“You can burn,” she said.

10

The Trial of the Judge of Ages

1. Fair and Square

“We do not have a stake,” said the female with a young woman’s body but an old woman’s weariness and helplessness and hate in her eyes. “But one of the automata is being drenched with its own lubrication oil by the crones, and it has petrol as well, so it can just clasp you to its body while afire like Talos of myth.”

Menelaus said, “It’s enterprising to improvise, I guess. But before we get on with the barbecue, let me explain the current situation, since a lot has happened in the last four minutes.”

Fatin opened her mouth to object, her eyes white and hot with hate; but Illiance (looking strangely like a miniature Pilgrim from a children’s history primer in his blank and unadorned coat) stepped forward, his eyes bent on Montrose, and made a cutting gesture with the edge of his hand. Such was the dignity and authority of the gesture, that Fatin—perhaps more sensitive to strange conjunctions or hidden meaning than a non-Witch could be—drew back and held her piece.

Or perhaps (Montrose thought cynically) Fatin understood enough to guess that Illiance could now render paralytic or comatose everyone in the room except for Mickey, Guy, Scipio, and Trey—and he had already captured or needled three of the four.

Whatever the reason, Menelaus seized the opportunity to seize the floor: “First, Alalloel the Melusine has been taken over by a download demon named Legion, who works for Blackie—Ximen del Azarchel, the Arch-Hermeticist, and Master of the World—who arranged to have an avalanche block the doors leading back to the surface, and collapse the depthtrain tube leading down to the deep. So we are all trapped here.

“Second, the Bell is coming. Oh, Baby Jesus puking milk on Mary’s virgin shoulder, you don’t know what that is, do you? Gigantic alien tower that eats cities, so tall that most of it is out of the atmo. Just outside us, about twenty miles off. The thing is about nine miles wide, so the leading edge will reach here a little while before the trailing edge catches up. I thought it was a local-made thing, until the Melusine made it clear that Blackie did not want to find my Tombs and kill me. He wanted to find my Tombs to find a way to Pellucid, and find a way to make a space launch, to spread Exarchel in the form of a Von Neumann technology to other planets. Or that’s my guess. And I should have seen the clues when I saw the Iron Hermeticist D’Aragó come waltzing in to fight me to keep his spaceport on Fear Island—not its real name—open, and when I realized the place they made planetfall was Mount Misery—is so its real name—because you don’t spend expensive fuel to belly flop into the Caribbean from the great black yonder if you can climb down and back up a convenient skyhook for free.

“Third, Exarchel—your friend, the Machine—just shot a wee sliver of the core of the planet into space, programmed with a copy of his mind, almost as if that were some emergency measure used to save a copy of himself if the world he is leaving is doomed. So the evil god you serve, the one that promised you long life, not to mention castles in the air and moonbeams in a jar? He’s gone. Or, since he cannot move, he mailed his backup copy of his brain to Mars or something to carry on the family name. We can call that one Exo-exarchel. Just to keep our version numbers straight.

“Fourth, there is a current civilization out there, like I said—hurrah for me, I am a genius—and they seem to be a civilization of evil freaks who mean to break into all my Tombs, drill jacks into all our heads, and turn us all into zombies and mind slaves absorbed into the local hierarchy of five-man neuroinfospheres.

“So that is the situation we find ourselves in—trapped, doomed, abandoned, and the Hyades skyhook is about to float over us and yank us up into a Clarke orbit for transshipment to Alpha Centauri, but if the skyhook don’t get us, a Melusine called a Paramount is coming to brain-rape us, and absorb us into its soul vampire-style, but more neuroelectronically. And Blackie just ran away. Got it?

“So, Fatin; Illiance. What little thing can I do for y’all?”

But Illiance stepped forward, coming between the muskets and pikes and the man at which they pointed, and he stepped with such boldness, it was as if he could not imagine any creature could harm him.

“I wish to address you,” said Illiance. “Fatin, who intends you harm, would preclude my comments, who wishes harm from you. Logically, I must go first.”

Fatin did not look peeved at the interruption, but amazed. She held her peace, and inclined her head, opening her hands as if to invite the little blue man to continue.

The common habit of Simplifiers, to speak in the passive voice, and to phrase things as if one were merely observing a coincidence, rather than causing an effect, was not here being used. Menelaus wondered what that portended.

“So, Illiance!” said Menelaus. “Am I to assume that Sir Guiden took off his big and heavy gauntlets to get all the gems off your coat, and to take your pistol, but that I failed to warn him you also carry a venom needle that can prick bare hands, because sometimes I forget baseline humans do not notice what seems obvious to me? And may I also assume Scipio the Cryonarch and Trey Azurine the Sylph were herded at point of that same pistol, and are squeezed together naked in embarrassing intimacy in a narrow coffin that two ugly crones and a half-broken automaton are perched atop?”

Illiance looked surprised. “The situation is one they would find shameworthy? One of my people would not be sexually stimulated by sharing a coffin with a Sylph, particularly if she were unclothed as a security precaution, her clothing being hunger silk, and not as a display of mate-willingness; and to us there can be no stimulation if she were a non-virgin, since we cannot switch from one partner to another. Being innately chaste, those of my order do not always appreciate what more primitive men categorize as associated with mating behaviors, signs, or displays.”

“Well, being stuffed naked into a coffin bed with a wiggly teenager young enough to be your daughter, but who maybe has something not right in her head, yeah, that violates normal Churchgoing notions of decent respectability, I’d say. But maybe I am old-fashioned, because everyone in the future seems to be a nudist. I won’t complain. I am just glad you did not shoot them.

“So! What can I do for you before the angry and superstitious Witch burns the falsely accused Christian? You have the floor, Preceptor Illiance.”

At this, the Blue Man drew himself up almost pridefully, and tilted up his chin, and said, “You mistake me. Am I dressed like a Preceptor?”

Had Montrose not been teetering on the edge of fainting, and not distracted with many layers of disasters and deception, he would have seen it sooner. As it was, it caught him by surprise, and he laughed aloud.

Of course Illiance was strutting and smiling, head high and shoulders back. It was not that he had an unbreakable hold over everyone in the chamber. It was that his long-ingrained habit of mind made him look splendid to himself. For Illiance wore the uniform of the highest rank and highest dignity of the Simple Men: a vacant coat. There was nothing simpler than the simplicity of blank blue.

“Then how should I address you?”

“I wear the display of an Expositor of the Perfected dignity. While it is true that I happen to wear it, not that Sir Guiden meant me to wear it, nonetheless, it was by his hand that I find myself so garbed—and therefore I must with utmost effort behave with simplicity so perfect and limpid, that should my peers again adorn me, it will not be due to my failure to attempt.”

Menelaus chuckled and spread his hands, amused despite himself. “Well then, Expositor Illiance. How do perfected folk act?”