"I see it now!" Shamika said, and she banked right, her wings beating faster, and we surged forward at increased speed.
I didn't see anything, but then my zombie eyes aren't any better than the ones I had when I was alive. Shamika was an alien creature, and I had no idea exactly how her senses worked, but if she said she saw Ulterion, I believed her. A moment later I was finally able to make out a dark shape of an orb, black against the black sky behind it. I couldn't tell how large it was, for there was nothing nearby to lend perspective, but I guessed that while it was a far smaller version of the satellite that orbited Earth, it was at least big enough for Gregor's dimension-shifting machine.
Gregor didn't bother firing his energy ray at us again. He learned fast – information was his stock in trade, after all – and he probably needed all the power he could get to make his machine work. Why waste it on us if the Coat of Every Color would just repel his attacks? So Shamika and I were able to approach Ulterion without any more trouble, and she descended to the surface of the Hidden Moon and landed with surprising gentleness for someone who'd just completed her first flight.
I climbed off and stood on wobbly legs. My physical condition had little to do with how nervous I'd been during our flight and everything to do with how difficult it was for me to keep my various body parts together. The cohesion spell that Papa Chatha had cast on me was close to wearing off, and when it finally failed, I'd collapse into a pile of useless pieces. If we were going to stop Gregor, we had to do it fast.
I looked around, but it was like standing in the middle of a deep cave without any light source. I could sense the solid weight of Ulterion beneath my feet and feel its rocky surface under my shoes, but I couldn't see a damn thing.
"It's OK," Shamika said. "I'll lead you."
Ulterion, like Umbriel, lay within the atmospheric bubble that encloses Nekropolis, so even though we were technically standing on the surface of a moon, there was air to transmit our voices, even if neither of us needed it to breathe.
Shamika took my hand with human-seeming fingers, and I knew she'd once more taken the form of a teenage girl. She started walking, and I went with her, moving with the spastic jerky motions that were all I was capable of. Shamika surely noticed my awkward movements, but she said nothing about them.
"There's a dome a few hundred feet in front of us," Shamika said. "It looks like Gregor created it from Ulterion's substance."
I imagined hundreds of insects scuttling over the moon's dark surface, tearing chunks out of the ground and refashioning them bit by bit into a dome to hide Gregor's machinery. "Can you see anything that looks like an entrance?"
"I doubt there is one," she said. "Gregor used teleportation magic to bring the magic-users here, remember? It's probably how he moved his equipment in as well. But don't worry. I'll be able to get us inside."
With every step we took, I anticipated an attack by a horde of insects, but none came. I still wore the Coat of Every Color and carried the Dreamthrower, and I had the Herald Bells and the osame-fuda gun tucked into my pockets. Maybe Gregor knew his insects couldn't stand against the holy weapons. Or maybe he had another reason for not attacking us. Whatever it was, I knew I wouldn't like it. Gregor always stacked the deck in his favor.
I sensed the dome ahead of us rather than seeing it, but I still would've bumped into it if Shamika hadn't stopped me. Before either of us could say or do anything, a tiny pinprick of light appeared in the surface of the dome before us. It quickly widened as a semicircular door formed, spilling greenish light onto the moon's dark surface.
I could see Shamika's face now, and she was frowning.
"I was wrong," she said. "Gregor didn't make the dome out of Ulterion's substance. He made it out of his own."
I looked at Shamika. "Welcome to my parlor, said the spider to the fly."
She gave me a confused look, and I said, "Means we're expected. Shall we?"
We stepped inside, and I didn't bother to check if the entrance sealed shut behind us. I knew it would.
Greenfire torches were set in sconces around the inside of the dome, providing illumination. The mystic flames were set to burn at a low level, and I remembered how Gregor had once told me that since the Watchers were native to this dark dimension, intense light could hurt them. Too bad I hadn't asked Maggie to loan me one of the Hidden Light's illuminaries.
The inside of the dome was fashioned from the same dark substance as the outside, and it creeped me out to think that in a sense I was standing inside Gregor. In the middle of the dome stood a circle of men and women, all of them mired in black goo that stretched from the floor and covered them up to their waists. Their hands and arms had been left free, but since each of them stared blankly into space, their facial features slack, I knew they were under Gregor's control. They were the missing magic-users, and I was relieved to see Papa Chatha among them, though I hated seeing my old friend held in this trance-like state. The magic-users faced inward, gazing sightlessly at each other, connected by black wires attached to metal bands around their heads.
In the middle of the circle lay Darius. He was covered by a cocoon of black goo up to his neck, and he was clearly in a trance as well. Like the magic-users, his arms were free, and they lay folded over his chest. Clutched in his hands was another metal lightning rod, a twin to the one Gregor's General Klamm body had used to transmit Talaith's captured power. The rod pulsed with yellowish light, and there was a feeling of barely restrained energy in the air, like a storm that might erupt any moment. Darius also had a metal band around his head with wires protruding from it, but instead of being connected to the circle of magic-users, his wires stretched across the floor, out of the circle and over to a bank of computer consoles set up near one section of the wall. The equipment was extremely high-tech and reminded me of the holographic display table in Varvara's war room. This was a different configuration of machinery, but there was no mistaking how advanced it was.
Gregor stood outside the circle. The real Gregor, or at least the giant insect guise familiar to me from years of going to him for information: a human-sized roach standing upright on a quartet of segmented legs, obsidian gems in place of eyes, antennae in constant motion as they greedily drank in all sensory data in his vicinity. And standing next to Gregor, mired in the same black gunk that imprisoned the abducted magic-users, was Devona.
"It's about time you got here," she said, smiling.
The relief I felt upon seeing my love alive was so strong it nearly knocked me to my knees.
"Sorry it took so long," I said. "We ran into a few problems along the way."
"Don't you always?" Devona said.
I held up my right hand with the word Ulterion scratched into the palm. "Thanks for the message. But one thing puzzles me: how did you hide my hand from Gregor?"
"It hid itself," she said. "As soon as we arrived, it scuttled off behind the computer banks and stayed there until Gregor was busy, then it crawled back over to me. I had the idea to scratch a message into it with my teeth, and then I put a reverser in it and watched it teleport back to you." Devona turned to Gregor. "You really should've kept me in a trance, you know. Or at least searched me and taken the reverser away before I could use it."