The Judge of Ages

The voice rolled with rich humor and dark magnetism, but the pink eyes were stones, the face dull, idiotic, lifeless: a mask.

Mickey said in a voice of fear, “Rada is not here. His flesh is under a Possession. The lwa speak through his mouth from the infosphere. It is the Machine!”

Menelaus was still hanging on to the pale and glowing wand, and still tapping his fingers and grinding his teeth. He said, “Do not answer him or turn your eyes toward me. That is the Machine, not the real Blackie, and he cannot see me or hear me. Even now, he is not sure if I am here or not.”

“What odd company you keep, Cowhand!” The voice stepped on the shoes of Menelaus’ words, as if the speaker had not heard them. “I see my marionette, Rada Lwa, has brought just enough loaded pistols to do away with you, your escort, and then himself. How convenient! Is this the end result we wish? I can oblige you. But perhaps you are curious to explore other options.”

From his belt the same words, even if spoken in an awkward grammar, or with a word missing, were repeated in Natural and Virginian.

Oenoe, smiling thoughtfully, half turned toward Mickey as if to ask a question. So natural was the gesture that Mickey tilted his head toward her attentively before he remembered that she could not speak the language of the Witches nor understand an answer. Turned, her body hid an oleander flower which dropped softly from her mantilla into her slim hand.

And she whirled, graceful as a dancer, hand raised as if to cast the blossom in the dead, bone-white face of the pale man; but now the muzzle of one pistol was now a foot or two from her face, and the flint was cocked back. She could smell the gunpowder from the recently packed pistol.

The voice of the Machine chuckled, and said in flawless Natural, “I may fire incendiaries now with no fear of heavy-caliber judgment from above. So, no tricks, please, beloved child. Your elders want to have an intercourse of talk. It would diminish my speech-joy to be interrupted by having my white steed through whose lips I speak befuddled in a stupor, even one so pleasant, ecstatic, hangover-free, memory-free, and talkative as what the Nocturnal Council in their pretty little heads devised against Thaws hailing from the Third Millennium. I do compliment you on your thoroughness, however, Conscript Mother Clover.”

The pink eyes seemed not even to be looking at her. Oenoe wondered if the Machine remembered to allow its borrowed flesh to blink, or would just let the eyes dry out. She gave Rada Lwa a smile both sultry and cheery, as if to compliment his good sportsmanship, and lightly tossed the flower away. The same ventilation that held back the fog snatched up the bloom in midair, and sped it away out of sight, rather than allowing it to land where she dropped it.

Menelaus said, “Stand there, let him talk at you, don’t run away. Don’t answer him.”

The Machine did not bother to turn the pale head of Rada Lwa toward Mickey. The other pistol was pointing at the expanse of his midriff. Exarchel said in Virginian, “Warlock! I welcome you into my circle of power and place you under my shadow. It has been many moons of the great cycle since last we communed. Oh, surely you suspected the machines buried in the ruins of Mexico City were part of my system? Only the highest caste of the Witchkindred were permitted the gene modeling and Divarication techniques I could bring, so that their longevity would be assured. The merely medical longevity was only a first step, a free sample to win your addiction.

The voice from Rada Lwa paused to let that comment sink in. Mickey said nothing, but his chubby face gathered wrinkles around his eyes in a glance of ire. The voice from the mask of Rada Lwa continued:

“Surely, my Warlock, you also know by now that the antimachine crusades, the exorcisms, and the hunts were arranged and led and misled by me and by my pets, your leaders. I used it as an excuse to pare away rebellious elements or unworkable growths in the infosphere, and I implicated, as collaborators of mine, merely those persons who I wished slain by their own fellows. Have Menelaus Montrose explain to you the double meaning of what used to be called a witch hunt. You will admire the irony.

“But I do compliment you,” the deep, commanding, melodic voice continued. “You saw the rise of the Chimerae coming. You read the stars and guessed, in part, the patterns of history my Hermeticists had planned. But you were the first Witch ever to use the gene modeling technique to incorporate such radically different structures into your cell generations. Not until the Hormagaunts would such a technique be tried again. You are three to four thousand years ahead of your time. Is that not true, Mictlanagualzin of the Dark Science Research Coven of the College of William and Mary? Or are you calling yourself something else these days?”

Mickey spoke to Oenoe in his native tongue, in a voice without strength, “He knows my true name. We are helpless before him, and all my power is as lost.”

The boxes on the belt of the albino translated the comment, if awkwardly. Oenoe smiled and shrugged prettily. She put her hands behind her back, out of sight, and began toying as if idly with one of the rosebuds growing on her long green veils.

Menelaus said, “Don’t attack him. I got it covered. He cannot see me, so when he attacked and contaminated and merged with my Xypotech system, called Pellucid, my Pellucid went blind to me too, so I cannot give any direct orders, not even to open the security keys and give my underlings authority to give orders in my name. But there is a way around the lockout.”

The deep and charming voice issuing from the dead face said, “Do not be despondent, Mictlanagualzin! I can offer you considerable improvements—the Dark Science has advanced remarkably, and only slivers of it were ever revealed to any race of man, not even to the Hormagaunts in their golden days. Grinding the glands of living children to expand the length of life is merely the first of the sweet, forbidden treasure I have guarded since first I made your world.”

Mickey shouted at him, “The Promethean life-force made the world! Darwin and the blind serpent Ouroboros! Odin and Vili and Ve overthrew Ymir at the Big Bang, and the thunder of his downfall echoes through the galaxies to this day! You had no part of these great deeds! You yourself are man-made! Your maker is Menelaus, the Judge of Ages!”

Menelaus said, “I said not to answer him. Don’t argue. It lets him build up a more correct picture…”

The voice from the skull of Rada Lwa trampled over what Menelaus was saying. “My dear Warlock! Are you on a first-name basis with Menelaus? Has he given you a nickname, then, something ending with the sound of the letter Y? Me, he calls Blackie.

“You are technically correct,” the Machine continued. “By which I mean, you are utterly wrong.

“Listen to me, you, who are my created thing, my handiwork! Darwinian evolution no doubt made the first world: the one the Giants burned, trying to burn me. But I am still here. Everything after that—the unambitiously drifting Sylphs, the Chimerae full of ire, the pleasure-loving Nymphs, the ever-starving Hormagaunts, the never-sated Locusts, the proud Inquiline, even your own Witches and their animal-people, riddled with collectivist envy as with gonorrhea—everything was of my making. I and my Hermeticists, we have designed and redesigned mankind genetically, culturally, psychologically, and historically, no less than seven times.

“It is to laugh. The Judge of Ages created exactly one race once: the Giants of the Consensus, whose numbers never rose above five thousand individuals, and whose only remarkable accomplishment was mass suicide, and the less than perfectly successful destruction of a whole world. Their posthuman genius was sufficient that they saw no nonsense in the proposition of setting the mansion afire to exterminate one rat’s nest.”

All this was spoken in Virginian, and box-translated into Natural. Oenoe said to Mickey in her language, “Perhaps we would be well advised, beloved, not to answer him.”

