The Iron Dragon's Daughter

— 18 —

IT WAS THE WORST POSSIBLE THING SHE COULD HAVE DONE. On the mimeographed sheets that the University had distributed to all undergrads, the very first item, in big, sweet-smelling purple letters, had been 1. STAY IN YOUR ROOM.

Jane knew that was good advice.

But blind panic drove her out of her room, out of Habundia, out of Bellegarde altogether, and onto the street. She had no conscious say in it. One moment she was staring down at the two bodies on her floor and the next she was trembling, bewildered, in an unfamiliar part of town.

A boar-headed fey shambled by, crying. His elbows pumped higher than his head, and tears ran down his curling tusks. He was paced by a dozen or so wolf-boys, jeering and laughing. A stick jabbed into his side, he stumbled, and then he was up and gone.

There was the sound of breaking glass.

She had to get back to Bellegarde! They'd be closing the riot gates at midnight. But if she could slip in before then, she might yet find refuge in Sirin's room or maybe Linnet's, high above ground level where the worst was sure to go down.

The street turned and narrowed. Blind walls rose to either side, making of it a trough or chute. Down the block, a crowd of feys was dancing about a bonfire to the throb and boom of a ghetto box. Others had broken into a textile warehouse and were throwing bolts of muslin, calico, worsted poplin, and watered silk from five floors of windows. Unspooling, they showered down to the pavement. Grigs and dunters darted into the crash zone to drag material to the fire.

Jane drew back, but suddenly the street behind her filled with grotesques, chanting

"Vervaine, Johnswort, Cinquefoil, Hate,

Burn the Cit-y, Smash the State!"

They were playing bells and horns and waving advertising banners back and forth over their bobbing heads. Lanterns hung from high poles. Bat-eared, antlered, and stork-legged, they looked like nothing so much as carnival revelers.

"Burn the Cit-y,

Smash the State!"

Too fearful to run, Jane was overtaken by the mob, swept up, and carried along. Abruptly she was one of them, not their target but safe within their merry number, cushioned and upheld by the crush of bodies. Everyone was laughing and red-faced and ugly. A red dwarf handed her a can of beer. To calm herself, she popped it open and drank deeply. It was so cold it stung her tongue.

"Burn the Cit-y,

Smash the State!"

A strange, electric mix of fear and excitement filled her. The mob came to the bonfire. The two groups merged and eddied.

"Having fun?"

Jane whirled, astounded. "Linnet! What are you doing here?"

Her classmate shrugged. "Same thing you are—enjoying myself."

"Linnet, we've got to get back to the dorm. Do you have any idea how far away it is? If it's not too distant, we can still make it to Habundia before they lock it up."

"Fuck that shit!" Linnet hugged herself fiercely, bony shoulders standing up like a second pair of wings. "I'm not giving this up to sit in my room and stare at the wall. Crack a book. Maybe get out the electric coil and brew some camomile tea. Habundia is a million light-years away. Don't you understand? Tonight, nothing is forbidden. You want something—take it! You like somebody—go ahead and do it! You can sit on the curb and eat your own boogers for all the world to see, if that's what turns you on. Nobody's going to stop you. Nobody's keeping score."

She stuck a battered hemp cigarette in her mouth and snapped her fingers beneath it. A spark, a flame, a puff of smoke. She didn't offer to share. The gleeful light of abandon in her face was so intense that Jane ducked her head in embarrassment.

With a roar the crowd surged forward again. Jane was shoved to one side and then the other. She had to trot to keep from falling. "Where are we going?" she cried.

"Who cares?!"

They sped by a row of shops. Plate glass windows shattered in their wake. Scattered individuals darted in to snatch up a purse or a handful of cuff links, but the mob as a whole did not slacken pace. The sound of exploding glass went on and on. "This is awful!" Jane shouted.

"This is nothing." Linnet's eyes were incandescent. Her grin was so wide it had to hurt. "Just wait."

The mob contracted. Shoulders, elbows, and bony chins pushed against Jane from all sides, threatening to crack her ribs. Bodies shifted. Like a grapefruit seed squeezed between thumb and forefinger, Linnet was squirted out of sight.

Jane's helplessness was perfect. Caught in the crush, pressed tight, she was unable even to fall—the mob upheld her. Briefly she was lifted off her feet and carried along. When the road widened, her feet touched pavement and she had to run to keep from falling and being trampled under.

