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THIRTY-THREE




The riotous clamor of the Grays’ voices rang off the ice and stone above, disturbing a flock of gulls and sending them off with raucous cries. Not all of the Edu were shouting; fewer than half were, probably. But the shouters were loud. They had enthusiasm and they were unified.

Kareem gripped the hilt of his ankh. Marty and François were good at waiting, but in the face of danger, Kareem wanted forward momentum.

A Gray climbed onto the speaking platform where shortly before there had been debate. He carried a hooked scimitar naked in one hand and bore savage scars on one side of his face. He wore leather leggings with metal plates stitched to them, and a tunic and skirt of overlapping bronze disks. Bronze bracers covered his forearms from wrist to elbow. He stomped to the front of the platform, tunic and skirt jangling, and leaned forward over the crowd. The crowd continued to boil and shout, and the scar-faced Gray waited.

Two more Grays followed him onto the platform and ranged themselves one to his right and one to his left. They wore leather breeches and jackets, and each held a long staff. The one to the scarred Gray’s right stepped forward and banged the end of his staff on the stone of the platform. “Silence, all!”

The Grays began to quiet.

“Silence!” The herald banged his staff again. “Silence! Warleader Pinosh will address you to explain the situation!”

Kareem looked for his party and found them hopelessly scattered through the crowd, insulated from the Herders by groups of the Farmer faction. He wanted to consult with François, because he knew he needed to do something, and he wanted to take an action François would approve of. But François was on the far side of the crowd from Kareem, and looking the other direction.

Kareem cursed his luck that his enemies among the Grays seemed to include all the warriors, while his allies were useless scholars, healers, and engineers who didn’t even know how to operate their own machines.

“Silence!” The herald banged his staff one final time and then stepped back.

Warleader Pinosh, the scarred Gray with the scimitar, looked out over the crowd, head slowly swiveling one direction and then the other. His Adam’s apple rolled up and down once with a resounding click. Finally, he opened his mouth, and the voice that came out sounded like barbed wire soaked in unsweetened lemon juice.

“You all know me!” Pinosh howled over yellow teeth, sharp and numerous. “I am a warrior of few words! I am a fighter who takes action!”

A muted cheer rose from some quarters of the crowd, but in other sections, there was uneasy silence.

Kareem saw Marty and François begin to gather up the rest of the party. They spoke to each other briefly in whispers, then headed to grab Surjan. They were still too far from Kareem for convenience.

And he wanted to do something to help, something effective.

Even though Kareem felt confident in his skills, he still felt that he needed to prove himself, but he also wanted to do the right thing for the team. It might seem silly, but he wanted to feel a heroic moment that was all his own doing.

“I urge my Farmer brothers to relax.” Pinosh sheathed his scimitar in a scabbard at his belt. “No good will come of conflict among us. I will let anyone who wishes to farm beans continue to farm beans. And I have done nothing any of us need be ashamed of. When a creature is starving, it is no crime to eat, and all creatures eat other beings to live. Are we not creatures, too? This is simple biology. We’ve slowly been choking ourselves to death in this wretched atmosphere and something had to be done. What the Farmers have done is laudable, but insufficient.”

The rumble that arose from the crowd sounded like general, maybe somewhat reluctant, agreement. Kareem spotted a knot of angry young Grays near the front, muttering their disagreement.

“I have brought food that will feed us for many days,” Pinosh said. “The Shnipara livers are rich in iron, which will help us breathe free. And most of them are not even local. We have captured a migrating clan from a distant land. This means we will continue to bring in the iron that my Farmer brothers buy with medical assistance, with no interruption. These are all victories. There is no compromise in these actions and no defeat.”

Kareem knew where the Herders would take their prisoners. To get out in front of them, he turned and headed toward the machinery room. He ducked to shrink himself in size and he slipped into the crowd, heading for the entrance he’d discovered.

But Pinosh wasn’t finished yet. “Survival was at stake. Am I right, yes or no? Was survival at stake?”

“Yes!” some in the crowd cried.

“The gods sent us their bounty,” he continued. “Am I right, yes or no? Did the gods not send us their bounty?”

