They all watched, awe-struck, as the hovering thing folded its great wings back against its thirty-meter fuselage and delicately felt its way down. It nosed obliquely between a pair of tall firs where there was a minimum of undergrowth, hesitated just barely off the ground, and then let its long legs settle. There was a loud hiss; a few bushes began to smolder and wisps of smoke curled up around the footpads. The skin of the bird went dead black.
Then the people, who had stood as though paralyzed, broke into wild cheers. A number sobbed aloud as they rushed to follow Kawai's orders, beating out the little fires that had been set by the rho-field and hustling to set up poles and guy-ropes for the nets.
The belly hatch opened and the ladder extruded. Slowly, Madame Guderian came down.
Amerie said, "Welcome home."
"We have brought it," said Madame.
"Everything is ready. Exactly as your plan specified."
Lame Miz Cheryl-Ann, who was two hundred and three and nearly blind, seized one of Madame's hands and kissed it; but the Frenchwoman hardly seemed to notice. Up above, a word of warning came from within the flyer. A litter was lowered from the hatch by Felice and Richard.
Madame said only, "You are needed, ma Soeur." And then she turned and walked as in a daze toward her cottage. Amerie knelt down and took one of Martha's bony wrists. Richard stood there in his ruffled pirate shirt and battered buckskins with fists clenched and tears running down his dirty sun-scorched cheeks.
"She wouldn't let us come back until the Spear was working right. And now she's damn near bled to death. Help her, Amerie."
"Follow me," said the nun, and they rushed off after Madame, carrying the litter with them, leaving Claude to see that the big black bird of prey was safely bedded down for the night.
Chapter Ten
Before dawn there was the Battle Mass, and then Madame exerted her farspeech power to transmit an enigmatic "we come" to Pallol, insuring that the invasion fleet would be poised to exploit the bombardment of Finiah's wall. Sunrise was less than an hour away and if past performance was any criterion, Lord Velteyn and the members of his Flying Hunt would be back at their stronghold after the night's foray.
Claude strode along nearly at the end of the procession heading for the flyer and wished Felice would shut up. She was once again attired in her black leather ring-hockey armor, which had been beautifully refurbished by Old Man Kawai's artisans, and she was wild with anxiety lest she should miss the war.
"I wouldn't take up any room. And I swear I won't say a word during the flight! Claude, you've got to let me come with you. I can't wait for you to come back after the strike. What if you don't make it?"
"If Velteyn nails the flyer, you'd go down with us."
"But if you get away, you could put me down right outside Finiah! Say, at the breach in the wall on the land side of the peninsula. I could go in with the Firvulag on the second wave! Please Claude!"
"The Hunt could have spotted us by then. Landing could be suicide, and that's not what this fight is all about. Not for me and Madame Guderian, at any rate. Finiah is just the beginning of our war. And Richard's got Martha to live for now."
Up ahead, villagers were pulling the nets from the black bird. A few candles gleamed in the mist where Amerie was blessing the aircraft.
Felice said, "I could help you with the Spear, Claude. You know what an awkward big bastard it is. I could be useful." She clutched at the old man's bush shirt and he stopped abruptly and took her by, the shoulders.
"Listen to me, girl! Richard is all strung up. He hasn't slept for more than twenty-four hours and he's half-crazy with worry because of Martha, Even with the transfusions, Amerie gives her less than a fifty-fifty chance. And now Richard has to fly a combat mission in an exotic aircraft with a couple of old crocks and the future of Pliocene humanity riding on his tail! You know how he feels about you. Having you in the flyer during the mission could be the last straw. You say that you'd keep out of the way. But I know you couldn't help asserting yourself once the heat was on. So you're staying here, and that's that. We'll do our job and then run for home, and with luck we'll leave Velteyn completely mystified about where we've gone. We'll come back and pick you up. I promise you that if we make it, we'll get you to the battle not more than an hour or so after the main assault begins."
"Claude . . . Claude . . ." Her face peered through the T-shaped opening in the black hoplite helmet, panic and fury and some other more alien emotion at war with reason. Claude waited, praying that she wouldn't jump him. But he was so steeped in fatigue that he almost didn't give a damn whether or not she knocked him cold and forced the others to let her take his place. It was in her mind, all right; but she also knew that he was by far the better shot.
