“Well, what?”

“First, unfortunately, none of the men we took has talked. I doubt they will; they are a very confident lot. They’re in the prison of the Neckerdam Guard now.

“Second, though, I do have results from your valence tests of this morning.”

Harris grimaced. The last thing Doc and Alastair had done before he’d been allowed to go up to his room was take him into a small side laboratory and load him into a preposterous upright glass cylinder capped with electrical apparatus. Harris hadn’t been alarmed until the two men drew on thick goggles with lenses that were almost black.

Then they’d fired up the equipment, the noise of transformers and discharging electricity striking fear into Harris’ heart. That was only the start; things got worse when a continuous chain of green lightning poured into the cylinder and washed over him, rattling Harris’ teeth and standing every hair of his body on end.

But that had been over soon, and they’d sent the shocked (and, he suspected, smoking) Harris up to his room immediately after.

Doc continued, “The Firbolg Valence was zero. Meaning that you’re not Gifted. You can’t influence your surroundings except through normal means.”

“You mean, not like Alastair does with his medicine.”

Doc nodded. “But you have a Tallysin Aura like none I’ve ever seen. That’s what Alastair sees around you. With normal people—” he ignored Harris’ bark of laughter “—it shows up among the Gifted. In your case, when I subjected your aura to analysis, it indicated that you were . . . from somewhere else.” They roared by another red rail-bus, and Harris barely glimpsed the man dancing merrily atop the vehicle.

Harris glared. “I told you that last night. So tell me, where is this ‘somewhere else’ of yours?”

There was a stoplight on the median ahead. It was different from the ones Harris was used to. It didn’t change colors; a black-and-white sign swung out of the pole’s summit, reading “Halt.” Doc’s car and the other traffic slowed to a stop at the corner.

Doc took his time answering, not speaking until long after the “Halt” sign snapped back into the pole and was replaced by “Go.”

They left one cluster of skyscrapers and too-tall round towers behind and headed into a second one, near what should have been the financial district. Harris looked around to see if he could spot any familiar landmark, but there was nothing until a side street gave him a glimpse of the distant Brook—the Island Bridge.

“Some of the old stories say that there used to be two worlds,” Doc said; his voice sounded as though he were reciting. “The fair world and the grim world. On one lived the fair folk, on the other the grim folk. And it was easy to go from one to the other.

“The fair folk were our ancestors, in our thousand clans: light, dark, and dusky. Smaller than people today, of course, and knowing many things that modern man has forgotten. Ignorant of many things modern man has learned.

“The grim folk were barbarians. They were bigger than our ancestors, stronger, more constant in size and form, but savage. Bloodthirsty men who preferred killing to lovemaking or anything else.

“And the grim men were entirely immune to iron and iron’s daughter metals.”

Harris frowned as what Doc was saying sank home. “Hey, wait a minute.”

“Some of the men and women of the grim folk were better than others. More beautiful, more tolerable. They came to live on the fair world. And they were more prolific than the fair folk, more fertile. Those of our ancestors who wanted to have larger, healthier families found it no hardship to bring some of the grim folk into their bloodlines. And while this was going on, while these crosses were taking place, it became harder and harder to move between the grim place and the fair place.”

“You think I’m from this grim world.”

Doc nodded. “I’ve been rooting around in antique records and collections of legends, calling to experts on the talk-box, since you went to sleep. A lot of them put credence I never would have imagined into this twin-world idea.”

“So I’m a savage.” Harris felt himself get mad.

Doc cracked one of his rare smiles. “And most of us are the descendants of you savages, too. Caster Roundcap, an arcanologist I talked to this morning, who takes this sort of thing seriously, suspects that most modern men owe a quarter or more of their ancestry to the grim men. It explains a lot. A greater resistance than our ancestors had to iron poisoning. Increasing uniformity in the size and physical nature of people over the last three thousand years, something that still confuses arcan­ologists.”

Harris sat back, his thoughts running around in circles. They thought he was a caveman. Some sort of Neanderthal.

But, wait. If his people were the ancestral boogey-men of the fair world folk, what were their ancestors to his people? He shot Doc another glance, looking again at the sharp-pointed ear revealed by the wind whipping at Doc’s hair.

Then another thought occurred to him. “Wait a minute. There’s no way.”

“Why not?”

“Something I learned in college. I was a theater ­major. That accounts for my glittering job prospects. When people move apart and live in isolated communities, their language changes. That’s where dialects come from. ­After long enough, the languages are almost completely different. It takes a scholar to figure out that they’re ­related.”

“True.”

“But you’re speaking English. Weird English, maybe. But I understand it.”

“We are speaking Low Cretanis.”

“I don’t speak Low Cretinish at home.”

Doc shrugged. “Perhaps your speech adapted itself when you came here, a mystical transformation. It’s something I admit I hadn’t considered. It’s a good question. But you’re speaking the vulgar speech of the Islands, regard­less of what you spoke on the grim world.”

“The hell you say.” Harris thought furiously, then ­recited: “ ‘The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.’ There, did that rhyme?”

Doc looked startled. “Yes.” His lips began moving ­silently as though he were reciting to himself.

“What are the odds of a random rhyme surviving some sort of hocus-pocus translation like you were suggesting?”

Doc didn’t answer. For the first time since Harris had met him, he looked stunned. “That was William Shake­speare.”

“Yes!”

“Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Act Two, Scene Two.”

“Yes, goddammit, yes! How do you know that?”

“There’s no need to curse . . . Shakespeare was an ­insane fabulator several centuries ago. He wrote plays about places that never existed. They’ve survived as classical examples of fantastic literature. There has never been any proof that he himself really existed; it’s long been suspected that Shakespeare was a quill name for Lord Conn MaqqMann, the poet who ‘discovered’ his work.”

“No, he was real. Where I come from. And Denmark was real, and Richard the Third was real, and England was real, and William Shakespeare wrote about them.” Harris blinked. “Okay. So there are some people who think somebody else wrote the plays for him. But they don’t deny he existed. And we’re speaking the modern version of his language, English, whether you like it or not.”

Doc pulled over and parked beside a high, rickety wooden fence and looked closely at Harris. “Of all the things I have seen since you arrived, I think that disturbs me most. For everything else there is a reason. Not for this . . . duplication.”

“Sorry.” Harris waited a long moment. “Shouldn’t we get going again?”

“No. We are there.”

Harris looked up. Over the fencetop, he saw the metal girder framework of a skyscraper under construction.

Phipps entered the Manhattan office of his employer and cursed to himself as he felt his armpits go suddenly damp. The air-conditioning never seemed to help. He didn’t know why his employer affected him this way. The old man might be murder on those who stood in his way, but he was always solicitous of his own people. Fixing their ties, inquiring after their families, giving them little gifts and big bonuses. And yet there was something about him, as though he were a hooded cobra hiding inside a teddy bear.