Another roar. The front edge of the mob had found something. It was, Jane discovered when she pushed close enough to see, a behemoth. They had trapped it in a cul-de-sac and were rocking it back and forth. It toppled over with a bellow of frustrated rage, and its conquerors swarmed up over its hindquarters. They sprang the hood and driver-side door and began yanking out its guts. Seats, cables, spark plugs, a plastic dashboard statue of the Great Mother were thrown out into the crowd. "Bastards!" the behemoth roared. "I kill you! Crush you! I stomp you flat!" It was terrifying that so great a beast, so mighty a machine, could be mastered so easily.

Terrifying and just a little magnificent.

The front of a tavern had been ripped away and its bar broken up. Bottles were being handed out to whoever passed by. Jane found herself clutching a pint of peppermint schnapps. It tasted dreadful. But after a while she got used to it.

Smashing and looting, the mob flowed forward until something up ahead—a dead end, a split in the road—made it pause in indecision. Slowed to a walk, Jane again spotted Linnet. She was arm in arm with an enormous, misshapen wight. Jane tapped her shoulder.

Linnet looked up blankly. "What are you doing here?" Without waiting for an answer, she released her companion's arm. "This is Bone Head."

Bone Head certainly looked the part. His skull was enormously thick, lopsided, and deathly white under close-cropped hair. Blackwork sun wheels were tattooed onto his forehead and cheeks. His eyes were lifeless, pits of ash.

He grinned loutishly and fingered his balls.

Desperately ignoring him, Jane said, "Do you have any idea where we are? You don't have to come with me. Just point me in the right direction and I'll find my own way home."

With withering scorn, Linnet said, "You don't get it, do you? You just don't get it." Wings flapping, she pulled her sweater over her head. She wore nothing underneath. Her breasts weren't particularly large, but her nipples were enormous, as large as plums and the color of apricots. At the sight of them, a cheer went up.

Linnet flung the sweater into the air. A hunchbacked musician bent to stick his head between her legs, then stood again. She rose up on his shoulders, a figurehead for the mob.

"The Barrows!" somebody shouted. Linnet waved her arms, urging them onward. "The Barrows!" she screamed. With the hunchback playing his flute beneath her, she led them away.

They moved at a fast stride, almost a trot. The intoxicating smell of their sweat surrounded Jane, like rotting fruit. The mob was not chanting now, but making an extraordinary noise, a surf of voices with occasional high cries lifting up from the surface in sonic spikes, and a bass rumble that vibrated in the pit of her stomach and never stopped. It buzzed and crackled in her head like an amphetamine high, constant, unchanging, and yet complexly varied, a symphony to chaos.

Jane ran a hand through her hair. It crackled. She no longer wanted to get away. What was happening was too exciting, too vital in an awful way, to relinquish. She had to see what came next. Weightless, a charged particle in the current of the mob, she let it carry her away, offering not the least resistance to its will.

Abruptly Jane was inside an appliance store. Everywhere dim forms were snatching up camcorders, CD players, minifridges. A box was dumped into her arms. Bewildered, she took it.

A soot black imp jumped from the shadows and cheerily shouted, "Fire! Fear! Fire! Get out! Get out!"

Flames leaped up behind him.

Everyone tried to squeeze out the front at once. For a fearful instant Jane thought she was going to be crushed and feared for her life. She was blocks down the road before she thought to look down and see what she had.

A microwave oven.

It really was a remarkable bit of luck. She had a serious need for a microwave back in her room, and because there was no way she could ever shoplift anything so large, she decided to keep it.

Lugging the oven, though, Jane found she could not keep up. By degrees she lagged behind, steadily slipping to the rear of the mob. Until finally, arms and shoulders aching, she had to sit down on some steel-and-concrete steps by an old industrial canal. She felt exhausted.

The last of the mob flowed away. The air chilled. The roar of voices sank to a mutter, one that rose sporadically from different parts of the City, as if the mob were a monster that could exist in several places at once. She stared down at her feet, at the litter of rusty metal scrap, plastic crack vials, and cigarette butts. Her head was still buzzing.

The mob had sucked up all vitality from the streets and buildings as it passed. In its train paint blistered, popped, and released spores of rust in tiny puffs. Asphalt buckled. Stucco fell away from brick in patches. Trash multiplied by the curbs and bobbed in the oily waters of the canal. Walls crumbled.

From the interiors of gutted buildings, weeds sprouted with necromantic speed. As Jane watched, a vine pushed its way from a crack at the base of a concrete bridge pier, and grew into a labyrinthine tangle of thorns. Deep in its heart roses bloomed whose attar, like spoiled milk, drew in some species of winged sprites no larger than her fist.

