It was the moment of sunset, the sun falling behind a range of low hills to the west just as a gibbous moon loomed over the eastern horizon. I had never seen an accurate rendition of Earth's long-gone moon and studied the great pale orb with interest: its shallow seas and fertile plains were clearly visible. I thought of its inhabitants looking up into their pale blue sky and seeing our world hanging above them, the old star -- still more yellow than orange in those forgotten times -- blazing behind.
The viewpoint on the screen now shifted back to the device in the pit, focusing on a point where one of its sides was closest to the lip of the excavation. Here a narrow ramp led from upward the solid ground to connect to the mechanism not far below its top, where a panel was set into the shimmering gray surface, etched with figures above a small, dark slot.
A sound went up from the crowd, a collective sigh that almost, but not quite, covered a mass moan. Heads turned and the viewpoint followed, showing me the dark pyramid on the horizon, backed by the rising moon. The ruby doors in its crystalline peak parted and a black object emerged, flying silently, inexorably, toward me. Majestrum, still seated on his throne, had come to claim his new kingdoms.
At the landward end of the narrow ramp, seven persons waited. I saw Phaladrine at their front, wearing a long coat of heavy fabric with a curious dark design -- I could not make it out clearly -- on its front.
The black throne glided to a rest before them, glimmering with power. There came an intake of breath from the crowd, though no sound of exhalation followed, as the Authority rose from his seat. The black stone of which he was made moved as if it were flesh as he approached Phaladrine and the others, his hard face set in a look that said he owned all that he saw and did not hold its value high.
The seven made him a profound obeisance and did not rise until he let a small sound issue from his lips. Then the woman in the forefront of the group abased herself a second time and offered the dark overlord a look of inquiry. Receiving a gesture of consent, contemptuous in its languor, she bowed again and turned sideways, signaling to the six thaumaturges. Each one in turn stepped forward and handed her a small object. As she received the first of these, she fitted it to another that she held in her hand, then did the same with those offered by each of her colleagues.
This she did under the gaze of Majestrum, her jewel-tipped hands moving with careful precision. When the seven components had been fitted together, she held in her palm a small oblong of gray metal, its surface etched with lines and symbols, across which flitted a rainbow like those that shimmered on the great device.
Now Phaladrine, her head bowed, turned to Majestrum. Her face impassive, eyes averted, she bent at the waist to make a deep courtesy to him, while her two hands pressed themselves -- and the gray object -- to her chest. A moment later, she straightened and presented the key to the man of stone.
For the first time, I saw evidence of feeling grip the tyrant. His languid air had fled and he reached eagerly for the object, snatching it from Phaladrine's outstretched palm. I heard his hard fingers click on the metal as he clutched it and turned to stride on heavy footfalls up the ramp to where the slot awaited.
The viewpoint, however, lingered on Phaladrine for a moment as she lowered her hands and stepped back. And now I saw clearly what decorated the front of her heavy coat; I recognized the figure of the woven man in whose heart she had buried. . .
"It was the insect thing," I said. "She added it to the other components, at precisely the moment when he champed to get on with the activation of the device."
"She knew him well," said Old Confustible. "They had formerly been lovers."
And now the stone-fleshed tyrant had reached the control panel. He did not pause for any effect but drove the key into the aperture and twisted it, hard.
For a brief time, nothing happened. The viewpoint lingered on Majestrum's face, frozen in expectation. Then the image cut to a close-up of Phaladrine, her narrow features held deliberately inert but her pale eyes betraying an inner agony of suspense.
The picture went again to the tyrant, and now the faintest hint of inchoate suspicion colored the hardness of his dark visage. His eyes snapped to the key, half of it in the aperture, the other half still in his stony fingers.
