He was growing sick and did not know why. It was like the sicknesses he had felt each time he left Gedwyn. It grew stronger. If only the tanks and the castle would leave, both of them. Let the tanks go on with their explorations and let the mountain drift on its mage-wind for the few years left to it.
The Office's gun was in his right hand. The grip hummed like a captive insect as its circuitries changed and modified the composition of its ammunition. The wires under his scalp were hurting again, feeding undecipherable impulses into empty connectors around his left eye socket. For the first time he wondered if the secrets the eye had observed were still inscribed on the individual atoms of the melted spheres, garbled, confused but possibly retaining a singular logic.
It was a double-action automatic that could be cocked and fired with one hand. He raised the gun to eye level. One of the men who had been working around a burning tank saw him and shouted. His voice was lost in the rocket fire and crack of splitting masonry.
He started running toward Aden, looking back over his shoulder at the floating castle. Fires were beginning in its courtyards and the island itself tilted strangely on its axis. Fragments of the bolt that crushed the lead tank hit the man as he ran, turning him to the color of the sky and then to white ash.
Aden's gun fired at the same time. The gun barely moved as pistons the diameter of human hair jumped backward along its hexagonal barrel to absorb the recoil. The safety was on, and his right index finger was resting against the outside of the trigger guard.
The weapon had been pointed at a tank that was not firing, but which had been watching with its antenna arrays. He could not see the bullet hit, but one of the vehicle's slab antennas abruptly stopped rotating. As the gun intended, for it adjusted its ammunition to conform to the nature of its target, the communicative chain was broken; Aden saw this in the suddenly erratic rhythms of the other antennas.
This could not be right, he thought wildly. The gun fired again, hitting an identical antenna on the tank immediately behind the first. "This is not my work!" he said aloud to the tanks. "My ideas aren't that . . . " The gun fired a third time, and the untouched antennas jumped and spun as if they were frightened birds. Some twisted around to regard him with nervous intensity while others wavered between him, the castle and targets he could not see.
Light came arching down from the keep, striking a tank and turning it to ice. The other units responded with ferocious bursts of rocket fire, but only half of the shells hit and a third of those detonated. Trumpets and drums sang out from the castle, at once strident and fearful; they were pitched too high and often broke and faltered in the middle of calls that needed piercing clarity. Flags ran up and down the towers without apparent purpose.
Aden holstered the gun, his hands shaking with fear and uncertainty as if he expected it to forcibly resist. It hummed against his chest in the same frequency as the wires of his cranial net. He backed away, first cautiously and then at a run, running as the soldier had, looking back frantically at the continuing exchange of fire.
His sense of distance vanished in his panic. The shock of his knees locking too far above the ground drove up through his frame. He was strong and practiced in the uses and limitations of his mutilations, but there was too much surrounding him here. He had never seen the two forces actually joined in combat, reducing each other to powder, each force imprisoned by the ground on which they had to stand to strike across their divergent universes. He had lived all his life in a borderland wide enough for the Office to cultivate its extravagant paradoxes and contradictions. There was nothing but an interface around him, the two realities jammed up against one another, drooling maniacally and blindly into each other's universes with no room left for him at all. There had to be room, he was shouting to himself.
Both sides were desperately squandering their powers when he looked again. The island descended until it almost touched the earth. It tilted and spun with the same irregular rhythm of the antennas. Strangely lighted shafts traced outward from the castle. They ripped into the line of torn and burning vehicles, destroying some but failing to visibly affect others. Some of the shafts struck outward, cutting long, smoking furrows in the thick prairie grass and setting it afire; others lanced upward toward the zenith, trying to wound the sky.
The shooting by the surviving tanks became equally erratic. Some of the projectiles slammed into other vehicles while others missed hitting anything, detonating kilometers away on the prairie or rising upward like star shells, casting shadows down into the castle's interior.
The sounds that reached Aden over the pistoning of his own heart were like the screechings of fatigued metal pulling itself apart under impossible stress.
Aden stopped when he heard this and turned to watch the underside of the island dig into the ground. It tilted forward, digging a trench toward the tanks. He could see into the courtyards and gardens inside the walls. The perspective momentarily disoriented him for it seemed as if he was looking down on the castle from some altitude, rather than standing on the ground. It was the same illusion that the sky and the distant, sloping horizon played upon him when he first saw the island.
The building cracked apart and slid from its foundation; then the island itself dropped down onto the vehicles. There was the blue light again, an oval splash of sky reaching down into the earth, ignoring the boundaries of the horizon, spreading outward to where Aden was, threatening to cut the ground from under him and plunge him into a gulf of metal-colored sunlight, without limit or definition.
The concussion caught him around the hips and in the small of his back and lifted him with scornful gentleness. It carried him upward, through the sky and then toward a growing circle of blackness that he entered. Within it there was no sound or movement but the distant humming of the wires inside his skull and the Office's gun puzzling over this new environment, postulating what sort of enemies might live within it.
Hovercraft were like ships, Etridge was fond of pointing out. They answered their helms slowly and with an imprecision that demanded a practiced hand at the wheel. They had to be sailed over the earth. Their routes of passage had to be carefully planned for inclination, surface integrity and clearance between landmarks. All that, at sixty-five kilometers an hour. A properly handled two hundred tonner could be an impressive sight, racing across a foreign plain, the ground beneath it turning to dust as if it had been ignited, antennas and gun turrets regarding the passing landscape with disconcerting stability.
Stamp was glad at this moment that Etridge had selected him as his aide, if only to have been on the hover-ships and not the tanks. But he still would have felt more comfortable if they were following along with their treads and wheels and jouncing antennas. Etridge had been told by Lake Gilbert that they had been wiped out, and had been asked what the hell they were doing out there in the first place. Etridge replied, as he had before, that in view of sharply decreased enemy activity, a reconnaissance in force was justified. But so far into his lands? Lake Gilbert persisted. Etridge played with the radio spectrums so that it appeared that his position was nine hundred kilometers west of where they actually were.
