"Hear me." Duko Rigoglio crouched before Fava in his embroidered nightshirt, his big face intent. "A whorl, my child… A whorl, any whorl, is only flat. Don't you see that? So much land and so much water?" His hands molded a plain around them. "Here on Blue, I'm going to claim it all. In time, hmm? In time. But it's really not so much, now is it? Not so great an area. You must have…

"No, you, sir. The sorcerer. Incanto? That's your name?"

I said that he might call me Incanto or Horn, as he wished.

"But you were in the void, the emptiness between the stars, the mirror sphere? You looked down, down upon this Blue whorl, and you saw it all, didn't you? The seas, the continents and islands, just we looked down on Urth from the Loganstone. We saw land and Ocean, as we had seen green Lune in the night sky. And it was not so very big."

He turned back to Fava, taking her by the shoulder. "Also we beheld Nessus, the undying city. But we did not see Nessus. No one save Pas, whose true name was known to us all in those glorious days, could behold Nessus."

"We came hoping to make peace," she whispered.

"Exactly," the Duko whispered in return. "Precisely so. Listen now, while I explain. There were many buildings there, countless houses of one and two and three and even four stories, and countless towers of twenty and thirty and three hundred. Of three thousand. Do you grasp it? Why, no one ever succeeded in counting the towers in the Citadel alone. That's what they say, though I never tried, or met anyone who had, and the Citadel itself… I lived near it. Did I tell you?"

Fava shook her head.

"I did, near the river, south of the Necropolis, which was unfortunate because its infinite dead polluted the water after each rain, a sort of sticky black, like tar, that might float or sink. We used to say the women floated and the men sunk, but that was a joke. Only a sort of joke. I doubt that it was true at all."

Valico touched my arm and pointed to the open window, from which a clamor as of contending voices issued. I nodded and put a finger to my lips.

"But one could have walked all around the Citadel in three days, or four," the Duko was saying. "It was only a small area, really so small that people from distant parts of the city, of which there were many thousands, actually doubted that it existed at all. Then underneath all our buildings were cellars and sub-cellars, dungeons and caverns and tunnels without end. The wall around the city, which was taller than its tallest towers, was honeycombed with passages, chambers, gun rooms, barracks, shelters, galleries, armories, cells, chapels, retiring rooms, and compartments of a hundred other sorts. One has only to sum the areas of all these, and the damp mines under Gyoll. But no one could."

I said, "We had hoped, Your Grandeur, to reach some mutually satisfactory arrangement by which our Corpo, while acknowledging your supremacy, might retain some local control over strictly local matters.

That, coupled with your guarantee that property rights would be respected, might be the basis of a lasting peace advantageous to both parties."

The Duko laughed, rose, and walked over to lay a hand as clean and well groomed as any woman's on my arm. "Do you know the definition of peace, my friend?"

"Not the one you are about to quote, I'm sure."

Beyond the Duko, I saw Oreb flash past the windows-and heard him, too: "Here Silk! Silk here!"

"Peace, as you intend peace, is but the slice of cheese in a sandwich, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting. Your peace would endure only until Blanko felt strong enough to throw us off, probably when we were deeply committed elsewhere. No, my friend, Pas would agree to no such peace, and neither will I. Would your Blanko consent to surrender all its weapons, every big gun, every slug gun, every needier, every sword and every knife?"

I said that I did not know, but that I felt sure the Corpo would at least consider such a demand.

"Then I make it. I make it because after you have complied with it, I can do whatever I wish."

Soon there was a hubbub in the hallway outside, over which I heard the voice of the sentry, followed by four or five shots.

"It's time for us to leave," I told Fava urgently. "Think of the hillside, of the snow. Concentrate!"

She closed her eyes, and I would have closed mine as well; but the door burst open, admitting Oreb and a dozen wild-eyed troopers I did not at first recognize as Kupus's mercenaries. One leveled his slug gun at the Duko, and fired. The slug struck the slime-draped wall across the creeping stream of fetid filth into which about a third of the mercenaries had fallen, and ricocheted again and again, echoing and re-echoing up and down the sewer as it screamed through the reeking air.

When Inclito sent me here, I expected to face a great many difficulties; but never the worst that I have encountered, which is simply that the mercenaries themselves are not here. Because they are not, I am unable to ask them, either collectively or individually, what they might be willing to accept in place of the promised silver. By forming my own auxiliary corps, I have raised a good deal of money. A fortune, although it may seem that I am boasting.

But what confusion! Much of it is in silver-of various grades and alloyed with a variety of other stuffs, generally nickel. Some of it is gold, more or less alloyed with copper and lead. It ranges in hardness from a buttery little ingot contributed by Cantoro (may the Outsider smile upon him, now and forever), to three broad disks as hard as flints.

Nor is that all. There are real cards, too, such as we used to use in the Whorl. How much silver is a card worth? How much gold? I have asked half a dozen merchants, bankers, and moneylenders thus far, and received a full dozen replies. That is scarcely to be wondered at, and not all the cards in circulation here are in serviceable condition. (To think that we used to chop them up into a hundred cardbits, never once considering that they could never be reassembled!)

And how good is the silver you want to change them for, Incanto? Let me see it.

Well, I would if I could.

I've jumped far ahead of myself, however. Let me say here quickly what our situation is. Then I will write more about all that befell Fava, Oreb, and me on Green, and how Kupus's mercenaries discovered the corpse hatch and followed us to Soldo. I still do not understand why they did not disappear into some dream of their own when Fava and I left, or why all of us returned to the sewer we hoped to have left behind us forever; but I find so many other mysteries there that I am scarcely troubled by that one. (Why did not the Duko accompany us? And was he shot, and what was the result of that shot, a visionary slug fired by an unreal trooper from an equally chimerical slug gun.)

It is only too easy to ask whether we were actually on Green-I should know, since I have been asking it ever since I returned. But what is meant by actually? Our physical bodies were not there: Valico saw them asleep in the snow. Equally, something else was or imagined it was. Our minds? Our spirits? Both, and some third and fourth things as well? At what point did Fava (I cannot, will not, write "poor Fava") die?

When I arrived, I had little idea how I might raise the large sum we require. Inclito had suggested that I assemble the leading men of the town, and provided me with a list. I did; but the topic of our deliberations was quickly changed to how we might best cheat the mercenaries of the money Inclito and I had promised them, in spite of all that I could do to prevent it.

At last I rose and slammed the table with my staff. "You are thieves," I told them. "I had thought you worthy of respect. The more fool I! You have made yourselves rich by robbing your fellow citizens-"