Donnerjack

by Roger Zelazny

  Nymph of the Logic Tree,

  Child of the First Word,

  Give our antagonist to grief.

  As the final words were spoken, Ayradyss flung herself from the train cab, metamorphosis already upon her. The white robes of the caoineag billowed upward, silvered, became the mylar dragon wings of the Angel of the Forsaken Hope. Naked legs, glimpsed momentarily, melded into the slender curving tail of the Mermaid Beneath the Seven Dancing Moons. Her hair remained dark, but her gaze became wild and inhuman; her sweet mouth lost its softness, curling with fierceness as her wings beat and carried her to the moire barrier.

  To the appreciative war cries of the Scottish ghosts who leaned from the passenger cars of the Brass Babboon to watch the battle, she used the Sword of Wind and Obsidian to reduce the barrier to code and sickly mist that paled, dissipated, vanished, and was gone.

  “Mother…” Jay whispered, hoarse with awe. “I never…”

  But the Nymph of the Logic Tree had no attention to spare for the young man who was stepping down from the train’s cab to approach her. She twisted in the air, turning, spiraling outward as if seeking to orient on a summons that none of the rest could hear.

  “Mother?” Jay called. “Ayradyss?”

  The fierce eyes looked at him uncomprehendingly. Wings of mylar beat against the air, fish tail swam against currents those below could not see. She rose higher in the air.

  “Mom! Ayradyss? Mom!” Jay’s voice broke, for clearly the creature in the air above them all was flying (or perhaps swimming) away from them. “Come back! Mom!”

  Once again the dark eyes glanced down at him. This time, they might have held a touch of reproach—or perhaps what he saw was pity—or perhaps there was naught but indifference. With a final powerful effort of wings and tail the Child of the First Word soared into the highest reaches of the sky, so high that the jet stream became a river.

  She dove into those sea green waters and was gone.

  Jay stared after her as if the power of his attention would draw her down again, that he would find beside him the dark-haired young woman in the shrouding garments of the caoineag he was just barely comfortable accepting as what remained of his idealized mother. No such thing happened and what he found beside him was the crusader ghost.

  “Ghost, what happened?”

  “You called upon what she once was and she became it. Then her maker summoned her and she had no choice but to go.”

  “What she once was?”

  “All that was in the chant, laddie. Come back to the train. We mus’ be movin’ on or another such beastie as the last will be sent. I dinna doubt that its maker felt its goin’.”

  Jay stumbled after, beginning to comprehend.

  “My mother was like Alice’s father, a thing created by one of the gods of Virtu?”

  “Aye, I wouldna call her a ‘thing,’ but from what I heard her tell the caoineag long ago that was the way of it.”

  “The caoineag? But she was the caoineag.”

  “She took over from the one before, laddie.”

  “Who was my mother’s maker, then? This Skyga?”

  “Nae, i’ ‘twere the one called Seaga.”

  Without waiting for instructions, the Brass Babboon stoked up its engines and brought them up to speed. Realities rippled by: Hindu ghosts awaited reissuance according to their deeds in life; coffins gaped beneath a sickle moon and the skeletons parodied the Maypole romp; fires burned with heat but without destroying the writhing bodies on which they fed.

  Alice touched Jay lightly on one arm.

  “She isn’t dead, Jay. Seaga must want her for the same reasons that Skyga wanted Ambry.”

  “She never mentioned…” Jay trailed off, lifted his wrist and addressed the bracelet. “Did you know about this? Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “I did not know,” the bracelet said. “As you recall, your father did not include full knowledge of Ayradyss in my programming.”

  The crusader ghost rapped his chain to get Jay’s attention.

  “I dinna think that the old laird ever knew Ayradyss’s origin.”

  “How couldn’t he? They were married!”

  “Aye, but he was from a far later part of her life. To him, she was the Nymph he met in romantic places in Virtu, not one whose past he tried to learn.”

  The bracelet spoke, “That, at least, I can confirm. My files do record his shock at learning that the woman he had loved without consideration for time was merely a virtual creation, destined for the touch of moire.”

