Robert Charrette - Arthur 03 - A Knight Among Knaves (46 page)

"You're worse than Kun," she shouted.

He wasn't about to tell her that the only driving he'd done before this was at a video arcade.

Without warning the fog was gone and John found that they were rolling along beside the hangers by the airstrip, headed away from where the Snowhawks were parked. Somehow he had gotten disoriented. He spun the MoGo in a tight turn and gunned the engine, hoping they weren't too late.

The rotors on one of the Snowhawks were spinning up to speed.

No time left. Knowing that he couldn't drive and help activate the trap grid at the same time, he hit the brakes. Dr. Spae began reciting the first phrases of the spell before they skidded to a complete stop. John took her hand, throwing himself into the link that would add his strength to hers.

They weren't fast enough. In a swirl of white, the Snowhawk lifted. The contact with the earth was broken and the chance of tying the harbinger down lost.

New gunfire erupted, announcing that the more mundane battle was rejoined.

"He's gotten away," Dr. Spae said despondently.

"Chill down, Doc. A Snowhawk's a verrie like any other. We brought him down before. We'll just do it again."

John took control of the link and launched their projections after the departing Snowhawk. But Van Dieman had learned their trick. This time John couldn't get near the fire in the heart of the engines. Van Dieman had anticipated their attack and set his pet creature to weave an armor of darkness around the Snowhawk's engine.

Hell, they were back where they'd been before the first missiles had been launched. Only this time, they didn't have any missiles to send after the fleeing verrie.

Kun came pounding toward them across the air strip, covering the distance at surprising speed.

"Looks like we chase him after all," he said when he arrived.

John drove the MoGo and Kun paced alongside. They headed for the nearest Snowhawk. As Kun was opening the cabin door, Dr. Spae said, "I didn't know you were a qualified pilot, Kun."

"I'm not."

"But I am," said a voice from inside. Hagen.

"So this is where you went to ground," Kun said.

"And a good thing too," Hagen said. There was a bloodstained pressure bandage around his leg, but he seemed okay, if a bit pale. His gun was pointed toward the back of the Snowhawk's cabin. "Look what I caught sneaking around."

Climbing aboard, they saw that Hagen had captured one of Van Dieman's bodyguards.

"I believe he had some idea about sabotaging this craft," Hagen said.

"That's what Van Dieman wanted," the man said. "Actually, I had a rather different plan in mind."

"I'll just bet," Dr. Spae said.

"As I told your short friend, I've seen enough to know that helping Van Dieman is the last thing I ought to be doing. I think you have the right of it. He's got to be stopped."

"And you want to help?" Dr. Spae didn't sound like she believed him.

"As a matter of fact, I do," the man said.

Hagen snorted. "And just who the hell are you to do that?"

"They call me Chase. Not that names should matter." Chase swept his gaze across all of them. "And I think that you can use all the help that you can get. I also think that we're wasting time sitting here and arguing. Van Dieman's getting away."

That was certainly true.

"We can't trust him," Hagen said, voicing John's thought.

"I'm not so sure," Kun said. "I think he does want to help. And he's right—we can't afford to waste time. Let's get this thing into the air. We'll sort things out on the way. If we decide not to believe him, we can dump him out the door."

"Good enough," Chase said.

Hagen grumbled, but he said, "Help me up into the driver's seat."

Benton found it a little embarrassing to be under detention by a half-dozen guards none of whom came any higher than his chest, but six guns were higher odds than he wanted to bet against. He let them lead him to one of the construction shacks scattered across the station. The shacks were among the few structures with intact roofs. Czerkas and Juarez, one of his guys and one of Van Dieman's, were already incarcerated inside. They were both wounded; Czerkas had a pressure splint around his left arm, and Juarez's head was swathed in a bloody bandage. One of the shrimp guards used the muzzle of his weapon to issue Benton an invitation to join them. Two of the midgets started removing potentially useful items from the workshed-turned-prison cell.

"So the hotshot couldn't cut it either. No reward for you," Juarez said with a sneer.

Benton ignored him. "Czerkas, you okay?"

"I'll live."

"What happened to Chase and Reg?"

Czerkas didn't look at him. "The midgets caught Reg right when the fog lifted. Chase I didn't see. Got to the verries, I think. I heard a shot from over that way after the first one went up."

Benton had heard the shot too. It had been from a Viper, one of the shrimps' weapons. Czerkas would know that too. Since there had been no return fire, and no verrie had gone north—their plan if they'd captured one—Chase had to be considered MIA at best. More likely he was as dead as Reg.

"You failed the Opener of the Way," Juarez said. "Great will be his retribution for your failure to give your all."

"Yeah? I don't see where you gave
yours,"
Czerkas said.

Juarez touched his bandage. "I was not at fault."

Benton shrugged. "Well, retribution comes when it comes. I know my limits. We did our job, and it didn't work out. There'll be another day. There always is."

A second Snowhawk lifted off and roared overhead, headed east.

"Only if they win," their dwarvish guard said.

"Whatever you say, Shorty."

The guard didn't react to the sarcasm. Once his buddies finished clearing out every visible useful item, the guard backed out and closed the door on the prisoners. Benton listened to the lock dropping in place, a rudimentary thing by the sound of it but strong enough to keep an ordinary man penned in.

"They're determined little buggers," Czerkas commented.

"They cannot hold back the momentum of time," Juarez said sanctimoniously.

The guy had the charm of three-day-old fish. "Maybe, maybe not," Benton said as he walked to the door. "Now why don't you just shut up for a while?"

Benton listened until he was sure the area outside the door was empty, then he levered the door handle down until the retaining bolt snapped. Good thing the shrimps' tactical leader had rushed off without filling his team in on Benton's capabilities.

