The Iron Dragon's Daughter

— 20 —

TWO DWARVES, ONE RED AND ONE BLACK, FOUGHT GRIMLY on the balcony. Their bodies were slick with sweat and their knives gleamed in the floodlights. Their feet kicked up puffs of the sawdust that had been strewn over the flagstones to soak up blood. They were both naked.

Jane watched from the roof garden, resting her drink on the rail.

The dwarves circled each other warily, like scorpions, looking for an opening. Suddenly one swung wildly and stumbled. It was an incredible gaffe for a fighter of his quality to make. The second feinted as if about to take advantage of the lapse. But when the first pivoted on a stiff arm and whipped his legs around to knock him off his feet, his opponent was out of reach. With a scream the second dwarf leaped. The first only managed to block his blow at the cost of a finger. Luckily the finger wasn't on his knife hand.

Partygoers thronged the balcony. Jane was not the only one watching from above, but the rail was far from crowded. The serious aficionados all wanted to be close enough to hear the combatants grunt, close enough to smell their rage and fear.

It was an appalling sport. Jane couldn't understand its appeal at all. But the spectators, now—she chewed her lip. She had promised Melanchthon fuel; nearly any of them would do. Which to choose?

She was reaching for her drink when the down on the nape of her neck and the tiny hairs on the backs of her arms and the insides of her thighs stirred and lifted. It was an electric, crackling sensation, akin to the abrupt realization that a millipede is crawling up one's leg. Galiagante was approaching.

Jane waited until he was almost upon her, then turned as the flirtation coaches had trained her: lips parting at the same time that one eyebrow rose ever so slightly and both eyes widened in a way that was subtly mocking and challenging all at the same time. Put together her expression said, Let's see what you've got.

Galiagante was not impressed. "You should be mingling." Flambeaux dotted the banks of an artificial stream. With the torches burning at his back, he looked like one of his own savage ancestors, a harkening back to a time when his kind could not be invoked without forfeiting a geld of blood in one form or another. Jane leaned back against the rail, feigning nonchalance.

Never apologize. That was the first thing they had taught her. "I am mingling." She raised the glass, looked at him over its rim. "Mingling and showing off my costume." Turning, she sat, and lifted a high-heeled boot to the rail beside her in a way that showed off her black leather pants to good advantage. "And very popular both it and I have been, I might add."

She leaned forward, letting her zippered jacket display the truly stunning décolletage that was largely its own creation; the bustier lifted and squeezed her breasts so, she felt as if they rested on a shelf. "Do you like what they've done with my spoon?" She teasingly dandled it at the end of its chain.

Galiagante took the spoon and glanced at both sides. The handle had been twisted into a complex spiral by dwarven crafters to make its allegorical meaning more obvious. The bowl had been hammered flat and worked into a relief of the Goddess, the front all boobs and cellulite, the back all butt and mystery. "You are a cartoon." He let it swing back. "That's not good enough."

"I could do a better job of selling myself if I knew just exactly what you're going to package me as."

"You're still under development. The exact details are unimportant."

"But I—"

"If you don't work out," Galiagante said, "I'll put you back where you came from." The emphasis on those last five words was too distinct to be unintended. He snapped his fingers and over his shoulder said, "Show her about. Keep her circulating." Then, like a mountain wrapping itself in fog, he withdrew his presence.

"Fata Jayne," someone said deferentially.

For servants the chin should be lifted in a way that is aloof but not arrogant. Servants, dwarves, and creditors are never important enough to snub. Meet their eyes firmly. Look away before you've finished speaking. Don't treat them like friends unless you have good reason to want to make them squirm.

Jane turned. Her jaw fell. "Ferret!"

"Madame remembers me." The gray-haired fey smiled gravely and dipped his head. With his mouth closed and eyes lowered, he looked not in the least dangerous. "I am honored."

The only time Jane had ever encountered Ferret was the once in la jettatura when he'd caught her shoplifting. She remembered him vividly enough, though, to find his presence alarming. "What are you doing here?"

"Lord Galiagante ran a background check on you. In the course of which he found me. Galiagante likes clever things. He offered me a position on terms I could not refuse. Here I am." Ferret offered his arm. "Have you met Fata Incolore?"

"Not yet. She's Galiagante's inamorata, isn't she?"

"Oh, much more than that."

Chatting amiably, he steered her into the heart of the garden.

The Fata Incolore stood by a shallow pond made luminous by the skylight beneath it. She was deep in an animated discussion with three Teggish intellectuals. Dark fish darted over the shimmering dancers of the ballroom below. The watery light showed off her fashionably ghoulish pallor. Her clothes made Jane feel like a cartoon.

