The four eyes at the wheel hubs grew bright, as did the four eyes of her face, her forehead, and on her tongue. Too late, Vigil realized what he was facing. This was no Nomad, no Firstling in masquerade.

This was a Megalodon in truth, a Third Human, a space-borne form of life that had descended to Earth to occupy the ancient Myrmidon war-car shape of his ancestors.

Then the four living wheels spat from their spokes a glittering spiral cloud, a swarm of thousands of jewels fine as dust specks.

The Megalodon was a master guru, as skilled as Vigil in the art of nerve indication, or more skilled: for this bright cloud her flying wheels wove solidified into a canopy, burning with gems, behind and above the head of the juggernaut. And the burning canopy displayed a mandala of uttermost terror.

It was a sixty-four-fold mandala made of eightfold mandalas, as complex as the bloom of a rose, showing patterns within patterns of eye-dazzling neural signifiers. It was louder than a silent explosion and brighter than unseen lightning.

One of Vigil’s internal creatures sacrificed itself to prevent his conscious mind from seeing the sixty-four-sided mandala. All his memories and reflexes running through that internal felt numb, and the shocking pain of its dying agony echoed in Vigil’s nerves.

The vendetta wand, that irreplaceable antique, was not so fortunate. It had no internal buffers prepared for self-sacrifice. Instead, it uttered a high-pitched whistle, calling for restorative software which had been extinct an eon before the planet Torment was born, and it died in Vigil’s hand. Little gems and logic crystals flaked away from beneath Vigil’s fingers and dropped to the cobblestones, tinkling.

Vigil was now unarmed. Even his giant strength was nothing compared to this steam-powered behemoth. He could perhaps dodge the blows from sword and spear and mace and bifork, and he could hope the bow and arrow would miss, but he could not outrun the deadly sound of the conch shell, or the deadly light from the burning lamp. Worst of all, he could not make himself unfrightened by the sight of the severed head, nor could he close the vulnerable nerve-channels deep into the racial subconsciousness that primal fear opened. The scent of the lotus leaf had no doubt, by now, exploited those open channels to insert all fashions of false reflexes and fatal thoughts into his lower nervous system, because smells did not pass through the midbrain complex as sights and sounds did before leaving their imprints.

Were there any vulnerable points? Vigil flung out a mudra called shuni, touching his thumb to his middle finger, a calming gesture indicating a shutdown of the fusion cell, but the mudra echoed back at him and benumbed his arm from fingers to elbow, not just rejecting the command with contempt but also punishing him for issuing it. The authority level was beyond that of the Lords of Stability, beyond the range of any member of the First Human Race.

Then there was no more time for speech, nothing clever to do. Vigil (his right arm flapping uselessly) ran from the juggernaut. The juggernaut on treads that roared like ten thunders rolled after him, fast as a locomotive. And the Rokurokubi threw her head back two yards or more and laughed her crazed and long-throated laugh.

There was no escape. The Rokurokubi was between him and the alley mouth, holding a brass mirror in her hands, trying to catch and maze his vision in the reflected sight from behind him of the mandala the juggernaut displayed like a parachute.

Vigil knelt, and, even as the juggernaut emitted a steam whistle of triumph and made to roll over him, he slapped the cobblestones, using his authority as a Lord of Stability to command the cobblestones to disintegrate, to part beneath the juggernaut’s treads, and drop the metal monster into a pit of sand.

But it was no use. The cobblestones were overwhelmed by the mandala of the juggernaut and shrieked on the emergency channels and were petrified with fear. The frightened stones were as still as stones.

Vigil tried to leap or roll or scurry to one side before the monster rolled over him, but the juggernaut shifted her fingers so that, without dropping any of her many weapons or emblems, she indicated the mudras of the Ten Primal Forms of Fear, and Vigil’s muscles would not respond to his nerve commands nor his hardwire commands. He forgot how to breathe, as that knowledge was wiped from his cell memory, lung muscles, and hindbrain. And the great treads rolling filled his vision, and he saw all the weapons rise up, flourish themselves, and fall.

And they all fell to one side or the other. The mace head smashed the cobblestones, sending chips of shrapnel to cut his skin, and the sword blade rang to the stones, missing him; and the head of the goad and the two blades of the bifork smashed and cut the stones to his left-hand side; the cutting octagon of the sharpened discus, and the arrowhead and spearhead and the venomous teeth of the serpent scarred the stones to his right-hand side. The deadly light of the burning lamp fell on him, but his flesh was not consumed; the horror of the conch shell sounded in his ears, but as if distant and dull, and he was not driven mad.

A mudra of immense power, a power beyond what any First Men commanded, a power that operated below the molecular information level, was protecting Vigil like an unseen bubble.

Vigil looked behind him with his many viewpoints to see who had saved him.

3. The Last of the Third Men

In the mouth of the alley stood a tall shape in a hooded cloak that fell to the elbows and a cape that fell to the ankles. In the narrow opening of the hood, his face was a skull-like mask of metal, iron-eyed and impassive. In one gauntlet was a two-edged sword, made of transparent gold.

His other gauntlet, this new figure held before him, palm up. At his mudra-gesture, the juggernaut, as if caught in a giant unseen hand following the man’s hand, was pulled upward so that the treads failed to crush and grind Vigil into paste. The man flicked his wrist, and an unseen force threw the immense machine on her back, which smashed her head and half of her arms.

The transparent, amber sword he pointed at the Rokurokubi and said, “I usurp all your other commands, including the self-preservation imperative. Destroy yourself.”

Being disconnected from the Noösphere did not save the long-necked woman. She opened her mouth to protest the command, but liquid formed from her own disintegrating internal organs gushed out instead. The vomit-mass fell across her upper body and clung like glue, and it ignited, burning hot like alcohol. Her snake neck whipped back and forth in frenzy, and she raised her hands as if to tear her burning garments from her, but her fingers did not obey her commands and instead wrung her neck, snapping the many collapsible vertebrae.

It was raining a brightly colored rain of gemstones. This was the remnant of the shattered canopy containing the sixty-four-sided mandala. The four sly-eyed wheels dived at the cloaked figure, but then swirled to the left and right as if blind and smashed into walls and street, spokes bent, sly eyes dead. With them, little gems, small as dust motes, also fell, twinkling brightly. The cobblestones were carpeted in a layer of rainbow grit, a scattering of sand without a pattern.

The blind push broom sighed, and straightened itself, and began slowly to gather the scattered gem dust into heaps.

Vigil slowly regained control of his muscles and, as luck would have it, found a backup containing the muscle instructions on how to breathe in one of the memento files his mother had made of his birth, including the moment when he switched over from taking oxygenated blood through his navel to switching to an air-breathing regimen. Silently, he blessed his mother.