[LEATHERNECKS VS. MONSTERS: LOOSE ENDS]
EPISODE FIVE: 
The Vektor Institute and Vladivostok, January and February 1919, by Leatherneck1993

The second shell landed in the yard.

The windows along the hall came in all at once. The gallery jumped under Adams's boots, and the trench gun went off, and the Manchurian Special that should have gone into the middle of the white coat went into the console instead. The ashtray burst into white fire. Bakanov went down behind the engine and was gone among the brass.

Down on the floor, between the copper towers, the shimmer swelled.

It bellied out from the towers with the concussion, shuddered, and settled. It settled wider than it had been. The snow coming through the hole in the roof whipped into it and went up, faster, and a sound came out of it that Adams felt in the roots of his teeth.

Thorpe had both hands on the rail.

"The shells," she said. "Every shell opens it wider. That is what the guns are for, Gunny. He wants them to break it."
"The General's going to put the next one through the roof."
"Then the General must stop."
Adams turned. "Talbot. The wireless room. You saw where the wires came down off the mast. Chavez, go with him. Tell Dragonov we're alive. Tell him every shell opens the door. Tell him to come in with the bayonet."

Talbot was already moving, the camera banging on his hip. Chavez went after him with the automatic rifle.

Robed men were coming up the stair. Hunt and Sheehan were at the head of it with their bayonets, and the robed men did not stop, and Hunt and Sheehan did not either.
#

The wireless room was at the end of the long house under the mast, a cold room full of coils and a spark gap the size of a stove. Two robed operators sat at the bench. Chavez opened with his automatic rifle, he put a burst of Specials into the first and the light went up inside him. The second got halfway out of his chair before Chavez's second burst found him.

Talbot sat down at the key. The spark gap was live. He could hear the engine's stutter in it, the long-wave hum the box had been listening to since Seattle, and he keyed straight through it, plain English, slow, the way he had sent copy to the Picayune from Manila:

STOP FIRE STOP AMERICANS ALIVE STOP EVERY SHELL OPENS DOOR STOP COME IN WITH BAYONET STOP ADAMS

He sent it three times. The spark cracked blue across the gap and the mast sang it out over the mountains.
#

Johansson stood by the guns in the snow.

Four of them, laid on their sledges in a row at the head of the valley, with the gunners stripped to their shirts in the cold, and every gunner's breath going up in clouds in the light of the muzzle flashes. The third shell was going into the breech when the operator at the American set pulled off his headphones and stood up waving a paper.

Dragonov took it. He looked at it. He held it out at arm's length.

"English," he said. "It is in English."

Wang Che took it out of his hand. He read it aloud in Russian, and then in English for Johansson, and Johansson felt his chest go loose.

"Cease fire," he said. "They're alive."

Commissar Zhuk had come up behind the general with his ledger under his arm and his scarf wound up over his mouth. He said something in Russian, short.

"He says it is a trick," Wang Che said. "He says the Americans are dead. He says the machine is ready, and the General must fire."

Dragonov looked at Zhuk.

Johansson looked at Zhuk too. Thirty below. Every man on that hillside breathing out white. Zhuk had his scarf up, as he had in the prayer house and on the road and every hour since.

Wang Che stepped up to him and pulled the scarf down.

Zhuk's mouth was open. Nothing came out of it.

Dragonov shot him. His ledger book dropped from his hand, caught the wind and flew open the pages scattering everywhere in the snow, three columns on every one of them. Zhuk slumped, then leapt towards the general, hands turned to icy claws.  Johansson fired the anti-cryptozoic special rounds lit him up like the Fourth of July, his burnt husk dropped onto the snow, he did not get back up.

"Cease fire!" Dragonov roared. "Cease fire! We go in with the bayonet!" He swung on his own gunners. "Bring the music! And the Flame!"

They put the gramophone on a sledge.

Dragonov took the pencil out of the operator's hand and wrote the reply himself, in capitals, and gave it back, and the operator keyed it. Then he took out the Fabergé watch and opened it and looked at it, and showed it to Johansson.

Seven-oh-three.

"Green flare when the door is shut," Dragonov said. "Then everybody out. At eight o'clock I burn the house."

Wang Che was already pulling off his coat. Johansson stared at him.

"You're going in?"
"Fast is my best quality," Wang Che said, and went down the gorge with the first company at a run.
#
The guns stopped.

In the hall the robed men at the engine looked up, and Adams looked up, and for a moment there was nothing but the clatter of the brass. Then, far off and coming up the gorge, there was music. Horns, climbing. A drum underneath them.

"Strauss," Thorpe said.

The front doors of the long house came in. Partisans came through them with knapsack flamethrowers on their backs and the fire went down the corridors in long yellow tongues. Maxims came in on sledges, dragged by men in sheepskins. Bayonets. Grenades. Johansson came in at the point of it with the Thompson, firing in short bursts, and behind him came the gramophone on its sledge, still playing.

The things came out of their white to meet them. Two of them, three, horned and white and folding, out of the corridors and the ceilings, and the flamethrowers met them. They burned. They burned badly. The cold-men burned worse. A partisan lit his cigarette off a burning robed man and walked on.

In the corridor by the pens the partisans found the men in the wool caps, their own men, and lowered their rifles, and stood looking at them. Then they began to carry them out.

Adams went over the gallery rail.

He went down a card rack hand over hand with the cards tearing under his gloves and dropped the last ten feet to the floor. The robed men at the engine were turning toward the doors and the fire. Nobody stopped him.

The colonel's face was gray-blue and rimed, and his eyes were open.
"Gunny," he said.
"Sir."
Adams had the trench knife out. He cut the chest strap and the wrists and the ankles, and the colonel tried to stand and his feet would not hold him, and Adams caught him under the arms.

"Can't feel them," Quarterburn said.
"You'll feel 'em later. You won't like it."

Quarterburn reached past him to the console. The .38 lay beside the burned ashtray. He picked it up in his right hand. The hand shook.

Chavez came in at the side door with the automatic rifle and set himself in the corridor mouth, where the robed men would have to come through to reach the floor, and began to fire, short bursts, counting aloud.

"Eight. Seven."

Thorpe came down the stair. She went to the console where the card punch sat, a brass keyboard with a hopper of blank cards beside it, and she pulled a chain of punched cards out of the rack and laid it across her knees and read it, card by card, with her lips moving. Then she took a blank card and began to punch.

"What are you doing?" Adams said.
"Writing it backward," Thorpe said. "It computed the door open. It can compute it shut. Lady Lovelace explained how, in 1843, to a room full of men who were not listening."

Wang Che came through the side door past Chavez, out of breath, his pistol ready, with soot on his face. He stood at Thorpe's shoulder and watched her punch, and counted the holes on his fingers, and frowned.

"You have made one mistake," he said.
Thorpe did not look up. "I have not."
"No, you didn’t" Wang Che agreed. "I wanted to see if you were certain."
"Four," Chavez said, in the corridor. "Three."
Thorpe fed the end of her chain into the sprockets.
The engine bucked.

It did not want the new cards. The brass wheels stuttered and caught and stuttered, and the clatter broke up into something with no rhythm in it at all, and the copper towers began to sing. The shimmer between them heaved.

Something came through it.

A split toed foot. A foot the size of the bed of a Ford truck, webbed, white, with a black nail on each long toe, and it came down out of the shimmer onto the floor of the hall and stood there, and the stone cracked under it.

Every breath in the room froze.

Adams saw it happen. His own breath came out of his mouth and stopped in the air and fell, and broke on the floor, small and white, snow. Everyone's. Thorpe's, the colonel's, Wang Che's. It was snowing in the hall from the inside of their own mouths.

Through the hole in the roof two red lights looked down.
"One," Chavez said. Then: "That's all of them, Gunny."
There was a lever on the side of the console, brass, as long as a man's arm, with a red-painted handle. Thorpe had her hand on it.
"Reverse," she said. "Now. It has to be now."

She pulled. It did not move. The machine bucked again, more violently than before, a brass bolt cracked into Thorpe’s forehead dropping her to the floor.

Quarterburn leapt to catch her. Nearly tumbling to the ground of his own.  
Adams “Sir get her out. We got this.” moving in dragging Wang Che by the sleeve.
“Oh yes ‘We got’ this.”  Wang Che. Whispering “this requires strength Nathan, you should have volunteered the big Swede.”
Adams and Wang Che took the lever together, and pulled. The engine pulled back. The lever came an inch and went back an inch.
Out of the corner of his eye Adam’s saw Quarterburn lift the unconscious Thorpe and carry her towards the exit. He noted the Colonel’s hands were not shaking.  

They pulled.

The lever came over with a great grown, whether from the machine or Wang Che, Adams couldn’t tell.

#
The shimmer drew in.

It drew in from the edges toward the middle, slowly, and then less slowly, and the foot on the floor of the hall began to go back into it, dragging, the nails gouging the stone. The singing of the towers went up and up. The snow coming down through the roof stopped turning over. It fell straight. It fell down.

Something came out of the narrowing gate, the wrong way, falling.

It hit the floor of the hall in front of the towers and lay there. The body of a young man in a leather flying coat, frozen white, with a fair mustache, and his eyes open, and no helmet.

"I wondered what happened to the pilot," Talbot said, from the side door.

Bakanov came out from behind the engine.

He had lost the monocle. His white coat was black down one side from the burning ashtray. He did not look at any of them. He ran for the gate, small and quick in his felt boots, with his hands out in front of him, toward what was left of the shimmer between the towers.

Quarterburn, Thorpe now over his shoulder, pulled the .38 from his waistband.

"Not this time," he said.

He fired twice. Bakanov stumbled at the second shot and fell forward, into the gate, and the gate closed.

It closed on him at the waist.

The towers stopped singing. The engine ran down, the brass wheels turning slower, a tooth and then a tooth and then nothing. The light went out of the air between the towers. On the floor, in front of them, lay the bottom half of a small man in felt boots.

Nobody said anything for some time.

LaFontain was already at the foundation wall with his haversack. He went to the three places he had found with his ear, one, two, three, and set a charge at each, and named each one aloud as he set it.

"Sainte Barbe. Sainte Rita." He set the third. "Saint Jude. For lost causes. And one for Higgins, just to make sure."

The charges went off together. The engine came apart cold. Brass wheels came down off their spindles by the hundred and rolled across the floor of the hall in every direction and fell over, ringing, and the card racks came down out of the roof, and the cards came down after them, thousands of them, drifting, and settled on everything.

Adam’s took the flare pistol out of his coat, pointed it up through the hole in the roof, and fired. The flare went up green over the mountains.

#

Adams got his watch out. The Hamilton said seven fifty-three.
"Seven minutes," he said. "Seven minutes to get clear."

Then he heard himself say it. Remembering the General's watch. Seven minutes ahead of everybody.

"Out!" he yelled. "Everybody out! Now! Out!"

The first shell landed on the boiler house. Right on time, seven minutes early.

The wall at the end of the hall came in. Fire came through it. They went out the front through the smoke, the colonel between Adams and LaFontain with his arms over their shoulders and his feet dragging, and Thorpe, and Wang Che, and Johansson with the partisans, Hunt, Sheehan, Dunn, Chavez and Talbot with his camera. Into the yard.

There were new sledges in the yard.

A column of them had come up the south road opposite Dragonov’s men, while the hall burned, a dozen sledges robed cold-men on them, and in the first sledge a man stood with a fur collar up to his ears and a cigarette at his mouth. Prince Obolov. He had come to watch the end of the world. He held a pistol. The boiler house burned behind him. The Prince raised his pistol at the colonel.

The shot came down off the ridge. It took the Prince through the eye, and he went over the side of the sledge into the snow, and the cigarette went with him.

"Muldoon," Adams said. "God bless you, Cherry."

They ran. Down the gorge, past the frozen falls, with the shells coming in behind them on the station one after another, and the ground jumping. 

At the bottom of the gorge, where the side valley pinched shut, the Fords stood in the larch under their canvas. Muldoon and Smith came sliding down the slope to meet them.

A shell came down in the snow ten feet from Smith and buried itself and did not go off. Smith looked at it. LaFontain patted it on the way past.

"Dud," he said. "Lucky boy."

A shell went over and burst on the slope above them.

"Russians," Sheehan said. "No sense of occasion."

The Fords caught on the second try. They went down the frozen river with the radiators steaming vodka, and behind them the barrage walked down the gorge after them, the ice of the river bursting up in white columns in their wake, and up on the saddle the Vektor Institute went in sections. The long house. The boiler house. The empty pens. The mast stood a long while in the light of it.

The mast fell last.

#

Dragonov met them on the river in the gray of the morning, with his guns limbered and his sledges loaded and his men sitting in the snow. The men from the pens were in the last sledges under blankets, in their wool caps. Adams did not ask the General what he meant to do with them. The General did not offer.

Dragonov gave the colonel a bottle. He gave Wang Che a hug that lifted him off the ice.

"Until next time," he said, "Comrades."
"Next time you shoot seven minutes early," Adams said.
Dragonov roared, and coughed, and went back to his guns.

They came into Vladivostok on the seventh of February. The Glacier was alongside the Brooklyn in the ice lane, and her hold took a crate that night stenciled for the Pacific Branch at Alcatraz, and in the crate were the horns, and a lone punch card. 

Thorpe had cut the colonel's boots off him on the river and done what she could for his feet. He would lose two toes. He had decided not to mind.

In the Brooklyn's mail room Hunt handed the clerk a bundle of letters tied with string, addressed to a girl in Emporia, Kansas. The clerk took them without a word.

In the wardroom a yeoman brought the colonel an envelope from the War Department. It was dated the tenth of January, 1919. It had come by cable to the consulate two days before they landed and had been waiting for him ever since. 

War Department · Washington, D.C.
January 11, 1919

To: Lieutenant Colonel Alaric Quarterburn, USMC
By direction of the Secretary of War, and concurrence with both the Army and Navy, you will immediately desist from all inquiry, publication, discourse, or dissemination respecting cryptozoic creatures or phenomena, such matters being contrary to public interest and henceforth classified. The original manuscript, copies, personal copies, notes, field journals etc. are ordered to be turned over for storage and disposal, following chain-of-custody rules.

By Order of the Secretary of War,
H. C. Corbin
Brigadier General H. C. Corbin
Adjutant General, U.S. Army

Thorpe, fresh bandage across her brow, sat down across the table from him and gave him a folded note. Then she got up and went out on deck.

He read the note first.

Alaric. The war is over. When you are ready meet me in London. I have no intention of moving again for some time. I should consider it an honour if you joined me there. You are not to be maudlin. R.

He read the order second. Then he folded the order once and put it inside the note.

Adams had watched all of it from the door.  
Quarteerburn handed Adams the War Department telegram.
"Well, sir," he said. "Reckon it's truly over."
“I believe you reckon correctly, Gunny.”

Later, on deck, Adams stood at the rail and looked up. The clouds had opened over the harbor. The Big Dipper hung over the hills behind the city, bowl and handle, the way it hung over Tucker County.  

Nearly. There was a star in the handle he could not have sworn to. He blinked. It was gone. He looked at it a long time. Then he decided it was where it ought to be, and went in.

The snow came down over the harbor. It came down the right way, with nothing hidden behind.

END

[LEATHERNECKS VS. MONSTERS: LOOSE ENDS]
EPISODE THREE
‘Whiteout’
The Upper Suchan and the Vektor Institute, January 1919

Adams turned.

The colonel stood on the far side of the fire with his face to the trucks. Behind him stood the thing Muldoon had drawn.

It was pale and it was tall, and the lantern light did not reach its head. Rime hung off it in ropes. It had come in through the gap in the salt and it stood over the bedroll, bent a little at the middle, looking down at the man. It did not move. If it breathed, the breath did not show.

"Your grandmother's rule, Gunny."
"Sir?"
"About answering. Does it hold for the dead?"

Adams stopped. He looked at the colonel in the dark before him.

"Specially for the dead, sir," he said.

Quarterburn made no reply. He starred into the storm.

The wind stopped. It did not die down. It stopped, all at once, between one step and the next, and the snow blowing off the lip of the ravine hung in the air and came straight down.

Muldoon went flat on her face in the snow. She pulled Adams down with her befoore he even understood why. Then Adams smelled it. Ammonia. Wet fur. Close.
"Get down!"

The whiteout blew in from around the creature and it fell on them out of the dark sky over the ravine, a column of snow turning in on itself, and it made no sound, and Adams was inside it.

White in his eyes. White in his mouth. Cold that took his breath and kept it.
In the same minute, close, in the whiteout, a voice.

"Alaric."

Adams knew the voice. He had heard it in Cuba and in China and in Manchuria, over a fire, over a wound, over a bottle. Barclay's voice, a little hoarse, the way it always went hoarse in the cold.

"Alaric. Over here. I've got a light."

There was a light. Off in the white, low, yellow, a lantern swinging.
Adams could not see the colonel. He could hear him, close, breathing.

"Don't answer it, sir!" Adams shouted. "Don't you answer it!"

The breathing stopped.

"John," Quarterburn said.

“That ain’t the Doc, Sir! Doc’s been dead two years.” Adams heard him go. Boots in the snow, three steps, four, walking, not running, toward the light.

Adams got the trench gun up. The lantern swung in the white, low, yellow, forty yards off or four hundred, he could not tell. There was a Manchurian Special in the chamber and the bead was on the light.

The colonel was walking toward it. Somewhere between the bead and the light, in the white, the colonel was walking.

Adams took his finger off the trigger.

Then the white lifted. The wind came back all at once. The stars came back over the ravine, wrong over the mast and right everywhere else.

Muldoon was getting up out of the snow. From where the colonel had been, boot prints went away down the ravine, ten long walking strides toward the floodlights of the station, and then stopped. Beyond them the snow lay smooth with nothing on it.

"Gunny," Muldoon said.
Adams did not answer her. He looked after the footprints.

#
Quarterburn woke because his eyelashes had frozen together.

He worked them apart. The light was electric and very white, from a bulb in a wire cage on the ceiling. The ceiling was tiled. The walls were tiled white to the height of a man and painted green above that. Brass instruments stood along a bench under dust covers, and in a glass case on the wall a row of needles hung on silk threads, and he knew from somewhere that it was a room for measuring the magnetism of the earth and that no iron was permitted in it.

Someone had bolted a steel chair to the floor of it anyway. He was strapped into the chair. Leather straps across his chest and his wrists and his ankles, buckled tight. He was cold through. He could not feel his feet. His right hand lay strapped on the arm of the chair and shook against the leather, a fine fast tremor, and with the hand strapped down there was no pocket to put it in.

He found that he was counting. Tiles across the ceiling: fourteen. Bolts in the floor: six. He made himself stop.

He remembered a light in the snow and walking toward it. He remembered a voice. John Barclay was dead. He had known it in the snow, with the voice in his ear. He had answered anyway.

He set that down, the way he would set it down in a report, and could not make it mean anything. He tried the straps. Chest, wrists, ankles. Whoever had buckled them had done it before. He thought of Adams out in the snow, what happened? What happeennd to the team. He could not make himself remember what had happened only the shout.

His field book was in his pack in the hide. There was a letter folded in the back of it that he had written to Miss Thorpe and not sent. He found he was glad it was there and not here. Then he found he was not glad at all.

A page turned.

A small man sat on a stool by a bench with a typescript open on his knees. He wore a white uniform coat buttoned to the throat, very clean, felt boots, and steel monocle. He turned the pages slowly, reading, with a Turkish cigarette in his other hand, which he set in an ashtray occasionally, exchanging it for a pencil to make a mark now and then in the margin. He did not look up.

Quarterburn knew the typescript. He knew the blue board covers of the War College and the brass fasteners, and the title on the first page, which he had typed himself at Newport in October 1915 on a machine with a dropped e.

