The Physiognomy

I turned and ran ahead of him, but not so far that he didn't catch me with the stick here and there. Into the sick yellow I went, toting my shovel and pickax, my gourd of putrid water, and cremat disks. I thought the odor of the sulphur would fell me, but after I realized that the corporal would not follow me in, I stood, bent over in the yellow mist, until my head and vision cleared.

"Seven pounds of sulphur," I thought. "What is seven pounds of sulphur?"

The walls of the chamber I entered had an ambient glow, some kind of phosphorous material mixed with the sulphur. I peered through the hazy light and saw, ten feet in front of me, a wooden bridge that passed over a small chasm and led to the opening of a tunnel. Shifting the weight of the tools on my shoulder, I advanced. The bridge swayed with every step, but I made it across, half expecting Garland to meet me on the other side.

I paused for a moment to shiver and gag through the stench. The evil odor was always present, but sometimes it was as if I was not paying enough attention to it, and then it would consciously swamp me like a wave. To imagine this aroma, think of all things scatological roasting with a viral fever and bury your face in them. In the tunnel it was cramped and dark, and the way seemed to wind inward like a coiled snake. The pickax kept striking the ceiling. My bare feet burned against the heat of the rock. I was on the verge of panic, when, eventually, I saw light up ahead and quickened my pace.

The underground chamber I stepped into must have been as large as the entire structure of the Academy of Physiognomy back in the Weil-Built City. Before me was an enormous hole in the ground. I stepped carefully up to the edge and peered down and down. Its circumference was so wide, I could barely see across to the other side. All of it glowed a dull yellow through the mist, and I could make out a path that spiraled along the inner walls. Cut into these walls, at various points all the way to where the rising smoke obscured my vision, were the entrances to tunnels, which I assumed had been cut by the likes of Professor Flock and Barlow, the tepid poet. In relation to the immensity of the mine, these appeared the work of insects.

With each step I took down the treacherous spiral, the heat increased another degree as did the foul bouquet. I wondered, as I crept lightly along, how many had tripped and fallen into the mine and how many beyond that had simply flung themselves down. The narrowness of the path would make it very advantageous to hurry the construction of a personal tunnel.

I descended steadily for about an hour, trying to locate an unused portion of the inner wall. By the time I had found what I was looking for, I was gasping and drenched with sweat. My eyes burned so badly from the fumes that I could hardly see. I threw the tools down and placed my package of cremat disks safely away from the edge. Keeping the water gourd, I sat down on the path and cried. The tears washed my eyes out and this offered some relief. I took a sip of the water, and though it was putrid, it required great fortitude to keep from swallowing it all at once.

After another sip, I cocked my head back and saw the name that had been chiseled over the opening to the tunnel to my right. Cut deeply into the glowing sulphur were the letters F-E-N-T-O-N. At first this made little impression on me, but then the mine gathered up its stench and battered me.

As my head reeled, I remembered Notious Fenton. It was my physiognomical skills that had sent him here. I believe the charge was that he had harbored ill thoughts against the Well-Built City. He had been part of the roundup in the Grulig case. Most of the conspirators had had their heads exploded, and I could now see they were the lucky ones.

I got up and entered Fenton's tunnel. The light was very dim inside, but I could still make out the form of a skeleton, sitting on the ground, cross-legged, with a pickax resting on what had once been his lap. I remembered that during the trial, his wife and sons had been very vocal in their protests against the realm. Then one day I came to court and they were not there. In fact, they never returned. It was only later, after the Master had intimated to me in a stupor of beauty that it was he who had Grulig beheaded, did I find out that he had also had the Fenton family, as he put it, "permanently restructured" as a personal favor to me, assuring the smooth procedure of the case.

I stepped slowly forward as if the poor man's remains were potentially dangerous. Then I leaned over and said, "I am sorry. I am sorry." My hand came up of its own volition and rested on the collarbone of my victim. In a moment, it shattered beneath my touch, turning to salt and drifting to the dusty floor. I stepped back and watched as the process I had started in motion slowly spread like a plague through the rib cage and down the spine, disintegrating the entirety of Fenton until his skull crashed to the floor and disappeared in a shower of atoms.

Although there was some respite from the smell in there, I could not stay in his tunnel. I stepped back out into the horror of the mine and lifted my pickax. It required a firmer grip than usual, because the voluminous sweat that poured from every inch of me made the wooden handle as slippery as a fish. I brought the tool back over my shoulder, and then I struck the wall with a mighty blow powered by self-loathing.

I worked with an insane energy for about twenty minutes, after which, I collapsed against the craggy rock face I had torn away at. In a panic, I suddenly realized I wasn't breathing. The pick fell out of my hand onto the path. My eyes felt as if they had burned out completely. I could now no longer see. There was an intense pain in my head, and I could feel myself sliding down the wall, my hands and face being lacerated by the jagged stone.

Unfortunately, I woke a little while later. Breathing somewhat easier, I crawled over to where my food and water were. A big chunk of sulphur I had chipped from the wall had landed on my moist cremat disks, squashing the package to a disturbing thinness. I ripped the paper open. Moist was not the word for them, for I found no disks within, just brown cremat smeared upon the paper. I licked it off greedily and then downed it with some of the water.

When I was done, I rolled the paper into a ball and tossed it out over the edge of the pit. The rising steam prevented it from falling, and it floated for a minute or two before my eyes. Eventually the upward current overpowered it and carried it out of sight. I wondered what this phenomenon stood for in the mind of Corporal Matters of the day watch. If the mine was his mind, his mind was a hot stinking pit riddled with holes, holding the brittle remains of the dead. This struck me as humorous. But later, as I again dug away at the yellow wall, it dawned on me how accurate he had been.

The day was eternal. I passed out twice more and thought, once, that my blood was literally boiling. In my brain, I heard a constant sizzling sound. Soon after I had eaten, the cremat dug into my stomach like a demon and gave me no rest from its fury. In addition to these tortures, the abrasions I had received from sliding down along the sharp face of the wall stung from the salt of my sweat mixing with the poisonous air.

Finally, like a voice calling out of paradise, I heard my name echoing down through the emptiness of the mine. "Sundown, sundown, sundown," the corporal yelled. I gathered chunks of sulphur into the canvas sack I had been given and slung it over my back. On the other shoulder, I hefted the shovel and pick. The string for the water gourd, I held in my teeth. The ascent was brutal. My legs ached beneath the weight, and my arms shook with weariness. I stopped three times to catch my breath, but I made it out into the open air.

It was dark outside, but the air was filled with a night breeze that carried the smell of the ocean. I would have traded ten vials of the beauty for just one gasp of it. The corporal propped his torch in a hole in the ground and weighed my load on an antique scale that operated somehow with shifting stones and springs. He beat me with his stick when he found I had brought up ten pounds instead of seven.

"Does seven sound like ten?" he asked me.

"No," I replied.

"You are a moron of the first water," he said.

I nodded.

"You aren't the first physiognomist I've seen reduced to ash. I remember a Professor Flock. Oh, how I flayed that idiot. It was rich. I blinded him with a beating one day. Taking his sight was like pulling the wings from a fly. When he eventually went under, I stole this from him," he said.

He held his stick out to show me the handle—a carved, ivory monkey head. "Some evening Harrows hindquarters will not shit you out, and I will find you down there in a pose of agony, surrounded by the smell of baking flesh," he said. "Now get out of here. I will be by to fetch you early tomorrow."

The corporal took the torch with him and left me standing there in front of the mine. Above, the moon was shining and the stars were bright. My body stung all over as if I had a bad sunburn, and the cool night wind made me shiver. The abundance of fresh air caused me severe dizziness as I staggered forward onto the winding path that led through the dunes. It took me two hours to locate the inn.

The light was on in my room. The bed was made, and someone had drawn a warm bath for me. For a moment, it was a battle between the water and sleep. I ended up opting for both. I lay in the tub in my underwear, feeling the warm perfumed water wash the mine off me as I fell asleep. I was awakened sometime later by a soft hint of a sound coming from downstairs. I tried to ignore it and continue with my dream of Aria, but it was as persistent as a mosquito. After a while, I gave into it and discovered that someone was playing a piano.

After dressing in just my trousers, I went barefoot down the stairs, through the inn. I followed the sound of the music across the main bar, through a dining room toward the back of the place. A chair had been left in the aisle, shrouded by night, and I stubbed my toe against it. I held my voice, but the chair scratched along the floor and hit another one. With this collision, the music abruptly stopped.

At the end of the dining room, I pushed through a door and stepped out onto a large screened porch. Again, I could hear the ocean, and the breeze washed over me. The dunes beyond the screen were lit by the moon. Sitting before me was a small black piano, not very much bigger than a child might practice at. Across the empty plank floor, at the other end of the porch, was a polished wooden bar with shelves of bottles and a mirror behind it. As I stared through the shadows, it appeared to me that there was someone sitting behind the bar.

"Hello?" I called.

I watched the dark figure and saw it raise a hand and wave. Slowly, I made my way across the porch. When I was within a few feet of the bar, a match flared. I stopped but then saw he was lighting a candle and continued to take a seat before him.

"Silencio?" I asked.

He nodded and I saw his face. The caretaker appeared slight of build, a miniature old man with a wrinkled face and a long beard. My attention was momentarily distracted by something moving in the air behind him. Suddenly it became clear that what I was looking at was a long tail. Silencio was a monkey.

Seeing the look of recognition in my eyes, he reached below the bar and hoisted up a bottle of Rose Ear Sweet, which had been my standard cocktail at all political functions and social gatherings. With the other, he pulled up a glass. Putting the cork of the bottle in his teeth, he opened it. A smile grew around that cork as he poured me a double.

"Silencio," I said and he nodded.

We stared at each other for a long time, and I wondered if I had not died in the mines that day. "This is the afterlife, eternity for me—sulphur all day and a monkey at night," I thought. Then he nodded slightly as if he had been thinking the same thing.

"I am Cley," I said.

He brought his hands together and clapped twice. I was unsure if he was mocking me or letting me know that he understood.

I realized I didn't care. Taking up my drink, I sat back in the chair and sipped. He seemed to approve of my decision to stay.

"Thank you," I said.

With this, he hopped off his chair and went through a doorway at the end of the bar. A few minutes later, he returned holding a serving tray. He climbed back up on his chair and then laid the tray before me. It was a complete dinner of pig shank covered with pineapple slices. There was bread and butter and a separate dish of potatoes and garlic.

I did not realize until that moment how insane my hunger was. While I ate like an animal, Silencio got down from his chair, went around the side of the bar, crossed the porch, and sat down at his piano. It was the combination of the pineapple and the music that made me think of paradise. I gulped the Rose Ear Sweet and jammed potatoes down my throat as I saw the golden gates sweep open to let me in.

I was still at the bar when Corporal Matters of the day watch came for me. He beat me roundly but I was too drunk to feel it. Out in the sand, in the circle, the dice showed two sixes. I heard the corporal's laughter all day, spiraling down through the mine as I stood before my hole, swinging the pick. Even after I had passed out and was deep in a cool dream of salvation, it was there, like a cricket in an egg, threatening to hatch.

On Doralice, the days were near infinite and filled to the brim with physical suffering. The nights were a candle going out, a few brief moments of shadow-laden solitude, underscored by the persistent whisper of the ocean and the baying of the wild dogs. The moonlit pain was mental anguish, bubbling up from dreams in which my guilt was revealed both literally and symbolically. Sometimes, when the corporal of the day watch woke me with his stick across my back, I almost thanked him for retrieving me from some memory of myself in Anamasobia.

The only thing that seemed to change on Doralice was me. Over the course of a few weeks, I had become physically stronger from my efforts in the mine. Silencio was a wizard at curing my wounds when I returned beaten up or scorched or delirious from the fumes. He had large green leaves he sometimes dipped in water and then wrapped me in to ease the fire in my flesh. There was a certain herbal tea he prepared that increased my strength and cleared my head. With his hairy-backed hands he gently applied a blue salve to the places where the corporal's stick had landed and broken the skin. But even with all of his efforts, and the fact that my muscles were becoming as hard as the rock I worked, I could feel I was dying inside. Day and night, I thought longingly ahead to the time when I would exchange my haunted remembering for a complete forgetting.

I learned my lesson about going down to the bar at night after that first painful experience. From then on, after staggering back to the inn, I went to my room and stayed there. Silencio brought up a tray of food for me. Whatever type of monkey he was, he was most unusually brilliant—handsome too, with his various shades of brown and that long black beard that came to the middle of his white chest. He used his tail like an extra hand, and was quite strong in his wiry muscles. I could swear, when I spoke to him, that he understood every nuance of my conversation.

Sometimes, when I had finished eating, he sat on the dresser, picking ticks from his fur and cracking them between his teeth. I lay on the bed and revealed to him the depths of the vanity that had brought me to the island. Occasionally, he shook his head or gave a little screech as I related yet another embarrassing detail, but he never seemed judgmental. When I told him the story of Aria, and what I had done to her, he brought his fist to his eyes to wipe away tears.

One day when the corporal had rolled only a pair of ones, and I had plenty of time to myself down in the mine, I went exploring through the tunnels of my predecessors. Some of the names were familiar to me, either from having read about them in the city Gazette or having had a hand in prosecuting their cases. It dawned on me that most were political prisoners. Those who committed robbery or rape or murder were usually dealt with immediately by way of electrocution, firing squad, or explosion of the head. It seemed the ones who made it to Doralice were all individuals who had, in some way, questioned the authority or philosophies of the Master. In words or writing, they had professed a disdain for the rigid societal control of the Weil-Built City, doubted the efficacy of the Physiognomy, or called the mental state of Drachton Below into question.

Above the entrances of the various openings, I found Rasuka, Barlow, Therian. They had all in their own cracked ways seen beyond the limits of the city to a place where brutality and fear were not necessary for the regulation of society. I remembered the Master laughing at Therian's plan to feed the poor of La-trobia and the other communities that had sprung up around the walls of the metropolis. "He's a whiner, Cley," Below had told me. "The stupid ass doesn't see that starvation is a way of thinning out these undesirables." And what did I do? I read poor Therian's head and found him dangerous to the realm. I can't recall if it was his chin or the bridge of his nose, but it didn't matter. Those two features, along with the rest of him, sat before me, a sizable pile of salt, barely visible in the dim, yellow glow of his otherwise barren tunnel.

Barlow's hole was filled with writing. He had used some implement to etch poetry into the sulphur walls. It was a sad thing to see that through all his suffering, he had never become any better a writer—here rhyming ghost with host, there, trope with hope, too many beats, too few images, all love and lovely. In the heat and stench of the pit, I wondered if that was important, or if there was not something I was missing about the passion that had literally consumed his life. What danger he was to the Master, I could not see.

Although I used quite a bit of energy I could have otherwise conserved in moving from tunnel to tunnel inspecting the remains of the dead, there was something fascinating about my search. The upward draft in the pit was doubly hot that day for some reason, but I continued on, wiping the burning sweat out of my eyes and peering through the mist. It was almost as if I was visiting these people, almost as if I was one of them. Here were my compatriots. This thought actually offered a modicum of solace until I moved down along the path, past my own tunnel, and found the name Flock, carved above one of the openings.

Out of all the eternal homes I had visited that day, the most impressive one was my old professor's. Had I been able to put out of my mind that it was all hewn from sulphur, and been able to ignore the stench, I would say that Flock's little grotto was quite beautiful. The old man had a touch of the artist in him, for he had made his hole into a garden, having sculpted onto the walls reliefs of plants and shrubbery and trees. Tendrils and vines, leaves and blossoms were delicately rendered, showing detail and proper dimension. At the back of the tunnel, which was quite deep, was a small garden bench, carved entirely from what must have been an enormous boulder of sulphur. It faced the back wall.

I took a seat there, in Flock's garden, and stared at a row of life-size faces that he had shaped out of the yellow stone. The first was of the Master—an uncanny likeness. He was snickering, his eyes slightly rolled back as if he had just injected himself with sheer beauty. Next to him was Corporal Matters of the day watch, scowling jowls and deep pockets beneath the hateful eyes. Last in the strange gallery of the professor's tormentors was a visage I could not place, though I knew it to be familiar. It was certainly as filled with spite and menace as the other two. One might say it had some of the Master's own madness in it.

While I tried to remember where I had seen it, I noticed that beneath all of these rude heads had been carved the word forgive. Eventually, I lifted my pick and swung violently, smashing that last head from the wall. I beat it where it lay on the ground until it had been reduced to yellow crumbs. Then I shoveled it into my sack. 'Two pounds," I whispered to the corporal's leering face.

That night, after bathing, I lay on my bed, simply staring. I should have left those other tunnels alone and not disturbed the dead. What I had found there had taken what little will to live I had left. Now it was just a matter of deciding how I would hasten the end of my life. ''Should I leap into the pit, a graceful dive and never-ending fall into the bright yellow heat, my body disintegrating before I hit the bottom," I wondered, "or, like my dead host, Harrow, should I swim for it?"

"Have you seen the kraken?" I asked Silencio, who sat on my dresser with a worried look. All night he had been imploring me by way of looks and hand gestures to eat the tray of food he had brought up.

He pulled some nit off his fur and wiggled the fingers of his opposite hand around it before bringing it to his mouth and crunching it between his teeth.

I resumed my despondent gaze as Silencio jumped down from the dresser. I thought he had left the room, but a moment later I was recalled from my reverie when I heard him rummaging in the closet. A few seconds later, he was on the bed, hoisting up the travel bag I had brought to the island with me. I watched without interest or comment as he unfastened the snaps and reached inside. What he brought forth was a parcel wrapped in blue paper and tied with string. At first, I did not remember ever bringing such an item with me. Then the monkey kicked the bag back on the floor and, lifting the parcel in two hands, tossed it onto my chest. The next thing I knew, he had returned the travel bag to the closet and left the room.

I lay there looking at the package with both fear and wonder as if it were the tentacle of a kraken. Lifting it slowly, I ripped the paper away, and as I did, a very faint mixture of scents was released. One of these was that of parchment and ink and the other was distinctly the perfume of Aria Beaton. These were, of course, the pages of her notes on the memories of the story of her grandfather's journey. I tore away the rest of the blue wrapping and string, remembering that I had packed it in such a manner to protect it on the trip from the mainland.

Up till that moment, I had been unable to lay my eyes on the manuscript without shaking uncontrollably. All the time I had spent in my holding cell while my trial was dragging along I kept the pages in the opposite corner from my bed, and if my gaze landed on them, I quickly averted my eyes as if I were seeing a ghost there instead. Now I did not have the same aversion to it. I held up the bulk of pages and read the first words: Dear Physiognomist Cley.

Soft piano music drifted up from the back porch of the inn, laying a melody over the constant bass of the distant ocean. The breeze lifted the curtains, and I began to read the Fragments from the Impossible Journey to the Earthly Paradise.

Dear Physiognomist Cley:

A number of days ago, at your request, I spent some time delving into the physiognomical attributes of my late grandfather Harad Beaton in an attempt to discern both his personal worth and any "secrets" he might have to reveal concerning an expedition he had taken many years past. My reading of his features, which have been turned to blue spire, merely confirmed that he was an ordinary man with a rather low physiognomical quo-

tient. What is more interesting is that as I ran my hands over his hardened face, I began to remember snatches of the story of this journey he had related to me when I was a child. I began to write these down, thinking that they might be of some use to you.

