Aenea nodded. “We come into the world alone, We depart alone, This also is illusion. I will teach you the way Not to come, not to go!”

“That would be a good trick,” said Cardinal Mustafa with false joviality.

The Dalai Lama leaned forward. “Ikkyû taught us that it is possible to live at least part of our lives in a timeless, spaceless world where there is no birth and death, no coming and going,” he said softly. “A place where there is no separation in time, no distance in space, no barrier barring us from the ones we love, no glass wall between experience and our hearts.”

Cardinal Mustafa stared as if speechless.

“My friend… M. Ananda… also taught me this,” said the boy. For a second, the Cardinal’s face was twisted by something like a sneer. He turned toward Aenea.

“I would be pleased if the young lady would teach me… teach us all… this clever conjuror’s trick,” he said sharply.

“I hope to,” said Aenea.

Rhadamanth Nemes took a half step toward my friend. I set my hand in my cape, lightly touching the firing stud of the flashlight laser. The Regent tapped a gong with a cloth-wrapped stick. The Lord Chamberlain hurried forward to escort us out. Aenea bowed to the Dalai Lama and I clumsily did likewise.

The audience was over.

I dance with Aenea in the great, echoing reception hall, to the music of a seventy-two-piece orchestra, with the lords and ladies, priests and plenipotentiaries of T’ien Shan, the Mountains of Heaven, all watching from the edges of the dance floor or wheeling around us in shared motion to the music. I remember dancing with Aenea, dining again before midnight at the long tables constantly restocked with food, and then dancing again. I remember holding her tight as we moved together around the dance floor. I do not remember ever having danced before—at least when I was sober—but I dance this night, holding Aenea close to me as the torchlight from the crackling braziers dims and the Oracle casts skylight shadows across the parquet floors.

It is in the wee hours of the morning and the older guests have retired, all the monks and mayors and elder statesmen—except for the Thunderbolt Sow, who has laughed and sung and clapped along with the orchestra for every raceme quadrille, tapping her slippered feet on the polished floors—and there are only four or five hundred determined celebrants remaining in the great, shadowy space, while the band plays slower and slower pieces as if their musical mainspring is wearing down.

I confess that I would have gone off to bed hours earlier if it were not for Aenea: she wants to dance. So dance we do, moving slowly, her small hand in my large one, my other hand flat on her back—feeling her spine and strong muscles under my palm through the thin silk of the dress—her hair against my cheek, her breasts soft against me, the curve of her skull against my neck and chin. She seems slightly sad, but still energetic, still celebrating. Private audiences had ended many hours ago and word had spread that the Dalai Lama had gone to bed before midnight, but we last celebrants partied on—Lhomo Dondrub, our flyer friend, laughing and pouring champagne and rice beer for everyone, Labsang Samten, the Dalai Lama’s little brother, leaping over the ember-filled braziers at some point, the serious Tromo Trochi of Dhomu suddenly metamorphosing into a magician in one corner, doing tricks with fire and hoops and levitations, and then the Dorje Phamo singing one clear, slow a cappella solo in a voice so sweet that it haunts my dreams to this day, and finally the scores of others joining in the Oracle Song as the orchestra prepares to wrap up the evening’s celebration before the predawn begins to fade the night sky. Suddenly the music ends in mid-bar. The dancers stop. Aenea and I lurch to a stop and look around.

There has been no sign of the Pax guests for hours, but suddenly one of them—Rhadamanth Nemes—emerges from the shadows of the Dalai Lama’s curtained alcove. She has changed her uniform and is now dressed all in red. There are two others with her, and for a moment I think they are the priests, but then I see that the two figures dressed in black are near-copies of the Nemes thing: another woman and a man, both in black combat suits, both with limp, black bangs hanging down on pale foreheads, both with eyes of dead amber.

The trio moves through the frozen dancers toward Aenea and me. Instinctively I put myself between my friend and the things, but the Nemes male and its other sibling begin to move around us, flanking us. I pull Aenea close behind me, but she steps to my side.

The frozen dancers make no noise. The orchestra remains silent. Even the moonlight seems stilled to solid shafts in the dusty air. I remove the flashlight laser and hold it at my side. The primary Nemes thing shows small teeth. Cardinal Mustafa steps from the shadows and stands behind her. All four of the Pax creatures hold their gaze on Aenea. For a moment I think that the universe has stopped, that the dancers are literally frozen in time and space, that the music hangs above us like icy stalactites ready to shatter and fall, but then I hear the murmur through the crowd—fearful whispers, a hiss of anxiety.

There is no visible threat—only four Pax guests moving out across the ballroom floor with Aenea as the locus of their closing circle—but the sense of predators closing on their prey is too strong to ignore, as is the scent of fear through the perfume and powder and cologne.

“Why wait?” says Rhadamanth Nemes, looking at Aenea but speaking to someone else—her siblings perhaps, or the Cardinal.

“I think…” says Cardinal Mustafa and freezes.

Everyone freezes. The great horns near the entrance arch have blown with the bass rumble of continental crusts shifting. No one is there in the alcoves to blow them. The bone and brass trumpets bracket the endless one-note rumbling of the horns. The great gong vibrates on the bone conduction level.

There is a rustle and stifled outcry across the dance floor, in the direction of the escalators, the anteroom, and the curtained entrance arch. The thinning crowds there are parting wider, moving aside like furrowed soil ahead of a steel plow.

Something is moving behind the closed curtains of the anteroom. Now something has passed through the curtains, not so much parting them as severing them. Now something is glinting in Oracle light and gliding across the parquet floors, gliding as if floating centimeters above the floor, glinting in the dying light of the moon. Tatters of red curtain hang from an impossibly tall form—three meters at least—and there are too many arms emerging from the folds of that crimson robe. It looks as if the hands hold steel blades. The dancers move away more quickly and there is a general and audible intake of breath. Lightning silently supercedes the moonlight and strobes off polished floors, eclipsing the Oracle with retinal echoes. When the thunder arrives some long seconds later, it is indistinguishable from the low, bone-shaking rumble of the reverberating horns in the entrance hall.

The Shrike glides to a halt five paces from Aenea and me, five paces from the Nemes thing, ten paces from each of the Nemes siblings frozen in their act of circling us, eight paces from the Cardinal. It occurs to me that the Shrike shrouded in its dangling red curtain tatters resembles nothing so much as a chrome and bladed caricature of Cardinal Mustafa in his crimson robe. The Nemes clones in their black uniforms look like shadows of stilettos against the walls.

Somewhere in one of the shadowed corners of the great reception hall, a tall clock slowly strikes the hour… one… two… three… four. It is, of course, the number of inhuman killing machines standing before and behind us. It has been more than four years since I have seen the Shrike, but its presence is no less terrible and no more welcome despite its intercession here.