The statue that had been the construct dropped toward the floor, the snarling mouth lagging in the air for an instant behind it, the whole assembly still gaining mass at an accelerated rate. Max began to lunge around it toward the door. The mass hit the stone floor weighing a ton or more, the floor cracked around it, a giant shudder shook the room as the cracks ran up into the walls, the floor canted abruptly outward, and with a final lurch and rumble the entire room pulled free from the tower wall and started to fall. The doorway slid up and away barely short of Max’s fingers. He turned and vaulted across the room, hit floor and leapt again, sprang headfirst in a clean plunge through the window space opposite the doorway, and arched over in a long swan dive toward the water far below.
20. THE DANCE OF DEATH
The falling turret entered the water thirty feet to Max’s right and a second ahead; the splash had barely begun to reach him when he sliced into the river. The blow drove the air from his lungs. He let his momentum carry him deep, felt his ears pop as the pressure wave from the turret radiated past overhead, turned, stroked back to the surface, shook the water out of his eyes, took a deep gasping breath, and looked around. He had shrugged out of his backpack in mid-air so the impact wouldn’t rip his shoulders off; now in the river swells starting to carry him downstream there was no sign of it. A flash caught his attention out of the corner of his vision. Upstream and high in the air, a moving pinpoint slid down against the stars, no, more than a pinpoint, a dot, not a dot at all but a disc, a disc with sprouting lines on both sides, flapping lines; and then abruptly the moving dot was a large swooping bird, claws down and open and grasping, painted dim white by the light of the moon, gliding toward Max over the surface of the water. The bird flapped once more, Max raised his arms, the claws swelled, and with a thud to his chest and a lurch in his stomach he was jerked into the air. In two powerful wing thrusts the bird gained altitude and banked toward the castle. The river tilted crazily below. Max looked up instead.
A hood with two bright sparks at about the right place for eyes peered back at him around the neck of the bird. “Fortunate are you waited I around,” Haddo said.
Another wing-flap, and the bird cleared a battlement with no more than five feet to spare. “Thanks, Haddo, you’re a handy guy!” Max yelled up. Haddo had been planning to loiter in the vicinity of Roosing Oolvaya to see what happened there before heading back to the castle. Of course, it had ended up saving him a trip, since the castle had come to him instead. “What’s the situation?”
“Karlini, must help. Progressing is evacuation -”
Haddo broke off and squawked angrily at the bird. The bird banked sharply right, skimmed a wall, flapped once more, skimmed the ridge of a slate roof, and brought its wings up, cupping them underneath; the three of them paused abruptly in mid-air and then dropped. Below the bird and rushing up at them was the landing-field. Ten feet above the field the bird opened its claws; Max, who’d been anticipating this, curled free and rolled down onto the grass. The bird glided across the field, grabbed a bundle of books and other packages wrapped in a net, stuck its left wing in the air and snapped to the right, and passed out of sight just above another wall and a line of chimneys. Max came to his feet and trotted across the field. A man with sacks over both shoulders came out of a door in front of him.
“Oh, good,” said the Great Karlini, swinging the sacks to the ground, “you’ve showed up.”
“You can thank Haddo,” Max said, “yet another time. You don’t want to find out what you’d do without him. But things downstairs in this castle of yours are getting pretty hairy; I don’t know how long it would have taken me to get up here on my own. What’s the situation?”
Karlini began stuffing sacks and loose books into another net. “We’d gotten ready to evacuate like you suggested, so we’re almost finished, now. This is the end of the stuff from the towers, and Wroclaw’s got a boat downstairs. Roni’s with him.”
A rolling tremor ran through the castle, followed by the rumble of stone collapsing somewhere out of sight. “Yeah,” Max said, “and what about you?”
Karlini swallowed and gnawed on his lip. “I still can’t leave. Whatever it is that’s locked into me hasn’t turned itself off.”
“I was afraid of that,” Max muttered. “The Death may have a manual override on your hook-line, but he’s got to be sentient to use it, all of which means we’ve got to get you loose ourselves, unless of course we can think of some way to get the Death calmed down and make him friendly at the same time.”
“It does look that way. You have any ideas?”
Max had flipped down his lens and was studying Karlini through it. Karlini’s form was suffused with a vague skeleton of wispy black, but unlike the construct Max had just fought, the streamers inside Karlini were self-contained, with no apparent connection to the rest of the castle’s energy matrix. “I think there’s some resonant effect going between you and the castle,” Max said. “Maybe if we can destabilize the castle field we can pry you loose. If we destabilize the field we may also be able to bleed off energy from the Death, which may make him more tractable if we hit him with something like a confinement shell.”
Karlini shrugged. “Okay. How?”
“What did you find out from your probes after I left?”
“Well,” Karlini said, “I couldn’t get past the defenses on the power reservoir, but I did manage to sneak a tap into the energy transmission system; I think I can run a shunt if we need it. Oh!, - I also found the castle’s jump engine, figured out part of the activation mechanism too. That thing takes a lot of power. Unfortunately, all of these contraptions are embedded in the foundation, and the foundation’s under thirty feet of water.”
“That’s going to be a problem,’· Max said. “I don’t think we have the extra time to set up a dive-bubble, so we’ll have to work it remote. The way I see it, we’ve got to handle these things together at the same time: we have to get the Death under control, move this castle out of the river, and pry you loose, keeping ourselves alive at the same time.” A large shape rose into the air beyond the wall at the end of the field, becoming Haddo and the bird. They glided over the yard, snatched the last net off the ground, and swooped off into the night.
Max and Karlini straightened. “That’s it for the airlift,” Karlini said, “so I guess that means we have to get back to work.”
“Right. Where’s the tower with our friend the mad god?”
“This way.” Karlini took off across the field and through a doorway, Max right behind him. “I know a route that’ll get us around the worst of the obstacles.”
“The god will be pulling a lot of power himself,” Max said. “We can bleed off some of that energy to fuel a beat-resonance wave and try to overload the stability focus-points. The castle will have to feed more power into the stabilizers, and that’ll make them stand out against the matrix background; we superimpose a shunt surge on top of the resonance wave, tell it to home in on the stabilization loci, change the beat frequency, and maybe we can blow the stabilizers out. With all that going on the god should be weakened enough for the confinement shell to work.”