The Books of the Wars (68 page)

Streams of perspiration coursed down Etridge's face too. His paleness gleamed like the ship's. But his eyes were almost glowing like the unicorn's right eye: no pupils or irises, just mad illumination and fanatic purpose drilled into sheets of white metal.

Stamp forced his breathing into regular patterns. The effort required him to restrain his fear and to keep walking carefully, one booted foot in front of the other with the same cadence as the ship's antennas.

"Come on. Come on." Etridge, strained and urgent. He was gesturing outward with both hands, the little rifle in his right, motioning Stamp and the other two men to spread out. "Block its exits. Don't let it out of the square."

" . . . the square?" Stamp muttered to himself. "The thing's nearly stopped the ship and he wants us to corral it?" He found this ludicrous, and it gave him a moment of clarity. The City is deserted, yet I feel it to be overrun by unknown presences, secret agencies, madmen, lunatics, spies. He wondered if this was how they had felt on the first day of the Wizards' War.

Aden could not tell whether it was the heat alone, or if the wires were at last making sense. The net pounded against his mind with a symmetry it had not had before, and which he distantly connected with the days when there was an annunciator connected to it that had allowed the Office to speak directly into his brain with the tone and inflection of his own thoughts.

He looked at the unicorn through the gunsight and saw great, violent sheets of metallic light unfolding from its guarded head and horn, blanketing the spaces perceptible to him and reaching out to smother the ship and the walking men.

There were shields around them that dulled the light and turned it aside. Their composition must have been infinitely complex, shifting without reference to linear time to meet the battering of the unicorn's magic. More than the unicorn, the shields were largely beyond the capabilities of the gunsight.

The men and the ship moved slowly, with obvious pain.

Aden braced himself against the column. He had no shields of his own to stop the heat or block the frightening resonances that he saw through the sight. He thought they were also visible at the edges of his vision, as when one saw faint stars by looking for them with purposeful indirection. That had been the way the Special Office had looked at everything.

The attendant had not moved. Although it was impossible to know, Aden thought that it was the unicorn's own creation. The other possibility that suggested itself was that the giant was the unicorn's master and creator, now enslaved and drained by the creature and the singular vision it had acquired.

But its power, whether the unicorn's own or stolen, did not stop the ship. Its shields expanded against the tiers of light in proportion to the closing distance between them. The undulating walls and wave fronts stiffened, as if they had suddenly dried out, and long, irregular cracks ate at their fluidity. The fissures spread through the unicorn's power like branches of lightning, all twisting angles and lines through which the blueness of the sky shone with jarring tranquillity.

The fabric of the unicorn's power broke against the ship's defenses. Both its eyes began flicking from side to side, briefly snaring Aden where he hid, pleading for help in the casting of its spells, and then jerking back to the advancing ship.

The men staggered under the weight of the enchantments the beast hurled at them. But the heat and the lights that infused all the hidden spectrums only magnified the ship's progress, muffling its irregularities, blurring its halts and hesitations into the semblance of relentless progress.

Aden pressed himself against the stone, frantically asking why he had to watch this.

The unicorn moved for the first time. It shifted its weight from its front hooves to the rear, apparently trying to find better footing on the paving stones.

It wavered, adjusted its stance again, and then took a step backward. The attendant giant stayed where he was. Only the figures on his skin moved.

A shout came from one or two of the men, and a thin hiss of probing electrons and subatomic particles rushed from the ship to fill up the space from which the unicorn had just stepped, studying the nature of the absence it created as thoroughly as other radiations continued to examine its presence.

The men were walking faster, moving more at right angles to the unicorn rather than toward it. Aden looked through the gunsight and saw globes of shimmering light with lines traced upon them, forming within the ship's dish antennas, and then flying outward against the current of the unicorn's magic, toward the center of the square. Thick ropes of energy followed behind them, using them as anchors. Gradually, they contained and enveloped the enemy's world. And if one had been captured, bound in unimaginable chains, imprisoned in a Chinese box of cages-within-cages, each one confining the wizard in each of the spectrums he chose to occupy—what then could one do with him?