  “How could he know so little?” Jay said. “He loved her!”

  “He did,” Desmond Drum said, speaking for the first time, “but love does not guarantee accurate information. In fact, it almost always includes a certain degree of willful blindness.”

  Jay could have wept for disillusionment and guilt, but the cab of the Brass Babboon and the passenger cars behind were crowded with those he had brought to help him fight for the Lord of Entropy. Nor was he the only one who had taken a loss in this battle—and his was far smaller than that of Virginia or even of Alice, who must suffer for her mother’s loss along with her own.

  Alice was right. Ayradyss was beyond his helping—at least for now. If he had placed her in danger, then more than ever he needed to effect the rescue of the Lord of Deep Fields. Death had indicated that the trespass of the Ones on Meru into his realms would give him a certain reciprocal power over them. Certainly, Death’s actions would distract the gods from their various pawns.

  Jay pressed other, less comforting, thoughts from his mind. He did not want to consider that the destruction or reduction of the Ones on High might also mean the ending of their creations. He did not want to consider that the games that Death would play with the gods might not suit his own needs. Such thoughts would do him no good now, no matter how true they might be.

  Reaching up, he dragged on the whistle cord and bared his teeth in delight at its wild, angry shriek. His companions sensed his mood and let him be, though Alice squeezed his hand before going to sit beside Drum.

  Dubhe, hanging by his tail, turned to face Jay.

  “We’re almost there. I recognize the acid river. You ready to give orders?”

  Jay nodded. “As ready as I’ll ever be. Pass the word to look for signs of battle. We may learn something from what has gone before. B.B., take us to the palace.”

  “Right!”

  “Crusader, tell the ghosts to sharpen their claymores. We’re almost there.”

  “Aye!”

  Humming rails, steel against stone, light songs for courage.

  * * *

  “Not much longer now,” Death said, looking down from the window of his palace. “We cannot hold out much longer. It is as I feared. Earthma’s child can draw on strengths beyond mine or hers alone.”

  “‘Child’ seems a most inappropriate appellation for such a creature,” Tranto said, “for it is not at all childlike.”

  “Except, perhaps, in its talent for destruction,” Death countered wryly.

  “Still, I propose that we dub it ‘Antaeus’—the name of another warlike child of Earth.”

  “Fitting.”

  A howl, spare and lonely, seemed to echo the despair the Lord of the Lost would not permit himself to voice. Snake and phant barely heard it, so appropriate did it seem to this moment. Mizar raised his head, tongue drooping between spiked fangs, listened to hear if it would come again.

  “Perhaps the bastard is a fitting replacement for me,” the Lord of the Lost continued on. “In some ways, it is my offspring. In the ways and customs of many lands and many times patricide is an honored and accepted way of claiming a kingdom.”

  “John D’Arcy Donnerjack designed well,” Phecda hissed. “This palace has stood strong so far.”

  “But the end must come, Phecda,” Death answered. “We are out of ways of attacking from afar. My minions are battered beyond my ability to stir them into motion, or subverted by the proximate aura of my oppone
nt. Even now the child itself batters at the door into the great hall. From there, it will seep up the stair and—”

  A shrill howl, a cascade of maniacal laughter, varicolored lights against the darkness making brief stars where there had been none before. The dull thudding of the child beating against the door below stopped.

  Mizar barked satisfaction, tails wagging. He balanced, paws against the windowsill, and howled answer to the Brass Babboon’s whistle.

  “Jay comes!”

  “So he does,” the Lord of Entropy said, “in the eleventh hour. I fear he only comes to join us in our ending. Alas, that his strengths are still dormant.”

  “Strengths?” Tranto asked.

  “Son of two worlds, born of a myth who had taken woman-form and a man who did not know that he himself was myth, engendered by the creative principle of one of the Most High at the hands of Death.” Death’s grin was skeletal, without humor. “His strengths are not the magical powers discovered in the time of need by a hero in a fable, nor are they deus ex machina so honored by the earliest playwrights, but they are strengths nonetheless.

