Alium, page 55
Chalem glowered. “So you keep on with this talk of doom. No power in the universe can supplant me now. There is a cannon aboard this vessel which can obliterate entire countries. Do you know of any magic to accomplish such a feat?”
The wizard raised his fluffy eyebrows like a tired parent.
The King smirked. “What is this news?”
“The Empress refuses alliance against Duxmortul so long as you advance upon Efvla with your fleet, and at the knowledge of your new might—which I gave her freely—has resorted to the worst desperation. Fozlest has sworn to exhume and set upon you an ancient evil from its prison beneath the sea, a godling called the Frandun, which long ago battled with Caelare herself, and could not be slain even by the full might of the goddess.”
Chalem’s proud smile did not waver. “And you have the audacity to return here? You who have—as you say—doomed us all, then, if our weapons cannot suffice.”
“Certainly they do not suffice.”
The King laughed, cold and clear. “Foolish old man. Have you not guessed it yet? My ancestor Chalor was not one to give up such strength. He knew that the Elechlear never wished to forget their power! They were forced to seal it away by that very goddess herself.” Now he leaned forward, the mad ecstasy of might on his brow. “Caelare fears our power.”
“You know not what you do, Son of Chalor.” Nubes’ voice boomed and the air seemed to crackle with a different kind of energy. “This will be the end of us all. Yet hear my council unchanged: there is still hope for Altum if we join forces with the Empire. Only together can we force the Frandun to incarceration and prepare for war with those who come to enslave this world which is home to us both, Novare and Xol.”
Chalem turned back to his lectern, gazing through the tremendous window unto the distant glittering expanse of purple sea. The hand which held his sceptre was uncommonly gentle, and the sharp tip of the instrument hardly graced the metal floor, so calm was its wielder.
“The weapons forged by our fathers will accomplish these tasks, along with the total eradication of the hated black forest. The Xol are as evil as any, and we will exterminate them now before the bigger foe might disrupt our long-hearted war. Harbinger knows well that beneath the most mutated woods of their land lie some of the oldest and greatest vestiges of the Elechlear world. When Duxmortul arrives, Lucetal will be equipped with a hundred more ships as glorious as this, and a hundred thousand more weapons the likes of which It cannot know.” Two of the powerfully armoured knights seized Nubes by the arms. The luxint cores in their suits gave them the strength of fifty Novare each, and they held him so tight as to seal him in molten metal instantly cooled. “What good is your wisdom if you cannot surpass ordinary men, great wizard? Watch as the primitive Empire of the Xol turns to ash. From the wastes of their end will rise at last the full majesty of our kin.”
Metal circlets were clamped to Nubes’ wrists and ankles, bands of the blue-white energy leaping all together from each to join in a bright net constraining his every movement. His staff was removed to the vestibule, and he was led to stand lastly beside Chalem in a mockery of his former seat at the throne of Lucetal.
“Captain,” Chalem called to Ramcrone, his voice—which passion had for a moment cracked—suddenly composed. “We shall achieve the coast within the hour. The Xol army there has mostly retreated and gathered to the northeast. We will strike from above with the Lux Cannon and move on. Your orders are to stay behind—take twenty ships and whichever men and equipment you desire—to sweep the city. Search the biggest trees for any surviving leaders, and kill them. I’ll have no other magic users aboard our ships. One wizard is enough.”
“My Lord,” said Ramcrone gruffly. “Was I not to lead the charge on Xoldra?”
Chalem laughed distantly. “Vespia commands a destroyer which is already much closer.” He glanced casually across the room to his Captain. “You must admit she is more skilled as a pilot. We cannot show even the slightest inefficiency in that blackest wood. Besides, I need your valour in the outer wilds cutting off the Xol now retreating to the capital. Put that new toy of yours to work!”
The knight set his eyes upon the floor, arms crossed. “Aye, m’Lord.”
“This Lux Cannon,” Nubes tittered suddenly. “Might it be the same weapon that nearly destroyed your ancestors?”
