The Adversary - 4 (7 page)

"Don't worry! Even this disaster ... this d-jump has been valuable.

I learned ... but I'll show you when I wake up.

Meanwhile, get everything ready to go to Europe. Jordy and Peter ... I'm counting on you and your people to repair this CE rig. Dismantle it ... power supply, computer, auxiliaries, the spare suit of armour, everything! Salvage Kyllikki ... get this equipment set up on board. Use the small sigmas so that the children and Aiken Drum can't farsense you clearly. My plan ... destroy deep geological structure of time-gate site, thus ... interfere with geomagnetic input to tau-field. Old Guderian himself wrote that this input was critical to the focus of the timewarp. Advantage of this plan ... we need not confront the children directly, nor Aiken Drum. And solution is permanent.

Can't say more now. Trust me."

"We do," said Patricia.

Again that smile [ pine pine pine ] . A nd pain.

Marc's farspeech was laughing, shouting. You aren't born yet Mental Man I'm free of you!

Then he was speaking rationally, aloud, concentrating entirely upon Patricia Castellane. "Keep a close watch on me while I'm floating, Pat. We all know the regen tank has its quirks and crotchets. I don't want to wake up with extra fingers or toes ... or anything else."

"I'll see to it," she whispered. "Now let me take you down.

Out of the pain."

Painpinepainpine.

[Images: Adolescent boy opening baby's blanket to see rosy perfection. Mama he's all right Papa was wrong after all wasn't he Yes dear wrong wrong wrong. Pine roses cancerous degeneration stink smoke guttering vigil candle consummatum est young Jack.] "Thank you, Pat. No, I must go alone. Au 'voir." The eyes closed. The mental projections faded.

Marc Remillard had withdrawn into his abyss.

I.

The Subsumption

CHAPTER ONE

Summer fog.

It leached all colour and substance from the world, leaving only greys. Lead grey tombstone grey cobweb grey mouse grey ash grey snot grey dust grey corpse grey. It was unheard-of that there be fog at that time of the year, late August. So it had to be still another portent-as dire a one as the death of the OneHanded Warrior. There were many who said that the fog had its origin in the supercooled ashes of the hero: each molecule of his scattered body accreting water vapour, each tiny relic drawing to itself the air's own tears to fashion this widespreading shroud over the Many-Coloured Land.

(The less morbidly poetic decided that the fog was a meteorological freak, perhaps a belated consequent of the Flood refilling the Empty Sea. Ah ... but they had not been there in Goriah, watching the duel at dawn from the battlements of the Castle of Glass!) The fog rolled over Armorica from the Strait of Redon to the dense jungles of the Upper Laar, south beyond the Gulf of Aquitaine and the marshes of Bordeaux. It brimmed the Paris Basin swamps and the Hercynian Forest and flowed eastward to the Vosges, the Jura, the very foothills of the High Helvetides. By afternoon its south-moving front had poured through the Cantabrian passes into central Koneyn. Paradoxically growing in volume, it buried the low Sierra Morena, seeped into the embayment of the Guadalquivir, and only halted at the snow-dusted Betic crest, lapping the slopes of Veleta and Alcababa and blasted, empty Mulhacen.

Bland, energy sapping, it masked the sun and stifled sound and left the vegetation dripping sadly. Forest animals hid.

Chilled birds and insects slept. The great herds of the Pliocene steppes crowded together on the heights, nostrils quivering and eyes wide and ears pricked, paralysed because their senses gave no input but misty uncertainty.

It was the day the Nonborn King had his great victory. The day Queen Mercy-Rosmar and Nodonn Battlemaster died.

In the aftermath, the King returned to his castle, carrying the trophy.

The knights and retainers came rushing to meet him, exultant and mind-shouting, eager to proclaim the triumph. But they fell back dismayed when he dropped the silver hand in the courtyard and stood there silent and empty-eyed, his mind guarded-yet clearly changed in some terrible way, full to the bursting point rather than drained, as might have been expected.

Those who were closest to him, the great heroes Bleyn and Alberonn, prevailed on him to withdraw from the tumult. But he would not go to his own bedchamber (it was not until much later that they knew why), and so Bleyn said, "Let us take you then to my apartments, where my lady Tirone Heartsinger will attempt to help you with her healing power."

