“So tell me,” the young policeman said, pausing to lick his pencil point, “when was the last time you saw this god?” He had a smooth face, this policeman, with blond hair slicked back into a ponytail and a loop of gold chain through one earlobe. He looked up expectantly, an expression which smoothed his face out even more until he looked like a blond egg.

“You can’t be serious,” Father Rameau said. “My God didn’t do this! He doesn’t commit murder.”

“We’re not accusing—him, is it?” The policeman made a note and his Academy ring glittered. “But it did happen in his temple. He may have seen something.”

“It’s not a temple,” Father Rameau said. “It’s a church. There’s a difference.” He hoped nobody asked him to explain the difference, because he couldn’t have come up with one on the spur- of- the- moment. The policeman looked interested, though, and was just opening his mouth when his partner knocked on the open door. Rameau liked the partner better because he was older and a bit fatter; also, he was respectably dressed in a suit and tie. No uniform and none of the Academy trappings.

“The necromancer says she doesn’t have a time of death,” he said now.

“Who’s examining? I thought we had Magister Klimt.”

“Yeah. He says this woman doesn’t have a time of death. Parts of her died up to ten years ago.”

“Then you can’t blame my God,” Rameau said, grasping at straws. “We’ve only been in Osyth for three years. And this church just opened last night.”

“No one’s blaming any god so far as I know,” the partner said. “In the scriptures, when gods kill people they want the credit. If a god had done it, there would have been a press release by now.”

Rameau didn’t like him any more.

Chapter One

The woman next to Teddy Whin was trying to check her makeup in the baggage claim window. All Teddy could see of herself in the window was the round outline of her head and a hint of glitter from two bright eyes. Since Teddy already knew she looked like a gerbil she ignored these in favor of pressing her nose against the window, putting her hands around her face to make a viewing-tunnel, and looking through her reflection into the world before dawn.

She saw a roadway curving in from her right; on the other side of it, the slabs and columns of the Osyth International Airport’s parking structure. Torn clouds hurried across the sky and a single branch nodded into and out of the light from the window, its tiny leaves flashing gold-edged neon green with every nod. Taxi drivers in windbreakers dodged drips from the overhang as they loaded luggage and travelers. Reflections sparkled on the wet pavement and danced in wind-blown puddles. When Teddy craned her neck, she could see a bit of horizon past the end of the parking structure, the beginning of day peeking over it.

She squinted at the streetlight closest to her. “They’re green.”

“You’re just used to those sodium lights in Selanto,” a voice from behind her said.

“Neil!” Teddy turned away from the window with a grin. “I was starting to think you forgot.”

“How could I forget a five thirty pick up? Not that I didn’t try.”

Looking at Neil Torecki, Teddy felt herself grow up. Her old profs at Selanto had still seen her as a graduate student, and that had made Teddy feel young and excited for about a day. She had spent the rest of spring break rediscovering that Selanto demonologists thought female students were luxuries—charming and decorative but not really capable of accomplishing anything. Now she was home, though, and in one giddy flash became the established demonologist with nothing to prove, the one who set the standards! It was like waking up from a bad dream. Relief flooded through her, and she gave the surprised Neil a quick hug.

“It’s so great to be back! If I ever talk about wanting to be a grad student again, put me out of my misery.”

“The joys of Selanto, huh?”

Neil smelled like linseed oil. His curls were red, his eyes green, and he had a smear of yellow paint along his jaw. The rest of his face was the kind of pink that never tanned. His clothes—an old-fashioned tailored shirt and tweed pants—might have seemed stodgy except for the streak of paint on one thigh. There was something perverse about painting in good clothes. Something Teddy associated with avant-garde artists of an earlier era, arrogant men who lived on martinis and sucked the life out of their more talented wives. But Neil’s snub-nosed face didn’t look arrogant. It looked determinedly cheerful, as if he were covering something up.

“How’d you get paint on yourself at five a.m.?”

“I was working all night.”

“Big project, huh?” The baggage carousel gave a clank before Neil could answer, and they walked over to where half a dozen other travelers had leapt to attention. One of them had a cup of coffee; the smell was heavenly.

“Why didn’t you put your luggage in a bolt-hole?” Neil asked, peering into the carousel’s maw. “It looks as if everyone else did.”

“I didn’t want to waste the power,” Teddy said, swallowing a yawn. “We’ll be invoking in a few hours, won’t we?” Neil didn’t turn around. “What am I missing here?”

“There’s no invocation this morning,” he said. “It’s IDA planning week.”

“Omigosh!” Teddy said, her jaw dropping. “I can’t believe I forgot about IDA!”

“You really were in Selanto.” Neil chuckled. “Though I would’ve thought they’d twit you about it nonstop.”

“No, they’re pretending it doesn’t exist. The only organization they ever mention is the Demonological Congress, and then they look at you in this sort of ‘dare you to say a word’ way. And I needed too much help to make people hostile…so, who all’s gone?”

“Warren and Russell, and Patsy Hoth,” Neil replied.

This made sense. Warren Oldham and Russell Cinea, the senior demonologists at the Royal Academy of the Arcane Arts and Sciences at Osyth, had helped found the International Demonological Association and never missed its spring board meetings. And Patsy Hoth, the Academy’s lecher, had been rising through the ranks of the IDA ever since the incubi she studied had been reclassified as first category demons.

“I’m surprised you didn’t have to go,” Neil added.

“I’m not on the board this year,” Teddy said, yawning out loud this time. “We do a lot more switching off in the Feminist Magicians’ branch. So are we invoking at all this week?”

“I don’t think they’ll be back until next week, and James is in the field.”

