“Ouch. Did he have a marking like a two-headed eagle on his face?”
There was no time to answer, because just this moment, the crowd of naked bodies ahead of them parted, and the crowd behind, shoving, pushing them forward. There were shouts and commotion, cries of joy and cries of woe. The prisoners were being moved from the showers into a wider area, lit with many lanterns, where dog things with pikes and truncheons were struggling with the crowd. Little Blue Men, six of them, were standing on little disks or platforms held in midair by long metal serpentine arms.
The walls were still mud and lumber. This was an area where several trenches intersected. To one side were angular machines, evidently digging automata, whose shovel blades showed many dints and scars of work. The area was covered over with a tarp or circus tent, and the rain was drumming on the metallic fabric, but at last there was no water falling on him.
Some of the dog things were passing out one-piece overalls made of soft, dull fabric. This was the source of the joyful noise, as cold or shamefaced prisoners were pulling on garments. Other of the dog things were yanking prisoners to the left or right, and beating those who resisted with their pikestaffs. And this was the source of the noise of woe.
Dogs came, brandishing their pikes, growling and coughing, gestured for Montrose to part from his companions, each to go to a different part of the floor.
Montrose struggled to stay near the three dwarfs and the Iatrocrat. With his implants silently to the Locusts, and aloud to Prissy Pskov, he said, “Do not to resist. The Blues don’t mean to hurt us yet.”
“They will torment us to discover where we have buried our treasures,” she said. Prissy cowered behind him, her hair spines flexing and standing erect on her scalp like the comb of a cock in battle.
“I think they are looking for something else.”
Prissy was touching him gingerly on the shoulder, and she shivered because her people made to touch a taboo. Her hand was warm, almost hot, compared to the shower water still drenching him, and his shoulder immediately began to itch with allergic reaction, so he did not think their taboo was all that unreasonable.
“I will do as you say,” she murmured. “For the lore of my people says there is a figure buried beneath the Earth, who guards tombs such as this, and to despoil them is to wake a great cry. ‘My time, is it yet? My bride, is she nigh?’ And if the answer is wrong, he destroys all.”
“I think that only happens on his good days,” muttered Montrose.
But there was no more talk, for the dogs had shoved her to one side and him to another. He saw the woebegone faces of the three Locusts, small as the faces of children, from an era where no person ever laid violent hands on another, bewildered and lost as they were dragged away.
3
The Warrior-Aristocrats
1. Two Chimerae
It was twilight, and the dusk was cold. A hooded figure stood in a high place at the brink of a deep pit, staring downward.
He was not dressed in the overalls the Blue Men had passed out. Instead, he wore an impromptu robe of metallic cloth. Despite the fineness of the cloth, the garb was crude. He wore two long sheets, flung over either shoulder, crossed and tied at the waist by a line of cord. Flaps of material hung fore and aft, leaving his sides free. His arms were hidden in overlapping tiers of the cloth. The cloth was metallic, bronze hued, and shot through with silver strands in a regular pattern of hexagons; the reverse was shiny black. This originally had been a tent and a groundcloth; the belt was tent line.
It was Menelaus Montrose. He had drawn the hood flap of his garment up, hiding his features: albeit it was not clear from whom or from what he hid.
Behind him, out of the trees, came two upright shapes that moved as gracefully and silently as hunting cats. The pair were darker shadows against the rattling shadow-mass of twigs and leafless branches of the wood, and the red and distant brightness of the air did not illume them until they stepped across the snow. Then, by the unearthly poise of their motions, Menelaus saw that they were Chimerae, warrior-aristocrats who ruled the Earth between A.D. 4500 and A.D. 5900.
The older Chimera had iron gray hair, which was tight to his skull, hanging down in a queue behind, and he looked as grim as an arctic wolf. Menelaus had seen his name, or, at least, a name on his coffin: it was Daae.
The younger Chimera had a queue even longer, a tail of darkness hanging past his shoulder blades. He was like silken panther, lazy and graceful and deadly. His name was Yuen. Yuen had a strip of cloth, a bandage, around his head, hiding one eye. It gave him an incongruous and rakish look, like that of a storybook pirate.
