The Iron Dragon's Daughter

— 21 —

CHEEK FLAT AGAINST TOMMY PADDLEFOOT'S THIGH, JANE waggled his penis back and forth. It was such a funny, floppy little fellow, she thought affectionately. She liked penises quite a lot, clownish things that they were, the sort of silly dangles that would look equally at home on a jester's cap or scepter.

It was only at times like this, immediately after sex, that Jane ever felt truly at peace anymore. She cherished this still, calm feeling of content, and prolonged it as best she could, wrapping the moment about her like a blanket that could briefly ward off the harsh shocks and chills of the world. She dreaded the rude instant that must inevitably come to end it.

"Hey. As long as you're down there anyway, how's about blowing a little tune on the mouth organ?"

Jane let it drop.

"That won't be necessary." She scraped up a bit of something from the wet spot and, holding the tip of her nail directly over his cock, whispered a summoning. "Stand up, Mister Bumble. Arise and grow larger." With her other hand she formed the mudra of spiritual expansion. And because she knew his organ's name and the proper techniques, it engorged with blood and stood erect for her.

Playtime was over. Back to work.

She sat up, twisted around, and crouched over Tommy's torpid form. With one hand, she guided Mister Bumble into Little Jane.

"You going to do the thing with the scarf again?"

"I'm going to do something better," she promised. "But to do it, I'll need your true name."

"Aw, no," Tommy Paddlefoot mumbled. "I really shouldn't."

"No?" She brushed her breasts lightly over his face, drawing them back from his questing mouth so that he only got the slightest sweet taste of nipple, and then reached a hand behind her to rake her nails lightly up his balls. He drew in his breath. "But you did like the game with the scarf?"

"Well, yeah, but—"

"You'll like this a whole lot better. I promise."

There was a pantry cupboard off the kitchenette that Jane had no use for. She opened the door and threw Tommy Paddlefoot's clothes inside. The cupboard had amassed quite a pile of silks, cottons, and leathers. Apollidon's plumed hat must surely be crushed flat. She slammed the door. "Ferret was asking questions today," she said.

"Oh?"

"Is that all you have to say—Oh? Doesn't the thought of Ferret sniffing after your trail even bother you?"

"No."

"It should. He knows there's something wrong about my background. It can only be so long before he finds out what."

An angry hiss of steam rattled the walls. But the dragon's voice was cool and aloof. "So you are being pursued! What a weak and pathetic waif I find myself harnessed to! You don't know the least jot of it. We have been more closely pursued than you can imagine and by powers that would freeze your blood to think upon. Eight times in the last year have we come close to discovery. Even now, all sources of flight-octane fuel are being carefully watched. They know I'm out here and they know how much fuel I took with me. They're sure I'll try for more sooner or later. And so I would, if we hadn't worked out this alternative source of energy."

"What powers? Name them!"

"Save for one, their names would mean nothing to you. And that one you surely would underestimate gravely. If I were to say that for three nights running the Baldwynn had stalked the corridors outside this very apartment, you would—"

"Oh, the Baldwynn," Jane said airily. "Did I mention that I went dancing with him? You'd never guess what he tried to do."

"Don't let him kiss you!" In his shock, Melanchthon's voice was a roar that shook the steel frame of Termagant down to its foundations. Jane staggered. In the dining room a candy dish fell and broke.

"Why not?" Jane demanded. "What'll happen if I do?" It did not escape her notice that the dragon had known the Baldwynn wanted to kiss her. Nor that he had assumed that he had not succeeded. Well, she was tougher than Melanchthon realized.

He retreated into silence.

"You're still lying to me, damn you! I don't lie to you! We're supposed to be partners, right? Equals. In this together. When are you going to stop your stupid mind games and power trips so we can work in concert?"

Still the dragon said nothing. After a while Jane went to take a shower.

When she emerged twenty minutes later, wrapping a towel around her head, the dragon could not be seen. He had drawn the illusion of off-white walls, draped windows, and hanging baskets of English ivy about himself. But the air sang with tension. It trembled with the malice of his regard.

"Well?" Jane said testily.

For a long moment the silence held. At last, grudgingly, the dragon said, "You are right. We have little time left. We must complete our preparations as soon as possible."

"I know what you want and you can just forget it. Not tonight."

"Tonight," the dragon insisted. "I need more."

"More? I must've given you close to a hundred names by now. Just how fucking many do you need?"

