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The Shadows Over Athras
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A long time after the darkness fell came the drumming, the boom-ba-ba-ba-boom-boom out of pitch darkness, distant at first, then all around Bronze, then dying away after endless prolongation of echoes in the psychic labyrinth. Then came the fountain of cold light, a column, as of water, shining with some radiance of its own, and pulsating, and never any nearer however long he traveled down the river and at last suddenly eclipsed. He did not find what it was. And so, after more strangeness and grander in his visions than I can tell, he awoke into broad daylight and air and cold, and rolled head over heels, and found himself deposited, dazzled and breathless, Aaron's badge in hand, onto a street in Frostveil.
The top of Athras was no more than another two thousand feet above him. At his left and right were the ends of the bastion walls that enclosed the keep of Frostveil, reaching the point where they merged with the shoulder of the mountains. A hundred snow-covered, disorganized buildings had all been densely constructed around a few cobblestone paths, the outermost of which skirted just behind the city walls. A single black gate of Logarian build led out to the main road through the mountains that Bronze and company had shunned. Behind him was the blast door in Athras's flesh that led to the Gym complex.
There was hardly any visible life in Frostveil. The predominant colors were bluish ice, pale grey rock, and black buildings. From the tangle of chimney-pots and windcatchers scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three corner-turrets on the walls were of black iron. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where archer-slits should have been. The sagging black roofs showed wormy decay, and on the slopes outside the city were a few abandoned houses whose roofs had caved in. There were some large square Late Logarian houses, too, with kucheh roofs, stucco ornamentation, and short minarets. These were mostly well back from the walls and seemed to be in sound condition. Most of the buildings had existed in more or less the same state for many centuries.
"But why did he do it, Cobalion?" said Tess from somewhere out of his sight. He felt a reluctance to move or get up. "I'd be furious if someone was playing with my mind like that, but was he serious about killing him?"
"Even with all the time possible and knowledge in Deep Heaven, I will never understand the minds of men," said Cobalion's voice. Bronze heard the smoky quality to it and knew that Cobalion was unfleshed. "It is best that we let the matter lie."
"We're all under stress," said Ruby, "and Bronze most of all. He's lost his parents."
"I don't think he would get bogged down about that," said Tess.
"He says he tries not to," said Ruby. "But I know that one of the most terrible moments in a boy's life is when he discovers his father and mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It's a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone. The moment carries its own truth and sadness. You can't evade it."
"This town needs some work, doesn't it?" said Bronze, finally turning and standing. His head hurt worse than a bucket of hangnails and his vision was blurred, so that the falling snow moved in circles and sparkled. Then, after seeing Tess's worried face, said, "To be a capital, I mean."
"Listen, Bronze," said Cobalion's voice. "We are leaving for Crescent Island, but not as soon as possible. We'd better stretch out the journey to half a week."
"Why?" He looked up behind Tess at Athras, and marveled at the delicious colors, shades of rejoicing majesty that seemed to bow themselves unmasked down to the city below.
"A messenger spirit came to me in the morning," said Cobalion. "The Association is marching with force on the Eclipse stronghold there. We will not reach it in time to fight there, even if we set out now and I used all the powers of Elyon to get us to the island quicker. We must wait and see how things shape themselves, and not arrive with too much haste. The island and city of Murkwater may be different than we had thought after the battles are over."
"Finally!" said Bronze. "The Association is throwing their weight around. But how will we get to Crescent? Shall we fly in defiance of the Enemy's storms? Or take the long road beneath Athras?"
"We could do the mountain path," said Tess, "as long as we've got Steelix."
"Yes, the mountain road through old Logarian ruins seems aright," said Cobalion. "The legacy of the South-kingdom is everywhere in these lands. Atun-Kaah is not so many miles behind us. But I would not have us go up Athras, no matter our need. Bronze should not come there til it is time for a crowning."
"Right," said Bronze. "When the heir of Logaria returns to the summit of the Holy Mountain at last, then the Rorians will know that their winter has ended. But that day is far, far away."
"Not as far as you may think," said Cobalion.
"Then how long?" asked Tess.
"A year at most," said Cobalion. "The League is in a month, and I am certain that the Alliance will do something there, but what I cannot say. All in all, not bad. We know what the Alliance wants, have a vague conception of how they'll do it, and have a timeframe that fits within several weeks. We are not blind to our enemies as despair would make us think."
"Blind or not, it won't help anything if we can't stop them," said Ruby.
"We'll only survive if the Rorians awaken," said Bronze.
"Will we?" asked Tess, shivering in a gust. "I know everything that you're fighting for is supposed to make that happen. But how, Bronze? When they see you, what will you say to get them on your side? Do they even remember the Emperor? How can they come out of their sleep?"
"I don't know," said Bronze heavily. "I'm not sure if we know ourselves anymore. The Elder Days are so far away. But something will happen. The long and slow wrath of the Rorians is brimming over and all the cities and towns are filled with it. I hope that the battles against Cypress and my coming with spill it. The tide will be overwhelming, but hopefully, that tide will be against Evil and not for it. You can smell the anger in the air. Something is going to happen that has not happened since the Fall of Logaria: all of the Rorians will re-awaken and find that they are strong, strong, strong."
"Then what will they do?" said Tess in astonishment.
"Again, I don't know," said Bronze. "We stand on a knife of possible futures. It's almost exciting. Sometimes decades of history happen in hours. Time moves glacially slow or lightning fast. Truthfully, I see things both horrible and noble, monstrous and virtuous. The war against the Alliance is not the only conflict this world will have in the coming century."
"You knew about this, didn't you, Cobalion?" said Tess with a laugh. There seemed nothing she could do. A crushing, blunt sense of doom, like human teeth, which grind more than they cut, seemed before her and around her.
"Bronze and I have already discussed it, yes," said Cobalion. "We will tell you now, though briefly, for we must soon go. Here it is. This present world and age is about to end. Something will replace it. The Rorians may do something terrible. Bronze hopes to prevent this. I would tell more but we understand nothing. What I suspect is too grim to speak of. The Masque of the Red Death. A decadent Association burning out its last energy on defeating the Alliance, all while the Rorians make civilization collapse around their ears."
"And you must keep waiting," said Ruby.