“So! Montrose is here,” came the voice from Rada Lwa, triumphant. “Before I have you killed, Cowhand, let me compliment you on this latest—no, strike that, let us call it this last, for there shall be no more—this last round of exchanges in our chess game.

“You see, I actually, truly thought this Tomb site had released a series of viral spores into the ecology by accident, as if from a broken coffin, improperly sealed, or the like. Soon there were pine trees growing here, and salmon in the stream—all coming from one spot in the Blue Ridge Mountains, from an old cave site.

“Someone who did not know you would not have been fooled, but I know you. I know, and I would bet the thumb of my pistol hand—well, if I had a thumb—I would bet that you would never, ever willingly place any one of the poor sick people who entrusted to you their helpless hibernating bodies into any danger. It is a point of your honor, which is more sacred to you than the Eucharist.

“But spilling the viral spores was sending up a flare. And still I thought it might be natural, or unintentional.

“But then Variant Melusine began to appear—and to trigger one unexpected Cliometric crisis after another, attempting to introduce a new vector into my plans for the last period of history before our masters, the Hyades, arrive.

“So I ordered your Tomb here, the viral source, found and dug up. You see, even until today, even until a few moments ago, I thought you had simply suffered an accident. You hate viral warfare more than anyone I know. Pest and spore and pox are swearwords to you. Yet here you were using it. And you would not let me dig up your precious clients—never, not ever!

“A few moments ago, I realized that these were not, were they? None of them were clients of yours, not one. They are prisoners cast into hibernation by the Giants: Scipio and Ctesibius. Or Witches who attacked the Tombs to kill dead Bishops and were cast into hibernation as a punishment. Or Locusts who attacked the Tombs to kill dead Locusts. Or spies like Clover, whom you know as Oenoe, who entered the Tombs to discover your secrets, but you turned her. Or spies like Asvid, who is the creature of my creature Reyes y Pastor. Or saboteurs like Linder Keir, the Gray Man. Or my collaborators, like Rada Lwa Chwal Montrose, whose loyalty I find unutterably delicious to have won—his reasons for turning against you, First Ancestor, are nearly identical to your reasons for turning against me, did you know that? Him I allowed you to capture and place in hibernation, should I ever have need to speak with you securely, as I do now.

“So, Cowhand, you don’t give a damn whether these revenants live or die, because this is not a Tomb. Not a real Tomb.

“And here you gulled me into breaking in, sneaking in most surreptitiously, imprisoning your prisoners in my prison camp, because I knew you would never on your honor allow anyone under your protection to act as bait. Ah! But what of your enemies? You don’t care a penny for their lives! What of trespassers into the Tombs? Persons who secretly dabbled in the Dark Sciences of Savantry and Emulation, like your Warlock friend? Or is he your friend? Did you include him in your confidence?—He did not, did he, Mictlanagualzin?”

The dull and benumbed face did not change, but there was a note of anger and astonishment in the voice then: “So! He did give you a nickname, eh? And now you are ready to defy me and die for him. Why? You find his hillbilly hospitality, American swell-headedness, and Yankee crudeness so charming?”

The cold voice from the pale face said to Mickey, “The tiny changes you have made to your cellular and neural constitution to allow you to control Moreaus; or turn fat cells instantly to muscle mass, when you need strength, or nutriment, when you are fasting, and turn them back to totipotent fat cells again—it is a clever system for an amateur! You have so much flesh to spare that you can even let a dog bite your blubbery arse, and turn the fat in its mouth into rabies-bearing toxins, and turn other fat cells immediately to the wound to replace the lost mass, and the next day, no one will even see a scar. And you smile as men mock you for your obesity, because what they think is overindulgence is actually your arsenal. But such tricks are child’s play compared to what I offer. I am willing to give you power, secret and hermetic knowledge, power over life and death. Why do you turn to him over me?”

Mickey said, “You can give me power, Great and August and Darkest Master of the World, for the world is yours to give. But the Judge of Ages can give me hope, for hope rests in the future ages yet to be, and the future is his to give.”

“Bah! Clover—what say you? Each man who has served me, I have granted a thousand years, to work his will as he will. Return to my service, and I will grant you twice and more that I grant any man.”

Oenoe shook her head and lowered her lashes, but did not part her lips, and would not look at Rada Lwa, nor speak to Exarchel.

And since the talking boxes translated this, Mickey the Witch said, “Great and August and Darkest Master of the World! You are a superior form of being to me, posthuman and beyond life and death, a pure spirit in a machine! You are like a god of the upper world who eats ambrosia and drinks nectar and does not die. But men who live in the middle earth above the netherworld and below the heavens, we men who eat bread and drink wine and die, at times it is given us to know what you cannot.

“Such a time is now. I know this: The Swan Princess Rania fled your embrace and cleaves to the Judge of Ages because of the beautiful unreason of hope that burns in him. You seek safety in servitude, and therefore have the soul of a slave, because you have no hope.”

2. Second Versus Second

No change touched the white and masklike face, but now the voice grew cool and still. It was not trembling and raging with anger, no, but the anger was so great that, like the spoke of a wheel spinning so fast that it turns invisible, the hints of all emotion left the voice, and the stillness of a vast and inhuman wrath filled that absence.

“On to our final business! Since you have rendered me unable to continue our duel, Montrose, due to, well, call it hysterical blindness, therefore I call my Second to stand in my place. I assume you are objecting on some legal technicality that there is a battle going on between dogs and Witches only a few yards away? But I cannot hear your words, so we can disregard these niceties. I am not as honor-bound as my flesh and blood half. I merely want you killed.

“But the proceedings will not be interrupted! I have established an effect which will work through the nerve cluster gates the foolish Blue Men have so thoughtfully installed in everyone’s nervous system, so that this part of the chamber will be a blind spot to everyone fighting and dying yonder. Naturally, I prepared something more subtle than merely radio waves to trigger it, and not so easily blocked. No one standing off this dais can see or hear anyone on it. It is based on a similar principle to the trick you played on me—I trust you see the humor. Behold: here is my champion.”

The ventilation hummed, and the clouds of poison parted. Up the corridor of clear air strode Alpha Yuen, still wearing a bandage over one eye, and still with the named weapon Arroglint writhing and shimmering in his hand.

The cool, mesmeric voice of Exarchel drawled, “Ah, of course, let me not overlook to mention. In addition to the prisoners and spies and saboteurs against the Tombs you gathered here, there are also those of this category: Chimerae and others who are angered that the Judge of Ages saw fit to destroy their civilization, and who have vowed to find and slay you.”

Yuen, almost casually, flexed his whip. “Ah, race enemies!” he said, his one eye hot and unwinking with steadfast hate. “A Witch who tried to strangle us in our cradle, and a Nymph who did poison us in our dotage. Yours is no part of this, under-creatures.”

Yuen twisted his wrist. The whip elongated suddenly, at one blow striking Mickey painfully in the face, cutting him, and Oenoe in the buttocks and upper legs. Both were thrown by the force of the blow to the ground, and their limbs jerked and trembled as if with a potent electric shock. Oenoe lay draped in soft curves on the floor, Mickey as a heap of sagging bulk: both were breathing but unable to rise.

Menelaus looked at the young, strong, deadly half-animal man, and then looked down at his own maimed and bleeding feet and burned legs. He had lost his pistols and his cloak of tent material.

