"Very good, after seven hundred years."
"Better than good," Bock warmed to the subject. "These people never seem to have touched the land. Bauxite, rare earths, pitchblende so rich I'd think that's what makes parts of this country glow at night, copper lodes you hardly need to refine. And all that gold and silver and lapis lazuli they conjured up out of mud is transmuting back into stable nitrogen and phosphorus compounds. The land'll be a garden. It'll be like coming to a new country." Bock looked out the ship's windscreen, fitting his personal mythologies into degrees of latitude and longitude, feeling the earth whole again between his compass and dividers.
They were wrong about the man. He's ours, just infatuated with their stage dressings; it's part of growing up on one's way to attack the godhead. Etridge smiled and Bock thought it was to share his delight in the new land.
"Sir!" the man at the wheel called out to Etridge. "The City!" The trees thinned out as they came onto the plain around the City's walls.
Etridge pushed his hand forward and the engines accelerated in response, blurring the late summer grasses beneath them.
The windows cleared to show the City, long quays and stumps of cranes fronting the skyline of dissolving minarets. Stamp had a notebook open and recited the names of the structures he matched up with old photographs or with the multi-spectrum pictures the unicorn's eye had sent back.
Curving roads faced with marble intersected their path. Grass and weeds had pushed between the paving blocks and were already splitting some of them in two. Piles of skeletons could be observed on either side of the ships; each one had a small creature playing a flute or lyre or other instrument standing beside it. Stamp saw them raise their heads from their playing and stare at the approaching ships.
As they sailed by the players dropped their instruments and expressions of sadness crossed their remotely human faces. Stamp knew the white sides of the hovercraft retained their gleam and polish and speculated as to whether it was the ships or the creatures' own reflections which caused them to look that way.
Anderton reported that the players held no power other than that which sustained their lives; they posed no overt threat. The source of the power itself was identified and traced to the City. Anderton requested permission to hit one of them, but Etridge said it would hardly be worth the trouble.
The City's dimensions sharpened as they approached. The port of Cape St. Vincent had been absorbed by an incredible mass of palaces, guild halls, temples, private fortresses, circuses and baths. They had all seen the reconnaissance photos and the architects' elevations posted for a hundred meters along the main corridors of Joust Mountain. But they had not been prepared for this. Even Etridge. He judged that the City was already in an advanced state of decay. What could its beauty have been like five or twenty years ago? It was possible, he admitted to himself, that the force of the City's splendor alone could have stopped our missiles in mid-flight and smothered the blast of their warheads.
That was what the Special Office had dealt with every day for three hundred years.
"Ever seen colors like that? Not like last night, no, but look, look. . . "
"Jeez, that dome, to the left of those three towers. You have that map?"
"
H
Town itself. I'd never thought I'd get to see it standing up or even want to."
"Ten, possibly fifteen kilometers."
"Imagine the effort that went into that. Must have taken at least . . . "
The voices rose over the engines.
"And the lot of it falling to pieces like wet paper," Etridge said loudly. "Look at them." He pointed out at the gaping memorialists. "Look how much in love they were with their own power and now with their own death. They were in love with themselves, so deeply they acknowledged nothing else." The ships passed on either side of a tangle of skeletons with its attendant player, and the blast from their supporting air cushions scattered them like jackstraws.
The conversation returned to the normal subjects of range, speed, navigation, energy analysis. Etridge pressed his hands together on the grab bar and permitted his eyes to wander away from the City. If only we were all Andertons and Bocks. He knew that if Stamp now agreed with him it was as much from unacknowledged hatred of the City and the wizards for failing as from any allegiance to him. They had proved themselves weak and vulnerable. However long their threat would linger in the world, it had shown itself capable of defeat and could therefore be feared with a righteousness that hid one's sense of divine betrayal.
Etridge wondered briefly how much of his own thoughts were motivated by loyalty to the world's way of doing things, and how much could be attributed to the wizards for having allowed themselves to be defeated and their dreams with them. Had he seen that, too, at Thorn River?
Stamp waited beside him, referring to the notebook and making corrections on the maps with a pen. Bock was seated to the right of the helmsman; his arms were braced on the control panel as he patiently took photos of their approach. A cable connected the camera to the ranging computers and made it unnecessary to constantly adjust the focus.
"Have you found an opening yet?"
The pilot gestured toward the northern end of the walls that faced them. "Gate Five."
"What did
they
call it?"
"The Teachers' Door," Stamp volunteered; his voice was flat and abstracted.
"Good. After all, we're here to learn. Aren't we, Bock?"
Bock nodded behind his camera. "All we can."
"All there is," Stamp continued in the same tone.
"Anderton. Tell the second unit to find a position up in those hills where they can see as much of the City as possible and still be in range of everything but their smallest stuff. Make sure the area is secure. If they can avoid those musicians and their pet bone heaps, they should. No souvenir hunting. And constant surveillance through all the spectrums as long as we're inside."
"How far in can we take the ship?"
Stamp flipped to an aerial photograph of the City; it was in infrared, so it had the appearance of a negative. "This avenue"—he indicated with his pen—"leads from the Door to a plaza, here. From there we can take either this street or this one into the old section of town. That's where the only real power readings are located."
"The unicorn, do you think?"
"The position is roughly the same as that of the transmission we got last night."
"The eye, too?"
Stamp shrugged. Another enemy blunder. Even he had been able to find it. A year and the poor beast had not caught on to the fact that it was still revealing itself and its master, if he was still around, to the world. "Same position, same power characteristics. Both of them running on identical lines."
