Bredon, however, was no sloth. He kicked out hard and caught Thaddeus in the gut. The immortal folded up, and they both went down. Bredon's death-grip on Thaddeus's wrist threw them off-balance, and both hit the floor hard, head-first.
The machine Bredon had ridden reached out a long steel arm, wrapped it around Bredon's waist, and plucked the dazed short-lifer off the equally dazed Thaddeus. Bredon, however, still kept his grip on the immortal's wrist.
“Let go!” Thaddeus shouted.
Bredon did not bother answering. He clung remorselessly. The machine lifted him up, extending its arm until his feet dangled half a meter off the floor. Bredon still held on, dragging Thaddeus back up onto his knees in the process.
The machine began shaking Bredon.
He held on, unthinking, as he fought off the effects of the fall. His head cleared somewhat, despite the shaking, and he realized what was happening to him.
“Ka nama kaa lajerama!” he called when he had gathered his wits. “Put me down!"
He felt the arm start to loosen and added, “Gently!"
The machine obeyed promptly, but as the metal arm lowered Bredon, Thaddeus reached up and grabbed Bredon's own wrist.
His grip was inhumanly strong. Bredon had forgotten that the Powers augmented their own muscles directly, as well as through the various serving machines they commanded. He felt Thaddeus's hand tightening steadily on his wrist, cutting off the circulation, straining the very bones.
He released his own hold, gambling that Thaddeus would be more interested in freeing himself than in crushing his attacker's wrist.
He won his gamble; Thaddeus, too, let go, and pulled free. By the time the robot had released Bredon completely Thaddeus was back on his feet and running for the open door, apparently not interested in unarmed combat with his opponent.
Bredon brushed himself off and looked after the fleeing figure.
Thaddeus had already turned a corner and was out of sight. He knew the fortress maze infinitely better than Bredon did, and with his modified body he was almost certainly faster than Bredon. He was also far stronger, and Bredon had no weapons.
And of course, he was a meter taller than Bredon, and built proportionately. Even without any modification, he would have been far stronger and heavier than Bredon.
Pursuit, Bredon decided, would be really stupid. He, Bredon, had control of the war room, and with that he was fairly certain he could handle Thaddeus. Thaddeus could still command any of his machines that he ran into, of course—until Bredon gave Aulden's overriding password, anyway.
Thaddeus was still a very real threat, and would have to be dealt with.
Running after him, though, was not the way to do it. Instead, Bredon crossed to the console where Thaddeus had been standing and began studying the controls.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Everything of value beneath the surface of the world belongs to Gold the Delver. His is the hand that placed jewels in the rocks, and precious metals in the earth. When we find caves that seem to lead nowhere, these are but the abandoned back rooms of his endless caverns, closed off because he had no more use for them..."
—from the tales of
Kithen the Storyteller
* * * *
“Thaddeus?” Geste called uncertainly, peering about at the blank grey walls. “Are you there?"
No one answered. Nothing changed. He was still alone in the room, with only the gleaming mirrored sphere of the stasis field, and the little black floater still bumping against it, for company.
Something had happened to Thaddeus. That was obvious. Furthermore, Geste had a pretty good idea what it might be that had happened. Bredon, he guessed, must have freed the others somehow, and now they were all at the war room, turning the tables on their captor, keeping Thaddeus too busy to bother with anything else.
Thaddeus would still have control of all the fortress machines, though. Geste had kept in touch with his machines for as long as he could before entering the jamming fields in the Fortress, and he knew that the various attempts at sabotage had virtually all been useless. Only a handful of peripheral machines and software had been damaged. Aulden might be able to commandeer some sort of weapons, but Geste guessed the fight would be a close one, with Thaddeus's control of the fortress more than compensating for the superior numbers of his attackers, particularly since he had removed so much of their personal equipment.
And Thaddeus might have already dispatched his torture machines before the attack came. They could well be on their way to where Geste waited.
He was not entirely defenseless, of course; he had a weapon. He had the stasis field generator.
But that was in use. It could only create one field at a time. He could only use it against the original Thaddeus, or against Thaddeus's machines, if he released the Thaddeus clone.
If he turned off the field, though, what would happen to the body within? Would Thaddeus return to it?
From the description Thaddeus had given of how it worked, Geste thought not. He risked it; he pushed the control.
The gleaming bubble vanished. The triangular floater zipped into position with its drink, and the clone slumped forward in his seat, comatose. The chair reshaped itself quickly to keep him from tumbling to the floor, and he hung there, motionless.
Watching closely for any sign of life, Geste rose and walked to the door, his every sense alert. His slippered feet seemed loud in the silence.
Nothing happened. The clone stayed awkwardly slumped. The floater waited patiently for someone to take the drink.
Geste reached out, and the door slid open. Thaddeus had not ordered it to stay closed.
The Trickster stepped out into the corridor, relieved, and turned back toward where the others had been held prisoner. He did not expect to find them there, but had no idea where else to go, and thought they might have left a message for him.
