She lashed out in equal measure, smashing the window by her divan with one arm, the rest of her perfectly still. He'd earned a dose of her volatility, and it was legendary-how could he think to out-tantrum her? "They call me the Queen of Poisons! A queen of wh.o.r.es and drug-f.u.c.ked madmen! How dare you manipulate me with my lost sovereignty! I am a captive in this body, bound to this place with only my own moisture for succor-the beasts of the desert live better!" She took a breath and picked gla.s.s from her gown. "I decide where my best interests lie, and the skylords and I have something in common. . . ." She stressed the t.i.tle the lich-lords had given themselves.

"You cannot Die. The liches cannot live-they're undead; Thea, we don't ally ourselves with abominations. Even a dark fey like Thyu knows that. Not even for self-preservation."

"We do what ever we deem necessary, gray man. And you are no longer in a position to afford our favor, nor its attendant courtesies." All possibility of coquettery was flown, now. Her beauty evaporated, replaced by bronze and thunder.

"Reverting to the royal we, Thea? You are slipping. Whatever hold those undead husks have over you must be powerful indeed."

"You think you know desperation. Ask the skylords. Ask the Unseelie. Ask us, Asher, we have ever known urgency and fear. Now the Dying cannot find Death, and a sickness is coming that every poison-wh.o.r.e worth her asps can smell. Something holds it at bay for now, but not, I think, for much longer."

"You're desperate." Asher gave her a searching look. "No, you're mad. It's already got you, hasn't it?"

"Ask me that question when you've been dethroned and damaged beyond mending, Ash-skin. You have choice while I have none. Talk to me of freedom and royalty when you have poisoned your spirit so thoroughly that it cannot Die."

"Oh Thea. I am. I have." He shook his head, feeling sorrier for the Queen of Poisons than ever before. How could he hate her when he felt so much of her own pain? They were too similar, though he could never say so. "You've betrayed me and sacrificed an innocent to the lichdom because you are unhappy?"

Thea threw up her hands. "No, you stupid man, I saved your friend from the Terenz-de-Guises she-elf, who tortures her father to death once a day. I do not betray you-I will not bring more poison into my soul." She couldn't stop herself from laughing. "Although what befalls him once he's made his choice, well . . . perhaps he would be better off butchered by your marchioness."

Asher looked dumbfounded, then stunned. "Dead G.o.ds, what have you done?"

"A dead G.o.d- that's what I am, Asher.This is what a dead G.o.d looks like." She spread her arms, looking so unhappy. "A moment ago you rebuked me for not acting a proper queen. But that's exactly what I've done. The skylords aren't so different from their underlings, or from the lords and ladies of your own Circle Unsung- aimless, purposeless. G.o.dless. Kingless."

Now she rose, turning her back to him and gazing out the broken window into the new day. A day that would see her life change, at the longest last. She pointed west, to the Guiselaine, where the Manse Terenz-de- Guises squatted like a cancer of dark wood and daub. "She's free. The rest of the pigs are locked away, Asher-why leave her uncaged?" Thea's voice shook with a jealousy that surprised Asher with its virulence. "Tell me what Thyu and Terenz-de-Guises and the other scattered handful of free- range n.o.bility did to earn their freedom? Tell me now and I'll undo everything. I will return your useless boy and abase myself if you can just tell me why."

Rage. Asher said nothing. He thought nothing. He held himself as still as possible and wished the words would fly back into her mouth and choke her.

"I didn't think so." She drew herself up and searched him with unblinking eyes. "I see the serpent slithers free, as it always does. Cooper knows you have a daughter, did he tell you that? I don't know how, but he knows. Your threadbare game unravels."

Asher's eyes flared with blue-red fire. "You sound just like Thyu, threatening me with sc.r.a.ps of knowledge you don't begin to understand. I don't know what motivates her, Thea, but what drives you is ugly to the core."

She shrugged, thinking of the throne she'd build atop those towers flickering like candles on the horizon. A house of suns. It was a pretty lie, and it had let her lead herself this far. Every soul could be seduced, even hers. Even Asher's.

"What do you know. A woman with a spine is a foreign creature-to you, we are all the same. Of course you'd see the similarities between women who resist you, desperate narcissist that you are. It doesn't matter now, does it? I will be monarch, or I will be nothing."

Asher buried his face in his hands. If he'd thought he couldn't feel any sorrier for Thea, he'd been wrong. "Two thousand years and you're still making the same mistakes, Thea. Still choosing the losing side. And that makes it all the sadder-where will you run this time? No snake can save you now."

