Titans of Chaos

And, on a shelf of rock near the top, above them all, kneel-ing on an altar-stone, was Lamia. ThePhaeacian in white to her right, and goddess of Fraud, Laverna, to her left.

Lamia raised her knife. I saw a huge wash of knotted strands and webs of magic, the force shewas using to control the maenads, flex, throb, and begin to turn around that knife. Themadwomen had to be controlled by a spell; otherwise, they would have torn themselves and theirallies to pieces. Now the spell was heaving itself like a gathering tornado, reaching down to washover the maenads, readying to fling themselves upon our ship.

With a mechanical precision, each Amazon shouldered her weapon.

The gun crews sent out range-finding pulses of radar energy, which I could feel, useful andinnately undreamlike, bouncing obediently off our ship and returning with information to theguns.

The covens of nymphs all raised their torches. With a hissing murmur, the coven-mistresses spokea word. The flames turned black as midnight, black as pitch, and the shadows of the womenbegan to billow out from them like pools of ink.

The choir-leader raised her wand, and the choir of sirens drew in a breath.

Laverna smiled.

Something rose up from the pool of muck where Victor had melted.

And rose and rose, up and up.

It was a dragon. A cybernetic leviathan. An armored segmented wormlike thing, with weaponsand projections built along every ring-segment of his long, long body.

The dragon-worm, five hundred yards long, thousands of tons of armed and armored flesh andhorn and bone, metal and wire and substances unknown, raised a sleek serpentine head, partedserrated mandibles, and opened a mouth ringed with row on row of crystalline teeth, to reveal acentral orb of blazing azure, buried deep in his throat, surrounded by a symmetrical array of boxymuscles and nerves and solenoid coils.

His eye. Victor's eye.

The crystal teeth acted as amplifiers.

What came from his mouth was brighter than the sun. It seemed almost a solid thing, and themain axis of the discharge path was surrounded with concentric tubes of lightning sparks andpositronic discharges. ,

For a split second, all was utterly silent.