  “I had planned to awaken him to his potential as he grew to manhood in my palace, but foolishly I gave in to his father’s claim that he needed to live as a mortal. Now, it is too late and he will be unmade with the rest of us.”

  Phecda had joined Mizar at the window and now she spoke, excitement making the hiss in her speech more pronounced.

  “Jay iss not alone. He hass an army with him.”

  “An army oddly clad and more oddly generaled,” Tranto commented.

  “I did my bit with an Anglo-Indian scenario. Many of those spilling out of the train resemble Scots—male and female both.’

  “And they are bearing swords,’” Phecda added, “and strange attractors. Where did he find these people? Has he stolen Skyga’s Phantom Legion?”

  “No,” Death said, “for I have met many of their number, albeit briefly, in ages past. These do not scan like natives of Virtu. Yet I would swear upon my own head that they are not merely virtventurers from the Verite.”

  On the wide but broken field, battle was being joined. On the one side were the green moire-touched troops that Antaeus had animated from the litter of Deep Fields. On the other were bands of Scots ghosts. Jay and the crusader ghost generated the whole; Dubhe swung from section to section, bearing messages. Alice, Drum, and Virginia had arrayed themselves as bodyguards near Jay. The Brass Babboon, too large to take part lest it endanger its allies, dropped back to where it could lob strategic strange attractors and provide a potential retreat.

  Mizar’s sharp hearing caught the final commands that were being given.

  “No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” Jay was saying, “and that’s got to be more true here than it has been in battles past, so I’m not going to try to coordinate beyond what we have here. We need to disable Earthma’s child—without its aura its army will fall.”

  “Aye, laddie, and those you’ve brought will be tryin”t’ open a way for you to do that very thing.”

  “Good.” Jay grinned. “Don’t let anyone’s misplaced sense that the honor should be mine keep them from slipping in a good shot. Okay?”

  “Right.”

  Shorty lifted his head on high. His bloodcurdling death cry was the clarion call for the attack. As voices raised in cries of “For Donnerjack!” and the stirring notes of “Scotland the Brave” Jay’s army joined battle.

  Crowded in the window that gave the best view of the field, four besieged figures permitted themselves something like hope.

  “They are making headway,” Tranto observed, when this was clearly true. “Antaeus’s forces seem confused, as if they have trouble perceiving them.”

  “I begin to understand from where he may have recruited his army,” Death said. ” ‘Tis a clever plan, but they cannot long hold the field. An alteration to the parameters of Antaeus’s forces and they, too, will be pushed hack.”

  “We have stood by you and fought for you,” Tranto said. “Would you mind just this once not speaking in riddles?”

  The Lord of Deep Fields coughed laughter. “Very well. Jay has unwittingly done as the gods themselves do when they make war. In a sense, he has conjured from his imagination an army to fight for him__

  but in this case the imagination is not solely his own, but is the ancestral memory of the bit of land on Eilean a’Tempull Dubh upon which John D’Arcy Donnerjack built a castle to replace that of his ancestors. Put simply, Jay has raised an army of ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?” Phecda asked. “How can an army that is of those already dead be defeated?”

  “By banishing them from this place, Phecda. They do not belong to

  Virtu, nor even, really, to the Verite. When Earthma realizes what I have…”

  He said no more, for nothing productive was to be said. Meanwhile, on the field, Jay observed his troops and came to a startling realization.

  “Alice,” he said, “come here a moment, would you?”

  He called her not only because she was near, but because he knew she was a skilled observer. Unlike Drum, who looked for things of significance, she had the journalist’s gift for seeing the entire setting and preserving it for analysis.

  “Yes, Jay?” She came to his side.

  “Tell me what you see.”

  She did not question, but put on her reporter’s voice and narrated: “In the broad stretch of ground between the curving bulk of the Brass Babboon and the vast, dark palace of the Lord of Deep Fields, a strange and stylized battle is taking place.