The King went with them and did not resist as they removed his dulled glass armour and laid him on a cot in a secluded retiring room. There were no bodily wounds; but even though he maintained his mental shield, they were aware of how swollen his psyche was, how it threatened to overflow and escape from the small body that confined it.

"What has happened?" Tirone asked him, fearful and overawed. But he would not reply. She said, "If I am to help you, High King, you must open to me at least a little, and tell me what manner of strange disability afflicts you."

He only shook his head.

Tirone made a helpless gesture to her husband and Alberonn.

She said to the King, "Would you prefer that we leave you, then? Is there nothing we can do?"

He spoke at last. "Not for me. But take care of our people and oversee the mopping-up operations. I'll rest here. At twenty-one hundred hours, I'll deal with the prisoners. Farspeak the other High Table members and tell them to be ready."

"Surely that can wait," Alberonn protested.

"No," said the King.

The three of them prepared to go. Tirone said, "I will remain outside in case you need me. The best thing you can do now is sleep."

The Nonborn King smiled at her. "It would be best ... but the two of them won't let me."

They did not understand, but only touched him with reassurance and loyal deference and then went away, thinking that he was alone.

The relief column crept along the Great South Road above Sayzorask, twenty wagons loaded with contraband Milieu materiel, 200 Tanu knights, an equal number of humans belonging to the King's Own Elite Golds, and 500 grey-torcs serving in the capacity of men-at-arms, teamsters, lackeys, and logistics personnel. The travellers without farsight (and this included most of the human golds, who had received their torcs as honorariums from the King, irrespective of any metapsychic latency) had their vision limited to a little over two metres, a scant chaliko length. Not that you had much of a chance of seeing the fellows ahead of you, not with the caravan in extended order the way it had been all morning, with each pair of riders or wagon with its escort seeming to clump along in damp isolation.

The column was strung out to minimize problems with the pack of guardian bear-dogs. Ever since they had departed Sayzorask the wilful brutes had been acting up-spooking the stock by getting underfoot, slavering and yowling and rolling their yellow eyes and resisting attempts by the coercers to force them back into their proper stations on the flank.

"Bad ions in the air," the gold-torc Yoshimitsu Watanabe diagnosed. "The fog's made the amphicyons hypersensitive to metapsychic vibes. I can almost feel something myself lurking on the mental fringes ... I had a dog back in Colorado, a fortyfive-kilo Akita who used to go backpacking with me in the Rockies. Acted like this sometimes when really foul weather was moving in. Bezerko, you know? Primitive dogs, Akitas. I learned to listen up good when old Inu told me to get out of the high country."

"Hey-you think we're in for a storm, chief?" Sunny Jim Quigley, driving a huge-wheeled Conestoga with the precious infrared spotter and its power supply and auxiliary robotics, was nothing but a hooded silhouette. Only his voice was clear, amplified telepathically by his grey torc.

"Storm?" Yosh shrugged. "Who can say? My experience with Pliocene climate is limited. You're the native."

"The Paris swamps were nothin' like this here," Jim said.

"Half a desert on these slopes 'bove the Rhone, jungle in the bottoms. But it sure's hell got cold of a sudden. Could be the rainy season'll come early."

"That's all we'd bloody well need," grunted Vilkas, who rode a chaliko to the right of the wagon. "As if it hasn't been tough enough .hauling this damn equipment all the way from Goriah overland. By the time we get it to Bardelask, the damn spooks'll be thicker on the ground than roaches in a garbage dump! I've seen it all before and I know. The Firvulag plan to pick off the little cities first. That's why they hit Burask-why they're sniping at Bardelask and putting the blame on renegade Howlers. Once the little cities fall, they'll make a move on vulnerable big ones like Roniah. And His Exalted Shininess can't do a friggerty thing about it!"

"Aw, Vilkas," Jim demurred. "The King's sending us, isn't he? We get this IR spotterscope set up in Bardelask, ain'no spook gone be able t' sneak up under illusion-cover. We got 'nuff good stuff in the other wagons t'fix Lady Armida's people so's the Famorel mob won't dare poke snout outa the Alps.

Ain'at right, chief?"

"That's King Aiken-Lugonn's strategy." Yosh guided his chaliko closer to the wagon, frowning. His golden torc was warm beneath the clammy mastodon-hide plates of his nodowa, the throat-piece of his ornate samurai-style armour. He could "hear" the Tanu members of the column whispering anxiously among themselves on their private mental wavelength, incomprehensible to the human golds. What was happening?

