The Mirror showed a clearly luxurious cabin, dark but for a fire in the center. Two figures huddled beside it, one slim, the other almost square. Their voices could be heard, though there was no sound. "At least we have plenty of fuel," the voice of the slim figure said.
"When the night falls, it will not matter," the larger figure answered.
"You have wings. Why can't you fly out of here? Actually… I've never seen you fly."
"Only a Lindormess has the full power of full flight. On the thermals of the Black Mountains, I could glide for a time, no more. If I could fly, we would still be much too far from land. If we were not, the wind chill at altitude would freeze us even faster. All we can do is wait, and hope."
"Gracious Emperor, whatever may happen, I have one request of you."
"Speak it. I owe you much already."
"Whomp for me."
"Your Majesty… You speak of a majestic rite rarely seen outside my Realm. A Kyrush performs it for his beloved, or a worthy rival. I cannot Whomp merely for an outsider's amusement."
"I understand. Whomp for me."
"As you wish. I have prepared you as best I can."
The cabin visibly shook as the larger figure leaped and capered, a silhouette before the flames. In the midst of it, another figure suddenly leaped upward, and a clawed hand seized the Lindorm's wrist.
"So… wow," Ajax said. "If you had told me…"
"C'mon," Mel said. "Alone, after a shipwreck, on ice? I had already heard enough of the story to take a guess."
"It took a long time to process," Pruna said. "I didn't even tell Daffy till I was engaged. It was… complicated."
"Then what was it really like?" Mel asked. "Maybe it will be easier talking to a Lady."
"All right, I can try," the Empress said. "First… first… I had the hardest climax of my entire life. Then… I had the worst diarrhea of my life. Then I threw up."
Ajax gaped. Mel had covered her mouth. "Naam was a perfect gentleman about all of it," Pruna concluded. "He said first transformations often have powerful effects. He cleaned me up, all by himself. When his Guards came to check on us, he swore them to secrecy and swore the same to me. That was Kyros and Mushku… They were with me at the wedding." She stroked the frame. "Could I, perhaps, have a little time alone?"
"You bet," Mel said. "Come on. Let's go shoot stuff…" As she led Ajax up from the compartment, the Empress turned back to the mirror. Her own luminous form gazed back at her.
Xaja's saucer rose from the Palace grounds. They were the first of a flurry of hastily departing ships. "There," Cerasa said, pointing at one particular ship. "The King of the Indigo Realm is preparing to leave, in a hurry." She pointed to another ship. "That is the caravel of the Marshal of the Sky Marines. They're leaving on their own."
"That is why they held their hostages as long as they did," Xaja said. "They knew they couldn't force the rulers to surrender their Realms, but they could keep them from organizing opposition until they were ready to move."
Cerasa clasped his hand. "You are always kingly when you talk about plots," she said. "It is good that we are out of that."
"No," Xaja said. "I have told you, we are part of this world, you even more than I. I cannot leave the World Island to its fate."
Cerasa smiled. "We could take a vote," she said. She looked back at their passengers. There were Ultra and Infra, Joe and John, and Kiv by himself, utterly miserable.
"I just wanna see Paly," Kiv said. "I'm going back to find her."
Ultra gave an affirmative gesture. Infra said, "We will fight." All of them looked to Joe and John.
The two warriors looked at each other. "Yo, Joe," said John.
"Yo, John," said Joe. They both nodded.
"Okay, fine," Cerasa said. "We stay."
Nauplius piloted the transport Euphonia through the lower strata of the gaseous envelope that was the Disc. The atmosphere was nearly opaque, while the radar was full of anomalies. There was a shudder of turbulence as a train of radar signatures passed close by. He looked out the canopy. In the midst of the fog, he glimpsed a dark fluke the size of the transport. Jets of flame shot from the trailing edge, driving the silhouette of a much larger body out of sight.
The cockpit door behind him opened. He only looked up as Autolycos took a seat beside him. "The Agema is ready to go," the commander said. He propped up his feet on the console. "They were talking about Meliboia. Some of them were worried. I put a stop to that. It will be easy, as long as we don't let her psych anyone out."
"If you say so," Nauplius said. He shifted comm frequencies, again. "Ataraxes, please respond. Are you on track to reach the target coordinates?"
An answer came. It was Marpessa. "Yes, of course, we will be at the target on time," she said. "Make sure you are, too."
"Of course," Nauplius said. "It does appear you were out of contact for a short time. The data feed shows an automated alarm."
"We had minor difficulties with the prisoner," Marpessa said. "She proved to have capabilities we were not appraised of. The situation is under control."
"I see," Autolycos said. "Is the prisoner alive?"
There was a short but pointed silence. "Does it matter?" Marpessa replied.
Autolycos only laughed.
Ajax took aim at a blood-black slab that had fallen beside the Great Gate. The rocket-assisted round left a white trail to the target. The stone appeared to shatter with the impact, but as the fractured basalt crumbled, it came away in a relatively thin sheet, leaving fresh and seemingly unbroken rock beneath.
He turned to Mel. She had sat down next to him, at the foot of a waist-high retaining wall that some counted as the first tier of the Palace's defenses. In her lap, she had his own much-acclaimed book documenting his expedition to explore the Palace. He had marked a page of schematics, carefully drawn in his own hand. It showed what could be known of the entrances to the structure, a subject that was steeped in theory and speculation.