Tess's ungloved hands were red in the cold, but they turned white when she clenched them into fists. She wanted to scream loud enough to topple Athras. She was like a leaf being pushed around to annihilation in the jaws of a blast furnace. Any delusions of Free Will she harbored now must be merely the prisoner rattling her cage. Her curse lay in the fact that she saw the cage. She saw it! There was a nasty and childish assumption that this was one of Arceus's lessons: that there are problems in this universe for which there is nothing to do but accept fate as it comes. Nothing. Nothing can be done. She must trust in God. She must have faith. She must have faith. She must have faith. She was tired of faith.
Bronze looked at her and knew. He knew that he would not be able to stop it, not once he was declared Emperor. The Rorians would kill and there would never be enough Eclipse men to satisfy them. He could yield himself up, denounce his follower's plans, and go where even a bird could not find. It was a useless thought, and he knew it. The Jihad of the Rorians would come and follow him whatever he did. He could only trust in Arceus to guide him. Was this cynicism a greater crime than some heresy? Or was heresy really so difficult for him, he who had seen the gods, who conversed with spirits?
Something will happen. SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN. This thought, by nature of the uncertainty of its object, always came out as a bitter scream. Something horrible will happen not caused by the Association or the Djinn or the Alliance or himself, but by the Rorians. He hoped to control it, stop a world war, contain the firey bile. But he saw, with limited prescience, that it was already too late. The coming war could only be stopped if everyone in this city and everyone who knew them died instantly. He hoped against a million variables, putting Arceus's love against a looming peril. But how often it is that the angry man rages in denial of what his inner self is telling him? Saying "Arceus loves you" was not a cop-out. He always knew that by becoming Emperor he would be a little less of an individual and become partially symbolic. Could that alone stop a Rorian Jihad, a city-burning and machine-smashing holy war? He thought not.
"We'll keep talking about this later," said Cobalion, and the tone in his voice suggested to Bronze that he had come to the same conclusion about the Jihad. "Hitch up and get ready. I'll go ahead to scout the road."
"And I need to get to Sapphire and Emerald," said Ruby. "I've done my part with you three. My only parting wish, Bronze, is that you count me as a king's man."
"I count you as my friend," said Bronze, "but I am not emperor yet and have no royal favorites. My only title is Emperor of Aredia. I have already put the Aredians into my service, but there will be no sham and pretense in your case. Never will I have the authority to command another Pokedex Holder. I won't bind your path with the fate of Roria; I am too thankful for you."
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Pass of Anshan
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With so much to think about Bronze's footsteps proceeded dreamlike, putting one foot in front of the other like a sleepwalker. With a walking stick in hand and burden slung across back, he felt like an ancient Rorian goat herder, manning the mountain passes of the Empire. Bordering the gorge path were ruins: old columns around a trailing ridge, behind the branch clusters of shriveled bushes, or hidden under the pattern of sharp boulders. Behind him the closest watchtower of Frostveil could just barely be seen.
Once they passed a rocky shrine to the skull of dead king. It had become a grave of lamentations. Only the wind heard the voice of this place. In that desolate pass, where the cries of the mountain creatures and the whistling of the wind said that the days of Logaria had ended, Bronze felt more a supplicant to a fallen glory than an heir. How bare the pathway down this mountain, he thought.
Parting with friends is a sadness, he thought. A place is only a place.
Cobalion was far ahead. Tess rose Charizard silently beside him. She turned and stared at Bronze. The moment began to transmute, and she wondered if there was something she should say. What was it about this boy? He was warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man. There was no measuring Bronze's motives by ordinary standards. Even now he saw the death ahead of him, and yet accepted that death.
"I sense that you have been speaking differently than you think," said Bronze. "It seems you have learned diplomacy."
"How can you stand it?" she said. "All the waiting? We've been fighting the enemy only when they come to us."
"God's command comes, so seek not to hasten it," said Bronze, quoting the Coda. "God's it is to show the way, and some do swerve from it."
"But I didn't say anything about Arceus."
"Not knowing what you said, you said it. Arceus is very patient. Some quests have an end but no beginning; some begin but do not end. It all depends upon where the observer is standing. You won't deny that our quest is the first. Sometimes there is nothing you can do to speed up the mind of God."
"There's a paradox," said Tess. "I know that when something does change, it's going to be for the worse, obviously worse than what's happening now. But I'm sick of waiting for things to happen."
"It's only been a few months since my journey started," said Bronze, "and less for you. But the weeks feel like their own little eternities, don't they? So much happens that everything in between is unbearably stagnant. I feel like a naked child under the winds of heaven. The flesh surrenders itself and Arceus takes back His own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, and will submit to the instruments of God. What can we say of this other than we occurred and were loved?"
"I'm worried about you," said Tess. Hesitating for a moment, she slid off Charizard and walked beside Bronze. "You can't sleep without Cobalion's help and I know the dreams you're having aren't any better than mine. Haven't you noticed that your moods go from madman to child, old man to saint, king to, uh, philosopher? It isn't right."
"I take my feelings as they appear," said Bronze. "Humans do not take anything from Free Will. Arceus gives to them as He wills. But I understand your concern. Destiny tends to isolate those caught in its throes. Eventually, they lose touch with reality and fall."
"Oh, so you're the chosen one, aren't you?"
"But I am the chosen one!"
An impulse hit Bronze hard and his vision spun. In the first moment he suspected demonic meddling, but then knew indisputably that this thought originated from himself, from whatever personal consciousness remained to him. He wondered if he should kiss her. He wondered if he wanted to kiss her, and he realized that he truly did not know. He had felt a halfhearted urge for the past week and had suppressed it because he knew Cobalion wouldn't approve. But Cobalion was not here. This girl was like a touch from outside his destiny.
He looked down at his hands. "I see a child in my arms. It's our child, yours and mine. How can I know every feature of you?" He tried to focus on her, but past and future were merging into the present, blurring her image. He saw her in countless ways and positions and settings.
"What is it you want to say?" she asked.
"You cannot back into the future," he said. A profound compassion for her swept through him. He felt fate finish its work within him, ripping away the curtains to let him see the distant gray turmoil of his future. He held himself poised in the awareness, seeing time stretch out in its weird dimension, delicately balanced yet whirling, narrow yet spread like a net gathering countless worlds and forces, a tightwire that he must walk, yet a teeter-totter on which he balanced.
On one side he could see the Alliance, a man called Jonathan Rowell Cypress who flashed toward him like a deadly blade, the Eclipse-men raging out of their strongholds to spread pogrom on Earth, the Association conniving and plotting, the other organizations with their disparate schemes. They lay massed like a thunderhead on his horizon, held back by no more than the Rorians and their Logarian Emperor, the sleeping giant Roria poised for its wild crusade across the multiverse.
