CHAPTER VII
Battle of the Titans
In the light of earliest dawn they could see it rolling toward them far off across the plain. Crouching under the loom of Brann’s castle walls, Miller and Orelle waited almost in silence. It had seemed wisest to hurry ahead by teleportation and take shelter while Brann was presumably occupying all his powers with the direction of his mechanical warrior as it broke down the walls of the Power chamber and seized at last the thing he had sought so long.
Now the two watchers—three, for Llesi waited in Miller’s brain—saw the lazily turning halo of pointed lights which was the Power glowing through the cloudiness of the machine that carried it. Faintly the soundless music of its turning floated to their ears.
“We’ll have no time to waste,” Llesi warned them. “Brann’s wanted the Power for a purpose, you know. Once he learns how to use it there’ll be no hope of controlling him. Whatever we do we must do fast.”
“Can he learn quickly how to operate it?” Miller asked.
“You’re thinking of yourself.” Llesi sounded amused. “Yes, it can be mastered without too much difficulty. But don’t think about it now, Miller. You have our promise. Be content with that.”
Miller stirred restlessly. “You’re hiding something. I’ve opened my mind to you, Orelle. If I deserve any reward for what I’m helping you do I deserve the truth from you. What is it?”
Orelle shook her head. “Don’t ask us now. I’ll tell you if we come out of this alive. But it will only distract you now. I promise you it’s nothing that will affect our plans to conquer Brann. You need all your thoughts to do that. Afterward there’ll be time to talk of other things. Look—it’s nearly here. I wonder where Brann means to let it into the castle.”
The music of the turning stars was clearer now. Miller could feel remotely that extraordinary attraction-repulsion action which the Power constantly exerted—it was so near to them as they crouched in hiding. The machine rolled its cloudy bulk past them, almost brushing their faces with the periphery of its mist, and moved up over the jumble of rocks that bordered Brann’s castle.
It pressed close against the surface of the wall. Light glowing down from that extraordinary barrier which ran like water and shone like fire cast colored shadows upon the mist, so that it was like a cumulus of sunset-lighted cloud as it flattened itself against the wall.
Miller could see Orelle’s anxious face lighted with strange hues from the water-wall as she watched. He held his breath.
Within the sunset cloud patterns of latticed diamond moved and shifted. The wall surface dimmed as if a breath had blown upon it. Darkness grew where the dimness was—and suddenly a door had opened in the streaming water-light of the barrier.
“Now!” Llesi breathed. “Now—follow it in!” She rushed forward.
There was one breathless, heart-stopping moment when the rocks turned beneath their feel and Orelle, stumbling, nearly fell. The darkness of the opened door was already beginning to mist over with solidity when they reached it.
“Dangerous.” Llesi’s thought flashed through Miller’s brain, lightning-like, far faster than it takes to express in words. “If we miss the turn of the wall-substance we’ll be caught in the solid mass. Hurry! Never mind making a noise. Hurry!”
It was like pushing through a thin jelly of darkness that gave way readily enough but thickened perceptibly even as they moved. “Don’t breathe!” Llesi warned them. “Hold your breath if you can—I think you’ll be through in a moment.”
The substance of the wall was a stiff, scarcely yielding stuff by the time they pushed free into clear air. They had made it with nothing to spare. Orelle reached back to touch the surface with a wondering hand as soon as she caught her breath, and the way they had come was already a solid resilient surface that lost its resilience as she pressed it and became hard unyielding wall again.
They stood in a steeply sloping corridor that echoed with the thin voiceless music of the Power. Ahead of them the slowly spinning stars were visible through cloudy grey moving rapidly up the ramp away from them.
Silently they followed.
They were far down under the main floors of the castle. On their left, as they climbed the steep ramp, the wall of flowing light moved ceaselessly, tracing their shadows in the inner wall of the corridor.
“Somewhere there must be guards,” Orelle said.
“I’d feel better if we’d seen some before now,” Llesi told them uneasily. “I have a feeling Brann may be more omniscient than we know.”
The ramp came to a steep end and turned back upon itself in a second long zig-zag rise. They toiled up in the wake of the cloudy robot that carried the Power. Still no guards.
The ramp zig-zagged twice more and then there was a great open area, like a spacious chimney, rising overhead. The ramp had ended. Lightly, like the cloud it was, the robot left the ground. Teleportation carried it out of sight with startling swiftness. From high above the sound of voices drifted down the well, laughter, music.
