The Hermetic Millennia (18 page)

Yuen said, “We rush the machine guns at the gate. The survivors cut down the guards, and we either commandeer or burn the aircraft. We follow the stream to the sea, living off the land as we go. We relax the eugenic protocols for a few generations, and allow both interbreeding and inbreeding, so that we can repopulate the Earth with the ten of us.”

Menelaus said, “Rocks and sticks against steam-powered machine guns?”

Yuen sneered, “Rocks and sticks in the hands of Chimerae. Steam-powered machine guns manned by Moreaus, who are merely walking artifacts.”

Menelaus said, “Yeah, but there are two hundred of them. Also, I have not seen what the muskets shoot yet, but I think it is an incendiary, not a musket ball.”

Yuen said, “We may have finer weapons anon. I was buried with Arroglint, named of the Extet and prized at a thousand medallions. The weapon is haunted. I have put forth my will; whatever unclean hands now clutch it, or whatever walls or wills oppose, Arroglint the Fortunate will seek me out and return to my hand; then let the foeman quail and scatter before my scourge.”

Menelaus was puzzled, wondering what type of weapon this was. The Chimerical word for “whip,”
culwerin,
with the accent of classical Virginian,
colubrine,
which literally meant “snake-shaped.” But
coluber
was an Anglatino word taken from a Meriken word for “most superlative”
cool-über
—a slang term referring to a plateau technology. But which technology?

Menelaus gasped, and raised his hand to his mouth, pretending it was a cough.

Thunderstruck, only now did he realize that the “named weapons” of the Chimera, the ornamental whips they were so proud of, were none other than the defining plateau technology of the Sylphs: self-aware smartmetal serpentines. The Chimerical practice of dubbing their thighbones or truncheons or rocks was nothing more than a sad echo of a tradition started when weapons created by a higher plateau of ratiotechnology had been smart enough to answer when called by name.

Menelaus had been thawed briefly in
A.D.
5250, during the Chimera period, and had seen a civilization that, despite its flaws, was on the verge of rediscovering space travel. He had released from their Tombs two scientists from the Order of the Knights Hospitalier, Manwell Magri and Themistocles Zammit, to go out into the world and teach the Chimerae the theory and practice of atomics. During the few months when he was awake, Menelaus had come across countless references to the ritualized Chimerical reverence for the named weapons of their ancient and aristocratic bloodlines, but he had not
seen
one. Menelaus in his buried stronghold beneath Cheyenne Mountain had not exactly been invited into the parlors and parliaments of the Alpha-class Chimerae.

A plateau technology, like the shape of an ax or the hull of a ship, was that which showed no change over centuries, no improvements being possible. In this case, the serpentine weapons of the Chimerae had been constructed two thousand years earlier. For that technology to last so long did not fit the normal pattern of Cliometry. It would be as if Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon and while carrying Julius Caesar’s unrusted sword and camping out in a tent made by Saint Paul.

This anomaly was a sign of interference by Del Azarchel. Something important had happened in history while Menelaus slept. It was a clue to follow up. What the pattern meant, even he could not yet see.

But the effect of his ancestral weapon on Yuen, Menelaus could see. The man would lead the surviving Chimerae to suicide. Menelaus spoke in a respectful voice:

“Proven and Loyal Alpha Yuen, when your haunted weapon returns to your hand, can you protect us and the other prisoners from directed-energy fire, cannonade, or musket fusillade?”

Yuen said contemptuously, “Of course not. Where is the battle-death and the oblivion we seek? Not at the end of the safer path.”

Menelaus said to Daae, “My advice is to go the opposite direction.”

Daae said, “Opposite?”

Menelaus said, “The safer path. Not to break out of the camp, but break into the Tombs.”

Daae said, “This may be feasible. Before you woke from your coffin, the Blue Men twice sent gangs into the Tomb, to wrestle coffins won from the Tomb defenses. If there were a way to disable or elude such defenses, the Tombs would make an excellent citadel.”

Menelaus said, “We are Thaws, so the automatics should let us pass inside.”

Daae raised an eyebrow. “How so? The main doors open fire on any member of the work gang who exposes himself.”

Menelaus said in anger. “You mean the Blue Men are forcing Thaws into attacks against the Tomb guns?”

