The immaculate guards caused Slide to momentarily wonder if his clothing was completely suitable for an audience with a queen. Funny how he always ended up in one variation or another of a dirty duster coat, and, if he hadn't known better, he might have believed himself the victim of a sartorial predestination. This final squad of guards relieved him of his radium revolver and gave him a small ceramic token in return, in order to retrieve the weapon later. Then the guarded doors swung back and Slide walked into the Throne Room of Queen Mina of Extrosylvania.

Story so far:Accused of disrupting time and on the run from mysterious enemies, Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, finds himself leaving a trail of disintegrated backstory, as, somewhere else in the universe, unimaginable forces cause unthinkably destructive upheavals. Slide arrives on ancient Mars via Doc Zen's Carter Machine, only to discover that a coterie of extraordinarily perverse neo-Victorians have established a faux-British Raj on the Red Planet. After watching an intimate display of Victorian decadence at the Establishment of Mrs. Rosa Coote, he encounters the vampire Lupo and is, with no choice in the matter, conducted to the palace of Queen Mina, the ruler of the Imperial City of Extrosylvania.

The Throne Room was like a chill and austere boudoir of muted purple, small, gauze-draped gatherings of white gold light, and soft-focus shadows, but, beneath the cool control and austere restraint of the supposed philosopher-queen, Slide sensed a ruthless, and potentially explosive barbarism that would, sooner or later, demand to run free, if only for short intervals and in small measures. And, indeed, what else should he expect from She of Fable who had melded minds with Count Dracula. The lingering spell-by-association of the bizarre combination of vampire, human tyrant, and old school demon king was both implacable and indestructible. Although driven from the material realms, and the undead body of the Tepes the Impaler, by Van Helsing and his gang of repressed and ravening, witch-hunting bigots, old Drac, the Infinite Count remained as potent as ever, circling in orbit in the ever-vague, over-there of the Ancients, but somehow managing, maybe fed by the mass energy of his Legion of Darklost, to maintain a disembodied icon-presence, black cape and manicured fangs, in the culture of the consumer dimensions. In one time-stream he even ruined the minds of children with a heavily merchandised, but also heavily drugged, brand of breakfast cereal.

Slide had noticed, however, as they entered the throne room, that Queen Mina was being unhooked from a intravenous feeding set-up with decoratively imperial hardware. From long experience, Slide recognized that the oily fluid being introduced into the royal veins as almost certainly a cocktail that contained a unhealthy amount of the old fashioned IV tincture form of tetradetoxin, know as oblividol. Where the fuck was she at if she needed to be doped up on tetradetoxin, plus fuck knew what else? By the time anyone reached the need for a tetradetoxin drip, they had almost certainly picked up rare tastes for a lot of other highly addictive shit along the way. And what did that effectively say about Count Dracula, if his link with the woman could only be maintained by large doses of a powerful time and dimension stabilizer? Unless of course the tetradetoxin was to keep the Count at bay.

Queen Mina leaned forward as Slide approached the throne. She seemed to be having a little trouble focusing her eyes. "You are the demon?"

"I'm Slide, Yancey Slide, your Majesty."

She had the ever-young, ever-old, look of the vampire, but with an added lines of contempt around the mouth. Her courtiers probably called her slender, but to Slide, she looked as emaciated as a twentieth century cocaine concubine whose price was about to plummet, with skin like wafer thin, transparent ivory. "You have probably heard things about us."

Slide was assuming the queen was using the royal "us". "I have learned to not to pay very much attention to gossip."

"About how we are the Victim Queen of a Great and Legendary Evil?"

"I am a Idimmu, your Majesty, we really

don't grasp the concept of evil."

She fixed him with a stare that was penetrating, but was also inclined to drift off-focus at certain moments. "You are something of a conundrum, Yancey Slide?"

"I'm sorry, your majesty. I don't mean to be. It is my aim to seek simplicity in all things."

The Queen swayed slightly and Slide took this yaw in her inspection and questioning as a chance quickly to examine his surroundings. He had visited a lot of courts in his time. As a demon, he was able to move with ease and speed from lowlife to high places, and had never been totally certain which one he really preferred. His real interest had always been in the extremes. It was the center that generally caused him trouble. As courts went, that of Queen Mina was sparse. A small gaggle of Green Martian handmaidens ministered to her

needs, along with an equal number of human attendants, all underdressed for the chill of the Martian night, in the style of the seraglio paintings so popular in the colonial 1800s. Mina herself was barely clothed in a loose jeweled robe that could have been designed by Gustav Klimt, and might have been considered more suitable for the bedroom than the throne room. The garment used abstract mosaics of small glowing gems that, coupled with the movements of the wearer, produced constantly shifting shimmer patterns, but Slide suspected that at least some of the crystals could only be radioactive, and, if the Queen was, to any degree still human, they were probably wreaking havoc with her cell structure. The robe was also heavy and tended to fall open whenever she leaned forward, affording Slide a clear view of the dark nipples of her small but firm breasts. He could only assume that this was a private audience, unless of course Queen Mina was the pace setter of the local decadence, or attempting to emulate Catherine the Great. The small compliment of courtiers certainly indicated that whatever matter had caused the Queen to summon Slide to her presence was hardly for public consumption.

Aside from the guards and servants, just six individuals waited on the monarch's pleasure, five humans and one Martian, and the arrival of Slide and Lupo raised the total to eight. After introductions had been made, Slide found that he was in the company of Bolivar Morlock, an obvious Captain of Industry, the stereotypical fat capitalist, red faced from over indulgence in whores and vintage port, and arrayed in frock coat and solid gold watch chain. Sir Hubert Guest was the elderly commander of the Royal Martian Air Force, while the even more antiquated General Cairngorm, was the senior officer of Queen Mina's imperial staff. An admiral would have completed the set, except that, on Mars, with its scarcity of water and complete lack of seas, high or otherwise, a navy was clearly redundant; something that Slide knew must have been a blow to this faux-British collective consciousness. On the Red Planet, Britannia had no waves to rule.

The two men were formally attired in full dress uniforms, blue and scarlet respectively, and all but bowed down by decorations and gold braid, and, Slide would quickly learn that they shared a common and aggressive stupidity that it was near-miraculous that the Slimy Things had not wiped out Extrosylvania long ago. A conniving oaf called Captain Harry Flashman was the human commander of the Throne Room's Red Martian guards, while a mute young woman who was referred to only as Prudence the Kitten, and whose function Slide was never to learn or fully understand completed the human representation. The ranking native in the throne room was Jalja Hajd, the Red Jeddak of Amhor, and Master of Indigenous Regulars. Queen Mina, however, totally ignored these supposedly familiar courtiers and concentrated exclusively on Slide. "You are said to have the ability to exist and function in multiple places at multiple times?"