It was a bore, deciding what to do. If she was to keep her search methodical, she should by rights skew across the Mediterranean and take up the hunt at dismal Var-Mesk, then go up to Bardelask and Roniah. But the afternoon was lengthening and her precipitous pace had begun to sap her strength.
She thought: I’ll go home to Mulhacén, and start again tomorrow.
Her heart lifted along with her raven’s body as she soared up on a thermal, then arrowed southwest toward the Betic Cordillera. Home to her mountain, her treasure, her dear animal companions.
She thought: I could keep him in there, chained in gold. Encased in gold. Pervaded with gold! Yes! All through the muscles, a precious network of conductive metal, and golden external terminals to each major neural plexus! The brain itself would need a very special divarication, which he would have to help her build. What a delicious prospect! With him thus equipped, she would be able to play him like some magnificent algetic instrument, first warming his sanguine frigidity with simple capriccios and inventions, then going on to immense panharmonies, dithyrambs of pleasure and pain.
Oh, Beloved! Before it was my joy to receive, and that was sick and unsane, wasn’t it? But now I am well and ready for the joy of giving and contemplation relished by all sane minds— even those who would like to reject it, indignant and disgusted at its dark enigma. But we know don’t we Beloved, that the sight of the suffering Other only confirms our own power and pain-freedom, sealing our sense of worth. We triumph as we are spared. We are gratified by a price paid but not by us.
(And did she not suffer and die for me, Crucifixa etiam pro nobis, as her foolish God did for her?)
You too will suffer gloriously. Beloved, but not die. I love you too much ever to let you die.
Aiken came to Felice s cave as a new-hatched spider riding on a strand of gossamer one of hundreds that the afternoon s thermal wind blew up the northern flank of the mountain. When his glistening thread tangled in a pine tree, he made his way down to a branch and rested there, carefully thinking arachnoid thoughts just in case Abaddon’s earlier scan had missed the monster. Using the shortest possible soft focus farsight, the spiderling scanned the cave ambit. Felice wasn’t hiding among the green framed boulders or down in the canyon, or anywhere on the upper slopes where the alpine flowers bloomed in pink and white tufts. His deep-vision, exerted more forcefully, assured him that she wasn’t concealed inside Mulhacén—at least, not within a kilometer or so of the cave.
The tiny spider descended from the tree and turned into a man in a golden suit. He lowered the metapsychic shield until it was closely cupped about the cave entrance. Then, from the large pocket on his back, he took a titiridion net, which he spread on the ground. With his face shining, he entered the cave and penetrated to the inner room, sliding aside the protective rock slab as though it were a paper screen.
The radiance streaming from him lit a pile of golden torcs higher than his head. How many had the mad scavenger gleaned? It seemed there were thousands, each necklet a hollow shell filled with components from Gomnol’s demolished factory in Muriah. There remained small stockpiles of the psychic amplifiers in each Tanu city; but none could compare with this cache of Felice’s.
He sent quantities of the torcs flying out of the cave to pile up on the net, and at length uncovered the Spear of Lugonn and its pack.
“At last!” he muttered, taking up the weapon. He had last worn it in the Duel of Battlemasters against Nodonn. When the torcs had all been removed from the inner chamber he strolled back outside the cave, the Spear over his shoulder, and stood staring at the heaped-up treasure.
Finally he gestured, and the net gathered into a purse that encompassed the golden torcs. All that remained was to fly back to the waiting army, parcel out the spoils, and flee. Felice might never know who had robbed her.
But he couldn’t leave it at that.
He sprang into the air, lifting the enormous bundle, and earned it a couple of kilometers northward along the ridge connecting Mulhacén with its sister peak. Alcazaba. Leaving the torcs and the Spear, he flew back, enclosed in the bubble of defensive force maintained by Abaddon, and hovered over the vicinity of the cave. He said:
Kill the screen! Go to the offensive mode! I have to leave my royal calling card!
