"Sit down, Giles," McGann said.
  "Look at him," Bloxham went on, jabbing his thumb in Dowd's direction. "He's guilty as 
hell."
  "I said sit down," McGann replied, raising his voice ever so slightly. Cowed, Bloxham 
sat. "You're not on trial here," McGann said to Dowd. "It's Godolphin we want."
  "So find him," Feaver said.
  "And when you do," Shales said, "tell him I've got a few items he may recognize."
  The table fell silent. Several heads turned in Matthias McGann's direction. "I think 
that's it," he said. "Unless you have any remarks to make?"
  "I don't believe so," Dowd replied.
  "Then you may go."
  Dowd took his leave without further exchange, escorted as far as the lift by Charlotte 
Feaver and left to make the descent alone. They were better informed than he'd imagined, 
but they were some way from guessing the truth. He turned over passages of the interview 
as he drove back to Regent's Park Road, committing them to memory for later recitation. 
Wakeman's drunken irrelevancies; Shales's indiscretion; McGann, smooth as a velvet 
scabbard. He'd repeat it all for Godolphin's edification, especially the 
cross-questioning about the absentee's whereabouts.
  Somewhere in the East, Dowd had said. East Yzordder-rex, maybe, in the Kesparates built 
close to the harbor where Oscar liked to bargain for contraband brought back from 
Hakaridek or the islands. Whether he was there or some other place, Dowd had no way of 
fetching him back. He would come when he would come, and the Tabula Rasa would have to 
bide its time, though the longer he was away the more the likelihood grew of one of their 
number voicing the suspicion some of them surely nurtured: that Godolphin's dealings in 
talismans and wantons were only the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps they even suspected he 
took trips.
  He wasn't the only Fifther who'd jaunte4 between Dominions, of course. There were many 
routes from Earth to the Reconciled Dominions, some safer than others but all used at one 
time or another, and not always by magicians. Poets had found their way over (and 
sometimes back, to tell the tale); so had a good number of priests over the centuries, 
and hermits, meditating on their essence so hard the In Ovo enveloped them and spat them 
into another world. Any soul despairing or inspired enough could get access. But few in 
Dowd's experience had made such a commonplace of it as Godolphin.
  These were dangerous times for such jaunts, both here and there. The Reconciled 
Dominions had been under the control of Yzordderrex's Autarch for over a century, and 
every time Godolphin returned from a trip he had new signs of unrest to report. From the 
margins of the First Dominion to Patashoqua and its satellite cities in the Fourth, 
voices were raised to stir rebellion. There was as yet no consensus on how best to 
overcome the Autarch's tyranny, only a simmering unrest which regularly erupted in riots 
or strikes, the leaders of such mutinies invariably found and executed. In fact, on 
occasion the Autarch's suppressions had been more Draconian still. Entire communities had 
been destroyed in the name of the Yzordderrexian Empire: tribes and small nations 
deprived of their gods, their lands, and their right to procreate, others, simply 
eradicated by pogroms the Autarch personally supervised. But none of these horrors had 
dissuaded Godolphin from traveling in the Reconciled Dominions. Perhaps tonight's events 
would, however, at least until the Society's suspicions had been allayed.
  Tiresome as it was, Dowd knew he had no choice as to where he went tonight: to the 
Godolphin estate and the folly in its deserted grounds which was Oscar's departure place. 
There he would wait, like a dog grown lonely at its master's absence, until Godolphin's 
return. Oscar was not the only one who would have to muster some excuses in the near 
future; so would he. Killing Chant had seemed like a wise maneuver at the time-and, of 
course, an agreeable diversion on a night without a show to go to-but Dowd hadn't 
predicted the furor it would cause. With hindsight, that had been naive. England loved 
murder, preferably with diagrams. And he'd been unlucky, what with the ubiquitous Mr. 
Burke of the Somme and a low quota of political scandals conspiring to make Chant 
posthumously famous. He would have to be prepared for Godolphin's wrath. But hopefully it 
would be subsumed in the larger anxiety of the Society's suspicions. Godolphin would need 
Dowd to help him calm these suspicions, and a man who needed his dog knew not to kick it 
too hard.
  
  
  7
  
  Gentle called Klein from the airport, minutes before he caught his flight. He presented 
Chester with a severely edited version of the truth, making no mention of Esta-brook's 
murder plot but explaining that Jude was ill and had requested his presence. Klein didn't 
deliver the tirade that Gentle had anticipated. He simply observed, rather wearily, that 
if Gentle's word was worth so little after all the effort he, Klein, had put into finding 
work for him, it was perhaps best that they end their business relationship now. Gentle 
begged him to be a little more lenient, to which Klein said he'd call Gentle's studio in 
two days' time and, if he received no answer, would assume their deal was no longer valid.
  "Your dick'll be the death of you," he commented as he signed off.
  The flight gave Gentle time to think about both that re-, mark and the conversation on 
Kite Hill, the memory of which still vexed him. During the exchange itself he'd moved 
from suspicion to disbelief to disgust and finally to acceptance of Estabrook's proposal- 
But despite the fact that the man had been as good as his word, providing ample funds for 
the trip, the more Gentle returned to the conversation in memory, the more that first 
response-suspicion-was reawakened. His doubts circled around two elements of Estabrook's 
story: the assassin himself (this Mr. Pie, hired out of nowhere) and, more particularly, 
around the man who'd introduced Estabrook to his hired hand: Chant, whose death had been 
media fodder for the past several days.
  The dead man's letter was virtually incomprehensible, as Estabrook had warned, veering 
from pulpit rhetoric to opiate invention. The fact that Chant, knowing he was going to be 
murdered (that much was cogent), should have chosen to set these nonsenses down as vital 
information was proof of significant derangement. How much more deranged, then, a man 
like Estabrook, who did business with this crazy? And by the same token was Gentle not 
crazier still, employed by the lunatic's employer?
  Amid all these fantasies and equivocations, however, there were two irreducible facts: 
death and Judith. The former had come to Chant in a derelict house in Clerkenwell; about 
that there was no ambiguity. The latter, innocent of her husband's malice, was probably 
its next target. His task was simple: to come between the two.
  He checked into his hotel at 52nd and Madison a little after five in the afternoon, New 
York time. From his window on the fourteenth floor he had a view downtown, but the scene 
was far from welcoming. A gruel of rain, threatening to thicken into snow, had begun to 
fall as he journeyed in from Kennedy, and the weather reports promised cold and more 
cold. It suited him, however. The gray darkness, together with the horn and brake squeals 
rising from the intersection below, fitted his mood of dislocation. As with London, New 
York was a city in which he'd had friends once, but lost them. The only face he would 
seek out here was Judith's.
  There was no purpose in delaying that search. He ordered coffee from Room Service,