Once I began, I could not stop. The memories turned into waking dreams, and, as I recorded them, I believe I was experiencing what some mystics call automatic writing. I wrote so rapidly, without looking at the page, it was as if some unseen hand were guiding my efforts. Although I did not re-experience the entire journey, I did experience quite a bit of it. There are gaps that probably will never be filled in. When the journey did come to me, it was as if I were there with the miners in the wilderness, an invisible witness to their quest.

Seeing Aria's script, I could almost feel her hand moving across the page. Breathing in the vague scent of her perfume, traces of lilac and lemon, it was as if she were there with me in bed. These things calmed my mind and I began to grow weary as I continued reading. Her earliest fragment was a vision of the Beyond. There was great detail concerning the unspoiled beauty and strange vegetation and animals the miners saw as they headed deeper and deeper into those woods Bataldo, Cal-loo, and I had passed through. I could see them with their lantern helmets, their pickaxes slung over their shoulders, walking in single file, joking and laughing. Some of their names passed by me. Twigs broke and branches rustled as a herd of albino deer broke into a small clearing and bounded away through the trees. The moon was out at midday and Harad Beaton was longing for home.

The next thing I knew, I was scrabbling beneath the stick of the corporal of the day watch. My mind was so full of the Beyond, even his curses and punishment did not clear away the undergrowth and enormous cedars until we were well on our way through the maze of dunes. Before entering the mine, I had to ask him again what it was he had rolled that morning.

"Ten, you dimwit," he yelled, "a six and a four." He seemed like he wanted to give me another beating, but the night was beginning to lighten, so he pushed me toward the mine instead. "Perhaps you will die today," he said as I stumbled through the entrance.

His words caused me to remember that I had planned to do just that, but I never seemed to get around to it. I realized as I pounded into the rock of my tunnel, sweating, heaving for air, that I would have to stay alive at least until I had finished reading Aria's manuscript. I worked with great vigor that day.

Whereas Flock's tunnel was filled with a make-believe garden, my mind was overgrowing with images of a real wilderness. As I worked, I began to wonder if Beaton had ever made it to paradise. This thought, no bigger than the grains of sulphur that flew about me following each blow of the pick, buried itself in my mind like a seed with the potential to blossom.

I was lying in bed, reading aloud to Silencio a passage from Aria's Fragments concerning a demon attack the miners had sustained in a tract of pines on a steep hillside. My monkey friend sat by my feet, wide-eyed, grasping his tail with one hand and covering his eyes with the other. A miner by the name of Miller was being disemboweled by three of the filthy creatures amid a torrent of rhetorical description. Blood was flying, duodenum was drooping, groans from the nether end of hell were being loosed into the wilderness when I was interrupted by a knocking at my half-open door.

The sound frightened me, and I thought, ' 'Could it be the morning already? I just began reading a few moments ago."

Silencio jumped down off the bed, bounded twice, and then leaped up just as Corporal Matters of the night watch entered the room. The monkey landed deftly on the man's left shoulder and strung his tail around the corporal's collar like a necklace.

"Good evening, all," said Matters, wearing a broad smile.

I had neither seen nor heard him since the night I had first arrived. Because of his absence, I had just assumed that he was really one and the same person as the corporal of the day watch. It was my theory that he had two wigs, one black and one white, and he would pretend, from reasons of insanity, to be two people. Now seeing him, though, smiling, reaching up to pet Silencio, I had to change my mind.

"Cley," he said, "it's good to see you. Sorry I wasn't by sooner to check up and see how you were getting on."

I said nothing but tried to drop the pages on the floor next to the bed, fearing a rule that might require him to take them from me.

"Thought you might like to join me for a drink down on the back porch," he said. At the sound of his voice, Silencio jumped down off his shoulder and scampered out the door.

I got out of bed, put my shirt and boots on, and followed him downstairs. As we were wending our way through the dark inn, I could hear the piano playing.

Later as we sat at the bar, sipping Rose Ear Sweet, he pushed his white hair behind his ear on the left side and said, "My brother is quite a fellow, isn't he?"

I shook my head. "With all due respect," I said, "he seems somewhat angry."

The corporal laughed wearily. "With all due respect," he said and shook his head, "he is the angriest person I have ever met."

"The mines are brutal," I said, feeling I could be honest with him.

"Quite," he said. "If it was up to me, I would not require you to go down there. I'd let you roam the island and live out your life here as you saw fit." He paused for a moment as if weighing what he was about to say. "I'm afraid you are going to die down there—you know that yourself already."

I nodded, staring across the porch at Silencio as he worked the keys of his miniature piano.

"The realm is corrupt," he said, "rotten to the core. I'd rather be out here on this island then in that ill City. With all the death I've witnessed here, there is less suffering in the mine then there is close to Below."

"Have you met the Master?" I asked.

"Met him? I fought alongside him on the fields of Harakun. You remember, no doubt, from your history lessons, the Peasant Revolt? Oh yes, the poor outside the walls tried to take the City. My brother and I both fought there. Knee-deep in slaughter we were."

"I remember reading about it," I said, though I remembered very little.

"Three thousand men in one day. Five hundred of ours and the rest theirs," he said, then took a long drink. He wiped his mouth and continued. "My brother's troops and my own outflanked a large party of peasants just south of the Latrobian village. They were all that was left of the revolt. We butchered most of them but took more than fifty prisoners. It was that maneuver that finished the war. We were to take the prisoners to the City the next day to be executed in Memorial Park, but that night, while my brother slept, I relieved the sentries and let every one of the poor beggars go."

"And you're still alive?" I said.

"Below blamed both of us. My brother was furious. He wanted to kill me. We were to be tried and executed ourselves, but since we had fought so bravely, and the insurrection had no chance of rekindling, the Master spared us, giving us permanent positions here on Doralice."

"How long have you been here?" I asked.

"A good forty years," he said. "And I haven't seen my brother since the day we arrived. Soon after disembarking on the dock, we came up with this arrangement. He would rule the day, and I, the night."

"Not even a glimpse of him?" I asked.

"My only evidence of him is the suffering of the prisoners," he said. "If I were to meet him, we would probably fight to the death. I know it will happen sooner or later. I live with the thought of it always."

We sat quietly for a long time. Silencio eventually stopped playing and came over to refill our glasses. That beautiful breeze was at work, and I wished I could sit there all night.

"Is this not a remarkable monkey?" asked the corporal, as Silencio pushed a drink toward him.

"Remarkable is not the word for him," I said. "He has already saved my life on more than one horrible day."

"He came to us from the city," said Matters, "the result of one of the Master's intelligence transference experiments. Apparently they did not want to do away with him, but he was far too friendly to be of any use. We have become good friends over the years. My brother could not get him to have anything to do with policing the mine."

"I will never look at animals the same again," I said.

"Silencio has made friends with all the prisoners. He takes it very hard when one of them does not return from the mines at night. That is when he takes to drinking himself—Three Fingers with a shot of Pelic Bay is his poison. For a whole week he will be inconsolable," said the corporal.

"A comforting thought," I said.

He laughed. "It is all rather absurd," he said. "But you'd better be off to sleep. Mine-is-the-mind will be here in a few hours."

I put down my drink and stood. The corporal of the day watch shook hands with me, and I went back through the inn and up the stairs to my room. I was not drunk, but I felt calm and sleepy. Once in bed, I closed my eyes and let the images of the Beyond flood my thoughts. During the day, I hid the Fragments under my pillow so that Aria's scent would be with me all night.

When I picked up where I had left off, I discovered that there was with them now a foliate, a man of green, whom they called Moissac. It never said in the text how they had come upon him. He just appeared at the beginning of a long shard of the journey. He was friendly to the miners and offered to take them to an ancient abandoned city by the shores of an inland sea. Harad Beaton thought there might be evidence among the ruins suggesting a path to paradise.

Moissac spoke to them through touch. He placed his viney hand upon the side of a man's face and spoke fluently. In his thatched, flowering hedge of a face there were eyes like distant fires, but in the tangle of branches and roots it was hard to see their exact origin. When he moved through the trees and underbrush he was almost invisible.

At this point, there were only four miners left beside Beaton. Even out beneath the open sky, they felt as if they had been trapped by a cave-in. In the weeks preceding, they had seen their companions devoured by demons, succumb to suicide, fall from some precipice, but they had not lost the idea that they were on a divine mission. They moved like ants through the immensity of the Beyond.

Before they entered the empty City, the foliate told them it was called "Palishize." Other than this he could tell them nothing about it. It looked from a distance like a giant sand castle melting in the surf. Situated behind an outer wall were high mounds punctuated by crude openings one could not exactly classify as doorways or windows. It appeared to be more the home of some prodigious beetles than any human civilization.

The miners drew their rifles and clutched their picks firmly as they walked between the sand and seashell pillars of the main entrance. Moissac led the way, motioning for them to move quietly through the already silent City. The streets were cobbled with millions of clam shells between which weeds had run wild.

The buildings of Palishize were tunneled dirt mounds hiding an elaborate network of passages and small empty rooms. The miners lit the candles on their helmets as they explored the weird structures. They soon found that the buildings were connected by long, underground hallways.

"There is nothing here," Beaton told the others after a full day of traversing the maze of tunnels. "We had better move on."

All were in agreement, especially Moissac, who told them he felt a sense of doom pervading the stale air of the place. They bedded down on the street for the night, thankful that they did not have to stay in one of the mounds. The dark emptiness of them reminded Beaton of a grave.

Just before dawn, the foliate awoke them. He pointed to the sky where strange red lights slowly moved like fish in a pool. The miners knelt and prayed, believing now what they had already suspected—that they were dead and working toward salvation in some world between heaven and hell. The lights swam in their eyes and dazed them, so that when morning came, they did not want to leave Palishize. Moissac implored them, telling them through touch that something was wrong.

Beaton told him everything was fine and that they would stay one more night to see the lights. All day they moved through the tunnels again, searching for some sign of humanity. Near evening, Mayor Bataldo's uncle, Joseph, found something in one of the passageways. It was a small gold coin with an imprint of a coiled serpent on one side and a flower on the other. After showing the others, he put it in his pocket and joined them for some salted caribou meat and turnip root.

My head nodded more and more with fatigue as I continued with Aria's account until I must have fallen asleep reading, because it was precisely here that the words of the text suddenly swept up off the page, turning into the snaking arm of a sea creature, and pulled me down beneath the surface of paper and ink. There was a minute of gasping for air, and then I, Cley, stood next to the huddled miners asleep on the street of Palishize. Even Moissac, who was supposed to be keeping guard, was firmly rooted in dreams. I leaned over and studied the face of Beaton as a young man.

"Cley," said a voice a few feet down the street. At the curve where the cobbled shells disappeared around the base of a building, there was a woman. She wore a veil over her entire face.

"Aria?" I whispered.

She waved to me to come to her. I moved cautiously away from the miners. As I approached her, she reached out to me, and I instinctively took her in my arms. I kissed her through the veil and we fell to lean against the slope of the mound. She was breathing heavily as my hand ran up under her skirts, along her thigh, toward paradise.

The next thing I knew, we were standing in front of the sleeping miners and Aria was pointing down at Joseph.

"He has my coin," she said to me.

"What coin?" I asked.

"It runs my child," she said. "The Master has taken my son and automated him, made him into a penny machine. I was given four coins to put in a slot in his back. When the coins drop in, he will be alive for an hour. He moves stiffly and sometimes I can hear the gear work humming, but I love him. I foolishly have used up three of the coins already, and the one that man has is my last coin. There are no others like them; the Master poured the metal himself."

I tried to nudge Joseph with the toe of my boot, but it passed right through him.

"I don't think we can do anything," I said.

"Tomorrow, we can," she said. 'Til bring up the red lights for one more dawn, and then tomorrow night we will have him."

"What do you mean, 'have him'?" I asked.

She took my hand and put it to her breast. An instant later, it was the next night and she was relating her plan for me. I was to play a little flute she gave me and lure him awake and around the corner where there was a small alley. She would be waiting there.

"I can't play," I told her.

"Blow hard," she said.

I did, but heard nothing. Nevertheless, Joseph awoke from sleep, stood up, scratched his stomach, and then came toward me. Although I was amazed, I began backing up the street to where it turned into the alley. We were halfway there, when I saw Moissac sit up, crossing his legs in front of him. He watched intently but made no move to interfere.

Aria stood a short way down between the structures. As I brought Joseph around the corner, she stepped forward.

"My coin," she said, putting her hand out.

To my surprise, the miner turned and looked at her. He shared a strong resemblance to his nephew, only thinner from the rugged journey.

"I haven't got it," he said, bringing his hands together as if in prayer.

"Where is it?" she asked, the veil rustling slightly with the breeze of each word.

"I lost it," he said. "Today in the tunnels, I took it out of my pocket to look at so many times, I must have dropped it."

She stood like a statue. I could hear the distant waves of the sea. Then she lifted her arms and put her fingers to the bottom of the veil. As she lifted it, I closed my eyes and turned away.

I heard Joseph make a noise, a furious exhalation as if the breath were being sucked out of him. When I finally opened my eyes, the veil was dropping and the miner lay dead at my feet. There were as many holes in his flesh as there were openings in the mounds of Palishize. Aria vanished, sifting into the sound of the surf.

Somehow, I was still present in my ghostly form the next morning when Beaton and the others discovered Joseph was missing. They went in search of him. Moissac found him almost immediately and called to the men. Whatever spell the red lights had cast over the expedition, it suddenly vanished in the face of Joseph's wounds.

"Run, now," said the foliate, caressing Beaton's left cheek.

He yelled, "Run," and they did. As they dashed out through the gates of Palishize, they could feel the thing following them. They made their way back through the forest, moving like deer over the fallen trees and bursting through the undergrowth. Not until they had crossed a frozen river did they feel the invisible terror take its gaze from them. Once on the other side, they lay down on the bank and gasped for breath while all the time the frozen water snapped and cracked against my spine and the moving ice moaned, "Cley, you worthless fly turd, it's time to mine sulphur."

The gas lamp suddenly came up, casting out the darkness, and I staggered to my feet beneath a torrent of expletives. The corporal wielded the cane with a blind fury. As I undressed down to my underwear, my arms and back bleeding from the assault, I heard Matters say, "What is this nonsense?" I turned around to see him lift the manuscript pages of the Fragments off the bed where they had fallen through the night.

"This won't do," he said, gathering the pages into a pile and clasping it beneath his arm. "You'll dig double your roll for a week for this, you sorry ass of a dog."

"Drachton Below said I was permitted to bring these pages to Doralice," I said.

The corporal reached out with the cane and struck me hard on the side of my neck. The blow staggered me, and I went down on one knee. He had caught the bottom of my ear, and it stung unmercifully.

"Do you think that will prevent me from burning this in my fireplace tonight?" he said. "I don't even want to be touching it. There should be no room in your head for this air. The mine is the mind, and I don't want it littered with frivolity," he said, swinging the cane across my back.

I came up off the ground so quickly, he did not have time to react. My fist, fueled by the thought of the Fragments reduced to ash, drove deep into his soft stomach. I could smell the Rose Ear Sweet as his breath exploded out. Before he could straighten up, I came across with my right hand and hit him squarely on the side of the head. Blood came from his mouth. He tottered for a moment or two and then began to fall. As he went down, I grabbed a handful of hair and the whole ratty coif came sliding off his scalp, his hat dropping next to him. Two more kicks to the head put him out, and over his face I dropped the black wig.

I dressed quickly and then set about turning the corporal over in order to fetch the manuscript. I rolled the pages into a tube and tied them with the piece of string they had come bound in. Instead of taking his sword, I grabbed the monkey-headed cane. Putting my fist around it gave me a sudden sense of power. I so wanted to thrash the slumped form of Matters, I had to grit my teeth in order to forgo my revenge. Instead, I bolted from the room, stumbled down the stairs, and fled the inn.

I tried to follow the sound of the ocean down to the beach, but I could never seem to get there, trapped as I was in the maze of dunes. Running through the sand was tiring me out, and I began to fear that the corporal would have awakened and would soon be on my trail. I stopped in order to think and listen more closely to the waves. That is when Silencio came bounding over a dune.

'Tm breaking out," I told him.

He stopped before me, clapped his hands, and did a back flip.

"Get me to the beach," I said. "My only chance is to go up the island."

He took my hand, and we began walking. In two quick turns, we were standing staring at the long expanse of beach that led down to the shoreline. The sky was beginning to lighten, and I could see flocks of white long-legged birds running back and forth at the water's edge.

I was a good way up the beach when I heard a faint scream and looked back to see Silencio waving. The horizon was hatching a brilliant red sun, and my mind was swimming with freedom. I hoped that in the daylight I would be able to think more clearly about my predicament. A few rash moments of action, and now there was no going back. Having smelled the Rose Ear Sweet on Matter's breath, and held the black mop of hair, I was convinced that the corporals were one and the same twisted individual. Not only had I thrashed him, but I had also exposed his charade. I was sure the punishment for this would be death.

As I strode along through the ever lightening day, watching the fins of the sharks circling a quarter of a mile from shore, I racked my brain for a plan of, first, survival, and then escape. "If there could only be trees at the other end of the island," I thought, "then I might be able to fashion a raft and set out for the mainland." I needed to return to the Weil-Built City, to rescue Aria and make things right. I realized my suffering would change nothing. Action was the only thing that could eradicate my guilt.

The sun climbed in the sky, growing less red and more brilliant. Its warmth penetrated my bones and cleansed the persistent shadows from my eyes. Above me, the sky was perfectly clear and infinitely blue. Every now and then, I had to spin around in order to take in the full scope of the ocean and dunes. Although I was drunk on the beauty of Doralice, I kept it in mind to cut a path through the fringe of the surf so that it would quickly wash away my footprints.

Around noon, I left the beach and headed up into the dunes to find a place to lie down. The salt air was like a drug to me. I could hardly keep my eyes open. At the top of the tallest dune, I found a small plateau of sea grass, and in the center of it was a sandy depression, like the palm of a cupped hand. That is where I lay down and closed my eyes, resigning myself to fate.

Hours passed before I awoke. The sun was still high in the sky, the day still beautiful. The wind had picked up somewhat, and when I strolled over to the edge of the dune, I could see whitecaps on the ocean. I turned to look up the beach to see if anyone was coming and found it empty.

I had to hold tightly to the Fragments after untying the string for fear of the wind. Leaning back on my warm throne of sand, i lingered through the pile of pages looking for where I had left off. Matters had made a bitter mess of it, but it was not long before I found the image of the two miners and the foliate adrift on an ice floe in a near-frozen river.

Moissac was weakened by the intense cold. He lay on the ice, wrapped in a black coat, grunting and rolling slowly from side to side. All of his leaves had shriveled to brown, littering the surface of the floating island of ice. His face was barren bark, and the fire of his eyes was distant.

Beaton kneeled next to the foliate. Behind them stood Ives, the youngest of the original expedition. He held his rifle aimed, ready to fire, waiting for demons that weren't there. The wind blew fiercely. The sea was iron and the sky, dull.

"When I die, you must cut a hole in my chest. Inside, you will find a large brown seed with thorns. Take it with you and plant it in the spring," said Moissac.

Beaton wanted the foliate's thorny hand to release him.