"I'll let you know when it's enough."

Jane had a script to go over and lines to memorize. She'd been up late three nights running and it was beginning to affect her complexion. She'd promised herself she would go to bed early with a mud pack and a trashy paperback. "Cut me some slack. You can spare one night."

"Destruction," said the dragon, "is my all. Your screams would be as meat and drink to me, your torment sweeter than the blood of innocents, your slow death a lifetime of pleasure. Don't think the only sacrifices made have been yours. Do you want the Goddess or not? She's a tricky piece of business, and I won't go against her at anything less than full strength. If you won't cooperate, say so and I'll lower my sights. I may not have the power yet to kill the Lady, but I have more than enough to destroy the City and all that abide in it."

The reek of indignation and cold iron filled the apartment.

Jane sighed and glanced at the clock. She always lost these arguments. Maybe on some unconscious level she wanted to lose them. Maybe, living within the sphere of the dragon's aura, his passions were translated by her body into desire. In any case, Little Jane always silently sided with Melanchthon. And there was no denying that her duties in this phase of the conspiracy were proving far less onerous than she had expected them to be.

"I've got a shoot in the morning," she said. Her handlers needed publicity shots for an image makeover. So far as Jane could tell, her new image was the same thing as her old, only in red leather instead of black. But two weeks' scheduling had been shuffled to make time for a new set of glossies. Still, she could always pop an amphetamine with breakfast. Just so long as she didn't start making a habit of it. "I suppose I could pick up somebody in the bar."

"My little slut," Melanchthon said approvingly.

At the end of the shoot, while the photographer's assistants were packing up the equipment, Corinde came over and, putting aside his walking stick, placed an arm around Jane's shoulders. Corinde was the single most anorexic elf Jane had ever met, a stick figure in black, and such a bundle of mannerisms that it was hard to guess at the real personality underneath. Rumor was that he wasn't an elf at all, but some socially elevated variety of night-gaunt, and it was certainly true that Jane had never seen him in natural light. Still, he'd always treated her well enough.

Nattily tucking his cane under one arm Corinde said, "Darling, I have to say this. I've worked with the best—and you know me, I never flatter anyone if I can avoid it—the absolute best, and in all my years I've never seen anything the equal of you today. You were quite simply dreadful!"

"I'm sorry, I—"

"Yes, yes, yes. All this sex-drugs-and-glamour. You think I don't understand? You get to go to all the best clubs and take all those pretty young boys home and do whatever you want with them." Jane held herself expressionless. "Believe me, sweetcakes, I understand perfectly. But listen to me. Your wealth and notoriety—they're simply borrowed against expectations. They could vanish in the morning light. You haven't earned them yet. It's like shooting up speed." He raised his eyebrows significantly. "You feel fine and vigorous for ever so long. You look marvelous. You have the time of your life. But sooner or later, you have to crash. And then you will pay the piper, in exact measure according to how much you've drawn on account. Are you following me?"

"Yes, I—I think so," Jane said in a small voice.

"Good. Now go home and get some sleep."

"Oh, Corinde, I would, really. But I promised Fata Incolore…"

Corinde's eyes flashed. He slammed the floor with the tip of his stick and spun on his heel. Over his shoulder he snapped, "Somebody shorten the way for Fata Jayne. She has an important date uptown."

Under his prickly exterior, Corinde was really very sweet. It was a pity she had offended him. Jane hoped dearly that she hadn't won his enmity. The thought troubled her all the way to Pentecost.

The doorway to House Incolore—or, rather, to the physical expression of House Incolore's local nexus—was gray and unassuming. It opened at her touch and closed noiselessly behind her. She walked unsurely through a dimly lit narthex.

The hall Jane stepped into was overwhelming. It seemed to be carven of vaulted and arched shadows that lofted in great curves to the farabove gloom. The gray walls, which turned to granite when touched, were braced by slim white pillars that glowed faintly in the distant gray. At first Jane thought the pillars were marble. But when she brushed against one, it had the warmth and texture of ivory.

Startled, she looked up at the vaulting again, dizzy with recognition. She was standing within the buttressed chest of some enormous monster whose ribs and bones had been polished and reshaped to form the supports of the granite hall. How could such a creature even support itself? Surely its organs would collapse under their own weight. However could it have taken in enough food to keep itself alive? It must have had an incredibly sluggish metabolism. Perhaps its movements had been excruciatingly slow, centuries for a single thought, ages to complete an action.