In Jane's ear, Ferret murmured, "The one in blue is Fata Jouissante, a hot prospect to be the Left Hand Path candidate for senator in the coming elections and an even hotter prospect to replace the Fata Incolore in Galiagante's affections. She'll have to choose soon. She can't have both. Beside her is the Lord Corvo. Corvo is archetypical of his class, aloof but quick to wrath should you engage his dislike. Laugh at all his jokes. The lean one in crimson with the plumed hat is a parvenu. Ignore him." He released Jane's arm and faded back.

She approached the group. Intent on their argument, nobody noticed her.

"But surely, Fata Incolore—"

"The experiments with tortured chimeras have proved, you will agree, that—"

"Is it not possible that—"

Fata Incolore shook her head impatiently. "Everyone tries to draw correspondences between the two worlds. They are the lower and we the upper. We the boat and they the anchor. They the reality, we the dream. Ridiculous. The worlds are simply two different levels of physical being, ours existing at energies higher than any that exist in their world and theirs at energies exactly so much lower than our own. The separation is absolute. Nothing of our world can exist in theirs and nothing of theirs in ours. If you stuck your arm into the lower world, it would explode with hideous fury as every atom of it converted instantly to energy. It is possible to pass through Dream Gate, yes, but not to take anything to or from their world."

"There is always the child trade," Fata Jouissante said. The parvenu's face lit up in the sudden smirk of one who enjoys an unexpected obscenity. "You make a brisk profit in changelings for someone who doesn't believe in the possibility of such intercourse."

Anger bloomed on the Incolore's beestung lips. Her eyebrows flared like black flames. But the anger that danced beneath them was laced with amusement. It was as if she were a carnivore that found itself cornered by a foe it did not wholly respect. "There is no physical traffic between the worlds, after all, and that is all that matters. The changelings are a special case, an exemption if you will, that—" She looked up. "Ah. It is our host's new toy."

All eyes turned to Jane.

"Oh, please." Jane affected a pained expression, though all her interest lay in the conversation she had just interrupted. "Not a toy. Say rather, an investment."

"What's the difference?" The parvenu addressed not her but her tits, her boots, the tangled hipful of chains, locks, and keys, that chimed and dangled from her belt.

Glancing sidelong at Fata Jouissante, Jane said, "In my case it means that I can expect Galiagante to give some serious thought before casting me aside."

Fata Incolore snorted, and her rival may have colored faintly. Corvo cleared his throat sternly and stepped between them. "Tell me," he said to Jane, his gray face gathered into an implausible smile. "Is it true, the story they tell? About you and Galiagante."

"He pegged me in his case with a bindle of his silver," Jane admitted. "Not in this outfit, obviously—this is just make-believe and fantasy. But I was a professional thief, yeah. That's how Galiagante and I discovered each other."

"I gather that Galiagante is working up a television special based on your exploits."

"A series, I heard," threw in the parvenu.

"Actually, I believe that Galiagante is considering giving me the addresses of a few of his friends and having us split the swag."

The parvenu laughed so hard at this that his hat fell off. Even Jane had to look away.

Waiters were passing through the party, indentured children clad for the occasion in such fantastical costumes as flower-petal dresses, bumblebee-fur tunics, fox grape shawls, and acorn caps. Some had white-puffed dandelion stalks slung over their shoulders. Others carried mushrooms big enough to serve as umbrellas. A few were purely decorative; they skipped and twirled in a grotesque pretense of childish play. Most were as solemn as psychopomps.

A girl in a daisy-petal skirt and a boy in spiked brown tights and doublet and a hat shaped like the head of a thistle, came by with a silver platter on which was a flayed horse's head.

Fata Incolore waved the horse's head to her. Taking up knife and spoon she deftly scooped out the eyes. One she placed on a small white plate. "For you." The other she picked up between thumb and forefinger and took for herself. It filled her mouth and bulged out one cheek. Jane watched her chew it, horrified. Then she looked down at the plate in her hand. That hideous eye stared vacantly upward. It inevitably reminded her of Melanchthon's fable of the hunters and their moonstone baits. She felt trapped by it, unable to look away.

"May I?" Corvo produced a knife and with enormous gravity began slicing the eye. Vitreous humor gushed onto the plate. He speared a circlet. "Like so many delicacies, it is an acquired taste." He pointed the knife at her. "Open."

Jane started to shake her head. But at the look that came over Corvo's face she quickly changed her mind. She opened her mouth. He popped it in. "Not bad, eh?"

It was as cold and rubbery as she had imagined it would be. She had not expected, however, that it would be so hotly spiced. Her eyes watered. "Wonderful," she gasped.

"Putting new things in your mouth excites you, then." The parvenu looked pleased with his own wit. The fatas looked bored.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," Jane said coldly.