Bronze felt himself at the center, at the pivot where the whole structure turned, walking a thin wire of peace with a measure of happiness, Tess at his side. He could see it stretching ahead of him, a time of relative quiet in a hidden mountain pass, a moment of peace between periods of violence.
"There's no other place for peace like right now," he muttered.
The vision had him again and he thought: So many times I have wanted comfort and forgetfulness. He felt anew the hyperillumination with its high-relief imagery of time, sensed his possible future becoming memories, the tender indignities of physical love, the sharing and communion of selves, the softness and the violence. And again, like so many times before, he was faced with a choice. One half would go one way and the other half a different road. It was his decision.
On the untrodden path was a vision that filled his heart with pain and longing. He saw Tess storing bread baked on red-hot sheets of plasteel. He saw the clear water in the Rosecove channels, gentle and shining, but a stormwind ran through his heart. Many pseudo-nights did his flesh lay beside the lighthouse and dream of Tess in the summer heat. She sipped coffee and ate. Her teeth shined in the shadows. He saw her braiding rings into her hair. La! The amber fragrance of her perfume struck through to his innermost senses. She tormented him and oppressed him by her very existence.
The pressure of his multi-memories exploded the time-frozen englobement which he had tried to resist. Oh, how sweet to let that come to existence! The wedding would be on the seashore. He would have seven sons, and his daughters would be renowned as the most beautiful women in the southern world. He would die an old and hearty chief of Logaria, like his grandfather and great-grandfather, remembering the time when the Alliance had been defeated and afterward he had walked away from the world, thinking of that moment in the Pass of Anshan when he became sure at last that his mad scheme to restore the old imperial title would never succeed. It was virtually heavenly contentment. A longing for this future ponded in his head with savage pressure, pressure for the slackening of responsibility. How sweet it was. How very sweet.
But just as before this vision was excluded from full entrance. Such thoughts had often knocked for admission ever since he met Tess, but had always been excluded for the very good reason that if they were once entertained it involved ripping up the whole web of his life, canceling almost every decision his will had ever made, and really beginning over again as though he had no right to become Emperor in the first place. The dozens and dozens of kings-in-exile before him, the men who had bred and striven and died so that he might have a chance of uniting Roria under one banner again: their voices and sacrifices he could not throw away. And above all Arceus was pressing him to do this.
He was absolutely certain that his quest was divinely justified. If it was not, then there would be no Groudon, no Zeraora, no Dialga and Palkia, no Swords of Justice. Whatever evils would come, God had favored him, and he was in the judgment of Arceus. Would the scales weigh more heavily for the good he had done or for the evil? Would He forgive many sins done for the greater good? In truth, Bronze thought Arceus would be harsh with him. But so be it, for that was the price of imperium and so he must bear it. He might become a military saint. A saint! After all the bloodshed that was to come in his life, he thought it disturbingly likely.
"I live in an apocalyptic dream," he whispered. "My steps fit into it so precisely that I fear most of all I will grow bored reliving the thing I dread so exactly."
Ahhhh, now it was too late! Too late was worse than impossible. The rational part of him had made the final call. What a perverse poison that kind of desire had been. There was no turning back now, in any capacity. Did he really want Tess for a wife? Not when he thought about what that would mean. It was only a dream, no more substantial than a fire smoke and sinew. He needed a Logarian mate to maintain the bloodline. Jake, if he was ever rescued, would never look at him again if he saw a ring on Tess's finger that was not his own. That peace was not for him. There were other responsibilities. He must be getting on. He must give Tess her freedom.
It would be quite unjust to think that his love for her had been basely sensual. Bronze's body knew better than his mind had known, and even his sensual desires were the true index of something that he lacked and Tess had to give. When she first crossed the dry and dusty world that his mind inhabited she had been like a spring shower; in opening himself to it he had not been mistaken. He had gone wrong only in assuming that a future marriage, by itself, gave him either power or title to appropriate that freshness. As he now saw, one might as well have thought one could buy a sunset by buying the field from which one had seen it. There would be no union of the flesh. If any woman would be his empress, not her. If not any woman, then the line died with him. She was his sister in the faith. Yes, a sibling in the infinite and eternal progeny of Heaven. How very spiritual. How very pious. How very sweet...
To his surprise Tess had lurched forward and kissed him. He was completely off-guard and as she pulled away he did not speak.
"There," she said, pulling her coat tighter. "We've done it. Now it's out of the way and you can think about other things."
"What if I don't want to?"
And then she hesitated! He was terrified of turning back. It was still possible to run away as long as her loving him was a possibility. That pause made it clear that it still was. It made him angry that he should still be faced with the agony of decision, even for another few seconds.
But in the end she said: "What good would it do? For either of us? I haven't fallen in love with you, Bronze, and I want to keep it that way."
At last, he was safe and the diverging paths were cushioned away forever. "It's all right, Tess. I haven't fallen in love with you, either."
...
Tess felt a lingering desire to cover his hand with her own. There was a spark of energy in his eyes, so very delicious...then she sank onto the ground, cushioned by his hand, unconscious before he pulled the hand away. Bronze stood up again, feeling the depths of his weakness. The long walk and battle earlier had drained him and her. Sleep would have to come aft her current matter had been attended. He had Charizard shield Tess with its wings, counted to a thousand to gather every bit of energy in his cells, and looked up.
They had been followed for the past hour. The sounds were like those he heard in the illusion-cave, but from above him. The noise of paws against stone and occasionally bursts of labored breathing had sometimes echoes in the high clefts. There had been a short time when he wondered if he was still in Aaron's illusion and everything he had seen was a lie, though this thought was removed almost immediately because of its silliness. He had to get out of the pass, but he knew he'd not get far if he started running unprotected. Cobalion himself might be subdued ahead and would not return in time. Slowly he sent out his Pokemon one by one, drew the robe around him, and began to search the upward slopes.
When he began his labor he heard a sharp cracking, and a flash of brilliance behind him that reflected off the slope. He turned and saw a creature with a curved blue horn sticking up into the frosty air, attached to a head with a silver mane of fur clinging thickly to neck and forehead. Red, lashless eyes looked at him. Then the magnificent creature looked up past Bronze and at the slender ridge above the pass.
