Ledroff said, “Could be. We had a run-in with ’nother.”

“Same Mantis,” Killeen said.

Fornax scowled as if he didn’t want to believe it. “Sure?”

“I took a leg strut from the first. This one had a gimped-up leg.”

“Could be accident,” Ledroff said.

“Damnsight strange, then,” Killeen said dismissively.

Fornax said, “We never saw a Mantis. Heard ’bout somethin’ like it, though, from my mother.”

Shibo murmured, “Mantis kill Knight.”

Fornax looked puzzled. “Yousay Stalkers, Lancers, Rattlers did it. They surrounded you Knights, yeasay?”

Shibo said impassively, “Mantis lead them. Mantis take us if escape.”

Ledroff asked, “You mean Mantis led the Marauder group?”

Shibo nodded silently.

Killeen asked, “How’d you get away?”

“Crawl into rocks.”

Killeen remembered her sleeping place. “When was this?”

She paused, consulting an Aspect. “Six years, ’bout.”

He regarded her with respect. She had lived for years on her own. “Then the Knight Citadel fell ’bout same time’s ours. We call it the Calamity.”

Fornax nodded, his eyes hooded. “Ours, too. We held the Marauders two days. Then they broke our walls and drove us out.”

Killeen said, “We lasted three. Some said they saw somethin’ big, big as the Mantis, in the distance.”

Fornax sighed. “Easy to mistake. Lots wild stories then. What’d Mantis be there for, anyway? Bunch of rods and pods. Don’t look much like a fighter.”

“Mantis quick,” Shibo said.

Ledroff said. “I figure it got lucky, is all. Caught Fanny at a bad moment. Killeen got it with one shot, ’member.”

Killeen said, “It was me was lucky, not Mantis.”

Ledroff shrugged this off. “It jumped in right when we were distracted. Families meetin’.”

Shibo shook her head again in a slow, sad way but again said nothing. Fornax was eyeing her closely, as though she were a rival. Killeen knew this could not be, though, for no matter how good Shibo of the now-gone Knights was, she could never be Cap’n of the Rooks. So Fornax must be learning things he had never heard, even though Shibo had been with the Rooks for quite a time.

This didn’t surprise Killeen. She spoke little beyond the essential. Killeen had heard from Cermo that she had been living on her own, in the shadow of a mech factory, when the Rooks passed near. They accepted her, but the Knight ways were different. She ate and worked and marched and sexed her own way—in fact, was close with no Rook at all. Fornax felt that.

Killeen said, “Mantis has brains in all parts. So we plugged as much as we could.”

Ledroff said, “I grant we’ve seen no such mech before. But we got it this time.”

Shibo shook her head. “Mantis replace.”

Fornax twisted his face into a look of dismissal. “With what? We left its parts on the ground!”

“Something could carry parts for it,” Killeen said mildly. “Maybe even mechminds.”

“Easier to send ’nother Mantis,” Fornax countered.

Killeen answered, “Not if it’s specially made.”

“For what?” Fornax asked.

“Hunting us.”

Fornax slapped his knees in derision. “All Marauders hunt us.”

“Marauders do jobs, not just look for us,” Killeen said. “If they see us, they track. Attack, if looks right. Not able to send illusions straight into us like Mantis, though.”

Fornax sniffed and shrugged. “Lookyou, I know you downed the Mantis.”

“Twice,” Killeen said.

“Good. But no reason make big noise ’bout it.”

Killeen knotted his fists and made himself say nothing. There was no room for dispute between Rook and Bishop.

“How you suppose it knew where so many of us were together?” Ledroff said, obviously breaking in to soothe matters over.

Shibo said, “Made.”

“What?” Fornax asked.

She looked at him with eyes of pearly white against a skin long tanned into a deep though somehow translucent mahogany. “Made us meet.”

“Our two Families?”

“Yeasay.”

Fornax said loudly, “Nossir noway! We sighted a Baba Yagga two days back. Came this way, gettin’ clear. Saw a Rattler crossing on a far ridge, south. Just accident we come down that valley, makin’ distance from the Rattler before we turned south again. Just—”

He saw the point then and stopped. There came a long silence as Killeen felt the true enormity of what they faced. The Mantis was using Rattlers and Baba Yaggas and all the other Marauders. That undoubtedly included whatever had cornered them back in the Trough, and surekilled Jake. All to drive the Bishops toward the Rooks and in the moment of their meeting harvest a field of death.

Jake was a minor loss, compared to the catastrophe which had hardstruck them in the moment of their human vulnerability. The joy of reuniting and rekindling the human connections which were in the end what made them human at all. That had been slamshut in a grotesque instant. And now the survivors carried the inner festering sore of that moment too well remembered, the acrid welding of jubilation with terror—and that union, too, would exact a price. Killeen felt without thinking through it that the Mantis was far more understanding of humanity than any mech had been. It knew how to wound them in their selfhood, their abiding sense of community. And was therefore far more dangerous than any crafty Lancer or Barb.

TWO

The two Families decided that morning to continue with separate Cap’ns. A single Cap’n would mean a single Family. Losing a full Family from the Clan was intolerable. Likewise, neither Family would accept its own formal end.

The talking took hours. Ledroff and Jocelyn negotiated with the Rooks at a full Witnessing, since the Rooks had no Cap’n. They observed all titles and rituals and other proceedings, not hastening a single phrase or gesture. Each step carried the same liturgical gravity and sober, attentive detail as had been the tradition for centuries.

There was a quietly forlorn and obliging comfort in this. Humans used the shaping and polishing of phrases as a refuge from the raw rub of their lives. The telling of stories, the artful arch of talk—these made ornate and prettily baroque what otherwise and most logically would be usually a swift and simple business. This, too, gave them the momentary soft shelter of the vast human heritage, even though only half-remembered, fogged and blunted. They talked on, relishing.

In the Citadels such conversations had followed on a month’s rapt preparatory gossip. Witnessings were once wreathed by ceremony in arched, chromed vaults. Now their high officers conferred as they squatted, scratchy and grimed, about the rude pyramid of the newdead. Once each Family had numbered thousands. In this tribal talk no one yielded even a phrase which admitted to their shrunken status.

The Rooks made Fornax their Cap’n. They would have integrated the Family Rook topo display into his sensorium, too, as was traditional. But the woman who knew how to do that was a wizened old techtype named Kuiper, and she had fallen the day before.

Fornax and Ledroff seemed not to get on well. They did agree that the Families should march. It was risky to remain anywhere near the Mantis carcass, even after its dismemberment. Passing Marauders could perhaps repair it. And there might be more than one Mantis.

Killeen felt a vague unease, for no one seemed to have grasped the essential difference between it and the other Marauders. The Mantis died but rose again. It seemed to have been designed for persistence, for unflagging and remorseless energy and especially for tracking humans.