Penult (63 page)

“
Go, if you want,” said
Ubaldo, shrugging and turning away. “I will stay.”

“
Yeah. Me too,” said
Olivier, sighing.

“
And me, as well,” said
Solomon, running his hand along the shaft of his
scepter.

“
That is sheer
foolishness,” said Karla. “Everyone, call your bugs! We live to
fight another day.”

Her agitated eyes sought and demanded
my support.

“
Come, James. You will ride
with me. We will go find your Tigger.”

I looked away, unable to endure her
beckoning stare.

“
I’m thinking … I might
stay … too.”

“
What? Don’t be so
ridiculous! Come with me. We can still get away.”

I didn’t really want to stay. It felt
wrong, though, to run off and leave our friends to be massacred. It
wasn’t bravery or stupidity operating here. It was loyalty.
Besides, we had come a long way to get here. I just didn’t see the
point of running away, particularly since I was already dying in
the only place that mattered to me.

Karla’s burly robber fly came hurtling
up over the top of the hill skimming its tarsi against the tall
grass as it kept low across the sloping meadows. The creature, well
over a hundred pounds, pulled up on a dime, alighting beside her as
gently as a leaf.

“
I’m staying.”

Karla shot me a pissed grimace and
glanced away, but then she directed another darting glance at me,
this one infused with a speck more worry and guilt. I did not
engage her directly, watching out of the corner of my eye while she
hopped into the saddle and rapped her heels against her fly’s
back.

“
Fools!”

Her robber fly burst away, back from
whence it had come. I snuck a peek at her zooming off, but I had no
regrets.

Several falcons that had emerged from
the city broke off to intercept her, while the rest kept pace with
the Hashmallim and Cherubim on foot below, providing air cover. The
Pennies took their time in getting us surrounded. They were being
ultra-cautious.

They must have found it suspicious to
come across such a tiny force of invaders. They probably have
thought this was a trap; that a larger force of raiders lay in wait
somewhere out of sight. I could only wish.

Three Seraphim now hovered above each
line of advance, while two contingents of chariot-like scooters
swooped around behind us, converging to cut off our escape route
across the causeway.

“
Okay fellas, this is it,”
said Olivier, as he attempted to rise but collapsed again to his
knees, his head drooping. “Fuck! I think I lost a bunch of blood. I
can feel it in my head.”

From behind the gleaming towers of
Loomis, a parade of other winged devices emerged—slow, frilly,
pastel-colored contraptions, built more for comfort than
combat.

“
The Lords,” said
Solomon.

Olivier crouched, panting. “Oh,
they’ve come out to watch the slaughter. How special.”

Several long trains of carts pulled up
on the ring road just above us and disgorged their sluggish
Cherubim cargo, standing stiff and tall. Hashmallin marched into
chevrons on the slopes.

A peculiar, heavily armored cart
arrived and a pair of Hashmallim dismounted, unloading from the
back a huge device with a long shaft and strings connected to
bulbous outgrowths. It looked more musical instrument than
weapon—an unholy three-way cross between sitar, harp and
bazooka.

The ranks of Cherubim halted about a
hundred meters out. A lone Hashmal emerged and strolled down to a
point in the meadow about halfway between us and the sitar wielders
on the ring road. He was sheathed in a sparse and satiny armor that
padded and protected only the most vulnerable parts of his body,
including a half helm with flanges that covered his
neck.

He called down to us in that strange
language of theirs. When we did not respond, he cycled through
French, Spanish and German before he made it to English.

“
Why are you
here?”

Solomon and I just looked each other.
Ubaldo just glared and caressed one of the huge arrow shafts he had
liberated from the Hashmal on the boat.

“
We’re returning one of
your poles,” said Olivier.

“
Poles?”

Olivier gestured towards the shattered
remains of the cracker column heaped in the road.

“
Yeah. Thought you might
like it back.”

The Hashmal stared straight at
Olivier, his expression flat.

“
This realm is off limits
to you and your kind. The surface is forbidden to you. Place your
weapons down and give yourselves to us. We will process you
appropriately and humanely. Otherwise, you shall be dispatched
without mercy.”

“
Yeah, well how about you
dispatch this!” said Olivier, brandishing his middle
finger.

Ubaldo, his arrow already strung,
raised his bow, but the Hashmallim with the sitar-like device were
quicker. One aimed while the other plucked its one thick strand.
The space before it grew as blurry as the air above a
flame.

None of us took cover. We saw no
projectile. We didn’t know what was happening. But when the wings
of the device whipped forward, a shock wave came hurtling towards
us, refracting the air before it in concentric waves like ripples
propagating across a pond. It wafted harmlessly through the ranks
of Cherubim, but the wave gained power and solidity the farther it
flew.

Ubaldo shot his giant arrow at the
thing. It stuck as if had hit a wall of mud and tumbled back at us.
Just before the wave hit, Olivier and Solomon each managed to
unleash a pair of stout pulses from their scepters, but the blasts
simply vanished, their energy consumed and incorporated into the
oncoming force.

The wave slammed into me with the
force of a speeding truck, bludgeoning my ribs and my head. My
sword went flying from my grip and I fell backward, clutching my
middle, struggling to breathe as it sucked the air right out of my
lungs. The wave lingered over us and swirled like a tornado,
scouring away what remained of our already shredded
clothes.

Ubaldo and Solomon dove to the ground.
Their weapons crumbled like unfired clay. Stubborn Olivier took the
full brunt of the blow and was summarily slammed to the ground. I
rolled into a shallow gully and covered my face until the wave and
its vicious little back eddies had dissipated.

The air cleared to reveal Cherubim
advancing in close formation from three directions, followed
closely by their overseers. Olivier lay writhing and coughing in
the tall grass beside me.

