Robert Charrette - Arthur 03 - A Knight Among Knaves

by Robert N. Charrette

  "I'll just bet," Dr. Spae said.

  "As I told your short friend, I've seen enough to know that helping Van Dieman is the last thing I ought to be doing. I think you have the right of it. He's got to be stopped."

  "And you want to help?" Dr. Spae didn't sound like she believed him.

  "As a matter of fact, I do," the man said.

  Hagen snorted. "And just who the hell are you to do that?"

  "They call me Chase. Not that names should matter." Chase swept his gaze across all of them. "And I think that you can use all the help that you can get. I also think that we're wasting time sitting here and arguing. Van Dieman's getting away."

  That was certainly true.

  "We can't trust him," Hagen said, voicing John's thought.

  "I'm not so sure," Kun said. "I think he does want to help. And he's right—we can't afford to waste time. Let's get this thing into the air. We'll sort things out on the way. If we decide not to believe him, we can dump him out the door."

  "Good enough," Chase said.

  Hagen grumbled, but he said, "Help me up into the driver's seat."

  Benton found it a little embarrassing to be under detention by a half-dozen guards none of whom came any higher than his chest, but six guns were higher odds than he wanted to bet against. He let them lead him to one of the construction shacks scattered across the station. The shacks were among the few structures with intact roofs. Czerkas and Juarez, one of his guys and one of Van Dieman's, were already incarcerated inside. They were both wounded; Czerkas had a pressure splint around his left arm, and Juarez's head was swathed in a bloody bandage. One of the shrimp guards used the muzzle of his weapon to issue Benton an invitation to join them. Two of the midgets started removing potentially useful items from the workshed-turned-prison cell.

  "So the hotshot couldn't cut it either. No reward for you," Juarez said with a sneer.

  Benton ignored him. "Czerkas, you okay?"

  "I'll live."

  "What happened to Chase and Reg?"

  Czerkas didn't look at him. "The midgets caught Reg right when the fog lifted. Chase I didn't see. Got to the verries, I think. I heard a shot from over that way after the first one went up."

  Benton had heard the shot too. It had been from a Viper, one of the shrimps' weapons. Czerkas would know that too. Since there had been no return fire, and no verrie had gone north—their plan if they'd captured one—Chase had to be considered MIA at best. More likely he was as dead as Reg.

  "You failed the Opener of the Way," Juarez said. "Great will be his retribution for your failure to give your all."

  "Yeah? I don't see where you gave yours," Czerkas said.

  Juarez touched his bandage. "I was not at fault."

  Benton shrugged. "Well, retribution comes when it comes. I know my limits. We did our job, and it didn't work out. There'll be another day. There always is."

  A second Snowhawk lifted off and roared overhead, headed east.

  "Only if they win," their dwarvish guard said.

  "Whatever you say, Shorty."

  The guard didn't react to the sarcasm. Once his buddies finished clearing out every visible useful item, the guard backed out and closed the door on the prisoners. Benton listened to the lock dropping in place, a rudimentary thing by the sound of it but strong enough to keep an ordinary man penned in.

  "They're determined little buggers," Czerkas commented.

  "They cannot hold back the momentum of time," Juarez said sanctimoniously.

  The guy had the charm of three-day-old fish. "Maybe, maybe not," Benton said as he walked to the door. "Now why don't you just shut up for a while?"

  Benton listened until he was sure the area outside the door was empty, then he levered the door handle down until the retaining bolt snapped. Good thing the shrimps' tactical leader had rushed off without filling his team in on Benton's capabilities.

  "Czerkas and I are going to be gone before whoever comes out on top gets back. You can come along too, Juarez, if you think you can pull your weight."

  "You have no faith," Juarez said as if it were a condemnation.

  "Maybe not, but I have money in the bank and I intend to spend it."

  He scanned the area looking for any sign of the guards. They seemed to be well occupied elsewhere. Fine. He took off for the nearest cover, running hard, but not so hard Czerkas couldn't keep up. For a miracle, Juarez wasn't enough of a bastard to yell for the shrimps.