“No, you speak of the Luxint Ray.” The blue hologram of Harbinger winked into being before the lectern. Ageless and slender he stood in the same floating image of a hairless young man with which he had first appeared to Nubes beneath the throne room, and tilted his head as if to add some degree of Novare authenticity to his speech. “That weapon can only be deployed from orbit, and though this ship is capable of interfacing with its computer, it seems to have been offline for many thousands of years.”
“Which is well,” said the King.
Nubes raised an ashen eyebrow. “Well? To go without your greatest weapon? I see there is yet some speck of remorse in you.”
Chalem smirked. “If only it was merely a weapon, I should use it without hesitation. But the Ray leaves behind a deathless breed of invisible poison which only decays over great ages. The last of the Elechlear only returned to Altum when the worst of it had finally faded.”
“But it is nothing more than luxint energy, correct?” Nubes turned to Harbinger.
“Yes.”
“Then does this ship not trail such poison through the sky even as we speak?”
“To a degree, but it is statistically harmless.”
“Right.” Chalem smiled wolfishly, his yellow hair seeming all the more sickly and pale.
“The Lux Cannon, however, which the King speaks of, leaves behind a significant degree of radiation. Its fallout cannot approach the devastation that drove your people to the stars, but the areas which it strikes will be uninhabitable by Novare for no less than one thousand years.”
“So you will not acquire their land after all,” Nubes murmured.
The King looked off over the vast fabric of the poison sea as if he had considered such a notion many times. “Not now, yes, or for myself, but what is one millennium next to the future of our people? Harbinger, we will still be able to extract the other Elechlear Forts using the gear you spoke of?”
“Yes. There are enough radiation suits aboard Soarlin alone to clothe a formidable investigation.”
The King nodded. “You see, Nubes. We will unearth the rest of our weapons and face Duxmortul with more power than the Xol could ever offer.”
On this point, Nubes was silent.
*
For a while King and wizard stood as once they had in the court of Lucetal, watching through the crystal floor as the leagues of the purple sea rushed below. The world was still, it seemed, poised on the precipice of war, and between the men so openly opposed in their ideals there settled even a calm which spoke to the many years they had spent together. But it was not to last. As the first hazy signs of coastline troubled the otherwise changeless horizon, a great boom echoed through the ship, and Nubes being quite unable to balance fell flat on his rear. Chalem, however, stood tall, and holding up his hand bid his knights be at ease.
At the swift turning of his ringed hand amid the luxint control field, a sudden magnification distorted the fore of the command deck, as though the transparent ellipse itself were made of that same transformative energy. Now they saw in stunning detail what waited a hundred miles ahead, the individual trees, the lay of the white shore, the crashing of the poison surf upon it, and even the trailing wisps of dirt and rock tumbling all about, displaced by the great quake which must have been the cause of so titanic a noise. Now a tremendous wave smashed unto the coast, so tall and powerful that it pressed through the tall elz sentinels there and flooded into their midst as though the sea had risen twenty meters in level. Chalem withdrew the focus of his sight to reveal in a wide perspective including all the surrounding sea, another wave coming in from the open water more massive than the first, and behind it, rising, curling in upon itself, a third which might smother and drown all Lucetal with its landing.
But above and beyond even this historic wave, a greater shape was risen, and of its birth surely radiated the seismic power so shaking the world and dashing the coast with destroying waters. It was a colossal, dark hump, emerging as from the enseaming masses of the sea itself, shed from its growing substance in waves more stupefying. Yet already the smooth shape began to change, articulating round terrific geysers of solid ocean erupting from the great gaps of its moving parts, collapsing in crushing falls upon the long, unfolding digits as of some monstrous hand, opened and splaying its sickle claws each streaming huge rivers of seawater. Suspended fully above the exploding waves and clear in its enormous image as the hand of the deep incarnate, the horrifying organ slammed down, raked grinding chasms in the distant beach, caught hold of some stiffer rock below the crust, and began to pull so hard that the shelf of land split under the pressure and cracked in huge rifts which sped out into the forest, sucking grand lines of elz beneath the world like broken twigs, and throwing up into the sky from their distant midst huge storms of black debris.
