He stepped to his bed, bent, and drew from beneath it a large hammer. Standing again before the oversized cucurbit, he braced himself and swung the hammer with both hands.
The first blow starred the glass with cracks. The second shattered it and the cucurbit fell to pieces. A gush of water flowed forth, swilling around Rachad’s legs and flooding the floor of the small room.
And following the flood there stepped forth the man-sized homunculus. The fluid seemed to fall away from him to leave him perfectly dry, even dropping out of the fabric of his voluminous purple robe. He stepped hesitantly, looking frail, gazing around him with glazed eyes.
Rachad focused his thoughts. Say to me: I can speak, young Rachad.
The voice that came was distant, breathless, vague. “I can speak, young Rachad.”
A perfect imitation!
Rachad walked the creature up and down the room, still under thought control. To look at, it was hard to believe it was not a genuine human being.
He would have to move quickly. It was odds-on whether they would get to their destination before the homunculus collapsed.
“Come with me,” he ordered.
Stealthily they left the sleeping quarters, making for the entrance to the inner maze.
***
Low ceilings of soil and rock confined the noise of bustle as, in the underground tunnels, men readied themselves for a last stand.
Outside, Kerek ships were dropping from the sky like autumn leaves. Baron Matello closed his ears to the bitter arguments going on around him, getting Captain Zhorga to help him strap on his armor. He lifted up his two-handed sword, his favorite weapon, and ran the lamplight up and down it before sheathing it in its enormous scabbard.
Nearby, visible through the open door of the commandant’s section, a squad of men-at-arms were checking their bell-muzzled muskets. It was so cramped and crowded here. It would almost be good to get into the open once again, even though it was to face certain death. Sourly Matello glanced at the periscope at the far end of the chamber. The man who sat peering into it was one of a round-the-clock watch of six, and the presence of the niggling, useless duty had begun to grate on Matello’s nerves.
Suddenly the argument broke off and King Lutheron turned to Matello. “What do you say, Sir Goth? The Commandant here is trying to persuade me that now is the time to seek refuge with the Duke of Koss. It was you, I remember, who first raised the possibility.”
“There are too many of us, liege-lord,” Matello rumbled. “Koss would never let us in—even unarmed, we are enough to take over the Aegis, and he will let nothing interfere with his private wretchedness.” He paused to pull tight a large buckle, moving his arms to test his freedom of movement and grunting with satisfaction. “In a way I brought about this state of affairs, liege-lord—but I never thought the Kerek would descend on us like this. Rather, I thought they’d pass this star by—but there’s the Kerek for you, they seem able to sniff anything out, and it will only be a short time before they find us and dig us out of our hidey-hole. I say, make a sally against them while they are unprepared, then retreat back here and kill them by the droves as they try to reach us through the access tunnel. We’ll make a good, hard fight of it before they get us all.”
“That I agree with,” the camp commandant said, his face turning red with something like anger. “But the Duke of Koss might admit the King at least, if not the rest of us!”
“We would have to reveal the presence of our camp, which will put the duke in a strange frame of mind. Still, it is up to His Majesty to make that decision.”
“Give me a sword,” King Lutheron said. “I will fight with the rest of you.”
Matello nodded. “Come along, Zhorga, let’s inspect the men.”
At that moment a yell went up from the man at the periscope. “Commandant! Come quickly!”
The officer lumbered to the instrument, bent and put his eyes to it. After only a second he straightened and turned to address the room in astonishment.
“The gates are opening!”
Matello blinked. He rushed to the periscope, nearly shouldering the commandant aside in his haste. What he saw through the eyepiece made him gasp.
The eyepiece communicated with a lens that, hidden in the shadow of a rock, kept watch on the Aegis. Two great doors were now edging slowly outward, giving a glimpse of geared machinery within.
“He’s done it!” he gasped hoarsely, turning back to the others. “The Aegis is open!”
Like him, everyone was paralyzed for a moment. Then Matello began to bellow wildly.