"Sure you do."

"Excuse me." Fata Jouissante brushed the parvenu aside. "That's not how it's done." She peeled a glove from her hand and delicately laid a cool fingertip on the back of Jane's wrist. A hot flash of desire ran through Jane's veins, and she shied like a horse. Her belly tautened and her nipples stood erect. Staring up into the elf-lady's face, she felt open and vulnerable in a way she did not like at all. But she was helpless against it. Had she wanted, the lady could have led her away to her boudoir then and there. And everyone there knew it.

"All right," Jane said hotly. Holding her hands low, she crooked her fingers, as if she were a street fighter beckoning the fata to come at her. "If that's what you want. Right here, right now. On the floor. In front of your friends."

Jouissante bristled.

For a long moment nobody moved. Then Fata Incolore laughed, and the spell was broken. "You two are even now," she said. And then, not unkindly, "But do try not to involve yourself in politics, little one. It is a dangerous game, and one that will break you if you don't take care." She turned her back. The group shifted slightly, and suddenly Jane found herself standing outside it. As was, on the side opposite her, the parvenu.

She slunk away.

The parvenu hurried forward to match paces. "I'm a social leper," he said bitterly. "Did you see how those two quaints treated me?"

"To be brutally honest," Jane said, "no."

"It was the cut direct! That bitch Jouissante cut me off when I was speaking. She brushed me aside—me!—as if I were nobody." In a more confidential tone, he told her breasts, "My house is old, however new our wealth may be. Do not listen to those who say the lineage is assumed. The name is but restored, and our ancestral sword reforged."

"Look," Jane said. "Exactly what must I say to get rid of you?"

"Why, you mustn't." Grinning, he swept off his hat in what amounted to a parody of courtesy. "My dearest Fata Jayne, I am your squire, your lovesick swain, your very slave."

"Good sir." Ferret materialized in their path and bowed. "I do not believe I've had the pleasure?"

The parvenu gaped at him buggishly. "Apollidon," he said at last.

"Charmed." Ferret took Jane's arm. "You'll excuse us, I'm sure."

A stairway curved gracefully out of night and into brightness. They descended. From the heights, the revelers were like flower petals aswirl on flowing water. Gliding with sure ease, they joined in temporary alliances, gyred slowly about, and then were sent spinning apart by breezes too slight to be otherwise detected.

A nixie hurried up the stairs with a tray of fresh drinks. Jane's had gone flat. Ferret took the glass from her hand, plunked it down, and snagged a bubbling replacement without so much as slowing the child's ascent.

Not a drop of alcohol had passed Jane's lips that evening. The numen of so many high-elven gathered in one place made the very air sparkle with the giddy charm of their presence; she felt as if she were swimming in champagne. One sip would send her right over the edge.

"You did quite well, by the way," Ferret said.

"I was humiliated."

"That's only to be expected when you match wits with three powers. Nonetheless you diverted both ladies and roused Corvo to at least a token show of protectiveness. They are potential investors, and you've managed to engage their interests."

"I doubt Jouissante was much diverted."

"Oh, but she most certainly was. In her own way." Changing the subject, Ferret said, "Have you been introduced to Rocket yet?"

"No."

"A delightful lad. Don't be deceived by his name—he is no mongrel woods fey. He is of noble birth, brother sanguine to Fata Incolore herself. If he weren't a bastard and half-human to boot, he might expect great honor in House Incolore. Even so, he is somebody to be reckoned with."

"How does the Fata Incolore come to have a mestizo brother?"

"He's a dragon pilot." Ferret lowered his voice. "House Incolore derives its wealth from the trade, you know, and there is… an inherited weakness in that direction." They moved silkily through the crowds, with Ferret murmuring here a name, there a title, but mostly dismissing the guests as irrelevant to her. At last he said, "There's Rocket now."

The dragon pilot wore dress blues and had his back to them. He was in light converse with a triad of low-elven nondescripts. From behind he was distinctly attractive. Jane was quite taken by his height, his buns, and the width of his shoulders. Maybe him, she thought. Yes, he'd do quite nicely.

Alerted by some subtle change in the atmosphere, Rocket turned.

Their eyes met. His were the everchanging green-gray of Hyperborean seas. Subtle eyes, trickster eyes, eyes that meant nothing but trouble. Jane's stomach lurched. She knew him. They had never met before, and yet he was as familiar to her as the inside of her own purse.

It was Puck again, Peter again, Rooster again. The externals were superficially different, hair shorter and more disciplined than any of the others', nose thinner, features more regular. He was taller and straighter and had the bearing of a warrior. But inside it was him and nobody else. He burned in her vision like a neon sign. She'd know him anywhere.

