This time Harman did not lose consciousness. The high voltage threw him back across the room, bounced him off the strange sofa, sent him falling to his hands and knees on the elaborate carpet. His vision still blinded by red circles, Harman growled and rose again.

“Next time I will burn your right leg off,” the magus said in a flat, cold, completely convincing tone. “If you ever get home to your woman, you’ll do so hopping.”

Harman stopped. “Tell me what to do,” he whispered.

“Sit down… no, there at the table where you can see outside.”

Harman sat at the table. The sunlight was very bright as it reflected from vertical ice walls and the rising glacier; much of the ice had melted from the glass panes. The mountains were growing taller—a profusion of the tallest peaks Harman had ever seen, much more dramatic than the mountains near the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. The cablecar was following a high ridgeline, a glacier dropping farther and farther below to their left. At that moment the car rumbled through another eiffelbahn tower and Harman had to grab the table as the two-story car rocked, bounced, ground against ice, and then continued creaking upward.

The tower fell behind. Harman leaned against the cold glass to watch it recede—this tower was not black like the others, but resplendently silver, gleaming in the sunlight, its iron arches and girders standing out like a spider’s web in morning dew. Ice, thought Harman. He looked the other way, to his right, in the direction the cables were climbing and rising, and could see the white face of the most amazing mountain imaginable—no, beyond imagination. Clouds massed to the west of it, piling against a ridge as serrated and merciless looking as a bone knife. The face they were rising toward was striated with rock, ice, more rock, a summit pyramid of white snow and gleaming ice. The cablecar was grinding and slipping on icy cables following a ridgeline to the east of this incredible peak. Harman could see another tower on a swooping ridge high above, the rising cables connecting this mountain ridge to the higher peak. High above that—on and around the summit of the impossibly tall mountain—rose the most perfect white dome imaginable, its surface tinted a light gold from the morning sun, its central mass surrounded by four white eiffelbahn towers, the entire complex set on a white base cantilevered out over the sheer face of the mountain and connected to surrounding peaks by at least six slender suspension bridges arching out into space to other peaks—each of the bridges a hundred times higher, slimmer, and more elegant than the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu.

“What is this place?” Harman whispered. “Chomolungma,” said Prospero. “Goddess Mother of the World.”

“That building at the top…”

“Rongbok Pumori Chu-mu-lang-ma Feng Dudh Kosi Lhotse-Nuptse Khumbu aga Ghat-Mandir Khan Ho Tep Rauza,” said the magus. “Known locally as the Taj Moira. We’ll be stopping there.”

The voynix didn’t come scuttling up Starved Rock by the hundreds or thousands that first cold, rainy night Daeman was there. Nor did they attack on the second night. By the third night everyone was weak from hunger or seriously sick with colds, flu, incipient pneumonia, or wounds—Daeman’s left hand ached and throbbed with a sick heat where the calibani at Paris Crater had bitten off two of his fingers and he felt light-headed much of the time—but still the voynix did not come.

Ada had regained consciousness that second day on the Rock. Her injuries had been numerous—cuts, abrasions, a broken right wrist, two broken ribs on her left side—but the only ones that had been life threatening had been a serious concussion and smoke inhalation. She’d finally awakened with a terrible headache, a rough cough, and hazy memories of the last hours of the Ardis Massacre, but her mind was clear. Voice flat, she had gone through the list of friends she was not sure she’d dreamt she’d seen die or actually watched die, only her eyes reacting when Greogi responded with his litany.

“Petyr?” she said softly, trying not to cough.

“Dead.”

“Reman?”

“Dead.”

“Emme?”

“Dead with Reman.”

“Peaen?”

“Dead. A thrown rock crushed her chest and she died here on Starved Rock.”

“Salas?”

“Dead.”

“Oelleo?”

“Dead.”

And so on for another twoscore names before Ada sagged back onto the dirty rucksack that was her pillow. Her face was parchment white beneath the streaked soot and blood.

Daeman was there, kneeling, the Setebos Egg glowing unseen in his own backpack. He cleared his throat. “Some important people survived, Ada,” he said. “Boman’s here … and Kaman. Kaman was one of Odysseus’ earliest disciples and has sigled everything he could find on military history. Laman lost four fingers on his right hand defending Ardis but he’s here and still alive. Loes and Stoman are here, as well as some of the people I sent on my fax-warning expedition—Caul, Oko, Elle, and Edide. Oh, and Tom and Siris both made it.”

“That’s good,” said Ada and coughed. Tom and Siris were Ardis’s best medics.

“But none of the medical gear or medicines made it here,” said Greogi.

“What did?” asked Ada.

Greogi shrugged. “Weapons we were carrying but not enough flechette ammunition. The clothes on our back. A few tarps and blankets we’ve been huddling under during the last three nights of cold rain.”

“Have you gone back to Ardis to bury those who fell?” asked Ada. Her voice was steady except for the rasp and cough.

Greogi glanced at Daeman and then looked away, out over the edge of the tall rock summit on which they all huddled. “Can’t,” he said, voice full. “We tried. Voynix wait for us. Ambush.”

“Were you able to get any more stores from Ardis Hall?” asked the injured woman.

Greogi shook his head. “Nothing important. It’s gone, Ada. Gone.”

Ada only nodded. More than two thousand years of her family history and pride, burned down and gone forever. She was not thinking of Ardis Hall now, but of her surviving people injured, cold, and stranded on this miserable Starved Rock. “What have you been doing for food and water?”

“We’ve caught rainwater on plastic tarps and have been able to zip away on the sonie for some fast hunting,” said Greogi, obviously glad to change the subject from those who had died. “Mostly rabbits, but we got an elk yesterday evening. We’re still picking flechettes out of it.”

“Why haven’t the voynix finished us off?” asked Ada. Her voice sounded only mildly curious.

“Now that,” said Daeman, “is a good question.” He had his own theory about it, but it was too early to share it.

“It’s not that they’re afraid of us,” said Greogi. “There must be two or three thousand of the damned things down there in the woods and we don’t have enough flechette ammunition to kill more than a few hundred. They can come up the rock anytime they want. They just haven’t.”

“You’ve tried the faxnode,” said Ada. It wasn’t really a question.

“The voynix ambushed us there,” said Greogi. He squinted up at the blue sky. This was the first sunny day they’d had and everyone was trying to dry clothes and blankets, laying them out like signal sheets on the flat acre of rock that was the summit of Starved Rock, but it was still a bitter winter, worse than any in Ardis-dwellers’ memory, and everyone was shivering in the thin sunlight.

“We’ve done tests,” said Daeman. “We can stack twelve people in the sonie—twice what it’s designed for—but more than that and the ma-chine’s AI refuses to fly. And it handles like a pig with twelve.”

“How many of us did you say made it up here?” asked Ada. “Only fifty?”

“Fifty-three,” said Greogi. “Nine of those—including you until this morning—were too sick or injured to travel.”