Daae looked surprised at the other man’s vehemence. “But of course. The big tattooed man was hurt so badly that the Blue Men took him to their hospital outside the wire, the pink shell, and has not been seen since.”

Menelaus blinked, trying to hide his sense of shock and dismay. Sir Guy wounded?

Then a second dismay struck him, and anger. “Wait. That cannot be. Is the postern door also malfunctioning? There is a radio shack on Level Four, which we might be able to reach from the postern door.”

Daae said, “The postern door spits out a waterfall. The seventh level is flooded, as is any nonwatertight level below that. At least two levels above that are also, or else the water would have simply drained away. No one can swim up two levels in the dark through locked doors to reach Level Four. And how do you know where the radio equipment for the Tombs is kept?”

Menelaus said in surprise, “Dark? Is the power out? Why haven’t the automatics repaired it? Why haven’t the pumps cleared out the water? What the hell is going on?”

Yuen tilted his head. In the far distance was a soft hooting, like an owl. “That is the signal from young Beta Vulpina. The dogs are about to do a tent check and will find where we dug our way out if we do not return. So there is no more time for debate. Alpha Daae! Beta Anubis has no plan—we cannot force the dogs guarding the Tomb and also fight the Tomb doors. Whatever you command, I perform, since you have seniority: but to rush the wire is the wiser course, and our deaths there more glorious. I say rush the wire now, tonight, before we are discovered.”

Menelaus gritted his teeth. He did not particularly cotton to the Chimerae. They had been genetically and psychoculturally designed to be what they were, so they could not really help it. Besides, some of his own stolen genetic material had been used in their progenitors, presumably to make them more likely to endure certain nerve alterations that Menelaus himself had survived. So maybe their nature was partly his fault.

But like them or hate them, they were people who trusted his Tombs with their lives, and so he could not stand by and watch them throw themselves to death in front of a machine gun emplacement.

He had to tell them who he was. Once they knew they were standing with the owner and architect of the Tombs, they would know that getting into them would be the best tactic.

“Gentlemen, I should have said this earlier, but I am really—”

There came a second owl hoot, louder and holding a note of desperation.

Daae said, “The time for talk is done. Beta Anubis, we know what you really are.”

Menelaus blinked. “You do? Well, that makes things simpler—”

“Yes. You overlook that I come from two hundred years in your future, and so things secret in your time were known and discussed by historians in mine. This includes historians who slumbered in your time and were thawed in mine, and gave eyewitness testimony of what, to us, was centuries past. My time knew that the Academic Command was under the complete control of Intelligence Command, and that academics were spies and propagandists, whose mission was not to educate the young, but to indoctrinate the loyalty programming. Schoolteacher, indeed! You are a spy. We know.”

“Oh, uh … yeah.”

“As an espionage officer, you are suited to your task. You must speak to as many of the undermen and aftercomers as you can and enlist them to our cause. We will not move until we have at least forty men. You have seven days. Then we rush the wire whether we have the manpower or not. Dismissed!”

And the two Chimerae rushed down the slope of the knoll, loping in opposite directions, passing over the dry grass and patches of snow with no noise, swift as leopards. Menelaus watched them depart, a great disquiet in his heart, and he turned and ran as quietly as he could.

4

The Warlock of Williamsburg

1. Melech, Chemosh, Shemyaza, Nagual, Witch

It took the better part of two hours to make it from the knoll in the glade halfway up the great hill to the swales at the foot of the hill, eluding the quiet rustle of dogs by following the marching clatter of the automata. The dog things did not bother searching areas the automata searched. He had removed his cloak, and the circuits in the machines did not react to his presence.

But the chill was atrocious, and the need to follow one automaton and then the next constrained him not to follow a straight or brief path down the hill.

He was also helped by using the terrain to his advantage when he could. Menelaus knew the hill contours perfectly well, having glanced at the topographical maps for a moment when the Tomb site was selected, and being able to deduce the changes in ground contour due to the passing years and passing glaciers.

In those two hours, clouds trudging up from the south had snuffed the stars and smothered the moon. The sky was black, except for one vague phantom of pale silver seeping through the vapor.