Aden guessed. The hideous fantasies and speculations of the preceding nights, and of the entire time since he had left the Taritan flooded back into his mind.

Everything, except the ship, the men flanking it and the unicorn, was held immobile in huge calipers of light and energy. He barely noticed that the City's pace of decay was speeding up around the square, where the near misses of the ship and the unicorn blasted into the walls and buttressed towers.

The gun was locked against his shoulder. He found a shallow border cut into the column and rested the gun barrel against it. With the bracing and the gun's own internal stabilization systems, the image of the unicorn froze in the sight. It wavered only when rolling currents of heated air billowed between them, making it seem as if they were separated by depths of clear water and the ocean had returned and buried them in the middle of their war.

"You!" The voice was far away. "Ad . . . Aden? Aden! Stop him!" Him? The unicorn? Himself?

The wires burned, inflicting visible patterns of light on his consciousness, trying to reassure him with the familiarity of their pain, trying to distract him from the voice with broken snatches of coherency.

Tiny numbers in red lined the bottom of the gun-sight; the unicorn's range was exactly thirty-one meters. The gun spoke to itself and reformulated and redefined its ammunition.

At a range of twenty-eight meters he could see that the unicorn's horn was not made of gold and ebony. There was only a single tapering spiral of gold that held an absolute vacuum within it. It was a vacuum of light as well as of air, warmth, energy, life. It was a spear made from the darkness that was supposed to lie behind the throne of god, the night into which even he would, in time, tumble and be lost. It was an absolute, a thing for which there could be no understanding or comprehension. Perhaps. That was how the gryphon-cavalrymen had thought of themselves.

"Stop! Please! Aden, listen to . . . " Engines rising to his left and boots falling rapidly on the paving stones. The ship was pouring immense amounts of energy onto the square, dissolving the fountain and then drowning the attendant where he stood.

The unicorn focused its own eyes and that of the Office on Aden, twenty-two meters away. The cranial net shrieked inside his skull, speaking a single word that he had never heard before.

The gun fired at the command. His senses, heightened by fear, saw the iridescent bulb, electric blue and white, grow from the muzzle, burning away the skin on his knuckles, exposing nerves and old scar tissue, expanding and transmuting into silver and then into the deep chrome that one sees in polished mirrors. The shell was without mass in four of the spectrums perceptible to the gun, infinite in one, and weighing four, five and eight grams, respectively, in the remaining three.

The unicorn faced directly into its flight. The shell drove into its left eye, shattering the artificial one and then the magical one in back of it.

The gun repeated the sequence. This time the bullet struck the right eye, Aden distantly heard more shouting, hysterical and deafening in the abrupt silence of the wires inside his head.

A wall of energy from the ship swept between him and the unicorn. It fell and shoved him laterally down the length of the arcade.

The unicorn died behind the wall. The energies that held it together erupted through the two bullet wounds, and poisoned all of the lands and universes into which it might have tried to flee and carry on the War.

The burning air whipped itself into a storm and then into hurricane circularities around the unicorn. It rose above the sound of the ship's engines and the cursing of the men's voices. Aden could not tell if he was unconscious or buried under debris. Above him, masonry and metal broke apart with thunderous reports. The ground under him quivered as more buildings disintegrated and fell. To maintain the symmetry of its own conception of the world, the dying unicorn was draining all the magic that remained in the City. Sudden gaps were created which could be filled in only one logical way.

Logical. The mode of death was that of his own world, not of the unicorn's.

At the center of the winds, hidden from him by the ship's last screen, Aden envisioned the part of its horn that was the night acting as a dark polar star for the escape of the creature's soul. Its creator had been powerful enough to have imprisoned that on the unicorn's forehead; the creation of a soul so that the unicorn could follow and serve him after its death would have been comparatively simple.

