Wizard

27 Burst of Flame

"This could be the most dangerous part of the trip," Cirocco told them.

"I disagree," Gaby said. "Iapetus will be the worst."

"I thought Oceanus would be," Chris put in.

Gaby shook her head. "Oceanus is tough, but I've never had too much trouble getting across. He's still lying low, making his plans. I don't expect to live to see the results. These beings think in terms of millennia. Iapetus is the most actively hostile region. You can count on him to notice you when you pass through and to try to do something about it."

The group was gathered around the base of the central Phoebe cable, which, like the one in Hyperion, came to ground in a wide bend of the river. It was actually more accurate to say the cable had created the bend through a process Cirocco called millennial sag. Gaealithic evidence beneath the cable proved that in earlier times Ophion had flowed among the cable strands. As its rim stretched, the land beneath the juncture had been pulled up and the river had found a new path.

"You're right about Iapetus and Oceanus," Cirocco said. "Though I'm not sure Oceanus will stay quiet much longer. The thing is that this is the only place where two strong regionals opposed to Gaea's rule are border to border. Rhea's too insane to be called an enemy. Beyond Tethys is Thea, who is still loyal to Gaea, and past her is Metis, who's an enemy but cowardly. Dione is dead, and beyond her-"

"One of the regional brains is dead?" Robin asked. "What effect does that have on things?"

"Not as much as you'd suspect," Cirocco said. "Dione's bad luck was to be squeezed between Metis and Iapetus when the war came. She was too loyal to cooperate or even to stay in the background, so they attacked her and she was mortally wounded. She's been dead for three or four centuries, but the land itself is doing okay. lapetus has tried to take it over, but he hasn't had much luck. I believe Gaea is able to handle most things that need doing."

"I've had fair amount of work there," Gaby pointed out. "Things break down more rapidly in Dione. But it's pretty peaceful."

"The point is," Cirocco continued, "that only here with Phoebe and Tethys do we have a situation with two strong enemies of Gaea side by side. I blimp over it when I can, and I thought you two ought to know you have that option if you want to leave us now. We're going to cross Phoebe and Tethys just as quickly as we can, but it has to be on land because while I can get a blimp to come in here and pick us up, none of them would take us from central Phoebe to central Tethys, which is what I have to do." She looked at Chris, then at Robin.

"I'll stick it out," Robin said. "But I would like to get out of here. I worry that Kong has ... you know. I've got two more days to go."

"As long as the wind holds, we're okay," Gaby said. "If it shifts, we'll get moving very fast, I promise you. What about you, Chris?"

Chris was still thinking about Kong, too, but not in the way Robin seemed to assume. He was not anxious to become a hero, dead or alive, but was bothered to know that this was the first real opportunity he had seen.

"I'll stick around," he said.

The Titanides did not like Phoebe. They tended to jump at unexpected sounds. Valiha almost stepped on Robin's foot at one point. They stayed near the fire a short distance from the outlying cable strands and sang their songs, which sounded to Chris like whistling in the dark.

He didn't blame them. He felt it, too.

Cirocco had said she did not expect to be long. There had been no question of anyone, even Gaby, going with her when she called on Phoebe. The Wizard knew Phoebe would not go so far as to drain her acid pool, so she would have to stand on the stairs and communicate as best she could. There seemed little reason why the encounter should last more than a few minutes. Cirocco would ask Phoebe to return to Gaea's arms and reap the benefits of her love-which meant avoid the consequences of her wrath since there was little Gaea could do to improve anything but a lot she could do to hurt Phoebe. Phoebe would refuse and send Cirocco on her way, possibly with a demonstration of power meant to frighten but not to seriously injure her. Phoebe was no fool. She was aware of the spoke pointed at her like a cosmic siege gun, and she knew about the Big Squeeze.

Cirocco had told Chris about the Squeeze, which had been Gaea's final weapon in the Oceanic Rebellion. The interior of each of the six spokes was lined with a thick coat of green which, when examined closely, turned out to be the trees of the vertical forest. It was vertical because of the ground; the trees grew horizontally from the spoke walls and dwarfed any redwood.

