The Golden Torc

by Julian May

  The bats flew down a long, sloping tunnel. For the first time since their descent, they were aware of a current of air against their flapping wing membranes. The mental voice of Aiken spoke to Stein on the intimate human mode:

  Don't think one solitary thing. Keep your mind quiet if you value your sweet ass. I don't think he can hear me on this mode but any squeak outa you would hit him S9 and wall to wall.

  The two bats, now totally enveloped in the heaviest mind-barrier that Aiken could conjure, came to a ninety-degree bend in the corridor. They fluttered around the corner and saw light ahead—orangey yellow and flickering gently. The passage was dry. There were huge footprints in the dust.

  Drifting among the rock formations, the bats approached the lighted area. It was a large open chamber full of looming monoliths almost like shrouded human figures, together with complex tiers of flowstone that resembled gigantic gilled fungi. The bats flew up toward the ceiling to a ledge that jutted far out over the central area of the floor. There, hidden from the sight of anyone below, the bats turned into Aiken and Stein.

  Silence. Don't move. Don't rattle that damn sword scabbard. Don't do one friggerty thing.

  Aiken crept toward the edge of the formation on his stomach and peered down. A large fire burned within a well-made circular hearth. Piles of barkless tree trunks were neatly stacked in an alcove. Other parts of the cavern were furnished with a table, chairs, a bedstead of gargantuan proportions having a canopy and side curtains of the finest Tanu brocade, and any number of carved wooden chests and shelves. Leathern bags bulging with mysterious contents stood at the base of one pillar. Near another was a framework hung with fish netting edged with wooden floats. The floor was carpeted in glossy pelts—some dark, some spotted. Most of the dirty dishes on the table seemed to be large mollusk shells.

  Drawn up close to the fire was a species of overstuffed chair upholstered in gray hide. In the chair, quite asleep, was a humanoid exceeding the tall Tanu in height and vastly more robust of build. His head had a tangled brick-colored mane of hair and a bushy beard. He wore a leather shirt with the front lacing open, showing the reddish pelt of his chest. His breeches were scarlet. He had taken off his boots and extended his huge feet toward the fire. Now and then the toes wiggled. A cyclic noise reminiscent of a malfunctioning ore crusher told Aiken Drum that Delbaeth, the Shape of Fire, most formidable wild Firvulag in the southern reaches of the Many-Colored Land, was snoring.

  Aiken opened the golden box and removed the pencil-slim gray object. Hefting the little thing, he seemed to calculate a trajectory. He ignited the tip of his secret weapon with his creative metafunction.

  The sparkler burst into vivid white light, throwing out glowing iron filings like tiny meteorites. Aiken held the firework at arm's length.

  Down below, Delbaeth surged from his chair, bellowing. His body, nearly three meters tall, was transformed into a blazing mass that reached fiery arms toward the ceiling ledge and began to mold a ball of fire between incandescent paws.

  Aiken threw the sparkler, guiding it with whatever PK he could muster through the thick psychic screen he had erected around Stein and himself. Delbaeth's fireball arced up, dead on target, and bounced.

  There was another echoing cry from the monster. The fragile firework struck his flaming form and fell to the cave floor, still spitting sparks. Delbaeth's fire was extinguished. He crumpled slowly, almost seeming to melt into the ground, and did not move again.

  "Come on!" Aiken cried.

  The two bats flew down and became men once more. They stood beside the awesome carcass, and Stein said, "See where it hit him? Right on the forehead, because he was looking up. One tiny little burn with a hot iron wire!"

  There was a leather bucket full of water beside the table. Aiken hoisted it and poured a stream over the still-coruscating sparkler. It hissed and went out. A hole had been burned in one fur rug, ruining it.

  "You did it!" Stein swept up the little man and crushed him in a bear hug. "You did it!" Dropping Aiken, Stein howled to the stalactites: "Sukey, babe, we did it!"

  Aiken frowned, then laughed out loud. "I'll be damned, Viking. She did hear you! Maybe you can't pick her up, but I get this little weak farspeak whisper. Aw ... you'll never guess. She loves you."

  Stein grabbed up the bucket and emptied it over Aiken.

  "Thanks," said the golliwog. "I needed that. Now cut off his head and let's get out of here. We've gotta find the shortest route to the open air and fly back to bedoozle the royalty. Not to sweat, though! We're one whole day early!"

