Greg Bear - Songs of Earth 1 - Infinity Concerto

 

 

The Infinity Concerto

 

Songs of Earth and Power Vol. 1

 

Greg Bear

 

 

Copyright Greg Bear 1984

 

 

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Ay! - and what then?

 

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

 

What song did the sirens sing?

 

- Ancient Riddle

 

 

Chapter One

 

 

Are you ready?

 

 

"Huh?" Michael Perrin twitched in his sleep. An uncertain number of tall white forms stood around his bed, merging with the walls, the dresser, the bookcases and easels.

 

 

He's not very impressive.

 

 

Michael rolled over and rubbed his nose. His short sandy hair tousled up against his pillow. His thick feathery red eyebrows pulled together as if in minor irritation, but his eyes stayed shut.

 

 

Look deeper. Several of the forms bent over him.

 

 

He's only a man-child.

 

 

Yet he has the hallmark.

 

 

What's that? Wasting his talents in all directions instead of concentrating? Never quite able to make up his mind what he is going to be? A ghostly arm waved at the easels and bookcases, at the desk swamped with ragged-edged notebooks, chewed pencils and scraps of paper.

 

 

Indeed. That is the hallmark, or one of -

 

 

Michael's alarm clock went off with a hideous buzz. He jerked upright in bed and slapped his hand over the cut-off switch, hoping his parents hadn't heard. He sleepily regarded the glowing green numbers; twelve thirty in the morning. He picked up his watch to check. "Damn." The clock was eight minutes late. He only had twenty-two minutes.

 

 

He rolled out of bed, kicking a book of Yeats' poems across the floor with one bare foot. He swore under his breath and felt for his pants. The only light he dared use was the Tensor lamp on his desk. He pushed aside the portable typewriter to let the concentrated glow spread farther and spilled a stack of paperbacks on the floor. Bending over to pick them up, he smacked his head on the edge of the desk.

 

 

Teeth clenched, Michael grabbed his pants from the back of the chair and slipped them on. One leg on and the other stuck halfway, he lost balance and steadied himself by pushing against the wall.

 

 

His fingers brushed a framed print hung slightly off balance against the lines and flowers of the wallpaper. He squinted at the print - a Bonestell rendition of Saturn seen from one of its closer moons. His head throbbed.

 

 

A tall, slender figure was walking across the print's cratered moonscape. He blinked. The figure turned and regarded him as if from a considerable distance, then motioned for him to follow. He scrunched his eyes shut, and when he opened them again, the figure had vanished. "Christ," he said softly. "I'm not even awake yet."

 

 

He buckled his belt and donned his favorite shirt, a short-sleeved brown pull-over with a V-neck. Socks, gray hush-puppies and tan nylon windbreaker completed the ensemble. But he was forgetting something.

 

 

He stood in the middle of the room, trying to remember, when his eyes lit on a small book bound in glossy black leather. He picked it up and stuffed it in his jacket pocket, zipping the pocket shut. He dug in his pants pocket for the note, found it folded neatly next to the key-holder and glanced at his watch again. Twelve forty-five.

 

 

He had fifteen minutes.

 

 

He trod softly down the wall-edge of the stairs, avoiding most of the squeaks, and half-ran to the front door. The living room was black except for the digital display on the video recorder. Twelve forty-seven, it said.

 

 

He opened and closed the door swiftly and ran across the lawn. The neighborhood streetlights had been converted to sodium-vapor bulbs that cast a sour orange glow over the grass and sidewalk. Michael's shadow marched ahead, growing huge before it vanished in the glare of the next light. The orange emphasized the midnight-blue of the sky, dulling the stars.

 

 

Four blocks south, the orange lights ended and traditional streetlamps on concrete posts took over. His father said those lights went back to the 1920's and were priceless. They had been installed when the neighborhood houses had first been built; back then, they had stood on a fancy country road, where movie stars and railroad magnates had come to get away from it all.

 

 

The houses were imposing at night. Spanish-style white plaster and stucco dominated; some, two stories tall with enclosures over the side driveways. Others were woodsy, shake shingles on walls and roofs and narrow frame windows staring darkly out of dormers.

 

 

All the houses were dark. It was easy to imagine the street was a movie set, with nothing behind the walls but hollowness and crickets.

 

 

Twelve fifty-eight. He crossed the last intersection and turned to face his destination. Four houses down and on the opposite side of the street was the white plaster, single-story home of David Clarkham. It had been deserted for over forty years, yet its lawns were immaculately groomed and its hedges trimmed, walls spotless and Spanish wood beams unfaded. Drawn curtains in the tall arched windows hid only emptiness - or so it was realistic to assume. Being realistic hadn't brought him here, however.

 

 

For all he knew, the house could be crammed with all manner of things. incredible, unpleasant things.

 

 

He stood beneath the moon-colored streetlight, half in the shadow of a tall, brown-leafed maple, folding and unfolding the paper in his pants pocket with one sweaty hand.

 

 

One o'clock in the morning. He wasn't dressed for adventure. He had the instructions, the book and the learner key-holder with its one old brass key; what he didn't have was conviction.

 

 

It was a silly decision. The world was sane; such opportunities didn't present themselves. He withdrew the paper and read it for the hundredth time:

 

 

"Use the key to enter the front door. Do not linger. Pass through the house, through the back door and through the side gate to the front door of the neighboring house on the left, as you face the houses. The door to that house will be open. Enter. Do not stop to look at anything. Surely, quickly, make your way to the back of the house, through the back door again, and across the rear yard to the wrought-iron gate. Go through the gate and turn to your left. The alley behind the house will take you past many gates on both sides. Enter the sixth gate on your left."

 

 

He folded the note and replaced it. What would his parents think, seeing him here, contemplating breaking and entering - or at the very least, entering without breaking?

 

 

"There comes a time," Arno Waltiri had said, "when one must disregard the thoughts of one's parents, or the warnings of old men; when caution must be put temporarily aside and instincts followed. In short, when one must rely on one's own judgment."

 

 

Michael's parents gave parties renowned throughout the city. Michael had met the elderly composer Waltiri and his wife, Golda, at one such party in June. The party celebrated the Equinox ("Late," his mother explained, "because nothing we do is prompt"). Michael's father was a carpenter with a reputation for making fine furniture; he had a wide clientele among the rich and glamorous folk of Los Angeles, and Waltiri had commissioned him to make a new bench for his fifty-year-old piano.

 

 

Michael had stayed downstairs for the first hour of the party, wandering through the crowd and sipping a bottle of beer. He listened in while the heavily bearded, gray-haired captain of an ocean liner told a young stage actress of his perilous adventures during World War II, "on convoy in the Western Ocean." Michael's attention was evenly divided between them; his breath seemed to shorten, the woman was so beautiful, and he'd always been interested in ships and the sea. When the captain put an arm around the actress and stopped talking of things nautical, Michael moved on. He sat in a folding chair near a noisy group of newspaper people.

 

 

Journalists irritated Michael. They came in large numbers to his parents' parties. They were brash and drank a lot and postured and talked more about politics than writing. When their conversation turned to literature (which was seldom), it seemed all they had ever read was Raymond Chandler or Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Michael tried to interject a few words about poetry, but the conversation stopped dead and he moved on again.

 

 

The rest of the party was taken up by a councilman and his entourage, a few businessmen and the neighbors, so Michael selected a reserve supply of hors d'ouevres and carried the plate upstairs to his room.

 

 

He closed the door and switched on the TV, then sat at his small desk - which he was rapidly outgrowing - and pulled a sheaf of poems from the upper drawer.

 

 

Music pounded faintly through the floor. They were dancing.

 

 

He found the poem he had written that morning and read it over, frowning. It was yet another in a long line of bad Yeats imitations. He was trying to compress the experiences of a senior in high school into romantic verse, and it wasn't working.

 

 

Disgusted, he returned the poems to the drawer and switched the TV channels until he found an old Humphrey Bogart movie. He'd seen it before; Bogart was having woman trouble with Barbara Stanwyck.

 

 

Michael's troubles with women had been limited to stuffing love poems into a girl's locker. She had caught him doing it and laughed at him.

 

 

There was a soft tap on his door. "Michael?" It was his father.

 

 

"Yeah?"

 

 

"You receiving visitors?"

 

 

"Sure." He opened the door. His father came in first, slightly drunk, and motioned for an old, white-haired man to follow.

 

 

"Mike, this is Arno Waltiri, composer. Arno, my son, the poet."

 

 

Waltiri shook Michael's hand solemnly. His nose was straight and thin and his lips were full and young-looking. His grip was strong but not painful. "We are not intruding, I hope?" His accent was indefinite middle-European, faded from years in California.

 

 

"Not at all," Michael said. He felt a little awkward; his grandparents had died before he was born, and he wasn't used to old people.

 

 

Waltiri examined the prints and posters arranged on the walls. He paused before the print of Saturn, glanced at Michael, and nodded. He turned to a framed magazine cover showing insect-like creatures dancing near wave-washed beach rocks and smiled. "Max Ernst," he said. His voice was a soft rumble. "You obviously like to visit strange places."

 

 

Michael muttered something about never having actually been to anyplace strange.

 

 

"He wants to be a poet," his father said, pointing to the bookcases lining the walls. "A packrat. Keeps everything he's read."

 

 

Waltiri regarded the television with a critical eye. Bogart was painstakingly explaining a delicate matter to Stanwyck. "I wrote the score for that one," he said.

 

 

Michael brightened immediately. He didn't have much money for records - he spent most of his allowance and summer earnings on books - but the five records he did have consisted of a Bee Gees album, a Ricky Lee Jones concert double, and the soundtrack albums for the original King Kong, Star Wars and Citizen Kane. "You did? When was that?"