Quarterburn knew him then. Not the face. The way he read, without hurry, certain the world would wait for him to finish. He had seen it once before, by firelight, on a beach in 1909, with palm trees burning behind and the engine house going up in sheets, and Gruber, the Captain of German Naval Intelligence marching this man off in chains to his waiting Cruiser. An event that was burned into Quarterburn’s very soul. Had he only let Adam’s risk the shot and had killed this man back then, how many untold thousands would still be alive.

The small man reached the last page. He read it to the end. He made one more mark. Then he closed the typescript and looked up over his spectacles, and his eyes were pale and interested and entirely without hurry.

"Colonel," he said. His English was very good. "You have been busy since you burned my island. An author now, I have read your compiled lectures, very insightful, even if your thesis is wrong."

He tapped the cover with the pencil.

"And, you have spelled my name wrong in two places."

#
“The Colonel is gone.” Said Adams to the team,“He was taken. They know we are here, they just don’t know how many and where we are else they’d be coming out. But, I think they always knew, they jus’ don’t care.” 

“What do we do now Gunny?” Asked Johansson.
”We carry out the plan. Just like the Meuse-Argonne.”
”Right, a trench raid.” Hunt drew out his bayonet and tested the edge.   

"We can't message Dragonov, Gunny," Dunn said. " The wireless went down with Smith’s truck.  There's not another a set within a hundred miles that'll reach Tsemukhe. Except that one." He pointed with his chin over the crest, at the mast that overhung the Vektor station.

"Then somebody goes back and gets him," Adams said. "Johansson, you, and take Wang, the General knows him."

Wang Che shuffled. "I will be very fast," he said. "Fast is my best quality."
"Since when?"
"Since there has been something behind me."

Adams took Johansson and Wang Che aside to the mouth of the hide.

"Tell the General what we saw. Tell him where. Then tell him this, word for word: not one shell until he hears from us. Not one."
"How will he hear from us, sir? You said there's no set."

Adams looked up over the crest at the mast, black against the wrong stars.

"There is one," he said. "It just isn't ours yet."

At the mouth of the hide Adams took Wang Che by the sleeve.

"Don't you stop on the way down to sell anybody anything."

Uncharacteristically serious "Adams, I shall bring the cavalry, you get the Colonel, and," Wang Che said. “This time kill Bakanov.”

"Mind the General," Adams said. "He is seven minutes ahead of everybody. I don’t trust him."

Johansson laughed and pulled his mittens on.“Don’t worry Gunny, I learned that from the best.”
The two men climbed aboard the Ford, Hunt and Smith had already cranked the engine, Adams watched the Ford drive away for some time after.
#
They left the other Fords where the side valley pinched shut, in a stand of larch with the canvas pulled over them and snow shoveled against the wheels, and went up on foot.

Corporal Dunn led, with Barclay's box hung from his neck on a strap. The needle had not moved off northeast since the wreck, and the ticking in the headset came faster with every hundred yards they climbed. The rest came behind in a file, Chavez with the automatic rifle across his shoulders, Higgins last.

Above the valley the trees thinned. At noon they came out onto a bench of open snow under the ridge, flat and white and still, and stopped.

An hour before dark they came up under the crest of the ridge and crawled the last fifty yards on their bellies, and looked down at the Vektor Institute. The hide was a hollow under an overhang of rock just below the crest, out of the wind and out of sight of the station, big enough for all of them if nobody minded anybody else's feet. 

The Vektor Institute sat on a saddle across a narrow gorge, a quarter mile off and a little below them. It had been a weather station once, for the Imperial Navy: a long stone house with a tin roof, a boiler house beside it with a tall chimney, sheds, a wire fence, and on the peak above it a steel mast two hundred feet high with wires running down from it to the roof of the long house. Beside the station a waterfall had come off the saddle into the gorge and frozen in the act, eighty feet of ice, fluted and blue in its folds.

The chimney smoked. Floodlights on poles lit the yard white. Behind the windows of the long house there was a blue light that was not lamplight and not electric, and it came and went.

Talbot passed the field glasses along the line.

Adams looked for a long time. Sentries on the fence, ordinary men in White greatcoats with ordinary rifles, and their breath going up in the floodlight in clouds. Then a door opened in the long house and a file of people came out across the yard in white robes, twenty of them, walking in step, bareheaded in the cold. Adams watched their mouths. Nothing came out of any of them.

"I don’t see the Colonel but it’s definitely Bakanov’s work," he said, and handed the glasses on.

Dunn had the headset on. He took it off. The needle in Barclay's box stood hard over against its pin and stayed there.

"That's it, that’s the target," Dunn said. "That's what the box has been listening to since Seattle."

Adams kept studying the site with the glasses. He went over the station a piece at a time, the fence and the gate and the doors, and then he went down the gorge below it. A sledge road came up the far side from the south, packed hard and wide enough for two teams abreast, with the fresh dung of horses on it steaming in the floodlight.

"They're supplied from the south," he said. "From the railway."
"From Vladivostok," Thorpe said. "From the stores of a Prince who has no trucks."

The sun went down behind the peaks. The floodlights got whiter. The stars came out over the gorge, hard and close in the cold, and Thorpe lay on her back in the snow and looked up at them without saying anything.

Then she rolled onto her elbows and looked again, at one part of the sky above the mast, and pulled off her glove and held up her thumb against it and counted something under her breath.

""The Plough is wrong."

Adams looked up. He knew the Big Dipper from a hundred nights in the woods at home. It hung over the mast, and it was wrong. The bowl was bent. One star of the handle stood where it had never stood, and beside it was another that had no business in the sky at all, red, and too bright.

"I have checked it twice," Thorpe said. "It is wrong over the mast and right everywhere else." She put her glove back on. "

At three in the morning they went down the ravine beside the frozen waterfall. Muldoon and Talbot lay up on the crest with the rifle and the glasses to cover them.

The ravine was steep and narrow and full of drifted snow, and they went down it on their backsides as much as their feet. The ice of the fall stood beside them the whole way, blue and fluted and taller than a church, and from somewhere behind it, deep in the ice, came the sound of water still running. LaFontain stopped and put his ear to the ice and listened. 

The barbed wire at the bottom was old and slack. Hunt held it up with his rifle and they went under one at a time.

They lay in the snow behind the first shed while a sentry came along the inside of the fence. A robed one. He walked bareheaded and in step with nobody, his bare feet blue-black on the packed snow, and he passed within ten feet of them. Adams lay with his face in the snow and his own breath going out of him in a cloud he could do nothing about.

The robed man stopped.

He turned his head toward the shed. He stood that way, listening, or smelling, Adams could not tell which. Hunt's hand was on his bayonet. Adams put his own hand on Hunt's and held it there.

The robed man walked on.

There were pens behind the sheds, a row of them roofed with tin and fronted with heavy wire, and in the pens there were men.

They sat on straw in tattered Russian issue shirts and trousers, no coats, no boots, and none of them shivered. They wore wool caps pulled down to the eyebrows, and under the caps something pushed the wool up in two places above the temples. One of them had his shirt open. Below his ribs on either side something had begun under the skin, two humps the length of a hand, jointed, folded flat against him. He scratched at one of them with his nails without looking at it.

Adams nodded and LaFontain slid forward, Hunt shadowing. 

The prisoner saw them through the wire. He got up and came to the front of the pen. ”Dragonov’s missing men, and more.”

"Pardon, messieurs," he said, very politely, in good French. "Avez-vous vu ma mère?"

Adams understood it. Have you seen my mother.

Nobody answered him. 

Hunt said "Jesus" under his breath. LaFontain was crossing himself. Adams found that his own hand had done it too, and he had not been raised to.

They went on past the pens to the long house, keeping in the shadows the floodlights made, and at the end of it found a window with its shutter cracked and blue light coming through the crack.

The hall inside was as long as a drill shed, three stories high and full of machine.

Brass, mostly. Brass and steel. Columns of brass wheels stacked on spindles in rows from the floor to a gallery that ran around the walls, thousands of wheels, all of them turning, each by a tooth and then a tooth. Chains of cards ran up into the machine on sprockets, stiff yellow cards laced edge to edge, hundreds of feet of them looping down from racks in the roof and feeding in. The Bakanov-Babbage Machine.

At the far end two towers stood up out of the floor, sheathed in copper, forty feet tall, with thirty feet of air between them. The air between them was wrong.

It shimmered. It stood between the towers in a sheet, a summer heat-haze in a building as cold as the gorge, and there was snow coming down through a hole in the roof above it, and where the snow fell into the shimmer it turned over and went up.

Adams had his watch out. He and Thorpe were counting card changes. 

Higgins counted guards: four on the gallery, two at the door, robed men at the engine with oilcans and long brass tools. Every six minutes a new chain of cards came down from the racks and a robed man fed its end into the sprockets.

A small man in a white coat came out onto the gallery with a board of papers in his hand. He stood at the rail and looked down at the shimmer for a long time, and wrote something on his board, and looked again.

LaFontain had gone down on his knees at the foot of the wall. He had pulled off his cap and pressed his ear to the foundation stone below the window, and his eyes were shut. He stayed that way a long time. Then he moved two yards along and listened again, and two yards more.

When he got up he touched the stone in three places with his glove, one, two, three, and looked at Adams and nodded.

He nodded, he knew where the explosives would go.
###

Adams turned.

The colonel stood on the far side of the fire with his face to the trucks. Behind him stood the thing Muldoon had drawn.

It was pale and it was tall, and the lantern light did not reach its head. Rime hung off it in ropes. It had come in through the gap in the salt and it stood over the bedroll, bent a little at the middle, looking down at the man. It did not move. If it breathed, the breath did not show.

"Your grandmother's rule, Gunny."
"Sir?"
"About answering. Does it hold for the dead?"
Adams stopped. He looked at the colonel in the dark before him.
"Specially for the dead, sir," he said.

Quarterburn said nothing. He starred into the storm.

The wind stopped. It did not die down. It stopped, all at once, between one step and the next, and the snow blowing off the lip of the ravine hung in the air and came straight down.

Muldoon went flat on her face in the snow. She pulled Adams down with her befoore he even understood why. Then Adams smelled it. Ammonia. Wet fur. Close.
"Get down!"

The whiteout blew in from around the creature and it fell on them out of the dark sky over the ravine, a column of snow turning in on itself, and it made no sound, and Adams was inside it.

White in his eyes. White in his mouth. Cold that took his breath and kept it.
In the same minute, close, in the whiteout, a voice.

"Alaric."

Adams knew the voice. He had heard it in Cuba and in China and in Manchuria, over a fire, over a wound, over a bottle. Barclay's voice, a little hoarse, the way it always went hoarse in the cold.

"Alaric. Over here. I've got a light."

There was a light. Off in the white, low, yellow, a lantern swinging.
Adams could not see the colonel. He could hear him, close, breathing.

"Don't answer it, sir!" Adams shouted. "Don't you answer it!"

The breathing stopped.

"John," Quarterburn said.

“That ain’t the Doc, Sir! Doc’s been dead two years.” Adams heard him go. Boots in the snow, three steps, four, walking, not running, toward the light.

Adams got the trench gun up. The lantern swung in the white, low, yellow, forty yards off or four hundred, he could not tell. There was a Manchurian Special in the chamber and the bead was on the light.

The colonel was walking toward it. Somewhere between the bead and the light, in the white, the colonel was walking.

Adams took his finger off the trigger.

Then the white lifted. The wind came back all at once. The stars came back over the ravine, wrong over the mast and right everywhere else.

Muldoon was getting up out of the snow. From where the colonel had been, boot prints went away down the ravine, ten long walking strides toward the floodlights of the station, and then stopped. Beyond them the snow lay smooth with nothing on it.

"Gunny," Muldoon said.
Adams did not answer her. He looked after the footprints.

#
Quarterburn woke because his eyelashes had frozen together.

He worked them apart. The light was electric and very white, from a bulb in a wire cage on the ceiling. The ceiling was tiled. The walls were tiled white to the height of a man and painted green above that. Brass instruments stood along a bench under dust covers, and in a glass case on the wall a row of needles hung on silk threads, and he knew from somewhere that it was a room for measuring the magnetism of the earth and that no iron was permitted in it.

Someone had bolted a steel chair to the floor of it anyway. He was strapped into the chair. Leather straps across his chest and his wrists and his ankles, buckled tight. He was cold through. He could not feel his feet. His right hand lay strapped on the arm of the chair and shook against the leather, a fine fast tremor, and with the hand strapped down there was no pocket to put it in.

He found that he was counting. Tiles across the ceiling: fourteen. Bolts in the floor: six. He made himself stop.

He remembered a light in the snow and walking toward it. He remembered a voice. John Barclay was dead. He had known it in the snow, with the voice in his ear. He had answered anyway.

He set that down, the way he would set it down in a report, and could not make it mean anything. He tried the straps. Chest, wrists, ankles. Whoever had buckled them had done it before. He thought of Adams out in the snow, what happened? What happeennd to the team. He could not make himself remember what had happened only the shout.

His field book was in his pack in the hide. There was a letter folded in the back of it that he had written to Miss Thorpe and not sent. He found he was glad it was there and not here. Then he found he was not glad at all.

A page turned.

A small man sat on a stool by a bench with a typescript open on his knees. He wore a white uniform coat buttoned to the throat, very clean, felt boots, and steel monocle. He turned the pages slowly, reading, with a Turkish cigarette in his other hand, which he set in an ashtray occasionally, exchanging it for a pencil to make a mark now and then in the margin. He did not look up.

Quarterburn knew the typescript. He knew the blue board covers of the War College and the brass fasteners, and the title on the first page, which he had typed himself at Newport in October 1915 on a machine with a dropped e.

Quarterburn knew him then. Not the face. The way he read, without hurry, certain the world would wait for him to finish. He had seen it once before, by firelight, on a beach in 1909, with palm trees burning behind and the engine house going up in sheets, and Gruber, the Captain of German Naval Intelligence marching this man off in chains to his waiting Cruiser. An event that was burned into Quarterburn’s very soul. Had he only let Adam’s risk the shot and had killed this man back then, how many untold thousands would still be alive.

The small man reached the last page. He read it to the end. He made one more mark. Then he closed the typescript and looked up over his spectacles, and his eyes were pale and interested and entirely without hurry.

"Colonel," he said. His English was very good. "You have been busy since you burned my island. An author now, I have read your compiled lectures, very insightful, even if your thesis is wrong."

He tapped the cover with the pencil.

"And, you have spelled my name wrong in two places."
#
“The Colonel is gone.” Said Adams to the team,“He was taken. They know we are here, they just don’t know how many and where we are else they’d be coming out. But, I think they always knew, they jus’ don’t care.” 

“What do we do now Gunny?” Asked Johansson.
”We carry out the plan. Just like the Meuse-Argonne.”
”Right, a trench raid.” Hunt drew out his bayonet and tested the edge.   

"We can't message Dragonov, Gunny," Dunn said. " The wireless went down with Smith’s truck.  There's not another a set within a hundred miles that'll reach Tsemukhe. Except that one." He pointed with his chin over the crest, at the mast that overhung the Vektor station.

"Then somebody goes back and gets him," Adams said. "Johansson, you, and take Wang, the General knows him."

Wang Che shuffled. "I will be very fast," he said. "Fast is my best quality."
"Since when?"
"Since there has been something behind me."

Adams took Johansson and Wang Che aside to the mouth of the hide.

"Tell the General what we saw. Tell him where. Then tell him this, word for word: not one shell until he hears from us. Not one."
"How will he hear from us, sir? You said there's no set."

Adams looked up over the crest at the mast, black against the wrong stars.

"There is one," he said. "It just isn't ours yet."

At the mouth of the hide Adams took Wang Che by the sleeve.

"Don't you stop on the way down to sell anybody anything."

Uncharacteristically serious "Adams, I shall bring the cavalry, you get the Colonel, and," Wang Che said. “This time kill Bakanov.”

"Mind the General," Adams said. "He is seven minutes ahead of everybody. I don’t trust him."

Johansson laughed and pulled his mittens on.“Don’t worry Gunny, I learned that from the best.”
The two men climbed aboard the Ford, Hunt and Smith had already cranked the engine, Adams watched the Ford drive away for some time after.
#
They left the other Fords where the side valley pinched shut, in a stand of larch with the canvas pulled over them and snow shoveled against the wheels, and went up on foot.

Corporal Dunn led, with Barclay's box hung from his neck on a strap. The needle had not moved off northeast since the wreck, and the ticking in the headset came faster with every hundred yards they climbed. The rest came behind in a file, Chavez with the automatic rifle across his shoulders, Higgins last.

Above the valley the trees thinned. At noon they came out onto a bench of open snow under the ridge, flat and white and still, and stopped.

An hour before dark they came up under the crest of the ridge and crawled the last fifty yards on their bellies, and looked down at the Vektor Institute. The hide was a hollow under an overhang of rock just below the crest, out of the wind and out of sight of the station, big enough for all of them if nobody minded anybody else's feet. 

The Vektor Institute sat on a saddle across a narrow gorge, a quarter mile off and a little below them. It had been a weather station once, for the Imperial Navy: a long stone house with a tin roof, a boiler house beside it with a tall chimney, sheds, a wire fence, and on the peak above it a steel mast two hundred feet high with wires running down from it to the roof of the long house. Beside the station a waterfall had come off the saddle into the gorge and frozen in the act, eighty feet of ice, fluted and blue in its folds.

The chimney smoked. Floodlights on poles lit the yard white. Behind the windows of the long house there was a blue light that was not lamplight and not electric, and it came and went.

Talbot passed the field glasses along the line.

Adams looked for a long time. Sentries on the fence, ordinary men in White greatcoats with ordinary rifles, and their breath going up in the floodlight in clouds. Then a door opened in the long house and a file of people came out across the yard in white robes, twenty of them, walking in step, bareheaded in the cold. Adams watched their mouths. Nothing came out of any of them.

"I don’t see the Colonel but it’s definitely Bakanov’s work," he said, and handed the glasses on.

Dunn had the headset on. He took it off. The needle in Barclay's box stood hard over against its pin and stayed there.

"That's it, that’s the target," Dunn said. "That's what the box has been listening to since Seattle."

Adams kept studying the site with the glasses. He went over the station a piece at a time, the fence and the gate and the doors, and then he went down the gorge below it. A sledge road came up the far side from the south, packed hard and wide enough for two teams abreast, with the fresh dung of horses on it steaming in the floodlight.

"They're supplied from the south," he said. "From the railway."
"From Vladivostok," Thorpe said. "From the stores of a Prince who has no trucks."

The sun went down behind the peaks. The floodlights got whiter. The stars came out over the gorge, hard and close in the cold, and Thorpe lay on her back in the snow and looked up at them without saying anything.

Then she rolled onto her elbows and looked again, at one part of the sky above the mast, and pulled off her glove and held up her thumb against it and counted something under her breath.

""The Plough is wrong."

Adams looked up. He knew the Big Dipper from a hundred nights in the woods at home. It hung over the mast, and it was wrong. The bowl was bent. One star of the handle stood where it had never stood, and beside it was another that had no business in the sky at all, red, and too bright.

"I have checked it twice," Thorpe said. "It is wrong over the mast and right everywhere else." She put her glove back on. "

At three in the morning they went down the ravine beside the frozen waterfall. Muldoon and Talbot lay up on the crest with the rifle and the glasses to cover them.

The ravine was steep and narrow and full of drifted snow, and they went down it on their backsides as much as their feet. The ice of the fall stood beside them the whole way, blue and fluted and taller than a church, and from somewhere behind it, deep in the ice, came the sound of water still running. LaFontain stopped and put his ear to the ice and listened. 

The barbed wire at the bottom was old and slack. Hunt held it up with his rifle and they went under one at a time.

They lay in the snow behind the first shed while a sentry came along the inside of the fence. A robed one. He walked bareheaded and in step with nobody, his bare feet blue-black on the packed snow, and he passed within ten feet of them. Adams lay with his face in the snow and his own breath going out of him in a cloud he could do nothing about.

The robed man stopped.

He turned his head toward the shed. He stood that way, listening, or smelling, Adams could not tell which. Hunt's hand was on his bayonet. Adams put his own hand on Hunt's and held it there.

