The resulting explosion was only partly satisfactory; but the damaged section of balcony, where Yndech was strutting and looking very satisfied with himself, leaned forward like an old man nodding his head, slid like an old man slipping as if on ice, and while Yndech screamed and clutched at nothing, gems blazing in a panic of colored light, the whole section surfboarded out into midair, and turned neatly over, so that Yndech was slammed into the golden floor with the marble slab atop him. And then, like an exclamation point ending a sentence, the two-ton automaton, arms windmilling, fell down atop the wreckage, followed, more slowly, by the second. Power couplings were yanked out of the wall behind the balcony, and more lights went dark in that quarter of the chamber.
Ctesibius was standing by himself near where the Giant had fallen. No one was attacking or even watching him. How he knew that Yndech had been the one to copy his mind and corrupt it, creating a mental twin brother who lived in agony for less than an hour before being killed, could not be guessed. But somehow he knew; for he clapped his hands together (lost in the noise of the fighting, it seemed strangely silent) and threw back his head and opened his mouth as if in silent laughter, the only smile Menelaus had ever seen on the grim face of Ctesibius; and Menelaus thought it was such a smile as empty-eyed devils might wear, bending over a well-oiled torture mechanism, and proud of their work in hell. And yet somehow Menelaus could not blame Ctesibius.
Menelaus looked out across the chamber. It was hard to see. Twilight hung over half the vault, and clouds of black smoke from peace-gas and white smoke from the gunpowder hung over everything, trapped beneath the roof.
The vast bulk of the corpse of Bashan was still warm and still giving forth a sea of blood, its huge back torn and pitted and smoldering as a barbecue smell rose above it. The sobs of Trey Azurine the Sylph rose up from there.
Beyond were scores and dozens of heaped dog things. Half the Blue Men were already dead. Wreckages of automata were here and there. And the column of water from the fountain blocked the far end of the room.
The waters from the fountain were interrupted at that moment by Sir Guiden, his strength-amplified powered gauntlets wrapped around an automaton, rolling and tumbling blindly through the middle of the fountainworks. The column of water fell, sprayed sideways, and then rose again as the armored body of Sir Guiden passed across the nozzles. During that moment, Menelaus had a dim view of the far end of the chamber. The throne was hidden by black smog and yellowish-green spore-haze, but he caught a gleam of four ghostly lines of vertical light reflecting through the intervening fog. He resolved the image in his mind and brought it into sharp focus: he saw the four pale wands holding up the canopy of the throne.
There they were. Right out in the open. All he had to do was cross the chamber and get to one.
“Sir Guy, can you hear me? There are four fully charged wands sitting out in the open next to the throne…” But the static drowned the signal.
Menelaus wrapped his limbs in his cloak, noting with dismay that where it had been melted and torn, the circuits were nonresponsive, the material in patches awkward and inflexible. But he had nothing else wherewith to protect himself, so he drew the cloak around him and made his way across the battlefield. Some of the dogs had reloaded by now, and the crack and smoke of musket fire filled his ears and nose.
6. Naar’s Reward
An automaton with clashing feet came suddenly out of a cloud bank to block his way. This one was taller and heavier than the others, and built more like an ape than a praying mantis: it was the one used for heavy demolition. A drillshaft like a lance was carried on the automaton’s shoulder, along with a bandolier of test charges. A heavy blast shield protected the operator cage.
Menelaus was reaching up to doff his cloak and merely let the mechanism stomp by him, unseeing, when the heavy shield came open like the visor of the helmet of a knight. Inside, slumped on the operator stool, was Naar, who had been wounded along his side; the whole left flap of his coat was stained with blood, and all the gems on that side had turned black and lost their color. His face was creased into a sneer, his look expressing both boredom and nausea.
With him were two narrow-skulled Dalmatians, fur spotted like flecks of ash upon white snow. One knelt next to Naar, whining in fear, pressing a bandage against Naar’s bleeding side. The other was pointing Naar’s energy pistol carefully at Menelaus, hind legs spread in a proper stance, supporting his gunpaw with his other paw, head tilted with one eye in line with the weapon’s rear and front sites.