Without a word Orelle put out her arm and clasped Miller’s hand. A moment later the ground no longer pressed his feet. The light-wall slid down past them like a Niagara of colored water.
The hall in which Brann held court was a vast domed circle. In the center of it rose a dais—and over the dais a curtain of darkness hung in straight columnar folds from the great height of the ceiling, veiling the platform. On its steps a woman was sitting, a stringed instrument on her knee. Rainbow hair swung forward about her shoulders as she bent her head and swept a hand across the strings. Wild, high music rang through the room.
Someone called, “Brann! Where is Brann?” and the woman looked up, smiling. It was Tsi.
“He’ll be here. He’s coming. He expects guests,” she said and looked straight across the room toward the far wall where, in an alcove, the robot stood motionless, enshrouding the Power in a misty cloud.
Behind the robot, huddled against the alcove wall, Miller felt Orelle’s fingers tighten upon his. So long as the robot stood quiet, they were hidden behind its foggy outlines. When it moved—
“She means us,” Orelle whispered. “I know Tsi. What shall we do?”
“Wait,” Llesi counseled. “Listen.”
In the great room beyond, where Brann’s court of brilliantly robed men and women lounged on divans that seemed cushioned with substance as immaterial as mist, a discontented cry was beginning to rise. Many mental voices blended in the clamor now.
“Brann! Call him up, Tsi, call him up! Tell him the robot’s here. We want Brann again!”
Tsi swept the strings musically. “He’s still asleep, down below,” she said. “I’m not sure if I dare wake him yet. Shall I try?”
“Go down and call him,” someone urged, petulance in the voice that spoke. “We’ve waited too long already. Call him, Tsi!”
Tsi smiled. “His visitors must be here by now,” she said maliciously. “Yes, I’ll go down and waken Brann.” She laid the harp on the steps and rose.
At the same moment Miller felt a surge of force suddenly burst into blinding violence in the center of his brain. For an instant he was stunned by the power that seemed to pour tangibly forth from him and through him. . . .
The robot that had screened them from view rose from the floor, lightly as a cloud, drifted forward over the heads of the gaping audience and turned suddenly incandescent just above the dais where Tsi stood.
Miller knew it was Llesi’s doing, even before the quiet voice in his brain said, “This is the best way, after all. Attack. You were right, Miller. Now watch.”
The robot was pure flame now. With a detached part of his mind Miller understood that it must have been deactivated once its mission was completed, so that any mind which teleported it now could do with it as it would. Llesi chose to destroy it in as spectacular a manner as he could contrive.
Out of the blinding cloud of its dissolution the cube of the Power fell, the singing halo in it turning with slow, indifferent steadiness. The transparent block struck the steps a yard from where Tsi stood. It struck—and crashed through, splitting the white marble from top to floor. Tsi staggered.
The crash rang from the high vaults above, rebounding from arch to arch in distant, diminishing echoes that came slowly back to the watcher below, long after the dais had ceased to vibrate.
Tsi recovered her balance, turned on the shattered steps, looked straight across the hall to the alcove where Miller and Orelle stood.
She was shaken but she had not lost her poise.
“Sister!” she said, “Welcome to Brann’s castle. Shall I call him to greet you?”
From Orelle a strong steady thought went out, compelling and quiet.
“Tsi, sister, you must do as you think best. Is it best for us that Brann be called?”
The woman on the dais hesitated. Miller could see that the quiet confidence in Orelle’s mental voice has shaken her a little. He knew now what Orelle had meant when she said she could control Tsi.
It was a simple matter of sister speaking to sister with the voice of authority, calling back to mind the precepts of conscience and childhood training. Tsi was not, he thought, evil as Brann was evil. She was weak, certainly—and perhaps the weakness would stand them in good stead.
She said uncertainly, “Orelle, I think perhaps—” But the voices from the audience around her, rising with sudden violence, drowned out whatever it was she meant to say. Miller was reminded of Roman audiences clamoring for blood in the arena.
“Brann, Brann!” the voices howled. “Waken Brann! Go call him up to meet his guests! Brann, waken from your sleep! Brann, Brann, do you hear us?”