"I will do that," he said.

"I have been to paradise," said Moissac.

"Tell me what I will find there," said Beaton.

"You will never get there; it is the paradise of plants. Humans have their own paradise."

"What is it like?" asked Beaton.

Moissac writhed back and forth wildly, and then a shudder began at his roots. Like a wind, it moved through his legs, his chest and extinguished his intelligence. Small trails of smoke came snaking up from his thatched sockets, but still he managed to say, "Like this," the words echoing up through Beaton's wrist.

He pulled out his knife and hacked away at the branches of Moissac's hand. The fingers still gripped him tightly like an elaborate wooden bracelet. It took him some time to chip and splinter the rest of it to pieces without cutting himself. When he was free, he plunged the knife blade into the chest of the foliate. Twigs cracked and flew as he sawed a hole in the chest. He lifted out the panel he had cut and found beneath it the promised seed.

That night the temperature dropped so fiercely that Ives could no longer keep the rifle in his hands. The ice floe came to a halt and Beaton realized that the river was freezing solid. He knew it was their only chance, a dash across the ice before the sun came up.

"Soon we are going to run," he told Ives.

"What about the demons?" asked the young man.

"There are no demons," said Beaton.

I rolled up the pages and retied them with the string. It was late afternoon before I got on my way, blazing a trail through the dunes. I swung the cane in my left hand and this helped me keep a brisk pace through the loose sand. For the first time, I felt some relief from the idea that Matters might hunt me down. I thought that if I was careful I could easily avoid him. The beating I had given him reminded me of some of those brutal encounters when I had been a Physiognomist, First Class, and it clearly brought back those dirty fighting skills. I was sure that in hand-to-hand combat, I was his superior.

The dunes of Doralice seemed endless. When night fell I finally just crawled to the top of one of the taller ones and lay down among the sea grass. The stars were magnificent, so perfectly clear you could see the space around them. I held the monkey cane across my chest and wondered what had happened in the mine that day, who had finally turned to salt and how it might have affected Matters's mind.

It was all very amusing until I heard the first howl. After the fifth howl, I could tell the dogs were drawing closer and closer from every direction and seemed to be converging on me. I grabbed the pages under my arm and held the cane up in a defensive posture. In moments, though, I could see the absurdity of my position. I had to get off the dune or I would be trapped.

I slid down the side and landed softly on the sand below. Once I had my feet beneath me, I began to run. The valleys of the dunes echoed with the barking of the wild dogs, and I had no idea where I was going. All I could think of was the demon attack I had been through with Bataldo and Calloo, and the sounds of the approaching beasts filled me with terror.

I expected at any moment that one would leap out of the sea grass at me as I rounded the turns in the sandy labyrinth. My leg muscles were burning, and I could hardly draw breath, but I fled until I tripped and landed with my face in the sand. I could see nothing, but I heard the low chorus of dogs begin to build around me.

As I stood, I waved the cane in front of me to ward them off. They began to snap and growl. Clearing the sand from my face, I saw what seemed a hundred pairs of yellow eyes bobbing in the shadows. Their upper incisors were like down-curving tusks, and their ears came to sharp points. They leaped forward. I shouted and swung the cane, and they jumped back. I had to keep turning inside their circle to try to stare them down all at once.

It became clear to me very soon that they were more than willing to let me stew there until I was weakened by fear. I had no choice but to comply. To make matters worse, a few had begun running laps around the outside of their circle, always counter to the direction I was turning. Trying to keep them in view made my head ache. I could hear them breathing heavily, a kind of weird, hungry laughter.

I turned for hours, to the right, to the left, and then I turned inward, spinning a glimpse of Aria moving amid the dogs. When I blinked she disappeared, but soon after her, I saw young Ives fall through the ice. I could feel the pack sense my confusion, because things got suddenly quiet. Trying to keep my sanity, I cut to ribbons with the cane a phantom of the mayor as he lurched out of the night, arm reaching forward, a perfect black hole in the middle of his forehead.

It leaped on my back, driving me to the ground. I could feel it snapping at my ear, trying to get to my throat. Covering my face with one arm, I rolled over and stabbed it with the end of the cane so hard I heard ribs cracking. It yelped and leaped off me. The next one was already on its way. I heard it running before I could turn to see. There was just enough time for me to hoist the cane up like a club and swing. The ivory monkey bit down into the dog's eye as my boot came up for the jaw.

I had sustained quite a few bites and scratches, and also wounded a good number of them, but near dawn, a shot rang out from the top of a nearby dune and the explosion chased off the dogs. I wasn't sure at first if it was another apparition or really Corporal Matters and Silencio coming toward me. The corporal wore no wig, and through his closely cropped hair I could see a suture that cut a longitudinal hemisphere across his scalp. He carried two pistols, both of which were aimed at my heart. Silencio followed close behind, carrying a rope.

"You've got a mother lode of sulphur to dig, Cley," said Matters. He looked down at Silencio and said, "Tie him up."

The traitorous monkey tied my hands behind my back and then wound the rope three times around my neck, leaving a long leash in front by which he could lead me. When he was done with the job, he clapped and did a back flip. Matters ordered him to bring the cane which was covered with dog blood. Silencio tugged me by the neck and brought the corporal his stick. I thought he was going to cry when he saw the condition it was in.

"I'd love more than life itself to beat you this very moment, Cley, but I'm saving you for something finer," he said, controlling his obvious anger. He walked close behind me with one of the pistols trained on the back of my head. Silencio led the way, the end of my leash over his shoulder.

"The monkey tracked you for a case of Three Fingers," said Matters. "After you're gone, he'll need it to console himself."

"What was all the business with the wigs, and the night watch and day watch?" I asked. I had nothing to lose. We trudged along the shoreline back toward the maze of dunes that held the mine. Silencio pointed out to sea, and I caught a glimpse of a kraken's tentacle as it curled beneath the waves.

"I'll give you some business," said Matters and shoved the barrel of the gun up under my ear.

"Your head has been tampered with by the Master, hasn't it?" I asked.

"If you consider a pound of brass gear work tampering," he said. "But tell me that your head hasn't been tampered with."

"I can't," I called over my shoulder.

"My brother's got the same setup, springs and the like, but his runs counterclockwise to mine," he said.

"What brother?" I asked.

He struck me across the back with the stick. "You think you're so smart, Cley. My mind is going to eat you alive," he said and swung twice more.

Silencio led us up through the dunes and, by some miracle route he knew, brought us to the opening of the mine in less than an hour.

"Now, Cley," said Matters, coming up close behind me, "I've been having nightmares about demons and ice, and I expect not to have them this evening. By sundown you'll have literally baked to death."

I was going to plead for my life, but before the words could make their way out, the butt of the corporal's gun smashed the back of my head, and I found I was already gone. In the dark distance where I was huddled, I felt my body being dragged and then the unbearable heat of the mine enveloped me.

I woke, screaming, to find my feet and hands bound and each roped tightly to metal cleats that had been pounded deep into the sulphur of the path. I lay outside my miserable tunnel, my head on the down slope, my eyes looking up to see, through the mist, the upper rim of the pit. Halfway to the top on the spiral path, I saw the doll-sized figure of the corporal across the abyss. He stopped in his ascent, turned to me, cupped his hand to his mouth, and yelled something. I thought he was going to yell, "The mine is the mind," but he didn't. It had more syllables than that, yet came across as a frantic grunting that he kept up until he had breached the top of the mine and disappeared.

Without the benefit of being able to keep moving, the mine was an oven. The heat built up in me quickly, and it was not long before I could feel my skin begin to lightly sizzle on the hot stone of the path. The sweat bubbled away in pools of evaporating steam. My tongue and throat soon became parched.

I tried to think what I could do, but all my plans gave way to an overwhelming weariness. I soon reached a point beyond pain where I felt nothing. The mine was cradling me in its warmth, but I fought to stay awake by trying to read the inscriptions above the tunnels on the opposite side of the hole. I located Barlow and went on from there.

Then I heard something, the sound of a voice far off. I searched all around before staring straight up. There was Silencio, dancing on the rim of the pit. He was screaming and waving as if trying to tell me something. "The damn monkey is more insane than Matters/' I thought to myself and could not help but laugh, drawing in great clouds of the noxious mist.

I watched from a distance as the miniature Silencio crept near the very edge of the hole. He moved suddenly as if he were tossing something out into the mine. I caught with my glance the falling object, something like a white log. Then the updraft hit it and it blew apart into a hundred separate white birds that flapped and circled.

For the longest time I watched, enchanted, as the thin flock soared through the sulphur wind, rising and falling. One swept down and flew past my face before being carried out and up in a hellish gust. That is when I realized that what Silencio had tossed in had been the Fragments. I caught one last glimpse of the monkey, leaning over, looking down at me. He made a brushing motion with his hands, as if washing them of the scene, and then turned and was gone.

When I lost sight of the pages, the pain returned, instantly becoming unbearable. It was difficult to breathe, and I could no longer keep my eyes open but for short intervals. The hair on my arms and back began to singe. To avoid suffering, I journeyed inward, searching desperately for paradise, and soon caught sight of Beaton in my eye's mind.

Beaton walked alone now along a dry riverbed that wound through a willow wood. After the deaths of Ives and Moissac in snow country, he had given up all hope of ever reaching paradise or home. He had with him the rifle the young man had continuously aimed but had never had the courage to fire. This would help him to survive for a few more weeks in his wandering.

Harad Beaton was numb with adventures and oddities. He had no wonder left. The things he had witnessed in the Beyond had made an ardent believer of him. What he had come to believe in was the invisible energy that connected the trees, the plants, the creatures of the wilderness. Now that he was alone, he would catch the whisper of its low hum moving beneath the wind in the branches. It was definitely there in all its awesome power, but he could not see what good knowing about it had done him. He was an outsider to it, a germ to be eradicated.

That afternoon, he sat on a tree stump next to the dry riverbed and ate some venison from a deer he had killed two days earlier.

He drank from his water skin and judged that he should do some hunting that day. When he was finished with his meal, he left his blankets and provisions, his helmet and pick by the stump and took along only the rifle.

He entered into the willow wood, parting the long branches. There were cool shadows under the whips of foliage, and he could hear small animals and birds moving about. He wanted a rabbit, even though in the Beyond they had the pink, fleshy faces of pigs. The taste of them was unusual too—earthy and birdlike. He was still not sure that he enjoyed it, but he was always happy to have one skinned and turning on a spit.

It wasn't long before he spotted a pheasant, pecking around the base of a willow twenty or so yards ahead of him. He pulled the gun up and took aim. The shot would be difficult because of the layers of branches that separated them. He took his time, feeling for the drift of the breeze and calculating the location of the bird's heart. That is when he felt a hand come down lightly on his shoulder.

"Are you looking for Wenau?" said a voice behind him.

He spun around and there stood the Traveler, full of life, as I had seen him back in Anamasobia. Beaton backed up three steps and turned the gun on the creature.

"No harm," said the Traveler, holding up one of his webbed hands.

"You speak?" Beaton said.

"I heard you moving through the Beyond. I saw, in the reflection of water, your friends die. At night, while you sleep, you cry like a child and none of the beasts of the Beyond will come near you," he said.

"But how do you know the language of the realm?" asked the miner, unsure whether to lower his gun.

"The language was in me; I discovered it after having overheard your conversations in a seashell," he said.

Beaton shrugged. "I've got no reason to doubt you," he said and lowered the gun.

The Traveler stepped forward and handed the miner a piece of wood with a picture etched in black on it. It was the portrait of a young girl with long hair. Beaton had no idea at the time, but I could see over his shoulder that it was a likeness of Aria.

There was something about the strange man that Beaton liked right away. It had something to do with the sense of calm he exuded, something about his smile and eyes. The miner reached in his pocket to find a gift to exchange. He came across the seed first, but as its thistle poked his finger, he remembered his pledge to Moissac that he, himself, would plant it. Down below the seed, he found the coin he had seen Joseph drop in the tunnels of Palishize. As he placed it in the large brown hand, he wondered why he had never given it back to Bataldo.

"The flower and the snake," said the Traveler.

''Have you been to Palishize?" asked Beaton.

"People came out of the sea and built it," he said. 'They worshiped this flower, a yellow blossom from a certain tree that weeps when it is cut. This represented possibility. The coiled snake was forever. Palishize was abandoned before the forests of the Beyond had begun to grow."

"What is Wenau?" asked the miner. "Is it the Earthly Paradise?"

The Traveler nodded.

"Is death there?" he asked.

"No death," said the Traveler. "I will take you." He put the coin away in a pouch he wore on a leather strap about his waist. Then he reached up to a large fruit pit he wore like a pendant on a necklace. Miraculously, the thing opened on tiny hinges that had been carved into it. From within the pit, he pulled out two red leaves that had been folded over many times in order to fit. When opened all the way, they were the size of a man's hand and tissue thin.

He ate one of the leaves and handed the other to Beaton. "Eat it," he said.

"What will it do?" asked the miner.

"Give you courage," he said. Then he pulled the double-bladed knife from his belt and led the way.

Beaton began to feel asleep on his feet as he chewed the sweet red leaf. Things became visible to him that he had not noticed before. Small bright lights of various colors streamed down the path they took and passed right through them. Sparks of energy leaped off the ends of the Traveler's hair and fingers. Ghostly creatures poked their heads through the undergrowth to watch them pass. I hid behind a tree for fear that I could now be seen by them.

"We found one of you in Mount Gronus," Beaton tried to tell his guide, but the Traveler motioned for him to be quiet.

An instant later, Beaton perceived the Traveler was wrapped in deadly combat with a white phantom of a snake. Again and again, he plunged the double-bladed knife into its scaly back. White blood poured from the wounds, but still the creature kept tightening its stranglehold. The suddenness with which it happened shocked Beaton. It was almost as if the Traveler had always been fighting the snake.

Beaton finally came to his senses and lifted the rifle. He fired once, a direct hit through the jaw and into the brain of the monster. Then it was gone, disappearing like a memory forgotten, and they were walking calmly along again. The Traveler was smiling. His knife put away, he was smoking a long, hollow twig. How he had lit it, Beaton never saw. He passed it to the miner, who inhaled.

That day they forded streams and rivers, crossed vast barren tracts of snow and ice, climbed mountains, and walked along the shoreline of another inland sea. As the sun began to set, they came upon a village in a clearing in the woods. It was situated between two rivers, like an island.

"Wenau," said the Traveler.

People came streaming out of the simple dwellings and over the earthen bridge to greet them. There were children and women and old men, all made like the Traveler. Beaton was brought into the center of the village and fed a dinner of fruit and boiled grain. Stories were told, some in another language, until the rest of the inhabitants of Wenau discovered the language of the visitor.

Beaton was told he was welcome in the village, and they helped him to build a shelter for himself. He soon came to know all of the children and men and women. In the days that followed, he traveled throughout the island between the rivers, taking samples of all the myriad strange plants and flowers that grew there. Wenau always had a beautiful scent of spring to it. The days were always clear and warm and peaceful. One night, when he wandered by himself just outside the perimeter of the village, he planted Moissac's seed in a small stand of violet, flowering trees.

He marked his time in Wenau by the progress of the tree that grew up from the spiny brown seed. It grew rapidly and by the end of a few weeks, it was the size of the Traveler himself. The miner brought his friend to see the growth of Moissac's offspring one day. By then, it had brought forth on one single branch a white fruit like the one that had sat on the altar at Anamasobia.

"The fruit of paradise," Beaton said to his companion.

"Where did you get this seed?" said the Traveler.

Beaton told the story of the foliate, and as he did the Traveler shook his head.

"But the fruit holds immortality," said the miner.

"Come with me," said the Traveler.

Beaton followed him back to the village and then to a particular hut. There, on the floor in the main living quarters lay an old emaciated woman, gasping for breath. Two young women sat by her side, holding her thin hands, the webs now cracked and brittle.

"But she's dying," said Beaton to the Traveler.

"No, she is changing," he said. "The white fruit that grows from the seed of your friend disallows change."

"But she is physically dying then," said Beaton.

"I understand what you mean," said the Traveler. "I wasn't sure at first. This word death is a difficult idea. If you want to reach the land where there is no death, you must travel due north from here, a twelve season journey. I will show you the path, but I will not go with you."

"Then I haven't reached paradise?" said Beaton.

"What is paradise?" asked the Traveler. "That white fruit is an unchanging dream. It is death, as you call it. Now I must take it back to the world of those like you. We cannot have it here."

"You mean you will journey back with me to Anamasobia?" asked the miner.

"No, your people will discover me one day in a sealed chamber beneath a mountain, holding the white fruit," he said.

"But we already have," said Beaton.

"There are trails through the Beyond, if you know of them, that can take you back in time or ahead into the future. I will show you one to take that will return you to your town in two days' journey. Now I must hurry so that I can get to the mountain before the slow buildup of blue mineral seals the chamber three thousand years ago. There I will wait to meet you again." Back out in the Beyond, I lost track of them, though I tried to stay close. I was exhausted and lay down on the ground beneath a bush whose tendrils curled and uncurled in the breeze like the arms of a kraken. As I closed my eyes on the wilderness, I opened them to see the face of Silencio. It was night and I was back in my room at the inn, lying on my bed. Every inch of me was in exquisite pain, and the monkey had just brought a glass of Rose Ear Sweet to my lips.

I sat up in the bed, extra pillows behind me. The sun streamed in the window, and the ocean breeze rolled through the room. I sipped at a cup of herbal tea. Silencio had applied his leaves to me through the night and saved my skin from anything worse than blistering. The most dangerous of my afflictions was dehydration, which the monkey had also cured over a period of hours by administering water, cabbage juice, and Rose Ear Sweet.

Corporal Matters of the night watch, with his winning personality and long white hair, stood before me with a nervous look.

"You say your brother has run off?" I asked him.

"Yes, he came by my place yesterday afternoon. I was working in my garden on the veranda overlooking the sea, when he suddenly appeared from behind a potted shrub," said the corporal.

"Was there violence?" I asked.

"None at all. He implored me to go to the mine to release you. He said his mind was full of paradise and that he must journey out into the wilderness. I think he has finally gone mad," said Matters.

"He said he'd been tampered with by the Master," I said.

"That's what they all say," said the corporal, sitting on the end of my bed.

"He told me that you too had been subject to some invention on Below's part," I said.

"Nonsense, Cley. It's all lies. Why are you willing to believe a lunatic who tried to kill you?" he asked.

"I saw a scar," I said.

"That scar," he said, "was made by a saber blade on the fields of Harakun."

"I had a suspicion that you and your brother were one and the same Corporal Matters," I told him.

He laughed. "Forget about that oaf. He's gone down the island. I doubt he will ever return. I'm in charge now, always. My first edict is no more mine. My second is, Silencio, go get us a bottle of Sweet and three glasses."

We drank, but I did not drink a lot. How could I not be leery of the corporal? He seemed to be truly the affable fellow of the night in broad daylight, but I knew I would have to watch him closely. Where Silencio stood, as an enemy or friend or maybe even the instigator of my salvation, was hard to tell. He seemed to have some personal agenda I couldn't yet figure out. Still, I was alive, and these two were the ones who had cut the ropes and dragged me from the mine. I gave myself up to the moment and conversed with the corporal about the fine weather.