 

 

"1940," Waltiri said. "So long ago, now, but seems much closer. I scored over two hundred films before I retired." Waltiri sighed and turned to Michael's father. "Your son is very diverse in his interests."

 

 

Waltiri's hands were strong and broad-fingered, Michael noticed, and his clothing was well-tailored and simple. His slate-gray eyes seemed very young. Perhaps the most unusual thing about him were his teeth, which were like gray ivory.

 

 

"Ruth would like for him to study law," his father said, grinning. "I hear poets don't make much of a living. Still, it beats wanting to be a rock star."

 

 

Waltiri shrugged. "Rock star isn't so bad." He put a hand on Michael's shoulder. Usually Michael resented such familiarities, but not this time. "I like impractical people, people who are willing to rely only on themselves. It was very impractical for me to want to become a composer." He sat on Michael's desk chair, hands on his knees, elbows pointed out, staring at the TV. "So very difficult to get anything performed at all, not to mention by a good orchestra. So I followed my friend Steiner to California-"

 

 

"You knew Max Steiner?"

 

 

"Indeed. Sometime you must come over to our house, visit Golda and me, perhaps listen to the old scores." At that moment, Waltiri's wife entered the room, a slender, golden-haired woman a few years younger than he. She bore a distinct resemblance to Gloria Swanson, Michael thought, but without the wild look Swanson had had in Sunset Boulevard. He liked Golda immediately.

 

 

So it had all begun with music. When his father delivered the piano bench, Michael tagged along. Golda met them at the door, and ten minutes later Arno was guiding them around the ground floor of the two-story bungalow. "Arno loves to talk," Golda told Michael as they approached the music room at the rear of the house. "If you love to listen, you'll get along just fine."

 

 

Waltiri opened the door with a key and let them enter first.

 

 

"I don't go in here very often now," he said. "Golda keeps it dusted. I read nowadays, play the piano in the front room now and then, but I don't need to listen." He tapped his head. "It's all up here, every note."

 

 

The walls on three sides were covered with shelves of records. Waltiri pulled down big lacquered masters from a few of his early films, then pointed out the progression to smaller disks, scores released by record companies on seventy-eights, and finally the long-play format Michael was familiar with. For scores composed in the 1950's and 60's, he had tapes neatly labeled and shelved in black and white and plaid boxes. "This was my last score," he said, pulling down a bigger tape box. "Half-inch stereo eight-track master. For William Wyler, you know. In 1963 he asked me to score Call It Sleep. Not my finest score, but certainly my favorite film."

 

 

Michael ran his finger along the tape box labels. "Look! Mr. Waltiri-"

 

 

"Arno, please. Only producers call me Mr. Waltiri."

 

 

"You did the music for Bogart in The Man Who Would Be King!"

 

 

"Certainly. For John Huston, actually. Good score, that one."

 

 

"That's my favorite movie," Michael said, awed.

 

 

Waltiri's eyes sparkled. For the next two months, Michael spent most of his free time in the Waltiri house, listening to him recite selections on the piano or carefully play the fragile masters of the scores. It had been a wonderful two months, almost a justification for being bookish, something of a loner, buried in his mind instead of hanging out with friends....

 

 

Now Michael stood on the porch of Clarkham's house. He tried the handle on the heavy wooden door; locked, as expected. He removed the key from his pants pocket. It was late for the old neighborhood. There was no street traffic, not even the sound of distant airplanes. Everything seemed to have been muffled in a blanket.

 

 

Two months before, on a hot, airless August day, Waltiri had taken Michael up to the attic to look through papers and memorabilia. Michael had exulted over letters from Clark Gable, correspondence with Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a manuscript copy of a Stravinsky oratorio.

 

 

"Up here, it feels like it's the forties again," Michael said. Waltiri stared down at lines of light thrown by a wall vent across a stack of boxes and said, "Perhaps it is." He looked up at Michael. "Let's go downstairs and get some iced tea. And on the way - instead of my talking about myself - on the way, I would like you to tell me why you want to be a poet."

 

 

That was difficult. Sitting on the porch, Michael sipped from his glass and shook his head. "I don't know. Mom says it's because I want to be difficult. She laughs, but I think she means it." He made a wry face. "As if my folks should worry about me being different. They're not your normal middle-class couple, either. She might be right. But it's something else, too. When I write poetry, I'm more in touch with being alive. I like living here. I have some friends. But. it seems so limited. I try hard to find the flavor, the richness, but I can't. There has to be something more." He rubbed his cheek and looked at the fallen magnolia blossoms on the lawn. "Some of my friends just go to the movies. That's their idea of magic, of getting away. I like movies, but I can't live in them."

 

 

The composer nodded, his slate-gray eyes focused on the distance above the hedges bordering the yard. "You think there's something higher than what we see - or lower - and you want to find it."

 

 

"That's it." Michael nodded.

 

 

"Are you a good poet?"

 

 

"Not very," Michael said automatically.

 

 

"No false modesty now." Waltiri wiped condensation from his glass on the knee of his pants.

 

 

Michael thought for a moment. "I'm going to be."

 

 

"Going to be what?"

 

 

"I'm going to be a good poet."

 

 

"That's a fine thing to say. Now that you've said it, you know I'll be watching you. You must become a good poet."

 

 

Michael shook his head ruefully. "Thanks a lot!"

 

 

"Think nothing of it. We all need someone to watch over us. For me, it was Gustav Mahler. I met him when I was eleven years old, and he asked me much the same thing. I was a young piano player - how do they say - a prodigy. 'How good will you be?' he asked after he heard me perform. I tried to dodge the question by acting like a young boy, but he turned his very intense dark eyes on me and said again, 'How good?' Because I was cornered, I puffed up and said, 'I'll be very good.' And he smiled at me! What a benediction that was. Ah, what a moment! Do you know Mahler?"

 

 

He meant Mahler's music, and Michael didn't.

 

 

"He was my god. The sad German. I worshiped him. He died a few months after we met, but somehow I felt he still watched me, he would still be disappointed if I didn't make something of myself."

 

 

By early September, Waltiri had taken Michael even further into his confidence. "When I began to write music for movies, I was a little ashamed," he said one evening when Michael came over for dinner. "Even though my first score was for a good movie, Trevor Howard in Ashenden. Now I have no regrets, but I thought then, what would my heroes say about writing for silly films? Still, it was next to impossible to work otherwise. I had married Golda in 1930, and we had to live. Times were hard then.

 

 

"But always before me was the shining splendor of perhaps doing serious music, concert hall material. I wrote some on the side - piano pieces, cantatas, exactly the opposite of the big orchestral scores for the studios. A little has even been recorded recently, because I am so well-known as a film composer. I wanted to do an opera - how I loved the libretti of Hofmannsthal, and how I envied Richard Strauss that he lived in a time when such things were easier! 'Dream and reality are one, together, you and I alone, always together. to all eternity.' 'Geht all's sonst wie ein Traum dahin vor meinem Sinn." He laughed and shook his head. "But I am wandering.

 

 

"I had one last fling with serious music. And." Waltiri paused in the dim, candlelit dining room, his eyes again focused on the distance, this time piercing a framed landscape over the china cupboard. "A very serious fling it was. A man my own age then, perhaps a little older, by the name of David Clarkham approached me at Warner Brothers one day. I remember it was raining, but he didn't wear a raincoat.just a gray wool suit, without any drips on it. Not wet, you understand?"

 

 

Michael nodded.

 

 

"We had some mutual acquaintances. At first, I thought maybe he was just another studio vulture. You know the kind, maybe. They hang around, bask in other peoples' fame and fortune, live off parties. 'Lounge lizards,' somebody called them. But it turned out he was knowledgeable about music. A charming fellow. We got along well. for a time.

 

 

"He had some theories about music that were highly unusual, to say the least." Waltiri went to a glassed-in bookcase, lifted a door, and withdrew a small thick volume in a worn wrapper. He held it out for Michael's inspection. The title was Devil's Music and the author was Charles Fort.

 

 

"We worked together, Clarkham and I. He suggested orchestrations and arrangements; I composed." Waltiri's expression became grim. His next words were clipped and ironic. "'Arno,' he tells me - we are good friends by this time - 'Arno, there shall be no other music like this. Not for millions of years have such sounds been heard on Earth.' I kidded him about dinosaurs breaking wind. He looked at me very seriously and said, 'Someday you will understand what I mean.' I accepted he was a little eccentric, but also brilliant. He appealed directly to my wish to be another Stravinsky. So. I was a sucker. I applied his theories to our composition, using what he called 'psychotropic tone structure.'

 

 

"'This,' he tells me, 'will do exactly what Scriabin tried to do, and failed.'" Michael didn't know who Scriabin was, but Waltiri continued as if with a long-rehearsed speech.

 

 

"The piece we wrote, it was my forty-fifth opus, a concerto for piano and orchestra called 'Infinity.'" He took the book from Michael's hand and opened it to a marked passage, then handed it back. "So we get infamous. Read, please."

 

 

Michael read.

 

 

"Or of strange things musical.

 

 

"A song of enchantment.

 

 

"Judge as you will, here is the data:

 

 

"That on November 23rd, 1939, a musician created a work of undeniable genius, a work which changed the lives of famous men, fellow musicians. This man was Arno Waltiri, and with his new concerto, Opus 45, he created a suitable atmosphere for musical catastrophe.

 

 

"Picture it: a cold night, Los Angeles, the Pandall Theater on Sunset Boulevard. Crowds in black silk hats, white tie and tails, long sheer gowns, pouring in to hear a premier performance. Listen to it: the orchestra tuning, cacophonic. Then Waltiri raising his baton, bringing it down.

