The next room they came upon was a complete surprise. Toroca motioned for Delplas to come stand relatively near him. "What do you make of that?" said Toroca.

Jutting from the walls of the room were pallets, each one about twice as long as it was wide, covered with a pile of decayed material that might at one time have been fabric. There were a total of twelve pallets, three at about Toroca’s knee-level on each side of the room, and three more above these at his shoulder-level. The upper pallets had strange ladder-like affairs leading up so them, except that the ladders were really two narrow ladders paired side by side, with a handspan’s gap between them. Toroca couldn’t fathom what the use of such ladders would be; they were almost what one might imagine for a Quintaglio who wanted to climb backward and needed a slot for his or her tail.

"They’re beds," said Delplas at last, gesturing at the pallets.

Beds. Most Quintaglios slept on the floor, but such things were used in hospitals or in the homes of the very old to bring bodies up to a comfortable level for doctors to work on. But in all his life, Toroca had never seen a room with more than one bed in it.

"That would mean twelve people slept in this room at once," said Toroca. "That’s not possible. No one could stand such close quarters for any length of time." And, when the words were out, Toroca realized how true they were — even for him, even free of territoriality, the idea of sleeping with eleven others was completely beyond his ken.

"They do look like beds, though, don’t they?" persisted Delplas.

Toroca thought about that. "Yes. Yes, they do." He shuddered as a thought occurred to him. Yes, this vast object was miraculous, but he’d still retained the thought, the six-fingered handgrip of the original artifact not withstanding, that it was of Quintaglio manufacture. After all, who else could have possibly built it? But this room — this room was no room a Quintaglio would ever use. And those straight corridors — hallways no Quintaglio would feel comfortable walking in except when completely alone. Someone else — something else — had built this.

What, wondered Toroca, did the builders look like?

With the outer door jammed partially closed, poor Greeblo still couldn’t get inside the great blue structure. Her job became cataloging the markings on its vast curving surface. Meanwhile, Toroca organized the other six surveyors into three interior-exploration teams. Because of the poor air circulation within the massive structure, each team had only a single lamp.

Toroca and Delplas constituted one such team. It was hard on Delplas, since Toroca carried the lamp and territoriality tended to make her lag behind in the dark. The blue structure was huge, and it was frustrating not to be able to get a really good look at its interior. Toroca’s lamp flame lit only a small area. The rest faded away into eerie darkness.

The inner walls were all made of the same blue material as the outer shell. Toroca tried to find seams indicating where two sheets of the blue stuff had been joined, but he couldn’t. It was almost as if the whole vast structure was one continuous piece, like blown glass.

Suddenly something occurred to Toroca. "It’s not a sailing ship," he said, turning around to face Delplas, who cast a giant dancing shadow on the wall behind her in the swaying light of Toroca’s lamp.

"Oh?" she replied, crossing her arms in front of her chest. "I agree it doesn’t look like any ship I’ve ever seen before, but well, it is streamlined on the outside, and it has a ship-like quality about it."

"Think about the Dasheter." he said. "Do you remember the doorways?"

"They had nice scenes carved into them," said Delplas.

"Yes, yes. But they also didn’t go all the way to the floor, I’m sure. There was a lip, a handspan or greater in height, that you had to step over at each doorway."

"Now that you mention it, I do remember that."

"It was to keep water from sloshing from compartment to compartment," said Toroca. "As Var-Keenir once said to me, all ships leak."

Delplas nodded in understanding. "But here the doorways go right to the floor, and in most cases there are no actual doors at all, just open archways."

"Exactly," said Toroca. "Whatever this thing was used for, it wasn’t a sailing ship."

"But it can’t have been a building, either. It has a rounded floor. I mean, here, inside, the floors are flat, but the bottom of the — of the hull, call it — the bottom of the hull, as seen from outside, is rounded."

"Yes. And no one would build an edifice that didn’t have a flat bottom."

"So it is a ship," said Delplas.

"Perhaps."

"But not a sailing ship."

"No, not a sailing ship."

"Then what kind of ship is it?"

"I don’t…"

"Toroca!"

The shout came from deep in the interior of the structure. Toroca broke into a dead run, Delplas following. His lantern made mad shadows run along with them as they bounded down the strange, straight corridors.

"Toroca!" went the shout again, echoing off the hard blue walls.

Ahead, Gan-Spalton was standing by an open doorway. "It had been closed," he said, pointing. "One of the few I’ve seen that really had a door. I operated the latch, and…"

The corpse was desiccated. If it had been at one time covered with skin, that skin was long since gone. The body was about the same bulk as Toroca, but that was the only characteristic they had in common. The dome-shaped head had five eyes. A long trunk dangled from the face. It ended in a pair of convex, shell-shaped manipulators, each with six little fingers within, just right for handling the strange artifact Toroca had found all those days ago.

The body was slumped over, a bowl-shaped structure visible beneath it that might have been a chair. The creature’s torso was made up of a series of disks, shining like opals in the torchlight. At the end of the torso was a cup-shaped brace supporting three pairs of legs. The first pair was long, the second and third pairs much shorter, and looked as though they wouldn’t have reached the ground if the creature had been standing.

Toroca staggered back on his tail. What manner of creature was this? It was unlike a Quintaglio, or anything else he was familiar with. Even the bizarre lifeforms of the south pole had shared a fundamental body plan that he recognized, but this, this was like nothing he’d ever seen before, nothing he’d even imagined before.

And then it hit him, and his jaw dropped.

This ship, this giant blue vessel, must have traveled very far indeed.

*41*

A Quintaglio’s Diary

Two down, four to go.

Perhaps I should have done Toroca when I last saw him. It will be a long time before he returns to the Capital, I’m sure. Still, the fact that he is away so much of the time makes his existence tolerable … to a degree. Absence makes the heart grow calmer.

That mass dagamant was a release for me, and for many others, I’m sure. Perhaps I’ll wait awhile until I do number three.

Or perhaps not.

Capital City

After the collective dagamant, Cadool searched and searched for Afsan. At last he found him, disoriented, unsure of where he was, slumped in an alley beside a building, exhausted, bruised, bloodied, but not severely injured.

They retired to Rockscape for three days, recovering, and waiting for Gathgol, now the busiest of all workers in the province, to collect all the bodies that littered the streets.

But, at last, Afsan and Cadool came back into the city to deal with the task at hand.

"Let’s rest here," said Cadool. They’d been walking all afternoon, going from one side of the Capital to the other, the streets still a mess, blood splatters on the paving stones and adobe walls, broken tree branches and discarded sashes skittering along the avenues, propelled by the wind.