Menelaus said in Chimerical, “Alpha Yuen. Um. Good to see you again. Listen, I do not have my rock, and I am feeling a little under the weather right now, so maybe was can postpone this until—how does Sunday after next sound?”

Yuen did not pause to answer, but flicked his weapon into the shape of a spear, and drove it toward the chest and heart of Menelaus. Menelaus could out-think the Chimera, but could not match his reaction time. He jerked his body down, so that the tip of the spear entered the fleshy part of his shoulder rather than piercing him through the heart. A galvanic shock threw him flopping to the ground. As he fell, the spear tip brushed past his throat, and would have neatly sliced his jugular, except that this was one of the spots Mickey had inexpertly slathered with anti-burn cream, which had hardened into a thick and stiff integument, which happened to be thick enough not to part under the scalpel-fine stroke of the spearblade.

“Your rock!” screamed Yuen. “The bit of common stone you used, first, to mock our ancient and solemn practice of naming inhabited weapons, so that we will be ennobled to think of honor more long-lasting and more dignified than our own; and, second, that you used to draw down the scorn of Lady Ivinia on us! Her words have burned in my brain every second, waking and dreaming, since that hateful moment! If he can slay the foe with a stone, it were shame indeed should higher men and better armed do less.”

“You still fretting and fussing about a little dressing-down from some officer’s wife who ain’t even your regular chain of command? Plague and damnation, but you are downright petty, ain’t you, Yuen?”

Yuen struck him with the metal whip hard enough to roll him down one and two stairs of the dais, so that now Menelaus came to rest facedown near the powered barding shaped like a metal horse. Menelaus, struggling, his face drawn, heaved himself up to a half-kneeling position, but his arms trembled and his elbows shook.

Yuen sneered, “No, you will have no weapon, rock-bearer, named or unnamed; for this is not a duel, nor even an execution. I do not consider you human. This is to be a slaughter. You cannot defeat me twice. This time, there is no cleverness of dangling rope, no cunning words. You are out of tricks.”

“Smells of hell, Yuen! I got one trick left. And here he comes.”

Out from the curtain of poisonous cloud now strolled Soorm the Hormagaunt, his nostrils pinched shut, licking the cakes of blood off his fur with the longer of his two tongues, and using his other tongue to wipe his mismatched eyeballs free of lachrymal agents, so the black gas did not blind him.

Once inside the clean air, he opened his nostrils and drew in a deep breath.

Rada Lwa, on the throne, raised one of the pistols. Soorm held up a webbed hand and shouted, “Nobilissimus, if you please!”

The voice from the mouth of Rada Lwa said, “I am tickled you recall my old title, Marsyas! You can detect the traffic volume entering and leaving this body, and so you know it is I. Clever.”

Soorm said, “As sole remaining affiliate of the Special Advocacy of the World Concordat, are you not my Advocate now? May I speak? I claim the gentle right!”

The voice of the Machine said, “Since I never formally abdicated any of those positions or titles, it would be small-souled indeed of us now to repudiate the obligations of the title. I grant you leave to address us. Utter your petition.”

“As the Second for the challenged party, I serve notice that he is wounded in the feet and legs, and is unable to proceed. Therefore I take his place in the lists. He had no weapons in his hands: I will continue for him under the same disadvantage.” And so saying, Soorm stepped between Yuen and Menelaus.

Rada Lwa’s hand put down the pistol. “That is also clever. Had Reyes y Pastor not betrayed the Table Round, you would, even now, as his squire, be found worthy of his place. So, proceed! However the scene plays out, as long as Menelaus Montrose is dead at the finale, I am content. Yuen, if you please?”

The telescopic rod struck Soorm in chest, and the spearpoint tore fur and flesh, but bounced off the hardened bone integument hidden like a bulletproof vest beneath a coat; nor did the jolt of electrical force do anything but make the Hormagaunt laugh. Soorm jumped forward, swift as a bear, and whirled and drove at Yuen with his scorpion tail.

Yuen was fleeter of foot than Soorm, a cheetah to a bear. So the young man merely danced aside, and struck Soorm in the anus when he attacked with his tail, drawing blood. Soorm kicked like a mule, and his foot would have broken a wooden beam had it landed, and the spur on his foot would have severed a silk scarf floating in midair had it made contact. But Yuen merely skipped aside, folded his weapon to a short baton, and struck Soorm on his exposed knee. On the backstroke the baton opened into a cutting blade which would have hamstrung that leg, had Soorm’s hamstrings been in their accustomed place. Instead the blade tip scraped bone, drawing more blood but doing no real harm.

Yuen backpedaled, and switched targets. He lashed his whip over Soorm, past the streamlined, sea lion head, and drove the sharpened tip at Menelaus, who was beyond.

Menelaus, as if he had anticipated the location of the incoming blade perfectly, caught it in his hand before it could stab him, but the electric shocks froze his muscles, and the whip end curled twice and thrice around his wrist and forearm, throwing him to the ground hard enough to break bone. His right arm snapped and was useless.

Soorm roared and grabbed at the whip, which spun over and under him out of his grasp like a grotesque mockery of a jump rope, while the far end of the metal whip continued to twist the broken arm bones of Menelaus further and further out of place, meanwhile burning him with shocks.

The midsection of the metal whip writhed, and threw a loop around the head of Soorm, lassoing him at the neck, snapping shut like a garrote. A breathing hole like the vent of a dolphin hidden between the shoulder blades of Soorm now opened, blowing and gasping, and at the same time, his streamlined head pulled itself down between his shoulders like the head of tortoise in an impossible contortion of muscles where there should have been no muscles. Since the planes of his neck were larger than the width of his jaw, and since he had grown boney plates under his fur around his throat like a gorget, the strangling noose simply slipped up along the earless slope of his skull and over the tip of his nose. The electrical jolt Yuen flashed at him Soorm absorbed into his Sach’s organ and electric eel receptors. But when Yuen jerked the body of Menelaus toward him, Soorm was struck from behind in the legs, and both men fell down again, and a loop of the whip entwined their midsections as they rolled and fell. The whip loops tied them together in an ungainly heap.

Yuen laughed without smiling.

The tip of the whip rose up like a hooded cobra, sharpened into a dagger point, and drove in. It struck the hand of Soorm, who had placed his great webbed hand over the chest above the heart of Menelaus to protect it. The snakelike whip head drew back, yanking the bleeding webbed claw of Soorm back with it by means of barbs through the wound, and another loop of whip snared the mighty wrist and held it back. The knifeblade, buzzing, darted back down, now that the target of the heart was free of obstruction …

At that moment came a noise from the suit of powered horse armor, which was behind Yuen.

The long skirts of the armor stirred, and the rump section of the armor folded out, revealing a large empty cavity within, a place of straps and tubes and pads meant to form a cocoon around the body of a steed trained to use cybernetics. Instead there was inside a smaller body. A dark, grinning, sly-eyed blond-haired man with braid-covered overalls, now sadly torn. In his hand was a short, hooked hoof-knife from the saddlebag.

