Sol Weintraub stood near an eastern window, holding his daughter up so that soft light fell across her cheek and curled fist. “All that matters little now,” he said. “Let’s find a corner free of carnage where we can sleep and eat our evening meal.”
“Are we going on tonight?” asked Brawne Lamia.
“To the Tombs?” asked Silenus, showing real surprise for the first time on the voyage. “You’d go to the Shrike in the dark?”
Lamia shrugged. “What difference does it make?”
The Consul stood near a leaded glass door leading to a stone balcony and closed his eyes. His body still lurched and balanced to the movement of the tramcar. The night and day of travel above the peaks had blurred together in his mind, lost in the fatigue of almost three days without sleep and his rising tension. He opened his eyes before he dozed off standing up. “We’re tired,” he said. “We’ll stay here tonight and go down in the morning.”
Father Hoyt had gone out onto the narrow ledge of balcony. He leaned on a railing of jagged stone. “Can we see the Tombs from here?”
“No,” said Silenus. “They’re beyond that rise of hills. But see those white things to the north and west a bit … those things gleaming like shards of broken teeth in the sand?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the City of Poets. King Billy’s original site for Keats and for all things bright and beautiful. The locals say that it’s haunted now by headless ghosts.”
“Are you one of them?” asked Lamia.
Martin Silenus turned to say something, looked a moment at the pistol still in her hand, shook his head, and turned away.
Footsteps echoed from an unseen curve of staircase and Colonel Kassad reentered the room. “There are two small storerooms above the dining hall,” he said. “They have a section of balcony outside but no other access than this stairway. Easy to defend. The rooms are … clean.”
Silenus laughed. “Does that mean nothing can get at us or that, when something does get at us, we’ll have no way to get out?”
“Where would we go?” asked Sol Weintraub.
“Where indeed?” said the Consul. He was very tired. He lifted his gear and took one handle of the heavy Möbius cube, waiting for Father Hoyt to lift the other end. “Let’s do what Kassad says. Find a space to spend the night. Let’s at least get out of this room. It stinks of death.”
Dinner was the last of their dried rations, some wine from Silenus’s last bottle, and some stale cake which Sol Weintraub had brought along to celebrate their last evening together. Rachel was too little to eat the cake, but she took her milk and went to sleep on her stomach on a mat near her father.
Lenar Hoyt removed a small balalaika from his pack and strummed a few chords.
“I didn’t know you played,” said Brawne Lamia.
“Poorly.”
The Consul rubbed his eyes. “I wish we had a piano.”
“You do have one,” said Martin Silenus.
The Consul looked at the poet.
“Bring it here,” said Silenus. “I’d welcome a Scotch.”
“What are you talking about?” snapped Father Hoyt. “Make sense.”
“His ship,” said Silenus. “Do you remember our dear, departed Voice of the Bush Masteen telling our Consul friend that his secret weapon was that nice Hegemony singleship sitting back at Keats Spaceport? Call it up, Your Consulship. Bring it on in.”
Kassad moved away from the stairway where he had been placing tripbeams. “The planet’s datasphere is dead. The comsats are down. The orbiting FORCE ships are on tightbeam. How is he supposed to call it?”
It was Lamia who spoke. “A fatline transmitter.”
The Consul moved his stare to her.
“Fatline transmitters are the size of buildings,” said Kassad.
Brawne Lamia shrugged. “What Masteen said made sense. If I were the Consul … if I were one of the few thousand individuals in the entire damn Web to own a singleship … I’d be damn sure I could fly it in on remote if I needed it. The planet’s too primitive to depend on its comm net, the ionosphere’s too weak for shortwave, the comsats are the first things to go in a skirmish … I’d call it by fatline.”
“And the size?” said the Consul.
Brawne Lamia returned the diplomat’s level gaze. “The Hegemony can’t yet build portable fatline transmitters. There are rumors that the Ousters can.”
The Consul smiled. From somewhere there came a scrape and then the sound of metal crashing.
“Stay here,” said Kassad. He removed a deathwand from his tunic, canceled the tripbeams with his tactical comlog, and descended from sight.
“I guess we’re under martial law now,” said Silenus when the Colonel was gone. “Mars ascendant.”
“Shut up,” said Lamia.
“Do you think it’s the Shrike?” asked Hoyt.
The Consul made a gesture. “The Shrike doesn’t have to clank around downstairs. It can simply appear … here.”
Hoyt shook his head. “I mean the Shrike that has been the cause of everyone’s … absence. The signs of slaughter here in the Keep.”
“The empty villages might be the result of the evacuation order,” said the Consul. “No one wants to stay behind to face the Ousters. The SDF forces have been running wild. Much of the carnage could be their doing.”
“With no bodies?” laughed Martin Silenus. “Wishful thinking. Our absent hosts downstairs dangle now on the Shrike’s steel tree. Where, ere long, we too will be.”
“Shut up,” Brawne Lamia said tiredly.
“And if I don’t,” grinned the poet, “will you shoot me, madam?”
“Yes.”
The silence lasted until Colonel Kassad returned. He reactivated the tripbeams and turned to the group seated on packing crates and flowfoam cubes. “It was nothing. Some carrion birds—harbingers, I think the locals call them—had come in through the broken glass doors in the dining hall and were finishing the feast.”
Silenus chuckled. “Harbingers. Very appropriate.”
Kassad sighed, sat on a blanket with his back to a crate, and poked at his cold food. A single lantern brought from the windwagon lighted the room and the shadows were beginning to mount the walls in the corners away from the door to the balcony. “It’s our last night,” said Kassad. “One more story to tell.” He looked at the Consul.
The Consul had been twisting his slip of paper with the number 7 scrawled on it. He licked his lips. “What’s the purpose? The purpose of the pilgrimage has been destroyed already.”
The others stirred.
“What do you mean?” asked Father Hoyt.
The Consul crumpled the paper and threw it into a corner. “For the Shrike to grant a request, the band of pilgrims must constitute a prime number. We had seven. Masteen’s … disappearance … reduces us to six. We go to our deaths now with no hope of a wish being granted.”
“Superstition,” said Lamia.
The Consul sighed and rubbed his brow. “Yes. But that is our final hope.”
Father Hoyt gestured toward the sleeping infant. “Can’t Rachel be our seventh?”
Sol Weintraub rubbed his beard. “No. A pilgrim must come to the Tombs of his or her own free will.”
“But she did once,” said Hoyt. “Maybe it qualifies.”
“No,” said the Consul.
Martin Silenus had been writing notes on a pad but now he stood and paced the length of the room. “Jesus Christ, people. Look at us. We’re not six fucking pilgrims, we’re a mob. Hoyt there with his cruciform carrying the ghost of Paul Duré. Our ‘semisentient’ erg in the box there. Colonel Kassad with his memory of Moneta. M. Brawne there, if we are to believe her tale, carrying not only an unborn child but a dead Romantic poet. Our scholar with the child his daughter used to be. Me with my muse. The Consul with whatever fucking baggage he’s brought to this insane trek. My God, people, we should have received a fucking group rate for this trip.”