“Damn straight, the female principle is paramount. That’s why Life is a Bitch. But you are wrong about the world outside. There is someone out there. And behind that someone is Blackie.”

Mickey said, “Black? That is your name for the godling who put the Moon in the sky and placed his hand upon it? He is the Father of the All Ghosts. We curse the Machine of his devising, which since has devised all the woes of man. We call him Xocotl and Azarch.”

“Ximen del Azarchel. That’s him. Though the Moon was there for a fair piece of time before he stained it. I call him Blackie on account of his black scalp, black beard, black eyes, black soul. He stole my damned ship. Blackie is out there.”

Mickey shook his head. “On the Moon, perhaps, or another plane of vibration. But not on the material surface of this earth. It is all a wasteland.”

“The Blue Men have flying machines. That implies some place to fly to. It implies a technological civilization with air traffic.”

“Technological, perhaps, but not a current one. Mine.”

“What? Your what?”

“My civilization—the Delphic Acroamatic Progressive Transhumanitarian Order of Longevity: the Delphians, whom the mundanes call Wisewives or Witches.”

“Or Nut-axes.”

“Those are Witch-markings on the aircraft wings. Far Eastern Witches, maybe Taoist Alchemists or Bon, from the look of them: the blue-winged beast is Lei-kun the Thunderer. Haya-Ji is the whirlwind spiral. Shenlhaokar is one of the Four Wisdom Deities. Others I don’t recognize. Those ships are Demonstrator Windcraft. Heavier-than-air flying machines from the days of the Last Collapse of Steel and Smoke, fourteen hundred years before my time.”

“What about the larger ship? The helicopter?”

“Also built by my people. She is an air-ironclad called Albatross, used by my ancestors to hunt down the remnants of the Sylphs and Demonstrate them. The iron hull was resistant to hunger silk.”

“Demonstrate?”

“With nerve toxins or radioactive chemtrails. My people are pacifists, and not allowed to employs soldiers, but the Coven Law allows for peaceful mass demonstrations by activists. The Demonstrator flying machines were the only things left over from the days of Steel and Smoke, the technology days, that still worked. The totemic markings on the wings allay the anger of the sky-beings, for using internal combustion engines and marring the blue sky with black smoke. Such machines would be very carefully preserved. All this happened long before my time, but Witches are scrupulous about keeping our lore correct, and we neither flatter our ancestors nor condemn. It is one of the blessings of Gandalf, that our memories are as long as our shadows.”

“Or, in your case, as wide. Wait. Did you just say Gandalf?”

“He is the founder of our order, and the first of the Five Warlocks. He comes from afar across the Western Ocean, from Easter Island, or perhaps from Japan.”

“No, I think he comes from the mind of a story writer. An old-fashioned Roman Catholic from the days just before First Space Age. Unless I am confusing him with the guy who wrote about Talking Animal Land? With the Cowardly Lion who gets killed by a Wicked White Witch? I never read the text, I watched the comic.”

“Oh, you err so! The Witches, we have preserved this lore since the time of the Fall of the Giants, whom we overthrew and destroyed. The tale is this: C. S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke were led by the Indian Maiden Sacagawea to the Pacific Ocean and back, stealing the land from the Red Man and selling them blankets impregnated with smallpox. It was called the Lewis and Clarke Expedition. When they reached the Pacific, they set out in the Dawn Treader to find the sea route to India, where the sacred river Alph runs through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. They came to the Last Island, called Ramandu or Selidor, where the World Serpent guards the gateway to the Land of the Dead, and there they found Gandalf, returned alive from the underworld, and stripped of all his powers. He came again to mortal lands in North America to teach the Simon Families. The Chronicle is a symbolic retelling of their journey. It is one of our Holy Books.”

“Your Holy Books were written for children by Englishmen.”

“The gods wear many masks! If the Continuum chooses the lips of a White Man to be the lips through which the Continuum speaks, who are we to question? Tolkien was not Roman. He was of a race called the hobbits, Homo floresiensis, discovered on an isle in Indonesia, and he would have lived in happiness, had not the White Man killed him with DDT. So there were no Roman Catholics involved. May the Earth curse their memory forever! May they be forgotten forever!”

“Hm. Earth is big. Maybe it can do both. You know about Rome? It perished in the Ecpyrosis, somewhat before your time.”

“How could we not? The Pope in Rome created the Giants, whom the Witches rose up against and overthrew. Theirs was the masculine religion, aggressive, intolerant, and forbidding abortion. Ours is the feminine religion, peaceful and life-affirming and all-loving, and we offer the firstborn child to perish on our sacred fires. The First Coven was organized to destroy them like rats! When Rome was burned, we danced, and their one god was cast down and fled weeping on his pierced feet, and our many gods rose up. My ancestors hunted the Christians like stoats, and when we caught them, we burned them slowly, as they once did of us in Salem. What ill you do is returned to you tenfold!”

“Hm. Are you willing to work with a Giant? I saw one in the pit, and saw the jumbo-sized coffin they pried him out from. What if he is a baptized Christian? Most of them were, since they were created by my pet pope and raised by nuns.”

“All Christians must perish! Such is our code.”

“Your code is miscoded.”

“What of the Unforgettable Hate?”

“Forget about it.”

“Ah! The Witches are a pragmatic race,” said Mickey in a tone of grandiose modesty. “Toleration is our cardinal virtue, second only to our scientific rationality.”

Menelaus raised an eyebrow. “You guys call yourselves scientific?”

“Of course,” said Mickey. “Enemies of science are cursed by the Crones.”

“The ones who paint fright masks on biplane wings to create lift? Those Crones?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Mickey. “Lift is created by the Bernoulli principle: wing curvature magically creates a partial vacuum which the goddess Nature abhors, and so she lifts the windcraft upward to occlude the void in compensation. The Witch-marks are inscribed not to create lift, but to avert malediction according to the law of sympathy and contagion. It is based on entirely different principle of the occult sciences.”

“And you believe this because you’ll be cursed if you don’t?”

Mickey looked at him with a level-eyed judicious look. “You have told me that you and your enemies can make it fated for nations, tribes, and peoples to rise and fall, meet victory or defeat, expansion or extinction, by means of mathematical hieroglyphs and incantations you found written on a dead moon circling an impossible star in the constellation of the Centaur? And you ask me to doubt something as obvious and elementary as a curse? Everyone utters curses. You utter curses.”

“God damn it, I do not!”

“You are a scoffer, then! Odd for a magical being not to believe in magic. Odd and dangerous! It is bad luck not to believe in curses! Beware!”

“Pshaw and phooey, haw and hooey,” drawled Montrose. “What worse luck is going to bite me in my sorry butt? The only things I’ve ever wanted was the stars and my maiden born among the stars. The first expedition, I went bonkers and don’t remember, and the second one, I missed. I married the most beautiful girl in history, and then on my wedding night, she slipped out of my fingers and I got a building dropped on my head.” Menelaus gave a weary laugh. “Good thing I was wearing armor and had a bad guy lying atop me. I guess that was a lucky turn.”