The Nonborn King (55 page)

He bent to the task. Perspiration streamed from his scalp and armpits. In his brain visions of the lock encodements, microscopic bubbles within bubbles, all dotted and etched with psychosensitive chemicals, zoomed into and out of focus- He concentrated, thrust, bent, and pricked. Something began to buzz. "Getting it," he mumbled. Magnify and hold the thing up to scrutiny. Ah, a sequential set. Ingenious' And with nulls scattered in the substructure.

Buzz. Click-click. Throm.

The force-field cut out. "That's a help' Now, " Press, press, push-pull twist!

There were noises behind the door, bars lifting, bolts sliding back. And then silence, and a tall crack openmg "You've done it!" Mercy pushed past him, activated the lighting. "Now!" she cned. "It must all be saved for Nodonn, but put in a condition so that it's useless to him during the time that my daemon lover strikes!"

She regarded the long aisles with their glass racks and shelves, the thousands of different items podded or swathed in transparent durofilm, the walls of the place thickly coaled in sealant impervious to damp and chemical action, the small inventorycontrol computer, and its robot retriever standing by.

"We'll start with you!" Mercy cried. An emerald ray lanced from her hand. The computer and robot began to smoke, and puddles of stinking liquid spread incontinently beneath their casters.

"That should slow my Lord King's next shopping expedition! And now what? We must embed all this, render it unusable until it's been painstakingly cleaned with special solvents that my Nodonn will have to get a Milleu chemist to formulate!"

His face full of fear. Sullivan-Tonn backed slowly toward the door. Mercy saw him and laughed. "That's right, Sullivan dear. Run off, man! Your work's done. Back up the stairs if you value your life' Fly... for I'm brewing up a witch's cauldron of foul sticky glop to sink Aiken Drum's weapons in, so he'll never use them against my love!"

A tremendous explosion made the rock walls quake. Putrid yellow matter began to boil from their plastic coating; it foamed and surged. "The polymers in the insulating sealant!" cned Mercy, safe in a psychocreative sphere. "Who else can tumble and stretch and refashion their giant molecules as I can? I, the mistress of organics, who can make food and drink all wholesome and nourishing from the trash of the fields! And can't I also make the devil's own glue, and a clinging foam to encrust all the pods and packages, and foul poison gases caught in the bubbles that knit the mess together?"

The terrible stuff flowed like magma, filling every cranny of the storage chamber. Mercy's lifesaving sphere wafted out the door and she caused it to slam shut, still laughing wildly. The shaft was now half-filled with noxious vapors and so she - went lofting up, to where the open door and Sullivan waited. And then she was safely through, and he crashed the heavy panel shut, and the two of them stood side by side.

Aiken Drum sat on the bottom step of the spiral staircase, Staring at them. The air still reverberated with the slamming of the bronze door.

"It's done!" she cried exultantly. "And he's on his way! You'll fight him fair. little man. because it'll take weeks to get the Milieu weapons dug out of the poisonous mess I've sunk them in! Get your Spear, King Aiken-Lugonn. Cudgel your burnt-out brain into operancy again, if you can. Nodonn's coming! And it's the end!"

"Yes," Aiken agreed. Almost casually, he said to SullivanTonn, "Get away from her. you."

The psychokinetic levitated and whisked across the great foyer, toward the passage leading to the exterior courtyard. Abruptly, his body seemed to meet an invisible wall. There was a sickening crackle, a choked scream "Not too far away," Aiken said.

Sullivan's stout torso was pinioned to the invisible wall. His nose oozed blood and his jaw hung awry. the lower lip pierced by splintered teeth. He began to utter liquid-thickened cries.

Both his feet burst into flame.

"No!" screamed Mercy.

"It's your doing," said Aiken.

The smoke roiled and blackened. Sullivan writhed, the sounds coming from his mind and throat as shapeless and hideous as his sloughing flesh. His clothing had flashed away in an instant; now he bumed only from the knees up. his feet and lower legs having been reduced to calcined bone.

"Oh, God." Mercy was weeping. A small fulgurant ball flew from her, struck the flaming man full in the head. The mind-cries ceased. There was only the tick and sputter of the burning, and Mercy's low sobs.

"Come upstairs with me."

Aiken held out one hand to her. She came slowly to him. noticing at last that he was all in black, with even the golden tone of his thoughts damped down to a level of darkness more fearful, more exciting, than any aspect of him she had ever yet known.

