The War of the Flowers

34 INTERLUDE WITH VAN GOGH STARS

"No, you're not going. It's my problem. I'll deal with it."

Cumber looked irritated but spoke calmly. "You'll do nothing of the sort. You're no hero, Theo. Neither am I, but maybe together we might manage to equal one Lord Rose or whatever."

"It's not a battle, Cumber. I'm not going to fight anyone with a sword or anything, just going to ask for some help."

"From the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles, one of the most dangerous creatures in all the world. You don't even know how to find your way there, do you?"

"I wrote down the directions." It didn't sound very heroic, he had to admit. "I know you like Applecore, Cumber, but you don't owe her the way I do. She saved my life."

The ferisher shook his head. "I'm not demanding to go in your place, Theo, I'm just going with you. We'll have a better chance of making it work, especially if something goes wrong. You don't know the city very well, Theo. No, I'm definitely going with you."

The tent flap opened and Mistress Twinge looked in. "Going where?"

Theo almost told her — misery being the inveterate lover of company — but a look from Cumber seemed to indicate caution. "Nowhere special. Just having an argument."

"Ah." She slouched in and arranged herself in a corner of the tent. "I like arguments. Can I play, too?"

The goblin Coathook came in behind her, dark and quiet as a raincloud slipping across the sky. He nodded to Theo and Cumber as he settled on his bedroll.

"Hey, Coathook, that was a world-class fit you threw in what's-it-called — Elysium House," Theo said. "You really looked like you were dying or something."

"He was," said Mistress Twinge cheerfully. "There's too many people with diagnostic charms around these days. A little poison makes it look good and feel good, no matter what charm you use to read it with. You just have to make sure to take the antidote before the stuff hits — right, Hooky?"

Coathook was wearing his poker face today. He didn't even blink at the nickname.

"Hang on," said Theo. "I'm not sure I'm getting this. Coathook took real poison so he could fake that fit in the records office?"

"Had to," the pooka explained. "Most of the guards in places like that have at least some elementary healing training. They've got charms that will tell them what's wrong so they know whether to call for an ambulance or just make the person comfortable. So Coathook had a little sack of iron filings in his pocket and a healing charm to make him right again. Take the first, wait 'til you begin to feel it, then take the other before you forget." She chuckled. "Good, huh?"

"Jeez… Wow," Theo said. "So all that screaming and… you were really feeling that?"

Coathook looked at him with inscrutable yellow eyes. "Yes." He unrolled his bedroll and stretched out. "Sleeping now." He closed his eyes and appeared to begin doing so immediately.

After a long moment's silence Mistress Twinge stood up, pulling a cigar out of the pocket of her red overalls. "Well, I can see you young lovers want to be alone so I think I'll just go for a walk and a smoke — maybe I'll grab Streedy on his way back from Button and teach the boy how to drink or something. That might be amusing." She gave them a jaunty salute. "Have fun, kids!"

"Is that where Streedy is?" Theo asked when the pooka was gone. "With Button? I was just over there and I didn't see him."

Cumber shrugged. "Anything else you want to talk about, now that we're agreed I'm going along to see the Remover? Are you still planning on tomorrow?"

"I guess. Button wouldn't be specific, but I got the feeling things are about to start happening and if something's really up I want to be ready with information on how to get into Hellebore House — if we can get any, that is." Theo rubbed his face. Watching Coathook's placid slumber was making him tired and it was getting late. "What do you think Button has planned, anyway? Do you think he has a hope in hell against the Flower houses?"

Cumber frowned at the unfamiliar expression. "I don't know, Theo. He's awfully smart. Primrose isn't stupid, either, although he's not in Button's league. But if they really think there's a chance they must know something we don't, because even if you gave every able-bodied adult in this camp a weapon they still wouldn't have a chance against the Parliamentary Guard, let alone Hellebore's dragons. It looks quite hopeless to me, but they used to hunt dragons, you know. Goblins did, I mean — Button's people. Perhaps that means he's tough and hard-minded enough to pull it off." Cumber didn't sound very much like he believed it, though.

"The dragons seem to have caught everyone by surprise," said Theo. "I remember Daffodil shouting something about it wasn't fair, or that Hellebore had broken the rules…"

"There have always been dragons in Faerie," said Cumber. "But the big ones were killed off a long time ago in the Dragon Campaigns back in the days of the Tree Lords — the first generation of fairies. Everyone agreed the dragons had to go — they were just too dangerous, too big and too smart. Only a few of the smallest survived, mostly hiding in caves in the high mountains. Every now and then one would carry off few sheep or something, but basically they were scavengers living in remote areas and nobody even knew they were there except the wild goblins. But during the last Gigantine War it was clear to everyone that we were going to have to come up with something new to beat the giants, so Parliament decided to start a breeding program, but only after a lot of very bitter argument — see, the dragons had almost wiped us out early on, and a lot of folk weren't too pleased about bringing them back. All kinds of agreements were signed by all the houses, swearing that these dragons would be kept under control, that they could only be flown by an act of the full Parliament of Blooms, and they could never — never, never, never — be used against fairy-folk."

"So Hellebore broke that law."

"Of course, although he got Parliament to rubber-stamp it once the smoke had cleared. Because the winners make the rules, Theo." A depth of bitterness was in Cumber's words Theo hadn't heard since the night in the club named Christmas. "That's how it always works. They make the rules and they write the histories. So if things end the way they're probably going to, Hellebore and Thornapple and those other lizards will be the heroes and Button and Primrose will be the villains — you and me too, if they even remember us. Five hundred years from now there will probably be a public holiday to celebrate the anniversary of our executions."

"Thanks for that pleasant thought," said Theo. "Shit, I just thought of something. Five hundred years — but fairies don't die, do they? I mean, if he wins, Hellebore will probably still be around then, won't he? Celebrating."

"He'll be fairly old by then — nobody lives forever, we just endure a lot longer than mortals — but unless someone kills him, yes, he'll probably be sitting in Strawflower Square watching us being burned in effigy for the five hundredth time."

It was disconcerting that although Coathook was apparently sleeping deeply, he made no noise or movements at all — not a snore, not a fidget. "Answer me one more question," Theo said quietly. "It's purely hypothetical since I'm probably going to get killed tomorrow anyway. I'm a fairy too, or at least that's what you and the others tell me. Does that mean if I didn't do anything stupid, just kept my head down and my nose clean, I might live for a thousand years or so as well?"

Cumber frowned. "It's hard to say, because nobody knows all the effects of being raised in the mortal world. You're not entirely like other fairies — I saw some of the physical differences when we were testing you in Daffodil House. Your facial features and body shape have taken on a little mortal coarsening. Excuse the expression, Theo, but you must know what I mean."

"Yeah. I don't look like an anorexic male model like the rest of these Flower-folk."

"But you're not that different, either, so it's hard to tell. I'm trying to remember — you didn't have children, did you? That makes a big difference."

For a moment that terrible night flashed through Theo's thoughts — Cat in her blood-soaked bathrobe, the overworked emergency room intern saying in a weary, offhand way, "It's a miscarriage, of course. There shouldn't be any permanent harm to her ability to conceive, if that's any help at a time like this."

"No," he said. "No kids. But what does that have to do with anything?"

"Nobody knows for certain — by the time people began to want to test these things in a proper, rigorous way there weren't enough mortals crossing over to our side, or fairies to the mortal side, to provide the information necessary for a decent study. But the conventional wisdom is that a changeling — a fairy raised by mortals — will still retain most of the Faerie birthright, whether he or she knows it or not, until the changeling in turn becomes father or mother to a child in the mortal world. Then what remains of the birthright, which can be anything from fairy-nature to some kinds of fairy talents and innate knowledge, passes to that child diminishing a bit with each generation. At least that's what everyone thinks. There hasn't been a chance to test, as I said."

Theo sighed. "So there really is a chance I might live to be a thousand or so. A chance."

Cumber nodded. "I suppose so."

"Well, at least I'll have that to be miserable about when they're torturing me and killing me — you know, just to keep me distracted."

"Does being raised as a mortal make everyone strange?" asked Cumber.

"Do you have the expression here, 'You have to laugh to keep from crying?' Well, right now it's more like, 'You have to laugh to keep from throwing up in terror.' "

He slept only fitfully that night, for several reasons.

After falling almost immediately into one of the worst of the shared-mind dreams yet — one in which he felt himself helplessly drowning inside his own stolen self, swallowed up by a terrible cold blackness — he escaped into a succession of less frightening episodes, although he was never entirely free of the feeling that he was sharing his thoughts with something foreign, something other. The last dream was something about delivering flowers to his mother in the hospital and trying to tell her that it was really him, her boy Theo, and that he didn't care whether she was his real mother or not, he still loved her, but in the dream she was too far gone in her illness and couldn't understand him. All she could do was stare at the flowers on the bedside table as if they had her hypnotized.

It was a sad dream, and usually he didn't remember the sad ones, just the happy ones (making out with some woman he'd lusted after but would never touch in real life, winning the lottery) or the really dreadful ones. Lately there had been quite a few really dreadful ones. But the chances were that he would not have remembered this one, with his mother's lost face and the drooping flowers beside the hospital bed, if he had not woken up in the middle of it to find a hand across his mouth and another around his throat.

The thing! It's found me! His heart sped from sleep-slow to terrified in a second, as though someone had pushed the cardiac pedal to the floorboards. He tried to roll away from the clutching hands; the one on his throat came away but the grip on his mouth only tightened. He clawed at the arm and torso, expecting to find rotting flesh, but his attacker was distinctly whole… and distinctly feminine.

"Theo! Ssshhh! You'll wake everybody!"

"Poppy?" He was stunned. "What are you doing here? Why are you trying to strangle me?"

"I'm not, you idiot," she whispered. "I was trying to find your mouth to keep you from shouting and I slipped…" She suddenly let out a little gasp and fell away from him into a deeper shadow.

"Are you well, Theo Vilmos?" It was Coathook's voice. The goblin had come out of his bedroll across the tent as silently as a cat, and now seemed to have Poppy Thornapple in some kind of chokehold.

"I… I think he's going to kill me!" she wheezed. Theo could barely hear her.

"Don't, Coathook. She's a friend. Let her go."

"Are you certain?"

"Yes! Yes, let her go."

Suddenly Poppy came sprawling into his lap, knocking him back onto his rumpled blanket. The other three residents of the tent were beginning to stir now as well. He pushed her toward the tent flap. "Wait for me outside."

"Theo?" asked Cumber, muzzy with sleep. "What… ?"

"It's okay, really. Just someone with a message for me. Coathook was looking out for all of us but it's a false alarm." By the thin moonlight leaking in through the flap Theo could see the yellow eyes staring back at him. It was like being watched by the Devil himself, but he knew that if the intruder had been anyone other than Poppy he would have been helplessly grateful for the goblin's vigilance and excellent night vision. "Thanks," he said.

Coathook nodded, blinked, then slithered back across the tent and under his blanket once more. Theo took a moment to catch his breath — his hands were still shaking — and then followed Poppy out through the flap.

The Faerie-moon was almost full, a vast white onion sinking toward the horizon, so bright that even the pyrotechnic stars were glared into the background. Washed in its light, Button's bridge loomed above the flat emptiness at the far end of the camp like a phantom castle out of an old folktale making its once-in-a-century appearance on some misty Scottish heath.

Before Theo had even stood all the way upright she had her arms around him. She kissed his face, then pulled back, her dark eyes wide and serious. "Is it too terrible I've come? I was half-afraid I'd find you with some other woman."

He didn't think it was terrible at all — she felt wonderful against him. He kissed her for an answer, then suddenly stopped and leaned back. "But how did you find me?"

"I have a friend who works in the Parliamentary Bureau of Mirror Service. She's having an affair with her boss and she has an access to records that is simply scandalous. It wasn't that hard for her to trace back the call you had your friend make to me the other day."

"But you already knew I was in the camp."

"I didn't trace it back to the camp, I traced it back to your friend." She lifted the small wand she used as a phone. It glowed with the faintest silvery light. "See? I had it charmed to show me when it was getting close to the person who made the call. I was hoping that if you weren't in the same tent he'd at least know where you stayed — but there you were."

He was shocked and disturbed. He'd underestimated the technology of Faerie again. "But that's terrible! That means anyone can trace us… !"

"Why, have you been calling a lot of other girls? Because if you haven't, then you only have to worry about me and I'm obviously not going to turn you in." She gave him a look, half-suspicious, half-amused. "There aren't any other calls, are there?"

"No, no. That was the first time I tried that. But what if your friend in the Whatsit Bureau… ?"

"She won't think twice about it. I told her a man with an attractive voice got my shell by accident and I was curious what he looked like. She's so busy agonizing over what's going on with her and her boss she's probably forgotten already. Feel better?"

"Yeah, I guess so. I was just… see, I made Streedy do it. I'd feel terrible if something happened to him because of me."

Now she did look amused. "You and your obligations! You may be of fairy blood but it's certainly not from any of the high houses, not if you spend your time worrying about things like that. Even the relatively nice boys like Lander Foxglove would step over their own dying grandmothers to get into an interesting party."

"But you're not like that." Although, remembering how she had spoken about her own brother's murder, he couldn't be sure.

"I don't want to be," she said seriously. "Sometimes I think I'm not, then sometimes I think I can't change it, it's just the world I grew up in." She put her arm through his and pulled him down the path atop the levee, away from the camp. "People like my father and his friends — I'm not talking about the Hellebores, they're completely mad, I'm talking about the ones that everyone thinks of as normal Flower types — they don't waste their strength caring much for anyone except themselves. I used to think that was normal, but every now and then one of the servants or one of my more distant relatives would be… different. Do something simply because it was nice. Be kind to me just because I was a sad little girl, not because they wanted something from my father. One of my aunts actually stood up to him — told him he treated his children worse than he treated the servants, and he treated the servants like animals. That was almost the only time I'd ever seen him surprised."

"Wow. What happened?"

"He killed her." She gave an angry little laugh. "Oh, not in an obvious way. But he ruined her life. Destroyed her husband's business, spread poison about her all through our social circle. Got her children thrown out of their school. Eventually her husband left her and she went to the Well."

"The Well… ?"

"She killed herself. But really he murdered her, my father murdered her. If she'd said those things about him in private he wouldn't have cared — he would have laughed, probably, that she thought it worth mentioning as though it were something bad. But she said it in public, in front of the lower orders who are supposed to worship him, and that he couldn't allow, so he destroyed her. That's when I started hating him." She stopped suddenly. "I don't want to talk about this any more, Theo. I know you're going after your friend. I… I don't want to talk about my horrible family when I don't know how much time we have before… before…"

"Before I head off to get myself killed, too."

"Don't say things like that!" She threw her arms around him and squeezed hard, like a drowning swimmer and Theo suddenly understood how a rescuer could be turned into a victim. He wished he had spoken in a less petty, self-pitying way, but at the moment he felt caught between duty and common sense, neither of which were things he really wanted running his life in the first place — they certainly hadn't been big parts of the Theo Vilmos Master Plan before now.

Poppy still held him. "I couldn't stand it when you walked away the other night. I could just tell you were planning to do something heroic and stupid."

"I was? I mean, you could tell that?"

"Yes, you had this determined air that they always have in the mirror-plays — Lord Rose going off to fight the goblins, kissing his little daughters good-bye, or Memnon Alder on the eve of the Frost War."

Theo hadn't really thought of himself as determined, let alone heroic, but for this instant it was nice to think it might be so. Maybe all heroes are basically cowards like me, he thought, and it's doing whatever you have to do anyway that's important. I mean, if you aren't scared, if you're just completely oblivious to danger, how heroic is that? Still, he didn't quite feel ready to put himself in the camp of the determined and brave just yet — it went against too many years of self-image. He turned his attention to something much more immediate and much more pleasant.

When he had finished kissing her she took his hand and began to lead him down the levee once more, the moonlight so strong Theo and Poppy even cast shadows. "Where are we going?" he asked.

"I'll show you." She led him on until the camp was just a clot of darkness lit by a few fires huddled along the banks of the river. The big moon was disappearing into the horizon like a leaking balloon. Poppy rucked up her long skirt and sat cross-legged on the damp ground, then beckoned Theo to join her. The wind had picked up. He shivered a little and wished once again that he hadn't been forced to trade away his leather jacket to a troll, however sensible the bargain.

When he was seated she put her cool hands on either side of his face. She seemed to have retreated a little, her face set in that now-familiar Flower mask. "I want you to love me, Theo — but only if you mean it."

He shook his head. "I don't know enough… that is, I wouldn't want you to…"

"That's not what I mean, whatever you're going to say. I want you to love me with your body. Your heart — well, that will make its own choices. But I don't want you to be my lover because you feel sorry for me or because you think it will make up for something else you did wrong."

He took her hand. "I don't know how much of me there really is, Poppy, but what there is — well, right now, it's yours."

"Good." And now she let the mask slip a little. "Then come back and kiss me again and let's forget about all the horrible things for a while. Love me."

He got up on his knees to kiss her and found himself shivering again. "But… it's so cold. And not very private."

She laughed. "I brought a pavilion."

"A what?"

"Watch." She took something out of the pocket of her pants and held it out to him. It was a small sachet about the size of a tea bag. "A very useful charm. Will you think I'm terrible if I admit I bought it this afternoon, planning to come find you?" She closed it in her hand and broke it open with her fingers, then clambered to her feet, bent over, and began to sprinkle the shimmery dust in a wide circle around them. The air just above the line of powder on the ground seemed to waver; it might have been a trick of the dying moonlight, but Theo felt pretty sure it wasn't. The effect spread and traveled upward with surprising speed, coming together over their heads at a point some six or seven feet above the ground.

"You mean… no one can see us now?" He looked around. The walls distorted the light like thick glass, turning the stars wobbly, but they were by no means opaque. He also didn't feel much warmer. The whole experience was exciting but strange; he shivered again, not entirely from the cold.

"Nobody can see in — in fact, unless they're standing right next to it, they won't even see the pavilion at all." She reached out and clasped his hands. "You really are cold, aren't you? I'm sorry, Theo. The store where I got it only had these inexpensive ones. We'll have to warm it with our own body heat — but that shouldn't be too bad, should it?" She shrugged off her coat and pulled her sweater over her head then undid her blouse. She was wearing nothing underneath but a thin silver-white chain around her neck; her pale skin seemed to glow like the moon. He reached out his hand and touched her breast. "It's not warm in here yet, though, is it?" She laughed but she sounded nervous. "Look — goosebumps."

He pulled her to him then and by the time he had puzzled out the strange mechanics of the fastenings on her other clothes (you had to tap on them at least four times) he had forgotten about the temperature, about other eyes, about nearly everything except the black-haired woman he was kissing and the glossy, underwater stars gleaming above them, and he was fast forgetting about the stars as well.

At one point she pulled back from him and said, a little breathlessly, "I have some other charms as well."

"For what?" It was hard to use spoken language after long minutes of nearly perfect silent communication. A thought occurred to him. "Birth control? I mean, for not having babies?"

"Black iron, no!" she said and giggled. "We learn those charms with our first blood and I've already done mine for this moon. No, these are just… lovemaking charms. Little ones to make things, I don't know, more interesting. They were in this display at the apothecary." She looked away, suddenly shy. "I just thought you might…"

"I don't need anything but you." Whether because of heightened senses or the close space inside the charmed circle, the smells of her skin and hair were as powerful as any drug. "And I don't want anything but you. This is magic… pardon… science enough for me."

"I'm so glad you said that."

And then they stopped talking again. The Van Gogh stars glittered like snowflakes in the cold sky, but inside the pavilion the air had grown warm as deepest summer.

35 A SORT OF REUNION

Another dream of a lost parent had caught him up. He was surrounded by clouds again, a hospital corridor full of smoke, or perhaps it was Daffodil House — the ghostly shapes in the halls might have been ash-covered victims or only patients in white hospital gowns. He was looking for his father, shouting for him — but not for "Pete" (which Theo had called him in that awkward, twenty-something stage of trying to find some common ground) or even "Dad."

"Daddy! Daddy, where are you?"

He thought he saw him through the haze, turning the corner at the end of the hall, slump-shouldered, balding on top, wearing one of the Hawaiian shirts that he put on every Saturday morning as if to prove to himself that the weekend had really come. As a teenager Theo had been astonished to realize that to the old man a Hawaiian shirt was actually cool, a symbol of some kind of tiny rebellion against the gray suits, white shirts, and ugly ties.

"Daddy?" He realized, or at least the Theo in the dream realized, that he had never said good-bye, not properly. He had clutched his father's hand while he lay in the hospital bed after his stroke, but if Pete Vilmos had been aware of his son and his wife in those last hours he had given no sign.

Theo hurried down the darkening corridor. It seemed increasingly important he tell his father something of what he had learned and done in the years since the old man's death, prove to him that life was worth it, that the mind-numbing years of work Pete Vilmos had endured to put food on the table and toys under the Christmas tree meant something, but he couldn't think of what to say. There's nothing to tell, is there? I'm nobody, just like he was. Still, he was desperate to catch up with that shuffling figure.

"Daddy?"

A voice came back to him through the smoke, thinned by distance. "Theo? Theo, where are you?"

He struggled toward the sound but something had caught him, hands were pulling at him — the other patients must be trying to hold him back… unless they were victims, burned sufferers trying to climb past him and down the stairs to safety. Had the dragon come back? He fought without strength. He could still hear his father's voice but it seemed to be receding.

"Theo, wake up!" It was another voice — a woman's voice. "Theo, someone's looking for you."

He came up shuddering, tangled in his own discarded clothes. Poppy had her arms around him. "There's someone out there," she said.

He shook his head, clumsily trying to assemble the details into a coherent whole and having little luck. Then the voice came again and for an instant he thought it really was his father or his father's unsettled spirit; his heart lurched and his skin tingled.

"Theo? Are you out here?"

"Oh my God — it's Cumber. I completely forgot. I'm supposed to…" He sat up and began to drag on his pants. "Where is he? Why can I hear him so clearly?"

"Because he's probably only a few yards away." She was naked and seemed a little shy. It was very distracting to be here with this lovely unclothed near-stranger while someone was searching for him. The filtered light of the stars played unevenly across her milky skin as she sat up.

"Then why doesn't he… ?" He remembered. "The charm."

"Just step outside, then he'll see you." She tried to smile.

Still hopping as he pulled up his pants, he passed through the wall of the pavilion without feeling anything until he was suddenly engulfed in the chill of night. Cumber was a few dozen paces down the levee, his back turned until Theo called him.

"By the Grove, you startled me!" the ferisher said. "Where have you been? I was terrified — I thought that dead thing had come and taken you! We have only a little more than an hour until dawn." He squinted. "What are you doing wandering around out here half-naked?"

"I'll explain later. I'm sorry I forgot. I'll meet you back at the tent in a few minutes."

Cumber Sedge shook his head. "Not there. Down by the river at this end of the camp. You'll see why when you get there. You really had me worried — I've been looking for you all over. Are you sure you're all right?"

"Fine. Sorry for the trouble. Go ahead now and I'll catch up with you."

The ferisher gave him a strange look. "Are you sure everything is all right?"

"Really. Go on."

Cumber nodded slowly, then turned and walked back up the levee.

Even though he was only a yard from it, it took Theo a few moments to locate the pavilion again: with the moon down, the slight blurring of the air that marked its presence was hard to distinguish from the mists rising off the river. Crossing the barrier was much different this time, moving from the cold into the warm and back into the scents of their lovemaking.

"You have to go." She had put her blouse back on but stopped there. He wanted to lie down beside her and kiss her smooth leg, the taut skin of her side just above her hip, but knew that if he did he would never be able to make himself get up again.

"I do," he said, "I really do. Button seemed to think it was very important we leave before dawn."

"Who's Button?"

He hesitated. He trusted her now, of course he did, but he did not want to add to her danger, either. What had Button said? "We cannot tell what we do not know."

"He's a friend of mine from the camp. A goblin."

"I want to make you stay," she said. "Make you want to stay, that is,"— again, the sad smile — "but I know I shouldn't. If you weren't the kind of person who was going to help his friend, you wouldn't be the person I'm… that I feel this way about."

Is this how it works? he wondered. The magnitude of what was before him came rushing back, dreams and even Poppy's presence no longer enough to distract him. He felt weak and ill. Is this how you get less shallow? You do the right thing, no matter how it feels and how much you wish you could run away, then everyone thinks you're a grand guy? Everybody cries at your funeral? But there was something heartening in it too, even if it was a lesson he was learning too late to be of much use — a path toward reinvention. She thinks that's who I am, so that's who I am to her. "I don't want to leave you," was all he could think of to say. "But I have to."

"I know." She had put her mask of control back on, but it was not entirely effective and she could not meet his eye. "I… I want you to have something. Well, two things."

"One of your gloves to wear on my lance when I ride into battle?"

She did look up then, puzzled. "Why would you be taking a lance?"

"I'm not, it's just… what the knights of my world used to do with gifts from their lady-loves."

"Well, you'd better take more care of these than putting them on some lance." She handed him something about the size and shape of a long lipstick tube. "Use this and call me if you need me. I mean it, Theo. If you need anything, I'll get it for you. If you need me, I'll be there — no matter what."

He looked at the small, silvery wand. "I may not get a chance to make any calls for a little while. But thanks. After… after whatever happens, it will be nice to be able to reach you without having to give Streedy a headache."

She smiled but her eyes were wet. "You'd better call me, that's all I'll say. And I want you to have this, too." She tugged a thin silver chain and pendant out of the neck of her blouse, the one thing she had kept on all during the night. Now she took it off and held it out to him. What he had thought might be a small coin he now saw was a moon, one crescent of it made of something like polished opal. "It's a chip from my mother's family moundstone. She gave this to me."

"What does it do?"

"Do? It doesn't do anything. It's something she gave me — one of the only things she ever gave me. It's really important to me, Theo, and I'm giving it to you to make sure you come back to me."

He had expected some fairy-charm, some magical talisman to protect against danger, and for a moment he was almost disappointed — he suspected he was going to need all the help he could get. Then he realized the significance of what she was giving to him and he felt something expand inside his chest, a quiet rapture that was bigger and more powerful than even the heights of their lovemaking. "Thank you," he managed to say. He carefully lifted the necklace over his head, let the moon fall onto his chest. "Thank you. I'll do my best to come back to you."

She laughed, but it was raw with pain and anger. "This is so wretched. I knew there was a reason I didn't want to fall in love any more, but I never thought…" She struggled for composure. "Kiss me and go, Theo. Hurry."

"Will you be able to get back all right… ?"

"Black iron, will you just kiss me and get out of here? My heart is breaking."

"Mine too," he said, and was surprised and frightened to realize it was true.

Cumber was waiting for him on the banks of the dark river, but he was not alone.