Both were dressed in baggy overalls of drab fabric. Both had wrapped their hands and wrists in medical tape, leaving fingers free, like bare-knuckle boxers. Similar tape wrapped their ankles and feet, but left toes free. The Blue Men had not provided any prisoner with shoes.
In the gloom of the coming night, with nothing behind him but the dim reflections of red glints from the pit behind him, his hooded silhouette formed a tall and ominous figure. Slowly he raised his hand, beckoning. “Come and get it, boys,” he whispered in English.
No word of parley or defiance was spoken. One moment, the pair of Chimerae stood at the edge of the snowy wood in the gathering gloom; in the next, they were moving with the speed of the shadow of an eagle as it stoops across the white and black ground.
Their blurred feet made almost no noise as they rushed in, perhaps a hiss of snow, perhaps the slap of moccasin on rock. They used an odd posture to run: their bodies leaning too far forward, their arms held straight back behind them.
Menelaus stood motionless as a statue, awaiting their attack. The faintest gleam beneath the triangular shadow of the hood was visible as he drew back his lips from his teeth in what was either a snarl or a smile.
At the moment of collision, Yuen, the younger of the two attackers whipped his hand from behind his back and bludgeoned the tall hooded figure with what looked like a pale truncheon or baton. At the same moment, the older of the two attackers, Daae, lashed out with superhuman speed with his walking stick, which cracked like a whip when the tip surpassed the speed of sound. The forward stroke of the cane came in at kneecap-breaking height, and the backstroke was lower, to hook Menelaus at the ankle and yank him off his feet.
Yuen’s truncheon swept through an empty hood left in place when Menelaus ducked, but somehow his metallic garment mysteriously did not duck. The walking stick likewise swept through eaves of heavy fabric, hitting nothing.
Neither attacker was unskilled enough to actually be thrown off balance by the impossible and unexpected lack of resistance, but they both were a half second slow to recover from their lunges. During that half second, the cloak fabric like a live thing jumped into the faces of the attackers, swirled about them, catching their heads, tugging them into a stumble.
Daae pulled his cold and burning-eyed face from the cloak fabric, with one hand flung a tent spike sharpened like a knife toward Menelaus. With an almost casual motion, Menelaus lifted his hand from the folds swirling about him, and as if by happenstance, the spike with a chime of pure sound struck a fist-sized rock he held, was deflected, and spun away into the darkness. With the same casual motion, the rock hammered the one-eyed younger attacker from his blind side, drawing a trail of blood from his skull just above the temple, a parabola of rubies.
Menelaus was falling—no, he had flung himself backwards in a powerful and agile motion, but not to safety. He plunged in a clattering swirl of metallic fabric in the one direction the attackers had no way and no expectation of hindering: directly off the cliffside. It was like a backward swan dive into a nothingness of air. He pulled both attackers with him.
Daae writhed, regained his footing, and jerked back, arms windmilling. The heavy rock continued its arc of motion, flew from the hand of Menelaus (an unlikely shot, since Menelaus was upside-down and backwards to Daae at this moment, in midair), and struck Daae where ear met jaw. Dizzying abyss was at h
is feet. Choking, Daae lost his footing and clutched frantically the snowy ground beneath him.
Yuen and Montrose went over the side of the precipice.
There was a slither of motion and a singing jar of sound, like the string of an instrument plucked taut. The hawk-faced older man stared in puzzlement at a tent stake driven deeply into the cold and rocky ground. For a dazed moment, he wondered how the tent spike he had thrown had fallen here. But no. There was a second spike here, and a third, and all were pounded securely into the ground. This was the spot where Menelaus had been standing. A length of tent rope securely lashed to all three spikes was pulled taut, vibrating. It ran over the brink.
The gray-haired Daae belly-crawled to the edge of the precipice and cautiously peered over.
The line of tent rope extended only seven or eight feet. It was done in a bowline around the bare left foot of Menelaus, who hung with his pale buttocks and loincloth exposed, his head downward, with his bulky garments fluttering beyond his ears like the petals of some baroque flower.
