Chapter 24 – Yum-Yum
Chapter 24 – Yum-Yum
Three little maids from school are we
Pert as a schoolgirl well can be
Filled to the brim with girlish glee
Three little maids from school
Everything is a source of fun
Nobody's safe, for we care for none
Life is a joke that has just begun
Three little maids from school
Three little maids who, all unwary
Come from a ladies' seminary
Freed from its genius tutelary
Three little maids from school
One little maid is a bride, Yum-Yum
Two little maids in attendance come
Three little maids is the total sum
Three little maids from school
From three little maids take one away
Two little maids remain, and they
Won't have to wait very long, they say
Three little maids from school
- Three Little Maids by William Schwenk Gilbert, as displayed on Chrono's sword
The first flood the desert had seen in what passed for centuries beyond time was made of Golems. Hundreds of them poured out from the site of the destroyed monster, which was now little more than a hole in the sand with a pillar of smoke and flame emanating from it, huge balls of rock with beady eyes and unearthly teeth and tiny arms and legs designed for manipulating tools and mouths that could swallow a grown man. Onward, unceasingly they trudged, shoulder to shoulder and in queues hundreds of Golems long, marching in uniform rhythm at times and cacophonously at other times, stony feet shaking the desert and shattering what little calm the demise of the desert monster temporarily brought to the scene. Those nearest to the hole in the desert floor marched most haphazardly; they fell slowly into line as they had time to organize, as if they were guided by some invisible general issuing marching orders to those Golems already crossing the top of the sand.
Hundreds of eyes, all somewhere in between dead and lively in a way that seemed somehow appropriate for the halfway land Beyond Time, stared forward as their owners continued their relentless march. Only a few dared, or bothered, to look away from their distant target. Inherent in the swarms of Golems was a sort of single-mindedness, as if the entire horde shared only one brain and only one focus of attention, a monomind as mechanical as their movements both in singularity of purpose and in precision of its calculations. Each Golem was a perfect automaton, a servant utterly bent to its master's will, a well-designed cog in a deadly machine. The rhythmic thumping of the feet of the Golems against the sand, hundreds of feet at once, was the machine's heartbeat.
The Golems marched at first in two separate formations, one line of them moving straight for the city of God's Hand and the other curving down the path to the Yellow River Fortress. For a time the two groups were identical in every respect except for the direction of their marching, but after a while they fell out of synch just enough that they could be distinguished by the timing of their footfalls as well; each group hit the ground simultaneously with the collective force of a thunderclap, the first army's footfalls the bolt of lightning itself and the second army's, its echo of thunder, with the thunder's timing moving gradually away from the rhythm of the lightning as if the storm were really drifting across the desert and away from Chrono.
All of this left Chrono completely unable to think of an appropriate way to respond. Clearly, the Golems were a threat to the land, the real invasion force hiding behind the sand monster, and clearly they had to be stopped somehow, but their sheer numbers left him feeling powerless. He could easily fight several Golems himself, even at the same time. On a good day, he reasoned, he could taken on a dozen or two, maybe even a hundred (and here he had to caution himself not to get carried away), but in front of him he could see thousands upon thousands of them, and their ranks continued to grow every second. More came from underground faster than he could stop the ones he could already see.
A shiver broke through the desert heat and ran down Chrono's spine as he continued to stare, utterly enthralled, at the endless armies of Golems, his ears ringing with the noise of their march and his eyes pulled along their route. His head turned involuntarily with the flow of the stream of Golems, each fraction of a radian arcing his focus of vision past more of the silent stone soldiers than he could count. Only when his neck reached the limit of its swiveling range did he find his concentration broken long enough to launch into a more deliberate analysis of the situation.
"There are two groups of them," he said aloud to himself and to Coppelia, if she cared to listen. "One army heading for the city, the other for the fortress. My guess is that the fortress has some sort of defense set up for it, but I cannot say how well-prepared the city is for an attack, especially an attack by a force of this size and this amazingly well-organized. I think we should join in the defense of..."
"Did you say there were two groups, Mister Chrono?" interrupted Coppelia. "By my count, there are three."