"Coathook?" Theo had to look twice to make sure — he was still not entirely adept at telling one goblin from another. "What are you doing here?"

"Button says we shouldn't go through the City to get to… to the place we're going," Cumber told Theo. "Even just along the edges. He says it's better to go by water."

"That doesn't explain why you're here," Theo said to Coathook.

"Because I know how to paddle a boat without making as much noise as a drowning troll." The goblin's slot-eyes gleamed with reflected starlight. "You don't."

"Oh. Well… thanks."

Coathook pointed to the open boat, which was little more than a canoe. "Come."

"Where's Streedy?" Theo asked as they pushed off and into the sluggish current. "I was kind of hoping he could come with us, in case there were some, I don't know, alarms or magic fences…"

"Button says he needs him today," Cumber said. "And that he doesn't think getting in will be our biggest problem, anyway."

Theo let that sink in as they made their way silently up the Moonflood to the point where it widened as they met the newer channel of the river. Theo and Cumber ate a breakfast of bread and sweet cheese the ferisher had brought while Coathook guided the boat across the breadth of the flow and up close to the bank on the far side. Theo could see houses on slender stilts looming above them, some with lights burning in the windows. Below them, like barnacles on the pilings of a dock, smaller and far humbler dwellings clustered on the river shore.

"Who lives there?" Theo asked in a whisper.

"Niskies," said Cumber. Coathook silenced them both with a motion of his clawed hand.

A few larger boats were anchored in the coves and in marinas, shiny, many-oared things that looked more like ancient triremes or even upside-down centipedes than like modern ships, but no other traffic was moving on this section of the river. Theo wondered if that was normal, or if it was something to do with the Flower War curfew. He couldn't help wishing there were a few other vessels plying the channel down toward Ys, if only to make their own boat less conspicuous. Although Coathook kept to the edge of the river and, as he had promised, plied his paddle as quietly as a knife cutting warm butter, Theo could not help feeling terribly exposed.

Finally, as they turned a bend in the Moonflood and saw the whole expanse of Ys stretching before them, a black immensity barely touched even by Faerie's exuberant starlight, Coathook took his paddle out of the water. "After this, no more talking," he said, so quietly it barely carried. "But Button says to tell you, today might be a good day to go on to Hellebore House."

"What?" Theo had trouble keeping his voice low. "What does that mean?"

Coathook shrugged. "No more talking now. We are close."

The word "close," Theo decided, must have a very odd meaning to goblins, since they paddled on for at least another quarter of an hour. The section of riverbank they could see through the hanging mists was studded with broken-down industrial buildings, once-exuberant Faerie versions of old warehouses and canneries. A few of the structures were apparently still occupied — signs glowed sputteringly here and there like dying fireflies, "End of the Rainbow Storage" or "Grotto-4-U"— but the rest seemed long-disused, and with the first lightening of the sky Theo could make out painted advertisements, sometimes with one sign flaking off to reveal an earlier message. They were close enough to the bank that he could even read some of them. "King Kilpie Ocean Goodes," proclaimed one, illustrated by a dim, rather frightening picture of a fishy humanoid with a crown and a basket full of fish and shellfish: "Lawfull Purveyor by Their Majesties' Charter of the Fruites of Ys."

Something slapped at the water and Theo looked over, startled that Coathook should suddenly lose his touch, but the goblin was looking back at him as though the noise had been Theo's doing. Something in the dark water beside the boat caught Theo's eye: a little sprinkling of pale blue-green lights was moving just below the surface. For a moment he thought it was a parade of glowing fish, but the movement was different than any shoal of fish he had seen on a television nature show. He found himself watching in fascination as the ordered glimmer moved closer to the surface just below him, but it was another long moment before he realized that what he was looking at was a human shape, pacing them in the water with effortless movements. It rolled toward him, the face only inches beneath the surface, glowing like the dial of a watch. The eyes met his — a woman's eyes, he could see now, but huge compared to the rest of the narrow face. Even with all its strangeness, it was a very lovely face. The staring eyes were black, so very black… blacker even than the water, and they seemed to be getting larger and larger as he leaned toward them. Larger… and larger…

Instead of going over into the inviting darkness he was yanked backward into the boat so abruptly that the air whooshed out of his lungs and he bumped his head on the boat's other rail as he fell. The whole craft swayed alarmingly as he struggled onto the bench again. The swift pressure of Coathook's talons still hurt his arm even after the goblin had let go. Cumber had not moved, but was watching with startled eyes. Theo looked at his companions, then back at the glimmering shape beneath the surface. It had slowed its pace and they were beginning to pull away. The lean, predatory features no longer looked quite so human. He thought he could feel a certain disappointment emanate from it that lingered in his mind like a faint odor even after the swimming shape vanished into the depths.

Theo was trembling and breathing hard, as though he had actually been pulled into the water and had been forced to struggle for his life. The nymph-band around his wrist seemed hot and tight, chafing his skin. He nodded at Coathook to show that he was grateful, that he understood. He thought he understood, anyway. He suspected that the thing in the water had been much more interested in him than his two companions.

There's such a fine line here, he thought, between a useful reminder and getting yourself killed. Or worse.

Coathook's paddling was so smooth and silent that Theo did not realize for some moments that the goblin had stopped and that the boat was stopping too. They were in among the pilings of a dock, but although what he could see of the dock was made of wood, the posts were cylinders of ancient stone that loomed through the river-mist like a half-submerged Stonehenge. A soaked and deteriorating wooden ladder tied to the nearest one led up through a hatch toward the purpling sky. The goblin drew his hand across his mouth again, reminding them to be silent, then pointed to the ladder. As Theo got unsteadily to his feet and clambered up, moving far enough for Cumber to climb out behind him, Coathook made another sign, this one unrecognizable, and then turned the little boat around; within a few heartbeats he had disappeared into the roil of fog. Theo looked down at Cumber with wide eyes. The ferisher seemed almost as alarmed as Theo was, but only shrugged. Perhaps he had known Coathook was not going to wait for them, but it was strange that the goblin had not even mentioned coming back to pick them up. Theo found it hard not to feel a bit betrayed.

What do you want? he chided himself. You're not the center of his universe or Button's, either. You wanted to go and get yourself killed trying to help a friend. Well, they helped you get here. Now you're on your own.

He climbed the ladder, pausing to gather his courage before thrusting his head through the open hatch. The catwalk of weathered timbers was empty and the warehouse wall featureless, a long stretch of salt-stained boards with only the smallest remnant of its original coat of white paint. He wanted to ask Cumber how this broken-down barn could be the headquarters of one of the most dangerous creatures in Faerie, but if the creaking ladder hadn't already alerted the occupants that someone was out here, he didn't want to do its job for it.

The ferisher came up behind him and crouched. Together they listened to the slap of waves on the pilings below, the cries of waterbirds, and, briefly, a distant voice rising above the other noises in a snatch of quaveringly alien song. Theo took a breath and stood, then followed the catwalk around toward the side of the building away from the water. They were at the end of a long stone pier that pushed out at least a hundred yards into the Moonflood just a short distance from where it joined Ys. A line of ramshackle buildings in different shapes and sizes covered the pier all the way to the end, as though some weird circus train had ground to a shuddering, bumping halt a moment before it would have rolled off into the water. But if the building they were to enter was the train's engine, it did not look the part: it was a featureless rectangle with no visible windows. In the pre-dawn light its high blank sides gave it the look of some ancient stone slab, the foundations of an antediluvian temple where screaming victims had once been sacrificed.

Steady, Theo told himself. Don't make it worse than it is. But the windowless walls disturbed him. Who lived like that? Who would build a long low box like this at the end of a pier and leave no openings to the ocean breeze, no view of the estuary and the sea? He suddenly saw the building as something different, not a temple, not an edifice at all, but the shell of some immense, angular thing.

Instead of being in character with the rest of the structure, the door set in the side of the building was a small and quite ordinary thing of wind-scoured wood with a single tarnished bronze handle, as though someone had built a storage closet into the base of the Sphinx. Theo looked at Cumber, who seemed one loud noise away from running for his life — not that Theo blamed him: In fact, I'd be right behind him. He reached out his trembling hand toward the latch. This is crazy, he thought. It's a warehouse. Even if it's full of monsters or guys with guns or… or whatever, on the outside it's just a warehouse and I'm not psychic. Why should I feel like I'm about to walk through the Gates of Hades?

Before he could touch it, the door silently swung open. Theo gasped and jumped back, half-expecting something slimy and otherworldly to stretch a tentacle out of the darkness and yank him in, but no such appendage appeared. The door remained open. The darkness beyond remained impenetrable.

Whoever, whatever… they must know we're here. No use trying to sneak up on them. Still, he didn't feel like shouting "Hello!" either. "Do we have a light?" he whispered.

Cumber, bug-eyed and unable to look away from that dark opening, shook his head several times before he realized what Theo had asked and turned the headshake into a nod. He fumbled out a small witchlight sphere like the one he had produced in the underground garage. He ran his thumb across it and passed it to Theo as it bloomed into a swampy glow.

As Theo stepped through the door the first thing he noticed was that the glow didn't seem to go very far — that it showed him his own legs and arms and a suggestion of a flat vertical surface beside him that might be a wall, but did not illuminate the greater darkness. All he could see for certain was that the dark, carpeted floor seemed to go on for some distance. He was also aware — he couldn't have missed it — of a powerful unpleasant smell. The sour-sweet odor was frighteningly similar to the thing that had found him three different times in three different rotting bodies, but after a moment he realized this smell was more complicated, a combination of scents that had putrefaction in it, but also strange sweet spices and the vigorous essence of growing things, the smell of a fistful of wet mud and spring grass bumping improbably against the reek of burning sulfur, of whiskey and cinnamon and excrement and other far less recognizable things all jumbled together until it made his eyes water.

Strange as it was, he couldn't really waste time considering it, not with his heart thumping like some insanely overhyped click-track as he edged forward through the near-darkness, brandishing what he was beginning to think was a faulty witchlight. He reached out toward the spot where it looked like there might be a wall and was relieved to find something cool, hard, and ever so slightly damp. He slid his foot forward and found that the solid floor continued. He bent, holding the globe at the height of his shoetops, and suddenly the hallway began to grow brighter.

"Theo… ?"

"Ssshh!"

It happened quickly but smoothly and had nothing whatsoever to do with the witchlight in his hand. Within a few moments he could see that they were standing at one end of a long hallway with matte-black walls on both sides and a carpet of the same shade beneath their feet. At the far end, basking in a little directionless glow of its own, a door with a golden nameplate waited.

I wonder whose name is on that? But it was only a tiny flick of curiosity in the midst of dread, like a bird flying just ahead of a storm. He looked at Cumber. Cumber looked back. It was pretty clear to Theo that if either one of them suggested turning around instead of walking down that long, black hallway toward the door, the other would agree.

Applecore, he reminded himself. Applecore with that corkscrew. Fighting with that thing to help someone she didn't even know.

Despite the carpet which all but silenced their footfalls, by the time they reached the door Theo felt like they were walking across bubble-wrap in stone shoes, each step excruciatingly loud. The weird odors were making him light-headed, but instead of reducing his inhibitions it made him feel like the worst sort of stoned, paranoid teenager stuck at a stoplight next to a cop car.

The nameplate had the word "Enter" scratched on it in a crude, almost childish hand. As he watched, the word ran off the golden rectangle like water; a moment later the word "Push" appeared in its place.

Is that somebody's little joke? Anger gave back a little of his bravery, although it was stretched thinly over a great deal of raw terror. He reached out and shoved the door open, then stepped through.

The room beyond was completely unexpected after the featureless hallway. Jumbled mountains of objects stretched yards above his head on all sides, thousands of unfathomable things scattered seemingly at random, as if someone had crashed an old-fashioned pharmacy into a particularly disturbing toy shop at high speed, then liberally sprinkled the wreckage with the contents of the Library of Alexandria. Pinkish-purple dawn light streamed down from oblong windows high above, illuminating the piles so that it all looked a bit like a stage set or a Disneyland ride.

Dazzled and overwhelmed, Theo did not notice the massive figure in the shadows behind him until it reached an arm around his chest and immobilized him, then pinioned his head with its other huge hand. The arm across his torso was so tight that after he let out his breath in a panicked gust he could get no air back in again. He was lifted up until he dangled helplessly above the floor, struggling unsuccessfully to breathe. Sparks danced before his eyes. Everything turned red, then black.

Even though someone was speaking to him, he was not at first aware that he was awake, or where he was, or even precisely who he was. The voice itself was a strange thing, insubstantial as wind stirring a pile of leaves, but oddly loud, as though the person speaking might be small enough to sit inside his ear.

"… Your pardon," the breathy voice was saying. "They are not very subtle, I'm afraid. You are awake, aren't you?"

Memory came back, and with it a quickening of his heart, which did not help his pounding head any.

Not good. Something not good happening.

Theo was lying on the floor. Cumber lay beside him, arms at his sides like a toy put neatly back in its box, his face covered by a semi-transparent membrane so unexpected and baffling that for a wretched second Theo thought the ferisher had been skinned.

"Don't worry, he's not dead," the invisible presence explained. "It's a caul. He's sleeping. I wanted to speak to you alone."

Theo got up into a crouch, looking from side to side trying to discover the source of the voice.

"I'm in the room with you," his captor told him. "But you really don't want to see me. You'll be happier where you are."

Theo pretended to look for the Remover, if that was indeed who the speaker was, but meanwhile he was getting his feet under him, unobtrusively balancing himself to move quickly. Half his mind was screaming at him just to run for the door and keep running, Cumber Sedge and even Applecore be damned, but he was also wondering how far and how fast he could drag the unconscious ferisher and what it was that had manhandled them both so easily in the first place.

He turned and grabbed at Cumber, but no sooner did his fingers touch his companion's clothes than a pair of pale shapes almost as big as ogres but much stiffer in their movements stepped out of the shadows near the doorway. Theo froze as the things walked slowly toward him and stopped a few yards away. They looked like living statues, crude ones at that, their features barely defined in the chalky white flesh, the eyes black dots that he recognized a startled moment later were nothing more than holes punched into the heavy, dead faces.

"Please," the voice said, "do not challenge them. They are not very subtle, the mandragora, and I would prefer not to have to wait for you to regain consciousness again."

"Mandragora… ?" The twinned faces stared at him, unmoving, impassive. They might have just arrived from their perches atop the cliffs of Easter Island.

"Children of the mandrake. Each slave has been carved from one of the great roots. Very time-consuming, actually, and finding the roots is a long and boring and dangerous process, but once you've got them they're very useful. Incredibly strong and about as much sensitivity to pain as a steam locomotive. But, as I said, not extremely good with more complicated tasks like grappling someone without crushing them to death. I truly did not wish them to be so rough with you."

"I've seen one of these before." Theo slowly disentangled his hand from Cumber's coat. Keep the Remover talking — that seemed the best bet right now. Maybe it wasn't as bad as it seemed. Maybe he treated all his guests this way. "There was one in Daffodil House. Just before…"

"Yes." The Remover actually sounded a little regretful. "A waste of a great root, and really for no purpose except to allow Hellebore to gloat."

"You… you know about that?" He suddenly realized that not only was he helpless, this person, whoever he was, might be more of an ally of the Hellebore faction than Button or Primrose had known. He might already have contacted them. "Did you do it? Did you help them do that?"

The Remover did not sound overly disturbed. "The dragons, you mean? No, no — Nidrus Hellebore is quite capable of thinking up something like that on his own. Oh, yes, he certainly is." His voice had an odd note in it. Theo looked around the room again and saw that the shadows seemed darker in the room's north corner. He even thought he saw a little movement. The Remover must be sitting there watching him from the depths of that insane clutter, like a dragon crouched on its hoard.

"What are you going to do with me?"

To his surprise the Remover laughed, not an arch-villain's chortle but an honest wheeze of near-breathless amusement. "You know, I can't really say, at least not in the short term. In the long term… well, I'll explain. But at the moment, I'm just trying to appreciate the irony."

"Irony?" It seemed he was going to be allowed to survive for at least another few minutes. Theo began surreptitiously to examine his surroundings. Now that his eyes were adjusting to the dim light, he was even more certain that he had discerned the Remover's position: far back in the corner, half-hidden by a ring of draped statuary, was something that looked a bit like a high-backed chair occupied by a very complicated shadow. Theo took a step toward it.

"Don't!" the voice said. "I told you — you will not like what you see."

"I've seen all kinds of shit since I've been here. How much worse can it be?"

"You'd be surprised," the voice told him. "Besides, it is not entirely your feelings I am concerned with. I am… ashamed of what I have become."

Theo retreated a few steps. What little he could see of the thing in the chair was certainly unsettling — a suggestion of stick-like limbs, but also of membranous folds and glistening wetness. "Okay. You said… irony."

"Yes. It is ironic that I expended so much effort to bring you to me, and failed so completely, and yet here you are in my place of business. Voluntarily." Again came the whispering laugh.

"What do you mean?"

"The irrha that I sent to capture you — that one that is still no doubt hunting you. Do you have any idea what sort of energy it costs to summon such a thing out of the old, dead places? And what mostly forgotten skills are necessary to keep it in the breathing world for such a long time?"

"You sent that thing after me?" His panic, which had eased for a moment, came rushing back like a fever chill. "Then… then you are working for Hellebore." So all this had been for nothing. Not only hadn't he found a way to free Applecore, he had saved the bad guys the trouble of waiting until he reached Hellebore House. "God, I really am an idiot."

"Perhaps. But it's a bit more complicated than that. I had hoped for just this chance, the chance to have you to myself. The irrha is a creature of instincts, but it is compelled by the summoning. In this case, it's compelled to do only one thing — to seize you and bring you here, to this place."

"So you can turn me over to Hellebore, get the credit, earn a tidy little commission." Theo looked over to where Cumber lay on the floor, caul-faced, his chest moving shallowly. "You bastard. I should make you kill me — or make your big old root monsters kill me. Better than letting Hellebore and Thornapple get their hands on me." A thought wiggled up through the anger and fear. "But I'll make a bargain with you. Let him go." He pointed to Cumber. "They don't care about him. Let him go and I'll let them take me quietly."

"Interesting." The tone was flat. "You would do that for a friend? What they plan for you is terrible, you know. And not just for you."

Theo suddenly recalled Lord Hollyhock's speculations on the afternoon that Daffodil House burned. "You're talking about Old Night, aren't you? What they're planning to do to the rest of the mortal world. Some kind of black magic tidal wave…" And even as he said it Theo realized that he could not afford to sacrifice himself for Cumber Sedge, for Applecore, for anyone. He had no idea what he was supposed to know but he could not take the risk. He turned abruptly and bolted for the door.

It was a near-miss, or seemed to be. Even as his fingers brushed the latch a huge, doughy hand curled in the back of his shirt, which tore at the seams but held long enough for the thing to enfold him in its grip. He kicked and fought, trying to reach the mandragorum's face with his free hand, to scratch at its eyes and enrage it. He knew it might be his last moment, that he was choosing suicide over being made a tool of the Hellebore faction, but although he sunk his nails deep into the thing's sockets there was nothing there to injure; the damp, fibrous substance just scraped away and spattered down his wrist. The thing pulled him in, wrapped him in its massive arms, held him fast.

Theo's eyes were blurred with tears of rage and desperation. "Fuck you!" he screamed at the watcher in the shadows. "If you won't kill me, I'll make them do it. I won't give them what they want."

"You would not keep that promise very long once they began to work on you," said the dry voice. "But you misunderstand me. The irrha was summoned to bring you to me first, not so I could earn Hellebore's commission, but so I can have my own conversation with you. Nidrus Hellebore is not the only one who has waited a long time to gain his heart's desire. You see, I too need your help."

"Help you! You must be joking. I'll die first. You might as well start with the thumbscrews." But it was false, hollow. He knew that even the strongest, most iron-willed people could succumb to torture, and he wasn't one of those. His only hope was to keep this Remover-thing talking and pray for a better chance to escape. He remembered Poppy's phone, and for a moment wondered if he could pretend to be more compliant, then find a chance to signal her with it somehow. But what could she do? Drive here with her school chum? He had already failed his other two closest friends, Cumber and Applecore; he could not drag Poppy into this as well. "So you're double-crossing Hellebore," he said. "So you've found some other client who'll pay more for whatever it is I'm supposed to know."

"I am truly sorry that it has come to this, Theo. I already have enough on my conscience with the suffering I have brought to you and yours, but my need is very great."

"Conscience? Fairies don't have goddamned consciences. All of you people, you're the most self-centered creatures I've ever heard of. Even Hitler wouldn't do what Hellebore wants to do, destroy an entire world just to keep himself in power."

"I rather suspect he would have if he'd had the chance," the Remover said. "But in any case, your accusation isn't entirely fair. You see, I'm not a fairy. Or at least not really."

"So what are you? A monster, obviously."

"Whether I am a monster is open to debate. But I am even less of this world than you are."

Theo's terror had turned into a thick, queasy heaviness. "I don't care. I don't give a damn about your problems or your riddles."

"I had hoped this would go better," the voice in the shadows said after a long pause. "Perhaps I have done a poor job of presenting things. When I anticipated this day, I felt sure we could find some way to speak to each other, since we have so much in common."

"So much in common! Are you joking? You're… you're a thing! A murderer, a mercenary kidnapper! You're a traitor even to the bastards who hired you!"

"All those things are probably true, Theo. But I am also the closest thing you have to family and I had hoped we would be able to speak to each other in a civil way."

"What? What are you talking about?"

The Remover cleared his throat with a noise like newspapers blowing in an alleyway. "I am… I used to be… Eamonn Dowd."

36 CHANGELINGS

"That's a lie! You're dead!" Theo realized what he had just said a moment later. "I mean, Eamonn Dowd is dead."

"In a way, yes. In a way, no." The thing in the shadows shifted itself with a noise halfway between a rustle and a squelch. "Believe me, Theo, this is not the way I imagined it. I had hoped our first conversation could be a bit more… familial. See here, if I tell the mandragorum to let you go, will you promise not to try to escape until you hear what I have to say? It won't do you any good, anyway — you've seen how fast and strong they are."

Theo wondered why the thing would make such a claim. It didn't seem possible — life in Fairyland was strange, but surely not that strange — but it couldn't hurt to play for time. "All right. Tell it to quit breaking my ribs. I'll stay put." The root slave, responding to some silent command, set him down and then moved quietly back toward the wall to stand next to its twin. "Okay, look, whoever you are, you can't be Eamonn Dowd. For one thing, everyone here says the Remover is very old — ancient. That he's been around longer than anyone can remember."

"And so he has — or at least he had been, before I took his place. In fact, I've often wondered if it was possible that the Remover I ousted had once replaced an earlier version. Perhaps the role of Remover is more title than name, and each one who holds that title eventually has it taken away from him by a younger contender… as it were." The sad, dry chuckle issued from nowhere and everywhere. "If so, it's a dubious prize, believe me."

"Go ahead, say what you need to say. But I'll only listen if you promise to let my friend go."

"The ferisher? I have no interest in him — I certainly don't want to harm him. But it's in my interests to keep you calm and keep you here, so for now he will remain sleeping peacefully on the floor."

"Why don't you show yourself? I don't like talking to the air."

"Do not presume too much, Theo — you're not in a position to dictate to me, even if I have a certain family-feeling toward you. As I said, I am ashamed of how I look, so keep your distance. I can put on a slightly less disturbing form when I go out into the city — nothing pleasant, but with a long coat and hat on I do not attract too much attention if I keep to shadows and back entrances. However, putting on that semblance takes a great deal of energy, a great deal, and I am very tired today. It's been a busy week." The thing rustled again. "I suppose I can't blame you for doubting me."

"If you want me to believe you, then prove it. Tell me something only Eamonn Dowd would know."

"Now there's an old chestnut — right out of some radio play, it sounds like. What might such a private something be, Theo? It is not as if I shared your childhood, came to visit you like an ordinary great-uncle, brought you sweets and comic books and exchanged little secrets that we could recall together now. Shall I tell you something written in the notebook? It would prove very little, since I know others beside you have had it — including, if I am correct, your ferisher friend lying there." The Remover seemed to consider. "What else would prove it to you? Shall I list the presidents, Washington to Nixon? That's all I know — I'm a bit blank on American history after the early 1970s, which is understandable when you remember where I've been. Or should we stick with the personal? Do you want me to tell you what was in the letter I sent to your mother, or at least to the woman you thought was your mother? You are eventually going to hear something of why I apologized to her, whether you wish to or not…"

He did not want it to be true. "But you… but Eamonn Dowd died! I read his obituary!"

"You read an obituary written after Eamonn Dowd's body was discovered. Yes, that particular physical envelope is definitely dead now, dust or near-dust. Do you think if I still had it available to me, however old and infirm, I would choose to live like this? Hiding in the shadows, solitary as a spider, so terrifying that even the children of trolls and goblins run from me, shrieking?" For the first time Theo could hear pain in the voice, real and powerful.

But maybe he's just a good actor. They're tricky, these fairies. Who knows what one of them might do to weasel answers out of me, if what I know is really so damn important? "Just keep talking."

"I presume you read the notebook so I won't bother to reiterate the early part of my story. I came here to New Erewhon and grew attached to the place. I made a sort of life for myself. All well and good, and no different than the story of many other mortals who found their way to Faerie and then never wanted to leave again. I even fell in love.

"Ah. I see that you know something about that. You have heard the gossip, perhaps? Or the propaganda of her family, the lies of the Primrose clan? Because that is who I fell in love with — Erephine Primrose, youngest daughter of that great house."

"They… they say you kidnapped her." Whether the story was true or not seemed to make little difference just now: Theo needed his invisible captor to go on talking until he figured out how to free himself. Even if this thing was somehow what was left of his great-uncle, he had all but admitted he was working for Hellebore. Still, Theo's earlier certainty that the Remover was lying about his true identity was definitely weakening.

"They say that, do they, that I kidnapped her? Well, they're right — up to a point. But I am not ready to tell that part of the story yet. Trust me, Theo, if you are patient the whole sordid, wretched mess will come out."

"Go on." He stole a glance at Cumber. The film over his face obscured his features but his chest was still moving regularly. Would he never wake up as long as that caul thing was on him? What if you had to perform some fairy magic to get it off? It would be hard enough to escape the two swift and powerful root slaves on his own, let alone while carrying the dead weight of Cumber Sedge.