The sun brightened for him and the air regained its dazzle. His mind seemed to swell, totipotent, as the entire offensive sum of the metaconcert flowed into his creative reservoir and approached focus. (Throttle back, Exalted Laddie! No sense leveling the whole bloody place, you know. Might attract her notice, wherever she is. And the energy level is a wee bit scary, now that you experience the totality for the first time! So back off a tad. Give her the finger, the heraldic digitus impudicus, and let go.)
Let go!
He laughed like Jove as the psychic bolt flew and thunder boomed. A huge chunk of the mountain split away, fragmented, and rumbled down into the secret crevice where the raven girl had dwelt. Most of the sound waves had been reflected skyward by the shape of the terrain. There was little dust no smoke. But Felice’s lair was gone.
The creative blast had burned as it traveled through him and he faltered in midair, engulfed in pain, willing Abaddon to restructure the shield as he pulled himself back together. Even mitigated, the energy of the metaconcert had nearly vaporized his brain plasm.
Marc Marc what do wrong God help!
Amateur blockhead! You used wrong channels [images] harmless at lowlevel zap greatdanger ai high. Even Felice knew better than use that puny creativemode . . .
Yeahyeahyeah. Just give fix. Pain.
Overload kill you just as dead as feedback or allsystem zorch! I look too much for granted.
Godsake save schoolteacher acl + fuckingduncecap for owndamnkids show RIGHT WAY channelize megazap.
Suppressed expletives. [Profoundly esoteric image.] You got that Royal Highness?
Uh. Say again?
King Aiken-Lugonn take your loot and get back to the others. I’ll finish the lesson as you retreat. And I hope to hell you’re a quick study.
The rainbow-colored knights on their chargers fled across the Granadine savanna, the great claws of the mounts slicing the dry turf and uprooting buttercups and purple scabious and eyebright. The tumult of the Tanu army’s passing scattered herds of gazelles and hipparions. Sabertooth cats started up from their naps and roared in alarm, and great bustards flapped off on low trajectories from their violated nests among the tussocks. The sun was now low in the west and broiling hot. Dust devils trailed in the wake of the retreating force, wavering like tall tan spectres above the dim gleam of the defensive canopy.
The riders did not guide their steeds. Their minds were utterly rapt in the task of maintaining their share of the metaconcert; and though their eyes saw and their ears heard and they were conscious of the heat and the smell of dust and ripped meadow herbiage, they had no volition, no sense of independent being. Each brain functioned as a cell of the Organic Mind, exuding psychoenergy in the erection of the great shield, holding still more energy in reserve, ready for the offensive thrust they might be called upon at any moment to deliver.
King Aiken-Lugonn galloped at the head of the horde, leading his people back to the navigable stretch of the Río Genil. Behind his saddle, and behind that of each other rider as well, was a sack full of golden torcs that rang with every step his chaliko took. In his arms he held a golden-glass lance with a cable connecting its butt to a powermodule slung from a sturdy shoulder harness. The readout on the module showed no charge, and the five colored studs set into its armrest were fouled with salt, as was its needle-thin aperture. At the moment, the Spear of Lugonn was dead, inoperative. But technicians were waiting at the river with tools that would bring it back to life, and the diminutive form of the King glowed in anticipation of using it once again. This weapon would conquer Felice, then rout the Firvulag. And at the end it would complete the task that the Flood had interrupted: It would kill Nodonn.
Still clothed
in her raven’s guise, her mind perfectly screened, Felice arrived at her lair on Mulhacén. She hovered, incredulous, at the sight of the stupendous rockslide, the glittering blocks of micaschist larger than houses that had been sheared off the face of the mountain and tumbled into the nook that had been her home. The trees were gone, the flowering shrubs, the waterfall with its fern-bordered pool for bathing, the firepit and the quaintly wrought rustic furniture that had been just outside the cavern, the mossy boulders where the rock thrushes had perched and sung for her in the evening’s hush. Gone. The small branch of the river where the fat trout swam was buried under tons of debris, as was the game-trail that had brought the animal friends to her door. The only living thing left to greet her was the lynx, Pseudaelurus, which sat on the flat crest of an isolated crag, basking in the last of the dying sunlight.