Knowing that the presence of Absol meant gravest peril, he followed its eyes and spotted a glinting metal object. The albedo was too high for a simple rock or even a snowdrift. This was a geometrical shape with a smooth metal shell, the flat and polished planes of an artificial object. The configuration was unmistakable: a probe scout, about fifteen feet long and tube-shaped, trailing his path with metal legs like a centipede. There was no telling who sent it or what data it had, but Bronze wanted it gone. Moving cautiously and with an eye on the Absol, as if afraid that the soft noise of his footfalls in ledges and gaps would alert an animal rage, he wondered where would be best to strike first.
Then he heard a quivering, soft moonbeam sound coming from the thinking machine, as if it suspected something. An active scan beam rippled across his face, blinding him for a moment and making him flinch. He bashed his knee against the stone and the spycraft powered up immediately. He leaped on Magnezone and had it hit hard acceleration. He was now over the gorge and looking at his enemy attempt to flee over the wide crags.
But the robotic scout's afterburners fired away in a long and hot acceleration that no human could have survived. Before giving up, Bronze had Magnezone release its full spread of plasma shells. The projectiles shot out far faster than he could fly, spreading like a swarm of deadly wasps. But the drone pinwheeled in an astonishing blur that must have been beyond the material limits of traditional hull metals. Purple smoke appeared in a cloud around the fleeing robot. The energy shells exploded, sending out waves of shock that displaced the snow. The robot continued to pick up speed, though it began to weave erratically, as if it was either still trying to dodge or had been damaged somehow.
He swept down and dismounted, falling roughly on the ground while Magnezone maintained pursuit. But it would not make it in time. Cursing his failure, he gulped huge breaths to fight back pangs of dizziness. The agony in his lower spine recurred and he nearly blacked out.
A moment he thought he saw a hallucination, but then recognized the new streak in the air as Absol on an intercept course. The robot spycraft saw it much too late. It swerved to miss Absol but fell into Magnezone's line of fire. Two of his Pokemon's seven plasma shells struck their target, detonating against the robot's hull. The explosions imparted force in several different directions, sending the craft tumbling as it sputtered flames and globules of molten metal. The glow of its hot engines flickered and died.
The drone spun and Magnezone closed in, locking in a tractor beam to stabilize it. "Stay on your guard," said Cobalion's voice. "It may just be playing dead."
"About time you got here."
"There were two of those probes up ahead that I had to take care of. Be careful."
"I hit it hard enough to make it play dead forever."
Slowly Magnezone stabilized the machine's erratic movements. The long probe was set down in the path, its silvery legs twitching, some broken off and pouring out sparks and oil. The insignia of the Alliance was unmistakable. Working with Cobalion's own sword, Bronze used his dagger to slice open an access hatch in the spy vessel's belly. It was cramped, but large enough for him to fit into once they pried the hole open wide enough.
"As long as Absol's here, I wouldn't go inside," said Cobalion. "It's been following us for a long time, perhaps ever since Flouruma. Luckily it found the probe I missed. It might have tried to kill you and Tess in your sleep."
The hatch blew away in a belch of steam. Bronze sidestepped the flying chunk of metal and looked into the probe. Inside the cylinder, a red glow like a stoplight broke the darkness. Something began to crawl its way out with the iron clanging of rust and uneven metal. Bronze could make out several black-colored limbs being extended outward, bristling with slender weapons, all swiveling to get a good shot at him in the narrow tube. The assassin-bot screeched with a sound like claws being dragged quickly over a chalkboard of sheet iron. The single eye flickered from red to purple to red. More violet smoke leaked out.
Absol was already ready. It fired a blast from its mouth, part of which diffused against the ragged hull opening, but the rest ricocheted and shivered through the robot. The assassin-bot twitched and shuddered, fighting to reset its gelcircuitry systems. Bronze pushed himself inside. Using his own mass, he knocked the robot off balance. The mech compressed and squished, still jerking, unable to reset itself. A blow from the Logarian dagger to the bot's eye turned the lone robot into a motionless hunk of scrap metal.
"Now we can see what this damned machine was doing," said Bronze, carefully severing the bot's weapons one by one. He set the guns and acid hoses outside for Magnezone to dispose of. When he dragged the gelded mech out onto the snow his first impression was of a vermiform creature with a plated head, made of black iron and covered in antenneae-like sensors. The rear heat sinks were emitting purple gas. On Cobalion's examination, it was revealed that the machine was partially made of human bone.
"If Cypress hasn't enough humans to control, he'll use machines," said Bronze. "We need to keep looking for these scouts. Doubtless, this type of robot is all over Roria by now."
As they watched, the creature's legs curled inward, and suddenly it withered to ash and bright red dust, as if it had been consumed in a fire. "Dark science and sorcery!" said Cobalion. "Not men and demons only make up the armies of the Dark Lord."
The mechanized cylinder and remains of the bot were burned in a pit which was then filled. Bronze detached the bot's computer memory core and hoped to find a use for it. Meanwhile, Absol kept looking at him.
"I'll bite," said Bronze to Cobalion. "Why has it been following me?"
"Sometimes the ways of the Firstborn as just as irrational as the Followers," said Cobalion. "It seems it wants to be with you, and maybe you'd accept its company as a gift from Arceus. If not, then it is a spy of the Enemy who has made a throw to gain our trust."
"Then it will be a middle way," said Bronze. This whole moment had the deceptive appearance of simplicity. Never had he attracted a Pokemon by the power of his will and he suspected that such an idealized thing was not the current case. The Absol opened and closed its mouth occasionally, so that he could see its large, diamond-like teeth. Sometimes a flash came from its eyes so bright he could not bear to look at it. The creature was willing. Between setting it free with a tracker attached, or keeping it in a Poke Ball, only one made him stronger.
...
When Tess awoke she was lying on a downward slope of the pass and looking into the face of a huge sitting figure, still and solemn as the great stone kings of the River Sereghir. The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it. Its head was gone, and in its place was set in mockery a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the midst of its forehead. Upon its knees and mighty chair, and all about the pedestal, were idle scrawls of vandals.
She saw Bronze was kneeling beside it. Suddenly, caught by the faint beams of sunlight, she saw the Logarian king's head: it was lying rolled away by the roadside. "What are you doing?" she asked.
He had been cleaning away the graffiti and scrawling runes at the statue base with his knife, just beside the king's left foot. "Only preserving the likeness of one of my ancestors," said Bronze, standing and moving away. "There's plenty to clean and plenty to add."
And written in Logarian runes were:
...
Here lies a toppled god.
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.
...
"Just a fancy," said Bronze. "Those words came to me and I needed to stop and eat. Hence the carving."
