“Holy?”

“Because of how he acted. He talked to invisible people on his knees (when he had knees) and he clasped his hands to ask the invisible people for help (when he had hands) and he was very kind and very not afraid. You could see it in his eyes.”

“But there were no holy men in your era. Or unholy. The Chimerae outlawed churches and Witches both.”

“They outlawed buildings and books. Who can outlaw holy men? All you can do is kill them, which makes them more holy. What’s so funny?”

“I was just thinking about a man I knew. His idea of a perfect society was one where everyone was in uniform and no one was in church, and men slept with each other’s wives like weasels in heat, and human beings were bred like dogs.”

Kine Larz looked solemn. “You are talking about us.”

Montrose gave him a sharp look. “You think I should talk more kindly about the works of the Chimerae? Now that the oblivion of time has swallowed all, you are a loyal fan?”

“All the higher-ups think our society is perfect, or soon will be. They dreamed great things!”

“Well, Larz old buddy, the icy waste you saw outside these Tombs is where all those dreams ended up. Their future never arrived. It is pie bye-and-bye and pie in the sky, but nothing but toil and lies now and here. This guy I mean, he would have been so very disappointed to find Christians in the catacombs in his perfect little world; I am just sorry I beefed him before he found out. I would have liked to see the dumbfounded look on his face. Well, he looked surprised enough when I shot him. That’ll have to do.”

“You shot one of the Alpha caste?”

“Higher rank than that,” said Montrose.

Larz nodded solemnly. “The prototype.”

“Who?” Montrose had not heard this term before.

“Narcís D’Aragó, our founder. He is the posthuman, the prototype toward which all Chimerical evolution is directed. The creator of all the lineages, Epsilon to Alpha.”

“He told everyone y’all were supposed to evolve up to be like him? Man’s ego was even more elephant-sized than I thought.”

“Mister, why did you shoot him? I mean, I know what the story says. That he killed your Thucydides Montrose by mistake, the Roman Holy Man who made the Giants.”

“That was sure one reason. The other is harder to explain.”

“Tell me. I have known your tales my whole life. Tell me the truth!” The eyes of Larz gleamed with strange hunger.

“This is the truth. Narcís D’Aragó was the opposite of a holy man, the kind of man who ushers in hell on earth. It is our duty to kill such men.”

“Whose duty?”

“All of us. Everyone with a trigger finger and half a pint of manhood. Ain’t that the moral of all those old stories you love?”

Larz nodded solemnly. “Your Sir Guy—if that was his name—was a man from an old story, and not the kind of stories Chimerae tell, which are all about honor and shame, rapes and polygamy, and war, murder, and suicide, and mass murder, and mass suicide. Not the lies their stories are. No, he was like one from a real story. An old tale. He was a knight and a Crusader and a Hospitalier, a warlord of the light, and it was like he had stepped down from a better world to be in this one, to help us fight our wars. Just like the Crusades!”

“You know about the Crusades? No, don’t tell me…”

“Of course. Strange Tales of the Street number 86 was Curse of the Treasure of the Templars, and one of the undead Professor Necromant raised from the Tombs of the Ages was a Crusader—a Red Cross Knight, in service to Richard the Lionheart during the King’s Crusade.”

“Huhn. You really can learn useful stuff from kiddie yarns. Maybe learn everything you need.”

“Professor Necromant also raised a zombie triceratops, an amphibious mer-vampire samurai cyberassassin from Atlantis named Glaucon, and a dog-eating Witch named Melech Chemosh Shemyaza the Nagual. Hey! Do you think this is the very tomb the Professor used?”

“Uh, yeah. Forget what I said about kiddie yarns being useful. Tell me more about Sir Guy.”

“He was every inch the perfect knight. He tried to console the black dwarfs when they were sad, even though they did not speak the same tongue. The little men with gold antennae. They knew they were going to die. He sprinkled them with water, just plain water, and for some reason that seemed to drive back their sadness. The next day, Ull had Naar’s automata dig a deep pit next to the airstrip, and the trio were driven into it, and the dogs climbed in, tore the little black men to bits, and climbed out, and Naar’s machines shoveled the cold dirt on top of them. They did not even put up a marker or nothing.”

“Who was with him?”

“Ull? He acted alone. Just the machines were with him.”

“Is he still alive?”

“The knight? He was alive when I saw him: they were moving his coffin down here with the rest of us.”

“Did he tell you anything or leave any message?”

“How would I know? He didn’t talk. Not a language I understood.”

“Then how—?”

“We used slumber marks.”

“Slumber marks? What’s that?”

“In my day everyone—every Chimera or Kine—before he went into suspension was taught a set of signs to allow people from different time periods to communicate. In case you were thawed out to do work for the Judge of Ages with someone else from a different period. Or in case you wanted to join the Knights. It is not always the same knight, you know! They are allowed to quit and reenter the un-thawed world, and the Judge of Ages has to fill out his missing roster, and he recruits new men. They did not have slumber marks in your day? Little signs you put on the coffins to tell the knights when to wake you up?”

“The coffins were better designed in my day. Who else was in the hospital?”

“A Giant—but I see you believe in Giants.”

“They are real, too. I glimpsed him in the pit when I first was thawed, and later, I saw his oversized coffin being lowered down when I came down from the surface just now.”

Larz squinted and looked at him sidelong. “You say you do not know the slumber marks, and yet they date from the time of the Witches. Yet you are not a Sylph, nor a Giant, nor a Savant. What period are you from?”

Menelaus shrugged. Everyone was about to find out anyway, one way or the other. “I come from the days before the Giants. I am the oldest man in the world. And the damned tiredest. You see, I am really—”

“The Judge of Ages—wow!”

“Yes, yes—eh? How did you kn—”

“There he is! It’s him!” Larz was looking ahead, pointing with excitement. “He must be inside! He must!”

For the dogs had brought them suddenly through a pair of huge double doors into a chamber much larger than any ordinary coffin cell, a golden chamber. “—it’s the Judge of Ages! His tomb! His sanctum sanctorum! The great armored battle-crypt! Just like in the old stories!”

This was the mausoleum more splendid than that of a king. It was a sight to awe the eyes.

4. The Tomb of the Judge of Ages

The ceiling was painted in frescoes of gold and deep blue, a pattern of stars and constellations. Stalactites of yellow gold hung from the ceiling, an architectural oddity like baseless capitals of columns: these held clustered dozens of pinpoint sources for light, and from the points depended pineapple-shaped ornaments. The floor was tessellated with alternating squares of yellow gold and white marble and green malachite.

The chamber was like the nave of a cathedral, long and narrow. One wall, the south, was occupied by a doorframe and massive leaves large enough, when opened, to admit five chariots abreast. Through this door Menelaus and Larz came, escorted by a troop of dog things.

Thirty-foot-tall gold statues gilded and painted of white-bearded Father Time and the hooded Grim Reaper stood on either side of the great doors, looking inward toward the hall, and their scythes met and touched over the tops of the open doors. Opposite them at the far end of the hall and facing also inward loomed a statue of Michael the Archangel, balance scales in one hand, boar-spear impaling the jaws of a red dragon in the other, and a gigantic statue of Hades wrestling a fainting Proserpine was beside him. The white arms of the goddess were outstretched as if imploring old Chronos the Titan to come to her aid. Michael the Archangel stared with youthful defiance into the hood of the Grim Reaper, as if promising him, once victory over the old serpent won, he would be the last enemy felled.