The Nonborn King

by Julian May

  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, ad of the life-force, ad of the joy and sorrow, ad memory, ad thinking, ad 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 that 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 wad 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 sliver, 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 tights. 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 firestorm. Their black cerametal 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 wanwans 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 telepathic 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, turned 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 pdot 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.

  Too late, Nodonn extended the Sword. A coherent light beam, twin to the one that had destroyed the flyer, vaporized the top third of the turret. The air reverberated to the shattering concussion.

  And laughter.

  Try again, came a jeering thought.

  Beside himself, Nodonn blew the tower's stub to fragments. But of course the Foe was no longer there—only the echo of his gibes.

  Nodonn sent his farsight boring into the main keep of the citadel. His 200 surviving knights were already engaging the enemy. Tanu forces loyal to the King, led by Bleyn the Champion and Alberonn Mindeater, were marshalling for an attack in metaconcert. The Battlemaster streaked into the forecourt with his Sword high, and a photonic blast brought a great chunk of the castle façade tumbling down upon the defenders.

  "Hold off!" cried Bleyn, switching his direction instantly to a PK deflective structure. The threescore knights under his control managed to divert the bulk of the collapsing masonry and only a few were harmed. But Nodonn's forces piled in on the loyalists, and in the heat of subsequent hand-to-hand encounters, the discipline required for cooperative mental effort was almost totally disrupted. Both invading and defending Tanu turned instinctively to the ancient fighting style of the race, contending against one another with flashing glass weapons and haphazard mental blows.

  "Minds together!" Alberonn pleaded. Numbers of the younger loyalists rallied around the hybrid coercer and resumed fighting in the efficient metaconcert mode. Those of Nodonn's force who were struck by multimind thrusts either died in their tracks or suffered massive brain damage. But Nodonn was quick to take advantage of the confusion. He encouraged the weaker among his knights to fight on in the courtyard mêlée while the stalwarts broke free. Divided into three groups led by himself, Kuhal Earthshaker, and Celadeyr, they pressed more deeply into the castle.

  "Aiken Drum! Find him!" The Battlemaster was alight with solar fury. "Each force to a different part of the citadel—but when you corner him, remember he is mine!"

  Ordinary farsight was useless for locating the usurper, who was masked not only by his own mind's cunning but also by the portable Milieu-technology screening devices he wore. He would have to be detected physically—or lured to a confrontation.

  ***

  Celadeyr of Afaliah and the seventy-odd knights under his command smashed their way into the predominantly human wing of the citadel, taking a fearful toll of gray and silver defenders. The collared humans, loyal in their hearts to Aiken, became helpless before the invading Tanu overlords, who were able to coerce them through their
tores. Wave after wave of gray troopers advanced with their silver officers, only to meet the irresistible compulsion of the enemy that bade them throw away their iron weapons and submit to the terrible glass swords.

  "Cut the Lowlife rabble down!" the old Lord of Afaliah crowed. "Wipe 'em out!"

  He led his band into the castle garrison, thinking that Aiken might have taken refuge among members of his own race. His knights killed every bareneck or gray or silver that they encountered; but finally, when the invaders were far out of range of Nodonn's protective mental aegis, they were confronted by a detachment of the King's gold-torc elite guard, who advanced on them from behind the detention barracks.

  Uncoercible, wearing full-body glass armor capable of deflecting the small psychocreative blasts of the individual stalwarts, the humans lifted unfamiliar slender weapons. There were only about twenty of them, headed by Commander Congreve, who glowed a vivid azure with the force of his own metapsychic power and saluted Celadeyr on the intimate mode.

  "I know you, Congreve!" Celadeyr roared. "You were a loyal servant of the Battlemaster before that little gold pipsqueak turned your head. Join us! Throw down your arms!"

  Congreve said, "Surrender, Celadeyr of Afaliah. King Aiken-Lugonn would not take your lives."

  Celadeyr and ad his knights laughed and hefted their great swords. "You're outnumbered more than three to one," the old creator stated. "I'd give you five seconds."

  "Ready, Jerry?" said Congreve quietly.

