Ruiz sighed and tapped at the wall with the butt of his ruptor. It made a dull clunk. He moved a few meters down the corridor and tapped again. Was there a difference in the clunk?
He shook his head ruefully. The flaw in this approach was that if these tunnels did indeed parallel the inhabited tunnels, he would be constantly announcing his position to everyone on the other side. Though perhaps they already knew where he was.
He tried another spot and this time he heard a definite clink.
“Might as well be hung for a goat,” he said to himself. He set one of his limpet mines against the wall and set it for a penetrating explosion. As he trotted off around the curve of the tunnel, he heard Nisa’s clone ask, “What’s a goat?”
The mine detonated, and an instant later Ruiz heard the shrieks of the wounded.
The world had grown very strange for Nisa by the time they reached the entrance to the enclave’s habitations — a deep narrow shaft, down which a ladder descended into red darkness. She edged forward to look, but an armored man pushed her roughly back, as if fearing that she might fling herself down the hole, dragging the rest of the prisoners with her. She laughed; what a foolish idea. She had long ago passed that point. Now her overriding emotion was curiosity. What new weirdness would her life next serve up to her?
Another disfigured person scrambled from the pit and went up to their guide. The man, who wore intricate herringbone patterns of eyebrows on his otherwise hairless chest, spoke in an excited whisper to the guide. Nisa watched, repulsed and fascinated. The patterns seemed to move over the man’s skin, as active as a swarm of hairy insects.
Corean took the guide by the arm. “Soosen,” she said. “What’s going on?”
The guide put her nippled hands to her face. “Uncomfortable events. The invaders have separated. We’ve lost contact with one of them, and the other has just broken into the Inner Spaces.”
Corean gave the woman a little shake. “How close to the Machine is he?”
“Why? He would not really hurt the Machine, surely?”
Corean jerked her close, and spoke in a low intense voice. “Never ask me questions, Gencha garbage. Why else would he be down here? Of course he would hurt the Machine. How close is he?”
Soosen opened her mouth, as if to argue, but apparently her loss of humanity had not made her stupid. “He is relatively close to the Machine. If he knows the way, he can be there in a thousand heartbeats or less.”
Corean cursed ripely. “How far are we from the Machine?”
“Much farther.”
Corean turned away, shaking her head. To Nisa’s drugged perceptions, she seemed as dangerous as a dustbear, as unpredictable, as horrifyingly strong. The slaver’s armor shimmered with hallucinatory color, imaginary light sweeping over the polished metal.
Corean called Kroone to her. The squad leader trotted to her, holding his weapon high; his movements reminded Nisa of a dog’s.
“We must travel fast now, Kroone; the coffle will slow us down and make us vulnerable. But I want to keep the Pharaohans in reserve… I’ll never underestimate Ruiz Aw again. So. I’ll leave you here with five of your men to guard the prisoners. The Moc and your two best men will go on with me. Pick them for me.”
Kroone bobbed his helmeted head and gestured two of his men forward.
“Wait until I send for you, Kroone,” said Corean. She turned to look toward Nisa, the red light shining on her armor. “I’ll see him first, it seems. But I’ll save a piece to show you, slut.”
Then she turned to the pit and nodded at Soosen the guide. The woman with the ears on her arms made a sorrowful face and started down the ladder. The Moc followed, its insectile body moving with a flickering grace.
“Good-bye,” Corean said to Nisa, and was gone.
Ruiz, pressed to the wall beside the hole he had made, readied himself and then peeked into the jagged opening. Instantly he jerked his head back, but no fire came through the hole. He risked another look.
A half-dozen bodies lay on the other side of the wall. They had been monstrously grotesque before the explosion, but now they were only dead or dying people, returned to humanity by their blood and pain.
He darted through the opening, ready to defend himself, but nothing moved, except for the slow writhing of two of his victims. A line of dark spatters led away up the tunnel, as if the least badly hurt member of the group had run away.
Scattered among the bodies were the fragments of crude megaphonelike devices. It came to Ruiz that they had been following him, listening at the thin spots in the wall.
He ran along the trail of blood, hoping that human instinct would make the survivor flee toward home.
Somnire had said that the Orpheus Machine was kept at the core of the enclave, where the tunnels were most thickly inhabited — by the Gencha and their servants.
Nisa sat with the other prisoners on a bench cut from the wall. It reminded Nisa uncomfortably of the niches in the catacombs beneath her father’s palace, where royal corpses were laid to rest. She shifted from one uncomfortable vision to another — each seen from the corner of her eye, tenuous and incomplete. She saw the faces of lost friends, the suffering victims of Expiations she had attended with her father, the gruesome illustrations in a book of dark fairy tales she had owned as a child. Once Flomel turned to her and she saw the mask he had worn for her Expiation — the dreadful countenance of Bhas. She jerked back; at the same moment he shrank away from her. She wondered what awful thing he had seen in her face.
She glanced at Dolmaero, whose broad face glistened with sweat, but who seemed remarkably unafraid. His features seemed somehow less distorted. He patted her hand and spoke in a voice of comfort. “This is only a new way of riding the snake, Noble Person. The visions can’t hurt you. Give heed to their lessons. Try to learn from them — if nothing else, the attempt is calming.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. She looked at Molnekh, who retained his grinning-skull face. She squinted and thumped the side of her head with the heel of her hand. Just for an instant she saw his real features beneath the illusory bone. He seemed unmoved by the visions.
“Are you not at all frightened, Molnekh?” she asked.
His smile widened to show his long yellow teeth. “You forget. I’ve been here before.”
Oh, yes, she thought. So you have. His reply reminded her of what in all likelihood awaited her. She wondered if it hurt to have one’s soul removed.
She heard a low hiss — and somehow the sound conveyed some quality of mortality. One of Kroone’s men staggered and fell.
The others dropped behind the various bits of cover Kroone had posted them by, but not before another hiss sounded and another man had gone down.
The cavern grew still. After a minute Kroone spoke in a strained voice. “Who’s there? What do you want? We’re here on the authority of Corean Heiclaro, proprietor of this place — and also with the permission of the Gencha.”
No one replied.
“Don’t trifle with us,” Kroone shouted in a voice that cracked with fear.
One of his men crawled over to one of the fallen men. “Dead, Kroone,” he reported in a low voice. “Pinbeamed through the bellows of his neck joint. Fancy shooting.”
“I know the Deltan armor,” someone said, though the source of the voice seemed oddly general, as though it issued from several speakers scattered around the perimeter of the cavern. “SeedCorp is so cheap. Besides, I have an acquaintance who occasionally wears the stuff.”
Nisa felt hope begin to warm her heart. She recognized that voice. Ruiz Aw had apparently arrived to rescue her, with the same miraculous timing he had always displayed in the past. Nightmares still chased each other through the edges of her vision, but she felt a great deal better, suddenly.