With a tinkling of small bells the sprites sped over the canal. They traveled in pairs, hauling equally diminutive prisoners at the ends of twin ropes no thicker than threads. Headlong they plunged into the gloomy thicket.

Tiny screams pierced the night.

As an alchemist-to-be, Jane understood natural processes. Balance had been destroyed; it had to be restored. But she didn't have to watch. She had caught her breath. It was time to go. She stood, leaving the microwave on the steps. She didn't really want the damned thing after all.

A gout of vomit splashed the road. She danced back, but still flecks of it spattered her shoes.

Three hyena-headed creatures leaned over the rail of an overpass above her. "Hey, watch it!" she shouted.

One, the sick one, appeared not even to notice her. A second brayed at her distress. The third stepped up on the rail, unbuttoned his fly and shook his prick at her. "Bite on this, honey!"

"Shitheads!" she yelled.

"This bitch," the prick-waggler said coldly, "needs to be taught a lesson." His friend was already casting about for a way down. "Over there!" he cried. Leaving their drunken comrade clutching the rail, they ran toward a stairway on the far side of the bridge. Terrified, Jane ducked into a doorway and discovered that it was the entrance to a less obvious stairway up to the street they had just vacated.

At the top she paused as first a dozen and then a hundred misshapen creatures raced by. Her tormenters had been front-runners of one arm of the mob. It was not the same group she had left—she recognized no one, and there were faces among these she would have remembered. But it didn't matter. She stepped into their hurrying number.

Safe again.

Jane had not run far when an enormous roar exploded up ahead. Abruptly the street opened into a great five-sided square. Like gas molecules escaping from compression the mob sped up and spread out to fill the new space. With a thrill of fear, Jane realized where they were.

This was Oberon Square. On four sides were taverns, record outlets, hardware stores, haberdasheries, and the like. On the fifth the massive obsidian front of the single most infamous penitentiary in all the Great Gray City jutted over the plaza like the massive prow of an ominous black freighter.

The Long Barrows.

Confronted with the place itself, the mob proved oddly reluctant to attack. It broke into smaller groups on the other four sides, ignoring the obvious target. The storefronts were covered with security grates and blast screens but there were unprotected windows higher up. The mob pelted them with stones and brickbats.

On an impulse too swift for apprehension, Jane picked up an empty beer bottle, cocked her arm, and threw. Her window shattered. She tossed her head and crowed. A troll patted her back, making her stagger.

It felt great.

The madness of the fairy host engaged her fully then, wrapping about her like a pair of gauze wings. She took a deep breath, drawing the swirling, effervescent feeling deep into her lungs and abdomen. Once done, it was inevitable. She was one of them now, body and soul, a citizen of the mob.

A drunk stumbled against her and she shoved him hard with both hands. "Out of my way, you fucking yob!"

And that felt great too.

When they had shattered all the windows, peeled the grates from the shops, looted the interiors, and torched two of the stores, there was a pause. Several burly dwarves tried to smash the hinges of the great gate of the penitentiary. But for all their strength and cunning, they had to step down in disgrace.

The mob almost stalled out then. To keep up momentum some of its number turned to a boutique winery that had heretofore escaped their attention. Leather chairs and spider plants flew into the street. Oils of naked ogres crouching on toilets were thrown into the flames. Then three gargantuan casks rumbled onto the paving stones, pushed by straining lamies. One leaped atop the lead hogshead and waved his feathered cap in the air. "Goodfellows!" he cried. Derisive laughter. He hoisted an ax. "Our beloved masters, the Lords of the City, have imprisoned—for its own good!—this lawless and defiant liquor. Many a long and festering year has it been confined within these oaken walls, maturing, mellowing, losing its harsh edges, aspiring to become a clement and obedient drink, fit for the noble gullets of our most worthy owners." He was the center of all eyes. The lamie puffed out his chest, mugged, and shouted, "Has it matured?"

"No!!!"

"Has it learned its lesson?"

"No!!!"

"Has it mended its unruly ways?"

"No!!!"

"Fair spoken. 'Tis clearly recalcitrant and no suitable glug for the likes of our betters." He brought the ax down on the cask's bunghole. Wine gushed across the square. Laughing grotesques rushed to the gutters to kneel and drink.

A pump was liberated from the hardware store and used to fill an empty fountain at the center of the plaza. Revelers—Linnet was one—splashed naked in it, drinking from cupped hands and pouring bloody liquid over one another. The burning buildings and mercury-vapor streetlamps combined to cast a cheerless orange light over them all.

There was a shout from the outskirts of the crowd.

