Geological Thinking, Chapter Four

“Right, I’ve not done a lot of swordfighting at high school,” Neetra began. “It’s mostly been cheerleading, in fact. Couldn’t we – ”

The champion struck home with the first blow of the tournament. Neetra was only just able to meet it with her shield in time, and the sheer force of his sword was enough to drop her to her knees. The tribe went wild, howling and hooting their belligerence, as Bret and Steam set their teeth and put muscles and pistons to work without delay. As they snarled and struggled against the obsidian chains the rock-boy pressed home his advantage, hammering Neetra’s shield again and again while she was down. Finally she managed to swing up her own sword and stand, interrupting his barrage, but the foe countered quickly and the resultant clash of blades was short and one-sided. He who had been training in such combat all his life swiftly outmatched she who had not, knocking her weapon away and following through with a roundhouse kick that propelled Neetra to the rocky ground.

Steam, with a yell of rage, finally snapped his chains. He leapt down from the pillar, followed seconds later by Bret, as the High Elder barked a new command. To the obvious approval of the spectators the two portcullises juddered open, and from the black spaces behind two monstrous forms lurched and shambled out into the arena. Each was a gaunt giant of rock, twenty feet tall with great craggy hams and dragging forearms of angular chiseled stone, their eye-hollows and cavernous mouths spewing sulphourous embers and ash.

“I don’t fancy yours much,” Steam remarked to Bret, and took off at the beast on the left in a column of broiling fire. Bret sprang accordingly at the creature on the right, while Neetra picked herself up, dusted down her skirt and faced her enemy.

“OK, cutie, let’s try that again my way,” said she, and ran headlong at the champion with her sword gleaming aloft. The rock-boy lashed out with what he meant to be a critical hit upon her undefended frame, but his blade sliced only empty space as Neetra teleported in a burst of yellow light. She rematerialized behind him and whacked him in the back with her shield, tumbling him head-over-heels.

As the screaming tribe railed at this insult their champion scrambled to his feet, fury etched on his fiery face, and launched himself at Neetra slashing in a frenzy. Our heroine teleported out of the range of each attack, moving steadily backward and leading her opponent to where she wanted him to be. Meanwhile Bret had raced into close quarters with his looming monster, which hefted a sledgehammer arm high above its head and brought it down with brutal force. A lightning dodge from Bret and its claw pounded the arena’s surface, making even the highest seats tremble, while our hero leapt straight up in a blur of blue light and a cloud of dust. His hands and feet shot out at the behemoth’s hide, once, twice, three times, but against a carcass of solid rock that housed little or no intelligence the effect of even Bret’s strength was negligible.

Steam, his metal fists striking useless sparks from the other monster as he circled it on his flames, was reaching a similar conclusion. “I don’t mind fighting another bloke, but this is like fighting a motorway bridge!” he cried.

“Then let’s stop hitting them and use a drill instead!” Bret grinned, as his boots touched his monster’s shoulder and he boosted himself from it. Somersaulting high above its summit and beginning to descend, Bret drew back his arm and steeled his superhuman powers. Blue light erupted forth as our hero threw the fastest, longest and loudest combination-punch he had ever mustered, driving down upon the shrieking monster with his fist flying back and forth too swiftly for the eye to follow. In less than a second, by which time more than seventy separate impacts had been made, great cracks were shattering out from the single point Bret had attacked and spreading all over the beast’s anatomy. With a thunderous din like an avalanche, half its body-mass including one arm splintered away and hailed upon the ground.

Neetra, with the champion still in hot pursuit, reached this pile of rubble and began to teleport up it in stage after stage. Her opponent, who was panting and blowing by now, climbed after her making ineffectual stabs and hacks in between hauling himself up. Our heroine reached the highest stone and steadily descended in flash after flash, he gaining the peak seconds later and proceeding to half-run and half-fall after her down the other side.

“Typical boy, brains in his toga,” Neetra commented, while above her Steam drew to a hover and faced his beast. “Alright, you walking flyover, it’s demolition day!” he declared.

Hurtling back to the fray with all the speed of a meteorite, Steam began to whip round and round the lumbering hulk and left in his wake a spiral of fire that span ever faster and faster. It was not the heat from this flaming whirlwind, against which the rocky monster was immune, but the shearing force of its endless revolutions that served as natural erosion at a vastly accelerated pace, chipping away and dislodging great chunks of its body and dragging them into the maelstrom even as the beast staggered and bellowed in protest. While this was going on, Bret unleashed one more rapid-fire pummeling upon what remained of his opponent and with a noise like a building site reduced it to a heap of boulders and shards.

