Fugitives of Chaos

Colin wagged a finger in my face. "No more talk about quitting as leader, then. Okay? If you try to resign again, I'll mutiny. Now, then! How do I get my powers back? What am I supposed to be able to do again?"

I said, "Write love letters. And I saw you jump nearly thirty feet straight up once. And maybe anything else you want. Your power works on desire. You wish it; it happens."

He closed his eyes, tilted back his head, spread his hands. "I wish I had my powers!"

We all looked at him.

He opened one eye. "Is something supposed to happen?"

I said, "I don't know!"

He closed his eye again. "I wish for a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich!" He held his hand up.

He wiggled his fingers. His hand stayed empty, of course.

He opened his eyes. "Is this like one of those monkey's paw things, where my Aunt Petunia is going to die in a plane crash and leave me the money to buy a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich?"

I said, "I think it has to be something you really, really want."

He closed his eyes again, spread his legs, and put his arms out as if he were ready to catch a sandbag or something about to be dropped on him. "Marilyn Monroe, as she was when she appeared in Seven Year Itch, naked from her bubble-bath, lonely, horny, and needing the warmth and comfort of an Irish schoolboy half her age! One, two, three… go! And she has her own birth control."

Quentin said, "You're not Irish."

Colin muttered, "I sure as hell am not English, thank God!"

"You are a monster from beyond space and time, shape-changed to look human."

"That just shows how little you know about the Irish, laddie. We're all monsters from beyond space and time. Besides, with a name like Colin…"

"You made that name up!"

Colin opened his eyes and put his hands on his hips. He turned away from Quentin and glowered at me.

"Where's my Marilyn?"

Vanity said, "Maybe you have to throw a gold pin in the well, or something."

Victor said sardonically, "Marilyn Monroe died in 1962. Isn't that exactly the monkey's paw kind of thing you were trying to avoid?"

Colin rolled his eyes and turned toward Victor. "I said, 'as she was in Seven Year Itch' ! That's the movie where her skirts blew up. She was alive during that scene."

I said, "Maybe it works more like psychic phenomena and less like just wishing. The desire has to come from the core of your being."

Colin said, "So… you're saying I should have wished for Catwoman?"

I goggled at him. "Who?"

"Supervillainess. Dresses all in skintight black leather. Wears heels. Carries a whip. Catwoman is ichiban

. The hottest."

Vanity pointed skyward, hopping and screaming. "Colin! Put your arms out! Here she comes! It's Julie Newmar! Catch her! Catch her!"

Colin's head jerked up. Vanity leaned over, picked up a handful of snow, and dashed it into Colin's face when he brought his gaze back down.

Colin smiled a nasty smile, picked up a double handful of snow, and started forward. Vanity squealed and danced around behind me, grabbing my shoulders. "Leader! Protect me!"

I put my hand up. "Okay, children! Playtime is over. Colin, put that snowball down."

"Down her cleavage, I will."

"Drop it."

"But she started it!"

"You're a big strong Irishman, and she's English, so she gets to oppress you. Okay? We are in the middle of an escape attempt. I do not want to lose anyone this evening. Colin, I do not know how to turn on your powers. I am not even sure what they are. We only have the amount of time it will take Boggin to fly up to the North, look around, and come back. That's assuming he didn't set additional guards around the Great Hall."

Quentin said, "He's at the burial mound."

A cold sensation passed over my neck. I looked at Quentin with mingled horror and respect. "It is really eerie when you do that. How do you know?"

Quentin said, "My friend told me. Every time Boggin moves, he has to tell the spirits in the air and wind where he is, so they know where to go to bring him news of what people are saying. So, every time he moves, he has to tell them all where he is going. This wand used to belong to Mrs. Wren. She used it to keep track of Boggin. Not all of her old spells are washed out of it. When my friend moved into the stick, the house wasn't empty."

I said, "Could it be another trap? Could it be bugged, I mean? Booby-trapped? Or giving you false information?"

Quentin said, "After the oath she swore to Romus? I doubt it. But it is possible. I can throw this stick into the ocean and pick up another one right now. You want me to? You are the leader. It is your decision."

It was not an easy decision. On the one hand, knowing where Boggin was, was of utmost importance to us. On the other hand, the danger that Erichtho the Witch could still have some sort of power or mysterious connection leading back to her wand…

I said to Quentin, "If this were a fairy tale, and you were a prince, what would you do?"

He smiled. "I am a prince. My father is Proteus, remember?"

"And?"

"I'd pitch it into the sea."

I said, "Throw it, then. But—wait a minute. See if you can remove the curse Mrs. Wren put on Colin.

You might be able to unblock his memory. The magic paradigm trumps the psychic paradigm."

Quentin nodded. "This involves a very brief demonstration."

He walked in a circle around Colin, dragging the distaff, and made a circle in the snow about him. He bowed to the West and held up the distaff in both hands.

"I call upon the guardians of the watchtowers of the West, the element of Water. I hold the power of the witch Erichtho in my hands, given to me from her, freely and without hurt. I hold here the curse she placed upon Pho-betor. Erichtho! I call you by your true name! The Guardians of the Towers of the West break your power in two! Hesperides, lave Phobetor in your wave, and let him emerge unhurt, washed clean, stainless, and forgiven! So Mote It Be!"

And he cracked the distaff in half over his knee.

He threw the two halves of the distaff spinning into the waters far below, calling out, "This gift I give to the Sons of Danu, who dwell in the waters of the West, in memory of promises kept."

He reached over with his foot and rubbed out part of the line he had drawn in the snow around Colin.

"The wall around you is broken. Be free."

Colin clutched his head, rolling his eyes like a maddened horse, and doubled over, groaning.

Quentin stepped forward, looking worried. Victor said, "Did it work? Are your memories coming back?"

Colin straightened up, brushing his hands through his hair. "Naw. Just joking around. But that was a damn impressive ceremony, Big Q. Thanks for trying, at least."

Vanity said softly to me, "Permission to whack him with a snowball again, O my Queen?"

"Denied." I raised my voice. "Next step. We fly to the Great Hall. We have two fliers in the group and three walkers. Which one of you two boys can carry two people?"

Quentin, who was rather short, looked up at Victor. Quentin pointed at Victor. "Him."

Victor said, "I should take the two lightest people."

Quentin snorted and said, "I'm not carrying Colin."

Victor said, "Amelia? Colin? How much do you each weigh?"

Quentin suddenly got a funny look on his face. He said, "Amelia. I have to carry Amelia."

Vanity looked at him oddly.

He said, "There are reasons which are hard to explain. According to the signs, she flew with me before.

The sympathies might be more favorable if I do not introduce any novel parameters into the demonstration."

I said, "Vanity, if you sense anyone watching us, break off. If we get scattered, we'll… meet back here, at the Kissing Well. Okay?"

Quentin said, "It will take me a moment to prepare."

Victor said, "Should I wait?"

Quentin looked at me. "Leader makes the call."

I said, "Let me think. If you meet Miss Daw, Colin can stop her, if he can make himself want to. Fell and Victor are at least evenly matched; so are Grendel and Colin."

Vanity said, "Who is Grendel?"

"Mr. Glum's first name. He's planning on kidnapping you and marrying you, so be careful of him. If you meet Mrs. Wren, Victor can neutralize her magic. Um. The same goes for me and Quentin running into anybody. We are either going to be equal to or be able to trump any paradigm we come across. I do not know how Olympians and Phaeacians fit into the chart, though. You guys take off; Quentin and I will join you."

Quentin said, "I have to make a preparatory lemma. I'm going uphill to that grove of trees. Follow me when I call."

He walked away from the Kissing Well to where some clumps of trees clung to the grass that broke through the rocky soil. As he approached the grove, he put out his hand.

A long stick of pale wood came felling out of the grove toward him. It was as if an unseen stagehand, hidden just beyond the tree, had tossed him a prop. He caught the stick and walked into the trees.

We waited a moment or two, until Quentin called out that he was ready. I waved at the others to take off.

Victor, without any further ado, put one arm around Colin's waist, and told him to loop his belt through the chain links of his jerkin. But Victor simply picked up Vanity and hoisted her over his shoulder, like Tarzan picking up Jane, so her head was dangling down his back and her bottom was high in the air.

With no noise and no fuss, the invisible chessmaster picked up his Victor piece and swept him off the board and out of sight.

I climbed the rocky slope and entered the small grove of trees. There was no visible sign that Quentin had done anything in particular; no cut-open goats or candles floating in midair or anything like that. If he had made any scratches on the ground or the trees, it was too dim, in the moonlight, with the twigs and branches overhead, to see.

He said, "Um, Amelia, I hope you won't get mad, but…"

I pulled off my scarf and handed it to him. "You have to blindfold me. I've been through this before."

I had my aviatrix cap (which I take along on all my es-cape attempts) folded into a bulky wad in my outer coat pocket. I put it on and began tucking my hair up.

He wrapped the scarf fabric around my head, and I donned the goggles atop them.

He said, "Now open your mouth."

I hooked a thumb under the blindfold and goggles and raised one corner to turn and give him a cold, one-eyed stare.

"Why exactly am I opening my mouth?"

He said, "I thought you said we did this before… ?"

"Blindfold, yes. Gagged, absolutely not. I cannot go a week around here without someone trying to tie me up. Why the hell do you need me with a scarf in my mouth to fly?"

He pointed at the trees. Or maybe he was pointing at unseen things in the air around us. "The long-lived ones say you tried to talk last time. They don't trust you to keep your mouth shut."

"What if I promise?"

He cocked his head, looking thoughtful. "Um, Amelia. Rumor has been set against you. Someone has been spreading the story that you are an oath-breaker."

"Boggin."

"Well, whoever did it, the long-lived ones won't carry us without some clear sign that you won't talk.

Look. I'll just tie it loosely. It's not going to hurt you, or choke you. It's a symbol. It's only symbolic.

Well… ? The others are going to be waiting for us. We are being chased, you know."

"Okay. Okay, fine. But you don't tell anyone, anyone, that I let you do this."

I put the blindfold back in place. Quentin moved around behind me, reached up over my shoulders. I felt soft fabric come up toward my mouth, touch my lips.

The gag was just for show. He draped a strip of fabric—maybe it was his scarf—over my mouth and tied it in back of my head. It would not actually stop me from talking, any more than the veil of a harem girl would have. But it would remind me not to talk.

He said, "Ready? Don't talk." He stooped and swept me off my feet. He held me very close to his chest, a husband carrying a bride over the threshold. His arms were much stronger than those a boy his height should have. I had my arms around his neck.

I spoke through the so-called gag. "Uh, Quentin, can I ask you a question before we take off?"

His left hand relaxed, and he dropped my feet to the ground again. I felt the stones and leaves under my boots.

He said, "What is it?"

I said, "Why me? I thought you would have jumped at the chance to pick up Vanity and fly around with her."

He straightened his right arm, and I was standing upright again. "I did not want to have to blindfold her.

She would have thought I was being kinky, or something. Here, hold still. I am going to have to make this more realistic-looking. Open wide."

This time he put a wad of silk fabric, maybe it was his pocket handkerchief, into my mouth, and tucked the scarf between my teeth. That tickled my throat, and I coughed, and I put up my hands to adjust the gag, but he grabbed my arms.

"Stop that." His voice sounded alarmed. "There is one of them standing next to me. If they think you are about to give them away, they kill me. This is serious business, Amelia! I am trying to get them to break the laws of nature for me. Those laws have police. These are like Mafia people. Do you understand? We were a mile up in the air and halfway there when you spoke before. They don't like it when you talk and attract attention. I don't like it. Now hold still. I can adjust the gag, but you can't touch it while they are watching. Put your hands behind you or something. This has to look real. Okay? Be careful."

Seething with indignation, I put my hands down while he fussed with the scarf and loosened it. I sort of had to bite down to keep the thing from falling out.

I was certainly not putting my hands anywhere but tightly around him while he picked me up through the air, though, spirits or no spirits. Did he think I was crazy?

He was probably lying about the "Mafia" spirits. Gags and blindfolds? I was lucky he didn't have a pair of handcuffs on him. I saw how much more rudely Victor had hauled Vanity than Colin when he had picked her up. Boggin had gotten all turned on and aroused after flying with me.

I think it is just a thing with men who go up in the air with women. Aren't stewardesses supposed to be really risque and wild? That was the reason.

He muttered, "Now, remember, you are supposed to be the sensible one. / would not fool around with your experiments if you were trying your powers, Amelia."

Oho. Not exactly a fair comment. Criticize the girl when she's gagged and cannot answer back.

He picked me up again, hefted me in his arms, held me close to his chest. Beneath the blindfold, I closed my eyes. I put my head against his shoulder and tried to snuggle as close to him as I could. I did not like not being allowed to see, not being allowed to talk. It made me feel too helpless. What was odd was that even young little Quentin, when he held me, seemed in my imagination to grow into something strong, and masculine. It was so strange. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.

Colin's voice broke the silence. "Jesus H. Christ! Quentin! Oh my God! You are the man!"

I started to kick and put my hands up toward the gag, but then I stopped. We might still be twenty feet up in the air. I could not yank off the blindfold until Quentin gave me permission.

Quentin shifted his grip. With an easy strength, he put me on my feet. I could feel a slanted surface under my boots. Was it safe to talk yet? I waved my hand behind me toward him, and made a mmph! noise.

Quentin plucked at the play-knot. I pushed at the gag with my tongue, but instead of falling off, it suddenly changed shape, becoming thicker, and blocked my mouth for real. The blindfold suddenly seemed snug, and more opaque.

I could feel Quentin pluck at the knot for a moment. I did not have time to start panicking, because Quentin made a slight snort of disgust, or surprise, and he tapped his staff on the ground. The gag and the blindfold relaxed. I spit out the gag and, hooking a finger through the top of my blindfold, I pulled the whole assembly, scarf, goggles, and all, down around my neck.

I said to Colin, "You did that on purpose!"

He gave me a half grin. "What? Don't I wish! I didn't talk Big Q into trussing you up like Lois Lane."

Quentin said, "It actually was part of the spell. She had to make a sacrifice to please the spirits. A little embarrassment, I suppose, is sacrifice enough."

We were standing on the roof of the Great Hall.

Vanity was standing a few feet away from Colin and Victor, holding her nose. Victor had no expression, but there was a small greenish stain trailing down his left side.

I said, "What happened to you?"

Vanity answered, "Colin gets airsick."

Colin said, "It was the worst hour of my life."

Vanity said, "It was less than two minutes, barfy boy."

"Seemed like an hour."

Vanity jerked her head suddenly to the left, pointed her finger to a spot in the sky.

Before she could say anything, Quentin spread his arms, stepped into the middle of where we stood, and swung his stick in a wide circle. He was shorter than all of us, but he was standing on the peak of the roof a little way above us. We ducked, and the stick passed over our heads.

I could not see it with my eyes, but with my higher sense I saw a circle of light traced by the path of the staff. It hung in the air, embracing all of us, and then spread slowly out, like a single ripple in a smooth pond. A hush seemed to fall across the night sky, the estate around us.

Quentin said, "The aery ones can make the air quiet when I fly; I am using the same effect now. Vanity, is there anyone listening to us?"

Vanity shook her head. She said, "It's like a pressure. It's moving East to West across the campus. I don't think they know where we are. Going that way." She pointed. "Back the way we had come."

Victor said, "Maybe there was a bug of some sort on the stick Quentin broke. They could be going that way."

I said, "Okay. Let's go in."

1.

After all the hubbub and hoopla getting here, getting in was easy. I had Vanity touch the big metal door on the roof. She gave me a thumbs-up; no one was watching or listening to it.

It was padlocked, but Victor waved his hand over it, and the padlock jumped up and fell open. I made the door light and hauled it up and over.

Vanity went first. She said, "Jump over the third stair."

"What is it?"

She just shrugged. "It is something that watches. Just skip over it."

At the bottom of the stairs, Victor said, "Microwaves. Motion detectors, I think."

I said, "None of this was here before. I think. Can you, I don't know, interfere with the signal without setting them off?"

He said, "Maybe if I had a week to figure out the math. Can't you see through walls? Trace the wires and tell me where the switch is. If it is made of metal, I'll turn it to its 'off setting."

I stood, eyes closed, with the building around me laid out like a blueprint. The wires were useful to someone, they glowed.

I also saw a webwork, like a spiderweb, of lines of moral force laid across the doorways and lintels.

I said, "There is a box all the wires lead to in an office on the first floor."

It took a while for Victor, blind, being led just by my voice, to direct a beam of magnetic force down through several floors to the control panel for the alarms. Vanity hopped back and forth, one foot to the other, giving out little yelps when we were about to trip something.

I could not see the circuitry go dead, since I cannot see electron flows, but I saw the system become useless.

I said to Quentin, "There is some sort of spell laid across all the doors. Can you break it?"

He looked a little uncertain. He said, "Get me to the door with the safe in it. Vanity, I hope you'll tell me if I am about to set off an alarm or something."

Victor said, "I will look for electronic signals. Amelia can look through the walls for traps."

Colin said, "And I'll look for an opportunity to drop my pants. Hey! Has anyone noticed that I'm the only completely useless person here?"

Vanity said, "Quiet, puke boy. We've noticed it for years."

Victor hushed them both.

We set off down the gloomy corridor. Our way was lit only by what moonlight there was leaking in through the windows.

Soon we were in front of the door to the second-floor corner office.

I told Victor where the wires were running to the door. He said, "I can see them." He pointed his finger, disarmed the alarms. With a click, the door unlocked.

I said, "The spell looks like a big red spiderweb to me. It is right over the door, and it goes through the walls and floor."

Quentin took a deep breath and said, "Okay. Let me try something."

He lightly touched his staff to the handle of the door, and spoke: " Annon edhellenf edro hi ammen!

Fennas no-gothrim, lasto beth lammen!"

Nothing happened,

Colin said, "Break the stick over your knee and throw it at the doors. It looked cool when you did that before."

Vanity squinted at Quentin. "Was that from a made-up language?"

"Better than most real languages," muttered Quentin under his breath. Then he said, "That would have worked if these had been dwarf doors. Well. Let me try something else." He knelt, took a piece of chalk from his pocket, and wrote some angular-looking Viking letters on the little strip of floor that showed between the edge of the carpet and the threshold of the door.

He stood, raised his wand, touched the tip to his chest, and spoke: "Nine nights I hung upon the wind-torn tree, my own spear through my own heart, myself a sacrifice to myself, high on the tree whose roots none know! None came to aid me, none gave me drink. I saw the runes below me. Crying out, I seized on them."

He pointed to one of the marks he'd made on the ground with his wand. "Three great runes burn in my hand. A fourth and greater one I know. If a man fastens chains and gyves to my limbs, I sing the song to set me free; locks spring apart, fetters jump open, my hands and feet know liberty."

He raised the wand and tapped the door.

The door trembled in the frame.

Vanity said, "Did it work? The door was listening to him."

I said, "No. I can still see the spiderweb across it."

Colin said, "Maybe Vanity can just wish a secret passage into being, and we can go into the room that way."

Quentin said over his shoulder, "That's not the problem. The door is not really locked; it is just going to let off an alarm or a curse if we open it unlawfully. The windows and floorboards are the same way. The act of going into the room is what is prohibited. If this had been a locked door, something keeping us prisoner, that last rune would have worked. Well. Maybe I can make the magic think magic is wicked.

Let me try something else…"

Again he tapped a chalk letter with his wand-tip. "Nine great runes burn in my hand. A tenth and greater one I know. When witch-hags ride the wild wind at night, such spell I know as to daze and confound them, that they will not find their own doorposts again, or return to don their day-shapes."

When he raised the wand to touch the door this time, the stick in his hand jumped backwards in his grip, striking Quentin a nasty knock across the elbow—he had put his arm up to guard his face—and went spinning end over end down the corridor. It clattered loudly to the carpet.

"Ow, ow, ow," muttered Quentin, holding his arm.

"Is it broken?" asked Colin.

"If it were broken, I would be crying like a girl, not saying, 'Ow, ow, ow.'"

"Well," said Colin. "Let me go fetch your wand. At least it will give me something to do."