  Sitting in the Snowhawk's cockpit, Van Dieman had a much better view of the land over which they flew than he'd had from the cabin of the Petrel. The magnificence of the Transantarctic Mountains lay ahead of them and through gaps between the peaks he could occasionally glimpse a sparkle from the great East Antarctic Ice Sheet beyond them. But the glacier was not their destination; that lay among the mountains. Despite the pilot's grumbling about the state of the Snowhawk's engine, they were making good time.

  "Weather's closing in," Santiago said, pointing to the sky above the mountains.

  The skies were graying, true, but Van Dieman knew that it was magic and not weather that was closing in. He could feel the harbinger squirming, overcoming its fear of flying and reaching out in response to the land below them. He could hear its silent song.

  Close. The timorousness that the harbinger had shown on previous flights was gone. It was full of confidence and filling with power. Very close. Soon now.

  "We will be there soon," Van Dieman said.

  The harbinger's song increased its tempo.

  The first of the Dry Valleys that they reached was something of a shock after the icy plains that lapped against the mountains. The walls of the valley were steep, like the vertical walls of the desert canyons of the American Southwest. In fact, the vista might have been an old black and white photograph of those badlands. The exposed faces of stone were striped bands of light and dark standing in sharp contrast to each other. Spills of eroded dolerite and sandstone skirted cliffs in sooty-looking talus slopes that flowed down to blend with the rough glacial till that floored the valleys. Nowhere was there any vegetation, any hint of color.

  They flew down a long valley and popped up over a rise into another. Side canyons branched off from the main valley. Their flight offered them only glimpses of those lesser branches as they flashed by the rough shouldered mountains standing sentinel at the entrances. One of those canyons held more than geological wonders. One of them—

  There.

  Van Dieman sensed the point on which the harbinger's attention centered. He directed Santiago to take the craft into the side canyon. As the Snowhawk banked between the shoulders of the mighty cliffs that flanked the entrance, Van Dieman saw that the harbinger was already at work. Its song was not silent here—the eerie melody audible and reminiscent of a lost, lonely wind.

  Soil whipped along the canyon's floor, flowing around the larger stones and boulders of the glacial till that blanketed the ancient water-etched basement of the formation. As the harbinger's song grew stronger, the arcane winds moved faster and faster. Stones and pebbles joined the whirling cloud of dust. Faster. Small rocks were added to the dance. A hollow began to appear in the center of the canyon floor at the focus of the whirlwind. The harbinger's song shrieked louder, more compelling and more insistent. The boulders that had stood proud of the till were whipped up into the vortex as the bowl in the soil grew wider and deeper. New boulders appeared like mountains rising from the sea.

  But they were not ordinary boulders, for each was long and flat, and there were sixteen of them, four widely spaced sets of four, each set arranged in a rectangle. As more and more of the canyon's fill was drawn up into the harbinger's whirlwind, the boulders were revealed as lintel stones capping monolithic uprights. The tips of other upright stones appeared, stretching in curving arcs between the rectangles. As the new stones appeared, it became clear that they described a circle. One end of each rectangle was a part of the circle. The rectangle of capped stones stood at the quadrant points, th
eir structures offering an entry into the inner precincts of the circle.

  Van Dieman understood the privilege of being allowed to see the temple revealed. It was an honor to be present when the gateway was uncovered. It was the time foretold. They had come to the time of the Opening.

  The vortex expanded with sudden violence, flinging its lithic burden wide and away from the revealed temple. No boulder, no rock, not even the slightest pebble touched the Snowhawk, enveloped as it was in the power of the harbinger. The verrie continued undisturbed on its approach. In the center of the half-kilometer depression, Van Dieman could see the black altar stone at the heart of the henge. The coiled and entwined whorls carved into the altar's surface were aglow with arcane power.

  "What is my role?" he asked the harbinger.

  No need for hands.

  The obliqueness of its response puzzled him.

  Then pain radiated from his left knee and he looked down to see his pants soaked with blood. His back exploded with fiery agony and he nearly fainted from the pain. His insides burned. He understood then that the harbinger had not healed his injuries, but only masked them. It had taken the pain away and made it possible for him to walk and act, but it had done no more than that. Now it had removed that veil and abandoned pretense. And in that moment Van Dieman knew that the harbinger had never been bound by his power. The devious creature had only pretended to be subservient to him. He understood that he had been betrayed. He had been systematically misled and used.

