“Soorm is here with me. He says the motive powers of several of the sarcophagi are intact.”

“He can tell that at a glance, can he?”

“The Red Hermeticists taught him that aspect of your technology, Your Honor, since he was meant often to slumber and thaw.”

Menelaus was silent. Soorm’s expertise was suspiciously convenient. Menelaus fretted that perhaps Father Pasty had outwitted him this round. But, if so, there was no helping it now. Soorm was locked in there, with the pantry and arsenal well stocked and the pretty girl well stacked, while Menelaus was locked out here, in the cold, on a stinking latrine, with a nasty dog thing giving him dirty looks.

“I can tell you how to enter the chamber safely, and then give you the sequences to bring the knights to life. Don’t touch the coins scattered on the floor: they are there to trap the greedy. Once we have even one knight awake and in full kit, the Blue Men don’t have the firepower to stop ’em.”

With a squawk of data, he sent down to a man he suddenly wondered how far to trust and to the wife of his best friend the secret words to enter the chamber and thaw the sleeping knights.

A moment later, there was a whine of noise in his implants, and the link was cut. The line went dead.

Someone had discovered and jammed the wavelength. Was it a coincidence that this happened just as he had sent out his all-important code words? Or was it good luck it had not happened earlier?

Meanwhile the dog thing was becoming restive, and the stink was getting to Menelaus as well. Menelaus opened his hand and let the six tiny stones fall into the latrine.

2. Self-Directed

A single pair of dog things acted as escorts to guard Invigilator Illiance as he walked Menelaus back to the mess tent at noon.

Menelaus spoke without preliminary: “Do you know who you are working for?”

Illiance did not seem surprised by the question. “It is obvious that we are self-directed.”

“And who self-directed you to break open the Tombs? Does Ull really think that filch-artist Larz is going to get him into the Tomb system? Your aircraft were dug up from another Tomb system—unless I miss my guess, from the burial mounds outside of Wright-Patterson in Ohio. Whoever you were looking for was not there, was he?”

Illiance made a delicate gesture with his fingers. “Let us not allow the conversation to veer into areas of no particular consequence to our continued mutual harmony. Instead, as a mathematician, I am confident that you will be interested in the following puzzle: Not long ago, some forty-two rod-logic crystals, obtainers, reflectors, and memory glints were removed from my coat by you, a gesture which, if you understood it, indicated that you believe I am able to operate all aspects of my nervous system without artificial aid—”

“I understood the gesture. Ull was being a jackass.”

“—but an anomaly arises when the crystals are regathered afterwards, for only thirty-five can be found. Seven are missing.”

“Interesting. Do you have some method of scanning for them? Perhaps a homing signal or something?”

“A question that must vex whomever took them. I seem to recall you have a pattern of such investigatory expropriation.”

“Well, I seem to recall that Kine Larz asked to have some of those logic crystals, since he thought they were gemstones. He also claimed to be a snake-charmer, implying he might be skilled and therefore interested in computerpathics. You could ask him about the missing stones—if he lives through his attempt to force the Tomb door, I mean. What makes you think he can open it? And who told you to let him try?”

Illiance nodded serenely. “You seem to be exerting yourself to ask an additional question, rather than taking the trouble to answer my question.”

“Well, let’s not let the conversation veer into areas of no particular consequences for our contaminated mucilage harmonicas, right?”

Menelaus ducked into the mess tent once Illiance (lightly gliding) and the dog things (loping) departed.

3. Mess Tent

Inside, the long low tent was carpeted with woven mats of straw set atop a heated groundcloth. To one side stood a row of cannibalized coffins, lids open, connected to an ungainly power sump and feeder elements. Various forms of soup, stew, and gruel filled what used to be the nutrient control and restoration pockets. Instead of regrowing the missing flesh and bone marrow of the patient, the assemblers were taking material from the feeder tubes and turning it into other forms of protein and vitamins. Four Nymph women, looking achingly lovely despite their drab prison overalls, tended the cooking coffins and ladled out the gruel.

The revenants from different eras tended to segregate themselves by language. The Witches were grouped to one side of the tent, a circle of white-haired women with mummy-gray skins inside a large circle of menfolk. To his disappointment, he did not see Mickey.

The Chimerae sat or stood in rows according to their ranks at the other side of the tent, the lesser ranks not eating until their betters had finished. Only the Hormaguants spaced themselves more or less evenly about the tent, but even they kept their Clade-dwellers and Donors near at hand, for conversation’s sake if nothing else. And the gray twins sat together.

Seated near no one were the Savant Ctesibius from A.D. 2525 and the strange-eyed woman from A.D. 10100.

Glorified Ctesibius, the Savant, had entered at about the same time Menelaus did, but from the opposite end of the tent. A sudden hush fell across the diners. The Witches hissed with detestation. As Ctesibius with regal footstep walked past them, the Witches stood or scudded aside, clutching their bowls of gruel, careful lest he accidentally touch one, or have his shadow pass across them.

He was dressed in camp overalls, but had pinned or sewn two blankets together, and these swathed his upper limbs and draped gracefully behind him as he strode, like the toga of a Roman senator, or the ermine cloak of a king. Arrogance radiated from him like heat from a stove. Ctesibius had a number of unsightly holes or ports drilled in his skull, including a opening right in the crown of his head, and large enough one could have inserted a finger and not felt the bottom. He had found a black kerchief large enough to wear over his head like a shawl in lieu of the elaborate, long, antiseptic wigs that were part of the costume of the members of his order of his time.

The Chimerae did not feel any more love for servants of the Machine than Witches, but as he passed where they sat, their outward expressions did not change, except that they grew more still and stiff than their wont, and tightened grip on truncheon or staff.

Ctesibius took a bowl of gruel from the Nymphs, who shrank away from him, either giving him the “cut celestial” (which meant to stare upward rather than meet his eye) or the “cut infernal” (which meant to find something fascinating on the ground). He took the ladle from the hand of one beautiful, big-eyed Nymph without seeing her, and served himself. Then he sat on a straw mat on the cold ground as if he owned the entire world beneath his buttocks.

None of the generations after him would sit near him nor speak to him.

The unknown waif from A.D. 10100 was the opposite: she sat near no one and spoke to none.

The dog things were noticeably afraid of her, bristling when she moved. Her demeanor was like that of a hermit in the wilderness: an aura of otherworldliness hung about her. She seemed not to notice that there were any living things near her.

Glancing at the unnamed woman, Menelaus wondered how advanced her civilization of four hundred years ago had been. It arose six hundred years after the fall of the 1036 Ganymed. Clearly some life had survived in order to give rise to the civilization of the Blue Men, and records as well—records clear enough to allow the Blue Men to speak flawless High Iatric from the Iatocracy period, three thousand years before present. This civilization had practiced a high degree of biological technology: he looked at her eyes and at the joints where her antennae entered her scalp, and determined this was biotechnology far in advance of what the Hormagaunts practiced. From the little nuances of her stance and motions, he decided that she, like an Hermeticist, did not age.