Daae said, “Forgive us. By my time, the days of the Republic were legend. The same fires that blotted out the world’s memory of the Social Wars erased records of previous eras as well. Only the Judge of Ages, who dwells in the underworld, knows and remembers the truth.”

Menelaus nodded. “For just that reason, I don’t know my derivation, gentlemen, since my lineage records were wiped out. And the atomics made it so the Social Wars weren’t none too sociable. I am sure I have at least some rattlesnake in my cocktail.”

With no word, the three men each saluted the weapons of the other two by a gesture of raising the hand, palm out, before the eyes, as if to shield them from an invisible glory. Then they gravely passed their weapons each back to the proper owner, shillelagh, thighbone, and rock.

5. Aeonicide

“Now that the formalities are over, gentlemen,” Menelaus said, “what do you want? You did not just come all this way to kill an imposter, and you could have done that in plain sight, back at the camp. You didn’t hit as hard or as nasty as you could have done, which means you were trying to guess my mettle. I assume I passed, and that you want to recruit me. What’s the mission?”

“Escape first, and then revenge,” said Daae. “The Blues have woken men of other times: men you must gather to us. The rods can be broken each separately, but not when bundled together.”

Yuen said, “Even the lesser races from earlier periods, and the degenerate freaks of our future, can redeem, in part, their inferiority, by service to a superior cause.”

Menelaus cleared his throat. “Excellent plan. Do let me do the talking, right, Proven Alpha? The lesser races, uh, have brains not excellent enough to stand the shock of being told how pathetic they are. I’ll have to kind of cajole them into helping us. We are clearly low on manpower: how feasible would it be to break into the Tombs and wake others of our kind?”

Yuen said, “To thaw the sick and the weak? Unless the Blue Men restore them, they will have no weapons and hence no names worth speaking.”

Daae said, “More than this: we dare not provoke the Judge of Ages. How shall it fare with us, if we disturb the Tombs for our purposes, if he comes in wrath to avenge himself on the Blue Men?”

Menelaus turned his hooded head toward him. “You have faith in this Judge of Ages?”

Daae said softly, “Erudite sir, you have studied history, have you not?”

The hood nodded. “More than I’d like.”

“You know that there is a recurrent pattern to history. The persistence of the Tombs over so many centuries, unmolested, despite the rumors of buried wealth, bespeaks some power that protects them from grave-robbers. A great power. I say he will arise to punish this trespass. Are not those who unearthed us defilers of his work, and defiers of his word?”

“Chimerae do not believe in spirits,” said Menelaus.

“I say the Judge of Ages is a real man, a survivor from some earlier period of history, the Second Age of Space, and that he rises from his own Tombs to walk the earth when need calls.”

The hood turned toward the younger. “And what do you say, Alpha Yuen?”

“I say nothing to contradict my Captain,” said Yuen.

“Do you believe in the Judge of Ages?”

“Permission to speak freely?” The younger man looked at Daae, who flicked his eyes in a microscopic nod of assent.

Yuen said, “The Judges of Ages is a children’s story, invented by the superstitious fools of the Final Sabbat. The Witches worshipped everything they did not understand, including the technology they destroyed. Of course, the great Tombs and how they worked were beyond their wits, undisciplined as they were, to conceive. No doubt some coffin contained a victim of a bioweapon. The Witches unsealed a Tomb and were struck down by a disease, something their undisciplined minds could not comprehend, and so they invented the figment of an avenger. They had gods and godlets for all things, houses and hearths and fields and trees. To add one more to their crowded pantheon”—he practically spat the word—“saved them from the expense of mounting a continual guard on known Tomb sites.”

Menelaus said, “The Natural Order of Man, those fruit-eaters called the Nymphs, they believed the Judge of Ages was real. The Hormagaunts from the period of the Iatrocracy besieged his Tomb site to prevent entry or egress. They said they encountered his soldiers, armored men who balanced on the back of an extinct quadruped called a horse and were carried from place to place. These men were called cniht, which means ‘vassal,’ or cavalier, which means ‘horse-rider of disdainful mien.’ Are there vassals without a liege? I wondered why the Blue Men have not unearthed any of these knights, or why they have not risen from the earth, if they are real. Do either of you Loyal and Proven Alphas have any information on the subject?”

Daae shook his head. “Perhaps the soldiers of the Judge of Ages are buried too deeply. Or they fought and were slain before we thawed. But there is no sign of battle here.”

Yuen’s one eye narrowed. “It is noteworthy, Beta Anubis, that you speak several of the aftercomer languages. I take it your slumber was interrupted, that you rose from the buried Tombs and walked the Earth in later years, and learned their ways?” There was no mistaking the suspicion in Yuen’s tone.

“I learned of their ways, Alpha Yuen,” said Menelaus. The Chimerae were always careful to avoid contamination with foreign cultures and ideas. “Mine was a scholastic interment, not medical, and so I could thaw without undue harm.”

Daae said, “Scholastic? You were ordered into the Tombs?”

“Yes, sir. I am a schoolteacher. A mathematician. My unit is the Hundred and Second Civic Control Division, attached to the Third Pennsylvania Legion, College for Dependents. Academic Joint Command told me to study the causes and results of civilizational decline.”

The eyes of the two other men grew intent.

Daae asked, “What caused our glory to pass away?” His voice was hushed, the tone of voice one used over an open grave, at a funeral.

“Remember I come from a day when atomic world civil war burned everything that could burn. We were reduced to savagery,” Menelaus said solemnly. “All Chimerae are genetically programmed with instincts designed to protect the race. It was the one thing that makes us better than the Witches. How could we have done this to ourselves? So I was ordered to reconstruct, if I could, the predictive mathematical analysis of history called Cliometry, which legend says the Giants knew. I thawed in A.D. 5884, I learned that Richmond, that great city, in a single hour was fallen, and no candle burned there, and there was no sound of engine, no noise of mill or drill. I thawed again in A.D. 5900 and A.D. 5950, and there was no sign anywhere of the Command, and no one to report to. I continued forward into the future, century upon century, because there was no officer, no Alpha, to rescind my orders, or tell me to stop. Therefore I will continue my assigned task until the End of Days, or the arrival of the Hyades, or until an Alpha properly dismisses or relieves me.”

Yuen said, “Are we truly as far in the future as you say? Is it truly all gone? There is no trace of us? Did nothing we erect survive?”

Menelaus said, “I saw ten coffins from the Chimera period in the yard, broken open. So there are eleven of us, counting me.”

Daae said solemnly, “All is lost. The Chimerical way of life passed away, and the black Oculus-pierced domes of our anti-chapels, where once our bravest men gathered to pour out curses into an empty and uncaring sky against an unreal God before our duels and battles, stood isolated and silent upon the hills of Appalachia, and along the shores of the poisonous, sterile waters of the Chesapeake. The woodlands grew and the cities crumbled, and the race that comes after us dances amid our ruins.”