Teddy gave a little skip at the thought. “Cool! I can loaf around all day and get over my jet lag.”

Neil looked at the carpet.

“What’s wrong?”

“I won’t be invoking with you anymore,” he said, his tone defiant. “I’m leaving the department. I’m joining Arcane Arts in the fall.”

Teddy woke up. Information pumped through her blood, as hot as coffee. “Arcane Arts! When did this happen? And why on earth?”

“I sent in my letter two weeks ago.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Because I knew you’d be like this. ‘Arcane Arts!’” he mimicked. “Why does everyone say it like that? Arcane Arts has been around longer than Demonology.”

“Well, yeah…” Teddy’s tactful fading away wouldn’t have fooled anybody. “You were sure to get tenure in Demonology. Why switch horses? Won’t you have to start all over? And what are you going to live on until then?”

“That’s why I made the switch—I got a big commission for a rush project somebody bailed on, and I couldn’t pass it up. It’ll count toward tenure in Arts. And my work in Demonology counts too, particularly since I published those two books.”

The two books Neil referred to—The Bottle Imp and Inside the Red Box—were illustrated fairy tales for children. Teddy owned both of them, and part of her was relieved that she didn’t have to justify giving someone tenure in Demonology at the Royal Academy on the basis of two children’s books.

“Still, you were sure to get it,” she said, to Neil and to that part of herself. “You saved all our lives when that demon got loose.”

“All I did was push a safety switch in the pentarium,” Neil said. “Do you think I want to spend my life having that explained to grad students who wonder how I rate?”

“Grad students take that sort of thing as given,” Teddy said, waving her hand. “We would have been explaining it to junior faculty.” That was when she knew she was fine with Neil’s leaving the Demonology Department. “We’ll be dull without you,” she said, as if to apologize for caving in so quickly. “So, what else haven’t you told me about?”

He didn’t look at her. “I’m moving in with Bill,” he said.

“Wha—” Teddy shut her mouth.

“Wha— what?”

“Wha— wow,” she said. Lame. “You mean Bill Navanax?”

Neil glared at her. He took two steps forward until he was standing beside the luggage carousel and Teddy could only see the back of his head. There was paint on that, too, as if Neil had been twisting his hair the way he did before an invocation. Damn! Where did this come from? Trust Neil to jump into the middle of the biggest scandal in all Osyth!

It had been almost three years since Gordon, Bill’s ex, was burned for making illegal metals, but the rumbling around Bill had never died down. He’d been the real metals expert in that couple—the one smart enough not to get caught!–and he hadn’t done himself any favors since by hiding away in the Alchemy Building, earning a reputation as a nasty drunk. She would have had a serious talk with Neil about this, if anybody had only seen fit to tell her what was going on. But now it was too late. There were times when she had to keep her mouth shut or lose a friend, and Teddy hated those times. “Are you moving into his house, or is he moving into yours?” she asked.

“His,” said Neil. “It’s bigger.”

“Then I guess it’s really nice of you to give me a ride,” Teddy said. Bill Navanax lived in the suburbs to the west of the airport. Neil was going out of his way to drive Teddy to her apartment in the city of Osyth’s low-rent North End.

“I’m heading into town anyway,” he said. “My studio’s just around the corner from you.”

The carousel began to jerk and Teddy’s suitcase tipped out, the purple and orange ribbons she had tied around it trailing behind. She and Neil had an excuse to stop talking and jump into action, and then they were outside in the wet wind, dragging her luggage across to the parking structure under a brightening sky. The clouds had almost all blown away and a bird began to sing.

One of the streetlights along the sidewalk flashed blue as Teddy stepped under it with her backpack. “Are those watchlights? Somebody put a lot of energy into that,” she said, looking up.

“It’s a Public Health project,” Neil said, popping the trunk. “Are you carrying something magical?”

“Always,” Teddy said. “Are all of these watchlights?”

“One a kilometer out here, and every fifth light in the city.”

“But why? Since when have we needed watchlights?”

“Since forever,” Neil said, crossly. “Just because you think demons are good fun—”

There was no talking to him. Teddy slammed the car door and buckled herself in. The skyscrapers of Osyth rose ahead of them as Neil maneuvered the car through heavy commuter traffic from the southern suburbs. He followed most of the cars off the highway’s third exit onto a city street. Watchlights flickered green and blue as far as Teddy could see, showing where incubi, ghosts, or demons might be passing. Vampires might be lurking in the shadows, or brownies going about their household business. Conspicuous magic, Teddy thought. She couldn’t imagine a bigger waste of power than watchlights in a city on a ley-line.

“They’ve been in the works for a long time,” Neil said as the traffic thinned. “Public Health got nervous. Warren and Russell losing their souls didn’t help.”

“They didn’t—” Teddy stopped. There really wasn’t a good excuse for Warren and Russell. Senior demonologists were supposed to keep track of their souls, something that had been pointed out to her several times in Selanto. That still rankled.

“Public Health doesn’t know how good they have it here,” she said stoutly. “Do they have any idea what it’s like in a country where magicians and demons are at war? There’s a new demon in Selanto that’s killed four people this semester, and the faculty there were practically slitting throats to get the first crack at binding it. It’s a possessor, too—feeds on despair—and word was that some of them were using their grad students as bait.”

“That sucks,” Neil said without much attention. Everybody knew the University of Selanto was like that. “What demon?”

“The name they’re using is Antimora, but it’s not a true name. At least, no one’s been able to bind it using that name.”

“Crap! You’re sure?”

The car swerved. Teddy grabbed at the dash.

“Watch it! Of course I’m sure. Would I be alive if I got demons’ names wrong?”

“We got that one in an invocation right after you left,” Neil said. “It was scary as hell.”

