"It passed as an accident at the time, but I knew that the Milieu's forensic redactors would catch up with me sooner or later. It seemed the sensible thing to leg it."
Skathe patted Tony on the head. "You know, I like you."
"Then why not turn me loose? I'm never going to be any good for your experiment. Aside from being scared to death of you, I'm so tired that I could sleep for a week, and devilishly hungry besides."
"Are you, by damn!" She exploded in great gusts of laughter that brought Karbree to the compartment door. "Sling that hamper of food and drink in here, Worm!" She tipped a wink to Tony. "After you've eaten, get some rest. Strap into one of the soft seats so you won't be bothered by the rapids. I've got business to attend to down in Bardelask, but when that's over—we'll see about letting you go. "
***
Again, Tony dreamed. But this time it was about Finiah, flaming and devastated, with bodies heaped in the streets and Firvulag monstrosities gathering for their final assault on the palace gate, and Lord Velteyn and his Flying Hunt poised in the smoke, their brave battle cries ringing in his mind while he, Tony, hacked his way through a horde of Lowlife invaders, wielding an aquamarine sword.
But he hadn't.
Even as the dream scenario unfolded, Tony knew it for falsehood. He had never even suspected that Finiah was under attack until the ragtag Hidden Springs troops broke into the pleasure dome, dispatched his Tanu bedmate with an iron-studded mace, and hustled him off to judgment. Dream-Tony, defying this contradiction, fought on until the moment that the sleeper opened his eyes to reality—to lurid smoke clouds rolling above the boat's bubbletop roof, to martial shouts and screams faintly heard, to the unmistakable battle-reek that smote his nostrils and shocked him into alertness.
He was alone in the after cabin of the boat. It was moored in the midst of papyrus plants so tall and densely crowded that he could see no details of the region on either side. The view forward was less restricted and he could see a dock area with devastated buildings ablaze; and when the air cleared momentarily he caught sight of a Tanu citadel with scorched walls and broken towers and a single defiant blue beacon against the lowering sky. Pulses of multicolored lights sparked fitfully behind the fortress windows. There were random small explosions that uncannily resembled heavy-caliber rifle fire.
This, beyond a doubt, was Bardelask. And it seemed as though the battle was nearly over. How long had he been asleep?
Wondering if the monsters had abandoned him, he began to make his way forward. And then he heard indeterminate soft noises and muttered speech coming from up there, and a sudden burst of choked laughter. Tony stood stock-still.
"Marvelous. Terrific!" The voice was that of Karbree the Worm.
"No turn-on like a good bit of warfare," Skathe agreed. "Just enough to whet the old lower appetites."
Karbree giggled hideously. "Still say you should have taken yours, too. Any which way."
"My turn's coming, cockie. I have my own style."
"You watched me, I get to watch you. Fair's fair."
"Shares on your leftovers, then," Skathe demanded.
The Worm growled, then waxed jovial. "Oh, why the hell not? Here—try these toes." There came a distinct crunch.
Tony felt his guts transmute into a frigid lump. Fee fie... Tanu lies! ...fo fum... propaganda, on my honor as a member of the Gnomish Council...
Somebody emitted a colossal belch. Somebody else vented a replete sigh. The voices of the Firvulag seemed to recede to a great distance.
"Great little battle, all right," said Karbree. "Discipline in the ranks pretty well fell apart after the brewery was taken, but you can't expect miracles."
Skathe murmured assent. "I'll give old Mimee the Bird high marks for the main action, though. And I thought his special forces did particularly well, considering the small number of high-technology weapons we were able to send to Famorel."
A guffaw broke from the Worm. "And didn't the Exalted Lady Armida look surprised when Anduvor Doubletarse put that steel-jacketed bullet into her gizzard! Pity the body fell into the main fermentation vat. Contaminated the whole batch." The ogres chortled in reminiscence. There was a loud splash, followed by a number of small ones. Tidying up time, no doubt. Karbree uttered a huge yawn.
"Why not catch a little zizz?" Skathe said. "I've got a lot of female-type preliminaries I want to enjoy before getting around to my own main event. Tease my miminy-piminy poppet before letting him have his little souvenir of Bardelask. Keep him begging. Take my time in the buildup. But you'll be waked up when the real fun starts—no fear!"