"I met her at one of Tertius Stock's house-parties. She thought I was an amusing freak, at first, but I waited her out as patiently as one of her own kind, because she was… she was…" He made a kind of strangled noise, anger or grief. "No, there is no use telling you what I felt for Erephine or trying to describe our time together. If you have been in love that way, you know. If you haven't, no words will make it sound like anything but craziness. When her family browbeat Parliament into doing what they wanted — the Primroses were one of the Seven Families, you know, the lords of New Erewhon — and my banishment was proclaimed, my life was effectively over. They would have done me a kindness simply to kill me. As it turns out, they would have done themselves a kindness as well." A sudden icy edge in the Remover's voice brought up goose pimples on Theo's skin. "Instead I was cast out of the Garden of Eden and back into the world of mortals, alone, miserable… no, more than miserable. Bereft. Insane with grief."

"See? You can't be Eamonn Dowd because you've got the details wrong. Dowd never left this world — Primrose told me that his sister was kidnapped after Dowd's banishment was supposed to have gone down. So he dodged it somehow. If there's one thing everyone knows for certain, it's that, what's it called, Clover Effect. No one can come here, leave, and then come back again, so if you say you did, you're not him. Quid pro quo."

The dry laugh gusted through the room again, but there wasn't much mirth in it. "What you want to say is 'Q.E.D.' — Quod Erat Demonstrandum, 'to be demonstrated' — not quid pro quo, which basically means 'tit for tat'."

Theo was far too frightened and angry to be embarrassed. "So sue me. You know what I mean. You say you went to the mortal world but Eamonn Dowd couldn't have done that."

"Theo, Theo." He could almost imagine the thing in the dark corner shaking its head, although he saw no motion in the shadows to indicate it. "Don't wave the Clover Effect at me of all people. What you don't know about the way Faerie works — in fact, what most of the fairies themselves don't know about it — is staggering to contemplate. So why don't you shut your mouth for a while and listen?

"I was sentenced to banishment. I was going to be forcefully removed from New Erewhon. There were three days of legal formality before the banishment took effect — these Flower fairies are as bad as the British or even the Russian apparatchiks when it comes to meaningless paper-stamping and standing in line for no good reason. Erephine had been taken away from me and hauled back to her family's country house, which was more or less a fortress. I knew that I could not reach her there without being killed, and yet I honestly thought about it, considered whether dying on her lawn might not be a better choice than simply letting her family and their tame members in Parliament boot me out. I was not a well man, Theo. I loved her — I would have sold my immortal soul without a moment's thought to be with her…"

"Oh my God." Theo's skin was tingling, and something tightened inside his gut until he felt quite ill. "Oh my God, you really are him. You really are Eamonn Dowd."

"I knew that already," the Remover said. "Why do you suddenly believe me?"

"On top of all the other things, it was the way you just said you'd have sold your soul. The way a person would, an ordinary human person, even if they didn't believe they had one. The human-type fairies don't think about souls, any of that stuff. It's not just that they don't believe in them, they don't even seem to have considered it. The few times I've asked about it, it was like I'd asked them if they thought they had tentacles — something anyone could see they didn't have."

"Actually, some of the fairy-folk do have tentacles. You should see some of the deep-sea nixies. Even if you start out looking more or less like a human here, this is a Lamarckian world and a couple of thousand years of intense pressure will do funny things to you."

"Okay, okay, you win — you really are my great-uncle. I don't need to hear the whole story, I need to help my friend Applecore — and this friend here." He pointed at Cumber. "So what are you going to do? Help me? Or sell me to those murdering creeps Hellebore and Thornapple?"

"I told you, you must listen to…"

"No! I have responsibilities!"

There was a long silence. When Dowd broke it, his voice had taken on a new quality, cold and precise, which Theo had not heard before and didn't much like. "You are not to interrupt me, whatever claims you may have on my conscience. I have waited a long time and the situation is complicated. I will tell you my story…"

"But…"

"I will tell you my story. After that, we will see what is to be done."

Theo lowered his head. He might not be related by actual blood to this man, but even with no more of him to judge from than his voice, Theo could recognize a family resemblance to his mother, that chilly disaffection that could sweep down suddenly in the middle of an apparently insignificant argument, transmuting it to something painful, and against which there was no more sense arguing than there was value in waving your arms at a hurricane to turn it aside. "So talk," he said at last.

"Very well." The chill abated a little. "As I said, Theo, I was desperate. I was a condemned man, waiting for something I feared more than death — not merely being sent away from the woman I loved, but being sent across a barrier that I could never cross again. I had appealed to the few allies I had among the high houses, Stocks, Violets, Daffodils, but none of them were willing to support me against Parliament and especially against the Primroses, who were frequently allies of theirs in the fierce struggles among the highest houses for dominance. The Flower war that until recently everyone called 'the last Flower War' was just beginning, so allegiances were even more delicate and crucially important. In fact, things had grown worse than I knew, as I found out later. So I turned instead to the only person I had heard of who might know more about that barrier than the Seven Families and their tame wizards — or 'scientists,' as they are called here. The day before the banishment was to be carried out I went to the one known as the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles.

"Yes, I came here to this desolate place, just as you did, and probably feeling many of the same things — terror, hopelessness, rage over what had been done to me and those I loved. I was desperate. I was willing to do anything.

"The old Remover was a creature of infinite subtlety and malice, but he never bothered to waste his energies against those who had done him no personal harm unless he stood to gain something from their suffering, so I was safe enough… at least at first. Still, he liked to be entertained, so he let me wander for hours in the maze outside this room before he let me in."

"I didn't see a maze."

"No, you didn't. And he was also less reticent than I am about showing himself to supplicants. When I was finally admitted into his presence it was all I could do not to run away again, but my need was greater than any horror or nausea and I forced myself to look at him as I begged for his assistance. I told him I would pay nearly any price for it.

"He could help me, he said at last, but he needed something from me in return — a mortal child to give to one of the most powerful families, who had developed a sudden and serious need for one. Even in my madness and despair I was not so far gone that I was willing to give an infant up to torture or murder, so I demanded to know the purpose and who would get the child. He would not reveal which house, but he swore — invoking certain powers in whose names it is a very bad idea to swear falsely, as he and I knew — that the child would be treated as a member of that family and raised by them, that no hurt would be done to it. This was true, it turned out, but in a rather horrid way…"

Theo suddenly thought he felt things fitting together. "Was… was that me? Is that what you did — why you apologized to my mother in that letter?" But somehow the details remained confusingly wrong.

"Good lord," Dowd said in disgust. "I can understand not knowing 'Q.E.D.' but can you not use logic at all? What have they done to the schools since I was a boy?" The dark shape rustled and twitched in the corner shadows. Despite the weirdness of the setting, the life or death matters, Theo had a momentary taste of what it would have been like to grow up with a cross old great-uncle. "Think, boy! If you were a mortal child taken from your parents and brought here, then how did you wind up spending your entire life until now in the mortal world? How would that make sense?"

"All right, all right, I didn't work it through — but this does have something to do with me, doesn't it?"

"Of course it does, if you'll let me tell it without interrupting." Dowd took a moment to reorder his thoughts. "So the Remover made a bargain with me. Swearing by the same oaths he used to proclaim the safety of the child I would steal, he promised that if I would secure a mortal child for him before the first sunrise after my return, he would help to bring me back to Faerie, despite the Clover Effect — something that no one but the Remover himself even thought possible. There was more to his scheme, of course, but I hadn't learned that yet.

"So I went away from this place on my last night in Faerie, still miserable — still almost mad with grief, really — but also with a little hope that I might not be separated from my beloved Erephine forever. I returned to my house in Forenoon to pack up those few things I planned to take back with me…"

"You mean you can, like, take a suitcase when you leave Faerie?"

Again Dowd did not bother to hide his irritation. "Did the person who went to your world to fetch you arrive naked? Didn't you yourself bring my notebook and whatever you were wearing when you came through? Of course you can take things. Not everything will remain what it seems to be once it leaves Faerie, of course — the legends of what happens to fairy gold are common enough that even your television-dulled generation has probably heard them — but I was certainly able to take a few keepsakes." His voice calmed, but still remained chilly. "Now, where was I? Ah, yes. So I went to my house to pack up. I had made my devil's bargain with the Remover. I would give him a child, a mortal child, and in return he would help me return to Faerie, in secret."

"That's still a horrible thing," Theo said despite his own determination not to interrupt again.

"What is?"

"Stealing a child."

"Even when I was promised that the child would be raised as a member of one of the high families? That it would want for nothing?"

"That's fine for the child, but what about the baby's parents, its real parents? That would ruin their lives, having their baby disappear."

A long moment passed. To Theo's surprise, when Dowd spoke again there was no anger left, nothing but a bleak emptiness. "Of course. Of course. And I knew that. Knew also that on such short notice I would have little chance to find a child who deserved to be saved, one whose parents were bullying monsters or drunkards or drug addicts — little chance to salve my conscience by stealing a child whose parents, I could tell myself, deserved it. So as I prepared to leave New Erewhon I was on the horns of a terrible dilemma. If the Remover was wrong, or lying, I would never see my love Erephine again. If he was right, I would regain what I had lost only by inflicting a dreadful loss on someone else."

You shouldn't have agreed to it, Theo thought but did not say. There are some bargains you just can't make. But he still felt a kind of pity for the thing that had been Eamonn Dowd. He had been hammered by love a few times himself, badly enough that he had done some really idiotic things. He had slept in his car outside one ex-girlfriend's house three freezing nights in a row just so he could torture himself by watching her go in and out with her new boyfriend, compelled against all sense to make himself miserable imagining what they were doing in bed together just inside. He certainly understood being violently, almost criminally love-stupid. But there are still limits. There have to be limits.

"As it turned out, the old Remover was far more subtle than I understood," Dowd went on, his whispery voice distant with what might have been grief. "He had many projects in hand and was not going to squander such an opportunity on just one. That very night, as I lay sleepless on my bed, someone knocked at my door. It was a uniformed doonie — you must have met a few of them by now — and he told me I was to accompany him. I was confused, but because I thought it might be something the Remover had arranged to help accomplish our plot, or that the doonie might even have been sent to bring me back here to the Remover's house, I dressed and got into the huge black luxury coach and we sped across New Erewhon.

"We didn't go all the way to the waterfront, but toward the center of town instead, into Eventide. It was only when we suddenly turned in at one of its back entrances that I understood that for some reason I had been summoned to Violet House. I had been there before. The Violets were among the families who were, if not friendly to mortals, reasonably tolerant of them.

"As the bodyguards carefully searched me before allowing me out of the garage and into the main house, I began to realize for the first time how bad things had gotten between the highest Flower houses just during the months of my downfall and my trial in Parliament, when I had been largely oblivious to other events. There were soldiers everywhere in the compound, a private army, and they were all busy. The house seemed to be preparing for some kind of imminent assault, maybe even a full-blown war. Actually, as I found out later, they were preparing for what would happen when they lost that war.

"The doonie chauffeur was left behind and a young, high-handed fairy of the Violet clan inner circle took charge of me with as much enthusiasm as if I were a basket of dirty linen, hurrying me into the heart of the house. I was searched one more time by a quartet of ogre guards, then ushered into the house library. Belleius Violet, the head of the family, was waiting there for me.

"I can probably best describe him if I tell you that he was something like the head of a wealthy old New England family — Boston Brahmins, as we used to call them. As fairy nobility goes he was better than most, reasonably fair-minded, no crueler than average. In fact, by the standards of his people he would have to be called a liberal. This does not mean he treated me well that night. He was angry and heartsick, and it must also have galled him to have to turn in his most desperate need to one such as I — a mortal, an interloper.

" 'You have received a fitting punishment for your presumption, Eamonn Dowd,' he said to me. 'Do not think I feel sympathy for you. But it is not because, as many in the other houses do, I deem my blood above yours, although even among mortals I understand yours is not particularly distinguished. Rather, I object to what you did because we of the ruling families constitute the thin walls that separate our world from the barbarous old days, and we simply cannot afford to let ourselves be diluted with mortal ideas, our daughters taken as wives by mortals, our houses inherited by them. That may not be what you intended but I know well how things happen, how one liberty opens the door for the rest. If such a thing came to pass, we would soon be only an adjunct of your world. That cannot be allowed.' That's what he said to me by way of hello." Dowd allowed himself a sour, wheezing chuckle. "And remember, he was one of the progressive party.

"I asked him if he had brought me all the way across town merely to insult me and my race. He grew angry, but could not afford to lose his temper, as I guessed. I didn't press my advantage. I had also guessed that the hand of the Remover was in this somewhere and I didn't have much time left. Much of the night was already gone and in the morning I was to be taken to Strawflower Square.

"It took a while — he had to call for a stiff drink to nerve himself to be open with someone like me. To be fair, it was a terrible moment for him, one nobody would envy. He began with a rambling explanation of what I had seen outside, which confirmed my guess that not only had things become very bad between the seven ruling houses, they were worse than I could have imagined.

"In short, war was about to break out. All of the other ruling houses were either supporting Hellebore — for he was the instigator, of course — or were unwilling to resist him openly. Only Violet stood against him, and that meant that Violet House would almost certainly lose."

"What were they fighting about?"

"Ah, yes. That is, of course, a significant detail. It wasn't known to me at the time, but it certainly is to you now — and to the point of this story. The leading families had fallen out over a difference of approach. Of management, if you will. At the end of what they call here the Second Gigantine War — you have heard of that?"

"Yes."

"The king and queen of Faerie — not quite Shakespeare's Oberon and Titania, as I have discovered since, but definitely the rulers of this place — had died at the end of that war. Somehow, by means I have never been able to discover, the Seven Families gained control over the channeling of power that had once been a part of the king's and queen's duties… no, duties is the wrong word… that had once been a part of the king's and queen's very essences. The Seven put themselves in the place of the king and queen, and not incidentally gained power over the lives of all who had been royal subjects — in short, all of Faerie.

"But, and here is the significant part, they might have gained control of the conduit — the pipeline, as it were — but they couldn't insure the continued flow of power, of magic, of whatever you wish to call it that is the lifeblood of this place. Somehow the magic of Faerie had been either controlled by, or even generated by the old king and queen, and the Seven Families could not make things work in the same way. They were forced to find cruder substitutes. Instead of tapping a self-renewing source they were forced to use the actual energies of living fairies. A bit like eating your friends instead of eating fruits and vegetables that need only water and sun to grow, I suppose. Certainly it was not very efficient. Also, to their dismay, the leaders of the Seven Families soon discovered that the human-type fairies themselves act as concentrators of the kind of power they need in a way that other people of Faerie do not…"

"A friend of mine explained that to me."

"Yes, well, it is a significant fact. The ruthlessness of the families in question is such that if they could have used those they deemed 'lesser races' of Faerie, this crisis could have been averted for thousands of years more, perhaps forever. I have seen the plans commissioned by Hellebore and his allies, curious antiques now, for self-contained power stations that would have bred their own goblins and kobolds, used them up, then essentially thrown them away, like the Nazi camps. But they could not make such a thing work. The cost of use was and still is too high — as much power is expended extracting the essence of one of that kind of fairy as is gained. Even taking power from the 'higher fairies,' so-called, is a bad bargain, although that is what they have been doing for years. And even if it were a better bargain in terms of energy generated, the morality of it has always troubled many folk here.

"That had already become clear on that night, as I stood before Lord Violet. He alone, apparently, had found the courage to stand before the other families and say that he could no longer countenance living off what was essentially the slavery of other fairies. He might have felt differently if the strategy had been an effective one, but it was clearly only a delaying action against inevitable collapse. You see, a fairy city is similar to a human city in at least one important respect. It is an unnatural thing, and the more unnatural a thing is — in this case, a concentration of people in one place, using countless labor-saving devices and altering the very land to cram ever more people in — the more energy it uses. New Erewhon is a kind of reverse solar system, with the City becoming a sun that does not give light and heat to that which surrounds it, but draws it away from everything else.

"In any case, back on that long-ago day, Violet had made his stand and had failed. Things still seemed normal on the surface — very few people on the street would have guessed that another Flower War was about to begin — but Belleius Violet was no fool. He had not swayed the other ruling families to his side, and since he had angered Hellebore and his faction by challenging them in public they would certainly seek revenge. Lord Violet knew he did not have enough powerful allies to win, and he knew that Hellebore would not be content merely to push Violet House out of the inner circle of power. It would be destroyed, its ruling family devastated, perhaps even exterminated."

"Like Daffodil House this time."

"Exactly. Now, something else you must understand about Faerie is that its rules may be strange, but they work. I have had thirty years to study this place and I have learned a great deal. I still cannot tell you exactly what Faerie is, whether it is a place in its own right or a sort of reflection of the mortal world, but although its rules may be incomprehensible to our way of thinking, they are just as valid as any physics you may have learned back home. If you swear an oath here then you had better fulfill it or you will definitely reap the consequences and they will be unpleasant in some particularly apt way. If you go to a crossroads at midnight, you will meet someone who will offer you a bargain, even if it's only a barrow-troll who's willing to let you have a two-step head start before he catches you and eats the flesh off your bones."

Theo's fear had begun to ebb a little, although he was by no means feeling comfortable. "Does this have something to do with Lord Violet?"

"It does. Don't hurry me. Faerie has its rules and they may seem magical — they are magical, or at least so different as to seem so — but they work. One of them is primogeniture. Do you know what that means? No? Good God, boy. It means that the firstborn inherits, or in some cases, the oldest living child. And I'm not just talking about land or the family limousine. I mean everything — all the powers, contracts, charms, and obligations that the head of the family, usually the father, has accumulated during his long, long life. This is one reason that even a progressive like Violet hated me for marrying into a fairy family, and why he was so particularly galled to have to ask for my help. As far as they were concerned, letting mortals into the bloodline of the high houses was more than a social issue, it meant a possible end to one of the most important truths of life in Faerie — namely, that as long as one child survives, the family still exists and can be reconstituted, in a sense, no matter how low they have fallen. The games of power between houses are played over millennia here, Theo, and they are very complicated.

"So this was the situation in which Violet found himself. He faced a war he almost certainly could not win, and in which he feared that not only he might die, but his sons and daughters as well, thus ending his family. Nidrus Hellebore of all people understands that you have not destroyed an enemy until you have destroyed his issue as well — 'It is not enough to kill the bloom,' an old expression here goes, 'you must burn the seeds and salt the ground.' And that is what Violet feared would happen. His wife had given birth to a son only a few months earlier, an infant who would normally have had nothing more unusual to look forward to than the life of a seventh child in a powerful family, but now he might be the seed that could let the family live again, no matter the outcome of the next Flower War. Violet wanted to send that child somewhere beyond Hellebore's reach, but there was nowhere in Faerie he could feel confident that would be true. So he had thought of a Faerie tradition from the old days. He would send the child to the mortal world."

An overwhelming idea was knocking like an impatient stranger at the door, but Theo held it at bay for a moment to grapple with something in Dowd's story that was confusing him. "But why send a baby? Why not send one of his older children — someone who would be able to do the family some good if they wound up as the last one?"

"Because although travel to the mortal world has been curtailed by the Clover Effect, it is still possible. Violet knew that if Hellebore ever learned what had happened, or even guessed, he would begin to search the mortal world. One of the other strange things about the overlap between the mortal world and Faerie is that a fairy child raised in the mortal world very quickly begins to resemble a mortal — to smell like a mortal, as it were — while an older child or adult will never fully lose the scent of Faerie. Trained hunters would find it much easier to locate one of Violet's older children."

"So he wanted you to take… take this child to the mortal world."

"Well, not precisely — I was going to be banished in public. Violet's plan would not be much of a secret if I was seen to cross back into the human world with an infant in my arms. But in desperation he had gone to the Remover with this problem and that cunning old monstrosity had seen a way to kill two birds with one stone — or rather, to swap birds. The Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles was going to take Lord and Lady Violet's youngest child and pass that child to me once I was back on the mortal side. I was then to take it and keep it, or so Violet intended, and he promised me that if he survived to recover his child — since that would mean he had somewhat improbably triumphed over Hellebore's faction — he would work to revoke my banishment and find a way to bring me back to Faerie. Not a very good bargain for me, he must have thought, but it must have seemed that as a beggar I could not afford to be too choosy.

"What he did not know of course was that the Remover was manipulating everything, most definitely including me, and that I fully intended to return without any help from the obviously doomed Violet House. The Remover had foreseen my ethical dilemma — you know, it makes me wonder if like me, he had once been a mortal — and was providing me with a sop to my conscience. I would take a mortal child from its parents, but now I would have a healthy fairy child to leave in its place. One of the oldest of fairy tales, that is — the changeling child, substituted in the cradle. So I agreed to Violet's bargain, thinking that Violet House's plans would mean little to me — that I would be coming back to Faerie on my own and that the Violet family would never survive to want to claim their offspring. I was right, of course, but not in the ways that I thought that night."

"And that baby, the fairy child… that was me."

There was a long pause. "Yes, Theo. That was you. For what it is worth at this late date, I can confirm that you were born Septimus Violet and that everything your father feared came to pass. You are the last living member of Violet House."

37 THE EBONY BOX

"Septimus? I was named Septimus?"

"Not exactly," said Dowd. "You and I seem to perceive first names here as Classical names, mostly Roman — at least among the upper-class fairy families. Septimus is Latin for 'Seventh,' which is what you were called."

"Jesus, that's even worse. I was called 'Number Seven'? They didn't even bother to think up a name for me?"

"They may not have used much imagination in naming you, Theo,"— the whispery voice was as close to kind as it had been — "but your brothers and sisters were all killed in the Flower War, so they gave you something better than a clever name. They gave you a life."

"So that's how I wound up with my mom and dad? You stole your own niece's baby and left me in his place!"

Dowd took a rattling breath. "If it means anything, I am sorry now for all that I did. More sorry than you can guess."

"Just tell me what happened. No, tell me about my real family." He was finding it hard to absorb all that he had learned. To discover that the great-uncle he had thought was dead was alive — a man he had only recently learned wasn't really his great-uncle, after all — would have been strange enough. But to learn of his true family and find that they were all dead at the same time… Theo felt as though he had a fever: his head seemed to be floating, but the messages coming through from his body were of illness and discomfort. He turned to look at Cumber and felt a sudden powerful dislike for his unconscious friend, for all the creatures of this world that a month ago he had not believed existed, but which had nevertheless turned his entire life upside-down.

Yeah, but be honest — it wasn't much of a life, was it?

"We have been talking a long time and I am weary," Dowd announced. "I use several unnatural means to keep this crippled body functioning and I have not taken advantage of any of them recently. Also, to be honest with you, I did not sell half my vitality to raise an irrha to fetch you here just so I might tell you what nice people your true parents were. In any case, there are things in my own story you must hear first."

Theo didn't have the strength to argue. The weird warehouse room had begun to seem like the setting of some existentialist play in which he would stand forever listening to a disembodied voice telling him about how miserable and pointless the universe was. "Yeah, okay. Go ahead."

"Very well. The morning of my banishment came. The marshals of the Parliamentary Guard came to take me to Strawflower Square, which was almost deserted. Rumors of impending trouble between the ruling houses had inclined some of the more powerful families to stay home, and in any case my so-called crime and trial had been a bit of a nine-day wonder — there was more exciting gossip on the wind now. Only a few ordinary working fairies passing through the square dallied long enough to witness a mortal being sent back to the mortal world.

"My sentence was read by a minor Parliamentary official — he had not even bothered to put on a formal coat. A doorway, a gate, whatever you wish to call it, was opened and I was thrust through the fiery seam with no more ceremony than a bag of rubbish dropped down a chute. I took nothing with me but the clothes in which I had arrived in Faerie, my notebook, and, on a necklace underneath my shirt, a charmed stone given to me by the Remover — a sort of signal beacon, as I understood it. The doorway closed behind me and I found myself back in San Francisco — in Golden Gate Park, in an open meadow where I terrified a pair of tramps by appearing out of nowhere. I imagine the after-effects as having been something from an old newspaper cartoon, with both of them swearing on the spot to give up alcohol forever.

"In any case, I found myself in the middle of a bright California day after how long away I could only guess. Longer than I suspected, as it turned out. I had been gone perhaps three or four years by my own reckoning, but something like twenty had passed in the mortal world. When I had left, the Second World War had only recently ended. Truman was still the president. Now I had returned to an America that was unhappily embroiled in Southeast Asia, at war in a country called Viet Nam. Richard Nixon, a man I only vaguely remembered, was the president. The nineteen-sixties were just ending and the entire world I knew had been reshaped like an image in a carnival mirror.

"I did not know all this at the time, of course, and if things had gone the way I planned I would never have learned any of it.

"A bit overwhelmed, I wandered over to the park bandstand and thought about what I should do next. Every time a couple walked past pushing a baby carriage on their way to the aquarium or the Japanese tea garden I had to fight down the impulse to simply grab the child and run. I didn't have long, you see — I had to accomplish my task before the next sunrise if I wanted the Remover to be able to use the stone around my neck to locate me in the mortal world, or at least that is what he had told me. Perhaps it was a lie — certainly the stone had a darker purpose, as I discovered. But the fact was, I was in a panic, finally coming to realize how difficult this task would be and knowing that if I failed I would lose any chance to see my beloved Erephine again.

"The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became that I could not simply snatch any child. For one thing, I could not substitute the Violet baby — you, Theo, yes — for the stolen child until the Remover put him into my hands. I had to arrange things so that everything could happen in one place, at one time, and I could not afford to attract attention until that moment for fear I would be arrested and lose any chance of getting back.

"I had not really thought the problem through in all its intricacy during my last distracted hours in Faerie. Now, faced with half a day in which to come up with a solution, I walked across the park and considered my plight. I kept moving — I certainly did not want to wind up in jail as a vagrant — and eventually wandered over to the post office in my old neighborhood in Cole Valley. I knew that after twenty years most of the mail waiting in my box would be meaningless, but I still had no idea of how I was going to proceed with my real errand, so I was more or less killing time. The account I had set up at the Traveler's Bank before crossing over to Faerie had done its work and the post office box was still mine. I had a sack of mail waiting — a very small sack considering it had been twenty years, but the era of junk mail was only beginning — and I went to a diner to read it over a cup of coffee. There were a few letters from fellows I'd sailed with and a few from gals I'd known in various ports. Some business mail as well. And then I found it, three months old but incredibly timely — the birth notice."

"From my mom and dad," Theo said flatly.

"From my niece Anna and her husband, yes," said Dowd. "Your adoptive parents, so to speak. I still remember it. A son, seven pounds, ten ounces, named Theodore Patrick Vilmos.

