Titans of Chaos

"You were there. I cooked breakfast."

"That's so... so... chauvinist! It is such a stereotype! The girl cooking breakfast. Victor's a better cook than you! Victor's better at everything."

She crinkled her little freckled nose. "Is that what this is about? You think I am upstaging Victor?

Listen, Amelia. The boys were all disorganized after our first campsite floated away. They needed something reassuring, domestic, orderly. I had to bring order to the chaos. I got things going, had firewood brought, found a clean pan. I notice when people are paying attention, what they are looking at. I notice details. I knew which foods each boy liked because I remembered what he had picked out in the stops during our supply run. Victor's a better cook, but he didn't think of feeding the depressed and disorganized troops.

"Once I did that, I had to organize the schedule for training. I had to decide," she said gravely.

"There was no one to ask. On the one hand, there is a chance that any use of our powers can be detected by means we can only guess. Oracular owls or orbital spy-rays or periscopes from dimensions even you don't have a number for. On the other hand, we have to get stronger. We have to get smarter. We have to figure out what it is we can do that makes them so afraid of us.

That means everyone works on schedule, including tree chopping to break up the monotony of experiments. Tell me: Did you enjoy getting back to them, after all that mindless work? Yes? So that's how I got to be leader. That is what leaders do.

"Speaking of what leaders do, I have good news and bad news. Bad news: I still have to assign you some sort of punishment detail, to keep order in the ranks. The good news is that we can throw you a birthday party after."

"What? No one knows when my birthday is."

"No one knows when baby Jesus was born, but there is a date all picked out for Christmas, isn't there? As leader, I can assign a date. Your birthday is the day after next. Then, the next bit of good news: the final exam!"

"Leader, what is going to be on the final? I mean, the reason why I got in trouble flying off... Well, you should tell us what we should be preparing for, right?"

"For the final, we are going to be sneaking back into civilization. Colin needs a piano or something. He should be practicing music. Quentin needs all sorts of supplies, everything from tarot cards to real clay. We need to replace missing mess gear."

"That doesn't seem that hard." I remember a distinct feeling of disappointment.

Now she smiled, and her eyes twinkled, and she knelt down again beside me to speak in a low voice. It is the kind of voice you use when you are telling a secret, whether there is anyone around or not. "We are going to see if we can help your old friend Sam. The drayman who gave you a lift."

Less than thirty-six hours later, after an afternoon of punishment chores I do not want to remember, and the most charming birthday I do not want to forget, we five were aboard the Argent Nautilus, in a fogbound Irish Sea, rolling and pitching in the choppy waves, and the smothering cold was leaving droplets on our thick woolen sea-coats.

Sam had mentioned to me that he had a nephew in an institution with a mental disease. I had once, half-jokingly, offered to grant him a wish. He wished for a cure.

Now we would see what we could do.

Pallid Hounds A-Hunting

This trip, we had bought supplies with more forethought. We had drifted off the coast of the Isle of Man. Quentin had passed across the waves as silently as a shadow, to approach Castletown, on the south of the island. He returned with the sweaters and jackets and caps we wore, and a heavy backpack filled with chow. We were still low on some things, but he had restocked our larder.

There was no piano to buy for Colin on the Isle of Man.

"The severed head of Bran has not seen us yet," said Quentin as he stepped out of the shadows and down to the deck. "The Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom, merely a possession of the Crown. I saw the shivering ghosts of Vikings, still hungry for blood, but no sigils of Arthur, no ravens loyal to the spells of Elizabeth the First. Officially, I did not step foot on the soil Bran protects. Now, since we are coming on a mission of mercy, perhaps, even when we do, he will not inform the gods of our coming. Perhaps." He gave Vanity a look of doubt, but said no more. Very Victor-like.

A few hours later, after midnight, we had crossed the rough North Sea and were approaching the opposite coast. Quentin, on the bow, summoned friends of his from below the waters, while we all huddled in the stern, trying not to overhear the sinister whispers. But that worked, or something did, and the fog thickened as we crept silently into the mouth of the river Wear, with the lights of Sunderland above us. A short way up the river were the ancient stone bridges and modern iron shipyards of Durham.

Quentin hissed when we passed the peninsula where Durham Cathedral rose up against the foggy lights of the city. He announced that certain of his "covenants" would not operate here, since the bone of Saint Cuthbert scared his allies away.

Edgestow is just north of Stockton-on-Tees, not far from Durham. We disembarked and sent the Argent Nautilus away to lead Mestor's needle somewhere else, and we spent most of the night tramping down roads, or occasionally crossing fields and climbing over walls and hedgerows.

(Yes, hedgerows, just the kind you think they don't make in England anymore, but this was the Northwest.)

It was a bitter January night, and the snow lay wet and thick on the ground, trampled into mud by the roads. The stars were hidden, but the moon rode veiled between tattered streamers of cold clouds.

Between my higher senses, Quentin's divining rod, Colin's hunches, and Victor's tapping into the global-positioning satellites, without trouble we found the tiny institution just before dawn.

We were all behind a snowy hedge, dressed in our thick blue coats and white turtlenecks, looking like a bunch of fishermen. Sneaky fishermen. The boys and Vanity were peering suspiciously down at an empty, snowy road- which looked sickly and yellow beneath the unflickering streetlamps-at the ugly cubical building of glass and concrete beyond.

We could see the ancient buttresses and Gothic spires of some ancient buildings on our side of the street. Perhaps the mental ward had originally been associated with the medical college here; at least, the solemn beautiful architecture of the ancient buildings looked like a campus to me, and I know what a campus looks like.

Orange light pollution lit the sky in one direction, and there was a dim noise of traffic elsewhere, but there was nothing in our immediate environment but those college buildings, an empty field we'd cut across, a white graveyard to one side, and beyond it, a chapel wearing a wimple of snow.

I should mention there was a smaller graveyard at the crossroads, not on the chapel grounds.

Quentin, following a croaking raven and carrying an entrenching tool, went off to do his spooky business there, while we shivered in the cold, waiting. Warlocks are something like doctors, I guess. No matter how much you like them personally, there is quite a bit of nasty mess involved in their line of work.

By the time Quentin got back, Vanity was casing the joint through the snowy twigs of the hedge, and listening to Colin and Victor give her completely contradictory advice about a plan of attack.

Vanity asked us all to report on what we could see.

I was standing farther from the hedge, two paces down the slope. I did not bother to turn my head in the direction of the modern building.

Now was my chance to show my time on the island had not been all wasted. I took my glass globe out of my pocket, unfolded it into a hypersphere. In that thick light, I could examine the immediate fourth-dimensional environment. A trick I'd learned allowed me to send the light down one of my limbs (a part of my body that looked like a strand of music) to shine it against distant objects. Down that same strand, I reached a cluster of sense-receptors.

The three-dimensional building was laid out before me like a blueprint. To my fourth-dimensional eyes, it looked flat. I could see internal natures, utility, monads, all that 4-D stuff. But now, I could agitate the photons in the area, give just enough of them free will to ask them to carry information back to my eyes, so that the number of nonconformist photons who went giggling off as rainbows was relatively small. In effect, I had just made the dimensional periscope Vanity mentioned earlier. Into any one of the squares of the rooms or corridors, I could dip a photon-freeing note of energy and get a 3-D picture of what was in there, too.

I reported my findings. "He's alone. Sleeping on a cot in a cell. Window has steel netting across it, and the door is locked. I can see wires on the main doors into the wing, but no security cameras or anything like that. The alarms back on campus were more sophisticated. There is one guy on guard duty, two floors down, and he is sleeping in his chair."

Vanity said, "Can you confirm that this is the right guy?"

To them, it must have looked like I merely reached my hand up into the air and had it bend strangely, turn red, vanish, and reappear. In my hand was a clipboard. I had merely picked it up with a gleaming whiplike tendril, pulled it "blue" an inch or two, and then pushed it "red" into the hand of my three-dimensional cross-section. One hundred yards in three-space, slightly longer than that in four-space, I could reach with some straining.

"Mortimer Finklestein," I read off the top sheet. "List of the stuff they are doping him with. What he eats, when he cra-uh, goes potty. Hunh. Here is the diagnosis and history. He was out hunting in Teesdale. Wandered off by himself. When his friends found him, he had the mind of a five-year-old."

Colin said, "I thought hunting was illegal now. No more toffs trampling through other people's gardens, you know, killing innocent foxes."

I checked the date. "This was years ago, back when Englishmen still had rights. He was in the estuary below Middlesbrough, hunting small game birds, which were every one as guilty as sin, I'm sure. Anyway, the diagnosis here is of a trauma to the diencephalic-mesencephalic core-anyone know what that means?"

"It's part of an auto," Colin offered.

"It's part of his head," Quentin said. "Cephalic is from the Latin for 'head.'"

"The chart mentions severe cognitive impairment. And something happened to his Ommaya and Gennarelli. No, wait, that's the name of the scale he was tested against." I breathed a sigh.

"Leader, I'm sorry. I've studied grammar, logic, rhetoric, as well as astronomy, music, arithmetic, and geometry, but I cannot read a medical chart. This is written in another language only remotely related to the Queen's English. At a guess? Mortimer here went into the marsh and came out stupid. They think he fell and hit his head."

We had discussed the plans for this exhaustively during the boat fide. Vanity stepped down toward the road, found a manhole cover, which, at Victor's gesture, flew open silently. She descended a ladder to where, not by coincidence, she "found" a large underground river. She called her boat.

Then she scampered back up the ladder.

She said, "We have our escape route, and our getaway boat coming. Amelia, is it obvious?"

I had to say, "Sort of. To me it looks like this big tube filled with river water just dipped out of the parallel plane where the dreamlands are and intersected the Earth continuum. I dunno. There are other fourth-dimensional topography features here, stuff from the cathedral and old Roman ruins, other old roads through hyperspace, hidden groves of trees at right angles to normal space. Druid stuff, I guess. Someone like you was really active here, years ago. Your river might pass unnoticed if a siren walks by, but it's not exactly hidden, either."

Vanity frowned. "In that case, let me keep the secret-passage-making to a minimum. We go in the front way. Victor, your turn."

He walked across the snowy road and we followed him.

I noticed invisible forces leaving his body and reaching up to nearby lampposts. "Victor!" I whispered. "Are you knocking out the cameras? I think those are just for traffic, not part of the hospital. You know, to catch jaywalkers and stuff. They're innocent."

Victor said darkly, "Cameras like that are always put up by men like Boggin. I am sure whoever put them up told his students they were for their own good, too, using the same jolly tones our Boggin uses."

At the front door, Victor manipulated the lock mechanism and the wires I described to him. The door clicked open. Quentin brought out from beneath his cloak a severed human hand dipped in wax, and he carefully lit each of the fingers on fire. Holding it before him, he strode down the corridors. He stood with his eerie candle between us and the main desk where the guard was sleeping, and the smoke from the candles reached like tentacles toward the guard's face. We all made noise as we crept past him, but somehow, the guard did not wake.

The elevators were locked down at night. Rather than asking us to trace wires and locks and fiddle with the unfamiliar controls, Vanity gave Colin the high sign. Colin grinned a wicked grin, stepping forward. He grew at least two inches, and his muscles swelled and thickened on his frame, until his coat buttons and seams were straining. Then, like some abominable snowman, he just plunged his bare hands into the steel doors and tore them from their tracks.

Victor had him tear one metal door in half, which made such a noise that it should have set the entire ward screaming, but Quentin's candle protected us, or something did. Colin thrust the broken door into the empty elevator shaft, and we all stepped on it, and Victor levitated us up to the third floor.

This time, before Colin could show off, I reached into the locking mechanism and removed the little iron pins through the untouched surface of the door, and the doors could be slid aside without further ado.

The corridor was a drab olive hue, thick-shadowed in the light of a single night-bulb held in a cage of wires on the ceiling. Vanity started looking at the room numbers painted on the wall, but I just took her elbow and pointed.

And here was our next locked door in an evening of locked doors.

I whispered, "There are five of us, and five ways to open this door. Who does the honor, Leader?"

Vanity whispered back, "How do you figure five?"

"Fourth dimension, magnetic powers, magic, brute strength. And you can open a locked door, too. I mean, you don't know for sure the lock is engaged, do you? No one knows what is inside a wall."

She shook her head. "I can only find a secret passage if there might be one. Here there is nothing I can work with: Too much attention has already been paid to these walls."

But Quentin said, "Leader! We cannot open this door."

"Why not?" she said. "Are you worried about the rules here? We're already breaking and entering."

He shook his head. "I don't know why, but I see the signs. This door is forbidden."

Vanity looked at me and I looked at the threads of moral energy in the place. "He's right," I said.

"But I don't see anything like that on the other doors. Why is this door different? I wonder if we should abort."

Vanity said, "We can go in without touching the door."

Victor said, 'To get in without touching the door requires we break in through an adjoining wall, the outside window, the ceiling, or the floor."

Vanity said, "Amelia, if you would... ?"

"Gladly, Leader."

I have no idea what it looked like to them. I asked them to close their eyes anyway. I stood with one foot in the corridor and one foot in the room, with my leg going "over" the wall in the red direction, without touching it. I picked up Vanity first, and ballet-lifted her from right to left, and I made sure there were no wrinkles or rotations when I flattened their paper-doll bodies back into the flat square that formed the room.

When it came Victor's turn, I balked. "Leader, I think it might be bad for him. He is kind of thinner than you people are in the fourth dimension. I don't want to hurt him."

Quentin said, "He can go through the door. It won't see him."

Blue light dazzled from Victor's head, and the lock clicked of its own accord, and he walked through. The azure light fell into the small, grim room and snuffed out Quentin's candle.

The man, Mortimer, stirred on the white metal-framed bed, opened his eyes, and sat up.

"Who're you?" His eyes were as blue and empty as a summer sky. Innocent. A child's eyes.

A dart of light left Victor's metallic third eye and flicked into the man's face. His eyelids drooped, and he lay back down, snoring before he hit the thin yellow pillow.

Vanity said, "What was that?"

Victor closed the door behind him. "Narcolepsy. I stimulated the pons area of the brain and activated his sleep cycle."

Vanity looked a little miffed that Victor had acted without waiting for orders, but she didn't say anything aside from, "Can you fix him?"

"Let me look." And the azure beam played over the young man's face for many minutes. "Leader, I have been instructed, programmed, in a science called cryptognosis, which involves the manipulation of the nervous system on a fine structural level. There is nothing physically wrong with his brain. If it is a spell, anything from Quentin's paradigm, I should have been unable to undo it."

Vanity said, "Should have been?"

Victor said, 'The proper stimulation sequences are occurring, but the synapses in certain brain areas will not fire. I can detect the microvoltage changes on the dendrites, which should trigger corresponding actions in the axons, but nothing happens. There are no proteins that would attenuate the signals in operation."

"Amelia, report."

I said, "Something is lowering the utility, the usefulness of his brain cells to him. I see moral connections running into the past and future. There is a confusion of time-energy. There is something, some awareness, which is in the future, that reacts to changes in Mr. Finklestein here.

Its interior nature is watchful and stern, but it has no free will. Its moral stance, um, changed, when Victor negated all the magic in the patient. I don't know what I am looking at. It could be natural. It could be artificial."

"Can you do your monad thing?"

I reached into the man's nervous system and straightened what I could. "Leader, I don't see a change. It is like it is something he's doing to himself, maybe? If he's not really hurt, could it be hypnosis? He has free will; he is just not using it."

Quentin said, 'This sounds like it is up my alley, Leader. An enchantment, something that bound his will. Maybe he ran into a bad elf in the swamp? I suggest we retire to the graveyard across the street and let me try something. I know the formulae to summon and command the Great King and President called Zagam. He will appear at first in the form of a bull with gryphon's wings. He has the power to make fools witty. I need but a drop of blood from the patient."

I reached into a cabinet one floor down and several yards up the corridor. Quentin looked startled when my hand turned red and vanished and reappeared. "Sterile lancet?" I offered. "This is a hospital, you know."

Vanity unbuttoned her sea-coat and pulled her necklace out from her sweater. She was sweating.

It had been cool outside, but the air in this small dim room was hot and close. "Let me see if I can get a more magical set of laws of nature working here, to help you out."

"You know," I said doubtfully, "if we mess up something here, it could be bad. I mean, we're trying to do neurosurgery on this guy without anyone's permission, and..."

No one was listening. They were all staring at Vanity's bosom. I mean, it is large and round and nicely shaped, but...

Oh. There was a face in the middle of the green stone around her neck. That was what the boys were staring at.

Vanity said, "Who are you?"

A fair soft voice seemed to have spoken, although it did not speak. It was like we were remembering words, not hearing words. A queenly face in the dim depth of the green stone had answered wordlessly: "Andromeda am I, the queen of Ethiopia's daughter, prideful Cassiopeia. In all the devastated lands from Philistia to Lebanon, none save the fairest could be found to sate the monster, and so to pay my mother's guilt, with modest piety, uncomplaining, with daughterish obedience, I chained myself to the sacrificial sea-rock, to save the human lands from horrid Typhon's brood." Her eyes turned toward Victor as she spoke this. "Great Perseus me succored, who slew Medusa, cousin of the Graeae." Now she looked at Quentin. "And after life and death, Olympian Lord Terminus, All-highest, he who guards the boundary stone, opened the boundaries of starry night for me, had my figure placed within the heavens, a guide to mariners. The Phaeacians befriended my folk in times past, the mariners of Phoenicia and Tyre. I watch your silver ships even as Bran watches Cassiterides, the island of Tin. Ask of me, Daughter of Arete."

"Can you make the room here hold the laws of nature that will let Quentin cast his magic?"

The woman's voice hung in our memories, as if she had spoken: "There is no magic, only mysteries explained, and mysteries unexplained."

Quentin muttered, "See? As I've always said."

Vanity seemed at a loss. "Well-can you help us some other way?"

"I will bestow what grace is mine to give, for any demoiselle who suffers chains is mine, and any savior who breaks those chains, and you are both at once, Phaeacian. The young man is chained, but he is not one of mine: On your oath to harm him not, I will perform."

We all agreed.

In our memories, we heard her words: "Phobetor, Nightmare-prince, this room is yours: I gift it you."

The room did not change shape, nor did the moonlight falling in through the grille of the window darken, but something like that should have happened, because a strange dreamlike sensation crept over me, a sense that I could not move, or that the objects around me were alive, silently chuckling, merely holding into the familiar shapes of floor and bed out of a watchful malice.