 

 

"We are told the music was strange, as no music heard before. Sounds grew in that auditorium like apparitions. We are told that a famous composer walked out in disgust. And. then, a week later, filed suit against Waltiri! 'I am unable to hear or compose music in a sensible fashion!' he said in the court deposition. And what did he blame? Waltiri's music!

 

 

"Consider it.

 

 

"What would prompt a well-known and respected composer to sue a fellow composer for an impossible - so doctors tell us - injury? The case was dropped before it ever reached court. But. what did that concerto sound like?

 

 

"I submit to you, perhaps Waltiri knew the answer to an age-old question, namely, 'What song did the sirens sing?'"

 

 

Michael closed the book. "It's not all nonsense," Waltiri said, returning it to the shelf. "That is roughly what happened. And then, months later, twenty people disappear. The only thing they have in common is, they were in the audience for our music." He looked at Michael and lifted his eyebrows. "Most of us live in the real world, my young friend. but David Clarkham. I am not so sure. The first time I saw him, coming out of the wet with his suit so dry, I thought to myself - 'The man must walk between raindrops.' The last time I saw him it was also raining, in July of 1944. Two years before, he had bought a house a few blocks from here. We didn't see each other often. But this wet summer day he comes to stand on our porch and gives me a key. 'I'm going on a trip,' he says. 'You should have this, in case you ever wish to follow me. The house will be taken care of.' Very mysterious. With the key there is a piece of paper."

 

 

Waltiri took a small teak box from the top of the bookshelf and held it before Michael, pulling up the lid. Inside was a yellowed, folded paper, and wrapped partly within, a tarnished brass house key. "I never followed him. I was curious, but I never had the courage. And besides, there was Golda. How could I leave her? But you. you are a young man."

 

 

"Where did Clarkham go?" Michael asked.

 

 

"I don't know. The last words he said to me, he says, 'Arno, should you ever wish to come after me, do everything on the paper. Go to my house between midnight and two in the morning. I will meet you." He removed the note and key from the box and gave them to Michael. "I won't live forever. I will never follow. Perhaps you."

 

 

Michael grinned. "It all sounds pretty weird to me."

 

 

"It is very weird, and silly. That house - he told me he did a great deal of musical experimentation there. I heard very little of it. As I said, we weren't close after the premiere of the concerto. But once he told me, "The music gets into the walls in time, you know. It haunts the place'

 

 

"He was a brilliant man, Michael, but he - how do you say it? - he 'screwed me over.' I took the blame for the concerto. He left for two years. I settled the lawsuits. Nothing was ever decided in court. I was nearly broke.

 

 

"He had made me write music that affects the way a person thinks, as drugs affect the brain. I have written nothing like it since."

 

 

"What will happen if I go?"

 

 

"I don't know," Waltiri said, staring at him intently. "Perhaps you will find what lives above or below the things we know."

 

 

"I mean, if something happened to me, what would my parents think?"

 

 

"There comes a time when one must disregard the thoughts of one's parents, or the warnings of old men, when caution must be temporarily put aside and instincts followed. In short, when one must rely on one's own judgment." He opened another door in the bookcase. "Now, my young friend, before we become sententious, I've been thinking there is one other thing I'd like to give to you. A book. One of my favorites." He pulled out a pocket-sized book bound in plain, shiny black leather and held it out for Michael.

 

 

"It's very pretty," Michael said. "It looks old."

 

 

"Not so very old," Waltiri said. "My father bought it for me when I left for California. It's the finest poetry, in English, all my favorites. A poet should have it. There is a large selection of Coleridge. You've read him, I'm sure."

 

 

Michael nodded.

 

 

"Then, for me, read him again."

 

 

Two weeks later, Michael was swimming in the backyard pool when his mother came out on the patio with a peculiar expression. She brushed back a strand of her red hair nervously and shielded her eyes against the sun. Michael stared at her from poolside, his arm flesh goose-bumping. He almost knew.

 

 

"That was Golda on the phone," she said. "Arno's dead."

 

 

There was no funeral. Waltiri's ashes were placed in a columbarium at Forest Lawn. There were features on his death in the newspaper and on television.

 

 

That had been six weeks before. Michael had last spoken with Golda two days ago. She had sat on the piano bench in her front room, straight-backed and dignified, wearing a cream colored suit, her golden hair immaculately coifed. Her accent was more pronounced than her husband's.

 

 

"He was sitting right here, at the piano," she said, "and he looked at me and said, 'Golda, what have I done, I've given that boy Clarkham's key. Call his parents now.' And his arm stiffened - - He said he was in great pain. Then he was on the floor." She looked at Michael earnestly. "But I did not tell your parents. He trusted you. You will make the right decision."

 

 

She sat quietly for a time, then continued. 'Two days later, a tiny brown sparrow flew into Arno's study, where the library is now. It sat on the piano and plucked at pieces of sheet music. Arno had once made a joke about a bird being a spirit inside an animal body. I tried to shoo it out the window, but it wouldn't go. It perched on the music stand and stayed there for an hour, twisting its head to stare at me. Then it flew away." She began to cry. "I would dearly love for Arno to visit me now and then, even as a sparrow. He is such a fine man." She wiped her eyes and hugged Michael tightly, then let him go and straightened his jacket.

 

 

"He trusted you," she had repeated, tugging gently at his lapel. "You will know what is best."

 

 

Now he stood on the porch of Clarkham's house, feeling resigned if not calm. Night birds sang in the trees lining the street, a sound that had always intrigued him for the way it carried a bit of daylight into the still darkness.

 

 

He couldn't say precisely why he was there. Perhaps it was a tribute to a friend he had known for so short a time. Had Waltiri actually wanted him to follow the instructions? It was all so ambiguous.

 

 

He inserted the key in the lock.

 

 

To discover what is above or below.

 

 

He turned the key.

 

 

Music haunts the place now.

 

 

The door opened quietly.

 

 

Michael entered and shut the door tight behind him. The brass workings clicked.

 

 

Walking straight in the darkness was difficult. He brushed against a wall with his shoulder. The touch set off an unexpected bong, as if he were inside a giant bell. He didn't know if he had crossed a room or made his way down a hall, but he bumped against another door, fumbled for the knob, and found it. The door opened easily and silently. To Michael's left in the room beyond was another doorway leading into a smaller room. Moonlight spilled through French doors like milk on the bare wood floor. All the rooms were empty of furniture.

 

 

The French doors opened onto a bare brick patio and a desolate yard, with a brick wall beyond. The door handles felt like ice in his hands.

 

 

He left Clarkham's house. A flagstone path curved around the outside to the side gate. When he had gone through the front door there had been no moon, but now a sullen green orb rose over the silhouettes of the houses on the opposite side of the street. It didn't cast much light. (And yet, the moonlight through the French doors had been bright - - ) The streetlights were also strangely dim, and yellowish-green in color.

 

 

There were fewer trees than he remembered, and those were leafless and skeletal. The air smelled antiseptic, electric and somehow mildewy all at once, as if it had been preserved and then had spoiled for lack of use. The sky was pitch black and starless. Through the windows of the houses across the street came fitful brown glimmers, not at all like electric lights or television - more like reflections off dried blood.

 

 

He went to the front door of the house on the left. As predicted in the instructions, the door was open a crack. Warm, welcoming light poured in a narrow shaft from within. Entering, Michael saw a small table sitting on delicately curved and worked legs on the polished wood floor of the hallway. A brass bowl on the table held fruit: oranges, apples, something blue and shiny. Down the hall about eight feet and to the left was the rounded archway leading to the living room. He closed the front door.

 

 

The air in the house was stuffy. A faint mildewy smell issued from the walls and floor and hung in transparent wisps through the hall. Michael approached the archway, nose wrinkled. The house was lighted as if somebody lived there, but the only sound he heard was that of his own footsteps.

 

 

The living room's only furniture was a chair on a large circular throw rug before the dark fireplace. The throw rug was made of concentric circles of tan and black, resembling a target. The chair had its rear to him and rocked slowly back and forth. He couldn't see who was sitting in it. He had just realized he. was not following the instructions when the chair stopped rocking and began to swivel.

 

 

Suddenly, Michael didn't want to see or be seen. He ran down the hall, around a short bend and into another empty room. "Do not stop to look at anything," the note had said. He had hesitated, he told himself, not stopped; still, he felt the need to be more cautious. He made sure no one was following him, then exited through the rear door of the house onto yet another brick patio. To his left was a trellis roof overgrown with wisteria. Fireflies danced in oleander bushes to each side. Beyond the patio, glowing paper lanterns hung from strings over a stretch of flower beds.

 

 

He was startled to see someone sitting behind a glass-topped wrought-iron table under the wisteria trellis. Except for the wan flicker of the paper lanterns, there was little illumination, but he could make out that the person at the table wore a long dress, pale and flounced, and a broad hat half-obscured by inky shadow.

 

 

Michael stared hard at the seated figure, fascinated. Was someone supposed to meet him, take him farther? The note had said nothing about a woman waiting. He tried to discern the face beneath the hat.

 

 

The figure rose slowly from the chair. There was a quality to its movement, a loose awkwardness, that made his flesh crawl. He backed up, stumbled down the porch steps into the garden and twisted around to fall on his face. For a second or two he was stunned and breathless. Then he looked over his shoulder.

 

 

The figure had left the table and stood at the top of the steps. Even hidden by the dress, every limb was obviously bending in the wrong place. He still couldn't make out the face beneath the hat.

