The pounding of shoveler feet and their deafening calls were enough to break a few of the Quintaglios out of the blood rage. In front of a shop he was passing, one fellow pushed aside the female he’d been grappling with and looked up. Cadool turned to him and shouted imploringly, "Kalahatch!"

The fellow looked indecisive for an instant, then charged toward the nearest shovelmouth, one of the rare ones with a crest like two crescent moons. He leapt onto the shoveler’s side and brought his jaws together in a great scooping bite. The female he’d been fighting charged after him, as if to tear him apart, but then with a visible effort of will at the last instant she changed her course and also leapt onto the shoveler, chomping into its meaty rump.

Cadool was carried farther down the street. He continued his hunting cry. Ahead, right in the middle of the road, was a ball of green arms and legs and tails — perhaps six or seven Quintaglios locked in mortal combat.

Cadool jabbed his feet into his shoveler’s side, this time toes in, deliberately piercing the hide. The tube-crester pumped out an anguished cry, splitting the air like all the thunder of a storm discharged with a single blast. Heads appeared from the ball of limbs, slick all over with blood. "Kalahatch!" shouted Cadool.

Three individuals disentangled themselves from the ball; the rest, dead, dying, or dazed, didn’t get out of the way in time and were trampled by the stampede. But the ones who had escaped ran to the sides of the road, ensconcing themselves in recessed doorways, letting part of the shovelmouth herd thunder by. Cadool looked back long enough to see two of them leap onto shovelers. The third, a male apparently more injured than Cadool had first thought, collapsed slowly to the paving stones as the rest of the herbivores pounded on.

Cadool continued into the center of town. He was having about a three-quarters success rate at getting the crazed Quintaglio to switch from killing each other to hunting the shovelers. As for the rest, there was nothing he could do.

Suddenly the street widened into a large square, dotted with the red-spattered bodies of the dead or dying. Entering the square from the opposite direction was another cluster of shovelmouths. Quintaglios were attacking them, purging their rage through the hunt, coming together in the hunt, cooperating for the hunt…

But how? Where were these other shovelers coming from?

And then Cadool saw. Dybo, the Emperor himself, riding atop a shovelmouth with an orange-and-blue-striped hide, one of the imported Arj’toolar beasts kept in the private imperial stockyard. Dybo, unaggressive to the point of docility, thought to be the weakest of his mother’s hatchlings, all but immune, apparently, to the clouds of pheromones drenching every corner of the Capital. Dybo, risking his life to quell the madness in his people.

Cadool saluted the Emperor, and Dybo waved back. The tide was turning, the madness abating, the population releasing its bloodlust. Shovelers fell to the paving, and Quintaglios feasted together, their mode shifting from violence to the torpor brought by full bellies.

Many had died, but most had survived — this time. But Cadool knew this was only a temporary reprieve.

Next time, they might not be so lucky.

*40*

Fra’toolar

The first thing Toroca heard was a voice.

"What happened?"

It was Delplas. Toroca tried to rise, but made a small groan instead. "My head hurts."

"You banged it when you collapsed," said Delplas. "What happened?"

Toroca opened his eyes. It was dark; eight moons moved overhead. "When that inner door opened, I got this gush of air in my face. It was stale, musty. It smelled wrong. Then I collapsed."

"Something funny about the air," said Greeblo. "Your lamp went out, too."

"How long have I been unconscious?"

"Not too long," said Delplas. "About a daytenth."

Toroca sighed. "It’s night. Let’s wait until morning to let some decent air get into that thing, then head back inside."

"Aye," said Delplas. "You’re probably right."

It was even-night, the night most people didn’t sleep — everyone was back on normal schedules. Toroca lay on his belly, eyes turned up, watching the stars careen across the bowl of the sky.

As soon as the sun was up, Toroca squeezed into the tiny room with doors at either end. The outer door was still jammed half-open: the inner wasn’t yet quite open all the way. Toroca had succumbed to the bad air before he’d slid the panel all the way to the left side. He sniffed warily. Everything smelled fine now. He pulled the inner door all the way aside and stepped through, into the interior of the object, whatever it was, the spluttering flame from a hand-held lantern illuminating his way.

He was in a long gently curving corridor, running parallel to the outer wall of the object. Toroca was immediately startled by how straight the corridor was. Most Quintaglio corridors twisted and turned, so as to keep other users of them out of sight. There was a standard walking pace for corridors: as long as you moved along at that pace, you could walk the length of most hallways without ever seeing another individual, even if the hallway was actually in heavy use.

"Well?" called Delplas from outside.

"It seems all right," replied Toroca, his voice echoing a bit. "Come along."

Toroca stepped about ten paces down the corridor. He could hear Delplas making her way through the strange double-doored room.

The light from two lanterns — Toroca’s and Delplas’s — cast weird shadows on the blue walls. The object, like everything on Land, had been rocked over time by landquakes, and its floors were canted at an angle. Thick black dust had accumulated along the downslope side of the corridors. Toroca thought perhaps it was the remnant of some fabric covering that had decayed over time, although why one would put tapestries on the floor was beyond him.

They passed their first room. It contained blobs of corroded metal; perhaps once they had been furniture. None of the rooms seemed to have doors, just open archways. That made even more peculiar the strange double-doored room they had first come through. Littering the floor were artifacts similar to the one Toroca had originally found and clumps of rusted material, presumably artifacts made of less-stem stuff that had corroded.

Toroca and Delplas continued along, ten or so paces between them. The next room they passed also contained corroded metal, and the one after that, nothing at all, except intricate metal panels — perhaps art of some kind? — embedded in the walls. Toroca leaned in to examine one of the panels. It was perforated with many tiny holes in regular patterns, and most of the holes were covered with bits of colored glass or crystal. Little geometric shapes were etched into parts of the panels.

It took a while, but Toroca finally noticed the roofs. The ceilings of the corridor and rooms weren’t made of the same blue material. Rather, they seemed to be covered over with translucent glass. In several places, the glass was broken. Looking closely at a large piece that had fallen to the floor, Toroca saw that it wasn’t really glass. It was a softer material, waxier, and when he looked at it edge-on, it was white, rather than the dark green or blue of glass seen thus. He also found he could flex the material slightly.

Toroca looked up to where the piece of milky material had fallen from. Recessed in the roof were long orange tubes, and those, mostly cracked and shattered, did look as though they were made from real glass.

It was one of those sudden flashes of insight. Toroca suddenly realized what was missing from the walls — hooks to hang lanterns on, candle holders, anything to hold a light source. The translucent roof, and the strange tubes behind, must have provided light, somehow. Perhaps the tubes were optical conduits, something like Novato’s far-seers, channeling light from outside. Perhaps.