Avery set his tea cup down and stood. “It’s time for me to go.”

Idris did not look upset. Instead, he rose to his own feet, and the others followed. “I understand it’s a shock. I know you’re loyal to the Prime Minister, and I sympathize with you for it. But it’s important to bring Ani to us now. If you wait until Grand Admiral Haggarty makes his move, she could get hurt in the violence that that will entail. I would not want that. No one would.”

“I will not give up on the Prime Minister.”

Idris dropped his charm and said bluntly, but not meanly, “Denaris’s government is living on borrowed time, Doctor. What organization is left is running out of money. The war emptied its coffers, as did feeding the refugees and the rebuilding afterward, and this second war against the Navy is taking what’s left—what do you think has been keeping the Army in line?—not to mention Haggarty was able to make off with a substantial amount. He got the gold and left the Prime Minister with the bank loans from foreign countries. All of which is to say that Denaris’s government can’t sustain itself.” He indicated Ajaun. “But my friends can renew those coffers. We can provide the solidity that Ghenisa needs. And ... we have other sources. The Ysstral Empire, for example.”

Avery failed to find words.

“You need time to think,” Idris said kindly. “That’s fine. Personally, I like Prime Minister Denaris quite a lot, and I admire her greatly. No harm would come to her. In fact, once we have Ani I have no problem waiting for Denaris’s government to run its course, for Haggarty to take over before I make my own move. I would much rather topple him than the Prime Minister. I will not have her blood on my hands.”

Avery moved toward the door.

Idris, in a very low voice, almost above a whisper, said, “Has Ani been having strange dreams?”

Avery spun toward him. “How did you know?”

Idris spread his hands. “Bring her to me, Doctor. Bring her to me.”

Chapter 9

The next day Avery and Layanna set to work cataloguing and analyzing the pieces of Starfish tissue in the laboratory they had been given, teams of junior scientists working under them. They all worked relentlessly, trying to find some weakness of the material. They exposed it to heat, cold, radiation, anything they could think of. Days passed, but the material seemed impervious. They knew the creatures had blood and flesh beneath all that armor, even some sort of vascular system—a heart, perhaps. If they could pump a poison into a main artery, or anywhere deep enough inside it, they might just be able to kill it.

They tried arsenic, strychnine, cyanide, and numerous other obvious lethal agents, failing to even so much as weaken the blood cells, or what approximated blood cells, in the sample tissue. They kept trying, searching for more esoteric compounds, even reaching out to the non-humans in the city; Hissig only had a few small populations of non-human intelligent races, but they were there, and their leading minds, some enemies of Haggarty, eagerly lent their assistance in response to Denaris’s (albeit secret) entreaties. Though they were able to provide poisons unique to their cultures and physiologies, these too proved ineffective.

In addition to all this, Layanna designed a type of automated drill, similar to that used by oilers, that could be carried by a lightning-rod-protected helicopter or dirigible and deposited on the back of a Starfish. What with all the extradimensional energy surrounding the creature, it would prove virtually impossible for Layanna to set down on its back and bore a hole through it herself. They would depend on the drill to do that for them, and then she would drop through the new-formed cavity in its exoskeleton from the safety of an airship before any of the Starfish’s defenses could kill her. Only then could she administer the poison, assuming one could be fashioned. To that end, once she organized the team to build the drill, she more or less left them on their own while she worked with Avery on developing a substance lethal enough to end the creature.

More days passed, and meanwhile the oncoming wave of Starfish (most of the papers were calling the creatures that now, independent of Avery, though the yellower periodicals still referred to them as the Things or the Horrors from the Deep) destroyed one island after another. Reports from up and down the coast confirmed the presence of multiple such creatures, wiping out islands in a broad swath along the section of the sea fronting the continents of Consur and Urslin, and all moving toward the mainland. One was said to be coming straight for Hissig. Refugees that had fled to the islands to escape the onslaught of Octung now fled back, and Ghenisa was more overburdened with the homeless and destitute than ever before—people who then, hearing reports of the approaching Starfish, began to pack their bags to flee Ghenisa for parts further inland. More replaced them.

It was a world of refugees, with camps set up in any available space; charity groups, churches and even the overburdened government tending to them, but it was not enough. Every group had been pushed to its breaking point, not least the refugees. Crime ran rampant. The police went on strike before Prime Minister Denaris forced them back to work.

