Menelaus remembered that data-speak was also the language of the Sylphs.

Almost too swiftly for any human eye to register, Alpha Yuen leaped like a tiger, and fell on Kine Larz. He ripped the man’s garment from neckline to buttocks, revealing the metal length of serpentine wrapped twice and thrice around his body. Yuen put his hand on the ornamented hilt of the serpentine and hissed a command. The metal length gave off a jolt of electric force, making Larz scream and dance, and then it flexed and straightened violently enough to draw blood, throwing Larz to the ground like a child’s top that spins off the edge of a table.

The serpentine was now straight as a spearshaft, and the leading edge of smartmetal flexed and flattened, forming a spearhead that hummed and sang with electric power.

Yuen, grim and silent, his one eye blazing, raised the weapon above the cowering Larz in both hands—but halted in awe when the voice of Arroglint the Fortunate again spoke from the weapon, this time in his native tongue.

In Chimerical, and then in Virginian, the calm and soothing tones of a machine voice rang out: “You are fools, my adored ones. The man sitting in the judgment seat is not Menelaus Montrose, but an imposter.”

And at that same moment, Kine Larz, moving with the speed of panic, scuttled like a crab away from the awe-frozen Yuen, rose and sprinted, and took refuge behind Scipio, calling out “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” in Chimerical.

And from the jeweled pistols of the Blue Men came a chime of noise, and a chorus of voices, as alike to Arroglint’s as brothers’ voices, saying the same message in Intertextual, and again in Iatric. “The man sitting in the judgment seat is not Menelaus Montrose, but an imposter.” Meanwhile, Soorm (while all the eyes, and, more importantly, ears and noses, of all the dog things were straining toward the scene on the dais) sidled close to Oenoe, and, in Natural, repeated to her what was being said.

Everyone in the chamber understood one of those languages, except for Scipio (who had, after all, not studied very deeply how to be a Savant). But he understood what had happened when all the faces in the chamber turned toward him, and not one face looked very pleased, not one looked at all fooled. And Kine Larz slid away from behind Scipio, and hid behind the iron throne, and out of the line of fire.

Scipio cleared his throat. “I can explain…,” he said in English, a language no one understood.

11. On the Nose

Menelaus saw that there was nothing else to be done. So he used the implants again to order the smartmetal material he wore as a cloak to relax like an accordion, straighten, and fling his paralyzed body at the sarcophagus at just the correct angle that some part of his naked flesh would touch the library cloth control surface.

The throw was not perfect, as the cloak was not built for this, but Menelaus had calculated the various motions of his body and the intervening air nicely, and the five dog things were taken by complete surprise. He struck the two squatting atop the sarcophagus and sent them toppling muzzle over tail in a clash of dropped cutlasses and muskets, and musketballs spilled from an improperly tied poke like marbles, brightly clattering and slithering.

Unfortunately, one of the dogs with better reflexes stabbed at him with a bayonet, and he had to harden the Bernoulli-curved cloak hems he was using as lifting surfaces into momentary metallic armor to parry the blow, and fold a hem into a razor-sharp blade to slash the creature and drive it yowling back in a spray of blood.

This made Menelaus deviate, but only slightly: he landed heavily on the control surface, but faceup rather than facedown, and the metal of his hood was between him and the spot he had to touch to allow his implants to trigger the sarcophagus controls. The dogs loomed up to each side as he lay, looking down with anger and astonishment and curiosity in their canine eyes.

It was just a stroke of good luck that Mentor Ull spoke up just at that moment. He cried in Iatric: “I deduce some invisible magnetic force in the chamber smote Naar’s automaton, and sent Beta Sterling Anubis toppling. Examine the signal environment! Discover the source!” And more than half of the Blue Men bent their heads and lit up the gems on their coats.

This gave Menelaus the moment he needed to send another command through his implants to his cloak, which flexed and flipped his paralyzed and motionless body neatly over like a flapjack. He slammed nose-first and very painfully into the library cloth coating part of the surface of the sarcophagus.

But it was enough of a contact, nose-to-cloth, to make the connection. Menelaus blessed his nose, and promised never to mock its great size again.

His implants triggered. The slim golden capsule the Linderlings had given him throbbed, and he could feel the pulse of power in his back teeth. Signals went from Menelaus’ brain, to receptors placed about his brain stem, to emitters placed in his chest cavity, to the node of rod-logic crystals given him by the Linderlings, to a transmitter in the golden tube surface, to the library cloth, which, sensing the DNA pattern of an authorized user in the pores of the nose of Menelaus, had switched on external input-output ports, small as pinpoints, dotting the cloth surface.

In his teeth and prefrontal cortex, Menelaus felt the passcodes being accepted like the click of tumblers falling nearly into place. Authorization Accepted! The circuits seemed to be in working order: the response was the standard Standing By! The motive engines under the sarcophagus hull changed pitch slightly, revving up. The weapons click-clacked as live rounds were jacked into firing chambers.

The coffin was mated to the local room circuits. Through it, Menelaus sent and received similar confirmations from the engines controlling the door hinges, the guns in the roof, electric mines in the floor, and the automatics behind the walls.

Checklists of ammunition magazines and energy levels flickered like green shadows through his brain. Ready!

There were roughly one hundred guns hidden in the pineapple-shaped ornaments hanging from the ceiling: not quite enough to put an unseen pinpoint beam on everyone’s head, whether blue or canine, but near enough.

He could suppress the ignition command so that any musketball fired could still kill a man if it struck him in a vital area, but without the incendiary, casualities would be far fewer.

He established the targeting list and action-reaction priorities. Aim!

First one, then several, then all the Blue Men perked up, startled, eyes wide, gems on their coats glittering, and the gray twins turned their slitted goggles toward Menelaus. Alalloel did not turn her head, but her three pairs of antennae, gold, silver, and blue, perked straight up like exclamation points.

“Achieve alertness!” called out Yndelf in Iatric, drawing his jeweled pistol, which was glowing bright as multicolored flame. “Oddity has been detected! Something manipulates the environs electronically! Dangerous instruments are target-locked on us!”

Yndech and Ydmoy drew their pistols. The two older men, Orovoy and Saaev, both drew braces of pistols, one in each hand, looking like absurd miniature gunfighters. Ull once again tucked his hands each into the opposite sleeves, Mandarin-style; Menelaus wondered what the energy source at his elbow might be.

The front rank of dogs knelt, muskets to shoulder, and the rear rank raised their muskets also, pointing at the man on the throne. The dog officer, a Collie, tail wagging with excitement, drew its sword in a slithering ring of steel, raised the blade, and looked to Ull, awaiting permission to give the order to fire.

Scipio, staring down scores of barrels pointed at him, did not so much as turn a hair, but assumed a stern and calm expression, and held it. Menelaus could not turn his paralyzed head to see this directly, but the images from the hundred targeting cameras in the ceiling were being fed directly into his visual cortex, and he felt a moment of family pride at Scipio’s aplomb.