The Dragons of Babel

19 The Dragon King

Will went to the coronation as to a beheading.

The Obsidian Throne was located deep in the heart of the same building that the Palace of Leaves perched atop. So the procession ran widdershins around Ararat seven times, with the Lion Guard clearing the way and brass bands, ranks of wyverns, spider-legged daliphants, sword dancers, and fire jugglers following. Will sat upon a horse whose strength and beauty were second only to those of Epona herself, flanked by a security force of scorpion-men.

Nymphs danced before him in flowing white, scattering rose petals and twirling batons.

The sidewalks were filled with spectators and the windows of all the buildings as well, while those who could fly perched on rooftops and thronged the sky. Shouts and cheers merged into a constant background pandemonium. Banks of bright balloons were released as Will rode by and tumbled upward through downfalling multicolored confetti and flocks of newly freed pigeons slanting skyward like mad whirligigs. It was infinitely better organized than his Acclamation had been, but it felt prepackaged and over-rehearsed. The mood on the street was uglier, the cheers less spontaneous. Bucentaurs trotting a pace behind Will threw handfuls of gold soleils and silver lunars, fresh minted with his profile on the obverse. The gesture was meant to start off his reign with a burst of goodwill, but the crowds scrambled frantically for the coins so that fights were constantly breaking out in Will's wake.

Will kept his head down, for his thoughts were dark and he did not wish anyone to read them in his eyes.

"Smile, sir," Ariel murmured in his ear. "Wave."

Halfheartedly, Will managed to wave. It seemed only fair to the citizens. Yet he could not manage a smile. Nor could he feel the same love for them he had when they had spontaneously carried him all the way from Little Thule to the top of Babel. He felt nothing for them but a distant emotionless disdain.

And then, all too soon the procession was over.

Will had arrived back where he had started. Three ranks of gleaming horns played a heroic fanfare composed lor the occasion as he dismounted. The satraps of vassal states lay down before him, forming a carpet with their backs. Celebrities vaulted from their limos to fling open the doors to Ararat.

He entered.

Though his bodyguard and the politicians nearest him in the procession poured into the building along with Will, only a fraction of the procession made it into the lobby. Fewer could squeeze into the first elevator car with him. And somehow, more still were lost on the long walk down narrow corridors to the throne room. When its metal doors slammed shut behind him, Will looked up, startled, to realize that his entourage had been reduced to two ogres, who held him by the arms, and Florian L'Inconnu, leading the way.

"Now comes the moment that pays for all," Ariel said. "Sir." Will looked back to discover that nobody was following him. "Where is everybody?" he asked confusedly, as he was forced down onto the throne. Leather straps were cinched over his arms and legs. Another was tightened about his chest. He couldn't move.

The room was dimly lit and it had cinder-block walls. There were stains, or possibly scorch marks, on the floor, radiating out from the throne. A burnt smell lingered in the air. In one wall was a long window. Through it he could see a line of high-elven dignitaries watching him impassively. They all wore cobalt-blue goggles and lead X-ray vests.

"What's going on here? Why are they wearing protective gear?"

"Its only a precaution." Florian opened an equipment chest and lifted out a tangle of cords and wires. The ogres set to work unsnarling them and plugging them into wall sockets and unidentifiable electrical equipment. A featureless metal ring, about half a hand wide, was screwed tight about Will's head. "Your crown," Florian explained. He took a set of jumper cables and clipped one end to the crown and the other to what looked to be a generator.

"I don't understand," Will said, trying to fight down panic. "This is nothing like I expected it to be."

The ogres applied electrodes to the sides of his neck with dabs of gel. "If you throw up," Florian said, "try to turn your head to the side so that you don't short out any of the equipment."

"Am I likely to throw up?"

"There is a season for everything, sir," Ariel said primly. "It's possible you may also soil yourself."

To his horror, Will felt tears welling up. He tried to blink them away. "Please," he said. "Not like this. Let me die with some shred of dignity."