She could not keep the sadness from her face or voice, this once. "No, not a snake." Then she shook her head clear and resumed her lies. "The Undertow make the perfect army, for the proper queen. The liches . . . the skylords are ready-made generals. Fflaen has abdicated and his puppies are locked in their kennel. Thyu might stand against me, but her goals lie beyond the city, you must know that. I, however, am d.a.m.ned to live in this world, so I must content myself with ruling it."

"Bells, Thea, if I had a dirty silver for every bitter former G.o.d-emperor who said as much . . . We are all of us trapped. You think you're the only one who's desperate for change? Wake up. That's everybody."

But she simply nodded. "Of course ambition is common. Rather less common, Asher, is ambition's realization. A Deathless city needs a Deathless ruler; we cannot Die. We are what we have always been, Asher. We are the Woman King."

Wrong and wronger. "Oh Thea, I am so, so sorry."

"As well you should be. Your freedom nears its end, Asher, and soon you will be the prisoner. You know precisely what we mean. n.o.body seems to know about the svarning except those of us who should know what to do about it, you abysmal failure of a man."

That last, she'd never been more sincere.

"That isn't what I meant." Asher shook his head, tears rolling down his face. He could sail a sea on the tears he'd shed . . . A ship of bones, a ship of doves. "I'm sorry about this, Thea. I did not want to see you meet your end this way."

"You waste your sorrow on me. You waste your breath." Do it. Please, old friend. Believe my lies.

Still crying, Asher nodded. "I know."

Thank you.

She needed peace, he knew, even though it would hurt him. She needed to fade away rather than rise again. The Lady could not Die, so Asher lifted his head and, with the voice of a mutilated angel, began to sing.

6.

Candace swears like a sailor & drives like a drunk. She's p.i.s.sed & pulling 80 in an ancient diesel Benz that cost her $60 & a hand- job. She wants to be a c.o.c.ktail waitress but she can't get past change-purse girl. Green polyester pants & church pumps with rubber soles. Vomit.

"f.u.c.k him and his a.s.s-sucking mother. She can rot in sinner's h.e.l.l, the s.h.i.t-eating wh.o.r.e." Candace lights a Lady Pinksmoke Menthol UltraLight while trying to sc.r.a.pe no-smear lipstick off an incisor. Finger slips & the Lady Pinksmoke drops into her lap.

"a.s.sf.u.c.k." Candace elaborates into her chest & she gropes for the filter. Doesn't see the truck. Doesn't see the impact coming.

Wait for it. In less time than an eye-blink: every car commercial she's ever seen, leafy afternoon light through the sunroof, Momma & the gambler sweaty on the sofa, an Isadora Duncan scarf streaming past the rear window, Berlioz on a record player.

Gla.s.s shatters. Her eggsh.e.l.l skull shatters too, & Candy is a held breath and starlight. Then for a moment she's nothing at all.

Brushes off the dust, stands. Rust & clay smeared across her face, caked in her bangs, eyelashes, gums. Knuckles grime from her sunstabbed eyes, shakes herself off & tucks the girls back into her top. There beneath a sky a shade too yellow to ever dare squat over Texas stretches a ribbon of concrete. Nothing but dust & gray-green weed & empty foothills. And fertile Candace, alive & alone. Wonders if she's hurt the baby. Hopes she has.

"f.u.c.k you, Candy." Mutters, reaches into her pocket & realizes she's lost her Lady Pinksmokes somewhere along the way. "Another Christ- f.u.c.king highway."

-Jack Kerouac, Fast Moves for Goners Still reeking of beer, Osebo the Leopard carried Nixon in his arms. Worn out and still thoroughly fainted, Nixon lolled in the valley between Osebo's bare biceps, looking for all the worlds as innocent and helpless as a child. He was coming around now, mewling like a cranky kitten as he floated out of sleep. Osebo had stolen the unboy away from the confrontation in Bonseki-sai and carried him to safety. He hadn't interfered with the angry pink-haired woman for numerous reasons, not the least of which was her rocky relationship with his wife, but he'd been unwilling to leave a little boy, even a false one like Nixon.

So while Asher and Sesstri fought their battles and Cooper flew into madness, Osebo the Leopard took it upon himself to tend to the child, and to see if he could kindle in Nixon's eyes the ghost of wonder he knew had once lived there. They all had that, and as a rule they all lost it one way or another; in that way, Osebo mused, they were no different than the First People. It had taken marriage to reawaken the house cat sleeping inside the full-throttle jaguar who'd stalked the jungles of the worlds, and Osebo thanked his wife for it. The beast was not weakened by the babe within- so he hoped it might go for Nixon, too.

But Nixon had none of a child's tacit complicity-evinced as soon as he blinked himself awake and looked up to see Osebo's dark face. He bucked like a wet cat and tried to claw his way out of Osebo's arms.

