The Noborn King

by Julian May

Powerful as she was. Felice faltered before the job was complete. In her extremity of hatred, Felice prayed help from whatever powers of darkness might exist—and the help came from somewhere, and she was able to open the Gibraltar Gate at last. A monstrous cascade of seawater began to fill the Alborán Basin, backing up behind a loose rubble dam near the Long Fjord.

  On the Second Day of the Grand Combat, the culminating event was the selection of the Combat leaders by means of a manifestation of powers. The nine Firvulag leaders of long standing were unchallenged and accepted by acclamation. Wicked old Pallol One-Eye, the Firvulag Battlemaster, gave a demonstration of his formidable metapsychic power.

  The selection of Tanu leaders was not so orderly. Things began tamely enough when Bleyn, Alberonn, Lady Bunone Warteacher, and Tagan Lord of Swords stood forth unchallenged. And then Dionket appointed Culluket his deputy, as was expected; and Nodonn similarly deputized his brother Kuhal Earthshaker since he himself would serve as Battlemaster. But a furor broke out when Gomnol’s empty place was claimed by both Imidol and the exiled Leyr. The two agreed to duel for the coercer leadership on the field of battle rather than to manifest powers at that time.

  Then it was the turn of Aluteyn Craftsmaster, Lord of the Creators. He was challenged by Mercy, and in the subsequent manifestation she was victorious. Rather than banishment, proud Aluteyn chose death. He went off to a huge glass vessel called the Great Retort, in which those condemned to die at the Combat’s end awaited their fate. Mercy, the new Lady Creator, declined to fight in the Combat. She deputized Velteyn, erst while Lord of devastated Finiah, as her champion.

  The final Tanu leader to stand forth was Mayvar, President of the Farsensors. She chose Aiken as her deputy rather than the Host’s nominee, Riganone. After King Thagdal designated Nodonn as Battlemaster, all of the company retired to feasting and entertainment. Tomorrow the actual Combat would begin, lasting for two and a half days with only a few recesses. During that time, the sump behind the rubble dam across the Mediterranean Basin would fill with ever-deepening water . . .

  The last, fateful psychocreative blast that had let in the sea also caused Felice to fall from the balloon. Stein and Sukey could find no trace of the girl. After cutting off his wife’s silver torc so she could not transmit a telepathic warning to Muriah, Stein guided the balloon into a northerly current of air and soared far away, heading for freedom in a remote part of France.

  The only person at the Grand Combat with an intimation of approaching disaster was the deposed Creator, Aluteyn Craftsmaster. As the Grand Combat proper began, he perceived subtle geophysical hints of the encroaching sea and tried to give warning while imprisoned inside the Great Retort. He was ignored. Tanu and Firvulag met in their ritual war with no thought except for their ancient rivalry. The human Raimo Hakkinen, forced to lake part in the battle, was rescued from slaughter by Aiken Drum. Then Raimo attempted to desert, but he was found out and condemned to the Retort for cowardice.

  Unlike the previous forty Grand Combats, which the Tanu had won easily, this contest showed signs of being a squeaker. The Firvulag used new tactics, learned at Finiah, against the battle-mounts of Tanu and torced humanity. The Little People pulled ahead in the body-count scoring, even though the Tanu retained a lead in the more significant banner-capture tally. Velteyn of Finiah, too anxious for vengeance after the loss of his city, was responsible for a Tanu fiasco. Aiken Drum, on the other hand, engineered a number of triumphs by means of tricky maneuvers, which delighted the more progressive Tanu but enraged the reactionaries of the Host, most notably Nodonn Battlemaster.

  The rivalry between Aiken and Nodonn for the battlemastership became more heated during the second day of fighting. At a war feast, Nodonn tried to discredit Aiken by dramatically producing Bryan Grenfell and his adverse study of humanity’s impact upon the Many-Colored Land. Some of the Tanu abandoned Aiken because of this; but large numbers still were pragmatic enough to stick with him. In the duel between coercers, Imidol of the Host defeated the elderly Leyr. Tough old Celadeyr of Afaliah took the place of the defunct Velteyn as Second Creator under Mercy.

