The Noborn King

by Julian May

  As the prisoner stepped into the bright moonlight in front of the infirmary, she seemed so obviously harmless that everyone, even the gang of armed guards, visibly relaxed. She wore a pair of white canvas shorts and a plaid cotton shirt knotted below her breasts. Her blonde hair, held off her forehead with a narrow bandeau, was clean and shining. On her shoulders was a small day-pack. In spite of her tearful apprehension, she was almost breathtakingly beautiful.

  Basil stepped forward, the golden torc gleaming in the neck of his open safari blouse. Cloud Remillard came directly to him and said, “You must be Professor Wimbome!”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t had—” Basil started to say, instinctively—and then pained chagrin flooded through him and he wondered how he could have failed to recognize Alice. Enormous Alice, long-necked Alice, sly-eyed Alice escaped from Wonderland and pressing a single silencing finger against his lips, simultaneously muffling his mind that would have screamed a warning into the aether. alerting Chief Burke in Hidden Springs.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Cloud said gently. Her redaction coiled out like the multiple tentacles of a basket star, restraining every mind. Basil and his Bastards were helpless statues under the August moon. The stun-gun and all the iron weapons clattered to the ground. Tears of helpless rage glittered in the eyes of Mr. Betsy, who might have been a costumed waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s, save for the anomalous mustache and tiny goatee.

  The two physicians, torn from their patient by the irresistible command of the redactor, came to join their fellow humans in thrall.

  “Are there any others?” Cloud inquired of thin air, and the atmosphere replied in the negative. “Not yet!” the woman said in a peremptory tone. “Not while he’s still wearing the torc and there’s the least chance of adrenaline override.”

  Basil watched her take off the backpack and flip it open. She took out a pair of yachtsman’s heavy-duty cable cutters. Utterly lacking in willpower. Basil knelt and bent his neck. Cloud severed the torc with a single stroke and the alpinist crumpled senseless to the ground.

  “Now it’s safe,” Cloud said.

  The paralyzed crowd of humans would have cried out if they had not lost control of their vocal cords. Four tall phantoms materialized in the moonlight, smothering the natural radiance in the glow of their vitredur armor. Two shone the krypton-green of creators and one was clad in the sodium-vapor glow worn by psychokinetic stalwarts; but the fourth, who towered above the others, had the eye-smarting brilliance of the noon sun. The pilots, the technicians, the medics, and the daredevils despaired at the sight of him: Nodonn, the implacable enemy of humankind, who had sworn to rid the Many-Colored Land of all time-travelers, no matter what the cost.

  “But you promised,” Cloud Remillard said.

  And Apollo sighed, “Yes.”

  So with a painless medullary pinch the woman sent all of the prisoners cascading into welcome black; and none of them, not even recovering Dougal, awoke until they had been two days in the dungeons of Afaliah, and the clash between the rival Battlemasters had long since been resolved.

  7

  MERCY FOUND SULUVAN-TONN SITTING ALONE IN A CLUTtered chamber at the top of the northwestern turret of the Castle of Glass, reading Essais de sciences maudites and sipping Strega from a Venetian goblet of a most scandalous shape.

  “Great Queen!” he exclaimed, making haste to turn the book face down. There was, unfortunately, nothing to be done about the goblet.

  Her face was pale, but her mind, only partially screened, seemed on fire with some violent emotion. “I’m sorry to disturb you. I would not have broken in upon your private space except on business of mortal urgency.”

  “Whatever I can do—” He faltered at her look. “Has he done something to you? Has he hurt you?” The portly psychokinetic was roused to indignation in spite of his own timidity. He rushed to Mercy’s side, put an arm around her, and led her to a chair that stood in the cool breeze blowing off the sea.

  “He’s done only what he usually does,” she replied darkly. “But before this night is done I’ll have revenge. If you’ll help me, Sullivan.”

  “I will,” he declared.

  “Your psychokinesis . . . can you open any lock?”

  “Without question!”

  “The special one he’s put on the storage vaults beneath the castle?”