"What have you done while I've been asleep?" There were memories that she felt she ought to grasp immediately, but they only came up as a slow simmer.
Bronze turned as if to look down the path to the tropical moor-country below, but something startled him into speech. "Look!" he cried, pointing at the fallen emperor's head. "Look! The king has got a crown again!"
The eyes were hollow and the carven beard was broken, and the amphora and scepter that had lain in the king's right and left hands were scattered about in various pieces of decay, but about the high stern forehead there was a coronal of silver and gold. A trailing plant with flowers like small white stars had bound itself across the brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of his stony hair yellow stonecrop gleamed.
"They...they cannot conquer us!" said Bronze. "They cannot conquer me!" And then suddenly the brief glimpse was gone. The Sun dipped and vanished, and as if at the shuttering of a lamp, black night fell.
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Eclipse Base Prime
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In the past two days the preparations for the evacuation had reached an almost unbearable scurry. Jake himself had little part in it, and was nearly always constantly guarded, but sometimes his captor's attention was elsewhere in the frenzy and he had time to himself or with Robert and Lily. They had formed some kind of conspiracy to merely keep their sanity (which he had mostly regained) but Jake knew they were shooting in the dark for anything that would actually hurt the Alliance.
After the talks with Robert had gone on for a while, Lily was also allowed to speak with them, making a party of three. Like Robert, she had been changed. Her face was sallower, and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that was not the change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way, had stiffened. Robert remarked to him that her body felt more like stone than flesh. It occurred to him, said Robert, that the texture of her skin would be quite different from what it had once been.
It had been at least a few weeks since his arrival, or something like it at any rate; with no clocks and no daylight it was hard to gauge the time. The once-clean Eclipse base was becoming a crowded and evil-smelling place. Foul vapors came from behind closed doors in hallways he only got glimpses of. The noise of industry had been growing progressively louder during his stay and there were different kinds of robots scuttling through the complex. Though to his knowledge he had never changed elevation, the base was definitely multi-tiered and gigantic, with the production and storage floors below him and the administrative and quartering rooms above him. His layer was evidentially reserved for experiments on undesirables and political prisoners like himself. The base's power was definitely geothermal or fission-fusion.
There had been one time where he had been put into a cell, but not all by himself. It was dirty and filled with ten or fifteen people. Ever since the war had begun the amount of captives from occupied cities and captured Association outposts had soared, and kept soaring. The majority of them were common criminals that caused trouble for their new overlords, but there were a few political inmates among them. He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty bodies, too preoccupied with fear, his mental exercises, and Robert's plan to take much interest in his surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference in demeanor between the Association prisoners and the others.
The bureaucratic prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody. They yelled insults at the guards, fought back fiercely when their belongings were impounded, wrote obscene words on the floor, ate smuggled food that they produced from mysterious hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the audio speakers when they tried to restore order. On the other hand some of them seemed to be on good terms with the guards, specifically the hired Eclipse mercenaries, who called them by nicknames, and tried to wheedle cigarettes through the spyhole in the door. The mercenaries, too, treated the common criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle them roughly.
There was much talk about the forced-labor workshops and various supply depots scattered around the world, hidden in glaciers, in mountains, underwater, and in the farthest reaches of desolate islands, to which most of the prisoners expected to be sent. It was 'all right' in the workshops, he gathered, so long as you had good contacts and knew the ropes. There was bribery, favoritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was homosexuality and prostitution, and there was even illicit alcohol distilled from potatoes. The positions of trust were given only to the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs, the making of warship parts and weapons, were done by the Association prisoners, if they expected to live that long.
"The fact that we've been isolated means they have separate plans for us," said Robert. "It's not bad or good. It just gives us more chances to do some real damage."
This rhythm had suddenly ceased a few days ago. He did not know how, but it was certain that the base had been discovered. The great underground storehouses were being stripped clean of their goods and sent abroad on sentinel ships. Mass liquidations were taking place in the prisoner population. Previously privileged inmates were herded into gas chambers and deprived of their special status. Jake noticed that his rations were being increased in proportion as the prisoner population got thinner, though he could judge that sort of thing, I don't know.
He saw many things being moved through the halls for evacuation. One thing that had long since hardly affected him was that demons appeared often in physical form. It seemed natural for the place, but the striking thing was he saw how they were reproducing. In giant plastiglass tanks filled with violet gas, shriveled and warped creatures grew. They moaned and twitched as their life pods were wheeled past him, all while some crooning devil-matriarch trailed its spawn and terrorized the robotic attendants. He didn't know what to make of it.
"Dark science," Lily had said when told of the creatures. "It was always said in the old stories that the Djinn created monsters. Now he can make them on an industrial scale, and all the more horrible."
"I never thought that demons could reproduce," said Robert, frowning. "It always seemed like a fixed number, maybe with converts occasionally going from one side to the other."
"Maybe reproducing isn't the right word," said Jake. "It's more like growing mold."
Although the Emrett-creature was his constant companion, tutor, and tormenter, he never saw the Un-Cypress during the whole period of his captivity. There was time when the Un-Emrett sometimes showed him their great gestation tanks, located in a dark and echoing room filled with tubes and fumes of burning alcohol. He was brought to a row of a dozen tanks filled with violet gas and ordered to look inside. The shapes of misshapen Pokemon and humans could sometimes be seen drifting, growing slowly, all while a mix of artificial placenta was exchanged by automated pumps and worker drones. At the speed that these brainwashed clones and robots were being produced, the Alliance had far more tools at its disposal than Jake had first feared.
You can't fight robots in the same way as humans, he thought. They don't make mistakes. And I thought Pokemon couldn't even stand to look at demons. But here they are, being bred into service of the dark.
The Un-Emrett entered a command into a panel that stood in front of a shallow pool of red liquid, and below it the fluid began to drain away. Four figures, still obscured by darkness, were lifted up from the pool by long, black metal arms that whirred quietly as they worked. They carried metallic plates, long lengths of wire and tubing, and racks of ammunition over to the figures, across whom glowing lines of superheated metal appeared as they squirmed silently. Jake watched the entire process until it was finished, and the four figures were lifted up to the platform and deposited. Their breath came out misty in the air.
"Can you hear me?" the Un-Emrett said.
"We hear and obey," said the first creature, a humanoid male with skin paler than a cavefish.
"This is the Djinn's Right Hand," said the Un-Emrett to Jake, "soldiers grown from Logarian cell cultures. They do not need food or air or water. Not even sleep is necessary for them. Soon there will be many thousands of these ego-clones, the prototype of New Man."
