Ada gave Daeman a quick hug and moved close to Harman, slipping her arm around him. “How is Ody …” she began.
“Noman’s still alive, but only barely,” Harman said softly. “He’s lost too much blood. His breathing is becoming more and more difficult. Loes thinks that he’ll die within the next hour or two. We’re trying to decide what to do.” He touched her lower back. “Ada, Daeman has brought us some terrible news about his mother.”
Ada looked at her friend, wondering if his mother had simply refused to come to Ardis. She and Daeman had visited Marina twice in the past eight months, and neither time had they come close to convincing the older woman.
“She’s dead,” said Daeman. “Caliban killed her and everyone else in the domi tower.”
Ada bit her knuckle until it almost bled and then said, “Oh, Daeman, I am so, so sorry …” And then, realizing what he’d said, she whispered, “Caliban?” She had convinced herself from Harman’s stories about Prospero’s Isle that the creature had died up there. “Caliban?” she repeated stupidly. Her dream was still with her like a weight on her neck. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” said Daeman.
Ada put her arms around him, but Daeman’s body was as tight and rigid as a rock. He patted her shoulder almost absently. Ada wondered if he was in shock.
The group resumed discussing the night’s defense of Ardis Hall.
The voynix had attacked just before midnight—at least a hundred of them, perhaps a hundred and fifty; it was hard to tell in the dark and rain—and they had rushed at least three out of the four sides of the palisade perimeter. It was the largest and certainly the most coordinated attack the voynix had ever carried out against Ardis.
The defenders had killed them until just before dawn—first setting the huge braziers alight, burning the precious kerosene and naphtha saved for that purpose, illuminating the walls and fields beyond the walls—and then showering volley upon volley of aimed bow-and-crossbow fire onto the rushing forms.
Arrows and bolts didn’t always penetrate a voynix’s carapace or leathery hood—more often than not they didn’t—so the defenders expended a huge percentage of their arrows and bolts. Dozens of the voynix had fallen—Loes reported that his team had counted fifty-three voynix corpses in the fields and woods at first light.
Some of the things had gotten to the walls and leapt to the ramparts—voynix could jump thirty feet and more from a standing start, like huge grasshoppers—but the mass of pikes and reserve fighters with swords had stopped any from getting to the house. Eight of Ardis’s people had been hurt, but only two seriously: a woman named Kirik with a badly broken arm, and Laman, a friend of Petyr’s, with four fingers lopped off—not by a voynix’s blades, but from a fellow defender’s ill-timed swing of a sword.
What had turned the tide was the sonie.
Harman launched the oval disk from the ancient jinker platform high on Ardis Hall’s gabled rooftop. He flew it from its center-forward niche.
The flying machine had six shallow, cushioned indentations for people lying prone, but Petyr, Loes, Reman, and Hannah had knelt in their niches, shooting down from the sonie, the three men wielding all of Ardis’s flechette rifles and Hannah firing the finest crossbow she’d ever crafted.
Harman couldn’t go lower than about sixty feet because of the voynix’s amazing leaping abilities. But that was close enough. Even in the dark and the rain, even with the voynix scuttling as fast as cockroaches and leaping like giant grasshoppers on a griddle, the sustained flechette and crossbow fire dropped the creatures in their tracks. Harman flew the sonie in among the tall trees at the bottom and top of the hill, the defenders on the palisade ramparts shot flaming arrows and catapult-launched balls of burning, hissing naphtha to illuminate the night. The voynix scattered, regrouped, and attacked six more times before finally disappearing, some toward the river far down the hill from Ardis and the rest into the hills to the north.
“But why did they stop attacking?” asked the young woman named Peaen. “Why’d they leave?”
“What do you mean?” said Petyr. “We killed a third of them.”
Harman crossed his arms and glared out at the softly falling snow. “I know what Peaen means. It’s a good question. Why did they break off the attack? We’ve never seen a voynix react to pain. They die… but they don’t complain about it. Why didn’t they all keep coming until they overran us or died?”
“Because someone or something recalled them,” Daeman said.
Ada glanced at him. Daeman’s face was almost slack, his voice dull, his eyes not quite focused on anything. For the last nine months, Daeman’s energy and determination had deepened and visibly increased daily. Now he was listless, seemingly indifferent to the conversation and the people around him. Ada felt sure that his mother’s death had almost undone him—perhaps it would yet do so.
“If the voynix were recalled, who recalled them?” asked Hannah.
No one spoke.
“Daeman,” Harman said, “please tell your story again, for Ada. And add any detail you left out the first time.” More men and women had gathered in the long room. Everyone looked tired. No one spoke or asked questions as Daeman gave his story again, his voice a dull monotone.
He told of the slaughter at his mother’s domi, the stack of skulls, the presence of the turin cloth on the table—the only thing not splattered with blood—and how he activated it later when he’d faxed somewhere else; he didn’t specify where exactly. He told of the appearance of the hole above the city of Paris Crater and about his glimpse of something large emerging from it—something that seemed to scuttle about on impossible sets of giant hands.
He explained how he had faxed away to regain his composure, then faxed to the Ardis node—the guards at the small fort there told him of the movement of voynix they’d glimpsed all night, the torches were lit and every man was at the walls, and about the sounds of fighting and flashes of torches and naphtha they’d seen from the direction of Ardis Hall. Daeman had been tempted to start toward Ardis on foot but the men at the barricades there at the fax pavilion were positive it’d be certain death to try that walk in the dark—they’d counted more than seventy voynix slipping past across meadows and into the woods, headed toward the great house.
Daeman explained how he’d left the turin cloth with Casman and Greogi, the two captains of the guard there, and directed one of them to fax to Chom or somewhere safe with the turin if the voynix overran the fax pavilion before he got back.
“We plan to fax out if those bastards attack us,” said Greogi. “We’ve made plans on who goes when and in which order, while others provide covering fire until it’s their turn. We’re not planning to die to protect this pavilion.”
Daeman had nodded and faxed back to Paris Crater.
He told the others now that if he had chosen the closer-in Invalid Hotel node to the more distant Guarded Lion, he would have died. All the center of Paris Crater had been transformed. The hole in space was still there—weak sunlight streaming out—but the center of the city itself had been encased in a webbed glacier of blue ice.
“Blue ice?” interrupted Ada. “It was that cold?”
“Very cold near the stuff,” said Daeman. “But not so bad just a few yards away. Just chilly and raining, It wasn’t really ice, I don’t think. Just something chill and crystalline—cold but organic, like spiderwebs rising out of icebergs—and the blocks and webs of the stuff covered the old domi towers and boulevards all around the crater in the heart of Paris Crater.”
“Did you see that… thing… you saw come through the hole?” asked Emme.