Wincing, Menelaus addressed the gathered survivors:

“I have discovered the control channels to the extra platoon of digging machines Aanwen brought before she died. The automata are currently under my control and trying to dig us out. A simple calculation shows we cannot possibly get out of here before the Bell arrives—and who knows what that means?

“Soorm I can send down the cistern to follow Alalloel and try to find if we can float out through the flooded areas in coffins, which are watertight and contain their own life support.

“The other Blue Men and their dogs are all in coffins, being repaired or restrained until I can decide what to do with them. Yes, I stopped the Blues from doing in their dogs. In my house, one of my rules is that it is not lawful for a man to kill his wounded dog, not while I have veterinarian-coffins to spare.

“Also, no human suicides just because you’ve had a hard day. Betas, I am looking right at you. Oh, and yes, you can unbraid your hair now. Battle is over. You were brave. You did well.”

The girls sat on a lower tier of the dais, and started out happily enough combing each other’s hair and chatting, but soon their accustomed Chimerical stoicism and stiff-faced discipline broke; then had their arms around each other, and began to weep, ashamed and disappointed to have survived the battle, cheated of a glorious death.

Menelaus, meanwhile, said, “I regret to report that Happy the Kine had wounds beyond what my coffins can repair. You all seem to think I am superhuman, and I guess I am, a little, but there are things no one can fix. Larz, Franz, and Ardzl! Because you pummeled to death the dog which had bayoneted Happy, I give you my permission as ranking Beta to keep as rightfully named weapons the cutlasses taken from dog things. I reward your service with manumission: you are free men.”

Franz raised one hand meekly. “Sir? And what rank of freedom would that be? How much freedom? I mean, are we Alpha or Beta, Gamma or Delta? I ain’t being no Epsilon. They stink.”

Ardzl asked in a voice less meek, “And when will we be issued breeding mates from the quartermaster? If we are free men, the Command has to carry on our breed, right? I want two of the Geisha girls in green over there.”

Larz, who was sitting in a coffin with only his head showing, said loudly to Montrose, “Whoa and woe! That’s powerful hard, brains of lard—we’z emotionally scarred! You just gunna toss us a loss and cut free on the street to beat feet? Free to starve under bridges? No, no, we won’t go, unless we got a life, and a wife or three. And those honeys cost money! Upkeep, and you got to dress them, and you have to bring in someone to beat them with a lash every now and again, because if a stud draws blood, that’s no good for domestic tranquilizers. Guys who know how to do it without leaving bruises cost coin too, and you gotta have Kine to draw the plough and raise the crop, or else freedom is just starvation, right?”

“Freedman Larz, I am delighted that you are alive again and that you have found a way to rewind up the motors of your mouth, and let me just say I hate your period of history like the red-lungrot plague, and you are not getting a damn dime out of me, because I do not pay men to be free. Earn it or starve. And, Sir Guy, maybe you can take the newly freed citizens off to one side and explain some basics of civilized law and civilized religion to them.

“Toil, Drudge, and Drench, the same applies. Any man who fights in my service, or takes up arms against my enemies, wins his liberty; and my laws last longer than the laws of merely earthly princes, whose laws of slavery die when they do. You are beholden to none.”

The three ex-Donors of the Hormagaunt Era immediately began whispering and laughing and cutting capers, and talking about the high-quality organs they would buy to replace those they had lost, or they would grow a house as big as dreams to dwell in, and fill it up with clones of themselves, as alike as eggs in a nest, or how fabulously rich they would become buying and selling children in the market.

“Ah, Sir Guy, give a little talk to them too, while you are at it.”

2. Life and the World

Menelaus no longer bothered to hide his nature, and he increased the number of nerve firings to his eyes, so that the scene around him grew crisp and bright as crystal. He turned his painfully sharp more-than-human eyes left and right, and no one could meet his gaze.

“Anyone else have a complaint about life and the world? You Chimerae! Yuen thought the fault was mine that his civilization was fell apart. Kine Larz thought I shot the Last Imperator-General to make the World Empire shatter. You Nymphs thought I helped you overthrow the Chimerae by spreading the various addictions and the hedonism of Greencloak technology among the Lotus Eaters, because I love you so much. Prissy and Gload, I don’t know what you lay at my door, but it must be something. Illiance, you think I arranged for the Noösphere of the Locusts to crack into pieces, and you think this is praiseworthy, because I saved you from a life of permanent thought-enforced mental uniformity; and Keirthlin, you think the same thing, but you think this is blameworthy, because I ruined your life of permanent thought-enforced mental uniformity. Do I really need to go through the whole list of what really happened in each case? It would take forever, and we are out of time.”

Vulpina stood up, striking the dais sharply with the heel of her unstrung bowstaff. She looked very young and very fierce and warlike, despite her tear-stains, and her hair was loose about her face and wild. “Not the whole list. Just one thing.” She drew herself up. “Judge of Ages, the Chimerae of the Emergency General Command demand to know…”

“Will you knock it off, sister? All your Alphas are dead and your race is extinct. The Command ain’t giving no-one not no-more commands, not now, not forever and amen. We are all just people now, human people, and we all have the exact same rank: which is Screwpustulated, First Class. Just ask your damned question.”

She blinked but gathered her breath and spoke. “Why did you kill the Imperator-General? Larz said you shot the last Emperor in an act of assassination, and the Empire fell.”

“Act of assassination my ass—uh—assination. Shot him fair and square, blast pattern in the chest, eyes open, pistol in his hand, plenty of warning and in a good light. It was a duel. I ain’t no assassin. What was I supposed to do? Sue him in court? D’Aragó had his men break into the Tombs in Switzerland, found Thucydides Montrose, a relative of mine, and shot him in his coffin. Thucydides was a preacher man. Little old guy. Later he got poped or something. His men took a DNA sample back, and it was a close match, and they thought they had done me; so they told Draggy I was dead, so I had to go have some dealings with him to convince him of the error of his ways. That time, it was just personal. He killed kin, so I killed him.”

Illiance said, “And did the same obtain of the Hermeticist De Ulloa? Had you some personal vendetta against him? I recall the testimony of Rada Lwa the Scholar.”

Menelaus said, “Nope. That was just professional, a courtesy call. His Witches decided to dig up all the slumbering Christians, bishops and popes and so on who were in medical hibernation, so I had to go beef him just to keep him out of my back yard.”

Oenoe said in a voice like throbbing woodwinds, “And what of Sarmento i Illa d’Or?”

Menelaus said, “Well, that was a different case entirely. Old Yellow Door was a strange guy. He thought he could talk me over to his side of things, talk me into accepting the Hyades as the master race, talk me into liking Blackie’s way of playing with people’s lives like puppets, forgiving the murder of Star-Captain Grimaldi, and talk me into not being in love with Rania anymore. See, he had all these good, sound, logical, persuasive-sounding arguments, and he wanted to lead me through every step of them, starting with definitions, axioms, and common notions. What a damn bore that man was. Oh, and the poxified, pestilential, disease-riddled, scab-oozing, leper whoreson dolled up a clone of my wife, my own damn wife, and sent her around to try to seduce me. He just took that same section of the Monument that defined Rania, and ran through the same calculation again. The idea being I will give up my fight with Blackie, and let the world be his personal bugger boy, provided I am getting my own urges soothed—but I found out old Yellow had plunged her measure before me, cherry-picking, and that without benefit of clergy, if you take my meaning.”