Don't let it show.

The defeated dwarf was being carried through the party on the same silver platter that had earlier held the flayed horse's head. It took six straining children to bear him up. Revelers surged about them, vying to dab a sprig of holly in his blood for luck.

Smiling oddly, Rocket took a tentative step her way.

"Get lost," Jane told Ferret. His teeth flashed in a brief, astonished hiss, and then Jane was pushing her way through the merrymakers, through the hot crush of bodies and out onto the balcony.

The air was cool and fresh; it cleared her head wonderfully. Two dwarves in Galiagante's livery were sweeping up, dumping the last dustpanfuls of sawdust over the edge. They took their brooms, nodded curtly, and left.

Jane stared out over the Great Gray City. The buildings were black and mysterious, their lights a message she could not decode in a language she had never learned. She started to put her drink down on the rail, then impulsively cast it away from her. It tumbled and glittered on the way down, a temporary star.

Rocket came out on the balcony, as she had either feared or hoped he would.

"Who are you?" he said. "I know you. Why?"

She favored him with a scornful look. "Perhaps you've had too much to drink."

"I know you," he insisted. "Your fate and mine are bound together in some way. If not in this life, then in another."

"Your premonitions and fancies mean nothing to me, sir. Good night."

"I am a dragon pilot. Every day I deal with machines that would eat my soul from the inside if I gave them the chance. I assure you, madam, that I am not one who is prone to whimsy."

"Ah." Jane was not deaf to the boast in his statement. A very macho thing, handling dragons. Strapping those great black iron machines between one's legs and then opening the throttle. Sure to get the young ladies' juices flowing. "You are one of those gentlemen who make their living by enslaving children."

Rocket flushed. "There is more to my job than harvesting changelings," he protested.

"Is there?" Jane felt light as air, conscienceless, amoral. "I should think the one would be quite enough."

His face was taut. But Rocket managed to construct a plausible smile and an apologetic bow. "We seem to have somehow gotten off on the wrong foot. If you would allow me the privilege of starting over again—? My name is Rocket. I would very much enjoy the pleasure of your company."

"Are you witless?" This was wonderful fun. "You have been dismissed, sir."

The dragon pilot made an abortive movement toward her, as if driven by some great emotion. It seemed he must either leave immediately or else strike her. Jane stared at him coolly, feeling an unhealthy excitement, an irresistibly unwise desire to see exactly how far she could provoke him. Then, with a strangled cry, he strode forward and seized her chin. Roughly, he tilted her head back and to the side. "By the holy wolf, you're a changeling!"

Jane wrenched herself free. "Is this how you usually treat ladies? Good night, sir."

"I've been through Dream Gate seventeen times. This is nothing I could be mistaken about."

"And just what do you intend to do about it?" Jane demanded. "Will you turn me over to the Hospitalers? I'm old enough for them to start breeding me, aren't I? They ought to be able to get ten or twelve mestizo bastards out of me before my womb collapses."

Had she slapped him, Rocket could not have turned more white. He stepped back from her, hands clenched, eyes afire. He opened his mouth to say something, closed it again.

Still, he did not leave.

"There you are!"

Galiagante strolled out onto the balcony. His entourage followed, shedding glamour and sparks. Jouissante said, "We're going slumming," and Incolore explained, "We're forming up a little group to visit the Goblin Market," and Galiagante himself asked indifferently, "Would you care to come along?"

"Yes," Jane said. Why not? "Yes, I would."

"I'll come too," Rocket said grimly.

There were seven in the party: Galiagante, with Jouissante and Incolore in uneasy balance on either arm, Rocket, Jane herself, and two elves from one of the lower houses, Floristan and Esplandian, more functionaries than actual guests. Servants fetched their cloaks. Jane, along with the other fatas, pulled the hood up so that only a slim oval of face showed. They all donned white masks.

They took the elevator down to the street, the functionaries shortened the way, and the entire party strolled easily into the Goblin Market.

"Gents, gents, gents!" a goblin barker cried.

Bad disco music gushed from aging speakers, all fuzz and repetitive bass thump. Galiagante gestured, the goblin stepped aside, and they ducked through a doorway into a lobby with mirrored walls.

Bank notes crinkled and sighed. They were ushered into a small, dark screening room. The linoleum floor was sticky underfoot. On the screen the magnified head of a kobold was noisily chewing food open-mouthed. They stood in the back, watching as beefsteaks, bananas, oysters, chocolate bars, and endless bowls of hot oatmeal disappeared into or fell in moist globs out of that enormous maw. There were only a few patrons in the cramped rows of seats.

