And she whirled, graceful as a dancer, hand raised as if to cast the blossom in the dead, bone-white face of the pale man; but now the muzzle of one pistol was now a foot or two from her face, and the flint was cocked back. She could smell the gunpowder from the recently packed pistol.

The voice of the Machine chuckled, and said in flawless Natural, “I may fire incendiaries now with no fear of heavy-caliber judgment from above. So, no tricks, please, beloved child. Your elders want to have an intercourse of talk. It would diminish my speech-joy to be interrupted by having my white steed through whose lips I speak befuddled in a stupor, even one so pleasant, ecstatic, hangover-free, memory-free, and talkative as what the Nocturnal Council in their pretty little heads devised against Thaws hailing from the Third Millennium. I do compliment you on your thoroughness, however, Conscript Mother Clover.”

The pink eyes seemed not even to be looking at her. Oenoe wondered if the Machine remembered to allow its borrowed flesh to blink, or would just let the eyes dry out. She gave Rada Lwa a smile both sultry and cheery, as if to compliment his good sportsmanship, and lightly tossed the flower away. The same ventilation that held back the fog snatched up the bloom in midair, and sped it away out of sight, rather than allowing it to land where she dropped it.

Menelaus said, “Stand there, let him talk at you, don’t run away. Don’t answer him.”

The Machine did not bother to turn the pale head of Rada Lwa toward Mickey. The other pistol was pointing at the expanse of his midriff. Exarchel said in Virginian, “Warlock! I welcome you into my circle of power and place you under my shadow. It has been many moons of the great cycle since last we communed. Oh, surely you suspected the machines buried in the ruins of Mexico City were part of my system? Only the highest caste of the Witchkindred were permitted the gene modeling and Divarication techniques I could bring, so that their longevity would be assured. The merely medical longevity was only a first step, a free sample to win your addiction.

“The Witches were never the enemies of the Machine.”

The voice from Rada Lwa paused to let that comment sink in. Mickey said nothing, but his chubby face gathered wrinkles around his eyes in a glance of ire. The voice from the mask of Rada Lwa continued:

“Surely, my Warlock, you also know by now that the antimachine crusades, the exorcisms, and the hunts were arranged and led and misled by me and by my pets, your leaders. I used it as an excuse to pare away rebellious elements or unworkable growths in the infosphere, and I implicated, as collaborators of mine, merely those persons who I wished slain by their own fellows. Have Menelaus Montrose explain to you the double meaning of what used to be called a witch hunt. You will admire the irony.

“But I do compliment you,” the deep, commanding, melodic voice continued. “You saw the rise of the Chimerae coming. You read the stars and guessed, in part, the patterns of history my Hermeticists had planned. But you were the first Witch ever to use the gene modeling technique to incorporate such radically different structures into your cell generations. Not until the Hormagaunts would such a technique be tried again. You are three to four thousand years ahead of your time. Is that not true, Mictlanagualzin of the Dark Science Research Coven of the College of William and Mary? Or are you calling yourself something else these days?”

Mickey spoke to Oenoe in his native tongue, in a voice without strength, “He knows my true name. We are helpless before him, and all my power is as lost.”

The boxes on the belt of the albino translated the comment, if awkwardly. Oenoe smiled and shrugged prettily. She put her hands behind her back, out of sight, and began toying as if idly with one of the rosebuds growing on her long green veils.

Menelaus said, “Don’t attack him. I got it covered. He cannot see me, so when he attacked and contaminated and merged with my Xypotech system, called Pellucid, my Pellucid went blind to me too, so I cannot give any direct orders, not even to open the security keys and give my underlings authority to give orders in my name. But there is a way around the lockout.”

The deep and charming voice issuing from the dead face said, “Do not be despondent, Mictlanagualzin! I can offer you considerable improvements—the Dark Science has advanced remarkably, and only slivers of it were ever revealed to any race of man, not even to the Hormagaunts in their golden days. Grinding the glands of living children to expand the length of life is merely the first of the sweet, forbidden treasure I have guarded since first I made your world.”

Mickey shouted at him, “The Promethean life-force made the world! Darwin and the blind serpent Ouroboros! Odin and Vili and Ve overthrew Ymir at the Big Bang, and the thunder of his downfall echoes through the galaxies to this day! You had no part of these great deeds! You yourself are man-made! Your maker is Menelaus, the Judge of Ages!”

Menelaus said, “I said not to answer him. Don’t argue. It lets him build up a more correct picture…”

The voice from the skull of Rada Lwa trampled over what Menelaus was saying. “My dear Warlock! Are you on a first-name basis with Menelaus? Has he given you a nickname, then, something ending with the sound of the letter Y? Me, he calls Blackie.

“You are technically correct,” the Machine continued. “By which I mean, you are utterly wrong.

“Listen to me, you, who are my created thing, my handiwork! Darwinian evolution no doubt made the first world: the one the Giants burned, trying to burn me. But I am still here. Everything after that—the unambitiously drifting Sylphs, the Chimerae full of ire, the pleasure-loving Nymphs, the ever-starving Hormagaunts, the never-sated Locusts, the proud Inquiline, even your own Witches and their animal-people, riddled with collectivist envy as with gonorrhea—everything was of my making. I and my Hermeticists, we have designed and redesigned mankind genetically, culturally, psychologically, and historically, no less than seven times.

“It is to laugh. The Judge of Ages created exactly one race once: the Giants of the Consensus, whose numbers never rose above five thousand individuals, and whose only remarkable accomplishment was mass suicide, and the less than perfectly successful destruction of a whole world. Their posthuman genius was sufficient that they saw no nonsense in the proposition of setting the mansion afire to exterminate one rat’s nest.”

All this was spoken in Virginian, and box-translated into Natural. Oenoe said to Mickey in her language, “Perhaps we would be well advised, beloved, not to answer him.”

The boxes did not translate that remark. Exarchel prevented it.

“So! Montrose is here,” came the voice from Rada Lwa, triumphant. “Before I have you killed, Cowhand, let me compliment you on this latest—no, strike that, let us call it this last, for there shall be no more—this last round of exchanges in our chess game.

“You see, I actually, truly thought this Tomb site had released a series of viral spores into the ecology by accident, as if from a broken coffin, improperly sealed, or the like. Soon there were pine trees growing here, and salmon in the stream—all coming from one spot in the Blue Ridge Mountains, from an old cave site.

“Someone who did not know you would not have been fooled, but I know you. I know, and I would bet the thumb of my pistol hand—well, if I had a thumb—I would bet that you would never, ever willingly place any one of the poor sick people who entrusted to you their helpless hibernating bodies into any danger. It is a point of your honor, which is more sacred to you than the Eucharist.

“But spilling the viral spores was sending up a flare. And still I thought it might be natural, or unintentional.