So vast was the bottomless tower that the noise was like a distant jet fighter’s wake, passing overhead at thousands of feet high; but so many were the jets, and so gigantic each nozzle cone, that the noise came clearly over the world, like the mutter of a waterfall of fire.
But what was the symbol? The storm clouds and their escort of sheets and bolts of lightning blocked part of the image, but then some unseen force from the Bell (perhaps an air displacement simply vented from a lower to a higher altitude within the Bell, and spilled out as a million Niagara Falls made of denser air pouring down, a man-made cold front) made a gap appear in the cloud banks, and widen and disperse the blanket of storm gathered at the lower knees of the vast Bell, till all was plain.
The sign hung under heaven and over all the land, large in view as a constellation sprung to life. There were four vast rivers of light, broad as the Nile, rushing up the side of the towering vastness. A fifth rose at a different angle, and was shorter. The five rivers of fire entered into a lake of light, but a round island filled the lake with a core of darkness.
Laughter and rage and exaltation roared from his heart and rose to his lips. Menelaus’ ears were still ringing, but he was shouting and shouting.
“Damn you! Damn you, bastard! COME DOWN HERE! Come down right now, or I’ll come up there…” And then he started in on his favorite swearwords and blasphemies, of which he had no small supply.
Because what the image of the dots of rocket exhaust painted, of course, was the image of a pale white duelist’s gauntlet, its palm the black circle showing the enemy was ready to exchange fire.
His protracted wait was over.
3. Ximen the Black
One of the cnidarians, larger than a longboat, departed from the streaming aerial river of machines, and swooped softly and swiftly downward, and hung over the clifftop surrounding the open dig.
Atop it, legs spread like one who stands on a swaying raft, a hooded figure in dark sable silk was standing, white cloak flying in the wind, hands clasped behind his back, outlined for a blinding moment in the glare of the lightning bolts that decorated the knees of his flying tower. It was a starfarer in the shipsuit of the Hermetic Order, and beneath the lowering hood, skull-like, was seen the outline of goggles and mask.
Del Azarchel threw back his hood and doffed his mask, and he smiled, a shock of white teeth in his black beard, and his eyes glittered like agates.
4. Figures in the Earth
One of the serpentines, issuing from the edge of the cnidarian on which Del Azarchel stood, elongated and reached down and writhed a loop around Montrose.
Then Montrose was hanging in the winter air, wearing nothing heavier than Scipio’s spare red robe, maimed in both feet, burnt over twenty percent of his body, one arm broken, and various pains in his head, throat, chest, spine, bowels, and a burning sensation in his eyes … that he only slowly realized were tears. For weapons, he had one of the dog pistols that Rada Lwa had loaded, and it had a single shot. Scipio had been kind enough to lend it to him.
Montrose was lifted aloft to a point above the cnidarian as rapidly as a flag being hoisted.
Blackie del Azarchel, hovering in midair above the cliffside overlooking the deep and broken Tombs, was now below him; the mantle of the cnidarian on which Blackie stood was like a magic carpet of metallic silver, levitating, edges flapping and floating.
Now Montrose raised the pistol and took aim at Del Azarchel, who merely looked amused when he saw the threat. He raised his black gloved hand and made a dismissive gesture, as if brushing a fly away.
Montrose pulled the trigger. The hammer fell, driving the flint against the striker. The sparks ignited the primer, but the powder did not ignite. Menelaus felt his implants screaming so loudly that his back teeth ached in their sockets. He realized that the logic crystal pistol ball was issuing a radiation that broke down the chemical bonds of the nitrates in the gunpowder, rendering it inert. It was a clever trick, and he wished he had used it during the fight in the burial chamber.
The realization was like bile. Had Montrose been as imaginative as Del Azarchel, Daae would still have been alive.
The serpentine bent and lowered Montrose to the metallic surface of the upper mantle. Montrose impatiently threw the loops of snakelike metal off him, which was a mistake, for the grinding of the bone ends in his broken arm struck him with dizziness like the blow from a club of chaos and darkness; he shut off the pain center of his brain, and the scene around him seemed to become remote and dim, but clear, as if he were watching the whole thing through the wrong end of a telescope.