The pantherish Yuen was also still alive, also head downward, and a lariat running from somewhere in the bulky garments flapping around Menelaus ran to the younger attacker’s feet. It was a slipknot, not a bowline, and so Yuen’s feet and thighs were cut and bleeding from the bite of the rope, but the rope held him.
The two were swaying very slowly, a human pendulum.
2. The Tombs
The cleft beyond the heads of the upside-down men was as sharp and clean as if the mountainside had been split in two, in times now long past, by some titanic force. Slightly jarred parallel lines of the first and second level of a cryogenic Tomb facility could be seen descending into darkness, looking oddly like bookshelves of a titan’s library. Broken cells and empty corridors opened out into midair, separated by strata of severed wires and tubes, rock and insulation. Dripping from every level, like icicles, were streaks of twisted girders.
The coffins near the surface, far below them, were blank lozenges, dull and inert. Their coolant had long ago leaked out, their seals compromised, their cargo dead beyond recovery.
After a long moment, the knife-sharpened spike that had flown over the edge struck bottom, and there was a clatter and an echo of clatter that rose from the dark. At that sound, there flickered winks of energy, as the defensive mechanisms of some coffin from yet a lower stratum, still active, stirred to life. A faintly audible murmur and echo of chiming, hissing, and buzzing, like atonal music, suddenly rose from the deep, accompanied by the insectlike rustle of many metallic feet, moving.
The noise spooked Daae; his face was frozen in a look of supernatural fear.
From somewhere in the mass of the fabric, Menelaus spoke quietly, but carried over the rustling from below, “Loyal, respected, and Proven Alphas, how can this Beta line be of service to the Command this day?”
He spoke in grammatically flawless Virginian, a language called Old Dominion, in the accent of a Patrician, and he used the correct declensions and form of address.
Menelaus added, “And if this Beta may speak freely, loyal Alphas, perhaps the service could be one carried out either beyond the range of whatever power we have disturbed in the Tombs, or a task simple enough to be accomplished before any buried weapons are brought to bear.”
Daae called down softly, “Then you are truly Chimera?”
He spoke in a stilted and formalized version of the same tongue, as formulated by Chimerical grammarians long after Virginian was a dead language.
Menelaus brought his hand slowly into view. He held a scalpel stolen from the medical supply tent. He put it against the line of the lariat holding Yuen headfirst above the abyss. Menelaus said, “Must we revert to the older custom, and prove our worth by delivering up a dead foe? This involves considerable inconvenience!”
Daae’s eyes narrowed. “What inconvenience?”
“Sir! No foe is ready to hand, and if I commit an act of insubordination against the Loyal and Proven Alpha youth helplessly dangling below me, surely you, sir, would be duty-bound to reciprocate by chastising me, perhaps by unearthing the stake on which I currently depend. This would rob the Emergency Eugenic Command of two of her surviving veterans in this strange and cold far-future era.”
Silence. Daae said nothing.
Menelaus offered: “I await with pleasure the orders of my superior officer, sir.”
Daae called down, “Loyal and Proven wielder of Grislac, is your weapon still in your hand?”
The white truncheon had a thong looped around the dark-haired man’s wrist. The youth flourished it lightly in the air.
Daae said, “Then what say you?”
But the younger warrior was laughing softly. He spoke in Chimerical, in the dialect used in the western hemisphere during the forty-ninth century. “Loyal sir, if this man is not a Chimera, then sever the line and let me drop with him! If a baseline stock or Kine or underling can defeat me so handily, I am no further use to the Command, and will go without complaint into the promised oblivion we all seek.”
Daae said, “Our race is extinct, and the Command consists of we two, and the Alpha Lady Ivinia. Therefore the Command—such as it is—cannot afford the loss of one-third its number, one half its Alpha line fighting strength.”
Menelaus called up, “Sir, if I may, there is a block and tackle hidden under a gray tarp next to you, bolted to a plate. It might be wiser to have us up and out of sight before the commotion among the coffins summons the dogs, the Blue Men, or their automata.”
