“If it turns solid rock into a hole with blue ice around it,” Froggie said, “then somebody disagrees with you about it being worthwhile to put one here.”
He reached for the key. The administrator kept hold of it and said, “This is incredible! I must take this—”
“Nowhere,” Froggie said, closing his fist around the little tube despite Slats’ attempt to retain it. “The girl has got to get it back before her master finds it’s missing. Whatever else happened, she’d be chopped for sure. You coming back late pushed the time more than I’d have chosen to do.”
“This is more important than one—” Slats said.
Froggie tapped the bug’s mouth, not the lavaliere, with his index finger. “No,” he said, “it isn’t. I’ve got nothing against killing barbs, but I’m not going to have somebody else kill ’em because I didn’t do what I promised. Understood?”
“Understood, Centurion Froggie,” Slats said in a tiny voice. “I must go to my room, now. This is very important.”
“Yeah,” said Froggie, “I thought it might be.”
Queenie waited nearby, tense and silent. When Froggie nodded to her, she snatched the key and slipped it beneath her kilt before scurrying out of the fort. Froggie smiled faintly.
“Do you have any idea what this is all about, Slats?” he asked as he followed the administrator out of the fort. Slats didn’t bother with status and the palanquin in his haste to get back to his room in the temple.
“I do not!” he said. “It is inconceivable, Centurion Froggie!”
Froggie sighed again. “I kinda thought that too,” he said.
* * *
During previous nights a fire on the central slate hearth illuminated the temple’s interior adequately. Tonight the space was full of troopers: sharpening weapons, polishing armor, and talking in hushed voices about the future. Because so many bodies blocked the light, Froggie’d had a fatigue detail string the nut-oil lanterns they’d found in a storage room on the sixth level. The shades were rinds of something like a beet, pierced with fanciful shapes.
The lamplight was creamy, but it waked sword-edges into sparkles like fangs winking in the night.
Slats came down the stairs, eyeing the assembled troopers warily. Froggie broke off his conversation with Verruca about the guard roster and went to meet the administrator.
“Are you expecting trouble, Centurion Froggie?” Slats whispered, twitching one of his middle limbs to indicate the soldiers. The courtyard would’ve held at least five hundred worshippers, but men in armor filled the space in a way that civilians could not have done.
“Not anything special, Slats,” Froggie said. “The men’re getting a break tonight except for the guards. A lot of them thought it’d be a good time to put their equipment in order.”
Slats moved his head in tiny jerks, looking across the array of bronze and iron. “You had them busy on other duties before?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Froggie. “I did.”
“I have been talking to the Commander,” Slats said. He held up the little wand that he’d said could summon help. “Trying to talk with him, that is.”
“You have?” Froggie said. “Dis, if whoever’s behind Three-Spire gets wind of what we’ve found here, they’ll come for us sure. And I sure don’t believe the Commander’s going to keep anything private. We’re going to have to head back to Harbor at first light!”
“We can’t do that,” the administrator said. “Our orders are to remain here until recalled. In any case, I doubt that the Commander will even remember that we talked. He seemed disconnected. By the end of the conversation he was almost comatose.”
Froggie shook his head. “Slats,” he said, “I’m a big believer in following orders, at least when people are going to know if you don’t, but Three-Spire’s bound to have listened to everything you said to the Blue Boy. As soon as he gets a messenger out here, the guys with the axes are going to send the whole village at us. We can’t fight that many barbs, even if most of ’em are women.”
“If they have a dimensional portal,” Slats said, “surely they would have holographic communicators—”
He waggled his wand in the air again.