It took a few days before I could get on my feet. With the constant attention of Matters and Silencio, I made a full recovery. As soon as I was up and about, I began spending my mornings down along the shore and my afternoons going to see certain sights suggested by the corporal. One day he and Silencio accompanied me to a lagoon that cut into the south shore of the island. It was surrounded by palm trees and flowering oleander. The monkey walked down to the water's edge and began doing a dance, flapping his arms over his head and screeching.

"Watch closely," said the corporal, who sat next to me on a blanket up the beach a way. As he spoke, I noticed that the birds, who had been squawking and chirping, suddenly fell silent. Now Silencio stopped moving and also quieted down. Although he had his back to us, I could tell he was staring intently into the clear waters. Off to his right, what I had thought to be an eel slithered up onto the shore, but when it kept coming, growing out of the water, and I could see the circular cups that lined it, I realized this was the kraken.

'Watch out, Silencio," I yelled and got to my feet, but the monkey had already begun to move as the huge, slippery arm swept the beach for him. A series of back flips brought him clear of the danger. Later that day, as we sat eating radish sandwiches and swilling Three Fingers, we saw the kraken surface. Its bulbous head, three barrels wide, had a single eye that watched us as its numerous tentacles undulated through the water.

We spent the nights sitting at the bar out on the screened porch. It was these times that almost made me forget that I had nearly been cooked alive a few weeks earlier. There seemed to be an endless supply of alcohol, and Silencio wouldn't take no for an answer on the refills. Sometimes we played cards by candlelight. The monkey invariably won, but we had decided to play for points—demarcations on a sheet of paper that stood for nothing owed. Many times, we did not go to bed until the sun was coming up.

On a morning after we had turned in rather early, the corporal came to my room and invited me to join him on a trip to the center of the island. He told me that we would have to bring guns in case of wild dogs, but that they probably wouldn't bother us in daylight. I agreed to go, seeing that all the sites the corporal had so far taken me to had been interesting. It was also my desire to know the island as well as I could.

When Silencio found out where we were going, he declined an offer to accompany us. This made me somewhat suspicious. The idea of the corporal toting a gun reminded me that the issue of him and his brother had never been sufficiently settled. Ever since my rescue, though, I had seen no sign in him that he was anything but what he professed. We had actually become good friends and companions. It was an effort to remind myself to be wary.

On the way to the center of Doralice, we did encounter a rogue dog who jumped for my throat from off the side of a dune. The corporal felled it with a rapid shot from his pistol. Very close to the spot of the attack, Matters showed me the bones of an enormous sea creature that had crawled ashore in a storm one night and died in the dunes. We continued on, passing through a valley in the sand that was a small oasis. There was a clear pool at its center, and fruit-bearing trees grew all around it.

"Sometimes I come here and think about my brother," said the corporal as he picked a lemon off an overhanging branch.

"What do you think?" I asked.

"You know, it all goes back to your mother," he said, biting into the fruit. Its aroma was one half of Aria's perfume.

At almost exactly midday we came over a particularly tall dune and saw below us an enormous wall constructed of sea-shells, behind which were tall mounds with openings, like sand castles melting in the surf.

"Palishize," I said to Matters.

He looked quizzically at me. "Very ancient," he said. "Once I found some writings by Harrow up in the attic of the inn. His theory was that it was built by people who came out of the sea."

We walked through the streets and, as in my vision, they were cobbled with large clam shells, backs to the sun. I found the experience so startling that as we wound around the bases of the mounds, I told the story of Beaton's journey to paradise. It took me the entire return trip to the inn to recount all of the adventures I remembered, and I finished up on the back porch at midnight, drunk on Rose Ear Sweet.

The corporal just shook his head when I finished. A few seconds later, his eyes closed and he fell off his stool onto the floor. Silencio soon came with a pillow for him. The combination of Three Fingers and the Beyond had been too much. We threw an old blanket over him, and I stepped outside to see the stars. As I walked through the dunes, I thought about Aria and how I would get to her. I saw the Weil-Built City in my head, but its vicious power scared me. I decided to simply think first about getting off Doralice.

I stopped in the path and looked up at the sky. As I traced the lines of the constellations, I heard someone approaching on the path. I thought it was Silencio, since, back at the inn, he had signaled to me as he finished his drink that he might join me on the beach. That is when two hands grabbed me by the shirt collar. I looked down into the face of Corporal Matters of the day watch. The scar that ran through the center of his head split my vision.

His breath was foul with alcohol, and, as he spoke, he spat all over me. "Cley," he yelled, "I order you to paradise." He pulled on my shirt, trying to drag me along with him. "I've located it; it's here on Doralice."

"Where is it?" I said, though I was still dazed by the suddenness of his appearance.

He stopped and loosened his grip on me somewhat. His eyes wandered as if he were trying to remember.

"I was there," he said and tightened his grip.

I poked him in the eyes with two fingers of my left hand, and he instantly let go of me. His scream echoed behind me as I ran at full speed through the dunes, back toward the inn. I had to see if the corporal of the night watch was still asleep on the floor. Either I had him or I didn't, but at least it would settle these matters.

As I came through the screen door onto the back porch of the inn, Silencio was playing a somber nocturne. I was gasping for air from my run, but I pushed on across the porch to the bar. There, I found Corporal Matters asleep where I had left him. I poured myself a drink and sat down and stared at him. It seemed to me that the white hair was rather askew, that he appeared to be breathing heavily for someone asleep, and that the blanket no longer fully covered him as it had before. On my second drink, I was not so sure of these things. By my third, I began to believe that the corporal of the day watch was really out there, searching for paradise.

The next day I told the corporal, as he sat nursing a hangover, that I had had an encounter with his brother.

"He's not in paradise yet?" asked Matters.

"He was out in the dunes," I told him.

"There's some bad business," he said.

"He ordered me to go to paradise with him," I said.

"He's run aground," said Matters. "I wouldn't be surprised if the wild dogs make a meal of his sagging flesh quite soon."

A few mornings later, Silencio came to me, screeching and motioning for me to get out of bed. The sun was barely up and the night had left a chill in the room. Corporal Matters of the night watch came through the door, looking worried.

"There's a boat in the harbor with soldiers on it," he said. "You'd better strip down and get over to the mine, while I go see what they want."

I immediately did as he requested, and, in less than a half hour, I was down there in the heat and stink again, sweating and gagging and chipping away at my tunnel. "One more reminder of hell," I thought, wishing it were true. I began to become concerned after I had been in the mine for more than two hours. I started to wonder why the soldiers were there. "Perhaps they are bringing another prisoner," I thought.

It was still an hour beyond that when I heard the corporal calling me from the rim of the pit. I gladly threw down my pick and scrabbled up the path. Outside in the afternoon heat, I found the corporal and three uniformed soldiers, carrying rifles.

"Cley?" said one of the men.

I nodded.

"Come with us, please," he said.

I looked over at Matters, who shook his head slightly to indicate to me not to address him. We followed the soldiers through the dunes, down the beach, and to the harbor where there was a steamboat waiting.

"Corporal Matters," said one of the soldiers as we stood on the wharf next to the boat.

The corporal stepped forward.

"We are taking Cley," said the soldier.

"As you wish," said Matters.

Then the soldier pulled something off his belt and applied it to the side of Matters's face. The object was a black box with two steel prongs sticking out of one end. The corporal screamed in intense pain. This lasted for a full minute until his eyes turned to jelly and black smoke poured from his ears, nose, and mouth. He fell in a heap at my feet.

"What?" was all I could ask.

The soldier proudly held the device up to me. "It melts gear work. It's an easy way to put them down when they've become obsolete. Now, if you'll kindly step aboard, Physiognomist

Cley, we have been ordered by the Master to escort you back to the Well-Built City. You have been pardoned."

Just like that, dressed in my underwear, I stepped aboard the boat. I felt bad about leaving Silencio alone, but this was the only way to get back to the City. They sat me by the side so I would have a good view. One of the soldiers brought me a blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders. I couldn't believe I had been pardoned.

Later, as we cruised down the north side of the island, four soldiers came and held me down. One of them brought forth a syringe of sheer beauty and jabbed it into my neck. The drug exploded in my head and showered its violet glow throughout me. The soldiers begged my pardon, then lifted me up and put me back where I had been sitting.

The beauty wrapped me tightly against the winds and I stared, lost in daydreams. Before the boat turned away from the island, we passed its western tip. At somewhat of a distance but still visible, I saw Corporal Matters of the day watch on a small spit of sand that jutted out into the breakers. Behind him the beach was crawling with hungry wild dogs, waiting. I waved to him and called his name. He looked up and out to sea at me. 'Tve found paradise," he called over the water.

News of my return was all over the Gazette. The headlines hinted that a terrible mistake had been made in one of the more intricate calculations leading to the final equation of my guilt. As far as the general populace was concerned, they were to have no fear of the efficacy of the Physiognomy for themselves, since their features were obviously much cruder, hence, easier to read. There was a quote attributed to myself, which, of course, I can never remember having given, to the effect that the whole mix-up was totally understandable. The Master was quoted as saying that he was relieved that one of his most trusted subjects could now be pardoned and return to a fruitful life in the City. Following this nonsense was an in-depth recounting of my life and the numerous high-profile cases I had prosecuted. Every one of these represented to me a tunnel tomb carved in sulphur.

When I opened the door to my apartment, all was exactly as I had left it on that afternoon, months ago, when I had set out for the territory. The only exception was a giant bouquet of yellow flowers on my desk along with a small package which turned out to be a month's supply of sheer beauty and enough syringes to carry it to my veins. The soldiers, who had brought me from Doralice, had injected me every eight hours on the return trip, so that I was once again dependent on the drug.

I cannot say that I did not breathe a sigh of relief getting beneath the covers of my own bed and sleeping deeply, but once in dreams, Aria, Calloo, Bataldo—even Silencio—came to me to remind me that I had covert, unfinished business with the realm to attend to and that I could not allow any measure of comfort and warm welcome to deter me.

After I awoke from a nightmare of demons, I stayed up and tried to think clearly through what I would have to do. I smoked thirty cigarettes between then and dawn, in an attempt to forgo an injection. I soon realized that, in my secret self, with my new knowledge, I was as much a stranger in the City as I had been in the territory. The title of Physiognomist, First Class was merely a disguise for me now. Somehow I would have to outsmart the Master, stay two thoughts ahead of him. The only problem was that his thought process was less than linear. "I will have to think around him," I whispered, but then regretted my words, remembering the time he had told me, "I don't read, I listen." It was all too much, too suddenly. The morning sun brought tears to my eyes as I rolled back my sleeve and tapped a vein at the crook of my arm.

The next day a messenger appeared at my door to inform me that a coach would be by in an hour to take me to Below's offices at the Ministry of Benevolent Power. I bathed quickly and dressed in my lime silk suit with matching vest. Plucking one of the yellow blossoms from the bouquet, I affixed it to my lapel as an outward sign that all was right with Cley, that his confidence in the Master, the realm had been fully restored. I knew that the order of the day would call for both a good measure of groveling and a certain self-assurance when it came to discussing my future. I was sure that there had been some ulterior motive behind my pardon. As I heard the driver knock at my door, I decided to allow things to develop as they would, all the while staying keenly observant for a spark of insight that might lead to a plan.

As the coach wound through the streets of the City, I marveled at that complexity of design I had not witnessed in so long. My last stay there had been spent between my prison cell and the courtroom. The black bag, which had been thrown over my head during the transport between them, had prevented me from seeing the citizens bustling to and fro beneath the spires and domes. The pink coral buildings, the glass, the crystal would probably have made Beaton think he had stumbled upon paradise had he taken a wrong turn in his wanderings and landed here. I did notice a greater presence of uniformed guards on patrol. They carried flamethrowers, which was unusual.

The coach pulled up before the enormous crystal structure of the ministry. I got out and made my way up the steep steps and through the front door into the lobby. A young woman came up to me as I advanced toward the elevators.

"Physiognomist Cley, welcome back to the City. The Master awaits your arrival," she said.

I nodded to her and smiled, but she was only the first to greet me. People I didn't even know stopped me in the lobby to wish me well. Behind their smiles and open palms, I knew there had been an order from above requiring affability. I stayed calm until I had nodded to everyone and then took the elevator up to the tenth floor. When the doors opened and I entered the long hallway that led to Below's office, I was astonished to see that it was lined on both sides with the blue static forms of hardened heroes from Anamasobia. Among them I spotted Arden, holding his mirror. On my left, Beaton leaned in a static pose into the aisle, the fingers of his hand slightly parted, proffering his invisible message.

When I entered his office, the Master was sitting behind his desk, a flat, smooth piece of quartz the length of the coach that had brought me. There were stacks of paperwork on it, which he was in the process of throwing into the blazing fireplace behind him.

"Cley, welcome," he said, nodding for me to take the seat across the desk from him. "I don't think I'll ever get through this paperwork. It is the bane of the Master."

He threw a few more stacks in and then turned, folded his hands on the desk, and stared into my eyes. I returned his stare for as long as I could and then looked away toward the miniature replica of the City that sat on a table in the corner.

"I see you have brought back souvenirs from the territory," I said, pointing over my shoulder toward the hallway.

"The territory, the territory, the people can't get enough of it. The papers are filled with tales of the territory. I've made a fortune on the few things I was able to bring back. Demon horns are selling for seven hundred belows apiece. I disseminated the lie that when taken in its powdered form it would induce week-long erections and orgasms that would leave one washed up at the gates of paradise." He laughed. "Some fun for the people."

"I wanted to thank you personally for my pardon," I said, trying to seem as cowed as possible.

"Well, Cley," he said, leaning back, "I missed you. You were always so damned conscientious. The memory of you riding next to me in my cart, bespattering your trousers over the consequences of your crimes against the realm, made me feel . . . shall we say, like a father who has lost touch with an errant son."

"Master, you honor me with the analogy," I said.

His eyes darted back and forth beneath that one contiguous hedge of eyebrow as if he were unsure whether he had gone too far. "How was Doralice?" he asked.

"Well, I met your old war companions, Matters and Matters," I said.

"Oh, those two. Fuck them, the monkey runs the show on that island," he said. "What did you think of the monkey?"

"Silencio. He was remarkable," I said.

"One of mine," said Below and clapped for himself.

"I also came to the conclusion that I had sinned and that it was just punishment for me to bake in the mines," I told him.

"Very well then," he said, and began manipulating the fingers of both hands in front of me. I knew that one of his parlor tricks was to follow, and, sure enough, the yellow flower I had been wearing was now cupped in his palms.

I looked down at my lapel to find it empty. "Miraculous," I said.

He nodded in agreement with me. "Listen, Cley, I can't have you come back to the City and not have some work for you. I know you love your work. I've got a new project for you."

"Will I be employing the Physiognomy?" I asked.

"Your rank has already been reinstated. I need someone of your intensity to carry out this special mission I have. You see, I noticed while wandering through the streets in disguise the other day that my divine creation, this amazing metropolis, was getting too crowded. Believe it or not, I heard rumblings of unhappiness from the citizenry. When I looked closely at these malcontents, I began to notice that their physiognomies were less than sterling. Many of their faces could have passed for the rear ends of animals. So I began to devise a plan to thin out the population."

"I am at your service," I said.

"I knew you would respond with fortitude," he said. "What I want you to do is round up ten people a day, read them all, find the ones with the least favorable visages, and send their names to me. In ten days, we will bring these people in and have them eradicated. My plan is that we hold public executions in Memorial Park. We'll see how much grumbling there is afterward."

"A splendid plan," I told him.

"The word is out that you have full power to detain and read any subjects you see fit with the exception of my personal staff. Remember those idiots who prosecuted you? They are open to investigation, if you see what I mean," he said, laughing. "In any event, I want ten warm bodies in ten days, but it is important for you to read as many as you can. I want these investigations to touch as many people's lives as possible."

"Understood," I said. "I will proceed immediately."

He was not ready to let me go just yet, though. He brought out two vials of the beauty. I wanted to decline, but I could see that it was a test of my loyalty. The Master went for the vein in his tongue.

"It's my special mix," he slurred as he pulled the needle out of his mouth.

We sat there for an hour in the throes of the beauty, and he did card tricks and sleight of hand with coins. Below's special mix was certainly special. I couldn't move. The graceful motion of his hands as he performed was hypnotic. Pigeons, fire, a tiny man fashioned from his earwax did somersaults across the tabfe. Finally, it all came so fast and furiously, I thought I was going to pass out. Then he jumped out of his seat, came around the table, and ushered me toward the door.

"Tonight, Cley," he said, "I have arranged for a dinner in your honor. I want them all to kiss your ass for a night. It was a shame that I allowed them to talk me into sending you away."

"As you wish," I said.

"You'll need this to get in," he said and put one of the coins he had been performing with into my palm.

I said good-bye and walked down the hall of hardened heroes. Once outside, I stopped on a bench and tried to catch my breath. Not even on Doralice had I perspired so much. That batch of the beauty had given me the worst case of chills I had ever experienced. In addition to this, my nerves were frayed by the immensity of the future.

Eventually, I pulled myself together by walking around one of the outside malls. In a temporary ring, at the center of the walkway, there was a battle match taking place between two of the Master's hardware-enhanced citizens. I tried not to pay any attention to the brutality, but at that time of day the mall was relatively empty. There was only a young mother and her two daughters present.

When my breathing had returned to normal, I turned my attention to the contest in the ring. One of the fighters had snapping metallic claws for hands and a set of steel corkscrews protruding from his head. The other fellow whirred and clanked with the noise of his defective inner workings, but he was very large. There were crude skin grafts across his neck and chest. He had no odd features save for life itself, but he carried in one hand a pickax and in the other a net.

The metal claws snipped through the net as if it were lace. When the big man swung the pick and missed, the other drove forward with his head and gored an arm. I saw no blood, but the skin tore fiercely. It ended with the pickax in the claw man's back. The sound of applause filled the mall from speakers mounted on the buildings. The big man bowed stiffly as the cleanup crew came to take away the vanquished. The mother and daughters lost interest and wandered off to something else. I walked quietly up to the side of the battle ring behind where the winner stood.

"Calloo," I said.

He stood perfectly still, staring off into the distance.

"Calloo," I called.

At the sound of his name, he turned and looked down at me. He stared for the longest time. I thought I was making some deep contact with him, but then I realized that he had broken down. When I looked up, I saw a large spring protruding through the skin at the back of his neck.

I ran through the mall and out into the park. I wandered through the City gardens for an hour or so before I finally made my way across town to my office. After having seen Calloo, I was more determined than ever to undermine the realm in any way I could. As soon as I got to my desk, I dashed off a letter on official stationery to the Minister of the Treasury, requesting a complete inventory of all the items the Master had brought back with him from the territory. If I was lucky, my message would never even get to the minister but would be handled by one of his underlings. I was afraid of being caught, but in this situation it was as dangerous not to act as it was to. I thought I might find a clue in the official records that would show me the way to Aria.

After dispatching the note with a messenger, I stood by the window, staring down across the street in front of the Academy of Physiognomy. I wanted to yell out the window to the passing crowds, "There is madness here," but I could tell they were too busy thinking of what official connections they could massage in order to procure a snort or two of demon horn.