Wordlessly, his escort withdrew. Florian L'Inconnu bowed formally before closing the doors from the outside. Will was alone.

A minute later, Florian entered the room on the other side of the window. He donned vest and goggles and joined the line of observers. An elf at the opposite end of the line turned briskly to the wall. Will saw for the first time that there was a large knife switch there, bolted open by two flanges. The elf took out a screwdriver and unhurriedly but efficiently removed the fail-safes. He put his hand to the switch. Ariel's voice sounded from a staticky wall-mounted speaker. "Try to relax, sir. There may be some slight discomfort." A flash like an incandescent lightbulb exploded behind Will's eyes. He fell.

Showering sparks, Will fell through infinite darkness. The darkness was virtual, so in a sense it did not exist, but the sensation of falling was quite real, for he was plunging deeper and deeper into the spirit world. Will spread his arms so that in his mind's eye he looked like a William Blake watercolor of a falling star.

He fell and, falling, understood the nature of the Obsidian Throne for the first time. It was more than a symbol of power and more than the ultimate test of the legitimacy of the king. Those functions were incidental to its true purpose. For it was the controlling node for all electronic and thaumaturgic data ever assembled by the governance of Babel. All the lore and secrets of the Tower of Kings were here to be discovered. Will could learn anything he wished. But where to begin?

Will found himself sitting by a small stream, feet in the water, talking with his best friend, Puck. Dragonflies darted busily about the reeds. There was a pleasant marshy smell. For one dizzying instant he thought that he was back in the village and that all his adventures in the wider world had been nothing but a timeless vision vouchsafed him by the Seven, whose capaciousness was notorious and whose motives were unfathomable. But then two abatwa trudged by with a water dragon's carcass hanging from a twig slung over their shoulders, and he realized that he was in the Hanging Gardens of Babel.

"...suffered greatly to get here, and so you must be given a gift." Puck was saying. "Here it is: When you die, you'll find yourself standing in a kind of field or meadow with short green grass, almost like a lawn. There'll be a bright blue sky overhead, but no sun. There's a path and you'll follow it because there's nothing else you can do. Eventually it comes to a stone — a big thing, set up on its end like a menhir. Most folks go around the left-hand side. The path is well-trodden there. But if you look closely, there's a way around to the right. You're of the second blood so you can go either way. If you go around to the left, you'll be reborn again. What happens if you go around to the right, no living wight knows."

"Am I dead?" Will said carefully.

"No, of course not. Trust me, if you were dead you'd know it."

"Then why do you tell me this?"

Puck Berrysnatcher leaned forward and fixed Will with those dark, intense eyes. His face was pale and puffy, as if he'd drowned some time ago and his body only just now been hauled from the water. "Not to tell you which way to go — that's your decision. But to let you know that when the time comes you have a choice. You always have a choice."

Will remembered then that Puck was dead, and his skin crackled with dread. "Are you really here?" he asked. "Or am I just imagining you?"

"Such distinctions do not matter in the Inner World. Perhaps I am only a mental artifact, cobbled together from your memories and emotions. Perhaps — and personally think this is more likely — I am a messenger from a distant land." He grinned a grin as wide as a bullfrog's "You have sat yourself down on the Obsidian Throne, and thus we can converse freely. That's all."

"How is that possible? Why didn't it kill me?"

"Because you are the one true king."

With those words, the Obsidian Throne unlocked itself completely. In the language that was spoken in the dawn-times before the invention of lies, which had been forgotten a million years ago but was so lucid that to hear it was to comprehend it perfectly, the Throne told him that he was the legitimate and undisputed heir to the throne and thus, now, the king. Then it told him exactly how this strange fact had come to be.

Thus it was that the first words spoken by Marduk XXIV, by the Grace of the Seven, King in Babel Tower and Monarch Over All Babylonia and Its Contingent Territories, Defender of Fäerie, Protector of Fäerie Minor, Clan-Chief of House sayn-Draco, Titular Prince of Coronata and the Isles of Avalon, and Hereditary Laird of the Western Paradise, were, "Oh, you bastard!"

