"No, it’s probably some fresh hell coming our way." Festina sighed. "Anything else?"

"The Black Army has broken through the defense perimeter, and the palace guards are falling back to the next canal. Looks like an orderly retreat. I suppose they’ll form up again and kill a few more Black Shoulders at each canal they come to. It ain’t going to hold the enemy off forever, but they’re buying us time to pull off our brilliant plan. We do have a brilliant plan, right, Admiral?"

"Sure," Festina answered. "I’ll wave my hands and pixies will teleport the bad guys into the heart of the sun."

"Oh good," Tobit said, "I was afraid it would be something impractical."

"I could go to the battle lines," I offered. "Make some royal pheromone and see what happens."

"What happens," Festina said, "is you get shot by guys in gas masks." She turned to Gashwan. "I don’t suppose you’ve been saving a tac nuke for a rainy day."

"That rainy day came and went," Gashwan replied… and even she had the decency to sound subdued. "The first weeks of the war weren’t pretty, human — the Fasskister Swarm didn’t take out every missile silo in time. Unshummin survived because all the queens wanted to keep the palace intact… no bombing the pretty silver throne. Other cities weren’t so lucky. They say Fortitude’s old stronghold in Therol still glows in the dark. As for Queen Clemency in Koshav…"

We never got to hear about Queen Clemency. Gashwan was interrupted by Dade screaming over the radio. "Admiral, Admiral! There’s a Sperm-tail on the horizon!"

"My God," Festina said. "Maybe Prope does have a conscience. Have you turned on our anchor?"

"Affirmative, Admiral," Dade answered. "But the tail isn’t coming to us. It’s just quivering in place — its tip is dangling into one of the canals."

"Tug-of-war, Tobit!" Festina shouted. "You know the drill." To the rest of us, she snapped, "The roof. Run!"

Gashwan opened her mouth to say something… but we were already racing for the up-ramp. I looked back just before I disappeared into the stairwell; she was staring straight at me with a hint of sorrow on her face.

Gashwan. My creator. Maybe even my mother — if I had Mandasar DNA in me, Gashwan must have got it from somewhere. But I never slowed down to wave good-bye. I didn’t like her any better than I liked the rest of my family.

"Tug-of-war what?" Zeeleepull demanded as we raced up the slow-sloping ramp to the next floor. My heart was pounding. Even the placid workers were gabbling excitedly amongst themselves. "If the tail won’t come to our anchor," Festina told him, "that means there’s another anchor somewhere in the city. Pulling hard in a different direction."

"Samantha might have an anchor," I said. "She probably kept all kinds of navy stuff."

"My thought exactly," Festina agreed. "She let us land, but doesn’t want us getting away. Now she’s trying to steal the tail from us."

"So what are you going to do?" Counselor asked.

"Boost our anchor’s power by feeding it juice from other sources: a Bumbler, or a tightsuit’s battery pack."

Counselor panted, "Won’t the bad queen increase her anchor’s power too?"

"That’s what makes tug-of-wars interesting," Festina said. "Now less talk, more speed,"

The ramp took us up to the palace’s main gallery: a big wide hall like a spine running the length of the building. In Verity’s time, the gallery had been lined with memorials to Troyen’s medical achievements — paintings of famous doctors, first editions of medical books, and even (I’m not kidding) labeled dissections of all four Mandasar castes including crazy old Queen Spontaneity encased in clear plexi. Now, all I could see was a hot red glow fifty paces in front of us, like staring into an open furnace… the Balrog, clotted on floor, walls, and ceiling. Thick as carpet, stretching off hundreds of meters, all the way to the front nose of the palace.

"Holy shit," Festina whispered. "We don’t have to go through that, do we?"

"No," I answered, pointing. "There’s our way to the roof."

The door we wanted lay in the opposite wall of the gallery, maybe halfway between us and the glowing moss. Cautiously I led the group forward, keeping my eyes on the stone floor to make sure I wouldn’t step on stray spores that had drifted ahead of the main body. The gallery was unnaturally quiet with the moss’s muffling effect — it absorbed noise like crushed velvet laid over every surface. The pressure of sheer silence pushed against my eardrums, muting the sounds of our footsteps. I found myself holding my breath… but that wasn’t enough to keep from smelling the reek of buttered toast filling the air.

"Teelu" Counselor whispered, tiptoeing at my heels, "I am very very scared."

"Who isn’t?" I whispered back. "But remember, Tobit and the others must have come this way too. Nothing happened to them."

"Explorers are just normal humans," Counselor replied. "You are special, Teelu. What was it the moss woman said? The Balrog will act if it finds a host too good to pass up."

I winced. In the past few weeks I’d figured out two basic facts about the Balrog:

1. The moss got a kick out of scaring the pants off lesser species.

2. It preferred waiting to pounce till someone spoke a good straight line… like, "We should be safe now," or, "I don’t think it knows we’re here," or, "The Balrog will act if it finds a host too good to pass up."

Um.

The gallery’s silence was broken by a ripping sound, starting at the far end of the palace and racing our way. The moss on the walls and ceiling came sloughing off in great flat sheets, peeling from the stone and falling to the floor. Like mounds of snow sliding off trees, the moss slopped onto the ground, building up higher and higher… until it reached some critical mass and began to spill forward.

Rolling heaps of scarlet fuzz tumbled toward us with all the surging unstoppability of an avalanche.

"Run!" Festina shouted. As if we needed to be told.

I sprinted the last few steps to the doorway and threw myself inside, flattening against the wall of the stairwell. Outside, the moss had started to make a skittering scratchy sound — alien spores tripping over each other as they flowed after us. I waved the others to pass me and hightail it for the roof; but Festina planted herself against the wall opposite me, clutching the lantern in her gloved hand. She had the air of a woman who intended to make sure everyone else was safe before she headed up herself.

Zeeleepull seemed to have the same idea: stopping with Festina and me just inside the stairwell, all of us playing the hero, no one wanting to make a break for it till the others were safely on their way. Then Counselor gave her warrior-mate a tremendous shove that practically knocked him off his feet, forcing him to stagger a few steps up the ramp in spite of himself. She barreled forward and shoved him again: no delicacy at all, just whomp, like a small brown bulldozer plowing into an obstacle she was determined to move. One more shove and Zeeleepull accepted the inevitable — he ran, Counselor ran, Hib Nib Pib ran, with Festina and me racing close on their heels.

I had just reached the first landing when the stairwell behind me flushed bright with a crimson glow. The Balrog was coming up too.

Nothing to see in the stairwell but Festina’s lantern and the bloom of Balrog creeping up behind us. The moss didn’t move nearly so fast on the rarnp as it did on a level floor — the upslope slowed it to a baby’s crawl. We’d have no trouble staying ahead in the short run, but the long-term picture didn’t look so rosy. There was no way out of this stairwell but the parapet on the roof; and there was no way off that parapet but a bunch of ramps at the front of the building, where the Balrog was already in total control.