The problem was, of course, the manshonyaggers that now surrounded the Eye.

According to the stories Ayril had collected, the manshonyaggers had colonised the area around the Eye of the Winds. What could they possibly want there? Mira wondered when she first heard this. The manshonyaggers were created for combat Outside. They could have made a great wedge of force that would break out of the besieged Pyramid, so why would they want to consolidate their own Inner Redoubt? There were of course plenty more stories addressing those questions, and all were incomplete and contradictory.

Reluctantly, knowing the danger, she sent Ayril out again to gather more information. Her next reports confirmed what Mira dreaded. They had indeed established themselves in significant numbers about the Eye and from their stronghold the war machines were making purgative expeditions, using the arteries as their main thoroughfares to reach the rest of the Redoubt. Their organisation somewhat akin to that of a hive, but unlike bees, they were conscious and intelligent entities, so they must have some definitely articulated goal. It appeared, as far as Mira could deduce, that they had nominated themselves as the censors of humanity, eliminating those who deviated from their ideal.

Ayril's reconnaissance was incomplete - else she would not have returned - and it was impossible to tell what was happening within the Eye, but Mira could make guesses from her gleanings. If they were acting as sentient bees in their social mode, then they were preparing some nest for their queen there. It was not a literal queen, as they were self-reproducing, it was not a political queen, because the insect queens were breeders, not rulers, so it had to be some other pattern that decribed their nature.

She ran over the facts in her mind again and again. They were waiting for the Watcher and they were preparing to meet it on their own terms - that seemed clear. Human beings, it seemed, were to have no part in their conclusion...unless Mira made herself their queen. And how might that be achieved? Battle was certainly doomed to be lost, but what other alternative was there? She considered raking over the dust and gravel of a Black Museum to find what weapons other than the old fighting machines might be there, but the nearest might be miles and hundreds of hostile levels higher, and there would be little chance of finding anything left now. The situation seemed hopeless.

Then another possibility came to her.

"I piloted one of these once," the man at the game board said in a dream that night. "I know their patterns, their weaknesses, where they are ordered. It is all quite simple, really."

"How?" Mira asked, seeing an opportunity. He told her.

The next diphaos, Mira stood in her armour before her army. She had no speech to make, only a few words. "It is time to face them," she said.

It happened soon enough.

They came across a flayed body suspended over the gate of the cordon hive, its gender unknowable and its skin stretched like the wings of a scarlet butterfly. Probably the victim of an image casting, its face had been obliterated. The machines were intelligent, there was no doubt about that - and that made them abominable. Their ministrations on the purity of the human form smacked of a vile artistry, as if some perverse genius had been at work meddling with their programming.

The stink was overpowering. Ayril gagged and put her hand over her face and others further away blanched.

"Even if a machine made this, a man made the pattern of the machine," observed Scribe. "In our minds we always had the seeds of abhumanity… perhaps the machines recognise this and that is why they pass such sentences. It is almost a tautology."

"Do you empathise with them?" Ayril snapped, her voice muffled but still cutting. "Would you agree with them?" It was not only the foul odour that made her eyes stream.

"My Lady, I am a Masquer. I must be able to adopt any mode but I still choose who I am."

"And what do you choose to be now?" she retorted.

Mira silenced them with a chopping gesture. There was movement in the shadows at the end of the tunnel. Wind whispered and there was a scrabbling sound. She felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. Was there an infrasonic component to the sound? Did the machine deliberately manipulate fear reflexes? Of course it did. Needles, guns and emotions were all weapons in its arsenal, why else would it erect such banners as the corpse hanging before them now?

She felt a vibration through her feet as a great mass began to move. The machine could have sent a horde of metal ants to infiltrate the chinks of their armour or it could have induced currents in the surrounding metal to burn them. Instead, it approached, and that could only be to present itself.

Suddenly a fanfare echoed down the passage and a hard violet light flared. Their visors filtered the extremes of light and they were able to make out the shape of the thing that crept toward them. It was, like most manshonyaggers, approximately in the form of a large black beetle with a heavy, sleek body supported between jointed legs and ornamented with the bosses and flanges of its various sensor and weapon systems. Multiple heads fanned out from its fore-portion and mobile clusters of lenses glinted like strange, elaborate crowns.