Nat Whilk was Will's father.

Once said, it was obvious. Nat had been waiting for Will on the train to Babel, and had used all his wiles and cunning to bring Will under his influence. When Will proved reluctant to join forces with him, he had lost Will's luggage, rendering him paperless, a pauper, and an outlaw. Nat had been an aristocrat in Babel, he'd said, and had escaped — but what aristocrat, other than the king, would be so obviously lacking in high-elven genes? What aristocrat, other than the king, needed to escape?

Nat had isolated Will, taught him cunning and deceit, and bought him the social graces. He had aimed Will, swift and true as an arrow, straight at the Obsidian Throne. And all the while, in his arrogance, he had not spoken a single untruthful word. He had deceived Will by acting as it he were an inveterate liar while speaking always the simple and unvarnished truth.

How many times had he called Will son?

Wills head throbbed, his stomach was queasy with nausea, and his wrists were so cold they ached. He remembered those sensations well from the dark nights when he had been the dragon's lieutenant. The familiarity of which filled him with despair, for it made him feel as if he had escaped nothing.

From the corner of his mind, Will saw the high-elven dignitaries in the observation chamber smiling with relief and removing their goggles. They came ambling into the throne room, chatting casually with each other. They were going to disconnect him from the Obsidian Throne now while he was, as they assumed, still stunned from his first exposure to it. The next time he sat upon the throne, however, would be a different matter. They would be prepared for him to attempt to use its power for his own purposes. They would have neuromancers monitoring his thoughts, and a thick-witted but loyal ogre holding a cocked gun to his head to ensure he did as he was told.

It had been so long since they'd had a king that they'd forgotten what one could do.

Will had lost track of the Hanging Gardens and was adrift in raw information. All the Outer World was recorded here, every gas pump, weed, and nobleman of it, rendered in binary mana and tracked in real-time emulation. Which meant that, in accordance with the quantum-alchemical principle of similarity of effect most often rendered by the phrase "As Within. So Without," any model he created in the Inner World would have its corresponding dopplegänger in the physical universe.

Will imagined a wind and let it fill the throne room, buffeting and pushing the elf-lords out into the hall and then chivying them, squeaking and flapping their arms, through the corridors of Ararat, down the stairwells, and out into the street. The doors he shut and locked behind them. At one point Ariel managed to slip aside and crawl behind an alabaster planter. But Will had not forgotten him, and his invisibility only operated in the Outer World. Effortlessly, Will exploded the plainer outward, taking care that its blast pattern did not intersect the majordomo's body. Then he picked up his erstwhile jailor by the scruff of the neck, floated him through a window, and dropped him into a decorative thorn hedge. This was fun.

Swiftly, Will ran his thoughts through the Palace of Leaves, locking doors and securing corridors. When he was sure he was safe from interruption, he withdrew his attention from the palace.

It was time he saw just what powers he had inherited.

Will let his consciousness go skipping from mind to mind through the streets and apartments of his city.

He was a stone lion rererereading with neither haste nor admiration Aristocrats of the Air, a book on the natural history of hippogriffs that he'd stolen from an inattentive hick outlander. For the umpteenth time he cursed the little git for his deplorable taste in reading matter.

He was a Tylwyth Teg treasury agent closing in on a petty embezzler named Salem Toussaint. For decades, the alderman had been redirecting public monies to private (and sometimes one-person) charities under the supremely self-assured conviction that only he knew best how it should be spent. Will had the accountant carefully gather up all the paperwork that had been assembled over the past three years and then make eight trips out to the incinerator chute. After which he left a compulsion in the investigator to go to the nearest bar, drink until he passed out, and wake up with no memory of the case whatsoever. Meanwhile, Will erased all the electronic records incriminating his onetime mentor. While he was at it, he rewrote the voter regulations which artificially depressed the haint turnout on election days, and enacted legislation to make certain discriminatory banking practices illegal.

