Lupo eyed Slide coldly, less than pleased at what he obviously considered an interrogation. "Not when it is so very distant. I can feel it as an irritation, but it does me no harm."
Lupo's response was structured in such a way that it gave discreet warning that further questions on Slide's part might be considered an invasion of Nosferatu privacy. He had forgotten how sensitive old school vampires could be about unwarranted intrusions into what they viewed as their personal business. To gain information was to gain strength, but Slide knew he should, for the moment, curb his curiosity. Lupo could too easily take offense. Slide had seen vampires become offended and it was always violent and most times messy. He wasn't afraid of Lupo, but he knew, in a trial of strength, they were, at the very least, evenly matched and the outcome might be anyone's guess. Fortunately an outside distraction created a natural pause in the conversation. A trio of unsuspecting Fygglhgis came down one of the radiating paths on the far side of the stone circle. Their carapaces and tripod legs clicked as they moved, causing both Slide and Lupo to turn. At the sight of the demon and the vampire, the small crustaceans turned and beat a hasty retreat while exhibiting the body signs of three beings who have suddenly remembered urgent business elsewhere.
Lupo frowned at Slide as the Fygglhgis hastily vanished into the night, back they way that they had come. "Those things…"
Slide nodded, as if totally understanding the nosferatu's confusion. "They are Fygglhgis. Indigenous Martians. I think our presence scared them off. They are understandably nervous creatures."
Now Lupo was even more puzzled. "Indigenous Martians? How can such a thing be?" He gestured around at the immediate environs of Albert Park. "I though all this was all an artificial fabrication on a dead world."
Slide didn't need to read the vampire's mind to know that Lupo didn't grasp, or hadn't been told about, the cathedral gulf of time across which he had traveled. He believed that the Gridley Wave had only transported him from Earth to Mars, and that he was on some dead and dry C21 planet. Slide didn't feel like being the one to tell him that he was also a cool eight million years in his own relative past, and that the Gridley Wave might not turn out to be a reliable return ticket. In fact, Slide decided it was high time to take his leave. "Well listen, Nosferatu Lupo, this chance encounter has been very enlightening, but right now…"
Lupo interrupted him.
"You think to leave?"
"I fear I have things to do and people to see."
Lupo sternly shook his head. "I'm afraid, Idimmu Slide, that the places to which you go and the people you will see have already been precisely determined."
Slide tensed, but did not move. "What?"
"This is nothing personal, you understand?"
"A matter of business?"
"Exactly."
"Then this meeting is not a matter of chance?"
"I fear not. I was sent to bring you to the Turquoise Tower."
"Turquoise Tower?"
"The palace of Queen Mina."
"You are in the employ of Sir Richard Barton?"
Now Lupo really was offended. "Indeed I am not, sir. The human is a crude and predictable pervert. If I am in the employ of anyone, as you put it, I am in the employ of the Queen herself."
Slide considered simply using the moment of Lupo's anger to take off. He had no idea if he could outdistance a vampire with his demon speed, but he was willing to give it a try. The problem with flight was that he had no clear idea to where he might flee unless it was back into the stews, knocking shops, and gin houses of the proles. He was hardly in any position to return to Rosa's or leave the city. He owed no debt of allegiance to these Victorians, but, from what he had heard so far, he doubted that the Slimy Things would greet him warmly should he try to defect. He might just as well go with Lupo to the Turquoise Tower. If nothing else, it would be a new phase in his Martian education. He was also amused by Lupo's condemnation of Barton as a "crude and predictable pervert" considering the vampire's feeding requirements, and methods of luring its prey, unless the Gridley Wave had radically transformed Lupo's metabolism. Slide raised an acquiescent hand. "I didn't think you were working for Barton. I just felt I needed to check."
"Then you'll accompany me of your own free will?" Lupo seemed a little disappointed that Slide was offering no resistance.
Slide gestured to the path that led away from the henge. "Shall we go?"
The demon and the vampire walked rapidly with Lupo's personal fog at their heels, and they occasioned looks of concealed mystification from passing humans who did not know what they were, but grew nervous all the same. A gate came into sight, and beside it, clearly waiting for them, stood a ornamented and very gothic carriage, drawn by four jet black thoats, with two Red Martian postilions in royal livery, plus two footmen armed with short barreled radium rifles, who looked both formal and dangerously practical at the same time.
"So my arrest is being conducted with a certain style?"
Lupo opened the door of the carriage, and motioned Slide to get in. "Who said you were being arrested?"
"It rather seemed like it."
"You are merely being conducted to an audience with the Queen."
"Is that what this is?" As he climbed into the coach, Slide could only conjecture that someone on Mars knew more about his situation than he did, and he didn't like that one bit. Again, it seemed that coasting with his curiosity might be the only way to learn who and what. They moved off, and the postilions pressed the thoats to a sharp pace. Beyond the carriage window, a broad avenue carried only a light, nighttime traffic of carriages, steam cabs, and various models of electrocars. If he looked up, he could see the riding lights of Martian ornithopters, and, every so often, a man or woman would float by them in midair, supported by an Equilibrimotor flying belt. Slide did not have a good view of the Turquoise Tower until they had left the thoroughfare, and were ascending a wide spiral ramp that was the only approach to the palace of Queen Mina. The soaring structure that loomed beyond the window was a narrow but baroque tower, a blue-green phallus, spiky with buttresses and gargoyles, floodlit against the Martian night. It terminated in a hypodermic spire, some kind of transmission mast, or perhaps a mooring staff for airships.
As the carriage negotiated the rising curves of the ramp, Slide was also treated to a panoramic view of the Grand Canal and the desert beyond. Slide could hardly guess what Lupo made of the Grand Canal with its huge undulating pipes, believing as he did that he was on sere, and long dead planet. In the distance, Slide could see what looked like a second city, but where Extrosylvania was a place of light, neat within its circular walls, this
other conurbation sprawled dark and dirty, with tall smokestacks that belched black and noxious fumes into the thin Martian air, smoking slag heaps that blemished the red desert, and grim portals that revealed the angry red hearts of industrial furnaces. "What the hell is that place?"
On this point, Lupo knew more than Slide did. "Those are the Morlock Foundries
"The what?"
"Where do you think these people get their weapons, and the rest of their neo-Victorian toys?"
Slide had not been aware that Extrosylvania had an abundance of weapons, but, very shortly, he began to see this was in fact the case. Queen Mina kept herself heavily guarded, to a point where he would have believed Extrosylvania
to be in a state of war, except that he had seen no similar signs at Rosa Coote's, or in the sectors of the proles. In those places, all had seemed peacetime normal, although he knew there was no predicting the paranoia of those in power. The coach passed through three sets of circular gates, defended by emplacements of heavy Gatling guns and light artillery, and manned by formidably armed guard companies of both humans and Red Martians. At the first gate, Slide also noticed blue flashes of concentric psychic energy briefly enveloping the coach, indicating to him how the Turquoise Tower was protected against threats both normal and metaphysical. They finally pulled up in a courtyard, where more soldiers waited, who, once Slide and Lupo had alighted from the carriage, immediately conducted them into the palace itself. With a six-Martian escort,they were swiftly through majestic, radium-lit corridors with walls, floors, and ceilings faced with geometric slabs of turquoise so large that they could have only been artificially produced. The destination to which Slide and Lupo were being led turned out the be a pair of tall and dauntingly imposing stainless steel doors, inlaid with gold and platinum, and flanked by even more armed men in the full armor of one of Extrosylvania's crack regiments.