"There you are."

Fata Incolore strode briskly into the hall, pulling on her gloves. "Shall we go?"

"Uh, yes. Why not?" Jane continued to stare curiously at the ivory columns. She could not help herself. Incolore followed her glance.

"My ancestor."

"Oh." Jane trailed her hostess into an ambulatory beyond the right-hand row of columns. They stepped into an open-work elevator the details of which were invisible in the murk and rose to an upper gallery. A narrow corridor led deeper into the shadows. With every step they moved farther from the entrance.

"I thought we were going out somewhere," Jane said.

"Yes. To that place you agreed to see."

"Aren't you going to have somebody shorten the way?" Incolore was a gray-paper silhouette just before her, in constant danger of fading away to indistinction. Her stride was long and Jane had to hurry to keep from losing her.

"No need. In my house there are doors that lead wherever I want." She paused, one hand extended, and glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes were twin sparks of predatory calm. "Through here."

Jane stepped through the door and was blinded by sunlight.

As her sight returned, a hospital room coalesced about Jane. The antiseptic smell was unmistakable, as were the half-drawn institutional curtains, before which dust motes danced in slanted light as thick and golden as honey. Yet Jane knew for a fact that there was no hospital within miles of Pentecost.

Shoes clicked loudly in the hallway. Incolore walked over and closed the door. Quiet returned. Behind her, the portal through which they had entered shut without a trace. At the center of the room, an IV drip idle by its side, was a glass coffin.

There was a woman sleeping within.

She was thin, drawn and desiccated, and her scalp was pink beneath wispy white hair. Her face was deeply lined. Jane thought at first that she was old and then that she was not so much old as used up. In sleep she had found a kind of sad peace. Her brow and the skin at the corners of her eyes were tense, as if she were peering into a great distance. But the mouth was relaxed and unworried. Hers was no joyous expression, but that of one who had attained after long struggle a hard-won cessation of suffering.

"She's a mortal," Incolore said. "A changeling like you."

"I'm sure I don't know what you're—" Jane began. Then, seeing the indulgent expression that spread itself across Fata Incolore's features, she said, "How could you tell?"

"I'm in the trade, darling child, remember? You could no more hide your nature from me than you could from Rocket." She laughed briefly. "Don't worry, your secret is safe with me. What's one bit of shrinkage when the inventory is so full?"

Jane let some time pass before asking, "What's the matter with her?"

"Sleeping beauty sickness." Fata Incolore ditched her cigarette stub in the water glass and knocked another cigarette from its pack. "It's endemic among changelings of a certain age. They don't really belong here. The world rejects them, or they the world. It's what will happen to you eventually. Does that frighten you?"

"Yes." Jane peered, fascinated, into the face of the woman. Trying to comprehend her, trying to fathom what alien dreams played in the theater of her sleeping brain. "No. I don't know. Who is she?"

"Her name is Elizabeth."

"Elizabeth." Jane tasted the name, savoring its exotic syllables. This was the first full-blooded mortal, herself excepted, she could remember ever encountering. "She looks like she's had a hard life."

"How could it be otherwise?" There was a small table by the window with a vase of browning flowers on it, Incolore's drinking-glass ashtray, and a twisted bonsai pine in a glazed ceramic pot. Incolore picked up the pot and held it in the flat of her hand. "This tree is over a century old. Do you know how it's stunted into the desired shape?"

"You wrap wires around its trunk, right? You restrict its intake of water and you don't give it much soil to grow in. You prune it too."

"Yes. It's only a plant, of course. A serviceable half blood takes ever so much more manipulation. But we have clever gardeners. They begin by transplanting the mestizo boys and their mothers to small huts on a walled estate maintained for this purpose on a Southern island of perpetual summer. It's a lovely place; you'd adore it. Life is pleasant there. The hills ring with laughter and the mothers are encouraged to bond with their sons. Some refuse, and these are weeded out and sent back to the same factories that absorb their daughters. Most, though—well. The Goddess has given them no choice but to love their own. They raise their sons as best they can. They try not to think of the future.

"But there are servants in the garden, storytellers and other attendants with subtle ways of reminding the children of the noble heritage of their fathers. When they are old enough, the boys are dressed in silks and taken to visit their elven half-kindred. In their father's mansions, they are waited on hand and foot. They taste wealth for the first time. They are denied nothing. They are treated by their grand relations with the utmost condescension and disdain.

