Nimstowl said, “He might have gotten me at that, he jumped at me so quickly. But this”—he held up a hand with a large ringjust like An ana’s— “warned me in time.”
“All the Sellers are dead,” Anana said.
“It’s hard to believe!” he replied.-“At last! And I killed the last one!”
Kickaha smiled at that but did not comment. He said, “All right, Nimstowl, on your feet. And don’t try anything. I’m locking you up for a while.”
Again, he frisked Nimstowl. The little Lord was indignant. He yelled, “Why are you doing this to me?”
“I don’t believe in taking chances. I want to check you out. Come on. There’s a room down the hall where I can lock you up until I’m sure about you.”
Nimstowl protested all the way. Kickaha, before shutting the door on him, said, “What were you doing so far from the control room? You were supposed to be with us. You weren’t running out on us, were you?”
“So what if I was?” Nimstowl said. “The fight was won, or at least I thought it was. I meant to get back to my universe before the bitch Anana tried
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to kill me, now that she didn’t need me. I couldn’t trust you to control her. Anyway, it’s a good thing I did leave you. If I hadn’t, that Beller might have gotten away or managed to ambush you.”
“You may be right,” Kickaha said. “But you stay here for a while, anyway.” He shut the door and locked it by pressing a button on the wall.
XXIV
AFTER THAT, he and Anana continued the long search. They could have cut down the room-to-toom legwork if they had been able to use the video monitors in the control room, since many rooms and corridors could be seen through these. But Wolff had deactivated these when he left the palace, knowing that Kickaha was able to turn them on if he revisited the palace. The Bellers had not been able to locate the source of control, and they had not had time or enough hands to disassemble the control console and rewire it. Now Kickaha could not use them because the fight had put them out of commission.
They looked through hundreds of rooms and dozens of corridors and scores of staircases and yet had covered only a small part of the one building. And they had many wings to go.
They decided they had to get food and sleep. They checked in on Luvah, who was sleeping comfortably, and they ordered a meal from the kitchen. There were several taloses there, the only taloses not involved in the attack on the Bellers. These gated a meal through to the two. After eating, Kickaha decided to go up to the control room to make sure nothing important had happened. He
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had some hopes that Wolff might come back, though this did not seem likely. The chances were high that the gate was one-way unless the Horn of Shambarimen were used, and Luvah had had that.
They trudged back up the staircases, Kickaha did not dare use the elevators until he was certain they were not booby-trapped. Just before they went into the control room, he stopped.
“Did you hear something?”
She shook her head. He gestured to her to cover him and he leaped through the doorway and rolled onto the floor and up behind a control console. Listening, he lay there for a while. Presently, he heard a low moan. Silence followed. Then another moan. He snaked across the floor from console to console, following the sounds. He was surprised, though not shocked, when he found the Harpy, Podarge, slumped against a console. Her feathers were blackened and stinking; her legs were charred so deeply that some of the toes had fallen off. Her breasts were brown-red meat. A half-melted beamer lay near her, a talon clutched around its butt.
She had come into the room while he and Anana were gone, and somebody had beamed her. Still on his belly, he investigated and within a minute found the responsible person. This was the soldier, Do Shuptarp, whom he had supposed was slain by the Bellers. But, now that he thought back, he had not been able to identify any corpse as his. This was not unexpected, since many were too burned to be recognizable.