“Honor!”
“You will have saved the Quaggi and its egg. A not inconsiderable achievement.”
“You will save the Quaggi,” cried Madame, “but you will let us die?”
“I, Madame?” Questioner’s eyebrows rose. “I would not think of such a thing. I will simply recommend that mankind not continue on Newholme past the lives of those now living. Even our earliest espousers of human rights limit them to life, liberty, and the pursuit of satisfactions. They do not guarantee posterity or immortality.”
Madame turned away to hide her face. “How long do we have … before we must go into that place?”
“Until the last of these monsters have been absorbed. By then, it will be day. The moons collect near noon, so says the Corojum. All six of the larger ones will be more or less in line with the sun; there will be darkness at noon; we will have one dilly of an eclipse.”
Madame returned to the Hags to tell them brokenly what Questioner had said. They stood where they were, watching. There was nothing else they could do.
Slightly above them on the road, Ashes looked down on the observers and called his sons’ attention to them.
“That’s Mouche over in those rocks,” said Bane, outraged. “What’s he doing here?”
“And there’s that Questioner thing,” said Dyre. “And there’s ol’ Simon and Madame.”
“Who? two, three, four,” muttered Ashes. “Simon? two, three four.”
“Just somebody from House Genevois,” muttered Bane, embarrassed to see Mouche looking up at Ashes’s nakedness. “Why’d you hafta take your clothes off?”
Ashes ignored him. Any clothing worn by the Wilderneers had been stripped away. The rags lay along the descending path. The sight of Mouche made up Bane’s mind for him, and he edged away from Ashes, stepped over the edge of the path behind a large boulder, and waited there while the procession passed him by. He did not notice that Mouche and Ornery, Ellin and Bao had also slipped away to disappear along the boulder-strewn slope that led down to the pond.
Bane heard wings and looked up. Webwings dropped onto the concealing rock and perched there. “What you waitin’ for, boy?”
“I think all you folks should go in first,” said Bane carefully. “Cause you’ve already been in once. Then Dyre and me, because it’ll be our first time.”
“Oh, we’re gonna get all refurbished, we are. Been kind of shabby, lately. You noticed that? Kind of shabby. Kind of worn. But we’ll come out lovely, we will.” Webwings almost purred. “Shiny. Like stars. Just lately, I’ve been thinkin’ about it. All of us have. Hughy Huge. He told me he was gonna be a star.”
“That’s right,” said Bane. “I’m sure of it.”
Webwings spread his wings, the spiders beneath them quivering in anticipation. He launched himself into the air, circling upwards, then from the height fell like an arrow, making scarcely a splash as he slipped into the pond and was gone.
There were only a dozen or so monsters remaining. Below Bane, on the switchback path, Dyre was straggling along at Ashes’s heels. Bane whistled softly. Dyre looked up, saw him, looked back at Ashes, then darted upward, off the path to make his way upward toward Bane. They watched as their father marched into the Fauxi-dizalonz without a backward glance, moving briskly forward until even the top of his head had disappeared.
The few Wilderneers who had been behind him finished their march, their voices growing weaker, their very substance seeming to lose definition. The tunneler levees had pulled back as the liquid level rose, and were finally removed altogether when the turbid pond filled the caldera to the very foot of the road. The surface was barely riffled, but the depths were full of dark shadows and stringy shapes that writhed like leeches. The shapes swam just under the surface until early light drove them into the depths. As the sun came higher, shining more directly into the caldera, the pond began to clear, and with torturous slowness it continued clearing until, when the sun was high, it shone at last with the bright, emerald green they had all seen at first.
The world began to move beneath them, a different movement than any they had felt heretofore, a pounding, like a heart beating far beneath them.