Energized at last by sheer panic, Tony spun wildly about and staggered toward the stern. There was no way he could escape overboard. Abaft the wheelhouse, the boat was still securely roofed over, the plass panels held in place by stubborn little clips. To hide then ... but the big deck hatches wouldn't budge, and the lockers were too small to hold him, and the pedestals of the benches were already stuffed with marine paraphernalia. It would be hopeless to hide in the head; the she-monster could rip the door off its hinges in an instant. There remained only the pile of baggage jumbled in the stern sheets—all manner of bags and pouches and dispatch boxes and map cases, most unstrapped and scattering their contents in a jumble on the deck. He could burrow into the heap and—
"Tonee, are you awake?"
He froze, partially concealed behind an enormous leather armor-case. The houri came slinking along the passage. He saw her enter, sable-skinned, crowned with the flowing mane of luscious scarlet, holding something aloft in one hand, something that shone metallic by the light of the burning city.
"I've brought you a wonderful present, darling—just what you needed! We're going to have the greatest fun with my little experiment—"
She paused, frowning. "Tonee, are you going to be tiresome?"
He shrank down, tried in desperation to creep into the capacious leather box with its compartments and supportive loops, and then felt, held in a kind of open scabbard, something slender, hard, and longer than his arm. He drew it out, not believing his eyes. The monsters had carried other arms, of course, but this—
"Come out of there at once," she hissed, brandishing the gift angrily. Tony saw at last what it was.
A tore. But not one of silver. It was gold.
He peeked over the top of the armor case and grinned. "Just fooling, luv!" His hands, out of sight, fumbled inexpertly. But there had been that long-ago holiday on barbarous Assiniboia, and these classic pieces were all of a type, after all.
The Dreadful Skathe chuckled, pranced toward him in a parody of a nautch-dance, enticing as a black widow spider on the verge of its fatal embrace. Tony came slowly to his feet, keeping the thing pointed at the deck until the last possible moment. Then as she held the tore high and safe, he swept up the archaic Rigby .470 elephant rifle and shot her in the face.
The explosion and the fierce recoil sent him reeling. He saw the ogress fall with the rear half of her skull blown away and the bulkhead behind her suddenly turned to the color of her hair.
The other Firvulag came roaring down the passage, wearing his illusory guise of a limbless winged dragon with saucer-sized green eyes and fangs dripping venom. But the Rigby was a double-barreled weapon, and Karbree died as ignominiously as the female hero had done.
Like a man still spellbound, Tony picked up the golden tore and fastened it about his neck. He said to himself, "Rowane."
And then he heard the hissing and gurgling and realized he had not got off scot-free after all. There was a price to be paid when one banged about on a pneumatic boat with a high-powered rifle—but it was, under the circumstances, reasonable enough.
6
THE PROTECTIVE SPHERE of psychocreative force carrying the King and the chemist hung poised above the foamy mass that had surged out of the subterranean storage area and partially filled the stairwell. Embedded in the goop were countless plass-sheathed packages and container pods.
"Rather like a d
evil's Nesselrode pudding," the chemist observed. At his silver-tore initiation, the Tanu had dubbed him Wex-Velitokal, which was only slightly less ungainly than his original name of Ethel bert Anketell Milledge-Wexler; but the exotic penchant for nicknames having come to the rescue, he was now known to one and all as Bert Candyman, and had so introduced himself to the King without the slightest trace of embarrassment.
"Queen Mercy-Rosmar made this mess out of the wall insulation," Aiken said. "Her purpose was to prevent me from using any of these weapons or other contraband Milieu equipment against Nodonn and his invaders—but not to ruin the matériel beyond retrieval. She succeeded very well in the first instance. The bubbles of that sticky foam are filled with poison gas. Any ordinary human poking around in it is an instant goner. A Tanu unshielded by creativity becomes a candidate for six weeks in Skin."
"Can you filch a sample for me and pop it into here?" Bert Candyman held out a device about the size of a pocket AV recorder, with a tiny hopper open at the top. "This will analyze the constituents for us in half a sec."