"Come again?"
Coppelia walked directly in front of Chrono, bowed politely in apology for breaking into Chrono's train of though, and continued, "There are two obvious directions in which the Golems are now marching, but there is a third, less obvious, group marching with one of the two. You can hear the distinct patterns of their feet hitting the ground at the same time, can you not?"
Chrono nodded. "It's as if they are all being controlled by the same mind!"
"Exactly," said Coppelia, "but we have more than one mind at work. Were there not some central organizing principle, there would be no reason for the mess of marching Golems to fall into step after leaving their hole in the ground, but why are there different marching patterns? Why are their steps perfectly periodic? Most importantly, why does the echo of the steps from the second group fall further and further behind the steps of the first?"
"I figured it had something to do with them marching into the distance, where it takes the sound longer to reach us. Lucca took great pains to make sure I understood that sound is not instantaneous, and that it has to travel, so..."
"I do not think they are far enough away for that to be an issue," said Coppelia. "What is more, I can check the timing visually. I am certain that the Golems are marching with evenly periodic steps, but there are three different period lengths. The group marching toward the city is doing so slightly more slowly than the other group, and thus each step they take is a tiny fraction of a second further removed from the step preceding it from the other formation. The group moving for the fortress, meanwhile, contains two different rhythms. Perhaps it takes extremely finely tuned hearing to notice this fact, but I assure you it is true, Mister Chrono."
Chrono paused for a moment, taking in all that Coppelia said and attempting to apply some of Lucca's lectures on basic physics to make sense of it and digging through his memory of old battles and adventures to find some relevant reference point. Somewhere before he had encountered similar armies, with a single mind controlling a horde of... robots, was it? Dealing with the horde meant dealing with the mind in control of it. When he decided he had a good grasp of the situation, he said, "Then there are three leaders of this army."
"Exactly," said Coppelia.
"One of which does not want to be seen."
"Please explain your reasoning, Mister Chrono."
"You said there were two distinct marching patterns in the group going for the fortress, right? That means there are two groups of Golems in that branch of the horde, and if you are right about each group being controlled by a single mind, then there are two minds there, while there is only one mind in control of the other group. Now, we can guess the objectives of two thirds of these Golems. One group wants to attack the city, and the other wants to attack the fortress in case the governing body of this province has fled to there by now. I have to wonder, then, why is there a third group? What is its objective?"
"I do not know."
"I want to find out, so I intend to follow that line," concluded Chrono.
"I have seen neither Miss Paem nor Sir Egmont," said Coppelia, "but I believe it is in our best interest to hurry on with them. From what Miss Paem said previously, I predict she will run to the city to meet with Lady Qilin. We do not have the luxury of following them so long as we do not know for what purpose an entire third of an army has amassed itself. My instinct tells me that following this trail is the quickest path to finding Miss Orchid."
"Yes, we... wait!" Chrono stopped himself. "You think that's who is in charge?"
"Miss Orchid allegedly has some role in this invasion, and she is clever enough to devise a stratagem involving disguising her forces amongst a larger crowd. I have seen no better indication of her mind at work than this."
"You really think we're going to find her, and your journey will reach its end?"
"I am cautiously optimistic."
Seizing upon this wording, Chrono took off at a jog down into the desert, shouting, "Optimism is just what we need now!"
Coppelia followed.
XXX
Neither Paem nor Egmont had any intention of following the waves of Golems to either the City of God's Hand or the Yellow River Fortress, at least at the moment. Their attentions were occupied entirely by the spectacle of the gaping hole in the desert out of which the Golems poured like water from a spigot. Egmont stood spellbound by the sight, hardly moving at all, whereas Paem had long since gone into a full-on panic. Her instincts pulled her in multiple directions at once, to protect the city, to look for Chrono and Coppelia, to try to contact Lady Qilin, and to wait and watch the source of the Golem army for some hint about what to do next. One minute, she found herself running in the direction of the city, and the next she found herself running back to where Egmont stood, watching the circus of Golems and waiting for the right opportunity for action to present itself.
