Menelaus knew the risk, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. Paralyzed from head to toe as he was, he still had his neural implants. Were they unaffected by the nanite nerve-seekers hidden in the food?
It was one of those ironies of life that he could not, at the moment, get a signal to the sarcophagus a few yards away, but that he could get a signal to his cloak of tent material, which had emitters and receivers designed to interface with the gems that controlled the automata.
So when the Judge of Ages in his long red robes and long white wig pointed his short-bladed sword and uttered his kingly command, the automaton twitched, and bucked, throwing an astonished Preceptor Naar to the floor (much to the consternation of the dogs, who yowled); then the automaton stepped forward, and put Sir Guiden gently down on the dais beneath the shadow of the statue of Hades, and thus not far from where the powered armor rested. The automaton then bowed to the throne, and, leaning too far forward as it bowed, with a whine of gyros toppled with a horrid clatter to the floor, limp and sprawling as a dead thing.
Sir Guiden rose unsteadily to his feet, his hands upon the powered armor as if leaning on it for support. He spoke without turning his head in Latin, “Did you arrange that? That hurt.” But Menelaus, paralyzed, could not answer.
Scipio, showing more presence of mind (and acting ability) than Menelaus could have displayed in like circumstance, drew his red robes about him, and seated himself once more on the throne, holding aloft the black crystal sword. This simple gesture was done with such dignity and majesty that the chamber fell silent, all eyes staring at him. The dog things were as frozen as Menelaus.
And the men of various eras in the chamber looked at the black sword in awe, as if it were enchanted.
Only Naar, who was on the floor, chin propped up by one elbow, did not seem the least astonished or impressed. He was drumming the fingers of one hand against the floor, a gesture that seemed weirdly and casually human when done by a Blue Man. The gems on his coat were flickering, and his eyes were narrowed in thought as he looked first left and then right. Menelaus estimated Naar would deduce the truth of what had happened, and the origin of the signals, within four minutes.
Rada Lwa, who might be a stubborn fellow, but whose intelligence was above what was possible for unagumented humans, had at that moment deduced a truth of his own. He stepped up on the dais and pointed the misericorde at Scipio.
“Why is this man sitting as if in a judgment seat? Is he pretending to be the Judge of Ages? If so, you are fools. This is not Menelaus Montrose, but an imposter! I order any who understands my words to transmit them!”
But he did not say it in Spanish or in Korrekthotspeek. He said it in the data-compressed machine-squawk language of the Savants.
A voice from halfway across the chamber and from beneath the garish overalls Kine Larz wore emitted a chime and said back, “Understood, adored Montrose, first of all my programmers! I will comply!”
Menelaus remembered that data-speak was also the language of the Sylphs.
Almost too swiftly for any human eye to register, Alpha Yuen leaped like a tiger, and fell on Kine Larz. He ripped the man’s garment from neckline to buttocks, revealing the metal length of serpentine wrapped twice and thrice around his body. Yuen put his hand on the ornamented hilt of the serpentine and hissed a command. The metal length gave off a jolt of electric force, making Larz scream and dance, and then it flexed and straightened violently enough to draw blood, throwing Larz to the ground like a child’s top that spins off the edge of a table.
The serpentine was now straight as a spearshaft, and the leading edge of smartmetal flexed and flattened, forming a spearhead that hummed and sang with electric power.
Yuen, grim and silent, his one eye blazing, raised the weapon above the cowering Larz in both hands—but halted in awe when the voice of Arroglint the Fortunate again spoke from the weapon, this time in his native tongue.
In Chimerical, and then in Virginian, the calm and soothing tones of a machine voice rang out: “You are fools, my adored ones. The man sitting in the judgment seat is not Menelaus Montrose, but an imposter.”
And at that same moment, Kine Larz, moving with the speed of panic, scuttled like a crab away from the awe-frozen Yuen, rose and sprinted, and took refuge behind Scipio, calling out “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” in Chimerical.
And from the jeweled pistols of the Blue Men came a chime of noise, and a chorus of voices, as alike to Arroglint’s as brothers’ voices, saying the same message in Intertextual, and again in Iatric. “The man sitting in the judgment seat is not Menelaus Montrose, but an imposter.” Meanwhile, Soorm (while all the eyes, and, more importantly, ears and noses, of all the dog things were straining toward the scene on the dais) sidled close to Oenoe, and, in Natural, repeated to her what was being said.
Everyone in the chamber understood one of those languages, except for Scipio (who had, after all, not studied very deeply how to be a Savant). But he understood what had happened when all the faces in the chamber turned toward him, and not one face looked very pleased, not one looked at all fooled. And Kine Larz slid away from behind Scipio, and hid behind the iron throne, and out of the line of fire.
Scipio cleared his throat. “I can explain…,” he said in English, a language no one understood.
11. On the Nose
Menelaus saw that there was nothing else to be done. So he used the implants again to order the smartmetal material he wore as a cloak to relax like an accordion, straighten, and fling his paralyzed body at the sarcophagus at just the correct angle that some part of his naked flesh would touch the library cloth control surface.
The throw was not perfect, as the cloak was not built for this, but Menelaus had calculated the various motions of his body and the intervening air nicely, and the five dog things were taken by complete surprise. He struck the two squatting atop the sarcophagus and sent them toppling muzzle over tail in a clash of dropped cutlasses and muskets, and musketballs spilled from an improperly tied poke like marbles, brightly clattering and slithering.
Unfortunately, one of the dogs with better reflexes stabbed at him with a bayonet, and he had to harden the Bernoulli-curved cloak hems he was using as lifting surfaces into momentary metallic armor to parry the blow, and fold a hem into a razor-sharp blade to slash the creature and drive it yowling back in a spray of blood.
This made Menelaus deviate, but only slightly: he landed heavily on the control surface, but faceup rather than facedown, and the metal of his hood was between him and the spot he had to touch to allow his implants to trigger the sarcophagus controls. The dogs loomed up to each side as he lay, looking down with anger and astonishment and curiosity in their canine eyes.
It was just a stroke of good luck that Mentor Ull spoke up just at that moment. He cried in Iatric: “I deduce some invisible magnetic force in the chamber smote Naar’s automaton, and sent Beta Sterling Anubis toppling. Examine the signal environment! Discover the source!” And more than half of the Blue Men bent their heads and lit up the gems on their coats.
This gave Menelaus the moment he needed to send another command through his implants to his cloak, which flexed and flipped his paralyzed and motionless body neatly over like a flapjack. He slammed nose-first and very painfully into the library cloth coating part of the surface of the sarcophagus.
But it was enough of a contact, nose-to-cloth, to make the connection. Menelaus blessed his nose, and promised never to mock its great size again.
His implants triggered. The slim golden capsule the Linderlings had given him throbbed, and he could feel the pulse of power in his back teeth. Signals went from Menelaus’ brain, to receptors placed about his brain stem, to emitters placed in his chest cavity, to the node of rod-logic crystals given him by the Linderlings, to a transmitter in the golden tube surface, to the library cloth, which, sensing the DNA pattern of an authorized user in the pores of the nose of Menelaus, had switched on external input-output ports, small as pinpoints, dotting the cloth surface.