“Yes!” the crowd roared. “The gods sent us their bounty!”

Kareem was surprised that aliens would have any gods whatsoever. What demonic thing would these monsters worship?

“Would the Farmers have agreed, if I had asked their consent?” Pinosh asked. “Would Yotto have said, ‘Yes, I agree, let us eat the humans’? Would Chaz have said, ‘Yes, take as many as you can, so we have stores’? Would the Farmers have chosen their own species above the Shnipara?”

He let the question fall onto the stage, rhetorical and heavy.

“I think we all know they would not have chosen their own people,” Pinosh said. He stood still and shook his head in sorrow.

A soft boo rose from the crowd.

“I had to do it! I had to seize the opportunity!” The warleader sprang back into action. He paced back and forth on the stage, shouting. “We must eat to live, and it would be a corruption to let ourselves die! I had no choice! I had to capture the humans for food, didn’t I? Yes or no, didn’t I?”

“Yes!” the crowd cried.

Pinosh raised his arms and bowed his head.

“Pinosh is a liar!”

Kareem was nearly to the engines room when he heard the voice shouting. He slipped behind the edge of a rock wall and looked back, just in time to see a gang of Grays rush the speaking platform.

One of the attacking Grays slapped his hands on the edge of the stage, in order to pull himself up. Pinosh already had his scimitar in hand and slashed through both wrists in a single motion. His attacker fell away, screaming and jetting blood from both wrists. Both of Pinosh’s heralds stepped forward, swinging clubs. They cracked skulls and ribs and used the staffs like levers to throw attackers back into the crowd.

“Anyone resisting,” Pinosh shrieked, “goes into the dungeons with the humans!”

Kareem faded back toward the engine room. Pinosh hadn’t quite ordered his people to seize every other human, but it seemed like only a matter of time. Kareem let himself into the room full of machines, shut the door behind him, and briefly considered his options in the sour stink of iron-enriched tofu bricks.

He could wait in the machine room, but then he might have to sneak past or attack guards to gain access to the prisoners. He could try to hide somewhere in the cells, but the rooms were bare stone, and anywhere he might hide, he risked discovery.

The choice was obvious.

Kareem headed down into the dungeon, toward the chamber of gnawed bones.


Gunther stared at the wheeled cages, full of humans and drawn by humans, with the whip-wielding Grays standing atop. He recognized dozens of their faces, maybe hundreds. He told himself they couldn’t logically all be looking at him, but he felt they were. Everywhere he looked, his gaze met accusing eyes.

He closed his eyes and still he saw them.

He saw Dawa, weeping. Where was Sharrum? Had he died defending his people in vain? Had he been eaten by the Edu war party on the frozen Pampas?

Save them.

He saw Arnun and both his sisters, Telipi and Yaru. They weren’t fishing now, or frolicking in the tall grasses behind their family’s hut, they were huddled together to protect each other, and their faces were streaked with tears.

Rescue them. This is the task at hand.

He saw Zidna, the fisherwoman, but no sign of her husband, Muwat. He saw the queen’s handmaids, Nirni and Kuzi, who had been forced to flee with their abdicating queen, then survived cannibal raiders, had been allowed back among their people, and were now facing death by consumption.

Save mankind, and then come to the portal.

“All of mankind?” The voice’s words felt like iron.

Save the ones in front of you, and you have saved all of mankind.

Gunther rushed through the crowd. Grays milled this way and that in insensate flows that risked sweeping him away. He pushed with his hands and shoulders and made his way as best he could.

He had no skills or magic with which to rescue the Neshili, so he needed to gather his friends. He ran into Lowanna, who fought her way through the mob with the fisher family’s weasel on her shoulder.

“The voice says we have to save them!” Gunther cried.

“I don’t need a voice to tell me what to do!” Lowanna snapped. “Do you think I don’t know that we need to rescue our people?”

“I think it’s more important than our survival,” Gunther said, out of breath. “I think it’s part of our test. I think it’s why we’re here.”

Lowanna eyed him strangely, but led him away from the crowd.


