his gaze focused on the far end of the Pass and not on the catastrophe below.

  "Can't you do something," Jon-Tom pleaded with him. "Bring fire and destruction down on them! Bring…"

  Clothahump did not seem to be listening. He was looking without eyes. "I almost have it," he whispered to no one in particular. "Almost can…" He broke off, turned to stare at Ion-Tom.

  "Do you think conjuring up lightning and floods and fire is merely a matter of snapping one's fingers, boy? Haven't you learned anything about magic since you've been here?" He turned his attention away again.

  "Can almost… yes," he said excitedly, "I can. I believe I can see it now!" The enthusiasm faded. "No, I was wrong. Too well screened by distortion spells. Eejakrat leaves nothing to chance. Nothing."

  Jon-Tom turned away from the entranced wizard, swung his duar around in front of him. His fingers played furiously on the strings. But he could not think of a single appropriate song to sing. His favorites were songs of love, of creativity and relationships. He knew a few marches, and though he sang with ample fervor nothing materialized to slow the Plated Folk advance.

  Then Mudge, sweaty and his fur streaked with dried blood, was shaking him and pointing westward. "Wot the bloody 'ell is that?" The otter was staring across the widening field of battle.

  "It sounds like…" said Caz confusedly. "I don't know. A rusty door hinge, perhaps. Or high voices. Many high voices."

  Then they could make out the source of the peculiar noise. It was singing. Undisciplined, but strong, and it rose from a motley horde of marchers nearing the foothills. They were armed with pitchforks and makeshift spears, with scythes and knives tied to broom handles, with woodcutters' tools and sharpened iron posts.

  They flowed like a brown-gray wave over the milling combatants, and wherever their numbers appeared the Plated Folk were overwhelmed.

  "Mice!" said Mudge, aghast. "Rats an' shrews in there, too. I don't believe it. They're not fighters. Wot be they doin"ere?"

  "Fighting," said Jon-Tom with satisfaction, "and damn well, too, from the look of it."

  The rodent mob attacked with a ferocity that more than compensated for their lack of training. The flow of clicking, gleaming death from the Pass was blunted, then stopped. The rodents fought with astonishing bravery, throwing themselves onto larger opponents while others cut at warriors' knees and ankles.

  Sometimes three and four of the small wamilanders would bring down a powerful insect by weight alone. Their makeshift weapons broke and snapped. They resorted to rocks and bare paws, whatever they could scavenge that would kill.

  For a few moments the remnants of the warmlander forces were as stunned by the unexpected assault as the Plated Polk. They stared dumbfounded as the much maligned, oft-abused rodents threw themselves into the fray. Then they resumed fighting themselves, alongside heroic allies once held in servitude and contempt.

  Now if the wamilanders prevailed there would be permanent changes in the social structure of Polastrindu and other communities, Jon-Tom knew. At least one good thing would come of this war.

  He thought they were finished with surprises. But while he selected targets below for the spears he was handed, yet another one appeared.

  In the midst of the battle a gout of flame brightened the winter morning. There was another. It was almost asif… yes! A familiar iridescent bulk loomed large above the combatants, incinerating Plated Folk by the squadron.

  "I'll be damned!" he muttered. "It's Falameezar!" "But I thought he was through with us," said Caz,

  "You know this dragon?" Bribbens tended to a wounded leg and eyed the distant fight with amazement. It was the first time Jon-Tom had seen the frog's demeanor change.

  "We sure as hell do!" Jon-Tom told him joyfully. "Don't you see, Caz, it all adds up."

  "Pardon my ignorance, friend Jon-Tom, but the only mathematics I've mastered involves dice and cards."

  "This army of the downtrodden, of the lowest mass of workers. Who do you think organized them, persuaded them to fight? Someone had to raise a cry among them, someone had to convince them to fight for their rights as well as for their land. And who would be more willing to do so, to assume the mantle of leadership, than our innocent Marxist Falameezar!"

  "This is absurd." Bribbens could still not quite believe it. "Dragons do not fight with people. They are solitary, antisocial creatures who…"

  "Not this one," Jon-Tom informed him assuredly. "If anything, he's too social. But I'm not going to argue his philosophies now."

  Indeed, as the gleaming black and purple shape trudged nearer they could hear the great dragon voice bellowing encouragingly above the noise of battle.

  "Onward downtrodden masses! Workers arise! Down with the invading imperialist warmongers!"

  Yes, that was Falameezar and none other. The dragon was in his sociological element. In between thundering favorite Marxist homilies he would incinerate a dozen terrified insect warriors or squash a couple beneath massive clawed feet. Around him swirled a bedraggled mob of tiny furry supporters like an armada of fighter craft protecting a dreadnought.