  "Up yours, then, Lowlife!" Celo howled, and launched the heaviest psychozap he could muster at the armored human. Congreve stood unmoving in the midst of a snapping coronal discharge. At the same time, a PK knight came soaring straight at him from the rear ranks of the invaders, brandishing a flaming sword like the Angel of Eden.

  "Zap him, Jer," Congreve said.

  One of the elites bent to his laser carbine and there was a Moogish chirp. A scarlet beam flicked momentarily. The psychokinetic, sailing into it head-on, was sliced cleanly from crown to crotch through glass armor, flesh, and bone, and crashed to the pavement less than two meters in front of Celadeyr.

  "Surrender," Congreve repeated. The Tanu force stood stock-still. Then, abrupdy, four coercers and a creator leaped forward, swinging their blades. The entire front rank of elites fired their Matsus, this time with the beams dialed to needle. Drilled through heart and brain, the five attackers crumpled, their armor ringing a death knell on the stone slabs of the compound.

  "Surrender." Now Congreve's voice was weary. "We have been ordered to spare you if it is possible. King Aiken-Lugonn reminds you that the true Adversary in the Nightfad War is the Firvulag Foe—not humanity."

  Celadeyr seemed to hear a high-pitched mental keening. It was coming from somewhere deep within the citadel, together with the sounds of a furious altercation. Desperate, he sent a telepathic plea on the Battlemaster's intimate mode:

  Help us or we are lost.

  There was no reply. And behind him was the sound of a glass sword dropping to the stone—and then more fading, and a sigh of many minds mourning forlorn hope. Slowly, Celadeyr of Afaliah let his own arm relax, his fingers open. Duded, his once glowing sword slipped down to ignominy.

  The human gold nodded. He said, "Carbines up. Huskies ready." Open-mouthed, Celadeyr saw the elite guards lift the light-weapons in a swift gesture, hanging them on the right side of their armored backpacks. Almost in the same motion, they seized the butts of different weapons that had been hung muzzle-down from the pack center and swept them into firing position.

  Incredulous, Celo cried, "But, we've yielded!"

  Congreve was almost apologetic. "Unfortunately, we're pressed for time ... Ready at stun-five. Ad lib, fire." And the Husqvarnas sang their sizzling song of oblivion while the Lord of Afaliah and all his knights went tumbling down.

  ***

  It was Kuhal Earthshaker who found Mercy.

  He and his knights were storming through the royal wing, tearing open doors, poking into cubbyholes and presses, stabbing behind draperies, terrorizing lackeys and chambermaids, and slaughtering the occasional gray-tore guard, when they came upon a pair of tall golden doors. Mounted on them were great champlevé escutcheons set in bejeweled cartouches, ridiculously ornate, but unmistakably representations of the impudent finger motif of the usurper himself.

  "His apartments!" Kuhal cried. He smote the doors with his PK so that they dropped from their hinges with a resounding clang.

  Rosy-gold sword high, he dashed inside, most of his forty knights at his heels. There was an antechamber with cool rattan furniture and a wide balcony overlooking the moon-plated sea, and then a pair of dressing rooms with packed clothes closets, and an inner salon opening into a luxurious bath all tricked out in onyx and gold, and finally the royal bedroom itself, lit with festoons of purple and amber stars and dominated by a great goldcanopied circular bed covered in black satin sheets.

  On it lay a pale shape.

  Kuhal stood as though turned to ice. Brother! his mind cried out. Nodonn—to me!

  The Battlemaster materialized at his side, filling the dark room with his sunlight radiance. Kuhal drew back, motioning his fighters to retreat, and Nodonn was left alone.

  "My Mercy-Rosmar," Apollo whispered, standing over her.

  Every dear contour had been preserved: the slender arms, one thrown wide, the other in repose at her side: the feet with their oddly long toes, the dimpled knees, the curved hips, and the dark cleft mystery of her sex. Her small high breasts were perfect in pearl-gray ash, and her shoulders, and the neck with its tore, slightly arched so that the delicate jawline was thrown into poignant relief. Her face was calm, the lips softly parted, tinted by his own warm light so that they might have been living flesh. But never had her lashes or her hair been so pallid, gossamer-fine now as the rare basaltic threads spun by certain volcanos.