The substance underfoot was not metal, but foil, for it had a slight give where his bitterly cold naked feet touched, leaving bloodstains. Through his implants, he could tell the buoyancy was magnetic in nature, a set of fields balanced against some immense field generated from the top and bottom of the skyhook and surrounding it like a cocoon.
He was next to his old enemy. Montrose could not retain his balance, but started to topple off the edge. Del Azarchel put an arm around him, and prevented the fall. The eyes of Del Azarchel, burning with that same superhuman presence that no human could look at as Montrose’s eyes, seemed to swell in his vision hypnotically. Their two faces were close enough that Montrose could see the tiny nick in the skin of his cheek where Del Azarchel had cut himself shaving with a straight razor.
He could smell the scent of Blackie’s beard lotion, a brand Montrose recognized, for it had been on sale at the barbershop back in his home village in rural Texas, back in the centuries long ago. It was called Armstrong’s Space Age After-Shave, and it claimed (falsely) to date from the time of the moon landings, back before the Little Dark Ages. It had not been manufactured on Earth for millennia.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, old friend,” said Del Azarchel. “You do not look well. As you have realized by now, I have no further need of you, your Tombs, or your damned interference. But I thought I should afford you a clear view of the proceedings. I am about to destroy everything you rightfully love. Look!”
Underfoot, Montrose could see the golden burial chamber up from which he had been plucked. The cnidarians were methodically and quickly snaring all the Thaws in the chamber. There was the square of the fountain, and Soorm and Gload, men from an era with no metals, tiny as dolls, staring upward in astonishment at the skyhook and the swarms of cnidarians. Sir Guiden, with an arm around Oenoe, was moving toward the wall of the chamber, firing his shoulder-mounted rocket as he fled, but a cnidarian swept the rocket in midflight off to one side, where it exploded harmlessly, and wrapped both Sir Guy and his bride in tendrils. Oenoe dashed her cloak against the machine in what seemed to be an attempt to stun or lull it with her pollens and soporifics; she did not know it was not a living thing. There was other movement down below, but now a cloud of dust and smoke had risen up, and tears were in Montrose’s eyes.
Del Azarchel still had one arm tightly about him, preventing him from falling. “Would you care for a jolt? Looks like you could use a stiff one.” Montrose thought Del Azarchel was either threatening to electrocute him, or else proposing buggery, but then the man held an oaken hip flask with a brass cap open before his broken nose. The smell of whiskey was delicious. He ached for it.
“Go to hell, Blackie,” he croaked.
“Not if I live forever,” Del Azarchel smiled.
Then they both heard a noise of trumpets, and Montrose raised his hand and wiped his tears from his eyes, peering to see what was happening.
A great voice, enormously amplified, rang from a hundred places beneath the earth, loud enough to shake the rocks and to make the cnidarians tremble in midair. The voices were crying in Latin.
“IS IT YET, THE AEON?”
Montrose put his good hand to one ear, wincing. It was, of course, a recording of his own voice. It was mingled with supersonics and subsonics, and the sound-based weapons were already throwing so many of the cnidarians out of the air that metal pieces were flas
hing and floating as they spun earthward like so many bits of tinfoil.
And many voices roared in answer, a tidal wave of noise. “IT IS NOT YET!”
“IS SHE COME, MY RANIA?”
And the many voices made the Earth tremble. “SHE IS NOT COME!”
“THEN ARISE! ARISE AND SLAY, FOR THEY DARE WAKE ME WHEN MINE AEON IS NOT YET, AND MY RANIA IS NOT COME.”
To the left and right of the cleft, where so much of the Tomb already lay torn open and exposed to the sky, vast doors were suddenly seen in the ground and thrusting upward. The gates opened with such force that whatever was atop them, whether dirt or rock or tree stumps or glacier, was hugely flung aside. Light, brilliant and white, poured out from underfoot, and in the light were motes of gold that fled upward like snow, if snow were made of fire, and if, instead of falling to earth from heaven, snow was received into heaven from Earth. These snowy motes came from lances held in the hands of the knights, who rose to the surface on platforms, coming suddenly into view.
