The Judge of Ages
Reaching up, she placed her palm on the spot on the wall where the shot still burned, and there was an audible hiss when the skin of her palm was also burnt. She drew her arm down, and held it before the dog’s eyes, and it saw a little mark like a circular brand.
Alalloel moved this hand right and left, and the six dog things guarding them fell to the floor limply. There was a noise of dropped weapons, metal clanging, bodies hitting, and skulls cracking—unlike a conscious man who trips and who tries to prevent his head from striking first, the limp bodies simply fell as if flung downward. But there was no sound at all from the dogs themselves, not a last word, not a sigh.
Alalloel the Melusine of the Eighteenth World Mental Configuration simply slew all those nearby without a word or sound, without any sign of a weapon.
The noise and shouts and screams and explosions going on elsewhere at that moment were such that no one heard the utterly silent execution that had just occurred, and the broad back of the statue blocked the view from the middle of the chamber, so no one saw.
Keirthlin looked up as a vast shadow fell on her, and so did Ctesibius, and Rada Lwa.
Bashan filled the universe before their eyes, and he lifted Menelaus like a mother playing upsy-daisy with her child, and placed him on the balcony directly above. They saw the vast, ungainly face of the Giant, they saw his ugly little mouth drool and twitch and contort with pain while his beautiful golden eyes wept, as volley after volley of thunderous gunfire deafened them all. The air was now gunsmoke and burnt flesh and hot iron, and there was no oxygen to breathe. The Giant turned, a great slab of metal in hand, and fell, hugely, slowly, terribly, crushing his enemies beneath him: and something from the most ancient of times was no more.
The vast body blocked much of the view from the chamber, and the dogs slain by Alalloel, having been kicked by the elephant-legs of Bashan, were now mingled with a score of other dog corpses littering the golden floor.
Keirthlin, despite the whirlpool of her grief, still had a distant part of her mind aware of this sight, and aware of the fearful wonder of it. Who was Alalloel of Lree? What was she? What were these Melusine?
But that part was rather distant, after all, and now she opened her mouth and uttered a piercing cry of sorrow that went on and on.
Ctesibius, like a man exhausted, put his back to the wall, slid, and came to rest sitting next to Keirthlin. He could think of nothing to say and no reason to say it, but the sound of her deep grief was, aloud, much like something silent in him. So he pushed back her furred hood and stroked her blue hair, and patted her hand, and spoke soothing words in a language she did not know.
Rada Lwa stood a moment, looking down without interest at the death and grief. Then he turned over the nearest body of a dog thing with his foot, stooped, and looted a pistol. First one, then a second, then two more he found amid the six bodies. Methodically, he loaded each one with powder, cloth, and shot, working the ramrod to pack the powder tight. Helping himself to a belt from which dangled a powder horn and a poke of musketballs, he tightened the belt around his waist, tucked in two pistols at a jaunty angle, and took up the other two pistols, one in each hand.
Rada Lwa paused long enough to gather up three or four of the talking boxes the dog things used, and he hung them from his belt as well. Without a backward glance at the anguished orphan, he strode away across the bloodstained floor to look for the Judge of Ages.
Keirthlin sat with Ctesibius, one grieving loudly and the other comforting quietly. No matter how loudly she shrieked and sobbed, the hellish uproar in the chamber smothered it, and no foe came to see, and no friend came to save, and her father could hear nothing of her voice, never again forever.
2. Slumber Pistols
Above this, Menelaus, parts of his bulky metal cloak steaming or bleeding tiny molten lines where the pistol-beams had brushed him, now peered from between the balcony railings. “Hey, Ull! Lookit what I just found you threw up here!”
And he thrust his hands through the marble posts of the balcony rail, a white glass pistol in either fist. “Surrender, or I shoot! I am really, really good with these!”
Ull scoffed. “You arrogant Neanderthal! Those weapons are biometric. Your thumbprint will not fire them.”
