Stamp looked back in time to see this. More bolts hit the village and their fires spiraled upward and joined together. "Firestorm!" he yelled to Etridge as they ran through the village gate.
"Not melodramatic enough. Not enough drama. No fuel for their dreams," Etridge shouted back. The engines of the hovercraft and tanks accelerated in front of them. Light half-tracks scattered at right angles to the road, side-looking radars moving in nervous jerks to stay fixed on the burning village.
They reached the lead hovercraft. It lifted off as they boarded, dipping slightly as its gyroscopes came into phase. Three identical units floated backward, away from the village.
The individual fires kept twisting together until the density of their light cast a shadow against the sun. Branches grew downward from points a hundred meters from the ground, and as they watched, the pillar assumed shape and animation.
"Splendid!" Etridge remarked to the bridge crew when he saw this. "Nearly the same thing they tried at Foxblind. If it really is, it'll have the shape of some wonderful beast, like a minotaur or such. They're incapable of thinking in terms of simple power, always anthropomorphizing this or that so each act has the personal mark of the man behind it. What do you say, Stamp? Two to one it's a minotaur."
"The same device was employed at Thorn River . . . "—trying to appear knowledgeable.
Etridge's face went through a sequence of closed and guarded expressions. "Yes. Except there, they used hundreds of those fire things, and each one had the shape and the face of the last person it killed. We didn't know how to fight them then."
Dust swirled outside the hovercraft's windows as it slid backward. The fiery column danced in the half-light, seeming to grow in rough proportion to the distance they traveled away from it. The planes of Etridge's face matched the lines of the craft's bridge and the flanking turrets on either side of it. "Pointless melodrama. Wasted effort!"
Two men behind him received the input from the circling tanks and from the antennas on the four main ships.
"They never seem to learn or understand," Etridge muttered over the engines. "They always give us enough time."
"Sir, the second unit thinks they have something. They want to experiment."
Etridge nodded, the man spoke into a microphone, and the hovership to their right tentatively opened fire.
All four ships stopped their rearward movement and watched as it continued shooting. Two kilometers away, the fire-beast detached itself from the village and began striding toward them. Etridge's smile came back when the bull's head defined itself.
"Not working very well," Etridge commented absently. "Anyone else read the input differently?" Responding light, chromium against the fire-minotaur's yellow and red, angled out from antennas on the two hoverships on their left. Similar lines were drawn from three tanks racing around the northern side of the creature.
An officer came up behind them. "Rather different from previous stuff. But we're running interference patterns with the scatter antennas too, and I think that might do it."
"All right. Let's get closer."
Stamp placed both his hands on the grab rail and moved his feet apart. He had read and studied the phenomena the men of power had conjured for centuries, but his actual dealings with them had been as remote as most of his contemporaries, those who had grown into the war's world after Thorn River. He had always seen the wizards' might and their own through the reductive prisms of computers.
Now that they were moving forward, diminishing perspective and the beast's own increasing powers made it grow alarmingly in the windscreen's aldiss rings. The glass darkened automatically to compensate for the brilliance.
"Additional presences behind the subject," a man at the console called out.
"Close on them." Etridge's smile widened, breaking his facial planes into patterns of broken glass.
The driver accelerated the ship. Stamp saw more lines of the chrome light emerge from the top of the windscreen and join with the fire from the other craft at a point on the creature's neck. Blocking radiations combined with its own indefinite structure and made it difficult to tell if the beast's raging gestures expressed any problematic agony or were merely part of its slow, dancing attack.
If there was only some sound, Stamp thought, not just the eternally competent murmuring of our own engines and the afternoon light from the armored windows.
Etridge is enjoying this, he also thought, far more than the ship itself was; to it, and to most of its crew, the menace and wonder of the beast was that of an enemy, no more unique or terrible than a rifle squad or a fighter-bomber. Among some old combat units there had been a saying to the effect that "there is only one kind of dead."
They were all older than himself, and had fought this enemy for years before Thorn River. They were absorbed in the ship's dials and scopes; the driver and fire control personnel looked at the minotaur through target and range grids projected onto the windows in front of them. Only he and Etridge had no assigned station and there was nothing in front of them to block or polarize the fire-creature's power. Stamp wondered if the two of them were succumbing to it.
"Cavalry behind it," the man called out again.
"Nothing more?"
"No sir." The man paused to examine the readout. "And these're much simpler. Tanks on the right report they've already eliminated one or two."
"Good. The survivors may be throwing their palace guards against us, Stamp."
Stamp mumbled something he hoped would not show his concern. Two silver dots appeared far above the minotaur. Simultaneously with their sighting, a nimbus of visual anomalies edged the beast's outline.
Every vehicle in the column, except the lightest half-tracks, joined in spinning the cool, sharp lines that wavered and bent only where they passed through the giant.
The hovercraft on their right paused and then resumed gunfire. This time its ammunition was perfectly suited to destruction in the dimension which the creature's life and energy came from. The shells began cratering its body, disrupting the sustaining life that the enemy poured into it, freezing its fire so that it could splinter apart like dense red crystal.
The other main units joined in, replacing their inquisitory lights with gunfire. Stamp felt a release as the reports thudded against the cabin walls and the creature finally bellowed out its pain.
Etridge anticipated his question: "That's not the minotaur, Stamp, but the despair of the man who built it"—turning smoothly to the younger men and then back to the village. "We've shown him something which he'd rather not have seen. Haven't we, Anderton?" The fire control officer accepted the compliment without any sign, keeping his eyes on his ranging scopes. "And now our survivor of power finds that he can't let his little vision go. We've contained his puppet and we've also snared his sustaining powers. Listen to him!"