"Don't bother. Apsu! To me!" And the invisible stagehand snatched up the stick and tossed it back to him.

"Great trick," said Colin, looking more downcast than ever.

Quentin said to the door, " Mellon!"

A noise came from the door, a creak of wood.

Vanity said, "What's that noise?"

Quentin said, "It is laughing at me. Apparently, I am not exactly a friend."

I asked, "What it? What is laughing?"

He said, "An undead dryad. They chopped her up and planed her into boards. I cannot break the spell, because I don't have any influences to back me up. I am a trespasser. The moral order of the universe is not on my side."

Colin said, "Tell the door that it's our stuff in there. Stolen property. Belongs to us."

"In effect, I just tried that. Whoever put up the door was not the one who stole the goods. If they are stolen."

I said, "They might have been surrendered in a war. Or they might simply belong to Boggin."

Victor said, "We are forgetting the principle of what you call the table of oppositions. Magicians don't stop spells, you said. They stop psionic effects. Materialism stops magic."

His forehead opened. His metal eye rotated into view. Azure sparks, and then a beam, lanced from his eye and played back and forth across the door.

Quentin backed away nervously.

Victor, said, 'There is a magnetic anomaly. But there cannot be any mind, or intention, or purpose watching this door, since only complex living mechanisms have minds, and there is insufficient complexity here for that. I see nothing but wood, and wood is carbon atoms strung together. I do not see anything that could cause the magnetic anomaly. Whatever has no cause cannot exist."

Victor put his hand out and pushed the door open.

2.

I stepped in. I said, "Quentin, do you have the disc?"

Quentin pulled out the CD.

I said, "Victor, please tell me the disc player you got from that Lilac woman is still in working order after your duel with Dr. Fell?"

Victor gave me an odd look. "Her name is Lily. I haven't checked the player. I don't know if it works.

Give me the disc, Quentin."

Colin said, "What is supposed to happen?"

I said, "The last time I was here, Miss Daw played music. One of the objects in the safe reacted to the music, and sent out an energy. Call it light. That light allowed me to see in a direction I normally cannot see, and to reach a part of my body… God, you guys don't remember any of that, do you?"

Victor said, "I remember." To the others, he said, "She thinks she is four-dimensional. That is the model she uses to explain her supernatural effects, like psychokinesis, clairvoyance, and shape-change."

I wasn't going to argue the point. I said, "Play the music."

One of Mozart's violin concertos floated from the tiny speakers on the little square machine. I saw space shiver and flatten.

Like a crystal goblet vibrating in sympathy to a perfect note, the sphere in the safe rang. It gave off the substance of hyperspace, a material thicker than reality, which, at once, was light, music, thought, interval, time, probability, certainty___

I could see the squat safe, drawn like a thick line around the other flat objects it encircled. Extending above and below it in the "red" and "blue" directions, I saw the hemispheres of the hypersphere.

Victor handed me the disc player, and I kept my hand on the button. When I stopped it, the hypersphere continued to ring and echo for a moment, and, during that moment, I could act.

I put my hand "over" the line and into the safe. I could touch the surface—one of the many surfaces of its hypersurface—of the sphere with my fingers, but I could not budge it from its location.

I pulled my hand back down into three-space.

I pushed the play button again; space flattened; the flatness set the sphere to ringing; I pushed pause and reached again. I tried to pick up the other objects in the safe: a book, a photo, a vial of fluid, a necklace.

Nothing moved. It was as if they were frozen in ice.

Vanity said, "Gosh, that looked weird."

I glanced at her. "What did you see?"

She said, "Your hand got small. Not like it was shrinking, but like it was receding down a tunnel. You know."

"Parallax," Victor said.

"Yeah. Parallax. But the wall of that metal cabinet thing. Still looked like it was closer, even though the hand, your hand, in front of it, looked farther away. Um. And it turned red."

"Doppler shift," said Victor.

Quentin said, "Your hand turned ghostly. I saw a red light, too. But it wasn't exactly what Vanity just described."

Victor said, "Chaos. Our brains are each programmed to interpret it according to a mutually exclusive metaphor."

Colin said, "No. I saw. Her hand woke up. This dream, this false world we are all in, it gave way. Look, you are all logical people. If the safe was real, could she put her hand through it, into it, without leaving a hole? No. The safe is an illusion. It is only there because we think it is there."

Victor said, "I cannot seem to penetrate the safe wall with my magnetics. I cannot manipulate the lock."

He turned. "If your theory is correct, Colin, you could open the safe just by willing it to open."

Quentin muttered, "It is not a theory. Not disprovable. Article of faith."

Colin frowned, looked determined, strode forward with a quick and steady step, plunged his hand down as if to brush the substance of the safe aside like mist…

Cracked his knuckles loudly on the steel sides of the safe, and sprang back, yelping and waving his hurt hand in the air.

Vanity said sweetly, "Illusion hurt you?"

Colin gave her a dark look. "Bugger you. Nightmares scare people, okay? They are still not real. No one dies on roller-coasters, but everyone screams on them." He wiggled his fingers gingerly. He muttered to himself, "If Cat-woman had been in that safe, damn safe would have melted…"

I said to the group, "I can touch the sphere, but for some reason, I cannot move it. Any theories?"

Colin sat down on the desk, still nursing his hand. He said, "You know more than any of us do about what's happening here."

I said, "Wait a minute. While we are waiting, let's catch up on what we intended to do."

I looked at Victor, reached into his monad, and realigned it, so that it illuminated all the darkened sections of his nervous system.

Vanity shrieked.

"What?" I said.

"You just stuck your hand through his head!"

Colin said grumpily, "It only appeared that way!"

Victor said, "I do not know what you did, but it seems to have accelerated some of what your molecule creature was doing. Quentin? May I experiment on you?"

Quentin said, "There is something I need to do first. I don't know what you are going to do to me, but I don't want to get my memory back until I do this."

He stepped forward and, with infinite tenderness and simple strength, took Vanity by the shoulders and dipped her back.

She said in horror, "Let go of me, or I'll scream!"

He said, "Then scream."

But he kissed her, and so she didn't. She made sort of surprised noises in her throat, and waved her arms almost comically in the air, but then the throat-noises became warm and soft, and the arms twined around Quentin's neck.

Colin said, "Me next."

Victor said, "I cannot help you. You need Quentin to cast a spell to get your memory back to you."

"No, I meant I get Vanity next. Pucker up, hot stuff!"

Quentin straightened up, pushed Vanity slightly behind him with a gentle motion of his arm, as if to keep her away from Colin.

Victor opened his third eye. With my higher sense, I saw the life-force of the puppy-like helpful nanite creature stream as a series of charged particles out from Vic-tor and embed themselves/itself into Quentin's bloodstream. Knots of moral energy that had been twisted around his heart and head went lax and slipped away.

Quentin rolled his eyes. "Oh, I am an idiot." He touched his wand to Colin's head.

Colin said, "Hold on! There is something I have to do before I get my memory back!"

And he got up off the table and came toward me with an evil gleam in his eyes.

I danced back. "Get away from me! I am not kissing some guy who just vomited! I don't even like you!"

Victor stepped between Colin and me, saying, "Colin, leave your sister alone."

That was like a bucket of cold water on me. Sister. If I was Colin's sister, then, according to Victor logic, I was Victor's sister, too.

Colin must have seen the sick look on my face, because the sort of fun-and-games grin he was wearing slipped.

He turned to Quentin. "Go ahead, Great and Powerful Oz. Zap me."

Quentin said, "I did everything right, but I did not finish the demonstration. There were other people besides Mrs. Wren who did things to you."

He tapped Colin on either shoulder, as if he were knighting him, touched him lightly with the wand on the forehead, and turned toward one of the walls (the west wall), saying in a loud voice, "Guardians of the Watch-towers of the West, it was only by Erichtho's evil that other forces and spells, potions and evils came to afflict Phobetor! You have washed him clean! He is unstained and whole! Morpheus, father of dreams, return the memories and thoughts that were lost to your son! I call upon Mnemosyne to make whole the spell! So Mote It Be!"

Colin said, "Oh my God!"

"What? What?" said Quentin.

"I tried to chop up Mrs. Wren with an axe! And she kicked my ass!"

Vanity rolled her eyes and made that little ugh! gesture she sometimes makes when Colin is around. She tucked her hand into Quentin's elbow.

Quentin said, "What about Vanity?"

Colin said to me, "Yeah. Vanity next."

Vanity looked at me hopefully. "Yes? What about me? Is it my turn?"

I felt a sickening, sinking sensation in my stomach.

"Maybe something in the safe will help," I said. "If we could get it open."

3.

We talked over several options for how to get the safe open.

Victor assumed the hypersphere was fixed in place by Mr. Glum's power, psionics, and that Quentin could release it, if he could cast a spell into the safe, which he could not. Victor said the safe was made of a durable nonmagnetic alloy, which would not let "magnetic anomalies," i.e., magic, through the surface. Maybe if I had Quentin's wand in my hand, and touched it to the ball?

I tried that. Quentin and I practiced once or twice without reaching into the safe, just to get the timing right. Only the moment or two after I turned off the music, but while the sphere was still ringing, did I have a chance to act.

I knelt before the safe, one hand on the disc player, one hand on his staff tip. He was holding the other end of the staff, standing behind me.

I clicked the button. Mozart floated into the room. The sphere rang sharply, as if the notes were hammers striking it. Click. Music stopped. The ringing started to fade…

Quentin looked nervous as one end of his wand turned ghostly, reddened, and vanished into the solid surface of the safe wall. I touched the staff to one of the surfaces of the many spherical volumes of which the curved hyper-surface was composed.

I said, "Quickly." Each echo was quieter than the one before.

He said quickly, "The Eloi Adonai gave to Adam dominion over all beasts of the field and birds of the air, the bugs that swarm and the fish that swim. In token of this, King Adam granted names to all living things.

Force which binds: I am a son of Adam. You are a living thing of Earth. I name you, I dub, I christen you…"

I said, "Faster." The echoing in hyperspace was fading, fading. The hyperlight dimmed, like a candle flickering out. It was getting hard for me to "see" in that direction. Hyperspace is so very dark.

"… You are Er, the alone one, who grips these talismans. I call you by your true name! Release the talismans! And you shall no longer be alone…"

Too long. The last glint of hyperlight went dark; I lost the direction. With a spray of red sparks and the thrust of pressure, both my hand and Quentin's staff were forced out of the safe.

Quentin staggered back, looking at his staff, and at my hand. "Are you all right?"

He was talking to me, but the safe answered, with a hideous, unearthly moan, "It hurts! It is so heavy!"

Quentin waved his staff, and said several impressive things, but the voice did not speak again.

After a moment or two, Vanity told him to stop. "It is not listening anymore."

Victor said, "There was a magnetic flux near the point where the wand came out from the surface of the safe, but then it was smothered."

Vanity said, "I think it… died."

Quentin had been trying to mold the psychic energy into a living being, like drawing a face in clay. He had gotten the idea from what I had done to Dr. Fell's molecular engine, which I had given free will. His thought was that he could cast a spell on a being that had a moral nature, or at least talk to it.

Quentin looked rather pale at this point. "I wasn't expecting it to die again. I mean… I wasn't expecting that…"

Victor said, "I have an idea, though. In your paradigm, murder is bad, right? You could argue that Boggin was responsible for that entity being killed, and…"

Colin, looking at Quentin, interrupted softly, "Hey, maybe the thing is still alive, but just, you know, trapped in the safe?"

I said, "Um. No. There is nothing alive in the safe."

The face in the clay had been smoothed over and rubbed out. Unfortunately, the force was still there.

Quentin shook his head. "Why don't you guys try something else? Do it without me. I have to sit down."

He went to sit behind the desk.

Vanity said, "Quentin, I hate to say this, but we're in the middle of something right now. You have to help!"

Quentin laid his head down on the desk. He spoke without raising his head. "Okay. Fine. Here's my help.

Weight is the key. The force can barely hold the talismans as it is. Have Amelia make the thing heavier.

Eventually, the force will break."

Vanity looked at me and shrugged. "Go ahead and try it."

I knelt down, turned the music on, waited for a nice running glissade to get the sphere ringing really voluminously, and put my hand "past" the safe wall, and touched the hypersphere.

I could not manipulate the world-lines connecting its center of mass with the center of mass of the Earth. I was not sure why, but maybe the fact that it was a fourth-dimensional object, a perfectly regular sphere, made me unable to rotate it to alter its possible free-fall paths. Maybe my powers worked only because I had a higher dimension than the "flat" 3-D matter around me.

But Miss Daw had implied that there were higher dimensions than just the four. Maybe I could manipulate them, if I could see or imagine them.

I said half aloud, half to myself, "A five-sphere would satisfy v2+H;2+Jc2+y2+z2=r2. The 'surface' would be a set of hypervolumes made of hyperspheres, all equidistant from a single center-point. The 'volume'

would be a su-perhypervolume, and…"

Something happened. Quietly, quickly, unexpectedly. Not what I was trying to do. But something amazing.

Under my finger, the sphere changed into a five-dimensional object. I saw it.

The ringing damped even more quickly when that happened, and I yanked my hand away even as red sparks began to tremble across the safe surface.

I said aloud, "Victor, you're good at math. What is the ratio of the surface area of a five-dimensional sphere to its volume?"

He said, "I am not good at that kind of math. But the ratio is higher than that of a hypersurface of a globe to its content, much higher than a normal sphere surface to its volume. Remember the pie plate and the goldfish bowl. The more dimensions you have, the more water you can fill in, within the same given radius."

I said, "The surface area for any number of dimensions is directly proportional to 2 pi raised to the power of nil, where n is the number of dimensions. It is inversely proportional to gamma times one-half n"

Colin said, "Oh my dear lord, she is talking in equations again. Quentin! Get your gag back out! The spirits are demanding Colin be spared!"

"I'll say it simply. This will sound odd, but the hypersurface area and content reach maxima and then decrease towards zero as n increases."

Colin shook his head. He spoke in a voice of lilting sarcasm: "Odd? No. That sounds 'normal.' Why would I think that sounded odd?"

I pointed at the safe. "If I raised the number of dimensions to six, and kept the same radius, the volume would decrease, and, for a seven-D sphere, it would get even lower. So I think I cannot make it any heavier than I just did…"

It sounded like an explosion. The bottom crashed out of the safe with a noise like battleship armor being holed. Compared to the safe bottom, the wooden floor was matchwood. Boards and splinters flew up in a fountain. Whatever was on the floor below also exploded with noise of cracking boards, breaking glass, and screaming metal. Shocking reports like gunshots, snapping even louder than the general cacophony, stunned our ears.

Victor had his hand up. There were holes like bullet holes in the wall above us, where metal shards had flown, but he had deflected the worst of it overhead. Quentin, behind the desk, was unhurt. Colin, once again moving faster than was possible, had thrown himself in front of Vanity, with his arms out, and was bleeding from two large splinters, which had cut his cheek and shoulder. I had flinched at the noise, moved half an inch in the "blue" direction, and let the matter pass "through" me without touching me.

Victor said, 'They must have heard that."

Vanity, who was looking scared, said, "I don't sense anything—"

Victor said, "Then they must be jamming your attention-detector. Leader… !" Victor turned to me. "I strongly urge we just grab the stuff from the safe and go. We can pause to examine it later. Which way?"

Vanity had her hankie out and was trying to wipe the blood off Colin's face. Colin was saying, "I'm fine, I'm fine. Ow, shit! These wounds are no more real than if someone painted ink on my face. Fuck! And I could get myself to believe that if it didn't hurt so damn much!"

Vanity said, "You are spouting gibberish. Hold still. You can't believe what you don't believe."

Colin muttered, "Not this me. The real me believes it. I wish he were here."

"Yeah," said Vanity. "Because he would not be spouting gibberish. He would also hold still."

I stepped over the wreckage of the safe, made it light, and pushed it over. There was a splintered hole in the floor. Below was a crater of what had once been a bookshelf. In the middle of the crater was a sphere. It gave off no light in three-space, but to my eyes, it was shining and pale.

I said, "Quentin, if you know any healing magic, cast a charm on Colin. If not, Victor, can you manipulate the atoms his body is made out of, and stitch up his face? Vanity, collect the stuff from the safe."

Victor said, "And you… ?"

"I am going down after my sphere. Everyone else start moving to the roof now. If we get split up, we meet…"

Damn it. I hated being leader. Leaders do not get to say things like, meet at the house of that tawdry, grasping Jezebel Lily Lilac.

"… we meet at the dock where Lily Lilac keeps her motorboat. Quentin says it will go badly for us if we steal it. If we tap on her window at—jeez, what time is it?—at four o'clock in the morning, is she a good enough… um… friend that she would lend it to you… V

Vanity stooped down at my feet and started looting the safe. There were no papers and no money, nothing but the four objects: a book, a necklace, a drug ampoule, a small brown card. Even in the dim light, the gold tracery on the cover of the book, the silver weave of the necklace, glittered and glinted.

Vanity's coat had many large pockets. She zippered them carefully inside.

Except for the necklace. After staring at its fine chain for a brief moment, she smiled an impish smile, reached under her hair to clasp it around her neck. It was studded with tiny emeralds, and there was a pendant, a green stone with silver wings. It looked nice on her.

Victor said, "She said I could borrow it any time I wished."

I looked at Quentin. "Would that count? I mean, I am sure no one means it literally when they say 'any time.'"

Victor said curtly, "If she intended to convey a more precise meaning, she would have spoken more precisely."

Quentin said to me, "I'm not sure. In fairy tales, though, it is the exact wording that counts, not the intent.

We can take the boat." Then he smiled and gave out a laugh.

Colin said, "I'm bleeding my face off here, and you're laughing. What's so funny?"

Victor, who had stepped over to peer at Colin's face, said over his shoulder to me, "Leader, I do not think his body is made of atoms. I cannot really do much."

Quentin was talking to Colin. He smiled a self-deprecating smile. "We should have checked the desk first… look here…"

Vanity's head jerked up. " Wait—"

"… I wonder if this goes to the safe…" Quentin picked a small metal key out of a drawer and held it up.

"—don't touch it!"

Quentin shouted in pain and threw the key from him. The key was covered with crawling sparks, and the metal surface was red-hot. It crossed the room like a coal from a stove, like a tiny meteor, and tinkled against the far wall.

Vanity said in the shrill voice, "Leader! I regret to report that my detection sense is not being jammed! It just went off! Several people just became aware of us."

Quentin was clutching his hand. There were tears of pain in his eyes. 'Tricky bloody bastards, aren't they?"

I said, "Roof, now! Run!"

Quentin said, "I should stay with you…"

I said, "No back-talk! Victor, you're second-in-command. Get everyone up."

Victor said, "How are you going to get out?"

I hesitated. I had no idea. But I was not going to leave my sphere.

Colin said, "Hey! Don't you have wings? Winged squid? Remember? I just remembered. Wings? Can't you hear me? Wings…"

I stared at him blankly.

He said, "Hello… ? Well… ? Do they work?"

I rotated part of my shoulder blade. Shimmering with higher-dimensional motes of music, glittering with thought-energies, pinions made of transparent blue, mingled with dapples of starlight and colors the human eye could not see, appeared around me, passing "through" the back of my coat, and yet not disturbing the fabric.

I said, "Roof. This is a direct order." I made the floor insubstantial in relation to me, and dropped from sight as if through a trapdoor.

I heard Colin mutter, "Great. Just great. Everyone can fly but me."

They ran.

1.

The wings did not seem to operate by any principle of aerodynamics. I did not flap them. Instead, there seemed to be energy currents issuing from and rushing toward the core of the Earth, forming fast- and slow-moving streams. There was something in the wing feathers, an eye or a pressure-membrane, that sensed them. Gravity waves? Antigravity? Something else entirely? I wondered if I was detecting some abstract concept like "ownership" or "desire," because a wash of the gravity-stream ran from my heart to the hypersphere.

I dropped down to where the sphere rested among the wreckage of the bookshelf. I put out my hand.

There were other senses that opened in me when the fifth-dimensional vibration, shed by the hypersphere, traveled up my arm, throbbing. My teeth ached.