The horn shriveled, and the life of the unicorn fled into it. Behind it, the magical energies of the creature and those which it had torn loose from the City increased, effloresced and blinded Etridge, Stamp, Grant and Halstead.

They had huddled under the grounded ship for an hour while the unicorn died, unable to move because of the storm it had summoned. While they waited, the winds outside reached four hundred and twenty kilometers an hour and drifting blocks of hard radiation bombarded the ship's armored sides.

It had taken another two hours for the dust to settle. There were no more plasmas spouting from the fountain when they emerged, neither were there any memorialists looking for corpses to eulogize or statues saluting their appearance. The unicorn had taken all the City's magic and hidden it in its own death.

Etridge looked around himself. The afternoon showed them nothing that might have been a recognizable part of a building, so complete was the devastation. Coherency of form remained only in the paving blocks under them and in the ship itself. The cathedral was gone, except for its stairs leading up from the rubble-filled square into blank air. Everything had been crushed and leveled, as if the seven hundred years of war had never happened, as if the wizards had never slaughtered their millions.

Now, Stamp thought, we have only our murderous philosophy and the weapons that articulated it to prove that the enemy had thrown their enchantments against us, or that they ever caused things like Thorn River to have happened.

Anderton reviewed the spectrums. The only thing left was the Special Office man and he directed Etridge to where he lay. Etridge walked stiffly away from the ship.

His initial emotion was self-hatred for not having eliminated the man when he had first been spotted. But he had never thought of the Office as being terribly effective, except in confusing its own personnel—and politicians and theologians when the time was appropriate. The man might have even helped them.

They had intercepted the signals as they were broadcast to the man. The computers had shunted aside any attempt to decode them because it would distract them from their examination of the unicorn, and because they recognized that they were purposely fragmentary and incomplete.

As at Thorn River, Etridge had allowed this Aden to stay, half thinking to see how the energies of magic played against him and the ways they would take him apart. As at Thorn River, he had learned more about the processes of magic than the processes of men. He had discounted the possibilities of Aden's survival and his capacity for action. Being neither committed to his own world nor having fully gone over to the other side, the man obviously existed in a vacuum; nothing lived, Etridge knew, outside of the great counterpositions of rationality and magic, and all the man's actions must therefore be nothing more than futile gestures, deprived of even symbolic meaning.

The man had taken the unicorn from him.

Stamp followed dumbly behind Etridge. They could hear Anderton's voice over the ship's speaker monotonously reciting the absence of extraordinary phenomena in each of the parallel spectrums. The gulls came back over the City, crying to one another, reserving their fishing grounds for when the ocean returned.

Etridge's anger grew inside of him, the rifle glistening where he ran his hands along it. The last gateway had been snatched away from him at the moment of its attainment.

Stamp saw the volcanic light reignited in Etridge's eyes as they neared the man. He was dressed in rags and looked like a beggar from the worst part of any town in either of the enemy worlds.

The air was still thick with powdered masonry and rotted magic, so he could not tell if he smelled as badly as he looked.

"Aden?" Etridge asked with brittle formality.

The man raised his head, looked at them with his one good eye and nodded.

"Special Office?" Etridge went on. Stamp fingered the safety on his rifle uneasily. The cut glass exactitude of his voice indicated shock and insanity.

"I was. It doesn't exist any more." The other man sounded incredibly tired.

"No more than the unicorn does. Now." Etridge bent over, grabbed Aden's filthy tunic with his right hand and easily lifted him to his feet. "But it existed a moment ago. Didn't it? We heard the signals. We saw what this toy of yours did." He let go of the man and grabbed the pistol from his right hand. Etridge stared at it for a second and then hurled it into the rubble. It exploded into gray smoke where it hit.

"The thing is over, sir. We've won." Aden refused to meet their eyes. "Please . . . "