"Is she pretty?" asked the Astronomer, sitting in his wheelchair by the tomb of Jean d'Alluye. There was still some blood on the stone figure; the Astronomer had lately felt the need to recharge his power.

"Quite pretty." Roman took a perfunctory sip from the glass of wine and set it aside on the preacher's table nearby. The Astronomer was always offering him things-booze, drugs, women. He would take a taste out of courtesy and then set whatever it was aside. Exactly how much longer the Astronomer would allow that to go on was anyone's guess. Sooner or later he was bound to make some bizarre demand involving Roman's debasement. No one came out of association with the Astronomer unscathed. Roman's attention wandered to a shadowy area under a brick arch where the skinny blasted ruin called Demise slouched brooding, his bottomless gaze fixed on something no one else could see. In another part of the room, near one of the lantern poles, Kafka was rustling impatiently. He couldn't help rustling with that damned exoskeleton. It sounded like a multitude of cockroaches going wingcase to wingcase. Roman didn't bother trying to hide his disgust at Kafka's appearance. And Demise-well, he was beyond disgusting. Sometimes Roman thought that even the Astronomer was ginger about Demise. But both Demise and Kafka had been through their allotted humiliations courtesy of the wild card virus, while he could only wait and see what the Astronomer had in mind for him. He hoped there'd be enough time to know which way to jump. And then there was Ellie… The thought of his wife was a fist in his stomach. No, please, no more for Ellie. He looked at the glass of wine and refused for the millionth time to succumb to the desire for anesthesia. If I go down-no, when I go down, I will go down in full possession of my faculties…

The Astronomer laughed suddenly. "Melodrama becomes you, Roman. It's your good looks. I could see you in some other life rescuing widows and orphans from blizzards." The laughter faded, leaving a malicious smile. "Watch yourself around that girl. You could end up a little prematurely as the dust we all are."

"I could." Roman's gaze went to the upper gallery. The Italian wood sculptures were gone now; he couldn't remember what they'd looked like. "But I won't."

"And what makes you so sure?"

"She's a white-hat. A good guy. She's a twenty-one-yearold innocent, she doesn't have murder in her soul." Belatedly, he looked at Demise, who was staring at him the way you never wanted Demise to stare at you.

Roman braced himself against a broken-off pedestal. It would be horrible but it wouldn't last long, not really. The eternity of a few seconds. At least it would put him beyond the Astronomer's reach for all time. But it also meant he wouldn't be able to help Ellie, either. I'm sorry, darling, he thought, and waited for the darkness.

A quarter of a second later, the Astronomer lifted one finger. Demise sank back into himself and resumed staring at nothing. Roman forced himself not to sigh.

"Twenty-one," mused the Astronomer, as though one of his people had not just narrowly escaped being killed by his pet murder machine. "Such a fine age. Plenty of life and strength. Not the most level-headed age. An impulsive age. You're sure you're not just a little bit afraid of her impulses, Roman?"

Roman couldn't resist sneaking a glance at Demise, who was no longer paying any attention. " I don't mind staking my life on someone whose heart is in the right place."

"Your life." The Astronomer chuckled. "How about something of value?"

Roman allowed himself an answering smile. "Excuse me, sir, but if my life didn't have some value to you, you'd have let Demise do me a long time ago."

The Astronomer burst into surprisingly hearty laughter. "Brains and good looks. They're what make you so damned useful to all of us. Must be what attracted your wife to you. You think?"

Roman kept smiling. "Very likely."

Her dreams were full of strange pictures, things she'd never seen before. They troubled her sleep, passing through her head with an urgency that felt directed and reminded her of Roman's impassioned pleas for her to join them. Whoever they were. Egyptian Masons. Her dreams told her all about them. And the Astronomer.

The Astronomer. A little man, shorter than she was, bone thin, head too large. What Sal would have called bad-ass eyes while making that sign with his hand, the index and little fingers thrust out like horns, the middle two curled over his palm, some kind of Italian thing. Sal's face floated through her dreams briefly and was swept away.

She saw the entrance of some kind of church-no, a temple, definitely not a church. She saw it. but she wasn't there, couldn't have been there; this was a time before she'd been born. Her disembodied presence scanned a nighttime street and then floated up the temple steps past the man on the door who seemed to be frozen. She had a glimpse of a great room aglow with candles, two columns, and a man on a platform, wearing'some kind of gaudy red and white thing over his front, just before the screams began.

Not just screams but screams, SCREAMS, ripped from the throat of a soul gone forfeit. The sound stabbed into her. There was time for her point of view to swing around cameralike so she could see it was the little man screaming, the Astronomer, staggering into the hall. Then there was a fast jumble of pictures, a jackal face, a hawk's head, another man, his wide face pale; light glinting off the little man's glasses and then some kind of a thing, a creature-thing-slime-massdamned-thing-thing-thing.

She found herself sitting up in bed, her arms thrown up in front of her face.

"TIAMAT." Unbidden, the word came to her, and unwanted it hung there in the darkness. She rubbed her face with both hands and lay down again.

The dream returned immediately, dragging her under with horrible strength. The little man with the enormous head was smiling at her-no, not at her, she wasn't there and she was glad; she didn't ever want anyone to smile at her that way. Her point of view drew back and she saw that he was now standing on the platform, and around him she saw several figures-Roman, the red man, and the oriental woman, a thin wreck of a man with the feel of death about him, a woman with regret so etched into her features that it hurt to look at her (somehow she knew the woman was a nurse), a young albino man with a prematurely old face, a creature male, she thought-that might have been an anthropomorphic cockroach. There but for the grace of God, she thought.

God is still out on coffee break, little girl. She was looking into the face of the man who had brought her here, the one they called Judas. He was the only one who could see her. It's just the luck of the draw, babe, and you were lucky. And so was I. Blackjack!

Everything went dark. There was a sensation of incredibly fast movement. Something was propelling her toward a tiny point of light far ahead in the blackness.

And then suddenly she was there; the light swelled from a pinpoint to a fiery mass and she hit going full-out at the speed of thought. The light shattered and she was tumbling softly on the mossy floor of a forest. She rolled over once and came to rest gently at the base of a large tree.

Well, she thought, this is more like it. I must have missed the White Rabbit, but the Mad Hatter ought to be around here somewhere. She shifted position and found she had to grab hold of a large root to keep from floating away.

Look, whispered a voice very close to her ear. She turned her head, her hair floating around her as though she were underwater, but she saw no one. Look. Look! Look and you'll see them!

A puff of mist blew between two larches in front of her and disintegrated, leaving behind a man dressed in the height of eighteenth-century finery. His face was aristocratic, his eyes so piercing that she caught her breath as his gaze rested on her. But she had nothing to fear. He turned; the air beside him shimmered and a strange machine melted into existence. She blinked several times, trying to see it clearly, but the angles refused to resolve themselves. Try as she would, she couldn't tell whether it was large and sharp-cornered or small and molded, sculpted in marble or nailed together with wood and rags. Something glimmered and detached itself from the machine. She marveled; a part of it had just gotten up and walked away.