“What?”
I’d finally managed to trace Iskendarian to its Scapula instantiation using its subcarrier signature. Now I was infiltrating my code patches down the link - had to use a low-bandwidth packet to avoid alerting the recipient - but it shouldn’t be -
“Huh,” I said.
“What?”
I’d never seen anything like it - a humongous power surge, coming from the Scapula, no doubt, overloading everything in sight - the emergency cutouts in this workroom were kicking in but it was anybody’s guess what his game was this time, and what would be left when the dust settled - or whether there’d be anything left but dust. All I could say was, “Hang on to your seat.”
“I don’t like the sound of this,” said Leen. “Is he promising them miracles?”
“The amount of energy he’s sloshing around,” Max muttered, “he may actually be able to deliver.” The Corpus itself was both source and consumer of more power flux than Max had ever heard of being deliberately wielded. Just producing the apparition of the Corpus - as was the expected case in your typical Knitting - was a reasonable feat. It left the assembled Imperial officeholders none the worse for wear, too, and uplifted through their contribution to the spectacle to boot. But welding together their bodies as the scaffolding for this man-mountain horror, with on top of them the cloaking illusion that made the Corpus seem to have one skin, one flesh, was waste on a massive scale, even if the Scapula hadn’t been sucking their own life forces for an assist in their own destruction. Even if you didn’t like bureaucrats, they weren’t all useless, and surely no one deserved such a fate. Max didn’t even want to think about those at the bottom, being ground into mush by the weight of the tons of mass atop them stretching up into the sky.
The Scapula had been one of them. To his other accomplishments he could now add elevating the taking of revenge on your coworkers to a wholly new plane. Presumably the multitudes on their feet in the stands venting acclaimation at full volume had not yet realized this was anything different than the run-of-the-mill Knitting; presumably those who had had friends or relations on the field had no idea that their intimates had already perished or were likely to finish doing so in the next few moments. Presumably anyone left who understood what was happening had been standing by with the same impotent frustration as Max himself, trying and failing to think of some way to effectively oppose it.
But Leen was right; now Arznaak was promising miracles, too. The Corpus gestured, the ground around its feet heaved, and then the surface broke open and blasted itself up into the air. Great gouting geysers spouted up around the Corpus, as though it were the centerpiece in some titanic heroic fountain... but what was that material rising above the rim of the stadium, arcing outward but not even yet starting to descend? It didn’t look like oil, or dirt, exactly; it seemed more gooey and iridescent than either, more like soap scum, perhaps - but now the topmost portion of the spout was churning and roiling, great clumps of the material separating themselves off and floating away as giant bubbles, others twisting themselves together and beginning to rain down... as water, apparently, but mixed in with this more typical rain was - stuff?
Leen and Phlinn and Max were already hiding under the chairs and staying far enough away from the edge to avoid being tossed over the side by another of the platform’s frequent lurches and tremors, but under cover was now the right place to be for yet another reason, as the Scapula’s promise of miracles made solid began pelting down from the sky - within the steaming rain a hail of coins, small jewels, chains and trinkets; just in front of Max a whole cooked turkey impacted on a soldier who had been crouched low trying to shield his head. The man fell over, knocked cold, as drumsticks flopped off to either side and stuffing cascaded down his back.
Then the decanting cornucopia tilted on its side and began to vibrate - no, Max realized, it wasn’t what he was watching that was shaking, it was him, he was having some sort of a seizure - the storm of stuff wasn’t the only thing Arznaak was sending out, on top of it was something magic, pure magic, a sleet of magic like the noise of a million people shouting at once into his ears -
Max felt his eyes bugging out. His head felt like it was getting ready to explode right off his shoulders from the overload of first and second level harmonics. Violet induction coils lashed through Max’s personal protection field, he knew he was gibbering mindlessly beneath the widespread roar, and as his eyes whipped around most everyone on the platform seemed to be writhing themselves into a frenzy. Had the Scapula deliberately hit them up here with his full force, or was it like this everywhere across the city?
Not far away, a piano plunged from the heavens, plowed into a knot of squirming people, and continued through the floor in a wild clanging clamor of popping strings. A pervasive groaning and creaking and cracking became more apparent. Was the tower finally coming apart altogether?
“All right, already, Arznaak,” Max found himself thinking. “Okay, you’ve won.”
CHAPTER 21
Shaa could detect his brother’s transmission beam; he could almost see it, even.
The rolling of the earth had subsided enough, for a moment, that he thought he might actually be able to reach the beam’s point of origination, a squat camouflaged pillbox sort of thing that had popped itself out of the ground to about knee-high. Then had come the cavalcade of marvels.
It could have been worse. If Shaa had still occupied his location of half-a-minute before he would have been directly on top of one of the geysers gushing precursors and the rest of the grab-bag of stuff; indeed, he himself would either have found himself rendered for his constituents, or dropped whole on some startled housewife or fishmonger as an offering from the gods. He was also under the arc of the fountain, so that virtually all of the baggage descending from the heavens was falling no closer than the inner tier of the stadium, and much appeared to be descending beyond the stadium and perhaps even across the city.
Still, the assault of dry-goods was not the only barrage underway. The paroxysmal energy bloom rolled over him, making it feel like his very hair follicles were crackling with eldritch vigor. For whatever reason, though, it became apparent as he probed the surge field with his suddenly augmented power that he was within something of a shielded lobe; that most of this energy push was following the distribution of the horn of plenty, being directed outward at the spectators in the stadium and the city beyond.
All the more reason to presume his brother was near. Arznaak would naturally guard against some sort of feedback overload. His power surge would be affecting anyone who had any capability for magic - the more powerful you were, the more the potential for traumatic burnout, but there would be folks around the city whose abilities had been only latent who’d suddenly be finding themselves shooting flames out of their fingertips before they fell over in a crisp. He wouldn’t want to fricassee himself, though - it appeared Arznaak wanted to be the only magic user of any ability whatever still left standing when he was done, as well as the only functional god.
But there wasn’t any particular reason his brother should always get his way.
Shaa’s own currently augmented energy stores wouldn’t last forever; might as well use them. He gestured ahead of him. A cloud of force-lines appeared, spun themselves together into a gleaming silver discus, and zoomed off, condensing further and acquiring the sheen of a perfectly reflective mirror, skimming the ground and then pulling up and virtually screeching to a halt -