Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (34 page)

"Well, that is as it may be."

"And if I could return to the Dungeon, rescue her at the moment of her death, bring her to a safer place—would she truly live, Neville?"

"Alas, brother, she would not. That is the one immutable law of existence, both in the Dungeon and out of it. One lives one's life, one suffers one's death. We can visit the past and the future, to a degree we can change them. But the law of life and death is greater than our poor power to change."

"Then Father, too, is truly dead."

"Oh yes."

Clive raised his eyes once more to lock with his brother's. "And you are Baron Tewkesbury."

Neville smiled. There was a mockery of the self-effacement in his expression, and more than a hint of smugness. "I am, indeed."

"Shame to our house, Neville. That you should become Lord Folliot, you who are a traitor not merely to your sovereign but to your race, your world—a traitor to all free beings! Shame, Neville! I thought I had seen the ultimate in the venial and the traitorous, but you have exceeded anything I have seen before!"

Neville Folliot burst out laughing. "You are such a prig, Clive! And a hypocrite as well. You've confronted me over my little dalliances of long ago—"

"For which I paid the price!"

"—and I suppose you will condemn me for the union from which the lovely Anna Maria is descended."

"I do not know, Neville. Who is the girl's grandmother? Was Anna Maria's father conceived under honorable circumstances? Where is he? Who is he? Who is her mother? And where is your own spouse, brother Neville? You have much to answer for."

"Read me no sermons, Clive, and do not question me as if I were an erring schoolboy and you a master. You have begun to try my patience! I allow you your foolishness because you are my brother. And because you are fairly harmless. You border, occasionally, upon the amusing. But enough is enough. Now I shall have to decide what to do with you and your companions."

"What about my companions?"

"Oh, your country bumpkin and your dusky friend are safe enough. I've sent them off to work for their keep."

"Bumpkin! Dusky friend! Horace Smythe and Sidi Bombay are each a dozen times the man you are, Neville! If you knew the deeds of heroism they have performed—each of them, and many times, each of them!"

The heated exchange was interrupted by a series of thumps and cries from outside the train. Neville Folliot shoved himself from his seat and leaped to the side of the coach, where heavy drapes covered large windows. He shove aside the drapes, Clive Folliot at his elbow, their quarrel for the moment forgotten.

Outside the coach, the gray plain stretched endlessly in all directions. The black lines that Clive had seen from the aerial car—or that he had thought he had seen—were no longer visible. Perhaps they had been an illusion, after all.

Green-and-black-armored troopers were dashing from the coaches, forming into precisely aligned military units and trotting away.

Without a word, the two brothers headed for the exit. They clambered onto the gray plain. Clive bent for an instant to feel the surface. To the eye it appeared hard, solid, featureless. But to his hands it seemed to have no surface. He extended his fingertips, anticipating a substance like slate, but felt… nothing. There was no surface, no plane. Instead, Clive pressed his hand down, and at a certain point, it simply went no farther.

He straightened.

A mass of troopers had assembled, formed up in ranks and columns with a precision that would have made Her Majesty's Guards envious.

Standing before the troopers, her trim armor gleaming (and where, Clive asked himself, did the light come from?), stood Anna Maria Folliot. She held her helmet beneath her arm. Her hair swirled in a passing breeze, and Clive wondered where the wind came from.

For an instant he was immobilized by her beauty. She had all the best characteristics of the Folliots—strong, solid bones, the complexion of the English countryside, softly shining tresses that flirted languorously with each zephyr. And she had another set of characteristics. If Neville was her grandfather, then three-fourths of her heritage were unknown to Clive.

Where had she traveled? What had transpired in her life? What had brought her to this strange locale, to the position of command and authority she clearly held?

Anna Maria faced about, looked questioningly at Neville, then nodded her acceptance of a set of instructions that he uttered so rapidly and cryptically that Clive was unable to comprehend their meaning. She turned away, toward the troopers, and issued a sharp command.

The troopers turned and moved off, trotting smartly toward the rear of the train.