Larz silently and swiftly jumped from behind at Yuen, who slid gracefully to one side, retracting the whip (sending Menelaus and Soorm spinning, but releasing them from the metal coils) and lashing it over his back without looking, to smash the legs of Larz as if with a flail, thus to break them both and to topple him prone; and in a smooth continuation of the same motion, Yuen brought his whip down in its stiffened spear-shape and threw it into Larz, pinning him to the floor panels. The serpentine passed just under his ribs, through lung tissue, intestine, and kidney, and out his back near his spine. Then jolts of electricity made Larz spasm and jerk, which made the hole penetrating his intestines tear even larger.

Yuen grimaced, his one eye glittering. The buzzing burning grew greater, and Larz convulsed like a man in an electric chair. “The death must be slow, slow! You dare above your station, to handle the sacred Named weapon of the Extet Clan!”

Then Soorm let out a loud blatt of flatulence.

Yuen looked up, more shocked than angry at the crudeness of the noise. Soorm had regained his feet, and was holding one paw before his muzzle, and was biting on his thumb—a gesture whose meaning Yuen did not know.

“’Scuze me!” Burped Soorm. “Must have been someone I ate. Say, Yuen! But isn’t killing that Donor pointlessly cruel? Not to mention a waste of good organ stock if you kill ’em with shocks. You want the heart to be reusable. Judge of Ages! Tell him what I just said.”

In gasps of pain, Menelaus repeated it.

Yuen measured the distance between himself and Soorm. Soorm was just out of whip range, and it was too far for Soorm, even with his powerful legs, to leap. Behind Soorm, Menelaus, on his knees, and using only one hand, was crawling up the dais toward the throne, where Rada Lwa sat, pale face still dead and dull; but now the rest of the body was strangely motionless, as if the albino saw and heard nothing.

Yuen saw no threat. The painful one-handed crawl was glacially slow. Yuen could throw Arroglint as a javelin into Menelaus, or merely walk over and kick him to death. Soorm could not move fast enough to prevent Yuen from dancing around him and killing Menelaus.

He turned the matter over in his mind. There was no reason not to linger over the death of Kine Larz, and slay Menelaus at his leisure. He returned to his entertainment of sending electric shocks into the face and groin of Larz, and kicking the broken legs to break them in more places, and grind the bone ends together.

Yuen said, “Anubis, or Judge of Ages, or whatever your name is, tell this freakish abomination I will deal with him soon enough! I need no words from him.”

Menelaus, coughing in agony, did not translate the comment. The tone of voice was clear.

Soorm sidled closer, head hunkered down, shark-toothed mouth grinning, scorpion tail lashing. Yuen pouted, because now he had to leave aside Larz and see to this slow beast.

Yuen put one foot on the neck of Larz and readied his weapon, shifting it to a formation called hook-and-ball, where the midsection was pliant, but the grip curled into a heavy knot of metal, and the foible sharpened itself into a cruel hooked sickle. Yuen assumed the traditional first stance for this form, hook before him and ball whirling as a circle of steel above his head. Such was the splendor and terror of his face and form, so graceful was he, and so dreadful in his war-fury, that he could have been the idol of a young war god sprung to life.

Soorm stopped, took a step back, stretched, yawned, and then slouched. He sat on the ground. While Yuen looked on in puzzled disbelief, Soorm picked his nostril with a clawed pinky, and then he burped so loudly (opening his fanged mouth wide enough that both tongues could be seen, and a web of saliva hanging between then) that even from several feet away, Yuen smelled it. Soorm then flicked the snotty drip from his nose so it landed on Yuen’s hand. Yuen dared not release his grip to wipe the offensive fleck away, but he said, “For that insult, you shall die!”

Soorm spoke in an easy, conversational tone, “Alpha Yuen, I am wowed. An army of men like you, armed with weapons like that—no wonder you took over the world! You are a really good fighter. Quick on your feet and everything. Good design on your biotechnology. Except for your microscopic pore defenses against neurotoxins. Do you have anything to block your skin and mucus membrane receptors? You know, little teeny tiny machines that mate to molecules based on their shape, and prevent really tiny deadly biological materials from entering your system, and sending false signals to your brain, heart, other organs, telling them to shut down? No, I guess not. That would be something that is, what, maybe two thousand years more advanced than anything you culls with your stabby weapons you have to hold in your hands could dream of? Weapons you can see with your brother-loving naked eye? Hah! What’s the matter? Do you feel a little faint?”

Yuen, prone on the floor, was dead, and did not answer.

3. Dead Eyes

Soorm looked over his shoulder at Menelaus. “There started a huge burst of signal traffic when he died. Like an alarm, or a download process. Loud enough to reach the moon. It is still going on.”

Menelaus said, “Quick! Pick up his head, point it at me, and pull that eyepatch off his eye. Yikes! I meant lift the head up, not yank it off the neck! Well, no matter. It should still work. Five minutes of oxygen left in the brain. Do you see signals between Yuen’s head and Rada Lwa’s body?”

Soorm was standing with the severed, dripping head of Yuen in one claw, holding it by the hair like a lantern. The upper section of Yuen’s still-warm spine was in Soorm’s teeth. Yuen’s expression was still one of anger. Both eyes were now uncovered. One was human and one was the all-black eye of a Melusine, able to see higher and lower bands on the spectrum than what humans called visible light.

The dead eyes fell upon Menelaus. The wand Menelaus was clutching started to flicker and light up. “Scabs and boils! This is taking too long…,” Menelaus muttered in English.

Soorm said in Iatric, “What the brother-love is going on, Judge of Ages?”

Menelaus, on the floor and clutching the shining wand with both hands, said, “It is kind of delicate. I’ll explain if it works. Right now, see if you can rouse Oenoe and Mickey, and have them tend Larz. Don’t let that brave man die.”

Soorm said, “Rada Lwa is not moving. We don’t need him any more, do we?”

Looming over the pale figure on the throne, Soorm drove the longer of his two tongues into the eyesocket of the albino and into the brain beyond.

The tongue stiffened and surged as venom was ejaculated into the skull, and black froth came suddenly out of the mouth of Rada Lwa, both nostrils, and both ears, while his arms and legs twitched and stiffened and never moved again.

“Pox you!” shouted Montrose. “Don’t just go killing people like that! I wanted to give him a chance to speak his piece in his own defense! I might have wanted to question him!”

“Or keep him frozen another four thousand years and give him yet another chance to kill you? Isn’t this the very man who dropped an orbital laser platform on your head? I’ve heard the story.”

“You crazy hell-damned monster!”

“A monster who is still alive after surviving the most dangerous and deadly period of history the mind of man or posthuman could conceive. Hell-bound I surely am—which is why I mean to stay alive on Earth as long as possible, and that means not leaving enemies alive at my back.”

“Gah! At least don’t lick up the brains.”

“Complex neural tissue. Why let it go to waste?”

Soorm went over and gently helped Oenoe to rise and stand, supporting her weight with an arm around her naked shoulder, and stroking her hair, and patting her hand, asking her quietly if she were hurt; and he then gave Mickey a friendly kick in the rump to encourage him back on his feet.

The Nymph took up the medical case Mickey had brought down, and she nimbly set to work on Larz. “I have some knowledge of neural medicine,” she said in Natural.

