Aiken zinged Yosh with a trenchant inquiry: Important. Think! Could the glitch in robotics be deliberate fabrication excuse get you & assistants into Hagen ATV instead of another?
Well hell Chief ... it's possible. Why you ask?
Nevermind Yoshilad just keep alert for mischief.
"There's such divinity that doth hedge a king," Dougal reassured Aiken, "that treason can but peep to what it would."
"You think so, do you?" Aiken bestowed a bleak grin on the big ginger-beard who had become his court jester through an uncanny sort of insinuation. "Your divinity better look slippy if I have to fight Hagen and his gang as well as Marc Remillard! Here I thought I had the young Rebs on my side—and now it seems that they were just biding their time, waiting for the chance to launch a royal screw. They've probably decided I'm a burnt-out case after what Vilkas told them about the Calamosk chicane."
"They should know better," Alberonn exclaimed, "having seen you direct the metaconcert maneuvers of our forces!"
"Ah, but a director doesn't have to be a personal hotshot," Aiken observed. "As long as he has the right program tucked away in his noodle, mental strength isn't nearly as important as adroitness and the ability to channel energies. I think Hagen might be afraid that I'd be unable to handle Marc in a one-on-one confrontation, without a concert to back me up. He's a supercautious young prick, you know. He doesn't much care for my freewheeling style—going blithely about without three sigma-shells and a full suit of cerametal armor to safe guard my royal ass from sneak attack. The kid could be worrying that his old man might simply grab me. And use me."
The other ATVs rumbled over the span, one at a time. Hagen's breezy thought addressed Aiken on the intimate mode: Sir you left us all in the dust didn't you? You're a better driver than any of us! Would you like us to form up for a parade entry into the Establishment? I could even broadcast some snappy bagpipe music over the loud-hailer—
Aiken's thought was wry: Just follow Me.
"He would," Dougal said softly, as Aiken started up their own vehicle. "He'd follow for expediency's sake, provided that you demonstrate once and for all who is vassal and who is King." And he tapped the lion's head embroidered in gold on his knightly surtout.
Aiken cast a sidelong glance of surprise at the medievalist, who wore no tore yet so often seemed to know his thoughts. He noticed for the first time that the leonine charge now wore a crown, and this tripped a half-forgotten memory from his misspent youth on the planet Dalriada. But the thought slipped away before the press of immediate matters and he said, "First we must make absolutely certain that they're planning a coup. It's never a good idea to waste your shots. Especially when you don't have all that many in the old quiver."
***
The Iron Master of the new Royal Siderurgical Establishment was a tough old bareneck named Axel, an early defector from the Lowlife Iron Villages in the Vosges. With the King's carte blanche on materials and personnel, the technician had organized a far more sophisticated setup on Breton Island—one that was, moreover, secure from virtually any kind of attack short of aerial bombardment. The mine-workings, which yielded siderite, were entirely underground. Ore was removed with a minimum of human labor by four compact mining machines liberated from the Goriah contraband cache. The initial smelting was done in an adjacent blast furnace equipped with a pair of huge water-powered bellows.
After a brief stroll through the mine and a look at the roaring furnace, Aiken and his party were taken to a catwalk about fifteen meters above the main floor of the enormous smeltery structure. There they watched molten pig iron stream spectacularly from the crucible into a great bucket-shaped charging ladle. This container was three times the height of the scurrying workers, who attended it dressed in silvery reflective garb that protected them from the heat and flying sparks. When it was full, the ladle came trundling along a track to an even larger, egg-shaped vessel with an open top, tilted on its side ready to receive the unrefined liquid iron.
"We use metal straight from the crucible for arrows and lance heads and other simple applications," Axel explained to the King. "Or cast it into pigs for conversion into wrought iron in the hammer shed next door. But that process is as noisy as the bells of hell and not too interesting. I figured you Exalteds would rather watch something livelier—so we're going to do the first blow of the new Bessemer converter for you!"
The King said, "That should be fun."
