Festina let out her breath slowly. "Damn it to fucking hell," she said in a controlled voice. "That’s twice Prope has stranded me in some shithole. Next time…"

I never got to hear about next time. Her words were drowned out by a pack of warriors storming onto the roof. It looked like the embassy’s floors were strong enough to hold Mandasars after all.

You can tell a lot about folks from how they react to a bunch of soldiers.

Festina and Tobit cranked up the volume on their tight-suit speakers and shouted in stilted Mandasar, "Greetings, we are sentient citizens of the League of Peoples, we beg your Hospitality." At the same time, they were drawing their stun-pistols.

Dade gaped a moment, then just held up his hands in surrender. Counselor did the same, except that she folded her arms in a gesture I’d taught her, and cried out, "Naizo! Naizo!"

Zeeleepull stepped in front of her, flexed his pincers theatrically, and began to pump out a combination of battle-musks. I couldn’t distinguish all the scents he used, but the basic message was clear: "I will not attack, but I will defend."

Hib Nib Pib backed to the edge of the roof and whispered as they stared admiringly at Zeeleepull. "Isn’t he strong?" "Isn’t he handsome?" "Isn’t he a teeny bit outnumbered?"

Kaisho said nothing — just standing her ground, with her legs glowing bright as lasers.

Me, I was watching everybody else, waiting to take my lead from them… but I was also concentrating mighty hard on smelling royal. Half the soldiers had gas masks; half of them didn’t. I still wasn’t great at controlling my pheromones, but I figured if worse came to worst, I could dose the maskless ones and sic them on their troopmates.

But it was Plebon who stepped toward the soldiers: waving his hands and shouting, "Nairit ul Gashwan!" Friend of Gashwan. Plebon’s accent was pretty awful, even on three short words; I got the Impression he’d memorized the phrase by sound, rather than actually understanding it. Still, the soldiers eased up a bit: they didn’t lower their bows but a few took their fingers off the triggers.

For a moment, I considered walking up to them anyway: use my pheromones to win a bunch of them over to our side. But that wouldn’t work on the masked guys, and they might get really mad about their fellow guards being zonked by chemical warfare. Grumbling to myself, I damped down the smell factory and let the fumes drift away on the breeze.

The soldiers hustled us down to street level, not giving us the tiniest chance to talk among ourselves. "Jush, jush!" they kept saying… which means, "Shut up and keep moving."

Plebon didn’t look too worried about this treatment, so he must have thought we were safe. His friend Gashwan must carry a lot of clout.

Who was she? I wondered. Gashwan was a female name, but the only Gashwan I’d ever known was the doctor who looked after me when I had the jaundice… or rather, when I had venom poisoning from all those nanites dosing me up. Could it be the same Gashwan, hanging around the palace for twenty years? Maybe. No matter which queens passed through Unshummin in the past two decades, they could all use a smart doctor. I didn’t know much about Gashwan herself — she was the sort of M.D. who reads medical charts rather than talking to patients personally — but if she’d been on Verity’s staff, she must have been the best at what she did.

Out on the street, another guard ran up and whispered something to the corporal at the head of our group. The corporal looked back at me, his antennas lifting straight up like lightning rods. Um: I think I’d been identified. Either someone remembered me from way back when, or they’d seen my face when Jacaranda broadcast my little message. ("Don’t worry, neutral mission, keep calm.") Now they realized I was the Little Father Without Blame. I didn’t know what the guards would do about that, and the guards didn’t know either. Our platoon of escorts gawked at me when they heard the news, but didn’t say a word.

Sorry. They did say one word. "Jush!" And they hurried us even faster toward the palace.

We quick-marched up Diplomats Row to an army checkpoint where Aliens Gate used to be. The gate had been a big diamondwood arch in the palace’s outer palisade, nearly a century old and carved with Mandasar artists’ impressions of various aliens. No species would be flattered by the pictures — humans, for example, were shown as stick-thin and frail, men indistinguishable from women, with huge eyes, tiny mouths, and enormous quantities of hair growing from their heads like cedar bushes — but I still kind of liked the figures. This really was how Mandasars saw us, back years ago when we were exotic curiosities rather than day-to-day acquaintances. (Sam always claimed the male human on the gate was modeled after our father, back when he was just a greenhorn diplomat on Troyen. I couldn’t see the resemblance… but my sister loved thinking everything had some connection to her.)

Aliens Gate was gone now — maybe destroyed in battle, maybe just pulled down by armies occupying the palace, because it’s hard to defend a big open arch. In place of the gate was a narrow walkway past a row of arrow slits, then a path with twists and turns and odd little bumps in the concrete floor, probably designed to make Mandasar warriors stumble if they tried to charge through at speed. The path slanted upward too, rising at least two stories above the actual level of the ground; and once you were inside the walls, you had to go down again, on a set of awkward switchbacking ramps that were fully exposed to cannon and arrow fire from the palace.

It made me wonder how recent these defense measures were. Making it hard for attackers to get in also made it hard for defenders to get out for sorties and counteroffensives. I couldn’t help thinking the folks in the palace had abandoned all hope of fighting their way to open territory; this was their last stand, their Masada, their Alamo. If they had no chance of surviving, they wanted to take a ton of their enemies with them.

Our corporal borrowed a lantern from a guard post and led the way across the dark palace grounds. Once upon a time, this area had bloomed with gardens of glass-lily, queen’s-crown and skyflowers. Now there was only bare earth, tangled over with monofilament razor wire: stuff so sharp, it could even cut through a warrior’s carapace. Behind the wire were trenches, behind the trenches were more trenches, and behind them all was the palace, where archers and cannons were ready to fire on anyone coming too near.

Or maybe there were just archers — the palace’s cannons had stopped shooting. I doubted the Black Army had called off its attack; more likely, the gunners on the ramparts had run out of shells.

We scrambled up the ramp to the palace’s back door — what my sister called the Sphincter. Since the building was shaped like a queen, and this entrance was smack in the middle of the tail section, Sam always joked that the door led right up the queen’s rectum.

Not very funny you think about it.

The stonework here was free of Balrog moss. That was no accident — a lot of the place looked scorched, as if someone had taken a flamethrower to the walls. I guess the palace guards didn’t know the spores were sentient… or else they didn’t care. The stink of burned vegetation was strong enough that even a human nose would smell it.

The same stink filled the corridor inside. This end of the building had once been painted with scenes from around the planet — the great waterfalls at Feelon, the ocean grotto of Pellibav, the sacred hoodoos of the Joalang Mountains — but now the paintings were charred black, with thick flakes of ash littering the floor. The Balrog must have tried to crawl through here like soul-sucking ivy; and it’d been stopped. For the time being, this part of the palace was sanitized… but with the front of the building swallowed up, the red moss would surely keep trying to work its way back.