“I thank Mighty
Amon,” was the retort. “But first, be pleased to accept these small gifts from
us.” And with that, he tapped Gil’s shoulder. The American, nearly paralyzed
until that moment, lobbed the WP he’d had waiting in his hand and it landed
fair at the feet of the demon, who looked at it curiously. A second later the
canister went off with a hiss, and a flare which grew into a burning nimbus.
Amon staggered
back from it, shaggy arm thrown across his eyes, and howled. The other members
of the Nine-Mob tossed their WPs in all directions as Olivier, poised at his
gun and taking the most careful aim he ever had, cut down the crone without
compunction.
Yardiff Bey,
who had been racing toward the two slabs, skidded to a stop at the first sound
of gunfire. He bit his lip in indecision as his resolve wavered. Andre drew his
sword and jumped to face Bey while Springbuck threw open the rear hatch and ran
to Gabrielle’s side. Bar severed the bonds holding her as if they were rotten
cordage. He swept her up in his left arm and dashed for
Lobo.
The hall had
become a scene of unimaginable chaos. Those creatures of the depths who had
been closest to the burning WPs were lying stricken on the floor, among these
Amon himself. Many more were shifting their shapes to afford protection against
the torturous light. Human adherents, in a turmoil, were beseeching their Lord
for help and Bey himself had drawn Dirge to meet the advance of Andre
deCourteney. But the Nine-Mob had cut loose with all guns and the pandemonium
became a slaughter. Gil had elevated his barrel and was quartering the air,
bringing down the flying creatures—huge bats, bloated birds, nightmare
fliers—which some of the celebrants had become.
Bey cursed,
turned and fled before Andre could reach him, no doubt moved to do so by the
gunfire but perhaps unwilling to face the portly magician in a physical
contest. Mara had resumed her mount and was fleeing, too. Andre cried out to
his old friend to stop, but to no avail. Springbuck and Gabrielle were back
aboard the APC and Gil called out to the wizard to follow. A swollen thing of
gorilla body and pig-snouted face made to slaughter Andre with scythelike claws
before he could regain the track, but Handelman saw, and cut its legs out from
under it, continuing to fire after the magician skirted the convulsing body and
raced on. Andre reached the APC and dogged the hatch behind him, turning
instantly to his sister.
She was sitting
up, apparently well and unharmed. She shrugged their helping hands away. “The
infant,” she insisted, seizing the Prince’s arm. “Get the child; we cannot
abandon it to them.” Springbuck exchanged glances with Andre, who nodded. The
Heir of the
Ku-Mor-Mai
sprang up through the cargo hatch.
The Nine-Mob
were men possessed, lashing out with all their strength at the things gathering
for attack. They swiveled smoking weapons here and there as swarms of bullets
found this or that target, paused to decimate it, and moved on. Torrents of
slugs reached out implacably for the creations of the Infernality whether they
groveled, fled or gave battle, as if some cleansing holocaust sped through the
hall. They steered their barrels back and forth as if the outpouring of death
and devastation would never end. They had no thought but to walk the paths of
tracers from one annihilated enemy to the next. The racket of machine guns and
the popping of the grenade launcher overwhelmed even the screams of fury and
wrath ringing through the room.
Gil was
destroying an elephantine atrocity that had been bearing down on them, its
features those of a lovely woman. It staggered and collapsed under the hail of
automatic fire. Bar in hand, Springbuck pounded Gil’s shoulder and pointed out
the baby wailing alone in the midst of the carnage. The American was growing
sated and wanted only to leave; Woods had started the engine and they could go
at any time. It made no difference; he knew that they couldn’t desert the child
there. He traversed his gun to cover.
The Prince
launched himself through space, landing by the slab. The infant was not bound
and he reached to take it up. A burst went over his head and he ducked, peering
around for the sergeant’s target. An obscene bird-thing lay convulsed and
dying, brought down in midstoop. He turned, the baby cradled in his left arm,
only to find that a more frightening phantasm had come up behind him, a
grinning, decaying corpse swinging a khopesh.
Gil had fired
the last of his ammo belt and was locking and loading another, unable to help.