Motion was impossible in the fifth dimension, and there was nothing like vision here, but I could hear the crystal ringing of tremors and shock waves, like whale-sound or heavy drumbeats, traveling through the medium. But it was not conveying knowledge of sound to me. I was "hearing" something else, something almost incomprehensible: degrees of extension, relation, and existence.

From the degree of extension, I could sense that the medium within this dimension was even thicker and closer than the fourth; it was filled with heavy darkness, and some force or obstruction filled the area around Earth's home continuum.

The relation sense told me that, like the hypersphere, the particles here had such high volume for their surface area, that they could not be deflected from their straight-line motions by any contact with each other's surfaces. The surfaces were simply too small. Imagine if all space were filled with infinitely hard, dense points of neutron-ium. They could not interact.

On the existence level, I was hearing the underpinnings of the universe. The universe was somehow false: It did not "exist" as much as, it was not as real as, the void over which it was constructed.

I heard Vanity scream. The moral strands connecting me to my friends all went rigid. The moment I had spent looking into five-space had been long. How long? The time might be different between 3-D and 5-D.

First problem. How to pick up a five-dimensional hypersphere?

I said, or perhaps only thought, to the sphere, "Collapse into xt+yt-zzr" It folded from the hypersphere into a sphere, and then into a crystal disk about the size of a saucer. It was too thin to see with my eyes or touch with my hand, but I reached down with part of my manipulator-structure, and lifted the disk an inch into the "red" direction. It glowed like a lamp in my hand.

That light showed me what was around me. In the fourth dimension, I could see the wheels within wheels of Miss Daw, issuing musical concentric spheres, expanding; I saw a conical giant made of hands and arms, surrounded by waves of overbearing pressure. My other senses were confused; there were tangles of world-paths rippling and distorting from all objects in my view, blinding and blazing, as if all probabilities had gone wild, all time were bent out of joint. A tidal wave of Phaeacian space-distortion was also raging over the whole area. In the visual gibberish, I could not see where my friends were; I could not see what was happening,

I closed my higher eyes against the blazing noise and followed the jerking morality-lines coming from my heart. I spread my wings and caught an energy flow leading toward my friends. Up. Straight up I soared, passing through floors and ceilings as if they were mist.

Then I was on the roof. Victor was prone, either unconscious or dead. Colin had one arm around Victor, as if he had just caught him, and was lowering his body to the tiles. Vanity was drawing her breath to scream again, her hand protectively over the necklace around her neck. Azure blue sparks were streaming up over the side of the roof, passing through Quentin's body, and he had dropped his staff. The staff was sliding down the roof tiles, bouncing over the rain gutter and away.

In front of us were enemies. Boggin, barefoot and shirtless in the cold, wearing nothing but his purple pirate pants, was landing on the peak of the dome, not ten yards away, his red wings pumping energetically, his fists spread wide. One leg was crooked, one leg was straight, toes reaching down to the capstone of the dome.

To the east, among the moonlit clouds behind Boggin, three other winged figures flew: black Notus, whose wings were shaped like a seagull's, and falcon-winged Corus, armed with a bow, and an owl-winged man with streaming silver hair, who carried a rifle.

On the lawn below us, advancing with huge steps, were two giants, their heads fifty feet high. Six or ten arms sprang from the knotted muscles of their shoulders; cloaks of mist and cloud streamed from their backs, and a dozen more hands and arms reached out from the folds and billows of these clouds. Their black fingernails were the size of shields, their fingers were timber beams, their palms were courtyards.

In one of the palms of the nearer of the two giants, the one-eyed, skull-faced version of Dr. Fell stood, Telemus, his feet planted wide, one hand resting against the thumb of the giant, as if the thumb were the mast of a pitching ship. From him came the azure light that struck Quentin.

I knew Miss Daw was in the area, but I could not see her.

Behind us were enemies. Several of the hands of the giants, larger than lifeboats, were issuing from a white mist that had blotted out the roof behind us. One hand descended toward Vanity, its palm down and fingers curled like the bars of a prison gate. In the palm of another of the hands was Mr. Glum, leaning on his makeshift crutch.

The moment Glum's eyes fell on me, his face lit up with dark delight, and reality hiccuped. My wings were gone, my higher senses dimmed, and I felt the upper dimensions vanish from my memory like a dream upon waking. My winter coat and pants seemed both tighter and prettier.

Boggin was speaking as he landed. "Well, now that that little romp is over with, we can…"

I hit the button on the disc player. Miss Daw's lovely music floated from the tiny speaker, very quiet in the wide night.

The screams of the giants were cut off in mid-shout. The hands all vanished in blazes and explosions of red sparks. Mr. Glum toppled headlong; Dr. Fell grabbed the thumb he was clutching, and he disappeared into whatever place the hands were being yanked. The clouds of mist the giants produced erupted into red sparks, turned transparent, and were gone.

Glum struck the roof tiles, slid, and grabbed on to the rain gutter with both hands. Whatever his desires were at the moment, they did not include concentrating on me. In the fourth dimension, my crystal disk shone and gave off light.

You will never be without light…

And I could see my wings again. I rotated them back into this level. Shining blue-sparkling feathers fanned out to either side of me.

Colin roared. He ran forward, snatching up Mr. Glum's hoe. He moved faster than was possible, as fast as runners desire to run, which was faster than they do run.

He shouted as he sprinted past me, "Save them!"

He jumped to the peak of the dome in one leap.

My higher senses picked up Boggin's power beginning to radiate from him; morality and probability were warping, building up some sort of massive time-energy, as if fate itself were being wrenched from its moorings and used as a weapon in Boggin's hands.

But Colin was too quick for him. Colin clouted him over the head and shoulder with the hoe. Boggin snarled and slapped at Colin, cracking the hoe in two when Colin raised it to parry the blow.

Boggin's wings pumped furiously, and he began to rise. Colin threw himself heedlessly through the air and tackled him. Boggin began to draw in his breath, and, even from yards and yards away, I could feel the air getting cold. Colin, his legs dangling in midair as Boggin lifted off, drove the blunt end of the broken hoe-staff into the pit of Boggin's stomach. Boggin doubled over and coughed, but continued to rise, higher and higher.

I took a step, raised my wings, but looked back. Victor was not moving. He did not seem to be breathing. Vanity was sitting on the roof tiles, looking in horror at Mr. Glum's hand, which had gotten a grip on a roof ornament, and was lifting Mr. Glum into view. Quentin was looking hopeless and lost, his magic gone again, and he was still clutching his hand that the key had singed.

Damn, damn. A leader cannot abandon her people. But now I had to, one or the other. Either Colin, or the rest. Which? I had less time than it takes to take a breath to decide. As soon as Glum raised his head, I would be just a girl again. If I could have thrown something at Glum, or run down to him before he could raise his head, and pitched him off the roof to his death, I would have. But there was nothing to throw.

The giants were not the only ones with other hands. Mine looked like sparks and motes of energy when I rotated them into this time-space, and they swirled around Victor, Vanity, and Quentin; and perhaps my hands were not so strong as the giants' were, but I could negate the weight of my friends, so they were all feather-light.

I selected a very fast-moving energy path, caught it with my wings, and we all were swept off the roof at high speed. The path I took dipped down off the far side of the roof from Glum, putting the mass of the building between him and us for a moment.

I heard Boggin's voice crying out from above, "Stop! Stop! Stop! Or you will kill us both!"

Colin, his voice wild with glee, "No, teacher! Just you!"

I saw them outlined against the moon. They were very far away from me. There was no way I could get there, no shortcut through the fourth dimension to reach there; the distances were longer through four-space.

Boggin's three brothers were racing toward him, their wings like storms, but they were also simply too far away.

Colin was on Boggin's back, his legs around his neck. He had one hand yanking up Boggin's left wing.

With the other, he flourished the broken hoe-shaft.

Colin shouted, "This is for every kid who hates wearing a tie!"

And he brained him. He struck the Headmaster forcefully enough to knock him limp. They both tumbled from the sky, down and down…

There were bright moonlit clouds behind them. I saw the two tumbling silhouettes. As they fell lower, only dark horizon was behind them, tree shadows, the gloom of the earth, and I saw nothing.

Or perhaps it was tears that clouded my vision.

2.

Dawn. The sun was not yet above the sea, but the western clouds were all aflame with red, and bands of pale and distant yellow light peered through the bands of cloud. A low retaining wall of gray stone ran the length of the seafront, and above this were the shops of Waterside Street, quiet as ghosts in the dawn.

There was a boardwalk on our side of the stone wall, and piers ran out on tall posts into the dark, murmuring water.

The four of us were huddled on the wide pier next to Lily Lilac's motorboat. There were crates lashed down under tarps on two sides of us, sheltering us from any view. On the fourth side was the sea. There were other boats moored here, too, but the fishermen either had not risen yet, or were taking Christmas Day off.

I had realigned Victor's monad, which had been twisted by Miss Daw to render him inert. His body had been stiff, without any heartbeat or breathing, but when I put him back to normal, the mechanical processes of breathing and circulation merely started again. It was so eerie, so inhuman, that I was having trouble remembering this was Victor, my Victor of whom I had dreamed so often. It was like seeing a computer or something, restored from a tape back-up.

Victor, in short order, had opened his third eye, and "remagnetized," as he called it, the "parts of Quentin's nervous system" which "allowed him to create magnetic anomalies." In other words, he turned Quentin's magic back on. The beam he used was more golden than blue.

Quentin poked around in the rubbish in some trash bins near the dock and found an axe-handle with no axe head, which someone had thrown away. Now he held it tucked under one arm like a baton. The first thing he had done with it was draw what he called a "circle of silence" on the planks of the dock where we hid, to allow us to talk, rather than pass notes, while Boggin's air spirits were listening for us.

The bus station was less than one hundred yards from where we huddled. It had taken me five minutes to walk up to the closed and locked door, slide "past" them, find the locker. I did not bother opening the door; I was wary of using keys. I stuck my head in, lowered the hyper-sphere into this space, so that its light shone on the inte-rior of the locker. Here were papers and an envelope with money, as promised.

I would have brought Vanity, whom I now thought of as our trap-detector, but I was unwilling to experiment with what might happen if I drew her through the fourth dimension.

I drew out the papers and tickets and the envelope, and wafted through the wall. I folded my wings and assumed my secret identity as a girl again, and walked back down the street to where the others were waiting.

There were tears in my eyes by the time I got there. "Assume my secret identity" was like a phrase Colin would have used.

I stepped back into Quentin's circle, and the sea noise grew hushed and remote, as if cotton were blocking my ears.

I showed them the papers. We had visas and passports, and about £5,000 of Mr. ap Cymru's money. I was not sure if that was a little money or a lot, but I thought it was a lot. There were pictures of us, but I did not recognize the photographs; I had no idea when they had been taken.

There were papers for Colin, too, and there he was, a devilish half-smile to his face, looking out at me from his passport.

Victor said, "How long do we wait, Leader? Our chances of being spotted from the air have just gone up tremendously, because we waited till sunup."

I said, "I don't know and I don't care. You decide. This time I am quitting and for real. I resign as leader."

Victor said, "Not wise. You still have a lot of information we don't know yet."

I said stiffly, "When a leader loses one of the men under her command, she can resign."

Quentin said softly, "We do not know for sure he's dead."

Bitterness crept into my voice. "You're right. He may only be captured."

And I wondered how much of his memory they would have to erase to blot out all memories of us. All of them, I suppose. They would have to turn him back into a baby. Which, for all practical purposes, would erase him as a person. It was the same as death.

Quentin turned and looked at Victor. "It still seems like we need a leader. Someone has to decide how long we wait, whether we go back to look for his… to look for him, or where we go."

Vanity said, "And what about me?"

In my heart, I had to agree with Vanity. Why was Quentin automatically assuming Victor would be leader if I was not? I said, "Good point! Why can't Vanity be leader? Are we just all assuming girls can't do anything right? Is that it?"

Vanity looked embarrassed. "Um, actually, I mean, what about getting my memory back? You said something in the safe might help me. We haven't even looked at that stuff yet. Where do I fit in on your table of oppositions, Amelia?"

I sighed, feeling an immense weariness. I had been awake now, for how long? Two days? I lay back on the dock and tucked my hands behind my head, staring up at the sky. The zenith was mauve and dark blue, and the armies of the sunrise had not yet defeated that last rearguard of night. A star was there, faint, but not yet blotted out. One last holdout against the inevitable.

I just wanted to rest. I just wanted someone else to do the thinking for the group. I just wanted…

I just wanted Quartinus not to be dead. Once, at one of the irregular birthday parties Mrs. Wren used to throw for us (we had had three that year, I remember, and none the year before) Quartinus had been frightened by a party balloon. It had deflated, spitting with a rude noise, and when he ran from it, it flopped at random, here and there. Blind chance had made it seem to come after him, at least for a moment. Then he had cried, because the thing was limp, and he thought it was dead. He had been very young. I had held him in my lap and fed him a slice of birthday cake, and wiped his tears___

I said dully, "Of the four powers, two of them are equal and opposite to each other. Me and Quentin; Victor and Colin. I had the hypothesis—really just a guess in the dark—that the two other powers we know exist, the Olympian and the Phaeacian, are combinations of two opposites. The Phaeacians seem to be able to bend space. I do not know by what mechanism. Dreams, or other levels of consciousness might be involved. They find shortcuts through some sort of dream-universe, where distances are meaningless. The Olympians clearly have something both in common with my paradigm and with Quentin's. They operate on moral principles. You have to break a promise to them, or break a rule, for them to get power over you."

Victor commented darkly, "That explains why religions have rules no one can follow. If everyone is a sinner, by definition, everyone is under their power."

"But they also control the fabric of time. They can bless and curse; they can create destiny. Hermes

'created' coincidences to make me visit him. I think the things Boggin can do are similar. In Victor's model, time is an absolute; it is not an object. It cannot be manipulated or affected. In my model, time is one aspect of time-space, it is relative, and certain conditions, such as proximity to event horizons, can distort time. On a quantum level, the arrow of time is ambiguous."

Vanity said, "Losing audience. Come again?"

I shook my head. "Sorry. I just think Olympians somehow combine Quentin's morality-based magic and my multidimensional time-space manipulation. If Phaeacian power is a combination of the other two—and don't ask me how pure materialism and pure mysticism can be combined!—but if it were, if the two of them worked together, they might be able to…"

The two of them were Victor… and Colin.

My voice trailed off. The one star that had been holding out against the dawn had been vanquished. I could not see it any longer.

I closed my eyes.

Vanity said softly, "Then, I'm not getting my memory back… ?"

Quentin said, "Is she asleep?"

I was not asleep. I just did not feel like talking at the moment.

Victor said, "We should decide how long we should keep waiting."

Quentin said, "I vote for you to be leader. Do we have any other candidates? Vanity, unless you want the job again?"

Victor said, "We have a chance to talk things out; let's not pick a leader till we need one. How long should we wait?"

Vanity: "I don't know. Is there going to be a time, you know, like noon and we know he's… Colin's not coming, but at eleven fifty-nine, we think he still might be coming? How do you pick a time like that?"

Quentin said, "We all have powers. Maybe I could read the cards, try to get a clue as to what is happening."

Victor said, "Does that create a signal of some sort? Is it detectable?"

Quentin sighed. "I don't know. I don't think tarot cards are radioactive or something. But I don't know.

They clearly pick up influences from their environment. That is why they have to be kept in a cedarwood box."

Victor said, "Try to read Vanity's fortune. She can tell us if she feels something 'watching' her."

I heard the rustle of cards. Quentin briefly explained the positions in a cross-and-scepter spread, and started depicting a rather gloomy future, with Towers and Moons and the Seven of Swords opposing Vanity's path to happiness.

Vanity said, "Stop. I can feel it. There are some sort of creatures in the upper atmosphere that are looking at me when you do that. And you might want to redraw your magic circle. I wanted to tell you something. Amelia, are you asleep?"

Of course I was not asleep. I could hear them perfectly well.

"Guys, I think Amelia is planning on slipping away. Boggin has her bugged somehow. He can tell where she is. He's not doing it now. I assume that means Colin knocked Boggin out, if he didn't kill him dead.

But if Boggin pulls through… well, you see what I mean? The only way the group can get away is if she's not in it. That's what she's thinking."

Damn her. Sometimes I underestimate Vanity.

Vanity said, "While she was leader, I wasn't going to say anything, because, well, you know how Churchill let Coventry get bombed, so the Axis would not figure out we'd broken their codes? I thought it was like that. But if she's not Churchill anymore, then she doesn't have the right to decide to sacrifice herself… well, you see what I mean?"

Victor said, "I am not sure what we can do to stop her. If Colin were here, he could stop her from walking through walls. But even for that, we'd need a wall. We don't have anything."

Quentin said, "We have the talismans from the safe. Do we have time to examine them? We still haven't decided whether to get into the motorboat now or later."

Victor said, "We ought at least to wait the amount of time it would take a man on foot to walk here from the estate. If Colin is wounded, but can still walk averaging at one mile an hour, he would get here within the next thirty minutes, assuming he set out the moment after he fell. Let's wait at least half an hour, then decide our next step."

Vanity said, "Make it an hour. You know how Colin is with directions and maps and stuff."

Quentin said, "I agree. An hour. Okay, Vanity, let's see what you've got."

"Item number one is this fine necklace. Note the alluring craftsmanship!"

Quentin: "The green stone is the same substance as the table in the Great Hall; the same one we used to summon the Head of Bran. Oh! That reminds me of a very important issue. Bran made us swear to do nothing that would hurt the British Isles. It would not bind you or Colin, but it is very important."

Victor said, "Important, why… ?"

"Um. Let me talk to you about that a little later."

Vanity said, "Item number two is a brown envelope. It has something written on it in Boggin's handwriting. ' Remember Next Time Not to Look.' I can feel there is something the size and shape of a playing card. Should I look?"

Quentin said, "That could be a trick, like the burning key that scalded my hand. Why don't we leave item number two aside for the moment."

Vanity said, "Item number three is this. What is it?"

Victor said, "It is an ampoule for a syringe. Whatever the substance inside is, it gives off electronic signals."

Quentin said, "Nanites? What Amelia calls molecular engines?"

"At a guess, if it is meant for me," said Victor, "it is a library. Programs and codes stored in liquid form, which will change my brain if I inject it, and tell me how to do the things I saw Dr. Fell doing."

Vanity said, "You are not just going to inject yourself, are you?"

"Not at the moment. It might have to reorganize parts of my nervous system, and that might render me incommunicado."

Quentin said, "Or it could just be poison. If Boggin wanted to reactivate your powers, there could be a molecular key or antidote he has which he was going to feed you first."

Victor said, "Let me hang on to it. Who has that hypo we had earlier?"

Vanity said, "And last, but not least, ta da! We have a book, bound in black leather, with metal wires of gold and silver making Celtic knotwork and runes of mystic power on the cover. I have never seen something that is more obviously a grimoire in my life. Unfortunately it is locked shut"

Quentin said, "Hmm. Let me see that."

Vanity said, "Now, unless this is one of those ironic things where the instructions for molecular engine construction are in the book, and Quentin is supposed to inject himself with the nanites, which will engrave all sorts of spells into his brain, I think we know who gets what."

Quentin said, "It's not locked." I heard a rustle of paper.

A moment of silence.

Vanity said, "Well?"

Quentin said, "Unfortunately, this is written in the language of dreams. I cannot read it while I am awake.

But I am pretty sure this is not molecular engineering 101. That picture is showing the Sephiroth. These diagrams are astrological charts. And that… I think this is the organizational table for the pre-Adamite kings and dukes, along with their telluric and mesoaetheric correspondences. Wish I could read the captions…"

Vanity said, "So we have four objects we either can't use right now, or aren't willing to inject or look at.

And a necklace. Hey! I have a question! I wish Amelia were awake. Where is my boundary? Obviously my powers came back on, at least a little bit. And I guess this green stone is supposed to wake up more powers. But what turned on my first little bit?"

Morpheus said, "It is the boundary of dreams. The Lords of Cosmos cannot keep the powers of Night at bay. We are as close as sleep itself."

Victor said, "If that is true, Boggin could not keep Vanity's power turned off for more than one night."