The Hospitaliers were risen.
Gleaming in their black powered armor, white crosses shining on breastplate and banner, proud on the backs of rearing steeds girded and armored likewise in powered barding, the knights held in hand tall lances made of the same nanotechnological material as the slumber wands. But these had more settings than the rosy pink of thaw or the white of slumber, for now the light changed, and turned grim, and the shining hue turned purplish black, and the lances were crackling with dark sparks and motes.
The speakers from their helmets roared as each man shouted, and amplifiers buried beneath the soil acres-wide repeated the words, words which rolled across the landscape like the footfalls of giants:
“LET NONE DARE WAKEN HE WHO WAITS, FOR, LO, HIS WRATH AWAKES!”
Dark lightning from the lances swept the air like searchlights during a night air raid. The cnidarian robots that crowded near the roofless cleft began to sparkle and dissolve. Rocket fire arching from the armored men wrapped the cnidarians in boiling smoke; laser fire chopped the cnidarians neatly in pieces. Some two or three dozen were brought to the ground in a moment.
“DEUS LO VOLT!”
The wreckage of metal was strangely buoyant, and fell with dreamlike, lunar slowness. Montrose saw Sir Guiden and Oenoe, and several frightened and angry Witches, pulling themselves safely from the wreckage of the machines which had captured them. The cnidarians must have been extremely light and fragile, like the aeroscaphes of the Sylphs, because Montrose saw little Fatin push one over with one hand as she crawled out of its trembling debris.
Then several hundred of other cnidarians began to gather toward the roofless Tombs where those forty-five or so had been shot down. Several thousand beyond them, part of the colossal cloud of aerial machines, also turned and began drifting serenely in that direction, as if curious about the source of the disturbance.
Del Azarchel, looking down with one eyebrow raised, said, “Impressive. As toys, I mean. Very pretty. But they will not be able to accomplish anything against my Tower. This mighty surface-to-orbit skyhook has an outer shell made not of atoms, but of a single sheet of the strong nuclear force held in a sub-Planck-distance matrix of grids, the most invulnerable structure the whole resource of our current world can imagine or devise. Nothing can pierce the hull.”
“Hull, schmull. You left the basement door open,” said Montrose. “And my men can call up the lightning from hell.”
At that moment, a voice came from the cnidarian on which they stood. “Master,” it said. “There is a vast electrical disturbance in the mantle and crust of the Earth, apparently being produced by the entire core itself…”
“Only the outer core is being used as a dynamo,” interrupted Menelaus, his teeth gritted in a mad grimace. “I mean, let’s not exaggerate what I can do. That would be ridiculous.”
“… and resulting in a buildup,” continued the emotionless voice, “… of a static charge of immense…”
The concussion smothered any next words.
What came up from the earth next were not the relatively mild sparks called lightning that appear in electrical storms, when passing clouds build up a charge differential between the ground and thunderhead. No, rather, this was the power of the rotating nickel-iron core of the Earth, a dynamo so astronomically vast that it produced such things as the magnetic fields surrounding the planet, with all their associated celestial phenomena such as the Van Allen radiation belts, the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis, the ozone layer, and so on, merely as side effects.
The entire crust of the Earth in this particular area, agitated by the many continent-sized plates of Von Neumann crystals of Pellucid, built up a negative charge of unthinkable magnitude, and concentrated it on one spot: directly under the nine-mile-wide mouth of the Bell. For a moment before the actual bolt struck, Saint Elmo’s fire and balled lightning could be seen crawling across the tree stumps and icy hillocks of the ground. Lightning bolts climbed and exploded from between hilltop and hilltop like sparks from a Jacob’s Ladder.
For some reason, none were near the Tomb itself, or near any of the knights, even though the power crackled and crawled from peak to peak and tree to tree in a wide circle all around them. The Bell was not directly above the Tombs in any case; the midpoint of the open mouth was four miles away. Four miles away was the point of discharge.
Then the bolt struck.