“What’s it like?”

“Really calm,” he said. “About Russell’s height. Gray. It looked like one of those old statues of the mysteriosa, with the robes and the wings. Remember those?”

Teddy nodded. The mysteriosa stood at street corners all over Selanto, relicts of a religion long abandoned. Only the statues of the Bright Lady outnumbered them.

“But when you looked under the robe, it was on fire. Flames all around it—it spoke to us,” Neil said.

Complaining about that didn’t make any sense. The whole point of invoking a demon was to speak with it.

“It spoke to each of us, and none of us heard what it said to the others.”

“Ooh,” Teddy said. That was an issue. A demon’s magic should not be able to reach out of the pentacle and affect the magicians who had invoked it. “Why didn’t anybody tell me about this?”

“Russell didn’t email?”

“Uh—no.”

“That’s weird,” Neil said. “I can’t give you a clue on that one.”

“So what did it say?”

Neil made a face. “Believe it or not, we didn’t figure out what it had done for a while. Each of us thought we were the only one it had spoken to, and the things it said—well, they were the sort of things your friends don’t bring up later. You know?”

“Like what?”

Neil sighed. “Typical demon crap, I don’t know why we paid attention to it. It told me I was a charlatan, pretending to be qualified, that sort of thing. How many people would die because I’d fall apart when it really mattered.”

“That is crap,” Teddy pointed out. “You saved us all.”

“Yeah, but somehow that didn’t mean much… I guess it told each of us what we were afraid people were thinking. And then when nobody else mentioned what it had said, we thought they were being tactfully silent, and it took almost a week before we started to figure it out. Susan was the only one really speaking to anybody else by then. You’re lucky you missed it. And it’s a possessor?” Neil shuddered so hard that the car did a little jig. “That has to be why the watchlights. But it never came back,” he said, as if to reassure himself. “If a possessor were in town, Warren and Russell would never have gone to the IDA meeting. Probably our demons drove it away. You know they’re actually getting their union set up? I think Nezumia ate everything that wouldn’t join.”

“Wow. I can’t believe nobody told me any of this! What else happened while I was away? Did goblins take over city hall, or all the maintenance people sprout wings, or something?” They’d reached downtown Osyth, and Teddy looked out the window into a city that had apparently forgotten all about her as soon as she got on the plane to Selanto. It looked back, big and bland, its sharp-edged buildings set back from the streets on sterile pads of concrete. More green watchlights flashed by as the car moved from downtown’s wide spaces into the narrower streets of North End. Now older shops and factories crowded forward, pushing their rough faces and security-barred windows toward the sidewalk. Teddy liked these stores better. They made an effort. No pretensions, she thought. These stores knew what they were here for—to get people’s money—and didn’t hide it under any veneer of respectability. It was when you hid things that you faced problems like having a demon point them out … She wondered mightily what the demon Antimora would have said to her, had she been present at that invocation.

“The demon probably made you believe what it said,” she responded. “If it could talk to you with magic, through the lines, it could make you believe it the same way.”

“Yeah, probably. It’s all over now, though. Especially for me.”

“But you quit Demonology. And—” Teddy did mental math. “Did you quit before or after you found out what the demon had been up to? You can’t let a demon trick you out of your job!”

“I quit before break,” Neil said. “It didn’t take any demon to tell me. I used to wake up in a cold sweat every morning, just thinking about the invocation and what would happen if something got loose again… I don’t know how you can bounce into the pentarium and call up a demon as if it was some kind of party.”

“I don’t know,” Teddy said, flattered. “It’s just what I do, I guess.”

“Not me,” Neil repeated. “Not anymore.”

He pulled over in front of Teddy’s building, a four-story brick structure built in a grander era. Its door was flanked by dirty pillars, and worn faces with their noses knocked off looked down from over its windows. The streetlight above them flashed blue and then the whole line of lights went out at once, their cold glare replaced with gold as the sun peeped over the mountains to the southeast. Looking north, Teddy saw the crenellated top of the city wall leap into sight behind still shadowed buildings, like a stage set with the Royal Academy’s trees and roofs a backdrop behind it. Pigeons wheeled up from the wall, white against the sky. A siren wailed somewhere behind her and a clock chimed seven uncertain notes. She craned her neck to look past Neil, to where a streak of light hit her window three stories up and glinted off the golden wards that hung there. Looking up, she felt herself glow in return. Home!

“Whoa,” Neil said. “What’s that?”

“What?”

His finger pointed down the street to Teddy’s right, where the watchlights still shone a pale green in the shadow—except those at the next corner down, which flared a vivid blue, almost violet. By the time she had registered that, the purple blaze had run up the line of streetlights almost halfway to where they were parked.

“Shit!” Neil said, starting the car up again. It jerked forward and died.

Neil wrestled with the key for a moment, but the wave of purple was almost upon them; Teddy could feel the cauld grue running before it, a sick wave of cold in her bones.

Neil gave up on the car and threw his arms around her. “Hold still,” he said, his voice thin. “I have a ward against it—”

Cold was all around them, swirling and pushing, and Teddy felt Neil’s wards and her own flare to life.

“Against what?” she said, as the seconds passed and nothing happened. Neil loosened his grip on her, a little shamefaced.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s just that we were talking about Antimora.”

“I have a ward against it too,” Teddy pointed out. “From Selanto Public Health. But you’re still my hero.” She patted his hand before leaning forward to peer through the windshield. “This thing’s really checking us out, isn’t it? Look at the wards on my building.” Every first floor window was lit up like festival lights, and as they watched, the sparkle worked its way up until Teddy’s third-floor windows blazed out almost too brightly to watch. The grue faded away, the light in her windows went out, and the demon was gone.

