“Big fellow. Name unknown.” Dr. Taproot frowned, one hand coming up to stroke his chin, fingers sliding toward an absent goatee.

“You don’t remember, Snorri?” I asked.

“I am simply a library record, dear boy. This unit has not been connected to the deepnet for . . . oh my, nearly a thousand years.”

“Why do you look like Dr. Taproot?”

“Who else would I look like? I am Elias Taproot’s data-echo.”

I frowned and considered shaking the box to see if it held more intelligible answers.

“Why have you popped up out of all the ghosts in this box? And—” *beep* “And why is it beeping?”

Taproot frowned for a moment, flexing his hands rapidly in the space between us as if trying to wring out a reply. “A narrow bandwidth emergency signal, broadcast using residual satellite power, has activated all devices in this immediate area.”

“Say that again in words that have meaning or I’m closing this box, digging a hole, and leaving it here under five foot of soil.” I meant it too, except for the digging part.

Taproot’s eyes widened at that. “This is a level 5 sanctioned emergency broadcast. You can’t just walk away from that—it contravenes any number of regulations. You wouldn’t dare!”

“Watch me!” I turned away.

“Wait!” The thing had Taproot’s voice down pat, I had to give it that. He’d had the same mix of outrage and nervousness when dressing me down for bringing an unborn into his circus. “Wait! You wanted to know why I was projected rather than any other record?”

I glanced back. “Well?”

“It’s me that’s in trouble. My flesh. Somewhere close by. The location system is corrupt, orbits have decayed—” He caught my deepening frown and amended his language. “The box will beep more rapidly as you get closer, but it’s only a rough guide.”

I reached over and snapped the box shut. I don’t like ghosts. “So, let’s go.” I picked it up, straightened and turned toward Murder. “While we still have the light.”

“He said Dr. Taproot is in danger.” I could tell without looking that Snorri wasn’t moving.

“The circus man?” Hennan piped up. I must have told him stories at some point.

“There might be more wonders with him . . .” Kara sounded like a starving woman describing a hot roast with gravy. I glanced her way but the box in my hands held her gaze. It beeped again. “That was truly his likeness?”

I shrugged. “Like him, but thirty years younger.” In Grandmother’s childhood memories Taproot had been there at the palace, a man in his forties, head of Gholloth the First’s security. What in hell’s name he was, or what gets a man like that in trouble, I had no interest in discovering.

“Which direction shall we try?” Snorri asked.

I sighed and pointed up the hill without looking at it. “It’s pretty obvious. Where else would it be? A fortress full of corpses, laced with the remnants of some horrendous magic or Builder weapon . . . it’s got to be there, doesn’t it?”

None of them bothered to deny it.

TWENTY-FOUR

The sun set, leaving us to climb up to the fort in the day’s afterglow. We beat the rising mists up the slopes, and glancing back I could see nothing of the burned village, just a white sea, all a-swirl, flowing into the woods, coiling around each trunk before reaching up to drown the trees.

In the west the sky glowed red; in the east darkness threatened, and somewhere a screech-owl lifted its voice to greet the night. Just great.

*beep* “We could wait until morning, you know.” *beep* I wrapped the box in my cloak, trying to muffle it. The thing had been annoying from the start, and the irritation increased with the increasing tempo of the beeps. “Or I could stay here with the box—we don’t want it to give us away.”

“We need the box to find Taproot,” Snorri said. “And I never saw your Red Queen as the sort to leave survivors. Certainly not armed and dangerous ones.”

Large chunks of masonry littered the upper slope, some pieces so big we had to track around them. Hennan leapt from one to another, clearly oblivious to the growing sense of dread that any reasonable person should feel in such circumstances. Just above us the breach in the walls yawned wide, still jagged with the violence of the event that had obliterated the gatehouse.

“Is that . . . smoke?” I pointed to a white cloud hanging across the breach.

“The memory of smoke.” Kara reached up to snatch something from the air. Opening her palm she revealed a small seed hanging below a scrap of downy fluff. “Fireweed. Always the first green among the black.”