Colin said, "Hey. I can see his dreams. He is dreaming right now."

Vanity said, "Colin, Amelia is freaking out. I think your dreamworld is bad for her. Can you do something?"

He pulled his eyes away from the figure on the bed. "Um. Like what, Red Leader?"

The man on the bed opened his eyes. It was horrible, like looking at a zombie. His mouth was open, and his voice came out, but I did not see any tongue or teeth. The lips did not move. It was like the real Mortimer was crouched below the bed, speaking up through a tube shoved through the back of a corpse. Nothing looked wrong, but it was horrible for the same reason dreams are horrible, when you dream about an empty white room with an empty wooden chair in it, and cannot remember why that terrifies you.

Colin was holding me by the shoulders, and Victor was standing behind me with his arm around my waist. Funny. I didn't remember them reaching for me.

"Amelia," said Colin. "Calm down. You have nothing to be afraid of. By the authority vested in me as a Prince of Chaos, son of Morpheus, I invite you into my realm, um, this whole room, the land on which it stands and the sky above, and all the rights, rents, and privileges appertaining thereto. There. Did anything happen?"

I said in a calm, slow voice: "His eyes are open. He's talking. Can't you hear him?"

"Amelia, stop screaming. Um." Colin shrugged. "Leader, what's going on?"

Vanity spoke up, "Ask her what the voice said."

I said, "I can hear you, Vanity. Mortimer is talking. He says he saw her bathing. The girl was naked. It was freezing winter, and the snow was on the sedge and swamp-grass, but she laughed and sported in the pool like it was a bath. Her dogs were blind, no eyes in the sockets, and white and pale as death. She set her dogs on him."

Colin said, "She's right. That is what I am seeing inside his head. There is a girl, maybe fourteen, fifteen. Athletic build, sort of Jewish-looking, olive-skinned, with her hair all pinned up. Huh.

That's funny. She just turned and looked at me."

Vanity said, "Someone is watching us."

Colin said, "She's whistling for her dogs. How can she be doing that? This is something in his dream."

I spoke. My words sounded odd to me. "He is dreaming a real thing."

"Actaeon," said Quentin. "I told you about him before. His own hounds turn on him. I guess in the modern version, his brain cells turn on him. Leader, we had best start the retreat!"

Colin reached forward and touched the figure on the bed. Suddenly, the dream sensations left me.

The man's eyes were closed again; his mouth was relaxed. Colin spoke in a voice of solemn command: "I release you from your nightmare. Be whole! I release you from the curse of the goddess! Wake! OH, BAT CRAP! She's coming! Don't any of you see her! She's coming with her dogs! Leader, whaddya wanna do?"

Vanity said in a voice that squeaked with panic, "Can any of you see anything?"

Victor said, "I think only Colin's laws of nature are working now."

Vanity clutched at her stone. "Okay. I can-"

I shouted, "Leader, no! Wait! I can see her, too. She is approaching through the dream-realm, a plane parallel to the plane of earth. But the world-paths curve away from this room. I don't think she can get into the room, not while you are maintaining a boundary with your green stone."

The moon shining in through the window changed suddenly, and an olive-skinned girl stood outside, looking in. She was dressed in a brief white tunic, leather leggings, and a forearm-guard on her right arm. In that hand, she held a bow that was as silver and lustrous as the moon. Atop her tightly bunned and netted hair, she wore a coronet shaped like a crescent. With her other hand, she was fishing an arrow from her ivory quiver. Her eyes were the color of moonlight, and eerie, and cold. Her internal nature was fierce and clean and young, untouched by any man.

"Chaotic creatures, dressed like humans, and standing in a house!" she said, and her voice was like a crystal goblet chiming. It was more regal than pretty, but it was the kind of voice that could say things like off with their heads or throw them to the snakes without any hint of pity or doubt.

From the shape of her legs and her general trim, I could tell she'd be good at the hundred-meter dash. Her shoulders were broad and sinewy for a girl, the muscles sculpted from endlessly pulling a bowstring.

Victor raised his hand. "Miss, don't shoot! We're the hostages from Chaos. If we die, the war between Cosmos and Chaos starts again."

She rolled her silvery blind-seeming eyes in mirth. "You give commands to me, little boar piglet, little wolf cub? Your kind is my prey: I hunt you for sport. Cunning it is of you vile creatures to pretend to be the babies Father gave to Boreas. But the wise North Wind would never let the real hostages of Chaos escape his sight, would he? My Big Brother would know, for he sees everything, and Mavors would know, too. I will cut out your tongue for that lie, unhearted dragon-boy, and cook it for soup. You others I will stuff. Release your hostage!"

Vanity was standing there, her mouth open, her face blank with fear. I knew that look. I had seen it on her when she was called on in class, on days when we hadn't studied the lesson. Out of ideas.

I saw the morality webs fletch and twitch. "She means you, Leader. She thinks we've captured you."

I could see the dogs through the walls. They were coming out of the moonlit clouds, silvery white, as if made of cloud-stuff, solidifying as they ran through the air. Blind things with red ears. Their internal nature was deadly and cold: These were things from Hell. Everyone heard them baying.

The queenly teenager said to me, "You have spoken out of turn, Unknown One. For that affront, I demand the sacrifice of life and limb and everything. Do you deny me?"

Quentin said quickly, "Don't answer! It is a trap. What are your orders, Leader?"

But the young goddess now turned her fierce gaze to Quentin. "A Fallen creature from the Pit?

My! What craft your body has! I almost took you for a man, instead of one of mine. Every hair, every internal organ, is fitted in place. That is a masterpiece of sculpture. You even did the little veins and nerves. Well! Enough! Invite me into the wards, little magician-or else, by your silence, deny my right to step anywhere my hounds can track."

Colin said to Vanity, "Leader! I think I can take her. Just say the word." With a clang of ear-ringing noise, he broke the metal strut off the foot of the bed and hefted it as a bludgeon. It would have impressed a mortal.

The Huntress drew back her head: Her eyes were as cold and inhuman as arctic stars. "You think to lay hands on me, the Virgin, inviolate, divine, and sacred? This world, this human earth, this dirty spot within heavenly sphere, it is overwhelmed by all the bloodshed and pollutions of men, their stinking lusts, their cities a-drip with oil, their battlefields with carrion. Who told the Phaeacian to smuggle you into the world, sons of Chaos, dream things, Tartarians, soulless wights? Who discovered our weakness to you? Who told you of the madness of my adulterous Father, who did not slay the orphans of Chaos, those four children you impersonate? Was it Lady Cyprian? Was it the Whore of Heaven? Was it she? Who else is the enemy of purity? Who else hates the clean wilderness, the sacred chastity? Answer! Answer in the name of the untainted and fierce hatred only untouched maidens know!"

I saw the morality strands begin to wind around Quentin. "Leader! Have Andromeda shut off all magic! Quick!"

Vanity clutched at her stone. Green light throbbed through her fingers. The tendrils I could see were still issuing from the bow of the goddess, the substance of enchantment, reaching here and there, but they could not enter the room. On the other side of the locked door, a pack of hounds materialized suddenly in the moonlight. Also in the bed cells to the left and right of us, in the adjacent rooms.

"Leader, I can see where the dog packs are! We're surrounded!"

Quentin bowed and said to the goddess, "Diane Artemis, mighty Potnia Theron, Mistress of the Wild, who is called also Courotrophos the Nourisher, Locheia and Agrotora, Healer and Huntress, Shining One, Born of Leto! We have not forgotten your names nor ever held your shrine in dishonor! We proffer you no disrespect, and deeply do we genuflect to you, sovereign goddess, White Lady, Maiden of Heaven! We do not disobey the wise commands of any god or goddess, we do not meddle with sacred things, but in preserving the world, we do your will and do not oppose it..."

"Phoebe," she said, waving her bow in the air as if to clear away cobwebs. "I am Lady Phoebe now. Call me that. Cunning, you are! How can you be disobeying me, without triggering the demands of fate?"

Victor said to Quentin, "Don't answer. Tell the enemy nothing. Leader, orders?"

Quentin said, "Lady Phoebe." Then he shrugged and smiled, and said to Victor. "Sorry, but that was worded as a direct command..."

I said, "Leader, listen to me! I can see what is going on. The laws of nature in the room-"

Vanity looked like she was about to break down. "Amelia is now second in command. Do what she says."

Oops.

All eyes turned toward me, including the penetrating, silver-white eyes of the girl hanging in midair outside the window.

She smiled a truly chilling smile, as cold as the far side of the moon. "Come out, come out, prelapsarian. I part my hounds and give you a running start: You look swift. Your ham is firm and thigh is sleek. Am I not generous? Otherwise you are surrounded."

I said, "Colin, Andromeda gave you this room and you gave it to me, right? In the eyes of the law, how far down, or how far up, do the boundaries go?"

Quentin answered, "To the core of the Earth, and up to infinity."

The moment he said that, the uncertainty collapsed, and I saw, like a forcefield, the lines flush with the square floor of the room. Four walls of light dwindling to a vanishing point far underfoot, and reaching upward like a slowly expanding cone overhead. The moral energy lines were gathered around it, trying to get in, but they could not cross the boundary. My property.

Colin grunted. "What he said. Leader, let me rip her head off, huhn?"

Victor said, "Leader, your orders?"

"Everyone hold hands," I said.

Lady Phoebe was right. I was fast.

I pulled the suddenly weightless team "past" the ceiling, the attic, and the roof tiles without disturbing them. I was still directly above the room, still within the cone of my legal property, and accelerating straight up. Zero to Mach four in thirty seconds.

Victor slid through without much problem, though it did kill him, until I tilted his monad back in place and the mechanical processes of his life started again. The fact that Colin had been able to make his deadly dream-environment friendly to me made me think I could do the same for Victor.

(In hindsight, Colin should have been the one impossible to pull into the fourth dimension, but maybe he can turn off his anti-Amelia-ness somehow. Maybe he was inspired to pass through the roof.)

I was two miles up, going Mach ten, before the dogs of cloud closed in on me. The blind, narrow-headed greyhounds were horrible to look at, and their teeth were like icicles. But they hung to every side of me, running straight up as I soared, some leaping ahead, baying and barking, some falling behind. I ignited the atmosphere around me to form a multicolored aura of free-willed air to protect my friends, and Vanity made a quick pass with her green stone to give us laws of nature favorable to our attempt.

She must have done something clever, because the dogs still could not close with us, but our other abilities were permitted. Victor was turning to gold, his flesh peeling away in grotesque strips so that a harder integument underneath could take its place. A darkness gathered around Quentin, and he seemed to burn with black fire, but the acceleration was not hurting him, and his speed was as great as mine, or Victor's.

Colin was hanging on for dear life. No, sorry, he was grinning like a devil, with one arm clenching my waist, and one arm around Vanity. He was slipping slowly downward, so his nose was somewhere pressed into my bosom, and Vanity was being likewise crushed up against his lusty self. Jerk. But he must have been inspired, or something, because the friction and acceleration were not even mussing his hair.

Underfoot, I heard Lady Phoebe wind her hunting horn, a long, chilling note.

At that noise, Victor pointed a finger, and an invisible beam punched a clean hole though the skull and breast of two of the clamoring dogs at his heels, passed through the clouds below, and left a circle in the cloudbank as neat as a mechanical punch might make. The Huntress must have been directly below. The horn-note squawked and died.

Victor sent a radio beam toward me, a silent commutation that ignored the hurricane of wind noise all around us. "She is doing magic. I can hold some of it back, but she has millions of ergs of electromagnetic life-forms, many more than Quentin commands."

Up. Straight up. There was nowhere else to go. I could not go right or left. If I went into the fourth dimension, I would be going much slower, and I could also see her dog things were partly in my paradigm: They were flickering in and out of the moonlight of earthland and dreamland freely. If I left three-dimensional space entirely, they might get me.

The goddess was coming. She was not so fast as I was, not so fast as her own dogs, but I could see the winding strands of energy reaching into the past and future. I was gripped with the sick, sudden certainty that, in the same way that Mavors the Warrior could not be defeated in melee, Phoebe the Huntress could not lose her prey.

Cloud. The dogs had the internal nature of clouds. They were made out of cloud. An atmospheric phenomenon.

I could not reach escape velocity. Orbital velocity is a different thing. But...

The air should have been too thin for speech, or life, at this altitude, but the free air blanketing us, and Vanity's imposition of more Aristotelian laws of nature that did not worry about concepts like friction and air pressure, allowed us to talk.

I put my mouth to Vanity's ear and shouted. "Call your ship!"

She yelled back, "It's a ship, not a plane!"

"Call your ship! That's an order!"

"There is no water up here!" she said in a voice of misery.

The dark world was underfoot. The pattern of city lights followed the coastlines of England and, across the channel, Normandy. A curving red line of fire defined the distant dawn to the east. To either side was thin stratosphere. And still the pale, blind dogs chased us. And overhead:..

The shadowy form of Quentin pointed with an ebon finger. "I see a river," he said. By some trick of his, the words were clear and close within our ears, despite the raging noise of our terrible acceleration.

Vanity's eyes followed where he pointed. There, mystical, wondrous, were the million gem-gleaming stars of the Milky Way, a stream of light.

Silhouetted against the jeweled splendor of the Milky Way was the slender silhouette of a Greek trireme. The solemn eyes painted on the prow were looking at us.

I said, "She has to match velocities with us, because we need to remain geosynchronous above the room. The dogs will have a chance to attack when we board. Um, everyone, if my bubble of free-willed air around us breaks when we cross to the ship, you'll get an attack of flatulence. Let it out, Chaucer-like, if you know what I mean, or else your internal organs might get damaged.

Colin! I am counting on you to kill and slay and maim like Cuchulainn, or one of those heroes from your ridiculous Irish epics. Once we board, Vanity looks for a secret compartment that is airtight; Colin and I saw her find a trapdoor leading into a hold, so maybe she can find a pressurized cabin. And then, um, and then..."

Quentin said, "Where can we go that the goddess will not follow? She will pursue us to the ends of the Earth."

The word came to my lips without effort. "Mars!" I breathed. "The Red Planet!"

I gave Colin a kiss on the top of his head. "Kill the dogs for me, Colin, and we'll go put the first footprints on the planet Mars!"

When we engaged, Colin ripped the jawbone out of the first monster hound his hands found, and he beat the others to pulp with it, and gore was sprayed in slowly falling crescents of mist across the upper atmosphere.

The Red Planet

During those frantic moments when we had to cross several yards of high stratosphere to the hull of the ship, I think Victor actually killed more dogs, because they disintegrated into cloud when his azure beam lanced through them. But Colin fought like a demon, laughing. His skin was dark and hot as blood suffused it, and the hair on his head stood up like the arched back of a witch's cat.

Yes, it was in midair, in the troposphere, and yes, Colin should have simply fallen to his death, like a parachutist with no chute, and should have suffered frostbite and decompression, but no, his paradigm did not work that way. He was inspired to slaughter the dogs. He went berserk.

Vanity sought and "found" an airlock leading into a space below the hull, a wooden torpedo-shape, reinforced with iron ribs, pierced by small, round portholes above and below. It looked like the type of submersible Jules Verne would have developed. The upper deck and the mast could fold themselves into the dream-dimension (I don't know what that process looked like to anyone but me), and the whole ship, now a spindle-shaped cylinder of ivory, silver, and wood, darted like a slender fish through the troposphere.

She still had a ram on her prow, painted eyes to either side. There were no lifting surfaces, or ailerons, no source of thrust in the spacegoing aspect of the ship, any more than there had been sail or steering board in the seagoing version.

"Who built this ship?" I remember asking Vanity in wonder and awe. It was the perfect vessel to explore the universe in.

Vanity fiddled with her glowing green necklace until she found and established a set of laws of nature amenable to our needs. Aristotle thought the air was a transparency that conveyed the potential for light to the eye, made of a continuous substance. No molecules, no partial pressures, none of the Pascalian air-has-weight stuff.

And no oxygen-carbon dioxide cycles, not in a universe with only four elements. We did not worry about the air going stale, because that was not something that happened in the particular paradigm of the universe that currently obtained within the hull of our craft.

The ship flew at the speed of dreams, and climbed to an altitude Victor announced was two hundred miles high. We were in low Earth orbit. All sign of pursuit was gone.

My heart soared higher than any mere two hundred miles. Outer space was at my fingertips! Orbit is halfway to anywhere.

The sensation of being in a falling elevator made Quentin puke. He was quick-witted enough to throw his cloak before his face and catch the mess before it formed a cloud, but the stinking drench was as disgusting as you might imagine. Ask someone who has small children what it's like. Now picture that floating in three dimensions.

Other business was put on hold until Vanity found a set of laws of nature in her green stone that would allow for some gravity. Aristotelian physics had drawbacks: The ship, made of noncelestial substance, did not move in the divine circular motions natural to the crystal spheres of Aristotle's concentric heavens, but instead started to plunge back toward Earth, where her natural motion inclined it-and since she was a heavier object, she fell faster.

We could not maintain orbit with Aristotle's physics: He did not believe in inertia, in centrifugal and centripetal forces. Vanity found something more Newtonian. Victor imparted a spin to the ship, magnetically adding angular momentum to the metal joists and bolts. The sunlight, unhampered by any atmosphere, shot blinding rays through the portholes, first above and then below, as if a lamp, un-endurably brilliant, were being spun on the chain just outside our windows.

I found the easiest way to converse was to lie on my back between two port-holes, looking "up" at Vanity and the boys, who were stuck to the walls of the cylinder. It was like those rapidly spinning barrels you see in rides at the fair.

Vanity resigned. "I am a peacetime leader, really, and I don't think my administration is that good in time of war. I mean, I could feel her staring at me, you know? Staring like she was picking out which wallpaper would look good on the spot in her house where she would nail my skinned pelt."

Vanity shivered.

I could tell from the looks on the boys' faces that Colin thought Vanity was being a sissy; Quentin was more forgiving. He said, "The Lady Phoebe may have known a weakness associated with the Phaeacian ability to feel that 'being watched' sensation. It is a sense impression of some sort. Why couldn't it be dazzled or deafened?"

Victor had put his prosthetic face back on, but his expression, as usual, was composed and dispassionate. "In any case, we must decide our next course of action. We have no reason to believe the Huntress cannot follow us up out of the atmosphere. She is a moon goddess, after all."

I said, "Mars! Who here wants to go to Mars? We'll be famous!"

Victor said, "Well, for one thing, people trying to hide should not be famous."

