Asgard's Heart (21 page)

I did not try it; not because I was certain that it
would not work, but rather that I was afraid that it would not work to our
advantage. We had set out beneath a dull and sullen sky, perhaps for adequate
reason, and I knew enough of the perils of magic to know that a foolish spell
must always rebound upon its user.

The plash of the invisible oars could still be heard
as they dipped into the water to haul us across its surface. I wondered whether
there were fish in the sea which saw us as a marvelous many-legged insect
scudding across the surface, but it was not a cheering thought.

Myrlin was standing at the wheel, holding it loosely,
while the woman looked on. I did not know whether the wheel was such as to need
a man to guard it, or whether the rudder moved with the same innate
intelligence as the oars; I fancied, though, that Myrlin felt better having the
semblance of a job to do. I went to stand beside him, taking my bow and arrows
from the side of the ship to the bulwark's

ledge
that formed the front-facing wall of our platform.

"It seems that they are becoming more
distinct," he said, glancing upward at the circling shadows. He sounded uneasy;
no doubt he would rather postpone our first moment of real danger for as long
as possible, though when it came it would immediately banish any sensation of
having been delayed. I turned to our companion, goddess in mortal guise, to
study her as she stared up into the sky, with an expression of considerable
vexation.

"Too soon," she murmured, and seeing me
looking in her direction, added: "Do not worry, I beg of you. If they
begin to come through now, they will be very weak. Our world will not be
breached so easily."

As if to contradict her, another shadow swooped at
her, zooming from the heights like a black eagle, claws extended to tear and
rend. She could not help but draw her face away, and put up a defending arm,
while the folds of her dark cloak fell momentarily away from her golden armour.

Whether the hand made contact with the shadow-thing it
was difficult to say, but she sustained no hurt from it and the bird-demon
soared away again, impotent still.

It was obvious that the next swoop might not be so impotent,
so dense were the shadows now becoming, so fast and furious in their flight. I
drew my sword, and threw back the cloak, determined to hide from the cold no
longer.

As if glad to meet my challenge, three of the shadows
dived at once, hurtling towards me with wing-tips drawn back. I watched the heads
of the creatures, and saw their bird-like faces dissolve, to be replaced by
features far more humanoid, save for pointed teeth behind gaping lips. Their
great claws thrust out before them seemed to grow as they drew near.

I slashed with the sword, finding it remarkably easy
to wield. For a moment, I had the sensation that the blade itself was only
shadow, not substantial at all, and feared that it could not disturb the attack
of the harpies, but the lack of apparent weight was no reflection of a lack of
effective substance.

The single sweep of the sword cut through all three of
the bird-demons, and it was they who lacked the substance to interrupt its
passing. It cut through them as if they were no less vaporous than the clammy
mist, but as it did it tore them savagely, so that their forms were shattered,
dissolving into blood-red clouds. They had no momentum to carry through their
thrust—the sword caught them and hurled them away, scarlet-and-black shreds
that had lost all semblance of what they had tried to be. They disappeared
over the parapet, on a downward-looping trajectory, but there was no sound of
any splash as they hit the waves.

There surged through me a feeling of such power that I
felt momentarily giddy. The casual ease of the victory imparted such a sense
of exultation that I could revel in the sensation of being a person of great
substance . . . one who would never need to yield to the monsters of the night.
Though reason told me that this was the merest of beginnings, and the most
derisory of all the tests which were to come, still I felt indomitable, as
though I knew for the first time in my existence what it might mean to be a
hero. I still felt as though I might be drunk, but this was the glorious intoxication
of triumph and exultation.

Without meaning to, I followed the course of the shattered
bird-things, moving over to the side of the ship and placing my left hand on
the parapet while I peered into the thicker mists which hid the sea.

I could see no more than I could hear, and the broken
things were utterly gone in the confusion, but while my hand rested on the
parapet something long and black snaked out of the murk as though it came from
beneath the belly of the ship, and wrapped itself around my wrist.

It had the texture of something very soft and slimy,
and yet it tightened in a muscular fashion once it had me in its grip. It put
me in mind of the head of a great leech, and I half-expected to feel the bite
of something acid as it tried to draw my blood. My reaction was one of
instinctive horror, and I tried to pull my hand away with a convulsive jerk— but
that was exactly the wrong thing to do. It was as though the strength of my
backward thrust was immediately reflected in the body of the thing itself, as
though my action had added to its own capacity for elastic reaction. As my arm
reached the full measure of my jerking pull, it was suddenly wrenched back
again, with such force that I nearly overbalanced.

In that moment, I think, there was a real danger that
our defences might be breached by the enemy's first hopeful foray. I could have
tripped, felled by my own unreadiness and clumsiness, and if I had been dragged
over the edge of the parapet and down into the turbulent waters, the shock of
immersion would surely have driven all sense from my mind and left me at the
mercy of whatever half-formed sea- monsters were nascent there.