Tsi hesitated a moment longer. Miller was aware of a desperate stream of thought-waves pouring out from Orelle beside him but the noise of the assembled people was too strong for her. She could not get through to her sister. Tsi turned suddenly, putting both hands to her face, and stumbled up the broken steps toward the dais.
The long curtains that hung a hundred feet or more from the height of the ceiling trembled down all their dark length as she put them aside and vanished into the big tent they made, hiding the platform.
There was a moment’s profound silence.
Then Miller said quietly to Orelle, “Come on,” and, seizing her hand, strode forward across the floor. He had no idea what he meant to do but if he had come to attack then attack he must—not stand waiting for Brann to make an entrance on his throne.
Heads turned avidly to watch their progress across the great room. No one made a move to block their way, but eager eyes watched every motion they made and searched their faces for expression. This was the audience, Miller thought grimly, that would have watched Brann’s terrible “experiments” upon him if he had not escaped from the castle—with Tsi’s help. It was the audience, he realized, that might yet watch, if he failed.
Llesi was silent in his brain, waiting.
They were almost at the steps when the curtains stirred as if a breath of wind had blown through the hall. Tsi’s voice came weakly from the hidden place, “Wait, Brann—you mustn’t—”
But drowning out the feeble protest another voice sounded clear. Miller, hearing that thin, sweet, sneering pattern which was the mental voice he had heard before, the voice of Brann, felt a chill sliding down his spine and a tightening of all his muscles. It was a hateful, a frightening voice, evoking a picture of a hateful man.
“Come out, Brann!” Miller said strongly. “Unless you’re afraid of us—come out!”
Behind him in the hall two or three intrepid voices echoed the invitation. “Come out Brann! Let us see you. You aren’t afraid, Brann—come out!” He knew from that how high curiosity must run even in Brann’s stronghold and he realized that not even here, then, had Brann ever yet showed his face. It made him a little more confident. If Brann had so much to hide, then, there must be weaknesses behind that curtain upon which he could play.
He said, “Here’s the Power you wanted, Brann. We broke your platform but here it is waiting. Do you dare come out and look at it?”
Brann said nothing. But his thin, sardonic laughter rang silently through the hall.
Miller felt it rasping his nerves like something tangible. He said roughly, “All right then—I’ll come and bring you out!” And he set his foot firmly on the lowest step.
A breath of excitement and anticipation ran rippling through the hall. Llesi was still silent. Orelle’s hand in Miller’s squeezed his fingers reassuringly. He mounted the second step, reached out his free hand for the curtain. . . .
There was a deep, wrenching sound of stone against stone, and under his feet the steps lurched sickeningly. And then he was falling.
The walls spun. The floor tilted up to strike him a solid blow—that did not touch him. For some firm, supporting mind closed its protection around his body and he floated gently a dozen feet and came to solid footing again, dazed but unhurt.
The marble block of steps lay upturned upon the floor. Teleportation again, he realized. Brann had uprooted the steps he had climbed to prevent him from reaching the curtain. And someone—Llesi or Orelle—had reached out a mental beam to teleport him to safety.
Brann’s cold clear laughter rang silently through the hall. He had not yet spoken. He did not speak now but his derision was like vitriol to the ears and the mind. Brann was waiting. . . . Somehow Miller could sense that, as he waited, an eagerness and impatience went out from him toward that block of transparence on the broken steps, where the halo of the Power revolved on its singing axis.
Llesi realized it in the same instant and Miller felt in his brain the beginnings of some plan take shape—too late. For now there was a strange heaviness in the very air about him—a familiar heaviness. . . . This was the weapon Brann had used on him once before, turning the air itself to a crushing weight that had all but smashed his ribs in upon the laboring lungs.
He felt his knees buckle under that sudden, overwhelming pressure. The air screamed around him and the vast hanging curtains of the dais billowed with a serpentine motion as displaced air moved with hurricane suddenness through the great room. Miller’s breath was stopped in his chest by that unbearable pressure. His ears sang and the room swam redly before him. Brann’s careless laughter was a distant ripple of sound.
Power from outside himself gathered in Miller’s brain, gathered and spilled over in a wave like molten flame. He felt it gush out toward the platform where Brann sat hidden. But he was blind and deaf with the crushing weight of that suddenly ponderable air.
Even above his own deafness and the shriek of the unnatural wind in the room he heard the scream of riven marble. And the weight upon him lessened a little. He could see again. He could see the great block of stone uprooted with jagged edges from the broken floor at the foot of Brann’s dais.