"Then they are dressed in wool again and returned to the huts.

"By such small means are they shaped. Ambition is encouraged. Envy is unavoidable. With puberty there are cousins who will take them to bed, teach them courtly ways, and snub them in public. Their fathers make it explicit that they are of tainted blood, bastards who will never be acknowledged. It is left to their mortal mothers to wipe away the tears of humiliation. What do you imagine the upshot of this is?"

"They despise their mothers."

"Exactly. Let us skip ahead several years—you can imagine them well enough—to the day when the best and most cunningly warped of the young mestizos are invited to the Academy. To be a dragon pilot is a great thing, beyond any reasonable expectations they might have, and close, very close to their most unreasonable dreams. They have no idea this was intended for them from before their births.

"A messenger presents the invitation in a distant corner of the estate, in a cool wood, by a gate they have never seen open before. The recipient must leave on the instant. He must pass through the gate without going back for food or cloak or farewell. Knowing how she will feel, he must leave his mother without so much as a word of regret. He is told he will never see her again."

"So he betrays her," said Jane.

"He betrays her."

"But what is the point of such an elaborate exercise?"

"Guilt," said Incolore. "So rare a quality, so precious. I confess I don't understand it at all myself, though the fortunes of House Incolore rest upon it. But its workings are simple. Having denied their own kind once, the young warriors understand the pain of betrayal on a very deep level indeed. Their loyalty to that side of their heritage which remains uncompromised is fierce beyond belief. This is a most desirable trait in one who handles creatures as dangerous as dragons and must bathe in their treachery every day."

Gracefully, she put down the potted tree.

Jane studied the woman's face. It loomed in her sight, as large and mysterious as a new continent. She could fall into it if she weren't careful. "What is she looking at?"

"Well—"

The hall door rattled. It opened.

Rocket walked in.

He stopped, flustered, at the sight of her. He had a bouquet of flowers in the crook of his arm. "Excuse me, I wasn't—" he began. Then, puzzled, "What are you doing here?"

"I bid you good den, brother," Incolore said.

"Ahhhh." It was almost a sigh. "So that's it."

Jane frowned. "Would somebody mind telling me just what is going on here?"

"I come here every week. To visit my mother." Rocket turned away and placed the nosegay on the table. He removed the old flowers from the vase, freshened the water, and set about arranging the new blossoms. "My half sister knows this. Doubtless she has her reasons for confronting us with each other."

When he turned back his expression was stiff and formal. Bowing slightly he handed Jane a daisy. "I beg you forgive my family, madam. I recognize you are not a deliberate party to this farce."

Jane looked down at her hands, at the flower clasped in them.

"Oh, don't be so stuffy," Incolore said. "Jayne, take off your blouse and show my brother what nice breasts you have."

Jane felt her face redden. But Rocket only said, "Don't insult the girl, Lesya. You won't manipulate us into each other's affections with such cheap tricks."

Smiling sternly, Lesya Incolore folded her arms. Her long, black nails dug unpleasantly into the flesh of her forearms. "It is most vexing," she said, "to be thwarted."

A touch of humor animated Rocket's expression. "By definition."

"Oh, don't chop words. Here you are, surrounded by reminders of death and mortality and here's Jayne provided with as nice a proof of your blockishly loyal nature as could be wished. You two could save me a lot of trouble by falling madly in lust."

Ignoring his sister, Rocket went to the coffin and laid a hand on its surface. Briefly he stood there. Then he turned back. "With your permission," he said, "I'll leave by that same way which you came." He groped in the air. Something clicked, and a portal opened into shadow. "Fata Jayne," he said meeting her gaze steadily. "I remain your devoted servant."

"His haunch and thighs are dappled," Incolore said. "Like a fawn's."

He slammed through the portal, shivering the air in his wake.

Incolore sighed. "The loyalty of the systematically betrayed. Is there anything sadder?"

"I can think of a few things." Jane put the daisy behind one ear. She patted the stray hairs into place. "Just what the fuck were you trying to do?"

Fata Incolore shrugged angrily. "I was meddling, of course. That's the source and summa of it. Nothing more. I thought you two had the potential to complicate each other's lives enormously. It would have been amusing."

"Amusing? What kind of shit is that? You're a power—don't you have anything better to do with your life?"

"It is important for me to involve myself in the ephemera of your little lives. To convince myself that they matter. To anchor myself—" Incolore stopped. "To—" A spasm passed through her body. One arm trembled uncontrollably.

