The knight called out through his speakers in German: “Hexen! Ready are you?”
The Warlock called out through his speakers in Virginian: “Christlich! Shall we?”
Neither understood the other. Both understood perfectly.
They charged into the thickest part of the line of automata, dog things, and little men firing energy weapons. Soorm, the fur of his head matted and dripping with blood, put his sea lion nose over the edge of the fountain, and twitched both his mismatched eyes at the sight, looking on in awe.
10. Chimerae
When first the Giant snatched up Menelaus and began charging across the chamber, Lady Ivinia and the two Beta girls, Vulpina and Suspinia, heard Daae give the order, and they let fly at Ull.
The javelin and the handmade arrows flew straight and true toward Ull. But the many, many gems on his coat flickered with energy. This was evidently more gems than he was used to manipulating, for the wooden arrows were instantly reduced to ash; the metal spearhead was seized by an invisible magnetic force, twisted, and flung to the ground like a red-hot pretzel. Annoyed, he whistled toward the Great Dane in charge of the musketeers facing the Chimerae, and called, “Rirk Refka Kak-Et! Abate this nuisance!”
The Great Dane barked back, “Me! I will do it! Them! They shall die!” But the dog thing was unwilling to fire a fusillade toward a damaged atomic pile, so it raised its snickersnee and gave the signal to charge. It led the charge itself, clutching its sword in its teeth and running on all fours.
The Chimerae, astoundingly enough, did not man their defenses, but themselves countercharged the charging dogs, moving faster on their two feet than any dog could run on four. The Chimerae wheeled right, struck the flank of the dogs, and broke through their line.
The Chimerae made for the curving staircase behind the statue of Father Time. These stairs led to the balcony opposite the one where Menelaus fought. Halfway up the stairs, where the foe could come at them only in twos and threes, the Chimerae made their stand. The Kine were at the top; the maidens with their bows were midway; and Gamma Phyle, with his sling firing over the heads of the Alphas, at the foot of the staircase.
The Great Dane was puzzled as to why the Chimerae had left one fixed position only to occupy another, but only then noticed that by dressing his lines against the alcove, he had placed his squad out of position to assault the stairs: its left flank was near the stairway, and was already pelting forward, not waiting for the tardy right flank, which was still milling near the alcove, some dogs casting for scent, having not seen which way the Chimerae went, so dark and evil-smelling was the gunpowder-filled chamber and so rapid was Chimerical flight.
The Kine brandished spears and bills they had found fallen from the trophies on the walls, but they never actually engaged any foe, except by cheers and hoots.
The Chimerae women fought like she-demons or pagan goddesses of the hunt.
The girls impaled dog things with arrows, missing never a shot. Each had shrugged one shoulder free of her uniform, so they were half-naked, breasts bound up with medical tape to protect them from the snap of the bowstring. Back they drew the creaking bows, feathers to the ear; aimed; and let fly.
It was nearly perfect conditions for shooting. Indoors, with no wind, good lighting, at close range, and no need to arc any shot; nor did the dog things or Blue Men have any cover or concealment, not even a shield to hold overhead.
Their pretty eyes narrowed and glittered with concentration. They spoke only in grunts of one word or two:
“Five confirmed.”
“Four confirmed.”
“Seven. Arm. Could die.”
“Five. Arm doesn’t count.”
“Seven. Groin.”
“Six. Ouch! But doesn’t count.”
“Seven. Through both temples.”
“Counts. Seven confirmed. We’re tied.”
“Nine. Blue.”
“Only Eight!”
“Blues count double.”
And on and on the bowstrings sang.
After a time, Suspinia ordered Franz and Ardzl to climb over the railings of the stairs and pass among the dead to recover their arrows, and whining, the Kine obeyed.
The Lady Ivinia, wielding a kitchen knife in either hand, very neatly butchered one dog after another, parrying a bayonet or cutlass with one knife, disemboweling her attacker with the other. She was careful to leave the dying sufficiently alive to die slowly, so that a pair of comrades would come to their aid and drag the wounded from the fray, occupying three soldiers for each casualty.
