Castle War! (27 page)

Manned by frog-faced drivers, chariots of fire rumbled out of the plains ahead, each drawn by five black horses snorting flames.
 

Jonath fell on his face and covered his head. When he dared look up again he saw not one but five Incarnadines, each wielding a fiery sword.
 

The next few moments were furious, profligate of energy and power. The flashes were incessant, the noise deafening. The ground heaved and rumbled, canting to one side, then the other. The heavens opened up and rain fell, lightning splintering the sky.
 

The concussions were so forceful that Jonath thought he would die. He hid his head again and prayed to be taken without too much pain.
 

The flashing stopped and the thunder gradually died, echoing from the far hills and ridges. The air cleared. The hellish creatures vanished, leaving behind the rapidly decomposing carcasses of dead horses and an idly spinning chariot wheel.
 

Jonath looked up and saw a lone magician, sword still at the ready.
 

Incarnadine scanned the horizon as things quieted down. He looked, sniffed the air, then made a few motions with his hands. He nodded with satisfaction.
 

He lowered his sword and turned to Jonath, smiling broadly. “Well, that was quite a workout!”
 

Jonath got to his feet and retrieved his cane. “You are more than merely a powerful sorcerer,” he said. “You must also be a god.”
 

“Not quite. Never did aspire to it. Heady stuff, godhood. It can get to you.”
 

“Nevertheless, you must be divine. No mere mortal could stand up to such wrath and live.”
 

“You'd be surprised what a diet rich in oat bran can do.”
 

Something was building on the plain. It was an immense effort—waves of energy left the temple and froze into matter, accreting layer upon layer. The thing grew, took on shape and substance. The end result, when the last of the emanations had solidified, was an enormous beast of mind-numbing lineaments, an incongruous monster of disparate parts: leg of goat, head of lizard, eye of cat, flank of lion, claw of bear, and on and on in an incredible and ferocious mélange. The beast's tail was serpentine and spiked, and when it twitched boulders flew.
 

“What have we here?” Incarnadine mused.
 

“You might come to wish that you had aspired to godhead,” Jonath said.
 

Incarnadine shook his head. “It's not good work. Too busy. No organizing principle. But then again, such things can be charming in their own catch-as-catch-can way.”
 

The beast roared in a thousand voices. It put one mighty foot forward.
 

“Aesthetic criticisms aside,” Incarnadine said, “there remains the problem of what the hell I'm going to do about it. It's too damn big just to zap.”
 

The beast advanced, its footsteps thundering. Its shadow fell across the pair below. It bent its head and lowered its body.
 

Jonath bolted, lost his cane, tripped, and fell. He got to his knees and looked back. The gigantic mouth came down on Incarnadine and enveloped him. The mighty jaws closed. The beast unbent, its head rising into the air, a satisfied smile on its saurian-feline countenance.
 

It chewed and swallowed, then emitted a loud belch. Its eyes scanned the ground below, its gimlet gaze finally falling on Jonath.
 

Jonath began to pray again, on his knees now, as the beast shambled toward him. A taloned foot came to rest beside him, and the fetid stench of the thing was in his nostrils. Jonath collapsed and lay still on the ground.
 

When he came back to consciousness he lay unmoving for a moment longer, then raised his head. The monstrous foot was gone. He looked around and saw the creature walking away. It had retreated about a hundred human paces when it turned around, a clawed paw on its abdomen. Its eyes narrowed, and what Jonath took to be a grimace of pain came over its countenance. The creature groaned, bringing the other paw up to clutch its middle. A bellowing roar escaped its mouth.
 

The creature exploded into a million glittering fragments, became a blizzard of confetti. The wind rose and blew the swirling cloud away to the hills.
 

On the spot where the creature had stood, Incarnadine got to his feet and brushed the sand off his doublet.
 

Jonath rose, fetched his cane, and went to him.
 

“I thought you had succumbed,” Jonath said.
 

“It was the only way the deed could be done,” Incarnadine said. “Blasting it from the outside wouldn't have even stunned it. But the insides of magical constructs are often shoddily put together.”
 

“How did you manage to pass through the creature's maw unharmed?”
 

“A simple hard-shell protective bubble. Nothing to it. There wasn't much to breathe in there, though. I had to work fast.”
 

“You have proven yourself worthy. Mordek is sure to vouchsafe you the sight of his beatific visage.”
 

“I should be so lucky. No, I don't think he's through. You said it was a ‘he,' didn't you?”
 

“Oh, most assuredly, Honorable.”
 

“Goddesses are special problems. Well.” Incarnadine turned to view the temple. “It's definitely closer. Let's see if we can't walk to it. We have to, anyway. My animal's run off.”
 

They walked. This time the temple obeyed the laws of perspective and got closer. Its grandeur did not diminish. An imposing pylon gateway, decorated with painted reliefs, guarded the entrance. Gold leaf shone everywhere.
 

“Oh-oh. Wait a minute.”
 

Incarnadine approached cautiously. He drew his sword and poked the air. The point hit something invisible and sparks jumped from it.
 

“Your basic invisible screen.” Incarnadine began probing the air up and down, outlining the dimensions. “No doubt it goes all around in a big cube.” Holding the haft with both hands he pushed the sword forward. A high-pitched note like that from a tuning fork was the result as more sparks flew.
 

“Hmmm.” Incarnadine stepped back, put the sword between his knees, and spit on his hands. Then he used both to grip the sword again. He measured his swing, bringing the weapon slowly over his head and down in a sweeping arc.
 

“You gotta hit these things je-e-est right.”
 

Jonath watched in fascination.
 

