Chapter 25

Backfire

"Desperate measures ― how the Outsiders enjoy them."

― the Sentinel Oldahn, before destroying a Slac citadel, and himself, to rescue Doril

The old Sorcerers battled with no finesse, no imagination, simply brutal persistence. But they attacked, and kept attacking, even after they received deadly injuries.

Siryyk's monster fighters fell by the score; many split up and fled back toward the mountain terrain. The special Slac troops tried a different tactic, with five of them converging on a single Sorcerer, hacking the undead body to pieces, then moving to the next opponent. The snow had been churned into mud and blood.

The monsters howled and snarled and clanged their weapons as they battled; but the old Sorcerers spoke no word, gave no cry of triumph or pain or anger. They merely fought in silence, with a deliberate and ponderous ferocity.

Siryyk stood by the carcass of the dragon and felt agony in his body. His scorpion tail remained drained of power. He felt cracked bones in his chest and hot blood in his mouth from Arken's attack; the wounds from Rognoth scored across his hide. He had never come so close to defeat before.

When he saw that the fighters marching out of the ice fortress were yet another wild card Delrael's army played on him, he felt his fury rise to its highest pitch.

With a sudden snap in his mind, he also sensed a greater freedom of his thoughts, as if the Outsider David had diverted his attentions elsewhere. Siryyk knew this would be his chance to make a final gambit.

"I want those Stones now!" he snarled to himself, and then bellowed in a voice that crackled over the battlefield. "Korux!"

General Korux rode away from the fighting in the steam-engine car. Bound in the back, Professor Verne lay struggling. Korux enjoyed taunting the prisoner and trying to frighten him, but Siryyk had no more patience for that.

"Prepare the cannon!" the manticore said. "I want those fortress walls down immediately. Delrael is inside. These ― " He glared at the attacking old Sorcerers. Blood-flecked saliva came down his black lips. "These are just diversions."

Siryyk turned his squarish head and looked around the battlefield, seeing how many of his monster fighters lay slaughtered. It angered him that his own troops were such pathetic fighters.

Throughout this entire march the humans had defeated him again and again. Siryyk's horde had once outnumbered the humans five to one ― and now the forces seemed equally matched.

"Hurry!" he snapped at Korux.

The Slac general leaped out of the steam-engine car and ran to the black cannon. Its surface gleamed in patches from where the goblins had scoured it that morning, but their work had been interrupted by the appearance of Arken.

As the old Sorcerers continued to fight, and as wounded monsters kept screaming and snarling, Korux and several Slac assistants aimed the cannon barrel at the thick ice walls.

Siryyk drew himself up. In a moment the fortress would crumble. He would march in triumph and snatch the Stones out of Delrael's dying hand.

In the steam-engine car, Professor Verne squirmed and managed to get himself into a sitting position with his elbows propped behind him. He coughed. His eyes looked wide and bloodshot, his appearance haggard, a character at the end of his play.

Korux and the Slac loaded the cannon with one of the last casks of firepowder, then they rolled the heavy cannonball down the gullet of the weapon.

"Wait!" Verne said. His voice was weak, but desperate. "Please wait. I know how to make it better."

The manticore turned to him. "I am quite satisfied with the performance of your cannon as it is."

"You don't understand," Verne sounded too tired to shout. "You saw the avalanche you created when you fired it before. Do you want to destroy the entire ice fortress? Please, I can adjust the detonation, change it so that the impact is less brisant. It will merely shatter the walls and open a way for you to get in."

"It is a trick," Korux said to Siryyk. The other Slac finished aiming the cannon and locked down the gears. They placed rocks behind the wheels to stop the recoil from hurling it backward.

"No trick. Let me save those characters. If I show you a clean way to break in, you can take what you want from them. There's no need to slaughter the entire army."

"Why should I bother?" Siryyk said.

Verne's haggard face grew hard, and he snapped, "What if your unnecessary destruction ruins the Stones? How long is it going to take you to dig through a mound of rubble and dead characters just to find a few tiny gems?"

"All right," Siryyk said. "But hurry." The vision of tedious sifting through the wreckage had not occurred to him. If they could overwhelm the human forces and take Delrael prisoner, Siryyk would enjoy drawing claws across the human commander's throat. It would be much more satisfying than just blowing up the place.

"Korux ― watch him!"

Siryyk yanked the professor out of the steam-engine car and used his claws to rip free the bindings on Verne's wrists and ankles. The professor cried out as the ropes snapped, and the manticore wondered if he had sprained the man's wrists, then decided it didn't matter.

