Songs of the Dying Earth. Gardner Dozois
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room in unsettled silence, chewing his upper lip. Vespanus did his best to sleep.
Shortly before nightfall, the Exarch and the Basileopater, each commanding a battalion of elite troops, crossed to the palace and took their places in what they must have known was a trap. Vespanus rejoiced that their vanity did not permit them to behave otherwise.
Once again, Vespanus had no intention of attacking those in the palace directly. He, and Castle Abrizonde, entirely lacked the means.
Instead, he instructed Hegadil to seal the palace from the outside, and then to plate the palace with enormous sheets of adamantine metal. If Vespanus could not actually kill the inhabitants, he would do his best to seal them inside, after which he would fill the interior with a poisonous vapor.
After he sent Hegadil on his errand, Vespanus paced back and forth on the battlements as he awaited the outcome of his scheme. The field was silent, the night cold. In his mind, Vespanus pictured vast sheets of armor being lowered silently into place, all along the distant palace.
Then there was a sudden flare of light that limned the marble towers of the palace, followed by a rush and a clap of thunder. More flashes followed, red, yellow, and blazing orange, and the air was filled with shrieks, war cries, and the beating of invisible wings.
Vespanus cursed his luck, his ancestors, and every human being for fifty leagues round. Before he was quite finished, Hegadil appeared by his side—once again in the form of Austeri-Pranz, a sight alarming enough without the addition, in this case, of charred, smoking clothing and a singed beard.
“Alas,” Hegadil croaked, “they were prepared. I barely escaped annihilation.”
Disgusted by the turn of events, Vespanus opened his thumb-ring and let Hegadil take his healing rest there. He then took himself to bed.
In the morning, he awoke to the sounds of acclamation, as the two enemy lords left the palace to the cheers of their armies. Vespanus bent his mind entirely to the subject of escape. In the confusion of the final assault, he thought, he might be able to swim the river, possibly with Hegadil’s assistance, and then take refuge in a shelter created by the madling while the enemy armies went about their business…
It was a wretched, dangerous plan, but it was the only one that occurred to him.
He rose, broke his fast, and went to the Onyx Tower. A pair of twkmen orbited the Protostrator’s head in gay silence, as out-of-place as a cheerful red cap on the statue of a Deodand. Ambius, his round face by now set in an expression of permanent dolor, gestured toward the armies of Calabrande. Looking from the window, Vespanus saw that a ridge-top, out of range of any of the castle’s weapons, had been perfectly leveled.
“A platform for the Projectors of Halcyon Detonation,” Ambius said. “The twk-men inform me that the barges will arrive at the enemy camp later this morning. Afterwards, it will take the army most or all of the day to drag the weapons from the landing-stage to their position. We may expect the grand assault at dawn tomorrow.”
“It would take a sandestin, or a madling like Hegadil, to level that ridge overnight,” Vespanus said.
Ambius merely shrugged. “Why should they not outnumber us in sandestins, as they do in all else?” he said.
“Perhaps we should find out.”
Vespanus opened his thumb-ring and summoned Hegadil. The creature appeared in the form of a dead twk-man, green skin turned gray, a needle thrust like a spear through his abdomen.
“Abandon this distasteful form,” Vespanus said, “go to the ridge yonder, and discover if you can undermine it and drop the Projectors into a pit of your own creation.”
Hegadil was gone for three or four minutes, and then returned, this time as a dwarfed Exarch, the lord’s habitual superior smile now turned to a deranged leer.
“A sandestin named Quaad guards the platform,” he reported. “He is far stronger than I, and informed me that he would tear me to bits if I attempted any digging.”
Vespanus opended the thumb-ring.
“You may return to your rest.”
When Hegadil was bottled up, Vespanus went to the windows and manipulated their adjustable properties to give himself a closer view of the ridge.
“Those are engineers on the site,” he said. “They employ instruments familiar to me from their uses in architecture and surveying—tripods and alidades, chains and rods, altazimuths and dividing engines. Are they proposing to build something there?”
“The opposite,” said Ambius. “They intend destruction. They measure precisely the distance and angle to the castle, so that the Projectors may be better aimed so as to blast us to ruin.”
Vespanus paused for a moment to absorb the melancholy implications of this revelation. Suddenly, diving into the Dimwer did not seem so dreadful a plan. Ambius, who now seemed very diminished in his grand array, slowly rose to his feet.
“I fear it is time to visit my wife,” he said.
Curious, Vespanus followed Ambius to his quarters. Ambius either did not mind his presence, or was unaware of it. The Protostrator disarmed the various traps on his door, then led Vespanus again into his study.
This time he found himself with a better view of the Protostrate—she was a buxom woman, with wiry hair, and, even at her current size, a piercing voice. From the Protostrator’s attempts to communicate with her, Vespanus gathered her name was Amay.
Amay began abusing Ambius as soon as he entered the room and continued throughout the interview. The gist of her comments—leaving aside the personal references to Ambius, his person, and his habits—was that she would delight in the destruction of the castle, and would not prevent it if she could.
Perceiving that his arguments were futile, Ambius shrugged and walked to a shelf, where he found a vial filled with an amber liquid. Loosening the stopper, he poured a single drop into the neck of the crystal bottle, whereupon Amay staggered, spat, and collapsed into unconsciousness.
“Sometimes it is necessary to think in silence,” he said, as he returned the vial to its shelf, “and this narcotic will guarantee my peace for some hours.”
“Very effective,” Vespanus observed.
Ambius contemplated the supine figure of his wife. “I fear that six years in a glass bowl has given her an unshakable prejudice against me,” he said.
“That would appear to be the case,” Vespanus said. “Would it help if I conducted a private conversation with her?”
Ambius gave him a doleful look. “Do you think it would help?” he asked.
Vespanus shrugged his most hopeless shrug. “Truth to tell, I believe it would not.”
Vespanus went to the buttery and helped himself to bread, cheese, and liquor. He wondered if he might, that evening, hurl himself from the Onyx Tower into the Dimwer and survive, perhaps with the help of Hegadil, and then be carried to freedom by the current.
Unlikely, he thought. The defenders of the castle would only be the first to shoot at him.
He considered those Calabrandene engineers with their alidades and dividing engines, and the smug smiles that had been reported on the faces of the Exarch’s magicians. He considered how the Basileopater and the Exarch had dismissed him as insignificant, and how all his schemes for the defense of the castle had come to nothing.
“Even their sandestins are stronger than mine,” he muttered, which led his thoughts to consideration of the nature of the sandestins, their ability to travel freely in the chronosphere, to visit Earth in any eon from its fiery birth to its long icy sleep beneath the dim stars and dead sun. Then he considered how this ability to travel in time had affected their psychology, had made the sandestins and their lesser cousins, the madlings, extraordinarily accepting of whatever environment in which they found themselves.