The Great Dane, seeing this and realizing how dangerous Lady Ivinia was, ran toward the stairs on three legs, drew its black powder pistol with its fourth, and shot her point-blank. The bullet lodged between the breasts that had suckled so many warriors of the Chimera race, and she fell backward, a look of bliss on her features. The Great Dane had time to see that neither its nor any musketballs were igniting, and had time to start wondering why, when shots from the ceiling guns blew its head and upper body into chunks and scattered them.
When Ivinia fell, a peculiar wailing cry went up from Alpha Daae, and a look of madness was in his face, and all the other Chimerae echoed it; and throughout the chamber both the later-period Witches, and the early-period Nymphs, and any who had ever faced the Chimera race for a moment quailed at that dread keening, their limbs shaken with terror; and the dogs quailed also. It was the wail of the Chimerae.
The second-in-command after the Great Dane, a Golden Retriever, barked out the order. “You! Blades out! Bayonets only! Hold fire!” And this order was repeated in other parts of the chamber, in the other fights breaking out at this same time, for others had been slain by overhead shots. The fire control panel had been destroyed, and Menelaus could give no new order to the Mälzel brain controlling the local defense, but the orders he had typed in still stood, and that included retaliation against gunfire.
Gamma Phyle, bellowing and screaming, stood above Ivinia’s fallen body and slung pellets from his sling into the skulls of any dog things or Blue Men who seemed to be giving orders. His pellets neither exploded nor emitted microwave radiation, but even a man of ordinary strength can kill with a sling and a stone, and Phyle was bred and bioengineered to strength twice that of the strongest unmodified athlete, and his eye was more keen and his aim more sure.
Preceptor Ydmoy, who despite being of greater intelligence than the Followers did not have as swift of reflexes or a habit of obeying orders, just then aimed his jeweled pistol at Gamma Phyle and fired.
With astonishing reflexes, Gamma Phyle twisted just as a microwave ray from Ydmoy’s pistol struck him, intercepting the beam-path with his left hand, so that his left arm up to the elbow was charred, but his chest was not struck and no major organs were damaged.
Meanwhile, Ydmoy was felled by wall-guns. His coat gems deflected the shots seeking him, but the weapons in the lintels of the great doors, more sophisticated, sprayed him with a gush of liquid fire, a substance his magnetics could not deflect. He could utter only one scream, because after that his lungs were charred and motionless. The little man ran hither and thither for a moment, eyes and tongue consumed from his skull, fatty cells in his skin and muscles being eaten by fire, and then collapsed to the floor, flopping like a beached fish, in a spreading stench and puddle of his own blood and entrails, and many gems of his torn coat lay in the red mire glowing like live coals.
Phyle continued to fight one-handed, and the smart fibers in his uniform sleeve made themselves into a tourniquet. Because he had no sensation in that arm, he thrust the smoking arm fragment into the jaws of a dog thing that leaped on him; it closed its jaws on the dead arm by reflex, and Phyle, with reflexes better trained, crushed its windpipe with a stiff-fingered blow from his other hand. He plucked the saber from its belt as the dog-corpse fell away and he slew any dog near him, cutting his way toward the commanding Blue Men. More and more fell before him: there was something horrible in the sight, like seeing awkward
but enthusiastic children cut down by a hardened and trained veteran.
Phyle was not the most excellent of his race. He was merely a Gamma.
Daae strode forth, crying out the name of Ivinia, challenging all comers. He killed dog things, one after the next after the next, with perfectly executed and practiced strokes of his shillelagh.
After killing an even score of them, Daae turned and saw a grenadier among the dogs, with a haversack full of petards and grenades. Now he nimbly plucked the musket from dying paws, turned, and drove the bayonet into and through the grenade pouch of the grenadier, and into its kidneys. Now he leaned into the musket and screamed and ran, pushing the stumbling and bleeding grenadier dog thing back into the arms of its own comrades and pack leaders. These were the highest ranked of the dogs, their alphas and captains. Then Daae shouted, “Save my people, Judge of Ages! I never disbelieved of you!”
He pulled the trigger, so that the grenades, petards, fuses, and powder in the bulging ammo haversack ignited in every direction, killing more than a dozen at once, including the pack leaders, and wounding many others. A fusillade from the ceiling guns blew apart his shoulder, chest, and head, and Daae fell without a word. But even as the bullets struck, even as he fell, even as he died, he contrived to fling his body forward onto the dogs, so that the ricochets, divots, and shrapnel from the overhead guns would pass through his body and pierce his foes. With his last thought and his last breath and his last moment of life, he made his own corpse into a weapon against the enemy.