“If I were really a hero, I wouldn’t let you get out of the car.”

“If you’re really a hero, you’ll recognize that I’m safer up there than anyplace else in Osyth,” Teddy said, and opened the door. “Come on, give me my luggage. I really need some sleep.”

***

First sunlight woke a pigeon dozing on the back of one of the benches spaced along the city wall. The bird flustered into the air and flew in circles, looking for another perch; most enticing was the gilded flame atop a spire rising from just inside the wall. The spire was square, wide-based and with sides dented in like a magician’s hat, which meant any cats climbing up it would be easy to see from the top. But the pigeon could find no footing on the flame. It slipped, rebalanced, clutched and fell before it fluttered down to the brim of the magician’s hat and settled with great ado, scrabbling on the tiles.

Inside, the noise echoed through an open room that contained little except an altar pushed against the back wall, a crystal lamp burning on it, and a large-boned, paunchy man kneeling against the altar rail. The lank brown hair fringing the man’s tonsure matched his robe. He looked up at the noise, raising a blunt nose and a square face that would never look ascetic. Wide-set gray eyes blinked on either side of the nose, distracted, and the man looked down again hastily as if scolding himself.

Father Rameau was scolding himself, but listlessly and without hope, for he had come to know that he was no worshipper. When he had first walked up to the Sacred Flame, in its courtyard in Selanto, for one moment he had been alone in the world. There had been nothing else, no distractions, and he had seen a life of ceaseless adoration stretch in front of him, but where had that clarity gone? Now, the minute his knees hit the floor, all Osyth seemed to clamor for his attention. Was that a noise? A waft of air? A bit of dust? And on the news that morning, a child lost, a man arrested. Outside, sirens blared, raised voices and running footsteps called to him—and that dratted pigeon again, flopping about on the roof. Rameau opened his eyes in fury, and all around him the church seemed to gloat. ‘Made you look!’ it said, and he glared around it, cataloguing the things he might set to and fix, move, or scrub within an inch of whatever life they had. The church would be sorry it had insisted on his attention. Having glared it into submission, Rameau turned back to the altar and, looking under it from a new angle, saw a pair of feet.

He would never have noticed if the altar cloth had hung properly, but it was rucked up on one edge and he could see a pair of narrow, child sized feet right under the boarded up window. They raised up as if their owner stood on tiptoe or on toes made into hooves. Rameau stood up, crouching over so as not to lose sight of the feet. They didn’t move, and from his new position he could see that there was no room above them for a body between the altar and the walled-up window it was shoved against. Still, he climbed over the altar rail as stealthily as a large man in robes could manage, got back onto his knees (and the church kept silent!) and crept up to the altar, under it, until he was within arms’ length of the feet.

By then he could see that there was no body above them, only the flat ovals where legs had been broken off. They were relicts such as he’d seen in other parts of the building, scars of an older religion that had built the church. He put his hand out and felt their narrow arches, the ridges of carved bones and the way the toes became hooves. The ladies who set the altar must have known about the feet and not told him. Perhaps they were hedging their bets, unsure of which religion would prevail, or they might have felt nostalgia for these bits of the past. The statue would have stood a-tiptoe before the north window, looking out toward the ley line and inviting its kindred in. “Not anymore,” Father Rameau said, sat up incautiously, and cracked his head against the bottom of the altar. He heard a tone as if his head had been a bell, and was not surprised to see the sanctuary transformed when he peered out. It always came on with a tone like a bell and lightness in his chest.

He should have seen an open space, its scarred floor littered with dust and plaster, new pews stacked in one corner, covered by a tarp and by dim colors from the stained-glass windows that were still occluded by thick plastic and scaffolding. But instead the sanctuary stretched before him as a maze of high-walled pews, with bewigged and beribboned heads popping up out of them like gophers. The windows behind them, clear and diamond-paned, looked onto a cobblestone street. Light falling over his head from behind the altar told Father Rameau the old north window was there in this time, and the great wall of Osyth was not. The ley-line looked into his church, and prancing with it came the little feet and their owner, a faun with its goat tail standing up behind it and its little pizzle standing up before. Down one aisle and up the other it pranced, and as it passed heads came together, sank sideways behind the pew walls, and Father Rameau saw the opal glow of incubi dancing through the church behind the little creature. He blinked, leaned hard on his burned hand, and the vision was gone.

He crawled out as he had come, stood up and looked around the sanctuary. Nowadays, if reopened, the north window would only give a view of the city wall. But he had no plan to reopen it. Nor would he ever let the lamp before it go out. The Sacred Flame burned there and drove off things that had such feet. The windows to the right and left of him were warded with gold chains and medallions, and the ones in front of him on either side of the door were even better protected by the First and Second Prophets in all their stained-glass glory. Before the week was out, this empty room would be filled with all the trappings of worship, and the two prophets would look down into it from the flames through which they had ascended to heaven and made a mockery of death.

Father Rameau sighed happily, looking over the house of God; he raised his burned hand and gave it his blessing, and then stepped out onto the sidewalk. He looked right and left before locking the door, to admire the windows from the outside. The watchlights turned blue in the distance—that meant something. By the time Father Rameau had thought this, the lights had gone blue all the way toward him and were flaring purple over his head.

A bell sounded in his head again and the street faded away. This time he saw a field of orange fire. It gathered around him, burning and freezing at once, and in its center a flaming face appeared, smiling gently at him. The face opened its mouth. If he heard its voice nothing could save him… With a wrench and a wordless cry, Rameau threw himself back into the sanctuary. But when he looked up from the floor, there was no flame or face, only the first sunlight running down a shaft of dust motes toward his feet. Rameau pulled back in a panic, and the sunlight seemed to coil in on itself and snarl; but it was just an eddy of wind, one that made the Sacred Flame on the altar jump and flare.

