In his teeth and prefrontal cortex, Menelaus felt the passcodes being accepted like the click of tumblers falling nearly into place. Authorization Accepted! The circuits seemed to be in working order: the response was the standard Standing By! The motive engines under the sarcophagus hull changed pitch slightly, revving up. The weapons click-clacked as live rounds were jacked into firing chambers.
The coffin was mated to the local room circuits. Through it, Menelaus sent and received similar confirmations from the engines controlling the door hinges, the guns in the roof, electric mines in the floor, and the automatics behind the walls.
Checklists of ammunition magazines and energy levels flickered like green shadows through his brain. Ready!
There were roughly one hundred guns hidden in the pineapple-shaped ornaments hanging from the ceiling: not quite enough to put an unseen pinpoint beam on everyone’s head, whether blue or canine, but near enough.
He could suppress the ignition command so that any musketball fired could still kill a man if it struck him in a vital area, but without the incendiary, casualities would be far fewer.
He established the targeting list and action-reaction priorities. Aim!
First one, then several, then all the Blue Men perked up, startled, eyes wide, gems on their coats glittering, and the gray twins turned their slitted goggles toward Menelaus. Alalloel did not turn her head, but her three pairs of antennae, gold, silver, and blue, perked straight up like exclamation points.
“Achieve alertness!” called out Yndelf in Iatric, drawing his jeweled pistol, which was glowing bright as multicolored flame. “Oddity has been detected! Something manipulates the environs electronically! Dangerous instruments are target-locked on us!”
Yndech and Ydmoy drew their pistols. The two older men, Orovoy and Saaev, both drew braces of pistols, one in each hand, looking like absurd miniature gunfighters. Ull once again tucked his hands each into the opposite sleeves, Mandarin-style; Menelaus wondered what the energy source at his elbow might be.
The front rank of dogs knelt, muskets to shoulder, and the rear rank raised their muskets also, pointing at the man on the throne. The dog officer, a Collie, tail wagging with excitement, drew its sword in a slithering ring of steel, raised the blade, and looked to Ull, awaiting permission to give the order to fire.
Scipio, staring down scores of barrels pointed at him, did not so much as turn a hair, but assumed a stern and calm expression, and held it. Menelaus could not turn his paralyzed head to see this directly, but the images from the hundred targeting cameras in the ceiling were being fed directly into his visual cortex, and he felt a moment of family pride at Scipio’s aplomb.
Naar rose slowly to his feet, looking bored, and brushed the dust off his coat. The coat-gems under his fingers lit up, and to either side of him his line of cannon-bearing automata stirred, straightened, and raised their heavy guns. One of them stooped and hoisted Naar to a perch atop.
Ull said to Yndelf, “Whence originates the signal?”
Yndelf was pointing his glittering pistol at the sarcophagus, or at the body of Montrose paralyzed and helpless atop it.
All this conversation was in Iatric. So it was that when Soorm, in an absolutely serious tone, and with no expression possible on his fixed, seal-like and goggle-eyed face, shouted, “Quickly! The real Judge of Ages is here! He is angered! Rescue our translator Beta Anubis from the magnetic curse of the coffin before it flings him again! Undo the paralysis!” the Blue Men not only understood him, but Preceptor Yndech, much less accustomed to trickery and deception than a Hormagaunt of Soorm’s age, actually commanded the dog things Menelaus had attacked to come to his aid. In the same moment, Yndech’s coat gems lit up, and Menelaus felt a tingling, burning sensation start from his lower spine and spread throughout his trunk and limbs and head.
Menelaus, head lolling, arms flopping, allowed the helpful dog things to pull him to his rubbery feet, but he could not suppress the laughter that welled up from his lungs.
The dogs near him shrank back, alarmed by that laughter, which rang with madness.
Docent Aarthroy, the boy, whose coat was almost a solid mass of glittering gems, raised his hand and spoke. Menelaus had not heard his voice before. It was oddly flat yet rhythmic, just like the triune voice of the three Locusts, Crucxit, Axcit, and Litcec, had been. “Forgive if it happens to disturb. Significant information is apprehended. Relict of coffin labeled Beta Sterling Xenius Anubis, Proven in Battle of Mt. Erebus, Genetic Unknown, Line Unknown, Possibly Crotalinae, interment date A.D. 5292. Identified oddity! Relict possesses/employs third-order logic crystal energy system, multivariable channel neuroemission transponder and responder node, devised post-condition, object tracing number 6AS-46A-W5-BB963, technology comparable to object found in coffin Locust labeled Linderkeirthlin Laialin Inquiline Northeastern Region interment date A.D. 8866.” As he spoke, with one hand he pointed at Menelaus, and with the other at Keirthlin.
Naar peered calmly down over the edge of his machine, and said in a bored tone of voice, “I confirm Docent Aarthroy’s reading. Mentor Ull and Relict Soorm are mistaken. Relict Anubis is himself the source of the signals. He has primitive first-order short-range cybernetics channeled through a Linderling third-order node.”
“Too late!” laughed Menelaus, clutching for support at the supine image of his own head atop the sarcophagus lid, using the golden nose as a convenient hand grip. “Too slow on the uptake! Checkmate!”
There came a loud clattering from the walls and stalactite-shaped chandeliers. All of the pineapple ornaments banged open, one after another, with a noise like a hundred mousetraps snapping, and stubby little gunbarrels, their camera-eye lenses glittering, poked out of the openings.
12. Grand Entrance
They were interrupted by a commotion from the great doors. Now came a rumble, as of a slow drum, pounding. There was a murmur of awe from the gathered prisoners when a Giant stepped across the threshold.
The Giant strode forward on his immense legs, and the floor trembled at his footfall. It was like seeing an avalanche stride, or an iceberg on the northern seas. He ducked his head slightly to clear the vast doors, stepped within, halted, and drew himself up, casting his gaze over the room. His head was above the level of the chandeliers near him, so that while his massive shoulders and Herculean chest were brightly lit, his head was in half shadow. In this gloom, his yellow eyes glimmered, catlike.
The ten dog things escorting him were brought up short, and, seeing guns in the ceiling, bristled and whined. At their noise, alarmed, one hundred or so dogs, nearly half of the number in the chamber, turned and leveled weapons toward the Giant.
He stood at least fifteen feet tall. The tallest of the Witches was only level with his waist. Even Menelaus, who was tall for a man, was less than a child to him.
The Giant was not a pretty creature. The feet were toeless pads, and the legs were elephantine cylinders. The torso was disproportionately squat, and the chest and shoulders abnormally thick and wide. The hands were muscled, the fingers long and strong, but the last joint of the pinky of either hand was split like a Y into two smaller digits, flagella so fine that a watchmaker would envy them. The neck was a ring of muscle and flab that made the creature look like he was wearing a turtleneck sweater. Coarse hairs like the bristles of a rhinoceros stuck out from here and there from his flesh, which was the consistency of an orange peel. The head was an astonishing globe, large even for a body this size, in proportion as if the head of a baby had been perched on the body of a monster. The flesh of the scalp was thickly webbed with blue arteries like river deltas, implying a brain that needed more blood than a human brain. The facial features were coarse and gathered near the chin, making the beetling brow and vast dome of the skull even more grotesque.