“I can tell you how to enter the chamber safely, and then give you the sequences to bring the knights to life. Don’t touch the coins scattered on the floor: they are there to trap the greedy. Once we have even one knight awake and in full kit, the Blue Men don’t have the firepower to stop ’em.”
With a squawk of data, he sent down to a man he suddenly wondered how far to trust and to the wife of his best friend the secret words to enter the chamber and thaw the sleeping knights.
A moment later, there was a whine of noise in his implants, and the link was cut. The line went dead.
Someone had discovered and jammed the wavelength. Was it a coincidence that this happened just as he had sent out his all-important code words? Or was it good luck it had not happened earlier?
Meanwhile the dog thing was becoming restive, and the stink was getting to Menelaus as well. Menelaus opened his hand and let the six tiny stones fall into the latrine.
2. Self-Directed
A single pair of dog things acted as escorts to guard Invigilator Illiance as he walked Menelaus back to the mess tent at noon.
Menelaus spoke without preliminary: “Do you know who you are working for?”
Illiance did not seem surprised by the question. “It is obvious that we are self-directed.”
“And who self-directed you to break open the Tombs? Does Ull really think that filch-artist Larz is going to get him into the Tomb system? Your aircraft were dug up from another Tomb system—unless I miss my guess, from the burial mounds outside of Wright-Patterson in Ohio. Whoever you were looking for was not there, was he?”
Illiance made a delicate gesture with his fingers. “Let us not allow the conversation to veer into areas of no particular consequence to our continued mutual harmony. Instead, as a mathematician, I am confident that you will be interested in the following puzzle: Not long ago, some forty-two rod-logic crystals, obtainers, reflectors, and memory glints were removed from my coat by you, a gesture which, if you understood it, indicated that you believe I am able to operate all aspects of my nervous system without artificial aid—”
“I understood the gesture. Ull was being a jackass.”
“—but an anomaly arises when the crystals are regathered afterwards, for only thirty-five can be found. Seven are missing.”
“Interesting. Do you have some method of scanning for them? Perhaps a homing signal or something?”
“A question that must vex whomever took them. I seem to recall you have a pattern of such investigatory expropriation.”
“Well, I seem to recall that Kine Larz asked to have some of those logic crystals, since he thought they were gemstones. He also claimed to be a snake-charmer, implying he might be skilled and therefore interested in computerpathics. You could ask him about the missing stones—if he lives through his attempt to force the Tomb door, I mean. What makes you think he can open it? And who told you to let him try?”
Illiance nodded serenely. “You seem to be exerting yourself to ask an additional question, rather than taking the trouble to answer my question.”
“Well, let’s not let the conversation veer into areas of no particular consequences for our contaminated mucilage harmonicas, right?”
Menelaus ducked into the mess tent once Illiance (lightly gliding) and the dog things (loping) departed.
3. Mess Tent
Inside, the long low tent was carpeted with woven mats of straw set atop a heated groundcloth. To one side stood a row of cannibalized coffins, lids open, connected to an ungainly power sump and feeder elements. Various forms of soup, stew, and gruel filled what used to be the nutrient control and restoration pockets. Instead of regrowing the missing flesh and bone marrow of the patient, the assemblers were taking material from the feeder tubes and turning it into other forms of protein and vitamins. Four Nymph women, looking achingly lovely despite their drab prison overalls, tended the cooking coffins and ladled out the gruel.
The revenants from different eras tended to segregate themselves by language. The Witches were grouped to one side of the tent, a circle of white-haired women with mummy-gray skins inside a large circle of menfolk. To his disappointment, he did not see Mickey.
The Chimerae sat or stood in rows according to their ranks at the other side of the tent, the lesser ranks not eating until their betters had finished. Only the Hormaguants spaced themselves more or less evenly about the tent, but even they kept their Clade-dwellers and Donors near at hand, for conversation’s sake if nothing else. And the gray twins sat together.
Seated near no one were the Savant Ctesibius from A.D. 2525 and the strange-eyed woman from A.D. 10100.