Suddenly she cried out. Light poured from her eyes, blazed from her open mouth. It was as if a god had seized her by the hair to reveal the nuclear fires burning within. The light splashed against the wall, and nicked Jane's eyes. Wincing, throwing up an arm to shield herself against it, Jane cried, "What's happening? What should I do?"

"I have… pills," Incolore gasped. "Back in… back in House Incol—" She bit off the words, forcing eyes and mouth tight. When she opened them again, the fires were quenched, and her features once again appeared normal. But they were not the same features she had had an instant before.

"Gwen!"

With a smile of recognition, Gwen placed a finger to her lips and winked. Jane wanted to ask her old friend how she had survived the sacrifice on the football field, how she had come to be reborn in the Incolore. But then Gwen's face slackened and turned gray. Horns sprouted from her forehead. When Jane seized her by the shoulders, she hissed and bent a needle-toothed mouth toward Jane's neck.

Jane jerked away. "None of that now!"

The creature swayed and straightened, thinning, growing taller. For an instant Jane thought she was turning into a serpent. But then her face stabilized into distinctly male features.

"Oh, this is a nuisance," Lord Corvo grumbled. "Tell Incolore that if she can't control herself any better than—" He choked in midsentence, bent over, and became someone else.

Jane waved an arm back and forth in the air, groping for the portal back to House Incolore. But however one found it, whatever the trick might be, it was beyond her. She could not hope to fetch Incolore home by herself.

Then Incolore underwent one final transformation. She hooked a finger under Jane's chin to force up her gaze. With horror, Jane recognized the sharp intelligence of her new features.

"Oh, my!" Jouissante laughed. "This is an opportunity."

She touched velvet fingertips to perfect lips. "Where to start? Shall I trim a bit of this and that from you, little darling, would you like that?" Then, when Jane took a frantic step backward, "Pooh! Of course you would, if I wanted you to. But let's not waste this on such a trifle. We must do something memorable, something truly wonderful."

With a sudden gesture, Fata Jouissante opened the shadow portal.

She seized Jane by the arm and dragged her back through the door into House Incolore.

Straight through the house of shadows Jouissante hauled Jane, and up an endlessly twisting spine of stairs. "We are all bubbles of earth," she said. "Did you know that?"

"Please!" Jane cried. Desperately, silently, she called upon Melanchthon. He could not be invoked. She reached into the primitive depths of her brain, where he normally lurked, quiescent, alert, waiting.

The dragon was not there. He had abandoned her again.

"You are an alchemist and understand that everything is made out of the same component parts. The difference between a tree and a troll is one of organization only." Cold mists blew over the stairway, lit only intermittently by braziers that were smears of silvery light in the harsh sea-fogs, charcoal-smelling with unsteady pinkish hearts where the coals contended with the moisture. "If a tree's understanding of itself were great enough, it could fart and eat meat."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I should think its applications were obvious." The landings flew by. "Do you never wonder why the powers are so quick to anger, desire, and envy? Why we suffer so many feuds, affairs, and scandals? We have them by choice. Our comprehension of the world and of ourselves is so great that there is no clear distinction between the two. We are in constant danger of dissolving altogether. And Incolore—never doubt it—is great among us. There are those who whisper that—well, never mind. Our flaws are the friction that keeps us from sliding right off the surface of existence."

Jane lost her footing and was dragged up a dozen stairs, struggling like a rebellious rag doll. Jouissante paused at a landing just long enough to let Jane get her legs under her, then plunged upward again. Her heels struck sparks from the stairs.

"But if—if—if you're not really you—" It was hard to think clearly under these conditions. "—if you're really Fata Incolore, then why—why are you behaving as if—?"

"Are you retarded?" Jouissante demanded. "Am I speaking to myself? Identity is a fiction. Surely you can grasp that. The Fatas Incolore and Jouissante are simply games that matter chooses to play. I am no more Lesya Incolore than you are."

They were still climbing. Fata Jouissante's vigor was apparently bottomless. Jane, however, was short of breath. Her head swam dizzily. For a second it seemed as if the ghosts of all her victims thronged about her, plucking at her hair, pinching her with their small, mean fingers, silently demanding the return of their stolen names. She shook her head and they were gone.