  "Liar!" he named the harbinger.

  It did not answer his accusation.

  "Liar! Is this how you reward the faithful?"

  Death, you feared. Life, you wanted. Reward, you asked.

  "Yes! Yes! I want to live!"

  Life you shall have.

  He felt the harbinger's attention shift to Santiago. It took the pilot, draining the life out of the man, but none of those energies, sweeping so tantalizing near, touched him. He understood that the harbinger had left behind fragments of the man, shreds of knowledge and splinters of skill. He felt the harbinger slip into the shell of Santiago and manipulate the little that remained to direct the Snowhawk's course. Paralyzed by the pain, Van Dieman could do nothing but watch as the altar stone grew closer, looming ever larger as the verrie rushed toward it. The harbinger had found a way to deliver the telesmon to the necessary spot.

  The Snowhawk crashed, but Van Dieman was barely aware of the new violence done to his body, awash as he was in agony. New pain forced its way through his wretchedness as ceramic composite fragments from the verrie's fuselage, and razor-edged shards from the windscreen, tore through his body. Crumpling metal mangled his legs and ground his flesh to hamburger. His wounds should have killed him, but he lived.

  Life you shall have, the harbinger had said. He knew the words for a curse.

  Smoke filled the air and Van Dieman's lungs. There was fire in the cockpit. Something oily and viscous began to drip onto his shoulder. Fuel or lubricant, its precise nature didn't matter. Whatever it was, it was highly flammable. He called to the harbinger, begging it to save him. Beating his fist bloody against the wreckage that imprisoned him, he screamed promises to the creature. He was willing to do anything for it. Anything!

  "Just don't let me burn!"

  The harbinger ignored his pleas.

  It was singing to the stars.

  Holger was impressed by Hagen's piloting skill. Once they reached the mountains, the dwarf shifted the Snowhawk into vertical mode for maneuverability and kept it there, but he never throttled back. The verrie pitched and yawed as Hagen flung it about, climbing to skim over a ridge or banking to avoid a cliff with the barest of margins. It was a wild, nerve-racking ride, but they steadily closed on the Snowhawk that they pursued.

  The Dry Valleys through which they flew were strange, the bare ground out of place in this continent of ice. It seemed wrong somehow. He wanted to close his eyes and make it all go away, but he couldn't. Van Dieman's verrie was ahead of them somewhere, and every pair of eyes were needed to spot him. Holger had a duty.

  Caliburn lay in his lap—the only way to carry the sword, since he'd had to take off the back-slung scabbard to strap into the verrie's seat. The sword's quick release scabbard exposed most of the blade; Holger ran his hand along it, feeling the cool calmness of the dark steel. The worn leather of the grip felt comfortable under the fingers of his hand. He was flying into battle armed with a sword and an automatic weapon.

  Strange, but somehow right.

  The strange had become his commonplace. There was no reason for an iceless valley in Antarctica to seem strange, was there? It was what it was, as he was what he was. There was nothing to do but accept it.

  "What's that?" Hagen pointed to what looked like a column of smoke rising from somewhere ahead of them.

  Holger squinted to see it better. What appeared to be smoke was windborne soil and rocks twisting in the grip of a monstrous dust devil.

  "The work of the harbinger," Dr. Spae said. "We must hurry."

  "Nice of it to tell us where to look," Hagen commented.

  "Keep low," Holger said. "We want to get as close as possible before they see us."

  "Don't have to tell me twice."

  Hagen dropped the Snowhawk so low that Holger thought they were in danger of making an unintended landing. The verrie arrowed toward a break in the wall of cliffs, a side canyon that seemed to be the one from which the telltale column rose. They banked hard, heading for the mouth of the side canyon.

  As he got his first glimpse of the canyon, Holger spotted their quarry. Van Dieman's Snowhawk was headed directly for the sediment-laden whirlwind.

  "What have you got that sword for?" Chase asked.

  An incongruous time for that sort of question.

