of a score of yards, surrounded by fire-melted and blackened stones wrenched from the edifice by tractor beams and strewn across the Great Square. Homing wasps hummed somewhere, but his shields should take care of them.
Estafen’s heavy breathing rasped in his own ears as he tried to ignore the smoky, oily air that seared his mouth and throat, and he crouched between two massive scorched alabaster blocks just before his personal shields pulsed and dropped three dead homing wasps to the pale permite pavement of the City. From somewhere in front of him, seeker beams swept over the stone monoliths that shielded him.
He couldn’t see or sense the gryphon, although it couldn’t be that far away, but a quick glance from behind the edge of the blackened stone revealed the source of the seeker beams. On the far side of the square was a massive sphinx, the red beams from its heavy-lidded eyes sweeping the square, beams that would go from the red of search to the incandescent white-blue of destruction near instantly.
He peered through the open space at the far end of the fallen and massive chunks of stone angled together, forming an opening too narrow for him to use. He’d have to try another way to get into the library. Keeping low, with quick glances up toward the pale green sky, trying to pick out the gryphon, he edged along the stone to the knife-edged corner. Blood smeared on the stone near the edge indicated just how sharp that edge was.
With the sound of electrofans, he looked back over his shoulder. A green and gold skimmer entered the square from the side boulevard but barely made it another fifteen yards before a single brilliant bolt of violet-white light disintegrated the cockpit. The rest of the fuselage slammed into the permite pavement, then split, disgorging a single white coffin that tumbled end over end once, then twice, before it slid in Estafen’s direction, stopping yards away, faceup. Immediately, chill fog formed around the coffin.
Estafen barely took in the coffin, trying to grasp exactly what that meant, before another destruct beam from the sphinx turned it into fine gray ashes, and a wisp of chill fog swept past him, followed by a blast of heat. He dashed around the corner of the fallen stone block, feeling the sting and slash of the stone knife-edge as his elbow brushed it, and smelling the sweet-sour stench of real physical death.
Behind him the sphinx’s laser flashed again, futilely, against the mirror finish of the immobilized turtle tank, then flashed again, this time destroying the remnants of the skimmer.
Estafen sprinted for the pillars that marked the entrance to the library, scrambling up the alabaster steps and diving behind the pillar on the left just before the sphinx’s laser flashed above him, its beam fragmented by the quantum-fractal finish of the pillar.
Still breathing hard, Estafen squeezed along the wall until he was far enough back that the sphinx couldn’t focus on him. Glancing back, he saw that the cut from his elbow had left a trail of blood along the shining stone. A blast of air announced the gryphon’s arrival at the base of the steps leading up to the recessed entry and the door that it sheltered, the door he needed to open and get through in order to reach his goal.
The gryphon’s bulk and wingspan prevented it from advancing through the pillars that led to the door, but, instantly, the gryphon’s long front leg slashed at the air just short of Estafen, the amber claws coming almost close enough to slice even the near-indestructible shadow fabric of Estafen’s singlesuit, the closest thing to a uniform of the aetherial opposition.
Seeing that it could not reach Estafen, the gryphon turned its claws on the pillars, ripping away the synthstone designed to block energy weapons, but not a gryphon’s talons . . . or not for long.
Flattening himself against the stone, Estafen edged toward the door, finally pressing his hand against the access square.
The door irised open, and the gryphon lunged, not fast enough to rend Estafen before the door irised shut.
He took a long deep breath of relief, knowing that the weapons possessed by the True Believers in the square couldn’t penetrate the heavy stone walls