Daeman lay on his stomach near the edge, feeling the egg shifting in his rucksack as if it were alive, wanting to hatch, and he had to concentrate on not weeping. There had been scrabblings in the tunnel openings and crevasses he’d passed—more hands searching, he was sure. He’d seen none up here in the starlight and ringlight atop the ice mass, but the dome behind him was glowing more brightly than ever.
Setebos is missing his egg.
His? thought Daeman, resisting the urge to laugh since hysteria might be right behind the softest giggle.
Something at the edge of the bottomless abyss ahead of him caught his eye. Daeman pulled himself forward on his elbows.
One of his nails with a tatter of yellow cloth attached.
This was the ice chimney only a hundred and fifty yards from the Guarded Lion node where he’d faxed in to Paris Crater.
Weeping openly now, Daeman hammered in the last of his ice nails, bent it, secured the rope—not even bothering to knot it in the rappelling knot he’d learned so he could slide it free when he reached the bottom—and heaving himself over the edge, he let himself down into the darkness.
Leaving the rope behind, Daeman staggered and crawled the last hundred yards or so. There was one last junction, marked by his yellow tatters of cloth, then he had to crawl, and then he was out and sliding into the Guarded Lion fax pavilion where he could stand up on a solid floor. The faxpad glowed softly on its pedestal in the center of the circular node.
The naked shape hit him from the side, sending him sliding across the floor, his crossbow skittering on tile.
The thing—Caliban or calibani, he couldn’t tell in the blue darkness—wrapped long fingers around Daeman’s throat even as yellow teeth snapped at his face.
Daeman rolled again, tried to throw the clinging shape off, but the naked form hung on with its legs and spatulate, prehensile toes even as it clung tight with its long arms and powerful hands.
The egg! thought Daeman, trying not to land on his back as the two surged back and forth, crashing into the faxpad pedestal.
Then he was free for a second and leaping for the crossbow against the far wall. The amphibian man-shape snarled and grabbed him, throwing Daeman up against the ice. The yellow eyes and yellow teeth glowed in the blue gloom.
Daeman had fought Caliban before and this wasn’t Caliban—this fiend was smaller, not quite as strong, not quite as fast, but terrible enough. The teeth snapped at Daeman’s eyes.
The human got his left palm under the calibani’s chin and forced the jaw up, the scaly face with its flat nose arching up and back, the yellow eyes glaring. Daeman felt strength flowing in with the rush of the last of his adrenaline, and he tried to snap the creature’s neck by forcing its head back.
The calibani’s head whipped like a snake and it bit off two of the fingers on Daeman’s straining left hand.
The man howled and fell away. The calibani swung its arms wide, paused to swallow fingers, and leaped.
Daeman swept the crossbow up with his good right hand and fired both bolts. The calibani was thrown backward, impaled on the ice wall with one of the long, iron, barbed bolts protruding through its upper shoulder into the ice and the other through its palm, its hand raised next to its howling face. The naked creature writhed, pulled, snarled, and snapped one of the bolts free.
Daeman also howled. He leaped to his feet, pulled the knife from his belt, and rammed the long blade up through the calibani’s underjaw, up through its soft palate and into its brain. Then he pressed against the length of the calibani’s long body like a lover and twisted the blade around—twisted again, again, and then again—and kept twisting until the obscene writhing against him stopped.
He fell back onto the tile, cradling his mangled hand. Incredibly, there was no bleeding. The thermskin glove had closed around the stumps of the two amputated fingers, but the pain made him want to vomit.
He could do that, and he did, kneeling and throwing up until he could vomit no more.
There was a scrabbling from one or more of the tunnels on the opposite wall.
Daeman stood, jerked the long knife from the calibani’s underjaw—the creature’s body sagged but was held up by the bolt through its shoulder—and then he retrieved the other bolt, rocking it loose, picked up the crossbow, and crossed to the faxpad.
Something surged out of the glowing tunnel entrance behind him.
Daeman faxed into daylight at the Ardis Hall node. He staggered away from the faxpad there, fumbled a bolt out of his pack, dropped it in the groove in his crossbow, and used his foot to cock the massive mechanism. He aimed the crossbow at the faxpad node and waited.
Nothing came through.
After a long minute, he lowered the weapon and staggered out into the sunlight.
It looked to be early afternoon here at the Ardis node. There were no guards around. The palisade wall here had been pulled down in a dozen places. The carcasses of at least a score of dead voynix lay all around the fax pavilion, but other than streaks and smears and trails of human blood leading off to the meadow and into the forest, there was no sign of the humans who had been left behind to guard the pavilion.
Daeman’s hand hurt so terribly that his entire body and skull became only an echo to that throbbing pain, but he cradled his hand to his chest, set another bolt in the crossbow, and staggered out to the road. It was a little less than a mile and a half to Ardis Hall.
Ardis Hall was gone.
Daeman had approached cautiously, staying off the road and moving through the trees most of the way, wading the narrow river upstream from the bridge. He had approached the palisade and Ardis from the northeast, through the woods, ready to call out quickly to the sentries rather than be shot as a voynix.
There were no sentries. For half an hour, Daeman crouched at the edge of the woods and watched. Nothing moved except the crows and magpies feeding on the remnants of human bodies. Then he moved carefully around to the left, coming as close to the barracks and east entrance to the Ardis palisade as he could before coming out of the cover of the trees.
The palisade had been breached in a hundred places. Much of the wall was down. Hannah’s beautiful cupola and hearth had been burned and then knocked over. The line of barracks and tents where half of the four hundred people of Ardis had lived had all burned down. Ardis Hall itself—the grand hall that had weathered more than two thousand winters—had been reduced to a few carbon-smeared stone chimneys, burned and tumbled rafters, and heaps of collapsed stone.
The place stank of smoke and death. There were scores of dead voynix on what had been Ada’s front yard, more piled where the porch had stood, but mixed in with the shattered carapaces were remains of hundreds of men and women. Daeman couldn’t identify any of the corpses he could see around the burned ruins of the house—there a small charred corpse, seemingly too small to be an adult, burned black, the charred and flaking arms raised in a boxer’s posture, here a rib cage and skull picked almost clean by the birds, there a woman lying seemingly unharmed in the sooty grass, but—when Daeman rushed to her and rolled her over—missing a face.
Daeman knelt in the cold, bloodied grass and tried to weep. The best he could do was wave his arms to chase away the heavy crows and hopping magpies that kept trying to return to the corpses.
The sun was going down. The light was fading from the sky.
Daeman rose to look at the other bodies—flung here and there like bundles of abandoned laundry on the frozen earth, some lying under voynix carcasses, others lying alone, some fallen in clumps as if the people had huddled together at the end. He had to find Ada. Identify and bury her and as many of the others as he could before trying to make his way back to the fax pavilion.