 

 

It took the first step down from the patio, and he jumped to his feet. The second, and he ran across the garden to the black wrought-iron gate at the rear. The latch opened easily and he stopped in the alley to get his bearings. "To the left," he said, his breath ragged. He heard footsteps behind, the sound of the latch. Was it the fifth or sixth gate to the left? The alley was too dark to allow him to re-read the note, but he could make out gates - on both sides. Trees loomed thick and black over the opposite wall, absolutely still.

 

 

He counted the gates as he ran. two, three, four, five. He stopped again, then passed to the sixth.

 

 

A lock blocked the iron latch. He knew instinctively he couldn't just climb over - if he did, he would find nothing but darkness on the other side. He fumbled frantically for the key in his pocket, the only key he had been given.

 

 

The figure in the flounced dress was six or seven yards behind, lurching slowly and deliberately toward him, as if it had all the time in the world.

 

 

The key fit the lock, but just barely. He had to jerk it several times. There was a sigh behind him, long and dry, and he felt a cold pressure on his shoulder, the rasp of something light and hard brushing his jacket sleeve -

 

 

Michael pushed the gate open and fell through, crawling and stumbling across broken dirt and withered stubble. The gate shut with a clang and the snick of the latch falling into place again. He closed his eyes and clutched the crumbling clods and twigs, waiting.

 

 

Several seconds passed before he even allowed himself to think he hadn't been followed. The quality of the air had changed. He rolled over and looked at the stone wall. The figure should have been visible above the wall, or through die openwork of the gate, but it wasn't.

 

 

He let his breath out all at once. He felt safe now - safe for the moment at least. "It worked," he said, standing and brushing off his clothes. "It really worked!" Somehow, he wasn't all that elated. A strange thing had just happened, and he had been badly frightened.

 

 

It couldn't have taken Michael more than fifteen minutes to do everything in the instructions, yet dawn was a hazy orange in the east.

 

 

He had crossed over. But to where?

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

His next thought was how to get back home. He walked cautiously to the gate and peered over. There was no alley, only a broad bank leading down to a gray slow-moving river about a hundred yards from shore to shore. The river flowed hazy in the early dawn light through a hilly landscape devoid of trees, the banks lined with scrubby weeds.

 

 

He turned around and surveyed the field before him. It had once been a vineyard but was now overgrown with weeds. The weeds themselves weren't faring too well. The vines had died, leaving thick gray stumps tethered to tilted stakes, surrounded by dead dry leaves and dirt.

 

 

As the smoky dawn brightened, he saw that the garden was in the rear of a blocky rectangular mansion. He walked through the dead vineyard, squinting to make out details within the mansion's dark outline. The sun was rising behind the mansion; he couldn't see it clearly until he was about a hundred yards away.

 

 

It wasn't in very good repair. One whole wing had been ravaged by fire, leaving only masonry and charred timbers. Michael was no expert on architecture, but the design seemed European, like a chateau in France. It could have been anywhere from a century to three centuries old, even older. There was no sign of life.

 

 

He felt he was intruding. He was cold, he hadn't the slightest idea where he was, and now he was getting hungry. For the time being, his only option was to go to the house, see if anyone lived there and try to get his questions answered.

 

 

He found a narrow path through the weeds and dead vines.

 

 

The house was even larger than he had thought; it was three stories tall. The bottom story was inset five or six feet. Five broad corbeled stone arches supported the overhang; as he approached, he saw that a yard-wide chunk had fallen from the middle arch.

 

 

The air of desertion and decay didn't encourage him. The path led up to the central arch, where Michael stopped. A dark oak door was set into the wall beneath, two mirror-image whorls occupying the top and bottom frames, surrounded by intertwining serpents. Two bronze lanterns jutted from the stone beside the door, their glasswork broken and jagged.

 

 

Michael made a fist and knocked on the rough, cracked wood. Even after several episodes of heavy pounding, there was no answer. He backed away a step. To each side of the door were bricked-up windows, and beyond them more alcoves in the stone wall. He moved to the next on his right and found another door, again without an exterior handle. He tried prying it open with his fingers but it wouldn't budge. The last door on die right had been plastered over. He returned to the second door and tentatively pushed at it with one hand, feeling the smooth rolls of the serpents beneath his fingers. It swung inward with a whining creak.

 

 

He looked behind him anxiously. He was still alone, unobserved, though he couldn't quite help wondering what might be hiding in the ruined vineyard.

 

 

With a stronger shove, the door swung all the way open, rebounding with a hollow thud from the wall. He stared into a dark hallway. Back-scattered morning light allowed him to see a couple of yards into the gloom. The walls were simple brickwork, without ornament or furniture. He advanced slowly. About fifteen feet in, the hall turned a corner, and a bar light slanted across the floor from that direction.

 

 

Michael peered around the comer. Beyond lay a large and exceedingly abandoned kitchen. He stepped forward gingerly, his feet displacing great wafts of felt-like dust. Yard-wide iron pots and brick-based stoves and ovens filled a chamber at least seventy feet long and sixty wide. Light shafted down through a long, narrow horizontal window about twelve feet above the floor on the opposite wall. Apparently the kitchen was in a.kind of basement; from the front it lay below ground level.

 

 

The hall through which he had entered flanked a brick enclosure which might have been a storage locker or refrigerator. A white-enameled metal door hung ajar on corroded hinges, revealing only darkness within.

 

 

On the south side of the kitchen a stairwell rose into more shadow. He crossed the cluttered floor between the iron-grilled stove and the enclosure, feet striking mounds of broken crockery and heavy, smaller pots beneath the smooth rivers of dust. He climbed the stair.

 

 

Swinging doors waited at the top, one knocked from its hinges and propped against the wall, the other kicked and splintered askew. He pushed the leaning door aside and stepped into a dining hall.

 

 

Three long dark wood tables filled about half the space, chairs upended neatly on the table edges. Beyond the tables, the carpet gave way to wooden parquet flooring. The room could have held a respectable-size ball, and stretched to the front of the house, where tall arched windows afforded a view of the rising sun. Morning light smeared silvery-gray across the table tops.

 

 

The room smelled of dust and a rather bitter tang of flowers. He looked to both sides and decided to try the broad door on the right.

 

 

That took him into an equally decrepit and impressive foyer, with modem-looking overstuffed couches spaced along the walls beneath more tall arched windows. A demolished grand piano cluttered a small stage like a crushed beetle. At the opposite end of the foyer was an immense staircase, transplanted from a castle or luxury liner, with gold banisters mounted on turned pillars of black wood. He looked up. A balustrade ran from the staircase across the length of an upper landing.

 

 

"Ne there! Hoy ac!"

 

 

The largest woman he had ever seen leaned over the stone and metal railing of the balustrade, directly above him. She pulled back. The creak of the floor allowed him to trace her footsteps as she approached the stairs. Through the rails her shapeless body appeared to bulk in at least five hundred pounds; she stood six and a half feet tall, and her arms were thick as hams and like in shape, covered by the long sleeves of a black caftan. Her face was little more than eyes and mouth poked into white dough, topped with well-kept long black hair.

 

 

"Hello," he said, his voice cracking.

 

 

She paused at the top of the staircase and thumped her palm on the railing. "Hel-lo," she repeated, her tiny eyes growing almost imperceptibly larger. He couldn't decide whether to stay or run. "Antros. You're human. Where in hell did you come from?"

 

 

He pointed to the rear of the house. "Outside. The vineyard gate."

 

 

"You couldn't have come that way," the woman said, her voice deepening. "It's locked."

 

 

He took the key-holder from his pants pocket and held it up. "I used this."

 

 

"A key!" She made her way down the stairs slowly, taking each step with great care, as well she should have. If she fell, she was heavy enough to kill herself and bring the staircase down with her. "Who gave that to you?"

 

 

Michael didn't answer.

 

 

"Who gave that to you?"

 

 

"Mr. Waltiri," he said in a small voice.

 

 

"Waltiri, Waltiri." She reached the bottom and waddled slowly toward him, her arms describing archs with each step to avoid the span of her hips. "Nobody comes here," she said, vibrating to a slow stop a few feet from Michael. "You speak Cascar or Nerb?"

 

 

He shook his head, not understanding.

 

 

"Only English?"

 

 

"I speak a little French," he said. 'Took two years in high school. And some Spanish."

 

 

She tittered, then abruptly broke into a loud, high, sad cackle. "French, Spanish. You're new. Definitely new."

 

 

He couldn't argue with that. "Where am I?"

 

 

"When did you get here?" she countered.

 

 

"About half an hour ago, I think."

 

 

"What time was it when you left?"

 

 

"Left where?"

 

 

"Your home, boy," she said, some of the gravel tone returning.

 

 

"About one in the morning."

 

 

"You don't know where you are, or who I am?"

 

 

He shook his head. A slow anger grew alongside his fear.

 

 

"My name," the huge, corpulent woman said, "is Lamia. Yours?" She lifted one arm and pointed a surprisingly delicate finger at him.

 

 

"Michael," he said.

 

 

"What did you bring with you?"

 

 

He held out his arms. "My clothes, I guess. The key."

 

 

"What's that in your coat pocket?"

 

 

"A book."

 

 

She nodded as best she could; her head was almost immobile on the column of her neck. The effort buried her chin in flesh. "Mr. Waltiri sent you. Where is he?"

 

 

"He's dead."

 

 

She cackled again, as if that was something ridiculous. "And so am I. Dead as this house, dead as a million dreams!" Her laughter scattered off the walls and ceilings like a flight of desperate birds. "Can you go back?"

 

 

"I don't know," he said. "I want to."

 

 

"You want to. You come here, and you want to go back. Don't you know how?"

 

 

He shook his head.

