213

Christopher Stasheff

A howl of laughter answered him, and the old lord smiled.

Grinning, Magnus turned back to his cannon, laying hold of the crank and raising the muzzle a touch, then cranking it around just a few minutes clock-wise. It was all for effect, though—he had fired such antique bombards before, and knew they were scarcely precision instruments. He watched the horizon and saw a sudden puff of smoke. “Fire!”

A huge explosion rocked the battlements. The cannon slammed back against its chain, and smoke streamed out over the courtyard. Magnus waited for it to clear, gazing anxiously at the sky, trying to find his cannonball, hoping it hadn’t gone astray.

There it was, diminishing even as he watched. He reached out to touch it with his mind, changing its trajectory just a little, feeling the pressure of wind against it, resisting… .

Another puff of smoke appeared on the horizon.

Magnus guided the ball straight toward the puff. It sank down right where the smoke had been. Whatever noise it made was too little to be heard from where they were, but Magnus felt the first stab of pain in the minds of the gunners before he managed to turn his attention away.

Lord Aran was staring after the ball. “I do believe you may have hit them.”

“Or come close enough to scare them, at any rate,”

another captain said.

“I hit them,” Magnus said, with grim certainty.

Another puff of smoke appeared—but quite some distance from the first.

A cheer went up from the battlements. “You hit them, you must have hit them!” The lieutenant slapped Magnus’s shoulder, grinning. “Why else would a new gun answer us?”

The other was, indeed, silent.

The boom of the new gun sounded, and its ball splashed into the lake far from the castle.

“Loaded and ready, sir,” the serf sergeant said.

Magnus nodded and cranked the gun around.

“Fire!”

Another explosion rocked them, another cloud of smoke hid the climbing ball—but Magnus already had contact with it, was guiding its flight with telekinesis.

A puff of smoke appeared from the new gun, none from the old.

Magnus guided the ball right down on top of the smoke. At the last minute, he felt someone’s relief that the ball would pass over the gun, and dropped it sharply. Again he felt a stab of pain and alarm, and closed off his mind.

“Again!” The lieutenant slapped his shoulder.

“Two bombards out, with two shots! What a gunner you are!”

“Aye.” Lord Aran fairly beamed at Magnus. “How do you manage such wonders. Captain Pike?”

“I learned calculus,” Magnus explained—which was true, but really had very little to do with the issue.

The guns were silent for the rest of the day, and Magnus began to worry. What were they cooking up?

So he did a little mental eavesdropping—not unethical, since they were the enemy—and discovered that they were moving their energy projectors up. Yes, the projectors had greater range than the cannon—

but they needed a clear line of sight, which the cannon did not, so they, too, had to be brought up to the ridge line. Magnus relaxed—he was fairly confident when it came to dealing with energy in any form.

The infantry pressed onward across the plain.

Plumes of smoke began to appear, and the sentries reported it, grim-faced. The word spread to the peasants below, and women wailed and men cursed, for the smoke was that of their villages burning.

As dusk came, the army was only a mile away, and the plumes of smoke turned to the glow of flames.

Lord Aran looked out across his ravaged estates and nodded grimly. “Fire the causeway.”

Runners with torches sped out across the causeway to the bank, then came back, lighting the piles of tinder laid ready at the sides of the bridge. Flame-flowers blossomed behind them; then the pitch caught with a roar, and the landward drawbridge went up in a blaze. The flames raced toward the castle, a line of fire arrowing out toward the stronghold but stopping short where the drawbridge had been drawn up. Great clouds of greasy smoke filled the air, making the sentries cough and wheeze atop the battlements. Between fits, they stared, their isolation coming home to them at last—and serfs jammed the stairs, striving for a look, then passing word to their fellows below. ” Tis a bridge of flames!” ” Tis a curtain of fire!” ” ‘Tis as the Judgement Day itself!”

A WIZABD IN ABSENTIA

Then they fell silent, awed and shivering as they realized they were committed more fully than they had ever been.

Magnus knew that other lords might have left half their serfs or more to the mercy of the enemy—

certainly the women, children, and old men, so that they would not be a drain on the castle’s supplies—

but Lord Aran cared for his people’s welfare, and they cared for him in return.

