A Maltese Knight in powered armor stood before him, and in his gauntlet a slumber wand glowing with pink motes: the emergency thaw setting.

Menelaus sniffed, and smelled a smell that chilled his heart. It was that particular combination of heat and dust that men who work in the demolition of old buildings, buildings made of stone and concrete, recognize: the smell of solid rock being cracked, crumpled, crumbled. It is the smell, behind the gunpowder, that hangs behind a mine explosion.

“One of these days,” said Menelaus, “I am going to wake up in bed next to a pretty blond space princess. Unless she changes her hair again. What the hell, Sir Knight? When I zonked out, I had coffins rolling in here to pick up the wounded, I got the doors open, and everyone who was fighting was safely zonked out but you.”

The voice from the external speakers was Sir Guiden’s. “Also the man in red who played you—”

“Scipio Montrose. He is a great-great-whatthehellever-grandnephew or something.”

“—He was at the doors when the cave-in happened. The geophone in his sarcophagus shows that the corridor outside the big doors you jammed shut is now filled up entirely with rubble.”

“Give me some good news.”

“I performed a shutdown of the reactor core, so we are not going to die of radiation poisoning, but the quicker we get everyone into coffins for cellular cleanup and regeneration, the fewer cases of hair loss and bone marrow disease we might encounter. The bad news is that if I thaw the Blues, they can use their radio triggers to paralyze everyone.”

Another temblor rippled through the area. The stalactite-shaped chandelier which had been hanging like a loose tooth now fell in a cataclysm of crashing, breaking, shattering, and the groaning scream of tortured metal. Menelaus could not see if any petrified bodies had just been crushed. Dust filtered down from the cracked ceiling, and he could hear dozens of bullets fallen from a broken wall-gun belt clattering brightly to the floor like so many dropped marbles.

“What’s causing the cave-in?” snarled Menelaus. “This facility is supposed to be able to withstand an energy blast equivalent to one thousand sticks of dynamite without rattling a teacup on a saucer.”

“Offhand, Liege, I would say it was an energy blast equivalent to one thousand and one sticks of dynamite.”

“’Swonderful. Thaw Illiance. Scrape every single last of his gems off his coat and then and only then whack him with your wake-up stick. Get Scipio over here. Hand him one of Rada Lwa’s dog pistols. If Illiance paralyzes us, Scipio shoots him. Shouldn’t come to that, though. I think Illiance has a good heart, if he keeps his weirdness chip turned off. And who else is thawed?”

“Everyone I thought was not dangerous to you, Liege.”

“And who would that be, exactly?”

“Oenoe, Aea, Thysa, Daeira, Ianassa.”

“Your lovely lady wife and her love-starved bouncy-boobed Beautiful Nurse Squad.”

“It was the nursing rather than the bouncing I had in mind, Liege, thinking that we need help with any wounded that had to be thawed, or transitioned from short-term hibernation to a long-term regime.”

“Thaw up Mickey the Witch—”

“He’s dangerous, Liege.”

“—and Soorm the Hormagaunt—”

“He’s also dangerous, Liege.”

“—and Daae the Chimera—”

“He’s dead, Liege.”

“Will you stop saying th—Wait! What? What did he die of?”

“Being a Chimera, sir. He threw himself on the enemy bayonets and blew himself to bits. The aiming cameras recorded it.”

“Damn! And I promised the nice psycho lady Chimeress I’d try to save him.”

“Ivinia? She’s dead, too.”

“Also thaw Keirthlin the Linderling and send her up here.”

“She’s dangerous, Liege.”

“And send one of the bouncy-boob squad with a medical kit over here on the quickstep. I need a gill of morphine or something, and a seamstress to sew my big toe back on. Have one of the dogs sniff around the room to see where it rolled. And hand me your sword.”

“My sword, my Liege?” The voice over the helmet speakers was slow with puzzlement. “You are too weak to wield it, and your hands are unpracticed.” Nonetheless, he unhooked the massive claymore from its war belt, and leaned it against the armrest of the throne.

“It’s not for me.”

Soorm and Mickey were lying, one in a smooth furry heap, the other in a mountainous gelatin blob, to the left and right of the throne. Sir Guiden directed cherry-colored motes from his thaw wand toward them, waiting until their skins started to take on color, and then he moved away in a whirr of leg motors down the dais and across the chamber.

The ventilation had cleared more and more of the black smoke away, and now could be seen the bodies of the dead and dying—the latter preserved like flies in amber in pale petrifaction—here lying singly, there lying in a pile, or there lying sundered in pieces. There was wreckage of automata also, and the waters of the fountain had fallen silent.

2. Epicenter

With his good hand, Menelaus tapped on the library surface of the armrest of the throne. He was talking aloud, in English. “I just love having a computer system where, every time you press a poxed command in, nothing the pox happens. Oops! What have we here? Seismometer is working. The epicenter is the depthtrain station. Someone on the surface is blowing a hole through the armor between the third and fourth level. Prying the damn roof off, so the train station will be open to the sky. But who in the world is—?”

A voice, or rather a set of voices, answered him, speaking in English. “It was Aanwen.”

Menelaus looked up. Soorm and Mickey had thawed to the point where they were breathing, and their flesh was pink, but they looked comatose. Neither of them had spoken.

Some clouds and banks of the black smoke still hovered in the chamber, in quarters where the ventilation was broken. One cloud lapped the area between the dais and the statue of Hades, so that the white, marble arms and pale, frightened face of Proserpine, frozen in midfling over the death god’s shoulder, emerged from the top of the cloud like a drowning swimmer.

The black cloud stirred and Alalloel of Lree, the Melusine, stepped out from the fogbank of poison, and mounted the dais. The skin of her face and hands, which were not covered by her skintight wet suit, were glinting and glimmering with a cherry-red cloud of motes, as if she herself were a living thaw wand, or could impersonate the action of such a wand with her skin cells. From the tiny glints of reflection behind her, he could tell that the surface of her exposed back was also lit up as if with the same cold flame of delicate pink.

Alalloel opened her tongueless mouth. The voices of three women blended together emerged. “Aanwen the Widow was the final agent of the Nobilissimus del Azarchel, the one you did not detect.”

Her walk was different than it had been before. Now it was both more confident and more womanish: she swayed her hips and swung her arms, or, when a strand from her hanging bangs fell in her face, she tossed her head with a casual, unselfconscious, girlish gesture to flip it back. Menelaus found her whole demeanor eerie and unnerving.

The cherry aura of motes withdrew into her skin, which returned to normal hue. Alalloel stood before the throne, one leg straight, the other flexed, one hand on her hip, gazing at him with her strange, lightless eyes. At one moment, she reminded him of some blind and inhuman monster; in another moment, she looked like a girl, shorter than average, wearing an oddly bobbed haircut and what could almost be a pair of dark eyeglasses.

Now two of the voices halted, and only one, a contralto with a slight, lilting accent, continued to speak. “Upon discovering your identity, Aanwen commanded Ull to pretend not to know your identity until the point when any further delay would trigger your suspicions. If I may venture a personal opinion, it would have been wiser for him not to continue the deception for so long; but he evidently knew your psychology better than I. Even now, I sense you doubt me. You think Ull was that slow-witted? I wonder what distorts your estimate.”