John Wright - Titans of Chaos

Quentin's eyes were focused behind me: Awe and astonishment had robbed him of expression.

I turned. There were more towers behind me. At least two dozen, rearing up, taller than the burned trees around them.

And trapdoors were opening, some slowly, some quickly. Not one, not ten, but hundreds. I saw doors an acre wide, rising up, carrying huge segments of the landscape with them, lifting rocks and tree stumps. Deep in these vast doors could be seen the heads of staircases fit for giants, inset with ivory ramparts, five hundred yards wide. There were battlements and windows like gems being pulled up to the surface, carried by the posts that lifted up these titanic roofs.

And beyond these hundred doors, one vast door that ran from horizon to horizon made itself known.

The hills opened.

Imagine that all the mountains and hills that embraced a quarter of the horizon, as far to the north and south as could be seen without turning, were not hills at all, but the rooftops and turrets and tower-tops of a buried city: and not merely a city, but also its suburbs, and a goodly section of the surrounding farms and villages.

Now imagine that all the million columns supporting the roofs and towers, halls, palaces, esplanades, and wintergar-dens of that underground countryside moved upward with one ponderous, silent, earthquake-potent thrust Those roofs and tower-tops with all the countless tons of rock atop them, and all the wide acres of burned forest-tops crowning them, were all moved upward with untroubled, infinite strength.

That was what we saw.

Vast pillars of ivory and marble pushed the miles of hillside, rock and trees and stream and woods, birds' nests and salt lick and brush, earth and stone and steaming wreckage of forest stump, acre upon acre, upward. A hundred yards aloft, two hundred, more.

Upward and upward. The underside of the hollow hills gleamed with the reflections of that ceiling, like a firmament, of a world that shone up from underfoot.

We saw the tops of pillars the size of skyscrapers holding up a sky of stone. Light from beneath, bright as the sun, but colored like moonlight seen through rippling water, played back and forth across the underside of this pillar-upheld firmament.

Like jagged teeth in the wide gap between the lower brink and the upper hill-covered roof now held aloft, we saw the many fortresses and walls, overlooking wide passes between them. These passes were the heads of roads and highways leading down into that underground universe. Only the tops of the roads were visible to us, but the shape of the mighty slope down which they rolled could be detected from the contour of the pillars, minarets, and hanging gardens that overtopped them. The upper battlements of the chain of fortress walls fell lower the farther they were from the lip of the pit-or should I call it the boundary of the landscape- and the roadways were no doubt parallel to them.

There were pennants and battle flags hanging from every window and archer slit. Siege guns peered from over the fortress walls, and sixteen-inch guns, something that would grace the heaviest dreadnought afloat, looked down from pillboxes and fortified positions beyond.

And from this chasm, roaring and murmuring, came a noise of many voices calling out.

My ear heard only a roar of ocean noise. A higher sense detected an inner meaning: "Death! To the Orphans of Chaos! Death!"

It was the battle cry of Lamia.

Like a river breaking from a dam, endless lines of cavalry poured forth from the passes between the forts. Amazons on their swift steeds streamed with quiet haste down the slope.

All the central, metal eyes of all the steeds were lit, a thousand little winks and flashes of azure light, a constellation of blue stars approaching through the green trees and brown stumps, the columns of ash.

With them, less orderly, were maenads. What I had seen before had not been an army, or even a horde. Compared to this, the hundreds from which I had been running had been merely a flying squad, a detachment.

Song rose up from the battlements. Thousand-voices strong, the choir of music and magic rose like a rising sun from out of that inner, underground universe. Siren song.

A river of eerie green-gold sparks poured out from one of the taller towers in the landscape and reached across three miles of green forest, brown ash-land, and green forest again, to wrap a distant tower in an aura of supernatural fire. Arms of gold and emerald fire streamed from that tower in answer, and rushed like a wall of burning flame across miles of landscape to a third tower. The third tower ignited and threw a river of gold-green power to a fourth; a fourth to a fifth, this one made all from a single huge slab of quartz; and this fifth back to the fourth again.

A pentacle. With walls of gold-green flaming energy reaching across four miles of space, the towers drew a star-shape around us. No doubt hidden nymphs, not merely four or five, but countless scores and hundreds, were practicing their craft and beginning their demonstrations.

And the siege guns opened fire.

I saw the muzzle flashes of the gigantic siege cannons and sixteen-inch guns firing before we heard any noise. I should not call them muzzle flashes. Energy discharges. These were not gunpowder cannons; they were rail guns. Heavy artillery based roughly on the same weapon design that the Amazons used as rifles. There was not going to be any noise, except the rush of one-ton shells breaking the sound barrier.

In that moment of eerie silence, as the shells were falling, but before they hit, Quentin shouted,

"Aboard! Now!"

The first note of siren-music had robbed me of my extra dimensions, powers, and senses. Colin was going crosseyed with shock and pain as the miles-wide pentagram was being drawn around us, but, before the fifth tower finished drawing arms of fire from across the forest to its sister towers, Colin had caught me up in his arms, and heaved Victor's immobile body upright, and fell, dragging us, into the open trapdoor that Vanity was, even now, jumping down through.

Quentin's powers were not yet turned off, as the Amazons and their metal-eyed horses were still far away. A shadow came around him as his feet silently left the soil, and the cloak seemed to reach out with ever-widening wings, and that shadow reached out and touched all of us, lifted, pushed, and we were all standing on the deck of the Argent Nautilus. Except for Victor, who fell over.

Quentin said, "Vanity! If you would please-"

The trapdoor overhead exploded with blue light as the first of the hundred shells landed. The roof of the tunnel above us was turned instantly to plasma. The vacuum created by the firestorm sucked the river water up in a white spray, where the heat was breaking the water molecules into their constituent oxygen and hydrogen."

The concussion would have instantly destroyed us (or anything made of that fragile substance we call "matter") had we still been in the normal laws of Earth. As it was, the blue light showered over all of us. There was no visible change.