The quiet splash of the banked oars now fell silent. As the ship glided slowly to a stop beside the dock Paul and his companions stared at the looming temple, its wind-blasted front high as an office building and as wide as several city blocks. There was no noise anywhere along the riverbank.

"Don't want to go in there," T4b said at last.

"We must," Martine said, but gently: if she had heard the argument about his secret affiliation, it did not seem to have lessened her opinion of the youth. "Dread will come looking for us—it could be any time now. He will not be tricked or defeated, not like Wells, And he will be very angry."

T4b did not say anything else, but when the others began moving toward the gangplank he went with them as though being led to execution. The Wicked Tribe hung on his and Paul's and Florimel's clothes like sleeping bats, frightened for once into good behavior.

"Not so bad this time," one of them whispered in Paul's ear, but the childish voice did not sound entirely convinced. "It more asleep. Maybe doesn't know we here."

Despite Martine's warnings, Paul could not make himself move any faster than a foot-dragging trudge across the sun-blasted desert. The blowing sand stung his face. The looming row of columns seemed ready to swallow him down. The very air was heavy, as though they were pushing their way through something solid and sticky. Behind him Florimel let out a strangled sigh, fighting to get breath into a fear-tightened throat.

The baking heat diminished only a little as they stepped between the Cyclopean columns and into the shade. The long wall before them was covered with what had once been intricately carved panels, but which had been worn down until they were only idiot scribbles, devoid of sense or reassurance. The only doorway was a simple black square in the middle of the massive front wall, a hole into a deeper darkness.

Martine went through first, holding her hands to her ears despite the thickly expectant silence of the place—exactly as though someone stood beside her screaming, Paul thought as he and the others followed her inside.

As his eyes grew used to the darkness of the interior, illuminated only by the light from the door, Paul saw that white-clad bodies lay everywhere, perhaps two dozen in all. Not one was moving; all appeared to have suffered in dying. He turned away in dismay from the nearest corpse, its fingers red from tearing at the unyielding stone floor, eyes rolled up as though looking for a salvation that would never arrive.

"They are not Puppets," Nandi said quietly. Paul looked at him in surprise. "They are empty sims," the dark-skinned man said. "See—they have not putrefied or even changed, only stiffened. Real people died or went offline and left their sims behind."

Martine had stopped in front of an immense doorway that stretched to the ceiling along the interior wall, its double doors covered in hammered bronze. The very size of them gave his fear an extra, sickening twist.

I don't really want to see what's on the other side. . . .

Something touched his arm and he jumped.

"Didn't lie to no one, me," T4b said quietly. Paul was amazed that in the midst of this doom-laden atmosphere the boy was still worrying about what people thought.

"I believe you, Javier."

"Sorry. Sorry . . . I tried to six you." He spoke so quietly Paul did not immediately understand him. "On the mountain, like."

"Oh! Oh, that. It's all right, really."

"But that girl, Emily, she was chizz. Had ops for her, me. Utterly did." He seemed desperate for Paul to understand. "Then when all that fen blew up. . . ."

The whole conversation was surreal. First Nandi, now this boy. When did I become the father-confessor? Or is it because they both think we probably won't be alive much longer—that soon it will be too late for apologies. . . .

"Are you all simply going to wander around until someone shows up to kill us?" Martine called, her voice ragged with pain or fear or both, startling both Paul and T4b. "Come and help me open this door!"

They hurried across the echoing room. The others gathered near the doors, whispering. Paul wanted to laugh, but the ache of fear was too great. Why bother to be quiet? Did they think the thing on the other side was really sleeping, that it wouldn't hear them? He remembered the monstrous presence he had summoned on Ithaca, the thing that had come to Orlando and Fredericks in the Freezer. Didn't they understand this place by now? The Other was always sleeping—but it was always listening, too.

Weighed down by dark foreboding that made it hard to think or even move, he let himself be pressed in beside T4b and Nandi to pull at the huge double doors. For a moment there was no movement, then the great bronzed panels swung outward with a screech like some angry primordial beast. The Wicked Tribe darted back from the opening as though the cavern beyond were full of poisonous gas or burning-hot air; Paul could not help remembering what Martine had said about an oven.

"Not go in there!" one of the monkeys shouted. "Wait out here!" They looped up into the high reaches of the antechamber and hung near the doorway leading back outside, babbling in fear and excitement.

Martine had already stepped through like a woman wading into a high wind. Paul followed her, expecting to feel something similar to what she was experiencing, but the sensation of oppressive menace was no greater outside the room than in.

The chamber was made of rough, dark stone, as though it had been hurriedly chipped from a living mountain. At the center, its exquisitely carved and polished lines in sharp contrast, lay a gigantic black stone sarcophagus.

Paul could feel the others pressing in behind him, but he was unwilling to take another step. Martine had her hands to her ears again, swaying in place as though dizzy. Paul feared she might fall, but even that could not make him move closer to the silent black box.

"He . . . he feels me. . . ." Martine said in a strangulated whisper. It echoed from the walls and came back in pieces: "Feels me . . . feels. . . ."

A light, painfully bright, flared at the side of the cavern, twenty meters from the coffin. As though in a nightmare, Paul could not move, but he felt his heart lurch inside his breast.

The light hung in the air for a moment, dripping sparks like burning magnesium, then resolved into a human-shaped blank white hole. Paul was surprised to feel a dull and somewhat anticlimatic tug of recognition. Still, neither he nor his companions were quite prepared for the high-pitched voice that echoed across the cavern.

"Man! What kind of mierda that crazy old man throw me in this time?"

The astonishing spectacle of a twitching, featureless figure swearing in Spanish was interrupted by the explosive entrance into the tomb-chamber of a cloud of yellow, finger-sized monkeys.

"Someone coming!" they squealed, "Look out! Le big chien!"

Their shrill excitation made it almost impossible to figure out what was going on. "What on earth are you children screaming about?" Bonita Mae Simpkins demanded. "Zunni, you tell me straight—the rest of you, quiet!"

"No wonder you all friends with Sellars," declared the glowing shape with a mixture of amusement and disgust, "You all loco, for true."

"Sellars?" said Florimel, startled.

"It's coming," the little monkey named Zunni explained.

"What?"

"Big black dog," she squeaked. "Coming here across the desert."

"Big, big dog," one of the other monkeys piped up. "Big like a mountain. Coming fast!"