Aiken nodded. A small bubble materialized above the deadly suds and scooped up a portion. It oozed through the superficies of the greater sphere enveloping the two men and disappeared into the analyzer. Bert snapped the hopper shut and studied the diminutive visual display.
"Beastly ingenious, Her Late Majesty. She simply unzipped a fairly standard polyurethane molecule. Broke up the original insulating material into its constituent tolylene diisocyanate and poly(oxypro-pylene)triol. She heated this foul glop and injected groundwater from the castle sumps, then diddled around a bit further with the isocyanate to generate the hydrogen cyanide gas."
"How do we get rid of it?"
"Well, a talented metapsychic creator might simply reverse the process—"
The King's face was expressionless. "How else?"
"The likeliest solvent would be acetone. Effective, and harmless to the fluorocarbon thermoplastic of the equipment wrappings. I don't suppose you have a few thousand liters stashed away somewhere?"
Aiken laughed bitterly. "There's probably a gadget buried down there that would make as much as we need in five minutes—if we could only identify it. But the Queen destroyed the inventory-control computer, so it's all one big high-tech grab bag now. I probably wouldn't know an acetone cooker from a robot bartender if you set the two pods in front of me."
"Ah. Well! We can make acetone from scratch, too, of course. Not particularly difficult. Hardly on a par with my last project—perfecting a pickling process that would yield a pecan flavor in the walnuts we utilize in the brandied buttercream chocolates—"
Aiken blinked. The chemist broke off his genial digression as though a bullwhip had been snapped in front of his face.
"You make pyroligneous acid from hog-fuel—hardwood chips, that is. Treat it with quicklime. Your stonemasons should have plenty of that on hand. Then distill the slurry to make calcium acetate. A modicum of further heating yields the acetone by fractional distillation. A straightforward industrial operation."
The two of them were wafting upward. "How long to make what we'll need?" Aiken asked. Their feet touched stone and the sphere of mental force flattened as it pushed the invisible gas away from the tightly closed door.
"Give me carte blanche on supplies and personnel, and I'll have the solvent ready in three weeks. The actual decontamination operation may take longer unless you have protective clothing with oxygen apparatus for the workers. The acetone wash will remove the foam, but there's still the cyanide to contend with."
The small man in the golden leather storm-suit and the chemist dressed in the elegant turquoise robes of the Creator Guild emerged into the safe atmosphere of the castle's grand foyer. The door to the deadly storage area clanged shut.
"You're not thinking like a metapsychic, Candyman," the King chided, "but that's not surprising, since your own talents run more to the intellectual than the physical." They walked rapidly down a corridor, and Aiken continued. "You will have at your service—and I mean, prepared to do whatever dirty work this dirty job requires—a cadre of very special assistants. They'll use their mindpower to build your apparatus, to prepare the raw materials, to expedite things in whatever manner you command. They'll protect themselves mentally while they swab down the contaminated stuff—pod by pod, package by package—so you needn't worry about safety gear. They can protect you as well as themselves. What's more, they'll work without sleeping for a week. It's easy, if you're a Tanu stalwart."
Aiken opened the door to a small antechamber. Several dozen Tanu wearing knightly mufti waited there. As the King entered they rose and placed right hands to their golden tores in the gesture of fealty. Their protective mental barriers were down. All of them were either creators or psychokinetics, and their status was such that the human chemist stepped back, overawed, and would have abased himself in the customary manner of silver-tores if the King had not subliminally restrained him.
A slight smile twitched at the King's lips as he made introductions. "Here are Kuhal Earthshaker and Celadeyr of Afaliah and certain of their followers. They'll be your principal helpers on the job, but you can have as many others in addition as you might require."
Bert Candyman could only nod wordlessly as the former High Table members and the other noble Tanu made humble mental obeisance to him. And then the King seemed to look into his soul with devouring black eyes, and the tore at his throat warmed and changed— and by the mind-whispers of the exotics Bert knew that it had become free gold.
Aiken said, "You have seven days to produce that solvent and decontaminate the Milieu weapons and the other matériel. Work as though the fate of the Many-Colored Land depended upon you."