"I wanted to build one of these up in Haut Furneauxville, but our supervisor, Tony Wayland, overruled me." Axel grimaced. "He wanted something sophisticated—as if we needed fancy alloys or squeaky-pure iron for stabbing Firvulag! Wayland never did get his electric furnace into operation. We couldn't salvage the proper power supply from Finiah."
The King was listening intently. "This Wayland—in your opinion, was he a topnotch metallurgist?"
The Iron Master's lip curled and he tipped his head toward Dougal. "Better ask him. He was Wayland's keeper. All I know is, we can process a hundred times as much steel in my Bessemer converter as we would have been able to do in Wayland's electric dipstick oven. You'll see!"
The charging ladle poured white-hot metal into the converter's wide mouth. Alberonn remarked, "How the Firvulag Foe would quail, could they but see this abundance of blood-metal being refined to their destruction..."
"They will see it," Aiken declared, "because I'm going to display some useful steel thingummies at the Grand Tourney, just to let Sharn and Ayfa know that it didn't do them any good to knock out the Low life Iron Villages. Then we'll find out if the Little Folks are still keen to start the Nightfall War."
Axel peered down at the workers. One silvery form clasped gloved hands above its hooded head in a sign of readiness. The charging ladle rolled away and the great egg loaded with molten iron began to tilt up on its trunnions. For a moment the mouth faced directly at the group of observers and they shrank back involuntarily from the view of the white, glowing interior. Then the converter was vertical, and finally came to rest canted slightly to the rear, so that the mouth could blow against a curved shield that protected the building's wooden wall.
"Everybody gather round!" Axel cried, bubbling with show-biz fervor. "I'll explain what's going to happen."
Aiken had been closely hemmed by Tanu members of his entourage, and the North Americans and most of the human retainers were scattered along the railing. The King suddenly told the exotics, "Now, then, Exalted Brothers and Sisters! Where's your sense of hospitality? make a place for our North American guests up here close to Me so that they can hear what Axel has to say. And you, too, Yosh! Come over here and bring your assistants. This steelworks is only partially automated, and you might get some useful notions on how to improve production."
The samurai gold-tore bowed. "As you command, Aiken-sama." Sunny Jim pushed up eagerly to take a front position, but Vilkas hung back with a diffident air.
"Come along, man," Aiken urged. "We're ready for the big show. Don't you want a front seat? There's plenty of room next to Hagen and Nial."
Young Remillard and his thirteen associates stood in a loose group at the King's left. Axel beamed delightedly at them. A human chauvinist to the core, the Iron Master was secretly proud that these important young people were barenecks like himself. They had listened with flattering attention to his little lectures on the tour, and several were particularly impressed by his surreptitious explanation of why blood-metal was the ultimate weapon against both exotic races.
Now Axel addressed the gathering with growing excitement. "The Bessemer converter is as simple as it is dramatic. You will note that there is no means of externally heating the chamber—and yet, within a few minutes, the temperature will rise, converting certain impurities into glowing gases and others into slag! We do this by forcing a mighty blast of air through nozzles in the converter's bottom. It comes not from a simple bellows but from a solar-powered compressor! The injected oxygen causes carbon still trapped in the iron to ignite. The converter c
ontents boil like a volcano! Undesirable elements belch forth in a display of fireworks that is as awesome as it is efficient!" He hauled out a bandanna handkerchief and swabbed his dripping face. "Any last questions before we let 'er rip?"
"Is there no hazard in the coddling of this devil's egg?" Dougal asked sternly. "After all—you did say this was its maiden blast-off."
"No danger, none at all," Axel insisted. "Lordy, we're fifty meters away from the thing, and it's pointed the other way!"
"Let's get on with it," Hagen said. "We're not afraid. It should be very interesting." He turned a cool blue eye on Aiken. "What do you say, Your Majesty?"
"Carry on," said the King.
Axel leaned over the railing and gave the bandanna a vigorous shake. One of the silver figures waved and hurried to a big wheel valve in the pipes entering at the right trunnion. As he hauled the thing open a hissing scream manifested itself and a monstrous tongue of flame howled from the converter mouth. Sparks erupted in a dazzling shower, bouncing off the protective steel-ceramic shield on the rear wall. A wave of heat swept over the onlookers. The entire building quivered to the foundations. Multicolored smoke roiled into the roof beams to escape through ventilation slots.