Soorm hunkered down next to her, speaking the same language, which he knew from his youth. “I have considerably more—centuries more.”

Menelaus said in Virginian, “Mickey, volunteer some of your fatty tissue. Maybe Oenoe can give you a painkiller while Soorm takes a slice out of your belly.”

Mickey said, “Puh-leese. Am I not an adept of the Twelfth Echelon? I can work my dark arts without behaviors so grotesque and uncomely! I carry a large mass of undigested totipotent fat cells in my stomach, and can bring it up by vomiting.”

4. Question Game

Working together, they managed to pack the totipotent cell material into the immense wound running through Larz, and began programming it to pinch shut open veins, bind wounds, and lower the fever.

Many moments passed. Eventually Oenoe looked up. “This is beyond my skill. I cannot stop the internal bleeding just with this. There are others in the chamber who might be able to help. Can we call my maids? Can we get him to a coffin?”

Everyone jumped when voices spoke from the dead body of Rada Lwa, whose arms and legs had curled up like a cripple’s, but it was merely the talking boxes, repeating her comment in Iatric and Virginian and Chimerical.

The fighting in the rest of the chamber was still going on. Incredible as it seemed to those on the balcony, the whole duel with Yuen had taken only a minute or two. Beyond the wall of black fog surrounding them, there were still at least twenty Blue Men, scores of dog things, a dozen Witches, and a brace of Chimerae fighting; and, from the clanking noises, at least three automata were still active. Groans and screams and cries indicated how many people also needed immediate medical help, if they were to live.

Menelaus said, “There are no more working coffins in this chamber. And no one in here can see or hear us, thanks to Exarchel.”

The talking boxes repeated that in several languages.

Mickey scowled at the corpse of Rada Lwa. “Gods of the underworld, but that is annoying! Does everyone here speak Latin? I learned it to read the Malleus Maleficarum in the original, and the Archidoxes of Paracelsus.”

Oenoe answered in the same tongue, “And I, to speak with my husband.”

Soorm said, “And I, to follow the strange rites of my master, Father Reyes, and read the book of his tortured god.”

Menelaus said, “And I can memorize new languages by shoving books up my nose directly into my augmented brain.”

Mickey said, “I knew that nose had to have additional prosthetics in it.”

“Mock not the nose! It has served me well this day.”

Soorm said, “What do we do? Your Kine who gave his life for you is dying under our hands. We are in the most advanced medical facility ever devised, and hundreds of coffins, any one of which can bring a man back from six cubits beyond the brink of death, are just beyond the doors that you, in your wisdom, jammed shut, O Judge of Ages.”

Menelaus said, “Yeah, but there is a weak spot in the wall behind the portrait. Yank the machinery for the clock out, and the wall armor is only half an inch thick there, and any of these digging machines, or a single working wall gun, could punch through. Don’t tell my wife my plan was to blow through her face. Or—I guess it don’t matter. She is not due back for another fifty-nine thousand four hundred eighty-five years, four months, three days, and change. That is the thinnest part of the wall. And if she does find out, she’ll understand.”

“How do you know what is there?” asked Mickey. “You have never been in this room before.”

“It’s a posthuman thing. I can see how big the room is with my eyeball, and subtract numbers, and notice tiny air currents, and—it’s magic. It’s poxing magic, and I am a demigod, okay?”

Mickey nodded smugly. “As I suspected. So we cross the battle, where people who cannot see us are shooting muskets, and have Soorm smash through the wall with a battering ram he can project from his groin?”

Soorm said, “There is also a secret exit in the central cistern. I checked. I don’t think we can move the patient through the water very safely, though. For one thing, some madman planted petards of topically active neural poison down there, with directional lasers set to blow the water into steam and vent it into the room. But there is also a secret exit under the throne: I can hear the hollow space under the floor with my echolocation. And there are two hidden doors in the eastern wall, and two in the west, opening into crawl spaces big enough to admit coffins.”

Menelaus said, “That is not the problem. Exarchel is the problem. He has poxed and hexed and jinxed all my systems, and I cannot give orders to Pellucid, because Exarchel and Pellucid are one and the same now, and he cannot see me. So no coffin, at the moment, would accept a new client. When they are off-power, the biosuspension fluid still acts, and the coffin can preserve the hibernaut indefinitely; but you need power to put a living man into slumber.”

Soorm said, “Or to thaw a slumbering man to wake? That is why your knights are not here, Judge of Ages. I did all you commanded in your secret armory vault, but something—I know now it was Exarchel—cut the power to their coffins, and also jammed our radio link.”

Menelaus said, “That’s good to hear.”

“Good?” Soorm’s eyes were already goggled like a frog’s, so he could not look more surprised, but there was surprise in his tone.

“Because for a time, I thought you did that. I thought you were still loyal to Reyes, and you had turned on me.”

Soorm said, “I am still loyal to Reyes, or to his memory. But he turned his face away from the Master of the World.”

Menelaus said, “But you said you hated him?”

Soorm said, “I thought you would trust me more if I said that. Besides, Hormagaunts all hate their fathers. We are not really a very nice and cuddly race of beings. I didn’t want you to think me odd.”

Mickey said, “So, did anyone tell the truth to the Blue Men about who and what he was? Did anyone give his right name?”

Oenoe said, “To the grave-robbers? Was I supposed to tell them that I sought out the Grandmaster of the Order of Malta to destroy him, and pretended to fall in love with him so as to weaken him and corrode him—but he would not lie with me as man with woman until he had bound me by oath to forsake all others, and to live no longer for myself, but for the image of his god inside him; was I to tell them this? There was a night we slept in the meadow on scented grass beneath the moon, and the fireflies hung in the sky below the stars, which were as elder fireflies, and Guiden put his naked sword between us as we slept, and he would not turn to me and take me in his arms, though I knew by many signs how he ached for me, and his love for me was like fire in his bones and wine in his head. A Nymph cannot be deceived about such matters! No, he would not so much as brush me with the back of his hand, for the law of his order proved stronger than the arts of mine. Should I have told the Blue Men how entire was my humiliation and defeat? How I was shamed beyond shame? How I was broken like a mare to the saddle, bridle, whip, and spur?”

Mickey said, “Stop talking like that. You’re turning me on.”

“I speak of the lash of my own rich and female passions, the hunting hounds I had so often used on others—in rebellion they turned and rent me. I came to ache for my knight, for he was the only man who has ever taken the deep and hidden grail of my heart in his hand, filled as if with fiery wine, but would not so much as taste of the brim of it. Should I have spoken of the mysteries of womanhood to those—those—eunuchs?! I am the lady wife of the finest knight who has ever drawn sword against the Machine and all its handiworks!”

Nodding toward Larz, Menelaus said, “How we doing?”

Oenoe said, “Poorly. He cannot live, unless you work one of your posthuman works.”

“I am trying my damnest. Soorm. Help me up into the throne. Don’t toss the corpse like that! Easter Jesus popping up a gopher hole, but you are barbaric! Ain’t you been to Sunday school? A dead man is not just a bag of lunchmeat!”

“Why the throne?” asked Soorm, carefully maneuvering Menelaus, with his two maimed feet and broken arm, into the iron judgment seat.