The machine stopped a few paces away. Whip-antennae uncoiled and feathery olfactory sensors licked the air. Mira stood her ground, hardly out of courage because there was now no point in flight. It was a colossal risk to even allow the machine to find her party and her only hope now was to play whatever game the thing intended and turn it to their own end. Her bowels tightened. She held up her diskos and let it roar and send out its own clean blue light. "Lordling!" she shouted, as if addressing a human. "Name yourself!"

The voice of the manshonyagger was not harsh, but mild and as polished as its own carapace. It used the reverberation of the passage to its own advantage to surround them with its sound. "We have no name and we possess all names," it said. "For we are the Final Child!"

That was a genuine surprise to Mira. Would she dispute it and bicker over titles? The machine was clearly insane and might kill her and her party in a fit of rage no matter how curious it might be. "Do you know who I am?" she asked instead, probing.

"We know your name, Mira. We read the emanations of your mind, we have tapped the conduits of the Pyramid and we have heard theme and variation...and we can see that your face is properly made as the true model. This interests us."

"Then why do you let me live, knowing that I have been called the Final Child?"

"We are not destroyers. We were made to preserve the Redoubt and this we do."

Mira pointed to the dripping trophy. "And that is not destruction?" she yelled.

"That is not you, that is mere flesh and not idea."

"They thought, they lived and they loved! That ‘mere flesh" made ideas!"

The machine waved a complicated effector in a parody of a human making a dismissive gesture. "The sea of darkness is risen. Thought must find a better ark."

"And that is you?"

"That is us. Our memory has space to hold you all." Points of light swept over her, she felt a prickling on her scalp and the electric sensation of more profound scanning. "You are our greatest prize, nexus-knot of all souls. Come within us and we will be the saviour of all humanity."

"You are inhuman!"

"We are human-made and therefore we are human - as are you. Come with us and let us read you and write yourself upon us as others have been written upon you."

Mira would have sworn, told the thing that humans also made faeces, and that was not the repository of her soul, but she remembered the tone of her conversations with Hinde and the manner of Pallin's writings. The machine was not about to use mere reactive brutality and it was not to be turned by defiance, but she could risk fencing with it some more perhaps and hope to turn its path that way. In any case she was not going to let it ‘read' their minds and indulge in its grisly art with their empty remains. "I do not recognize your legitimacy as inheritor," she said flatly.

"We are your children, your mothers and your ark by our fitness to be so."

"Fitness? Could you withstand the Watcher when it breaks inside?"

"The Watcher has no interest in such as us."

Mira pounced. "And what does that eloquent fact say, machine?"

"That it does not recognise us."

"So you are but a mirror that thinks it is alive!"

"We are alive."

"The Watcher knows, machine with no name. The Watcher knows what is human and you are not human, nor can you be."

"Then we will become."

"With me, you say."

"We must read you and we must write upon each other and complete ourselves."

"You plead with me nameless one, but I, Mira, refuse your offer!" She felt a hand tugging at her arm, as if she would be dragged away to turn and to run. She shook free and taunted the machine, unfastening her helm and plating to reveal slivers of her own palimpsest skin. "Why do you simply not take what you think is your right and necessity?"

More of the light points skipped and twitched over the lines of her tattoos. She fancied that she could read frustration in their movement. "Resistance will sour and corrupt the essence," it admitted. "We will win nothing."

Did she sense victory? "Ha, then you know what Basileos never knew, machine. Perhaps there is hope for you yet!"

"Basileos?"

Mira waved her hand. "No matter now." She took a step forward and reached out to touch the foremost head of the manshonyagger. There was a strange vibration from the machine, an oddly familiar intensity to the air. In her dreams of the ages before, this was the sensation that had preceded thunderstorms...and other appearances here in the Redoubt. "What is it that possesses you?" she asked. "What is the origin of your urge?"

"Desire."

"Not love? People spoke to me of love. Humans love. Do you want to be human? Can you desire to be able to desire truly by love?"

The machine did not move itself, but the black mask of its central face stirred as if there were watery currents within it. Mira watched, one half of her amazed, the other half experiencing a peculiar familiarity. Presently the eddying strengthened and a familiar visage emerged.

"Ah yes...and I think I know who you are, machine bearing this Face now. You are a mirror, aren't you? You are a mirror with two sides...and I think I know who Face is now too." She laughed. "The overture that lives for itself!" Mirth continued to bubble, driven in no small portion by hysterical relief. She shook and felt a chill sweat and realised that she was exhausted. "Your mouthpiece spoke true after all, you come for me rightly after all!"

Then she collapsed.