"I won't draw this out. I can imagine that it's painful for you. I thought simply of calling up, inviting myself to their home down in San Mateo for a visit — what more natural for an uncle only just returned to town than to want to meet his niece and her husband and new baby? — but I was more than a little worried about what could happen if something went wrong. Also, I was close to two decades younger than I should have been, because of the differences between time in Faerie and in the mortal world, and I was afraid that would make them suspicious — make them think I was some impostor. There's irony, eh? I didn't want them to think I was some dangerous stranger because it might hinder me from stealing their child! So instead I took a cab to the Traveler's Bank in Russian Hill, which you must have guessed by now is a place that has long catered to those who travel to Faerie or other strange lands, and withdrew a decent sum of money, then took a taxi all the way down the peninsula to San Mateo at the cost of a small fortune. I located the house and then walked the neighborhood, waiting for it to get dark. When night came I watched Anna and her baby through their back window from a tree in the yard of an absent neighbor. I didn't feel very good about what I was doing, needless to say."

Theo was feeling sick to his stomach again. It was like having someone stick a finger right into his memories and smear them around: nothing was what he had thought it was. "Just… tell. Tell what happened."

"You may well despise me, but remember, I was desperate. Besides, I thought little Theodore would be going off to Faerie to be raised by a good family, that my niece would be getting prime fairy stock in return and that she would never know a change had been made. You see, the Remover had explained to me that there is a sort of… melding that happens when a changeling is substituted for a human baby. Both take on something of the other's essence. The changeling baby takes on the semblance of the mortal child during the first night as it lies in the crib and the mortal baby, even at a distance, is changed in subtle ways as well. They are linked like Siamese twins despite their separation."

"So I look like what the real baby would have looked like?"

"Not exactly, but quite closely, as far as I have been able to discover."

His mother's sad little deathbed confession floated up from his memory. "She did know."

"What?"

"My mother knew. That I wasn't real… that I wasn't really hers."

Eamonn Dowd seemed distracted and uneasy, but not because of what Theo was saying; in fact, he hardly seemed to be listening. "Yes, well, I should finish this explanation. Time may be shorter than I thought."

"What does that mean?"

Dowd went on as though Theo had not spoken. "At midnight, after I used the charm to make myself visible to the Remover, a shining gate opened and a shrouded, masked figure appeared at the foot of the tree with the Violet infant — you — in its arms. It was not the Remover. I still do not know who or what it was. Some other poor fool tricked into doing the Remover's will, using his one trip to the mortal world on a visit that lasted only minutes. Feeling like a murderer, my heart racing, I went to the basement window that I had noticed was unlocked, crawled through, then brought the Violet baby up the stairs and into the house. I could hear Anna's husband snoring. I took Anna's child out of the cradle and put you in — it was most strange, I could already feel you beginning to change even as I laid you down, a kind of… sliding sensation… but I was too breathless with anticipation and fear to pay much attention. I hurried out through the back door with my niece's child. As I stepped out into the yard a hand reached out and touched the Remover's stone dangling on my chest. I had time only to shout in pain at the shock that ran through me before I found myself tumbling helplessly to the ground.

"A terrible coldness overtook me, and something else as well, a sensation so strange I still cannot describe it except to say that I found myself rushing away from myself at right angles. Suddenly I was floating in the air like a soap bubble, looking down on the scene in your parents' back garden, which included my own body lying curled on the grass. I can't tell you how strange it was to realize that I was not inside that body anymore. The masked stranger handed the stolen baby through the gateway to what must have been, I can only presume, the Remover waiting on the far side. Then the stranger came back. He pulled the stone and its chain from the neck of my lifeless body and I found myself drawn after that stone as he headed back to the gateway — the stone was pulling my bodiless essence with it!

"I had been a fool to forget Faerie's natural laws, and especially that they were as literal as in any folktale. The Remover had sworn to bring the baby and me back across the barrier, but he had not promised how he would do it. The Remover clearly meant to fulfill the letter of the contract — it is always perilous not to do that here — in the only way he could, which meant leaving my body behind and dooming me to roam Faerie as an unhomed spirit.

"But chance intervened. Someone had heard my cry of surprise and pain. Peter Vilmos opened the window and shouted at the shadowy figure. I wonder if he saw the doorway to Faerie and if he did, what he made of it. Did he ever mention such a night? Ah, no matter. Startled, the Remover's lackey dropped the stone and its chain in the undergrowth near the shining gate. Your stepfather was shouting about the police now and the doorway to Faerie was already flickering. The masked stranger hesitated for a moment, then abandoned the magical stone and dove through, making his escape back to Faerie. As soon as the gate closed I found myself back in my body again. I managed to drag myself to my feet and locate the stone — in my bodiless form I had seen its fall quite clearly — then pocket it and climb over your step-parents' fence. I was still disoriented by my experience and must have looked like a hapless drunk. Certainly I barely made it over. By the time I had crashed through the hedges into the next street I had recovered my wits enough to know that I would never escape the neighborhood on foot — the police had undoubtedly already been summoned. I found an empty garden shed and shivered there until just before dawn, then headed back to San Francisco, full of despair. I had been double-crossed. I had betrayed my own kin and received nothing for it. I was never going to see my love Erephine Primrose again.

"If I'd been a bit mad before, it was as nothing to what I went through in the days that followed. If I hadn't had money in the bank, I'm sure I would have died in a gutter somewhere, another derelict killed by the cold. But I did have money, so I took a hotel room, then later an apartment, living modestly so that I would not have to find a job and take time away from the obsession that drove me. To my neighbors I must have seemed merely a distracted and solitary man, but truly I was no longer sane. I was consumed with one thought — somehow to return to Faerie and Erephine. Oh, yes, and most definitely to get revenge against the creature who had betrayed me, the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles, not to mention the master and mistress of Primrose House and all their lackeys in the Parliament. Such fantasies I had! They made the terrible things that Hellebore has done look tame.

"Other than the books and artifacts I had collected before, which had been waiting for me in storage for all those years, I had only one thing to help me, one very large clue — the charmed stone the Remover had given me, the thing which had brought his henchman so unerringly to me and which had somehow briefly separated my essence from my body. Faerie has very strict natural rules, as I have said, and anything used in that sort of magic — for that sort of science, as they would say — bears some traces of its user.

"It took me several years to discover a way, a very dangerous way, that I could turn the charm-stone to my own use. The search was hard, hard work, particularly because many of the sources I needed to study were scattered widely around the world. So during that time I reasserted my identity somewhat, disguising myself to seem closer to the age I should have been and re-establishing myself as traveler and a student of curiosities who was also a respectable member of the community. Not that all of my sources and contributors cared about such things, of course. Some of them had led far stranger lives than mine. You would be astonished, Theo, to learn the number of people — well, some of them only look like people — who hang about on the fringes of the mortal world trying to get back into Faerie or one of the other, less well-known destinations.

"In any case, I had found what seemed to be my only chance to return to New Erewhon. Still, the odds were not good, and when I sent that letter of apology to my niece Anna, the letter you have read, I truly believed I was likely to die. Perhaps it would have been better if I had."

Theo had been standing for too long, shifting from foot to foot. He was tired and, now that the worst of his terror had worn off, even a little hungry. But more than anything else he was beginning to be very angry. His entire life — a life that had seemed a little pointless anyway — was now shown to be largely the outcome of other people's plans, other people's needs. "Yeah, maybe it would have been better," he said. "So what happened? How did you get to be a… to be the way you are, where you won't even show yourself? And more important, why am I here at all? Why did you send that zombie-thing after me instead of just allowing me to be a happy thinks-he's-human idiot back in my own world?"

"I am giving you answers, Theo, but only because I wish to do so. You act as though you deserve them — as though it is your right." The voice had gone ice-cold again. "You are a typical American of your time. You believe the universe should have rules, like some board game, that cheating will be punished and virtue rewarded. Nonsense. That is nonsense."

Theo took a few steps into the middle of the room. "I'm tired of talking to the air."

"Come no farther!" There might have been a touch of fear behind the fury. "Your ferisher friend is hostage to your good behavior, Theo. I was never really your uncle, remember, so do not presume too much on family connections. We are not even related."

Theo could not help himself — he laughed out loud in shock and anger. "Family connections? Shit. You took me from my parents, stole my stepparents' real baby, all for your own selfish goddamn plans. I don't think I'm really the one who's taking advantage of family connections, am I?"

After a pause, Dowd spoke again in a calmer voice. "I am trying to tell you what you want to know, Theo. Please, just listen. You're not the only one who finds this hard."

Theo waved his hand angrily, directing him to continue. It was pointless to argue, everything was decades in the past.

But it's new to me.

"To be brief, my experiment succeeded, although not the way I had hoped. I crossed the barrier, but in a way completely unlike what I had experienced before…" Eamonn Dowd had now begun speaking a bit more quickly. Theo thought he seemed nervous and distracted, and wondered what he had done to make Dowd fretful — certainly he couldn't have expected anyone to take news like this cheerfully.

Actually, all things considered, I've been pretty damn calm so far, and he sure seems like he's holding all the cards, anyway. So what's his trip? What's he afraid of? Theo squinted at the shadowed corner. Maybe he's like Oz the Great and Terrible. Maybe there's something about how he looks — who he really is — that he doesn't want me to see, and all this "I'm so ugly" stuff is just a cover. He began to move slowly forward under the guise of restlessly shifting from foot to foot.

"It did not take me long to discover what the strange thing was that had happened to me," Dowd was saying. "I passed over into Faerie — but not all of me made the trip. Just as the Remover had planned for me earlier, I traveled as a disembodied spirit. Whether my actual body died at that moment or only when I had been out of it a certain time, I don't know, but I knew I was leaving it behind forever. I cannot tell you how dreadful that felt and I will not try.

"I found myself here in this place, but not precisely the place that you are seeing now. I can offer no better explanation than to say that in my bodiless state I saw a larger version of the Remover's house — a version that opened out into planes of existence I had only suspected to exist. My God, how little most people guess! And at the center of it all, in the middle of his web of intrigues and experiments, the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles sat like a multi-dimensional spider. A barely imaginable hatred swept over me. I had no mortal body anymore, so I became that hatred. Here in front of me was the creature that had cheated me and stolen my hope! Like a dog who has long been tortured by a vicious owner, and whose confining chain finally breaks, I could think of only one thing — Attack. Destroy.

"I took him by surprise, I think, and that helped. Whatever he truly was, the Remover was certainly powerful and much better schooled than me — even with surprise on my side I would have had no chance except that in the place where we fought my fury was a pure thing, a powerful thing. It is also possible that, in the way peculiar to Faerie, his own breaking of his promise to me weakened him. He had not brought me back from the mortal world as he had sworn he would — his lackey had made a mistake. If he had done so and then killed me or left me to roam bodiless I doubt it would have rippled even the quietest side-currents of reality… but he had not fulfilled his bargain. In Faerie, such things have a price.

"We struggled a long time. But he had a body, and a strange and crippled one at that — I of all people understand that now. Bound as he was to that malformed shell, he did not have the strength to prevail in a long struggle. When his earliest and deadliest attempts to destroy me failed, I knew that eventually I would win. In that strange place he was like a jellyfish of shadows and lightning, but I burned like a comet — white-hot, blazing with hatred. As he weakened he tried one last time to banish me from his plane of existence, but I had the upper hand and I turned his own power against him. His soul or whatever it might be went shrieking away into the ultimate darkness, leaving me exhausted but victorious. With my last strength I wrapped his empty body around me like a blanket and found myself back in Faerie again. But I was stuck in the Remover's rotting, alien carcass, and despite many attempts, I have not been able to replace it with anything less dreadful, this body that bears the residue of a million horrible thoughts, sights, deeds. If you think I have done bad things, Theo, you should feel comforted to know the hell in which I have trapped myself.

"When I regained my strength I was desperate to see Erephine, to show her that I had returned to her against all odds, even if it was in this grotesque form. I tried to contact her but received no reply. I sent her message after clandestine message without hearing anything back — if I had not seen occasional mention of her on the talking mirrors I would have feared that she had died. After a while I began to consider that her family might somehow have turned her against me. Much had happened during the years I had been absent — the Flower War had come and gone, the Violets had been destroyed as I had supposed they would be and six families now ruled New Erewhon and Faerie instead of seven — but it was still a short time by fairy standards, far too short for a love like ours simply to evaporate. I decided I must have her brought to me, to get her away from her cursed family and show her how I had broken the very laws of time and space to be with her again.

"Things did not go as I planned. My hired hands brought her to me but she was strangely resistant. The woman I had loved and who had loved me beyond all meaning now acted as though the time that had passed in Faerie during my absence had changed everything — impossible in a race that lives for centuries! I could not show myself to her directly, of course, not in the form I was wearing — I was cloaked and masked like the Phantom of the Opera or some other melodramatic nonsense, and this made her suspicious despite all the proofs I offered her. She demanded to know what I looked like — she said that I might be hiding from her because I was not Eamonn Dowd at all but the infamous Remover trying to embroil her in some scheme! I had my employees transport her across town to my old house in Forenoon, which I had reclaimed under a new name. I had hoped to remind her of what we had together, but it quickly became clear that something dreadful had happened — that her parents had found some Faerie magic to brainwash her, to make her think she didn't love me anymore. And after all I had been through! It was a terrible night, me demanding that she admit that it was really me that stood before her, that she remember our love, and she insisting in turn that I was trying to trick her, complaining that she was tired and frightened and wanted to go home. Home! To the very people who had tried to pull us apart!"

My God, Theo thought, he really is crazy. He can't even imagine she might just have changed her mind, fallen out of love.

"At last, in desperation, I revealed myself to her. 'This is what I did for you!' I shouted. 'This is the torment I suffer every day to be in your world!' But I should not have done it. She was not ready for the truth. She screamed and screamed and tried to escape and I was forced to restrain her — not physically, because this body does not have that sort of strength, but with certain charms I had found in the Remover's vast library. I suppose I was more hasty than I should have been — remember, I was also tired, and heartbroken, and much of the Remover's science was new to me. I silenced her and made her pliable, but only at a terrible cost."

Theo finally broke the long silence. "What does that mean?"

Dowd sighed. "Step forward. Now turn to your right. Do you see that wooden casket?"

Theo stared at the nearest pile of strange objects. The black chest was a little over a foot long and almost as wide. "Yes, I see it."

"Open it. Go ahead. Do not fear — there is nothing in it that can harm you."

He picked it up carefully — it was surprisingly heavy — and slowly lifted the lid. Inside, couched on dark gray velvet, lay the stone head of a woman, a white marble mask carved in an attitude of serenity and repose. Whoever the model had been, her beauty was unearthly. "I don't underst…"

The stone eyes opened. The lips curled into a rictus of horror and the mask began to shriek. Theo gasped in terror and dropped the box, which thumped down onto the floor and landed on its side, the lid open. The screaming grew louder.

"Close it!" shouted Dowd. "Close the lid!"

It was one of the most terrible sounds Theo had ever heard, an endless shrill of raw terror. He jammed his hands over his ears, almost weeping, and at last managed to kick the ebony box shut.

"She is seldom awake," said Dowd in a shaken voice. "I did not think…"

"Jesus Christ, what did you do to her?"

"Nothing, not intentionally. Somehow the charm I used to calm her only paralyzed her body. In an attempt to reach inside her and bring the real Erephine back to the surface, I pulled out her essence but could not reintegrate it. Do not look at me — I did my best! Do you think I wanted this?" His voice shook. "You don't understand. Her family soon tracked us down and I was forced to escape, taking only her essence with me. Her body is still alive, unlike my own mortal form, but it is virtually empty. Her family has installed the shell, for that is what it is, in a sanitarium outside of the city, but she, the real, true Erephine, remains with me." He was quiet for a long moment, as if he'd lost his way in some prepared speech. "I saved her," he said weakly, "and one day I will reunite body and mind again…"

"You're a fucking monster, do you know that? Saved her? You drove her mad and then you took her mind and locked it up in some statue!"

"Listen to me, you don't understand… !"

"I understand as much as I need to!" Theo strode toward the corner where Dowd hid in shadow. "Is this the kind of help you've got in mind for me, too? No fucking thanks. I was an idiot to stand here listening to you. Come out! Come out of there or I'll drag you out."

"Stay away, boy!" Dowd's voice rose to a hysterical pitch. "I'm warning you!"

Theo made it another few steps forward before the mandragorum caught up to him. He was close enough to see some of the shape that was Eamonn Dowd trying to struggle away from him and into deeper shadows like a bat with two broken wings. It was incomprehensible, really, at least in that brief instant, something that might have been a mass of slime and dead leaves and chicken bones picked half clean, although even that did not really explain the complex wrongness of what he saw. Worst of all, what stopped him even before the hand of the root slave clamped his shoulder, was the momentary glimpse of the ruin that was Dowd's face, the distorted knob of head whose only clear features were the eyes, the only human things in the glistening, tattered face, eyes that were wide with terror and misery and shame. Theo could not help himself. He recoiled with a cry of disgust.

"I told you not to come near me," Dowd screamed. "I told you! I should kill you."

"For what? For seeing what you've done to yourself?"

"Done to m-m-myself?" Dowd sounded like he was having trouble breathing. "H-how can you say such a thing, boy? Was it me who banished myself from Faerie in the first place? Did I double-cross myself?"

"Oh, God. Yeah, in a way you damn well did." Theo had reached the point where he no longer cared. "The hell with all of it. The hell with you. Just tell me what you're going to do to me."

Dowd calmed himself a little. "The same thing Hellebore and Thornapple and the others would have done if they'd been able to lay their hands on you. As the heir of the Violets you possess some kind of key they think will allow them to access the ultimate source of power, the beliefs of the mortal world. I don't need to destroy the sanity of our old world to achieve my goals — I do not need so much power — but I must find out what that key is and use it to restore Erephine and myself to some semblance of normality. I am sorry, Theo, but unlike Hellebore, I will do my best not to harm you."

"Drop dead, you psycho — there is no key. Everyone's hunting for me but I don't have anything! No key, no magic wand, no one ring to bind them all — nothing!" He writhed uselessly in the grip of the mandragorum.

"We will not know for certain until I have a chance to examine you. Don't you see, it's only fair, after all they did to me, to Erephine. That is why I pretended to search for you on their behalf, even though I knew exactly where you were. Hellebore needed me and I needed him, because I have slowly taken resources and knowledge from him under the guise of doing his bidding, until I think I have discovered much of what I need to know."

"So you're not really any different from Hellebore, are you?" Theo spat on the floor. "Oh, I forgot — you're going to try not to kill me while you're doing whatever you do."

"I am not Hellebore," Dowd said coldly. He had shrunk back into the darkened corner again; Theo could see him only as an irregular shadow. "I have done terrible things, but I did them for love."

"That's one of the most frightening things I've ever heard."

The other mandragorum suddenly stepped out from the shadows by the wall and into one of the pools of light. Theo felt sure that Dowd had suffered more recrimination than he could stomach, that he was going to have the root slave beat Theo unconscious or worse, but then it wobbled and bent forward as if in a bow and just kept bending — collapsing, really, in the most surreal, cartoonish way possible. It fell into several huge pale slices that thumped onto the floor and rolled.

"What the hell… ?" was all that Theo had time to ask, then half a dozen figures spilled out into the room from the spot where the root slave had stood — armed constables in what looked like riot gear, eyes hidden behind insectoid goggles, beehive guns trained on Theo and the place where Dowd sat hidden by shadow. Two more men dressed in civilian clothes stepped out behind them, one extremely tall and thin and somehow vaguely familiar, holding what looked like a whip made of curling light. The other was of more ordinary size and all too recognizable.

"Tansy." Theo spat on the ground. It was a futile gesture, but it didn't look like he was going to get to make any other kind of gesture in the near future.

"Yes, Master Vilmos — or should I say Master Violet? I am alive, thanks to you. You merely left me to die instead of finishing me off." There was something wrong with the fairy's face, an unnatural gleam. "You are clearly out of touch with your true heritage."

"Shut your hole, Tansy," said the tall, dead-faced one. "Father wants this done quickly."

Doomed, Theo thought as he looked at the array of flaring gun barrels pointed in his direction. His veins seemed to be trying to pump icy water through him instead of blood. He had recognized the tall one, or at least the family resemblance. He must be Hellebore's kid — the one Poppy said was completely mad.

38 THE BROKEN STICK

"This is outrageous!" Eamonn Dowd's voice boomed so loud out of the empty air that Theo stumbled and even the helmeted constables flinched. Tansy covered his ears as Dowd's voice blared again. "How dare you break into my sanctuary like this, uninvited?"

"Spare us," said the tall, pale fairy. "You're a traitor, playing both ends against each other. My father has already heard and decided."

"What are you talking about?" Dowd sounded so alarmed that Theo's spirits, already at rock bottom, began scraping themselves a hole so they could sink even lower. "That's a lie, Anton Hellebore! I have done your father countless favors — your entire family…"

Hellebore raised his hand and snapped his fingers. There was a flurry of musical tones like the harmonics at the top end of a guitar neck, then a complicated gleam of light near the ceiling above Hellebore's head slowly became the glinting outline of a spiderweb stretched across the space where two walls met near the door. A curiously mechanical-looking spider crawled out of the dark spaces and into the middle of the web. "You're not the only one who can hide in the shadows," the younger Hellebore said. "We sent this in here the last time you were out visiting us." He gestured again and Dowd's voice filled the room.

"… That is why I pretended to search for you on their behalf, even though I knew exactly where you were. Hellebore needed me and I needed him, because I have slowly taken resources and knowledge from him under the guise of doing his bidding, until I think I have discovered much of what I need to know."

Theo looked around desperately for a way out, but there were armed constables on all sides and at least two of them stood between him and Cumber's sleeping form.

"All right, Anton," said Dowd. "You have me, I'll admit it, although you know perfectly well that your father not only understands the advantage of playing one's rivals off against each other, he does it himself. So let's not waste time arguing when we could be bargaining. You want my more-or-less grand-nephew, and doubtless you know that I have lots of other valuable information as well, things gathered over many centuries by my predecessor. My own needs are few and I have no illusions about fighting with your father over ultimate power — all I ask for letting you take the Violet heir without resistance is a day to leave the City…"

"You bastard!" Theo shouted.

Anton Hellebore had the disconcerting laugh of an idiot child. "That's funny, it really is. But it's a bit late to be surprised by anything he does, Violet or Vilmos or whatever you are. You already know what Dowd did to his own family, not to mention the so-called love of his life. Now ask him what he did to the baby that was in your woman's belly."

For a moment, a sharp, panicky moment, Theo believed the young Hellebore meant Poppy — that they knew about her somehow, had captured her. Then it sank in.

"The miscarriage?" he asked, turning to the shadowy spot where Dowd crouched. In a day of bizarre surprises, of terror and revelation, he could barely encompass one more. "Cat's miscarriage? You did that?"

"For Hellebore! I didn't want to. I hated doing it! But if I hadn't he would have pulled you out of the mortal world right then, to keep the birthright from passing on, and I… I wasn't ready…" A strange, choking sound came from both the air and, for the first time, audibly from the huddled form. "I wasn't ready… !"

Theo could not speak.

Hellebore's lips twitched briefly, as though he had learned to smile from a manual. "Well, that was fun, I must say."

"You're a fool, Anton Hellebore." Dowd's anger now sounded like nothing but bluster. "Your father would never make such a mistake. Now Vilmos is angry at me — you've made it even harder for us to put him to use. Not only can't you do it without me, now I will have to work very diligently indeed…"

"No, you're the fool, Dowd," said Lord Hellebore's son. "We don't need anything from you at all." He turned to the constables. "Shoot him."

In an instant, before Theo even had time to do more than flinch, two of the armored men stepped forward, goggles darkening as they lowered their weapons. The muzzles flashed and for an instant a whine like a plane's engine filled the room and seemed to suck everything toward it like a tunnel of vacuum. The whole shadowed corner of the room where Dowd had hidden flew apart, bits everywhere, tatters floating down. Theo heard one harsh breath, a raw gurgle, and then the twitching thing in the wreckage stopped moving. Something rattled down between the rafters and fell to the floor, rolled near to Theo's feet. It was a wasp — a spent bullet in the form of a tiny bronze automaton, legs kicking feebly. Theo could only stare at it, stupid with shock.

He's dead. Dowd's gone. Just like that.

"Now bring out the salamanders and burn the place." Anton Hellebore seemed utterly unmoved by what he had just ordered done; he might have been a cadaver jolted just strongly enough to move around in a semblance of life without actually feeling anything. "Oh, and someone put this short-timer in the coach. So you're really one of those weakling Violets," he said, grinning at Theo. "Well, I can't say I'm surprised." He turned back to the beetle-eyed guards. "Don't damage him fatally, but if he resists, hurt him. You, why are you moving so slowly? Take the one with the caul over his face, too. Maybe he knows something useful."

Four constables grabbed Theo and Cumber as the others began to empty sacks they had been carrying onto the floor, spilling out dozens of tiny reddish creatures with bright golden eyes. If they were salamanders, the words didn't mean quite the same thing here — there was something of amphibian shape to them but they also looked a bit like cartoon demons as they fled the center of the room and scuttled toward the nearest dark hiding places, some of them already smoldering into flame.

Tansy was almost jumping in place with anxiety. "My lord, you're not really going to burn this place, are you? The knowledge collected here is invaluable…"

"The knowledge here is false." For the first time there was real fury in young Hellebore's voice. "I should have known the Remover was a mortal — he never understood anything I told him, couldn't answer any of my questions. He didn't like the way I performed my experiments, either. I should have known!"

"But there are things here gathered by the original Remover… !"

Theo watched, sickly fascinated even as the guards handcuffed his hands behind his back. The surface of the restraints was strangely wet and rubbery, but Theo was distracted by something else: Count Tansy's features seemed almost to flicker and slide, inconstant as an oil slick. His face — it's held together by some kind of charm, Theo realized, like the kind that Poppy was talking about, youth charms, beauty charms. He must have been really messed up in Daffodil House.

"Enough, Tansy. If you try to tell me what to do here, you will burn with it." Hellebore's sullenness sounded almost teenaged, but with an edge of something else as well, something truly terrifying. "I don't like this place and I don't believe it. I am a great scientist — greater than my father, even. I know what's important. I know why my experiments scream, what they are seeing, what they are feeling. Anything else is wrong. This Dowd person was wrong. I want it all to go away."

In fact, fires were already springing up wherever the salamander-demons had hidden themselves, burning as silvery-hot as magnesium flares. Great billows of flame began to climb the walls and lick at the ceiling. In other spots the fires had taken something of the character of their fuel — weird colors filtered through the blaze and an even more disturbing set of harsh chemical smells began to fill the air.

Tansy scuttled toward the exit, too frightened to argue any more. Anton Hellebore walked backward out of the room so he could watch the growing blaze, his long arms held out as though he were conducting the fire like music. "Old and rotten and wrong," he said, almost to himself. He turned to look at Theo, flashing that humorless, rictus grin. "This place will burn for days. They'll be able to see it at night from the mountains of Alder."