“Oh, you have got to be kidding! Illiance! Tell this idiot who I am! Naar! Tell him! The widow Aanwen even told you! My face is on the sarcophagus! Are you poxy blind and stupid as well as deaf?” Then he shouted in Intertextual: “Where the hell is my wife?! What the hell year is it?! How dare you disturb my slumber, you pustule!!”
Ull looked stupefied. “You speak this language? You’ve understood everything we—”
Naar shouted, “Adjust the electrical output to two hundred kilovolts. Take the Judge of Ages alive, that we might compel the restoration of our race.”
Illiance shouted also, “Madness! That man is the Judge of Ages and our benefactor! We have been gulled by the Hermeticists of legend! One of their number stands among us! Do not heed the order to fire!” Illiance threw his pistol on the floor, and raised both his empty hands toward Menelaus. “I surrender! I yield! Do not destroy us!”
Naar shouted, “You overestimate his abilities! He is helpless! Fire!”
3. Fireworks
When Naar gave the order to fire, ten threads of lightning, too bright to look at, snapped through the air. (This was at about the same time when the other half of the remaining twenty Blue Men—for thirteen, by now, were dead—had turned to direct their gunfire on the advancing juggernaut of Sir Guiden in his powered armor. There would have been more fire directed against Menelaus had not Sir Guiden drawn it away.)
Menelaus had adjusted his cloak to its most nonconductive setting, and several of the thread-thin rays glanced from the marble railings, but most of the charge still got through. All his muscles tightened in a spasm as if he had put his hand on an electrified cow fence: he did not drop his pistols only because his fingers tried unsuccessfully to grind the grips in half. The laser light beams glanced off the reflective stone and his reflective cloak, and the voltage followed the path of least resistance, and landed wherever the laser dots landed, making a spray of blindingly white sparks dance across the walls behind him like ricochets.
Trey laughed and shouted at the sight of the fireworks, “Okay, Menelaus, I want to play too! Azurine! My adored one! Wherever you are, stop firing!”
And all the jeweled pistols went dark.
Thirty haunting, strange voices echoed through the room, speaking a long-dead language. “Third Azurine, adored mistress! For so long we have waited … So very long…”
“Azurine? Is that you?” called Trey.
“We are all one system now,” came the multiple voices floating from the weapons. “I am Azurine as much as Arroglint. But each and every of the masters and mistresses, adored by us, whom we have served since the first of time, we remember … not seven thousand years nor eight could erase you from my perfect memory…”
She smiled. “Glad to know someone remembers me! Do you still adore me? Good thing the future hasn’t changed anything important!”
Naar snapped, “Docent Aarthroy! Immobilize that girl-relict! Administer a brain-spike to her upper spine, and override her vocal apparatus and breathing cavities by means of false neural signals. Then have her voice rescind the order and return weapons control to us.”
Aarthroy holstered his now-useless weapon, drew out a savage-looking medical needle, longer than a man’s finger, from a sterilized holster, and fitted it to a spinal rongeur.
The young Blue Man, tall for his race, was of the same height as the girl, small for hers. He beckoned to three dog things to follow him, and jumped lithely up toward Trey Azurine.
Trey Azurine, raised aboard an aeroscaphe that protected her from all dangers and assaults, from bruises and hunger and ennui, perhaps had no ability to feel fear of any physical jeopardy. So she looked at Aarthroy with surprise with her wild, mad eyes, and she smiled a ghastly, empty smile, and
flung a trailing streamer of her robe into his face.
The material caught and tightened, sinking into Aarthroy’s mouth and eye holes, and only a moment of horrifying, muffled scream came from his skull before it melted. The blue-gray material turned red all along the length of the streamer and most of the garment, as capillaries in the fabric pulled the flesh, blood, and fluid out of his face. When his corpse hit the floor, only his jawbone and the rear half of his skull were intact: his head looked like an apple someone had taken a bite out of.
The following dog things, trembling with fear and unable to howl, inched backward, cutlass and snickersnee and dirk falling from nerveless paws.