She took his hand, warm flesh, quite human.

"What will it be. then?" she asked with fey archness. "How will you do it, Amadan-na-Briona?"

"Come," he said. "And see."

The Spear.

Golden and rising from the dark, full of hot energy, hungry. A living shaft, not one of glass, as she had known it would be. First discharging light and pain, then reabsorbing its own energies and hers, all of the life-force, ail of the joy and sorrow, all memory, all thinking, all that had been created and matured and fulfilled. He took her and she was goneHe was alive and shining.

As he looked at the ashes, he was surprised how little it had hurt.

8

NODONN HAD THE TWO EXOTIC AIRCRAFT APPROACH GORIAH from the seaward side, out of the descending full moon, even though it was plain mat the usurper not only anticipated invasion, but had prepared a perverse and splendorous welcome for his archrival.

All of the city lights were on, so that even from a distance the sky formed a mother-of-pearl backdrop to the multicolored twinkling outlines of the buildings. The great city wall was topped with the orange beads of bonfires, and each bastion was strung with ominous purple and blue faerie lamps. On its height overlooking the sea, the Castle of Glass formed a soaring pile of blazing amethyst and topaz, braced with spangled flying buttresses and crowned by filigreed spires beaconed with yellow stars.

Hanging above the citadel, riding the night wind on wires and cables of gold and silver, were kites,

There were hundreds of them, from titanic oval wanwans more than twenty meters in diameter to stacked boxes, centipedes, Rogallo wings, parafoils, sinuous dragons, and Japanese fighting styles both geometric and theriomorphic. All of the kites were decked in tiny lights. The great man carriers, now flying without passengers, bore gaudy paintings of grimacing samurai, oriental demons, and fierce mythical characters.

Nodonn Battlemaster had to roar at the audacity of it. The two flyers hovered, screened and invisible, a few thousand meters off the castle seawall, while the invaders recovered from paroxysms of hilarity before launching their assault.

"How shall we proceed, Battlemaster?" came the voice of Thufan Thunderhead over the RF communicator. "The air above the castle is as thickly tenanted as a locust swarm."

Nodonn stood behind Celadeyr, who piloted the Number One craft. He inspected the crazy ban-age with his farsight. "Sheets of paper and bamboo frames and panels of flimsy silk!" he said contemptuously. "The rho-fields clothing our aircraft will burn them up like tinder. Fty into the midst of them, and let all the battle-company be prepared to descend upon the castle after I have swept the royal apartments with the power of my Sword."

"As you command," said Thufan. Celadeyr, a madcap grin showing through his open glass visor, twisted the throttle-grip and sent their own inerlialess craft tearing into the swarm of kites at barely subsonic velocity.

Two blinding bursts of light lit the entire countryside as the gravomagnetic aircraft, flying side by side, simultaneously encountered the highly conductive anchoring cables. The kites all burst into flame and were consumed within seconds; but the rhocraft hung motionless in the center of an amazing firestorm. Their black ceremetal skins crawled with flickering networks of force. The energies were grounding out through the gold and silver wires, the flimsier conductors going molten and falling away in smoking arcs. The sturdy cables of the wanwans and the o-dako and the other great kites wrapped the birdlike machines with spiderweb tenacity, however, and the flux-tappers of the craft surged toward terminal overload as they strove to maintain gravomagnetic equipoise in the face of the relentless drain.

Now the lelepathic laughter of the trickster could be heard ringing in the aether, mingling with the teeth-jarring screech of the dumping rho-field generators, the crackle of the currentladen wires, and a thunderous hiss of ion-charged vapor from the boiling sea below. "Away!" Nodonn cried out to his knights. "Out of the ship, before it's too late!"

"Brother, the hatch!" Kuhal Earthshaker shouted"Januned!"

With his mighty psychokinesis Nodonn ripped open the short-circuited airlock, then formed a tunnel of protective screening for the escaping knights. Those who could not levitate by their own power were borne down by the Battlemaster or Kuhal to the seaside parapet of the castle like a stream of rainbow-hued meteorites. Nodonn himself, clutching his photonic Sword, flew out only after he saw Celadeyr safely away.

The Battlemaster hovered to one side as his craft shuddered, Aimed slowly end over end. and dropped toward the sea. enveloped in a seething violet cloud.

