Mark S. Geston by The Siege of Wonder

Author:The Siege of Wonder
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-05-31T13:04:10+00:00

“Sir!” the imagist shouted as the picture blasted across his mind.

The bolt hit and leveled the block of houses on the opposite side of the park. There was no sound or shock wave, just an intense heat that drove them back behind the nearest walL

“No power? Goddamn bastard!” The second man grabbed the imagist by the front of his cloak and nearly lifted him off his feet.

His mouth working through the usual signs of terror, the other man yelled, “I don’t understand this. It can’t be this! It hasn’t for years!”

Etridge smiled back and dropped the other man. “Relieved, Stamp?” he hissed as another block of houses and godowns detonated. Then he stepped back and began trotting along the undamaged side of the street, back to the vehicles. Stamp followed uncertainly.

The imagist and the man who had brought the book to Etridge stayed for a moment. They saw that the fires left by the two bolts were made from extraordinary colors; despite the rush of heat released by their impact, they now danced above the ruins without warmth, as if they had used themselves up all at once and remained only as an after-image in their eyes. One or two people staggered from the houses, seemingly unaware of the gold and scarlet flames that were eating at the backs of their skulls.

The third bolt consumed the burning people, the imagist and the man beside him.

Stamp looked back in time to see this. More bolts hit the village and their fires spiraled upward and joined together. “Firestorm!” he yelled to Etridge as they ran through the village gate.

“Not melodramatic enough. Not enough drama. No fuel for their dreams,”

Etridge shouted back. The engines of the hovercraft and tanks accelerated in front of them. Light halftracks scattered at right angles to the road, side-looking radars moving in nervous jerks to stay fixed on the burning village.

They reached the lead hovercraft. It lifted off as they boarded, dipping slightly as its gyroscopes came into phase. Three identical units floated backward, away from the village.

The individual fires kept twisting together until the density of their light cast a shadow against the sun. Branches grew downward from points a hundred meters from the ground, and as they watched, the pifiar assumed shape and animation.

“Splendid!” Etridge remarked to the bridge crew when he saw this.

“Nearly the same thing they tried at Foxblind. If it really is, it’ll have the shape of some wonderful beast, like a minotaur or such. They’re incapable of thinking in terms of simple power, always anthropomorphizing this or that so each act has the personal mark of the man behind it. What do you say, Stamp?

Two to one it’s a minotaur.”

“The same device was employed at Thorn River…”—trying to appear knowledgeable.

Etridge’s face went through a sequence of closed and guarded expressions. “Yes. Except there, they used hundreds of those fire things, and each one had the shape and the face of the last person it killed. We didn’t know how to fight them then.

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