The raven spiraled down, crying. At first, she believed the catastrophe to be natural; but then she saw a dusty golden lore half-buried in the detritus, and she thought to exert her powerful deep-seeing eye, scanning the barricaded interior of her talus cave. She discovered that the treasure chamber had been emptied.
“Culluket!” she screamed. The sound echoed into the dizzying gorge cut by the young Genil The lynx cringed, its ears flattened “Culluket—you and Aiken Drum!” The lynx vanished into rocky chaos and the dark-feathered bird descended onto the vacant crag and was transformed.
A fantastic being stood on the rock, dressed in gleaming black cuir bouilli, the hoplite armor of Felice’s old profession much modified by her mind’s vagary. Now the angles of the carapace were sharper, the contours more cruel. The old open greaves and short gauntlets had expanded to enclose all the flesh of the legs and arms, and now were adorned with curved spurs and excrescences like talons. The helmet had a predatory beak, balanced by a spiny crest projecting to the rear. From its T-shaped opening shone two beams of light, white as magnesium flares. When the being turned its head and began to survey the Granadine steppe north of the mountain, the eyebeams drilled through an intervening ridge of metamorphic rock like lasers punching a wedge of cheese. Felice searched the valley of the lower Genil through smoking peepholes, located her prey at long last, and took off after it like a vengeful comet.
The boats were tearing down the river. Aiken, in the primary repair craft, was using his deep-vision to guide the technicians in reaming out the barrel of the Spear when Marc’s abrupt warning came.
Felice is on her way.
“Finish the fix, for God’s sake!” Aiken shouted at the shaken Carvalho and McGillicuddy, before levitating back into the lead boat in a sizzling cloud of ozone.
“Spotted her!” he cried. This time his focusing was nearly instantaneous. He sucked and the energy flowed into him. He exhaled and the terrible blazing gobbet roared toward the shadowy fleck that hurtled after the flotilla, spiky black against a turquoise evening sky.
The fireball bloomed, obliterating some 40 square kilometers of jungle below it. The passage of the monstrous energy surge stunned Aiken. Every neuron in his body had turned into a rill of lava. His brain not only seethed, it pulsed like some variable star, with each peak verging on disjunction. A squealing craven nub within him said: Marc was right! You overloaded—and now you’re dead, sucker!
But the near-fatal vertigo dampened and he was surprised to find himself still firmly ensconced in the executive slot of the Organic Mind, with Abaddon not scornful or accusatory but registering Olympian approval:
Very commendable—for a barebrain. I think you got her.
“I did?”
I get nothing on a mass-energy scan in ground zero.
“Jesus, you better be right That zap nearly finished—”
GOD NO SHE D-JVMPED’ [unintelligible image]
…ABOVE YOU AIKEN HIT HER AGAIN HIT HER!!
Abaddon’s warning crashed in his aching brain. He saw Felice again, magnified by some weird atmospheric effect, looming directly overhead. She seemed to be several hundred meters tall. Her form, now that of a human female, appeared to be clothed in white flames that rippled like liquid silk. Her monstrous face was translucent. Her eyes were black and blazing and so was her mind. Aiken felt the defensive barrier above the flotilla begin to crumble. Something was critically wrong in the coercive segment. A vital component had failed and the structure was collapsing—
The screen resolidified. Marc Rermillard had injected some arcane reinforcement, bypassing his man, Owen Blanchard, who was dead. Instinctively, Aiken knew that this makeshift shoring mechanism would hold only for the brief nanosecond that he, the prime executive, needed to shift back into the offensive mode. He would have to blast Felice again with the full load of the metaconcert, even if it killed him.
There was no time even to focus. He demanded and received the soul-bursting volume of energy and expelled it point-blank at the monster.
A shriek, inhuman, clanging in the aetheric welkin. Conflicting psychic bursts impinging, exploding, imploding, cancelling. A slowly expanding psychocreative detonation that was overwhelming light without noise or heat. Behind and beyond this, a structure besprinkled with thousands of scintillations, multicolored, some of which now flared and died away. A tenuous rolling juncture, deepest carmine, stretched across half a world (Between my own pain and his?) Pain bridge sentient and sharing, threatening to fade to black, rescued, regenerated, newly joined to a deadly white flame. Candle burning in ruby-glass tube, shrinking. Croon of laughter. Dwindling howl plummeting to despair.