My God, he really is crazy. Psychotic. Theo had little left but despair — the thing he had most feared had now happened. He managed to get the fingers of one of his cuffed hands into his pocket and pulled out the phone that Poppy had given him. While his guards turned to pull him through the door he dropped it on the floor and kicked it into the nearest smoldering pile of bric-a-brac, and felt the only kind of relief he was likely to feel until at some indeterminate point in the future he escaped these people into death. At least they weren't going to find a phone on him that would lead them straight to Poppy. That was something, anyway.

Although the lighting was still inconstant, the hallway seemed much more normal on the way out than it had on the way in. A short, squat figure, a brownie with frizzled hair and an eyepatch, was sitting with a mirrorcase open on his lap just inside the front door. He looked up at their approach. "Something's gone wrong, master," he said. "The scientific envelope has gone all pear-shaped. The defenses are still smothered, but I don't know how much longer I can…"

"I'm burning the place down, Squelch," said Anton Hellebore. "So forget about it. Do you want to stay and see what happens when some of the old pockets under the floors and between the walls take fire?"

The brownie paled and scrambled to his feet. One of his legs was shorter than the other and he wore a huge corrective boot. "By the Well, there are reserves of pure pyromantic vitality in there! It's going to burn like the sun!"

The young Hellebore nodded. "Until it all falls smoking into Ys." He waited as the guards opened the front door of the Remover's storehouse and peered out, then exited in swift military fashion, dragging Theo and Cumber as though they were suitcases. Theo wanted to shriek at the pain in his arms, but he was able to sink down and find a deeper part of himself, numb and distant enough that the pain could touch him but not overcome him.

A pair of huge matte-black utility coaches waited in the alley, motors vibrating silently but so deeply that Theo could feel it in his bones. They were shaped like armored personnel carriers but were streamlined and shiny as limousines, the bubble-windows opaque blind eyes. A group of people had gathered around the coaches, mostly women and children whose faint blue skin made them look more like drowning victims than living folks, but as the guards came out the bystanders retreated back down the pier's main road and out of sight, leaving nothing behind but a few webbed handprints on the coaches' polished exteriors.

"Wretched nixies," said Hellebore. "Touching things that aren't theirs. Wait until this whole nasty neighborhood goes up in smoke and lava-blisters." Cumber and Theo were thrown onto the floor of the coach; Hellebore climbed in after them. The interior was rigged for half a dozen people to sit in comfort, with racks overhead to hold luggage — or, presumably, automatic weapons. Tansy, the brownie, and two of the guards got in with the Hellebore heir and ranged themselves in the seats. The coach's back door was open, and for an instant Theo saw the rest of the constables clambering into the other vehicle, helping one of their number who seemed to have been overcome by the growing fumes, then someone slammed the door closed.

Anton Hellebore flicked his fingers to signal the driver, invisible on the other side of one of the compartment's black front windows, and the coach started to move. The exterior windows were big enough that Theo could see a little something of what was behind them and on either side, although from his position on the floor that didn't amount to much more than gray sky and rooftops. He rolled over to check Cumber's breathing, then slowly began to push himself toward the compartment's rear door. No one seemed to be the slightest bit worried that he might somehow get the door open and escape. Theo couldn't help seeing this as a bad sign, but tried not to let it discourage him. Ignoring the pain of his bound hands, he sat up straighter and tried to reach behind his back, searching for the edge of the door. Perhaps he could pop the handle with his head and fall out when it came open. If he hooked a foot through Cumber's handcuffs, he could take the ferisher with him. Roll, get up and run. Scream. He couldn't carry Cumber, not cuffed like this, but maybe the niskies or someone else would help. Not too goddamn likely, though, is it? Not against armed Flower guards. Still, he kept feeling for the door. First things first…

Something bit into his wrists, hard — a thousand hot needles through the skin. He screamed.

A couple of the guards jumped, but Anton Hellebore only looked up lazily. The dead smile appeared again, no more cheering than a crease in a jellyfish. "You really shouldn't move if you can avoid it, Violet. You'll upset the annis. It's a kind of sea-sprite, no brain, all teeth and reflexes — and very amusing reflexes, they are. I bred it into a shape where it could be used as a restraint."

It felt like there was poison burning upward along the veins in Theo's arms; it took all his restraint not to try to smash the things, to scrape them off, but every time he moved the needles closed on his flesh again. He lay as still as he could until the pain began to subside.

The coach was moving slowly; at first Theo thought they must be maneuvering through some of the smaller back streets around the Remover's dockside building, but when he lifted his head high enough he could see through the windows that the streets were unusually crowded, with masses of fairy-folk on the sidewalks and in the intersections, tall and small, winged and unwinged, although an unusually large proportion were long-nosed and hairy.

Theo was not the only one to notice. When the coach rocked to a sudden stop, the young Hellebore made a hissing noise of irritation. "What is going on?"

The driver's voice filled the compartment. "There are a lot of folk around, master. I can't go very fast."

"What is it?" Anton Hellebore peered through the thick windows. "Goblins? It looks like lots of goblins. Troublemakers."

"Not just goblins, master."

"Drive over them if you have to."

The chauffeur did not seem in any hurry to do that, but he kept the coach moving forward. Theo heard people shouting outside and some of them thumped on the coach's fenders or doors, but he never heard anyone screaming or sounding really upset. It was strange: they all seemed to be out in the streets without really knowing why they were there — like Mardi Gras, he thought, but a little less cheerful. But as faces pressed in on the windows, trying and failing to see in through the one-way glass, Theo sensed a menacing undertone. It was hard to worry about it too much, and in fact he was half-hoping the chauffeur would crush someone, that the crowd would turn seriously ugly, tip the coach over and drag Hellebore and Tansy out, and — most importantly — that someone would notice Theo was a handcuffed prisoner before the crowd got down to tearing the rest of the vehicle's occupants to shreds.

"Why are they all here?" said Tansy. His control over his rebuilt face seemed to be growing worse. It wobbled and even seemed to slip a little, although Theo guessed that might be a trick of the light bouncing off something that was not quite real. It was disturbing to see both Tansy's ordinary, coldly handsome features and glimpses of a raw, tattered something else underneath, but even if his entire face slid off and onto the carpeted floor of the utility coach Theo knew it wouldn't help his own cause much.

"Why did you do it?" Theo asked him suddenly. "You didn't just betray me, you helped betray a lot of others, too — the Daffodil folk, the Hollyhocks, all of them. Why?"

Tansy's unstable features turned pale and angry but he wouldn't meet Theo's eye. "Shut your mouth, mortal."

"Count Tansy has a lot of debts." It was clear that Anton Hellebore was mocking Tansy, not really talking to Theo at all. "And very few loyalties."

The driver's voice came again. "Um, pardon me, master, but… well, I think you should see this. It's on every tributary. I'll open the mirror back there."

What Theo had thought was only a dark window between their compartment and the driver sparkled alight, displaying a street scene not that different from what was outside. A voice was speaking calmly but with a certain breathlessness.

"… Made the unexpected and so far inexplicable announcement an hour ago. The criminals and their leader managed to insert the bizarre message into every mirror-stream and tributary, disguised as an emergency bulletin from First Councillor Thornapple. Much unrest has followed, although so far there has been no violence. Spokesmen for the leading houses assure the public that there is no real danger, but all citizens are commanded to return to their homes as quickly as possible. Parliament is meeting in emergency session later today to consider an earlier curfew and perhaps even the re-imposition of military law. In a moment we will go to the reception room in the Parliament of Blooms, but first, here is that… announcement… again…"

The picture shifted, the crowd scene vanishing to be replaced by an extremely familiar face.

"I speak to my people, and to all good folk." Button was dressed, as always, in a nondescript robe of rough cloth, sitting cross-legged in front of a wall that Theo recognized after a moment as the piled stones of the Fayfort Bridge. "My name is Mud Bug Button. I am a goblin. Any thinking creature who values freedom and justice is part of my tribe. Any who tries to take those precious things from others is my enemy.

"People of Faerie, your masters are murderers. Many of you know that, although you are afraid to acknowledge it. But did you know this, also? They have failed. All their repression, all their theft, all their cruelty, and still they have failed to provide the only thing that might overshadow their crimes — a safe, secure life for all Faerie. Their time is over now. Those of you who hear me, you know I speak the truth." He nodded his head as though he had just answered a difficult question. "To my own goblin people I have something else to say. Long we have let ourselves be mistreated, in large part because our sacred word was given in contract, those long, long centuries ago, by our venerated elders. Had they seen into the future, seen what the Flower lords would do, they would not have given those words, of course. But they did, and we have lived with their promise at terrible cost."

Slowly, and with unhurried, ritualistic care, Button produced a dull black bundle and began to unfold it.

"What is the little skin-eater doing?" Anton Hellebore actually sounded frightened. "Why doesn't someone arrest him, kill him? How did he get control over the mirror-system… ?"

Button lifted the decorated stick and held it up to the thousands upon thousands who must have been watching him. When Primrose had first brought it out Theo had been close enough to touch it, this object that almost everyone in Faerie must now be watching. He had wondered then if such an ordinary-looking thing might be a weapon. He had wondered why it had been worth the bother.

"Here is our word," said Button. "Here is the record, the embodiment of our ancient pledge." His face, already sober, became even more unreadable. His eyes closed. "Knowing full well what I do, and doing it willingly — joyfully! — I set my people free of this bargain with their oppressors." His clawed hands held out the stick. He snapped it in half and dropped the pieces onto the stones in front of him.

"Today our ancestors are smiling." Mud Bug Button opened his yellow eyes again. "Today you are free. Hem. Today every one of you is free, no matter who you are, no matter what you have been told. Make of that freedom what you will."

Then he was gone, replaced once more by scenes of the city's streets filled with uneasy people, goblins and many other sorts of fairies, while commentators rushed back to fill the mirror-void with excited analysis.

"A lot of people are going to be tasting iron before this day's over," was all Anton Hellebore said, but he looked surprisingly shaken. He ordered the driver to pick up speed. They moved onto smaller streets so they could avoid the restless crowds that now seemed to be at every major intersection.

Button's strange publicity coup had lifted Theo's spirits a little but the effects were short-lived. The miserable facts remained: Button had admitted earlier that he did not have enough would-be revolutionaries at the bridge to overcome even one of the ruling houses' security forces. If he thought he could inspire others in the City to rise up and join them, then he was reckoning without the terror that just one of Hellebore's tame dragons would bring. How could anyone stand up to something like that, how could they fight it with rocks and sticks and shovels? Hundreds, even thousands would be carbonized on the spot and the uprising would be over.

Still, the streets were unquestionably filling — more with people wanting reassurance and answers than with hot-eyed revolutionaries determined to follow some strange little goblin to an honorable death, Theo felt sure, but it certainly seemed to have the ruling houses worried. The mirror-talkers were reporting anxiously about riots that had broken out in the Barrows district on the outskirts of the City and a workers' action of some kind at the Eastwater docks. Even the fire in Dowd's waterfront storehouse was interpreted as another attack on established order — not surprising because it was burning so fiercely now. The images showed the flames billowing a hundred feet high and a nixie man from the local fire department saying it was so hot his men couldn't approach it, that it was all they could do to keep it from spreading farther and that he couldn't imagine them getting it under control for days.

Anton Hellebore laughed a little at that, but in general he did not seem very happy.

His own brief moment of hope now dissipated, Theo slid back into despair. He saw Hellebore House getting larger and larger before them, jutting against the harsh gray light of the smoky sky, and felt as though he were observing something happening to someone else, an old movie or something on the television news back home, half-seen while walking from room to room. He knew that it was his own death he was approaching, but even so he could only watch the building grow larger and wonder dully how long he would have to wait until all the horror was over.

Dowd helped them kill Cat's baby. Our baby. Whatever they want from me, they'll get it. Button and the rest will be burned into black cornflakes and blow away on the wind.

Something pushed at his thoughts like a memory trying to assert itself, but it was no memory, just a blank shove against his mind, a pinching ghost. He twitched and the annis nipped him gently, almost playfully. Fire danced again in his veins.

However unlikely the success of Button's revolution might be, Hellebore House was clearly not taking anything lightly. As they drove down the long street in front of the building — little more than a vast driveway, really — Theo could see that the concrete apron around the skyscraper was lined with vehicles like theirs and open coaches full of armed and armored men. Strange shapes like concave butterfly wings dangled from wires strung high overhead, some kind of communication array, perhaps. A grim purposefulness seemed to have hardened the faces of all the constables and other fairies they passed.

Wartime, Theo thought. Going to the mattresses. Button would need a division of tanks to get anywhere near here.

A spasm of unreality suddenly gripped him so hard as the vehicle stopped that Theo thought the annis had bitten him again. For a moment he was both inside his body looking at the tusk-shaped skyscraper and looking down on the utility coach from above. That dreadfully familiar, intrusive presence was back inside his head — but he wasn't dreaming now. He was all too terribly awake, and something was rubbing up against his mind, clearly enjoying the way it made his thoughts squirm.

Soon. He felt it rather than heard it, not a word but a communication — a cold, amused promise. Soon. Then the presence was gone and he was alone in his own head again, weak and shaking.

Tansy finished talking on his shell. "The guards are holding the third lift for us."

"I didn't need you to tell me that." Hellebore stretched out his long legs. For a fairy, he was quite ungainly. He flicked an uninterested glance at Theo, then down at sleeping Cumber Sedge. "If you want to make yourself useful, Tansy, take that thing off the ferisher. If Father wants to talk to him, he'll need to be awake first. Father doesn't like waiting."

As Tansy began to remove the gluey, clinging mask from Cumber's face, the coach slowed. Theo felt certain that if he went into Hellebore House he would never come out again, that the malign presence he had sensed was waiting there for him, that the tower standing like a stump of broken legbone would be the last place he ever saw. It would swallow him like the sea monster swallowed Jonah — but Theo did not believe that any god would deliver him up again.

He straightened. If there was ever a time to try something, one last chance…

But somehow either the mere thought or perhaps the minute tensing of his muscles upset the annis. It clamped its wet, needle-toothed mouth on his wrist again and dropped him screaming to the floor, muscles in spasm.

He was barely conscious when they pulled him out of the back of the van and dragged him across the lobby of Hellebore House into the elevator, aware of little except that he was lost beyond all hope.

39 STEPCHILD

The blurriness of pain began to recede as Theo stumbled out of the elevator with a helmeted guard holding his arms on either side. The long hallway came into focus as though appearing out of the fog. Anton Hellebore slowly leaned down — to Theo's dazed mind the tall fairy seemed twice normal height — and seized his face in a grip that was much more powerful than the pale, soft hands would suggest. He pulled down one of Theo's lower eyelids with a cold finger so he could examine his eyes.

"Look at that," he said cheerfully. "So many of the rootlets of blood are broken that the white of the eye turns quite pink — it's as though they tried to jump out of the sockets. What do you think, Tansy? There must be many undiscovered uses for annis venom in this exciting world of ours. Perhaps we should make that your new project."

Tansy was clutching his own face as though trying to hold broken pieces together. "Certainly, Master Hellebore," he said through clenched teeth. "If you wish." He sounded like he would have agreed to being shot out of a cannon to avoid talking.

Theo heard himself make a very strange noise — a kind of bubbling groan, very distant — and then realized that it was not him at all but Cumber Sedge waking up. Almost comatose for hours, the ferisher had avoided being savaged by his own annis-cuffs, but from the noises he was making, recovering from a cauling didn't sound very nice either.

"What… ?" Cumber looked around blearily. His knees buckled but he had a pair of personal constable-wardens just like Theo's and they kept him from falling.

"We're in Hellebore House," Theo said. "Don't move or the thing around your wrists will bite you. And don't say anything." It was ultimately pointless, but at least their captors wouldn't get anything blurted out by accident. Make them work for it, he told himself, but that made him consider what kind of work that might be and his legs went rubbery. The hell with it — who am I kidding? I'll tell them anything they want to know. Nobody stands up to torture forever, so it's just a question of when you wave the white flag.

The simple, unmarked door at the end of the hall looked like nothing so much as the entrance to a janitor's closet — the type of place people got dragged into for this kind of thing because there were buckets and tools and concrete floors with drains. "Look," Theo said suddenly. "I'll tell you whatever you want to know. Tell your daddy that, Hellebore. Just let the ferisher and the little sprite go. You don't need them — you're only after them because of me."

Anton Hellebore flicked him a look of contempt. "My… daddy… may not want to talk to you. He may just want to cut pieces off you because you did something that annoyed him — your friends too, for all I know. If you think you can bargain you're as stupid as your uncle, or whatever that Remover creature really was. Your side lost. You are an orphan. You have no power and you make no deals."

As if to silently illustrate power and access, the door at the end of the hall swung open. Theo's guards let go of his wrists and one of them put a boot in his rump and shoved him through.

His hands annis-wrapped, Theo could not keep his balance; he stumbled and fell, then struggled up onto his knees. At first it was dark except for a circle of light that touched the wide desk but illuminated only the single flower at its center. The light grew brighter as a man stood up behind the desk. In person, he was quite strikingly beautiful — a god of the underworld. It was easy to see where Anton Hellebore got his height, but there was none of the son's sullen immaturity in the father's pale face. For a long moment the endlessly black eyes regarded him in silence.

Pleased to meet you, Theo could not help thinking, the old Stones song ringing in his mind. Hope you guessed my name. A moment later he wondered, Is this the one who's been in my head? He seemed powerful enough, and more than cruel enough, but for some reason Theo didn't think it was so. Out loud, and with his voice only shaking a little, he said, "And you must be Satan, Lord of Darkness."

Nidrus Hellebore actually smiled a little. "And you must be the last of the Violets. What a tiresome family. Like birds — musical, flighty, shrill. But the nest has long since fallen from the tree and nearly all the eggs are shattered." He shook his head, dismissing the tiresome business of the destruction of an entire clan. "The rest of you out there may also come into the office. Do not waste any more of my time than is necessary."

His son and Tansy entered, along with the four constables, two of whom were still propping up Cumber. Nidrus Hellebore raised an eyebrow. "Guards, you are dismissed."

"Are you sure, Lord Hellebore… ?" Tansy began and then abruptly fell silent. The constables showed an open-palm salute before marching out.

"They're both bound, Father," said Anton Hellebore with a touch of pride. "Helpless. Something new of mine…"

Lord Hellebore came out from behind the desk and moved behind Theo. It was hard to keep still, stinging annis or no stinging annis — just the proximity of the fairy lord brought a deep chill of unease, like knowing Dracula was examining the back of your neck. "I don't think we'll need these anymore," Hellebore said. Something flicked Theo's wrists. A moment later the pressure of the annis cuffs was gone and his wrists were prickling with returning circulation.

"But Father… !"

"Don't be petulant, Antoninus. Do you really think that a physical restraint around their arms is better than what I can do?" All of a sudden Lord Hellebore was in front of Theo again. His hand came up so quickly that Theo did not even begin to flinch until after Hellebore's finger had tapped his forehead. He seemed to have put some kind of freezing dot on Theo's skin, something so cold it burned, but before even a second had passed it became less intense and yet somehow wider, spreading across his skin and into the muscles, tangling itself around Theo's spine like a climbing thorn. "You will go wherever I tell you to go," Hellebore said. "You will do whatever I tell you to do. For now, you will stand and listen and speak only when I ask you a question."

"Die, you corpse-faced bastard," was what Theo wanted to say, but as in those nightmares where he tried desperately to scream but couldn't, only a tiny whistle of air escaped his mouth. As he struggled against silence, Hellebore moved in front of Cumber. The ferisher's eyes were wide with terror.

"What does this one know?" he asked.

"Perhaps nothing, Lord Hellebore," said Tansy. "We brought them straight to you."

"I brought them," Anton proclaimed. "I was in charge."

"Yes, and you made some other decisions as well," said his father. "Not very good ones, in fact." He touched Cumber's forehead and repeated the words he had said to Theo, then made a broader gesture. Lights began to gleam against the dark walls, or perhaps even within the walls themselves; Theo could suddenly see that the space was quite large, that the desk was in one corner of an octagonal room some forty yards across.

The walls were windows — a complete circle of windows providing a spectacular penthouse view of the City spreading away on all sides, a view that made Hellebore House appear to be what it had now become in fact, the hub of Faerie. Staring at the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree cityscape, Theo found that he still had a little freedom of movement, could move his head and arms, even shuffle his feet a bit. He tried to take a small, inconspicuous step backward and discovered that he didn't have that much freedom: he was held to the spot where he stood as though magnetized.

Hellebore gazed at a patch of light across town that blazed like a highway flare. "I see a fire in the warehouse district, Antoninus. Why is there a fire?"

"The Remover's place was f-full of traps." The younger Hellebore was suddenly fighting a stammer. "I… w-we couldn't… I had to…"

Hellebore's voice was ice. "We will talk about it later. I am not pleased. Just now, however, we have more important things to do." He looked up at nothing at all for a silent moment. "Ah. The others have arrived and are on their way up." He turned his queerly uninterested stare on Theo. "You are struggling to say something. You may speak. Use the chance wisely."

Theo swallowed the insults he wanted to spit at him. "You've got a friend of mine. In a jar. May I see her?"

Hellebore considered for a moment, then nodded his head at Tansy, who ran to Hellebore's massive desk and lifted out the bell-shaped jar from the place it had been hidden. "You may walk to the desk and have your reunion."

Theo dimly heard Anton Hellebore protesting, heard his father's low, amused voice replying, but he did not care about any of it. He moved toward the desk, feeling altogether normal except when he tried to step more than a little bit out of the way, at which point a kind of numb cramp set in until he turned his foot back in the right direction again.

He stopped in front of the desk, more or less of his own volition. She was standing with her tiny hands pressed against the inside of the bell jar. "Oh, Theo, I am sorry," she said. He could barely hear her.

Tears filled his eyes. "It's my fault, not yours."

She said something else he could not make out.

"What?"

"You may open the jar," Hellebore told him.

"Father, do you think that's wise?"

"Open the jar."

Theo only wished he had done it sooner, so that it felt like his own idea, his own gesture. His hands moved toward the heavy glass vessel and lifted it away from the base. Applecore took a moment to fan her wings and then sprang into the air to hover in front of him. She was crying too, and that upset him more than had any of the pain inflicted on him. "I'm sorry I dragged you into this shite, Theo, really I am."

"What are you talking about? None of this was your fault."

"I was the one who brought you out of your world in the first place." She was pale and bony-thin and had bruised-looking blue circles under her eyes.

"It's good to see you, Applecore," he said quietly. "It really is. I thought… Cumber and I thought you were dead."

She darted a pitying look over at Cumber Sedge, then stiffened when she saw who stood beside him. "Tansy," she said slowly. "What in the name of the bloody Trees are you doing here, you traitor? I heard Hellebore talking about you — you sold us all out, you lyin', murderin'… !"

Before Theo or anyone else could move she had darted across the room and was buzzing around Quillius Tansy like a maddened hornet. He swatted at her. "Stop her! My face, she's going to… Somebody kill her!"

Hellebore spoke in a deep, untroubled voice. "Walk to the window."

Theo wondered who the fairy lord was talking to, and understood only when his own legs began to carry him toward the nearest panel of the City panorama. He tried to fight, but could not — it was as though Hellebore had reached directly into his spine and was manipulating his nerves like the strings of a marionette. The view of the City shimmered and distorted, stretching, bending, then began to dissolve like some ultraslow view of a soap bubble popping. There was another window behind it with an identical City-view spreading below. Hellebore must have mirror-screens in front of the windows, so he can look at things beside the view, Theo thought absently. He's got spiders, dragons, all the modern conveniences… Then the outer window began to open, sliding up like a rising eyelid, and Theo could feel cold air slapping at his face.

"Stop!" Applecore shouted. "All right, Hellebore, I'm off Tansy — just make him stop!"

Theo took three more steps before halting at the frame of the open window. Each time he swayed in the wind he could feel how easy it would be to tilt too far forward and simply tumble into space, go spinning down through the air to the ground many hundred feet below. A few small drops of rain patted against his cheeks and forehead. If Hellebore misjudged how long and how steadily he could stand on his tired, tired legs, there was nowhere to go but down…

"Sprite, I allowed you out of the jar because now that we have the last of the Violets in our custody you no longer matter," said Lord Hellebore. "But when you attack one of my employees you become an annoyance. Rather than waste our time and impair our dignity chasing you, I instead remind you who wields the power."

Applecore was still hovering above Tansy, just out of his reach. "But you wouldn't go through all that trouble to get him and then chuck him out a window, now would you?" Her defiance was not entirely convincing.

"There is some truth to that," Hellebore said. "But I could have him pull out one of his own eyes without impairing his usefulness at all. I'd prefer not to have a mess like that in my office, however, so if you irritate me I will simply throw the ferisher out a window instead. Now I am through talking to you."

Applecore looked back at him hard — as hard as a person her size could look at the master of all Faerie, anyway — then zipped across the room and landed on Theo's shoulder. "Get away from there now, Theo," she said. "Please."

"You may step back from the window," said Hellebore, and Theo suddenly found that he could. He took a few steps backward, then his knees finally gave out and he half-sank, half-fell to the floor, clutching the carpet as though at any moment the room might turn sideways and send him tumbling back toward that open window, that leap into nothing.

"Lord Foxglove and Lord Thornapple are in the outer office," announced a crisply inhuman voice.

"They are late. Send them in." Hellebore turned to his sulking son. "For the time being, I think we should find some secure accommodation for Master Violet, or whatever he is to be called."

"Yes, Father." The younger Hellebore seemed to perk up a little.

"But not in the laboratories. Do you understand me? He is not to be experimented upon. I have far more important uses for him."

The outer door opened and two well-dressed fairy men walked in, both lean, both in that indeterminate middle age that, as far as Theo could tell, indicated they had reached at least a few centuries of age. One had reddish-gold hair, straight and hanging to his collar in a way that in any other city would seem intentionally foppish. He wore a huge medallion on the chest of his tailored suit and had a certain watchfulness in his manner that Theo guessed might be the fairy equivalent of nerves. The other, his unnaturally black hair so dark as to seem dyed, but still no blacker than his spidersilk suit, and with bushy white eyebrows in weird contrast, was clearly Poppy's father. Theo did not have much attention left for anything but minute-to-minute survival, but it was still very disturbing to see the face of the woman he had come to care for so much reinterpreted in her father's stony mask.

Thornapple looked Theo over with some interest. "So this is the Violet heir. He does not look like much."

Your daughter likes me a lot more than she likes you, buddy, was what Theo wanted to say, but of course he didn't.

"Your pardon, Nidrus," said the golden-haired one, Lord Foxglove. "We were delayed. The streets are full of troublemakers."

"I know." Hellebore waved a white hand in casual dismissal. "We will find the little goblin soon, I think. A depressing public execution is the best example for the shirkers and ne'er-do-wells blocking our thoroughfares."