He left behind the final automaton near the foot of the great hill. The trees here were few, and nothing hindered the cold blades of the wind. It was with great relief that he redonned his cloak. He used his implants to tell the fabric circuits to generate heat.

Then he walked, first one way, and then the other. Finally, he heard the soft and eerie sound like that of panpipes.

He followed the haunting thread of sound through the gloom, stopping whenever the wind blew, for the noise of the wind in the grass drowned the piping. Soon he heard another noise. The fence was close enough that the snakelike slithering of the smartwire along its tops could be heard.

Menelaus came suddenly around a shoulder of ground and stood looking down upon a hollow that was closed on three sides by steep and rocky walls. The music rang out clear and cold across the scene.

The cliff walls of the surrounding hollow had kept snow from gathering here. In the hollow were two stunted and leafless trees with balls of mistletoe lodged in their branches. Between these two trees, with his back to the wall, was a grotesquely overweight blob of a seated figure. This was a man of the Witch race.

A circle was scratched into the gravelly sand around the rotund man, and he was seated before a smoldering campfire. Ever and anon he dropped spicy leaves into the flame, nor did he remove his head from the fumes of the smoke.

His cheeks were belled out, for he played the pipes made of many reeds cut to differing lengths, plucked earlier that day from the stream.

The dogs were in a fenced yard, where the fluid from the broken coffins had spilled and formed a frozen pool a dozen paces wide. A quartet of dog things behind this line of sandbags had musket and mattock and poleax close at hand, but they were asleep, hunched under blankets with muskets in their laps. The stew pot hanging by a broken branch over their watch fire was bubbling over and dripping, unattended. Scattered on the snow-patched grass were little things the sleeping paws had let slip: a metal hook for picking teeth, a clay pipe, with the thread of smoke still creeping upward from it, a pair of luminous dice, still glinting amber with the last three scores from the previous rolls.

And the music from the Witch-man played on.

Menelaus slithered down the steep slope on all fours, cursing when he skidded and tumbled. The fabric of his bulky garment clattered as he was dusting himself off, flapping the skirts to dislodge burrs. Finally he straightened and approached the Witch.

The song of the pipes stopped. The rotund man called out in a deep voice in the Virginian language: “I have heard that the Chimerae are known for the catlike grace of their stealth!”

“And I have heard that the Witches are known for getting their asses kicked by Chimerae.”

The overweight man was shirtless despite the cold, and had painted Celtic spirals and knots all across his arms and upper body with an ink brush. His hips and legs were covered with a woven grass skirt that made a rustling circle on the ground around him. Skinned rabbits had provided fur that he had cured and tied around his feet as moccasins.

The blue ink against his coffee-colored flab was nearly invisible in the fiery half darkness; but when the wind whipped up the flare from the campfire, the spirals seemed to swirl and dance as if they were crawling along his breasts and hanging ripples of fat like smoke vortexes.

He was seated in lotus position on the soil, half nude, and his wide grass skirt emerged from beneath the vast sagging globe of his hairy belly. His navel, lonely in the rotund immensity of stomach, stared out like a muzzle in a gun blister.

The fat man was wearing a sort of enormous lampshade hat he had woven from grass, which hid his face and almost hid his shoulders. The firelight struck only his baby mouth and double chin, but the gleam of his eyes from between the fibers of the hat could be seen. Stuck upright in the ground before him was a gnarled, crooked tree branch dangling with fetishes made of feather and bone, which he had picked out of owl pellets.

His name was Melechemoshemyazanagual Onmyoji de Concepcion, Padre Bruja-Stregone of Donna Verdant Coven at the Holy Fortress at Williamsburg. The interment date on his coffin was
A.D.
4733.

When Menelaus stepped into the firelight, the seated man said, “I see a creature shapen like unto a man! Is he spirit or flesh? Clean or unclean?”

“Flesh,” said Menelaus. “Unclean.”

“I hear the voice of one who calls himself Sterling Xenius Anubis of Erebus! And yet I sense this is not his True Name. By what sign can you prove you are he, and not some ghost returned from the most ancient days to bedevil us, and involve mere mortals in your intrigues against undying enemies as posthuman, as strange, and as truly annoying as yourself?”