The sky was clear by the time she stood in front of the Shrike Palace.

The structure was aptly named: the half-dome arched up and outward like the creature’s carapace, support elements curved downward like blades stabbing the valley floor and other buttresses leaped upward and away like Shrike thorns. Walls had become translucent as the interior glow increased, and now the building shone like a giant jack-o'-lantern shaved paper thin; the upper regions glowed red as the Shrike’s gaze.

Brawne took a breath and touched her abdomen. She was pregnant—she had known it before she left Lusus—and didn’t she owe more now to her unborn son or daughter than to the obscene old poet on the Shrike’s tree? Brawne knew that the answer was yes and that it did not matter one damn bit. She let out the breath and approached the Shrike Palace.

From the outside, the Shrike Palace was no more than twenty meters across. Before, when they had entered, Brawne and the other pilgrims had seen the interior as a single open space, empty except for the bladelike supports that crisscrossed the space under the glowing dome.

Now, as Brawne stood at the entrance, the interior was a space larger than the valley itself. A dozen tiers of white stone rose rank on rank and stretched into the faded distance. On each tier of stone, human bodies lay, each garbed a different way, each tethered by the same sort of semiorganic, semiparasitic shunt socket and cable which her friends had told Brawne she herself had worn. Only these metallic but translucent umbilicals pulsed red and expanded and contracted regularly, as if blood were being recycled through the sleeping forms’ skulls.

Brawne staggered back, affected by the pull of anti-entropic tides as much as by the view, but when she stood ten meters from the Palace, the exterior was the same size as always. She did not pretend to understand how klicks of interior could fit into such a modest shell. The Time Tombs were opening. This one could coexist in different times for all she knew. What she did understand was that when she was awakening from her own travels under the shunt, she had seen the Shrike’s thorn tree tied with tubes and vines of energy invisible to the eye but now quite obviously connected with the Shrike Palace.

She stepped to the entrance again.

The Shrike waited inside. Its carapace, usually gleaming, now seemed black, silhouetted against the light and marble glare around it.

Brawne felt the adrenaline rush fill her, felt the impulse to turn and run, and stepped inside.

The entrance all but vanished behind her, remaining visible only by a faint fuzziness in the uniform glow which emanated from the walls.

The Shrike did not move. Its red eyes gleamed from the shadow of its skull.

Brawne stepped forward, her booted heels making no sound on the stone floor. The Shrike was ten meters to her right where the stone tiers began, ascending like obscene display racks to a ceiling lost in the glow. She had no illusion that she could make it back to the door before the creature closed on her.

It did not move. The air smelled of ozone and something sickly sweet. Brawne moved along the wall at her back and scanned the rows of bodies for a familiar sleeping face. With each step to her left, she moved farther from the exit and made it easier for the Shrike to cut her off. The creature stood there like a black sculpture in an ocean of light.

The tiers did stretch for kilometers. Stone steps, each almost a meter high, broke the horizontal lines of dark bodies. Several minutes’ walk from the entrance, Brawne climbed the lower third of one of these stairways, touched the nearest body on the second tier, and was relieved to find the flesh warm, the man’s chest rising and falling. It was not Martin Silenus.

Brawne continued onward, half expecting to find Paul Duré or Sol Weintraub or even herself lying among the living dead. Instead, she found a face she had last seen carved into a mountainside. Sad King Billy lay motionless on white stone, five tiers up, his royal robes scorched and stained. The sad face was—as were all the others—contorted in some internal agony. Martin Silenus lay three bodies away on a lower tier.

Brawne crouched next to the poet, glancing over her shoulder at the black speck of the Shrike, still unmoving at the end of the rows of bodies. Like the others, Silenus appeared to be alive, in silent agony, and was attached by a shunt socket connected to a pulsating umbilical which, in turn, ran into the white wall behind the ledge as if wed to the stone.

Brawne panted from fear as she ran her hand over the poet’s skull, feeling the fusion of plastic and bone, and then felt along the umbilical itself, finding no join or opening to the point where it melded with stone. Fluid pulsed beneath her fingers.

“Shit,” whispered Brawne and, in a sudden flurry of panic, looked behind her, certain the Shrike had crept within striking distance. The dark form still stood at the end of the long room.

Her pockets were empty. She had neither weapon nor tool. She realized that she would have to return to the Sphinx, find the packs, dig out something to cut with, and then return and muster enough courage to enter here again.

Brawne knew that she could never come through that door again.

She knelt, took a deep breath, and brought her hand and arm up, then down. The edge of her palm smashed against material that looked like clear plastic and felt harder than steel. Her arm ached from wrist to shoulder from the single blow.

Brawne Lamia glanced to her right. The Shrike was moving toward her, stepping slowly like an old man out for a leisurely walk.

Brawne shouted, knelt, and struck again, palm-edge rigid, thumb locked at right angles. The long room echoed to the impact.

Brawne Lamia had grown up on Lusus at 1.3 standard gravity, and she was athletic for her race. Since she was nine years old, she had dreamed of and worked toward becoming a detective, and a part of that admittedly obsessive and totally illogical preparation had been training in the martial arts. Now she grunted, raised her arm, and struck again, willing her palm to be an axe blade, seeing in her mind the severing blow, the successful strikethrough.

The tough umbilical dented imperceptibly, pulsed like a living thing, and seemed to cringe away as she swung again.

Footsteps became audible below and behind her. Brawne almost giggled. The Shrike could move without walking, go from here to there without the effort of going between. It must enjoy scaring its prey.

Brawne was not frightened. She was too busy.

She raised her hand, brought it down again. It would have been easier striking the stone for effect. She slammed her palm-edge into the umbilical again, feeling some small bone give in her hand. The pain was like a distant noise, like the sliding below her and behind her.

Has it occurred to you, she thought, that it’ll probably kill him if you do manage to break this thing?

She swung again. The footsteps stopped at the base of the stairway below.

Brawne was panting from effort. Sweat dripped from her forehead and cheeks onto the chest of the sleeping poet.

I don’t even like you, she thought at Martin Silenus and chopped again. It was like trying to sever a metal elephant’s leg.

The Shrike began ascending the staircase.

Brawne half-stood and threw the entire weight of her body into a swing which almost dislocated her shoulder and broke her wrist, and smashed small bones in her hand.

And severed the umbilical.

Red fluid too nonviscous for blood splashed across Brawne’s legs and the white stone. The severed cable still extending from the wall spasmed and then thrashed like an agitated tentacle before lying limply and then withdrawing, a bleeding snake sliding into a hole that ceased to exist as soon as the umbilical was out of sight. The stump of umbilical still attached to Silenus’s neural shunt socket withered in five seconds, drying and contracting like a jellyfish out of water. Red splashed the poet’s face and shoulders, the liquid turning blue even as Brawne watched.