Thornapple gave him a curious look. "Have you not heard? It is more than the unemployed and the usual rabble-rousers. The goblins are rioting, Hellebore, rioting! They have set fires all through the Sunlight district and come flooding out of Goblintown. At this moment there are thousands of them surrounding New Mound House and threatening to burn down the Parliament! At least twenty constables have been killed already. By the Grove, have you been ignoring your calls all day?"

Hellebore for the first time seemed surprised. "Because of a broken stick? Are you telling me that the only thing that has kept the goblins orderly was some ancient treaty?" He turned and flicked his fingers at the windows. The cityscape shimmered and vanished as the mirrors came on, the elevated view replaced by street-level perspectives of angry crowds fighting with armored constables. Theo guessed that an ornate, multistory building behind the scene of conflict, a little like a white, gray and gold wedding cake, must be the place they called New Mound House, the parliamentary building. He was surprised and pleased to see that it was not only goblins who seemed to be fighting against the authorities — many types of fairies were there, including some that, except for their wings, looked not much different from Hellebore and his peers. They had thrown together barricades across the streets and built fires in trash cans. Rocks and other objects were banging off the constables' shields, but for the moment it seemed a bit of a standoff.

"It won't do them or us any good," Applecore whispered in Theo's ear. "The Flowers are too strong. But it's grand to see, isn't it?"

"Oberon's Blood." Hellebore stared at the scene, his mouth twisted as though he had eaten something very sour. "Set fires in our City, will they? Then I will see Goblintown burned to its foundations and the ground seeded with salt. A whole goblin generation will… will…" His eyes narrowed. "What… is… that?"

A disturbance was eddying through the crowd of goblins and their allies, a surge as though the mob were some unicellular animal about to divide itself and reproduce. A gap formed and people threw themselves out of the way, barely avoiding the mounted riders who crashed out onto the street of the paved no-man's land in front of the startled police. Theo bit back a shout of surprise. He had seen these riders before, and also their single-horned mounts.

"Grims!" snarled Foxglove. "Where in the name of the Elder Trees did they come from?"

They were weirdly stirring in their bright furs and feathers, something not just out of an earlier, wilder era of Faerie but out of a dream, a full-blown nightmare. Spears and spiral horns flashed and bell-mouthed rifles gouted fire as the howling troop surged forward. Theo thought that with their gleaming yellow eyes and painted faces stranger than any mask, the wild goblins looked altogether uncontrollable, like all of Hallowe'en lifted up and flung forward by a hurricane wind. The constables who stood in their way with riot shields locked together did their best to stand up to the hundreds of spear-wielding riders and razor-hooved unicorns, but the grims had the advantage of momentum; within moments they had crashed through the police line, scattering the constables, spearing dozens and crushing as many more under their mounts' kicking, silver-hooved feet. Heartened by the charge, the mob surged forward with a rising, rumbling shout of gleeful bloodlust that even through the mirror-stream lifted the hairs on Theo's neck, and fairy and goblin alike threw themselves on the reeling Parliamentary Guards.

"Where did the grims come from?" Foxglove demanded again. "How could all those cursed hill-country vermin have got into the City?"

Thornapple had one hand on his ear as though he were listening to a headphone, although of course there was no headphone. "It is not just Strawflower Square," he said. "I have reports that they are all over the City. Larkspur's secretary says that they have surrounded his family tower in Longshadow, that wild goblins have destroyed the guardhouse and set the grounds on fire."

"It can't be!" said Foxglove.

Hellebore did not waste his time protesting the obvious. He walked to his desk and touched the side of it. "I want to speak to Snakeroot at the caves," he said. "Tell him this is a Class Four alert. I need all the available animals."

"Black iron," said Thornapple, surprised, "are you really going to use them again?"

"Yes," said Hellebore. "Would you like me to send them to Thornapple House, too? No? Then be silent."

Theo barely listened, staring at the screen with a muted joy. It would be no help to him or his friends, he knew, but it was good to see somebody striking back at Hellebore and his crew, to see them alarmed and forced to scramble. It was Button's work, it had to be. Somehow he had managed to smuggle wild grims into the city… wild grims and their unicorns, too…

"Oh my God," he said quietly. "It was us!"

"What?" Applecore leaned in close.

"Nothing. I'll tell you later… if there is a later." He didn't want to miss any of what was going on, but he felt sure that, with the help of Streedy Nettle's strange gift, the entrance permit to the City he and Sedge had obtained for one individual and one livestock animal had become multiplied. My God! Button must have had them coming into the City through every single checkpoint, a dozen here, a dozen there… He felt a quiet glow of pride that he had helped throw this particular monkey wrench into Hellebore's smooth-running machinery.

Indeed, it was turning out to be a fairly good-sized wrench. It was now almost impossible to make complete sense of what was happening on the ring of mirror-screens: several small blazes had sprung up around the edges of New Mound House, a few even on the roof. Theo had no idea how anyone had managed to get fire up there until he saw one of the wild goblins lean back in his saddle and put a flaming arrow through one of the parliament building's upstairs windows. The protestors and the mounted grims seemed to have control of the field with all the parliamentary constables killed, lying wounded, or in retreat. The grims were forming up to ride again, leaving the protestors in a spasm of joyful destruction, uprooting benches and starting to smash in the front doors of New Mound House. A cascade of golden bugs sluiced out of the broken doorframe and skittered away across the steps, following each other in blind compulsion right into a pile of flaming trash. Pale, anxious faces peered down from the upstairs windows. Theo thought he should feel sorry for them — many of them were probably nothing but functionaries, trapped now between fires and an angry mob — but at the moment he had problems of his own.

A word, a horrifying word, yanked his attention back to his captors.

"But if you bring in the dragons," said Thornapple, "the destruction may keep us pinned here for days."

Theo flinched as though he had been punched in the stomach. That big black snake squirming across the sky…

"We cannot wait that long, Nidrus, you know that," Thornapple continued. "You said yourself there is only a brief time when the invocation will work. Let Monkshood and his constables handle this. Revenge must wait, I insist."

Hellebore looked at the First Councillor of Faerie with a face so hard and expressionless that Theo saw for the first time how too much rationality could be a form of madness. "I do not think you can insist, Aulus. You are right that the destruction will interfere with our plans, but that does not mean we will refrain from teaching these skin-eaters a lesson. It merely means we must move up our schedule." He touched his desk again. "Ready three battle-coaches. We are leaving now." He smiled at his co-conspirator, who did not smile back. It was one of the creepiest things Theo had ever seen. If he were Thornapple, Theo thought, he'd be planning to find himself another world to live in as soon as possible, because there was clearly only going to be one big dog in this particular kennel before much longer. "We will proceed to the Cathedral. In fact, if we are lucky, we will not only accomplish our main task, but also pass one or two very fine vantage points along the way where we can pause to watch the punishment being administered to that ungrateful rabble."

A moment later half a dozen armed constables and a pair of ogre guards entered, their appearance so sudden that even Thornapple and Foxglove were visibly startled. Hellebore was still issuing orders to the air.

"And prepare the child. Yes, now. We will be there in moments." He turned and walked toward the door. All the others, even the Flower lords, fell in behind him without protest.

Two constables dragged Cumber toward the door. Two more moved to take Theo's arms, but there was no need: he was already following Lord Hellebore like a dog on an invisible leash. One of the constables swatted half-heartedly at Applecore where she sat on Theo's shoulder, but she pulled herself into the tangle of his hair at the side of his neck. Theo wanted to say something brave and reassuring to her but he couldn't. Even though it appeared they were actually going to leave Hellebore House, something he hadn't believed would happen, it was all still too hopeless. Nidrus Hellebore's spell of control lay on top of him like a lead blanket — something he could carry as he walked, but just barely.

Theo quickly lost track of the twists and turns of the hallways, the doors that appeared from nowhere in empty halls, but although the air had grown notably warmer they had been walking for only a few minutes when a figure in a white cloak appeared in the hallway before them. For a fairy, he was displaying a great deal of emotion, most of it nervousness. "My lord! I did not expect… That is, I thought we had until tomorrow at least — the portents were all taken for tomorrow, the scrying, the oneiromantic metering…"

Hellebore barely looked at him. "Is he ready?"

"In a moment. He is being dressed to go outside. He was just finishing his meal — we were caught by surprise…"

"Then that is all I need from you, weft-Iris. You may return to your other work."

The fairy in white still seemed agitated. "But… but my lord, if it is to be today, do you not wish me to accompany you? To accompany the child, that is? There is so much about him… that is, I have worked so long and hard…"

"If we succeed you will be rewarded. Go now."

Weft-Iris stared for a moment, then ran his hands through his hair, bowed, and stepped away through a door. Nidrus Hellebore stood waiting, patient as a statue, but Foxglove and Thornapple looked a little uncomfortable. Cumber Sedge gave out a quiet whimper of pain and despair.

Theo felt something hovering over his thoughts like a storm cloud, moving nearer each moment. Every cell of his body seemed to contract in fear. Only the guards' firm grip on his arms kept him from dropping bonelessly to the floor. It's coming. It was very close now. He felt sick, hopeless. The thing that's been waiting for me. The thing in my dreams…

The door opened and two fairy women led out a surprisingly small figure in a thick hooded cloak and equally heavy pants and shoes — something that looked for all the world like a child setting out on the fairyland equivalent of an arctic trek. The women's skin gleamed with moisture; their movements were sluggish and their eyes heavy, as though they had been drugged, but as they adjusted the cloak and hood they still seemed to go out of their way to avoid touching the little figure. Theo knew just how they felt — at this moment he wanted nothing more than to put distance between himself and this small, silent thing.

"Is there anything else he needs?" Hellebore asked, betraying impatience. "It is time."

The hood fell back, revealing a pink, childish face and curly brown hair. Despite the enormity of his fear Theo's attention snagged for a moment on a detail, a little spot of blood on the boy's lower lip and the tiny arm and wingtip that protruded from his mouth. The child sucked it in, chewed, swallowed, and then smiled a dreadful, satisfied smile.

"I am ready, Stepfather." The brown eyes turned from Hellebore to Theo. "And here you are at last, my… half brother. We meet face to face."

For a dizzying, nauseating moment Theo felt certain the child-creature was in his head again, that he was seeing through two sets of eyes simultaneously, both the child looking at Theo and Theo looking at the child, like two mirrors facing each other. Then he realized he was seeing his own features, his family's features, in the face of this little monstrosity, as if it were all the punchline of some dreadful joke. It was like staring at one of his own elementary school pictures on a hit of bad acid, the obscenity of his own nose — his mother's thin nose — with what was still a childish upturn, his father's stolid jaw gleaming beneath the oiled pink skin. But the eyes… except for the color, they were nothing to do with his family, or with anything human. They were as dead as something in a mortuary jar.

"Oh, save the Elder Trees…" Applecore said in a shocked whisper.

The last piece of Dowd's story suddenly fell into place. He's the changeling. No, I'm the changeling — he's my parents'… he's the real child, the lost child… Theo suddenly jackknifed at the waist and threw up what little there was in his stomach.

"Not such a happy reunion, I fear," said the boy. "I hoped for more, since we shared so many interesting dreams. We are almost twins, after all."

Hellebore made a noise of disgust. "Clean that up," he told the two dazed women. "We are taking the boy with us now." He looked at the Terrible Child for a moment. "Shared dreams?" He barked an angry laugh. "It seems you two have a deeper bond than I have been told."

"I am often bored, Stepfather. It was a small private pleasure."

Hellebore shook his head. "I do not like surprises. This… connection makes for uncertainty at a time we cannot afford any."

"He is weak, Stepfather, and I grow stronger by the hour."

"Still." He frowned. "The Remover might have been able to answer some questions about the exact nature of the relationship, but thanks to my eldest son, we have lost that resource."

"But Father!" Anton Hellebore protested, "I did it for you! I did it because…"

"Close your mouth — I am tired of your whining. Everyone into the coaches. We have urgent business. Tansy, you will travel with me and our long-lost Violet… and the child, of course. I have questions about what happened at the Remover's house on the waterfront."

"I can tell you everything you need to know, Father," protested Anton, but was ignored.

"Things have changed, apparently," said the child. "We are leaving early."

"There is resistance." Hellebore turned to the others. "Come, we are wasting time. I am about to make an example of some malcontents."

The group began to move rapidly down the corridor. Theo, still staggering, had to be all but carried by his guards. The little obscenity reached up and wrapped his hot, wet hand around Theo's, who was too weak to pull free of the surprisingly firm grip.

"I have finally met my true brother." The Terrible Child again showed his perfect teeth, which only made the spot of blood on his mouth harder to ignore. "It is too bad we will be separated again so soon."

40 STRAWFLOWER SQUARE

Even after all the oddities he had seen in Faerie, the creatures standing at attention outside the three huge battle-coaches in the garage caught Theo by surprise: with long, gleaming snouts and bulbous, insectoid eyes they looked like Hollywood extraterrestrials. They were doonie drivers, he realized, dressed in some kind of battle-rig, with helmets over their long equine heads. The vehicles themselves were even bulkier than the utility coaches that had brought them into Hellebore House, with heavy leaf-textured armor around the sides and front and rear bumpers, but with tops that seemed to be a single dome of black glass.

His guardian constables thrust him into a seat in the middle coach, shoving him so hard that he feared for Applecore, who was still clinging to his neck. Lord Hellebore and Tansy and a pair of ogre bodyguards climbed in after them, the ogres even bulkier than was usual with their massive kind because they were wearing some kind of flak jackets. The Terrible Child entered last.

"You will stay where you are until I tell you otherwise," Hellebore instructed Theo, who found that to be quite true: he could move his head, even adjust his position in small ways, but he sure as hell wasn't going to be getting up and going anywhere.

At first he couldn't make out anything through the dome that surrounded them except the dim, marsh-gas glow of the lights in the garage ceiling, but as they came up the ramp and out into the filtered sunlight he could see all around with complete clarity, as though they rode in an open-top car and nothing stood between him and the world except a pair of polarized sunglasses. Nothing seemed unusual inside the compound as the lines of Hellebore guards moved quickly and efficiently to the side of the road to let them pass, but when they rode out between the blocky gatehouses Theo could see how things had changed even just during the time they had been indoors. The streets of the Moonlight district were crowded too, now, and the mixture of goblins and other fairy-folk from the lower end of the social ladder looked angry.

Although a little surprised by the appearance of the Hellebore coaches, some of the mob scrambled out into the road to block the way. The battle-coaches simply drove on; Theo saw at least one goat-horned fairy fall and disappear beneath the wheels of the front vehicle. Rather than frightening off the rest of the throng, it made them angry, and brought many more of them surging out from the sidewalks. The lead battle-coach struck a half-dozen more people before it had to stop. The rioters began to press in tightly on all sides, surrounding Theo's coach as well. Faces flattened against the dome, an array as bizarre as a Bosch painting. Fists thumped on the doors. A few bolder members of the crowd were climbing onto the hood.

"There are too many, my lord," the driver announced from the front compartment.

"Drive over them," said Hellebore.

"There are too many," another voice said, stubborn despite obvious fear at contradicting his master. "This is Coach One. We already have bodies jammed in the wheel wells. A few more and it will slow us down so much we will be undergoing unacceptable risk — they're dragging paving stones out down the street to block the way. We can survive a few firebombs, my lord, but if we're stuck in one place, eventually the heat-dispersal charms will lose their effectiveness…"

"Use the guns."

"But there are hundreds of bystanders trapped in this street, not just the ones blocking our way…"

"Use the guns or I will have you thrown to the mob." Hellebore sat back in his seat. "Now, Tansy, tell me what happened at the Remover's. I have not had time to review the transcripts very thoroughly."

A loud noise like a bandsaw penetrated the bubble of Theo's vehicle as something sprayed from the sides and front of the lead car, turning the closest rioters into little more than a mist of red, knocking down scores of others for what seemed like hundred of yards in each direction. People were fighting to get away now, sliding off the hood of Theo's coach, knocking over the slower wounded in their hurry to escape and stepping on those who had fallen, dozens of fleeing fairies skidding and stumbling on the blood-spattered road. The lead car lurched forward but there were still too many upright bodies in the way and the industrial whine rose again. Something ticked onto the hood of Theo's coach, rolled halfway up the window, then slid down again. It was not just a bullet, he saw in a brief glimpse, but more like a tiny, rigid lamprey, its toothy, circular jaw irising open and closed even as it fell away into the road. Theo's stomach convulsed and hot bile rose into his throat, but he had nothing left in his stomach to vomit. Within moments the convoy was bumping along once more, driving over still-twitching bodies while the crowd ran screaming in front of them. People on the roofs or in upper windows flung down stones that thumped on the coach's hardened dome like a drunk percussionist.

Theo could actually feel the pleasure emanating from the small figure beside him at all this destructive upheaval, waves of glee pushing against his thoughts like buffeting winds.

Hellebore seemed hardly to notice any of it, but Tansy was clearly finding it difficult to talk. The Daisy-lord still had the look of a porcelain doll whose face had been repaired with faulty glue, and it seemed to be giving him pain. His stare flicked from side to side, drawn to the carnage all around. "My lord, please, I… I thought your son acted with your express orders…"

"He did, up to a point. It is the point where he diverged that I wish to ascertain."

"We… we listened with the spider for a while. The Remover said… he said…" Tansy's voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper and Theo could no longer hear what he was saying.

Here, Theo. The pull was as strong as Hellebore's spell of command but more subtle, like the compulsion to stare at a terrible accident. Look here. Theo turned toward the child.

"Do you know what they call me?" the boy asked out loud. He had pulled his thick cloak around him as though the car were a sled racing across the Russian steppes, only his small round face and the tips of his stubby fingers visible. The eyes held Theo's gaze; his helplessness terrified him. "They call me the Terrible Child. It's a title, really, not a name. Because of course I have a name, even though no one uses it. You know what it is, don't you?"

Theo tried to answer but a nightmare weight was pressing on his chest and he could not breathe deeply enough.

"It's Theo Vilmos." The child laughed, showing the tip of his tongue between his small, shiny teeth. "My name is Theodore Patrick Vilmos. You were given my name and my parents, but they were never truly yours. You are just another Violet child, the last and least of a dead family. You know, I see my parents sometimes in your dreams — Anna and Peter. I make them rise up from your memories just so I can see what they looked like, so I can laugh as I watch you struggling to apologize to them even while you hate them for your own shortcomings."

Sickened to hear their names out of that mouth, Theo finally found the air to make his voice work. "They… weren't… your parents. You might have been their child to begin with, but… but you're not anybody's anything now. You're… a freak. A messed-up, inhuman freak."

The boy nodded, not at all displeased. "I am the only one like me, that is true. There are worse things to be, of course — average, or less than average. A failure. A nonentity. Speaking of which, did you know I was with you in Daffodil House as you stumbled around in the smoke and dust? I was watching it all through your eyes, drinking your thoughts. Oh, the poor little fairy-folk! Oh, the destruction! How sad! I drank your fear, too. It was a very pleasant experience, actually, so at least you're good for something."

Theo tried to strike at the child, but could not lift his hand more than a few inches off his lap. Struggling hopelessly, he let out a little moan of frustration and despair.

The boy smiled. "Even now, you are only still alive because of what other people did years ago, not because of anything you have done yourself." He paused for a moment and sniffed. "That sprite is still with you, isn't she, hiding somewhere? I can smell her." He smacked his lips and opened his eyes wide in a grotesque parody of juvenile pleasure. "Yum! It's too bad I've already eaten quite a lot for my afternoon meal — she would be very sweet, I think. And crunchy."

Disgust overcame Theo's exhaustion and horror, even gave him a little strength. "You're proud of not being human, aren't you? You enjoyed it when they killed our child — the baby that Cat was carrying. Eamonn Dowd might have been a bastard, might even have helped, but he didn't enjoy it like you did. Yeah, I can feel it — this thought-drinking thing doesn't just go one way. Jesus Christ, and you think being like you is better than being me?" Theo took a shuddering breath. It was difficult to speak, but he couldn't just let the thing smirk at him.

"I am what I am." The smile flashed like cold bone. "I have lived a thousand lives in my short time, seen a million indescribable things while you have trudged through a single meaningless life and muddled even that. Your pointless span will end today, but mine will go on. I have been in preparation for this since the first hour I was brought into Faerie. One day I will shake the very secrets of the universe down like fruit from a tree."

That it was his parents' faces combined here in this soulless thing, more than it being a younger version of his own face, more than any words it spoke, finally brought tears to Theo's eyes. He had not done any better a job of loving his mother and father than they had him, but there had been some love there, however muted and confused. This abomination made it all a mockery. He summoned up a little more strength. "I'll destroy you."

"Don't talk to it, Theo — oh, by the Trees, don't talk to it," Applecore whispered in his ear. "It'll only poison you."

He grunted, too tired to talk more in any case.

The child laughed and turned back to the window. Destroy me? I think not. The stream of alien thought pushed its way into Theo's mind, a cold and painful intruder against which he was helpless. You are not really Septimus Violet, and you are certainly not Theo Vilmos. In fact, you are nothing.

They had reached the top of a hill at the edge of the Moonlight district, the street crowds long gone behind them, when Hellebore directed the convoy to stop and the three coaches pulled up onto the grass of a small, manicured park. The City lay below them, threads of smoke rising in many places now, especially down by the waterfront where, true to Anton Hellebore's prediction, the Remover's warehouse seemed still to be burning like the heart of the sun. Another large blaze raged in the center of town near the ivory spike of Hellebore House.

"Why have we stopped, lord?" asked Tansy. "Are we under attack?"

"They are on their way," Hellebore said, although it didn't seem to explain anything. He raised his voice, perhaps talking to the invisible driver of the coach. "Give me my birds. I wish a closer look at Strawflower Square."

The two ogre guards got out — the massive coach rocked as their weight was removed — and made a quick check around the vicinity. Satisfied that the park did not contain an ambush, they stood in the muted sun, stretching their long, slab-muscled gray arms and whispering quietly to each other. The bubble dome of the coach flickered just as the windows of Hellebore's penthouse office had, and suddenly the natural cityscape was gone across one side, replaced by a bizarre street-level view of the riot zone around the Parliament, as though the coach in which Theo sat had suddenly dived down into the City center like a submarine.

"The constables have been reinforced, but I see there is still resistance," said Hellebore. "Too much resistance. I think that when this has ended, Lord Monkshood will no longer hold domain over the constables — this has been a debacle. Well, I will do what his men cannot."

Theo was too distracted by what he was seeing in the actual sky above them to pay much attention to the scenes of constables and mounted grims fighting across the rubble of Strawflower Square's fountains and benches and public walkways. Coming down through the clouds like kites on a single string were three vast serpentine shapes. It was so much like that awful day in Daffodil House that for a moment he found himself plunged into a disassociated near-faint, suspended in a loop of unreality where dragons were always coming down the sky toward him like living missiles.

The huge beasts dropped so fast that it seemed as though they must crash down on the hillside where Theo's coach stood, must smash and destroy the caravan and everything in it, Hellebore and Theo and Applecore and the monstrous, pink-faced child. He found himself half-praying for it as the huge, dark bodies plummeted toward them. Then, just a few hundred feet overhead, three mighty pairs of batlike wings flared out and the dragons' descent suddenly flattened. They swooped over the park, only a couple of hundred feet off the ground, with a crack of air that knocked the ogre bodyguards to their knees, ripped branches from the bending trees and made the coaches rock crazily on their suspensions. Theo could see that the nearest dragon had a rider, a small, humanoid shape crouched in a boxy glass case strapped around the massive neck just in front of the wings. The stink of the monsters, sulfur and a rank, sour odor like the alligator pool at the San Francisco Aquarium on a hot day, lingered in Theo's nostrils even after the dragons themselves were only dwindling shapes against the City skyline.

As horrible as the creatures' passage had been, he still found himself turning with a kind of miserable avidity to the coach window that displayed Strawflower Square, not so much wanting to see what would happen next as unable to avoid looking. There was a feeling of supreme aliveness in witnessing such horror, he knew that now: it sang in the blood. To watch death, no matter how terrible, was to be alive oneself, at least for a few moments longer.

The dragons entered the mirror-picture of the square first as long shadows that whipped across the crowd so quickly that many of the combatants didn't even look up — but terror filled the faces of all who did see them, even the parliamentary constables. Only the grims kept their faces set hard and cold, as if a long-anticipated moment had finally come, although they threw themselves from their unicorns and scrambled for shelter like the rest of the shrieking multitude. The dragons rushed past like stunting jet planes, wrenching tornados of dirt and trash up in their wake, even pieces of clothing ripped from rioters' backs. For a suspended moment all sign of the monsters disappeared from the scene Theo was watching, so that the thousands of people fleeing randomly in all directions seemed conceived of a kind of mass-psychosis, but then the shadows fell across the square once more, followed immediately by the fire.

The first great gout swept across the broad steps in front of New Mound House like a broom of orange flame — a broom that did not merely tumble away that which was in front of it but burned it to black carbon. The flames were so hot that the sudden blooms of ash seemed to hold the shapes of the fleeing victims for an instant before bursting into whirling, sparking fragments.

Applecore was weeping loudly beside Theo's ear, but he had no more tears. He could only watch, limp and numb — the second time he had been forced to witness a horror no one should ever have to see once.

The viewpoint of the mirror-screen was shifting now, moving rapidly away from the destruction and refocusing elsewhere in the square. Jarred by the unsteady movement, Theo found a moment's refuge in wondering what kind of birds these were, magical or mechanical, that acted as Hellebore's eyes at the scene.

The dragons made another pass, sweeping the square with flame, killing all that could not escape, rioters and riot-fighters, civilians and constables. A maddened unicorn ran past the fountain, its mane trailing fire. But Theo saw something else happening, too, something so strange that even Hellebore sat up in his leather seat.

"Blood and iron," growled the fairy lord, "what are they doing?"

The grims, alone of all the living things in Strawflower Square, were not running for their lives — or at least they had not run very far. Knots of them had taken up places where they were shielded from the worst of the inferno by buildings or statuary, and now were working with a swift economy of movement, unpacking long poles that had hung beside their saddles, bending these staves and stringing them.

"Bows?" Hellebore sounded angry as well as surprised, as though the spectacle were aesthetically displeasing. "They are going to fight dragons with arrows?"

As the winged monsters came in on their next pass several of the grims leaped out from behind their makeshift ramparts and raised their bows. A dripping burst of fire caught two of them and turned them into shrieking, jigging torches, but the others loosed their arrows before running for cover again.

"Are they mad, these skin-eaters?" Hellebore demanded.

"They hunted dragons in the old days, Stepfather." The Terrible Child sounded amused. "They do what they know best. I think it involves some kind of very powerful poison."