3. The Plaque
After more effort than might be expected, the two men were hauled safely back up the cliffside. The tackle gear was made fast to a plate bolted to a stone set to the ground. Yuen, the one-eyed, dark-haired Chimera stared curiously at the ancient letters on the stone as Daae bound the cuts on his legs with medical tape.
Yuen looked at the plaque. “You smile at the writing. What does it say?”
Menelaus read it aloud:
Devil’s Den Long-term biosuspension Facility, Hibernation Syndicate of Fancy Gap, Virginia—M. I. Montrose, Proprietor—This Site Declared a Sanctuary by Order of the Marchioness of Carroll County—These lands under the Protection of the Sovereign Military Order of Knights Hospitalier of Saint John of Jerusalem: Trespassers Killed On Sight. No Soliciting.
“And those?” Below it, in the stone, was a series of linear scratches, a simple code of strokes and angles.
Menelaus said, “Slumber marks. I cannot read them, Proven Alpha.”
Their voices attracted attention. Echoes of metallic noise and reflections of distant and buried light haunted the edge of the pit. The Chimerae wore faces as calm and stoical as if carven from stone, but they moved quickly away from the brink on their silent, catlike feet, alarmed, perhaps terrified. Menelaus knew the era from which they came was famed for its rejection of supernaturalism; therefore, the unknown unnerved them, because they had no category in which to place the uncanny.
Menelaus and the two Chimerae moved into the wood and squatted behind a thicket, keeping a wary eye on the cleft.
Menelaus said, “The dog patrols may come back.”
Yuen said, “Something in the trees interferes with the instruments of the Blue Men. We are safe from eavesdropping here. Do you know what drew the dog things away?”
Menelaus said, “Magic.”
Yuen sighed, and said to the white-haired Daae, “The Beta cannot lawfully answer to us until we establish our chain of command.”
Daae was bent over Yuen’s leg wounds and spoke without looking up. “We should establish how we were betrayed. We were meant to come by surprise. I thought none of these before-men nor after-men speak our tongue. Is there spy in the mess tent?”
“Many spies, I am sure, but none of them speak to me,” answered Menelaus.
“Then how were you forewarned?” asked the older.
“Deduction. I knew I would not look like a proper Chimera to you. The Eugenics Board in my centuries was experimenting wit
h different bloodline factors. Redheadedness is an atavism from Neanderthal genes, a melanin deficiency reintroduced in my forbearers from archive reconstruction.… You did not have this technology? You are from the earlier days, are you not, young sir?”
Yuen’s voice held a shrug. “Oho? Early compared to what? Until I was thawed here, I thought my days were the last days. The wars against the Witches were going badly. You gentlemen are a surprise and joy to me, the fulfillment of many dreams of breeding.”
Daae spoke out of the darkness, “None from before the time of the Chimerae could know it is our custom to slay imposters and wrongbloods, and no kine from our time would dare play the imposter.”
Yuen said doubtfully, “He could be a historian from after.”
“Perhaps,” Daae said, “but we were superceded by creatures I have heard called the Naturalists, also called the Nymphs. You have seen them in the medical tent: a race of gold-skinned and slant-eyed fructivores of superlative and delicate loveliness. And after them come the monster-things called Hormagaunts. After that I know not what.”
“Locusts,” said Montrose. “Then, sea-things called Melusine. Then history stops.”
Daae said, “Each race of man is more artificial, more highly engineered than the ones before. Does this phenotype look deliberate?”
Yuen peered thoughtfully at Menelaus. “Ah, you speak truth! Who would deliberately affix a great hooked claw of flesh to the front a man’s face?”
Menelaus said, “My nurse always told me the Eugenics Board was breeding me in case the lighthouses on the coast failed, with a nose I could blow when the seas were fogbound.”
Yuen chuckled softly in the dark. “Oo? You dare mock the Command?”
Menelaus said, “Before I answer, let me ask this: Did the Eugenics Board breed themselves for intelligence, or did they breed their women to ripe-melons front-up in full kit?”
Yuen gave a louder, shorter laugh. “He’s Chimera, sure enough. No underling would know what ink-stained butterbars and groin-thunks our high brass are.”