On Earth this plan would not have been workable. A bird the size of the eagle probably could not have gotten into the air without launching herself from a high cliff. Even then, her flight would have been very slow, maybe too slow to keep from stalling or sinking back to Earth. However, the Lord had given the eagles muscles with strength to match their weight.
They rose up and up. The pale sides of the monolith, a mile away, glimmered in the moonlight. Wolff clutched the straps of his cradle and looked at the others. Chryseis and Kickaha waved back. Abiru was motionless. The shattered and prone wreck of Rhadamanthus’ tower became smaller. No ravens flew by to be startled and to wing upward to warn the Lord. Those eagles not serving as carriers spread wide to forestall such a possibility. The air was filled with an armada; the beat of their wings drummed loudly in Wolff’s ears, so loudly that he could not imagine the noise not traveling for miles.
The time came when this side of ravaged Atlantis was spread out in the moonlight for him to scan in one sweep of the eye. Then the rim appeared, and part of the tier below it. Dracheland became visible as a great half-disc of darkness. The hours crept by. The mass of Amerindia appeared, grew and was suddenly chopped off at the rim. The garden of Okeanos, so far below Amerindia and so narrow, could not be seen.
Both the moon and the sun were visible now because of the comparative slenderness of this monolith. Nevertheless, the eagles and their burdens were still in darkness, in the shadow of Idaquizzoorhruz. It would not last for long. Soon this side would be under the full glare of the daytime luninary. Any ravens would be able to see them from miles away. The party had, however, drifted close to the monolith, so that anyone on top would have to be on the edge to detect them.
At last, after over four hours, just as the sun touched them, they were level with the top. Beside them was the garden of the Lord, a place of flaming beauty. Beyond rose the towers and minarets and flying buttresses and spiderweb architectures of the palace of the Lord. It soared up for two hundred feet and covered, according to Kickaha, more than three hundred acres.
They did not have time to appreciate its wonder, for the ravens in the garden were screaming. Already the hundreds of Podarge’s pets had swooped down upon them and were killing them. Others were winging toward the many windows to enter and seek out the Lord.
Wolff saw a number get inside before the traps of the Lord could be activated. Shortly thereafter, those attempting to climb in through the openings disappeared in a clap of thunder and a flash of lighting. Charred to the bone, they fell off the ledges and onto the ground below or on the rooftops or buttresses.
The human beings and the apes settled to the ground just outside a diamond-shaped door of rose stone set with rubies. The eagles released the ropes and gathered by Podarge to wait for her orders.
Wolff untied the ropes from the metal rings on the cross-bars. Then he lifted the bars above his head. After running to a point just a few feet from the diamond-shaped doorway, he cast the steel cross into it. One bar went through the entrance; the two at right angles to it jammed against the sides of the door.
Flame exploded again and again. Thunder deafened him. Tongues of searing voltage leaped out at him. Suddenly, smoke poured from within the palace, and the lightning ceased. The ravaging device had either burned out from the load or was temporarily discharged.
Wolff took one glance around him. Other entrances were also spurting blasts of flame or else their defenses had burned out. Eagles had taken many of the cross-bars and were dropping them at an angle into the windows above. He leaped over the whitehot liquid of his cross-bar and through the door. Chryseis and Kickaha joined him from another entrance. Behind Kickaha came the horde of giant apes. Each carried a sword or battle-axe in his hand.
Kickaha asked, “Is it coming back to you?”
Wolff nodded. “Not all, but enough, I hope. Where’s Abiru?”
“Podarge and a couple of the apes are keeping an eye on him. He could try something for his own purposes.”
Wolff in the lead, they walked down a hall the walls of which were painted with murals that would have delighted and awed the most critical of Terrestrials. At the far end was a low gate of delicate and intricate tracery and of a shimmering bluish metal. They proceeded toward it but stopped as a raven, fleeing for its life, sped over them. Behind it came an eagle.
The raven passed over the gate, and as it did so it flew headlong into an invisible screen. Abruptly, the raven was a scatter of thin slices of flesh, bones and feathers. The pursuing eagle screamed as it saw this and tried to check her flight, but too late. She too was cut into strips.
Wolff pulled the left section of the gate toward him instead of pushing in on it as he would naturally have done. He said, “It should be okay now. But I’m glad the raven triggered the screen first. I hadn’t remembered it.”
Still, he stuck his sword forward to test, then it came back to him that only living matter activated the trap. There was nothing to do but to trust that he could remember correctly. He walked forward without feeling anything but the air, and the others followed.
“The Lord will be holed up in the center of the palace, where the defense control room is,” he said. “Some of the defenses are automatic, but there are others he can operate himself. That is, if he’s found out how to operate them, and he’s certainly had enough time to learn.”
They padded through a mile of corridors and rooms, each one of which could have detained anyone with a sense of beauty for days. Every now and then a boom or a scream announced a trap set off somewhere in the palace.
A dozen times, they were halted by Wolff. He stood frowning for awhile until he suddenly smiled. Then he would move a picture at an angle or touch a spot on the murals: the eye of a painted man, the horn of a buffalo in a scene of the Amerindian plains, the hilt of a sword in the scabbard of a knight in a Teutoniac tableau. Then he would walk forward.
Finally, he summoned an eagle. “Go bring Podarge and the others,” he said. “There is no use their sacrificing themselves any more. I will show the way.”
He said to Kickaha, “The sense of deja vu is getting stronger every minute. But I don’t remember all. Just certain details.”
“As long as they’re the significant details, that’s all that matters at this moment,” Kickaha said. His grin was broad, and his face was lit with the delight of conflict. “Now you can see why I didn’t dare to try re-entry by myself. I got the guts but I lack the knowledge.”
Chryseis said, “I don’t understand.” Wolff pulled her to him and squeezed her. “You will soon. That is, if we make it. I’ve much to tell you, and you have much to forgive.”
A door ahead of them slid into the wall, and a man in armor clanked toward them. He held a huge axe in one hand, swinging it as if it were a feather.
“It’s no man,” Wolff said. “It’s one of the Lord’s taloses.”
“A robot!” Kickaha said.
Wolff thought. Not quite in the sense Kickaha means. It was not all steel and plastic and electrical wires. Half of it was protein, formed in the biobanks of the Lord. It had a will for survival that no machine of all-inanimate parts could have. This was a strength and also a weakness.
He spoke to Kickaha, who ordered the apes behind him to obey Wolff. A dozen stepped forward, side by side, and hurled their axes simultaneously. The talos dodged but could not evade all. It was struck with a force and precision that would have chopped it apart if it had not been armor-plated. It fell backward and rolled, then rose to its feet. While it was down, Wolff ran at it. He struck at it with his scimitar at the juncture of shoulder and neck. The blade broke without cutting into the metal. However, the force of the blow did knock the talos down again.