Menelaus was reaching up to doff his cloak and merely let the mechanism stomp by him, unseeing, when the heavy shield came open like the visor of the helmet of a knight. Inside, slumped on the operator stool, was Naar, who had been wounded along his side; the whole left flap of his coat was stained with blood, and all the gems on that side had turned black and lost their color. His face was creased into a sneer, his look expressing both boredom and nausea.

With him were two narrow-skulled Dalmatians, fur spotted like flecks of ash upon white snow. One knelt next to Naar, whining in fear, pressing a bandage against Naar’s bleeding side. The other was pointing Naar’s energy pistol carefully at Menelaus, hind legs spread in a proper stance, supporting his gunpaw with his other paw, head tilted with one eye in line with the weapon’s rear and front sites.

Naar’s automaton raised its drillhead like a lance and pointed it at Menelaus.

Menelaus shouted in Iatric over the noise and clash of the fray. “What purpose is served, Preceptor? Ull was a Hermeticist, and he gulled you into doing his work to seek me. Whatever he told you was a lie. You have no quarrel with me.”

Naar said coldly, “The quarrel is your doing. Look about at your handiwork.”

Menelaus looked wildly over the bloodshed, which still raged around them. “Can we yak about this later? Step aside.”

Naar said, “You have not yet happened to agree to turn the Earth over to our race, and suppress or destroy those in your Tombs who would otherwise wake and be our competitors. We are the pinnacle of humanity: Unlike Sylphs, we are diligent; unlike Witches, we eschew envy; unlike Chimerae, we seek peace; unlike Nymphs, we are chaste; unlike Hormagaunts, we are temperate in all desires, and neither do we eat our children in gluttony for elongation of life-span; and unlike Locusts, we are charitable, individual, and human, and neither do we overswarm the Earth and consume the souls and ghosts of all we encounter. You have seen both the murderous indifference of the Melusine who come after us, and the legalistic inhumanity of the Linderlings: Generations after ours are degenerate. Mine is the paramount generation.”

“Gee, if you only worked on your humility a bit, you’d be golden.”

“You mock me?”

“Not as much as I should, shortstuff, ’cause I am in a hurry. Your group has the worst fault of all, in case you didn’t notice.”

“We have no error. We are not as other races, whose members are hypocritical, thievish, murdering. What flaw have we? You cannot name…”

“Arrogance.”

“What?”

7. Pride

“Snotty, intellectual, know-it-all arrogance. The other failings can be cured because people know when they are acting like Sylphs and Nymphs and Witches and Chimerae. They feel the hunger of Hormagaunts and the greed of Locusts. They feel the sickness inside.

“But brainy little people like y’all cannot cure this, because pride feels good, don’t it? Like having your own little flattering soft-soap salesman living in your left ear, and his only sales pitch is to persuade you what swells you are. You define pride as a virtue and you wear it like a badge of courage.

“And when you meet another as proud as you, you can’t stand it, and you hate him hotter than hell: hot enough to rob and loot and enslave and murder, and do all these things y’all have done in my Tombs, on my damn land, in my damn house; because pride can’t stand competition.

“And when you meet someone actually smarter than you, those brains of which you are so very proud are not smart enough to see it. Are they? Even to the very end, when I was practically beating in his skull with clues of who and what I was, your little weasel Ull could not believe I was the posthuman.

“I guess I have a yokel accent, and I guess you smarty smart guys only judge things by surface appearances. That’s what you call empiricism, I reckon.

“Aanwen figured it neatly enough, because she was the sole one of you not all wrapped up in yourself like a me-blanket.

“I would rather share this world with any of these vile and perverted people from any other vile span of history, because bad as they are, they still have some human nature left in them. If you are actually asking me to judge between you and these others, you come in last.

“So, Little Boy Blue, you can blow me.”

8. Same Answer as Ever

Naar was looking at him with a stare of incomprehension so utterly blank that Menelaus paused a moment, wondering if he had accidentally spoken the words in English rather than Iatric.

Then Naar said in a voice of condescending patience, as one who explains something to a child, “Your comments are irrelevant and eccentric, so let us disregard them. Our race surpasses all others, as I have said. Only we have achieved the goal of the gladiatorial games of Darwin’s cruel circus. Your only task remaining is to crown us our laurels, and grant us our prize. Judge us, O Judge. The contest is ours.”

“Ain’t you a hoot! You talk like I am the judge at the county fair for a kiddie talent show. What do you want, Naar? A blue ribbon? I see you ain’t heard that I am the Hanging Judge of Ages.”

“Yield up the passwords and passcodes that control your Xypotechnology. Turn over to us the authority to thaw the dead and enslumber the living, that the Order of Simplicity shall hereafter judge the ages of man.”

“You are out of your bald, plum-colored, and slightly lopsided little head. I am a serious man with no time for your buggery. Step aside.”

“Or otherwise I kill you, and we continue to dig up and examine your Tombs until all their secrets are yielded to us. We will find other Blue Men, and grow other Followers, and will eventually win for ourselves what you seek now to deny us. It would be simpler for us both for you to yield. What is your answer?”

“Same answer as it ever is.”

“Cogent meaning fails to be conveyed.”

“My wife!”

“What?”

“Is she here yet? She is not!”

“I don’t see the relevance of…”

“My time!”

“Why are you saying these words…?”

“Is it my time yet? It is not!”

Naar’s face was blank for a moment, perhaps with surprise, or perhaps with fear, but then his little finely made features twisted into a scowl of murderous rage to make him seem, almost, a miniature Chimera.

Naar started to speak but Menelaus shouted him down: “Then how do you dare to rouse me before my time?” Menelaus was now red-faced with wrath. “Dare you to see my anger roused?”

And Menelaus took out the powder horn he carried, tossed it casually up into the operator cage of the automaton, and fired with his left-hand pistol at Naar. As expected, the gems on his coat lit, and the bullet was deflected, but Menelaus had so precisely calculated the angle of deflection that the ricochet passed through the powder horn, and the iron slug, heated to molten heat by the magnetic linear acceleration, ignited it. It was a simple chemical explosion: not an energy Naar could manipulate, not a metal he could levitate.

There was a crack of thunder and a violent cloud of white smoke flooding outward.

The test charges carried by the demolitions automaton were too near, and they went off, one after another, like a string of firecrackers, so that the whole left side of the huge machine was afire.

But Menelaus had calculated without taking into account the love and loyalty of the Dalmatians. The first, instead of firing the energy pistol, threw himself bodily on the powder horn a half instant after the hot slug entered and a half instant before the powder caught and ignited. That dog died smothering the blast, and its corpse seemed to hang in midair for a moment, halfway between the explosion and the operator’s stool.