Glorified Ctesibius, the Savant, had entered at about the same time Menelaus did, but from the opposite end of the tent. A sudden hush fell across the diners. The Witches hissed with detestation. As Ctesibius with regal footstep walked past them, the Witches stood or scudded aside, clutching their bowls of gruel, careful lest he accidentally touch one, or have his shadow pass across them.
He was dressed in camp overalls, but had pinned or sewn two blankets together, and these swathed his upper limbs and draped gracefully behind him as he strode, like the toga of a Roman senator, or the ermine cloak of a king. Arrogance radiated from him like heat from a stove. Ctesibius had a number of unsightly holes or ports drilled in his skull, including a opening right in the crown of his head, and large enough one could have inserted a finger and not felt the bottom. He had found a black kerchief large enough to wear over his head like a shawl in lieu of the elaborate, long, antiseptic wigs that were part of the costume of the members of his order of his time.
The Chimerae did not feel any more love for servants of the Machine than Witches, but as he passed where they sat, their outward expressions did not change, except that they grew more still and stiff than their wont, and tightened grip on truncheon or staff.
Ctesibius took a bowl of gruel from the Nymphs, who shrank away from him, either giving him the “cut celestial” (which meant to stare upward rather than meet his eye) or the “cut infernal” (which meant to find something fascinating on the ground). He took the ladle from the hand of one beautiful, big-eyed Nymph without seeing her, and served himself. Then he sat on a straw mat on the cold ground as if he owned the entire world beneath his buttocks.
None of the generations after him would sit near him nor speak to him.
The unknown waif from A.D. 10100 was the opposite: she sat near no one and spoke to none.
The dog things were noticeably afraid of her, bristling when she moved. Her demeanor was like that of a hermit in the wilderness: an aura of otherworldliness hung about her. She seemed not to notice that there were any living things near her.
Glancing at the unnamed woman, Menelaus wondered how advanced her civilization of four hundred years ago had been. It arose six hundred years after the fall of the 1036 Ganymed. Clearly some life had survived in order to give rise to the civilization of the Blue Men, and records as well—records clear enough to allow the Blue Men to speak flawless High Iatric from the Iatocracy period, three thousand years before present. This civilization had practiced a high degree of biological technology: he looked at her eyes and at the joints where her antennae entered her scalp, and determined this was biotechnology far in advance of what the Hormagaunts practiced. From the little nuances of her stance and motions, he decided that she, like an Hermeticist, did not age.
How else was she like a Hermeticist? For example, did she know the Monument math?
As he approached, she turned from her meal, and rose to her feet, and looked up at him with an expressionless, inhuman stare.
The woman of A.D. 10100 had no sclera nor iris in her eye: every part of her eyes glittered black as a well of ink, so that she seemed blind. She had no eyebrows, and this gave her face a masklike appearance. Small, well-shaped, and symmetrical growths that no doubt were extra sense organs protruded from her skull: there were infrared pits like dimples on her cheekbones below her eyes, and also were two
stubs of dark material above her eyes, which expanded as she turned her attention toward Menelaus. He guessed they were ultraviolet sensors. Above this, she had the same golden tendrils that the Grays sported issuing from her brow, except that her tendrils were so long, they fell to her shoulders. Smaller tendrils of silver hung down parallel to the gold ones, and feathery antennae of metallic blue likewise. Beneath each ear, high on her neck, were what looked like secondary ears, like folded flower petals made of flesh.
She was tall and slender, neither so lovely as a Nymph nor so ugly as a Witch. Her skin was almost as pale as an albino’s, but there was a silvery sheen or highlight to her flesh reminiscent of the Grays. Her hair was a dark cap above the ears, but the lower hemisphere of the back of her head was shaved, a tonsure which emphasized the odd elongation of her neck. The hair was longer in front than back: two locks of hair hung down before her ears to her jawline, framing her face. Her lips were a wide red oval, stark in the paleness of her skin, and her eyes were magnetically and inhumanly dark, as if the midnight sky were using her face as a mask. Her features were too long, too harsh, too serene to be beautiful.