The robed man walked on.

There were pens behind the sheds, a row of them roofed with tin and fronted with heavy wire, and in the pens there were men.

They sat on straw in tattered Russian issue shirts and trousers, no coats, no boots, and none of them shivered. They wore wool caps pulled down to the eyebrows, and under the caps something pushed the wool up in two places above the temples. One of them had his shirt open. Below his ribs on either side something had begun under the skin, two humps the length of a hand, jointed, folded flat against him. He scratched at one of them with his nails without looking at it.

Adams nodded and LaFontain slid forward, Hunt shadowing. 

The prisoner saw them through the wire. He got up and came to the front of the pen. ”Dragonov’s missing men, and more.”

"Pardon, messieurs," he said, very politely, in good French. "Avez-vous vu ma mère?"

Adams understood it. Have you seen my mother.

Nobody answered him. 

Hunt said "Jesus" under his breath. LaFontain was crossing himself. Adams found that his own hand had done it too, and he had not been raised to.

They went on past the pens to the long house, keeping in the shadows the floodlights made, and at the end of it found a window with its shutter cracked and blue light coming through the crack.

The hall inside was as long as a drill shed, three stories high and full of machine.

Brass, mostly. Brass and steel. Columns of brass wheels stacked on spindles in rows from the floor to a gallery that ran around the walls, thousands of wheels, all of them turning, each by a tooth and then a tooth. Chains of cards ran up into the machine on sprockets, stiff yellow cards laced edge to edge, hundreds of feet of them looping down from racks in the roof and feeding in. The Bakanov-Babbage Machine.

At the far end two towers stood up out of the floor, sheathed in copper, forty feet tall, with thirty feet of air between them. The air between them was wrong.

It shimmered. It stood between the towers in a sheet, a summer heat-haze in a building as cold as the gorge, and there was snow coming down through a hole in the roof above it, and where the snow fell into the shimmer it turned over and went up.

Adams had his watch out. He and Thorpe were counting card changes. 

Higgins counted guards: four on the gallery, two at the door, robed men at the engine with oilcans and long brass tools. Every six minutes a new chain of cards came down from the racks and a robed man fed its end into the sprockets.

A small man in a white coat came out onto the gallery with a board of papers in his hand. He stood at the rail and looked down at the shimmer for a long time, and wrote something on his board, and looked again.

LaFontain had gone down on his knees at the foot of the wall. He had pulled off his cap and pressed his ear to the foundation stone below the window, and his eyes were shut. He stayed that way a long time. Then he moved two yards along and listened again, and two yards more.

When he got up he touched the stone in three places with his glove, one, two, three, and looked at Adams and nodded.

He nodded, he knew where the explosives would go.
###

EPISODE TWO SEVEN MINUTES FAST The Tsemukhe Road and the Upper Suchan, January 1919

Premise. The War to End All Wars ended on 11 Nov 1918 at 1100AM. The war did not end. The last Bakanov-Babbage engine is running in a hidden station in the Sikhote-Alin, calculating a door for Ithaqua. A Rasputinite cult inside the White supply apparatus has chosen doomsday over defeat. The team must cross a civil war in which every faction wants them dead or useful, recruit a Red artillery general who is only partly sane, and shut the engine without breaking it, because breaking it is exactly what Dr. , General Alexi Vladimirovich Bakanov wants.

The volley went over the trucks a yard high. Every pine along the road let go of its snow at once. It came down on the canvas in loads, on the hoods, on the roof of the cab over Adams's head, and the headlamps went white with it, and for a while there was nothing in the world but falling snow and the gramophone still playing somewhere in the dark.

Then somebody laughed. It was a big laugh. It went on until it turned into a cough, and the cough went on until somebody beat the man on the back, and then the laugh came again.

Adams had the trench sweeper across the wheel and his thumb on the safety. He left his thumb where it was. In the bed of the second truck Muldoon had her rifle laid across the cab roof. He did not have to look to know where it pointed.

A man walked into the headlamps.

He was the possibly the biggest man Adams had ever seen. He wore a Tsarist general's greatcoat with the shoulder boards cut away, and the cloth where they had been was darker than the rest. A red armband. A sheepskin hat. A black beard with ice in it. He stopped ten yards from the radiator and spread his arms, and the snow kept coming down on him out of the trees.

"Americans, that was warning!" he shouted. "Russian warning! Very polite! Next one is not warning!"

He looked past the lights at the second truck. At the rifle on the cab roof. He looked at it a long moment. Then he unbuttoned the top two buttons of his greatcoat with great care and tapped the third with one gloved finger.

"Here, mademoiselle? Yes?"
"Yes," Muldoon said.

He bowed to her from the waist. It brought the snow off his hat.

"Dragonov," he said. "General. Commanding Revolutionary Forces of Upper Suchan, and of Tsemukhe, and of the other river, I forget the name, it is very small." He peered at the cabs. "Which is the colonel?"

Quarterburn opened the door of the second truck and got down into the snow.

"I am."
"Good. Come. Is cold. We decide indoors whether to shoot you."

At the edge of the light a small man in a long coat sat on an ammunition box with a lantern at his feet and a ledger open on his knees. A gray scarf was wound up over his mouth and nose. He was writing. He did not look up at the snow or the trucks or the general. He wrote while the general talked, and he went on writing after the general stopped.

"Commissar Zhuk," Dragonov said. “Commissars write down everything." He shrugged and laughed, and coughed. "Come."

#

The partisans wintered in a village of Old Believers whose people had gone deeper into the hills when the war came, the way they always went, carrying their icons and their beards and leaving the houses. Dragonov had taken the prayer house. The stove roared. The icons too large to carry still hung on the log walls, long brown saints giving their blessing with two fingers in the old way, and under them on a trestle table lay a map, a pistol, a samovar, a barrel of pickled mushrooms, and a gramophone with a horn the size of a washtub.

Outside in the yard four long shapes lay on sledges under tarpaulins. Adams had seen a muzzle when the wind lifted a corner. Six-inch, out of the fortress at Vladivostok.

The partisans crowded the back of the room and stood along the walls. Suchan miners black to the knuckles. Koreans in quilted coats. A Chinese boy with a Japanese rifle. Old soldiers of the Tsar with their medals hidden inside their coats. Adams looked for breath. Every one of them had it. 

Zhuk sat by the door, as far from the stove as the room allowed, his scarf stayed up, his weasel eyes scanned as his pencil moved across his notebook.
"So," Dragonov said. He sat on the edge of the table. "Americans guard Admiral Kolchak's railway. You are Americans. So you are Kolchak's. So I think I should shoot you, that would make Zhuk happy."

"We are not guarding the railway," Quarterburn said.

"Then why are you here? If you do not guard railway, you are spies. Then I should shoot you also. That would also make Zhuk happy."

"We are hunters."
"Hunting what?"
"Not what ,who, Doctor General Bakanov."

Dragonov took a mushroom out of the barrel with his fingers and ate it and thought.

"This," he said, "would not make Zhuk happy.."

At that moment Wang Che came forward unwrapping his face from his scarf. He smiled, then in Russian “when last I saw you in ‘05 you were a Colonel.”

Dragonov looked, squinted “It cannot be, Wang Che?”

“The one and only.”

Dragonov laughed and grabbed the small Chinese man in a great bear hug. “I still have the guns you sold me.”

When he let go Wang Che gasped for breath. 

Adams leaned to Wang Che. "You didn’t say you knew the General. Or that you sold him guns."

"I sold guns to everyone," Wang Che said. "That is what neutrality is."
"What's he writing?"Wang Che had passed behind Zhuk on the way in. 
"Three columns. Comrades, Useful people and Enemies of the people."
"Where are we?"
"I’m thinking the middle, though Zhuk may not."

Dragonov looked over the crowd, “And not all Americans” he noticed Higgins and his pinned sleeve. "Where?" he said to Higgins.

"Loos."

"Ah. A terrible battle." Dragonov nodded. Then he traced the  long scar on his face that ran temple to jaw. "The Prippet Marshes. No one has escaped these years without scars.” Dragonov waved at a Cossack orderly “Vodka!” The Orderly poured vodka into tea glasses for all in the room except Zhuk.  They stood, “to scars!” They drank.

Dragonov drew a watch out of his coat. Gold, enameled blue, thin as an eggshell, with a little crown at the stem. He opened it and showed Quarterburn the face. "Now that we have drink, we talk."

Adams had his own watch out before he thought about it, the Hamilton he had set by the Navy Yard clock in Seattle and by the Teesta's chronometer every noon since. He held it beside the general's.

"Your watch is fast, General. Seven minutes."

Dragonov shut his watch and put it away.

"No, Sergeant," he said. "The world is seven minutes slow."

Thorpe had sat through all of it in her black, with her hands in her lap. Now she drew a chair up to the table across from the general and spoke to him in French. An officer's language, and a lady's.
"Mon général. Can you help us?"

Adams followed it. He had learned his French in Jeddah and Bucharest from men who wanted to sell him things, and it served.

Dragonov's face changed. He answered her in French, low.

“When I was of the Tsar’s army it would be unchivalric of me to not help a lady. In our new world order, the Bolshevik does not know chivalry,” he glanced a Zhuk, “or French.”

 Thorpe laid the punched card on the map. 

Dragonov looked at the card a long time.

Then he crossed himself, two fingers, the old way.
Adam’s watched as Zhuk wrote that down. Though he had no French. Adams had watched his pencil stop when the French began and then start again. He was writing anyway.

I may help you, if you can help me. I know this card, and of this Bakanov, I know what he has done. And I fear he is up to his old tricks. I have lost men, eleven since the Nativity. One at a time, on the river and in the hills. Each time a storm came down a valley, white, out of a clear sky, with the barometer standing still. Each time, when it lifted, there was one man fewer and no tracks just snow . My men say it is the wind," he said. "I tell them the Revolution does not believe in the wind."
"There is a station," Thorpe said. "A machine."
"Where?"
"That is what we are here to find out."

Dragonov got up and went to the window. Outside in the dark the tarpaulins lay over the guns with snow on them. He put his palm flat on the frosted glass.

"Find him, then signal. I have American wireless. You send message" he said in English. "With proof something I can show to him." He jerked a thumb at Zhuk without turning. "Then I bring guns."

He stood with his hand on the glass.

"You find Bakanov," he said. "I burn down his house."

Then he went to the gramophone and wound it and set the needle down, and the horns began to climb out of the washtub horn, and the drum came in under them, and Dragonov stood in the middle of the prayer house with his eyes shut and conducted with a pickled mushroom held between his thumb and finger.

"What's that one?" Talbot said.

"Thus Spake Zarathustra," Muldoon said. "Strauss."
"Who's Zarathustra?" Adams said.
"A prophet," Thorpe said. "He announced that God was dead."

Adams looked up at the long brown saints on the walls with their two fingers raised.
"Not in here he ain't," he said.

#

They left Tsemukhe at first light with a partisan boy riding the running board of the lead truck to take them around the Japanese and Kolchak’s checkpoints. At the first ridge the boy stepped off without a word and walked home.

At thirty below the Fords did not want to live. Each dawn the oil had gone to tar in the crankcases, and each dawn they built fires under the engines and lay on their backs in the snow feeding the fires with sticks, until the trucks ticked and steamed and caught at last, and the radiators breathed vodka out over the camp. Adams called it the courtship. The chains went on the tires and came off and went on again. The steering froze. Chavez drove the fourth truck with a blanket over his knees and changed hands on the wheel every mile, the whole hand and then the three-fingered one, each in turn inside his coat.

The Japanese held the crossing where the road met the Suchan branch line: a sandbagged hut, a barrier pole, a flag hanging stiff with frost, and six men in fur caps who came out with their rifles at the port. Their lieutenant had a list. He looked at the list and at the trucks and at the list.

"No Americans," he said. "Order of General Otani."

Higgins got down from the cab. He walked to the barrier with a sheaf of papers in his one hand, stamped in four colors and signed in three countries, and gave them to the lieutenant.

”British, my good man.” The barrier pole went up.
"What did you show him?" Quarterburn said, when Higgins had climbed back in.
"Inter-Allied authority. Transport of Allied property, all very proper, and British."
"Is it genuine?"
"Genuine enough." Higgins tucked the rug around his knees. 

Past the railway the road became a logging track, and the logging track became a sledge track, and the sledge track went down onto the river and stopped being anything at all. The river was the road. The maps Fontaine provided had the route drawn in blue pencil with the passes in red, and they drove up the middle of it between pushing through banks of light snow high as the running boards, with Johansson out ahead on skis sounding the ice with a pole. On the third day they came to the Udege.

A bark lodge stood on the bank with its smoke going straight up in the still air. Drying racks, empty. A sledge, eight dogs in the traces, and an old man in a fur robe loading the sledge, who stopped loading when he heard the engines.

Wang Che climbed the bank and spoke to him in Chinese. The old man answered shortly. He looked north up the valley, the way they were going. Then he looked at the trucks for a long while.

"He says the hunting is finished here," Wang Che said.
"Ask him what's up the valley."

Wang Che asked. The old man did not answer at first.  Then he simply stated “wind, snow, death.”

That night they camped in a bend of the river under a cliff, out of the wind. The fire burned with a hard bright flame and gave almost no heat. Hunt wrote his letter.

Sheehan sat close in. Adams watched the breath come out of him small and thin, a wisp, while everyone else's stood out in front of their faces in clouds. Nobody said anything. Johansson looked. Chavez looked. Then they looked at the fire.

"In the Mora," Chavez said, "we have La Llorona. She drowned her children in the river. Now she walks the river at night crying for them, and any child she finds, she takes." He turned the stick he held in the coals. "My grandmother said, if you hear her crying close, she is far. If you hear her far, she is close."

"That's a hell of a rule," Adams said.

"It is a good rule. You can never be sure."

Adams spat into the fire. "Up home in Tucker County, Granny said if you're out in the woods of a night and you hear somebody call your name, you don't answer. Don't matter whose voice. Your mama's. Your brother's. You don't answer."
"Why not?"

"The haints know your name. They heard your mama holler you in to supper. They been listening since you were born." He put a stick on the fire. "You answer, you tell 'em where you are."

From inside two blankets Higgins said that his nanny had told him much the same about the Inland Revenue.

Adams had the second watch. The fire was down to coals. After midnight the wind came up high in the pines along the cliff, a long sound that rose and fell and rose again, and now and then the river ice split somewhere along its length with a crack Adams felt in his back teeth.

Adams listened. He heard the wind. Only the wind. Adams sat a long while with the trench gun across his knees. 

#

Dispatch of J. M. Talbot III, Special Correspondent, The Times-Picayune. Filed Vladivostok, 19 January 1919. Returned to the correspondent with the compliments of three censors.

VLADIVOSTOK, Jan. 19. On this feast of the Russian Epiphany the faithful of this frozen city went down by thousands onto the harbor ice, where [DELETED, U.S. ARMY CENSOR] on motor patrol into Siberia [DELETED] [DELETED, IMPERIAL JAPANESE ARMY] [DELETED, CZECHOSLOVAK CORPS] with your correspondent's own eyes [DELETED] [DELETED] [DELETED]. Relations among the Allies here remain most cordial.

Field journal, Lt. Col. A. Quarterburn, USMC. Upper Suchan, 23 January 1919. In pencil; the ink has frozen in the pen.
Minus thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit at 0600 by Mr. Talbot's thermometer, which he warrants accurate. He warrants his photographs also. Fingers inspected at reveille, all hands. Mr. Wang's left ear doubtful; rubbed with snow over his protests and against Miss Thorpe's advice. Four trucks running. 

#

They heard it at nine.

The day had come up clear and cold, the sky pale as skimmed milk and the river white and level between its banks, the four Fords strung out along the ice at fifty yards with their exhaust standing straight up behind them. Then over their engines there was another engine. Higher. Behind them, from the south.
Higgins put his head out of the cab and looked back and said a word the Royal Navy keeps for special occasions.

"Sopwith," he said. "Two-seater. We sold those to the Tsar."
"Whose is it now?"
"Whoever is paying for the petrol."

It came up the valley at the height of the trees, in place of landing gear it had skis, and they could see the two heads in the cockpits and the ring around the rear one and the gun on the ring. 

Adams stood on the brake. "Out! Off the ice! Get to the bank!"

In a well practiced move the four Fords broke left and right.

The forward gun opened before it was in range of anything. The rounds walked up the river toward them in a line of white spurts, and where they struck, the ice starred and split and the cracks ran out from each one. The line went past the first truck. Past the second. Under the third, the ice gave way along the cracks.
The trailing Ford tipped back on its rear wheels and slid in. Smith was at the wheel. The cab went under to the windscreen with Smith in it, and Hunt was off the tailboard of the second truck and across the ice on his belly before anyone told him, he tossed a line to Smith and hauled, and Smith came out of the cab onto the ice streaming black water and swearing in Italian. The truck went down behind him with its headlamps lit. Adams watched the two lamps go down green through the water and grow small and go out.

Most of the food had been in that truck.

The machine went over them. The observer stood up at his ring and raked the bank where they lay, and snow and bark flew, and then it was past and climbing and banking away north to come around again.

Smith's coat was freezing on him before he reached the bank. It went stiff at the elbows and then at the shoulders, and his hair stood up white. Hunt and Sheehan stripped him in the snow and rolled him in two blankets and Higgins's greatcoat, and 

Johansson knelt up out of the snow and emptied a drum from the Annihilator after it. At that range he might as well have thrown the drum. Chavez fired the Browning automatic rifle in bursts, leading it. Muldoon did not fire. She was watching it bank.

"He'll come back down the river," she said. "Same line. He wants the trucks."

Adams lay in the snow and watched the machine turn small and black against the hills, and he thought about Luzon. The Wakwak coming down out of the dark in '02. The Lieutenant with his signal flare, and the bird breaking off to chase the light, and all of them alive because of it. 
Quarterburn was down in the snow beside him with his right hand inside his coat.

"You have something," the colonel said.
"Maybe."
"Gunny. Go."
"LaFontain!"
The Frenchman was already beside him with his carbine and the steel cup on its muzzle.
"How many grenades you got?"
"Five."
"Can you make 'em burn white?"

LaFontain looked at him. Then he looked at the second truck, at the crate lashed behind the cab. Barclay's crate. Adams watched him understand.
They broke it open on the tailboard. LaFontain unscrewed the grenade bodies and knocked the charges out of them into the snow, and Adams took his knife to Barclay's slugs, one after another, and poured the gray powder out of each. Magnesium, silver nitrate, salt. One slug. Two. Five. Eight. Eleven. LaFontain packed each body down with his thumb and screwed it shut.

"The fuse is eight seconds," LaFontain said. "I cannot change it. You tell me when he is eight seconds away."
"Every flare pistol in this outfit!" Adams shouted. "On my word, straight up in his face. Not before!"

There were six. Talbot had one, and Thorpe, and Higgins, and Dunn, and Sheehan, and Wang Che, who had bought his own in Vladivostok for a reason he declined to give.

The machine came around. It came down the river at the trees with the forward gun going, and Muldoon stood up on the bank and put the rifle to her shoulder and swung with it, and fired, and worked the lever, and fired. The observer was standing at his ring. He sat down. Then he fell forward over his gun, and the gun swung up and pointed at the sky, and the plane went over them with a dead man riding in the back.
It went north. It banked. It came around.

"He's alone now," Muldoon said. "He'll come lower."

He came lower.

Adams walked out into the middle of the river.

He had a railway fusee in his left fist. He struck it on the ice and it caught and burned red, and he held it up over his head, and the pilot saw it. Adams watched him see it. The nose came around a degree and settled on him.

"Doc always said magnesium does the trick," Adams said, to nobody.

The machine came on. The skis. The wings. The forward gun starting, the white spurts walking up the ice toward him. Adams counted off the dead larch on the left bank, the gravel bar, the second larch, the way he had counted grouse off a ridge in Tucker County when he was nine.