“Let them make of that what they will, the nobles who beset our lord!” one captain said stoutly.

“What do they think, I wonder?” a lieutenant answered.

But Magnus knew. The lords had been sure Aran would burn his bridges, and the gentlemen had suspected it—but the serfs in the ranks were awed and fearful at the sight, so reminiscent of the Hell of which their preachers had told them.

Then lightning struck, horizontal lightning, stabbing out across the plain to score the curtain wall with a huge thunder-crack, echoing for seconds, away to the ridge line.

Women screamed, serfs howled, all dove for cover.

“Tis the anger of God!”

“Or the spite of the lords!” Magnus bellowed in answer, ducking down behind a wall. “Only of the noblemen who would bring down our Lord Aran for his charity!”

He knew he had at least thirty seconds, probably a few minutes—the energy projectors might be antiques, were certainly anything but state-of-the-art/-

their capacitors would need time to recharge—that/p>

is, if there were only one, yet; it would be quite like these spiteful aristocrats to start hurling lightning bolts the second they could, rather than waiting till all their forces were in place. Peering over the wall, he probed with his mind toward the ridge, listening for the gunners’ thoughts.

There! The officer in charge of the energy projector, thinking about his task, preening himself on having hit the castle wall with his first shot. But he was thinking about his other artillery pieces, too.

Sure enough, there was only the one gun in place, though there were seven more coming.

Seven! Magnus could see he was going to have a busy night. He probed the projector to see if it was constructed as he had thought. But he found no capacitor; this projector wasn’t working on electricity!

There was a battery, true, but it only fed current to the coils that lined the barrel, to direct the beam—

and at the base of that tube was the open mouth of a plasma bottle, a set of extremely powerful magnetic fields that held in a plasma of ionized hydrogen and heated it to the point of fusion! The idiots had brought an H-bomb to discipline their renegade member; they had brought a sun to earth! Plasma cannon were for space heaters, not for surface war-fare!

One way or another, he had to disable that monster. He followed the circuits, found and traced the huge cable that led to the power source—a fission re-actor, heavily shielded. The idiots! If that shielding cracked, they could die of radiation poisoning.

No. Serfs would die, gentlemen would die—but lords wouldn’t go anywhere near that thing.

Grimly, Magnus speeded up molecules inside a current-bearing wire. They grew hotter and hotter, melting insulation, flowing, touching the ground wire…

He felt the shock, both from the electrical explosion he had triggered and from the minds of the men near it. There was a raw, mental scream of pain—one serf had been burned—but the gentleman was only surprised at the short circuit, then suddenly afraid of what would happen when the lord found out. He began to snap out quick orders to disconnect the cable and begin repairs.

Magnus relaxed; they weren’t exactly long on skilled labor, these people. It would be an hour or more before that gun could work again—and it wouldn’t last that long. He rose from his crouch and nodded to his gun crew. “Ready?”

“Loaded and waiting, sir.” But the serfs stayed down below the wall, staring at him with huge, frightened eyes.

“Good.” Magnus turned cranks, shifting the gun’s aim slightly, then stopped back and nodded to the lieutenant. “Fire.”

The man jumped up, touched his match to the hole, and dropped back down below a crenel as the gun blasted. Magnus stayed on his feet, knowing he had nothing to fear, narrowing his eyes as he watched the ball arc away toward the ridge, adjusting its flight, guiding it with faint nudges. …

There was a flare of light on the horizon, and men-Christopher Stasheff

tal shrieks of alarm and fright, then a black anger from the gunnery officer—and relief; he wouldn’t have to try to explain that short circuit, after all.

Magnus smiled, finding satisfaction in the irony of an antique bombard taking out a high-technology energy projector.

“What… what was that flare. Captain?” the lieutenant asked.

“You know full well, Lieutenant,” Magnus answered with asperity. “It was the energy projector being crushed.” He turned to the Officer of the Watch.

“We won’t have to worry about that gun again—but they’ll bring in others. It’s going to be a long night.”

“Not if you can shoot that well with all the others, Captain,” the man said with a grin.

“Only when I’ve light—it will be much more difficult at night.”

The officer’s smile vanished. “So, of course, they will wait till night to give us any more bolts.”