My dinner was held at the Top of the City, beneath the crystal dome. When I tried to give the guard at the entrance the coin that Below had handed me, he refused it. He welcomed me back from Doralice as I stepped through the doorway. The sun was setting behind a mountain range off to the west, its red beams refracting through the translucent roof of the candlelit restaurant. I immediately went to the bar and ordered a drink.

The circular room was a hive of ministers and dignitaries from the realm's matrix of bureaucracy. They moved around between the tables, methodically chasing one another and running away, talking from one side of the mouth, laughing from the other, all the while gritting their teeth. Big cigars were being smoked, and I caught snippets of conversation, all revolving around status and the acquisition of belows.

The moment it was known I had arrived, a long line formed before me. They came at me one at a time to shake my hand, welcome me back, perhaps ask some tidbit about the territory or the sulphur mine. I yessed them and thanked them and told them all how much I had suffered. The alcohol flowed freely, and many of my well-wishers were drunk. I, myself, had downed three Rose Ear Sweets before half the line had gotten to me. I remembered my days of Physiognomy and how many lines of faces I had been through. The same now as then; I did not expect to find anything remarkable.

That thought had just left my head, when a drunken young woman came staggering toward me. She was unescorted, probably one of the young women the Master hired at these events to "fill out the crowd." Her eyes were half closed, and she wore a smirk on her face. I could smell Three Fingers before she got within four feet of me. She threw her arms around my shoulders and kissed me full on the lips, pressing her tongue between my teeth. Those behind her in the line applauded.

I drew away and she put her lips to my ear and said, "How's that leather glove?"

"Do I know you?" I asked.

"No," she said. Then she released me and stepped back to the person behind her in line, a tall fellow with a striped suit and a well-trimmed mustache. "He pinkied me one night wearing a leather glove over in Memorial Park," she said.

The man laughed and nodded. As she moved off into the crowd, I saw him turn to the man behind him and tell him something. The second man looked up at me while he listened and then he too began to laugh. I watched with a sick feeling as the description of my dalliance made a visible wave through the crowd. Some of the inebriated put on their gloves to shake hands with me. I grinned and told them how much I had suffered.

After I had been accosted by everyone present, the Master made his appearance. He was dressed in a living suit made of some trailing plant that grew from pockets filled with soil. The thing covered him like a hedge and made a sort of hood above the back of his head. In a half dance, he moved to the center of the room and called for silence. Quiet descended like a rock, for everyone knew that even to sneeze during one of his orations could mean dire consequences.

"I have been to the territory," he said, staring up through the dome at the gathering night as if looking for something.

Everyone looked up until they realized it was merely a dramatic effect.

"And," he continued, "I have brought the territory back to you." With this he clapped his hands and attendants began moving tables and chairs aside, creating a wide path that led from the double doors of the kitchen to a large, circular clearing. When their work was finished, the Master announced, ' 'Behold the demon."

They brought it through the doors of the kitchen with its hands chained behind its back and a rope around its chest, folding down and holding fast the wings. Two soldiers accompanied the creature—one leading it by a chain attached to a metal clasp around its neck and the other following, a flamethrower trained on its back.

The demon hopped more than walked, all the time flashing its fangs and growling at the guests. They shrank back as it tried to lunge at them. The soldier pulled hard on the leash and brought his prisoner away from the crowd. It was led into the circular clearing, and its chain was shortened considerably and attached to a clamp in the floor.

The demon roared and fought against the restraints. Muscles across its back flexed, swelling the wings a pitiful half inch beneath the rope. The Weil-Built City's elite stayed clear of it for five minutes, and then seeing that it could not escape, they inched closer and closer. Soon the taunts began. They threw crumpled cocktail napkins at it. They crept up until they were just out of its reach and yelled threats to it. The Master walked up to me where I still stood next to the bar.

"You're a smart man, Cley," he said to me, turning to keep an eye on the spectacle.

"How's that, Master?" I asked.

"You are interested in investing in some of the relics of the territory, I believe?" he asked.

"Well, I'm not sure," I said, taking a drink to disguise my confusion.

"The Minister of the Treasury has informed me that you requested an entire list of items brought back from the territory," he said.

"Oh, that," I said. I smiled, then laughed, then scratched my head. "I thought a demon horn might be a wise investment, seeing as how if it were ground up and sold by the snort, one could charge quite a bit, making fourteen hundred out of seven," I said. "Of course, I got the idea from you this morning."

"I knew that is what you had in mind," he said. "I'll send you one as a gift."

I was going to thank him, but there was some commotion going on in the crowd. The guests suddenly fled backward, tripping over the legs of chairs and sprawling across tables. It seemed the demon had been able to catch one of its tormentors with a horn to the forehead. I looked up just in time to see the poor victim slide to the floor with a blood-drenched look of total surprise beneath a gaping wound. The demon immediately descended, snapping down with its powerful jaws on the now screaming face.

The Master stepped forward as the soldier with the flamethrower tightened his finger on the trigger. "Hold on a second," he called as the man writhed beneath the fangs of the demon. "Who is that on the floor there?" he asked.

A few of the people turned and said, "It's Burke from the Ministry of the Arts."

The Master laughed. "Forget it," he said to the soldier, and the man lowered his weapon. Then Below snapped his fingers and the music began to play. Waiters entered from the kitchen, carrying bottles of absence and trays of chived cremat. "Delicacies from the territory," he called out over the rush to grab them.

Later, I had to sit on a dais at the north side of the dome while ponderous speeches were made about my brilliance, my dedication to the realm, the perplexing elegance of my physiognomy. I smiled and nodded inanely, and the crowd applauded, laughed, and cheered in all the right places. When I was asked to speak, I merely gave the standard salute to Below and said, "Long live the City, the realm, and the Master." I looked down at the crowd, and after their response died away they looked at me, none of us knowing what should come next.

The Master was then beside me, shaking my hand for all the dignitaries to see. I was escorted back to my seat on the dais by one of the attendants as Below addressed the guests.

"Watch this," he said, and grimaced. White flowers popped into existence at the ends of the tendrils that made up his hood. The guests were beside themselves. I preferred to watch the attendants drag the remains of Burke away from the demon with an eight-foot steel hook.

"Get your resumes in for the minister of the arts position," said Below. A wave of laughter welled up from the crowd, but once things had quieted down, the Master struck a more sober pose. "It is only fitting that we honor Physiognomist Cley tonight," he said, "for he embodies the ingenuity and insight of the territory. You all love the idea of those strange, wide-open places, and I have done my best to bring some of that to you tonight. But beyond this, I see the territory as a symbol of my new campaign to revitalize the City. In doing so, I propose two measures. First, I have ordered Cley here to round up physiognomical undesirables for execution. In ten days, in Memorial Park, you will witness the survival of the fittest, or should I say the perishing of the unfit, a phenomenon borrowed directly from the wilderness."

The guests clapped madly for this announcement, as if in the energy of their applause, the Master might notice they were worthy of survival.

"As a result of this campaign, you may lose a relative, a spouse, a child, but never let it be said that Drachton Below takes without giving back. A new exhibit from the territory will open in ten days. The location of this spectacle will be kept a secret until it is announced after the executions in the park. This display will be called "Anomalies of the Territory," and in it, you will see some of the strangest sights any City dweller has ever beheld. It will be fun for the whole family. The demon there is merely a pathetic creature. Wait till you see what I have brought back," he said.

He moved the fingers of his left hand as he had that morning and produced a small coin out of thin air. "All of you were given one of these," he said. "Save these special coins, for they will admit you and a loved one to the exhibition for free at the grand opening."

I followed suit as the members of the audience began searching their pockets for the coins. When I pulled mine out and held it up in my palm, I saw that it had an image of a coiled snake on one side. I flipped it over and there was a flower.

The mess that was Burke had been whisked away by the time dinner was served. I sat at a table with the Master and the Minister of Security, Winsome Graves. The moment we were seated, Graves began toadying, blathering on about the grandeur of Below's Territory Campaign.

"Shut up," Below said to him.

"Yes, of course," said the minister with a forced smile.

In keeping with the theme of the evening, roasted fire bat and old-fashioned cremat dumplings were the main course. I could barely keep from retching when my plate was set down before me. The Master looked over and saw that I wasn't digging in like the other guests, some of whom were already inquiring about seconds.

"Cley, don't you like the meal?" he asked.

Graves looked across at me and smiled, his mouth full of dumpling, waiting to see what would happen.

"It's the excitement, sir. I am overwhelmed by this outpouring of acceptance," I said.

"Well, I don't blame you," said the Master. "I don't see how they can eat that shit."

He, of course, did not have a serving of the foul repast set before him, but as he finished speaking, a silver tray with a domed top was brought. "Here is real sustenance," he said as he lifted the top to reveal the white fruit of paradise.

"Begging your pardon," said Graves, "but is it wise to eat that? Who knows what effects it might have."

"I've had it tested over the past few months," said the Master. "There is a laboratory rat, now in the Academy of Science, who was fed a morsel of it. The little beggar has been brought back from death's door by it. Though he was dying of rat old age, he is now virile, resilient, and runs mazes, I dare say, with more intelligence than you would, Graves."

"May you taste paradise," I said to Below as he lifted the fruit to his mouth and began eating, its pale juices flowing down his chin. The aroma of it wafted around me, bringing me back to my visions and dreams and obliterating the stench of the cremat. The Master's vegetal suit reminded me of Moissac, the foi\&te, M*d fragments of the Fragments of Beaton's journey came back to me. When I looked up from my thoughts, I saw the core of the fruit, a gnawed hour glass, revealing black pits at its center.

"Quite edible," he said, as he wiped his hands on his leaves, "but I hardly feel immortal." He snapped his fingers and his private servant moved up next to him. "Take this away and plant the seeds as I have instructed," he said.

The night wore on as I minced and bowed and nodded. I kept a close watch on the Master to see what kinds of changes the fruit might make in him, but nothing remarkable came to pass. When he got up to dance with the young lady who had revealed to the others my sexual techniques, I pumped Graves for any information he might have about the exhibit the Master had referred to. He told me some of his men had been pulled from their usual assignments in order to guard the thing, but not even he knew where it was being built.

"We can only know what the Master tells us," he said, smiling.

I considered paying him a visit the next day in my new, official capacity and ordering him in for a reading. I wondered how many deaths he had been responsible for over the years. As I pictured his head being filled with inert gas before a crowd in Memorial Park, swelling to match his sense of self-importance, I caught myself. "You are hating again, Cley," I told myself. I remembered the word carved into sulphur in Professor Flock's tomb—"forgive." It was a struggle, but before long, I could see that Graves was simply trying to survive. He had his own disguise, like me, like the rest of them. We were all trying to hide our true selves from Drachton Below, waiting for his "glorious dream" to finally come to a close.

The affair abruptly ended when the Master entangled two young ladies in rapidly growing vines, like spiderwebs, and left through the double doors of the kitchen. The minute he was gone, the music stopped, the lights came up, and the attendants began cleaning up. The demon was then led away. Guests were wrapping up the delicacies of the territory in napkins and pocketing them to take back to their families. I was quite drunk but relieved that I had made it through the evening.

The coach was waiting for me outside on the windy street, but I told the driver to go on without me. I walked the City for an hour or so, trying to sober up. It was down on the

Boulevard of Montz along the man-made lake of floating lilies that I realized I was being followed. I first heard the footsteps in syncopation with my own. Finally, I spun around and saw a shadow clumsily dart into a doorway on the other side of the street.

I went directly to my apartment, locked the door behind me, and listened with my ear to the keyhole. When I had established that there was no one there, I rushed to my desk and prepared a vial of the beauty. My skull itched terribly, and I was beginning to quiver on the edge of withdrawal. I took it in the head and called on Flock, but he would no longer come. The floor and walls wavered and sparked, the yellow flowers wept, and before I dozed off, of all people, Frod Geeble, the tavern owner of Anamasobia, appeared before me and spent a half hour belching.

The next morning I was up early, filling out appointment cards for those unlucky citizens I would decide to read. Of course, I had no intention of turning ten people over to the Master for execution. Whatever it was I was going to do, I had ten days in which to do it and then figure out some way to flee the City. For now, though, I would need to follow through with the charade by requesting that certain individuals I encountered through the morning come to my offices in the afternoon for a reading.

I left my apartment before the crush of workers on the way to their jobs could choke the streets. My first stop was to be the Top of the City, where I had dined the previous night. I took a circuitous route, doubling back, stopping in passageways, passing through the Academy of Physiognomy and then out the back door. I had not noticed anyone following me, but if someone was, I felt confident that I had lost him.

When I got to the restaurant, the cleanup crew was just opening the doors to the elevator that led to the dome. They tried to prevent me from going up, but I told them who I was and asked them if they would like to stop by my office for a reading that afternoon. When they instantly lost all interest in detaining me, I realized that my new power would come in handy. I didn't bother to give any of them cards, and they smiled thankfully at me. I smiled back as the elevator doors closed.

The restaurant was empty, save for a cleaning woman, who entered soon after me and was trying to scrub the blood of poor Burke from the middle of the dance floor. She ignored me and I her. I could see the sun coming up beyond the dome, and the room began to glow with its warmth. My plan was to use the tower as a lookout point in order to see if I could spot any signs of construction going on throughout the city. I walked the rim of the crystal, staring down, watching carefully as the insectlike inhabitants scurried purposefully along paths and through holes in the coral structures. "Palishize," I thought to myself.

I spotted nothing. All seemed as it always had on the City's skyline. There were no great depressions in the earth, no accumulation of building equipment, no scaffolding. As I spied from my perch, I noticed that the woman had walked up next to me and was also looking down.

"Can I help you?" I asked.

"Was wondering if you were looking for the demon," she said.

"The demon was here last night," I told her. "That mess you are working on is the fruit of its labor."

"I know that," she said and smiled through missing teeth. "But I guess you haven't heard about what happened last night. As soon as they took it through the kitchen over there, it managed to burst out of its chains. They tried to flame it, but they ended up flaming each other. The ones that were left were killed by it. It's out there now, hiding in the City," she said.

"That is not good," I said.

"I read in the paper where one of the Master's experts said that it must be hiding underground during the daylight hours. They said there shouldn't be a problem until the night comes."

The news was frightful, but I did not miss the fact that there was much information to be garnered from listening to the populace. I thanked her and she seemed genuinely happy that I had acknowledged her help. She went back to the stain, kneeled and continued scrubbing.

Having found nothing in the visible topography of the City to indicate the construction of the exhibit, I left and went immediately to a newsstand to purchase a copy of the Gazette. Sitting down with it in front of a steaming cup of shudder at the outdoor cafe by the park, I turned to the second page and read the headline demon loose. I sped through the story, which told me little more than the cleaning woman had. "Since when has Below begun admitting to mistakes?" I wondered. In the past, this incident would never have been reported. This was something I would try to ask him about at our next meeting.

The shudder went down well, and I ordered another cup. I sat contemplating the thought that an ally of some kind might be helpful, but who was I to trust? The cleaning woman seemed the only one I had met since my return who didn't appear to have any ulterior motive behind her words. I thought about her and then recalled her telling me that the demon was probably underground somewhere. It struck me that not only was the demon hiding beneath the surface but also that was probably the location of the exhibit.

I remembered from my student days when I had had to be across town to attend a reading or fetch reports from the Ministry of Security in a hurry. I had traveled underground to avoid the busy hours on the streets. When the foundation of the City had been laid, Below had ingeniously built in a vast network of underground passageways, tunnels, and catacombs that he himself had used as a means of traveling unseen from location to location. "Surprise is my meat, Cley," he had said to me on one occasion, referring to that very network. Officials were allowed to use it but rarely did, not wanting to be found down there by the Master and raise his suspicion of some hidden plot.

"Beneath the surface," I said to myself, and wanted to go and investigate right then. Instead, I kept my revelation in check and got up and passed out appointment cards to the other patrons of the cafe. They thanked me in pitifully weak voices. I could see how frightened they were, but I had to keep a severe gaze as I took down their names.

On the way back to the office to keep those appointments, I passed through the mall where I had witnessed Calloo battle the claw man the day before. There was another match going on and quite a bigger crowd of onlookers. Belows were exchanging hands, and the audience was calling for gears and springs to be scattered across the ring. Luckily, the participants were not familiar to me.

I walked up to a soldier who stood behind the crowd, holding a flamethrower. One of the automated gladiators had just lost his head to a battle-ax blow. "What happens to the ones that are defeated or broken?" I asked him.

"None of your business," he said.

"Do you know who I am?" I asked him in a pleasant voice.

"You're about two seconds from being burnt beyond recognition," he said. "Move on."

I handed him an appointment card. Seeing it, he immediately understood the gravity of his mistake.

"Your honor," he said.

"Perhaps we could discuss it in my office this afternoon," I said. "By the way, has anyone ever read that forehead of yours?" I shook my head and grumbled a little.

"A million pardons, your honor," he said. "The ones who are defeated are taken back to the big warehouse behind the munitions factory. If they are beyond saving, they are incinerated after the brass and zinc parts have been removed. If they are salvageable, they are outfitted with new pieces and sent back for another battle match."

I snatched the card from his hand. "You are very helpful," I said.

As I walked away, he called after me, "Welcome back from Doralice."

I spent the afternoon at my office, reading those who I had made appointments for. They were all just simple people of the realm, and I did not make them undress. Instead, I played around with the calipers and the lip vise, every now and then jotting down a bogus note or two as I had done back in Anama-sobia. No matter how deficient the Physiognomy told me they were, I lauded praise on their features and encouraged them to talk. At first they were wary, unused to having so important a member of the realm seem friendly to them. I believe they each reached a point where they intuited that I would do them no harm, and then they told me everything—about their children, their jobs, their fears concerning the demon. I nodded and listened attentively even though I was itching for the beauty.

Then the last of the fellows who came through my examination room, a young gardener, whose main job was keeping the tilibar bushes blooming in the park, mentioned something that I found interesting. He had heard I had been to the territory and wanted to let me know that he too had been there.

"I was sent out to the wilderness beyond the boundary of the territory about a month after the Master's expedition had returned, a few weeks after you were so wrongly sentenced," he said.

"Interesting," I said.

"I was ordered by the Master to bring back a variety of species of plants and trees—a great quantity of them. The operation was immense," he told me.

"What did you do with them?" I asked.

"It was the strangest thing," he said. "We brought them back to the City and were told to deliver them to the western side of town, over by the sewage treatment plant and the waterworks. We dropped them off in the middle of the street, and they nearly filled the whole thoroughfare. Then I was dismissed from the detail and was sent back to the park to my tilibar bushes. The next day, after work, I went to see what they had done with them, and they had all vanished."

He wanted to then tell me about his fiancee and his plans for the future, but by then the chills were running through me, and I needed a fix desperately. I ushered him to the door as he was still talking, assuring him that he was a great asset to the realm and wishing him well in his marriage. The instant he was outside, I closed the door and went to my desk to prepare a syringe. Through the years, I had become so good that I had that needle in my neck in less than three minutes.

Since I had been able to quit the beauty once, it seemed to know that I could do it again, and because of this it did not treat me so roughly as it had back before my imprisonment. I would still hallucinate, but there was less of it, and that overwhelming feeling of paranoia was replaced by long stretches of deep thought. That afternoon, I daydreamed about rescuing Cal-loo from his mechanized, walking death and enlisting him to help me. Then I watched out the window the illusion of the City melting in a fine black rain that fell beneath an opulent sun.

