Svin realized Dortonn was talking to himself. His voice had not improved - if anything, it had gotten worse - but even though the sound was cracked and distorted and barely audible to boot, the words could be still be ascertained. “It must be hiding underneath,” he was saying, “using the power of the fire to go burrowing into the earth - intelligent? No, I feel no intelligence - but instinctual motivation? Yes?”
Should Dortonn be interrupted? Svin wondered, caught up as Dortonn clearly was in a professional challenge? Should or not, he must be dragged back to the issue at hand - but how best? Why not just presume on his competence? “Can you kill it?” said Svin. “Poison it? Send it to another dimension?”
One baleful red eye swung up to glare at him. “You will owe me more than you can pay when this is finished.”
“Just deal with it,” Svin said. “Talk later.”
Overhead, Favored-of-the-Gods made another erratic swooping pass in his ball-vehicle. His scanners showed another upwelling deep beneath the fire. He’d seen the same indications before that strange bit with the animated cobblestones - something putting out enough thaumaturgical sideband radiation to leave a crater thirty feet deep if it all let loose at once. Whatever was down there was using a pumped-resonance cycle, feeding a catalytic amount of energy to stoke the fire and then turning on the siphons when the fire took the bait and exploded. It had to have some shield, though; it couldn’t survive in the middle of those flames, and it clearly wasn’t a creature of flames itself, no matter the manifestations its emanations had shaped. So it must be using a disinclination shield of some sort, or perhaps a misdirecting trick... and it bore remembering that craters, of course, were scarcely the real danger at hand, nor was energy, no matter how prodigiously employed.
Did he have any acid bombs left in this thing?
Jurtan was still fighting the leviathan, but at least he still had it on his line. He was starting to get a feel for its jerks and thrashes, though, and even better was the fact that it didn’t seem to realize yet that he was playing it. If he could just hit it with the right out-of-phase harmonics he might even be able to do better. He’d try a different chord progression.
Svin was now watching Jurtan Mont even more closely than Dortonn. What if the kid wasn’t insane after all? “Dortonn!” Svin said. “Pay attention to Mont, there. What is he doing?”
“Nothing, I’m certain,” growled Dortonn, diverting a crispy hand to wave indifferently in Jurtan’s direction. “Stop bothering - wait! You’re right.” He cocked his head to the side, listening with his residual fragment of earlobe. “I can only detect his side-scatter, but yes, yes, if he does that, than I will do - so!”
The flying machine was making its steepest approach yet to the center of the fire in the center of the Karlini building, Svin noted, coming in almost straight toward the ground. Had it lost control again? But then a small egg of gleaming copper metal emerged from a protruding tube and disappeared into the flames as the ball lurched away in a spasmodic roll that took it into a leaping curtain of flame... and through, badly scorched, on the other side. At Svin’s own side, Dortonn gave a sudden shudder, his fingers writhing and his mouth moving without words; then Dortonn seemed to abruptly lose five pounds of his remaining weight in Svin’s grip, and sagged limply. Jurtan Mont’s instrument gave a final discordant blare and burst into fragments of reed and horn. Mont took a unsteady step to the rear, his bloody hands still held out in front of him, then went over onto his backside.
Well, that is that, Svin thought. The last participants were now out of commission, and no further reinforcements were in sight. A tall splash of flame erupted, as though a new barrel of oil had been added to the wreckage, and in its wake Svin felt a wind tugging him toward the building. Not strong enough to pull him off his feet, it still had the force to lift ashes and embers and some of the scattered small rocks and twirl them toward the inferno, and pull over the remaining standing wall, and suck in at the leaping flames... but then the wind died, and amazingly enough the fire seemed to suck in on itself as well, and puff out.
Fire Chief Cinder was hollering again, waving his men in his line of sight back from their spread-out positions along the block, where they had been fighting the secondary blazes and trying to keep the situation from spreading too far downwind. New streams of water hit the site of the lab building from several angles at once, and for the first time the bounding flames and towering gray smoke were supplanted by steam and a welcome white smoke. Dortonn was breathing but unconscious. Jurtan Mont was breathing as well, and his eyes were open, but he seemed more glazed than truly aware of his surroundings. From the amount of blood in evidence, that might be just as well. In tearing itself apart, his harmonica had ripped its way across fingers and lips and -
“This time you’ve really done it, you fool,” Jurtan’s sister, Tildamire, was saying in a particularly hectoring tone as she rushed toward him. Her face, however, was the white of a grub found in the lightless hollow under a moss-encrusted boulder, and her stride was so wobbly that watching her Svin expected another comatose body to hit the ground any instant now.
Dortonn would keep. Svin grabbed up one of the few water barrels remaining undrained from the firefighters’ wagon and strode toward the Monts. Tildamire, still unaccountably on her feet, turned her uncertain gaze on Svin, said “What -” and then “no! -” as she saw the barrel raised to the considerable height of Svin’s arms outstretched above his body, and finally said nothing more as she disappeared beneath a cascade of water. The water scoured across Jurtan too, or indeed principally Jurtan, washing away blood and grime as well as the scum and stench still remaining from his recent plunges into his offal-laden mudbank and the Tongue Water, which of course wasn’t much better.
With cleanliness returned attentiveness. “Wow!” said Jurtan, followed immediately by “Ow!” as the catalog of his injuries descended on him at once.
“An inspiring performance,” commented Svin. “The danger has passed?”
“Looks that way,” said Favored-of-the-Gods, leaning from the open hatchway of his once-again-landed vehicle. “There’s still mopping up the fire, but at least I think we wiped out all the nasty stuff. Better keep an eye on it just to be -” Something within his machine began an insistent beeping sound. Favored ducked from sight but his voice continued, although unintelligibly. After another moment he peeked up again long enough to say, “Gotta run.” Then the hatch swung back into place and the sphere wobbled into the air with the typical attendant prodigies of brimstone-laden vapors and strange clanking noises. The machine swooped off down the street, barely missing with its retracting landing-gear assembly the remaining Karlini retainers just now striding up the block.
Haddo gibbered something particularly unpleasant-sounding from the depths of his black hood, waving a gauntleted fist in the air as he did so. His companion, Wroclaw, merely sighed. “Oh, my,” he said, surveying the scene.
They both looked about ready to keel over themselves. Haddo broke off his imprecations to ask the key question of the hour. “Under control situation is?”
The dripping, hair-plastered Tildamire was the one who answered. She had just decided to forgive that oaf Svin for his water treatment, since it clearly had done her good, not only from a standpoint of her own level of ash and grime, but from the way it had cut through her total mental paralysis. Being reminded of the facts of the situation, furthermore, might make it appropriate to have him do it again. “If you don’t count Roni,” she said heavily, “I guess it seems to be.”