"I believe we should take the risk seriously," he pronounced. "However unlikely we think it is."

"What risk?" McGann said.

"That there is a Maestro out there. Somebody who understands our forefathers' ambition and is going to find his own way of repeating the experiment. Maybe he doesn't want the books. Maybe he doesn't need the books. Maybe he's sitting at home somewhere, even now, working out the problems for himself."

"So what do we do?" said Charlotte.

"We purge," said Shales. "It pains me to say it, but Godolphin's right. We don't know what's going, on out there. We've kept an eye on things from a distance, and occasionally arranged to have somebody put under permanent sedation, but we haven't purged. I think we've got to begin."

"How do we go about that?" Bloxham wanted to know. He had a zealot's gleam in his dishwater eyes.

"We've got our allies. We use them. We turn over every stone, and if we find anything we don't like, we kill it."

"We're not an assassination squad."

"We have the finance to hire one," Shales pointed out. "And the friends to cover the evidence if need be. As I see it, we have one responsibility: to prevent, at all costs, another attempt at Reconciliation. That's what we were born to do."

He spoke with a total lack of melodrama, as though he were reciting a shopping list. His detachment impressed the room. So did the last sentiment, however blandly it was presented. Who could fail to be stirred by the thought of such purpose, reaching back over generations to the men who had gathered on this spot two centuries before? A few bloodied survivors, swearing that they, and their children, and their children's children, and so on until the end of the world would live and die with one ambition burning in their hearts: the prevention of another such apocalypse.

At this juncture McGann suggested a vote, and one was taken. There were no dissenting voices. The Society was agreed that the way forward lay in a comprehensive purge of all elements—innocent or not—who might presently be tampering, or tempted to tamper, with rituals intended to gain access to so-called Reconciled Dominions. All conventional religious structures would be excluded from this sanction, as they were utterly ineffectual and presented a useful distraction for some souls who might have been tempted towards esoteric practices. The shams and the profiteers would also be passed over. The pier-end palmists and fake psychics, the spiritualists who wrote new concertos for dead composers and sonnets for poets long since dust—all these would be left untouched. Only those who stood a chance of tripping over something Jmajical, and acting upon it, would be rooted out. It would be an extensive and sometimes brutal business, but the Society was the equal of the challenge. This was not the first purge it had masterminded (though it would be the first of this scale); the structure was in place for an invisible but comprehensive cleansing. The cults would be the prime targets: their acolytes would be dispersed, their leaders bought off or incarcerated. It had happened before that England had been sluiced clean of every significant esoteric and thaumatur-gist. Now it would happen again.

"Is the business of the day concluded?" Oscar asked. "Only Mass calls me."

"What's to be done with the body?" Alice Tyrwhitt asked.

Godolphin had his answer ready and waiting. "It's my mess and I'll clear it up," he said, with due humility. "I can arrange to have it buried in a motorway tonight, unless anybody has a better idea?"

There were no objections.

"Just as long as it's out of here," Alice said.

"I'll need some help to wrap it up and get it down to the car. Bloxham, would you oblige?"

Reluctant to refuse, Bloxham went in search of something to contain the carcass.

"I see no reason for us to sit and watch," Charlotte said, rising from her seat. "If that's the night's business, I'm going home."

As she headed to the door, Oscar took his cue to sow one last triumphant mischief.

"I suppose we'll be all thinking the same thing tonight," he said.

"What's that?" Lionel asked.

"Oh, just that if these things are as good at imitation as they appear to be, then we can't entirely trust each other from now on. I'm assuming we're all still human at the moment, but who knows what Christmas will bring?"

Half an hour later, Oscar was ready to depart for Mass. For all his earlier squeamishness, Bloxham had done well, returning Dowd's guts into the bowl of the carcass and mummifying the whole sorry slab in plastic and tape. He and Oscar had then lugged the corpse to the lift and, at the bottom, out of the tower to the car. It was a fine night, the moon a virtuous sliver in a sky rife with stars. As ever, Oscar took beauty where he could find it and, before setting off, halted to admire the spectacle.

"Isn't it stupendous, Giles?"

"It is indeed!" Bloxham replied. "It makes my head spin."

"All those worlds."

"Don't worry," Bloxham replied. "We'll make sure it never happens."

Confounded by this reply, Oscar looked across at the other man, to see that he wasn't looking at the stars at all but was still busying himself with the body. It was the thought of the coming purge he found stupendous,

"That should do it," Bloxham said, slamming the trunk and offering his hand for shaking.

Glad that he had the shadows to conceal his distaste, Oscar shook it, and bid the boor good night. Very soon, he knew, he would have to choose sides, and despite the success of tonight's endeavor, and the security he'd won with it, he was by no means sure that he belonged among the ranks of the purgers, even though they were certain to carry the day. But then if his place was not there, where was his place? This was a puzzlement, and he was glad he had the soothing spectacle of Midnight Mass to distract him from it.

Twenty-five minutes later, as he climbed the steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, he found himself offering up a little prayer, its sentiments not so very different from those of the carols this congregation would presently be singing. He prayed that hope was somewhere out there in the city tonight, and that it might come into his heart and scour him of his doubts and confusions, a light that would not only burn in him but would spread throughout the Dominions and illuminate the Imajica from one end to the other. But if such a divinity was near, he prayed that the songs had it wrong, because sweet as tales of Nativity were, time was short, and if hope was only a babe tonight then by the time it had reached redeeming age the worlds it had come to save would be dead.

TAYLOR BRIGGS HAD once told Judith that he measured out his life in summers. When his span came to an end, he said, it would be the summers he remembered and, counting them, count himself blessed among them. From the romances of his youth to the days of the last great orgies in the back rooms and bathhouses of New York and San Francisco, he could recall his career in love by sniffing the sweat from his armpits. Judith had envied him at the time. Like Gentle, she had difficulty remembering more than ten years of her past. She had no recollection of her adolescence whatsoever, nor her childhood; could not picture her parents or even name them. This inability to hold on to history didn't much concern her (she knew no other), until she encountered somebody like Taylor, who took such satisfaction from memory. She hoped he still did; it was one of the few pleasures left to him.

She'd first heard news of his sickness the previous July, from his lover, Clem. Despite the fact that he and Taylor had lived the same high life together, the plague had passed Clem by, and Jude had spent several nights with him, talking through the guilt he felt at what he saw as an undeserved escape. Their paths had diverged through the autumn months, however, and she was surprised to find an invitation to their Christmas party awaiting her when she got back from New York. Still feeling delicate after all that had happened, she'd rung up to decline, only to have Clem quietly tell her that Taylor was not expected to see another spring, never mind another summer. Would she not come, for his sake? She of course accepted. If any of her circle could make good times of bad it was Taylor and Clem, and she owed them both her best efforts in that endeavor. Was it perhaps because she'd had so many difficulties with the heterosexual males in her life that she relaxed in the company of men for whom her sex were not contested terrain?