Ammarod caught the Golden Horn, put it to his mouth, and blew it. It made a loud, bellowing noise that echoed throughout the countryside.
Benny realized that he had been suckered again. Ammarod had feigned exhaustion so as to get close to the Horn. Then, while Benny paused, he had acted.
Furious, Benny swung his sword, aiming to decapitate the man. But Ammarod smoked out, the sword passing harmlessly through his neck. He had been ready for this, too. The man was not merely a superior fighter, he was a devastating strategist. He had Benny figured every which way.
Then he came at Benny, ready to suffocate him in his deadly vapor and capture his soul. Benny reversed the ploy, ghosting in that instant. This time, he didn't merely return to solid substance a moment later. He focused on the enemy, taking him in while he was vapor. Then Benny materialized, holding that smoke within him.
Ammarod had tried in effect to eat him. Instead, he had eaten Ammarod.
“Where is he?” Dale asked, fearful of another deadly ploy.
“I ate him,” Benny said.
“You what?”
“I incorporated his vapor into my substance. He is now part of me, and completely subject to my will.”
“I didn't know you could do that!”
“Neither did I,” Benny said, surprised. “I am still learning my abilities.”
Helena recovered. “You're some man.”
Then, Burgundy spied something. “You missed his head. It's lying there behind you.”
They all looked. There was the head. Benny realized that Ammarod had been in motion, and the head must have been just beyond Benny when he materialized. He had caught everything except that.
But first they had to deal with the Horn. The message of the first could be countered by the second, if blown in time. Dale took the Silver Horn and blew a blast.
“Now destroy them both,” Dale told Benny. “Before there can be any more mischief.”
Benny recovered his staff and used it to attack the Horns. A beam of light emerged that cracked them both. They were now useless, as they could no longer be blown.
There was laughter. It was Ammarod's head, magically animated.
Kolpak confronted the head. “What are you laughing about, since in moment you will be all the way dead without your body?”
“It is because I know something you don't, you fools.”
“What is that?” Benny asked suspiciously.
“When I absorbed the frost dwarf shaman's soul, I learned which horn summoned the Titans and which one called them off,” the head said. Somehow it made sounds without having any air. “It is the Silver Horn that summons the Titans, and the Gold Horn that calls them off, not the other way around. In his old age the shaman made a blunder. I was going to blow the Silver Horn next, but you did it for me. The Titans are coming! What a laugh!”
The others gazed at each other with horror. Could this be true?
The head became serious. “Benny, I admire your strength. You fought well on every level and are a worthy brother. Maybe you will find a way to weasel out of this disaster too. But be warned: there will be others worse than me, who won't be tempered by being related to you. Your most serious challenge is still ahead of you.”
This abrupt compliment and warning overcame Benny. He had on one level wanted to make up with his brother, and now it was happening, but too late. He felt tears starting. The others were silent, staying tactfully out of it. Someone drew him in comfortingly.
“My residual magic is expiring,” Ammarod's head said. “I am finally truly dying. For what it's worth, I'm sorry it had to be this way. And I'm sorry about Laurel. She was a better woman than I believed.” Then his eyes closed, and the head dissolved into a puddle of goo. He was gone.
“And for what little else it's worth,” Dale said, “I think he meant it.”
“I'm sure he did,” Helena said. Benny discovered that she was the one holding him. Noting his dawning dismay, she said, “Desdemona Dryad made me do it. I'm wearing her pendant, and sometimes it takes over. She doesn't like to let folk suffer.” She disengaged and stepped back.
Oh. She had mentioned the amulet she wore. Desdemona was the dryad Nolan Ducat had married, then lost. She was clearly a good soul, literally. “Uh, thanks,” he said.
“Ammarod said worse is coming,” Dale said. “He must mean the Sky Titans. It seems they have been summoned after all, as Ammarod said.”
“We had better get back to Alfen Gulfadex,” Helena said. “To warn them.”
“Only Kolpak knows the route,” Burgundy reminded them.
“I will guide you back immediately,” Kolpak agreed grimly.
They gathered up their gear and made ready to travel.