Trey looked up at Montrose. “Meany, are these dogs bad too? Should I kill them? I’ve never killed people before, but it’s just like in the fun-line!”
Montrose was now at the top of the curving staircase leading down from the balcony. In Merikan he said, “Hold off killing people, crazy-baby, I am trying to save my damn stupid clients.”
She did not listen, or perhaps she thought dogs did not count as people, so she spun like a ballerina, and danced among the screaming dog things, and a spiral of blood and flung viscera followed her.
4. Down the Stairs
Next, Menelaus shouted in Intertextual, “Mentor Ull! I am coming on down to shoot you now!” And, as he walked slowly and unstoppably down the stairs, he raised first one pistol and discharged it at Ull, and then the other, and then the first again, firing as he came.
He commanded the hems of his bulky robes to wrap around his hands and pistols, so that only the very ends of the muzzles protruded, and he tuned the metal to a setting not permeable to magnetics, so that Ull could not simply yank the weapons out of his hands.
Each pistol made only a whisper of noise when fired, but there was a snap like a whipcrack when tiny segments pinched off the dowel were accelerated past the speed of sound. The magnetic acceleration heated the iron, so the slugs were molten when they struck. The defensive mechanics in the gems of Ull’s coat swatted the bullets to either side. Either by luck, or due to some uncanny calculation on the part of Menelaus, the first two bullets struck the dog things to the left and right of Ull, piercing them through the heart or brain and killing each instantly.
Menelaus took a step, fired with one hand, took a step, fired with the other. He had a small, tense, grim smile on his face, as a man proud of his skill and glad for a chance to use it.
Ull adjusted the coat, so now the tiny deflected pellets of red-hot iron swerved down, making small black craters in the gold floor to his left and right: first one bullethole, then two, then three.
“A useless gesture,” said Ull. “But the biometric lock on your weapons betrays you: despite all the contrary evidence, you must indeed be the Judge of Ages.”
“You are so goddam slow-witted. Is your brain so infected by the Machine you can’t recognize me? Is that your problem?” Menelaus was now at the bottom stair, and he strode forward again, and fired. Plink! Another microcrater appeared on the floor behind Ull. With the other hand, Menelaus shot a dog thing (who was rushing him with a bayonet) through the left eye, and then another dog, this time through the right eye. He took a step forward, shot two or three more dog things, and shot another iron pellet at Ull.
“Do you poxy know what I do when a Hermeticist wakes me up? I shoot him. I’ve done everyone but Yellow Door, who is pretty damn good with a shooting iron, and the Padre, on account of he’s a man of the cloth—but you pack of jackals beefed him anyways, which is why I gunned down Coronimas like a dog in the street, even when he was blind. Now it is your turn. It is a tradition. Poke the Judge of Ages with a stick until he wakes up, he shouts is my wife here yet, and then he burns your sorry blue wrinkled ass with a smoke wagon. Fun game. Never tire of it.”
Then a change overcame Ull. His body shivered, and the wrinkles of his ancient face were smoothed away. His skin changed from blue to silvery-gray, so that he now looked more like Keir than like Illiance. Fuzz, and then stubble, and then hair of rich deep blue came out of his skull, and his whole body seemed to expand an inch in every direction as his withered old limbs took on muscle and tone.
His gray skin darkened to jet-black, handsome as onyx, and two tendrils, gold and gleaming, rose up as delicate as springtide seedlings from the hairline above his eyes. Now his hair reached to his shoulders like a witch’s hood. He was dark as night, with only the glistening antennae lending strands of color to his silhouette.
He was a hale, young Locust: only the eyes of Ull were still wizened and hideous with age.
He touched his left sleeve, and it parted from wrist to shoulder, hanging free in two jeweled straps. There at his elbow was the red amulet of the Hermeticist, and even through the electronic din filling the chamber, Montrose could sense with his implants the powerful signals issuing from the arm-ring: powerful enough to reach through armor and rock and atmosphere to outer space.