Naar’s automaton raised its drillhead like a lance and pointed it at Menelaus.
Menelaus shouted in Iatric over the noise and clash of the fray. “What purpose is served, Preceptor? Ull was a Hermeticist, and he gulled you into doing his work to seek me. Whatever he told you was a lie. You have no quarrel with me.”
Naar said coldly, “The quarrel is your doing. Look about at your handiwork.”
Menelaus looked wildly over the bloodshed, which still raged around them. “Can we yak about this later? Step aside.”
Naar said, “You have not yet happened to agree to turn the Earth over to our race, and suppress or destroy those in your Tombs who would otherwise wake and be our competitors. We are the pinnacle of humanity: Unlike Sylphs, we are diligent; unlike Witches, we eschew envy; unlike Chimerae, we seek peace; unlike Nymphs, we are chaste; unlike Hormagaunts, we are temperate in all desires, and neither do we eat our children in gluttony for elongation of life-span; and unlike Locusts, we are charitable, individual, and human, and neither do we overswarm the Earth and consume the souls and ghosts of all we encounter. You have seen both the murderous indifference of the Melusine who come after us, and the legalistic inhumanity of the Linderlings: Generations after ours are degenerate. Mine is the paramount generation.”
“Gee, if you only worked on your humility a bit, you’d be golden.”
“You mock me?”
“Not as much as I should, shortstuff, ’cause I am in a hurry. Your group has the worst fault of all, in case you didn’t notice.”
“We have no error. We are not as other races, whose members are hypocritical, thievish, murdering. What flaw have we? You cannot name…”
“Arrogance.”
“What?”
7. Pride
“Snotty, intellectual, know-it-all arrogance. The other failings can be cured because people know when they are acting like Sylphs and Nymphs and Witches and Chimerae. They feel the hunger of Hormagaunts and the greed of Locusts. They feel the sickness inside.
“But brainy little people like y’all cannot cure this, because pride feels good, don’t it? Like having your own little flattering soft-soap salesman living in your left ear, and his only sales pitch is to persuade you what swells you are. You define pride as a virtue and you wear it like a badge of courage.
“And when you meet another as proud as you, you can’t stand it, and you hate him hotter than hell: hot enough to rob and loot and enslave and murder, and do all these things y’all have done in my Tombs, on my damn land, in my damn house; because pride can’t stand competition.
“And when you meet someone actually smarter than you, those brains of which you are so very proud are not smart enough to see it. Are they? Even to the very end, when I was practically beating in his skull with clues of who and what I was, your little weasel Ull could not believe I was the posthuman.
“I guess I have a yokel accent, and I guess you smarty smart guys only judge things by surface appearances. That’s what you call empiricism, I reckon.
“Aanwen figured it neatly enough, because she was the sole one of you not all wrapped up in yourself like a me-blanket.
“I would rather share this world with any of these vile and perverted people from any other vile span of history, because bad as they are, they still have some human nature left in them. If you are actually asking me to judge between you and these others, you come in last.
“So, Little Boy Blue, you can blow me.”
8. Same Answer as Ever
Naar was looking at him with a stare of incomprehension so utterly blank that Menelaus paused a moment, wondering if he had accidentally spoken the words in English rather than Iatric.
Then Naar said in a voice of condescending patience, as one who explains something to a child, “Your comments are irrelevant and eccentric, so let us disregard them. Our race surpasses all others, as I have said. Only we have achieved the goal of the gladiatorial games of Darwin’s cruel circus. Your only task remaining is to crown us our laurels, and grant us our prize. Judge us, O Judge. The contest is ours.”
“Ain’t you a hoot! You talk like I am the judge at the county fair for a kiddie talent show. What do you want, Naar? A blue ribbon? I see you ain’t heard that I am the Hanging Judge of Ages.”
“Yield up the passwords and passcodes that control your Xypotechnology. Turn over to us the authority to thaw the dead and enslumber the living, that the Order of Simplicity shall hereafter judge the ages of man.”
“You are out of your bald, plum-colored, and slightly lopsided little head. I am a serious man with no time for your buggery. Step aside.”