The doors he encountered in the passageway, however, were not as obliging as the room door had been. They did not open as he approached, nor when he pounded on them or kicked them or gave them orders. He was trapped in a twenty-meter section of corridor.
He paced back and forth for a moment, then, frustrated, he turned to an emergency access panel and kicked at it.
It slid aside.
Startled, he stooped and looked in. He had always assumed that emergency access panels were for machines, and had not expected this one to open, but he was not about to pass up any opportunity.
The shaft behind the panel was narrow and unlit, and rather than any sort of lifter it held a metal ladder, mounted solidly to one wall.
This, he thought, would make a good place for an ambush. If he hid in it, he could spring out at Thaddeus, or at passing machines, unexpectedly.
Besides, it might lead somewhere useful. He guessed that he would be able to reach the correct level, two levels down from where he stood, and even if he could not reach the prison chamber, that would be an improvement on his current situation.
The stasis field generator was still in his hand. He considered putting it back in the pocket in his ear.
Ordinarily, he could not expect the same trick to work twice on someone like Thaddeus, but Thaddeus had not seen the trick. That was clear from his demand to know how it was done.
The same stunt just might work again, then. He reached up with his free hand, found the bent-space opening, and tucked the generator in.
He shuddered once, briefly. The sensation was so very weird!
That done, he clambered into the shaft, swung himself onto the ladder, and began descending into the gloom.
Two levels down he kicked open another access panel and peered out into the corridor, hoping—although he knew the odds were wildly against it—to see or hear Thaddeus approaching. If the master of the fortress had happened along just then, Geste could easily have caught him in the stasis field before he had any idea he was in danger.
Thaddeus was nowhere in sight, but the Trickster saw something almost as
good and almost as surprising. All the corridor doors were open.
Puzzled, Geste climbed out of the shaft into the passageway.
He could see now that not all the doors were open, but several were in either direction. He calculated his location as best he could from his accumulated memories of the fortress, and then headed in the direction that he hoped would lead him to the room where the prisoners had been held.
As Geste emerged from the shaft, Bredon was still in the war room, trying to puzzle out the controls, none of which were anything at all like anything in Arcade, when one of the darkened screens suddenly lit.
“...right now, Monitor,” he heard Thaddeus say.
An image appeared on the screen, a flat, two-dimensional image like a weaving, rather than a proper three-dimensional transmission, and Bredon needed a second or two before he recognized the prison chamber as seen from above the door.
The seven captives were still chained to the wall, and Thaddeus stood over them, looking up as if he were able to see Bredon.
“Listen, savage,” he said, “you caught me by surprise, but I'm ready for you now. You come down here, right now, unarmed, or I'll start cutting throats.” He held up a small black device, clutched tightly in one hand. “This is a knife."
“It is?” Bredon asked. He had never seen anything of the sort. The black thing had no visible blade.
“Yes, it is,” Thaddeus replied. He held out a corner of his robe and waved the “knife” at it.
A chunk of fabric came away in his hand.
Bredon stepped back. The thought of Thaddeus cutting Lady Sunlight's throat was horrible, but he knew that if he obeyed and went down there, alone and unarmed, Thaddeus would kill him.
He needed time to think, time for a miracle to intervene. In the stories he heard as a child, this was the time when Rawl the Adjuster would step in on the side of virtue, but right now Rawl was a helpless captive.
There were other Powers, though. Bredon had no idea what had become of Geste, for one thing, and there were all those other Powers who had refused to help, any one of whom might have reconsidered.
He needed to stall. Even if no one intervened, he had to have a moment to think.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “We can talk about this."
As he spoke, a vague realization began forming. He had control of the fortress machines, if he could figure out how to use it. Surely, he could do something with that!
He looked at the mysterious screens and panels, hoping for inspiration.
“I don't want to talk, savage,” Thaddeus said. “Get down here!"
“All right, all right! Just a minute!” With sudden inspiration, he added, “I don't know the way!"
Thaddeus snorted in disbelief. “You got from here to there,” he said.
“But I wasn't watching the route, I just rode that machine."
Thaddeus paused, considering that, and Bredon felt a sudden chill as he wondered if he had made a mistake in mentioning his control of the fortress machines.
Geste was sure that he was on the right route. He was also sure that somehow the escaping captives had not only gotten the doors to open, but had gotten them to stay open. No other explanation made sense, because the open doors were in a direct path to the prison chamber.
He hurried along, eager to do what he could to help, keeping one hand near his ear.
He rounded the final corner, then stopped, frozen in astonishment.
The prisoners were just as he had left them, still chained to the wall, and Thaddeus, surely the real Thaddeus this time, was standing over them with something clutched tightly in his hand. He was clad in black, rather than the brown the clone had worn. His robe had been cut, and a severed scrap of cloth lay on the floor by his feet.
“All right, savage,” he was saying, “I'll tell you how to get here. It's easy."
This was an irresistible opportunity, better than anything he could have hoped for; if he was somehow making a mistake, he could straighten it out later. He pulled out the stasis generator, adjusted the range, and pushed the control.
