The clouds parted like a door opening. I saw the lower slopes of the mountain forested with rank upon rank of black-clad warrior-women on horseback, rifles ready. Field pieces on gun-carriages were placed here and there among the cavalry squadrons, two-inch and four-inch guns of blue metal, with caissons standing by. The beautiful armor-clad women sat ahorse, without motion, without noise, awaiting orders.
To either side of the well-ordered squares of Amazonian soldiers were two loud and ragged mobs of maenads. The vine-clad girls were rollicking and cavorting on the grass, some wrestling, some throwing the discus, many dancing to pounding drums, and bathing in wine, which they drew out of solid rock with their fingernails.
The mist parted further, drawing up the slope, revealing more mountainside. On the upper slopes were broad designs of chalk cut into the green turf, eerie stick-figure drawings: a man; an elongated bull, crook-legged with crescent horns; a spread-eagle design; a set of curves representing a snake. In the center of each wide chalk drawing, a coven of nymphs stood in a circle, gathered around altar-stones placed here and there across the slope. Some held silver knives or sickles; others held torches. Burned offerings of sheep and cattle lay on the bloodstained altars, and trains of smoke trailed up from them.
On the high slopes, among stands and shards of rock, stood choirs of sirens in austere pale robes of Greek cut, armed with fiddles, recorders, and tambourines. A choir-mistress with a wand stood before them, and the sirens were arranged in a semicircle, three ranks deep around her.
And, on a shelf of rock near the top, above them all, kneel-ing on an altar-stone, was Lamia. The Phaeacian in white to her right, and goddess of Fraud, Laverna, to her left.
Lamia raised her knife. I saw a huge wash of knotted strands and webs of magic, the force she was using to control the maenads, flex, throb, and begin to turn around that knife. The madwomen had to be controlled by a spell; otherwise, they would have torn themselves and their allies to pieces. Now the spell was heaving itself like a gathering tornado, reaching down to wash over the maenads, readying to fling themselves upon our ship.
With a mechanical precision, each Amazon shouldered her weapon.
The gun crews sent out range-finding pulses of radar energy, which I could feel, useful and innately undreamlike, bouncing obediently off our ship and returning with information to the guns.
The covens of nymphs all raised their torches. With a hissing murmur, the coven-mistresses spoke a word. The flames turned black as midnight, black as pitch, and the shadows of the women began to billow out from them like pools of ink.
The choir-leader raised her wand, and the choir of sirens drew in a breath.
Laverna smiled.
Something rose up from the pool of muck where Victor had melted.
And rose and rose, up and up.
It was a dragon. A cybernetic leviathan. An armored segmented wormlike thing, with weapons and projections built along every ring-segment of his long, long body.
The dragon-worm, five hundred yards long, thousands of tons of armed and armored flesh and horn and bone, metal and wire and substances unknown, raised a sleek serpentine head, parted serrated mandibles, and opened a mouth ringed with row on row of crystalline teeth, to reveal a central orb of blazing azure, buried deep in his throat, surrounded by a symmetrical array of boxy muscles and nerves and solenoid coils.
His eye. Victor's eye.
The crystal teeth acted as amplifiers.
What came from his mouth was brighter than the sun. It seemed almost a solid thing, and the main axis of the discharge path was surrounded with concentric tubes of lightning sparks and positronic discharges. ,
For a split second, all was utterly silent.
In silence, the beam reached across the intervening space and touched Lamia and burned her instantly to ash. The ground behind her sagged, for it was now molten rock. The mountaintop exploded in each direction, sending out tons of ash and smoke. In silence, we saw a shock wave rush out from the point of impact, a wall of dust and rubble flickering outward at the speed of sound, concentric rings of shattered destruction.
Then the sound hit us. It was as if a brick wall fell on us.
Back on the island, he had not found the materials he needed to construct all parts of his body under the sea. That had been a prototype, a toy. This was the real thing. A battlewagon. The real Victor: an adult Telchine, fully grown and fully armed.
A moment before the sound struck, I said nervously, "Leader, what do we do?" And Quentin answered softly, "Destroy them." But he was not talking to me. Quentin was in the path of a golden ray of light one of the lesser weapon-ports along the spine of the dragon-thing was shedding. Something large and dark and catlike flickered out from behind Quentin and slithered into, of all places, Colin's guitar. At the same moment, Phobetor (or, I should say, a grinning Colin inside Phobetor's body) was scuttling half-bent across the deck to snatch up the guitar.
His hoof touched a spot where the Chaos muck was still bubbling. Now he straightened up again, standing at an odd angle to the deck, as if it were a flat surface to him.
When the shock wave passed over him, it did not knock him flat. Instead, he grew larger, and the wind swirled around his mane and shaggy hair, and he spread his wings to catch it. And he laughed.
At the same moment when the dragon sheered off the top of the mountain, the siren choir, to save themselves, rotated into hyperspace and unleashed a dire barrage of death music. An all-destroying energy filled the area.
I could see them. This little pocket of dream-space in which we were stranded, this landscape of cherry blossom trees, was surrounded in all directions by a hollow four-dimensional bubble of chaos stuff. Imagine a firm island surrounded by a marshy lake, a solid planet surrounded by vacuum. The sirens jumped off the shore when their part of the island erupted, stepped into space when the planet was under attack.