"What?" Geraint was incredulous. "Ship me the Empire State Building and we'll talk about it." He was about to break the connection when Michael played his ace.

"We need it. Wouldn't want HKB to know who's been

into their hard copy and told someone else about a certain ownership, now would we?"

Geraint looked like thunder. "You slimy fragging bastard! I'll kill you for this."

"No you won't. Then HKB would definitely get to hear all about it. Come on, you're worth millions. Do it."

"Serrin, are you there?" Geraint demanded. When he heard the elf's voice, he asked him if this was a stunt.

"No, old friend, it isn't. I don't know exactly why Michael thinks he needs so much, but we really are in Grade A megadrek here. It's no stunt, believe me."

The sincerity in Serrin's voice calmed Geraint down a bit. He went back to talking with Michael.

"All right," he grumbled. "But you'll be working for me six months for this, you little swine, and I won't forget this blackmail until hell freezes over."

"Call it a mutually advantageous arrangement," Michael said. Then added, "It's a deal," before breaking the connection. Within minutes the money was in one of his accounts, a fact he verified at once.

"You wouldn't really have ratted on him, would you?" the elf asked. Geraint was a good friend.

"Of course I wouldn't. When he stops to think about it, he'll know that and calm down. But we needed the money. I don't have that much in liquid assets," Michael told him. "Hell, don't worry about it. We used to do a lot worse to each other back in our schooldays, old boy."

"I suppose we should book flights to Berlin, then," Serrin said. He was feeling slightly disorientated. It was six in the morning, but it felt like the middle of the afternoon. The middle of the afternoon on a day after one of the world's most horrifically extreme binges on most forms of self-abuse known to man.

"I'll get the credstick transfers ready so I can pick up the money at the airport," Michael told him. "If we leave right away, we'll be in Berlin by early afternoon. We can get some sleep and then go buy everything we can lay our hands on in the evening. And visit Mr. von Hayek tomorrow at dawn. Just when the sun comes up, heh-heh."

The Englishman groaned as he rose from his chair. He was stiff and his left arm still throbbed with a dull ache. Serrin lit a cigarette and coughed.

"God, does your body feel as bad as mine does?" he asked the elf. "I ache all over."

"Snap," Serrin replied with feeling.

"Ever get a massage from a troll who really knows what he's doing?"

"Sounds appalling," the elf replied with even more feeling.

"Does it? One hour after he's pummeled your every muscle into burger meat you feel like death. You sleep some, you wake up and then you feel like you could run a marathon. I don't usually need it, with my meditating, but I've been skipping my sessions for days and I think we should call out the Troll Roll for a service call."

"Terrific. I can't wait," Serrin said laconically and coughed again.

"Oh, and just one other call," Michael said quietly, walking into his bedroom. They didn't listen in.

Niall landed the plane at Saint Malo and fumed for half an hour while he waited for the right official to turn up to examine his papers. Nantes or Paris, he wondered, which was quicker? It had to be Paris. He could fly to Munich from there. But that was the obvious route, and they might be following him

Stop being paranoid, he told himself. It's got to be Paris. I'll never get a direct flight to Munich from Nantes, even if it is almost a hundred miles closer. I can make Paris by noon, Munich by four, probably, and then Schwandorf by six. I could do it tonight.

No you can't, Mathanas let him know. You know how much time the rituals will take. You won't be ready until the dawn. Let it happen at sunrise. Luther will always be a little less than his best at that time. You know, too, that assensing the place and examining the defenses will take hours. It cannot be rushed.

An hour delay might mean the crucial hour's difference, Niall pleaded. It might be the hour during which he finally sets the thing free.

Mathanas considered, and told him that that was a

chance they'd have to take. Niall drained a credstick and changed it for francs and marks in bills at the bureau de change. He bought himself a ticket for the Paris shuttle, then headed for the platform.

On the way he caught sight of his reflection in a mirror. The change of clothes Patrick had prepared for him was rustic enough that he resembled a French farmer heading off to some mindless political protest or other, though his own dramatic features gave the lie to that. Tucking his hair down into the collar of the almost shapeless jacket, he stooped to hide his face and disguise his height. Then he shuffled on, slouched and with his head kept down, out onto the bare concrete of the almost deserted, litter-choked train platform.

Serrin argued with Kristen while Michael packed and Tom returned to his own room. He begged her not to come with them. She wasn't trained in using a gun, she would be at risk, it was crazy. She was furious.

"I used it well enough before," she protested, which was true enough. If she hadn't gotten that head shot right, he'd have been drilled through by the machine-gunner back in New Hlobane.

"But this is going to be different. Very, very dangerous," he said.

"So? I want to be there," she insisted. She had a way of tapping her right foot on the floor when annoyed, something he hadn't noticed before. If not for the tenseness of the situation, he'd have found it desperately endearing.

"We'll have plenty of muscle with us," he said.

"You ain't got no one yet," she pointed out. "I won't let you go without me. Maybe I might have to pull the trigger for you again." She smiled happily. It was her trump card and she intended to get maximum use out of it.

"And don't forget," she went on, grinning hugely, "I got two men in my life to take care of. There's you, and there's my husband." Serrin couldn't help but laugh; she'd won the argument.

"All right. But, promise me you'll stay way back. You cover whoever's going in, but you stay out."

"Promise," she said with a taunting grin, one that said, well, she'd do her best, but amp;

The troll lay on his bed, huge feet hanging over the end of it, looking quietly through the window at the early New York sun. With hands cupped over his belly, he dug the fingers of his left hand into the smartgun link he could feel below the skin of the other.

Damn it, if I hadn't ruined my body with metal, he thought, I'd be a much better shaman. But it's too late to go back and undo it all now.

Reflections seemed to rise up in his mind unbidden. What's going to happen to me? I'm twenty-five years old. I got chosen by Bear. Everybody knows that doesn't usually happen to street people. The street shamans I know, most of 'em go with Rat, a few with Dog the better sorts and I've run into a few Cat folk. But Bear doesn't often show up in the city. Yet I don't feel out of place there amp; here. Strange amp;

His mind flashed back to New Hlobane. Without the slightest chance of finding Serrin, he'd done so. And he'd accomplished it by trying to do absolutely nothing, just being empty and still. He couldn't make sense of that. Tom had spent his whole life trying to do things: running the shadows, killing, stealing, drinking in the bad old days, working in downtown Seattle in the better ones. Anything he'd got from life, anything that had any meaning for him, he'd gone out and actively sought to get, or at least tried to.

But he felt there was something real bad at the end of all this. Sure, he listened to the Englishman's arguments and facts and took it all in. But Tom didn't feel facts. He could only feel what he could tangle with.