Morpheus said, "It is not in the thought of the Olympians that Dream should aid the children of Phaea-cia, who were, of old, our bitter foes. Yet she is beloved by you, and we work her aid. The Lords of Utmost Night shall spare her for your sake, when we uproot the world-tree, and feed creation to the final flame.

She alone of all her race shall be spared."

I had the feeling I had lost track of part of the conversation. Who had just spoken?

Vanity said, "Something just became aware of Amelia…"

Quentin said, "Just her… ?"

Victor said, "How does your power work? Can you detect distance or direction?"

"Or who it is?"

Morpheus said, "It is Grendel. His desire for you maddens him. He sees you with his heart. Yet he comes alone, for he seeks you only to be his own. But there is cunning even in his madness, for he had taken a ring of Gyges from the finger of Erichtho, which will turn the curses of Eidotheia and confound his grammary; there is no power among you which can withstand his coming. Dream no more, for Dream cannot help you. My brother Death is near. I grant you shall not forget. Wake now."

"Wake up, Amelia! We think there is someone coming."

1.

I sat up, rubbing my eyes. "I wasn't asleep. Who was it who spoke just now?"

Vanity said, "That was me. I sense someone is looking for you."

I said, "It's Grendel. Grendel Glum. He is all by himself, but someone just told me he had the ring of Gyges, which he took from the finger of Mrs. Wren. Quentin, you are our expert on myths. Is Gyges a name we came across in Greek literature?"

He suppressed a smile. "No, Amelia, but we read about him in philosophy. Socrates mentions the myth of Gyges in the Republic, A shepherd found a gold ring in the grave of some being greater than man.

When he turned the collet in toward his palm, it made him invisible. He raped the queen and killed the king of Lydia. He could do whatever he wanted and no one could stop him. It is used as a symbol and example of how men act when corrupted by absolute power."

"What's a collet?" asked Victor.

Vanity answered him. "The setting. The thing that holds the stone of the ring. What do we do? Colin won't be able to find us if we run away."

Quentin said, "You said Glum was alone. If he is bound by the psionics paradigm, doesn't that mean I can automatically overcome his powers?"

I answered, "That other guy just told me the ring of Gyges will protect him from your magic, and that nothing we have can withstand his coming."

Victor said, "What guy?"

"The long-haired guy dressed in the black robes with stars circling his head. He had a silver goblet full of sand. Colin's dad."

Victor said, "You were asleep."

"He was here! I heard you talking to him."

Vanity said, "It was a dream."

I said, "I know who it was! Didn't I just say who it was?"

Vanity said to Victor, "We have to run away. Grendel is here. He is looking at us from somewhere. I think he can hear our voices."

We all looked back and forth across the waterfront. There was no one on the boardwalk, no one on the stone wall, no one in sight on the street.

Victor was saying, "We stay. I will neutralize the magnetic anomalies in the ring to kill its magic, and that will let Quentin cast a spell on him. Quentin, I assume an assault against us is enough of a moral error to let your powers work?"

I said, "There is no time to debate the issue! We have to leave. He's too strong for us. We can come back to look for Colin later."

Vanity said, "He smells us. He's that close."

There was no one on the pier. There was no noise but the wash and crash of the waves against the piles underfoot.

Victor said, "Make a circle. Stand back to back. If he's invisible…"

I said, "No! Get into the boat! Let's take off! Visible or not, he won't be able to get at us, unless he can outswim an outboard motor…"

Quentin and Victor turned so that Quentin was looking out to sea, and Victor was facing the shore.

Quentin hefted his axe-handle as if to ready it. Vanity hesitated, but stepped between them and turned her back so that she was facing the motorboat.

I did not join the formation. "Wait a minute… !"

Quentin did not turn his head, but said to me, rather sharply, "You resigned. Stop giving orders. We don't have time to talk."

I said, "But Victor is telling us the wrong thing to do! And who says Victor's in charge anyway? Colin's dad warned us that…"

Victor said in a maddeningly calm voice, "I'd be willing to abide by the outcome of a vote. Fight or flee?"

Vanity said, "Flee!" at the same time Quentin said, "Fight. If Victor can stop the ring…"

Vanity shrieked, "He's listening! He knows what you are planning to do! He's right here! He's here!"

Quentin said, puzzled, "We should be able to hear his wooden leg on the boards."

Victor, still in a voice of exasperating calmness, as if we had all the time in the world, said, "It's a tie. I guess we need Colin after all…"

I took a few steps toward the boat, saying, "Vanity, if we run for the boat, the boys will have to come."

There was a note of panic in my voice, a shrill sound I did not like hearing.

Victor said patiently, "Of course, by that logic, if Quentin and I were to stand our ground, you would have to get out of the boat and come back. All that will do is split us into two bite-size pieces."

Vanity said to me in a quivering voice, "I'm not moving! He could be standing between me and the boat."

Her wide green eyes rolled this way and that, seeing nothing but empty docks.

Victor said, "Does that mean you change your vote… ?" To me, he said, "Get in the circle and put your back to us. We have a majority."

1

I put my hand on the ladder to get down into the mo-torboat. The others were standing in a triangle, their backs to each other, about ten feet away.

I stopped. There was something wrong, all wrong.

Quentin said in a loud, clear voice, "Mr. Glum! Are you waiting for something? Why haven't you done anything yet… ?"

He wasn't after them.

He was after me.

He was waiting for me to get farther away from them.

I turned and ran back toward the group. I had taken two steps when the boards underneath the feet of Victor, Vanity, and Quentin exploded upward with a noise that stunned my ears.

Surrounded by flying splinters and snapping boards, a translucent column of water, a hooded cloak made of glass rose up in the midst of the explosion, with droplets like shining gems flying in each direction from it.

Not a cloak of glass. It was shivering seawater, sluicing in rivulets from an unseen form that was thrusting up through the docks. These boards were at least an inch thick, hardened by years, but they shattered like balsa before irresistible strength.

Victor did not have time to turn around. A blow tore the back of his coat and sent him stumbling over the edge of the pier. Into the waters he went. I saw the hilt of a knife sticking in the back of his coat. He rotated his head as he fell, and he opened his third eye. A blue spark flashed across the pier, and struck.

Then the gray waters closed over Victor's calm face, and he was gone. He sank like a stone. He had still been wearing the chain-mail jerkin, pounds upon pounds of metal.

The blue spark struck home. Grendel Glum flickered and became visible. His face was painted, and he had a necklace of teeth rattling at his throat. A baggy gray shirt and baggy pants hung in sopping folds on his body. One pants leg had been tied off around the top of his peg leg. In one hand he held the axe-handle he had just torn from the grip of little Quentin.

Quentin had no time to cast spells or do anything but try to raise his arms. Glum clubbed him with the axe-handle. There was a sickening noise, and Quentin fell to the boards, bleeding from his face.

I tried to move into the fourth dimension. Nothing happened. I saw nothing. Even my hypersphere, my light the ghost said would not fail, was not shining.

Grendel tossed the axe-handle away, put one huge arm around Vanity's waist and, with one huge thrust of his single leg, came flying in a low tackle across the pier toward me.

I could not move. I was paralyzed with fear. Grendel didn't want me to move.

He caught me around the legs. He, Vanity, and I hung in the air for a moment as the world toppled end over end. The shockingly cold waters of the midwinter sea struck us with the force of a falling wall. It was like being stunned with a club; I could not feel my hands or feet.

I had no control. Grendel had knocked the wind out of me with his tackle. Icy salt water flooded my lungs before I could stop myself.

Swirling green-brown gloom was around us. I saw the dark pillars from the pier, reaching down to further darkness. Down we went.

Vanity was struggling and writhing, and silver bubbles came from her lips, and then stopped. Maybe Grendel had squeezed the air out of her by tightening his arm. My hands, of their own accord, clawed and struck at Gren-del's face and arms. I tried to dig my fingers into his eyes; I kicked between his legs.

My blows were slow and weak. Or landed wrong. Or Grendel did not desire any blows to hurt him.

The bottom was much, much farther down than I would have believed possible. My vision was turning red around the edges. Was it possible to die so quickly?

There was rubbish here, rusted barrel-hoops, a broken anchor, coral, bottles, a net weighted with balls of stone.

I saw a blue light. Victor slid into view, swift and quiet as a submarine, and the third eye in his head was sweeping through the murk of the bottom like a searchlight. He was not moving his arms or legs, and his coat was streaming back, revealing the chain-mail jerkin beneath. The knife was still hanging through the back of the fabric of his jacket, but whether the coat of rings had turned the blade or not, I could not see.

When the blue light swept over us, Grendel held Vanity overhead, where Victor could clearly see her.

Then, with a huge thrust of his arm, Grendel shoved her down into the mud and sand of the bottom, and threw the net over her. Her struggles grew feebler, and then stopped.

Grendel kicked off the bottom and soared through the murk. Like Mestor, like Victor, he had some ability to propel himself through the water by thought alone. I do not know whether his method was faster or slower than Victor's. Victor dived down to haul the net off Vanity.

I lost sight of Victor as he was carrying Vanity quickly to the surface, behind us and growing farther behind, at about the same time I lost consciousness.

2.

Dimly, I sensed a sensation of warmth, of motion. My breathing was slow, heavy, and full. Someone was carrying me. Someone who loved me. Was it Victor… ?

I came more awake. I drew a deep breath. No, not a breath. Something heavier.

I opened my eyes and sat up. My movements were dream-slow.

I was lying in the shell of a giant clam, on a soft surface made of some sort of sea moss or red-gold seaweed.

It was beautiful to the eye, but repellent to the touch, cold and rubbery. The gold weeds were half-weightless, and they floated and stirred as I sat up.

I was in a palace with a floor of gold. The ceiling was ribbed like the skeleton of a whale. Between the ribs were shingles of mother-of-pearl, nacre, and strands of hammered gold. The ribs themselves were crusted with pearl. It was more beautiful than a jewelry box, finer than a photo of a Faberge egg I once saw. And yet it was the belly of a whale. I had been swallowed.

The walls were crusts of living coral, which had been sculpted with fantastic scenes of mermaids and storms, whales and dolphins and strange leviathans. But the carvings had a crude, rough look to them, and I realized that the coral out of which the walls were carved was still alive, rough and knobbed, so that, each month, a little bit of the carvings must be blotted out and grown over.

Even as I looked, blushes like blood appeared and disappeared across the intricately carven surface, as thousands of tiny red worms stuck their heads out into the floating dirt, or yanked them back in.

On the lintel of a distant door, there were bottles of various designs and sizes, fantasy-shapes of crystal and glass. In each one was a transparent fish, with huge blind eyes, nightmare things whose faces were clusters of teeth. Their skins glowed pale, or they held little dots of light on the end of antennae. These dim lamps lit the wide, shadowy space of the gold-floored chamber.

I sat up on the edge of the clamshell. I was floating, but for some reason, I was not actually buoyant.

Were my lungs filled up with water? Why wasn't I dead?

I put one foot to the cold gold floor, and noticed that there was a slipper made of small glass beads, patterned like the scales of the snake, on my foot. A white garment like a cloud of fine mist was swirling around me, a garment from a dream.

There was a noise behind me, a small laugh of satisfaction. I turned my head, expecting to see Grendel.

There was a young and stern-looking man. Maybe he was twenty-five, maybe twenty, but there was cruelty on his handsome lips, a look of mingled dominance and pride in his dark magnetic eyes.

His eyes were sea-gray, and his hair was the color of a storm off the coast of Norway, drawn back and clasped in a pearl ring at the base of his neck. He was dressed in grand fashion, a stiff collar made bright with lace and a long coat of shining pearl buttons. The fabric swam and flickered with sea-blue colors.

He wore a wide cummerbund of emerald silk, and powder blue knickerbockers clasped his legs.

No, not legs. His leg. His left stocking was a pale viri-descent hue, tucked into a dark sharkskin leather shoe with a mother-of-pearl buckle. His right leg ended at the knee, and a peg of pale whalebone held him up against the mild weight of this gloomy undersea palace. He did not have any cane or crutch in his hand. Perhaps he needed none here.

He stood with his arms crossed on his chest, looking down at me. He had been watching me sleep.

The face was so familiar. I tried to picture his cheek less lean, his hair fallen out, his face pitted and wrinkled by years of labor. And I saw, in his eyes, how that look was the same, This thin, young, hawk-faced lordling looked at me as if I were his most prized possession, the dearest of all the things he owned.

I said in soft awe, "Grendel… ?"

"Aye. 'Tis I." His voice was an octave lower than it had been on land. There, it had been a thin skirl of cracked pipes. Here, it was the hum of a bass viol.

"How is it possible?"

" 'Tis my true self you see, not as I am on land. In my mother's place, we are, here, and how she sees me, so I am."

When he moved, the gold floor chimed softly, like a gong, beneath his peg leg, but he moved with the grace of a moon astronaut. Underwater, the missing foot was less of a hindrance to him.

He moved forward and put out his hand, as if to help me up.

I put my hand out. I wasn't sure what else to do. Fight? Run? Scream? No option seemed very appealing. And I wasn't even sure how it was that I could be alive.

Young Grendel's lightest touch on my hand brought me floating to my feet. Only then did I see how I was dressed.

It was no fabric of Earth. It was some fairy-stuff, lighter than cobwebs and whiter than snow. There was a pinch-waist bodice set with many tiny pearls, long floating sleeves of film, a skirt of gossamer with a train of smoky dandelion fluff. A belt of translucent blue-green links hung low on my hips and came to a low V, and from there trailed down the front like a shining serpent with bright scales. On my feet were the tiny slippers made of translucent blue-green beads.

Like running smoke, the fabric of the dress changed moment to moment, growing dim and transparent, or white and translucent by turns, as it swayed and folded weightlessly around me. At no point did the fabric actually hide anything dresses are supposed to hide.

I was not even sure if the neckline was high or low. The fabric faded into existence somewhere between my neck and cleavage, becoming slightly more opaque as it curved around my bosom. The substance looked something like a spiderweb at dawn, gemmed with night dew. The strands of pearl flecks floating in the bodice fabric formed converging lines from the bustline toward the crotch, creating the optical illusion that my waist was thinner than it was.

I covered my breasts with one forearm and put my other hand between my legs, turning away from Grendel. You know the pose. Botticelli's Venus holds her hands this way when she steps from her clamshell to the shore. Of course, she is wearing a dreamy smile. I wasn't.

I caught my breath (or whatever it was I had instead of breath) when I turned. There was an antique silver mirror, something from the wreck of a Spanish galleon, propped up against the barnacle-rough side of the chamber. To either side of it stood amphorae of paper-thin ivory. Whatever phosphorescent sea monster was inside those urns could not be seen, except as moving shadows of light, but the ivory glowed and cast light from the silver mirror.

There was my reflection. I was beautiful. And yet…

I don't know what it was; perhaps it was a combination of many tiny changes. My lips were redder, and my hair shone, and maybe my cheeks were a trifle more pronounced. My skin seemed fairer, with no sun-freckles, bug bites, or moles. As if I had been airbrushed. I seemed almost to glow.

This was the way Grendel saw me. There was something more than flattering in this. It was almost awe-inspiring. As if I had been transformed into a goddess.

And yet I had been altered while I slept. The idea was a repellent one.

There was something jarring about the dress while it swirled and floated about me, shining. On the one hand, it looked like something an elf-maiden in a fairy tale could wear, glass slippers and all. Something too aetherial for Earth. At the same time, it was somehow all too Earthy, tawdry, almost tasteless, a combination of a fishnet body stocking and a wet T-shirt. A cross between what a princess and a professional harlot should wear. It confused me to see it. I didn't know what to make of it.

At my neck was a choker of glass links, matching the belt and shoes. It reminded me unpleasantly of the collar I had worn for Grendel; the one no one but he could remove.

A collar no one can remove. Now there is a thought to give a girl claustrophobia of the neck. Or what is fear of choking called? Victor would have known.

My hair was gathered into a net, finer than a silk web, set with pearls and phosphorescent dots. The dots were clustering thickly about my brows and ears, as if I wore both earrings and a tiara.

Again, it seemed both attractive and repellent. It was beautiful to have little stars caught in the net in my hair; but it also looked too much like cobwebs, over which glowing insects from some sunless mold were crawling.

"How come I'm not tied up?" I said.

In the mirror, I could see him smile, a cruel quirk of his lips on his narrow face. He put his hand gently on the top of my head, as if to pat me. The little lights webbed into the fragile snood exhaled a soft luminous twinkle at his touch. "This cap keeps you alive, allows you breath, lets your words come out, unstoppers your pretty little ears. If I yerk it from your head, you die. As long as you love life, what need have I for chain or rope to keep you by my side, princess mine?"

I reached my hand up as if to touch the cap; he slapped the wrist away.

I said, "What is it?"

"Always curious? Always so bright at your lessons, eh? This cap, I'll tell the tale. This cap, it is from my mother's loom, woven of my dead father's hair, and there are so few of them left. They told you that you weren't not able to breathe water, eh? They told you the cold would kill you. That was lie. All they say is lie. This cap makes those lies have no more hold or grip on you, my pretty princess. Let it leave your head, my golden one, and you are but one more drowned maiden of all the many maidens who have drowned at sea, and only the crabs will love you then."

His eyes traveled up and down my image in the mirror, drinking in the sight. He touched my elbow gently.

"Besides. I'm not going to tie up no girl in her wedding dress, not on her wedding day. What kind of man you think I am, eh?"

I jerked my hand in front to cover myself again. He tilted his head to stare in wonder and admiration at my bottom, which was about as well-clad as it would have been had a very short cigarette smoker blown a smoke ring toward my hips. He said in a sharper tone of voice, "I didn't say to move. Put down your hands. I'd like to look at you."

"I'm embarrassed," I said in a wretched tone of voice.

"That's fine. Girl should be shy on her wedding day. But once we're wed, and I am your master and your lord, you'll do just what I say, when I say, or I'll take a rod to you."

I looked over my options again. Fight. Argue. Run. Scream. Cry. Defy him. Find out if he meant a heavy bone-breaking sort of rod or a light birch-whip kind of rod. None of those options really leaped out at me.

Well, we had already established that I was not exactly Joan of Arc. I put my hands down at my sides, my fingers curled into fists. In the mirror, my fists looked so small. Like a child's fists.

He touched my chin with his finger. I raised my head slightly, to get away from the touch. Once I was standing nice and straight and tall, he took his hand away.

"There we are," he said.

"If Quentin is dead, Mavors will kill you," I said.

"Och, don't worry your pretty head about that. Don't you know what he is, that one? Quentin be one of the Gray Folk. The Fallen. They can't die. They shuck off their bodies like you and I change clothes, and wear somewhat new, fat or tall, fair or foul, whatever they please."

I said, "If you marry me, Boreas will kill you."

"Maybe so, pretty one, may be so. But he has a hornet's nest around his head, once the Big Ones find out he's let you all slip through his fingers. And his power up yonder is great, for he is the captain of all the winds what served his dad. But, look you, down hither, there ain't no air here, eh? Here's the water, black water and deep. What need have I to fear the wind down here?"

He stepped behind me and reached his hand over my shoulders to take my cheeks, one in each palm. It was an odd yet intimate gesture, and very gentle. This made me stand slightly straighter, on tiptoe, and something about how lovingly he spoke frightened me. "But lookit yourself in the glass. I look, and I see you're worth dying for. I ain't afraid of nothing when I look at you, if I make you be mine."

He took his hands away, but I kept standing at attention.

He did make me seem so pretty; so very pretty.

After a moment, he added, "I gave up my Vanity for you, even though she's prettier and girlier than you. I wanted you more. You saw me put her aside and take you."

"What do you mean, 'girlier'?" I asked. The moment the comment left my mouth, I realized how bad it sounded. As if I were jealous, and competing for Gren-del's affections.

He laughed and put his hand around my elbow, a gentleman taking a milkmaid to a country fair. He gestured toward the door. We began walking across the shining gloom of the golden floor toward it.

As we walked, young Grendel seemed to absorb me with his eyes, drunk on the sight of me. His prize.

His possession. He said, "Well, she ain't much one for all that running around with sticks and balls and what-not."

"Sports," I said. "They're called sports."

