“You’d be putting yourself in danger.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time. If I get nervous I’ll shy away—I promise.”

It was a welcome offer, and I accepted it.

Just before we remounted I fetched from among my own goods a spare copy of A Western Boy at Sea (I had packed half a dozen) and gave it to Lymon to keep. He marveled at it by the light that leaked from the Palace doors. “This is the one you wrote?”

“It has my name on the front. Just up from the Octopus. The Octopus doesn’t appear in the book.”

He seemed genuinely moved by the gift. “I’ll read it, Adam, I promise, just as soon as I come to a slow spot in my life. Here,” he said, reaching into his pocket, “here’s something for you, in return. Something to remember me by. Call it a Christmas present.”

I accepted his gift, which he had made himself, and solemnly thanked him for it.

We nearly had a disastrous adventure even before we left the Palace grounds. On the way to the 59th Street Gate we rode through the Statuary Lawn, where sculptures and relics from the days of the Secular Ancients were preserved. It was an eerie place even by daylight, and eerier still in the diffuse night-glow of the city, with the copper head of the Colossus of Liberty listing perpetually to the south, the Angel of the Waters gazing in solemn pity at Christopher Columbus, and Simon Bolivar frozen in a cavalry raid on the Needle of Cleopatra. The road twined among these bronze enigmas from ancient times as through a maze. We seemed to be alone in it.

But we were not. A small group of men on horseback, who must have forced their way through one or another of the Gates, was lurking among the statues, perhaps on the theory that they could rob any Eupatridians or unaccompanied Guardsmen departing the property with loot; and I suppose they imagined they could get away with this outrage, in the general atmosphere of chaos and abandonment.

Whatever their plan, they saw us coming and rode at us from their hiding place in a tight group. I counted six of them. The lead man did not disguise his intentions, but pulled a rifle from his saddle-holster. “This way!” Lymon Pugh cried, and we spurred our mounts; but the thieves had calculated their attack very finely. They were about to cut off our escape route, and probably kill us for our modest treasure, when the rifleman suddenly looked past us, his eyes wide, and shouted an obscenity, as his horse reared up under him.

I turned in my saddle to see what had frightened him so.

It was nothing hostile. It was only Otis, the elderly bachelor Giraffe, who liked to spend his evenings among the statues. All the night-time activity at the Palace had made him nervous, I suppose, and when Otis was nervous he was apt to charge, which was just what he did—he came out from behind Liberty’s battered diadem with his long neck swaying majestically, and galloped straight at the bandits. I think he would have roared, if nature had blessed him with such a talent.

The thieves scattered in several directions. Lymon and I took the opportunity and fled the scene without looking back, not slowing until we saw the lights of 59th Street.

I heard some gunfire as we passed out of the Gate. I don’t know whether Otis was injured in his confrontation with the bandits. I believe he was not, though I can’t produce evidence. Giraffes are as mortal as any other creature, of course, and entirely vulnerable to bullets. But I didn’t think Otis would let himself be killed by such low men as those—it wasn’t in his nature.

^* A bold boast, but that’s how show-business operates.

^* A Broadway voice-actress, famous for her silvery voice and impressive girth.

^* I had not entertained the thought

That I could love a scholar,

For they read from books an awful lot

And seldom spend a dollar.…

^* Giraffes, strictly speaking, are not native to South America; but we had a Giraffe, and we used it.

9

I didn’t tell Lymon Pugh our destination until we were much closer to it, for I was constantly unsure of the wisdom of going there; but I thought Julian deserved a final opportunity to change his mind about staying in Manhattan, especially now that the city was burning down; and if I found him (or so I reasoned) I could ask him why he had not offered his farewell by some means less impersonal than a short, scrawled note.

I wasn’t entirely sure I could find him; but I had a firm hunch as to his whereabouts, and I calculated there was enough time left to pursue the matter, if only just.

If anything would stymie us it would be the fire in the Immigrant District, depending on how it had spread. As we crossed Ninth Street we were nearly borne back by a tide of fleeing Egyptians. They were a troubled people, despised by the majority. Many of them had left their native country to escape the poverty and warfare of Suez and the sickness that haunts the terrible ruins of Cairo. They had seen destruction before, and they didn’t seem surprised by this fresh catastrophe, but were resigned to it, and trudged along with their packs on their shoulders and their carts dragged behind them as if it were not the first apocalypse they had witnessed or the last they expected to see. They paid us no attention; but we were riding against a human avalanche, and it slowed our progress.

Soon we could see the fire itself, leaping above nearby rooftops. The flames had already consumed most of the Immigrant District, where the flimsy houses, often appended to old concrete ruins and built from whatever debris could be dug out from makeshift excavations, burned like tinder. All Manhattan’s fire-wagons and water-engines had been brought to bear on the problem, or so it seemed. The pumpers took their water from the Houston Canal, a freight canal, and from the Delancey Canal, a sewage canal—though in practice there was little to choose between them. Debris of the most noxious sort often plugged the firemen’s hoses; and the stench of smoke, char, and boiling human waste nearly turned us back. Fortunately Lymon Pugh had brought along an assortment of paper plague masks (some dipped, as was the Eupatridian custom, in oil of opoponax); and we each donned one of these, and they were modestly useful in impeding the unwelcome odor of the conflagration.

The wind was fierce, and carried sparks and embers with it. At least so far, however, the water-engines had succeeded in keeping the Houston Canal as a sort of fire-break, and the flames had not spread beyond it. That was fortunate, for the address I was seeking was just this side of that Canal.

“You might as well break down and tell me where we’re going,” Lymon Pugh said.

“The Church of the Apostles Etc.”

“What—Magnus Stepney’s old barn? It was raided last year, I thought.”

“He keeps a smaller version of it in the loft of a building on Ninth Street.”

“You think Julian went there, despite the fire?”

“It’s an intuition,” I muttered, and it was, and probably a mistaken one; but the idea that they had come here, once fixed in my mind, had been impossible to dislodge.

“Maybe more than that,” Lymon said suddenly, reining up his horse and gesturing to me to follow him into an alley. “Look there.”

We kept to the shadows as a group of horsemen rode by, not away from but toward the fire, the same direction we were going. Shortly I realized what had alarmed Lymon about them: the man at the head was Deacon Hollingshead himself, with a body of Ecclesiastical Police in gilded uniforms trailing behind. I was sure it was the Deacon, for he was close enough to be easily recognized, and I could not forget the hateful face of the man who had attempted to put Calyxa on trial.