“Legend says you killed him atop Mount Ypsilon, in a mighty duel, in the years when the sun hid his face. You called down fire from heaven.”

“I shot fire from my shooting iron and missed by a country mile. But I surely did severe hurt to some of the trees and stones aways behind him, and I reckon they’d be almightily afeared of me.”

“You missed? Can superhumans do that?”

“We surely can, and lucky for me, because he missed his shot at me when he sought to drop a mass of de-orbiting space wreckage on my head, and he was in the drop zone, near enough that he got poisoned by radioactivity, got scared, stuck his pistol up his nose and pulled the trigger and died in a right cowardly and sloppy way, most adroitly messing up that handsome face of his. Your legends leave that part out? Ah, don’t feel bad. Stories tend to get simplified in the retelling. Due to divarication. There is a white-faced jerk locked up in one of these coffins here who knows the whole story, a Scholar named Rada Lwa. So, yes, I can damn well miss. And I can get tripped up. I got tripped up something royally when the history of your people went off the rails.”

“Which of your brother Hermeticists did this thing?”

“No brother of mine. Draggy.”

“Who?”

“The Learned Narcís Santdionís de Rei D’Aragó. You have idols of him too.”

“Why did he condemn us?”

“He wanted a more worldly and warlike type of folk than Witches.”

“Is that the reason? We were a race of Collies, and he craved to breed Huntaways or Lurchers or MacNabs, and so everything our ancestors did, our songs of power, our starlore and deep knowledge, our heraldries and homeopathic phosphors, even our games and festivals—the song the children sing in springtime about the unselfish bee and the diligent ant—was it all dashed away like a chamber pot into the gutter?”

“Sang. Pretty much, that was his reason, yeah.”

“When men die, their shades linger. Do worlds have shades? Do not all my people, all my way of life, cry for vengeance? Is there no echo of that outcry lingering, even if the voice that sends the echo out itself is still? Does a civilization leave a spirit of itself behind?”

“Well, if it can haunt the living, your civilization can rest easy. Because I shot D’Aragó dead as mutton in A.D. 5884. That time I didn’t miss.”

“In the year 4728 by the old reckoning, at Mount Airy, in the shadow of the shrine to Grace Sherwood, you rose from the dead and erected a hall and zendo of the Old Knowing. I and many others learned at your feet, and first swore fealty to you. Yet you went back to your Tomb after only a season. Had you stayed on the surface longer, could you have saved us?”

Menelaus drew his hood more closely about his face and said nothing.

By then, they were coming within earshot of the watchdogs, and so proceeded more cautiously, by sprint, by crawl, by belly-crawl.

4. Witch Lore

They reached Mickey’s tent without being seen or scented. Menelaus touched the metal fabric. The smartmetal could change its conductivity and flexibility. At the moment, it was rigid as steel. Menelaus closed his eyes, sent out a sequence of high-amplitude ultra-shortwave signals from his implants, then grinned. With a soft snap of noise, the metal grew pliant as leather. Menelaus opened the tent flap and shooed Mickey inside.

Inside the tent was a flap of fabric to serve as a cot, a cylindrical unit that served both as latrine and water recycler, and a blanket that could be commanded—one of the few commands the Thaws could give that the circuit would obey—to serve as a stool, a light, or a heat source.

Mickey threw the blanket on the ground and spoke the word. The fabric crinkled and flexed and stood up into a soft cylinder that glowed. Menelaus sat. His shadow spread across the sloping roof of the tent.

“What kind of critters make their stools so that lights shine up their bilge holes?” demanded Menelaus.

Mickey sat heavily on the cot, which creaked beneath his weight, and he said, “I think they mean us to sit on the floor, as they do. Surely the tents record all conversations.”

“Yup. What would you like me to have the record say? I can do visuals and audio. I could record that orgy with the Nymph ladies you was talking about earlier, except then the Blues would wonder how you managed to fit seventy virgins in a tent this size.”

“Your power is such?”

“My know-how is such.”

“Knowledge is power,” said Mickey, removing his vast straw hat. With no sense of modesty, he dropped his grass skirt, unrolled, and began to draw on the prison overalls, grunting and snuffling. “Can you teach me the spell?”

“How good are you at differential calculus using analytical logic notation?”

“Ah … I know enough geometry to cast a horoscope, and can calculate the motion of the same and the motion of the other of the wandering star Venus on her epicycles using hexadecimals. I know how to consult an arithmetic table.”

“Hm. Do you know what a zero is? Or algebra?”

“These are forgotten concepts, invented by the Christians, whom we curse.”

“I think the Mohammedans invented the zero. Or was it the Hindus?”

“Bah! All forms of monotheism the Witch race despises with the Unforgettable Hate.”

“The Hindu was pagans with more gods than you could hit with grapeshot. Back in my day, they owned half the planet and told the other half what tunes to dance to. Scoff all you like, but their mathematicians were top notch and first water.”

“There is more to a people than how cunning they are with numbers.”

“I reckon that’s possible, but I cannot imagine what. Not anything important.” Menelaus drew back his hood and scratched his head. “Anyhow, take you a few years to learn the basics, but I plan to be planted back in the ground and snoring before that. I’ll program one of my critters to teach you, if’n you’d like. Call it a wage.”

“Critters? I fear to ask. Something fried in grease, no doubt. But I will spare them the exertion.” Mickey waved his huge hand in the air with a surprisingly delicate gesture, as if to shoo away a fly. “I need no wage. Am I a hireling? I am a Warlock of the Illuminatus Exemptus of the Twelfth Temple Echelon. My misogi or purification attainments includes dream-walking, mnemonics, and autohysteria, and control of the six phases of the six endocrinal glands. I know the secrets of the Red and of the Black, the nature of the Five Elements, the names of the fixed stars and wandering stars, retrogrades, squares, triunes, and conjunctions, and I speak the hidden language of beasts. My yearning is not for things of this false universe.”

“You got some other universe to swap for it?”

“I have nothing; thus I need nothing. My enemies are dead; the Thirteenth Echelon honors I yearned so eagerly to attain are less than dust; my coven and my circle are as extinct as the second dinosaurs, the whales, and the great apes. Wage? What would I ask? My weight in gold? I could not lift it! And if I could, where would I haul it? Outside the fence is ice and moss and tundra grass. The world is empty. No! Say no more of wage and price and prize: I am a Magus, a master of the most hidden powers, and I live for the Threefold Way: to look at darkness, hear the silence, and name the nameless. Even a godling cannot give me this.”

“Damn straight, because I ain’t got the teensiest notion what you just said. And I told you I ain’t no god. I don’t even say ‘thou’ or ‘verily’ or not no scrap like that. My mother’d done take a bar of lye soap to your mouth, she heard you talk all blasphemous! And tan your hide with a strap—except seeing as you’re tan enough as it is, she might not.”

Mickey had a big laugh, deep and bass and full of joy. “Strange and wondrous! To think the little gods fear their mother goddesses! Truly the Feminine Principle is paramount in all things!”