"Well," he said, "they'll be no more of that."

That grim little comment brought home to me what was happening. A sea monster was about to marry me. And then he would be in control of my life until I escaped him, or died. If he wanted me to wear my hair up, I'd wear it up. If he wanted it loose, it would be loose. If he didn't like the way I talked, or walked, or thought, he'd whip me till I changed to please him. And then when he tired of me, I'd be left alone in some cell buried under the sea. Or he'd strangle me and throw my body to the crabs.

Unless he needed me alive to nurse the baby. Our baby. Sea monster junior.

There was a pressure in my eyes. I blinked, but nothing happened. I started to raise my hand to my face, but then he took my hand with grave and polite grace, raised it to his lips, and kissed it.

He said softly, "You're trying to cry. You cannot do it down here. This is all tears, all this salty ocean.

Your folk wept when they was driven out by Saturn, and all the seas turned salt. That's how sad they was. But you have no cause to be sad, darling. Darling girl. My darling. Undersea is a happy place, see?

There's no crying here, so it must be happy, get it? My mother told me that when she used to whup me.

Heh."

And then he said, "Come along," and he turned and stepped out from the golden doors.

I followed him. His palace was gloomy, a place of massive shadows and slow whale-like noises. I saw corridors and arches, and, dimly, jars and fences behind which luminous fish and glowing worms trembled and flickered.

When I saw myself shining in the panel of some polished wall of silver, or cut marble, I saw how filmy trails and tails of the dress swept over the darkly sparkling floor and remained all white and unstained.

The slippers shone brightly.

I said, "So much wealth…"

"Hmph. 'Tis of no worth to me, golden one. All the treasure of all the ships that ever sunk is gathered here, and when my mom wants for more, she sinks some ships and drowns some sailors more. But what's to buy with it, eh? There is no beam of golden sunlight here, nothing bright nor fair… till you."

Great gates like the baleen of a whale, set with gold and pearls, drew aside at our approach. We were outside.

The palace behind us was formed into the great shape of a dome, half-covered over with coral and slaked with mud. Pearls and ribs of gold and other shapes of great beauty reared up from the gates out from which I stepped, but the beauty was half-shrouded in the murky mud and twitching sea insects that formed dun clouds to every side.

The heavy water was black overhead. There was no sun.

We stood on a hillside, or, I suppose, one should call it the slope of a sea trough. The greatest light in the area came from a mound of coral and seashell cemented into a rough dome. There were joints and parallel strands of some phosphorescent material set into that coral as well, and round lumps of it. It seemed a fairy castle, laced with light. And yet, something in the shapes of those lights was odd. It looked like rib cages, skeletons, skulls, all the ivory of the dead lit up with Saint Elmo's fire.

In that dim light, I could see a few other scattered mounds, much smaller than the main dome. These were palaces like the one from which I had come, going away down slope. They were beautiful, but the lifeless light in them made them seem like graveyard things.

To my left was a cliff, rising sheer into the gloom. In the cliff was a crack. Gathered about the lower lip of the crack, and spilling down to the mud below, were heaps of gold and silver coins, the wreckage of a chariot, the skeletons of two horses, and the rusted remains of once-bright helmets. The loot of sunken ships, I supposed, left lying in the mud.

I turned to him. "Who promised Vanity to you?"

"Just a voice in the wood."

But there was something in the way he said it.

I said, "You recognized that voice, didn't you? You told Dr. Fell you did not, but why would you have heeded a voice you didn't know?"

He squinted at me, and frowned. "Sneaking and peeking, were we? Hiding and listening? I recall what I told Fell. He knew what I meaned, even if you didn't. I spoke of the voice, to make him know, in case he wanted to get in on it. To get in on divvying up the loot. Boggin were a sinking boat, see; and I was telling Fell it were time to jump ship. But did he listen? Gar! He says to me, he says, 'Go tell Boggin when you hear this voice, eh?' You listened, little princess, but you didn't hear what was being said."

"What was being said?"

"I was telling him Boggin is done for, and that I was going to get Vanity for my own, when my new friend came to step on Boggin and take his stuff. I were asking Fell if he wanted to get on the right side, and I were telling him he could get stuff, too. Sweet stuff, very sweet. I was offering you. He said no. Now, of course, I'm glad he turned me down."

"Who was this new friend?"

Young Grendel grinned. "I ain't saying. But it were one of the Big Ones, one of the Olympians. One of them what could make be so, what he said be so."

"Then it was not Boggin?"

Grendel laughed at that idea. "Har! Boggin? Offer to give me Vanity? Not no how. Wants her himself, that one does. He's all stiff in the trousers when she walks by, swaying her hips and with her shirt all open. But he ain't going to marry her, him. He ain't honest."

I pointed. "What's that?" I gestured toward the pile of gold coins and pins below the crack in the cliff wall.

Grendel said, "Folk throw coins and pins down. Half is Mother's; half is for the Fair Ones what built this well. They ain't never coming for it, but we daren't touch their half of it. The Fair Ones, they gets all the nice things. They are so fine and high and mighty, or they was. Like you. Fine and fair."

I said, "Is that the bottom of the Kissing Well?"

"Full of questions, aren't you? Aye, that it is."

"But I thought this was the sea. You said it was salt water. Well water is fresh."

"It gets fresher as you go up."

"How is that possible?"

He shrugged, clearly uninterested. "The Fair Folk do it. Dunno how it works. Come along."

I did not move. "Where are we going?"

He pointed to the huge rough dome made of glowing bones on the hillside. "Ma. That's her place. She's the one what dressed you."

I said, "She dressed me?"

Grendel's mouth gawped, and then he looked embarrassed. "You don't think it were me? Undressing a girl naked without someone there? An unmarried girl?"

He was flabbergasted at the concept.

He squinted at me and looked me in the eye, and that squint made him look so much more like the old, grizzled Mr. Glum I knew. He said, "Look'ee here, Melia! I'm a bad man, there's no denying it. A bad, bad man! I've stove in skulls of those who done me no harm, and bit off ears, too. I've drowned folk and eat their flesh cold, and drank their blood like soup. I've pinched things what weren't mine and lied about it after. I've promised to be a place, and then weren't nowhere near when the time came. But I ain't never cheated at no game of cards, and I never give no sass to my mom, and I ain't never diddled with no unwed girl, or brought no shame to her name."

He straightened up and pointed at the dome made of seashells, coral crusts, and luminous bones. "My mom lives just over yonder. You think she'd let me carry on like Boggin does? You'll find out what she's like."

I did not move from the spot where I stood, and he did not seem to be in a hurry. The fact that the crack in the cliffside led up to a place I knew made me reluctant to lose sight of it. It was like seeing blue sky through prison bars.

"Who is your mother? I thought Beowulf killed Gren-del's mother."

"Him? Yellow-haired bastard sticking his oar in where it weren't none of his quarrel. Them that bragged Hereot were a finer house than Arima! Fairest house in middle-earth, they said! It weren't so fair once we had done some dirty work on it, though. Heh. No, they didn't have no joy in their fine house with its roof of gold for many a day, and it was only wailing, not singing, their poets did.

"Anyhow, blondie comes in for no reason, and killt my older brother, from who I got his name second-hand. But Mom weren't killed. Can't. Mighty wounded, though, hurt bad. She had to go to the Destroyer what to get herself fixed up, and that one, he made her change sides and swear up and down to serve the Big Ones on the Mountain. We used to be part of you lot. That whelp Quentin, he's my mom's nephew. My grand-dame is Ceto, what gave birth to the Gray Witches, what gave birth to Quentin.

"Anyway, the Destroyer kept his part of things, and sent a dragon to go take care of that blond guy.

Showed him. But, no, she didn't die."

He looked at me sidelong, and added: " You know she can't die. I heard you talking about her once."

"Me?"

"Yeah! In classroom. I were outside the window, listening. You were doing your lessons, and talking about her. I came right on down here afters, and told her what you said, and it made her smile. She don't smile much, and it does a heart good to see it."

"What did I say…?"

He looked hurt. "You mean you don't remember?"

I said blankly, "I… I do a lot of lessons. I don't remember them all."

"You were talking about that poet. I ain't got much book learning, but when Mom found out that guy wrote her up in a poem and all, she were wild about it. Made me go up and rememberize it, so as I could come down here and tell it her. Not the whole poem; just the part about her. I wanted to steal the damn book, but Mom ain't so good with her letters, and the pages would have got wetted and spoilt anyhow.

It's funny, I know and you forget. You think I'm stupider than you, but I didn't forget my lessons. You want to hear… ?"

Without waiting for an answer, he tucked his hands behind his back, and squared his shoulders, and cleared his throat, and recited: " And in a hollow cave, she was born, a monster irresistible, and there are none, mortal or immortal, like unto her. She is the goddess fierce Echidna, who is half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge serpent, great and awful, with speckled skin, eating raw flesh beneath the secret parts of the holy earth. And there she has a cave deep down under a hollow rock far from the deathless gods and mortal men. There, then, did the gods appoint her a glorious house to dwell in: and she keeps guard in Arima beneath the earth, grim Echidna, a nymph who dies not nor grows old all her days."

He grinned. "Hear that? Even your poet feller said her house was glorious. Better than that damn Hereot place, anyhow. Ma liked that a lot. She used to have me say it out for her like that, especially when she was eating, 'cause sometimes the people she had for dinner was making lots of noise, screaming and carrying on. You know what her favorite part was? Irresistible'! She liked being called irresistible, on account of she is a mighty fine looker.

"She said you was quite a looker, too. Better than was fit for me, she says. She was really tickled when she saw how you fit into her dress. Didn't even have to take it in at the chest or nothing, not like some we've had down here. Good stock, she said you were. That's a joke, see? Get it? Good stock?"

"I don't get it," I said.

"Soup stock. Never mind. You'll get used to her little jokes. It's always a lot better when she's kidding around than when she gets in her black moods." He shook his head sorrowfully.

"Black moods… ?"I asked.

"They killt my brothers, you know. Hercules and Bellerophon and folks like that. Oedipus shoved my sister off a cliff. They say she jumped, but that's a lie. She was the smart one in the family, the only one was all loved and got along with.

"My mom, she's got like a little pile of bones out back, one pile for each of the departed, and she keeps

'em to remind herself how much she misses them. When she misses them too much, she goes out hunting to get more bones to pile on. I tell her to go up the surface, so as she can cry and let it all out, but she don't listen to me, even though I'm the only one of her kids what still sticks by her. But she surely misses her babies, sometimes. The pile for my sister is the biggest of all, on account of she misses her the most.

Such a pretty thing, too! Took after Mom, at least from the waist up.

"You'd think those puny folk couldn't do folk like us much hurt, but they had it out for my brothers.

Especially Hercules. Five of them are dead. No, six, if you count Or-thus. Mom ain't got no memento for him. He were the eldest, and weren't too bright, and we always called him the 'Shy One Brain,' on account of he only had two heads instead of three. I'm kind of sorry I made fun of him, now he's dead, but he was a bit of a bully, really, and he was married to Mom for a while, which sort of turns your stomach, if you think about it. That was after the Thunderer killt Dad, and Orthus was kind of the man of the family, but he didn't really ask Mom or nothing. He just did it.

"He turned over a new leaf, and tried to straighten up. Got himself a job guarding the Cattle of Geryon.

Good work, steady. And he were fierce, but Hercules laid him low.

"My second biggest brother, though, he's safe. Ain't no one ever going to kill him, not ever. He got himself a good job, watchman sort of thing, working for the Unseen One. Mom is always ragging and worrying us, why we can't get no good jobs like he got. I reckon he just got that job to make the rest of us look bad. Anyway. Mom's real proud of him, though he never comes back to visit. I just saw him in a dream the other day, though. He weren't too friendly, and me his brother and all.

"I guess 'cause his boss were looking on. Normally, he's kind of easy-tempered and funny like Mom is, you know: 'And you think your work is Hell!' That's something he says. It's a joke. You get it? You don't get it.

"Well, anyway, there is just me now, and Ladon comes by when he can, and gives her some of the apples he's supposed to be guarding. He's the young one, runt of the litter, but he got a pretty good job himself.

"You'll meet him in time, I guess. If you don't cross Mom and she don't eat you like she did the last one.

Hey, and if you butter him up, maybe he'll filch an apple for you, so as you can be immortal, too.

"We can be your family, now. You ain't had no family, had you? No one to look out for you." He patted me on the shoulder. "I'll look after you now, me and Mom, and my two brothers. You ain't never going to be lonesome again."

As he spoke about his dead brothers, a sense of pity welled up in me, but also a sensation of cold horror.

"But you are monsters," I said. "You kill and eat people like wolves kill rabbits."

"Yeah, but people don't mind. They used to, but these days? They're always going on and on about overpopulation and the balance of Nature and stuff. We gotta dress up different these days, o' course, serial murders and axe murders and so on. Jack the Ripper—heard of him? One of my nephews. He only killt whores, though, and everyone knows they're too many of them; all the preachers say so. No, you ain't worried about human beans, are you? It's Mom. Who would not be nervous meeting her, what with her being famous and written up in a poem and all?"

He reached out and took my hand in his. He stared down at it for a moment, as if impressed at how slim and white it looked, fingers slender and well-shaped, so unlike his own. Then he bowed his head over it, as if he meant to kiss it, but he did not.

He straightened, but did not let go of my hand. Instead he raised his other hand and stroked my knuckles with caresses as gentle as he could manage.

"Don't worry about a thing. I gave up a lot for you. I gave up Vanity; I cut my own foot off for you.

Mother's not going to eat you. She likes you. I told you that's her dress."

"Dress… ?"

"Her wedding dress. My mom's wedding dress. She wore that dress when she was hitched up with Typhon. She saved it in a box for the Sphinx, but Sphinx got killt by Oedipus. That cap is hers, too, last one I got. That's why I could not keep you and Vanity both."

I reached up my hand to touch the web of pearls and lights around my hair.

"Don't touch that, I said! You don't want to die by drowning. It's a foul, foul death" he said in a matter-of-fact voice. "I know the word to break the charm on that there cap. You are thinking how far you can run? Not far enough. You try to run off, and I say the word. You stab me in my sleep, and Mother says the word.

"Now, come along! We tarried enough, jawing. Mother wants to talk to you and give her blessing. She keeps her blessings in ajar next to her high seat. She's going to say about how not to be afraid of having babies, and how you'll love the ones with two heads as much as the ones with three. It's a thing matrons say to virgins, you know? And she's going to say some stupid stuff about how it hurts the first time, so liquor up good after the ceremony, but after that you learn not to mind. The kind of garbage womenfolk think men don't know you talk about. Besides, I wouldn't hurt you for all the world."

I drew a deep not-breath. Suddenly, I was calm and unafraid. It was simple. It was like a math puzzle.

There were certain known factors I could control, and certain factors he controlled; some were known and some were unknown. I could solve for the known factors.

Actually, it was more like a chess puzzle. Math puzzles do not require one to sacrifice pieces.

I said, "No, Grendel."

He said, "What's that?"

"No. You shall not marry me. I will not stay here. You shall take me back up to the surface in the next five minutes."

He said, "You want me to go fetch the rod, is that it? It's an ill thing to beat a woman on her wedding day. I'd rather wait till after the preacher were done, to make it proper and legal-like."

I looked at him. I don't know what he saw in my face, but he quailed and stepped back, even though he was immensely stronger than me, and possessed of a power I could not oppose.

My words marched out of my mouth like soldiers: "Hear me, Grendel. I pity you, for you are wretched, but I will not be yours. You wish to possess me, and I do not wish to be possessed. My wishes will be granted, and yours will be thwarted."

He stepped forward again, beginning to smile. "I'll get my way."

"You will do what I wish you to do. You will take me to the surface."

"And why will I do that, little golden princess?"

"Because my will is stronger than yours, Grendel."

He may have had some intimation of what I was about to do, because he grabbed for my wrists. Too late.

The net I wore on my head, the mermaid's cap, came up easily off my hair, and tore in half very easily.

There was a flash of green sparks as the fabric parted.

The sounds grew rubbery and thick, and the icy water shocked every inch of my flesh, every cubic inch of my lungs. Oddly enough, there was no sensation of choking, because my lungs were already entirely filled with water.

And it was cold, so cold, that it felt, paradoxically, as if all the water around me had turned to lava. As if my arms and legs were burned to stubs immediately, I could not tell whether I could move them or not.

My vision went dark.

Pnigerophobia. That was the word. Fear of choking is called pnigerophobia.

1.

For a time, I lay between waking and not-waking, troubled by memories of dark nightmares of cold, endless cold, and of choking and vomiting black water. I remembered rough lips trying to breathe life back into my lungs, and being unable to breathe and unable to see or feel. And reality had somehow…

snapped into place… and in the new version of reality, the lips came again, and breathed into me, and I breathed in and out. In and out.

There is no sensation more wonderful. How pleasant, how wonderful life is, which allows us to enjoy this pleasure, life's best pleasure, ten or five times a minute, when we relax, fifteen when we are filled with excitement.

Except… why was I only breathing in through my nose? What was blocking my mouth?

I came fully awake. I opened my eyes.

There were two large campfires burning left and right. I was wrapped snugly in a bearskin rug, folded over me and under me like a sleeping bag. It might have been the same bearskin rug Grendel wore as a robe.

I was lying, rolled up in the rug, on snow. Around me were a few scraggly trees, naked and powdered with snow. Every twig bore a little icicle. Not twenty feet away was the rocky soil the Kissing Well stood on, its little witch-hat roof layered with a second hat of snow. Beyond it was the cliff. I could see and smell the sea.

Even with the bearskin and the fires, I was still cold, although, perhaps, I was not near death. Grendel had not removed the wedding dress, and I could feel its sopping wet fabric clinging tightly to me, freezing.

Little puddles had collected from the garments and gathered under my stomach.

Yes, I was lying on my stomach. And yes, I had a gag in my mouth, the second one today, if I hadn't lost count. And, yes, I was tied hand and foot, and from what I could tell from a little wiggling, probably elbows, knees, upper thighs, around the waist, etc., etc. You get the idea. Grendel had gone at least a week without seeing me trussed up like a turkey; his favorite spectator sport. I was surprised he hadn't roped me down like a landing zeppelin to tent stakes in the ground.

And there he was, Old Grendel was back, bald and crooked, dressed in a wet gray shirt and sagging patched trousers. His peg leg was made of wood again, not ivory.

He leaned close and whispered, "Sush! Sush! If you make any noise at all, Boggin might hear. The winds do his sneaking and eavesdropping for him. Got me?"

Have you ever had something really, really important to say, when a magic sea monster had you gagged, so that you could not even make very much noise out of your nose? Very frustrating. It helps to have expressive eyes.

Thunking a bit with your bound legs can help, if you do it regularly enough to make him think you've got a signal you are trying to send. If he just thinks you are struggling, it would just turn him on. Pervert.

He took the gag out. "No carrying on. You're already due for a licking when we get back home, scaring me like that. Don't add to the account."

I said through chattering teeth, "I am going to freeze. I am going to die. My clothes are still wet. It's turning to ice on me…"

He looked up, worry plain on his face. "Yeah," he muttered. "Weather always turns fierce cold when he gets mad…"

I said, more loudly, "You have to dry me off, get me someplace warm! Get me out of these things!"

Without getting up, he reached over and picked up a broken tree branch he was using as a crutch. He whispered, uncertainty in his voice: "I were going to get Mom, seeing if she wouldn't change her mind, get me another cap. I'll bring her up here…"

I wondered if my powers would come back on if he went away. I did not think so; Miss Daw had implied there was no range limitation.

"Look!" I said, my voice shivering and choking with cold. "If we are engaged, it's legal to look at me naked, see? It's not like this dress actually covers me anyway! Are you an idiot? I thought this was your sick daydream come true: a half-naked girl begging you to strip her clothes off. Are you going to marry my corpse? Is that the plan?"

I should mention that Grendel did not seem to be doing too well, temperature-wise, either. His soaking wet pants and ragged gray shirt were stiff with frost. But it wasn't killing him. Maybe he had blood like an arctic walrus or something, or natural antifreeze.

