“Yes, but if the water fills it—whatever the liquid is—it’ll be ten feet deep or deeper. I’m not a good swimmer …” began Harman.

Suddenly Ariel was standing next to them on the platform, although Harman hadn’t heard his steps on the metal floor. The small figure was carrying something bulky wrapped in what looked to be a red turin cloth.

“Ariel, my darling!” cried Moira. Her voice carried a tone of delight and excitement that Harman had not yet heard from her—nor even from Savi in the time he’d known her.

“Greetings to Miranda,” said the sprite, removing the red cloth and handing Moira some sort of antique instrument with strings. Harman’s people played and sang some music, but knew few instruments and made none.

“A guitar!” said the post-human woman, taking the oddly shaped instrument from the greenish-glowing sprite and touching the strings with her long fingers. The notes that issued forth reminded Harman of Ariel’s own voice.

Ariel bowed low and spoke in formal tone—

“Take This slave of Music, for the sake Of him who is the slave of thee. And teach it all the harmony In which thou canst, and only thou,

Make the delighted spirit glow, Till joy defines itself again, And, too intense, is turned to pain; For by permission and command Of thine own Prince Ferdinand, Poor Ariel sends this silent token Of more than ever can be spoken.”

Moira bowed toward the sprite, set the resonating instrument on a table, and kissed Ariel on his green-glowing forehead. “I thank thee, friend, sometimes friendly servant, never slave. How has my Ariel fared since I went to sleep?” And said:

“When you died, the silent Moon, in her interlunar swoon, Is not sadder in her cell Than deserted Ariel. When you live again on earth, Like an unseen star of birth, Ariel guides you o’er the sea Of life from your nativity.”

Moira touched his cheek, then looked at Harman, then back to the sprite—avatar of the biosphere. “Have you two encountered one another before?”

“We’ve met,” said Harman. “How is the world, Ariel, since I left it?” asked Moira, turning away from Harman again. Ariel said,

“Many changes have been run, Since Ferdinand and you begun Your course of love, and Ariel still Has tracked your steps, and served your will.”

In a less formal voice, as if concluding some official ceremony, the biosphere sprite said, “And how is it with you, my lady, now that you are born unto us again?”

Now it seemed to be Moira’s turn to sound more formal and cadenced than Harman had ever heard in Savi’s voice—

“This temple, sad and lone, Is all spared from the thunder of a war Foughten long since by giant hierarchy

Against rebellion: this old image here, Whose carved features wrinkled as he fell, Is Prosper’s; I Miranda, left supreme Sole Priestess of this desolation.”—

To his horror, Harman saw that both the post-human woman and inhuman biosphere entity were openly weeping.

Ariel stepped back, bowed again, swept his hand in Harman’s direction, and said, “This mortal man who’s done no harm, despite all the contrary his name implies, has he come to the crystal cabinet to be executed?”

“No,” said Moira, “to be educated.”

The Setebos Egg hatched during their first night back at the ruins of Ardis Hall.

Ada was shocked to see the devastation at her former home. She’d been unconscious when flown away on the sonie the night of the attack and because of her concussion and other injuries had only partial memories of the horrible hours before. Now she saw the ruins of her life and home and memories in stark daylight. It made her want to fall to her knees and weep until she slept, but because she was leading the group of forty-four other survivors as they came up the last hill toward Ardis, the sonie hovering with eight of the most severely ill and wounded above, she kept her head up and her eyes dry as she walked past the scorched ruins, glancing left and right only to point out articles and remnants that could be salvaged for their new camp.

Her home, the great manor of Ardis Hall, two thousand years of her family’s pride, was all but gone—only soot-blackened timbers and the stone remnants of the many fireplaces left—but there was a surprising amount to salvage elsewhere.

There were also the rotting bodies of their friends—at least bits and pieces of them—left in the fields.

Ada conferred with Daeman and a few others and they agreed that the first priority was creating a fire and shelter—first a rough lean-to and warm place for the ill and injured to be treated and brought to before the short winter day was over, a shelter large enough for all of them to make it through the night without freezing. While Ardis Hall was lost to them, segments of several of the barracks, sheds, and other outbuildings erected in the last nine months before the sky fell were partially intact. They might have crowded into one of these shacks, but they were too near the forest, too hard to defend, and too far from the well that had been right outside Ardis Hall.

They found heaps of kindling and dry wood and used what Ada thought was too many matches from their dwindling supply to start a large fire. Greogi landed the sonie and they unloaded the unconscious and semiconscious injured and made them as comfortable as they could on makeshift cots and bedrolls near the fire. A work detail kept carrying more firewood from the various ruins—no one wanted to go as far as the shadowy forest and Ada had forbidden such adventures for that day. The sonie took off and orbited in a mile-wide circle, the exhausted Greogi at the controls and Boman with his rifle, both men watching for voynix. One of the barracks—the one Odysseus built by hand for his followers months before—yielded a treasure trove of blankets and rolls of canvas, all smelling of smoke but usable, and in another tumbled but only partially burned shed near Hannah’s burned-out cupola, Caul found shovels, picks, crowbars, hoes, hammers, nails, spikes, nylon rope, carabiners, and other former servitor tools that might now save their lives. With the unscorched wood from the barracks and logs scavenged from large parts of the former palisade, a work party began erecting a structure part tent, part log cabin around the deep water well next to the still-smoldering ruins of Ardis—a temporary shelter good enough for that night and a few more nights at least. Boman had more elaborate plans for a permanent lodge with a tower, gun slits, and close-in palisade, but Ada told him to help build the survival lean-to first and plan the castle later.

There still was no sign of the voynix, but it was only afternoon and night would be coming quickly enough, so Ada and Daeman assigned Kaman and ten of his best marksmen to set up a perimeter defense. Other men and women with flechette weapons—they’d counted twenty-four working weapons and one that seemed defective, with fewer than one hundred and twenty magazines of crystal flechettes—were detailed to provide guard closer to the fire and lean-to.

It took a little more than three hours to get the basic structure hammered together and raised—walls only about six feet high, made from palisade logs, a cobbled-together arched roof made of wood planks from the barracks, and a canvas roof. It was important to put something between the wounded and the cold ground, but there was no time to fit a floor, so multiple layers of canvas were laid down atop straw brought in from the former hay barn near the north wall. The cattle themselves had disappeared—killed by voynix or simply run off. No one was going into the forest hunting for them that particular afternoon and the circling sonie had its own duties to perform.

By late afternoon, the temporary lean-to was completed. Ada, who had been working on new buckets and ropes for the well and leading burial parties with picks and shovels digging shallow graves in the frozen earth, returned to inspect the structure and found it large enough for at least forty-five people to crowd in close together to sleep, the others presumably on guard duty outside, and for all fifty-three of them to crowd into for meals if necessary, although it would be crowded. Three of the walls were of wood, but the fourth wall—facing the well and two fires now burning—was only canvas, with most of it open to the heat. Laman and Edide had scrounged metal and ceramic from Ardis Hall to build a stovepipe, if not an actual chimney, for the lean-to, but that modification would have to wait for the next day. There was no glass for windows, only small openings at different heights on each of the wood walls with sliding wood slats and covering canvas. Daeman agreed they could retreat to the lean-to and lay down a withering field of flechette fire from those slits, but one look at the canvas roof and the canvas fourth wall told everyone there that the voynix could not be held off long once they leaped to the attack.