A field of lush grass, through which a tidal wind was moving. A porch, overgrown with scarlet bougainvillea, where a child with white-blonde hair was laughing. A doughnut shop at dusk, with the evening star above it, set in a flawless blue. Somebody was dreaming here, he thought; yearning for the Helter Incendo. And it was someone who had been there and seen these sights with their own eyes.

Human. There was something human here. A prisoner of the lad, he assumed, trapped in this gleaming spiral, and guarded by reminders of flesh and its frailties.

He had no way of questioning it; no way of knowing if it had simply folded him into its visions, had comprehended that it was no longer alone. If the latter, then perhaps he could liberate it; lead it out of its dreaming cell. He turned his curious spirit around, and began to make his way back along the channel, hoping that the prisoner would follow. He was not disappointed. After a few seconds of travel, the channel widening once more, he glanced back and felt the eyeless stare upon him.

The escape, however, was not without consequence. Even as he picked up his pace, fractures appeared in the walls around them, and the fluid he'd seen ooze between the scales when he'd first approached the channel trickled into view. It was not, he now comprehended, the blood of the lad, but rather its raw stuff, turning even as it appeared into the same wretched, sickening forms. But for all their burgeoning vileness, there was something about their spread that smacked of desperation. Did he dare believe that they, or the mind that directed them, was afraid? Not of him, perhaps, but of whatever came on his spirit-heels; the dreamer he'd woken with his presence?

The further the two spirits traveled, the more certain he became that this was so. The fractures were fissures now, the lad's mud spilling into their path. But they were quicksilver. Before the Iad could block their path with atrocities they were escaping the spiral, dodging between the entities that had risen from the prison in all directions. Some seemed to have fashioned wings from their flayed hides, others had the appearance of things turned inside out; others still were like flocks of burned birds, sewn into a single anguished form. they came after the escapees in a foul horde, their whispers rising to shrieks now, their bodies colliding with the strands and dragging them after, so that when Joe glanced back the web was shaking in all directions, and sending down a rain of dead matter, which beat upon his spirit like a black hail.

It rapidly became so thick, this hail, that he lost contact with the dreamer completely. He tried to turn back and find his fellow spirit, but the horde had grown apace, and came at him like a raging wall, pressing a gust of hail ahead of it. He felt himself struck over and over, each assault beating him back and blinding him as it did so, until he could no longer see the dome or the pit, or anything between. He reeled in darkness for a few moments, not knowing which way he had come, and then, to his astonishment, a blaze of light enveloped him and he was failing through the empty air. Below him he saw the dream-sea churned into a frenzy by the Iad's approach, and beyond it a city in whose harbor the ships were lifted so high they would soon be pitched into the streets.

It was Liverpool, of course. In the time he'd adventured in the lad's head or belly the creature had strode across Quiddity, and was almost at the threshold between worlds. He had time, as he fell in the midst of lad's hail, to look along the shore towards the door. It was still wreathed in mist, but he could see the dark crack, and thought perhaps he glimpsed a star gleaming in the sky over Harmon's Heights.

Then he struck the waters amid a hail of ladic matter, and before he could free his spirit of its weight a wave rose beneath him, and bearing him up amid a raft of detritus, carned him on towards the city streets, where it left him, stranded in the shadow of the power that had shit him out.

Six

"Lucky Joe," said the face looming over Phoebe. It was as cracked as Unger's Creek in a drought.

Phoebe raised her head off the hard pillow. "What about him?"

"I'm just saying, he's damn lucky, the way you talk about him."

"What was I saying?"

"Mostly just his name," King Texas replied.

She looked past his muddy shoulder. The cave behind him was vast, and filled with people, standing, sitting, lying down.

"Did they hear me?" she asked Texas.

He smiled conspiratorially. "No," he said. "Only me."

"Have I broken any bones?" she said, looking down at her body.

"Nothing," he said. "I'd never let a woman's blood be spilled down here."

"What is it? Bad luck?"

"The worst," he said. "The very worst."

"What about MusnakaflP"

"What about him?"

"Did he survive?" King Texas shook his head. "So you saved me but not him?"

"I warned her, didn't I?" he said, almost petulantly. "I said I'd kill him if she didn't turn back."

"He wasn't to blame."

"And neither am I," Texas said. "She's the trouble. Always was."

"So why don't you just put her out of your mind? You've got plenty of company."

"No I don't."

"What about them?" she said, pointing to the assembly on his back.

"Look again," he said.

Puzzled, she sat up, and scanning the assembly, realized her error. What she had taken to be a congregation of living souls was in fact a crowd of sculptures, some set with fragments of glittering ore, some roughly hewn from blocks of stone, some barely human in shape.

"Who made them?" she said. "You?"

"Who else?" "You really are alone down here?"

"Not by choice. But yes."

"So you made these to keep you company?"

"No. they were my attempts to find some form that would win Mistress O'Connell's affections."

Phoebe swung her legs off the bed and got to her feet. "Is it all right if I look at them?" she asked him.

"Help yourself," he told her, standing aside. Then, as she walked past him he murmured, "I could forbid you nothing."

She pretended not to hear the remark, suspecting it would only open a subject she was not willing to address.

"Did she ever see any of these faces?" she asked him, wandering between the statues.

"One or two," he replied, somewhat mournfully. "But none of them made any impression upon her."

"Maybe you misunderstood-" Phoebe began.

"Misunderstood what?"

"The reason she doesn't care for you any longer. I'm sure it's nothing to do with the way you look. She's halfblind anyway."

"So what does she want from me?" King Texas wailed. "I built her highways. I built her a harbor. I leveled the ground so that she could dream her city into being."

"was she beautiful?" Phoebe said.

"Never."

"Not even a little?"

"No. She was antiquated even when I met her. And she'd just been hanged. Filthy, foul-mouthed-"

"But?"

"But what?"

"There was something you loved."

"Oh yes... " he said softly.

"What?"

"The fire in her, for one. The appetite in her. And the stories of course." "She told good stories?"

"She's got Irish blood, so of course." He smiled to himself. "That's how she made the city," he explained. "She told it. Night after night. Sat on the ground and told it. Then she'd sleep, and in the morning what she'd told would be there. The houses. The monuments. The pigeons. The smell of fish. The fogs. The smoke. That's how she made it all. Stories and dreams. Dreams and stories. It was wonderful to watch. I think I was never so much in love as those mornings, getting up and seeing what she'd made."

Listening to his reverie, Phoebe found herself warming to him. He was probably a fool for love, just as Maeve had said, and clearly that had made him a little crazed, but she understood that feeling well enough.