Etridge crossed over to the right side of the cabin and slid open a window. The cabin was filled with the deafening sound of the batteries and over them, the long pathetic wailing of the fire-minotaur as the chromium lines shackled it, dragging it to its knees and holding it still for their barrage.
The bridge crew clamped their earphones more tightly to their heads and tried to ignore it. Stamp could not, but found it less unnerving than the linear hum of the ship's engines.
The creature lost its form and dissolved back into the low, brilliant fires it had arisen from twelve minutes ago. "Short glory," Etridge said. There was a line of armored deaths, carrying lances made of darkness and mounted on gryphons, behind the flattened village. "Ah! The costume ball!" and clapped his hands together.
The driver edged the throttles forward with what seemed to Stamp to be needless theatricality.
The line stretched for at least two kilometers. They stood utterly, stupidly motionless as the light and the surgical gunfire concentrated on the rider at each end. They refused to move as they were enveloped in Joust Mountain's merciless understanding, refused to show emotion or come to the aid of their fellows when their limbs turned to powder and the gateways their lances defined between their own world and that of their master were brutally slammed shut.
"Are they alive?" Stamp breathed.
"Alive enough for us to murder them. Like I said, Stamp, that is their failing. They must always personify their powers and try to make them the reflection of their own thoughts."
"They're artists. They have to do it that way. It's the only way they understand . . . "
"They understand nothing! That's what they think is the base of their power. Ignorance made into a religion."
The four ships advanced into the village. It had been consumed to feed the creature's minutes of birth and life, but the ships elevated to three meters to be safe. The remaining fires played against their sides, impotent and sucked dry by the ship's light.
"Now . . . " As Etridge spoke to the driver, the hovercraft on their right collided with a thick column of masonry; it had been wrapped in a fire which Anderton's instruments quickly analyzed and found to be of the same composition as the minotaur. Too late; no one had been looking at the fires around them.
The burning rock cut into the ship's left side, shearing away the plenum skirt and gouging into its understructure. The window on that side of Etridge's ship was still open; the screech of tearing metal and ceramic armor hit them along with a last, undefined echo of the minotaur.
The wounded hovercraft spun to the right and dug its nose into the burning ruins. The other ships, although they had identified the fire, did not shoot for fear of hitting it. Its metal structure ignited in five of the nonvisual dimensions, turning white and slagging into a glittering lake.
The fire penetrated the engines and fuel cells. The glass on the right side of Etridge's ship went black except for the open vent window; the light from it drilled into Stamp's retina, threatening to dissolve his heart.
"God, kill it!" Etridge screamed to the computers. The three remaining craft swung their antennas and weapons downward along their own flanks. The batteries went automatic, driving shells of unimaginably complex structures into the remaining humps and masses which hinted at animate power. Gyroscopes rocked violently against the ships' roll axes to compensate for the hammering recoil and concussions rising up alongside the hulls.
Stamp dove at the window and slammed it shut against the physical pressure of the exterior light.
The hovercraft bathed each other in radiations and shells they themselves only half understood. That was enough.
The glass cleared. The fires were gone, flattened into common reality. Only the line of cavalry stood before them; the vanished ship was forgotten. All three hover-ships leveled their batteries upon the northern end of the line, accidentally crushing the nearest tank, and swept along it.
The noise was similar to that of the minotaur and its dying, but now the windows and ventilators were closed and it had the distance of memory. "His most truly beloved," Etridge observed with forced calm. As the distance closed, they could recognize skull faces and shreds of putrefied flesh hanging from seams in their cuirasses and greaves. "The minotaur was a robot. Our man of power gave nothing to it which was of his own but some life. But look how he must love those things. Look, Stamp! Can you see starlight shining through, no, inside their lances! He's given them power of their own. He must trust them greatly."
"We've hit the fourth unit," the driver shouted over the muffled howling. He pointed to his left and the rest of the crew reflexively followed his hand. The hovercraft farthest from them was drawing away, near side tilted down, escaping air driving it across their path against the rudders in full opposite lock. "She'll ground!"
Speed brakes snapped open on their ship and the one next to them. They dug into the air and slowed them enough for the damaged ship to arc in front of them. Its guns and antennas were all pointed at the line of deaths, at maximum elevation raking them and shattering individuals as if they had been made from ivory glass.
"Look at this." Etridge's voice was flat and unemotional in comparison to when he had spoken of the enemy. Then, he had sounded as if he were about to take a rival's love; but the dying craft presented him with no mystery or challenge. The reasons and causes for its actions had been understood before the Wizards' War began. The ship could have never served as the gateway Etridge sought.
He watched the terror spread before the careening ship. Its windows were solid black, so he could not gauge its crew's reaction.
Its magazines detonated and a long club of fire and hard radiation descended on the southern third of the line. It drowned them, burning them from the inside, cremating their interior blankness and turning their peculiar nights into ash.
The cabin darkened again to protect the men from the other ship's arsenal. Ventilator guards snapped shut and nickel steel shields locked over them. The silence returned, now absolute, and the only light was from red battle lanterns.
Navigation and fire control grids were projected across the closed windows to guide them. The completeness of the schematic diagrams showed how thoroughly these enemies were understood. Energy graphs, spectral analysis, frequency and dimensional readings sped crisply along the borders of the windows.
The computers anticipated Etridge's anger. The other ship appeared as a schematic on the left side windows; dense columns of information showed that it was destroying the northern end of the line. Etridge's ship concentrated on the middle, and at a range of one hundred meters it broke.
The coherency of the line fragmented. Individual deaths fell apart or burst into saffron flame or ran straight into the guns of the two ships and the flanking vehicles. Others ran to the east. The instruments traced the lines of power that drew them and, one by one, cut them.
They passed the spot where the second ship had touched down. Readings indicated a shallow gouge in the earth, at right angles to their line of travel, and fatally high radiation levels, but little else.