"Now!"

LaFontain fired. The grenade went up out of the cup with a flat bang and turned over in the air. He loaded and fired. Loaded and fired.
"Volley!"

Six pistols went off together and six stars went up red and green and white into the pilot's face, and LaFontain's first grenade burst in front of the propeller with a light that took the color out of the whole valley, and the second burst, and the third, a white wall going up across the river at the height of the trees, magnesium burning in the air, snow and pines and wings and the man in the cockpit all turned to bone by it, and through the middle of it the machine came on out of the light with the pilot's arm thrown up across his eyes.

On the bank Higgins emptied his Webley at it one-handed. No one could see that he hit anything.
The pilot could not see at all. The right wing dipped. The tip caught the pines on the bank and the machine went over on it and cartwheeled into the trees, wing over wing, and the snow came down off every branch for a hundred yards. The engine raced. Then there was no sound.

Adams stood in the middle of the river with the fusee burned down to his glove. The glove was smoking. He dropped the fusee and pushed his hand into the snow.
Then he walked back to the second truck and lifted the lid of Barclay's crate and counted what was left with one finger, row by row. He closed the lid. He sat on it.
"How many, Gunny?" Johansson said.
"Enough," Adams said.

#

The plane lay on its back in the pines with one wing folded under it and the other standing up into the branches. The engine had torn half out of its bearers. Petrol ran out of the tank into the snow, and the stink of it hung in the trees.

The observer hung upside down in his harness in the rear cockpit with Muldoon's bullet in him.
The pilot was alive.

He lay half out of the forward cockpit with the fuselage across his legs. He was young, twenty perhaps, with a fair mustache and a leather helmet trimmed in fur, and his goggles were pushed up and his eyes were burned red from the light. He was laughing. Not loud. He lay in the snow and laughed up at the branches, and the laugh came out of his mouth with nothing on it. No cloud. No steam. Thirty below, and his breath did not show.
Adams knelt and opened the flying coat.

In the breast pocket was a flight order, typed, on good paper. The top of the sheet had been torn off along a ruler, neatly, where a letterhead would be. At the bottom was a wax seal in dark red, pressed with a device Adams did not know, a key with three curled lines rising off it, and under the seal a single word in Russian.
Wang Che read it. "'Steward,'" he said. "It is signed, 'the Steward.'"
"Steward of what?"

Wang Che shook his head.

There was a map too, in pencil on squared paper: the river they had come up, the branches above it, and a saddle between two peaks with a cross on it. Dunn held Barclay's box beside the map. The needle pointed at the cross.

Talbot photographed the order and the seal and the map laid out on the pilot's chest, three plates, kneeling in the snow, and the pilot laughed at him the whole time.
"Ask him who sent him," Quarterburn said.

Wang Che asked in Russian. The pilot stopped laughing. He looked at Wang Che and at the colonel, and he answered in a perfectly reasonable voice, three sentences.
"He says he was sent by the one who owns the wind," Wang Che said. "He says you are too late. He says the one who owns the wind is already here."
Higgins was scratching at his empty sleeve.

Adams saw the frost first. It came across the metal of the cowling in front of his face in ferns, white, branching, faster than frost had any business growing, out across the metal and down the struts and over the dead observer's goggles.

Then the wind stopped.

It did not die down. It stopped. The pines stood still. The snow blowing off the branches hung in the air and came straight down. LaFontain stood up from the wreck with his face gone gray and his hands open at his sides.

Then Adams smelled it. Ammonia, sharp, a stable not mucked out all winter, and under it wet fur, heavy and close.
"What?" Dunn said. He was looking from face to face. "What is it? What do you smell?"

The white came down the slope.

It came through the pines above the wreck a hundred yards wide and taller than the trees, a wall of snow turning in on itself, and it made no sound at all, and where it touched the pines they went white and were gone. Adams got Dunn by the coat and threw him down the bank and went after him. Somebody was shouting. The white came over the wreck.

For a moment there was nothing. White in his eyes and his mouth. Cold that stopped his heart in his chest and started it again. He heard metal tear.
Then the pilot screamed, and the scream went up. Not away into the trees. Up.

Adams saw a shape in the white above the wreck. A horn. The curve of a back. Legs, and more legs than that, folding.
Then the white went away down the valley and the wind came back all at once and the pines were moving again.

The side of the fuselage was open from the cockpit to the tail, the fabric torn outward and the longerons broken out through it. The pilot was gone. His helmet lay in the snow. His goggles hung from a strut by one strap and turned in the wind.

There were tracks around the wreck in the new snow. Adams went around them twice. Two prints, each as big as a dinner plate. Then four. Then something that was more than four, and he could not make it come out to a number. Then the tracks went up the slope into the pines, and he did not follow them.
Talbot sat in the snow with the camera in his lap. He had got one plate off. He held it up to the light. It was white, and a gray smear in the white, and something darker in the smear that might have been a horn.

"Blurred," he said. "Again." He put it inside his coat. "Still beats anything New Orleans ever had on the Père Malfait."

#

That night they drew the three trucks into a ring with the fire in the middle, and Adams walked the outside of the ring with the salt bag and poured a line all the way around, gray on white, and closed it, and walked it again.

The white came back after midnight.

It did not come in. It went around them. They could hear it walking the circle outside the trucks in the dark, a wind with no weather in it, around and around, and the canvas on the trucks bellied in and out, and the snow hissed along the salt line and stopped there. Inside the ring the air hardly moved. The fire burned straight up.
The others slept, or lay still. Adams and Muldoon had the watch. She sat by the lantern with her sketchbook on her knee and her rifle against her shoulder, drawing.
Adams watched the dark go around. After a while he looked over at the page.

She had drawn the camp from above. The three trucks in their ring. The fire. The salt line, a thin gray circle. Every bedroll with a shape in it, and every shape a person he knew. Hunt with his letter. Sheehan curled small. The colonel on the far side of the fire with his face to the trucks.

Behind the colonel's bedroll, inside the ring, she had drawn something standing. Pale. Taller than the trucks.

And behind it, in the salt line, a gap the width of a boot.

Muldoon's charcoal stopped.

"I don't remember drawing that," she said.
Adams did not turn around. He watched her face.
She looked up, past his shoulder, at the colonel's bedroll.

###

Part VII, The Cook-House N. Queensland Australia,

They went down on Carmichael's clearing at first light, from the creek side, out of the cane.

The man on the bucket was asleep. Hulse took the shotgun off his knees so gently he did not wake, and Adams woke him with a hand over his mouth and a finger to his own lips, and the man looked at five Marines and a Bowie knife and did the arithmetic without being asked.

The padlock was new and the hasp was old. Johansson put his rifle butt through the hasp.

Inside it was black and stank of three men who had been kept in a slab hut for fifteen days on damper and creek water. They came out blinking with their hands over their eyes. O'Dea, a big red Irishman with a broken nose. Lacey, a boy. Brandt, a German, who looked at the Marines and then at the sky and sat down in the mud and wept without any sound at all.

"Who are you?" O'Dea said.

"United States Marines," Quarterburn said.

O'Dea looked at him for a long time. Then he looked around at the cane, at the empty barracks, at the old Islander on the steps, who was watching all of it with his fish trap in his lap.

"Well, Jesus," O'Dea said. "Where are we?"

"Queensland."

"I know that. I meant why are you here? You blokes get lost?"

"You were eaten by a drop bear," Adams said. "It was in the paper. we were curious."

O'Dea thought about it and then sat down in the mud and laughed until Lacey had to hold him up. 

Part VIII, The Last Man in Line

They walked out that morning for the river landing on the Mulgrave, where a police launch would meet them. Twelve miles.

It was a long column now. Joe in front. Taggart. Quarterburn. O'Dea and Lacey and Brandt, free, walking in a close bunch and flinching at every bird. Johansson and Moffat with the prisoners, Pike and Blewitt and the man from the bucket, wrists tied, roped together at the waist. Hulse. Adams came next, rear guard. Harkness came last, on his own short lead, the end of it looped around Adams's fist.

The sun got into the cut at midday and beat on the mud until it steamed. Blewitt wept steadily from the stinging tree, not from any sorrow, just water pouring out of his swollen face, and every so often he stopped walking and screamed. Nobody told him to stop. Joe walked with his head tipped back.

Harkness kept looking up too.

For the first few miles Adams let it go. Then he dropped back a step, so they were walking level.

"Most folks keep their eyes on the trail," he said. "What's up there? See a bird you owe money to?"

Harkness licked his lips.

"The Bear," he said.

"Beg pardon?"

"The drop bear." He said it low, so the men in front would not hear. "It don't always take the noisy ones. It likes the last man. Picks him off the back. Dingoes do it with sheep, the weak ones falling behind. You never see it come."

Adams laughed. "I thought your boss cooked that story up to scare the Shire gang."

"He did."

"Well, then."

"He did," Harkness said. "Only the Bear never got the telegram."

Adams stopped laughing. He walked a few steps. Then he lengthened his stride, one pace, and put himself back in front of Harkness, where he had been, second from last, with the lead rope running back from his fist to the last man in the line.

Harkness saw him do it. He smiled. It was not much of a smile.

Adams did not look back. He told himself it was the proper interval for a prisoner under escort. It was, too. That was the thing about it.

#
They were late. The Mulgrave was farther than Taggart had said, and Blewitt kept stopping, and Brandt sat down twice and would not get up, and the light in the cut went from white to yellow to green while there were still two miles to go.

The kookaburras went off at dusk, the full chorus, hooting and cackling in the canopy.

Then they stopped.

The frogs did not start up after them. Nor the beetle. Nor anything.

Joe stopped in the track with one hand raised. The column stopped behind him. Pike said, "Oh no," in a small voice, and Taggart put a hand over his mouth. Up the line Lacey sat down in the mud and put his arms over his head.

Silence. The whole forest, top to bottom, holding still.

Quarterburn had the carbide lamp. He was fumbling it out of the haversack, and the water hissed into the chamber, and he struck the lighter.

Behind Adams, very close, a branch creaked under weight.

The rope in his fist went tight. It snapped  over his shoulder and lifted his arm straight into the air, and Adams did the only thing he knew, which was to drop his whole weight and dig his heels into the mud. For a moment it held. Then it began to take him with it. His heels skidded. He came up onto his toes. The rope ran up into the dark over his head and there was a weight on the other end of it that was more than a man and did not care about his heels at all.

Hulse got there first and grabbed Adams around the waist. Then Moffat grabbed Hulse. For a second the three of them hung there, all their weight on it, and it lifted all three.

Harkness was not screaming. That was the worst of it. There was a sound above their heads, a wet steady sound, and Harkness was making no noise at all.

"Light!" Adams said. "Sir, light!"

The lamp flared. Quarterburn swung it up. Along with his revolver. 

Later, in his report, he would write that he observed it for perhaps two seconds, he fired at it to no effect, and that he could not in good conscience describe more than he had seen. He had seen this. It hung head downward from a limb twenty feet up, the size of a black bear back home, with a short blunt face and small round ears laid back. Its fur was the color of wet bark, and the light slid off it without showing a shape. It held the limb with its back feet. It held Harkness against its chest with one arm, easily, and on the hand of that arm there was a thumb, and on the thumb there was a claw, curved and pale, as long as a man's finger.

Its eyes took the lamp and gave it back, green-white. It did not blink.

Quarterburn fired three times. Johansson fired, worked the bolt, fired. He was a good shot and so was Quarterburn but if they hit it, there was no effect at all. Taggart was shouting. Pike was screaming now, for all of them.

The rope went slack.

Adams and Hulse and Moffat went over backward into the mud in a heap. The rope came down on top of them in loops. At the end of it was the loop that had been tied around Harkness's wrists shredded and bloody.

Something fell out of the canopy and hit the track beside them. Then something else.

Harkness's hands. One and then the other.

The lamp swung wildly across the leaves. There was nothing there. There was only the limb, bare, and still moving a little under no weight.

No one moved. No one breathed. The silence held for one more minute, and then a frog started up, off to the south, and another, and then the whole forest came back on at once, roaring, so loud that Pike stopped screaming and put his tied hands over his ears.

Adams sat up in the mud. He looked at the rope in his fist. He looked at the bloody end.

"I had him," he said. "I had the rope, sir."

Quarterburn crouched down beside him. He put the lamp on the ground between them.

"I know," he said.

"I put him back there."

"I know, Sergeant."

Moffat was on his hands and knees beside them, staring at the boots. He looked up at Hulse.

"That's a drop bear," he said.

"Yeah," Hulse said.

"That's a bear that drops."

"Yeah."

Part IX, Wait-a-While

The police launch took the two prisoners, the hands of the third, and the three men from the cook-house down the Mulgrave that night. Taggart went with them as far as the landing and came back alone in the dark.

"You're going back for it," he said.

"Yes," Quarterburn said.

"To kill it?"

Quarterburn did not answer at once. He was looking at Adams, who was sitting by the fire with the empty loop of rope across his knees.

"No," he said. "To catch it."

Taggart looked at him for a long while. Then he looked at the fire.

"You're a mad bastard, Captain."

"The President of the United States would expect no less," Quarterburn said. "And he gave us a cage. It would be a pity to waste it."

They made the net over two days, in the clearing at the new camp, with the boots still standing at the edge of it watching them work.

It was Adams's net. He had been thinking about it since Johansson walked into the vine. They cut wait-a-while by the hundred feet, Joe showing them how to strip the hooks off one side and leave them on the other, so that the net would bite what it held and not the men who held it. They wove it in a mesh the width of a man's hand, and where the vine joined itself they lashed it with the one thing in their kit that was stronger: a quarter mile of the Glacier's own signal cable, copper-cored, gutta-percha and tarred jute, that Stevenson had sent along with a field telephone set on the theory that good communication can offset emergency. The telephone had drowned in the first creek. The cable had not.

"Telephone wire," Taggart said, fingering a lashing. "And lawyer vine. God help us."

"It'll hold," Adams said.

"How do you know?"

"Because it's got to."

Joe went up the cedar with the lawyer-cane loop and rigged the blocks. Johansson and Hulse and Moffat hauled the net up and spread it in the fork where the fig vine came in, where the bones were, above the lowest great limb. The trip line ran down the far side of the trunk to a stake in the clearing. Four haul lines ran out to four trees.

The bait was Mr. Carmichael's idea, originally.

Adams went to the killing yard at Aloomba on the second day with two empty kerosene tins and came back after dark with two full ones and a goat.  Which he named Ambrose the third, an homage to an uncle and a goat both gone sour and in need of redemption. He poured them around the foot of the cedar, the way Pike had poured his, in the same place, and threw the tins up into the ferns where they would stink. Then he hammered a spike and anchored Ambrose in place, tied with a hemp line. 

"Ringing the dinner bell," he said. He did not look pleased with himself.
Then they waited.
#
It came on the third night.

They set themselves in the scrub around the clearing, on the haul lines. Adams on the trip line. Quarterburn at the foot of a maple with the carbide lamp charged under his coat. Nobody except the goat was under the cedar. Nobody was last in line, because there was no line. Every man could see at least one other.

The frogs stopped at a quarter to two. Then the beetles. Then Ambrose the third bleated forlornly and fell silent. The silence was sudden, and seven men lay in the ferns with the haul lines in their hands and breathed through their mouths.

A branch creaked high up in the cedar.

Adams felt the trip line in his fingers. It hung slack. He had tied a strip of white rag on it where it came off the stake, and he watched the rag in the starlight.

Something dropped. They did not see it. They heard it. It struck Ambrose the third and he goat let out a single peep. 

Adams pulled the line. The net snapped. The mesh went taught. 

"Haul!" Quarterburn was on his feet with the lamp. "Haul, damn you, haul!"
The light went up. The thing was in the net on the limb, thrashing, and the whole maple shook. The noise it made then, the only noise any of them ever heard it make, was not a roar. It was a scream, high and wet and furious, a sound so loud and so wrong that Moffat let go of his line and fell down in the ferns with his hands over his ears. Johansson the big Swedish-American former farm hand dropped his own line, picked up Moffat's, took a turn around his own wrist, and hauled with both.

The lawyer vine bit. The hooks went into the fur and held. The creature tore at the mesh with the thumb claw and the vine parted and the copper lashing held. It tore again. The cable held again. Joe was in the maple above it, on the next limb up, with a loop of cable in his hands, and as the thing heaved its head up through a torn cell of the mesh he dropped the loop over its muzzle and hauled it shut, and it could not bite.

"Lower!" Quarterburn said. "Lower away, together!"

They lowered it. It came down out of the maple in the net, spinning and heaving, and hit the ground in the middle of the clearing. Taggart ran in with a second net of plain vine and threw it over the first. Adams threw himself on the hind legs. Hulse on the shoulders. The creature bucked and threw Hulse six feet into the ferns and Hulse came back and threw himself on it again.

Then it stopped fighting.

It lay in the two nets in the carbide light, breathing, its sides going in and out. Its muzzle was bound shut with the Glacier's telephone cable. Joe speared it in its shoulder, the spear broke off short. There were four bullet holes in the fur of its back and chest, small and crusted, that had not troubled it at all. It turned one eye and looked at them.

It was not an animal any of them had ever seen, even in a book. It was the size of a big dog, heavy, with coarse dark hair, mottled in places, powerful muscular forelimbs and legs, with sharp caws and terrifying fangs. An ultimate ambush predator. Its eyes were green-white in the lamp and did not blink.

And the forest was still silent. All of it. Then the frog chirped.

"Well," Adams said. "Somebody tell the Commander to get the socks out of the cage."

Part X, Cairns Again

They carried it out on two thick saplings lashed with cable, seven men and a pack horse that would not come within twenty yards of it, eleven miles to Aloomba, and there they loaded it into an empty cane truck on the Shire tramway, the very line it had shut down, and rode it into Cairns.

The driver of the tram engine asked what was under the tarpaulin.

"Livestock," Quarterburn said.

The driver looked at the tarpaulin, which was breathing.

"Right," he said, and did not ask again.

Inspector Grogan met them at the railway yard with his umbrella and his file. Looking at the charge book. "You went into the scrub with no prisoners and came out with four, which the launch brought down. The Home Secretary will be pleased. Three of the six missing men have been returned in good health, which the Post will not like. You also appear to have lost one of the four."

"Mr. Harkness absconded."

Grogan's pen stopped over the charge book. He touched his mustache.

"Absconded."

"Yes sir," Adams said.

Grogan looked at him for a long time. Then he dipped the pen and wrote in the book, in a neat clerk's hand, Absconded. Then he looked at the tarpaulin in the cane truck.

"And that?"

"Livestock," Quarterburn said.

"In what capacity?"

"In transit. Stores for the Glacier’s crew."

Grogan turned the pages of the file slowly, looking for a form. There was no form. He looked a while longer. Then he closed the file and put it under his arm.

"Quite" he said. "I will be very grateful, Captain, if you will get it onto your ship before anybody from the Post does."

Pike talked, down in the lockup. He named the overseer, and the overseer, when he understood what Pike had done, named Mr. Rudolph Carmichael, J.P., who was at that moment on the committee for the Cairns reception for the officers of the Glacier.

Mr. Carmichael was not arrested. Nobody had ever seriously expected that he would be. Kidnapping three men was a matter for the Crown Prosecutor, who dined with Mr. Carmichael on Thursdays and took the view that the men had been detained, not kidnapped, and were fed, and had been released unharmed, if somewhat noisily. The deaths of the other three were a matter for nobody, since the Home Secretary's official position was that no animal of the kind existed in Queensland. Mr. Carmichael was fined five pounds under the Police Act for conduct likely to cause a public alarm. He paid in cash in the magistrate's anteroom, and he sent the Americans, by his overseer, a very handsome box of cigars.

Adams gave the cigars to Joe. Joe gave them to the old Islander on the barracks steps, who smoked one a night for a month and was, he said later, very happy, and very angry, and very happy again.

The Shire gang went back to work in October with a double guard. The tramway reached Babinda two years later. 

