Dinner At Deviant's Palace

Chapter 1

Crouched way up at the top of the wall in the rusty bed of the Rocking Truck, Modesto tugged his jacket more tightly across his chest, pushed back his hat and squinted around at the city. At the moment there was no one in particular that it would be lucrative to watch for, but just to keep in practice the boy liked to climb up here and keep track of the comings and goings in general. Below him to his left was the South Gate area, not quite its usual crowded self because of the recent rain, and beyond that to the southeast—the direction that was nearly always downwind—he could see the ragged shacks and black mud lanes of Dogtown, canopied by the snarls of smoke rising from the eternal fires in its trash-filled trenches.

The boy clambered over the collapsed cab to sit on the hood and look north. The broken-backed truck, as immovable as the age-rounded concrete wall it straddled, didn't shift under him; nor had it ever moved in the memory of anyone now living.

The towers made ragged brushstrokes of black down the gray northern sky, and at the skeletal top of the Crocker Tower he could see bright orange pinpricks that he knew were torches; the night watch was coming on duty early, and Modesto knew that their various spyglasses would be turned to the east, watching for any sign of the army that was rumored to be approaching from San Berdoo. And though even Modesto couldn't see them from here, he knew that out beyond the north farms there were armed men on horseback patrolling the Golden State Freeway from the Berdoo Freeway in the north to the Pomona in the south.

Thirty feet below his perch he noticed a grotesque vehicle moving south down Fig Street toward him, and with a grin half-admiring and half-contemptuous he identified it as the carriage of Greg Rivas, the famous pelican gunner. Like most kids his age, Modesto considered gunning a slightly embarrassing historical curiosity, conjuring up implausible images of one's parents when they were young and foolish . . . . Modesto was far more interested in the more defined

and consistent rhythms of Scrap, and the new dances like Scrapping, Gimpscrew and the Bugwalk.

With a creaking of axles and an altered pace in the clopping of the horses' hooves, the vehicle turned west onto Woolshirt Boulevard, and Modesto knew Rivas was just arriving early for his nightly gig at Spink's.

Bored, the boy turned his attention back to the thrillingly ominous lights in the Crocker Tower.

The carriage was an old but painstakingly polished Chevrolet body mounted on a flat wooden wagon drawn by two horses, and though the late afternoon rain drabbed the colors and made the streamers droop, it was by far the grandest vehicle out on Woolshirt Boulevard. Old superstitions about rain being poisonous had kept the usual street crowd indoors today, though, and only two boys emerged from a recessed doorway and scampered up to cry, somewhat mechanically, «Rivas! Hooray, it's Gregorio Rivas!»

Rivas pushed aside the beaded curtain that hung in place of the long gone door, stepped out onto the flat surface of the wagon and, squinting in the light drizzle, braced himself there as his driver snapped the reins and drew the vehicle to a squeaking halt in front of the building that was their destination.

Like most of the structures that stood along the north to south midcity line, this one was a well-preserved shell of old concrete with neat sections of woodwork filling the gaps where plate glass had once fabulously stretched across yards and yards of space. The building was three stories high and, again typically for this area, the wall at the top, now decorated with a profusion of spikes and ornaments and sun-faded flags, was jaggedly uneven with an ancient fracture. Over the doorway strips of metal and colored glass had been nailed to spell out, in letters a foot tall, SPINKS.

«Here,» Rivas called to the boys, «never mind it today, no one's around. Anyway, I think I need a couple of new prompters—lately the goddamn parrots sound more enthusiastic than you guys.»

As if to illustrate his point, one of the parrots nesting in the top of the nearest palm tree called down, «Rivas! Rivas!»

«Hooray!» added another one from a tree farther up the street.

«Hear that?» Rivas demanded as he reached back inside the car for his hat and his vinyl pelican case. «I think it's because they work free, just for the art of it.» He put on his hat, glanced around below him for unpuddled pavement, spotted an area and leaped to it.

»We don't, though, man,» one of the boys pointed out cheerily. Both of them held out their palms.

«Mercenary little mules,» Rivas muttered. He dug a couple of small white cards out of his vest pocket and gave one to each boy. «There's a jigger apiece, and you should be ashamed to take so much.»

«You bet we are, man.» The pair dashed back to their sheltered doorway.

Rivas paused under the restaurant's awning to set his antique hat at the proper angle and comb his fingers through his dark Van Dyke beard. Finally he pushed open the swinging doors and strode inside.

A moment later, though, he was pursing his lips irritably, for his careful entrance had been wasted—the chandeliers, which had been lowered after the lunch crowd, still sat on the floor unlit, and the room was so dim that if it weren't for the faint smells of stale beer and old grease the place could have been mistaken for a between-services church.

«Damn it,» he yelped, stubbing his toe against the edge of one of the chandeliers and awkwardly hopping over it, «where are you, Mojo? How come these things aren't lit yet?»

«It's early yet, Greg,» came a voice from the kitchen. «I'll get to 'em.»

Rivas picked his way around the wooden wheels of the chandeliers to the bar, lifted the hinged section and stepped behind it. By touch he found the stack of clean glasses, and then the big room echoed with the clicking of the pump as he impatiently worked the handle to prime the beer tap.

«There's a bottle of Currency Barrows open,» called Mojo from the kitchen.

The edges of Rivas's mouth curled down in a sort of inverted smile. «The beer's fine,» he said in a carefully casual voice. He opened the tap and let the stream of cool beer begin filling his glass.

Old Mojo lurched ponderously out of the kitchen carrying a flickering oil lamp, and he crouched over the nearest chandelier to light the candles on it. «That's right,» he said absently, «you're not crazy about the Barrows stuff, are you?»

«I'm a beer and whiskey man,» said Rivas lightly. «Fandango or the twins here yet?»

«Yeah, Fandango is—them's some of his drums on the stage there. He went for the rest.»

There was a shuffling and banging from the direction of the back hall just then, and a voice called, «That you, Greg? Help me with these, will you?»

«Whatever I can carry in one hand, Tommy.» Tucking the pelican case under his arm and sipping the beer as he went, Rivas groped his way to the back hall, relieved the puffing Fandango of one of his smaller drums and led the way back across the already somewhat brighter room to the stage.

Fandango put his drums down carefully and wiped sweat from his chubby face. «Whew ,» he said, leaning against the raised stage. «Spink was askin' me this morning when you'd be in,» he remarked in a confiding tone.

Rivas put down the drum he'd been carrying and then glanced at the younger man. «So?»

«Well, I don't know, but he seemed mad.»

«How could you tell? He probably sleeps with that smile on.»

«He said he wanted to talk to you about something.» Fandango avoided looking at Rivas by concentrating on tightening a drumhead screw. «Uh, maybe about that girl.»

«Who, that Hammond creature?» Rivas frowned, uneasily aware that Fandango had been seeing the girl first, and had introduced her to him. «Listen, she turned out to be crazy.»

«They all do, to hear you tell it.»

«Well, most of them are crazy,» Rivas snapped as he climbed up onto the stage. «I can't help that.» He untied the knots that held the vinyl case closed, flipped up the lid and lifted the instrument out.

Though not even quite two feet long, it was said to be the finest in Ellay, its neck carved of mahogany with copper wire frets and polished copper pennies for pegs, and its body a smoothly laminated half sphere of various woods, waxed and polished to a glassy sheen. The horsehair bow was clipped to the back of the neck, and in profile the instrument did look something like a pelican's head, the body being the jowly pouch and the long neck the beak.

He put the case on the stage floor, sat down on a stool with the pelican across his knees, and plucked out a quick, nearly atonal gun riff; then he swung it up to his shoulder, undipped the bow and skated it experimentally across the strings, producing a melancholy chord.

Satisfied, he laid the instrument back in the open case and put the bow down beside it. He picked up his glass of beer. «Anyway,» he said after taking a sip, «Spink wouldn't be bothered about any such crap. Hell, this is the eleventh year of the Seventh Ace—all that chastity and everlasting fidelity stuff left by the Dogtown gate before you and I were born.»

As was very often the case, especially lately, Fandango couldn't tell whether Rivas was being sincere or bitterly ironic, so he let the subject drop and set about arranging the drum stands around his own stool.

«Say,» he ventured quietly a few minutes later, «who's the guy by the window?»

Mojo had got several of the chandeliers lit by now, and the kitchen corner of the room glowed brightly enough to show a heavy-set man sitting at a table just to the right of the streetside window. Rivas stared at him for a moment, unable to tell in that uncertain light whether or not the man was looking his way, or was even awake; then he shrugged. «Jaybush knows.»

«And he ain't tellin',» Fandango agreed. «Say, is it still gonna be mostly gunning tonight? I've been practicing some newer songs, some of these bugwalk numbers, and it seems to me—»

Rivas drained his beer. «Catch!» he called, and tossed the glass in a high, spinning parabola toward Mojo, who looked up wearily, clanged his lamp down and caught the glass before it could hit the floor.

«Goddammit, Greg . . .» he muttered, getting to his feet and shambling toward the bar.

«Yeah,» said Rivas, frowning slightly as he watched the old man's progress, «it'll be gunning. They don't pay to hear Rivas doing bugwalk.» No, he thought. For that you want those savage kids coming out of the southeast end of town—Dogtown—the kids who rely on the ferocity of their voices and ragtag instruments to make up for their lack of musical skill. «Why?»

«I still can't get the hang of the beat on it,» Fandango complained. «If you'd just let me bang away in the same time as what you're playin', or even the time of what you're singin', I could handle it, but this third and fourth layer stuff, all at different paces but having to touch the peaks and bottoms together . . .»

«We're going to gun,» Rivas said firmly.

After a few moments, «Are you gonna do 'Drinking Alone'?» Fandango persisted. «It's the hardest.»

«Christ, Tommy,» said Rivas impatiently, «this is your job. Yes, I'm going to do that song. If you don't want to learn the whole trade, you may as well grow a beard and beg out on the street.»

«Well, sure, Greg, except—»

«Think I moved back here from Venice working like that?»

«No, Greg.»

«Damn right. Maybe we'd better go through it now, before the show, to give you some practice.»

Before Fandango could reply, a chair rutched back in the corner and the man at the windowside table stood up and spoke. «Mr. Rivas, I'd like to have a word with you before you start.»

Rivas cocked a wary eyebrow at the man. What's this, he wondered, a challenge over some despoiled daughter or wife? Or just a bid for a private party performance? The man was dressed respectably, at least, in a conservative off white flax shirt and trousers and a dark leather Sam Brown belt—in contrast to Rivas's own flamboyant red plastic vest and wide-brimmed hat. «Sure,» said Rivas after a pause. «Shoot.»

«It's a personal matter. Could we discuss it at the table here, perhaps over a drink?»

». . . Okay.»

Mojo bumbled up to the stage with the refilled beer glass just as the pelicanist hopped down. «Thanks,» said Rivas, taking it from him. «And a glass of whatever for the citizen yonder.»

Mojo turned toward the stranger, who said, «A shot of that Currency Barrows, please.»

Rivas walked over to the man's table, holding the beer in his right hand so that his knife hand was free, and when he got there he hooked back a chair for himself with his foot.

Mojo arrived with the glass of brandy a moment later, set it down in front of the stranger, then stepped back and cleared his throat.

«On my tab, Mojo,» said Rivas without taking his eyes off the stranger—who, he noticed, had no hair on his head at all, not even eyebrows or lashes.

«No, I insist,» the man said, «and Mr. Rivas's beer, too. How much?»

«Uh . . . one ha'pint.»

The stranger took a bugshell moneycase from his belt pouch, snapped it open and handed Mojo a one-fifth card. Mojo took it and lurched away.

«Never mind the change,» the man called after him.

Mojo slowed to a more comfortable pace. «Thank you, man,» he called back in a voice from which he was unable to keep a note of pleased surprise.

«Well?» said Rivas.

The man gave Rivas a distinctly frosty smile. «My name is Joe Montecruz. I'd like to hire your services.»

Though still a little puzzled, Rivas relaxed and sat back. «Well, sure. You want a backup band too, or just me? It's twenty fifths a night for me, and for this band it's seven fifths ha'pint extra. If I put together a better group it'd be more, of course. Now I'm booked solid until—»

Montecruz raised a hand. «No no. You misunderstand. It's not in your musical capacity that I wish to hire you.»

«Oh.» I should have guessed, he told himself. «What, then?» he asked dutifully, just to be certain he was right.

«I want you to perform a redemption.»

He'd been right. «Sorry. I'm retired.»

Montecruz's not quite friendly smile didn't falter. «I think I can make an offer that will bring you out of retirement.»

Rivas shook his head. «Look, I wasn't being coy. I've quit. I make plenty now with the music—and anyway, I'm thirty-one years old. I don't have that kind of reflexes and stamina anymore.» Or luck, either, he thought sourly. «And it's been three years since my last one—the country will have changed. It always does.»

Montecruz leaned forward. «Rivas,» he said quietly, «I'm talking five thousand Ellay fifths .»

Rivas raised his eyebrows in genuine respect. «That's handsome,» he admitted. «There can't be fifty people in Ellay that can even hope to borrow that much.» He took a long sip of beer. «But I'm retired. I just don't want to risk my life and sanity for strangers anymore. There's other redeemers around, though. Hell, five thousand would buy Frake MeAn ten times over.»

«Is McAn as good as you?»

«Infinitely better, since I don't do it at all now. Thanks for the beer—and now I really should try to show that damn fool drummer what I want.» He got to his feet.

«Wait a minute,» Montecruz said quickly, holding up a pudgy hand and beginning to look a little less confident. «You're the only guy that ever performed eight redemptions—»

«Six. Two got to the Holy City before I could catch them.»

«Okay, six. You've still got the record. The girl's father wants the best, and listen, this won't be as difficult as the others. All you've got to do is locate her, her family will do the kidnap and breaking—»

«Her family can do the whole thing,» said Rivas, straightening up. «I'm not kidding about being out of that game. Hire me as a pelicanist or songwriter anytime—they're my only occupations nowadays.»

He turned and started back toward the stage, but Montecruz, agile for a fat man, scrambled around the table and caught Rivas's elbow when he'd taken only four paces.

«We'll go ten thousand! » the man hissed.

Exasperated, Rivas turned back to face him. «I told you my answer.»

For a couple of seconds Montecruz's face was expressionless, and looked oddly childlike; then, «To sing? » he demanded, his voice shrill with incredulous scorn. «You'd stop saving lives—souls!—to sit in a bar and sing? Oh, but you only did it while you needed the money, isn't that right? And now that you can fiddle for it, everybody else can . . . can be gutted and skinned, and it won't disturb your self-satisfaction even as much as a wrinkle in your precious costume would, huh? It must be nice to be the only person worthy of your concern.»

A crooked, unmirthful grin had appeared on the pelicanist's face during Montecruz's speech, and when the man had finished, Rivas said, «Why don't you go home and just deal with things you know something about, sport.»

He'd spoken quietly, but Mojo and Fandango heard him and looked up in alarm.

The insult, especially deadly in view of Montecruz's hairlessness, hung in the air for several seconds and hardened jaw muscles made Montecruz's suddenly pale face seem even wider.

Rivas yanked his arm free and took two steps back, the skin over his cheekbones taut and his left hand near his knife sheath.

Finally Montecruz, whose hand had darted for his own knife, took a deep breath, let it out, and then whispered, «I don't take that, Rivas—I'll just hold it for a while.» He turned and stalked out of the building.

When the swinging doors had creakily flapped shut after him Rivas looked at the ceiling and exhaled a long, descending whistle. That, he told himself, was loss of control. Better slow down on the beer, old buddy—you've had enough already, at home and here, to keep you oiled for the rest of the evening.

«God, Greg,» said Fandango in some awe as the peli-canist walked back to the stage, «you were mad, weren't you? I just realized, I never seen you mad before—just, you know, grouchy about something not being done right. What'd he say to make you call him out that way? That stuff about singing, and your clothes? And whose life did he want you to—»

«Oh, shut up. Tommy,» said Rivas wearily. Mojo had got the bright lamps lit at the front of the stage, so he put on a look of only mild annoyance as he climbed back up onto it. «He didn't make me mad, all right? I'm tired of everybody thinking they've got a right to my time, that's all. And I didn't mean to call him out.» He picked up his instrument and the horsehair bow, and was embarrassed to notice that his hands were trembling; he lowered them quickly and shot a freezing look at the drummer, but Fandango was shaking his head and tapping out a quick burst on one of his drums and clearly hadn't noticed.

«But you called him a sport ,» the drummer said. «I mean, sure, you call me that when I screw up sometimes, but that guy was one—I could see from here he was a baldy.»

«I'm going to think you're a mental one if you still can't grasp the tempo of this,» said Rivas. «From the beginning now, and make it rattle.» He tapped his foot three times while Fandango frowned attentively, then began playing.

They had to stop a few minutes later when Mojo began turning the noisy, ratcheted wall cranks that hoisted the lit chandeliers up to the ceiling, and in spite of his earlier resolve Rivas put down his pelican and went to the bar for another refill. He came back and perched cross-legged on his stool and then just stared absently into the still dim corners of the ceiling, where long, dusty festoons of paper dolls were draped like huge cobwebs around three of the walls.

Only a few customers had wandered in and sat down by the time Mojo finished his tour of the wall cranks, and Fandango glanced inquiringly toward Rivas, but the pelicanist seemed to have forgotten his dissatisfaction with the drummer's playing. More people drifted in, and the chandeliers slowly stopped swinging as the ripple of conversation grew louder and the laughter and clinking of glasses more frequent; but Rivas remained oblivious, and when the pair of typically mute Chino twins who were the steel guitarist and chimes-banger arrived and climbed onto the stage, Rivas's hand-jive greeting was as unconsciously automatic as the twitch of a horse's flank when a fly lands on it.

Finally Fandango had to nudge him and hiss, «Heads up, Greg!» when the owner appeared and began threading his way around the tables toward the stage.

Steve Spink and Rivas were of about the same age and build—thirty or so and rangy but tending a little toward plumpness over the belt—but Spink with his ready smile and undisciplined tumble of blond hair fairly radiated boyish cheer, while Rivas's dark hair and beard and deeply lined cheeks gave his face in repose an almost theatrical look of disdain.

Spink leaned toward the stage as Rivas, looking only startled at the moment, hastily hopped off his stool and picked up his instrument and blinked around in some surprise at the filled room.

«You okay, Rivas?» Spink asked pleasantly.

«Uh, what?» Rivas stepped to the edge of the stage, inadvertently kicking over his forgotten beer glass. The glass broke, and beer spattered Spink's expensive leather coat.

«Damn it, I asked if you were all right. You don't act like you are. Can you still perform?»

Rivas scowled and straightened to his full height. «Of course I can perform! What do you mean still? My God, just because I kick over one cheap beer glass—»

«Since when is glass cheap? There was an old guy in here at lunch talking to me. Said you were a Jaybird once. Any truth to that?»

«Yes,» Rivas said haughtily. «I don't make any secret of it. I've been a lot of things in my life.»

«You talk about all the other things, though. Did you take the sacrament very often?»

For the second time that evening Rivas felt real anger kindle in him. «Just what are you trying to say, Steve?»

Spink let his habitual eye-narrowing smile relax into a frown. «I'm sorry, Greg. But you can understand my concern, can't you? I can't have any of the people I rely on going birdy.»

«Start worrying about it when I can't fill your damn place to overflowing for you anymore.»

«You're right, Greg. Sorry. I shouldn't have listened to the old guy.» He turned to the audience, and Rivas glimpsed the smile flashing back on. «Ladies and gentlemen,» Spink said loudly, «tonight once again we're privileged to have with us Gregorio Rivas, of Venice.»

The applause came right on cue and was satisfactory in volume and duration, and Rivas grinned as arrogantly as ever as he bowed in acknowledgement—but under it he was uneasy. How would the applause sound, he wondered, if I didn't have a few paid prompters in the crowd to lead it? And-how much longer can the dangerous glamor of Venice plausibly cling to me? I've been out of Venice for five years, after all, and while it's true that Steve's standard intro still gets raised eyebrows and shocked whispers from strangers, old Mojo the other day was actually surprised when I mentioned having worked at the Bom Sheltr Bar in Venice—he said he thought that story was just flash for the tourists, like the fake hooter skulls on spikes on the roof.

As the clapping and whistling was tapering off, Rivas turned to Fandango and the twins and impulsively hand-jived the signal for «Everybody Wants to Smoke My Comoy,» his trademark song, which he usually saved for reviving an apathetic audience. Fandango hammered out the staccato opening of the song and the crowd reacted with unmistakably genuine enthusiasm, and for the next few minutes Rivas forgot his doubts and let his singing and playing absorb him totally.

During a lengthy alternation between the steel guitarist and the drummer—a sequence Rivas knew they had no trouble with—he took the opportunity to scan the audience—a little nervously, for he was afraid the Hammond girl might have shown up to make a scene. Spink might have liked it, as being evidence of what a genuine Venetian rake-hell the pelicanist was, but Rivas dreaded such encounters, inevitable though they seemed to be. He peered at each face that he could make out by the illumination of the chandeliers and the tabletop candles, and was relieved not to see her.

And she'd be sure to sit where I would see her, he thought with a slightly drunken shiver. Damn her anyway. Why can't a girl grasp the fact that a breakup can't look tragic to the one initiating it? It can only seem tragic to the one being ditched; to the one doing the ditching it's . . . fresh air, a load off the shoulders, a spring in the step and a whistle on the lips—the very opposite of tragic.

And hell, he thought, it's not as if I haven't drawn that hand as well as dealt it; only once, granted, but I had naively invested so much that time—much more than this Hammond creature ever could have—that I carry the loss with me still, as helplessly as I carry my skeleton, and like the old-time stainless steel it doesn't rust away with time into camouflage colors, but is always as bright as new, and mercilessly reflective.

Rivas turned to the chimes-banger and hand-jived, Remind me later —stainless steel —rust —camouflage colors. The man nodded.

Yes, thought Rivas with some satisfaction, a nice image. Ought to fit well into a song, with some dramatic way of having lost the girl . . . death, maybe . . . suicide even, sure . . .

. . . Anything but the way I actually did lose Urania . . . .

He shied away from the memory of himself at the age of eighteen, crouched behind a bush, in the ruins of a rented suit that stank of brandy and vomit, and, to his everlasting horror, barking like a dog.

Once or twice in the years since, during unusually objective moods, it had occurred to him that he might someday find the memory funny. It had certainly not happened yet.

In any case he was glad the Hammond girl seemed willing to disappear painlessly. He'd found her interesting for a while, but she was no Urania. None of them ever were.

