In any case, an orgy of these sicklings were driving toward a Tomb hold I was gene-locked by instinct to ward, and I pursued them, and a maniple of my Clade-dwellers with me, and a three-clawed sloth-mastodon.

But the sick were wily enough to lead the chase through the swamp, where my sloth-mastodon was bogged, and the branches of the world-forest there too fine to bear his weight.

To this day, I wonder what happened to Behemodont. That was his name. I grew him from an egg in my own sacs, and I trained him, and he loved me, and I so wanted to eat the steaks and roasts from his ribs and flank when he died. Every time I mounted up the howdah to ride him to battle, where he fought so bravely for me, I salivated, contemplating the rich marbling of his well-designed meat. And now, he is gone forever, eaten not by me, but by time. Ah, how I miss my steed! And the world ecology is changed, and his whole race extinct, and will never come again.

I left him and my Clade-dwellers behind, and pressed on alone. This same pack of sicklings, as it turned out, also were wily enough to know I would take to the swamp waters and approach them from below, for they had seeded the waters with spore.

My gills grew inflamed. When I surfaced, spitting swamp water, a man made of steel with a plume above his metal head, shining, terrible, great, came upon me. He rode a steed like horse crossed with a deer; a shining white drestrier that ran on split hooves and lashed a tail like a lion’s tail.

He had lived four thousand years ago, and served an order founded seven thousand years ago. On his surcoat of black he wore a white cross like unto four chevrons all facing inward, and the hems were decorated with images of crouching lions and unicorns: by this I knew him to be a beforegoer, a man of the Bygone, and a protector of the Hospital.

He called out “Gesprecan! Hwām gesecen Þū?”

I knew not what the words meant, but I had learned from the sicklings that to survive this challenge I was supposed to cry out, “Yldothane!” Which is the sickling name for the Judge of Ages—but I had no patience for his superstitions or his folly, so instead of speech, I answered by expelling a stench from my buttocks glands and by throwing the barb of my tail toward his heart.

Instantly, he should have died. Instead, my poisons availed nothing but to burn his surcoat.

He struck me with a pointed wand he held in his hand. The word for it in the Nymphs language is lance, but the Nymphs also use this word to refer to the barbed male member of cats bred for bestiality intercourse, so I cannot say what term is best. It was like an oryx horn made of wood and tipped with an iron tooth, so I could use a swarm of diggerwasps from my armpit hive to attack and warp the wood. The weapon bent and shattered, and the wasps blinded his steed.

But then he dismounted, tossed the shards of lance aside, and smote me with a knife as long as his arm. It was not a living thing, because when I sprayed it, this knife did not flinch.

If the world were just, I should have been able to flatten him with a stroke of my hand, but justice departed this world long ago. When I grappled him, his metal hull was like the electric eel to shock me, and I heard the motors in his joints whirring and whining, giving him the strength of ten, and I knew I faced a foe from the Age of Machines. His skin was not skin, but armor. It was iron, cold iron, and my claws and great tail availed me nothing.

He struck me through the primary heart, and I swooned. My secondary heart kept me alive, and my deep-diving oxygen stores kept me breathing. I woke buried in soil. The metal man had put me a foot or so under the ground for some reason, and did not harvest me. With difficulty I dug myself up.

Wounded, I could not allow my own Clade to come upon me, because my organs were particularly well designed and rare, and if my men found me weakened, their gluttony for what the Iatrocrats would give in return for my body would overcome their fear of me—and a wounded man cannot provoke fear, even if he has a full spectrum of infectives and biotics still at his command.

And I had perhaps deviated from strict interpretations of the Way, for I needed children, young children, where the donors had no prime specimens, and perhaps I had impressed a Clade-dweller or two into making a donation. They are small of soul, their minds preoccupied by matters of affection and lineage and other trivial things we know to be caused by molecular neurochemistry. A true Phastorling was above mere animal emotions like father-love! But my people had perhaps been afflicted by sentimentality and pettiness.

I was a sickling now, and therefore weak, and the Way of the Phastorlings has no softness for the weak, because our bodies belong to the Clade.

Scenting his steed, and knowing myself lost if I did not, I crawled after my murderer, knowing he would be more likely to grant mercy than my friends.

I remember it began to rain, and this confused the scent, and my bloodloss made me tremble, and so I was very weak. I passed the same outcropping of rock twice and thrice, and knew then I was crawling in circles.

Then the wind blew, and the rains fluttered like a gray curtain and parted: and I saw my slayer, a great armored knight of the early world, suddenly before me. Because the rain deadened my nose and dinned in my ears, I had no warning. One moment he was simply there. Perhaps he rose from the ground. He did not move, and the rain made the ground boil with mud about the golden spurs of his steel boots.

By gestures and signs, for we had very few words in common, I made known to him that I wished to be taken into the presence of the Judge of Ages, the Yldothane. He laughed, and it echoed oddly in his helm, and said, Is hit nowh, hys yldu? And then he said, Is sheo becuman, hys wīf?

I did not know his words, and yet I knew his meaning, and so I said back, “The aeon is not now. His bride is not come.”

The knight uttered a sardonic laugh and said, “Leort nan-mann wecean Hé Hwa ÁbireÞ, lœst heos wrœðu biÞ äwaeenlan!” I needed no translation. Had I not heard from my youth onward the tale of his anger? Let none waken He Who Waits, lest his wrath be awakened!

I served the knight in the frozen mortuary for a year and a day, which was the only way to earn the traditional two pence needed to pay the hibernation fee. He did not show to me any Judge, for there was none to show.

5. Soorm and the Unreal Man

What is your question? That I do know. There is no Judge of Ages, no one man or one mind controlling all the Tombs here and there and everywhere around the world. That is a myth invented by the Nymphs.

The Nymphs had to expel their excess populations, and did not have the heart—because they were unevolved, and had not yet achieved the sublime perfection of the One True Way of the Phastorlings, the astru-do—to slaughter and consume their excess population as a greater being would have.

No, hobbled by sentiment and other neuroglandular weaknesses that the Wintermind can overcome, the Nymphs merely preserved their unwanted until such a time as these were no Nymphs, and they woke, and used their arts not for pleasure, as the Nymphs had done, but for pain, for glory, for the dream of escaping all degrading pleasure forever, and living eternally to face the Hyades at the End of Days. By rejecting life and embracing the thing-beyond-life, those exiled Nymphs sculpted and resculpted themselves into the first of my people.

The idea that the Tombs have a buried and first ruler, a wise lord who sleeps? Nonsense. The Nymphs needed a father-figure as reassurance to the cast-offs that someone or something would protect them as they slept. They were afraid of tomorrow, because Nymphs have no concept of tomorrow, and so they had to be told there was a little godling, a posthuman, a guardian of their graveyards.