Verne stumbled to the cannon, as if on the verge of breaking into sobs. He adjusted parts of the back end of the cannon, moving the bronze support struts that Siryyk had always suspected served no purpose. Verne seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

Korux stood beside Verne with a short sword poised against his ribs. The professor turned to the Slac general and sneered. "I am incredibly weary of your bullying. I have nothing left to fear, so you're wasting your energy."

Korux hissed, but Verne ignored him and finished with the cannon. He glared at Siryyk. "It's finished. You may fire it ― and the rest of your efforts be damned!"

Siryyk knocked Verne sprawling toward the steam-engine car and then took up his position behind the cannon. "Korux, bring me a torch! Prepare the entire army for a charge into the fortress when we blast the walls down. Have them ignore these other fighters."

Korux bellowed to all the monsters who could hear him. One of the other Slac handed Siryyk a burning brand from a scattered campfire.

The manticore, holding the torch in his huge paw, stepped behind the cannon.

Verne crawled to his knees and watched the end of his work. He had lived in such terror for so long that his emotions were scoured down into apathy. Tears seemed to freeze across his eyes.

Siryyk took his position directly behind the cannon, as he had done before, and raised his flame to the touch hole. The fuse hissed. The other Slac backed away, covering their ears.

The entire cannon exploded.

The back end of the barrel blew out in a tremendous sheet of flame and shrapnel. The iron cylinder blasted apart.

Verne rolled behind the steam-engine car for shelter. As the smoke and flames cleared, he saw the twisted wreckage of his cannon tilted onto one side on a broken wheel. With a groan, it slumped and collapsed to the ground.

Behind it, thrown backward five feet from the concussion, the bulk of Siryyk lay in a mess of blood and mangled tissue. His face and his broad chest had been blown away. His neck snapped backward, his spine turned inside out. A hiss like a leaking Sitnaltan air pump wheezed through the holes in the manticore's punctured lungs. With a crackle of sparks and a dying blue glow, the deadly scorpion tail twitched once and then lay still.

The other monsters howled and shouted. Several ran to Siryyk's body like flies settling on a fresh kill.

With a cry of triumph, Verne leaped to his feet and felt the raw edge of joy fill him again. In one blow he had destroyed the deadly cannon and killed the powerful commander of the horde ― perhaps he had even saved Gamearth.

A sharp reptilian hand grabbed the hair behind Verne's head and dug claws into his scalp, tilting his face up. Korux, two feet taller than the professor, glared down with sizzling slitted eyes.

"Now it's time for my fun, Professor. And no one is going to stop me." He put the point of his short sword against Verne's abdomen.

Verne could not summon the energy even to struggle. Unlike when he had tried to throw himself into the void of broken hexes, this time his self-preservation drive did not try to assert itself.

"You have begged for this a long time," Korux said.

Slowly, an inch at a time, he pushed the blade deep into Verne's stomach until the bloody point came out his back.

The professor's last thought was to wonder if he and Frankenstein had ever patented a sword-proof vest.

In disgust, Korux tossed Verne's body down to the ground. Many of the monsters had stopped fighting. But the remaining old Sorcerer forces continued to drive forward and attack.

Korux immediately took charge. "We will destroy them all now!" he shouted. His own Slac came to him, adding their instant support. He spoke to them.

"We will use a tactic Siryyk himself feared. The professor created an ultimate weapon ― and after we detonate it, we will be the victors. Gamearth is ours!"

With one hand, Korux snatched Verne's bloody body up from the ground and dumped him into the back seat of the still-chugging steam-engine car. "It's time for you to take a message to Delrael, Professor."

Korux set the Sitnaltan weapon upright on the seat. It looked so much smaller, so much more harmless than the cannon, but though Korux did not understand how it functioned, he knew clearly the fear it inspired in Verne, and the hesitation that the manticore had felt when thinking about it.

Korux pushed the arming button and then set the newly repaired timer. He had watched the professor fix the device, and as he held a knife to Verne's scrawny throat and hissed in his ear, he had forced the man to tell him how to use the weapon. For just such an occasion as this.

Now, when he released the timer and it began to tick like the rattling of a viper, Korux adjusted the steering levers and disengaged the braking lock. He jumped out of the car as it rolled forward.

The Slac general signalled his own fighters to back away, to be prepared to shield their eyes. "This will be spectacular!" he said.

The Sitnaltan weapon continued to tick as the vehicle drove in a straight line toward the ice fortress.

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