Saor’s black body appeared before Lod, its outline jagged, vibrating with rage. The ground where the Face of Night stood buckled. Tiles tore loose from the colonnade and flew at him, into him, splattering into fiery dust against his invisible corona and vanishing in his darkness. He stood there pulsing with wrath long enough for Lod to hope Saor would kill him. Once his plasma shape was destroyed, he would be free of the phanes and returned to his Form. But Saor did not kill him. He pointed to the webwork of cables in the ceiling vault above Lod, and the zōtl there gusted away like a flock of bats.
The constriction of the phanes slackened, and Lod found the strength to speak. “What are you doing?”
Saor’s voice throbbed from the dark, dense with withheld anger. “Ned O’Tennis has found the O’ode.”
Saor pointed at the rust-red torso, and Lod reeled before the flux of data-energy that battered him. A flurry of images showed Loryn among the distort tribes in the giant forests of Q’re, the dusky archipelagoes of Elphame, the fog-roads of Xappur. In each successive image, she appeared in the midst of larger crowds of misshaped humans.
“She gathers an army—” Saor spoke stonily. “She draws her forces exclusively from the distort tribes. And quickly. No one in Doror is aware. Only the Saor-priests of Chalco know. Perhaps the Ordo Vala, too. I send my assassins—” The cinematic stream showed the bald, black-robed corpses of Saor-priests nailed to trees, hung from outcroppings, stacked in grabens swarming with carrion birds. “They never even glimpsed the O’ode. The distorts kill them on sight.”
Lod viewed the O’ode. It turned slow as a planet before him. In its velvety surface, he perceived vision-ripples and jumpcuts of a frizzy-haired teenager, face smudged, rag clothes grimed, herded with a cluster of other bedraggled humans through a redrock dolmen.
A loggia of metallic glass reared out of the darkness of the lynk, a corridor of twisted pillars with a ceiling lost among buttresses and rampways. Galleries, high above the loggia, gleamed like tar blisters. In each bulbous gallery, fanned in smoky light, swarms of zōtl clouded. Higher yet, against an ichorous sky of amber, tendrilled clouds, dark flocks of zōtl soared.
Humans with spiders clasping the backs of their skulls lurched from the hivelike alcoves of the loggia. They came with electric prods to sort the harvest. Jostled by the panic of the others, Loryn let herself be shoved to the edge of the crowd. Grubs closed in, prods held low. From down the vitreous length of the loggia, screams wafted on an acrid stink of poisonous char.
Loryn opened her mouth and spit into her hand the O’ode. Nothing changed. The grubs thrust closer, and she staggered backward into those behind her. A prod struck her leg. The jolt heaved her back into the crowd, and she dropped the O’ode. The blue pebble skidded out of sight into the frenzy of the stampede.
Zōtl spiraled down from high galleries. The crowd screamed as one, a horrifying despair under the claw of the spiders. The first bunch of zōtl struck the herded humans in deadfall, limp sparrow-weight bodies. Others smacked lifelessly onto the metallic glass boulevard, where the lynk had deposited the humans.
Grubs collapsed and convulsed, zōtl mounts sloughing off in a curdle of chitinous legs. The crowd burst open, hurrying for the alcoves of the loggia, to get out of the downpour of zōtl corpses. Loryn went with them and stood propped against a black glass pillar to keep from collapsing under her amazement. Spidery black bodies rained out of the sky and beat the ground, thudding softer on the carcasses of those that had fallen first. Slowly, a widening silence grew across the alien heaven.
“The zōtl nest world that tapped Chalco-Doror is dead.” Saor’s voice ripped Lod from his trance. “But the zōtl here still live. The ones that work the probes above you—they will be back once they overcome their shock. They will want revenge.”
The air around Saor’s black shape lit up with a quick succession of scenes showing distorts swarming strohlkraft that had been lured into narrow defiles and forest glades by decoy tribes and bogus distress signals from captured equipment.
“They worked quickly, over days,” Saor explained, outline fluttering insanely. “They had Gai’s help. She was shrewd enough to have collected a small armada of strohlkraft over the years, hidden in caches on numerous planetesimals. The technical expertise to use them came from herself and a few early defectors. In days—days, Lod—she had an army and an adolescent to lead them. She’s learned a lot since she created Egil Grimson’s Emirate. Enough to destroy and replace it in an eyeblink.”