As the titan hand bore down into the surface of the continental plate for support, far out to sea up reared the vast sluggish coils of an enormous serpent, one staggering loop after another, until at last it seemed the final head of the thing had been yanked to the surface. Still with lethargy it rose, and Chalem gasped as clear as Nubes, for the immense scales of the serpent body did not appear upon the loathsome, hairy visage which slowly shook out its lank fur boisterous with the crashing ocean, devil-horned, massive tusked, and absurdly toothed. Sea water seeped from its grizzled jaws, and its numberless, differently sized, lambent eyes—situated chaotically all along the length of the neck and head—gazed each in their own directions with terrible comprehension of their wakefulness. Winding and knotting and twisting the newborn jaws shot straight up into the sky, and though it was a clear day soon vanished by the sheer extent of that still loosely uncoiling neck. Up came then the shoulders of the creature much closer to the hand which mantled up its cosmic weight against the land, and the rising full bulk of the body of the thing became so large as to reveal its every detail, for it was covered in coarse, matted fur, as it reared up and bared its ugly chest.
In its full height the terrible head was nowhere to be seen, as if it searched to swallow Caelare herself for its first free errand in a billion years of frozen sleep. Yet even so, untensed coils of its scaly serpent neck still hung in awful loops waiting to unravel as the head dove higher. These rings of snake-flesh wrapped and swung massively all over the hairy body, which was as large as a mountain. And then suddenly, as if it had been merely hiding just out of sight, the hideous head lowered into view, its every eye—and all those eyes bulging massively down the neck—focused on the command ship. Already the great claw began to slip from the coastal shelf, the massive hairy body began to plow through the purple waves.
“Behold, the Frandun,” said Nubes distantly.
Chalem shakily raised his old hands from the field of blue light, and with them was out-flung a planar vision into some other part of the ship, where a host of technicians sat in various states of awe and frenzy in rows of metal seats, eclectic luxint fields of presumably differing purpose hovering at their hands along curving silvery desks. Only one man appeared to notice the King’s intrusion; seated before a larger display at the back of the wide chamber atop a raised platform, he was the Captain of Defence.
“Ready the Lux Cannon!” the King shouted into the hologram. “Atomize that monster before it takes another step!” Though the pride in Chalem’s voice was not assuaged, there was a haste in it which seemed to make the captain slightly nervous, but as if hearing his own doubt in the distorted, distant-sounding words which had left his dry mouth, the King added, “Now we shall experience the true might of our ancestors!”
The man grinned through whatever anguish was brought on by the sight of the Frandun, for his desire to unleash their most glorious weapon without consequence was far greater than his fear. “It is fully charged, my Lord,” he replied as quickly as he could, his knuckles white against the armrests of his chair, wispy moustache fluttering as he spoke, and now most others in the room had noticed what must have been a vast apparition of Chalem before them. The captain shouted down to their ranks. “How is our aim?”
“We are locked on to its chest,” came a shout from a group which stood now about one field of blue energy.
In the enhanced view the beast waded through the sea as if it walked upon the very bottom, hunching its mountainous shaggy shoulders, lowering its reptilian neck in innumerable helices rearing up behind the slathering fangs and tusks bared under its lowering horns.
“Fire!” Chalem yelled.
Silence arose, as though all commotion was sucked from the universe, and all was perfectly ordered and still. Then a pure, straight, fine beam of light shot straight and true from beneath the command deck, out along the sea. Perhaps ten full seconds passed as it travelled the many leagues of distance to its titan target, but it seemed as though it struck right where the heart should be. Great blue tendons of energy coiled about the thread of light, and a second beam purely blue and wider, large and columnar barrelled down the length of the white light and struck with an enormous, world-rocking boom against the creature’s chest. The impact roared louder than anything ever perhaps heard on the face of Altum, and mortal vision was drowned in a flash. Down leaned the Frandun as if fallen to one knee against the abyssal floor, lopsided against the waves which slammed now in a directionless chaos. Huge clouds of steam poured up and out from the place where it was struck, until the whole coast was full of white fog.