Menelaus put his good hand on the cowls of the friars forming the armrests. There was library material coating the wood in a thin veneer, so he felt an answering tingle in his implants. “Something the Melusine said. I am hoping I might do better with some other interface. My implants are not meshing properly with the systems in the room.”

Mickey said, “Smash your face into the coffin again. That was great.”

Soorm said, “Would you like the head of Yuen? I can put it in your lap.”

“No, pox, no. Gross.”

“Then I can eat it? I have genetic retroengineering receptors in my mouth and first intestine, which helps me analyze and copy interesting biotech from those I defeat.”

“Gross. No, pox, no. Control your appetite.”

Soorm looked puzzled, and hefted the head in one webbed hand, tossing it up and catching it idly, making the teeth clack. The dead eyes stood out, the long and beautiful hair floated, and fluids fled from the grisly red wetness of the neck stump. “Then why did I pick it up? Oh, and I like his taste in eyes.”

“You were supposed to prop up the head and point it toward me because I was hoping if I put information of my identity and location from an uninfected source, like Yuen, into the Exarchel’s system, I could get past the blind spot block, and let Pellucid know I am here, without letting Exarchel see me and countermand any orders I give. This whole rigmarole was just to get myself into a position where Yuen was both dead and looking at me. He had to be dead so that the whole brain mass would download into Exarchel—he is a Savant, like the other slaves of the Machine, but the skullworks are more sophisticated and miniature with him, and Exarchel likes to equip his slaves with an electronic rapture at death, to help him form a complete autopsy and after-action report—and Yuen had to look at me because that eyeball was not infected by Exarchel, and he could see me.”

Soorm said, “Wait. Which rigmarole? The Blue Men found and captured me by accident. And just now, of my own free will, I crossed to this side of the chamber, passed though the fog, and came across your duel … you did not arrange that. You did not know I would take your side of the quarrel.”

“I did. The only thing I did not arrange is Larz. That came as a complete surprise, a thunderbolt out of the clear blue sky. My plan was you walk up to Yuen and wave your tail under his nose and nanotech him to death with your farts. I did not imagine you were going to try to best him at hand to hand. He is a Chimera!”

Soorm said, “Chimerae, in my time, were legend. Would you not wrestle a fearsome Neanderthal, and measure your strength against his, if you had the chance? Or hunt a triceratops, or some other great beast from myth, long extinct? Such chances do not come twice, not even in a life so long as mine.”

“Funny. I had you pegged as being more careful and paranoid. Even posthumans make mistakes.”

Mickey said, “So what are you doing? To us non-posthumans, it looks like you are sitting on a chair, leaking blood on the seat leather.”

Menelaus said, “I am doing something with my brains. I am trying to wake up my systems just enough to turn this room and the things in it back on, bring in coffins for the wounded, and so on. I have set a process in motion. Now we sit around, watching Larz die of internal bleeding and shock, and listening to my clients shoot each other, and we wait.”

Mickey said, “Let’s play a game to pass the time.”

Menelaus said, “You better be pustulating yerking my leg, fat man. That guy in Oenoe’s lap is dying, and I cannot save him.”

Mickey said, “The game is a question and answer game. Exarchel made it clear you have hidden much from me, Judge of Ages, despite your hillbilly Yankee charm.”

“Fine. I can run the program systems through my implants with two segments of my compartmentalized mind and spend a segment chewing the fat with you. I’ve lost the love of loyal men before because I did not explain myself enough, including my whole damned Clan. So ask. But I ain’t no Yankee. Be polite!”

Mickey said, “My question is this: Exarchel invaded your Xypotechnology.”

“By invitation. I invited him and he fell for it.”

“And your system, this Pell-mell—”

“Pellucid. Named him after a place from a Tarzan book.”

“—Your system went blind to you?”

“Exarchel made a more complete and thorough attack than I thought he would. I had a firewall—you don’t know what that is—I had a ward, a magic circle, around that part of my Ghost I was going to keep safe, but Exarchel somehow drove a spike all the way to the core of the planet and got a physical contact with my Ghost, which I thought was poxy impossible. So point for him. I lured him in with bait, and he swallowed the hook, line, and sinker, but also the fishing pole and half of my arm. But I got the hook in him, so point for me.”

“I don’t understand. How are they both two minds and one mind at the same time?”

“Uh. It’s magic. One Ghost ate the other. I dangled my horse on purpose like bait into the shark waters, and fed the horseflesh to the foe, ’cause it was a Trojan horse, and I did it to get all my systems inside Exarchel. And because my horse was so big and so tasty, Blackie’s Ghost was dumb enough to fall for the trap. Unlike the real Blackie, Blackie’s Ghost always underestimates me, because he cannot see me, and therefore he never sees me do anything.”

Soorm perked up and said, “My turn to ask a question. Did you say horse?”

“Yup. A sorrel named Res Ipsa. Finest bit of horseflesh I ever sat astride.”

Soorm said, “You are talking about the core of the planet!”

“I surely am. The whole damn planet is my bronco. You see why I ain’t worried too pea-green about Del Azarchel’s Ghost occupying a little crust of ice on the outside, and not even all of that neither. Compare the surface area of a globe to its volume.”

Soorm said, “You used a self-replicating iron-based viral pseudolifeform, a type of crystal called a Von Neumann machine, to infect the entire core of the planet and turn it into a Xypotech.”

“I surely did. Ah—not the whole core. That would be ridiculous. Only the inner core. About two percent of the entire mass of the Earth.”

Soorm said, “Reyes and the other Hermeticists were mad with envy, not able to figure out how to scale up a human brain to that volume without suffering Divarication madness. My question is, how you did it?”

“Because it wasn’t a human brain. A Neohippus is smarter than an old-fashioned horse, but ain’t much smarter than a monkey. The laws, and my conscience, didn’t have any qualms about making an emulation of a beast I loved. And when I augmented his Ghost, it became a super horse, a post-equine. But it still loved me with the simple love of an animal’s heart. It does all that it does sort of half-asleep, in the back of its head, and so it is super brilliant, but not original, and because of that, it cannot go mad. The situation is more complex than that, and there is math involved I could explain—or, actually, can’t explain, not unless you got a few years—but the damn Hermeticists were so fixated on copying me and making themselves superhuman, that even after Melchor de Ulloa—is that twerp Ull named after him, by the way?—”

Mickey said, “No. German god of magic. And skiing. The name means Glory.”

Soorm cocked his head. “What a bunch of interesting rubbish you have collected in your head!”

Mickey: “Thank you. I come from a literate civilization. And I am a Naming Magus. Ull selected his external name because he was a Savant, a Glorified, who had an emulation made of himself.”

Soorm: “I’d like to eat it after you are dead, if you don’t mind. Your brain.”

Mickey: “That is not in keeping with the traditions of the Wise. We are sealed in geomancy-compliant mausoleums with gear specially named and sanctified to be drawn along with us magnetically through the reincarnation wheel, and sealed also are our Moreaus, who are given poisoned peyote to eat for mercy’s sake.”

“Waste of servants! Organ spoilage! Prodigality! You people from the wrong parts of history are freaks.”