  Sullivan’s eyes bulged. “Not the secret rooms where the Milieu weapons and devices are kept—”

  “The same. Can you?” She was reining in her coercion and the awesome psychocreative forces that could mould matter and energies to her whim, trying not to frighten him. The lock was a subtle thing that had defied her own manipulation and was proof against mind-blasts. Sullivan, with his great PK talent, was her only hope of neutralizing the high-technology weaponry in a way that Aiken might not detect until it was too late . . .

  “I—I can only try, Lady Creator.”

  She leaped to her feet, her green gauze gown with its silver borders billowing like surf. “Try, for vengeance’s sake, Sullivan! I know you hate him as I do. But soon, perhaps at dawn, he’ll be paid in full for all his trickery! Now we must hurry, while he still sleeps off his surfeit of me.” Seizing his moist hand, she held it tightly for a moment, her wild eyes ablaze. Then she cried, “Follow!” and was off racing down the circular stairs.

  He bounded along in her wake, leather slippers thwacking on the dull glass paving, cerise dressing robe aflap, sandy hair standing on end for sheer terror. The castle was very quiet. They dashed through an open atrium where wind-chimes tinkled and a small fountain splashed, and the big white sheepdog Deirdre leaped up to welcome its mistress and nearly gave Sullivan a heart attack.

  “Down, Deirdre! Stay!” Mercy hissed, and the animal vanished back into the shadows.

  They fled down echoing halls with only the faerie-light chains for interior illumination; and the full moon riding high outside gleamed eerily through the colored-glass panels of the corridor roof, spreading pools of spectral lavender, pink, and amber underfoot. Here and there little ramas with feather dusters or mops cringed away in apprehension at their passing. The only human they saw was a middle-aged gray guard, stiff as a post outside the main audience room, holding a vitredur sword before his face with the staunch tirelessness of the pre-programmed torc wearer.

  At last they reached the great foyer of the royal wing, with its sconces of flaming oil and spiral staircase. Mercy showed Sullivan the unobtrusive bronze door in the inner wall. “Open ft without a trace.”

  He concentrated his PK, lips pressed together and forehead all corrugated. There was a subdued clunk. The door slid open and steep stone steps leading into blackness yawned ahead of them.

  “That wasn’t too hard.” Sullivan managed a crooked smile.

  “The real lock is down there. Hurry, man! He may wake and find me gone.”

  She conjured up a fireball torch and went slipping and sliding down the crudely cut shaft. There was no dampness now, but the stair treads and risers had been designed for long exotic legs and the going was precarious. Sullivan was beginning to gasp for breath, and only saved himself from stumbling by adroit use of his PK, which had him bobbing through the air from time to time like a silk-wrapped balloon effigy.

  And then they reached the bottom. There was the vaultlike door with its battery of exotic code locks. As Sullivan came close to inspect them his skin crawled and the air seemed to attain a rubbery semisolidity.

  “There’s a force-field here as well, my Queen. Not a sigma, thank the Lord. Perhaps a gravomag repulsor, to keep damp air and fungus spores and things from seeping into the chamber. As well as thieves and malefactors.” He giggled nervously.

  Mercy was calm. “Open it.”

  He bent to the task. Perspiration streamed from his scalp and armpits. In his brain visions of the lock encodements— microscopic bubbles within bubbles, all dotted and etched with psychosensitive chemicals—zoomed into and out of focus. He concentrated, thrust, bent, and prick
ed. Something began to buzz. “Getting it,” he mumbled. Magnify and hold the thing up to scrutiny. Ah—a sequential set. Ingenious! And with nulls scattered in the substructure . . .

  Buzz. Click-click. Throm.

  The force-field cut out. “That’s a help! Now—” Press, press, push-pull twist!

  There were noises behind the door, bars lifting, bolts sliding back. And then silence, and a tall crack opening.

  “You’ve done it!” Mercy pushed past him, activated the lighting. “Now!” she cried. “It must all be saved for Nodonn— but put in a condition so that it’s useless to him during the time that my daemon lover strikes!”

  She regarded the long aisles with their glass racks and shelves, the thousands of different items podded or swathed in transparent durofilm, the walls of the place thickly coaled in sealant impervious to damp and chemical action, the small inventory-control computer, and its robot retriever standing by.

  “We’ll start with you!” Mercy cried. An emerald ray lanced from her hand. The computer and robot began to smoke, and puddles of stinking liquid spread incontinently beneath their casters.