***

Neil waited for his heart to slow down before he pulled away from Teddy’s building. It seemed wrong to leave her there, but she was far better with demons than he was. She hadn’t even been fazed by that thing rushing toward them! But Neil wouldn’t have been either, if those stupid watchlights hadn’t shown it. The grue hadn’t been that strong. No stronger than he had felt every day in the pentarium, or at least twice a week in his studio around the corner, the corner he had just passed. Darn! There was nowhere for him to go now, in the early commuter traffic, except through the city’s north gate to where the row of evergreens that fronted the Royal Academy lay before him, an unwelcome sight.

“Crap!” he said, looking at the trees with a moment of panic. He stood on the brakes, but honking from behind told him he must turn right or left on the Academy Ring Road: left toward the Magic Building, or right toward the Sorcery Complex. He chose right, pulling in to park at one of the pubs across from the teaching hospital. This was not the first time Neil had driven to campus without thinking, as if the Academy were pulling him back. It wasn’t the first time he had left his car here in the parking lot of The King’s and walked back to his studio on the other side of the city wall. The waitress in the nearest café knew his face.

The sunlight Neil stepped out into raced down a busy street, bouncing off cars and buses on its way from east to west across the Osyth Plateau. A line of trees to the north and a line of shops to the south kept the light on its course. Behind the shops the city wall of Osyth stood up three stories tall. He could see its oldest levels of cut stone between the shops, and its newer brick and rubble layers above them. A few heads bobbed along the top, the wall serving as a commuter path for people who, like Teddy, lived in the low rent district on the other side.

Most of the people Neil saw up there would come down the North Gate stairs and cross the Academy Ring Road at the light, go between the trees, and turn right, walking toward the Sorcery Complex and teaching hospital. They would replace the tired, scrubs-clad figures who were jaywalking across from the hospital and hurrying past him toward the Salamander Café’s low door. Neil hustled after them into a busy room that glowed orange in the morning sunlight, like a pumpkin shell turned into a coffee shop by some happy magic. He found a seat by the window, in the light, and his cup sent up an artistic swirl of steam that might have congealed into a little imp or a dragonet.

A confused, night-chilled bumblebee zoomed in the open door, following a shaft of sunlight. Squeals tracked its progress across the room, but Neil didn’t watch. He sighed and stretched out his legs, and inside his head he heard everything Teddy hadn’t said about Bill, about Arcane Arts, and about Neil himself. But he didn’t hear it in Teddy’s voice. He heard it in a smooth gray voice full of knowing. The bee came back and Neil batted at it, but he was really driving something else away.

“Work awaits,” he said to the dregs of his coffee, and, finding that it didn’t sympathize, threw it into the wastebasket. Sunlight caught the cup’s wet rim, making it blaze up for an instant as if it were on fire, and looking up Neil saw everything around him edged in flame. He groaned and shut his eyes, but then an orange field filled his vision—flame made solid. Giving up, he went back out onto the street.

Instead of crossing over to the Royal Academy at the light Neil turned left, walking back through North Gate. The gate proper arched over a two lane street, filled with bumper to bumper traffic; it boasted a portcullis with spikes a half meter long, almost scraping the tops of the city buses that inched under it. Neil passed through a smaller arch over the sidewalk and then he was back inside Osyth. Shopkeepers bustled on both sides of North Avenue, unrolling awnings and sweeping up. Neil turned away from them, walking toward the sunlight as best he could in the tangle of narrow lanes.

Within two turnings he was in a slum, walking by neglected buildings, rubbish, rats and skeletonized cars. He dodged the overflow from garbage cans and stepped over something that could have been a man or a man’s possessions, bundled up in a filthy blanket. Nobody disturbed strangers in this quarter, because of what came over (or under, or through) the wall from the ley line. Neil’s ex-colleagues in demonology might have poked the bundle, but they would have been looking for ghosts or vampires.

Neil felt more nervous the further he walked. Bits of emotion came up in his head, snatches of conversation, and the effort of not letting them fit together gave him a foggy feeling. He stamped his feet and shook his head, muttering to himself, and once he stopped in a building’s cold shadow and addressed the air fiercely. “You can’t just ignore things,” he said to it, and it had no counterargument. Neil felt as if he had lost, just the same. He felt his shoulders slump as he crossed Granary Street to his studio.

This building, an old limestone warehouse with three-meter high double doors, stood pristine in a line of graffiti covered hulks. A golden eye was painted on the window of each polished door. The eyes were slightly crossed as they looked down at Neil. He held up his driver’s license and bowed, and the doors silently swung open. They let him into dark hallways, spangled over with chartreuse and purple by his sun filled eyes. By the time his eyes adjusted to the darkness he was at his own second-floor door, pushing it open and stepping back into sunlight that whirled around him like flames jumping back from every canvas in the room. Flames alone, in studies; flames as little parts of larger pictures. Men in flames, what was left of men after flames. Towering over them all was an oil painting of a man almost twice life size, with his gray hair and beard done up in braids, surrounded by flames. He looked at the viewer with blue eyes and a gentle face. His counterpart hung on the opposite wall, dark-bearded, blazing and angry. Neil looked at each one of them, and that foggy feeling came up inside him again. “You can’t just ignore things!” he said. But the men looked back at him, finished. The windows Neil had patterned after them stood, completed except for the glazier’s last spells, in the Church of the Sacred Flame ten blocks away. Their gazes pitied and accused the artist who wouldn’t move on when a project was done.