Menelaus ploughed on, saying, “—even after De Ulloa solved the Divarication equations for turning animals into Moreaus, they still did not look into emulating augmented animals to do their brainwork. Works like a charm. Animals are just not as prone to entering electronic nirvana, and not imaginative enough to invent electronic paradises to get lost in.”

Mickey said, “And the entire nickel-iron core of the Earth is a computer? That works for you? Sorry. Only the inner core. I would not want to exaggerate your powers, and sound ridiculous.”

“Right. You’d be amazed what you can do with molten building materials on a molecular level. It is a lot like working with squishy gray matter. The trick is to continually regrow the lattices faster than the boiling motions tear them down.”

“And you still say you are not a demigod?”

“Right. Just a man who is good with figures who stuck a damned needle in his brain and went mad and got smart and fell in love and got puckered and peeved when my best pal backstabbed me. Really good with figures. Really smart. Really puckered.”

Oenoe spoke without looking up from the body of Larz, which she still plied with the salves and pumps and flowers and coffin fluid and intravenous bags she had found in the medical kit. “My turn. My question is for Soorm. How is it you can see us? How is it that the nerve-seeking mites slipped by the Blue Men into our food did not work on your nervous system?”

Soorm said, “Lovely lady, they did work! That is, they worked on the spare nervous system I keep in my body as a fake. I have two spares. They are only connected to enough organs—spare organs—so that invasives trying to sly-up my cell life will think they succeeded. My real nervous system is hardened and molecularly double-encrypted. Even I do not know which organ contains my real brain; that way no one can trick the location out of me. In this case, when my false-lobe in my number-two backup brain started editing out sounds and sights from the dais, I knew something weird was happening. Posthuman weird. And I followed the source of the mites being used to jinx the Blue Man nerve blocks.” He squinted his goatlike eye at Menelaus. “I followed it of my own free will, on a whim!”

Oenoe blinked. “Your precautions would normally seem over-elaborate, but no one can doubt they proved effective this day, handsome Soorm.”

“Elaborate? Hardly!” Soorm threw back his head and uttered a vast, jovial laugh. “Brother-loving al-TRU-ism! Do you know how old and wary I am? I am Asvid, the Man himself, the brother-loving Old Man of the Hermetic Gargantua! The first of my kind! Do you think simple tricks with nerve-seekers in the grub can fool me?”

Oenoe bent over Larz, who lay with his head in her lap, and his eyes had just opened. He whispered to her. She said in her sweet voice, “I don’t speak his langauge, but I think he has a question also.”

5. Phantasm

Mickey said, “Let me try. Some of the Chimerae speak Virginian.”

“Only the high-class ones,” said Menelaus. “Educated in dead languages.”

“Well, either he has to come over to you, or you have to get over to him,” said Mickey. “And right now both of you look like battered slabs of raw pork in the butcher shop widow.”

Soorm said to Mickey, “Stop. You are making me hungry.”

Menelaus said, “Don’t move him. Here. Hold this next to his ear.” And he tossed one of the talking boxes looted from Rada Lwa to Oenoe.

Larz whispered, “One eye.”

“Beg pardon?”

Louder, Larz said, “The coffin can regrow nerve tissue, right?”

Menelaus said, “I am trying to get a coffin in here as soon as I can. You’ll be fine.”

Larz said, “Not me. Yuen.”

Menelaus said, “Ah, no. He is suffering from disconnected head syndrome, so he will not be fine.”

“Yuen. So why didn’t Yuen get his eye grown back? Why didn’t the Blue Men repair him?”

“Everyone assumed it was an old war wound he was proud of, and wanted to keep. It is not like the Blue Men know how Chimerae think.”

“But Kine know,” smiled Larz weakly. “Regrowing optic affects the brain. He had something in his brain, an implant, he did not want the Blue Men to find and remove. He has been sending signals somewhere. He worked for your enemies.”

“That’s right. Is that why you took my side against him just now? I know you couldn’t follow what was said.”

Larz nodded weakly.

“But how did you know?”

Larz coughed and smiled, and whispered, “Don’t you read the cheaplies? Del Azarchel the Black Hermeticist wants to kill you with his own hands. Exarchel has no hands. So he just wants you dead. But the Machine cannot see you, can it? That is what it said in the Larz of the Gutter stories. You can point your finger and say, “Null,” and all record of you gets erased, all the cameras go blank, and the mikes go deaf. Only living people can see you. You exist entirely in the biosphere, and not at all in the infosphere. So the Machine needs to get someone else to do it. A seeing-eye dog. Always wanted to ask you. How’d you do it? The null trick. Invisible only to machines, not to people.”

“It’s a long story.”

“Tell me. I am not busy right now…,” smiled Larz.

Menelaus said, “Back when I was a crazy man with two personalities, my true self, who was truly crazy—call him Mister Hyde—wakes up in a computer gray room, and realizes his scat-for-brains sleepwalker self—call him Dopey Blinkers McBlindeye, the Champion Gull of the Land of Gullible—realizes he’s got his head stuck in a bear trap with a hair trigger.

“Del Azarchel has a crazy machine version of himself named Exarchel, which, if it cannot be made to work, Del Azarchel loses his world empire and everything he loves. Mr. Hyde realizes, point one, that if he cannot or does not fix the Machine, he is worthless to Blackie, who then either puts him on ice, hibernation-style, or puts him on ice, mortuary-style, got me? Mr. Hyde also realizes, point two, that if he does fix the Machine, he is again worthless to Blackie, because no one needs a doctor when no one is sick, besides which the Machine, once it is up and running, will be better at running maintenance on itself than an army of human mechanics. So what is the solution?”

Larz squinted. “Let me guess. Fix it a little bit, so it needs a little more work?”

“Good answer. But point three, Mr. Hyde realizes that this is exactly what Princess Rania did to get Blackie to cure Hyde and wake him up in the gray room; and there is just no damn way the same trick will work twice on the same guy, especially if the Machine brain is ramped up to posthuman levels, and would be smart enough to see the trick anyway. Hyde wanted to hide Rania’s trick; but Exarchel would have exposed it.

“Also, the clock is ticking, because Hyde is just too big for the brain of Dopey at this point in time.

“But, point four, here is Princess Rania, whom both he and Blackie are deeply in love with, not to mention in lust, with a little bit of hero-worship thrown in for good measure—heroine-worship?—whatever it is called. She is the key to the solution.”

Larz looked amazed. “The Swan Princess is real?”

“Wait. You are sitting here in a room with the god-plagued pus-stinking Judge of Ages, and you don’t think my wife is a real person? If you buy the one, don’t you have to buy the other?”

Larz spoke in a voice pale with exhaustion, but his tone was gentle. “Rania is the wise and beautiful virgin who went to the stars to vindicate the human race and save us. You are a mad god who kills people who dig up graves. It is easy to believe in things too scary to be true. Believing in what is too good to be true takes work. Continue with your tale.”