"Czerkas and I are going to be gone before whoever comes out on top gets back. You can come along too, Juarez, if you think you can pull your weight."

"You have no faith," Juarez said as if it were a condemnation.

"Maybe not, but I have money in the bank and I intend to spend it."

He scanned the area looking for any sign of the guards. They seemed to be well occupied elsewhere. Fine. He took off for the nearest cover, running hard, but not so hard Czerkas couldn't keep up. For a miracle, Juarez wasn't enough of a bastard to yell for the shrimps.

Sitting in the Snowhawk's cockpit, Van Dieman had a much better view of the land over which they flew than he'd had from the cabin of the Petrel. The magnificence of the Transantarctic Mountains lay ahead of them and through gaps between the peaks he could occasionally glimpse a sparkle from the great East Antarctic Ice Sheet beyond them. But the glacier was not their destination;
that
lay among the mountains. Despite the pilot's grumbling about the state of the Snowhawk's engine, they were making good time.

"Weather's closing in," Santiago said, pointing to the sky above the mountains.

The skies were graying, true, but Van Dieman knew that it was magic and not weather that was closing in. He could feel the harbinger squirming, overcoming its fear of flying and reaching out in response to the land below them. He could hear its silent song.

Close.
The timorousness that the harbinger had shown on previous flights was gone. It was full of confidence and filling with power.
Very close. Soon now.

"We will be there soon," Van Dieman said.

The harbinger's song increased its tempo.

The first of the Dry Valleys that they reached was something of a shock after the icy plains that lapped against the mountains. The walls of the valley were steep, like the vertical walls of the desert canyons of the American Southwest. In fact, the vista might have been an old black and white photograph of those badlands. The exposed faces of stone were striped bands of light and dark standing in sharp contrast to each other. Spills of eroded dolerite and sandstone skirted cliffs in sooty-looking talus slopes that flowed down to blend with the rough glacial till that floored the valleys. Nowhere was there any vegetation, any hint of color.

They flew down a long valley and popped up over a rise into another. Side canyons branched off from the main valley. Their flight offered them only glimpses of those lesser branches as they flashed by the rough shouldered mountains standing sentinel at the entrances. One of those canyons held more than geological wonders. One of them—

There.

Van Dieman sensed the point on which the harbinger's attention centered. He directed Santiago to take the craft into the side canyon. As the Snowhawk banked between the shoulders of the mighty cliffs that flanked the entrance, Van Dieman saw that the harbinger was already at work. Its song was not silent here—the eerie melody audible and reminiscent of a lost, lonely wind.

Soil whipped along the canyon's floor, flowing around the larger stones and boulders of the glacial till that blanketed the ancient water-etched basement of the formation. As the harbinger's song grew stronger, the arcane winds moved faster and faster. Stones and pebbles joined the whirling cloud of dust. Faster. Small rocks were added to the dance. A hollow began to appear in the center of the canyon floor at the focus of the whirlwind. The harbinger's song shrieked louder, more compelling and more insistent. The boulders that had stood proud of the till were whipped up into the vortex as the bowl in the soil grew wider and deeper. New boulders appeared like mountains rising from the sea.

But they were not ordinary boulders, for each was long and flat, and there were sixteen of them, four widely spaced sets of four, each set arranged in a rectangle. As more and more of the canyon's fill was drawn up into the harbinger's whirlwind, the boulders were revealed as lintel stones capping monolithic uprights. The tips of other upright stones appeared, stretching in curving arcs between the rectangles. As the new stones appeared, it became clear that they described a circle. One end of each rectangle was a part of the circle. The rectangle of capped stones stood at the quadrant points, their structures offering an entry into the inner precincts of the circle.

Van Dieman understood the privilege of being allowed to see the temple revealed. It was an honor to be present when the gateway was uncovered. It was the time foretold. They had come to the time of the Opening.

The vortex expanded with sudden violence, flinging its lithic burden wide and away from the revealed temple. No boulder, no rock, not even the slightest pebble touched the Snowhawk, enveloped as it was in the power of the harbinger. The verrie continued undisturbed on its approach. In the center of the half-kilometer depression, Van Dieman could see the black altar stone at the heart of the henge. The coiled and entwined whorls carved into the altar's surface were aglow with arcane power.

"What is my role?" he asked the harbinger.

No need for hands.

The obliqueness of its response puzzled him.

Then pain radiated from his left knee and he looked down to see his pants soaked with blood. His back exploded with fiery agony and he nearly fainted from the pain. His insides burned. He understood then that the harbinger had not healed his injuries, but only masked them. It had taken the pain away and made it possible for him to walk and act, but it had done no more than that. Now it had removed that veil and abandoned pretense. And in that moment Van Dieman knew that the harbinger had never been bound by his power. The devious creature had only pretended to be subservient to him. He understood that he had been betrayed. He had been systematically misled and used.

"Liar!" he named the harbinger.

It did not answer his accusation.

"Liar! Is this how you reward the faithful?"

Death, you feared. Life, you wanted. Reward, you asked.

"Yes! Yes! I want to live!"

Life you shall have.

He felt the harbinger's attention shift to Santiago. It took the pilot, draining the life out of the man, but none of those energies, sweeping so tantalizing near, touched him. He understood that the harbinger had left behind fragments of the man, shreds of knowledge and splinters of skill. He felt the harbinger slip into the shell of Santiago and manipulate the little that remained to direct the Snowhawk's course. Paralyzed by the pain, Van Dieman could do nothing but watch as the altar stone grew closer, looming ever larger as the verrie rushed toward it. The harbinger had found a way to deliver the
telesmon
to the necessary spot.