Montrose was bent double with puking into the stream, but he still held his knife up high in defiance. If his hand would stop shaking, he might manage a throw into the older-looking one. His coat had fewer gems, so perhaps he was lower rank or lower status than the other two, but he had a look of arrogance that bespoke command.
Menelaus did not throw the knife. Instead, baffled, he induced in his middle-level brain sections one of those pattern-recognition gestalts normally called intuition. The answer surfaced immediately: The Hermetic Order has an agent (or agents) observing this scene: but he (or they) fails to recognize you due to subverbal-conceptual interference across more than one mental system.
At some point, if he lived, and if he had the time to go back through his thought process, he could try to put into words the wordless intuition. As it was, he decided merely to accept it as a given.
Coronimas, Sarmento, and Father Reyes, as far as he knew, were still alive, not to mention Ximen del Azarchel. Why were they absent when the Tombs were being looted?
Their absence bespoke stealth, indirection, secrecy, and therefore fear. Del Azarchel was hiding from someone. From whom? If Montrose’s Cliometrically calculated predictive model of history was right, no civilization on the Earth’s surface powerful enough to threaten Exarchel could have arisen from the barren ice floes that ruled the surface when last he woke. So something was wrong with his model of history, something very basic. That was something imperative to look into, later.
If there was a later.
The Blue Men were the starting point of the thread leading back to Del Azarchel, who must be ultimately behind the attack and the looting. Montrose tried to imagine the magnitude of damage needed to have so thoroughly crippled the defensive systems of the Tombs that they could not stop a squad of musketmen. Or musketdogs. Some part of Pellucid must still be operating, if only a local node, but the main brain must already be compromised, perhaps dead. And where were the Knights Hospitalier?
The time for grief was later, as was the time to sort this out. For the moment, he was captured, but his captors missed the fact that they had found whom they sought.
Of course, it helped that the coffin had been marked with the wrong name and interment date. There were not many periods of history after the era in which Montrose was born, where large numbers of great-boned redheads walked abroad: the one such period, the time of the Chimerae, circa A.D. 5000, had an unusually broad genetic base.
So Menelaus hesitated, armed with nothing but one dinky knife, stood shivering, eyeing the dozens of musket muzzles covering him and the dozens of dog muzzles snarling.
The younger Blue Man tilted his head to one side as if in thought, and a made a polite fluting sound in some unknown language of singing notes to the older one, who grunted and nodded. Menelaus was gratified that, despite the passage of thousands of years, the meaning of that particular head motion had not changed.
The younger Blue Man, lowering his pistol, opened his coat with both hands, exposing the inner lining, which was a pearly gray. The coat lining shimmered. It was library cloth.
An image of the Monument appeared on the inside of the coat to the left and right of the young Blue Man’s body, and then the image expanded to zoom in on the opening statement. First one group of glyphs lit up, and then a second, and then a third. A bisected circle filled the view, constructed of a sequence of dashes that flickered quickly: large-three-small-one-four-one-five-nine—
“You little plague-sucking rot-brained buggers broke into my coffin and abducted me to ask me the value of pi?” Montrose roared in anger, or tried to. The severed breathing tube was still dangling and flapping from his mouth like an absurd proboscis, and now he gagged, drew in a deep breath, and, when the air struck his fluid-adapted lungs, they seized up.
Terrible hacking coughs started to yank themselves out of his body like scarves from the mouth of a sideshow magician, and his muscles tightened in the first seizure of the transition paroxysm, first in his chest, then in his limbs.
He wobbled, knelt, and then fell face-first into the freezing water. A roaring darkness filled his brain, and little black metallic flashes swirled to and fro in his eyes. He thought he could detect a mathematical pattern in the swirls he saw as his vision faded in and out, something he could analyze with the Navier–Stokes vortex equations.
He was dimly aware of doglike paws pulling him from the water. Two dog things held his either arm, and his naked legs were being dragged across the frost-coated pebbles and through the burrs and prickles of the gray dead winter weeds of the stream bank.
He was inordinately proud of the fact that they had to bend his thumb so far back that it broke with a dull snap like a twig before they could pry the knife from his hand.
They dragged him roughly before the younger Blue Man, who knelt and wrote a set of Monument glyphs in the snow. It was the glyph for self-identity, and a symbolic logic expression also used to refer to set representation. In other words, it was the glyph that meant “name.”
Montrose also saw a red dot appear in the glyph, and then another, and he realized blood from his face wounds was dripping onto the snow.
The younger man pointed at his nose and said solemnly, “Ss’s Illiance-pra-e syn-suan va, hna-t.” He pointed at the older Blue Man with the back of his hand. “Ss’s Ull-mnempra-e syn-suan hthna, hno-t.” He pointed the back of his hand at the Purple Man. “Ss’s Naar-ma-e syn-suan hthna, hno-t.” Then he made as if to touch Montrose with the back of his hand, but did not actually brush his skin. “Ss’s nii, hni? T?”
Menelaus knew his previous, nonaugmented brain would not have been quick enough on the uptake to deduce some of the grammatical rules of a semi-declined language based on so small a sample. Ss’s either indicated the beginning of a sentence, or the younger Blue Man Illiance had a lisp. Va, hthna, nii were “me, he, you.” Hna, hno, hni were verbs in the passive voice, the act of naming: “I am called, he is called, you are called.” The t sound indicated the end of a sentence, which meant this was an old and corrupted form of computer-derived language, since no human listener needs to hear punctuation marks in spoken speech.
Illiance, Ull, and Naar were names or honorifics.
Damn me, but I am smart.
“Me, Tarzan,” replied Montrose. “You, Jerkdong? I can’t talk with this damned buggery tube yerked up my eating-hole, you smurf.” But since his mouth was blocked, it came out more like: A cawh’n taw wif dif bwah-erwee doob eerd ut mwa eewen-oal, oo fnurf. Which, upon reflection, actually did not make much less sense than what he’d tried to say.
The tone must have been clear even if the words were not, because one of the dog things drew what looked like a single-shot wheel lock pistol from his sash and clouted Montrose sharply across the cheek with it. More than ever, Montrose wished for the mind powers the old comics always awarded to creatures with superior intelligence. As it was, he was able to deduce the exact vector magnitude of the incoming iron pistol barrel and make an accurate mental model of which parts of his cheek and face and nose cartilage would be torn and broken before the blow actually fell. He was not able to anticipate how much it would hurt, however. Pain is always a surprise.
When the blow landed, Menelaus had sufficient control of his nervous system to induce a fainting cycle without anything more than a silent act of will. He slid down into the roaring darkness with a sense of relief, hoping the breathing tube still lodged in his face would hide any smile of victory.