The blackness of Saor’s body filled with a view of the inner adytum of Ioli Palace, where Egil Grimson, naked but for a chainmail breechcloth, stood before a hovering zōtl. The squat, muscular man knelt, and the zōtl mounted the back of his head and with its pincers parted his long blond hair, revealing a pith hole. The zōtl inserted its feedertube, and Egil Grimson jerked upright, eyes flaring white and bulging like a terrified mare’s. Agony lifted him to his toetips, and his beard opened around a silent scream.
“The zōtl is not killing him,” Saor clarified, voice leaden. “It’s communing. They did this regularly—at least once a year, to share knowledge directly.”
The scene jumpcut forward and showed the zōtl disengage, its feedertube glistening with the grease of the Viking’s brain. Pincers applied a medicinal plug to the hole in Grimson’s skull and the zōtl then floated off toward the red-pulsing dolmen at the far end of the vaulted chamber.
“Isn’t biological life grotesque, Lod? Only by direct physical lynk could those two very different neurologies fuse. I’m sure the zōtl could have devised a mechanical means of communication. For mundane matters, like their quota requirements for the vassals they bred on Ren, they transmitted data through a machine intelligence. But this grisly physical link allowed Egil Grimson the experience of the zōtl’s expanded awareness. Despite the suffering of the union, the event must have been godlike for Grimson. Once the zōtl left, it imparted in him a prescient telepathy that he used to his advantage in ruling his kingdom. That strength is worthless to him now. Gai has used her lynks to place her army of distorts.”
The black body of Saor revealed masses of laser-armed distorts filing through the natural lynks on all the worlds in Chalco. Banners they carried displayed an open hand with the forefinger and thumb widely separated from the other three fingers—the chiromantic symbol of will.
“They staked their lives on their will,” Saor said. “With the Rimstalker to guide them, the distort army invaded all the major cities and military installations of Doror.”
Cities aflame flitted by in midair. Hordes of frenzied distorts swarmed through streets, destroying everything and everyone displaying the Thunderhawk sigil of the Emirate. The carnage churned unremittingly: Towers toppled, bridges collapsed, and the colossal magravity generators that Lod had reactivated, after the fall of Ieuanc 751, crumbled under blasts of commandeered proton cannon. The skies above all the crystal cities of Doror blackened with smoke.
Saor again showed the elegant corridors of Ioli Palace, this time teeming with rabid distorts. Egil Grimson appeared in his mead hall swinging a battle-ax, which was all he had had time to snatch from the wall when the distorts surprised him.
“The Emir fed the spiders well,” Saor droned on. “He respected them and their nest world. Now their world is dead. The surviving zōtl will want revenge.”
A glimpse of Emir Egil Grimson’s severed head upheld by its hair in the clawgrip of a distort flew by among a throng of fiery, chaotic images of turrets collapsing, walls bursting apart, and howling distorts riding proton cannon through the blazing streets.
“And their revenge will be horrible. Don’t you see, Lod? I want life and more of it. I want the worlds to live, for all the lives on these worlds to live. Your Form could burn for billions of years. These worlds could last as long. And you would endure as benefactor to a race of star-children. But now—” Saor’s gel body seemed to rip and then re-form. “They are coming. They are trying to control me. They will want th
eir revenge.”
Saor’s projections revealed Valdëmiraën, where the last of the retreating Aesirai strohlkraft clashed. Proton fire ignited the outline of the capital, N’ym. The atmosphere writhed with giant strokes of lightning as fusion bombs ignited under the city’s pylons and immense ramstat thrusters blew radioactive debris away from the city. A bluewhite flare burned blindingly for an instant. Slowly, the city sheared away from its craggy perch and launched into space.
“The whole city is flying!” Saor exclaimed. “Flying!”
Saor had gone mad. Lod remained silent, mind whirring with the information he had just received. Where was Gai? Surely Gai would come for him now that the zōtl were broken. How else could the Rimstalker get home? All Lod had to do was hold on, not let the zōtl that remained pick his brain and gain control of the gravity amp.
“N’ym will fall forever through an infinite spiral along a conch of inward-warping spacetime,” Saor predicted. “With their hydroponics to grow food and ramstat engines to drive oxygen from the rock foundation, they could survive for centuries—in terrible isolation.” The crystal-spired capital flew into darkness, a glimmer of city lights congealing to a bright star as it fell toward the blackness of Saor. “A living death—a true Viking death.”