“Get moving, you curs! This is what we’ve been waiting for!” With his clenched fist he gestured at the commandant, his eyes bulging. “Drop the ramp! Sound the advance!”
The commandant snapped out an order, then strode to the two big levers that were set in grooves at the side of the chamber. As a trumpet began to sound he took them one by one in both hands and pulled them hard over.
The result was dramatic. The roof fell in, a section of ground overhead folding inward to form a ramp which showered dirt and dust directly into the post Matello was first to leap up that ramp, his great sword in his hand, closely followed by Zhorga and others who had already arrived in answer to the trumpet’s summons.
He emerged scant yards from the Aegis gate. Matello raced for the widening gap. His broadsword flashed briefly in the fierce sun. Then he was inside, looking for young Caban.
But it was not Caban who had opened the Aegis. Matello found himself facing a large, nearly empty plaza, illuminated by soft ceiling lights. A line of pikemen, in the peculiar pied livery of Koss, stood behind a mass of timber that looked as if it had been newly chopped to pieces. A large adamant box-shield lay on top of the pile. Matello could easily guess that this had protected the wheeled mechanism which was now being worked by two more pikemen as the foot-thick doors continued to swing open.
The line of guards were standing stiffly at attention, the ends of their weapons planted firmly on the floor, and were making no response to Matello’s entrance. Then Matello saw Rachad, standing beside a gaunt, pale figure in a long purple robe.
He knew at once that this was the Duke of Koss. Though the figure looked ill and consumptive, he recognized him from a painting he had once seen of the former duke. Yes, this was the detested Koss’s son for sure.
Zhorga drew abreast of Matello. The two of them stared in puzzlement at the unexpected scene. Suddenly the duke swayed, his head drooped, and he fell in a graceful swoon to the floor.
“Your Grace!” The captain of the guard rushed to the limp form, taking the lolling head in his hand. “Two of you over here, on the double!”
Rachad sidled hastily over to Matello, his face feverish. “Round them all up—quick!” he hissed. “Before they realize they’ve been tricked!”
“Tricked?”
“They think the duke ordered them to open the Aegis—but that’s not the duke at all! It’s an homunculus I made!”
“Eh?” Matello growled, not fully understanding what Rachad was talking about. But his earnest advice was good enough. He glanced round at his men who were still streaming after him through the doorway.
He thrust out his sword, and roared: “Kill them all!”
The ensuing fight was brief and bloody. The pikemen were totally bewildered. Only when actually attacked did they move, in sudden panic, to defend themselves, wielding their long pikes with skill, so that several of Matello’s liegelings were stretched out on the floor before full possession was taken of the plaza.
While men continued to pour through the gateway, Matello wiped his sword on a pied tunic and returned to stare thoughtfully at the body of Rachad’s homunculus. Already it was beginning to shrivel up. The purple cloak, also organic in nature, had become like a huge withered leaf.
“How did you manage it?” he asked. “I had almost given you up.”
“It wasn’t possible to open the Aegis straight away,” Rachad explained eagerly. “It wa
s too well guarded. I’ve been working with Master Amschel, in his laboratory. That was where I got the idea of making an homunculus replica of the duke, under my mental control. And it worked!”
Rachad was bursting to tell the whole story. Surreptitiously he had guided the rapidly weakening homunculus through the Aegis. For the last stages of the journey he had been obliged to support the ephemeral creature by letting it lean on his shoulder. Then, at the gateway, there was the stunned astonishment on the part of the guards, as they heard the reedy voice of their duke order them to open up. At first they had reacted with inbred reluctance. Three times the homunculus had pressed his command, and only the actual presence—so they thought—of their master had prodded them out of their stupor, making them perform the incredible act, something they had been sure they would never see in their lifetimes.
But when he tried to launch into his tale Matello shut him up with an impatient wave of his hand. “Later,” he said, but nevertheless he clapped Rachad fondly on the shoulder. “It was a brilliant piece of work, my boy. You’ve saved all our lives, though you don’t know it, and I’ll remember that.”