  “That should slow my Lord King’s next shopping expedition! And now what? We must embed all this—render it unusable until it’s been painstakingly cleaned with special solvents that my Nodonn will have to get a Milieu chemist to formulate!”

  His face full of fear. Sullivan-Tonn backed slowly toward the door. Mercy saw him and laughed. “That’s right, Sullivan dear. Run off, man! Your work’s done. Back up the stairs if you value your life! Fly...for I’m brewing up a witch’s cauldron of foul sticky glop to sink Aiken Drum’s weapons in, so he’ll never use them against my love!”

  A tremendous explosion made the rock walls quake. Putrid yellow matter began to boil from their plastic coating; it foamed and surged. “The polymers in the insulating sealant!” cried Mercy, safe in a psychocreative sphere. “Who else can tumble and stretch and refashion their giant molecules as I can? I— the mistress of organics, who can make food and drink all wholesome and nourishing from the trash of the fields! And can’t I also make the devil’s own glue, and a clinging foam to encrust all the pods and packages, and foul poison gases caught in the bubbles that knit the mess together?”

  The terrible stuff flowed like magma, filling every cranny of the storage chamber. Mercy’s lifesaving sphere wafted out the door and she caused it to slam shut, still laughing wildly. The shaft was now half-filled with noxious vapors and so she went lofting up, to where the open door and Sullivan waited. And then she was safely through, and he crashed the heavy panel shut, and the two of them stood side by side.

  Aiken Drum sat on the bottom step of the spiral staircase, Staring at them. The air still reverberated with the slamming of the bronze door.

  “It’s done!” she cried exultantly. “And he’s on his way! You’ll fight him fair, little man, because it’ll take weeks to get the Milieu weapons dug out of the poisonous mess I’ve sunk them in! Get your Spear, King Aiken-Lugonn. Cudgel your burnt-out brain into operancy again, if you can. Nodonn’s coming! And it’s the end!”

  “Yes,” Aiken agreed. Almost casually, he said to SullivanTonn, “Get away from her, you.”

  The psychokinetic levitated and whisked across the great foyer, toward the passage leading to the exterior courtyard. Abruptly, his body seemed to meet an invisible wall. There was a sickening crackle, a choked scream.

  “Not too far away,” Aiken said.

  Sullivan’s stout torso was pinioned to the invisible wall. His nose oozed blood and his jaw hung awry, the lower lip pierced by splintered teeth. He began to utter liquid-thickened cries.

  Both his feet burst into flame.

  “No!” screamed Mercy.

  “It’s your doing,” said Aiken.

  The smoke roiled and blackened. Sullivan writhed, the sounds coming from his mind and throat as shapeless and hideous as his sloughing flesh. His clothing had flashed away in an instant; now he burned only from the knees up, his feet and lower legs having been reduced to calcined bone.

  “Oh, God.” Mercy was weeping. A small fulgurant ball flew from her, struck the flaming man full in the head. The mind-cries ceased. There was only the tick and sputter of the burning, and Mercy’s low sobs.

  “Come upstairs with me.”

  Aiken held out one hand to her. She came slowly to him, noticing at last that he was all in black, with even the golden tone of his thoughts damped down to a level of darkness more fearful—more exciting—than any aspect of him she had ever yet known.

  She took his hand, warm flesh, quite human.

  “What will it be, then?” she asked with fey archness. “How will you do it, Amadán-na-Briona?”

  “Come,” he said. “And see.”

  The Spear.

  Golden and rising from the dark, full of hot energy, hungry. A living shaft, not one of glass, as she had known it would be. First discharging light and pain, then reabsorbing its own energies and hers, all of the life-force, all of the joy and sorrow, all memory, all thinking, all that had been created and matured and fulfilled. He took her and she was gone.

  He was alive and shining.

  As he looked at the ashes, he was surprised how little it had hurt.

  8

  NODONN HAD THE TWO EXOTIC AIRCRAFT APPROACH GORIAH from the seaward side, out of the descending full moon, even though it was plain mat the usurper not only anticipated invasion, but had prepared a perverse and splendorous welcome for his archrival.