Well, that little speech got me untied and got me out of that dress. Both the ropes and the fabric just parted under his hands. I spent a moment, for the second time this month, if I hadn't lost count, stark naked in the snow.

I hopped from foot to foot, while he shook the cold water out of the bearskin; then he wrapped the huge skin over my shoulders and all around me.

I was sure he was aroused by the sight of me dancing and shaking, goosebumps on my goosebumps, blue lips and all. Me, I just felt as if the nadir of misery was not far away. Where was that brave feeling, that I-am-not-afraid-to-die recklessness that had possessed me just a minute ago? Maybe people can only be brave when they are warm.

But Grendel did not look aroused by the sight; he looked concerned. When he folded the bearskin around me once more, I felt like a child at the beach being wrapped in a fluffy towel by a worried mother. The skin was voluminous enough that I could stand on one flap of it and have another flap wound around my sopping hair like a turban. Where in the world did they make bears this big? I wondered if Grendel had killed it during the previous ice age.

He leaned on his tree branch, watching me huddle close to the bigger fire. Every now and again he threw a worried glance at the sky, as if fearing the fires would be seen.

Grendel whispered, "Hurry it up. I'm going to have to gag you and bind you, so as you don't cry out for Boggin."

I whispered back, "I am not going to call out for Bog-gin, you moron! I am getting away from here in a minute. Turn my powers back on."

He blinked. Still in whispers, he said, "Lost your wits, is it? Mother said you might go mad, once you saw her. Didn't think it would happen before."

I whispered, "You've already lost, Glum. Lost. You are a card player? I called your bluff. You folded."

"Listen here, girl: You are my property. You're mine. I took you 'cause I wanted you, and no force under heaven can stop me. I never had nothing so fine as you. I never saw no one as fine as you. Except maybe Vanity, and I had to give her up to get that Telchine off my tail; and even her, to my thinking, ain't not so pretty as you are now. You're the only thing I have in my life."

I said quietly, "You can have my dead body. You want it? You can keep it. I'm not going to miss it once I drown."

He squinted, looking uncertain.

I said, "Or were you thinking of keeping me ashore? In the air? Boggin will find you. He'll make you cut your own penis off and eat it like a sausage. Or am I wrong about him?"

The look on his face told me I was not wrong. I had read about all the color leaving a man's face, but I never saw it happen before.

I whispered, "Do you have something else besides those fragile little mermaid caps for keeping a girl able to breathe down there? I don't think you do, or you would have used it. You wished me back to health when I was dying, and I thank you for that. But you couldn't wish air into my lungs, or you would have done it."

He stared at me, his face a little slack.

And then he grinned, a big grin, showing all his teeth. He tucked his branch under one arm, and pantomimed clapping his hands together, making the motion, but not making the noise.

"That were good," he said quietly, his eyes sparkling with admiration. "You talk a good fight. Let's see how it works out."

He flicked the branch back into his hand and struck the blunt end solidly into the bearskin, just at the point where my midriff was.

I doubled over, suddenly out of breath. He dropped the branch and caught me up in his arms, arms as tough as old tree roots. One arm wrapped around me, pinning my arms to my sides. With the thick folds of the bearskin draped over, I could not even raise my elbows.

His other hand he clapped over my mouth.

He breathed in my ear. "You're a quick one, a clever one. I like that. Lots of book-learning. Suppose to give a girl polish, book-learning. Refined. But you ain't never been one of my people. Everything we can do, we do with our feelings. The world is a big lie, and we are the biggest liars in it. And sometimes the world believes us, if we are sincere enough. Sincerity; that's the thing, the very thing. You see, I can't just stop wanting you, desiring you, needing you, just 'cause I want to. My feeling is too strong. Now you come and say your feeling that you'd rather die than be with me is stronger than my feeling to the contrary. Well, maybe you caught me in a weak moment. But I know all about feelings. I studies 'em. All my folk do. We know what makes a man go, and a man stop. Some feelings, they blaze bright enough, but they are like fire in autumn leaves, see? Poof, and they are gone. Now, you think you can keep your feeling up forever? No matter what I do? What if I was to burn off your foot, slow-like, so you'd be matched with me, eh? Then you wouldn't be so sad I couldn't go dancing with you."

He picked me up as if my weight were nothing, and hopped a one-footed hop closer to the fire. With one hand still over my mouth, and one around my arms and waist, he thrust my feet toward the fire.

I kicked and lifted my legs as high as I could, writhing beneath his arm. I could not get free; I could not bite his hand; I could barely make any noise through my nose. The bottom of the bearskin fell in the flames, and started smoking and crawling upward.

"Now, then," he whispered. "That looked bad, didn't it? Here you are all willing and ready to die, but not to get a little singed? I'll make you a promise. You stick your foot into the hot coals, and let your foot get burnt black, without flinching, without being afraid, and—hey!—I'll let you go and with my blessing.

Mucius Scaevola did it. You can do it."

I did not do it. I kicked once or twice more, trying to get my legs higher up.

"Such pretty, pretty legs," he whispered. "I make it simpler. One toe. You burn off one toe without flinching or making a face, and I'll let you go. It will convince me you mean what you say. No? Come on.

Even a bunny will gnaw off its legs if'n it's caught in a trap. And I ain't even asking your whole leg. Just a toe. It won't hurt after the nerves burn off; it'll smell like roast pork."

That did not make the prospect any more appealing. I gathered my every ounce of strength and strained against his arm, making a shrill noise through my nostrils. It was the same as if iron bands were wrapped around me.

He was standing on one goddamn leg, and all my kicking could not knock him over.

"Naw. Time's up. I changed my mind. Your legs are so long and fine. Trim ankles, just like a naiad." He made a little hop, and took me away from the flame. The bearskin was still smoking, and I jumped and kicked where little flecks of ash touched me.

"And besides, you can dance for me, even if I can't dance no more. Belly dancing like those houri girls do. But I'll give you one more test."

He moved his thumb less than an inch, and pinched my nostrils shut with his hand.

"Maybe I hold you this way till you pass out. Maybe I kill you dead. You don't know, do you? But I tell you what. You hold still and look real brave, and I'll know, I'll really know, you don't mind smothering to death. Maybe I'll do this over and over and over again, while you faint each time, till I am really convinced."

Wherever that feeling of calmness, that chess-match feeling, was, which had made me so sure I had all the answers, that feeling wasn't here. I really tried to hold still. But when your lungs are empty, your body starts jerking.

And you start thinking about books you started reading that you want to finish. Things you wanted to say to friends.

He hissed, "You see, it's one thing to close your eyes and jump down into a pit. It's another to take a spade and dig that pit, and lay down in it, and then pull the dirt atop you, one spadeful at a time. Plenty of time to think, when you dig your own grave. Are you going to hold still? I'll be impressed."

I rolled my eyes and looked up at him. I was ready to surrender. But now, I could not even tell him I was ready to give up.

He must have seen it. But he held his hand there, choking me.

Then he moved his thumb. Less than half an inch. That is how much space separated me from not-me.

Half an inch.

And yes, I was weeping. Quentin had done so well when it was his turn to face this kind of thing.

Grendel said, "I take my hand off your mouth, if you're willing to do one little thing for me. You say,

'Thank you, sir,' when I let you talk again."

I nodded. It was Boggin and his making me count, all over again.

He took his hand away.

I said, "Thank you, sir."

"That's better."

"I'm not talking to you."

"What?"

"I see something you don't see." I was draped over his arm at the moment, remember, and my face was turned toward the sky.

He turned his head and looked up.

It was perfect timing. He could not get his hand up to save his face.

Like a thunderbolt, a huge black eagle with white-tipped feathers struck, claws like knives digging deep into his cheeks. The sharp beak rose and fell like a hammer, or rather, like a pickaxe.

Thank you, sir. Oh, thank you, whoever you are.

When the eagle's head yanked back, there was something long and bloody in his beak. A tongue?

Grendel let me fall, and he sprang back, toppling, batting at the wings that were batting at him. Reality quivered, and when the quivering stopped, Grendel was gone. In his place stood an enormous three-pawed bear. Tatters of his torn shirt fell from the bear's shoulders. There was that much concession to reality, but the fact that an extra seven hundred pounds of matter just popped into existence out of nowhere evidently did not annoy the Grendel paradigm of the universe.

The bear swept out with a paw and delivered the kind of blow that can decapitate a full-grown bull.

Boom.

But the eagle, instead of collapsing into a bloody mess, bounced away and flew back in the bear's face.

He thrust his beak into the white muzzle and tore a swatch of tissue out of the bear's nose.

I shrieked and winced. Very girlish. Grendel would have approved. But seeing the nose ripped off a bear, all that delicate tissue come out, is almost too gross for words.

This time the bear got his claws into the eagle, and it was time to feel sorry for the eagle. Blood and feathers flew up—I do not know from where—and another sweep of that terrible paw sent the bird rolling across the snow, leaving a swath of red drops on the white snow.

The rolling mass of feathers would have seemed funny, if this had been a cartoon. But as it was, I think it was one of the most horrible things I ever saw. No, wait. Seeing the bird flop to a standstill, and wiggle his wings, was worse. Both wings flopped. Both were broken.

Then, somehow, it was even worse again to see the eagle stretch out his neck, drive his beak through the snow to the hard soil, and jerk his neck and shoulders. He pulled himself forward an inch. Two inches.

Three.

The bear, dripping bloody gore from his face, and bellowing in pain, rose up, teetering on one leg, clawing at the sky and screaming; and even the bear stopped in astonishment, and watched. Four inches.

Five.

The bird kept coming. He did not give up. He wanted to keep fighting.

The bear dropped to three legs, loped in one huge rolling wave of muscles and fur over to where the eagle was crawling toward him, stepped on the bird with one huge paw. The eagle was driven down into snow. I wondered why all his hollow bones were not cracked.

The eagle craned his neck around at an impossible angle and bit the bear in the foot.

The bear had had just about enough from this eagle. Taking the eagle by the neck in his jaws, the bear lashed to the right and left, smashing the eagle's body over and over and over again into the snowy, rocky soil, until there were splatters of blood to the left and right.

I cried out, "Grendel! Don't kill him!"

My shout was loud enough to draw an echo from the Kissing Well. The voice sounded like a man's voice. "… don't kill him…" Unlike my voice, the echo was calm and soldierlike. A voice giving an order.

A second bird fell from the sky. This one was a vulture. It was more enormous than any vulture of Earth.

It had black wings and a white head.

The vulture struck, driving claws like sabers into the shoulder and chest of the great bear. It drove its beak into one eye socket and pulled out the eye in a gush of blood and vitreous humor.

The bear dropped the eagle and raised his claws to defend himself, knocking the vulture away from him.

In a flurry of wings like the snap of gale winds, the vulture returned.

The bear was battering the vulture, and was winning. But the eagle, still somehow alive, even with two broken wings, and while being trampled underfoot, raised his beak and his shivering claws.

The eagle clawed at the stump of the severed bear paw, and opened the seam that held it shut. At the same time, I saw something not almost too gross for words, but really too gross, even though I cheered and hurrahed at the time. The eagle drove his beak straight into… Well, never mind. Why don't we just say it was the upper thigh, or near there.

The bear began lumbering away. He was blinded, noseless, bleeding from jowls and groin and leg. The bear ran toward the sea cliffs with the wounded vulture in pursuit, its wings like a storm.

At the edge of the cliff, the bear tried to rise up on his one hind leg. The vulture landed on his face again. I saw the vulture tear at the bear's throat, and a splash of blood shot out. It looked like a death blow. The bear went limp but caught the vulture in his paws as he fell. They both went over. If there was a sound of a splash, I (fid not hear it.

Clutching the bearskin tight around me, I went closer to the wounded eagle, my bare feet sloshing through the snow. I was afraid to touch a wounded animal, but I knew this was something supernatural, something that had come to save me. Eagles were the symbols of Jove in myth. Maybe this was one of Boggin's servants?

I looked at him. He looked terrible.

What could I do? What was I supposed to do? I wasn't a veterinarian. Maybe I could move him closer to a fire, but I was afraid to try to pick him up. He had just bitten through a bear. What could he do to my little hand?

I tried to look into the fourth dimension, now that Grendel was… dead? In the sea? I could see the tiniest glimmer of light from my hypersphere, but then darkness closed over it again. The Grendel effect was fading, it seemed, but it seemed it might take a while to fade. How long? A minute? A day? Six months?

The wind blew by, and I shivered. Once I started shivering, I could not stop.

This will sound selfish, but suddenly I was worrying about more than just the wounded bird. Where was I going to go? How was I going to get away, if my powers did not come back on in time?

I could stand near the fire, I supposed, wrapped in the bearskin. Until the fire died out. Then what?

Gather wood? Wait till Boggin found me? I was sure that a fight to the death between two supernatural birds and a shape-changing bear monster was something Erichtho's mirror or tarot cards could pick up, even if Boggin's winds hadn't heard the noise and weren't coming to investigate. I was still on the grounds of the estate.

I reached out and touched the bird gently. He flinched when I touched him, as if my hand had hit a sore spot,

and the beak snapped in my direction. The eagle seemed to have a cross expression on his features, even though he did not really have expressions.

"Sorry!" I said. "Oh, I am so sorry!"

The eagle looked at me as if I were an idiot. He had a sarcastic look.

"Is—is there anything I can do?"

The eagle dropped his head back into the snow, eyes sinking shut, too weary to continue withering me with his contempt.

"Please get better. I don't know if you are magic or anything, or if you can grant wishes, but—please get better! I'll do anything if you get better!"

One yellow eye rolled open, and the beak snapped. A hissing croak came from the throat. Was that a yes? I know that in fairy stories you are not supposed to make wishes or say things like "I'll do anything,"

but I didn't want the poor creature to die on my account.

I said, "Are you going to get better?"

Then the eye stopped moving; the lid drooped. He looked dead. Maybe he was just resting. But he looked dead.

The wind blew again. Cold, cold, cold.

I hopped and danced (a little dance I like to call the frostbite toe dance) over to the fires.

It was painful to get a dozen feet across the snow back to the fires. I could not even imagine trying to make the two miles or more to the village. Assuming the group would be waiting for me still at the same dock.

Think, Amelia, think. Review options. What would Victor do? Use logic. What did logic say?

Look over all raw materials. Okay. One wounded eagle. One bearskin. My wedding dress, hanging on a branch not far from the fire… Hm. Probably dry by now. Little glass slippers at the foot of the tree. Lots of rope on the ground, in case I wanted to tie myself up again and wait for Grendel to come back.

Wait. Rope.

Where had Grendel gotten the rope from? Or the bearskin? For that matter, where were the materials he used to start the two campfires? He might have just ripped the branches off trees with his bear claws, but then what? Any matches or anything he might have been carrying in the undersea kingdom would have been soaked through.

I remembered how Boggin had kept his man-clothes in the bell tower, where he could reach them from the air. Grendel said he visited his mother on a regular basis. Where did he keep his man-clothes? It had to be near the Kissing Well——-

Think, Amelia. You are standing in snow. Look at the ground.

And there they were. Bear tracks going from the well into the little stand of trees not far away, a footprint and a peg-print coming out.

I hopped over to the slippers, hoping they might have some magic to enable them to resist the cold. Well, they didn't. It was the same as being barefoot. I took the dress, too. Don't ask me why. It was still a pretty dress, sort of.

One girl in a bear rug (me) went running as fast as she could into the woods.

Here was a little shed, no bigger than a closet, with a round roof made of sod patches, buried up to its neck in the ground. You had to step down into a waist-deep pit to get at the doorflap, which was made of deerskin heavy with ice.

Inside the hut were two chests, and a circle of ash on a flat stone beneath a smokehole. Sitting in the ashes were three right boots. The place was too small to step all the way inside. I knelt, and reached in.

And there were clothes. I stole two pairs of his pants and put them on, one atop the other. I took up a shirt, but it was so scratchy and disgusting that I put on the wedding dress first. It did have some magic for repelling dirt or something, because when I put three shirts on over top, this time they did not scratch or feel greasy.

Was there anything else worth stealing? I found a heavy knife in a sheath. Girl can always use a knife when she is out walking. The boots? One was burnt through and through, but the other two were in so-so shape. They were large enough that left or right did not matter to me, and I could slip my feet into them, glass slippers and all.

Anything that might help the wounded bird? One chest had a compartment with some white handkerchiefs in it. I wondered why Grendel would carry gentlemen's pocket handkerchiefs. He did not seem the type to use so many.

Oh. I should have recognized them. Except I knew them better by taste, not by sight. Handkerchiefs?

Not quite. This was what he used to gag his prospective brides with.

I pulled out a handful. Maybe I could bind up the bird's wounds with them.

Beneath the hankies was a book: Hesiod's Theogony.

That brought tears to my eyes. I know Grendel was an enemy, and a rapist, and he was going to kill me, and torture me, and… and…

And I felt sorry for his mother. There would be another pile of bones out back.

When I got back out to the bird, he was sitting up, preening. The wings seemed better. They did not look broken. Every time he drove his beak through the layer of bloody feathers, more red drops fell to the snow, leaving the wing clean and unwounded.

I crept closer. It did not smell like blood. It was a smell I knew. I had smelled it every day in my life. All students did.

I put my hand to the snow, touched a drop, raised it to my nose, touched it to my tongue.

Ink? It was red ink.

Wait a minute. Who had just been saying that wounds were nothing but red ink… ? And the vulture. I knew who sent the vulture. Lord Mavors. It was part of his curse. Whoever threatened to kill one of us would die. And the vulture…

The vulture had not been coming to save me. Grendel had no intention of killing me. The vulture had been coming to save…

I looked at the eagle.

"Colin… ? Is that you… ?"

1.

I walked south, parallel to the sea cliffs, my feet wiggling a bit inside Grendel's big boots. Snow whitened the ragged boots and the burnt hem of the bearskin. I wore the bearskin over my head like an Indian squaw in a blanket. My hair was still wet, and it hung in icy snarls down my back.

I had lost my leather aviatrix cap somewhere along the way. It was true that I also had lost my shoes and underwear and clothes and every other worldly possession. But I missed my cap.

At first, I walked with the eagle held close to my chest, with a flap of the bearskin over him, trying to warm his cold feathers with my body heat. His wounds were mostly healed, but not all. I do not know why the turn-the-blood-to-red-ink trick worked on some wounds and not on others.

For that matter, if Colin could cure two broken wings, why was Grendel unable to wish his severed leg back on? Surely there was no desire stronger or more profound than that of a one-legged man to get his foot back. I wondered if Boggin had interfered with Grendel's wishing-ability in some way.

There was still blood seeping from his feathers, but I did not see any red spurts, as you would get if a major artery were pierced. I kept him wrapped in a handkerchief, until it got brown; then I would change bandages by throwing that hankie away, and wrapping another one around the shivering bird.

For the first mile, I had talked with the bird, trying to get him to clack his beak to count out numbers, or respond to signals, or do something to demonstrate that he was something smarter than a bird. Maybe he was too sick and cold to try to communicate. Maybe he wasn't Colin at all. I didn't know.

My ability to fret was eroding. I was still grateful to the bird, even though the idea that he was not Colin grew on me. I did not drop the creature in the snow, but I stopped thinking of him as my wounded comrade-in-arms. I held him to my chest under Grendel's shirts, so that his head was under my chin, his beak peeking out from my collar, yellow eyes peering at the pathless path ahead.

2.

After the first mile, I was too cold and weary to keep trying to talk. I just gritted my teeth and trudged.

Little white clouds puffed from my lips; sogginess sloshed in my boots. Every hundred paces, I would try to look into the fourth dimension. The light from the hypersphere was a distant ember, then a dull spark, then a not-so-dull flicker. It was still too dim and far-off to see with; my hyper-body and higher senses were blind and numb still; but the fact that Grendel's curse seemed to be wearing off comforted me.

And I admit, I had to use one of the handkerchiefs to wipe away tears that, to my surprise, I kept finding on my cheeks. By rights, I should have cheered when Grendel got his throat ripped out and fell to his death. He had boasted about murdering people and "biting ears off," and I suspected I was not the first virgin girl he had dragged down to his lair for a quick wedding and a brief life as a sex toy.

