The woman twisted her head on its long, long neck. “The fool does not know who is aboard. Call upon the elder brother.”

The man’s head fell neatly onto the neck stump and attached itself, and then the no-longer-headless body of the Nukekubi knelt on the cobblestones and pounded on the iron lid covering the sewer entrance. It rang like a gong.

At that moment, a roar of song and joy rockets passed over the area, making further speech impossible. The fourth ambusher, the node underground, now uttered a silent shout—a mudra technique using negative shapes of silence against a noisy background to trigger a nerve reaction—and Vigil was blinded for a moment as an internal energy surge blocked the visual centers of his brain. The mudra was not affecting his eyes alone but his ability to process images so that he could switch to no points of view from any houses or dust motes nearby.

Blind, Vigil stamped his foot and silently commanded the stones near him to draw a mandala at his feet. The stones were sleeping but came awake for a Lord of Stability and erupted in sudden lines, circles within squares within circles, of intricate patterns of sand, glowing like a coal fire. It was a figure system meant to include the aspect called Immeasurably Magnificent Palace, used for focusing power to the body and accentuate the senses, especially the hearing.

It was fortunate that he did so. The woman and the man rushed him from opposite sides. Despite the roar of music and candle-snaps, his discriminating hearing could distinguish their footfalls from the background roar of the celebration.

The woman stopped at the edge of the design on the ground, unable to step forward, her motor nerves jammed.

The man had a more flexible neural pattern, no doubt based on his decentralized nerve network of his detachable limbs and organs, and was able, not without pain, to pass over. Vigil surrendered to the cruel battle reflexes he carried and acted without thought.

First, Vigil’s blind body drove his fingers knife-edged into the man’s midriff, doubling him over so that his falling chin met Vigil’s kneecap. Vigil then twisted the man’s head clean off. Because it had clamps and sutures rather than connecting tissues of muscle, spinal column, and throat, the head came off easily. Vigil threw it into the air with all his considerable strength.

In the blackness of his blindness, suddenly he could see three pink shapes of redheads. They were literally redheads—that is, just the head and not the bodies. It was the Fox Maidens who had toyed with him earlier, floating their heads among the balloons. When his blind eyes turned upon them, some indication being shed from unseen symbols surrounding them restored at least his ability to see them, even though the rest of the world was still a dark blur. The severed heads of the three Fox girls looked archly, smiling red smiles, as the Nukekubi man’s head flew up.

Then, as his head began floating away as rapidly as his silly flapping ears and sputtering spine could carry him, the three Fox Maiden heads, long red hair streaming like comets tails, began to circle and nip and harass him, tearing away bits of flesh from his cheeks and nose, or yanking on his hair with their sharp, white teeth. And he screamed silently as he fled through the air, shouting out defensive mudras which the Foxes ignored.

In that same moment, an internal inside Vigil noticed that the reaction time of the fourth attacker, the immaterial node in the sewer line, was too small for the node to be remotely controlled. This meant, unlike the other three, this assassin was not a Nomad too poor to afford to buy soul-rental space in the Noösphere and too proud to accept one as charity, and was not a would-be Swan too detached from human society to desire one. No: the fourth man was actually in the Noösphere, a ghost, a disembodied spirit, and merely operating through a node. Ghosts were not immune to vendetta.

Vigil drew up the wand, sending chips of the cobblestones flying, and pointed at the ground, and uttered a Word of Retaliation. There was something like a silent thunderclap on all the near-system channels, and the fourth man flickered and vanished.

Dead? Perhaps so, but Vigil blinked his eyes and found his sight again, pouring in from a thousand points of view, so he assumed the wand inflicted a more poetic judgment than simple capital punishment and edited the physical world, all of reality outside the infosphere, out of the mind and sensorium of the fourth man forever.

Vigil flourished the wand like a quarterstaff, and turned to the Rokurokubi. “There is neither honor nor accomplishment in slaying a woman,” he said. “Flee, and no more will be said.”

The long-necked creature chuckled, and the laugh bubbled and echoed many times as it passed up the length of her throat. “There is, however, great honor in slaying a Stranger, who came to our world so long after us. Die, arrogant Stranger, and no more will be said.”

Only then did he see that the control lines leading from the sewer were active. Some command must have been uttered by the fourth man before he fell. Vigil looked around wildly, wondering from what quarter the weapon would strike, and seeing nothing. There was no giant weapon taller than a man here in the alley. Everything looked normal.

Then the cart fell apart and stood up.

2. The Juggernaut

On one of the higher bands in his eyesight from points of view in the alley walls behind the cart, Vigil saw a burst of radioactivity and heat. Inside the cart, a fusion cell was heating water to steam.

As the cart stood, it formed a traditional shape called a juggernaut, a type of armored car used by Myrmidons to crush Firstling men.

Instead of the guns and cannons of the ancient form of juggernaut, called a tank, this juggernaut followed the traditional form from the sad period of the Long Twilight, after the Golden Afternoon had passed, and the wars of man grew distorted under the pressures of the Absolute Rules imposed by Tau Ceti, creating such bizarre anachronisms. The Absolute Rules forbade automatons and firearms to be used in combat and electromotive amplification, but not steam-powered prosthetics. Atomics could not be used in weaponry, but could be used to heat water. The limbs were jointed, and the muscles were hydraulic cylinders powered by branching copper veins of steam.

With a great rattle, the juggernaut brought her many hidden arms into view, each carrying a weapon or emblem permitted under the Absolute Rules.

In the right hands of the juggernaut were a naked sword, a burning lamp, a mace, a spear, a bifork, an arrow, a goad, and a lotus; and in the left hands were a shield, a bowl, an octagonal discus, a noose, a longbow, a conch shell, a serpent, and a severed human head. Blood poured from the decollated head into the bowl made from the top of the skull held in a lower hand below it.

Up she reared, huge, a body of metal throwing aside the disguise of wood in a spray of splinters. The hard metal hemispheres of her bosom were decorated with a necklace of skulls. Beneath, the wheelless body of the cart now stood on saw-toothed treads made of jointed metal slabs.

The cart was wheelless because the sly-eyed wheels of the cart flew into the air like so many helicopters, the cruel, dead-center eyes steady in screaming circles of spinning blades.

The face of the three-eyed juggernaut lifted up, throwing aside splinters and dust from the serpents of her hair. Her face was blue, and her lolling tongue coated with blood, and her teeth were like the teeth of a lioness.

Worst of all, there was a fourth eye inside her mouth, indicating absolute control over all appetites, total self-command which no Swan, no Fox, and certainly no Firstling human being, could match.