  All of the city lights were on, so that even from a distance the sky formed a mother-of-pearl backdrop to the multicolored twinkling outlines of the buildings. The great city wall was topped with the orange beads of bonfires, and each bastion was strung with ominous purple and blue faerie lamps. On its height overlooking the sea, the Castle of Glass formed a soaring pile of blazing amethyst and topaz, braced with spangled flying buttresses and crowned by filigreed spires beaconed with yellow stars.

  Hanging above the citadel, riding the night wind on wires and cables of gold and silver, were kites,

  There were hundreds of them, from titanic oval wanwans more than twenty meters in diameter to stacked boxes, centipedes, Rogallo wings, parafoils, sinuous dragons, and Japanese fighting styles both geometric and theriomorphic. All of the kites were decked in tiny lights. The great man carriers, now flying without passengers, bore gaudy paintings of grimacing samurai, oriental demons, and fierce mythical characters.

  Nodonn Battlemaster had to roar at the audacity of it. The two flyers hovered, screened and invisible, a few thousand meters off the castle seawall, while the invaders recovered from paroxysms of hilarity before launching their assault.

  “How shall we proceed, Battlemaster?” came the voice of Thufan Thunderhead over the RF communicator. “The air above the castle is as thickly tenanted as a locust swarm.”

  Nodonn stood behind Celadeyr, who piloted the Number One craft. He inspected the crazy barrage with his farsight. “Sheets of paper and bamboo frames and panels of flimsy silk!” he said contemptuously. “The rho-fields clothing our aircraft will burn them up like tinder. Fly into the midst of them— and let all the battle-company be prepared to descend upon the castle after I have swept the royal apartments with the power of my Sword.”

  “As you command,” said Thufan. Celadeyr, a madcap grin showing through his open glass visor, twisted the throttle-grip and sent their own inertialess craft tearing into the swarm of kites at barely subsonic velocity.

  Two blinding bursts of light lit the entire countryside as the gravomagnetic aircraft, flying side by side, simultaneously encountered the highly conductive anchoring cables. The kites all burst into flame and were consumed within seconds; but the rhocraft hung motionless in the center of an amazing fire-storm. Their black ceremetal skins crawled with flickering networks of force. The energies were grounding out through the gold and silver wires, the flimsier conductors going molten and falling away in smoking arcs. The sturdy cables of the wanw
ans and the o-dako and the other great kites wrapped the birdlike machines with spiderweb tenacity, however, and the flux-tappers of the craft surged toward terminal overload as they strove to maintain gravomagnetic equipoise in the face of the relentless drain.

  Now the lelepathic laughter of the trickster could be heard ringing in the aether, mingling with the teeth-jarring screech of the dumping rho-field generators, the crackle of the current-laden wires, and a thunderous hiss of ion-charged vapor from the boiling sea below.

  “Away!” Nodonn cried out to his knights. “Out of the ship, before it’s too late!”

  “Brother—the hatch!” Kuhal Earthshaker shouted. “Jammed!”

  With his mighty psychokinesis Nodonn ripped open the short-circuited airlock, then formed a tunnel of protective screening for the escaping knights. Those who could not levitate by their own power were borne down by the Battlemaster or Kuhal to the seaside parapet of the castle like a stream of rainbow-hued meteorites. Nodonn himself, clutching his photonic Sword, flew out only after he saw Celadeyr safely away.

  The Battlemaster hovered to one side as his craft shuddered, Aimed slowly end over end, and dropped toward the sea, enveloped in a seething violet cloud.

  “Thufan!” his storm-loud voice cried. “Evacuate your flyer!”

  The distracted thoughts of the First Comer pilot reached him dimly through a mental tumult. The knights trapped within the second ship were in a panic, chopping at the frozen hatch with their glass weapons and bombarding it with futile psychocreative thrusts. Thufan said:

  Sorry Battlemaster...should have... danger of grounding...we Tanu ...more chivalry than science...

  Up on the highest turret of the Castle of Glass danced a spark of gold wielding a bright needle. A bar of green light transfixed the hanging aircraft as Aiken Drum’s Spear discharged. The blast’s shockwave flattened Nodonn. He saw a fireball bloom above the water with excruciating slowness, all flecked with torn purple force-field asterisms and ejecting secondary detonations.