" 'Who that?' it said. 'How you know Zunni's name? How you know Wicked Tribe?'

"It was too difficult to carry on a conversation—it would have taken hours of hit and miss—and based on the stories I had been told, I did not have the highest belief in the patience of the Wicked Tribe children. I banked my entire roll on one message.

" 'We are friends of Orlando Gardiner's. We are locked in a prison cell here in the temple. They are going to hurt us. We need help right now.'

"I heard no reply back. A guard had begun to talk in the corridor outside, blasting the subtle pipeline of space and movement into crazy ripples.

"So that is that. It is a ridiculously unlikely possibility that they even heard the whole of my message, or that they can do anything about it, but it was the only plan I could devise. At least I was right in my guess that the monkey-children were still hiding in the temple. And against all odds I have told someone that we are here, that we need help. The fact that our safety is now dependent on a group of preschool children leaves us no worse off then we were, if not a great deal better.

"Still, although Bonnie Mae Simpkins was happy to hear that the children had survived, I think the rest of my companions were depressed to hear of the slim thread I had expended so much time and energy constructing, and on which our hopes now hung.

"However, I was so tired and felt so sick at that point that I was not even afraid of Dread—would not have cared if Satan himself had knocked on the cell door. I fell asleep almost immediately despite my head banging like a drum. Now I am awake again, but nothing has changed. My head still aches, a persistent throb that I fear will never leave me. Poor Paul Jonas is suffering God alone knows what kind of punishments. The rest of us still wait for death—or worse. We wait for Dread. And perhaps I have accomplished nothing—perhaps I am a failure as a witch. But at least I have done . . . something.

"If I am to die soon, that might be a little solace. A little.

"Code Delphi. End here."

He was tied and helpless, his back bent across the curved stone table so that he felt the merest touch would split open his belly. In the dim, torchlit chamber the yellow face of Ptah hovered like a sickly sun.

"Comfy?"

Paul struggled against the bonds that were already rubbing skin from his wrists and ankles. "Why are you doing this, Wells?"

"Because I want to know." He straightened up and told the guard who had tied Paul, "Go find Userhotep."

"But I don't know myself! You can't torture someone into telling something he doesn't know!"

Robert Wells shook his head in mock sadness. "Oh, but I can. This isn't the real world anymore, Jonas. This is something much more complicated—more interesting, too."

"Interesting enough to get you killed if your new master doesn't like what you're doing to me."

His captor laughed. "Oh, I'll leave plenty for him to play with, don't worry. But first we're going to try a few tricks of our own." He looked up at the sound of footsteps. "And here's the chief trickster himself."

"I live to serve you, O Lord of the White Walls." The man who spoke might have been old or young—it was hard to tell in the shadowy chamber, and was made more difficult by the fleshy smoothness of the stranger's features. He was not fat—his arms showed hints of terrifying muscle beneath the unusually pale skin—but he was rounded, almost curvaceous, and had the sexless look of a eunuch.

"Userhotep is a very special person," Wells said solemnly. "A . . . damn, what's the term? There's a little snake that talks in my ear, but it almost never shuts up and I get tired of listening. Ah, right, a kheri-heb. A special kind of priest."

"He's a torturer," Paul snapped. "And you're an arrogant criminal bastard, Wells. Does your snake-gear have an Egyptian translation for that?"

"You know it already. The term is . . . a god." Robert Wells smiled. "But Userhotep is far more skilled than any mere torturer. He's a lector priest. That means a magician. And he's going to help you tell me everything you know. And everything you don't know, too."

Userhotep moved closer, raising his hands above Paul's unprotected belly. When Paul flinched, the priest frowned slightly, but his eyes remained as empty as the glazed stare of a fish.

No, a shark, Paul thought miserably. Something that uses its teeth just because it has them.

"No need to squirm," Wells said. "The painful bit is a pretty small part of the whole operation—I just mentioned it to give your cellmates something to think about. No, Userhotep here is going to cast a spell over you, then you're going to sing like a canary."

"You've been in here too long if you think some of Jongleur's ancient Egyptian mumbo-jumbo is going to make me tell you anything." He strained against the ropes, lifting his head until he could look into Userhotep's epicene face. "You're code, did you know that? You don't even exist. You're imaginary—a bunch of numbers in a big machine!"

Wells chuckled. "He won't hear anything that doesn't fit in with the simulation, Jonas. And it's you who doesn't understand much if you think this . . . mumbo-jumbo won't affect you."

Userhotep bent. When he stood again a long bronze blade was in his hand, more like a straight razor than a dagger. Before Paul had time to react, the priest swiped it across his chest. He had made three shallow cuts before Paul felt the burning pain of the first.

"You bastard!"

Paying no attention to Paul's struggles, Userhotep lifted a jar from the floor and dipped out something black and viscous. He rubbed it across the incisions. It was all Paul could do not to scream as it burned into the raw flesh.

"I think that's probably poppy-seed paste," Wells observed. "Kind of a primitive opium to help you dream. They have a multidisciplinary approach here, you see—a little science, a little magic, a little pain. . . ."

"Here is the malefactor, O gods,"

the priest chanted,

"The one whose mouth is closed against you

as a door is shut

Here is the one who will not tell truth

Unless you open his mouth so that his spirit

has no shade in which to hide!

Give unto me the provenance of his tongue!

Give unto me the secrets of his heart!"

Even as he spoke the charm Userhotep sliced at Paul's skin again and again, caulking each wound with salty black paste. His fluting voice was distant, distracted, as though he were reading the minutes of an unimportant, forgotten meeting, but there was a curious intensity to the man's flat, cold eyes: as the pain mounted, they seemed to grow brighter, until the face was all Paul could see, the rest of the room falling back into shadow.

"See, it doesn't matter whether you believe or not," Wells said from somewhere behind him, the yellow Ptah-face eclipsed by the priest's round visage like the sun disappearing behind the moon. "That's one of the clever things about this network—really, you have to give old Jongleur credit, it approaches genius. . . ."

"I don't know anything!" Paul groaned, fighting uselessly against the ropes, the burning of his skin.

"Oh, but you do. And if we play the system right, perform the proper spells, you'll talk whether you want to or not—whether you think you remember or not. Surely you've noticed by now that the network operates below the conscious level? Makes everything more real? Hides things that you know must actually be there, even kills people just by convincing them they're dead? If I'd known how Jongleur managed it all, I would have pushed him out a long time ago." Wells' bad-boy giggle penetrated only slowly—Paul was having trouble understanding, his mind beset by storms of agony and confusion.