His cheeks were belled out, for he played the pipes made of many reeds cut to differing lengths, plucked earlier that day from the stream.

The dogs were in a fenced yard, where the fluid from the broken coffins had spilled and formed a frozen pool a dozen paces wide. A quartet of dog things behind this line of sandbags had musket and mattock and poleax close at hand, but they were asleep, hunched under blankets with muskets in their laps. The stew pot hanging by a broken branch over their watch fire was bubbling over and dripping, unattended. Scattered on the snow-patched grass were little things the sleeping paws had let slip: a metal hook for picking teeth, a clay pipe, with the thread of smoke still creeping upward from it, a pair of luminous dice, still glinting amber with the last three scores from the previous rolls.

And the music from the Witch-man played on.

Menelaus slithered down the steep slope on all fours, cursing when he skidded and tumbled. The fabric of his bulky garment clattered as he was dusting himself off, flapping the skirts to dislodge burrs. Finally he straightened and approached the Witch.

The song of the pipes stopped. The rotund man called out in a deep voice in the Virginian language: “I have heard that the Chimerae are known for the catlike grace of their stealth!”

“And I have heard that the Witches are known for getting their asses kicked by Chimerae.”

The overweight man was shirtless despite the cold, and had painted Celtic spirals and knots all across his arms and upper body with an ink brush. His hips and legs were covered with a woven grass skirt that made a rustling circle on the ground around him. Skinned rabbits had provided fur that he had cured and tied around his feet as moccasins.

The blue ink against his coffee-colored flab was nearly invisible in the fiery half darkness; but when the wind whipped up the flare from the campfire, the spirals seemed to swirl and dance as if they were crawling along his breasts and hanging ripples of fat like smoke vortexes.

He was seated in lotus position on the soil, half nude, and his wide grass skirt emerged from beneath the vast sagging globe of his hairy belly. His navel, lonely in the rotund immensity of stomach, stared out like a muzzle in a gun blister.

The fat man was wearing a sort of enormous lampshade hat he had woven from grass, which hid his face and almost hid his shoulders. The firelight struck only his baby mouth and double chin, but the gleam of his eyes from between the fibers of the hat could be seen. Stuck upright in the ground before him was a gnarled, crooked tree branch dangling with fetishes made of feather and bone, which he had picked out of owl pellets.

His name was Melechemoshemyazanagual Onmyoji de Concepcion, Padre Bruja-Stregone of Donna Verdant Coven at the Holy Fortress at Williamsburg. The interment date on his coffin was A.D. 4733.

When Menelaus stepped into the firelight, the seated man said, “I see a creature shapen like unto a man! Is he spirit or flesh? Clean or unclean?”

“Flesh,” said Menelaus. “Unclean.”

“I hear the voice of one who calls himself Sterling Xenius Anubis of Erebus! And yet I sense this is not his True Name. By what sign can you prove you are he, and not some ghost returned from the most ancient days to bedevil us, and involve mere mortals in your intrigues against undying enemies as posthuman, as strange, and as truly annoying as yourself?”

“Will you stop fooling around? The dogs are crawling all over the hill, looking for the pack that was supposed to be guarding the Tomb site. Where did you put them, anyway?”

There was a rustle of the lampshade-wide hat as the Witch-man nodded toward the yard where the sleeping dog things were not guarding the damaged coffins.

Menelaus said, “Inside the coffins?”

“Airtight and scent-free, warm and safe. It worked for you, last night, did it not? You spent a comfortable hour inside a heated coffin, having your implants turned back on, while I sat naked in the snow, piping and playing. You recall those implants? The ones that were supposed to be able to have you make contact with the Tomb brains, turn on the active defenses, wake the slumbering Knights, and call down the Apocalypse? Not to mention, open the lower levels and give us access to food, shelter, warm clothing, hot showers, and cold beer? And yet here I am, naked again, still sitting in the snow. Utterly beerless.”

“Can you use your musical hoo-doo to get the missing dog patrol back up there? The moment the Blue Men suspect that you can interfere with the nervous system of their Moreaus, the game is up.”

“Then the Blue Men should not have been stupid enough to use the Witch designs my ancestors used to build their artificials! We Witches live as one with all animal life! That is, ahem, all the animal life our ancestors designed. And that means we leave in trapdoor codes and Trojan horses in the midbrain and hindbrain complexes. Silence! I must call upon Mnemosyne, the muse of memory, to recall the sequences of the subconscious language. I should be able to get them on their furry little hind legs and sleepwalking up the slope before they wake.

“Then you can tell me what in the name of Mordor went wrong with your plan!” the Witch continued. “I was expecting a roar of thunder when you woke your buried Knights, followed by a flight of short-range mortar fire and screaming rockets to blow up the Blue Men and their fence, my good Dr. Montrose! Followed by a feast and my choice of the most attractive girls you have on ice to be my harem slaves.”

“Keep your flabby coal-black reproductive member to yourself, Warlock: you ain’t touching no one slumbering in my Tombs. You are one of the good guys now, recollect?”

“Bah! Why must the good guys go celibate? Something is amiss.”

“Boo-hoo and let me get out my ten-gallon crying bag to hold all the tears I must shed for you. I did not even get a whole wedding night with my wife before she got blasted out into space. My woman is nigh unto eighty-one hundred light-years away, and I got no outlet for all my manly urges excepting to kill damn nuisances what keep lifting me awake and delaying my reunion and hence the resumption of that warm commerce all bridegrooms a-yearn of. Right now those nuisances are as blue as my Saint Peter, whom I have been disrespectfully dangling naked in the cold.”

“So you could not get back into your Tombs, Dr. Montrose? Forget to leave a spare latchkey tucked in the eaves?”

“Call me Meany. After tonight, what you did for me, Williamsburg, we’re on a first-name basis.”

“May the stars above and stones below smile upon you, Meany! It is a deep ritual and sacred to my people to exchange True Names! No more address me as Williamsburg, for that is only the name of my place of power. You must call me Melechemoshemyazanagual!”

“Not if my life depended on it.”

“Quite right. Then call me Mickey. It is too cold for long names.”

“Just toot your poxified flutes, Mickey, and sleepwalk these damn dogs out of the coffins and back up to the top of the hill where they belong. Then I’ll tell you everything that’s gone wrong in my life of late.”

Mickey raised the twin pipes to his lips, puffed out his cheeks, and blew. There came a muttering and clicking among the broken coffins, and then, one by one, the lids began to open.

2. First-Name Basis

The two walked together back toward the tents. Menelaus said, “Try to keep your bulk in my radar shadow. I think I can hoax any of the energy signals coming from the Blue Men in the watchtowers. But you have to keep the dog things off our trail.”

Mickey said, “Alas, long is my shadow and deep is my lore in the Black Art, but I cannot lift the smell of out footprints off the grass. And even the dogs on patrol, I had to wait until the silence and monotony of the night watch, and the slow fumes from my alchemic fire, to put them close enough to alpha-wave state to trigger their buried neural codes. I cannot just toot the flute and send them skipping and jigging off the cliffside like lemmings. All deep magic is based on the things of the night of the mind.”