  “More awkwardly constructed than even the hound Mizar, human and machine forms come together from the rubble. Their hodge-podge forms are no match for the keen-edged blades swung by the ghosts of Castle Donnerjack, nor for the exploding strange attractors. Yet, of all those who fall, only a few fail to rise again. Immortal against immortal— or perhaps unliving against undying—war. Only a few from among the corrupted legions of Deep Fields fail to rise again.”

  “Exactly!” Jay said. “We need to know what keeps the ones who fall fallen.”

  “And,” Alice added in somewhat more conversational tones, “why suddenly our own troops have begun to blink out. We lost Shorty just a moment ago and the Lady of the Gallery was taken right in the act of flinging a strange attractor. If this continues, we will soon be without troops.”

  Jay studied the battlefield, frantically seeking what differed about those whose opponents stayed down and those who merely delayed them.

  The crusader ghost was among the most successful. His voice raised in song, his sword in one hand, a length of his chain in the other, he slashed and battered without pause. Could his crusader’s cross be some protection? No. There were others who wore similar adornment, others who bore the same weapon, others who… An idea occurred to Jay; he glanced about the field, searching for confirmation of his guess.

  “It is not their swords,” Jay said, wonder dawning in his voice, “but their songs that fell their foes!”

  “Songs?” Alice echoed, momentarily puzzled, but her observant nature could not be deceived for long. “You’re right, Jay! It’s the singing, not the swords that are doing the job. Even the strange attractors only delay.”

  “There is no music in Deep Fields,” Jay said, remembering the tales he had culled from Dubhe and Mizar. “That’s why the Lord of the Lost treasures it so and why my father sought to win his favor with song!”

  He sent out the command that all the combatants should sing as they fought—even at the expense of fighting as rapidly. The result, while not miraculous, was certain.

  “Destruction cannot answer destruction; creation is the answer,” Jay said, certain he was correct. “I am the son of the Engineer—creator of the Brass Babboon, programmer of sites, designer of that very palace in front of us. I was only half right when I said that we could not use the living to fight Death’s troops. What I should have realized is while our dead ghosts cannot be killed,
neither can the other troops, since they’re formed from the discarded materials of this place and bound by moire. We need the creative force of music to make them lie still.”

  Alice paused in her duet with Drum of “Amazing Grace.” The detective carried on, his voice rasping but surprisingly pleasant.

  “Something still is leeching away at our forces, Jay.”

  “Then we need to win the palace before we’re alone and too hoarse to carry on. I wish I knew the layout better. Going in the front door seems foolish. Perhaps Dubhe…”

  The spidery monkey could not sing, but hanging by his tail left him four limbs with which to fling strange attractors. He had been taking the occasional bite out of his arsenal and as a result his usually dark coat was pointed with rustling lights, like illuminated fleas.

  “Sorry, Jay. I never spent much time here. I came to report, but mostly I’ve kept an eye on you.”

  The voice of John D’Arcy Donnerjack spoke from Jay’s wrist.

  “I can be of assistance at this point, Jay. Within my memory is held the complete plans for the palace, including any number of secret passages, concealed doors, and the like that John included when he began to fear that you would be kept prisoner there. He planned for your eventual escape.”

  “Well,” Jay sang, laughing, “I hope he won’t mind that we use them to break in rather than to break out. Let’s hear what you have to tell us.

  * * *

  The battering at the great hall door had recommenced some time after the battle had been joined, but now those who listened thought that it played a different tune.

  “Desperate, now,” Tranto said. “Jay’s forces have Antaeus pressed on the field. If it cannot win here, then all this great struggle will have been for naught.”

  Death’s acknowledgment caused the fabric of his cowl to move as if in a breeze.

  “Ironic, too, that the doors and walls that resist the intrusion could be defined, in some senses, as the half-brothers of our opponent. But Antaeus’s claim to inheritance comes from me while the palace owes its stability to Earthma. The rejected son rejects the favorite.”