"What about all the other mercenaries you have?"
"They have served their purpose, I grant it. But he who cannot throw a thing away at need is bound in chains."
...
He was told that he would be leaving the base, and that Robert and Lily would do the same. Rescue from the Association was unlikely, yet they had to be alert, though Jake did not get many chances to think of a possible plan of escape in his own right. During the whole packing frenzy, he had not yet been obligated to work or do any maintenance out of the ordinary. He was, however, subject to a new training routine that had begun the past week after he had been put into contact with Robert, a training routine that was gradually intensifying.
His diet was mandated to be vast quantities of salty eggs and heaps of lettuce, along with pills of varying size and color that he was obliged to swallow. Despite the obvious danger he did so. In the process he learned to take them all in a single drink of water and that the larger pills went down the easiest. The small ones made him automatically gag. Once he broke a pill open and tasted the powder inside, and, with relief, found it to be a foul-tasting nutrient mixture. For drink he was given water that tasted vaguely sweet, and large brown shakes that reminded him of chocolate with a hint of some unknown and bitter compound.
The meals were obviously to gain muscle. The Un-Emrett sometimes moved him from his cell or the Objectivity Room to a weight chamber. There he worked himself out to exhaustion, was constantly revitalized by an energizing elixir, and then worked out again. His progress was accelerated to an unnatural degree by the Eclipse medications. These exercises gave him new strength and definition in his physique, all of which carried into other things. Sometimes he saw himself reflected in the weight room's mirror and felt a reluctant and almost sheepish pride in his work, though he shelved it away after thinking the Un-Emrett might want such feelings to develop.
It was not only his strength that they increased. He was also given training with a variety of deadly weapons. On the first session of sparring with an Eclipse trainer, he was shocked that the Un-Emrett could be so stupid as to make him more deadly, but he offered up no complaint. There were knives and guns, lasers and poisons ("Poisons are for women and Aredians," Lily had scoffed), and even maces, though Jake couldn't see himself killing the Un-Emrett with a mace. Some Pokemon training was provided but there was no special focus on that over martial arts. He was tutored in the deadly school of zurkhaneh, a Logarian warrior training developed in the late empire. He fought dozens of men daily and sometimes wounded them severely. There were times when he wanted to kill them unbidden but a deep repugnance for this awoke in him every time he clutched the blade or trigger firmer.
Of all the weapons in the training room, he liked the pulsesword best. It was a good standard length for his arm and body, lighter than the metal instruments of death, and the black blade could extend, retract, and bend at the right mode of thought. The trainer noticed this preference and decided to specialize his skills further by putting him up against self-learning combat mechs. Pulseswords were engineered to give deadly electric shocks to organic opponents after the tip had already pierced their body, and could also short out a robot's gelcircutry with a single pulse. The battery's lifespan gave a hard limit to how many times he use the blade's energy attack, but it was versatile enough to make up for the shortcoming. He also enjoyed beating the robots in a fair fight.
"Many inventions have selectively improved particular skills or abilities, emphasizing one aspect or another. But no achievement has ever scratched the complexity or adaptability of the human mind."
Robert's words from long ago frequently came to him as he dueled sleek and responsive combat mechs. That day before his session with Robert and Lily, he was brought to face another bot. In its resting position, the man-sized mech was a featureless charcoal ovoid; no arms, legs, or face. Once the fight began, however, the Eclipse unit morphed a set of crude protrusions and took on varying shapes based upon feedback from its scanner, telling it how best to defeat an adversary. Steel fists, knives, flexsteel cables, and other surprises could be thrust from any point on its body. Its mechanical face could disappear entirely or change expression, from a dullness designed to lull an opponent to a ferocious red-eyed glare, or even fiendish glee. The mech interpreted and reacted, learning with each step.
"Remember, no regular patterns," the trainer shouted to Jake. "Don't let it read you."
He ducked as two blunted darts sped past his head. A surprise knife thrust from the mech drew a trickle of blood on his shoulder. Even with the injury, Jake feinted and attacked, proud of himself for not crying out. The tip of the pulsesword's blade found a soft spot on the mech's charcoal body, and it fell over "dead."
He fought the mech again twice that day, defeating it each time on higher difficulty settings than before. He had firsthand proof that Bronze's method of training him was superior, despite the mech's chilling intelligence. And with the Eclipse studies giving him a background involving rapiers, knives, pellet stunners, and rudimentary body-shields, he hoped to become a more dangerous and unpredictable fighter than the Un-Emrett or any elite Eclipse soldier could ever be.
"Seven-point two-four!" he called. Nearly nine notches of difficulty higher than the last time.
"Too high," said the trainer. "My orders are to disable the dangerous higher levels. And there's no time. You've been called back to the Community Room."
"Yeah, see you." He used a towel to wipe the sweat from the back of his neck. So it seemed that the Un-Emrett wanted to make sure he didn't challenge himself, or risk anything worse than the slightest enemy. Bronze and Robert would have laughed out loud.
When the Un-Emrett walked in to fetch him, he smiled as he looked into its eyes. "Don't want me to show off, huh? Don't want to get me hurt?"
The Un-Emrett looked at him, its jaw half-opened, and then looked at the trainer, as if waiting for its fellow to act. What followed was pure lunacy. With infinite caution, wheezing and creaking, moved by inescapable psychic force, down went the trainer; and half a second later, with a jerky, metallic movement, Emrett had crossed five feet with a leap and was standing in front of Jake. The flash of pure hatred in its face, but hatred, as it were, crystallized so that it was no longer a passion and had no heat in it, was like touching metal in the Arctic where metal burns.
"Kneel," it bleated, and instantly turned its head and walked away, expecting him to follow. Jake never could remember afterward whether he simply forgot to obey this order or whether his real rebellion dated from that moment. He kept standing.
The Un-Emrett swung around to see what was the delay and was met by a babble of syllables from the trainer, still prone on the floor. "Let me go," he said, "I plead you to spare me. I will tell the boy nothing more. God forgive me!" He pointed at the Un-Emrett and spoke to Jake. "This man is the devil reborn; he is a diabolist, a worker of infernal miracles, Look! Look what he did to me! He did it with his eye, only by looking at me. The evil eye, the evil eye." This died out in a pitiful wail.
"Silence!" said the Un-Emrett, "and listen. If you do what you are told, no harm will come to you. If you do not, you will be destroyed. I think that if you are troublesome you may lose your soul as well as your life, for you do not sound likely to be a martyr."