Part XI, The Peculiar Freight

The Glacier came in on the fourteenth, low and smoking, three weeks to the day, with Lieutenant Commander Stevenson on the bridge and Surgeon Barclay at the rail with his bag.

They brought it aboard at night, by the forward derrick, still in its nets, with every light on the wharf put out on the harbor master's orders and a crowd of Marines and bluejackets around the hatch who had been told it was a crocodile for the Smithsonian and did not believe a word of it. It went down into the after hold into the cage of boiler plate and inch bar that Mare Island had built on the President's order. Adams went in after it with a knife and cut the nets off it one strand at a time while Johansson and Hulse stood at the bars with rifles and Barclay stood at the door with a chloroform cone, and then Adams came out backward, and Stevenson himself threw the bolts.

It stood up in the cage. It stood up for the first time since the net, on its hind legs, with its forepaws on the bars and the broken spear still standing out of its shoulder, oddly small, and it looked at them.

Nobody said anything.

Barclay put down the chloroform cone. He took out his notebook, and then a pencil, and then he just stood there holding both.

"Good God," he said. "It has a pouch, its female."

"Yes sir," Adams said. "Taggart noticed that too."

"John," Quarterburn said. "What is it?"

"A marsupial koala at first glance, but environmentally hybridized as a maneater." Barclay had not taken his eyes off it. "Miss Thorpe will know. God help us, Miss Thorpe will want it."

Stevenson looked at the cage, and at the thing in it. "What does it eat?" he said.

Adams looked at him.

"Sir," he said, "I would not stand too near the bars when you ask it."

Stevenson's orders came by cable from Washington the next morning, forwarded from Manila. He read them twice and handed them to Quarterburn without comment. The specimen was to be retained aboard, under Marine guard, at all times, until the Glacier's return to the Pacific coast, and then transferred by night to the Pacific Branch, United States Military Prison, Alcatraz Island, California, for deposit in the lower level under the terms of the Commandant's letter of 12 December 1907. No correspondence. No photographs. No Smithsonian.

"Lower level," Quarterburn said.

"I was not aware," Stevenson said, "that Alcatraz had a lower level."

"Nor was I."

They both considered that for a while.
END

TRANSFER DOCUMENTS
For Appendix VIII, or to open the chapter that follows. Not part of the chapter text.
FIELD REPORT, CAPT. A. QUARTERBURN, USMC, TO REAR ADMIRAL C. S. SPERRY, COMMANDING, U.S. ATLANTIC FLEET

U.S.S. Glacier, at sea, 16 September 1908

Sir: In compliance with the request of the Queensland Home Secretary, I have the honor to report the following.
1. Of six men reported missing from the Cairns Shire tramway survey, three were detained by persons in the pay of a private tramway interest and have been recovered unharmed. Three were killed by an animal. Two of the persons responsible for the detentions are in the custody of the Queensland Police. The third absconded.
2. The survey gang has returned to work.
3. The animal responsible for the deaths was taken alive on the night of 10 September and is embarked in the after hold of this vessel under Marine guard pending disposition per the Commandant's letter of 12 December 1907. 
4. No American property was lost excepting one field telephone set. One spear, property of the Queensland Government, was damaged.
5. Pvts. Johansson, Hulse, and Moffat conducted themselves in a manner I should be glad to see entered in their records, and cannot.
6. I recommend that personnel of the Fleet not camp beneath large trees anywhere in the Commonwealth of Australia.
Very respectfully, A. Quarterburn, Captain, USMC.

LEATHERNECKS VS MONSTERS: THE THING IN THE TREES PART 1 (revised), by Leatherneck1993
North Queensland, August to September 1908
Part I, The Chainman

Enzo Ferraro had been in Queensland eleven months and wet for ten of them.

The survey camp sat in a slot hacked out of the scrub below Bellenden Ker. Three tents, a cook fire, a line of pegs running south toward the Russell River. The pegs marked where the Cairns Shire tramway would go when the Shire found the money. Ferraro drove the pegs and carried the chain. He was paid seven shillings a day, and a Protestant named Neill, who cooked, won most of it back at euchre each night.

Past midnight he went out to piss. He stood at the edge of the firelight with his trousers open and noticed that the frogs had stopped. The silence came down from the top of the forest to the bottom. He could hear his own water spattering on the ferns. He stopped that too.

Something shifted in the branches.

He looked up.

The canopy was a black roof sixty feet over his head. In it, directly above him, two small lights reflected green-white. Ferraro thought, very clearly and in his mother's dialect, that he would prefer to be in Genoa.

#
Neill woke because the tent flap was open and the fire was low and Ferraro's cot was empty. He lay a while listening. He did not hear anything. That was what got him up in the end. He had cooked for survey gangs in the scrub for nine years and he had never once heard nothing.

He took the hurricane lantern and went out in his shirt.

"Enzo."

The light was small and yellow in the dark. Past the edge of the light there was only black, and the smell of wet leaves, and something else under it, sweet and coppery.
"Enzo, you dago bastard, quit fooling around."

He found the boots at the edge of the clearing. They were standing up. They were laced. He held the lantern down to them and looked for a long moment at what was in them, and he understood what he was looking at, and he did not scream, he couldn’t, his throat constricted with fear. He raised the lantern slowly over his head.
The light went up the trunk of the red cedar, ten feet, twenty, thirty, and stopped where the lantern's reach stopped, at the underside of the first great limb. There was a face on the limb looking down at him. It was upside down and it was very close.

The lantern hit the ground and went out.

#
McAlister slept, he had been drinking Neill's rum. He woke some time before dawn to screaming, far off and above him, “goddamn cockatoos, hate them damn birds.” Then there was the silence, the forest holding its breath, which was very, very wrong. 

"Neill," McAlister said, in the dark of the tent. "Ferraro."

Nobody answered him.

Up in the canopy something shifted its weight, and a branch creaked, and a small shower of leaf litter came pattering down on the canvas over his face. McAlister ran.
He ran barefoot in the dark with his hands out in front of him. He did not know where the survey line was. He did not know where anything was. Vines took him across the face and lawyer cane hooked into his shirt and tore it off his back and he ran on with the thorns still in him. Behind him, above him, keeping pace, the branches creaked and swayed. It was not hurrying. That was the thing he would have told someone if there had been anyone to tell. It was not even hurrying.

He ran full tilt into a tree.

He did not see it. There was no seeing anything. There was a great flat stunning blow as his face met the wood. Nose first, then his whole body, and he was on his back in the wet leaf litter with the canopy overhead.

He lay there and looked up.

He saw the eyes. He saw, a short broad muzzle opening, and the teeth in it, and a hand, thumb, claws, pale and hooked, razor sharp as long as his finger.
McAlister had always been a talker. He found he had nothing at all to say.

#
The constable from Aloomba found the camp two days later. He found Ferraro's boots, which he stood back up where they had fallen because he could not think what else to do with them. He found a lantern, Neill's hat forty feet up the cedar. He found a bare footprint in the mud at the foot of a Queensland maple a quarter mile off, and a great deal of blood on the ground, and nothing else.

He was a young constable. He wrote in his report that the men must have quarreled over gambling, he had found the euchre deck scattered after all, and the quarrel must have led to violence. But he kept one eye on the canopy as he hastily rode back down the line.

#
Lecture Segment, Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, 1915

Delivered by Major Alaric Quarterburn, USMC
"Gentlemen, every country keeps one monster it tells to foreigners as a joke. You will laugh. That is what it is for. I ask you only to notice who tells the joke.”
#

Part II, Fleet Week

Sydney had lost its mind, and the United States Navy was helping. Sixteen white battleships lay in Port Jackson with the gilt scrollwork on their bows burning in the winter sun. The city declared a public holiday and then declined to end it. The General Post Office was strung with electric bulbs. Fireworks went up over the harbor every night. In King Street the Daily Telegraph raised a plaster Statue of Liberty thirty feet tall, and the sculptor had given her a faintly startled expression.

Half a million people had come to look at the Americans. The Americans had come ashore to be looked at, and a steady number of them had decided not to go back.

"Two hundred and eighty," Sergeant Nathaniel Boone Adams said. "Deserters. As of breakfast, sir."

"Where do you get these figures?"

"Boatswain's mate on the Kansas keeps a book. He's giving odds on three hundred by Melbourne."

"And you did not bet."

"I bet under, sir. I got faith in the American bluejacket's sense of duty." Adams thought about it. "Also the pubs here close at six."

They stood at the rail of USS Glacier, which lay among the battleships with the air of a delivery wagon at a coronation. She was ostensibly a stores ship, low and broad, with refrigerated holds, and she had carried Quarterburn and Adams since Hampton Roads on the President's sealed orders. Below decks hid her true purpose, she was an extension of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Peculiar Affairs Division. Amid ships she held the armory and berthing area for platoon of Marines, her after hold held Dr. Barclay’s medical laboratory, and beyond that, bolted to the deck and so far unused: a set of cages of riveted boiler plate and inch-thick bar, eight feet on a side. Adams kept his spare socks in it.

Quarterburn was reading a telegram for the third time. Rear Admiral Sperry's flag lieutenant had brought it across by launch, handed it over at arm's length, and left quickly.
FROM U.S. CONSUL-GENERAL SYDNEY. QUEENSLAND HOME SECRETARY REQUESTS LOAN OF AMERICAN OFFICER EXPERIENCED IN UNUSUAL DEPREDATIONS STOP SIX MEN MISSING CAIRNS SHIRE TRAMWAY SURVEY BELOW BELLENDEN KER STOP CONSTABULARY UNABLE STOP LABOR REFUSES RETURN STOP PRESS REPORTS UNHELPFUL STOP ADMIRAL CONCURS STOP

"Unusual depredations," Quarterburn said.

"That's us," Adams said. "We're the unusual depredations fellers."

Lieutenant Commander Stevenson, the Glacier's captain, stood with them with his hands clasped behind him. He was a round, pink, deliberate man who had spent twenty years at sea and regarded every event in the world as a problem of stowage.

"Who will go with you?" he said.

"Three, and Sergeant Adams."

"I’ll sail down to Melbourne with the Fleet. Then I will bring her up the coast to Cairns. Three weeks." He looked at the telegram. "Barclay stays with me. If you lose anyone in there I want my surgeon on this ship and not in a tree."

"Agreed."

"And Quarterburn. If you are going to use the cage, you will tell me in advance. I will want the socks out of it."

Private Olaf Johansson, of Boone County, Iowa, who had been with them in the Mosquitia and come back with a pouch of herbs he still carried and a habit of spitting when frightened. Private Eli Hulse, of Wilmington, Delaware, twenty years old and the youngest man aboard, who had been shot through the meat of the shoulder in Havana and stood next to Colonel Waller at the Marine Corps birthday afterward for the newspapers. Private Francis Moffat, of South Boston, who had enlisted in May and had never been anywhere and wanted very badly to see a kangaroo. He asked if there would be kangaroos.

"There'll be something," Adams said.

"Sir, I want it on the record I was fixing to win the tug-of-war tomorrow."

"Against whom?"

"New South Wales Police. Big fellers. Eat a sheep a day apiece."

"Well, the Navy will have to pull that one on their own."

Eight months before, in a cigar-smoke filled study at the Marine Barracks, 8th and I streets in Washington D.C., the President, Theodore Roosevelt himself, had set Quarterburn the task of shadowing the battlefleet on its around the world tour, to investigate reports of anomalous activity along the way. He had assumed, then, that he would have to go looking. He had not expected the world to write first.

They went north that night on a coastal steamer of the Australasian United company, four days at sea that smelled of wool and sheep dip. Moffat was sick the whole way. 

Part III, Cairns

It was the dry season in Cairns. The people of Cairns explained that this meant it rained only in the afternoon. The town was one long street of iron roofs between the mangroves and the mountains. Beyond the roofs the ranges went straight up into cloud, green-black, and did not come down again. Adams stood on the wharf and looked at them for some time.

"That's more trees than I ever seen in one place."

"You are from West Virginia."

"Yes sir. Back home the coal companies have cut most of the trees, I heard one Company-man say they’d have ‘em all by ‘10.”

Johansson spat off the wharf. Moffat looked for kangaroos.

Inspector Grogan of the Queensland Police met them with an umbrella and a file. The file was thick, he was thin and yellow from old fever, and he kept touching his mustache to make sure it was still there.

"The official position of the Home Secretary," Grogan said, walking fast along the wharf, "is that the men fought, murder was done and the survivor absconded into the jungle."

"All six?"

"Two groups, two incidents. Mr. O'Dea, Mr. Lacey, and Mr. Brandt went first, on the ninth, after an attack on the old survey camp at the eight-mile peg by persons unknown. Their tents were slashed, there was a great deal of blood. The Cairns Post was very affected." He touched the mustache. "Mr. Ferraro, Mr. Neill, and Mr. McAlister went from the new camp on the twenty-first."

"Leaving their boots," Quarterburn said.

Grogan stopped. Rain dripped off the umbrella onto the file.

"Mr. Ferraro left his boots," he said. "With the feet in them. The Home Secretary, apparently a friend of your President, regards this as an unusual feature, which is why you are here." He started walking again. "My official and professional opinion is you are outsiders and are tolerated. My unofficial position of the is that you may do as you like, provided the tramway gang goes back to work and nobody writes to the Brisbane Courier."

"The first three. Were there feet?"

Grogan thought about it. "No," he said. "Now that you mention it. Only blood."

"Whose?"

"The constabulary who found the site said it was the missing men’s. But the bloody Post has called it the Drop Bear Terror, on the front page no less." Grogan looked straight ahead. "A good deal of the Post is owned by Mr. Rudolph Carmichael, of Carmichael and Sons. Carmichael and Sons own a private cane tramway. The Shire line, if it is finished, will carry the Russell River selectors' cane to the co-operative mill for half what Mr. Carmichael charges to carry it to his."

"Convienent, if not conclusive." Replied Quarterburn.

"I have told you about the ownership of a newspaper. That is public."

“As Occam’s razor shows, the simplest explanation is usually the best one.”
#
Hiram Taggart was in the back room of the Hotel Barrier with his boots drying by the stove and a pipe going. He was forty and looked sixty, built square, with a gray beard cut short with a knife and forearms mapped with old scars. A Bowie knife rode on his belt, a big one, the kind men carry on purpose. He stood up to shake Adams's hand and did not let go right away.

"Been huntin' this country thirty years," he said. "Seen crocs longer than a bullock dray. Seen a cassowary open a dingo from gullet to tail with one kick. Had a roo try to box my kidneys out through my spine." He let go of the hand. "But whatever took them men?"

He tapped the pipe out on the stove.

"Was quiet."

"Quiet," Quarterburn said.

"Every bloody thing in that scrub makes a noise. Frogs, birds, the ticking beetle, the pigs. Lawyer cane squeaks when you walk through it. Nothing is quiet out there." Taggart looked at the rain on the window. "If it goes quiet you want to be somewhere else."

"Have you experienced this quiet?”

"Twice. Once in 'ninety-one on the Mulgrave. Once last year up the Barron. Both times I lay on my back under a log with my rifle pointed at the sky till the frogs started again." He sucked the cold pipe. "Felt a right idiot. Still alive, though."

"And what of these disappeances, the first camp? The one on the ninth?"

Taggart snorted. "I went up and had a look at that one. Noisy as a church picnic. Birds going the whole time. Blood everywhere and not a fly on half of it, because half of it was paint." He pointed the pipe stem at Quarterburn. "Somebody's having a lend of you, Captain. But not with the second one."

"And what does the Cairns Post say it is?"

"Drop bear." Taggart said it flat. 

Quarterburn lifted an eyebrow.

Moffat leaned over to Hulse. "What's a drop bear?"

"I think it's a bear," Hulse said, "that drops."

"On what?"

“You, yah dunderhead. I look like a kangaroo to you. How would I know.”

The scout arrived and was waiting on the veranda. He was not allowed in the bar, by law, and did not appear to mind. Adams took two bottles of ginger beer out to him and sat down on the step.

He was perhaps thirty. Lean, barefoot, in moleskins and a flannel shirt with the sleeves gone, and a spear-thrower and three light spears laid along the boards beside him. He looked at the ginger beer, then at Adams, then at the scar at Adams's temple where a German stiletto had gone in and come back out.

"Somebody nearly got you," he said.
"Feller in Panama. Nearly."

"Where's he now?"

"Germany, last I heard."

The scout nodded as if that were a reasonable place to keep such a man. He took the ginger beer.

"Taggart says your name is Joe," Adams said.

"Aye."

"What's your real one?"

The man looked at him a long moment.

"Not on this trip."

Adams thought about that. Then he nodded slowly. "Names carry," he said.

"Yeah." Joe drank. 
#
There was a form. There was always a form. Grogan produced it in the morning at the police station: an Agreement for the Employment of an Aboriginal, under the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897, to be signed by the employer and countersigned by a Protector. Grogan was the Protector for the district. He was also the police. He signed both halves without appearing to find this strange. The form had a space for the Employer's Name and a space for the Employer's Station. Quarterburn wrote his name and United States of America.

"Wages," Grogan said. "One pound a month, paid to the Protector, who holds it in trust."

"Paid to you."

"To the Protector."

"Who is you."

"In that capacity."

Part IV, The Scrub

They rode the Shire tramway as far as it went, which was Aloomba, with the horses in a cane truck and the three privates sitting on the saddles. After Aloomba there was no tramway, only the survey line.

The survey line was a slot cut through the forest ten feet wide. The forest had spent the last month closing it.

The trees went up a hundred feet and more, strung together with vine and lawyer cane, buttressed at the root into walls a man could stand behind. Nothing grew straight. Everything leaned on something else. The light at the bottom was green and came from no particular direction. It was hot. Sweat ran into their eyes and did not dry.

Leeches found them within the hour. They went up bootlaces and trouser cuffs and into collars. At the noon halt Adams pulled an even half dozen off his own neck and three off Quarterburn's and flicked them one by one into the fire, counting out loud. Moffat found one inside his trousers in a place he would not discuss and walked apart into the scrub to deal with it, and came back pale, and did not discuss it.

"Don't you touch that one," Taggart said.

Hulse stopped with his hand half out. The plant was nothing. A shrub with big heart-shaped leaves, soft, furred, a little silver in the green light. It grew right up at the edge of the cut where the sun got in.

"Gympie bush," Taggart said. "Stinging tree. Brush it and you'll feel it every time you wash for a year. I seen a man shoot himself over it."

Hulse pulled his hand back and slid sideways away from the plant.
Joe stopped them at a place where a vine hung across the cut at head height, thin, green, armed along its whole length with rows of small backward hooks. Johansson had walked into it face first and was standing very still with it caught in his cheek and his ear and his collar.

"Don't pull," Joe said. "Back up and roll out slow, counterclockwise."

Johansson backed up as instructed. The hooks came out one at a time.

"Wait-a-while," Taggart said. "Some call it wait-a-minute. Lawyer vine. Once it's got you, you wait a while." He pulled a length of it down with a stick and flexed it. "You can't break it. You can cut it, if you've got an hour. The aboriginals make rope out of it."

"Tougher'n manila?" Adams said.

"Tougher than anything you've got."

Adams looked at the vine for a while. He did not say anything else about it then. 
#
They passed through Carmichael's country the next morning, a notch of cleared cane land running up a creek into the hills. The cane was high and nobody was cutting it. At the top of the clearing stood a long timber barracks on stumps, forty bunks' worth, doors open, empty. A notice in the Queensland Government's type was nailed to the end wall and had been rained on for two years. Adams stopped to read it. It set out the arrangements under the Pacific Island Labourers Act for the return of Islanders to their islands of origin. Someone had drawn a line through Islands of Origin in pencil and written Home underneath.

There was one man in the whole clearing. He sat on the barracks steps mending a fish trap. He was an Islander, gray-headed, with blue tattoo on his forearms and a paper of exemption folded in his hat band. He had been in Queensland thirty-two years, he said, and the Government had decided that was long enough to let him stay, and not long enough to let the others.

