Killeen added to it without slowing, firing on an awkward tilt. No point in being accurate; their shots pocked and ricocheted but did not slow the smug-ugly and inexorable Rattler.

They would not all make it. “Toby! Faster!” he called, knowing it was useless and yet wanting to give vent to his knotting apprehension.

This was the Rattler they’d seen before, he was sure of it. It must have disgorged its half-finished meal to follow. Never before had a Rattler been so aggressive as to track them.

A figure ran slower though no less frantically than the others: Old Mary. She had not been feeling well these last few days. Already she had dropped behind. Killeen heard her labored panting turn to gasps.

He turned back. She came struggling up an incline and Killeen fired over her, directly into the bluehot mouth of the Rattler. The thing barely acknowledged the antennae blown off, the gouges in its obdurate face.

It caught Old Mary. Arms and the quick-opening mouth ingested her almost casually. It never slowed its oncoming momentum.

“Mary!” Killeen cried in rage and frustration. He knew the Rattler would only later discover she was not metal throughout, like a mechthing. Taste her, find her indigestible, spit her out.

Killeen had no time for remorse. He whirled and fled, realizing that he was now the most exposed. The Rattler undoubtedly saw them all as a covey of defenseless metal-sheeted beings and mistook them for free sources of cheap ore. Since they did not carry the eat-me-not codes of this Rattler’s city, they were fair game.

Killeen gave himself over to the running. The Rattler came flexing and oozing over a weedy streambed.

A hollow shuuuung twisted the air by his head. It was a blaring noise-cast, blending infra-sonic rumbles at his feet with electromagnetic screeches, ascending to teeth-jarring frequencies.

The Rattler was trying to confuse him, scramble his sensors. He ducked his head reflexively, though it did no good, and made all his receptors go dead. Except for his fast-lurching vision he heard and felt nothing.

Toby stumbled ahead. Killeen grabbed him by shoulder and haunch and lifted him up a sandbank.

Another shuuuung echoed dimly in his sheathed mind. It was so powerful it caught Toby unaware. He crumpled. He bent, sucked in breath. With a rolling motion Killeen took Toby’s weight across his back.

Close now, the Rattler sent a feverhot neural spark forking into Killeen’s leg. The muscles jumped and howled and then went stonecold dead.

Killeen stumbled forward. The mech building ahead loomed. It was tall, imposing, far higher than the usual mechwork.

He wasn’t going to make it.

He staggered. “Killeen!” someone called.

Sand slid beneath his boots. The sky reeled.

He fumbled for his weapon. The Rattler would be on him in a moment. If he could fire sure and quick and steady—

Then the world came rushing in. Sound blared. The Rattler’s crunch and clank was hollow, diminishing.

Someone was pounding him on the back.

Toby’s weight slipped off.

His sensorium flooded with scattershot pricklings, tripped open by some freeing signal.

Killeen turned to confront the Rattler. He saw only the rear of it as massive gray cylinders slid and worked. It was retreating.

Cermo-the-Slow was shouting, “—hadn’t shut down your ears you’da heard it bellow. Right mad it was.”

“Why? Why’d it stop?”

“That li’l thing there.”

A small pyramid poked up through the sandstone shelf they stood on. Killeen had passed it without noticing.

He blinked at the finely machined thing. “How?”

“Dunno. Musta given the Rattler orders.”

Killeen had heard of such things, but never seen one. The four-sided monument of chromed faces and ornate designs must have told the Rattler to come no closer.

Family shouted at him joyfully. Toby was fine. Shibo beamed. Considering their terror of only moments before, their glee was permissible, even after the loss of Old Mary.

Exhausted but exultant faces swam in his vision. They brought him up toward the large mech building. Friends brought him drink. Children clapped their hands in glee.

Mechs could not violate a command to leave a mechwork alone. Humans could. Thus they stepped with impunity into the grounds of the massive construction. The spacious plaza’s flatness felt odd after broken ground.

Killeen frowned, puzzled. What was so different about this place?

Ordinarily he ignored whatever mechs built beyond what he could pillage. This thing, though, had saved his life.

It was broad and high. And impossibly shaped.

Atop a huge marble platform sat what Killeen at first thought must be an illusion. Only mechs made mirages; he was on guard. But when he kicked the thing, it gave back a reassuring solid thud.

It was massive, made of plates of ivory stone, yet it seemed to float in air. Pure curves met at enchanting though somehow inevitable angles. Walls of white plaques soared upward as though there were no gravity. Then they bulged outward in a dome that seemed to grow more light and gauzy as the rounded shape rose still more. Finally, high above the gathering Families, the stonework arced inward and came to an upthrusting that pinned the sky upon its dagger point.

The arabesques of gossamer-thin stone, shining white, did not interest Killeen so much as the evident design. He had never seen such craft.

Around him swirled celebration. Their deliverance without even a battle was a signal for exaltation. Cermo-the-Slow got into the strong, rough fruit brandy that served both as ritual fluid and as a valued currency among Families.

Ledroff and Fornax hesitated, then decided to let the festing go on. It was only midday, but the Families had been under strain. A wise Cap’n let vagrant energies dissipate.

Killeen watched them make this decision, heads bowed together. He didn’t like it, but he went along.

Hoarse voices rose in song. Hands plucked at him. Two Rook women beckoned to him, their intentions clear. Their smooth skins, browned by the double suns, could not match the ghostly pale of the stones he crossed. The Rooks, despite all they had suffered, had not discon nected their sexcens. He murmured thanks, stroked their shiny hair, and moved on. Shibo was not nearby, he noted.

He explored, ignoring the ricocheting voices. At the borders of the vast square marble platform stood four delicate towers. Killeen walked between them, eyeing their solemn, silent upjut. They stood like sentinels at the monument’s corners, guards against whatever rude forces the world could muster.

He saw that each tower leaned outward at a tiny angle. Something told him the reason. When the towers finally collapsed, they would fall outward. Their demise would not damage the huge, airy building at the center.

On the back of the last marble wall there was a single plate of solid black. It seemed like a dark eye that gazed out on a land inhospitable. Written above it in ebony script was NW.

As Killeen approached, it blinked. A ruby glaze momentarily fogged its surface and into his mind came a steady, chanting voice that spoke of glories gone and names resonantly odd.

Killeen felt the words as crystalline cold wedges of meaning, beyond mere talk. He gaped as he understood.

The thing was, incredibly, not mechmade.

It was instead of human times and ’facture.

Yet the mechs had left it untouched.

Killeen listened for a while, comprehending nothing beyond the singular fact of it: that men and women had once made things as fine and ordered as mechs. Far more beautiful than the Citadels. And had done it so well that even machines gave their work tribute and place.

Dazed, eyes opened but unseeing, he did not hear Cermo-the-Slow until a hand clapped on his shoulder.