“All right, then,” Neil said, sullen. He went around the room turning paintings to the wall, but it felt wrong; he turned them out again, looked at them, and sighed. “I’m not done with it yet,” he said to the men on the wall. “I may be done with you, but I’m not done with this.” He looked at his painting gear and the canvases stored at one end of the room, moved a few of the flame paintings to the rack of failures to be painted over, and sighed again.

Every time he walked across the room, Neil passed closer and closer to the television and VCR in the corner, and at last he gave up and sat down on a stool in front of it. “Damn,” he said, and switched it on.

Nothing told the viewer where this video had been taken. It showed a city square, such as lay before the Hall of Justice in every major city Neil had visited. Surrounded by red stone municipal buildings, with a row of judges in black robes standing behind the stake, it could have been from any time in the last three hundred years except for the green dates blinking along the bottom of the screen, and the fact of a videotape at all. If the dates were to be believed, this tape was less than three years old. Neil might meet those judges today, walking nowadays streets without their robes or wigs or hanging faces on. He might run into one of the guards who now marched into view, half-dragging their inert prisoner, or shake one of those hands that lit the pyre. Because this was Osyth, the summer before Neil had come to live here. He had missed all this excitement by just one month.

And the inert prisoner who looked like no competition, or else an unbeatable competitor, being so much more dead than Neil himself could ever hope to be—that was the person Teddy would have named if she had finished her ‘Wha—’ in the airport. ‘What about Gordon,’ that’s what she would have said. What about the man Bill had loved before he met Neil, the alchemist executed for making illegal metals. It was hard to believe that making a new metal could change the world enough that a man should die for it, but here he was in the video, dying before Neil’s eyes. Here were his name and crime, scrolling along the bottom of the screen. ‘Gordon Weyerhauser, release of unauthorized elements.’

The man at the stake jerked a few times, as if he were checking the chains that bound him there in the fire. It roared up at the movement, wrapping around him, and Neil swallowed, but he couldn’t look away from the monitor; he didn’t want to miss what came next, when the camera swung, almost casually, as if whoever held it were simply turning on his heels as a man might do when bored. The flames went out of one side of the image and people came into the other side in a mass of too-close blurry black until the autofocus made them real. Neil saw Cham Ligalla from the Demonology Department and Magister Vinca from Alchemy, with his round face drawn down in harsh lines. Vinca was not looking at the burning, though he had his face to it. His eyes slid sideways, and the camera followed them to a tall long-faced man who stood apart from the rest, his hands behind his back.

The man had dark hair, deep-sunk eyes with purple stains under them, and a big triangular nose. His face fell down in vertical folds from the cheekbones as if it were half empty. He was wearing a white button-down shirt, a brown suit and a brown tie, and he probably had those very items still in his closet, but Neil couldn’t be sure because all Bill’s clothes looked like that. How still he stood! Like a statue cast of metal, he stared straight ahead. The first time Neil had seen Bill Navanax’s face, his hand had fairly itched to draw it. But now he practically lived with that face, kissed it, saw it every morning and every night, and he had not put one line of it on paper. If we broke up tomorrow, he thought, this is all I’d have to remember him by. Something happened out of the camera’s sight and Bill’s chest gave a jump, but his face did not move. The camera began to swing back past Vinca, toward the pyre, and Neil put his hands over his own face. His eyes burned.

***

Cham Ligalla watched the sunrise from high in one of the blankest and squarest of the tall buildings in the middle of Osyth. She looked east from one window and north from another, over the city wall and the Royal Academy’s outbuildings (which was how Cham, a faculty member in demonology as well as a civil servant, thought of the Administration Building, Student Union, and athletic facilities). Cham looked at the view with the intensity she brought to everything she did. She had hardly ever watched sunrise over the Academy; like all the demonologists, she spent most of her mornings in the pentarium, helping to invoke a demon.

Today being a clear day, with the last scraps of cloud disappearing toward the horizon, she could see over the outbuildings to where the three colleges of Magic, Sorcery, and Wizardry lay in a row along the ley-line: Magic’s white castle to the west, with its turrets lit up by the first sun; Sorcery’s old buildings long since overgrown and smothered by the teaching hospital; and Wizardry in the squat gray fortress the wizards had built for themselves back when they were the only ones who wanted to work on the ley-line. Now there was scarcely an inch of the line unused on campus, and the Royal Academy sought to acquire the unbuilt segments to its east and west, where the line meandered through parkland and between faculty houses. Magic had become big business, as much in the city as in the Academy. The city wall no longer kept it out of anything.

When Cham turned away from her window, she faced a large map showing the northern two-thirds of the Osyth Plateau, from the airport up to the Academy, tinted green and blue as watchlights sent information into it. The Royal Academy was entirely blue, the city sporadically so—Cham saw flashes of blue dart back and forth in North End, the watchlights sending new information to her map every few seconds—but in the south, around the airport, the suburbs and the industrial parks, Osyth was green. There was no magic there—yet.

Cham looked at the map the same way she had looked at the view, as if she were still making up her mind about it. It was the way her face was built. Subcutaneous fat, a classmate of hers had once said. That gave her face the smooth, bland look, the air of remote observation and approval withheld. It was why so many exorcists came from northern, native stock, he had said, and Cham had looked at him. All the students of color in the room had looked at him. All they had needed to do was look…they had been a strong class of exorcists, that year, but hardly any of them were still in the field. Hardly any of them were still alive. Cham put out a hand to touch the map, but it flared blue under her fingers and began to buzz, the sound of overload. She pulled her hand back.

“You can’t put markers on it that way,” Commissioner Trott said, leaning against her doorway. “Use the console.”