Clive reached to touch his brother's arm, to demand an explanation of this newest turn of events. But Neville was himself moving away from Clive, trotting parallel to Anna Maria Folliot and the gleaming, armored troopers.

A mass of movement drew his attention and he sprinted forward, distancing the military unit. His brother was close behind.

The movement became clearer. It was a collection of bodies, all of them human, but garbed in a melange of styles ranging from the exotic and unfamiliar to that of urban civilization, from the ancient and primitive to the up-to-date, and, Clive suspected, beyond.

For a moment he was reminded of the polyglot corps he had faced when first he had sounded the huge gong in Q'oorna. Roman legionnaire, Apache warrior, Japanese Samurai, and European Zouave mixed indiscriminately. Some of the warriors, he discerned, were female—but that should have been no surprise, in view of his grand-niece's position of command under Neville.

And as the aggregation of arms and legs and torsoes writhed, a greater, darker mass rose from their center.

For an instant Clive thought it might be one of the monster Ren, replete with tentacles and suckers and claws, but this being was a monster of a very different sort.

It was clad in a black suit with tattered jacket and ill-fitting trousers. Its skin was as pale as death—or as that of the Lady 'Nrrc'kth—but with the sickly palor of the grave rather than the exotic whiteness of that woman's icelike beauty.

Like a stag beleaguered by wolves, Henry Frankenstein's unnatural creation struggled to its feet. A spearman clad as in the days of Pharaonic Egypt clung to one arm, and a female individual wearing incandescent trousers and a blouse of what appeared to be writhing worms held to the other.

The monster spun, flinging its arms outward.

In a moment, his two attackers lost their grips on his black-clad arms and flew above the heads of their erstwhile comrades, crashing down onto persons unable to avoid the impact.

The monster roared. He lifted a foot. Another attacker, this one looking like an Aztec priest, clung to his leg. The monster uttered another cry of rage and swept his hand at the Aztec. The latter was dislodged, fell back to the gray earth, and was trampled, for his trouble, beneath the monster's massive boot.

Clive heard the crunch of human bones.

The monster turned as if seeking desperately for an avenue of escape. He locked eyes with Clive. The exchange lasted for only the briefest of moments, but in that fleeting instant Clive could read the monster's message.

Why had the soldiers attacked him to begin with? Clive wondered. But there was no time to resolve that question. The monster was an inhuman revenant, a being constructed blasphemously from the remnants of the grave. Clive's stomach twisted at the recollection of his encounter with the monster at Earth's polar cap. Clive had climbed aboard one coach of the train as it settled there amid the groaning ice. And the monster had boarded another.

Clive had found himself in London, in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Yet somehow the monster had wound up here—here in this strange, unworldly locale that was the nearest approach yet to the spiraling stars and the home of the Gennine.

The monster was struggling to extricate himself from the disorganized attack of his polyglot assailants. Beyond the clustered figures, Clive thought he could make out two more familiar forms, racing toward him. Yes, it was they! It was Sidi Bombay and Horace Hamilton Smythe!

The monster had recognized in Clive a familiar face. Though the dead-alive creation had expressed his hatred of Clive in their previous encounter, he was now struggling to make his way to Clive. He knew Clive, knew that he would remember him, and that he might be an ally, an ally of familiarity in the face of the alien and the hostile.

Flailing with his mighty arms, hurling attackers aside with every stride, the monster advanced. Clive was reminded of a mighty beast throwing aside ravening wolves. Who was the monster, who the assailant? To Clive's recollection, in Mrs. Shelley's novel and in the dramatizations that had brought her story to the playhouses of the world, the monster had been—at least initially—a creature of innocence. Called into being not by his own will but by that of the intemperate Dr. Frankenstein, the monster had been set upon by man and dog, had found in a blind hermit his single friend, only to be driven from the hermit's hovel by sighted men. Despised and rejected by all, even by his own creator, the monster had been abandoned to his fate, drifting to his inevitable death amid the polar ice floes.

