Pliocene Exile - The Adversary Part 3

In the small hours, Nodonn and his knights attacked the forewarned Aiken. The trickster brought down the aircraft, and one planeload of invading Tanu perished. The 200 led by Nodonn and Celadeyr and Kuhal Earthshaker attained the Castle of Gla.s.s and engaged Aiken's forces in a pitched battle. Aiken had been able to muster only a skeleton army of defenders, but most of these were equipped with Milieu weapons such as laser carbines and stun-guns. They gained the upper hand.

Nodonn came upon Mercy's body, now nothing but a form composed of grey ash, still wearing its golden torc. At the same moment that he told Mercy farewell, Nodonn heard Aiken's voice commanding him to come out of the castle for their final encounter.

Hovering in midair, the pair took up the duel that had been interrupted by the Flood so many months ago. Nodonn was the princ.i.p.al aggressor, blasting Aiken with the photon weapon as well as with his mind's energies. Aiken seemed barely to defend himself, hiding instead inside a psychocreative bubble. Those in the castle left off their fighting to watch the fantastic conflict.

When it seemed that Aiken's force-s.h.i.+eld was weakening, Nodonn gambled everything on two final strokes that drained the Sword. The little human disappeared in a blinding globe of light ... but when it dissipated, he was still there, uns.h.i.+elded, alive, and ready to put an end to it. The witnesses had seen Nodonn do his utmost. Now it was Aiken's turn.

Disdainfully, the power of the Nonborn King sent both Sword and Spear hurtling away. Using only his mind, Aiken struck.

As Mercy had gone, so went Nodonn-his mind subsumed, his body reduced to ash, his blackened silver hand falling toward the sea, only to be caught up and borne aloft in triumph by Aiken.

Across the Atlantic on Ocala Island, Marc Remillard had been watching. Now he was prepared to put his own plans into action.

It was 25 August. Exactly one year before, Aiken and the other members of Group Green had pa.s.sed through the timegate into the Pliocene.

Now read the fourth and final volume of The Saga of Pliocene Exile, which begins with a flashback to the time of the great fight with Felice at the Rio Genii-and then picks up the main thread of the chronicle immediately after Aiken's victory over Nodonn.

PROLOGUE ONE.

It had happened, just as Elizabeth had known it would; and there was no metapsychic prolepsis involved in the foretelling, only logic and inevitability, given those protagonists: Aiken Drum, Felice Landry, and Marc Remillard.

The last reverberations of the great psychocreative blast had dissipated. The four observers still hung high above Spain, out of range, inside the protective bubble spun by the mind of Minanonn the Heretic.

"Felice is surely dead," he observed.

"Her thoughts and her image are snuffed out." Creyn was noncommittal.

"Which proves nothing," muttered Dionket Lord Healer.

Elizabeth's ranging fa.r.s.enses, so much more powerful than those of the three Tanu, could provide no positive rea.s.surance at that high alt.i.tude. Felice, if she lived, was buried beneath the enormous landslide. "I think it's safe for us to descend," she said. "We must take the risk. There are casualties needing help ... "

A swift warning pa.s.sed between Dionket and Minanonn: Maintain your s.h.i.+eld at maximum strength Brother!

The three exotic men and the human woman felt no flow of air as they glided down through smoke-layered twilight. They were isolated from the stench of the burning jungle, the steam rising from the diverted Rio Genii, the dust still rolling up from the rockfall that had pushed the river from its bed and overwhelmed part of Aiken's flotilla.

"So many dead and wounded at the margin of the landslide," the Heretic mourned. "There lies Artigonn, my late sister's son.

And Aluteyn Craftsmaster, may Tana grant him peace! He would not abjure the ancient battle-religion, even though his heart rejected it."

"I see the King." Dionket's farsight showed a vision of Aiken flung up on a gravel bank downstream, his body in its golden suit stiffened, his heart stopped, and mind contracted to a screaming nub.

"You and Creyn go to him," Elizabeth said. The four touched down upon a great flat rock crusted with burnt vegetation, an island amid foaming dirty water. "You'll be able to keep him alive until I come. There are plenty of uninjured survivors. The majority escaped harm, I think. Organize rescue parties for the wounded. Minanonn and I will join you ... after I find out what happened to Felice." After I search this place where she fell, a meteor self-consummate; and how my mind still shrinks from the memory of her mind's last cry: agony and regret, to be sure-but triumph?