"If the gods are so secretive, they might not be willing to strike out against famous people, right?" I pointed out.

Colin said sarcastically, "Yeah, look at how well things turned out for famous guys like Agamemnon and Ajax and Oedipus and Icarus..."

I said, "Listen! We're free for the first time in our lives, and now is our chance to spread our wings, to test our strength against the odds, to attempt bold things, to sail beyond the sunset!"

Colin grinned at that.

I looked at Quentin and said, "To learn things never learned, to step where none have stepped, to fly higher than even the princes of the Middle Air."

And to Victor I said, "Even if she follows us up out of the atmosphere, then Phoebe might not be able to achieve escape velocity. If she cannot, then the whole solar system, the whole universe, is ours! What will we care then about the gods? What is Olympos but one small mountain on one small world?"

The motion was carried, and I found myself in the leadership position once again.

As they say, the devil is in the details. We need an Aristotelian paradigm in order to keep our air from going stale, but Aristotle did not allow for the Newtonian orbital mechanics we need to reach another planet.

We discussed whether we could merely turn one cabinet, or a small area of deck, into an Aristotelian vest-pocket cosmos, and pump our carbon dioxide into it, and pump out fresh air, without having that cabinet be pulled to Earth by its natural motion. Vanity, based on the results of her research back on the island, seemed to think having two non-harmonious laws of nature right next to each other might cause problems. Colin was urging Vanity to use her stone to summon up something more primitive, pre-Ptolemaic; His argument was that Stone Age shamans did not worry about or know how the sky-people breathed or moved. No one wanted to take Victor up on his offer to grow specially designed algae in our lungs that would allow us to breathe oxygen and carbon dioxide indifferently.

"Don't expeditions like this usually involve, you know, more planning... ?" asked Vanity. "Like NASA and getting food and space suits and all sorts of stuff? We have the knapsacks of gear lashed to the deck, which is in a vacuum right now, I should mention."

Victor said, "I thought there were launch windows controlling the timing of space shots?"

I was bubbling with enthusiasm. "Sure, Victor, there would be, if we were dealing with the rocket equation, and if conserving fuel were our main concern. In such a case, the most efficient method would be to begin from low Earth orbit, achieve a six-point-six kilometers per second delta-V, to put us into a Hohmann transfer ellipse, where its perihelion is tangential to Earth's orbit and its aphelion at Mars! In such a case, the next available launch date would be July ninth of this year, when Mars is past its closest approach by forty-five degrees, and the orbit out would take about two hundred fifty-nine days! After four hundred and fifty-five days on Mars, the planets would be in a good relative position, and we could make a second burn of seven point two kilometers per second! Let me show you how these figures are derived! First, remember that Kepler's third law states that for all objects orbiting the sun, the square of the orbital period is inversely proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis..."

Colin, who was pinned to the curved ceiling above me, groaned. "Bat crap! She's talking in equations again! You've memorized the acceleration requirements for a Mars shot? Girl, you have thought about this entirely too much."

I said impatiently, "What else was there to think about, back when we were trapped in the orphanage, but how to get off the planet?"

"Wait, wait," said Quentin, who was halfway up the wall to my left. "Amelia, I mean, um, Leader, were you proposing we sail to Mars in a wooden boat for eight and a half months?"

Colin said, "And we don't have a bathroom aboard."

"Head," I said. "Aboard a ship, it's called a 'head.'"

"Fine, we don't have one."

Victor said, "I assume we can use our special powers to overcome the need for oxygen at sea-level pressure, or do without food or water. But what about radiation from solar activity? The walls of this vessel are made of wood. I should not even mention the fuel supply, except Vanity, what does this ship use for fuel, anyhow? What makes it go?"

Vanity was lying with both hands behind her red curls, one leg bent, the other crossed over it, so she could bounce her foot idly in the air. It was the kind of posture one would assume for watching clouds passing by, but in this case she was looking up (her "up," my "down") at her friends. "I dunno. The ship goes where I tell her. I did not think she could fly into space."

Quentin said, "If the vessel is moved by a spirit, there may be limitations on where the spirit has leave to go. Is it lawful for a Phaeacian ship to sail beyond the circles of the Earth? The laws of magic may differ in the superlunary realms."

Colin said, "I am not living in a coffin one hundred twenty feet long and twelve feet wide for eight months. And then how long on Mars to wait for the planets to move back to the right positions?"

I said, "No, no, no! That figure was for a fuel-flightpath efficient orbit. We are supernatural creatures in a supernatural boat. We can cheat. If the Nautilus can achieve and maintain a one-g acceleration throughout the trip, it should only take about two days."

Victor said, "Actually, Leader, we don't know if this ship can even achieve escape velocity."

"Then that will be the first thing to test!" I declared.

Victor said, "Very good, Leader. How do we measure our velocity?"

I said, "We don't We measure acceleration. Vanity, ask your ship to maintain an acceleration equal to one gravity as measured at sea level on Earth. Victor, can you measure the fall of an object in seconds per second? You go up on deck, get a tin cup or something out of the knapsacks, and we drop it from the bow to the stern."

Colin looked to the stern. "If this works, that will be the floor, right? We'll be stuck at the bottom of a wooden well, which is six feet in radius, for two days with no bathroom... 'scuse me, Leader, no head. Where are you and Vanity going to take showers? I want to watch you scrub each other's backs with sudsy soap in zero-g."

I said, "Maybe we can take a shortcut and be there in a few minutes!"

Vanity closed her eyes and asked her boat for a path to the planet Mars. Nothing of any particular import happened. She opened her eyes and said, "I cannot find a secret passage through a wall if there is no wall. It's all empty nothingness up here. Also, I think my power is at least a bit like yours: a place someone has looked before is already 'fixed.' You know what I mean? It's taken, established, claimed. I can convince the world there might be a shortcut in some place no one has ever looked before; I cannot do that in a night sky the whole planet of astronomers look at every day, er, night. Unless you can bend the fourth dimension for me, Amelia?"

Which I could not think of how to do just at that moment. Her ship was much bigger in the fourth dimension than in three, and I could not see how I could move the vessel at all, as it was attached to a complex and huge structure of space-warps and energy-obligations. I could throw things past the walls, but I could not move the ship herself. As far as my race was concerned, the ship was anchored in one spot. I could make the ship heavier or lighter, but I could not add momentum to her. Go figure.

I tried to tell Vanity how big her ship was, but she covered her ears and warned me not to look at the ship too closely, or else I would kill off any chance of finding other secret doors in the hull.

So I said, "We have to go through outer space, just like any other astronauts, then."

Quentin shook his head. "Which might prove impossible, Leader. Are X-rays and gamma rays and cosmic rays from the sun sterilizing us right now?"

It was not impossible, but we spent longer getting the vessel ready for the trip than the trip itself took.

The Huntress did not overtake us. We took up a middle-distance orbit about one thousand miles above the Earth and set to work.

First, Vanity found the laws of nature from what must have been an ancient Greek atomist theory, something like what Lucretius or Democritus imagined. These laws did not have the problems with Aristotelian natural motions pulling us toward the Earth, but the "atomies" were made of essential airy bits, not something that broke down into oxygen-nitrogen. Vanity found she could apply them to the interior of the cylinder and leave the outside Newtonian, so mass and acceleration and all those laws of motion acted normally.

Second, Quentin worked his astrology, using just the tables he carried in his head, which was good enough to tell us that Mars was in opposition, at its closest approach to Earth. He did not know the distance of Mars at closest approach, but I did: 56 million kilometers. The equation for a Brachistochrone curve was simple to solve using calculus of variations.

(I always thought Leibniz's solution to Bernoulli's problem was more elegant than Newton's. But I am British, so I say Newton invented the calculus, and we'll invade the damn foreigners who say otherwise. Soon as we get another Wellington.)

Quentin and Colin, working together, managed to cast a whopper of a spell. Hours were spent drawing pentagrams and circles, inscribed minutely with Latin, all across the curving inner walls of our ship. Colin knelt down and handed me the gold ring of Gyges, making several rude suggestions that earned him KP. During the experiment, I wore the ring with the collet turned in, so the manifestation would not see me, and I had to carry Vanity in my arms so that she was invisible, too. Victor scoffed at the notion that one of Quentin's "imaginary friends" could see him-and he was right, and it did not.

A creature named Saburac, "a Marquis mighty, great and strong" (as Quentin called him), appeared in the midst of smoke and fumes that filled our cramped living space, and this apparition took the form of an Elizabethan soldier in breastplate and helm, armed at all points, with the head of the lion, riding a horse as white as bone. He roared with scornful laughter when Quentin commanded him to build a tower, filled and furnished with victuals, arms, and armor, in the void of space, but Colin threatened him, and the monster called him "Prince Phobetor," and bowed. (Which surprised me, because Colin's paradigm was trumped by Quentin's. I guess not every creature from Quentin's paradigm trumped Colin, though.)

"Mine office also be to afflict men for many days with wounds and sores, rotten and full of worms," the lion-headed knight announced. Colin was interested in the possibilities here, but by that time, Quentin had banished the entity to its tasks. A tower made of great gray stones, tumbling hugely in the zero-g, was beginning to fall to pieces off our port bow. I had seen the tower cross over from the parallel plane of Earth's dreamland, but to the others, the tower must have seemed to appear from nowhere.

Of course, we really did not need a tower. We needed the metals and other elements, or, I should say, Victor did. He assumed his faceless, gold-skinned spaceworthy form and pulled himself across the vacuum on magnetic beams. In the wreckage of the tower were iron and steel, carbon and water, and so on.

The food the creature conjured from nothing was not harmed by exposure to vacuum and radiation: If anything, it was safer than normal. Radiation kills germs.

It was salt pork and hardtack, with a barrel of apples and a barrel of limes: soldiers' food from the days when soldiers manned towers. The water barrels made it intact, being watertight. Vanity was surprised the water did not freeze in the cold of outer space, and I tried to explain to her how a thermos bottle worked.

The Marquis had also thoughtfully supplied the tower with strands of cable, useful for any number of things in wartime, but they shattered like glass after exposure to vacuum. Colin wanted to keep the culverins and bombards, but Victor melted them down with molecular engines. He let Colin keep a harquebus, along with a forked stick to rest it on.

The Marquis was thorough. There were drums and trumpets and other military odds and ends.

The prize of the collection, and something I slid through the fourth dimension and swept across the vacuum to recover myself, was the standard: It was the Union Jack. I also kept a spear to fly it from.

Victor manipulated the elements, absorbing mass from the walls and armory of the tower, and grew new forms of life in his stomach, which he vomited out after gestation. I like Victor a lot, as we all know, but sometimes I wonder about kissing him, you know?

He created metallic plant-mollusk creatures that looked like green clams. They adhered to the outer surface of Vanity's ship, perfectly happy in the airlessness, and multiplied until, at the end of five days, they covered every square inch. Victor said they were iron-based life-forms that could absorb and block dangerous radiation, and protect us from the reentry heat of the Martian atmosphere. Vanity doubted the laws of nature inside the ship would allow for radiation, but Quentin thought that Lucretius-theory might permit small, fast-moving atomies of fire-essence to exist, so I ruled in favor of Victor.

The portholes were occluded by clams, which bothered everyone but Victor (who doesn't get bothered) and me (who doesn't need portholes). Victor and Quentin designed a light source that looked like a basin of burning water, which also fed oxygen and hydrogen into the little air-atomies. Vanity had to green-stone the basin so that its rim formed another boundary for yet a third set of laws of nature.

There was enough lumber left over from the wreckage of the tower to build two crude platforms, one above the other, amidships, to divide our cylinder into three chambers. Victor glued the lumber together with a resin he secreted from an orifice that, shall we say, made the vomiting up of green clams look in contrast like a wholesome process.

This timber was too bulky to fit in our Jules Verne-style brass airlock, so my job was to reach through the walls and pull the lumber inside. The tower came with a chamber pot, and I volunteered to empty it overboard, which I could do without touching the hull. When the ship was under thrust, the stern became floor. With our lamp hanging in the bow, the third chamber was dark and private enough, even with all the light leaking through the crudely glued floorboards, to serve as the head.

Victor broke the remaining pieces of the tower into small bits, too small to survive reentry heat and reach the ground in lumps, once their orbit decayed.

And yes, the ship could maintain one-g for two days.

We spent the time telling each other ghost stories. Quentin's were the best.

The fourth world out from Sol swelled in my vision, red as rust, lifeless as a skull, and capped with dry ice at the poles. It was beautiful.

You are wondering how the Dark Mistress prevented her troops from going stir-crazy when locked in a large coffin for nine days. Well, keep in mind our background: We were used to confinement, to boring assignments, to grueling schoolwork.

So everyone checked my figures. The motivation was simple: You flunk the math problem, the ship misses the target, we all die.

We did trigonometry and calculus. Victor magnetically opened his layer of clams so we could clear a porthole and take measurements of the planets with binoculars and homemade sextants. We did our figuring on slide rales. You heard me: good old-fashioned slipsticks, those things everyone says are dead as a dodo. They are easy to make with two sticks, or even two pieces of paper laid side by side. Try making an electronic adding machine with what you have in your knapsack.

Victor had the log tables memorized, and several of the Dukes, Great Kings, and Presidents of the Middle Air that Quentin could call up teach liberal arts and useful sciences, including mathematics.

An abacus is pretty easy to make, too, if you have a Telchine boy who can sculpt materials to fine-machine standards with his brain. Vanity and I contributed pearl necklaces and beaded bracelets to the project.

Four days of playing with numbers, and you can get pretty quick with an abacus.

I also staggered the watches, so that not everyone was awake at the same time. It was the only privacy we had, to have some time when the guy who is getting on your nerves is asleep. And yes, Colin did talk after lights out, and Victor did tell him to shut up. Just like in school.

We celebrated at the skew-turn point. One minute of zero gravity, while we howled like monkeys and bounced off the walls, doing fast somersaults and slow cartwheels. Vanity's hair was like a puffball surrounding her head; I was blinded by a blond cloud. Note to female cosmonauts: Short hair is in fashion.

Then the Nautilus was running prow-backwards, and decelerating toward Mars.

The ship did seem to have some arbitrary limitations. She could drive through space, but not fly through the air.

Propelled how, by the way? I could see lines of energy reaching from the vessel into the complexities of higher dimensions, and see the rippling activity in the strange dreamlands surrounding Mars, but I could not figure out how the ship moved. But I saw the utility dimming dangerously toward uselessness, and I knew she could not land under her own power.

So we cheated on the landing again. I simply bent the world-lines radiating from the center of Mars away from the vessel. The ship, aerodynamic as a falling log, was lapsed into a feather-slow fall by me, while we were still high enough in the thin Martian atmosphere that four-space was pliant; then she was magnetically levitated down by Victor the rest of the way.

Victor, with his brain, had read the location of the most-recent lander from various computer sites before we left Earth. He was confident that he could restore power to the cameras, and the antennae, and send a signal back to Earth. He was not confident that any receiving stations were operating on Earth, space-exploration budgets being what they were, but I wanted to have a go nonetheless. So we fell through the sky in that direction.

Where to set down? Quentin had prepared one of our three chambers with his hexagons and pentagrams, and he burned a candle and summoned up one of his allies. Our procedure was the same as before: I used the ring of Gyges to hide us from the entity, and Victor did not. This one looked like a lion carrying a viper in its paw, and riding the back of a coal-black steed, but Quentin tricked it into assuming human form, and then it was dressed like a Dominican friar.

The black friar gestured with his viper. "Mine office is to make waters rough with stones. As Moses with his rod, so I. Soil of sullen red, yield up thy ancient waters!"

Through the uncovered portholes, we saw, two hundred yards below our hull, one of the dry riverbeds of Mars, which had not known water for three billion years, now bubbled white and crimson with muddy and torrential floods.

The ship that landed on the single living waterway of Mars was shaped like a trireme again, not a torpedo, when Victor and I emerged onto the upper deck. We did not have pressure suits with us, and our attempts to construct them from materials aboard, or from materials taken from the dreamlands, did not thrill and amaze the others to the point of trusting their lives to them.

Colin was particularly peeved at this, and he begged Quentin to summon up some spirit from the vasty deep that could inspire him to survive the subartic, low-pressure, high-ultraviolet conditions. Quentin leafed through his translated notes of his grimoire, and said he had barons who could command ninety-nine legions, and discover the virtues of birds and precious stones, but there was nothing about radiation poisoning.

I said, "Sorry, Colin, you are just going to have to play Collins."

"Who is Collins?"

"The first man not on the moon," I said.

"Maybe I could just step outside for a minute and take the damage, and heal myself?" Colin suggested.

I said, "The air is thinner than the top of Mount Everest, there is no free oxygen in it to breathe, and the temperature is between minus eighty and minus one hundred and ten!"

"Fahrenheit or Celsius?"

"I am English!" I said. "Do you think I would use the continental system invented by Jacobins?"

Quentin inquired in a soft voice, "Wasn't Fahrenheit a German?"

Vanity said, "We did our estimates of the Mars positions in kilometers."

"Well, I may be English, but I am also an astronaut! So there!" I retorted triumphantly.

Colin said, "Leader, that does not make any sense."

So they were left belowdecks. I was carrying Colin's boot, which I had promised to push into the soil and return to him, so he could at least boast later his bootprint had been left in the rust-red soil of this dead, outer world. I looked something more like a winged centaur made of solidified energy than I did a girl, and an aura of blue light surrounded my head and shoulders as I kept a one-molecule-thin layer of hyperspatial substance between me and the Martian air. In my human arms I carried the Union Jack, furled on a spearshaft.

Victor looked like a faceless gold statue, with arms and legs little more than streamlined tubes marring the symmetry of his bulletlike space-body. He did not walk. His legs were one solid fused mass, their internal consistency hardened into a many-textured bonelike growth. But he could move himself by balancing positive and negative energy flows, and manipulated the environment with particles finer and surer than hands.

The waters of the canal were already turning the color of old blood and forming lumpy rose-gray ice. (Yes, I know it was a dry riverbed, filled via magic, but no girl explorer worth her salt is going to call a streambed on Mars anything but a canal.) Vapor was also pouring up from the orange waters, which might have been sublimation because the air temperature was so low. Red frost had collected at the waterline of our ship.

The windy shoreline, and the dead rocks and fine sands of the cracked surface, gave off a high-pitched wail. This shrilling wavered and rose and fell, like a woman of Arabia lamenting at a funeral: a nerve-racking noise. There was no smell I could smell. The horizon seemed strangely close. The sun was a dim smudge, smaller than seen from Earth, but the sky was rose, crimson, and pale orange in concentric bands centered on the sun, like a dust storm seen in the distance.

