at a time, and I’m feeling just mean enough to do it. I’m having a very bad day in your city—the music sucks, everybody has a bad case of b.o., and the first guy we saw threw a grenade at us and kidnapped our friend. So what do you say?”
“Why would you go to Blaine in any case?” one of the others asked. “He stirs no more from his berth in the cradle—not for years now. He has even stopped speaking in his many voices and laughing.”
Speaking in his many voices and laughing? Eddie thought. He looked at Susannah. She looked back and shrugged.
“Ardis was the last to go nigh Blaine,” the bloodstained woman said.
Jeeves nodded somberly. “Ardis always was a fool when he were in drink. Blaine asked him some question. I heard it, but it made no sense to me—something about the mother of ravens, I think—and when Ardis couldn’t answer what was asked, Blaine slew him with blue fire.”
“Electricity?” Eddie asked.
Jeeves and the bloodstained woman both nodded. “Ay,” the woman said. “Electricity, so it were called in the old days, so it were.”
“You don’t have to go in with us,” Susannah proposed suddenly. “Just get us within sight of the place. We’ll go the rest of the way on our own.”
The woman looked at her mistrustfully, and then Jeeves pulled her head close to his lips and mumbled in her ear for a while. The other Pubes stood behind them in a ragged line, looking at Eddie and Susannah with the dazed eyes of people who have survived a bad air-raid.
At last the woman looked around. “Ay,” she said. “We’ll take you nigh the cradle, and then it’s good riddance to bad swill.”
“My idea exactly,” Eddie said. “You and Jeeves. The rest of you, scatter.” He swept them with his eyes. “But remember this—one spear thrown from ambush, one arrow, one brick, and these two die.” This threat came out sounding so weak and pointless that Eddie wished he hadn’t made it. How could they possibly care for these two, or for any of the individual members of their clan, when they dusted two or more of them each and every day? Well, he thought, watching the others trot off without so much as a backward glance, it was too late to worry about that now.
“Come on,” the woman said. “I want to be done with you.”
“The feeling’s mutual,” Eddie replied.
But before she and Jeeves led them away, the woman did something which made Eddie repent a little of his hard thoughts: knelt, brushed back the hair of the man in the kilt, and placed a kiss on his dirty cheek. “Goodbye, Winston,” she said. “Wait for me where the trees clear and the water’s sweet. I’ll come to ye, ay, as sure as dawn makes shadows run west.”
“I didn’t want to kill him,” Susannah said. “I want you to know that. But I wanted to die even less.”
“Ay.” The face that turned toward Susannah was stern and tearless. “But if ye mean to enter Blaine’s cradle, ye’ll die anyway. And the chances are that ye’ll die envying poor old Winston. He’s cruel, is Blaine. The cruelest of all demons in this cruel, cruel place.”
“Come on, Maud,” Jeeves said, and helped her up.
“Ay. Let’s finish with them.” She surveyed Susannah and Eddie again, her eyes stern but somehow confused, as well. “Gods curse my eyes that they should ever have happened on you two in the first place. And gods curse the guns ye carry, as well, for they were always the springhead of our troubles.”
And with that attitude, Susannah thought, your troubles are going to last at least a thousand years, sugar.
Maud set a rapid pace along The Street of the Turtle. Jeeves trotted beside her. Eddie, who was pushing Susannah in the wheelchair, was soon panting and struggling to keep up. The palatial buildings which lined their way spread out until they resembled ivy-covered country houses on huge, run-to-riot lawns, and Eddie realized they had entered what had once been a very ritzy neighborhood indeed. Ahead of them, one building loomed above all others. It was a deceptively simple square construction of white stone blocks, its overhanging roof supported by many pillars. Eddie thought again of the gladiator movies he’d so enjoyed as a kid. Susannah, educated in more formal schools, was reminded of the Parthenon. Both saw and marvelled at the gorgeously sculpted bestiary— Bear and Turtle, Fish and Rat, Horse and Dog—which ringed