I could not even think of another person so horrible as Grendel had been, except maybe for some of the oriental tyrants described in Herodotus, or Torquemada, or Adolf Hitler or something.

Those sailors he killed had wives and sweethearts and children back home. No doubt, they had stared out windows at the gray sea on cold nights, wondering; and no doubt, years passed, and no news ever came of the boyfriends, husbands, and fathers who had been the central pillars of their lives.

But pity is not something that fits in an either-or matrix. Just because I felt sorry for his victims did not mean I was not also sorry for him.

It would have been simpler if I could have just hated him and laughed when he died, or made some cruel wisecrack, like a good British spy in the movies when he pushes the bad Chinese spy into a nuclear reactor coolant tank. ("Have a nice trip, Grendel! See you next fall! Har, har, har!") When I was young, I thought the act of getting older meant, year by year, getting more sophisticated, more hard, cool, and unpitying. Less innocent.

Maybe that was a childish idea of what getting older was about. Maybe adults, mature adults, get more innocent with time, not less. Because the word "innocent" does not mean "naive," it means "not guilty."

Children do small evils to each other, schoolyard fights and insults, not because their hearts are pure, but because their powers are small. Grown-ups have more power. Some of them do great evils with that power. But what about the ones who don't? Aren't they more innocent than children, not less?

So I trudged in the snow, weeping slow tears for a dead monster who had wanted to marry me, and wishing I were like a child, cruel and unpitying, again.

3.

I topped the rise. Below me was a narrow slope of hill, then the brink of the upper cliffs, the ragged limestone juts of lower and lesser cliffs, and the inlet, where the docks of Abertwyi are. The village curves around the mouth of the inlet, separated by a low stone retaining wall from the water. Across the water could be seen the looming silhouette of Worm's Head, a steep-sided island, which rises sheer from the waves.

On the slopes north of the village, climbing up toward my vantage point, were derricks and ropes used by stone miners. To the south was the fish cannery that had made the Lilac family rich. On a hill in the middle of the village were the church and the courthouse, and to the east were the tenant estates of some of the influential local families, the Penrice and Mansel Halls. To the northeast was the extension of the highway, easily visible through the nude trees of wintertime, a marching line of telephone poles and power lines to either side…

Except it was not there.

Gone. Vanished.

The physical features were the same. There was the inlet, the cliffs of limestone, and, across the water, the brooding rock of Worm's Head.

There was a village there. It looked enough like Abertwyi that a moment passed before I noticed how small it was. During the day, it is hard to tell whether a town has suffered a power blackout, but after a moment, I noticed no lights were burning anywhere.

The fish cannery was gone. The highway was gone. There were no power lines or telephone poles. The streets were narrower, unpaved, and there were no signal lamps. There was no traffic. On the slopes closer to me, there were a few crudely made wooden derricks, and only a small part of the cliff had been mined for limestone. At the mouth of one of the cuttings, I saw, not a diesel engine, but a steam engine from a museum, next to a coal bin. Both were coated with snow and ice at the moment, white and motionless.

The boats. Nothing seemed that different about them, except that there were far more, even though the docks were fewer. Then I noticed the lack of motorboats. Then I saw the side-wheeler, with a crooked black smokestack above it.

I tried to look into the fourth dimension again. For a moment, I got a clearer view, then a dimmer, and I could see the utility and inner nature of the things around me. The moment I looked, a strand of the morality substance touching me jerked rigidly, and glittered as some energy or signal passed along it.

That jerk frightened me; it looked too much like a trip wire being sprung. I closed my eyes tightly for a moment. When I opened them again, the fourth dimension was dim again, my hypersphere only a candle flame, illuminating nothing.

I admit I was scared. It is much easier to be scared when you are cold, tired, and footsore. And hungry.

When was the last time I had eaten? Holiday pie and hors d'oeuvres at Lily Lilac's house, I think.

Why had my upper senses failed just now? Maybe I had strained them by trying too hard. Maybe fear hindered their operation. Maybe it was part of a trap, or an attack. Or…

I said aloud, "Colin, this is creeping me out. What was your motto: 'When in doubt, bug out'?"

Time to run away.

4.

I turned east and began to jog. In ten minutes, I had trees around me. By fifteen minutes, I was getting tired and beginning to wonder what time it was. Near noon? In the afternoon? Where was I going to sleep tonight?

Twenty minutes, and I came to a break in the trees.

And there was the highway. I walked across the empty lanes, staring left and right in wonder.

Power lines were dripping with icicles like Christmas ornaments. The telephone poles stood as stiff, regular, and proper as Beefeater guards before the palace of the Queen, with no expression to show that they had been gone from their posts when I last looked for them, half an hour ago.

One lane of the highway was paved in black slush and puddles of blue-gray water. In the distance there came one truck on the road, rolling cautiously down the lane, little wings of filthy water dashing from its tires as it came.

I put up my thumb. I cannot recall if they ever taught me not to hitchhike at school. Maybe they thought I would never leave the estate. But, unless the guy driving the truck was Grendel Glum's twin brother, I thought I would be in less danger than I had been anytime that morning.

I danced back to avoid getting sloshed, tripped on the snow, and landed on my bottom by the roadside, my bearskin flopping open, my hair tangles spilling every which way. My bird flapped and shrieked in annoyance, a high-pitched whine like a steam whistle, cold and lonely.

And shockingly loud. No ghost, no banshee could utter a wail as penetrating as a prince of chaos, trapped in the form of a brainless, bloodstained bird, lost in the snow.

The truck went on by. I understand it is customary in these situations to make rude finger-gestures in the rearview mirrors. I was too well brought up. I stood up, bird in one hand, and tried to shake the snow off my bearskin with the other.

Maybe the bearskin flapping did it. The truck slowed, stopped. Its reverse lights came on, and it backed up. It made a little beep-beep noise as it came.

A man leaned from the driver's side and pushed open the passenger's door. He was a rough-looking fellow in a gray knit cap and a heavy woolen sweater. He had a pipe in his teeth, and the cab of the truck was thick and wet with pipe smoke. I stared in disbelief. Who smoked a pipe in a cab without opening a window?

He had a thick Cornish accent when he spoke. "Merry Christmas, little lady. What might yew be doing out in the wet, on a day like this day?"

"You would not believe me," I said.

"Oh, I hear a lot of things."

"Today was supposed to be my wedding day and someone stole all my clothes, and I'm lost, and I was supposed to meet some friends at the docks in the village, but that was this morning, and they may have left——-"

He looked at my face, which was probably all tearstained and red-eyed; at my clothes, which obviously were not mine; and at my bird, which was wrapped in a bloodstained handkerchief. The collar or choker made of green glass was still around my neck, and the matching bracelets shimmered and twinkled on my wrists. Maybe he thought they were real jewelry.

The pipe, as if by itself, slid from one corner of his mouth to the other. He pushed the door wider. "Get in. I can give yew a ride to the dock. 'Tis nought but five minutes awa'."

I climbed in gratefully. The cab was so high that I had to climb a little ladder thing set along the wheel guard.

It was hot to the point of stifling in the cab, and I coughed on the smoke.

He reached across me to grab the handle and rolled down my window. I must have had a worse morning than I thought, because when he reached out his arm, I fully expected him to grab me and tie me to the seat, or something.

He leaned back, giving me a cocked eye. "Jumpy, are we, missy? Yew've had a bad time, no doubt." He pronounced it doowt.

I said, "I can't believe you believe my story."

He shrugged. "Yew dinnae know me. Why would y' lie? If yew are to lie, why not say something like to be believed, such as yer car broke down? Or that yer a travel-ing bird salesman who carries a big black bearskin rug around on her head? Besides, it's Christmas Day, it is. So I'll pretend to believe yer tale, and yull pretend yew fooled me, and 'twill be our little Christmas gifties to each other, hnn? Tis a day of faith, ye know."

The truck trundled over the rise and came down again into the village. The lanes narrowed, and he began maneuvering the massive lorry down crooked little cobblestone streets to the dock area.

I looked in relief at the red and green traffic lights.

I said, "Ever had one of those days where you are not sure what year you are in?"

He grunted. "Every Saturday morning, if my Friday night goes as big as planned. If I remember not a thing, I know I had a real damn fine good time."

Then he extended one big hand in my direction, not taking his eyes from the lanes. "Name's Sam."

"I am Miss Windrose." I shifted the eagle to one hand and took his handshake gingerly.

"Howdjadoo." (He pronounced it as one word.) "Yer thinking 'tis unchancy that there is no one about?"

("aboowt") "They're all at church. Driving on holy days…" (This was two words) "… 'tis always quiet and graveyardlike, hn? But they give me triple wages, any hauling I do today. How's that for a life? But I won't tell you my base wage, either. It's a pretty penny, too. We got the whole country by the throat, and they pay what we say. It's grand."

I looked at him sidelong. There he sat, working his clutch and gearshift with unselfconscious grace, puffing away like six chimneys, half-hidden in clouds of tobacco, boasting of the highway robbery he enjoyed. Was this what real human beings were like?

I said, "What would you do if you had magic powers?"

"Hn? Join the circus, I guess. Do tricks."

"No, I mean real magic powers. If you could grant wishes… ?"

"Travel the countryside on holy days, disguised as a beautiful motion picture star in baggy clothes, wearing a rug and carrying a bird. Then I would ask folks strange questions. What would you do, missy?"

"I'm serious!"

"Of course you are. Anyone who carries around a hawk covered with blood on her wedding day is serious."

He slowed the truck, stopped, engaged the brake. We were on Waterside Street. I could see the boardwalk and the piers. Empty. I could see the slip where Lily Lilac's boat used to be. Empty.

5.

Sam was looking at my face. He said, "You need some food in you?"

I stirred. I said, "What… ?"

He pointed at a little shop across the way. "I always eat there. The owner is a Hindoo, and he is only closed on Hindoo holy days. Ramandan, or something."

"Ramadan is Islam," I said.

"Well, whatever may be. He's open now, and the first cup of coffee is always free."

"I don't have any money," I said.

"I'd throw it back in yer face if yew did. Christmas gift. Coming?" And he opened his door and began striking his pipe against his boot to throw hot ashes out into the snow.

Not five minutes later we were both eating potato bread and butter pancakes and breakfast ham; not what I expected a Hindu to serve. (I had never seen pancakes before; I thought only Americans ate them.) Of course, the place was called "Jerry's Fine Cafe," and Jerry (whose name was probably Ramarjuna or Sajeeve) was a dark-skinned man who came out and exchanged pleasantries with Sam.

Jerry looked disapprovingly at my eagle, but Sam told him the bird was my Seeing Eye bird and the law required

i

shop owners to allow him on the premises. Sam and I were the only customers in the place, so Jerry let the matter rest

I leaned and whispered, "Is it okay to take these boots off? My feet are all wet and sore."

Sam leaned and whispered back, "Go on. Jerry comes back, I'll tell him yer Japanese."

He stared, not without curiosity, at my beaded slippers, glittering with translucent green beads and lines of crystal. I dried my feet off with a paper napkin, and put my feet back into the slippers, but left the boots on the seat of the chair next to me.

"Yew need something warm in you," he said.

I sipped my first ever cup of coffee. Bleh. Did people actually drink this stuff?

We ate without speaking for a time. I was very hungry.

Then, with no preamble, Sam pointed at me with a fork, which had a piece of pancake on it, dripping syrup. "I been thinking! Here are my wishes. First, I got a nephew who's wrong in the head. They have him in this place near Edgestow. He's fifteen, but he thinks he's five. Bright, for a five-year-old, but…

Well, I'd wish his head back straight. I'd wish my wife, second wife, be up in heaven with the angels. She died of tuberculosis, oh, four years back. About this time of year. First wife, I'd wish her straight to hell, her and her lawyers, too. That's three. Course, Annie probably didn't need any help from me getting to heaven, so let me change my second wish to curing everyone who's got tuberculosis. Filthy disease.

Aside from that, I don't have much I need. Wouldn't wish for money, though. Ruins people. How 'bout yew?"

"Well, I actually have magic powers, and I am trying to decide how to use them."

"Hn. Use 'em for good rather than for evil, I'd say. Create world peace, that'd be a good one. So they let yew out of the institution on Christmas, do they? I don't suppose yew know my nephew. Mortie Finklestein."

I goggled at him. "Your name is Finklestein?"

"My sis, she married a Jew. What's so bad about that! Is it a crime to marry out of the faith? Benjamin Disraeli was a Jew, and he was the finest PM this island ever had, says I, bar none. Einstein was a Jew and smartest man ever lived, wasn't he?" He waved the bit of pancake to make his point, and chomped into it aggressively.

He poured himself another cup of coffee, and poured some more in my cup, even though I didn't ask. I felt I had to try another sip, since he had poured for me. I stirred in five little plastic containers of cream, to make it as white as possible, and endless spoonfuls of sugar. Bleh. Who invented this stuff?

I looked at him, and said in an accusing voice, "You stopped because you saw my hair, didn't you? Had I been a man, you would have kept going."

Now it was his turn to goggle at me. "What? Yew think it rude to be polite?"

"Maybe I don't like being condescended to."

"Well, hn! When yoor done eating up, I can give yer a lift back and putcha in the snow, if yew like." He snorted and laughed, pleased at his own wit.

Then he put his fork down and pointed his finger toward my face, very rudely, I thought: "Lookee here, life is more cruel to women than it is to men, and there is no use saying it's not! Here yew are, a woman stood up at the altar, or one who says she is, and yoor telling me women and men got dealt the same hand of cards?"

I felt I had to stand up for my sex: "The equality between men and women requires that they be treated the same."

"Yeah? Well, I don't know what kind of men you know, but the ones I know always feel a little hurt when yew give 'em a hand. Y'know? I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just saying women make it easier for yew to help them. And being pretty as a Sunday morning doesn't hurt matters either.

"Besides, no girl ever tried to hijack my load. You think it don't happen, but it does. In Liverpool, I was once.

"But, listen here! Don't turn down help when someone reaches out his hand, hn? It's the only thing that keeps human beings alive on the Earth, and I am right about that!"

He picked up his fork and stabbed it back into the pile of pancakes. He chewed for a moment, and then spoke with his mouth full, mumbling. I had never seen someone talk with food in their mouth before, and I stared in amazement. But I suppose there was no Mrs. Wren in his life to slap him with a ruler for bad table manners.

This is what he said: "Little missy, I stopped when yew fell, 'cause I hear'd a cry, a high cry, and I thought yew were holding a baby in yoor arms. And yew fell down."

He swallowed a bit; then he continued: "Maybe I shouldna stopped for a woman with a baby on Christmas Day, issat what yew think? But I hear'd the cry and I stopped. Didn't expect it was yer pet screeching."

We ate in silence for a while. I felt a bit like a wretch. This man was the only person who had rescued me with whom I had argued. (How many times had I been rescued… ? Just the Grendel menace: once by Boggin, once by Telegonus, once by the eagle… was there one I had forgotten? Romus had rescued me from Erichtho…)

I started to apologize, but he waved my words away, and changed the subject. Sam said, "What can yew do with your magic powers? Talk to the departed, tip tables, tell fortunes, that sort of thing?"

I said, "Well, maybe I can show you…"

I looked into the fourth dimension again. I saw two things at once. The rooms of the little restaurant were laid out like a blueprint. I could see Jerry in the back room. He was on the telephone, saying, "Yes, Constable, I am not very likely to be mistaken! It is one of the five strange children from the Branshead estate. How is it possible I could not know one of them? The ones who never get any older…"

At the same time, I saw the moral strand running to me jerk, and flicker with light. This time, I used one of the other senses to look at the first sense, and sought its internal nature. Magic. I was seeing a magic spell. A finding spell.

I jumped to my feet. I pulled and pushed on the higher parts of my body, but it was mostly still numb. I could not deploy my wings or move into hyperspace.

Sam dropped his fork. "Um. Don't get excited———Is, ah, is everything… ?"

"Sam!" I leaned across the table and kissed him.

He looked, at once, startled, pleased, surprised, and worried. "Hold on…"

"Thanks for saving me! You're my second rescuer today, fourth one this week. I must run. I have enemies. Bad, bad people. Actually, um, gods. Old gods from the pagan days. They are beyond your strength. Don't follow me!"

I stepped toward the door and he grabbed at my arm. My "pet bird" snapped at his fingers with the razor-edged bolt-cutters of his beak, but I yanked the bird back with one hand before he drew blood.

The snapping bird made Sam flinch, and I was away.

Even had Sam been faster than me in the sprint (which I doubt), he was not faster than me in the steeplechase. I leaped from table to table in a straight line toward the door, and cleared one or two chairs in my way with a good takeoff, slightly wobbly landing. I lost the bearskin rug behind me during one jump.

The little bell tinkled, and I was out the door.

On the street, Waterside Street. Still deserted. Maybe everyone was at church; I could hear bells tolling solemnly in the distance. Which way? Would any direct tion do? Away from the docks, though: I might have to come back here, and it would not do to lead any pursuit that direction.

I turned and sprinted up Main Street, which was more or less straight, heading toward the hill where the church and the courthouse were. I tucked the bird under my arm like a ball.

And Sam came pounding down the street after me. He still had a napkin tucked in his collar, and was carrying a fork in one fist He had left his coat behind. His form was not bad, for an old guy. Maybe he did rugby when he was younger.

Up the street About one hundred yards ahead of me was a carriage circle, with a circle of grass in the middle, and a pillar bearing the names of local townsmen who died in the Great War. They had put a statue of an angel up recently; at least I did not remember seeing it there before, tall atop the pillar. They had painted it for Christmas, blue and white. I was still at least a quarter mile from the church…

Wait a minute. Why was I going toward the church? If that was where all the townspeople were, (a) I might be putting them in danger, (b) they might call the coppers on me, just as Jerry had done. This was the worst direction of all to be going.

I stopped at the carriage circle, blowing puffs of white and looking left and right. There were lanes running north and south.

The angel on the pillar turned his head, spread his peacock-blue wings, raised his bow. There was an arrow in the string.

"Phaethusa, Helion's daughter, I make it fated that you will be struck by this shaft if you do not surrender to me. I am Corus. I am the North by Northwest Wind, a humble god, perhaps, for only one-sixteenth part of the infinite sky is mine; but I am great enough to wound you."

I stood with one hand on my knee, bird in the other, blowing white puffs. I shook my head. "No. No, thanks. I'm sick and tired of surrendering."

He said, "Do you toy with me, Chaoticist?"

"Lord Mavors said you can't kill us! How are you going to stop me if you don't risk killing me!"

"I make it fated that you shall not die when my arrow strikes. With such a fate, I may strike your eye with no fear the shaft will enter your brain-pan, or hit your thigh, hand, bosom, marring and maiming, as I will."

I straightened up, and held up the wounded eagle in both hands. "Look out! I've got a magic bird… this bird will save me! And I am not a monster or anything. I'm just a girl with a monster's powers, and I've never done anything wrong, so I don't want you to shoot me."

Sam came trotting into the carriage circle, slowed down, and walked up. His mouth and eyes were wide.

"Hey! Are yew an angel? Don't point that thing at the girl here. She's touched in the head!"

Corus said, "Creature of Prometheus, go, and I will spare you. I make it fated that when you wake after you have slept, this will fade like a strange dream. If you speak of it this day, you will not be believed, even by those that love you…"

"Is my wife up there with yew all? Second wife, Annie, I mean…"

"Go!"

He turned the arrow toward Sam.

Sam set his jaw and looked stubborn.

I said, "Um, Sam, maybe you should…"

The bowstring sang.

I jumped in front of Sam and threw out my arms. The eagle, released, flapped and jumped in front of me.

The eagle moved faster than was possible, as if he were trying to bat the speeding arrow out of midair with his wing. The arrow passed through the one wing, lost all velocity, turned sideways, and slapped against me before it clattered to the pavement.

The eagle screamed, loud, shrill, and piercing. There was an answering scream from far away. I am not an expert on bird screams, but I am pretty sure that second scream was one I had heard earlier today.

The eagle flapped to the ground and began poking at his newly rewounded wing.

Corus looked down, frowning. Then he put his foot to the bowstaff, bent, and unstrung his bow. "I release you," he said.

"What?" Had I heard that right?