Menelaus looked around the tent. There were, for once, no Blue Men here watching the revenants. All were occupied preparing for Larz to attempt the doors. There were dog things as guards, but they were well away from the dark-eyed woman.
He would have greatly preferred a slower and more thoughtful approach to making “first contact” with this woman, whatever species of humanity she might be. Using his implants on a short-range setting, he sent a Monument-hieroglyph message to her on several frequencies in several formats. Menelaus knew he was taking a risk using his implants inside a tent, which had circuits for detecting such energy activity.
Her antennae twitched but otherwise her face showed no reaction.
Menelaus spelled out the Monument hieroglyph that meant “unit” or “name” or “identity.” Monument code was a very time-consuming method of spelling out a message, even with an electric signal. The other Thaws in the tent were watching as the two stood looking eye to eye, neither apparently saying anything. The Chimerae seemed particularly interested, or perhaps were bewildered that Beta Anubis had not come over first to salute the Alphas present.
Once he had given the last nondiatonic note equivalent of the symbol for identity, he pointed at her, and cupped his ear.
She parted her lips, and a pleasant female voice issue from her throat as if from a hidden mic. She did not seem to have a tongue. The voice from her throat said, or sang, “Alalloel.”
Then she pointed at him and cupped her ear.
Very pleased at this progress, Menelaus pointed at himself and said, “Anubis.”
Alalloel (if that was her name) gave him a look of withering scorn and turned away. She sat and picked up her bowl of gruel.
4. Mystical Garb
At that moment, Mickey came in through the tent flap, blowing like a whale and stamping his feet. With him were two other Witch-men, Twardowski of Wkra and Drosselmeyer of Detroit. In their hands were fabrics of fabulous colors and hues, a stack of conical hats piled one atop another, rolls of fabric under each arm. Mickey strode hugely over to the circle of Witches, with Twardowski and Drosselmeyer capering behind, and with a gigantic cries, the three threw what they carried into the air above their heads.
All the Witches cried and screamed and laughed with delight, and some made howls and hoots like animals. It was their robes and garbs and costumes stolen from them by the Blue Men when they slept, now returned: shimmering red silks, satins white as snow, sable cloaks gemmed with patterns of stars and cabalistic signs.
Menelaus saw the flinty looks on the faces the Hormagaunts. The female Clade-dweller from the time of the Hormagaunts, Prissy Pskov, was looking particularly irate, and the porcupine quills in her mane of hair stood on her scalp and swayed angrily.
There were also flinty looks on the faces of the Chimerae, but such was their normal expression, so it was hard to say if they noticed the change of wardrobe. The Nymphs did not look bitter, but merely envious in an innocent fashion: and two of them, girls nubile and perfect in beauty, with yellow skins and shining black hair, tiptoed closer to the celebration of fabric and tried to stroke the stray scarf or pelisse that fluttered to the mats.
Menelaus deduced the reasons the Blue Men had returned the garb. First, Witch biometric was more sensitive to changes in costume than other races, so the recognition cameras in the Tomb were more likely to let pass a Witch in the same ritual garb he wore when he was interred. Second, by showing favoritism to an historically early group the later groups knew and disliked (for historical memory runs long), the Blue Men introduced an aggravating element of jealousy to hinder a unified conspiracy of the prisoners against them. Both reasons suggested that the Blue Men intended a very serious assault on the Fourth Door, no doubt with a backup plan involving war machines and siege equipment in case the boasts of Larz proved hollow.
This meant time was short.
Menelaus tried to catch caught Mickey’s eye, but that worthy was preoccupied passing out their robes to the delighted men and women of the Witch era.
The Witches retained a modesty custom, and so each man removed to his tent to change clothes. Mickey, however, was too impatient to climb back in his beloved robes, and so by pantomime he beckoned the Nymphs over to him.
Their names were Aea, Daeira, Ianassa, and Thysa, and they ranged from achingly sweet-faced to breathtakingly lovely to maddeningly voluptuous. All wore their hair to waist length or longer, and within the shadowed eaves of their bangs, their eyes were as mysterious and exquisite as the eyes of a tigress at midnight, when her pupils are bright as dark mirrors and round as the moon. To watch them walk was to see the music of flute, viols, and clashing bangles woven in song.