It was nearly time for the pelican to re-enter, and he had just gripped the neck and poised the bow over the taut strings when he noticed at the bar a well-dressed old man who was watching him; and his belly went cold several seconds before he even consciously realized who it was, and he missed his cue.

The steel guitarist looked up in mild surprise and without a falter smoothly began the phrase again.

He had to begin it one more time, though, and let the more attentive members of the audience catch on that something was wrong, for Rivas had now remembered who the old man was and was staring at him with astonishment and hatred and, even after more than a decade, a bit of fear.

«Greg!» whispered Fandango urgently. «Hop aboard!»

Rivas blinked, returned some of his attention to the music, and then at the correct moment slashed the bow across the strings, and the song continued as usual.

He signaled to the other musicians to drop the time-consuming flourishes from the end of the song this time, and, as Fandango obediently rattled out a quick conclusion phrase, Rivas, much soberer now than he'd been a minute ago, lowered his instrument and stepped to the front of the stage.

«We'll be taking a short break now,» he said curtly, and leaving the pelican beside his stool, he hopped down and strode to the bar—and he was able to do it fairly quickly, for even the bleariest of the drinkers seemed to sense a dangerous tautness in him, and pulled in their legs and scooted their chairs closer to the tables to get out of his way.

By the time he stopped in front of the old man his shock had receded enough for him to have deduced what must have happened to bring the man here.

«There's a private room off the kitchen,» Rivas said to him in a voice from which conflicting emotions had leached all inflection. «Wait till we get in there to tell me about it. Whiskey,» he added, more loudly, to Mojo. «Double, with a chaser, now.»

Mojo provided the two filled glasses quickly, and Rivas picked them up and led the old man away from the bar to a door in a shadowed comer.

«Go fetch us a lamp from somewhere,» the pelicanist snapped at the old man as he held both glasses in one hand to open the door with the other. «Hurry now—chop chop!»

The old man's face had been pinched into the expression of someone who has learned that his dinner will consist of the stable boys' leftovers, and the change it underwent now was as though he had been told that he'd have to express gratitude for it too; but he silently did as he was told and went back to get a lamp from the corner of the bar.

Rivas stood by the door and shut it behind them when the old man had returned with the lamp and carried it into the little room. All but filling the chamber was a plastic table with half a dozen chairs around it, and Rivas sat down in one of the chairs and set his drinks in front of himself.

«You should have told Spink who you were this afternoon,» he said. «He'd have been impressed to meet the man who distills Ellay's money.»

The lamp clanked down onto the table and the agitated flame made the two men's shadows fragment and then reform on the wooden walls. «It would do neither of us any good,» came the rasped reply, «to let people know that Irwin Barrows has business with Gregorio Rivas.»

Rivas took a gulp of the whiskey and chased it with a long draught of the beer. «Right,» he said coldly, «in fact why let even Rivas himself know, eh? Who was your touchy negotiator this evening? Some jumped-up vineyard foreman? He didn't handle the approach in a terribly businesslike way—almost wound up challenging me to a duel.»

Irwin Barrows stared at him speculatively. «I considered not telling you this,» he said finally, «but I will, because I don't think it will alter your decision. Montecruz can be excused, perhaps, for showing some heat—you see, he's her fiancй. They're to be—they were to be—married next month.»

Rivas was surprised by the gust of unhappiness that battered at his control—and even shook it, for he could feel the color draining from his rigidly expressionless face– and he realized wearily that the grief he'd been tending like a garden for thirteen years had gradually become domesticated, ceased to be the wild, naturally occurring sort. And then a moment later he was disgusted with himself for having such an obsessive focus on the feelings of Gregorio Rivas. My God, he told himself, that Montecruz son-of-a-bitch was right: for you, everything exists only to the extent that it pleases or displeases your favorite person—you.

Still, I won't fetch her back for him.

He hastily downed the remainder of the whiskey, but instead of the obscuring fog he'd hoped for, it brought an unwelcome clarity to his thoughts; and he knew, despairingly, that he couldn't let the Jaybirds have her.

If only I didn't know, he thought, if I hadn't been one myself for almost three years, I could probably turn him down. If I hadn't seen for myself Jaybush's methodical disassembly of human minds, his consumption of souls as if they were firewood, I could probably spit in Barrow's face this minute and stalk out of here in a grand gesture of rejection. You exiled me from her thirteen years ago —now I exile you from her. How do you like it? Yes, to rub his hitherto celestially superior nose in it . . . to send his smug complacency out the Dogtown gate . . . to let him beg me for her, and be contemptuously dismissed . . .

If only I didn't know!

But when he replayed that last thought and considered the several things it indicated about himself, he had to suppress a shudder, for it had momentarily sickened him simply to be Gregorio Rivas.

Finally he looked up. «You're right,» he said, wishing his voice hadn't hoarsened for the occasion. «It doesn't alter my decision. I'll do it.»

Barrows inclined his head. «Thank you.»

«So when did they get her?»

«Last night, late. She was at a party north of here, at Third and Fig, and somehow she wound up alone out front, and a gang of them started talking to her—I guess you should know their stinking arguments and tricks as well as anyone—and when her lazy and now unemployed bodyguard finally caught up with her, it was just in time to see Urania climbing into the back of a Jaybird wagon as the horses were being whipped up.»

«It took off in what direction?»

«East on Third.»

«One wagon alone?»

«That's what the bodyguard said.»

Rivas sat back and drummed his fingers on the table and his eyes lost their sharp focus as, for the first time in three years, he began planning one more redemption. «You should have come to me right away,» he said, «and not wasted time trying to undermine my job here and sending that clown in here this evening. Still, it's a good sign that it was a single eastbound wagon; that implies the shepherd wanted to recruit at least another one or two people before returning to his caravan camp. They might still be in the area, camped in one of the neglected districts outside the wall.»

«Can you find out tonight?»

Rivas smiled at the naive question. «No way. You don't just ask the nearest Jaybird where one of their wagons went. And even if they are right outside—even if there were a full moon out tonight, instead of this rainy overcast—do you know how many square miles of ruins there are out there?»

«Tomorrow morning, then. Now as Montecruz evidently started to explain to you, all you'll have to do is—»

«—Locate her. Yeah, he did say that, but that's not how it's going to be. I'll do the kidnap and breaking too.»

Barrow's eyes narrowed and his face assumed the stony cast Rivas remembered so well. «No,» he said firmly. «That is simply but of the question.»

Rivas pushed his chair back and stood up. «Frake MeAn lives over Mister Lou's on Sandoval Street. Don't tell him I sent you—it'll only prejudice him against you. And don't waste time,» he added, poking a finger at Barrows. «Some of those recruiting caravans go directly to the Holy City.» He picked up his beer glass and reached for the door latch.

Barrows raised a frail hand. «All right,» he said tiredly, «wait, sit down, you can have it. The whole thing, like you say.»

Rivas opened the door and leaned out. «Mojo!» he called. «Another beer here!» He closed it and resumed his seat. «Then I guess we've got a deal, Barrows.» Unconsciously he ran his fingers through his hair, disarranging it. «Ten thousand fifths of your Currency brandy; a bank draft for five thousand now, and another of the same when and if I can bring Urania back inside the Ellay walls.»

«You misunderstood. Five thousand is the total price.»

«Montecruz went up to ten.»

«Montecruz must have got carried away in his anxiety. I think that's understandable. But there's no—»

«That's something you can take up with him later,» Rivas said. «I'm taking the offer that was made to me.»

«The price I'm offering,» said Barrows angrily, «is still much more than you've ever been paid before.»

The door was pulled open from the outside and Mojo hobbled in, set the fresh beer on the table, took the old glasses and exited.

«Evidently she's worth five to you,» Rivas remarked matter-of-factly, «but not quite ten. Did you catch McAn's address? Over Mister Lou's on—»

Barrows was staring at him with loathing. «This is interesting,» he interrupted in a tight voice. «I had thought that extended use of the Jaybird sacrament always simply eroded the intelligence of the communicant, but I see it can do far worse than that—I see it can destroy the person's empathy, his very humanity, leaving just a . . . sort of shrewd, cunning insect.»

Rivas knew that anger was what Barrows wanted, so he leaned back and laughed. «Not bad, Barrows! I like it, write it down so I can use it in a song sometime.» He leaned forward and let his smile unkink. «And I hope you realize that a 'shrewd, cunning insect,' as you so diplomatically put it, is exactly what you need right now. Yes, I was a Jaybird for nearly three years after that night you drove me off the Barrows estate, and I have taken their devastating sacrament a number of times—as Urania is probably doing at this very moment, quite a thought, hmm?—though I pretty quick figured ways to blunt its effects, make my mind inaccessible to it. But that's why I'm the only guy who's been any kind of successful at prying people out of Jaybush's hands . . . or off his dinner plate, let's say; I'm sure you like that better, you being such a fan of colorful metaphors, right?»

The door was pulled open again, but this time it was the furiously grinning Steve Spink that leaned in. «You gonna get back out here, Greg? People are beginning to leave, and I remember what you said about always filling the place to overflowing.»

Rivas had a quick, involuntary vision of himself as he'd probably be if he lost this job and blew the Barrows redemption deal—a no longer young man fiddling for jiggers on a Dogtown comer, his beard thick and bushy and no longer a daring, carefully trimmed symbol of straddling the line dividing the upper classes from the lower—but he took a leisurely sip of the beer and managed to sound unconcerned when he said, «I'll be back up there in a minute, Steve. They aren't going to forget who I am between now and then.»

«Hope you're sure of that, Greg,» Spink said with a couple of extra teeth showing in his grin. Then he noticed Rivas's companion. «Say, that's the old guy who was—»

«I know, Steve. One more minute.»

The door closed again, muting the crowd sounds, and Rivas turned to Barrows with raised eyebrows. «Well?»

«Okay,» the old man said quietly. «Ten. Five now and five when you bring her back.»

«Done. See me after the show tonight to set up the details.»

Barrows nodded, got to his feet and edged around the table to the door, but paused. «Oh, by the way,» he said uncertainly.

Rivas looked up, clearly impatient.

«Uh, there's something that's been . . .puzzling me for thirteen years. Maybe I shouldn't ask.»

Rivas was afraid he knew what was coming, but he said, «Yes?» casually.

«Why—excuse me, I don't by any means insist on an answer—but on that night I had you driven off, why were you behind those bushes on your hands and knees, throwing up and . . . barking?»

Rivas was humiliated to realize that his face was turning red. Why, he thought, can't he and I forget that damned incident? «You've been wondering about that for thirteen years?» he asked.

«Yes.»

Rivas shook his head and waved at the door. «Keep on wondering.»

* * *

After Barrows had left, Rivas sat back and tilted up his glass again, and then, gingerly, he gave in and allowed himself to remember that disastrous night—the first and last time he'd ever tasted the Currency brandy.

It had been in the fall of—Rivas counted the years on his fingers—the sixth year of the Sixth Ace, and Urania Barrows had decided to invite Gregorio, her fieldboy lover, to her gala seventeenth birthday party. Though only the son of one of the tenant farmers, the eighteen-year-old Gregorio had managed to save some money—a fifth and some change, big money to a field hand—and on the day of the party he spent it all on renting a suit and getting a haircut and a presumptuously aristocratic shave. And he went to the party, and in spite of being terribly nervous in the sophisticated company, he had made a good impression . . . until the brandy was served.

Young Gregorio had been drinking wine since childhood, but distilled spirits were new to him, and he didn't know that one was supposed to drink them more slowly. He eventually realized that he was foolishly drunk and embarrassing Urania, so he left the party . . . and as soon as he was out in the fresh air, it occurred to him that he was sick.

Not wanting to be seen vomiting, he'd reeled off the path into a tiny clearing behind some bushes and then, on his hands and knees, begun the lengthy process of expelling the brandy from his stomach.

And at one point, when he'd paused for breath, he heard a lady on the path asking someone about the peculiar noises coming from behind the bushes. A man's voice replied that it sounded like a dog.

Rivas shuddered now, and drained his beer. He remembered that he had desperately wanted the people to forget about the noises and go away, and somehow he'd concluded that the best way to accomplish that would be to convince them that it was indeed only a dog, and not anything that needed investigating^ So he'd begun . . . barking.

He stood up now and opened the door, but he was unable to avoid remembering the rest of it, his last conscious moments of that disastrous evening . . . when he'd finally opened his eyes and seen Irwin Barrows's boots six inches from his face.

He left the little room, swinging the door shut behind him, and as he reeled back toward the stage—the alcohol had caught up with him again—his eyes only half saw the dim bar and the stage ahead and the uneasy faces watching him; overlaid on that scene like a second transparency he was seeing again the One-a-One Freeway, seeming because of the thick fog to be a solitary track across the chilly sky, down which he'd fled on foot on that awful dawn thirteen years ago. He'd been shivering with cold and dizzily sick from a concussion as well as a hangover, for the outraged Irwin Barrows had given him a solid kick in the head before dragging him out from behind the bushes and ordering the kitchen crew to carry him away and dump him somewhere outside the Barrows land boundary.

He'd walked all that day, and as the sun rose and gradually scattered the fog, he'd seen for the first time the weathered and vine-hung ruins of big old Ellay, noisy now only with the chatter of parrots and monkeys. Decrepitude lent the still imposing building shells an air of tragic grandeur that they couldn't have had in life, and the sheer number of them—they stretched like ranks of uncared-for tombstones to the horizon—awed the young Gregorio; several times his curiosity had outweighed his sickness and haste and numb sense of loss, and he'd gone exploring through old rooms and up and down alarming, rubble-strewn stairways. By the time he finally sighted the high west wall of Ellay, only its top trim of crenelations was still lit by the low red sun. The summer-shrunken river beyond the city was invisible in the darkness, and fear of hooters and hemogoblins made him ignore his headache and cover the last couple of miles at a run.

That had been the first night he'd ever spent out of his father's house, and, after a couple of hours of unhappy wandering through the streets, he'd spent it in a corner of a shed in Dogtown. He hadn't been the only vagrant to seek shelter there, and he was awakened several times by the abrupt awareness of, and then the weary effort of refusing, the affectionate attentions of one or another of his shedmates. One young man, offended at having been rebuffed, had asked Gregorio if he'd care to leave the city right at that minute by the Dogtown gate. Rivas had politely refused . . . and been very glad of his refusal when he learned, years later, that there was no such gate, and that the phrase «leave by the Dogtown gate» meant to disappear, figuratively or literally, into one of Dogtown's ubiquitous, feculent trash trenches.

The next morning, stunned by hunger and exhaustion, he'd set out walking, and in the South Gate area by Sandoval Street he'd met the group of the zealots popularly known as Jaybirds . . . the wonderfully concerned, shoulder-patting, sympathetically smiling Jaybirds.

Steve was right, he thought uneasily when he stepped back up onto the stage and surveyed the crowd—quite a few people have left. How long was I in that room talking to Barrows? It'd probably be an error to ask, admit I don't know. Goddamn whiskey. No more beer or anything for you tonight, man!

He started to signal for «Everybody Wants to Smoke My Comoy,» and then remembered that he'd already used it and signaled instead for «Drinking Alone.»

Fandango sighed audibly as he started the song. Oh, look on the bright side, Tommy, Rivas thought—the next main attraction performer they get in here will probably want to do nothing but Scrap and Bugwalk.

Chapter 2

Somehow the clear blue sky visible through the unglassed windows only made the interior of the Toothtalker's room look shabbier. The Toothtalker herself, it occurred to Rivas, looked like just one more piece of faintly morbid antique trash to avoid tripping over. The thought made him smile in spite of his headache. Yes, he thought, among all these pictures and specimen jars and rotted books and bits of incomprehensible old-time machinery, she looks like a desiccated old mummy. The lower jaw, perhaps due to some error in taxidermic technique, had gradually pulled away from the face as the unwholesome memento dried out, finally leaving the effigy frozen forever in a stressful but inaudible scream.

A mummy which, he added as once again she treated her guests to some of the eerie low gargling she was so good at, has become inhabited by baritone mice. In spite of being irritable and grainy-eyed from a nearly sleepless night, Rivas had to strangle a chuckle. The effort made his headache worse.

He glanced at the chair beside him and saw that Irwin Barrows was sitting hunched forward, anxiously watching the motionless, gargling old woman. Rivas was surprised– he had thought that Barrows's insistence that they consult a Toothtalker before Rivas embarked on the redemption was nothing more than a formality, a traditional gesture like letting a wagon «warm up» for a few minutes on cold mornings before flicking the reins and getting started . . . but the old financier was obviously as credulous as the stupidest scavenger who ever shambled up these tower stairs to hear the judgment of the spirit world on which beyond-the-wall districts were particularly favored or imperiled by the configurations of the stars.

Rivas felt almost betrayed to realize it. Come on, he thought, you're one of the wealthiest men in Ellay, surely you can see through this nonsense if I can.

He leaned back and looked out the window at the sunlit but still damp landscape. To the west he could see a green band that was the edge of the south farms, but to the south was nothing but the spread of tumbled, empty buildings, a scene lost somewhere between city scape and landscape, animated by rolling tumbleweeds and, once in a while, the ragged figure of a scavenger too weak to venture very far from the city walls. Further to the south he could see the gleam of San Pedro Harbor. And beyond that, he knew, was Long Beach Island and then the open sea, and, way down the coast at the mouth of the Santa Ana River, Irvine.

I hope I can catch her, he thought, before having to travel too far in that direction. He shuddered, remembering one redemption—one that had not succeeded—that actually brought him within sight of the high white walls of Jaybush's Holy City at Irvine. I never, he thought firmly, want to be that close to that damned place again. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't more than half suspect he is some kind of messiah. My father used to swear he'd seen the spray of shooting stars that lit the sky on the night of Jaybush's conception, thirty-some years ago—and even rival religions admit that before he retired from public life he several times did, verifiably, bring dead people back to life . . . though of course the rival religions claim he had Satan's help.

A patch of morning sunlight had been inching its way across the wall, and when Rivas glanced again at the old woman in the corner, he saw that the light had reached her face, and, in her gaping mouth, was glittering on all the bits of metal glued to her teeth. Well, Barrows can't say he isn't getting his money's worth, he thought. There must be half a pound of scrap metal in there. Rivas knew—as Barrows evidently didn't—that this was just a gaudy prop, that real toothtalking was supposed to be a consequence of having tiny metal fillings in the teeth. In years past a few people with such fillings had reported hearing faint voices in their mouths; but they said it happened very seldom and only on mountain tops, and Rivas hadn't heard of a verified case of it showing up within at least the last ten years.

It was, though, a priceless piece of popular superstition for fortunetellers to exploit.

Rivas yawned audibly—so that for a moment he and the old woman seemed to be yawning in tandem—but he closed his mouth with a snap when Barrows darted an angry glance at him, and he had to make do with just arranging himself more comfortably in his chair. He'd given up trying to sleep last night after a dream about Urania had sent him jack-knifing out of bed just as the one o'clock bell was being rung. He'd spent the remainder of the night on the roof of his building with his pelican, sawing and strumming increasingly fantastic gun improvisations on the tune of Peter and the Wolf.

Perhaps because Rivas seemed unimpressed with her routine thus far, the old Toothtalker let her jaw relax and hurried to a closet from which, after knocking a few things over, she produced a yellow plastic telephone with a receiver which began buzzing and clicking after she gave it a couple of shakes. She frowned reprovingly at Rivas as she began whispering into it.

For a few minutes he tried to pay attention, if only to figure out what she was saying about him to the spirit world, but the interrupted dream from last night seemed to cling to him like a faint, disagreeable odor, ignorable most of the time but intruding itself whenever he shifted position. Finally he sighed and gave in, and let the recollection take him.

In the dream Urania had been one of a row of people kneeling in a typical Jaybird nest, a cramped room out in the ruins somewhere, littered with the sort of relics that aren't worthy anybody's time to scavenge. The priest– known as the jaybush, for during administration of the sacrament he was supposed to become an actual, literal extension of the Messiah, Norton Jaybush himself—moved down the line, pausing in front of each communicant just long enough to touch him or her on the forehead.

Every one of the kneeling figures at least jerked at the touch, and many pitched over in violent fits. Rivas still remembered very clearly his own first receiving of the sacrament—remembered watching the jaybush work his way down the line toward him, and wondering how much of the gaffed-fish response was just hysteria or outright faking; and then the jaybush had come to him, and touched his forehead, and the rending physical shock of it had blacked him out, leaving him to wake up on the floor, dazed and bruised and stupefied, half an hour later.

In the dream, when the jaybush came to Urania and touched her, she had raspingly exhaled a cloud of pink vapor, and then had steadily kept on exhaling more of it, long after her lungs should have been wrung completely empty, and when Rivas rushed up in concern and took her in his arms he could feel her flesh diminishing inside her clothes like an outgoing tide; for a long time he cradled the still impossibly exhaling and ever-lighter girl, and when the emptying finally stopped and he raised his head from her shoulder and looked down into her face, it was nothing more than a naked skull that gaped blindly up at him.

And, he recalled now with something like nausea, that discovery had not in any way altered his determination to bring her back to Ellay and make her his wife. He rubbed his eyes and pushed a stray lock of hair back into place.

«Ah,» the old woman said, nodding and pacing back and forth with the telephone receiver pressed to her ear. «Neutrons, you say? Goddamn. And . . . master cylinders? Lord have mercy.» She squinted down her nose at Rivas to see if he was properly impressed by these esoteric terms. He noticed that she hadn't bothered to connect the end of the telephone cord to anything, and it was dragging around on the floor behind her. He wondered whether she'd trip over it. «Ten-four,» she said finally, and then put the telephone down on the window sill, apparently to cool off.

She turned to her guests. «Well, the spirits had a lot to say. You, sir,» she said, pointing at Rivas, «are the focus of a lot of uncertainty. You see, in every equation there's an unknown factor—the hex, as we mathematicians say– and in order to untangle the various lifelines involved and see which one comes out healthy at the end, it's necessary to . . .»

She went into a long speech then, full of «identity resonances» and «orbital velocities of the soul,» frequently waving toward her dust-covered and obviously random collection of shabby books to support her statements. Presently she dug out a deck of playing cards and, while shuffling them, explained that Matt Sandoval, Ellay's legendary First Ace, had designed the fifty-two cards on his deathbed as a means for mystically savvy people to be able to consult him even after his demise. The four «aces,» she informed her guests, were called that because they represented the four natures of the Ace himself. She then began laying the cards out on a tabletop in a significant-looking pattern, scowling or nodding as each card was added.