Just when Jane's temples were beginning to throb in time to the sound track, Galiagante abruptly strode to the rear and threw open the fire door. They all followed him down a corridor that stank of disinfectant and up a narrow set of stairs. More paper whispered, and another goblin stood away from a turnstile. They passed through.

The room they entered was dominated by a horseshoe curve of doors. Galiagante went through one. Jouissante opened another. One of the functionaries—Esplandian?—dropped several tokens into Jane's hand. She opened her own door.

There was a chair. She sat down. A single dim light revealed a device on one wall with a slot for tokens. She inserted them all.

A window covering slid up. She was looking at a semicircular stage. At its center a troll writhed on a flat couch. He was naked save for a pair of socks and tight-laced brown shoes and the upper half of a gray undershirt. His great hairy belly protruded like a continent rising from an ugly sea of flesh. His eyelids had been sewn shut so long ago the flesh had grown together.

Jane saw Rocket in a window opposite. His mask stared at her.

The troll groaned. He had the most amazing hard-on. It was a raw pink for most of its length, as if the top layers of skin had been abraded away, shading to a bruise-like purple at the tip. From the slow way he twisted about, Jane thought at first that he was masturbating. But then he turned over on his side, and she could see the stump by one shoulder and realized that he had no arms with which to perform that function.

When the tokens ran out, the windows shut again and the party emerged with a clatter of doors.

"I want to arrange a private showing," Galiagante told a goblin with a mustache on his upper lip like a thin line of grease. They conferred briefly. Then the goblin led them two landings downward, through a storage room with leaking pipes, and into a vest-pocket theater.

A weak attempt had been made at glitz. Small tables were scattered about a low stage. Heavy metal played from a boom box, and scattered points of light bounced from a mirror ball to swirl about the theater. They took up chairs.

"This should be good," Jouissante remarked.

"Are you looking at me, sir?" Jane asked.

Rocket shook his head and sullenly stared down at the mask clenched in his hands. "I'm not sure this is my sort of scene at all."

"If you're not here to have fun, then why did you invite yourself along in the first place?"

A nymph wearing not much at all came by their table. "Falernian," Galiagante said, and tucked several bills in her underwear. He removed his mask and laid it down by the ashtray. The room was hot and stuffy, but Jane decided to keep her own mask on anyway.

Shortly, the same troll they had seen earlier was led onstage by two dwarves. They removed his dressing gown; he was dressed exactly as before in undershirt, shoes, and socks. One of the dwarves had a stick and prodded the troll with it.

He crashed to his knees in the center of the stage.

The nymph returned with their wine and baskets of silver coins for each table. The goblin with the grease-pencil mustache plugged a microphone into the boom box, and his voice overrode the music.

"LAYdeezangents," he said in a wash of muzzy sound. "Lordzanfatas, revered patronzovza ardz—"

"Shitheadzandwarves," muttered one of the lesser elves.

"Seekerzafterwizdom," Incolore laughed.

"—welcomdawr show." The lights over the tables came down. Blue and red spots pinned the troll. "TONIGHT weerproudabrezent duhmazing and todally unprezadent Tooooby CLUNCH!"

Jane joined the others in a polite smattering of applause.

The dwarf with the stick cued Toby by slashing him in the throat. The troll shivered, and in a high, clear voice said, "The Cold War is over. We stand at the dawn of a new world order. But many dangers and uncertainties are ahead. You've got to read all the tea leaves and listen to the nuances. I know we're in hard times. Out of the loop. But I never felt kind of—you mean, along like the Rodney Dangerfield kind of thing? Crematoriums of a thousand pointed lights. This is no Johnny-come-lately vicious assault. I put confidence in the American people smart bombs stealth drawing a line in the sand. The vision thing. I put my hand out to those crazy guys." Toby twisted, a conduit for madness, words bubbling out of him faster and faster, voice rising to a shriek. "To sum it up in one word, it's jobs!"

Dwarf One silenced him with another slash in the throat.

Dwarf Two grabbed his ears from behind and pulled down. The troll's chin rose and he made an incoherent, gargling noise that might have been protest. Dwarf One tapped his lips with the baton. Slowly, painfully, he forced his mouth yet wider. A creaking noise sounded from the hinges of his jaw. Still he strove to enlarge that impossible gap, forcing it bigger and rounder, until it was a great hole in his head, an immense funnel down his gullet. Something popped. The goblin with the painted mustache pumped up the music.

Galiagante dipped a languid hand into his basket. He cocked his arm and chucked a coin. It flew over the stage and into the troll's mouth-hole.

"Bravo!" cried Jouissante. She threw one herself. Down it went. Incolore threw another. A fourth coin, Jane's, looked about to miss. But Toby, guided by some primitive sense, wrenched his neck to one side and caught it.