Kareem hid at the mouth of the tunnel leading to the chamber of the bones and waited. After the chaos of the square above, the silence was comforting. The bones would have unnerved him, but now he felt as if they were the bones of his friends.

Or his family, maybe. Or his clients. They were the remains of someone whose death he was about to avenge.

But he couldn’t just kill all the Grays himself. There were too many for that.

He needed information.

The raiding party came down into the dungeon not through the machine room, but by some other way Kareem had not scouted. How many unused entrances did this ancient prison have? Had all the entrances been sealed off? Or had the Herders been keeping some set of entryways open, preparing for the moment when they’d fill these ancient pens with prisoners again?

Phosphorescent light came to the prisons, illuminating what he had known in complete darkness. He watched torchbearers come first, carrying clubs like maces with bulbous heads, dipped in glowing green paint and giving off light. These were fixed into brackets in the walls. Scouts checked all the cells to be certain they were empty; guards were posted at exits in pairs and trios.

Then Kareem retreated around the corner and listened. He heard the cracking of whips and the crunching of clubs on bone. He heard curses and whimpers. He heard cries for mercy from voices of all ages and both sexes, but never did he hear the Grays relent. He heard pleas not to be locked away, and the slamming of doors.

Eventually, the prisons grew quiet.

Kareem knew very well that he should reconnoiter, learn the positions of the Gray guards, and go report to Marty. He should do nothing to interfere with the prisoners or their guards, not yet. Anything he did might give away their hand. He knew that he should control his rage, keep his cool, and take wise actions that would keep the party’s hands free.

But Kareem was angry. The same monsters that had seized him and run off into their dungeon below Nesha had now seized all the Neshili and locked them away to store them for food. That included children and women, but those weren’t even really the grounds for his wrath; in Kareem’s mind he felt that he himself had been locked up again.

The single Gray he’d killed hadn’t slaked his thirst for vengeance.

And Kareem now had the advantage of surprise.

So he was going to do something about it.

He took the first guard standing in a pump room, with his back to the chamber of bones. It was easy. Kareem walked up behind him silently and sank his ankh into the creature’s lungs. Hot blood spattered the stones of the floor, and he took the alien’s sword and dagger, stashing them in the wall-niche in the hall leading to the chamber of bones, as the Gray disintegrated into goo.

It felt like the beginning of justice.

Kareem felt even better after taking the second Gray. This monster stood at the iron door to one of the cells, hissing threats to a room full of young women inside. He would eat them alive, he told them, because liver tasted best when it was fresh. He would violate them first. Moreover, he’d force each one to witness the deaths of all her friends before her, and even compel them to taste each other’s livers before dying.

Kareem took off the guard’s head with one blow. He plucked the leather helmet, dagger, and spear from the pile of ichor and stashed them with the other gear he was accumulating.

He slightly regretted that the Edu dissolved into black pudding. He would have found it satisfying to drag their bodies back into the labyrinth and hurl them onto the pile of human bones.

He told the young women to be patient, that he couldn’t release them yet, but that he would come right back. It felt good to say the words. He felt heroic.

He considered slicing open the cell doors and freeing as many prisoners as he could then and there, but decided again that he had to wait.

Kareem killed a third Herder guard coming out of the latrine. With no warning—just as they’d given him no warning when they’d snatched him in Nesha—he sliced through the Gray’s chest, opening both lungs and cutting through the heart in one blow. The gear went into Kareem’s growing stash and he scattered dirt over all the ooze he’d sprayed on the floors and on the walls.

Then he headed for the surface.

His thirst for justice was still not slaked. The taste of vengeance he had had made him, if anything, want more. But there were too many Grays moving about in the dungeon and he didn’t want to get caught.

He used his heat vision to explore unused passages, eventually finding a tunnel that was really an air vent. When it turned upward ninety degrees and rose vertically, he had no problem shimmying right up the shaft and out onto a ledge at its top. From there, he ran across the ridge, leaped over the narrow point of a ravine, and let himself down onto the ledge in front of the engineer’s laboratory.

Gollip let him in and François turned to meet him with a relieved expression. “It’s about time you got here. We need a plan.”



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