Rivas stopped paying attention. During the last several years he had laboriously learned to read the old-time writing, with all its silent letters, superfluous tenses and fabulous, credulity-straining words; and he'd actually read a number of the books and magazines that were just decorations in the more affluent households, and props for fortunetellers. And though he had arrived at no very clear understanding of the bright, crowded, «electrical» world of more than a century ago—even their maps described a southern California coastline that didn't exist—he'd gleaned enough to know that most people who made their livings by claiming to know about the ancient wonders actually knew less about them than he did.

Her story about Sandoval having invented playing cards, for example, and naming the aces after his own title, was, Rivas knew, exactly backward. Rivas had read a journal kept during the First Ace's reign, and had learned that the citizens of Ellay had wanted to confer the title of king upon the man who had founded the currency, had the wall built, broken the terror hold of the piratical «motorcyclists» known as the hooters, and re-instituted agriculture. Sandoval had accepted the job but not the title. «There've been too many kings,» he was reported to have said; «and Queen or Jack or Joker won't do—I'll be the first Ace.»

The old woman seemed to be winding down anyway. «I see success for you both,» she said. «The spirits say you're cookin' with gas. For you, man,» she went on, pointing at Barrows, «I see an increase in your fortune, I see those old brandy bottles just a-rolling toward you.»

Rivas looked over at Barrows. Yes, the chance of mention of brandy had firmly set the Toothtalker's hook—the old man's eyes were wide and his knuckles were white on the arms of the chair.

«And for you,» she continued, now pointing at Rivas and eyeing his bare wedding ring finger, «I see . . . a reunion with a long-lost lover, a wedding and . . . six unsporting children.»

Rivas blinked. You old phony, he thought in instant panic, don't say that, he believes your idiot predictions! The musician glanced apprehensively at the old man and, sure enough, Barrows was staring at him coldly and nodding.

«I wondered how great the risk of that would be,» Barrows murmured.

Rivas abruptly decided that he'd go after Urania unpaid and independently if he had to—but leaving to perform a redemption right now would almost certainly cost him his job, and Barrow's payment would mean the difference between a leisurely, well-fed year or two in which to court another position on the one hand, and poverty and bad food and the selling off of possessions and hasty, undignified begging for any sort of job on the other. And if at all possible he wanted to prevent Barrows from hiring some other re-demptionist who'd certainly only manage to muddy the water and put the Jaybirds on their guard.

«Look,» he said evenly, «this old lady's a fraud, and no more able to tell the future than I am. Now just because she—»

«Don't try to claim that, Rivas,» rasped Barrows. «After she knew—»

«She just said you'd get a lot of money! That's a standard fortuneteller's line, dammit, same as the one she gave me! She didn't know you're the guy that distills it.»

The Toothtalker, disconcerted that so innocuous a prediction had caused such rancor, had been listening closely, and her eyebrows went up at Rivas's last sentence. «Yes I did,» she said instantly. «The vibratory dimensions told me everything. Greg Rivas and Irwin Barrows, you two are.»

Smothering a curse, Rivas sprang out of his chair, crossed to the window and picked up the telephone receiver, which had quieted down but began buzzing again when he jiggled it. «Damn it,» he shouted at Barrows, «none of this is real. Look.» He unscrewed the perforated plastic cap on the earpiece and a large wasp flew out; it looped a confused figure-eight in front of his eyes and then lighted on his cheek and stung him. «Ow, goddammit.»

«You see?» cried the Toothtalker triumphantly. «You can't mess with scientifical machinery with impunity!» The wasp found the window and disappeared outside. «Look, you made me lose my . . . high frequency receptor.»

Rivas saw that Barrows, who evidently didn't know how telephones were supposed to have worked, was even more impressed with the Toothtalker's powers now than he'd been a minute ago. «Holy smokes,» the old man exclaimed, «Rivas isn't going to die, is he?»

Rivas started to say, scathingly, «Of a wasp sting? » but the old woman, with the reflexes of a veteran entertainer used to quelling troublesome audiences, whipped a squirt gun out from under her robe and squeezed off a blast of raw high-proof gin straight into his face; Rivas squawked, reeled blindly to the window and hung on the sill, gasping and spitting.

«He would have,» she said serenely, «if I hadn't given him that. Radio liquor, distilled from isotopes. He's lucky I had some handy—that was no ordinary wasp.»

Feeling defeated, Rivas straightened up, took a deep breath and turned around to face Barrows. «Listen to me,» he said. «I'll promise to bring her back to your house-assuming I can get her away from the Jaybirds—if you'll promise to let her go with me if she understands what she'd be doing . . . and if she should happen to want to, after all these years. How's that? We'll leave it up to Uri to decide whether this lady's prediction was accurate.» Barrows started to speak, but Rivas interrupted him by taking a firmer grip on the telephone receiver, which he somehow hadn't let go of, and slamming it very hard against the concrete window sill. The receiver exploded, and bits of yellow plastic buzzed through the air and clattered around among the piles of incomprehensible old junk. «And of course,» Rivas went on, «keep in mind the fact that I'm the only redemptionist with any real chance of getting her at all.»

Barrows squinted at him for several seconds, and Rivas was a little surprised to see that the old man actually looked uncertain and even a little sick—as if the price of this redemption had begun to involve something more than his Currency.

«You make it hard on both of us,» Barrows said softly.

Rivas wasn't sure he knew what the old man meant, but he said, «I'm just divvying up the weight.» He crossed to where Barrows was sitting and stuck out his right hand. «Promise?»

Barrows sighed. «I truly hope she doesn't decide to join you. Yes, I promise.» He reached up and with the slow emphasis of a weary judge rapping a gavel, shook Rivas's hand.

* * *

Few of his sophisticated friends would have recognized the lost-looking fellow standing in the rain-puddled square by the South Gate as Gregorio Rivas; he had spent the hour since leaving the Toothtalker's parlor at a tailor's and a barber shop. Now, looking years younger with his half beard shaved off and his hair pulled back and funneled into a tarred stump at the back of his neck and his wild clothes replaced by a neat suit of off white flax, he was the very picture of a well-born youth bewildered at finding himself alone, jiggerless and hungover in the nastier end of the big city.

He wasn't the only person loitering there. In general parlance the South Gate consisted of the area immediately roundabout as well as the actual gate through which Sandoval Street entered the walled city, and it was perhaps the busiest and most crowded fifty square yards in southern California. At the moment Ellay's most successful lumber scavenger was bringing several wagons into the city, each one piled high with wooden beams, most of them gray and caked with concrete but a few still bright with ancient paint. The musty smell of freshly resurrected lumber contended in the morning air with the aroma of the hot tacos being sold on several street corners, the stench from Dogtown every time the wind faltered, and the smoky pungency of the charcoal and lye guilds out on eastern Woolshirt; and the big old buildings on the west side of Sandoval echoed back the cacophony of daily life among the barrows and gullies and shacks on the other side. Rivas's aching head was assaulted with an auctioneer's jabbering from the big wooden warehouse that was the Relic Exchange, the ringing of hammers in the various blacksmith booths, and even, he half suspected, the clink, clank and curse of the steel miners under the streets, struggling to free and bring up pieces of the vast steel beams that lay tumbled and rusting under the fine soil of the whole eastern half of Ellay. And there was even, Rivas noted with a wry grin, a street balladeer playing a pelican and ineptly singing «Everybody Wants to Smoke My Comoy.» Rivas rubbed his smooth chin and wondered if he wasn't leaving more of himself in the city than he was taking with him.

And because the little white, cards that represented brandy changed hands so frequently in this quarter, much of the crowd consisted of scavengers of a less respectable sort than the lumber merchant and the miners. Though continuing to behave like a scared young man in unfamiliar surroundings, Rivas watched with concealed amusement the specialized dance of an expert pickpocket—strangely insectlike in its series of hesitant touches culminating in a darting garb, the whole body spring-poised for the possible necessity of flight—and the indolent progress of a somewhat overripe prostitute who had come to terms with the consequences of time and knew how to make the most of shadows and selectively revealing clothes. It occurred to Rivas that he was, at the moment, just as much a web-spinner, just as much a patient angler, as either of them.

The difference between us, he thought as he hefted his knapsack and wandered in an aimless fashion to a different corner, is that I'm fishing for predators.

During the next fifteen minutes he saw, too, a number of people who were genuinely in the sort of plight he was mimicking. Hunched down in a doorway near where he'd been standing before, Rivas noticed an obviously malnourished, no more than teenaged boy muttering angrily to several imaginary companions, and Rivas wondered what it was that had brought the boy to this state. Liquor or syphilis generally took decades to ruin a person's mind, but dope could have—especially the Venetian Blood—or the Jaybird sacrament, though the Jaybirds nearly never let strangers see any of their very badly eroded communicants.

There was a drunken girl stumbling around, too, who seemed at first to be with the inexpert pelican player but was eventually led away by a grinning baldy-sport who, Rivas happened to know, was a Blood dealer. What's the matter, thought Rivas sourly, the dope trade so bad you've got to pimp in your spare time? I'd go rescue her if I wasn't certain she'd drift right back here to one of you.

Some people, he thought, simply have no will to survive—they're walking hors d'oeuvres waiting for someone who can spare the time to devour them. And while it's probably some such unattractive quality as egotism or vanity that has kept me clear of . . . that catastrophic relaxation, it's the reason I'm still alive and able to think, and I'll work on keeping it.

Rivas smiled, remembering his response to his first taking of the Jaybird sacrament—while the rest of the recovering communicants had been praising the Lord Jaybush and making sure they knew when the sacrament would be administered again so as not to miss it, young Gregorio Rivas, though stunned, exhausted and glad to have found shelter and company, was coldly appraising the situation. He didn't doubt that the mysterious Norton Jaybush was certainly more than a man and possibly a god, but the prospect of abandoning his individuality in order to «merge with the Lord» was profoundly repugnant to him.

The Jaybird band that picked him up had taken him to a nest in one of the neglected structures outside the wall and introduced him to the Jaybird way of life. He had, that first day, watched several of the far-gone communicants «speaking in tongues,» and he was disturbed not so much by the gibberish pouring out of the slack faces as by the fact that they were all doing it in precise, effortless unison, as if—and Rivas still recalled the image that had occurred to him then—as if each of them was just one visible loop of a vast, vibrating worm. Rivas had had no wish to graft himself on, and soon discovered that an alcohol-dulled mind was inaccessible to the sacrament. Thereafter, despite the Messiah's ban on liquor, he had been careful to take the sacrament only when he was, unobtrusively, drunk. This let him parry the alertness-blunting effects of the damaging communion . . . though it wasn't until he got the idea of incorporating his musical skills into the Jaybird services that he found himself able, if only furtively, to riposte.

And then, when he'd finally left the Jaybirds and drifted northwest to Venice, there had been Blood.

Venice was a savage carnival of a town that had sprung up like crystals in a saturate solution around the semicircular bay known as the Ellay-Ex Deep, in the center of which was a submarine pit that was reputed to glow with fantastic rainbow colors on some nights. A person who had a lot of money and could take care of himself could sample some amazing pleasures, it was said, in the rooms above the waterfront and canalside bars—Rivas had heard stories of «snuff galleries» where one could strangle to death people who were actually volunteers, frequently but not always goaded to this course by the money that would subsequently be paid to their families; of «sporting establishments,» brothels whose inmates were all physically deformed in erotically accommodating ways; of sport-seafood restaurants, whose long-time patrons eventually could be conveyed inside only with some difficulty, being blind, decomposing and confined to wheeled aquariums . . . but eager for just one more deadly, fabulously expensive meal; and of course he'd heard whispers about the quintessential nightclub of the damned, the place about which no two stories were consistent but all attributed to it a horrible, poisonous glamor, the establishment known as Deviant's Palace.

As a jiggerless young vagrant, Rivas was in no position even to verify the existence of such fabulous places, and even a tortilla with some beans rolled up in it was the price of a day's hard labor—but Blood was cheap.

The drug was a reddish brown powder that could be snorted, brewed, smoked or eaten, and it sucked the user into a semicomatose state, comfortingly bathed by the triple illusion of great deeds done, time to rest, and warmth; longtime users claimed to feel also a vast, loving attention, as if it was God himself rocking the cradle.

In Venice it was daringly fashionable to sample Blood, perhaps because the genuine Blood freaks were such an unattractive crew. Many of them simply starved to death, unwilling to buy food with money that could be used to get more of the drug, and none of them ate much, or bathed, or shambled any farther than to the next person that could be wheedled out of a jigger or two, and then back to the Blood shop.

After Rivas found himself a steady job washing dishes in one of the many restaurants and got a little money, he wandered one evening into a narrow little Blood shop beside one of the canals, curious about the drug because in Ellay it was illegal and expensive. The man who ran the shop was a user himself, and delivered such a glowing panegyric in praise of the stuff that Rivas fled, sensing that this all-reconciling drug would rob him of his carefully constructed vanity, his painful memories of Urania, his budding musical ambitions . . . in short, everything that made him Gregorio Rivas.

«Beautiful morning, isn't it?»

Rivas jumped realistically and looked with wary hope at the man who'd paused beside him. Though not as tall as Rivas, he was a good deal stockier, and except for his nose and his eyes his whole face was hidden by a hat and a bushy copper beard.

«Uh, yeah,» said Rivas in a nervous tone as he shifted his knapsack to a more comfortable position on his shoulders. «Kind of cold, though.»

«Yeah, it is.» The man yawned and leaned against the wall beside Rivas. «Waiting for someone?»

«Oh yes,» said Rivas quickly, «I—» He paused and then shrugged. «Well, no.»

The man chuckled. «I see. Listen, I'm on my way to get some food. You hungry?»

Rivas hoped that the quick gesture of touching his wallet looked spontaneous. «Uh, I guess not.»

«You sure? The place I'm thinking of will give us each a big plate ofmachaca conjuevos, on the house, no charge.» He winked. «And I can get us a table right next to the fire.»

Rivas frowned. This was beginning to sound wrong. «Yeah? Where's this?»

«Oh, it's a little place on Spring, run by some friends of mine.» The man yawned again and stretched his arms over his head and then let them fall—one of them landed, and stayed, around Rivas's shoulders.

Rivas's mouth became a straight line. «Spring and what?»

«Huh? Oh, only a couple of blocks from here, Spring and Main. A five minute—»

«Right.» Rivas stepped out from under the man's arm. «That would be the Boy's Club. No thank you.» He strode off to find a different wall to lean on.

But the man came hurrying after him. «You know about the place, huh? Well, listen, lad, this is no time for false pride. Let me just—»

Rivas spun to face him, and he let the man see the knife he'd snatched from his right sleeve. «I can have it in your heart so fast you won't have time to yell,» he remarked, not unkindly. «Vaya .»

«Jesus, kid,» the man exclaimed, stepping back, «okay!» Once out of range of the knife he permitted himself to amble away insouciantly, and he called back over his shoulder, «But you could have had a friend!»

I like the way, thought Rivas in almost honest puzzlement as he settled the knife back in its sleeve sheath and walked on, that every person in the world thinks his or her friendship is worth something. My God, if I really was a broke, hungry kid, I'd be a lot more chagrined at the loss of that breakfast.

Earlier Rivas had noticed a gang of young people crouched around a fire under a canted stone arch beside the Relic Exchange, and when he glanced in that direction now he saw that one of the girls was walking toward him, smiling, her hands in the pockets of her long, pavement-sweeping dress.

«Lost a friend, huh?» she asked when she was close enough to speak quietly and be heard.

«Oh.» Rivas waved vaguely. «I didn't know him. He just came over and started talking to me.»

«Are you hungry? Come and share our breakfast.»

Rivas's heart was thumping, for he suspected this might be the baited hook he'd been looking for, but he made himself look wistful as he said, «Well, I don't have any money . . . .»

The girl put her hand on his shoulder and looked into his eyes. «Money is just the checkers in a game played by unhappy children,» she told him earnestly, and he turned away in case his sudden burst of feral satisfaction might show in his face—for he recognized her statement as one of the standard Jaybird come-along lines, unchanged since he'd first heard it on that lonely morning thirteen years ago. He'd later used it himself when out on recruiting expeditions.

«That may be true,» he said, reciting a response to it that he remembered as being easy to counter, «but you need money to live.»

«No,» she said gently, pulling him toward the leaning arch, «you're exactly wrong. You need money to die. It's love you need to live.»

He laughed with sophomoric bitterness. «That's even harder to find.»

«Anything's hard to find,» she told him, «if you don't know where to look for it or what it is.»

This girl's smooth, Rivas thought as he allowed himself to be led toward the group of Jaybirds, who were all looking up now and smiling at him; the grime around her neck and wrists has been there a while, and the dress has been slept in, but the figure's adequate, she delivers her lines with fair sincerity, and, despite her teeth, that smile is as bright as a lamp in a window on a stormy night, and it's the only thing a hungry stray would notice anyway.

The Jaybirds in the circle shifted to make room for Rivas, and he looked around sharply as he sat down on the damp dirt, but Urania wasn't one of them. It seemed to be a typical band—mostly young people, their faces ranging in expression from the timid optimism of the new recruit through the sunny confidence of those who, like the girl that had snagged him, had been with the faith for a while, to the vacuous inattention of a couple of long time communicants, on whose faces the obligatory smile sat like a welcome mat in front of an abandoned house.

«This is a new friend of ours,» his guide told the group as she sat down next to him, «who's been kind enough to accept our invitation to breakfast.»

There were quietly delighted exclamations, and from all sides Rivas was warmly assured that his arrival had brightened their day enormously. Rivas set about the task of responding as they would expect him to.

Abruptly he realized that he was shaking hands and grinning like an idiot spontaneously —for at least several seconds there he had not been acting. He felt a faint stirring of uneasiness—no, genuine fear—deep inside himself, for this had happened to him only twice before in his life, this warm, happy surrender of personality: once thirteen years ago when as a scared runaway he had first been approached by the Jaybirds, and then once only three years ago while performing his last redemption. He had finally located the girl he'd been hired to snatch, had finalized his plan for the escape late that evening, and had incautiously permitted himself the luxury of relaxing in the crowded Jaybird nest in the meantime. Both times it had been just a brief slip, and he'd only been vulnerable at all because of extreme fatigue—but what was his excuse this time?

«What's the matter, brother?» A skinny Jaybird girl had noticed Rivas's sudden chill and was leaning forward solicitously, stroking his cheek with one hand and, he noticed out of the corner of his eye, furtively twitching the other hand at her companions in the tighten-the-net signal. Instantly the gang closed around him, expressing concern and as if by accident blocking all the directions in which he might make a run for it.

Rivas looked around at them all and decided it was time to find out which one was the boss here. «I, uh, was just thinking,» he stammered, «I really should be trying to find a way to get back home; to my family.»

He knew this called for a strong block, and that he'd learn now who their leader was; and as he'd guessed, it was Sister Sue, the girl who'd found him, that now knelt in front of him and took his hands and, leaning almost close enough to kiss, stared hard into his eyes.

«Trust yourself,» she said to him in a low vibrant voice that seemed to resonate in his teeth. «You realized that they weren't your real family, didn't you, saw that there are qualities and depths in yourself that they can't share or recognize? Questions they not only can't answer, but can't even understand? That is why you left them—no, don't interrupt—think about it, and you'll realize I'm right. I knew the moment I saw you that you had a real soul and that you were seeking the family that you can join totally. I don't say trust me, or them, or anyone; I tell you that the only person you dare trust is yourself. And where did your need to find love lead you? To me. To us.»

Her eyes were glistening with tears, and the other Jaybirds, even the deteriorated ones, were nodding at him and humming deep in their throats, half of them on a very low note and half on a very high one, and the insidious two-toned buzz seemed to get right in behind his eyes and set all the contents of his brain vibrating into softened blurs.

It was hard to remember anything . . . nearly impossible to hold onto a thought for more than a few seconds . . . but he knew he didn't need to anymore. The self-consciousness, the anxious policing of his personal boundaries, could at last be relaxed.

He felt tired—his knees didn't seem to have their usual spring—but of course he hadn't gotten much rest last night, and he didn't have any reason to stand up anyway. He was among people he could trust.

He was aware of some inconsistencies between his memory and his perceptions—he remembered this Jaybird band as consisting of different people, and he thought he'd been sitting with them at a different corner, and the gray overcast he remembered seemed to be gone, and his clothes were somehow clean and pressed again, no longer caked with dust and dried blood—but his own personal memories and perceptions no longer seemed crucially important.

He smiled into the pair of eyes that seemed to fill the whole world, and he realized that he felt better already. The loss of Urania might have happened years ago for all the pain it caused him now, and even the aches and stiffnesses from the beating Barrows and his men had given him last night, after Urania's birthday party, were gone.

«You've found your real family now, haven't you?» Sister Sue asked softly.

If there was a part of his mind screaming in horrified denial, it was well buried. Rivas, totally at peace for the first time in many years, happily breathed the single word, «Yes.»

When the Jaybird band left the city at noon they took Rivas with them. One of the guards at the South Gate, a grayed veteran who had seen this sort of thing many times over the years, wearily walked out of the guard shack and extended his staff across their way to stop them.

»Alto ,» he said. «Whoa.»

Sister Sue beamed at him. «Is there anything wrong, man?»

The guard nodded toward Rivas, who had bumped into the man in front of him when the group stopped, but was smiling benevolently at everyone.

«Who's the blurry boy?» the guard asked sternly.

«He's one of us,» the girl said. «His name is Brother Boaz.»

«Is that right, son?» he asked more loudly. «Son? Jeez, one of you nudge him, will you? That's got it. Listen to me, do you want to leave the city? You don't have to.»

«I want to go where these people go,» Rivas explained.

«Where are they going?»

«I don't know.»

«What's your name?»

«Uh . . . they told me, but I forget.»

«Well, that's fine,» the guard said bitterly, letting his staff tip clack onto the flagstones. He looked at the girl. «And him still dressed respectable. You all sure didn't waste any time on him, did you?»

«Some are more ready than others to give themselves to the Lord,» she told him serenely.

He opened his mouth for an angry retort, then apparently couldn't think of one, for he just said, «Vaya ,» and turned back to the guard shack.

»Vayamos ,» Sister Sue replied, and led her band forward under the high arch of the gate and then across the cobbled wall road and down the gravel slope west toward the Harbor Freeway. The day being clear and sunny, a number of beribboned tents and booths had been set up in random patterns across the face of the slope like some kind of colorful mushrooms brought out by yesterday's rain, and some of the vendors hooted at the group of pilgrims.

«Hey, seсora ,» yelled one fat old tentkeeper to Sister Sue, «let me give you a bath and a little lipstick and I swear to Jaybush you could knock down three fifths a day!»

The other vendors within earshot laughed, and the laughter doubled when one added, «A jigger at a time!»