The zenith was a chilly deep indigo, strange to see.

I spent some minutes looking for Phobos and Deimos, but they were not the luminous hurling moons of Barsoom that John Carter had promised me. Perhaps that dim spot there, like a Sputnik? The senses of my race are just not that good for picking out astronomical objects, which have no moral entanglements or immediate utility.

We set off, flying and levitating, toward the calculated location of the Mars lander. I wanted to unfurl my Union Jack where someone could see it I had had over a week to shift through the candidates for the first words spoken on Mars. "That's one small step for a woman, one giant leap for mankind," still seemed best. "God save the Queen!" had a nice ring to it, too. Traditional.

What had Roald Amundsen said when he planted a flag at the South Pole?

You'd think they'd teach children important facts like that in school.

Victor and I soared through the thin atmosphere. Supersonic dust particles bounced from his gold integument, leaving steaks, or were turned aside by my extradimen-sionalaura.

As I said, Victor knew the longitude and latitude of the lander; our latitude we knew from measuring the rise and fall of northern stars. But we did not know our longitude. (Obviously Polaris is not the North Star, not here, nor were any of the stars I used to watch from my window-obvious, yet it was still strange.) Once we reached the correct latitude, we started searching west, hoping to come across the site. Soon Victor detected metallic pings, consistent with the expected radar-contour of the lander we sought.

Here we saw a slight circular depression, about half a mile wide, like a crater from an ancient meteor, weathered by years of sandstorms. Rocks of red, red-gray, rose, and dirty gray littered the ground; streamers of orange dust tiger-striped the pebbles and the permafrost of dry ice. In the middle of the depression was the lander. It looked like a circular coffee table, about four feet across, on which some coffee drinkers had left squares of white and black metal, stubby cylinders, hoops of foil-covered steel, hourglasses of dim ceramic, radio dishes, a camera on a tall mast, and a telescoping arm on a gimbal. To the left and right of the coffee table were expanded fans shaped like glassy black stop signs. Hemispheres and cones of orange and black huddled underneath the coffee table, visible between the leg struts. The legs were tipped with wide pads, as one might see on the heel of a crutch. It was kind of surprising how crude the machine looked, all wrapped in tinfoil. It was sitting in the middle of a radiating flower of scorch marks made by its landing rockets.

Victor radioed me. "The UHF antenna is active. These signals reach to an orbiter package, no farther."

I said, "There must be a stronger broadcaster on the satellite. Let's land in front of the camera and hoist the Union Jack."

When we passed over the rim of the crater, suddenly the air got very thick and very warm. It was like running face-first into a hot towel. The lander shimmered like a heat mirage and vanished.

At that same moment, the fourth dimension collapsed around me, and I forgot what it looked like.

I was only a yard or so off the cold rocky soil. I landed heavily, however, taken by surprise when my 3-D girl-body winked into reality around me. In addition to my lucky aviatrix cap and long scarf, my three-dimensional cross-section was wearing my riding boots, jodhpurs, and leather coat, which provided enough padding that I was not injured as I fell.

On hands and knees, I looked up as Victor clanged heavily to the ground also, a statue without expression or motion, and did not get up. Dead? I hoped not.

I looked up. Before me, where the lander had been, on a throne made of crudely hewn slabs of the rust-streaked black rock, was a soldier in the panoply of a Greek hoplite. His breastplate and helm were coppery bronze, and his cloak was bloodred, as was the horsehair plume nodding above. A round shield painted with a gorgon face rested against his knee, and a slender lance was in his hand. Anachronistically, his arms and legs were covered in fatigues of red and brown and black camouflage patterns. Both katana and Mauser broom-handle pistol dangled from his web-belt in holster and sheath.

Beaten again. Oh, I did not mind being a prisoner-- heck, I was used to that by now. I had lost another race. Someone got to Mars before me.

"You will plant no flags on the soil of my world," Lord Mavors said. Behind him was a banner standing: a black field with a red circle, from which a single arrow pointed to the upper right.

Behind and above Mavors, I could see a flickering discontinuity, like the ripples on the surface of a lake. On this side was breathable earthlike air; on the other side, the thin subarctic atmosphere of Mars. I guessed I was seeing the refraction from the change in density of the medium: the boundary between two sets of natural law. The film was stretched like a drumhead over the half-mile-wide crater valley.

Before I could get up, Mavors tipped his lance, and the blade touched me lightly on the shoulder, not two inches from my naked cheek.

He said, "It takes about four pounds per inch of pressure for a blade to penetrate the skin. Once the skin is broken, no other internal organs-all of which are necessary for life, or useful-offer any real resistance. Only bone. A man skilled with a spear, of course, knows to avoid bone."

So there I knelt before his crude throne on all fours, looking up at him. The Union Jack had spun from my hand as I collapsed, and I could see it, an impromptu parachute, unrolled in midair over Mavors' head.

He moved his eyes, but no other part of him, and glanced up. The rippling fabric of red, white, and blue, bold with the cross of Saint Andrew and Saint George, seemed to be caught or suspended in the surface tension of the air boundary separating the crater bowl from the thin Martian air above. Now it began to sink in the slight Martian gravity, and started to fall, pulled down by the weight of its pikeshaft.

Mavors said, "Boreas, don't let her banner touch the soil."

There was another eye-wrenching distortion, like a heat shimmer, and I could see Headmaster Boggin standing beside the throne. He was wearing a flowing garment like a tunic, but backless to allow for his wide red wings, and his unbound tresses of fine rose red brushed his shoulders. Only the breadth of those shoulders and the thickness of his chest saved his appearance from girlishness. His shins and feet were bare, and I saw the green stone, jade-hued like Vanity's, winking on his toe.

With a whirl of wings, he jumped into the air and caught the falling flag before it touched down.

He landed and bowed to Mavors, and returned to his spot by the side of the throne.

"Why did you do that?" I asked Mavors.

He raised an eyebrow and glanced at Boggin, whose expression was mild and unreadable. Maybe most people on their hands and knees in the dirt before him did not ask curt questions. Looking back to me, Mavors said, "I did not want your colors to touch the soil."

"Then you are a man of honor," I said.

"No farther than is practical," he allowed, with a slight inclination of his head. By this he meant that dirtying my banner would have (in his eyes) obligated me to fight until I died.

I drew in a shivering breath. "And so you will understand why I must stand up, even if you kill me for it."

Did I mention that I was scared? The hair inside my cap was lank with sweat, and my jacket felt close. Even my scarf was strangling me. The knowledge that he had vowed to protect us children did not seem like a very solid comfort when I was looking in his eyes, and trying to find the strength in my knees.

I expected the eyes of a murderer, pitiless and cold. Instead, his eyes were old with sorrow, wise and ancient as winter. They were the eyes of a veteran, weary of war, but still iron-hard. He wanted to go home, put down his red-hot sword, throw his heavy helm aside, and lay his head in the lap of the glancing-eyed love-goddess.

And I was the obstacle in his way.

He let me get to my feet alive. That was something, at least.

Mavors spoke. "Your presence on my dead, war-slain world is unexpected. I can make no sense of it. Why come here?"

I just shrugged, and said nothing. If he didn't understand, it wasn't my place to explain it to him.

Boggin leaned and whispered, "Highness, if I may mention, the young lady is of the blood of Helion, not to mention, ah, Oceanos and Tethys, lords of the endless waste. Our universe must seem a small place to her, three cramped dimensions, a mere fifteen billion light-years across. The girl suffers from claustrophobia."

Mavors waved him away. To me, he said, "I am not asking why you came to see me; I am asking why you are absent from your post without my leave. These were not your orders."

"Wh-? I mean, I beg your pardon, sir? Orders?"

"You and yours went to ground on an island. You knew, at least from the moment you saw my fleet part to let you pass, that you were meant to serve as bait for Lamia, and whoever is behind her. Obviously I meant you to draw her out; for that reason I let you go. By going, you acknowledged. You were impressed into my service as of that moment. But if you will not perform, I have no reason not to gather you back in."

"Are you making a bargain with me? We can be free as long as we act as bait for Lamia?"

"Bargain?" The tiniest hint of a frown darkened Mavors' features. "My bastard half brother Mulciber bargains. I do not bargain. A sovereign imposes duties. What sort of nation could stand, were every man a shopkeeper, like Mulciber?"

"That greatest nation in war and peace, in the arts and sciences, in laws and in letters, the world has ever known!" I said hotly. "Great Britain is a nation of shopkeepers, and the foe who mocked her with those words was laid low."

Mavors raised an eyebrow and glanced once more at Boggin. Boggin was still holding the Union Jack, idly puffing to make the colors stream: He could make a breeze stiff enough to lift the flag without even distending his cheeks. When he felt Mavors' eyes upon him, he casually put the standard behind his back.

With a rustling shrug of his red wings, he said in a confidential tone, "Your father Lord Terminus gave me the latitude, that is to say, the discretion to choose in which nation to raise the children, ah, the monsters, Highness.

Your stern cities of Rome and Sparta had both known days of ascendancy, that is glorious days, um, at one time, historically speaking, of that we need harbor no doubt, but I have always had a weakness, as one might expect, for the colder and paler peoples of the North."

Mavors made a slight, dismissive gesture with his hand. "Even the mortals know the north wind favors England, since the storm whelmed the Armada of Spain. I am merely surprised a Chaos-daughter could be raised to learn so noble a passion. Too many mock homeland-love."

Boggin smirked and bowed low again.

Mavors turned back to me. "Your loyalty does you credit, woman of Britain, especially since you are not Saxon, not Norman, not any blood of theirs. You are wise enough to know that the British Isles will not survive once the supporting globe is shattered to asteroids."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean your orders are these: Return to your atoll and carry on as normal. It is serviceable to my needs, remote from human habitation or any sunken city of the sea-elves. I have positioned troop-bearing ships around the island, below and above, and ranged my cannon and orbital emplacements. My forces are hidden by the same deception technique Boggin used to place the image of the Mars lander here. Even the many senses of your people, Phaethusa, cannot penetrate such Hecatean counterfeits. Your venture above the orbit of the moon, and your downfall once more to Earth cannot fail to attract the enemy's attention. You need take no heed for your safety: Once battle erupts, the environment is in my realm, and under my authority. Over other things, I have less control, but the outcome of battles is mine. If you fall, you will be avenged, which is all that any man can ask. Is there any part of these orders you do not understand?"

My eye fell on the golden body, still motionless on the ground next to me. "What happened to Victor? Is he dead?"

Boggin spoke up: "Members of his race, they are not so, ah, friable or, immaterial, there is a perfect word, not so immaterial as to die when their life processes are interrupted. Mr. Triumph is in what we might call a halted condition. He can be restarted without harm to him." To Mavors, he bowed once more, saying, "Dread Prince of ultralunar Heaven, if I might be so bold, the young lady might be, ah, less prone to distraction, not to mention more, what is the word, pliant? Ah, more attentive to Your Highness's words if the burden of worrying about her fallen comrade were, ah, lessened? Ameliorated? Sated? Perhaps if your guest were permitted to view the, ah, mechanisms..."

Mavors said, "Carry on."

The green stone on Boggin's toe winked and shimmered, and my upper senses turned back on. My fourth-dimensional limbs, the parts of my body made of light and music and various shades of emotion and energy, were still numb, but I was no longer blind.

I could see Victor's internal workings were undamaged. A simple twist of his monad would have restored him to action, but the manipulator I used to do that was numb.

I also saw, shining with utility, something hidden in Boggin's belt pouch. The usefulness to me was almost blinding.

It was a note. Addressed to me. Folded up, crumbled into a ball, stuck in the bowl of his clay pipe.

Right out in plain sight where I could not fail to see it.

Reading the note, I said, "Mavors-excuse me, Lord Mavors-I do have a question. Lady Phoebe, the moon-goddess, your royal sister-"

"Half sister!" he said sharply.

"-ah, half sister, she was on our trail when we fled the Earth. Am I correct in assuming she is to hunts as you are to battles? If she overtakes us..."

Mavors nodded briefly. Now he waved his spear in the air. "Hear me, O Furies! I decree, by my authority as God of Battles and Lord of Men, that the flight of the children of Chaos from Earth, and their doings there, were part of my battle with Lamia. No foxhunt can cross a battlefield.

Luna is the lowest of heavens, and the martial heavens, fifth of the Spheres, is ulterior and superior to it."

He did it right in front of me. I saw him change fate. It was complex, and I did not understand what I was seeing, but I saw it.

It was as if the reddish strands of moral energy binding me to what fate had been decreed by Lady Phoebe were parted by the sweep of that spear. Something in the future, an entity, perhaps, or a process, shifted its attention. The internal nature of objects changed slightly but definitely, losing free will in one vector of possibilities and gaining it back again in another.

Mavors ordered Boggin to return my flag to me, which he did. Then Mavors spoke one last time,

'To any who challenge my sovereignty, I will answer with a weapon, thus." And he threw the lance into the rust-colored soil at his feet, splitting a rock in half with a noise like a gunshot. The lance stuck fast and stood quivering.

This time, I saw how Boggin made himself and Mavors disappear. They had not been in the crater any more than the Mars lander had been. It was a Phaeacian technique. It looked to me like a tube of force running from this spot, up out of the continuum, through the dreamlands, and back into the continuum at another spot, their real location. The three-dimensional energies, such as light waves, as well as fourth-dimensional media, by which I perceived such things as internal natures, utilities, monads, and moral obligations, were all swept from one spot to another through the Phaeacian shortcut. Presumably, they could be manipulated, dreamed into new shapes, while they passed through the dreamlands, before being deposited here, in a spot where the laws of nature had been changed to allow for this type of illusion. The photons were not emerging from trapdoors, but from subatomic areas of uncertainty in the base vacuum of space itself.

Magnetic waves had been present, too. Something from Victor's paradigm had allowed these three-dimensional light images to manipulate my flagpole and Mavors' spear in coordination with the actions of their hands. I had not seen how the wind and air had been manipulated, but it was not hard to guess that Boreas might have fine control over such things, fine enough to make the sound waves of a spoken voice. Since I could detect no clue, perhaps Colin's paradigm was involved? Hard to say.

And also, somehow, the Phaeacian ability to detect attention must have been tied into an ability to deflect attention: The clues that would have warned me that the lander was not below as we flew down toward it had been hypnotically thrust aside in my brain.

The moment I woke up Victor, I knew why they had to knock him out. He called it cryptognosis.

He said he had detected the interference in my perception system the moment we crossed the boundary into the special laws of nature obtaining in the crater basin. He had been silenced before he could speak. He was immune to illusions woven by magic.

I attuned my senses to a distant spot, during that moment while I had the chance. The place where Boggin and Mavors had truly been standing was atop Mons Olympos, the tallest mountain in the solar system.

And it was not a barren waste: Mavors had a camp there. A camp? A city. I saw endless arsenals and munitions factories half-buried beneath the rock and crag of the mountain, manned by shark-toothed snake-skinned Laestrygonians. Poking up through the bedrock and casting long shadows across the landscape of snow and rust loomed launching towers, magnetic rails, and missile emplacements large enough to shoot down the tiny moons, cyclopean, huge and dark, beneath the dusty pink sky. The Laestrygonians manning these skyscraper-size guns wore no pressure suits on the surface: Perhaps they were the original inhabitants of Mars.

Out from this fortress-city ran corridors into the fourth dimension, shortcuts through space exactly the type Vanity had been unable to make.

I could see the distant points to where these corridors led: I saw strange cathedrals made of glass beneath black skies that rained sulfuric acid; I saw a soaring fortress, slim as an upraised sword, towering over a cratered gray land where stars burned to either side of a pitiless sun. At the end of one corridor made of darkened air, I saw a space station made of carven wood, its hull overgrown with metal trees and leaves of purest silver, hanging above cold, swirled methane-snowstorms of a gas giant surrounded by broken and scattered rings.

Venus, Luna, Neptune. Of course, I knew these places at a glance. Had I not seen a hundred artists' renditions, had I not pored over Voyager photographs, hadn't I dreamt of nothing else my whole life? These were the unclaimed worlds into whose alien soils I had meant one day to plant the Union Jack.

Someone had beaten me to it. All these planets were explored.

I saw ships plying these space routes. I saw the gilled men of Atlantis, brothers to Mestor, in shining black scale-mail, wearing neither helmets nor gauntlets, hanging weightlessly by tethers from long cylindrical vehicles of open grillework, vessels poised in the airless, interplanetary void.

Atlanteans were amphibious, not just to water, but to outer space as well. A pang of envy went through me. No need to carry heavy life support if you were a race born for space.

Some of the vessels were heavily armed, and crewed by Laestrygonians. These had the circle-and-arrow emblem of Mars painted on their hulls. The Atlantean ships were bronze or cerulean blue, and bore the emblem of the trident.

The trip back across the cold red landscape of Mars at dusk was bleak and melancholy.

The ship was trapped in the ice, and Victor circled it slowly, bathing the waters in infrared and microwave radiation until she floated on a very small, steaming lake of dirty red water.

I turned and looked over the globe of the Fourth World from Sol, a blasted desert that had known life a million years ago, perhaps-or never. It had been so easy for us to get here. An impromptu expedition, a bit of skylarking.

I was thinking of those poor humans, trapped on their world. Not unless they expended their utmost, cleverly used the technology at their command, could they match what we had accomplished in a fortnight, and then only with months and years of genius devoted and treasure expended, and with the toil, and sweat, and courage of multitudes.

They had the ability now. Why hadn't they come? Why hadn't someone planted a flag to defy the grim black banner of Ares?

Were they content to remain trapped? I would not believe that of anyone.

Not until we were back aboard the Argent Nautilus, and I had Vanity check me for bugging devices and Quentin for divination spells, did I tell them what had happened.

"They were too scared to meet me face-to-face. It was an elaborate illusion, and Boggin messed it up for me, showed me how it was being done."

Colin said, "I hope he is not on our side. That would make me barf."

I said, "He is not on our side. But he is not on Mavors' side either. Mavors cast a spell, a decree, a fate on me. Imposed a moral obligation. On all of us. Boggin had a note in his pocket, telling me where to go to have it nullified."

"Where are we going, Leader?" asked Quentin.

I smiled at Vanity. "Hollywood!"

Her face lit up.

