The golden box of the burial chamber beneath them was clear and plain to the eye. The cnidarian on which they stood had been pushed by the gale winds to the north, so they now saw the chamber from a different angle. There were the great main doors.

Above the doors was the portrait of a fair princess in white, with the half circle of a galaxy framing her like a multistellar sunrise.

Del Azarchel, eyes on the portrait of Rania, said brusquely, “Give my compliments to the Grandmaster Sir Guiden and tell him that if he orders his men to stop firing, I will call my instruments back into the Tower, and trouble him no further. You I will also release back into his hands. There is no need to involve these others. I will let your humans live: such pets do not concern me. This is between the two of us.”

Montrose said, “It won’t take me long to dig up my armor and my Krupp gun.”

“Ah. You keep yours loaded and ready? So do I. I will meet you in an hour.”

And Del Azarchel ordered his cnidarian to carry Montrose gently back down to the Tomb.

13

The Judge of Ages and the Master of the World

1. Delays

It took longer than an hour.

As there always were in affairs of this type, despite the willingness, even the impatience, to begin, there were delays which accumulated to many hours.

The Seconds had to be appointed and sent to address each other.

Montrose had to receive medical attention and invigoration from his coffins. He had much, much damage to undo; and Del Azarchel scorned the idea of facing a foe at less than the peak of his prowess, and so insisted he be sent the coffin medical reports to prove Montrose was hale. Since some of the information had value, it had to be redacted, and the Seconds had to negotiate what data were left in and what cut out.

The submicroscopic mites the Blue Men had introduced into Montrose’s nervous system had to be painstakingly removed, lest they hinder his reaction time.

With great reluctance and regret, Montrose also had his implants, which had served him so well, removed. Now that Exarchel was occupying the entire volume of Pellucid, and was having the nanomechanisms augmenting his brain power expanded in number from merely what could coat the Earth to what could fill it, the signal environment was too dangerous for Montrose to have any direct link even to peripheral parts of his nervous system. Montrose also did not want to be distracted by an unexpected hiss of electromagnetic noise, or to have anything radiating from him that a clever bullet might target.

The negotiations over the intelligence quotient of the weapons also took time. Since a logic crystal the size of a diamond that could fit on a lady’s smallest finger contained calculating power equal to what every computer system on the Earth combined could achieve back when these guns were first designed and programmed, there was something absurd about the long discussion over how intelligent, and what kind of intelligence, and what programming, could be allowed in the gun calculation magazine. It was as if they were discussing whether the abacus could use oily stones, lest the fingers flicking the beads get some advantage of speed. But Montrose did not merely admire and appreciate, he loved his weapon, and refused to admit that it could ever be out-of-date. And from the tenacity of the responses carried by the Seconds, Del Azarchel felt the same way.

When Montrose explained to Keirthlin the Linderling that the ranging and detection gear performed its calculations by means of electrons being forced across open or shut transistor gates powered by a current differential in the circuit, she actually laughed, her deep sorrow, if only for that moment, held in abeyance.

However, Vulpina chided her, saying that Chimeresses were trained in every weapon, even the oldest and simplest, because at times this was the only weapon at hand. She also made a point of saying to Montrose that Chimeresses made good wives and bore fierce children.

There was considerable debate over whom to have as judge of honor presiding over the duel. Everyone Del Azarchel and Montrose knew was either one man’s servant and the other man’s enemy or vice versa. Montrose thought it over carefully, and then agreed that Alalloel the Cetacean could serve in this capacity.

Montrose had to check his dueling armor, which, compared to the powered armor of the Hospitaliers, now seemed primitive, small, and weak, but unbearably precious. Both men had to submit (Montrose insisted) to an invasive medical examination by agreed-upon physicians, to ensure that their skin, bones, and organs were within a defined range of human location, and made of natural biological materials.

And, most importantly, after all other matters were decided, Montrose returned to his Tombs and found a workbench, found a light and shook it until it glowed, and he sat and packed the chaff for his dueling pistol, and selected and balanced and loaded and programmed the targeting tactics, one by one, into the eight escort gyro-jet bullets, and then into the deadly, massive, self-propelled main shot.

As it happened, it was the brink of dawn before they met and faced each other.

2. Unnatural Twilight

It was dark where they stood below the foot of the Bell, the air scented with the hint of sunrise, but the cherry-red light of dawn struck the sides of the vast Tower above them. Above that, where the structure intercepted the direct and unrefracted rays of the sun, the towerlight was yellow. An aurora borealis had gathered around the reaches above that, a side effect of radiation disturbances and flux in the magnetosphere surrounding the globe. Even farther skyward, the uppermost lengths, and the long-tailed crescent of the anchor point, were glaring in the sharp light of hard vacuum.

The Tower was far brighter than the full moon. Because of this, odd to the eye, the landscape neither had the clarity of daylight nor the mystic softness of moonlight. It was not even the wild overcast gloom of a heavy storm, since the light was the color of blood and fire, but too bright. It was, rather, like the unnatural noon twilight of a solar eclipse. Everything looked spectral.

The scenery exposed to that light was equally uncanny. It was like the surface of the moon for craters and pockmarks. Steam rose from glaciers in the distance, which were sprinkled with spots and streamers of molten and refrozen iron, surrounded wherever it appeared by discharged matter that looked like fine black sand. Stumps of burnt and broken trees lay every way the eye turned, and the piled and thrown trunks were like the remnants of a lumberyard fire, acres of black splinters.

A dry streambed cut across the hill in one area; and frozen fans, red with rust and sediment, boiling and dripping across the slopes, was the dispossessed volume of water that once ran there.

In another place, a lake that had been underground had boiled to the surface, but a vortex was in the midst of it, and a continual roaring; and broken bits of depthtrain cars floated on the lake. The water was draining into the rail tube leading below the mantle of the Earth.

In each direction was wreckage, destruction and death, broken rock, craters, smoke and burnings, and fields of cracked ice dotted with pellets and dust from the earth’s core, or black with tiny bits and flakes of debris that fell from the inner cylinder of the skyhook.

The only things that were whole were the cnidarian machines, hanging with unnatural weightlessness between the broken landscape and the storm-caressed Tower.

One of these, a cnidarian no larger than a Viking longboat, swooped smoothly down through the predawn gloom. Against the vertical red river of towerlight, the silhouettes of five hooded figures could be seen: one boyish and slouching, one looming and huge-limbed as a blacksmith, one thin and erect as an upraised sword, one crowned with two golden tendrils. The final figure was half their height, like a big-headed child.