  Stein began to draw his great bronze sword from its amber-studded sheath. But when the blade was halfway out he froze and tilted his head. "Listen! Hear that?...It's a lot clearer now than it was up next to the ceiling with that spook snoring."

  Aiken cocked an ear. A slow, deep boom vibrated the rocks. Several seconds passed. Boom. Like the tolling of some huge bell the sound repeated. Boom. Slow. Inexorable.

  "Do you know what that is, kid?" Stein asked. "It's surf. Somewhere just the other side of that rock wall is the Atlantic Ocean."

  ***

  THE END OF PART ONE

  PART II

  The Closure

  1

  FELICE WALKED the ruins of Finiah.

  By the time that the Truce was in its third day, the minor eruption of lava from the old Kaiserstuhl volcano had come to an end. Streams of once molten rock solidified into clinkery masses—fat, rounded, and branched like monstrous roots where they had flowed out from the central mineworkings into the streets and arcades of the devastated city. It had rained heavily. Buildings that had been white or golden and rose, or blue-green and silver with the colors of the Creative Lord Velteyn, were now streaked and smeared with ashy mud. Ash had smothered the gardens and blasted the foliage from most of the ornamental trees. The central plaza, where Felice prowled, was a tangle of burnt-out shops, shredded awnings, broken carts and tradesmen's booths, and bodies half-buried in cinders and muck.

  Giant ravens as long as Felice's arms pecked at the swollen remains of chalikos, hellads, ramapithecines, and people. The scavengers were not disturbed by the passing of the small woman dressed in shining black. Perhaps they took her for one of themselves.

  There were noises. The ravens uttered their pruk pruk calls. A broken water conduit gushed and flooded down a flight of stairs, washing clean the corpses of gray-torc soldiers and Lowlife invaders. In a cul-de-sac near the palace of Lord Velteyn, nearly a dozen uninjured ramas in ruined aquamarine tabards huddled together, whimpering. A sound of human groans came from a porter's house adjacent to the main palace approach. Felice ignored it and walked toward the entrance of Velteyn's mansion, an iron-tipped arrow nocked and ready in her compound bow. She had many other arrows in a shoulder quiver, all with stained shafts. There had been a few stubborn grays down at the river landing determined to fight on, even though their Tanu overlords had fled; and down in the artisans' quarter, a bareneck woman had come rushing out of a devastated glasscrafter's workshop, brandishing a vitredur machete and crying vengeance on the despoilers of Finiah even as Felice shot her in the throat.

  Humans were too irreligious to hold to the Truce. Long after the Firvulag and Tanu had quit the burning wreck of the city, Lowlife warriors continued to fight against those of their fellow humans who remained loyal to the exotics. Captured grays, as well as the few silvers who fell into the invaders' hands, were hustled before a guerilla tribunal where a Lowlife officer showed them an iron chisel and an iron knife and bade them choose: "Live free or die." A surprising proportion had opted for death rather than the removal of their mind-amplifying collars.

  Felice entered the palace. The carrion birds were absent here, but there were flies, swift-scuttling rodents, and an appalling stench. The bodies of guards and servitors were heaped behind improvised barricades of furniture and demounted doors. Many of the defenders had died without a mark upon them, faces contorted by the mind-blasting attack of the Firvulag.

>   Except for the buzzing of insects, the rustle and squeak of rats, and the sighing sound of wind through smashed panes of colored glass, the palace of Lord Velteyn was quiet in its ruin. The little woman in black penetrated deeper into the apartments of the Great Ones, leaping over the piled corpses of human retainers who had fought an increasingly desperate rearguard action as the invading army hunted their trapped exotic masters.

  Felice came to a great open door of bronze, studded with green stones. Bodies in Lowlife buckskin and homespun mingled with those in palace livery to clog its threshold. And here, for the first time, there were also Firvulag bodies, some squat, some taller than humans or Tanu and as burly as fairytale giants; all were attired in the goldchased obsidian armor of Pallol One-Eye's elite corps and all had been dispatched by iron-tipped weapons that Velteyn's human guard had presumably wrested from the Lowlives.