Then the air was full of silver, like shooting stars etching white streaks toward the stage. Toby Clunch bobbed and darted comically, desperate to catch them all. It was amazing how many coins the wretched creature managed to snap up.

Jane paused, glancing sidelong at Rocket. He was drumming his fingers on the table. Alone of them all, he had not pitched so much as a single coin. She slapped one down before him. "Join in, 'sieur dragoneur!"

Rocket shoved back from the table so violently it almost tipped over. The chair crashed to the floor.

He strode from the room.

Unaccountably offended, Jane scooped up a handful of coins and threw them all at once, as hard as she could. Toby half-rose from his knees in his eagerness to intercept them. He managed to swallow some, but most bounced from his face and body, leaving small red marks.

Laughing, Fata Jouissante placed a warm hand on Jane's shoulder. "What do you think? Could you catch so many coins if you had to?"

"Oh, I could never get my mouth open so wide."

"I was thinking you could stand on your head and catch them in your bel chose." She turned to Galiagante. "How much do you want for her?"

"Straight sale?" Galiagante considered. "Three times investment at a minimum. But I'm not really ready to sell yet. I want to see if I can get a package going, use it to shoehorn my way into television. So much of my money is tied up in the trade. I'd like to see it diversified."

The nymph came by with fresh baskets. Toby Clunch was filling up. Each coin made a harsh clinking noise now as it struck coins already in his throat. "Excuse me," Jane said. She gathered up her purse and stood. The goblin jerked a thumb over his shoulder and she followed it to the ladies' room.

It was filthy. Jane could tell without looking that some of the toilets were stopped up. She stepped around a rancid puddle of water, went to the sinks, and removed her mask. Her mascara was a mess.

The door swung open. Fata Incolore came in. Doffing her mask, she went to the mirror. She peeled up a lip and scraped a bit of something off a canine. Then she took out her compact.

"Toot?" she asked.

"All right."

Incolore laid the compact on the edge of the sink and measured out two lines. She offered a rolled-up bank note. Jane held one end to her nose and bent over the powder.

It hit the back of her throat and the top of her skull almost simultaneously, with an intensely artificial sensation of clean green meadows. It was like a little light going on in a room you hadn't known was there.

Incolore did up the other line, then crumpled the bill and tossed it away. "What's this thing going on between you and Rocket? You've really put a burr under his saddle."

"Have I?" Jane said carelessly. "I guess it must've been something I said."

"Hum." Incolore's hand closed about the compact and pushed it into nonexistence. "First Fata Jouissante, and then my brother. You seem to be at war with the world."

"If I am, it's certainly no business of yours."

"I'll be blunt. My brother is clearly attracted to you. For reasons of my own, it is an alliance I would not mind fostering."

"Dream on." Jane reached for her mask.

Incolore stopped her with a touch. "Galiagante is overextended. This notion of his to expand into the entertainment media—" She shrugged. "Hopeless. He can't even make up his mind what he intends to do with you. Do you follow me? If he can't find funding, he'll have no choice but to try to recoup some fraction of his investment. He'll sell you to Jouissante." Her eyes were dark, serious, glimmering with anger. "I promise you it's a bargain you would learn to regret."

"I'm not for sale," Jane snapped. "Galiagante doesn't own me. Jouissante can't buy me. And you're not even in the game."

"What a strange creature you are." Incolore passed a hand over her mouth and a lit cigarette drooped from her lips. She blew smoke out her nostrils. "I'll tell you what. I have no particular interest in funding any more of Galiagante's follies. But I'll string him along for a week or so, if you'll agree to let me show you something."

"What thing?"

"Nothing you can't live with." She picked the coal off the cigarette and swallowed it live. The rest she dropped on the floor. "Call my secretary, and we'll set up a date."

Galiagante was impatient to go. They followed him down the blind gut of yet another kinked set of stairs. A broomstick jammed between the walls shunted them aside and into a room lined with glass booths from which houris in hot pink bikinis and chrome-studded leather harnesses beckoned. It came to Jane suddenly that the Goblin Market might well have no end. There might be an infinite number of windowless rooms and orgy pits beneath the City, all redolent with incense and ammonia, charged with overamplified rap music, and tended by uncountable dawdling lowlifes. She was hopelessly lost, hopelessly tired, and hopelessly bored. She stifled a yawn.

"Fata Jayne doesn't seem to be enjoying herself," the one who was probably Floristan observed.

"I'm all right."

"Perhaps our pleasures are too refined for her," said maybe-Esplandian.

"Why don't we go to a place Jayne would like?"

"If there is such a place."