The lack of solid information as to the column's destruction pleased Stamp, as did Etridge's scarcely concealed anger with it. He noted how the veins and muscles stood out from the old man's neck and how the planes of his face jerked from calm for the benefit of the crew, to repressed fury as he again reviewed the readout tapes and the last communications with the column.
"The men of power still seem to be around in some force."
"And ability." Etridge balled up a sheaf of papers and threw it into a corner. The hoverships were traversing a long canyon floor and they bucked and rocked as the helmsmen braked with their engines and drag skids.
"We may not be so far along as we thought."
"We are. The tanks had that, whatever that fairy-tale contraption was, blocked and halfway understood. It should have been turned into dust."
"It was," Stamp mentioned gratuitously.
"So were our own people, goddamnit! There was no reason for it." Etridge picked up another sheet of printout. "No, that's not right. There are reasons. They just look like questions right now. Here." He held the sheet under Stamp's chin and then snatched it back. "Multiple readings, 'jokers' we called them before Thorn River, showing up just when the column signaled that they'd figured out the castle's power."
"Another mystery, another manifestation of that magician's way of doing things that they couldn't analyze before it got them.
We
didn't see the power of that fire-beast when it came in. It was even hidden from the wind ships."
Anderton came up to the console and braced himself. "Pardon me, sir, the readings aren't completely unknown. If you'll look along the third and fifth lines you'll see they're identical with the ones we picked up a few weeks ago, when we asked Lake Gilbert about the Special Office files."
Etridge's eyes turned inward. "You're sure?"
"Just about. Not only the same sort of power indications, but maybe the same person or entity."
"All right. That could make sense. Tell Lake Gilbert that . . . "—seeing Anderton's question—"tell them again that we have got to have access to their files."
"If we gave them the reason," Stamp ventured carefully, "wouldn't that indicate just where
we
are and what we are really doing?"
"But we are not here, Stamp. We're just making a border land reconnaissance as standing orders and my rank as director of Joust Mountain both obligate me to do."
"Then it seems we will be playing the game the Office used to."
"The game was never played because that player never existed." Etridge's voice showed he was forcibly suppressing the destruction of the tank columns and the loss of the castle's mysteries. He rubbed his jaw lightly. "But if we are doing that, where do you think it will take us?"
"To victory!" Anderton replied mechanically, though the question had been directed to Stamp.
They traveled beyond the range of the wind ships. That was another advantage of the hovercraft. Although they were restricted to relatively flat surfaces and gentle gradients, their tremendous lifting capacity allowed them to carry the shielding necessary for fusion motors.
Large animals of reassuringly non-magical varieties were unexpectedly plentiful with the warming weather, so food was no problem.
Stamp had hoped that the distance they put between themselves and home might have eroded morale and forced Etridge to turn back. Instead the men seemed to draw closer to Etridge. The lack of any other authority from home gave his fanaticism space in which to grow and acquire the appeal that Heisner had found so terrible.
The frequency of enchanted ruins had obligingly increased as they moved farther into the kingdoms. At each one, they stopped and studied until they had understood the details of its construction and the heritage of the man of power it had been built to honor or protect or entomb.
There were small engagements too, but nothing like the fire-minotaur and the dead cavalry they had encountered at the first village. Only forlorn and solitary hydras, poisoned wells, badgering homunculi the size and shape of bats, all hideous little dreams that the ships' computers easily handled.
They lost no more than one or two men to each of these irritations. Stamp perversely speculated as to whether Etridge was not also studying their deaths as well as those of the monsters that had inflicted them.
They were within two days of the Holy City. The land around them was covered by a magnificent forest of oak and ironwood trees. Many of the boles on the trees had been laboriously carved or had naturally grown into semi-human masks. They had to move slowly, while the laser guns of the lead ship cut an avenue for them. Stamp watched the faces drift by as they passed, many of them charred and smoking from the light, and they regarded him with murderously tranquil eyes.
Anderton explained that the trees were endowed with unusual phototropic tendencies. The carvings were also the result of gene mutation and when the sensitized bole-endings picked up side flashes from the lasers, they naturally followed. There really was movement and apparent changes of expression, but it was the mindless reaction of cells to ordinary occurrences.
Against this, Stamp pointed out the extraordinary naturalness of the faces in the way they moved and narrowed their eye-carvings, tightening the bark around the skulls that might have been carved underneath them. Anderton replied, "suggestion," and offered to show him the psychological gradients to prove it.
In any event, the gunner continued, there was no need to worry. Morgan, the life-analysis man, had found evidence of rapid gene deterioration. The power that had forced the trees into their simulation of watching, perhaps as an elaborate mockery of the masses of antennas that surrounded the cities of their own world, was located in the Holy City, and it was failing. Soon the forest would be like any other and Anderton remarked that he might like to come back when he retired from the Border Command and build a house from the fine, sturdy trunks.
The lasers burned away the forest for a radius of seven hundred meters when they set down that night. Etridge ordered that their full power be shunted into the guns once the lift engines were shut down, and they paved the cleared ground with a seamless sheet of green glass five centimeters thick.
Their losses had demanded that the crews spread themselves more thinly than they would have liked. It was therefore easy for Stamp to enter the ship's auxiliary radio cabin unnoticed. He shut and dogged the door behind him and sat down at the console. Why, he asked himself a dozen times before concluding that there was no answer, did he out of all the survivors have the need to cling to the ruins of magic. Certainly Etridge's abilities of command had been sufficiently demonstrated; why then did he further judge the nature of the mission that the man had undertaken.