I knew none of it was real, and yet I continued to fantasize, this time about Aria. How I would rescue her and she would forgive me and fall in love with the new me. It all seemed so simple, so absolutely necessary. I had my arms around her and was just about to kiss her, when there came a knocking at my door that scared me so by its suddenness that I nearly fell out of my chair.

"Package for Physiognomist Cley," a voice said.

My head spun as I got up and walked shakily to the door. I opened it just enough to let the package in and then closed it. "Thank you," I called, but there was no response. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string. There was no name on it, no return address. I laid it on my desk and then just sat staring at it for some time. Finally, when the effects of the beauty had nearly worn off, I opened it. The first thing I pulled out was a note written in the Master's hand.

Cley,

Here is the demon horn I promised you last night. Try to stay away from the ones that are attached to a head. If you can't, I have enclosed something to help you protect yourself Do not go out at night until the crisis has been abated.

Drachton Below, Master of the Realm

Inside the package I found the hard black horn of a demon. Holding it in my hand, I realized that with its weight and sharp tip, it would make an adequate weapon. Beneath it, though, wrapped in tissue paper, I discovered something far more effective—my old derringer, fully loaded, along with a box of bullets. When I put on my topcoat that evening to leave the office, I had the gun, the horn, and a scalpel, each in a different pocket. None of them was a flamethrower, but I did feel a little safer as I stepped onto the street beneath the starlit sky.

I moved with some confidence amid the sea of homebound workers. When they recognized me, they gave me that curious one-fingered salute. Upon seeing it, I smiled and lifted my middle finger to them as a show of solidarity. To my annoyance, they did not smile back, but dropped their gaze and moved off, looking disgusted. It was then that I wished I was one of them, a nobody in the crowd, living a simple life like the gardener and his fiancee.

The streets had emptied completely by the time I got to the munitions factory. This was one of the older parts of town that did not have gas lamps on every corner. There were no stores there to light the way with glowing signs. It was a district of manufacturing, where the Master's ideas were transformed into brass and zinc. There hadn't been a war in over thirty-five years, yet the munitions factory had triple shifts. One of the Master's greatest feats of sleight of hand was how he stored all of the rockets and bullets that were made there. As I passed by, I could hear the machines banging out shells, and the glow from the windows was as vague as twilight.

Two blocks behind the factory, I found the warehouse I thought the soldier in the mall had been talking about. It ran, windowless, nearly the length of a full block and was deep to the point where I could not see beyond it. The entrance to the place was two huge wooden doors with a loose chain attaching them. I could easily slip through the opening between them. I took out my lighter and my derringer and went into the dark crevice.

I could barely make out the rows and rows of large cribs that lined the aisle I suddenly found myself in. Next to the cribs were rolling trays of tools, gears, and wires. My lighter went out for a moment, and it took me too long to get it going again. When I held it lit over one of the cribs, I saw a near-human Below creation of metal and flesh, half open and completely asleep.

It took me over an hour to check all of the faces for Calloo's, but I found him. He seemed to have been patched since his contest in the mall. In fact, he looked much better. The scar tissue I had noticed on his neck and chest was greatly diminished, and his arms looked as powerful as they had in the territory. I put the lighter down near his open eyes to see if there was any movement. At first I noticed nothing, but then—and I nearly burned his lashes to see it—his pupils began to contract. Then his eyes began to rapidly jiggle ever so slightly from side to side.

Five minutes later, muscles all over his body began twitching, and then the lighter went out for good. Through the darkness I heard a great commotion of rolling and quaking from the crib. I almost ran, afraid someone might hear. Suddenly it stopped and there was quiet.

"Calloo," I whispered.

There was no answer. I tried the lighter, but it was spent. I whispered his name again and again. "It's me, Cley," I said. But the longer I stood in the dark, the more frightened I became. I was ready to bolt in an instant when I heard his voice. The horrible sound of it set me off, and I was stumbling back down the pitch-black aisle of cribs, ramming into their corners and slamming against trays of tools. I groped along in desperation as I heard him behind me now, yelling the word he had whispered. "Paradise," echoed through the warehouse, and I heard some of the Master's other inventions begin to stir.

Eventually I found my way back to the crevice between the doors and slipped out. The first thing I did upon gaining my freedom was throw that damnable lighter across the street. I began walking very quickly, and my breathing rushed to catch up with me. In my confusion, I took the wrong street and walked for two blocks before I realized I had not passed the munitions factory.

I tried to turn back but I was totally lost by then. Though I had changed direction and decided to push on, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that it was one of those situations where I was heading in the exact opposite direction. I thought I saw the lights of the center of the City ahead of me, but I couldn't be sure.

It seemed as if I had walked all night when I came upon a bar with a glowing sign in the window on the corner of an otherwise unlit street. The sounds of voices and music drifted out through an open window. The sight of it so relieved me, I didn't care if I was spotted after hours in a less than reputable place. I went through the door, went up to the bar, and ordered a Rose Ear Sweet with which to erase the memory of those mockeries of life, squirming and squealing with a rudimentary electromechanical awareness.

Some of the people at the bar waved to me and I waved back. I sipped my drink and tried to relax. The bartender asked if I was from the manufacturing district. I told him that I was from the center of the City.

"I thought so," he said. "You're Cley, aren't you?"

"Physiognomist, First Class," I said and took a gulp of my drink.

"I read about you," he said. "You were in the territory."

I nodded.

"I heard paradise was out that way," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"I also heard that the women in the woods outside of La-trobia have three tits," he said and laughed.

"I've been there too," I said. "But I couldn't tell you one way or the other."

The bartender liked my answer and bought me another drink on the house. He had to go and serve the other customers then, so I took to staring into the mirror behind the bar.

My nerves needed considerable calming. I was on my third drink when a woman came running into the bar, screaming, "The demon, the demon."

The bartender rushed around to her and tried to calm her. "The demon is coming up the street," she said.

To my surprise, most of these citizens were armed. Ownership of a gun by workers was strictly prohibited by the realm. When I saw them brandish those weapons, though, I drew my derringer and followed the crowd into the street. We instinctively formed two rows, one kneeling, one standing. I had a position in the middle of the front row. Ahead of us we could see the thing's shadow approaching.

"Hold fire," said the bartender, who stood to the left of us, sipping from a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Schrimley's. "Wait up until we can all hit him," he said.

The creature methodically advanced as if it had no idea we were there. I heard the sound of his hidden machinery before I saw his face. Calloo had followed me. With a sick recollection of the favor he had once done Bataldo, I aimed for his forehead. The bartender raised his arm in the air and yelled, "Ready."

He was no more than ten yards from us when we fired. The volley hit him straight on and forced him backward three steps, but he did not fall. We heard him grunt, as if the volley had merely awakened him suddenly from a nap, and then he began advancing again. The bartender yelled, "Reload," and that is when I stood and told everyone to hold their fire.

"This is not the demon," I told them.

"What is it?" one of them yelled.

"Just another man in search of paradise," I said. At that, they put down their weapons and Calloo came to stand next to me. He had about twenty holes in his City-issue overalls, and there were definite wounds, though bloodless, in his chest and arms. His face was untouched.

The patrons of the bar came over and shook his limp hand. "We're sorry," they said and Calloo stumbled in place and grunted. Before we headed back toward the center of the City, I gave the bartender the demon horn that Below had given me.

"Powder it and give each person here tonight a snort," I said.

He passed me his bottle as I handed him the horn. I took a drink and passed it to Calloo. The bartender said, "You don't snort this shit, you shoot it." I wasn't sure if he was speaking literally or figuratively, but we had no time to ponder it. Calloo moved slowly, and it was a race against the sun to get him back to my apartment before the streets filled with workers.

It was entirely bizarre, but the only person we passed on the way happened to be the cleaning woman from the Top of the City. She smiled and waved, and I waved back. "Up early, your honor," she said, and then gave me a sign with her left hand, an O formed by the thumb and middle finger. I returned the sign and Calloo tried.

After that encounter, I prodded him to move a little faster. We made it to my apartment just before the streets filled with workers. I led him to my bedroom and had him lie on the bed.

"How do you feel?" I asked.

He said nothing but blinked his eyes.

"I have to go out to work," I said. "Do you understand?"

He blinked again.

"If anyone comes to the door, hide in the closet. If they discover you, kill them. Do you understand?" I asked.

He blinked.

As I made out the new day's appointment cards, I noticed that he was blinking quite a lot and began to question whether he had actually understood my instructions. I got dressed and armed myself with the derringer. I was just putting on my topcoat when someone knocked at my door.

"Who is it?" I called.

"The Master requests your presence," said a voice. "There is a coach waiting."

I looked into the bedroom and saw that Calloo had not moved off the bed. "Get in the closet," I said.

"Paradise," he mumbled but remained still.

I left with the coachman, and it seemed only minutes before I was across town in an elevator on the way up to the Master's offices. As I walked down the hall of hardened heroes, my mind was ablaze with fabulations and excuses for Below, but when I pushed through the door of his office, they twisted together and strangled each other. I stood, empty-headed before him. He sat with his elbow resting on the desk and a hand clutching his forehead. The expression he wore was grimmer than Calloo's.

"Sit down, Cley," he said, waving me into the chair.

There was a long pause, in which he closed his eyes.

"Did you hear about the demon?" he finally asked.

"Yes," I said.

He started to laugh. ''That's right," he said. "I sent that note to you."

"Have you captured it?" I asked.

"Captured it," he said, "I was the one who let it go. I realized that change requires access to random possibility, so I released the demon into the City. He is your competition. As you methodically gather the unworthy for expungment, he kills them as he sees them. I'm thinking big, Cley, very big."

"Brilliant," I said. "By the way, I much appreciated your gifts."

He waved his hand at me and shook his head. "What I've called you here for is to discuss these headaches I've been getting ever since I ate that white shit of the wilderness. My, was that a mistake. Stomach pains and these blasted headaches."

"I have some familiarity with chemistry," I said. "What were the ingredients your researchers found in it?"

"Who knows," he said.

"Can you describe the pains?" I asked.

"Like a fist squeezing my brain," he said. "I can feel that it is projecting energy from my head. Never before has the Weil-Built City of my imagination seemed so inextricably tied to the physical City we now inhabit. These attacks make it hard to distinguish between the two."

("I can't think of what that might be," I told him. "How is your special assignment coming?" he asked. "I read a group yesterday afternoon and already have some participants for the Memorial Park affair," I said.

"Excellent work," he said, clutching at his head again. When he didn't speak for quite some time, I started to get up to leave. As I made for the door, he stopped me.

"Cley," he said, not looking up, "keep that leather glove of yours clean." He began to laugh, but soon it quieted into a wince.

By the time I got to the office, the morning was gone. I had just enough time to send out some appointment cards by messenger. I gave instructions that they should be distributed to the Minister of the Treasury and all the members of his family.

I longed for the beauty, but I did not take it. Instead, I smoked and stared out the window, trying to wrap my mind around the Master's gibberish about random possibility and the demon being my competition. He did not appear well at all, which was a blessing for me. I knew I would have to take bolder and bolder steps to get where I wanted to be, and to have Below distracted could only be beneficial. Then the Minister of the Treasury and his family arrived.

The minister was heavy and sweating profusely as I put him through his paces. Calipers, cranial radius—every tool I had in my bag. As I worked away, I praised his features and told him he was remarkable. He spoke of his accomplishments and his importance to the realm. I duly noted in my book the elegance of his third chin. I offhandedly questioned him about the treasures brought back from the territory.

"I am not at liberty to divulge that information," he said.

"Good," I told him. "You have passed the test. The Master will be pleased with your reliability concerning the subject."

He left smiling.

With his three daughters and their mother, it hardly took any praise at all to get them to talk. I barely even scratched the surface and they each separately told me how much they despised the minister. "I can see what you mean," I told them. His wife got so carried away that she spat on the floor. I gave her a tissue which she used twice more. Even his youngest daughter, little more than a baby, gave the thumbs-down when I asked her about Daddy. I wondered where, inside all that flesh, he was hiding. When they left my office, they went quietly, calmly, with the minister in the lead.

Now it was time for the beauty. I went to my desk and prepared a full dose. Later, when I came out of it, I could hardly remember anything from the experience. Moissac had made a brief appearance, and Silencio had perched on the win-dowsill, picking ticks from his fur and crunching them in his teeth. The sun was going down, and I had to leave immediately. I had plans for Calloo and me to go on an expedition.

Even under cover of darkness, trying to be inconspicuous with Calloo was an effort. I had dressed him in a rather large topcoat of mine, the sleeves of which came nearly to his elbows and the bottom hem to mid-thigh. In addition to this, I shoved an old broad-brimmed hat onto his head and folded the front down to cover his face. He lumbered along behind me as I navigated a path through the alleys to the western side of town. It was clear to me that somewhere in his scrambled, gear-work head, he understood most of what I had told him, because when I arrived home from the office, I found him huddled in my bedroom closet. "We're going for a stroll," I had said to him.

I spoke quietly as we walked along through the shadows, but I could not stop from telling him everything that had happened to me since I had last seen him. I was not sure how much of an asset he would be to my plans, but it didn't matter. He was to me what I needed most, a coconspirator, a friend to plot with. I had the courtesy not to mention his ghoulish condition, and I got the feeling he was thankful for this. Occasionally, he would mutter some words in his deep mechanical voice, and though I could not always pick up what he was saying, I tried to respond with a likely comment. He said my name once or twice, and when he did, I turned and smiled and patted him on the shoulder.

I could see that the duration of my companion's strange life was in some question, considering that there were times when his inner workings screeched and whined so badly I thought he was going to explode. Then he stopped walking and began to sway back and forth. Sparks were visible in his eyes and puffs of smoke drifted from his open mouth. A minute or two later, these episodes passed and we continued. Calloo was, for the most part, no different than the Minister of Treasury and the Minister of Security, his true self trapped somewhere deep within. The one thing that set him apart from them is that even in the condition he was in the voice that moved him was the one in search of paradise.

It took a good hour or so to traverse half the distance to the sewage treatment plant, and I realized after walking so far, that I had not eaten anything all day. My head was light, and I began to feel weak. I knew I should get some food, since I might be required to run or fight before the night was over.

"Hungry?" I asked Calloo.

He grunted and I took that to mean yes.

"We'll go up onto the main street, but whatever you do, don't talk to anyone, don't look at them," I said.

He put his hand up to scratch his beard, and a clump of hair sloughed off his face and came away on the ends of his fingers. I wasn't sure if that was a sign that he understood or not. We made our way out of the alley and up onto Quigley Boulevard, one of the less traveled thoroughfares of the city. I knew there were a few restaurants there.

I chose a small place that had dough-gummels to take out. The man behind the counter was extremely talkative, extremely inquisitive. It was just my bad luck that he, like the bartender the other evening, knew who I was. He welcomed me back and asked a lot of questions about the territory as he waited for a rack of the pastries to come out of the oven.

Calloo stood behind me, weaving in place, now and then sounding like an automatic water pump with a stone caught in it. The man behind the counter turned away from me to check the oven, and when he did, I turned to check Calloo. The big miner was having one of his seizures right there in the restaurant. There were few patrons in the place, probably because of the demon scare, but those who sat at tables eating were now staring over at us. I smiled and waved to them. When the smoke started issuing from Calloo's mouth, I reached into my coat, brought out a cigarette, lit it and stuck it in the corner of his lips.

"Is your friend all right?" asked the man behind the counter when he turned his attention back to us.

"A few too many Rose Ear Sweets," I said.

He nodded. "I've been there."

Not a moment too soon, the pastries were done and he had bagged them for us. Then a strange thing happened. When I tried to pay him, he refused the belows I held out. He simply waved his hand in the air, as if to say there was no charge, and gave me that signal the cleaning woman had—the middle finger and thumb forming an O. When I gave him a surprised look, he leaned across the counter and whispered, "See you in Wenau."

I was stunned. I backed away from the counter and quickly made for the door. Once outside, I leaned against the wall as I tried to understand how this man could have known anything about Wenau. My first thought, of course, was that the Master was on to me, toying with me, as I made and carried out my less than cunning plans. Then I wondered if there was some conspiracy at work in the City. Below had told me that there were grumblings among the populace. Perhaps that is why the soldiers now carried flamethrowers. I ran through this dizzying list of possibilities in moments, and then realized that I had left Calloo back in the restaurant.

When I turned to go fetch him, I found him standing behind me, chewing on the lit cigarette. Fearing for the safety of my fingers, I plucked most of it from his mouth exchanging it for one of the dough-gummels. He simply continued chewing, but it couldn't really be said that he was eating. The pastry was turned to crumbs in his mouth, and eventually just fell out onto my old topcoat. Seeing this almost made me lose my appetite, but I forced one of the gummels down for the sake of the expedition.

For the rest of the journey, I spoke to Calloo. I told him about a possible conspiracy against the Master. He made a sound like someone passing wind, and I took this to mean that he was as excited as I was by the prospect. After that, I boldly admitted my love for Aria Beaton. I knew I had talked too much, though, when I had slipped and mentioned the mayor. Calloo was walking behind me, and I heard him stop moving for a second. I thought I heard a muffled cry, and I wanted to believe that if I turned around, I would find tears in his eyes, but I merely slowed and waited for him to catch up.

The sewage treatment plant and the waterworks were separated by a wide avenue. One of the buildings was white marble with columns and a dome, the other was gray, crudely resembling a beehive. Entering the hive was like stepping back into the mines of Doralice. The stench was poignant and the lighting dim. There were no guards, but this was not unusual, considering what they would have been guarding. We passed through the lobby and then down a set of concrete steps. The first level we came to underground was comprised of a vast lake of human waste with a catwalk spanning the middle of it.

Calloo actually held his nose against the rippling air as we crossed to the other side of the tarn. Passing beneath the walk were giant yellow-white spheres of grease that rolled as they floated by. Things were moving below the surface, stirring the brown sea, and occasionally a bubble or two would rise through the muck and pop.

"Paradise," Calloo called to me.

We descended level after level of concrete steps, following the waters from above as they became waterfalls that dove into large pools and then became a swiftly downward-moving river. It took us some time to manage the stairs because of Calloo's stiffness of gait, but he forged ahead as I gave him constant encouragement. By the time we reached level ground, it must have been a half mile under the street. I noticed that the water appeared to have turned clear. It rushed along madly beside us and we followed its path.

After walking for another few minutes we came to a place where the river tunnel opened up into an enormous concrete cavern. A hundred yards away from us, in the middle of the structure, was a clear crystal bubble of a size my imagination could not readily accept. It sat there like a giant's holiday paperweight, and I could see inside, a forest growing. Somehow there were clouds floating in the blue sky beneath a miniature sun. Exotic birds flew from tree to tree, and off around the southern rim of it I thought I saw a herd of green deer moving through the tall amber grass that bent to and fro in a subtle breeze.

It struck me more forcefully than it ever had before that Below was playing God. Those physiognomical features of his that had concerned me with their indication of pride beyond all bounds, though a fault in men, were perfect for the deity he perceived himself to be. That is why he had no problem utilizing the Physiognomy as his golden mean. When he looked in the mirror there had never been a discrepancy.

