Menelaus stood motionless as a statue, awaiting their attack. The faintest gleam beneath the triangular shadow of the hood was visible as he drew back his lips from his teeth in what was either a snarl or a smile.
At the moment of collision, Yuen, the younger of the two attackers whipped his hand from behind his back and bludgeoned the tall hooded figure with what looked like a pale truncheon or baton. At the same moment, the older of the two attackers, Daae, lashed out with superhuman speed with his walking stick, which cracked like a whip when the tip surpassed the speed of sound. The forward stroke of the cane came in at kneecap-breaking height, and the backstroke was lower, to hook Menelaus at the ankle and yank him off his feet.
Yuen’s truncheon swept through an empty hood left in place when Menelaus ducked, but somehow his metallic garment mysteriously did not duck. The walking stick likewise swept through eaves of heavy fabric, hitting nothing.
Neither attacker was unskilled enough to actually be thrown off balance by the impossible and unexpected lack of resistance, but they both were a half second slow to recover from their lunges. During that half second, the cloak fabric like a live thing jumped into the faces of the attackers, swirled about them, catching their heads, tugging them into a stumble.
Daae pulled his cold and burning-eyed face from the cloak fabric, with one hand flung a tent spike sharpened like a knife toward Menelaus. With an almost casual motion, Menelaus lifted his hand from the folds swirling about him, and as if by happenstance, the spike with a chime of pure sound struck a fist-sized rock he held, was deflected, and spun away into the darkness. With the same casual motion, the rock hammered the one-eyed younger attacker from his blind side, drawing a trail of blood from his skull just above the temple, a parabola of rubies.
Menelaus was falling—no, he had flung himself backwards in a powerful and agile motion, but not to safety. He plunged in a clattering swirl of metallic fabric in the one direction the attackers had no way and no expectation of hindering: directly off the cliffside. It was like a backward swan dive into a nothingness of air. He pulled both attackers with him.
Daae writhed, regained his footing, and jerked back, arms windmilling. The heavy rock continued its arc of motion, flew from the hand of Menelaus (an unlikely shot, since Menelaus was upside-down and backwards to Daae at this moment, in midair), and struck Daae where ear met jaw. Dizzying abyss was at his feet. Choking, Daae lost his footing and clutched frantically the snowy ground beneath him.
Yuen and Montrose went over the side of the precipice.
There was a slither of motion and a singing jar of sound, like the string of an instrument plucked taut. The hawk-faced older man stared in puzzlement at a tent stake driven deeply into the cold and rocky ground. For a dazed moment, he wondered how the tent spike he had thrown had fallen here. But no. There was a second spike here, and a third, and all were pounded securely into the ground. This was the spot where Menelaus had been standing. A length of tent rope securely lashed to all three spikes was pulled taut, vibrating. It ran over the brink.
The gray-haired Daae belly-crawled to the edge of the precipice and cautiously peered over.
The line of tent rope extended only seven or eight feet. It was done in a bowline around the bare left foot of Menelaus, who hung with his pale buttocks and loincloth exposed, his head downward, with his bulky garments fluttering beyond his ears like the petals of some baroque flower.
The pantherish Yuen was also still alive, also head downward, and a lariat running from somewhere in the bulky garments flapping around Menelaus ran to the younger attacker’s feet. It was a slipknot, not a bowline, and so Yuen’s feet and thighs were cut and bleeding from the bite of the rope, but the rope held him.
The two were swaying very slowly, a human pendulum.
2. The Tombs
The cleft beyond the heads of the upside-down men was as sharp and clean as if the mountainside had been split in two, in times now long past, by some titanic force. Slightly jarred parallel lines of the first and second level of a cryogenic Tomb facility could be seen descending into darkness, looking oddly like bookshelves of a titan’s library. Broken cells and empty corridors opened out into midair, separated by strata of severed wires and tubes, rock and insulation. Dripping from every level, like icicles, were streaks of twisted girders.
The coffins near the surface, far below them, were blank lozenges, dull and inert. Their coolant had long ago leaked out, their seals compromised, their cargo dead beyond recovery.
After a long moment, the knife-sharpened spike that had flown over the edge struck bottom, and there was a clatter and an echo of clatter that rose from the dark. At that sound, there flickered winks of energy, as the defensive mechanisms of some coffin from yet a lower stratum, still active, stirred to life. A faintly audible murmur and echo of chiming, hissing, and buzzing, like atonal music, suddenly rose from the deep, accompanied by the insectlike rustle of many metallic feet, moving.
The noise spooked Daae; his face was frozen in a look of supernatural fear.
From somewhere in the mass of the fabric, Menelaus spoke quietly, but carried over the rustling from below, “Loyal, respected, and Proven Alphas, how can this Beta line be of service to the Command this day?”
He spoke in grammatically flawless Virginian, a language called Old Dominion, in the accent of a Patrician, and he used the correct declensions and form of address.
Menelaus added, “And if this Beta may speak freely, loyal Alphas, perhaps the service could be one carried out either beyond the range of whatever power we have disturbed in the Tombs, or a task simple enough to be accomplished before any buried weapons are brought to bear.”
Daae called down softly, “Then you are truly Chimera?”
He spoke in a stilted and formalized version of the same tongue, as formulated by Chimerical grammarians long after Virginian was a dead language.
Menelaus brought his hand slowly into view. He held a scalpel stolen from the medical supply tent. He put it against the line of the lariat holding Yuen headfirst above the abyss. Menelaus said, “Must we revert to the older custom, and prove our worth by delivering up a dead foe? This involves considerable inconvenience!”
Daae’s eyes narrowed. “What inconvenience?”
“Sir! No foe is ready to hand, and if I commit an act of insubordination against the Loyal and Proven Alpha youth helplessly dangling below me, surely you, sir, would be duty-bound to reciprocate by chastising me, perhaps by unearthing the stake on which I currently depend. This would rob the Emergency Eugenic Command of two of her surviving veterans in this strange and cold far-future era.”
Silence. Daae said nothing.
Menelaus offered: “I await with pleasure the orders of my superior officer, sir.”
Daae called down, “Loyal and Proven wielder of Grislac, is your weapon still in your hand?”
The white truncheon had a thong looped around the dark-haired man’s wrist. The youth flourished it lightly in the air.
Daae said, “Then what say you?”
But the younger warrior was laughing softly. He spoke in Chimerical, in the dialect used in the western hemisphere during the forty-ninth century. “Loyal sir, if this man is not a Chimera, then sever the line and let me drop with him! If a baseline stock or Kine or underling can defeat me so handily, I am no further use to the Command, and will go without complaint into the promised oblivion we all seek.”
Daae said, “Our race is extinct, and the Command consists of we two, and the Alpha Lady Ivinia. Therefore the Command—such as it is—cannot afford the loss of one-third its number, one half its Alpha line fighting strength.”