At that moment, a deep groan issued seemingly from every direction at once, the sound rising rapidly in pitch to a ear-shattering scream. Majestrum's rock-like flesh shook to the vibration of the noise. I saw tiny fragments and puffs of black dust erupt from his head and shoulders. Over his limbs and torso, thin lines of fiercely bright light ran like cracks across breaking ice. These fissures converged on one arm, that which led to the hand that still held the key, and swarmed down his arm to meet at his fingers. The hand now blazed with an actinic glare too sharp for the eye to endure, and the Authority's entire form shook with such heavy vibration that his stone heels beat a staccato tattoo on the ramp, even as the stuff of which he was made began to crumble.
The viewpoint now shifted to Phaladrine and the six others, who stood where they had been, but with their bodies now leaning forward, their eyes agleam, as they waited for the fulfillment of their plan. But then I saw sudden horror wash across the woman's face, her mouth opening as a prelude to a shout as she stepped forward.
But whatever it might have been in her mind to scream, the utterance went unvoiced. For now I saw what she had seen: that Majestrum, even as his obdurate non-flesh shattered and blazed under the flood of energy that poured into him, surged through him, from the device of his dreams, even then he could summon the will to lift his free hand high above his head where it performed a series of motions, fist and fingers repositioning themselves as if speaking in a language of signs.
Phaladrine stepped onto the ramp, her pale slim hand outstretched, her mouth as agape in horror as that of the woven man who screamed silently on her breast. Behind her, the other plotters recoiled in terror and the crowd at their backs had already dropped their flags and bunting, turning away as if there could have been any hope of fleeing what was to come.
At that moment the screen went white with an incandescent glare. The viewpoint shifted. Now I looked down at an angle from a point in the air high above the city of Ambit, the picture centered on the interplanar device half buried in its pit. A scintilla of brilliant white light appeared at the place where the Authority turned the key then the pinpoint expanded in a fast-flying ring, like a ripple in a pond, that swept laterally across the crowd then continued on across the cityscape in all directions. Everything the wave front touched -- people, buildings, trees, a giant creature of amorphous shape tethered in an open space -- glowed with a brief luminescence of green fire before shattering, bursting, tumbling away, leaving behind rubble and smoldering detritus beneath air filled with swirls of pale ash.
The ring of force encountered Majestrum's pyramidal palace, that had already swung about on its gargantuan limbs in a forlorn attempt to flee. The wave of force caught the legs across the back of their knees, severing them as neatly as a butcher disjoints a stewing fowl. The pyramid tumbled to the ground, landing on one corner but immediately spinning on, relentlessly propelled by the onrushing blast. It rolled across a district of houses and manses, smashing them to fragments. But even as it was driven ahead of the wave, its massive black blocks were being pulled asunder. Gouts of fiery mortar spilled from the cracks, igniting whatever they touched -- though only for a moment, for the shock wave came inexorably after, battering everything before it into shards and smoking debris.
I saw the crystal apex of the palace fly free as the pyramid tumbled. Perhaps someone, or some force, within it attempted to save the master's seat. It began to rise, gaining height ahead of the wave front, but then it failed to clear the top of a squat tower of gold and silver. It tore through the structure's upper floors, then spun toward the ground beyond, rolling to land, still in one piece, against the inner side of the high, white wall that girdled the city. And here the ring of blinding light caught it and smashed it
like glass, before leveling the wall and racing on to devastate the countryside.
"That force was intended to destroy him," I said, but he diverted some of it outward."
"Yes," said the Archon's integrator. "But in doing so, he reversed the polarity of the interplanar capacitor. It instantly collected all the evil then at large in our world, plus an immense charge from the other plane, and discharged it in one focused burst. See."
I made a wordless sound of horror touched by pity as I realized that the worst was not yet come. A deep and ominous thrumming filled the air above devastated Ambit. The great mechanism in the pit was pulsating, wreathed in tendrils of energy that struck my eyes with colors they had never before encountered. Its dimensions seemed to change, as if it swelled and shrank, so that it might have been some ill intentioned leviathan drawing in and letting out huge breaths in preparation for issuing one destroying blast.