It hung between the instantaneously formed lake of lava below the mouth and the pattern of white and brown and black structures, buildings and factories and robotic housings, visible inside the open mouth of the Bell.
A normal lightning bolt is, at best, a foot in diameter of ionized air surrounding a thread-thin stream of electric current. This bolt was a force half a mile in diameter surrounded by a field of ions six or seven miles in diameter, and the vacuum formed by its passage caused the surrounding atmosphere to rush into the Bell mouth at twice the speed of sound.
It was brighter than the sun, bright as a nova, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lesser lightning bolts crowded around it, writhing like dragons whirled into its midst as it appeared. It was a white fire larger than the cone formed by a tornado, and all the air between the opening of the Bell and the ground below was not merely ionized, but due to the immensity of the heat and discharge, underwent fission.
What few strands of the lightning storm that were attracted to the outer hull, of course, accomplished no effect, aside from breaking a few hundred thousand of the maneuvering jets, which spilled countless metric tons of rocket fuel into the air, which (in turn) was then ignited by the surrounding heat and electricity, and fell to earth as a rain of fire.
The main effect struck the interior. The heat of the electrical discharge formed a mushroom cloud, looking remarkably like a cnidarian itself, that went boiling upward where the lightning, or, rather, the electron-energy beam-weapon from the Earth’s outer core, had passed. In the mushroom cloud were seen falling buildings, towers, and fiery rectilinear shapes larger than castles struck from the endless interior wallscape of the Bell, looking like so many children’s blocks tossed out of the window of a burning nursery.
From their position five miles from the epicenter of the atmospheric disaster, Del Azarchel and Montrose were unharmed, but they both stood with their arms before their faces, waiting for the winds to die down, and while Del Azarchel’s suit protected him, Montrose was now sunburned along the half of his body that had been facing the event. The cnidarian on which they stood buckled and swayed. It must have had an independent or redundant means of buoyancy, however, for it stayed aloft even while every other cnidarian lifting machine, from those the size of aircraft carriers to those the size of pocket handkerchiefs, toppled with the slowness of great catastrophes toward the earth below. The smaller ones opened their mantles to act as parachute canopies, but even the smaller ones which were too high, or too near the blast, were crumpled and scuttled by the hundred-mile-an-hour winds, and sent leaf-whirling earthward.
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Those directly above the lava lake, when they splashed down, sent up a wave of black ash and smoke like the smoke of an open furnace, a wall of darkness so vast that it hid the continuing destruction. Other machines, their tendrils groping and looping helplessly, were carried by the winds as they plunged down and down through thousands of feet of air, as if an army of paratroopers, and all their aircraft large and small, dove at the ground without ever once opening a parachute. The noise was not merely indescribable: Montrose’s remaining ear had failed him. To him, the scene was as silent as a dream.
Looking down, he saw at several points, about half a mile in each direction from the Devil’s Den facility, smoke arising from a line of newly formed craters encircling the whole hilltop. These were the emission points of the various fields and defensive systems designed to protect the Tombs from the discharge of its own primary earth-current beam weapon. It had been designed, of course, with the thought in mind that the roof armor and several yards of insulating bedrock would be intact; but Montrose was gratified that the four or five miles of distance, and the strength of the grounding fields, had been sufficient to spare the Tombs from echoes, reflections, and ricochets of the energy forces involved.
Montrose and Del Azarchel were low enough that the details of the Tomb corridors and chambers were clearly visible. He could see the rotund shape of Mickey the Witch, for example, seated on the throne of the burial chamber, looking upward and clapping his hands together in applause.
With his good hand, Montrose took the hip flask from the listless fingers of Del Azarchel. He shouted, “Thanks! I’ll take that drink now!”
The line of fire in his throat was warm and soothing, and he coughed helplessly. It was oak-barrel-aged Kentucky. He shouted, “Someday, you’ll have to tell me how you managed to preserve so much of the ancient world. All I got is one God’s-snotting poxy box of ciggies left, and not a single damn cigar. Smoked the last one in 7985 while I was sitting on the dead body of Coronimas. Ah! What a smoke.”