"Oh, Claude." The blazing brown eyes closed. Tears poured behind the cheekpieces of her helmet and the green plumes flattened as she wrenched away from him and fled back toward Madame's cottage.
He let out a long breath. "Be ready when we get back!" he called, and then hurried to where the others were waiting.
The great bird crept furtively from its hiding place. When it was in the clear, it mounted the predawn sky like a violet spark going up an invisible chimney, attaining an altitude of 5000 meters in a thunderclap inertialess surge. Angélique Guderian stood beside Richard, clutching the back of his seat with one hand and her golden torc with the other. Richard had changed into his old spacer's coverall.
"You got us hidden, Madame?" he asked.
"Yes," she replied faintly. She had said hardly a word since their safe return.
"Claude! You ready?"
"Whenever you give the word, son."
"We're on our way!"
A split second later, the belly hatch rolled smoothly back. They hovered motionless above a patch of microscopic jewels, shaped roughly like a tadpole with its tail joined to the eastern bank of the Rhine.
"Why, it's on the Kaiserstuhl," Claude said to himself.
The patch grew, spread, its star-cluster blur clarifying into twinkling lights as the flyer dropped, subsonically this time, and stopped dead in the air about 200 meters above the highest eminence of the Tanu city.
"Give it to 'em," said Richard.
Claude horsed the great Spear into position and took a bead on the line of fiery dots marking the Rhineside wall. Somewhere in the graying mists of the river waited a flotilla of Firvulag boats loaded with human and exotic troops.
Keep her depressed, old man! You don't want to boil your own folks out of the water!
He raised the caplock and swung it aside. There, right there. Touch the second stud.
A thin bar of green-white lanced without sound.
Down below, a tiny orange flower bloomed, but the line of dots atop the wall remained unbroken.
"Shit!" Richard exclaimed. "You missed! Elevate!"
Calmly, Claude took aim once again, pressed the stud. This time there was no burst of orange fire, only a dull-red glow. Perhaps a dozen of the rampart lamps were swallowed by it.
"Hee-yow! Gotcha!" screeched the pirate. "Make a one-eighty, Claudsie-boy! Ready for the back door!"
The flyer spun on its vertical axis and Claude found himself aiming at a point near the base of the shining tadpole's tail. He fired and missed . . . high. He fired and missed again . . . low.
"Jesus, hurry it up!" urged Richard.
The third time, the blast struck the wall squarely, melting it at a point where the causeway of the peninsular neck met the extinct volcanic mass of the Kaiserstuhl proper.
Madame moaned. Claude felt dragon talons grip his guts.
"Are they coming?" Richard demanded. "Hang on, Madame! Sweet Christ, Claude, get on with ft! Never mind zapping the Tanu buildings. Go for the mine!"
The old man wrestled the Spear around, a sudden bunt of sweat greasing his hands and making them slip on the weapon's glassy butt. His tensed-up muscles trembled as he tried to bring the weapon to bear upon the small blue constellation that marked the mine wor
kings. He could not depress the Spear sufficiently to bring the target into range. "Quick, Richard! Take her a couple of hundred meters south!"
"Aye," growled the pirate. The flyer changed position in the twinkling of an eye. "That better?"
"Wait . . . yes! I've just about got her. Have to do this right the first time. Only have one blast at full zap . . ."
"Merde alors." Madame whispered.
The old woman staggered away from Richard to crash against the right bulkheads. Fists pressed to her temples, she began to scream. Claude had never heard such a sound from a human throat, such a distillation of anguish, horror, and despair.
At the same moment, something flashed past the flight deck port. It glowed neon-red and was shaped like a mounted knight.
"Oh, God," said Richard flatly. Madame's screams cut off and she fell senseless to the deck.
"How many?" asked Claude. He tried to get a grip on himself, tried to steady the heavy Spear on target, prayed that his damned old body wouldn't betray him at this last extremity. They had almost done it! Almost . . .
"I make it twenty-two." Richard's calm voice seemed to come from a considerable distance. "The whole Round Table circling us like Sioux around a wagon train. All scarlet except the leader, and I'd put his spectral class somewhere in the BO range, look out!"
One of the figures, the blue-white one, soared down and took a position immediately below the flyer. He drew his glassy sword and thrust it upward. Three Roman-candle globes of ball lightning left the tip and soared rather slowly toward the open belly hatch. Claude dodged, pulling the Spear out of the way, and the things flew into the aircraft, where they began caroming off the panels and decking, hissing and emitting a fearful smell of ozone.