Then there was a distraction. They saw multiple beams of green light shooting down in the forest beyond the ruined Horns. “What is that?” Helena asked, alarmed.
“We'll check,” Kolpak said. “We don't want to take the path with an unknown menace following us. It may be a natural phenomenon.” He and Quill went into the woods to find out what was happening.
The remaining four walked to the edge of the glade where the path took off and waited. “Think we should have gone with them?” Dale asked.
“They know this area better than we do,” Helena said. “We'd only get in the way.”
“I've got a bad feeling about this,” Burgundy said. “Those light beams aren't anything natural, and Kolpak knew it. He was just trying to reassure us.”
Benny had to agree. His body was assimilating the portion of Ammarod he had absorbed, and though the head had not been included, the body had some knowledge of its own. It was nervous about the green light.
There was a loud roar that shook the ground around them. Then Kolpak ran out of the woods, covered in blood. “Run!” he screamed.
Behind him, Quill, his wings completely ripped off, staggered into the open just as an enormous green hand reached through the trees and grabbed him. At least a dozen giants, even larger than the Cyclops, broke into the opening. Each was around thirty feet tall, with green skin and long, green hair and beard.
The giant holding Quill lifted the struggling man up to his face as if to look at him more closely. Then, to Benny's utter shock, he shoved Quill into his mouth and bit off his head. He threw the body into the distance.
The Sky Titans had arrived.
Chapter 11
Magenta
T he Sky Titans wasted no time on formalities. One of the giants shouted, “I'll eat you, little man!” and charged, spitting fire from his mouth and lightning bolts from his fingertips. The others spread out, attacking the countryside and setting everything on fire.
There was nothing to do but flee.
“This way!” Kolpak said, leading them into the path.
They dived after him. The Titans, surprisingly, did not immediately follow. “That path is masked,” Kolpak explained. “They can't see it. But they surely know where Alfen Gulfadex is. We must get there first.”
Benny heard the crashing of branches and trees, felt the heat of the fires, and needed no further encouragement to move out. It was a hurried trip, but they all were strongly motivated and familiar with the procedure if not the actual route. They reached the city in good time.
But news had already gotten there. The dwarves were fighting more of the Titans. There was no time to prepare a defense, assuming that was even possible; the disaster was upon them.
“Damn!” Benny swore, striking the staff into the ground. Was this the end, simply because they hadn't quite stopped the Horns from getting blown? It seemed unfair. “Why do you allow this, Protector?” he cried. “This is not fair to any of the good people who never sought such mischief!”
A shadow fell across him. The figure of a Titan loomed, large even for that form. “Who stomps the staff?” a voice boomed.
Benny was beyond patience. “Who wants to know?” he demanded.
The figure squatted down before him. Now Benny saw that it was al
most twice the size of the other Titans, and royally garbed. “It is I, Tybalt, King of the Titans,” he said. “My name means 'leader of the people,' but that has nothing to do with you inferior creatures. The time has finally come for me to destroy the little men, and I relish the occasion. It has been far too long in coming.” He formed a fireball in his huge hands, so big it could have swallowed Benny without flickering. “Now answer me, you who hold the staff that has been lost for centuries, only to appear now to ruin the Horns. Who are you, and how did you manage to steal so precious an artifact?”
Benny was daunted. The King of the Titans! But he answered. “I am Benny Clout, well-meaning mortal. I stole nothing! I won the staff as a prize in a contest, and am still learning how to use it. Why do you care?”
“I care because, though I do not value the rest of the planet, I do value the staff. You possess it as stolen goods. I want to return it to my museum collection. But the enchantment on it defends the one it—in its inanimate ignorance—supposes is its legitimate associate. I can't destroy you without destroying it, which would be an annoying waste. So it seems I must acquire it from you before I destroy your world, nuisance as that may be. What is your price?”
Benny looked at the staff. He had had no idea! “I didn't know it was stolen. If I have it illegitimately, then take it back.” He held forth the staff.
Tybalt laughed. “And you actually believe you are doing the honorable thing, you utter fool! That's why it honors you, and why I can't just take it. Neither one of you knows any better.”