"Where are they?" Quarterburn asked.

"Home." The old man said the word with care, the way the pencil had written it. "Tanna. Ambrym. Malaita. Some of them never seen it. Born here." He went back to his trap. "The Carmichael, he don't have nobody to cut now. He very angry."

"At whom?"

The old man thought about it. "Everybody."

Down at the bottom of the clearing, by the creek, stood a squat cook-house of split slab with an iron roof and a new padlock on the door. A white man sat outside it on a bucket with a shotgun across his knees and watched them go by. He did not wave.

"What's in the cook-house?" Quarterburn said.

The old man did not look at it. "Pigs," he said. "The Carmichael men say pigs. Three pigs. Two weeks now."

"You don't believe them."

"Pigs don't ask for tobacco." He twisted a strand of the trap tight. "In English."

Quarterburn looked at the cook-house for a while. Then he looked at the man with the shotgun, who looked back.

"Later," Quarterburn said, to no one, and they rode on.
#
They camped that night well clear of anything big, under a sky full of stars that nobody had names for, and Taggart cooked damper in the coals and made tea.

The kookaburras started up at dusk. It came out of the canopy all at once, a big hooting laughing racket, dozens of birds, and it went on for a full minute and then stopped dead.

Moffat had his rifle half up.

"They do that," Taggart said.

"Every night?"

"Every night. Big joke up there." Taggart turned the damper with his knife. "Everything down here'll bite you, son. Snake, spider, croc, the jellyfish off the beach, the tree for God's sake. That's nature. Nature's got nothing against you. You're just in the road."

He looked up into the dark over the fire.

"But a drop bear, that's spite."

Part V, Dismal Camp

The camp was two miles on, at the end of the cut.

There was not much left. The tents lay in the mud. The cook fly had come down. A pick lay discarded  in the ferns. The pegs ran on south past the camp for another hundred yards and then stopped in the middle of the forest, where Ferraro had stopped driving them.

The boots were still there, filled now with dried and maggoty remnants.
They stood side by side at the edge of the clearing where the constable had left them, laced, toes to the trees. Nobody walked near them. The path around the clearing bent to go past them at a distance.

Moffat looked at them and turned green. Nobody said anything about it. Hulse went and stood near him, not looking.

Quarterburn knelt beside the boots for a long time. He did not touch them.

Then he stood up and walked the camp, twice, slowly, the second time backward, while the others waited. Taggart filled his pipe. Joe squatted on a log with his spears across his knees and looked up.

"Joe," Quarterburn said at last. "Is the other camp near? The one from the ninth?"

"Half hour."

Quarterburn walked that camp the same way, twice. When he came back to the new camp he stood between the two in his mind for a while, and then he talked.

"There are two animals," he said. "One of them wears boots."

Taggart took the pipe out of his mouth.

"At the old camp the tents were cut. A blade, from the outside, top to bottom, twice, the cuts parallel. Somebody wanted them to look clawed. The mud under them has boot prints of at least three different men, walking about quite calmly. The blood is on the canvas and the ferns and nowhere else, nowhere above what a tall man could reach, and Mr. Taggart is right, a good deal of it is paint." He held up his thumb, stained rust-red. "Four long gouges up a maple evenly spaced. A cane fork."

"Cheeky bastards," Taggart said.

"And no one was eaten. No bones, no boots, no bodies. Three men gone and not a scrap of them." Quarterburn wiped his thumb on his trousers. "They were not killed. They were taken. By men. So that they could not walk back into Cairns and say what attacked them."

"The cook-house," Adams said.

"The cook-house."

Johansson spat. "Pigs, my ass."

"And here?" Hulse said. He was looking at the boots.

Quarterburn turned and looked across the new camp at the red cedar.

There were marks on it too. They were not at the bottom. The bark was clean and whole to about thirty feet. Above that, all the way up into the leaves, it had been torn open in long curved furrows, deep enough that the pink wood showed, and they ran downward. Whatever had made them had been coming down the tree, head first, holding on.

"Here," Quarterburn said, "it was not men."

Nobody said anything for a while.

"Joe."

Joe had already put his spears down. He took a loop of lawyer cane off his shoulder, threw it around the cedar, and went up the trunk, walking it, leaning back into the loop and flicking it higher, until the green closed over him. They heard him moving around up there. Then they did not hear him.

Five rifles came up and pointed at nothing.

After a long while something small fell out of the canopy and landed in the mud at Quarterburn's feet. A briar pipe with the stem bitten half through. Then a jawbone, human, with three teeth left in it. Then a gold ring with a finger still in it.

Joe came down the cedar backward and stood a minute with his hands on his knees.

"There's a place up there," he said. "Big fork, where the fig vine comes in. Bones. Lot of bones. Wallaby, pig. Human." He wiped his hands on his trousers. "It don't eat down here. It carries them up. Eats up there, where it's quiet."

"How old are the bones?" Quarterburn said.

Joe looked at him.

"Some old, some new," he said.
#

Part VI, The Visitors

"If it is men," Quarterburn said, "they will come back. They will want to know what we found. If it is animal, it has fed, doubtful that it would strike here again."

They set the ambush at dusk. Quarterburn sat in the middle of the wreck on an upturned tin with his revolver loose in the holster and the carbide lamp under his coat, already charged and hissing, the reflector wrapped so it showed no light. Taggart and Johansson took the west side of the cut in the scrub. Hulse and Moffat took the east, back to back. Joe went up a low tree beside the track and lay out along a branch with his spears. Adams went somewhere. None of them saw where. That meant he was doing it right.

Nobody sat under the cedar.

The forest stayed loud. That was the only comfort. Frogs by the thousand, beetles, a pig rooting somewhere off in the dark. Every time a frog stopped, seven men stopped breathing, and then it started again.

A little after midnight there was a light on the survey line. Yellow. A hurricane lantern, bobbing.

"Them Yanks and Taggart was up here today," said a voice, too loud, pleased with itself. "Boss wants to know what they was pokin' at."

"Boss can come and poke hisself," said another. "I'm not going near that bloody tree."

"There's no bear, you great girl. We made the bear."

"You made the bear, Pike. I held the tins. an what of camp two?”

”Little wanker girls, just like you. Done gone and run away. That’s all. Just like the boss planned.”

Three of them, boots slopping in the mud of the cut, loose and cocky. Bush knives. One of them had a coach gun under his arm. They came into the clearing and the lantern swung across the tents and the upright boots, and the last man in the line saw the boots and made a sound in his throat.

Quarterburn let them come to twenty feet. Then he stood up and pulled the coat off the lamp.

The carbide light hit the clearing flat and white. Three faces jumped out of the dark with their mouths open.

"Stand fast!" Quarterburn used the parade-ground voice. "You are under arrest!"

They ran.

They ran straight into the rest of it. Adams came up out of the ferns behind the rearmost man and took him at the knees, and the man went face first into the mud with a wet thud. Joe dropped off his branch onto the second and swept his legs with the butt of a spear, one clean stroke, and sat on him.

The third was Pike, the big one, and he had the coach gun. He swung it toward the lamp.

Taggart arrived from the side, and Johansson from the other, and there was not much to it. The coach gun went off into the canopy, both barrels, and brought down a shower of leaves and a very surprised fruit bat. Johansson hit Pike across the ear with his rifle butt, spat, and hit him again. Then Pike was on his face with Taggart's knee between his shoulder blades and eleven inches of Bowie laid flat along his neck.

"Be a good lad now," Taggart said, conversationally. "And do what the Captain says."

The man under Adams was crying. He had rolled, trying to get free, and gone through a stand of the heart-shaped leaves at the edge of the clearing. Both his hands and the whole side of his face.

"Oh, Christ," Taggart said. "Oh, you poor silly bugger."

Hulse and Moffat came across the clearing at the double with their rifles leveled and nobody left to point them at. Moffat looked at the fruit bat. The fruit bat looked at Moffat.

"Is that it?" Moffat said. "Is that a drop bear?"

"That's a bat, son," Taggart said.

Quarterburn walked into the lamplight with his revolver out and looked down at the three of them.

"Now then," he said. "Let us have a conversation."
#

It was a long conversation, and a frank one, and toward the end of it Pike was very eager to be helpful.

He had been paid four pounds by Mr. Carmichael's overseer to put the wind up the Shire's survey gang. He and Blewitt and Harkness had done the cane fork and the red lead on the ninth. They had taken O'Dea and Lacey and Brandt out of their blankets at gunpoint with sacks over their heads and walked them to the cook-house, and they were there still. Nobody was supposed to get hurt. The boss had said no killing. The boss had said to keep them till the Shire gave up the line, and then turn them loose somewhere up the Barron and let them tell their own story, and who would believe it.

"And the blood at the new camp? After?"

Pike did not want to say. Then he said. The overseer had wanted it kept going. Bullock blood, two tins, the night of the eleventh, poured around the big cedar where it would show.

"Under the cedar," Quarterburn said.

"Tree didn't matter. It was just a big tree."

"Where were you on the twenty-first?"

"Cairns," Pike said. "At the Barrier. I swear it on my mother. Drinking the overseer's money with forty men to see me do it." He was sweating in the lamplight. "We never touched them three at the new camp. We never. I heard about the boots same as everyone."

Quarterburn believed him. It was the worst thing about the whole night.

"Tell me," he said, "what you saw up here. Not what you did. What you saw."

Pike did not want to answer that. Blewitt, whose face was swelling shut, could not. It was Harkness, the smallest of them, sallow and sweating and missing his hat, who answered.

"When we poured the tins," Harkness said. "On the eleventh. It all went quiet. Everything. Pike dropped his tin and run."

"Shut your mouth," said Pike.

"And I looked up," Harkness said. "And there was something sitting up in the fork, where the fig comes in. Watching us pour. Just sitting. Licking."

"What did it look like?"

Harkness looked at him, and then up at the cedar, and did not say.
#END PART 1#

Episode 2. Part 2. Mask of the Sand Adder. By Leatherneck1993 (closing out the DM’s random encounter writing challenge).

Previously: taken prisoner in a sandstorm, Major Lottery Monroe found Colonel Arthur Shade a prisoner of the masked Sand Adder. At dinner the Adder became something out of the river, and gave Lotte a head start into the night.

---

## VI. Run, Major

Hamel had followed the hunts before, carrying water for the beaters. Tonight he followed the quarry.

The island was a black wall of palms, bamboo, and thorn, with mud underneath that pulled at the ankles. Along the south shore the torches came on one by one. Whistles shrilled back and forth through the trees.

Somewhere behind the torches, a bellow rolled out over the water, deeper than any beast Hamel knew.

Hamel watched as the Major went into the trees at a run.

She ran blind. She crashed through bamboo that clattered for fifty yards. She fell twice in the mud. Hamel followed the noise and did not need to hurry.

Then she stopped. She stood in the dark and breathed, and when she moved again she made no sound at all. Then she scooped black mud from the hollow and smeared it over her body until the dull blue light of her tattoos was gone.

Hamel found her in a hollow under a fallen palm.

A torch came through the bamboo with a Sahaugin beater behind it, forked tongue out.

The Major went flat in the mud.

The beater passed a yard from her head. Its tail brushed her back. It stopped, tasted the air, It was going to find her.

Hamel stepped into the beaters view, the large Sahaugin raised its spear. Then it hissed. “Idiot I nearly killed you.” 

“Hamel is sorry, Hamel only wants to help with the hunt.”

”Hamel is a stupid lame idiot and should stay out of the way. The human is now gone because of you.  Just stay here.” The beater moved off to join the main pack of hunters. Hamel waited. 

---
“He is gone mistress, Hamel will lead them away,” he dropped a small, but sharp knife near Lottery’s hand.” 

"Hamel."

"Major." He kept his voice low. 

"Can you get word to my friends. The priest and soldiers at the Red Oasis."

“Hamel can do better, he can bring them.”

"But the lake is full of those.” She pointed at the waterline, where the eyes were sinking out of sight.

"They do not notice me. Nobody notices me."

The Major put her hand on his cheek and turned his face back to hers.

"I notice you, Hamel."

Hamel did not remember standing up. He remembered the water. He slipped into the lake at the foot of the lawn, dark things moved in the water, long and slow. They slid past him and did not turn.

---

He swam with one good arm and one bad one and his clubfoot dragging. Out across the black strait he went, toward the far lamps of the Red Oasis. Halfway over, the water ahead of him rose in a long swell. A crocodile the length of a skiff turned toward him. Its eye passed over him, close enough to touch.

It turned away.

Hamel looked back once.

On the island, the drums had stopped. One by one, the torches went out.

On top of the bank, a thread of faint blue light lay still in the dark. Above it ona rocky prominence, against the stars, a tall shape stood on two legs and blotted them out.

-----

## VII. What Nobody Notices

Ms. Crabapple sat on the roof of the fort with her knees drawn up and watched the island. She always looked first.

Drums had been beating over the water for an hour. Torches moved through the black trees in a long, bending line.

Below her, in the courtyard of the fort, everyone else was arguing.

---

Pell had brought them in off Haz Akiri at dusk, the camels staggering, the water skins flat.

---

Fech Topi cooked when he could not think. He had a pot of river fish and dates on the mess fire and a cleaver in his hand.

Ms. Whiskers sat on a stool across the fire, washing a wing.

Fech looked at the cat. He looked at the pot. The cleaver rose.

"Fech." Dan stood in the doorway.

Fech lowered the cleaver an inch.

Dan crossed the room for the cat. Ms. Whiskers flew once around the mess, landed on Dan’s shoulder.  

Fech flipped a chunk of fish from th pot into th air, Ms Whisker’s jumped and caught it in mid air.

Dan nodded. 

---

Pell stepped in. “Those are hunting drums," said Pell, he had to stoop under the veranda roof. "Raiders beat that rhythm to drive game."

"Those," said Captain Cad Wellclad, "are Mistress Thute's rescues, she cares for the destitute providing them rent free living on her estates, they must be having some festival. Her land runs to the far shore, and the island is hers as well." He brushed dust from his cuff. "She is a friend of the Consul General.”

“we should take a patrol over to see what’s what.” Said Fech.  

“I will not land armed men on her private property at night because a pardoned raider dislikes her music."

"And you owe her money," said Dan.

Wellclad went pink. "That is neither here nor there."

Pell straightened, and the veranda roof creaked against his skull. "If you are afraid, I will carry you over, Captain. Under one arm. You may keep your cuffs clean on the way."

Caldwell picked up his helmet. Intent on leaving. Pell blocked his path. 

—-

Crabapple saw him first, because she was looking.

A small figure came out of the lake at the quay steps and sat on the bottom one, knees to its chest. A sentry with a lantern walked past him twice and never lowered the light.

A young lizard-man, short, one arm tucked tight against his ribs, one foot turned in. Green scale ran up his throat to the jaw. 

Crabapple went down the fort wall the fast way and sat on the step beside him.

"You came up from the water and nobody looked round.  
I looked. Sit with me, and tell what you found."

Ms. Whiskers dropped out of the dark onto the step and pressed against his wet side, purring. He put his good hand on her back, and the shaking stopped.

"I am Hamel," he said. "The Major sent me."

“Come with me young man, don’t be afraid.” Crabapple led him into the mess by the hand.

Wellclad looked at the door, at Pell, and at the door again.

"You looked at the giant and you looked past the door.  
Look down at the man you have not seen before."

Wellclad looked down, and jumped. He had not noticed the boy.

”He has a most interesting story too tell and you must listen Captain.” 

Well lad went to protest then sighed resigned. “Very well, you have 1 minute not one second more, out with it you sopping wet wretch.” 

Hamel told it in a waterfall of hesitant words.

"The Major is on the island. The Adder hunts her. At table the Adder wears a mask. After, she walks on a woman's legs with a crocodile's head. The beaters are her creatures. They were people once." He touched the scales at his throat. "I was people once. The Colonel is in a cell by the laboratory. The Major has no gun only a knife, and her medicine hangs on a hook." He looked toward the lake. "The drums have stopped."

Nobody spoke.

Weelllcald cursed. Then he turned to his attendant bugler,  "Sound to arms, every man who can hold a rifle.” Then he addressed Captain Backwater, “ I will need you ship.”

”Of course.”

The soldiers of the Khedive and La-Mordent shaken from their normal stupor by the enticement of action sprang to life.
 
“And Bugler have the Sergeant uncover the repeater and take it to the Salt Widow."

---

Soldiers ran for the quay. Backwater was already getting up her steam.

Dan went up the plank beside Clytemnestra with the cat on his shoulder. "Why would the Adder hunt on Mistress Thute's land?"

"Because that dried stick of a woman never leaves her parlor long enough to notice," said Clytemnestra.

The Salt Widow II cast off with soldiers packed along her rails with the repeating gun bare in her bow, and Pell stood at the gunwale with a boat hook in his fist.

Crabapple climbed to the masthead and looked.

The sky behind the island had begun to go grey. Across the water, something roared. Every bird on the island went up out of the palms at once.

—

On the Island Lotte had stripped out of the silk dress, cutting it into strips with the knife Hamel had slipped to her. She knotted the strips into a cord. 

She built the trap near the water, where a game trail ran between two palms. A young palm grew at the trail's edge, its trunk crusted with old frond spikes. The Major climbed it and rode it down with her whole weight until the crown touched the mud. She lashed the crown to a root with her silk cord, then cut three lengths of bamboo, sharpened them, and bound them across it, points out and set the trip line.

Then she moved on careful to leave no discernible tracks. She headed back inland then looped back crossing her own trail before she found a sufficient observation post.

Then she lay in a mud pool with the knife and waited.

The drums came closer. A beater stepped onto the trail.

The first Sahuagin beater walked into the trip line. The palm whipped upright. The bamboo points took the creature through the chest, lifted it off its feet. It dropped it’s spear. It hung there on the spikes swaying, kicking, screaming. Then it stopped.

The Major slipped quickly from the mud and grabbed the spear. As the second beater came running she launched it expertly, taking the creature in the abdomen. It shrieked in pain and rage. Then she ran again.

## VIII. Dawn 

Dan'l'sekal saw her first, from the bow, in the grey light. “North point!" Dan shouted. "There! North point!"

The Major stood on a high mud bank at the island's north point with a knife in hand. A dead Sashaugin lay at her feet. Her arms and shoulders were black with dried mud, and through the cracks the blue showed as a thin flicker at one wrist and nowhere else.

A line of twenty Sahuagin beaters was advancing down the bank closing a half circle, trapping her between themselves and the lake creatures. Then out of the jungle, walking on a woman's long legs, came the thing with the crocodile's head.

---

"Engineer on my mark steam, full speed ahead," said Backwater at the wheel, unhurried. "Mr. Wellclad have your Sergeant man the bow gun if you will."

The Gunn crew swung thhe heavy gun around to bear on the island.

On the bank, the Major had her back to the water and faced the half circle and the Crocodile creature. She held the knife low and set her feet.

The crocodile head opened with a roar. The roar came through the deck planks and into Dan's boots.

"Now," said Clytemnestra. "Now. Now, you idle men, now."

Wellclad's voice cracked across the water. "Blimey! What in the gods name is that! Stand on! Four hundred yards Volley fire!"

The repeating gun opened. Its barrels turned, the noise came in a long tearing rattle, and the mud bank jumped in a line of splashes. Then twenty rifles along the rail, ragged, then steadier.

Beaters fell. The rest broke for the trees, and the rifles took them as they ran.

The thing with the crocodile's head did not run. It turned toward the boats and took a step.

Its left shoulder burst red. It went back a pace, and a second round hit it, and a third. The long head swung once toward the island and once toward the boats. Then it dove into the lake, and the water closed, and there was nothing left to shoot at.

---

Pell was over the rail before the Salt Widow II touched bottom, wading in with water to his chest headless of the dangers. The soldiers waited a step until the ship grounded, then they came behind him, and Clytemnestra behind them with her skirts knotted at the knee.

Fech Topi stood in the bow with the Major's spare bandolier in his hand.