Love's Proper Hue

The reentry heat killed Victor's green metal clams, and his mood was grim as he spent an hour stripping them from the hull, because he felt responsible for life he had created. Vanity was pleased because her ship was silver-white again, and the painted eyes uncovered. I was pleased because the clams, alive or dead, had been able to act like ablative tiles and had prevented our wooden ship from going up like kindling.

Quentin seemed, not glad exactly, but relieved, that they were dead. "We don't need to worry about what happens when you introduce a self-replicating nonorganic life-form into terrestrial ecology," he murmured to me. I think he felt about Victor's mechanistic view of the world the way I felt about Colin's passion-driven mysticism. He liked Victor, but did not like Victor's universe.

Our splashdown point was in the Pacific, off the coast of Oregon. There are three assumptions I was operating on:

First, I assumed all sorts of air-traffic controllers, military radar stations, satellites from NASA and Red China, high-flying spy-planes, aircraft carriers, speedboats, and Polynesians in canoes saw us: They all wondered about the falling Greek trireme shining green and white and silver, miraculously unburned by reentry heat.

Second, I assumed the Olympian gods, no friends of mankind, erased records and memories and people as needed to make the happening into an Orwellian unhap-pening, the people into nonpersons.

Third, I assumed the Olympians followed the boat as it sailed leisurely toward Vanity Island. We, of course, winged our way in a menagerie of shapes to Catalina Island, and then to Los Angeles.

A cold north wind blew us past the coast until we saw below the hurrying clouds, the city lights, crawling lines of red traffic, a glitter of signs, a solemn glow from empty offices.

Boggin's letter had been written in his backwards-slanting, wide-looped style: My dear Miss Windrose,

If you have not overlooked the evident usefulness to your party of this note, and if my assumption is sound that you do not wish to be burdened by fates more than is natural, then you may take it as given that Lord Mavors has overstepped his authority in the matter of arranging your current dangerous circumstances. Nonetheless, being an Olympian, he can decree fate to his wishes, including his wish to involve boys and girls of tender years in affairs best left to professional military men.

Matters being as they are, I am confident that you would care to explore any avenue that might promise solution to this conundrum. There is but one god who can overrule even the war-god, even in matters of war. For obvious reasons, he is a fellow of cautious retiring temperament, so take care not to startle him upon your approach.

I have sent my regards ahead of you, that he awaits your coming.

Below this, an address and a name. The name was Valentine Archer. The address turned out to be a swank club on Santa Monica Boulevard.

It was night as we approached, which, I suppose, is the proper time to approach a Hollywood nightclub. (If they are open during the day, are they called dayclubs?) A line of limousines, like shining black jewels, threaded its way past the fountains, with here and there a red sports car for contrast.

Some were magnificently dressed: The men were in black tie and tails, the women in flimsy silks of sable or scarlet, or clinging short dresses of peach hue, which left their arms and long legs bare to the cool night air, the ladies had gems at their wrists and throats, or winking in their hair. Others looked like day laborers, longshoremen, or criminals, with tattered dungarees, wild dreadlocks, caps on backwards, T-shirts with tails untucked. I stared in fascination at one smiling woman whose teeth had been studded with diamonds.

There was an honest-to-goodness red carpet leading from the curb to the tall glass doors. The walls beyond were green and lit with olive lights, giving the building an unearthly look, and atop the central tower was, I kid you not, a giant-size Robin Hood hat, complete with five yards of feather.

The garish neon sign spelled out archer's bull's-eye. In smaller letters beneath: the place to score.

We had circled the block once and twice, trying to get a view from all angles, but other buildings, including a discotheque and a restaurant, blocked approach from the rear. Now we joined the line. The scent of perfume from many bodies hung in the air, and the tang of cigarette smoke, along with the endless mutter of traffic from the street, and the dimly heard banging of the music from the club. When the wind blew, droplets from the fountains fell among us, refreshing.

Colin nudged me. "Hey! There she is! I wrote her a letter. Why is there another guy with her? I thought I was supposed to have mind-control powers or something. What's the point of mind control if your girls date other guys? What's up with that?"

Vanity said, "She's not your girl because you wrote her a love letter."

Colin muttered, "If I had mind-control powers, she would be!"

Quentin said mildly, "I've seen that guy on TV. Funny, I thought he was done with computers."

I started to look "past" the walls of the building, but Vanity hissed, "Stop!"

"What?" I said.

"Your eyes turn red when you do that, and they seem to be, sort of, further away than your head is."

"Well..."

Colin said, "I'll handle it."

Without another word, he jumped over the velvet rope separating one part of the line from another. He was speaking to a young woman with long chestnut hair that brushed her hips. Her hair was longer than her dress, which almost did not make it all the way from her armpits to the top of her legs. Whatever he said, he was making her laugh, and I noticed he touched her bare shoulder when he spoke.

He was wearing her sunglasses when he returned and, without a word, he passed them to me.

"I could have just closed my eyes, you know," I said crossly. "I can see through my lids."

"Gross," opined Vanity.

In a higher dimension, where no mortals could see, I opened my hypersphere and jarred it to set it ringing. The concentric pressure waves of not-light radiated out in four directions, filling hypervolumes rather than volumes. In the sudden gleam, I looked.

"The buildings are interconnected. Two dance floors with lights and lasers. A bar. Basement rooms contain refrigerators, wine cellars. There are offices on the top floor."

"Can you see through lead? Look for a safe," suggested Colin.

"Are you an idiot? I am looking over the sides of things. It doesn't matter what they're made of."

"Anyone look like a god?" Colin asked. "They have ichor inside 'em instead of blood."

Victor said, "Leader, I just noticed the electromagnetic aura concentrated here dropped. The signatures are consistent with the standing-wave phenomena Quentin manipulates. Magic."

"Dropped, meaning... ?"

"Something just went away, or reduced output. Doesn't look like a threat."

I winced and bit my lip. In the higher plane, I folded my hypersphere back into a disk, feeling foolish. "Boggin warned me to be cautious. I might have scared Archer away. If he sees in the fourth dimension, he just saw a spotlight passing over his house here, or if he has a Phaeacian...

Vanity, is anyone looking at us?"

Vanity was signing an autograph for a young man who mistook her for Lindsay Lohan. He was trying to wheedle her phone number from her when Quentin stepped between the two, letting his walking stick rap threateningly near the boy's feet and allowing her to disengage.

Vanity said, "Amelia, that is the dumbest question since the question mark was invented in 500

a.d. Every man here is looking at us, comparing us to his date, and every date is sizing us up, too.

And the boys are staring, wishing they were men. So, yes, a lot of people are looking." She turned and waved at several tall men in tuxedoes, who were smiling toward her. Over her shoulder, she said, "If there is a sniper on the roof, I can't tell, not in a crowd."

Then we were at the front of the line. The doorman was dressed in Lincoln green, with a peaked cap on his head and a clipboard in his hand. The Merry Man effect was jarred by his sunglasses and hearing aid, which made him look like a Secret Service agent from a movie.

"Names?"

"Amelia Windrose, how do you do?" "Vanity Fair." "Victor Invictus Triumph, sir." "Call me Nemo." "Randy Johnson Willie Joystick, but friends call me Dick."

He looked up. "Vanity Fair? Like the magazine?"

Vanity smiled brightly. "They named a magazine after me? This is a wonderful country!"

The expression in his eyes was hidden. "You kids make those names up?"

Quentin said, "Actually, we did. The North Wind sent us. We're here to see Archer."

The guy looked back down at his checklist. "I'm sorry, your names, made up or not, are not on my list. The Bull's-Eye Club is invitation only. Next!"

Vanity said, "But we have an invitation! Boreas said he sent word ahead."

"Next!"

I said in my best Headmaster Boggin voice, "See here, young man! We are here to see Mr. Archer, and we have no intention of leaving without seeing him!"

The two guys behind us (one of whom had a ring both in his nostril and in his lip) started to shoulder forward, but Victor stood in the way. They made the mistake of deciding to manhandle him, grabbing at his shoulder and elbow. There was a loud snap of noise and a smell of ozone, and the two men jumped back, yowling and swearing.

Colin turned toward them, gritting his teeth, and his hair started to stand up, and his face to grow dark. Quentin tapped his walking stick on the ground, and a dark shadow began to stream from his feet and swell across the sidewalk and up the building.

"Troops!" I said sharply. "Stand down! The Dark Mistress has not given the word yet!"

This drew some hoots and murmurs from the crowd around us. We were suddenly the center of attention.

The guy with the rings in his nose and lip said, "Hey! He's got a stun gun! He shocked us! I'm calling the cops!"

A voice from the crowd called out, "The cops'll just kick your ass, man. This is L. A."

I did not see the fast-moving molecular packages leave Victor's body and enter the nervous systems of the two men behind us, but I noticed the sudden snarl of moral forces in the area as the angry young men behind us suddenly looked sleepy and forgetful.

To Victor I hissed, "I said stand down! Or you'll see a court-martial, I swear to you, Victor Triumph!"

"Yes, Leader," said Victor.

The Merry Man with the clipboard asked me carefully, "Did he just call you 'Leader' ?"

At that moment, another man came over, stepping briskly. I assume from the way the Merry Man wordlessly deferred to him that he was a member of the staff, or maybe he just got out of the way because the guy was huge and heavily armed.

Could be a basketball player, if he wasn't already a linebacker. Heavy black boots, heavy black denim pants, heavy black leather jacket. Black on black on black. You get the picture. Every inch of the black leather jacket had a shining metal ring sewn to it, so he rang and glittered as he walked. Clipped among his rings were Japanese throwing stars, looking like harmless ornaments, lost in the glitter. The handle of a Bowie knife protruded from a sheath in his boot, a second was at his hip, a third up his sleeve. In his hand he carried not a spear (as I first had thought) but a harpoon with a sharpened steel togglehead and, incredibly, a loop of cable running through it, with the other end of the cord wrapping his spear hand.

He might have been a member of a biker gang. A really, really nasty biker gang. A biker gang of Eskimos, I should say, who harpooned seals between riots.

Oh, and he was handsome, in a rough way. Very rough. His face looked like something carved by rough hatchet blows out of a pine stump. His hair was done up in short gelled spikes, a look that went out of fashion in England after the defeat of the Rets. He had wide, high cheeks, blunt jaw, his mouth a single cruel slash beneath a proud nose, eyes like a wolf's eye beneath a wide overhanging brow, the forehead of a king or a philosopher: a warrior-king, though, or a Nietzschean philosopher. A scar ran from the corner of his eye across the muscles of his cheek, to where the deep lines formed brackets around his stern mouth. It was a big, ugly scar, but, somehow, it made his face look more striking, not less. I was sure he had gotten it at Heidelberg.

The crowd quieted down when he strode up. "May I help you?" he said in a tone that left no question that no help could possibly be forthcoming.

I said, "We are here to see Mr. Archer on a matter of very important, um, importance." (Boy, I could have said that better.)

Colin helped me. Sort of. Not. He chimed in, "Tell your boss that the world could be destroyed if he dicks around with us."

Tall, Dark, Scarred, and Handsome gave him a thoughtful look. "So... you can, um, destroy the world, issat right? Cute trick."

Colin grinned like an idiot. "Yeah, but we can only do it once."

He said, "Listen, kids. You know what my job here is?"

Vanity looked at his huge harpoon. She said gaily, "Let me guess. You seek the White Whale?"

She was doing that Vanity-thing she does with her eyelashes and bestowing the sweetest smile on him, so even his grim face softened, and he smiled back. "No, miss. I'm Mr. Nice Guy. I am here to see that the people who are invited into the club here have a nice time. Now you are blocking the line, and all of Mr. Archer's guests behind you might not have a nice time because of it. So I gotta make it right, okay?"

I thought this meant he was going to burn us to cinders with laser beams shooting from his eyes or something, but no. Instead, he led us a few steps to one side, and the Merry Man proceeded with the glittering people in line behind us. We were standing beside the doors, and long thin leaves from potted plants were poking me in the back.

"Now, your names are not on the list, are they?" said the huge man.

Quentin said quietly, "May we have your name, sir? Mr. Archer will be displeased if we are hindered, I assure you."

"I am Terro- ah, Terrance. Terrance, um, Miles. And Mr. Archer is my brother."

Quentin said, "If he's your brother, why isn't your last name-?"

"Stage name."

I said, "Listen. This is important. Do you know the world is run by pagan gods?"

"I know L.A. is, that's for sure. And one of the gods of L.A. says that no one gets in the Bull's-Eye Club unless they're properly dressed. We have a dress code."

I watched a couple go by. The man had glasses shaped like the number 2008, with an eye peering through each zero. His date was wearing see-through plastic pants.

"What about them?"

Tall and Dark said, "They're on the list. Dress code does not apply to Mr. Archer's special guests."

Victor said, "Leader, why don't we simply leave a cell phone number? Archer can call us, once he gets Boggin's message."

Before I could answer, Tall and Dark said, "Listen, you seem like nice kids. You go away and come back dressed properly, you can come in."

I said, 'Then we can see Mr. Archer?"

A shrug. "Maybe he'll see you, maybe not He's not here right now, but he might be back tonight."

Vanity said to me, "Amelia, my nice outfits are on the boat. And where are the boys going to get tuxedoes at this hour? We don't have that much money left, after all."

Tall and Dark said, "Kids, if you are not the kind of folk who can afford expensive suits with your pocket money, you're not getting into this club."

Vanity's face was flushed with anger. She stamped her foot and demanded, "What? Is there a tailor open at this hour?"

Her rosy-red features and low-cut blouse, well, they attracted his attention, and his craggy face softened once again with a smile. "Look, like I said, I'm Mr. Nice Guy. I stop fights, see? We like to have good-looking girls in the club. Here."

He took a card out of his pocket, leaned his harpoon against the wall, took out a ballpoint pen, and scribbled on the back. He proffered the card to Vanity. "Go to this address. Tuxedo shop, dresses, that sort of thing. Upscale, very nice. They keep late hours. Show the manager my card, and he'll fix you up, give you ten percent off. He owes me a favor. And meanwhile, you there, Little Miss Blond Girl." He offered me the pen and a blank card. "Write a message. Any crazy thing you like, gods blowing up the world, whatever. I'll put it on Mr. Archer's desk. I can't guarantee he'll read it, I can't guarantee he'll believe it, but write what you like. Don't bother putting down your phone number. He never makes calls. Hates phones. Likes to talk to people face-to-face, you know?"

I knelt down to use the pavement for a desk. I forget what I wrote: something about how Boggin sent us, we were not from Mavors or Mulciber, but we have urgent business to discuss. I was kind of coy about saying too much, but I wanted to drop names so he'd know we were not humeys.

Wolves, not cattle.

Then the huge guy politely escorted us to the curb, smiled, ignored whatever else we said, and stomped back to the club, his ring mail glittering and chiming at every footstep.

Vanity, staring at the broad back retreating said, "Why was he carrying a harpoon?"

Quentin said, "Because that was-"

Without warning, Vanity jumped into Quentin's arms and landed a big, wet, sloppy kiss on his lips.

After a moment or two, Colin said, "Are you guys going to come up for air?"

I slapped myself on the neck. "Damn these mosquitoes." Then I said, "Let's go to this tux shop, whatever it is." And I began marching down the sidewalk. Vanity and Quentin broke their hold and followed.

After a short bit, we turned a corner, and Vanity said softly, "All clear."

Colin said to Vanity, "Red, if I am about to say something stupid, would you kiss me, too?"

Quentin said, "Down, hormone boy, down!"

Vanity smiled sweetly. "Each time you are about to say something stupid? Well, I'd have no time for anything else!"

I looked at Vanity, "If we are now in the clear... ?" She nodded.

To the group: "First, in the future, let the Leader do the talking. That was just disgraceful!

Everyone jaw-jawing at once. If I had been the bouncer, I would have had us all arrested." I drew a deep breath and gave them all the basilisk eye. No one decided to talk back to me, not then.

To Quentin: "And what were you about to say, Quentin?"

"Deimos. That was Deimos, son of Mavors. Terror is his other name. Miles is just a word for

'soldier.' He stops fights because he is the god who causes one side to panic and rout, so that spearmen can cut them down from behind as they flee." Quentin breathed a sigh and wiped his brow. "He is not Mr. Nice Guy. Really. Not. Did none of you recognize him?"

Vanity said, "Why a harpoon?"

Quentin said, "Not sure. Maybe as a symbol? Terror, once it strikes, leaves its hook in your heart, and slowly pulls you in. Even the hugest creatures on earth cannot escape."

Victor said, "What now, Leader? I suggest we break into the club and wait for Mr. Archer to return-assuming he is actually gone."

I said, "Why would Mavors' son help us against his father?"

Quentin said, "Greek gods don't love their dads. Saturn castrated his father and ate his son, or tried to, and he, in turn, threw him into Tartarus." Quentin shivered again. "I have no love for the White Christ, but at least the God of Jerusalem was adored by his son."

Victor said sardonically, "Who adored the son enough in return to have him tortured to death for crimes he did not commit."

I said, "We are shelving the theology discussion. Advice on a course of action? We have one vote for break in and surprise him."

Colin licked his lower lip and said in a thoughtful tone, "That big guy? I think I can take him.

Let's break in."

I had sudden insight into male psychology. My theory: Guys are idiots. Keep this theory in mind. It explains the phenomena while assuming no unnecessary agents.

Vanity said in exasperation, "Beggars can't be break-in-ers! We're trying to get ourselves free from Mavors' curse. If we disobey his direct order, then it's a Quentin thing again, right? Like poor Mr. Finklestein looking at Phoebe bathing. So we are coming to this guy for help." She turned to Quentin. "Deimos is really Archer, right? There are not two gods running around in L.

A."

Quentin did not answer her, but said, "Leader, I cannot trespass, or break rules like that, or else my Art will endanger me."

I said, "If you were wearing a tux, could you break in? Think about the words Deimos said. He invited you back in, if you were dressed right. He did not say anything about going in through the front door."

Victor said, "So what's the plan?"

I said, "Let's go shopping! You know, I have not spent a single dime of my money yet, and I think I need a new dress."

"Upscale" he called it. The place was huge. Glittering aisles of goods were piled deep as the rooms of gold the Aztecs gathered to ransom Montezuma. Fabrics, jewelry, more shoes than an elfish cobbler's shop. Sporting goods for sale in the back of the store. (I made a mental note to buy myself a shooting iron. I was in America, after all.) Electronics. Televisions. Musical instruments.

Everything.