Presumably the Lady Qilin would have heard the commotion outside and made for the safety of the fortress by now, Paem reasoned, but if the fortress was also under attack, what then? Could Chrono come to her aid? She had seen him running off in the direction of the fortress, but he was only one soldier. And what of Coppelia? Could Paem just let her go like that?
Running off on some fool's errand could just worsen the problem, however. As long as the Golems continued to storm out from beneath the ground, taking care of them, however many of them, would be a matter of treating a symptom of the problem rather than the problem itself. But what could she do here? Egmont wasn't being any help, and it was unlikely that any of the city's defenders would have the time to follow the Golems back to their origin, would they?
Legs worn out from running, Paem found herself pacing rapidly back and forth, and then pacing more slowly, and then standing still and twitching, and then finally sitting on the sand, tightening and loosening her grip on her staff with the rhythm of the marching Golems. Between the umpteen directions in which her mind was torn, the unrelenting heat of the desert and the accursed sand that never stopped stinging her eyes, the worry that the conflict in the desert might spread to her own home, the soreness in her legs, the lack of anything she or her travel companions could do to stop the constant stream of invading monsters, and the never-ceasing thud, thud, thud of the feet of the horrid things trampling across the land—her land, or at least her allies' land—without a shred of compassion or pity in their faces, or even anger or revenge or patriotic fervor or anything else that normally motivated soldiers, without any emotion at all, just the incessant clumping of stone feet and dead-eyed stares into the distance, between all these things Paem felt as if she were going mad.
And then, after all the bizarre and unlikely and nearly incomprehensible things to happen that day, something else happened that further upset the delicate balance of Paem's psyche: something appeared beside the Golems.
At first she could hardly make out what it was—it was just a small, vaguely humanoid figure, a fraction of the size of any of the monstrous Golems. It rose out from the hole in the ground like a child's toy rocket, shooting a few dozen feet into the air and then landing, softly, over to the side, out of the way of the stone army. Only, it didn't land, at least not completely. It stopped and hovered just above the sand, and then it began to float forward, roughly in the direction of the flow of Golem traffic. As it came nearer, Paem could make out more and more details. It had a round white face, pale hair, bare white feet, a faintly bluish white robe or dress or some sort of indistinct article of clothing. Its shape was slightly feminine, but like that of a young girl rather than a fully-developed woman. Paem found that she could not distinguish any more details on the figure, as it gave off a bright white glow that, combined with the glare from the sun, made looking directly at it somewhat difficult. Moreover, the figure appeared fuzzy, as if its outline had been sketched several times over and no extraneous marks had been erased—it was an ill-defined figure.
Turning away for a second, Paem glanced over at Egmont. His relaxed posture had given way to that of an accomplished swordsman standing at ready, hand on the hilt of his blade, head cocked forward. Paem thought she detected a hint of nervousness in him, the like of which he had not even noticed during their fight with the giant shelled monster, but she easily could have been projecting her own fear onto him.
Then, as if to punctuate the sheer oddness of an what looked like a ghost girl appearing in the middle of the desert with an army of stone soldiers, the figure's blurry outline split into three, at first three overlapping little ghost girls, who separated themselves and then floated shoulder-to-shoulder forward, three shining dots of peculiarity. And from these three dots of ghostly light came music.
"Three little maids from school are we," they sang in union, "filled to the brim with girlish glee, pert as a schoolgirl well can be! Three little maids from school."
"Everything is a source of fun," sang the girl on the left.
"No one is safe, for we care for none," sang the girl on the right.
"Death is a joke that has just begun," sand the girl in the middle.
Then, altogether, "Three little maids from school."
Egmont drew his sword.
"Three little maids who, all unwary, come from a ladies' seminary, freed from its genius tutelary! Three little maids from school."
"One little maid is a bride, Yum-Yum..."
Paem, surprised that she turned out to be the one to keep her cool, watched in horror as Egmont snapped and charged the girls, shouting curses at them, flailing his sword about like a man possessed. Before she could stop him, he brought his sword down on the girl in the middle of the pack.