Or the pegasus riders, centering him in cross hairs drawn with fire in the open air, preparing spells and enchantments of terrible finality.
Or his world had come already, and he had only felt the brush of its inquisitory antennas as they reviewed the power and meaning of everything left alive in the enemy's land.
The last of the three was the most logical. It was proper that his world should come and occupy the vacuum left by the defeat of magic, thus preserving symmetry and balance. But he knew the occupation would be total when it came and that it would find no reason to stop with what might soon be understood as a minor victory.
Individual wires pulsed. His conception of his world's victory shrank as he began to suspect the dimensions of the field on which it had been fought.
The pegasuses' gorgeous ornamentation became the rags of refugees too inconsequential for the forces of either side to destroy. When he was a child, he had watched creatures like them struggling along the roads leading from Thorn River. They had been burned and starved and brutalized by forces so alien that their bodies seemed unsure as to what sort of death was called for. The pegasuses, grazing in their rich field, were the same, for their eyes had been turned to cinders by the things they had witnessed. They had been deserted by their commanders and their creation, and there was nothing left for them. But they, unlike the victims of Thorn River, or of the Third Perimeter or Foxblind, were not yet fully aware of this, so they persisted in their wonder and existence.
Aden touched the long-barreled automatic in its holster. The Office had fashioned it so that it could change the nature and composition of its ammunition in the magazine. The Office, however, had purposely made it fragile and needlessly complex. It was machined to tolerances more suited to match competition than field service. He was not even sure he could remember how to work it.
He resumed walking. The wires continued to pulse for some moments and then left him alone but for the thought of the Office, orbiting through its own strange, self-created nighttime, pondering its own existence and never wishing to approach any answer.
Aden smiled tensely. His skin stretched against the eye patch, hiding its edges and making the stylized eye engraved on it appear to be his own: brown cornea, black iris, brown pupil.
The riverbed was carpeted with sword grass. Scarlet and yellow wildflowers spotted the greenness. Small trees that survived the spring runoff thumped against the plenum skirts of the two hovercraft. Like Joust Mountain, they were flawlessly white, arrogantly perfect despite the dirt and fires that the kingdoms had hurled at them.
The column had waited after the first village, conversing with the computers of their home until they understood what had happened to them. Then they buried what the powers had left of their dead.
Etridge kept asking about the Special Office. Nothing obtrusive, just occasional inquiries as to what this closed Office file or that sealed Office report might have had to say about the way the enemy had moved or what its dark lances might have actually been composed of.
As they had supposed, the animating forces behind the fire-minotaur and the dead cavalries were basically the same as those used for ages, with only minor variations drawn from one or two neglected corners of the parallel spectrums. How they had managed to come upon the column undetected required more study.
When the study group at Saart finally understood it and fabricated machineries to duplicate it, Lake Gilbert broadcast this knowledge to places where the remaining men of power might be listening from. Seven thousand kilometers from the Holy City, the castle of the prince who had carried out the attack and committed his last and most favorite retainers to its success, turned from the sunlight of which his father had built it, to stone and then to rust, and then to slag.
A trio of wind ships hovered above the castle, observing its disintegration. The acuity of their watching nearly took the mystery of the castle's death away from its dying prince and exiled both him and it in the world they could not conceive of fully enough to hate.
Etridge was pleased with the course of the mission. Stamp made an opposing show of his displeasure, hoping to find the point at which Etridge would drop his insane dialogues and simply accuse him of insubordination or treason.
The kingdoms, however, continually provided them diverting nests of lingering magic. Stamp celebrated each irregular assault that hit them. Etridge was similarly prideful when they slowed and then understood each one.
"Reductio ad imperium" had been scrawled around the base of one of the ship's antenna mounts. Each man saw the other staring at it in odd moments, and saw him regarding it as his own. Gradually Stamp came to attach a tremendous weight of bitterness and irony to it. Etridge found it a perfect expression of the soldier's ethos in this war, just triumphant enough to distract that soldier from how far the phrase begged to be taken.
Etridge leaned close to the windscreen, enjoying the torrent of grass passing under the ship. A ranging mast extended twenty meters outward from the leading edge of the ship like a bowsprit, anticipating drops and irregularities in the ground's contours. The smooth, relentless movement put him in mind of his own obsessions. He considered how the appeal of the mysteries and their solving, one by one, acquired their own propulsive force, gradually forming the conviction that the horizon might not prove to be an eternally receding one.
Why, he marveled to his own reflection, did Stamp seem so repelled by such a suggestion? Certainly the searching was the greatest part, not the thought they might someday actually arrive at a complete and literal understanding of the universe. But, he also permitted himself, if such a position could be reached, it might include an understanding of primary creative forces, gods, if you will, and in so understanding them, encompass them and take their measure.
He could not hope to do things like that. He was a soldier, not a theologian or a philosopher. On cue, the jumble of misconnected nerve endings in his right side that the observation of Thorn River had cost him burned lightly. Not badly, but enough to remind him of that place's terror, and that this business of understanding and unraveling had to continue. If men did not continue it, if they allowed the momentum of their victorious strategy to dissipate, then they would have shown themselves to be as careless and blind as the god that created them.
How: that was what they were discovering, but very seldom the
why.
Transmutation, parthenogenesis, animation of the dead, generation of love, psychokinesis, all the dread mechanisms the enemy had used from Heartbreak Ridge to Thorn River. With each understanding, they revealed themselves to be only the operant expressions of deeper and more complex motivations. He recalled an Office memorandum on the subject which he had read years ago, but could not attach any great importance to what it had said.
The only thing one could do, Etridge considered, was to attempt to understand everything. The sum of these understandings might eventually equal and then exceed the understanding of the single motive for all of it.