But I did not fall; my reflexes, however untrained or
doubtfully adapted, caught me up and steadied me, while the sword in my right
hand cut downwards, almost of its own accord, and sheared through the black
tentacle as though it were hardly there.

Again there was a stain as if of blood upon the mist,
but then the loop which wound around my wrist dissolved into the icy air, and
the rest of the thing was gone into the waters.

"Too soon it may be," I shouted to my
companions, though there was not sound enough to require me to raise my voice,
"but it will not stop them. They are at us, and I do not believe that they
will give us pause to rest."

She did not need the warning. Her slender sword was in
her hand, and Myrlin came back from his senseless duty at the wheel, with his
own weapons ready. He towered above me by a full head and more, and as he
whirled his blade about his head, slashing at the demons of the air who came at
him with many ugly faces and countless thrusting talons, he seemed closer kin
to god or titan than to mankind.

More of the black things curled on to the deck, some
climbing in sinuous fashion, others striking like whiplashes. I swung the sword
back and forth, cutting through them as fast as they reached for me, and though
one touched my ankle it had not the time to curl around it.

On the deck below us, the automata came to life at
last, and with their own weapons drawn began to fight against shadows raised as
though from the sea itself—vague things with dog-like heads and arms like huge
apes, which reached for them in ponderous fashion.

The skirmish seemed to last for some while, but it
quickly became obvious that these lumpish things had no more power to hurt our
defenders than the bird-demons and the slimy ropes had to carry us away. When
that fact became clear within my mind, it seemed that the knowledge itself was
enough to put an end to the episode. One moment the demonic birds were crowding
around us as thickly as they could; the next they were gone into the mists,
flown away to leave the lowering sky much brighter than it had been before they
filled it.

I took this as a good sign, until I saw the expression
on my female companion's face, and knew that this was not the way she had hoped
that things would go.

"They know we are here," she said, "and
are prepared to test us. I had hoped to find less quickness of reaction, and I
know now that we have more to fight than mere automata. There is a mind in
this, and I cannot tell how clever it will prove. I fear that we may have
underestimated their capacity to deal with such as we."

"Well then," I said, "we must hope that
they in their turn will underestimate our capacity to deal with such as
they."

As I said it, the mist seemed to darken again, and
renew its iciness, making me shiver even within my cloak. Hero though I was,
armed and aided by gods, I felt a chill course through me, which promised me an
abundance of pain and anguish in time to come.

15

There
were five of us in the truck—or six, if we counted non-humanoids. That was one
more than was specified in our original plans—but I thought we'd be able to
cope, given that the truck we were chasing had eight aboard. As I had anticipated,
the admission of 673-Nisreen to our company met with the unequivocal
disapproval of Susarma Lear, who was still nursing an altogether reasonable
suspicion of the probable perfidy of all members of the Tetron species, but by
the time she realised he'd been added to our strength his position was a
fait accompli.
She had no opportunity to start
an argument about it.

The scion who had been appointed to come with us was
quite indistinguishable, in my eyes, from all her fellows. She suggested that
we should address her as Urania-3, but there didn't seem to be any point in
retaining the number, so I promptly abandoned it.

The sixth member of our expedition might also have
been reckoned to be a scion, though it (or "she," as consistency
demanded that I think of her) wasn't any kind of organic entity. At rest she
looked not unlike a suitcase, but she was studded with connect-points for all
kinds of leads: metal, glassfibre, and organic, and she could extrude
pseudopods of all these kinds in order to hook herself up to virtually any kind
of system she was likely to meet. If necessary, she could slide artificial
neurons into humanoid flesh, just like the hoods of the chairs the Isthomi used
for interfacing with us, but she was equally at home interfacing with the

systems
of the robot transporter.

Her main purpose, to my mind, would be to help us open
the many doorways that must undoubtedly lie between ourselves and the lowest
levels of the macroworld, at least some of which would presumably need external
supplies of power because they had no stored potential of their own and could
no longer draw upon the great network. I had no doubt, though, that she thought
of herself as the real guide and leader of the expedition—a far more powerful
and more versatile incarnation of the Nine than Urania. She had no voice of her
own, but Urania told us that we could refer to her, if we wished, by the name
Clio-14. Again, I promptly forgot the number, and I had some difficulty at
first in thinking of her by name, given that she was so very different in form
from the furry humanoid Clios I had known.

By the time we had loaded extra power cells and the
various kinds of equipment which either the Nine or I considered potentially
useful, the free space aboard the truck was getting very cluttered. Anyone who
was not in the cab had only two choices—they could sit in the gun-turret or lie
down in the narrow bunk-space. To begin with, the colonel took the turret while
Myrlin, Urania, and Clio shared the front seat with me and Nisreen lurked in
the rear.