It was then that Doc first appeared. Gaby found ­reports of a brilliant engineer from Cretanis named Desmond MaqqRee building a bridge across the River Madb in the Cretanis capital, Beldon. Doc had uncovered and thwarted a plot by Blackletter to assassinate the Queen. Gaby noted with interest some mild criticism in the newspapers that he had not been knighted for his efforts. This was thirty-five years ago, so she had to revise Doc’s estimated age up again, to sixty or higher.

Not long after, there was an obituary notice for a Deirdriu MaqqRee. A suicide, she’d jumped from one of the high towers of Doc’s bridge. She was survived only by her husband . . . Desmond. Doc.

There was no explanation, no other account of the death, no hint as to what Deirdriu might have been like or why she killed herself. Gaby fumed over the incomplete picture she was assembling. She kept at it.

Duncan had invested in munitions and reaped big profits during the Colonial War between Castilia and the ­nations of the New World. A few years later, Scholars’ Year 1412, he was at it again. There were hints that he manipulated the kings of the Old World into the war called the World Crisis. The same year, the papers reported Doc refusing a commission in the army of Cretanis and being exiled from that nation; he accepted citizenship in Novimagos.

He was by this time appearing in the news as leader of the Sidhe Foundation, accompanied by an Acadian princess and other like-minded people; they settled disputes, turned the tides of some battles, and followed the trail of Duncan Blackletter across the landscape of the Old World.

Then it was Scholars’ Year 1415. Obituaries for Duncan Blackletter, Whiskers Okerry, Micah Cremm, and Siobhan Damvert—the last survived by her grieving prince of a husband, only two years away from becoming king himself, and her grim twelve-year-old son Jean-Pierre.

The end of Duncan Blackletter . . . until his botched plan to kidnap Gaby resulted in Harris finding the fair world.

Gaby sat back from her studies. With so much history between Doc and Duncan, Duncan and Jean-Pierre, there was no way they were all going to emerge from it alive. She feared for Harris and her new friends.

Harris kept his fedora low on his face and left the Monarch Building by one of its side exits. He tried to use reflections in storefront windows to spot anyone who might be following, but couldn’t spot anyone. If no one were following now, and if the device in his pocket were working right, then he’d be all right . . . but he felt more secure for having the hard, heavy lump pressed against his kidney, the revolver Noriko had given him.

Jean-Pierre’s directions were on target. Damablanca turned out to be a narrow, winding street with two-way traffic moving between tall residential buildings of brown brick; only at street level, where storefronts were crowded with neon and painted signs, was there any color along the street.

And then, a few blocks later, there was Banwite’s Talk-Boxes and Electrical Eccentricities, offering enough color and motion for any two normal blocks of storefronts. The shop’s name was picked out in gleaming green neon Celtic knotwork letters and surrounded by a gigantic yellow neon oval; just outside the border of that oval ran a bronze model train, upside down when it turned to chug along the underside of the sign, always sending gray fog from its smokestack floating up into the sky. Like most of the ground-floor shops in Neckerdam, Banwite’s had no windows at street level, but in the windows up one, Harris glimpsed dozens of talk-boxes and moving mechanical toys.

He shoved his way in through the front door, heard the clang of the cowbell hanging overhead, and walked in on a gadget-freak’s vision of paradise. The shop interior was like a repeat of the exterior, only more crowded. In one corner was a gadget that looked like a diving suit’s arms and legs sticking out of a water heater. A model aircraft with articulated pterodactyl-like wings hung from the ceiling. A grandfather clock with moving figurines instead of a pendulum behind the glass belled six, hours off from the correct time.

Brian Banwite stood behind the massive black-and-gold cash register at the main counter. “Help you, son?”

“You can take my money.” Harris set a lib in front of him.

“Always glad to oblige. But you have to take something for it.”

“I did that already.” Harris lifted his hat. “Remember, about a week back, I stole a ride in the back of your truck—lorry?”

“That was you!” Banwite scooped up the coin and pocketed it. “Done, then. I knew you were good for it. You seem to have done well for yourself.” He shot Harris a suspicious look. “You haven’t fallen in with bad eamons, have you? No gangs, no glitter-bright?”

“A sort of gang, yes. The Sidhe Foundation.”

Banwite sighed, relieved.

“You have a neat shop. Do you make all this, or just sell it?”

“Half and half. If it’s electrical or mechanical, I can make it for you. Ask Doc.”

“I’ll do that.” For politeness’ sake, Harris took a walk around the shop, marveling at dioramas of moving figures, flashlights that were so small by fair world standards they looked almost normal to him, folding knives with extra tools like half-hearted Swiss Army knives. Then he tipped his hat to Banwite on the way out and went looking for the tailor’s.

It was two blocks further on, much less conspicuous than Banwite’s. The owner, Brannach, was a comfortably overweight pale man with bright eyes and big, blindingly bright teeth. He’d never heard of denim, but showed Harris his selection of materials.

One of them, demasalle— “That’s more properly serge de Masallia, of course”—was the right stuff, but was available only in red and green.

“Can you dye it blue, like that?” Harris pointed to the one blue garment in the shop.

“With ease.” The tailor looked uncomfortable with Harris’ color choice, but said nothing about it.

So, half an hour later, poorer by about a third of his coins, Harris left. Three sets of jeans for Gaby, three for himself, ready within a few days; he’d have to pay the other half then.

It was just two errands, but he’d pulled them off without any of Doc’s associates leading him around by the hand, without screwing up three ways from Sunday. He smiled at the skyscrapers of Neckerdam and turned back toward the Monarch Building.

Gaby accepted Alastair’s proffered hand and stepped up out of the car. She looked dubiously at the mound of a building. “And these guys are supposed to be able to figure me out.”

Doc joined them on the sidewalk. “If anyone can.”

The building was a mountain of brick. This was no accident of design, no passing similarity. The structure was ten stories tall and took up an entire block. It rose in gradual, irregular curves, slopes, and cliff faces. Bushes grew from outcroppings—and from planters set outside the many lit windows. The shutters across the closed windows blended in with the surrounding brick in color and texture.

At street level, the doorway into the building was flanked by bearded men sitting against the brick front. One was gray haired, the other brown haired and much younger. Both wore stained garments in dull brown and green. Their eyes were focused on some distant point invisible to Gaby; they did not react to her or to the pedes­trian traffic on the sidewalk.

The three of them entered the building’s dark, low-ceilinged lobby. “What’s their problem?” Gaby asked.

“Glitter-bright,” Doc said. “Highly addictive, very destruc­tive. It’s illegal in most kingdoms, but sold everywhere. That’s where crime makes a lot of its coin.”

Several old men and women sat on the lobby’s sofas, many of them reading newspapers, some playing chess. A set of wooden doors in the far wall vibrated with the music playing beyond. It was much like the music Gaby had heard several times in the fair world, but she had the impression that it was wilder, more powerful.