"Just wait!" yelled Axel. "It gets better!"
The valve operator was admitting more compressed air. The roaring heightened in pitch until the converter seemed to scream in triumph. The smoke glowed a peculiar brownish scarlet and elongate lances of incandescent gas thrust from it, flickering purple and pink and orange. Drops of molten slag arced through the air like meteorites. The silver-clad workers down on the floor were jumping up and down ecstatically, while on the catwalk, the group gathered about the King was engrossed in the spectacle.
Slowly, the flame spurts became bright yellow. The smoke cleared as the purification of the iron continued and silicon burned. Unobtrusively, Hagen and his people edged away to the left, with Vilkas trailing after. The Lithuanian in his festive ashigaru outfit was open-mouthed; his eyes darted back and forth between the King and the fire-spitting egg across the building. The North Americans stood shoulder to shoulder in a compact knot ten meters away. Their eyes, amazingly, had closed.
The flames of the converter turned from orange to purest white, spraying a diamond glitter and writhing like braided star-stuff. Carbon burned now; the incandescent gases were at their hottest, blasting the shield so that the firebrick cladding became a shining bullseye.
The converter began to rotate on its trunnions.
Axel screamed, "No!"
The stupendous jet moved off the shield as the flask pivoted and ignited the wall timbers in a split second. Down below, workers scattered. One heroic figure could be seen wrestling impotently with the air valve. Like a colossal blowtorch, the flames roaring from the egg swept a scorching three-meter path across the entire roof and down the wall immediately behind the King and his stunned retinue.
Then the open mouth blasted directly at them and they were engulfed in white heat.
Vilkas gave a moan of terror. The catwalk was in flames and the entire building filled with thick smoke. He began to run, and reached the wooden stairway only to stumble and nearly pitch headlong when a gust of smoke choked and nearly blinded him. He sobbed out loud clung to the railing, howled, "Help, somebody, for God's sake!"
He heard the roar of the converter cut off. Then the snap of burning timber rustled away to nothingness. There came a great wind that drove the smoke upward, out of the roof vents, and for a brief moment the embers of the quenched wood glowed brightly again before subsiding into dead charcoal.
Vilkas pulled himself upright, tears streaming from his stinging eyes. The great egg-shaped converter was motionless, tipped at an approximate forty-five-degree angle with its mouth aimed at the place where Aiken and his group were standing. They were safe inside a shimmer ing globe of psychocreative force that the King's mind had generated, gathered upon a length of unscorched catwalk that apparently hung unsupported in midair.
Gently, the bubble floated to the furnace-house floor. The section of walk came to rest on the pounded earth as the sphere evaporated.
Axel fell to his knees before Aiken and burst into tears. Vilkas could hear the King's reaction very clearly through his gray tore.
"Don't fash yourself, guy. It wasn't your fault and we're not hurt." The little man in the golden suit tilted his head to regard the fourteen young North Americans, now motionless near the end of the devastated mezzanine. "And it seems our overseas chums also survived the disaster! That's kaleidoscopic. We'd be hard put to build the time-gate and defend the Many-Colored Land from your dear parents without your help! Of course, if some terrible accident deprived us of your company, we'd manage to muddle through somehow. But working together would see us all to our goals more handily ... Or don't you agree, Hagen Remillard?"
"I agree, High King."
Not looking at the people up on the catwalk, Aiken strolled over to the looming Bessemer converter and considered the cooling dribblets of slag depending from the lip. "With a little adjustment—and some new safety measures installed—this thing will serve us well. Safety measures can be installed on people, too. I'd really hate to do it, though, since some folks have such an adverse reaction to tores. I haven't the faintest idea whether silver ones could be locked onto non-coadunate operants without blowing the circuitry of the collars—or the brains. I'm not anxious to experiment along those lines unless I've no alternative. Do you understand that, Hagen Remillard?"
"I understand, High King."
