Beyond their midst, Bronze descends and somewhere a city begins to come apart. The poet raises his cane, but its green fires cannot cancel the blue flare that Bronze exhales now like a fountain upon the world. Now there are only nine cities on Blis and Time is burning them down. Buildings, machines, corpses, babies, pavilions, these are taken by the wind from the flame, and they pass, wavering, by the fairground. Regard their colors. Red? There’s a riverbank, green stream hung above, and flying purple rocks. Yellow and gray and black the city beneath the three lime-hued bridges. Now the creamy sea is the sky and buzz-saw come the breezes. The odors of Blis are smoke and charred flesh. The sounds are screams amid the clashing of broken gears and the rapid-fire rainfall of running feet like guilt within the Black Daddy Night that comes on like unconsciousness now.
“Cease!” cries Vramin, becoming a blazing green giant in the midst of chaos. “You will lay waste the entire world if you continue!” he cries, and his voice comes down like thunder and whistles and trumpets upon them.
They continue to strive, however, and the magician takes his friend Madrak by the arm and attempts to open them a gateway of escape from Blis.
“Civilians are dying!” cries a moment of the General.
A moment of Wakim laughs.
“What difference does a uniform make in the House of the Dead?”
A great green door appears in outline, grows more substantial, begins to open.
Vramin diminishes in size. As the door swings wide, he and Madrak are both swept toward it, as tall waves race and topple upon a wind-slashed ocean.
The armies of Wakim and the General are also raised by the waves of chaos and driven by the winds of change until they, too, are come at last to the green gateway which stands now wide, like a luminous magnet/ drain/whirlpool’s center. Still striving, they flow toward it, and one by one pass within and are gone.
Bronze begins to move very slowly as the gateway closes, but somehow passes through it before the chaos comes upon the empty space it occupied.
Then the roaring and the movement cease, and the entire world of Blis seems to sigh within the moment of its reprieve. Many things are broken and people dead or dying at this moment, which could have been one set thirty-three seconds before Wakim and the General began the fugue which will not now begin upon the litter-strewn fairground with its crevasses and its steaming craters.
Among the fallen archways, the toppled towers, the flattened buildings, salvation strides with its sword of fires unsheathed. The fevers of the day come forth from the Houses of Power, and somewhere a dog is barking.
WRATH OF THE RED LADY
Megra of Kalgan flees, half unseeing now, through the many-formed shapes of the crowd. As she moves, there comes up a new screaming, from out many throats. A cold, wild wind begins to blow among the colors and shapes of the fairground. Looking upward, she sees a sight that holds her eyes upon it and causes her feet to falter, there amid the buffeted tents and the flapping pennons.
It is the Steel General on the back of Bronze, riding. Downward he comes, slowing, slowing. She has read of him, heard of him, for he exists in the apocalyptic writings of all nations and peoples.
Behind her, a pavilion goes up in a burst of green flame. Now, as she watches, a green flare cuts the air, hovers, burns there.
The great beast Bronze changes his course, slowing, still slowing with each stride, as he descends upon the ruined pavilion where she had left Wakim and Madrak the warrior-priest to their combat. She looks back in that direction, but her height, within any crowd, prevents her seeing beyond whatever walls of humanity may be standing near.
Finally, the Steel General himself is lost to her sight, and she continues to push her way through the many-footed mass and toward the latest tent of death.
She calls upon her strength now to force a path where others would be left standing: she moves like a swimmer doing a breast stroke amid bodies large and many-limbed, machines with faces and feathers, women with blinking lights within their breasts, men with spurs at their joints, hordes of ordinary-appearing persons of the six races, a woman from whose blue thorax violin notes constantly emerge, corning now in a frantic crescendo which it hurts her ears to hear, and passes then by a man who carries his heart within a humming casket close against his side; she strikes a creature like an uncovered umbrella, which encircles her with a tentacle in its frenzy; now she pushes past a horde of pimply green dwarves, turns up an alleyway between pavilions, crosses an open place where the ground is hard-packed, caked with sawdust and straw; she moves between two more pavilions as a gradual diminishing of light begins to occur about her, and she strikes at a small flying thing which circles and gibbers around her head.
She turns then and regards a sight that is like nothing she has ever seen before.
There is a red chariot standing, with empty traces, still smoldering with the dust of the sky. Its wheels have dug deep ruts into the ground for a distance of perhaps three meters. Beyond that, there is no track.
Within the chariot stands the cloaked and veiled figure of a tall woman. A lock of her hair hangs down, the color of blood. Her right hand, almost as red as its nails, holds reins which are attached to nothing before the chariot. The flying, gibbering thing at which Megra had struck stands now upon this woman’s shoulder, its leathery wings folded and invisible, its hairless tail twitching.
“Megra of Kalgan,” says a voice that strikes her like a jeweled glove, “you have come to me as I wished,” and the vapors that rise from the chariot swirl about the red women.
Megra shivers then, feeling a thing that is like a piece of the black ice that lies between the stars, touch upon her heart.
“Who are you?” she asks.
“I am called Isis, Mother of Dust.”
“And why do you seek me? I do not know you, Lady- save by reputation out of legend.”
Isis laughs and Megra reaches out and touches a metal strut that bolsters the pavilion to her right.
“I seek you, little rabbit, that I might wreak a terrible thing upon you.”
“Why, Lady? I have done nothing to you.”
“Perhaps, and perhaps not. I may be wrong, though I think not. I shall know shortly, however. We must wait”
“For what?”
“The conduct of the battle which I believe is about to occur.”
“As much as I enjoy your company, I am not about to wait here, for any purpose. You must excuse me. I’ve as errand-“
“… Of mercy! I know-“ and she laughs once more, and Megra’s grip tightens upon the metal strut so that it buckles within her hand and she tears it free of the pavilion, causing it to sway and creak, there at her right.
The laughter of Isis dies upon the air.
“Impertinent child! You would take up arms against me?”
“If necessary, though I doubt I’ll need them, Madam.”
“Then be frozen like a statue where you stand!” and as she speaks, the Red Witch touches a ruby pendant at her throat and a ray of light speeds forth from its heart and falls upon Megra.
Striving against a numbing paralysis which comes then over her, Megra hurls the metal strut toward Isis. It spins like a great gray wheel, a saw blade, a discus, as it falls toward the chariot.
Dropping the reins and raising an arm, Isis continues to clutch her pendant, from which more rays now leap forth. These fall upon the turning metal which for an instant blazes like a meteor and vanishes, a heap of slag falling to the baked ground beneath its place of combustion.
During this time, Megra feels herself released from the icy grip that had seized her, and she leaps toward the chariot, striking it with her shoulder, so that Isis is thrown to the ground and her familiar scoots, chittering, behind a swaying wheel.