She looked oddly at Menelaus. He, not knowing what else to do, pushed back his hood and drove his fingers through his hair once or twice, using his fingernails to straighten up his part, and spitting on his palm to pat down his unruly cowlick with saliva.

She said, “My late lord bore the weapon Callixiroc the Dark, which his fathers in times past bore against the Witches and their Werewolves in the battle of Buffington’s Island, where Arthuna Ire Extet of never-ending memory fell.”

Menelaus had never heard of any Arthuna. Maybe the epithet never-ending memory merely meant the fellow didn’t forget things, not that he was all that unforgettable.

She said, “This spear in my hand is yet virgin and nameless, and has done no service, and bears no name: yet she is a true weapon. Do you contest this?”

Menelaus said, “I would not dare, ma’am. Sometimes those virgins bite.”

She nodded regally. “Grislac and the wand in the hand of Varuman Daae are pledged to my honor, for the good of the Eugenic Emergency Command. I am Dependant Alpha Lady Mother-of-Commandant Wife-of-Captain Ulec Nemosthene Ivinia née Echtal. My victory title is Septimilegens, for I have borne seven sons into distinguished service.”

Menelaus pulled out the fist-sized stone from his robes and laid it at her feet. “This is my rock. I call him Rock. I gave one of the dog things a handsome clout across the jaw with it, and broke some teeth, and I might have killed another one. It’s not a confirmed kill.” Menelaus did not mention the dog things he had shot with his pistols, now lost. Losing a weapon to the enemy was grounds for ritual suicide among the Chimerae.

“Confirmed or not,” she said, “I trust none loyal to the Command will contest the point. We are too few to spill our blood in contests.” Lady Ivinia turned her eyes to where Yuen and Daae were kneeling and dressing their hair. “Behold the loyalty of his lowly one! I have not seen such great heart, no, not in all of Virginia. Heroes have lain down at the feet of my linage weapons worth ten thousand medallions and twenty thousand tourneys, and yet this one, I tell you, lays down more, for he gives all he has. If he can slay the foe with a stone, it were shame indeed should higher men and better armed do less.”

She turned back to him. “State your grade, rank, line, clan, name, derivation, and action.”

“High-Beta Lance-Corporal Sterling Xenius Anubis. Homo sapiens and Crotalus horridus, proven of Mount Erebus on Ross Island, ma’am.”

With a motion of inhuman gracefulness, the lady knelt, one hand on her spear, and with the other picked up the stone, and straightened again. She offered it to Menelaus. “Take your weapon from my hand, soldier, and bear it loyally in the name of the cause of racial perfection. It is not my hand alone who gives it, but every mother who has ever buried a fallen son. Freely we offer our sons into the oblivion we all crave. When you face death, think of us, who have already given all we love into the maw of war.”

Lady Ivinia pointed with her spear down the slope. “Stand, Alpha Gentleman, and Loyal. Look about you. Here is our killing ground. Look closely.”

7. The Camp

From this prospect, they could see over the tops of the trees. The slope of the great hill was not regular, but rose and fell in mound and dell. The snowy knolls of the lower slopes looked as round and heavy as pregnant women with long white hair huddled against the winter in shaggy fur coats. The trees were merely masses of soft shadows in the moonlight.

The fence formed a triangle, and the glitter of it could be seen, sinister as the heaving side of a breathing snake, through the boughs. The apex of this triangle surrounded the peak of the hilltop. The cleft that parted the hilltop was entirely within the converging lines of fence. Within this cleft were the exposed first two levels of the Tomb system.

A second cleft, narrower and not so deep, was halfway down the slope, cutting at right angles, and from between the sheer cliffs of this narrower cleft arose a rushing white stream thundering or chuckling downhill. In this stream was the battle wreckage of several Blue Man automata, not visible at the moment. At the mouth of the stream was a lesser door, a back way into the Tomb system, opening into the Eighth Level.

This rushing stream bisected the triangle of the fence. On one side of the stream was a cleared field where the metallic tents of the thawed prisoners gleamed. Here was a large infirmary tent and a larger mess tent.

To the other side were the machine-pavilions and the exercise field for the insect-limbed automata: the snow had been trampled into frozen mud by metal feet.

At the foot of the hill, a large but windowless egg-shaped structure, apparently a powerhouse, squatted at one corner of the triangular fence. At the other corner was a guarded yard containing a pile of broken coffins.

Between these two points, the long line of fence forming the base of the triangle faced the landing field. This line of fence held three guard towers, one to either side of the gate, and one straddling the gap in the fence where the stream ran out. This third tower also acted as a control tower, with flags and lanterns dangling from a yardarm. These towers were little more than impromptu platforms atop narrow-based tripods which swayed alarmingly when the wind blew. The dog things would not climb them. The towers were manned by Blue Men.

The control tower had a large parabolic dish, made of what looked like mother of pearl, lashed and rigged to its lopsided structure. Cables lying across the snowy grass snaked from the control tower to the egg-shaped powerhouse. The gaze of Menelaus rested on that radio tower for a while.

Moonlight glinted ghostlike from the armored cylinders flanking the gate, and the slowly moving smartwire atop the fence, waving and swaying like thorny sea-grass.

Beyond the gate, where the thaws could not go, rose the brick piles of the doghouses, and the taller spiral seashell buildings of the Blue Men. The doghouses had many small windows, no bigger than a man’s fist, for scenting rather than for sunlight.

The seashell-shaped coral structures of the Blue Men had no windows at all. The largest was shaped like a nautilus, the Spira mirabilis of the mathematicians, and it rose up fifty feet. By day, it was sky blue dappled with silver spots. By night it was a looming round shadow, moaning softly when the wind walked past its mouth. It was flanked by spiral minarets like narwhale horns. Nearby four squat sheds like prone conch shells hunkered, crusted with barnacles and spires. To one side was a large pink structure shaped like a snail shell that served as a field hospital.

Not far from these structures, the landing field contained a dozen cloth-winged flying machines: triplanes, biplanes, and motorized kites. By day, the brightly colored heraldic designs and totems painted on the wings were visible. These planes had rear screws rather than propellers.

In their midst, a dun whale looming above a school of colorful fish, was an air-ironclad with a score of helicopter blades above and propellers fore and aft. Like Viking shields, the sides of this large craft were shadowed with many overlapping plates of solar energy material. The plates were ancient, yellowed with age and spiderwebbed with cracks, as if each shield had been meticulously pieced together, shard by shard, from fragments. And yet the smell of gasoline and oil could be smelled over the machine when the wind was right. The cracked solar plates were purely ceremonial, something left from other days.

Beyond, the land was wraithlike, white and empty: a land of boulders and tufts of colorless grass. Where the sky met the ground in the dark distance, the rising moon glittered against a range of cliffs of ice, eerie silver blue in the moonlight. This was a spur the northern glacier had sent down along the crests of western hills. The land to the east, now merely shadow, held no ice outcropping, but neither did it hold any forest or tilled fields, no sign of croft or barn or road. The valleys of Virginia looked almost like tundra, acres of shrub and scrub and wiry grass, with boulders peeping from the soil like the helmets of buried trolls.