He was a rail-thin shellycoat creeping out of the mouth of the subsurface line on a twilight scavenging mission. His johatsu community had been driven out of their old squat by the transit police and their thane-lady had sent him upstairs to seek out much-needed bedding material — shredded newspapers, scrap wool, whatever came to hand. He sank back into the shadows as a truck pulled up to a vacant lot directly opposite him. Then his eyes widened as a ginger dwarf hopped down from the cab, double-checked an invoice, shrugged, and began dragging new, plastic-wrapped mattresses from the truck and flinging them into the lot.

He was one of the horse-folk, gaunt and naked, but proud of their herd. Because they neither had nor wanted any possessions other than their blind cave-horses, there was nothing Will could give them. So he moved swiftly on.

He was, briefly, Dame Serena. Will was astonished to learn just how wealthy she was. Every king over the last two centuries, it seemed, including those who had ostensibly lived in fear of her, had left Dame Serena well provided for. He glanced into her memories, blushed, and fled.

Up and down the seventeen boroughs of Babel Will let his consciousness flow from haint to troll and dwarf to stickfella, through hobthrushes, nocnictas, and night-gaunts, street-corner wise guys, traffie cops, kitty-witches, milchdicks, a russalka pretending to hump the pole in a titty bar, cynocephali, onis, a cluricaun dying in a small room above a bar, mawkies, coin clippers, pastry chefs, rogues and innocents, opportunistic weaklings, corrupt lawyers and saintly plumbers, clabber snappers, vodniks, longshoreman-poets, a street-sweeper spending his last thirteen dollars on lottery tickets, igoshas, itchikitchies, muggers and remittance men, red-diaper babies, bricklayers, heartbreakers, commodities brokers, a desperate klude changing into her dog form before raiding a restaurant dumpster, haberdashers, fishmongers, bouncers, lexicographers, a korigan dreaming of bygone days on the Broadway stage, Ukrainians and Ruthenians, laboratory inspectors, proud hags and war-scarred battleaxes, nixies, nymphs, heiresses, kinderofenfrauen, foolish virgins, doting grannies, hopeful monsters...

He saw the vixen riding a Vespa down a two-lane road with the Tower of Babel at her back and could not enter her mind. Will thought at first that it was a function of distance, a matter simply of how far she was from his siege of power. But then she abruptly swerved her scooter into a pull-off area. "You're here," she said, "I can feel you."

The vixen unbuckled her saddlebag and dug out a gun and a doll so small that it disappeared when she closed her hand around it. "You and I were never exactly friends," she said with a crisp flash of sharp white teeth. "But you're Nat's kid, so I'll cut you some slack." She opened her hand to reveal a crude effigy made of tar and straw with hanks of blond hair stuck to its pate and a button from one of Will's blazers sewed onto its shirt. "Guess whose hair and blood and snot went into this?" She put the muzzle of the gun against the doll's stomach. "Try to sleaze your way into my head one more time, laddy-buck, and the little guy buys it. You'll never know what hit you. "Then she smiled sweetly. "Or maybe I'm just bluffing. You can call me on it, if you like."

The vixen got back on her scooter and drove away. But just before she disappeared around the bend, Will saw her look back, wink, and tap her heart. He lives, she meant. In here. Then she blew him a kiss and was gone. Good luck.

He had a complete picture of Babel now, from its demon sewer-workers to the gargoyles that haunted its rooftops. Will turned his thoughts to the War. First, he leaped into the mind of Lord Venganza, the war strategist he'd met when Alcyone took him clubbing, and there determined that the proximate causes of the War — boundary disputes dating all the way back to the Treaty of Hy-Brasil, the sinking of a gunboat by a sea serpent off the coast of Magh Mell, and the refusal of the Daughters of the West to offer tribute in the form of a purebred bull of the lineage of Fennbennech Ai — were less important than control of North Sea oil, strategic supplies of manganese, and access to the Straits of Hyperborea. Indeed, the deeper Will looked, the less clear it became who was the original aggressor or how the conflict could be peaceably resolved. But when he looked into strategy and logistics, Will saw immediately that the entire Western campaign would fall apart without adequate air support.