The King was obviously infinitely more powerful than Benny or the staff, but his attitude was becoming annoying. “What the hell do you know about honor? You're just a thoughtless destroyer.”
“What do I care about honor?” Tybalt asked rhetorically. “I have power, which is far better. But I want my staff back, and I have to make a deal you find legitimate to recover it from you. Name your terms.”
“What good would any terms be, if you destroy the world I must live in?”
“You seek to debate me, you microscopic pipsqueak?” the king demanded wrathfully. “Then I will simply have to abolish you along with your world, even if it means the loss of the staff.” He lifted the fireball, which started to expand ominously.
Then an even larger figure appeared behind Tybalt. A hand swung down and knocked the king to the ground as if he were a feeble insect. He landed on his back, surprise transforming to rage as his fireball fell from his hand and guttered out. “Who dares?” he demanded.
“As if it were your province to question me,” the figure said, kneeling so that the whole of her came into view. It was a woman in a shining robe, ethereally lovely.
“Sethrida!” Tybalt exclaimed, sitting up. “Appointed by the Lord!”
“That is the meaning of my name,” she agreed. “I come to recover my Horns.” She lifted her other hand, which held the two broken Horns. She set them on her head above her ears, where they merged immediately with the flesh and became whole again. They were part of her!
Benny stared. He could not do otherwise. He would have thought that horns would make a woman look like a devil, but these only enhanced her beauty. She had been sent by the Protector?
The king recovered his bluster. “It is too late for you to interfere, Sentinel,” he said. “We Titans have been summoned, and now it is our right and duty to destroy this world. Even you cannot deny us.” He formed another fireball, which quickly grew larger than the first. “Now depart, spooky spirit, and leave us to our endeavor. You have recovered your horns and have no further business here.”
“You forget that the Horns have been neutralized,” Sethrida said. “Your summoning has been revoked. This world is not yours to play with.”
“So you say,” Tybalt said. “But I will not deny my minions their pleasure at this stage. Get you gone.”
“I regret the need to discipline you,” the Sentinel murmured. “But you have become annoyingly willful.”
“And what are you going to do about it, female?” His tone was increasingly ugly.
“Nothing. Your own unbridled passion will destroy you.”
“Oh?” the King said ironically. The fireball in his hand continued to grow. “Maybe after this flame consumes you, wench.”
Sethrida merely gazed at him. The king, still sitting, threw the fireball at her.
It did not fly. It remained attached to his hand, still growing. Surprised, he tried again, and failed again, as Benny and the Sentinel watched.
The fire expanded to encompass Tybalt's hand. Now pain showed on his face. His own fire was consuming him! It traveled along his arm, then took in his body, engulfing him in flame. He did not even have time to scream before his body was burned to ash.
The Sentinel blew, and the ash dissipated into the air in a thinning cloud. Then she faced Benny. “I regret you had to witness that,” she said. “I tried to persuade him to depart in peace, but his soul was corrupted by his supposed power and it had to be done. Now I believe his minions will depart without further disruption.”
Indeed, the other Sky Titans had returned to form a circle around her as the Sentinel stood, towering over them. She made a small gesture with one hand, as of flicking off dust, and they quickly retreated. They had gotten the message.
Benny suspected that he should keep his mouth shut, but his mouth did not cooperate. “Couldn't there have been a better way to make the point than killing him?”
“Kill him?” she asked blankly.
“Burning him up like that.”
She smiled, and it was like the sun emerging from a dark cloud. “Ah, now I see. The Titans are immortal. What you saw was not killing but banishing; his fabricated local host was incinerated, sending him back to his home plane. It will be a while before he travels again to another planet.”
Oh. A special effect. “Uh, thanks,” Benny said. “Does this mean that our word of Pakk will survive?”
“It does. The Protector has not yet slated this particular world for extinction. The Titans were supposed to merely chasten it, not eliminate it, so I came to rectify the error.”
Not yet slated? That made Benny nervous. “We're still on probation?”
