Zane wiped his blade off and looked around, barking orders to whoever was still alive. Outside, alarm bells were finally ringing, calling scores of sleeping guards into the fray.
Lights blazed in the south bailey. Caliph stood up, slightly stunned. His formula wasn’t supposed to do that. Something had gone wrong with the math. New sounds turned his attention from the holomorphic aberration. He didn’t have time to think about mutated spells. Glancing out a window he could see hordes of armed men pouring from virtually every direction. Some were still pulling on armor.
Green chemiostatic torch beams cut the dark. Tall man-things lurched from crevices in the architecture of the castle, hopelessly outnumbered. They went down under the merciless onslaught of dozens of men.
Trumpets blared. The parapets swelled with running soldiers. Archers with gas-powered crossbows riddled indistinct fleeing forms with enough bolts to add many pounds of weight.
The corpses of the enemy landed in ponderous piles of ruination, splashing into fountains and beds of blue petunias.
Caliph headed downstairs and back out to the courtyard in an effort to help.
The powerful beams of the magnesium lights on the zeppelin deck were turned down into the east gardens. All the gas lamps on the castle grounds burst into hissing blossoms of life.
Suddenly, an army had appeared. They ransacked every shadow, pitiless and angry.
Search parties were organized. Staff sergeants barked commands to their squads. Out came the knights.
They had taken time enough to put their armor on. They stalked into the yard, hackles up, seized chemical torches from the hands of confused and sleepy servants and conducted grumpy solitary investigations of the castle grounds.
They asked statistical questions while they rummaged in bushes and flower beds. “Who fucked this up?” “How many dead?” “How many expectants?”
Groups of guards followed in their wake, feeling virtually invulnerable.
A man-thing made the mistake of leaping out at one knight who then proceeded to blast the creature with a chemiostatic flail the heavy spiked ball of which, being tipped with beryllium, delivered an awesome blaze of light as it turned the creature’s skin to ash with a jolting explosion of electricity. The knight stepped on the creature’s twitching body and walked on.
It took less than four hours to completely scour the castle and the grounds. Altogether, the sentries and knights found and dispatched thirty-seven intruders, half of which were noticeably more human than the tall thin creatures with the slippery skin.
They laid them out in the south bailey in a long row. The losses to the castle garrison unfortunately surpassed those of the enemy.
Forty-two soldiers had been killed. Mostly by strangulation and mostly by surprise. Caliph got word while he was in the south bailey that Sena was safe but (for reasons lost in the relay of information) utterly inconsolable. He would go to her soon. For now, the fact that she was safe was enough.
They had turned off the magnesium lights after the grounds had been declared clean but Caliph decided to make one last circuit of the gardens before going inside. While men began tossing bodies in the beds of steam wagons and making trips to the gate, Caliph walked into the darkened easterly courtyard.
He wasn’t really looking for foes. He was simply trying to sort out the madness of the evening.
Who or what were these gruesome creatures? How had they gotten inside the castle grounds? What had they come searching for?
He turned off the path, brooding over the unanswerable questions. He had told his men to haul the bodies to West Gate for autopsy by government physicians first thing tomorrow morning. He wanted to know, from a dissector’s point of view, everything there was to know about their physiology.
As he walked along the courtyard wall he noticed a sudden movement in the dark. His heart froze. He opened his mouth to yell for help, but stopped when he realized the figure was not tall and thin but bulky like a bear on its hind legs. Nor did the figure appear intent on escape. Rather it picked its way carefully across the garden, glancing furtively over its meaty shoulders.
Apparently it had not seen Caliph. Caliph stopped, fearful to watch, fearful to look away.
The figure held a key in its hand, the key that had unlocked the double grated entrance to the sewers under the mulberry shrubs.
The figure fumbled, glancing around as it bent to secure the portals it must have opened earlier that day—the portal through which Caliph realized the enemies must have come.
Caliph flattened himself against the courtyard wall, breathing slow and quiet. He heard the key turn in the lock, leaves rustle. After another moment, the figure appeared on the courtyard path, still nervous, smoothing down its clothing, checking over its shoulder time and again.
It headed for the torch-lit archway beside which Caliph was pressed. Caliph held his breath.
As it walked, the figure’s fretful manner dissipated quickly. It whistled, thrusting its hands into deep pockets, moving into the cone of light.
Caliph gasped. It was all he could do to stay silent and hidden as the traitor, whose face was plainly visible, strode smugly toward the castle entrance, confident his actions had gone unobserved.
After the footsteps had echoed into silence, Caliph waited another five minutes before moving.
Finally, muscles aching with tension and stress brought on by heartbroken disbelief, he crept counterclockwise through the courtyards, stealing through the tumid darkness with fumbling uncertain steps, taking pains to approach the castle doors from a direction seemingly disconnected with the place and moment of the crime.
CHAPTER 21
Caliph sat in the dark of his bedroom despising David Thacker. He still couldn’t choke it down, that his old friend from Desdae had sold him out. His anger was rogue, displaced, confused. Had he done something to earn this perfidious crime? Could he have somehow slighted the quiet writer who studied composition and novels and diverse fields of criticism? Had he made some trespass against David that his own calluses made invisible?
He thought back to their afternoon in Grume’s, where they had seemingly drunk to the camaraderie between them. Had it all been a façade? Had there ever been any true friendship at all?
Caliph had no answers. All he had were questions and the feeling that reality had somehow changed for him more drastically than any holomorph could ever manage with all the holojoules in the world.
One thing was certain. David Thacker had plans of his own.
Caliph had returned from the courtyard to find Sena soulsick and wretched. She equivocated on telling him the reason but eventually it came out that her book, Caliph’s uncle’s book, had disappeared.
Caliph repressed an intransigent impulse to scold her. He paused and his face tightened. He wanted to shout that soldiers had died tonight—a great many men and women had died tonight and would not be going home to their families, to their friends. He wanted to rouse her, tell her it was common sense that people’s lives were far more important than any book. He wanted to ask her where her head was at, that all she could think about was some worm-eaten incunabulum.
Instead, his face relaxed. “Are you sure it’s missing?”
“Of course I’m sure.” Sena looked insulted.
“Let’s have a look.”
Sena sighed. She followed him to the fourth floor. With the gas lamps on, the room looked even worse than it had in the dark. Investigators from the watch had come and gone.
They had jotted down clues before letting the servants in to clean. The dead guards had been wrapped up and taken away. All that was left was to sort through the jumble of annihilated objects.