into was stripped of all furniture and decoration; if anybody had occupied this house 
since Sartori's time-and it surely hadn't stood empty for two hundred years-they had 
gone, taking every trace of their presence. He raised his good arm and struck the glass 
with his elbow, a single jab which shattered the window. Then, careless of the damage he 
did himself, he hoisted his bulk onto the sill, beat out the rest of the pieces of glass 
with his hand, and dropped down into the room on the other side.
  The layout of the house was still clear in his mind. In dreams he'd drifted through 
these rooms and heard the Maestro's voice summoning him up the stairs-up! up!-to the room 
at the top where Sartori had worked his work. It was there Chant wanted to go now, but 
there were new signs of atrophy in his body with every heartbeat. The hand first invaded 
by the flea was withered, its nails dropped from their place, its bone showing at the 
knuckles and wrist. Beneath his jacket he knew his torso to the hip was similarly unmade; 
he felt pieces of his flesh falling inside his shirt as he moved. He would not be moving 
for much longer. His legs were increasingly unwilling to bear him up, and his senses were 
close to flickering out. Like a man whose children were leaving him, he begged as he 
climbed the stairs.
  "Stay with me. Just a little longer. Please. . .."
  His cajoling got him as far as the first landing, but then his legs all but gave out, 
and thereafter he had to climb using his one good arm to haul him onward.
  He was halfway up the final flight when he heard the voiders' whistle in the street 
outside, its piercing din unmistakable. They had found him quicker than he'd anticipated, 
sniffing him out through the darkened streets. The fear that he'd be denied sight of the 
sanctum at the top of the stairs spurred him on, his body doing its ragged best to 
accommodate his ambition.
  From below, he heard the door being forced open. Then the whistle again, harder than 
before, as his pursuers stepped into the house. He began to berate his limbs, his tongue 
barely able to shape the words.
  "Don't let me down! Work, will you? Work!"
  And they obliged. He scaled the last few stairs in a spastic fashion, but reached the 
top flight as he heard the voiders' soles at the bottom. It was dark up here, though how 
much of that was blindness and how much night he didn't know. It scarcely mattered. The 
route to the door of the sanctum was as familiar to him as the limbs he'd lost. He 
crawled on hands and knees across the landing, the ancient boards creaking beneath him. A 
sudden fear seized him: that the door would be locked, and he'd beat his weakness against 
it and fail to gain access. He reached up for the handle, grasped it, tried to turn it 
once, failed, tried again, and this time dropped face down over the threshold as the door 
swung open.
  There was food for his enfeebled eyes. Shafts of moonlight spilled from the windows in 
the roof. Though he'd dimly thought it was sentiment that had driven him back here, he 
saw now it was not. In returning here he came full circle, back to the room which had 
been his first glimpse of the Fifth Dominion. This was his cradle and his tutoring room. 
Here he'd smelled the air of England for the first time, the crisp October air; here he'd 
fed first, drunk first; first had cause for laughter and, later, for tears. Unlike the 
lower rooms, whose emptiness was a sign of desertion, this space had always been sparely 
furnished, and sometimes completely empty. He'd danced here on the same legs that now lay 
dead beneath him, while Sartori had told him how he planned to take this wretched 
Dominion and build in its midst a city that would shame Babylon; danced for sheer 
exuberance, knowing his Maestro was a great man and had it in his power to change the 
world.
  Lost ambition; all lost. Before that October had become November Sartori had gone, 
flitted in the night or murdered by his enemies. Gone, and left his servant stranded in a 
city he barely knew. How Chant had longed then to return to the ether from where he'd 
been summoned, to shrug off the body which Sartori had congealed around him and be gone 
out of this Dominion. But the only voice capable of ordering such a release was that 
which had conjured him, and with Sartori gone he was exiled on earth forever. He hadn't 
hated his summoner for that. Sartori had been indulgent for the weeks they'd been 
together. Were he to appear now, in the moonlit room, Chant would not have accused him of 
negligence but made proper obeisances and been glad that his inspiration had returned.
  "Maestro . . ." he murmured, face to the musty boards.
  "Not here," came a voice from behind him. It was not, he knew, one of the voiders. They 
could whistle but not speak. "You were Sartori's creature, were you? I don't remember 
that."
  The speaker was precise, cautious and smug. Unable to turn, Chant had to wait until the 
man walked past his supine body to get a sight of him. He knew better than to judge by 
appearances: he, whose flesh was not his own but of the Maestro's sculpting. Though the 
man in front of him looked human enough, he had the voiders in tow and spoke with 
knowledge of things few humans had access to. His face was an overripe cheese, drooping 
with jowls and weary folds around the eyes, his expression that of a funereal comic. The 
smugness in his voice was here too, in the studied way he licked upper and lower lips 
with his tongue before he spoke, and tapped the fingertips of each hand together as he 
judged the broken man at his feet. He wore an immaculately tailored three-piece suit, cut 
from a cloth of apricot cream. Chant would have given a good deal to break the bastard's 
nose so he bled on it.
  "I never did meet Sartori," he said. "Whatever happened to him?"
  The man went down on his haunches in front of Chant and suddenly snatched hold of a 
handful of his hair.
  "I asked you what happened to your Maestro," he said. "I'm Dowd, by the way. You never 
knew my master, the Lord Godotphin, and I never knew yours. But they're gone, and you're 
scrabbling around for work. Well, you won't have to do it any longer, if you take my 
meaning."
  "Did you . . . did you send him to me?"
  "It would help my comprehension if you could be more specific."
  "Estabrook."
  "Oh, yes. Him."
  "You did. Why?"
  "Wheels within wheels, my dove," Dowd said. "I'd tell you the whole bitter story, but 
you don't have the time to listen and I don't have the patience to explain. I knew of a 
man who needed an assassin. I knew of another man who dealt in them. Let's leave it at 
that."
  "But how did you know about me?"
  "You're not discreet," Dowd replied. "You get drunk on the Queen's birthday, and you 
gab like an Irishman at a wake. Lovey, it draws attention sooner or later."
  "Once in a while-"
  "I know, you get melancholy. We all do, lovey, we all do. But some of us do our weeping 
in private, and some of us"-he let Chant's head drop-"make fucking public spectacles of 
ourselves. There are consequences, lovey, didn't Sartori tell you that? There are always 
consequences. You've begun something with this Estabrook business, for instance, and I'll 
need to watch it closely, or before we know it there'll be ripples spreading through the 
Imajica."
  "The Imajica . . ."