And so here he was riding down this side of this road, a submachine gun on his knee, alert for Lizard patrols, German patrols, Polish brigands, Jewish brigands… anyone at all. The fewer people he saw, the better he liked it.

His nerves jumped again when he came out of the forest into open farm country. Now he was visible for kilometers, not just a few meters. Of course, a lot of men got around on horseback these days, and a lot of them were in uniform and carried weapons. Not all of those were soldiers, by any means. The times had turned Poland as rough as the cinema made the America Wild West out to be. Rougher-the cowboys didn’t have machine guns or panzers.

His eyes swiveled back and forth. He still didn’t see anybody. He rode on. The farm wasn’t far. He could leave his message, boot the mare up into a trot, and be back with his regiment at the front only an hour or so later than he should have been. Given how erratic any sort of travel was these days, no one would think twice over that.

“Here we go,” he said softly, recognizing the well-kept little grove of apple trees ahead. Karol would pass the word to Tadeusz, Tadeusz could get it to Anielewicz, and that would be that.

Everything was quiet ahead. Too quiet? The hair prickled up on the back of Jager’s neck. No chickens ran in the yard, no sheep bleated, no pigs grunted. For that matter, no one was in the fields, no toddlers played by the house. Like a lot of Poles, Karol was raising a great brood of children. You could always spot them-or hear them, anyhow. Not now, though.

His horse snorted and sidestepped, white showing around her eyes. “Steady,” Jager said, and steady she was. But something had spooked her. She was walking forward, yes, but her nostrils still flared with every breath she took.

Jager sniffed, too. At first he noted nothing out of the ordinary. Then he too smelled what was bothering the mare. It wasn’t much, just a faint whiff of corruption, as if aHausfrau hadn’t got round to cooking a joint of beef until it had stayed in the icebox too long.

He knew he should have wheeled the horse around and ridden out of there at that first whiff of danger. But the whiff argued that the danger wasn’t there now. It had come and gone, probably a couple of days before. Jager rode the ever more restive mare up to the farmhouse and tied her to one of the posts holding up the front porch. As he dismounted, he flipped the change lever on his Schmeisser to full automatic.

Flies buzzed in and out through the front door, which was slightly ajar. Jager kicked it open. The sudden noise made the mare quiver and try to run. Jager bounded into the house.

The first two bodies lay in the kitchen. One of Karol’s daughters, maybe seven years old, had been shot execution-style in the back of the neck. His wife lay there, too, naked, on her back. She had a bullet hole between the eyes. Whoever had been here had probably raped her a few times, or more than a few, before they’d killed her.

Biting his lip, Jager walked into the parlor. Several more children sprawled in death there. The visitors had served one of them, a little blond of about twelve whom Jager remembered as always smiling, the same way they had Karol’s wife. The black bread he’d had for breakfast wanted to come back up. He clamped his jaw and wouldn’t let it.

The door to Karol’s bedroom gaped wide, like his wife’s legs, like his daughter’s. Jager walked in. There on the bed lay Karol. He had not been slain neatly, professionally, dispassionately. His killers had taken time and pains on their work. Karol had taken pain, too, some enormous amount of it, before he was finally allowed to die.

Jager turned away, partly sickened, partly afraid. Now he knew who had visited this farmhouse before him. They’d signed their masterpiece, so to speak: on Karol’s belly, they’d burned in the SS runes with a redhot poker or something similar. The next interesting question was, how much had they asked him before they finally cut out his tongue? He didn’t know Jager’s name-the panzer colonel called himself Joachim around here-but if he’d described Jager, figuring out who he was wouldn’t take the SS long.

Whistling tunelessly, Jager went outside, unhitched the mare, and rode away. Where to ride troubled him. Should he flee for his life? If he could get to Lodz, Anielewicz and the Jews would protect him. That was loaded with irony thick enough to slice, but it was also probably true.

In the end, though, instead of riding south, he went north, back toward his regiment. Karol and his family had been dead for days now. If the SS did know about him, they would have dropped on him by now. And, never mind the Jews, he still had the war against the Lizards to fight.

When he did get back to the regimental encampment, Gunther Grillparzer looked up from a game of skat and said, “You look a little green around the gills, sir. Everything all right?”

“I must have drunk some bad water or something,” Jager answered. “I’ve been jumping down off this miserable creature”-he patted the horse’s neck-“and squatting behind a bush about every five minutes, all the way back from corps headquarters.” That accounted not only for his pallor but also for getting back here later than he should have.

“The galloping shits are no fun at all, sir,” the panzer gunner said sympathetically. Then he guffawed and pointed to Jager’s mare. “The galloping shits! Get it, sir? I made a joke without even noticing.”

“Life is like that sometimes,” Jager said. Grillparzer scratched his head. Jager just led away the horse. He’d ridden it a long way; it needed seeing to. Grillparzer shrugged and went back to his card game.

Nieh Ho-T’ing and Hsia Shou-Tao passed the little scaly devils’ inspection and were allowed into the main part of the tent on the island in the lake at the heart of the Forbidden City. “Good of you to invite me here with you today,” he said, “instead of-” He stopped.

Instead of your woman, the one I tried to rape.Nieh completed the sentence, perhaps not exactly as his aide would have. Aloud, he answered, “Liu Mei has some sort of sickness, the kind babies get. Liu Han asked the central committee for permission to be relieved of this duty so she could care for the girl. Said permission having been granted-”

Hsia Shou-Tao nodded. “Women need to look after their brats. It’s one of the things they’re good for. They’re-” He stopped again. Again, Nieh Ho-T’ing had no trouble coming up with a likely continuation.They’re also good for laying, which causes the brats in the first place. But Hsia, while he might have thought that, hadn’t come out and said it. His reeducation, however slowly it proceeded, was advancing.

“Liu Han has all sorts of interesting projects going on,” Nieh said. Hsia Shou-Tao nodded once more, but did not ask him to amplify that. Where women were not involved, Hsia was plenty clever. He would not allude to the whereabouts of the scaly devil Ttomalss where other little devils might hear.

Nieh had thought that by this time he would be delivering small pieces of Ttomalss to the little devils one at a time. It hadn’t worked out that way. The capture of the little devil who’d stolen Liu Han’s child had gone off as planned-better than planned-but she hadn’t yet taken the ferocious revenge she and Nieh had anticipated. He wondered why. It wasn’t as if she’d become a Christian or anything foolish like that.

A couple of chairs were the only articles of human-made furniture inside the tent. Nieh and Hsia sat down in them. A moment later, the little scaly devil named Ppevel and his interpreter came out and seated themselves behind their worktable. Ppevel let loose with a volley of hisses and pops, squeaks and coughs. The interpreter turned them into pretty good Chinese: “The assistant administrator, eastern region, main continental mass, notes that one of you appears to be different from past sessions. Is it Nieh Ho-T’ing or Liu Han who is absent?”