Incarnadine took a few more practice sweeps, then hauled back and swung in one powerful, graceful motion of calculated force.
 

The sword met the invisible wall with a flash. A spider's web of purple lines, like cracks in a pane of glass, expanded from the point of impact and propagated across an expansive plane paralleling the front of the temple. The cracking took right angles at the edges of the three upper sides and continued until it defined a gigantic cube around the structure. An ear-piercing high-frequency tone accompanied this process. Then, after a moment of shimmering and vibrating, the force screen shattered like so much plate glass, millions of fragments tumbling in a violet cascade. The debris disappeared in bursts of sparks as it hit the ground. When the roaring ceased, nothing remained.
 

“Pretty,” Incarnadine said.
 

He motioned Jonath to come along and they approached the tapered walls of the facade. Two obelisks of red granite flanked the opening, but they did not stop to admire these, passing through the doorway and into the temple.
 

A vast hall, defined by a forest of columns with leafed capitals, greeted them as they came out of the dark vestibule. Light came from clerestory windows with screens of stone tracery. The scale was immense, bigger than anything in the Mizzerite valley. At the end of the hall was a wide doorway.
 

They went through and entered a chamber of somewhat smaller proportions but still breathtaking in its spaciousness, its high ceiling supported by columns sheathed in hammered gold that glinted in the light of a dozen ceremonial braziers. The scent of exotic incense hung heavy.
 

There were voices. An unseen chorus chanted a plaintive dirge.
 

The centerpiece of all this atmosphere was a gigantic golden statue of a creature with arms and torso of a man, the legs of a lion, and the head of a goat. The right hand held a sword, the left a knout.
 

As the pair came toward it, the statue began to move. The right arm brought the sword down until the tip was pointing at Incarnadine.
 

A voice boomed in the sanctuary.
 

“You ... have ... incurred ... my ... wrath.”
 

Jonath fell to the floor and prostrated himself.
 

Incarnadine said, “Isn't it about time we cut the crap? I mean, you've put on a fine show for the faithful, you've done the wrath bit, but I do have pressing business and I
really
need to talk to you. So, if you don't mind...” Incarnadine sheathed his sword.
 

The statue ceased moving. The doleful chorus stopped with a ripping sound suspiciously like that of a phonograph needle skating across a record.
 

There was silence.
 

Presently a little man came out from behind the obsidian stone base of the statue. Bald, hook-nosed, and wearing black horn-rim glasses, he was dressed in an electric-blue leisure suit over a red paisley sport shirt with the shirt collar out over the collar of the jacket. His cordovan loafers shone with a mirror gloss. The top three buttons of the shirt were open, exposing a bumpy chest covered with gray hair. A gold medallion on a gold chain nested there.
 

Hands in his pockets, he sauntered over to the two visitors. On his face was a half-smile of mild annoyance. He came up to Incarnadine.
 

He shrugged. “So, talk to me, Mister Smart Guy.”
 

 

 

 

Queen's Dining Hall

 

“I got here first,” Incarnadine said adamantly.
 

“The Hell you did,” Incarnadine said just as adamantly.
 

The two men, identical in every respect save that one wore a crown and the other was bareheaded, stood facing each other. The crown wearer had made his point with a leg of honey-basted sage hen, which he then took a bite of.
 

A fight was going on in the other end of the room. The participants consisted of the following: one anti-Guardsman, hereafter referred to as a -Guardsman; one Guardsman, hereafter designated as a +Guardsman; one +Snowclaw; one -Snowclaw; another +Guardsman; and, for the sake of plot complication, one anti-anti-Guardsman, a category hereafter referred to as -2Guardsman.
 

“I'm telling you, I sent my men in here first. Everything was going swimmingly. Then you blundered in and buggered up the whole works.”
 

“
I
buggered up the works? The castle was mine till you and your lot showed up.”
 

“The mirror aspect showed up in my castle.”
 

“In mine, too!”
 

“All right, in yours, too, but as soon as I found it I shot right through and hit with everything I had.”
 

“As did I. I'm not one to pass up a target of opportunity.”
 

The bareheaded one picked up a sparerib, took a bite, spat it out, and tossed the thing over his shoulder. “Cold. Lousy service in this dump.”
 

“There's a war going on, you know.”
 

“No excuse. Look, we're going to have to work something out.”
 

“Doubtless,” the crown wearer said. “But how?”
 

“It's a big castle.”
 

“No, no, no. I'm not going to subdivide.”
 

“Then we have to establish who has priority.”
 

“Who's going to establish it? Are you suggesting we settle this in a court of law? Arbitration, maybe?”
 

“No, look. Two intelligent fellows ought to be able to work this out.”
 

“Well, I'm not gainsaying it. But there has to be common ground from which to start.”
 

“How much more in common could we have?”
 

“A point. A point.”
 

“All right, then. Withdraw your boys and we'll talk.”
 

“We are talking. It would be pretty silly of us to draw swords and start hacking away at each another, now, wouldn't it?”
 

“Of course.”
 

The crown-wearer threw down the sage hen. “You're right, the food here stinks.”
 

“Probably been sitting there for a couple of days. Okay, if you won't withdraw, then let's call a truce. This noise is distracting.”
 

“Let's retire to my study.”
 

“Where, here? It's not yours.”
 

“My castle, then.”
 

“You want me to walk into your lair?”
 

“All right, where?”
 

“Forget it, we'll stay here.”
 

The crowned one rummaged through a salad bowl and came up with a radish, which he popped into his mouth. “Talk about generally futzing things up,
I
didn't come up with the brilliant idea of the yellow Snowclaws.”