  "You ought to know," John snapped.

  Any surprise at the kid's remark was blown away as the vortex exploded outward, hurling its burden away from the center. A sheet of soil and rocks engulfed the verrie in front of them and hurtled toward their own. Reflexively Holger brought his hands up. Caliburn's point struck the roof of the cabin, the weapon's steel ringing like a gong. He'd forgotten he was holding it. Lucky he hadn't taken Hagen's arm off.

  Hitting the airborne debris was like hitting a wall. The Snowhawk shuddered under the hail of stone. The cabin was filled with the thunder of the pounding they were receiving. The fuselage dented, bulging inward where the heavy stones struck. The verrie's windscreen pitted under punishment, then cracked. Just as the fury of the unnatural storm seemed to abate, the windscreen shattered. The cold wind swept into the cabin, carrying lacerating shards of Transparex along with the last of its burden of sand. The Snowhawk nosed down, dropping like a stricken bird.

  And all through the buffeting Caliburn tolled softly and continually like a distant mourning bell.

  Somehow Hagen regained a measure of control over the craft and fought it back to an even keel.

  Holger was surprised to find himself barely scratched by the barrage of unconventional shrapnel. "Everyone all right?" he asked.

  "Nothing serious," Spae reported.

  "Wrong," Hagen contradicted. "Listen."

  The steady throb of the Snowhawk's engines fluttered and shifted to a ratcheting grind.

  "Land," Holger ordered. "We'll have a better chance on the ground."

  "Like we have a choice?" Hagen's hands fought with the controls of the pitching verrie. "This bucket's had it."

  John felt a flash of annoyance at Chase's question about the sword. "You ought to know," he snapped without thinking.

  But why should Chase know?

  There was no time to wonder. Something out in front of them surged and the energy in the vortex precipitously peaked. With hurricane force, the whirling cloud of soil and rocks exploded toward them.

  Somehow the Snowhawk managed to survive the ersatz storm, and Hagen managed to get the verrie down for a safe landing. The battered aircraft sat at the edge of a huge bowl-shaped depressio
n in the center of the canyon floor. In the center of the depression stood a truly enormous stone henge, and in the center of the henge lay Van Dieman's crashed Snowhawk.

  It appeared Van Dieman had absolutely no luck with aircraft. Smoke—real smoke this time—was rising from the

  wreck.

  Kun was the first out of the Snowhawk, but he didn't go far. He stood at the lip of the depression, the sword Caliburn in one hand and a Viper machine pistol in the other, staring down at what lay below. One by one they joined him. Hagen, hampered by his wounded leg, was the last. The air was the coldest that John had felt since he'd arrived in Antarctica, but that wasn't what made him shiver. The wind made a keening sound—only there was no wind.

  A monstrous serpentine shape, made of shadow, lay coiled beside the wreckage of Van Dieman's verrie. It was huge, bigger than any snake John had ever seen in a nature vid. And no snake outside a fantasy epic had ever had eyes that burned with fire as this one's did. No one needed to be told that this creature was the harbinger.

  "This doesn't look good," Kun said.

  What Kun was seeing might not look good, but what John was seeing looked worse. The great serpent shape coiled around the wrecked verrie looked even more loathsome to arcane sight than to the mortal eye. But what truly unnerved him were the other serpents, smaller and more ghostly, that spiraled down from the darkening skies and wove among the henge stones in a twisting, torturous dance. John watched in horror as one of the whirling spirits left the stones and squirmed across the open space to join with the harbinger and add its essence to the shadow creature. The great serpent quivered, moaning orgiastically. The ululating wail notched up in volume and the sky darkened further. Another of the lesser beings started wriggling toward the harbinger.

  "At least Van Dieman's out of the picture," Chase said.

  "How do you know?" Hagen asked.

  "He's trapped in the wreck," Chase said with a confident smile. Something about his expression was very familiar.

  "Then it's just the harbinger we have to deal with," Dr. Spae said, staring at the monster.

  Chase nodded. "Isn't that enough?"

  Yet another of the small shapes slithered to the harbinger and was absorbed. The creature's hue darkened fractionally, becoming more substantial.