A construction giant lurched slowly into the square, directed by a grinning devil of a boggart who sat on his shoulder, whispering in his ear. They stopped at the prison gates and the giant lifted his massive fist. Three times he smashed the iron-clad doors. They splintered and held. Then on the fourth blow the gate gave way and crashed down.

A cheer went up that shook the stars.

Jane surged forward with everyone else. She found herself running down a dark and narrow corridor with Bone Head at her side. He seized her arm and hauled her to a stop before a cell door. "Hold this!" He thrust his jacket at her and spat a stream of yellow phlegm between his shoes. Then he rammed a pry bar between lock and jamb. Muscles bulged under his sweat-dampened T-shirt.

The door popped open.

Rotting teeth in a rotting mouth. A face that seemed to be twisted sideways. The creature stepped out of its cell and pinched Jane's cheek with fingers that stung like ice. "Is this for me?" it rasped, then chuckled at her dismay and hobbled away.

Bone Head snapped open a second lock. Something dark, like gritty shadow, flowed free. It glanced at Jane in passing. She had a brief impression of hate-filled eyes, like the tips of a thousand scorpion claws. Her heart leaped with fear.

"Don't just stand there!" Bone Head cuffed Jane's ear. "We got work to do."

But Jane did just stand there. Too involved to notice, Bone Head worked his way down the corridor, springing door after door, releasing horrors the like of which she had never seen.

She dropped the jacket and backed away.

Outside, a grinning pixie handed Jane a bottle of whiskey. She drank. A hytersprite was passing out pills. She popped five dry.

Too impatient to wait, arsonists had already started several blazes within. Rioters and prisoners emerged choking and gagging, drunk and giggling. Only the nearer cellblocks had been emptied. In no time at all the farther reaches were enveloped in flames hotter than any oven.

Escaping convicts issued screaming from the gate, running in frantic circles, their arms flapping and their heads ablaze. They were greeted with laughter.

Ash fell like snow. The flakes were as large as Jane's hand. She stared up, blinking.

As was commonplace in prison architecture, the gate was topped by a short bridge atop which was a small guard tower. The guards were long fled and the gates thrown down, but it yet bridged the gap over the space where they had been.

The bridge was black against the flames and on the short tower at its center feys capered, singing and pissing into the flames. They took no regard for their danger. This went beyond the merely suicidal. It was terrifying.

Suddenly the feys on the gate tower shouted. One pointed to a far street.

Elven warriors in black glass helmets marched into the square.

As if prearranged, blankets appeared at the foot of the wall, held taut at the corners. One by one the lookouts jumped, bounced on the blankets, and were down.

The mob grew curiously quiet.

The elven warriors formed up to one end of the square. They stood in tense ranks with riot clubs drawn and plexy shields slung over one arm. All wore the badge of the winged ronyon on their tunics.

Their captain rode a chrome destrier polished to so fine a gloss it was difficult to make out. Reflections of the mob, the warriors, the burning walls of the Long Barrows, swam silently over its cool surfaces, bulging up as the destrier paced forward, then being swallowed back into mystery as it shifted slightly to one side.

The ashes continued to softly fall.

The elf-captain stood in his stirrups and in a high clear voice cried, "This rabble is assembled against the conventions of the Teind. Your presence here is unseely and forbidden. You have two minutes to clear the square."

They jeered, but weakly. The mob was uncertain, hesitant. At its edges, some few of the fickler wights were beginning to slip away. Had the elven warriors stepped forward then, they could have swept the square clear with little effort. But their captain gave no order. A cruel smile played on his face.

The jeering grew louder. A rock flew and then a bottle. It exploded. At the sound a shock ran through the mob, a ripple of apprehension that crossed the square in less time than a shout. Jane trembled involuntarily. All about her, bodies tensed. "Oh shit," muttered a dwarf. They were actually going to do it. They were really going to go up against the elves.

The dwarf grabbed Jane's elbow and pointed. Heads swiveled. In a side street more warriors appeared. Then in another. They were blocking all the exits. Here was the reason why their captain had hesitated. He wanted the mob enclosed and unable to escape.

"If you don't disperse, force may be used against you." The elf-captain glanced casually at his wristwatch.

The hypocrisy of it steeled Jane's resolve. Her hatred of the high-elven flared to white heat. So they thought they could cow her? It wouldn't work. She might be terrified, but she was no coward. Here I stand, she thought. I will not be moved.

With a shout, the warriors charged.

The clash was all a jumble.

Everyone was pushing and screaming and cursing. There was no order to it that Jane could see. The charge was as brutally simple as the assault of the ocean on the land. But the mob faced it as boldly as the mountains did the sea. Just before the warriors reached the first rioters, their captain raised his club high and spoke a word of power.