The lesser elves advanced on Jane, eyes glowing spitefully behind their masks. Backing away from them, she suddenly panicked, whirled, and discovered herself standing before an archway. Over the glass doors, surrounded by blinking lights, was a sign:

RUN WITH THE APES OF HELL

* Dreams Realized * Addictive Drugs *

* Disgusting Fantasies *

"I think," Galiagante said, "that we can provide Jayne with what she wants." He held open a door. "In here."

"Yes, certainly, delightful, oh yes." They sat in the anteroom on chintz chairs, listening to a fat, hairless old goblin run through his spiel. He bobbed and bowed restlessly, rubbing his hands together. "Oh, we know," he said. "We know what you want, before you do. Secret things, private things, revolting things that you would never admit to another. True love, enemas, eight yards of old lace turned brittle and brown with age. Your heart's desire." He leered at Galiagante. "Fishhooks. Other things."

Galiagante produced a mass of bank notes. "Serve her." The goblin bounced toward him, hands extended. But Fata Incolore intercepted the wad. She counted out half, and folded the rest back into Galiagante's jacket pocket. "If we're going to be business partners," she said, "we must first institute some financial accountability."

He looked at her with new interest. "Are we going to be business partners, then?"

"Wait and see."

"In through here." The goblin put his hand on an undistinguished-looking door. "Filthy nasty, very nice, oh my yes."

Jane hesitated. She was loath to enter. There was something fearsome inside. She could feel it. Something she knew she would forever regret seeing.

"You're afraid?" Jouissante said.

The two words hung in the air, a challenge.

"No, of course not." Jane went through the door, pulling it firmly shut behind her. Be damned if she was going to let the others see this, whatever it was.

She entered a room the size of a basketball court, and empty. Half a dozen dwarves sat on the floor in one corner, huddled about a portable television set. At her entry, they snapped it off and scattered through several doors. Two returned, wheeling in an old hand-cranked console record player. A third hurried after them with a wax cylinder. He snapped it in, spun the crank, and lowered the needle.

Scratchy waltz music came on.

Ladders slammed up against the walls. Strings of crepe-paper bells were stretched across the hall with dazzling speed. There was a clatter on the stairs as the remaining three dwarves returned.

They led in the Baldwynn.

The Baldwynn was dressed in formal evening wear. His suit was classically expensive, and just worn enough to indicate that it wasn't rented. His step was weak and faltering. His porcelain hands, mottled with brown, hung down motionless. But his head swung slowly from side to side like a turtle's, its gaze disconcertingly unfocused, as if he were staring into another universe.

I'm not afraid, Jane told herself. I won't be afraid.

The Baldwynn's head swiveled toward her. It stopped.

He looked directly at Jane.

Grinning, the dwarves swarmed about her. One removed her mask. Another took her cloak. They tugged her forward, placing her left hand on the Baldwynn's shoulder. One of his dead white hands was put into hers and the other around her waist.

Then they were dancing. The tinny waltz propelled them about the gym. They both moved clumsily, shuffling in response to the pokes and prods of their attendants. Awkwardly they spun around and around.

At first Jane stared fixedly at the Baldwynn's chest. But then a dwarf darted between them and knocked her chin up with his small fist. She looked into his pale gray eyes.

A spark of something glimmered briefly there. His lips trembled, as if he were trying to remember how to perform some long-forgotten task with them. Once. Twice.

The third time was the charm. Slowly he puckered his lips, like a little girl begging for a kiss. He released them with a faint tchk noise.

Jane shook her head. "No."

Again his lips puckered. He moved his head down toward hers. She could smell his breath, maggoty and sweet. Life came to his hands. His fingers plucked feebly at her.

"No!" Jane pushed back against the Baldwynn's chest with all her might. But she could not break free. It was impossible for one so frail and infirm to hold her, and yet he did. His arms were like metal bands. Slowly, inexorably, they tightened, crushing her against the aged elf-laird. His mouth closed on hers. When she tried to turn away, dwarves held her head in place.

He poked out his tongue and pushed it into her mouth. It entered her like a key gliding into a lock.

She opened at its touch.

At the prodding of his tongue, everything changed. The ballroom, dwarves, even the Baldwynn himself, all warped and melted away like wax in carbolic acid. Jane's stomach lurched. She experienced a bewildering dizziness unlike anything she had ever felt, as if she were being rotated through a dimension impenetrable to her senses. The room resolved into someplace else.

"Jane?"

She did not turn. She was staring at the window, mesmerized by the horrible thing there. The panes were streaked and filthy, and there were the blown husks of dead houseflies on the sill. The paint on the wood was white and chalky and broke away in sharp flakes if you pushed down on it hard enough with your thumb. Doing that pricked the flesh hard enough to hurt, but never enough to draw blood.

But none of that was the horrible thing.

