Asgard's Heart (39 page)

He seemed to be working hard to make that
point, and I wondered whether my acceptance of ignorance and confusion, or
some fatal weakening of my resolve, was yet necessary to the final victory of
the forces which were labouring so hard in the work of my destruction.

"You switched off the power," I
accused him. "It was the invaders, not the gods made by the builders,
which sought to condemn thousands of worldlets to death."

"Yes," he said, without
hesitation. "We switched off the power. The Isthomi's probing disrupted
the stalemate that had long held us impotent, and we took advantage of it. But
the robots which penetrated the starshell were of necessity very crude, and
that was the only thing which they could achieve—the real space inside the
starshell is too hazardous for
our
kind of being. We have no flesh-and-blood
legions at our disposal, as the guardian gods once had, but the balance of
power is more equal now. When we struck again at the Isthomi, we seized our chance
to conscript a little flesh to our own cause. When we have won our victory, you
may be sure that the power will be returned to the levels; we have need of
Asgard, if we can only dispossess its jealous gods. But you, I fear, must be
destroyed. We cannot tell what the clever Aesir may have made of you, and we
must protect ourselves."

There was an obvious hypocrisy in his
regretfulness. He still wasn't absolutely certain that I was harmless. He was
still trying to delay while the forces of corruption worked their careful way
with my rotting body. I knew that I couldn't move, but I also knew that I could
work magic. I had helped to calm a storm with the power of my voice, and though
I knew no spells or words of power, I knew that there must be some key to
unlock the forces in my mind.

"Loki died too," I whispered—and
my voice, though weak, sounded oddly loud over the clamour of the crowd who
were waiting to see me killed. "On the field of Ragnarok,
they all died!
When it all began
again, there was a new race of gods, unknown save for Balder, whose murder was
undone. You're all going to die. Do you hear me—
you're all
going to die!"

My voice rose as I spoke to what I intended
to be a stentorian shout, but it came out more like a cracked shriek. The
effect was entirely ruined, and the person who called himself Loki, far from
being intimidated by my defiant curse, laughed again, with every sign of
genuine amusement. The crowd joined in with him, and suddenly the random noise
generated by the throng coalesced into a single continuing sound: the sound of
joyous laughter.

I burned with humiliation, and I tried with
all my might to focus every last vestige of my waning spirit into a hot surge
of pure hatred. I was certain that I had the power to raise my arm, to fight
back. In that moment, the sheer magnitude of my rage made me feel like a god—like
one whose power simply could not be denied.

But passion wasn't enough. My arm wouldn't
come up, and when I looked down to command my flesh with the power of my gaze,
I saw why. The maggots were already busy in my flesh. They had devoured me
almost to the bone. Where once there had been white skin there was now a grey
tegument like ragged cloth, pallid and writhing, foul to behold.

Helplessly, I looked up again into the
vicious grey eyes of my accuser and executioner.

He had a sword in his hand now, whose
mirror-bright blade shone like liquid fire in the angry sunlight. As he raised
it to sweep it around in a deadly arc his lips drew back from his teeth in a way
that linked him incontrovertibly with the predator whose appearance he had worn
in his previous manifestation, when I had engaged him in debate before. Perhaps
it was then that I had unwisely given him the opportunity to learn to
understand me.

He was Loki the traitor; he was Amara Guur;
he was the devil incarnate—and I had nothing left with which to resist his
evil.

He reached out with his left hand to grab a
handful of my scaly hair, and held me tight while he brought the sword across
to cut cleanly through my neck.

My rotting body fell to the ground, seared
by the heat of the sun-warmed stone, while he held my severed head aloft,
displaying it to the assembled crowd. He let loose a great wordless howl of
triumph, which said as clearly as I might have wished that he
had
still feared me,
and that there
had
been something I could have done, if only I
had known the way, but that I had failed to discover it.

29

At first glance, they didn't look like wings.

In fact, the things which Urania pulled out
of the bags she'd thoughtfully packed for us looked so much like screwed-up
balloons that I thought I'd got hold of the wrong end of the stick and we were
going down Montgolfier-fashion. No such luck—they were wings all right, but
they were made out of artificial organics, and they spent their inactive time
huddled into tight little balls.

"What exactly are we supposed to do
with these things?" I asked Urania, as I took up one of these unpromising
objects and weighed it in my hand. It felt distressingly light and fragile.

"Think of them as another kind of
robot," she suggested. "They are not so very different from the tiny
things which we used to carry cameras and poison darts down to this level. But
these are adapted for the purpose of carrying humanoid beings. It will not be
necessary for you to do anything—they will hold you securely, and have an
expertise of their own which will enable you to glide down safely. They can
cope with any movements which you make, but it would be as well if you tried to
remain still, spreading out your limbs horizontally until you touch down on the
shell which surrounds the starlet."