Some of the newer Jaybirds looked embarrassed or angry as they plodded their winding course through this irreverent gauntlet, but the smiles on the faces of Sister Sue, Rivas, and the several deteriorated communicants never faltered.

One small time vice-caterer vaulted the counter of his booth and sprinted across the slope to Rivas and waved a piece of paper at him. It was a faded black-and-white photograph of a nude woman, a shabby example of the sort of relic that, bigger and more explicit and in color, could sell for cases of fifths in the fancy galleries in the city.

«You like that, eh?» cackled the merchant.

Rivas's gaze crossed the picture and then returned to it, and for the first time in a couple of hours his eyes focused and his smile relaxed and was replaced by a frown.

«Oho, don't like girls, eh?» said the merchant loudly, playing to the delighted audience. «I'll bet this is what you like, am I right?» And he yanked out of his pocket a pint bottle of cheap Ventura gin and waved it alluringly.

Rivas stopped, and the man behind him bumped into him as Rivas hesitantly reached for the bottle. The attentive vendors roared, pounding on the counters of their booths and rolling on the ground.

«Not all the way birdy yet!» yelled the prancing merchant. He was tugging at the stopper when a hard slap knocked the bottle out of his hands; Sister Sue was in front of him now, leaning toward him, her smiling gaze so intense that the man actually squinted before it as though it were an intolerably bright light.

She whispered to him for a few seconds and then said, «We'll be back for you, brother.»

She turned to Rivas and said softly, «Follow me, Brother Boaz.» He nodded, and fell into step when the band began moving forward between the now silent vendors, but Sister Sue kept looking back at him, for the tiny creases of frown hadn't left his face.

The vice-caterer, who'd been wobbling ever since Sister Sue turned away from him, all at once sat down heavily on the gravel, and the ancient magazine clipping slipped from between his fingers and fluttered away across the slope.

Chapter 3

All morning the little group moved south along the shore of the great inland sea that, though its broad surface now extended north nearly to the walls of Ellay, was still called San Pedro Bay; and though Rrvas didn't particularly slow the group—he climbed over fallen building sides, waded down streets reclaimed by the sea, and plodded across the occasional stretches of gray powder as tirelessly as any of them—his pace remained somnambulistic, his gaze unfocused.

They'd moved into the Inglewood Desolate, a wide band that extended east all the way from Venice; plants grew poorly in the Desolate, but the main reason for its almost complete lack of population was the spectrum of illnesses suffered by long term residents, and the impossibility of having unsporting children here. Several times during their trek lean faces peered longingly down at them from glass-less windows or up from sewer vents, but the hunched, hungry, scarcely human creatures that would have attacked other travelers let Sister Sue's band pass unmolested, for it was only in and around the cities that the Jaybirds pretended to be pacifists, and the dwellers in the Desolate had learned to stay away from even the most defenseless-looking group of them.

They passed a few piers that had been built recently enough not to have been swallowed by the ever-rising water, but one could only speculate about what businesses might be practiced by the men who moored their boats at them, for the furtive sailors never yelled or waved, and all carried long knives and slingshots.

The area around the Gage Street pier, though, was a sort of Jaybird settlement. Several tents had been erected, and every month a different group of shepherds took over the task of maintaining the boats and making sure all new recruits were shipped on across the bay.

Sister Sue's group presented no problems. Along with the rest of them, Rivas shambled docilely out to the end of the pier. The Jaybirds' pier was a result of luck rather than construction, for it was a big, ancient truck lying on its side; the uphill end of it, which was the cab, was half buried in the layers of soil that a dozen winter floods had flung over it, and out at the far end the top side of the box-shaped trailer was nearly awash in the water of the bay. The surface of this pier was rusted and scuffed and riddled with finger-sized punch holes, but a big cross that might once have been red was still dimly visible painted on it, along with fragments of words, after a hundred baking summers. Ordinarily Rivas would have tried to read the words and guess at their meaning, but today they were just patterns on the pavement. Beyond the rear of the truck, silhouetted against to his new masters earlier that day . . . but now it only deepened his frown. He glanced at Sister Sue and saw that she was watching him, and he looked away quickly.

The nearest horizon was a ragged line of bone-white buildings three miles away across the bay, but the shepherd at the end of the pier was squinting south, where the bay broadened out and one could see, this being a clear day, the distant dot that was Long Beach Island. At the seaward end of the pier Rivas hung back, seeming to find something disquieting about traveling on the water, but a shepherd stepped up impatiently behind him and gave him a hard shove between the shoulders. Rivas wound up making a flailing jump down onto one of the benches, but once he was in the boat he sat down quietly.

Sister Sue stared at him, then turned to the shepherd, shrugged, and resumed getting the rest of her group aboard.

In the midafternoon the boat tacked in to a Jaybird dock at Cerritos, which, being a good two miles below the southern edge of the Desolate, presented an almost tropical front to the bay, with tall trees trailing flowers and vivid greenery over the water. The harsh cries of monkeys and parrots rang for hundreds of yards through the trees up and down the coast, and the warty top halves of a few amphibian heads poked up out of the water to see what the commotion was, but there was no hitch as the shepherd helped everyone up out of the boat and onto the dock. As he pushed away and let the wind fill his main and jib sails for the skate back northwest to the Gage Street pier, Sister Sue's band plodded up the foliage-roofed highroad that split the narrow band of coastline jungle and led the group finally to the crest of a hill from which they could look down on the Cerritos Stadium. Other groups of Jaybirds were arriving from north and south and inland, and there was a considerable crowd at the gates. Sister Sue led her group down.

Over the stadium's entrance gates some agile devotee had painted, with more fervor than skill, a mural of the Messiah Norton Jaybush welcoming all of humanity with outstretched, misproportioned arms; and the painted crowd on which he was looking down became, below the long lintel over the gates, the real, animate crowd of smiling Jaybirds jostling up to get inside. They were all silent, and the only sounds were panting, and the scuff of shod or callused feet, and the occasional uncomplaining grunt of a member of the faithful being momentarily compressed against a wall.

Once inside the huge weathered bowl of the stadium, Rivas absently noticed eight rickety wooden towers set up at even intervals around the periphery of the wide field, and on the little railed platform at the top of each tower stood a brown-robed, bearded man holding a crook-topped staff. Once free of the press at the gates, the various Jaybird groups became distinct and separate again, and each group set out walking toward the base of one or another of the towers.

There were no visible differences among the hooded, tower-top shepherds, and in this orderly dispersal it was, for once, the most deteriorated and imbecilic member of each group that determined on a specific tower and led his or her band across the weedy field toward it. The tower toward which Rivas's group plodded was on the far side of the enclosed field, and most of the other bands were already standing at ease in the shadow of other towers by the time his band came to a halt.

As if at a signal, all the tower-top shepherds abruptly opened their mouths and began producing a low, steady note, and a moment later every deteriorated Jaybird in the stadium joined in with a shrill «eee » sound; though a ground-rumbling roar now instead of a buzz, it was the same insistent two-tone note that had aided Rivas's acquiescence to his new masters earlier that day . . . but now it only deepened his frown. He glanced at Sister Sue and saw that she was watching him, and he looked away quickly.

As suddenly as it had started the sound stopped, and in the moment that the last harsh echoes were rebounding away among the high tiers, Rivas took an involuntary step forward, as if the sound had been something physical he'd been pushing against.

The shepherds slung their staves through their belts and climbed nimbly down from the towers, and Rivas watched the one his group and a couple of others were clustered around. When the man got to the ground he straightened up, hiked his staff free and then strode up to Sister Sue and spoke to her quietly.

She indicated Rivas with a nod of her head and then whispered to the bearded shepherd for nearly half a minute. The expression on the man's tanned, craggy face didn't change, but he slowly lifted his head to stare at Rivas, and when Sister Sue had finished he walked over to the new member.

«Welcome to your real family, Brother Boaz,» he said in a deep voice.

Rivas glanced around uneasily, then nodded. «Uh, thank you.»

«How old are you?»

» . . . Eighteen? I think eighteen.»

The shepherd raised an eyebrow and looked more closely at Rivas's face and hair. «Hmm. Take off your knapsack, please, and let me have it.»

Rivas looked over at Sister Sue, who smiled and nodded. With evident reluctance he reached up, slipped the canvas straps off his shoulders, shrugged the knapsack off and held it out toward the shepherd.

The man took it, stepped back and began undoing the buckles. Around the arena the other shepherds were also busy taking stock of new recruits, and, except for the low mutter of those conversations, the wind in the ragged high tiers was the only sound.

«Or thirty-one,» said Rivas.

The shepherd looked up. «What?»

«Maybe I'm thirty-one years old.»

The man had got the flap open, but paused to squint at him. «Maybe thirty-one, eh? Have you ever . . .been with us before?»

«No, sir. I ran away from home yesterday. My father's a tenant farmer for Barrows. The Currency brandy estates.»

«Let me get this straight,» said the shepherd curiously as he pulled a large cloth-wrapped bundle out of the knapsack. «You leave home at thirty-one and call it running away?»

Rivas was breathing deeply now, clearly trying to resist panic. «No, eighteen,» he said tensely. «That's right, eighteen. For sure.»

The shepherd opened his mouth to ask another question but shut it again when he saw what was wrapped up in the cloth—Rivas's second-best pelican.

The gaze he now turned on Rivas was full of suspicion. «What the hell is this?»

After a pause Rivas said, almost in a whisper, «Somebody's pelican.»

«Somebody's? It's not yours? . . . Damn it, answer me!»

«No, sir.» Rivas rubbed his hand across his mouth. «I have one, but not as nice as that.»

«Well, Brother Boaz, music is one of the things we have to sacrifice.» He opened his hand and the instrument fell to the ground with a discordant bwang, and then he lifted a heavy boot and stamped the thing flat.

The shepherd started to turn away, then froze, and an instant later he had whirled back to face Rivas again. «Say, what's your name?»

For a moment Rivas's apprehensive frown left his face and, proud of knowing the answer, he said, «Brother Boaz.»

«No, damn it, I mean before, what was your—»

A strident trumpet note suddenly split the air, and a voice from the far side of the arena shouted through a megaphone, «Make yourselves ready for the Lord!»

The shepherd craned his neck and saw that an old man in a white robe had entered the stadium. «The jaybush is here,» he said. «You walk out into the center of the field. We'll talk some more after the sacrament.» He gave Rivas a push and then turned to the other groups around his tower. «All new members follow this brother!» he called. «I'll greet you all personally afterward.»

Rivas plodded out across the uneven ground, which was stippled now with fresh green weed shoots after the rain, and though he walked as slowly as any of the hundred or so new members who were approaching from all sides of the arena in a steadily shrinking circle, his mind was racing.

That wasn't my pelican, he thought, I remember mine, I saved up my jiggers and bought it when I was sixteen– okay, so why do I remember the one he stomped? Hell, I even remember that its E-string screw didn't bind properly, and needed to be readjusted after every set.

Set? What do I mean set? That's right, I play at the . . . what's the name of the place? The Bom Sheltr, that's it, in Venice; of course, and I'm twenty-five—why in hell was I thinking eighteen or thirty-one?

And what in God's name am I doing back among the Jaybirds? And lining up for the communion while sober?

He paused for a moment, but a dim suspicion that he did have some presently forgotten purpose in being here made him reluctantly resume the quasi-ceremonial pace. He surreptitiously touched his wrist and was reassured to feel his knife strapped there as usual. Okay, he thought, I'll play this scene up to, but not including, the point of receiving the sacrament. This seems to be the Cerritos Stadium, and from my old birdy days I remember where the kitchen exit is; with surprise, speed and my knife, I should be able to be out of here and into the hills within two minutes.

The white-robed figure of the jaybush had been walking toward the center of the field at a slightly quicker pace than the tightening ring of communicants, and just before shoulder to shoulder contact caused the ring to stop shrinking he slipped between a couple of them and then made his way to the very center. For ten long soundless seconds he scrutinized the nervously eager people in the ring.

Then, «Kneel,» he said, in a voice like concrete blocks rubbed together.

Everyone in the stadium did, with a rustling and thudding that seemed loud in the silence. Rivas squinted up at the jaybush, and the man's robe shone so in the afternoon sun that the sky looked darkened to purple behind him. The man looked around the congregation again, then slowly crossed to stand in front of a young girl six places away to Rivas's right.

«Merge with the Lord,» the jaybush said, then reached out and touched her forehead.

She oomphed as if she'd been punched in the belly, and a moment later she was rolling on the damp ground outside the circle.

And suddenly it all came back to Rivas: Barrows hiring him to perform the redemption of Urania, the nightmare he'd had about her, and his own alarming susceptibility to this predatory religion.

Let me out of here, he thought, instinctively reaching into his sleeve for the knife; if the plain recruitment tricks can make a grinning zombie of me so easily, what would a dose of the sacrament do?

But you can't run, he realized a moment later—not without blowing your hard-won earnest-new-boy cover and wrecking your chance of finding Urania.

But I can't take the sacrament sober either, he thought desperately. His heart was pounding in his coldly hollow chest, and when he darted a glance to his right he saw that there were now only two people to be disposed of before it was his own turn. He noticed that he was whimpering deep in his throat, and with some difficulty he forced himself to stop it.

«Merge with the Lord,» said the jaybush, touching the forehead of the boy who was next in line. The boy slumped limply to the ground, and Rivas heard his jaw clack shut as his face hit the dirt.

Rivas dug up inside his sleeve and tugged slightly on the knife grip so that an inch of blade was free of the sheath, and then he pressed the nail of his thumb up against the bottom edge. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

«Merge with the Lord.» Gasp. Thud.

As he heard the jaybush's boots scuff to directly in front of him, Rivas exhaled . . .

. . . and then drove his thumb up against the blade edge, which split the nail and grated against the bone. The pain was a bright, hot flare that brought a metallic taste to his mouth, and he forced his mind to cling to the agony and focus on it to the exclusion of everything else.

He didn't even hear the jaybush say, «Merge with the Lord.»

There was a silent, stunning impact and then he was falling through an abyss so frigid that what lived and moved here—and he knew something did—partook of an animation below freezing, as he'd read that liquid helium was said by the ancients to begin to crawl at temperatures approaching absolute zero; his own warmth was being violently wrung out of him, but more kept on coursing into him through his left hand—specifically through his thumb.

He was being stretched both toward the bottomless cold and toward the heat, and though he sensed a tearing in himself, in his mind, he willed himself to move in the direction of the heat; then he seemed to be rushing upward, though whatever had been on the other side of the rip in his soul had now broken free of him and, alive but separate, was pacing him. It became more distant and soon he wasn't aware of it anymore, nor of the sentience in the black cold below.

What he was aware of was an aching hip and pebbly, damp dirt against his cheek. He sat up and looked around– the jaybush was gone, though the crowd around the field's periphery was still out there, and all of them were still kneeling; then he let his gaze fall onto his fellow communicants.

Only a couple had regained, or kept, consciousness, and they were blinking around stupidly like people lately roused from sodden sleep. Most were still stretched out on the dirt, several of them twitching, the rest limp and conceivably dead. Of the ones near enough to see closely, quite a few were bleeding from injuries sustained during falls or fits; his gashed thumb probably wouldn't excite any comment.

And then he realized that he was still clear-headed—as alert as he ever was, and with his memory and personality intact. This new-found pain defense worked even better than the drunk defense, for though the latter insulated him from the sacrament, it did leave him drunk.

The thought of drink reminded him of the pint of Malk whiskey concealed behind a flap in his knapsack, and brought him to his feet. He walked across the field to his own Jaybird group, being careful to act dopey and clumsy.

Sister Sue watched him approach, but the shepherd kept his back turned until Rivas paused a few feet away—then he turned around, and he was holding the pint of whiskey.

«You recover fast,» the shepherd said.

Rivas put on a foolish grin and brushed some stray strands of hair off his forehead, leaving a smear of blood over one eyebrow. «Murphy's still playing in the yard,» he said thickly, «even though Mom told him to come in.» It was the sort of thing people said when recovering from the sacrament.

«You're bleeding, Brother Boaz,» said Sister Sue in a concerned tone, at the same time giving the shepherd a hand signal that Rivas didn't catch.

«Yeah?» Rivas stared at his split thumb with what he hoped looked like foolish astonishment. «Gee.»

«Piece of old glass, probably, out there that he fell on,» said the shepherd. «Say, brother, what's this?» he asked Rivas, holding up the flat bottle.

Rivas peered at it. «Whiskey,» he said finally. «I think it's mine.»

«It was yours.»

The shepherd let it fall. It didn't break when it hit the ground, but it did when the man stamped on it. Rivas forced himself not to let his chagrin show.

«Liquor's another thing we have to sacrifice,» the shepherd told him. «You're lucky it was still full, and that the sister here says you were sober when she picked you up this morning. Still, liquor and a musical instrument, both on one novitiate.» He shook his head thoughtfully. «What's your name again?»

«Joe Wiley,» said Rivas at random. «Uh, no, sorry, I mean Brother Boaz.»

«And how old are you?»

«I . . . forget.»

The shepherd nodded, then smiled. «Did you like taking the sacrament?»

Rivas closed his eyes and inhaled the fumes of the lost whiskey. «Oh, yes sir.»

«Good, because I'm going to set up a special treat for you. Most people only get to take it once a day at the very most, but we're going to let you have it twice today, isn't that great? I think you'll be able to talk to me more . . . frankly, afterward. How does that sound?» Before Rivas could answer, the shepherd added, «Oh, and we'll have you sitting down, so you won't fall and hurt yourself this time.»

Rivas widened his eyes. «I'd love it,» he said. Then he whispered, «But won't everybody else be jealous ?»

«Naw. It'll be our little secret. Follow me.»

He led Rivas across the dirt to a door in the stadium wall, and through it and down a dim corridor to a room with a bolt on the outside of the door. «Sorry there's no window or lamp,» he told Rivas, «but you've got the Lord Jaybush watching over you now, so there's no need to be scared of the dark. There's a chair in there—find your way to it and sit down.»

Rivas hesitated. Once again, he thought, I could knife him and run. Easier now than before. But, once again, that would blow my cover.

Do I really want Urania back this much?

«Yes,» he sighed, and stepped into the room. The door was instantly slammed shut behind him, the buffet of air pressure letting him know that the room was indeed win-dowless, and very small, too. A tool storage room once, probably. A moment later he heard the bolt clank solidly home.

After a bit of cautious shambling and groping, his split thumb collided agonizingly with the promised chair, and he sat down. Okay, he told himself, let's get one thing straight, there's no way you're going to take that damned sacrament again. Don't even consider worrying about that. I'll kill the jaybush if I have to . . . but maybe I can whistle him out, and then sprawl on the floor, so that when he regains consciousness he'll think he already gave it to me.

He pursed his lips and in a simultaneously hesitant and hasty gunning rhythm, whistled the first six notes of Peter and the Wolf- —the bright adventurous tune sounding constricted and out of place in these surroundings—and then, satisfied, he sat back to wait.

He remembered how he had come to discover this special property of music, and of Peter and the Wolf in particular.

In the hills north of the Seal Beach Desolate the Jaybird band he was with had followed a column of smoke until they found, broken up and still burning and scattered across one of the little dry riverbeds, the remains of a Santa Anan merchant caravan. The raiders, whoever they'd been– probably the self-styled modern hooters, who had to ride weirdly customized bicycles instead of the fabled motorcycles ridden by their historical namesakes but did still carry the dreaded hooter swords, painstakingly slotted to produce a loud hooting when whirled in the air at high speed—had taken everything of particular value, but the Jaybirds had lots of time and would be content with meager pickings. They rooted and scrabbled patiently among the blood-spattered wreckage, and came away with a modest haul of metal pieces and wire . . . but Rivas came across a pelican, miraculously unbroken.

And so for a few minutes the nineteen-year-old Rivas forgot the ruin around him and treated the sprawled corpses to a few of the old melodies he'd learned from his father; and the calculatedly uneven rhythms that he eventually evolved into gunning startled the carrion birds overhead and made them circle a little higher.

The other members of his band somehow didn't guess that he'd owned and played one before, and assumed that his modest proficiency was a miracle. Rivas had let them think it, and that evening when they'd returned to the nest he had set about writing new, pious lyrics to accompany the handful of tunes he knew how to play.

A month or so later a circuit-riding jaybush had passed through to administer the communion, and Rivas had self-lessly offered to forego the joy of receiving the sacrament in order that the event might be graced with music. The jaybush had had no particular objection, and proceeded with the ceremony while Rivas sawed and plucked his way through Blue Moon, Can't Always Get What You Want, and other traditional favorites—and he played them at a fairly traditional, tempo—but something happened when he wearied of that sort of thing and began to do an emphatically gunned rendition of Peter and the Wolf.

At the first bouncing notes the jaybush had paused, and as the tune continued the man's eyes had unfocused and his outstretched hand had fallen limp to his side. Rivas had of course noticed it, though he didn't suspect that his music was the cause, and glancing around he saw that all the far-gones had ceased their usual speaking-in-tongues background rumble and were also inert. The jaybush snapped out of it and resumed working his way down the line as soon as the tune came to an end, and the far-gones started up their eerily synchronized jabbering again, and young Rivas thoughtfully put his instrument away for the evening.

In the next couple of weeks he'd managed to prove to himself that that tune, when rendered at a gunning tempo, did reduce the very deteriorated communicants from near to total unconsciousness, and when the next circuit-riding jaybush passed through, Rivas found an opportunity to verify the effect with him, too.

From then on it had been his secret last-ditch defense against the sacrament, and in later years, after his stay in Venice and his eventual return to Ellay, it became the trade secret that made him the best redeemer in the business.

But, he reminded himself worriedly as he sat now in the lightless little room, now they're down on music. Is that just for the sake of deprivation, or are they onto my trick?

After a long time in the dark he heard footsteps in the corridor and saw a wavering line of yellow light appear and brighten under the door, and then the bolt rattled and snapped back and the door was pulled open. The jaybush stood in the doorway with a flaring torch in his left hand, looking like some Old Testament prophet with his robe and wild white beard, and for a few seconds he just stood there– presumably staring at Rivas, though his face was in shadow down to his prominent cheekbones and it was hard to be sure. Rivas took the opportunity to glance around the room. Some stringy webs in the corners implied big spiders, but his chair was the only piece of furniture.

«A great privilege is yours,» the jaybush grated.

«Yes, sir,» said Rivas, trying to sound eager. «I mean, father. Or whatever. I'm just glad you all think I'm worthy of it.»

The white-robed figure stepped into the room and, reaching out to the left, fitted the butt of the torch into an old can that had been nailed to the wall. Now the long right arm lifted, with the pointer finger extended like the stinger of some oversized insect.