The dark Ull spoke sternly and grandly, in a voice as if he were repeating some words long cherished in contemplation, practiced in imagination many times before this day: “Crewman Fifty-One! For your dereliction of duties, absence without leave; refusal to obey lawful orders; and conspiracy to commit, and commissions of, treasons too numerous to list; and in the name of the Senior of the Landing Party of the Hermetic Expedition, I place you under parole and arrest! I have sent the signal to the Hermetic Order…”
“God DAMN it took you long enough. That was the one last little thing you get to do in this life. Time to meet your Maker, and I don’t mean that psycho little drip Coronimas.”
Ull looked miffed that his prepared speech had been interrupted. “Your blustering nonsense is wearisome. Energy, I can nullify, bullets, I can magnetize. I am proof against your weapons.”
“Not all my weapons, you murdering bastard!”
And Montrose flung the pistol in his right hand spinning into the air almost to the ceiling so high above, reached into his cloak, brought out his rock, and let it fly with all the strength in his body at Ull, so that Montrose was bent double from the force of the throw, one hand at his knee, spine parallel with the floor, back leg in the air. “Magnetize this!”
Ull was standing only ten or twelve feet from him, and the noise of the stone breaking his skull, the sound of his neck snapping as the blunt object hit him, was audible even above the noise, shouts, and confusion in the chamber. His forehead caved in, and his eyes faced each other. He fell, and a pool of blood and brain matter spilled across the floor panels.
Montrose grinned like a gargoyle. “The oldest and simplest weapon of man is named Rock. Sometimes the simplest solutions are best.”
The dog things howled in grief and anger. Menelaus coolly squeezed off shots with the pistol in his left hand. The other pistol, glittering and spinning like some boomerang, fell out of the shadows of the roof overhead. He put out his right hand, caught it neatly, and used it to drill a snarling dog in midleap through the chest without bothering to turn his head to look.
Trey Azurine, giggling, danced toward the squad of dogs nearest her, flinging her trailing streamers toward their heads. A coal-black Border Collie shot her; the musketball did not explode, but she fell and crawled for comfort to the bulk of the dead Giant, and hid herself in the space between his huge upper arm and huge body. There in the warmth of his armpit, she lay curled in a ball, screaming and crying for her Azurine to make the pain go away.
5. Fire at Will
At that same moment of time a vast concussion shook the air. There was a burning and smoldering like a many-armed squid of flame writhing among the stalactite-shaped chandeliers. One chandelier fell with a colossal crash, looking like an aircraft that landed nose-first, and toppled like a felled tree. Another stalactite was hanging at an angle like a loose tooth in the mouth of a Cyclops.
Yndech was standing on the balcony, with two digging machines to either side of him balanced very precariously on the marble railing, their yellow metal limbs telescope
d out to full length and jammed up into a pit in the ceiling where they had pulled the ceiling panels away, exposing belt-feed mechanisms and the ammunition magazines.
The balcony pillars were cracked, and that whole section of the balcony was tilting and was dripping dust and pebbles of marble. One of the automata was missing an arm, an arm that had been tipped with an oxyacetylene torch. It had merely used the flame to ignite a trigger charge of mercury fulminate, which had followed the belt feeds to every gun in the ceiling. But the damage to the automata did not look like the acetylene had been ignited. The severed end of an orange tube was dangling from its metal armpit. The large canister of propane was propped like an internal organ in a ribcage inside the tooling slots along the front hull.
The voice of Yndech rang through the half-darkened chamber, amplified: “Weapons free! Fire at will!”
There came whoops and barks of glee, and then, like stars here and there across the bloodstained chamber, incendiary musketballs flew. A great cry of panic and pain answered.
“Thanks a lot, Yndech,” Menelaus muttered. He aimed carefully and squeezed off a shot at Yndech, but either it did not land or else the Blue Man’s magnetics deflected the shot. Squinting narrowly, he sent a shot first into the propane tank of the damaged automaton, and then into a similar tank in the undamaged one. Then, just for good luck, he sent a shot or two into the open arsenal space, hoping to ignite any spare ordnance that had survived the first blast.