The Nonborn King
CLOUD: I haven't got the straight of it. But there are definitely some modern arms being used by both the Lowlives and Aiken's elite corps.
HAGEN: Fuck.
CLOUD: The little scenario that Kuhal and Nodonn worked out for the Vale of Hyenas should keep me safe enough. I'm not worried.
HAGEN: Well, lotsa luck, sister. But, listen! Under no circumstances do you go along on the invasion of Aiken Drum's magic castle.
CLOUD: No fear.
HAGEN: Think time-gate. Remember that the rest of us are counting on you to mediate with Papa. He's not going to stay in the tank forever—if that's where he actually is. When he starts in again with the old hoo-ha, he's going to be right over here on our necks instead of back in Ocala. If anyone can get round him, you can.
CLOUD: I've tried calling him again and again on the i-mode, but he doesn't answer. He must be in the regeneration tank. Unless ... Hagen, you don't think he could have—
HAGEN: Don't be an idiot.
CLOUD: Well, Felice nearly killed Aiken. And if she did d-jump to North America, she might have got right into the observatory, screens or no screens, riding right up Papa's peripheral farsense beam.
HAGEN: He's alive, damn him.
CLOUD: Have you had any success yet farspeaking Manion?
HAGEN: No. Veikko keeps trying, but he just doesn't pull the watts like old Vaughn on i-mode, and we don't want to risk an overall had. Not that any of the others on Ocala would tell us the truth anyhow ...
CLOUD: They've come. It's time for me to go now.
HAGEN: Take care. Take great care.
CLOUD: And you. Bring me a Tri-D loop of the Gibraltar waterfall if you can. It must be quite a sight ...
***
A party of snipe hunters from the Lowlife camp at the Vale of Hyenas found Dougal. He was Still alive nearly a week after the Firvulag ambush, raving in delirium, a pitiful mass of infected wounds and insect bites. He had managed to retrace his tracks nearly twenty kilometers before collapsing on a marshy trail just south of the valley where the aircraft were concealed.
"I would fain die a dry death," Dougal murmured, as his rescuers dragged him from the mud. "By my troth, Morisca, my little body is aweary of this world."
"Sometimes I find it medium tedious myself," drawled Sophronisba Gillis. "How'd you get loose of Orion and the others, suck-face?"
But Dougal only mumbled incoherencies. Later, when they entered camp, he roused briefly at the sight of the two parked flying machines and moaned, "Alas! Poor falcons, towering in their pride of place!" Then he lapsed once more into a stupor.
Phronsie and the other snipe hunters carried the stricken medievalist to the infirmary. Dusk had deepened and the nearly full moon sent bars of searchlight-bright luminescence through the tall sequoias, painting the black aircraft silver. All of Basil's Bastards who were not on guard duty crowded into the infirmary shelter, where the physicians Thongsa and Magnus Bell worked in vain to restore the recaptured prisoner to consciousness.
"It looks pretty hopeless, Basil," Magnus said. "Guy's in shock. In addition to all the surface wounds, I think he may have a ruptured spleen. God knows why he's still alive."
"Get these people out of here!" Thongsa fretted.
Basil herded the throng out into the bright moonlit clearing. He said to Phronsie, "We've got to find out what happened to that prisoner-escort party. Whether Dougal simply escaped—or whether the party was jumped by Aiken's people or the Firvulag. Are you sure Dougal didn't say anything significant? Give any hint that this hiding place of ours might be compromised?"
The statuesque black woman shrugged. "He just spouted a lot of Shakespeare talk. The guy's usual shtick. Then when we got him back here, he was nattering on a little about the aircraft. Calling 'em proud falcons—some such thing."
The former Oxford don's eyes widened. "What did he say? Exactly?"
One of the other snipe hunters piped up. "I remember! It was, 'Poor falcons, towering in their pride of place.'"
Basil's gaze lifted to the long-legged aircraft with the down-swept wings and empennages, their flight decks tilted like inclined bird necks. He recited:
A falcon, towering in her pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and kill'd.
"Subhan'llah!" breathed the technician Nazir.
"Er—precisely my own sentiments." Basil fingered his golden tore. "Oblique though it may be, I'm afraid that Dougal's little quote admits of only one interpretation. And so—"
"Hey, stop where you are!" came a shout from the other side of the clearing.