The dogs in this part of the chamber all yowled in panic and wrath, and they broke ranks, each attacking merely whatever was before its nose, without discipline or thought. That was the turning point of the fight.
Yet, for all this, neither was Daae the most excellent of his race, being past his prime and from what, by Chimera standards, counted as a peaceful era.
It was Yuen, the young pantherish Chimera, who shined with battle fury beyond description in that hour. He was as an acrobat, his every move and block and thrust a work of art. He threw himself bodily into the air, sailing over the head of the nearest dog thing as it stooped to thrust, landing at its back to grapple its neck, and then Yuen turned, pulling the beast into the line of the stroke of the dog thing behind it, who had also lunged with its bayonet. The one dog thing impaled its packmate while Yuen, in the same split second of time, caved in the canine skull with a blow from Arroglint, the metal whip being stiffened at that moment into a quarterstaff.
The next moment, Arroglint was as a spear of fire: with it, Yuen began killing dogs and Blue Men, one after another, with dainty mechanical precision. He would wait for his opponent to lunge with bayonet, parry the barrel of the musket with his weapon, and down the foe with a quick thrust to the neck, or head; for the smartmetal tip had formed a blade, and the smartmetal neck would telescope outward like a bright finger, swift as the stinger of a wasp, and the blade-metal emitted infrared hot enough to cook whatever it touched.
Dogs with ax and fang, dagger and claw, and snickersnee came pelting in, howling in rage, lunging for Yuen. The dogs cried out, “Him! He is but one man! Us! We are many! Kill, kill and slay!” But Arroglint was suddenly the tentacle of an octopus of steel, writhing and binding any limbs that ventured too close. An electric charge in the whip-metal stiffened the muscles of the trapped dogs, who trembled in agony without motion for an artistic moment while Yuen paused as if to admire the effect of the sinuous cursive curls; then the whip loops snapped closed, and amputated limbs jumped in the air like festive hats tossed at a celebration, if the hats trailed long red wet scarves.
Yuen danced over the still-living bodies of the armless and legless foes, crushing necks and groins beneath his feet, hearing their screams and cries and whimpers, and he closed with the next line of dogs, spinning his weapon like a circle of fire.
When he parried blades of steel, electricity jumped from his staff, shocking them motionless; and in that motionless moment, Arroglint became a flail or truncheon or lasso or bill or mattock or poleax or lance, and crushed or bludgeoned or strangled or stabbed or hewed or cleaved or pierced.
There were some he neither electrocuted nor lit their fur afire, and these he more mercifully dispatched with a blow from his elbow or knee or the side of whichever hand was not whirling his weapon at that moment. And one, a dog in the act of fleeing, he killed with an elegant aerial kick which he executed by using Arroglint as a pole-vaulter’s pole: at that point, the inequality of prowess had become clear, so he was merely showing off.
The automata gave him less trouble than the dog things, since he could drive his telescoping lance neatly through the open gridwork of their bodies, and impale their brainboxes and blow out all their circuits with electric jolts.
Yndelf had the misfortune of riding one of these mechanisms, and Yuen broke Yndelf’s neck with one hand, and held the little man before him like a shield when Naar sent two machine gun–bearing automata stalking toward him. Naar was evidently willing to let the ceiling guns blast one automaton or two in return for stopping the deadly young Chimera from the most warlike period of Chimera history.
The safety circuits in the automata would not allow it to shoot at the dead Yndelf, whose coat gems were still active. So Yuen and the gun-bearing automata began an odd dancing race of cycles and epicycles, as the automata attempted to take Yuen in the flank or rear to find a shot not blocked by the dead man’s coat, and Yuen, laughing in anger, turned and turned again, making his way across the floor back to the damaged atomic pile.
As it turned out, some other safety circuit, or perhaps interference to their electronics caused by the high radiation count, prevented the automata from firing at the broken sphere of gold, and Yuen struck again and again with the telescoping length of his electrified weapon, poking out cameras and controls, electronic eyes and mechanical brains, until the automata stood still and blind and useless, emitting the plaintive horn-hoots that called in vain for maintenance crews.