All the streetlamps exploded. The square was plunged into a ruddy, firelit murk.

The new conditions favored the elves, who had been trained in night combat and by an ancient blessing of the Goddess would be ever clear-sighted so long as the least sliver of Dame Moon hung in the sky. Clubs flashing, they advanced, and the mob gave way before them. But so eager to get their blows in were the soldiers that the line quickly broke into ragged knots of violence, and much of that advantage was lost.

Jane was shoved one way and then the other. She saw a burly knocker throw himself on a shield and its warrior fall back with an agonized cry and a broken arm. The crowd swirled and he disappeared. It swung around again and Jane saw three elves clubbing her dwarf. His doublet had been torn off him. His body lay at their feet, bloody, half-naked, and unresisting. The head lolled freely on his neck. It jerked with each blow. His spine had been snapped. Jane stepped forward. Aghast, she realized that she was going to try and help him.

Stupid, stupid, stupid! she raged at herself. What the fuck am I doing here? This is pointless. The dwarf is dead. There's nothing I can do for him. Turn away, run, flee!

Like a sleepwalker she kept on going.

A warrior loomed up before her, helmet lost and his fine blond hair lashing. The battle-light blazed in his face. He raised his club against her. Then his foot fell wrong on a wine-slick paving stone and he stumbled to one knee.

In that instant an ogre was on his back, head down and braced between his shoulder blades, bandy legs scissoring his waist, knobby hands yanking back his chin. There was a sharp crack. The elf thrashed, and the light went out in his face. His club clattered to the stones.

Jane snatched it up.

The ashes were falling thicker than ever. Any more and it would be impossible to breathe. The smell of burning vinyl-wood-fabric-plastic from the torched buildings was everywhere; it stung her nose and lingered in the back of her mouth. Jane knew this should be the darkest moment of her life, but in a bizarre and distasteful way it wasn't.

It was fun.

"Get away from me! Get away get away get away!" The club was solid metal and as long as she was, with a short crosspiece on one side to make it amenable to skillful mob control tactics. Untutored, Jane grabbed one end and swung it back and forth like a great two-handed sword. Space opened up before and around her. She could breathe again. "Bastards!" she screamed. "Cocksucking elves!"

A noise like a sigh and then another and then three more, sounds made distinct from the general clamor of battle by their quiet diffidence. Gas canisters clattered onto the paving stones. They exploded, releasing clouds of riot gas.

Those touched by the gas fell back retching. They fought and clawed at one another to escape. But before the warriors could take advantage of their disorder, croppy lads with dampened handkerchiefs wrapped around their mouths and noses dashed forward, grabbed the canisters, and threw them back at the troops.

A touch of wind folded one of the clouds gently over onto the section of crowd where Jane stood.

She couldn't breathe! She couldn't see! Her skin was on fire! She was coughing, choking, crying miserably. Snot ran from her nose. One side of her face felt like it had been wiped with nettles. Stumbling, bent over, she groped for a way out.

And then, miraculously, a hand took hers and led her away. She could feel cool air on her face. Through blinking eyes she got a watery glimpse of open road ahead.

"Come on," her benefactor growled. "There'll be more gas soon."

When they had won free of the square, though, Jane had to stop. She dug in her heels and yanked her hand free. Then she wiped her eyes against one shoulder of her jacket and her nose against the other. Through her tears, she looked back at the riot.

The smoke from a hundred fires had made of the sky a canvas and then painted it a muddy red. Under its somber canopy, dark creatures were hunkered over the bodies of the fallen. Some were stealing wallets. Others were not. She recognized some of them as prisoners she had helped free.

"We ain't got time for sightseeing," her companion insisted. "The Greencoaties are coming." And, indeed, she could hear the cadenced jackboots of fresh elven troops. He gave her a shove and off they ran. It was only then that she thought to look and see who her savior was.

It was Bone Head.

When it was clear that nobody was following, Jane stumbled to a stop. She had to puke. Bone Head steadied her with an arm about her shoulders while she purged herself of the ashes, madness, and blight. When she straightened again she felt surprisingly clearheaded.

"Some brawl, eh?" Bone Head said.

She looked at him.

"I bit this one fucker's finger right off. He had this big old gold ring on, all covered with itty-bitty emeralds and rubies and shit. Got it right here." He patted a bloody shirt pocket gloatingly. "So I got me a nice little profit out of tonight."