Straightening, he began to bark orders. “Commandant, see to it that everybody gets in here without delay, before the Kerek find out what’s happening. Then close up these doors again, and we’ll organize a general takeover of this place. There might still be a bit of fighting to do.”
“With odds in our favor, this time,” Zhorga added. He grinned at Rachad. “You’ve done well, shipmate. I’m proud of you.”
***
They went through the Aegis like a storm.
The impact of hardened fighting men, drawn both from Matello’s forces and King Lutheron’s, on the sybarite’s paradise was like that of a barbarian horde on a soft, decadent culture—which, in exaggerated form, was exactly what the interior of the Aegis represented. There was practically no resistance and Matello, sensing his followers’ relief at having escaped imminent death at the hands of the Kerek, allowed them a brief catharsis of rape and ransack. Artworks were smashed, sumptuous drapes torn down in acres of billowing finery to reveal the bare adamant beneath, and for a while the omnipresent haunting music was mingled with coarse bellows of triumph.
Flammarion, moving with surprising agility by means of his warping wings, attached himself to the party led by Baron Matello and proved as eager as any. But his search had only one object—the Duke of Koss himself, the man who had spent a lifetime as his creditor.
They eventually found the defeated duke deep down in the fortress. He lay limply on a samite couch, a servant girl dabbing at his brow with scented water. He seemed to be in a state of collapse.
He stirred feebly when Matello and his men burst into the chamber. His face was fully as pale and deathlike as the face of the homunculus that had recently impersonated him. “Who are these strangers who disturb my peace?” he murmured, his voice so faint as to be barely audible. “Vandals, despoilers, desecrators of my pleasure …”
“We are here because you failed to do your duty, Koss!” Baron Matello stormed.
From behind him Flammarion came forward. He reared up over the supine noble like a threatening cobra. “Now is the time to remind you of our contract, Your Grace!” he exclaimed, his voice vibrant with passion.
“What strange beast is this?” the duke queried breathlessly. “Ah yes, the builder of my retreat, of my cosmos.”
“My fee! I am here to collect my fee, unpaid for all these years!”
“But the Aegis was not invulnerable, master builder,” the duke replied in a pained whisper. “No payment is due.”
“ot invulnerable?” Matello demanded incredulously.
“Why, no … as is attested by your presence here …” The duke smiled faintly. Then he uttered a sigh.
His head suddenly lolled.
“He took poison,” the girl told them. “It takes a few minutes to work.”
Matello grabbed the duke’s head by the hair and turned it so as to lift an eyelid with his thumb. Then, with a grunt, he let it drop.
“Well that’s that. Don’t worry, Flammarion, there’s plenty of stuff here. I’ll see you get your reward.”
Flammarion’s response was dolorous and labored. “But the logic of his argument is inescapable,” he droned. “To collect payment, I must first force access to the Aegis; yet once that is done the terms of the contract are broken. How completely the old duke tricked me! I can accept no fee.”
“What are you worried about? Take what you want anyway.”
“No. The ethic of my craft will not permit sharp, practice. What an ill day it was when I ventured into Maralia! I have labored in vain!”
“Well, it probably won’t make any difference,” Baron Matello muttered to the others as Flammarion shuffled despondently away. “The way things look, we’ll all have to spend the rest of our lives here.”
Chapter FIFTEEN
As the months passed, the atmosphere within the Aegis sank into gloom. Outside, the Kerek were encamped in force. A constant barrage of ballista missiles, cannon balls and sticky fire was hurled against the sloping walls of the fortress. Galleys sailed overhead and dropped immense stones from great heights. None of this was felt or even heard within the adamant casing, however. Once the original exultation of victory and escape was over, the Aegis’s all-pervading reservoir of silence, of cloying degeneracy, took over.
King Lutheron made some effort to prevent this. He tried to keep his own people apart from the Duke of Koss’s followers as much as possible and forbade most of the pleasures the fortress offered, tearing apart the intricate bordellos, destroying extensive apartments whose weird artistic purpose offended him, and spoiling the dream-slime by mixing acid in it. But nothing, not even the regular military drill he insisted on, seemed able to halt the slow, steady slide into listlessness.