Etridge found himself momentarily depressed by the other man's words. Unavoidably, he felt that he had taken the belief from Stamp, rather than having merely shown him how fragile and insubstantial it was. Soon, he thought, the disappointment will break up enough to allow the hatred and contempt to surface; then the desperate intoxication of the pursuit would overtake him. That was the way it had worked after Thorn River.
The other hovercraft fell behind and then glided away from them.
Their ship paralleled the City's western wall. Fragments of vast mosaics depicted the heads and limbs of unimaginable beasts, great armies of gilded warriors and the slaughter of hovercraft such as their own.
Etridge wished that the crew was speaking again, if only in astonishment at the walls. The quiet in the cabin was that of the unbeliever in the cathedral, equally awe and embarrassment, each emotion reflecting back upon the other and magnifying it. There were only a few bodies this close to the walls. There was nothing around which could dilute the size and majesty of the City with its pathetic defeat.
At least there were the engines and the sounds of the scopes and the antenna drives and computers, all of them thoroughly unimpressed with the ruins whose binding forces they had striven for years to untie.
Etridge knew that the application of certain radiant energies would instantly obliterate every mosaic that remained. Others would cause the walls themselves to collapse—which they would do of their own accord within a year. That would be incorrect. He might bury the unicorn before his ships could understand it.
The unicorn was a servant, possibly still serving its master though he had died. He had been the City's greatest magician, if the carefully edited reports of the Special Office could be believed. The lines of power that still connected him to his servant must be found and followed.
There it was. Etridge felt his energy returning. He sensed it growing in Stamp and Bock and Anderton too.
Something at last to occupy the field that had been deserted for the first time in seven hundred years, something overwhelming enough to contain and animate their mortality and rage.
Carefully now, he reminded himself. This too was a spell that could be broken like all the others. He learned how to preserve it at Thorn River when thousands were incinerated while he gently probed and tapped against the skins of their destroyers. "Are we near the gate?"
"One kilometer."
"There should be an approach road. Set it down there, five hundred meters from the Door. We'll wait for the other unit to get established, and then go in tomorrow morning. Stamp and I, and two more men will be on foot. Walking speed, and try to be as careful as you can. I'm sure the museum people will want to see everything as authentically as possible."
"Tourists," Anderton snorted.
"No," Etridge said lightly. "Remember, gentlemen, we are not here. We are hundreds of kilometers to the west, exploring border lands recently vacated by our distinguished adversaries."
"I don't think Lake Gilbert cares where we might be." The desolation remained in Stamp's voice. So many things were being taken from him so quickly: the consequence of having clung to them too long.
"So much the better. We can live with their indifference. If they did want to know where we really were, I think it might be just as much to stop us as help us along." Mutinous talk, even for a commander on the edge of retirement and a continent away from his headquarters.
They drew level with the Teachers' Door, swerved to face it and then settled to the road's surface. Etridge appreciated the drama of the scene and hoped he was not overplaying it.
Anderton leaned over in his chair and touched his sleeve. "Presence on the walls, sir."
Below Aden and several hundred meters to the west, the boat-shaped hovercraft waited while an identical unit sped away toward the hills he had just come down from. The purity of their whiteness burned into his eye and made it difficult to distinguish the turrets and antenna domes that pebbled their topsides.
Still only two of them. He looked again and recognized Border Command chevrons on their vertical stabilizers. If the world had chosen to ignore the direction pointed to by the Taritan Valley, the air would have been thick with transports, wind ships and armored helicopters bringing men to bury the dead palaces under linear steel and polymeric roadbeds straight as rifle shots. Instead there were two renegade ships.
He reached the street. Withered, whitened trunks of jewel-maples in onyx planters bordered it, the skeletons of grotesque birds caught in their branches as the sparrows had been in Gedwyn's garden. Aden sat on the edge of one and tried to calm himself. He knew the City. They did not. But they had photos and maps and possibly the image that the eye,
his
eye had sent back to the Special Office. The ships could see through walls. They could probe into solid nuclear masses and listen to the sound of his breathing on the other side.
The wires under his skin were inert. Coldness occupied the empty space where the eye had been. The Special Office was absent this morning. Only its weapon remained, and its eternal humming seemed to be of the same range and frequency as the singing of the memorialists.
That parallel was too close. Both the Office and the men of power had withdrawn and vanished. One left the gun; the others had left the singers lamenting over their remains. The Office has left its own memorialist, too, he thought as he ran his hand over the blinded side of his face: me.
He got up again and found walking surprisingly easy. I am too young, but that is acceptable. I am scarred, but most of the wounds are on the outside and all but the largest two are healed. Though they are Border Command, they cannot know how to deal with real Special Office people. God, Special Office people barely knew how to deal with themselves.
Better, he murmured, and found the skin loosening around his jaw and cheekbones. "These ironies," he began to the passing warehouses, "are not necessarily self-destructive. They can be as amusing as the tricks of your magicians have been. One can hide inside of them, be protected . . . " He cut himself short when he became aware of how loudly he was speaking; they could be listening, through the walls, from kilometers away.
They might not be the only dangers. There was hunger and thirst. His rations of dried meat would be adequate for another week, and there was water for three or four more days. The wells of the City had always been infused with magic (the properties of those in the red light quarter, he remembered distantly, had been renowned through half the kingdoms of magic). Unnameable plasmas, many which he knew to be imperceptible to his gunsight, could fill the spaces between water molecules. The City could abound in mystical booby traps, snares, hair-triggered spells that might have enough power left to them to kill him.
His steps became more certain. Just like the old days. Perhaps one or two of the men of power remained, disguised as homunculi, or statues, or merged into the very person and being of the unicorn and its attendant.
The war, if one's premises were properly phrased within one's mind, might still be on. The awful gateway of death need not yet be entered to meet the nearest enemy.