As the dragons wheeled and their shadows again dropped onto the square, a full dozen more of the grims darted from cover and fired their shafts; with their long, almost apelike arms, the wild goblins were perfectly suited to draw such tall, heavy bows. The dragons spat death and then wheeled away. The grims kept loosing arrows until the great winged worms turned and came down again, blazing.

Again and again the liquid flame splashed across the square, which was now covered with leaping fires even where there seemed nothing that could burn. Again and again wild goblins were caught and martyred by the spray, but others ran out in the dragons' wake, firing up into the air before the giant creatures could rise out of range. At first it seemed that it was all just some goblin-gesture, a bit of primitive bravery in the face of certain death, but finally on the sixth or seventh pass all the shadows did not disappear as the dragons swung out of range: one shadow grew in size until darkness covered the entire square. The goblins stared up, shouting to each other and pointing before running for cover as the shadow rapidly began to grow smaller and blacker: the monster was falling.

The dragon dropped out of the sky and hit the ground so hard that one of the buildings along the square shuddered and collapsed, adding its own dust to the flume of black blood and gobbets of molten pavement thrown up by the creature's fall. Other facades shook and the few windows left unbroken now shattered. Then all was silence, the square motionless except for the jittering of flames, the monster lying dead in a crater at the center of a spiderweb of cracked stone with a thicket of arrows protruding from its great filming eye and more picketing its long throat, its tail stretched across the smoldering steps of New Mound House like the snapped cable of a suspension bridge.

"It cannot be," said Hellebore. Theo had never imagined he would see the fairy lord so astonished. He almost looked mortal. "It cannot be."

"But it is, Stepfather," said the child. "Look and your eyes will tell you the truth. The goblins have killed one of your big lizards. Do you doubt they will manage to kill the rest, too? They can afford to sacrifice a few dozen to bring down each one — they will think it a good trade. And can you imagine what will happen to Hellebore House when the mob realizes the high families are actually vulnerable? If you had been paying attention to your private line you would have just heard the security force calling out to you, telling you that our house is surrounded." The Terrible Child definitely appeared to be more entertained than upset by what had happened. "And the grims have more weapons than simply bows and arrows, the commander says — they are shooting out the windows of our tower with lightning-throwers and many of the guards are dead."

"We won't be vulnerable long," said Hellebore. "Into the coach!" he shouted at the ogre bodyguards. "Drive! Now! Straight to the Cathedral!"

The ogres did not even have time to climb all the way into their seats before the armored coach spun around on the park lawn, spitting divots of grass and mud; one of the huge gray creatures almost rolled on Theo — which, he couldn't help thinking, would at least be a faster way to die than whatever Hellebore had planned for him.

"They did it," Applecore crowed softly by his ear. "Did you see? It was brilliant!"

He couldn't help feeling pride. What the goblins had done was more than a heroic gesture — Hellebore was set back, even a little scared. And Theo and Cumber Sedge had helped it happen.

Good old Button, he thought. That will serve the Flower bastards right for underestimating him.

Within minutes they were driving through a sudden mist into a part of the City he had never seen, a district he did not remember even being described in Dowd's journal. The buildings on either side of the increasingly narrow road were odd conglomerations of stone and earth that looked almost like termite mounds or some ancient archaeological site. The dark, foggy streets were empty, and the strange buildings seemed empty too, doors and unglassed windows gaping like the eyes of skulls piled in a catacomb. Even the mist seemed to be growing thicker as the convoy made its way down the sloping streets between the crude, close-leaning buildings.

No, Theo realized, it isn't just the mist. The sky itself was growing darker overhead, as though afternoon was ending and evening coming on fast. But evening should still be hours away. Can you have a power blackout in the sky?

Hellebore was snapping orders on his invisible private line, the child was looking calmly out the window, and Tansy seemed lost in some personal realm of pain, but Theo still whispered as he asked Applecore, "Where are we? Why is it getting dark already? Is it the smoke from the fires?"

"We're driving into Midnight," she said in his ear. Her moment of joy had evaporated and her voice trembled. "It's not good, Theo. Ever since the king and queen died, nobody comes here except for funerals. It's… it's thick."

"What's thick?"

"Everything. It just is. Faerie — it gets thick here."

The Terrible Child stirred, took a deep ecstatic breath. "It is the heart of the realm, home to the first mound where civilization began — but it was alive long before that." He smiled and nodded. "It is where the edges are, where things come in and go out, are born… and die." The Terrible Child pushed his way into Theo's head: You will find it instructive, my almost-twin — for a little while.

Applecore moved in even closer to Theo's neck, although she was on the far side from the boy. "Don't talk to him!"

But he could not resist. The grims' killing of the dragon had heartened him. "And this is where you're going to bring on this, what is it called, Eternal Night?"

"Old Night. Ah, yes. But I will not bring it on, as you say. It already is. I will simply open a door so that it can make its way to the mortal world. Not that your world is a stranger to it, to the old ways and the old nightmares. But there are only a few small points of contact now — like tiny holes in an otherwise watertight ship, they are not enough to change things. But I will open a great gash in the side of reality as they know it on your world — a hole too big for patching or bailing. Once Old Night starts pouring in, bringing chaos such as even your troubled world has not known in a thousand years or more, nothing will stop it." He sighed. "It will be lovely. Like bathing in a river of discordant music. A blizzard of dark light. Screams, useless prayers, the unique sound of the very lattices of reality coming apart — I will drink it all in, until I am intoxicated. It was what I have waited my entire life to do."

Theo was sickened, but would not show it. "All, what, seven years?"

"I have had as many moments of life as you, my half brother, my blind and deaf twin, but mine have passed in this world. We age more slowly here, breathing the airs of Faerie, but you know the date of my birth — that was something else of mine that was given to you."

"But you know what I had that you didn't? A real family. A life." Theo wanted to hurt the smiling creature shaped like a child any way he could, as though it were the worst parts of himself that sat beside him, gloating and mocking. "Love. Do you even know what that is?"

The Terrible Child laughed. "Do you?"

Hellebore turned in irritation. "Shut your mouth." Something seized control of Theo and he could no longer speak. The child smiled and looked out the window.

The battle-coaches drove on, the winding road taking them down into what seemed a kind of wooded valley thick with ground fog. Great corridors of uninterrupted darkness yawned between the trees. Empty buildings still stood on either side of the bumpy road, but they had been dug straight into the ground and seemed almost invisible: only dusty openings too regular be animal dens, or here and there a jut of roof protruding from a pile of dirt or tangle of leaves showed that someone had once lived there.

"I don't like this place," Applecore moaned. "It's bad."

Theo could not talk and could barely move. He let his head loll back and stared up through the domed top of the coach at the tips of the tall old trees. The tops of the treeline on either side shimmied up and down as they passed like wave patterns on an oscilloscope. Something was tracking them from high above, a minuscule winged shape barely visible against the darkening sky, and for a heart-freezing moment Theo thought it was another dragon coming down from the heights, but he realized he would never have been able to see anything that far up through the swirling mists. It was a gray bird, passing back and forth only a few dozen yards overhead as though it were keeping the car in sight — an owl, or perhaps a small hawk. Then the mists thickened and the sky seemed to grow darker. As he lost sight of the bird he felt a moment of sadness.

Maybe the last free creature I'll see. I should have told Applecore to fly away while I could still talk. They say they don't care about her, but once they've done whatever it is to me, they might just kill her for spite. A brief image of her back in the jar, but this time in the long-fingered hands of Anton Hellebore — or worse, the hungry child — pulled up a groan of fear and disgust that died somewhere between his lungs and larynx, unable to overcome Lord Hellebore's order of silence.

And it will get better still, the Terrible Child silently mocked him. Theo whimpered. He could not force the voice, the presence out of his head: it was like struggling in a nightmare. Pain and terror such as is visited on the waking world only once in an entire epoch. Just wait, O my brother. You will see such sublime things… !

The winding road took them over a rise and they emerged for a moment from the endless colonnade of phantom trees. A great forested valley stretched before them, a thick carpet of treetop foliage that rose unexpectedly from the lowlands and ended in a ring of huge trees at the valley's center that stood more than twice the height of the others. He could see something gleaming at the center of that ring, a dull shine like old silver, but then the coach crested the rise and started back down; within moments they were deep in the blind woods again. The trees around him were taller now, vast cylinders of bark whose lowest branches jutted far above the top of the coach, and it made Theo wonder how big the trees in the ring at the center must be — giants. The light was dim here but in some odd way still seemed too bright, like the sideways glare just before sunset. In fact, even through his own fog of weariness and despair he could not help feeling the strangeness of the place: not just the light, but the way that loud noises like the engines seemed unduly muffled yet quiet sounds like the wind through the trees penetrated even the hardened bubble windows. Even the air he breathed was both thinner and headier than it should have been. It all contributed to a growing sense of dislocation like a bad drug trip, as though reality itself were congealing around him, time slowing, everything increasing in density…

No, it's not getting more dense, that's too scientific or something, it's just getting… He had to hunt through his bruised, exhausted mind until he could come up with Applecore's words. Thick. Faerie gets thicker here. There's just… more of everything.

The passengers were all silent as the convoy wound through the foggy, light-streaked woodland, Hellebore and his monstrous stepchild perhaps lost in dreams of what was to come, Tansy distracted and still apparently in pain. Only Applecore had anything to say: she crept close to his ear and whispered, "Be brave, Theo," but there was nothing he could have said to that even if he could speak.

At last the armored coach slowed and stopped. The world seemed to have dropped away in front of them, and it took Theo a little while to realize that he was not looking at some kind of interdimensional nothingness but the silvery blankness of a still lake shrouded in fog.

"Get out," said Hellebore.

He was a prisoner in his own clumsy body: all he could do was obey. Outside the protective bubble of the coach, the world felt even stranger. He had often heard or read of silences that were tangible, so thick they could be cut with a knife, but this was the first time he had ever truly experienced such a thing. The quiet was stiflingly heavy, as though the entire world had drawn in its breath and held it.

He wasn't the only one to feel overwhelmed. The ogre guards didn't even waste a glance on him as they got out, but like tourists come to the big city, leaned back and stared up at the immense ring of trees surrounding the lake. Theo found himself doing the same. The trees were as huge as they had looked at a distance, big as office towers, the innermost circle stretching so high that Theo guessed that full daylight only touched the water for a few minutes around noon each day.

The size of them was arresting enough, but although Theo knew little about trees, it was also hard to ignore the fact that no two of them in the ring were quite the same: the tree beneath which they had parked was a skyscraping pine, but it stood between a massive oak and an improbably vast birch whose pale trunk loomed like a moon rocket. This made the ring of giant trees around the lake seem artificial — odd, when in other ways the place seemed so extremely natural, almost throbbing with primordial grandeur and solitude. Also, each tree was rooted in its own grassy mound of earth, each mound as big as a school playing field, so that if it had not been for the brilliance of the colors, the hundreds of different shades of greenery, the splendid diversity of gray, white, and brown trunks, and the way their terrifyingly distant tops swayed in a breeze unfelt at ground level, the giants might almost have been titanic statues of trees instead of real living things, a sort of arboreal museum for young gods, with each display set on its own plinth overlooking the lake.

As the last members of the convoy climbed out to stand beside the lake Theo looked out across the expanse of mirror-still water. The fog had grown a little thinner, and he could now see a bump at the center of it all, a low island several hundred yards from the shore, a bizarrely unassuming lump in the midst of so much majesty, its outlines partially hidden by low, drifting mist. The island had no tall trees: it was covered with grass and underbrush which made it hard to see against the forest on the shore behind it, but even through the mist and in this dim, directionless afternoon light Theo could see something sparkling at the island's center like a pile of diamonds.

Hellebore walked to the edge of the lake and raised his hand, a gesture so imperially casual that any Caesar would have been envious. At first Theo thought that he was summoning one of his bodyguards or his son, but then a long, low boat detached itself from the shadows at the island's waterline and begin to move toward them across the lake, a robed and hooded figure sitting in the stern. It all seemed a little too much, even to Theo's exhausted eye. The legendary Ferryman out of the old myths, coming to take him away? But that had been a river in that story, hadn't it? It was hard to live in the middle of all these old tales, to try to make sense of them. In fact, he felt like he was being eaten by a story… a story with teeth…

The boat moved swiftly; within what seemed to Theo only a minute or two — he had so few minutes left, and even in this place of clotted time they were racing by so quickly! — the silent craft was sliding up to the bank. The boatman was small and slender, with a handsome long-nosed face, ears that would make a bat proud, and a shock of graying hair. He was chained to the bench by a shiny ring around his neck, and — if what protruded from beneath his robe was any indication — had woolly legs and goat's feet.

"Still here, I see," said Hellebore.

"By dint of your chain around my neck, my lord," said the goat-legged man with a slight bow. His voice was high-pitched and extremely musical; Theo thought that in another story, one that was going to have a happier ending than this one, it would be interesting to hear him sing. "The iron in it burns at night and keeps me from sleeping. I think of you during all the lonely hours. You haven't by any chance come to drown yourself in a fit of remorse, have you?"

Hellebore didn't waste the energy on either a smile or frown. "No. We will all cross to the island."

The handsome little man nodded his head. "Nidrus Hellebore, it shall be done." Now that he was closer, Theo could see that the shape of the ferryman's face was much less human than he had initially thought.

Lord Hellebore glanced back at the small crowd from the coaches that had gathered on the grassy bank behind him — eight or ten constables, half a dozen ogre bodyguards, and Hellebore's son and stepchild and fellow fairy lords (although Tansy for one looked as though he would be happy to stay behind, and even Lord Foxglove appeared a bit nervous), as well as the prisoners Cumber and Theo — then looked at the boat, a small barge made of ancient black wood. "How many trips?" asked Hellebore.

The ferryman smiled. "All will cross together, my lord."

Hellebore ordered Theo onto the boat. It pitched gently as he stepped from the lakeside and Applecore held onto his hair tightly, but even in his exhausted and almost helpless state he found it easy to stay upright. As the constables prodded him toward the stern the rest of Hellebore's little party followed, leaving only the trio of doonie drivers in their buglike riot gear to wait with the battle-coaches. Just as the ferryman had said, there was room for all, although to Theo it seemed no more credible now that it had happened than it had been while everyone was still on the bank: in whichever direction he looked the boat seemed to stretch a little wider than was actually possible.

When Cumber and the last of the constables were on board the craft turned away from the bank, apparently of its own accord, and began a stately progress back toward the island.

The ferryman was looking at Theo with interest. His amber eyes slanted upward, glowing like the gaze of a jack-o'-lantern, but the look of intelligence and the deep laughter lines on his brown skin almost made up for it. "You have something of the smell of mortals about you," the ferryman said. "But not quite. What is your name?"

To his surprise, Theo found he could talk again. "I'm not sure anymore. Theo Vilmos. Septimus Violet. It doesn't seem like it matters much." He could feel the Terrible Child on the edge of his thoughts, although he could not see him, and the cold glow of the child's anticipation for what was to come made it hard to concentrate.

"Robin is my name." The ferryman looked Theo up and down. "Goodfellow is my other name, if not always my true tale, I must regretfully admit. I see you have an appointment with the wet sisterhood."

"What?" Theo glanced over at Hellebore, but if the Flower lord had noticed Theo could speak once more, he didn't seem disturbed by it.

"He means the nymphs," Applecore said quietly. "Your… bracelet."

Theo looked down at the knotted band of grass, then at the still water all around them, the surface barely disturbed by the boat's passage. The lake seemed as silent and ancient as the forest; Theo could imagine almost anything living in its depths. "Ah. Yes. Well, they'll have to get in line."

Robin smiled again, showing surprisingly sharp teeth. "In fact, it is one of the oldest and greatest of the sisterhood who lives here, but never doubt she will take you just as quickly if you fall in as her youngest, hungriest sisters. Perhaps you should not sit so close to the edge."

Theo shrugged. If it was hard to concentrate with the rising joy of the child pushing at his mind, it was almost harder to care. "I'm not very good at moving right now unless Lord Hellebore allows me to."

Robin nodded and tapped the ring on his neck. "Our current master is indeed one for bindings and suchlike, isn't he?" He leaned forward and said in a loud, theatrical whisper. "We wonder what sort of games his mama played with him when he was wee, our Nidrus."

"You are alive because you are a curiosity, pooka." Apparently Hellebore had not been ignoring their conversation entirely. "But curiosity is not a very strong emotion, and thus not much of a guarantee of safety."

"I take your excellent point, Lord Hellebore." Despite the ring on his neck and the heavy links that chained him to the bench, Robin Goodfellow contrived a graceful little bow. "And what," he said to Theo, "is the purpose of your visit here, if I may ask? Not that I'm complaining — a little company helps the centuries to inch by a bit faster."

Theo sighed. "I think we're going to destroy the world. Somebody's world, anyway. It used to be my world."

"Ah," said Robin, "another busy day for the Flower lords," but he seemed depressed by the news and did not speak again.

The ferry passed through a last swirl of mist and grounded against the island.

41 THE CATHEDRAL

The island itself was not very big, but even so, as Theo acted out Hellebore's command and disembarked under the utterly unnecessary guns of the guards he found himself having trouble understanding what it looked like. It was not the dying light that made its shape hard to judge, or the shroud of mist that rose from the water's edge, or even the disorienting shimmer at the top of the low hill, although they all added to his confusion. Instead, it was something in the place itself, some intense anomaly that was part of its very nature, as if the primeval silence of the ring of giant trees became something even more concentrated and yet paradoxically also more cloudy here, a pulse of irreducible strangeness at the still heart of Faerie that confused Theo's senses just as the magnetism of the North Pole deranged compasses.

Soon, the avid voice whispered in his head, but it was talking to itself now even more than to him, a child's quiet song of impatience and hunger. Soon, soon… This was its hour, and Theo could only wonder what horrors had come before this crowning moment, to create something that looked forward so gleefully to madness and destruction being visited on an entire world.

What he could make out through the disorienting nature of the place and his own hopeless misery was that the island sloped up from the water's edge to the top, a long, low hillock covered with uneven grass and gnarled shrubbery. In a depression at the top, hidden from the base of the island by the curve of the land, lay whatever was creating that blur of inconstant, refracted light which hung over the hilltop as though something up there was trying, with some difficulty, to birth a rainbow.

They trooped up the hill, Lord Hellebore first, his flawless white suit a beacon in the gloom. The little monster with Theo's features followed right behind, hurrying along on his short legs, excited even in his physical movements, as though he were a normal child being led through the gates of the zoo. Theo and Cumber followed, prodded along by helmeted constables, then Tansy, Anton Hellebore, Foxglove, and Thornapple, and the rest of the guards. The ogre bodyguards brought up the rear, walking silently, very attentive to the surroundings despite the minuscule size of the landscape they were surveying.

"We're in the real middle of it now," Applecore whispered in a choked voice. "Never…" She fell silent for a moment. "I've heard…" Again she ran out of words. "It's here, Theo."

"What?" he whispered back, fighting to stay calm, fighting to concentrate his straggling thoughts. "What is this?" Somehow the conversation with Robin Goodfellow seemed to have released him from Hellebore's silence. A momentary flicker of hope — perhaps the ferryman had other powers and could intervene on his behalf or at least interfere with Hellebore's control over him — died when Theo looked back and saw the black boat slipping out of sight around the edge of the island, gliding into a curtain of mist. Goodfellow again sat hunched in the stern, motionless as a stone garden faun, looking at nothing except perhaps his own cloven hooves.

"This is where the old mound was — the first mound." Applecore was struggling to keep her voice under control. It was not just caution or confusion making her speak that way — she was struggling against overwhelming panic. "This is where the king and queen lived!"

"Here?" Theo looked from side to side. Even this small freedom from his lockstepped obedience to Hellebore seemed exhilarating, dangerous. "On this pokey little thing?"

He must have spoken louder than he intended. Cumber Sedge looked over at them, his face gray, his expression hopeless. Just when he had thought he could not feel worse, Theo had a cold squeeze of guilt: Look what happens to the people who trusted me, who treated me like a friend.

"There wasn't any water here then," Applecore whispered. "No lake, not like this. Just the mound. Deep into the ground it goes — deeper than the Elder Trees, even. The first place of all the people."

Theo felt something even chillier grab at his vitals. Was Hellebore planning to lead them down into the earth, into some horrible tomb in the wet ground under the lake? He didn't know why it actually made any difference, but if he had to die he wanted to do it under the open sky…

Here. The child's voice rang in his head, triumphant, mad. Here. The waiting is ended.

Theo reached the top of the crest and saw what was making the air shimmer.

It was not so much a crater as a depression, the grassy earth of the hilltop dented like a piece of dough into which someone had gently pushed a fist. Within it, mostly scattered in gleaming shards, but with enough broken sections still upright to give a ghostly hint of what had once stood there, lay the ruins of some great building that had been made entirely of glass. The ground at the top of the hill seemed to have been badly scorched, and although none of the glass was blackened — Theo wondered if the crystalline stuff might not be glass at all but something else entirely, something burn-proof like diamond — many of the pieces on the ground had been melted into smooth, twisting shapes, and the few sections still standing were veined with cracks, so that in his dizzied, loose-minded way, Theo thought they looked like something fractal, the results of some bubble-chamber experiment lovingly photographed and displayed in Smithsonian Magazine. Even in their destruction the shards had a power and beauty that held his eye until the bending of the light around them made his head ache.

Here.

In short, the hilltop looked like it had been the site of a small but very powerful and very weird explosion. Something of that actual event seemed to remain, a shifting liquid glow in a pit at the center — a bright smear like magma, but only loosely bound by gravity. It was this, bounced and refracted by the shards of glass, which made the twinkling above the crown of the hill.

Hellebore ordered Theo to walk forward. If his command over his prisoner's speech had grown lax, his command over his body had not. When Theo had marched helplessly to him, Hellebore took him by the arm in a disturbingly familiar way, like an older man about to impart the secrets of life to a younger colleague, then led him along the lip of the depression, a sort of battlefield of broken spikes and blobs of glass. The colors in the shining pit were now vibrating more swiftly and unevenly, as though the hole were a living thing that had sensed their presence. Theo tensed as Hellebore touched his neck, positive he was about to be thrown in, the volcano-virgin of this particular religious ritual, but still unable to resist. Instead, the fairy lord's hand moved with startling swiftness to pluck Applecore out from behind Theo's ear.

"You will interfere with the project if you remain," Hellebore said to the kicking sprite held between finger and thumb. "He cannot do what he is meant to do with you so close to him — even your tiny bit of lifeforce will confuse the connection."

She reached up, clawing at his finger with her hands. "And you can go and shag yourself, you pasty-faced…"

"You will not be able to approach him again." Hellebore flicked her away with surprising force — a slight movement of his hand and she went whizzing away through the air as though shot out of a gun and vanished out over the lake.

Keep flying, Theo silently begged her. Keep flying. Get yourself out of here… !

"Now," Hellebore told Theo, "you will wait here until I am ready for you." He turned and walked back toward the others.

For once, Theo desperately wanted to follow the fairy lord — proximity to the glowing pit and its vivid, liquid colors was making him feel like he imagined an epileptic did just before a seizure struck — but he could not make his legs move. The smoldering amber and smoky purple-blue bubbled without noise or even substance. From his standing imprisonment at the edge of the pit he heard Hellebore saying something, and from the corner of his eye he saw the Terrible Child taking up a position on the opposite rim, but something even more disturbing had arrested his attention: deep in the pool of light, so faint that at first he thought his eyes were creating patterns out of nothingness, lay two vaguely human shapes.

There are bodies in there. The horror that was making his skin prickle and his breath hitch seemed to be happening at a distance, but he could still feel it, like the screams of someone being murdered a few apartments down coming up through the floorboards. Bodies. Is it… ?

"The king and queen!" cried Lord Foxglove, who sounded almost as frightened as Theo. "By the Trees, Hellebore, surely we dare not meddle with their resting place… !"

"Shut your mouth," Aulus Thornapple said, but there was a hairline crack of fear in his voice as well. "Don't speak about what you don't know, Foxglove."

Now the bodies in the crypt of light seemed to come more strongly into focus, as though they rose toward the surface without getting any nearer, but as Theo stared helplessly he still could make little of them except that one had a more female shape than the other and that both seemed tall — taller than even Anton Hellebore, although it was hard to judge anything through the distortions of the glowing medium. He saw hints of other attributes as well — a crown, a curl of dark hair that wavered in the pulsing light like tide-swept kelp — but this only confused him, because at the same time he saw other aspects of the two figures that did not match, contradictory and simultaneous: a hand suddenly became a claw, a curly-haired head was at the same moment a bald dome with a crest of stretched flesh like the fin of a sailfish. The sword lying on the king's breast blurred and became a club, then a musical instrument almost like something the goblins had played. The gem cupped in the queen's graceful hands grew into an egg, then a flower, while the hands themselves also changed shape like candlewax in a fire, fingers long then stubby, talons appearing and vanishing, skin changing color, growing fur like mold that disappeared again in a moment. It was as though a hundred different figures, a thousand, floated in the smoldering depths, all reflected in one place, so that not a single version came to his eye without bearing traces of all the others.

But although each and every one of these spectral, superimposed kings and queens lay arranged as if for ritual burial, they also had one other thing in common: though their eyes seemed as variable as everything else — round as an owl's or slitted, some spike-pupiled like a cat's or a snake's, others covered with some kind of film, or invisible but for a gleam from beneath lowering, bony brows — all the eyes, every pair on each and every one of the royal bodies, were open.

"They're alive." Lord Foxglove's voice was a horrified whisper. "Oberon and Titania… they're still alive!"

"Of course they are, you idiot," said Hellebore. "They are chained, not dead. They are Faerie, they are its embodiment — its heart. If they were dead we would probably not exist. How could we have survived without them?"

"But… but you didn't warn me…" Foxglove seemed on the verge of weeping. "You said we were just going to tap the mortal world!"

"And where do you think such power will go, once we have it?" Hellebore laughed. "Without using the king and queen, it would be like channeling the Moonflood into a rain barrel."

Foxglove fell into a shaking silence, but someone else spoke up — a halting voice that Theo did not recognize for a moment. "It was you, wasn't it? The Seven Families. You did this to them."

Hellebore smiled. Except for the Terrible Child, he seemed the only person not overwhelmed by the weird power of the place. "The little ferisher speaks at last. I seem to remember you worked for Lady Jonquil. Obviously she was wise to see something in you. But you are only half-right. The king and queen were badly weakened by the last Gigantine War, had expended almost all their energy to hold the fabric of the realm together. They were in no position to fight back when we staged our little… coup."

