The Dragons of Babel

15 The Rousing of the West

The offices of the Mayoralty coiled like a snake around the air shaft at the core of Babel nine loops up and then another nine down, so that it crisscrossed itself like a parking garage. This meant that there were two floors per level, intersecting and interpenetrating each other in a manner that, when taken in combination with centuries of alterations, subdividings, security glamours, and curses laid down by disgruntled office-seekers, guaranteed that only the cognoscenti could find their way about its endless warren of rooms. All others were lost in a matter of minutes and had to hire a local guide if they hoped to ever get anywhere.

Alcyone had an office on the third gyre of the upward serpent. Will hired a grig who claimed he had originally come to the Mayoralty to obtain a business license, lost his livelihood in the years-long and ultimately futile pursuit of that document, and now never left the building, eating at public receptions when he could and from vending machines and employee cafeterias when nothing better presented itself, and sleeping in the visitors gallery of the City Council caucus chamber. He was a cheerful little cricket of a fellow, and Will tipped him a silver dime when their journey ended safely at an undistinguished door whose brass plate read:

308

A. L'lnconnu Asst. Director

Signs & Omens

Will opened the door without knocking and stepped inside. Alcyone looked up from her desk. For a long moment neither spoke.

At last Alcyone said, "It's you, isn't it? Tell me that the bastard prince and heir to His Absent Majesty that everyone is talking about isn't really you."

"Well... it is and it isn't, if you see what I mean. May I sit?"

She nodded with chill grace toward a chair.

"I used to have a job that brought me to this building two or three times a week," Will said musingly. The office had good furniture and a grim view. Its window faced across the air shaft to the Criminal Vengeance Division, where the heads of malefactors insufficiently notorious for a place above the city gates were routinely hung from spikes on the windowsills like so many cheeses in a delicatessen. "I had no idea you were so near."

"And why should that matter to you?" Her manner was all business. There was not a scintilla of flirtatiousness to it.

"You know why," Will said. "I'll say it out loud it you like." "That won't be necessary." Alcyone lifted a stack of papers from her inbox and let it fall again. "There was a rain of snakes two weeks ago. A three-headed calf was born in Hell's kitchen the day before yesterday. Just last night, a blood-red comet sped across the sky shrieking. Citizens spontaneously burst into flames. Tap water turns to blood. Tatzlwurms infest the Upper West Side. Statues weep and hogs fly. On Sixth Avenue, a merchant tries to give his goods away. There's never been such a season for portents, signs, and plagues of owls. My sleepy backwater office has suddenly become one of the focuses of governance. All of which, apparently, is your doing. And for what?"

"Wealth, obviously."

"But you won't live to enjoy it!" Alcyone slammed her hands down on her desk and stood in a fury. "Yours is a fool's ambition, Master le Fey. I have seen the death that awaits those who, with whatever rationale, are ambitious enough to seat themselves down upon the Obsidian Throne, and I assure you it is far from pleasant."

"Please," Will said mildly, "don't use that name. I have reason to believe it's been compromised. As for the Obsidian Throne, I plan never to get that far— quite."

"Then what is the point of this elaborate charade?"

"How can I best explain this?" Will cast about in his mind. "Let me tell you a story."

Raven was walking, just walking (Will began). He wasn't looking for trouble. But he wasn't looking to avoid it, either. That's just the kind of guy he was.

Well. He came to Scorpion's house and Scorpion invited him in. Scorpion poured him a drink. "Will you stay for supper?" "Yes, I will do that thing."

So Scorpion got out his good silver and his best china and served Raven a fine meal. Then he said. "Would you like coffee? Would you care for some tobacco?"

"Oh, I will do those things as well and I will stay the night, too."

Scorpion brewed Blue Mountain coffee in his samovar and gave Raven Turkish tobacco to smoke in his hookah. He showed his guest all the rooms of his house but one. And afterward Raven said, "I hear that you have a room full of treasure. Everybody says so."

"There's nothing special about it," Scorpion said. But he showed it to Raven anyway. The room was full of gold and silver and gems. But Scorpion was right—there was nothing special about it. It was just ordinary treasure.

Nevertheless, Raven's eyes gleamed with avarice. "This is excellent treasure indeed," he said. "But I do not think it is very safe. Somebody could climb through the window at night and steal it all."

"I never thought of that," said Scorpion. This was long ago when everyone was better behaved. "Could such a thing really happen?"