But his death had not been inevitable!

Somehow the monster had found refuge in a cave of ice. Frozen there, he had remained for untold years, until released from his icy imprisonment by Clive and Chang Guafe. And now he was here!

Was he menace, or was he victim?

Had his rage at Clive been the pervasive instinct of a creature whose only desire was to rend and murder? Or was the monster simply reflecting the emotions that had been meted upon him?

Clive managed a feeble grin and the semblance of a welcoming, encouraging gesture.

The ghastly simulacrum of a smile on his cadaverous features, the monster lurched even more desperately toward Clive. He managed to break loose from his attackers, and then he covered the gray distance between himself and Clive Folliot with astonishing speed.

Even as the monster escaped his besiegers, Sidi Bombay and Horace Smythe were racing toward Clive. The three arrived simultaneously. Sidi Bombay and Horace Smythe could see that Clive and the monster were in some fashion acquainted, but they cautiously kept Clive between themselves and the giant being.

The brigade of armor-clad troopers under command of Anna Maria Folliot were tramping toward the quartet. In the opposite direction, the monster's ragtag erstwhile pursuers had formed into a disorganized band and were advancing again.

Behind them was the train. Ahead of them, an infinite and featureless gray expanse.

They could try to board the train, they could flee across the featureless plain, or they could stand and fight, caught between two parties of attackers.

And Clive could feel the eyes of his three companions upon him. They had turned to him for leadership—for decision!

Only for the barest fraction of a second, Clive Folliot squeezed his eyes shut and made a supreme mental effort. He felt as if he had left his body. He could look back and see himself and his three companions, the ragtag gang that had attacked the monster and the black-and-green-clad brigade commanded by Anna Maria, all of them frozen as if they were captured in a daguerreotype.

Nearby, Clive could see his brother Neville.

Neville alone, of the uncounted men and women before him, seemed unfrozen, aware of the situation, able to act. He raised a fist and shook it toward Clive. His mouth moved and words emerged.

But all in a strange, slow tempo, as if Neville were moving at half-time, quarter-time, one-eighth-time. Slower, slower, and still slower.

Clive found himself suffused in a blinding illumination.

George du Maurier said,
You are in command
!

Esmond Folliot said,
You are the Master of the Ordolite
!

Esmond!

I tell you that you are the Master of the Ordolite!

What does that mean to you
? Clive asked.

Go back!

You were never born. You never lived
, Clive retorted.
What can you care
?

You must command!

I will not go, Esmond! Not until you answer my question.

Du Maurier
—
our schoolboy asserts himself
.

Better that he does
, du Maurier said.
Should a weakling rule
?

He has known sultans.

He has known Philo Goode, Esmond. He has known Timothy F. X. O'Hara!

And he has survived. What odds were quoted at the outset, du Maurier?

He has not merely survived. He has grown. He is nearly ready.

Hmm. Perhaps he
is
ready, then
.

It is my fault, brother Clive. You were to have been firstborn. I tried to usurp your place and failed
—

What do you mean? We know nothing of our lives before birth
, Clive said silently.

You
remember nothing of them, you mean
!

What difference does it make? The succession of a rural barony, Esmond, really!

You do not understand, Clive! The next Baron Tewkesbury should have been the Master of the Ordolite! And that baron is rightfully
you,
Clive! But by my ambition, I denied myself life and I caused such disarray that Neville was born before you. Thus, he is now Baron Tewkesbury, while you are the rightful Master of the Ordolite! The two roles
—
that of the baron, and that of Master of the Ordolite, have been sundered. Go back and claim what is yours! Command in the name of your rightful authority! That is all that can save
—

There was a crack as of nearby sheet lightning in an Equatorian thunderstorm, and Clive was standing surrounded by Sidi Bombay and Horace Hamilton Smythe and the Frankenstein monster.

He touched each of them, briefly, laying his palm upon the crown of their heads. To reach the monster's head, he had to stand on tippy-toe and reach as high as he could, but he succeeded.