The calibani’s head whipped like a snake and it bit off two of the fingers on Daeman’s straining left hand.

The man howled and fell away. The calibani swung its arms wide, paused to swallow fingers, and leaped.

Daeman swept the crossbow up with his good right hand and fired both bolts. The calibani was thrown backward, impaled on the ice wall with one of the long, iron, barbed bolts protruding through its upper shoulder into the ice and the other through its palm, its hand raised next to its howling face. The naked creature writhed, pulled, snarled, and snapped one of the bolts free.

Daeman also howled. He leaped to his feet, pulled the knife from his belt, and rammed the long blade up through the calibani’s underjaw, up through its soft palate and into its brain. Then he pressed against the length of the calibani’s long body like a lover and twisted the blade around—twisted again, again, and then again—and kept twisting until the obscene writhing against him stopped.

He fell back onto the tile, cradling his mangled hand. Incredibly, there was no bleeding. The thermskin glove had closed around the stumps of the two amputated fingers, but the pain made him want to vomit.

He could do that, and he did, kneeling and throwing up until he could vomit no more.

There was a scrabbling from one or more of the tunnels on the opposite wall.

Daeman stood, jerked the long knife from the calibani’s underjaw—the creature’s body sagged but was held up by the bolt through its shoulder—and then he retrieved the other bolt, rocking it loose, picked up the crossbow, and crossed to the faxpad.

Something surged out of the glowing tunnel entrance behind him.

Daeman faxed into daylight at the Ardis Hall node. He staggered away from the faxpad there, fumbled a bolt out of his pack, dropped it in the groove in his crossbow, and used his foot to cock the massive mechanism. He aimed the crossbow at the faxpad node and waited.

Nothing came through.

After a long minute, he lowered the weapon and staggered out into the sunlight.

It looked to be early afternoon here at the Ardis node. There were no guards around. The palisade wall here had been pulled down in a dozen places. The carcasses of at least a score of dead voynix lay all around the fax pavilion, but other than streaks and smears and trails of human blood leading off to the meadow and into the forest, there was no sign of the humans who had been left behind to guard the pavilion.

Daeman’s hand hurt so terribly that his entire body and skull became only an echo to that throbbing pain, but he cradled his hand to his chest, set another bolt in the crossbow, and staggered out to the road. It was a little less than a mile and a half to Ardis Hall.

Ardis Hall was gone.

Daeman had approached cautiously, staying off the road and moving through the trees most of the way, wading the narrow river upstream from the bridge. He had approached the palisade and Ardis from the northeast, through the woods, ready to call out quickly to the sentries rather than be shot as a voynix.

There were no sentries. For half an hour, Daeman crouched at the edge of the woods and watched. Nothing moved except the crows and magpies feeding on the remnants of human bodies. Then he moved carefully around to the left, coming as close to the barracks and east entrance to the Ardis palisade as he could before coming out of the cover of the trees.

The palisade had been breached in a hundred places. Much of the wall was down. Hannah’s beautiful cupola and hearth had been burned and then knocked over. The line of barracks and tents where half of the four hundred people of Ardis had lived had all burned down. Ardis Hall itself—the grand hall that had weathered more than two thousand winters—had been reduced to a few carbon-smeared stone chimneys, burned and tumbled rafters, and heaps of collapsed stone.

The place stank of smoke and death. There were scores of dead voynix on what had been Ada’s front yard, more piled where the porch had stood, but mixed in with the shattered carapaces were remains of hundreds of men and women. Daeman couldn’t identify any of the corpses he could see around the burned ruins of the house—there a small charred corpse, seemingly too small to be an adult, burned black, the charred and flaking arms raised in a boxer’s posture, here a rib cage and skull picked almost clean by the birds, there a woman lying seemingly unharmed in the sooty grass, but—when Daeman rushed to her and rolled her over—missing a face.

Daeman knelt in the cold, bloodied grass and tried to weep. The best he could do was wave his arms to chase away the heavy crows and hopping magpies that kept trying to return to the corpses.

The sun was going down. The light was fading from the sky.

Daeman rose to look at the other bodies—flung here and there like bundles of abandoned laundry on the frozen earth, some lying under voynix carcasses, others lying alone, some fallen in clumps as if the people had huddled together at the end. He had to find Ada. Identify and bury her and as many of the others as he could before trying to make his way back to the fax pavilion.

Where can I go? Which community will take me in?

Before he could answer that or reach the other bodies in the quickly falling twilight, he saw the movement at the edge of the forest.

At first Daeman thought that the survivors of the Ardis massacre were coming out of the trees, but even as he raised his good hand to hail them, he saw the glint on gray carapaces and knew that he was wrong.

Thirty, sixty, a hundred voynix moved out of the forest and across the grass toward him from the road and forest to the east.

Sighing, too tired to run, Daeman staggered a few yards toward the woods to the southwest and then saw the movement there. Voynix scuttling out of the darkness there, more voynix dropping from the trees and moving out into the open on all fours. They’d be on him in a few seconds.

He knew that it was no use running around the smoldering ruins of the Great Hall toward the north. There would just be more voynix there.

Daeman went to one knee, noticed that the egg in his rucksack was glowing brightly enough now to throw his shadow across the frozen grass, and then pulled the last of the crossbow quarrels out.

Six. He had six bolts left. Plus the two already loaded.

Smiling grimly, feeling something like a terrible elation rise in him, he stood and leveled the weapon at the closest cluster of advancing shapes. They were sixty feet away. He’d let them get closer, knowing that they could close the gap in seconds running at full voynix speed. His mangled hand was good enough to level the crossbow with his thumb and remaining two fingers.

Something cracked and slapped behind him. Daeman whirled, ready to meet the attack, but it was the sonie, flying in low from the west. Two people were firing flechette rifles from the rear niches. Voynix leaped at it but were slapped away by clouds of flickering flechettes.

“Jump!” yelled Greogi as the sonie flew in at head height and then hovered next to Daeman.

The voynix rushed in from every side, bouncing and leaping like giant silver grasshoppers. A man Daeman vaguely recognized as Boman and a woman with dark hair—not Ada, but the woman named Edide who had gone with Daeman on the fax-warning expedition—were firing their flechette rifles in opposite directions on full automatic, pouring out a cloud of crystal darts.

“Jump!” Greogi yelled again.

Daeman shook his head, retrieved the rucksack with the egg, tossed it up into the sonie, tossed in his crossbow, and only then jumped. The sonie began to climb even as he leaped.

He didn’t quite make it. His good hand found a grip on the inner edge of the sonie, but his mangled left hand banged against metal, the pain blinded him, he released his grip and began to slide away toward the mass of silent voynix below.