Elric to Rescue Tanelorn - Michael Moorcock [28]
I only hoped that he had not overestimated their power.
The next day I was taken by Arjavh to the vaults which lay within the core of the city. We moved along bare corridors of polished black marble, lighted by small bulbs which burned with a greenish light. We came to a door of dark metal and he pressed a stud beside it. The door moved open and we entered an elevator which bore us yet further downwards.
We stepped out into a great hall full of weirdly wrought machines that looked brand new. They stretched for nearly half a mile ahead of us.
“There are the weapons,” said Arjavh hollowly.
Around the walls were arranged handguns of various kinds, rifles and things that looked like bazookas. There were squat machines on treads, like ultra-streamlined tanks, with glass cabins and couches for a single man to lie flat upon and operate the controls. I saw no flying machines of any kind, however. I asked Arjavh about this.
“Flying machines! It would be interesting if there were such things. We have never, in all our history, been able to develop a machine that will safely stay in the air for any length of time.”
I was amazed at this strange gap in their technology, but did not comment upon it.
“Are you still decided to use them?” he asked me, thinking perhaps that the sight of them would shock me out of my decision.
But these things were not so very different to similar war machines of the age from which, eighteen months before, I had come. I nodded my head.
We returned to the surface and there instructed our warriors to bring the weapons up.
Already I half-doubted my own decision, but felt, as always, that I had to act as I thought best, not as my emotions told me to act.
The weapons were raised. The men were armed. The larger machines were mounted upon the walls. I sent a messenger under a flag of truce to tell the marshals to assemble, the next day, before the walls of Loos Ptokai.
They came, in all their proud panoply of war, which seemed so insignificant, now, against the power of our energy weapons.
We had set one of the new cannon pointing up into the sky so that we could demonstrate its fearful potential.
“We offer you a truce—and peace,” I said.
Roldero laughed aloud. “You offer us peace, traitor! You should be begging for peace—though you’ll get none.”
“I warn you Count Roldero,” I shouted. “I warn you all. We have fresh weapons—weapons which once came near to destroying this whole Earth! Watch!”
I gave the order to fire the giant cannon.
An Eldren warrior depressed a stud on the controls.
There came a humming from the cannon and all at once a tremendous blinding bolt of golden energy gouted from its snout. The heat alone blistered our skins and we fell back shielding our eyes.
Horses shrieked and reared. The marshals’ faces were grey and their mouths gaped. They fought to control their mounts.
“That is what we offer you if you will not have peace!” I shouted. “We have a dozen like it and hand-cannon which can kill a hundred men at a sweep. What say you now?”
“We fight—we fight assured of your evil pact with Azmobaana. We are pledged to wage war on sorcery—and what better example of sorcery is there than that—that…?” He was lost for a word to describe our cannon.
“It is not sorcery, foolish Count Roldero,” I cried desperately. “It is science—a more developed science than that which invented powder and cannon, that is all. Your own ancestors once had weapons like these!”
“Sorcery! Black sorcery!” he shouted and wheeled his horse away with his men fleeing behind him, back to gather his forces, I knew.
They came and we met them. They were helpless against our weapons. Energy spouted from the guns and seared into their ranks. We all felt pain as we fired the howling waves of force which swept across them and destroyed them, turning proud men and beasts to blackened rubble.
I pitied them as they came on, the cream of Humanity’s menfolk.
It took an hour to destroy a million warriors.
One hour.
When the extermination was over, I was filled with a strange