“Or otherwise I kill you, and we continue to dig up and examine your Tombs until all their secrets are yielded to us. We will find other Blue Men, and grow other Followers, and will eventually win for ourselves what you seek now to deny us. It would be simpler for us both for you to yield. What is your answer?”
“Same answer as it ever is.”
“Cogent meaning fails to be conveyed.”
“My wife!”
“What?”
“Is she here yet? She is not!”
“I don’t see the relevance of…”
“My time!”
“Why are you saying these words…?”
“Is it my time yet? It is not!”
Naar’s face was blank for a moment, perhaps with surprise, or perhaps with fear, but then his little finely made features twisted into a scowl of murderous rage to make him seem, almost, a miniature Chimera.
Naar started to speak but Menelaus shouted him down: “Then how do you dare to rouse me before my time?” Menelaus was now red-faced with wrath. “Dare you to see my anger roused?”
And Menelaus took out the powder horn he carried, tossed it casually up into the operator cage of the automaton, and fired with his left-hand pistol at Naar. As expected, the gems on his coat lit, and the bullet was deflected, but Menelaus had so precisely calculated the angle of deflection that the ricochet passed through the powder horn, and the iron slug, heated to molten heat by the magnetic linear acceleration, ignited it. It was a simple chemical explosion: not an energy Naar could manipulate, not a metal he could levitate.
There was a crack of thunder and a violent cloud of white smoke flooding outward.
The test charges carried by the demolitions automaton were too near, and they went off, one after another, like a string of firecrackers, so that the whole left side of the huge machine was afire.
But Menelaus had calculated without taking into account the love and loyalty of the Dalmatians. The first, instead of firing the energy pistol, threw himself bodily on the powder horn a half instant after the hot slug entered and a half instant before the powder caught and ignited. That dog died smothering the blast, and its corpse seemed to hang in midair for a moment, halfway between the explosion and the operator’s stool.
The other dog, who already had paws half wrapped around its beloved master, boldly swept up Naar off the stool and leaped headlong from the cage of the mechanism, twisting as it fell so that its body would strike the floor first, and cushion, if possible, Naar falling atop.
Naar was atop the dog on the floor now, his face set in an expression as one who endures annoying tedium. It was impossible to see if the blood on him was new or was from his previous wounds. He snapped his fingers, and the burning automaton flourished its drillshaft like a mighty spear and drove it forward.
The drill spun up to speed, a needle-pointed blur of spiral steel that screamed with the scream of a small girl; and down came the massive thrust as if to skewer Menelaus through the middle.
The tent material, at least in patches, stiffened into armor; the drillhead fortuitously struck one of these, and danced and skittered, whining and throwing up sparks. Menelaus put the muzzle of his pistol to the elbow joint of the digging machine and blew the drillshaft off, sending the broken drillhead spinning toward the ceiling.
A shocking pain cut into his leg. It was the remaining Dalmatian, crawling, rear legs broken, on its forepaws. It had reached beneath the hem of the armored cloak to the unprotected and shoeless feet of Menelaus, and driven the blade of a dirk deep into the man’s Achilles tendon, rendering the foot as useless as an oblong lump of meat. Blood was gushing rapidly enough to indicate a major vein was cut.
At the same time, several of the gems on Naar’s coat grew blindingly bright, and Montrose screamed, stumbling and hopping and slipping in the puddle of his own blood, because the fabric of his metallic robes began to emit heat, glowing red-hot around the seams. He was wrapped in a cast-iron stove. The pistols grew warm in his hands, and the glow of the dowels of ammo could be seen clearly through the white glass barrels, like seeing the incandescent filament in an old-fashioned lightbulb. The glow from the guns was so bright that it shined through his fists, and he could see red shadows of the bones of his hands.
Menelaus raised both pistols and sent the entire dowel of remaining metal in a continuous stream of gunfire down at point blank range toward Naar, whose coat contemptuously brushed it all aside. The Dalmatian stabbed at his other foot, neatly cutting off his big toe, and Menelaus fell in a heap, fold upon fold of red-hot metal pressing into his flesh, sizzling.
