The Ringworld Throne

If I’m crazy, point it out!

They looked at her in a silence broken only by shrieking of ten thousand vampires.

“Now!” she bellowed, and her people began to run.

Louis could see three Sailing People peering over the Council House roof. They showed courage, but they weren’t seeing any more than Louis was. The window in the cliff had become no more than dark rock. The Hindmost’s spy device lay in darkness in the payload shell of a six-wheeled wagon.

The Hindmost said in Interspeak, “I still can hear them, Louis, and smell them.”

The dark cliff became a dark window. A Pierson’s puppeteer danced, and uncountable others wove a pattern behind him: a dark forest of one-eyed snakes.

Louis was amused. “Dancing in the dark?”

The Hindmost twirled. “A test of agility. Darkness was common enough, long, long ago. Not impossible that the dark might come to any of us.”

So: they tested each other for mating privileges, like the Fertility Board on Earth. The Hindmost was honing his skills. But he’d said—“You can hear whom?”

“I can hear Valavirgillin’s company. With the door in the payload bay closed, I can still resolve voices. They are organizing to defend the wagons. Now the wagons are in motion, with vampires all about. Would you hear?”

“In a minute. I wonder what our Ghoulish observers make of your dancing.”

“The small one shifts position constantly. The larger remains still. Would you capture him?”

“… No.”

“Touch your translator to the core of the webeye. I will transmit.”

Louis waded through shallow water to the cliff. It remained a fuzzy-edged doorway to Pierson’s puppeteers dancing in dusk. A black dot like a lumpy heart floated unsupported at nose level, and Louis pushed his translator against that.

He heard voices, human shading into animal, bass to tenor and higher, agony and rage and urgency. Once, a cry of surprise and pain, more yelling, then a solid thud as a body fell on the webeye itself. Once, he made out Valavirgillin’s voice bellowing orders as she never had in his presence. Otherwise it was all a confusion of screaming.

The vampire shrieking dwindled over several minutes. Then, jarring as hell, came a cool, musically persuasive voice that sounded not quite like speech. That stopped suddenly, followed by eerie quiet.

Vala turned them downstream because the upstream direction seethed with vampires returning from the hunt. She kept them moving for a tenthday after they were clear. Slick black heads popped into view on the river: the River People were keeping pace.

Cruiser One was still rolling when Beedj swung the payload bay doors open and rolled inside.

Vala waited.

Something heavy rolled out.

Paroom. They’d been all over him, tearing him to ribbons, while friends hacked at them from above and below. A vampire had slashed Perilack, too. Vala waited.

Beedj climbed up beside her. “Dead,” he said. “Perilack doesn’t look bad. I washed the scratches with fuel. Does that really do anything?”

Vala nodded, wondering if Grieving Tube and Harpster would be offended … would understand why Paroom’s body was better left for strangers than for his Night People friends. She said none of that to the Thurl’s heir. It was all his own decision.

A meadow stretched away from the river. It looked like good hunting. Valavirgillin kept them in a clump, all the several species, and made them wear towel masks. There were vampires about.

Vala had taken stacks of cloth from the dock warehouses. She gave Rooballabl and Fudghabladl a long sheet of gauzy stuff for netting fish. They were hugely successful, and now there was fish for any who could eat it.

The Grass Giants had found some acceptable river grass. There was prey about. Reds and Gleaners didn’t need to wait for fire. The Machine People had a firepot starting to boil, and roots and meat in it.

Her crew was being fed.

Valavirgillin looked her people over while she waited. Tegger looked much better with food in him. Forn and Barok were cooking di

Grieving Tube and Harpster were kneeling twenty manlengths away, and a good thing, because they were eating. The Ghouls had found a hominid of the Farming Folk, perhaps a vampire’s captive fallen on the trek to the Shadow Nest. They’d stopped short of actually dragging the carrion into camp.

Vampires still dotted the passes. The excitement around the Shadow Nest drew them. Eventually, Vala knew, she would have to get past that.

Gradually, perhaps only from hunger, Vala’s mood darkened. An antic whim set her walking toward the Ghouls.

Grieving Tube saw her coming. She came over to stand not too close. “You haven’t eaten yet,” she said.

“Soon.”

“Your mood will improve. We’ve escaped, Valavirgillin. We’re free, with a tale to tell that no hominid can match.”

“Grieving Tube, what have we accomplished here?”

“I don’t grasp your point.”

“We came. We found our way up. We used up most of Louis Wu’s magic cloth. We found our way down. We killed some vampires and drove the rest out into the rain. We’ve lost one cruiser, and Paroom, and what else can I brag about?”

“We rescued Foranayeedli. You loaded ten manweights of wonderfully preserved ancient cloth into your cruiser.”

Vala shrugged. Indeed, she’d reap a profit from what she’d collected from the docks, and not just the cloth. And Forn … yes.

The Ghoul woman dropped a stripped rib and walked closer. “Boss, we’ve ended the vampire infestation.”

“Oh, Grieving Tube. We drove them out. Now they’ll spread to every land around us. The vampire infestation is going to get worse.”

“They’ll be far fewer in a generation,” the Ghoul woman said placidly, “in forty to fifty falans. Brag now. Await vindication.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Valavirgillin, you’ve felt the pull of the vampire musk. No hominid can stand against it, not even a Red Herder. Does it not strike you that they also secrete that scent to lure a mate?”

“What?”

“Vampires secrete their musk when prey is about. When food is to be had, that is a time to breed. When they’ve found a cave for refuge, that too is a time to breed, and a cave concentrates the musk. It was their mating scent when their ancestors were like ours, and it is their mating scent now. But we’ve taken away their refuge and driven them into the rain, the same rain that hasn’t stopped since Louis Wu boiled a sea, Boss. The rain is washing off their mating scent.”

Valavirgillin thought it over until she believed it. Then she stood up and whooped. “They’ll stop breeding!”

Day was near its end. Before night the cruisers must be where vampires couldn’t reach them. Come morning she would siphon the fuel from Cruiser Two to move Cruiser One home.

She said, “And you, you’ve got the bronze web.”

“Somewhere beneath the Arch, Louis Wu can look and hear through that pattern. There is something we must show the wizard … if the wizard still lives and cares to look, if the web is still a window.”

“You’ll have to find your fuel somewhere else,” she told Grieving Tube.

The woman nodded placidly. “We’ll make our needs known. Night People will set fuel dumps all the way to the rim wall. I suppose Tegger and Warvia told you, they’ll travel with us.”

“Not a bad notion. There are Reds everywhere. They’ll find a home.”

“Yes.”

“How do you propose to buy a trading cruiser?”

She blinked. “Ah, the legendary greed of the Machine People. Valavirgillin, we need Cruiser Two to end a threat that endangers all who live beneath the Arch. You know enough to take my words seriously.”

“Seriously, yes, but moving your massive spying thing formed no part of our agreements.” Valavirgillin smiled, remembering the negotiations outside the Thurl’s wall. The effort with which she’d persuaded the Night People to join her assault on the Shadow Nest! She couldn’t have driven them away with a ca