Rivas puckered his lips and began whistling Peter and the Wolf.

The arm remained up, the feet kept moving and the finger stayed pointing at him.

He whistled a few more notes, more shrilly, and then kicked the chair over backward and rolled to his feet behind it, not even caring if he roused some spiders.

Another robed figure came into view behind the jaybush and laid a restraining hand on the old man's shoulder. The jaybush stepped back, turned and left the room. Rivas heard his steps receding away up the corridor as the by now familiar shepherd entered the room, smiling and holding a pistol trained at Rivas's stomach.

Though frightened, Rivas was a little surprised that the man would use so awkward and unreliable a weapon– antique pistols refitted to shoot spring-propelled poison darts were a trendy item among the high society ladies in the city, but the darts frequently got fouled up in the barrel and at the best of times had nearly no range nor accuracy. Rivas tensed, and calculated how he would jump.

«He's deaf,» the shepherd remarked. He cocked the gun and raised it. «Now, no hard feelings, but we don't care if you're McAn or Bailey or Rivas or just some creep trying to kidnap his wife away from us. We can't have you around.»

«Oh Jesus, mister, don't shoot me,» quavered Rivas, falling forward onto one knee and snaking his left hand up into his right sleeve—and then from the half-kneeling position he lunged strongly upward, whipping the knife free and driving it at the shepherd's chest.

The pistol exploded beside his ear as he came up and a hot lash ripped his shoulder a moment before he slammed heavily against the shepherd. Together they thudded into the wall and rebounded, knocking the torch loose and spattering both of them with scalding wax, and then Rivas had spun away in the sudden darkness, lost his footing and tumbled to the floor. He heard the shepherd lurch forward, collide with the chair and go over it and then fall thrashing and gasping in the corner.

Christ, thought Rivas frantically as he slapped the floor around himself for the lost knife, the goddamn gun shoots bullets, he shot me, he's probably aiming it at the noise I'm making right now, where's the goddamn knife . . . .

All his muscles were tensed in useless anticipation of the next bullet, and even after he heard the harsh exhalation from the corner and the staccato knocking of one of the shepherd's boots against the wall and floor, and realized what it meant, it took him nearly a full minute to relax enough even to get to his feet.

Live ammunition, he marveled. Where on earth can he have got it? I thought it all went stale half a century ago.

After a while he stopped panting. The torch had gone out when it fell, and the room was illuminated only dimly by the light that filtered down the hall, but after some peering he saw his knife on the floor and picked it up. It was slippery with warm blood. He shoved it back into its sheath, promising himself he'd clean it later.

He took a deep breath, tried not to pay attention to the hollow feeling in his belly and the sudden sweat on his face, and then he forced himself to walk around the fallen chair, get down on his knees, and grope for the pistol.

He thought his eyes would become accustomed to the dimness, but somehow as the minutes went by he could see even less than before. The shepherd's death spasm had left his corpse smelling very bad, and when Rivas's fumbling search forced him to move the body he had no idea what his hands were getting wet with. Webs stretched and tore under his fingers in the darkness, and his thumb had started bleeding again, slicking everything he touched, and the dead body seemed to have gotten huge, so that Rivas could hardly move without bumping into an arm or a leg . . . or maybe it had, spiderlike itself, grown more limbs in the dark . . . or maybe there was more than one corpse in here, maybe there were dozens, all over the floor, behind him, getting silently to their feet, wide-eyed in the dark, reaching for him with cooling hands . . . .

A spider or something tapped across his hand, but instead of exploding in a scream Rivas imploded into a sort of mentally crystallized state. His jaws were clenched together so hard that his whole head hurt, and his knees were helping push against his lower jaw, both kneecaps jammed under his chin and his arms wound tightly around his shins.

Hang on, he thought dimly, just hold it all in, maintain stasis, until Jaybush can take the whole thing away. Don't want agitation, motion, stuff, people . . . come soon, take it all away from me.

But he hadn't backed far enough away from it all, and he knew he was lying on his side on the floor like a knocked-over barrel, and that his elbow was in agony. He released the grip of his hands, and his knees fell away from his chin and he coughed.

Alarm quickly replaced the crystalline stasis as he struggled to his feet. There was more light in the corridor outside, as if approaching torches were only a corner or two away, and voices were getting louder. He reeled to the doorway and hurried down the corridor in the direction away from the light.

He wished he'd found the pistol, but he was fairly confident that he could find the kitchen—and the kitchen exit!– from here.

An hour later he was crouched on the shaded balcony of a half-collapsed apartment building a few miles south of the stadium, wishing he hadn't lost the pint of whiskey, which he'd brought along as much for its disinfectant properties as for its relaxing ones. Though his bullet-furrowed shoulder had stopped bleeding, it was hot and aching, and he was afraid that it—or maybe his thumb—had got infected and was responsible for his present feverish dizziness.

You can't get sick now, he told himself angrily, you've got to decide with a clear head what to do. I'm blown with the Jaybirds, Sister Sue's band, anyway, and all my supplies are gone. What any smart redemptionist would do at this point is go home, refund half the client's advance, apologize and recommend a colleague; especially a redemptionist who has every reason to believe he's begun losing his mind.

But they've got Urania. If I'm not willing to risk it for her, then what am I saving it for?

He stood up, flexing his hot, throbbing shoulder against the weight it seemed to have on it. The only thing I can do, he thought bleakly, is to move much further southeast, along the shore of the Long Beach Channel and into the Seal Beach Desolate—assume the worst, that Urania is being taken directly toward the Holy City in Irvine, get well ahead of her and then slowly try to work my way back northwestward without letting any Jaybird group get past me unobserved.

The realization that it was a nearly impossible task didn't make him change his mind about attempting it.

Rivas sighed, plodded out of the shade to the end of the tilted balcony and was about to climb back down the outward-leaning stairs, when out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of his shadow on the stucco wall.

And then despite his dizziness he had instantly vaulted over the rail with a hoarse yell of fear, and he landed heavily on his side but forced himself to go rolling and somersaulting across the yard, scraping against walls and grinding his wounded shoulder across the dirt . . . for in blurry silhouette against the wall he had seen an as-yet-only-tenuous shape crouched on his shoulder, the shadow of a thing still mostly transparent but clearly man-shaped.

After a few frantic, spasmodic seconds Rivas scrambled to his feet, wheezing, and peered around fearfully behind him, afraid the dislodged thing might still be near enough to pounce on him and reattach itself.

Then he saw it, a dozen feet away. Its ectoplasmic substance had been torn and crumpled in Rivas's slithering progress across the yard, but it was hunching itself up into a crouch, and though it was as hard to get a good look at as a jellyfish in clear water, Rivas could see the thing's faintly pink-tinged face curl in an idiot grin.

He was desperately trying to remember what he'd heard– and naively scoffed at!—about the creatures known as hemogoblins: that they were mostly commonly encountered in the southern hills, and started out as almost invisible cellophanelike bags that drifted through the air until they could attach themselves to an open wound; they expanded and took on human shape and a reddish color as they ingested more and more of the blood of their host, until finally the host expired and the vitalized hemogoblin was able to walk around and hunt rather than just fly randomly, like a dandelion seed, on the wind. He'd even heard stories of them speaking.

The indistinct anthropoid shape started toward him, and he scooped up a handful of dirt and lashed it at the thing. The dirt tore through it like shrapnel, but in a few seconds it had re-knit itself and was grinning at him again.

It began hissing, in bursts, and then it whispered, «Rivas.»

«Get the hell away from me,» he told it in a voice shrilled by tension.

«Need little blood,» the thing pointed out.

Rivas pulled loose his clotted knife and tossed it onto the dirt. The move reminded him of tossing a crust of bread to a stray dog to keep it from following you. «Take that first,» he said unsteadily. «I'll wait right here until you're done with it.» He'd seen a gravelly stretch a few yards to his right, and as soon as the thing began to suck the knife he planned to dive over there and then just keep flinging handfuls of rocks until the thing was so shredded and scattered that it wouldn't ever be able to pull itself back together.

But when the hemogoblin reached out and touched the bloody knife it instantly became much more clearly visible, and Rivas saw that its face, impossibly, was a perfect caricature of his own; and a moment later he was running away with the boundless energy of absolute panic, his knife and all thought of strategy forgotten.

When he rolled to a gasping halt five minutes later– having followed the last street of his zigzagging course past the point where, undercut by the bay, it ended in a muddy slope—his panic had thinned out to mere apprehension, and he was able to note with chagrin the mud that now caked his once white clothes.

He sat up, gingerly rubbing his abraded palms together, and stared back up the slope he'd just cartwheeled down. The black ash band exposed in the soil's cross section was clearly visible, and he remembered his father saying that it was always about two feet under the surface anywhere one went, so it wasn't difficult for Rivas to calculate how far he'd tumbled—about twelve feet, he decided. Lucky I didn't break a leg, he thought as he stood up, suppressing a groan– or my neck.

It occurred to him that he was hungry, and he stared out across the broad wrinkled face of the water, which was beginning to glitter gold under the late afternoon sun. He was far enough south so that the fresh water of the Ellay River would be fairly well mixed with the sea, and there might be some salt-water fish out there; he wasn't nearly hungry enough to experiment with the sort of fresh-water specimens that somehow throve in the Inglewood Desolate. But how was he to catch anything?

Then to the north he saw a sail, and when he squinted at it he recognized the sophisticated rigging the Jaybirds used. All at once thankful for the broad smears of mud on his clothes, he carefully but quickly picked his way along the shoreline until he came to a gap in the bank, a water-cut cleft choked with age-rounded chunks of broken concrete . He clambered up over them, pausing a couple of times to admire the line of decorated tile that ran across one edge of a few of them, and up at street level he shambled toward the clustered, tumbled, vine-hung buildings, hoping at least to find edible vegetation.

He didn't seem to be able to keep his mind on the concerns of the moment, though; just as he'd paused to peer at the century-old decorations on the broken stones, he found himself shading his eyes to look up at the rooftops and balconies around him, where now only lizards, birds and the occasional cat sunned themselves, and he was imagining what it would be like to waste an afternoon picnicking up on one of them with Uri on the return trip. He wasn't considering the odds against his finding her, nor the fact that a lot of hard psychological crowbarring was required to even partially free a person's mind from the Jaybird template. He finally found an avocado tree and managed to knock down a couple of avocados and then he climbed a fire escape to the top of a three-story building and sat there and stared at the slow sunset while he chewed them up.

Two distinct lines of smoke stood up from Long Beach Island in the south, and when the sky began to get dark he thought he could glimpse the winking yellow dots of distant fires.

Chapter 4

The next morning was cold; fog, like the ghost of stone, had spread another sedimentary layer over the already mostly buried old landscape, so that the building Rivas had taken shelter in stuck up out of the indistinct gray flatness like the last spire of a city reclaimed by desert sand. He stood on the roof with one foot up on the crumbled coping, and as the sun made the fog band glow a ruddier and ruddier pink in the east and then rose above it and began to dispel it, he studied the emerging view and wondered where evening would find him.

At last he decided that the fog had thinned enough for travel to be practical, and he started to turn toward the fire escape—but he'd caught a suggestion of motion out of the corner of his eye, and he turned back to the landscape that stretched away below his perch.

A vertical line was slowly moving over the fog far away to his right, which was north, and after he'd stared at it for a few minutes he decided that it was a boat's mast, and that it was approaching. Nothing in that for me, he thought, and he had again started for the stairs when a thought struck him. How, he wondered, can that mast be approaching so steadily when it seems to carry no sails? The river certainly provides no strong current this far south, and at least when I last passed through these parts any oceanic currents would only be moving the other way on this side of the bay.

Curious in spite of himself, he limped stiffly back across the roof to the coping and stared at the mast, which was much closer now, perhaps only a mile away. It was rocking back and forth, and sinking and rising, much more than could be caused by the surface of the bay, and at last Rivas realized that the mast must be attached to a wagon that was moving down the uneven bay side roads.

He watched it until he was pretty sure where it would pass, and then he hurried down the fire escape to wait for it, not sure yet whether he meant to hitch a ride, steal a horse, or just satisfy his curiosity about the vehicle. When he got to street level he hid behind a clump of bougainvillea, confident that the bush and the remaining traces of fog made him invisible.

If he hadn't heard the'clopping of hooves first, he might have thought he'd miscalculated his position and was down on the bay shore, for the vehicle that soon appeared out of the fog, first as a shadowy silhouette and then with proximity gaining detail and color, was more boat than wagon in spite of the four horses pulling it. A wide hull flared like an up-blown skirt above the axles, with cowls around the wheels, and the pole that projected up from the front of the cabin was indeed a mast; from his hiding place Rivas could see the horizontal boom stretching away behind, over the roof of the cabin.

The cabin itself was a wooden shed as compact and solid as a Jaybird recruiting wagon, and Rivas thought he could guess what business these early morning travelers were in. His suspicion became virtual certainty when the vehicle approached close enough for him to see the freshly splintered and dented spots along the hull, and a couple of broken ropes that swung in the air and flicked an occasional drop of dew from their fog-wet, frayed ends.

As Rivas mentally put together a cover story that might make him seem to be a useful hitchhiker, he squinted now at the men themselves, who were slouched on the high driver's bench, which was shielded at the rear and the sides by sheets of aluminum so frequently dented that they now had a uniformly hammered look. The men seemed to have fared about as well as their boat-wagon: they too were battered but evidently still functioning. The wagon was close now, and would pass him if he waited much longer.

Rivas took a deep breath, crossed his fingers and then stepped out from behind his bush. «Good morning,» he said cheerfully.

The driver snapped the reins and pulled a brake lever, and the wail of the brake shoes echoed away up and down the street as the wagon ground to a halt, the mast swaying overhead.

«What do you want,» the other man said, looking down without enthusiasm at Rivas. «We don't pick up hitchhikers.» A bowler hat sat loosely on top of a blood-speckled turbanlike bandage, and under it his tanned face was so lean and pinched that it was hard to imagine him ever having eaten a decent meal, or even ever having smiled.

«Too risky,» jovially agreed the driver, a white-haired old man wearing a baseball cap and overalls. Like his companion, he too wore several bandages.

Rivas smiled at them. «I was just wondering if you ran into the same gang of Jaybirds that jumped me last night.

I managed to run clear, but they got my wagon and all my . . .stock.»

The old man stared down at him. «Stock,» he said thoughtfully.

«What, uh, do you gentlemen deal in?» Rivas inquired, his eyebrows high.

After a pause in which he glanced cautiously around at the nearby buildings, the old man said, «We're redeemers, son.»

His partner nodded absently.

And I know what sort, thought Rivas. «Ah,» he said. «Commendable. I'm a . . . pharmacist, myself.»

«You're a Blood dealer,» said the old man.

«And you're pimps,» said Rivas affably.

After another pause, the old man nodded. «Correct, son. And yes, it was a gang of Jaybirds—those damn shepherds, resenting us cutting a few ewes out of their flock. They get all your Blood?»

«All I had with me. And my horse and wagon. I'm lucky I still have my head.»

«Ah. Too bad. Blood's the only thing that'll quiet 'em down when they've got the birdy fits.»

«Yeah.» Hence my story, thought Rivas. «You know Ratty Frazee?»

«Sure,» said the lean man. «You know he's dead?»

«I heard something about it. What happened?»

«Some damn redeemer.»

«One of the out for hire redeemers,» the old man clarified. «They say it was Greg Rivas, snatching some girl for her parents. You knew Frazee?»

Rivas shrugged. «Did some business with him.»

The two men up on the bench seemed to relax a little. The lean man took his hat off and peered into it. «Where do you go for more Blood?» he asked, apparently addressing the hat.

«I've got some stashed in a sewer outside Hunningten Town.» Rivas guessed that this pair had at least a couple of girls in their wagon—the Jaybirds wouldn't have sling-shotted the vehicle so savagely otherwise, and the fact that these two were alive was proof that the Jaybird shepherds hadn't caught up with them—and hijacked Jaybird girls were nearly always routed to Hunningten Town and then by sea up to Venice, because the pacifying Blood was so plentiful there. Perhaps the main complaint the average prostitute runner had about the universe was the fact thatfemale communicants, unlike the less readily saleable males, never did reach the placid, tractable far-gone stage, and in order to be used had to be regularly tranquilized with doses of Blood.

The lean man put his hat back on. «Hunningten's on our way.»

«Yeah, you can ride there with us if you like,» the old man said.

«Thanks,» said Rivas, climbing over the wheel cowl . . . a bit awkwardly because of his mangled thumb. «I'll pay for the ride when we get there.»

«Sit by me,» the old man added. «Nigel will sit on the roof behind.»

«I'd be cautious too,» acknowledged Rivas as he settled himself on the bench Nigel had just vacated. The last of the fog had drifted away down the bay and he savored the smell of eucalyptus on the warming air as the old man flicked the reins and the wagon lurched into motion.

«If you need to re-stock,» the old man said, «you could sail north to Venice with us too—can always use an extra pair of hands on a boat, and I think this old barge needs some patching up this time. I think the shepherds messed up the keel hinge, and half the line's shot.»

«Sure, sounds good,» said Rivas, though reflecting inwardly that no power on earth could ever get him to enter Venice from its seaward side, where the most altered of the city's denizens limped, hopped and swam about on unimaginable errands in the canals of poisonous Inglewood . . . on the narrow, ever-shifting beaches whose mulitcolored sand was sown with lumps of fused glass and occasional ancient but undecaying bone fragments . . . and even in the very shadow of the structure known as Deviant's Palace.

Though in his years in Venice Rivas had prided himself on being a particularly wild, nothing-to-lose young man, boating by moonlight down canals sane people shunned even at noon and participating in several foolish duels, he had taken care never to venture within blocks of Deviant's Palace. But the stories he'd heard about the place still colored his nightmares: stories of fantastic towers and spires that threw dark stains on the sky, so that even at noon stars could be seen twinkling around the warped rib-cage architecture of its upper levels; of nonhuman forms glimpsed weeping in its remoter windows; of what creatures were sometimes found dying in the canals that entered the place through high arches, and what things these creatures sometimes said; of wooden gargoyles writhing in splintery agony on rainy nights and crying out in voices recognized by passersby as those of departed friends . . . . The place was supposed to be more a nightclub than anything else, and Rivas remembered one young lady who, after he'd impatiently broken off their romance even more quickly than he'd instigated it, had tearfully told him that she was going to get a waitress job at Deviant's Palace. He had never permitted himself to believe that she might really have done it, in spite of the evening when a walruslike thing that a gang of fishermen had netted and dragged to shore and were butchering by torchlight rolled its eyes at him and with its expiring breath pronounced the pet name she'd always called him . . . .

The boat-wagon rattled on southward along the old streets, putting on a little more speed as the sun came up and let the old man see where the potholes and washouts were. For the first half hour of the ride Rivas didn't ask about the girls his companions had rustled, for he didn't want to seem too interested in their business; but the thought that Uri might be in the wagon right below him made him unable to consider anything else, and finally forced him to speak. «How many have you got?» he asked with feigned casualness, jerking his wounded thumb downwards.

«Four,» the old man said. «Or maybe it's three now. Nigel overthumps them sometimes.»

«Vermin,» commented Nigel from behind.

«Nigel doesn't care for ladies.»

«'Specially birdy ones,» Nigel explained.

«I see,» said Rivas, nodding.

Jesus, he thought, what a pair. If I can think of a way to work them ill before I ditch them, I'll do it. And if Uri's in this wagon, I'll kill them. And if Uri's in here and dead, I'll . . .

He turned away as if to look at the inland countryside, for he feared that his amiable smile was turning into some less reassuring expression. Several tumbleweeds were rolling across a field parallel to the wagon like skeletons of some spherical species; and as the things crested a grassy rise and spun free in the air for a moment Rivas thought he saw a faint rosy shadow or stain on one of them . . . but the old man was speaking again and Rivas had to turn and face him.

«My name's Lollypop,» the old man said.

Given ten tries, thought Rivas, I think I might have guessed that. «I'm Pogo Possum,» he said on the spur of the moment, it being a pretty safe bet that neither of these fellows would be well read. «You been in this . . . trade long?»

«Since the sixth year of the last Ace, Nigel and me both. We were around when young Jaybush first appeared and started recruiting followers. Hell, I used to live in Irvine, in a house that's behind the white walls today—or was, I guess, until the big explosion in the last year of that Ace.»

Rivas nodded. The rumors of the midnight flash and deafening roar behind the white walls—and speculations that Jaybush himself had died in the blast, for he subsequently went into cloistered seclusion in the Holy City– had shaken the whole structure of the faith, and Rivas, at the age of twenty-one, had taken advantage of the confusion and quietly left the Jaybirds and fled to Venice.

«Did you ever see Norton Jaybush?» Rivas asked.

«Oh hell yes, in those days before he retired into his damned city he was everywhere.» Lollypop shook his head wonderingly. «Can't really blame people for following him, you know? That man was hard to beat. Still is, I suppose, just doesn't have to prove it anymore. Yeah, I seen him make a dead man get up and walk around and talk to his family—and I mean dead, this guy was bloated up and stinking.»

«Trees bent over when he walked by, like bowing,» said Nigel. «We seen it.»

«It wasn't any big thing at all for a hundred birds at once to circle around over his head neat as the rim of a dish, like a big damn whirling halo, and not a peep out of one of 'em.»

My rival for Uri's devotion, thought Rivas uneasily. And one time father figure of my own, too; though luckily only through the jaybushes, the surrogates, the representatives of him. I probably wouldn't have had the—the what? Strength of character? Certainty of my identity?—to leave the faith if I'd been dealing with Mister Messiah Jaybush himself. And I'd never have dared to disobey him so directly by going straight to Venice as soon as I ditched the faith. Jaybush had nothing but condemnations for that sinful place.

He was startled then by a quick, rhythmic thumping from inside the wagon under him, and it wasn't until Nigel, at the rear of the roof, pounded his fist on the wood and yelled, «Save it, slut—they gonna teach you a new dance,» that Rivas realized what the noise had been. One of the girls was evidently having doubts, losing a little of her confidence that the world was in Jaybush's hands and all was well; for the peculiar running-in-place, arm-waving activity known as Sanctified Dancing was the recommended means to clear the mind of uncomfortable thoughts. Like speaking in tongues, it had never held any attraction for Rivas.

He knew it couldn't be Uri—this would be only her third day in the faith, and she wouldn't have been taught Sanctified Dancing yet—but if she actually was in this wagon he wondered what she was making of the spectacle. Often, he recalled, it was kind of scary when someone erupted into it, stamping and waving and gasping, eyes generally screwed tight shut, and it had to be scarier still when it started happening in a dim confinement and you didn't even know what it was.