Suddenly, there were more voices, and pounding footsteps, and electric torches flicking on and scything in the shadows behind the Number Two flyer.
"Stand still, damn you—or I'd drop you in your tracks!" Taffy Evans yelled.
The flashlight beams of the converging guards zeroed in on a redwood trunk, where a lone human woman cowered. She shielded her eyes from the light. Then, as a figure in a great hoopskirt and ruff stepped forward and administered a merciless prod with an iron-tipped spear, the intruder burst into tears.
Basil and the others stood thunderstruck.
"Don't hurt me!" the woman wept. "Please don't."
The guards had closed in, and now began to move with their prisoner toward Basil and the large group that still surrounded him.
"She's really human, at any rate," Mr. Betsy called out in smug satisfaction. "Not some miserable exotic shape-shifter!"
"Of course I'm human," the woman wailed. She seemed to stumble. Taffy Evans, carrying the stun-gun, shifted the weapon quickly to one arm and caught the prisoner in the other. She smiled at him.
"Keep that Husky on her, Taff!" The incarnation of Queen Elizabeth I was unrelenting in vigilance. "One false move out of her, and you blast!"
"Aw, come on, Bets," the pilot protested.
As the prisoner stepped into the bright moonlight in front of the infirmary, she seemed so obviously harmless that everyone, even the gang of armed guards, visibly relaxed. She wore a pair of white canvas shorts and a plaid cotton shirt knotted below her breasts. Her blonde hair, held off her forehead with a narrow bandeau, was clean and shining. On her shoulders was a small day-pack. In spite of her tearful apprehension, she was almost breathtakingly beautiful.
Basil stepped forward, the golden tore gleaming in the neck of his open safari blouse. Cloud Remillard came directly to him and said, "You must be Professor Wimborne!"
"I'm afraid I haven't had—" Basil started to say, instinctively—and then pained chagrin flooded through him and he wondered how he could have faded to recognize Alice. Enormous Alice, long-necked Alice, sly-eyed Alice escaped from Wonderland and pressing a single sliencing finger against his lips, simultaneously muffling his mind that would have screamed a warning into the aether, alerting Chief Burke in Hidden Springs.
"Oh, no you don't," Cloud said gently. Her redaction coiled out like the multiple tentacles of a basket star, restraining every mind. Basil and his Bastards were helpless statues under the August moon. The stun-gun and all the iron weapons clattered to the ground. Tears of helpless rage glittered in the eyes of Mr. Betsy, who might have been a costumed waxwork at Madame Tussaud's, save for the anomalous mustache and tiny goatee.
The two physicians, torn from their patient by the irresistible command of the redactor, came to join their fellow humans in thrall.
"Are there any others?" Cloud inquired of thin air, and the atmosphere replied in the negative. "Not yet!" the woman said in a peremptory tone. "Not while he's still wearing the tore and there's the least chance of adrenaline override."
Basil watched her take off the backpack and flip it open. She took out a pair of yachtsman's heavy-duty cable cutters. Utterly lacking in willpower, Basil knelt and bent his neck. Cloud severed the tore with a single stroke and the alpinist crumpled senseless to the ground.
"Now it's safe," Cloud said.
The paralyzed crowd of humans would have cried out if they had
not lost control of their vocal cords. Four tall phantoms materialized in the moonlight, smothering the natural radiance in the glow of their vitredur armor. Two shone the krypton-green of creators and one was clad in the sodiumvapor glow worn by psychokinetic stalwarts; but the fourth, who towered above the others, had the eye-smarting brilliance of the noon sun. The pilots, the technicians, the medics, and the daredevils despaired at the sight of him: Nodonn, the implacable enemy of humankind, who had sworn to rid the Many-Colored Land of all time-travelers, no matter what the cost.
"But you promised," Cloud Remillard said.
And Apollo sighed, "Yes."
So with a painless medullary pinch the woman sent all of the prisoners cascading into welcome black; and none of them, not even recovering Dougal, awoke until they had been two days in the dungeons of Afaliah, and the clash between the rival Battlemasters had long since been resolved.