"You wouldn't have needed to steal their power if you hadn't been so busy imitating the mortals' ways." Cumber spoke like one who expected at any moment to be silenced. "Is that why you hate mortals — because you recognize that they are alive in a way you are not? That they change and grow, make mistakes, learn — but all we of Faerie can do is mimic them? You spent years among them, they say, studying them. Was it interest, or envy?"

"Mortals have their uses, even perhaps some talents we do not." Hellebore seemed to be enjoying the discourse, as though he wanted to savor every single part of this triumphant hour. "That proves nothing. I cannot give milk. That does not make a cow my equal."

"But, Nidrus!" said Foxglove. "Surely this explains the problems we have been having, the difficulty maintaining energy in our world, if the king and queen have been kept helpless all this time, imprisoned…"

"Of course it explains it," snapped Hellebore, but he still did not seem very angry: rather he seemed to be enjoying the playing out of some large and very complicated joke whose full extent was still not obvious to anyone but himself. "It was never meant to be a long-term solution. I argued years ago that if this realm was not eventually to become cold and barren and dark, we had to find a way to tap the old science of the mortal world, but it was the resistance of those sentimentalist idiots like Violet and Lily and Daffodil — not to mention your own craven family, who didn't even have the courage of such convictions, however wrong they might be — that kept us from that solution."

"I can assure you," Foxglove said, "that if I had understood…"

"If you had understood, you would have been pissing yourself in fright just as you are now. You are terrified to discover we have usurped the king and queen, aren't you? It was all well and good when you thought we had no choice, that they had died defending the realm — you Coextensives resented their control, too — but since your conscience was clear, you were satisfied. It is always that way. The cowards not only rely on the brave to take the needed actions, they wish to be protected from the truth of those actions as well." Hellebore snorted. "Count Tansy may be from another one of the fence-straddling families, but at least he had the wisdom to recognize early which side of this particular conflict was going to win. In fact, we might not have been able to harness even what power we have had without his help, since I did not trust the Remover with the secret of the king and queen's true state — discretion that has proved well-founded."

Theo yearned to speak but the pull of the smoldering pit and the bubbling thoughts of the Terrible Child were too powerful.

"So you've owned Tansy for a long time." It clearly was not easy for Cumber to talk, and he must have felt, as Theo did, that he would not take what he was learning anywhere but the grave, but even in these last moments the ferisher remained true to himself: he wanted to know the answers. "He had already helped you commit the greatest treason of all."

"He does indeed have a keen eye for both sides of an equation," Hellebore said. "A bit too keen. Quillius Tansy, come forward." Obviously, Tansy did not obey quickly enough: a moment later Theo heard him protesting as the guards dragged him to Hellebore. "It has come to my attention, Tansy, that although you have long professed loyalty to me, even if secretly, you let Hollyhock and the others use you to bring the Violet heir across from the mortal world without telling me until he was here in Faerie. This muddled my plans and caused me a great deal of needless irritation. I suspect you were hedging your bets in case my design should fail, so that you could claim to Hollyhock and the others that you had been on their side all along."

"But, Lord Hellebore!" Tansy shrieked in alarm, his features showing more than a trace now of the terrible damage that had been mostly hidden. "How can you believe such… I did my best… I never…"

"I note your protestations of innocence," Hellebore said. "I am sure the king and queen have noted them also, even in their slumber, although they may take a rather different view of it when you are shortly introduced to them."

"Black iron! Here, just a moment, Hellebore." It was Lord Thornapple, his voice shaky with the fear that seemed to have seized him now as well. He stepped forward to the edge of the depression, looking down with obvious alarm into the pit; bruise-colored light played on his face. "Nidrus, I don't… You never said anything about… about waking them up."

"No, I did not, Aulus,"— he made Thornapple's first name sound like an insult — "and I am not planning to do so. What I said was that Tansy is about to be introduced to them." He turned and waved a hand. Instantly two of the constables stepped forward and seized Tansy by the arms. "You of all people should know there are rules that must be rigidly observed," Hellebore told the struggling prisoner. "That is why it is science. And this sort of process has its rules, however infrequently it is attempted. A blood sacrifice is necessary." He nodded to the constables. "Slit his throat and throw him in."

"No!" Tansy screamed. As though he had lost almost all control of it now, the fairy's face began to shift and slide beneath the skin as if pieces of his skull had broken free and were floating loose like pack ice. It was a horrible sight: Theo wanted to close his eyes, but couldn't. "These others are expendable, not me! I did everything you asked, Hellebore!"

"Hurry, Stepfather!" The Terrible Child's eyes were closed, his face seized in an ecstatic grimace. Perched on the far rim of the depression, he looked as though he were standing in a kitchen full of wonderful smells. "The moment has grown ripe."

"Yes, Tansy," said Lord Hellebore, "you did everything I asked, but you are a traitor by nature — you wake up every day intent only on doing what is best for Quillius Tansy. Because you wanted the power I promised you and feared my anger, you betrayed the Hollyhocks and the Daffodils and your other allies, but at the same time you left a door open so that you could turn to them again if our enterprise did not succeed. And one day you may conceive another idea, however wrongly — the idea that doing my bidding is no longer what is best for you. I will spare us all such a future annoyance." He turned to the constables. "Do it now."

"But, Lord Hellebore… !" one of the guards holding Tansy said. They were all looking at the pit and their terror was obvious even behind the goggles that covered half their faces. "Here… where the king and queen… ?"

"Of course, here. That is the whole point. By the Well, is there anyone else who wishes to question me? Do it now or you will go in with him."

"Let me, Father!" cried Anton Hellebore, bounding forward. The younger Hellebore pulled a long, wicked-looking bladed tool out of his breast pocket and, with startling economy of motion, grabbed Tansy's long white hair, yanked back his head, then dragged the blade across his throat. Tansy's shrieks turned to gurgles, his face becoming an almost unrecognizable puzzle of bruises and healing scars as he lost his grip on the cosmetic charm for once and all. Blood spurted from the wound, and much of it guttered down his front. The guards, their mouths screwed up in expressions of fear and disgust, did their best to hold him without getting splashed.

"Throw him in, curse it!" said Lord Hellebore.

The constables took a few steps down into the depression and flung Tansy away from them. He stayed up for a few staggering steps, knocked down one of the standing shards of broken glass, then tumbled blindly into the pool of light.

Theo flinched, half-expecting some kind of explosion, some great outflaring of heat and light, but although the fairy vanished struggling into the bright depths, within seconds the only sign of what had happened was a reddening of the plasma so that the whole thing glared like a sunset sky.

"Yes," shrieked the Terrible Child, "the blood has opened the door, Stepfather!" He raised his little arms as though asking to be lifted, embraced. "Hurry! Help me reach through!"

Hellebore walked back toward Theo.

This is it. My turn. He struggled until a bolt of pain slammed down his spine but he could not move from the spot. He thought helplessly of Tansy's last moments, lurching down that slope as the life fountained out of him. But what if they were not his last moments? What if Tansy was doomed to live forever, dying forever, in that pool of scarlet light? What if that was going to be Theo's fate, too? He let his eyes flick across the others gathered on the edge of the low hilltop, the lords Thornapple and Foxglove, terror struggling with greed and anticipation on their faces, Cumber Sedge hanging in the grasp of two constables, the Terrible Child already immersed in some paroxysm of joyful discovery. Then something else caught his attention, although he could not have said why — a small movement on the far shore of the lake. For a moment he thought it might be the ferryman Robin Goodfellow, especially when the manlike shape slid over the bank and into the water, but then it was gone and did not come up again.

Too late, whatever it was, if it even mattered. Hellebore stood in front of him now, pale face masked in calm despite an inner furor that only leaked out through his crazily intent eyes. Theo could feel the fairy lord's will like a physical thing. "Your turn, Violet child. We need the key to open the final door."

Theo tried to speak and found he could, although every word hurt coming out, as though he were disgorging a train of objects covered in thorns. "I… don't… know… about… any… key…"

"You are the key, fool. Your true father would not let me have control over the powers of the king and queen, even when we had all sworn not to meddle with them. The others backed him and I did not have the strength then to make them do otherwise. We two were given authority over this place, the first place, so that we could only use the powers prisoned here if we agreed, Violet and Hellebore. But of course we did not agree."

"And… I… still… don't…"

"It no longer matters. You are not your father. You cannot resist my will, Theo Vilmos — Septimus Violet. Hold out your hands."

Despite every ounce of resistance, even though he fought until the muscles in his arms writhed and cramped, Theo saw his hands slowly rise. Hellebore took them with his own. The fairylord's flesh was cool and dry. Bizarrely, he began to sing, although in a tuneless and hurried way.

"The toil of Death now enwraps feet and hands and head, but does not bind the heart!"

There was poetry in Hellebore's chant, but none in the uninflected way he spoke. Still, Theo could feel something swimming up from inside him as though to a summons, a deep movement without physical substance. If he was the key, he was being fitted into the lock and turned, just like those fail-safe launch systems down in the nuclear bunkers. That's why he's saying it like that, singing. The pressure in Theo's head made him feel he was plunging into a miles-deep ocean trench. Because it's not poetry to him, it's a formula. It's just science. Like the formula for an H-bomb…

The shift of pressure inside Theo grew stronger, became something else, a feeling of something breaking free that had been moored so long and so firmly that he had thought it a part of himself. Suddenly the Terrible Child was in his head again, but no longer simply as a presence that poked and prodded. Now the cold joy that was the child began to leach Theo's own life and energy away, as though he were on one end of some great conduit with the empty vacuum of space on the other side.

Give it to me, the child crooned as the pressure mounted. Let go. You are done.

Theo fought, struggling against the flow, but it was only a fading reflex: whatever the key might be, an idea or a thing, it would not belong to him much longer. He did not feel queasy, but still felt as if he needed to vomit, to void himself of something that was no longer wanted. It was like waiting to give birth, but bleak and hopeless, as if he knew already that any issue would be dead. His mind flashed to Cat and then he could not get free of her again, of her terrible, bloodless face in the hospital, lit only by despair. In some ways he hardly remembered her, but he ached at the thought of what he was helping to release, however unwillingly, on the world and people he had known and even loved. Johnny, Cat, her friends and family, his co-workers at Khasigian's, people Theo hadn't even met, all were going to be plunged into some kind of endless age of horror, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He wasn't even an integral part, he was just a key — an inanimate appliance as far as Hellebore and the rest were concerned.

No! I won't let them do it! But it was pointless. They were doing it, tapping into the sleeping power of the king and queen so that Hellebore and his bonsai demon could open a door into some unimaginably dark place. And even as he thought this, Theo felt the block or barrier finally give way and the thing inside began to stream out of him like water from a wrung cloth.

Hellebore nodded, satisfied, then let go of Theo's hands, turned his back and walked away, leaving Theo to sink slowly to his knees as life ebbed slowly but steadily out of him and into his gleeful twin, the Terrible Child.

The low gleam of red and amber light had flared high now, a huge bonfire of something less substantial than flame, but although it continued to billow upward in an unstable column whose top was invisible in the clouds, the color of it had cooled to a sort of shifting lavender-blue only distinguishable from the twilight sky because it gave off its own light. The Terrible Child stood before it, small hands spread wide, and pulses of a brighter glow jumped and throbbed at the child's nearness. The Terrible Child was chanting something, a spell, a manipulation of the universe, just as Hellebore had done, but the boy was using a language that barely sounded like words, shouting it joyfully, and where Hellebore had hurried through his own invocation like a man trying to get off the phone, the Terrible Child was immersed in his, riding it through some unimaginable experience, laughing, squealing with pleasure, moving toward some hideous climax.

That's it. Theo looked sadly at Cumber Sedge, but his friend was slumped between his guards, head down. Theo hoped he had only been stunned by a punitive blow to the head, not killed, although it didn't seem to matter much now. That's it. We lose. Button loses. I lose. Hellebore wins. He could feel the last dregs of whatever made up the magical Violet part of the key leaking out of him and into the child, along with his own vitality, as though he were a sack with a hole ripped in it. The escaping essence was running out swiftly and smoothly, synchronized with the tempo of the child's slow, exultant chant.

No, not just running smoothly, he realized as his head nodded forward and his weary eyes closed. He was falling into something deep and dark, endlessly dark, a slow-motion plummet at right angles from his own self. The outward flow of the key was the only strong thing left now, and impossible to ignore. It didn't just run, it pulsed, and there was a rhythm to it, something as remorselessly steady as a cosmic heartbeat.

Ba-bump. Ba-bump. It might have been his own heart slowly pumping. Ba-bump. Ba-bump. The connection between himself and the child pulsed like Tansy's slashed artery, gushing out life. He felt it, floated in it for a long moment. Always a musician, a dying part of him thought, distantly amused. The end of the world has a backbeat…

The remorseless pulse was dragging him ever deeper toward sleep and final darkness, but he did not want to sleep yet. He thought suddenly of the goblin music, its gloriously disordered yet organized tangle, the elliptical rhythms that would tug a plodding beat like this to pieces. Goblin sounds. He tried to summon them up, but they seemed as distant as the waking world is from the center of a nightmare. Then a drift, a hint, a fragment of memory came back to him. Goblins make shapes like… like this. He remembered them, or maybe only imagined them, but they felt right, a sprung rhythm that ran out-of-kilter circles around the slow pulse. Just that crazy bit off. Yeah, like that. Astonishingly, he discovered a sort of strength in the memory. For a moment he thought it was only a fleeting relief, the way a candle might flare one last instant in air from the breath that extinguished it, but then the larger pulse quieted. Suddenly he felt an impatient swallowing suction from the child, demanding what Theo was holding back.

Without conscious thought, he felt even more intently for the alternate rhythm. He wasn't really certain now it had anything to do with goblins, but it was a counter-pattern, and one that he could hold. He grabbed it, worked the changes with slippery mental fingers that threatened at any moment to fumble away the complicated cadence. I should have worked harder at this stuff, he thought dizzily, desperately, from a perch on the edge of a black hole, one mistake away from a plunge into unbeing. I was always shit at real jazz.

Let go. The words that came to him from the child were not mockery, but a command. You are too weak to stop me. And Theo knew it was true — he was too weak. But he also knew that if the child and Hellebore were to have their victory, he would make them crawl scratched and bleeding through his coils of barbed-wire polyrhythms to get it.

The pull grew more intense as the angry child fought harder, and pain suddenly seemed to turn Theo inside out so that for a moment he lost everything, but he grabbed at the memory of the goblin song — not just the beat itself, or even the music, but the feeling of connection and belonging that it had given him — and pulled himself back up to his perch above the internal abyss. Not yet, he told the child, and despite the certain knowledge that eventually he would lose, it was Theo who did the taunting now. Not that easy. First we're going to make some music, little brother.

He gave it all he had left, pulling the plodding beat to pieces and throwing those pieces around, reassembling them into something that went twice as far sideways at any given timeless instant as it went forward. He sang, even if it was only in his own head, and the dark, cold child could only grab at him without catching him, surround him without caging him. He sang about the spaces between beats, of the beats between spaces, about the sounds that came after quiet and even the sounds that were in quiet itself. He was aware as he did so, and even a little amused, that it was the greatest performance he would ever give — could ever give — but not only would it be his last, it was utterly, entirely silent.

The rage of the child built and built, but it was coupled with a growing worry that the peak opportunity would pass — a worry that was so tangible Theo could almost see it in his mind's eye, and for a brief moment could almost believe he might actually thwart the Terrible Child. As the child worked harder to encircle his resistance and beat him down, Theo not only glimpsed the child's unprotected and innermost feelings but could even sense for the first time what was on the other side of their complicated transaction — both the endlessly complex energies of the waiting world that Theo had known and something that was both bigger and smaller, a shadow as nebulous as smoke and as real as death.

Old Night. The sudden touch of it surprised him and shocked him to the core of himself — even just this merest hint of it nearly killed him. He faltered at the suggestion of that mad emptiness, fell for a moment into a blank, complete terror, and lost his grip on that thing in him which had been resisting. With a surge of freezing triumph the child drained away all that Theo had been holding back: one moment it was still there and active inside him, the next moment it was gone. Suddenly Theo's eyes were open and the hilltop was around him once more, but he was no longer the center of anything.

Time to die, he thought, but it no longer seemed like such a dreadful thing as it once had. It was almost comfortable lying on the ground, comfortable to know you had done all you could and that nothing else was expected from you, even at the end of the world — especially at the end of the world. The others around the rim of the pit were still locked into life, looking on in apprehension and expectation as the Terrible Child's invocation rose to new heights of fervor as it neared the finish, every one of the faces afire with the purplish light, all of them rigidly still, as though they were more afraid of being noticed than of anything else. Nothing moved but the light.

No, that was not quite true: Theo had spotted another hint of motion in the near distance, in the water near the island's shore. It was hard to make out — at first he thought it must be a trick of the mists and the light seething above the low hilltop — but after a moment he was certain: something was coming out the lake. At first it was only a head, but as the neck and shoulders came smoothly, slowly up he realized that whatever it was had not been swimming but walking. It was the thing he had seen go into the water on the far side, and it had walked all the way to the island across the bottom of the lake.

Even before he could make out the empty eye sockets, the ragged, rotting shreds of what had been a constable's uniform, he knew what was coming. Even as a small, dark part of himself felt reassured by this proof that the universe was really as shitty as it seemed, that even after the worst thing imaginable had happened there was still more bad stuff to come, Theo was trying desperately to move, all illusion of comfort gone now, but although he could manage a twitch, even a small shuffling of his feet in place, Hellebore's command and the exhaustion of his struggle with the child still held him.

Eyes fixed on the pit and the Terrible Child, Hellebore and the others had not seen the interloper yet. The irrha, Dowd's summoning, breasted the water and made its clumsy way up onto the bottom of the low slope; then, despite the black holes where the dead eyes had once been, it began to lurch up the hill directly toward the spot where Theo lay, its clenched teeth and withered gums like a horrid cartoon of determination.

"Theo!" Astonishingly, it was Applecore's voice at the center of a fierce whirring of wings a few yards away — she looked as though she was trying to fly into a windstorm. "Oh, Theo, get up, Hellebore's charm won't let me get any closer to you. It's that dead thing, coming for you! Run, by the Trees, run!"

He wept as he forced out the words. "Hellebore's… too… strong…" Oh, why didn't you get out of here when you had the chance, you brave, stupid woman… !

The sprite did not hesitate, but flew away, speeding low across the grass. She headed for Lord Hellebore where he stood behind the Terrible Child, watching with the closest thing to fatherly approval Theo could imagine him showing as the child began to twist the glow of the royal fires into bizarre shapes. The air was thickening around the island — Theo could feel it in his ears, on his skin, a tightening as though all of reality were about to burst like a balloon.

Hellebore suddenly shrieked in surprise and put a hand up to his face. A moment later a line of blood appeared between his fingers as though drawn by some magical, slow-appearing paint. A blur slid around his head and then something poked at his eye. He reeled back, waving angrily at the invisible something. Applecore slowed and hovered for a moment and Theo could see a glint in her arms, the long sliver of Cathedral glass she had snatched up from the ground. Then, as if she had suddenly remembered the greater danger, she turned and flew at the Terrible Child, but skidded off him and his blanket of purple light like water off a hot griddle. Undeterred, she buzzed back toward Hellebore. The master of Hellebore House swung his hand at her and she dodged, even managing to jab his finger with the bright shard. He drew the hand back in pain, then suddenly seemed to realize his error and snapped the hand back out. Yards away, the hovering sprite suddenly became a tiny knot of flame.

"No!" Theo shrieked, and with a surge of strength he could not have guessed he had, struggled to his feet. He had no time to mourn Applecore's sacrifice: the irrha was most of the way up the slope, still headed right for him. Even Hellebore had noticed it now. One of the constables turned and set his hornet-gun against his shoulder, then fired. The whining roar of the gun sawed across the hillside. The undead thing's arm whipped back and then fluttered forward, rags of it now stripped away, but it kept trudging grimly upward.

"It wants only the one it was summoned for," shouted Hellebore. He wiped at the blood on his cheek, smearing it across his snow-pale skin. He turned and saw to his satisfaction that the Terrible Child was still actively immersed in the storm of lavender light, still singing and laughing obliviously, still climbing toward conclusion. "Let it have him," Hellebore directed the guards. "They are hard to kill, those things."

You're thick, Vilmos, you really are! Plunged back into reality again, Theo was full of desperation and shame. Just like she always said! Applecore had sacrificed her life for this moment, for his freedom, and it was vanishing. He threw himself against the rigid resistance of his own sinews, fighting to move away from the spot where he was held. Hellebore was distracted, still dabbing at his cheek and staring at the thing coming up the slope, but the fairy lord was no longer fighting: Theo could feel the power of Hellebore's will stretch but hold, keeping Theo's feet planted, leaving him helpless.

The irrha opened its arms, one of them green-brown with putrefaction, the other wet and tattered, shredded to ribbons by the constable's gun — an embrace without human feeling, only hunger to complete its task. Theo turned away from the relentless horror, not wanting to see that face as it closed on him. His hand climbed to the chain around his neck, Poppy's chain, and clutched it. So many had given so much, risked so much, for him, but in the end it had not been enough. He looked out to the lake, the water dark now, only silvered a little by the light from the island's center. All ending now.

The water…

He had no more than a few seconds left to act. With an effort that felt as though it tore every nerve in his body loose from its sheath, he tried one last time to throw himself sideways, away from the advancing creature. Scalding pain splashed through him, made him scream until it felt like his lungs were going to come out of his throat, but it was not enough to move his feet.

It was enough, however — just barely enough — to tip him sideways.

For a moment Theo felt the supremely weird sensation of his overmatched muscles trying independently of his own will to do the impossible, to keep his body upright when it was already falling, then he thumped onto his side and began to roll down the sloping hillside toward the lake. He reached the bottom and teetered there for a moment on a low hummock at the water's edge, everything depending on the minutiae of balance, then his legs went over and the rest of him was tugged behind them, sliding him into the cold gray water.

He bobbed up to the surface, in control of his own exhausted body once more. The water was so shallow that even on his knees he was still only half-submerged.

"Ha!" said Lord Hellebore. "You are stronger than I suspected. But it was pointless, wasn't it? Better to give in gracefully — I do not think a cubit of water is going to keep you out of the hands of your nemesis."

Everything seemed to pause — the Terrible Child still busy in the center of his glow, almost hidden now by its stunning brightness, Hellebore and the others watching the confrontation between Theo and the dead thing. Even the irrha itself seemed surprised into immobility for a few seconds. Then it simply turned and came lurching down the slope toward him, as though someone had switched it back on.

Theo felt something vast and cold touch him. He looked down and saw two arms pale almost to the point of translucence encircle him like bars of iron, felt himself pulled back against wet fabric and a hard, flat breast as chill as ice.

"No, nothing else will have him. He is mine." The voice resounded in his ear, ancient, slow. "He wears our shackle on his arm. He was freed to ransom himself but I smell no gold, no bright jewels for my hair, so now he is reclaimed."

Theo could only crouch in the belly-high water, held in her unbreakable, clammy grip. Her wet hair lay across his shoulders like seaweed. He did not turn, knew that if he looked into her eyes that would be the last thing he saw. "Please," he said. "Not yet. Just a few moments more."

"You have no right of plea or pardon," the ancient water-nymph told him, but not harshly.

"I know. But I want to see… if I was right…"

He could feel cold radiating from her, filling him where he lay cradled against her freezing belly, could feel her slow, slow heartbeat. "A moment, then," she said.

And as he watched the irrha halted and stood motionless on the hillside, just yards from Theo but suddenly as blind to him as if he had ceased to exist. It slowly pivoted its ruined head from side to side, then turned to the place where Hellebore and his monstrous stepchild stood. It took a hesitant step toward them, then another.

Hellebore watched with wide eyes. "Stop, you idiot thing, stop!" he shouted, but the irrha did not stop. Hellebore moved out of its way, waving his arms, screaming, "Shoot it! Destroy it!" Several of the constables began to fire; their guns hissed and snapped and the bronze hornets leaped toward the thing and through it. Gobbets of rotting flesh flew into the air. Much of the irrha's stolen face vanished in a spray of dead tissue, leaving hanging bone and a few teeth, but still it trudged up the hill. Only then did Hellebore realize that the thing was not after him. With Theo now the rightful possession of the ancient water-spirit and out of the irrha's circle of perception, it headed inexorably toward the only thing like him, his almost-twin, the small boy luxuriating in the lavender glow of pure power at the lip of the hill.

Hellebore screamed in rage as he dashed after the irrha and was almost shot by his own guards before they saw him and stopped firing. The ogres sprang after their master, but too late: Hellebore leaped and caught the creature's leg even as it stretched out its arms toward the oblivious child. Rotted fabric tore away in Hellebore's fingers, and so did a long strip of putrid flesh. He lost his grip and tumbled backward.

The dead thing waded into the purple gleam and wrapped its arms around the child, who began to writhe and murmur like someone shaken out a beautiful dream. Simultaneously, the light changed color, blooming scarlet and orange, or so it appeared at first; it was a moment before Theo, watching from the nymph's cold embrace, could be certain of what had happened. The irrha had opened a gateway like the one that had brought Theo to Faerie, but this gateway led straight into a raging inferno — the blaze that had been the warehouse of the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles.

"It is compelled to do only one thing," Eamonn Dowd had told him as they had stood in that place, "— to seize you and bring you here." Dowd was gone, but it seemed the irrha's compulsion was not.

The Terrible Child awoke to full reality only as the thing stepped through the gateway. He began to scream, a heartrending screech of horror that could have been any child's. The boy's flesh was already smoking, the little body struggling helplessly in the grip of its burning captor, as the doorway in reality closed again.

Straight to hell, Theo thought. Just like in the old stories. Then for an instant the severed connection between them returned — just a brief touch, but even that merest hint of what the child was feeling made Theo scream and convulse in the unbending arms of his captor.

Nidrus Hellebore had only time for a single shout of rage before the billowing purple light, uncontrolled in the wake of the Terrible Child's vanishing, or perhaps returned to the control of those who had reason to hate him, suddenly enfolded the fairy lord. Hellebore squealed as the very bones inside his flesh turned white hot and began to burn their way out of his body, howled as light burst from his joints, his belly, his eyes and mouth, then fell silent and collapsed in on himself, although small sounds still came out of the smoking mass. As the light from the pit expanded outward, growing weaker as it spread, the others ran away down the hill in heedless terror, scattering in all directions like startled pigeons.

A chill hand covered Theo's eyes. "Enough," said the strong old voice, and the nymph pulled him down.

As the hand that had temporarily blinded him lifted free, Theo saw green depths rushing up to meet him, incalculable depths.

So that was it. That was a life. The thoughts were like bubbles, rising and popping. Goodnight nobody. Say goodnight… Then the water flooded into his startled, open mouth and blackness rushed in behind it.