And now that blast came. From the top of the device erupted a beam of energy, dark violet in hue but flickering with a radiance beyond the spectrum my eye could encompass. The beam was narrow at its source, but as it pushed up at a shallow angle into the evening sky it grew gradually wider, though it showed no corresponding diminution of its intensity.
It was heading for the moon, and as it passed out of the atmosphere and sped across empty space it grew darker and wider, so that the disc of its expanding front soon obscured all view of Earth's satellite. I wondered how it must have seemed to those standing in their rural gardens or walking the thoroughfares of the lunar cities, to look up at the Earth, a gray sphere lit only by the moon's own reflected light, and see that strange pinpoint of light high on the planet's rim. Then the dark circle of power swelling as it surged toward them, first obliterating their view of the motherworld, then of the sun beyond, then of everything as the interplanar force smashed into their homes and obliterated all that they were, all that they knew.
I saw it from a conjectured vantage point in the air above the ruins of Ambit, saw the deep violet beam expand to blot out the moon. Then it ceased to be emitted from its source atop the pulsing, thrumming device. Instantly, the beam was gone. And so was the moon. Where the great light had hung in the evening sky I now saw only blackness and a roiling of clouds where the power had passed through Earth's skimpy blanket of air.
"Is there any possibility that the satellite was spun off into some other dimension, that there might have been survivors?" I asked Old Confustible.
"No," it said. "The nature of the force unleashed by the device was to negate that which it encountered. It encountered the moon and effectively negated it. They canceled each other out."
The image on the screen now showed the ruins of Horthalia at a later date. It was as if I was flying over a sea of rubble in which nothing grew, though I saw a pack of segmented arthropods, the size of large dogs, whose forelimbs ended in great claws. Then we came to a wide circular zone that was smooth as glass, and swooped over the surface toward its center. Here I saw, wedged into the featureless plain, the top of Majestrum's device. It resembled a dull gray building surrounded by a frozen lake. The view enlarged to show the control panel, then bored in closer to show a small, round indicator just above the aperture into which the Authority had inserted the key. As the magnification increased to make the indicator fill the screen before me, its dull circle flashed brilliant red for a moment, then went dark again.
"What does that last part signify?" I asked the Archon's integrator.
He said that it was part of the briefing all archons had received soon after their installation, ever since the destruction of the Authority. "The device remained live. It gradually accumulated energy from the adjacent plane, storing it over the centuries, as it was designed to do. But since no one ever came to direct the use of that energy -- the knowledge having died with the thaumaturges of Ambit -- it would eventually reach the device's saturation limit. Before that moment arrived, someone had to go to the device and reset the mechanism, discharging the energy back into the dimension from which it had been drawn."
"Someone?" I said.
"It became the obligation of those who assumed power after the Authority was destroyed: the archons. Ever since, an archon who discovered that the moment of discharge was about to occur would travel to Barran, as Horthalia is now known, insert Phaladrine's key into the mechanism, and reset it. Here is a reconstruction of a typical operation."
I saw a small group making their way across the glassy plain, sliding rather than walking on the smooth surface, fighting a stiff wind that blew their antique clothes around them. They stopped before the device, and one of them, a stern-faced, older man in a formal robe and extravagant headgear, approached alone. In his hand he held a small box of carved wood. From this he took a gray oblong that I immediately recognized. He seemed to stand in meditation for several moments before the control panel, where the indicator now flashed red every other second. Then he thrust the key into the aperture and twisted it.
The red light blinked off. The man made to remove the key but it would not come out of the slot. Instead, a thin tendril of deep blackness, like the soul of night come to life, emerged from the key and coiled itself as if shyly around the man's wrist, then grew thick and ropy as it raced up his arm to enfold his head, meanwhile shooting off new tentacles that wrapped themselves about his entire body until he was completely absorbed in stygian force.
