"I'm tired, and it's late. If that's all that?.."

"I can..." Rodriguez had a great coughing fit, doubled over the table, face buried in his hands. Ryan heard muffled laughter from near the door. He eased his chair around so that he could more comfortably keep an eye on the group, his hand falling by reflex to the butt of his pistol.

But most of his concentration was occupied in planning their escape from the ville. Out the window and over the roof, cutting through the damp alleyways into the open ground to the north. Move fast and in file, parallel to the road east. Watch for the patrols of sec men, and if possible avoid them. If not... chill them. It was vital that they get away to the island where the gateway was hidden before any pursuers got close to them.

Ryan was drawn from his thoughts by something the landlord was saying.

"What? I was thinking about something else. What did you say?"

"I said I felt a chill and was going to take a schooner of fine old port. The very best, Master Cawdor. Only a dozen bottles left now from the dead days beyond recall. Thou and thy harpooneer friend will join me, I trust?"

Ryan was still locked into the details of their escape, hardly even listening to the nervous chatter of Rodriguez. But Donfil waslistening.

"Not port wine, thanks. Too sweet. Too sickly. Drink for soft women. Have you nothing sharper to offer us?"

"Sharper? I have... Oh, I believe I take thy meaning. Sharper for a hand with a sharp iron. Is that not the manner of it? I have some drink made in the hills close by."

"In the hills?" Ryan asked, the thread of the conversation crossing with his own thoughts. "What of the hills?"

"A drink, Master Cawdor. Like to what is called 'whiskey' by some. Here it is made in stills in the old family ways. We call it 'usquebaugh.' It has the kick of a heart-struck whale."

Ryan was anxious to get upstairs and join the others. But the insistence of Rodriguez that they share a drink with him meant that a refusal could be more troublesome than acceptance. Knock back the usquebaugh quickly and then up and away.

"Very well."

"Something's not right," Donfil whispered, leaning across the table, covering his mouth with his hands. He watched Rodriguez mince away behind the bar, wringing his long, delicate fingers. The purple shirt seeming to glow in the half-light of the lamps.

The group of men from the Salvationwas completely silent, sitting with the air of men waiting for some great event to take place before their eyes.

"What?"

"Landlord's sweating like a hog. Man's scared out of his flesh."

"Why?"

The Indian shook his head. "Can't tell. Wish Krysty was here. She'd 'see' it. I can't do that like she can."

Ryan looked at Rodriguez as the landlord came back in, carrying a metal tray with three small glasses. Two were plain, and one had a faded red flower painted on it. All three glasses were three-quarters filled with amber liquid. As he placed the tray on the table, the glasses chinked and rattled.

"The usquebaugh, my masters. The water of life is what it's called. Gives a man great strength."

Donfil took one of the two glasses, and Ryan reached for the one with the flower. But Rodriguez stayed his hand. "That's my own, if thou mindest not. My lucky glass, as it were. Drink the crystal-clear spirits and part as friends."

Ryan thought that the moonshine liquor was a way off being clear as crystal. Milky as a chem cloud, more like.

"A stern wind, a short chase, a clean strike and the try-pots brimming," toasted the tavern keeper, downing his shot in a single gulp.

"A clean shaft and a swift passing for my brother the deer," Donfil responded, sinking the glass in a long swallow.

"A better tomorrow," Ryan said quietly, draining the glass of spirit.

It was fiery and bitter, scorching as it scalded its way down his throat. There was also a slightly dull, unpleasant aftertaste, like the cold ashes of a dead fire.

"Another?" Rodriguez asked.

"No," Ryan replied, feeling the liquor eventually find its way into the pit of his stomach, where it lay in a sullen, curdled pool.

"Can't say I care for this water of life." Donfil pulled a face at the flavor. "Hot enough, I'll give you that. But a taste like a vulture's claws. No more for me. I'm for bed. You, Ryan?"

"Yeah."

Ryan started to rise, but he suddenly felt sick. He blinked, putting a hand to his forehead. The light from the flickering oil lamps was dimmer than earlier in the evening, and his first thought was that the clam chowder might have gone off. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the whaling hands at the far table were all standing up, drawing cudgels and belaying pins from their belts, grinning to one another.

"Ryan," Donfil warned, his voice vibrating from a long way off.

"Gently, Master Cawdor. Gently..." said Jedediah Rodriguez.

Then Ryan knew. Knew with the bitterness of cold iron. And he carried that raging knowledge with him into the careening deeps of a great blackness.

Darkness, pierced by the needle point of a slim silver dagger; noises, soft and muffled, like the distant beating of a slack-skinned drum; movement, pitching and regular, like being in some giant's cradle; the smell, cramping and sickly, overlaid with the unmistakable stench of death and the sea.

Consciousness was slowly coming back to Ryan Cawdor.

The dreams seemed to have lasted for all of a dismal, bleak eternity. Swaying, pitching dreams that carried Ryan across gray mountain passes where his breath smoked like fire, through featureless swamps of turgid brown water, broken only by the gnarled roots of dead trees. Occasionally a bubble of foul gas would plop to the surface, leaving a tiny circle of frozen ripples in the scum.

Ryan had fallen by the wayside, and he had watched a parade of the hopeless and damned file past him with scarcely a glance in his direction. There had been a tall man in black, white collared, riding a great raw-boned stallion whose head was a fiery-eyed skull.

A pair of women, both of them slender and barefoot, swayed along the center of the dreary highway through a steady fall of drizzle. Their faces were covered in masks of black muslin, and they were singing in a foreign tongue. But Ryan could recognize the word "death" repeated again and again.

A child, with golden hair and the sweetest smile, was herding along a flock of bedraggled sheep, aided by two slavering hounds. If any of the bleating creatures attempted to delay, or go to the side of the track and nibble the rank grasses, the dogs would pounce on them, rip open their bellies and claw out greasy loops of intestines, letting them dangle in the dust.

And all the time, the little boy smiled innocently and whistled a merry tune.

"Ryan. You..."

Two ragged men, sitting on a slope, were both staring at Ryan as he swayed with exhaustion. They were in the shade of a stump of a tree bearing only a handful of curling leaves. One of the men had his boots unlaced, and the other was nibbling on the end of a scrawny carrot. Eventually they looked away from him and carried on with their own waiting.

"Come on, Ryan. Wake up... Come on.... Open your eye, brother."

In his shuddering nightmare, he was running along a darkened corridor in an old castle. Rotting tapestries hid gaping holes in the walls, which were covered in a shimmering veil of iridescent beetles. Behind him Ryan could hear the murmur of voices and the pounding of boots on stone flags. The tapestries blew across the passage in front of him, and he had to run through them, wincing as they slapped at his face.