He set about changing the access codes to every war-dragon in His Present Majesty's Air Force so that, once landed, they could not be ordered into the air again.

"Oh, Will. What have you done?"

Will looked up and found himself standing on a dark and windswept plain. Mountains glittered in the distance. No stars shone in the sky. Before him stood a figure who looked exactly like Puck Berrysnatcher but was not. "I know who you are," Will said. "Reveal yourself."

With a smirk, the fey grabbed one of his ears and pulled, peeling the water-bloated flesh from his head so that it came off like a fat, rubbery mask. Underneath, raw and pink, was Will's own face.

"You cannot fool me, old mocker," Will said sternly. I recognize you, Dragon Baalthazar."

"You think I'm trying to deceive you? I'm a part of you now, remember?" the dragon said. "You and I shall never be free of each other." But he took on his spirit form, sinuous and veined with light. It made Will's heart ache to remember how beautiful the creature was. "You wish to end the War — fine. But will shutting down your air forces do it? More dragons can always be built."

"Silence, Worm! I know whose side you're on."

"I care nothing about sides — destruction is my all. The question is, whose side are you on? You swore once to bring the War to Babel. Have you forgotten? Do your youthful ideals mean nothing to you anymore? Let me show you how it could be."

The noise was deafening, as if all existence had screamed. So primal was it that only after the fact did Will's mind register it as the shock of a tremendous explosion. A warm hand made of air pushed him backward a foot and he suddenly realized that his ears were ringing. Something has changed, he thought, and simultaneously he felt all of Babel shift uncomfortably underfoot.

Will twisted around to either side but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were strollers on the sidewalk and hummingiris in the air. A faun sold roasted chestnuts from a pushcart.

Then there were bodies leaning over the railing of the esplanade and fingers pointing upward to where, high above, billows of smoke poured from the side of the city. "It crashed!" somebody said. "I saw it!"

Will leaned over the rail as well, craning to see. Smoke was gushing outward from the Tower. It seemed impossible that there could be so much smoke. It poured from the city in a rush, as it it were eager to fill the sky. Surely it would have to use itself up soon, he thought —there couldn't possibly be anything left to burn. But it just kept coming and coming and coming....

A presentiment was building deep within Will. It was nothing so crude as a hand writing letters on his palm. Nevertheless, what he felt was so profound and certain that he could not deny its truth: Something bad was about to happen. "Look!" a haint cried. "There!"

He turned just in time to see a dragon slip across the sky like a dark shadow. For a flickering instant, Will felt a pulse of kinship. Then the dragon flew into the side of Babel.

The noise was beyond thunder, a physical presence so great that the explosion of the war machine's fuel tanks was no more than a continuation and amplification of it. For a second time, Babel shook under him.

Other dragons, small as gnats, were swimming lazily through a heartbreakingly blue sky. He saw them converging upon the Dread Tower from every direction. There must have been hundreds of them within sight. Meanwhile, a part of Will's mind accessed the Air Force registry and discovered that for every dragon he could see, there were hundreds more over the horizon. Every dragon in his empire that was capable of flight had launched itself into the air. They were all on their final mission, jets throttled wide open, straining to reach Babel while some of it yet stood.

A third dragon crashed into the side of Babel, and a fourth. Sirens rose from all parts of the city. The street rose and fell in a wave. Will felt terrified and elated, all at one and the same time.

"Is it not brave to be a king?" the dragon exulted. "Is it not passing brave to be the last king of Babylon, and watch the fall of the Tower?"