Another issue vexed Avery. Early on, he found time to meet with Prime Minister Denaris about finding and keeping an eye on Sheridan in an effort to prevent her from delivering the Atoshan relic to whoever Davic’s contact was, but Sheridan proved elusive, and deadly. Two of Denaris’s agents failed to return from their assigned tailings, and after that the agents tasked with watching her did so too cautiously to produce any appreciable results. Avery was forced to realize that he could not stop Sheridan delivering the relic, and in all likelihood the contact already possessed it. All Avery could do was hope this didn’t prove disastrous.

On the sixth day of work in the laboratory, he and Layanna were interrupted by an official aide.

“The Prime Minister wants to meet with you.”

Avery and Layanna joined the others in the lobby—Janx, Hildra and the Prime Minister.

“Rest assured, I summoned you here for a worthwhile reason,” Denaris said. “If you recall, I mentioned having another motive for inviting you into my ranks, and that is this: to get your opinion, perhaps advice, on a most particular corpse.”

“Corpse,” Hildra repeated, and Avery frowned.

Other than used clothes and a slouching hat, Denaris made no concession toward disguise, but disguised she was. She meant to set forth from behind the walls of her siege. Leading them with some authority and flanked by two casually-dressed guards, she led the group down a staircase and into a system of tunnels, explaining that these had originally been built out by the Drakes (the Parliament Building had been erected on the site of the old Palace, destroyed after the Revolution) to conduct their secret business, and she and her people used it now to get around Haggarty. She would teach Avery’s party how to use them and give them access cards so that they could come and go at will.

A car waited for them on the street at the termination of one of the halls and they piled in, Janx asking, “Where we goin’?”

“Why, the morgue, of course.”

After a drive of perhaps twenty minutes, a guard opened a side door of the city morgue for them. Their footfalls echoed off the stone walls and tile floor as Denaris led them through the institution, seeming to know her way around better than she should. The air grew colder as they entered a frigid, medium-sized room lined with cracked marble on two sides and stainless steel banks of body vaults on the other two. Harsh lights lit long tables, and at one a watery-eyed man in scrubs bent over a partly vivisected infected woman. He glanced up as they entered and pulled down his mask.

“Prime Minister,” he said, bowing his head in a strangely lopsided gesture. “Good day.”

“Everyone, meet Dr. Donnel Gehyme. Donnel, everyone.”

“Hello,” he said. “You’ve come to see ... him, I suppose?”

“We have. May we?”

Donnel bobbed his wrinkled, balding head, washed his hands and crossed to one of the banks of body cabinets, moving directly to a certain storage unit, then pausing, as if reluctant for some reason to open it. Was it fear that made him hesitate, or showmanship?

“Is it a pre-human?” Avery asked.

“No,” Denaris said. “It’s human enough, though infected.”

“Is it a particularly odd mutation, perhaps?”

“No.”

“Then why ... ?”

She nodded to Donnel, and he opened the drawer with a flourish—it had been showmanship—and grinned down at the body on the slab. Avery gasped. The body was that of a man in his fifties, badly mutated, with gills on one side of his neck, his nose almost vanished, lips rubbery and large, and webs between the fingers of his right hand—his only hand.

Less than half of the man remained. Everything below his navel was gone, a ragged, strangely melted-looking truncation, and the slash—or wound, or whatever it was—angled up to include his left arm as well, so that all that was left of him was most of a torso, a head and a right arm that had been broken in several places. His whole body, what was left of it, seemed floppy and shrunken. Boneless. As if he had been hurled so hard against something that every bone in his body had shattered. Fish or the like had been at the body, and it had evidently been submerged in water some time, as it was a gnawed and shriveled thing, seemingly about to fall apart. A foul odor rose from it.

“Hells,” Janx said. “What did this?”

“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me,” Denaris said. Then, to Layanna: “More specifically, you.”

Layanna stared at the corpse, seemingly unable to speak. An odd expression had entered her features; Avery couldn’t place it.

“It is a medical mystery,” Donnel said. “Nothing in my experience, even the pre-human races that I know of, could have caused such a death. I’ve analyzed where the body was severed and I believe it was done by some sort of corrosive acid.”

“Acid,” Denaris repeated, as if that were significant. She watched Layanna. “What do you think? Don’t worry, you can speak in front of Donnel.”

Layanna still did not answer, and the Prime Minister frowned.

“Where was the body found?” Avery said. “It looks as though fish have been nibbling on it. Possibly more than fish. And that smell …”

“Near one of the sewer settlements,” Denaris said.

“Sewer settlements?” Avery said, giving Janx a look. “I know you mentioned them before, but, surely … they’re an urban myth.”

“The body was found down there, washed in from a tunnel, drifting on the tide,” the Prime Minister declared flatly, then added, “One of many. Layanna, you still don’t want to say what did this?”