Dade shrieked and dropped his stunner, throwing his hands to his helmet. For ten long seconds, he tried to scrape his visor clear with his fingers, scrabbling at the dusty layer of moss that continued to thicken around him. Then some particularly hungry mass of spores managed to corrode through his tightsuit, down near his stomach where the front had been cut to expose the power circuits. Air puffed out from the suit’s belly, swirling the spores around like steam on a breeze. As the suit began to deflate, Dade howled and doubled over, like something was clawing at his gut. A moment later, he dropped out of sight behind the parapet wall, and his howling cut off dead.

As for my father — my son, my twin brother — he didn’t even have a tightsuit to protect him. In a single heartbeat, his head was enveloped by a spongy clot of moss: red wads of fuzz coating his hair, covering his eyes, clogging up his nose and mouth. I think he tried to scream, but the noise was muffled to an almost inaudible whine. He took two blind steps but couldn’t manage a third… more moss congealed around him every second, weighing down his legs, freezing him in place. His arms waved feebly till they became too heavy to move; already his body looked twice its original size, with still more spores accumulating all over, packing outward until the human shape was lost. Soon there was only a fuzzy red ball, man height and glowing as bright as a bonfire.

Twenty seconds of hold-your-breath silence. Then the top of that red-shining ball began to flatten in. Moment by moment, more of the ball sank away, spores sloughing off onto the stone parapet; and there was nothing underneath. No man. No bones. Nothing but solid moss. I could smell an overpowering buttered-toast odor on the wind that blew through the hole in our glass cube… and it made me think of a smugly satisfied predator that’s just eaten a nice meal.

As the ball of moss continued to dissolve, I could see that the glass chest plate hadn’t been consumed — it must have been indigestible. Also untouched was the tiny glass container that had once nestled in the man’s intestines. The container floated atop the mass of moss, like a bottle bobbing on a calm lake, while spores kept falling away. Within a minute, the ball that had once been my father shrank to nothing but a flat sheen of red on the parapet’s stone. For a moment more, the glass container remained motionless on that mossy bed… and I could just make out the tiny dot of scarlet inside, the Balrog spore my father had imprisoned.

The surrounding moss suddenly flared a brilliant burning neon: bright enough to blind me for a second. When I could see again, the container was gone — vaporized, dissolved — and the once-captive spore was now just one among a million others glimmering silently in the darkness.

Mission accomplished for the Balrog… the prisoner freed. But the rescue hadn’t happened till after Dad’s clone had been eaten alive. My father’s other copies — Mr. Clear Chest on Celestia, and Alexander York, Admiral of the Gold, on New Earth — must have stayed mentally linked with the dying man through the whole ordeal: must have felt every millisecond of the devouring as if it was happening to them.

I wondered what it would do to you… feeling yourself being eaten alive. The Balrog could surely tell me — if it was telepathic, it must have heard my father’s silent screams — but I decided I didn’t want to know.

Festina was already scaling the rope, hand over hand toward the top of our glass cube. As she climbed, she called to Tobit, "Have you figured out how to fly this thing yet?"

"Almost," he answered. "Provided there aren’t any built-in security checks. If the onboard computer wants me to type a password or something, we’re screwed."

"Cross your fingers that doesn’t happen," Festina told him. "If we can’t stop the attacking army, this cube is our only way out of the city."

The moment she clambered onto the cube’s glass roof, I grabbed the rope and headed up too. No point me staying in the cube: I couldn’t help Tobit with the controls, and I couldn’t help Innocence either. Sometime in the past two minutes, while I was watching my dad get eaten, Innocence had quietly passed out. Maybe that was a good sign — Mandasars shut down like that when their metabolisms shift into a full-out healing state — but it could also mean she was too broken inside to keep herself awake. We needed to get Innocence to the infirmary… but she wouldn’t be safe till we stopped the Black Army.

Outside the cube, the air had curdled with the smell of buttered toast — eau de Balrog, so thick the night breeze couldn’t dissipate it. From this angle, I could see how much of the parapet was covered with glowing red: a bulgy patch where my father had been, a Dade-shaped mound nearby, a light dusting everywhere else. Plebon and the Mandasars had been pelted with their share of spores when the Balrog exploded from the stairwell, but they weren’t coated solidly… just a sprinkle of specks, like gleaming freckles all over their bodies.

Festina turned toward me as I joined her. She stood at the edge of the cube, where it nuzzled the top of the parapet wall. No spores had fallen on the cube itself; but if Festina took another step forward, she’d be walking on moss dust.

"What do you think?" she asked. "Is it going to eat us?"

"I don’t know," I said. "It sure likes pretending it wants to eat us… but that might be its idea of a joke. Jumping out and going, ‘Boo!’ at the lower species. If the Balrog really wanted to have us for supper, it could have done that long ago."

"Maybe it’s just following its own code of ethics," Festina suggested. "Can’t eat anyone who keeps a respectful distance, but if you actually step on a spore, you’re fair game."

She had a point. Maybe if you stepped on a bunch of moss, it actually hurt the spores — I’d get hurt if someone walked all over me. In that case, the Balrog might feel perfectly justified in biting your feet.

I glanced back at the palace’s palisade. Outside, the Black Army was massing for its final assault, with ramps and battering rams and siege towers. Even worse, four Laughing Larries had taken up positions just inside one section of wall; by the look of it, they’d soon open fire, slaughtering nearby guards as the attackers began smashing their way in.

Whatever we needed to do, we’d better do it fast. Time to try a trick. "Give me a second," I told Festina. Then I closed my eyes and thought of pheromones.

Here are the pheromones I’d made: the lust scent that got Festina talking about judo mats; the "don’t be scared" smell I’d used to comfort Counselor; the royal pheromone that screamed, "Obey me now!" Some of those chemicals worked on humans, some worked on Mandasars. I didn’t know if I could make something to work on Balrogs… but Balrogs could "taste" pheromones so maybe the darned moss could be affected too.

Back on the orbital I’d tried to make a Balrog repellant and Kaisho had got real mad: Stop it, Edward, before you produce something deadly. Okay — maybe it was dangerous, trying to make the Balrog go away… but what if I made it nice?

I pictured a different sort of royal pheromone: not one to subdue peasants, but one that spoke to rulers. A scent that said, Some people end up in positions of power; and if you’re the one who comes out on top, you have to be good about it. You have to do the right thing, and never ever act like a jerk.

It wasn’t a fancy sentiment, and any philosopher would nitpick it to pieces… but the Balrog and me, we had things in common. If we really wanted, we could both run roughshod over normal folks; so we had to take special care not to. Do the right thing and don’t act like a jerk. That was a rule I wanted to follow myself, and I wanted the Balrog to follow it too. I tried to make a pheromone that would stir some sense of scruples in a bunch of glowing alien spores…