Outside, Warrior dived for the stairs, scuttled away. “Come back!” Jim shouted at it, and jerked from his pocket the gun which he had for his protection, an azi against a Kontrin. Pol saw it, raised both hands and turned his face aside, miming peace.
Jim held the gun in both hands to steady it. “Max!” he shouted, panic hammering in him.
“Please,” Pol said fervently. “I’d not be shot by mistake.”
Steps tramped up the stairs, not human ones, but spurred feet which caught on the carpet fiber, with the hollow gasp of majat breathing. Warrior loomed up in the doorway again.
“Many, many,” it announced. “Trouble.”
Jim did not take his eyes off Pol-motioned nervously with the gun, indicated the chair. Pol subsided, his gaunt face anxious.
“Where’s Max?” Jim asked of Warrior.
“Down. All down in outside. Warrior-azi, yess. Much danger. Reds, golds, greens are grouping. Blues are here, Jim-unit. Kill this green, take taste to Mother, yesss.”
Pol looked for once sober, his hands held in plain sight. “Argue with it, azi.”
“Stay still!” Jim tried to control his breathing, tried to reason. “I hold this place,” he said. “No, Warrior. This is Raen’s. She’ll understand it when she comes.”
“Queen.” Warrior seemed to accept that logic. “Where? Where is Meth-maren queen, Jim?”
“I don’t know.”
Warrior clicked to itself, edged forward. “Mother wants. Mother sends Warriors out, seek, seek, find. I guard. This-chamber is no good, too high. Come, this-unit guides, down, down, where safety is, good places, deep.”
“No,” Pol advised softly, alarm in his voice.
“I trust Warrior more. Up, ser. Up. We’re going downstairs.”
Pol made a gesture of exasperation and rose, and this sudden lack of seriousness in him, Jim watched with the greatest apprehension. Pol sauntered out, past him, and Warrior led them downstairs, Jim last and with the gun at Pol’s back.
The center of the house, windowless, was plunged in darkness, blue lights bobbing and flaring on the walls and making strange shadows of their bearers. Majat-azi skipped about them, touching them, Pol as well. The Kontrin cursed them from him, and they laughed and scampered off, taking the light with them.
Other azi remained, in the blackness. “Jim,” Max’s voice said. “They urged us to come in. Was it right to do? I thought maybe we shouldn’t, but they pushed us and kept pushing.”
“You did right,” Jim said, although in his mind was the horrible possibility of being swept up with the majat-azi, herded deep below. “The Hald is with us. Watch him.”
“Tape-fed obstinance,” Pol’s voice came, outraged, for they laid hands on him. “If you would listen—”
“I won’t.”
“At least check comp.”
Jim hesitated. It ceased to be an attempt to unsettle him, began to seem plain advice. He felt his way aside, into the comp centre, shuddered as a majat-azi brushed his shoulder. He caught a slim female arm. “Stay, come,” he asked of her, for the light’s sake, and took her with him, into the face of the dead machinery, the dark screens.
But paper had fed out, printout, in the machine’s dying.
He was stricken, suddenly, with the realisation Pol had been urging him to what he should have done. He drew the majat-azi to the machine, tore off the print and laid it on the counter. “Light,” he said, “light,” and she lent it, leaning on his shoulder with her arm about him. He ignored her and ran through the messages as rapidly as he could read the dim print in azi-light. Most were of no meaning to him; he had known so. Pol might understand, and he knew that Pol would urge him to show them to him: but he dared not, would not. It was useless; the key to these was not in the tapes he had stolen.
JIM, one said plainly. STAND BY. EMERGENCY.
It was not signed. But only one who knew his name could have used a comp board.
Sent before her trouble, perhaps; the possibility hit his stomach like a blow, that she had needed him, and he had been upstairs, unhearing.
“Stay!” he begged of the azi, who had tired of what she did not understand. He caught at her wrist and held her light still upon the paper, ran his eye over the other messages.
JIM, the last said, BEWARE POL HALD.
He thought to check the time of transmission; it was not on this one, but on the one before…an ITAK message… One in the night and one in the morning.
He looked up, at a commotion in the doorway, where dancing azi-lights cast Pol Hald and Max and others into a flickering blue visibility.
Alive,his heart beat in him. Alive, alive, alive.
And they had let Pol in.
“Is it from her?” Pol asked. “Is it from her?”
“Max, get him down to the basement.”
Pol resisted; there were azi enough to hold him, though they had trouble moving him. “Please;” Jim said sharply, rolling up the precious message, and the struggle ceased. He felt the insistent hands of the majat-azi touching him, wanting something of him. He ignored her, for she was mad. “Please go,” he asked of the Kontrin. “Her orders, yes. This house is still hers.”
Pol went then, led by the guard-azi. Jim stood still in the dark, conscious of others who remained, majat shapes. All through the house bodies moved, and round about it, a never-ceasing stream.
“Warrior,” Jim asked, “Warrior? Raen’s alive. She sent a message through the comp before it died. Do you understand?”
“Yess.” A shadow scuttled forward. “Kethiuy-queen. Where?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know that But she’ll come.” He looked about him at the shapes in the dark, that flowed steadily toward the front doors. “Where are they going?”
“Tunnels,” Warrior answered. “Human-hive tunnels. Reds are moving to attack; golds, greens, all move, seek here, seek Kethiuy-queen. We fight in tunnels.”
“They’re coming up the subway,” Jim breathed.
“Yes. From port. Kontrin leads, green-hive: we taste this presence in reds. This-hive and blue-hive now touch; tunnel is finished. All come. Fight.” It sucked air, reached for him, touched nervously and uncertainly he sought to calm it, but Warrior would have none of it. It clicked its jaws and moved on, joining the dark stream of others that flowed toward the doors.
Azi went, majat-azi, bearing blue lights in one hand and weapons in the other, naked and wild. Warriors hastened them on. Jim tried to pass them, almost gathered up in their number, but that he ducked and went the other way, down the hall and down the stairs.
Blue azi-lights were there, hanging from majat fibre, and a draft breathed out of an earth-rimmed pit, the floor much trampled with muddy feet. Max and the other azi were there in a recess by the stairs. and Pol Hald among them.
Pol rose to his feet, looking up at him on the stairs. Azi surrounded him with weapons. “There’s nothing,” Pol said, “so dangerous as one who thinks he knows what he’s doing. If you had checked comp while it was still alive—when I told you to—you could have contacted her and been of some use.”
That was true, and it struck home. “Yes,” he admitted freely.
“Still,” Pol said, “I could help her.”
He shook his head. “No, ser. I won’t listen.” He sank down where he stood, on the steps. At the bottom a majat-azi huddled, a wretched thing, female, whose hands were torn and bleeding and whose tangled hair and naked body were equally muddied. It was uncommon: never had he seen one so undone. The azi’s sides heaved. She seemed ill. Perhaps her termination was on her, for she was not young.
“See to her,” he told one of the guard-azi. The man tried; others slid, and the woman would take a little water, but sank down again.
And suddenly it occurred to him that it was much quieter than it had been, the house silent; that of all the Workers which had laboured hereabouts—not one remained.
The tunnel breathed at them, a breath neither warm nor cold, but damp. And from deep within it, came a humming that was very far and strange.