He ordered through his implants for the smartmetal to expand, but the heat was melting the control fibers, and even where the undamaged material could pull away from his skin, the air trapped between was superheated.
It was Mickey who saved him.
The sky-blue coffin came roaring out of a nearby cloud of black gas, bucking and swerving to dislodge two ambitious dog things, a Mastiff and a Pit Bull, clinging ferociously to the lid. The coffin accelerated and smashed into Naar’s automaton at full speed, empty machine guns clattering, spitting a few hiccoughs of napalm left and right. The burning automaton staggered, hopped, and fell toward Naar. The result was a toppled and magnificent crash of dogs and men and machines. But somehow Mickey got out of the toppled coffin before Naar or any dogs rose to feet or hindpaws. And then Mickey was peeling the hot metal robe off the peeling skin of Menelaus. Menelaus thanked his luck that he was wearing Rada Lwa’s undersuit beneath, or otherwise the metal would have seared and stuck to his flesh in more than just one or two places. As it was, patches of his skin were burnt so badly the nerves were dead. Menelaus clung dizzily to the thought that it was a type of damage his biosuspension nanotechnology was programmed to repair, if only he survived the battle and made it safely to his coffin.
Menelaus found the thought so funny, safely to his coffin, he giggled like a drunk.
Mickey said in Virginian, “How you feeling, little godling?”
“Which godling is in charge of the latrines in hell? Excremento the Stinknificent? I feel like him. You gotta get me to the throne yonder. I can stop the madness. Stop the room from swaying. Or is that just me?”
“Just you, godling.”
“Stop calling me that! Get me across the room.”
The automaton recovered first, jerking itself to its legs one awkward thrust of motion at a time. It swung its cameras around, clicking angrily.
Menelaus said, “Get behind me. It can’t see me.”
Naar was still on the ground, groaning. One of the dogs climbed from under the coffin, dragging its rear leg awkwardly behind, and, seeing Menelaus and Mickey, crawled forward on three paws, growling.
Mickey said, “No, you get behind me. I can deal with the dog,” and merely squatted down, put out an empty hand
toward the maimed beast, and said in its own barking language, “Your master who loves you needs your help. See to his wounds. The door is locked and we cannot escape. See to him first.”
And the dog hesitated, drew its pistol, gritted its teeth, but then turned and crawled toward Naar, whimpering, and began to lick his face.
Menelaus was impressed. “You are a magician.”
While Mickey still knelt, the automaton focused a camera on him, swung a metal limb down, and Menelaus touched it with his finger as it swept past. The whole mechanism froze at that touch.
Mickey looked up at the mantis-armed two-ton digging mechanism, whirring and whining but unable to move. “Whereas everything you do is perfectly explainable, right?”
And Menelaus said, “I just jinxed it, that’s all. Help me up. We can ride across the battlefield.”
Mickey said, “Oh, no. There is an easier way.” And without waiting to debate it, he picked up the wounded Menelaus and flung him lightly over his shoulder—it seemed there was considerable muscle beneath the Warlock’s flabby exterior layers—and he jogged away from the throne.
“Wrong way,” grunted Menelaus. But then Mickey passed beneath the shadow of the Grim Reaper and was pounding up the curving stairs.
Not only was there no one and nothing on the balcony to block the path, there were both water ewers and medical unguents sealed in the cabinets all along this level, and five very pretty Nymphs, who cooed in alarm at seeing Menelaus hurt.
Mickey wanted to stop and balm the burns and bleeding slashes on the back and legs of Menelaus. “Godling, you are going to go into shock.”
Menelaus said only, “No time! Grab the stuff but get me the hell downstairs. There are gas masks behind that green emergency panel marked with the cave-in sign. There is still a cloud of sleepy-bye smog down there, not to mention whatever bugs and pests the Clades shed. Don’t stop walking!”
These gas masks were not the type Menelaus recalled from his horse soldier days, which were goggle-eyed and proboscis-dangling like the faces of fantastical bugs from a nightmare. Instead a clear bag of film merely fit over the head and tightened at the neck. It looked so exactly like the sort of plastic bag panic-haunted mothers warn their suicidal children not to play with that Menelaus flinched when it was thrust over his face.