  The legions of Plated Folk seemed endless. But now that the surprise engendered by the destruction of the wall had passed, their offensive began to falter. The arrival of what amounted to a second warmlander army, as ferocious if not as well trained as the original, started to turn the tide.

  Meanwhile the Weavers and fliers from h-oncloud continued to cause havoc among the packed ranks of warriors trying to squeeze through the section of ruined wall to reach the open plain where their numbers could be a factor. The diminutive lemur bowmen fired and fired until their drawstring fingers were bloody.

  When the fall came it was not in a great surge of panic. A steady withering of purpose and determination ate through the ranks of the Plat
ed Folk. In clusters, and individually, they lost their will to fight on. A vast sigh of discouragement rippled through the whole exhausted army.

  Sensing it, the warmlanders redoubled then- efforts. Still fighting, but with intensity seeping away from them, the Plated Folk were gradually pressed back. The plain was cleared, and then the destroyed section of wall. The battle moved once again back into the confines of the Pass. Insect officers raged and threatened, but they could do nothing to stop the steady slow leak of desire that bled their soldiers' will to fight.

  Jon-Tom had stopped throwing spears. His arm throbbed with the efforts of the past several days. The conflict had retreated steadily up the Pass, and the Plated combatants were out of range now. He was cheering tiredly when a han6 clamped on his arm so forcefully that he winced. He lookeo around. It was Clothahump. The wizard's grip was anything but that of an oldster.

  "By the periodic table, I can see it now!"

  "See what?"

  "The deadmind." Clothahump's tone held a peculiar mixture of confusion and excitement. "The deadmind. It is not in a body."

  "You mean the brain itself s been extracted?" The image was gruesome.

  "No. It is scattered about, in several containers of differing shape."

  Jon-Tom's mind shunted aside the instinctive vision and produced only a blank from the wizard's description. Flor listened intently.

  "It talks to Eejakrat," Clothahump continued, "his voice far away, distant, "in words I can't understand."

  "Several containers… the mind is several minds?" JonTom struggled to make sense of a seeming impossibility.

  "No, no. It is one mind that has been split into many parts."

  "What does it look like? You said containers. Can you be more specific?" Flor asked him.

  "Not really. The containers are mostly rectangular, but not all. One inscribes words on a scroll, symbols and magic terms I do not recognize." He winced with the strain of focusing senses his companions did not possess.

  "There are symbols over all the containers as well, though they mostly differ from those appearing on the scroll. The mind also makes a strange noise, like talking that is not. I can read some of the symbols… it is strangely inscribed. It changes as I look at it." He stopped.

  Jon-Tom urged him on. "What is it? What's happening?"

  Clothahump's face was filled with pain. Sweat poured down his face into his shell. Jon-Tom didn't know that a turtle could sweat. Everything indicated that the wizard was expending a massive effort not only to continue to see but to understand.

  "Eejakrat… Eejakrat sees the failure of the attack." He swayed, and Jon-Tom and Flor had to support him or he would have fallen. "He works a last magic, a final conjuration. He has… has delved deep within the deadmind for its most powerful manifestation. It has given him the formula he has. Now he is giving orders to his assistants. They are ringing materials from the store of sorceral supplies. Skrritch watches, she will kill him if he fails. Eejakrat promises her the battle will be won. The materials… I recognize some. No, many. But I do not understand the formula given, the purpose. The purpose is to… to…" He turned a frightened face upward. Jon-Tom shivered. He'd never before seen the wizard frightened. Not when confronted by the Massawrafh, not when crossing Helldrink.

  But he was more than frightened now. He was terrified.

  "Must stop it!" he mumbled. "Got to stop him from completing the formula. Even Eejakrat does not understand what he does. But he… I see it clearly… he is desperate. He will try anything. I do not think… do not think he can control…"

  "What's the formula?" Flor pressed him.

  "Complex… can't understand…"

  "Well then, the symbols you read on the deadmind I containers."

  "Can read them now, yes… but can't understand…"

  "Try. Repeat them, anyway."

  Clothahump went silent, and for a moment the two humans I were afraid he wouldn't speak again. But Jon-Tom finally managed to shake him into coherence.

  "Symbols… symbols say, 'Property.' "

  "That's all?" Flor said puzzledly. "Just 'property'?"

  "No… there is more. Property… property restricted access. U.S. Army Intelligence."

  Flor looked over at Jon-Tom. "That explains everything; the parachutes, the tactics, the formula for the explosives to undermine the wall, maybe the technique for doing it as well. Los insectos have gotten hold of a military computer."

  "That's why Clothahump tried to find an engineer to combat Eejakrat's 'new magic,' " Jon-Tom muttered. "And he got me instead. And you." He gazed helplessly at her.

  "What are we going to do? I don't know anything about computers."

  "I know a little, but it's not a matter of knowing anything about computers. Machine, man or insect, it has to be destroyed before Eejakrat can finish his new formula."

