Jodi stood still for a moment, muscles just a bit too tense, then took a deep breath and started walking forward.
As before, once she got within seventy feet, the creature raised its head and started humming. But this time Jodi wasn’t wearing anything metal to be affected. She kept moving forward slowly, forty feet, thirty, twenty-five, twenty . . .
At twenty feet, the Magon hissed and moved slightly. Jodi stopped and opened her mouth. A pure note issued forth, one matching the eerie hum precisely in pitch. The hum instantly sounded louder than ever, and Jodi’s voice responded, increasing volume steadily.
The Magon must have encountered caverns in which it had heard feedback. The hum started to fade for a moment as it stopped generation. But nothing had ever tried this trick on it before; as Jodi made a step forward, its instincts forced it to begin the defensive signal generation again.
Jodi’s face was as set as a marble statue, giving out an unending, unwavering tone that I knew could not be sustained much longer, a crescendo of echoing sound that was answered in the swiftly-building hum that she was trying to drive out of control. The Magon moved jerkily, trying to shake its head and drive away an indescribable sensation, starting a lunge forward but drawing back as the movement increased the resonance. Even from this distance I saw Jodi’s face changing color slightly, reddening from the effort of wringing the last dregs of air from her lungs to maintain the feedback cycle. She was running out of air, it wasn’t going to work—
And then the sound of her own pure voice echoed out from behind me, doubled and redoubled, as the Nowëthada, having caught on to her plan, all joined together to imitate the same precise sound. Though they were much farther away, there were twelve of them, and they were putting all the strength into it they could; with their ability to imitate other sounds perfectly, they did exactly what was needed. They maintained the resonance as the Magon gave a frustrated whine and finally moved, in fits and starts, towards Jodi.
But by maintaining the resonance, the Nomes had given Jodi a breather. She backed up two steps, her lungs refilled, and this time her voice seemed to split the room with a single note of high-pitched thunder. The resonant hum from the Magon rose with her volume, becoming louder, the creature scrabbling now to reach its own forehead with claws just a bit too short—and the crystal antenna exploded with enough force to send shards flying thirty feet.
The Magon gave a shriek that pierced my ears like an icepick and lunged at Jodi; no longer under control, just berserk and out to kill the one that hurt it. Jodi ran.
I stood still and let her run past me. As the Magon followed—ignoring me completely in its mania to get Jodi—I swung the iron at one of its legs hard enough to break it. There was no heating; Jodi’s trick had ended that problem. The monstrous centipedal creature skidded to a halt and whipped around, screaming at me—and that’s when I pitched the ball in my other hand down its throat.
For a moment only I saw it, sparkling silvery in the LED light with its duct-taped surface. Then I flung myself flat behind a low, domelike stalactite.
The blast deafened me and shattered helictites sixty feet away. When I rose up, I could see that the Magon was writhing on the floor, headless and dying. All Jodi and I had to do was dance like madmen to stay out of the way of the rocky coils until they juddered slowly into stillness. Two pounds of C-4 makes for a hell of a case of indigestion.
Rokhaset and the other Nomes moved forward slowly. Even though they didn’t have expressions, everything about the way they moved shouted out their incredulity. “Clinton Slade, Jodi Goldman . . . you have defeated a Magon. I did not think it possible.”
“Nishtkefelecht, it’s nothing. Without you singing backup, my main performance would’ve bombed. We did it together.”
“Perhaps, perhaps. Still, such a thing has not been done in my memory.”