Thaddeus froze, his face raised to Monitor's light, one hand raised in a gesture of admonition, the other holding the disintegrator knife. His black garb seemed to expand and fill the surrounding air as the field darkened around him, and then he vanished completely as it crystallized into the familiar mirrored sphere.
In the war room, as Bredon groped for something to say, some new delaying tactic, he saw the stasis field appear. He stared at the screen, baffled.
Then he relaxed and sank into Thaddeus's control chair, overcome with relief, as Geste stepped into view and the prisoners, despite their chains, burst into applause.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“...told among the people who live along the banks of the river where the forests end and the grasslands begin. There, a woman will often wake in the middle of the night to find the furs beside her empty. When that happens, she knows that the Nymph has called her man away for a few hours’ pleasure.
"You might think that the women would be upset by this, that they would be jealous, but in fact few are. They have lived all their lives knowing that this happens, for it's hardly a secret. Scarcely a grown man in the area has not been called at least once. In fact, the wife of a man who has been called back repeatedly will often take pride in the fact—must her man not be a wonderful and inventive lover, to have been so summoned?
"It's not as if another woman had seduced their men. After all, who can compete with a Power? And they can take comfort in knowing that for tensleeps afterward, after a dark or two with the insatiable and perverse Nymph, their men are always too tired and too jaded to bother straying to the beds of other mortal women..."
—from the tales of
Atheron the Storyteller
* * * *
The disintegrator knife would have been handy for cutting the chains, but it was trapped in the stasis field with Thaddeus. Monitor refused to provide any assistance, and eventually, at Geste's suggestion and with Aulden providing the necessary technical advice, Bredon sent a machine down that blew Monitor out of the wall in microscopic shards.
While this was being done Bredon and Geste exchanged accounts of what had happened, piecing together the entire story of Thaddeus's downfall. When they had the tale straight, Bredon put a reassuring call through to the Skyland; almost all the jamming and defensive fields had been shut down when he gave his “abort” command to the entire war room, so communication was easy.
The Skyler, though relieved, had no intention of entering Fortress Holding. She would wait where she was, she said.
The same machine that destroyed Monitor, under careful direction, was able to remove the shackles from the seven captives and lead them all, as well as Geste, to the war room.
As they made their way through the passages Bredon, growing more confident in his abilities, summoned other machines, and by the time the Powers reached the room he had a steady stream of service devices bringing food and drink.
This done, he stood and turned to face the door.
Brenner was the first to arrive; he burst into the war room smiling, directly behind the guiding machine. The machine wheeled itself quickly to one side, letting the Powers into the room. “Well done, boy!” Brenner called. “Well done indeed!” He started to cross the room to address Bredon more directly, but then stopped at the sight of the machines bearing food and redirected his steps.
“Very well done!” he called as he stuffed a handful of delicacies in his mouth.
Khalid and Madame O arrived close on Brenner's heels. They said nothing, but headed directly for the refreshments.
Lady Sunlight hung back, looking at the vast, machinery-lined room.
Geste, Rawl, and Sheila were more polite. The three of them crossed the room to congratulate Bredon on his part in their victory.
“I think we make a pretty good team,” Geste said, holding out his hand to Bredon. “If you hadn't kept him busy like that I co
uldn't have gotten him. And if you hadn't jumped him when you did, and disabled most of his machines, he probably would have killed me."
Bredon accepted this praise calmly, but felt compelled to point out, “It was Aulden's password that made it all possible. I couldn't have done anything if he hadn't set it up for me."
“So you're all wonderful,” Sheila said mockingly.
Aulden and Imp, who had fallen behind the others, arrived then, ambling into the war room with their arms about each other. Aulden disengaged himself and promptly settled into a nearby chair. Imp bounced across the room, kissed Geste, kissed Bredon, and then flung herself back in Aulden's arms, letting her white prison gown bunch up to her waist as she nestled onto his lap.
Bredon looked away, slightly embarrassed by Imp's lack of modesty.
Close beside him, Sheila draped herself on Geste and began to kiss him repeatedly, working her way downward. Startled, Bredon stepped back and again looked away.
Over by the food-bearing floaters and carts O, Brenner, and Khalid draped arms around one another.
To Bredon's shocked surprise these embraces led to other actions. Aulden raised his own gown and pushed Imp's higher as her hand fell between his thighs. Sheila pulled Geste's gown from his shoulders and worked his arms free, so that the garment dropped to the floor, followed by her own.
In short order the victory celebration turned into an orgy. Bredon stood to one side, watching.
He glanced around. Rawl was paying no attention to the others as he studied the walls of machinery, and Lady Sunlight was still standing quietly by the door, but the others were all enjoying each other, oblivious to their rather inappropriate surroundings.
Bredon stepped back against the banks of controls and closed his eyes. The thought came to him that at any moment, Rawl and Lady Sunlight would follow the example of their companions; he suppressed the thought, but kept his eyes shut. He did not want to see that.
Lady Sunlight watched the others uncertainly. She was still somewhat disoriented. Thaddeus had thrown her entire view of the universe into doubt; in her understanding of reality, no one kidnapped or tortured anyone.
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