"Oh, yes. I think I should sleep with your treasure tonight to guard it from thieves."

But innocent though the times may have been, everybody had heard about Raven and his roguish ways. So Scorpion said. "No, no, no. That is too lowly a job for a guest. You must sleep in my own bed tonight. It has silk sheets and an Irish lace coverlet. I will guard the treasure myself." And so it was.

Scorpion went into the treasure room and locked the door and piled all the treasure in a heap, and crouched over it, pincers open and tail raised, ready to sting. He did not sleep a wink that night for worrying about what sort of tricks Raven might be planning.

When morning came, Scorpion emerged from his treasure room to discover that Raven was gone. Along with his bedclothes, silver ware, plates, samovar, and hookah.

Will spread his hands to indicate the end of his story. "That's all."

After a brief, tense silence, Alcyone said, "In what sense is this an allegory?"

"Well... I have an associate. While I'm being prepped for the coronation, hell set up an enterprise to sell titles and offices to the ambitious and gullible at prices just barely steep enough to be plausible. Those who suspect I am a fraud—and there will be many such—will refrain from arresting him, lest I become aware they are watching me. I will be housed in the Palace of Leaves, after all, and the treasure there is not at all ordinary. A nimble man could stuff enough in his pockets to make him rich forever. So my adversaries will set traps for me, baited with such wonders as no cracksman could resist. But while they're guarding their glitters and geegaws, I'll skip town. My profits will be relatively modest. But I'll have my life and that's worth something, too."

Alcyone scowled and pinched the bridge of her nose as if she were coining down with a headache. "Oh, you idiot. Why, out of all the denizens of Babel, should you tell me these things? I am a functionary in His Absent Majesty's governance. I'm a Lady of the Mayoralty and heir to the female line of House L'Inconnu. There's a legislative seat in the l.iosalfar in my future when my brother has moved on to bigger things, as he surely will, and with luck I might even rise to the Council of Magi before my dotage. I am all your enemies rolled into one."

"No." Will stood and took her hands in his. "I don't believe you are. I came here today wondering how much of what I felt for you was but a romantic illusion—the image of freedom I saw in the Hanging Gardens the day I emerged from the underground—and how much was mere aspiration for the unattainable adventuress I met at your brother's masked ball. You received me coldly, proffering not one kindly word nor a single smile. And yet I find—"

A russalka stuck her head in the office. "Allie, we've just gotten word that the West is moving."

"Yes, thank you," Alcyone said, subtly shifting her stance so that her coworker would not see her holding hands with a stranger. Then, when the intruder was gone, "You find—?"

"I find that—"

A muera rode into the office atop a bureaucrat who walked bent over and leaning on two short canes, so that the saddle on his back was level to the floor. There were blinders on his eyes and a bit in his mouth. She was a goat from the waist down and went naked, save for her tattoos, and with her hair all in tangles and witch-knots as an outward sign of her devotion to the welfare of the city.

"The West is astir!" she cried.

"Yes, yes, I'll get to it soon." To Will, Alcyone said, "You have to understand—"

"It's moving! The West! It moves!"

"Thank you, Glaistig." She pulled away from Will just as a black dwarf came in with a crate of chickens and a requisition slip for her to sign. Two haint messengers arrived almost simultaneously, striding through opposing walls, and began speaking at once. A follet knocked on the door and waved a sheath of telephone message slips.

The russalka reappeared. "Allie, the Lord High Comptroller wants to know—"

"Enough!" The battle-light shone about Alcyone's head and her hair whipped in a wind that touched nothing else in the office. Beautiful beyond enduring was she in that instant, and terrifying as well. "Cover your eyes," she said.

She clapped her hands and thunder pealed.

They were flying. The hippogriff swam strongly upward beneath them, and Will's arms were about Alcyone's waist. The crate of poultry was lashed to the back of the saddle behind Will. They were high in the air outside of Babel.

"How did you do that?" he gasped.

Alcyone glanced over her shoulder. Her face was stern and strong, like unto that of a warrior. "You're playing in the big leagues now, feyling. If you find this startling, then maybe it would be a good time for you to reconsider the wisdom of continuing in your rash and fraudulent impersonations."

Pale faces stared out from windows that flashed by and were gone. The air was cold and the winds were so strong that they shoved Will like enormous hands one way and another, threatening to tear him from the saddle and fling him to his death. But in the presence of his beloved, Will discovered that, however fleeting the moment might be, he was happy.

