- directly in line with Arznaak’s scintillating beam, an arm’s-length in front of his pillbox.
Several things happened at more-or-less the same time.
The beam beyond the mirror winked out.
Shaa heard a muffled yet nonetheless familiar voice cry out from under the small pillbox and beneath the ground, followed by a zip-zip-CRACK! sound and a gout of steam from around the beam’s lens-coupling; then the beam died.
Arznaak’s power burst desynchronized and began to rapidly decay. The rain of curry-favor-with-the-masses trinkets began to lessen as well, although who knew how long it would take for the stuff already in flight to finish pattering down.
The Corpus took a look around, momentarily at a loss for words. Then Shaa could see it fix its gaze on the tower at the far end of the field and take a deliberate step in that direction, lowering its arm toward it and opening its fingers as though to grasp the pinnacle for a firm handshake. Well, it had stood to reason that Arznaak would have left his golem with instructions in case communications were abruptly severed. It would be interesting to see how fast the thing began to atrophy.
If, that is, Arznaak was actually out of the picture. Gashanatantra had reached Shaa again, dragging a scorched-looking Jardin. For that matter, Gashanatantra didn’t seem particularly healthy himself. Even this side-lobe radiation must have hit a god’s augmented system with the same roasting fervor as being on the receiving end of a bolt of lightning. “Did you stop the transmission?” Gashanatantra gasped.
“Yes,” Shaa said, “at least for the moment. That would make the next natural step the storming of the hideout.”
“Shouldn’t someone be going out there to fight that thing?” Phlinn Arol said nervously, as the Corpus fixed its gaze again on their position on the top of the tower and headed resolutely in their direction.
“Don’t look at me,” said Max, his voice rubbery, the rest of him still twanging like an elastic band. Was smoke coming out of his ears? But it was looking like high time to do something other than wait around for the Scapula’s next move, though, even if that something was to jump.
“What’s that?” said Leen. She was gazing off behind them and into the night sky above the rim of the stadium.
“What’s -” Max began, wheeling around to see what she was talking about; in his obnoxious armor it was impossible to merely crank his head over to the side for a quick glance. By the time he had gotten his field of view over to see what Leen was goggling at, though, the answer was clear, and not unfamiliar either - a large black shadow against the stars, swelling rapidly, the ragged outline of feathered wingtips, a descending wattled claw, a -
“Hey! -” Max began again, just as it became obvious that the claw was descending straight toward him, and him alone, but before he could get any further the foot slugged him in the chest and his stomach fell out through his toes as the clawed talons snapped shut around his back and dragged him across the tilting floor and - just short of the guardrail- yanked him unceremoniously into the air. “You crazy idiot!-” Max gasped, “what do you think you’re -”
Then the bird leaned over in a tight bank, flinging Max out sideways virtually parallel to the ground, and Max saw between his feet the hand of the Corpus, seemingly half as large as the bird itself, as it mashed its fingers together on the space it had obviously thought the bird would be occupying at that particular moment. From the block-sized foot sliding by far below, too, it was obvious that the bird was not taking their narrow escape to heart, either; quite the contrary, in fact, for it was wrapping itself into an even closer spin around the body of the Corpus. And here was the hand following them, not surprisingly, now trying to bat them out of the sky with the sort of flat-palm swat usually reserved by normal-sized folks for a mosquito.
The bird was the latest player to be out of its mind - that much was merely empirical evidence - but it plainly wasn’t going to do Max any good to try to cure it, or put it out of its misery, either. The damn thing was squawking at him, too, and you didn’t have to be Haddo and actually be able to hold two-way conversations with the creature to have a pretty good idea what it had in mind. Or how limited your options were if you wanted to do anything else. At least Max had a sword, although he might as well use it to run himself through for all the good it was going to do against Arznaak’s runamok Corpus. Arznaak was too smart to leave the proverbial soft unguarded patch the size of a grapefruit where a single sword-stab could hit a vital ganglion and fell a construct the size of a small mountain.
So what was the vulture’s plan? Wait for the thing to decay on its own and feast on the carrion? Maybe the bird did know carrion when it saw it, but it was not out of the question that under the circumstances it was planning for Max to fill that role himself. The bird was gaining altitude now; it was still swooping around the Corpus’ trunk as the Corpus kept twisting to try to keep it in sight. At least the bird was continually side-slipping out of the way of the Corpus’ vigorous swipes, even if it was waiting for the last second to actually make its escape, and in the process it had succeeded - at least for the moment - in distracting the Corpus from its probable intent of tossing the tower over the bleachers and out of the stadium like a javelin. Of course, the bird might be straining for height merely to get the right angle for lobbing Max into the thing’s mouth. It did not appear particularly likely that the Corpus had a gullet behind its mouth, or indeed anything in the way of internal structure or traditional organs, but then again the bird was crazy. And it was still a bird, after all.
On the other hand, there didn’t seem to be much point in continuing the attempt to lie low. Max didn’t think he could attract any more attention through a use of second-quantum level energies than he’d accumulated already. Arznaak might have been trying to burn out his magical abilities through his power pulse, but if he’d succeeded Max would probably be dead; time to find out how much residual capacity he had left. The toes of the bird were still wrapped firmly around his body, leaving his arms free, so he pointed with one of them at the arm of the Corpus, which happened to be trailing them astern at present, and activated a passive probe. Max felt the probe lock on, and when no retaliatory spell-forms came barreling down the line after him he boosted the gain and added an active interrogator. Diagnostics took shape around him, their level of detail augmented by proximity, revealing the structure of the animatory apparatus keeping the Corpus intact. The Corpus was clever work, with its mass of captive functionaries trapped in a supporting matrix that supplied motive power and the cloak of unity, clever - but apparently decaying. If he could desynchronize the timing of the stabilizer it might pull the finger out of the dike, so to speak...
With the bird squawking its enthusiastic approval, Max began to tinker. It was delicate work, not the sort of stuff you really wanted to be doing while hanging a few hundred feet in the air in the foot of a giant vulture while the object of your puttering tried to bash you into mush, but there it was; he was, after all, supposed to be a professional. It didn’t seem wise to take more than a few seconds to set up the job, either. Max had determined that the Corpus was indeed operating on internal programming at the moment, but there was no telling when Arznaak might come back on line and deploy some of the anti-magic defenses Max had thus far been able to skirt. So - wrap it up and send it off, Max thought, and he yanked loose the originator cord and felt the package slide away.
The giant arm waving after them paused. The head of the Corpus skidded by, looking thoughtful, and then a ragged line of piercing silver sparks ran crossways down its face from its left eyebrow across the bridge of its nose past the corner of its mouth and around the angle of its jaw. More sparks burst loose on its chest, it took one step backward, and then its head and shoulders slumped downward a good twenty feet, like a balloon just getting underway with a solid leak.