"—you may well ask. Occasionally a child is born without a true name. It has no subtle body—you understand? No self. It has eyes, brain, fingers, and organs in the proper place and number. But it is insensate. It knows nothing. It responds to nothing."

Give me back my name said Esmeree. Jane turned and she was not there. I want said Wibble said Apollidon said Gandalac. Give me said Lip back my said Gloam life said Hypallage. There were too many to keep track of and they were none of them there and Jouissante was speaking.

"When this happens the child is claimed for the good of the State. A dragon is sent through Dream Gate to raid the lower world and harvest the subtle bodies—they are there called souls—of mortal children. Nothing material may be returned to the upper world. Ah, but souls—!"

I don't feel guilty, Jane told the phantoms. Go away. They swirled about her, less substantial than the skeletal remains of autumn leaves, rattling angrily against her side, batting against her lips with all the force of a wayward moth. It was astounding that Jouissante couldn't see any of them.

Jouissante glanced back over her shoulder. "If you're not going to pay attention, I shall be forced to gouge out your eyes."

"Please!" Jane gasped.

They came at last to a final landing. Breathless and exhausted, Jane gratefully stumbled to a stop. Jouissante flung open an ivory door. "This is her seat of power—the chancel of the skull."

They stepped within. Cool white light scattered and banished the phantoms.

The walls were lined with ivory chests and the floor had off-white rugs. A low ceiling supported track lighting. A pale wall divided the room into two chambers in such a way that one could look into one chamber or the other, but never both at once. Each chamber had a single straight-backed chair facing the leaded-glass windows that were set into the eye sockets. Jouissante yanked her into the left-hand chamber. "We are standing within the skull of the first Incolore. If you hold very still, you can feel the force of her personality humming deep within the bone."

If so, then Fata Incolore's ancestor had been stranger even than her remains would have led one to think. For an overwhelming sense of the tenuousness of existence throbbed through Jane from all directions. Here, she sensed, nothing very dearly wished to remain itself. It made no matter to the albino maple escritoire whether it held letters or motor oil, stood stock still or burrowed in the earth, screamed for blood in the pouring rain or merely burst into flames. An alabaster crocodile trembled on the brink of flight.

"What—what are you going to do to me?"

"That's what I've been trying to explain to you, small lack-wit. I'm thinking of destroying your gross body and incarnating you in the flesh of a thrush or a wren. With your own wicker cage." She began rummaging through the cupboards. "Or better yet a little pink pig. Incolore could lead you about on a ribbon." She glanced up briefly. "Oh, don't look so! You'd have ever so much more pleasant a life as a pig than a wren. You could be potty-trained, for one thing." Bottles clanked and clattered. "Sit in the chair but don't stare into the window. You wouldn't like what it might choose to show you."

Jane had no choice but to obey, though she did risk one quick glance anyway. The window looked upon an empty room with a lone pair of work boots resting to one side of center. They cast a pale shadow. One lay on its side. Mud clung to its sole. Its laces were filthy. For the life of her, she could not imagine why the window should focus on such a thing. And yet her captor was right. For some indefinable reason, the sight of it filled her with an irrational terror.

"There are two windows in the chancel; one looks upon lies and one on truth. Not even Lesya Incolore knows which is which." Jouissante tipped over a chest. She kicked its spilled contents across the room. "Not here either! Where in the name of Maga Argea can it be?"

Something in the chair or possibly the room itself was conducive to lethargy. Jane stared down at her lap, unable to stand.

"Aha!" Fata Jouissante held up a cordless phone in triumph. Numbers booped. She waited, then said, "This is Fata Incolore. I would like you to send up a pig. Yes. No, the creature must be personable. Sweet, yes. Its disposition is very important to me. No, female."

Listening, Jane knew she ought to be upset. But it was hard to care. The apathy that held her to the chair was spreading through her body. If she didn't do something right away, she'd never do anything again.

In a detached way, Jane's fingers meandered to her hair and combed from it the daisy that Rocket had given her earlier. She looked down at the blossom and closed her fingers about it. Crushing the petals.

"How soon can you have it here? Oh, and a satin pillow too!"

Staring down at her hands, Jane concentrated on Rocket's true name and performed a summoning. She had never tried so powerful a spell before, but she knew the theoretics inside out. Tetigistus, she whispered in the Arctic stillnesses of her hindbrain. Come to me.

Jouissante whirled, phone in hand. "What have you done?" she cried. "You've done something! What have you done?"

