“What is?”

“Differences. Women with purses, that’s the same. But they leave them unguarded on the tables to go over and dance, and they’re still there when they get back. I saw a guy standing at the edge of the dance floor who seemed to be looking one over, but the other people eating are keeping an eye on him.”

“Canary yellow suit and red tie?”

“That’s him. Then there’s the guy who came in with the rifle.”

Harris looked around, startled. “I didn’t see him. Where?”

“Oh, he doesn’t have it now. He left it with the hat-check girl by the front door.”

“Jesus.”

“Nobody thought anything about it! And then there’s the hookers.”

“Where?”

“Exactly. Where? This isn’t exactly a family restaurant. They’re groping each other to distraction out on the dance floor. When the music suits it, that is. And there’s kind of a meat market attitude to some of them here. But no one I can identify as a hooker. I didn’t see any on the street in the blocks we walked from Doc’s building . . . and this is not the jazziest block we came through.”

“You’re right. Well, it’s going to take a while to figure this place out. We have to live to figure it out, though.”

“We’ll go back as soon as you’re finished eating. ­Promise.”

Harris’ coin was easily enough to cover the charge; the waitress came back with a handful of coins—big copper ones, small copper ones, small silver ones. He slid one of the silver coins under his plate as a tip and hoped he’d guessed right.

The waitress, hovering, asked Harris, “By your leave—are you two lovers?”

Used to be, yeah. He glanced at Gaby. She wore her uncomfortable look again. “No.”

She smiled. “My duty ends in a chime. Care to come to my flat for lovemaking?”

He forced a smile and hoped that he wasn’t blushing again. “Well, thank you. I’m flattered. But my own, uh, duty calls. Maybe some other time.”

“Well, then. I’m Miarna.” And she was gone.

Harris clutched his heart for comic effect.

Gaby smiled uneasily as she stood. “People aren’t ­exactly repressed here.”

“Nope. One more difference.” He rose. “If we don’t want those differences to trip us up, I suggest we go and learn what they are.”

Duncan Blackletter and Adonis knelt in the center of Duncan’s ritual circle. This was no improvised thing made of rocks or paint; the inner and outer circles, like the words that lay between them, were of gold laid with an artisan’s skill into the veined green marble floor. Candles rested in notches cut for their presence; the gold incense burner, from which the bitterly strong smell of myrrh exuded, rested on its own upraised marble stand.

He breathed in the incense, focused his mind on the task at hand, and called upon the Crone.

On the grim world, she was so quiet, so deeply asleep, so close to death that it wrenched his heart whenever he invoked her. She was his favorite: the snipper of life-lines, the weaver of epilogues, the spirit of endgames, the weathered grandmother smiling fondly at her descendants while knowing that one day she must take their lives, too.

Perhaps, when all was done, he could speak some word or play some music so loud and glorious that it would awaken her here, too.

His sideline thoughts were drawing him out of his ­focused state. He put them from his mind and concentrated on finding the spirit of his goddess.

We sit within your sight, he thought. Tiny specks within the great circle of your eye. With all my heart and spirit, I beg of you, open your eye, cast your gaze about, and tell me: Are we the only ones? The last two straying motes left to be swept away?

Again and again, he repeated his prayer, as though with each repetition he could hurl it farther and farther into the depths of the goddess’ sleeping mind. With each completion he felt himself grow farther from his body, from the aches of age and joys of life, and he knew the familiar fear: would this be the time that the goddess just took him, cut him free from his life as easily as cutting a thread with shears?

Are we the only ones?

“Yes.” The word sighed out of Adonis’ gaping mouth, distant and fuzzy and indistinct, as though numberless worms deep in his chest had taken that moment to look upward and issue one word. The interruption jarred Duncan out of his concentration, snapped him back to resentful wakefulness.

“Damn you, Adonis, I have to begin again.” He automatically raised his hand to punish the creature and Adonis shrank away from him.

But Duncan froze, perplexed. Adonis never spoke. It couldn’t; it lacked the equipment.

This was the voice of the sleeping goddess.

Duncan swallowed hard, afraid to speak again. But he had to be sure. “Are we the only ones?” he asked again, aloud.

Again, the word wafted out of Adonis’ mouth: “Yeeessss.” The creature’s lips did not form to shape the word, and its eyes grew round with confusion. Even Adonis did not know how it was speaking.

The candles guttered for a moment, then grew brighter again, and Duncan felt the last of his rapport with the goddess slip away like the last memories of a dream. She was gone.

Duncan took a long moment to slow his racing heart, then forced a smile for his imbecilic companion. “Adonis, we’ve done it. Are you ready to home?”

Adonis’ face twisted into something like a child’s smile; its eyes grew bright and happy.

“Good. Let’s pack. We have a lot to do.”

Joseph looked up into the eyes of the man he held over his head. Whiskers Okerry, his face twisted with pain and effort. Above him, ceiling beams burned and gray-and-white flame licked off in search of more victims. All Joseph had to do was hold Okerry a little higher and the man, too, would begin burning.

He didn’t. It didn’t matter that he didn’t want to. He hadn’t been told to.

He exerted himself and heard the meaty crack of the man’s back. Okerry’s eyes widened. From pain, from reali­zation that nothing he could ever do would fix what had just been broken, Joseph didn’t know.

Almost tenderly, Joseph set him in the room’s one corner that fire had not yet touched.

Speak, he told himself. Tell him you would rather be dead than do this. Speak. The words welled up in him. But he could not utter them, could not give them to the dying man as one last comfort.

Duncan wouldn’t let him.

The words got bigger within him.

Speak.

Scream.

Joseph thrashed and heard himself shout. In the first moments of wakefulness, he felt his legs somehow ­hampered by cloth, felt his foot hit the footboard of his bed. Wood cracked and fell to the floor with a bang; the end of his bed collapsed.

He sighed. He’d kicked the footboard off again. He opened his eyes. A little light lurked behind his bedroom curtains.

He should be sweating, the way real men did.

“Joseph.” A woman’s voice from the other room.

Not alarmed—what could hurt him?—he rose and, naked, walked into the front room. Before he even faced it, he could see the glow shining from the screen of his talk-box.

It had been off when he went to bed last night. He moved to stand in front of it.

A woman stared back at him from the screen. She was beautiful, solemn. He could not determine the color of the dress she wore; even if his were not a gray-shade talk-box, his eyes did not offer him the range of colors that human eyes did.

She did not react to his nakedness. “Joseph,” she said, “Duncan Blackletter is looking for you.”

“He’s dead,” he said.

“No. He’s just been living on the grim world.”

He knew it was the truth. The gods did not love him enough for Duncan Blackletter to be dead. “Who are you?”