I quickly pulled my wonder in check when I noticed that there were soldiers standing around the base of it, sporting flamethrowers. We were too far off for them to clearly see us, as we still stood within the shadows of the tunnel. I grabbed Calloo and moved him up against the wall with me. We stood there as I tried to think of what to do next. I considered simply walking up to the guards and letting them know I was on official business, but then the Master would hear of that. For a second, I considered rushing them, derringer in hand, but I already knew that Calloo wasn't rushing anywhere. Then, I didn't have to worry about it, because I could hear someone approaching down the tunnel.

I took out the derringer and the scalpel and whispered to Calloo to get ready. Peering through the dim light, I tried to see how many of them there were. That is when Calloo took a step in front of me, blocking my vision.

''Pardon me," I whispered to the miner as the demon slammed into his chest with both horns.

The suddenness of it stunned me, and I dropped both scalpel and gun. I couldn't move as I watched the miner grapple with the creature. Its wings beat furiously as Calloo grabbed it around the throat and pulled its horns out of his chest. Then he reached up, took one of the vicious points in his huge fist, and snapped it off as though it were an icicle. The demon screamed and raked Calloo's jugular, or where it should have been, with his fierce claws. The big man responded with a hammer blow across the beast's face, sending it crashing into the wall.

Behind me in the concrete cavern I could hear the soldiers rushing toward the tunnel. I bent over and picked up my derringer and aimed it at the demon's head. It whipped its tail around Calloo's legs and spun him into the path of the shot as I fired. The bullet struck him in the forehead and a shower of diminutive brass gears flew from his open mouth as he fell back against the wall. Then the demon came toward me. I waited to feel its claws rip through my face, but before it could reach me, Calloo lunged onto its back, landing between its wings and taking a stranglehold around its neck. The demon spun to throw Calloo off, and its tail caught my ankles and lifted me off my feet. I fell backward and, as I did, I fired the second shot from the pistol into the monster's face.

The fall seemed inordinately long as I waved my arms at my sides, trying to catch myself. When the water came up around me, I realized I had been knocked into the river. The force of the current was remarkably strong, but I reached out and grabbed a small outcropping of stone with my left hand. This allowed me to bring my head above water for a minute. In that time, I heard the soldiers arrive. There were shouts of "Harrow's hindquarters" and 'Til be a winking minch" before the tunnel above me exploded with fire. I heard the screams of the demon as I let go of the wall and gave myself up to the river.

I worked desperately to keep my head above water, but it moved so swiftly, tumbling me and dashing me against the sides and bottom, that I had very little control at all. I could feel my topcoat being torn off me by the action of the rapids. As it flew away beneath the foam, I managed a last breath before I hit my head against another outcropping. Then I sank into unconsciousness, immediately dreaming that I was dead and that Corporal Matters of the day watch was sliding my body into its tomb.

There was an eternity of blankness in which I could feel myself becoming a pile of salt. When I finally opened my eyes, I stared up at a dreamy blue sky. There was a warm wind blowing, and I could hear birds calling in the distance. I felt thankful that death had been easy. I was tired and every muscle in my body hurt from the drubbing the river had given me. I lay there half asleep and just stared into the sky thinking, "Had I only known it was going to be like this."

I dozed for a minute or two, and when I woke again, the sky was eclipsed by something. A pale green piece of cloth fluttered over me. I concentrated and saw that it was a veil, covering a face.

"Aria," I said.

"Yes," said a voice, and I could tell it was hers.

"I love you," I said.

She leaned back so that I could see her whole body now, kneeling above me. Her beautiful hands came into view, and I watched them move like a pair of birds in the blue sky. They came to rest against my neck, and her touch thrilled me. I was about to reach up, when her fingers tightened around my throat.

» When I woke again, I was lying on the ground

I near a fire beneath a vaulting green canopy of leaves. That same beautifully warm breeze enveloped me, bringing the sweet scents of tree blossoms and wildflowers. I rose up on my elbow and saw Aria sitting across from me, holding a baby in her arms. Next to her, on the ground, sat the Traveler with his legs crossed in front of him. When he saw that I was awake, he smiled at me. I noticed now that in addition to the bumps and bruises that had been supplied by the river, my throat hurt terribly.

"Aria, I've come to rescue you," I said as I sat up. My head suddenly got light, and I fell onto my back again.

They laughed as I scrabbled back to a sitting position.

"You're lucky you're not dead," she said, her voice cold and flat, the veil moving slightly with her words as it had in my dream of her. "I would have killed you, but Ea came and made me stop choking you."

"Where am I?" I asked.

"Somehow, you came through the river into the false paradise. I found you washed up on the bank," she said.

"Aria," I said, then paused, trying to consider the best manner with which to present my case. Before I could employ any scheme to make my plea sound less trite, the words blundered forth with the power of the river that had nearly drowned me. "I've been waiting for a long time to ask you to forgive me for what I've done to you. I have suffered greatly, but somehow I managed to stay alive in order to find my way to you."

"You needn't have stayed alive on my account. What am I to forgive you for? Butchering my face? Making me a sideshow exhibit? Or just being a pompous prig, convinced of your own superiority?" she asked.

"I am changed," I said. "I have been to the sulphur mines. I am surreptitiously fighting against the Master in order to save your lives," I told her.

"Would you like me to remind you of what you were before this miracle you mention?" she said and began to lift the bottom of her veil.

I readied to cover my eyes, but here the Traveler held up his hand and spoke. "I can see in him that he is different now," he said to her.

"Unfortunately, my face is still a weapon," she said.

He put his hand out and touched her shoulder. "Even this, you will eventually forgive," he said in his calm voice.

After this, she let me speak, and I told them my sad saga and how I had come to see the evil of my actions. "All I can do now is try to rectify what I have done," I said.

She asked me about the fate of Calloo and Bataldo, and I wanted to tell her that they were free, heading through the wilderness toward Wenau, but that veiled face required more truth than any set of piercing eyes. She wept when I explained the fate of her people.

"I've got only a limited amount of time in which to get us out of the City," I told her. "In a few days, the Master is going to ask me for a list of citizens that he intends to execute as part of the gala event revealing this bubble of paradise to the people. If I have not been successful by then, it will be me who will be executed, for I will not turn over any names to him."

The Traveler asked me what I had in mind.

I told him how it was that I had come inside the bubble and suggested that, though it was dangerous, we could probably leave the same way.

"No," said Aria, "Ea is weak because of having to live beneath this counterfeit sun. The river almost killed you. He will never make it, and if he could, the baby couldn't."

"There are no other exits?" I asked.

"They built the place around us. It is hermetically sealed, a supposedly self-contained environment. It's a wonder you happened upon the entrance you did. We hadn't thought of that," she said.

"It is an egg ready to hatch," said Ea.

"Where did you learn the language?" I asked him.

"From the woman," he said, pointing to Aria.

"He is brilliant, Cley," she said. "He is so advanced, it was a miracle I could teach him anything."

"I remember," I said to the Traveler, "that you fed a piece of the white fruit to Aria before you left my study in Anamasobia."

"Yes," he said, "to preserve her life. She would have died otherwise."

"I thought maybe it would reverse the effects of my scalpel," I said to Aria.

"That will never change," she said.

"The fruit," he said, "does not do what you might expect it to always. That small bite of it helped her not to die, and it also burnt away some of her ambition for the power that you once held. If someone were to eat of it who was not so innocent as her, this could be trouble."

"Is it truly the fruit of paradise?" I asked him.

"It is not," he said. "It does cause seemingly miraculous things to happen, but they defy nature. They obscure what is important in life. Thousands of years ago, it came to Wenau, where my people lived. They began eating of it, and it caused many monstrous changes. The good things it caused cheated the people of a true life. The evil things it caused cheated them of hope. Finally, the elder of my people saw the truth about it and ordered the tree on which it grew to be burned. I was to take the last piece of fruit and find a spot to hide it that was so remote, it would never be found. We could not destroy it, because it had been made by the forest, and we did not have the right to obliterate it from the world. When I found such a spot, I was to take a mix of herbs and roots, prepared by our shaman, that would put me into a perpetual sleep. I was to guard the fruit and ensure that no creature ever tasted it again."

"But you were fed it by Garland, and then you gave a piece to Aria," I said.

He nodded and smiled. "I would have awoken from my slumber eventually without it. When the man gave it to me, it caused some change in my person. I should not have given it to Aria, but seeing her there in your room, I felt I could love her," he said. 'The change it made in me is that I was able to see her beauty, though she was so different from my people. I went against the spiritual law of Wenau for the promise of love. I am a criminal both here and in the Beyond."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"He means we are in love," said Aria.

"In love," I said, "as in the usual sense?"

"In every sense," she said, and I could almost hear her smile behind the veil.

The Traveler reached over and held her hand the way an old man might his wife's. I felt an instant surge of jealousy. "How could they be in love," I thought to myself, staring at them. "They are like two different species." I shook my head and tears came to my eyes, but when I cleared them and looked again at the couple, holding hands beside the fire, a transformation seemed to have taken place.

Where I had always seen the Traveler as some kind of prehuman animal with outlandish features, I noticed now that he looked as much like a man as any I had encountered in my life. He was tall and his skin was dark, but other than this I saw no difference. In fact, when I looked closely, I realized that his fingers were not webbed as I had always believed, and his nose was a nose and not merely two holes in his face.

"Look," said Ea to Aria, dropping her hand and pointing, "he is seeing me."

She put her arm around him and held him tightly. "Cley/' she said, "if you can save us, I will forgive you. Just help me get him back to the world before he dies. I love him."

"I will try," I said.

"You must think of some way to free us. We've beaten at the crystal with rocks and sticks. We've tried to tunnel under it, but found that the sphere reaches down below the ground. Ea has searched every inch of it for a flaw or some vent or opening. He has tried to dream an escape, but has been unable because of his waning strength," she said.

"I'd better go," I said, grimly considering the prospect of another swim. "You'll have to take me to where the river leaves the paradise. There is no way I can swim upstream against that current."

"I will show you," said Ea, rising slowly to his feet.

I got up and walked over to Aria and held my hand out to her. "I'm sorry," I said. She did not take my hand but sat silently, rocking the baby. The veil moved and I thought she was about to talk, but then I saw that it was just moving in the breeze. "I will come back for you," I said.

Then we left the little encampment and journeyed out across the false paradise. As much as it was a sham and a prison for Aria, her child, and the Traveler, Below had created something amazing. There was no way I would have known, had I not earlier been outside the bubble, that I was not walking through one of the forests of the Beyond. There were all manner of animals and birds and even insects trapped in the crystal. I could not imagine how he had made the sun and clouds. For the first time in thirty-five years, I again wondered why the sky was blue.

When we reached the spot where the river flowed beneath the crystal wall, I turned to Ea and took his hand.

"Watch for me," I said.

"I saw you coming in my dreams," he told me.

I wanted to say more, but the silence we shared was sufficient. Stepping up to the bank of the river, I tried to decide if I should jump directly into the swiftly moving water or ease in off the side. That is when I felt his hand on my back, pushing me. I plunged in and was immediately swept along. This time, though, I did not roll and tumble, but I continued to feel that hand on my back, guiding me, as I sped away from paradise.

Sometime later, I am not exactly sure how long, I felt the current quickly abate and knew that I had entered some larger body of water. Swimming to the surface, I noticed from the white marble ceiling above and the columns that lined the walkway a few yards off, that I had entered a holding tank in the waterworks. How it all came to be, I had moved too rapidly to tell. I swam to the side and pulled myself out onto the walkway.

Although I was soaked to the skin and my boots were squishing tiny geysers of water out of the seams with each step, I made it to the street before the workers arrived to begin the day. The sun was coming up as I fled from the entrance to the waterworks and down the first eastbound alley I could find. As I ran, I shivered and mourned the loss of Calloo for the third time. What was far more difficult was trying to come to terms with the fact that my dream of Aria's love was never going to come to pass.

When I finally crawled up the steps to my apartment, I was completely exhausted, and, now that all of my adrenaline had been depleted, the beauty was calling. I fixed a dose even before undressing and plunged the needle into my wrist. My vision began to blur, and I became unsteady as I tried to strip off my wet pants. At least the violet drug brought me some warmth. More than anything, I needed a few hours sleep before I could make my next move. I got into bed and fell headlong into a feverish beauty dream that swept me along like the river leaving paradise.

I saw Calloo and the demon wrapped in combat while the soldiers shot their flamethrowers, burying the two enemies in a wall of fire. Then I just saw the fire and it burned and burned forever. When the fire suddenly stopped, there was nothing left of either of them except what appeared to be one glistening droplet of water that fell to the cement path, making the noise of the highest key of a piano, struck once. I walked over and picked this droplet up, discovering it was really made of crystal.

It came to me that I was now outside, under a deep blue sky. In the newfound light, away from the river tunnel, I could see something moving inside the tiny crystal. Putting it up to my eye, I could see a minuscule forest growing inside. A wind blew then, like someone breathing, and I looked up, past the blue, and saw a giant eye staring down on me as if through a distant wall of crystal.

Everything shattered and I came awake. It was mid-afternoon. I went to my closet to get dressed, half hoping that I might find Calloo jammed in there, but there was nothing but clothes. I did not bother with a bath, seeing as I had spent most of the previous night in the water. When I was dressed, I made out some appointment cards for later that evening and went out to give them away.

My first stop was a cafe, where I bought a Gazette and ordered two cups of shudder to get my eyes completely open. The headline read: demon kills three at sewage plant. I went on to read that three armed soldiers were attacked and killed by the demon. There was no news of the remains of Calloo, nothing about a topcoat found floating. The story was brief, giving few details beyond the names of the unfortunates. I wondered if Calloo could still be alive out there somewhere, tottering around, springs poking through his flesh. For some reason this ghoulish thought brought a smile to my lips. I leaned back and drank my shudder and noticed that on page three there was a small piece announcing that the Minister of the Treasury had accidentally fallen out of his bedroom window and broken his neck.

I distributed my appointment cards at the open-air market, handing them out randomly. As soon as that was accomplished, I returned to my office, hoping to get a few more hours of sleep before the subjects came to be read. I had just eased back in my chair, settling my aching body in a position that would hurt the least, when someone knocked at my door.

"Who is it?" I called.

The door opened and in walked the Master. As the door closed behind him I caught a glimpse of armed soldiers taking up sentry positions in the hallway. Below carried a brown paper bag with him. He looked completely exhausted, and his hands were shaking. I whipped my feet off the desk and straightened to attention. He sat down in the chair across from me, reached into the bag, and pulled out two cups of shudder. Then he reached back in, took out a shiny object and threw it on the desk in front of me. I instantly recognized the scalpel I had dropped in the sewage plant when the demon had attacked Calloo.

I did not hesitate but an eye blink before reaching out and grabbing the scalpel. "Where did you get this?" I asked. "I haven't seen one of these in years."

"It's a scalpel, Cley," he said.

"Yes, but it's a Pierpoint. The old-timers used to use these," I said.

"It's not the type you use?" he asked.

"I use a Janus, double head," I said. "The cut is cleaner and it is easier to slice cartilage with. But, I'll tell you, in the hands of someone like Flock or Muldabar Reiling, these were very effective."

"I want you to find out whose it is," he said, looking skeptically at me.

I put the scalpel back down on the desk. "I'm just waiting for another group of subjects," I told him. "The list is slowly growing. I've unearthed a nice selection of miscreants so far."

He nodded wearily.

"Cley, the headaches—I can't shake them," he said. "They come more frequently now with weird results."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"My physicians have told me that they think certain foods I eat might set them off or make them worse. They have told me not to drink shudder, but, Harrow's hindquarters, how can a man with my busy schedule get by without a few jolts every day?" he asked.

"Perhaps it might be good to lie down for a day or two," I said.

"You have no idea what is happening. Last night, at a certain bar in the manufacturing district, my soldiers went in to check for a runaway gladiator and had a gun battle with the patrons. How can these workers have guns? My men finally just bombed the place, killing ten citizens. Then they rushed into the rubble and shot the rest of them. But this is bad business. There is a malaise of ingratitude among the people that even I was unaware of." He fell silent for a moment and shook his head. His eyes had dark crescents beneath them. "Things are falling apart," he said.

"Perhaps you should not drink this shudder you have brought," I said, trying to sound sympathetic. He did look rather pitiful and weak sitting there, but I could only gloat at the news he had brought.

"No," he said, "I've brought it to drink in front of you so that I can show you the effect these headaches have on me. I need your help, Cley. I don't trust anyone."

"I'll do everything within my abilities to serve you," I said.

He gave a weak smile and then reached out and took one of the cups in his hands and removed the lid. Bringing it to his lips, he dashed it off in a few seconds.

"It's the white fruit. I need something to reverse its change in me," he said as he put the cup down on my desk.

"What is this change?" I asked.

"Just wait," he told me, "you can't miss it."

"You said there was a runaway gladiator?" I asked.

"One of those wretches I use in the battle matches," he said. "I can't imagine that he will present much of a problem, but when you put it all together, there's just too much random possibility out there now."

"It must be difficult for you," I said.

"It's a lonely thing, being the Master," he said, looking over to stare out the window. "At the same time, I cannot give up. I don't care if I have to kill every last citizen—they will not take my City from me. My life has been the Weil-Built City. I am this City beyond mere rhetoric. Every inch of coral, every pane of crystal is a memory, a theory, an idea. My mentor, Scarfinati, taught me how to turn ghosts of abstraction into specific imagery, but I did him one better, turning imagery into concrete actuality. These streets, these buildings are the history of my heart and mind."

I nodded.

He winced but the unseen pain did not prevent him from continuing. "My trouble began when I tried to turn the people into a magnificent equation whose sum would be perfection. Instead, they have become a virus that beclouds my vision. Their ignorant simplicity corrodes my complexity. Order is needed to return viability to the mechanism of my genius in the same way I employed the Physiognomy to neutralize the chaos of abstract religion, the illness of faith." When he finished, he looked at me as if it should now all be perfectly clear.

"I will help you," was all I could say, my head swimming in the attempt to follow his meaning.

"I know," he told me. "It is the reason I brought you back. I realized when you were gone that you were really the only person here who could grasp the immensity of my vision."

"Your genius is beyond me," I told him.

"Somewhere along the line, someone has gotten the foolish notion that a city is its people instead of its magnificent structures," he said.

"Inane," I conceded.

He leaned over in the chair and grasped his head with both hands. His face became a closed fist of anguish. "Watch," he said as he rocked. Then, as if an invisible assailant had struck him in the face, he flew back in the chair. There was a moment in which the air in the room became heavy and a low crackling sound could be heard. The next thing I knew, the window glass shattered outward with a terrific explosion.

I leaped out of my seat and backed against the wall. The Master took his hands from his head and peered up at me, his pattid face forming a smile.

"It's over, Cley. You can sit down," he said.

I did as he told me.

"I had such a severe episode in my office the other day, the power, or whatever it is, blew apart one of the heads of those blue statues from the territory out in the hallway. It's growing in intensity," he said.

"Rest, Master. You've got to rest. Get off your feet. Let the ministers run the City for a few days," I said.

"Cley, I appreciate your concern, but those asses couldn't run a cart into a brick wall. That would be like turning my life over to a retarded child," he said. "I'd be better off putting the demon in charge."

"What can I do?" I asked.

"Find out which one of your illustrious colleagues uses a scalpel like that and be available for me to confer with you," he said. "What I need is your confidence. I can bring things under control if I just have someone to rebound my ideas off."