Smiling softly, with flowers of several hues grown from cooking coffins in their coiffures, swaying on silent steps, they came. Mickey had them turn their backs and hold up the straw floor mats behind them, to screen his vast bulk while he changed garments. They giggled, peered over their shoulders, and made sly rhymes to one another in their soft tongue. Mickey rewarded them with smiles and pinches on the cheek and with the voluminous silk of his undertunic, a vast enough fabric that, with a little clever work with needle and thread, they could all have silk blouses reaching at least to midthigh.
The Nymphs were kissing and fondling and petting Mickey, cooing their thanks in their melodic language, and the rest of the mess tent looked on in various shades of wonder or disgust, when Montrose walked through the midst of the warmly scented Nymph flesh, avoiding the various curves and elbows and clouds of lustrous black hair, took Mickey by the elbow, and guided him out of the mess tent into the snow.
The robes were splendid: chasuble; stole; maniple; burse in silks so black, they seemed almost purple; satins as scarlet as spurting blood, trimmed in the fur of winter ermine; sleeves long enough to sweep the ground with cuffs deep enough to hide a pumpkin; cinctures with tassels as long; shoes with points as curled a ram’s horn—and over all, inscribed with Icelandic runes, uncial elf-script, zodiacal, and esoteric signs, Solomonic seals circled by Latinate incantations and Monument hieroglyphs, trimmed in a geometric galloon. On his broad back was a shape of the cabalistic tree of life in colored thread, surrounded by Chinese trigrams, and an endless pattern of woven mazes.
On his skull an unlikely seventeen-inch-high conical cap loomed and nodded, dripping with earflaps and neck scarf and chin strap and tassels, another scarf floating from the peak, absurd with a false mouth and two squinting decorations like eyes, with lids that opened and shut; and the brim was a dazzle of star patterns picked out in moonstones.
Menelaus could read Monument glyphs, as well as Icelandic and Latin, and knew the writings spelled out gibberish.
Mickey was grinning like an idiot. “Those geisha girls are certainly fine-looking! Such soft hands and long fingers! I will chain them with chains of gold in my floating harem of love
when I sail about the world in a houseboat, and dote on them. They can trim the sails and prepare the meals, and during the long, warm, tropic nights … But, no! Gold sinks. I will adorn them in cork vests. Although with mammary glands so globular, they look buoyant enough—”
“Snap out of it, Romeo. You have a noseful of bioengineered pheromones. Your trace-amine-associated olfactory receptors just sent a complex chemosign to your orbitofrontal cortex, fusiform cortex, and right hypothalamus, and triggered an aphrodisiac response. By adjusting their allomones, they could have made you sexually attracted to a dog thing or an old tree stump. You are lucky they did not have their gear with them, or you’d be the one in their harem.”
“Gaah! You make life sound like a cold clockwork mechanism. I feel the stirring of the elemental powers of life, the very earth-energy itself! Those geisha girls—”
“Those ‘geisha girls’ as you call them, damn well ruled the eras from which they come. Not just the territory and the menfolk, but every living creature down to insects and bacteria were domesticated and in the palm of their oh-so-soft and gentle hands. You might escape because your olfactory and endocrinal systems are not designed and bred to be vulnerable to every nuance of their scent cues and flower language. Your brain is too primitive—if you are lucky—for them to invade it chemically and get complete control. They come from your future: the biopsychological mechanisms you Witches were beginning to play with, they actually understand. So I would not toy with those women, big buddy.”
“You should beware yourself. Did you not see the killing ferocity in the eyes of the Chimerae when you paid no obeisance to their Alphas, but came and touched me, an unclean Witch, and drew me aside to speak?”
“Nah, that is just their normal level of killing ferocity. When they get really puckered, they start combing their hair. Besides, they done told me to talk to the other Thaws and gather troops. Well, I am telling you, start gathering. Can you actually get your Witches from so many different periods to work together? I see some from the Nameless Empire period, another from the Sunless times, and the little blonde is from the days before the Witches were called Witches, the Simon Family era.”