 

 

"Then you're dead, too. You're stuck here. Well, at least you have company. But you must leave this house. Nobody stays here come night."

 

 

By this time he was trembling, and angry at himself for being afraid. It was all made worse by the way the woman stared at him, saying nothing. "Well," she said finally. "You'll learn soon enough. You'll return to this house tomorrow morning."

 

 

"It's only morning now," Michael said.

 

 

"And you'll need the rest of the day to straighten out your situation. Come with me."

 

 

She walked around the staircase and opened a large door at the front of the house. He followed her shimmying form down a long flight of stone steps to a rocky field, then across a narrow path to a dirt road which wound its way through more low, treeless hills.

 

 

"There's a town - a human town - about three miles up this road, beyond the field and over a bridge. Go there quickly. Don't loiter. There are those who have no great love for humans. There's a very ramshackle hotel in town, bed and board; you'll have to work for your keep. They stick together in the town. They have to. Go there, tell them Lamia wants you put up. Tell them you'll work." She stared at the book bulging his jacket pocket. "Are you a student?" she asked.

 

 

"I guess so," he said.

 

 

"Hide the book. Full morning tomorrow, come back and we'll talk."

 

 

She turned without waiting for any reaction and labored up the steps to the door, shutting it behind her. Michael looked this way and that, trying to squeeze meaning out of the barren hills, ruined old house and rocky front yard.

 

 

It was all quite real. He wasn't dreaming.

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

Michael had not reckoned with feeling scared, being hungry, or facing the acid realization that he had no idea what to do. He had nothing to fall back on, no reasonable guide; he had only Lamia's words. Lamia herself, whatever she had to say, was hardly reassuring. Her brusqueness and her almost certain insanity made Michael all the more desperate to find a way home. He decided to try the gate again, to climb over it if need be; perhaps the river and the countryside beyond the gate were illusory. Perhaps he could just jump and find himself back in the alley.

 

 

Back with the figure in the flounced dress and broad hat.

 

 

That thought stopped him halfway across the field, behind the ruined mansion. Fists clenched, he turned and trudged back between the dead vines and over the rocks and clods. He was on the dirt road again, following Lamia's directions, when he heard hooves pounding. A group of five horses and riders galloped along about half a mile behind him, raising a small plume of dust. He hid behind a boulder and watched.

 

 

The riders approached the narrow path leading to the house and slowed to confer with each other. Michael had never seen horses or men like them. The horses were large and lean, so tightly muscled they looked as if they had been flayed. They were a uniform mottled gray, all but one, a dazzling golden palomino.

 

 

The men were tall and thin, with a spectral quality most strikingly evident in their faces. All of them had reddish blond hair, long narrow jaws without beards and square large eyes beneath formidable brows. Their clothing was pearly gray, differing from the horses' coloration only in the way it diffracted die early morning sunlight.

 

 

Done conferring, they took the path to the house and dismounted near the steps. The horses kicked at clods of dirt as their masters entered the house without knocking.

 

 

Michael squinted from his awkward advantage. He decided it would be best for him to leave the area and get to the village as quickly as possible.

 

 

The walk took about forty-five minutes. All the way, he kept glancing over his shoulder to make sure the riders weren't coming up behind him.

 

 

His wristwatch wasn't working, he noticed; the sweep-second hand was motionless. The dial read one-sixteen. But he could judge time by his growing hunger.

 

 

The village first appeared as an irregular line of brown blocks set against the horizon. The closer he approached, the less impressed he was. The outskirts consisted of small mud-brick houses with thick thatched-straw roofs rising to conical peaks. Tiny columns of smoke crept up from most of the houses. In the still air, the smoke gradually settled into a thin, ground-hugging haze. Beyond the mud-brick houses, larger two-story buildings connected by stone walls presented a unified dreary green-brown exterior.

 

 

A low unguarded gate led through the walls into the village proper. He walked between the gateposts, kicking up wisps of moist smoke and ground fog. A sign neatly painted on the gate, arch, facing toward the village rather than out, proclaimed:

 

 

EUTERPE

 

 

Glorious Capital of the Pact Lands

 

 

A few people were about in the mid-morning, women carrying baskets and men standing and talking. They all stared at Michael as he passed. He stuck his hands firmly into his pants pockets and returned their stares with furtive glances. The women wore pants or brown, sack-like dresses. The men were dressed in dust-colored pants and dirty tan shirts. Some walked from house to house carrying bundles of dried reeds.

 

 

To Michael's discomfort, he was attracting a lot of attention, though nobody advanced to speak to him. The place had a prison's atmosphere, quiet and too orderly, with an undercurrent of tension.

 

 

He looked for a sign to show him where the hotel was. There were no signs. Finally he gathered up courage and approached a pale round-faced man with thinning black hair, who stood by a wicker crate to one side of the narrow stone-paved street.

 

 

"Excuse me," Michael said. The man regarded him with listless curiosity. "Can you tell me where the hotel is?"

 

 

The man smiled and nodded, then began speaking swiftly in a language Michael couldn't understand. Michael shook his head and the man made a few motions in the proper direction, lifting his eyebrows.

 

 

"Thanks," Michael said. Luckily, the hotel was nearby and rather obvious; it was the only place that smelled good. There was no sign in front, but the building was slightly more elegant than its neighbors, with a pretense of mud bas-relief ornament over the door and windows. The odor of baking bread poured from the first floor windows in billows. Michael paused, salivating, then walked up the front steps and entered the small lobby.

 

 

A short, bulky man wearing a gray kepi and coveralls sat behind the counter. All the furniture was made of woven wicker or - like the counter - of small close-fitting bricks. The carpets in the lobby and hall were thin and worn, and the coarse cloth upholstery on a wicker couch placed near the door was tattered, barbed with feathers and fibers.

 

 

"Lamia told me to come here," Michael said.

 

 

"Did she now?" the man asked, his gaze fixed on Michael's chest. He seemed unwilling to admit anyone was taller than he.

 

 

"You speak English," Michael said. The man agreed with a curt nod. "She said I should work for some food and be put up this evening. I should return to see her tomorrow."

 

 

"Did she now?" he repeated.

 

 

"She wants me to work."

 

 

"Ah." The man turned to look at the rack of keys mounted behind the counter - baked clay keys, bulky and silly-looking. "Lamia." He didn't sound pleased. He wrapped his fingers around a key but didn't remove it from the hook. He stared again at Michael's chest. Michael leaned over until the man could look into his face, and the man beamed a broad smile. "What kind of work?"

 

 

"I. anything, I guess."

 

 

"Lamia." He removed the key and looked at it longingly.

 

 

"She never sent anyone here before. You a friend?"

 

 

"I don't know," Michael said.

 

 

"Then why's she looking after you?" the man went on, as if Michael had answered in the negative.

 

 

"I don't know much of anything," Michael said.

 

 

"Then you're new." He stated it nonchalantly, then frowned and peered at Michael's face more closely. "By God, you're new! How'd you meet Lamia if you're new? But-" He lifted his hand and shook his head. "No questions. You are under her charge, or you wouldn't say so, believe me. Let it stand at that. Since you're new, you'll go in with the teacher." He came around the counter. "Double up. It's a small room and my wife'll work the skin off your fingers and the kink out of your arms. You'll eat plain like the rest of us." He chuckled. "There isn't anything fancy, believe me. This place is quiet at night, you'll sleep on cotton-grass, and when the alarm rings-"

 

 

At that instant, a bell clanged loudly. The sound seemed to issue from all directions. "My name," the stout man said, "is Brecker, and we'll be going downstairs now. That's the alarm. Risky!"

 

 

Michael thought he was assessing the situation, but he called out, "Risky!" again and a thin worried-looking woman about the same age as Brecker leaped down the stairs, her bandy legs taking them three at a time.

 

 

"I heard," she said. Michael looked through the lobby's smoky windows and saw people hurrying about in the streets.. "It's Wickmaster Alyons and his coursers again. They must have been at the Isomage's house, and now they're here." Michael followed them down stone steps into a dirt-walled cellar. They squatted by the wall closest to the steps, among large bottles of brown liquid and straw baskets filled with potatoes. Brecker patted the floor beside him and Michael sat.

 

 

"Why the alarm?" Michael asked.

 

 

Risky tossed her lank hair and spat into a corner. "The riding of the noble Sidhe against the race of man," she said, her voice thick with sarcasm. She appraised Michael with a cool eye. "You're new," she said. "Where's Savarin?"

 

 

"Probably watching them from upstairs," Brecker said. "As usual."

 

 

'Even with the cellar door shut, Michael heard the sharp clatter of hooves. There was a high-pitched keening, and then a voice resonant and hypnotic.

 

 

"Hoy ac! Meat-eaters, followers of the Serpent! Praise Adonna, or we unleash your babes and return the Pact Lands to dust and desert!"

 

 

Breaker shuddered and Risky's lips became thin and white. The hooves clattered off, and moments later bells rang again throughout the town.

 

 

"Welcome to Euterpe," Risky said to Michael as she threw open the cellar door and scrambled up the steps. Brecker followed, motioning for Michael to return with them to the first floor.

 

 

"Tomorrow," Brecker told Risky, "our new lodger goes back to the Isomage's house, to Lamia. He's new, you know."

 

 

"He's much too young to be anything else," Risky said. "And he's not like the rest of us. Not if she wants him." That said, she seemed to make an effort to put everything from her mind. "Show him the double."

 

 

"My thought, too. With Savarin."

 

 

"Might as well. There's a lot for him to learn."

 

 

The double on the second floor was at the end of an ill-lit corridor. The room was small, paneled in thin strips of gray pasteboard. The floor was tiled with mica and flaked under his shoes. There were two beds in the narrow space, stacked bunk-style, and a washbasin on a flimsy stand made of sticks and wicker. At least there were no insects he could see.