The King resumed his walk, waving a forgiving hand at the workers, who had pulled off their silvery hoods and gathered in an apprehensive little clutch. "Tush. Think nothing of it, lads and lasses. All's well that ends well—as my crony Dougal would say..."He spun about and faced his Tanu and human subjects. "Nonetheless, there have been rumors floating around. It's been said that my royal powers were weakened, that I was no longer fit to be King of the Many-Colored Land." His coercive power settled over them like a bright net. "What do you say to that?"
"Slonshal, Aiken-Lugonn!" they all cried.
The King was humming a ditty that might have been "Hail to the Chief." He came up to Vilkas, who stood at the foot of the catwalk stairs. "And here's another one who was lucky. Or was he?"
Vilkas uttered a strangled groan. The furnace building seemed to fade from view, then rush back to surround him with abnormal clarity. Agony flooded his skull.
Aiken clucked in sympathy. "I hate to be so crude in the mind-ream, but it's necessary to make sure. Ah. What a shame. And it was all because you thought you deserved gold? You poor gowk. If you'd got it, you'd only have found something else to brood on—and perhaps another logical reason to betray those who trusted you."
"Please, High King—" Vilkas began. And then he gave a single shattering cry and seized his tore with fingers that crisped and stank of broiled meat. The gray metal around Vilkas' neck glowed like the yellow molten steel still smoking inside the Bessemer converter. He fell to the earthen floor without making another sound.
"You wanted gold," said the King, and turned away.
7
TONY WAYLAND poled his dinghy through the vast marsh below the Lac de Bresse, trying to maintain a compass course that would take him north to open water. He was having a sticky time of it. The dank morning mist permitted only a few meters' visibility, and the swamp was alive with leeches that were ready to drink his blood if he happened to brush against their hiding places among the dense, dripping reeds.
He had been moving northward for more than three weeks since his escape from Bardelask, most of the time traveling on foot along the Great South Road that paralleled the Rhone. He had encountered no Firvulag at all in the West Bank country, where the widely scattered Little People were secretive and inclined to give the Foe-infested river corridor a wide berth. The principal hazards Tony had suffered were vipers in the dry campsites and wild boars in the bottomlands—and unexpected perils from members
of his own predatory species. He'd had a very close call when a band of bareneck outlaws ambushed him on a back trail as he tried to avoid a large fort. It had been necessary to shoot two of the buggers before they gave him up as a bad job.
Coming up on the metropolis of Roniah, Tony had run afoul of a different sort of menace: the Royal Recruiting Service. King Aiken-Lugonn was combing the bushes and byways for personnel of every sort, intensifying his earlier efforts as war with the Firvulag seemed more and more inevitable. Tempting perquisites were offered to volunteers who would accept gray tores, and there were rumors that out-and-out conscription among the displaced persons had already begun. Tony, of course, wore gold. But the contrast between his Exalted neckware and his shabby accouterments was in itself cause for official suspicion. He'd been careful to hide the tore with a neck cloth on the few occasions that he was forced to purchase supplies or mix with fellow travelers along the road.
The Recruiting Service had artfully spread its net on a treeless savanna where the Great South Road ascended to bypass a precipitous gorge of the Rhone. Up there on the windswept heights, one could see for scores of kilometers in almost every direction; any traveler who attempted to leave the main thoroughfare could be spotted at once. Tony's first clue to imminent danger was a cheery billboard:
WELCOME WAYFARERS!
THIRSTY? HUNGRY?
FREE FOOD & DRINK AHEAD!
HILLTOP HOUSE R.R.S. - 6 KM
The afternoon when Tony hiked that stretch had been a hot and dusty one, and he viewed the sign with elation. But then a caravan of hellads pulling carts of chaliko fodder to Roniah overtook him, and one of the teamsters gave Tony a lift. His name was Wiggy and he was quick to explain the true nature of the establishment they were approaching.
"Friggerty crimps' nest, that's wot it is! You watch your arse there, pilgrim, or they'll have you gray-chokered and off to Goriah as a raw ree-cruit in the King's Shitkicker Brigade."