Vilkas was still beefing bitterly. "If the King is so worried about Bardelask, why didn't he fly this junk to the city himself-or have that fat sod Sullivan-Tonn do it-instead of sending us on this three-week slog?"

"What good the spotterscope be, 'thout Yoshi-sama to set 'er up?" Sunny Jim asked reasonably. "And the weapons 'thout Lord Anket and Lord Raimo and the elites who know how fuse 'em? Shoo-oo!"

Yoshi beware! came Anket's mind-shout. Bear-dogs crazy!

Maybe sabrecats-maybe Foe-maybe Tanaknowswhat"Heads up!" the samurai cried to his companions, and at the same moment Vilkas broke into vicious swearing as his chaliko reared. Something big and black hurtled out of the soup. A single amphicyon zigged to avoid the claws of Vilkas' chaliko and disappeared under the bed of the high-wheeled wagon.

Another pair, whoofing and shambling, approached the wagon from Yosh's side, intent on using the same shelter. A bedlam of howls and snarling broke out. The four giraffids in the hitch plunged and squealed. Beneath the lurching vehicle the beardogs, weighing nearly 200 kilos each, thrashed and fought and banged against the enormous wheels.

"Look out!" Jim yelled, hauling back on the reins. "We'll get upset!"

Vilkas jabbed futilely at the furry bodies with the butt of his long lance. His curses were lost in the tumult. Jim clung for his life as the wagon heaved like a lifeboat on the high seas and the valuable cargo thumped the side panels.

Two Tanu coercers and an operant human gold, their glass armour glowing fuzzy blue in the swirling fog, galloped up on their chalikos. But their mental efforts were unavailing in the face of the bear-dogs' frenzy.

Move back! Yosh ordered. He unsheathed his Husqvarna and now thumbed it to widest angle. The stun-gun sizzled, sweeping the ground with its beam. There were throttled yelps and moans.

One massive shape lashed out in a final paroxysm, shattering the right front wheel of the Conestoga.

Suddenly, it was very quiet.

A tall form, luminous violet, the trappings of his mount shining with the same eerie light, materialized out of featureless opacity. It was Ochal the Harper, grandson of the ruler of Bardelask and leader of the relief column.

He silenced Yosh's attempts at explanation and the excuses of the coercer knights. "I have found the source of the madness-and the sense of unease that has plagued us all morning." He pointed to the east. "Out there. On the opposite bank of the Rhone. Behold!"

His powerful farsense projected a vision. For the shortersighted people in the train, it was as if the mysterious fog had abruptly become transparent, and the bottomland forest beyond the river as well.

Pouring out of one of the steep tributary valleys that formed corridors into the Alps came an army, arrogant in strength. It quick-marched through the ghostly farseen jungle casting no shadows, its members dark and numberless as a horde of predatory ants, unidentifiable until Ochal's mental eye magnified them and proved them to be Firvulag. They were some four kilometres away, not generating illusion-camouflage as was their usual custom, perhaps trusting in the fog to conceal them-or perhaps not caring whether or not they were detected. They came, giants and dwarfs and medium-sized warriors clad in obsidian battledress, bearing their traditional arms and holding standards draped with festoons of gilded skulls. As they marched they hummed a war chant with notes far beyond the threshold of audibility for Tanu or humans.

But the bear-dogs heard.

The track that the Firvulag army followed led straight into the Rhone bottomland, intersecting the narrow east-bank trail to Bardelask, not half a day's march upstream.

There were at least 8000 warriors.

"It's the main host of Mimee of Famorel," said Ochal, letting the terrible picture fade. "Now the raids and the pretence of Howler responsibility for the outrages committed against my grandmother's city are at an end. The Little People violate the Armistice openly! Doubtless the death of Nodonn Battlemaster served to embolden them."

One of the Tanu coercers said "This is the opening offensive in that conflict that certain of us feared to be inevitable. I cannot speak its name! But we all know Celadeyr's prediction. Tana have mercy!"

Ochal said, "I have already farspoken Lady Armida. My kinfolk, although hopelessly outnumbered, will defend the city to the end."

"Shoo!" breathed Jim. "Never saw so many spooks in my life!"

"Compared to the army that hit Burask, it's a skeleton crew,"

Vilkas growled. "But it'll do. Bardelask's doomed-and the best damn brewery in the Pliocene along with it! Now we'll drink nothing but plonk and jungle juice."