“Abaddon ?”
I hear . . . King Aiken-Lugonn.
“Get her?”
Gone. No more menace . . . either of us. Alliance concluded until your turn to fulfill bargain. No communication until then. Goodbye.
“Mare . . . overloaded Die? Marc?”
. . .
“Marc ANSWER ME!”
. . .
Amazing, he thought. It was a terminal overload and I should be dead, but it seems I’m not! Behold my mind, a sleazy fabric of carbonized threads, glowing bravely in vacuum. Let me out of my bell jar and into the real world and I may fall to ashes…
“Nonsense, Aiken. Just hold onto me. I’m almost finished pasting you back together. You’re a tough Scottish lad and far too wicked to die young.”
Elizabeth?
“Be quiet.”
I thought you couldn’t redact long-distance?
“I can’t. I’m here. Stop communicating, damn you. This is very hard to do and I’ve been at it for nearly a week and I’m tired.”
A week—!
He drifted. All around him were minds whispering. Hundreds—hell, thousands!—of them. Tanu. Gold-torc human operant. His people.
Elizabeth? My metaconcert fell apart, didn’t it?
“It lasted long enough. Quiet. Ah. There and there. And there.”
Lights! Action!
He saw, felt, heard, smelted, tasted. He sat up on the padded table and the sheet slithered from his mother-naked body. He was whole. The table stood in the middle of a small decamole shelter that was meshed on all four sides for ventilation. Outside was a typical Spanish jungle, extravagant greenery and the usual mammal-bird-amphibian-insect cacophony. Inside was Elizabeth, and Creyn and Dionket in informal redactor robes, and a leather-faced Tanu with a short blond beard, a Prince Valiant haircut, and uncompromising coercer-blue eyes. This personage held out a pair of golden jockey shorts.
“Allow me.”
The weak and disoriented King allowed himself to be dressed in his suit of many pockets. It was somewhat the worse for wear. He said, “So Felice is dead?”
“Her body fell into the Genil like a flaming meteor,” said Dionket, his mind projecting the image. “There was a strange secondary psychocreative concussion that brought a two-hundred-meter cliff crashing down into the river right on top of her. Some of your people were caught in the avalanche.”
“I—felt people dying.” Aiken was staring empty eyed at the jungle outside. “Who?”
Elizabeth’s
redactive strength held onto him. “Ninety-six are unaccounted for. Aluteyn Craftsmaster. Artigonn of Amalizan. The human operant Elaby Gathen. Culluket the Interrogator And Mercy.”
“Mercy dead?” He looked from face to face. “I don’t believe it!”
“Her body wasn’t found,” Elizabeth admitted, “but the avalanche and the surge in the river were tremendous things. The entire course of the Genil was changed Your people did find the Craftsmaster’s remains, and Elaby Gathen’s, as well as the bodies of some minor nobility. You may know that the elderly operant, Owen Blanchard, died of a cerebrovascular accident.”
“And nearly fucked the lot of us!” Aiken exclaimed bitterly.
“I felt the bastard give way right at the moment Felice started her attack. If it hadn’t been for Marc . . .” He faltered and dropped onto the edge of the bed, sitting with his head in his hands. “He did a job. God, if you only knew.” When he looked up there was an odd light in his eyes. His smile was tight. “It was an education. A painful one.”
“You’ll have the hangover of the Western World for the next month or so,” Elizabeth remarked. “Go easy. Let your mind heal fully.”
His nod was impatient. “Where the devil are we?”
“In the base-camp at the mouth of the Genil. Your people have been waiting for you to regain consciousness. Very few of them were hurt badly, aside from those who were caught in the full brunt of the avalanche and some who were brain-burned when the defenses faltered. The wounded are resting in Skin in Afaliah.”
Aiken looked sheepish. “Thanks for coming, Elizabeth. I mean—I was pretty mouthy there earlier, babe. Sorry.”
“What the hell,” she said, and smiled.