“The Archangels of the living ships sent it.”

“At your command.”

Silently, the tall pale hand now turned and faced inward, and closed across the entrance. There was a slight change in the air pressure as the tent sealed itself shut. It was now entirely dark in here.

A weft of light, a breath of metallic heat, began issuing from the wooden blade in the squire’s hand.

Norbert turned his black spectacles toward the glowing blade with a curious tilt of the head. “So this is not your trap, then, is it?”

The other man said, “Mine are less showy. As you said, it is Fox work. They have a certain panache that is unmistakable.”

“When one is caught in a trap of the Fox-women, it is too late to flee or pull away. Flight only drives the barbs of the snare home. Instead one seeks the center of the maze. Sometimes the Foxes can be prevailed upon by entreaty or whim.”

“What do you mean?”

Norbert jumped onto the stage. “I mean it is time to look behind the curtain and examine the stage machinery.”

Norbert drew his glassy knives with a flourish, one in each hand, and spun them in his fingers so that they caught the pale, faint light shed from the wooden blade. He made one slash in the screen from overhead to knee-high, and the other slash at waste height from left to right, forming a cross.

He kicked the cross open and stepped through.

3

The Treason of Jupiter

1. Behind the Curtain

Behind the stage screen, the two men found themselves in what seemed a vestry or dressing room, but which apparently served as a consolation chamber for private audiences, because it was equipped with all the gewgaws and implements a magician needed to cast a cliometric extrapolation of the future history of any single individual gullible enough to believe that cliometric extrapolations could be cast for single individuals.

Around the vestry were tripods for anthracomancy, skulls for necromancy, mirrors for enoptromancy, or perhaps for putting on stage makeup.

A carpet inscribed with Monument notation was underfoot, one of those types written with hidden fortunes that the client could reveal depending on where he accidentally stepped. From the tentpoles overhead hung a line of marionettes dressed in the costumes of the various constellations, Aquarius with his ewer or Sagittarius with his bow and arrow, Libra holding up a balance scale in which he weighed a feather against a beating human heart.

Brazen mandalas with traces of neural charge still vibrating in their spirals, thinking caps cruel with clamps and brain-spikes, and small bottles of delirious essence winking mischievously were all present in the litter of the ceiling, as was a nine-foot-long stuffed crocodile with glass eyes, motionless and signal-neutral. Norbert thought the crocodile an eerie object: he could not recall the last time he had seen something that was entirely dead.

A narrow shelf ran in a complete circle just at eye level along the chamber sides. From it hung a line of ticking owl-faced clocks and murmuring calendars showing the time and the time-dilations of ships passing between Mother Earth and the Stepmother Earths of the three diasporas. The shelf was an astrological ribbon, to compare a client’s birth signs and houses against the position of fortunate and adverse ships. This shelf had raised itself to allow the tall men to enter, dropping again to eye level as they passed beneath, and the owl-faced clocks looked down on them with round, incurious, and unwinking eyes.

Midmost all this bright clutter was a round brass table inscribed with the sigils of the hexagram on a sliding outer ring. In the center of the table rested a crystal ball next to an open cedarwood box. In the box were a deck of computer cards painted with figures of the tarot. Above the table hung a glass hookah filled with luminous fluid from which the only light in the chamber came.

To one side was an ornate chair for the magician flanked by the traditional winged monkeys, who were wearing the traditional pillbox caps and braided scarlet and gold jackets. To the other side was a red silk couch for the magician’s client, fitted with straps and head-clamp and a dream induction box underneath.

Sitting in the magician’s chair, chewing a lump of tobacco and spitting into a nearby crownless skull, was a tall man in a green poncho wearing a high-crowned broad-brimmed black hat adorned with a hatband of jade chips. The man’s face was oddly ugly, but not ugly enough to have been designed that way. He had rough and bony features: a big, square jaw like the toe of a boot, two deep set eyes that never seemed to blink, ears like jug handles, and a hooked nose that looked like it had been broken and reset badly. His skin was dark and the hair above his ears was reddish stubble cropped close. Across his knees rested a sidearm nearly a cubit long, heavy as a blunderbuss, with a main muzzle surrounded by six lesser muzzles for escort bullets. Over his shoulder was a bandolier and a cavalry saber. On the heels of either boot were metal instruments of a type Norbert had never seen: a small hooked arm ending in a rowel like a jagged wheel.

Draped in sinuous curves atop the couch, but not strapped into it, as if she had flung herself down artlessly and merely by chance had assumed a curvaceous posture of dangerous sensuality, was a female figure in a red kimono and a purple obi, the dress of a Nymph. In a wide circle above her, as if to hide her from the marionettes hanging from the ceiling, was a living parasol, also of red; nine white pearls bathed in strange silver candleflames circled the rim of the parasol like blind bees, sometimes alighting on the spokes.

She wore her bloodred hair in a loose mass flagrantly piled atop her head, with escaping strands tickling her ears and jawline and neck. This coiffeur was pinned in place with long needles adorned with amber beads, fine chains of gold, and a coronet shaped like the moon, and what looked like a row of lit candles. The kimono collar was loose in the back to show off the line of her neck. Her fingers and wrists were slender and graceful and her arms were hidden in shining black opera gloves that ran past her elbow. Her feet were unshod, but hidden in stockings made of the same dark and shining substance as her gloves, and hid her legs to the knee. Her feet were too long and thin to be handsome, but they boasted a dozen gold and red-gold anklets and ankle-bells that chimed and tittered if she moved her feet. She toyed with a scarlet folding fan whose spines were needles.

Hers was a triangular face with very high cheekbones sharply defined, an acutely pointed chin, and a thin and very red smile shaped like the letter V. She smiled without opening her mouth. Her eyes were larger than normally allowed for humans, and the pupils yellow as amber, yellow as gold coins seen in a running fountain.

When Norbert kicked his way into the chamber, the two winged monkeys fluttered their wings and pounded the carpet with their truncheons, hooting and screeching and showing their fangs.

The tall man in the black hat kicked the monkeys, who shrieked and dropped their truncheons, putting their paws before their mouths. “Well, damnation and tarnation and all other nations! Ain’t you the loudassingest and lousiest assassin since Scaevola?”

2. Needless Names and Introductions

Norbert used the point of his knife to tip his spectacles back on his head. The fabric of the mask, sensing his mood, scuttled quickly down from his face and into a neck pocket; his hood likewise folded itself to his neck. The spectacles whimpered when the silent knife touched them. Norbert, squinting against the light, with a nod had the spectacles fall back into place across his nose.