 

 

As he stood in the doorway, wondering who Savarin was, Risky came up behind him and argued with Brecker over what work he was to do. Brecker gave Michael a nervous glance and took Risky down the corridor, where they whispered.

 

 

Michael caught most of the conversation despite their precautions.

 

 

"If he's under Lamia's protection, should we work him at all?" Brecker asked.

 

 

"Did she forbid it? I say, work him. We can always use hands."

 

 

"Yes, but he's different from the rest of us-"

 

 

"Only because he came from the Isomage's house."

 

 

"And shouldn't that mean something?"

 

 

"Lamia doesn't scare me," Risky said. "Now, if Alyons brought him in under his arm and said, 'Show him a good time,' maybe then we'd spare him some labor."

 

 

That seemed to settle it. Risky showed him the washroom-"Modern, one upstairs and one down," she said, but no running water and no plumbing - and took him upstairs. He began by wringing fresh-washed linens through stone mangle in a laundry room behind the kitchen. As he turned the handle and fed in sheets and pillow casings, he munched on a piece of bread.

 

 

"No crumbs on the sheets," Risky told him, handing him a glass of thin milk. "You look hungry."

 

 

"Starved," Michael said.

 

 

"Well, don't eat too much. We'll just take it out in more work."

 

 

Carrying dried sheets upstairs, Michael noticed that only two rooms were occupied out of the twelve in the building; the double he shared with the unknown Savarin, and the largest, a suite. "We don't go in the suite but once a week," Risky explained.

 

 

"Who's in it?"

 

 

"Hungry and curious. Hungry and curious. Takes new ones a while to learn how the land lies, doesn't it?" She shook her head. "You'll meet him this evening. Brecker's already planning a gathering."

 

 

In the hotel's service court, he was put to chopping sticks - or rather making the attempt. He raised blisters quickly on both hands and felt miserable. He had never enjoyed hard physical labor. As he swung and missed, swung and missed, swung and splintered, swung and finally split a bundle of sticks cleanly, he wanted more than anything to be home again, in bed with a book on his lap and a ginger ale on his nightstand.

 

 

By dusk - which came somewhat early, he thought - he had cut thirteen bundles of sticks into sizes that would fit in the hotel stove. Brecker inspected the small pile and shook his head. He stared at Michael's chest as he said, "No doubt you'll do better later. If you get to stay here. But never mind. There's the meeting tonight." His face took on a contented expression and he winked. "Word gets around. You're good for the business, tonight at least."

 

 

They allowed Michael a half-hour to clean up for dinner. Having eaten only the bread and drunk two glasses of the translucent bluish milk, he was ravenous again. He went to his assigned room and lay on the lower of the two bunks for a moment, eyes closed, too tired to really want to eat and too hungry to nap. He washed his blistered hands in the basin of water and picked at a splinter beneath his fingernail. A pungent herbal smell came from the basin. Michael sniffed the soap - a fatty, grainy bar with no odor at all - and wiped his hands on a rag. The odor departed rapidly.

 

 

He removed his shirt and wiped himself from the waist up with a damp cloth, then used the primitive facilities in the lavatory at the end of the hall. He suspected he would carry the slops bucket downstairs the next day, unless___

 

 

What? Unless his talk with Lamia went well? What would she do besides talk to him, and what was her connection with the riders, the Shee as Risky called them?

 

 

He was too exhausted to really be curious. He descended the stairs to dinner with drooping eyelids and sat at the smooth-worn stone-top table next to Brecker.

 

 

Night had fallen and the table was lit by dozens of tallow candles stuck in holders before each seat. There were twelve seats, each filled, and their occupants - men and women alike - regarded Michael with intense interest whenever his head was turned.

 

 

Michael sat as straight as he could, trying to be dignified and not fall asleep. As a bowl of vegetable soup was carried out by Risky, Brecker stood and raised a cup of watered brown ale. "Patrons and matrons," he began. "We have among us this evening a newcomer. His name is Michael, and he's young, as you see; the youngest I've ever met in the Realm. Let us welcome him."

 

 

Men and women raised their cups and shouted in a bewildering array of tongues, "Cheers!"

 

 

"Skaal!"

 

 

"Slainte!"

 

 

"Zum Wohl!"

 

 

"Here's to Michael!" and so on, more than he could separate out. He lifted his cup to them. "Thank you," he murmured.

 

 

"Now eat," Risky said. When the soup was consumed, she removed the bowl to the kitchen and brought in the next from the stove. This was a pot filled with cabbage and carrots and large brown beans, as well as a vegetable Michael had never seen before - something resembling a brown-skinned cucumber with a triangular cross-section. There was no meat.

 

 

His eyelids drooped and he caught himself just in time to hear, ". so you see, lad, we're not in the best situation here." This from the tall, strong-looking fellow with the full salt-and-pepper beard sitting across and one chair left of him.

 

 

"Huh? I mean, sorry?" Michael said blinking.

 

 

"I say, the town is not in the best of circumstances. Ever since the Isomage lost his war, we've been confined to the Pact Lands in the middle of the Blasted Plain. No children, of course-"

 

 

The plump auburn-haired woman next to him shushed him and rolled her eyes. "Except," he continued, giving her a harsh look, "And you'll pardon the indiscretion, but the lad must know his circumstances-"

 

 

At this several people called out, "And where's Savarin?"

 

 

"He should be the one tutoring the lad," the auburn-haired woman said.

 

 

"The lad," the man pushed on, "must know that there are children of a sort, to remind us of our peril. They reside in the Yard at the center of Euterpe." The auburn-haired woman crossed herself and bowed her head, moving her lips. "And there's not an instrument in the entire land to play."

 

 

"Play?" Michael asked. The group looked at each other around the table.

 

 

"Music, you know," Brecker said.

 

 

"Music," Michael repeated, still puzzled.

 

 

"Lad," the strong fellow said, standing, "you mean to say you don't play an instrument?"

 

 

"I don't."

 

 

"You don't know music?"

 

 

"I like to listen," Michael said, feeling fresh alarm at their amazement. More glances were exchanged around the table. Brecker looked uncomfortable.

 

 

"Boy, are you telling us it wasn't music brought you here?"

 

 

"I don't think it was," Michael said.

 

 

The auburn-haired woman gave a shuddering moan and backed her chair away from the table. Several others did the same. "Then how did you come here?" she asked, no longer looking at him directly.

 

 

"He's not a Child, is he?" a stout woman at the end of the table wailed. Her male companion took hold of her arm and urged her back into the seat. "Obviously not," he said. "We know the children. His face is good."

 

 

"How did you get here, then?"

 

 

Michael haltingly gave an account of Waltiri, the note, Clarkham's house and the crossing over. For some reason - perhaps his weariness - he didn't mention the figure in the flounced dress. The gathering nodded in unison when he was done.

 

 

"That," said the strong man, "is a most unusual path. I've never heard of it."

 

 

"No doubt Lamia could tell us more," someone said, Michael couldn't see whom.

 

 

"I know," said a deep, gruff voice. The crowd fell silent. Brecker nudged Michael and pointed out a man seated across from them and to the right. "The occupant of the suite," he said.

 

 

The man was older than the others, none of whom seemed more than forty or forty-five. His hair was a thin white cap on his head and his almost white face carried an expression of bitter indifference. His pale blue eyes searched from face to astonished face. "He never says anything," Brecker said in a whisper.

 

 

"Boy," the man said, standing, "my name is Frederick Wolfer. Do you know of me?"

 

 

Michael shook his head. The man wore a worn formal black suit. The tuxedo was yellowed and torn and the elbows of the jacket had been patched over with ill-matched gray cloth. "Did Arno Waltiri mention me?"

 

 

"No," Michael said.

 

 

"He sent me here," Wolfer said, his jaw working. He raised an unsteady hand. "He sent a man already old into a land that doesn't tolerate the old. Fortunately, I have fallen in with good people." A murmur went around the table. "Fortunately, I have withstood the rigors of war, of Clarkham's attempt to build an empire, and the internment of all of us here in the Pact Lands. All of that." He paused and looked around the ceiling, as if he might find the proper words floating up there. "Because on a summer night, who knows how many decades ago, I went to a concert and listened to a piece of music, music written by Arno Waltiri. I know the name, yes indeed. I am the only one left alive of those who were transported by his music. The only one. Boy, you must understand our circumstances. All of us here, with the exception of you, all the humans in the Realm, or Sidhedark, or Faerie Shadow, or whatever you wish to call this accursed place - we are here because music transported us."

 

 

"Enchanted," said the auburn-haired woman.

 

 

"Crossed us over," said a plump, black-haired man.

 

 

"Me, when I played trumpet," said the strong fellow.

 

 

"And I, piano," said another.

 

 

Wolfer held up his hand to stop the voices. "I was not a musician. I was a critic of music. I have always believed that Waltiri took his vengeance on me. by setting me among musicians, forever and ever."

 

 

"We loved music," Brecker said. "We added something to human music which it does not ordinarily have-"

 

 

"Except for Waltiri's concerto," Wolfer interjected.

 

 

"We took from ourselves, and made it as the Sidhe have played it for thousands of years, made it whole. And crossed over. All of us love music."

 

 

"And here," Risky said, "there is none."

 

 

"The Sidhe say their Realm is music," the strong man said, "but not for us."

 

 

"Ask Lamia why you're here," Risky suggested.

 

 

"And be careful of that woman, boy," Wolfer said, seating himself with painful slowness. "Be very careful indeed."