"f.u.c.king queers!" he roared, or would have if he hadn't been a ten-yearold. Instead his roar sounded more a squeal. Nixon's face grew beet red.

"Be still, boy." Osebo's hand wrapped around the scruff of Nixon's neck and pulled him back down to safety. His nonhuman strength brooked no argument. Stunned, Nixon's eyes went wide, then he burped. Nixon might a.s.sume otherwise, but Osebo was not prejudiced by the unboy's misleading body. To Osebo, they were all kitten-babes-infants-when measured by the years they'd lived. When he met a mortal who'd lived so long he couldn't remember his own origin, Osebo might consider that soul his chronological peer.

"Um." Nixon's pupils didn't quite match yet, but the boy was recovering quickly "Why do you stink like beer?" he asked, only half- awake.

"I gave directions to your friend, earlier. He appeared very lost."

"Cooper?" Nixon made a screwy face and knuckled sleep from his eyes. "Yeah. Cooper the lost. Why the f.u.c.k are you holding me, guy?"

"You are in no danger." Osebo thought that might be the kind of thing he should say.

"Ha!" Nixon barked his laugh and started struggling again. "Be still, I said." More firmly this time.

"I'll be still when you get your oily paws off me, Black Panther!"

They weren't far from their destination, so Osebo set the boy down on his feet. Nixon tottered for a moment before finding his legs, then rounded on Osebo with an expression he'd obviously picked up from Sesstri.

"Hippie queers!" Nixon bellowed, glaring up at Osebo.

"I find you very strange, little boy." Osebo's face was implacable.

"That's because I'm not a little f.u.c.king boy, Sambo!"

Osebo shook his head with laughing eyes. "Of course you are. Just a tantrum away from the cradle, I'd say. Once elevated above the others, some of you never learn your lessons. But you have, haven't you, Nixon?"

"How do you know my name? What, are you friends with the gray man and his harpy?"

"I am not."

Nixon frowned. "Cruised the burly kid that got kidnapped after you gave him 'directions,' did ya?"

"I did not." My, but the Third People are odd, he thought.

"So what happened back there? Where's the pink girl? If you've hurt her, I'll smash your G.o.dd.a.m.ned mosshead in. I've done it once today already!"

Osebo walked down the lane, leaving Nixon to catch up. "Your friend is fine. The same cannot be said, however, for the Death Boy who seemed so determined to accost her. Your concern belies some tenderness, Nixon."

Nixon eyed Osebo warily. "Good for her. But you're not getting anywhere near my tenders, f.a.ggot, so f.u.c.k off back to whatever Congo you crawled out of." He paused, reconsidering his options. "We've got unboys aplenty for you to diddle back at the Minorarium if you're into sicko s.h.i.t." Osebo was right, Nixon had learned a few lessons. Such as when to prioritize profit over machismo. "If you're dead set on pederasty, I can make the connections. Won't cost you more than a few dirties. . . ."

"I am uninterested in intimacy with anyone but my wife." He smiled where Nixon could not see. So preoccupied, so young.

"Sure, sure," Nixon jawed, comfortable now that he was talking shop. "They all say that."

Osebo stopped at a wooden gate across from a sleepy cafe. A few old men were playing dominoes at a table, but besides them and the grapevines growing over the fence posts on both sides of the lane, he and Nixon were alone. The alley looked quaint-were they in the Lindenstra.s.se again, or was this somewhere else? Not the Guiselaine. Purseyet was too rundown. Amelia Heights? Caparisonside?

Osebo pointed to the morning sky. The suns had reached halfway to their aphelion, moving as one. A concomitant binary day, then. Should be cloudless blue as long as it lasted, which Osebo judged would be at least until eve ning. The little intersection of magic and physics that Osebo called the Skylit Fall would be stable till then. A piece of folded s.p.a.ce tucked between plots of lilies and lettuce, it might be an accident of s.p.a.ciotemporal mechanics or the remnant of some long- gone display of the excesses of metaphysical engineering, like the ruins of a desert boulevard lined with overflowing fountains. He knew all of the ways to return to the cottage he shared with his wife in the Anvitine Run, but this was his favorite- and he thought this the best way to impress upon Nixon that he need not abandon every thread of childhood in the name of self- preservation. The unboy's cynicism was not so far gone that it couldn't be teased into something wry but hale.

Osebo rebuked himself-here he was, taking time out of the end of everything to teach one reborn cretin the value of wonder. It was all her fault. How she'd tamed him!

"Would you like to see something impossible, Nixon? Harmless, I a.s.sure you, but impossible nonetheless?"

"It's sweet of you to care, big man, but I've survived enough 'impossible' to last me a hundred lives, thanks."