7
MERCY FOUND Sullivan-Tonn sitting alone in a cluttered chamber at the top of the northwestern turret of the Castle of Glass, reading Essais de sciences maudites and sipping Strega from a Venetian goblet of a most scandalous shape.
"Great Queen!" he exclaimed, making haste to turn the book face down. There was, unfortunately, nothing to be done about the goblet.
Her face was pale, but her mind, only partially screened, seemed on fire with some violent emotion. "I'm sorry to disturb you. I would not have broken in upon your private space except on business of mortal urgency."
"Whatever I can do—" He faltered at her look. "Has he done something to you? Has he hurt you?" The portly psychokinetic was roused to indignation in spite of his own timidity. He rushed to Mercy's side, put an arm around her, and led her to a chair that stood in the cool breeze blowing off the sea.
"He's done only what he usually does," she replied darkly. "But before this night is done I'd have revenge. If you'd help me, Sullivan."
"I will," he declared.
"Your psychokinesis ... can you open any lock?"
"Without question!"
"The special one he's put on the storage vaults beneath the castle?"
Sullivan's eyes bulged. "Not the secret rooms where the Milieu weapons and devices are kept—"
"The same. Can you?" She was reining in her coercion and the awesome psychocreative forces that could mould matter and energies to her whim, trying not to frighten him. The lock was a subtle thing that had defied her own manipulation and was proof against mindblasts. Sullivan, with his great PK talent, was her only hope of neutralizing the high-technology weaponry in a way that Aiken might not detect until it was too late ...
"I—I can only try, Lady Creator."
She leaped to her feet, her green gauze gown with its sliver borders billowing like surf. "Try, for vengeance's sake, Sullivan! I know you hate him as I do. But soon, perhaps at dawn, he'll be paid in full for all his trickery! Now we must hurry, while he still sleeps off his surfeit of me." Seizing his moist hand, she held it tightly for a moment, her wild eyes ablaze. Then she cried, "Follow!" and was off racing down the circular stairs.
He bounded along in her wake, leather slippers thwacking on the dull glass paving, cerise dressing robe aflap, sandy hair standing on end for sheer terror. The castle was very quiet. They dashed through an open atrium where wind-chimes tinkled and a small fountain splashed, and the big white sheepdog Deirdre leaped up to welcome its mistress and nearly gave Sullivan a heart attack.
"Down, Deirdre! Stay!" Mercy hissed, and the animal vanished back into the shadows.
They fled down echoing halls with only the faerie-light chains for interior illumination; and the full moon riding high outside gleamed eerily through the colored-glass panels of the corridor roof, spreading pools of spectral lavender, pink, and amber underfoot. Here and there little ramas with feather dusters or mops cringed away in apprehension at their passing. The only human they saw was a middle-aged gray guard, stiff as a post outside the main audience room, holding a vitredur sword before his face with the staunch tirelessness of the preprogrammed tore wearer.
At last they reached the great foyer of the royal wing, with its sconces of flaming oil and spiral staircase. Mercy showed Sullivan the unobtrusive bronze door in the inner wall. "Open it without a trace."
He concentrated his PK, lips pressed together and forehead all corrugated. There was a subdued clunk. The door slid open and steep stone steps leading into blackness yawned ahead of them.
"That wasn't too hard." Sullivan managed a crooked smile.
"The real lock is down there. Hurry, man! He may wake and find me gone."
She conjured up a fireball torch and went slipping and sliding down the crudely cut shaft. There was no dampness now, but the stair treads and risers had been designed for long exotic legs and the going was precarious. Sullivan was beginning to gasp for breath, and only saved himself from stumbling by adroit use of his PK, which had him bobbing through the air from time to time like a silk-wrapped balloon effigy.
And then they reached the bottom. There was the vaultlike door with its battery of exotic code locks. As Sullivan came close to inspect them his skin crawled and the air seemed to attain a rubbery semisolidity.
"There's a force-field here as well, my Queen. Not a sigma, thank the Lord. Perhaps a gravomag repulsor, to keep damp air and fungus spores and things from seeping into the chamber. As well as thieves and malefactors." He giggled nervously.