Etridge laughed as he visualized the personifications of eschatology and existentialism (both comic, lumbering giants, the former dressed in priest's robes and the latter naked) running on convergent arcs, colliding and merging into a single creature whose chief distinction was in the possession of two backsides: the Meaning of the Universe. He forced down his chuckling when he saw that the bridge crew was staring at him.
The valley where he had seen the pegasuses widened out into rolling plains of wild wheat and prairie grass. Groves of cottonwood trees marked the turning points of drainages and streams.
The sky above him was immense. It swallowed the clouds and all other presences within and below it, and turned down the edges of the horizon until one felt one's self trying to balance on one foot to avoid falling and rolling down to it forever. It was nothing like he remembered it to have been. Perhaps the men of power, jealous of the sky's presumption, had kept it shrunken and contained. They had exiled the ocean from Cape St. Vincent because it displeased them. Surely the sky could not have posed significantly greater problems. He wondered how it might have been done, and his face tightened when he thought that if it had been accomplished, then there were machines at Lake Gilbert and Castle Kent working at the problem, translating the gestures and alchemies and ancient disciplines into the precise language of the parallel spectrums, which any man could learn to speak in its single dialect.
On the opposite bank of a stream he saw the imprints of tracked vehicles, a meter across. The tracks led in from the west, followed the stream for a short while and then turned to the south, along his intended path.
Diesel fuel and grease stained the grass. For a moment he found its smell pleasant. At least the vacuum left by the men of power was being filled by something.
One of the tracks passed over a crushed dragon's egg in the semicircle of its stone nest. The unhatched embryo had struggled halfway out of the cracked egg. The ants had carried off its eyes and tongue, leaving the chitinous outer skin; the sun had shriveled its filmy wings and turned the emerging diamonds on its breast and tail to dull pebbles. Once, Aden knew, dragons had been as immortal and as invulnerable as any magician.
He found the first tank the next day. It was hardly recognizable as such, being a mass of crystallized metal shards and melted slag. The wreckage suggested rapid alternations of freezing and burning, shifting back and forth across the spectral planes too quickly for the vehicle's defenses to lock onto any single manifestation of the enemy's assault.
The ground near the wreck was chewed up and littered with shapes Aden assumed to be bones and weapons. He picked up one such fragment and found a dryad's head carved upon it. Her eyes seemed to move even when he held it perfectly still; the face studied him in this way for a minute and then closed its eyes.
Aden put the fragment in his pocket and looked around. Far away, again to the south, dust and smoke rose below a spindle-shaped chunk of rock, floating above the prairie. There was a castle built atop it, and the distance could not diminish its delicacy or its outrageous fantasy. White marble minarets braced against the wind by buttresses of malachite and onyx marked the borders of the island and rose about the central keep. That, too, was of white stone, underlain with the captured light of the moon so that, although there was darkness underneath the island, the castle itself held no shadows.
Following the tracks, Aden saw a line of eight large vehicles and several smaller ones strung out along a ridge a kilometer from the air-island. Three of the tanks or halftracks were burning in ruby and contradictory black.
One of the fires suddenly turned to the same distant blue as the sky. The vehicle inside of it disappeared in the flash, seeming to shrink inside of some gateway the fire had opened rather than being consumed by it.
Aden counted the seconds between the detonation and the sound. It matched his estimation of the distance between them. After all, it had been the death of something from his own world.
He followed the ascending pillar of colorless fire back up to the island. The castle's beauty hypnotized him as he walked. Despite the mental defenses he tried to erect against it, for the mountain garden had shown him how vulnerable he remained to such things, he still found himself irresistibly drawn; the significance of the burning tanks below nearly erased by their graceless deaths.
Richly dressed figures moved unconcernedly along its towers and parapets, reminding him of the river trireme, occasionally gesturing or playing musical instruments whose sound reached him instantly or not at all. Aside from the burning units, there was little activity on the ridgeline, just the revolving dish antennas and ship aerials nodding to the wind. Two or three men wandered around the damaged tanks.
The sky was growing around them, progressively reducing the castle's enchantment to dimensions that fit inside Llwyellan Functions.
The tanks are only watching, Aden thought, and recalled the galleries of Joust Mountain, Kells and Dance, and how they had held their fire while thousands were incinerated for fear that their own actions might distort or contaminate their readings.
Why was the castle fighting at all? Surely its seigneur knew what had happened and why. But, Aden thought as he kept moving toward the ridgeline, if he had known, then he would have necessarily understood his own art, and the despair which had engulfed the kingdoms would have driven him to self-annihilation. Perhaps that was what he was now attempting.
He was less than a hundred meters away when a tank in the center of the line probed the castle's walls with a burst of rocket fire. There was no immediate effect. The gunner paused, probably changing magazines, and then tried again. This time the color that erupted where the round struck was that of the sky, the same that had consumed the other tank. Despite the angle, Aden could make out cracks and fissures spreading outward from the point of impact along the walls' marble facing.
Responding to this success, four other tanks and two half-tracks joined in with similar fire. The rockets left the faceted turrets cleanly and the vaporous trails of their flight remained taut in the still air, except near the walls, where the blast concussions smudged them.
They chipped patiently at the castle, tearing away filigrees of marble and sheets of gold leaf. They were not simply rockets. Aden knew that if he had the Office's eye again, he could have seen the projectiles striking the castle in every dimension and plane it existed in, crushing its beauties into formless, undifferentiated molecular pulp.
The people on the walls became more agitated, their gestures wilder and less assured. One shot blasted a bridge of spider glass from under a running figure. She fell but evaporated before reaching the ground.