patrol cars parked at all angles in the avenue, with armed police kneeling behind them. 
Across the street, he could make out two detectives and a man in a green golfing shirt 
holding a dog on a lead.
   Time to leave, I think,' said Springer. The Night Warriors stood in a circle, closed 
their eyes, and floated through the molecules of the roof and into the humid night. They 
circled high above the house, and as they did so they saw the police dodging and darting 
through the yard.
   One of the cops took a sledgehammer to the front door, while three of his colleagues 
kept him covered. Reblax smiled to himself as he turned toward downtown Philadelphia. He 
saw the patrolmen's flashlights crisscrossing the upstairs room, searching for - what? 
Anarchists, dope addicts, terrorists, ghosts? All they would find would be dust and 
dereliction, and the stale odor of a house in which nobody human had lived for thirty 
years.
   The Night Warriors floated darkly through the sky, over the glittering crisscrossed 
streets of Philadelphia, at last approaching police headquarters like bats, or shadows, 
or shadows of shadows. They followed Oromas I and Oromas II through the concrete roof and 
down through floor after floor of darkened offices and corridors, until they arrived at 
last in the basement security area. In a gray-painted room with no furniture except a 
bed, a bedside locker, and a folding chair, Lenny lay sleeping. Dianne was there, too, 
with her video equipment set up, watching him. She was wearing a sand-colored safari 
suit, and her hair was tied up in a turban. Reblax thought that she looked stunning.
   They assembled around her, and although they
   D.D.--16 were ghostlike and insubstantial, she was aware of their arrival. They 
appeared to her as distortions in the air, similar to heat ripples rising off a summer 
sidewalk, and she was conscious of their voices as an almost imperceptible vibration.
   Reblax pointed to the staff of Moses, which Dianne had left propped in the corner of 
the room, beside the bed.
   Arkestrax said, 'Dianne knows how dangerous this is? I mean, she's going to be first 
in line for a slashing, if we don't zap that critter like instantly.'
   'She knows,' Reblax told him. 'I tried to talk her out of this, but she wouldn't hear 
of it.'
   'All right, then, let's do it,' said Themesteroth; and Oromas I and Oromas II drew 
their glowing blue hexagons in the air, their twin gateways to Lenny's dreams.
   Reblax nervously cleared his throat. He prayed that Lenny's dream wouldn't be too 
bizarre, and that the landscape wouldn't prove too difficult for them to track down the 
shadow-creature quickly.
   Oromas I and Oromas II parted the air in front of them, and revealed the huge interior 
of a brightly lit Byzantine building, tiled in peacock and gold. But as they pulled the 
hexagons down to the floor and the Night Warriors stepped into Lenny's sleeping 
imagination, they all realized that this was more than an ordinary dream about a grand, 
churchlike building. The entire structure was lying on its side, with its elaborately 
tiled floor rising up to their left, and the Moorish arches of its ceiling rising up to 
their right. They were actually standing on one of the walls, with a row of decorative 
windows stretched in front of them and sunlight slanting diagonally upward into the 
building's vast interior.
   Above their heads, there were two rows of green marble pillars, stretching 
horizontally from one 'side' of the building to the other; higher still, in the 
'ceiling', was another row of windows, through which they could see clear violet sky.
   Reblax approached the first of the windows in the floor, and cautiously looked down. 
He could see sky and Eastern-style rooftops and spires. But it was clear at once that not 
all the buildings were tilted the same way. Some were lying on their sides; others were 
upside-down, with their roofs against the ground. Reblax felt a deep surge of 
disorientation and nausea.
   'What's going on here?' asked Themesteroth. 'What the hell kind of a dream is this?'
   The whole damned world is lying on its side,' said Arkestrax.
   Oromas I was already sweeping the building with his sensors. 'It's close,' he 
announced almost at once. 'Very close, very strong. I wouldn't be surprised if it's been 
waiting for us. Intense negative reading close to the building's main door.'
   That's all very well,' Lyraq protested, 'but where is the main door?'
   Arkestrax lowered his screen in front of his helmet, and scanned a holographic diagram 
of the building. 'Byzantine church, similar to St. Sophia in Istanbul.' He swiveled the 
diagram around so that the building appeared to be right way up. 'We're standing close to 
the ceiling on the south side of the church, about twenty-four meters above the altar. 
The main door is on the north side of the church, diametrically opposite us.'
   They looked up and to the left; and behind the double rows of marble pillars they 
could make out an archway, its door partially open.
   That's it,' said Oromas I, 'that's where it's coming from. But how the Godfrey Daniels 
do we get up there?'
   Arkestrax punched the buttons of his architectural theorizer. 'Okay ... I can 
construct a temporary stairway up to the first row of pillars, then a bridge up to the 
second row of pillars, and finally a platform that will take us to door-level. We're 
going to need a platform there, because if we step out of that doorway we're simply going 
to fall straight down, into the sky.'
   Themesteroth said, 'Come on, then, let's get going.'
   Oromas I adjusted his scanner. 'It's there, the shadow-creature - right by the door - 
just above the door!'
   The huge building was shaken by a deep rumbling sound. One window at a time, the rays 
of the sun died away, and a cold wind began to blow upward, tossing dead leaves into the 
vaulted interior. Reblax, stepping back to catch his balance, caught a glimpse of 
something black hanging over the edge of the door. Something black, like funeral robes. 
Something that stank of death.
   Arkestrax checked the atmosphere for mineral content, anything that he could use to 
construct his stairways and bridges. 'Not enough!' he decided. 'Maybe the 
shadow-creature's gotten wise!' But he immediately unhooked a hand-held machine that 
looked like a heavyweight pastry wheel, and knelt down and began to cut slabs of stone 
out of the church walls. The wheel screeched through the stone at high speed, sending up 
clouds of gritty dust; but that dust was almost immediately swirled away by the 
gale-force winds.
   Within minutes, Arkestrax had set up the beginnings of a finely balanced stone 
staircase, only six or seven inches wide, which climbed toward the lower rank of pillars.
   He was still ten feet away from reaching the pillars, however, when a small, dark 
shape detached itself from the doorway on the opposite side of the church, and ran down 
the wall. 'Did you see that?' said Lyraq.
   Reblax nodded. 'It's sending something after us. Something that can walk on the floor.'
   It was growing darker inside the church. Reblax listened, and thought he heard a sharp 
scuffling sound, but it was impossible to distinguish anything clearly over the 
screeching of Arkestrax's stone-cutting and the wind that shrieked in through the open 
windows. But then he saw a black shape down by the base of one of the pillars - a 
scrunched-up, scaly thing with claws and spines. It had the same shuddery effect on him 
as switching on the kitchen light and finding the sink teeming with cockroaches.