To apply the Big Squeeze, Gaea first deprived the forest of moisture for several weeks. It became the tallest pile of firewood ever conceived. It was not necessary for Gaea to squeeze too hard to dislodge the trees in their millions to shower over the night below. She had done this to Oceanus, setting it afire as it fell, then closing the lower spoke valve. The fire storm had scorched Oceanus down to the bedrock. He had apparently been impressed because it was ten thousand years before he dared defy Gaea again.

The hours dragged by, and Cirocco did not arrive. She had been up and down the staircases to the regional brains enough times to know within a few minutes how long the journey should take her. It had seemed unlikely that she would spend more than an hour with Phoebe, but that time came and passed, marked by the slow movements of the gyroscopic clock, and still no Cirocco. When Gaea had completed another sixty-one-minute rev, Chris joined the conference to determine whether the tents should be pitched. There was not much sentiment for the idea, though Robin and Chris had been awake a long time. Gaby hardly bothered to talk about it; unstated but known to all was the certainty that before much longer she would go after her old friend, with or without help.

Chris moved away from the group and reclined on the dry ground. He oriented his body north and south and placed the Gaean clock on his belly, its axis in the east-west plane of rotation. He could no more see it move than he could watch water freeze, but when he looked away and then looked back, the motion was apparent. They had a mechanical clock which was much more useful because it worked all the time, regardless of orientation, but this one was more fun. It seemed to him that he could feel Gaea spinning beneath him. He recalled a similar feeling on a clear night back on Earth, and suddenly he wanted to be home, with or without his cure. It was not the same to be overwhelmed by the vastness of a starry night as it was to look up the dark, towering spoke to an unseen but tangible heaven.

"Strap on those bags, you quartet of quadrupedal quacks!"

"How about I ride you this time, Captain?" Hornpipe shouted.

"Hey, Rocky, how do you stay balanced so long?"

Her return brought Chris back from the edge of sleep. The group was transformed into a swirl of energy that Cirocco shaped toward the task of breaking the rough camp and getting back to the canoes. But finally, Gaby asked the question they all wanted answered.

"How did it go, Rocky?"

"Not bad, not bad, I guess. She was more ... talkative than I've seen her. I almost got the impression that it was she who..." She looked up and into Chris's eyes, then pursed her lips. "Tell you later. But I'm nervous. Not anything I can put my finger on, but I had the feeling she was up to something. The sooner we're out of here, the better I'll feel."

"Me, too," Gaby said. "Let's get moving."

Chris had worries of his own as he swung astride Valiha. The palms of his hands were wet, and there was a fluttering in his stomach, heat flashes washing over his body. Combining these symptoms with the sense of foreboding that now crept over him, he was as sure as he had ever been that another attack was imminent.

And so what? Tough it out; let it happen; these folks can take care of themselves. If anyone got hurt, it would probably be he, not they. It was not the first time he had thought of telling someone an attack was coming on. As before, he now decided against it, changed his mind, again elected to say nothing. Part of him knew this process of vacillation was the perfect defense because there was little chance he would act until it was too late.

No! Not this time. He turned to Gaby, who rode a meter to his right. As he did, he saw from the corner of one eye that Valiha had turned her head to look at him, and from the other he detected a flicker of motion.

He saw it a fraction of a second before Valiha did. Just a gaping mouth bristling with spikes, silently expanding, a circle cut by a thin horizontal line. It was far away and it was upon them, just like that. So little time.

He leaped, hit Gaby hard enough to carry her from Psaltery's back.

"Down! Get down!" he shouted, while Valiha shrieked an alarm in Titanide.

The sound hit like a fist, solid as an avalanche, as the buzz bomb ignited its torch and accelerated no more than a meter off the ground. The air pulsed with the rhythm of its engine; then Chris was blinded by what seemed like a flashbulb exploding in his eyes, and the sound dopplered far down the scale. He put his hand to the back of his head and felt hair singed into little knots.