The man whimpered, covering his face with his hands. Suddenly, not as if it wished to but as if it were a machine that had been worked, pseudo-Emrett kicked him. "Get out," it said.
The man did not stagger when he was kicked. He began walking jerkily up and down, evidently unable to keep still. Each time he straightened his knees it was apparent that they were trembling. His eyes had a wide-open, staring look, as though he could not prevent himself from gazing at something in the middle distance. Almost blubbering, he skirted a wide route around the Un-Emrett and left the room.
Jake had thoughts of slicing off its head then and there, but before he could even lift the sword it was already facing him, standing outside of range. "The session is over. Distractions of this sort are not good for your training, and can lead to serious injury."
"What do you care about it for?" He thought about trying to kill it then and there. But even if he could close the distance quickly enough, it wouldn't be a clean blow. It would need at least two strikes. He thought of its head lying on the training mats, surrounded by a red stain, its mouth still involuntarily opening and closing.
"And what does it matter to you to know?" said the Un-Emrett. "You have seen our men and the spirits and the criminals who are being given remedial treatment. If I wanted to kill you already, I would have. You understand that you are guilty."
Jake feigned a servile glance at the floor, and then spit in its face.
The facade was gone; the very heart of the realm was shaken. There had been a time when the creature terrified him with even the hint of punishment or a furious glance. Before Robert had entered the picture he had been set to become a slave like the trainer, willing to slay himself if the Djinn ordered it. Now the walking Emrett, still deadly, had become so evil as to digress to silliness, like a villain in a children's cartoon. It had none of the terror of the Un-Cypress, and the Djinn did not look out through its eyes. The human and age-old subtlety that had given its boogeyman scares any substance was increasingly decaying and losing any legitimacy. It had degenerated, after losing its rational mind through possession, from the fluid taunting of the Master Tempter to an obscene senility whose promises and threats Jake could do nothing but laugh at. Indeed, what could it do to him? A strike from its claws he would accept. But it was bound to do nothing else, to keep him alive. What was better, alive in good health!
It made a few jerky movements up and down, and then wiped the spit away almost dolefully. "I do not understand your irrationality. Saliva is easily cleaned and does not damage human flesh." What was startling was the sudden emaciation of its face. It was like a skull that he could see through a covering of translucent skin crossed by lightning bolts of blue and red veins. Because of its thinness, the mouth and eyes looked disproportionately large, and the eyes seemed no longer unfocused and glassy, but filled with a murderous, unappeasable hatred of somebody or something.
As they were standing there Jake realized what was the matter. Emrett was beginning to rot away. The few skittish, oily Eclipse workers that had entered the room to clean the weapons flinched, as if some thought had all entered their heads simultaneously. They looked at the tottering wreck of Emrett's body, still awkwardly twitching, and Jake knew they were thinking the same thing as him. A very faint stirring went across the room and they sped up the pace of their work.
But there was no denying it. The head and shoulders that had seemed full of demonic strength only a week before, which after the first failed scrum Jake had assumed was necessarily preternatural and unconquerable, had been steadily thinning. But even if it was dissolving, it was at a speed reduced by a factor of four. He could not count on it to collapse anytime soon. And it would not be difficult for the Un-Emrett to change its body altogether.
There were things he had not yet seen but were whispered about: brains removed from skulls and placed in canisters full of greenish embalming fluid, and then, by fissions so adroit it would be crude to call it mere surgery, the disembodied brain would be put inside an artificial body. Obviously this was the final step in the transformation from organic to anti-organic, the apotheosis of the philosophy of Djinn. As Arceus's promised body of the resurrection promised infinite delight, the body of the Djinn implied unlimited and inconceivable horror. And they would reign forever and ever.
The Un-Emrett took a pace nearer to Jake so that their shoulders nearly touched. Jake thought that it had intended to say something but had grown too senile to care. In reality, the Un-Emrett found it impossible to remember any words. Perhaps it was due to the rapid shifts from anger to coolness that had been going on. It could not speak. Nothing but nonsense syllables would occur to its mind. It spun around and left the room, trusting Jake to follow. He did, and after his time with Robert and Lily he expected to go to the Objective Room again. But he never did.
...
"What's the point of the training?" he asked. "They can't possibly think they're going to use me."
"And if they wanted to, why not just torture you to turn you into their slave?" said Lily.
"Well, they already tried," said Robert, "and it seems that Arceus helped you survive. We can't assume that we are dealing with psychologies similar to yours or mine. We aren't. Our enemies have become irrational and so they can be deceived by friendly psychic forces. They pulled Heaven on their eyes like horse's blinders and will therefore be destroyed. Think from the Enemy's perspective. He thinks he had broken you, and even if not, it won't even be a possibility to him that you could refuse his offer of power. For all he understands is power and the desire for it, and all his strategy is bent on that."
"They think the Objectivity Training is working, too," said Jake in a whisper. "Once you have a way to keep sane, its useless. Once you let it in, it does change you, permanently. Especially if you really mean it."
"They've kept us together," said Lily. "That was their greatest mistake. I think they wanted us to make an escape plan together and then realize it was hopeless." She laughed. "But they've kept the sheep together under the shepherd."
The door opened and without any prelude a voice called them. "Get up. It's time to go."
...
Outside in the great counsel room of Eclipse Base, a singularly uncomfortable farewell committee was by now assembled. The Un-Cypress had arrived about half an hour before. He took a very short time to settle in. In five minutes he was on their hands, and it was still much too early for anyone to go and pack their personal belongings on the evacuation frigates. Most of the site's personnel were gone and all that was left was a token force of robots and traps. The Un-Cypress was now standing with his back to the fire, mechanically drinking a glass of sherry, and the principal members of the Alliance were standing around him. Conversation was hanging fire.
The few members of the Alliance elite that had not yet gone through objectivity training found conversation with the Un-Cypress and Un-Emrett difficult. They shifted from one mode of speech to another, and had a habit of executing the curious or worry-prone. It was not really possible to talk to them in any normal capacity. The Un-Cypress's personal doctor, who had served it loyally when it was still a human, had been eliminated after remarking that the body of his charge now suffered at times from uncontrollable tremors and ejaculations. A prana-crystal transcriber, charged with writing down records on sheets of material only one molecule thick, had found herself facing the Un-Emrett's darkest desires.
