"Is this the kind of stuff the mailman used to bring, Doc?" he asked.

"Guarantees... fire-damaged stock... Shown half actual size... No deposit required... Ask our area manager to call... Complete satisfaction..." Doc snorted and crumpled the brittle paper in his hands. "Satisfaction! By the three Kennedys but this makes me want to vomit, my friends. This was the peak of thousands of years of civilization! A free condom with every meal at this eatery! Offer conditional on being alive after world madness! Oh, these were such times, my brothers!"

The old man threw the paper to the floor, where Jak started to pick it up. "Good for starting fire, this. Break off some that stuff side stairs. Plenty good dry wood. Yeah, Ryan?"

"Yeah, Jak."

All of them were used to sleeping on bare earth, so the lack of beds didn't bother anyone. After some discussion, Ryan and J.B. agreed that there didn't seem to be any feeling of danger. But they'd set single guards.

Two hours each, just in case.

Like Trader said — nobody ever got dead from being careful.

The smoke drew them to the big, empty house at the end of the street.

It snaked through the frosty New England night, weaving out of the remnants of the township of Consequence, in among the silent sentinels of oak, pine and maple. To the hillside where they lived.

Where they'd always lived.

Where they had their twining caves of earth and stone, where they all existed together. Sometimes one would kill another. They were hunters. Stealthy, cunning in the arts of stalking and trapping.

They never came close to the tumbled buildings of Consequence, where their forefathers and mothers had lived an eternity ago. The buildings were linked with death in their memories, those who had any memories for anything but dung and death.

They coupled with any other of them who happened to be there. Many of them bore babies that never drew a breath.

But some of them lived.

Strangers never went to that area. Claggartville folk knew of the dark region and avoided it as though the plague dwelled there.

But now there were outlanders come to Consequence.

And they were in the big house.

It was the flavor of the smoke that brought them there.

Ryan Cawdor was on guard. He'd picked the duty from two till four in the morning, the time of the soul's dark night, when sleep is deepest, when sickly babies lose their frail hold on life and when the breathing of the elderly becomes slower and falters and fails.

When a sentry is at his most careless and nocturnal attacks can be most successful.

Ryan had the G-12 slung across his shoulders, the white silk scarf tucked down into the fur collar of his long coat, a barrier against the cold that filtered all through the old house. Only in what had once been the music room, where a merry fire blazed, was the chill held at bay. On the upper floors, with broken glass crunching under the soles of his combat boots, Ryan whistled beneath his teeth at the bitterness of the night.

The SIG-Sauer P-226 pistol was on his right hip, balanced by the weight of the panga with its eighteen-inch blade on the other hip. The salt on his skin had made the thong of the eye patch chafe his temple, and he eased a finger beneath it.

A pallid moon rode low on the horizon, smudged behind galloping banks of dark clouds. Once there was a fluttering of hail against the wooden walls of the house, but it passed quickly off toward the south. All around the mansion were only darkness and the still night.

Ryan picked his way among the sleeping figures, his shadow dancing madly off the farthest wall, between the curtainless windows. Lori was cradled, inevitably, in Doc's arms. Jak was curled up like a young puppy, his damp jacket still steaming slightly from the heat of the fire. The wood in the empty house was so old and dry under its layers of varnish that it burned quickly with a ferocious heat. Donfil was stretched out straight near the bolted door, arms by his sides, mirrored glasses reflecting the yellow flames. Krysty was asleep near the wall, where Ryan had been lying. As he stooped to look at her, her long sentient hair curled protectively about her calm face.

Though Ryan moved like a ghost, he woke J.B. The fedora hat was pushed back off the sallow forehead and his eyes glittered like specks of onyx.

"Anything moving?" he whispered.

Ryan shook his head. "Just me," he replied, pitching his voice low.

"My turn?"

Ryan turned the left cuff of the coat to check his chron. "Nope. I'll wake you in another fifteen minutes."

The Armorer slipped easily back into sleep.

Ryan decided on one last slow turn around the creaking floors and stairs of the old house. There was the big main staircase, and the narrow back flights, which brought him through what must have been the kitchens to the unlocked door to the music room.

The cramped top floor with its attics for servants seemed even colder. He checked one of the turret rooms again.

And felt something burst toward his face, slashing and tearing, hot blood on his cheek, near his ear.

"Fireblast!" he cried, staggering back and nearly falling, his right hand punching up at his assailant, feeling the satisfying jar of an impact with flesh. There was a muffled squawk of pain, then the flutterings of great wings.

He watched as the huge owl panicked its way through the empty frame of the window, flying off into the safety of the night.

"Bitching gaudy-whore bastard," he muttered, dabbing at his cut face with the back of his hand, feeling that the cut wasn't much more than a surface scratch.

But the shock had been real enough.

Ryan walked to the casement and leaned on the frame, sucking in the cold air, steadying his breathing and his nerves. He stared down into what had once been the back garden of the house, past some overgrown apple trees and currant bushes.

He saw movement, a flicker among the deep pools of shadow that surrounded the mansion.

After the false alarm of the owl, Ryan wasn't about to open fire and find he'd smeared a rabbit all over the ground.

As light as a big cat, Ryan picked his way down the main stairs, arriving in the entrance hall on the first floor. The door had an old stained-glass pattern to it, acanthus leaves, twined with some unidentifiable purple flowers. The moonlight came and went as the wind drove clouds across it, and the colors flowed and merged on the dusty floor. The only sound was the bright crackling of the dry wood in the hearth, beyond the locked door to Ryan's left.

His pistol was in his hand, a round ready under the hammer.

There were heavy iron bolts at top and bottom and a rusting sec chain near the broken mortise. Ryan opened the top bolt first, wincing at the thin screech of corroded metal. He stooped to release the lower bolt, checking that the chain was still in place, hooked over the hasp.

He waited a moment for the return of moonlight. When it came he turned the ornate brass handle and put his good eye to the gap, squinting out into the garden.

But his view was blocked.

The cold moon was to his right, free from clouds, making the porch almost as bright as day.

They were out there, ringing the front of the house, standing quite still, like a scattering of obscenely grotesque statues, born from the crazed imagination of some long-dead, demented gardener.

The nearest of them was actually on the porch, less than a yard away from the front door.

It wasn't possible to tell either the age or the sex of the mutie, who stood several shambling inches taller than seven feet, with shoulders broader than an M-16 rifle. Its hair straggled down either side of its face, lank and matted with glittering streaks of orange clay. One lidless eye, weeping a colorless liquid, was roughly in the middle of its left cheek. There was no nose, just a semicircular hole above the chin, fringed with tendrils of pale skin that trembled in time with the thing's breathing. Ryan saw that it didn't actually have a proper chin. The lower jaw was missing, and a row of jagged stumps protruded from the set-back upper jaw.