“Shoot!” shrieked Richard. “For God’s sake, shoot!”
Claude took one deep breath. He said, “Steady, son,” and aimed, depressing the fifth stud of the Spear of Lugonn just as the little blue lights centered themselves in the weapon’s sight.
An emerald bar jabbed once at the spangled earth. Where it struck, the rock went white, yellow, orange, roiling crimson like a flame-armed starfish. Claude fell sideways and the Spear clanged to the deck. The belly hatch started to close.
Lightning balls bounced and crackled. The old man felt one of them strike him in the back, rolling up his spine from buttocks to the base of his neck, burning all the way. The interior of the flyer was filled with smoke and a smell of burnt flesh and fabric. There were sounds, too, Claude discovered, as he studied the scene from afar, a sizzle as the remaining two energy balls sought their targets, curses and then a thin scream from Richard, a whimpering sob from Angélique as she tried to creep toward him over the smeared deck, someone breathing in and out in harsh, rhythmic persistence.
“Get it away from me!” a frantic voice cried. “I can’t see to land! Ah, dammit, no!”
A jarring crash and a slow tilt to one side. Claude felt a breeze (amazing the way it seared his back) and the hatch opened. A peculiarly angled surface of grassy ground, gray and dim in the first light of morning. Richard sobbing and cursing. Angélique making no sound. Voices shouting. Heads poking up through the hatch, again at that odd angle. Wails from that silly youngster. Old Man Kawai. Amerie’s familiar tones: “Go easy. Go easy.” Felice spitting obscenities when somebody said she was going to get her armor all messed up.
“Put himover my shoulder. I can carry him. Stop your wiggling, Claude. Silly old fart! Now I’m going to have to walk all the way to the war.”
He laughed. Poor Felice. And then his face was upside down among her green skirts and he was jouncing up and down and he screamed. But after a little bit the movement stopped, and they laid him on his stomach and something touched his temple, making the pain and the rest of it grow muzzy.
He said. “Angélique? Richard?”
Unseen, Amerie replied, “They’ll recover. You all will. You did it, Claude. Sleep now.” Well, how about that? And for a moment he saw the fiery starfish again, but with crimson and gold limbs expanding, branching out among the hapless helpless firefly patterns of Finiah streets in the instant before the hatch of the flyer slammed shut. How about that… and if the lava kept oozing out of the old Kaiserstuhl volcano for even a little while, it was going to be a long time before they mined any more barium in the regions around there.
“Don’t worry about it, Claude,” Felice said.
And so he stopped.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Half-dozing in the dead hour before dawn, Moe Marshak and the other human troops on duty in Finiah had mistaken the first blast of the photon weapon for a lightning stroke. The thin green beam had lanced out of the stars, barely missing the Rhineside wall that the gray-torc garrison manned and demolishing an adjacent mess hall inside the compound. Marshak was still gaping at the flames consuming the wreckage when Claude’s second shot struck the Number Ten bastion squarely, breaching the fortification not a dozen meters from Marshak’s station. Great blocks of granite flew in all directions and the air boiled with smoke and dust. Oil tubs that held the watch fires spilled in the concussion and sent blazing rivulets racing down the cracked walkway.
When Marshak was able to get a grip on himself, he rushed to look through one of the embrasures. There in the fog-blurred waters below were the boats.
“Alert!” he shouted aloud; and then his mind sent the alarm on the declamatory mode, amplified by his gray torc.
Manhak: Invasion viaRhine! Wallbreach StationTen!
Captal Wag: Howthehellmany be there Moe? Howmany boats?
Manhak: Wholefuckin’ river FULL!! Eightyhundred who can count damnfog bastards everywhere Firvulagboats but letmesee yes! LOWLIVES TOO! Repeat Lowlives + Foe invading. Landings! Rocks swarming damnfuckers penetrating breach estimate hole maybeninemeters max.
Comet Formby: All troopsofwatch to StationTen. General alert RhineGarrison to arms. Dutyobservers scan/report Defensiveunits to wallstations… CANCELCANCELCANCEL! Defensiveunits to garrisoncompound! Invader penetration compound!
Commander Seaborg: Lord Velteyn. Alert. Firvulag and human invasion force has penetrated the city fortifications at breached Number Ten Station. Countering.
Lord Velteyn of Finiah: Kinfolk arise and defend! Flyers to saddle! Na bardito! Na bardito taynel o pogekdne!
Chief Burke and Uwe Guldenzopf led the mob of Vosges Lowlives and outland volunteers up the steep rampart and across the tumbled nibble of the breakthrough. Vitredur arrows and crossbow bolts rained down from the battlements, but until the defenders could redeploy at ground level, the invaders would have a brief advantage. As bad luck would have it, the breach was within the grounds of the principal Finiah garrison. In addition to the confusion caused by the mess hall conflagration, which was spreading to adjoining structures, a chaliko stable had been broken open by falling debris and numbers of the great animals were loose.
Three soldiers ran from the guardhouse at the compound gate. “Take ’em,” yelled Burke, and howling desperados fell upon the little force and cut it to pieces. “Out of here! Into the city streets! and get this gate off the hinges!”
Troops were pouring from the barracks, some with their armor only half strapped on. Free-for-all clashes erupted everywhere in the murk as invaders scrambled through the broken wall while the human minions of the Tanu strove to press them back. The irregulars trying to unhinge the gates were attacked and overwhelmed, and soldiers swung the heavy metal grille shut, locking it.
“We’re sealed in!” Chief Burke jumped on top of an overturned feed wagon. His face and upper torso were painted in the old war patterns and he had the wing feather of a fire-eagle thrust into his knotted, iron-colored hair. “Hit the sonnofabitches! Get that gate back open! This way!”
He saw Uwe fall beneath a sword-wielding gray-torc and leaped down, brandishing the wide tomahawk Khalid Khan had forged for him. The blade sank into the soldier’s crested bronze kettle-helmet as though it were made of pasteboard. Burke hauled the body off to find Ouldenzopf lying flat on his back, one hand clutching his breast and an expression of agony on his bearded face.
Burke knelt. “Did he nail you, bubi?”
Struggling up on one elbow, Uwe groped inside his buckskin shirt. Bone-colored bits gleamed in the lurid light “Only my second-best meerschaum, dammit.”
The Lowlives remained hemmed in, unable to break out of the area in the immediate vicinity of the garrison complex. Those crowded in the breach were pressed both by the defenders and by their own comrades coming up from the beachhead. A wall of panic arose. Some invaders fell and were trampled. A garrison officer wearing a silver torc and full blue-glass body armor directed a unit of halberdiers that advanced upon the stalled irregulars. Sweeping crystal blades mowed down the packed, shrieking throng.
And then the monsters came to the rescue.
High on the steep slope of rubble shone the wavering nightmare shape of a three-meter albino scorpion, the illusionary aspect of Sharn the younger, general of the Firvulag. From the minds of the exotics came a mighty wave of terror and dread that overloaded the telepathic circuits of the gray torcs and sent their wearers writhing into madness. Sharn himself could smite the enemy at a range of nearly twenty-five meters; others of his advancing company might not have auras so formidable, but woe to the Foe who fell into their clutches!