"Does it?" the shaken chemist asked, and the perplexed Tanu minds seemed to echo the question, and ready scores of others.
But those hot eyes held a warning, and the Tanu hesitated, and a moment later the Kingwas gone.
AIKEN: Ochal! How goes it?
OCHAL THE HARPER: Well enough, High King. We of thevanguard are just crossing the River Galegaar, and we'll reach Calamosk shortly. There wewill remount for the final sprint. We should arrive in Afaliah less than ten hours from now.
AIKEN: Kaleidoscopic. Your advance party should get there handily before the North Americans ... But here's the bad news. They had a stiff tailwind on the New Sea yesterday, and Morna-Ia far-sighted Hagen's ATVs approaching the Neck of Aven just before midnight.
OCHAL: Tana's teeth, what rotten luck! The supply wagons and the bulk of our forces can't get to Afaliah until more than forty hours after us. If the futuristic vehicles of the North Americans make a dash for the city up the Old Aven Road, we're for it!
AIKEN: Quite possibly. I don't think we can trust Cloud Remillard to honor her promise—not if she's backed up by her brother and his bunch, armed to the teeth with Milieu weapons. She says this crew of junior rebels has no ambition to take over the Many-Colored Land, but there's no way I can get the truth of it until I brain-ream the lot of them in person.
OCHAL: What shall we do then, High King?
AIKEN: Your advance party is too small and too lightly armed to risk attempting a stand in Afaliah. Carry on as we planned—be the courtly diplomatist until Cloud takes you to meet Wimborne and the other prisoners. Then spring it on her that you're taking them to Calamosk—and run. Without her brother to back her up, and with Kuhal Earthshaker still in my hands, Cloud won't dare use her aggressive redaction on you.
OCHAL: You will have the reinforcements meet us in Calamosk?
AIKEN: I think the timing will jibe. It's quite likely that Hagen Remillard will be tempted to follow you, and I don't doubt that he has thefirepower advantage. But my guess is that these North American kids will recognize the stalemate and hold back, rather than risk killing the Wimborne group in an all-out blitz on Calamosk. That'll be my cue to talk sweet reason with 'em!
OCHAL: You will bring your Flying Hunt to Koneyn, High King?
AIKEN: I
n time. But count on seeing Me in Calamosk in two or three days! Just remember that I'm relying on you, Harper. Don'tlet anything happen to Basil's Bastards.
***
SHARN!
Aikenladdiebuck! HowYOU? Longtimenothink!
Bloodybleatingbastard whatfuck BARDELASK?
Nownownownow ... MimeeFamorelViceroy ownhook distantHighVrazel beyondMycontrol Armisticeviolator let oldgrievance vs. ArmidaFormidable(maysherestGoddess-peaeeful) overrule royalpolicy just wait till Ayfa&I gethold MimeeBirdbrainhotspur—
BAT SHIT.
Aiken! Lad! You don't seriously think We'd encourage lawless excursions against You? Breaking Our Royal Word?
Bet yourballs I do.
...I swear on My Honor as Monarch of the Heights and Depths Father of All Firvulag—
Put a bung in it! I know verywell what yourword worth given humanbeing. [Colorful obscene image.] And don't think not wise to stunt you pulled fingering Lowlives&aircraft for Nodonn!
Well ladomyheart there you got me cold ... I was tempted beyondstrength thoughtofSWORDfell like ripepompelmous into fiendBattlemastertrap—
Morelikely wholething youridea.Well you backed wrongstarter KingScorpionGlitterguts and screwed self royally! I had planned nicefriendly surprise GrandTourney but now—
No! You didn't! O Te damme to uttermostchasm!—now I'll be drawn&quartered&liverfriedwithonions before I let you get perfidioushooks on Sword.
Lad ... KingAikenLugonn ... BrotherSovereign ... it was just a terrible MISUNDERSTANDING.
[Pitying laughter.]
No really! I'll prove it! Force Mimee withdraw Bardelask—Dammit Sharn RoyalAssholeness place smoking ruin Armida&- knights dead whatflaminggood withdrawal?