Bone Head was as alarmingly ugly as ever. But his eyes had changed. They were green now with flecks of gold, like leaves in early summer. A lively humor shone from them, as if Bone Head were merely a role he was playing, or as if something were using him as a mask and peeking through the sockets of his skull. "You've got something caught in your earring," Jane said.

"Eh?" Bone Head twisted around, hands flying up, as Jane grabbed at his ear. Too late. Her fingers closed about a talisman hanging from its lobe. "Hey, watch that!"

She ripped the talisman away. With a cry of alarm, he wavered and shrank. His face and features changed nature completely. The tattoos vanished, and with them his slack, malevolent expression. He was Bone Head no longer.

He was Puck Aleshire.

Jane glanced at the talisman—amber, bone, a superconducting disk, two bluejay feathers—and tossed it away. It was nothing; she could make one of them herself anytime she wanted to. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

"I was looking for you, okay? Holy pig, that smarts." He winced. Puck was wearing a battered cloth coat that didn't fit him at all well. "Look, I know you didn't ask me to come after you. But here I am anyway. And if you weren't so stoned, you'd be glad. We've got to get out of here. They've taken out their knives. They're not going to put them away when they run out of elves."

He seized her arm and began dragging her away.

Hurrying after, Jane had to admit that Puck looked heroic. His eyes blazed and his jaw was set. Her heart softened briefly. Then she looked down. Something dangled from his pocket, where it had been hastily and incompletely thrust. It was a scrap of black cloth. A pair of panties. The look and weave of them was familiar. "What's this?" Jane snatched them up. They had been worn and not laundered. She held them to her nose and sniffed.

Hers.

"Where did you get this?"

Puck ducked his head, embarrassed, but didn't slacken his pace. "I, uh, swapped something to Billy Bugaboo for it. He said you'd stayed the night at his room once, and forgot to pick it up when you got dressed the next morning."

"That Billy!" Jane said, outraged. "I'll strangle him!"

"We didn't think you'd actually mind."

"Well I do mind. I mind very much."

"Anyway, I couldn't've found you without it. Like calls to like, right? That's the law of contagion."

"Contagion?!"

"It's not such a big deal, okay? Billy told me he needed my leather jacket and what did he have that I wanted?" He glanced sideways at her and for the first time took in the sorry mess she had made of his jacket. "Hey. How'd you end up with it anyway?"

She colored.

They walked in silence for a while. Then Puck said, "I guess we've both done things we're not especially proud of. It's not important now. We really do have to get away from here before things turn nasty."

There were bodies in the road.

They were traveling in the wake of one arm of the mob. Periodically they could hear its voice roaring ahead of them. It was spooky, because for blocks at a time they saw not another living being. Just the bodies.

The corpses were mostly small—they were in a tenement neighborhood and various factions of the mob had gone in for a spot of dwarf-bashing. But there were lutins and nisken and goat people as well, though in lesser numbers. Jane was mesmerized by one in particular, a faun whose face was half-flayed. A trophy hunter had stripped the flesh from the lower jaw before something had distracted him from his project, revealing a wildly upturned grin. The one eye that could be seen was wide open and had turned a snowy blue. The resulting expression was knowing, daunting, compelling. Staring into it, Jane found herself close to understanding something important. Oh, what you're in for, that expression said. If only you knew.

"Don't stand there," Puck said. "Are you nuts?" He yanked her away.

The streets swelled and rolled underfoot. Jane had to clutch Puck's arm to keep from falling. "Where are we going?" she asked.

"Well, I'd staked out a space behind a dumpster out back of Bellegarde. But I wasted a lot of time looking for you. We'd never make it back there now. Old Mouldiwarp would take us in, but his digs are over across the river. There's a nest of mimsies I know would give me shelter, but I'm male—they wouldn't take you. We don't have many choices." He sounded like he were not so much running through possibilities as justifying a bad decision.

"Where?" she insisted.

"There." They turned a corner and were on a street bypassed by the mob. Ahead, a cluster of slum buildings huddled under the supporting buttresses of an iron suspension bridge. It could not be far to the wharves; Jane could smell the river. The buildings were all abandoned and their windows had been boarded over. A single unbroken streetlight cast just enough light to read the sign over what had once been a restaurant:

SISTER MINNIE'S KITCHEN

"It's a shooting gallery," Puck explained. "Wicked Tom runs it. But it'll be as safe as anyplace is tonight. Nothing in it but junkies on the nod. Nothing worth stealing. Nothing worth burning. So long as Tom's not there, we'll be fine. And he won't be there. He'll be out looking for me." He clucked his tongue. "Last place he'd ever look."

"You're sure of that?"

"I wasn't planning to be anywhere near the place. He knows me well enough to know that."

