Meanwhile the Weavers and fliers from Ironcloud 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 Plated 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 their 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 hand clamped on his arm so forcefully that he winced. He looked 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?” Jon-Tom 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 needs. Now he is giving orders to his assistants. They are bringing 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 Massawrath, 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 containers.”
“Can read them now, yes… but can’t understand…”
“Try. Repeat them, anyway.”
Clothahump went silent, and for a moment the two humans 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 the 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 th
at computer, he thought furiously. Just get me mere 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 learn 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 flight. 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 rapid-fire 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 Jon-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.
“I’m sorry,” he Finally managed to gasp out, “I was only trying…”
“LOOK TO MY BACK!” bellowed the sun horse.
Jon-Tom hesitated, then took a cautious step forward and craned his neck. Squinting through the glare, he made out a dark metallic shape that looked suspiciously like a saddle. It was very small and lost on that great flaming curve of a spine.
“I don’t… what does this mean?” he asked humbly.
“IT MEANS A TRANSFORMATION IN MY ODYSSEY; A SHORTCUT. LITTLE MAN BENEATH THE STARS, YOU HAVE CREATED A SHORTCUT! I CAN SEE THE END OF MY JOURNEY NOW. NO LONGER MUST I RACE AROUND THE RIM OF THE UNIVERSE. ONLY ANOTHER THREE MILLION YEARS AND I WILL BE FINISHED. ONLY THREE MILLION, AND I WILL KNOW PEACE. AND YOU, MAN, ARE TO THANK FOR IT!”
“But I don’t know what I did, and I don’t know how I did it,” Jon-Tom told him softly.
“CONSEQUENCE IS WHAT MATTERS, CAUSATION IS BUT EPHEMERAL. EMPYREAN RESULTS HAVE BEEN ACHIEVED, LITTLE MAN OF NOTHINGNESS.
“AS YOU HAVE HELPED ME, SO I WILL HELP YOU. BUT I CAN DO ONLY WHAT YOU DIRECT. YOUR MAGIC PUTS THIS SHIELD ON MY BACK, SO MOUNT THEN, GUARDED BY ITS SUBSTANCE AND BY YOUR OWN MAGIC, AND RIDE. SUCH A RIDE AS NO CREATURE OF MERE FLESH AND BLOOD HAS EVER HAD BEFORE NOR WILL HENCE!”
Jon-Tom hesitated. But eager hands were already urging him toward the equine inferno.
“Go on, Jon-Tom,” said Caz encouragingly.
“Yes, go on. It must be the spellsong magic that’s protecting us,” said Flor, “or the radiation and heat would have fried all of us by now.”
“But that little lead saddle, Flor…”
“The magic, Jon-Tom, the magic. The magic’s in the music and the music’s in you. Do it!”
It was Clothahump who finally convinced him. “It is all or nothing now, my boy. We live or we die on what you do. This is between you and Eejakrat.”
“I wish it wasn’t. I wish to God I was home. I wish… ahhh, fuck it. Let’s go!”
He could not see a barrier shielding the streaming nuclear material that was the substance of M’nemaxa, but one had to be present, as Flor had so incontrovertibly pointed out. He cradled the battered duar against his chest. That barrier had momentarily lapsed when M’nemaxa had touched down, and a thousand tons of solid rock had run like butter. If it lapsed again, there would not even be ashes left of him.
A series of stirrups led to the saddle, which was much larger up close than it had appeared from a distance. He mounted carefully, feeling neither heat nor pain but watching fascinated as tiny solar prominences erupted from M’nemaxa’s epidermis only inches from his puny human skin.
It was little different in the saddle, though he could feel some slight heat against his face and hands.
“Just a minim, guv’,” said a voice. A small gray shape had bounded into the saddle behind him.
“Mudge? It’s not necessary. Either I’ll make it or I won’t.”
