Yuen glanced at him sharply. “How do you know their content?”

Daae shrugged sadly. “I read them when I was living in the private barracks too. When you are young, a few hours’ punishment drill in full kit is not too high a price to pay for a dream.”

Menelaus said, “Well, these stories were written by a half-breed Beta-Gamma crossover named Gibson. When an author of a cheaplie could paste in previous text without rewrite, he did. Since, as I said, the aiming camera survived, most of the dialogue was taken word for word from Hermetic D’Aragó’s last words; but the surrounding events were all fiction cobbled together from other sources. And the ending of the story, ‘So I lived happily ever after,’ was the way Larz of the Gutter ended all his fictional exploits.”

Yuen said, “But Larz described what the Judge of Ages looked like!”

Menelaus said, “He described the face of the actor who portrayed the Judge of Ages in the wirecast version of the story, when it was later made into a play.”

Yuen said, “And how would you know that?”

Menelaus looked sheepish. “The Judge of Ages has often appeared in paintings and statues and animations. The Witches made a lot of pictures of him. You’d be surprised at how little one resembles the next, almost as if someone were trying to divaricate the visual information across history. At one time, I set about compiling a large collection of such images. It was for a monograph I never wrote concerning data degradation.”

Yuen said, “Of a fictional character? Such a monograph would seem to serve no military purpose.”

Menelaus looked mildly offended. “As you say, sir.”

Yuen said, “But why change the name from Bretchlouder to Quire?”

Menelaus said, “The decadence that causes and is caused by the death throes of a culture always aggravates sexual perversion. Being a ‘breech-loader’ in the days when the book was written had an indelicate second meaning, and Gibson, the author, no doubt thought it best to name his character Quire, the old word for ‘veteran-citizen,’ rather than a name that might raise a snicker.”

Daae said, “Beta Anubis, why do you assume that the man who killed the Hermeticist D’Aragó was not indeed the Judge of Ages?”

Menelaus shrugged. “Because I do not believe in the Judge of Ages. Permission to speak freely?”

“Granted,” said Daae.

“This Judge of Ages, if he is a real man, must have the flaws and shortcomings of a real man. He has no more power than I do to win the battle we face. We can look to no help for him, even if he were real. Right now the gate is weakly held, but not for long. As soon as the Blue Men realize Kine Larz—or whatever his real name is—is a fake, they will fall back from the doors. But even my suggestion, sir, requires the aid of the Witches.”

Yuen said, “Witches, bah! They are despicable cowards! The day when I kiss a Witch will come sooner than the day Witches and Chimerae could ever fight shoulder to shoulder against a foe!”

Daae (to whom the Witches were a legendary menace rather than recent or potent one) spoke in a voice of dry irony. “Gargle with wine to sweeten your breath, then, Proven Alpha Yuen. For here come the Witches in all their numbers.” And he raised his finger and pointed.

The rotund bulk of Melechemoshemyazanagual the Warlock of Williamsburg was gliding up the wintry slope toward them, adorned with an acre of black and scarlet silk, and the sephiroth, sigils, and trigrams glistered with many colors. His face was half-hidden beneath his headgear, a cone a foot and a half high. Despite his bulk, the obese man made no noise at all as he approached, and he seemed, somehow, to leave no footprints behind him.

With him were thirty others: the whole population of Witches in the camp.

10. Joint Command

Even at a distance, the difference between the nobles and the commoners of the Witch Era was clear: The Coven leaders were women unusually tall, and they walked with the stiffness and care of great age. The same genetic tinkering and geriatric treatments a Witch enjoyed from before her birth until after she was an octogenarian stimulated growth patterns in totipotent cells throughout her long life, whereas the commoners used up their entire supply of totipotent cells before birth, and the timing mechanisms in the human body allowed for no more growth, no more youth, after adolescence. The growing patterns that kept them young kept them growing throughout life.

The crowd of Witches stopped at the foot of the slope, and only seven figures came forward: Mickey and six others. The women elders carried charming wands cut from willow trees from which dangled skulls of rodents and small birds.

Four of the figures were ancient women seven or eight feet tall, with features as dignified and withered as old statues, and hair as white as snow, wearing hoods even taller. These crones loomed over Mickey. They wore sable and dark blue regalia, worked with images of crabs and carrion birds, and their peaked hoods hid all but their wrinkled stern mouths.

The fifth woman, the one in white, was a maiden who looked to be in her late teens, but she carried herself with the poise and dignity of a mother: a forty-year-old soul in a fourteen-year-old body. She was five feet high or less, dressed a simple dress of white cotton trimmed with peach satin, and she wore her hair in a snood.

The final witch, as tall as her sisters, was garbed in scarlet, pink, and dark red, buxom as a Nymph, though stouter, and her peaked hat was wide-brimmed.

The Witches of lower ranks were no less splendidly dressed. A hunter wore a wolfpelt at his shoulders and a uniform of Lincoln’s green, a husbandman wore designs of grain stalks and hayricks, a vintner wore grapeleaf patterns adorning purple, the mason’s garb was bedecked with the triangle and square of his order over a pattern of red bricks. From the time of the Nameless Empire were factory hands whose uniforms were woven with a pattern of cogwheels and smoke clouds; from the same era, an apothecary wore robes adorned with serpents and birds, and an alchemist’s dress was a pattern of spiral molecular chains woven about with formulae in ancient letters.

There were a dozen members of the feared Demonstrator caste here too, wearing cloaks of flayed and cured human skin-leather, feces wiped in the hair, and their faces painted horribly with black ink, and about their necks clattered the tiny fingerbones of dismembered children: several sported a bone or needle piercing the septum of his nose, or the flesh of cheek, earlobe, or lip.

The crones, as they came upslope, by way of greeting, uttered yips and yowls, owl screech and wolf howl somehow both ridiculous and horrific to hear.

Mickey stepped forward, pointed his wand at Menelaus, and beckoned, “Beta Sterling Xenius Anubis of Mount Erebus, I charge and summon thee to approach.”

Menelaus turned his eyes toward Daae. “Sir—”

Daae said, “Speak for us. Yuen, go with him, and repudiate any word of his not in keeping with the honor of the Alpha gene-Caste.”

The two men trudged forward in the snow, and Menelaus drew his hood close to his cheeks, either from the cold, or hoping to hide his expression. Menelaus would have been free to talk to Mickey and arrange terms, had Yuen stayed back out of earshot.

Mickey turned and turned again, and drew a large circle on the snowy ground with his staff. “Here is my circle of Power! Within it, all who walk tread lightly on their Mother Earth, leaving no trace when they die; and all goods are held in common; and all class-enemies, all enmities, inequalities, and patriarchy must be left outside, and cannot pass my ninefold wards! I call upon Jadis and Jahi, Phoebe and Prudence, Sabrina and Samantha, Willow and Wendy, to watch the sacred bounds!”

Menelaus went up to him, stepping into the circle, and said softly, “Uh. You do know all those people watching your sacred bounds are, um, made up from kiddie pixies and texts and toons, right? Make-believe?”