Illiance, Ull, and Naar were names or honorifics.

Damn me, but I am smart.

“Me, Tarzan,” replied Montrose. “You, Jerkdong? I can’t talk with this damned buggery tube yerked up my eating-hole, you smurf.” But since his mouth was blocked, it came out more like: A cawh’n taw wif dif bwah-erwee doob eerd ut mwa eewen-oal, oo fnurf. Which, upon reflection, actually did not make much less sense than what he’d tried to say.

The tone must have been clear even if the words were not, because one of the dog things drew what looked like a single-shot wheel lock pistol from his sash and clouted Montrose sharply across the cheek with it. More than ever, Montrose wished for the mind powers the old comics always awarded to creatures with superior intelligence. As it was, he was able to deduce the exact vector magnitude of the incoming iron pistol barrel and make an accurate mental model of which parts of his cheek and face and nose cartilage would be torn and broken before the blow actually fell. He was not able to anticipate how much it would hurt, however. Pain is always a surprise.

When the blow landed, Menelaus had sufficient control of his nervous system to induce a fainting cycle without anything more than a silent act of will. He slid down into the roaring darkness with a sense of relief, hoping the breathing tube still lodged in his face would hide any smile of victory.

If all went as planned, they would place him back in a working coffin for the internal systems to heal his damage. And turn on the communication implants wired into his nervous system.

The chance that they would kill him while he was unconscious was small; or, at least, small enough that it was worth the risk. And if they did kill him? He had already said his good-byes to Rania, and there was no one else he cared about, nor any group of people, nor any civilization, for thousands of years.

That was his last conscious thought for a while.

2

The Pit of Revenants

1. Three Locusts

His next conscious thought was how cold it was, and he wished his brother Leonidas, whose bunk was near the window, would stand up and lever the darn thing shut. Still, it was nice to know he was home, with his brothers around him. By why were they all in his bunk with him? Why did Agamemnon have his elbow sticking in his eye?

Menelaus pried an eyelid open. He was in a steep-sloped pit, in the mud, in the freezing rain, with other bodies cold as corpses huddled up to either side of him, groaning, and Leonidas had been dead for eight thousand years.

All was not going as planned. They had not placed him back inside a working coffin.

When he tried to stand, a naked, bald-headed, and big-headed boy put a hand, and then a shoulder, under his arm. He leaned, but the boy could not lift Montrose.

Montrose focused his eyes, wishing the light were better. He did a mental trick to repeat the visual images in overlapping layers in his cortex, pick out details, and deduce a brighter and clearer picture.

The one trying to help him up was not a boy: his frame and facial characteristics were the same as those of the Blue Men who had captured him and, like them, stood four feet tall—except that he was not blue. Instead the man was black as onyx. The fellow was an adult, for he had pubic hair and armpit hair, but no trace of beard stubble nor scalp hair.

A more obvious distinction was that this man had two yellow tendrils coming from the crown of his skull just above his eyes. These eyes were large and lustrous, and his mouth a tiny rosebud. From what he could see, Montrose guessed the eyes had been modified to pick up ultraviolet. High on the skull, near the base of the two antennae, were two pit organs like those of snakes, able to pick up infrared rays. The Blue Men had displayed no such modifications.

At that same moment, two other little onyx men, as alike to the first as twin brothers, came to the other side of Montrose and with soft hands helped him to his feet, and steadied him.

Montrose, for a moment, was delighted to see people who looked so exactly like what his childhood cartoons imaged far future men should look like. “Take me to your leader!” he said in English. Then he scowled. “Or if I am any judge of genetic handiwork, your leader was Coronimas, that idiot. But why this design? Maybe he watched the same toons I did as a kid. That’s a creepy thought.”

2. The Trench

He used the same visual layering trick to look around him. It was not pretty. Men and women, both naked, were standing or sitting or lying in the mud. The captors had neither provided clothing nor separated the sexes. There were forty individuals here from a wide variety of millennia, some on the ground; some by themselves, weeping; and the rest huddled into five groups.

The first group were the bald, onyx-skinned, antennae-wearing dwarfs helping Montrose. Second group were furry or scaly figures of monstrous aspect, animal-headed or headless, and with them, men of less obvious biomodifications. Third were brunette women whose overvoluptuous beauty no mud nor misery could mar, clinging to each other’s wet and nubile bodies and blinking at the rain with darkly exotic and overlarge eyes. With them were sloe-eyed yellow-skinned men whose faces were soft with boyish good looks. Fourth were stern-featured warrior-aristocrats with unblinking eyes, their long hair dank with rain and clinging to their shoulders, and a lady and two girls of their race standing stoically behind them at parade rest, none uttering any complaint, while their servants huddled and rolled in the mud, moaning and whining. Fifth were thin crones and unlovely hags, gross in their nakedness with dangling breast-sacs and wrinkled skins, but seven feet tall, or eight, gnashing their teeth and uttering curses, with their menfolk in a circle around them, in stature seeming like children beneath their grandmothers, shuffling their feet in a slow, mud-sloshing dance. With the hags was a man black as atrament, fat and round and sagging as a dumpling, who gave Montrose a nod of recognition and a small smile.

The pit was about nine feet deep with sloping walls reinforced by wooden planks. From the resin smell, the planks had been cut within the last day or so. The planks had been stapled in place with thorns, not nails or spikes, which implied a higher level of biotechnology than ironworking present. The pit was about ten paces across, roughly oval. To one side was an wooden doorframe leading up three wooden steps into a trench. The trench ran directly away from his point of view like a roofless corridor in a house, and met another wall of muddy earth, where it forked left and right. There were steps cut in the side of the trenches for musketmen to stand and fire. Montrose did not hear any noise of gunnery at the moment: but it was clear from the slope of the ground that this earthwork was meant to approach the Tombs without exposing the Tomb-robbers to the largest guns by the main door.

There were more figures in the trench, huddling to get out of the rain. He saw at least one giant, an elephantine silhouette twelve or thirteen feet tall, whose shoulders and head were above the level of the ground; and he saw an albino pale as paper. In the gloom and confusion, no details were clear.

Dog things armed with pike, cutlass, or musket stood or crouched at the brink. They looked down with dull, disinterested eyes. The dog things were slightly protected from the rain by a tarp. A keg or tank of some sort stood beside them, with hoses and nozzles. Montrose stooped and ran his fingers through the mud, lifted it to his nose, sniffed. Almost lost amid the rain was a faint smell of antiseptic. He put his hand to his armpit and found some white foam, still moist, clinging to him where the rain had not reached. The shock of being hosed down with this disinfectant foam must have been what woke him.