This was Whitlow.
Whitlow carried a silver-tipped black lacquered cane and a small gray box with a curious design on the lid. “This is not for you,” he told Glaucous. “I have a meeting with another later this day. Let’s move on.”
Out of Glaucous’s memories of that meeting—a palette reduced to dim grays and browns—he recalled unsteady nerves and embarrassment at his ill-fitting wool suit. (Shank had insisted he return all his master’s fine clothes. “What monkey owns his livery, I ask you?”)
Whitlow shared a tot of brandy from a silver flask, then escorted him up the hedgerow drive to the main house, a mouse’s holiday of neglect, one wing caved, rooms filled with roosting pigeons. Whitlow gained entry using a huge old key, then, with quiet humor, pushed Glaucous down a hall littered with broken furniture and the bones of mice and cats, arranged in rings and whorls, toward a special sort of room where, Whitlow said, none had lived or visited for several hundred years. Such rooms—difficult to find these days—best suited the closest servants of their Lady, who—he explained in a whisper, opening an inner door—ultimately paid their bills.
Whitlow locked the door behind Glaucous.
After a time of stuffy silence—long enough to feel pangs of hunger—Glaucous was joined, through no door he could detect, by an insubstantial being—a gentleman, judging by his soft voice and odor or lack of same. This nebulous figure, wrapped in a deeper cloak of shadows, never assumed definite form or size. Judging by the tapping of his hands around Glaucous’s face and shoulders—fingers like batting flies—the gentleman might have been blind. “I never go anywhere,” he whispered. “I am here always. Heremoves where I need to be. I am called the Moth. I transport and recruit for our Mistress.”
He spoke for what seemed a long time, his voice suggestive, modulated, indistinct. He spoke of books and words and permutations, and of a great war—greater than any dreary combat between imagined heavens and hells. “ Ourhells are real enough,” he said. “And our Mistress controls them all.” This Lady, he said, sought Shiftersand dreamers. Chancers, properly instructed, were ideal hunters and collectors. The Moth handed him a crust of bread, dusty with mold, then tapped Glaucous’s temple with a flitting finger. “If you serve well, you will never lack work,” came his muffled words. Apparently, having come this far, no refusal was permitted. “We pay in more than coin. Time no object. Different birds, different cages, Mr. Glaucous. Listen close, and I will pipe you all the songs you need ever sing.”
After some hours, the door opened, spearing the room with a broken shaft of sun. Glaucous blinked like a mole. Whitlow reappeared to usher him out. Behind, the room keened a wretched, pain-filled sound like none he had ever heard, and reclaimed its emptiness: spent.
Back on the hedgerow drive, dazed and exhausted, Glaucous asked, “Will I meet ever the Mistress?”
“Don’t be a fool,” Whitlow admonished. “We never hope for that. The Moth is bad enough, and he’s less than the tip of her pinky.”
For the next hundred twenty years Glaucous traveled from city to city across the United Kingdom, and then the United States…working as a diversion in carnival pitches, card parlors, side shows…always seeking, keeping a low profile, and wherever he went, posting ads in newspapers, ads that never varied except for an address, or later, a phone number—
Always asking the same question:
Do you dream of a City at the end of Time?
Glaucous kept deathly still. He could feel any vibration along the boards and beams. All was quiet. There would be no visitors for the next few minutes.
The collector behind the door—endlessly tossing his silver dollar—had failed in certain courtesies. He had not alerted Glaucous to his presence, nor had he shared information. He was poaching. Glaucous rapped a callused knuckle on the door, then fluted his voice, young and uneasy, the same voice he had used on the phone to answer the Chandler’s ad. “Hello? It’s Howard. Howard Grass.”
The slender man who opened the door held up his silver dollar between thumb and middle finger. His pupils were large, black, and steady. He presented a cold, surprised smile—and then a superior grin.
“Mr. Glaucous. How nice to see you.”
Glaucous knew the signs of a Chancer about to strike. There was no time to lose. In the slender man’s fingers, the head of the crowned silver woman on the Morgan faced north. Glaucous rolled up one eye, drew down a contrary strand, bent it sideways—and the head faced south. The Chandler’s heart also flipped, instantly filling his chest with blood. His fingers twitched and he released the coin. Falling, the stamped ounce of gray metal landed flat on the carpet—eagle side up. His face turned sickly green. Silent, he toppled facedown, stiff as a plank, and covered the coin. Also tails.
In the bathroom, the veiled woman began to shriek. Without the Chandler, her talent and passion flowered unchecked. Fire shot from around and under the bathroom door. Glaucous lent his assistance. She achieved her heart’s desire.
That afternoon, wrapped in melancholy, Glaucous sat in his warm apartment, shades drawn, the only light in the cramped living room focused on a phone sitting on a table next to his chair. Behind the closed door to the bedroom, his own partner, Penelope, sang in a low, childlike voice. Around her song flowed a steady buzz, like an electric bulb about to go dark.
Glaucous’s eyes turned sleepy. An hour before, he had eaten a spare lunch—an apple and a piece of wheat bread with three thin slices of salami. In those first days in London, it would have been a feast. He stared at the phone in its oblong of golden light. Something was stirring. He could feel a strong tug on the triggering thread that announced prey. Always before, his employers had informed him of a new rule, changes in the game. This awareness was arriving without warning. Perhaps there had not been time. Had he made a mistake, eliminating the Chandler?
Reaching out, he could feel as many as three small birds in his vicinity—almost certainly three—though one seemed odd, not what he might have expected. Of the other two, from long experience, he was sure he knew their habits, their concerns and fears, their needs.
A darker air was arriving. Max Glaucous could feel it in his light, lucky fingers. Long dreaded, long awaited—destruction, followed by freedom—an extraordinary conclusion to his troubles. Three sum-runners.
Whitlow will join us. And the Moth. They cannot do this without me. Finally—my reward. And my release.
CHAPTER 5
Wallingford
Trying to contain his churning, liquid misery, Daniel walked spastic. The sidewalk, old and gray and cracked, presented a rolling course of uneven obstacles. He leaned to the right on Sunnyside Avenue, grimly determined to make it home. He was ashamed. Daniel had always been the driver of his own soul, in control on the highways and byways of the fibrous multiverse. Now—he could barely keep from fouling his pants.
The neighborhood had not changed so much that he could spot the differences. In truth, he had never closely observed the houses more than a few doors away from his own. In his present hurry, there was no time to put together a catalog of obvious changes.
The sun slanted. This sick new body wore no watch and carried no keys; despite Daniel’s patting and thrusting, he could not find a key in all those pockets nor in the knapsack—but both he and his new body agreed, as they approached the concrete steps, the peaked porch roof and square tapered pillars, this