He was a solid, barrel-chested man with thinning hair and a round face that should have looked jolly. Now it looked tired, and its cheeks were too red—type A red, hypertension red.

“I don’t have anything to mark,” Cham said. “Unless you have news?”

Trott shook his head. “Lucky so far,” he said lightly. “It’s starting to look as if we didn’t need these.” He walked across to Cham’s computer and opened the map’s control panel. Blue trails lit across the map, fading into and out of existence as the demons that made them went in and out of the netherworld. Most of the trails began at the ley-line and roamed around the Academy, or into the north end. A knot of lighter blue appeared at the airport, dividing into a star of trails along major roads. “The five o’clock from Selanto,” Trott said. “All your Academy folks coming back from spring break.”

Cham nodded, noting the trail that passed her own building and ended in the north end. Teddy Whin, she thought. The north end was full of blue spots from sorcery students’ apartments and arcane artists’ studios. She swiveled and looked out the window again toward the Magic Building.

The sunlight that hit Osyth’s downtown buildings in a solid stream, flattening the view, looked hazy and irregular as it fell on the Royal Academy’s trees and towers. What time is it? Past nine o’clock, and habit told Cham she should be in the Magic Building’s sub-basement, using one of Teddy’s charms to invoke a demon. Perhaps Antimora.

She had not thought of any other demons since they had called that gray, flame-coated figure into the circle. She had expected it every morning, but it had never come again. It had looked at her, alone; it had spoken to her, alone.

“We follow the same path, you and I,” it had said. “We are not like these fools.”

Her phone rang; Cham jumped.

“Ligalla, Exorcism,” she answered, and heard an operator’s voice with a Selanto accent.

“Magister Ligalla? Please hold for Lord Stimms’ office.”

Cham didn’t move, but Trott noticed something. He looked at her with his eyebrows raised. She gestured at the phone and he left, a question still on his face.

Cham heard clicking on the other end. Her heart beat faster, though she did not want it to.

She had not seen Lord Stimms since her graduation, when he had named her exorcist, and while that would not sound like much to a magician or a wizard—might not even look like much, next to the pageantry of a sorcery graduation, the grim vows that necromancers took, or an alchemists’ branding—it was more. It was much more to be named an alchemist of souls, one whose attention could build up spirits and whose disdain could tear them down again. The talent had been Cham’s, but no amount of talent and study alone could have made her an exorcist. That had taken Lord Stimms’ acknowledgment; under his gaze her achievements had been judged real, her talent admitted true, and she had become herself.

“Hello?” a voice said, and Cham’s heart jumped in her chest. It landed at a lower spot, as if what had held it up inside her was missing.

“Arnold?” she said, her voice sharp with disappointment. “Arnold Jerroldsen?” This was not Lord Stimms. It was the Selanto Court Exorcist.

“Cham,” he said with relief. “I’m glad I caught you. I tried the Royal Academy—aren’t you invoking this morning?”

“No,” Cham said. “Why are you calling for Lord Stimms?”

“Uhm,” he cleared his throat, affecting an official tone. “Lord Stimms summons you to conclave, in fulfillment of your vows.”

“What?”

“Oh—do I really need to say all that again?”

“No, but what’s this all about?”

“Is this a secure line?”

“You know it is,” Cham said, losing patience. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“There’s been a manifestation,” Arnold said. “A god, or his prophet. The Sacred Flame.”

***

The oldest part of Osyth lay outside the city proper, in the tip of land on the other side of the ley line, and could only be approached by driving through the Royal Academy or around it on the Ring Road and turning off onto a hard-to-find lane that wound through a wood, where trees split the sunlight into spikes and dribbles. The lane, the sunlight, and the morning had been designed for convertibles, but Bill Navanax was the only person in the whole city with sense enough to see it. His car sped around the curves as if it were weightless, and as that was exactly what Bill was thinking about, he had a pleasant feeling of all the world being in tune.

Anyone who had seen Neil’s video would have recognized Bill Navanax by his nose and hair, and by the vertical lines his face fell into in moments of deep thought, but the half-empty look had disappeared over the past two years as his body had gotten used to being thirty pounds thinner. The current Bill did not look cast in metal either, or if he did it was a sparkling metal that flashed out whenever a shaft of sunlight hit it beneath the trees. Some light, festive metal…when he got near the Alchemy Building and turned onto its gravel drive the weightless feeling receded a little, but Bill still felt buoyant as he got out of his car. He even considered leaping out over the car door, like the stereotype of a private school lad, but decided against it. He was too old to be a private school lad, and too long to have much chance of leaping his legs over a door without a running start, and laddishness had never much appealed to him. There’s something to it, he thought now. Some set of useful conventions for expressing jubilance, perhaps for feeling it. Do normal people feel things first, or act them? Normal people meaning non-alchemists, of course, people whose wishes wouldn’t change the world. Maybe they acted their way into feeling things, and that was why their feelings weren’t real enough to accomplish much. Bill would have to ask Neil about that—with the thought, buoyancy bubbled up inside him again and he did leap over the grass between the parking lot and sidewalk.

The Alchemy Building was full of things to look at, from its grand staircase to the creatures carved above the arched lab doors, but Bill breezed past all of them. He walked over the floor’s inlaid birds and beasts without giving them a second thought, and went into his lab without a glance for anything in the bright room except his latest project. Still there! he thought and rejoiced, because his projects had been known to disappear overnight. Sometimes Bill had trouble believing in things, even if he had made them up himself. Sometimes things seemed too good to be true, and he came in to find they had popped out of his world. But this one had survived the night, and if Bill were lucky and clever, it would survive further testing as he had envisioned it, and become familiar enough to him in the process that he wouldn’t have to work so hard at believing in it. Then, when the Review Council of the Mystic Guild of Alchemists had approved it, it would be written up in their bulletin and metals alchemists all over the world would believe in it for him, mundanes would build things out of it and take it for granted, and then it would be real.