The ring of skyscrapers that sat atop Babel like a ragged crown were named after the sacred mountains of the world: Kilimanjaro, Olympus, Uluru, Sinai, McKinley, T'ai Shan, Amnye Machen, Annapurna, Popocatépetl, Meru, Fuji... And by tradition, the tallest of them all, whichever it might happen to be at any given tune, was named Ararat, after the mountain that had been quarried, shaped, and deconstructed to build Babel. At the very peak of this last and mightiest of buildings was the Palace of Leaves. Wings laboring, the hippogriff flew toward it.

"Where are we going?" Will shouted.

"You'll see."

The palace itself, almost hidden in its arboreal gardens, was a Second Empire wedding cake of gleaming white marble. But the fortress walls beneath it were blank and gray and windowless for the space of many floors. There, four Titans were shackled and chained, one facing each direction: Gog to the north, Magog to the east, Gogmagog to the south, and a fourth giant without a name facing westward. These had been the Guardians of the Four Quarters, who in the First Age held up the world but had subsequently rebelled against Marduk's heirs and so for punishment were imprisoned where operatives of His Absent Majesty's governance could keep a close eye on them —and call upon their divinatory talents at such times as might be politic, as well.

The hippogriff alit on a balcony so small as to be invisible from a distance, located directly beside the western Titan's face. Her head was twice as tall as Will was, but the Titan gave no notice of their presence but continued to stare vigilantly straight ahead of herself.

"Hand me a chicken," Alcyone said. "There's a tape recorder in the saddlebag. Make sure there's a windscreen on the microphone and then perform a sound check. The documentation on this has got to be tight."

Will eased a chicken out of the crate and gave it to her. When the tape recorder was up and running, Alcyone said, "Its the Day of the Kraken, Vendemiaire, Year of the Monolith." She glanced at her watch. "About two-thirty p.m." Removing a small silver sickle from her cincture, she cut off the bird's head. She held the spasming body in the crook of one arm so that its blood sprayed over the Titan's mouth.

The cracked stone lips slowly parted. A tongue as gray as granite emerged to lick them clean. "Ahhhh," the Titan sighed. "It has been long, long since I was fed."

"Show your gratitude, then. You moved in your chains — our observers saw you. What is it you saw that so alarmed you?"

"The sun blackens. Lands sink into sea, The radiant stars fall from the sky. Smoke rages against fire, nourisher of life. The heat soars high against heaven itself."

The Titan fell silent.

"Fabulous," Alcyone said. "They're really going to love this one back in the office."

Will hit pause, so his voice wouldn't be on the tape. "It's from the Motsognirsaga. That's one of the sacred books of dwarvenkind. I was told that no surface dweller had ever read it, though."

"Well, believe it or not, it's more straightforward than the kind of crap they usually teed us. Give me another bird." Alcyone nodded for him to start recording again and repeated the ritual bleeding. "What form does this menace take?"

"And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth."

"I don't know that one," Will said.

"I do, and it's never good news,'' Alcyone snarled. "Another bird!" More blood spurted. "Is it the War that comes?"

"I have seen war. I haw seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives... My answer is bring 'em on."

"This just gets better and better. Another." "This is the last bird."

"Just record, okay?" To the Titan, Alcyone said, "Is the doom in flight? Or is it something you see in the future?" "Chicken blood is weak stuff," the Titan grumbled. "I wouldn't know."

"So long have I hung here, and so dry! How I yearn tor something stronger." "Too bad."

"Once I drained millions of your kind for their blood. The swarming multitudes came to my hand to be crushed to pulp and squeezed for their juice. I drank and drank, so much overspilling my mouth that it stained the hills red and the seas as dark as wine."

"Answer the damn question. Is what you see on its way? Or yet to come?"

Those enormous stone eyes turned slowly to stare down at Will and Alcyone. Then, equally slowly, they moved away. "It is already here." The great stone face once again froze into immobility.

Will turned off the tape recorder.

In a rage, Alcyone kicked the chicken carcasses off the ledge and threw the crate after them. "It's always the same — high sounding words that mean nothing and ominous warnings of threats they will not define! Now I've got to spend the next three days dummying up reports to make it sound like we've actually learned something from this fiasco. I don't know why we don't just close the whole fucking office down." She swung up into the saddle and thrust out a hand lor Will. "Come on."