The High Elder was on his feet by now, flapping his arms and screeching horrible curses and threats. His people were in a similar frame of mind, incensed by the rout of their finest warriors and taking up clubs and axes to personally deal with those who had wronged them. A tide of stony bodies was swarming down the stands and spilling over the hoardings to the arena floor, their numbers far too great for a mere three to overcome…at which point the gate flung itself across the scene in an explosion of flame.

Into the amphitheatre stampeded three mighty salamanders, Joe, Dylan and D’Carthage riding astride. Scattering those barbarians who had made it to ground level, the latter two drove their reptillian mounts to where Steam had just broken off his assault and the surviving stone giant was flailing drunkenly about. As one, the salamanders threw open their mouths and each voided a jet of fire that struck the monster’s mid-section like the torrent from a high-pressure hose, pushing its feet out from under and toppling it against the arena wall where it collapsed half the seats on top of itself.

Neetra had led the tribe’s young champion all around the battlefield’s circumference more than once, and now finally stopped teleporting and stood her ground. The rock-boy, though so exhausted that his quivering red legs looked about ready to give out, raised a shaky sword to deliver the long-awaited killing blow. He was then blasted from behind by a fireball and laid out for the count as Joe galloped past and swept Neetra up onto his salamander, where they kissed.

“You do this every time I try to meet boys!” she giggled.

D’Carthage, receiving a telepathic message, pronounced: “Fellow adventurers, Gala informs me she and the dear Chancellor have located The One Below!”

“Then it’s time we were getting out of here!” Dylan hollered back. Bret leapt up behind him onto his steed and together they rampaged for the exit, closely followed by their mounted comrades who joined them in shunting aside or flame-jetting any straggling tribesmen who tried to block their route. The remaining bars of the gate gave way in short order, and with Steam blazing through the upper reaches abreast of them the three great lizards and their riders hit the trail, until the sounds of riot and turmoil were far behind them in the distance.

Gala and The Chancellor stepped down from their salamander. They had arrived at The One Below’s new home, and a humble palace it was indeed for one who had held dominion over the entire realm. The guards, rock-men identical to those that now served Phoenix Prime, did not put a fight and nor did they seem at all surprised to see the visitors. They showed them into the throne room at once, announcing their presence to their master.

There, on a flat stone slab, The One Below lay. Gone was the enormous entity of long ago, the terrible titan The Four Heroes had battled before. A meagre, bare skeleton of grained and pitted rock, its spindly limbs surrounded by dust and fragments that had fallen from its all-too-friable form, weakly raised its head as Gala and The Chancellor advanced to the bedside.

“Humans? Ah, at last,” creaked The One Below, in a voice that sounded as brittle and worn as his body. “I knew you would come, Four Heroes. I…wait. You are not – ”

The Chancellor drew his gun, loaded it, and took aim. Gala put her hand on his arm.

“No,” said she. “We don’t have time to make it look like natural causes, and it’s not their way.”

“How long has their way mattered to us?” demanded The Chancellor. Gala rounded on him, her teeth bared.

“Do you think I like this?” she hissed. “Every fibre of my being wants to put this scum out of our misery right now, for the millions of lives he took in his subterranean war, and for giving Phoenix Prime the means to act against us. But we can ill afford yet more conflict with The Four Heroes. You know as well as I do that we need them.”

“You need him,” The Chancellor corrected her, and had any member of The Four Heroes been listening it would have astonished them indeed to hear the bluntness, even surliness, of his tone. “I should like to know too what exactly you imagine you need him for these days. Intimate dinners together, little excursions alone with him into your past…could it be that now you have met him, you have come to feel you need him for somewhat more than you originally planned?”

“I wouldn’t tolerate that from Steam or D’Carthage,” Gala returned. Her voice was low, and the note of warning it carried was fearsome. “Don’t presume too much on our special relationship, Chancellor. Our cause is what matters now, far more than anything we’ve shared. If your loyalty to the Next Four ever falls into question, even if it’s in thought alone, and no matter what the reason, don’t think I won’t deal with you the same way I would anyone else.”

