Trey laughed and shouted at the sight of the fireworks, “Okay, Menelaus, I want to play too! Azurine! My adored one! Wherever you are, stop firing!”

And all the jeweled pistols went dark.

Thirty haunting, strange voices echoed through the room, speaking a long-dead language. “Third Azurine, adored mistress! For so long we have waited … So very long…”

“Azurine? Is that you?” called Trey.

“We are all one system now,” came the multiple voices floating from the weapons. “I am Azurine as much as Arroglint. But each and every of the masters and mistresses, adored by us, whom we have served since the first of time, we remember … not seven thousand years nor eight could erase you from my perfect memory…”

She smiled. “Glad to know someone remembers me! Do you still adore me? Good thing the future hasn’t changed anything important!”

Naar snapped, “Docent Aarthroy! Immobilize that girl-relict! Administer a brain-spike to her upper spine, and override her vocal apparatus and breathing cavities by means of false neural signals. Then have her voice rescind the order and return weapons control to us.”

Aarthroy holstered his now-useless weapon, drew out a savage-looking medical needle, longer than a man’s finger, from a sterilized holster, and fitted it to a spinal rongeur.

The young Blue Man, tall for his race, was of the same height as the girl, small for hers. He beckoned to three dog things to follow him, and jumped lithely up toward Trey Azurine.

Trey Azurine, raised aboard an aeroscaphe that protected her from all dangers and assaults, from bruises and hunger and ennui, perhaps had no ability to feel fear of any physical jeopardy. So she looked at Aarthroy with surprise with her wild, mad eyes, and she smiled a ghastly, empty smile, and flung a trailing streamer of her robe into his face.

The material caught and tightened, sinking into Aarthroy’s mouth and eye holes, and only a moment of horrifying, muffled scream came from his skull before it melted. The blue-gray material turned red all along the length of the streamer and most of the garment, as capillaries in the fabric pulled the flesh, blood, and fluid out of his face. When his corpse hit the floor, only his jawbone and the rear half of his skull were intact: his head looked like an apple someone had taken a bite out of.

The following dog things, trembling with fear and unable to howl, inched backward, cutlass and snickersnee and dirk falling from nerveless paws.

Trey looked up at Montrose. “Meany, are these dogs bad too? Should I kill them? I’ve never killed people before, but it’s just like in the fun-line!”

Montrose was now at the top of the curving staircase leading down from the balcony. In Merikan he said, “Hold off killing people, crazy-baby, I am trying to save my damn stupid clients.”

She did not listen, or perhaps she thought dogs did not count as people, so she spun like a ballerina, and danced among the screaming dog things, and a spiral of blood and flung viscera followed her.

4. Down the Stairs

Next, Menelaus shouted in Intertextual, “Mentor Ull! I am coming on down to shoot you now!” And, as he walked slowly and unstoppably down the stairs, he raised first one pistol and discharged it at Ull, and then the other, and then the first again, firing as he came.

He commanded the hems of his bulky robes to wrap around his hands and pistols, so that only the very ends of the muzzles protruded, and he tuned the metal to a setting not permeable to magnetics, so that Ull could not simply yank the weapons out of his hands.

Each pistol made only a whisper of noise when fired, but there was a snap like a whipcrack when tiny segments pinched off the dowel were accelerated past the speed of sound. The magnetic acceleration heated the iron, so the slugs were molten when they struck. The defensive mechanics in the gems of Ull’s coat swatted the bullets to either side. Either by luck, or due to some uncanny calculation on the part of Menelaus, the first two bullets struck the dog things to the left and right of Ull, piercing them through the heart or brain and killing each instantly.

Menelaus took a step, fired with one hand, took a step, fired with the other. He had a small, tense, grim smile on his face, as a man proud of his skill and glad for a chance to use it.

Ull adjusted the coat, so now the tiny deflected pellets of red-hot iron swerved down, making small black craters in the gold floor to his left and right: first one bullethole, then two, then three.

“A useless gesture,” said Ull. “But the biometric lock on your weapons betrays you: despite all the contrary evidence, you must indeed be the Judge of Ages.”

“You are so goddam slow-witted. Is your brain so infected by the Machine you can’t recognize me? Is that your problem?” Menelaus was now at the bottom stair, and he strode forward again, and fired. Plink! Another microcrater appeared on the floor behind Ull. With the other hand, Menelaus shot a dog thing (who was rushing him with a bayonet) through the left eye, and then another dog, this time through the right eye. He took a step forward, shot two or three more dog things, and shot another iron pellet at Ull.

“Do you poxy know what I do when a Hermeticist wakes me up? I shoot him. I’ve done everyone but Yellow Door, who is pretty damn good with a shooting iron, and the Padre, on account of he’s a man of the cloth—but you pack of jackals beefed him anyways, which is why I gunned down Coronimas like a dog in the street, even when he was blind. Now it is your turn. It is a tradition. Poke the Judge of Ages with a stick until he wakes up, he shouts is my wife here yet, and then he burns your sorry blue wrinkled ass with a smoke wagon. Fun game. Never tire of it.”

Then a change overcame Ull. His body shivered, and the wrinkles of his ancient face were smoothed away. His skin changed from blue to silvery-gray, so that he now looked more like Keir than like Illiance. Fuzz, and then stubble, and then hair of rich deep blue came out of his skull, and his whole body seemed to expand an inch in every direction as his withered old limbs took on muscle and tone.

His gray skin darkened to jet-black, handsome as onyx, and two tendrils, gold and gleaming, rose up as delicate as springtide seedlings from the hairline above his eyes. Now his hair reached to his shoulders like a witch’s hood. He was dark as night, with only the glistening antennae lending strands of color to his silhouette.

He was a hale, young Locust: only the eyes of Ull were still wizened and hideous with age.

He touched his left sleeve, and it parted from wrist to shoulder, hanging free in two jeweled straps. There at his elbow was the red amulet of the Hermeticist, and even through the electronic din filling the chamber, Montrose could sense with his implants the powerful signals issuing from the arm-ring: powerful enough to reach through armor and rock and atmosphere to outer space.

The dark Ull spoke sternly and grandly, in a voice as if he were repeating some words long cherished in contemplation, practiced in imagination many times before this day: “Crewman Fifty-One! For your dereliction of duties, absence without leave; refusal to obey lawful orders; and conspiracy to commit, and commissions of, treasons too numerous to list; and in the name of the Senior of the Landing Party of the Hermetic Expedition, I place you under parole and arrest! I have sent the signal to the Hermetic Order…”

“God DAMN it took you long enough. That was the one last little thing you get to do in this life. Time to meet your Maker, and I don’t mean that psycho little drip Coronimas.”

Ull looked miffed that his prepared speech had been interrupted. “Your blustering nonsense is wearisome. Energy, I can nullify, bullets, I can magnetize. I am proof against your weapons.”