"The walls are really relatively thin, compared to castles on Earth." he said. "On average, they are only two Cubits thick, I believe about a meter. But the rocks have unusual properties, especially the dark stone. That is quite strange. Other stone matches the rock formations of the Island, mainly granite, but that is only known from the blocks that make the Palace or once belonged to it. It must have been brought from some other location. Some believe that it was altered by some artificial treatment. We will probably never really know, unless we can find where the Island itself came from."
Mel nodded. "It's an excellent defensive structure," she said. "It looks to me like it was built for active defense. There's lots of places you can either draw back to or come out of. It's the only way to fight the Myrmidons."
They considered the Great Gate, a tall and majestic portal set where the point of the diamond had been cut off to make a solid central face. One of the doors still stood half-open as if in invitation. The King knew that the strangely alloyed metal was completely fused with rust, and likely to shatter if anyone ever applied sufficient force to move it. On either side were the forms of two figures like the Caryatids above, carved as bas reliefs that had weathered down to little more than silhouettes. It was uncertain where the door led, as very few had ventured inside for any distance. No counterpart had been found at the rear of the Palace, though that had been so heavily damaged that the original plan could only be inferred.
"There is a legend about the Palace, from a long time ago," Ajax said. "It is told that it belonged to an evil king on a World Island like our own. He tried to conquer all the Realms of his world, and some say he succeeded for a time. But the other kings vanquished him, and at the last, he used a spell that destroyed the Island, except the Palace and the rock beneath it."
Ajax's gazed followed Mel's, up to the highest tier that had been their nuptial chamber. "We could go up there for one more round," she mused.
The King shook his head. "I would do as you would wish, but I would not choose it for my own part," he said. "Not while my brother is without his Queen."
Mel nodded. "It's not really my thing, either," she said. "We have a saying, `The night is for love, the day is for battle.'"
"There must be sayings about tactics, how to win a war," Ajax said. "Tell me one of them."
"All right, here's the first one they teach," Mel said. "`The best defense is an obvious weakness.'"
Ajax frowned as he pondered. "Because… an enemy will target the obvious weakness before he tries to find any other."
"That's thinking like a Myrmidon," Mel said. "Now, try this one…"
Pruna ran her hand across the glass of the Mirror. Her luminous Image raised a hand to hers, with an expression of indulgent tolerance. "Are you me?" the Empress asked. "Have I trapped myself in the world of the Mirror?"
The Image shook her head. "You do not understand the nature of the Mirror," she answered. "Think of me as a fragment of yourself, one reflection in a mirror that was broken into pieces. I am the part of you that wanted what you could not have."
"Then are you imprisoned in penalty for my wish?" the Empress asked.
"Again, you do not understand; truly, you cannot," her Image answered. As she spoke, her appearance shifted, from a face barely out of girlhood to the brink of old age, and many points in between. "I am one with the Mirror now. With its power, I can see for myself the ways of the universe. I have seen the happiness you have found, and the happiness you have guided others to, not least Ajax. I know better than you the good you have brought and the evils you have prevented. I glow because you are a creature of light, and I am a reflection of that light."
Pruna smiled and leaned forward. "If you are part of me, then you must help," she said. "I wish to see, I must see, what the Myrmidons intend, and what will come of the plans Ajax and Meliboia have made."
"I will do what I can," the Image answered.
Flickering shapes began to appear in the Mirror, with the form of the Image still superimposed on them. As the vision took form, Pruna said, "I must go to Ajax."
"No," the Image said. "There is not enough time. You will only endanger yourself and him. Besides, there is more you must see…" The images changed again. The Empress's eyes widened… and slowly, a smile came to her face.
The Ataraxes came in slowly. Ajax watched through the rifle scope from the corner battlement to the right of the Great Gate, and frowned. As he watched, the rear parasite craft detached. The front craft, however, remained moored. His frown deepened. "Something is wrong," Hector said.
"Patience, brother," Ajax said. He looked to a half-improvised table that they had set up. It held the Eightfold Orb and his book. By common accord, the structure where they were emplaced was the primary entrance, positioned where the lay of the Island had made the second tier the ground level. The corner formed a guardhouse, with a gate below and the battlement they manned above. There were no similar openings on the face of the intersecting diamond behind them, only the sally port where they had entered and the narrow firing slit that Meliboia peered through.
The transport circled as it approached, intermittently correcting for a quivering in its tail plane. Ajax thought unbidden of tales of ghost ships drifting on the seas without their crews, though it was clear that the ship was under the control of a pilot. "Something is wrong," he said to Hector, "and I think that they did not plan for it."
He hurriedly activated the Orb. "I, King Ajax, ask for the wisdom of the Eightfold Orb," he said. "Orb, does Lady Daffodil still live?" The answer was quick: Proposition affirmative. There was a sigh from Hector. He considered his next question. "Orb, is Daffodil aboard the Ataraxes?" Again the answer came quickly: Proposition affirmative.
The transport finally made its descent, on a steep diagonal that went directly over their heads. He shuddered at the unsettlingly close sight of its "defensive" forward guns in the edges of its thick wings. There was a brief roar of its vertical jets as it came down with a final twist. He felt a rumble in the structure as it settled, its tail toward the strongpoint. There was no sign of activity. He darted back toward the table. "Orb," he said, "is Lady Daffodil in control of the ship?" The answer took time, but not long: Variables favorable.
Only then did he realize that he was alone. "Hector!" he shouted. "Wait!"