"What's done's done," McGann said, "and we must all bear some part of the responsibility. Including you, Oscar. You should have shared your suspicions with us."

"Would you have believed me?" Oscar replied. "I didn't believe it myself at first, until I started to notice little changes in Dowd."

"Why you?" Shales said. "That's what I want to know. Why would they target you for this surveillance unless they thought you were more susceptible than the rest of us? Maybe they thought you'd join them. Maybe you have."

"As usual, Hubert, you're too self-righteous to see your own frailties," Godolphin replied. "How do you know I am the only one they targeted? Could you swear to me every one of your circle is above suspicion? How closely do you watch your friends? Your family? Any one of them might be a part of this conspiracy."

It gave Oscar a perverse joy to sow these doubts. He saw them taking root already, saw faces that half an hour before had been puffed up with their own infallibility deflated by doubt. It was worth the risk he'd taken with these theatrics, just to see them afraid. But Shales wouldn't leave this bone alone.

"The fact remains this thing was in your employ," he said.

"We've heard enough, Hubert," McGann said softly. "This is no time for divisive talk. We've got a fight on our hands, and whether we agree with Oscar's methods or not—and just for the record, I don't—surely none of us can doubt his integrity." He glanced around the table. There were murmurs of accord on all sides. "God knows what a creature like this might have been capable of had it realized its ruse had been discovered. Godolphin took a very considerable risk on our behalf."

"I agree," Lionel said. He'd come around to Oscar's side of the table and placed a glass of neat malt whisky in the executioner's freshly wiped fingers. "Good man, I say," he remarked. "I'd have done the same. Drink up."

Oscar accepted the glass. "Salut," he said, downing the whisky in one.

"I see nothing to celebrate," said Charlotte Feaver, the first to sit down at the table despite what lay upon it. She lit a fresh cigarette, expelling the smoke through pursed lips. "Assuming Godolphin's right, and this thing was attempting to get access to the Society, we have to ask why."

"Ask away," Shales said dryly, indicating the corpse. "He's not going to be telling us very much. Which is no doubt convenient for some."

"How much longer do I have to endure this innuendo?" Oscar demanded.

"I said we've heard enough, Hubert," McGann remarked.

"This is a democratic gathering," Shales said, rising to challenge McGann's unspoken authority. "If I've got something to say—"

"You've already said it," Lionel remarked with well-lubricated vim. "Now why don't you just shut up?"

"The point is, what do we do now?" Bloxham said. He'd returned to the table, his chin wiped, and was determined to reassert himself following his unmanly display. "This is a dangerous time."

"That's why they're here," said Alice. "They know the anniversary's coming up, and they want to start the whole damn Reconciliation over again."

"Why try and penetrate the Society?" Bloxham said. "To put a spoke in our wheels," Lionel said. "If they know what we're planning, they can outmaneuver us. By the way, was the tie furiously expensive?"

Bloxham looked down to see that his silk tie was comprehensively spattered with puke. Casting a rancorous look in Lionel's direction, he tore it from his neck.

"I don't see what they could find out from us anyway," said Charlotte Feaver, in her distracted manner. "We don't even know what the Reconciliation is."

"Yes, we do," Shales said. "Our ancestors were trying to put Earth into the same orbit as Heaven."

"Very poetic," Charlotte remarked. "But what does that mean, in concrete terms? Does anybody know?" There was silence. "I thought not. Here we are, sworn to prevent something we don't even understand."

"It was an experiment of some kind," Bloxham said. "And it failed."

"Were they all insane?" Alice said.

"Let's hope not," Lionel put in. "Insanity usually runs in the family."

"Well, I'm not crazy," Alice said. "And I'm damn sure my friends are as sane and normal and human as I am. If they were anything else, I'd know it."

"Godolphin," McGann said, "you've been uncharacteristically quiet."

"I'm soaking up the wisdom," Oscar replied.

"Have you reached any conclusions?"

"Things go in cycles," he said, taking his time to reply. He was as certain of his audience as any man could ever hope to be. "We're coming to the end of the millennium. Reason'11 be supplanted by unreason. Detachment by sentiment. I think if I were a fledgling esoteric with a nose for history, it wouldn't be difficult to turn up details of what was attempted—the experiment, as Bloxham called it— and maybe get it into my head that the time was right to try again."

"Very plausible," said McGann.

"Where would such an adept get the information?" Shales inquired.

"Self-taught."

"From what source? We've got every tome of any value buried in the ground beneath us."

"Every one?" said Godolphin. "How can we be so sure?"

"Because there hasn't been a significant act of magic performed on earth in two centuries," was Shales' reply. "The esoterics are powerless; lost. If there'd been the least sign of magical activity we'd know about it."

"We didn't know about Godolphin's little friend," Charlotte pointed out, denying Oscar the pleasure of that irony dropping from his own lips.

"Are we even sure the library's intact?" Charlotte went on. "How do we know books haven't been stolen?" "Who by?" said Bloxham.

"By Dowd, for one. They've never been properly catalogued. I know that Leash woman attempted it, but we all know what happened to her."

The tale of the Leash woman, who had been a member of the Society, was one of its lesser shames: a catalogue of accidents that had ended in tragedy. In essence, the obsessive Clara Leash had taken it upon herself to make a full account of the volumes in the Society's possession and had suffered a stroke while doing so. She'd lain for three days on the cellar floor. By the time she was discovered, she was barely alive and quite without her wits. She survived, however, and eleven years later was still a resident in a hospice in Sussex, witless as ever.

"It still shouldn't be that difficult to find out if the place has been tampered with," Charlotte said.

Bloxham agreed. "That should be looked into," he said. "I take it you're volunteering," said McGann. "And if they didn't get their information from downstairs," Charlotte said, "there are other sources. We don't believe we have every last book dealing with the Imajica in our hands, do we?"

"No, of course not," said McGann. "But the Society's broken the back of the tradition over the years. The cults in this country aren't worth a damn, we all know that. They cobble workings together from whatever they can scrape up. It's all piecemeal. Senseless, None of them have the wherewithal to conceive of a Reconciliation. Most of them don't even know what the Imajica is. They're putting hexes on their bosses at the bank."

Godolphin had heard similar speeches for years. Talk of magic in the Western World as a spent force: self-congratulatory accounts of cults that had been infiltrated and discovered to be groups of pseudo-scientists exchanging arcane theories in a language no two of them agreed upon; or sexual obsessives using the excuse of workings to demand favors they couldn't seduce from their partners; or, most often, crazies in search of some mythology, however ludicrous, to keep them from complete psychosis. But among the fakes, obsessives, and lunatics was there perhaps a man who instinctively knew the route to the Imajica? A natural Maestro, born with something in his genes that made him capable of reinventing the workings of the Reconciliation? Until now the possibility hadn't occurred to Godolphin— he'd been too preoccupied by the secret that he'd lived with most of his adult life—but it was an intriguing, and disturbing, thought.