He was next to his old enemy. Montrose could not retain his balance, but started to topple off the edge. Del Azarchel put an arm around him, and prevented the fall. The eyes of Del Azarchel, burning with that same superhuman presence that no human could look at as Montrose’s eyes, seemed to swell in his vision hypnotically. Their two faces were close enough that Montrose could see the tiny nick in the skin of his cheek where Del Azarchel had cut himself shaving with a straight razor.

He could smell the scent of Blackie’s beard lotion, a brand Montrose recognized, for it had been on sale at the barbershop back in his home village in rural Texas, back in the centuries long ago. It was called Armstrong’s Space Age After-Shave, and it claimed (falsely) to date from the time of the moon landings, back before the Little Dark Ages. It had not been manufactured on Earth for millennia.

“Welcome back to the land of the living, old friend,” said Del Azarchel. “You do not look well. As you have realized by now, I have no further need of you, your Tombs, or your damned interference. But I thought I should afford you a clear view of the proceedings. I am about to destroy everything you rightfully love. Look!”

Underfoot, Montrose could see the golden burial chamber up from which he had been plucked. The cnidarians were methodically and quickly snaring all the Thaws in the chamber. There was the square of the fountain, and Soorm and Gload, men from an era with no metals, tiny as dolls, staring upward in astonishment at the skyhook and the swarms of cnidarians. Sir Guiden, with an arm around Oenoe, was moving toward the wall of the chamber, firing his shoulder-mounted rocket as he fled, but a cnidarian swept the rocket in midflight off to one side, where it exploded harmlessly, and wrapped both Sir Guy and his bride in tendrils. Oenoe dashed her cloak against the machine in what seemed to be an attempt to stun or lull it with her pollens and soporifics; she did not know it was not a living thing. There was other movement down below, but now a cloud of dust and smoke had risen up, and tears were in Montrose’s eyes.

Del Azarchel still had one arm tightly about him, preventing him from falling. “Would you care for a jolt? Looks like you could use a stiff one.” Montrose thought Del Azarchel was either threatening to electrocute him, or else proposing buggery, but then the man held an oaken hip flask with a brass cap open before his broken nose. The smell of whiskey was delicious. He ached for it.

“Go to hell, Blackie,” he croaked.

“Not if I live forever,” Del Azarchel smiled.

Then they both heard a noise of trumpets, and Montrose raised his hand and wiped his tears from his eyes, peering to see what was happening.

A great voice, enormously amplified, rang from a hundred places beneath the earth, loud enough to shake the rocks and to make the cnidarians tremble in midair. The voices were crying in Latin.

“IS IT YET, THE AEON?”

Montrose put his good hand to one ear, wincing. It was, of course, a recording of his own voice. It was mingled with supersonics and subsonics, and the sound-based weapons were already throwing so many of the cnidarians out of the air that metal pieces were flashing and floating as they spun earthward like so many bits of tinfoil.

And many voices roared in answer, a tidal wave of noise. “IT IS NOT YET!”

“IS SHE COME, MY RANIA?”

And the many voices made the Earth tremble. “SHE IS NOT COME!”

“THEN ARISE! ARISE AND SLAY, FOR THEY DARE WAKE ME WHEN MINE AEON IS NOT YET, AND MY RANIA IS NOT COME.”

To the left and right of the cleft, where so much of the Tomb already lay torn open and exposed to the sky, vast doors were suddenly seen in the ground and thrusting upward. The gates opened with such force that whatever was atop them, whether dirt or rock or tree stumps or glacier, was hugely flung aside. Light, brilliant and white, poured out from underfoot, and in the light were motes of gold that fled upward like snow, if snow were made of fire, and if, instead of falling to earth from heaven, snow was received into heaven from Earth. These snowy motes came from lances held in the hands of the knights, who rose to the surface on platforms, coming suddenly into view.

The Hospitaliers were risen.

Gleaming in their black powered armor, white crosses shining on breastplate and banner, proud on the backs of rearing steeds girded and armored likewise in powered barding, the knights held in hand tall lances made of the same nanotechnological material as the slumber wands. But these had more settings than the rosy pink of thaw or the white of slumber, for now the light changed, and turned grim, and the shining hue turned purplish black, and the lances were crackling with dark sparks and motes.

The speakers from their helmets roared as each man shouted, and amplifiers buried beneath the soil acres-wide repeated the words, words which rolled across the landscape like the footfalls of giants:

“LET NONE DARE WAKEN HE WHO WAITS, FOR, LO, HIS WRATH AWAKES!”

Dark lightning from the lances swept the air like searchlights during a night air raid. The cnidarian robots that crowded near the roofless cleft began to sparkle and dissolve. Rocket fire arching from the armored men wrapped the cnidarians in boiling smoke; laser fire chopped the cnidarians neatly in pieces. Some two or three dozen were brought to the ground in a moment.

“DEUS LO VOLT!”

The wreckage of metal was strangely buoyant, and fell with dreamlike, lunar slowness. Montrose saw Sir Guiden and Oenoe, and several frightened and angry Witches, pulling themselves safely from the wreckage of the machines which had captured them. The cnidarians must have been extremely light and fragile, like the aeroscaphes of the Sylphs, because Montrose saw little Fatin push one over with one hand as she crawled out of its trembling debris.

Then several hundred of other cnidarians began to gather toward the roofless Tombs where those forty-five or so had been shot down. Several thousand beyond them, part of the colossal cloud of aerial machines, also turned and began drifting serenely in that direction, as if curious about the source of the disturbance.

Del Azarchel, looking down with one eyebrow raised, said, “Impressive. As toys, I mean. Very pretty. But they will not be able to accomplish anything against my Tower. This mighty surface-to-orbit skyhook has an outer shell made not of atoms, but of a single sheet of the strong nuclear force held in a sub-Planck-distance matrix of grids, the most invulnerable structure the whole resource of our current world can imagine or devise. Nothing can pierce the hull.”

“Hull, schmull. You left the basement door open,” said Montrose. “And my men can call up the lightning from hell.”

At that moment, a voice came from the cnidarian on which they stood. “Master,” it said. “There is a vast electrical disturbance in the mantle and crust of the Earth, apparently being produced by the entire core itself…”

“Only the outer core is being used as a dynamo,” interrupted Menelaus, his teeth gritted in a mad grimace. “I mean, let’s not exaggerate what I can do. That would be ridiculous.”

“… and resulting in a buildup,” continued the emotionless voice, “… of a static charge of immense…”

The concussion smothered any next words.

What came up from the earth next were not the relatively mild sparks called lightning that appear in electrical storms, when passing clouds build up a charge differential between the ground and thunderhead. No, rather, this was the power of the rotating nickel-iron core of the Earth, a dynamo so astronomically vast that it produced such things as the magnetic fields surrounding the planet, with all their associated celestial phenomena such as the Van Allen radiation belts, the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis, the ozone layer, and so on, merely as side effects.