Menas did not seem to have heard the Prefect. He said, “Regulation of prayer is as important as regulation of firepower. By calling upon the grace of the Preservers we have survived here for more than a hundred days.” He cocked his head and drew out his timepiece again. “Listen! Ah, listen!”
The brassy sound of trumpets drifted across from the enemy lines, the noise doubling and redoubling in horrendous discords. Pandaras pressed his hands over his ears.
Menas shouted at Prefect Corin, “Sometimes they focus the sound! It can burst a man like an overripe fruit!” He signaled to one of the staff officers as the noise died away and told him, “They are two hundred twenty-eight seconds early tonight. Make a note. It may signify.”
All around, the soldiers bent in prayer as one of the priests began to declaim a praise song. Pandaras found himself mumbling the responses with the rest of the congregation. Now in the moment of our death is the moment of our rebirth into eternal life. He was very scared, convinced that his last hour was at hand, angry that he had thrown away all that he had been entrusted with, that he had so badly failed his master. How could he ever have thought that he could find Yama in the middle of this madness?
The priests began to move through the ranks of kneeling soldiers, asperging them with rose water from brass censers which they whirled about them on long chains, as indigen hunters whirl bolas around their heads before letting fly at their target.
Menas set off again, shouting that there was little time.
The party climbed a slope of rubble, leaning against a strengthening wind. The first fat drops of rain flew through the air, as hard as pistol shot. Menas bounded to the top and pointed. “There! The duel of the ironclads begins!”
Two leagues off, something was moving through the dark forest behind the enemy lines. Its passage, marked by a wave of toppling trees, was fitfully caught in overlapping searchlight beams. At first Pandaras thought that it must be a herd of megatheres, but then the machine reared up, twice as high as the tallest of the trees. It swayed forward, doubling its height again. As it came out of the forest, the focus of decads of lights, Pandaras saw that its sinuous body was supported by six cantilevered legs and counterbalanced by a long, spiked tail, like a snake carried by a scorpion. Smaller machines whirled about it, an agitated cloud of white sparks blowing back and forth like a flock of burning birds. Something glittered for a moment at the edge of Pandaras’s vision and he dashed a hand at it with no more thought than he would give a fly, watching with rapt amazement as the ironclad lumbered on.
Dense squalls of rain drove across the ruins, striking with a sudden fury and obscuring the monstrous machine. Pandaras was soaked to his pelt in an instant and he sought shelter behind a stub of stone. As he crouched there, cold and miserable and scared, he felt a warmth spreading across his chest. The coin was glowing so brightly that it shone through the worn weave of his ragged shirt. He closed his fingers around it to hide its light and whispered with sudden wild hope, “Save me, master. If ever you loved me, come and save me now.”
Prefect Corin and Menas were facing into the storm. The Prefect clasped the rim of his hat with one hand and gripped his staff with the other. The tail of his cloak blew out behind him. The terrible noise of the trumpets began again and fireworks shot up—real fireworks, bursting in white flowers beneath the low, racing clouds. Lights shone out, brilliant threads of scarlet and green that struck across the wasteland of the city and glittered on the ironclad’s hide.
Something flashed in Pandaras’s vision again. It was a little machine no bigger than a beetle, with a body of articulated cubes and delicate mica vanes which beat in a blur of golden light. It hovered for a moment, then darted forward. Pandaras slapped at the sudden pain at the side of his neck—and with amazement found that the ward Prefect Corin had fastened there was gone.
The tiny machine flew up and described a circle around Pandaras’s head. “Master,” Pandaras whispered. He was astonished and afraid. Every hair of his pelt was trying to stand away from its fellows. The coin burned inside his clenched fist. “Master, it’s you, isn’t it? Why didn’t you come before? Why did you abandon me?”
The machine’s golden glow brightened for a moment; then it flicked its vanes and was gone.
Menas whirled around as fireworks rose from his own lines and yelled into the face of one of the staff officers who crouched behind him. “There is no response from the third quarter!”
The man plucked one of his machines from the air and said, “I will signal—”
Menas clapped his hands together. Rain had plastered his black pelt to his skull. He looked ready to kill everyone around him, Pandaras thought. Not because he was angry, but because he was scared, and as desperate as only a truly scared man can be. He had put so much faith in his rituals that now they ruled him completely. Menas shouted over the howl of wind and rattle of rain, “Never mind! Together or not at all! Get over there, find the officer responsible and execute him and two of his maniple chosen at random. By the black blood of the Preservers, I will have order here! Why are you waiting, man? Time is all we have!”
The officer saluted and disappeared into rainy dark. Menas wiped rain from the pelt of his face, took a deep breath, and told Prefect Corin, “We must have order here. Order and regulation.”
“They have made you a puppet,” Prefect Corin said.
“It is a dance.” Menas lowered his voice and said, “A precisely choreographed dance on the edge of a razor blade.”
Prefect Corin made no reply. Menas glanced at his timepiece and turned back to watch the advance of the heretics’ monstrous machine. “Where is our fanfare, Golas?”
One of the staff officers grabbed a machine from the air and stuck it in his ear, then shook out a sheet of plastic; lines of script raced across it, glowing green like the river fire which sometimes burned in the water around the floating docks of Ys. He said in a high, trembling voice, “They are enabling now. Start-up sequence in five, four, three, two, one—”
Tinny trumpets squealed discords in the distance and something the size of a small hill began to move through the squalls of rain. The heretics’ ironclad doubled its pace, loping forward as eagerly as a hound scenting its prey and lashing its spiky tail from side to side. Its footsteps sounded like thunder. The stones beneath Pandaras’s rump trembled.
The second ironclad was squat and armored like a turtle. Things like flies danced on a hundred stumpy legs and pounded on along in the air above it—no, they were men riding floating discs. They slipped sideways and vanished into the darkness as the ironclads closed the distance between themselves.
They met like two mountains colliding. The heretics’ scorpion-snake sidestepped the turtle’s rush and lashed it with its armored tail. The tremendous blow slewed the turtle half-around. It stood its ground when struck a second time, and fans of metal unfolded along the edges of its shell. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion.
“The vanes are tipped with diamond,” Menas told Prefect Corin. “They vibrate, and will cut the enemy’s legs from beneath it. Watch.”
“I have seen enough,” Prefect Corin said, and extended his arm.
For a moment, a thread of light split the dark air above the ruined town. It touched the heretics’ ironclad and a ball of flame blossomed, doubling and redoubling in size. The machine broke in two. The upper part toppled forward, writhing as it fell, and smashed down across the broad back of the turtle. The ground shook and there was a noise like the hinge of the world slamming shut. Heat washed across the ruins as if a furnace door had been opened, blowing rain aside.