"Thufan!" his storm-loud voice cried. "Evacuate your flyer!"

The distracted thoughts of the First Comer pilot reached him dimly through a mental tumult. The knights trapped within the second ship were in a panic, chopping at the frozen hatch with their glass weapons and bombarding it with futile psychocreative thrusts. Thufan said:

Sorry Battlemaster... should have ... danger of grounding... we Tanu ... more chivalry than science...

Up on the highest turret of the Castle of Glass danced a spark of gold wielding a bright needle. A bar of green light transfixed the hanging aircraft as Aiken Drum's Spear discharged. The blast's shockwave flattened Nodonn. He saw a fireball bloom above the water with excruciating slowness, all flecked with torn purple force-field asterisms and ejecting secondary detonations.

Too late, Nodonn extended the Sword. A coherent light beam, twin to the one that had destroyed the flyer, vaporized the top third of the turret. The air reverberated to the shattering concussion.

And laughter.

Try again, came a jeering thought.

Beside himself. Nodonn blew the tower's stub to fragments. But of course the Foe was no longer there, only the echo of his gibes. Nodonn sent his farsight boring into the main keep of the citadel. His 200 surviving knights were already engaging the enemy. Tanu forces loyal to the King, led by Bleyn the Champion and Alberonn Mindeater, were marshalling for an attack in metaconcert. The Battlemaster streaked into the forecourt with his Sword high, and a photonic blast brought a great chunk of the castle facade tumbling down upon the defenders.

"Hold off!" cried Bleyn, switching his direction instantly to a PK deflective structure. The threescore knights under his control managed to divert the bulk of the collapsing masonry and only a few were harmed. But Nodonn's forces piled in on the loyalists, and in the heat of subsequent hand-to-hand encounters, the discipline required for cooperative mental effort was almost totally disrupted. Both invading and defending Tanu turned instinctively to the ancient fighting style of the race, contending against one another with flashing glass weapons and haphazard mental blows.

"Minds together!" Alberonn pleaded. Numbers of the younger loyalists rallied around the hybrid coercer and resumed fighting in the efficient metaconcert mode. Those of Nodonn's force who were struck by multimind thrusts either died in their tracks or suffered massive brain damage. But Nodonn was quick to take advantage of the confusion. He encouraged the weaker among his knights to fight on in the courtyard melee while the stalwarts broke free. Divided into three groups led by himself. Kuhal Earthshaker. and Celadeyr, they pressed more deeply into the castle.

"Aiken Drum! Find him!" The Battlemaster was alight with solar fury. "Each force to a different part of the citadel, but when you comer him. remember he is mine!"

Ordinary farsight was useless for locating the usurper, who was masked not only by his own mind's cunning but also by the portable Milieu-technology screening devices he wore. He would have to be detected physically, or lured to a confrontation.

Celadeyr of Afaliah and the seventy-odd knights under his command smashed their way into the predominantly human wing of the citadel, taking a fearful toll of gray and silver defenders. The collared humans, loyal in their hearts to Aiken, became helpless before the invading Tanu overlords, who were able to coerce them through their torcs. Wave after wave of gray troopers advanced with their silver officers, only to meet the irresistible compulsion of the enemy that bade them throw away their iron weapons and submit to the terrible glass swords.

"Cut the Lowlife rabble down!" the old Lord of Afaliah crowed. "Wipe 'em out!"

He led his band into the castle garrison, thinking that Aiken might have taken refuge among members of his own race. His knights killed every bareneck or gray or silver that they encountered; but finally, when the invaders were far out of range of Nodonn's protective mental aegis, they were confronted by a detachment of the King's gold-torc elite guard, who advanced on them from behind the detention barracks.

Uncoercible, wearing full-body glass armor capable of deflecting the small psychocreative blasts of the individual stalwarts, the humans lifted unfamiliar slender weapons. There were only about twenty of them, headed by Commander Congreve, who glowed a vivid azure with the force of his own metapsyctuc power and saluted Celadeyr on the intimate mode.

"I know you, Congreve!" Ceiadeyr roared. "You were a loyal servant of the Battlemaster before that little gold pipsqueak turned your head. Join us! Throw down your arms!"

Congreve said, "Surrender, Ceiadeyr of Afaliah. King AikenLugonn would not take your lives."