Right now it was a metal sphere about ten centimeters in diameter. It had a silvery pink color like freshly cut sodium, but was far shinier. Bill looked at the sphere carefully from all sides, checking for any flaws in its surface, and on seeing none he took a deep breath and picked it up. It came up into his hands as if it had leapt off the counter, and Bill held his breath for a moment. He hefted it again. Nothing! He might as well have been holding air. “Good deal!” he said to the sphere, grinning, and tossed it into the air. It came down at a normal speed, not defying gravity but landing in his palms with no more impact than a ball of paper.

Bill caught it carefully and took it across the room to an analytic balance, where he weighed it and entered the weight and time into his lab notebook. He stood a minute beside the balance paging back through the notes. “Now that’s stable,” he said to the sphere, feeling both triumphant and a little let down. “Nothing more to do till I melt you down.” That was a scary bit, having to melt down his greatest work and see if it would keep its qualities when cast in a different form. Bill picked up the sphere again and went out in the hall, looking for someone to show it to before he destroyed it. He went to Magister Vinca’s door and pounded, but nobody answered. Beth Langenahl poked her head out of the lab across the hall.

“He’s not in,” she said, in a complaining tone. “He’s been out all morning. I’ve got rationales for six new enzymes in here, and he promised me last week they’d go in the priority review pile. People are going to die because of this.”

“Priority review still takes six months,” Bill said. Beth was too dramatic for his taste.

“It goes to my credibility,” she said. “I leaned on the sorcerers to get their paperwork done, and now it gets held up at our end. And he was supposed to give me the verdict on a new kind of cytokine. I have it all ready to take over to the hospital. I’m so sick of the Guild Council, I could ralph.”

“You won’t hear me disagree with that,” Bill said. He strolled over to Beth’s door and looked into a lab filled with instruments he couldn’t recognize and small rodents he could. “Those are fat mice,” he said, looking at a cage full of spherical animals. One of them was running on an exercise wheel, with a grim and slightly hopeless expression.

“I’m trying to create model systems for the obesity lab,” Beth said, looking at the mice.

The resemblance was striking, except that Beth wore glasses. She had mouse-brown hair, and was almost spherical herself.

“It’s a challenge,” she confided, pushing her glasses up. “I really want them to be able to lose weight. Projection.” She sighed. “This Council has never approved anything that worked with obesity. It’s even worse than that—they’re doing retroactive reviews. Every year the Council disallows more of the old treatments, and then the people they worked for regain the weight. I think they intend to get us all fat and then eat us.”

“Maybe they’ll approve a famine,” Bill said.

“I can hope.”

Bill suddenly remembered his metal sphere. “Here, look at this,” he said, tossing it to Beth.

“Hey!” she protested, but she caught it. “Whoa! This doesn’t weigh a gram.”

“Speaking of slimming down.” Bill laughed. “How much will the airlines pay for something like this?”

Beth tossed the ball. “It’s amazing! How did you ever manage it?”

Bill shrugged. “Just fooling around.”

“Yes, but this isn’t what I’d expect you to come up with,” she said. “You’re usually fooling around at the bottom of the periodic table.”

Which was true. Bill had been making heavy metals for the last few years—dense, impervious metals, with heavy nuclei that held clouds of sullen electrons under tight restraint. Metals that weighed things down, and might reward their user with a blast of lethal radiation.

“I used to do a lot of lighter metals,” he said, his good mood a little dampened. “You just weren’t here then.”

“Well, this is a beauty,” Beth said. “Was it on commission, or will you have to write the proposal yourself?”

“It’s all my own. But I’ll ask Holly Frainlin out at Angel Air to help me with the proposal. They’re the first people I thought of selling it to.”

Beth boosted herself up onto the lab bench and frowned in concentration. “You know, I know the airplane people will want it,” she said, “but from looking at the latest Council judgments, you need to push the third world angle. They’re asking for social justice arguments. Now something like this—if it’s strong enough to replace standard construction materials, I’d look at how much it’ll cut shipping costs for projects overseas. How would it do for prefab homes? Also, can you use it for automobiles and cut fuel use? They’re very big on the global atmosphere right now.”

“I never thought of that.”

“Nobody does,” Beth said. “That’s why you’ll have an edge, if you do your homework.”

She tossed the sphere back to Bill, who caught it thoughtfully.

“That’s good advice,” he said, “because this is certainly too potentially useful for the guild to approve unless I sneak it around them somehow.”

“It would be a shame if they never let it exist outside the building,” Beth agreed, “but even if that happens, I hope you make more of it. I could use some lighter mouse cages.”

“We’ll see what happens when I try to make something out of it,” Bill said. “I still have the tensile strength and fatigue resistance tests to do. That’s why I’m hoping to get Holly interested enough to help.”

“Well, good luck,” Beth said.

She turned back to her mice, and Bill thought she seemed a little forlorn.

“Listen,” he said from the doorway, “how’d you like to come over for dinner some time next week? You’ve never met Neil.”

Beth looked astonished. “That would be really nice!” she said, in a more surprised tone than was actually flattering. “Just let me know what night.”

Okay, then,” Bill said, and went back to his own lab, where he put the sphere firmly on a benchtop and began heating up a furnace to melt it in. If it comes through the melting… Bill didn’t put it into words, but any alchemist would have understood. All semester, it had been coming back. His life, himself, everything that had burned away in the Court of Justice two years ago. The bad times are over, Bill thought.

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