"Wait." Will took out his Swiss Army knife and cut a large, shallow X in the palm of his hand. He smeared his blood across the gray stone lips. "It's not much," he said, "but it's the best I have and better than you're likely to get anytime soon."

Slowly, the lips were sucked into the mouth and—in a manner that in a being of flesh would have been distinctly voluptuous—slowly they emerged, licked clean. "There is mortal blood in you," the Titan said.

"I know. That's not what I fed you for."

"And a vile power as well. You believe you have mastered it, but you have not. The monster lurks in dark and secret places inside you, gathering its strength."

"Nor that."

A dark glitter of malice entered those vast gray eyes. "Then ask."

"Perhaps I aspire beyond my natural place," Will said. "But I don't give a rat's ass about that. I don't give a rats ass for anything but Alcyone. Can I win her? Can our love endure? Can we live together to the end of our days? That's all I want to know."

The Titan's mouth twisted up almost imperceptibly, so that its expression took on a sardonic cast. "You do not need to consult an oracle to know that a lady of House L'Inconnu and a pretender to the Obsidian Throne can never wed. Particularly after you have made an enemy of her brother. Yet you asked, and that is my augury. If you want more, you must cut yourself again, and deeper."

Will slashed another cut into his forearm and bent to smear more blood upon those mocking lips. "I'll surrender my claim to the kingship! I'll be her consort, her alphonse, her champion-without-favor, her backdoor man! Can then we be together?"

With an amusement vast and cruel, the Titan said. "No. All of Babel will conspire to keep you apart. Bleed yourself again and ask if there is any hope for you in the larger world."

Will's arm was red with blood. Nevertheless, he slashed himself a third time.

"Anywhere in the world!" he cried "Offer me hope. Something! Anything!"

The Titan roared with laughter. "Not in all of Fäerie will you find haven together, nor safe harbor in all the world, nor in a thousand lifetimes nor in a thousand worlds will you ever experience peace."

Will went to cut his flesh again and found that Alcyone had leapt down from her hippogriff and was holding back his arm. "Stop!" she cried. "Would you bleed yourself to death because you don't like the answers you hear?"

"Yes," Will said angrily. Then, bitterly. "Yes." Finally, in despairing sadness. "Yes."

She folded him into her arms and they were Elsewhere.

Many rooms were there in House L'Inconnu. After they'd made love in the great billowing bed he'd so coveted the night of the masked ball, Will and Alcyone wandered through them, hand in hand. Aimlessly they strolled down colonnades of ancient Atlantean pillars, past an erotic frieze by Phidias, through jade-tiled baths that had once graced the palace of Prester John, under cave paintings by the hands of the first witch women. Half the vanished treasures of the world, it seemed, were here amassed. Sometimes they paused to kiss, and from kissing declined to a nearby couch or billiards table or even the floor, after which they rose again, adjusted their clothing, and went onward as before.

They came to light on the lip of a Moorish fountain in a courtyard whose arched windows opened on one side to the sky and the other to the city. Heat lightning played in the distance and ambulance sirens warbled. Alcyone trailed a finger in the water and then flicked droplets at Will and laughed.

"Will you get in trouble for turning in your report late?" Will asked.

"No. Of course I will. Or not. What do I care?" Between bouts of lovemaking, she had clapped her hands thrice to summon a jackal-headed servitor who, ignoring Will's presence and Alcyone's nakedness with equal aplomb, had accepted the audiotape of her interview with the Titan and some hastily composed notes to be couriered to her staff. So Will knew that whatever passions she felt for him, her office was ever in her thoughts.

"Tell me why you stole the ring."

"Why should you care?"

"Because I want to know everything about you. You took an enormous risk depriving your brother of his trinket. Surely your reasons were serious. Surely they mattered deeply to you."

"Surely they were and surely they did. But I will not share them."

Lightly, ironically, Will glanced down at his bandaged hand and forearm, then back at Alcyone. Meaning: See what I have done for you.

Alcyone looked away. "You ask too much. I — hark!" A vast bell began to toll, its sound bottomless and unending, from somewhere deep underfoot. Its voice was muffled, as if it came from the center of the earth, yet its vibrations shook the flagstones. She stood. "A compulsion is placed upon me to return to the Mayoralty. I can resist the call of duty for only a moment or two. But I shall leave another in my place to see you safely free of my family's House."