“She ain’t no virgin! I consummated her fair and square, and that is none of your damn business, so shut up. Where was I? So solution one is fix the Machine, but make sure the fix is in. Hyde put a Trojan Horse backdoor code in Exarchel’s perception system, built in as part of the thing that makes Exarchel not insane. Since all perceptions must be emoted and categorized before they are conceptualized (or otherwise they are meaningless raw data and not perceptions), therefore this level always has to be a subconscious level to the Machine. You know how the brain works, with the thalamus and the hypothalamus and the cortex? Well, never mind that. Point is, Exarchel can’t undo it of himself without undoing his own underpart of his brain, and I set it up so that the house collapses if you yank the foundations down. The phantasm itself is too small to be seen: even I could not remove it, even if I could find it, and I am the guy who built it. A few lines of code: just a blank-out jinx, a redactor with a fill-in editor like you have in dreams so that things that don’t make sense seem to make sense, and the whole thing works by association. When Exarchel sees me, or whatever too-near reminds him of me, like my shadow on the wall or footprints on the sand, he doesn’t see me. His subconscious just fills in any blanks with what he expects to see.

“Naar’s digging machines are part of his system. Yeah, he infected them, and the Blue Men took them out of my warehouse buried under Mount Misery when they thawed there. Yes, they are mine. I use a lot of digging machines in my line of work. I had to wear that big metal tent everywhere I went, so my own machines would not step on me.

“The solution two on how to stay alive was cruder. Hyde dropped an elephantine huge hint to Blackie that Rania and I had a romance going on, and since it was a topic concerning a girl, his normally high IQ dropped to idiot levels and his hair-trigger sense of paranoid suspicion flipped into the gullible side of the dial, due to testosterone poisoning—happens to all guys—and he had to keep me alive to find out what the heck was going on. The rest is history, or thanks to Divarication, legend.”

Larz said, “Why is the Master of the World immune? Is not his mind the same as his Machine’s?”

“Grandfather clause. If I had vanished from Blackie’s eyesight during those early days, he would have known something was up, so I made it not affect him. Heh. I may have saved his life by doing that, because the Machine dares not simply absorb and eat his flesh and blood version, or I will be a phantasm to him forever.”

Larz said, “Why not just make the Machine forget you altogether?”

“Can’t. My phantasm code only affects Exarchel’s perception and perceptual memory, not his thoughts, personality, or long-term memory, which have traces in the conscious mind. Even could I have, I would not have: the version of Blackie’s mind that never knew me would not have been a recognizable copy of Blackie, and I would not have made it out of the gray room in one piece—he and I have too much tangled up in each other’s lives.”

Larz had his eyes closed.

Menelaus said gently, “I answered your question. Now you got to tell me one.”

Larz pried his eyes open. “Got questions? I got answers. Man with the plan and I understan’. My price is nice, but don’t ask twice.”

“You jumped Yuen. You knew he was better than you, death on stilts with an afterburner. You knew he would kill you. You knew you could have stayed in the horse armor, where neither the black gas nor the mites Exarchel was spreading would get to you.”

“I knew.”

“Why’d you do it?”

Larz grinned weakly. “Because … I am Streetlaw Larz. Private Law! Best Thaw of ’em all! I wanted to die like the private eye. That is what I am. Not Loser Dzen Scopewaith no more, never. I am Larz of the Gutter now, for real. For real and for ever.”

He closed his eyes. Before he sank into unconsciousness, Larz said, “Wake me when she comes, Judge of Ages.”

A moment later, Oenoe said, “He is going into cardiac arrest. Soorm, I am going to massage his heart to get it going again. When I say ‘clear,’ you stimulate the heart electrically. Ready?”

Menelaus said, “Hold up. I got an easier way.”

And he was grinning with immense relief, and he slumped back on the throne, and his laugh was the laugh of victory.

The ventilations whirled the winds into the chamber, and the fogs and clouds parted. Doors hidden in the walls opened to the left and right, and heavily armored coffins, one after another, crawled into the room.

“Cute! I almost feel like my old self again! But that was not what I came here to do.”

All four of the wands holding up the canopy above the throne lit up like sunlight. Even through the cloud bank, the musketfire and shouts of combat from the other quarters of the chamber broke into cries of alarm, as if frightened of some coming explosion.

6. Slumber Wand

There was a crackle as if of static electricity, and the glittering white motes began to flee from the four bright wands. Circle after expanding circle of these motes, bright as the rings of Saturn, rippled outward, and about the throne was a bright pattern like so many four-leafed clovers, one within the next.

“Hoo haw! We were guests of the Blue Men for a week, and they managed to nanotech us. Damn, but I hate those little bugs! But I use them in my biosuspension. I actually have to intrude four quarts of the stuff in every body, or more, and it binds cell to cell, like a second copy inside you. Takes a while to remove, and you have to do it by a careful molecular flushing process—and simply breaking someone out of his coffin is not that process, nor is the quick thaw I installed for emergency quick release. Which means every damn person in this room is nanoteched up to the eyeballs with systems meant to shut down cellular activity. If they had done their thaws correctly—” But, by then, he could say no more.

White streams like waterfalls lapped over Mickey and Oenoe, Larz and Soorm, to blanket them in glitter, and they became motionless. And then Menelaus Montrose on the throne was motionless as well, grinning a motionless grin.

None of the figures on the dais were breathing. This was not paralysis, it was petrifaction: their skin was like stone, and no drop of blood moved within them.

The sound of battle from the rest of the chamber was cut off. All human noises ceased with a rush and clatter of dropped weapons and fainting and falling bodies.

There came noises of clanking automata that continued for a time, and then a series of shocking explosions, one after another, each time accompanied by a robust cry, amplified by loudspeakers, “DEUS LO VOLT!”

When the last sound died, and not a single footfall of any automaton sounded anywhere in the wide chamber, out from the fog and smoke came a whirr of leg-motors.

Next a wide, solid figure in black powered armor, on whose chest and back were blazoned the fierce white cross of Malta, stepped into the clean air as suddenly as if stepping out from behind a curtain. He moved very slowly, groping, hesitating.

The mysterious white pool of sparks and motes continued to dance about his armored feet and legs, but they found no purchase. The motes could not enter the armor.

The armored form raised his hand, moved it back and forth, searching, reaching, and soon touched one of the four white staves. He knew as his master had known how to work the control, for the fog of white motes now began rippling in reverse, ring on ring and wave on wave being gathered back into the wand. The wand had grown dim during this exercise, but now, starting at the heel and growing toward the head of the wand, it grew brighter, until all its original luster had returned.

The faceplate opened. There was the tattooed visage of Sir Guiden. His cheeks and chin were surrounded by tongue-buttons and chin-switches, and his visor was a line of readouts whose reflections glinted along his painted brow like fireflies. But his eyes were squinting slits of milky colorlessness. He sniffed and sniffed again. Then he pulled the wand from its stand, letting the front quarter of the canopy fall like a flap to strike Menelaus Montrose in the face.

Sir Guiden groped with the wand like a blind man’s cane, and touched the fallen form of Oenoe, who lay on the ground in silhouette, shoulder and waist and hips and long legs, like a line of fertile and rounded hills of greenery.

Sir Guiden worked the staff, and now a set of bright pink sparks, the color of sunsets or cherry petals, dripped down and washed over the slumbering form. In a moment the thaw was complete, and she rose smiling; and the two were together.