I had to help him to his feet when he was ready to leave. As I moved him in the direction of the door, he placed his hand over mine, which supported his elbow. "Thank you," he said. The words almost had the same effect on me as did his headache upon the window.

"I'll send someone by to repair your glass, there," he said with a laugh. Once outside in the hallway, he straightened to his full height. "Let's go, you laggards," he said to the soldiers. They surrounded him as he took the stairs to the street.

I rushed through my appointments late that afternoon in order to get back to my apartment and go to sleep. I felt the way the Master had looked. As I walked along the night streets of the City, I thought about Below and actually felt bad for him. All around me were the incredible designs of his creation—the lights, the spires, the incessant commerce. He had built a kind of crystal sphere around himself and was now vaguely realizing it was a trap. For me, my exalted position of Physiognomist, First Class had been the sphere. It had protected me for quite some time, but it had also blinded me to the rest of life. I could sense that things were going to change, and this was remarkable; but in an odd way, there was a certain sadness to it. Still, I knew that if I had to, I would take Below's life in order to save Aria and Ea and the child. Like Moissac, the foliate, I would leave behind a seed, and it would be this family.

* * *

Part of the next two mornings, I spent wading through official documents in the basement of the Ministry of Information. I was intent on finding some design of a crystal sphere in the literature of the Master's early writings. Although all of his inventions had been committed to his strange memory system, he had written quite a few of them out as shorthand blueprints for his engineers to follow. I could not believe that such an ingenious creation as the false paradise could have been the work of a moment's free thought. There was nothing there in the collection that resembled what I had seen that night beneath the sewage treatment plant, but there were notes for all manner of exotic inventions, some of which had come to pass and some that were probably still in the works over in the manufacturing district. Seeing written evidence of all the Master's brilliant theories and musings was daunting, but it gave me the sense that it was, in a way, somewhat less than human. It was as if he could not help himself tinkering with nature.

I don't think anyone had bothered with these papers for the longest time. They were yellowed and poorly filed, and the dust did not shower from them but rolled in tumbleweeds onto the floor. I also noticed, while down in the musty chamber, that some sort of winged insect had taken up residence amid the moldering dreams of the great Drachton Below. After the early morning rush out on the street had abated and there were no longer the sounds of footsteps and coach wheels, these six-legged interlopers sent up a chorus of chirping that often drove me to distraction. In all, my time there had been wasted.

I was loath to think that I had basically sat through two whole days. Of course, I kept up with my official duties and went on coach rides through the entire city every night searching for any signs of Calloo. I wanted more than anything to return to Aria and Ea with news of their deliverance, but it was too risky to go for a visit without some definite plan for escape. I had made a vow that when next I returned to them, I would take them away with me. I wished I had more time, a commodity I was quickly running short of. It was now less than a week until the executions were to take place.

My next brainstorm was a gift from the beauty. I was riding through the city the evening after I had given up on the Ministry of Information, looking out the coach window into all the shadowy doorways and as far down the alleys as I could. The driver had been instructed to drive slowly and to keep a lookout himself for a big hulking man, moving slowly.

I had not had time that day to catch a fix of the beauty and the symptoms of withdrawal were plaguing me worse than usual. Right there in the coach, I took a vial full and sat back for a few minutes to think. I saw the crystal bubble of the false paradise in my eye's-mind as if at a distance. Then I began to wonder how it had been put together. Aria had said that they had built it around the two of them.

If it was not blown, like a glass bowl, than it must have been constructed in pieces and fitted together, which meant that there had to be a seam somewhere. I kept drawing a blank when it came to envisioning the plans for it, but I did see in my daydream, from a great distance, men at work on it, like a colony of ants swarming over an egg.

I banged on the ceiling of the coach and the driver answered me. "Your honor?" he said.

"Drive me around to the south side of the park, to Engineer Deemer's residence," I said. "Do you know the location?"

"Very good, sir," he said.

Pierce Deemer had been the Master's head engineer throughout the years of the construction of the Well-Built City. Some said he was every bit as brilliant as Below. He was an old man now, but still very active in working on municipal projects for the City. I knew he had children and that his children had children, and I was counting on the fact that he cared for them.

Engineer Deemer was a wiry, severe-looking man with short white hair. He allowed me into his house but was not pleased by my presence. We went into his study, a small comfortable room with a drawing board and books lining the walls. He was a powerful figure in the City, but even his influence, I knew, could not supersede my authority to detain and read him or any member of his family. I did not play coy but went straight to the heart of the matter.

"I need some information," I told him as I sat down in one of the plush chairs attending his desk.

"Everyone needs information," he said snidely.

I took out a handful of appointment cards and threw them on the desk. "Give one of these to each of your grandchildren," I told him. "I hope for their sakes they are all excellent physiognomical specimens. Have you heard about what the Master has planned for the park in a few days?" I asked.

He stared at the cards and then eventually nodded. "Are you threatening me, Cley?" he asked.

"Their heads will pop like grapes," I said. "All of those towheaded little minchs of yours, exploding for the glory of the realm. It will certainly be a spectacle," I said.

"The Master will hear of this," he said.

"Very well," I said and got up to leave.

"Wait," he called just as I was going out the door.

I turned and walked back to the desk. "The crystal sphere that houses the false paradise, how was it constructed?" I asked.

"You know of it?" he asked. "It's supposed to be a secret."

I pulled out another appointment card and threw it on his desk. "Have your wife come by my office also," I said.

"It was not constructed," he told me. "Crystal grows. The Master grew it in an elliptical mold that was made of a substance of his invention that eventually, over time, turns to pure oxygen. The solution was poured into the mold, the crystal grew, and the mold then disintegrated. A very rapid process," he said.

"Are there entrances or exits?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"Can it be cracked?" I asked.

"We tested it with flamethrowers, bullets, hand grenades. They didn't make a scratch. But why do you need to know?" he asked.

"It's a secret," I said.

"Has this been sanctioned by the Master?" he asked.

"No," I said. "If he hears of my visit to you, you can plan on your family line being snipped short."

"You're one of us, aren't you?" he said, and then held up his hand and made the sign of the O.

I nodded and gave him an O in return.

He smiled and showed me to the door. "If I can think of anything, I'll let you know," he said.

As I rode away from the park, I felt uneasy about having exposed my position to Deemer. I could only hope that he really was part of what appeared to be a City-wide conspiracy. ' These unknown allies might be my last and only salvation at the end," I thought. But things were rarely what they seemed in the realm. On my way back to my apartment, I continued to search the streets for the only person I could definitively trust—a gear-work giant with a pinprick of paradise in his head.

"An egg waiting to hatch," was how the Traveler had described the sphere. In my mind, I hit that egg with a hammer, kicked it with my boot, rode over it with a coach wheel, and sat on it like a hen, but nothing could crack it.

Finally, I gave in to the comfort of the beauty for the second time that evening. Corporal Matters of the day watch appeared in my bedroom, flailing away at a crystal egg with the monkey-headed cane. When he reached a state of near exhaustion, he rolled the dice on the end of my bed and announced, "Zero."

"The conspiracy is real," I told myself as I stepped out onto the street the next morning and, scanning the horizon, saw that there was no longer a top to the Top of the City. The long column that was the enclosed elevator that led to the domed restaurant had now a jagged end. The dome was absolutely gone and there was smoke issuing from the open shaft. I stopped the first person who passed me and asked what had happened.

"Explosion last night," the man said. "There and over at the Ministry of Security—a whole wing was taken out."

"Who is responsible?" I asked.

"They are saying that there are evil forces at work in the Weil-Built City," he said.

I thanked him for the information and hurried on to the cafe where I again bought a Gazette. explosions rock city was the headline. The story gave information on the loss of life, which was considerable in both instances, and made note that the Master was offering a hundred-thousand-below reward for information leading to the capture of the terrorists.

Things were heating up. The people of the O apparently were not waiting for me to move. I supposed that they knew about the upcoming executions in Memorial Park in a few days and were reacting violently to the idea of them, or perhaps this was in retaliation for the attack on the patrons of the bar the other night.

I had barely gotten into my first cup of shudder when a coach pulled up at the curb in front of the cafe. The driver got down and came walking over to me.

* There is an emergency meeting of the ministers this morning, your honor, and the Master requests your presence," he said.

"Very well then," I said. I paid for the shudder and took my cup and napkin and accompanied him to the coach.

The meeting was to be held in the Master's office at the Ministry of Benevolent Power. As we rode across town, we had to pass the Ministry of Security. I witnessed the aftermath of the destructive blast. The entire west wing of the building was now no more than a pile of rubble. The pink coral had crumbled like stale bread. Arms and legs and pipes and shards of window-pane poked out of the mess. Soldiers in riot armor patrolled the cordoned-off area. "These people aren't fooling around," I thought to myself.

We turned past what was left of the building and headed uptown toward the Master's office. As we went along, I finished off my drink and brought the napkin up to wipe my mouth. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw what I thought appeared to be writing on it. I brought it directly into my line of vision and discovered that there was a note penned on one side. Cley, it said, it is easier to break an egg from inside out than from outside in. If you want to find out more, come this evening at eight to the Earth Worm at the western side of town. P.D.

I crumpled the napkin up and remembered to throw it in the trash can outside the ministry before entering. As I rode up in the elevator, I wondered if the message had really been from Pierce Deemer or if it was a ruse to flush me out. To make the appointment would be very chancy, especially in light of the recent explosions, but it was an opportunity I couldn't let pass.

As I strode down the hallway to the office, I was disappointed to see that it had been the head of Arden that had succumbed to the Master's strange affliction. He stood there with his mirror, posing the same as ever, only now his body ended at the shoulders. The sight of it brought back to me a memory of Mantakis and his wife, and the last thing I thought before entering the Master's office was the sight of them clutching each other in a pool of blood in the lobby of the Hotel de Skree.

The ministers stood before the Master's desk in a semicircle. Seeing me enter, Winsome Graves, Minister of Security, said, "I thought this meeting was only for ministers."

"Shut up," Below said to him.

"Excuse my tardiness," I said to the Master, and he merely nodded to me and told me to take a position with the others.

He looked more worn and ragged than ever as he sat there in his chair. "We have a crisis on our hands, gentlemen. No doubt you know all about the explosions that ripped my City apart last night."

They all nodded.

"We have a conspiracy on our hands," said Below. "I want action on this. I want to see the culprits' heads brought before me by this time tomorrow morning, or you are all going to be out of a position in the worst way. Do you understand?"

They all nodded.

"Minister Graves," he said, "step forward."

Graves straightened up in military style and came forward, saluting the Master.

Below opened his desk drawer and pulled out a pistol. He hardly aimed before squeezing off a shot. Graves fell like a cut tree, straight onto the carpet, his face obliterated by the shot. Blood covered the jackets of the ministers standing next to him.

"One of you a day," said the Master, "until this thing is settled."

I noticed a yellow puddle forming beneath the new Minister of the Arts. The others were visibly shaken. They nodded and yessed and hailed to the realm. Then they stood there staring at Below who stared back.

"Get going," he yelled and fired the pistol into the ceiling. "Take that piece of dung with you and drop him off at the dump," he said, motioning to Graves's corpse.

The bureaucracy of the Well-Built City had never moved so swiftly. As soon as they were gone, he told me to pull up a chair. I did, trying to position it away from the gore that remained.

"I heard about the explosions, Master," I said. "Who do you suspect?"

"I know exactly who it was, Cley," he said, putting the pistol back in the drawer.

"But who?" I asked.

"It's me," he said. "I was up all night with headaches that were like seizures. I'm telling you, whatever has gotten inside me from that fruit has some kind of consciousness. It is determined to destroy my City. From my bedroom window I have a view of most of the skyline. I began to get one of the attacks, and then, in my mind, I saw a building I had lovingly designed so many years ago. The next thing I knew, my eyes were forced shut from the severity of the pain, and I heard an explosion. When the episode passed, I opened my eyes and could see outside that the building I had pictured was in ruins with flames leaping from the rubble. I won't even mention the damage I did to my own residence. My personal servant is a million flecks of flesh right now, spread across the ballroom of my palace."

"Is there any hope of a cure?" I asked.

"My researchers are working on something derived from the leaves of the tree growing where I planted the seeds of the fruit. It has just begun to sprout, and we hope the sap might counteract the effects of the fruit. I am still a day away from having my hands on that serum," he said.

"Why did you tell them it was a conspiracy?" I asked.

"What was I going to tell them? The Master is systematically destroying the City?" he asked.

I nodded.

"It's killing me, Cley," he said. "I can feel it inside me, plotting my demise. Here, in my veins, is where the conspiracy is." He shook his head in what appeared to be genuine sadness. "You know, there was a room in the Ministry of Security— perhaps you remember it—whose ceiling was made of tin embossed with the image of a pelican. That design was a mnemonic device for remembering the face of my sister, who died when I was ten. Now, after last night, I can no longer see her. That room has also been destroyed in the City behind my eyes."

Just then, he was flung back in the chair with another of the attacks. He grasped his head and cried out, "Here it comes. To the window, Cley. The Ministry of Education. They're going to take it in the rear entrance." His words turned into a prolonged groan.

I watched from the window as the back of the building he had mentioned suddenly turned into a pillar of smoke, shards of crystal, blocks of coral went flying into the air and rained down onto the streets below. In addition, I could hear blue spire heads popping down the hallway, and a bookcase just to my left cracked and splintered, the volumes falling in an avalanche to the floor.

I turned back to the Master, who was now drenched in sweat and breathing heavily. "I'm all right now," he said weakly. "Fix me a syringe, would you?"

I prepared a dose of the beauty for him. He took it and shoved it into the vein in his left temple. As he pulled the needle out, he breathed a sigh of relief. "My lovely beauty," he said. "It's the only thing that does any good against the pain."

"What more can I do?" I asked.

"Nothing," he said. "I just had to tell someone who would care. Keep your ears and eyes open for me, Cley. This is a dangerous time with me so under the weather."

"You can count on me," I told him.

I didn't hand out any appointment cards that day. I knew I was going to have to act within the next day or else there might be nothing left of any of us. The streets were in turmoil, rescue workers heading toward the Ministry of Education and citizens fleeing in the other direction. Soldiers were trying to keep the peace by aiming their flamethrowers at unruly crowds who were threatening to crush one another in human stampedes. I went back to my apartment, took a needle myself, and lay in bed, thinking. Somewhere amid the long dream of the beauty, I heard another explosion and stumbled out of bed to look out the window. The Academy of Physiognomy was on fire. I smiled and lay back down for a while more.

As soon as the night came, I got up and dressed. The streets were quiet now, though the smell of smoke was still in the air. I took the same route on which I had led Calloo to the western side of town. The Earth Worm was a dirty little place I remembered from my student days. Not that I ever visited it, but I knew many who did. I kept to the shadows and stayed off the main thoroughfares as much as possible.

A few blocks away from the place, I thought I heard someone following me. I looked back but saw nothing. With the whereabouts of the demon unknown—whether he was alive or dead— I was somewhat scared, not having my trusty derringer with me. I quickened my pace and did not turn around anymore, though I still thought I heard the sound of someone tailing me at a distance.

The Earth Worm was a small ramshackle establishment. There wasn't much light inside, only candles on a few of the tables and one glowing sign for Pelic Bay hanging over the mirror behind the bar. Three patrons sat together, drinking quietly in front of it, leaning against the splintered wood. The bartender dozed on a stool in the corner beneath an advertisement for Schrimley's. Over in the back, through the shadows, I saw Deemer's white hair. He was sitting at the last table, bent over a glass of wine.

I approached and took a seat in front of him. He did not look up. I cleared my throat to get his attention, but he didn't move. I thought that he had fallen asleep waiting for me, and leaned over and touched his shoulder. Then I noticed the bullet hole in his shirt, half hidden by his topcoat. At almost the same instant, I saw my derringer sitting on the table, next to his glass of wine. Behind me the three stools were scraping across the floor as the men stood.

I turned around and there were two soldiers holding rifles aimed at my heart. The Master stood between them, making the sign of the O with his middle finger and thumb.

"They've been fishing some strange items out of the containment pool over at the waterworks lately, Cley," he said. "In addition to that derringer, they also found a topcoat that looked very familiar to me."

"I can explain," I said.

He held up his hand. "I trusted you, Cley. I let you get close to me, and you betrayed me just like the rest of them. When the gun and coat were brought to my attention, I began inquiring as to your whereabouts. It seemed you had paid a visit to the engineer last night, so my men and I paid him a visit this afternoon. My head verily destroyed his study, but not before we found revolutionary writings. I had his whole family executed on the spot."

I looked over at the bar and realized that the bartender was also dead. "You can kill me," I said, "but at least I'll die knowing that you and this City won't be far behind."

"No more vacations to Doralice for you," he said. "I think we'll just inflate your head."

"Was it just the derringer?" I asked. "Or were you on to me from the beginning?"

"I found it rather peculiar that you never inquired about the girl. I didn't want to believe that you were hiding something, but when they came to me with the topcoat and gun today, I knew," he said. "What was your plan?"

"I wasn't after you," I told him. "I just wanted to free the girl."

"A shame. Take him outside," he said to the soldiers.

They came and each took me by an arm. As we started for the door, Below clutched at his head. I thought he was about to have another headache, but then it seemed to pass and we continued.

Out on the street, there was a coach waiting. "To the execution chamber," Below called to the driver. The soldiers took me to the coach and one of them opened the door. As it swung back on its hinges, something shot out and hit him in the face so hard his grip was torn from my arm by the force of it. The other soldier brought up his weapon, and as he did I hit the ground to get out of the way of his shot. He managed to get off one round into the coach, but as he aimed to fire again, Calloo, or something like Calloo but badly burned and popping springs, lunged out at him and grabbed him around the throat and snapped it as easily as he had taken off the demon's horn. In that same instant, Below was pulling a pistol from his belt. But Calloo's massive fist was faster, hitting him right in the face and sending him to the ground.

I leaped to my feet and moved around to the front of the coach to get to the driver before he could escape, but I soon saw his condition was similar to Deemer's. Calloo moved up behind me and put one of his hands on my shoulder. His inner workings were a cacophony of grinding gear work that I could barely hear over the dangerous hum of an overload. A good portion of his overalls had been scorched, and his left side, face, and arm had been blackened. There was a bullet hole or two more in him, but I think he smiled at me. A croaking noise came from his throat, and I interpreted it as a greeting.

I closed Calloo in the cab of the coach, begging him not to kill Below, who had only been knocked unconscious. I then climbed up into the driver's seat and pushed the lifeless body of the driver onto the street. Lifting the whip out of its holder, I cracked it over the horses' heads, realizing only then as they sped off that I had no idea how to drive the contraption. I pulled back on the reins and tried to slow them, but it seemed they had taken my initial command to go a little too much to heart. We rounded a few corners on two wheels and dashed the back of the cab against a lamppost, but in a few blocks, I was able to get them to slow to a moderate trot.

In the heat of the events that had transpired so rapidly, I had formulated a plan, or I should say it was more like one leaped into my head. I drove on and then looked around for the place Calloo and I had stopped for dough-gummels the night we had discovered the crystal sphere. It took all my strength to bring the four horses to a standstill at the curb outside the small store. As soon as I was sure they were not going to bolt without me, I leaped down from the driver's seat and ran across the sidewalk to the door.