The corpse closed with the Prince, its blade whistling savagely. Hampered by
his burden, he parried and cut back. Bar flashed eagerly and severed the
grinning head from the spine bone, but slowed his opponent not at all.
Horrified, he fought on, concentrating on the khopesh and the bleached arm
which held it, and these alone. The baby was making it difficult to fight; he
had to keep his torso turned awkwardly to shield it from the dead body’s
attack.
Then he heard
Gil’s voice. “Get down, Springbuck, down!” He whirled and threw himself
headlong, losing Bar but protecting the infant by landing on his right side and
arm. He saw the corpse above him, khopesh raised in triumph for the final
stroke, but it dissolved in a shower of bone fragments, rotting meat and dust
as Olivier and Gil scored concurrent hits on it.
The Prince
regained his feet, tottered to the side of the APC and handed his small burden
up to Olivier’s open arms. He then remembered Bar, still lying where he had
dropped it, and ran back to recover it. When he had it in hand, he looked
around for Yardiff Bey, thinking to settle accounts with him. His eyes fell
upon the still-squirming form of Amon. Ignoring the pleas of those in the
track, he ran to where the demon lay. The intense heat and brilliance hurt his
eyes as he bent next of the huge Lord of that place. The wolf head had ceased
howling and now regarded him with red-slitted gaze.
“Mighty Amon,”
said the Prince, “if you will but answer me one question we will leave your
halls. If you will not, I’ll place another of these burning sunlets upon your
breast and let it eat its way through. I know now that Strongblade is Yardiff
Bey’s son. Who, then, is his daughter, his firstborn, and how may we find her?”
The demon, even
in his great suffering, barked one short laugh and answered. Springbuck backed
away from him, bewildered, and walked back to
Lobo,
leaving the Lord of
forty legions in such agony as he had not felt since that first battle against
his eternal opponents. So distracted was the Prince that he did not even notice
the minions of Amon, now summoning their courage and arming themselves, as the
WPs were beginning to burn low. A threatening ring was slowly closing on
Alpha-Nine.
Pomorski jumped
out and threw him bodily through the rear hatch, pulling it shut as the
screaming slaves of Amon rushed toward them from all sides. The Nine-Mob lobbed
fragmentation grenades among them and ducked. The explosions were tremendous.
Metal bits flew in all directions, bouncing harmlessly off
Lobo’s
armor but
doing fearful damage to the attackers. Smoke billowed through the chamber as
broken figures crawled or expired among those already sped.
Woods got the
APC into gear, describing a tight circle, and drove at top speed, crushing
anonymous obstacles beneath them as they made their way back to the black sands
outside. Andre and Gabrielle joined hands and the girl went into a mystical
seizure, the blue glow of power coming from her as from the filament of some
strange, pulsing strobe. Of this the others saw little; the Nine-Mobsters were
busy looking for pursuit and the Prince was pondering the words of Amon.
Cold broke
around them like a wave and the black sands disappeared beneath, replaced by
weed-assailed cobblestones. Woods had to brake very hard indeed to keep from
plowing into a wall of the castle near Erub.
If you
wish to know what a man is, place him in authority.
ANONYMOUS PROVERB
THE baby, a beautiful little
girl, was the immediate center of attention. Stories were demanded, told in
confused style and received with wonder and acclaim.
The Nine-Mob
regarded
Lobo
ruefully: scorched, dented, gore-streaked and littered
with brass casings and bits of metal linking from disintegrated ammo belts.
They all
adjourned to the main hall for a meal amid the shouts and laughter of the
Erubites. Springbuck was sitting to one side, lost in thought, when Gabrielle
came to him. She knelt before him, face level with his, and took his hands in
hers. He guarded his expression as, smiling ever so faintly, she brought her
mouth to his. Van Duyn, standing near the hearth with Andre, watched without
comment and at length returned to his conversation, animation gone from him but
with no other indication of the hurt he felt.
Andre spoke to
his sister for a moment as she hovered yet near the Prince, then went to where
the Nine-Mob sprawled, relaxed and mellow on the floor.
“We will be
able to return you shortly before dusk,” he said.
“What’ll you do
then?” Pomorski asked.