Coras spoke quietly, his eyes downcast, "Little softhearted girl with the powers of a monster, who steps in front of our cattle, the frail and foolish mortal men, go and be free. On one condition, I release you."

"What's the condition?"

"That you tell no one of my dereliction."

"I want to be able to tell my friends."

"Only on their oath likewise, not to reveal this act."

"Won't Boggin just hear what you are saying now? He can hear the wind."

"I am the wind."

"I will agree… But! But I have one condition…"

That made him smile. He put his hands atop the bow-staff and leaned on it. "You are just as bold as brass, aren't you, little foe of all creation?"

"You have to tell me why. Why you are doing it?"

Coras frowned again.

Sam pointed upward with his fork, and said to me, "Yew know him, do yew?"

Coras glowered at Sam and waved his hand. "I make it fated that you will sleep before I speak this word."

Sam sat down on the cobblestones, blinked, slumped slowly over, snoring. His fork clattered to the pavement with a tiny tinkle.

"You didn't hurt him, did you? Is he going to be all right?"

The eagle twisted around his head and squawked at me angrily. Well, maybe the bird had a point. He had been hit with an arrow, and I was fretting over a sleeping guy. I picked up the bird and brought out another handkerchief to wrap around him.

There was another small tinkling noise when I did that, and something bright lay on the pavement. I put one slippered foot casually atop it.

Coras said, "I do not prey on the cattle of Mulciber. This world is his. I make it fated that this man shall be found by kind strangers, who will see to his care. I accept your final condition, O monster who pities even such low creatures as this man. Here is my reason: Thelxiepia begged me, that if by chance I were the first one to find you, that I be slow to carry out my duties. She is the finest, most beautiful, and most ill-used of women. I wanted to use the bounty Boreas placed on your head to buy her freedom, and I did not hear her plea, although my heart was torn. She said you would not destroy the world, and I did not believe she knew whereof she spoke. Now I know that she is also wise, and kind, and good…"

I said, "Oh my gosh! You are the one! At the party! You and Miss Daw. The Lady said someone was going to fall in love at that party! True love! She said it would be true love."

His grin was like the summer sun breaking through clouds, and his face lit up with happiness and embarrassment. He turned his head away, and put his hand on his mouth to still his involuntary smile.

Corus spoke again without turning his head. "I have fulfilled my condition, and now I lay my fate upon you: should my brother or any who might tell him of my treason to him, learn of it from you, your suffering and pain will be greater than mine, and last nine times the span of time."

He turned his back to me and spread his wings. "Your companions, who also seek you, await you in the harbor. Warn them that each time Nausicaa calls her silvery ship, or bids it sail, Mestor's lodestone is drawn.

"Do not mistake this act of mine for kindness. You and your kin I hold in hatred and contempt, for your life is the death of the earth and sky; and you wounded my great brother Boreas, who now lies in his sickbed, caught in dreams with no waking, for he is under attack by Morpheus the Lord of Night."

I said softly, "I am sorry for that. I like Boreas, even though he was so mean to me."

He did not turn his head, but he snorted. Perhaps he was amused at the idea of the softhearted monster, as he called me. He said in a gentler tone: "And do not envy me my true love. The Lady Cyprian did not warn me how it would stain my honor, sever my kinship, and make all my roads as hard as iron swords to cross. Yet I regret nothing."

And he stepped from the pillar and rose into the sky.

When he was gone, I moved my slipper and looked down.

The ring of Gyges lay under my toe.

1.

The church bells rang again, and down the street, the tall doors opened. A little crowd began to form on the stairs of the church, little figures in the distance in their best formal clothes.

I misted the "fate" Corus had put upon Sam, that someone would find and help him. I would have called out, but I feared they would call the police on me.

Bird in hand, I walked quickly down Main Street. No one was following. When the slope cut off the view of the church behind me, I ran.

I had the ring in my fist as I ran, but I was too wary of the unknown to put it on my finger.

How had it come to be in my pocket? At a guess, when Grendel came out of the Kissing Well with me freezing to death in his arms, he stepped over to his little buried shed, saw it was too small to get me inside, but grabbed up his cloak and fire-making tools. And took the time to take off the ring, wrap it in a hankie, and put it in his trunk? Maybe. He had that trunk open because he was getting a gag out for yours truly; he was terrified that I would make a noise and call down the vengeance of Boreas on his head.

But the fact that I had it seemed like a coincidence.

From Corns, it was clear that arranging coincidences was the especial province of the Olympians. But why? Maybe it had a tracking device in it, or the magical equivalent to one. Even so, several clues implied the Olympian power could only work on someone who broke a law, went back on a promise, or was indebted. I had not stolen this ring. Did that make it safe to use?

I came out onto Waterside Street.

I heard Vanity's voice before I saw them, a cheery voice ringing with relief and joy: "Oh! Look! It worked! There she is!"

I turned my head, and there they were. Quentin had his huge black cape on over his school uniform, a staff of white wood in his hand; Victor was wearing a brand-new buff-colored jacket that fell to his knees, with a chain-mail jerkin dangling and clinking underneath; Vanity was dressed in a plush red winter coat with white mink fur trim about the hood and wrists, with matching gloves, with little black booties below. It was an outfit I had never seen before. She looked like a glamour model doing a "Santa's little elf" theme.

I ran up and threw my arms—one arm, anyway— around the smiling Vanity and gave her the biggest hug circumstances allowed. She flinched and giggled when the huge bird of prey fluttered his wings across her head.

We were standing, of all places, right in front of Jerry's Fine Cafe. Victor had his back to me and was helping a police constable sit down on the bench that was there. A second police constable was already seated, slumped over the bench arm, ear on his shoulder, eyes closed and mouth open. There was a teardrop of drool dangling from his lip. I would have thought he was dead, but dead men don't snore so loudly.

Quentin's eyes were also closed. He had his left hand held out at shoulder level, with rosary beads twined through his fingers. A cross was hanging from it, like the bob of a pendulum. The pendulum was not swinging. The rosary was motionless, suspended at the apex of its arc or swing, and the cross was pointed at me.

Quentin relaxed and muttered, " Ave et vale. Abi!" Whereupon, the rosary in his hand also relaxed. He opened his eyes, casually looping the rosary around his hand to tuck it into an inner pocket, and he said,

"I was looking for Colin, that time ."

I said, "I sensed someone looking for me. Was that you?" And without waiting for an answer, I held up the bird. "This is Colin, I think."

Vanity stepped away and blinked at the bloody eagle. "Colin was taller, last time I saw him, wasn't he?"

Quentin said, "Found this on the bed of the sea, when I was dowsing for you. Like attracts to like. You wouldn't believe how often Victor went diving for you."

He handed me my lucky cap.

I was angry with Victor, of course.

If he had been thoughtful enough to be the one to return my aviatrix cap to me, I would have had the perfect excuse to kiss him. But he didn't. How rude.

Victor straightened up. "I have stimulated the narcoleptic reflex in their brains, but they are not actually asleep. That would require brainwave alterations to delta states, which are controlled by more complex sections of the medulla oblongata. In the meanwhile, they can hear us, so we should not discuss anything in front of them we do not want the enemy to know."

I said, "The gods erase the memories of people who learn about them; it just happened to a guy who helped me. Funny guy, real nice to me. Thelxiepia told me gods kill people who find out too much."

Victor nodded, looking entirely unsurprised by this news, and said to the sleeping policemen: "Your planet is being secretly controlled by a group of entities who need or enjoy the admiration and worship of human beings. They control a highly advanced technology which can affect thought processes. If you reveal what you have overheard to anyone, you run the risk of being destroyed by them. Nevertheless, you may wish to take that risk in order to organize a resistance to them, if you find that their rulership is unacceptable to you."

To me, Victor said, "Let us go back before more people come. These officers were sent for you."

I said, "Back?"

He pointed.

Out in the harbor was the silvery ship. She rested on the waves, bright as a naked sword blade, slim as a swan. The eyes to either side of the prow did not seem as blind as painted eyes should be; the long bronze ram extending sloping into the waterline gave the ship a friendly, almost comical look, like the nose of Cyrano. There was a crystal lantern shining (pale as the moon seen by day) on the mast, but no sails.

There was something so odd and so dreamlike about the silvery ship, that I looked again with my upper senses. The ship was not actually floating on the waters of Earth, not fully. The waters below her keel were an ocean that extended in another direction, becoming ever more mystical, haunting, and phantasmagorical in the distance. The two oceans overlapped when the silver ship met the sea, so that she was actually afloat in the ocean of dream, but her deck was exposed to the airs of Earth.

Quentin took the bird gently from my hand and frowned at him, scratching his head gently and muttering over him.

We all started to walk toward the pier. I put one hand through Victor's arm, and Vanity took my other hand. Quentin walked behind, stroking the bird.

The boardwalk boomed under our footsteps. Vanity said, "So this is a new look for you, isn't it, Amelia?

The sort of grungy, baggy, two-pairs-of-pants look?"

"Look who is talking! Where did you get those clothes?"

"Paris. We sailed up the Seine. Humans can't see Argent Nautilus. That's her name. We spent some of the money you got us."

I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach. "You went—to France—? Without me? You went shopping! In another country! In Paris! And I missed it!"

It was one of the worst moments of my life. Imagine if your friends got married, had a party, went to Alpha Cen-tauri, discovered an alien civilization, and got to name all the planets in the new solar system with new names, but they did not invite you. You were off being burnt and choked by a one-legged sex maniac. The boat sailed without me. One of the worst moments of my life.

Vanity said, "I would have invited you, but you were drowned by Grendel."

Victor said calmly, "They were buying scuba gear to help me look for you. Vanity's boat ignores distance considerations. Timewise, Paris was just as close as Oxwich Green or Swansea."

"I am not blaming you—I'd like to, but I'm not. Oh! Before I forget! Her boat is detectable. Each time she calls her or sails her, Mestor's lodestone points at it."

Victor said, "We already have a plan for that. We are going to have the Argent Nautilus tow Lily's motorboat into the sea lanes somewhere near Australia or America, or some other English-speaking country, and then lead them away on a goose chase. We'll flag down a passing ship and say we're lost at sea."

"You really went and bought clothes without me… ?"

Vanity said, "Victor took his drug. Quentin read his book. I waved the necklace around my head and shouted at it, but nothing happened. We all looked at the card."

The second most horrible moment in my life. My friends were doing experiments, fascinating scientific experiments, and getting new super-powers, all without me!

I said, "A vulture swooped from the sky and killed Grendel. Tore out his throat and he fell off a cliff! I felt bad about it before, but now I feel like celebrating. Did you guys buy any champagne? That's what made me think this was Colin; the curse of Mavors is protecting him."

Vanity said, "Why would we buy champagne? We were outfitting a rescue expedition!"

"You bought new clothes, didn't you?" I admit I was green with envy. After a whole life of school uniforms, I could not even imagine choosing your own clothes. From a store! With your own money! Not asking anyone's permission!

Vanity said, "We got some for you, too."

Quentin said, "Are you sure this is Colin… ? He is not reacting to my charms."

"Oh!" I said, "And I've got this! Grendel dropped it."

And I pulled out the ring.

Vanity looked impressed; Quentin whistled. Victor said only, "Is there a way to tell if it is booby-trapped, or carries a location signal?"

2.

The Argent Nautilus breasted the waves as swiftly as an arrow flies. The waters under her keel, however, were unruffled. The passage was silent, with only the most graceful of sea-motions to impart a sense of travel, mystery, and delight to the sailor. The winds of the world we passed through were surely supersonic, but only a stiff sea breeze, a token of that wind, passed within the rail of the ship, enough to bring a brisk chill, not enough to blind or stun us. Magic. It was the way folks sail in dreams of flight, faster than was reasonable, without seasickness or strenuous effort.

I stood at the stern, watching the island of Worm's Head sink away behind us. I had never seen the far side of that rock before, though I had seen its hither face many times. It was like seeing the dark side of the moon, or the strange constellations of the antipodes.

Victor was standing next to me, also looking astern, concentrating.

I stepped close to him, till my shoulder almost touched his. He did not seem to notice. I told myself that his task must have absorbed his concentration.

Astern of us, bouncing and sending up wild spray, like a drunken water-skier, was Lily's motorboat, which we towed on the end of a long rope. The motorboat was in water that retained the properties of Earthly water, mass, resistance, and so on, and so the boat made noise, a great deal of noise, as it was yanked through the water at blinding speed. As fast as the speed of sound? I could not estimate. But the poor motorboat was leaping from wave crest to wave crest in sheets of exploding foam, and it spent half the time in the air, tumbling and careening.

It was Victor who was keeping the motorboat from capsizing, using magnetic force-beams to try to stabilize the worst of the turbulence.

Vanity was seated on the bench, facing forward, smiling into the sun, which was now declining into the afternoon. This bench was of ivory, curiously carved, and fair to the eye. I stood next to it. The bench was fixed to the deck in the place where a steersman would sit on a boat that had a steering board.

Quentin was seated at her feet, drawing circles on the deck in chalk around the bored-looking eagle.

Quentin was looking fretful.

The eagle was looking (you guessed it) bored.

3.

The first thing I wanted to know was how much money was left. It looked to me as if Vanity and the others had bought several department stores' worth of material. The boys had bought Aqua-Lungs and fish-spears, camping equipment, food, chemicals. Victor had bought half a dozen textbooks on advanced neurological psychology, which he (before injecting himself) had memorized, flipping pages as quickly as he could, and then thrown aside. Quentin had bought a knapsack full of crystals and rune-stones and candles and other litter from a fortune-teller's shop. Quentin commented that he now knew not to be a fool when he shopped: none of the things he bought did what the fortune-teller said, and they were made of impure substances. None of it worked; none of it was real magic.

Apparently the amount of money ap Cymru had given us was enormous, or maybe the exchange rate between the pound sterling and franc was good for England at the moment, or something.

4.

The next thing we did was have a birthday party. It was a very strange birthday party, because I was the only one opening presents.

Vanity insisted on showing me everything she had gotten for me in the Paris shops, and as we opened dress-boxes and hat-boxes and shoe-boxes, the sea wind caught the crepe paper some of the goods were wrapped in, and blew it off the stern. Like confetti.

Everything was beautiful and wonderful. Things I had only seen in magazines, or only heard described, were there, and Vanity has exquisite taste. Or maybe her taste is bad, but at least it matches mine.

I realize that to people who have things, mere material possessions seem tawdry and unimportant. But to a girl who has only ever worn the uniforms assigned to her, the ability to pick whether to put on a pale blue blouse or a black dress with pearls was the doorstep of paradise. It is what freedom is for, being able to pick, in little matters as well as in great ones.

Vanity also knows me. Guess what else she got for me! Running shoes. The things were as light as feathers, made of god-knows-what space-age materials. They were gorgeous.

After spending an endless time selecting an outfit and accessories, shoes and stockings, I suddenly looked up and looked around.

I said, "There is no cabin on this boat. There is no place to change."

It was true. There was a little deck in the stern, and there were lines of rowing benches (I have no idea what for, on a ship without oars) and a tiny gangway that ran from the bow to the stern.

Quentin said, "Vanity is very proud of her ship. But, because she is so swift, Argent Nautilus was not designed to be at sea for more than a few hours, or a day at most. So, no cabin, no galley. There is a sail, apparently for times when you go into nonliving waters."

Vanity said, "I think there is a rain tent in the storage locker we can set up on deck. You could change in there. Or the boys could just close their eyes."

I started putting stuff back in boxes. "No. Let me keep on this filthy stuff, at least until we are out of danger. There might be a fight if we are overtaken, and I won't care if Grendel's ratty stuff gets ripped."

That comment ended the party atmosphere. We started exchanging histories.

I was still wearing the baggy dungarees and flannel shirts of Grendel. But I did put on the running shoes, and, because the wind was still slightly chill here, I put on the new coat Vanity had bought for me: a long black affair of silky fur, with gold buttons to match my hair.

I sat sideways on the stern bench while Vanity brushed out my tangles with her new silver brush, and we talked.

5.

Vanity had shrieked and commiserated while I told her of Grendel's various depredations. She is simply a wonderful person to tell stories to, because she hangs on every word, her eyes glowing with sympathy for the heroine, her lips pouting with boos and catcalls for the villain.

And Victor patted me on the hand, and told me he was proud of me for how bravely I had endured the ordeal. I thought that was a funny thing to say, because the worst part of my adventures had been that I had not been anywhere as brave as I would have liked.

I told them about what Grendel had said about Echidna and Beowulf, and his several dead brothers. I described the ripping of the mermaid's cap, choking, being healed by Grendel and then waking up all tied up in his bearskin rug. I glossed over the parts where he was threatening me with conflagration and strangulation, and I described the fight in gory enough detail that it made Vanity queasy and she begged me to stop.

I told them about the mysterious town I saw, resting where Abertwyi is in our world A different time? A different time line? We wasted some time discussing theories.

Quentin recalled that the enemy had mentioned multiple worlds during the meeting of the Board of Visitors and Governors.

I even gave them a brief precis of my conversation with Sam the dray-driver. My encounter with Corns I repeated word for word.

Vanity was enormously upset about Sam the dray-driver, for reasons I did not quite understand. She shook her hair with anger, so that red strands the color of fire stood up from her furry hood and whipped in the wind. "I've been thinking of nothing else for two days except how I was going to tell the newspapers! Maybe get a book deal out of it! You know, 'I was a teenage love slave of a pagan god.'

Good title, eh? And now your Sam—the entire Sam you met, as far as I'm concerned, is dead, or as good as. What's the point?! What's the point of knowing the secret truth about the world if you cannot tell anybody!"

Quentin did not really understand her anger either. He said, half to himself, in a voice as if he were quoting a poem: "An eighteenth I know, which to none I will tell, not to maiden nor another man's wife—what is known to oneself and oneself alone is warded best. Only to my sister, would I say it, or the wife I hold in my arms…"

Victor summed up their adventures in a few terse lines, to which Vanity added comments, examples, descriptions, and digressions. Vanity had called her Swift Silver Ship; they had sailed to Paris. Their passports and visas did not seem to be needed; they changed some of the pound notes to francs, and bought gear. At sea again, Quentin slept on the boat, and read the first three chapters of his book, the Arcanum Oneirocritica. Victor took his drug. Vanity fretted. After, they circled spots Quentin divined I might be. Victor dove.

Victor was now about three inches taller than when I had last seen him. He explained: "I've been modifying myself. I rearranged some clumsy joint structures and muscle tissue connections. My muscle pressure has increased, and I have increased the rate of nerve firings per second, to give myself finer motor control.

"The extra height? I created spare abdominal spaces, and I compressed other organs, to make room for certain amplifiers and storage cells I am in the process of growing; also focusing elements and sensory adaptations. The blueprints were coded into my memory by the ampoule.

"I have made additional ganglia connections between various sections of my cortex and lower brain functions, to give myself more direct access to involuntary activity.

"The library has a wide listing of coded commands to impose into other people's nervous systems to trigger their reaction cycles. The system is called cryptognosis.

"Certain of the molecular chains take much longer to put together than others, and I have to build step-by-step certain molecular-construction tools and processes which the library-compiler evidently thought would be already installed in me, or automatic.

"However, the work proceeds very slowly. Whoever put together the coded molecules of memory-stuff that was in the syringe seemed to have no understanding of biology, or terrestrial conditions. I have instructions and reflexes set up in my nervous system now, which, if I set into motion, would turn me into something that could not exist on Earth. There were also no safety features in this library, no warnings for what nerve cells are needed for other functions or not.

"Quentin keeps telling me it is dangerous for a scientist to experiment on his own brain, but I tell him that a magician's credo is to know, to dare, to will, and to be silent. Obviously, to know all, the magician must dare all, and be silent about the risks."

Victor smiled one of his rare smiles. I listened with surprise. Was Victor actually telling a joke?

Quentin, despite that he was fussing over the bird, had a much more relaxed and confident poise to him than I had seen before. There was a glint in his eye, and he talked back to Victor in a way which, when he was younger, he never would have done: "And I keep telling him that the principle of empirical experiment requires the experimenter to remain objective, a scientist who monkeys with his own mental hardware compromises his ability to observe.