On the stage, Morah was shouting instructions to his troops and trying to rally those he could. As with Kokul, nothing happening around him seemed to touch him in the slightest, a state that attested to both men’s extreme powers—and one I, also, would have found especially useful and comforting right about then.
Suddenly all the shooting stopped. The square itself looked like the scene of a grisly massacre, although I knew from the nature of the rays and from experience on the sonics that most of the people had simply been knocked cold.
Morah, suddenly aware of the silence, stopped his commands and turned to look at the rooftops.
“All right, Morah! Stay where you are until we get our people out and no additional measures will be taken,” came a deep, gruff voice. You too, Kokul. We’ve no desire to kill you—but we will.”
The Wizard of Bourget seemed to smile a bit, then looked up at the security chief. Morah’s face remained impassive as always, but his eyes and manner suggested that he was boiling inside.
“You dare face down me!” Morah shot back defiantly. “If that’s you, Koril, I welcome the challenge. If not, I have little to fear from the likes of the rest of you!”
My heart jumped on hearing Koril’s name. Koril! It was really beginning! In fact, I wondered if this wasn’t all pretty well stage-managed to do just that. Maybe Matuze was becoming as bored and impatient as I was to get something moving. Well, they’d sure as hell gotten something moving now…
After a long pause, heavy-weapons opened up from the rooftops right at Yatek Morah and the stage area. They were prevented from using real devastators since they wanted to keep the unconscious crowd alive, but the amount of ordinance that did open up would atomize anything it hit, and it hit Yatek Morah head on. Tully Kokul moved fast to the side as the entire stage area crackled, burned, turned suddenly white-hot and vanished, leaving a crater two meters deep.
Yatek Morah was still standing there where the stage had been, about four meters in mid-air. The stuff continued to pour into him, and for a moment he seemed not to notice and certainly not to be worried as he looked this way and that. I realized, however, that it was a frantic series of glances even for so impressive a power. He was holding off all that concentrated firepower by sheer force of will, aided, probably, by some very effective body-worn neutralizers, but they couldn’t withstand that sort of concentrated power very long and he knew it.
Suddenly he seemed to grow and expand, becoming in an instant a huge, three-headed dragon like monster rising up, up, out of an invisible cavity in the air just above the smoldering pit. It was a fearsome, terrifying sight as the thing grew and grew until it towered over the entire square and bathed the scene in its shadow. The firing wavered, but then picked up again and, with a defiant howl and hiss from all three heads, the terrible creature shot from sight as fast as a shuttle and quickly disappeared into the sky.
The firing stopped, leaving only a scene of incredible carnage and a vast, bubbling caldron where once the square had been. Some of the people who had been knocked out by the stun rays had been caught, inevitably, in the firing, but very few—-most had drawn back during the excitement.
I had to admit I was stunned almost beyond thought, and had to call on all my training and experience to put myself back together. Things had happened very fast, and few of them were expected. First Zala—the fact that she was, perhaps had been all along, part of the opposition here and neither told me nor betrayed it in any way. And, of course, there was her transformation into someone quite different almost before my very eyes. Then the tables being turned on Morah, followed by his own incredible transformation into the terrifying three-headed dragon.
And now? I was acutely aware of how very alone I was at the moment—and how much on the outside of where I wanted to be in. I looked out into the square and listened carefully. No weapons, no sonics, no rays. It was over, whatever it was. They would come in and take their own out, now marked with the horns, and shift to new and unknown places and bases. Either I got left behind to rot or I got out there and tried to get inside.
I opened the door and walked cautiously into the street, being careful to keep close to the wall and exercising all my training and experience to make as small and difficult a target as I could for anybody who might get nervous. I admitted to myself that I would have felt much more confident with a laser pistol of my own.
Still, I had to be out here if only to make my contacts. I wondered where Zala was. If she were in this up to her neck, as it now appeared, she would be very handy—I needed some friend to bridge the gap.
For a few minutes nothing moved except a couple of the poor devils shot but not killed by the troopers near the street intersection. Obviously the ray hadn’t gotten that far. The troopers themselves were mostly ugly messes, smeared over the nicely whitewashed walls.
But then, carefully, shapes began moving into the square—or what was left of it—starting with two nasty-looking things that flew down from the rooftops. Strange creatures covered with what appeared to be both fur and feathers of gold and brown. Their bat like wings did not fold into their bodies but instead semi-accordioned on their backs. Their heads were nasty, somewhat birdlike with large eyes and beaks but capable of an almost humanlike expression. They were horrors, and for a moment I feared they were some new kind of Charonese creature come to feed on carrion. But the deliberateness of their moves and their very human manner in going through and checking the unconscious and the dead showed them to be changelings. I was not really surprised at the changeling involvement, but to see two of them that looked like the same creature was more than interesting.
Huge, claw like hands gestured beyond my line of sight, and from all four main streets they entered—a nightmarish parade of creatures that had never evolved except in the human mind. Shaggy, apelike things, things that crawled, things on four legs, walkers, hoppers, amphibians—the collection of human horrors seemed endless and terrible, all the more so because you could see in their movements and gestures, and sometimes in their features, the humanity that lay deep within them. But they were not all repulsive—some were quite beautiful and graceful, exotic creatures out of mankind’s myths and imagination, as well as its nightmares.
I looked around for some sign of Zala or, perhaps, Tully Kokul, but neither were anywhere to be seen. I was suddenly acutely aware of the fact that I was very much alone in that square, the only whole and conscious human being and not marked by the spell as a friend or ally. I began to think better of the idea and edged back along the wall toward the door once more, whereupon a couple of creatures, one tentacled and snakelike, the other a gray thing like a crude stone carving noticed me and pointed. I froze, and some of the others turned in my direction. There seemed little I could do—they had the guns—so I just stood up straight, walked away from the wall, and put my hands up.
“Wait! Don’t shoot!” I called to them. “I’m not a bad guy. I’m Zala’s husband! You know—Zala. One of your people!”
A creature that looked something like a walking tree turned to the tentacled, snakelike thing and said something I couldn’t catch. The tentacled creature said something back. I saw some shrugs and indecision from several of the more humanoid ones around as they stopped for a moment from their task of identifying those with horns and carrying them off.
The frog-man came up to them and said, clearly, “He’s the T.A.—the government man here. Get rid of him!”
One of the winged creatures nodded, pulled its pistol, and aimed it at me.