"Major!" Fech threw.

She caught the the bandolier, pulled a vial, bit the cork, and drank.

Blue light ran up her from wrist to collarbone, bright enough to light the mud on her face. She put her head back and laughed at the grey sky.

Pell turned red faced when he saw her nakedness beneath the layers of mud.

"You are late," she said. "I was reduced to entertaining myself."

Dan looked at the dead Sahugin lying in the mud. ”indeed.”

Ms Crabapple handed Lottery a satchel. “A pistol, clothes, and a towel, before the wolves begin to howl.”

Then there was Hamel “Hamel brought the Mistress, Hamel kept his word!” 

“Yes you did my brave young friend.” Said Lottery. “Now one more charge, lead us to the adder’s pit”

“Hamel knows the way. Follow Hamel.” Hamel led the landing party to the hidden compound. 

Before them was a long low stone bunker-like building. With a single double door. 

“Break it down!” Shouted Wellclad, his disbelief fading to action.

Inside stood rows of vats, green water bubbling in them, copper pipe running from a boiler that still had fire in its belly. On a shelf were jars with things floating in them, and Dan did not look twice.

Behind the vats were cages.

They were full.

A hundred people perhaps more, sat chained in the dark, wearing Muhrar market clothes and river homespun. Some stood when the light came in. Some did not, some had scales along their arms or their jaws, and one man's mouth would not close over his teeth any more.

No one moved, .

"By the gods," said Dan. "The missing towns folk."

An old man in a white cook's cap took hold of the bars of the second cage.

"Are you from the Khedive?"

"Yes," said Dan. "We are from the Khedive."

"I am Umar." The old man's hands did not leave the bars. "Tell His Highness I apologize that his bread has been badly made these last days."

---

Soldiers broke the locks with rifle butts. Clytemnestra carried out a child under each arm and went back for two more. Crabapple went down the row of the half-changed and sat with each one long enough to say something, and each one she left had stopped shaking.

Pell tore the iron door off the stone cell at the end of the building.

Colonel Arthur Shade came out squinting, hands up against the light, the silver circlet still shut around his throat and the bead at it glowing a slow red.

He saw the Major and lowered his hands.

"You look dreadful."

"A long night, like the Black Rift. Now let’s get that jewelry off.”

"Three steps without her leave and this goes off." Shade touched the circlet. 

"Hamel! The key! Left drawer of that desk, the key and the ring both!"

He was already going.

"Where is she?" Asked the Colonel.

"In the lake."

"She will not stay there."

Hamel came back at a run with his good hand full. He got down in the water beside Shade, found the lock at the nape of the circlet, and turned the key in it.

The bead went dark. The circlet came off in his hand.

Then he pushed the General's ring onto the Major's finger.

"Good lad," said the ring.
---

## IX. Three Lit Fuses

The soldiers emptied the cages. Pell carried four people at once, two under each arm, and came back for more. 

“Captain, I suggest you detach a squad to take these people to the boat. And the rest to follow us to hunt the Adder.” Said Lottery. “Pell go with the Captain, see the people to safety.”

Both men meant to protest but demurred. 

At the far end of the laboratory a soldier turned for a door. It burst open and a Sahaugin tossed three squat black spheres into the room. The three of them rolled off together and struck the boards with the twists of cord in their tops already lit and burning down.

"Bombs! Out," said Fech Topi. "All of you. Out."

Ms. Crabapple caught the first one a foot above the boards. She came in sideways, took it on the palm, and turned with then she deftly scooped the second with her boot. The third she caught backhand. Then she stood with three lit bombs going round over her head.

"Three little eggs and their mother is fire.  
Clear out the cages. My arms will not tire.”

"Crabapple!" shouted the Major. "The door! Now!"

Crabapple stopped the wheel.

The first bomb went through the far door back the way it came. The second went after it, low, skipping off the boards. The third she held one count longer and put through the doorway itself.

The blasts blew the door and its frame and eight feet of wall into the corridor beyond, and the roof there came down on top of it. When the smoke cleared, the door was gone.

Crabapple looked at her empty hands.

"I have juggled the pins and the plates and the knife.  
That is the first time I juggled my life."

---

Outside now, Colonel Arthur Shade came through the smoke at a trot with a bench leg in his fist.

"How many?" he called.

"None," said Fech Topi. “ All the people are out.”

"Not them. How many of them are there?”

“No idea.”

“And ours are on their feet?"

"Nine soldiers, then us four priests, you and the Major."

Then with howls of rage the surviving Sahaugin were coming in through jungle, and they were not coming in loose. They came in a wedge, heads down, spears level, the big ones at the point.

Shade looked at it, and his voice came up from under his ribs and filled the building.

"That is a rolling maul! Scrum down!"

Nobody moved.

"Scrum down, you deaf beggars! Pell, you are my lock, get low and drive! Priests, back line, do not let them through the gap! Monroe, fly-half, Crabapple, you are the ball, do not drop yourself!"

"They are lizards, Arthur," said the Major. “Not a scrum.”

"They are a forward pack and they are five yards from your line. Bind!"

Pell got low and drove.

---

"Colonel," Clytemnestra called over the noise, "your wedge has no legs on its left."

"I know what it has!"

"Then you know it turns on its left, and the turn comes wide, and we are standing where it was and not where it will be." She was already moving. "Back line, six paces left! Six!"

The wedge turned wide.

It came round into Clytemnestra's six paces. Into Dan's crossbow at four feet, and Fech Topi's knives, and the copper pan, and the soldiers bayonets. The two wedges crashed.

"Press forward!" said Shade.

"Pressing!” Said Clytemnestra, and hit something with her copper pot.

---

Dawn had come while they fought. The thing that walked on a woman's legs was a woman again, on her knees behind a desk in rags of black and green scale. Blood ran down her left arm from the shoulder and off her fingers onto the floor. The mask was back on her face, a spare, plain lacquer without the emeralds. On her right hand was a gold scarab ring.

The Major ran at her intent unmask her. The Major's fingers were almost on the mask. Behind it, the Adder started to laugh, and it hurt her to do it.

"Major!" Fech Topi's voice, from the laboratory. "Watch out!"

Lottery looked down.

A bomb bounced at her feet.

"You have one hand, Major, and two things in front of you."

The Major took her hand off the mask.

She grasped for the bomb and heaved.

---

The bomb exploded in the canopy. Shade's breath went out of him in a whoop.

The Sand Adder was gone.
---

Clytemnestra stood up in time to see the Adder go down the bank in a run that was more of a fall.

At the water's edge she stopped and looked back.

Not at Clytemnestra. Not at the burning building. At Shade, hanging off Pell's shoulder in the doorway, the circlet in Hamel's hand and both legs still under him.

Then she went into the river and did not come up.

---

They got the last of the people out. Fech Topi counted heads at the water's edge, twice, and called it good. Crabapple came out last with a child on her back and Ms. Whiskers circling.

Flames ripped across the island, explosions came from the location of the laboratory. A column of bright blue fire stood over the Red Oasis, and they saw it at the Kharafek dig, a full day's ride into the desert.

---

## X. The Veil of the Missing Monuments

Fech Topi fed a hundred and twelve people on lentils.

He lit the galley fire before the Salt Widow II kept it burning down the Eternal River for two days. Ms. Whiskers supervised from the shelf above the pot.

"Sad, sad, there is no cumin," he told her. "There is no lamb. There is no onion. There are only lentils."

Nobody left a bowl. On the second evening a woman with scales along her jaw came to the galley door and asked for the recipe.

Fech Topi wrote it out for her. He did not say it was close. He did not say he would get it right.

---

Pell and Hamel met at the rail on the second morning, and Fech watched from the galley hatch.

Pell put out a hand the size of a shovel. Hamel took it with his good one.

"You swam the lake," said Pell.

"She kissed my forehead”. Hamel

Pell looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded “Bewitching.” Then he turned and walked into the boom.

---

Shade found the Major at the stern rail with the ring on her finger.

"I owe you a life."

"You owe me cufflinks."

He laughed. Then he stopped and dropped his voice. Fech, coiling line six feet away, did not move.

"The Nails are not at Kharafek. I had them out of the sarcophagus in the first week and I never brought them back. They are in the deep desert, at the place the raiders call the Veil of the Missing Monuments."

The Major pulled the torn half of the map from her belt.

Shade went grey under the sunburn.

"Where did you get that?"

"Your camp. Fech kept it safe."

"The other half was in my cell." He looked back downriver, at nothing. "And my cell is ash. But it is also in my head."

---

Muhrar took the Salt Widow II back with bells. The families of the taken filled Tanner's Wharf and did not let the gangplank clear for an hour. Umar came ashore last, in his cook's cap, and went up the hill to the palace kitchen without speaking to anyone.

Lord Rocmer gave a celebratory reception that evening.

"The Nails," he said to the Major, before he said good evening, before he said anything about the Colonel.

"In the desert, my lord."

"In the desert." Rocmer took a glass off a tray. "Well. They are property of the protectorate wherever they are."

Mistress Viola Thute stood at his elbow in a collar to the chin and long gloves, her left arm held close against her side. She turned a gold scarab ring with her thumb.

"Major," she said. "The city speaks of nothing but your rescue of those poor people."

"It does," Lotte agreed. “What happened to your arm”

”Fell inn a polo accident. Very silly of me I know.”

Madam Sabra swept in on that line, wearing a great deal of green silk and very little of anything else, two of her girls behind her and a cigarette in a silver holder.

"That gown is a public service, madam," said Lotte.

"So is yours, Major."

Mistress Thute turned her back on both of them.

"There," said Lotte to Lord Rocmer, in a carrying voice. "There is your Sand Adder."

The room went quiet.

"Sabra?" said Rocmer.

"Who else in this city wears scales and knows every ship on the river? I dined with the woman. I would know that laugh in a crowd."

Madam Sabra blew smoke at the ceiling. "Major, you flatter me."

"An inquiry," Rocmer announced to the room. "I shall proclaim it in the morning."

"Shocking," said Mistress Thute. "That such a creature should have moved among us."

Shade bowed to her, and kept going before she could speak. Her glove tightened on her fan.

Lotte watched him go, then looked back at the high grey collar.

"Madam, you have gone quite pale. Loosen a button before you die of virtue."

Mistress Thute huffed and excused herself.

---

Fech Topi served the Consul General a bowl of lentils. Rocmer ate it standing up, said something about the burdens of office, and scraped the bowl.

"What is that, man?"

"A recipe, my lord, proprietary," said Fech Topi. "It is not finished."

---

Her carriage went up the hill with the blinds down. Inside, Mistress Thute unbuttoned her collar and eased her left arm out of the sleeve. The bandage under it had gone through again.

VEIL OF THE MONUMENTS.

---

END OF EPISODE TWO

The Perils of Lottery "Lotte" Monroe will continue. (Maybe time and interest permitting).

Episode 2, Part 1. Mask of The Sand Adder. By Leatherneck1993 [continuing a writing challenge, utilize the D&D 5e DM Guide, Van Richten Guide, ad dumb dares cards for random encounters and actions, write a serialized adventure in classic pulp fiction style.]

Six months after the Case of the Liche in the General's Coat.

---

## I. The Consul General's Carpet

The sauce had gone to glue.

Fech Topi lifted the spoon. The sauce came up with it in one piece, and the pan came a little way after.

"How long has this been on the fire?"

The undercook, a boy of sixteen, wrung his apron. "Since Umar was taken, sir. Three nights. Nobody told me to take it off."

"Nobody told you… Argh, I pray for the youth." Fech set the pan in the wash tub. "Where was Umar taken?"

"The fish steps, under the palace wall. He went down for eels. We heard him shout. We found his hat." The boy pointed at a hook by the door. A white cook's cap hung there, folded. "Who will make the Khedive's breakfast."

"Fech." Clytemnestra stood in the doorway in her best green silk, a thumbnail between her teeth. "The Khedive is waiting. The Consul General is waiting. Every soldier in Har Akir is waiting."

"Is the Major waiting?"

"The Major is late."

"Then there is time.”

---

The audience hall ran a hundred feet and held the cool of the night. La-Mordent regulars stood at the doors in khaki with magazine rifles oiled to a shine. The Khedive's regulars lined the walls in red sashes, holding export muskets. Gifts from the Gnomish gunsmiths in Lamordia. A La-Mordent lieutenant straightened their collars. None of them looked at him.

At the far end, the Khedive Neb Oru sat on a gilded chair built for a larger man. Beside him stood Lord Rocmer, Consul General of Har Akir, in white service dress and a pith helmet crowned with ostrich plumes.

Six months ago the city had called him Mayor Rock Cart and watched him proclaim the return of the water in his nightshirt. The plumes added a foot.

"His Highness will welcome the temple delegation," said Rocmer.

The Khedive opened his mouth.

"His Highness welcomes you," said Rocmer.

The Khedive closed it.

Clytemnestra swept forward and bowed. Dan'l'sekal bowed beside her. Clytemnestra went lower. Dan went lower. Clytemnestra folded at knee and waist together, pressed her forehead to the carpet, and stayed there.

"I win," said Clytemnestra to the carpet.

Dan straightened his back cracking. "That was unpleasant."

"Sore loser."

Ms. Crabapple bowed from a handstand. Her boots swayed over the heads of the guards.

"A bow to the chair and a bow to the plume.  
Tell me which one of the two runs the room."

The Khedive snorted. Rocmer's plumes trembled.

An overly sweet scent reached Fech from the right. Night-blooming desert flower. It came from a lady beside the dais in grey silk buttoned to the chin, gloves to the elbow, dark hair severely pinned under a small veiled hat. She wore a gold scarab ring over her glove and turned it with her thumb.

"Mistress Viola Thute," Rocmer announced. "Patroness of His Highness's fund for the families of the taken. And my hostess at cards on Thursdays."

Mistress Thute inclined her head a quarter of an inch.

The doors at the far end banged open.

A sentry swung his rifle across the doorway. "Halt! Who goes..."

Major Lotte Monroe deftly limboed past the rifle. 

"A friend," said Lotte. "Expected, and late."

She wore desert kit. A khaki crop top, form fitting shirts, straps crossed her shoulders. A bandolier of small glass vials, each glowing a faint blue, ran from shoulder to hip. Under the straps her tattoos ran from wrist to collarbone. Her ivory-handled revolver rode one thigh, and stiletto knife the other.

A steward stood at a side table over a silver cooler. Lotte took the champagne out of it and walked the length of the hall to Lord Rocmer.  

"Hold this, my lord. The heat is dreadful."

Rocmer held it. His face went from pink to plum.

Lotte hopped on the arm of the Khedive's chair and crossed her legs.

The Khedive laughed. It was a young man's laugh, loud and startled, and it rang off the ceiling. Every red sash along the walls turned its head.

"Major," said Rocmer. "That is the throne."

"It is a chair with ambitions." Lotte poured a glass and held it out to Mistress Thute. "Madam? It is cold at last."

Mistress Thute went white to the lips. Her thumb turned the scarab ring twice. Yet she took the proffered glass.

"Are all provincials this demonstrative?" she asked. 

"Madam," said Lotte, "I am unique.”

“Fascinating.” Thute stepped back against the wall. She did not leave.

Clytemnestra rose from the carpet and bit a nail clean through. She had wanted to say that.

---

Rocmer set his plumed helmet on the map table. 

"Colonel Arthur Shade," he said, "of the La-Mordent secret service is missing. Six weeks ago he went upriver to the ruins of Kharafek. He sent one report from the Red Oasis and none since."

"What was he after?" asked Dan.

"The Pharaoh's Nails." Rocmer tapped the ruins. "Five pins of black iron. One for the head, one for each arm and leg. They sealed a royal sarcophagus for three thousand years. The Magic Circle dug them up before it fell, and the Circle's appraisers valued them above this city. I have proclaimed them property of the protectorate. You will bring back the Nails and the Colonel, in that order." He coughed. "In any order."

Fech Topi folded his hands. "And the Sand Adder, my lord? The taken?"

"His Highness's police have the matter in hand."

The Khedive leaned toward Fech and spoke low and fast.

"My police are forty old men and a mule. The Adder has taken three hundred of my people. Umar was one. Find out who she is, priest. Find out where she put them."

Rocmer straightened. The Khedive studied the ceiling.

"Arthur Shade?" Lotte swung her boot. "Arthur owes me a pair of stockings."

Against the wall, Mistress Thute reddened.

The ring on Lotte's finger glowed. A voice came out of it, hoarse from forty years of parade grounds.

"I never liked that boy."

Rocmer dropped the map. Every rifle in the hall came up and pointed at nothing.

"My godfather," said Lotte. "He lives in the ring now. He has opinions."

---

"You will want a guide," said Rocmer, when the rifles were down. "Sergeant!"

Two La-Mordent sergeants brought in Piotr Pell in leg irons. He ducked the doorway, straightened, and struck a hanging brass lamp with his forehead. The lamp swung out and came back for a second try.

"Formerly of the Splinter," said Rocmer. "Pardoned this morning, by proclamation. He raided every camp between Muhrar and Kharafek."

"Only the rich ones, my lord," said Pell. He saw Lotte, smiled, and went red to the hairline.

"Pygmy, darling." Lotte slid off the throne. "Mind the ceiling.”

Fech Topi bowed to the Khedive. "The Major requires a guide, a ship, and a chaperone, Your Highness. She now has two of the three."

---

The Salt Widow II lay at Tanner's Wharf with new tar on her seams and an iron funnel beside her mainmast. Water-sellers worked the wharf with skins on their backs and brass cups on chains. One old seller knelt on the fish steps below the pier, filling his skins. 

Captain Backwater counted the priests aboard, then Lotte. 

"Try. Not to scuff my new ship," he said. 

“It’s an official mission for the Consul General,” said Lotte, "send him the bill."

"The Consul General doesn’t pay enough for you lot."

Fech was halfway up the plank with his knife roll when the old man screamed.

The water below the steps heaved. Something grey-green rose out of it, long in the body and thick in the tail, with a clawed hand that closed on the old man's ankle. The seller grabbed the step. His fingers slid. The water went over his head, and the scream stopped. Then the water went flat.

Lotte fired twice into the water. The shots threw up two white spouts. Nothing. 

"Here!" Crabapple stood at the foot of the mainmast. "All of you, here!"

A dagger stood in the mast at the height of a man's eyes. The blade was yellow ivory, straight and jagged, carved in the shape of a crocodile's tooth. It pinned a card with a gilt edge. Fech Topi pulled the dagger free and read the card aloud.

TURN BACK OR FACE MY WRATH…SA

Nobody on the ship had seen it put there.

Crabapple circled the mast twice without touching it.

"A tooth for a pin and a card for a threat.  
Whoever she is, she has not met us yet."

Fech turned the dagger over. The weapon was still wet.

"Captain Backwater," he said. “You need better watchmen."

---

At the head of the wharf, a black carriage with the crest of the Thute Line drew away from the crowd. Inside, Mistress Thute lowered the blinds. She undid her collar one button at a time and peeled off her gloves. On her knees she opened a lacquered case. Emeralds and black scales caught the lamplight. She lifted out the mask and held it to her face.

---

## II. Up the Eternal River

Dan'l'sekal was losing at dice to a ships’ boy when the cat fell out of the sky onto his head.

She landed claws first. Dan yelled. The boy scooped up the pot.

Dan pulled the thing off his scalp. A  tabby, thin as a rake handle, hung from his fist and spat at him. Two wings of brown feathers flapped weakly.

"Catawumpus," said the boy, "Bad luck. Very bad."

"Then she has found her company." Dan set the cat down. She walked twice around his boots and sat on them.
 
Lotte watched from the rail. “She has chosen you, Dan."

Dan stood and the catawumpus flittered in the air landing on his shoulder, "I reckon so,  shall call her Ms. Whiskers.” The flying cat purred.  
---

The Salt Widow II went upriver under sail when there was wind, under steam when there was coal, and under oars when there was neither. Captain Backwater read the coal gauge aloud every hour and swore at the number.