He remembered being with her once when her cat dragged itself into the yard, its hind legs useless because of a broken back. Rivas and Uri had been breathlessly rolling around in the grass behind a toolshed in the Barrows yard, and when Uri leaped up and ran to the struggling cat, her eyes were still a little unfocused, her lips swollen—and then when she'd tried to pick it up, the cat had screeched and spun in the grass and Uri had lurched back with bright drops of blood already rolling down her slashed fingers and pattering onto the grass.

Rivas had put the animal out of its agony with a shovel, and then tried to comfort the appalled and weeping Uri. What had shocked her, he remembered now, was not the blood everywhere, nor even the pain of the several deep scratches she'd gotten, but the abruptness of it; the way grotesque, horrible violence had appeared in their midst with no warning, as if a chunk of icy iron had plummeted out of the cloudless summer sky.

For several miles the boat-wagon rattled along peacefully, while the day grew warmer; at one point a flicker of motion above the verdant ruins ahead caught Rivas's eye . . . and his belly went cold a moment later when he saw that it was one of the big-as-your-fist punch-bees looping toward them out of the high branches of a carob tree, the rattling buzz of its six-inch wings audible even a couple of hundred feet away. He'd seen a man hit by one of them once, knocked right off his feet by the impact and dead before he hit the ground because of the three-inch stinger driven right up to the bug's rear end in his eye.

Rivas was about to jump off the wagon and run when he heard a twang behind him and felt the air beside his right ear thrum like a plucked rope, and a split second later the punch-bee exploded with a wet smack and was suddenly just spray and bits of meat spatting onto the pavement and iridescent shards of wing spinning away like glassy leaves.

Very slowly Rivas turned around on the bench. Nigel, sitting astride the boom, was fitting a second pebble into his wrist-brace slingshot, and then he put the weapon back in his bowler hat and put the hat on his head. He met Rivas's gaze with eyes as cold and incurious as marbles.

«Good with that thing, Nigel is,» observed Lollypop.

«Yes,» Rivas agreed, re-evaluating his chances of disabling these boys soon and getting a look at the girls in the wagon.

As the wagon went rolling past the carob tree Rivas breathed through his mouth, for the air was sharp with the metallic smell of the killed bee.

Several hundred yards behind, the tumbleweed caught against a metal post from which still hung a few curly strands of a barbed wire barrier that, a century ago, had apparently blocked the whole street. The bush heeled around to a stop. A pinkly translucent head disattached itself from the twiggy ball and blinked around, then snuffed the air. A smile stretched its face like a breath stretches a smoke ring, and a pink arm less substantial than a snakeskin reached down and with some difficulty freed the bush from the barbed wire. The head and arm were retracted again as the tumbleweed began to roll, resuming its interrupted southward course.

Late in the afternoon Lollypop left the at least somewhat maintained succession of bayshore roads and turned east up one of the old highways that mounted inland through the band of jungle and into the dry hills beyond.

«Why the shift?» asked Rivas, watching the water move around from the starboard side to the stern, and then begin to recede.

«There's a big damned army been moving up the coast last couple of days,» said Lollypop. «Supposed to have come south overland, sacked Santa Ana and Westminster, and now they're heading toward the bay, along the shore and in boats, burning everything in their way.»

Rivas remembered the fires he'd seen on Long Beach Island last night. They're at the mouth of the bay now, he thought. «Huh. Who are they supposed to be?»

The old man didn't answer until he'd guided the horses around a dangerously undercut-looking section of pavement. «Well,» he said, relaxing when they were past it, «we were in Hunningten Town a couple of days ago, and people were saying it was an army from way up north, like Sari Berdoo.» He shrugged. «I guess it's possible.»

«Huh.» Rivas leaned back, absently enjoying the coolness on the right side of his face where the sun had been shining on it all day. So, he thought, Ellay's got soldiers patrolling her western and northern borders, and here comes San Berdoo up from below. I wonder if the Berdoo boys really think they can take her by surprise. Maybe they can. Nearly all the traffic across the Inglewood Desolate is of fairly furtive, untalkative types—Jaybirds, hooters, pimps like my pals here. Maybe they can, at that.

The girls were getting restless by the time Lollypop parked the wagon in a garagelike structure with a roof high enough to let the mast in, and Rivas was trying to hear their voices, for he was sure he'd recognize Uri's, even after thirteen years. During the long afternoon he'd considered and reluctantly dismissed the idea of asking to see the captives, even on the pretext of suffering a sudden fit of lust; a genuine Blood dealer would know better than to ask, and suspicion seemed easily kindled in his two traveling companions. The voices fell to muttering when the wagon stopped, though, so Rivas hopped down and looked around the big echoing chamber.

Square sunken areas with truncated metal pillars in them seemed to confirm his guess that this had once been some sort of garage, but there were indications too that it had seen other uses not quite as long ago. Several cots and stretchers, their fabric spiderweb-frail after all the desiccating years, were tumbled in the corners, and when Rivas crouched down on the littered floor, hoping to find a weapon, he picked up a tiny squat bottle with a rubber diaphragm instead of a lid. The diaphragm broke to dry bits when he touched it, and whatever fluid the bottle had once contained was long gone.

The unoiled-axle cries of homeward-bound parrots were ringing in the sky faintly—though very loud when, every now and then, a half dozen of the busily flapping green and orange birds would pass over the street in front of the garage—and the shadows were lengthening and the light outside was turning apricot when Nigel scuffed away with a roll of twine and a bag full of old jewelry and aluminum cans to set up some intruder alarms.

«Do you generally sleep in the wagon?» Rivas asked Lollypop.

«Yeah,» said the old man as he tossed some cloth bags to the pavement and then jumped down from the driver's bench. «The girls inside the cabin, Nigel and me on deck.» He sat down and opened the bags and began pulling out heavy waxed-paper packages. «Hope you like pork,» he said. «Oh,» he added, looking up, «and hitchhikers sleep off the wagon.»

«Makes sense,» said Rivas, who'd hoped for that answer. «I think while there's still some light I'll check for snakes and scorpions.»

«Probably a good idea,» the old man allowed.

Rivas wandered deeper into the building, looking around again for something that could serve as a reliable weapon. The inland detour had been a bit of luck for him, but he knew this was about as far east as his companions would be going—from here they'd begin to bear back west, toward the bay and away from Irvine. He'd have to find out tonight if Uri was in the wagon, for if she wasn't, he'd have to get moving south.

Against one wall an ancient engine block and an equally ancient bed frame seemed to have formed the seed of a particularly convoluted litter pile, and he walked over to it and noisily wrenched some things away: an old chair, a teevee box, the hood of a car, a refrigerator shell so rust-eaten that he could spin it away one-handed . . . .

He was exposing a sign stencil-painted on the bricks of the wall—he could already see the word "AVAILABLE"—so he pulled over a set of metal shelves, making a hellish clatter and sending a million little glass rectangles tinkling out across the concrete floor. He could read the sign now.

CD GUARANTEED SAFE FOOD

AVAILABLE HERE

There was still chalk dust in the pits in the brick surfaces over the stenciled line, but the only legible notation in that spot seemed to be the last applied, and it was scratched in as if with the point of a knife:

nevermore

Rivas looked over his shoulder at Lollypop, who had gathered wood for a fire and was laying pieces of pork out onto a metal grate. The old graffitist spoke too soon, he thought.

At last he found something that looked possible—it was a whippy length of flat aluminum with a heavy, rusted bolt at one end, and he slipped it up his sleeve so that the bolt was nestled in his armpit and the end of the strip was just concealed by his cuff. And, just as carefully, he was rehearsing in his head a word he didn't know the meaning of, but which he had heard many times: sevatividam, pronounced gutterally with the tongue against the edges of the teeth on the t and d.

«I guess there's nothing gonna bite me,» he said, ambling back toward the wagon in the wide doorway. He noticed that his hands were visibly shaking, so he added, «You guys got any liquor?»

«Sure, a fifth of Currency up under the driver's bench,» said Lollypop. «A cup, too. Don't take more'n one cupful.»

Rivas opened his mouth to voice the response that had become automatic with him over the years, but then he just nodded. «Okay.» He climbed up to the bench, and as he reached under it for the bottle and cup he risked whispering, «Uri ?» hoarsely at the floor. There was no reply, and he filled the cup, re-corked and replaced the bottle, and then managed to climb back down without spilling a drop or banging his thumb.

The old man had got the fire going and Rivas sat down on the concrete floor near it and with some trepidation took his first sip of Currency Barrows since the night thirteen years ago when he'd done his imitation of a barking dog.

He was a little disappointed that it didn't bring back any memories. It was just a mouthful of hard liquor, a bit perfumy and biting, without the clean grain taste of whiskey. Oh well, he told himself; better than gin. He relaxed and, having given up on feeling dramatic about it, set about enjoying it simply for its alcohol content.

«How is it?» Lollypop enquired.

«Root of all evil,» said Rivas with a satisfied smile. Wouldn't Mojo be surprised, he thought, to see me knocking this stuff back.

And what, he forced himself to wonder, is Mojo doing right at this moment, do you suppose? Drawing infrequent beers and making frequent apologies for the absence of the legendary Venetian pelicanist? Or hopping and sweating to fill the drink orders of the huge crowd attracted by some new performer? No, Steve couldn't have got someone else yet.

Rivas rolled another sip of the brandy around on his tongue—he was beginning to get used to it—and wondered if he'd ever stand on the stage at Spink's again. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize the place—the high ceilinged room with the bar on the far side and the doors to the left, the lamps, the tables, the strings of dusty paper dolls way

up there higher even than the chandeliers . . . . He wished

now that he'd taken the time to really look at those strings of little figures holding hands and touching toes. He'd always been curious about them, even before he'd learned that they were the last work of some genius sculptor—Noah Almondine, Rivas seemed to remember his name was– who lost his mind and killed himself in the last year of the Sixth Ace. Rivas had never been able to keep straight the names of all the genius painters and poets and doctors and engineers—and even politicians, for the Sixth Ace was supposed to have been the best Ellay had had since Sandoval himself—who crowded into prominence when Rivas was about seventeen, and then all wound up leaving by the Dogtown gate at about the same time the Sixth Ace was assassinated. Though there weren't ever any musicians in that crowd, Rivas thought, and thanks be to Jaybush for the lack of competition.

All too soon the distant rattling and clanging was replaced by the scuff of Nigel's returning footsteps. Rivas put down the cup and got up into a crouch, his heart pounding, and frowned dubiously at the pork to explain the move.

Nigel walked into view from around the corner.

«How long have you guys been carrying this pork around?» Rivas asked, trying not to talk too fast or too shrilly. «It looks a little old to me, yes man, little bit old. Don't need, what, worms, do we, hey? Why, I knew a guy ate some old pork one time, and listen, worms woulda been a blessing to him; he'd 'a' begged you for 'em, compared to what he got. He came down with—»

Nigel was close enough now, and looking annoyed rather than suspicious at this jabbering.

«—sevatividam —»

As Rivas had hoped, the captive girls instantly began shrieking when they heard those five syllables and Nigel, startled by the sudden din, spun toward the wagon.

Rivas sprang up out of his crouch, whipping the length of metal from his sleeve in one motion and whirling it around and back, over his head; when his right foot hit the pavement he was moving at running speed, and though Nigel looked back in real alarm when he heard it, Rivas was already upon him, and with all the strength of his arm and momentum of his rush Rivas lashed the heavy bolt directly into the bridge of Nigel's nose. Even as Nigel's head snapped back and his body folded backward, Rivas let go of the aluminum strip and let himself fall with the body, and as they hit the floor together he snatched Nigel's hat and when he rolled to his feet on the far side of the body he was fitting the slingshot into his hand and over his wrist and aiming it at Lollypop, who'd drawn a knife and taken a couple of steps forward.

The old man skidded to a stop when he saw Rivas draw the pebble back against the increasing resistance nearly to his ear.

«Drop the knife,» Rivas panted.

The knife clattered on the floor. «What have you done to Nigel?» the old man moaned.

«Maybe I overthumped him,» said Rivas, beginning to catch his breath. «Open the cabin.»

«You're a Jaybird,» said Lollypop.

«No. Open the cabin.»

The old man didn't move. «That was that speaking in tongues gibberish.»

«Right. I can kill you and open it myself.»

The old man started toward the wagon. «You're a redeemer, then.»

«One of the out for hire ones,» Rivas agreed. He turned slowly to keep the slingshot aimed at the man, but took a couple of steps back and let the rubberized netting go slack for a moment while he crouched and snatched up the knife. He had the knife wedged into his wrist sheath and the pebble drawn back again before the old man could do more than look around.

As Lollypop turned back toward the wagon Rivas glanced down at Nigel. One eye was wide open and staring up into a darkening comer of the ceiling, the other was nearly closed, and between them was a deep indentation. Rivas's outstretched arm began to shake, and he wished he was anywhere else on earth.

Lollypop had climbed up over the wagon's stern and unbolted the cabin door, and Rivas hurried forward as it swung open. Three girls were standing inside, blinking in the orange firelight; they were smiling uncertainly, evidently still supposing that Rivas's imitation of a far-gone receiving the sacrament had been genuine.

He peered closely. None of them was Uri.

«Step down, girls,» he said with weary gentleness. «You're free.»

Their smiles disappeared, but they climbed down and wandered aimlessly toward the fire.

«Climb in there,» Rivas told Lollypop, «and, carefully, bring the fourth girl forward.»

The old man disappeared inside the cabin. After a moment he called out, fearfully, «She's dead.»

«Bring her forward.»

«You'll kill me.»

Maybe I will, thought Rivas helplessly. But, «Don't be silly,» he said. «This is just a job to me.»

There was scuffling and thumping in the darkness, and then he saw a long, dark-haired body rolled to the cabin's threshold.

«Let me see her face.»

Lollypop lifted the head and turned it toward Rivas. It wasn't Uri.

Rivas wasn't aware of how tense he'd been until his shoulders relaxed. «Not the one I'm after,» he told Lollypop. «Get inside and shut the door.»

There were tears on the old man's face. «You can't lock me in here! This cabin's built tough, I'd starve to death, just shoot me right now—»

«I'm not going to lock it, relax. I'm just going to pile some stuff in front of the door so I'll hear it if you come out. The dead girl you can leave in there with you or roll out onto the deck.»

Lollypop rolled her back inside. «I can't be alone,» he muttered as he pulled the door closed.

Rivas let the slingshot go slack and tucked it into his shirt, then ran back into the dark garage, picked up the old bed frame and carried it back to the boat-wagon. He threw it onto the deck, climbed up himself, and leaned it up against the closed cabin door. «There,» he called. «If I'm still around when this falls, I'll hear it and come back and kill you, okay?»

The old man was mumbling inside, possibly to the dead girl, but there was no specific reply.

Rivas let the slingshot go slack and tucked it into his belt, walked around to the driver's bench and grabbed the bottle of Currency, then hopped down to the floor. During the day's ride, he had noticed that the harness of the horses was an unusual style, with some sort of hinge and pin arrangement as well as buckles on the harness straps, and a light English saddle on each horse; now he put the bottle down, carefully, and walked up to the front right horse to get a closer look at the harness.

Each of the pins, he saw, had a ring on the top end; he yanked one out of its hinge and the harness strap fell away. He smiled almost sadly. Ready for anything, you boys were, he thought; Jaybird shepherds, punch-bees, the necessity of having to take to the water . . . even, I see, for having to abandon your vehicle altogether and proceed on horseback without unbuckling anything. I'll bet old Lollypop is going to be a little more careful about picking up hitchhikers, though. Rivas yanked out another pin and tried to remember what length he liked stirrup leathers to be.

«Where's the jaybush?» came a voice from right behind him, making him jump and gasp.

He turned to the girl. She was tall, with pale hair; she was silhouetted against the comparative brightness outside, and so he couldn't see her expression, but, knowing Jaybirds, he didn't figure there would be much to see anyway. «Sorry, miss,» he said. «There isn't one anywhere near.» He looked past her. «Where'd the other two go?»

She shrugged.

«Good luck to them.» He went back for the bottle and tucked it into his shirt and then pulled the last pin, freeing the horse from the wagon. «And good luck to you,» he added, wondering if she'd know how to give him a leg up.

«Where are you going?»

He looked back at her in exasperation. Why couldn't she have wandered away with her friends? «South.»

«South?» she said with sudden eagerness. «To the Regroup Tent?»

«No, dammit, I—» He paused. Why not? What better cover could he hope for than the role of a Jaybird who'd become separated from his band and was waiting to be caught up with or reassigned? Especially if he was accompanied by an obviously genuine stray Jaybird girl. «I mean yes,» he said.

«Can we start tonight?» she asked. «I feel terrible being away from everyone.»

«Yes,» said Rivas, leading his horse around so that he could reach the harness pins on the left front one. «I'd like to get away from this place as soon as possible.»

The girl glanced around blankly, apparently giving Nigel's corpse no more attention than she gave the neglected pieces of pork. Obviously home was wherever the Jaybirds were, and every other place was simply a place where they weren't, only to be passed through and not worth a second look. Rivas had read somewhere that toads could perceive only two categories: a fly, and everything that was not a fly. This girl seemed to have the same sort of two-position attention switch.

«Since it's not where everyone is,» he amended wearily. She smiled and nodded, and he went on, «Sure, there's still enough light for us to cut a couple of miles out from between us and the Regroup Tent.» He handed her the reins to the second horse. «Can you ride?»

Her smiled disappeared. «Yes,» she said, taking them.

He realized that it must have been a skill she'd acquired before becoming a Jaybird, during her renounced old life, and that while she was willing to use it to get back into the bosom of the church, she'd take no pride or joy in it.

«Well,» he said, «if I fall off, come back for me.»

Without replying the girl hiked her left knee up, got her sandalled foot into the left stirrup, and effortlessly swung up onto the horse; Rivas noticed that her legs, under the coarse cloth robe, were long and graceful. She'd have fetched a good price in Venice, he thought—and I'm glad I saved her from that. And what the hell am I looking at a girl's legs for when I'm trying to find Uri?

At his second try Rivas got into the saddle. «Follow me,» he said, and led the way out onto the street.

When the quiet tick-tock of the hooves had receded away down the street, the garage was silent . . . but not quite still. The sunlight became redder and dimmer as it slowly advanced across the concrete floor, the remaining two horses blinked incuriously from time to time, and a shadow without a body drifted from the street into the garage, hard to see because it was the same color as the twilight glow. It turned like an unhurried underwater swimmer and tensed slightly when it saw the raw pork, but moved eagerly forward when it saw Nigel's corpse. It lifted its legs in a crouch, and when gravity finally coaxed it down to the floor its insubstantial fingers fluttered over Nigel's face and hands, trying to find an open wound.

Then finally the wagon's cabin door was pushed open, and a bed frame toppled onto the deck with a tremendous crash. The transparent creature, immensely startled, darted away like a minnow, and by the time the snuffling Lollypop had shuffled across the deck and climbed down to the floor, the thing was clinging upside-down to one of the ceiling beams, as tight and still as a pink glass bat.

The old man sat down beside the body and began haltingly whispering to it while the light crept further into the garage and grew dimmer and the creature on the ceiling beam blinked and rolled its big eyes and one of the Jaybird girls, outside, made a steady clanging racket but no vocal complaint as she tried patiently to extricate herself from one of Nigel's intruder alarms.

At last Lollypop picked up Nigel's body, carried it to the wagon and laid it on the deck. He climbed back aboard, rolled the dead girl out of the cabin and dumped her over the gunwale, and then gently dragged Nigel inside and closed the door behind them.

Five minutes passed, then the ceiling-clinging thing let go and spread its arms and legs and spiraled down like an autumn leaf and touched down, silently, on the dead girl's face.

There was no further motion in the garage; and after a while the Jaybird girl outside got free of the alarm and wandered aimlessly away into the night, and then the silence was unbroken.

Chapter 5

When a sudden clatter of hoofbeats spilled Rivas out of the night's web of dreams, he decided that he'd been premature yesterday in deciding that his fever was abating. His skin was hot and dry and tight and his breath was arid in his head and the bright morning sunlight seemed to be making faint rainbow auras around everything. His head was murky with the sort of unspecific depression left behind by a night of heavy drinking or the worst sort of nightmares. He rolled over into a crouch on the pile of cardboard that had been his bed, and he squinted around at the weedy yard. A collapsed, rusty swing-set leaned against a fence near him, and the cardboard freshly shoved under it reminded him that when he'd gone to sleep last night the Jaybird girl had been sleeping there. So where was she now? He stood up, feeling dangerously tall and fragile, and stumbled out of the yard to the tree he'd tied the horses to.

One of the horses was still tied to it. Rivas peered around, blinking tears out of his eyes and wishing that his nose would either produce a sneeze or stop tingling, and finally saw her, fifty yards down the street, riding the other horse.

»Hey! » he yelled. «Uh . . .» Why hadn't he learned her name? «Hey, girl! »

She looked over her shoulder, then reined in and rode back to the tree, which he was now leaning against. «What?» she said.

«Where are you going?» He had to squint to look up at her against the bright blue sky.

«The Regroup Tent,» she said impatiently. «Where did you think?»

«Well, Christ . . . you weren't going to wait for me?»

«I thought you were sick.»

«Oh! » he said, nodding in exaggerated comprehension. «I see. You thought I might slow you down. »

«Right.»

He throttled his anger by reminding himself that she was a vital stage prop in his role as a stray Jaybird . . . and just for a moment, though he suppressed the thought almost instantly, he knew he'd have ditched her in an instant if she'd been sick and of no use to him.

«Well, I'm not sick,» he said. «This is just an allergy. I'm allergic to these . . . bushes, here. Okay? So wait for me. And don't run off without me again, hear?»

She blinked at him in some surprise. «It's the duty of every strayed follower of the Lord to return to the fold as quickly as possible.»

«Well, sure,» he said, intrigued by the hint of an Ellay accent in her voice, «but not so hastily that you're likely not ever to get there at all. One girl alone, why . . . you wouldn't get two miles before you'd run into a snake or a punch-bee or a rapist or another couple of pimps.»

She seemed genuinely puzzled. «But my soul would be in the Lord's hands. Why should it upset you? »

He spread his hands and opened his eyes wide to show her how sincere he was. «Because I care what happens to you, that's why.» She waited while he saddled his horse and got onto the animal by half climbing the tree.

The girl didn't speak as they rode slowly down the sunlit street, but she looked vaguely troubled.

«Didn't I save you from those two guys who killed your friend?» he reminded her after a couple of minutes.