Yuen strode forth, kicked an automaton in the arm so that its machine guns pointed back toward the largest cluster of Blue Men, inserted his whip-head into the control socket, danced back into the alcove, and triggered the automaton. A hail of bullets killed a number of Blue Men before the ceiling weapons blasted the automaton into parts, but ignored Yuen. Then Yuen sauntered out, tilted the next armed automaton to point its cannons at the puzzled and woebegone Blues, plugged in his whip, skipped backward, and fired again.
Meanwhile, from halfway across the chamber, Invigilator Saaev, riding an automaton that was throwing canisters of black gas among the Witches, looked upward warily, but the ceiling guns had not been commanded to react to his form of attack. Various heavy guns in the upper walls twitched, but none of them fired at the automata distributing nonlethal gas.
Saaev turned and had his automaton pelt Yuen with one gas canister after another. The western alcove filled with opaque black clouds.
7
Darwin’s Circus
1. Linderlings
At the same time these events were beginning to unfold elsewhere in the great golden chamber, Keir and Keirthlin were being held at bayonet point in the corner near the statue of the Grim Reaper. With them were Alalloel, Ctesibius, and Rada Lwa.
When Bashan the Giant started his charge, the twenty dog things on guard duty there broke into three packs, with six dogs remaining there and fourteen rushing toward the oncoming Giant, breaking into two wings of seven, going left and right in hopes of taking Bashan from the side or rear.
The six guard dogs, of course, all turned at the grotesque and horrific noise of breaking bones and squishing meat when the Giant kicked aside and trampled their packmates. Bashan’s legs up to the knees were splattered with the blood of his victims, and the great long staff in his hand was stained and dripping, for he used it to crush or knock aside any of the dogs before him who raised a musket in his direction. Such was the inhumanly supreme intelligence that glittered in those vast and yellow eyes—
and the orb of either eye was the size of a basketball, able to gather immensities of light, unconfused by smoke or gloom—that even with the slowness the size of his huge arms forced on his motions, he was able to extrapolate, anticipate, and predict which dog was next ready to aim, and he lashed out with the great long beam of his walking stick before a trigger could be pulled. Bashan waded as if through a crowd of children no taller than his thighs, running as if on a carpet of crimson. But it was a wrinkled carpet, for many of the corpses were burst and scattered, and entrails and organs lay strewn underfoot, like the floor of an unclean butcher’s shop.
The noise of the screams and roars and cries, the smell of the carnage, was almost worse than the hellish vision of it. Keir the Linderling shouted in alarm, seeing such shocking violence before him, and brought up his hands to hide his eyes.
His shout startled the guard dog who stood staring in awe at the Giant. The dog’s musket was leveled at Keir’s throat, and the sudden motion of the man’s hands jarred the musket barrel. The weapon went off, and the shot shattered Keir’s jaw into two pieces and passed through the roof of his mouth. The musketball ignited inside his head, and then passed upward and took off the top of his skull. The fiery ball lodged in the wall behind, and hung like a star of sulfur, blazing.
By that pale and sickly light Keirthlin saw her innocent and peaceful father shot dead before her eyes, his handsome face instantly turned into a thing of horror: The jawbones, fragments of a mouthless and moaning head, were dangling by flesh tatters from his ears; and the long muscle of the tongue was falling out of his opened throat. The internal pressure made tears of blood start from his silvery eyes, and gush almost comically from his ruptured ears. His skull was opened like a flower, and a smoke of burning went up from it.
Keirthlin fell to the ground as her father fell, her arms about the body, shaking with a grief too immense for sobs or wails.
Alalloel of Lree tilted her head to one side, her all-black eyes narrowing slightly, blind-seeming, seeing everything; and her multiple antennae stirred like snakes; and her secondary ears opened like tiny petals. Her face was without any expression, except, perhaps, a small and mild vertical crease of disapproval forming between the brows of her eyes and also between the infrared eyepits above her eyes. If her face had been a winter constellation looking down through cloudless silence over a lifeless desert of blank and level sands at midnight, it could not have seemed more remote, more inhuman.