Martin Silenus folded his arms. “Somebody should stay here in case the Colonel returns.”

“Before anyone leaves,” said Sol, “I think we should search the rest of the valley. The Consul didn’t check far beyond the Monolith this morning.”

“I agree,” said Lamia. “Let’s get to it before it gets too late. I want to get provisions at the Keep and return before nightfall.”

They had descended to the Sphinx when Duré and the Consul emerged. The priest held the Consul’s spare comlog in one hand. Lamia explained the plan for a search, and the two men agreed to join them.

Once again they walked the halls of the Sphinx, the beams from their hand torches and pencil lasers illuminating sweating stone and bizarre angles. Emerging into noontime sunlight, they made the three-hundred-meter hike to the Jade Tomb. Lamia found herself shivering as they entered the room where the Shrike had appeared the night before. Hoyt’s blood had left a rust-brown stain on the green ceramic floors. There was no sign of the transparent opening to the labyrinth below. There was no sign of the Shrike.

The Obelisk had no rooms, merely a central shaft in which a spiral ramp, too steep for human comfort, twisted upward between ebony walls. Even whispers echoed here, and the group kept talk to a minimum.

There were no windows, no view, at the top of the ramp, fifty meters above the stone floor, and their torch beams illuminated only blackness as the roof curved in above them. Fixed ropes and chains leftover from two centuries of tourism allowed them to descend without undue fear of a slip and fall that would end in death below. As they paused at the entrance, Martin Silenus called Kassad’s name a final time, and the echoes followed them into sunlight.

They spent half an hour or more inspecting the damage near the Crystal Monolith. Puddles of sand turned to glass, some five to ten meters across, prismed the noonday light and reflected heat in their faces. The broken face of the Monolith, peeked now with holes and still-dangling strands of melted crystal, looked like the target of an act of mindless vandalism, but each knew that Kassad must have been fighting for his life.

Lamia, Silenus, the Consul, Weintraub, and Duré all began to shout for Kassad, their voices echoing and resonating to no avail.

“No sign of Kassad or Het Masteen,” said the Consul as they emerged.

“Perhaps this will be the pattern… each of us disappearing until only one remains.”

“And does that final one get his or her wish as the Shrike Cult legends foretell?” asked Brawne Lamia. She sat on the rocky hearth to the Shrike Palace, her short legs dangling in air.

Paul Duré raised his face to the sky. “I can’t believe that it was Father Hoyt’s wish that he would die so that I could live again.”

Martin Silenus squinted up at the priest. “So what would your wish be, Padre?”

Duré did not hesitate. “I would wish… pray… that God will lift the scourge of these twin obscenities—the war and the Shrike—from mankind once and for all.”

There was a silence in which the early afternoon wind inserted its distant sighs and moans. “In the meantime,” said Brawne Lamia, “we’ve got to get some food or learn how to subsist on air.”

Duré nodded. “Why did you bring so little with you?”

Martin Silenus laughed and said loudly:

Duré smiled, obviously still puzzled.

“We all expected to triumph or die the first night,” said the Consul.

“We hadn’t anticipated a long stay here.” Brawne Lamia stood and brushed off her trousers. “I’m going,” she said. “I should be able to carry back four or five days’ rations if they’re field foodpaks or the bulk-stored items we saw.”

“I’ll go too,” said Martin Silenus.

There was a silence. During the week of their pilgrimage, the poet and Lamia had almost come to blows half a dozen times. Once she was fighting for his life. There was no door, no opening to the honeycomb maze within. Instruments told them that the interior was as empty and unconnected as it always had been. They left reluctantly, climbing the steep trails to the base of the north cliffs where the Cave Tombs lay separated by less than a hundred meters each.

“Early archaeologists thought that these were the oldest of the Tombs because of their crudeness,” said Sol as they entered the first cave, sent flashlight beams playing across stone carved in a thousand indecipherable patterns. None of the caves was deeper than thirty or forty meters.

Each ended in a stone wall that no amount of probing or radar imaging had ever discovered an extension to.

Upon exiting the third Cave Tomb, the group sat in what little shade they could find and shared water and protein biscuits from Kassad’s extra field rations. The wind had risen, and now it sighed and whispered through fluted rock high above them.

“We’re not going to find him,” said Martin Silenus. “The fucking Shrike took him.”

Sol was feeding the baby with one of the last nursing paks. The top of her head had been turned pink by the sun despite Sol’s every effort to shield her as they walked outside. “He could be in one of the Tombs we were in,” he said, “if there are sections out of time-phase with us. That’s Arundez’s theory. He sees the Tombs as four-dimensional constructs with intricate folds through space-time.”

“Great,” said Lamia. “So even if Fedmahn Kassad is there, we won’t see him.”

“Well,” said the Consul, getting to his feet with a tired sigh, “let’s at least go through the motions. One tomb left.”

The Shrike Palace was a kilometer farther down the valley, lower than the others and hidden by a bend in the cliff walls. The structure was not large, smaller than the Jade Tomb, but its intricate construction—flanges, spires, buttresses, and support columns arching and arcing in controlled chaos—made it seem larger than it was.

The interior of the Shrike Palace was one echoing chamber with an irregular floor made up of thousands of curving, jointed segments which reminded Lamia of the ribs and vertebrae of some fossilized creature.

Fifteen meters overhead, the dome was crisscrossed by dozens of the chrome “blades” which continued through walls and each other to emerge as steel-tipped thorns above the structure. The material of the dome itself was slightly opaque, giving a rich, milky hue to the vaulted space.