Jane smiled vaguely up at her. The summoning had burned up the last of her volition. She was entirely passive now. She lacked even the will to speak.

There was a step on the stair. The door opened and Rocket entered.

He was masterful. Rocket took in the situation at a glance. He acted without hesitation. Striding forward, almost too fast to follow, he struck the telephone from Jouissante's hand. With a cry of dismay, she flew at him, raking her nails across his face, reaching for his eyes. Deftly, though, he seized her wrists, forcing her arms back. She thrust her body forward, striving to reach his jugular with her teeth. This was what he had been waiting for. Briefly, her ear was alongside Rocket's mouth.

"Kunosoura," he murmured in a voice so low that under ordinary conditions Jane could not possibly have heard him. But Jane knew his true name and with it had summoned him. His whispered word went right through her.

Kunosoura. It meant dog's tail.

It was Lesya Incolore's true name.

At the sound, the delusion of Fata Jouissante's persona fled from her face. Features melted one into another, some hardening, others softening, yet others growing sharp and keen. When they were done shifting, Incolore had stabilized as herself once more. Her eyes closed and her limbs went limp. Rocket hoisted her slumping body in his arms.

He gestured with his chin. "Open that door, please."

With the return of Fata Incolore, whatever force had held Jane passive was gone. She sprang from the chair and opened the small door he had indicated.

It took them to a room whose walls were lined with carnival masks. There were no windows. Rocket eased his sister down on a couch. "There's a medicine chest in that cabinet," he said. "When she comes to, we'll give her two of the white pills. That'll be enough."

Jane straightened from checking to see that Incolore was comfortable.

They looked at each other shyly.

"Well," Rocket said at last. "Lucky thing I dropped by."

"Yeah," Jane said. "Lucky."

"I apologize for forcing my presence on you twice in one day, madam. I realize that you don't like me—"

"Look, I like you, okay? I like you fine."

Rocket took a step forward and Jane took a step back. He stopped, looking puzzled. "Then why? If you do indeed like me, why then do you behave as you do? Why do you so consistently seek to put me out of countenance?"

"I don't want you to get caught up in all this shit," Jane said. "That's all. There's stuff going on, and I don't want to hurt you."

"Hurt me." Rocket was the stiffest, most sincere thing she had ever seen. "So long as my honor is unsullied, you may do as you wish with me. Treat me badly if that's what makes you happy. It can't be any worse than the pain of your disregard."

This was getting out of hand. To rein things in, Jane said, in as chill a tone as she could muster, "Your sister's political games have run completely amok, sir. She was going to turn me into a pig." Suddenly the ludicrous nature of it all struck her and she giggled with alarm. "A pig!"

"That was Fata Jouissante," Rocket reminded her. "But you are right to be angry, and if I cannot make amends, I can at least make explanations." He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "The eyes of the chancel are delicate mechanisms. Performing a major transformation beneath one would—what is the word I'm seeking?—distort? no, obsess the eye, rendering it unwilling to look at anything but the act itself, over and over. It would diminish Lesya's power incalculably. But many a strange deed is performed under the banner of love."

"Love! For who?"

"Why, Lesya, of course. Poor Jouissante! She lives in dread of that day—and it is coming—when Lesya is raised to the invisible college and becomes a guardian. To be made a guardian is a terrible scandal and as great an honor as one may aspire to. Its prospect arouses everyone involved to extremes of emotion." He shrugged. "Even under the best of conditions, powers play such messy games when they sport at love."

Jane pondered this in long silence. At last she asked, "Is that what the Baldwynn is—a guardian?"

All of Rocket's warmth blew away like mist before a wind. "How do you know of the Baldwynn?" he demanded sternly. "He is one of the Eight. Nobody is supposed to know of the Baldwynn."

Jane touched Rocket's doublet. She undid the top two buttons and slid her hand within. Her fingers stroked his chest. It confused Rocket, addled and silenced him. "Where do you live?" she asked. "I mean the full address."

"Caer Arianrod. North 9743-A Plaza Court D."

She invoked his true name a second time. "Go there," she said. "Forget all that has happened here tonight."

Reluctantly she withdrew her hand.

And Rocket went away.

Fata Incolore shuddered as the pills took hold. Color returned to her face. "It seems I'm in your debt."

"I don't want your gratitude!"