“Yes. We hope it will not be necessary to wipe the slate clean and start over. That would cost a few millennia and be inefficient. We do not enjoy inefficiency.”
Benny gazed at her, assimilating that. “I hope we can become more efficient.”
She smiled again. “Come up here, if we are to converse.”
“Uh, okay. But how?”
She put a hand down, and Benny sat on her palm, holding on to her thumb, which was about a foot and a half long yet marvelously slender and contoured, like her body. Her robe was vague in the manner of fog, and as he passed upward he fancied he could see the shapely columns of her thighs, the evocative narrowing of her waist, and the breathtaking outline of her swelling bosom beneath the vapor. She was every foot a woman!
She lifted him up to the level of her face. Her great rainbow eyes focused on him. They were brightly defined in the otherwise somewhat misty expanse of her face, as was her mouth. “Hello, Benny Clout,” she murmured. “Have you any other questions?” Her lustrous, dawn-hued hair flared slightly with seeming life of its own as she spoke.
Benny tried to suppress his awe. “Yes, if you have time for them. I don't want to keep you from your more important pursuits.”
She laughed, and her breath was like a flower scented summer breeze. “I am attending to them as we speak, Benny. This is not my complete aspect. This part of my attention has all the time you may require.”
Oh. “Tybalt told me that my staff is stolen goods. That's why he came to me. I love the staff, but I can't keep it if that's the case.”
“That is the case, but not the complete case,” she said. “Tybalt himself stole it for his collection. Later it was stolen from him. He has no more right to it than you do.”
“But still—”
“It is yo
urs as long as you use it for good. Be satisfied with that. Anything else?”
He plowed on. “Yes. I—I am curious why the Protector should ever have placed your horns there, and why he made the stipulation of using them to summon the Sky Titans to destroy the world, since I gather you don't wish to destroy it at this time. It seems to be to be downright dangerous to leave them there, where any fool like one of us might blow them.” Not that Dale was a fool, but he had been tricked into blowing the wrong Horn.
“He did not exactly place them here, Benny,” she said. “I have been here all along, reposing beneath the ground where my horns were set, resting until my attention was required. I do not like to stay far from my body parts.” The two horns on her head glowed faintly.
“You—that mountain was on your body?”
“That mountain was my body, to a fair degree, covered with a blanket of stone and earth. I am larger than I may appear.”
“I, uh, see,” Benny said awkwardly. “You—you are the Sentinel, but is that all?”
“Hardly. I am what you might think of as the Planet Mother, the spirit in all things. The Sentinel is the aspect that watches for mischief.”
“That's why you are so lovely!” Benny exclaimed. “You are Nature. You define perfection.”
She smiled. “In a manner. It depends on your perception and comprehension.” She paused. “Your friends have returned, and are confused about my form. I can appear smaller, if you prefer.” Then her hand shrank, along with her body, until he was deposited back on the ground and she stood before him no taller than he was, still excruciatingly lovely. The horns, now petite, took nothing from her beauty. “Is that better?”
“Uh, any size you want to be is fine with me. I'm just glad to have met you.”
“You meet me in all that you see on this world, if you but have the wit to perceive it.”
“I will be aware of it the rest of my life,” Benny said fervently.
She stepped forward and kissed him. “Thank you.”
Then, as he stood stunned, she introduced herself to Dale, Helena, and Burgundy, clarifying her presence. She also explained about the Horns. “They were never meant for destructive purpose. The Protector is above all merciful, and in his mercy he placed the horns there, and me with them as I rested, so that they could be used to aid Pakk, not destroy it. Over the centuries, the true story of the Twin Horns was skewed and misinterpreted through the generations of Pakk's inhabitants. Their original purpose was indeed to summon the Guardians, such as the Sky Titans, but only to destroy the evil in the world. If even one person upheld the goodness, truth, and beauty that was left in Pakk, the hand of the Sky Titans would be stayed. You and your companions selflessly sacrificed your well-being in fighting the Kudgels, and attempting to save a world filled with evil. Your actions could be nothing but that same goodness, truth, and beauty.”
Magenta Salvation Page 15