  "What the fuck could that devil have dug out of its electronic guts?" He looked back down at Clothahump.

  "Don't understand…" murmured the wizard. "Beyond my ken. But Eejakrat knows how to comply. It worries him, but he proceeds. He knows if he does not the war is lost."

  "Someone's got to get over there and destroy the computer and its mentor," Jon-Tom said decisively. He called to the rest of their companions.

  Mudge and Caz ambled over curiously. So did Bribbens, and Pog fluttered close from his perch near the back of the wall. Hastily, Jon-Tom told them what had to be done.

  "Wot about the Ironclouders, wot?" Mudge indicated the diving shapes of the great owls working their death up the Pass. "I don't think they'd 'old you, mate, but I ought to be able to ride one."

  "I could go myself, boss." Clothahump turned a startled gaze on the unexpectedly daring famulus.

  "No. Not you, Pog, nor you, otter. You would never make it, I fear. Hundreds of bowmen, a royal guard of the Greendowns' most skilled archers, surround Eejakrat and the Empress. You could not get within a quarter league of the deadmind. Even if you could, what would you destroy it with? It is made of metal. You cannot shoot an arrow through it. And there may be disciples of Eejakrat who could draw upon its evil knowledge in event of his death."

  "We need a plane," Jon-Tom told them. "A Huey or some other attack copter, with rockets."

  Clothahump looked blankly at him. "I know not what you describe, spellsinger, but by the heavens if you can do anything you must try."

  Jon-Tom licked his lips. The Who, J. Geils, Dylan: none sang much about war and its components. But he had to try something. He didn't know the Air Force song…

  "Try something, Jon-Tom," Flor urged him. "We don't have much time."

  Time. Time's getting away from us. There's your cue, man. Get there first. Worry about how to destroy the thing then.

  Trying to shut the sounds of fighting out of his thoughts, he ran his fingers a couple of times across the duar's strings. The instrument had been nicked and battered by arrows and spears, but it was still playable. He struggled to recall the melody. It was simple, smooth, a Steve Miller hallmark. A few adjustments to the duar's controls. It had to work. He turned tremble and mass all the way up. Dangerous, but whatever materialized had to carry him high above the combat, all the way to me end of the Pass.

  Anyway, Clothahump's urgency indicated that there was little time left now either for finesse or fine tuning.

  Just get me to that computer, he thought furiously. Just get me there safely and I'll find some way to destroy it. Even pulling a few wires would do it. Eejakrat couldn't repair the damage with magic… could he?

  And if he was killed and the attempt a failure, what did it matter? Talea was dead and so was much of himself. Yes, that was the answer. Crash whatever carries you and yourself into the computer. That should do it.

  Time was the first crucial element. Though he did not know it, he was soon to leam the other.

  Time… that was the key. He needed to move fast and he didn't have time to fool with machines that might or might not work, might or might not appear. Time and fligh
t. What song could possibly fill the need?

  Wait a minute! There was something about time and flight slipping, slipping into the future.

  His fingers began to fly over the strings as he threw back his head and began to sing with more strength than ever he had before.

  There was a tearing sound in the sky, and his nostrils were filled with the odor of ozone. It was coming! Whatever he'd called up. If not the sung-for huge bird, perhaps the British fighter nicknamed the Eagle, bristling with rockets and rapidfire cannon. Anything to get him into the air.

  He sang till his throat hurt, his fingers a blur above the strings. Reverberant waves of sound emerged from the quivering duar and the air vibrated in sympathy.

  A deep-throated crackling split the sky overhead, a sound no kin to any earthly thunder. It seemed the sun had drawn back to hide behind the clouds. The fighting did not stop, but warmlander and insect alike slowed their pace. That ominous rumble echoed down the walls of the Pass. Something extraordinary was happening.

  Vast wings that were of starry gases filled the air. The winter day turned warm with a sudden eruption of heat. Hot air blew Ion-Tom against the rampart behind him and nearly over, while his companions scrambled for something solid to cling to.

  Atop the wall the remaining warmlander defenders scattered in terror. On the cliffsides the Weavers scuttled for hiding places in the crevices and crannies as a monstrous fiery form came near. It touched down on the mountainside where the remaining half of the wall was worked into the naked rock, and twenty feet of granite melted and ran like syrup.

  "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!" roared a voice that could raise a sunspot. The remaining stones of the wall trembled, as did the cells of those still standing atop it. "WHAT HAVE YOU

  WROUGHT, LITTLE HUMAN!"

  "I…" Jon-Tom could only gape. He had not materialized the plane he'd wished for or the eagle he'd sung to. He had called up something best left undisturbed, interrupted a journey measurable in billions of years. It was all he could do to gaze back into those vast, infinite eyes, as M'nemaxa, barely touching the melting rock, fanned thermonuclear wings and glared down at him.