"Yes, so I gather." Long fingernails tapped against the top of the medicine kit, as if it were a small drum. "I suppose if I told you I could arrange for a certain stalwart young dragon pilot to materialize, naked and cooperative, in your bed one of these nights, you'd simply snarl at me again."

Jane folded her arms and said nothing.

"You really are the most amazingly perverse thing. I don't believe I've ever met anybody like you." Lesya laughed lightly. "Well, let's change the subject. Have I ever showed you my collection?" A negligent wave of one hand indicated the masks on the wall. Stern faces looked down on Jane, blank, assured, alluringly soulless.

"No."

"They're quite valuable. And useful as well. What I like about them, though, is that for all the sorcery that went into their making, they're not brute enchantments. They're instruments, dependent on the training and natural talent of whoever wears them."

"I don't follow you."

"Take this one, for example." She lifted a feathered demimask from the wall. The mask swooped up from the eyes in mock wings, covered the brow and nose, and left the mouth free. "Three bullocks were sacrificed just to activate it. Yet most of its power lies in the skill with which it's applied."

Jane shook her head slightly, involuntarily.

"The glamour of the mask is strong enough to confound identification so long as you do not speak. Such a mask can be, and often is, employed for a casual sexual fling, to protect one's reputation. But its true purpose is to be used on someone forbidden to you whom you yet strongly desire.

"You must want him greatly, so passionately that when you couple the extremity of your desire will be obvious to him. You must be shameless in your heart; you must do things you thought you would never do, and you must enjoy them. You must strive to shock your beloved. You must drive him to the limits of his endurance—so that when you rise from his body at the first weak light of dawn, he will not be able to raise a hand to stay your going, though he will want to do so.

"All the time you make love, he will stare into your eyes, whose color, because of the decognitive powers of the mask, he will not be able to remember, and see the fierce love of him burning there. They will be mirrors of his inner self, and they will show him in a far more flattering light than he has ever seen himself, as if he were a being composed of flame.

"He will want to know who you are—you must not speak. When he asks do you love him, smile and look aside. He will study the color and proportions of your nipples and try to size your breasts by how well they fill his hands, how much of each he can fit in his mouth. He will memorize your sighs and groans, and tickle you to learn the music of your laughter. He will store in his heart the smell and taste of your every part, the gentle hollow below your neck, the warm spot at the innermost top of your thighs, the flavors of your cunt herself and how they change with each stage of your arousal.

"It is only natural to wonder at the identity of one who so obviously loves you. And thus your intended is left with what at first may only be a mild curiosity. Perhaps he has a few surmises as to who you might be. Casually—at first—he begins to look for you.

"Of course, the only sure evidence of your identity can only be obtained by making love. You must arrange not to be one of the many he takes with him to bed. You will be jealous of them each and all, agonizingly so, but also needlessly. For every time he beds one, he will taste her sweat, lick the back of her knees and the downy line leading from the small of her back to the cleft between her cheeks, and he will be thinking: No. It is not she."

Lesya hung the mask back on the wall, her hands as graceful as butterflies. "What begins as mere curiosity soon burns out of control. Months pass. He is obsessed. Those rivals you had best reason to fear are one by one insulted and driven away by his behavior—for what woman cannot tell when the man she is abed with is thinking of someone else? You remain elusive. Your beloved engages in wild and aberrant behavior. He is ruled by love and desire alone.

"That is your opening gambit."

It was late and if Jane were ever to get back in Corinde's good graces, she needed to be bright and rested in the morning. She would gladly have left then, but Incolore was still wired from whatever was in the pills she had taken and kept her talking for an hour more. They discussed Lord Corvo's difficulties with his inamoratas and Fata Jouissante's chances at the senatorial cape. They talked about the war. They debated the merits of ermine viscera as a catalyst for skin-moisturizing spells and whether the increased efficiency justified the extra expense.

At last, Jane rose to leave. At the door she paused and, as if struck by a sudden notion, said, "That mask—may I borrow it?"

"My dear. Why do you think I showed it to you?"

Jane meant to go straight home. But somehow her feet took her directly away from Termagant, toward Caer Arianrod. I won't go in, she thought on the way up in the Plaza Court D elevator. I'll just go up to his floor and then straight back down. The elevator doors opened and she stepped out onto the carpet. I'll walk by his door. I won't knock.

She knocked. Fata Incolore's mask was still in her hand, dangling from its cord. Impatiently she stuffed it into her purse.

Rocket opened the door. "Jayne," he said flatly.

"Can I come in?"