On the wide but broken field, battle was being joined. On the one side were the green moire-touched troops that Antaeus had animated from the litter of Deep Fields. On the other were bands of Scots ghosts. Jay and the crusader ghost generated the whole; Dubhe swung from section to section, bearing messages. Alice, Drum, and Virginia had arrayed themselves as bodyguards near Jay. The Brass Babboon, too large to take part lest it endanger its allies, dropped back to where it could lob strategic strange attractors and provide a potential retreat.
Mizar’s sharp hearing caught the final commands that were being given.
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” Jay was saying, “and that’s got to be more true here than it has been in battles past, so I’m not going to try to coordinate beyond what we have here. We need to disable Earthma’s child—without its aura its army will fall.”
“Aye, laddie, and those you’ve brought will be tryin”t’ open a way for you to do that very thing.”
“Good.” Jay grinned. “Don’t let anyone’s misplaced sense that the honor should be mine keep them from slipping in a good shot. Okay?”
“Right.”
Shorty lifted his head on high. His bloodcurdling death cry was the clarion call for the attack. As voices raised in cries of “For Donnerjack!” and the stirring notes of “Scotland the Brave” Jay’s army joined battle.
Crowded in the window that gave the best view of the field, four besieged figures permitted themselves something like hope.
“They are making headway,” Tranto observed, when this was clearly true. “Antaeus’s forces seem confused, as if they have trouble perceiving them.”
“I begin to understand from where he may have recruited his army,” Death said. ” ‘Tis a clever plan, but they cannot long hold the field. An alteration to the parameters of Antaeus’s forces and they, too, will be pushed hack.”
“We have stood by you and fought for you,” Tranto said. “Would you mind just this once not speaking in riddles?”
The Lord of Deep Fields coughed laughter. “Very well. Jay has unwittingly done as the gods themselves do when they make war. In a sense, he has conjured from his imagination an army to fight for him__
but in this case the imagination is not solely his own, but is the ancestral memory of the bit of land on Eilean a’Tempull Dubh upon which John D’Arcy Donnerjack built a castle to replace that of his ancestors. Put simply, Jay has raised an army of ghosts.”
“Ghosts?” Phecda asked. “How can an army that is of those already dead be defeated?”
“By banishing them from this place, Phecda. They do not belong to
Virtu, nor even, really, to the Verite. When Earthma realizes what I have…”
He said no more, for nothing productive was to be said. Meanwhile, on the field, Jay observed his troops and came to a startling realization.
“Alice,” he said, “come here a moment, would you?”
He called her not only because she was near, but because he knew she was a skilled observer. Unlike Drum, who looked for things of significance, she had the journalist’s gift for seeing the entire setting and preserving it for analysis.
“Yes, Jay?” She came to his side.
“Tell me what you see.”
She did not question, but put on her reporter’s voice and narrated: “In the broad stretch of ground between the curving bulk of the Brass Babboon and the vast, dark palace of the Lord of Deep Fields, a strange and stylized battle is taking place.
“More awkwardly constructed than even the hound Mizar, human and machine forms come together from the rubble. Their hodge-podge forms are no match for the keen-edged blades swung by the ghosts of Castle Donnerjack, nor for the exploding strange attractors. Yet, of all those who fall, only a few fail to rise again. Immortal against immortal— or perhaps unliving against undying—war. Only a few from among the corrupted legions of Deep Fields fail to rise again.”
“Exactly!” Jay said. “We need to know what keeps the ones who fall fallen.”
“And,” Alice added in somewhat more conversational tones, “why suddenly our own troops have begun to blink out. We lost Shorty just a moment ago and the Lady of the Gallery was taken right in the act of flinging a strange attractor. If this continues, we will soon be without troops.”
Jay studied the battlefield, frantically seeking what differed about those whose opponents stayed down and those who merely delayed them.
The crusader ghost was among the most successful. His voice raised in song, his sword in one hand, a length of his chain in the other, he slashed and battered without pause. Could his crusader’s cross be some protection? No. There were others who wore similar adornment, others who bore the same weapon, others who… An idea occurred to Jay; he glanced about the field, searching for confirmation of his guess.
“It is not their swords,” Jay said, wonder dawning in his voice, “but their songs that fell their foes!”
“Songs?” Alice echoed, momentarily puzzled, but her observant nature could not be deceived for long. “You’re right, Jay! It’s the singing, not the swords that are doing the job. Even the strange attractors only delay.”
“There is no music in Deep Fields,” Jay said, remembering the tales he had culled from Dubhe and Mizar. “That’s why the Lord of the Lost treasures it so and why my father sought to win his favor with song!”
He sent out the command that all the combatants should sing as they fought—even at the expense of fighting as rapidly. The result, while not miraculous, was certain.
“Destruction cannot answer destruction; creation is the answer,” Jay said, certain he was correct. “I am the son of the Engineer—creator of the Brass Babboon, programmer of sites, designer of that very palace in front of us. I was only half right when I said that we could not use the living to fight Death’s troops. What I should have realized is while our dead ghosts cannot be killed, neither can the other troops, since they’re formed from the discarded materials of this place and bound by moire. We need the creative force of music to make them lie still.”
Alice paused in her duet with Drum of “Amazing Grace.” The detective carried on, his voice rasping but surprisingly pleasant.
“Something still is leeching away at our forces, Jay.”
“Then we need to win the palace before we’re alone and too hoarse to carry on. I wish I knew the layout better. Going in the front door seems foolish. Perhaps Dubhe…”
The spidery monkey could not sing, but hanging by his tail left him four limbs with which to fling strange attractors. He had been taking the occasional bite out of his arsenal and as a result his usually dark coat was pointed with rustling lights, like illuminated fleas.
“Sorry, Jay. I never spent much time here. I came to report, but mostly I’ve kept an eye on you.”
The voice of John D’Arcy Donnerjack spoke from Jay’s wrist.
“I can be of assistance at this point, Jay. Within my memory is held the complete plans for the palace, including any number of secret passages, concealed doors, and the like that John included when he began to fear that you would be kept prisoner there. He planned for your eventual escape.”
“Well,” Jay sang, laughing, “I hope he won’t mind that we use them to break in rather than to break out. Let’s hear what you have to tell us.
The battering at the great hall door had recommenced some time after the battle had been joined, but now those who listened thought that it played a different tune.