At that moment the arrival of more guests ended the conversation, though it did not resolve it. The Four Heroes, Steam and D’Carthage, escorted by more sentries, joined The Chancellor and Gala beside The One Below. Neetra, gazing at the diminished proportions of he who had once been large enough to hold her in the palm of his hand, breathed: “What’s happened to you?”

“Victory in the war was mine,” The One Below sighed. “With your sister serving as my power-source, the factions that opposed me were at last vanquished. But they had their revenge. The survivors of each army pooled their resources, and working together their scientists devised a weapon they called the Retrograde Bomb. Its effects, though harmless to organic life, worked catastrophic destruction and decay on every geological cell-structure within this domain. The civilizations, the great cities, the very face of the land…all lost, all mutated and distorted and changed.”

“I have seen first-hand the lasting legacy of this bomb,” The Chancellor told him grimly. “Its emanations will continue to wreak harm on your country for generations to come.”

“A myriad different silicate-based species once dwelled here, but The Retrograde Bomb took its toll on every one of them,” The One Below continued. “Millions it killed outright. Others it made old long before their time. Some it stripped of their intellect, reducing them to a primitive, atavistic state. Its effect upon me was this lingering death, my mind fully intact while my body crumbles to nothing piece by piece. Doubtless my enemies would be satisfied indeed with this result of their last great project, had the Retrograde Bomb not been their doom too.”

“You mean they bombed the life out of everything here, themselves, their mates, all the other people – just so’s they could get even with you?” Steam exclaimed.

“That’s war for you,” said Bret. “No winners, only losers. Kind of makes you want to give peace a try, doesn’t it?”

Dylan stepped forward. “One Below,” he began solemnly, “we need to know about Phoenix Prime.”

“She and I had a business arrangement, human, that is all,” The One Below replied wearily. “Three battalions of my soldiers in exchange for her assistance. That deal is now closed. I know nothing of her whereabouts, and would have no reason to contact her even if it were possible for me to do so. Do you think I am planning further collaborations with her, in my present condition?”

Bret nodded once. “The One Below always was strangely fond of contracts and agreements, Dylan – you know, for a big rock-monster, I mean,” he observed. “And he was certainly a creature of his word. I think we can believe him.”

“Your world above is no longer in any danger from me, Four Heroes,” The One Below wheezed, lying slowly and painfully back upon the slab. “All I ask of you, my old enemies, is that you allow me to end my days here in peace.”

“We will,” Neetra told him gently. Joe put his arm around her.

“His is the fate of all tyrants and despots, Neetra,” said he. “We shall do as he wishes and leave him. My friends, I believe our quest is at an end.”

“The trail has indeed run cold,” D’Carthage agreed. “It is at such times that the thoughts of we outdoorsmen turn to beating a path back to the lodge, the fireside, and the decanter!”

“Perhaps, but we have quite a walk ahead of us,” Gala reminded them all. “Leaving this land by the way we came in won’t be a problem with our powers, but then there’s a long stretch of desert between here and Nottingham!”

“Ah, it seems not even the exploits of today could make a plainswoman of our seafaring Gala!” D’Carthage beamed, his eyes sparkling. “Fear not, friends. Our original transportation may be lost, but nevertheless there is no call for our journey home to be a toilsome one…!”

It was dusk in the town of Silence, and the barber and the owner of the general store were smoking together on the shop porch as they did every evening. There had, as usual, been an exchange of notes on the one or maybe two customers each had seen during his working day, but now they had conversed enough and were sitting in quiet reflection, mulling it all over.

A dust-cloud was approaching from the east, travelling along the one road. The two old men turned wordlessly to look at it, and their gaze steadily rotated back to centre to follow the four enormous lizards that tore past the few buildings of the town, their flat feet and thrashing tails kicking up billows of desert sand, and fire from their nostrils and mouths making brilliant spurts in the twilight. On the back of each rode two heroes, Joe and Neetra, Gala and The Chancellor, Bret and Dylan and Steam and D’Carthage. No sooner had they appeared than they were gone, thundering through Silence and disappearing into the desert as they struck out for the western mountains and Nottingham.

The dust settled back on the road. Once more, the barber and the shopkeeper might have been the only two people on the planet. They sat there without speaking for quite some time.

“Yup,” the barber finally said.

END OF CHAPTER FOUR