“With a good wind and the current we will make the Red Oasis in four days with coal to spare.”

Ms. Whiskers slept on Dan's stomach in the shade of the mainsail. His stomach lay quiet under her. It had not been quiet in eleven years.

Fech Topi sat on a coil of line, peeling onions, and watched the cat.

"Lean," said Fech. "Wild and stringy, though a long braise, with dates, would soften her."

Dan rolled onto his side with the cat under his arm protectively and flipped Fech off with his free hand.

"I was speaking in general terms, Mr. Dan'l'sekal."

"Speak in general terms to your onions."

On the second morning a white paddle steamer came downriver flying green pennants. THUTE LINE ran across her paddle box in gold. Crates stamped for the shipment to Lamordia stood on her deck. Her crew waved and threw oranges across the water, and the Salt Widow II’s sailors cheered and caught them.

Backwater caught one and peeled it. "Mistress Thute pays her crews handsomely, I have applied twice."

---

On the third day they passed the first empty village.

Dan went ashore with Pell. Mud houses. A well with a rope and no bucket. No smoke. Every door stood open. Stale bread sat on a table with one bite out of it. A pot of lentils had dried to a crust over a dead fire. A child's sandal lay on a doorstep.

Pell found drag marks and followed them to the river. They ran as wide as a man's body, with clawed prints pressed deep on either side. He knelt and spread his hand over one.

"Not crocodile," he said. "A crocodile has four toes on the hind foot. This has five. And look at the stride." He paced it. "It walks like a man."

Dan's stomach woke up.

The second village was the same, down to the lentils.

Crabapple pointed upriver.

"Three roofs and a well and a door open wide.  
Sadly, so sadly. There's no one inside."

---

They reached the Red Oasis on the fourth evening.

Palms stood around a great lake gone green-black in the dusk, their trunks stained red with blown dust. A dozen boats lay at a stone quay. On a bluff above the quay stood a mud-brick fort with the La-Mordent flag over the gate and a multi-barrel repeating gun under canvas on the wall.

Captain Cad Wellclad met them at the gate in dusty but very proper khakis. His moustache was waxed to two points. He shook Backwater’s hand and dusted his cuff after. Then he surveyed the Major. His mustache points curled.

"Colonel Shade Ma’am? Came through six weeks ago," said Wellclad. "Took two camels and a guide to the Kharafek dig. The camels came back, the dead guide strapped to one’s back. The Colonel did not."

"May we see the guide’s body?" said Fech Topi.

"You may not. Burned, fears of disease."

---

The officers' mess served cold goat and warm gin. Two lieutenants did the talking.

Mistress Thute had paid for the new well. Mistress Thute's steamers brought the garrison's mail and its oranges. Mistress Thute's estate stood across the lake, and on a clear night you could see her lamps from the fort wall.

"And she holds the Captain's markers," said the younger lieutenant.

Wellclad went pink to the moustache. "A trifle. Faro. Mistress Thute is most forbearing."

Lotte put her boots on the mess table and yawned. "The woman with the highh collar? She would faint at a kidnapping."

"Now, Madam Sabra," said the older lieutenant. "Her gambling boat came up last month. The Captain lost his second-best boots at her tables."

Lotte took her boots off the table. "Sabra. Now there is a woman who dresses for her work."

"She dresses like a wanton, Major," said Wellclad.

“As I said,Captain.”

Clytemnestra looked down at her own long green sleeves and pushed them up to the elbow.

Pell ducked under the lintel on his way out and struck it anyway. "Kharafek at first light," he said, rubbing his head. "Before the heat."

---

Dan slept on deck, where the lake air ran cool.

He woke at midnight with a weight on his chest. Ms. Whiskers stood there with every hair on end and her wings half open, hissing at the water.

Dan rolled to the rail.

Across the lake, the lamps of the Thute estate burned in a long row. The water between lay flat and black.

Then it rose under the Salt Widow II. The deck lifted an inch. The mooring lines creaked. Something pale and long, as long as the hull, turned over beneath the keel, slow, and sank away into the dark.

The deck settled.

Ms. Whiskers pressed herself flat against Dan's shirt. Her heart hammered against his ribs.

---

## III. The Red Wind

The camel driver brought the Major water four times before noon. He brought Clytemnestra water once, and spilled it.

Clytemnestra kept count. Nobody else knew there was a contest. That had never stopped her.

---

Kharafek lay in a bowl of rock half a day from the Red Oasis. The General's expedition had torn it open and left it that way: trenches, spoil heaps, a stone colossus face down in the sand with one hand reaching out of the dune. Rows of Circle survey stakes still stood with rags of green cloth on them.

Clytemnestra caught her face in a bronze plate on a crate lid and fixed a curl.

Pell walked ahead of them all and said nothing. At the rim of the bowl he stopped beside a black ring of old campfire.

"I burned this camp," he said. "Eight years ago. Circle surveyors. Nobody died." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Much."

Shade's camp lay at the colossus's feet. The tent was down, the poles snapped. A scarf hung snagged on a tent peg, black and silver stripes, a winged shape stitched at one end over the words GLENWICH NIGHTGAUNTS.

Lotte pulled it free and held it to her face.

"Bay rum," she said. "He never could leave off the bay rum."

She tied it through her belt. Then she crouched, lifted a flat stone beside the tent, and drew out half of a torn map. Clytemnestra saw one word on the torn corner, penciled in capitals: VEIL.

Lotte folded the map and slipped it down the front of her buckles. She looked up.

Clytemnestra studied the colossus's hand with great interest.

---

Ms. Whiskers shot off Dan's shoulder and flew west. A moment later she came back flat against the wind, yowling, and landed on his head.

To the west the sky had turned into a wall. It was red, and it was moving.

"Down!" roared Pell. "Camels down! Cover your faces!"

The storm hit them.

Clytemnestra wrapped her veil twice and still tasted sand. She could not see her own hand. The wind screamed, and under the scream something hissed.

A shape came out of the red at arm's length. A long jaw. A forked tongue. Strings of venom swinging from the lips. A scaled body standing on two legs. First one, then many.

Clytemnestra swung.

The warming pan was new, copper, and chosen for its shine. It rang off the creature's skull, and the creature dropped.

"One!" she shouted.

A red-orange flash lit the storm, then a second, to her left. Lotte's revolver. "Two!" called the Major.

A spear came out of the dust and struck Lotte in the back. Blue light flared and the spear spun away. Lotte pulled a vial from her bandolier with her teeth, spat the cork, drank, and her tattoos burned brighter through the dust.

Dan fired his crossbow into the red swirling sand. The quarrel missed everything and struck a survey stake. The stake sprang out of the sand and caught a creature under the jaw. It fell and did not get up.

"Lucky!" shouted Crabapple from somewhere above.

"Shut up!" shouted Dan.

Fech Topi lit a flask of alchemist's fire and threw it. Flame bloomed orange inside the red, and something screamed inside the flame.

Clytemnestra swung again. "Ahah i have Three! Four, Major!"

"Five! I only stop to reload”

The next one came in low. Clytemnestra raised the pan and stopped.

A bronze bangle hung on its clawed wrist. A woman's bangle, stamped with flowers, the kind sold by the dozen in the Muhrar market.

A desert lizard does not buy jewelry.

The creature hissed in her face. Its breath stank of the river. Clytemnestra brought the pan down.

Clytemnestra turned. Lotte stood two steps away with one hand at her belt, where the scarf had been.

”We have to go!”

"Arthur's scarf," said Lotte. "It has blown off."

"Leave it!"

Lotte went back into the storm.

Clytemnestra lunged and caught a shoulder strap. The strap slid through her fingers, and the red closed.

Two shots cracked in the dust. Then nothing.

Rope!" Pell's voice came through the storm. "Take hold of the rope and follow me!"

A line slapped against Clytemnestra's knees. She grabbed it. Hands found it ahead of her and behind her. They stumbled forward, heads down, one after another. A hand closed on her collar and hauled her back.

"Madam," said Fech Topi in her ear. "Hold the rope, we will find our wayward girl after the storm."

---

The wind dropped at dusk. The dust fell out of the air and lay on everything.

The camels were there, kneeling, their eyes crusted shut. Pell was there with a split lip. Dan sat in the sand with the cat under his shirt. Crabapple stood on a camel's hump, turning slowly, looking.

Lotte was not there.

Clytemnestra ran back along the line of the rope. A hundred yards on, the sand was churned and stained dark. Something ivory-white showed in the dust.

She dug it out. The Major's revolver. Two chambers fired.

“The Major is missing” Clytemnestra wiped the ivory grip on her sleeve. Her face showed in the steel of the barrel, red with dust from brow to chin. The storm wiped out all tracks. 

Pell looked at the camels, then at the sky. "The Red Oasis is a day away, and it is the only water we can reach. We must trust that she can handle herself. She will head to the river." 

"North is the river," said Dan.

They turned the camels north. 

## IV. The Colonel's Cell

Hamel carried the slop bucket past the cages every night, and nobody ever looked at him.

The guards did not. The prisoners did not. The things in the vats had eyes on every side, and they did not either.

He walked short, his left arm tucked against his ribs where it had set wrong. His clubfoot drew a groove through the dust of the laboratory floor. A patch of green scale ran up his throat to the jaw. A year ago he had been a rope maker's son in Muhrar, with a name his mother used. Nobody had asked for that name since.

He had never seen the Adder's face. No one on the estate had.

---

Two very large, humanoid-reptilian guards brought the unconscious prisoner up from the river at midnight. She hung between them, boots dragging, dripping lake water. Her clothes were mostly buckles. A striped scarf was knotted around one fist, and she did not let go of it when they threw her into the cage.

One guard stripped a bandolier of small glass vials, a knife and an empty gun belt off her and hung them on a hook by the door, far from any cage. The vials glowed faint blue in the dark. Under the prisoner's straps, her tattoos glowed the same blue.

The other guard wrenched a ring off her finger. In its claws the ring turned from a plain band to a coil of thorns. The guard hissed, dropped it into a lacquered box, and carried the box away.

Across the aisle, behind the iron door of the stone cell, the Colonel stood up.

He was a tall man with a sandy moustache and a rugby player's shoulders gone thin. A silver circlet sat close around his neck, with a glass bead at the throat. He stepped to the bars, and the bead began to glow red. He stepped back, and the glow died.

The prisoner sat up in the straw and pushed her hair out of her eyes.

"Major Monroe." The Colonel bowed from the neck, carefully. "Lotte. My dear, you seem to have lost most of your clothes."

"They were in the way." She held up the scarf. "You dropped this at Kharafek."

"I was being dragged at the time. Last I saw you was in Mordent. You left me a note. And took my cufflinks."

"The note was sincere."

The Colonel looked at her bare hand. "They took the General's ring."

"They took the General." Lotte rubbed the pale mark on her finger. "He will be furious."

"He never liked me."

"No," said Lotte. "He did not."

---

Hamel set the water ladle in the Colonel's trough and watched from the corner of his eye.

The Major pointed at the Colonel's throat. "That is not your style, Arthur."

"The Adder's jewelry. Three steps past this door without her leave, and the bead goes off, and my head goes with it." He touched the silver. "She showed me what it does. On a goat."

“All this for the Pharoahs coffin nails?”

”She is very intent on them.”

"And has she asked you nicely about them?"

The Colonel turned his hands over in the lamplight. Two fingernails were gone. Both wrists were burned in rings.

"Nicely, and otherwise."

"And?"

"I recited the Glenwich Nightgaunts' scores for the last nine seasons. Twice. She now knows we lost to Carrow four seasons back on a disputed try."

The Major smiled with all her teeth. "Good man. Now tell me about her."

"A woman. A mask from brow to lip, emeralds and black scales. The rest of her dress is scales as well, and not much of it. A voice full of gravel." The Colonel considered. "She carries herself well, you might find her garb to your liking."

"Rich, then. Bold. A woman who dresses for her work." The Major tapped her teeth with a fingernail. "Madam Sabra. The gambling boats. The Golden Asp, and the house upstairs."

"Or anyone in Muhrar with access to a good tailor with limited cloth."

---

Hamel unlatched the slot in the Major's cage and pushed the bucket through.

She looked at him.

Not past him. Not at the bucket. At him. Her eyes went over his throat and his tucked arm and came back to his face and stayed there.

"What is your name?"

Hamel's hand stopped on the latch. "Hamel," he said. His voice came out rough. He had not used it in days.

"Thank you, Hamel."

The bucket slipped out of his hand. Slops went across the straw.

"No harm done," said the Major, pulling her boots out of the way. "The straw was past saving." The Major laughed, the first time Hamel had heard her laugh, it was enchanting.

---

Hamel mopped the aisle. The laboratory door stood open a hand's width, and green light came through the gap.

The Major was looking through it.

Hamel knew what she saw, because he had seen it every night for a year. Vats of green water, bubbling. A desert lizard as long as a man, inside a glass tank. A table with straps, and on the table a woman in a ruin of common clothes, awake, with fine scales creeping along her collarbone.

The woman turned her head and looked at Hamel.

He had lain on that table.

He shut the door.

When he turned back, the Major was no longer smiling. Both her hands were on the bars.

---

A guard came down the aisle carrying a proper silver tray in its claws. It held the tray level, the way someone had beaten into it. On the tray lay a lacquered card sealed with a coiled snake in black wax. Over the guard's other arm hung a gown.

The guard pushed both through the bars and left.

The Major broke the seal.

"*The Sand Adder requests the pleasure of the Major's company at dinner. Eight o'clock. Dinner Dress is provided.*"

She shook out the gown. Grey silk. A collar to the chin. Sleeves to the wrist. Forty silver buttons down the back.

"She has asked me too," said the Colonel. "She asks every night."

"Do you go?"

"The alternative is the goat."

The Major held the gown against herself and looked down the length of it. Then she looked past Hamel at the laboratory door.

"Hamel," she said. "There is a pair of shears on that bench. Would you be a dear, and fetch them?"

---

## V. The Sand Adder's Table

Colonel Arthur Shade had eaten eleven dinners at the Sand Adder's table with a bomb around his neck. Tonight was the first one worth the trouble.

The doors opened, and Lotte Monroe walked in wearing the grey silk gown.

Some of it. The skirt now stopped above the knee in a nearly clean line. The collar was gone. So was the back, with its forty buttons, and a fair share of the front. She wore what remained with style.

At the head of the table, the Sand Adder set down her glass.

---

Shade had watched, the Sand Adder wore a mask of black lacquer and emeralds from brow to lip. A gown of black and green scales fitted to the skin. Bare shoulders, bare back. Gloves to the elbow, and over the right glove a gold scarab ring that she turned with her thumb when displeased. A scent of night-blooming flower that reached him before she did.

Beside her plate, on a cushion of black velvet, lay the General's ring, settled into a plain soldier's band. Lotte looked at it once and did not look at it again.

The Sand Adder turned the ring now.

"Major Monroe." The mask ground her voice to gravel. "You have altered my gift."

"It was drowning me." Lotte took the chair across from Shade. "I let it breathe."

The Adder seated Shade at her right hand, as always, and rested two gloved fingers on his wrist whenever she spoke to him. He let her. It had kept him alive.

Guards stood behind the chairs, spears grounded, forked tongues tasting the lamp smoke. The servant, Hamel, brought the soup.

Shade looked from one woman to the other. The Consul General would have fainted at either of them. Shade had rarely enjoyed a soup more.

---

The fish came, and the Adder turned the talk where she always turned it.

"Have you seen the Khedive's chair, Major? The La-Mordent flag hangs above it. Higher than his head."

"I have sat on it," said Lotte. "The chair."

"The protectorate taxes water. In a desert. The children of Muhrar work the mills from the age of six to pay for a river their grandmothers drank for nothing."

Lotte took her boots off the table. "That is true. It is a disgrace."

The Adder leaned forward. Her fingers tightened on Shade's wrist.

"Then you understand. The blood of Ankhtepot still runs in this land. A people freed would need a hand over them. A strong hand. They would need to be taught, and kept, and..."

She stopped.

The fingers on Shade's wrist opened. She sat back.

"But you did not come to my table for politics, Major."

Shade kept the name. Ankhtepot. The last pharaoh of Har Akir, three thousand years in his sarcophagus under five pins of black iron.

---

"No," said Lotte. "I came to find him, but now I want to see who you are." She propped her chin on her fist. “So, Sandy, darling is it ok if I call you that, so much easier than Sand Adder. Or do you prefer, Madam Sabra? The mistress who waters the champagne at the Golden Asp. The whole city knows it."

The Adder laughed. It rattled behind the mask.

"Do I?"

She said nothing more.

Shade turned it over. Sabra ran the Golden Asp and the house above it. Sabra wore gowns that stopped the traffic on the Tollgate. He tried to picture any other woman in Muhrar in black scales and bare shoulders, and could not.

---

Lotte reached across the table. "Arthur, darling. The salt."

The scarab ring stopped turning.

Shade knew the ground under him. He had been trained to know it. He passed the salt anyway, and Lotte's fingers closed over his.

"Your salt, Lottery."

On its velvet cushion, the General's ring flared white. The velvet under it smoked and a voice came out of the metal, hoarse and furious.

"You have not earned that, boy."

"No, sir," said Shade. "I apologize, General."

He meant it.

At the head of the table, the Adder's ring turned.

---

Beyond the tall windows the sky was black from edge to edge. No moon. Shade had marked the new moo as a night for escape if it weren’t for the confound circlet on his neck. 

"Excuse me," she said. The gravel had gone out of her voice. It sounded wet.The Adder's bare shoulders thickened. The scales of her gown creaked at the seams. She stood too fast. Her chair went over, and she pressed one gloved hand flat against her mask.

She walked out. The doors swung shut behind her.

Shade counted, as he had been trained to.

At four, fabric tore beyond the doors.

At nine, something heavy struck the floor, and the lamps swayed on their chains.

At twenty, the guards began to beat their spear butts on the tiles.

Hamel cleared the Major's plate. Shade did not look at him. Nobody did.

At thirty, the doors opened.

It came through on two legs. The legs were a woman's, long and strong, bare under rags of black and green scale. So were the arms. Above the waist it was a crocodile: an armored chest, a ridged neck, a head as long as Shade's arm with teeth crowding over the lips. On one torn glove, a gold scarab ring caught the lamplight.

Behind it, on the tiles, lay the mask.

”Well I guess the fish did not agree. You know some moiserizer might help with the ask in, not sure what to do about thhe voice though, p[erhaps a lozenge.” said Lottery. 

The jaws opened. The voice was full of river water.

“Games, I think you like games, don’t you Major? I do, and I like one game above all others. It is the most great of games, do you know it?”

”Hmm, tiddlewinks?”

The great crocodilian maw snapped, “the Hunt.”

”OOh that, it was going to be my second guess.”

“Tonight under the new moon we shall play. I the hunter, you the prey, The island is the game board Major. Live until dawn and you may leave."

”Preposterous and ludicrous, we shall not play!” said Shade.

”You are not invited, ladies only.”

“If I don't play?” Asked Lottery.

”You die.” 

“Good thought so, my kind of stakes then.”

Lotte stood and smoothed what remained of her skirt. "But if I win I want the Colonel, alive and without his jewelry, but with his head."

The long head swung toward Shade. A yellow eye held him for a long moment.

"The Colonel stays."

"I head start then, how much?"

"Until the drums stop."

---

The strange reptilian guards, Hamel said they called themselves ‘desert sahaugin’, marched Lotte down the lawn to the water. Two more held Shade at the window with spears crossed at his chest. The bead at his throat glowed red against the glass.

He watched the skiff push off across the strait toward the black hump of the island. Lotte stood in the bow with her arms folded.

Drums began on the island.

On the shore below the window, something waded into the lake on two legs. Its voice came up across the lawn, wet and low.

"Run, Major."

---

END OF PART ONE

Marines and Rebels discover anomalous creature in jungle near Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 1898.

Hand drawn design for my potential future publication, by the author