"I brought you some nice fruit," Sylvia said. "Apples and bananas. And a carton of Salem Menthols, hundreds this time, just like you like. I gave them to the nurse at the station, and I wish there was some way you could tell me how many you actually smoke. I'm sure she's been stealing some."

The sky was low, but it didn't look like it was going to rain. It looked like it was going to stay gray and overcast forever. The view was ugly here, though it was not supposed to be. The rolling grounds existed only to be mowed, every other day it seemed, cropped so close that from up here the dirt could be seen through the stubble. They were afraid, she supposed, lest a blade of grass might briefly rise up and grow freely. To Jane, the lawn was the perfect symbol of oppression. But that wasn't the horrible thing either.

"Sit down on the edge of the bed and I'll do your hair."

Jane turned then to face her mother. How worn Sylvia looked, how unhappy, how old. She had that brave little look she always wore on entering, that reassuring everything-is-okay smile that was more then contradicted by the weary misery of her eyes.

Jane walked to the bed and sat down. Her body felt heavy, lumpish, awkward. It was the starchy diet, the lack of exercise, the fact that there had never been any reason not to let herself go.

Sylvia sat down beside her, took out a brush, and began putting Jane's hair in order. How her hands flew! Contemplating them, Jane could imagine how graceful her mother must have been in her youth, how gay and flirty back before Jane had happened to her. "I saw your Aunt Lillian the other day," Sylvia said lightly. "She said that young Albert is going back to his wife again, can you imagine that? That's what—the third time? There's something off about that relationship if you ask me, something more than meets the eye." She paused to light a cigarette, eyed Jane critically. "How would you like it if I braided your hair in cornrows?"

Mom, she tried to say. I want to come home.

But nothing came out.

Nothing ever did.

She raised her head slightly and stared at the window again. Though it was not visible from this angle, in her imagination she could see the horrible thing she had been staring at when her mother entered. It was her own reflection. The round, puffy face, the carelessly applied makeup, the dark, resentful eyes. The cast of expression that said her attention was a million light-years distant.

Suddenly it came to Jane that things weren't going to get any better. She was trapped. She was going to stay in the institution forever, slowly growing older and heavier, draining off the sap of her mother's life a shriveling drop at a time until it was all gone. Then there would be no more visits. She would be alone, decaying, growing ever more silently bitter, creeping toward zero.

She began to cry.

Astonished, her mother dropped the brush. It clattered loudly on the floor.

The Baldwynn's tongue withdrew from Jane's mouth.

He released her.

In a panic she whirled and, dwarves scattering and falling away from her, fled the room. The door resisted her tugging, shuddering in its frame, until she thought to push. It opened onto the front office.

When she emerged, her party was gone.

Only the goblin remained. He waddled toward her, grinning effusively, holding out her mask and cloak. "Nice and filthy—you like, right? Just what you want, disgusting. Come back again."

Elves were fickle. They'd pick you up at a thought and drop you for no reason at all. They weren't to blame, really; it was just their nature. You didn't go out with one unless you were willing to take the chance of suddenly discovering yourself standing alone in a puddle in the dark with a pocket full of dried leaves, abandoned.

Those were the facts. Jane kept reminding herself of them, over and over, for all the long and fearful hour that it took her to make it back to Caer Gwydion. But what she really wanted was to feed the lot of them, with all their cousins and relations, to the mouth of the Teind. If she could have shoved them one and all through Hell Gate, she would have done so gladly.

By the time she got to the party, Jane had largely recovered from her encounter with the Baldwynn. But she was tired and sullen, and in no mood for one more instant's lighthearted revelry. Why am I here? she asked herself. If she hadn't promised Melanchthon he'd feed tonight, she could be home now.

She discarded her mask and surrendered her cloak to a servant. Apollidon materialized in the foyer.

He saw her and headed straight for her boobs. "I'm nobody here," the parvenu said without preamble. "They all treat me like trash. Nobody here respects me for my ancestry."

"Well, they're pretty stuffy I guess," Jane said indifferently. He was still staring at her outfit. She could go home and change into a sweater and jeans, and he'd never recognize her.

"If I disappeared tonight and never showed up again, nobody would even miss me. I must be the most universally loathed individual in all creation."

"Really!" Jane was startled. Was it possible the answer had been staring her in the face all night long?

She resolved to find out.

Touching Apollidon's arm she sent a surge of desire up his nervous system. It was the same trick that Fata Jouissante had played on her earlier, and if she did not use it half so well, still, it was her first time. At any rate, to judge by the parvenu's reaction, she used it well enough. He shuddered and for the first time his eyes looked up and into hers. They connected. His pupils were wide with desire.

Then Apollidon flushed with awareness of what she had done.

"You're perfect," Jane assured him before he could look away. "Come home with me."