However, if it were a polygraph, it did not require any tubes or wires to take a reading from the subject.

The subject was seated in a chair, rudely but solidly built of branches lashed together, with a seat and back of woven willow.

He was a massive man, over six feet tall, but with such prodigious breadth of chest and shoulders as to appear like one of the Giants of old. His skin was dark, like seal pelt, because he was covered from heel to crown in fine, thick, dark hair. He had no nose, merely two tiny slits above a very wide mouth.

Only his palms and the area around his mouth and eyes showed his skin beneath, which was orange yellow, and the rings of orange around his mouth gave him a clown-makeup look, and his ringed eyes make him look like a raccoon.

The man had no visible ears, merely a dimple at either side of his skull, and his neck was so thick that it sloped into the massive planes of his shoulders evenly, given him a bullet-headed, almost torpedo-like aspect. The white frills down his chest and under his armpits seemed to be gill tissue. His waist was blubbery and legs like columns. His feet were almost comically large, swim-fin shaped and covered with a coarser and darker hair, scabrous, almost like the quills of porcupine, emerging from red orange scaly integument. His heels boasted an impressive set of spurs.

The seat of the chair divided, to allow a bulky tail to hang down. It looked something like an otter’s tail, but with flukes of cartilage and membrane folded like Chinese fans against its length. At the tip was a barb like a scorpion’s tail, complete with a venom sac, swollen and purplish.

The man raised his hand in greeting. Menelaus saw the fingers were webbed, and that the velvet tips hid retractable claws like those of a cat.

His eyes were not only different colors, they were different species: his left eye was pale, with a square pupil like that of a goat. The right eye was dark, with a bright gold pupil shaped like the letter W.

Menelaus wondered if, like the eye of a cuttlefish, this right eye had more than one set of receptor cells, called fovea, along the back of the eyeball. Cuttlefish distort their whole eye to change focus rather than using a lens, like humans, and they can see polarization of light.

The seated man turned one of his lunatic-looking eyes toward Menelaus, but he had the other eye tilted, like the eye of a chameleon, independently of the first, and it was looking at the Blue Men.

His voice was a rumble: “Han forwityng yon fremde not ken my tongue. Be ye tongue-witty?”

Menelaus raised his palm by way of greeting and answered him. “My lowely tonge is naught unweedle ne unkonnynge. I speke Leche. Assent ye to be apposed by twa wee pers lordynges?”

“Am naught looth ne drede,” said the big man with a chuckle of expansive good humor. “Find me servysable, who has none been hende weel-dressed muchel mee!”

And he pulled back his lips, revealing an impressive set of tusks. In addition to the molars and incisors of an omnivore, his mouth had a pair of serpent fangs and what looked like an extra row of shark teeth. When he laughed, his nostrils (which had been pinched shut) opened and gasped air. Menelaus listened, and tried to guess at the capacity of the lungs.

Whatever the psychological reason was that required a captor to stand over his captive was obviously not present in the Blue Men. Both Illiance and Ull, without any word, sat themselves at the feet of the huge dark man, spines straight, feet in lotus position, wrists resting on soles.

Menelaus looked down at Illiance and spoke in Iatric. “Small wonder you could not follow his speech. This is not High Iatric, but an earlier variant of the tongue. Old Iatric, or Leechcraft, is closer to Winter-Queen period Natural, the language of the Nymphs.”

Illiance said, “I am not familiar with this dialect.”

“I would call it separate language. Leechcraft was spoken between A.D. 6800 and 7300, along the northern coasts of Eurasia, from the British Isles through Scandinavia and Siberia, which were all warm and green at that time. The Yakutsk Analeptic Empire adopted, changed, and spread the language north across an open and ice-free polar sea to Canada, which at that time was temperate, and south past Lake Baikal to Mongolia, which at that time was jungle. The language you and I are speaking comes from a later period, when the Therapeutae ruled the northern hemisphere and used the impassible equatorial desert zones as test landscapes: their political order was called Iatrocracy, rule by those who created and were protected against bioweapons. The social order was called Triage.”

Illiance said, “This word-use is unexpected. Do we have mutually coherent symbol-correspondence?”

“Triage. I take it you are not familiar with this period? It was not pretty. The near-surface deposits of metal ore were exhausted, and the technology for submantle mining lost, so theirs was a postmetallic civilization. With their biotechnology, there was no practical upper limit on medical techniques, but no upper limit on cost: after everyone over a certain age had mortgaged their arbors and slave-herds and lives and children’s lives to the biotech guilds, the Iatrocrats, who rationed the medical care, got to decide who died and who lived and for how long and in what amount of pain, so the guilds did not give a damn who collected taxes or led armies. They were the real rulers. The geriatric elite forced lesser orders to donate their organs and glands and life spans to them, and could live for centuries, until killed by violence or accident.

“Technically speaking, the word Hormagaunt refers only to their heavily modified military-caste biofacts. The ruling caste biofacts were called Iatrocrats. The donor caste were harvested of their organs and children.

“The Theraputae arose in the northern hemisphere in the seventy-third century, growing the first walled cities and conquering the surrounding Nomads. By the end of that century, a biotechnological revolution created the Clades, who formed a third caste of technical and mercantile bourgeoisie or burg-dwellers. They were mass-produced twins or clones. Their complete genetic uniformity allowed them to program their immune systems to produce allergens which would sicken and drive off outsiders and strangers, so each walled city or hive-dwelling could stay isolated. By the seventy-fourth century, the Triage system of genetic feudalism ruled the globe.”

Illiance said, “Remarkable. Few records survived their global wars with the Locusts. We knew there was a biotechnological caste system, but did not know its origin date.”

“Interesting but irrelevant, I guess. This guy here is from the earliest period. Or his language is. Unless his slumber was interrupted, he would not know any more about the Iatrocracy than Ethelred the Unready would know about the world in Queen Victoria’s time.”

Illiance nodded thoughtfully. “If I knew who those personages happened to be, the contrast would no doubt be quite illuminating.”

During this, Ull sat without speaking but regarded the huge and furry man from beneath half-lidded eyes.

“What was it that the Hormagaunt said?” asked Illiance.

“He said he had a premonition that the foreigners, meaning you gentlemen, would not understand his tongue, and he asked me if I were fluent. I answered that my humble tongue was neither feeble nor ignorant. I told him I spoke Old Iatric. I asked him if he agreed to be questioned by the two, small blue superior officers. He said he was neither unwilling nor afraid, and that he was willing to serve, even though he had not been well served much himself.”

Ull said, “We are not superior officers.”

“Do you not give the orders here, sir?” Menelaus proffered him a stiff-armed salute.

Ull snapped, “Sit! Do not call me sir!”