  Calmly, Felice pulled a spear from a dead shape-shifter and used it for an alpenstock as she climbed over the noisome mound blocking the doorway. Inside the room, which was an elaborate bedchamber reduced to a shambles by the fighting, were six bodies attired in colored-glass armor. Four men and one Tanu woman were bloodied, transfixed by iron-pointed arrows. The second woman, a gold-torc human armored in sapphire blue, bore no wounds and had presumably succumbed to mental assault.

  Felice removed her hoplite helmet and set it upon a large bedside stand. On a lower shelf, incongruous in undisturbed tidiness, were a golden ewer and basin. The girl filled the basin with water and set it on top of the table. For a moment, she stood looking down at the corpse of the human woman. In death, her azure eyes showed wide pupils, oddly emphatic in a face as pale as chalk. Long chestnut hair spread on the carpet in a nimbus around the bare head; her helmet lay nearby. The slender fingers in jeweled blue-plate gauntlets were hooked over a golden torc.

  Like an acolyte enacting a ritual, Felice knelt. The rigor had left the dead hands and the torc was easily freed from their grip. The knobbed front catch clicked. The girl pivoted the collar on its back hinge and slipped it from around the livid throat. Rising, she went to the basin, dipped the gold several times, and dried it upon a soft towel.

  Then Felice fastened the torc about her own neck.

  The reality opened to her. She uttered a piercing cry.

  This ... so it was like this. All of it had been hidden within her, battened down and denied, so feared by the weaker ones all around her. But now open, released, and ready to be used.

  She went out onto the balcony of the death room. Trembling, vision partly blurred by the tears of her joy, she looked over the ruins of Finiah. There was the wide Rhine, the heights of the Vosges, High Vrazel itself on the western skyline, where King Yeochee and Sharn-Mes and the other Firvulag were doubtless still celebrating the triumph over their ancient Foe. There were the high passes she had come through alone, too late for the war, passing Chief Burke and Khalid Khan and the remnant of the Lowlife force conducting newly liberated human survivors of Finiah to the bottomland camp where they would await the judgment of Madame Guderian.

  Gold warm at her throat, Felice began to laugh. The sound swelled on the wind until it reverberated over the wasted city. The ravens, shocked out of their aplomb, took wing.

  2

  SHARN-MES the Young Champion regarded the riotous scene in the Hall of the Mountain King and shook his head in humorous wonderment.

  "Just look at that gang of stewed fewmets. It'll be at least three days' sleep to work off this three days' drunk. You know, Ayf, this is going to play havoc with our travel schedule. The armor and weaponry will have to be refurbished before we head south unless we want to go into the Grand Combat looking like a tatty rabble."

  "There's still plenty of time." Ayfa, leader of the Warrior Ogresses, tossed off her bumper of mead and helped herself to a refill. "The lads and lasses are entitled to a celebration. It's been forty years since we've had anything worth getting drunk about. Who cares if we miss some of the prelims down at the White Silver Plain? The high-ass crowd aren't about to start any main events without us."

  "I suppose," Sharn agreed, "that we do deserve a party."

  The two great captains were sequestered in a snug gallery that ordinarily accommodated musicians at formal feasts. But there was nothing formal about the action now taking place below them. All of the Firvulag veterans of the brief Finiah campaign, together with most of the rest of the citizenry of High Vrazel, seemed to have crowded into the royal audience cavern to cheer the unexpected victory.

  Brown ale and mead and cyser and blackberry brandy fountained up from hollow stalagmites right into the waiting mugs of those merrymakers who were still on their feet. Enough pastries, meats, and other party food remained to make the oaken tables creak under the weight. One mob in front of King Yeochee's empty throne was playing a type of blindman's buff in which the hooded female protagonist had taken the game's title quite literally. Another hilarious crowd surrounded the two heroes of the battle, Nukalavee the Skinless and Bles Four-Fang, who vied with one another to see who could create the most ridiculously obscene illusory body. Points were awarded by the cheers, jeers, and occasional retchings of the onlookers.

  More serious-minded revelers (and the maudlin drunks) gathered about a crookbacked goblin bard who had reached the one-hundred-sixty-fifth verse of a lugubrious ballad of doomed Firvulag lovers. Cheerier souls were concocting ingenious new stanzas to the soldiers' beloved drinking song, "A Princess Must Never Have Fleas," detailing those eccentricities that the royal demoiselle might legitimately expect to get away with. Warriors of the walking wounded, cosseted by plump little wenches, bragged of their late derring-do. Superannuated stay-at-homes muttered into their beer that the reduction of Finiah couldn't possibly compare to certain ancient affrays in which they had participated during the good old days.