  Shortly before the Combat’s start, Brede Shipspouse had secretly taken healing Skin to the prison cell in Muriah where Chief Burke, Basil, and Amerie lay dying. The three were fully recovered by the last day of the Combat and Brede led them, mystified, to a room high on the Mount of Heroes inside the Redactor Headquarters, which overlooked the White Silver Plain. Inside this room were lockers full of twenty-second-century equipment that the Tanu had confiscated from time-travelers. More important, Elizabeth was there, apparently in a deep coma. Brede instructed the three to take charge of the equipment and Elizabeth, and wait until the following morning, when they would know what to do. On no account were they to leave the room until then.

  The Grand Combat approaches its finale, in which the champions of the Tanu and Firvulag armies would meet hand to hand. The generalized phase of fighting had given the Tanu a narrow lead over the Little People, but this could be upset during the Heroic Encounters. The Firvulag were especially hopeful because neither Nodonn nor Aiken could participate in the first round of Encounters. Each battlemaster-candidate now had four heroes (leaders) pledged to him, and the candidate whose people won the most duels against the Firvulag heroes would stand forth in the culminating Encounter of Battlemasters against Pallol One-Eye.

  In the Encounters, Aiken’s partisans won two and lost two. Nodonn’s won one, lost two, and tied one. This meant that Aiken would meet Pallol. If he lost, the Firvulag would win the entire Grand Combat. Aiken maintained that he could beat the Firvulag ogre if the Tanu High Table allowed him to do it in a human way, using the same trick he had used to overcome Delbaeth. Reluctantly, Nodonn and his people had to agree. Aiken went out and downed the Firvulag Baitlemaster just as he had promised, and the Tanu were declared winners of the Grand Combat.

  Heartbroken by their narrow loss, most of the Firvulag decided to leave the battlefield before the award ceremonies. Not even the prospect of seeing Aiken and Nodonn battle it out with Spear and Sword seemed worth waiting for. Only the Firvulag royalty and their attendants remained for the finale.

  The Tanu victory was ceremoniously proclaimed and Aiken awarded the trophy Sword of Sharn (a photon weapon like the Spear). Instead of offering it in fealty to King Thagdal, thus acknowledging the Tanu’s overlordship, Aiken drove the Sword into the ground. Thagdal signed to Nodonn to take it up as King’s Champion. Meanwhile, Aiken’s allies girded him in the harness of the Spear. The two squared off and began their duel just as the cataclysmic flood from the encroaching Atlantic swept over the White Silver Plain.

  The mind-cries of the thousands of drowning people roused Elizabeth from her self-imposed coma. She and her three human companions looked out from the mountain refuge upon devastated Muriah and a submerged White Silver Plain. Redactor House contained a number of survivors and Chief Burke prepared for their evacuation.

  Not all of those combatants and spectators caught on the White Silver Plain perished—although a majority of the Tanu, who were especially vulnerable to immersion, did lose their lives. Some few Tanu were cast ashore by the flood wave or managed to use their metapsychic powers to save themselves. Humans and hybrids in fair numbers swam to safety. Aiken Drum climbed aboard the ceremonial Kral cauldron and later rescued Mercy. The Great Retort, with its load of condemned, floated on the surge and, ironically, brought salvation to Aluteyn Craftsmaster, Raimo Hakkinen, and numbers of others, mostly human.

  At the end of Volume 2, it was evident that an entirely new balance of power would now prevail in the Many-Colored Land. The Firvulag were strong under their new co-monarchs. King Sharn-Mes and Queen Ayfa. The Tanu cities, stripped of their most powerful metapsychic talents, were now vulnerable to attacks by Lowlife humans or the Little People. Most of the Tanu leadership, including Brede Shipspouse, had perished. Those Tanu remaining alive would have to decide whether or not to pledge allegiance to a human usurper who promised tha
t he could save them from annihilation.

  Now begin Volume 3, which, after a brief review of times gone by, picks up the chronicle in the period following the Great Flood.

  PROLOGUE

  THE DEAD AND THE WOUNDED AND THE BRAIN-BURNED HAD all been evacuated, and the highland forest lay innocent in Pliocene moonlight. Spicebush and orchids mingled their fragrance in the undergrowth. Flying squirrels came out of their hiding places and began to soar among the rowans and birches.

  Up against the slope of the Mont-Dore volcano, where the trees thinned, the deadly hemisphere was motionless, faintly glimmering. It had a diameter of about fifteen meters. Its mirror surface gave it the aspect of a colossal witch ball partially buried in the mountainside, punctured by a tall, slender snag.

