had lived, and it brought Dowd up to a certain tower in Highgate, where he was summoned 
in lieu of his absentee master, Estabrook's brother, Oscar Godolphin.
  
  In the 1780s, when Highgate Hill was so steep and deeply rutted that carriages 
regularly failed to make the grade and the drive to town was sufficiently dangerous that 
a wise man went with pistols, a merchant called Thomas Rox-borough had constructed a 
handsome house on Hornsey Lane, designed for him by one Henry Holland. At that time it 
had commanded fine views: south all the way to the river; north and west over the lush 
pastures of the region towards the tiny village of Hampstead. The former view was still 
available to the tourist, from the bridge that spanned the Archway Road, but Roxborough's 
fine house had gone, replaced in the late thirties with an anonymous ten-story tower, set 
back from the street. There was a screen of well-tended trees between tower and road, not 
sufficiently thick to conceal the building entirely, but enough to render what was 
already an undistinguished building virtually invisible. The only mail that was delivered 
there was circulars and official paperwork of one kind or another. There were no tenants, 
either individuals or businesses. Yet Roxborough Tower was kept well by its owners, who 
once every month or so gathered in the single room which occupied the top floor of the 
building, in the name of the man who had owned this plot of land two hundred years before 
and who had left it to the society he founded. The men and women (eleven in all) who met 
here and talked for a few hours and went their unremarkable ways were the descendants of 
the impassioned few Roxborough had gathered around him in the dark days following the 
failure of the Reconciliation. There was no passion among them now, nor more than a vague 
comprehension of Roxborough's purpose in forming what he'd called the Society of the 
Tabula Rasa, or the Clean Slate. But they met anyway, in part because in their early 
childhood one or other of their parents, usually but not always the father, had taken 
them aside and told them a great responsibility would fall to them-the carrying forward 
of a hermetically protected family secret-and in part because the Society looked after 
its own. Roxborough had been a man of wealth and insight. He'd purchased considerable 
tracts of land during his lifetime, and the profits that accrued from that investment had 
ballooned as London grew. The sole recipient of those monies was the Society, though the 
funds were so ingeniously routed, through companies and agents who were unaware of their 
place in the system, that nobody who serviced the Society in any capacity whatsoever knew 
of its existence.
  Thus the Tabula Rasa flourished in its peculiar, purposeless way, gathering to talk 
about the secrets it kept, as Roxborough had decreed, and enjoying the sight of the city 
from its place on Highgate Hill.
  Kuttner Dowd had been here several times, though never when the Society was assembled, 
as it was tonight. His employer, Oscar Godolphin, was one of the eleven to. whom the 
flame of Roxborough's intent had been passed, though of all of them surely none was so 
perfect a hypocrite as Godolphin, who was both a member of a Society committed to the 
repression of all magical activity, and the employer (Godolphin would have said owner) of 
a creature summoned by magic in the very year of the tragedy that had brought the Society 
into being.
  That creature was of course Dowd, whose existence was known to the Society's members 
but whose origins were not. If it had been, they would never have summoned him here and 
allowed him access to the hallowed tower. Rather, they would have been bound by 
Roxborough's edict to destroy him at whatever cost to their bodies, souls, or sanity that 
might entail. Certainly they had the expertise, or at least the means to gain it. The 
tower reputedly housed a library of treatises, grimoires, cyclopedias, and symposia 
second to none, collected by Roxborough and the group of Fifth Dominion magi who'd first 
supported the attempt at the Reconciliation. One of those men had been Joshua Godolphin, 
Earl of Bellingham. He and Rox-borough had survived the calamitous events of that 
midsummer almost two hundred years ago, but most of their dearest friends had not. The 
story went that after the tragedy Godolphin had retired to his country estate and never 
again ventured beyond its perimeters. Roxborough, on the other hand, ever the most 
pragmatic of the group, had within days of the cataclysm secured the occult libraries of 
his dead colleagues, hiding the thousands of volumes in the cellar of his house where 
they could, in the words of a letter to the Earl, no longer taint with un-Christian 
ambition the minds of good men like our dear friends. We must hereafter keep the doing of 
this damnable magic from our shores. That he had not destroyed the books, but merely 
locked them away, was testament to some ambiguity in him, however. Despite the horrors 
he'd seen, and the fierceness of his revulsion, some small part of him retained the 
fascination that had drawn him, Godolphin, and their fellow experimenters together in the 
first place.
  Dowd shivered with unease as he stood in the plain hallway of the tower, knowing that 
somewhere nearby was the largest collection of magical writings gathered in one place 
outside the Vatican, and that among them would be many rituals for the raising and 
dispatching of creatures like himself. He was not the conventional stuff of which 
familiars were made, of course. Most were simpering, mindless functionaries, plucked by 
then- summoners from the In Ovo- the space between the Fifth and the Reconciled 
Dominions-like lobsters from a restaurant tank. He, on the other hand, had been a 
professional actor in his time, and fgted for it. It wasn't congenital stupidity that had 
made him susceptible to human jurisdiction, it was anguish. He'd seen the face of 
Hapexamendios Himself and, half-crazed by the sight, had been unable to resist the 
summons, and the binding, when it came. His invoker had of course been Joshua Godolphin, 
and he'd commanded Dowd to serve his line until the end of time. In fact, Joshua's 
retirement to the safety of his estate had freed Dowd to wander until the old man's 
demise, when he was drawn back to offer his services to Joshua's son Nathaniel, only 
revealing his true nature once he'd made himself indispensable, for fear he was trapped 
between his bounden duty and the zeal of a Christian.
  In fact, Nathaniel had grown into a dissolute of considerable proportions by the time 
Dowd entered his employ, and could not have cared less what kind of creature Dowd was as 
long as he procured the right kind of company. And so it had gone on, generation after 
generation, Dowd changing his face on occasion (a simple trick, or feit) so as to conceal 
his longevity from the withering human world. But the possibility that one day his 
double-dealing would be discovered by the Tabula Rasa, and they would search through 
their library and find some vicious sway to destroy him, never entirely left his 
calculations: especially now, waiting for the call into their presence.
  That call was an hour and a half in coming, during which time he distracted himself 
thinking about the shows that were opening in the coming week. Theater remained his great 
love, and there was scarcely a production of any significance he failed to see. On the 
following Tuesday he had tickets for the much-acclaimed Lear at the National and then, 
two days later, a seat in the stalls for the revival of Turandot at the Coliseum. Much to 
look forward to, once this wretched interview was over,
  At last the lift hummed into life and one of the Society's younger members, Giles 
Bloxham, appeared. At forty, Bloxham looked twice that age. It took a kind of genius, 
Godolphin had once remarked when talking about Bloxham (he liked to report on the 
absurdities of the Society, particularly when he was in his cups), to look so dissipated 
and have nothing to regret for it.
  "We're ready for you now," Bloxham, said, indicating that Dowd should join him in the