The courtyard darkened and shifted queasily, and Alcyone threw open a pair of doors in a wall that had not been there before. Inside was a shallow closet, empty save for a full-length bronze mirror. She lifted her hands toward it and her reflection, in turn, reached for her. They seized each other's wrists and struggled, the one pulling inward and the other outward.

Alcyone stumbled and lurched forward, her face briefly plunging through the polished bronze interface between realms. But then she pulled back, shifted her grip, and hauled her reflection bodily out of the mirror and into the courtyard.

"This is my fetch," she said, closing the closet doors. To the fetch she said, "Get him out of here alive." Then she spun on her heel and hurried away, fading. With her slowly faded the tolling of the great bell.

Will looked after her and then back at her fetch. They were identical in every detail. He grinned. "Oh, where my imagination has gone."

"Dream on," the fetch snapped. "She may love you. I don't."

"You think she loves me, then?" Will said, still grinning.

"If her love is as great as my despite, then you are the worst calamity ever to befall her."

"Hey!"

"Let me explain something to you: There is no future in this. The only thing you and she have in common is your prick, and that only occasionally. You're young and cocky and you think that's enough. But you haven't the education or social standing to walk where she walks. Your experience, outlook, and values are incompatible with hers. You won't like her friends. She wouldn't like yours. You're penniless and she's rich, which means you'd end up parasitic upon her wealth. Even your accent is wrong."

"Obstacles exist to be overcome."

"Love conquers all. Oh, yes." The fetch rolled her eyes. "These high-blooded elf-bitches are aristocratic, inbred, solipsistic. given to sociopathic rages and sudden vendettas, murderous and sentimental by turn, occasionally incestuous, intermittently suicidal, passionate by whim, moody by nature, always unpredictable... I can see why you're drawn to Alcyone. But what's in it for her?"

"I can make her happy."

"What makes you think she wants to be happy?"

"What kind of woman exposes her breasts to strangers, knowing they will want her and be helpless to aspire so high?" Will said. "What kind of woman steals a ring she could borrow for the asking? What kind of woman strips her lover naked and dumps him in the Bay of Demons untasted? Makes love and then abandons him to her fetch without declaring her feelings? Not one who values her fate, I think, but one who struggles against it."

"And what have you done for her so far? Tempted her away from her duty, gotten her in bad with her boss, made her the talk of the Mayoralty." The fetch poked his chest with one sharp-nailed finger. "You're a real career-killer, you know that?"

"Now that I reflect on it," Will said testily, "you're not a bit like Alcyone."

"Fool! I am her, in all the ways that matter. I—"

The doors to the mirror-closet burst open and the manticore bounded into the room.

"Mistress!" he cried. "We've got a security situation. There's a—" He stopped. "Oh, hello, Enoycla. And you've got the ring-thief with you. This must be Old Home Week."

"Focus, you wretched creature!" the fetch cried. "What security situation are you talking about?"

"It seems there's somebody very powerful and covered with flames who wants something inside House L'Inconnu. Hrothgar's having a hell of a time holding him back."

"That would be the Burning Man," Will said. "He's after me, I'm afraid." He should have felt more alarmed than he did, he knew. But he could not. This was simply what his life was like. He'd gotten used to it.

"You don't seem overly upset by this news," Enoycla said coolly.

"And exactly where do you think you're going?" This last was addressed to the manticore, who had started to slink away.

"I'm going to have to tell Florian this guy's here," the manticore said sheepishly. "It's kind of my duty."

"Just as my reluctant duty is to keep 'this guy' safe." the fetch said. "You can give Florian a detailed report later."

"Um... I should do it now, I think."

"Do you realty want to get involved in a fight between my brother and me? Do you think that would be wise? Do you honestly believe things would go any easier on you because I'm the fetch rather than the original?"

The manticore put its head down on its front paws, lifting its haunch in the air submissively. "No," it mumbled, "not really."

"Wise creature. Niceums pussums. Now heel, sirrah! You"—she pointed to Will—"climb on his back."

Will wasn't at all sure this was either wise or safe. Nevertheless he obeyed. "How will I get in touch with Alcyone again?"

The fetch plucked a hair from his head. "I'll give her this for a token. If she wants you, she'll find you."

"But—"

"Scat!"