 

 

Chapter Four

 

 

Michael barely remembered stumbling up to the room after dinner, and he had no memory at all of falling asleep. But he awoke at an unknown hour, in complete darkness, to hear the room door open, footsteps and the clump of something heavy being put down on the mica flooring.

 

 

My roommate, he thought. Savarin. He dozed off again with a vague wonder as to what sort of Queequeg the Realm could conjure.

 

 

At dawn, his eyes flew open and he stared up at the bulges between the slats on the bunk above. He rolled over beneath the scratchy covers and stared at a trunk over against one wall, beside the washstand. The trunk was made of the ubiquitous wicker, equipped with heavy cloth straps.

 

 

He hadn't dreamed at all during the night. Sleep had excavated a pit in his life, a time when he might as well have been dead. Nevertheless, he felt rested. He was contemplating getting out of bed when someone knocked on the door. Simultaneously, a bushy-haired head peered over the edge of the top bunk.

 

 

"Lights up," Risky said behind the door. He heard her go down the hall.

 

 

"Good morning," said Michael's roommate. He was about forty, with graying brown hair and large bright eyes. His nose was pronounced and his chin withdrawn, set on a thin neck with almost no Adam's apple.

 

 

"Good morning," Michael said.

 

 

"Ah, American?" the man asked. Michael nodded. "My name is Henrik Savarin. You're in my bunk."

 

 

"Michael Perrin. I'm sorry."

 

 

"From?"

 

 

"Los Angeles."

 

 

Savarin nimbly stepped down the bunk ladder and landed on the floor with a plop. He had slept in his brown pants and loose fitting shirt, and had wrapped his feet in felt tied with lengths of rope.

 

 

"Short blanket on top," he explained. He untied the knots in the ropes and pulled off the felt, then slipped his feet into canvas shoes without socks. "Musician?"

 

 

Michael shook his head. "Student, I suppose."

 

 

"A scholar!" Savarin grinned and slid his palms down his pants legs in an effort to remove wrinkles. "In a land full of those crazy about music, a scholar like myself." He held out his hand. "Pleased to acquaint with you."

 

 

Michael shook Savarin's hand. "I'm not really a scholar," he said.

 

 

"They pry, you know," Savarin said, nodding at the closed door. "Myself, I regard it as most impolite to pry. So no questions for now. But." He raised his hand and smiled again. "I'll tell you. I study the people here, I study the Sidhe and their languages, and I sometimes teach the new ones. In my day I taught music, but only played a piano poorly. Still, music caught me. I crossed, as they say."

 

 

Michael dressed quickly and followed Savarin downstairs into the dining room. The morning sun revealed that the brick walls were covered with faded hand-painted flowers, arranged in decorative rows in imitation of wallpaper. The dinner of the night before had been cleared without a trace. Only Savarin, Michael and the old man Wolfer were in the dining room. Wolfer ignored them. He sat at his own small table near a window and ate his porridge a spoonful every thirty seconds or so, contemplating the indirect morning light with raised eyebrows.

 

 

Savarin held his spoon on the table upright in one fist as Risky dropped a starchy sphere of porridge into his bowl, then poured thin milk over it from a clay pitcher. She did the same for Michael. The porridge smelled faintly of horse corral, but it didn't taste bad.

 

 

"Lamia wants you this morning," she reminded Michael before returning to the kitchen. Her tone was aloof, as if he were no longer a curiosity or an asset to the inn, and therefore no longer counted for much.

 

 

Savarin grinned at Michael and cocked his head to one side. "You have an acquaintance with the large woman at the Iso-mage's house?"

 

 

"That's the way I came here," he said. Savarin stopped eating.

 

 

"I'd heard the rumor," he said, frowning. "Most unusual. From the house, you mean?"

 

 

"From the gate in the back."

 

 

"Most unusual indeed." Savarin said nothing more until Risky came to take the empty bowls. She removed the half-full bowl from under Wolfer's spoon and carried it away, whistling tunelessly.

 

 

"Did you know," Savarin said, his voice loud for Risky's benefit, "that the Sidhe feel little affection for humans, one of their many reasons, because we often whistle, as our hostess does this moment?"

 

 

Michael shook his head. "Who are the Shee?"

 

 

"Alyons and his coursers, among many others. The masters of the Realm. Whistling irritates them greatly. Any human music. Very sensitive. I believe if you had whistled your way across a Faerie path when they lived on Earth, they would just as soon have flattened you with barrow stones as said good night. Angry about spoliation of their art, you see."

 

 

Michael nodded. "Who is Lamia?"

 

 

Savarin shrugged. "You know more perhaps than I. A large woman who lives in the Isomage's house."

 

 

"Who is the Isomage?"

 

 

"A sorcerer. He angered the Sidhe far more than someone who simply whistles." Savarin smiled. Risky returned with a pitcher of water, which she poured into clay mugs, setting one before Wolfer, one before Savarin, and one before Michael. Savarin tsked her and shook a finger. "The tune," he said. "Bad luck."

 

 

Risky agreed with a nod. "Bad habit," she said.

 

 

"The Shee sound like they-" Michael began, but Savarin interrupted.

 

 

"Pronounce it correctly. It's spelled S-I-D-H-E, from the ancient Gaelic - or rather, the ancients Gaels heard them calling themselves by that name. They pronounce it as a cross between 'Shee' and 'Sthee.'"

 

 

"Yes," Michael said.

 

 

"Try it."

 

 

He tried it. "The Shthee-"

 

 

"Close. Try again."

 

 

"The Sidhe-"

 

 

"That's it."

 

 

"- sound like they're pretty cruel."

 

 

"And difficult. But we do, after all, intrude, and I've been told they came to the Realm to escape humanity. There's been enmity between us for a long time."

 

 

"But it doesn't seem to me that anyone in Euterpe wanted to come here."

 

 

"All the worse, no? Do you speak German?"

 

 

"No."

 

 

Savarin smiled valiantly, but it was obvious he was disappointed. "So odd," he said. "Only one or two German-speakers in the Realm, and yet Germany was so advanced, musically." He leaned across the table. "So you don't know much about Lamia?"

 

 

Michael shook his head.

 

 

"Learn as much as you can. Carefully. I hear she has a temper. And when - if - you come back, tell me."

 

 

"If?"

 

 

Savarin waved the word away. "You'll return. I have a feeling about you. you're most unusual."

 

 

Michael left the hotel a few minutes later. Brecker followed him into the street and handed him a frayed cloth bag with a piece of bread in it. "I hear Lamia's larder is empty. usually," he said. "Good luck."

 

 

Michael went back down the road he had taken the day before, his heart pounding and his hands cold. A small crowd gathered at the village outskirts to watch him leave.

 

 

He neither saw nor met any Sidhe riders. He saw nothing moving, in fact; neither animals on the ground nor birds in the air. The sky was a pale enameled blue above, and on the horizon greenish-brown mixed with patches of orange, similar to a layer of smog. The sun was warm but not very hot, not very bright in fact - he could look at it almost indefinitely without hurting his eyes.

 

 

Yard by yard he returned to the house, feeling as though he were enclosed in a transparent bowl that prevented the Realm from reaching in and making itself real to him, and likewise prevented his thoughts from reaching out to encompass what he saw.

 

 

Near the path leading to the house, his vision narrowed. He focused on the front door, which was half-open as if he were expected. He walked down the path.

 

 

Pausing on the porch, he took a deep breath. The bowl seemed to keep even the air from his lungs. He breathed again, with little better result.

 

 

His room. His books. Saturday afternoon movies on TV. Mother and Father. Golda Waltiri with a tear running down her cheek and more swelling up in her eyes. Michael felt hollow, full of echoes.

 

 

He heard horses coming. The door opened and a thick arm reached out to grab him, pulling him inside before he could react. Lamia's grip was painfully strong. She let him go, then took hold of his coat collar and lifted him to her head level, looking at him intensely through her tiny eyes. "Into the closet!" she whispered harshly. She half-dragged, half-pulled him across the floor and opened a narrow closet door behind the grand staircase, thrusting him inside. He fell back against soft dusty things and tried to hold back tears, shaking so hard his teeth chattered.

 

 

Through the closet door, he heard footsteps. The front door shut with a click, as if just enough energy had been expended to bring it completely closed, and no more.

 

 

He heard Sidhe voices again, commanding and melodic, speaking in a completely unfamiliar language. Lamia, her tone softened, subservient, replied in English. "I've felt nothing." Another voice continued at some length, fluid and high-pitched but distinctively masculine.

 

 

"No one's been here, no one's passed through," Lamia said. "I tell you, I felt nothing. I don't care what's happening in town. They're all fools, you know that better than I."

 

 

Michael reached out in the darkness to get leverage to stand. His hand touched rough fabric, then something soft and smooth which he couldn't identify, like leather but thinner and supple as silk.

 

 

The Sidhe voices took on a snake-like threatening tone.

 

 

"I remain at my station, I watch," Lamia said. "You force me to stay here, you keep my sister at the gates; we are your slaves. How can we defy you?"

 

 

Michael picked out one word in a rider's response: Clark-ham.

 

 

"He has not come here," Lamia said. That ended the conversation. The front door swung open and a sound resembling wind announced the rider's exit. Michael felt for a doorknob. There was none.

 

 

Greg Sear

 

 

Lamia opened the closet. "Come out," she said. He blinked and took a step forward, tripping over something soft and tough. Before he could look back in the closet and see what it contained, she whirled him around and slammed the door shut. "They'll raid the town tonight, looking for somebody. They won't raid Halftown; they never do. So I'm sending you there. First, though, listen to me and answer some questions."

 

 

Michael shrugged out from under her hand and backed away. "I have questions, too," he said.