The store was strangely deserted-or, not so strange, considering the late hour-but the manager came hurrying down the empty aisles when the five of us entered the front door.

He smiled and inclined his head when we showed him the card Deimos had given us. "Gentlemen's apparel is on the second floor..." He gestured toward the grand-ballroom-style staircase leading up to a sort of elevated courtyard surrounded by several departments or shops on the right.

"Women's evening wear, yes? On the left..." A twin of the first staircase led up to an area the size of a small town, but one where an impatient sorcerer turned every inhabitant into a dressmaker.

There was no balcony or bridge between the two departments: To cross from one to the other required descending one grand staircase, crossing the wealth-crowded aisles of the main salon, and ascending another.

Victor said, "Leader, I am not sure we should split up."

Colin said, "He's right, I mean, you girls might need help tucking your mammary glands into brassieres or something."

Vanity took me by the elbow. "We don't want to miss Archer; besides, this is still within screaming distance. And how fast can Victor fly? Mach twenty-two or something?"

I said, "Just stay alert. Go get your tuxes." But for some reason, Vanity and I started giggling as we tripped up the stairway to the palace of luxury atop. Here were mannequins in poses of grace, and acres of soft fabric hanging from padded hangers.

Vanity whispered: "The money! It is still folded up in your fourth dimension."

But there was a clerk watching. The young lady walked across the shimmering marble floor toward us, the only other person in sight, and it was not the time to pull my energy-shining wings down into this plenum.

A man in purple pulled open the door of my little dressing room. Of course, the way this world works, it was just at the moment when I was wearing nothing but bra and panties, and I was bent over, pulling my toes out of a collapsed skirt.

I should explain how he sneaked up on me: I was not looking. Hyperspace in this area was dark, and I would have had to ring my sphere, sending not-light out in all directions, to keep an eye on what was happening around me, and I was wary of showing a light, not knowing if there were eyes like my eye watching. So, surprise!

I kept a cool head. I straightened like a diver jumping, and jumped a direction at right angles of all directions, neither right nor left, forward nor back, up nor down. My arm should have simply moved "past" his fingers, but instead he kept his grip. He was like Colin, at least a bit, a creature of passion.

But he did not shut off my powers; perhaps he could not. Instead I reared up into the fourth dimension, and he, keeping his grip, was lifted partway out of the "plane" of Earth's continuum.

His feet were still in Earthly space, but his upper body was curled into the fourth dimension. To me his body looked like a streamer of bark peeling off a tree.

He had some thickness in the fourth dimension, not so much as Miss Daw and her body, which looked like a wheel of eyes within a wheel of eyes, but there was something feathered with strands of music, serpentine, with scales of alternating gravity and levity rippling down the solids that formed the surface of his snakelike body.

But he was not full, not like I was. I sensed his fourth dimensional extensions were of limited utility; their internal nature was artificial rather than natural. I was looking at some sort of living armor: a thing he wore, not a thing he was.

I screamed then: a loud, sustained, ear-piercing scream. In theory, I should have merely shouted, or struggled in grim silence, as a boy would do. Well, this was no time for theory. I needed help, and it was automatic anyway. Think of this as Nature's siren.

"Hush, Princess!" came the sharp command, which he flicked to me on a strand carrying an essence of meaning.

"The boys are coming!"

"Not unless they can hear sound waves in a volume skewed to the continuum, they aren't. Now, hush, or I'll make your true love a man with a jackass's head."

He moved his feet and pushed me in the "blue" direction, so that I landed in the changing room one or two over from where I had been. He was straddling me, pinning me down. He did not look like a snake in three-dimensional cross-section, but like a winged boy, and his vast purple plumes filled the cabinet above and to either side. He was dressed in gold-trimmed purple robes, and on his thick, dark, ambrosia-dripping curls of hair, he wore a diadem of woven poppies and red roses, thorns and all. Slung over one shoulder was a Turkish bow of rosy wood, shaped like a woman's upper lip. At his other shoulder was a quiver of ivory, in which arrows fletched with peacock feathers rattled.

He was strong, and very handsome, and he smelled good. What is wrong with having evil people be ugly guys with wormy features, eh? How come all the Greek gods look like, well, like Greek gods? It seemed unfair.

"You saw me naked," I said. "I get to turn you into a stag now, and have your dogs rend you."

He looked down at my cleavage. I was wearing a lacy black bra. And I started to blush. I am convinced it was a blush of rage, but it was so unfair.

"You're dressed in love's proper hue," he said dryly. "It is fitting. Besides, I've seen women with less on at the beach." But he stood up and-if I were in a good mood, I'd call what he did helping me to my feet. In a bad mood, I'd call it hauling me to my feet. With his bulky purple wings filling the changing closet, he was standing much too close. "You wanted to see me," he said.

I looked at this youngish fellow. "Are you Mr. Archer?"

"I'm the archer," he agreed.

"Who are you? Apollo?"

"Pshaw! Mightier than Apollo," said Archer with a quirk of his lips. "Ask Hyacinth about that.

Apollo rules during the day; I rule day and night. Omnia vincit amor! All things I conquer. Even Death is not as strong."

I said doubtfully, "You mean the Rich One? I saw him- didn't see him, actually-once. Hades? Lord Dis, you call him?"

He nodded, and smiled at some pleasing memory. "We were in the library, arguing, and he claimed he was stronger than I, despite that he was blind. I lifted up the Great Weapon and shot, just as he donned his dread helm and vanished, and I had no more sight of him than he of me. The curtains billowed and the candles blew, so for a time I thought he had escaped my shot, for (as well we know) the Great Weapon often goes astray, but the next day he outraged the Maiden as she gathered flowers in the fields of Enna, and carried her down through sunless crevasses into the House of Woe, so I knew my bolt struck home."

"Death is blind?"

Archer nodded. "As Justice is: He makes no distinctions, plays no favorites." Now the boy took me by my naked shoulders and lowered his face toward mine. I thought he was about to kiss me, but instead he merely looked deeply in my eyes.

"You are in my realm as well," he said. "There is a boy you love, who steps across the threshold into manhood. I can grant your wish. But you must ask it, and be in my debt."

"Wait! When you said you could make my true love have the head of an ass, did you mean you were going to change Victor, or that you would change me?"

He said, "Is that your boon? Is that what Boreas sent you all this way to pray from my court?"

"Your... your court?"

"Know you not who We are, little daughter of Chaos? We are Cosmos itself. The throne is Our own, granted by the Three Goddesses, confirmed by the Fates. Our Royal Person is no less than the Imperator of Heaven."

"Do you have-I don't mean to seem rude or anything, but-do you have a badge or anything?"

"A what?"

"A letter signed by your mother, or a driver's license, or something to prove you are the Emperor of Heaven? A golden stick, a fancy chair, a shiny hat?"

"I have the Great Weapon. Do you want to fall in love with a goat?"

Goat? I already had enough trouble with Colin. So I said, "Okay. You are the Cosmic Emperor and King of All Gods. Let's posit that. And you are talking to me, naked in a closet, because...

Why?"

"I've never had a boring conversation with a girl in her lacy things. But once she puts on clothes and opens her mouth, then..."

I favored him with a withering look. "It's the 'in the closet' part I was wondering about. You are afraid to talk to five children in a group, aren't you? You are not really an emperor of anything, are you?"

"Well, that depends. I was pitched off the throne by my uncles, but I never formally abdicated. My realm is shrunken somewhat, so only my brothers Fear and Dread keep faith with me. My sister Trouble is with me, too, sort of, but she's almost more trouble than she's worth. Well, it's not much, but it is something." He shrugged. "Every leader has some setbacks from time to time. So?

We are the sovereign power that rules the ordered universe. You have a petition to ask. Ask."

"Can I ask for peace between Cosmos and Chaos?"

"Petitions for peace can only be granted by both parties in contention, not by one. But I am pleased, very pleased, that you thought to ask for that before you asked for life or freedom. Lord Terminus had you raised together, as Earthly children, and instructed in the histories and arts of man. Have you never wondered why?"

"I have wondered," I admitted.

"Boreas told me the reason."

"You trust him?"

"Indeed. But I don't like him. Likeable and trustworthy are not the same thing, are they? But Boreas, even after Terminus died, kept faith with the orders he was given, kept his promises.

Which is why I trust him now, that cold bastard, and I let him know where I was, despite the people hunting me-"

The door swung open. There was Vanity, wearing a sheer peach evening dress with the tags at the neckline. "I thought I heard voices. Who the heck are you? Leader, is someone molesting you again? I swear you give off a scent that attracts perverts."

Archer, startled, let go of me and straightened up slightly. Then he swung his gaze back toward me, but the moment he took his eyes from me, the wall behind me gave way, and I had fallen through a trapdoor that snapped silently shut behind me. I was in a little crawl space that ran behind the dressing rooms.

Smoothly done. I had no idea Vanity was so smooth. I was in a crawl space: so I crawled.

Archer said, "Where'd she go?"

Vanity was saying, "You're Cupid, aren't you? The one who lost the throne?"

"I know exactly where is it, Lady Nausicaa." Through the wall, I could see him smile an ingratiating smile and place his hand on his heart. "It is merely that armed warriors stand between me and it."

Vanity did not smile back, which was rare for her. Instead she said in a businesslike tone, "Boggin says you can overrule Mavors. Is that true?"

"The matter is complex. Each god has certain terrain that is his own, a realm where his will rules fate. But if events occur where two influences overlap, there is considerable controversy, restrained, to a degree, by precedents long ago established, and to a degree the conflict is restrained by a gentlemen's agreement among ourselves to avoid an open fate-war."

"Mavors ordered Amelia to lead the five of us back to an island where we would be attacked by Lamia, a blood-drinking vampiress, who wants to kill us as the quickest way to break the truce between Cosmos and Chaos. Can you stop this decree?"

This was the Vanity from Vanity Island: the leader-woman, sharp and concise. I admit I used to think of her as silly. But silly was not the same as happy.

And anyone can afford to be silly when she is a prisoner, or a child, not in control of her own life, making no decisions that matter to anyone. That is what she used to be. Helpless and therefore silly. Me, too, I guess.

Through the walls, I saw Archer, with a rustle of his wide wings, step from the closet and advance toward Vanity. "Indeed I can halt the decree of the war-god, sending young girls in love to war, for you are in my realm, not his. But will I? Love is a fickle thing. Why should I grant this petition? Have any of you vowed fealty to me?" He looked left and right again. I could sense some sort of pressure wave coming from his fourth-dimensional armor, and sweeping back and forth to the "red" and "blue" of me. Again, his extensions into the fourth dimension were artificial, not part of his nervous system. I don't think his senses could interpret what he saw very clearly. He could not just look through walls. If I stayed flat in three dimensions, his radar (or whatever it was) did not see me.

"Where is your leader? Helion's daughter, the shepherdess? Boreas told me she was the one who was in charge of your merry band. The smart one, he called her."

Well, the so-called smart one at that moment did not want him to know how Vanity had gotten me out of the room; nor was I eager to continue the conversation in my underthings. Nude and blushing is not the way to talk to a love-god. I noticed that Vanity was not being distracted by asides as I had been.

Following the shortcut Vanity made for me, I found myself back in my little dressing room.

Even though Vanity was holding up her end of the conversation just fine, if Boggin told Archer I was the leader, he would not negotiate with her. Since I did not want him to deduce how I'd gotten out of his grip, and since I wanted to get dressed, I decided it was time to let him see me again.

I found an easy way to get dressed on the quick was merely to pluck my shed clothes up into the fourth dimension, scrunch my three-dimensional cross-section into a point inside my outfit, and rotate it so that the point expanded outward suddenly. I had my left arm in my right sleeve and vice versa, but it was quicker to twist dimensions in a half circle than it was to take the clothes off and put them back on again. I left the evening gown on the hanger: I was dressed in my flying leathers, with track shoes on my feet and my lucky cap on my head.

So I pushed open the door and stepped out. "Here I am, Mr. Archer! I need to know something about you before we close the deal."

He nodded briefly. "You need only know whether I have the power to do as you ask. I do."

Vanity spoke up. "If you are so powerful, why'd you lose the throne?"

He gave her a cryptic, sidelong glance. "That is sort of a personal question, Princess. Ask a historian."

I said, "We need to know the situation. You say you are powerful enough to overrule Mavors, but if he is the war-god, can't he win any battle with you? With anyone? Come to think of it, why didn't he take the throne by force when Terminus died? I'm asking the wrong question. Not how you got pushed off the throne, but how you ever got on it? How did you inherit Heaven?"

Archer smiled that type of smile I've seen on Boggin's face when he hears a clever question from Colin. Smiling at the unexpected. "I was deposed because of my power, not despite it."

"What does that mean?" Vanity asked, her hand on her hips, her green eyes glinting.

He paused to smile at her, perhaps gathering bitter memories in his head. "When Lord Terminus fell beneath Typhon, the secret of the lightning bolt was lost. Lady Tritogenia can wield the Bolt of Heaven, but even she knows not how to make it; they say the cyclopes of Mulciber can make it, but he cannot use it in battle; and the God of Battles, Mavors, who knows the outcome of war, knows that only the Lightning can drive Chaos away. You see? With our Great King dead, our only defense against Chaos is to hide behind you children. But there is a weapon greater than the greatest weapon of Heaven; even the gods bow to it."

He looked back and forth at Vanity and me, expectant, smug. I said, "The Great Weapon."

He nodded, and one hand touched the pink curves of his Turkish bow with unconscious pride.

"Indeed. The Great Weapon. How could Chaos resist, if I had all the queens of the underworld, of dreamland and outer void fall in love with the world? What can quiet the hatred of all enemies, but love, beautiful love?"

I shuddered at the thought of my mother, or the beautiful Lady Nepenthe, Colin's mother, whom I had once seen in a dream, in this man's arms.

He must have guessed my thought, for he looked at me and said sharply, "Not like that! I am a happily married man, little girl. I meant to have the enemies of this world fall in love with the world, with Gaea herself, her mountains and rushing streams, majestic forests of green, somber artic seas of blue, and deserts all encrimsoned with the many colors of a flame: and overhead the ordered spheres of heaven with their gemlike stars remote, the planets wheeling like falcons in their cycles and epicycles. Who, seeing the Cosmos, would not fall in love?"

"What went wrong?" I asked.

He spread his hands. "My mother told me that people do not always treat the ones they love so well. She thought it was madness."

Vanity said, "Your mother is Lady Cyprian? Aphrodite, Venus? Why does she get a vote? I thought you were the Emperor of Cosmos?"

"Ah, but even Monarchy is based on the willingness of the Led to be led. You see, three goddesses crowned me: Lady Tritogenia the Wise, also called Athena, who controls the Thunderbolt and the starry hosts of heaven; the Lady Cyprian, who bestows the love of the people; and the Great Queen Basilissa, called Hera, who grants the Mandate of Heaven, and decrees Sovereignty itself.

Only the head those three sovereign goddesses anoint, the martial maiden, the beloved, and the mother of gods and man, can sustain the oak-leaf crown.

"Do you know the meaning of the old history?" Archer continued. "King Terminus was a parricide; his hands were polluted with his father's blood. Only these three could wash the stains away: wisdom, and love, and the law. The Great Queen of Heaven is also the High Lady of Forgiveness, and Grandfather Terminus repaid her kindness by giving her ever more adulteries to forgive."

He seemed lost in thought for a moment, frowning.

"So these three goddesses picked you?" I said softly.

"I was the compromise candidate. The Great Queen was my grandmother, and Lady Cyprian was my mother, and Lady Tritogenia was as afraid of me as all intellectuals should be. (Merlin and Solomon can tell you how well the wise and learned can withstand the foolishness of love!) Mavors did not want to war on his own son, and Mulciber did not dare earn the hate of his wife, my mother. And everyone thought I was a foolish boy, young and weak and easily led.

"But my flaw was not that I was weak. As I said, I was too strong. Do you see? They were afraid to follow the love-god to war with Chaos. And when the Goddess of Love herself, the Lady Cyprian, said no... well, let us say that she is considerably older and greater than any of us know.

She was found floating on a seashell in the Western Sea, surrounded by singing Graces, and she may be older than Chaos or Old Night."

I said, "Is that why Mavors is not in charge of everything? He needs the three goddesses to coronate him?"

He nodded. "Partly why. Who wants War to rule the universe, rather than Love? My father Mavors is a strange man. I think he hates himself. He rejoices in the glory and virtue of war, but he hates the carnage, the madness, the tears, the bloody business of it, the lies. So many lies. He is basically an honest fellow, in his own way, and he doesn't like how enemies use spies and traitors; kings lie to men; men lie to their wives; and wives tell their children how brave their fathers are; cowards get medals and real heroes die unmarked; and bards lie about it all. He is not a happy man, my father, except when he's with Mother.

"And Father can never be with her, lawfully, unless he gains the throne and changes the laws. If he becomes the Lord of Sovereignty, no longer merely the Lord of War, he can bind his heavy red sword in olive branches and retire from his bloody work, spend his days at home with the prettiest wife in Heaven. What veteran wants more than that?"

Archer shrugged and seemed a little sad. "In any case, Mavors does not dare rule a Cosmos torn with bloody civil war, not with Chaos encamped in strength outside our crystal walls. It might be different if Father had the unambiguous support of Mother. But my mother, the Cyprian, merely looks at him through her long lashes and smiles and does not leave her crook-backed soot-streaked husband-but neither does she leave the rough and handsome war-god to his loneliness.

"So every eye is on Mavors now, now that he has imprudently risked the Children of Chaos to winkle out the traitors among us. If he finds the hidden foe whose hand guides Lamia to her sick crimes, the Great Queen, Mavors' mother, will support him, so she has said, and we all believe his lover, the Cyprian, will also, once a firm excuse allows her. Even his enemy, Tritogenia, the war-goddess, who hates him, cannot withhold her grace from a victor crowned by fate. If the Three Goddesses give him the auspices, Lord Pelagaeus the Earthshaker will withdraw his claim, and even Lord Dis may withdraw his threat to give the throne of brightest heaven to the sad girl-queen of darkest hell.

"Is the moral of my little story clear? Mavors, utterly un-suited to the task, must win the love of those he seeks to lead. He, who could conquer Heaven by fighting, will not be fit to rule in Heaven, unless he can conquer it without fighting. Letting you five run free until his prey starts from the brush is his way of proving to his peers that he is a master of policy and craft, not of bloodshed only. He has to prove he can cooperate with Mulciber and outthink the conspiracy that threatens us all. He has to prove he is as cunning and cold as old Boreas, or else old Boreas will not serve him loyally.