I spotted my blackened, swollen sword
lying on the ground. It had somehow survived the blow. I reached
for it and groaned. The broken ends of my ribs crunched and stabbed
at me when I moved. With great difficulty, still woozy from the
blow to my head, I rose to my feet.

Solomon knelt on the ground, looking
hopeless and beaten, but Ubaldo was crouched, trying to pry a rock
out of the turf. I stuck my sword out at the Cherubim and tried to
summon a pulse. More often than not, my will failed me when I
needed it most.

“
That’s it people. I’m
done,” said Olivier, rolling over onto his back. “What the heck?
They can’t say we didn’t try.”

I stood glaring at the sword in my
hand, begging it funnel my will against the plodding Cherubim. The
bumps and etchings in its textured surface wavered in and out of
focus.

Within that mental and visual haze, a
strange clarity came to me. A faint echo of the Singularity reached
out to me. The intricate patterning on the now swollen and
blackened blade suddenly made sense. It looked just like the
cracker—a scale model faithful to every nub and groove in the
full-sized column. Victoria had been in the process of modifying
and activating one of the captured columns in the grotto when she
turned her aggressions to me. While fighting me, perhaps she
inadvertently transferred its structure to my sword. Could that
really be true?

I stabbed the dull point of my sword
into the ground and pried at the lowermost nubs with my
fingernails. A ring of spines popped free. I folded them flat. The
segment was then free to rotate, just like the original cracker. I
rotated it and worked my way up the shaft. The sword grew hot and
began to hiss and vibrate and lengthen and swell.

The Cherubim paused, halted by their
Hashmallim. The sword began to vibrate. I worried that this model
column, while functional, would ultimately project only a tiny
fraction of the force of the real ones. But as I freed the topmost
ring of spines and turned, the ground began to shake vigorously
beyond an island of calm demarcated by a ten meter radius around
the sword point.

Ubaldo dropped his stone and dragged
Olivier into the circle of calm. Solomon, re-energized and
heartened by hope, found his legs and came over to help. The harp
wielders hustled closer with their apparatus and fired off another
blast.

“
Down low!” said
Ubaldo.

I dove down flat, pressing my cheek
against the soft and fragrant meadow as the pressure wave stomped
and scraped over my back. When it had moved on, I looked up to see
the sword still vertical. Moreover, the blade had swollen into a
perfect cylinder and had doubled in length. The rod kept growing
until it was taller than my head. It showed no signs of stopping
there. Soon it was a huge pillar, as big and stout as a pine tree,
much larger than the cracker that had served as its
template.

One of the Hashmallim overseers
abandoned all caution and sent his contingent of Cherubim storming
after us. Slashers all, their psychic muzzles released, they came
bounding after us now, bladed limbs raised and ready to
strike.

A series of waves ripped through the
ground, tearing trenches, heaping earth, tossing the Cherubim off
their feet and dumping them into newly opened ditches. The neat
formations of troops so carefully and artfully arrayed around us
were twisted apart and upended. The ring road burst with the crack
of bone. White shards flew through the air like
shrapnel.

A shrieking falcon dive-bombed us, its
forward cannon disgorging a sheet of stretchy plasma that came
flapping and twirling at the now gigantic pillar that had been my
sword. The substance came apart in clots and clumps that burned
like acid wherever it touched. It slapped wetly against the column
and dribbled off in gooey strands, cleaning off the grime, leaving
it not only unscathed but gleaming, its full luster
restored.

The root quake had now reached the
outskirts of the city, cracking facades, peeling walls and heaving
roofs. The color bleached out of the front-most rank of crystalline
towers. They stood like dead teeth among their companions as they
tossed about like unmoored skiffs in a gale, oscillating out of
synch until some broke at their bases and crashed into their
neighbors.

Towers went dark and toppled. The
lower buildings crumbled and dropped into vast chalky crevasses.
Clouds of white dust billowed everywhere and smothered everything.
The cityscape had become a nightmare of jagged spires erupting with
fireballs.

Chapter 66: The
Parting

With awe and disbelief, I watched the
cataclysm unfold and evolve from our weird, little bubble of
quietude at the base of the column. The cracker roared and shook
like a rocket booster, generating clashing waves that pulverized
the landscape in every direction.

Apart from a high frequency vibration
that buzzed my teeth like a dentist’s drill, the ground within
twenty meters of the column remained unaffected. I suppose it made
sense that the creators of an earthquake generator would design
measures that prevented the device from destroying itself and its
operators.

But beyond our refuge, thunderous
explosions punctuated the rumble as the bedrock split and ripped
apart. Walls of stone ground together like gnashing teeth,
crumbling and churning boulders into grit. Here and there, clouds
of dust billowed up as the land collapsed and filled the caverns
and tunnels beneath.

What once had been a section of gently
sloping meadow above a lake had become an isolated, steep-walled
bluff. The lake was gone, drained through a ravine that now cut
through the low range of hills separating us from the sea. Fresh
water clashed with sea water flooding in from the new fissures
splitting the headlands. Shaggy swaths of severed root squeezed
into the newly created rifts.

The surviving Hashmallin had lost all
control over whatever psychic reins they held over their assigned
Cherubim. Now master-less and aimless, the slave soldiers meandered
about the still heaving terrain, experiencing a freedom they had
not experienced since the theft of their souls, yet had no will to
lead them.

The Lords and privileged spectators of
Penult in their cushy aero-lounges retreated with haste. Their
flying machines, some bulbous, some sleek, herded back to safety
under the close escort of a growing swarm of falcons. The ruins of
Loomis no longer offered refuge. They were forced to seek safety in
the hills of the interior.