Then he gently exploded, becoming a puff of gray dust that dispersed on the wind. A young man with a serious face stepped out from the small group. He slid to the control panel, stooped to pick up the box of carved wood that had fallen to the glassy ground, then stood to remove the key and place it in the container. He bowed his head and said something that the wind snatched away, before rejoining the others. With the wind now at their backs they skated away.
"So that is why there are so many memorials to bygone archons but so few tombs," I said.
"Indeed," said Filidor's integrator. "The device used to require resetting about as often as an archon would reach the end of a long lifespan, so it was accepted as a necessary culmination of a reign."
"'Used to,'" I quoted, "and 'was.' Has something changed?"
"At the end of the Archon Dezendah VII's reign, his successor was able to turn off the machine permanently. Apparently, all it took was an inspired sense of timing."
"Dezendah VII was the last archon before Filidor I," I said. "You mean Filidor disabled a device that had been killing archons for aeons?"
"He did."
"Our Filidor?"
"The same."
I could think of nothing else to say but, "Remarkable."
My inner companion, however, had other things on his share of our mind, and was tugging at me. "What?" I said, inwardly.
"I want to revisit the scene where the Authority was destroyed and study it in slow motion," he said.
I thought I knew why. "You want to see the motions of his hand and fingers. You have an insatiable appetite for spells."
"No," he said. "Well, yes, I admit I am interested in whatever spell he was casting. But I also need to see what happened just before the blast."
"Very well," I told him, "though it is a moment of particular horror.' To Old Confustible, I said, "May we see the last instants of the Authority, and at the slowest possible resolution?"
""We?'" he said.
"My assistant and I," I said, indicating my shoulder.
"Your assistant is asleep."
I reached up and shook the furry creature into consciousness. "Pay attention."
It yawned a gust of fruity air into my ear. I made a mental note that a pointed discussion would occur between us in the near future. Meanwhile, the screen was again displaying the last moments before the wave of blue force consumed Ambit. I again saw Majestrum's hand insert the false key into the slot and turn it, saw him react as the motion failed to deliver the result he expected. He began to vibrate and come apart, then his free hand went above his head and made the motions of a si
lent spell.
"Pause," I said, in answer to my other self's urging, then put his question to the integrator. "Is this a reconstruction or are we somehow seeing this from Phaladrine's perceptions?"
"Interesting question. I will consult the records of the briefing's preparation." A moment later it said, "This scene is from her point of view."
"How was it recorded?"
"Some time after, an Archon of a sorcerous disposition raised an aspect of Phaladrine Baudrel and examined its memories."
"An aspect?" I said, needing no prompting from my sharer. "You mean a ghost?"
"When the Wheel turns, much that is impossible in the old phase becomes commonplace in the new."
"Why did this archon want to consult her memories?"
"To discover what she had done to adulterate the true key."
"Why?"
"In hopes of shaping a true one, of course."
Of course was right, I thought, a little annoyed with myself for not having the presence of mind to ask the logical question. I wondered if I was already beginning to fade. But my other self was nudging me and I said, "And was a true key ever made?"
"No," was the answer. "Nor could Phaladrine's revived aspect provide any illumination. Those memories were not available."
"Never mind the key," said the voice inside me. "Let us see the moment."
"Very well," I said to both him and Old Confustible, "let us see the instant of destruction at the slowest possible speed of image."
The scene crept forward in infinitesimal increments. "Do you want to focus on the hand?" I asked my other self.
"No," he said. "Watch all of him."
I did. Slowly, so slowly, his fingers made their motions. Slowly, so slowly, his shivering, calcified non-flesh fractured and erupted in puffs of black dust. Then came the first pinpoint of the brilliant light, just at the fingertips of the hand that held the key. It grew, instant by captured instant, and as it grew Majestrum's black stone body shattered. As the light became a ring that encircled his wrist, I saw chunks of him flying apart, rising into the air: an eye, a shoulder, a mouth and chin.
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