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if someone had picked him up by the feet and slammed him down, and she saw that the door had pinned his ankle. The chubby man looked back at Simpkins just as Donnell swung, and the club glanced off the side of his head and sent him reeling against the wall. Simpkins screamed. The chubby man bounced off the wall and started walking dreamily toward Jocundra, his hands outstretched, a befuddled look on his face. Blood was trickling onto his ear. He heard Donnell behind him, turned, then - just as Jocundra swung - turned back, confused. She caught him flush on the mouth. He staggered away a step and dropped to his knees. He gave a weird, gurgling cry, and his hands fluttered about his mouth, afraid to touch it. A section of his lip was crushed and smeared up beneath his nose, and his gums were a mush of white fragments and blood. Donnell hit him on the neck, and he rolled under the table and lay still.

Simpkins' eyes were dilated, his face ashen, and he had begun to hyperventilate. The door had sunk a couple of inches into his leg above the ankle, and a crescent of his blood stained the wood. Just as they stooped to lift it, a pair of black hands slipped under from the other side and lifted it for them. Jocundra jumped back, Donnell readied his club. The door came up slowly, revealing a pair of brown trousers, a polo shirt, and then the sullen face of the Baron. Simpkins never noticed the door had been raised. His foot flopped at a ridiculous, straw-man angle, and he stared along the nap of the carpet with scrutinous intensity, as if he were reading a tricky green. His nostrils flared.

'You people don't need no damn help,' said the Baron, surveying the carnage. Clea peeped out from behind him, depressed-looking and pale.

'Where's Otille?' asked Donnell.

'Seen her downstairs when we's headin' up,' said the Baron; he kicked Simpkins' leg out of the way and motioned for them to pass on through; then he let the door bang down. 'What the hell is gon' on 'round here? Clea say...'

'Stay away from the veve,' said Donnell, taking Jocundra by the shoulders. 'Understand? Find the tapes.' And then, before she could respond, he said to the Baron, 'Keep her here,' and ran toward the stairs. Clea ran after him.

Despite the warning, Jocundra started to follow, but the Baron blocked her way. 'Do what he say, woman,' he said. 'Way I hear it, ain't nothin' we can do down there 'cept die.'

Dusk had settled over Maravillosa, and a silvery three-quarter moon had risen high above the shattered trees. Scraps of insulation and roofing blown from the cabins glittered among the debris of fronds and branches and vines. The only sound was of Donnell and Clea crunching through the denuded thickets. Because of Valcours' weakness, Otille would be leading him along a circuitous and relatively uncluttered path to the veve, so Donnell had made a beeline for it. Clea was breathing hard, squeaking whenever a twig scratched her.

'You should go back,' he said. 'You know what he did to Downey.'

'I promise you,' said Clea, hiccupping. 'If you don't get him, then I'm gonna.'

Donnell glanced back and saw that she was crying.

A dark man-shaped thing floated in the marble pool, and the shadowy forms of Valcours' other anthropomorphic toys were visible among the stripped branches of the shrubbery, leaning, arms outflung, like soldiers fallen in barbed wire while advancing across a no man's land. Towering above them, some twelve or fifteen feet high, was a metal devil's head, lean-skulled and long-eared. Its faceted, moonstruck eyes appeared to be tracking them, and its jaw had fallen open, giving it a dumfounded look. The rivets stitching the plates together resembled tribal tattoos.

As he climbed up the last conical hill, a drop of sweat slid along his ribs and his mouth went dry. There was a terrifying aura of suppressed energy about the clearing. The floodlights were off, but the copper paths of the veve rippled with moonlight: a crazy river flowing in every direction at once. He forced himself down the hill and climbed up on it, feeling as though he had just strapped himself into an electric chair. Clea climbed on behind him. He was through warning her; she was her own agent, and he had no time to waste.

He became lost in walking his pattern, in building his fiery tower, so lost