The concussion began to shake large stones and other massive debris from the narrowing spaces between the unwinding strands far above. A boulder as big as Valiha crashed in a shower of sparks twenty meters ahead of them. Valiha went around it as they heard another buzz bomb impact, followed rapidly by two more, punctuated with the lesser sounds of released bombs.
Valiha did not stop until she saw the stone building that marked the entrance to the regional brain of Tethys. She halted, unwilling to enter. Only the driving force of the buzz bombs had brought her this far, into a place traditionally avoided by her kind.
"We've got to go in," Chris urged her. "This place is falling apart. One of those things is going to get us if a falling rock doesn't kill us first."
"Yes, but-"
"Valiha, do as I say. This is Long-Odds Major talking to you. Do you think I'd make you do something that wasn't a sure bet?"
Valiha hesitated one second more, then trotted under the arched doorway and across a stone floor until she reached the beginning of the five-kilometer stairs.
She started down.
32 The Vanished Army
The chemical fires had long guttered to their death when Cirocco, on foot, rounded the curve of the great cable with Hornpipe following behind. The Titanide used a three-legged gait, his right hind leg held up by a sling tied around his middle. The lower joint of the leg was splinted.
Cirocco, too, bore signs of the battle. There was a bandage wrapped around her head, covering one eye. Her face was streaked with dried blood. Her right arm was in a sling, and two fingers of her right hand were swollen and askew.
They walked on the hard rock that surrounded the base of the cable, not venturing onto the sand. Though the last wraiths they had encountered had been free of whatever bewitchment had enabled some of them to ignore water and actually to grapple with the humans and Titanides, Cirocco was taking no chances. One she had killed had sloughed off a clear, supple skin at the moment of death. It had felt like vinyl.
She saw something out on the sand, stopped, and held out her hand. Hornpipe handed her a pair of binoculars, which she awkwardly put to her good eye. It was Hautbois. She could be sure only because there were a few patches of green-and-brown skin undamaged. Cirocco looked away.
"I fear she will never see Ophion," Hornpipe sang.
"She was good," Cirocco sang, not knowing what else to say. "I hardly knew her. We will sing of her later."
Aside from the one body, there were few signs that a terrible battle had been fought here. A few patches of sand were blackened, but even now the relentless dunes were marching over them, the rising wind heaping grain after grain over the body of the Titanide.
Cirocco had expected much worse. They might be dead but she would not accept it until she saw the bodies.
They had been forced toward the east as their flight degenerated into chaos. Hornpipe had tried again and again to bear toward the other two Titanides but every time came upon another concealed cadre of the waterproof wraiths. There was little he could do but flee. The attacks had been so intense that Cirocco had decided the wraiths were after her alone. Thinking she could draw them off and thus relieve the pressure on her friends, she had told Hornpipe to run as fast as he could around the cable to the east. They were pursued by a lone buzz bomb, which nearly killed them when it dropped a bomb so close they were lifted into the air and slammed against one of the cable strands.
By then it was clear she had been wrong. The wraiths had not been after her; they had not followed her, nor had the buzz bombs, except for the one that had wounded them. Miserably, they sought shelter beneath the cable strands and listened to the sounds of battle far away, helpless to do anything about it. They had to bind their own wounds first.
Cirocco had been about to go on, but Hornpipe called her back. He was looking at the hard surface of the rock.
"One of our people came this way," he sang, pointing to parallel scratches that could have been made only by the hard, clear keratin of a Titanide's hoof. A few steps further he found a patch of drifted sand that bore two hoof marks and the imprint of a human foot.
"So Valiha made it here," Cirocco said, in English. "And at least one other." She put her free hand beside her mouth and shouted into the darkness. When the echoes had died away, they could hear no sound. "Come on. Let's go in and find them."
As they journeyed deeper into darkness, they began to encounter looming, irregular shapes that blocked their path. Hornpipe lit a lantern. By its light they could see a great deal of debris had fallen from the narrowing spaces overhead. The strands rose at least ten kilometers before entwining to form a single entity: the Tethys cable. Cirocco knew the maze harbored its own complex ecology-plants that rooted in the cable strands and animals that scuttled up and down them.
Cirocco led the way through the debris, conscious that under any of the larger piles could be all four of her friends. Yet from time to time Hornpipe called out to tell her he had seen another hoof mark. The two of them moved deeper until they came upon a massive pile of stone. Cirocco knew that she was dead center under the cable. She had been here before, and in the spot had been the usual gremlin-constructed entrance building. Now there was just rubble and, in the center of a huge scorch, the twisted corpses of three buzz bombs. There was not much left of them but the metal that had formed the combustion chamber linings and blackened steel teeth.
"Did they go in there?" Cirocco asked.
Hornpipe bent to study the ground in the light of his lantern.
"It is hard to say. There is a chance they got into the building before it was brought down."
Cirocco was breathing deeply. She took the lantern from Hornpipe and walked a short distance around the pile of rubble. Then she gingerly climbed a few steps until she had to give it up, handicapped by her broken arm and a feeling of dizziness. She came down. She sat with her forehead in her hand for a moment, sighed, got up, and began picking up small rocks and throwing them into the darkness.
"What are you doing?" Hornpipe asked after she had kept it up for several minutes.
"Digging."
Hornpipe watched her. There were rocks from fist-sized up to several hundred kilograms that the two of them would probably be able to move. But the great bulk of the pile, the rocks that gave the small mountain its massive shape, would have made good building blocks for an Egyptian pyramid. At last he came up behind her and touched her arm. She flinched away from him.
"Rocky, it's no use. You can't do it."
"I have to. I will."
"It's too-"
"Damn it, don't you understand? Gaby's down there."
She trembled and fell to her knees. Hornpipe eased himself down beside her, and she came into his arms to sob on his shoulder.
When she once more had control of herself, she drew back from his embrace, stood, and put both hands on his shoulders. Her eyes were burning with a determination Hornpipe had not seen in the Wizard for a long time.
"Hornpipe, my old friend," she sang, "by the blood tie that binds us, I must ask you to do a great thing for me. By the love we both know for your grandhindmother, I would not ask this thing if there were any other way."
"Command me, Wizard," Hornpipe sang, in formal mode.
"You must return to your homeland. There you must implore all who will to come to the great desert, to come to Tethys for their Wizard's sake, in her hour of need. Summon the great leviathans of the sky. Call Dreadnaught, Pathfinder, The Aristocrat, Ironbound, Whistlestop, Bombasto, His Honor, and Old Scout, himself. Tell them that the Wizard will make war on the skyrockets, that she will wipe their kind forever from the great wheel of the world. Say to them that in return for this sworn pledge, the Wizard asks them to take all who will come and bring them to Tethys. Will you do this thing for me, Hornpipe?"