  A single heroic squirrel came sailing out of the woods, zoomed, stalled out, and made an expert landing on the snag not far above the mirrored curve.

  “Nervy little bugger,” muttered Leyr Lord Coercer.

  “No. just curious,” the human Sebi-Gomnol said mildly.

  The little animal darted down the barkless trunk, extended a paw, and touched the hemisphere. Nothing happened. Head down, the squirrel sniffed, then appeared to come to a conclusion. It dropped onto the mirror, immediately lost its purchase, and went sliding to the ground, landing in an aggrieved heap.

  Bitter laughter broke from the observers as the creature scuttled off.

  “Now he knows as much as we do,” Bormol of Roniah observed. “If only we had learned our lesson as cheaply.”

  There were six shining personages standing at a respectable distance from the hemisphere. One was a human being with an extraordinarily large nose and the others were members of the handsome Tanu race, more than two heads taller than the man. All of them wore fantastic glass armor studded with faceted spikes and gemstones, the open helmets crested with horns or heraldic beasts. The figures glowed with a soft internal radiance. The human was smoking a cigar.

  “Sixteen warriors of the Roniah battle-company slain,” said Condateyr. Bormol’s chief deputy. “To say nothing of the twenty or thirty grays and silvers killed back at Castle Gateway before we could even bring up the Hunt. Operant humans! Great Tana, they’ve never let operants come through the time-gate before! That’s why we called on you at once, Battlemasler.”

  Nodonn inclined his head in acknowledgment. The rosy-gold light suffusing his magnificent form dimmed the blue and green-glowing armor of the others. His mind, as usual, wore an enigmatic smiling overlay, and his spoken words were very soft. “The time-gate. The damned time-gate.”

  Bormol said, “The mental thrusts that overwhelmed the castle guardians were easily screened off by stalwarts of my Hunt, Battlemaster. But the Lowlife invaders had some kind of high-technology weapon as well, one that projected a coherent energy beam. When we finally cornered them, they used the thing on us. Our metapsychic shields were impotent against it until Condateyr and I thought to coordinate a massed mind-defense according to the ancient discipline. Barely in time, at that.”

  Sebi-Gomnol grinned at the Lord of Roniah around his cigar. “And you made a strategic withdrawal behind the barrier. Very prudent. Coercive Brother.”

  “I have learned to be prudent where you humans are concerned ... Coercive Brother.”

  Gomnol ignored the insulting little pause and addressed himself to Nodonn. “Battlemaster, the weapon used by these human metapsychic operants is undoubtedly some type of portable photon cannon. Its operation is similar to that of your sacred Sword of Sharn, the trophy of the Grand Combat.”

  Nodonn indicated the mirrored hemisphere. “And that thing they’re hiding behind?”

  “What the science of my future world would call a sigma forcefield. I presume that it took a while for the invaders to get the generator working.”

  Bormo! said, “None of our weaponry or psychocreative energies can penetrate that bloody silver bubble. You can far sense dimly through it if you really work at it, but these aliens use a thought-mode that’s all but incomprehensible. Most of them have been asleep for several hours now . . . much good it does us.”

  Aluteyn, President of the Guild of Creators, asked Gomnol: “Just how strong is this sigma-field, son?”

  “It would be completely impervious to any attack we could mount against it, Craftsmaster.” The human’s smile had a touch of chauvinism.

  Leyr Lord Coercer glared down at his human Second. “I thought the rules of your human time-gate establishment forbade taking such equipment out of your world?”

  “That’s true. Coercive Lord. No modern weaponry is allowed to be exported to the Pliocene. Strictly forbidden by the Concilium of the Galactic Milieu.” Gomnol shrugged his sapphire épaulières. “Of course, the Concilium also proscribed the translation of operant metapsychics.”

  Stout old Aluteyn exploded in a picturesque blasphemy. “But somehow, more than a hundred of the bastards have sneaked through! And beat the ballocks off our brother Bormol, here! Now what? I say, now what? He brandished a radiant emerald fist at the rounded forcefield, which reflected a miniature moon and an anamorphically distorted forest skyline.

  “I summoned you here hoping for useful advice. Creative Brother,” Bormol responded with dignity, “not rhetorical questions. The alien invaders sleep now, but they’ll wake up. And when they do... I presume they have a way of shooting their weapon from inside that sigma-field.”