"Shoot!" shrieked Richard. "For God's sake, shoot!"
Claude took one deep breath. He said, "Steady, son," and aimed, depressing the fifth stud of the Spear of Lugonn just as the little blue lights centered themselves in the weapon's sight.
An emerald bar jabbed once at the spangled earth. Where it struck, the rock went white, yellow, orange, roiling crimson like a flame-armed starfish. Claude fell sideways and the Spear clanged to the deck. The belly hatch started to close.
Lightning balls bounced and crackled. The old man felt one of them strike him in the back, rolling up his spine from buttocks to the base of his neck, burning all the way. The interior of the flyer was filled with smoke and a smell of burnt flesh and fabric. There were sounds, too, Claude discovered, as he studied the scene from afar, a sizzle as the remaining two energy balls sought their targets, curses and then a thin scream from Richard, a whimpering sob from Angélique as she tried to creep toward him over the smeared deck, someone breathing in and out in harsh, rhythmic persistence.
"Get it away from me!" a frantic voice cried. "I can't see to land! Ah, dammit, no!"
A jarring crash and a slow tilt to one side. Claude felt a breeze (amazing the way it seared his back) and the hatch opened. A peculiarly angled surface of grassy ground, gray and dim in the first light of morning. Richard sobbing and cursing. Angélique making no sound. Voices shouting. Heads poking up through the hatch, again at that odd angle. Wails from that silly youngster. Old Man Kawai. Amerie's familiar tones: "Go easy. Go easy." Felice spitting obscenities when somebody said she was going to get her armor all messed up.
"Put himover my shoulder. I can carry him. Stop your wiggling, Claude. Silly old fart! Now I'm going to have to walk all the way to the war."
He laughed. Poor Felice. And then his face was upside down among her green skirts and he was jouncing up and down and he screamed. But after a little bit the movement stopped, and they laid him on his stomach and something touched his temple, making the pain and the rest of it grow muzzy.
He said. "Angélique? Richard?"
Unseen, Amerie replied, "They'll recover. You all will. You did it, Claude. Sleep now." Well, how about that? And for a moment he saw the fiery starfish again, but with crimson and gold limbs expanding, branching out among the hapless helpless firefly patterns of Finiah streets in the instant before the hatch of the flyer slammed shut. How about that . . . and if the lava kept oozing out of the old Kaiserstuhl volcano for even a little while, it was going to be a long time before they mined any more barium in the regions around there.
"Don't worry about it, Claude," Felice said.
And so he stopped.
Chapter Eleven
Half-dozing in the dead hour before dawn, Moe Marshak and the other human troops on duty in Finiah had mistaken the first blast of the photon weapon for a lightning stroke. The thin green beam had lanced out of the stars, barely missing the Rhineside wall that the gray-torc garrison manned and demolishing an adjacent mess hall inside the compound. Marshak was still gaping at the flames consuming the wreckage when Claude's second shot struck the Number Ten bastion squarely, breaching the fortification not a dozen meters from Marshak's station. Great blocks of granite flew in all directions and the air boiled with smoke and dust. Oil tubs that held the watch fires spilled in the concussion and sent blazing rivulets racing down the cracked walkway.
When Marshak was able to get a grip on himself, he rushed to look through one of the embrasures. There in the fog-blurred waters below were the boats.
"Alert!" he shouted aloud; and then his mind sent the alarm on the declamatory mode, amplified by his gray torc.
Manhak: Invasion viaRhine! Wallbreach StationTen!
Captal Wag: Howthehellmany be there Moe? Howmany boats?
Manhak: Wholefuckin' river FULL!! Eightyhundred who can count damnfog bastards everywhere Firvulagboats but letmesee yes! LOWLIVES TOO! Repeat Lowlives + Foe invading. Landings! Rocks swarming damnfuckers penetrating breach estimate hole maybeninemeters max.
Comet Formby: All troopsofwatch to StationTen. General alert RhineGarrison to arms. Dutyobservers scan/report Defensiveunits to wallstations . . . CANCELCANCELCANCEL! Defensiveunits to garrisoncompound! Invader penetration compound!
