Roger Zelazny - Donnerjack

“John D’Arcy Donnerjack designed well,” Phecda hissed. “This palace has stood strong so far.”

“But the end must come, Phecda,” Death answered. “We are out of ways of attacking from afar. My minions are battered beyond my ability to stir them into motion, or subverted by the proximate aura of my opponent. Even now the child itself batters at the door into the great hall. From there, it will seep up the stair and—”

A shrill howl, a cascade of maniacal laughter, varicolored lights against the darkness making brief stars where there had been none before. The dull thudding of the child beating against the door below stopped.

Mizar barked satisfaction, tails wagging. He balanced, paws against the windowsill, and howled answer to the Brass Babboon’s whistle.

“Jay comes!”

“So he does,” the Lord of Entropy said, “in the eleventh hour. I fear he only comes to join us in our ending. Alas, that his strengths are still dormant.”

“Strengths?” Tranto asked.

“Son of two worlds, born of a myth who had taken woman-form and a man who did not know that he himself was myth, engendered by the creative principle of one of the Most High at the hands of Death.” Death’s grin was skeletal, without humor. “His strengths are not the magical powers discovered in the time of need by a hero in a fable, nor are they deus ex machina so honored by the earliest playwrights, but they are strengths nonetheless.

“I had planned to awaken him to his potential as he grew to manhood in my palace, but foolishly I gave in to his father’s claim that he needed to live as a mortal. Now, it is too late and he will be unmade with the rest of us.”

Phecda had joined Mizar at the window and now she spoke, excitement making the hiss in her speech more pronounced.

“Jay iss not alone. He hass an army with him.”

“An army oddly clad and more oddly generaled,” Tranto commented.

“I did my bit with an Anglo-Indian scenario. Many of those spilling out of the train resemble Scots—male and female both.’

“And they are bearing swords,’” Phecda added, “and strange attractors. Where did he find these people? Has he stolen Skyga’s Phantom Legion?”

“No,” Death said, “for I have met many of their number, albeit briefly, in ages past. These do not scan like natives of Virtu. Yet I would swear upon my own head that they are not merely virtventurers from the Verite.”

On the wide but broken field, battle was being joined. On the one side were the green moire-touched troops that Antaeus had animated from the litter of Deep Fields. On the other were bands of Scots ghosts. Jay and the crusader ghost generated the whole; Dubhe swung from section to section, bearing messages. Alice, Drum, and Virginia had arrayed themselves as bodyguards near Jay. The Brass Babboon, too large to take part lest it endanger its allies, dropped back to where it could lob strategic strange attractors and provide a potential retreat.

Mizar’s sharp hearing caught the final commands that were being given.

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” Jay was saying, “and that’s got to be more true here than it has been in battles past, so I’m not going to try to coordinate beyond what we have here. We need to disable Earthma’s child—without its aura its army will fall.”

“Aye, laddie, and those you’ve brought will be tryin”t’ open a way for you to do that very thing.”

“Good.” Jay grinned. “Don’t let anyone’s misplaced sense that the honor should be mine keep them from slipping in a good shot. Okay?”

“Right.”

Shorty lifted his head on high. His bloodcurdling death cry was the clarion call for the attack. As voices raised in cries of “For Donnerjack!” and the stirring notes of “Scotland the Brave” Jay’s army joined battle.

Crowded in the window that gave the best view of the field, four besieged figures permitted themselves something like hope.

“They are making headway,” Tranto observed, when this was clearly true. “Antaeus’s forces seem confused, as if they have trouble perceiving them.”

“I begin to understand from where he may have recruited his army,” Death said. ” ‘Tis a clever plan, but they cannot long hold the field. An alteration to the parameters of Antaeus’s forces and they, too, will be pushed hack.”

“We have stood by you and fought for you,” Tranto said. “Would you mind just this once not speaking in riddles?”

The Lord of Deep Fields coughed laughter. “Very well. Jay has unwittingly done as the gods themselves do when they make war. In a sense, he has conjured from his imagination an army to fight for him__

but in this case the imagination is not solely his own, but is the ancestral memory of the bit of land on Eilean a’Tempull Dubh upon which John D’Arcy Donnerjack built a castle to replace that of his ancestors. Put simply, Jay has raised an army of ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” Phecda asked. “How can an army that is of those already dead be defeated?”

“By banishing them from this place, Phecda. They do not belong to

Virtu, nor even, really, to the Verite. When Earthma realizes what I have…”

He said no more, for nothing productive was to be said. Meanwhile, on the field, Jay observed his troops and came to a startling realization.

“Alice,” he said, “come here a moment, would you?”

He called her not only because she was near, but because he knew she was a skilled observer. Unlike Drum, who looked for things of significance, she had the journalist’s gift for seeing the entire setting and preserving it for analysis.

“Yes, Jay?” She came to his side.

“Tell me what you see.”

She did not question, but put on her reporter’s voice and narrated: “In the broad stretch of ground between the curving bulk of the Brass Babboon and the vast, dark palace of the Lord of Deep Fields, a strange and stylized battle is taking place.

“More awkwardly constructed than even the hound Mizar, human and machine forms come together from the rubble. Their hodge-podge forms are no match for the keen-edged blades swung by the ghosts of Castle Donnerjack, nor for the exploding strange attractors. Yet, of all those who fall, only a few fail to rise again. Immortal against immortal— or perhaps unliving against undying—war. Only a few from among the corrupted legions of Deep Fields fail to rise again.”

“Exactly!” Jay said. “We need to know what keeps the ones who fall fallen.”

“And,” Alice added in somewhat more conversational tones, “why suddenly our own troops have begun to blink out. We lost Shorty just a moment ago and the Lady of the Gallery was taken right in the act of flinging a strange attractor. If this continues, we will soon be without troops.”

Jay studied the battlefield, frantically seeking what differed about those whose opponents stayed down and those who merely delayed them.

The crusader ghost was among the most successful. His voice raised in song, his sword in one hand, a length of his chain in the other, he slashed and battered without pause. Could his crusader’s cross be some protection? No. There were others who wore similar adornment, others who bore the same weapon, others who… An idea occurred to Jay; he glanced about the field, searching for confirmation of his guess.

“It is not their swords,” Jay said, wonder dawning in his voice, “but their songs that fell their foes!”

“Songs?” Alice echoed, momentarily puzzled, but her observant nature could not be deceived for long. “You’re right, Jay! It’s the singing, not the swords that are doing the job. Even the strange attractors only delay.”

“There is no music in Deep Fields,” Jay said, remembering the tales he had culled from Dubhe and Mizar. “That’s why the Lord of the Lost treasures it so and why my father sought to win his favor with song!”