Lod stared hard at the embers of proton fire, where the city had sheared away, and observed gnats of strohlkraft exchanging laserfire. One of the gnats peeled off and dove toward the sea. Lod followed the blue exhaust of the ship as it entered the water and then abruptly vanished when Ned O’Tennis flew through a submerged Tryl lynk on his way backward to his destiny.
“The circle is complete,” Saor drawled. His shape warped. Electrostatic lines stressed the air around him, streamers of electricity blowing in an unfelt wind. “The worldline is closed for the zōtl now. Their home is destroyed.” Voltage twisted around Saor’s plasma shape with a grinding sound. When it stopped, Saor had shriveled to a shadowy blob. Insectoid legs snicked out of the amorphous blackness, oildrop eyes beaded in a cluster above a glisteny papule, and from that quivery bud, slowly, a stinger extruded. The blob of Saor’s plasma convulsed to the shape of a zōtl.
Lod remained silent and still. The zōtl shape drifted closer, its feedertube fully extended. Above it, blurred bodies of real zōtl flicked through the air, returning to their nest atop the magnetic column suspending his torso. They had assumed full control of Saor. The zōtl body they had shaped from his plasma glided directly up to Lod and stabbed its feedertube between the phanes and into his chest.
Pain gored him. He expected to die. But he did not die. The pain bored deeper and louder, cutting him to the very margin of consciousness. With cruel precision, the zōtl began disassembling his mind. They did not want to kill him—yet. They wanted to gut his machine mind and disrupt the flightpaths of the planets. They wanted to destroy Chalco-Doror and kill the Rimstalker who had poisoned their world.
Lod resisted. He hoped his struggle would inspire the zōtl’s rage so they would destroy his plasma shape outright and he could thus return to his Form. But the spiders were cold in their fury. They withdrew their stinger from his chest and let him writhe around the memory of pain before stabbing him again. Lod’s torso throbbed crimson against the phanes and dulled brown when Saor’s stinger gouged.
Gai materialized like an apparition, a shimmering specter of colors gathering into the shape of a Rimstalker. When Saor withdrew his stinger and flew at Gai, Lod knew then he was not hallucinating. He roused himself from the bloodmist cloud to witness the two plasma shapes collide. Glooms of cloudy fire jetted where they met. An acetylene glare seamed the space between, burning white, fusing them.
At last, Gai had gotten her hands on the zōtl. As soon as Loryn had delivered the O’ode to the spider’s nest-world, the Rimstalker had set her army of distort rebels marching through her lynks, and she had come to Perdur to free Lod. But the warriors she had brought with her perished from neurotox in the lynks. Only she had breached Perdur, by using her plasma shape to seep through rock walls. Without her warriors, and with no hope of freeing Lod, Gai determined to fight her parents’ killers for vengeance alone.
Deathlocked, Saor’s and Gai’s energies clashed in a mangling of lightning and fire. In moments, the conflagration consumed them, and only a billowy aurora draped the space where they had been. When that thinned, Lod waited for the zōtl to resume their torture. But the spiders could not. The temporary loss of Saor had drained their power, and without backup from their nest-world they would have to resort again to slowly picking at Lod’s program locks.
The machine intelligence relaxed as this information sifted into his stunned mind from analytic processors he had thought the zōtl had ripped from him, the pain had been that severe. The clicking of the zōtl’s magnetic probe in his brain began again. And, again, from the ghost cave, the robot voice asked, Where are you? . . . What is supposed to happen next? ...
*
Pahang had suited up with all the armor and weapons he could carry from the ordnance locker. He hung heavily in his sling, helmeted, cuirassed, and plated along arms and legs, the sparks of his eyes all that remained visible of him in the oversized firesuit. “Why do you go into battle undressed?” the Malay asked.
“I’ve got my armor,” Ned replied and patted the control deck. “Right here.”
The strohlkraft sailed swiftly through the gray void of the Overworld among chromatic floes of time. The damaged underbelly sent shivers through the hull but did not hamper the flight. Ahead, the lynk to the Dragon’s Shank and Chan-ti drew closer. In moments, he would know if she was alive.