Susarma Lear was no more enthused than I by
the sight of these creations, which certainly seemed less elegant in design
than anyone could have anticipated. As inventors went, the Isthomi were easily
a match for the legendary

Daedalus—their home level had a labyrinth to put his
to shame, and minotaurs would have been a mere finger- exercise for their
biotech skills—but I remembered only too well what had happened to poor Icarus.

"Do not be afraid," said Urania
to Susarma Lear. "There is nothing to fear. At least, there is nothing to
fear from the fall itself."

Until she appended the last remark I had
almost managed to reassure myself.

"What is there to fear?" I asked.

"There is breathable air in this
space," she reminded me. "Perhaps it is there only to facilitate the
kind of descent which we are about to make. On the other hand, it may well
support a complex life-system, which would presumably have its predators."

I looked down at the void, and contemplated
the faint, uncertain lights that marked out the disc of the starshell. With the
central power-supply cut off, those lights were most probably the product of
natural bioluminescence. The outside of the starshell was a planetoid in its
own right— though it was like no other planetoid in the known galaxy. An
asteroid that size couldn't hold on to any atmosphere to speak of because it
would be too light, but this one had air by virtue of being in an enclosed
space. The combination of very low gravity and relatively high atmospheric
pressure must be unique, and the life-system native to such an environment
would probably be highly idiosyncratic. But everywhere there was life, there
were predators and prey—and the hunters, presumably, would be well used to the
darkness.

Myrlin handed me something else which
Urania had taken from our luggage. It was a handgun—a needier. He gave one to
Susarma, too, although she still had the Scarid crash-gun holstered at her
waist.

"Carry it," Myrlin suggested.
"But if you have to shoot, try not to point it in my direction."

She favoured him with a nasty scowl. She
had chased him half way across the galactic arm with every intention of
murdering him, and had thought for a long time that she had succeeded. She had
probably never felt so good in all her life as when she thought she was gunning
him down, and though she was a trifle saner now than she had been then, she
hadn't exactly learned to love him.

673-Nisreen refused the offer of a weapon,
excusing himself on the grounds that the injury to his arm would prevent his
using it effectively. The long ride on the motorcycle hadn't done the broken
limb any favours, and he was obviously feeling more than a little discomfort.
But he wasn't about to turn back; he was determined to be in this to the bitter
end.

I watched Urania place a mass of folded
flesh on Myrlin's back, and I saw the thing beginning to unwind, sending
tentacles around his neck and torso in a complicated web. It looked strong,
but it also looked rather sinister, and I couldn't help remembering those
tentacled monsters that had come so close to stopping Tulyar's party. No wings
spread out as yet from the pulpy lump that was left. It just rearranged itself
on either side of the life-support pack that was hugging the android's spine
between his shoulder- blades.

Myrlin inspected the bits of it he could
see apprehensively. He knew the Isthomi better than any of us, and was usually
inclined to trust their word without the slightest hesitation, but it takes a
lot of faith to accept unquestioningly the assurance that when you jump into an
enormous hole, a rubbery pink mess will promptly convert itself into a set of
wings which is already trained to keep you safe.

673-Nisreen looked even more unhappy,
despite the reputation the Tetrax have for inscrutability. Myrlin told him that
he would try to stay close to him, and I ventured the opinion that we had all
better try to stay together, although we would perforce have to be very
careful if we had to start shooting.

The thought of having something to shoot at
usually lifted Susarma Lear's spirits, but she looked very grim now. She had a
special frame of mind that she reserved for combat situations, but she hadn't
yet been able to define this as a combat situation.

"Go carefully," I told her. "The
guys with the headlamps are on your side. Chances are that if there's anything
big down there it'll be no more lethal than those moths that mobbed us up
above. It may be wiser to save our ammunition for 994-Tulyar and his
friend."

When we were all kitted out, Urania simply
vaulted the barrier and launched herself into empty space, hugging Clio to her
chest. She didn't have a gun, but she had shown not the slightest sign of
apprehension or anxiety. When she had put on frail flesh she clearly hadn't
acquired all the hangups that fleshy creatures usually have. She was of the
Nine, and she had their perfect faith that what was properly planned would
always work.

It would have made me feel a lot better if
I could have watched her wings sprout and seen her dive flatten out into a
graceful soaring glide, but she was leaping into darkness, and she was out of
the reach of our feeble beams of light before the thing on her back had a
chance to
get
its
act
together. I was prepared to wait, figuring that once
her equipment had got itself into gear she might fly back up and favour us with
a brief glimpse of her new accomplishments, but she didn't.