A shriek tore the sky. A black hint of wings wrapped them in dread for the briefest instant and then was gone as the terror lifted up for a perch atop the bridge. More dark shapes fell from the cables, screaming. Like nightmare gulls, they fought with the first for something it held in its beak.

Two of the fliers collided, and the morsel tumbled down toward the street. It hit with a sickeningly meaty sound. "Ugh!" Jane cried involuntarily.

"Don't look," Puck commanded. But of course she did. It was the armless and legless torso of a dwarf. It was far from the most horrid thing she had seen that night, but somehow it affected her more. She felt it like a slap in the face.

"Take me inside," she pleaded.

They climbed a single crumbling concrete step. Puck pushed open a splintered door with a loop of string through the hole where the doorknob had been.

It opened onto splendor.

The interior was as elegant as a perfume ad. The floors were a checkerboard of gleaming marble. Slim pillars of semiprecious stone held up a roof too high to be seen. Snowy owls fluttered in the air, appearing and disappearing at random. Silk hangings floated before the walls. Below them godlike youths lounged on enormous throw pillows. A tape of synthesizer music droned in the background.

A wave of dizziness washed over Jane. She put a hand against a porphyry column to steady herself. Chips of dried paint crackled under her fingertips. The marble floor sagged underfoot. It felt slightly spongy.

"It's all glamour." Puck let the door swing shut behind them. "We're catching a kind of contact high." One of the golden dreamers swam languidly toward them. Puck held out a coin but the dreamer waved it away with a toothy grin. "Everything's free tonight." He gestured toward a line of white plates, each with a cone of powder or stack of resin bars at its center. "Take as much as you like. There's enough for all and everything the best." Jane caught a rank whiff of putrefaction. "Our host is paying for it all."

"Leave it to Tom to find a cheap way to pay the Teind."

"He is generosity itself," agreed the youth.

"He's a putrid son of a bitch."

With a shrug and a hint of a salaam, the dreamer returned to his hookah. High over his head an arched and grated window afforded a glimpse into a midsummer afternoon, all flowered vines and songbirds. A touch of breeze carried its scent to Jane and she caught her breath. It was her mother's garden! She'd recognize that smell among a million others.

Puck took Jane's head in his hands and forcibly turned it away. "You don't want to get too involved," he said. "I knew a girl once who fixated on that garden. She kept coming back, trying to find a way in. She was as bad as a crackhead looking for crumbs. She just couldn't stop. She was sure there had to be a door."

"So what happened to her?"

"Nothing happened to her." Puck's face was like stone. "She's around here somewhere."

Jane shivered. "I've never actually seen anybody on the bane before. It's not like I imagined it."

"This crap? This isn't the bane. Just your everyday vein food. Front room stuff. Nothing happening here but dreams and pretty pictures."

"Oh," Jane said. Then, "You seem to know a lot about this stuff."

"Yeah, well, I made a few mistakes when I was young." Puck glanced about tensely. "I wonder if there's anyplace around here that's clean enough we can sit down."

A curtain shot to in a Moorish arch doorway at the far end of the room. A figure clothed in the light of the sun stepped through it.

"College boy!" Tom grinned madly. "I been waiting for you."

Jane knew then what it was like to enter somebody else's story midway through the plot. Nothing of what happened then made any sense to her. There was no chance to ask questions. She knew they would take hours to explain. And she wasn't in any shape for explanations anyway. It all seemed hopelessly unfair.

"You know where my office is," Tom said. "I got the game all set up and ready for you."

"What is this? What's going on?"

"I made a few mistakes once."

"Aw, don't be so hard on yourself," Wicked Tom said. "Everybody makes mistakes. How else ya going to learn?"

"But I still want to know—" Jane began.

Puck rounded on Tom and grabbed the front of his blouse. "Nothing happens to her! Get that?" he said fiercely. "No matter what happens, she walks free!"

"She ain't done nothing to me. Why should I do anything to her? Not that you've got any say in it."

All the life went out of Puck. "Yeah, yeah." He released Wicked Tom's shirtfront. They passed through the Moorish doorway.

On the far side the silk curtain was a torn and dingy rag. Gray linoleum curled up underfoot. A poorly lit hall led by rooms that went beyond squalid. The doors had been removed and Jane could see thin junkies nodding on piss-damp mattresses. On one wall was a hand-lettered sign reading "Let Us Clean You're Needles 4 U."

Tom glanced shrewdly at Jane. "That's the bane. Not like that bullshit up front. No illusions. No dreams. No lies. Nothing but the straight truth."