“Chan-ti Beppu is alive,” a tremulous voice spoke from the back of the flight pod.
The two men swung about in a fright. Ned was glad he had made Pahang leave his gun in the locker, for if the Malay had been armed, he would have fired at the ghastly apparition forming in the air above them. A melted face drooled sparks, puddled in midair, and finally lifted like wet laundry and coalesced to a balding, rail-thin man in an academic robe.
“Tully Gunther,” Ned acknowledged. “The scyldar’s ghost.”
The wraith nodded, and its edges dissolved in prismatic vapors. “The Overworld has less of the field density of Chalco-Doror,” the ghost said. “It’s more difficult to hold together a plasma shape out here. Listen—I have news. Loryn has delivered the O’ode to the zōtl’s nest world—”
“How?” Pahang’s muffled voice sounded from inside his faceguard. “We gave her the O’ode but minutes ago.”
“You are in the Overworld,” the wraith pointed out. “In moments, you will pass through one of Saor’s lynks and appear on the Dragon’s Shank only days after the extermination of the zōtl in their own world. The Storm-Tree has toppled. The Emir is dead.”
“And N’ym?” Ned asked.
“N’ym has fallen. You have steered this ship through the Tryl lynk under the Silver Sea. The timeloop is complete, and, in this universe, in this planetary system, the fate of the zōtl is sealed.”
“Why are you here, then?”
“I am come to warn you—Saor belongs to the zōtl who survive in Perdur, and he knows you are coming. But Gai has disrupted the Face of Night’s plasma shape, so the zōtl cannot immediately use him for their revenge.”
“Revenge?” Pahang’s voice piped from the hollow of his armor. “I do not like that word.”
“The zōtl who are here in Chalco-Doror cannot survive indefinitely without their females, all of whom were left behind on their home world and are now dead. The spiders have lost everything but their loathing for other species. They will use Saor and Lod to smash the worlds into one another and destroy all of Chalco-Doror.”
“What can we do?” Ned asked.
“Nothing I am aware of.” The dissolving edges of the ghost had reduced it to a ribbon of bright smoke. “The fate of the worlds is bigger than we. I am come to warn you—the scyldar Neter Col has been mounted again by a zōtl and is on his way to intercept you on the Dra
gon’s Shank. You are to die for finding the O’ode.”
“What can we do?” Pahang whined.
“Be aware—” the filament of silver fire answered in a narrowing voice. “The damage to my brain enables me to drift free briefly, but I have no strength to control the scyldar. All I can do is warn you. Neter Col knows you are coming.”
“And Chan-ti Beppu,” Ned needed to know, “is she all right? Does she know we’re coming?”
No reply came from Tully Gunther. The specter had thinned to a thread that broke into scintillant pollen and dispersed. In the next moment, the visor filled with the black mirror of Mugna’s time-floe, and the strohlkraft shot through the lynk.
The ramstat cells died with a dull whine. Immediately, the ship began shaking violently. The visor had gone black in the lightless atmosphere of Mugna’s north pole and the vibration-blurred panel lights provided the only illumination in the flight pod. Shaking wildly, Ned tried to turn on the infrascope to see where they were gliding, but the trembling of the ship defeated him. He and Pahang hung quavering in their slings, gritting teeth, trying not to get sick.
A constellation of small lights appeared below. The strohlkraft banked and descended toward a hamlet lit with lanterns. A gray mist of bioluminescent fungi vaguely outlined fields and steep slopes. Figures dashed below, crisscrossing the hamlet’s one avenue, toward which the strohlkraft angled for a landing. Quaking and bucking, the craft dropped. Over the noise of the juddering hull, Ned heard the landing gear lower. He closed his eyes and kept his mind off his bruised entrails by remembering Chan-ti’s face. Days ago, her visage had been his only comfort during his thralldom to Squat. Would she look the same now? Or had time passed differently for her during her quest through the Overworld? Would she recognize him—or had captivity broken her memories?
The strohlkraft jarred. The hamlet’s lights streamed by, slowing and then wobbling to a stop. Through the visor, Ned and Pahang watched as cowled figures stepped from the darkness between buildings. Some had their hoods drawn back, revealing bizarre visages: lobster jaws, stalk eyes, flesh jagged as lightning.
The Last Legends of Earth Page 36