«Yes,» she said. Phone poles stood every few hundred feet along the left side of the road, and sun-rotted rope rings dangled from some of the cross pieces, way up there where only birds could get to, and a couple still held yellow sticks of forearm bones. At about every twenty-fifth hoof clop the horses passed through the shadow of another pole. «But . . .» the girl said after a while, «we aren't supposed to care about each other that way . . . . That's for the shepherds, rescuing is . . . and even they don't do it because they care about us but just because the Lord wants us.»

Rivas glanced at her with some respect. Very good, sister, he thought. You've got clear eyes for a birdy chick. She caught his look and smiled uneasily before looking away.

Rivas let his gaze drift to the buildings in the middle distance ahead, standing out there among the heat shimmers like broken, discolored teeth in green gums, and he let his eyes unfocus so that it all became just blurs of color. As the morning wore on, he wished he'd taken Nigel's hat as well as his slingshot. The hot sun made it feel as if his fever had spread out from him and infected the whole world, like a spilled beer gradually soaking through a whole book, so that the pages tore or stuck together in clumps, and all continuity was gone. He could remember, if he tried very carefully, who he was, how old he was, and what his purpose was in being here; but during this monotonous southward ride he didn't need to keep all those things in mind, and so he just rocked with the motion of the horse and, unless something roused his attention, thought about nothing at all.

Don't put on the act for me, old boy. I know you hate 'em all, every one of em.

He frowned and focused his eyes. Where had he heard that recently? Who was it that had said that to him? He couldn't have been sober at the time, or he'd remember. Unless he'd been overpoweringly sleepy . . .?

It's me you love. Me only.

It was last night. A dream? Yes, of course it had been a dream, a fever-warped one. He tried to remember something more about it, but couldn't.

At midmoming he killed two doves with Nigel's slingshot, and as he was awkwardly butchering them another sentence from his dream came to him. You're too ashamed to admit it, the voice had said.

Rivas paused, the bloody knife hovering over one of the half-dismembered birds, and he tried to remember what the dream had been about and who in it had been saying these things to him. Then he remembered seeing something in the dream . . . a person . . . himself? Was he looking in a mirror? And why, of all things, did he see himself sucking his thumb?

He finished butchering the birds, and started a fire by dampening some shredded cloth from his shirt with Currency and then banging together various rocks and bits of scrap metal until some sparks fell on the shreds and ignited the alcohol vapor. Then he spitted the doves and cooked them over a fire of powdery old lumber pieces. His companion didn't seem surprised when he let her have one of the birds, served with a mock flourish on a Ford hubcap, but she didn't look pleased either.

«What's your name?» Rivas asked her between bites as he leaned back against the big splintered sign that shaded them. He'd whimsically chosen it for their lunching spot because of the archaic message painted on it in big stark letters: ALL CANNIBLES HEREABOUTS CRUCIFYED– NO EXEPTIONS.

She gnawed a charred breast for a few moments, then said carefully, «Sister Windchime.»

He smiled. «I like that. I'm Brother—» What, not Pogo, «—Thomas.»

«It's nonessential for you to like my name,» she said irritably. Rivas remembered that nonessential was a pretty harsh term of disapproval among Jaybirds. «And why do you have that bottle of money?» she went on.

«To sterilize wounds and start fires,» he said virtuously. «Why? You don't think I'd drink it, do you?»

«How long have you been a follower of the Lord?»

«I was recruited when I was eighteen,» Rivas told her, truthfully.

«Huh,» she said. «You can't have taken the sacrament very often if you're still walking around at your age.»

Unable to think of a reply, he just shrugged.

She leaned back against the sign and pitched the breast bone into the fire. «I don't—what's the matter?» she asked, frightened, for he'd leaped to his feet and his face was gray.

«Uh—» He turned and squinted back the way they'd come. «Nothing. But we're wasting time. Let's get moving—if we crank, we can be at the Regroup Tent tonight.»

He didn't begin to relax until they were mounted and riding south down a well-preserved highway, and even then he kept glancing back anxiously; for he'd suddenly remembered a little more of his dream and he was pretty sure now that it hadn't been a dream at all, that he really had been mockingly spoken to, very late last night, while he was feverishly half awake—spoken to by the hemogoblin whose face was somehow a caricature of his own.

And he was sure, too, that the glimpse he'd remembered earlier, the glimpse he'd thought was of himself sucking his thumb, had actually been a fevered memory of seeing that thing sucking its sustenance from his self-inflicted knife wound.

When the sun was near meridian two columns of smoke appeared in the south, and a third began upwardly staining the blue sky within the next half hour. Rivas and Sister Windchime couldn't hear anything but the grasshoppers and lizards in the dry grass around them, but every time a long straight length of street offered a chance to see some distance, Rivas stood up in the stirrups and peered, trying to see through the mirage ripples and guess whether the troubles ahead—whatever they were, some consequence of the advance of the San Berdoo army, he supposed—would obstruct his progress toward the Regroup Tent.

After a while the street they'd been following turned sharply to the southwest, and they had to strike out across the fields and flattened housing tracts. Eventually they were fortunate enough to find a southward-snaking dry riverbed, and they rode down the middle of it for almost an hour before noises from ahead made Rivas call to Sister Wind-chime, softly, «Stop.»

«What is it?» she asked, already a little nervous herself.

«I don't know exactly, but I'm pretty sure it's people coming this way. Whoever it is, we don't need 'em. Come on,» he said, quickly hopping out of the saddle to the gravelly dirt, «let's get up the slope here.»

Sister Windchime dismounted and they led the horses up the eroded slope. After the first few minutes of dusty scrambling they were in shade among trees, and at the crest of the slope they found a segment of narrow paved road still not quite reclaimed by colonies of tall asphalt-crumbling weeds and the downhill tug of the annual floods.

«Quiet now,» Rivas whispered. «We'll just let 'em move on past us and then be on our way again.»

Over the rustling of the branches around them he could now hear a sort of windy ululation and a faint metallic clatter—but it wasn't until the first scream raised startled crows from the trees ahead that Rivas realized what must be going on. It's a band of hooters, he thought.

Though he'd several times talked to people who'd survived hooter attacks and once or twice come across the remains of people who'd run afoul of them, Rivas had never seen a band of them himself, and he wasn't eager to. He was glad he and the girl had found concealment, and he hoped everyone down there in the riverbed would be too busy to note the tracks of two horses on the dusty bank.

Again, and more loudly now, came the eerie fluting sounds, discordant and choppy.

«It's hooters, isn't it?» the girl whispered.

«Yeah,» he said. More fervently than ever he wished he'd grabbed Nigel's hat. The shift from motion in sunlight to stillness in shade had got him disoriented again, and thoughts were as hard to hold onto as lively fish in a bait tank. He caught one, and was able to add, «Probably running down some luckless fugitives from the troubles along the coast.»

Branches framed a segment of the gravel riverbed below, and as the hoarse yells and thudding footsteps and the clatter of bicycles got louder, Rivas kept his eyes on it. Almost unconsciously he had taken out the loaded slingshot and hooked it over his wrist. He felt Sister Windchime's hand close tightly on his shoulder, but he couldn't spare her a glance to see what her expression was.

«What are you going to do?» she whispered.

«Nothing, don't worry. This,» he whispered, raising the slingshot, «is just in case they try to come up here.»

Minutes passed and the sounds grew louder and sweat tickled his forehead and neck. Damn, he thought tensely, why do there have to be all these obstacles? All we want is to get to the Regroup Tent, get back to where we belong, in the hands of the Lord. The affairs of the world are ephemeral, I believe that, and the ways of the Lord are all important, I believe that too—so why must the world's ways always be so noisy?

A particularly raw scream erupted only a short distance ahead, and seemed to shake the leaves. Someone was cursing exhaustedly and a child was sobbing.

«We've got to help them,» Sister Windchime whispered.

Rivas glared sternly at her. «Are you backsliding, sister? Everyone dies, and if they are of the Lord it's a cause for rejoicing, and if they're not then their death means less than that of a fly.» Though it's noisier, he amended. «Perfect yourself before you take it upon yourself to improve the condition of others.»

Tears glittered in her eyes. «Well, that's,» she faltered, «that's all . . . true, of course, it's logical . . . but this"—she waved downward—"this is real.»

«The world seems real, sister,» he told her gently. «With the cleverness of its illusions it tempts us to participate in them. Why, this show today is probably just a test which the Lord has sent to measure our strength. Be brave and do the right thing.»

He had turned to look at her, but now a motion below made him snap his head back. A horse had appeared below; a little girl rocked in the saddle and a man was jogging alongside with the side-to-side weaving of total exhaustion. All three creatures were covered with dust and spattered with blood.

Then a rattling, glittering construction had flashed across his view, and the man fell to his knees with a sob, and coins of bright red blood began rapidly appearing under him and around him on the smooth stones—

–and in the same instant Sister Windchime put her heels to her horse's flanks and went avalanching down the slope.

Rivas, though swearing with fright and rage, was right behind her.

The cloud of dust they raised in sliding and scrambling down to the riverbed made it hard to see anything, but to his left Rivas heard the skid and clatter of one of the hooter bikes turning around, and he lifted the slingshot and faced that direction. Then he could see the thing through the dust: the two high-wheels that stuck out to the sides at an upward angle looked like the eye-stalks of some big metal insect, and under the cross bar that connected them he could just see the rider, hunched over the pedals; the bike was still leaning way over from its sharp U-turn as it bore down on Rivas, and the starboard high-wheel was spinning from having touched ground.

Rivas held his arm straight out, and fright made him risk the slingshot's elastic by drawing the stone all the way back to his mouth. He let fly and then without waiting to see the effect vaulted off his horse and landed in a crouch on the gravel. As he squinted around for Sister Windchime he fitted another stone into the slingshot's leather pouch, and when he heard quick, rhythmic fluting ahead of him he drew the stone back and peered.

One of the marauders was off his bike and running forward, whirling his slotted sword over his head to produce the alarming, nearly musical noise, but before Rivas could aim at the man, the bike whose rider he'd shot at careened past between them, leaning all the way over so that its starboard high-wheel was rolling along on the ground and the left one stuck straight up in the air like a dish being spun precariously on top of a pole. The rider was gone. When the bike had rolled on past, Rivas saw the slotted sword glittering as it tumbled away through the air, and the man who'd held it was in the process of sitting down; the seat of his pants hit the gravel only a moment before the back of his head did, and then Rivas saw Sister Windchime—she too was off her horse, and with an expression of horror on her face was straightening up and stepping forward like a pitcher following through after a fast ball.

The harsh squeak of pebbles grating together made him look to his right. Another of the weird bicycles was racing along a course diagonal to him, its rider pedaling furiously and holding his sword back for a chop at either the girl on the halted horse or Sister Windchime. Both possible victims looked off balance and confused.

Knowing that he wouldn't have time to reload and try again, Rivas turned carefully on his heel, tracking the bike and trying to aim at a point a bit ahead of the rider and wishing he'd spent the day practicing his marksmanship. When he saw that in another moment it would be too late, he let fly, and then yelled with triumph when the rider seemed to dive off the bike; the man tumbled along right beside the riderless bicycle for a few yards, then lagged behind, rolling more slowly over the stones.

Quickly Rivas crouched and fumbled another stone into the sling, then tensely turned all the way around, scanning both banks and the riverbed in both directions, and while he was doing that he heard the first bike roll to a stop fifty yards away, and a moment later heard the second one crash janglingly into the bank. He saw the three sprawled hooters, and Sister Windchime, and the girl, still on her horse, and the man still kneeling beside it . . . and there didn't seem to be anyone else. Rivas straightened and let the slingshot's elastic relax, and the wind that was sweeping the kicked-up dust away was suddenly cool on his sweaty face and chest.

He tucked the slingshot back into his belt and trudged over to the kneeling man, who had begun yanking at the tail of his own shirt, presumably trying to make a bandage for the jagged, energetically bleeding gash in his upper arm.

«Here,» croaked Rivas, then got control of his voice and went on, «let me get that with a knife.»

«Thanks,» the man whispered.

As he ripped Lollypop's knife through the cloth, Rivas looked up at the little girl on the horse. She was staring off into the distance with a half frown, as if trying to remember where she'd left something. He decided that there was nothing to be gained by speaking to her and focusing her attention. He'd cut a wide strip of cloth free and was knotting it around the man's arm when Sister Windchime gave a little startled scream.

«This one's still alive, brother!» she called fearfully.

Rivas gripped the knife more firmly and looked up. The second man he'd shot had rolled up onto his hands and knees and was coughing a lot of blood out onto the stones. The line of his profile seemed too straight from forehead to chin, and it occurred to Rivas that the front of the man's face, including his entire nose, was gone. Rivas stood up and walked over to the nearest sword, picked it up and looked at the other two fallen marauders. The first one he'd shot at was lying somewhat bunched-looking against a rock, and had pretty clearly suffered a fatal injury of the spine; the man Sister Windchime had flung a rock at was staring wide-eyed and unblinking straight into the sun, and Rivas felt safe in ignoring him too for now. He approached the crouching, retching one.

Though his face was a horrid red tangle of exploded flesh and bloody beard-fringe from the bridge of the nose on down, the eyes were bright and alert. He gargled something that sounded to Rivas like, «Go ahead.»

Rivas did, and then with sick, weary disgust flung the fouled sword away and plodded back to the kneeling man. He had to keep fighting off a dizzy, fatalistic certainty that this hot afternoon, characterised by dust in the throat and fingers sticky with drying blood, wouldn't ever end.

The man had finished tying and adjusting the bandage, and though it seemed to have cost him half his soul, had stood up and was hanging weakly onto the saddle horn.

«I've got,» said Rivas, «money. Brandy. To sterilize your wound.»

«Screw that,» the man said. «Let me . . . sterilize . . . my stomach with it.»

«Right.»

Peripherally Rivas noticed that Sister Windchime didn't evince any disapproval at all as he walked to his horse, unstrapped the bottle and carried it back to the man. He uncorked it and handed it over.

«Cheers,» Rivas said.

«Happy days,» the man responded, then tilted the bottle up to his mouth. Bubbles wobbled up through the amber inside, but not a drop spilled. The man finally lowered it and handed it back, with a sharp exhalation and a breathless «Thanks .»

«Sure you don't want to splash some on your bandage?» Rivas asked. «It kills germs.»

«Germs,» the man echoed contemptuously. He looked around. «They all dead?»

«Seem to be.»

Sister Windchime had quietly moved up behind Rivas, and now she shyly asked, «Why were they after you?» She pointed at the horse, whose harness bore cut straps but no pouches or saddle bags. «You haven't got anything.»

«Not anymore, no,» the man agreed. «They started after us just north of Stanton. Everybody's running from the Berdoo army, hooters as well as city citizens. We had some supplies originally, but had to cut 'em loose—less weight for the horse, and we kept thinkin' we could lose these boys while they were grabbing our scattered food. We kept going up steep hills and across bad terrain, but they'd always find a parallel street and be right back on us in a half hour at the most. And then this afternoon when they knew we had no supplies left but they still kept after us, that's when I knew they were as hungry as everybody else and our poor couple of pounds of salted pork hadn't done them enough good. They wanted fresh meat.»

«Well,» said Rivas, «now they are fresh meat.»

The man gave him an unreadable stare. «Not for me, thanks.» He cautiously let go of the saddle horn, and reeled a little but didn't fall. «They killed my wife—this kid's mother—a hundred yards back. We'll head back and bury her and then be on our way. We're much obliged to you people for saving our lives.»

Sure, thought Rivas helplessly as he watched the man take the horse's reins and begin to walk back. I'll bet we bought you and your little girl another whole two days of life. Six hours less for you, maybe, and six more for her, but averaged out, say two days. Jesus.

Sister Windchime touched him hesitantly. «I'm sorry, brother,» she said. «I feel terrible about it. Of course you'll report me to the disciplinary committee.»

At first Rivas thought she was sorry for having put a fast rock into the face of the dismounted hooter, but when he looked at her he realized that she was apologizing for having intervened in a worldly quarrel; and for having done it even as he was virtuously pointing out to her the doctrinally correct course.

«It was a singularly strenuous test,» he told her with kindly condescension, now faking the tone he'd somehow been sincerely taking earlier. «I'll report that fact to them.»

«Thank you, brother,» she said earnestly. With a humble, short-stepping stride she walked back to her horse and, with an ease that infuriated Rivas, swung up into the saddle.

After he managed to flounder onto his own horse they set off down the gravel track. Rivas waved as they passed the slow horse with the girl in the saddle and the wounded man walking alongside—there was no answering wave– but Sister Windchime, he noticed, frowned unhappily and looked away.

A few minutes later they passed the collapsed, ripped-up body of a woman. They didn't alter their pace.

«They,» said Sister Windchime after a while, «are going to die, aren't they? Soon?»

Rivas glanced at her. «One way or another, yeah. They won't make it to a town.»

«Then it didn't do any good, did it? Interfering. All we did was . . . delay them a little, in their trip to the Dogtown gate.»

Rivas was busy worrying about his episode of unfeigned birdy orthodoxy up on the hidden slope-crest road, and even this slang confirmation of his guess that she was an Ellay girl didn't make him want to talk. «Right,» he said shortly. «Goddamn waste of time.»

For another half mile they rode on in silence while the sunlight began to cast a warm light on the greenery to their left and silhouette it to their right; then Sister Windchime said, «Why do I feel like you have to do what you can to help? Even when you know in advance it won't do any good.»

«Because you're sinful,» said Rivas impatiently. «Now shut up, will you?»

«Would it be all right,» she ventured a little later, «if we stopped for a few minutes? I think I need to do some more Sanctified Dancing.»

Rivas groaned. «We're in a hurry, okay? Do it in the saddle.»

After that they rode on in silence, Sister Windchime stiff with resentment and Rivas frightened—frightened of what he was getting into and of what was happening to his mind

* * *

They carefully avoided all other groups of fugitives and by early evening they'd reached their destination. Viewed from above as they crested the last of the rounded, brush-covered hills, the huge Regroup Tent in the valley below them looked, Rivas thought dizzily as he swayed on the back of the horse, like a vast bony beast huddling under a patchwork blanket big enough to drape around God's shoulders. Up where they were, Rivas and Sister Windchime were still dazzled by the red sun sinking over the Pacific Ocean, but the tent was already in shadow, and lamps and torches bobbed like fireflies in the valley.

In spite of himself, Rivas slowly turned his head to the southeast, knowing what lay in that direction. And yes, there it was on the far side of the Seal Beach Desolate, the Holy City, its wall just visible as a pale rectangular segment on the horizon. He shivered, not entirely because of the cold sea wind that stirred the dry grass on the miles-separated hilltops.

With no sensation of relief he let his gaze fall back into the dark valley that lay open to him below his horse's hooves. He remembered how easily and totally he had succumbed to the mind-sapping techniques of Sister Sue and her band, and how difficult it had been to float back up into his own identity. I didn't even know how old I was, he thought now with a tight mix of sadness and panic. And this afternoon I delivered all those birdy homilies to this girl sincerely!

Only for you, Uri, he thought as he nudged his horse forward and down, would I do this.

In less than a minute the chilly sea wind and the sunlight and the view of the ocean were behind and above him. Up from below came warmth and the smell of rancid cooking oil.

«Not so fast, Brother Thomas,» called Sister Windchime behind him. «Your horse will trip in the shadows.»

«How nonessential of you to remember my name,» he snarled without looking back.

Rivas had been to the Regroup Tent only once, more than a decade ago, and in the years since he'd forgotten how big the thing was. Now as his horse slid and clattered down the slope, kicking up a plume of gray dust that was red lit at its breeze-flattened top, he began to remember details: that there were streets and tents inside it, and that the highest sections of the roof were seldom visible from inside because of the upwardly pooled smoke from all the cooking fires, and that for half an hour or so at night, especially after a hot day, you could hear a low whistling that was the warmer interior air escaping through the stitching of the million seams.

The path leveled out and, having given vent to some of his apprehension by his plunging descent, Rivas reined in and waited for Sister Windchime to catch up. It'd be idiotic to ditch her now, he told himself, after you've put up with her all the way down.

She stared at him when she rode up alongside. «You're a strange one, Brother Thomas. You act so bitter, but I've never seen anyone so anxious to get back to the Lord.»

He made himself smile. «Being away makes me bitter. I'm sorry. I'll be perfect when we get there.»

«I think we should both take the sacrament as soon as we get in, don't you?»

«Well—ofcourse ,» he said wildly. «Let's go. You can lead for a while—I think I may have lamed my horse a little there.»

As she nudged her mount ahead, he let his horse follow at its own pace and weighed his choices. It would look good, he had to admit, to rush in begging for the sacrament; the problem was that they'd probably be given it. So did he want to use the drunk defense—there was the third of a bottle of Currency—or the newly discovered pain defense?

Somehow, taking into account his weariness and fever– and the fact that he couldn't approach the tent with the liquor—the answer was inevitable. He pulled the bottle out of his shirt, held it down where the girl wouldn't see it if she turned around, and with his good hand he thumbed the cork out. He heard it rustle in the dry grass. And then every time it was clear that her attention would be devoted for a few moments to guiding her horse, he'd raise one arm as if pointing out emerging stars to her, and behind this cover– in case anyone below might be looking up—he'd raise the brandy bottle and swallow a couple of mouthfuls. The warm fumy liquor choked him, but he forced down gulp after gulp, and when he knew that one more drop would undo all his labor he let the nearly empty bottle fall noiselessly into a thick green bush. He'd ridden a few yards further before he realized that the bush was wild anise. He halted his horse and goaded it back, then with a cry toward Sister Windchime he swung his leg over and jumped into the bush.

He buried his face in the greenery and as he heard the thudding of her horse's returning hoof beats he ripped up handfuls of the ferny plant, shoved them into his mouth and chomped them up.

To his surprise he felt her hand on his shoulder and realized that she'd actually dismounted to help him, or at least to satisfy curiosity. «Are you all right, Brother Thomas?»

He got up unsteadily, his recent actions having accelerated the alcohol's invasion of his blood stream. «Yeah, thanks, I was dizzy—» He brushed bits of greenery out of his hair and spat out a leaf or two. «Dizzier than I thought, not really well enough to ride all day, I guess . . . went to sleep and fell off, and I . . . banged my head a good knock on the ground just now.»

He grinned foolishly at her. Perfect, he thought. I killed the brandy smell on my breath and at the same time established an alibi for any drunken lurching or babbling I may do: Poor guy —evidently a concussion. And I get to be drunk, too.

«Let's walk the rest of the way,» said Sister Windchime. «Wait here while I get the horses.»