No, Will wanted to say. But he could not. It was impossible for him to lie while he was in the spirit world. He could not deny the black delight that rose up in him at the thought of an all-encompassing vengeance. "I..." Will swallowed. "I mean, I... I think that..."

"Claim your revenge! Start with the king who seduced your mother and cuckolded he who should have been your father. The aunt who neglected you and then feared you when you came into power. The friends who turned on you. The village that cast you out, the bandits who tried to kill you, the informants who framed you, the camp commandant who blackmailed you, the refugees who tried to make you what you weren't, the petty officials who forced you into outlawry, the authorities who hunted you like an animal, the lovers who betrayed you, the followers who deserted you, the nobles who thought you beneath their contempt, the mediocrities who ordered you about, the aristocrats who wanted you for what you were not, the elf-lady who dared not love you, the populace who all against your will made you king! What do you owe any of them but pain to match your own? They all — all! — made you suffer when the power was theirs. Why should you retrain from responding in kind now that you have the upper hand? What have you ever known in this world but ugliness and wickedness and violence? You tried kindness, and what did that get you? The world responds to nothing but the whip. Lay on, then, with all your might, and make it bleed!"

Will looked around vaguely. "What is that sound?" he wondered. "I hear a sound."

"Pay it no mind!" the dragon snapped. "We have more important—" But Will had already opened his eyes.

Somebody was crying.

Will looked around groggily and saw nothing. Then he turned to the side and there was a small child tugging at the leather strap that held his left arm fastened to Obsidian Throne. It was a little girl.

"Esme?"

The strap came undone and Will lifted his arm. He could move both arms, he realized. The strap about his chest was gone. So was the one around his legs. He was weak as a kitten, though. It was all he could do to reach up and push the crown off his head. It fell to the floor with a clatter.

"Come here, child." Will patted his leg and Esme climbed into his lap. "Don't cry. How in the world did you get in here?"

"I know how to do things. How to slip past guards. How to pick locks. How to walk through walls. How to... I forget what else. But it wasn't hard for me, I know how to do almost everything."

"Yes, I remember." It seemed like something from another time, another world. Then a thought came to Will. "Why are you still here? With your luck, you should have left Babel days ago, Esme. This isn't a safe place to be."

"I know. You want to knock down the city. You want to kill my toad!"

"You have a toad?"

"She's big. I think you know her. She's so big she can't leave her bar and she listens to the radio and reads the newspaper all day. She said something about you, but I forget what."

"Do you mean the Duchess? Esme, you should stay away from her — she's a treacherous creature."

"Wait, I remember what my toad said now. She told me you don't like her. But I do! She's nice to me. She gave me pretzels."

"You've got to leave, Esme. You've got to go someplace safe. The city is burning.'' But then Will realized that it was not. The war-dragons he had seen smash into it were a vision that Baalthazar, his dragon-aspect, had shown him. The city was yet whole, and the mighty metal war-drakes were all locked down, unable to fly until he himself released thorn. With a convulsive shudder he hugged the child to him. He had almost killed her! The thought filled him with revulsion. How could he have thought to destroy an entire city when he hadn't the stomach to kill even a single child? "All right, Esme," he murmured through his shame, "I'll be good."

She struggled out of his embrace and put her forehead against his, staring solemnly into his eyes. "Promise?"

"Promise. But it's still not a good idea for you to stay here. Can you get out of the palace without being caught?"

"Of course I can. I'm lucky."

"Can you take me with you?"

Esme looked doubtful. "I don't think it works like that."

"No. I was afraid not." Will kissed the child on her forehead, then set her down on the floor. He was about to swat her behind and send her off when something caught his eye. "Why is there a safety pin clipped to the trout of your sweater?"

"Oh, yeah. I had a letter I was s'posed to give you. Only it got in my way, so I put it somewhere." Esme dug into her jeans and emerged with a wadded-up envelope. "Here."

