Mickey drew himself upright, which thrust his belly out even farther, and the scowl on his face was like a line drawn in a pie pan filled with raw dough. “Many records survived from the Days of Fire—the Final Archive listed nine hundred thousand references to the beloved Witch Hermione alone, not to mention Gillian Holroyd and Glinda the Good! Would you have us believe that the ancients devoted so much emphasis, effort, and attention to what they knew to be merely idle fictions?! Next you will claim that the warlocks Klingsor and Castaneda are unreal!”

One of the She-Witches, a towering and hatchet-faced crone as thin as a rail, tramped forward on long angular steps to reach the side of Mickey, and stood like a black minaret next to a dark dome.

“The spell is incomplete!” she said. And with her charming wand she drew a cross in the snow. “Depart the circle, trample this cross, and reenter.”

Menelaus said, “But, begging your pardon, ma’am, we Chimerae don’t believe in things like that.”

She pushed back her hood and bent her thin, gray face down toward Menelaus. She had shaved her scalp in an Irish tonsure, shorn over the head from ear to ear, leaving a patch of white dangling from her brow and a hem hanging from the back of her skull. “The gesture is significant! It shows our freedom from superstition!”

Yuen sidled close, his footsteps like those of a panther. He spoke in clear and unaccented Virginian (which, in his time, was still a living language), “It is known among our Kine that this cross is a symbol of an unarmed and dead man. Chimerae slur only armed and living men, able to retaliate.”

The crone favored him with a reptilian stare. “I am not armed, and I live, and yet it insults me if you do not step on the cross and blot it out, to enter the circle.”

Yuen’s face was colder and his one eye more unwinking with fury than normal even for him as he stamped the mark in the snow angrily with his foot, but he did not step within the circle. “Our age was the first in all history to be free of trumpery and priestcraft and all the deception of hope in afterlife. I will not betray that heritage. Gladly I trample the long-dead superstition you hate, but likewise I scorn the long-dead superstition you serve.”

She opened her mouth to object, showing her oddly narrow yellow teeth, but Mickey said in his jovial voice, “Come, Grandmother, we are proposing alliance, not a friendship. Copulation partners need not like each other: the man gives seed and the woman outlives him. Is this not the way of life? These are those who outlived our race. You do not know them, but they come from my days, when they outnumbered us, and their strength was terrifying, but so also was their honor. No spell will hold them in any case. If the Earth is sacred, is not all ground sacred? It is not our way to avoid confrontation, and outwait, and outlive?”

This seemed to mollify her.

Menelaus said diplomatically in Virginian, “We are, of course, curious about the opinions and concerns of all gathered here, but time harasses us all: can we not address our plea for alliance to the commanding officer of the Witches?”

Yuen said, “They are from different times and continents, and live in anarchy, having nothing in common but their superstitions.”

Menelaus said in Chimerical, “They are influenced by the shadow each one casts. The one with the greatest shadow will draw the others. That one there—” He nodded at the youngest witch present, the one dressed in white. “Ask to be introduced to her.”

Yuen said to Mickey, “You! Introduce us to the maiden.”

There was a reaction from the gathered Witches, a glint in the eyes, a sharp intake of breath.

Mickey said ceremoniously to Yuen and Menelaus: “Your leader can see partway beyond the veil, to know she whom we hold highest, though she walks with humblest garb among us.” Mickey now bowed very low. “She is the youngest but also the eldest of us. We call her Fatin. We are not certain of her coven, cell, or sept or assignment. She is eldest and speaks last. What she says, none dares unsay.”

Fatin stepped forward. “Call me Fatin Simon Fay. I am of the Delphic Acroamatic Progressive Transhumanitarian Order for the study of Longevity. The Order also experiments in altered states of consciousness, including the stimulation of lateral-format pattern-seeking modes that do not develop naturally in women until after one hundred and twenty or one hundred and forty years, and which were, in times past, mistaken for senility, or dismissed as women’s intuition. The human race would not even be aware of these ulterior forms had the limitations of the man-imposed so-called normal life span been accepted! The Giants, for all their vast intelligence, can neither plan as far ahead as we, nor can they see the patterns of events we see. They regard what we do as witchcraft, but that merely betrays the inflexibility of their thinking.”

Yuen said, “You are an unwed girl?”

Fatin, who was probably (despite her looks) considerably older than Yuen, narrowed her eyes at him. “I am pre–sexually active, yes. We have dispensed with marriage customs. We regard the word ‘girl’ as a deadly insult. You must say ‘living organism each with his or her or its place in the ecologic web not superior to any other.’”

“You are an unwed organism no better than a bug?” Yuen said, “And yet you command the Witches?”

Fatin said stiffly, “We don’t have ranks like that. The elder advise the younger. But since I come from the age when the Simon Families were still intact, that makes me eldest, so my advice carries more weight than anyone else’s. I am the one who decided we had to throw in with you.”

Yuen said, “Why?”

Fatin said, “Two reasons. The first is because Melechemoshemyazanagual had a bad dream.”

Mickey said solemnly, “I have flown in a vision in the shadow of the hawk, and I have seen that the lands to every side of us are empty of life. And yet there is a power in the sea that will surpass us all. I saw the moon drip blood, and from the south came one the shapen like unto a tower with neither top nor foundation; but I also saw a figure adorned as a judge before an execution, riding a pale horse, and a pale wand deadlier than any sword was in his hands, and voices cried out from below the earth, prophesying doom.”

Yuen said scornfully, “So! You managed to get one of the medical coffins to produce hallucinogenic mushrooms? Did the Nymphs help you?”

Fatin said with girlish sternness, “These are subconscious images betraying a pattern of data our conscious minds cannot yet grasp. Melechemoshemyazanagual comes from a generation that learned what neural modifications to make in a man to give him the lateral-thinking and pattern-recognition skills my generation first discovered in transoctogenarian females. The images are symbolic and primal. He tells us something you have not realized. The Judge of Ages walks among us. He is someone here in the camp.”

Daae had come up on cat-silent feet behind Menelaus, and now startled him by making a small noise of satisfaction. “Some here realized it.”

Menelaus said, “Miss, what is your second reason? You said there were two. You have one other reason for agreeing to help us?”

Mickey bowed his head and said, “If I may answer that, Maiden Fatin?” She nodded. When Mickey raised his head, his eyes glittered. “You Chimerae are so proud of your freedom and ferocity that you forget who came before you, and you forget from whom you learned it! I am from Williamsburg, and the roots of that town are ancient indeed!”

Daae said, “So? What does that mean?”

Mickey lifted his double chins proudly, and the sunlight, peeping through the snowy clouds, glanced off the rim of his fantastic hat so that it gleamed like a crown. “It means we Witches love our freedom no less than you Chimerae, and are no less willing to die fighting for it.”