The Fox had managed his escape with the help of the other leader of this group, a human woman named Rivi. She was not a sorcerer – Miriam claimed that Rivi hated sorcerers, although she got along well with a barmy like the Fox – but Rivi could still do things that struck Miriam as magic: reading minds, for example, or projecting her thoughts through the building to give orders to underlings.

«Oh,» said Hezekiah. «Rivi must be psionic.»

«What do you know about psionics?» I asked him.

«How do you think I teleport?» he replied. «I'm not a magician.»

«I thought you were.»

«Nope. It's all mind over matter.»

Hmm. If Hezekiah's mind could win that kind of contest, it substantially lowered my opinion of matter.

Miriam didn't know exactly what Rivi and the Fox were up to, but they wanted to find something that was buried in the dust a long time ago. The mysterious object had been unearthed once before, by an expedition under the leadership of Felice DeVail, Guvner Oonah's mother. The Fox had belonged to that expedition, along with members of many other Sigil factions; they had toured several planes including Dust, eventually jumping by accident into the middle of the Gray Wastes and finding themselves trapped between hostile armies in the Blood Wars raging there.

Most of the party had died in short order; the Fox had been battered by evil magics, and driven insane; but a few, including Felice, had escaped unscathed, dragging the Fox with them and eventually making their way back to Sigil. Naturally, the survivors had all reported these events to their factions, depositing personal accounts of the expedition in the various faction archives. Just as naturally, the Fox had set about stealing those accounts from faction headquarters the moment Rivi freed him. His eagerness to return here suggested that the long-ago expedition had found some kind of treasure in the Plane of Dust but hadn't taken it with them. Now, the Fox had come back to collect that treasure, using the information he had stolen from the factions.

Miriam's story introduced a dozen new puzzles about what was going on, but such questions could wait. At least we knew something about our opposition now: fire-wizard Fox, psionic Rivi, and an assortment of bashers from Sigil. There was only one other question in my mind, and I asked it. «If Petrov and his cronies captured some prisoners, where would he take them?»

«To Rivi,» Miriam answered immediately. «She can do things to people's minds. She can… change you. Back when she and the Fox were recruiting people, they hired two first-rate knights of the post: sneak thieves. Only problem was, the thieves wouldn't work together – one was githyanki, the other githzerai. Hated each other like poison. So Rivi took them away for a few hours, and next thing you know, they're bosom buddies. Lifelong friends. She did something spooky to their brains.»

«Is that really possible?» I whispered to Hezekiah. It irked me to turn to a Clueless for information, but he was the only authority we had on psionic powers.

«Rearranging a person's thoughts can be tricky,» he whispered back. «Making it permanent is even harder. It once took Uncle Toby a whole day to stop two kings from declaring war with each other. Of course, he had to fix up their generals too, so that's what dragged out the time.»

«Your Uncle… painted over their minds?» I pictured how easily I could change a frown to a smile with just a few strokes of the brush. Was it that easy for Uncle Toby? Was it equally easy for Rivi? If this brainpainter had enough time to work on Yasmin, to rape her mind…

«We have to save the others,» I said. «We have to save them now.»

«Where can we find this Rivi?» Wheezle asked quietly.

«Her quarters are on the lower level,» Miriam replied. «I can show you.»

I glanced at Wheezle, raising my eyebrows. «We cannot trust her,» Wheezle said, answering my unasked question. «On the other hand, it is safer to take her with us than leave her or kill her. As long as she remains in our hands, she has an incentive to cooperate.» The little gnome turned to her. «You understand what these wights will do if you betray us?»

The wights leered in her face, but she just jutted out her chin. «I know the game,» she answered. «I'll play.»

«And I'll make sure she does,» Hezekiah said. «I'll take her under my wing.»

He moved to her side and smiled. Suddenly, he was terrifying again – his face didn't change a muscle, but his smile took on the unnatural brightness of a killer, the placid tranquility of a child who could slay its mother without conscience. In that face was all the cruelty of childhood, the taunts, the bullying, the inventive tortures of insects and younger siblings.

«You'll be good, won't you?» Hezekiah told Miriam. Then he was simply a Clueless boy again, his smile only a smile, his face only an eighteen-year-old face.

I couldn't stand to look at it.

«Don't worry about me,» Miriam mumbled. «You're my high-up man, you are.» She edged away from him but kept her head lowered, like a dog showing submission to a wolf.

«Then we're all set,» the boy said. «Let's get going.»

With a pair of wights taking the lead, we proceeded down the corridor. Below us, in the circular arena surrounded by the ring of the Glass Spider, other wights continued to wade through the dust, searching for who-knew-what. I wondered how big their target was. Something the size of a needle would take days to find, but something substantial, like a spellbook or a magic sword, would surely turn up soon; there was a lot of ground to cover out there, but there were a lot of wights searching.

If we didn't rescue Yasmin and the others before the wights found their objective, I knew we'd all be in big trouble. No one went to all this bother for something innocuous.

Soon, we were approaching the next intersection of a radial arm with the Spider's central ring. As before, a furniture-filled lounge occupied the area where the arm connected with the body; but in the center of the room was a spiral wrought-iron staircase leading down to a lower level. The iron was bare and unpainted, yet I couldn't see the slightest fleck of rust – either these steps were scoured daily by a platoon of wights with sandpaper, or there was some kind of magic at work, maintaining this place in pristine condition. I put my money on the magic: the whole Glass Spider was in good upkeep, but it had an air of antiquity about it, as if it had endured for eons, impervious to decay.

Miriam gestured that we should go down the stairs. Wheezle stopped her and sent two wights ahead to see if the way was clear. They came back smiling their pointy grins and hissing in a relaxed fashion that suggested no one was lurking in ambush. We formed up our company again, wights at the head and rear, more wights tightly surrounding Miriam; then we began our descent.

As we climbed downward, my ears picked up a rumbling in the distance. It took me a few seconds to identify the sound; but then I remembered a tour I had taken of The Lady's Chime, that huge clock tower just down the street from Sigil's Hall of Speakers. The upper floors of the tower had echoed with the clicking of gears, the whirr of flywheels, and the ratcheting of counterweights pulling time forward. The rumble I heard now had the same sort of mechanical edge to it – a giant clockworks muttering to itself. We must be approaching the machinery that allowed the Glass Spider to move.

A long arcing corridor led us away from the stairs, and soon the air filled with the smell of metal: bare metal, oiled metal, hot metal. The corridor was lit by glass globes suspended from the ceiling; each globe burned bright and white from some inner fire. Their light revealed that Hezekiah had linked his arm with Miriam's as soon as we reached this lower floor. Clearly, he didn't want to risk her running away while he'd been appointed to watch her.