“Halt forward progress,” said Chalem, opening a second luxint field-screen unto the flight deck, where his team of pilots swiftly slowed the great ship to a stop.
The white hot fog was viscous, billowing thicker with each roiling plume. Seconds crawled by. All aboard, upon every deck, in every chamber big or small or hallway void of windows, waited in a great pause. Then there was a noise like the tortured ululations of demon choirs in hell, screeching, wailing, calling out from a place of suffering eternally endured to mock the petty weapons of men which chanced to scratch a god. The nebulous steam began to clear and disperse, therein was the great shadow of a snake rearing up. A clawed hand swiped forward, and so immense was its reach and size that the clouds were ripped and thrown to the winds, jetting off over the forest and the waves.
Now Chalem saw what his cannon had wrought. The entire right side and arm of the monster had been obliterated. A huge gory mess carved in jagged crescent from neck to hip spewed hideous black ichor like oil into the sea, and from the ragged tissue all manners of nonsensical bone sprouted, splintered and smoking. Still the thing had legs, or at least some means of locomotion beneath the surface, and seemed in general unperturbed, for it sank suddenly out of sight, not as in collapsing but as in diving.
“We just need to hit it one more time,” Chalem muttered shakily, somehow smiling, and a new kind of pride, a crazed arrogance as in the heat of battle supplanted his former confidence. “To think that our fathers’ technology is capable of even hurting a monster like that. Truly the thing is godlike! But we will do the smiting today! Raise our elevation! We must exceed the Mardes if we want to be safe from that thing’s reach.”
“Yes, my Lord!” The pilots laboured over their holographic controls, and with a powerful thrust the ship began to rise, gathering speed.
Now the King addressed the second image. “Recharge the cannon at once.”
“Your Grace, it won’t be ready for about forty minutes,” said the Captain of Defence. Behind him the technicians stood dead-eyed in awe of their peril.
“Then man the turrets and activate the phasers; express all that is in your lesser guns, Captain!” Chalem swept his hand through the command field, opening communication channels with the fleet. “I need all ships outbound. The sea creature is your target. Concentrate maximum firepower upon the neck and cut off that hideous head!”
Over the feed came then the sound of hatches opening and boots tramping, the yelling of names and responsibilities, the odd shout of despair. Suddenly all was dark in the cabin, for a wall of solid water erupted about the ship. There was a tremendous explosion of noise as the entire ship listed violently to the side, the structure of it all jarring, shaking. A loud grinding sound issued. The ship tilted on its side. Lights flashed red and bloody. Chalem bellowed orders to his pilots. The vessel righted, and as the command deck shed its last curtain of violet seawater, there waited before it but one enormous, bulging yellow eye itself twice as large as the command deck, as if the Frandun knew precisely that this small disc contained the one who had blown off its arm. So enormous was that visual organ that the knights fled to the back of the cabin, and Nubes stared in wonder at the most monstrous manifestation of flesh ever to have graced his presence.
“Attack, you fools!” Chalem shouted, staggering back, his sceptre slipping from his grasp as he fell upon the floor. “Protect the command deck!”
Sharp spears of blue light stabbed out from above and below, shredding matted fur and bursting part of the glassy wall of the eye. Gouts of smoke and black ichor jetted in all directions, hissed and slopped against the glass, and tattered gunk hung in strips shorn from the immense orbit, but the creature was largely unfazed, and now pressed its eye directly against the command deck, obscuring everything but for its pulsing veins big as rivers chugging against the glass so powerfully as to transmit the roaring of their blood through even shielding so thick. “Where is the fleet?” Chalem leapt up and stood shaking before the great eye which seemed to look directly into his own. “Begone you foul creature!” He shouted, “You are nothing next to the might of Lucetal!”