The manticore surged beneath Will and abruptly they were halfway down the hall and then descending a stairway in long and shallow leaps. The monster looked over his shoulder at Will, grinning a great crescent moon of a grin. "I bet you didn't think I'd recognize you without the clown mask," he said. "But I remember your smell. You oughta lay off the fried foods." He rounded a corner, sending throw rugs flying on the polished wood floor. "Thanks for the bribe, incidentally. It's been spent and Florian made me promise I wouldn't take any more from you, but it was great while it lasted." "Watch out for the fire pit!" Will shouted.

They flashed through a kitchen, cooks looking up in startlement and scullery lads clambering onto countertops, and vaulted over a roasting oxen. There was a blur of lobby and then they were out on the street.

"I hope you didn't get into any trouble on my account," Will said, holding on for dear life as they soared to the top of a moving autobus and then bounced down onto the sidewalk on the far side. A hot dog cart overturned and a covey of winged schoolgirls scattered and Will and the manticore were speeding down Fifth Avenue.

"Naw. The boss knew what he was getting when he hired me."

The terrifying ride ended at Grand Central Station. Swarms of passengers were boarding Uptown and Downtown express elevators, and a Midtown freight elevator was disgorging fleets of Mercedes and BMW's. Will deemed it safest to be dropped off here, for when the manticore made his report it would give Florian L'Inconnu no hint as to where he might be squatting. "I'm sorry for all the trouble you've been put through," he said when there was pavement safely beneath his feet again. "I apologize for all the trouble I've inadvertently put you through, and I apologize for any humiliation you may have undergone. I didn't want Alcyone's fetch to treat you as she did. It's very wrong of them to behave so shabbily."

The manticore leered. "Yeah, I'd be a socialist, too, only the money's better working this side of the street."

Then he was gone.

Hot date?" the vixen asked when Will sat down at her booth. She'd taken over a dark corner of a diner and, with small bribes to the management and generous tips to the waitstaff, made it her office. Unlike Nat, she did not require that her center of operations serve alcohol.

"I was with Alcyone., Will admitted. The vixen snapped her fingers for the waitress and pointed at Will. An undine nodded and began pouring a cup. "I'm not sure how she feels about me, though."

"Ah, youth!" The vixen accepted a cup of coffee and handed it to Will. "Trust me, she likes you. I can tell because you've got that gingerly way of walking that men get when their dicks are rubbed raw."

"Vickie, Will said irritably, "you're taking something that's sweet and romantic and—"

"Don't let's start passing judgment on an affair until we know how it comes out, eh? It ain't romantic till it's over.'' The vixen knocked over the saltshaker and muttered a cantrip over the spill. "Let's see what this slut looks like." She blew on the salt. The grains tumbled this way and that and finally formed a recognizable image of Alcyone. She passed her hand over the salt portrait and it took on color.

"Well. The apple doesn't fall from the tree." The vixen sniffed. "A redhead, too. I suppose I should feel flattered." By her tone, Will knew she did not. Yet, looking down upon Alcyone, he could not help but smile.

"She came that close to telling me she loved me," he said. "Oh, kid, you've got it bad! You do realize that when this scam is over, we'll have to leave Babylon? We'll be traveling fast and we'll be traveling light and we won't dare come back for years." "I know that," Will said sullenly.

The vixen studied him silently for a moment. Then she lit a cigarette. "Well, enough of that. Listen. You're gonna have to be careful going out in public nowadays. The polits know what you look like. They've got hold of a photo."

"How'd they get that?"

"How d'ya think? I mailed it to them."

The hawk came flying, swift as an arrow, down the center of the street and then straight at Will's face. He flinched away as it snapped out its wings at the last possible instant and, swerving, creased his cheek with the tip of one flight feather. Something fell into Will's hands. A cell phone. It rang.

"Some friends and I are going clubbing," Alcyone said. "Wait where you are and I'll pick you up."

Will stepped back into the shadowed doorway of a defunct art deco bank building and waited. Not much later, a white stretch limo, longer than life and pale as death, glided up to him. A footman leaped out to open the door.

"Hop in," Alcyone said.

Will did, and the car drove off. He and Alcyone kissed long and hard. "I don't think it would be a good idea for me to be seen in public with you," he said, hoping inwardly that she would suggest they retire to someplace private instead. "My face is known now."

"Tish. I have an invisibility potion." Alcyone led him deeper into the stretch, past masses of orchids and a small waterfall, and flipped down a vanity table. She donned disposable plastic gloves and opened a jar. "Take off your shirt and I'll rub it on you."