Gaby struggled out from under him, fighting for breath. Robin was prone, ten meters away. Her hands were held together in front of her. A thin blue-white line grew from her fists, followed rapidly by another. The tiny warheads popped like firecrackers, far short of their goal.

"It came from the cable," Cirocco called out "Everyone stay down."

Chris did as she said, then squirmed until he faced the dark prominence silhouetted against the upturned sands of Tethys. He realized that was what had saved them; he had seen the buzz bomb's motion before it was on the deck, during the last part of its fall from a perch on the cable.

"There's another!" Cirocco warned. Chris tried to make his spine meet his belly. The second attacker roared by to his right, followed in echelon by two more, seconds apart.

"I don't like this," Gaby yelled, very close to Chris's left ear. "The Titanides are too big, and the ground is too flat." Chris turned and saw her face, a few centimeters from his own and smeared with dirt He felt his hand squeezed tightly. "Thanks," she whispered.

"I don't like it either," Cirocco shouted back. "But we can't get up yet."

"Crawl to the lowest place you can find then," Gaby suggested. "Come on," she said quietly. "Psaltery's in the lowest spot around here."

The brown-skinned Titanide was two meters behind them, in the center of a depression that even wishful thinking could not make more than forty centimeters deep. Gaby slapped Psaltery's flank as Chris edged in beside them.

"Don't get up and look around, old friend," Gaby said.

"I won't. You keep your head down, Boss." Psaltery coughed, a strange and oddly melodious sound.

"Are you all right?" Gaby asked.

"I hit the ground pretty hard," was all he would say.

"We'll get Hautbois to take a look when we get out of here. Damn!" She wiped her hand on her pants. "Wouldn't you know we'd land in the only patch of wet ground on this stinking hill?"

"Northwest," Valiha called from a position Chris could not see. He did not try to find the approaching buzz bomb but did succeed in making himself smaller and flatter than he would have thought possible. The monster roared by, again followed by two more. He wondered why the first had not come in formation.

When he risked a look, he was actually able to see one dropping away from the cable. It was just a speck, and it must have been three kilometers up. It had clung there, nose down, waiting for the right opportunity. It might have come at them when they approached the cable but had sense enough to know that when the group left, their backs would be turned.

This one also seemed to know it was now useless to try for a kill. It passed fifty meters above them, snorting an insolent challenge. Another ignited shortly after dropping from the cable and could not resist making a pass at about the same altitude. That was a bad mistake since it gave Robin a good wide target at a realistic range, plenty of time to follow it, and three tries to get it right. Both the second and third shots connected. Chris got his best view yet as the swift shape was captured in the twin flashes of the exploding bullets. It was a tapered cylinder with swept-back rigid wings and a double tail. There was an eye tucked under the wing. The buzz bomb was a great black shark of the skies, all mouth and appetite, with sound effects added.

For a moment it looked as if the creature had not been harmed by Robin's shots. Then the creature began to bleed fire that spilled across the sky, and the landscape was washed in a dull orange light. Chris looked up in time to see the explosion and could barely hear it for the shrill, warbling victory cry of Robin the Nine-fingered.

"Send me more buzz bombs!" she shouted.

They all watched as the creature arced high and began its death roll. There was a supersonic keening just before it hit ground on the far side of Ophion.

When ten minutes had passed with no more sign of the creatures, Cirocco crawled to Gaby and suggested they make a run for the boats. Chris was all for it; he worried about being out on the river, but anything was better than hugging this little patch of ground.

"Sounds good," Gaby agreed. "Here's the plan, folks. Don't waste any time. When I give the signal, humans will mount and Titanides will head for the boats at top speed. Ride facing backwards, and keep your eyes open. We've got to cover all points of the compass and be ready to hit ground instantly because we may not have more than two or three seconds. Any questions?"

"I think you must find another mount," Psaltery said quietly.

"What? Is it that bad? What is it, your leg?"

"Worse, I think."

"Hand me that lamp, will you, Rocky? Thanks, now... ." She froze, cried out in horror, and dropped the lamp. In its soft light Chris had seen her hands and arms smeared with dark red blood.