It seemed to tear itself free, to leap into the air of its own volition—to hurtle toward Brann’s curtains as if Brann’s castle itself had suddenly turned upon him with great jagged stone fangs. In his brain Miller could feel the tremendous, concentrated effort of Llesi’s teleportation, balancing the marble weapon and guiding it on its course.
The weight upon him ceased abruptly. The release was so sudden that the congested blood drained from Miller’s brain and for an instant the great room swam before him. In that moment of faltering the hurtling marble fragment faltered too and Llesi and Miller together struggled with the faintness of Miller’s overtaxed brain.
Brann seized the opening that brief hesitation gave him. He could not stop the flying weapon but he could block it. . . . A broken segment of the marble steps flew up in the path of the oncoming boulder, grated against it, deflected its course.
The two struck together upon the dais steps and thundered down them with a ponderous sort of deliberation, bounding from step to step, their echoes rolling from the high ceiling. They went crashing across the floor, ploughing into the divans where Brann’s court had lain watching this unexpected sight.
The screams of the watchers as the great marble blocks rolled down upon them added a frenzied accompaniment to the echoes of thunder wakened by the stone itself. The room was a tumult of sound re-echoing upon sound.
Miller felt a renewed outpouring of Llesi’s power move in his brain. He saw a gigantic marble pillar across the room stagger suddenly on its base, crack across, lean majestically outward and fall. But it did not strike the floor. Instead it hurtled headlong, jagged end first, toward the dais.
Above it the ceiling buckled. There was a terrible shriek of metal upon stone as the vaulted roof gave way. But the falling debris, in turn, did not strike the floor. Deflected in a rain of shattered marble, it moved to intercept the flying pillar. Column and broken stone together crashed to the ground at the very foot of Brann’s dais.
The great hall was full of the shrieks of the scattering court, the cries of men caught beneath the falling ceiling, the uproar of echo upon echo as Brann’s throne room collapsed in thunderous noise upon its own floor.
When the thunder ceased all who could flee had vanished. Half the ceiling lay in fragments upon the floor and Miller stood dizzily looking up at the dais whose long curtains still billowed in the wind. Brann was silent for a moment as if gathering his resources for another try. And Llesi was whispering,
“My strength is failing, Miller. I can’t keep it up much longer. I’m going to try one last thing. I’ve got to know what it is Brann’s hiding. Help me if you can—and watch!”
For an instant there was silence. Then, from far overhead, a long shudder began and rippled down the length of those vast hanging curtains which shrouded Brann’s dais. Stone groaned deeply upon stone in the ceiling.
From the hidden platform Brann shrieked a soundless, “No!” as the block from which the curtains hung tore itself free of the vault above and came crashing down to rebound from the shattering pavement.
The curtains themselves fell far more slowly. Like smoke they wavered in the air, collapsing softly, deliberately, parting to one side and the other. . . .
Miller could see Brann trying to stop that fall. Invisibly the forces of his mind seemed to claw at their drifting lengths. But there was something wrong now in Brann’s mind. Even Miller could sense it.
A dissolution was taking place that the mind felt and shrank from. Something worse than hysteria, more frightening than fear itself. Llesi was suddenly intent and Orelle caught her breath.
Like smoke the last fragments of the curtains parted, lying to left and right along the broken floor, far out, in long swaths of shadow.
On the platform stood Brann. . . .
The figure that had terrorized such a multitude for so long stood swaying, clutching a black cloak about it as if to hide the shape of the body beneath. The face was contorted into a terrible grimace of anger and cold grinning hate. But the face itself was one they had all seen before.
It was the face of Tsi.
Her eyes were closed. She did not look at them nor speak nor move. And, Miller thought to himself, as Brann perhaps she had never opened her eyes. As Brann perhaps that grimace of chill hate always distorted her features. For it was clear to them all now that Tsi was mad.
“Schizophrenia,” Miller thought automatically. “Split personality.” But there was no answering thought from Llesi or from Orelle. Stunned amazement held them both frozen.
Tsi turned her unseeing eyes to Orelle. In Brann’s thin, cold, high-pitched voice-pattern she said, “Now you know. Now you’ve seen Brann. But before I kill you both, tell me—Orelle, where is Tsi?”
Miller felt a cold shudder ripple over him.