Andre seated
himself somberly as Van Duyn joined them. The wizard said, “I have talked this
over with Edward. Since the slaying of Chaffinch, many of the Erubites have
come to the castle, along with a number of stray horses they recovered. We are
going to take the nucleus of our school eastward over the mountains to
Freegate, where the King is an acquaintance of mine and has already said that
we may establish ourselves there.”
“School?” Gil
demanded, “But what about Coramonde? You gonna just leave it to Yardiff Bey?
After what his men did to Erub last night and the kind of backing he had
from—back there; you know—I can’t believe you’re dealing yourselves out and
moving on.”
Andre fiddled
with Calundronius, now back around his neck. “The situation has changed since
my last communication with the King of Freegate. Now we are certain that
Yardiff Bey plans to make war on him and indeed on all the lands within his
reach, one by one. But we have the Prince with us now, a viable approach to
unseating Strongblade and turning out Yardiff Bey, if we can evade capture and
win the factions of Coramonde to our side.”
Gil considered
this. “But what about the people you’ll be leaving behind? With a little
teaching, they could start a working resistance movement. There’s all kinds of
things they could do—propaganda, intelligence, sabotage and like that.
Guerrilla warfare.”
“Oh, well,”
Pomorski cut in, “too bad we never got to shoot Yardiff Bey. We’d have saved
Coramonde a lot of trouble.”
“It would have
been a great service,” Andre agreed. “Bey is the engineer of our present
troubles. But he has his counterparts in other places; rest assured that there
are replacements waiting in the wings if we eventually pull him down. We can
only do, each of us, what we may.
“But I feel
that there is much that you might do, Gil MacDonald. You speak of ways of using
our people here in Erub, things with which we are not conversant. Edward
assures me that, though he does not agree with the war you were fighting, you
have many skills and techniques which we do not know.”
The sergeant
yawned and stretched, looking to Van Duyn. He took a tug from a beer bucket as
the older man spoke carefully. “I won’t argue a tired and sore point with you,
MacDonald—”
“Oh, God, no,
please don’t,” Pomorski said quickly. “You’ll start him quoting the SEATO
codicil again.”
“—but,” Van
Duyn plodded on, “let me ask you this: what are you going to do with that
military head of yours when you get out? There isn’t any room in civilian life
for you as you are now. You’ll have to do things their way or starve. And
perhaps, if you feel strongly as you say, you wouldn’t find this war so very
different from yours.”
Gil rolled to
his feet. “I’m going to check out the track,” he said. “I’ll be waiting for
word on exactly when we can leave.”
As they watched
him go, Van Duyn took his lower lip between his teeth thoughtfully. “What kind
of soldier is MacDonald?” he asked the Nine-Mob.
Typically, it
was Pomorski who answered for them. “You meet his sort more and more now in the
army, a good troop who hates soldiering. He’s got it chalked up as his duty and
he doesn’t kick, but he hates to take orders and I think he hates giving them,
too. They lost a good candidate when he didn’t push for OCS.”
He twisted his
villainous mustache. “Take my handlebar, for instance. It’s against regs to
wear it this long, but I like it this way. Mac knows it but he doesn’t care
about things like that; minutiae and housework don’t interest him. He ignores
it as long as he can, until our new platoon leader, a wet-eared West Point
sonofabitch, calls him down about it. One thing leads to another and eventually
Mac’s in front of the Old man, but he never once suggests that I cut off my
broom. As far as he’s concerned, it’s mine and it isn’t hurting anyone.
“So he ends up
with his heels locked in front of Cap’n Cronkite, who’s just taken over as CO
of Alpha Troop. And do you know what he says, even with this newly minted looie
standing there right beside him? He says, ‘Well, sir, Pomorski’s a helluva good
grenadier and ammo bumper and a pretty sharp gunner. The ’stache keeps him
happy and doesn’t cost the government a red cent. I always figured that it’s
more important that what a soldier shoots at get killed than what his tonsorial
preferences are.’
“So it turns
out that the skipper, Captain Cronkite, feels the same way and the matter is
dropped. But none of us forget it and just after that the looie refers to us as
‘that raggedy-assed Alpha-Niner mob’ and the name stuck—the Nine-Mob.