"What has she done to you?" Gaby moaned. She fell on the prone body and began trying to turn him over. Cirocco shouted for Hautbois to come quickly, then ordered Robin and Valiha to stand watch. It was not until she turned back to the injured Titanide that Chris realized the sticky mud on his own face and chest was mixed from the spilled blood of Psaltery. He moved away, appalled, and still he was sitting in mud. The Titanide had bled rivers of it, was lying in a pool of his own making.

"Don't, don't," he protested as Gaby and Hautbois tried to turn him. Hautbois did stop, but Gaby ordered her to start again. Instead, the Titanide healer put her head close to Psaltery's and listened for a moment.

"It's no use," she said. "His death is arrived."

"He can't be dead."

"He still lives. Come, sing good-bye to him while he hears."

Chris moved away, went to kneel beside Robin. She said nothing, looked at him for only a moment, then resumed her watch on the night sky. He recalled, shakily, that minutes before he had been sure an attack was coming. In fact, one had, but not the kind he expected.

There was no sound but the singing of Hautbois and Gaby. Hautbois's voice was sweetly melodic, not sorrowful. Chris wished he could understand it. Gaby would never be a skilled singer, but it did not matter. She choked but kept at it. At last there was just the sound of her sobbing.

Cirocco insisted they turn the body over. They had to examine the death wound, she said, to understand how it had happened and learn more about the buzz bombs. Gaby did not argue but stood by herself some distance away.

When they lifted his legs and began to turn him, a bushel of shapeless wetness spilled in the mud. Chris hurried away and fell to his hands and knees. His stomach continued to heave long after it was completely empty.

Later he learned that the wound had run the length of Psaltery's body, had come quite close to severing his trunk from his lower body. They decided that the long right wing of the creature had swept along his side seconds after Chris threw Gaby to the ground. It had cut so neatly that it had to be razor-edged in front.

They brought Psaltery to the bank of the river, to a place protected from attack by a few trees. Chris stayed back with Robin, watched as Gaby knelt and cut off the bright orange hair, then stood and tied it securely. Without ceremony, the three gathered Titanides rolled the body into the water and pushed it out into the current with long poles. Psaltery was a dark shape bobbing in the gentle ripples. Chris watched him out of sight.

They stayed there for ten revs, not wanting to catch up with his body. No one felt like doing much, and there was very little talk. The Titanides spent the time weaving and singing quietly. When Chris asked Cirocco to translate the songs for him, she said they were all about Psaltery.

"They're not particularly sad songs," she said. "None of these three was really close to Psaltery. But even his best friends won't mourn the way we do. Remember, to them he's gone. He doesn't exist anymore. But he did exist, and if he is to live in any sense, it must be in song. So they sing of what he was to them. They sing of the things he did that made him a good person. It's not much different from what we do, except for the lack of an afterlife. It's doubly important to them because of that, I think."

"I'm an atheist, myself," Chris said.

"So am I. But it's different. We both had to reject the concept of life after death, even if we weren't brought up to believe in it, because all human cultures are steeped in the idea. You get it everywhere you turn. So I think in the back of your mind and my mind-no matter how we deny it-there's some part that hopes we're wrong or maybe even is sure the reasoning mind is wrong. Even atheists experience out-of-body transformations when they die and are brought back. It's deep in your soul, and it just does not exist in theirs. What amazes me is that they're such a cheerful race in the face of that. I wonder if Gaea built that into them, too, or if it's their own invention. I won't ask her because I don't really want to know; I'd prefer to think it's their particular genius to rise above the futility of it all, to love life so much and demand nothing more of her."

Chris had never thought about the advantages of a "decent burial." He could not help, in his human way, thinking of the body as the person. That connection was what caused humans to seal their dead in caskets to keep the worms away or to burn them and remove all possibility of further depredation.

The river burial had a certain rustic poetry, but Ophion cared not at all about preserving the decency of the dead. The river deposited Psaltery on a mud flat three kilometers downstream. When they passed her ruined body, the Titanides did not even glance at it. Chris could not look away. The corpse crawling with scavengers haunted his sleep for a long time.