"So much is riding on this episode, but he should not have crossed me. I am his son. My wars are fought in the heart, and my battlefields are more terrible than his! Do you doubt me, that I can overcome his curse, and free you from his command? Look at the orderly Cosmos around you!

What power guides the planets in their courses? What keeps the stars in place? What keeps the Earth firm on her center, and the polestar on his axle? Look, and answer! Is not love stronger than war? If you agree, vow fealty to me!"

I was impressed, in that I did not think Archer was exaggerating, but I reminded myself that Boreas had sent me here, and so this might be merely another and larger trap. I wanted to talk to Victor.

I said, "Sir, I cannot answer you quickly, or you will think me flippant. And I will need to consult with my crew before we make any deals."

At that moment, I heard Quentin's voice in my ear, clear and close as Jiminy Cricket. "Leader, Victor says he has built up sufficient potential to discharge a one hundred and twenty-megavolt X-ray laser into Archer's skull. If you want us to attack, extend your middle finger toward him. If not, touch your nose."

I rubbed my nose. How unladylike. I wish they had come up with a better signal system. I was glad (for once) that the boys had decided to spy on us while we changed: I assume Colin was behind this.

Of course, had I been a good leader, I would have set this all up ahead of time, signals and all.

Archer's eyes narrowed. If he had sense impressions like mine, which could detect the nature and use of objects and events, he might have seen my nose glow just now, and might know what it meant.

Quentin, in my ear, whispered, "Leader, we sign our death warrants if we back one faction over another, in a civil war where we don't know the identities, issues, or the strengths of the sides. We cannot agree to those terms. You have to find another common ground."

Archer said carefully, "I think you have consulted with your crew sufficiently, Lady Phaethusa of Myriagon. Your choices are clear, but narrow."

I nodded, agreeing with what both Archer and Quentin said.

Now that it was time to talk seriously, a sense of dread surprised me. Suddenly my mouth felt dry.

I think I kept licking my lips, because Archer kept staring at them.

I drew a breath and straightened my spine. I reminded myself that I was not a schoolgirl talking to a teacher I was an independent and equal player in some terrible game of war, with the lives of my four friends, and many more lives than that, depending on what I said next.

Okay. It was no harder than walking a tightrope over a pit, was it?

I said, "I am not sure any of us can swear fealty to you. I mean, no offense, but we cannot really afford to take sides in your civil cold war, cold civil war, whatever. We'd just get crushed. Used, then crushed. Because why would you trust us, once we were no longer necessary?"

He said smoothly, "You must weigh the comparative dangers. Mavors' curse will drive you into this island, where you will serve as bait for his ambuscade, if I do nothing. If we come to an agreement, and you support my claim to kingship, there is a danger I will not keep faith. Which danger seems more immediate, likelier, deadlier?"

No harder than walking a tightrope over a pit. A deep pit. Filled with sharks. Radioactive sharks.

I said, "But surely, milord..."

"You're demoting me. I'm a 'Your Imperial Majesty.'"

I nodded. I was not going to quibble with touchy gods over titles. "But surely, Your Imperial Majesty, you have a similar choice. You must weigh the dangers, how likely they are, how severe they are, of your several possible courses of action. If you do not help us, Mavors drives us to the island, where we may die, precipitating a war the Olympians cannot afford to fight right now. Or if we do not die, and Mavors is successful, he is covered with glory, not you, and some who waver now might cleave to him-am I guessing wrong here?-when the real fight starts over the throne. If Mavors saves us, we might have to keep helping him, simply because he is trying to kill someone who is trying to kill us, isn't he? The question is whether there is any advantage for you, in this course."

Archer's eye twinkled, and he smiled a charming, charming smile. "No, milady, the question is what you are offering me..."

"If I'm really a princess, isn't that 'Your Highness' also, Your Imperial Majesty?"

He nodded gracefully. "Your Highness. The question is, if I help Your Highness, what's in it for me? Royalty is not so different from piracy. We both have some reason to cooperate on a venture, and we must agree on the division of loot."

Radioactive sharks with charming smiles.

Think, Amelia, think. You read all those books. What would Odysseus do? Dress up like a beggar, and then shoot everyone. No help there. What would Achilles do? Go sulk in his tent. Nope.

Aeneas? Sacrifice a cow or something.

Boy, these old heroes are really not useful as role models. Who were my other heroes? Margaret Thatcher? Attack Argentina. No time to go wobbly.

Good advice, I guess. And what would Headmaster Boggin do? He was no hero of mine, and yet he was a master of intrigue...

... one who apparently kept his promises and followed orders even when his master was dead. And if I had actually volunteered for this mission, what promises had I made to my mother and father back home? Why was I here? What were my orders?

No matter what I had sworn back home, my duty now was to escape. Every prisoner's duty was escape. It is what we all swore back when we were children. Freedom was the goal. A freedom we could keep.

The deep pit suddenly did not look so deep. And sharks can be handled if you keep your wits about you.

I said, "Here is what is in it for you, sir. You override and undo the fate Mavors decreed, so that we are not caught each time we are in danger. We are not obligated to go act as bait for Lamia, or to cooperate with any war plans of Mavors. You decree that what law Lord Terminus made to keep us captive is null and void. Can you do that?"

He nodded. "And?"

"And we agree in return to vow that we will not, deliberately or negligently, endanger the Cosmos or threaten mankind. The moment we put man or man's universe in current and obvious danger, we are forsworn, and you, and only you, can find us again. In other words, we keep our liberty because the reason for keeping us prisoner no longer applies. Then you are the one who is in a position to save the world; the other gods and goddesses will have to come to you to find out where we are."

He said, "This would prevent you from returning to Chaos, would it not?"

I said, "Probably, but not necessarily. This oath would prevent us from returning for so long as such an act would endanger the universe. Anything might happen. Chaos could make peace with Cosmos. The horse could learn how to sing. Anything."

"And why do I want four dangerous little chaoticists running around my universe in the first place? If I let Mavors have his way, you'll get swept up in his battle, and, once on the battlefield, he can make sure you're captured again, unless he is wounded or killed."

I licked my lips, and picked each word carefully. I had messed up negotiating with ap Cymru, and had messed up talking with Mavors. Time to make good.

"Because as long as we are free, we have a good reason to see you get back on the throne again, don't we? We won't swear any oath. We don't know you well enough for that. But, whether we like it or not, if someone else achieved the throne of Olympos, someone other than you, the King of the Cosmos would no longer have a reason to allow us our liberty. It will be in our best interest, in our enlightened self-interest, to see that you get your way. And, for all you know, this deal might be the first of a beautiful relationship. You treat us well now; we have reason to treat you well next time. You let Mavors win this round, there is no next time."

He pursed his lips. "Is that your best offer?"

I gave him a coy look sidelong, through half-lowered eyelashes, but did not answer the question.

There are some questions it is better not to answer.

He took his rose-hued bow in hand and shrugged, and spread his wings, so that the purple plumage stretched out for yards to each side of him, brushing the dresses hanging there. "I could use the Great Weapon."

Archer paused to let that sink in, and then he said with soft danger in his voice, "Lord Terminus, for all his power and might, could not escape my darts, nor pull the barbed heads free of his enflamed heart. Ask Io, ask Europa, ask Leto."

I was suddenly certain he could do it. Take away what I felt for Victor, just like that. Make me fall in love with Colin, or Quentin. Or Grendel Glum, for that matter. All the warmth, all the special, hidden thoughts I had, all my plans: They could be turned to dust with a pluck of the string.

Something more precious than life itself, and it could be lost.

Now is not the time to go wobbly.

I said, "Controlling someone's mind is generally not a good foundation for a long-term, working relationship of mutual trust. Besides, if you make me fall in love with you, I'll try to change you.

So, you have the Great Weapon. You can threaten me with a nasty crush. But is that your best offer? Mavors can threaten me with bloodshed, death, and ruin."

Archer laughed and put the heel of the bow on the tiles, and leaned on it. "Okay. Let's make a best offer. I have limits on what I can decree, as all gods do. But I have the authority to prevent other gods from decreeing your capture. That is not the same as decreeing your freedom. You understand? I cannot be seen helping you. If you can make it, on your own, into a position where no one is chasing you, well and good: My oath will allow you to keep the freedom you earn. But you must earn it, and I cannot give it. I cannot deflect Lamia or the other vampires from your trail, because they are creatures no one loves or can love."

I said, "What about Boggin being able to trace me?"

He answered as I thought he would, "Even could I, I would not free you of your debt to him. That was the price he asked for selling me the chance of meeting you."

"But you have the power to free us from Mavors' curse?"

"Mavors is beholden, most shamefully, to my mother, Lady Cyprian, and his decrees I can undo, even in matters of war, for Love conquers War, and the Imperial Seal is still mine, and my bow is greater than his bloodthirsty spear. No more can I do."

I made myself wait, despite the bubbling sense of triumph rising inside me, and I made myself pause and look thoughtful, and I am sure I fooled nobody, because I am the world's worst actress.

With as much dignity as I could muster, I said to Vanity, "Go get the boys. We are going to exchange oaths with Mr. Archer."

While she was gone, he and I stood, awkwardly saying nothing for a moment. At least it was awkward for me. Guys do not usually feel a need to talk, because maybe they aren't curious about what people are up to, or their brains are built wrong, or something, and getting them to open up is like pulling teeth.

"I'm curious," I said. "Um, Mr. Imperial Majestic-"

"Let us not stand on ceremony," he said, leaning on his Turkish-style bow. "Just call me

'Handsome,' that'll do."

"Your Handsomeness, I was just curious about-"

"You want me to make someone love you? Who, Boggin? Wouldn't make him any nicer. He'd still be your enemy, except now he'd lust after you, too. Or maybe, should I say, more? And him a married man. Hmph."

"No!" I said, my face hot. I could feel my ears blushing hot, even in places where I thought ears did not have capillaries. "I was going to ask about, about... something else... an unrelated topic."

"What topic?"

I groped for one. "The Norse gods! Odin and Thor. Are they around? And, and, I dunno, Aztec gods and stuff?"

"They're around, some of them. Some of them are us, called by other names in Germany, and some are homegrown. They call Uranus by the name of Ymir, and claim Hermes, Vili, and Ve killed him, not Saturn, the liars. A lot of the Norse guys were wiped out during our last war with Chaos. Jormungander was like your friend Victor, and Fen-rir was like your friend Colin. Surtur is a first cousin to Quentin Nemo on his mother's side. You folks do a lot of damage when you cooperate.

"Whom else did you ask about? The ten thousand gods of Japan are real, and we've had a fruitful relationship with Amaterasu-o-mi-kami and her folk for years. The Aztec gods are mostly wiped out by the gods of Iberia, Cario-ciecus and his crew. Never heard of them? Iberian. They were close enough relations to absorb, and we could steal their honors. I am glad they were around long enough to deal with the New World gods, because the Aztecs were a nasty, filthy bunch. You wouldn't want to meet them."

"Why do you hide from the humans?"

"We need the worship. If they saw us as we were, they'd hate us."

"But they don't worship you, not the pagan gods, not anymore."

"My mom and dad are Lust and Violence. You telling me human beings don't worship them? We're in L.A.! Race riots and Hollywood. Men don't worship what they think they do, no matter what they say."

"You don't hide from other creatures. Cyclopes and Laestrygonians and mermaids and stuff."

He smiled a strange little smile. "Humans are different from other created creatures. Prometheus used something he stole from Lord Terminus and kindled a fire in the human souls. An inextinguishable flame. Indestructible. We don't know what it is. Lord Terminus did not know what Prometheus did, but he was scared silly. He ordered the Titan tormented, to get the information, but Prometheus spat in his eye and prophesied betrayal and death for Grandfather Terminus. The King of Heaven would be overthrown by his son, even as he overthrew his father, and his father overthrew his grandfather. A family tradition. No more than that did he say."

Archer shivered slightly, and drew his purple wings close about himself, as if cold. "If you find out who is trying to kill you, you'll find out who sent Typhon of Chaos to kill Heaven's Great King."

I said in a hollow voice, "Prometheus foretold that men would overthrow you, as you overthrew the Titans, and the Titans overthrew the Uranians. That's what he did, isn't it?"

Archer shook off the mood and smiled again. "This was not what we came here to discuss. You had quite another question, did you not?"

"Well," I said, "if, as part of our bargain, if I also asked, I mean, can you make it so my boyfriend, um-"

He laughed. "Now you see why everybody hates me, and wanted me off the throne. I've got the one thing everyone, gods and men alike, thinks he wants, but nobody ever really wants it once he gets it. The first answer to your question is no. I have come around to the opinion that messing up the lives of mortals, and driving them to poetry, or madness, or suicide, is not as funny as it once was.

"You see, I'm a married man these days. Psyche is her name, and she went to Hell and back for me.

"So I believe in true love, now, and my Soul tells me there is a greater love in the universe, a Timelessness beyond time, a supernal Eternity. A Forevermore. I'm a changed man. I'm still cruel, but I don't enjoy it as much.

"The second answer is, you picked the wrong boyfriend. He's the Lost One, isn't he? The Telchine?

Your people, the Nameless Ones, can reach into Telchine skulls and rewire them. You could make him love you with no help from me-and the fact you can do that, just by itself, whether I use the Great Weapon or not, will kill your relationship."

I said, "I would never... never do anything... like that! It would be cheating!"

He grinned his charming grin and shrugged his feathery shrug. "Women are supposed to domesticate men. List the countries where they treat women like dirt, and then list the crude, warlike, and brutal countries. Same list, yes? So you sweet little dears cannot help your sweet little selves. You have to try to change men. Remember your sister, Circe? Women are like that in reverse. Turn pigs into human beings. But a man you can control is not really a man, is he? He's a boychild, not a paterfamilias."

By then Vanity and the boys were approaching, so there was no more time for talk.

The Surprise

I wish I could remember whose idea it was to split up in the shop after Archer left. It must have been mine, because I was the leader. I guess I am responsible for the decision, no matter whose idea it was.

After seeing the boys all dressed up and handsome in their tuxes, the leader made the unilateral decision that we really ought to visit the club down the street anyway.

I said to them, "The same problem exists now as before. As long as we are being hunted, we endanger humans by being near them. So we'll have to search for some spot remoter than the planet Mars. Promixa Centauri might be nice!"

That was greeted by a choir of moans and groans. The troops were not eager for another long trip in an ancient Greek spaceship.

"But this is a victory, troops!" I said over the noise of dissent. "Sort of. The authority of Mavors is overruled. We're not out of the woods yet, but now getting out of the woods is possible. Archer was not willing to stop other fates already in motion, but no new ones will be set against us. If we ever, by our own efforts, get free from the gods, they cannot now simply decree that we'll be caught again. In other words, we still have to find some way to sever the bond between me and Boggin, or deceive Mestor's needle, but once that is done, Phoebe or someone else will not and cannot just predestine us to be found again. The game is still on, but now the playing field is level.

"So how about one last night of celebration before we leave? We're all dressed up, or, at least Vanity is"-I had not even tried on the dress I picked out-"so who wants to go dancing?"

The reaction to that was more enthused.

We had none of us left the store yet. I had gotten the money out from the fourth dimension where it had rested for so long, and everyone but me was all decked out in his finest, with old clothes balled up in shopping bags.

And all seemed amenable to a last night out on the town. Vanity and I still had one or two things to buy. Because who knew when we would get the chance again?

But since sensible people (girls) like to, you know, actually look at what we are buying and actually make informed decisions, it was driving certain not-so-sensible people (boys) slowly crazy, especially since they were standing around in tuxedoes I hadn't paid for yet.

So Colin and Victor wandered off to look at something else, or maybe I ordered them to find a clerk and find out where the checkout was. I don't remember. It just seemed natural at the time.

Quentin went with them.

We were going back into the dress department when Vanity's cell phone played the theme from the William Tell overture in electronic cricket chirps. That is what phones do in America instead of ringing.

Vanity was giggling, and her emerald eyes were dancing with light, and her cheeks turned ever-so-pink (her light complexion lends itself quite easily to blushing) and she was holding the little gizmo-phone in both hands, so that she could cover her mouth with her fingers to hide the giddy smile---

Okay, I am not an idiot. It was not Victor or Colin calling her, see?

Vanity, blushing red as a beet, snapped shut the little phone and, looking only at my chin or ear, said she had something else she had to do right now, and did I mind? She could put in a call to Victor and Colin, and have them come here from wherever part of this vast store into which they had wandered, so I would not be left alone.

"I need to go look at something over by the jewelry counter," she said.

My first thought, of course, was that Quentin was going to pick out a wedding ring. When else do men look at jewelry? But maybe she just wanted him aside to herself for a little snogging practice.

I did not want to be left alone, but, just at that moment, I saw something shining so brightly, so useful, even through the intervening walls and floors, that I knew I had to get it.

That little voice people are supposed to hear when they are in deep need of common sense spoke now in my ear. It told me to go back and get Victor and Colin, because I should not be alone. This shop filled up most of a long city block. It was bigger than Abertwyi village. The fact that Archer could walk up to me in the dressing room showed that across the shop was too far away.

I did not tell my little common sense voice to shut up- I would never do that-but I told it to talk a little quieter. Just a little. Only for a minute.

Because at that very moment, I was looking out across a wide countryside of modern musical instruments. There, bright beneath the neon lights, alone in an almost empty store, I saw it.

There it was, perfect and perfectly tasteless.

It was a guitar. An American guitar. Just like the ones the rock stars use, all those loud and unkempt boys Colin had watched so avidly on the telly during our crossing on the Queen Elizabeth II.

It was black and sleek and metallic and shiny, and had a weird-looking triangular sound-box instead of the normal hourglass shape. It looked like an alien rocket ship poised for takeoff.

My eye fell on that guitar, and I fell in love with it. I had to have it, to get it for Colin, and it had to be a surprise.

My thought: Colin didn't hate music. He only hated good music. Classical music, Brahms and Bach and Beethoven. Music in four voices, point and counterpoint, grace notes and floating glissandos.

Ah, but rock and roll was a different matter, wasn't it? Drumming backbeat, screaming guitar, banshee-shrieks of sound, all mangled and compressed together into thundering avalanches of pure noise! It had Colin written all over it. It was perfect for him. Perfect!

