It was a beautiful morning, a perfect morning. Her mood held all the way home to Termagant.
Black smoke poured from the heights of the building. Soot covered its sides in great streaks. The street was choked with evacuees from Termagant. Nixies, orends, and Teggish lawyers milled about in an agitated confusion, while fashion models, powries, and leshiye argued with each other, gesturing wildly upward. Three candymen had brought out a great bell and were tolling the alarum with slow, steady strokes.
She stared. Far above there was a flash of light, followed by a distant rumbling like thunder. Jane felt as if she'd been kicked in the stomach. All joy collapsed within her. It was over. Everything was over.
A Greencoatie rode up, forcing the crowd away from the building with the metal breast of his destrier. "Stand back!" he commanded Jane.
"But I've got to get inside!"
"Nobody gets inside. This is a police matter!" He raised his lance against her, and she was forced to retreat. More Greencoaties moved into place, cordoning off the building.
Something shifted in that dark part of her brain that the dragon had vacated the night before. Melanchthon was back, a wordless and compelling presence. A cold sense of urgency filled Jane. She had to get past the police lines. She pulled out Incolore's mask and critically examined its interior. The outlines of its workings were clear enough to her. She was sure she could jigger up a spell of invisibility with it if she could only get hold of some sal ammoniac, tincture of Redness, and an elder leaf. It would burn out in five minutes, but five minutes would be enough.
There was a pharmacy on the corner. She ran.
The passenger elevators had all been drawn by the heat to the burning floors like moths to a candle. But the freight elevators were simpler creatures, operated manually. Jane commandeered one.
Three times on the shudderingly slow climb to the seventy-third floor there were explosions. At each, she halted the car and waited lest the machinery be injured or the shaft thrown out of true. Jane feared the fire might block her way but her own floor, when she arrived at it, had only a light haze of smoke. It was suddenly silent. She tasted burnt plastic and charred wood at the back of her mouth.
Jane stepped into the canted hallway. Her mask turned hot and she ripped it from her face. Blistered and crisped, it fell to the floor and burst into flame. She left it burning behind her.
The door to 7332 fell off at her touch.
Her apartment had been leveled. Its furnishings were reduced to rubble. The interior walls were all gone. Splays of lathing fanned down here and there from the ceiling. The dragon was exposed, a cliff of black iron.
Ferret was in the center of the room, a short double-edged sword by his side. It was an athalme—Jane recognized it by the black handle and the almost imperceptible tug of its magnetized blade.
He was dead.
Wee bodies littered the floor, black and shriveled. They formed drifts by the walls. The meryons had died here by the thousands. Now at last, their nation was extinct. Loathsome little fascists though they were, Jane found their annihilation affected her horribly.
Without any conscious intent, she knelt by Ferret's side and stroked his short, silvery hair. It was soft, so soft. In death, his face was open, guileless, innocent. Too late, she regretted never having cultivated him. What a friend he could have been! And now he was gone.
"Who would have thought there was so much power in him?" she murmured.
"Not all the destruction was his," Melanchthon growled. "Less than half."
She looked at him.
"Your Master Ferret was a fool. He wanted the pleasure of taking me by himself. But he was not so much of a fool as not to have left word behind him. Others will be here soon, and they will not be fools at all. I would there had been another month to prepare. But we've power enough and more for our needs. It is time to leave. It is time for us to pass through Hell Gate and make our assault on Spiral Castle."
Jane raised her head.
She should have felt devastated. Ferret was dead, the meryons were dead, and there were surely others, caught in the flux of Melanchthon's battle with Ferret, who had died as well. When they blasted free of Termagant, everyone in the street outside would be caught in the building's collapse. And that would be only the beginning of the general slaughter. They were embarked on a quest of destruction, going up against the greatest Enemy of all, to die and in death seek the obliteration of history. It was the end of all things.
She felt great.
"Do we have enough power?" Jane asked. She was already racing across the rubble, climbing the rungs to the cabin. She threw her windbreaker and blouse out the portal into the living room and slammed the hatch. Her flight jacket was waiting for her. She zipped herself into it.
"It will have to do." Melanchthon's words were mild, but his tone was confident, smug in his strength and destructive potential. One by one his engines were coming up, rattling the walls and causing the soft green instrument lights to flicker. There was a helmet—Jane pulled it on and tucked her hair in. The cabin smelled of leather and lubricating oil. She fit the oxymask over her mouth.
Jane settled herself into the couch, seized the rubber grips, and twisted. The needles stung deep into her flesh. The wraparounds closed about her head. Once again she was resting in the warm center of the dragon's sensorium.
To three sides of Termagant there were too many skyscrapers to plot a safe course through. They would have to fly east, into the rising sun. Already, bits of cornice and brick were falling, shaken loose by vibrations from the dragon's engines. Jane called up his weapons systems, and the controls spread out before her in three tiers, like the keyboards of that great organ on which the Lady had played the very first sunrise.
Everything was in place. "Are you ready?" Jane asked.
"Before I existed, I was ready."
"Then let's do it!"
Three floors were reduced to dust when they blasted free. Jane glimpsed the pyramid-topped upper section of Termagant falling slowly into the gray cloud, outlines softening as the walls crumbled. Windows shattered for blocks around, filling the air with a sparkling crystal mist that burned red with the reflected glory of their jets. Then they were gone. The Great Gray City spread itself thinner and thinner beneath them, the tight grid of streets and buildings gradually giving way to the exurbs.
They came in low over Whinny Moor, flying at what would have been treetop level had there been any trees. The mud flats and industrial parks, the shanties, oil tanks, and chemical dumps, flashed by beneath them. Light turned the shallow ponds and rivers silver and kicked up rainbows on the oil slicks. Narrow roads whipped and twisted like snakes.
"Up! Up!" Jane screamed, and the dragon strained skyward, skimming a string of high-tension power lines, missing them by yards, leaving them lashing furiously in his hot wake. "That was too fucking close! Give us some more altitude, why don't you?"
"We're going under their radar," Melanchthon growled. "You've heard of radar, I trust?"
The dragon works were a smear on the horizon.
Jane brought the two cannons on-line and called up the aiming systems. A sun cross appeared at the center of her vision, floating up and down slightly as they hugged the contours of the ground. "First flyby," Jane said. "We'll be taking out the front gate and the Time Clock, and blasting the Goddess stone to gravel." She felt wild, free, vengeful, obscene—unstoppable. "Serving the Bitch notice." She knew that there was no Goddess, save as a metaphor for what was otherwise inconceivable, that the forces they were going up against were as impersonal as they were vast. But it felt more satisfying this way.