Part 37 (2/2)

No! he cried. Fury electrified him. Pain returned. Again he broke through into the air and found himself floating beside the golden Kral. But this time when Mercy darted at him, openmouthed, he seized her and squeezed the dragon's neck and smashed the fangs against the rim again and again until the reptile was broken and b.l.o.o.d.y. Then he climbed into the bowl, safe.

Mayvar the Hag leaned over him and kissed the burnt blind eye. It was healed. Then she took him into her lap to nurse him, and the baby nestled down, content at last, and drank and slept.

He was on a plain of sparkling salt, wearing his gold-l.u.s.tre armour.

The antagonist was nowhere to be seen. The coward! Where was he hiding? Why didn't he come out and fight?

Gripping his photonic Spear, he searched the glaring flatland through slitted eyes. A shadow raced toward him and he looked up, into the sun.

The golden eagle stooped, talons ready, and plummeted straight for his face. His visor was full open and he shrieked as the claws raked his right eye and the bird shrilled in triumph.

He fell heavily onto his back. Blood was welling uncontrollably and the sky was red, as was the relentless sun. He knew he would lie there, half-blind and parched and stricken, until he died. The eagle wheeled high out of reach and he roasted in his armour under aloof and pitiless light, impotent.

But there was still the Spear.

With his last strength he lifted the gla.s.s lance, thumbed its highest power setting, and triggered the shot full in the face of the solar disk. Light drowned light. The patriarchal bird tumbled from a sky gone suddenly indigo. When it struck the salt it was a man in dulled gla.s.s armour, holding a broken Sword.

In mortal agony, Aiken inched toward the unmoving form of the Battlemaster, feeling his own life ebbing through his torn eyesocket. He stretched a trembling hand to the cracked helmet of his enemy and opened it.

The face inside was that of Stein Oleson.

With his mind spinning, Aiken slumped over the chest of the t.i.tanic knight. Beneath the gla.s.s cuira.s.s with its sun-face blazon a heart was still beating. Astonished, revitalized, Aiken pulled himself up. He saw that the giant was smiling. His gauntleted hand lifted, proffering the broken Sword in a gesture of fealty.

Aiken took it and felt life surge back into him. His sight cleared.

He leaned over the dying man and kissed him on the mouth.

It was deep night on the mirror.

From out of the quicksilver pool came the three-headed hermaphrodite, pulling itself onto the gleaming sh.o.r.e. The chimaera was no longer a threatening monstrosity. Even though it was still both male and female, the bodily distortions were gone and the limbs well-filled and proportionate. It stood poised in the starlight, graceful and tall. The central lion head was erect and proud; the dragon and the eagle faced it, slightly bowed. The radiance of the Sagittarius Arm gave it a reflection, not a shadow, that extended across the mirror of the quicksilver pool.

Aiken saw that the reflection was himself.

”But what does it mean?” he exclaimed, rather testily.

”You are born,” Elizabeth said.

He thought about that for a while. ”On Dalriada, they called me a psychopath.”

”You were. A suffering soul. Incomplete. Lacking eros. A freak and a cripple, almost inevitably d.a.m.ned. You were intelligent and charming and utterly self-centred. It was impossible for you to love anyone but yourself, even though you gave the illusion of caring when it suited you.”

”They were going to lock me away-or kill me!”

”You were a menace, a liability to a structured society. You saved yourself by coming here. Your silver torc rechannelled the aberrant psychic energies. You were rea.s.sured and began to change when you saw you were able to exert genuine power.”

'”In the Milieu, that would have been impossible.”

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