"The monster is dead, as Minanonn said. And the G.o.ddess be thanked!" Creyn's face was crimson-lit by flames. "Let us go, Lord Healer." Borne by Dionket's psychokinesis, the two redactors vanished into the murk.

Elizabeth and Minannon stood on the charred ruin of the islet, the protective sphere of psychoenergy now extinguished.

All around them half-submerged trees thrust from the water, trailing broken lianas in the debris-laden current. A few were still afire. In others, terrified monkeys and other jungle creatures shrieked and hooted piteously.

Elizabeth's eyes were closed, her mind searching again, exerting itself to the utmost in order to fa.r.s.ense underground. Drifting bits of ash and soot settled onto her hair and jumpsuit.

Minanonn towered beside her, a bearded blond giant wearing a tunic with a triskelion badge. Under one arm he carried a cubic container that measured perhaps half a metre along the edge. It was made of a dark exotic substance with fragile patterns on its surface, filaments of red and silver that glowed in the deepening night like wisps of interstellar gas. The box held the powerful force-field projector that Brede s.h.i.+pspouse had called the room without doors.

Elizabeth searched.

A body clad in broken gla.s.s armour drifted past on the wreck of a pneumatic barge. Somewhere in the rockfall on the right, lost in lurid shadows, a partially buried warrior woman sent out a telepathic plea for aid.

Soon Sister, the ex-Battlemaster rea.s.sured her. And his mindvoice lifted to encourage others: Soon help will come.

Elizabeth searched.

Had Felice really been killed? Had she flashed into extinction at the climax of the gigantomachy, taking Culluket with her?

Reconst.i.tute the memory; dissect and a.n.a.lyse it. Resolve the paradoxes by focusing on the critical moment of the girl's rematerialization after the split-second leap to North America, her dimensional translation. Aiken Drum, in the extreme of desperation, had called up the full force of his metaconcert. In replay, Elizabeth saw the slow crawl of psychoenergy vouchsafed to the King by the thousands of linked minds-and the diabolical augmentation by Marc just as the mental blast was about to pa.s.s through the helpless conduit of Felice's Beloved.

Yes! Inexperienced though she was in the ways of offensive metafunction, Elizabeth saw how the Angel of the Abyss had planned this from the very beginning: the elimination of two great minds that threatened his schemes, and the coincidental death of the third, beneath contempt.

But Culluket, the unwilling mental fuse, was the key.

In memory Elizabeth saw Felice still poised within the synchronicity of the translation threshold, not yet fully emerged from her time-violating d-jump, seeing the mortal danger to her Beloved. Knowing instinctively how to thwart it and what the price would be.

The girl had inserted herself into the metaconcert structure, invading the hapless conductor before his mind could disrupt.

She had taken into herself the soul-bursting volume of energy, freely absorbing the entire quotient of destruction and thereby being transformed into an incandescent new Duality.

The King, hanging senseless in the flashover, was cut free-his body momentarily dead, his mind wrecked: Both were susceptible of healing. Not so the body of Culluket the Interrogator Beloved, which was gone beyond saving along with the mortal form of Felice. Only their fused minds remained, bound together in a tiny speck of matter trans.m.u.ted from the psychic energies by an indomitable will.

Deep under thousands of tons of steaming rock at a shallow ford in the Rio Genii, a tiny thing like a ruby cylinder burned whitely at the core ...

"I've found Felice." Elizabeth opened her eyes, transmitted the image to Minanonn. "And Cull, too."

Elizabeth! They live?

You might call it that. Or suspension. Or limbo.

Such a state beyond understanding.

Not myunderstanding! I have been. [Fiery coc.o.o.n image.] Tana-! You humans. But Cull ...

... is there of his freechoice. Lifeclinging.

Suffering withoutend!

Alive nonetheless in pseudoUnity.

Lovetravesty! Abomination!

Minanonn they are d.a.m.ned soulmates I tried to save her yes how I tried and thought I had foolishpride but she will be her own Centre and centripetency and refusing grace determined to burn as are Cull & Marc & O G.o.d sometimes I think even I ...