It was insanity, Admin Eric thought. One was always engaged in inventing answers to questions that were actually meaningless and expressing enthusiasm for ideas which were out of reckoning in conventional mentality and crude even when partially understood. That was why the absence of the thing that was once his brother Henry in such interviews was so disastrous, for Henry alone was master of a conversational style that exactly suited pseudo-Cypress and Emrett. At times, though, the old and jovial personalities of the two devils seeped through into their speech. The shifts from the familiar to otherworldly would drive Eric mad, if it kept up. Perhaps he already was.
"And as I said to the bishop," observed the Un-Cypress, twisting its mouth into a wide smirk, "'you may not know, my lord,' said I, 'that modern research shows the Hisuian temple at Jubilife to have been about the size of a Rorian village church.'"
"Have a little more sherry, my lord," said Eric.
"Well, I don't mind if I do," said the Un-Cypress. "It's not at all bad sherry, though I think I could tell you of a place where we could get something better. Not that I need to drink, that is! Ha! Ha! And how are you getting on, Admin Faba, with your reforms of our penal system?"
"We have removed most of the regressive elements of the inmate population," said Faba. "We're making real headway with the politicals, too, but I think some modification of the Ultrian method will be necessary."
The former Aether Foundation scientist was a cockney. He was a very slender man, whose legs were so thin that he had unkindly been compared with a skinny duck. He had a turned-up nose and a face in which some original bonhomie had been much interfered with by years of good living and conceit. His research had first raised him to fame and affluence; later, as a technician who had the greatest experience with interdimensional travel, his power was really necessary for the Alliance.
"What I always say," remarked the Un-Cypress, interrupting him, "is, why not treat crime like any other disease? I've no use for Punishment. What you want to do is to put the man on the right line, give him an interest in life. It's all perfectly simple if you look at it from that point of view. I daresay you've been reading a little address on the subject I gave at Silvent."
"I don't recall that, my lord," said Faba. "I have agreed with you, I'm sure."
"That's right," said the Un-Emrett. "I tell you who didn't though. Old Captain Hara of Anthien City. We never saw eye to eye. Shame what happen to him. Very last time I met him, one or two of us were talking about juvenile offenders, and do you know what he said? He said, 'The trouble with these courts for young criminals nowadays is that they're always binding them over when they ought to be bending them over.' Not bad, was it? By the way, where is Admin Henry?"
"I think he should be here any moment now," said Eric., "I can't imagine why he's not. He might be working on the ships."
"You're looking very well today, Eric," said the Un-Cypress. "I'm following your work alongside Darkrai with great interest. I look upon you as one of the makers of mankind."
"Yes, yes, my lord," said Eric, "that is the real business. Already we begin the final steps..."
"I try to help you all I can on the non-technical side," said Faba. "It's a battle I've been fighting for years: the question of the modified sex life. What I always say is, that once you get the whole thing out into the open, you don't have any more trouble. It's all this secrecy which does the harm. Making a mystery of it. I want every boy and girl in the country to be..."
"God!" Eric muttered to himself.
"Forgive me," said the Un-Emrett, "But that is not precisely the point."
"Say, what time are we leaving, exactly?" said Faba.
"Shut up," said the Un-Cypress, suddenly furious beyond its body's ability to contain. Why couldn't the fools mind what they were saying? thought the Djinn. "Shut up, all of you." It cleared its throat in the exact way to attract attention and pointed to twelve senior technicians. "I will need you. Line up against the wall."
Bright unblinking eyes and open mouths greeted it in every direction. Two women began to nervously laugh. Eric, after one frightened glance, jumped away, overturning a chair, and bolted from the room. And, expecting some joke or sharp word to return the room to sanity, the twelve technicians did as they were ordered.
The Un-Emrett watched its master sleepily. After leaving Jake it had gotten drunk and forgotten about the Objectivity Training. It had expected and intended to be so: it knew that later on in the day it would go down to the cells and do things. There was a new prisoner there, a little helpless girl of the kind it enjoyed, which whom it could pass an agreeable hour. The nonsense command did not alarm it: it found it exciting. They would be leaving that day and there was still time for novelty.
After wiping its hands and fixing its collar, the Un-Cypress walked to a guard, took a submachine gun, and pointed it at the lineup. There came an ear-splitting noise that seemed to last forever, and after that, at last, a few seconds of dead silence. Eric noticed that the technicians had been killed: only secondly, that the Un-Cypress had shot them. After that it was difficult to be sure what happened. The stampede and the shouting may have concealed a dozen reasonable plans for disarming the murderer and restoring its senses, but it was impossible to concert them. Nothing came of them but kicking, struggling, leaping on tables and under tables, pressing on and pulling back, screams, breaking of glass. It was the smell more than anything else that recalled the scene to Eric: the eerily bitter smell of the powderless shooting mixed with the sticky compound smell of blood and spilled sherry.
They could not arrest the two movements which were going on. The majority had not seen the Un-Cypress lock the door: they were pressing towards it, to get out at all costs: they would fight, they would kill if they could, rather than not reach the door. A large minority, on the other hand, knew that the door was locked. There must be another door, the one used by the servants. They were pressing to the opposite end of the room to find it. The whole center of the room was occupied by the meeting of these two waves, a huge football scrum, at first noisy with frantic efforts at explanation, but soon, as the struggle thickened, almost silent except for the sound of laboring breath, kicking or trampling feet, and meaningless muttering.
Four or five of these combatants lurched heavily against a table, pulling off the cloth in their fall and with it all the fruit dishes, decanters, glasses, plates. Out of that confusion, with a howl of terror, broke the Un-Emrett. It happened so quickly that Eric hardly took it in. He saw the hideous head, the cat's snarl of the mouth, the flaming eyes. He heard something tearing apart and a cackling. Something bony and white and bloodied was down among the feet of the scrummers. Eric, his back firmly against the fireplace's brickwork, could not recognize it at first for the face, from where he stood, was upside down and Emrett's kneeling body was covering it. He did hear the wet chewing of flesh in the Un-Emrett's teeth as it savaged its prey.
Eventually the door was shattered and the waves of men ran screaming out of the abattoir. Soon only Eric and the two devils were left. The Un-Emrett noisily continued its meal while pseudo-Cypress stood laughing as if it had heard a good joke at a dinner part. The corpses left could hardly qualify for Heaven or Hell. They were things that failed to make the grade, creatures more or less willing to sink into contented sub-humanity forever.
"Always fun to send them packing, eh?" said the Un-Cypress. "But it's time to go." It looked at its watch. "We've three hours before the Association arrives."