Osebo c.o.c.ked his head. "Not like this, I think. Not in your few lives. A simple thing, but it brings me the kind of joy I a.s.sociate with the very young."

"I told you: young I ain't. And I don't know if you've noticed, but life isn't exactly what it was."

"By my standards, you're young." Osebo flashed Nixon a grin. This one would not fall into the trap of so many of his ilk-he'd already relinquished the memory of the power and privilege he'd once enjoyed. Despite his rancor, Nixon had acknowledged the truth: that the past was the past, no matter how desperately one clung to it. The past, thought Osebo in Nixon's own idiom-to practice mortal- scale empathy-was spent rocket fuel. You could no more reclaim it than you could recapture the jettisoned first stage of an orbital launch missile. Nixon may still be spitting fire, but he'd moved on to other strata. He would not go the way of his bimillennial peer, Thea Philopater.

Nixon looked up at the dark- skinned hunter. "Who the h.e.l.l are you, pal?"

"Do you remember the woman who paid you yesterday, if that is not too broad a description?"

"The doll with the box of money?" Nixon cawed. "How could I forget! Red hair, wearing next to nothing, legs like cream cheese and toes worth nibbling all day long? Yeah, I got her all right."

Osebo blinked. "I am her husband."

Nixon hadn't the good sense to be abashed. He whistled. "Lucky b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

Osebo nodded. "Yes. But you should call me Osebo instead; 'lucky b.a.s.t.a.r.d' might not impress my wife."

"Osebo, then." Nixon stuck out his ten-year-old hand. Osebo shook it with all the seriousness the little man required, and Nixon nodded in approval. "It's good to meet a family man. 'Pologize for the misunderstanding. You never quite get used to being young again, do you?"

"I don't think one gets used to being anything other than what one was when one began," Osebo said with a sideways smile. It was the closest one of the First People could come to answering "yes" to the question.

"Sure, whatever. Show me." Nixon shrugged.

The gate swung open with a creak and Osebo ushered Nixon into a little courtyard-the kind of hidden shaft of green that lived behind every apartment building in every world across the cosmoses-a secret emerald gem where mothers grew irises they'd taken from their grandmothers' flowerbeds back in the old country, the suburbs, the childhood garden. Electric lights shaped like jalapeno peppers or stars, flotsam furniture, a zinc bucket for cigarette b.u.t.ts. You could change bodies, you could live on a floating continent fueled by birdsong or coast between stars on some industry's freighter, but wherever you found cities, you found these interst.i.tial cloisters, growing windowsill tomatoes and sheltering garden parties. People rarely evinced dissimilarities in their means of finding comfort, an observation that brought a smile to Osebo's face, remembering his recent adventure in a barrel of beer.

Nixon strolled through and looked back at Osebo with a skeptical face.

"Great. Tomatoes and Christmas lights. Thanks a ton, pal."

Had he been human, Osebo might have rolled his eyes.

"Turn around, Nixon."

The sky was blue and untroubled, and Nixon quietly appreciated the simple sight of blue sky through green leaves as he looked up and turned around. The buildings on each side framed the bricked patio of the courtyard, except for the far side. Strangely, there were no buildings there, just blue sky. Odd, thought Nixon, I didn't think you could find an un.o.bstructed view of the horizon anywhere nearby- Oh.

The sky continued down past where the city blocks-let alone the nonexis tent horizon-ought to have been. Instead he peered over a ribbon of sky that stretched as far below him as it did above, as if they stood on the precipice of a city in the sky.

"Sky." He mouthed the word.

"Earth." Osebo smiled. "I like this game."

"Huh," grunted Nixon. "Ain't that a thing. Where'd the ground go?"

Osebo shrugged. "The ground was never here to begin with. Just a slice of sky. There's no reason why, not that I'm aware of, and no purposed served-just a bit of the heavens, sandwiched between city blocks and embraced by these apartment buildings."

Nixon leaned out over the edge just a little bit, then snapped back from the ledge. The sky went down all the way, as blue as blue could be. "Huh," he grunted again, by way of appreciation. "Can't buy that kind of view, can you?"

"Not with money."

He looked up at Osebo with a flash of something that might have been filial- adjacent. "Kind of like forever decided to give us a little peck on the cheek, isn't it?"

Osebo patted Nixon on the back. "I'm happy you appreciate the view."

Nixon shrugged off the hand. "I appreciate cash and hot meat. But this isn't half bad. Although," he mused, one foot in paranoia again, "it'd also be the perfect place to diddle some brat. I'm keeping my eye on you. We need to find you a shirt, pal."

Osebo might have laughed if the boy's mistrust hadn't been so deeply pathological. Instead he folded his hands and nodded. "Do whatever makes you feel safe, Nixon."