“Shove it, mate. I’ve been watchin’ you ever since you stuck your nose int’ me business. You don’t think I could let you go off on your own now, do you? Somebody’s got t’ watch out for you. This great flippin’ flamin’ beastie can’t be ‘urt, but a good archer might pick you off ‘is back like a farmer pluckin’ a bloomin’ apple.” He notched an arrow into his bowstring and grinned beneath his whiskers.
Jon-Tom couldn’t think of anything else to say: “Thanks, Mudge. Mate.”
“Thank me when we get back. I’ve always wanted t’ ride a comet, wot? Let’s be about the business, then.”
The serpentine fiery neck arched, and the great head with its bottomless eyes stared back at them. “COMMAND, MAN!”
“I don’t know…” Mudge was prodding him in the ribs. “Shit… giddy up! To Eejakrat!”
Whether the message was conveyed by the word or the mental imagery connected with it no one knew. It didn’t matter. The vast wings seared the earth and a warm hurricane blasted those who were beneath. Those wings stretched from one side of the canyon to the other, and the Ironclouders, seeing it race toward them, scattered like gnats.
A swarm of dragonfly fighters rose to meet them, the Empress’ private aerial guard. They attacked with the mindless but admirable courage of their kind.
Mudge’s bow began its work. The soldiers riding the dragonflies fell from their mounts and none of their arrows reached the sun riders. Those that were launched impacted on the body or wings or neck of M’nemaxa and were vaporized with the briefest of sizzling sounds.
“Fly past them!” Jon-Tom ordered. “Down, over there!” He gestured toward the blunt butte rising fingerlike near the rear of the Pass. Beyond lay the mists of the Greendowns.
Jon-Tom’s attention shifted to concentrate on a single figure standing before a pile of materials and a semicircle of metal forms. Dragonflies and riders tried to break through to do battle with swords, but wings and hooves touched them, and their charred remnants fell earthward like so many sizzling lumps of smoking charcoal.
The imperial bodyguard sent a storm of arrows upward. Not one passed the belly of that flaming body. Jon-Tom was watching Eejakrat. He held his own spear-staff tightly, ready to pierce the sorcerer through.
Then his att
ention was diverted. In the air above the computer floated two faintly glowing pieces of stone. They were so tiny he noticed them only because of their glow. Behind the sorcerer danced the fearful, iridescent green shape of the Empress Skrritch.
What devastating magic so terrified the imperturbable Clothahump? What was Eejakrat about to risk in hopes of winning a lost war?
“Down,” he ordered M’nemaxa. “Down to the one surrounded by maggots and evil, down to destroy!”
A whispery sorceral mumbling, rapid and desperate, sounded from the crest of the butte. Eejakrat had panicked. He was rushing the incantation, as others had done before him, though he knew nothing of them. The two glowing shards of stone moved through the air toward the onrushing spirit fire and its mortal riders, and toward each other. Stones and spirit would meet at the same point in the sky.
They were no more than fifty yards from it and as many more from the butte’s summit when M’nemaxa suddenly gave forth a thunderous whinny. The infinite eyes glowed more brightly than the stones as the two came almost together a couple of yards in front of them.
There was a faint, hopeless scream from Eejakrat below, a desperate croaking Jon-Tom deciphered: “Not yet… too near, too close, not yet!”
Then the world was spinning farther and farther below them like a flower caught in a whirlpool.
Gone was the Troom Pass. So too was the butte where Eejakrat had gesticulated frantically before the Empress Skrritch. So were the milling mob of Plated Folk plunging to war and the insistent battle cries of the warmlanders.
Gone were the mists of the distant Greendowns and noisome distant Cugluch, gone too the mountain crags that towered above insignificant warriors. Soon the blue sky itself vanished behind them.
They still rode the spine of the furiously galloping M’nemaxa, but they rode now through the emptiness of convergent eternity. Stars gleamed bright as morning around them, unwinking and cold and so close it seemed you could reach out and touch them.
The Spellsinger Adventures Volume One Page 58