It could not even be said that the whole of the Aegis had fallen into his possession. When Rachad attempted to lead a party through the inner maze, it was to find that he no longer knew the way. Amschel had rearranged the labyrinth, rendering his number code useless and prompting him to retreat hastily, afraid of becoming lost or possibly trapped. He had refused to venture into it again despite Matello’s gibes.
When he could be avoided Matello who, nominally Duke of Koss now, had taken to prowling the Aegis in a fury of pent-up energy, lashing out angrily with his tongue, and sometimes his fists, at anyone he met. Rachad, who himself was utterly appalled by the way events had turned out, did not see how the baron would be able to endure his imprisonment, even in so capacious a refuge as the Aegis. He feared that he would do something foolish, such as open up the Aegis again so as to go down in a blaze of glory.
He had spoken to Zhorga about the dismal prospects for them all. The former merchant airman had stuck out his lower lip glumly.
“We’ve got two choices: either to stay here or take our chances with the Kerek,” he had said. “They’ll be crawling all over Maralia by now—and I reckon it won’t be long either before they get to Earth.”
One night, as Rachad lay in his private room, restlessly trying to sleep, the door opened slowly, and someone entered.
Rachad quit his bed and raised the wick of the night lamp. The intruder closed the door behind him and stared solemnly at Rachad.
“Wolo!” Rachad exclaimed in surprise. It was one of Amschel’s assistants, clad in a plain blue robe. Wolo nodded his head in greeting.
“The master has sent me to take you to him,” he said calmly. “Kindly get dressed, and come with me.”
Rachad felt an acute embarrassment “Why does he want me? He knows? …”
“That you opened the Aegis to the duke’s enemies? Yes … but the fastness of the Aegis is not, after all, Master Amschel’s concern. His work nears culmination. He reminds you of his promise.”
“Promise?”
“He made a bargain with you.”
“Oh. Yes.” A note of suspicious belligerency entered Rachad’s voice
. “Well, what if I refuse to come with you?”
Wolo lowered his head, as if understanding something. “I see … Then I will bid you good night, Master Rachad. I will inform the master that you have no interest in the Stone of the Philosophers.”
“Wait!” Rachad said as the other turned to go. “I’ll come.”
Quickly he dressed. Having come this far in pursuit of Gebeth’s goal, he might as well see the business through, he thought. At least it would provide a temporary diversion in what promised to be a lifetime of tedium.
Wolo led him calmly and confidently toward the maze. The Aegis seemed to be sleeping. Once they heard the sound of carousing, as some of Matello’s troops, in defiance of King Lutheron’s orders, disported with the Duke of Koss’s former courtesans. Then they were in the maze, and a distracted look came over Wolo as he repeated the sequence of numbers he had learned, guiding Rachad through into the dim wood.
In the laboratory, Amschel was waiting, wearing a colorful smock on which were woven patterns of star clusters. He sat at a table on which lay The Root of Transformations, the two halves bound together now in lead covers. Beside it was a thick pile of loose papers.
“Good evening, Rachad,” he greeted genially. “Your intrusion into our lives was not, it seems, entirely from honest motives.”
Rachad reddened, and felt sufficiently stung to retort angrily. “What I said was true—I did come to Maralia to obtain the secret of the Stone, though originally I had expected to look no farther than Mars. As for the other thing—yes, I admit it. Baron Matello sent me in here, to open the Aegis and unseat the duke. And for good reason!” Rachad’s voice became more heated. “Don’t you know what’s going on outside? Humanity is being invaded! Koss’s estates could have helped in the war—but now it’s too late!”
“Oh, I am aware of what is happening,” Amschel said quietly. “Did I not tell you that I am a much-traveled man? At a time when Matello and his ilk took cognizance only of their own private quarrels, I already knew how scant mankind’s chances were of prevailing against the Kerek.”
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