  Queen Klahnino supervised the safe retirement of fallen celebrants, who were dragged away into alcoves and packed cheek by jowl to sleep it off. King Yeochee wandered around in bare feet and a stained golden robe, his crown tilted over one ear, kissing all of the ladies and quite a number of the gentlemen as well. Pallol the Battlemaster, still disdainful of the enterprise but always ready for a party, had succumbed to a surfeit of sidecars—another legacy of the insidious Lowlives. He lay snoring in the King's crystal grotto, his huge head resting in the lap of the resigned concubine, Lulo.

  "Yes," Sharn repeated himself at length. "We definitely deserve a celebration ... What do you suppose the Lowlives are up to?"

  "I'll look," said Ayfa, who possessed more farsight than the majority of her race. She was a handsome creature if one overlooked the excessively developed arm muscles, a concomitant of her prowess with the two-handed sword. Her hair was apricot-colored and her broad face freckled. Like most Firvulag, she had dark, twinkling eyes. She had shed her armor and wore a rumpled kirtle and blouse of madder rose, which clashed with her hair.

  "Yes, there they are. The human prisoners, or refugees, or whatever you call 'em, are installed in the old staging-area camp. But Burke and his cronies are slogging along through Ravine Pass toward Hidden Springs. They're getting rained on."

  "Good," said Sham. "Maybe it'll rust their perishing iron." He took a pull from his beaker and wiped his lips with a furry paw. "Dammit, Ayf, that's a bad business—using the blood-metal. Unprecedented! You know, when we trapped that bunch of Tanu engineers near the smeltery, one of 'em let off a really heavy curse before he died. I can still hear it: 'The Goddess will avenge us. Accursed through the world's age be those who resort to the blood-metal. A bloody tide will overwhelm them...'"

  "Well, it seems to me that the curse is for the humans, not us. We'd always planned to put the Lowlives to the sword once they'd served our purposes."

  "But we're only too willing to use them— and their iron—in the meantime! I hate it, Ayfa. It's a Lowlife way of doing battle, not our way. Old Pallol was bitching about how we'd surrendered our ancient honor just by fighting alongside humans ... and
how the iron was so obscene that it made a travesty of our whole combat-philosophy. I can't help agreeing. How can war be glorious with such an ignoble weapon? It puts the mightiest Firvulag or Tanu hero on the same level as some half-starved human pipsqueak with a compound bow. It's unfair!"

  Ayfa grunted. "I suppose the Tanu have been fighting fair ... with their chalikos and bear-dogs that have turned the Hunts into massacres! Or the human cavalry and charioteers in the Grand Combat who've been whipping the shit out of us for the past forty years!"

  "Aaah. You women never did appreciate the fine points of chivalry!"

  "No—we're willing to fight dirty to win." The female warrior served herself another great tankard of mead. "And speaking of that—did you see how the Lowlife infantry dealt with the mounted Foe in Finiah?"

  Sharn acknowledged the fact with a surly nod. "Unsporting! That's not our way."

  "Screw our way. The chalikos weren't the Tanu way, either, until that human animal tamer came along ... Now you listen to me, big boy. There won't be any iron weapons to help us in the Grand Combat this year, but you can bet your sweet filberts that we will adopt those new antichaliko tactics of the Lowlives. This go-around, those gray-torc troopers are in for a helluva surprise! I've already got the armorers working on the modification. Easiest thing in the world."

  "It could make a difference," he conceded. "If we can get the warriors to accept it."

  "I'll leave the persuasion to you," she told him, smiling. Then her expression changed. "Keep still for a minute while I go back to my farsight of the Lowlives coming from Finiah ... I get a few under three hundred surviving irregulars going over the pass and maybe twice that many captives and casualties down in the Rhineside camp. Most of the refugees are barenecks ... No—wait. Some are too well dressed. By damn, they've got to be ex-grays or silvers with their torcs chiseled off! Noncombatants. Maybe scientific types, special-talent artificers. Old Madame Guderian will make good use of them, you can bank on it!"