 

 

"By what right? You've come here, you should know as much as there is to know."

 

 

"But / don't!" His voice ended in a high wail of frustration. The tears came freely now. "I don't know anything, not even where I am!"

 

 

"In Sidhedark," Lamia said, turning from him. "Come with me," she continued, more gently. "In the Faerie Shadow. The Realm. You are no longer on Earth."

 

 

"I've been told that. But where is this place?"

 

 

"Not on Earth," Lamia repeated. She walked ahead, her bulk rippling.

 

 

"Can I go back?" he shouted after her.

 

 

"Not this way. Perhaps not at all."

 

 

Suddenly deflated, Michael followed her down a broad hallway, into the burnt-out wing of the house.

 

 

Chapter Five

 

 

"Years ago, there was a war here," Lamia said. "The entire plain was scourged. The river turned to steam, the trees became serpents and crawled away, the land cracked like open wounds, revealing all of Adonna's past indiscretions, its abortions. And in the middle of it." She paused, swinging her thick arms to take in the ruined wing. "In the middle of it, this house stood alone. The Isomage lost everything, almost. But he escaped,'and he still had enough power to threaten them with great harm if they didn't make a pact with him. For their part, the Sidhe were to create a liveable territory within the Blasted Plain, and gather all humans here, all those who had crossed over and were being persecuted. The Sidhe were not to harm them, but would tend them. For his part, the Isomage would go far away and work no more magic in this part of the Realm." She turned her tiny eyes on him and Michael saw a gleam of defiance and strength that seemed out of place in the massive doughy face. She closed her eyes and hardly seemed human. "I was young then." She took a deep, quivering breath and let it out through her small, narrow nose with a low whistle.

 

 

They stopped by a long charred table with fragments of chairs scattered around it. In the rubble which covered the table, Michael could see glints of tarnished silver plates, bent and melted forks and knives, slumped metal cups and shattered glassware, all dusted with fine gray powder and chunks of wood and plaster. The smell of smoke was still thick in the air.

 

 

"Years ago. Ages," Lamia said. Moving one columnar leg at a time, slow and ponderous as an elephant, she swung around to face him and pointed with her quivering left hand in his general vicinity. "You crossed over with something powerful on your person. I know you did. Are you aware of it?"

 

 

Michael shook his head.

 

 

"You'll know what it is, soon. This is a strange place; take nothing for granted. And above all, obey." She growled the last word and advanced on him, stopping a yard away when he began to back up. "You still have a book. I told you to hide it. The Sidhe don't like human words, any more than they like human song. Why didn't you obey me?"

 

 

"I don't have anyplace safe to hide it."

 

 

"You doubt whether I should be obeyed?" Her voice was not any more menacing than usual, but he felt a tremor up his back nonetheless. He said nothing.

 

 

"I am the second guardian. Did you meet the first?"

 

 

"I don't know."

 

 

"You would know, my boy. Believe me, you would know."

 

 

He thought of the figure in the flounced dress. "I think so."

 

 

"Were you afraid of her?"

 

 

He nodded.

 

 

"You're less afraid of me, that's obvious. And yet." She smiled, the curve of her mouth barely shifting the great flaps of her cheeks and jowls. "I am the one who controls the other. Is that clear?"

 

 

"If nobody ever comes this way, why are you here?" Michael asked. Lamia tittered, holding one hand over her mouth and pretending coyness in a way that made his stomach uneasy.

 

 

"Now," she said. "There are a number of things you must do. You're new, you can't know half what it takes to simply stay alive. And believe me, you don't want to die here. To keep alive, you'll have to be trained."

 

 

"I don't want to stay. I want to go back." He clenched his hands. He still couldn't believe the situation was irreversible.

 

 

'To go back, you must move ahead," Lamia said. "There's only one person with the power to send you back. He's a great distance from here, and to reach him you'll make an arduous journey. That's why you must be trained. Do you understand me now?" She leaned over and peered at him. "Or are you stupid as well as young?" "I'm not stupid," Michael said.

 

 

"Parts of the Realm are quite beautiful, though few humans cross the Blasted Plain to see them. The Sidhe appreciate beauty. They leave the ruins for humans."

 

 

"Are you human?" Michael asked.

 

 

Lamia's white skin purpled slightly. "Not now."

 

 

"Are you a Sidhe?"

 

 

"No." Her laugh was a deep grumble in her massive torso. "Now you have had your questions. Any more and-"

 

 

"If I don't ask questions, how will I learn?"

 

 

Before he could flinch, her arm struck out like a scorpion's tail and her hand slammed against the side of his face. He spun across the charred floor and fell into a mound of ashes, raising a cloud. She pushed through the cloud and grabbed him with both hands by the shoulders, lifting him clear and dangling him over the floor. Gentle, almost sweet, her voice reached him through the haze as if she were miles away.

 

 

"You'll go to Halftown. You'll take instruction from the Crane Women. Got that?"

 

 

"The hotel-"

 

 

She shook him once, making his bones pop. "You don't deserve the luxury. The Crane Women are called Nare, Spart and Coom. Tell me their names."

 

 

He couldn't remember.

 

 

"Again, then. Nare, Spart, and Coom."

 

 

"Nare, Spart."

 

 

"Coom."

 

 

"Coom."

 

 

"They're expecting you. They'll teach you how to survive. Maybe they'll teach you how to see and hear and remember, how to judge situations better. Think that's possible?" She held him with one hand and brushed him down with the other. Her touch was feverishly warm. She set him down near the table and looked up longingly at the burnt-out rafters.

 

 

"It was the middle of a banquet," she said. "They took us by surprise. We used to have parties here often. It was beautiful."

 

 

Michael tried to control his trembling but couldn't. He was terrified and furious. He wanted to kill her.

 

 

"Go," she said. "Tell the innkeeper and his wife that Lamia no longer needs their services. Take yourself over to Halftown. The Crane Women. What are their names?"

 

 

"Nare, Spart and Coom."

 

 

She grunted. "Go, before the Sidhe return."

 

 

He fled from the ruined wing, through the hall and across the entry to the front door. Book bouncing against his hip, he ran down the road to Euterpe until his lungs were about to burst. His face was streaked with tears of rage. He stopped by a cracked, glazed boulder and pounded on it until his hand bled. "God damn you, God damn you!"

 

 

"Better be quiet," the wind whispered. He jumped and whirled around. Nobody.

 

 

"Remember where you are."

 

 

He screamed. Something luffed his hair and he looked up. There, translucent as a spider's web, was a narrow and colorless face. It rotated and vanished.

 

 

Cupping his hands over his mouth, smearing blood on his chin, he stumbled and ran the rest of the way to Euterpe with little concern for his lungs or his legs.

 

 

Risky accepted his explanation with seeming indifference. Brecker nodded and accompanied him upstairs to the room. "You didn't come here with anything, so there's no luggage for you to pick up," he said. "But you can help me clean it." They swept the floor in silence. Michael was confused by the token labor.

 

 

"It's not my dirt," he said. "I've only been here one night."

 

 

"We all do our bit," Brecker said. "It's what keeps us going."

 

 

"Even when there's nothing to do?"

 

 

Brecker leaned on his straw broom. "Where'd you get that bruise?"

 

 

"Lamia hit me."

 

 

"Why?"

 

 

"I don't know why," Michael lied.

 

 

"For asking dumb questions, likely." Brecker resumed his sweeping. "It's a hard land, boy. Wherever you came from, it seems you led an easy life among reasonable people. Not here. Mistakes cost." He held a pan down for Michael to sweep dust and mica flakes into. "Mistakes cost dear."

 

 

Savarin was climbing the stairs as they descended. Michael passed him with a shrug. "Moving already?" Savarin asked, peering after them.

 

 

"To Halftown," Michael said.

 

 

"Might I accompany you?" Savarin asked. Michael shrugged again. "This could be most useful."

 

 

"The road to Halftown stretched to the east of Euterpe for two miles.

 

 

"We call it east, anyway," Savarin explained, walking beside Michael. Michael kept his hands in his coat pockets, one wrapped around the book of poems. "Where the sun rises, you know."

 

 

Michael said nothing, staring at the ground as they walked.

 

 

"Where did you get the bruise?"

 

 

"Lamia hit me for asking questions."

 

 

Savarin pursed his lips. 'Tough customer, Lamia, I hear. Never met her myself. What sort of questions?"

 

 

Michael looked suspiciously at Savarin. "What do you know?"

 

 

"You might have gathered by now that when new people show up, I am their tutor. I know as much as any human here, I suspect - with the exception of the Isomage, but he's been gone for decades now."

 

 

"Where the hell is this place?"

 

 

"Some people claim this place is hell, but it is not. I would venture a guess that it is the legendary land of Faerie, which some consider the place of the dead; but none of us trapped here died on Earth, so your guess is probably as good as mine. Ask Adonna. Adonna made it."

 

 

"Who's Adonna?"

 

 

"The genius loci, the god of the Realm. Most of the Sidhe pay obeisance to it. From what I gather, it's not in the same league as whatever made our universe. Much cruder." Savarin winked. "But be careful to whom you speak when you make such critiques."

 

 

"So we're in a different dimension?"

 

 

Savarin held up his hands and shook his head. "Not to be quoted. Scholar that I am, and as hard as I've researched, I'm still remarkably ignorant. Facts are hard to obtain. Frankly, I was hoping you could provide a few."

 

 

"Who are the Sidhe?"

 

 

"The mortal enemies of humankind," Savarin said, his face suddenly grim. "There are all kinds of Sidhe, not just the ones who bear a passing resemblance to us. There are the Sidhe of the Air, called Meteorals by some-"