“Quite likely,” Magnus agreed, “so I’m going to the barracks to catch some sleep, while I can—it’s going to be a long watch from dusk till dawn. Wake me if there’s any sign of trouble, will you?”

“Oh, you may be sure of that!”

“Thank you.” Magnus smiled and turned away.

Serf eyes tracked him as he came down the stairs—

then, all about him, the simple folk began to relax, and turned to salvaging what they could of their tents and lean-tos. Women lighted their fires and went back to preparing the evening meal. Magnus looked about him as he walked to the barracks, amazed at the resiliency of these people, who so 220

quickly began to re-establish some semblance of normality. Of course, they were descended through generations of folk who had done the same down through the centuries, through wars and natural di-sasters; they had learned to take advantage of the peaceful moment, when it came. For folk still had to eat, and still needed shelter and warmth, and took as much of it as they could when they could, for who knew when it would come again?

In the dark of the night, lightning bolts stabbed all at once and from every direction—north, south, east, west, points in between, and two from straight overhead.

“Down!” Magnus shouted, taking cover behind the curtain wall, but his yell was drowned by the thunder of the energy projectors, then by the chorus of screams as peasant tents and lean-tos blazed. The smell of burning flesh rose in the air, smoke boiled forth, and the lightnings stabbed again with the thunder about them. By their light, Magnus saw boats shooting out from the shore, crammed with quaking serf soldiers whose sergeants drove them with whips while officers stood behind with mus-kets, ready to kill any sergeant who hesitated.

Then he had to duck down again—and this time, he sought with his mind. Moral qualms had drowned in screaming, and the time for deftness and delicacy was past. He probed into the engine of the flier overhead and wrenched. Above him, he heard an explosion; then a meteor plunged toward the lake, spitting fire. He let it go, searched, found the other, and gave 221

it the same treatment. As soon as he heard the explosion, his mind was out and questing toward the horizon, orienting on the mind of a gunner, then sliding into the machine he tended, altering the angle of a coil so that the magnetic bottle inside tilted, its mouth swerving against the side of the breech, instead of being open to the muzzle… .

A miniature sun rose on the ridge line, and the gunners’ thoughts ceased. Then a huge explosion echoed about them all, and Magnus’s mind was out and searching for the next gun. Once again a bottle tilted, plasma fused into helium, and a new sun lit the night.

Men ran to and fro across the battlements, but Magnus ignored them, searching for the next projector and the next. He was sure the courtyard was filled with screaming, but he couldn’t hear it through the thunder that filled the night around him. Gun after gun exploded, the echoes of one blast only slightly beginning to diminish before the next crashed out, and the night was bright with hellfire and slashed with shadow.

Then the last energy projector was gone, but the blazing light still lit the night, from glowing mush-room clouds that merged above. The thunder rumbled away and died, and finally Magnus could hear the screaming—but also the shouting and cursing from the lake, as terrified sergeants drove their crews onward toward the castle. Magnus knew that a huge trough now ringed the plain, and hoped the idiot lords had had sense enough to use clean fusion can-Christopher Stasheff

non. He hoped some of them had been near enough to be caught in the fireballs.

“What has happened! What have they done!” It was Lord Aran, disheveled and in deshabille, obviously having yanked on whatever clothes had come to hand. He came striding out onto the ramparts, calling for information.

Magnus ran up to him. “They surrounded us with energy projectors, my lord, including two fliers overhead, and all blasted at us at the same moment.”

“We must shoot back! To the cannon!”

“We have, my lord,” Magnus said, lying only a little, “and their guns are silenced—but their soldiers come.”

“To the guns again! Sink their boats!”

“They are too close, my lord, and too many!” Magnus shouted to be heard over the din. “See!”

He pointed at the lake. The old lord looked, and the blood drained from his face. He saw his castle en-circled by boats, three concentric rings of them, the nearest only a hundred yards away—and huge gaping breaches in his wall. His face calmed with the resignation of the doomed, and he laid his hand on his sword. “Then we must fight till we die.”

“No, my lord!” Magnus shouted. “We must flee!

They will not harm your serfs or gentlemen, for they’ve done nothing wrong—only obeyed their lord, as they must. But you they will execute. Away! It is far more important to your people, to all the people of this benighted world, that you live, so they may know there is still a champion of their rights somewhere!”