  "You hungered so," he said, "and made him afraid. Rightly, rightly. And now all your fierceness, all vitality is consumed in his restoration, to my death. Ah, Mercy. You knew. You warned me. Wildfire, burning heedless and free. Wait."

  He slipped off one rose-glass gauntlet. The sliver hand passed swiftly over the length of her body. There was left only the tore and dust, scattered in feathery cods on black cloth ...

  Outside the window the sinking moon suddenly kindled to a violent gold. A mind-voice commanded:

  Come out.

  ***

  They met in the high air above the sea, bright and furious and shielded only by their minds, as the ritual demanded.

  When the sharp green lightning of the preliminary sparring began to flash, and thunder was flung back upon the ramparts of the city, all of the other contention ceased. Tanu partisans of both heroes left off their trivial battling, and the human warriors as well, to watch the duel of the titans. Noncombatants who had hidden from the invasion's fury now crept out onto the battlements and turrets to stand among the quiet spectators in glass armor.

  Goriah was almost ghostly now, with the metapsychic faerie lights turned off and the oil lamps guttering low in predawn dark. The green explosions out over the Strait of Redon cast shadows that were lunar in their starkness. The glowing bodies of the two antagonists were ad but drowned in the dazzling glare.

  Some of the people watching had been on the White Sliver Plain, witnesses to the earlier encounter between Aiken and Nodonn that had been aborted by the Flood. These noted certain differences in the fighting form of the opponents: The little human had become more circumspect and defensive, and the godly Battlemaster now fought with a wanton aggressiveness at odds with his usual cool implacability.

  Nodonn was the more active pursuer. Englobed in an auroral nimbus, he soared about the drifting trickster, peppering him with an almost continuous fusillade of energy gouts that spewed from his Sword like stellar flares. When these rebounded from Aiken's psychocreative screen, they seemed to bruise it, causing the corona to flash blue or sickly yellow-green or—in the case of the more intense
blasts—a lingering vermilion.

  "Spoiler!" the storm-voice roared. "Nonborn! I am the heir of the Many-Colored Land, the first child of the Thagdal and Nontusvel. Who engendered you, Lowlife? Sterile dishes in some genetic kitchen? Test tubes mixing frozen sperm and the sluggish egg of a dead woman? What a King! What a Battlemaster!"

  And the Sword blasted, and the monstrous concussions rolled over the affronted sea, and Aiken's mind-shield flashed deeply orange while his small armored figure seemed to dull and darken inside its metapsychic halo.

  "Fight back!" Nodonn raged. "Or do you fight only women? Did her passion frighten you, little one? Did you shrink from her warmth like a slug fleeing the sunlight? I am the sun! Eclipse me if you can!"

  Inside the slowly shrinking mind-screen, the trickster hoisted his Spear—and one finger. He remained silent, and he did not retaliate. The scarlet-patched sphere of force seemed to drift aimlessly, almost skimming the surface of the black water.

  "Fight, damn you!" Nodonn thundered. "Or are you seeking death?" His aura streaming like a comet's tail, the Battlemaster orbited above his rival. "Is that it? By killing her, you hoped to restore your own broken mind. You fed on her creativity to bolster your own! Was it worth it, corruptor? Worth destroying the only thing you loved?"

  Nodonn thumbed the uppermost of the five power-setting studs on the Sword's hilt, summoning the weapon's full potential. The readout on the power supply told him that he would have only two shots of this magnitude before draining the weapon.

  "Are you tired of being King? Tired of coercing those who hate and fear and despise you? Little man! Trickster! Furtive conniver! Betrayer of honor and nobility and beauty!"

  A stupendous light-burst engulfed Aiken and his screen and seemed to dig a crater in the flat sea. Then a chaos of luminous vapor whirled and fountained, and deep within it were pulses of golden radiance alternating with sullen glows of deepest carmine lake.

  Nodonn waited. At length, a smooth sphere bobbed up from the ferment, its color now as darkly red as coagulating blood. It barely sufficed to enclose the dull-armored little figure clutching its glass lance.