The sky was a deep cobalt blue by the time they'd wound their way down the increasingly well-constructed path to the valley floor, and when Rivas looked up he saw that a lot of stars were already visible, seeming to hang not too far above the highest peak of the tent. Lowering his head, a bit jerkily, he saw several makeshift towers like the ones that had ringed the field in the Cerritos Stadium, and, closer at hand, an approaching figure silhouetted by the cooking fires behind it. The figure was tall and broad and carried a staff, and for one moment of drunken panic Rivas thought it was the same shepherd who had stomped his pelican and. shot him, and whom he'd killed, the day before yesterday. «Children,» rumbled this shepherd, «welcome home. What band are you from?»

«I'm from Brother Owen's,» said Sister Windchime. «I . . . don't remember,» said Rivas. He remembered Sister Sue vividly, but he wanted to get the concussion established right away.

Sister Windchime came in right on cue. «Brother Thomas has been feverish all day,» she explained apologetically. «And on the way down the path a little while ago he fell off his horse and bumped his head.»

Good girl, thought Rivas. «We'd like to take the sacrament, please,» he said.

The shepherd clapped him on the shoulder. «Of course. I imagine you've missed merging with the Lord.»

The man had turned toward the light now as the three of them approached the tent, and Rivas could see the kindly smile curling the mouth behind the beard. Careful, he told himself; they practice that you're-home-now smile. Don't relax.

A dozen cooking fires hazed the air of the valley floor and made the many lamps and torches glow like lights seen through fog, and as the shepherd escorted Rivas and Sister Windchime on a looping course toward the tent, unseen people called greetings to them through the smoke and glare and darkness: «Welcome home, stray sheep!» «Merge with the Lord!» and «May you enter the Holy City soon!»

Oh, thanks, thought Rivas, nervous in spite of the brandy. He was trying to figure out what it was that had changed since his previous visit. Something—some smell or noise– was missing.

Under wide hooked-back flaps the tent's main entrance was a twenty-foot-tall arch spilling out a delta of yellow light against the increasing darkness, and as they approached it Rivas could see brightly painted canvas tents inside and robed figures striding about. It occurred to him now what the missing piece of furniture was—there weren't any far-gone communicants speaking in tongues. The other time he'd been here, the valley had echoed day and night with their babbling.

«A jaybush will be administering communion before very long,» the shepherd told them as he led them inside, «so it might not be a good idea to put anything in your stomachs right now, but I'll find you a tent where you can relax for a—are you all right?»

Goggling around at the lanes of colorful tents and the spiderwebs of cables far overhead, Rivas had stumbled and fallen to his knees, but as he got up, muttering apologies, he saw only concern in his companions' faces.

«Merging with the Lord will help clear your head,» the shepherd assured him.

Rivas nodded solemnly, trying to re-establish his dignity.

«It will be a well-attended ceremony,» the shepherd went on. «Several bands are here to pick up their strays, and one of the bands is going directly from here into the Holy City!»

«Called home at last after their hour of wandering in the wilderness,» quoted Rivas drunkenly.

«Amen, little brother,» said the shepherd.

To someone perched on those high cables, thought Rivas an hour later as he peered up into the smoky heights of the tent, this line of Jaybirds would look like the outline of a huge snail, all looped around and around in a spiral.

He stood up on his toes and craned his neck, but he couldn't see the white-robed jaybush anymore. The old man had wordlessly entered the tent and begun walking through the coiled gauntlet toward the center; Rivas had nervously dropped his gaze when the jaybush passed directly in front of him, but when a few minutes later the man made his next pass on the other side of the line of people in front of Rivas, he sneaked a look . . . and reflected, not for the first time, that it was hard to tell jaybushes apart. Like every other one he'd ever seen, this one had a craggy, browned face and an ivory-colored beard.

Suddenly from the center of the coil he heard an agonized gasp and the clopping thud of a heavy fall, and he realized that the distant mutter he'd heard an instant earlier had been the jaybush's formal exhortation: «Merge with the Lord.» He could now hear the faint creaking of clothes and the change in everyone's breathing as the people in the spiral tensed in anticipation. Many closed their eyes and seemed to go into a trance, and Rivas knew that if any of the far-gone men present were on the brink of entering the speaking in tongues stage—women, of course, never deteriorated that far—it would happen about now. Got them old sevatividam blues, thought Rivas.

And, sure enough, two men in the line ahead of him started up at the same instant, in such effortlessly perfect unison that even their inhalations were exactly synchronized. «Hmmm ,» they said. «Hmm? » Now joined by two more, they went on in a rush: «Yes, yes, it's boiling down nicely now, let me see —yes, I think I can even taste the heaviness . . . . Help me boil it, children, gently, each of you lend me your little flame . . . .»

Quickly but calmly several shepherds trotted into the spiral, pausing in front of each speaker in tongues just long enough to deliver, with all their strength but apparently no animosity, a devastating punch to the belly.

Finally there was just one speaker still working—»Always welcome, newcomers are, oh, quite a group, how tasty, tasty . . . yes, children, let's see if we're strong enough to squeeze it, shall we? Summon a triton for your sea-king to make a hot dinner of, ho ho ho. . . . » and then an echoing punch silenced him too. All through these noisy interruptions the metronomic «Merge with the Lord,» and subsequent thumping collapse, had been continuing without any change in pace.

Rivas wished he could sober up just for a minute and think clearly. My God, he thought, they speak in English now! It's a much eerier-seeming trick now that when it was just gibberish. How do they do it, so perfectly in step with one another? Do they rehearse it? Impossible, most far-gones can't even feed themselves . . . .

And why do the shepherds silence them now? They never did when it was gibberish.

What are they afraid might be revealed?

«Merge with the Lord .» A scream, then a rattling thud.

Rivas wondered where Sister Windchime had wound up. Some of the new recruits were crying—the sacrament was a fairly scary spectacle to someone not used to it—and he wondered how deeply that vein of worried doubt ran in her, and what would be the effects on her of today's events and conversations. He looked around as much as he could without turning his head but didn't see her. Oh well, he thought. She's not my responsibility. He closed his eyes as if in a trance and waited for the jaybush to get to him.

When he opened his eyes again and blinked around, he was startled to see that considerable time had passed. In front of him was a circular clearing littered with bodies, some limp and some twitching and huffing as if with bad dreams; a few people were on their feet out there, gaping around in a sort of drugged bewilderment. The jaybush was only two people away to Rivas's left, and he wished he'd stayed in his nap or trance or whatever it had been just a minute longer, so that he wouldn't have seen the sacrament coming.

«Merge with the Lord.» A young man jackknifed forward, and the tremendous crack as his head hit the hard-packed dirt made Rivas guess he was killed. He tried to concentrate on how he wanted to fall himself—bending the knees so he'd sit down first, try to get the arms up around the head—but a woman behind him was crying so loudly that he could hardly make his drink-fogged mind work.

The jaybush stepped up to the boy next to Rivas. «Merge with the Lord,» spoke the white-robed figure, extending a hand. The boy hissed sharply as the touch was made, seemed to struggle to remain upright, then blew out a noseful of blood and went down like a dropped armload of firewood. Some of the red spray dotted the jaybush's robe, but there was already some drying blood spattered on the hem.

«No,» wept the woman behind Rivas. «I don't want to go to the Holy City. Not so soon.»

Something about her voice struck the drunken Rivas as familiar, and he turned to look at her. She was about thirty, a bit overweight, and tangled black hair hung over her reddened eyes.

He heard the jaybush step in front of him at the same moment that he recognized the woman as Urania Barrows, and even as he opened his mouth to say something to her the jaybush's cold, bony finger touched the back of his neck.

He wasn't drunk now, though he was vaguely aware that he had been recently and would be again soon, as soon as he got back into his body. In the meantime it was pleasant to be able to see in the dark and move without using any muscles . . . though he was careful not to move too fast or too far, for he knew it would be easy to scoot right up into the sky and forget the way back.

The big tent was far below him. He was level with the hilltop where he and the girl had paused earlier this evening, and he was still rising—must have bounced hard off the ground back there—but so slowly now that he knew there was no cause for alarm. It was nice to be alone up here, distantly aware of all the others way off there to the southeast. They were linked now to the cold, sentient thing that couldn't reach him; every few seconds he perceived yet another of them going there . . . no, more like becoming there, and stopping being in the tent . . . and much more distantly there were a few isolated awarenesses in the darkness to north and east . . .one fairly conspicuous one, as a matter of fact. . . .

Suddenly he was certain that something out there in those miles of darkness was aware of him, was watching him. And he knew he could see it if he cared to, for he wasn't seeing with his eyes now . . . .

But he was frightened, and was willing himself down, trying to put some hills between himself and that awareness out there in the dark; it was all he could do to move, and it occurred to him that fright in its pure state, without the hormones and reflexes of a physical body, was paralyzing, and that if he hadn't just been in a body recently he probably wouldn't have been capable of any motion at all.

The thing out there knew he was retreating, and he could feel its amusement.

Soon, it said, though without words. It's always been me you loved best. Only.

He didn't choose to see it, but he realized that it didn't matter, for he knew precisely what it looked like. It looked like himself.

And just before the hill rose up and blocked the night sky in front of him, he caught a faint hint, more an attitude than a thought, of the thing's ambition: below him, in the tent, was a physical body steadily deteriorating; out there in the hills was a physical body steadily solidifying. Was there a link, was there some sort of transference at work that was only symbolized by the transfer of blood? Was that thing becoming him? Would it one day complete itself and walk off, leaving him in a mindless little cellophanelike bag sharing the wind currents with dandelion seeds?

Just as he was about to be swallowed up by the tent that had been growing nearer and nearer beneath him, he realized that he had picked up another half thought from the distant thing: it was glad he had used the drunk defense rather than the pain one, because the thing didn't want any . . . any . . . what word, he wondered, expressed the flavor of the concept? Something like brothers, he decided as, inside the smoky tent now, he let himself be drawn down to his body; something like . . . rivals.

Sound crashed back in on him so abruptly that he jumped like a startled cat, and his brandy-fouled digestive system rebelled at the sudden movement; he rolled to his feet and with clenched teeth and sweat-cold forehead sprinted out of the tent without looking at anything, and on the dirt track outside rid himself of a lot of the brandy and a surprising amount of wild anise. Fortunately it wasn't an uncharacteristic response to the sacrament.

After a while he walked back, dug his heels into the dirt and leaned his weight back against the fabric of the tent. It gave a little, and he wound up resting comfortably at a twenty-degree angle, facing east. Well, he thought, at least I didn't get down on my hands and knees this time and go woof woof woof. He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths of the dawn-chilly air.

Suddenly it stuck him—dawn air? And yes, the sky behind the black hill was a little paler than black. Christ, he thought with instant panic, was I out all night? Has Uri's band left?

He floundered back upright and looked around. A few hooded figures were still hunching back and forth across the clearing in front of the tent, and he made himself walk swayingly over to one of them.

He grabbed the person by the shoulder. «Listen,» he babbled, «I . . . was supposed to be . . . I'm a member of that band that was supposed to go to the Holy City, you understand, but I just now recovered from the goddamn communion. They haven't left yet, have they?»

The person—Rivas couldn't tell in the dimness if it was a man or a woman—yanked its shoulder free of his hand. He couldn't see tears on the blur of the face but he could hear them in the voice as the person choked, «I—don't know. Ask the ones there by the entrance.» The figure hurried away from him and was almost instantly enveloped in the shadows of the eastern hill.

Not feeling at all reassured, Rivas reeled to the tent entrance, which was still brightly lit from within. «Has the band heading for the Holy City left yet?» he croaked at the half-dozen people clustered there. «I'm, uh, supposed to be, like, with them, all right?» He glared around belligerently.

Dark hoods turned toward him, but against the light from inside the tent he couldn't see faces. «They left hours ago, brother,» a man said in not a very friendly tone. «And their shepherd oversaw the loading of them all into a wagon, and he made sure he had every one of them, even the unconscious ones.» The man took a step closer. «What's your name, brother? Trying to get into the Lord's city by lying is a pretty serious sin.»

Another robed and hooded figure stepped forward from the group. «His name is Brother Boaz,» said Sister Sue. «Grab him, he—»

Rivas was off and running through the darkness toward the path that led up the hill, hearing nothing but the hard quick thumping of booted feet close behind him and his heart laboring in his chest, and he was wishing he'd done some exercise during his years in Ellay; and then an open hand slapped him solidly between the shoulder blades and he went flailing forward, off balance, his feet unable to keep up with his plunging body, and he hit the ground in a long grinding slide that left him retching in a cloud of dust as he struggled to get air into his impact-emptied lungs.

Strong hands yanked him roughly to his feet; he'd have collapsed again immediately but the two men held him up and turned him around, back toward the tent. Sister Sue was walking up to the swaying trio, and in the brightening light Rivas could just see her broad, savage smile. «He's a redeemer,» she told the figures following her. «He's the one who killed our shepherd in the Cerritos Stadium. He knows a way to resist the sacrament.» She stopped in front of him and her ferally happy gaze made him squint defensively. «But he's . . . susceptible, aren't you, little brother? He can be made to be uncertain about things like who a musical instrument belongs to, and how old he is. Yes.» She laughed softly and reached out and touched Rivas's abraded, bleeding cheek. «Yes, I think that after a couple of administrations of the sacrament while you're securely tied up, and then being kept awake and chanted over for about seventy-two hours, you'll be completely repentant, don't you think, and eager to tell us all the details of your sins.»

Rivas realized that he'd never been truly scared before now. «Look,» he quavered, trying to keep from breaking down and crying and probably wetting his pants too, «look, you don't have to. I'll tell you right now, Christ, everything, all of it, I swear, please—»

Sister Sue laughed again, affectionately. «No no, little brother. We'll do it our way—the Lord's way.» She turned to the four figures behind her. «He's strong with fear. All of you hold him. Get a rope around him—but not around his neck. Soon enough he'll be happy to merge with the Lord, but right now he'd certainly rather take his own life.»

With stout leather thongs they tied him to two big timbers which had been crossed and bolted together to form a big standing capital X, and a wide basket of woven bamboo was wedged over the tops of the beams as a sort of roof. The X stood over on the seaward side of the big tent, by the trash pits and the latrines; people seldom lingered on this side normally, but the sight of someone being disciplined roused morbid curiosity even in Jaybirds, and when the news about Rivas got around the shepherds had to set up a sticks-and-string boundary fence to keep the crowd back. The bright dawn had given way to an overcast sky, and the clouds whirled occasional skirts of rain across the valley, leaving patterns of round, dark pockmarks in the dust.

Rivas's ludicrous spread-eagled position was uncomfortable from the start, and during the morning it became increasingly painful in his shoulders and back; his arms would eventually have become entirely numb if he hadn't kept flexing them against the bindings, and wiggling his fingers . . . though by midmorning he had to roll his head around and look up to see if the fingers really were moving as ordered. The most tormenting things were aches and itches that he couldn't do anything about, and the way his nose kept tickling as if leading up to a sneeze which never came, and his consuming hangover thirst. Blood and sweat slowly dripped from him or soaked into the wood, and he couldn't get rid of the idea that as every drop left him the hemogoblin out there in the wilderness became stronger and more solid, and that as every dragging hour eroded Rivas's alertness and capacity for connected thought, the thing out there became more intelligent.

At around noon the rain became steady, and soon after that it began coming down hard in battering sheets that raised a foggy spray of splashes from the muddy ground and rattled a loud, continuous drum-roll on the tent and the hillside and the basket above Rivas's head. His black hair was slicked across his forehead and his clothes were darkly plastered against him and the breath seemed even hotter in his head because of how cold he was. The crowd of Jaybirds dispersed reluctantly, and before long they had all gone back inside the tent.

Rivas had by now become almost calm. He knew he was not as strong, mentally or physically, as he'd been at twenty-one, and that if he became a Jaybird again now he probably would not again succeed in escaping the dreadful faith. But he knew too how short was the lifetime of the average far-gone—and he suspected that he'd be gone, and definitely far, in record time. Sister Sue had been right this morning in guessing that he'd gladly have killed himself rather than wind up here . . . but now he could see little difference between the two courses. And it seemed to him that there was something fitting about not dying until everything one ever had was used up . . . not dropping the glass until it was empty and even gnawed a little . . . . There was a term he'd heard once . . . test to destruction. . . . To learn how much punishment something can take before breaking, you eventually have to break it . . . .

. . . He could think of a lot of smooth rhymes for «break it». . . .

At least, he thought feverishly, I won't wind up an old man. He spoke hoarsely into the rain: «I never did want to wind up an old man.»

Then, and it scared him even though he could tell it was just delirium, he thought he heard the hemogoblin's voice from miles away across the rainy hills: Well then I'll come over and wind him up.

He shuddered, and shook his head to clear it of all these morbid, self-pitying ideas. There you go again focusing only on Rivas, he told himself. You're just fascinated by the Gregorio Rivas story, aren't you? Especially the tragic ending.

What about the Urania Barrows story? She may be just a supporting actor in your story, but what about hers? Or is yours the only one there is, and when you're not actually looking at people they disappear or collapse like stage costumes that aren't currently in use? Now that would be an interesting position for you to take, Rivas; maybe even if you somehow get out of this you'll just end up as Noah Almondine's main successor in the art of cutting out paper dolls.

He couldn't hear over the thrashing hiss of the rain, but through the deeply moored timbers of his rack he could feel the thudding of approaching footsteps. He closed his eyes so that they might think he was unconscious . . . . The jay-bush might just touch him anyway, but it was worth a try.

«Brother Thomas!» came a sharp whisper.

Rivas's eyes snapped open. A robed and hooded figure stood in front of him, holding a knife. «Sister Windchime?» he rasped.

«Yes. I don't want to get my hair wet or they'll know I'm the one that did this.» Quickly she plowed the knife edge down the gap between Rivas's right arm and the wood, and as he shook off the slimy loops of wet leather she did the same for his left arm—and then had to hold him up with her free hand, for he'd started to fold helplessly forward. Reaching down, she cut his legs free too, and Rivas reflected dazedly that this was one strong young lady. «Now run,» she said. «No one should ever beforced to take the sacrament.»

«Thank you,» Rivas gasped. «I—»

«Go, damn you!»

«Right, right.»

Rivas ran wobblingly toward the seaward hill, his shoes splashing in the new mud, and when he got to the slope he crouched behind one of the scrawny bushes at the foot of the hill until he got his breath back and stopped seeing a rainbow glitter seeping into his vision from the sides.

After a few minutes he scrambled to the next bush, then to a boulder he could lie behind, then to a shallow gully. . . . Half an hour later he thought he heard shouting in the wind, but it was hard to be sure, for by this time he was well up into the inland end of the valley, and the patter of the rain on stone and leaves, and the trickle and splash of newborn streams, tended to drown out more distant sounds.

He paused, though, and looked back down the valley. The Regroup Tent was a gray mushroom far away, difficult to distinguish from the bulks of the hills because of the mile of veiling rain that hung between it and him.

He grinned. Redeemer, redeem thyself. So long, Sister Sue.

Late in the afternoon he found a building—once some kind of office, apparently—and decided that smoke against this gray-mottled sky would not constitute much of a risk, so he frictioned up a fire of plywood shelves and antique invoices in the open doorway and warmed himself and baked his clothes dry. He tried not to torment himself with thoughts of food or—though he had managed to slake his thirst at a pool of rain water—liquor. Finally, dry and warm and at least not much sicker than he'd been this morning, he admitted to himself that there was nothing he could do right now except, with massive reluctance and not even a drink, review his situation.

Well, he told himself, Uri's gone now, but everything you could do you did do. You not only have Barrow's five thousand fifths, you earned them: you took the sacrament twice; you were actually shot, though nobody'll believe that; twice a hemogoblin attached itself to you; you had to kill four men; and if it weren't for the unlikely intervention of that girl, Sister Windchime, you'd be a grinning, babbling moron at this very moment. Oh, and that guy knocked you down this morning, and damned hard, too. And you cut hell out of your thumb. And God knows if you still have a job at Spink's.

He glanced around at the rusty, dusty old filing cabinets and wondered if any of the generations-dead people who'd worked here had been in the habit of caching some liquor somewhere. One heard of such finds occasionally.

Suddenly and shamefacedly he remembered the incomparably greatest suffering he'd sustained during the course of this last, unsuccessful redemption: the loss of Uri herself! For thirteen years he'd planned to go find her as soon as he'd got some real money and could give her the kind of life she deserved, and for these last three days he'd been out actively risking his life to find her . . . and now she was gone, snatched from him just at the very moment—what a touch—the very moment when his three-day search, no, thirteen-year pilgrimage, was within seconds and inches of being completed!

He was sure to get some good lyrics out of all this.

Then with an unwelcome clarity that memory can rarely manage, he re-heard how Barrows had described him four nights ago: « . . . Just a kind of shrewd, cunning insect.» And though he'd laughed then, all at once he was astonished at how thoroughly Barrows had understood him. My God, Rivas thought now, you're going to get some lyrics out of this, are you? Sister Windchime may be birdy, but she's twice the human being you are, boy.

Well, he replied to himself defensively, I'm a professional songwriter—what am I supposed to do, pretend I don't derive my songs from the things that happen to me?

No, clown, what you're supposed to do now is the same thing you were supposed to do yesterday. Go get Uri.

But they took her into the Holy City.

So?

So no one has ever come out of the Holy City except a few jaybushes and shepherds. Even Norton Jaybush himself hasn't been seen since entering there ten years ago. Everyone knows that a redemption attempt ends when the quarry goes in there. And no, I don't think such an unheard-of effort is called for by the unheard-of price I screwed Barrows into paying. (Though how on earth could I have bargained for Uri's soul?)

Now memory replayed a statement of his own, one he'd made to Barrows that same night: «Evidently she's worth five to you, but not ten.» So what do you tell yourself, boy? he thought. Evidently she's worth a cut thumb and a few scares, but not worth putting your life on the table on a long-shot chance?

Against this question he involuntarily held up a sheaf of treasured images: his apartment on First by the North Gate, with rain and night outside and himself inside with warm lamplight and a pipe and a drink and a book; long summer afternoons with the feet up on a sunny balcony rail, and a friend or two, and a cool beer standing right where his hand could reach it; the pleasant certainty of new pretty girls to charm and impress and possibly take to his bed, and the equally pleasant certainty of being comfortably alone in that bed later . . . .

And at length he realized, bleakly, that all this did not balance the scale. Not when Uri's life was what was being weighed. He had to go to Irvine and get into the Holy City and get Uri out.

God damn her, he thought fervently, for getting us into this.