Commander Seaborg: Lord Velteyn. Alert. Firvulag and human invasion force has penetrated the city fortifications at breached Number Ten Station. Countering.
Lord Velteyn of Finiah: Kinfolk arise and defend! Flyers to saddle! Na bardito! Na bardito taynel o pogekdne!
Chief Burke and Uwe Guldenzopf led the mob of Vosges Lowlives and outland volunteers up the steep rampart and across the tumbled nibble of the breakthrough. Vitredur arrows and crossbow bolts rained down from the battlements, but until the defenders could redeploy at ground level, the invaders would have a brief advantage. As bad luck would have it, the breach was within the grounds of the principal Finiah garrison. In addition to the confusion caused by the mess hall conflagration, which was spreading to adjoining structures, a chaliko stable had been broken open by falling debris and numbers of the great animals were loose.
Three soldiers ran from the guardhouse at the compound gate. "Take 'em," yelled Burke, and howling desperados fell upon the little force and cut it to pieces. "Out of here! Into the city streets! and get this gate off the hinges!"
Troops were pouring from the barracks, some with their armor only half strapped on. Free-for-all clashes erupted everywhere in the murk as invaders scrambled through the broken wall while the human minions of the Tanu strove to press them back. The irregulars trying to unhinge the gates were attacked and overwhelmed, and soldiers swung the heavy metal grille shut, locking it.
"We're sealed in!" Chief Burke jumped on top of an overturned feed wagon. His face and upper torso were painted in the old war patterns and he had the wing feather of a fire-eagle thrust into his knotted, iron-colored hair. "Hit the sonnofabitches! Get that gate back open! This way!"
He saw Uwe fall beneath a sword-wielding gray-torc and leaped down, brandishing the wide tomahawk Khalid Khan had forged for him. The blade sank into the soldier's crested bronze kettle-helmet as though it were made of pasteboard. Burke hauled the body off to find Ouldenzopf lying flat on his back, one hand clutching his breast and an expression of
agony on his bearded face.
Burke knelt. "Did he nail you, bubi?"
Struggling up on one elbow, Uwe groped inside his buckskin shirt. Bone-colored bits gleamed in the lurid light "Only my second-best meerschaum, dammit."
The Lowlives remained hemmed in, unable to break out of the area in the immediate vicinity of the garrison complex. Those crowded in the breach were pressed both by the defenders and by their own comrades coming up from the beachhead. A wall of panic arose. Some invaders fell and were trampled. A garrison officer wearing a silver torc and full blue-glass body armor directed a unit of halberdiers that advanced upon the stalled irregulars. Sweeping crystal blades mowed down the packed, shrieking throng.
And then the monsters came to the rescue.
High on the steep slope of rubble shone the wavering nightmare shape of a three-meter albino scorpion, the illusionary aspect of Sharn the younger, general of the Firvulag. From the minds of the exotics came a mighty wave of terror and dread that overloaded the telepathic circuits of the gray torcs and sent their wearers writhing into madness. Sharn himself could smite the enemy at a range of nearly twenty-five meters; others of his advancing company might not have auras so formidable, but woe to the Foe who fell into their clutches!
Hideous trolls, spectres, manticores, shambling dark presences seized the soldiers in spine-crunching embraces, sank fangs into unarmored throats, even rent men limb from limb. Some of the exotics were capable of flinging bolts of psycho-energy that broiled troops in their bronze cuirasses like lobsters in the shell. Other Firvulag harassed with sheets of astral fire, streams of nauseating ichor, or brain-crippling illusions. The great hero Nukalavee the Skinless, wearing his aspect of a flayed centaur with blazing eyes, howled until enemy soldiers fell writhing to the ground, eardrums split and minds reduced to near-idiocy. Another champion, Bles Four-Fang, invaded the headquarters of the garrison, caught up the silver commander named Seaborg, and appeared to devour him, armor and all, while the dying officer calmly broadcast final telepathic orders to his subordinates directing the troops now making a last stand at the gate opening into the inner city. Seaborg's aides blunted their vitredur weapons against Bles's scaly illusory hide, only to be eaten alive in turn for their temerity. By the time the monster had downed the last adjutant, the headquarters building was afire and the invasion force swarmed in Finiah's streets. So Bles withdrew in good order, picking his teeth with a silver spur. His appetite had only been whetted, and the morning was young.