Robert Silverberg: Valentine Pontifex

“Who’s out there?” he growled. “What in the name of the Divine is all that racket?”

“My lord, I have to see you at once!” Alsimir’s voice. “Your guards say you must not be awakened under any circumstances, but I absolutely must speak with you!”

Hissune sighed. “I seem to be awake,” he said. “You may as well come in.”

There was the sound of unbolting of the doors. After a moment Alsimir entered, looking greatly agitated.

“My lord—”

“What’s going on?”

“The city is under attack, my lord!”

Suddenly Hissune was fully awake. “Attack? By whom?”

“Strange monstrous birds,” Alsimir said. “With wings like those of sea dragons, and beaks like scythes, and claws that drip poison.”

“There are no birds of such a kind.”

“These must be some evil new creatures of the Shape-shifters that began entering Ni-moya shortly before dawn from the south, a great hideous flock, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. Already they have taken fifty lives or more, and it will get much worse as the day goes on.” Alsimir went to the window. “See, my lord, there are some of them now, circling above the old palace of the duke—”

Hissune stared. A swarm of ghastly shapes soared and hovered in the clear morning sky: huge birds, bigger than gihornas, bigger even than miluftas and far more ugly. Their wings were not bird-wings but rather the sort of black leathery things, supported on outstretched fingerlike bones, that sea dragons had. Their beaks, wickedly sharp and curved, were flaming red, and their long outstretched claws were bright green. Fiercely they dived in quest of prey, swooping and rising and swooping again, while in the streets below people ran desperately for cover. Hissune watched one unwary boy of ten or twelve years, with schoolbooks under his arm, emerge from a building directly into the path of one of the creatures: it swept downward until it was no more than nine or ten feet above the ground, and its claws flicked out in a quick powerful assault that slashed through his tunic and ripped a bloody track up his back. As the bird swung swiftly upward again the boy went sprawling, hands slapping the pavement in wild convulsions. Then, almost at once, he was still, and three or four of the birds plummeted like stones from the sky, falling upon him and at once beginning to devour him.

Hissune muttered a curse. “You did well to awaken me. Have any countermeasures been taken yet?”

“We have some five hundred archers heading for the rooftops already, my lord. And we’re mobilizing the long-range energy-throwers as fast as we can.”

“Not enough. Not nearly enough. What we have to avoid is a general panic in the city—twenty million frightened civilians running around trampling each other to death. It’s vital to show them that we’re bringing the situation under control right away. Put five thousand archers up on the roofs. Ten thousand, if we have them. I want everybody who knows how to draw a bow up there taking part in this—all over the city, highly visible, highly reassuring.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“And issue a general command to the citizens to stay indoors until further orders. No one is to go outside: no one, regardless of how urgent he thinks his business is, while the birds are still a menace. Also: have Stimion send word downriver to Divvis that we’re having a little trouble here and he’d better be on guard if he’s still planning to enter Ni-moya this morning. And I want you to send for that old man who runs that rare-animal zoo in the hills, the one I spoke with last week—Ghitain, Khitain, something like that. Tell him what’s been going on this morning, if he doesn’t already know, and bring him here under careful guard, and have someone collect a few of the dead birds and bring them here too, for him to examine.” Hissune turned to the window again, glowering. The boy’s body was wholly hidden by the birds, nine or ten of them now, that fluttered greedily about it. His schoolbooks lay scattered in a pathetic sprawl nearby. “Shapeshifters!” he exclaimed bitterly. “Sending monsters to make war on children! Ah, but we’ll have them pay dearly for this, Alsimir! We’ll feed Faraataa to his own birds, eh? Go, now: there’s much that needs doing.”

More detailed reports arrived in a steady stream as Hissune had his hasty breakfast. More than a hundred deaths now were attributed to the aerial onslaught, and the number was mounting rapidly. And at least two more flocks of the birds had entered the city, making, so far as anyone had been able to reckon, at least fifteen hundred of the creatures so far.

But already the rooftop counterattack was producing results: the birds, on account of their great size, were slow and graceless fliers and made conspicuous targets for the archers—of whom they showed virtually no fear. So they were being picked off fairly easily, and eliminating them seemed mainly a matter of time, even if new hordes of them were still en route from Piurifayne. The streets of the city had largely been cleared of civilians, for word of the attack and of the Coronal’s orders to stay indoors had by now spread to the farthest suburbs. The birds circled morosely over a silent, deserted Ni-moya.

In midmorning word came that Yarmuz Khitain, the curator of the Park of Fabulous Beasts, had been brought to Nissmorn Prospect and was presently at work in the courtyard dissecting one of the dead birds. Hissune had met with him some days earlier, for Ni-moya was infested with all sorts of strange and lethal creatures spawned by the Metamorph rebels, and the zoologist had had valuable advice to offer on coping with them. Going downstairs now, Hissune found Khitain, a somber-eyed, hollow-chested man of late middle years, crouching over the remains of a bird so huge that at first Hissune thought there must be several of them outspread on the pavement.

“Have you ever seen such a thing as this?” Hissune asked.

Khitain looked up. He was pale, tense, trembling. “Never, my lord. It is a creature out of nightmares.”

“Metamorph nightmares, do you think?”

“Beyond doubt, my lord. Plainly it is no natural bird.”

“Some kind of synthetic creature, you mean?”

Khitain shook his head. “Not quite, my lord. I think these are produced by genetic manipulation from existing life-forms. The basic shape is that of a milufta, that much seems clear—do you know of it? The largest carrion-feeding bird of Zimroel. But they have made it even larger, and turned it into a raptorial bird, a predator, instead of a scavenger. These venom glands, at the base of the claws—no bird of Majipoor has those, but there is a reptile of Piurifayne known as the ammazoar that is armed in such a way, and they seem to have modeled them after those.”

“And the wings?” Hissune said. “Borrowed from sea dragons, are they?”

“Of similar design. That is, they are not typical bird-wings, but rather the kind of expanded fingerwebs that mammals sometimes evolve—dhiims, for instance, or bats, or sea-dragons. The sea dragons, my lord, are mammals, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” said Hissune drily. “But dragons don’t use their wings for flying. What purpose is served, would you say, by putting dragon wings on a bird?”

Khitain shrugged. “No aerodynamic purpose, so far as I can tell. It may have been done merely to make the birds seem more terrifying. When one is designing a life-form to use as an instrument of war—”

“Yes. Yes. So it is your opinion without any question that these birds are yet one more Metamorph weapon.”

“Without question, my lord. As I have said, this is no natural life-form of Majipoor, nothing that has ever existed in the wild. A creature this large and dangerous could certainly not have gone undiscovered for fourteen thousand years.”