Mercy was calm. "Open it"
He bent to the task. Perspiration streamed from his scalp and armpits. In his brain visions of the lock encodements—microscopic bubbles within bubbles, ad dotted and etched with psychosensitive chemicals—zoomed into and out of focus. He concentrated, thrust bent and pricked. Something began to buzz. "Getting it" he mumbled. Magnify and hold the thing up to scrutiny. Ah—a sequential set Ingenious! And with nulls scattered in the substructure ...
Buzz. Click-click. Throm.
The force-field cut out. "That's a help! Now—" Press, press, push-pull, twist!
There were noises behind the door, bars lifting, bolts sliding back. And then slience, and a tall crack opening.
"You've done it!" Mercy pushed past him, activated the lighting. "Now!" she cried. "It must ad be saved for Nodonn—but put in a condition so that it's useless to him during the time that my daemon lover strikes!"
She regarded the long aisles with their plass racks and shelves, the thousands of different items podded or swathed in transparent durofilm, the walls of the place thickly coated in sealant impervious to damp and chemical action, the small inventory-control computer, and its robot retriever standing by.
"We'll start with you!" Mercy cried. An emerald ray lanced from her hand. The computer and robot began to smoke, and puddles of stinking liquid spread incontinently beneath their casters.
"That should slow my Lord King's next shopping expedition! And now what? We must embed ad this—render it unusable until it's been painstakingly cleaned with special solvents that my Nodonn will have to get a Milieu chemist to formulate!"
His face full of fear, Sullivan-Tonn backed slowly toward the door. Mercy saw him and laughed. "That's right Sullivan dear. Run off, man! Your work's done. Back up the stairs if you value your life! Fly ... for I'm brewing up a witch's cauldron of foul sticky glop to sink Aiken Drum's weapons in, so he'll never use them against my love!"
A tremendous explosion made the rock walls quake. Putrid yellow matter began to bod from their plastic coating; it foamed and surged. "The polymers in the insulating sealant!" cried Mercy, safe in a psychocreative sphere. "Who else can tumble and stretch and refashion their giant molecules as I can? 1—the mistress of organics, who can make food and drink ad wholesome and nourishing from the trash of the fields! And can't I also make the devil's own glue, and a clinging foam to encrust all the pods and packages, and foul poison gases caught in the bubbles that knit the mess together?"
The terrible stuff flowed like magma, filling every cranny of the storage chamber. Mercy's lifesaving sphe
re wafted out the door and she caused it to slam shut, still laughing wildly. The shaft was now half-filled with noxious vapors and so she went lofting up, to where the open door and Sullivan waited. And then she was safely through, and he crashed the heavy panel shut, and the two of them stood side by side.
Aiken Drum sat on the bottom step of the spiral staircase, staring at them. The air still reverberated with the slamming of the bronze door.
"It's done!" she cried exultantly. "And he's on his way! You'll fight him fair, little man, because it'll take weeks to get the Milieu weapons dug out of the poisonous mess I've sunk them in! Get your Spear, King Aiken-Lugonn. Cudgel your burnt-out brain into operancy again, if you can. Nodonn's coming! And it's the end!"
"Yes," Aiken agreed. Almost casually, he said to Sullivan-Tonn, "Get away from her, you."
The psychokinetic levitated and whisked across the great foyer, toward the passage leading to the exterior courtyard. Abruptly, his body seemed to meet an invisible wall. There was a sickening crackle, a choked scream.
"Not too far away," Aiken said.
Sullivan's stout torso was pinioned to the invisible wall. His nose oozed blood and his jaw hung awry, the lower Up pierced by splintered teeth. He began to utter liquid-thickened cries.
Both his feet burst into flame.
"No!" screamed Mercy.
"It's your doing," said Aiken.
The smoke roiled and blackened. Sullivan writhed, the sounds coming from his mind and throat as shapeless and hideous as his sloughing flesh. His clothing had flashed away in an instant; now he burned only from the knees up, his feet and lower legs having been reduced to calcined bone.
"Oh, God." Mercy was weeping. A small fulgurant ball flew from her, struck the flaming man full in the head. The mind-cries ceased. There was only the tick and sputter of the burning, and Mercy's low sobs.
"Come upstairs with me."
Aiken held out one hand to her. She came slowly to him, noticing at last that he was all in black, with even the golden tone of his thoughts damped down to a level of darkness more fearful—more exciting—than any aspect of him she had ever yet known.