This last briefly roused Puck from his torpor. "What is truth?" he said bleakly.

"Well, we're gonna find out, ain't we?"

At the end of the hall was a real door. Tom opened it onto a room that was lit only by five television sets scattered about the floor and one atop a metal filing cabinet. They hissed and sputtered noisily. Their screens were all snow. Were they always tuned to dead channels, Jane wondered, or was it just that this one night nobody was transmitting?

A card table had been set up with two rickety chairs. On the tabletop were a pair of leather straps and two loaded syringes. Puck sat down on one of the chairs. His eyes were empty.

The televisions crackled and spat.

How do you talk somebody out of something you don't understand? Jane squeezed Puck's shoulder and whispered, "Please don't do this."

"He ain't got that option, young lady," Tom said, almost regretfully. "All this was established long before you entered the picture." He sat down facing Puck. "Trial by injection all right with you?"

Puck nodded.

They looped the straps around their upper arms. When the straps were yanked tight they clenched and unclenched their hands to pump up the veins. Tom gave Puck his choice of syringes. He picked up the other and studied the milk gray fluid within. "Yer looking at the basis of all our civilization."

"What?" Jane said.

"The piston." He waved it in the air, like a cigarette. "This is the four-stroke engine in its simplest form. Intake. Compression. Ignition. Exhaust. Elegant."

"Just this once," Puck muttered grimly. "Just this fucking one last time, I could do without your line of snappy patter." He thumped his elbow down on the table. Tom chuckled and did likewise. They locked thumbs.

"Ready?"

"Let's get it over with."

They picked up the syringes with their free hands and positioned them delicately against each other's forearms. The needles poised, paused, probed, and finally slid in.

"Puck—"

"Don't," he said. "Don't say a thing."

"But I—"

"I don't want to hear it! Okay? I know what I want to believe and the odds are real damn good that's not what you want to say." To Tom he said, "First stroke."

The plungers drew back slightly. A serpent of blood coiled and writhed within each glass cylinder. The noise from the television sets rose up deafeningly. The bluish glare cast pink shadows up over the duelists' faces, demonic brows over their eyes, hard crescents above their chins. Their gazes locked. Jane stood outside their circuit of loathing and desire, excluded.

A shadow passed before her eyes.

A gentle hand touched her shoulder.

"Come," the shadow-boy said. "You can't do anything for him and you know it."

The shadow-boy led Jane away from the frozen tableau. They passed without hindrance through the false oriental splendor of the front room and out onto the street.

They moved through the streets of the City as if charmed. Twice they came upon fragments of the mob, wild and bloody, with trophies Jane didn't like to look upon. Each time the shadow-boy led her away unharassed. So long as he held her hand, it seemed, she could not be detected.

A side door into Bellegarde opened at the shadow-boy's touch. They commandeered an elevator big enough to carry a hundred and rode it empty all the way to the top. Her guide had wanted to take Jane to her room, but she insisted on going to the student lounge instead. "It'll be okay," he assured her. "The administration has already cleared away the bodies. They're very good about that sort of thing."

"No."

The lounge was empty. Jane turned her back on the windows and surveyed the couches. Any one of them would do for a bed. Or else she could always sleep on the floor.

"I have to go now. If I'm not back at the plant soon, well…" The shadow-boy shrugged sadly.

"Yeah, sure, the plant." Jane did not release his arm.

"I have to go," he repeated.

"Who are you?"

The shadow-boy looked away. "You know me," he mumbled.

"What are you?"

He did not answer.

"Then suppose I tell you."

"No," he whispered, "don't."

It was a terrible thing that Jane was about to do. But she was drunk and wired and aching and crashing and she no longer gave a shit. She wrapped her arms around his thin, unresisting frame. He felt so cold and small. She was astonished to discover how much she had grown since leaving the dragon works. He looked up, stricken, into her eyes and trembled. Jane bent her head down and whispered her own name into his ear.

"I did everything I could," he whimpered.

"So did I. It wasn't enough, was it?"

He was shivering convulsively now. He didn't answer.

"If you want to hold a hippogriff captive, you clip its flight primaries. For a faun, you hamstring one leg. But how do you cripple a mortal without lessening her value as a laborer?"

"Please… don't." The shadow-boy writhed weakly within her embrace.

"Shush." Jane lowered her mouth to his. She pushed her tongue between his unresisting lips to open them. Then she sucked his tongue into her own mouth. She sucked more of him into her, and more. She went on sucking until there was nothing there.

When she looked up a faint brightness had entered the lounge. The sun was coming up.

The Teind was over.