By that pale and sickly light Keirthlin saw her innocent and peaceful father shot dead before her eyes, his handsome face instantly turned into a thing of horror: The jawbones, fragments of a mouthless and moaning head, were dangling by flesh tatters from his ears; and the long muscle of the tongue was falling out of his opened throat. The internal pressure made tears of blood start from his silvery eyes, and gush almost comically from his ruptured ears. His skull was opened like a flower, and a smoke of burning went up from it.

Keirthlin fell to the ground as her father fell, her arms about the body, shaking with a grief too immense for sobs or wails.

Alalloel of Lree tilted her head to one side, her all-black eyes narrowing slightly, blind-seeming, seeing everything; and her multiple antennae stirred like snakes; and her secondary ears opened like tiny petals. Her face was without any expression, except, perhaps, a small and mild vertical crease of disapproval forming between the brows of her eyes and also between the infrared eyepits above her eyes. If her face had been a winter constellation looking down through cloudless silence over a lifeless desert of blank and level sands at midnight, it could not have seemed more remote, more inhuman.

Reaching up, she placed her palm on the spot on the wall where the shot still burned, and there was an audible hiss when the skin of her palm was also burnt. She drew her arm down, and held it before the dog’s eyes, and it saw a little mark like a circular brand.

Alalloel moved this hand right and left, and the six dog things guarding them fell to the floor limply. There was a noise of dropped weapons, metal clanging, bodies hitting, and skulls cracking—unlike a conscious man who trips and who tries to prevent his head from striking first, the limp bodies simply fell as if flung downward. But there was no sound at all from the dogs themselves, not a last word, not a sigh.

Alalloel the Melusine of the Eighteenth World Mental Configuration simply slew all those nearby without a word or sound, without any sign of a weapon.

The noise and shouts and screams and explosions going on elsewhere at that moment were such that no one heard the utterly silent execution that had just occurred, and the broad back of the statue blocked the view from the middle of the chamber, so no one saw.

Keirthlin looked up as a vast shadow fell on her, and so did Ctesibius, and Rada Lwa.

Bashan filled the universe before their eyes, and he lifted Menelaus like a mother playing upsy-daisy with her child, and placed him on the balcony directly above. They saw the vast, ungainly face of the Giant, they saw his ugly little mouth drool and twitch and contort with pain while his beautiful golden eyes wept, as volley after volley of thunderous gunfire deafened them all. The air was now gunsmoke and burnt flesh and hot iron, and there was no oxygen to breathe. The Giant turned, a great slab of metal in hand, and fell, hugely, slowly, terribly, crushing his enemies beneath him: and something from the most ancient of times was no more.

The vast body blocked much of the view from the chamber, and the dogs slain by Alalloel, having been kicked by the elephant-legs of Bashan, were now mingled with a score of other dog corpses littering the golden floor.

Keirthlin, despite the whirlpool of her grief, still had a distant part of her mind aware of this sight, and aware of the fearful wonder of it. Who was Alalloel of Lree? What was she? What were these Melusine?

But that part was rather distant, after all, and now she opened her mouth and uttered a piercing cry of sorrow that went on and on.

Ctesibius, like a man exhausted, put his back to the wall, slid, and came to rest sitting next to Keirthlin. He could think of nothing to say and no reason to say it, but the sound of her deep grief was, aloud, much like something silent in him. So he pushed back her furred hood and stroked her blue hair, and patted her hand, and spoke soothing words in a language she did not know.

Rada Lwa stood a moment, looking down without interest at the death and grief. Then he turned over the nearest body of a dog thing with his foot, stooped, and looted a pistol. First one, then a second, then two more he found amid the six bodies. Methodically, he loaded each one with powder, cloth, and shot, working the ramrod to pack the powder tight. Helping himself to a belt from which dangled a powder horn and a poke of musketballs, he tightened the belt around his waist, tucked in two pistols at a jaunty angle, and took up the other two pistols, one in each hand.

Rada Lwa paused long enough to gather up three or four of the talking boxes the dog things used, and he hung them from his belt as well. Without a backward glance at the anguished orphan, he strode away across the bloodstained floor to look for the Judge of Ages.

Keirthlin sat with Ctesibius, one grieving loudly and the other comforting quietly. No matter how loudly she shrieked and sobbed, the hellish uproar in the chamber smothered it, and no foe came to see, and no friend came to save, and her father could hear nothing of her voice, never again forever.

2. Slumber Pistols

Above this, Menelaus, parts of his bulky metal cloak steaming or bleeding tiny molten lines where the pistol-beams had brushed him, now peered from between the balcony railings. “Hey, Ull! Lookit what I just found you threw up here!”

And he thrust his hands through the marble posts of the balcony rail, a white glass pistol in either fist. “Surrender, or I shoot! I am really, really good with these!”

Ull scoffed. “You arrogant Neanderthal! Those weapons are biometric. Your thumbprint will not fire them.”

“Oh, you have got to be kidding! Illiance! Tell this idiot who I am! Naar! Tell him! The widow Aanwen even told you! My face is on the sarcophagus! Are you poxy blind and stupid as well as deaf?” Then he shouted in Intertextual: “Where the hell is my wife?! What the hell year is it?! How dare you disturb my slumber, you pustule!!”

Ull looked stupefied. “You speak this language? You’ve understood everything we—”

Naar shouted, “Adjust the electrical output to two hundred kilovolts. Take the Judge of Ages alive, that we might compel the restoration of our race.”

Illiance shouted also, “Madness! That man is the Judge of Ages and our benefactor! We have been gulled by the Hermeticists of legend! One of their number stands among us! Do not heed the order to fire!” Illiance threw his pistol on the floor, and raised both his empty hands toward Menelaus. “I surrender! I yield! Do not destroy us!”

Naar shouted, “You overestimate his abilities! He is helpless! Fire!”

3. Fireworks

When Naar gave the order to fire, ten threads of lightning, too bright to look at, snapped through the air. (This was at about the same time when the other half of the remaining twenty Blue Men—for thirteen, by now, were dead—had turned to direct their gunfire on the advancing juggernaut of Sir Guiden in his powered armor. There would have been more fire directed against Menelaus had not Sir Guiden drawn it away.)

Menelaus had adjusted his cloak to its most nonconductive setting, and several of the thread-thin rays glanced from the marble railings, but most of the charge still got through. All his muscles tightened in a spasm as if he had put his hand on an electrified cow fence: he did not drop his pistols only because his fingers tried unsuccessfully to grind the grips in half. The laser light beams glanced off the reflective stone and his reflective cloak, and the voltage followed the path of least resistance, and landed wherever the laser dots landed, making a spray of blindingly white sparks dance across the walls behind him like ricochets.