  “It depends on the type of generator,” Gomnol said. “But we can assume they do,”

  The six of them united in a crude metapsychic concert to scan the hemisphere with their farsense; but the interior was an inchoate blur. Straining with the mind’s ear yielded only the cycling mind-waves of the sleepers and a single steely thread of awareness—a watcher—whose mental emanations were almost completely outside the normal Tanu limit of perception.

  Finally, Gomnol said to the Lord of Roniah, “Recapitulate the day’s melancholy events once again. Coercive Brother. Leave out no details.”

  Bormol’s mind, with Condateyr assisting, showed the four others a full-sensory reprise of the disaster. The arrival of the crowd of alien operants was first discovered by a gray-torc soldier on the battlements of Castle Gateway. (Luckily, survived the enusing massacre.) The invaders passed through the time-portal at the unprecedented time of eleven-hundred hours, rather than at dawn, as had been the unvarying custom for the more than forty years of temporal translation. There was no one outside the castle waiting to intercept them during the brief period of disorientation following exit from the time-warp; and when gray soldiers from the castle finally did emerge to investigate, they were felled by a powerful metacoercive blast. This alerted the silver-torc castellan, who in turn notified the two Tanu overlords in residence at the time.

  The operant newcomers had then turned their mental weapons, as well as some type of low-power photonic sidearms, against the castle staff. A farspoken alarm went out to Roniah, which lay a little over 30 kilometers away. But by the time Bormol and Condateyr arrived with a Grand Hunt two hours later, the invaders were gone, the Tanu overlords and about half the Castle Gateway personnel were dead, and the ordinary time-travelers in their prison compound were catatonic from some kind of redactive brain-drain that the operants had inflicted.

  Bormol’s pursuing force was hampered by metapsychic barriers and mirages thrown up by the operants; but eventually these weakened, and the trail of the invaders’ small all-terrain vehicles could be readily followed. The aliens headed west, across the steppe of the Plateau du Lyonnais and down into the forest that lay between the tableland and the enormous Mont-Dore stratovolcano. The chaliko mounts of the Hunt were more efficient than the alien ATVs in cross-country travel, once the chase took to the lowland. Nearly a dozen of the fat-wheeled contrivances were abandoned by their drivers in a hellishly dense bamboo swamp; and two more were found later on a game trail, stomped into bloody junk amid the spoor of hoetusker elephants.

  It was shortly after sunset that the flee
ing operants made the mistake of following a westward-trending valley that narrowed to a box canyon as it ascended a steep slope. Fatigued, frightened, and trapped, the operants had let their metapsychic screen waver for a brief moment, allowing Bormol’s keenest farsensors to discern the nature of the enemy—one hundred and one human beings, all operant, some in very poor physical condition and all suffering from profound mental trauma. They were equipped with eighty-nine miniature trailered vehicles that were jammed to the rolibars with twenty-second-century matériel.

  A cautious offensive probe by Bormol and his top coercers brought forth only feeble metapsychic retaliation. The skirmish at the castle and the long pursuit had seemingly worn the invaders out. And now they were cornered.

  Disdaining to fight mentally, the Roniah Hunt had charged, mind-yelling its exuberant battle-cry … only to be met by the photon cannon.

  After the shambles of retreat, rescue of the wounded, and regrouping, it was learned that the operants had zapped one canyon wall, built a ramp with the debris, and escaped the culde-sac. At nightfall, scouts reported to Bormol the new phenomenon of the giant mirrored hemisphere; and at that point, the Lord of Roniah decided to pack it in and call for help from the Battlemaster and his senior advisors…

  Nodonn said, “There is one point I find curiously disturbing. The human prisoners at Castle Gateway. The ordinary time-travelers detained in the holding area. You say they were drained?”

  Bormol was emphatic. “Minds wiped cleaner than the White Silver Plain, Battlemaster, Tabutae rasae. Damnedest thing I ever saw. It’s a good thing it was early in the week and we only had two days’ worth of prisoners. Those sixteen Lowlives are nothing but vegetables now. Whoever did that job had to be the devil’s own redactor.”

  “And he found out everything that the prisoners knew about us,” growled Leyr.

  “And wiped them clean,” Gomnol added, “which implies that the recently arrived time-travelers might have been able to tell us something useful about these émigré operants. Interesting.”