So I went off alone. The clerk, or maybe he was the manager, was a bent, balding man with a sunburned scalp and white puffs for eyebrows. He unlocked the display case and took the guitar out and showed it to me. "What type of amplifier does your friend have?"

"How do you know I am not buying it for myself?"

He smiled a bit into his mustache, and nodded and looked shy, but did not answer the question.

Maybe I was holding it in a way that showed I knew nothing about guitars.

The price he asked was more than I wanted to spend. On the other hand, we were about to leave civilization forever, and the money would be of no earthly use to me hereafter.

I was not very good at haggling, higgling, or chaffering, but I admitted it was a gift for a friend, and that I did not have very much money.

He could probably see that my upbringing had burdened me with ideas of polite behavior and ladylike refinement that, I am sure, have no place among the brash businesswomen of America.

The old man cut the price, just a bit, perhaps as a reward for the fact that I at least tried to get into the dickering spirit.

I could not afford any cords or amplifiers; the thing was worthless without them, but I had a vague notion that Victor could cobble something together.

I bought the thing anyway. The final thought that weakened my resolve to hold out for a reasonable price was this: Everything we bought on the cruise ship, either Victor or Vanity had bought (since they had been holding the envelope at that time), and I was not present during the Paris shopping spree. Come to think of it, hadn't Colin picked up the tab when we ate out our last night ashore? And Quentin bought the coats and stuff from the Isle of Man? I had not spent a single pound-note of the money yet.

So the bad news was that it was expensive. The good news Was that I had just enough.

It must have happened the moment he rang up the cash register and handed me the receipt.

I was riding back up to the ground-floor level on an empty escalator, the sleek black guitar in its case in one hand, my purse in the other, into which I was still (with one or two fingers not being used) trying to stuff the folded bills of my change while, at the same time, performing the not-quite-topologically-impossible act of trying to stuff the slender purse into the rather voluminous pocket of my leather jacket... when my radio phone chirruped the opening to the

"Moonlight" sonata in electronic cricket-beeps.

Okay. Enough was enough. Granted, I was in a store, and there might have been security cameras, but, on the other hand, no one was around me at that moment. No one was looking.

I stepped "past" the surface of the escalator and found myself in a little maintenance or machinery room in an unpainted section of the store customers are not supposed to see. There was a loading dock off to my left and a bare concrete corridor off to my right.

Now I reached "down" into the flat plane of three-space with a number of limbs made of motes of light, like tendrils of music, if music were made of solid energy-forms.

One group of motes diverted the mass-relationship leading from the guitar to the center of the Earth, to make it lighter in my hand; a second group folded my stray bills and slid them "past"

the surface of my purse into its interior; and a third group superimposed the purse on the interior of my pocket. To me, it looked much like putting a paper cutout of a purse inside a pocket-shaped line drawn on a plane. Since the purse actually (now that I could see it from more than 180

degrees at once) looked too large to fit through the mouth of the pocket, I would have to use the same means to get it out again, or resort to knifing open the pocket seams.

A fourth group of motes reached "into" my pants pocket and tilted the switch-hook of my phone into the fourth dimension, so that it popped "up." The mere fact that the lid of the phone was shut no longer engaged the off button. In effect, this took the cell phone off the hook without actually opening it.

A fifth group of motes folded the tiny area of time-space around my pants pocket to hold it against my ear.

I am not sure what this might have looked like to outside three-dimensional observers. Maybe they would have seen me bend at the waist at an impossible angle to put my ear to my hip. Maybe they would have seen or heard sound waves being teleported out of my pocket through a wormhole directly into my ear.

A manipulation set up a second distance-negating space-fold between my mouth and the cell phone's cunningly made little mouthpiece.

Maybe an outside observer would have seen me twisted like a Mobius pretzel to have my mouth and ear both pressed up against the same convex surface in a way spherical heads cannot. I prefer to think they would have seen a second wormhole opening between my head and my pocket, without any gross distortions. After all, the limited three-dimensional light would have followed the space-time curve as if it were flat, right? Outside observers surely would have seen a pretty girl with little firefly glints in a complex halo around her head. Hope so, anyway.

Multidimensional continuum control is a fine superpower-there is none better-but no girl wants a paradigm she cannot use without looking icky.

Vanity's voice came over the phone speaker: "Amelia! Amelia! Oh, God, please answer!"

"I'm here."

"Something just saw you. Something powerful and terrible. Then another group of somethings joined in. There is a crowd looking at you."

I looked left and right. Bare walls. Loading dock with empty trucks. Behind me was a space filled with a diesel engine, calmly purring. I ran the few yards, down a set of metal stairs, and eased open a rear door leading to the loading bay. Outside was a short alley leading to a nighttime street, neon-lit. There were people on it, couples walking, perhaps headed to the club just down the way. No one stopping to turn and look toward the store.

I opened up eyes in the fourth dimension. There was a blaze of utility from the music section of the store overhead, but now I saw it was not useful to me or Colin; the supply of instruments was very useful to someone else.

That same light sent out a streamer of moral obligation like a spiderweb. I traced the strands.

One bundle went toward Deimos, who was sitting in a glassed-in office high above a dancing floor of many dazzling lights. He had his harpoon in his hand, facing the direction of the store, as if the intervening walls and buildings were no barrier to his dread weapon. The threads there ran from him to Archer, who was on the street between the store and the club. Deimos was acting as a sniper, a friendly one, ready to strike down anyone who threatened his brother. Had he been watching the whole exchange between me and Archer? Probably not, or Vanity would have sensed his eyesight. No-something had startled him into a warlike stance, a warning that his oath to protect his brother was about to be challenged.

I saw a second bundle leaving him and leading back to me. He had made a promise to me to show my card to Archer. It was a dim connection, but enough that Deimos could sense a threat to me as well. If I were killed, he could not keep his promise.

I am lucky Deimos had made that promise, because I could see through his tangle of moral connections something I could not see radiating from myself.

A final bundle had reached down from a point immensely remote in space, right to my position, glowing, shivering, and crawling with motes and flickers of communication-purpose. It was as if the line was shouting to someone, HERE! SHE IS HERE!

"Damn!" I breathed.

Wives of the Psychopomp

"Do you see anyone?" asked Vanity over the phone.

"The money. I spent the money..."

I could dimly hear, in the background, Quentin's voice saying, "It's ap Cymru. Amelia's in debt to him now. That's why they gave her such an absurd amount of money. The obligation was not actual before, because she herself never spent it. Tell her to throw away whatever it is she just bought..."

Vanity: "Did you hear Quentin?"

"Yes." I tossed the sleek black guitar into a Dumpster filled with packing material. And immediately: "Didn't work," I said. The obligation lines continued to lead to me, not to it. Oh well.

I picked up the guitar again. No reason to throw away a perfectly good guitar.

I said to Vanity: "Which floor are you on?"

Vanity said: "I am not in the store anymore. I led the boys into a secret elevator behind the jewelry department when I felt someone find you. I am hoping it will lead down to a sewer or-Listen! Get to the docks, get to the shore. Or to the nearest body of water. I am ordering my ship to go find you."

Vanity shouted over the tiny phone speaker: "Do not dare tell me you are going to lead them away! What if we get attacked by Dr. Fell and you are not there? What if Mrs. Wren attacks you, and it is something Quentin could save you from by saying the name of a fish? We are all in danger if you are in danger! Don't you dare run off on us or be brave, or so help me God, I will never forgive you, Amelia Armstrong Windrose!"

Quentin, in the background, softly: "Colin can find her. She still owes him a favor."

I should have run back into the store, but the fact that streamers of obligation-energy were reaching from Deimos to this area frightened me irrationally. This store was part of a trap. Vanity was not in it, anyway.

I ran from the alley to the street. It was bright and crowded for a nighttime street, and the night air was warm.

People were staring at me, so I slowed down to a brisk trot. Just a lady in a leather jacket and cap, out for a walk with her space-age guitar! Everything is normal!

As I continued to walk, I noticed that everything did look normal. Whatever alarm I had just set off, it might be weeks or years before ap Cymru answered. Maybe I was safe for now.

I pulled the phone from my pocket and held it up to my ear. "Vanity! I'm in the main street in front of the shop. There are people all around me, humans. If we're right about the gods, they will not show themselves in front of a crowd. I am making my way West on..."

That was when I noticed the phone was dead. There was no click of disconnection, no hum of the power shutting off, just... silence.

"Vanity? Hello...?"

All the bright, noisy cars moving from light to light along the street now slowed and halted. Radio music banging from the nearer cars squawked and stopped.

The pedestrians, wherever they were, beneath the neon signs at the bus stops, in the middle of the crosswalk, on the sidewalks, fell, or slumped, or keeled over.

Blackness rushed across the cityscape as lights from the building across the way went out. The streetlamps turned dark. A thousand teeny tiny machine noises, radios, the hissing of the portable popcorn popper of a late-night street vendor, the whirr of distant automatic doors opening and closing, the hum from refrigerators, elevators, other motors... all muttered and fell into a deep, tomblike hush.

The clock on the bell tower of the bank across the street from my position emitted one last peal, and then stopped, its second hand frozen. The electronic sign turned all white as all the bulbs lit up, and then went black.

I felt a pressure in the sleep centers of my brain, activity in my pons attempting to trigger narcolepsy, changes in my medulla oblongata trying to switch my brain-wave pattern from alpha-beta consciousness to delta-wave dream state.

If my brain continued to obey the laws of nature, I would have to sleep, and immediately.

I jumped into another dimension.

I was through and "past" the stone surface of the building in front of me in a moment. I saw the cubicles and interior spaces of the building, the pipes beneath the street, the interstices between the walls, all laid out like a flat blueprint. I saw the various textures of internal natures: greedy billboards, generous water pipes, frowning walls, ambitious electrical generators, patient power lines.

At this point I was some nine hundred feet above the street, and about forty feet or so in the

"blue" direction of overspace, not so far away from the plane of Earth's home continuum that I could not see it, albeit everything was now made soft and mysterious by a haze of blue, a Doppler shift created by the curving metric.

Through the blue haze, I could see other planes of other continua around me, to my left and right, up and down, before me, behind me, and blue and red of me. Only then did I notice what was odd about this four-space. Unlike the street level, it was lit. It was much brighter here than the analogous four-space "above" England. I was seeing farther than I ever had before.

I looked "above" and "behind" me for the source of the light.

The light (actually, volumes of an energy for which we have no name) was coming from (issuing in concentric hyperspheres) a curving bubble or blister in a nearby continuum. This continuum was in a plane parallel to Earth's continuum. It lay about a hundred yards in the "blue" direction, and had formed this reddish blister on its hypersurface, which was swelling and shimmering. The sight reminded me of a steel door being melted, as if the metal were expanding and about to explode outward---

The sight made me feel, despite that I was in the freedom of hyperspace, claustrophobic.

In that gushing light, I could see that the hyperspace was swarming with traffic. In seventeen different time-space pockets, with the watery corridors before and behind them pinched shut, were great fleets of floating mountains of black metal, deck upon deck and turret upon turret bris-ding with deck-guns, bombards, and cannons. We had seen these lumbering battle barges on the horizon when Mavors had allowed us to escape. Their flags showed the circle-and-spear emblem of Mars. Laestragonians.

Not far from these barges, patrolling the time-space corridors, were slim black ships, pentaconters and triremes, skipping across the curving interdimensional waters like bolts shot from crossbows. These black ships flew banners displaying a trident. Atlanteans.

Hanging in little time-space pockets of their own were huge machines shaped like suits of armor, half a mile or more from crown to spurs. The hulls of the machines were blazing with silver and gold, brightly enameled and decorated with delicate bas-relief. Spears or war-hammers the size of aircraft carriers rested at the sides of the metal warlords. I gazed "past" their armored hulls at their interior clockworks, engines, amplifiers, linkages; I saw alchemical hearts of white fire burning in glass vessels. I saw pistons the size of the Empire State Building. Tubes charged with atomic energy, like veins from the heart of the sun, ran down the core of each suit, from shoulder to heel.

The massive visors of the machines were being cranked open. Their lantern-eyes were being lit by attendants, who stood on ladders clamped to the cheek-plates, and reached carefully upward with long poles tipped with fire. Their symbol was a crane in flight. Mulciber's people.

I was used to hyperspace being empty, my own private playground. Here it was seething with a hornet's nest of ships and men and armaments, the crossroads of hundreds of pathways through time-space. A port city for the traffic of the gods. And it was under guard. Archer's place had been in one of the few dark corners of this multidimensional edifice.

And we had been skipping along in the middle of it. Shopping.

I had let one of the members of my squad leave me alone, to go off and play smooch-face with another member...

Where, in all this mess and splendor and commotion of hyperspace, was Vanity?

I followed a group of morality strands, my obligations to the group, with my eye---

There! I saw the Argent Nautilus, with Vanity at the prow, sailing down one sharply curving tube (although, to her, I assume, the space looked flat and open) about twenty-five feet below the surface of the street beneath the streets of Los Angeles, and about twenty meters in the dream-plane. Looking for me... ?

I tilted my wings and swam through the thick medium of hyperspace, moving toward Vanity and the Argent Nautilus. She was about a quarter mile away from me, no farther, but the hyperspatial distances here were longer because of the positive curve of the plane: It would take me twice as long to cover the distance here that I could have covered on foot, had I dipped back into Earth's home dimension. I was still afraid of the sleep effect rippling through the city, and wanted to stay above (or should I say a-blue) of it.

I drew closer slowly. Victor and Quentin were standing on deck next to her, and Vanity (who, no doubt, felt my gaze on her) was trying to point in my direction. It was not a direction she could turn. Victor and Quentin turned their eyes left and right, but I was not left or right of them. They looked up and down, but I was not above or below them.

I shouted, but they did not seem to hear me. Where was Colin?

I redoubled my speed. With wings and tail and hands and feet, I clawed and waded, sloshed and swam and flew toward my friends.

There came a flash. A group of morality strands looping widely from the near distance running to me now lit up and glittered.

That blister bulging out from the dream-plane, I now saw, was the source of the sleep-spell sweeping over Los Angeles. Morality radiated in concentric waves from it, somehow obligating the men and machines, clocks and electric circuits of Earth to slumber.

The internal nature of the obligation I could see: It affected everyone who used telephones, telegraphs, cars, other means of transport. Anyone who hired a lawyer, who made money, who trafficked with merchants. Anyone who told a lie. They all owed something to... whom?

Whoever was behind this spell. An Olympian calling in a debt.

Into the middle of the effect, the strands that drew my gaze led. In the epicenter of that blister, deep in the dreamworld, was a small bubble of stable reality where the laws of Earth were mimicked.

There, I saw a black mountainside surrounded by clouds of twilight red. Here on a shelf of rock, a score of columns stood in a circle, a temple with no roof.

On the altar-stone, kneeling, back straight, head down, buttocks on her heels, was a feminine figure wearing a red kimono. Her hair was black and straight, shining like India ink. The red silk fabric was decorated with images of butterflies and bats, blank-faced cherubs presenting lilies to tiny skeletons. In a semicircle before her on the stone there gleamed a strand of crystal marbles, arranged in pairs. In one hand she held a knife, in the other an ivory drinking horn.

To her left stood the girl-form of ap Cymru: dark-haired and dark-eyed Laverna, goddess of fraud. She was wearing a skintight black sheath of fabric and carrying a snake in; either hand.

One was lashing its tail in the air; the other was twining her wrist, a living bracelet.

Laverna's lips moved. My sense that detected inner meanings of things told me what their words meant to convey, even though I did not hear them: Try again. If she is not asleep, then she is fleeing. We must come at them one at a time....

There was a third woman, standing to the other side. She was dressed in a folded garb of many pockets and pleated layers of cloth, intricate, with sea motifs of green and blue. Her hair was red as new blood. She wore a long veil of aquamarine. I saw only her eyes, which were emeralds sparkling with light.

The words from the woman in white were: No need. She looks at me now. I feel the pressure of her gaze. She is outside of the plane of Earth, and alone. Another of my kind is also watching her-the Princess Nausicaa. The two are apart.

When the woman in the red kimono raised her head and her loose hair parted, I saw it was Lamia.

I saw the raw and empty red sockets where her eyes had been. I knew now what the marbles in the semicircle before her were: disembodied eyes.

The marbles twinkled and turned toward me.

Lamia-I see her. I see them both.

Laverna said-Begin!

Lamia upended the drinking horn. A splash of blood struck the stone before her. She threw back her head, mouth wide. I heard no scream, yet still I sensed the meaning of what was said: Wives of the Psychopomp, I release thee: All ye fair captives who sold white bodies and dark souls to the lust of Trismegistus for promises of escape from Hell, I put aside your chains: Let slip thy leash, and run thee down my prey!

The red-haired woman raised her hand, saying, Guardian of Dreams! I call upon our ancient covenant. I open the gate, I break the boundaries, I let pass my Lord's many wives into the daylight world: I let pass the laws of dreams as well.

A green stone, a twin to the one I had seen on Boggin's toe, glimmered in her palm like a star made of poison.

(I noticed then, too late... far too late... that the glinting strands whose flash, had attracted my attention were running from Laverna to me to the guitar I still held. My debt to ap Cymru.) The blister from the dream-plane expanded, grew brighter, and intersected the plane of Earth.

The blister erupted. There was an explosion, then darkness.

The heavy medium of hyperspace shook with the concussion. A force violent beyond all description sent me tumbling end over end.

An automatic reflex had made me turn headfirst into the wave, and to "yank in" the various red and blue limbs and wings of my hyperbody. I folded myself into a three-dimensional shape (to narrow my 4-D cross-section to nothing) and let the concussion flow over me. It helped-I was not broken in half-but I still was thrown.

I did not lose consciousness, but my senses spun. I remember dazed images of useful tubes through hyperspace, used by the Atlantean ships, being blown and twisted by the explosion, and darkening to uselessness.

I remember seeing the hidden half-mile-tall giants of Mulciber's army being scattered hither and yon throughout four-space. The blister itself, the source of the light, erupted into Earth's plane, depositing armies of dream-women into the sleeping metropolis and blowing aside the normal laws of nature of Earth in the Los Angeles area-I saw the internal nature of all objects flutter violently with the new impositions-become dreamlike, charged with magic.

The echoes of the fading light failed, and it was suddenly as dark here as it had ever been in hyperspace above England. Remember England, where I had gotten lost less than an inch or two away from the plane of Earth? Here, I was at least fifty yards away, and had been blown farther still, and tumbled. I did not know at what angle my present three-body might be relative to Earth's space-time.