“Carol,” he said to the startled captain’s image, “go tactical space, please.”

Wolmak jacked in and was standing in place above the gleaming cloud planet of T’ien Shan. Samuels suddenly appeared next to him in the starry darkness.

“Carol,” said Wolmak, “something’s going on down there. I think the Shrike may be loose again. If you suddenly lose transmission data from the Jibril, or we start screaming gibberish…”

“I’ll launch three boats of Marines,” said Samuels.

“Negative,” said Wolmak. “Slag the Jibril. Immediately.”

Captain Samuels blinked. So did the floating telltale that showed that Admiral Lempriere’s flagship was tightbeaming. Wolmak jacked out of tactical. The message was short. “I’ve spun the Raguel up for a jump in-system to just beyond the critical gravity well around T’ien Shan,” said Admiral Lempriere, his thin face grave.

Wolmak opened his mouth to protest to his superior, realized that a tightbeamed protest would arrive almost three minutes after the Hawking-drive jump was executed, and shut his mouth. A jump in-system like this was sickeningly dangerous—one chance in four, at least, of a disaster that would claim all hands—but he understood the Admiral’s need to get to where the information was fresh and his commands could be executed immediately.

Dear Jesus, thought Wolmak, the Grand Inquisitor crippled, the Archbishop and the others missing, the sodding Dalai Lama’s palace looking like an anthill that’s been kicked over.

Goddamn that Shrike-thing. Where’s the papal courier probe with its command? Where’s that Core ship we were promised? How can things get worse than this?

“Captain?” It was the chief Marine medic on the expeditionary force, beaming from the dropship infirmary.

“Report.”

“Cardinal Mustafa is conscious, sir… still blind, of course… in terrible pain, but…”

“Put him on,” snapped Wolmak.

A terrible visage filled the holosphere.

Captain Wolmak sensed others on the bridge shrinking back. The Grand Inquisitor’s face was still bloodied. His teeth were bright red as he screamed.

His eye sockets were ragged and void, except for tendrils of torn tissue and rivulets of blood.

At first, Captain Wolmak could not discern the word from the shriek. But then he realized what the Cardinal was screaming.

“Nemes! Nemes! Nemes!”

The constructs called Nemes, Scylla, and Briareus continue eastward. The three remain phase-shifted, oblivious to the staggering amounts of energy this consumes. The energy is sent from elsewhere. It is not their worry. All of their existence has led to this hour.

After the timeless interlude of slaughter under the Pargo Kaling Western Gate, Nemes leads the way up the tower and across the great metal cables holding the suspension bridge in place. The three jog through Drepung Marketplace, three motile figures moving through thickened, amber air, past human forms frozen in place. At Phari Marketplace, the thousands of shopping, browsing, laughing, arguing, jostling human statues make Nemes smile her thin-lipped smile.

She could decapitate all of them and they would have had no warning of their destruction. But she has an objective.

At the Phari Ridge cableway juncture, the three shift down—friction on the cable would be a problem otherwise.

Scylla, the northern High Way, Nemes sends on the common band. Briareus, the middle bridge. I will take the cableway.

Her siblings nod, shimmer, and are gone. The cablemaster steps forward to protest Nemes’s shoving in line ahead of scores of waiting cable passengers. It is a busy time of day.

Rhadamanth Nemes picks the cablemaster up and flings him off the platform. A dozen angry men and women shove toward her, shouting, bent on revenge.

Nemes leaps from the platform and grabs the cable. She has no pulley, no brakes, no climbing harness. She phase-shifts only the palms of her inhuman hands and hurtles down the cable toward K’un Lun Ridge. The angry mob behind her clip onto the cable and give chase—a dozen, two dozen, more. The cablemaster had been liked by many.

It takes Nemes half the usual transit time to cover the great abyss between Phari and K’un Lun ridges. She brakes sloppily on the approach and slams into the rock, phase-shifting at the last instant. Pulling herself out of the crumbling indentation on the cliff behind the landing ledge, she walks back to the cable.

Pulleys whine as the first of her pursuers careen down the last few hundred meters of wire. More spread out to the horizon, black beads on a thin string. Nemes smiles, phase-shifts both her hands, reaches high, and severs the cable. She is surprised how few of the dozens of doomed men and women scream as they slide off the twisting, falling cable to their deaths. Nemes jogs to the fixed ropes, climbs them freehand, and cuts all of them loose—ascent lines, rappel lines, safety lines, everything. Five armed members of the K’un Lun Constabulary from Hsi wang-mu confront her on the ridgeline just south of the slideway. She phase-shifts only her left forearm and swats them off into space.

Looking northwest, Nemes adjusts her infrared and telescopic vision and zooms in on the great swinging bonsai-bamboo bridge connecting the High Way promontories between Phari Ridge and K’un Lun Ridge.

The bridge falls as she watches, the slats and vines and support cables writhing as they fall back to the western ridgeline, the lower reaches of the bridge dropping into phosgene clouds.

That’s that, sends Briareus.

How many on it when it fell? queries Nemes.

Many. Briareus disconnects.

A second later, Scylla logs on. Northern bridge down. I’m destroying the High Way as I go.

Good, sends Nemes. I’ll see you in Jo-kung.

The three shift down as they pass through the city fissure at Jo-kung. It is raining lightly, the clouds as thick as summer fog. Nemes’s thin hair is plastered to her forehead and she notices that Scylla and Briareus have the same look. The crowd parts for them. The ledge road to the Temple Hanging in Air is empty.

Nemes is leading as they approach the final, short swinging bridge before the ledge below the stairway to the Temple. This had been the first artifact repaired by Aenea—a simple, twenty-meter swinging span above a narrow fissure between dolomite spires a thousand meters above the lower crags and cloudtops—and now the monsoon clouds billow beneath and around the dripping structure.

Invisible in the thick clouds, something stands on the cliff ledge at the other side of the bridge.

Nemes shifts to thermal imaging and smiles when she sees that the tall shape radiates no heat whatsoever. She pings it with her forehead-generated radar and studies the image: three meters tall, thorns, bladed fingers on four oversized hands, a perfectly radar-reflective carapace, sharp blades on chest and forehead, no respiration, razor wire rising from the shoulders and spikes from the forehead.

Perfect, sends Nemes.

Perfect, agrees Scylla and Briareus.

The figure at the other end of the dripping bridge makes no response.

We made it to the mountain with only a few meters to spare. Once we dropped out of the lower reaches of the jet stream, our descent was steady and irreversible. There were few thermals out above the cloud ocean and many downdrafts, and while we made the first half of the hundred-klick gap in a few minutes of thrilling acceleration, the second half was all heart-stopping descent—now certain that we would make it with room to spare, now more certain that we would drop into the clouds and never even see our deaths rising to surround us until the kite wings struck acid sea.

We did descend into the clouds, but these were the monsoon clouds, the water vapor clouds, the breathable clouds. The three of us flew as close as we could, blue delta, yellow delta, green delta, the metal and fabric of our parawings almost touching, more fearful of losing one another and dying alone than of striking one another and falling together.