And his fire burned more furiously; his glow increased.
“This is how it will be,” said Thanatos. “You will serve me. You can look on me, Max Whitman, and upon my servants, and you do not go mad. You do not run howling away. Because you are one of those who has always known about us, in some way. We met on the dream-plane once, you and I, and I knew you for what you were then. You can serve me, and still live among men. You will be my emissary. You will be shielded from the cowards who would prevent my entry into your world. You will go to certain men, the few who control the many. The wealthy ones. You will tell them about a great source of power, Lord Thanatos. I will send fiends and visitations to beset their enemies. Their power will grow, and they will feed me, and my power will grow. This is how it will be.”
As he finished speaking, another harpy flapped down from the sky, dropping a fresh corpse into the shadows. It was a young Hispanic man in a smudged white suit. Thanatos opened the wiry mouth of his hollow head and sighed; blue smoke smelling of munitions factories dirtied the air. “They always kill them, somehow, as they bring them to me. I cannot break them of it. They always kill the humans. Men are more pleasurable to consume when there is life left in them. My curse is this: I’m served by half-minds.”
Max thought: Why didn’t the harpies kill me, then?
The vinyl harpies tore an arm from the sprawled dead man, and fed it into their master’s fire. Their camera-lens eyes caught the shine of the fire. Thanatos looked at Max. “You have not yet spoken.”
And Max thought: Say anything. Anything to get the hell away. “I’ll do just what you ask. Let me go and I’ll bring you lives. I’ll be your, uh, your emissary.”
Another long, smoky sigh. “You’re lying. I was afraid you’d be loyal. Instinct of some sort, I suppose.”
“Loyal to who?”
“I can read you. You see only the semblance I’ve chosen. But I see past your semblance. You cannot lie to one of us. I see the lie in you unfolding like the blossoming of a poisonous purple orchid. You cannot lie to a Lord.”
He licked barbed wire lips with a tongue of flame.
So they will kill me, Max thought. They’ll feed me into this monstrosity! Is that a strange death? An absurd death? No stranger than dying by nerve-gas on some foreign battlefield; no more absurd than my Uncle Danny’s death: he drowned in a big vat of fluorescent pink paint.
“You’re not going to die,” said Thanatos. “We’ll keep you in stasis, forever imprisoned, unpleasantly alive.”
What happened next made Max think of a slogan stenciled on the snout of one of the old B-12 bombers from World War II: Death From Above. Because something silvery flashed down from above and struck the two harpies bending over the body of the man in the smudged white suit … both harpies were struck with a terrible impact, sent broken and lifeless over the edge of the roof.
The griffin pulled up from its dive, raking the tar roof, and soared over the burning outbuilding and up for another pass. The remaining harpies rose to meet it.
Other figures were converging on the roof, coming in a group from the north. One was a man who hovered without wings; he seemed to levitate. His body was angelic, his skin dazzling white; he wore a loincloth made of what looked like aluminum foil. His head was a man’s, haloed with blond curls—but where his eyes and forehead should have been was a small television screen, projecting from the bone of his skull. On the screen was an image of human eyes, looking about; it was as if he saw from the TV screen. Two more griffins arrived, one electroplated gold, another of nickel, and just behind them came a woman who drifted like a bit of cotton blown on the breeze. She resembled Mother Mary, but nude: a plastic Madonna made of the stuff of which inflatable beach toys are made; glossy and striped in wide bands of primary colors. She seemed insubstantial as a soap bubble, but when she struck at a vinyl harpy it reeled back, turning end over end to fall senseless to the rooftop. Flanking her were two miniature helicopters— helicopters no bigger than horses. The lower section of each helicopter resembled a medieval dragon attired in armored metal, complete with clawed arms in place of landing runners. Each copter’s cab was conventionally shaped—but no pilot sat behind the windows; and just below those sinister windows was a set of chrome teeth in a mouth opening to let loose great peals of electronically amplified laughter. The dragon copters dived to attack the remaining harpies, angling their whirring blades to shred the vinyl wings.
Thanatos grated a command, and from the burning doorway behind him came seven bats big as vultures, with camera-lens eyes and sawing electric knives for teeth and wings of paper-thin aluminum.
Max threw himself to the roof, coughing in the smoke of the growing fire; the bats whipped close over his head and climbed, keening, to attack Our Lady of the Plastics.
Two dog-sized spiders made of high-tension rubbery synthetics, their clashing mandibles forged of the best Solingen steel, raced on whirring copper legs across the roof to intercept the angel with television eyes. The angel alighted and turned to gesture urgently to Max. The spiders clutched at the angel’s legs and dragged him down, slashed bloody hunks from his ivory arms.
Max saw Lord Thanatos catch a passing griffin by the tail and slam it onto the roof; he clamped the griffin in his white-hot hands. It shrieked and began to melt.
Two metal bats collided head-on with a copter dragon and all three disintegrated in a shower of blue sparks. Our Lady of the Plastics struck dents into the aluminum ribs of the vinyl harpies who darted at her, slashed, and boomed GO IMMEDIATELY, bellowing it in triumph as she burst open—but they recoiled in dismay, flapping clumsily out of reach, when she re-formed, gathering her fragments together, making herself anew in mid-air.
Max sensed that the real battle was fought in some other dimension of subatomic physicality, with a subtler weaponry; he was seeing only the distorted visual echoes of the actual struggle.
The spiders were wrapping the angel’s legs with cords of optical fiber. He gave a mighty wrench and threw them off, levitating out of their reach, shouting at Max: “Take your life! You—”
“SILENCE HIM!” Thanatos bellowed, stabbing a hot finger at the angel. And instantly two of the harpies plummeted to sink their talons in the throat of the angel with television eyes. They tore at him, made a gouting, ragged wreckage of his white throat—and Max blinked, seeing a phosphorescent mist, the color of translucent turquoise, issuing from the angel’s slack mouth as he fell to the ground.
I’m seeing his plasma body escape, Max thought. I’m realizing my talent.