"Thank you," Will said solemnly. The envelope said READ IMMEDIATELY on the outside. He pocketed it without looking inside. "Now, go! You'll be fine."

"I know," Esme said. "I'm lucky like that."

She scampered away.

Now Will had to decide what to do with himself. He dared not sit on the Obsidian Throne ever again, lest his dragon aspect overcome him. Nor did he care to be used by the Lords of Babel as a weapon against the lands of the West. The power he had inherited was simply too great to be safely employed by any single person. As king, he was a constant threat to the safety of his city and of the world, and thus he must absent himself. One way or another.

Two twists, one turn, and a flight of stairs upward, and Will was lost. To be lost is a wonderful thing if one is in a position to appreciate it. Everything is new and surprising. The spittoons startle. The existence of a warren of access corridors to keep the servants unobtrusive astonishes. Will would have lingered to marvel at the stenciled ROYAL SERVICE ONLY on the scuffed backside of a door whose front was surely distinguished, had he not heard voices echoing up the stairwell. The staff had regained the building. He plunged through the doorway and found himself surrounded by alabaster statuary and ormolu clocks.

A hunted animal does not run full-out until the predator is in sight, but saves its energy for the crisis. So, now, Will, He loped down a hallway and, when the doorway he had passed through slammed open, slipped into the nearest room.

It was yet another conference space with too-high ceilings and mahogany trim carved into life-scaled nymph heroines in Greek helmets. There was a kitchenette to one side, but only the one door. The stentorian clamor of booted feet grew louder.

Will threw open the windows and climbed outside.

The ledge was narrow. The wind was cold. Will closed the windows behind him and edged to the side, out of sight. Then he looked down and almost fell.

It was a vertiginously long way down. From here, the ground was half-obscured by clouds. It looked distant and impossibly romantic. He wished he were down there now, by the side of one of those gossamer-thin roads, thumb out and about to hook a ride that would carry him hallway to Lemuria.

There were muffled sounds from the room he had just left. Will held his breath. But nobody looked out the windows, and after a minute or so the sounds died away.

He was stuck. He dared not go back inside, and he was physically incapable of moving anywhere on the ledge. Will stuck his hands in his pockets against the cold, and discovered the letter that Esme had given him.

He took it out and began to read.

Will let go of the letter and the wind whipped it away. Then he took a long and ragged breath. The air was cold up here and invigorating as iced wine. He felt more alive now than he ever had before. Lite was correspondingly more precious to him as well. He looked down the side of Babel. It looked so fragile from this perspective. So beautiful.

It would not he an ignoble thing to die protecting. There was a small dark speck in the air in the distance dancing against a cloud. Something about it felt vaguely familiar.

Will wasn't sure he was going to be able to jump. All his body resisted the thought. Against all expectations he realized that what he had thought at the time to be an unending cascade of misery and calamity had actually been a pretty good life. He was sorry to be leaving it.

He took a deep breath.

Alcyone swept down out of nowhere, her hippogriff screaming under her, and reined up just below the ledge. "Get on, you idiot!" she cried. "They're going to be after us in another minute."

Will blinked.

Then he leapt down behind her and put his arms about her in a hug. "How did you know I'd be here?" he said gratefully.

"I head up the gods-be-damned Division of Signs and Omens," she said. "If I didn't know who in seven hells would?"

Ararat grew slowly smaller behind them. Ahead, the sky was vast and unending, with continents of clouds adrift in it, and on them harbors and cities and billowing castles. "We can't stay together. A month would kill you."

"Don't talk like a fool. I know all that. But I don't suppose you can make me too happy in a week or three. And after that... well, there's always next year."

"I bet I could make you too happy in three weeks if I tried. I bet it would only take me ten days — tops."

"Asshole!" Alcyone laughed and wheeled her beast up and around in a great arc, and they were flying, and he was young and joyful and in love and his sweetie was here with him, and she loved him, too. All the world was theirs and bright with possibility.

So it couldn't last. Who the fuck cared?